Here’s the story so far. The Royal College of Art is bursting: 800 students are cramped into a building built for 500 in 1960-63 by H. T. Cadbury-Brown, Hugh Casson and Robert Gooden. Rather than split the school, its rector, the celebrity-academic Christopher Frayling, wants to expand on site. Fair enough. A competition was won by Nicholas Grimshaw, architect of the Eden Project, with his Ellipse, which curves deferentially opposite the Royal Albert Hall, but rather jostles the RCA’s grizzly grey concrete block. A wee bit of which, by the way, might have to be demolished to make way. Hold on a sec, says the Twentieth Century Society. Isn’t the RCA listed? You can’t just knock it about willy-nilly. And off they went. Frayling calls the society “single issue”. “They’re just playing naughty.”
And the college? “They just don’t appreciate the building,” says Catherine Croft, director of the Twentieth Century Society, “which is depressing given that they are meant to be the art and design establishment.”
Heaven help the Westminster planners who have to tear the scrappers apart and make a decision next week.
Nothing girds a conservationist’s loins better than a battle. Yet there have been precious few in the past ten years. After the Great Mods v Trads wars of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, peace was declared. Governments realised that heritage could be a nice little earner. A million visitors’ centres were born, and a more sensitive conservation consensus reached.
Lately, though, Britain’s building boom and a pro-developer Government have encouraged new skirmishes. Some have been old-school Mods v Trads, such as over Spitalfields Market, East London, now tragically half demolished for some half-baked slop from Norman Foster. Increasingly, though, it’s postwar buildings such as the Royal College of Art that are at risk. The Mods have become the Trads.
The Twentieth Century Society does win some battles, such as the one over the Rotunda in Birmingham; only last month it plucked Oaklands, a beautiful Mies van der Rohe-style college (1958-62) in St Albans, from the jaws of housing developers. Some they lose. I still mourn the loss of the glorious former rubber factory in Brynmawr, South Wales; and I’m sure to get all teary when they flatten the Central Library in Birmingham, a thumping great Brutalist ziggurat, infamously rubbished by the Prince of Wales as being “like a place where books are incinerated”.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. What a lot of fuss about concrete. But these days heritage isn’t all stately homes, cathedrals and buttered crumpets in tea shops. Lately, English Heritage has been shaking off the tweeds, slapping on the combat trousers and getting down with the kids. Well, a bit. Simon Thurley, its dynamic chief executive, has swept through its dusty Savile Row corridors with outrageously modern plans, such as an up-and-coming TV series, Restoration, where viewers can vote for which knackered old building gets restored. Social history — industrial heritage, pubs, military buildings — is the name of the game. Even the word heritage seems far too redolent of olden days: “We like to call it the historic environment,” Thurley says.
English Heritage started thinking about listing postwar architecture in 1995. It still causes more hullaballoo than anything else the institution does. “There still prevails in some places a knee-jerk reaction that concrete equals disgusting,” Croft says. Traditionalists find it hard to think fondly about the tower blocks that were the enemies of conservation 40 years ago. But attitudes usually drift from disdain to nostalgia in time. Fifty years ago nobody would think twice about pulling down a Georgian terrace. Maybe it’s a generational thing. I love Brutalism’s gruff temper and elephant- hide walls.
But then I was brought up with it. It’s my generation’s heritage. Trellick Tower in West London is stamped on T-shirts and R&B CDs as an icon of urban cool. We love the National Theatre. We even like the Hayward Gallery. The shock of this architecture has gone. What is left is an innate appreciation of its qualities.
Yet while the nature of heritage has changed, the mechanisms for protecting it have not kept pace. “The current procedures were never designed for postwar architecture,” Thurley says. “Salisbury Cathedral and Centrepoint have to be dealt with differently. Take Sheffield’s Park Hill estate — remarkable. But we couldn’t pretend that we would want to preserve it in aspic. Maybe parts of it must be sacrificed.”
The postwar decades saw many more complex structures built than before, such as housing estates and hospitals, that are hard to freeze in time. Much was designed not to be preserved as complete building-objects, but to be flexible “megastructures”, capable of growing and adapting through time, like the Byker Wall estate in Newcastle upon Tyne, the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury and the RCA. So English Heritage is working on a more subtle approach, Thurley says, which weighs up the significance of each case and applies varying shades of protection accordingly.
In the meantime, the Twentieth Century Society and English Heritage are keen to avoid damaging stand-offs such as the RCA, or the failure last year by English Heritage to block planning permission for Heron Tower, a skyscraper in the City of London, resulting in an £11 million public inquiry. In both cases the conservationists turned up too late, though Croft insists that, in the case of the RCA, the college ignored their overtures. The key is working with developers early on, so that conservationists are not constantly being seen as party poopers blocking development, but as progressive, guiding changes subtly to produce better architecture.
Postwar buildings may be flexible, less precious than a stately home, but their spirit must still be respected. The Twentieth Century Society worked early on with architects over current changes to the Hayward Gallery and the Barbican. And when you manage to find great architects to grapple intellectually with an old building, you get fireworks. Think of Herzog and De Meuron at Tate Modern.
Grimshaw’s RCA building is practical, its space long needed, but it’s no Tate Modern. It replaces the single-storey Gulbenkian wing, which Frayling regards as a waste of space, but which the Twentieth Century Society regards as essential to the design’s composition. Alan Powers, Croft’s colleague and one of the society’s founders, insists that the college is “deliberately composed, and not to be messed with, otherwise what’s a listed building for? It’s the delicate balance of such spaces that matters in Modernism.”
But it’s not the new building’s intrusion that bothers me. It’s that it manages to be intrusive and banal, like a bore at a party. It’s high-tech by numbers, lit up like a Wurlitzer on the artists’ impressions, a cheap architects’ trick to make the humdrum look sexy. “I’d rather it was bolder,” Powers says, “a Day-Glo orange box, something that wrestles with the building. Goodness, if you’re going to make a mess of it, at least do it with style.”
