The announcement of the Stirling Prize shortlist is normally a time for
back-slapping. This year, however, with four of the six buildings abroad,
and one of the architects not even British, the headlines were not good.
“Dreary buildings ‘foreshadow bleak future for Britain’ ”; “Shortlisted
architect hits out at timid British building culture”; “Fear of risks and
aversion to spending shackle UK architects”.
“In Britain no one wants to take any risks,” thundered David Chipperfield, the
aforementioned shortlisted architect. Richard Rogers agreed: “There should
be more exciting buildings in this country.”
But it was the president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Jack
Pringle, who hit the nail on the head: “[In Britain] it’s all about making
the business case... Everything has to be justified in a terribly
Presbyterian way.”
The business case is all-conquering. Fearful of a repeat of Wembley Stadium or
the Scottish Parliament, the Government, Private Finance Initiative
contractors and developers are interested in only four words: on time, on
budget. Design is just the cherry on top.
With all the money being creamed off the building boom, we should be living
amid glories to rival Medici’s Florence. Good architecture isbeing built. So
much building is going on, however, that these few gems are swamped under a
mass of shoddy, banal structures, as in that other economically booming but
now architecturally maligned decade, the 1960s. Like then, we are
sleepwalking through a jerry-built makeover of Britain. But there’s one big
difference: instead of concrete brutalism, these days we have bling
brutalism - dreary, unimaginative slabs wall-papered with bright colours,
iconic shapes and tinsel.
So, while the Stirling judges deliberate between now and October, we’re on the
search for the opposite: the worst new building in Britain. These ten have
caught my eye, and, in some cases, yanked it from its socket and left it
bleeding.
Tell us the one you really hate, or find out how to send us your photos of new
British buildings that offend you at the foot of this article
201 Bishopsgate and The Broadgate Tower, Central London
British Land
SOM
Where did this come from? There we all were, so busy watching London’s skyline
for the Walkie Talkie, the Curly Wurly, the Shard and the Cheese Grater that
we hardly noticed the Filing Cabinet being built. This dreary slab of
low-rent Americana, churned off the production line by SOM (architects of
Ground Zero’s Freedom Tower) was built in 2004/05 on the back of the City’s
boom. Thirty-five storeys, athletic cross-bracing – but it still looks
stumpy.
The Crescent, Bristol
Crest Nicholson
Edward Cullinan Architects
Bristol may be booming, but it’s impossible to find new architecture here that
reaches beyond mediocre. The city is squandering its fine geography and
wonderful architectural heritage with Flash Harry apartment developments
such as this - not the worst, just the latest, and a disappointment for so
good a firm as Cullinan’s. There were once grand plans for Bristol’s
waterfront. Now it is being sold off to make room for half-hearted slabs
with surface tinsel. It gets half a Brownie point for being faintly green.
Wembley Stadium, Northwest London
Wembley National Stadium Ltd
Foster and Partners and HOK Sport
Perhaps controversial, but it’s in this list not for the construction debacle.
It actually functions well as a football stadium - plenty of space, food not
the utter pits. It’s just that this is Norman Foster, one of the world’s
best architects. And this is Wembley, the world’s most famous stadium.
Couldn’t the marriage have produced a more inspirational offspring than a
bloated middle-aged office block with a pitch attached? A big fat
disappointment.
Norwich Market refurbishment
Norwich City Council
LSI Architects
Norwich market, there since Saxon times, used to be all that you imagine a
market to be: a tumbledown shambles of stalls and old characters yelling and
selling bacon butties and bowls of bananas for thruppence ha’penny under
candystriped awnings. All this has gone, replaced with a market as
reimagined as an anaemic shopping mall for health and safety inspectors:
straight lines, wipe-clean boxy cubicles, all life and love drained out.
Rickety chaos is the very point of a market, you dumbos.
GSK House, Brentford, West London
GlaxoSmithKline
RHWL
What more appropriate a gateway could there be for New Britain, where the
brand is king, than this - GlaxoSmithKline’s HQ, a glitzy building-as-brand,
all 13-storey blades of glass and posey curves it seems to think are sexy?
It’s the kind of building that looks as if it’s permanently checking itself
in the mirror, seemingly airlifted from Dallas or Phoenix, plonked on the M4
between Heathrow and Central London, but so airbrushed that it looks as if
it’s been plucked from a virtual world.
St George’s Wharf, Vauxhall, South London
St George
Broadway Malyan
Does this ever stop growing? Like some mad architectural genetic experiment,
Britain’s finest exponent of bling brutalism - a mammoth Miami-style luxury
apartment complex on the Thames beside the MI6 headquarters - keeps piling
on floors and growing new heads, each more hideous than the last.
Its greatest crime, though, is to ruin one of the most important vistas in
London, south from Westminster Bridge. Let’s hope today’s Wordsworths are
facing north.
Drake Circus shopping centre, Plymouth
P&O Developments
Chapman Taylor
Remember this? We reported on this nadir of “retail-led regeneration” in
January, calling it a “monocultural lump . . . enclosing and privatising
entire chunks of the city centre”, with “an exterior so surreally grotesque
that Salvador DalÍ might be spinning in his grave with envy”. Six months
later, we haven’t changed our minds. The façade - the “two mammoth
terracotta sheets, set at a jaunty, postearthquake angle, Libeskind-style,
to prove that Plymouth is architecturally with it” - is almost comical.
Every Matalan, Lidl, Netto, Toys ’R’ Us, drive-through KFC and McDonald’s,
and retail park in the land
Architect: Are you kidding?
An easy target, for sure. But far worse than the architectural awfulness of
all of the above is the insidious drip, drip, drip effect of big-box retail
development on our towns and cities. It’s bad enough dropping these
monolithic sheds - designed by computer in some business park in Kansas - on
the edge of town. It’s worse still when they’re wedged into town centres in
the vain hope that selling cut-price knickers will yank depressed
communities from the jaws of economic doom.
Opal Court, Leicester
Opal Student Accommodation, for Leicester University
Stephen George and Partners
Building student housing has become a huge business, not for the universities
themselves - once patrons of the best modern British architecture - but
outsourced to developers. I can think of few visions more depressing for a
fresher than clapping your eyes on this shelving system for human beings as
you weep your goodbyes to mum and dad. It’s another vast bulky box with no
concessions to humans, thinly draped with bright colours to disguise its
resemblance to a gulag.
The Orion Building, Birmingham
Crosby Homes
BBLB Architects and the fashion designer John Rocha
“City living reinvented” the hoardings said - reinvented, it seems, as
high-rise luxury prison hulks flogging urban renaissance to hapless
professionals. When it isn’t floodlit and glowing like a spaceship, it’s a
dun-coloured, shockingly dreary skyscraper - an upended 26-storey box, with
just a butterfly roof to pass for “design”. Iconic high-rises are going up
all over Britain. But it’s the drones such as the Orion, coming in their
wake, that we should really worry about.
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