Now, architects, I know you’re going through tough times. If even Lord “Moneybags” Foster is ditching a quarter of his workforce, things must be bad. I know the public don’t appreciate you. I know your job is thankless: anyone watching Grand Designs can see that only a masochist would ever consider building anything larger than a garden shed. And I know that the last thing you want to hear is criticism. But, here goes.
What the Prince of Wales will say to you tonight is a sideshow (and a pretty boring one, if the rumours are to be believed: lots of stuff about “place-making”, coummunity and respecting local character — who would disagree with that?). Yet you’ve risen to the bait , your grandees petitioning the newspapers, calling for boycotts, and coming across like the proud, touchy so-and-sos that critics like to portray you as. For insightful thoughts on contemporary architecture the Prince is a dolt. Why you’ve invited him to celebrate your 175th birthday is a mystery. It’s like inviting Silvio Berlusconi to address a roomful of feminists.
There was that recent storm in a teacup over Chelsea Barracks, in which it emerged that the Prince had written to the Emir of Qatar, urging him to ditch a property development designed by the arch-Modernist Richard Rogers, in favour of an “alternative design” commissioned from HRH’s favourite classicist, Quinlan Terry. Clearly his views have not altered one iota in 25 years, since the last time you invited him round for a birthday bash, your 150th in 1984, when he gave his “monstrous carbuncle” speech. That remark triggered ten years of headline-grabbing, naive opinions that mothballed British contemporary architecture for a decade, and, in the recession of the early 1990s, left 40 per cent of you out of work — what Michael Manser, the former RIBA president and arch critic of the Prince, called a “lost generation” of architects.
The Prince has never understood how buildings get built in the real world. He has no understanding of how powerful private developers have become in our towns. He still thinks you architects are the powerful creatures you once were, very briefly, in the 1950s and 1960s, roaming the Earth with concrete and set squares, plotting to disfigure his Canaletto vision of Blighty. These days the complete opposite is true: you British architects aren’t too powerful at all; you’re too weak by half. Your architecture isn’t too radical; it’s far, far too boring.
With savage cuts already in the private sector, and more looming in the public one, it looks as if that’s it, chaps. We are at the end of a 15-year boom in contemporary British architecture. What good times you’ve had. The boom began a decade after the Prince’s “carbuncle” speech, in 1994 — the very year I started writing about it. After years in the doldrums, architecture received its fillip thanks, it’s often forgotten, to the grey man of politics, John Major. When he instigated the National Lottery, he began the biggest injection of public money into buildings for years. Contemporary architecture suddenly materialised.
Two years later, RIBA, sensing change in the air, launched its Stirling Prize. Buildings on the shortlist the first year were modest indeed. The following one wasn’t exactly spectacular, either: half of them weren’t even in Britain, fuelling the suspicion that, for a decade, your “lost generation” of British architects had had to seek their fortunes abroad. The awards of 1998, though, showed a country finding its architectural confidence again: its winner, Norman Foster’s American Air Museum at Duxford, Cambridgeshire, revealed the thrilling stuff this country had missed out on in the 1980s, while our neighbours, such as France with its grands projets, had gorged on it.
We were one still-euphoric year into a Labour Government eager to associate itself with you. Cool Britannia was set against a loft-living, Modernist landscape. You architects were wanted again. Glass, brushed steel and wood floors became Britain’s new vernacular. The Government promised new schools, new hospitals, new housing. And the public were carried along on the wave. We queued in our hundreds of thousands outside sharp new buildings each September during Open House. We swarmed to see Tate Modern, the Imperial War Museum of the North in Salford and the Eden Project in Cornwall. A decade on, though, what do we have to show for it? What truly great British architecture do we have, to live up to all the money sloshing around? You’ve built, it’s true, a handful of good, occasionally innovative British buildings: Future Systems’ media centre at Lord’s cricket ground; David Chipperfield’s River and Rowing Museum, Henley; the Jubilee Line stations of the London Underground; the London Eye; Nicholas Grimshaw’s Eden Project; Foster’s British Museum Great Court; the Scottish Parliament; Tate Modern.
But great? The odd one, maybe, such as Caruso St John’s New Art Gallery, Walsall. And most of these date from years ago, when lottery funding peaked. It rarely funds big buildings any more, and for the past five years this gap has been filled by a private sector then in an economic boom. Rich individuals commissioned homes to the new Modernist aspirational agenda. Rich developers splashed out on fancy office buildings with added architecture for rich clients, such as Swiss Re’s Gherkin, by Foster.
By 2003 even the first, belated fruits of new Labour’s state building programme reached the Stirling Prize shortlist: Bexley Academy in Kent, by Foster. But while there’s been a lot of talk about “icon projects” these past few years, what precious few actual icons there have been.In a fortnight RIBA publishes its national awards. There’s a lot of decent stuff on the lists. Some good private homes and office blocks, some pretty good schools, well-built civic buildings and those small, eccentric one-offs we do so well. But great, truly great architecture there is none.
Generally, British architecture is in far better shape than it was 25 years ago, when the Prince first made his attacks. But greatness is rare, goodness still a one-off, mediocrity common. And what lies beneath is the vast bulk of what gets built on our streets — buildings whipped up by developers for a fast buck during the years of plenty, of banal or, worse, flashy, icon-aping architecture so shoddily and thinly constructed that these buildings look as if they wouldn’t survive a Force 3 gust, let alone the test of time.
The Chelsea Barracks furore illustrates perfectly what’s gone wrong. The Prince is right on one thing: Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners’ project ain’t great. (His “alternative” by Quinlan Terry, though, is worse still.) But what he misses is the cause. The mediocrity on our streets is caused less by you architects than by the convoluted system in which we now build in this country, dominated by private developers eager to maximise space and return per square foot (and minimise such costly things as design), and local councils, their power and income slashed since the Thatcher years, desperate to attract them. Architects have become pawns in a power game, window dressers.
Who can we blame? The Government? True, there was a lot of PR, such as establishing its design watchdog, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe). But little delivery. Like its feeble regulation of bankers, the Government failed to regulate the private developers it had to cajole, through the private finance initiative, to build our schools and hospitals.
Prince Charles is wrong. There are many good, talented, well-intentioned architects out there. We just don’t really use you. Architects are often asked to design a building’s outline concept, but not to build the result. The Government has failed to reform our rickety planning system, dominated by developers working the system, its gatekeepers the overworked planners, poorly trained in architectural standards. It has failed to encourage real devolution to councils. It has failed to insist on good design as the norm in even its own projects. Last month the Government’s own adviser, Cabe, found that 21 per cent of affordable and social housing was poor. A mere 18 per cent was rated good. Last year it found that eight out of ten new secondary schools were “mediocre” or “not yet good enough”.
But you, too, are to blame, architects. Like the Government, you have failed, dismally, to capitalise on the years of plenty. In the past 15 years, either individually — Richard Rogers excepted — or collectively through your “union”, RIBA, you’ve been lily-livered in lobbying Government, housebuilders and developers. You have failed to protect or make a case for your USP: while only architects can call themselves architects, anyone can put up a building, so long as they respect the red tape. You have failed to push for mandatory design competitions for public projects, which guarantee standards of design in countries such as France. You have failed to help create that system, common in other European countries, by which good, quality architecture becomes standard, not a luxury.
What hope can I leave you with? Not a lot. My biggest fear is that a severe recession will wipe out your emerging generation, who manage to make sustainable architecture that nods to history but isn’t afraid of innovation and sharp contemporary looks. They’ll just go abroad again. The “icon”? Many predict its death, but showstoppers have been around since the pyramids. Maybe one meagre benefit might be the death of the crap icon, those feeble starlets demanded of every client wanting to be the next Barcelona, high on bright colours, low on quality.
There’s only one way out, architects, on your 175th birthday: be bold again, collectively. Stop 25 years of defensiveness. Reform RIBA into a lean, savvy organisation connected to politics. Otherwise architecture will become a luxury product, and you will be left as individuals, beleaguered — yet occasionally brilliant, capable of a Nicholas Hawksmoor, a Norman Foster, a Royal Festival Hall — while your profession slowly sinks into irrelevance.
