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Thursday 4 December 2008

Concrete and carbuncles

Alan Powers on architecture

Speakers at the debate can play at tu quoque by nominating carbuncles from the other side’s shot locker, but the world will remain unaltered. That seems to be the result of most architectural discussion. Apart from the state of the economy, after ten years in which architects have had little reason to starve, the architectural profession is worried about two things which should matter to everyone. One is their loss of control over the process of building. Britain has always been unusual in the way that architects have supervised construction of their own designs, and tried to ensure that their vision was carried through without cutting corners. This ethos remains strong, regardless of architectural style preferences, although those working for developers and the public sector are most prone to find that, once their drawings have been used to get planning permission, they are given the shove-off.

The other worry is a more general if not universal one about the role of architecture in the crisis of global warming. This year’s Riba honorary and international fellowships were almost all given to green movement figures, including Aubrey Meyer, the inventor of ‘contraction and convergence’, and Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who has promoted tree-planting by women. The Gold medallist of 2008 was, incidentally, Ted Cullinan, whom the Prince described in his 1984 speech as ‘a man after my own heart’.

The two anxieties (to which one could add the dismal quality of speculative house design and construction) sound like causes the Prince would support, whatever his opinions about individual buildings. A conference in Oxford next month marks 50 years since a previous Oxford Conference where architectural education was channelled away from pupillage and practice and towards academia. One of the Prince of Wales’s intentions in setting up his Institute of Architecture in 1992 was to try to break the monolithic structure of training and reintroduce a contextual, people-oriented and practical approach. The 2008 conference challenges the surviving status quo with a green agenda, so even the foundations of the ivory towers may be about to shift.

The architectural dualisms of the past still have resonance but can never be resolved, so to conduct a debate solely in the terms of the 1980s seems like a Groundhog Day of stale prejudice.

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