Building block | 23 February 2017

What a strange affair it now seems, the Mansion House Square brouhaha. How very revealing of the battle for the soul of architecture that reached maximum ferocity in the late 1980s and which still echoes today. Where developers now jostle to build ever taller, fatter and odder-shaped City skyscrapers, this was a time when it took 34 years to get just one building built. An ambitious bronze tower and plaza by the German-American modernist pioneer Mies van der Rohe was finally rejected in favour of an utterly different post-modern corner block (with no plaza, but a roof garden) by Sir James Stirling. Both were shepherded by a man in search of his personal monument: the property developer Peter, now Lord, Palumbo.

The story is retold in a new exhibition and cluster of talks and debates at the Riba gallery which examines the work of both architects and the improbable history of the affair. The saga began in 1962 when the 27-year-old Palumbo, then working with his hugely successful bombsite-developer father Rudolph, first asked the ageing Mies to design them a building for a site to be carved out of existing good Victorian buildings facing the side of the Mansion House. It finally ended in 1996 when the replacement Stirling building, Number One Poultry, opened. Both architects had died in the meantime, Mies at 83 in 1969 and Stirling — unexpectedly, as the result of a botched operation — in 1992, aged only 66. It must have seemed that theproject was cursed, and not just by conservationists.

Hugh Pearman and John Rentoul debate the merits of modernist (and post-modern) architecture:

Dapper, precise Miesian modernism was quite the corporate thing in the early 1960s but had gone out of fashion. Palumbo commissioned the design in the full knowledge that it would take years for him to assemble all the plots of land needed to build it.