Classical peaceniks

The Three Classicists
RIBA, until 29 May

The Berlin Wall separated two sets of people who shared a history and language. In the same way, architecture has been divided into two groups, Classicists and Modernists, each convinced of their own rightness, and refusing to acknowledge the other’s existence. But suddenly it seems that they are offering each other flowers.

The exhibition Three Classicists opened recently with an array of Ionic volutes, Corinthian acanthus and sash windows. For the Royal Institute of British Architects this show would once have been as unthinkable as giving the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture to the Prince of Wales, and two major professional journals, having despised classicism for 50 years and more, have commented politely.

If the Mauer im Kopf (‘Wall in the Head’) has now come down, why was it there in the first place? To save the public from themselves, Modernists have always claimed, rather as Iron Curtain countries did in respect of capitalism. Classicism has been labelled as nostalgic, Luddite, uncreative and unprogressive. The Classical comeback of the 1980s followed a decade of worry about Modernism’s social, aesthetic and technical failures, and gained support, before Modernism reasserted itself, at least as a broad presumption for public buildings and cool, magazine-worthy private houses. Apart from its economic troubles, New Modernism has nothing to regret, yet it has never been loved or understood, and has failed to raise the standard of most houses built for sale. The fall of the Wall may be a recurrence in a cycle, or it may signal a new relationship.

The Three Classicists, Ben Pentreath, George Saumarez-Smith and Francis Terry, are all aged around 40. The last two could be described as ‘cradle classicists’, owing to connections leading back to Raymond Erith, the great post-war master of Dedham.