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. They attended architecture schools, where their true desires had to be suppressed, while Pentreath studied Art History and then learnt largely on the job. They all draw and letter their work neatly and sometimes with real beauty.
The handsome and thoughtfully written catalogue shows their buildings, which I find best when simplest although Terry, who has also worked as a painter and sculptor, has, like his father, Quinlan, a fine eye for detail. The art of distributing ornament to make taut compositions of unarguable rightness is not, it seems, so easily recovered. Pentreath’s Woodlands Crescent at Poundbury, composed of standard houses for sale, is the benchmark for ‘Good Ordinary Classicism’, on the same principle as Berry Bros’ ‘Good Ordinary Claret’.
The new Classical boys are, in their own word, ‘peaceniks’. They have detoxified their brand, they come with jokes and pretty things, and it seems that the timing, in the twilight of New Labour, is right. After the Wall fell in 1989, capitalism won outright in Europe. Architecture is different, although the Modernist thought police have been unified and effective to date, especially in excluding traditional styles from architectural education. A Classical hegemony would be as oppressive as a Modernist one, but can we settle for a coalition?
One of the convincing aspects of Three Classicists is the commitment to buildings that will be resilient in times of climate change and energy crisis rather than being spectacular objects of consumption. These values do not imply Classicism as the only outcome, but, given that the British public have shown few signs of loving Modernism, it is perverse to deny them what they want and admirable to try to do it better than the mediocre offerings generally accepted. Erith once wrote, ‘All my life, I have been waiting for the revival of architecture; I do not think it will happen but if the right idea could be put out at the right time I think it could happen. How wonderful it would be. The world could be beautiful again. And nothing, really, but a blind spot stops it. How do we start?’ It still seems a lot to hope for, but who knows?
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