The old ways

I’m sitting across a café table from a young man with a sheaf of drawings that have an archive look to them but are in fact brand new. His Jacob Rees-Mogg attire — well-cut chalk-stripe suit and immaculate tie — sets him apart from the others in the room, who are mostly architects and architectural fellow travellers like me. We don’t dress like that. But George Saumarez Smith is indeed an architect, a very good one. He just happens to be a trad. A traditionalist, mostly a classicist. And now is very much the time of the architectural trads. They have crept up on us. There’s a revival going on, and I’m very happy about that.

George, who I’ve known for a good few years, was giving me a preview of a new exhibition of his work at the RIBA, the HQ of British architecture. It’s fair to say that the RIBA (full disclosure: I edit its magazine) has, by and large, been a bastion of modernism since the 1950s. Mainstream architects have tended to be a bit ambivalent about the trads, sometimes to the point of hostility. There are various reasons for this. One is that it is a style or approach beloved of Prince Charles, and Prince Charles is for ever associated with his ferocious 1980s attacks on modernist architecture, and subsequent manoeuvrings against big modernist projects. Another is classicism’s unfortunate association with totalitarianism. Hitler and Stalin famously loved this stuff, and to this day there’s a dark corner on social media where a thin, poisonous trickle of neo-Nazism still oozes through the discourse on traditionalist architecture, especially in Germany and America. And, finally, modernism was meant by its early disciples to be the logical conclusion, the end of architectural history. If you accept that, then what on earth is this new throwback stuff.