Jessica Douglas-Home

Why is modern architecture so ugly?

In Chesham and Amersham last week, Tory voters punished the government, not only for building on greenfield sites, but for allowing the construction of too many ugly, badly designed buildings. The British public are fed up with modern architecture. Despite polls that prove this time and time again, architects simply ignore people’s views. Indeed, if the public has the temerity to criticise their latest works, there is uproar — as I have discovered to my cost.

At a dinner in late 2019, I asked Norman Foster, the ‘starchitect’ of such things as London’s widely derided City Hall and the Berlin Reichstag, if he was pleased by the government’s new Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. The commission’s mission was to ‘tackle the challenge of poor-quality design and build of homes and places across the country’ and to ‘ensure popular consent’. It was chaired by the late Sir Roger Scruton. How wrong I was to assume that Foster would applaud the initiative. Refusing to discuss it, he lost his temper, spewed ridicule on Scruton and stomped away.

But Foster’s response is not unusual. The chasm is widening between what people want to enhance our cities, our countryside and our lives and what architects are giving us. And now a massive building programme is planned all over England — similar to the reconstruction effort after the second world war.

‘This isn’t cladding is it?’

During the pandemic, the government announced a White Paper, backed up in the Queen’s Speech, which pledges more house-building. Ominously, it included a new algorithm (since abandoned) telling councils how many homes to build, with the Cotswolds a particular target. Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the local MP, has spoken out against over-development. Yet he failed to make his case by citing pertinent examples.

One is Quenington, the Cotswold-stone village (with houses both ancient and modern) where I live, near Cirencester.

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