Who knows what makes a great building? English Heritage, that’s who! Like any aesthetic response or any judgment about taste, a mixture of associational and direct factors is involved. Is this building powerfully articulate about the concerns of an age? Is it a touching memorial? Does it have intrinsic design qualities that lift it above the ordinary? Is it worth keeping? Shall we tell people about it? Who cares?
These questions are quite easily answered when architecture has been nicely patinated by the sanction of the past. The delicious, all-forgiving wash of history disguises many blemishes and, in any case, survival bias tends to mean that only the best of the old endures. So English Heritage confidently lists everything built before 1700.
But what of the modern period? Surely, unless we nurture a nasty nihilistic loathing of our own culture’s credibility, we must be able to identify quality in the here and now? When and how do we recognise in the best of the modern the same attributes that dignify the best of the past?
Half a lifetime ago in New York, when “high-tech” was journalism’s latest bright, shiny label and Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center was Manhattan’s outstanding new building, Tom Wolfe told me: “You know, 'Modern’ is now an historical style label. You should do a book about it.” In fact, he was doing one himself: From Bauhaus to Our House, Wolfe’s hilarious, perceptive, maddening, but not wrong, account of myopic modern megalomania was published in 1981. It seemed daring at the time.
Proof that “modern” has, indeed, become an historical style label is with us now. This week English Heritage has listed the Lloyd’s Building in the City of London and given it Grade I status. Thus, a ripe 20th-century architectural fantasy inspired at once by Buckminster Fuller’s daft techno-porn, Hanna-Barbera’s lovable Jetsons and Archigram’s unbuildable cartoon cities-of-the-future, joins York Minster and Montacute House, Somerset, as an official landmark, a repository of memory and an exemplary design.
There are several layers of meaning here. The architect of Lloyd’s is Richard Rogers, high-tech’s most persuasive front-man. He is elegant, cosmopolitan and bien pensant. Although, since he is half-Italian, we should say ben pensiero. For reasons buried in personal psycho-history, Rogers detests suburbs and has been in, not always intelligent, thrall to the design metaphors offered by the study of machinery. He has been rightly celebrated for Paris’s Pompidou Centre. With its guts hanging on its carapace, this is an absurdly irrational conceit, but a breathtaking one. And his new terminal for Madrid’s Barajas airport has brought new standards of civility to the discreditable zoo of air travel.
But recently, partly as a result of the offensively anti-social, vulgarian, ham-fisted over-development which is the Candy Brothers’ block of flats on Hyde Park and carries his name, Rogers’s reputation has been experiencing a little harsh revisionism. So far from being the liberal visionary with a River Café lunch table, he is a tool of oligarchs and money men. And Lloyd’s? So far from being a disciplined functionalist marvel of responsible, low-weight, high-efficiency architecture, it is expensive, indulgent, wilful, hand-crafted, ecologically wasteful and obsolete.
There are some who say that the extent to which Rogers ignored the client’s brief brought architecture into added disrepute, if such a thing were possible. Still, Lloyd’s has become an unignorable, although perhaps not yet much-loved, London landmark, a pilgrimage site for students and an evocative memorial to gung-ho finance. It is history, as the listing now proves.
From bold astonishment to the safety of the archives in a quarter of a century! This is an irony to savour, as modernists of all stripes were determined to slip the surly bonds of architectural history, but now find themselves getting trussed in an antiquarian muddle where finials and crockets and cornices mix ever so democratically with glass staircases, tensioned guy-wires and stainless steel pods. The Grade I listing of Lloyd’s may be inevitable. It may be controversial. What is certain is that it asks, and perhaps answers, important questions about what we value in buildings.
The listing of post-1945 buildings only began in 1987, arising from outrage about the greedy vandalism that saw Wallis Gilbert’s fine Art Deco Firestone Factory on the Great West Road demolished over a single weekend in 1980. This, to make way for bathos and mediocrity.
As a remedy and a rebuke, English Heritage’s Grade I listings from after 1945 offer us an architectural autobiography, a nation’s self-portrait emphasising its very best features. Chastening, then, that there are only eight of them after 66 years of building. The Severn Bridge and Jodrell Bank: great structures in the Brunel tradition. The Royal College of Physicians and Coventry Cathedral: mature Modernism. The Willis Faber Building in Ipswich, from Norman Foster’s early period when he was a radical innovator and not an international architectural brand.
What might be added? Certainly, Rogers’s Terminal 5 at Heathrow. A compromised execution, for sure, but proof none the less that sometimes this country can handle a grand project. James Stirling’s Engineering Building in Leicester University, a proud and unapologetic mid-Fifties revival of muscular Victorian redbrick. The Smithsons’ Economist Building in St James’s, a superb urban composition that loses nothing in comparison to its elegant 18th-century clubland neighbours. Or what about Future Systems’ Selfridges in Birmingham, a blink-making injection of ingenious vitality into a grim townscape?
You could also make persuasive claims for Colin St John Wilson’s British Library. Surely the last major library to be built? Or Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s Barbican? Imaginative dwarves dislike its grand gestures, but the Barbican remains the country’s most ambitious, boldest and most satisfying essay in large-scale inner-city renewal. And if the thoughtful adaptation of a mediocre Victorian building counts for anything, Dixon Jones’s wonderful enlargement of the National Portrait Gallery counts for a lot.
But Grade I quality does not have to be vast and expensive. Two recent designs, modest only in size and budget, have architectural qualities that deserve the accolade. The first is Thomas Heatherwick’s delightful East Beach Café in Littlehampton. The second is John Pawson’s Sackler footbridge in Kew Gardens, a thrillingly beautiful exercise in elegant restraint. In both cases, architecture enhances nature: this is an achievement Palladio would have recognised.
The Grade I listing of steel-and-glass Lloyd’s will have rubicund old bigots sputtering into their dog-eared copies of Vitruvius Britannicus. It will have Modernist diehards empurpled by the absurdity. But it proves one important principle: what matters in architecture is not whether a building is old or new, ancient or modern, but whether it is good or bad.
Making the grade...
Listing by English Heritage does not guarantee preservation; it is an official mark of recognition, the establishment’s rubber stamp of approved taste. About 600 post-war buildings have been listed, or 0.2 per cent of the national total. The first post-war listing was Sir Albert Richardson’s Bracken House of 1955-1959. Built for the Financial Times in the shadow of St Paul’s, it was extensively modified by Michael Hopkins between 1988 and 1991.
To be Grade I Listed means a building is “exceptionally important”. Before Lloyd’s, only eight buildings (or structures) reached this status.
The Severn Bridge. 1961-1966. Freeman Fox & Partners. Heroic steel and concrete.
The Royal Festival Hall, London. 1949-1951. Sir Leslie Martin. The chief monument of post-War neo-Romanticism.
The Lovell Telescope, Jodrell Bank, Cheshire. 1957. Sputnik-era futurism.
St Catherine’s College, 1960-1962. Arne Jacobsen. Polite Danish design for a new Oxford college.
Coventry Cathedral, 1956-1962. Sir Basil Spence. A symbol, with borrowings from Le Corbusier, of a nation’s revival.
The Royal College of Physicians. London. 1960-1964. Sir Denys Lasdun. Brutalism in the service of the professions.
Kingsgate Bridge, Durham. Arup Associates. 1966. Acknowledgement of engineering.
Willis Faber Building, Ipswich. 1972-1975. Lord Foster. A masterpiece of modern city building before Norman Foster became a professional genius.
