Richard Haut
millennium club
Joined: 18 Apr 2004
Posts: 1200
Location: Nice, France
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 Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 12:21 am Post subject: "The shame of British architecture" |
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From The Times, 10th. October 2007 - and referred to in Architecture Week
http://www.architectureweek.com/2007/1010/news_1-2.html
| Quote: | The shame of British architecture
We have become a nation of glorified property developers, the angry winner of the Stirling Prize tells our correspondent
Tom Dyckhoff
David Chipperfield is still sky-high from scooping the Stirling Prize on Saturday night for his Museum of Modern Literature, in Marbach am Neckar, Germany, and he’s dishing the dirt. His chest is puffed like a prizefighter fresh from the ring, and he’s licking his lips like a Rottweiler unleashed. Who can blame him? The 53-year-old London-born architect has earned his moment. For two decades he’s been the unofficial leader of that other, reticent, high-minded school of modern architecture – not the flashy high-tech of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, not the showy twists and turns of Zaha Hadid but an as-yet-unnamed movement that fuses abstract modernism and historical tradition. It’s solid stuff, designed to last generations, not what Chipperfield calls the “fizzy” iconic pop that’s lately ruled the landscape.
Now, having seen off, at last, his old boss Norman Foster for the £20,000 Stirling Prize, David Chipperfield, the stage is yours.
So why was the “building that has made the greatest contribution to British architecture in the past year” not British? For the second year running, too. Four of the six buildings on the Stirling shortlist were foreign, while the two that actually were on British soil were really rather tokenistic in comparison. And why was one of the shortlisted architects – Koolhaas – well, Dutch? Has it come to this? Is British architecture so enfeebled? What distant foreign climes will we have to scour for next year’s prize? Kazakhstan? (Don’t laugh – with China, central Asia is where all self-respecting British architects are touting for work.)
“Simple,” Chipperfield says. “Britain gets the architecture it deserves. We don’t value architecture, we don’t take it seriously, we don’t want to pay for it and the architect isn’t trusted.” Not an ambience conducive to architectural excellence, nor one easily changed. It is rooted, Chipperfield thinks, as deep as British political-economic culture. “We are a country that values money and individualism. Architecture becomes glorified property development, not valued culture. Ten storeys? Try for 20. Squeeze in more bedrooms. That’s British architecture” – especially since the Scottish Parliament and Wembley Stadium debacles.
Yes, we’re building loads, “but all people want now is delivery. Sod the quality. Just make sure it’s up on time and in budget.” And the budget is generally peanuts. Proper architecture “is hard work. No escaping it. And we just want it easy.”
Once, the architect was at the centre of things, the one who got the kudos – and the blame. Now, in a climate in which cash rules, one of PFI and PPP and design-and-build, with construction’s myriad parties – contractors, quantity surveyors, subcontractors, client, architect – split into adversarial camps, each focused on covering their backs, “the architect is reduced to being a mere ‘design consultant’,” Chipperfield says. “Nobody takes a risk. And architecture by nature is a risky business.” The result is a jobsworth culture, “where ‘it’ll do’ rules, where actual architecture isn’t valued, just this beauty parade of fizzy buildings that look good for the cameras.”
Like, of course, the Stirling Prize. Chipperfield’s buildings, though, are very much not airhead bimbos. The Museum of Modern Literature, in Schiller’s birthplace, is, as you might expect, a serious, sober affair, its interior monastically hushed and contemplative, its controversial nods to the stripped classicism of fascist architecture done intelligently, not for headlines.
Chipperfield’s architecture perhaps wears its angsty gravitas and subtlety too pointedly on its sleeve, but it’s a blessed relief to encounter in this dumbed-down age, like switching to Goethe after Dan Brown. So, no, of course he hasn’t built much in his native country. China, naturally; Spain, too; and especially Germany, where his magnum opus, a series of restorations and extensions on the Museum Island in Berlin, is hotly awaited in 2009. Even the American Midwest, hardly Mount Parnassus, has given him work.
In Britain, though, his only building of note is the River and Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames, completed a decade ago. “We’re regarded as the difficult ones here, the ones who kick up a fuss. I don’t play golf with the CEOs. I don’t schmooze or make friends.” But there is BBC Scotland’s HQ in Glasgow, newly opened, bright and shining, on the waterfront in Govan, with Chipperfield’s name on it. Don’t get him started. “I won‘t visit it,” he says. “Not until I get an apology from the BBC.”
Chipperfield was unceremoniously dumped from the project when the Director-General, Mark Thompson, succeeded Greg Dyke, and Dyke’s populist largesse, supposed to herald a new age of architectural excellence for the corporation, was replaced by the cold wind of penny-pinching. Chipperfield designed the building in outline, but it was built by a less-renowned firm, a process – nicknamed trophyism – increasingly common in the UK, and, to Chipperfield, indicative of its architectural dumbing-down. “The BBC was useless, useless. We were treated shabbily. We were shafted.”
You might expect it of a bottom-dollar developer, but Auntie? He reserves his bile for the consultants, lawyers and bean-counters, and lily-liveredness on the part of the client. “In Germany we had a client who was on the phone, sorting solutions, taking the flak, all the time. You never get that in Britain. In Britain it’s ‘nuffink to do with me, guv’. There was no point ringing up Alan Yentob and saying there’s a problem with my roof cladding. What could he do? But that’s what you need, a strong client, who’ll fight for quality with you, not leave you out to dry. The architect ends up being the sole guardian of quality, and hated for it.”
By contrast, on the Continent, where there’s still “the ghost of a public system” in which intervention in the free market for the common good is still the default, “quality is better because there the demand for it is built into the system”. In Germany architectural competitions are the rule, not the exception as they are in Britain; the law dictates a quota of young architects on the shortlist for all competitions for public buildings, to foster a vibrant, diverse architectural culture.
Is all this just sour grapes, another architect moaning again? “Well, architects are partly to blame. We haven’t stood up for ourselves. We have created this dysfunctional atmosphere where we’re not trusted. You go to planning committees and you think: ‘God, these guys must absolutely hate us.’ Then you see the crap they’re given to look at and you can quite understand why.”
His last barb is reserved for the very body that has just awarded him the Stirling, the Royal Institute of British Architects, which, he thinks, has been snoozing on its watch. “They’ve sold architects away. They haven’t been there for us, haven’t safeguarded what is special about British architecture.”
Perhaps his win is proof that the tide is turning, that people are getting as bored with celebrity architecture as they got bored of Big Brother in the summer. He even has work in Britain – the Turner Contemporary Art Gallery in Margate and an office building in the City. “Oh, it’s a bit better now. But as good as it should be, given the wealth in this country? I don’t think so.”
What does David Chipperfield actually like?
Engineering Building, Leicester University (James Stirling and James Gowan, 1961)
Willis Faber & Dumas HQ (Foster & Partners, Ipswich, 1975)
Creek Vean house (Team 4 –– Norman Foster and Richard Rogers –– Feock, Cornwall, 1967)
The Laban Centre for Movement and Dance (Herzog & De Meuron, Deptford, London, 2003)
Lisson Gallery (Tony Fretton Architects, Lisson Grove, London, 1986, 1992)
An exhibition of the RIBA Stirling Prize shortlist is on display at RIBA, 66 Portland Place, London W1 (020-7580 5533), until Nov 24 2007 |
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Richard Haut has worked with the architectural profession for over 25 years and produces the weekly Richard Haut's Competitions, which has given architects details of many thousands of projects for which they can apply across Britain and Europe. |
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The shame might have come from the USA. 
Although greed is not an american invention. We're working on fixing "it" on this side of the pond too.
