Originally published October 2017.
My first column for The Property Chronicle offers a welcome chance to reflect on matters beyond the moment. Which is useful as learning from the past enables us to design for a building’s uncertain future. There is much to consider as it is only when we ‘finish’ that the life of a building begins. Mark Twain once noted the future is never what it used to be, so in architecture, as in life, tolerance is key.
This idea has underpinned my thinking since I studied at the Bartlett, UCL in the mid-80s. Indeed it was there, in academe, that three fellow students and I set out our views in our manifesto on architecture and accommodating change, ‘The Fifth Man’. It took us until 1989 to formalise our eponymously titled practice, but the idea of both dimensional and political tolerance was always key.
We enjoyed the fact that some said we sounded like a Dickensian law firm (the trend then was for new practices to proclaim titles that used some clever hyphened word play). In our view, then as now, fashion is something to be aware of but not to follow. We also believed that whilst architecture is both an artistic and a practical discipline – professionalism remained key. So whilst we were keen to continue to build a brave new world we were also certain that we needed to offer delight in architecture. In that sense we were much more Heaven 17 than Joy Division: we recognised that you can turn off your radio but you cannot easily walk out of your home!
We never set out to be on trend or on message. Mainly because we always believed that time is the best test of architecture; that an idea is more important than a brand; and that the accepted orthodoxy too soon becomes a tyranny. Of course we did not wish to stand still, indeed we saw ourselves as keen innovators. But we noted that innovation is closer to iteration than is commonly assumed. And, as accelerated progress, it can always be referenced in history and is not something to be pursued for its own sake. Innovation is called into being by an attitude that positively embraces significant new challenges, technologies and opportunities; and not by a desire to be noted or notorious! What we did state very clearly in The Fifth Man was that function alone was an insufficient generator of an architecture; and that modernism had failed to successfully deliver the everyday buildings that make the city.
Thirty years on despite much excitement little appears to have changed. I am writing this on a plane (admittedly on an iPad not longhand) bound for Harvard where I will be giving a lecture to the Graduate School of Design on developed but similar views. For us architecture’s greatest project is still to make the everyday building ‘ExtraOrdinary’ (the ordinary is not good enough). And that great architecture is that which accommodates and enhances the theatre of life (rather than the particular programme of the moment).
There has however been a very significant shift in attitudes in general within architecture. In 1989, we spoke of camps. Of modernists, of post-modernists, of deconstruction (was it a camp or a po-mo sub set) and of classicists. We were all very committed and very intolerant of each other: we were suspicious of pluralism and pluralists. We were attacked for these internecine battles and learned much, if painfully, through the once dreaded and derided public consultation process. Crucially we now recognise that something we do not best like might still be good – as Proust noted ‘the best is the enemy of the good’. Consequently debate in architecture now is not about ‘the battle of the styles’ but about the essential quality of the building or place. This focus away from the battle to become the accepted orthodoxy (which incidentally still happens to be a new tolerant ‘modernism’!) to a more useful and historically contextualised idea of debate about whether a building offers delight to all (or at least a good number) is, in my view, all for the good. We have learnt much about and of tolerance.
Beyond the small world of architecture in the much more important and larger world of life, these ideas of tolerance and the benefit of uncertainty seem however, to have been forgotten. The cyber world of Twitter, Facebook and other social media is full of bullying and witch hunts. I choose to stay out of that world. But I cannot stay out of society and, alarmingly, the idea of sentencing without trial is increasingly accepted as necessary ‘for the general good’. True to the the law of inversion the more we revere the Magna Carta the less we respect habeus corpus. Indeed the more closely I look back to 1989 the more clearly I recognise that tolerance accommodating uncertainty has all but disappeared, to be replaced by intolerance justified by certainty.
In 1989 there was still speculation that there might be a new ice age. The waste products of nuclear fuel were deemed too dangerous an environmental legacy to leave to future generations. There were debates about whether your photograph on a bus pass was the first step to a National Identity Card – which was deemed too heinous an intrusion on personal freedom. Freedom of speech was something people fought to preserve – ‘I disagree with all you say but will fight to the death to ensure you have the right to say it’.
In 2017 anyone who queries the current concerns about a warmer planet (or even the speed of change) is denounced as a ‘global warming denier’. Nuclear fuel is the thing that is going to save us from environmental disaster. Your data is owned and traded by numerous technological giants who have the brazen cheek to claim to champion freedom of thought and speech. Political correctness (surely an oxymoron and an Orwellian one at that) and various ‘hate’ laws have all but done for freedom of speech.
This is the most worrying, as to seek control over what we say is to attempt to exert control over what we think. We now live in an Alice in Wonderland world of ‘Sentence First – Verdict After’. This view that society has finally reached the pinnacle of civilisation and can determine with absolute certainty what it is acceptable to say and what is not, is clearly absurd and flies in the face of history. Most worrying is that this view is most strongly held on university campuses where a host of historical figures are being called to account by a C21st witch hunt.
In 1989, architects were heavily criticised for their part in the political and professional alliance that had believed it knew what was best for society. By then the built reality of the New Jerusalem of post-war Britain was acknowledged to be offering a new and perhaps brave but most definitely not delightful world. A world where life was imitating neither art nor architecture. As a result we had to relearn the lessons from the past that both celebrated the value of design and accepted its limits. Architecture provides the stage set for much of life to be lived out upon, but that stage is only successful when it confines activity only by dimension, and without seeking control. As even the great visionary iconoclast and futurist Le Corbusier acknowledged, ‘life is always right’.
History teaches us much about the future and, nearly 30 years on, now is a very good moment for us all to look back and reflect on the recent past when the idea of tolerance was much more than an architectural idea about dimension.
