Before the coronation muted him, Charles, then Prince of Wales, launched several memorable broadsides against modern architects and planners. Addressing the annual dinner of the Corporation of London’s Planning and Communications Committee at the Mansion House in December 1987, he said: “You have, ladies and gentlemen, to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that… Your predecessors, as the planners, architects and developers of the City, wrecked the London skyline and desecrated the dome of St Paul’s.”
With dyspepsia gurgling through the room, the Prince recharged his guns. “Not only did they wreck the London skyline in general. They also did their best to lose the great dome in a jostling scrum of office buildings, so mediocre that the only way you ever remember them is by the frustration they induce — like a basketball team standing shoulder-to-shoulder between you and the Mona Lisa.” The French and Italians would never dishonour their finest buildings in this manner. Can you imagine office blocks imprisoning Paris’s cherished Notre Dame or Venice’s shimmering St Mark’s?
In a subsequent BBC interview, Owen Luder, the now-deceased former president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, took issue with the Prince’s speech: “I think it was most unfortunate and embarrassing… I lived through the Blitz, no comparison at all. I really resent that.”
Luder, designer of bold and controversial raw concrete Brutalist buildings that characterised the “comprehensive redevelopment” of many of Britain’s town and city centres in the Sixties and early Seventies, lived to see the most distinctive of his own buildings well and truly blitzed. The Tricorn Centre, Portsmouth: opened in 1966, demolished in 2004. Trinity Square, Gateshead, whose multi-storey car park featured in the Michael Caine gangster film, Get Carter: completed in 1967, razed in 2010. Derwent Tower, the 30-storey concrete housing block in Gateshead, known locally as the “Dunston Rocket”, was forcibly brought down in 2012. The problem was, as Mick Henry, leader of Gateshead’s Labour council, articulated at the time, “people did not want to live here, and a 30-storey tower block cannot be maintained on claimed architectural merits alone”.
As a result, brutalist buildings have often led dramatically foreshortened lives. As for the new buildings Prince Charles witnessed sprouting in and around the City of London, these continue to rise and fall and rise again, ever taller, and at increasingly breakneck speed. As they compete to scrape the London sky, gaggles of new City towers strip the streets they rise from of life and light and human scale. The tallest of all proposed to date, 1 Undershaft will, if given the final go-ahead by the Corporation of London this summer, reach the absolute height limit (1,016 ft) imposed by the Civil Aviation Authority.
The questionable architectural quality of the new City of London skyscrapers aside, it seems very odd indeed to witness earlier City office towers being demolished when they are no older and indeed even much younger than Luder’s Brutalist car parks and shopping centres. In its latest form, 1 Undershaft, designed by Eric Parry Architects, threatens to be not just uncomfortably high, but ugly and even silly with a roof garden sticking out over and above the street like some decolourised Rolling Stones’ tongue. What works, in vivid lipstick colour, for a rock band’s album covers and T-shirts fails in what should be a dignified, if spirited, city street.
Assuming it does go ahead, 1 Undershaft will take at least four noisy, disruptive years to build. And it will demand the sacrifice of St Helen’s Tower, formerly the Commercial Union building, a deft 28-storey Mies van der Rohe-style curtain-wall tower, designed by Gollins Melvin and Ward (GMW) and dating from as long ago, in City terms, as 1969. At 387 ft, this building was the very first in the City of London to be taller than St Paul’s. It formed part of a considered modern composition, in company with GMW’s 10-storey P&O (Peninsular and Oriental) building. The P&O building, in turn, was demolished at the grand old age of 39, its place taken by Richard Rogers’s 43-storey “Cheesegrater” office tower.
Meanwhile, the City of London has also approved plans for 55 Bishopsgate. This up-and-rising 935-ft skyscraper (given heights for the building vary), “inspired by nature” and promising “world-class sustainability performance”, will replace a post-modern office block designed by Fitzroy Robinson so venerable that it dates all the way back in the smog of time to 1992.
Given that buildings are currently responsible for approximately 40% of global energy-related carbon emissions, it does seem odd that so much effort should be going into demolishing ever younger buildings to build ever taller ones in their place. It’s strongly reminiscent of the Eighties in Tokyo, when land values were so inflated that developers tore down brand-new buildings to erect even bigger ones on the same sites to make even more money. But an even more reckless model lies in Las Vegas: closed in 1990, the entertainingly space-age Landmark Tower rising from Paradise Street, and looking for all the world like an architectural escapee from The Jetsons, was blown to smithereens. It had taken eight years to build — from 1961 to 1969 — yet vanished in a trice in a spectacular cloud of smoke, dust, dynamite and debris. Tim Burton used footage of the demolition to comic effect in his 1996 sci-fi spoof Mars Attacks!
While the architecture of cities evolves and sudden events such as war, earthquakes, fires, IRA bombs and Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks prompt unwonted change, the wilful destruction of ever younger city buildings in pursuit of extreme financial gain is as unsettling as it is destructive, wasteful of energy and a snub to earlier generations who have designed and built for us. Buildings have become disposable commodities: a fact I think that most of us find hard to accept.
Was it ever thus? In The Face of London (1932) Harold Clunn, a London shipping agent and an indefatigable chronicler of the capital’s streets and buildings, describes how he stops to stare at the robustly challenging St Mary Woolnoth. It’s an early 18th-century Baroque bulldog of a church — from the outside; geometric serenity within — designed by an architect considered since to be one of the greatest these islands has yet produced, Nicholas Hawksmoor.
What Clunn couldn’t understand was why, when so many other churches had been demolished for the greater good of London, St Mary Woolnoth remained stubbornly in place. Particularly as it occupied “perhaps the most valuable site in the whole city”. “If every building with a claim to antiquity is to be suffered to exist for perpetuity,” he wrote, “where is the space to be found in the course of time to allow for any future progress in the world?”
Here was a man with faith in modernity. Shortly after the Second World War, Clunn wrote London Marches On (1947), in which he considers the Luftwaffe’s Blitz a blessing in disguise, allowing the city to replace slums with sanitary new blocks of flats while raising bravura new commercial buildings of which he was a devoted fan.
A short walk away from the ever less enchanting streets of the City of London, you can find the old Huguenot chapel, built in 1743, on the corner of Spitalfields’s Brick Lane. In response to social change, it became a Methodist chapel in 1819, a synagogue in 1897 and, in 1976, the Jama Masjid (Friday Mosque). None of us, I think, expects London or any other city to be pickled in aspic. Life moves on. Yet who can look to the City skyline and say with a Harold Clunn-like assurance that the relentless demolition of young buildings in favour of bigger, more demonstrative machines-for-making-money is a good thing?
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/