The report of Richard Rogers's Urban Task Force (published in June) is one of the most intelligent and decent documents published by an official body in recent decades-and a cynic might say that this is a sure sign that its recommendations will not be implemented. The task force was set up under the aegis of John Prescott; its ideas on limiting the spread of the suburbs, reviving city centres, and improving the environment, are linked to Prescott's plans to restrict car use and promote public transport.
On the face of it the chances of something resembling a state-led "urban renaissance" seem better than at any point in the recent past, because for the first time since 1945 a humane consensus of ecological, aesthetic and civic values-as set out in the Rogers report-enjoys a powerful voice among those working in the field. This new spirit was reinforced this year when the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) awarded its Royal Gold Medal for Architecture to Barcelona, a city which has become an icon for both urbanists and tourists (like, to a lesser extent, Amsterdam, and Portland, Oregon). The award recognises the city's success in commissioning imaginative new buildings, creating popular and beautiful spaces, and maximising the area's natural advantages by creating a new marriage between city and sea. Added to this, however, has been Barcelona's success in conserving the city's medieval core and the wider inner city which was developed a century ago on the basis of an enlightened plan, and with some of the most striking art nouveau architecture in existence. The preservation and restoration of past achievements is vital to Barcelona's success, and the Riba prize marks an important shift within the British architectural establishment towards adapting the use of old buildings for radically new purposes.
Cities such as Glasgow are queuing up to follow this lead and to shed the concrete modernist overcoats they have worn for so long-and for which they used to be so much praised by Riba. The notion of Barcelona-style sunlit caf? life in Glasgow may seem far-fetched, but it is at least a welcome aspiration compared to the grim utopian visions for which our cities have been devastated in the past. If more of our leaders had tried to create aspects of the Mediterranean in Britain, instead of slipping off there for their holidays and treating their own country like a giant factory-cum-office block-we would be a great deal better off than we are now. At least Rogers, and other neo-modernists, have dared to reconsider their past commitment to "the building as machine."
The new urbanism owes a considerable, if ambiguous, debt to Prince Charles. The Prince's architectural judgement is questionable. His insistence on tradition and context often leads to blandness-as with the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery. If this is a least worst alternative in somewhere like Trafalgar Square, elsewhere it has contributed to the lack of imagination which has marked British architecture for many years. The Prince's ideas about urbanism, however, are more appealing than his ideas about architecture. He has performed a great service by insisting on the primacy of tradition and continuity, and in articulating public discontent with the arrogance of architects and the wrecking of historic sites. Thanks to him, there is a greater tendency to protect existing communities, harmonise new developments with existing urban patterns, and maintain some kind of human scale.
Intellectually, moreover, the whole arch-modernist project was demolished long ago. Critics such as Tom Wolfe and Roger Scruton exposed the ways in which modernist architects functioned as a kind of eschatological church with a profoundly irrational ideology. Yet as welcome as the new consensus is on the principles of a human architecture, it is too soon for self congratulation. The unwelcome truth is that commercial forces, supported by a small but significant party of unreconstructed modernists, stand in the way of the new world described in the Rogers report. If a bland crude version of modernist architecture became the "international style" it was in no small part because its endlessly repeated uniformity suited the needs of business. Even if many of the proponents of arch-modernism were intellectual fleas, they travelled in the hair of powerful giants who are still with us.
Does New Labour have the will to stand up to these giants? When it comes to the construction of monstrous new buildings in historic centres, it probably does. But it is a different matter with limitations on private motoring and on the destruction of the countryside by new suburbs. Some 3.8m new households will have to be housed in England by 2021, an increase of 19 per cent. Commercial and even democratic pressures will both favour "greenfield" sites-unless, as recommended in the Rogers report and promised by the government, the state takes fiscal and other measures to discourage these developments, in favour of redeveloping brownfield areas.
Already, indeed, there are signs that Prescott may not be able to carry the government with him. The backtracking on the commitments contained in the 1997 government transport white paper are all too visible. Even the limitations on out-of-town shopping malls introduced by the Conservatives may be in danger. If so, this will make a nonsense of commitments to limit new greenfield development and car use. Blair and his advisers are evidently worried that the sort of thinking that has gone into the Rogers report might not be popular with voters. But when it comes to ecology and urban development, a notion of "democracy" derived from the short-term opinions of focus groups is not appropriate. Majoritarianism and the dynamic of economic and cultural change must be qualified by Edmund Burke-an idea of communities set by history in particular places.
rogers now seeks to use technology to serve people and communities; but this is by no means true of the whole architectural profession. Indeed, the position of the arch-modernist "techno-mystics" is, to some extent, being strengthened by what the Soviets used to call "life itself." For the existence of a community-centred architecture presupposes the existence of a community, with an existence which transcends its immediate economic or technological base. In many parts of the world-most notably large parts of the US-such communities are becoming rarer, and an all powerful but also ever-changing technology does visibly dominate the urban scene. This reality helps to sustain the the remnants of an ultra-modernist, technologically determinist, architectural ideology. This ideology is described in a remarkable book, Terminal Architecture, by Martin Pawley-formerly architecture correspondent of the Guardian, a columnist for the Architect's Journal and a great admirer of Future Systems and other technologically-obsessed architects' groups. As a prescription for a desirable urban future, his book verges on the insane; but as a description of certain existing trends, it has a ghastly plausibility, which is echoed by more sober analysts such as Deyan Sudjic.
Pawley holds that, in the future, a mixture of instant communications and security considerations will-and should-destroy what is left of older architecture in our city centres, as the new economic forces insist on buildings to meet their needs. Ultimately these forces will destroy cities themselves. Humanity will be dispersed into a "sand heap" pattern, a kind of endless undifferentiated suburb, linked by computer and video connections, and supplied by anonymous distribution networks. "Everyone really wants to be alone," he writes. Such sand heaps, whether relatively wealthy or desperately impoverished, are already forming in the huge urban sprawls around London and many other British cities, and still more clearly between Boston and Washington, Los Angeles, San Diego and Tijuana, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Canton and Hong Kong, Bombay and Pune, and all over the developing world.
The only remaining important buildings in these sprawls-in Pawley's vision, but increasingly also in reality-will be the huge, faceless nodal points supplying and controlling the networks. Instead of existing "Terminal 1" architecture, linked to popular desires and historic traditions, Pawley predicts and advocates "Terminal 2" architecture. This will be in tune with economic and technological "reality," and will also be inherently disposable. And here Pawley does-alas-seem to be a true prophet. Commercial architecture is increasingly of this throwaway type. In the US, with the exception of a few self-conscious cultural monuments such as the Getty Museum, it seems that no buildings with either the intention or the feel of permanence are now being built. Even a building of the scale, the cost, and the historical and cultural importance of the Millennium Dome is of this type. And on the other side of the Thames, the Docklands development is perhaps the saddest failure of property developers, governments, architects and indeed of civic democracy in modern European architecture. London had the chance to create an original and beautiful modern urban centre which could have drawn on the most successful examples of waterside developments from Amsterdam to St Petersburg. What did we get? An agglomeration of huge, grey, characterless, uncoordinated shapes, with the water either banished or left as an irrelevance.
The Rogers report recommends the creation of Local Architecture Centres in every big city. But they will have no place in Pawley's world, where: "In place of the unique art object as the benchmark of value, the new architecture will put forward the infinitely replaceable replica of the art object, as evidence of the value of valuelessness. In place of the city as treasure house of civilisation, it will expose the city as a monstrous squanderer of resources. In place of the building as investment, it will put forward the building as an expendable container. In place of aesthetic value, it will put forward the value of access to networks that annihilate distance, presence and want..." The almost identical architecture of modern supermarkets around the world, endlessly repeatable and indeed endlessly demolishable, is precisely of this kind.
the line of descent from the old arch-modernist establishment to those architectural theorists of today who, like Pawley, place technology above all else, is clearest in the Platonic quest for an "essential" architecture, stripped of all "unnecessary" forms and decoration, beautiful-assuming that the concept of beauty is still seen as retaining any meaning-simply by virtue of its loyalty to its core purpose. This quest is fundamentally mistaken. Neither in nature nor in human creation is there usually any straightforward and necessary link between purpose and beauty of form. The direct link between purpose and beauty can be said to be clearly exhibited only in the context of speed, sex and religion-through the need for clean, streamlined lines in the first case and for some form of attractive display in the second. The central impulse of most organised monotheist religions also dictates a form which aims to be beautiful and serene. But this is not true of most modern public and commercial buildings. Nothing in the inner purpose of an office block, a hospital or factory dictates that its outer shape should be attractive. The only absolute requirements for a building are four walls and a roof-in northern climates, a sloping one for snow removal. When we penetrate the Platonic core of architecture we find-a shed. Everything else is mere "decoration." But the attempt to strip away that "decoration" and establish a "true architecture" would destroy not only the achievements of the past 3,000 years, but architecture itself.
Pawley's ideal architecture is, indeed, a "big shed," otherwise known as the "large single-storey building." He comes closest to lyricism in his description of buildings such as the Lafarge plasterboard factory at Portbury, and a "large temperature-controlled agricultural storage building in Essex." Obsessed with size, he rolls out statistics like an old Soviet bureaucrat: "The size of six World Cup stadiums... 50m square metres of plasterboard a year..." This kind of architecture-and talk-also characterises most giant shopping malls, although in a few cases, such as Bluewater in Kent, there has at least been an attempt to give them attractive landscaped surroundings.
Because even Pawley cannot fully admit that the big sheds are purely utilitarian, and have nothing striking about them but their size, he adopts the architectural critic's usual evasion when faced with ugliness and banality, and shifts the argument from the visual-which is, after all, how the external form of buildings must be assessed-to the intellectual. The sheds are thus seen to evoke the "authentic frisson of the 21st century" by their "nondescript but dramatic" appearance. Curiously enough, although obsessed with technology, this approach destroys the ability of technology to excite and inspire. The notion of "the shed as envelope," developed by the Archigram group in the 1960s, among others, implies a concentration on the powerful machines and processes contained within the relatively bland, anonymous "envelope." But for these to be "open to the public" and play a role in the visibly dynamic life of a city, the envelope must be a transparent one. A classic example is the Financial Times printing works on the Isle of Dogs, where the huge glass windows of the facade open the great machines inside to public view, as in a theatre. As Jonathan Glancey has pointed out, the model for the creation of an industrial theatre of this kind can be traced back to Sir Owen Williams's 1935 Daily Express printing works in Manchester (and indeed to the industrial tourism of the Victorian era, when the new machines were a source of fascination to the educated classes). This, then, is a visual allegory of the technological engines of a society integrated into the wider life of that society-whereas big sheds symbolise the opposite: a closed, secretive world of anonymous corporations, isolated behind thick screens of security.
words like beauty, harmony, proportion-which were central to all schools of architectural theory up to the 20th century-were for a long time wholly alien to the main currents of architectural design. They are barely mentioned in Pawley's book, which is characterised by a hatred for monuments of any kind and for all those who try to defend them. The latter he dubs the "art-history establishment," which he links in iniquity with its wicked sisters, the tourism and heritage industries. These mafias are said to be responsible for stifling economic growth. By contrast, Pawley (writing in 1997) gushes over the building boom in the far east in the mid-1990s: "Between 1991 and 1997 the mechanised and computerised divisions of development reshaped the natural environment of an entire ocean perimeter, much of it virtually untouched by man before... The great birds of development left their bases in Japan, Korea and Hong Kong, and swept over the immense Chinese littoral..." Even before his book was written, the collapse of the Japanese property boom had made the dangers of such speculative building booms abundantly clear.
But the anti-heritage forces are not always wrong when it comes to conservation. Many buildings of the past 100 years are eyesores, and their demolition could only improve their respective cities. And there is not much sense in trying to ban new towers from the City of London, given that the skyline created by Wren has long since been wrecked. The conservation movement is also partly responsible for cramping imagination in new British architecture.
None the less, the web of planning restrictions and the passion with which certain groups seek to prevent minor changes in some areas, are a legitimate expression of civic consciousness. They reflect a public perception of three things: the huge destruction wrought in past decades; an awareness that, given the weight of money and political influence on the side of demolition and new, gigantic construction, most of what is left of central London needs both legal protection and constant vigilance; and a lack of faith in the ability of most modern architects to create new buildings which will enhance their historic surroundings.
A case in point is Richard Rogers himself-a brilliant architect and urbanist. Yet this is also a man who seriously believed that his planned Sainsbury Wing, with its tower like the bridge of a US aircraft carrier, would have "balanced the beautiful spire of St Martin's and created a symmetrical composition of verticals flanking the National Gallery." This may be true in terms of an abstract calculation of mass, but in terms of the actual appearance of the resulting architectural mixture, it is utterly cockeyed.
If we really want to enhance existing architectural masterpieces, by far the best way is for architects to swallow their arrogance, study what is there already, and then follow what Edmund N Bacon has called "the principle of the second man"-that is to say, to construct new buildings in a style and with proportions most carefully attuned to whatever is in place. This principle, as he points out, played a critical role in the creation of Italy's greatest architectural ensembles, such as the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata in Florence (where Sangallo completed the 90-year-old work of Brunelleschi) and the Campidoglio in Rome: "One might have thought that a man of such drive toward order and beauty [as Michelangelo] would have swept away the old buildings in order to give free rein to his own creative efforts, or, conversely, that such modesty would lead to a hodgepodge compromise. Michelangelo has proved that humility and power can coexist in the same man, that it is possible to create a great work without destroying what is already there."
the last and conclusive rebuttal of economic determinism is to point out that whenever over the past 200 years mankind has allowed the forms of its settlements to be dictated by the latest technological-industrial development, the result has been disastrous. Modern cities which are bearable to live in have been created precisely by the planned taming and civilising of technology in the name of society-a process to which Lewis Mumford's classic, The City in History, is dedicated. The consequences of not doing this can be seen from the industrial coketowns of the 19th century to the automobile-ruled sprawls of today. Cities which grew up as nomadic encampments of the industrial revolution have been vile places to live in.
The apparent "freedom" from such places offered by the techno-mystical vision is a sort of adolescent fantasy of withdrawal from society, and even family life, into a private world in which everything-even the landscape-can be created by an act of will. Even more adolescent is the shunning of contact with real people in favour of a closed world whose inhabitants can be both chosen and manipulated-this is the world of cyber-relationships, phone sex and video games.
Anyone interested in the contemporary and future social impact of the "information revolution" would do better to read Manuel Castells's The Informational City. In it he analyses the growth of what he calls the "space of flows," currents of information and economic activity which are no longer tied to any one geographical location. Castells recognises the dangerous implications of this: "Cities and regions [may] disappear as socially meaningful places. The historical outcome of this process could be the ushering in of an era characterised by the uneasy co-existence of extraordinary human achievements and the disintegration of large segments of society..." But Castells does not want humanity to be simply swept along by this process: "These trends are not ineluctable. They can be reversed, and should be reversed."
Moreover, what the economic determinists do not see is that the great civic architecture of the past and present, while it may well be beautiful and valuable in itself, is also a symbol and a frame for civic-and more recently democratic-practice. They have forgotten that civilisation itself is actually as well as etymologically derived from the existence of stable, settled communities, whose elites felt responsible towards the places and the societies in which they lived. By contrast, traditional nomadic culture owes its cohesion to strong clan and family links-but they are hardly to be replicated, least of all in a "sand heap" society. The sand heap is a recipe for social irresponsibility, personal isolation and ultimately madness. It is also a recipe for the ravaging of the natural environment, as humanity spreads across the whole face of the land.
Belief in the inevitability of such a future mixes the loopiness of the loopiest American libertarians with the bleak, vulgar utilitarianism and economic determinism of the grimmest, sourest kind of British Gradgrind. In a way characteristic of the cruder kinds of both capitalist and communist thought, it reduces mankind to a mere expression of economic trends. If this kind of thought had been the only one prevailing in Victorian times, can you imagine the kind of cities-the kind of society-that we would be living in today? For 200 years, the best efforts of the Christian, the socialist, and even the liberal traditions have gone into shaping the impact of industry and technology on human centres. Our western civilisation is largely founded on those efforts. Pawley, by contrast, shows that the icy totalitarian machismo of the arch-modernists still survives.
the argument for the death of architecture is founded in part on an analogy with what the camera has done to the representative arts of painting and sculpture. If this analogy were correct, it would indeed be a crushing argument. Oceans of hype-and even greater seas of money-surround contemporary art. This money sustains a huge international elite dedicated to prolonging itself by the generation of more "works of art"; and it is supported by the many civilised human beings who refuse to believe that traditions which over the past 2,500 years have produced so much exquisite beauty can be defunct.
Yet defunct they are. Over the past 150 years, the purposes and social context of representative art have been destroyed. The death of art has been the result, most fundamentally, of the development of photography, film and television. Portraiture, commemoration, visual drama or eroticism-all the old reasons why human society needed art-are more vividly (although not necessarily better) achieved by the camera than the paintbrush or the sculptor's chisel. Meanwhile, the decay of organised religion has destroyed the need for visual representations of the divine.
Freed of its anchor and discipline in these human needs, the artistic imagination has spun off into a lazy, narcissistic, expression of the artist's personal whims. By far the greater part of western humanity now never actually needs to come into contact with a work of creative art-and treats works it does happen to stumble across with bewilderment. Any touch of visible artistic creation in most people's lives now comes in the form of films, television programmes and video games; and it does indeed seem likely that this is where the only real future for the visual arts lies.
In this respect, Pawley and the former arch-modernists are right. The artificial attempt to sustain a dead past is pointless (although this emphatically does not apply to the preservation and display of the great works of the past). The exception, however, is precisely the external or internal decoration of habitations, which is, after all, where it all began on the walls of caves, 30,000 years ago. Art as an aspect of architecture is, or ought to be, alive and well-were the artists wise and humble enough to see this.
Architecture is and always will be fundamental to all imaginable human life above the level of subsistence. Every human being, except for tiny groups of traditional nomads, spends much of his or her life in buildings, and a larger and larger proportion of humanity lives in cities. Contemporary art can be left to tiny self-regarding elites; architecture and city planning are the concern of all of us; they are linked to issues of democracy, justice, and the nature of contemporary society. There is a crucial difference between the contemporary art mafia and the popular, participatory, inclusive movements which have gathered to defend beloved buildings and historic neighbourhoods. Of course you can't stop progress. What you can do is to shape it. Or as the Chinese say: "Only dead fish float with the stream; live ones swim against it."
