conservation: Rears his Head

| My list of Grade X buildings...
| 1. qutub minar
| 2. indira gandhi airport (Charles Correa)
| 3. anything by Hafeez Contractor
| 4. anything by Raj Rewal
|
| Yours?

Entr'acte | For banal skyscrapers: Off with their heads!
Alan Riding NYT
Wednesday, August 18, 2004

LONDON Many countries routinely shield historic buildings from the 
scourge of philistine developers by listing them as part of their 
national heritage. But in Britain, where three grades of protection of 
buildings already exist, a fourth - more radical - category has now been 
proposed: Grade X to be attributed to buildings ... that deserve to be 
torn down.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the idea is being promoted by an architect, 
George Ferguson, who is currently president of the Royal Institute of 
British Architects.

It is also highly topical. Coming at a time when big-name architects are 
enjoying more power and prestige than in decades, his initiative 
reflects a healthy recognition that what looks great today may be 
considered an eyesore tomorrow.

His immediate concern, though, is what yesterday spawned. Here, the main 
culprit is postwar Modernism, a style rooted in the purist idealism of 
the Bauhaus movement but distorted by the rush to rebuild and expand 
European cities through the 1970s. The concrete office and housing 
blocks that began sprouting up over European cities and towns dealt with 
demographic pressure, were easy to build and, in their day, seemed 
modern. Today, most look ugly.

These are the kind of buildings that Ferguson would like to slap with a 
Grade X rating.

"I want the government to introduce grants for destruction," he wrote 
recently in The Evening Standard in London. "How often has a bad piece 
of architecture marred a beautiful view?" And in a telephone 
conversation from Nîmes while touring ancient French cities, he added: 
"In every town, there are three or four buildings that are universally 
disliked."

Of course, some postwar buildings are routinely razed on the peripheries 
of British and other European cities, but they are usually housing 
projects that have become vertical ghettos and are destroyed for social 
reasons. Ferguson's point is that our quality of life is also affected 
by the aesthetics of our surroundings: visual harmony can be comforting; 
a modern block in a medieval or even Victorian neighborhood can be shocking.

And here architects, along with urban planners and developers, have a 
unique responsibility. If you don't like a movie, you can walk out; if 
you don't like a song, you can change radio stations; if you dislike a 
painting, you can even turn it to the wall. But alone among artists, 
architects can impose their aesthetics on the public at large. And the 
public rarely has a say.

True, there are structures like the Eiffel Tower that at first seemed 
shocking and in time became icons. But even in Paris, a city that 
happily escaped wartime bombing and chaotic postwar rebuilding, the 
1970s permitted construction of the 56-floor Tour Montparnasse, a banal 
monstrosity that towers over the Left Bank and has been detested since 
the day it was planned. And from the 1990s, Dominique Perrault's new 
French National Library is hardly more loved.

Brussels, too, has suffered badly, with tens of thousands of European 
Union bureaucrats squeezed into the soulless concrete boxes that line 
desolate avenues. London, at least, is beginning to acknowledge its grim 
postwar legacy, not least the high rises of the oppressive Barbican 
Center. Yet more imaginative new skyscrapers must still stand alongside 
architectural abominations.

So it is realistic to talk of tearing them down? Ferguson argues that a 
Grade X listing could release fiscal incentives to demolish ugly 
buildings and discourage developers from trying to rescue them with 
superficial facelifts. He also believes such a policy would bring 
political rewards.

Yet unless a developer prizes the land on which a Grade X building 
stands, the cost of razing it could be prohibitive.

What makes Ferguson's proposal timely is that it also offers food for 
thought to cities, above all in Asia, that are engaged in wild 
construction booms, accompanied at times by the destruction of 
traditional neighborhoods.

The skyline of the future is being drawn now. So will skyscrapers 
heralded today deserve a Grade X rating tomorrow? Will today's daring 
designs look dated tomorrow?

Certainly, a generation of architects with remarkable panache has 
emerged since the demise of post-Modernism and its kitsch embellishments 
of concrete blocs. They are involved in designing skyscrapers, bridges 
and airports, as well as museums and opera houses. And, far more than 
their postwar predecessors, they seem eager to make sculptural 
statements with their works. They consider themselves artists and are 
treated as celebrities.

For many, the idea of adapting their design to an existing urban 
environment is to surrender to traditionalism. Instead, in such cases as 
Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Georges 
Pompidou Center in Paris designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, 
architecture can actually transform a neighborhood. In the same way as, 
say, Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York, these 
structures become landmarks. Liked or disliked, they cannot be ignored.

This also worries Ferguson.

"I have been speaking out against landmarkism," he said from Nîmes while 
admiring the Carré d'Art, a contemporary art museum designed by Norman 
Foster and situated beside a Roman monument. "I think we are being 
seduced by architectural photographs and architecture magazines. I 
believe in making places. Urban design and master planning, including 
scale, are more important than architecture. That's why I am studying 
places."

Clearly, the old has an advantage over the new. People are drawn to the 
historic centers of Rome, Prague, Budapest and Barcelona and even more 
to the medieval towns of Provence or Tuscany because these places have 
evolved slowly. Britain's Prince Charles has gone further: to 
demonstrate that the old can be reinvented, he is sponsoring 
construction of a new "traditional" English village in Dorset. He has 
been mocked, but the residents are apparently content.

Large historic cities, though, face different challenges. They must grow 
and renew themselves if they are not to resemble theme parks. But they 
should also be wary of obliterating their pasts. How this balance is 
achieved depends principally on the vision of urban planners, yet in the 
end what the public lives with is architecture. And architects, Ferguson 
believes, cannot escape responsibility.

"Undoubtedly, we are getting better," he said, addressing members of his 
institute earlier this year, "and I see so much to celebrate and take 
every opportunity to do so. But there is far too much so-called 
'architecture' that I find deeply depressing, and too much of it, albeit 
a small minority, involves members of our profession."

Still, to the old refrain that architects cannot bury their mistakes, 
Ferguson's Grade X rating offers an alternative. The Financial Times, 
for one, finds it appealing. "Down With Eyesores," it declared in an 
editorial endorsing the idea. And it added: "This will strike a chord 
wherever brutalist buildings erected in the last 50 years have ruined 
the character of great cities."

Alan Riding