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observer.guardian.co.uk/r...98,00.html
Ugly or not, our buildings shouldn't face trial by TV
Deyan Sudjic
Sunday August 14, 2005
The Observer
Gateshead's brutalist concrete highrise car park, now a urine-stained hulk, but once the unacknowledged star of Get Carter, the sharpest British gangster film ever made, has become something of a litmus test for architectural taste. It serves to provide a precise definition of the shifting borderline that divides eyesore from heritage. For my money, the film's best moment comes immediately after Michael Caine has hurled a local Geordie crime boss off the top floor. Two architects, whose presentation of a design for a new restaurant to the crime boss has been terminated by Caine's eruption, turn to each other. 'You know, something tells me we are going to have trouble getting our fees on this job', says one meditatively.
It's brilliant cinema, and succeeds in capturing the brittle glamour of a very particular moment in the modernisation of an English provincial city in the Sixties. But it doesn't make me want to join the campaign to save the structure. Nor does it make me want to vote for its celebratory dynamiting, so tastelessly promised by the makers of Channel 4's four-part series, Demolition, an architectural lynch mob, heading our way this autumn.
'Is there a building you really hate, one that makes your life a misery?' asks Demolition's website, inviting the punters to nominate contenders. 'Now Channel 4 has a solution - the winner will be demolished at the end of the series.' Ask a ridiculous question, and don't be surprised when you get a ridiculous answer. Like some ritualised annual reenactment of a civil war battle, one faction of Gateshead worthies have denounced the car park as a blot on the landscape, while an equally vociferous band of concrete obsessives say exactly the opposite.
It's a futile exercise. But those who live by the soundbite die by the soundbite. Or, in the case of George Ferguson - out-going president of the Royal Institute of British Architects who inspired the making of the series with a suggestion last year for the introduction of 'X Listing' to encourage developers to pull down bad buildings - find themselves hung out to dry. According to Ferguson, 'The series aims to kick start a national debate, about the built environment, about architecture, and how bad buildings come to be built.'
How can you seriously argue that, when heading the list of 'vile' buildings scheduled for consideration by the demolition jury, is the new Scottish parliament? The same parliament, designed by the late Enric Miralles, that is currently hot favourite to win this year's Stirling Prize as the best building in Britain. Whose life is going to be made better if the Scottish parliament is demolished? And how do Channel 4 think that they are going to demolish it anyway, should it win?
Of the buildings named so far as contenders for demolition, the parliament is just about the only one that qualifies as architecture at all. Most are wretched, cowering down-at-heel misfits free of any aesthetic ambitions. To put Northampton's bus station or the rotting Sixties office block behind London's old county hall out of its misery is like shooting fish in a barrel, and says just as little about the nature of architecture.
'Vile buildings are an affront to our senses, Demolition is about planning for a better future. This is very much a positive proposal about repairing damaged places,' says Ferguson. John Prescott, who has also been labouring under the delusion that demolition is a quick-fix solution, would say very much the same thing about the Pathfinder Project, his throwback to the scorched earth planning policies of the Sixties. He is threatening to demolish hundreds of thousands of basic but habitable homes across the north of England in the name of urban renewal.
The word is that the Department of Culture Media and Sport was so thrilled by the TV series Restoration, in which the punters were invited to vote for their favourite pile of crumbling stone and win the cash to fix it, that ministers have been busy trying to convert the heritage lottery fund to work in the same way. The idea is that the nation gets to vote on TV say, between Stonehenge's new visitor centre and the rebuilding of the Hayward Gallery. Lets hope that the glaring flaws of Demolition will persuade them to change their minds and decide that the bread and circuses approach may work as entertainment, but not as an instrument of policy making.
Ugly or not, our buildings shouldn't face trial by TV
Deyan Sudjic
Sunday August 14, 2005
The Observer
Gateshead's brutalist concrete highrise car park, now a urine-stained hulk, but once the unacknowledged star of Get Carter, the sharpest British gangster film ever made, has become something of a litmus test for architectural taste. It serves to provide a precise definition of the shifting borderline that divides eyesore from heritage. For my money, the film's best moment comes immediately after Michael Caine has hurled a local Geordie crime boss off the top floor. Two architects, whose presentation of a design for a new restaurant to the crime boss has been terminated by Caine's eruption, turn to each other. 'You know, something tells me we are going to have trouble getting our fees on this job', says one meditatively.
It's brilliant cinema, and succeeds in capturing the brittle glamour of a very particular moment in the modernisation of an English provincial city in the Sixties. But it doesn't make me want to join the campaign to save the structure. Nor does it make me want to vote for its celebratory dynamiting, so tastelessly promised by the makers of Channel 4's four-part series, Demolition, an architectural lynch mob, heading our way this autumn.
'Is there a building you really hate, one that makes your life a misery?' asks Demolition's website, inviting the punters to nominate contenders. 'Now Channel 4 has a solution - the winner will be demolished at the end of the series.' Ask a ridiculous question, and don't be surprised when you get a ridiculous answer. Like some ritualised annual reenactment of a civil war battle, one faction of Gateshead worthies have denounced the car park as a blot on the landscape, while an equally vociferous band of concrete obsessives say exactly the opposite.
It's a futile exercise. But those who live by the soundbite die by the soundbite. Or, in the case of George Ferguson - out-going president of the Royal Institute of British Architects who inspired the making of the series with a suggestion last year for the introduction of 'X Listing' to encourage developers to pull down bad buildings - find themselves hung out to dry. According to Ferguson, 'The series aims to kick start a national debate, about the built environment, about architecture, and how bad buildings come to be built.'
How can you seriously argue that, when heading the list of 'vile' buildings scheduled for consideration by the demolition jury, is the new Scottish parliament? The same parliament, designed by the late Enric Miralles, that is currently hot favourite to win this year's Stirling Prize as the best building in Britain. Whose life is going to be made better if the Scottish parliament is demolished? And how do Channel 4 think that they are going to demolish it anyway, should it win?
Of the buildings named so far as contenders for demolition, the parliament is just about the only one that qualifies as architecture at all. Most are wretched, cowering down-at-heel misfits free of any aesthetic ambitions. To put Northampton's bus station or the rotting Sixties office block behind London's old county hall out of its misery is like shooting fish in a barrel, and says just as little about the nature of architecture.
'Vile buildings are an affront to our senses, Demolition is about planning for a better future. This is very much a positive proposal about repairing damaged places,' says Ferguson. John Prescott, who has also been labouring under the delusion that demolition is a quick-fix solution, would say very much the same thing about the Pathfinder Project, his throwback to the scorched earth planning policies of the Sixties. He is threatening to demolish hundreds of thousands of basic but habitable homes across the north of England in the name of urban renewal.
The word is that the Department of Culture Media and Sport was so thrilled by the TV series Restoration, in which the punters were invited to vote for their favourite pile of crumbling stone and win the cash to fix it, that ministers have been busy trying to convert the heritage lottery fund to work in the same way. The idea is that the nation gets to vote on TV say, between Stonehenge's new visitor centre and the rebuilding of the Hayward Gallery. Lets hope that the glaring flaws of Demolition will persuade them to change their minds and decide that the bread and circuses approach may work as entertainment, but not as an instrument of policy making.
