ARCHITECTURE WEEK IS A heroic struggle to reshape the attitudes of a nation that largely believes the only good building is an old one — and by extension that the only good architect is a dead one.
So will the 21st century be any different from the last one, when public preferences were for Tomorrow’s World in all things except the style of building?
There are signs that the answer might be yes. The influence of those masters of the early Modern Movement, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, can be seen in contemporary homes cropping up around the country. New technology means that the leaking roofs, rusting windows and crumbling and stained concrete that so discredited their original white concrete-and-glass cubes and steel-and-glass boxes are a thing of the past. I want one. Even the chrome and leather furniture from the era, such as the Mies Barcelona chair and Le Corbusier’s chaise longue, are style icons in homes from Newcastle to Newquay. Well, Clerkenwell to Camden.
Which is a nice change from the old century, when anything new was to be despised; when mentioning the words “modern” and “architecture” together would trigger national hysteria. I always enjoy an outbreak of hyperventilation among the nation’s self-appointed custodians. Yet old fartism is hardly a fair swap for progress.
Since no one was building affordable Modern, the final decades of the 20th century featured a huge fad for doing up older properties and, where these weren’t available, for covering every spare plot with twee mock Tudor, Georgian and Victorian lookalikes with pretend period fixtures. I didn’t just imagine the Regency-style microwave cupboard, the “Georgian” panelled video cabinet or those dreadful brass “telephone” shower taps. I know, I know. You’ve still got yours.
The Modern Movement of the 1920s onwards had some drastic problems. But so do most innovations. Fatheads had a field day when the Millennium Bridge between St Paul’s and Tate Modern developed a wobble. It’s fixed now, and can you imagine London without it? Technology has produced a structure of great beauty and usefulness.
The early Modernists developed what became know as the International Style. They were utopians, set on changing the world. Le Corbusier wanted to build “machines for living in”. For the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright it was too much. He lumped together proponents of the International School as dangerous commies and denounced Mies and Co as totalitarians, hell-bent on dictating the way in which we live.
Construction defects aside, it was their leftie image that helped do for the Modernists here. Interestingly, Cambridge — home to Moscow sympathisers and KGB spies — more than any other city of its size embraced Modernism. Out of perhaps fewer than 50 important Modern Movement houses in Britain, Cambridge alone has 14. The Mies credo “less is more” was taken by him to such a degree of austere simplicity that his creations could be difficult to live with. Farnsworth House, outside Chicago, is a Mies masterpiece. Its steel and glass structure appears to float just above the ground, with huge windows looking across a ravishing landscape alongside the Fox river. Float it might: Mies built the house, completed in 1950 as a retreat for the wealthy Dr Edith Farnsworth, 5ft off the ground. But this has not been enough to prevent serious damage from flooding.
There were bugs, too — real ones. At night the illuminated glass house was like a giant lantern, and attracted swarms of mosquitoes and moths. Dr Farnsworth installed bronze screens to keep them out. It also suffered from rusting to its steel columns and the limestone flooring has to be scrubbed and bleached to remove staining from falling leaves. The next owner was the British property developer Lord Palumbo, who has a rather exclusive hobby: he collects Modernist houses. He removed the screens and installed air conditioning, which helped to sort out the heating and ventilation problems.
The Modernists had the ideas but were let down by their techniques. Steel windows set directly into concrete walls rust quickly and are expensive to repair. So is “concrete cancer”, where steel reinforcement placed too close to the surface is eaten away by rain penetration. Yet early 20th-century Modern Movement buildings are still a source of architectural inspiration. In the early 1960s struggling and unknown young architects — Richard and Su Rogers and Norman Foster — set about designing a Modern steel and glass house at Pill Creek, overlooking the Fal estuary in Cornwall. The building is now Grade II listed.
In the 1970s the architect Rick Mather designed a pace-setting glass-fronted building in Holland Park Avenue, West London, now the Pharmacy Restaurant and Bar, and Michael Hopkins brought a swagger to Downshire Hill, Hampstead, with his space-frame steel and glass house. In the early 1980s David Wild built his concrete and glass house in Rochester Place, a backwater of Camden Town. Built with the help of his students, it cost just £35,000 and was such a success that he was asked to build another one on the plot next door.
Newer versions of the old masters using the latest building technology are catching on. You can have huge expanses of glass spilling light into every blissful non-cluttered corner without the associated problems. Double glazing and solar glass cope with winter freezes and overheating in summer. Aluminium framing and decking and special steels beat corrosion. Plastic membranes and metal sheeting can take the place of hot asphalt roofing prone to cracking.
A rash of artists is endorsing the Modern Movement with studios and living space created for them in North and East London. In Hoxton, close to the appropriately named flagship White Cube Gallery, Rachel Whiteread is having a former synagogue converted into a modern place in which to live and work. Not far away, David Chipperfield, leading light of minimalist architecture, is designing a studio house for the sculptor Antony Gormley. In Highbury, a magnificent white cube of a house has just been completed in Petherton Road for a private buyer.
These houses are now being recognised, some with the protection of architectural listings. They come with price tags to match their new status. Thurso House — which at £2,500 was expensive to build in the 1930s — was on the market a couple of years ago for £750,000 and the Foster-Rogers house in Cornwall was recently on offer at upwards of £800,000. Serious Modern is worth serious money.
