William Flew and Architects

Strident ‘starchitects’ are turning the classical city into a landfill site for grotesque monuments to themselves

A city is not the work of ‘geniuses’ but of humble craftsmen

If you were to ask what is the most perspicuous sign by which a civilisation is known, the answer must surely be the city. It is through the city that human beings have marked the Earth as a place of collective faith, freedom and festivity. It is in the city street and city square that people meet in friendship and commerce, and the classical styles of vernacular architecture are designed to record and emphasise the freedom and order of a society at peace with itself.

Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao 

If the ideal city that I have just described seems more and more a thing of the past, then we should not neglect to assign a due proportion of blame to the people who now call themselves architects. Public projects in our cities are routinely assigned to one of a tiny band of “starchitects”, chosen to design structures that will reliably call attention to themselves, and stand out from their surroundings.

Renzo Piano's Shard

Most of these starchitects — Daniel Libeskind, Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas — have equipped themselves with a store of pretentious gobbledegook with which to explain their genius to those who are otherwise unable to perceive it. And when people are spending money that belongs to voters or shareholders, they will be easily influenced by gobbledegook that flatters them into believing that they are spending it on some original and world-changing masterpiece. The victim of this process is the city, and all those who have cherished the city as a home.

There have been architects who are geniuses — Michelangelo, Palladio, Frank Lloyd Wright. But a city is not the work of geniuses. It is the work of humble craftsmen and also the by-product of its own continuing conversation with itself. A city is a constantly evolving fabric, patched and repaired for our changing uses, in which order emerges by an “invisible hand” from the desire of people to get on with their neighbours. That is what produces a city such as Venice or Paris, where even the great monuments — St Mark’s, Notre Dame, the Place Vendôme, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco — soothe the eye and radiate a sense of belonging. In the past, geniuses did their best to harmonise with street, sky and public space — like Bernini at St Peter’s Square — or to create a vocabulary, as Palladio did, that could become the lingua franca of a city in which all could be at home.

Quinlan Terry's Richmond Development

In contrast, the new architecture, typified by Gehry’s costly Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, by Norman Foster’s lopsided City Hall in London, by Richard Rogers’ kitchen-utensil Lloyds Building, or by the shiny gadgets of Zaha Hadid, is designed to challenge the surrounding order and to stand out as the work of some inspired artist who does not build for people, but sculpts space for his own expressive ends.

This approach to architecture is encouraged by the professional bodies and the schools, such as the remorselessly trendy Architectural Association and the Royal Institute of British Architects. Few schools of architecture now teach students to draw townscapes, façades or the human figure; few teach students to compose using the classical orders, or to draw such meaningful architectural effects as the fall of light on a Corinthian capital — necessary skills that train the hand and the eye, and which teach architects to observe things more interesting than themselves. Engineering, isonometric drawing and smart computer imaging have replaced all that, and the rest is hype; deconstructionist gobbledegook designed to sell whatever piece of space-sculpture you can come up with.

We should not be surprised, therefore, if the “works of genius” that our city planners are constantly permitting or commissioning have the appearance of things other than architecture: of vegetables, vehicles, hairdryers, washing machines or backyard junk. Often they are named after the alien object that they most resemble, such as Renzo Piano’s Shard now growing by London Bridge. That which makes a building into architecture, which is the ability to embellish a location and to enhance it as a home, is the aspect of building that architects no longer learn.

It is often argued that modern constraints make it all but impossible for architects to behave as their predecessors did, veneering buildings with some eclectic reminiscence of the classical or Gothic styles, placing dressed stone over iron frames, or crowning the street façade with a Vignolesque cornice in tin. What were once cheap solutions to a shared public demand for ornament and order have become forbidding costs. Space is limited, skilled labour rare and gargantuan engineering well understood and relatively inexpensive — and that is why we look to the starchitects, since they authorise what would otherwise seem like vandalism on a massive scale.

To refute that argument is easy — you just have to look at the work of those public-spirited classical architects still working in our cities who have learnt how to construct buildings that fit so well into their surroundings that you notice them only in the way you notice friendly people in the street. Look at the commercial building just finished by Robert Adam next to St James’s Piccadilly, for example, or Quinlan Terry’s seminal Richmond Riverside. These buildings are not only less costly per square metre than just about anything by Rogers or Foster, they will also last longer, since they are able to change their use.

The typical starchitect building is without a façade or an orientation that it shares with its neighbours. It often seems to be modelled like a domestic utensil, as though to be held in some giant hand. It does not fit into a street or stand happily next to other buildings. In fact, it is designed as waste: throwaway architecture, involving vast quantities of energy-intensive materials, which will be demolished within 20 years.

Townscapes built from such architecture resemble landfill sites: scattered heaps of plastic junk from which the eye turns away in dejection. Gadget architecture is dropped in the townscape like litter, and neither faces the passer-by nor includes him. It may offer shelter, but it cannot make a home. And by becoming habituated to it we lose one fundamental component in our respect for the earth.