Cut Out Cities

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Cut Out Cities

Postby crusty_bint » Thu Jan 17, 2008 3:12 pm

Keeping in line with the majority of sentiments expressed here, thought you' might appreciate this article

http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=719&storycode=3099332 wrote:Cut-out cities

BD Magazine - Offices - November 2007

By Edwin Heathcote

Why are modern office buildings cutouts with no past or future?

I was talking to a planner from the City of London the other day, and he told me that on his watch of a little under a couple of decades, about two-thirds of the built fabric of the City had been replaced.

That is an extraordinary turnover. But it is not unique to London: Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Bristol, Liverpool, Newcastle, Belfast, all the big cities are being radically rebuilt. Huge buildings are gaining consent, the kind of ambitious, bulldozing projects that belong to an era of post-war planning. The mantra is that the modernist-inspired 1950s and 1960s buildings which these new schemes replace have palpably failed, and now we know better, with our shiny second-hand, hi-tech details and our lovely atriums. But do we?

The evidence says no. We pride ourselves on our architectural success as a nation, exporting design talent across the world. Yet the quality of the office buildings in this boom is appalling. It’s not about second- or even third-generation modernism, but urban gigantism. And the pernicious influence of commercial blandness seeping into public space, so that everything is being conceived in terms of bland, privatised, homogenised space.

Lack of depth

The lack of ambition, of cultural depth, can be most keenly observed in cities’ historic commercial and industrial quarters. Look at a new office building in Manchester beside a 19th century bank, or the sad, stripped facades in the City of London propped up from behind. Then check the incredible, stripped rigour of Victorian and early 20th century industrial buildings which form the solid background of so much contemporary development.

There is a depth of detail, of cultural information and language, there is meaning in the openings, the arches, the shop fronts, the mouldings, the sheer depth. There is the carefully articulated delineation of mixed use, the vertical layering expressed through carefully evolved languages.

Contemporary commercial buildings lack nearly all of this. Look at the way a development meets the street. This is what we are told the modernists failed in by placing everything on a plinth, they smashed the historic city plan. But our contemporary contribution is a simple sheet of plate glass, a generic glass door, cheap patch fittings and a length of tube. It is a dismal abdication of duty by the architectural profession. The lack of cultural, material and physical depth is producing city blocks resembling the awful two dimensionality of CGI.

While historians slaver over the civilised terraces and squares of Georgian Britain, there is far less interest in the everyday background stuff built by the Victorians, who constructed almost everything most of us in cities live with today. Yet this is good stuff. Which architect now can match the interest, the rhythm and formal sophistication of a Victorian high street — created almost entirely by anonymous builder-developers with an architect rarely involved?

What is sustainability?

I haven’t seen a new building in years that hasn’t been described as sustainable. But despite the green rhetoric, most contemporary architecture is one use only. It is inconceivable that modern offices would be able to be adapted by future generations as were the industrial buildings of Soho or Shoreditch. With their deep floorplates, unopenable windows, spindly brises soleil, and clichéd bar-code elevations, today’s buildings are depthproof.

Sustainability is being simplistically defined in terms of energy consumption, but true sustainability is cultural, commercial and chronological. Contemporary buildings desperately need meaning and cultural depth. We are replacing modernist structures which communicate post-war optimism and radicalism with a layer of bland, derivative superficiality, architecture without vision or intent.

I’m saddened by how rarely I hear architects talk of representation, symbol, sign and the significance of formal languages. Instead we hear vague sentiments about context and regeneration, the contrast between new and old. But without consideration of meaning, architecture is meaningless. That will be our real contribution to the commercial city — meaninglessness.

Edwin Heathcote is architecture critic at the Financial Times.
here i go, it's coming for me through the trees
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