Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (54 page)

Realizing the ground was slipping from under them, the modernists mounted a desperate rearguard action. The designer of the new British Library, Colin St John Wilson, and
the influential critic Martin Pawley compared their future sovereign to Hitler, claiming he had a Nazi approach to aesthetics. For good measure, Pawley added an unflattering comparison to Pol
Pot.
¹³
At a slightly more elevated level, in 1989, RIBA’s president, Maxwell Hutchinson, wrote a short book
The Prince of Wales, Right or
Wrong?: An Architect Replies
. Needless to say, the architect found the prince wrong, with Hutchinson thundering that ‘the intervention of the Prince of Wales has made honourable that
which would have been considered cowardly half a century ago: the renunciation of the new in favour of the old’.
¹⁴
Hutchinson was an
engaging interlocutor whose personal preference for archaic three-piece quality tailoring sat ill with his argument for functional modernity. Yet so admiring of the latter was he that he even
compared St Paul’s Cathedral unfavourably with Denys Lasdun’s concrete National Theatre on the South Bank, which, being more honest to its design, was therefore a better building.
Clearly, between the architectural old guard and popular opinion there was to be little meeting of minds. But it was clear which of the two entities considered itself to be on the defensive. At any
rate, Pawley may have compared the Prince of Wales to a succession of homicidal dictators, but he owed his job as architecture critic of the
Guardian
to him. It was in response to the
new-found public interest in architecture following the prince’s intervention that the newspaper created the position.
¹⁵

Po-Mo – The Spirit of the Age

The rout of the modernists was never more evident than in the long, forlorn campaign of the property developer Peter Palumbo to have a skyscraper erected at No. 1 Poultry,
adjacent to the Mansion House, right in the very heart of the City of London. The glass slab had been designed back in 1958 by Mies van der Rohe, its sleek, if unimaginative, lines closely
resembling his Seagram Building in New York. Despite Palumbo’s team of experts who earnestly espoused the need for Britain to gain a posthumous gift from the world-renowned master of glass
and steel – ‘international’ chic – two separate public inquiries rejected the plan. Yet the result was not a reprieve for the Venetian Gothic Victorian building that the
conservationists wished to preserve on the site. After a long fight, it eventually fell victim to Palumbo’s next proposal, a building as strikingly different from Mies’s vast glass slab
as could be imagined. Rather than a skyscraper, Palumbo promoted a ground-scraping complex of offices, shops and restaurant roof gardens designed by James Stirling. It was not another post-dated
exercise in modernism but an
essay in postmodernism – perhaps the most recognizable building style of Thatcher’s Britain.

Postmodernism (Po-Mo for short) was not just synonymous with Thatcherism because of its ubiquity during the eighties. It was an unashamedly commercial style, displaying just the sort of brash
transatlantic characteristics of style over substance that the decade’s critics found so irksome. Where the modernists had offered sober truths in untreated concrete, the postmodernists
proffered humour and a riot of polychromatic frontages. Po-Mo offices regularly boasted clip-on facades of polished, but extremely thin, granite panels bolted to a steel frame. This superficiality
– in effect, architectural wallpaper – was attacked by both extremes. Prince Charles thought it looked cheap and failed to use traditional materials, while the modernists continued to
regard any form of exterior frippery, be it cheap or expensive, as deceitful. In reality, postmodernist structures were often erected using similar techniques to sixties buildings and were merely
employing different outer-surface materials for that most modernist of structural devices, the curtain wall hung from the steel frame. Drawing the inevitable conclusion that appearance was
therefore more important than reality, recladding sixties buildings with the new shiny surfaces became a vogue. Cash-strapped local councils joined the fashion. Recognizing that rebuilding
Britain’s failing housing estates was beyond their budget, it was a much quicker fix to just stick Po-Mo’s exterior decor and bright colours on to sixties concrete slab blocks. The
result was cheap and cheerful – the ‘regenerated’ housing estates coming to resemble a pale and sickly old man given several sessions on a sun-lounger in order to create an
impression of rosy good health.

Since postmodernism’s departure from modernism was more on the surface than deep-rooted, the real differences were of tone and temperament. While the architects of the sixties imagined
their austere, ‘honest’, egalitarian structures were in the spirit of the age, those growing up in that decade were imbued with a sense of irony and lack of deference and exposed to the
influences of garish advertising and pop art. By the eighties, this generation had come of age and Po-Mo was the result. Vulgarity abounded in this reaction against modernism’s puritan
strictures, and when all subtlety was abandoned the results were not so much amusing as plain silly. Terry Farrell’s TV-am headquarters by Camden Lock resembled a 1930s corrugated-metal
Hollywood film lot, complete with giant egg cups to symbolize its occupants’ early morning broadcasting role. Uninhibited, showy and impolite – these were more good reasons for the
Prince of Wales, with his emphasis on aesthetic good manners, to dislike the style.

Worse, when Po-Mo adopted classical motifs it succeeded only in parodying them. Writing the soundtracks for Peter Greenaway’s films during the
eighties, the composer
Michael Nyman showed himself an exponent of borrowed baroque themes, clipped and orchestrated to a minimalist score. Po-Mo architecture followed a similar rhythm, in which the minimalist structures
of the modernist movement were erected with baroque shoulder padding. Strength and bulk were finessed with the addition of extremely basic triangular porticoes and baubles the size of giant
cannonballs. It was like the Blenheim Palace architecture of Sir John Vanburgh, but built from Lego. Status symbolism was most in evidence in the huge entrances which all but proclaimed to those
who passed in: ‘You Have Arrived.’ Not for eighties Po-Mo the obscure, unassertive entrances of sixties public sector commissions, whose outward declamations were so coy that signposts
with arrows were needed to indicate to visitors where the front door might be. With Po-Mo’s great monuments to bombast, there was never much doubt.

It was a postmodern take on classicism, rather than the scholarly exercises in the ancient orders by the likes of Quinlan Terry or John Simpson that the Prince of Wales favoured, that won the
battle of Trafalgar Square. While the prince’s intervention scuppered the insensitive ABK proposal, the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing ended up being designed by
postmodernism’s American pioneers Venturi-Scott Brown. Impressed by the symbolic expressions of Las Vegas’s casino architecture, Robert Venturi advocated a ‘decorated shed’
approach to building, contradicting Mies van der Rohe’s famous ‘less is more’ dictum with his own retaliatory sound bite: ‘Less is a bore.’ Begun in 1987 and completed
four years later, the Sainsbury Wing was in the words of the Po-Mo writer and practitioner Charles Jencks ‘the most accomplished pluralist building in London’.
¹⁶
It was this very pluralism that united the straighter-laced classicists and modernists in condemnation, equally unamused by Venturi’s playful decorative
references. These included such heresies as switching classical orders, a cornice that unaccountably petered out, and the stone facade facing Trafalgar Square being exposed as no more than a thin
screen by the sheet-glass outer wall of its connecting elevation. Here, indeed, was a classically decorated shed whose theoretical postures may have insulted purists but which succeeded in its
purpose as a gallery.

Away from the showpiece commissions, postmodernism also made its presence felt in domestic architecture, and its contribution to the urban landscape was at least jollier than the typically
rain-stained grey monotonies erected during the previous forty years. Yellow or warm-cream brick was preferred, providing good cheer with darker-coloured brick bandings deployed to reduce the sense
of mass. Nautical touches – familiar to British design in the 1930s – came back into fashion. Portholes punctured Cascades, Piers Gough’s whimsical brick-fronted block of flats on
the Isle of Dogs. Elsewhere, small square windows, often with blue frames, were in vogue as
were prow (V-shaped) windows. Like an acute variant on the oriel window, these
protrusions provided articulation to the elevation of buildings and were a particular feature of James Stirling’s Clore Wing of the Tate Gallery.
^EN22
Beside the ubiquitous, cheap-looking, clip-on thin stone panels used to face Po-Mo office buildings, there were occasional triumphs. In Berkeley Square, Lansdowne House
(tellingly, the head office of one of the period’s most emblematic companies, the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi) featured panels cut and mounted to create edges and shadows in an
overall effect reminiscent of art deco – unquestionably the historic style that Po-Mo most closely resembled.

The atrium was another common feature of eighties office design. Technological advance and the deregulation of the financial markets created a need for offices with large, open-plan dealing
floors. As a result, the width of office buildings expanded. A central atrium provided an obvious solution, penetrating the bulk and letting in natural light to those working in the heart of the
building. An atrium also created a magisterially soaring reception area, heightening the occupants’ sense of self-importance and projecting the impression of grandeur. A device used for
transatlantic shopping malls thus became the customary feature of the successful British company headquarters. Where there was not the space or money for an atrium, atrium-shaped windows were
fitted on eighties office buildings across the country. As with so many other architectural developments during the decade, it was in London that the most successful – and least cheaply
imitative – examples were built. Immediately following the Big Bang deregulation of 1986, the area of the City around Liverpool Street Station became a giant building site from which rose the
Broadgate complex, offering the rapidly expanding financial institutions the floor space and office environment they needed. Alongside Broadgate Street, the practice of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill
(SOM) erected a line of offices in the transatlantic Po-Mo style, their oppressive mass broken up by different colours, shiny granite panels and vast atrium-shaped windows. Arup Associates was
responsible for the offices around the Broadgate Arena, with atria providing internal light, but displaying a different approach to the outward appearance by hanging the polished clip-on panels
more clearly beyond the glass frontages so as to remove any doubt that they had a structural, load-bearing significance. Such a rejection of artifice might have appeased even the most recusant
modernist. Broadgate’s significance, though, was not just that it provided a lot of suitable office space, but rather the claim it could make to be one of the most successful examples of
modern urban-space design. What might in the 1960s have become an empty, windswept piazza was instead given life and drama by a
colonnaded amphitheatre. Artfully draped with
hanging greenery, it providing tiers of spectator-lined bars, cafes and places to sit and eat a lunchtime sandwich around a forum that in winter became an ice rink. Here was somewhere to sunbathe,
picnic, relax with friends – a village green for the international capitalist community.

In the last three years of the eighties, the City’s available office space increased by one third. Surprisingly, this vast expansion took place after the Stock Market crash of 1987, not
before it. It was in this supposedly postparty atmosphere that the world’s largest property development, Canary Wharf, began rising from the disused wasteland of East London’s
Docklands. As at Broadgate, SOM produced the Canary Wharf master plan. The centrepiece was One Canada Square, a fifty-storey, stainless-steel-clad tower resembling a shiny Ancient Egyptian obelisk.
Designed by the American architect Cesar Pelli, it was, at its completion, the tallest tower in Europe and was visible from thirty miles away. Canary Wharf had few discernible reference points to
indigenous culture. The look was more reminiscent of Chicago or Toronto. This was not just because the architects were commissioned by the Canadian property developers Olympia & York. Rather,
it was symptomatic of a style that was essentially an American import to Britain, designed to appeal to the borderless priorities of international capital. Indeed, Po-Mo buildings were much more
ubiquitous in Britain and America during the Thatcher/Reagan years than in continental Europe. Yet not only were such symbols of ‘yuppie’ confidence as Broadgate and Canary Wharf
constructed after the crash of 1987, Thatcher was no longer in Downing Street when they were completed. The most virile architectural statement of eighties money-making, Pelli’s tower at
Canary Wharf, was not finished until 1991, when John Major was in Downing Street, the country in the pit of recession and Olympia & York poised to file for bankruptcy, ruined by what suddenly
– if prematurely – looked like
folie de grandeur
.

The quintessential styles of the eighties were killed off by the recession that hit the construction industry in the early nineties. When James Stirling’s No. 1 Poultry building in the
City was belatedly erected in 1997, it already seemed curiously out of date, its heavy Po-Mo motifs belonging to an aesthetic crushed under the weight of its own self-parody. One of the most
accomplished of the eighties Po-Mo architects, Terry Farrell, produced works at the decade’s end that included two extraordinary additions to the banks of the Thames – the new MI6
building (resembling an art deco version of the temples of Luxor) and the office development of Embankment Place, whose curved arches rose above the platforms of Charing Cross Station like the
front radiator grille of a 1920s sports car. It was assumed that Farrell would dominate the British architectural scene in the nineties, but instead he spent much of it working in Hong Kong. By the
time his focus
returned to Britain, minimalism was back at the forefront of design and the near-ubiquitous architect of the age was the high-tech modernist Norman Foster.