The Shard's inauguration ceremony. Photo via Wikimedia CommonsThereâs no better display of wealth than throwing millions at a great fucking tower of concrete and glass. In fact, it feels like there are plans for a new corporate skyscraper in London every month, each one an opportunity for a handful of investors to thrust their financial brawn into the clouds, competing with all the capital's other phallic eyesores for our indifference.I wanted to talk to someone about London's architecture and how it's been affected by the arrogance of wealth, so I got in touch with the eminent design critic Stephen Bayley, who once spent a few months as the creative director of the Millennium Dome, but left in dismay at the chaos that surrounded him.Bayleyâs heroâthe Victorian art critic John Ruskinâonce said, âThere is no wealth but life.â It seems to me that, increasingly in London, there is no wealth but wealth. More and more of the capital is taken up by private land and the skyline is beginning to be dominated by private interests. I met Bayley in London's Soho neighborhood, and once heâd broken a glass of wine on me we talked about the changing face of the city.Stephen Bayley. Photo by Bruno BayleyVICE: Hi, Stephen. I think the Millennium Dome is a good place to start, because I was thinking about big building projects that were publicly funded or were meant to have some sort of public benefit, and itâs one of the last ones I can think of. And of course, it wasnât successful until a mobile phone company got involved.
Stephen Bayley: Well, they didnât actually take it over; they had to build something else inside it. Itâs not a dome, of course; itâs a tent. But New Labor required it be a dome with all the aggrandizing associations of the Vatican and Jerusalem. I enthusiastically accepted the challenge and totally underestimated the scope for political bullshit that was going to follow. It was a great idea, but Iâm vaguely sceptical about whether any such project would work.Having said that, I had an exchangeâthis is the most appalling, chunking name-dropping, but itâs trueâwith Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, the other day. He said a wonderful, simple thing to me. Itâs that if, a century ago, he were looking at the London skyline, everything that would have punctuated the horizon would have had some kind of public utility or symbolism. And now you look around, and theyâre symbols of arrogance and greed. Simple, large things representing simple, crude ideas. Weâve lost the kind of common good in projects, which is why the Millennium Dome, in principle, was a great idea. It was utterly flawed in execution, though, because of lowbrow politicking.The Millennium Dome (Photo via)Do you think, when we look at these buildings, that we have some kind of inherent sense of the fact that theyâre flawed in this way? I'm thinking of the Shard in particular.
The Shard is a stupid building. Iâm not against it because itâs tall, although I donât particularly like tall buildings. Height is a crude way to achieve economic efficiencies. You can make them more efficient in other ways and still meet your commercial needs. The Shard is annoying because itâs so unintelligent, energy-squandering, and inflexible. Even though itâs a 21st-century building, itâs conceptually a mid-20th-century building⊠itâs just a big ugly Qatari fuck-you.We enjoy buildings that appear to be connected with their environment. They donât have to be a slavish response to it, but they have to be in some way helpful. The Shard has nothing to do with London. Itâs just an alien thing sitting on top of London Bridge station, and itâs a horrible additional load on the transportation resources there.Thatâs not because itâs new. Prince Charles's adventure into architecture was misguided. He got it almost entirely wrong. He sweetly and naively thought that everything new was bad. The buildings he dislikes are not bad because theyâre new; theyâre bad because theyâre bad. But the terrible thing about his interest in architecture is that he gave false prestige and authority to people who thought that everything that was new was wrong.The HSBC building in Hong Kong. Photo via Wikimedia CommonsYeah, Norman Fosterâs HSBC building in Hong Kong has a connection to its environment, which seems in stark contrast to the Shard or the Gherkin.
I was in Hong Kong, and it looks, even though itâs modernist, like an ancient piece of craft in comparison with the other things that have been built in the nearly 30 years since. Thereâs a wonderful thing that Braque said about Picasso. He said he used to be a great painter and then he became a genius. I think Norman Foster used to be a really great architect. He made some really wonderfully crafted and intensely cerebral buildings, and about half an hour after his peak celebrity as a proper designer, he turned into a brand.Thinking of the Millennium Dome, the MI6 building is a relatively recent building that is technically public in that itâs part of government, but is actually completely closed off. Itâs representative of one of the few areas of government that Thatcher and beyond have invested in, which is âsecurity.â I think thereâs an implicit âfuck youâ to the people there; because they spent all this money on a building we have no interaction with.Itâs the strangest thing, isnât it, that the secret service occupies one of London's most ostentatious buildings? As architecture, it really is ham-fisted. Terry Farrell, the architect, is not a sparkling intellect. Thirty years ago I did an exhibition at the V&A about taste, just after Farrell did the TV-am building in Camden. It had chickens and tweety birds on the parapets to indicate breakfast. I put this on the dust bins in this exhibition, and Terry Farrell sent me a message saying he was going to come down and hit me. He came down, but he wimped out⊠possibly because I threatened to have a Daily Mail photographer on hand to record the incident.Itâs impossible to find objective standards when judging buildings. After years and years and years of looking, the answer is semi-mystical. If it makes you feel better, you see it, you step into it and you get an enhanced sense of something or other. No Terry Farrell building has any such thing. The MI6 building is just crude. Thereâs no sense of public utility. In any case, it was intended to be a hotel.The MI6 building. Photo Wikimedia CommonsThereâs more private land in the city now, and it also feels more homogenous. If you walk along the Southbank, you could almost be in any other city in the world.
In one sense, I really deplore that, but I remember having a conversation on the telephone with Boris Johnson just before he became mayor. I said, âBoris, could you tell me what your architectural policies are going to be?â And he said, âOh, my dear Stephen. We will have Georgian squares. We will have," and he actually said this, "Richard Foster and Norman Rogers.â I said to him, âBoris, how are we actually going to get these Georgian squares?â And he just said, âArgh⊠ummmm⊠argh⊠well.â I quite like Boris, but heâs not someone youâd look to for clarity and executive action.He seems to have presided over, and deliberately talked about, an increasingly capital-orientated shift in our culture.
I honestly think about that all the time, and of course the worship of money is always unsavory, but I donât know any other city thatâs really doing it better. London is the most interesting city in the world, and thereâs never been a plan for it, which I think is sort of wonderful.For all its terrible faults, London is more organically vital than New York now. Weâre terribly good at holding on to traditions, but weâre also curiously more tolerant of newness than any other place. In New York, particularly Manhattan, theyâre so protective and so inward-looking. In one sense, while I dislike the crassness and crudeness and the fact that all these new buildings are symbols of greed, I think it's sort of wonderful theyâre happening here. Great cities need to be dynamic.The Gherkin seen from the Tower of London (Photo via)But you love John Ruskin; what would he think about that? I suppose Iâm thinking of this in terms of a beautiful building being one that serves the community.
Iâm totally conflicted about that, as I am about almost everything else. I can honestly say I deplore the crudeness of most modern buildings, but I also think you canât legislate for it. Everything thatâs built betrays the preoccupations and beliefs of the people who made it. Thatâs my central belief in all of existence, I just donât know any examples of where legislating for beauty and utility has actually worked. It might have worked vaguely in Manhattan, but you know what they did in there? They divvied it all up in the 1850s into big great squares, and in those plots you can do anything you want.What about St. Paulâs Cathedral and Christopher Wrenâs London?
There's a wonderful man called Nicholas Barbon, a contemporary of Wren, who was one of the first property developers in London. He was working just after the Great Fire and he was fantastically particular about what you should do with cities. He developed Red Lion Square [between Bloomsbury and Holborn]. My basic point is that Christopher Wren didnât have any scruples about knocking things down. His people had the confidence to build something new. I love St. Paul's; I donât want it to be compromised ever. But youâve got to remember that it was a rebuild once upon a time.St. Paul's Cathedral seen from the Millennium Bridge. Photo via Wikimedia CommonsThatâs true, and buildings can be knocked down, of course. How do you think the arrogance of wealth is expressed in the buildings that have shot up around London in the past 10 or 15 years?
Iâm not against wealth finding expression; Iâm just uncomfortable when the expression it finds is anti-social arrogance. I think most new buildings in the city are woeful, but let's not forget that Venice became beautiful because it had a flourishing business community that was allowed to do more or less whatever it wanted. Now, itâs dead. Thatâs the central truth about Venice. A more reasonable person would disagree with what Iâm saying now, but Venice is a beautiful architectural cadaver. Culturally, economically, artistically, itâs a monument. But what can you do? Is this what urban beauty means? Who wants to live in a dead city? Even Venetians donât want to live in Venice, for Godâs sake.On a purely aesthetic level, does global capital just need to have its offices in big, tall, architectural penises?
Big swinging architecture will very soon have had its day. I am a bruised optimist and believe that, ultimately, intelligence will win. The best newspaper architectural critic ever was an American woman called Ada Louise Huxtable, who died last year in her nineties. She wrote The Tall Building Artistically Reconsideredâa take on Louis Sullivan's original. Sheâs the source of the idea of public utility. Itâs perfectly possible to make buildings that are both commercially viable and artistically exalting. It simply requires genius designers⊠corporate architecture doesnât have to be awful. We get the architecture we deserve.Follow Oscar Rickett on Twitter.
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Stephen Bayley: Well, they didnât actually take it over; they had to build something else inside it. Itâs not a dome, of course; itâs a tent. But New Labor required it be a dome with all the aggrandizing associations of the Vatican and Jerusalem. I enthusiastically accepted the challenge and totally underestimated the scope for political bullshit that was going to follow. It was a great idea, but Iâm vaguely sceptical about whether any such project would work.
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The Shard is a stupid building. Iâm not against it because itâs tall, although I donât particularly like tall buildings. Height is a crude way to achieve economic efficiencies. You can make them more efficient in other ways and still meet your commercial needs. The Shard is annoying because itâs so unintelligent, energy-squandering, and inflexible. Even though itâs a 21st-century building, itâs conceptually a mid-20th-century building⊠itâs just a big ugly Qatari fuck-you.We enjoy buildings that appear to be connected with their environment. They donât have to be a slavish response to it, but they have to be in some way helpful. The Shard has nothing to do with London. Itâs just an alien thing sitting on top of London Bridge station, and itâs a horrible additional load on the transportation resources there.
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I was in Hong Kong, and it looks, even though itâs modernist, like an ancient piece of craft in comparison with the other things that have been built in the nearly 30 years since. Thereâs a wonderful thing that Braque said about Picasso. He said he used to be a great painter and then he became a genius. I think Norman Foster used to be a really great architect. He made some really wonderfully crafted and intensely cerebral buildings, and about half an hour after his peak celebrity as a proper designer, he turned into a brand.Thinking of the Millennium Dome, the MI6 building is a relatively recent building that is technically public in that itâs part of government, but is actually completely closed off. Itâs representative of one of the few areas of government that Thatcher and beyond have invested in, which is âsecurity.â I think thereâs an implicit âfuck youâ to the people there; because they spent all this money on a building we have no interaction with.
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In one sense, I really deplore that, but I remember having a conversation on the telephone with Boris Johnson just before he became mayor. I said, âBoris, could you tell me what your architectural policies are going to be?â And he said, âOh, my dear Stephen. We will have Georgian squares. We will have," and he actually said this, "Richard Foster and Norman Rogers.â I said to him, âBoris, how are we actually going to get these Georgian squares?â And he just said, âArgh⊠ummmm⊠argh⊠well.â I quite like Boris, but heâs not someone youâd look to for clarity and executive action.
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I honestly think about that all the time, and of course the worship of money is always unsavory, but I donât know any other city thatâs really doing it better. London is the most interesting city in the world, and thereâs never been a plan for it, which I think is sort of wonderful.For all its terrible faults, London is more organically vital than New York now. Weâre terribly good at holding on to traditions, but weâre also curiously more tolerant of newness than any other place. In New York, particularly Manhattan, theyâre so protective and so inward-looking. In one sense, while I dislike the crassness and crudeness and the fact that all these new buildings are symbols of greed, I think it's sort of wonderful theyâre happening here. Great cities need to be dynamic.The Gherkin seen from the Tower of London (Photo via)But you love John Ruskin; what would he think about that? I suppose Iâm thinking of this in terms of a beautiful building being one that serves the community.
Iâm totally conflicted about that, as I am about almost everything else. I can honestly say I deplore the crudeness of most modern buildings, but I also think you canât legislate for it. Everything thatâs built betrays the preoccupations and beliefs of the people who made it. Thatâs my central belief in all of existence, I just donât know any examples of where legislating for beauty and utility has actually worked. It might have worked vaguely in Manhattan, but you know what they did in there? They divvied it all up in the 1850s into big great squares, and in those plots you can do anything you want.
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There's a wonderful man called Nicholas Barbon, a contemporary of Wren, who was one of the first property developers in London. He was working just after the Great Fire and he was fantastically particular about what you should do with cities. He developed Red Lion Square [between Bloomsbury and Holborn]. My basic point is that Christopher Wren didnât have any scruples about knocking things down. His people had the confidence to build something new. I love St. Paul's; I donât want it to be compromised ever. But youâve got to remember that it was a rebuild once upon a time.St. Paul's Cathedral seen from the Millennium Bridge. Photo via Wikimedia CommonsThatâs true, and buildings can be knocked down, of course. How do you think the arrogance of wealth is expressed in the buildings that have shot up around London in the past 10 or 15 years?
Iâm not against wealth finding expression; Iâm just uncomfortable when the expression it finds is anti-social arrogance. I think most new buildings in the city are woeful, but let's not forget that Venice became beautiful because it had a flourishing business community that was allowed to do more or less whatever it wanted. Now, itâs dead. Thatâs the central truth about Venice. A more reasonable person would disagree with what Iâm saying now, but Venice is a beautiful architectural cadaver. Culturally, economically, artistically, itâs a monument. But what can you do? Is this what urban beauty means? Who wants to live in a dead city? Even Venetians donât want to live in Venice, for Godâs sake.On a purely aesthetic level, does global capital just need to have its offices in big, tall, architectural penises?
Big swinging architecture will very soon have had its day. I am a bruised optimist and believe that, ultimately, intelligence will win. The best newspaper architectural critic ever was an American woman called Ada Louise Huxtable, who died last year in her nineties. She wrote The Tall Building Artistically Reconsideredâa take on Louis Sullivan's original. Sheâs the source of the idea of public utility. Itâs perfectly possible to make buildings that are both commercially viable and artistically exalting. It simply requires genius designers⊠corporate architecture doesnât have to be awful. We get the architecture we deserve.Follow Oscar Rickett on Twitter.