Over the last few decades, architects lost the authorship of buildings to agents and planners when architects refused to accept that production was outsourced to contractors as it has been to China and India in other sectors. Architects sank with the ‘production’ ship and abandoned the ‘services’ lifeboats that were eventually commandeered by letting agents.
Agents command so much clout over building design, yet one mustn’t forget that planners have also waded in to influence, nay dictate design with their strong style bias: Over the last decade, planners have become increasingly conservative in their taste and have attempted to lay down the law for architects to follow: Agents follow trends by emulating trailblazer schemes by visionary developers; planners also follow a select trend or two, and these trends are 300 years old. Planners are rewriting the annals of history by forcing architects to reshape London into a construct of an idealised past. Many planners have not trained as architects; they lose the design nuances of interpreting context and reinventing in subtle yet sensitive ways. Their interpretation of context becomes literal and stale. Building design becomes yet another template or flat-pack furniture catalogue for architects to implement, a Georgian Ikea.
Nowhere is this more evident than in residential projects. Some commercial projects can get away with non-orthodox materials but residential projects don’t: When did almost every new residential project have to be clad in brick to appease the planners and extract their planning permission? Isn’t this stifling to architects? Aren’t most new developments replicas of each other? London has become a rerun of itself, rather a bad remake or re-fresh. Every new Design & Access statement is a rehash. It offers nothing new. It feels like a facsimile. It slyly scans its context and almost always selectively identifies the Georgian vernacular as the predominant context and brick as the principal texture. The trend is ‘context’, and ‘context’ is a euphemism for brick. This is not to be construed as an indictment of brick as a material; rather, it is a critique of using brick gratuitously to resonate with an idealised past. Brick is a stunning and versatile material, but it should be the prerogative of the architect to use it, not a planning dictum.
Further to that, there is a disturbing trend where a tenuous historical reference is ‘unearthed’ and used an intellectual succour to feed a resurgence of postmodernism. Somehow, all new schemes have discovered lace artisans, foliage and Georgian ballrooms all over the city. This comes as a post-rationalisation and not as a genuine concept. It also justifies half-baked, gaudy ornamentation like a laser-cut wrought-iron balustrade or a foliage motif in the stone cladding or fluted pilasters for window reveals.
This trend of homogenising London into a cohesive ideal Georgian brick-clad city feels like a belated British version of Haussmann’s transformation of Paris. London is not Paris. Paris is a magnificent city predicated on consistency and monumentality. It represents how the French see themselves and want the world to see them rather than who they really are. Paris is a construct of an idealised image of France, exactly as individuals (falsely) construe themselves to be smarter, better-looking and younger-looking than their peers. London on the other hand is anything but consistent or conspicuously monumental. What makes London such a great city is how chaotic it is. Unlike Paris, London is a palimpsest of great thinking, audacious experiments and avant-garde architecture. The variegated urban fabric is a testament that the city and its creative industries have always set the trends for others to emulate. London has been both the colony and the metropole as far as testing out new styles; furthermore, London is the world’s design mecca with a commensurate urban grain of centuries of both successful and failed experiments. I have always argued that Paris is akin to being in your 50s and 60s, well-settled and content in your ways whilst London is being in your 20s and 30s, experimenting and fumbling as you learn more about yourself and grow to find your niche. You have a great deal of fun.
I use Paris as a comparison because I believe this obsession with ‘context’ and towing the line of a ‘Georgian’ vernacular is an endeavour for consistency and monumentality. It is a re-writing of history and a retrospective construct of an idealised city other than the actual London that people have been bequeathed.
London is not Paris. All the bricks of Britain (and Denmark!) will not sweeten this little chaotic town.