C O N T E X T 1 1 7 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 0 13 ALAN POWERS Looking back from the future One day some of today’s buildings will be listed. Recent history provides clues as to which they might be, and how the future may see the architecture of our time. Soon after the communist states of Eastern Europe collapsed in 1989, the American historian Francis Fukuyama wrote a book called The End of History. The book is now history, and things have moved on in ways that might have been predicted by a more pessimistic commentator. History, in terms of human actions and the entropic pressures of nature, never ends, so there is no reason to mark a definite cut-off point for architecture, or for the desire to save it from demolition or disfigurement. Even if the conservation movement in Britain as we know it is still less than 150 years old, the mental habit of wanting to keep things has worn deep. Besides, we may not even be able to afford to throw them away and replace them. In my own conservation activity since the early 1980s, I have seen the cycle turn. The Thirties Society was founded in 1979 as a result of the lack of concern among other groups about the demolition of Lloyds of London on Leadenhall Street, a classical building of 1928 by Sir Edwin Cooper that had long been seen as a wrong turning in the development of architecture. Somewhat to the dismay of the pro-Cooper lobby, the same Thirties Society (operating since 1992 as the Twentieth Century Society) is now pressing for the listing of Richard Rogers’ replacement building – with the assumption that now this has reached 30 years of age it will be a relatively uncontroversial decision. Can we predict the listable buildings and the The Royal Court Theatre auditorium with exposed, original steel structure (Photo: Andy Chopping) The Royal Court Theatre extended basement undercroft bar below Sloane Square (Photo: Edmund Sumner) conservation causes of 2040? If we still back-cast a 30 year shadow, the listers would have been busy for a decade already, catching what remained of the great Millennium architecture boom. A combination of
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