C O N T E X T 1 1 7 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 0 15 Alan Powers is a professor in architecture and cultural history at the University of Greenwich. BedZED in Sutton, south London, is a landmark within its genre. (Drawing: Rob Cowan) meeting and the client’s press release, every building tells a story. It does not seem to matter whether it is trivial or engaging – indeed, most people seem not to make a distinction. The danger is that when people listen to stories told about buildings in this way, they fail to see in a critical and sensitive way, so that the qualities once described as ‘formalism’ are now shunned in the way that buildings are judged, although architects may still be using them as a creative tool in as much of an undercover way as they previously might have used narrative and symbolism. No doubt this phase will come to an end, although it is hard to see what might replace it. Perhaps the Olympic site will be the final fanfare of our receding belle époque, but we are also already seeing a very different kind of ingenuity, better adapted to austerity, involving recycled materials, temporary uses and a light touch. Among those who consider technique at least as important as art in the production of architecture, there has been plenty to think about, despite the apparently superficial charms of many of the public building projects. For example, BedZED, the pioneer zero fossil energy housing development commissioned from Bill Dunster’s ZEDfactory by Bioregional and Peabody and completed in 2000, clearly represents a landmark within its genre. If and when it becomes protected by listing, there may be interesting new problems about giving consents for upgrading the energy-saving and substitution devices. However, at BedZED the intention was to reduce technology by designing a thermally self-regulating cross section. It is the absence of ‘kit’ that marks out BedZED’s significance as an alternative to the mainstream, not the application of mechanical services. Listing is not just there as a retrospective award for good behaviour, however, because it is the problem children who may be the most interesting. Paradoxically, technical deficiency rather than efficiency, if allied to sufficient strength of visual imagination, can become a trigger for listing. Certain buildings acquire a bad reputation, whether it is deserved or not. The works of James Stirling and James Gowan that are now called the Red Trilogy (Leicester Engineering Building, Cambridge History Faculty, and the Florey Building, Oxford) seem to have attracted poor management and poor refurbishment until recently because their owners may, in some obscure way, have thought it necessary to ‘punish’ the building for its bad behaviour, rather than working with it to apply the better technology of today as a retrofit. Listing may risk getting a bad reputation itself by hanging out with the bad boys, but on inspection they are more misunderstood than evil. Something similar applies to Robin Hood Gardens by Alison and Peter Smithson, whose reputation as a bad place persisted decades after the early problems of the estate had passed, while still becoming a convenient excuse for commentators to air their prejudices about a host of other matters. Maybe a building that wants to be listed should keep a low profile. Indeed, the exercise of post-war listing to date has resulted in the establishment of a canon of works substantially different from those that might have been predicted 30 or more years before. There is an element of changing taste in this, combined with a survival-of-the-fittest factor that depends on whether the building has come through its first 30 years sufficiently unscathed. In addition, there is still a lack of complete knowledge of what interesting work has been built in any one year. Private houses remain increasingly private, excluded from publication for obvious reasons, and tricky to survey, except perhaps by Google Earth. In this area, there continue to be major new discoveries. At present, the issue of how many buildings will be proposed or accepted for listing within the cycle of the 30 year rule is less urgent than the fear that the whole listing system as we have known it could be diluted or overturned as a result of the coalition government’s localism agenda. There would be a severe challenge in trying to convince a whole local council that a building that they might have difficulty in understanding is in fact the one most worth preserving, but it should be faced. A recent book on Stirling’s Red Trilogy, edited by the architect Alan Berman, responds to a question asked by one of the fellows of Queen’s College, Oxford: ‘Why do so many architects like these buildings when so many lay people do not? Why are they considered so important?’This not a question that the Georgian Group or even the Victorian Society have to worry about too much, but it remains a central issue for the conservation of more recent structures.
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