Setting the scene for the future

Architectural Review, The, March, 2005 by Peter Davey

I was rather taken aback when my fellow directors asked me to produce a special issue to mark the end of my tenure of the editorial chair. The request was embarrassing and daunting. What on earth was I to do? In the end, it seemed that the only response could be an analysis of what The Architectural Review has been up to for the last 25 years, (1) and what has happened in the world of architecture during that time. A quarter of a century is no longer a huge proportion of an average Western life, but culture, politics and economics alter so rapidly over such a period that it is impossible to compress all the changes into a manageable compass. So these pages are highly selective.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

When he retired in 1971 after 36 years with the magazine, my revered precursor J. M. Richards remarked that 'we are all modernists now'. (2) The battle for modern architecture versus 'period-revival' building had been won, and in Richards' eyes, modernism was becoming enriched because architects 'now know that there is not one answer but any number of answers'. Even so, he could not have anticipated that within a dozen years Post-Modern Classicism (PoMo) was to emerge blowsily full blown from the drawers of Philip Johnson's AT & T Chippendale cabinet.

Few would disagree that we are all post-modernists now--though few, thank goodness, are adherents of PoMo. For all Richards' belief that architecture was becoming more plural towards the end of the Modern period, to many it seemed to be increasingly grim, bureaucratic and dull. PoMo was an early and noisy example of the many imaginative theoretical and built reactions against tired official Modernism (and each other) that have made the last quarter of a century so multi-faceted, culturally productive and challenging.

At the same time, radical changes were taking place in the role of the profession. Richards could still talk about the architect as the leader of the building team--though he argued that what really mattered is not so much formal leadership as the fact that the architect is the only member of the team 'who has been trained to create order' and who has the ability to 'construct a picture of what the future world will actually be like'. Largely, that remains true, but the role of the design professions--architects, engineers, landscape and urban designers--is increasingly threatened and restricted by both business and government. Neither trusts the professional role, which was invented in the early nineteenth century to curb the excesses of the unbridled market. Business hates any attempt to restrain it, and governments believe that they are the only proper source of restraint.

Official philistinism

Official systems of building procurement have been set up to minimize the professional position. They are almost inevitably more expensive than traditional methods, more prone to corruption and, judging by results so far, much more likely to produce second-rate results. Absurd official reports are regularly produced that attempt to make professional imagination into a mere component (and a small one at that) of the development process. We do not undergo a long and difficult process of education and training to become cogs in the construction industry, and the buildings published in the AR show how architectural imagination can still triumph over the drag of mundane to produce places that enhance human life and spirit.

Richards believed that the AR had a complex role to play in communicating architectural ideas to clients and the general public; he thought of it as a 'bridge, carrying traffic in both directions' that 'can span the distance between architects and the public they serve'. It may still have been possible to make such a programme work even as late as the 1970s, but I doubt it. The difficulties of trying to generate a magazine that can appeal equally strongly to both general public and the design professions have been insurmountable in my time. In both business and intellectual terms, it has been impossible to make a consumer product that has relevance to creative architects and designers or vice-versa--as the few examples that have been tried demonstrate. The successful ones seem to end up as superficial followers of fashion. They tend to go in for interviews illustrated by large pictures of designers rather than what they make. All are seduced by flashy gestures.

Desperate straits

When I started, the AR was in desperate straits commercially, rapidly losing money and circulation. Something had to be done, and remedies ranged from turning it into a magazine covering earthquakes and natural disasters to becoming a colour supplement to The Architects' Journal, our sibling. I was convinced that the magazine could become successful again by building on its great days under Richards and his proprietor Hubert de Cronin Hastings. The AR had flirted with amateur sociology and various forms of graphic criticism: it was essential to bring the magazine back to being fundamentally about architecture and its immediately related disciplines.