Showing off: form not substance - architectural design of the Greenwich Millennium Dome building

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 1998 by Peter Davey

Since the Labour Government took power in Britain some nine months ago, urbanism, architecture and design have clearly been regarded with greater respect in official circles than during the philistine and socially destructive 18-year night of Conservative rule. Enthusiasm is (at least partly) clear, but Labour's judgement is strange, to say the least. When the Government wanted to entertain the President and Prime Minister of France last year, instead of using one of the many excellent (but old) reception suites in central London, it chose the upper floors of the Canary Wharf Tower, the centrepiece of the worst urban redevelopment in Europe (and the largest, until Renzo Plano's infinitely better Potsdarner Platz started to emerge in Berlin - see last month's AR p34-43). Cesar Pelli's tower is a tired, if technically competent example of American run-of-the-mill commercial architecture. Its top floors, which enjoy views of some of the most dreary recent buildings in the world, were done over for the great Franco-British meeting by a team directed by Terence Conran, Purveyor of Modern Gentility to the British middle classes. The only virtues the naff place and bland interiors seemed to have were that they were (relatively) new, and perhaps that the overall design was American, for possibly because the British are so notoriously bad at foreign languages, the US seems to offer the only patterns of the future understood in Whitehall: we are apparently old-fashioned and unselfconfident even in our choice of role models.

As we go to press, the Greenwich Dome, the Government's celebration of the Millennium, appears to be suffering from similar confusions of aim and imagination. The artistic director Stephen Bayley, and his political supremo Peter Mandelson,(1) seem to have fallen out over what to put into the place. The building itself, by the Richard Rogers Partnership and Buro Happold, promises to be a decent (if not revolutionary) example of modern architectural and engineering design, decorously and appropriately taking its cue from the much smaller but more innovatory Dome of Discovery, the focus of the 1951 Festival of Britain (AR January 1995).

But the contents of the Greenwich Dome remain extremely nebulous. Of the people given responsibility to fill it, neither Bayley nor the teams of designers he chose (with one or two very distinguished exceptions) give hope of originality, excellence, perception or powerful imagination. And Mandelson's visit to Disneyworld, in which he was apparently vouchsafed a Road-to-Damascus revelation at the well of huge profits based on dumbing-down as many people as possible, bodes extremely ill for the project.

Both the Great Exhibition and its 1951 successor tapped a sense of wonder. The 1851 event, though it was condemned by The Times as exhibiting 'universal infidelity in principles of design',(2) showed the vigour and variety of the first stage of the Industrial Revolution and its exploration of the natural world. Its centennial event illustrated the great courage of a people who had been locked in a near fatal combat with the most evil regime the civilized world has ever seen, and it celebrated visions of turning swords into ploughshares. The Greenwich exhibition shows little hope of achieving the power of its predecessors. Humanity has a huge amount of material and spiritual achievement to celebrate at the turn of the millennium, but where is the nobility of the Greenwich project? Where the wonder? Good design, innovative ideas, imagination and delight do not flourish in a climate of focus groups, trend surveys, PR agencies and media masseurs. P.D.

1 Ironically, Mandelson is the grandson of Herbert Morrison who oversaw the Festival of Britain (Bayley has left the project).

2 The Times, reprinted in The Journal of Design, 1851, quoted by Naylor, Gillian in The Arts and Crafts Movement, Studio Vista, London, 1971, p200.