Alan Clawley talks about new architecture in an old way.
Every Thursday I buy a copy of the Birmingham Post from my local newsagents, mainly to keep up with local news and to see whether a letter of mine has been published. Inside every edition is a 40-odd page full-colour Post Property supplement advertising houses for sale at prices ranging from £50,000 to several million in locations from inner city Small Heath to rural Worcestershire.
Now, as I don’t own my own home and am never likely to do so, this has only passing interest for me, but then I’m obviously not a typical Post reader. I do, however, glance through the pages to see if I recognise any modernist houses or other buildings designed by John Madin or his contemporaries, but these are very few and far between. When one of his houses, the 1960s ‘Juniper Hill’ in Lapworth was advertised with permission to demolish it and redevelop the site, it prompted the 20th Century Society to apply to have it listed. If they succeed this will be the first Madin building to be officially recognised as having special architectural and historic interest.
The vast bulk of houses in Post Property, whatever their age, are what estate agents like to call ‘period’ properties. Even new houses look like rustic country cottages, Victorian terraces or tudor villas. Flats roofs are nowhere to be seen except on the rare 1920s white modernist detached house that would make a suitable location for an episode of Poirot.
When it comes to spending their own money on a house most Post readers clearly prefer it to look like a traditional brick or stone country cottage with a pitched roof and a garden. If Post readers are typical, the general public can only tolerate modern and post-modern architecture if some private corporation or public body is footing the bill.
The new Library of Birmingham is widely admired, at least inside, because it is not like a gloomy mediaeval cathedral. The designs published by property developer Argent for Paradise Circus were approved by the Planning Committee last December because they were said to enhance the setting of the classical architecture of the Town Hall, the Council House, Baskerville House and the Hall of Memory as well as the Gothic Chamberlain Memorial. How many of those councillors went home to a Victorian terraced house?
Perhaps the public would prefer new buildings to replicate the Victorian ones that were destroyed in the 1970s. During his show on which Margaret Hodge announced that the Central Library would not be listed, Ed Doolan read out an email from a listener who wrote “I will be really pleased to see the back of the Library. I’d now like to see an award-winning complex similar to Brindleyplace – lovely, brick-built buildings which would complement the Town Hall and the Council House”.
Architects know that there is a deep dislike of modernism so they offer us some tokens of that past in their buildings – the twice re-instated (windowless) Shakespeare Room on the top of the new library and the metal rings on the outside that reminds us of a metalworking industry that is now incapable of making them.
It seems that only a few individuals are able to live outside this ambiguity. One was John Madin, who designed and lived in his own 1960s modern house in Edgbaston until he left Birmingham. Then it was demolished by its new owner. Another was Erno Goldfinger who famously lived, at least for a while, in one of his (now fashionable) London council tower blocks. Unresolved conflict can make us unhappy, but Alain de Botton in his book The Architecture of Happiness, in which he discusses all stylistic periods, points out this is something we just have to live with. Beautiful architecture, he says, has none of the unambiguous advantage of a vaccine or a bowl of rice and even of we could spend the rest of our lives in the Villa Rotunda or the Glass House, we would still often be in a bad mood.
