St Paul’s Visitor Centre, Make Architects

      The influence of Googie in contemporary urbanism is largely unacknowledged, but it is, I would argue, key to understanding exactly why the ‘signature’ wing of pseudomodernist architecture takes the form it does. Seemingly paradoxically, it aligns itself very closely with the heritage zones of the old capitals. Across the road from St Paul’s Cathedral is a tourist information pavilion by Make architects, the group established by Ken Shuttleworth, job architect on Norman Foster’s Gherkin. In its improbable geometry, its jagged zigzag showing zero interest in the expression of function or good taste, it could easily be selling donuts in 1950s Anaheim. There is by now a large amount of architecture like this, serving most often as a key component of urban regeneration strategies. Buildings for living in are more often done in a mild, asymmetrically patterned form of Scandinavian Modernism, while buildings for culture are allowed to make somewhat wilder gestures. This process can be seen in various buildings for the creative industries in Britain, with their logo-like names: Urbis in Manchester, The Public in West Bromwich, FACT in Liverpool. Its most extensive expression is not, however, in the UK, with its remaining vestiges of representative democracy, but in the oligarchies of Russia, China and the United Arab Emirates. Abu Dhabi, for instance, has set aside a district solely for ‘iconic’ cultural buildings by Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster and Jean Nouvel (who has designed a branch of the Louvre). Barry Lord, the (English) ‘cultural consultant’ for this zone, notes that ‘cultural tourists are older, wealthier, more educated, and they spend more. From an economic point of view, this makes sense’.⁸ No doubt this applies equally well in theory to West Bromwich or Salford.

      Much of this architecture has in common with Googie the reduction of the building to a logo, to an instantly memorable image: one that is appreciated in movement, as from a passing car, while quickly walking through an art gallery or museum on the way to the gift shop; or indeed while shopping, as with Future Systems and Rem Koolhaas’s work for Selfridges and Prada in Birmingham and New York, respectively. Although it may accompany exhibitions of art or simulations of war, it is not an architecture of contemplation but of distraction and speed. Yet it also continues the moralistic rhetoric of postwar Modernism, without any of the actual social uses—local authority housing, comprehensive schools, general hospitals—to which it was originally put. The new Modernism, like the new social democratic parties, is one emptied of all intent to actually improve the living conditions of the majority. Instead, the social use of the pseudo-modernist building, forever groping for the Bilbao effect, appears in a rather Victorian manner to be the uplifting of the spirit via interactive exhibits and installations.

      Nobody ever suggested that roadside diners had hyperbolic paraboloid roofs in order to make us better people or induce us to ‘aspire’, let alone to simulate the experience of war or the Holocaust. Nonetheless, the formal links between Googie and today’s apparently radical architecture does suggest a truth at its heart—its forbears are in the aesthetics of consumption and advertising, in forms designed to be seen at great speed, not in serene contemplation. It should not surprise us that a style of consumption would return under neoliberalism, but the formal affinities of Pseudomodernism with this aesthetic offers an alternative explanation for what often seems an arbitrary play of forms. By drawing on the futurism of the McCarthy era, the architecture of the equally conformist neoliberal consensus establishes a link between two eras of political stagnation and technological acceleration. It also allows us to reinterpret what purports to be an aesthetic of edification as one of consumption. In the computer-aided creation of futuristic form, today’s architects are producing enormous logos, and this is only appropriate. The architecture once described as deconstructivist owes less to Derrida than it does to McDonalds.

       In (Partial) Praise of Urban Britain

      The ‘Urban Renaissance’ is key to all this, and irrespective of its courting of suburbia, New Labour was very much an urban party. Its bases remained in ex-industrial cities, and its hierarchy was drawn from North London, Greater Manchester and Edinburgh. The Tories, irrespective of their capture of the Greater London Authority, are essentially an outer-suburban and rural party, so it will be instructive to find out what they plan to do with this major Blairite shibboleth. Coined in the late 1990s either by the sociologists Ricky Burdett and Anne Power or by Richard Rogers, under the auspices of the Urban Task Force set up by the de facto minister for architecture and planning John Prescott, this has become the optimistic term for a middle-class return to the cities, and an attendant redevelopment of previously demonized urban spaces. It is inextricably associated with the urban paraphernalia I define as Pseudomodern: in terms of architectural artefacts, the urban renaissance has meant lottery-funded centres, entertainment venues and shopping/eating complexes, clustered around disused riverfronts (Salford Quays, Cardiff Bay, the Tyneside ensemble of Baltic, Sage and Millennium Bridge); in housing, the aforementioned ‘mixed’ blocks of flats on brownfield sites, the privatization of council estates, the reuse of old mills or factories; extensive public art, whether cheerful or gesturing towards sculptor Antony Gormley’s enigmatic figures (his ‘Angel of the North’, outstretched atop a former coal seam, is perhaps the most famous icon of regeneration), usually symbolizing an area’s phoenix-like re-emergence; districts become branded ‘quarters’; and, perhaps most curiously, piazzas (or, in the incongruously grandiose planning parlance, ‘public realms’) appear, with attendant coffee concessions, promising to bring European sophistication to Derby or Portsmouth.

      The process is partial and unevenly scattered, but reaches its most spectacular extent in the miles of luxury flats in the former London Docks, the new high-rise skyline of Leeds, the privatized retail district of Liverpool One, and the repopulation of central Manchester. Irrespective of the virtues or otherwise of these new spaces, this urban renaissance is widely considered to have ended in aforementioned city centre flats standing empty, as if the exodus from the suburbs to the cities was a confidence trick. Half-finished, empty or cheaply let towers in Glasgow, Stratford or Sheffield act as symbols both of the euphemistic ‘credit crunch’ and of the failure, as suburban boosterism might have it, of an attempt to cajole people into a form of living alien to British predilections—although the linked sub-prime crash in the US was a suburban rather than inner-city phenomenon.

      So the suburbs—a fundamentally meaningless term, encompassing everything from