A New Kind of Bleak. Owen Hatherley
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The Germans are constructing an unambiguously capitalist city using social democratic, or at least Keynesian methods – public investment, tightly controlled long-term planning, very little speculation. In the last instance, here too, the public purse ends up paying for the follies of the super-rich. But it really does look nicer.
Agency (1): A Corporate Headquarters for Collectivists
The problem with expecting alternatives to emerge from the practice of architects or from the town planning of less casino-based economies is that they’re still tied to the dominant orthodoxy, whether out of choice or otherwise. Returning, reluctantly as ever, to the UK, we can find three groups, three forces, which are able and willing to resist the extreme neoliberalism of the Tory–Whigs, and who could eventually become the pioneers, the clients, even, of a more equitable society. The problem with imagining the city we might want, of prospecting around for solutions, is always one of agency. You can propose it, fine. Who will build it, or at least, who will force the changes necessary for it to happen? I have three answers here, which are Trade Unions, Students, and the Young Unemployed. They have all, in the last two years, made their own interventions into urban space, all of a very different order.
In summer 2011, I visited the new London headquarters of Unison. Although they don’t, funnily enough, tend to be considered part of the Big Society, trade unions are still, by an overwhelming margin, the largest civil society organizations in the UK. The unions are voluntary, democratic, mutual, bottom-up, and yet they’re the very obverse of ‘localism’, philanthropy and the other current shibboleths. Membership might have declined since its late 1970s peak, and a series of amalgamations might have swallowed up many of the once-influential unions, with even the fearsome Transport and General Workers Union absorbed into Unite – but membership still stands at seven million, which puts the much-vaunted likes of, say, London Citizens in the shade. And paradoxically, the frontal attacks on public-sector unions from the coalition have revealed their unexpected strength, whether in the half a million who marched in London on 26 March or the 750,000 or so strikers who walked out during just one of the several public-sector strikes.
The largest, along with Unite, of today’s amalgamated super-unions, the public-sector union Unison have just begun occupying the first purpose-built trade union headquarters to have been erected in the UK for nearly thirty years, in King’s Cross, London. While as a piece of architecture it’s quite deliberately unspectacular, Squire and Partners’ building shows a face of the trade union movement that is seldom seen. The stereotypes of donkey jackets, gavel-bashing and brawny masculinity are wholly absent – instead, this is quite consciously an exercise in branding and modernization. It suggests what the 1997–2010 era’s Blairite buildings might have been like if Labour had remained a socialist party. It’s a fascinating, occasionally rather inspiring place. But the first thing to note about the Unison building is what it is not.
Oddly, given their once pivotal and still key role in British political life, trade unions have not always been major sponsors of architecture. The most famous union building is in Central London, in the form of David Aberdeen’s Congress House for the TUC, a very expensively detailed Corbusian palazzo, with a Jacob Epstein sculpture and craftsmanlike finishes. It is one of several in the Bloomsbury/King’s Cross area, near to the termini serving the North and the Midlands, traditionally the unions’ strongholds. Even now, the NUJ, Unite and others are nearby. Also in the area is the original headquarters of the National Union of Mineworkers, a stripped classical building now occupied by University College. The NUM moved out of here even before their fateful defeat in the Miners’ Strike of 1984–5, to a purpose-built headquarters designed by Malcolm Lister – relocated to Sheffield, as a gesture of distrust to Union leadership’s tendency to get cosy with the Great Wen. It was left unfinished at the end of the strike. Unison’s tower is almost certainly the first of its kind since then. The two have a passing stylistic similarity, both centring on severe columns as a slightly strained metaphor for mutual support. It’s worth remembering that the Unison chief, Dave Prentis – not exactly known as a firebrand – has said of the current wave of public-sector strikes that it will be unlike the Miners’ Strike, as ‘this time we’ll win’.
The air of siege and conspiracy that all this might imply is conspicuous by its absence; no union barons or smoke-filled rooms to be seen. Michael Poots, the project architect at Squire and Partners, calls it a ‘corporate headquarters’; Unison’s site manager John Cole speaks of a ‘bold high-street frontage’, and both talk about it as a form of branding, a statement of what trade unions are in the twenty-first century. Cole contrasts it with the office block Unison previously occupied just across the road, a large, slit-windowed concrete tower which he refers to as the ‘East European grey concrete building’. The union had considered moving to the City of London (before deciding that ‘culturally, it didn’t quite fit’), but decided to stay near to other unions and to the termini for the North. But happenstance has meant that the new Unison building directly faces the old. Originally designed for the local government union NALGO, one of those that merged into Unison, Cole says of the old HQ now that ‘it was basically a concrete tower block’, although this is also a fair description of the most obvious element in the new Unison building. To the Euston Road, it is a concrete-clad, steel-framed tower, with a mild case of the barcode façades and a rhythm of different window heights; but this becomes more complex at the rear and the side, where that corporate symbol, a glass atrium, links it to the listed Arts and Crafts Elizabeth Garrett Anderson building, a former women’s hospital, and at the back, a small cluster of housing. It’s a complex more than a singular building, although this is hardly apparent from the laconic street frontage, where the most notable moment is the aforementioned branding: a large UNISON logo at the top and at the entrance, manifesting the purpose-built nature of the project, and announcing the union’s public presence.
The main bulk of the complex is the office block in the tower, spilling into the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson building, and curiously it’s here that the difference between this place and any other corporate headquarters is most apparent. On one level, it’s a question of rhetoric. You find the brightly coloured sloganeering that adorned some Blairite structures, but the content is very different. Instead of, say, AHMM’s Westminster Academy and its Mandelsonian mantra of ‘Enterprise, Global Citizenship, Communication’, each room features the rather more meaty, contentious ‘Solidarity, Participation, Democracy, Equality’. What would once have been called ‘improving quotations’ are also littered around the building, with ‘everything from Mahatma Gandhi to Billy Bragg’ etched into glass doors and internal windows. Most memorably, given that the UK has, as Tony Blair once proudly pointed out, the most repressive labour laws in the Western world, one wall comes courtesy of Michael Foot: ‘Most liberties have been won by those who broke the law’. All this heated (albeit graphically soft-toned and lower-case) rhetoric has to have some sort of correspondence to how the building actually functions. Given that the organization exists at least in part to fight for better working conditions, it had to be ‘an exemplary working environment’. And here Unison are clearest about the old NALGO building’s limitations. Not only was it dark and lit by artificial light, John Cole also points out that it had ‘no social spaces’. Now, the union ‘wanted large floor plates’ in order to be able to create these areas. In the concrete tower block, there’s a very pleasant roof garden, a café, a crèche, a ‘breakout room’ and much else. In design terms, these aims are compromised a little by the rather cold, identikit corporate detailing. Cole comments that opulence was out of the question, as ‘we have lots of low-paid members’ (something that didn’t deter the designers of Congress House in the 1940s) but there’s no doubt that the spaces work. When walking around it I chance upon a small office get-together, with crisps and what is (euphemistically?) labelled ‘juice’. One comments that in three days in the new building, she’d met six fellow Unison employees she’d never met before. ‘It shows how a building can change things’.
Most of the workers I saw here were women, and the building seems – perhaps inadvertently – to reflect where trade unions are currently strongest, in poorly paid but traditionally ‘white-collar’ jobs, largely female, and highly computer-literate. In the face of accusations that unions are lumbering pre-modern dinosaurs, Cole points out that Unison has the the largest intranet in Europe, and Michael Poots lists with equal pride the building’s impeccable