Perhaps there's something about the traditional public lecture - and lecture hall - that brings out more of the speaker than the usual Powerpoint keynote. It's certainly difficult to find a hall to better the Great Room at the Royal Society of Arts in London, and at the end of this evening's lecture I felt I knew more about Jonathan Glancey than his subject The Re-generation Game. That's not necessarily a bad thing for inquisitive readers of The Guardian, where he is architecture and design editor, and may also be useful for any regeneration agencies interested in gaining Mr Glancey's attention. More on that later.
The lecture was an entertaining and sneery - OK, ironic - look at what Government bodies and developers are doing to our towns and countryside. Lots of images, and not a bullet point in sight. Jonathan is particularly upset by the stacks of brochures dropping on his desk each week from regeneration agencies, full of stuff about new vibrant, creative, cultural hearts for urban centres in need of renewal. Jonathan doesn't like "vision" unless it has a spiritual basis, so there was much reference to William Blake and John Ruskin. Latte drinkers came in for a hammering too.
The serious points Jonathan was making included the poor standard of housing design in projects like the Thames Gateway, the big gap between the political rhetoric about sustainable communities and what we see on the ground, and the lack of public servants with a real commitment to design and the integration of different elements of the urban fabric. His favourite design champion was Frank Pick, chief executive of London Transport during its golden period, and his inspiring institution the architects department of the London County Council early in the last century. They managed to produce houses for the poor of London, not just "housing". Flats like those of the Boundary Estate now sell for about £170,000 for a single bedroom property.
I wasn't too clear at the end what solutions Jonathan was proposing, but I suggest any agency trying to interest him should scan his slide collection and focus on Routemaster buses, taxis with no adverts on the side, and Georgian-style crescents. Do not do suburban boxes with three garages, and be cautious with anything iconic after about 1950 - on this evening's showing, anyway.
I thought the most pertinent question at the end of the lecture came from someone who suggested the key issue was how decisions were to be made. Jonathan was deriding house designs that developers could sell, while urging creation of public corporations (like the old London Transport) who would be champions of good design. That may have been fine a hundred years ago, said the questioner, but public bodies hadn't done so well with architecture in the 1960s.
No-one offered an answer to that one, though the chair of the session, Sir Christopher Frayling did say the hot book for policy makers is currently Creating Public Value by Mark H. Moore.
There wasn't any mention of consultation, participation, engagement. It wasn't that sort of occasion.
More here on RSA lectures
Jonathan Glancey emailed me as below. Actually I liked the pictures/no bullets and agreed with much of what he said. Anyway I appreciate the response. David.
Jonathan wrote:
Many thanks for coming to the lecture yesterday evening and for your "blog" account of it.
Wow! you are as bitchy as any critic I have ever met! I never "sneer", never have, it isn't my style: but, there are time honoured ways of attacking humbug, hubris and sheer bad design . . . from irony to a full cannonade of rhetoric.
As for no "bullet points" with the pictures . . . the pictures, I had hoped, would tell their own story; you need only look to see what's wrong with the new "sustainable" housing. It's the argument of the eye, and one as equally important as anything abstract/ academic/quasi-academic or purely intellectual. I have attended a number of conferences at which "regen" people have banged on about partnerships/sustainability/consulatation without ever showing what they mean. There is indeed a streak of visual philistinism in England, and we need to counter it whenever possible
As for vision; yes, I stick by my guns; vision is something given to very few people; it means revelation, and I have yet to meet a regen chap with anything like vision; the rest of us try hard to see through the clouds of unreason and unknowing, often with little success. The word is much abused today
As for Frank Pick and public corporations and fine historic buses/tube stations/Georgian crescents, I use these as exemplars/paradigms of what we have and can achieve; there is no guarantee that what we do today is any better than what we did yesterday; progress is not linear; Ely cathedral is better than 90 per cent of English buildings erected since; the RT buses I showed crossing Westminster Bridge were, by common consent, very probaby the finest city buses ever built. Georgian terraces are not out of date; they remain excellent ways of using land economically, and of renewable design.
There were only two public corporations of the type I respect, LPTB (1933-48) and the BBC, which continues; neither had anything to do with poor housing/poor public services in the 1960s
We have 2,000 years of London history alone to learn from, as we have writers from 150 years ago to learn from, too. Of course I keep an eye out for the best new design/architecture and I publish as much of this as seems right in The Guardian. What I refuse to do is to be either a Panglossian neophiliac or to go along with bounder/philistines and placemen who want (a) as much profit as they can get, and (b) knighthoods etc
I'm riding my hobby-horses like Cobbett, Defoe, Swift, Ruskin or Nairn, but that, David, is what I do to alert people to the nonsense undermining the fabric of our towns and country under the smart name "regeneration"
Posted by: David Wilcox | October 29, 2004 at 10:23 AM