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New Modernism Reshapes Britain
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19591 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
1,691 Words |
| Author
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Kenneth Powell
Kenneth Powell is an architecture writer for the London Daily
Telegraph. |
This year sees the fortieth anniversary of the Festival of Britain, that "tonic to the nation" staged for five months in 1951 on the South Bank of London's river Thames. For a nation wearied by six years of war and subsequent postwar shortages and restrictions, the festival presented a vision of a new world. Not the least of its features was the first large-scale demonstration in Britain of the potential of modern architecture. The Skylon, the Dome of Discovery, and the many other structures erected for the festival--and later, sadly, demolished--showed that modern architecture could be entertaining, decorative, even awe-inspiring.
The festival closed, and the site was cleared. British architecture turned in new directions, most notably toward a "Brutalism" rooted in a veneration of the late works of Le Corbusier. The festival style had been about space and grace. The architecture of the late fifties and sixties was about solidity and mass and tended to be executed in concrete. A public housing boom was followed, under a series of Conservative governments, by a boom in commercial building. Britain's cities and towns were transformed by new shopping centers created in traditional office blocks.
The result, the Prince of Wales declared a few years ago, was frequently "sheer unadulterated ugliness and mediocrity." The architectural profession had produced a series of "Frankenstein monsters" disliked by the people who had to live in or use them.
Nowhere in Europe does modern architecture command less popular respect than in Britain. It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that a new generation of architecture, many of them born since the Festival of Britain, are giving modern architecture a new image and recapturing something of the lightness and sheer verve of 1951. Despite the rise of the new Classicists (who have enjoyed the prince's support) and the brief dominance in the eighties of commercial Post Modernism, taking its cue from American practitioners like Charles Moore, Robert Venturi, and Michael Graves, it is the New Modernism which is now on the ascendant. As European integration looms, moreover, British architects are seeking evermore to export their skills, following in the footsteps of internationally acknowledged masters like Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, and James Stirling.
Rogers and Foster, in particular, have acted as the mentors of many of the New Modern generation who have moved on from their offices to establish practices of their own. Typical is the firm of Troughton McAslan, established in 1984 and
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