There are several layers of meaning here. The architect of Lloyd’s is Richard
Rogers, high-tech’s most persuasive front-man. He is elegant, cosmopolitan
and bien pensant. Although, since he is half-Italian, we should say ben
pensiero. For reasons buried in personal psycho-history, Rogers detests
suburbs and has been in, not always intelligent, thrall to the design
metaphors offered by the study of machinery. He has been rightly celebrated
for Paris’s Pompidou Centre. With its guts hanging on its carapace, this is
an absurdly irrational conceit, but a breathtaking one. And his new terminal
for Madrid’s Barajas airport has brought new standards of civility to the
discreditable zoo of air travel.
But recently, partly as a result of the offensively anti-social, vulgarian,
ham-fisted over-development which is the Candy Brothers’ block of flats on
Hyde Park and carries his name, Rogers’s reputation has been experiencing a
little harsh revisionism. So far from being the liberal visionary with a
River Café lunch table, he is a tool of oligarchs and money men. And
Lloyd’s? So far from being a disciplined functionalist marvel of
responsible, low-weight, high-efficiency architecture, it is expensive,
indulgent, wilful, hand-crafted, ecologically wasteful and obsolete.
There are some who say that the extent to which Rogers ignored the client’s
brief brought architecture into added disrepute, if such a thing were
possible. Still, Lloyd’s has become an unignorable, although perhaps not yet
much-loved, London landmark, a pilgrimage site for students and an evocative
memorial to gung-ho finance. It is history, as the listing now proves.
From bold astonishment to the safety of the archives in a quarter of a
century! This is an irony to savour, as modernists of all stripes were
determined to slip the surly bonds of architectural history, but now find
themselves getting trussed in an antiquarian muddle where finials and
crockets and cornices mix ever so democratically with glass staircases,
tensioned guy-wires and stainless steel pods. The Grade I listing of Lloyd’s
may be inevitable. It may be controversial. What is certain is that it asks,
and perhaps answers, important questions about what we value in buildings.
The listing of post-1945 buildings only began in 1987, arising from outrage
about the greedy vandalism that saw Wallis Gilbert’s fine Art Deco Firestone
Factory on the Great West Road demolished over a single weekend in 1980.
This, to make way for bathos and mediocrity.
As a remedy and a rebuke, English Heritage’s Grade I listings from after 1945
offer us an architectural autobiography, a nation’s self-portrait
emphasising its very best features. Chastening, then, that there are only
eight of them after 66 years of building. The Severn Bridge and Jodrell
Bank: great structures in the Brunel tradition. The Royal College of
Physicians and Coventry Cathedral: mature Modernism. The Willis Faber
Building in Ipswich, from Norman Foster’s early period when he was a radical
innovator and not an international architectural brand.
What might be added? Certainly, Rogers’s Terminal 5 at Heathrow. A compromised
execution, for sure, but proof none the less that sometimes this country can
handle a grand project. James Stirling’s Engineering Building in Leicester
University, a proud and unapologetic mid-Fifties revival of muscular
Victorian redbrick. The Smithsons’ Economist Building in St James’s, a
superb urban composition that loses nothing in comparison to its elegant
18th-century clubland neighbours. Or what about Future Systems’ Selfridges
in Birmingham, a blink-making injection of ingenious vitality into a grim
townscape?
You could also make persuasive claims for Colin St John Wilson’s British
Library. Surely the last major library to be built? Or Chamberlin, Powell
and Bon’s Barbican? Imaginative dwarves dislike its grand gestures, but the
Barbican remains the country’s most ambitious, boldest and most satisfying
essay in large-scale inner-city renewal. And if the thoughtful adaptation of
a mediocre Victorian building counts for anything, Dixon Jones’s wonderful
enlargement of the National Portrait Gallery counts for a lot.
But Grade I quality does not have to be vast and expensive. Two recent
designs, modest only in size and budget, have architectural qualities that
deserve the accolade. The first is Thomas Heatherwick’s delightful East
Beach Café in Littlehampton. The second is John Pawson’s Sackler footbridge
in Kew Gardens, a thrillingly beautiful exercise in elegant restraint. In
both cases, architecture enhances nature: this is an achievement Palladio
would have recognised.
The Grade I listing of steel-and-glass Lloyd’s will have rubicund old bigots
sputtering into their dog-eared copies of Vitruvius Britannicus. It will
have Modernist diehards empurpled by the absurdity. But it proves one
important principle: what matters in architecture is not whether a building
is old or new, ancient or modern, but whether it is good or bad.
Making the grade…
Listing by English Heritage does not guarantee preservation; it is an official
mark of recognition, the establishment’s rubber stamp of approved taste.
About 600 post-war buildings have been listed, or 0.2 per cent of the
national total. The first post-war listing was Sir Albert Richardson’s
Bracken House of 1955-1959. Built for the Financial Times in the shadow of
St Paul’s, it was extensively modified by Michael Hopkins between 1988 and
1991.
To be Grade I Listed means a building is “exceptionally important”. Before
Lloyd’s, only eight buildings (or structures) reached this status.
The Severn Bridge. 1961-1966. Freeman Fox Partners. Heroic steel and
concrete.
The Royal Festival Hall, London. 1949-1951. Sir Leslie Martin. The chief
monument of post-War neo-Romanticism.
The Lovell Telescope, Jodrell Bank, Cheshire. 1957. Sputnik-era futurism.
St Catherine’s College, 1960-1962. Arne Jacobsen. Polite Danish design for a
new Oxford college.
Coventry Cathedral, 1956-1962. Sir Basil Spence. A symbol, with borrowings
from Le Corbusier, of a nation’s revival.
The Royal College of Physicians. London. 1960-1964. Sir Denys Lasdun.
Brutalism in the service of the professions.
Kingsgate Bridge, Durham. Arup Associates. 1966. Acknowledgement of
engineering.
Willis Faber Building, Ipswich. 1972-1975. Lord Foster. A masterpiece of
modern city building before Norman Foster became a professional genius.