Architecture News & Views We Need More Adventurous Buildings

Date Published:

27/05/2008

Lack Of Choice = Lack Of Taste?

If you ask property developers why they build the sort of houses they do, they'll tend to respond with a down-to-earth and apparently invincible argument: because this is what the market wants.

They will say that to attack rustic architecture is to ignore commercial logic and deny others a democratic right to their own tastes. They might even cheerfully add that if more interestingly designed houses sold well, they'd certainly like to start building them. But until such a time, they'd be happier to leave adventurous design to the glossy magazines - and to stick with what their customers tell them they like.

At first sight, this seems a pretty overwhelming case and yet it's worth probing the argument that economic success is a necessary proof of having fully satisfied one's audience. After all, many service stations with lousy food and facilities make a handsome profit, simply because there are no other choices in the vicinity.

Whatever liberal economics may state, the free market doesn't unfailingly respond to the true desires of consumers. It usually has to wait until these consumers have had their eyes fully opened to new possibilities by arbiters of taste; in the 18th century, people like Lord Burlington or the Earl of Bedford; in our society, Jamie Oliver or Kevin McCloud.

The property developers' reflexive defence of existing tastes constitutes, at base, a denial that human beings can ever come to appreciate anything other than what they are already purchasing. Imagine how much tastes in housing could evolve if only new styles were placed before our eyes.

An array of hitherto ignored materials and forms would quickly reveal their stunning qualities while the status quo would be prevented from coercively suggesting itself to be the natural and eternal order of things.

There are, after all, plenty of modern British architectural practices putting up buildings that benefit from contemporary materials, but who also know how to respond to the appealing themes of their ancestry. Without patronising the history they profess to love, they show us how we might carry the valuable, comforting parts of the rural British past into a restless global technological future.

After being properly introduced to the true range of modern architecture, many prospective buyers of redbrick, neo-Georgian houses would look beyond their original wishes and might even surprise themselves by registering an interest in sleek brick or concrete boxes, to whose virtues they had, through a journey of aesthetic education, been led to feel newly sensitive.

The building of new houses is typically synonymous with desecration, with the birth of neighbourhoods less beautiful than the countryside they have replaced. However bitter this equation, we conventionally accept it with passivity and resignation. We therefore refrain from raising of many disappointing new estates that most basic and incensed of political questions: 'Who did this?'

Yet an investigation of the process by which buildings rise reveals that unfortunate cases can in the end always be attributed to a pedestrian combination of low ambition, ignorance, greed and accident.

A development that spoils ten square miles of countryside will be the work of a few people neither particularly sinful nor malevolent. Bad architecture is a frozen mistake writ large. But it is only a mistake and, despite the impressive amounts of scaffolding, concrete, noise, money and bluster that tend to accompany its appearance, it is no more deserving of our deference than a blunder in any other area of life. We should be as unintimidated by architectural mediocrity as we are by unjust laws or nonsensical arguments.

We should recover a sense of the malleability behind what is built. There is no pre-determined script guiding the direction of bulldozers or cranes. While mourning the number of missed opportunities, we have no reason to abandon a belief in the ever-present possibility of moulding circumstances for the better.