Buildings for Blairism #4

Paternoster Square, London, William Whitfield et al, completed 2003

A quick, contemptuous entry in the series, which should be followed by something less easily scorned - a remarkably lame, late postmodernist scheme in front of St Paul's Cathedral. It should be noted that, although the three forces of computer-aided sub-decon whimsy, fourth-generation corporate high-tech, and developers' Scando have given the appearance that postmodernist architecture in its initial form has merely faded into aesthetic history, a trip outside London, or Manchester, or wherever will show a huge amount of postmodernist architecture being built. Much in the same way that blaming Corb or Gropius for crap council/office blocks is vapid, it is perhaps equally foolish (albeit tempting) to lambast Philip Johnson or Venturi et al for the rejigging and jollying up of traditionalism that still marks your average shopping mall, development scheme or Barratt estate, or anywhere that 'plannerrhoids' congregate. Yet this is at least a marginal phenomenon inside the metropolis - with one major exception.



Perhaps one of the best ways to refute Ayn Rand types is via the architectural results of laissez-faire capital in one of its oldest, most dedicated centres. The architecture of the City of London is one of the capital's darker, murkier areas. That medieval street plan has accommodated, after some initial post-fire buildings of quality, some of the worst architecture in the country's history. Victorian bombast, and decades of the joyless, filigree pomposity of the neo-Georgian imperial style, dominant for decades, from the 1900s to the 1960s - and when it finally went Modernist in the mid-60s, the results were equally shoddy and unimaginative. A couple of reasonable Seifert blocks and the Miesian geometries of London Wall were about as good as it got, bar the disputed territory of Barbican and Golden Lane. Then, after the 80s' big bang, the whole area was rebuilt far more comprehensively than it was after 1945, with a proliferation of brightly coloured stone and 'fun' references, (and inexplicably, the best building in the City was also built at this point). This period would reach a peak/nadir with Stirling & Wilford's truly indefensible corporate ice cream longship, No. 1 Poultry, perhaps the worst building ever produced by a Pritzker Prize-winning architect, plonked down, neoclassical frieze and all, atop a site earmarked for Mies van der Rohe's only British building.



Since 1997 though, Foster has made the ruthless, Masonic skullduggery of the City look ***TRANSPARENT***, and various already-or-soon-to-be-cancelled skyscrapers from the B-teams of sundry leading firms were announced under Livingstone. The big exception to this, and clear evidence of architectural 'pluralism', was this long-awaited remodelling of the area around St Paul's. The post-45 blocks were reproduced in Lewis Mumford's The City in History as an example of sensitive, anti-Corbusian planning, but our future King didn't like 'em, and so soon they had to go. The resultant scheme has several levels. Some of it is mild Modernism, spectacularly inoffensive, some of it neoclassicism appropriately worthy of a regeneration scheme in a Cathedral town, but what you notice first is Juxon House. Straight off the desk of SOM in 1986, this is a sub-Novecento bit of mock-classicism clumsily hiding some glass trading floors, dressed with free-standing Corinthian columns. Meanwhile, broken heads sit on plinths, symbolising order and the ruins of antiquity. There's a sort of Bluewater version of the Monument in the centre, and Temple Bar, an old city gate disputedly designed by Wren, has been shipped back from a garden in Enfield to be re-erected as the triumphal entrance to this farrago.



In sum, what we have here is the Corporation of London 'reaching out', attempting to encompass activities other than multibillion pound gambling. In fact, here are the two leading sectors of the economy under Blatcherism - the service industry (in the guise of tourism) and the financial services industry (Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and the London Stock Exchange are all housed here), both housed in the architecture of servitude. So on the one hand, the City here actually welcomes in outsiders, by giving St Paul's a theme park (rather than some severe office blocks) as its hinterland, with restaurants to accommodate those unfortunate, so often ruthlessly fleeced London tourists - and on the other, short selling and asset stripping goes on here surely as efficiently as in the Gherkin. Proof also that the architecture of financialisation need not be some excitingly futurist act of dematerialisation, but can just as easily resemble a branch of the historicist nick-nack emporium Past Times.

(photos on this one are by IT rather than myself, as you can tell by the fact that they're actually good)