Bye bye to Eighties architecture?

 
10 April 2012

In the architecture world, to speak in favour of Marco Polo House is to defend the indefensible.

Designed by developer/architect Ian Pollard, it's a brash, grandiose office building on Queenstown Road facing Battersea Park that was completed in 1987. It is made of grey stone and marble arches alternating with smoky glass panels. The entrance is in a projecting triumphal arch in an abstract Roman manner, three more elongated arches topped with a pediment that wouldn't look out of place on an 18th-century church memorial.

In short, it's an architectural dog's dinner, one of a very few buildings that can actually make me laugh out loud on the rare occasion I pass it on the bus. But it is a part of London and it is under threat of demolition. The office building is home to QVC (the television shopping channel, somehow an appropriate occupier for this Eighties icon), which will not be renewing the lease when it expires next year. Instead, a proposal, by developer Anastasia Ltd and its architect Scott Brownrigg, has been made to build 451 luxury apartments for wealthy youngish professionals on the site, in two interlocking glassy blocks.

Marco Polo House, in all its glorious bad taste, brings into sharp focus an issue facing London in the coming years. Eighties buildings, offices in particular, are reaching the "end of their functional lives", in the parlance of our times, as if buildings, like televisions, somehow exist in a world of planned obsolescence. We need to ask the question: what from that architecturally unfashionable decade is worth keeping?

In this city of high and rising land values, developers often rush to demolish buildings in order to replace them with larger, denser, more valuable projects to increase the return on their site. There is nothing to stop them erasing Eighties buildings from the landscape at the moment, since English Heritage can consider listing only 30 years after a building is complete. Before that date window closes we could see a rush of demolitions of significant buildings in order to escape preservation on the grounds of artistic merit.

There are many arguments against demolition.

Retaining buildings is always more environmentally sustainable than demolishing them, and adapting buildings is usually far less costly. Just as important as such efficiency issues is the fact that we perhaps don't yet have the distance to judge the value of these buildings as an architectural legacy.

If architecture can be funny, then Eighties architecture is hysterical. Whether it's the famous egg cups on the roof of Terry Farrell's TV-am headquarters by the canal in Camden, the absurd campanile at Angel Square (the building above Angel Tube station) or the Disneyland Gothic of GMW Partnership's Mincing Lane offices in the City, Eighties architects threw off the limits of expression that post-war modernism handed down and began to embrace decoration and historical reference again. This was also the decade of Prince Charles's growing influence, so historical parody was fashionable, if firmly part of the establishment. It was a decade when modernist-educated architects began seriously to question what modern architecture was missing and why it was so unpopular. Their responses were often exuberant, colourful, attempting to embrace pop.

The Eighties ended, in London architecture terms, with two buildings. The first was Norman Foster's Battersea HQ, completed in 1990 and displaying the cool, minimal glass and steel that would dominate commercial architecture until today. The second was James Stirling's One Poultry, which, while not completed until 1997, was (and to some still is) emblematic of how unpopular Eighties-style buildings had become. Critics panned it; the public voted it one of London's ugliest edifices.

The paradox about the Eighties is that architects wanted to bring back things that had been lost from their discipline in the 20th century. This was clearly a valuable intellectual effort: modernism had jettisoned historical type, decoration, colour and so on, in favour of abstraction and that was a dead end. But in spite of this attempt at populism, Eighties buildings never really lived up to their billing.

Architecture can never really be throwaway and pop in spirit - buildings cost many millions of pounds to build and are generally owned by conservative institutions and businesses. The popular iconography is often at odds with the size and lifelessness of the buildings in use.

The question about which buildings to preserve will be most acute in the City of London, which seems to have a very short memory when it comes to architecture. I recently spoke to the City's chief planner, Peter Rees, who made it clear that he'd shed few tears for Eighties buildings as they are replaced or reclad in the near future. To him, they are simply out of date, environmentally unsustainable, and should go.

A clear example of this is 5 and 6 Broadgate, two buildings to the north of Liverpool Street station and part of the Broadgate complex, designed by Peter Foggo and completed in 1988. These will be replaced by a boneheaded addition to London's skyline for Swiss Bank UBS, designed by Make. The two buildings it will replace are sophisticated architecturally, clad in a grid of pink granite and with a stately scale and interesting winter gardens and balconies at high level.

Thankfully (in some cases), good Eighties housing is more likely to survive, and notwithstanding the rubbish that developers were churning out in that decade, there is quite a lot in London that is very good. Good architects were then, as now, interested in how to recapture the beauty and spirit of the best of British housing, often taking traditional terraces and squares as inspiration. Take architects Joanna van Heyningen and Birkin Haward's house, designed for themselves, on Laurier Road near Highgate, or 103-120 St Marks Road in North Kensington, designed by Jeremy and Fenella Dixon, both of which make dignified brick terraced houses that do justice to their Victorian contexts. At the brasher end of Eighties residential architecture, the love-it-or-loathe-it Cascades apartment block in Docklands, by CZWG, has more character than almost anything built since on the Isle of Dogs.

But when we think of Eighties architecture, we think mainly of the brashness of its commercial architecture, such as Marco Polo House, or the Homebase superstore, also by Pollard, in Warwick Road, which combines on its facade Egyptian hieroglyphs and direct "quotations" from Stirling's Neue Nationalgalerie in Stuttgart. This stuff is cheap, ugly and unpopular - most architects hate it. But does that mean we should demolish it? In an era when we preserve prisons and workhouses alongside cathedrals, just because we like their style, we should open our minds to the strange world of Eighties architecture. We need to look beyond our own taste, and understand that Marco Polo House is trying to make a commercial architecture with a monumentally civic dimension, and does it far more successfully than the 21st-century buildings surrounding it on Queenstown Road.

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