![]() The one architect who introduced a genuinely original new approach was the late Zaha Hadid, but her finest architecture is elsewhere. Since Rogers’ Lloyd’s Building in 1986 there has been little architecture in London in recent years that could be called visionary or radical. Even the National Theatre and the Barbican, from the gentler end of the Brutalist spectrum, were much derided in their time (both finished in the 1970s when their rugged concrete style had become passé). It is often, as was the case with the concrete behemoths of the South Bank, deeply unpopular when it is first built. What went wrong and what can be done to restore this radical spirit? Should it be restored at all? Are we now too cynical for the avant garde? By its very nature radical architecture can upset. London, it appears, is no longer a city of radical architecture. Now we have the tragedy of Grenfell Tower, a fire allegedly accelerated by the cheap panels used for a cosmetic makeover to cover its uncompromising concrete. But compared with these buildings of the 1960s and 1970s, what will we leave behind? Has London architecture lost its radical edge? This is the city that built the world’s first municipal social housing, Shoreditch’s Boundary Estate, in 1890 - still a very fine place to live. A cursory glance at London’s contemporary skyline shows a city falling over itself to build - more and taller. But they were once the vanguard of contemporary architecture, glimpses into a radical utopian future. These buildings have now been adopted as heritage. Alison and Peter Smithson’s Economist plaza is a settled part of establishment St James’s, although their Robin Hood Gardens housing in the East End idiotically is being demolished. Erno Goldfinger’s fiercely uncompromising Trellick Tower is now one of the city’s most desirable high-rises, the Barbican appears on tea towels and the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury has been rebranded as a contemporary destination. London, it seemed, had finally fallen in love with modernism. When proposals were made to build in the concrete undercrofts adopted by skateboarders in 2014, there was an outcry, and the city lobbied for the retention of the dark, dank spaces that were once so reviled. The architecture of the Hayward and its wider context, the South Bank, has become an indispensable part of London life. Bookshop shelves sag under the weight of books as weighty as its concrete architecture. Concrete clutters Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram feeds. Today Brutalism is fetishised and revered. It was described as a brutal, inhospitable concrete monstrosity and, as the rain began to stain its walls, it was little loved, except by artists who appreciated its austere, dramatic spaces. A sculptural work of great power, it too was criticised by those for whom it was intended. Less than a decade earlier, the Greater London Council, working with some of the young architects who would go on to form Archigram, an avant-garde London practice whose work was as much influenced by comic books and sci-fi as it was by modernist architecture, had built the Hayward Gallery. Yet the brightly coloured building remains one of the most radical and striking structures to be built in the heart of a historic city. SIGNIFICANT ARCHITECTURE LOST TO TIME FREEThese never happened and the escalator, once a free mobile viewing platform is now beyond the barriers, for ticket-holders only (partly in response to fears of terror attacks). It was to have been covered in multimedia screens, broadcasting its content to the city and the plaza in front - the space outside was as much a part of the architecture as the interior. ![]() Its architect was Richard Rogers, the Briton who, with the Italian Renzo Piano, had been determined to create a new “High-Tech” architecture in which the audience determined the content - an idea of the future from the bottom up. But within months it became Paris’s most visited attraction, outstripping the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. Some derided it as looking more like an oil refinery than a cultural centre, others ridiculed a building with its guts on the outside. Forty years ago this year, the Pompidou Centre opened its doors in Paris It was perhaps the most radical cultural building in the world, a statement of openness, flexibility, democracy and faith in the future. ![]()
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