Yes, says Jonathan Glancey - but only if they start using their creative skills on Britain's mass-produced buildings

Jonathan Glancey
Guardian

Monday June 26, 2000

"Architects are doomed to extinction within 15 years." So says Ron German, a director of Stanhope plc, a major property development company. It is tempting to dismiss the remark as the barking of some no-nonsense chap with a dislike for the bow-tie-and-funny-glasses brigade after a few G&Ts. But German is no fool. He has been part of a decades-long process in which buildings are increasingly assembled from mass-produced components, much like cars. In the future, he says, the architect's role could be confined to "tweaking" components. "Making things special may be important to architects, but it does not make much difference to occupiers. Standardisation will be vital."

German was speaking at the annual British Council for Offices conference two weeks ago. Also on the bill was Michael Aukett of Michael Aukett Architects Ltd, who pointed out that his firm's standardised design system for Tesco supermarkets means that the company no longer needs to consult an architect each time it wants a new store. As a result, costs have come down by 32%.

German and Aukett's comments should come as no surprise. Just check out all those mass-produced supermarkets fronting Britain's A roads, that prefab litany of warehouses, distribution depots, shopping malls, business parks, sports stadia and executive hotels: an amorphous, anodyne, anonymous collection of sheds. The architectural input seems to be less than zero. Occasionally you'll drive past a shed - it could be Toys "R" Us, or Iceland, or Tesco - with some notional architectural input: it amounts to a fancy, tented porch, a split postmodern pediment and a lick of Jim Stirling-style lime green or mauve paint. And yet Britain has something like 30,000 architects. What do they do? Few seem to be involved at any great depth in the design of what really matters, such as new housing, even though Britain is being smothered in a feverish rash of the red-brick, three-bedroom stuff.

German's boss is the newly knighted Stuart Lipton, who is also chairman of the commission for architecture and the built environment, sponsored by the department for culture, media and sport. As a devotee of the most highly industrialised North American building processes, Lipton is part of the process which is sending architects sliding down the hierarchy of the construction team. He believes everyday buildings should be thought of as well designed, well made, efficient and profitable products, not arty-crafty artefacts.

The process that German and Lipton admire began in the US. The mass production of war machinery and agricultural equipment, the construction of continental railroads, the stratospheric rise of the aircraft industry, Henry Ford and his Model T, all encouraged architects to think in terms of component-based, mass-produced buildings. In the hands of young postwar Californian architects such as Pierre Koenig, Ezra Ehrenkrantz, Charles Eames and Craig Ellwood, and Mies van der Rohe in Chicago, industrial-style architecture became a new artform. This, in turn, was a major influence on the work of Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and other British architects.

In Britain today, a fundamental lack of respect for architects has seen the profession downgraded. It is not that this country lacks talent. But instead of getting someone as brilliant as Zaha Hadid to design a new opera house (which was on the cards once in Cardiff) or a museum for contemporary art (she is working on two at the moment, in Rome and Cincinatti), we have got her to design a temporary tent in front of a tiny public art gallery in a London park. Don't get me wrong. It was great that the Serpentine Gallery commissioned this delightful tent, which will stay up for the next two months, but why isn't Hadid designing a major art gallery or opera house, a factory or hotel?

It seems absurd that the huge sums pumped into millennium projects has produced virtually no worthwhile new buildings. There have been superb conversions of old buildings, like Tate Modern; there have been intriguing novelties, like the London Eye and the elegant Millennium Bridge. But aside from Caruso St John's intelligent new Walsall Art Gallery, it is hard to think of a single new building of real quality.

Meanwhile, Marco Goldschmied, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a partner in the Richard Rogers Partnership, is engaged in a battle of words with the government over the way public buildings are procured. Nick Raynsford, the construction minister, believes the procurement process that has given us the magnificent but hugely expensive stations of the Jubilee line extension, Portcullis House (the monstrous new office block for MPs opposite the Palace of Westminster), and the British Library has been inefficient. He wants architects to work to businesslike schedules and for buildings to be whizzed up more along the lines of German's Motown approach. Goldschmied, in Churchillian mode, calls for a "more mature understanding in the public sector of the blood, sweat, tears and sheer persistence that is needed to deliver quality buildings".

British architects are caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Many of the most inventive British architects of the past 25 years - including the Richard Rogers Partnership - have celebrated hi-tech industrial structures. They have been in love with the muscular US culture that has given us the modern skyscraper and the peerless system built Californian buildings of Koenig, Ehrenkrantz, Eames and Ellwood. But they have seen the system that produces such buildings shoulder their own more genteel profession out of the way. Of course there is a case to be made for more efficiently procured and constructed buildings. But in Britain, a country in which cultural philistines have long hidden behind arguments turning on efficiency, the aesthetic dimension is all too often pushed to one side.

The one thing the architects will be able to offer after German's 15 years is the power of imagination, which might yet lift trashy fast-track buildings into the realm of art. Again, architects were once their own worst enemy when they delighted in buildings conceived as purely functional machines. But one of those functions must be to provide beauty.

British architects appear to believe that marketing and PR gimmicks are their best hopes for survival. But, however much they might like to believe that "architecture is the new rock'n'roll" (it isn't) and that theirs is a "sexy" profession (ditto), the world of nationwide construction has no time for such conceits. Fifteen more years of ignoring the rules of a world they once worshipped and they really will be left "tweaking" components and dialling in the details. They need to get out a bit more and tour Britain's A roads to see where their future may lie.