- guardian.co.uk, Saturday 28 October 2000 01.02 BST
The war against Hitler allowed Britain to change, a little. On one level it was a chance to rebuild the physical fabric of blitzed towns and cities with new forms of architecture and construction that drew their inspiration in part from the mass production techniques and materials that had done so much to help the Allies towards victory from D-Day. Many of the most progressive post-war architects had experienced front-line action whether as a paratroopers like Big Jim Stirling (1924-92; one of Britain's most inventive post-war talents) or as engineer-officers like Denys Lasdun (1914-), who oversaw the construction of instant airfields for British and American fighters in Normandy during the Allied landings.
When they came to build, such architects brought together the lessons of victorious wartime technology, the abstract thinking of Modernism and a genuine desire to raise the standard of life for everyman, not just for the fashionable and wealthy who had commissioned the few Modern Movement houses to be built in these sceptred isles before Hitler's invasion of Poland. They were fortunate, these architects, because the public sector was dominant in Attlee's Britain and in many ways was to remain so right through until the 'oil crisis' of 1973-4 - when the economy all but collapsed and the country went into a kind of political and economic abeyance until the emergence of Thatcherism and the wholesale and wilful trashing of the public realm.
It's in those limbo years of the mid-70s when very little new architecture of any worth was built in punky 'Third World' Britain, that our home-based experience of modern architecture changed dramatically. The large public offices that had employed thousands of salaried architects, who designed prefabricated housing estates, local authority schools, general hospitals, civic centres and new universities, closed. And with them the often earnest, wholemeal style of public architecture that had developed in Britain since 1945, and all those proper, quasi-scientific concerns for proper levels of daylight and ventilation in ordinary people's homes. Who cared now that the greasy hand of the market would shape the new economically liberal Britain?
Whatever the social consequences of wiping out the notion of public duty, of a civic and civil society (perhaps these had never been more than myths), British architecture was liberated from the sense of worthiness that had made it appear so very tweedy and, if nourishing, nourishing in the way that wartime rationing had been. The culture and needs of the free market saw hi-tech fly and postmodernism dance to the tune of unbridled capitalism. The buildings that mattered now were deep-plan office blocks for the deregulated finance industry, shopping malls, out-of-town superstores, call centres, distribution depots and flash, trash Abigail's Party-style housing for Sierra people with padded shoulders and mobile phones so big they might well have needed planning permission.
Young architects no longer cut their teeth on public housing; they are more likely to design bars and cafes or else to propose whimsical 'urban landscape' schemes that are about as useful as a Philippe Starck lemon squeezer, as poetic as a lump of Play-Doh. Certainly Britain produces some fine, show-off architecture, but architects have long been forced or encouraged to become fashionable decadents, their tweedy demeanour replaced by a desire to want to look like fashion models in Prada rather than tweed jackets. They convince only the few, while the many in Britain continue to live in the kind of low-rent conditions architects, 50 years ago, were so keen as a profession to replace with machines for living a decent, worthy, National Health Service-assisted life in. Just as the public sector has given way to the private sector, so style has truly triumphed over content. The debate over the future of British architecture starts here.
