Can good architecture change the world?

Sean Griffiths, Charles Jenkins, Winy Maas, Patrick Schumacher, Cameron Sinclair, Razia Iqbal (chair)

Billed as the headline of the Barbican’s Le Corbusier series of debates and costing an amazing £18 per ticket, this architects showdown began to disappoint well before it had even started. Zaha Hadid, anticipating an unsympathetic reception by the other panellists, deputised to a colleague who himself, realising perhaps he was senior enough to refuse, passed it on to Schumacher who wasn’t. Schumacher aside, the Barbican had assembled an impressive selection of leading architects and their diversity of practice promised some interesting debate. However, as the evening progressed things began to unravel. Even if not to blame for the absence of their star name, the organisers were clearly at fault for the choice of chair; Razia Iqbal demonstrated no great grasp of architecture and struggled to steer the debate into any meaningful direction. Her lack of authority combined with the imposing egos present and the introversion of the profession, lent a amateurish tone to the evening and a near-total failure to address the issue in hand.

Perhaps the most avoidable failure was the confusion arising from the sprawling title. Choosing to treat the first half it as one question rather than two, the stage focused on analysing the world-changing potential of architecture. It was left to a member of the audience to question what definition of good architecture had been assumed through the previous 90 minutes and if indeed it made sense to talk of a moral quality to architecture. Little attention was spent addressing the Corbusian legacy the assumption that Le Corbusier had an ethical rather than political intent in his design and urban planning.

The panellists each made short presentation mostly addressing the question of quite how god-like architects should aim to be. Roughly-speaking, Sean Griffiths, Charles Jenks and Cameron Sinclair were against god-imitation while Patrick Schumacher pro. The position of Winy Maas was hard to pin down as being for or against anything, sitting as it did on top of such an enormous pile of irony it was impossible to oppose or confidently support it. The quality of the presentations diverged greatly with Sinclair giving an impassioned, if worthy, account of the work of Architecture for Humanity, Griffiths a playful exposition of his work with FAT, Maas wrong-footing everyone with satirical New Orleans post-hurricane emergency shelters and a multi-story pig city to save Holland’s pork industry, while Schumacher gave an outstandingly ill-judged presentation about Zaha Hadid’s concept-stage urban redevelopment projects (at one point comparing their work with Corbusier’s Plan Voisin which not only does not much resemble Hadid’s work but was a total failure).

In the subsequent “debate” section, confusion reigned. Sinclair had ended his presentation by disparaging in strong terms the work of Hadid as morally compromised (“celebrity architecture”) and undermining the value of the profession in general. Razia Iqbal, perhaps dreaming one day she might get a slot on the Today program, dispensed with any substantial engagement with the subject and mercilessly pressured the unfortunate Schumacher for a justification of Hadid’s entire ouvre. None was forthcoming. Sadly for Schumacher, a brief show of solidarity from Sean Griffiths, rebuking Sinclair’s moral posturing, was cut short by a statement along the line of, there’s nothing ethically wrong with Zaha Hadid’s work, it’s just rubbish architecture. Again Iqbal needled him for a response and again only feeble efforts were offered. How he must have cursed his boss. He performed so woefully they won’t even thank him.

Taking to my architect friend after the debate I had to confess that I my eyes his profession had come out of it rather badly. There is an acceptance within Architecture that architects are not good at explaining their work to outsiders. As Charles Jenkins mentioned during the event, the most important thing in architecture is getting the client and the second most important thing is keeping them. The only financially significant conversation is between architect and client and this is where the communication expertise exist. Justifying yourself to a wider audience that doesn’t share your goals is a different matter.

We discussed the charge, often levelled at architects, of having excessive arrogance and the contradictions involved in architectural authorship. Should one design only with in the needs of the community served by your building as perceived by them? There are certain technical and strategic judgements that must be made when planning and environment that will be beyond the capacities of the non-expert and in this sense the architects acts with justification when making them. There is another level of judgement demanded from architects, if not from the population as a whole, at least from the middle classes – to culturally enrich us, to make our societies more than they are and to aspire to greater things. This is a profoundly undemocratic notion of the role of the architect but also is the source of virtually all the world’s great architecture. The dangers of abandoning such a tradition provide a substantial opposition to the dangers of the Corbusian megalomaniac. It struck me that there is no way out of architectural arrogance. The projects involve such a level of complexity there is no way one person can grasp it all. As such you need someone to take control who is prepared to operate without a complete grasp of what they are doing. Big name architects working on large-scale projects will often provide energy more than expert guidance. The head architect will have a kind of fantasy existence in the minds of those in his or her practice. They are like an intellectual brand that manifests itself by generating a certain style of solution to any given problem. Those working for them will do the graft using their boss as a regulating idea.