Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

As society becomes more pluralistic and multicultural, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand in advance what a building will mean to the people who will be using it. If an architect and the building’s users are from the same social group, then it is more likely that the gestures will be understood in the way that they were intended. However any public building will be used by people with a multiplicity of different backgrounds, who respond to things in different ways. This is not a problem, so long as the responses fall within a reasonable range, but if for example a modern public official were to erect a house that looked and worked like the Brighton Pavilion, whether the money came from the public purse or whether it was borrowed (as it was when the then Prince of Wales built it) then there would now certainly be a public outcry. It is difficult to know what would be made of the oriental styling in a postcolonial context. It could either be seen as a tribute to an important ethnic minority’s culture, or as nostalgia for lost empire, but either way it would have powerful overtones now that were not present when it was built. Then it had some overtones that would be indefensible now, but they were acceptable to the people who came into contact with the building in its day. If it were built today, then there would be riots and resignations. Queen Victoria hated the building and all it represented to her. This was not principally on account of the style, but on account of the life that the building was designed to make possible — a life of extravagance and debauchery, which stood at odds with the image of the monarchy that she was determined to project. It was under Victoria that the Palace of Westminster was rebuilt, as an image of rectitude and piety, suited to the kind of government she would have hoped to see. When the Lord Chancellor’s suite there was recently refurbished the price seemed to the popular press to be profligate, but if we make adjustments for changes in the value of money, it would have cost no more than it did originally. From the outset the building’s duty was to be magnificent, not cheap. That was what was seen as appropriate to its role.

Now, more than in the past, it is necessary for public buildings to justify themselves to the public at large. We still accept that the meaning and value that is perceived by an educated elite has some value, but as the idea of democracy takes hold ever more firmly, it is seen as necessary for the popular audience to have its say. This was shown with great clarity at the award of the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Stirling Prize for 2000 and 2001 (and the practice may well continue) when the prize-winning building was chosen by a panel of experts. The awards were shown on television — a quintessentially populist medium — and the television company organized a poll of its viewers to select their favourite building from those shortlisted. What happened was that the popular verdict was announced, shortly followed by the declaration of the ‘real’ award, decided by expert opinion (which went to an altogether different building). We do not live in a unified culture, and we do not have a single way of determining what we, society as a whole, think is good. It is unusual to compare the results of two competing methods of evaluation in a public forum, as one of them tends to undermine the apparent validity of the other. In matters of taste we are less likely than we were a generation ago to bow to expert opinion, which is certainly a good thing by democratic standards, but it is not necessarily good for the art because it can involve a coarsening of judgement, and can be the means of sanctioning philistinism. I know that I would not want to say that the most popular thing was always the best one, but in our society the popular also has power, because it tends to have market forces on its side, and from time to time the rare and extraordinary does find popular acclaim. Then the object in question, whether it is Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, or Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water (Figure 10) is not only a delight in itself, it also confers status on its owner, and therefore if it comes on to the market, its price is high compared with the cost of making it.