In Chicago, former President Obama’s Presidential Library, has landed in historic Jackson Park: a 225 feet high flat-roofed and granite-clad concrete tower. It has a Sith-Lord-meets-conning-tower aesthetic. Largely bereft of windows and surrounded by lower blocks of precast concrete and glass curtain walls, it is described even by its own architects as “monolithic” and by its critics as “ugly”, “a jail”, “Soviet” and “brutalist”. Based on multiple studies of the types of places people tend to like and why, I can report confidently that it has none of the patterns, natural forms and sensitive handling of scale that most people find attractive and reassuring. It has all of the locational and symbolic sensitivity of the relentless black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001 A Space Odyssey.

Six hundred miles away in Washington, D.C., President Trump is planning to supersize Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s original Washington masterplan and out-French the French. To escape the need to host American state dinners in tents on the White House lawn, he has demolished the White House’s 1940s neoclassical East Wing and is replacing it with a $300 million ballroom by the skilled classical architect James McCrery. Three times as big as the original, the outside is replete with a balustrade, string courses, alternating pediments, a piano nobile and a Corinthian portico with all the trimmings. Inside, a double-height hall, with arched niches, fluted pilasters and a coffered ceiling, will adorn the largest classical room built for a century.

On nearby Memorial Circle, the President is planning a giant classical triumphal arch between the National Mall and the Arlington National Cemetery, topped with statues of eagles and a winged lady. At a White House dinner, Trump showed donors three models, informing them that he favored, you guessed, the largest option which, standing at 250 feet, would block symbolic views between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery.

Palpably modeled on the French Arc de Triomphe, which was itself inspired by Rome’s Arch of Titus, the new Washington Arch, Trump has told supporters, must be bigger than Jean-François Chalgrin’s Parisian precedent. Predictably, the Washington Arch is already being called the “Arc de Trump”. If the remodeled Oval Office is anything to go by, it will be dripping with gilt swags and festooned with over-ripe fruit in luxuriant cornucopia, though for now, the renderings by Nicholas Charbonneau show welcome restraint.

Which will it be: classical bombast or placeless corporatism? Federal nostalgia or digital civic aesthetics? Nothing about Obama and Trump’s visions for the future of American cities is the same, other than their shared elephantiasis. But in this, both are within the American urban tradition.

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Why our cities should be sacred

By Nicholas Boys Smith

Once upon a time, the United States was an urban civilization and, briefly, the world’s most significant city-maker. The American model was megalomaniacal: consistently taking European technology and precedents, dialing them up from genteel to gigantic and re-exporting them around the world.

Thomas Walter’s gargantuan 1850s dome over Washington’s Capitol may have been inspired by European churches such as Paris’ Les Invalides. However, in turn, it spawned a shoal of European domed civic imitations: Brussels’s Palais de Justice, Budapest’s parliament, and Berlin’s Reichstag.

By the 1890s, American architects could create 200 lavish temporary Beaux Arts buildings out of mere plaster and artificial stone for the 1893 Chicago World Fair, which are better than almost anything subsequently built in the last 80 years. With perfect irony, the World Fair took place on the very site on which Obama’s watchtower library is now being erected. The historically resonant location, precisely where American architecture demonstrated so supremely its classical and city-planning expertise, merely rubs coarse salt into the wound Obama is inflicting upon Chicago.

Ultimately, American urban super-sizing got out of hand. During the long 20th century America de-urbanized as her cities became too big to be urban. Middle classes fled to the hugely expanding suburbs where long commutes and declining neighborly life undermined their residents’ prosperity, connectedness and happiness. Wider and wider freeways cut through city centers, often mysteriously physically segregating majority black neighborhoods. Downtowns were scooped out and offices and homes replaced with parking lots, as Jeff Speck has related. Subtle towns of Lego bricks became cruder towns of Duplo bricks. Humane walking architecture, rich with texture, decoration and patterns was eviscerated and replaced with driving architecture, featureless and faceless. Glories such as Chicago’s Garrick Theatre were demolished for lumpen multi-story car parks. Among the many unseamed downtown neighborhoods were Detroit’s Paradise Valley and Black Bottom, which were sliced up by wide freeways and whose largely black populations were decanted into heartless and over-sized “public housing projects”. All of these failed and have been in turn demolished — a savage flop of “sustainable development”.

After a century in which the United States first defined and then ditched the modern city, we are left with two different presidential visions for the American city: Fifties corporate modernism with a superficial high-tech sheen, or federal classicism on a growth drug.

The Obama Library is beyond redemption: so flawed in its location, conception and execution that it is hard to see it ever becoming a much-loved landmark. The architects, New York-based Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, have form in nominative antiphrasis: a folk art museum which is modernist, a pavilion which has precisely nothing of the form, nature or tone of a pavilion and, now, a Presidential library which is bereft of books. In what has coyly been described as “a break with tradition”, the Obama Library has no research library and will not house the former President’s archives. Jackson Park has been mashed up for an empty box.

There is a good functional case to be made for Trump’s ballroom, however. The world’s superpower should not be hosting state dinners in tents. Nor is the loss of the Forties East Wing quite as shocking as it first seems. The White House, like a Shinto shrine, is old in name only. It is really a modern building pretending to be antique. Though the many Democratic supporters of classical architecture are appalled by Trump’s ballroom — traditional architecture, it should be noted, is the preferred architecture of both Democratic and republican voters — the plans could, in fact, be redeemed, but not if Trump remains actively in charge. The former real estate developer is rumored to be personally deeply involved in the negotiations, planning, fundraising and design, delaying other meetings for development discussion, supposedly insisting on concrete not stone for the super-sized triumphal arch and always asking, “How can it be bigger?”

Trump’s contempt for historic fabric sits within a clear presidential tradition. Harry Truman had the entire White House gutted and rebuilt internally while his family moved next door for three years. Of the original building, only the exterior walls and some re-installed doors, chimney pieces and wood paneling remain. The recently demolished East Wing was a 1942 near-total replacement, by McKim, Mead and White, of the 1902 original. And many of its interiors had also been transformed several times. Trump’s derision for normal consultation and approval via the National Trust for Historic Preservation offends but is not illegal. The White House is exempt from the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act.

Meanwhile, Memorial Circle is a good place for a triumphal arch, even if the probable scale and decorative excess would be obscene to Thomas Jefferson’s and the Founding Fathers’ more reserved aesthetics. Federal classicism’s moderation revealed its underpinning confidence and civility. The new arch needs to calm down. It should be in communion with the history of Washington, D.C.,not with the more brittle dictator gargantuanism of Beijing’s 10,000-seater Great Hall of the People or Pyongyang’s never-completed 105-story “Ryugyong Hotel”.

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Trump’s monumentalist aesthetic

By Adam Ellwanger and John J. Waters

Despite the flawed directions being taken by both Presidents Obama and Trump, there is hope for American cities. Increasingly Americans are rejecting towns that could be anywhere and so are nowhere. As long ago as 1955, and haunted by memories of the small town Marceline, Missouri, in which he grew up, America’s most culturally iconic entrepreneur, Walt Disney created a place for Americans to enjoy which rejected all of the emerging traffic-modernist truths of post-war US cities. Main Street, Disneyland is not just pretty and nostalgic. It has no cars, and it is human-scale. That, Disney and his designers realized, was what made people happy.

Over the past generation, a growing number of American researchers, investors, developers and city mayors, from both Left and Right, have reached the same conclusion that Disney did 70 years ago. Many developers have created so-called “new urbanist” towns and urban extensions which ignore most of the development patterns of the last 80 years: Seaside, Celebration and Kentlands and dozens more. All are rewarded with more consumer demand and higher land values, typically between 15% to 100%, as analysis by Chris Leindbeger, me and others has shown. In fact, so successful are they that a consortium of investors is funding the first new American city, California Forever, to be built on walkable pre-modernist principles for over a century.

Make places better and people like it. Republican mayor Jim Brainard’s transformation of downtown Carmel in Indiana was so popular that he was re-elected seven times becoming one of the longest serving American mayors. Streets with higher “walkscores” tend to be worth more, revealing pent-up demand. The economic, social and political benefits are clear.

Many American cities face huge challenges of discord, infrastructure decay and housing affordability. But to these challenges, the vaulting scale of Obama and Trump’s architectural visions have no answer. So, the message for my American friends is this: if you want your towns and cities to prosper, if you want to help heal the fissures in society, then ignore Trump and Obama. Don’t supersize your towns any further, but reweave them. Help each neighborhood feel enclosed and intimate, with all the concomitant advantages of prosperity, community and public health that brings. Help them feel small again.

That name comes from “béton brut,” French for “pure concrete.” To detractors, though, the name is all too apt: Brutalist buildings, with their imposing, inscrutable facades, can appear, well, brutish. The style is often associated with authoritarian movements, but incorrectly; it is a fundamentally humanist enterprise, one informed by, and suspicious of, the atrocities committed in the name of higher ideals throughout the 20th century. 

There is no accounting for taste, they say, but much of the dislike for Brutalism — which is hardly confined to Trump and his supporters — seems reflexive. You’re supposed to dislike it way you’re supposed to dislike anchovies. It doesn’t matter if you ever actually eat them.

Brutalism is “today associated with exactly the opposite values in which it was envisioned,” Mark Pasnik, who teaches architecture at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, told me. That may explain why, as Trump lashes out at Brutalism, few are speaking up in its defense.

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How the woke Right stole normality

By Alexander Nazaryan

Brutalist buildings line downtown Washington, DC, in particular the southwestern waterfront. Many of those buildings are functionally empty, as Trump has been cutting and relocating segments of the federal bureaucracy, and some could be torn down. Doing so would be an aesthetic mistake and an affront to history. Trump has the right to shape construction of new federal buildings while he remains in office, but any tinkering with the nation’s architectural treasures should elicit bipartisan outrage. 

There’s not much time left. In an executive order issued last month, the White House stipulated that “Federal public buildings, such as courthouses and government office buildings,” need to “embrace classical architecture to honor tradition, foster civic pride, and inspire the citizenry.” Public buildings are to be “constructed in a style that uplifts and beautifies public spaces, ennobles our Nation, and commands respect from the general public.”

That likely translates to a return to neoclassical forms: white marble columns, sweeping staircases, Greco-Roman statuary. The move is supposed to compensate for the influence of modern architecture, which was particularly strong during the federal government’s expansion under the administrations of  John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and happened to coincide with Brutalism’s peak.

“The drive toward monumentality was seen as being appropriate to a civic building that would represent the people,” Pasnik told me. “It dialed into the era of big, growing government — government that was doing things in a positive light.”

Now that government is evil — according to the people who run it — so is every building that symbolizes its power, or at least, does so without reference to Ancient Rome. “In the 1960s, the Federal government largely replaced traditional designs with modernist and Brutalist ones — a move that was deeply unpopular,” the executive order says, arguing that “a majority of American taxpayers want classical, regionally inspired public buildings that beautify public spaces.”

The order could imperil Brutalist classics around Washington: Marcel Breuer’s towering Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, the James V. Forrestal Building on Independence Avenue, the opaque donut that is the Hirschhorn Museum on the National Mall. This is the closest DC comes to the grandness of one of the world’s great capitals. But these and other Brutalist exemplars have unfairly been rebranded as “lumbering” representatives of a bloated government bureaucracy, Pasnik says.

If you need statues and colonnades, you can see those in London and Paris — and, for that matter, all over Washington. But the bold, angular structures of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters, across from the White House? That is pure midcentury cool, America at the height of its aesthetic and geopolitical influence. As the recent film The Brutalist pointed out, Brutalism was partly the style of European immigrants who had seen the horrors of World War II. The film stars Adrien Brody as a Jewish émigré from Hungary, who is seemingly based on Breuer. The members of this architectural cohort found comfort in concrete and simplicity, and they left Washington a grander and, yes, more beautiful than it had been in its staid, prewar days, when it was a small, Southern town.  

It is true that these buildings have been allowed to deteriorate, but that is a problem across the entirety of the federal government. And while federal workers have complained about working in them, I doubt that Trump is especially concerned with the comfort of his bureaucrats. Rather, in a complexly perverse move, any architecture that isn’t strictly neoclassical now seems to be identified as “woke.” Yet wokeness, whatever that is, was the last thing the Brutalists had in mind.

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The Brutalist's fatal flaw

By Darran Anderson

“As classical architecture is the physical expression of the American regime, modern architecture is the physical expression of the woke regime,” one conservative intellectual wrote in 2023. He identified Madison Square Garden, built in 1980, as an example of woke-ism run amok. In fact, MSG is neither Brutalist nor woke. It’s just bad architecture, a sop to corporate interests.

At the same time as Trump is waging war on Brutalism, the newly minted Department of War (formerly the Department of Defense) is preparing to reinstall a Confederate statue in Arlington National Cemetery, under the guise of wanting to showcase all of history, the bad along with the good. I personally oppose displays of Confederate iconography, but many members of the Trump administration feel differently. Consistency demands that they protect our Brutalist history, as well. 

Hope comes from an unlikely source: Mike Solana, editor of the influential and MAGA-adjacent website Pirate Wires, recently called Brutalism an abomination in a social-media post. But in a twist, that same post contained images of Brutalist buildings that have been rehabilitated with trees and plants — a new movement known as “eco-Brutalism.”

“This is acceptable,” Solana said of those images.

I may be grasping at straws here. Trump is no more a fan of environmentalism than he is of Brutalism. But maybe two (perceived) wrongs make a right? Trump wants to make Washington beautiful again. If he can resist his impulse towards the ersatz, he has a real chance of doing so by preserving and polishing the capital city’s Brutalist gems — and if that means a few trees sprouting from the concrete, so be it.

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John Betjeman had the last laugh

By Jonathan Glancey

Le Corbusier — the bogusly matey “Corb” is to be resisted — grew up in the francophone Swiss town of La Chaux-de-Fonds on, so far as he was concerned, the wrong side of the French border. Like Jean-Luc Godard some years later, he became a French citizen: both were mildly Helvetophobic, unattracted by ski-lifts, horology and rösti. Though Le Corbusier did not acknowledge it until much later the town made more impression on him than he did on it with a few prentice villas for family and friends which wave to art nouveau. La Chaux-de-Fonds was rebuilt after a fire in the late 18th century. Its grid pattern, unique in Switzerland, is omnipresent. It is a relentless rectilinear labyrinth which offers no relief, its axes are incarcerating. They lead to repetitive vanishing points. This would provide the template for the thwarted urbanistic projects which blighted Le Corbusier’s career. It fed the animus held by the enemies of modernism in the Twenties who failed to distinguish between Le Corbusier, architect of genius whose work shaped a century and — often apparently unrelated — Le Corbusier, utopian oddball (or hurluberlu). This wisenheimer’s megalomaniac schemes were not invariably recognized as the deadpan jests he partially intended, probably. Did he really expect to demolish much of Haussmannian Paris? Did he really expect to build 18 Cités Radieuses in a row in Marseille? He hid expressionlessly behind a prankster’s mask of the heaviest black-framed glasses that a human nose could support: frailer schnozzles have been defeated.

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Vladimir Nabokov: teasing trickster

By Jonathan Meades

It is indisputable that modernism in its various forms has won. Won what? Just look around you. (Unless, that is, you are in a British “housing” hutch or a “unit” of volume building.) Over half a century ago John Summerson noted that the architecture which demanded to be qualified by “modern” would soon no longer require a prefix. It would become architecture, tout court. Its debt to Le Corbusier would be immeasurably vast — and immeasurably third hand. A notion — playful or earnest, rational or fantastical or all of those, simultaneously — will, whatever its tenor, beget variations and dissipations, improvements and diminutions. Glasgow’s former Metropolitan College and Stirling and Gowan’s flats at Ham Common are obvious examples. Le Corbusier has been ripped off with abandon by the hackery which knows his work only from videos or low-quality images on a phone. Architecture can be represented in many ways, by far the worst of them is one dimensional.

A minor nuisance suffered by those, like me, whose home is Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille is the abundance of tourists who mill about the place. But at least they acquire some notion of the building as a living organism even if its inhabitants are exhibits in a freak show, ethnological samples who do things like drink coffee, laugh, look out to sea. We seldom pick lice out of our fur. Many of the guided tourists clearly have no idea why they are being directed though these corridors which are not so different from those in the blocks they live in. Now and again one of them dares to ask a passing exhibit why it lives here. What’s it like? What are those strange receptacles beside the front doors? (Ice boxes, daily refilled before the advent of the golden age of white goods.)

I guess this exhibit lives here because it can’t afford Blenheim or even Eastbury, the remaining wing of Vanbrugh’s third great house. But, generically there is a correspondence: the work of a supreme architect who was (in Vanbrugh’s case at least) a marvelously funny writer, the sense of being swaddled by concrete, cosseted by details realized with wit. The late Jim Cadbury Brown, whose wife Betty described Le Corbusier as an indefatigable groper, compared the Cité Radieuse’s solid clunkiness to a Bristol motor car. Piers Gough, whose work shares that quality, exclaimed, the first time he made a tour of the building: “This isn’t a modern work… this belongs to the arts and crafts.” That is one chasm which separates Le Corbusier from his followers, persons of blind goofy devotion who recall Eugène Burnand’s fanatics hurrying through a Millet-shaped landscape. “So they both ran together: and the other disciple did outrun Peter and came first to the sepulcher.” (St John 20.3)

Le Corbusier was, then, a magnet, a secular idol who, absolutely bereft of religion, created in his pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp near Belfort the supreme ecclesiastical structure of his age. But it might have been an eye-catcher, a stable, a sty, a bar. It belongs to refulgent architecture, to man’s craft and ingenuity, rather than to a clapped-out faith and its murky prescriptions, sick men’s dreams which demand no empirical validation.

With dyspepsia gurgling through the room, the Prince recharged his guns. “Not only did they wreck the London skyline in general. They also did their best to lose the great dome in a jostling scrum of office buildings, so mediocre that the only way you ever remember them is by the frustration they induce — like a basketball team standing shoulder-to-shoulder between you and the Mona Lisa.” The French and Italians would never dishonour their finest buildings in this manner. Can you imagine office blocks imprisoning Paris’s cherished Notre Dame or Venice’s shimmering St Mark’s?

​​In a subsequent BBC interview, Owen Luder, the now-deceased former president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, took issue with the Prince’s speech: “I think it was most unfortunate and embarrassing… I lived through the Blitz, no comparison at all. I really resent that.”

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Must we always demolish the past?

By Jonathan Glancey

Luder, designer of bold and controversial raw concrete Brutalist buildings that characterised the “comprehensive redevelopment” of many of Britain’s town and city centres in the Sixties and early Seventies, lived to see the most distinctive of his own buildings well and truly blitzed. The Tricorn Centre, Portsmouth: opened in 1966, demolished in 2004. Trinity Square, Gateshead, whose multi-storey car park featured in the Michael Caine gangster film, Get Carter: completed in 1967, razed in 2010. Derwent Tower, the 30-storey concrete housing block in Gateshead, known locally as the “Dunston Rocket”, was forcibly brought down in 2012. The problem was, as Mick Henry, leader of Gateshead’s Labour council, articulated at the time, “people did not want to live here, and a 30-storey tower block cannot be maintained on claimed architectural merits alone”.

As a result, ​brutalist buildings have often led dramatically foreshortened lives. As for the new buildings Prince Charles witnessed sprouting in and around the City of London, these continue to rise and fall and rise again, ever taller, and at increasingly breakneck speed. As they compete to scrape the London sky, gaggles of new City towers strip the streets they rise from of life and light and human scale. The tallest of all proposed to date, 1 Undershaft will, if given the final go-ahead by the Corporation of London this summer, reach the absolute height limit (1,016 ft) imposed by the Civil Aviation Authority.

The questionable architectural quality of the new City of London skyscrapers aside, it seems very odd indeed to witness earlier City office towers being demolished when they are no older and indeed even much younger than Luder’s Brutalist car parks and shopping centres. In its latest form, 1 Undershaft, designed by Eric Parry Architects, threatens to be not just uncomfortably high, but ugly and even silly with a roof garden sticking out over and above the street like some decolourised Rolling Stones’ tongue. What works, in vivid lipstick colour, for a rock band’s album covers and T-shirts fails in what should be a dignified, if spirited, city street.

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Christopher Wren: godfather of the technocrats

By Wessie du Toit

Assuming it does go ahead, 1 Undershaft will take at least four noisy, disruptive years to build. And it will demand the sacrifice of St Helen’s Tower, formerly the Commercial Union building, a deft 28-storey Mies van der Rohe-style curtain-wall tower, designed by Gollins Melvin and Ward (GMW) and dating from as long ago, in City terms, as 1969. At 387 ft, this building was the very first in the City of London to be taller than St Paul’s. It formed part of a considered modern composition, in company with GMW’s 10-storey P&O (Peninsular and Oriental) building. The P&O building, in turn, was demolished at the grand old age of 39, its place taken by Richard Rogers’s 43-storey “Cheesegrater” office tower.

Meanwhile, the City of London has also approved plans for 55 Bishopsgate. This up-and-rising 935-ft skyscraper (given heights for the building vary), “inspired by nature” and promising “world-class sustainability performance”, will replace a post-modern office block designed by Fitzroy Robinson so venerable that it dates all the way back in the smog of time to 1992.

Given that buildings are currently responsible for approximately 40% of global energy-related carbon emissions, it does seem odd that so much effort should be going into demolishing ever younger buildings to build ever taller ones in their place. It’s strongly reminiscent of the Eighties in Tokyo, when land values were so inflated that developers tore down brand-new buildings to erect even bigger ones on the same sites to make even more money. But an even more reckless model lies in Las Vegas: closed in 1990, the entertainingly space-age Landmark Tower rising from Paradise Street, and looking for all the world like an architectural escapee from The Jetsons, was blown to smithereens. It had taken eight years to build — from 1961 to 1969 — yet vanished in a trice in a spectacular cloud of smoke, dust, dynamite and debris. Tim Burton used footage of the demolition to comic effect in his 1996 sci-fi spoof Mars Attacks!

While the architecture of cities evolves and sudden events such as war, earthquakes, fires, IRA bombs and Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks prompt unwonted change, the wilful destruction of ever younger city buildings in pursuit of extreme financial gain is as unsettling as it is destructive, wasteful of energy and a snub to earlier generations who have designed and built for us. Buildings have become disposable commodities: a fact I think that most of us find hard to accept.

Was it ever thus? In The Face of London (1932) Harold Clunn, a London shipping agent and an indefatigable chronicler of the capital’s streets and buildings, describes how he stops to stare at the robustly challenging St Mary Woolnoth. It’s an early 18th-century Baroque bulldog of a church — from the outside; geometric serenity within — designed by an architect considered since to be one of the greatest these islands has yet produced, Nicholas Hawksmoor.

What Clunn couldn’t understand was why, when so many other churches had been demolished for the greater good of London, St Mary Woolnoth remained stubbornly in place. Particularly as it occupied “perhaps the most valuable site in the whole city”. “If every building with a claim to antiquity is to be suffered to exist for perpetuity,” he wrote, “where is the space to be found in the course of time to allow for any future progress in the world?”

Here was a man with faith in modernity. Shortly after the Second World War, Clunn wrote London Marches On (1947), in which he considers the Luftwaffe’s Blitz a blessing in disguise, allowing the city to replace slums with sanitary new blocks of flats while raising bravura new commercial buildings of which he was a devoted fan.

A short walk away from the ever less enchanting streets of the City of London, you can find the old Huguenot chapel, built in 1743, on the corner of Spitalfields’s Brick Lane. In response to social change, it became a Methodist chapel in 1819, a synagogue in 1897 and, in 1976, the Jama Masjid (Friday Mosque). None of us, I think, expects London or any other city to be pickled in aspic. Life moves on. Yet who  can look to the City skyline and say with a Harold Clunn-like assurance that the relentless demolition of young buildings in favour of bigger, more demonstrative machines-for-making-money is a good thing?

Brutalism had a brief heyday in the decades after the Second World War, an era of cultural optimism, new ideas and technological advance. But it has never exactly been popular, despite the best efforts of a small band of devotees. One such devotee is Barnabas Calder, an architecture academic and writer. In his passionate and well-written book Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism, he makes a strong and learned case for the style, focusing on its vigour and monumentality.

The book is a refreshing read. It was also a challenging one, given my own convictions about architecture, which are rather more on the Roger Scruton-reading, tweed-adjacent end of the scale. It certainly made me rethink some of my former prejudices towards the style.

For one thing, we cannot level against Calder the charge often faced by modernist architects, that they expect other people to live in their unprepossessing creations while they themselves retreat to classically proportioned Georgian townhouses or the gothic splendour of Victorian villas. When selecting a Cambridge college for his doctoral work, Calder chose Christ’s, on the basis of its famous Brutalist accommodation block, called New Court, and caused considerable bafflement to an admissions officer by specifically asking to live in it. He even spent a night in the “Hermit’s Castle”, a mysterious but fascinating bunker-like structure near Achmelvich in the remote north-west of Scotland, built in the Fifties for now-obscure reasons by a largely forgotten architect, David Scott.

Raw Concrete is akin to Richard Taylor’s classic How To Read A Church, in that it teaches the reader to begin to appreciate something that may at first feel incomprehensible and alien. Calder does an excellent job of putting Brutalism in its historical context, noting how the unprecedented abundance of cheap energy in the years after the Second World War meant that public projects could become much more structurally ambitious. He draws parallels with the huge reforming impulses that had been unleashed in post-war Britain, which involved reconstruction of the physical fabric of the big cities, the growth of the welfare state, the expansion of the middle-class, and the new universities.

It is easy for conservative-minded people to forget all this. The temptation is to look back on mid-20th century Britain through the distorting prisms of the economic disruption of the Seventies and the failure of the post-Sixties social settlement. However, life must be lived forwards, even if it can only be understood backwards. It is an injustice to the early Brutalists to associate them too directly with the things that went wrong in the years to come.

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Calder gently pushes back against other anti-Brutalist arguments, principally the suggestion that it was an excuse for fast, cheap and shoddy construction. This was undoubtedly the case in certain places, but he demonstrates quite conclusively that many of the most striking and prestigious projects were expensive and time-consuming. The Barbican took 20 years to complete. The New Court at Christ’s, Cambridge, by no means enormous, took four years, with a long lead-in of planning and development.

Brutalism, he makes clear, was in some ways a reaction against the early modernists, particularly what is now known as the International Style — think white square boxes, with large expanses of unadorned flat wall and large windows, and a certain sense of fragility and lightness, often heightened by the use of thin support pillars. These early modernist buildings, like the American Farnsworth House or the incomplete estate at Frinton-on-Sea in Essex, tended to be relatively modest, lacking the audacity that came to mark Brutalist construction.

It is the ambition and scale of Brutalism that really seems to inspire Calder, just as it has inspired members of Brutiful Birmingham. He writes movingly about his years teaching in Strathclyde University’s architecture school, and his first time seeing London’s Trellick and Balfron towers “in the flesh”. Even for a sceptic, it is hard not to get carried away by his delight, although I cannot take as much joy as he does in the limited and functional ornamentation of stairwells and roofs. The drama and uniqueness of buildings like the National Theatre is hard to gainsay, even for the doubter. I am also a fan of Dunelm House, the now-listed Brutalist HQ of the Durham University student union, which narrowly escaped demolition last year. It is a fine example of a medium-sized modernist building that looks good in a comparatively spacious setting, where it doesn’t intimidate or overwhelm its neighbours, nor ruin the harmony of a street.

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By Aaron Bastani

This was not the case for every Brutalist scheme. Some of the best-known were, or are, too gargantuan, and embodied a kind of monumental disdain for the city around them. The Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth and Gateshead’s Trinity Centre, both praised by Calder and both now demolished, were in this category, as is the Cumbernauld Centre in the Scottish new town of the same name. Of course, defenders of Brutalism might counter that the replacements for both Tricorn and Trinity are mere bland boxes with no vision or ideals behind them, anonymous additions to the steel and glass canyons that dominate early 21st century commercial architecture. At least Brutalism was about something!

It’s a reasonable point. Plausibly, the growing popular disillusionment with Brutalism since its heyday is not always the result of a specific dislike of the style, but of a more generalised fatigue with the uninspiring and tedious buildings that have become so prevalent in British towns and cities. It is also unfortunate that the high point of Brutalism coincided with the start of many disastrous trends in town planning, and the rise of car dependency which we are still struggling to manage today.

This doesn’t get Brutalism off the hook entirely. It’s hard to escape from the fact that concrete tends to age poorly, and as a material is generally ill-suited to a country that is often overcast and gloomy. (Calder, to his credit, uses very ordinary photos of his cherished masterworks, not the deceptive kind taken on cloudless sunny days that you find in coffee-table books.) Grandiose concrete construction is often highly inappropriate for British townscapes, which have gained much of their charm and attractiveness from harmonious and organic interrelations between neighbouring shops, houses and offices. Calder’s much-loved New Court was a sharp break with the rest of Cambridge’s King Street, presenting a stark and imposing bare façade. There are people who find such dramatic statements thrilling or even sublime, and I can see why, but to many others it is unsettling and unwelcome.

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By Niall Gooch

Architecture is unlike the other arts, in the sense that it is inescapable. I don’t like Jackson Pollock paintings or Marvel films or overwrought high Victorian poetry, but they are very easy to avoid. The built environment is not like that. It belongs to all of us, because all of us have to make our lives within it. The aesthetic preferences of the ordinary and unsophisticated may be frustrating to the more educated and advanced, but when it comes to their homes and their workplaces and their communities, it is unjust to ignore them.

So I am not a convert — not exactly. For one thing, just as Calder insists that we must disentangle aesthetic judgments about Brutalist buildings from the social and political problems with which they have become synonymous, we can be grateful for the achievements of post-war governments — in sanitation, living standards, and a more equal society — without accepting that Brutalism was inseparable from, or intrinsic to, those achievements.

Maybe I am simply too conservative to truly love austere innovations in architecture that represent such a radical rupture with the past. Calder notes that some Brutalists, like Denys Lasdun who designed New Court and the National Theatre, were influenced by classicists such as Nicholas Hawksmoor, and he draws some lines of continuity between pre-modernist and modernist styles. This may well be true, but it’s hard for the non-specialist to see such continuities, and one should not have to be a specialist in order to feel at home in an urban setting.

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By Niall Gooch

There is much to think about in some of the key tenets of architectural modernism. Most intriguing, perhaps, is the emphasis on “honesty”: the belief that buildings should as far as possible reflect the technologies and spirit of their own times, that they should not hide the materials or techniques used in their creation, and that they should reflect a democratic and liberating spirit. This is why they are so little adorned, and why they often seem stark and confrontational, and why they are so different from what came before. Basil Spence’s new Coventry Cathedral, completed in 1962, is a good example of a mostly successful attempt to come up with an appropriate idiom for Christian churches in a fractured and uncertain modern world where older forms feel exhausted or inadequate.

All the same, there are traps lurking in the background. Several times in Raw Concrete, Calder contrasts one of his favourite Brutalist landmarks with the ordinary, comfortable suburbia in which he, like so many of us, grew up. The impulse behind the comparison — the need to break from home and form our own tastes, to experience the grandeur and variety of the world — is perfectly natural and normal. The moment in the book where Calder describes fulfilling a long-held ambition, by visiting the top of one of the Barbican towers and peering down a dizzying triangular staircase, was spine-tingling.

But there is a danger in taking this instinct too far, and making the rejection of the traditional and the mundane a cornerstone of our thinking. Man does not live by magnificent concrete set pieces alone.

What is not asked, however, is why? Why did Britain, and much of the West, suddenly insist on remaking the built environment at such speed? The idea this resulted from a sudden bout of cultural self-loathing is supported by no evidence. The same is true for the notion that despite founding Nato and trying to maintain its empire, post-war Britain was somehow stuffed with surreptitious Marxists, from the commanding heights of Westminster to the planning offices of your local town hall.

Like most simple, comforting stories, this is wrong — a convenient narrative for inaction and self-satisfied moaning. What is needed instead is a Marxist, materialist account of why the built environment changed as it did. History, after all, is not forged purely by ideas.

What does a materialist analysis tell us? Firstly, that conservative concepts of beauty are incongruent with a devotion to the free market, something which Marx identified 150 years ago. Capitalism, driven by a relentless quest for profit, requires constant spatial transformation. This means we have the buildings we do because, for the most part, somebody somewhere is making a buck. This is difficult to grasp for many on the Right because they have elevated profit into a kind of ethical value (although this wasn’t always the case). But it should be relatively obvious, and far less outlandish than the idea that your nearest Wilko or TK Maxx looks the way it does because of the malevolent influence of Oscar Niemeyer. As Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto: “All that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned.” This is why a commitment to the free market, and to social and aesthetic conservatism, are irreconcilable.

This is most conspicuous today with Purpose Built Student Accommodation (PBSAs), those modular ziggurats afflicting skylines across Britain, from Altus House in Leeds to Beckley Point in Plymouth (each is the tallest building in their respective city). In Cardiff, more than 7,000 student “flats” were built in just three years.

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These buildings are springing up like medieval Bolognese towers for two reasons: firstly, because the building standards are lower for student developments than either residential housing or housing in multiple occupation; and secondly, because building them is lucrative. Forget Marxist council officers and architects with fantasies of becoming the next Frank Gehry. These buildings are being assembled in the quest for profit.

In Portsmouth, the city centre has now essentially become a student campus, the city’s sense of civic pride sacrificed to corporate student accommodation and fast-food outlets zipping deliveries to them via smartphone. It’s a grim vision of what our smaller city centres are becoming, with spaces for interaction in short supply. In Bournemouth, where I grew up, a seaside town synonymous with Victorian and Art Deco architecture looks increasingly like the set of the Teletubbies. Any sense of place is out of the question, the objective instead being to turn the town into a giant airport terminal.

Another important reason for those tragic “before and after” pictures so beloved of Trad Architecture Twitter is the popular adoption of the car in the mid-20th century. As with the failure to grasp the contradiction between free markets and conservation, this too is lost for many on the Right (although, in his defence, Scruton once referred to cars as “dangerous weapons”). This shouldn’t be overly surprising given the automobile was synonymous with personal freedom, an avatar of the sovereign individual conquering the elements. What is forgotten with this blanket projection of personal autonomy, detached from society, is that the dense patchwork of urban settlement that preceded it was lost. You may be able to go anywhere in a car, but you do so by cutting yourself off from others. In the words of Kafka: “you are free, and that is why you are lost.”

The reconfiguration of streets around the car is the principal reason cities such as Birmingham, Glasgow and Bristol lost much of their lustre. This was not limited to Britain, of course. Take the story of Robert Moses, the subject of Robert Caro’s magnificent biography The Power Broker. Over several decades as a public official in New York, Moses gleefully destroyed downtown areas often marked by cultural and racial diversity, as well as high density construction. The reason? To build expressways.

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The Cross Bronx Expressway offers the best example of this, ripping as it did through the heart of what would become the northern and southern parts of the Bronx. Things could have been worse, however. And it was only because of civic resistance, led by the likes of Jane Jacobs, that the construction of the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway was stopped. Had she failed, it would have destroyed much of what is SoHo, Little Italy and Chinatown.

While it’s true that an infatuation with the car was central to post-war planning, today it is the Left leading the movement for low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs). By contrast, it is Conservative councils, such as in Southampton or Wandsworth, that are reversing them. This is not to say all LTNs have been executed well, but it is clear that reducing our dependence on cars has become a part of the culture wars, with conservatives often on the wrong side. It’s one thing posting nostalgic pictures of yesteryear; it’s another to do the hard political yards to reverse mistaken choices since.

This bizarre confusion is most obvious in Poundbury, the experimental community built on land belonging to Prince Charles. Even here, in a place whose premise is a return to tradition, the civic centre of Queen Mother Square is a car park. Even if you embrace the orthodoxies behind the project (I personally find it more akin to a Las Vegas theme park), it’s hard to see how rows of hatchbacks and people carriers continue the legacy of Victorian or Georgian architecture. It’s the same in the village of Wickham, home to the second largest medieval square in England. The Visit Hampshire website refers to the village’s “15th century cottages” and “beautifully preserved Georgian houses”. Yet such wonders are also now obscured by the fact that the village square is now a rather large car park.

When it comes to the built environment, it’s easy to lapse into mistaken binaries. On the Right, conservatives wish to retain a distinctive architecture. They claim to want to “conserve” buildings whose qualities transcend present, fleeting sensibilities. They believe in objective standards of beauty — be they from antiquity, or the work of Palladio or Wren. The Left, meanwhile, is apparently driven by a fixation with the future, a permanent experimentation with forms and an impulse to discard the old.

And yet much of this narrative doesn’t align with reality. Councils of all stripes are gleefully granting permission for hideous student blocks, while a Conservative government oversees our rivers being pumped with effluent. Meanwhile, it is progressives who make the arguments for more humane environments where we use our cars less and enjoy a slower pace of life. They don’t always get everything right, but there should be no doubt that active travel, living streets and low traffic neighbourhoods are the simplest ways to begin making our towns and cities beautiful again.

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All of which is why the socialist case for respecting architectural heritage should not be at odds with a small ‘c’ conservative approach. This should be the opposite of the promethean road-building projects of the last century, while also avoiding a swivel-eyed hatred of more recent architectural heritage, whether that be the Barbican in London or Berlin’s Palace of the Republic. Take the brutalist Trinity car park in Gateshead. Conservative critics may think such buildings shouldn’t exist by default, and so it was demolished in 2010. Yet it has been replaced by a Tesco — hardly a win for Scrutonian beauty and the public good.

Finally, socialists and conservatives alike must understand that the built environment, as with every human endeavour, is an inheritance from one generation to the next. We should be humble rather than dismiss the ideas of those before us, regardless of which century they come from, while also asking what kinds of structures will fill our descendants with wonder. As Stephen Nachmanovitch wrote: “If we operate with a belief in long sweeps of time, we build cathedrals. If we operate from fiscal quarter to fiscal quarter, we build ugly shopping malls.” The enemy of beauty isn’t “modernism”; it’s a society built on maximising profit and shareholder value.

Indeed I only found that out last week, when word got out that North Lanarkshire Council had agreed to purchase Cumbernauld’s town centre, but only in order to raze it to the ground. The responses adhered to a familiar script. Architectural historians, of course, were appalled; they argued that, as Britain’s first shopping centre and a radical experiment in building a town centre that went up instead of down, the eight storey “megastructure” was an important part of our cultural legacy. But there was no popular outrage at the news that the rotting eyesore in the centre of the town might soon be gone.

In fact, the destruction of The Centre Cumbernauld (to give it its proper name), which was erected on concrete stilts over a dual carriageway in 1967, has been a dream of many people for a long time. In 2005 it topped a poll of 10,000 people in the UK as the building in Britain that people most wanted to see demolished. Cumbernauld itself, like many of the 27 New Towns that were built in the UK after the war, does not have a great reputation. The comedian Craig Ferguson (who grew up there) once derided it as a “modernist experiment”, where “clueless” town planners had provided “soulless housing for ground-down workers”, before adding that the houses looked like “German machine gun turrets”. My cousins on the west coast of Scotland were pithier: they called it “Scumbernauld”.

Yet for a brief moment in the Sixties and Seventies, Cumbernauld represented an exciting vision of the future, in which a projected population of 70,000 workers and their families would move through the town via a network of pavements, underpasses and bridges. They would never have to cross a road, and never have to spend more than 20 minutes walking to reach the “brilliantly logical” town centre, which housed shops, a library, offices, apartments and even a few penthouses.

When Princess Margaret visited The Centre Cumbernauld in 1967, she pronounced it “fabulous”; that same year it won the Reynolds Memorial Award from the American Institute of Architects. My grandparents lived there in the last years of their lives and greatly preferred their Cumbernauld flat to the one they had lived in on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow; likewise my Aunt Janet, who lived there between 1972 and 1982, still remembers how novel it was to go shopping without being rained on.

Indeed, even if it had been pouring when I paid a visit last week, I would have remained dry: when I stepped off the bus, I was already inside the centre, confronted with its “brilliant logic”. Is it possible, I wondered, that the architectural historians are right: does Cumbernauld’s town centre deserve to be preserved for future generations? I followed a ramp (there were no stairs or lifts) to the first floor, where I entered the retail complex which had so impressed Princess Margaret 55 years earlier.

The years have not been kind to the place. Where once it featured well-known retailers, such as Halford’s, M & Co. and the supermarket chain Presto, now it is clearly the part of the complex where rents are cheapest (an additional shopping centre, the Antonine, was grafted onto the original building in 2007; that one was opened by Princess Anne); it is here that the eyebrow threaders, tattoo artists, “vintage” shops and suicide prevention centres set up shop. The interior had been remodelled so all traces of its late Sixties utopia-lite origins were gone: bizarrely, the enormous clock from St Enoch’s train station in Glasgow had been embedded in the wall of a mezzanine in the new section, where it kept the time at a permanent 8:20.

After about ten minutes, a security guard informed me that it is forbidden to take pictures in the centre, because it is private property. I moved to the next level, which contains the library and a children’s day-care. This section has not been remodelled; it is very close to the original: lots of brick and tile and concrete, the pipes and wires were exposed. The corridors had names, as if they were streets, but the doors granting entry to them were locked. A service lift was out of order; a weird bench was moulded into the concrete; the glass overhead was filthy. Through it, I could make out the windows of the penthouses, long since abandoned. At the far end, a roof garden for toddlers hung suspended in the air over the dual carriageway beneath.

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The library itself was cheerful enough, but overall, I felt as though I had stumbled upon a vision of Logan’s Run as reimagined by Seventies British trade unionists, only the death squads that were supposed to kill you after you turned 30 had all gone, and everyone had long since taken the opportunity to run away, or simply grow older. It was pretty grim.

But if it was grim on the inside, then it was much worse from the outside. Glimpses of Cumbernauld’s town centre from the window of the bus over the years had not done justice to the scale of the architectural catastrophe. It reminded me of the vast Izhmash plant in Udmurtia, Russia, where they pump out AK 47s and other weapons. But Izhmash at least had a decorative historical entrance; with the general absence of windows and the abundance of pipes and wires in the town centre, everything looked like the back of something. The only feature the eye was drawn towards was the long rectangular section with porthole windows suspended on stilts that hung over the road. Locals call it “the alien’s head”.

From there I took a stroll over the bridges and through the underpasses of the town. Certainly it was convenient, though obviously the planners had not thought about the canvas that endless concrete represents to bored teenagers and the threatening atmosphere it can present at night. I was passing through a particularly luminous underpass when I was accosted by a man with a hammer and sickle tattoo on his arm. “They paint it and then it gets graffitied the next day,” he said.

When I asked him how long he had lived in the town, he replied: “Most of my life, on and off. Cumbernauld is a social experiment: it’s driven me doolally. Have you seen the centre? It’s full of people like that.”

Returning, I felt a sense of coercion: the ghostly hand of the planners had arranged everything so that I was more or less obliged to follow the same route through extremely functional housing. Obviously the working classes had no need of freedom, beauty, or variety: they could get by with a few trees. Behold, Le Corbusier’s “machine for living in”, in the Lanarkshire hills.

When I arrived in Cumbernauld, I was open to the idea that the town centre might be worth saving. Now, not so much. It was not the brutalism; having spent a lot of time in the former USSR I have developed a taste for brutalism when done right. In Central Asia, in particular, architects took eastern motifs and incorporated them into their concrete structures, giving a character to blocks of flats, universities and national libraries that is entirely lacking in Cumbernauld. Those structures are worth preserving, though the cheapness of the materials likely means that one day those buildings too will disappear. Nor do I think it’s a coincidence that the USSR embraced brutalism in the Seventies, after “communism” had withered to mean a fridge and a TV in every house, and an annual beach holiday. In the end, the ideology was not that dissimilar to the modest utopianism of Britain’s post-war town planners.

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Cumbernauld’s town centre was pioneering, but it was also a failure. There is no disgrace in that failure, however: the first generation of occupants, like my grandparents, found these homes a huge improvement on the Glasgow tenements they had grown up in; indeed, New Towns across the country were an improvement on conditions in the slums they were designed to replace. Instead of a single room, kitchen and shared toilet, families now had extra bedrooms, bathrooms and a living room. Later generations did not have this point of comparison, however, and lived in the town once it was already decaying.

The problem with preserving architectural experiments is that they are not like novels lacking the letter “e” or repurposed urinals that live unobtrusively on bookshelves and in museums; they are infrastructure, and it is very hard to persuade people that they should pass their lives in crumbling buildings that they hate because of the interesting ideas that inspired them.

It would be nice, of course, if you could take all those decaying brutalist buildings from around Britain and move them to an open-air park where architectural historians could admire these daring visions, while others could reflect on the dangers of falling for ideas that look good on paper. But that isn’t going to happen: some of these buildings will be preserved, but most of them are going to disappear, just as most of everything has disappeared.

The truth is, we often judge New Towns too harshly: it takes centuries for a city to become interesting, and even then, many old places are also quite boring and squalid. And as it turns out, many New Towns were simply a step in a broader evolutionary process. Just as Milton Keynes has realised its destiny as a sleeper town for middle class people priced out of London and Oxford, so Cumbernauld is discovering its destiny. It was never to be a self-contained social unit built around an eight-storey mixed use retail, office and residential complex — but rather a bedroom community on the edge of the larger metropolis of Glasgow.

This faceless collection of houses and shops and retail parks, without any particular centre or identity, will ultimately surrender to a vast urban sprawl: that’s progress. In time, other New Towns will see that this too is their best option; or, if they are not located close enough to a major city, continue to crumble, until one day they vanish and are forgotten forever.

The demolition of Wrexham Police station, a distinctive and assertive 10-storey concrete tower dating from the mid-Seventies took place at 08:30am on Sunday 1 November. Online footage shows the building tumbling over as if swatted by a giant hand. The event will feature in next year’s season of Scrap Kings, a TV show in which “the nation’s kings and queens of destruction . . . bang, blow, smash and crunch their way around the UK.”

Let’s hope that together with local politicians everyone in the Welsh market town is happy when, after the crunching rubble is cleared, a new Lidl supermarket, a drive-through coffee shop and 151 car parking spaces emerge from the ashes.

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It's the end of the line for Britain's industrial heritage

By Jonathan Glancey

One Westminster politician in particular may have relished the banging, smashing news from Wrexham. In October, Robert Jenrick, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, said that the Government’s new planning reforms will create a “big opportunity to demolish some of the mistakes of the recent past . . . empty derelict buildings in town and city centres that were put, often poorly constructed, not within the character of those places, particularly in market towns in the Sixties and Seventies.”

Although unlisted, the Wrexham Police headquarters was an interesting building. Designed by a team led by the Denbighshire County Architect Eric Langford Lewis and opened in 1975, it fitted into a canon of British civic buildings of its era labelled “Brutalist”, its offices spreading up and out from a central concrete pillar — the tower’s service core — to reach a height of 140ft. This was the tallest new building in Wrexham since the completion of the tower of St Giles, the town’s glorious Tudor parish church 500 years earlier. The police headquarters ought to have been fashionable by 2020, as such Seventies architecture can be, and converted, perhaps, into a hotel or workspaces and laboratories for hi-tech start-ups or whatever the collective local imagination might have in mind for Wrexham’s future.

A local petition hoped to protect the nine-acre building site from becoming the home of just another supermarket — Wrexham is brimful with them — but the prevailing official view was evidently Jenrickian. Will, though, the new Lidl supermarket be a better and more beautiful building than the smashed Seventies police headquarters?

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Aside from an unease about the lack of imagination shown in Wrexham, my wider concern here is with politicians and cultural commentators who find the architecture of the generation or two before them hard to understand, much less to like, and thus to protect and renovate for the future. Much the same is true, of course, of music, fashion, art and design.

There is though an irredeemable arrogance at play when it comes to the fate of buildings when a new generation takes against previous architectural styles it feels it has the cultural competence and a kind of divine right to dismiss and destroy. In 1961, Harold Macmillan, Conservative prime minister and arch moderniser, ensured the demolition of the Euston Arch. This monumental Greek Revival propylaeon, or triumphal gateway, designed in a severe Doric style by Philip Hardwick, fronted what had been the London terminus of Britain’s first long distance passenger railway, the London and Birmingham. Opened in 1837, this was the 19^th century equivalent of a Roman road, the scale of its engineering epic, its architecture noble.

When Jim Richards, editor of the Architectural Review, went to 10 Downing Street with fellow ‘Save the Euston Arch’ campaigners, “Macmillan listened, or I suppose he listened as he sat without moving and with his eyes apparently closed. He asked no questions; in fact he said nothing except that he would consider the matter.” With official apathy over the matter on the parts of the government, the London County Council and the British Transport Commission, Macmillan let the wrecking balls get to work.

What, though, could have been going through the Prime Minister’s mind? This, after all, was the same Harold Macmillan, who as a wounded young captain on the Somme waiting in a foxhole for rescue, read Aeschylus in Greek for comfort. Why the tragic gap between Aeschylus and the Greek Revival Euston Arch? Because, I think, Macmillan and those of his generation, especially following the destruction caused by two world wars, wanted to escape at least part of their Edwardian and, at root, Victorian hinterland.

It was Macmillan’s Conservative government that championed motorways, high-rise mass housing and tall commercial buildings on the London skyline alongside the destruction of unfashionable 19^th century architecture.

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St Pancras station and that great Victorian dragon of a building, the Midland Grand Hotel that fronts it, only just escaped demolition after determined battles by conservationists resolute after their failure to protect the Euston Arch. However, even John Summerson, the distinguished architectural historian, refused to support St Pancras. Why? Because, I think, St Pancras was a reminder of what, in spirit, had been a coal-fired Victorian childhood. The old order needed to change yielding place to the crisp, rational, white and new.

While John Summerson was making his mark, at the same time as John Betjeman who helped lead the fight for the Euston Arch and St Pancras, Harold Clunn wrote The Face of London (1932) in which the author praised the ambitious new commercial architecture of the capital. As for Nicholas Hawksmoor’s early 18^th century Baroque church of St Mary Woolnoth this was little short of a modern scandal. How could such a building out of keeping with the style and scale of modern streets be allowed to occupy a City of London site worth a million pounds and ripe for redevelopment?

If, as Robert Jenrick argues, new buildings will have to comply with design codes “so that local people this time around can decide what they want these buildings to look like which are so central to their lives”, there will be no contemporary equivalent of daring Hawksmoor churches, much less soaring Gothic cathedrals nor, of course, police station’s like Wrexham’s.

Sometimes, just sometimes, there are balanced outcomes. The 1960s Preston Bus Station — cinematic, sculptural, heroic — designed by Keith Ingham and Charles Wilson of the Building Design Partnership, survived prolonged attempts to have it demolished to make way for more shopping. Between 2016 and 2018 it was renovated by John Puttick Associates. Against Wrexham’s and Jenrick’s grain, local people truly like this Sixties adventure in concrete.

I wonder what if Wrexham had followed Preston’s path, realising that architectural fashions change but tend to return to favour. In the meantime, we should think much harder than politicians seem to have been able or willing to do in recent decades and not so much to demolish what we don’t like at one particular moment, but to build more intelligently and caringly than we tend to do in the first place.

I have never heard a more dismal, pessimistic noise. It sounds like a great sea creature coming to the surface and dying, just over the horizon, a miserable thought. And quite right too. How much more fitting than the silly tipsy cheering of the shivering crowds in other cities, as they watch the futile fireworks and toast the turn of the calendar. Towards what?

There are people who, around this time of year turn out lists of wondrous material achievements and supposedly pleasing prospects which lie before us. There will be more electric cars, apparently, as if that is a good thing. On the contrary, innocent pedestrians and cyclists, such as I am, fear these silent killers. Their sole function, it seems to me, is to make motorists feel less selfish because the filth and noise these things create have been outsourced to a distant power station. Even the revival of the railways, which I at first welcomed, turns out to mean that travelling by train is more and more like travelling by air.

Now, when I make these accurate points, people accuse me of wishing to go back to the 1950s, a decade which — to me — has all the allure of an overflowing ashtray next to a plate of bad food. I have no such desire. I do not wish on New Year’s Eve to be transported back to the age of custard, chilblains and Giles cartoons. What I feel, when I pause to think of what lies ahead, is that we have an unerring ability to choose the wrong future. Architecture, of all the arts, seems to me to mock at us for this mistake. For it is the most powerful art of all, and it also persists long enough to remind of us of what we used to be and what we might have been.

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The War was not Our Finest Hour

By Peter Hitchens

Wander, as I love to do on autumn days, through the great cities of continental Europe, and you will begin to sense something very disturbing. Of course, there is plenty of loveliness in their ancient quarters, though it often finishes abruptly, up against some modernist cuboid or a swooping, perpetually growling  motorway junction. And there is, increasingly, a frenzy of newness, as if there is a collective will to obliterate as much of the past as possible.

In the Netherlands, especially, there seems to be an almost hysterical desire to build tall, straight, featureless boxes at every opportunity. The Hague seems to suffer from this worse than anywhere else. How ruthless and crude it all seems in a city which once breathed Edwardian calm, with its stately parks and its foolishly optimistic Peace Palace.

But there is still an era in between, and this is the one which distresses me, because it is the relic of a future we nearly had, and which we threw away. The colossal Central Station at Antwerp, dating from shortly before the Great War, is perhaps the most moving example of this. It has opulence, grandeur and calm. It assumes that the world will remain solid, prosperous and peaceful. And, in its portly, slightly constipated way, it is exactly what all those ruthless, clean-lined tower blocks of today are not.

It is the inheritor of the old world of narrow streets, arches, spires and pinnacled towers, in which it was built. It respects the language of their architecture, one of a continuing Christian order and hierarchy. So, come to that, do the lovely millionaire’s mansions of Moscow, many of them preserved as embassies, and enough to make you weep at a world so irrecoverably lost amid Soviet new barbarism and Oligarch’s Baroque.

So do the light-hearted pinnacles and curves, still to be seen in Barcelona, of such Catalan geniuses as Antoni Gaudi and Lluis Domènech i Montaner. How might it have been if such minds — and the ideas that went with them — had dominated the building of the 20th and 21st centuries, not the thudding brutalism of Corbusier and Goldfinger, and their stark successors? Modern did not have to mean ferro-concrete. It just turned out that way.

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By Peter Hitchens

How different the world before 1914 was. It is a punctuation point as stark as the Fall of the Roman Empire. Before: curves, Degas, detail, shadow, mystery. Afterwards: eye-searing light, straight lines, Otto Dix, unconcealed power and no mystery at all. Power needs no mystery. On the contrary, it is keen to be recognised as what it is, straight away.

From Antwerp’s great cathedral of railways, doubtless once perfumed with good cigars and strong coffee, one could have travelled, in carriages of polished wood, brass fittings and deep cushions, to any number of ancient, unspoiled cities, in which patient, cautious statesmen made their careful plans in high-ceilinged offices looking out on to broad boulevards traversed by trams, offices so quiet that you could hear the rustle of the ashes shifting in their open fires.

And they planned war. Had they not done so, I am sure that most of the great developments of modern science would have come about, perhaps in a different shape, perhaps a little more slowly. We would have had another sort of modern world, more civilised and more worthy of optimism, than the rackety arrangements we have now. We might have no television, but some other gentler invention. The self-evidently crazy idea of mass car ownership, the foundation of Fordism, might never have taken root. Why, social democracy might actually have been made to work and Russia could have become a liberal democracy.

But they chose war. And it was that war which ended all possibility of the future which we might have had. War took us from stately, mannered opulence to bare, arrogant expressions of strength and money. It ended the slow amelioration of old-fashioned social democracy and gave us Bolshevism. It obliterated conservatism and gave us fascism and National Socialism. And in the end it brought us to the deliberately materialist modernism of the European Union and the secular worship of material progress above all things, which we have now, and perhaps for a while longer.

Suggested reading

What scars do we bear from the First World War?

By Robert Tombs

The change in architecture, art, literature and music, which accompanied this transformation, tells us that there is no way back. We have, more or less, recovered materially from the disaster of 1914. But our ideas have not. We can no longer believe in the things we believed in before 1914, because they were discredited by war and what followed.

Above all, the supposed repression brought about by religious belief has gone.  None of us, now, could bear to return to it even if we were offered the chance. Stefan Zweig’s World of Yesterday actually sounds rather appealing to me at this distance. I would in theory be glad if coarseness and violence once again became as shocking as they were to Zweig’s generation. But would I really be able to bear the stifling obedience to adults, the formality of dress, the interminable Sundays, the long postponement of pleasures during a lengthy and rigid education in which you could actually fail examinations?

The spirit which made all this possible, and which sustained the other many self-restraints which kept the peace, has gone. The simplest way of expressing this is that I would love to know great acres of poetry and Shakespeare by heart, and to be able to quote at will from the works of the classical thinkers. I would love to know Ancient Greek. But I would not love the self-discipline needed to do these things. I have simply not been brought up to such tasks, and the world around me, shouting for my immediate attention, will not let me pursue them.

But no amount of complacent or optimistic statistics about any coming year will ever persuade me that what I have is better than what I might have had, if we had chosen another future in 1914.