My Secret PoMo Shame

Look, it was bound to happen sooner or later.

You shouldn't blame yourself.  It's not your fault.  No, really.

It's me.  I'm different.  I've changed.

I've realised that I quite like PoMo.  And by PoMo, I mean the lowest-brow version of Post-Modern architecture, the type that found its way onto British high streets and bypasses throughout my youth.

Chatham's Pentagon, which was not narrowly missed by one of the hijacked jets on 9/11

Exhibit A, below,  is Marco Polo House (1987).  You may know this better as the QVC building, next to Battersea Park. It's by Ian Pollard, who I'd never heard of either.

It is shortly to be knocked down and replaced with another lump of 'luxury' flats within flobbing distance of the trains thundering to and from Victoria.  Lucky residents-to-be, stroking their iPad Airs and rattling with delight in their Smeg-fridged studios.

And what a shame for London to lose this.  Vertical slices of black-glass Miesian minimalism, interspersed for no apparent reason with heavy slabs of banded travertine Baroque.  It looks like some fantastical Lego set, built for real for adults to play in.  I find the building really very endearing.  I'm also surprised to see that marble apparently goes manky with age, foxing in the sunlight like a copy of the Beano on the back seat of a Ford Orion.

The slim volume Postmodern Architecture in London also enjoys Marco Polo House, broadsiding it as having 'the design integrity of a car-showroom'.  The book continues that it 'is often regarded as the most vulgar building in London'.  Top stuff!  And quite an achievement to be considered the most vulgar in a city replete with insane Victorian whimsy, and dreadful cash-in crap proclaiming themselves to be new-build luxury flats.

An massively-enjoyable bit of Victorian kitsch in Streatham, 

desperately pretending not to be a pumping station.

Pollard also built an early Homebase, up on Warwick Road near Earl's Court, in '88.

Homebases are so often big sheds.  Like huge ringroad supermarkets, they often seek to disguise their warehouse proportions by affecting tiled roofs and little vernacular clocktowers, whispering reassuring messages about being 'in keeping' to dense middle-Englanders.  It's impossible to look at Godalming's Homebase without humming Jerusalem.  Don't worry, I'm just a oast-house, fibs the Bromley-by-Bow's Tesco as the traffic roars from the Blackwall Tunnel.

Pollard's building, however, really is special stuff.

Demarking the edge of the carpark, essentially a fence, is a colonnade of Egyptian columns.  It's unclear if this is borrowing from antiquity, or Temple Mills in Leeds.  Is it important to know which?

There are etchings and glyphs on the Homebase walls, some picked out in gold.

One of the figures is, charmingly, sitting on the fire escape.  The sharp comic-book boundary with the banded stonework does not permit any pretence that this is any real Egyptian artefact, uncovered in a London carpark.  Nope, this is unapologetically fake.  The Egyptian style was an unrealistic representation of the human form; this is an unrealistic representation of the Egyptian style.

When the Georgians and Victorians aped the forms of Greek or Gothic buildings, they did so in part because they felt those forms were the aesthetic zenith and, in some confused quasi-moral delusion, how buildings ought to look.  Pollard here is borrowing the Egyptian style not because it's the best style ever, and not even because it best suits the demands of the 80s DIY-enthusiast.  Rather, because he can.  Egypt in West London?  Why not?

Which leads to the cheekiest bit of pillaging - this curvy glass undulation along the side.

Which, as of course you'll know, is nicked directly and completely from James Stirling's art gallery in Stuttgart.  Again, why not?  On one side of the building, Egyptian art; on the other, art gallery.  We are used to architects stealing from the ancient past for their new buildings.  Pollard, with admirable honesty, steals from both his ancient forebears and his modern contemporaries.  Or, even, Post-Modern contemporaries.

Pollard's Homebase, gaudy as it is, has far more integrity than Quinlan Terry's waver-thin Georgian shams (such as Richmond Riverside, which was being built at the same time).  Pollard is faking it, proudly producing a collage of nonsense for West Londoners in need of some emulsion and rawl plugs.  Which I prefer infinitely to the saccharine pillock-pleasing crap of HRH Chaz's Poundbury in Dorset.

Please don't knock this one down.  It's one of the most delightful, weird buildings I know.

A [nightmare] vision of Britain: Poundbury

The below is a clip from a late-80s TV programme, in which Prince Charles laments the fate of London's once-beautiful skyline at the hands of post-war (re)building(s).  'Can you imagine the French doing this sort of thing in Paris?' he taunts, fomenting NIMBY fury in the vague direction of modern architecture.

HRH Chaz is very much a fan of old (or old-looking, anyway) buildings.  He elsewhere described a proposed extension of the National Gallery as a 'monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend'.  Regardless the architectural merits of the extension, to call the lumbering stodge of the National Gallery 'elegant' is simply inane.  It's greatest rival for London's Most Insipid Neoclassical Wank is, natch, Buckingham Palace.

In the vid above, His Chazness decries Birmingham's (old) Central Library as looking 'like a place where books are incinerated, not kept'.  But what should a library look like?  What cultural symbol or language clearly announces a building's purpose?  Should a library looks like a giant book?  Or be entirely clad with books?  Have a large enough sign proclaiming LIBRARY to be totally unambiguous?

In response to the horrors of the Twentieth Century, and indeed, half of the Nineteenth, Chaz allowed an 'unashamedly traditional' sort-of New Town to be built on his lands, just to the west of humdrum Dorchester.  Poundbury: an idealised mock-Georgian 'urban quarter', a sort-of English Amish wonderland in which time stopped a couple of hundred years ago.

At first, Poundbury seems rather fun.  Swinging off the A35, the eye is caught by the Fire Station HQ, shaped like a Georgian version of a Greek temple.  And the drill tower is in the Venetian sytlee.  Tee hee!  How very silly.  But surely, Chaz, a fire station should be in the shape of a flame.  Or some water.

There are no painted road markings, no traffic lights, few signs, and a uniform set of period streetlamps.  Only replica Georgiana is permitted.

What becomes clear, however, is that Poundbury is not fun.  It may look like Chessington World of Adventures, but Poundbury takes itself very, very seriously.  There's a sterilised, totalitarian approach to everything.  It's clearly ridiculous, and yet no-one seems to be admitting it.  The experience is rather uncomfortable, like straight-faced panto.  Featuring on-stage incest.

And it goes on.  Streets and streets of particoloured brick-and-render, punctuated with bigger set-piece bits of silliness.

And there are cars.  Cars parked on the street everywhere.  There are some efforts to hide these, but the Georgians only had stable blocks, not garages or - heavens forbid! - multi-storey car parks.  And so Poundbury becomes trapped in its own Luddite rhetoric, and cannot permit any solution other than large, dead, confused spaces, such as the car park / main square / void outside Waitrose. 

The natural bricolage of place, usually driven by history and economics, here comes baked-in.  Artifices implying bricked-up windows are included in Poundbury new-builds because there was once a window tax in England.  Who would deliberately want less light in their house?  There's probably some inversely snobbish appropriation here too - the homeowner frugally choosing to brick up windows to minimise his/her tax bill - but when the houses are this expensive it's manifestly daft.

The below, cropped from the Rightmove world in which the sky is always blue, shows an end-of-terrace that comes ready-made with an 'extension' and a 'loft conversion'.  The house acquires a sense of age at the expense of practicality (say, the ability to stand up properly in the top floor, or storage space in the loft).  A fantasy heritage that is just as silly, and just as po-faced, as designer jeans that come ready-ripped.

What appear to be a single house is often purpose-built flats.  The fact that such destructive divisions, motivated by rising land prices and rising house prices, have been wrought on genuine Georgian houses by property speculators is surely something to be lamented, not something to ape in a new-build development not in the same way constrained by space.

Wandering around, I thought a few touches of Modernism had somehow sneaked under the eugenic radar.

But on reflection, Poundbury has not admitted real plurality, but rather appropriated and rewritten this unwanted aspect of history.  This result is a genetically re-engineered Modernism, a mutant form of the movement that remained centripetally drawn to the past.  A fantasy in which Corbusier limited himself to four piloti, and recognised that any building without a coaching lamp is dangerously subversive.

And it just stops.  Incomplete Poundbury becomes hinterland.  

There's a creepy, quasi-apocalyptic nothingness, a moat of wilderness around the town.  Which is, quite plausibly, deliberate.

Perhaps most, the picking-and-choosing irritates me.  If you want to live in a Georgian world, you should have to do it properly.  Cars should be banned, thereby making the place far more picturesque.  Maybe the water should be enriched with cholera. And maybe the air perfumed by some giant tuberculosis nebuliser.  Yes.

It terrifies me that the next King of England thinks that the last two hundred years were entirely a bad thing.  This does not bode well for the future.

Poundbury is the scariest place I have ever been.