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.