I’m going to have to learn to block it out, but I was staring at the Shard again the other day. The shell is nearly completed. It is still a monstrosity. The planners who cut the deal should have arranged for compensation to be paid to folk whose visual environment is invaded by it, much like you get compensation for loss of light.
I found some consolation, though, listening to Roger Scruton talking about architecture, in a discussion with Ben Rogers. Rogers’ talk doesn’t come across on the podcast, but Scruton’s is rich with ideas about what we might require of our architecture. In particular, he seemed to hit the nail on the head with what is so wrong with the Shard.
We’ve inherited an architecture of unhappiness in our time which has come in large part because functionalism has taken over our way of thinking about architecture. Buildings are designed for a specific function, usually at a drawing board so that the ground plan becomes all important, ignoring the fact that this function is as mortal as the person who’s ordered it.
We’re surrounded now by transparently mortal buildings… And it means that, because of the tyranny of the ground plan, most buildings are designed as a series of horizontal slabs. This is the modernist vernacular.
It was that line about ‘transparently mortal buildings’. The Shard is, in effect, a mammoth celebration of death.
The architecture of happiness, conversely, is that which can survive a change of function. It doesn’t have to be pulled down. A Georgian house becomes an office. A church becomes a settlement of flats. Buildings that outlast us, because they embody a satisfying form not a time-limited function, offer a deeper sense of place because their place is secured by a vision bigger than the person who ordered it. The sense of the past and future they afford lend their inhabitants some happiness.
(Image: Thefreddy12345)
