Progress isn’t always modernist

Traditional architecture is preferred by the vast majority of the public, says Robert Adam, yet its practitioners are at best ignored by the architectural establishment, and at worst derided. He argues the case for classical design and urges a move away from a world split between new localism and kowtowing to fashion

Traditional architecture makes an explicit display of its origins and its line of descent from a sometimes ancient architectural past.  This distinguishes it from the architectural mainstream, where literal historic imagery is restricted to early 20th century modernism and originality and invention are celebrated.  Architects who claim to be traditional number at most 2% of the UK profession, their work is rarely published in the professional press or by professional commentators and they hardly ever win peer-judged competitions or awards.

In spite of a tendency to factionalism, architects share more than their differences. All have to manage fees and clients, programmes and regulations and all buildings have to stand up and keep out water. While at the radical extreme extraordinary forms, extravagant costs and impractical layouts are enjoying a vogue, for the larger part, buildings of all styles have relatively simple forms and straightforward layouts. Some mainstream architects believe that it is traditional buildings that are expensive, impractical and hard to execute, but in reality there is no necessary difference in build costs, functionality or ease of construction across the design spectrum. Furthermore, to the surprise of many, traditional construction has turned out to be particularly sustainable. To the casual observer differences between mainstream and traditional design seem to be only in the outward expression of the building form and use of materials.  Indeed, some developers see facades as stylistically interchangeable, much to the dismay of many architects.

Notwithstanding substantial common ground, the architectural establishment either disapproves of or studiously ignores the small numbers of traditionalists in their midst.  This goes much deeper than distaste or stylistic preference.  The chances of passing through an architecture school with traditional projects are close to zero and most students, being ambitious but intellectually vulnerable, quickly fall into line.  Attacks, both public and behind-the-scenes, by successful architects on traditional schemes have been a feature of some recent high-profile developments but are only the tip of an iceberg that runs to Cabe, local architects’ panels, competition and award judgements and even professionally drafted planning policies.  The condemnation of traditional design even has it own specialised vocabulary: ‘pastiche’, ‘retrogressive’, ‘not of our time’ and so on.  Where support can be found in the profession it lies somewhere between an in-principle toleration in the interests of variety and a conditional acceptance provided projects remain safely in the realm of scholarly facsimile.

Puzzled public
Traditionalists have become accustomed to and are sometimes bemused by their professional exclusion but members of the public often find it puzzling and even disturbing in an apparently liberal profession. Despite a belief since the early 20th century that the public would come round to modernism (the underlying and original philosophy of today’s mainstream), this has not been the case.  Survey after survey, including two by Cabe (the latter suppressed), indicate a remarkable consistency over time of a public preference for traditionally designed houses of somewhere around 85%.  As houses are products for sale on the open market, this has a direct influence on the built outcome.  In public and commercial buildings, however, the guiding commercial principle is the rental of space and the market is not the public but committees, developers, agents and tenants, many of whom have come to subscribe to the theoretical link between progress and mainstream design.  As a result there is no background of public surveys and this has led to a belief among architects that public tastes in housing and other buildings are different.  A survey commissioned by my firm this year from YouGov, while limited in scope, indicated the more likely position: that the public preference for traditional design is consistent across all building types, even producing the same figure of 85%.

Logical mismatch
This relationship between traditional architecture and the professional mainstream poses two questions. How can a directly inverse proportion of design preference between the public and a profession be maintained?  As architecture is a reflection, rather than a generator, of trends in the broad social, political and economic context, how does its current condition relate to the wider world?

As part of the culture of the fine arts, most architects subscribe to the dominant view, dating from the 19th century romantic movement, that art need only be justified by the self-expression of the artist.  At the end of the 19th century this became the avant garde movement, where the artist was free to invent unconstrained by society, which would in time come to recognise the genius of the work.  This liberated the artist (or architect) from any need to satisfy the tastes or preferences of the public. Indeed, to be reviled by the public became and remains a badge of honour as proof positive that the artist is genuinely avant garde. 

The theory of the avant garde has been joined by the Enlightenment belief in the inevitability of progress driven by change.  Essentially a historical theory formed in a period of rapid development, this has led to a conviction that all that is important about any historical period is that which makes it different from any other historical period (never mind that similarities always outweigh differences.)  From this it is but a short step to assert that the defining characteristics of your own time lie only in those things that are unique and that to be true to your own time you must strive to create this uniqueness and difference.  Anyone who does otherwise will be judged not just to be in poor taste, but betraying the very process of history. In spite of the fact that everyone unavoidably participates in the composition of the modern world, the belief that traditionalists are not genuinely of their time clears the ground for an exclusive claim to the concepts of modernity and the contemporary. This allows the artistic and architectural mainstream to gather about it the politically and commercially potent symbolism of progress.

These theories lie at the heart of mainstream architecture today.  They enable architects to work outside public approval and to continue to do so on the basis that time will prove them right.  And by casting a tiny non-threatening minority as traitors to the future they can be elevated to a serious opposition, to be united against and singled out for opprobrium, condemnation or even suppression.

The claimed link between mainstream architecture and progress, combined with its historic association with Western democracies, has now made it the symbol of the new global liberalisation of capital. The instruments of commercial globalisation – consumerism, global corporations, international travel and international hotels – have their universal architectural counterparts in shopping malls, office blocks, airports and hotels all serviced by a new breed of global architectural firms and star architects. 

Global dimension
Globalisation, however, goes much further and is more complex than just the liberalisation of capital markets.  It is the most significant social, political and economic phenomenon of our time and also encompasses electronic communication, fashion, travel, migration, environmental damage, the conduct of warfare and terrorism.  The consequences can be unexpected. As national autonomy and control of communication and trade are lost by the large nation-states, there has been an upsurge in regional and local autonomy and identity. This re-assertion of local political and cultural identity is the flip-side of global homogenisation. 

In the developing world, outside high-profile urban projects, stylistically post-modern versions of traditional architecture are commonplace. As with the predominance of traditional speculative housing in developed countries, this is never revealed in professional publications.  The only way that the new localism impinges on mainstream architecture is in the new and influential field of traditional urbanism, (known in the USA as new urbanism) which has a direct, if occasionally uneasy, relationship with traditional architecture.

While political and commercial clients accept the premise that mainstream architecture does indeed represent the modernity and progress that they enthusiastically promote, it will continue to dominate this sector.  It is clear, however, that worldwide there is a significant public demand scarcely represented – and even denied – by most architects.  Many traditional architects are content to make a good living out of this situation but this sharp division of interest cannot be good for architecture and fails to serve the public.  If the establishment could make a more welcoming moral and intellectual space for traditionalists and if traditionalists could come in from the cold, who knows what each could learn from the other?