The history boys

The battleground of modernism versus traditionalism is old hat now, as a new generation of young classicists storms the RIBA with confidence, self-belief – and a great sense of fun

Words Hugh Pearman

There is a lot of goodwill towards the Young Athenians I’m talking to in the downstairs cafe at the RIBA. Doubtless there’ll be some adverse criticism of their exhibition this month, but there’s not been nearly so much of the kneejerk modernist outrage that used to greet the public outings of the older generation of traditionalists. Is the war over? Certainly there’s an approachability to be found here. Partly this is because the three who together make up the ‘Three Classicists’ exhibition are genuinely friends, despite working for rival firms. The relationship between their immediate forbears was and is usually rather distant, not to say frosty at times. Whereas one can easily imagine Robert Adam down the pub – in fact, no need to imagine it, I’ve been there – it’s harder to imagine Robert Adam down the pub with Quinlan Terry and John Simpson. The impression is that Adam likes to engage with other architects, while Terry and Simpson prefer to keep themselves to themselves. Demetri Porphyrios, meanwhile, whom some regard as the best of them all, seems to be in the United States most of the time. Besides, they all do different kinds of neoclassicism.

The three (relative) youngsters in question are Ben Pentreath, who is not strictly an architect but an architectural designer (which is not uncommon in this field, not least because of the unease parts of the architecture education system seem to feel for traditionalism) and who learned his trade through apprenticeships; Francis Terry, son and partner of Quinlan; and George Saumarez Smith, a director in Adam Architecture. Saumarez Smith’s grandfather, incidentally, was the notedly eclectic neoclassicist Raymond Erith, whose practice Quinlan Terry joined and later inherited, and where George himself worked for a while. But while there is an appropriate sense of historical continuity to be found in the trio, one thing you just don’t get much of is solemnity. Although distinctly self-mocking however, they believe with absolute seriousness in the rightness and quality of the work they do.

Their slightly irreverent attitude is nothing new. Robert Adam himself, as a youngster in the 1980s, was considered hip enough to appear in the otherwise wholly modernist Blueprint magazine, for instance. At the time he was seen as a ‘progressive classicist’, in contrast to what was then pigeonholed as the reactionary Palladianism of Quinlan Terry: not least because Terry’s work was championed by the very conservative and viscerally anti-modernist Professor David Watkin of Peterhouse, Cambridge. There was a style war in progress, remember, which was not only modernists versus classicists, but hipsters versus fogeys. And the fogeys weren’t always the classicists.

Given all of which, I was at first surprised to find that the catalogue to ‘Three Classicists’ has a forward from Prince Charles. I know he’s said we’re all friends now, past president Sunand Prasad signed up to greater collaboration, and there’s a thriving Traditional Architects Group at the RIBA, chaired by the excellent Alireza Sagharchi. Even so – doesn’t Charles come with the wrong kind of associations from the bad old days? Seemingly not. Bear in mind that the Prince, especially his Duchy of Cornwall, is an important patron for their practices, plus the fact that Pentreath trained partly at the former Prince’s Institute, and all three have connections with its successor, the Prince’s Foundation, the director of which, Hank Dittmar, writes the Afterword… in truth, it would have been professional suicide not to have had Charles’ name on that forward, such are the ways of 18th century style patronage. Besides, the forward is light-hearted, rather sweet. Charles, like anyone who’s seen the work – rush to see the exhibition, it’s excellent – is impressed by the remarkable drawing skills of these men.

Then again, there’s more than a touch of tongue-in-cheek about the way they present themselves here: take the photo of them before the Elgin Marbles, Francis with his father’s Royal Fine Art Commission civil-service issue briefcase, and all (as they gleefully admit) channelling the spirit of besuited Gilbert and George. And then, for a few days only, they have turned their exhibition venue, Gallery 1 of the RIBA, into a country-house drawing room, complete with antique furniture. It’s a deliberate wind-up of those who see this branch of architecture purely in terms of one-off country houses for the filthy rich. They do those, of course: but all three are working on both large housing developments and in tight urban sites, on commercial as well as residential projects.

‘It’s deadly serious, but at the same time, kind of poking fun at ourselves,’ says Saumarez Smith. ‘The kind of work that we do, there’s inevitably a kind of fogeyishness to it. But at the same time, I think we’re all quite aware of that.’ These three are saying they don’t just sit around all day drawing Corinthian capitals.

Well, maybe Saumarez Smith does, I don’t know. If you go to the Adam website, you’ll find a YouTube clip of him drawing and talking, and he’s in the Cullinan mould of the architect who can communicate brilliantly with a pencil. And Pentreath is not just an architectural designer – he runs a separate practice, Working Group, for that – but also a retailer, with a real shop selling choice if pricey nick-nacks. He is interested in what being ‘modern’ means, and contributes an essay on the subject to the catalogue. It’s one of their ‘nine observations on architecture’. You see? They’re doing it again. That’s a sly reference to Vitruvius’ Ten Books and Palladio’s Four Books. Anyway: ‘Is it enough to say that I prefer Mies van der Rohe to the Beaux Arts, Henry Moore to today’s figurative sculpture, Hockney to Alma Tadema, or peaceful European democracy to an Imperial dictatorship?’ Pentreath asks rhetorically of critics who accuse him of living in the past. He’s also good on repetition (better than look-at-me one-offs, especially in terraces he thinks), taste, and brings in Terence Conran. ‘He’s on our team,’ he remarks, meaning – modern but comfortable with the best aspects of the past.

Terry contributes observations on drawing, cooking as parable for architecture (he’s a fan of Masterchef) and on what he sees in classicism. ‘More minimal architecture may be laudable in its way, but I never feel that the architect has had much fun.’ In this write-off, it is Saumarez-Smith who comes over as most serious: he talks about patience – his kind of buildings are best when they’ve got a bit old and crumbly – measurement, and economy (‘the key thing is to understand the value of restraint’).

This is not just an exhibition and a book on modern neoclassical architecture. That would be interesting, but not especially revealing. What Pentreath, Saumarez Smith and Terry are up to here is something much braver. They are saying, we are people, we like each other, this is what we do and this is how we choose to present ourselves to the world. And then – you look at the quality of the drawings, and are amazed and entranced. Don’t miss this show.