Revaluing Modern Architecture

Changing conservation culture

John Allan

• Publisher: RIBA Publishing
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000564662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Historic Preservation in Architecture

The conservation of our Modern architectural heritage is a subject of vehement debate. When do buildings become old or significant enough to warrant special heritage status and protection? Should Modern listed buildings be treated differently from those of earlier periods? And what does all this mean for building users and owners, who might be better served if their buildings were less authentic, but more comfortable and usable?

Presenting a clear line of sight through these complex questions, this book explores the conservation, regeneration and adaptive re-use of Modern architecture. It provides a general grounding in the field, its recent history and current development, including chapters on authenticity, charters, listing and protection. Case studies drawing on the author's extensive practical experience offer valuable lessons learnt in the conservation of Modern heritage buildings.

Looking beyond the specialist field of 'elite' heritage, Revaluing Modern Architecture also considers the changing culture of conservation for 'sub-iconic' buildings in relation to de-carbonisation and the climate emergency. It suggests how revaluing the vast legacy of modern architecture can help to promote a more sustainable future.

• Features leading conservation projects, such as the celebrated Penguin Pool at London Zoo, Finsbury Health Centre by Lubetkin & Tecton and Wells Coates' Isokon (Lawn Road) Flats, as well as previously unpublished projects.
• Analyses key Modern conservation controversies of recent years
• Illustrated with over 160 photos and drawings.
• An essential primer for architectural students and practitioners, academics, those employed in conservation and planning, property owners, developers, surveyors and building managers.

PART ONE: RETROSPECT

DOI: 10.4324/9781003277880-2

1 The story so far

DOI: 10.4324/9781003277880-3

This chapter offers a concise narrative of the development of the modern conservation initiative, from its origins in the early designations of Modern Movement buildings in the 1970s up to the present day. Its aim is to provide new students with a general overview from a predominantly UK perspective of how the subject has become established, referencing key milestones in the form of official recognition, professional discourse, popular campaigns and selected high-profile conservation projects over this 50-year period.

THE STORY OF REVALUING MODERN ARCHITECTURE is roughly five decades old and still in full flux. It may be considered both as a cultural phenomenon in charting changing public attitudes and also as a survey of modern conservation’s practical manifestations in the emergence of new regulatory instruments and organisations, as well as in its technical exposition in fieldwork and professional discourse. The several spheres, of course, cannot be separated, as it is clear that a growing awareness of the significance of Modern architecture as ‘heritage’ itself acts as a stimulant to the development of new theoretical propositions, procedures and practices. The survey suggests that while significant progress can be measured over the period under review in terms of consciousness raising, governance, pedagogy and practical achievement, the recognition and appropriate stewardship of ‘Modern heritage’ in the UK is far from secure but remains a work in progress, still affected by a mixture of controversy, passion, ignorance and neglect.

IN THE BEGINNING... WAS THE END

Implicit in the very idea of ‘revaluing Modern architecture’ is the assumption that Modernism, or more specifically the Modern Movement itself, had reached some sort of terminus. Innumerable attempts have been made to nominate a definitive date for the moment that the Modernist hegemony came to an end. Of course, as the critic Robert Hughes has authoritatively stated:

Histories do not break off clean like a glass rod; they fray, stretch and come undone, like rope; and some strands never part. There was no specific year the Renaissance ended, but it did end, although culture is still permeated with the remnants of Renaissance thought. So it is with modernism, only more so, because we are that much closer to it... The modernist achievement will continue to affect culture for decades to come, because it was so large, so imposing and so irrefutably convincing.¹

Referring to a cultural phenomenon so diverse as ‘Modernism’ in such singular terms is selfevidently problematic (as Charles Jencks has elaborately demonstrated²). Nevertheless, history is usefully made more navigable by adopting individual events as signifiers of a larger turning point. The deaths of Modernism’s founding fathers Le Corbusier (in 1965), Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe (in 1969) and Alvar Aalto a little later in 1976 were surely key milestones, likewise for the UK the partial collapse of Ronan Point, in 1968, in Newham, London (Figure 1.1).

The demolition of Pruitt-lgoe housing estate in St Louis, Missouri (from 1972 onwards) is conventionally cited as the moment of Modern architecture’s international demise. By this time, Jane Jacob’s radical critique of modern city planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (first published in 1961), and Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) had become established as the alternative new wisdom in leading architectural schools, public authorities and professional discourse. Whichever way you look at it, something traumatic occurred between, say, 1965 and 1970 that would forever alter the way in which Modernism was perceived. As Hughes sagely went on to observe, ‘Our relation to its hopes has become nostalgic.’³ From being an active movement borne upon an almost worldwide consensus, its social ambitions, theoretical underpinnings and operational methods had become the subject of increasing doubt and disparagement or, in the words of Lionel Esher, ‘a broken wave’.⁴ It cannot be a complete coincidence that around this very same time the Civic Amenities Act (1967) in the UK introduced the concept of conservation areas, or specifically that proposals for listing important Modern Movement buildings were first mooted by England’s Historic Buildings Council.⁵ Just as the Victorian Society had been founded in 1958 at perhaps the high point of popular dislike of Victorian and Edwardian architecture, so, with hindsight, it appears as if at the very moment when Modernism’s present became its past, the process of its revaluation began.

Figure 1.1 The partial collapse of Ronan Point in 1968, just two months after it opened, symbolised the demise of Modern architecture in the UK.

A useful starting point in introducing the British picture is thus to chart the progress of designation - that is the statutory protection of Modern buildings on account of their architectural or historic interest. While historians may disagree as to the moment an architectural movement gains popular recognition as heritage, the official designation of particular buildings at least establishes an objective public record of places, names and dates. In the UK, the concept of enforceable statutory protection per se was established a little over a century ago with the Ancient Monuments Consolidation and Amendment Act of 1913, which repealed several earlier unwieldy pieces of legislation and acknowledged for the first time that there are physical remains of the nation’s history which are so special and so significant that the state has a duty to ensure their continued survival. Thus began the systematic compilation of a public roster of important ancient monuments. (Paradoxically, in view of the pioneering work of William Morris, the Act included the ‘ecclesiastical exemption’ whereby churches and other religious buildings in use were excluded from its protection.)

However, more than half a century would elapse before such recognition would extend to explicitly Modern buildings. As far as Modern architecture in the UK is concerned, the beginnings of its appreciation as cultural heritage on an official basis may be traced to Nikolaus Pevsner’s proposal in 1966 to prepare a select list of significant Modern buildings worthy of statutory designation. The template for designation of important buildings had been established through the wartime practice of ‘listing’, whereby ‘salvage lists’ were compiled by the Royal Institute of British Architects identifying buildings surviving bomb damage that were deemed capable and deserving of retention. This protection system had acquired statutory force in the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 (albeit limiting formal designation to buildings constructed before 1840) and now operates in England and Wales under the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990.⁶ The Historic Buildings Council Listing Subcommittee (of which Pevsner was a key member) was persuaded to support his proposal for consideration of significant buildings from the 25-year period 1914-1939 and the resulting so-called ‘Pevsner List’ identified a range of key works, including many cutting-edge Modern Movement buildings by such leading architects as Berthold Lubetkin, Amyas Connell, Wells Coates, Erno Goldfinger, Maxwell Fry and others, who had played a pioneering role in the introduction of Modern architecture to the UK in the 1930s (Figures 1.2 and 1.3).

However, the list was not wholly partisan and also included several of the ‘transitional Modern’ type - for example Charles Holden’s 55 Broadway, near St James’s Park, London (1929) and George Grey Wornum’s RIBA building in Portland Place, Marylebone, London (1934). Although the eventual formal listing ensued over several years, depending on their local authority location,

Figure 1.2 The Penguin Pool, London Zoo, by Lubetkin and Tecton, 1934. The pool was in the first group of MoMo (Modern Movement) buildings to be listed.

Figure 1.3 High and Over, Amersham, by Amyas Connell, 1931. The house was in the first group of Modern listings.

Figure 1.4 The Penguin Pool, Dudley Zoo, by Tecton, 1937. The pool was demolished in c. 1979.

this was an important milestone in conferring heritage status on the more significant buildings of the ‘heroic’ period (generally recognised to be the interwar years, especially the 1930s), and also helped to situate the period historically. It would take a good deal longer to develop a ‘culture’ of modern conservation in terms of theory and practice.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, most interventions in (and demolition of) Modern buildings, occasionally even listed ones, continued to be undertaken as a pragmatic response to operational and technical demands, with little attempt to objectivise the architectural criteria or ethical protocols that might be applicable for good conservation practice as such. Tecton’s Penguin Pool at Dudley Zoo (Figure 1.4), one of a unique ensemble of 13 listed structures dating from 1937, was unceremoniously demolished in c. 1979.

Another conspicuous example of Modern heritage insouciance involved a high-profile house in London’s Chelsea district (Figure 1.5). This rare work, listed Grade II in 1970, was one of the very few English buildings by Walter Gropius during his short tenure in England in the 1930s. It was pragmatically overclad in the 1970s in artificial slate shingles as a practical means of overcoming weathering problems rather than attempting to remediate the concrete envelope itself in such a way as to preserve its architectural character.

It is inconceivable that such an approach would be proposed, still less permitted, today. Bizarrely, however, extensions to the immediate neighbour of this ‘white MoMo’ house, the Grade II* listed Cohen House by Mendelsohn and Chermayeff, have been added as recently as 2020, albeit in the latter case on the basis of a personal consent valid only while the existing occupant is in residence - evidence of the continuing uncertainty of Modernism’s protection, even when listed.

Nonetheless, with increasing recognition of Modern buildings of the 1930s, it would be only a matter of time before listing reached architecture of the post-war period. The original 1840 cut-off date, already revised to 1939, was superseded by a DoE (Department of the Environment) Circular 8/87 in 1987 with the adoption of a ‘30-year rule’ - a dramatic revision with far-reaching consequences, as instead of the relatively simple test of eligibility, namely age, the more elusive criterion of ‘significance’ became paramount.⁷ The new dispensation brought post-war buildings within the ambit of designation, the first case being the Financial Times building, Bracken House (Figure 1.6), in the City of London, designed by Sir Albert Richardson - a Neoclassical office block in refined brickwork with bronze trimmings that might better be described as ‘sui generis’ than Modern, but which had been built barely 30 years previously, in 1959. This new status, however, did not prevent its partial demoli...