Alan Powers

Britain needs more houses, and the government’s highly unpopular draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) at least asks how to get them — the right question even if it gives the wrong answer. Anyone who deals with the planning system knows how overblown it has become, and that the cost and effort can exhaust a developer, to the extent that the good intentions of a scheme drain away at the crucial moment of building. The existing planning system may be imperfect but, if it is to be simplified, it needs to be better at eliminating bad designs, not the reverse. Prodigious amounts of brain power and energy have been devoted to making the well-intentioned suet pudding that is the planning system of today.

The Three Classicists RIBA, until 29 May The Berlin Wall separated two sets of people who shared a history and language. In the same way, architecture has been divided into two groups, Classicists and Modernists, each convinced of their own rightness, and refusing to acknowledge the other’s existence. But suddenly it seems that they are offering each other flowers. The exhibition Three Classicists opened recently with an array of Ionic volutes, Corinthian acanthus and sash windows. For the Royal Institute of British Architects this show would once have been as unthinkable as giving the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture to the Prince of Wales, and two major professional journals, having despised classicism for 50 years and more, have commented politely.

‘London smells Tory,’ announced Ian Martin, the Beachcomber of architectural journalism post-Boris in his weekly column in the Architects’ Journal. Heritage wars have broken out over the future of a concrete housing scheme, Robin Hood Gardens in East London by Alison and Peter Smithson, that is beloved of architects, but not, it seems, of many others. The Guardian devoted a page to complaints from classical architects that they were excluded en bloc from the Riba awards that lead to the Stirling Prize, and The Spectator is shortly to conduct a debate on whether Prince Charles’s opinion, delivered nearly 25 years ago, concerning glass stumps and monstrous carbuncles, remains as valid today. Does architectural style have a simple relationship to political position?

Earlier this year, a book appeared celebrating the first ten years of the Stirling Prize for architecture. Back in 1996, recession was only just ending and the National Lottery just beginning. It was the end of a bleak time for architects, doubly afflicted by the criticisms of the Prince of Wales. One unexpected benefit of the Prince’s attentions, however, was that the public was eager for stories about architecture, and the Stirling Prize managed to change these from bad news to good. A building that wins will always be a hostage, and this year, for the first time, the glitter looks a little tarnished in places.

Listing page content here Twenty years ago, Britain was gripped by an architectural battle of styles. The Lloyd’s building in the City opened, representing the hopes for a resurgence of modernism, while Quinlan Terry’s classical Richmond Riverside was beginning to emerge from scaffolding like a vision by Canaletto. Since 1986, a great deal has happened, but readers of Roger Scruton’s article in The Spectator of 8 April (‘Hail Quinlan Terry: our greatest living architect’) would know nothing of it.

London is about to experience two exhibitions about early 20th-century Modernism. The V&A is mounting a substantial themed display of design, art, film and life, based primarily on France and Germany before 1930. Tate Modern will exhibit jointly the work of two faculty members of the Bauhaus, Josef Albers and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. In anticipation, two exhibitions outside London demonstrate outgrowths from this core of experience, supposedly the rootstock of radicalism in the past 100 years of art and design. At Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College 1933–57 shows how the European modernist diaspora improbably made one of its significant early landfalls in North Carolina, in a small, underfunded independent arts college. The potter and poet M.C.

W.S. Gilbert’s parody of Oscar Wilde, Reginald Bunthorne, wanted to make a minor scandal with his belief that ‘art stopped short in the cultivated court of the Empress Josephine’. In 1881 he was prophetic, although taste took at least 50 years to catch up. The English equivalent of Empire, the Regency period, has exerted a fascination that peaked in the period 1935–55, and has never completely faded. The Bunthornes of Bloomsbury in the 1980s, as noted by John Martin Robinson and Alexandra Artley in The New Georgian Handbook 20 years ago, were busy swagging their curtains, Egyptianising their cat flaps and faking ormolu in their reclaimed rooming houses. Dr Robinson has now provided the book that would have been a compulsory accessory in those far-off days.

The Modern Movement in architecture had scarcely succeeded in abolishing ornament before people began to speculate about how and when it would return. In Britain, the historian Sir John Summerson, as a young journalist, found it hard to believe that architecture would be able to communicate without it beyond the initial period of purification which he and many others believed was a necessary transitional phase.

C. R. Cockerell RA (1788–1863) The Professor’s Dream is the title of a small exhibition (until 25 September) in the Tennant Room at the Royal Academy, a relatively new space that links with the John Madejski Fine Rooms, formerly the piano nobile of old Burlington House. Who was this professor, and what was his dream? For an architect of extraordinary ability, Cockerell seems destined to be overlooked, while some of his contemporaries, including Soane and Pugin, have entered the consciousness of the art-loving public. He was a designer and draughtsman of genius, the finest classical architect to work in the Victorian period.

Ever since W.S. Gilbert’s Lady Jane lamented, ‘Oh, South Kensington!’ in Patience, 1881, the place has carried a regretful quality. Owing to the extraordinary lack of confidence shown by successive governments and Treasury officials in the educational values that Prince Albert hoped to promote through the estates of the 1851 Commission, the gentle, south-facing slope of Brompton became, over the course of time, a palimpsest of build structures, not all of which deserve the title of architecture. ‘Here tears are absolutely vain — there is no remedy,’ said Beresford Pite, the Professor of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, bewailing in 1905 the loss of the opportunity for a north-south axis leading to the Albert Hall.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of Penguin Books, a company that has done more for design in Britain than any other commercial or government organisation. The slightly improvised look of the earliest sixpenny paperbacks launched by Allen Lane in the summer of 1935 was put aside in 1947 when the German–Swiss typographer Jan Tschichold came to set new rules and standards of impeccable consistency. He was one of many émigrés in the field of design who, before and after the war, inspired laid-back English design with a new understanding of rigour and principle.