Stephen Bayley

Different concepts of luxury may be inferred from a comparison of the wedding feast of Charles Bovary and Emma Rouault with the habits of their contemporary the Duke of Wellington. At the Bovary wedding were served four sirloins, six chicken fricassées, stewed veal, three legs of mutton, four chitterlings (with sorrel), brandy, wine, foaming sweet cider, yellow custards, tarts and sweets with an architectural cake comprising angelica, oranges, nuts, jam and chocolate. The austere Duke’s ‘conception of duty’, David Piper wrote, ‘did not provoke popularity at all times’. His daily routine was tea with bread and butter in the morning, no lunch and an unvaryingly simple dinner of a joint with a pudding and iced water.

Imagine for a moment Harley Earl, head of design at General Motors, Detroit’s wizard of kitsch. Standing before him, in his studio, is the cetacean bulk, nipple-coloured pink paint, churrigueresque chrome ornaments and rocket-ship details of his 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham Seville Convertible. He is talking to his acolytes, as attentive as Rubens’ studio assistants in Antwerp 300 years earlier. Earl is describing his stylist’s art, the astonishing formal achievement of the pink Caddy. He says, pointing perhaps to a tail fin: ‘I want that line to have a duflunky, to come across, have a little hook in it, and then do a rashoom or a zong.’ Our language lacks a vocabulary to describe what cars do to us. So Harley Earl had to invent his own.

Like peace, love and lemon-meringue pie, ‘public art’ seems unarguably attractive. Who but a philistine curmudgeon would deny the populace access to the immediate visual thrills and the enduring solace of beauty that the offer of public art seems to promise? Public art is surely a democratic benefit. Never mind that in the past century its most forceful expression was the grim and malignantly deceitful narratives of Soviet socialist realism, with their ruddy-faced, grinning and buxom tractor drivers disguising a more real reality of starvation, intolerance and torture. Public art is here to be enjoyed at a desolate piazza near you. And then you begin to think about it. Has public art ever achieved any level of popular approval or intellectual respect?

In 1915 D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was premièred, Henry Ford manufactured his millionth Model-T (‘a million of anything is a lot’, he said), Kafka’s Metamorphosis was published and so, too, was one of Einstein’s critical contributions to his own general theory of relativity. Mixed into this modernist cocktail of extreme achievement and harrowing perceptions was something more banal, but just as enduring: the Coca-Cola ‘contour’ bottle. A century old this year, it is, in a disputed field, an undisputed ‘design classic’. And, like any classic in any genre, it can be read in many ways. Long before Apple and the Messianic Steve Jobs, Coca-Cola developed a business model that was the proxy of a larger belief system.

The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact contemporaries of department stores: the whole world acquired, catalogued, labelled, displayed and inspected. Only at the moment of consumer interaction do they differ. In a department store, everything is for sale. In a museum, everything is for edification. The V&A is the most complete example. From the beginning it had populist and didactic intentions: collecting photographs began in the 1850s. There was a campaigning instinct: its exhibitions worked as Victorian social media, encouraging the public and rebuking manufacturers on questions of ‘taste’.

We are told this is now a ‘knowledge economy’. Strange, then, that there are so few recent educational buildings of note. An expansion of universities has not led to much enlightened architectural patronage. Rather the opposite, in fact. The university visual trope remains those dogged dreaming spires. And London’s skyline is punctuated not by grand monuments to learning but by the swaggering, leering one-liners of the global plutocracy. These are thoughts that come to mind on the occasion of Essex University’s 50th birthday, a much more interesting anniversary than it first (rather bleakly) sounds.

If you wanted to find a middle-aged man in a bright orange suit, matching tie and sneakers, Frieze is a good place to start looking. I found one. Or maybe he was a limited edition existing in several reproductions. Certainly, he was frequently spotted: conspiratorial of aspect, he was stooped and crouched over a mobile with body language saying ‘serious business’. I overheard: ‘Ah, Corinna. Va bene? How are prices in Zurigo?’ Long before you reach Frieze’s vast tented sites in Regent’s Park there are signs of danger. Extraordinary shoes and statement hair and rucked-up skinny trousers start appearing in a fall-out zone about half a mile away from the BMW VIP drop-off area and the Mercedes-Benz shuttle buses.

Everyone knows about architecture being frozen music. The source of that conceit may be debated, but its validity is timeless and certain. For all its weightiness, architecture plays with ethereal proportion, harmony, resonance and delight: the stuff of music. But architecture is more fundamentally about the management of light and space. Or, at least, that’s how architects see it. So photography makes better sense of architecture than any other medium does: there is something congruent between the fixed optical geometry of a camera and the way we perceive buildings. And because images are more readily accessible than travel to remote sites, everyone’s experience of world architecture is, at least initially, based on the photographic record, not the real thing.

What exactly, I found myself wondering, would jihadists do without modern four-wheel-drives? Car ads are customarily shot on the French Riviera's Grande Corniche or on a very particular road in Tuscany that all art directors know. But the sight of 43 brand new and coruscatingly white Toyota Hiluxes rolling across the infernal Syrian-Iraq border added a hard-edge nightmare venue to the ad-man's soft-focus dreamscape. If there's a micron of comfort to be had from the horrors of the Middle East, it's that the medievalising ISIS has a keen admiration for the consumer goods their despised enemies manufacture. In an earlier conflict, The New York Times called the same Hilux 'the ride of choice' for Somali pirates.

In 1963, Dr Richard Beeching, an ICI director with a PhD in physics, a qualification that clearly boondoggled his credulous political patrons, published a government report called ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’. It identified 8,000km of painstakingly created track for closure. At the time, road transport seemed just the thing. Lorries? Bring them on! Commuting by car? What could possibly be the objection? Beeching was a tragic case-study in mandarin myopia. It was not so much that he did not hit the target. He couldn’t even see it. The year after Beeching, Japan inaugurated its Shinkansen, the world’s greatest high-speed railway. The year after the Shinkansen, work began in Bristol on the prototype Concorde.

Shigeru Ban is the celebrated architect who refuses to become a celebrity. Thus, at 57, his career has run opposite to the dominant trend in the profession. For a generation there has been a star system in architecture, as tacky and ludicrous and overblown as the Hollywood original. Ban, softly spoken but strictly principled, is outside it. New money — gas- and mineral-rich individuals and, indeed, whole nations — seeks prestige through stand-out buildings. The stage army of celebrity architects who once made their reputations through ingenious design have become willing collaborators in a vulgar conspiracy. Instead of selling ingenuity, or humbling themselves with notions of public utility, the starchitects have been doing slick promotional selfies as premium brands.

Curtain walls, dreaming spires, crockets, finials, cantilevers, bush-hammered concrete, vermiculated rustication, heroic steel and delicate Cosmati work are all diverse parts of the architect’s vocabulary. But while Gothic, Classical, Baroque and Modern are well-thumbed volumes in his library of style, the architect’s real language is profound and prehistoric. Or, at least, it consists of prehistoric-style labels. So much of the ‘debate’ about architecture has been crudely adversarial with tweedy historicists, conservationists and pseudo-classicists supposedly lined up against antagonising, pitiless and chromium-plated technocrats, futurologists, social engineers and ditsy dreamers.