It was not, however, lawyers who were held culpable. For many years after its completion, the expression “espèce d’architecte” was a standard Bruxellois insult; indeed, it remained one long after the cause of its coinage was forgotten, even during that period between about 1890 and 1940 when the city’s architects were designing the most beguiling suburbs in Europe.
Did Joseph Poelaert, who designed the Palais de Justice and died only three years after it was finished, ever learn of the opprobrium he had unwittingly brought on his profession? I rather doubt it. Indeed, I doubt that Belgian architects in general were sensitive to the low esteem in which they were held.
I base this conjecture on my – admittedly unthorough – study of the English architectural scene during the exceptionally late 1970s and very early 1980s, when I worked at Architects Journal. More precisely, the period September 1979 to February 1980, when I was sacked for … well, offences against the well-being of a trade magazine. I naively failed to realise that a magazine that sells almost exclusively to a particular trade and that is supported by the advertising of suppliers to that trade must put that trade’s interests before all else.
It was clear from those few (curiously happy) months that architects had no idea of the obloquy that they attracted. Their siege mentality, paranoia and hubris rendered them deaf to criticism from outside “the profession”. Twenty years on, the notion that architects were once enemies of the people seems risible, a tall story from a far-off epoch. Today, architects are cool, or at least temperate.
They are certainly nothing like the martyrs to high-street tailoring who attended the RIBA conference in 1979 and listened to writer Tom Wolfe displaying the sort of big-picture ignorance that must have confirmed everything they believed about “laymen” being unqualified to criticise their work.
There remains one building type that incites nothing but despair in sentient adults. The English house
Today, new buildings are anticipated with excitement rather than dull fear. They are visited with enthusiastic curiosity. They put overlooked burghs back on the map: Birmingham, Walsall, Salford, Sheffield – each has benefited from the Bilbao stratagem. Architects are employed to brand cities as much as to create utile spaces. There is, of course, one exception to this happy new rule. There remains one building type that incites nothing but despair in sentient adults. The house. The English house. The piddling castle that it is every philistine junior executive’s inalienable right to stare out of through mock leaded lights …
It is possible that some of these excrescences were designed by architects. In which case, one has to wonder which architects and why they were employed to scar Britain with a variety of Tudorbethan that makes its 1930s arterial road precursor look the epitome of invention. Mostly, these terrible populist boxes are builder’s architecture. And it is the word builder that is likely to become a term of abuse.
It is builders who will be execrated for their commercial vandalism of what remains of southern England.
You may recall that in the mid-1980s, AIDS experts were confidently forecasting that within a decade, between 8 and 12 million cases would have presented in the UK. They were hopelessly wrong.
