Classicism is more than a blink in the eye of time
THE middle of September saw two events that bear on the contemporary contest between classical and modern architecture. At the RIBA Gallery in London, the exhibition ‘Conservatism, or the long reign of pseudo-georgian Architecture’ opened, consisting of pen-and-ink drawings by the artist Pablo Bronstein with supporting archive material. Then Richard Rogers announced his desire to debate with the Prince of Wales on that old chestnut, Modernism versus Classicism.
Athena thinks that the exhibition is the more notable of the two, since it potentially changes the terms of a stale discussion (unlike the putative debate). Mr Bronstein, whose playful adaptations of Classical engravings have been seen at Tate Modern and Pallant House in the past year, has drawn examples of a familiar type of urban building—the builder-developer’s uneducated attempt at Georgian-style, typically from the 1980s, usually filling a gap in a street. Prior to this time, a nearconsensus against ‘period’ styles had prevailed, but a new populism in planning control helped to win approval for even the clumsiest versions of the past, often because they fitted into existing streetscapes. The very artlessness of these often abject structures, which have only ever been scorned by those who noticed them at all, represent a challenge to the self-conscious work of the educated Classical architects of recent decades.
One of the definitions of folk-art is that things seem good because they are wrong. Spontaneity and authenticity are preferable to over-thinking. Mr. Bronstein has mixed up his folk-art cuties with other works by proper architects, including Quinlan Terry and Piers Gough (although he doesn’t name them), but similar though they may look, they are as different as birdsong and symphonies. But what he is apparently trying to tell us has been obscured by a loud buzz of curatorial disapproval in the exhibition title and the wall texts, lest visitors should think that do-it-yourself Georgian (or, in many cases, a robust early-victorian version) might be worthy of admiration. The message is an old one: ‘living in the past’ makes you a bad person who would condone all the bad things that happened back then.
Logically, this is nonsense and there is no evidence to support it, any more than evidence proves that Modern architecture opens the door to Utopia. These are nothing more than tribes who worship different gods. They have lived long together and one would not wish to see either of them taking complete control. But Mr. Bronstein has shown us something in a new way, namely that ‘the long reign of Georgian architecture’, rather than being, as Lord Rogers claims, just a blink in the eye of time, suits the human eye and mind in terms of purely abstract properties of design— a language of form that has never stopped feeling right, so that even the clumsiest interpretations of it can raise a smile.
‘These are nothing more than tribes who worship different gods