ARCHITECTURE
The Shock of Quality
By TERENCE BENDIXSON
WITHIN the last two years two different but equally famous foreign architects have completed buildings in this country. They are Arne Jacobsen, the Danish designer of St Catherine's College, Oxford, and the American firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, who have built offices for Heinz, the soup people, at Hayes in Middlesex. Apart from Eero Saarinen's US Embassy in London and a magnificent but vir- tually unknown diesel-engine factory also by Saarinen at Darlington, Heinz and St C,ath's are about the only major pieces of imported architecture to have been built in Britain since the war. To find their predecessors it is neces- sary to go back to the 'thirties and to buildings such as Erich Mendelsohn's Bexhill Pavilion or the International Style houses in Old Church Street, Chelsea, or earlier still to the monster palace that Dan Burnham, the Chicago architect, built for Selfridge's in Oxford Street.
Such imports are always valuable as anti- dotes to insularity, and in the case of Jacobsen and SOM they are from offices diametrically opposed in philosophy. Jacobsen, the artist- craftsman, carries on the European atelier tradition supervising in detail every line drawn by a small band of acolytes, while SOM, a big business group, has large offices scattered from New York to San Francisco.
Probably no greater contrast could be found between two architectural firms of international repute, but their buildings in Britain share the characteristic of being scrupulously designed and beautifully wrought. To someone accustomed to looking at our indigenous architecture such super-quality comes as a shock. The imports give sensual pleasure. They translate the on- looker into a world of Jean Patou's costliest perfume in the world'— and of sleek. black limousines.
This is even truer of the Heinz building than it is of St. Catherine's. Jacobsen is an architect for whom quality is a religion, but not a flam- boyant one. It is as much present in the mortar where you cannot detect it as in the bricks where you can. It is also present in the way materials are used. On some of the bricks at St Cath's it is possible to detect pencil marks made by the bricklayers to ensure that the joints in one course were at the mathematical centre of the courses above and below. As a general rule British builders are thought by British architects to be incapable of such precision, but the im- plication of the new Oxford college is that if it is insisted on, and paid for, it can be obtained. Furthermore, on the evidence of a surveyor I talked to on the job, when the contractors got over their original amazement at the standard of craftsmanship being asked for, they became intensely proud of the work they were doing.
At the home of the 57 different varieties at Hayes Park, the former seat of a country gentle- man, there is a more demonstrative kind of quality. It is not so exclusively a matter of cost as of technique. It turns on the use of bold architectural ideas like that of the very wide structural bay coupled with details in such materials as bronze and travertine that carry the unmistakable stigmata of excellence. The effect is reminiscent of a white linen shirt-cuff showing half an inch beyond a very dark grey jacket. When this polished technique is used for com- mercial buildings, it is easy to sneer at it as prestige architecture, but, as with Alfred Water- house and the Prudential in Holborn so with SOM at Hayes, sheer talent renders the slur inappropriate. There is, it seems, prestige and prestige.
A building such as the Shell Centre in Lon- don is positively crude by comparison, for all its extreme costliness, while the Vickers Building up-river from the Houses of Parliament attempts to be a Park Avenue dazzler but is a bit too self-effacing in detail. Those snowy shirt-cuffs of bronze or travertine are in this case stainless steel, but they are not so deftly handled.
It will be clear why it is valuable to have im- ported buildings here. They are an aide-memoire on quality for home-grown architects and a lesson to British clients that they could be get- ting something much better than what gets called prestige architecture in Croydon, along Victoria Street or beside London Wall.
In trying to pin down what accounts for this difference in performance the first thing that comes to mind is that the buildings of SOM are the architectural equivalent of the all-American girl in the Maclean's advertisement, impeccably clean, fresh and attractive but not soulfully beautiful in the manner of Jenne Moreau. How- ever, I fear that this is a bit superficial and snide. It seems more likely that the difference stems from the presence or absence of delight in building—of taking pleasure in marrying up the bits and pieces and in doing it superlatively well. In Britain architects, and by that I mean leading ones, have got so worked up about undoing the philistinism of the nineteenth century, of making good the lack of baths in Bolton and eliminating those bleak and bony by-law streets that building as a craft has become a bit over- shadowed.
There has also been the aesthetic influence of Brutalism, a philosophy based on the rejec- tion of the slick in favour of a cave-like immor- tality for which the chosen material is (or was, because Brutalism has been ousted by a new Batmania based on advanced technology) rough- cast concrete.
It is possible to sense the oppressiveness of the 'baths in Bolton' kind of social conscience in the exasperation of some Britons who have been to America and worked in the atmosphere of excellence that pervades the offices of Mies van der Rohe or SOM. It is also reflected by the importance that is attached in this country to Myron Goldsmith of SOM, who recently gave a talk in London. He is as much an engineer as he is an architect and is fascinated by the art of building as well as by the extreme prob- lems of the very high and the very wide struc- ture—in other words the skyscraper and the aircraft hangar. Working in these fields he has designed some buildings that have the beauty and pared-down simplicity of the new Severn road bridge.
Now this is a very valuable tradition in modern architecture and in this country it goes back to designers like Crystal Palace Paxton and is carried on by engineers such as Ove Arup, who received the Royal Institute of British Architects' gold medal last Tuesday. We badly need to draw on this philosophy in re- building our Victorian towns. Purposeful archi- tecture and a good environment will not emerge so much from worrying unduly about slums as from intense concern about building afresh and building well.
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