Architecture Here and There

Parliament has created a new upper court, called the "Supreme Court," for Britain and instead of spending millions on a carbuncle has put millions to better use by renovating an old building near Parliament. It's a lovely one, somewhat hidden amongst the greats of the neighborhood. Hugh Pearman, the architecture critic of the Times of London, has written a standard-issue sneer at what he calls its "Gilbert & Sullivan" charms.

Pearman's description of the building is perhaps the passage least dripping in sarcasm. The guildhall used to be the courthouse for Middlesex County, a nullity overtaken by the jurisdiction of London: "This, then, was a monument to a dying shire, and they did it proud. It's big, it has a tall tower, outside it's Gothic Revival meets Art Nouveau in Portland stone, inside it is quasi-medieval, and you will have no image of it in your minds. Its doom was to be always overlooked because of its more illustrious neighbours."

Sounds quite delightful and even adventurous to me. I thought classicism was incapable of invention!

In a tactical error that belies his critique, he includes several photographs of the buiding. It is almost ecclesiastical in its elegance. A "comic-opera stage set," Pearlman calls it. The ubiquity of this will to belittle fine old architecture runs rampant in architecture criticism. I can only surmise that critics are so unable to judge seriously of serious work that they resort to absurdity, in the expectation that readers will take its incongruity in stride as being as much above their ken as the modern architecture with which the critics seems so curiously infatuated.

Pearlman offers the courthouse his basest insult - he says he likes it. It's hard to know whether he means it, but it comes off as patronizing. At left is one of three courtrooms renovated to modernist tastes. This one he clearly does like. At bottom is the library, another of his comic-opera stage sets, I suppose.

Pearman regrets that the British judicial system did not instead hold a competition for a new building to be inflicted upon London, as is the real usual way, not what he declares is the usual way (it is not, alas) of reusing old buildings. He pretends not to delight that the real usual way is to build instant trash the adoration of which makes him feel superior to the ignorant, beauty besotted public. Since the critics seem obliged to laud the ugly new stuff rather than condemning it, won't they eventually tire of the lickspittle dripping on their shoes? Probably not.

 Tags  architecture British Supreme Court Gilbert & Sullivan Hugh Pearman Middlesex Guildhall

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BurnettIngrid19 said:

Various people all over the world get the mortgage loans from various banks, just because that is easy and fast.

Link | March 18, 2010 4:17 AM
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