Richard Rogers' Maggie's Cancer Care Centre in west London

This must be the least critically popular Stirling Prize shortlist yet.  RIBA president Sunand Prasad described it as ‘a fascinating set of schemes,’ but hardly anyone seemed to agree. Jonathan Glancey in The Guardian  hoped that the inclusion of the Liverpool One master plan was ‘some kind of drunken joke’, adding that its completion during the city’s year as European Capital of Culture ‘was as close to satire as architecture gets.’ Tom Dyckhoff, in The Times, at least said that the prize still acts as a ‘litmus test’ of British architecture (he was on the jury that selected the shortlist), but still he was broadly unimpressed: ‘how few creep over the bar into excellence!’ Even the impeccably polite Ellis Woodman of Building Design, described some buildings up for the Stirling as ‘pretty leftfield’.

More remarkably, the editor of the awards’ media sponsor, Kieran Long at the AJ, laid into the shortlist and offered his own alternative. He described the list as having ‘nothing to do with good architecture’ before focusing most of his displeasure on Richard Rogers, who is featured twice: for the Protos winery in Spain, and the Maggie’s Cancer Care Centre in west London. Long, who is not on the judging panel this year, even had to make up a word to convey his annoyance, criticising Rogers for being unable to reconcile the Maggie’s Centre’s ‘closedness’ with its role as a civic amenity.

The Stirling Prize’s new commercial sponsor, Chinese architectural visualisation specialists Crystal CG, also caused problems. Building Design led an attack on RIBA’s unpatriotic lack of solidarity for letting a Chinese company get in on the act. The criticism was largely nonsensical – treating the selection of a commercial sponsor as an honour to be bestowed rather than a desperately sought-after source of revenue – but, even more, it was naïve and reactionary.  BD’s editor Amanda Baillieu’s article on the subject began charitably  – ‘leaving aside China’s ongoing repression of minority groups’ – and then turned it into an argument for economic protectionism: ‘the RIBA should have realised that by signing up a company that undercuts its own members’ work smacks of gross hypocrisy.’ Given that the shortlist features work by British architects working abroad – Rogers in Spain, Tony Fretton in Denmark – perhaps Baillieu’s stance might seem a touch ironic, or even hypocritical, itself. As Penny Lewis has argued, the glossy images and worldwide success of Crystal CG, should be celebrated rather than feared: we should be grateful that anyone, anywhere, still has the money to ensure that the Stirling Prize continues to come with a financial reward. 

There was obviously something in the air when decided to do a special issue of Blueprint about the limits of public space. London’s summer heatwave, the activities of the Manifesto Club, and the opening of The High Line in New York have all contributed to rash of attempts to work out what public space is for, and how to make it work.

This seems to have been playing on the mind of London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, for a little while. The scheme to place pianos around the city and provoke public singalongs seemed like a jolly idea. But if a return to the ‘good old days’ of Londoners gathering around the old Joanna (as imagined by some) was the plan, it hasn’t really materialized. It’ll be interesting to see if Antony Gormley’s One & Other Fourth Plinth – described in the Guardian as a ‘public-access talent show’ – will be more successful in capturing the popular imagination.

Having also incurred the fury of the Guide Dogs for the Blind by supporting the Dixon Jones-designed ‘shared surface’ scheme for Exhibition Road in London, Johnson has now made an open call for ideas on how to revitalize London’s public spaces. Blueprint has made its own suggestion.

New York, by contrast, has been basking in the glory of a hugely popular public space project: at the beginning of June,  The High Line, by Field Operations and Diller Scofidio & Renfro, opened to near-universal praise. Nicolai Ouroussoff described it as “one of the most thoughtful, sensitively designed public spaces built in New York in years.” There was just one voice of dissent but that was quickly stomped my Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG, who described the critique on Twitter as “possibly the stupidest piece of urban criticism I’ve read in recent memory”. Less trumpeted was the, perhaps temporary, creation of a ‘pedestrian mall’ in Times Square: essentially a cordoned-off area with a few haphazardly arranged seats for spot of lunchtime relaxation. Some consider it a slipshod arrangement unworthy of a great city; but it is interesting to note that New York’s two most prominent efforts to transform public space have been about creating areas of calm and contemplation in a fearsomely busy city. London, on the other hand, seems desperate to inject life into increasingly deadened urban spaces. 

The Acropolis Museum, Athens

In an unexpected turn of events, Blueprint itself has been in the news over the last month, resulting in our editor, Vicky Richardson being invited to chair the annual conference of an organisation called Republic on 20 June. After a group of architects called for a boycott of Prince Charles’ anniversary lecture to RIBA, our editor took a more direct approach and suggested firmly at the end of the lecture, that it would be better to ‘abolish the monarchy’. Seems reasonable enough. Yet the heckle was reported in most of the broadsheets and the BBC, proving that monarchists are second only to certain bloggers when it comes to thin skins and twistable knickers. In the trade press, Building Design called, rather excessively, for our editor’s decapitation, while the Architect’s Journal went for casual sexism, describing her as a ‘naughty girl’. But The Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts showed them all up as amateurs when it comes to bigotry, unleashing a misogynistic attack and, rather bizarrely, using the incident as a reason to disband Boris Johnson’s Cultural Strategy Group. Of course, when the Daily Mail hates you, you must be doing something right.

Like the MPs expenses, the story of the Prince’s lecture rumbled on way longer than was interesting, and the follow-up to the speech itself was predictable: Simon Jenkins got a chance to rewrite the article he’s been trotting out for the last ten years or so, accusing architects of churning out ‘energy-guzzling glass boxes, lumps, blobs and phalluses’. Sunand Prasad and Amanda Baillieu defended their turf rather than going to the root of the argument. FAT architect Sam Jacobs said we should end this petty squabbling and turn to computer games for inspiration. The Richard Rogers scheme for Chelsea Barracks, which was at the centre of much of the arguments, still appears to be on a knife-edge.

An interesting point of comparison comes in the form of the New Acropolis Museum, Bernard Tschumi’s building in Athens that, it is hoped, will one day house the full set of Elgin Marbles. Located in the shadow of the Acropolis, the museum faced a rather more challenging and sensitive context than Chelsea Barracks. The Architectural Review published an excoriating review of the building, written by Alexandra Stara, who railed against the “relentless banality of its spaces, consistently poor material choices and frightful detailing.” Compromise, controversy and delays have certainly dogged the building ever since Tschumi won the competition and the architect’s regularly reiterated determination to be humble always ran the risk of blandness. Yet when faced with a context true classicism, the (incidentally republican) Greek government realized from the start that mimicry was never a viable option. The building now promises to provoke more fruitful debate over quality and architectural vision in the face of heritage than a 1000 princely interventions. 

Will the RIBA regret inviting Prince Charles to speak at its 175^th anniversary dinner next week? The last time he stood before the architecture profession’s elite was 25 years ago, when he infamously described the proposed Sainsbury Wing for the National Gallery as being “like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend”. This time round, before he’s even uttered a public word on the subject, the Prince kicked up a storm about modern architecture.

The controversy has centred around the Prince’s attempt to get the scheme by Rogers, Stirk + Harbour for Chelsea Barracks in London dropped in favour of a predictable classical proposal by his long-term chum architect Quinlan Terry. Many were outraged by his almost comically high-handed method of wielding influence: writing a personal letter to head of the Qatari royal family, which owns the site. 10 high-profile architects, including Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster and David Adjaye, responded swiftly in a signed a letter to The Times: “Rather than use his privileged position to intervene in one of the most significant residential projects likely to be built in London in the next five years, he should engage in an open and transparent debate,” they argued.

Just as in 1984, the Prince has deftly managed to make the top brass at RIBA look like fools. On announcing the prestigious lecture, RIBA president Sunand Prasad  told The Telegraph: “Both the Prince of Wales and the RIBA play a powerful role in raising awareness about sustainability and the design of places and we hope this lecture will engage an even greater audience with these globally important issues.” Given that many at the dinner will already be aggravated by the Prince’s secretive string-pulling, such an Eco love-in now seems unlikely.  And even if it did happen, why should RIBA want cosy endorsement from a man who has issued ill-informed statements on a whole range of subjects from medicine to GM farming? To his credit, Prasad did later denounce the Prince’s meddling, but the damage has, to a large extent, already been done.

Unsurprisingly the Prince has provided a rallying point for anti-modern opinion. A leader in The Times  smacked of conservative populism: “Faced by greedy developers and an arrogant architectural establishment that despises classical design, it requires the occasional influential voice to stand up to them. Let us hope that on this occasion his voice prevails and London ends up with a development to rival that of Wren.” The right-wing historian of British politics, Andrew Roberts made almost identical points in an article for The Telegraph.

Less understandably, some of the architecture press has been shockingly craven. Building Design’s editor Amanda Baileau meekly argued that “anything or anyone that starts the debate over this important London site is to be welcomed — royal or otherwise.” Yet the problem is that the Prince has set the lines of debate along well-worn, regressive and uninformed lines. Rowan Moore correctly gauged the depths of Charles’ ignorance in an article for The Evening Standard: “The Prince has forgotten nothing and learned nothing… He has not learned, in all this time, that good architecture is not about classical dress. He has not noticed the many and beautiful forms contemporary buildings can take.”

Hopefully RIBA will provide a more robust defense at next week’s dinner than it did 25 years ago. But even if it does – or even if the Prince deigns to offer a more conciliatory line to modern architects – one has to wonder why his opinions are thought to matter in the first place. 

Just as we were finishing work on our latest Italian-themed issue, which includes a special report on the current troubles of architects in Rome, news spread around the world of President Sarkozy’s competition to create a new Grand Plan for Paris.  At first, the contrast between the two cities could not appear more marked. The political situation in Rome – in particular the election of a new right-wing mayor after nearly 20 years of left-wing mayors who were sympathetic to modern art and buildings – is paralyzing the city’s architects. Projects are being cancelled, architects are losing work and nothing is being built or commissioned. In Paris, however, it seemed as if a forward-looking leader was giving architects a license to be truly ambitious. “I don’t want a virtual city: I want projects. You have the absolute freedom to dream, and the means to go with it,” President Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly told a stellar line-up of 10 international architecture practices in March. The idea was to create a new grand plan for Paris, to rejuvenate they city’s outskirts and to think boldly about expanding its boundaries.  The plans, developed by practices including Rogers Stirk Harbour, Jean Nouvel, and lauded urbanist Christian de Portzamparc, ranging from creating of enormous new parks, bringing mixed populations into high-rises, to building high-speed train lines, and even the movement of existing Parisian monuments.

In a time of recession, the scheme is remarkable, no doubt:  “Sarkozy, or at least his advisors, wants to redefine the city and its region in a manner unheard of since Baron Haussmann in the mid-19th century” enthused Tom Dyckhoff in The Times. Yet, just like in Rome, Parisian politics and architecture are impossible to separate, and Sarkozy was soon accused by some of pure political gesturing. The Telegraph reported that opposition Socialists were describing Sarkozy’s plan as a “Trojan horse” to reclaim power in Paris and the surrounding areas – mostly run by the Left. Jonathan Glancey, writing in The Guardian, was also suspicious of such grandiose proposals: “surely what is needed is a way of…  creating and nurturing the education, the jobs, the businesses and the ways of life that will allow Paris to develop humanely.” Zaha Hadid, who had not been requested to develop ideas for Sarkozy, told Building Design that the schemes were doomed to failure because “if you want to design through consensus, you end up with a kind of mediocre solution because… the committee system does not allow for extreme solutions.”

Suspicion and cynicism is not an unavoidable response to such grand visions. It is heartening that anyone is thinking on such a huge scale: as Nicolai Ouroussoff commented in the New York Times, “even if none of the proposals are ever built, they show a daring that has not been seen in a Western city for decades.” But this is clearly not enough. The current malaise of Roman architecture shows that hopes raised by apparently progressive administrations can result in even greater despair when the promises aren’t fulfilled.  We will have a better idea if Paris awaits a similar fate in the coming months, when Sarkovy announces the next stage in the Grand Plan, and his resolve is really put to the test. 

Campana brothers Favela chair for Edra, a piece of design-art that now meets with disapproval

Dire economic news has been a boon to at least one group: design puritans. NY Times journalist Michael Cannell started it all with an article headlined Design Loves a Depression: “The pain of layoffs notwithstanding, the design world could stand to come down a notch or,” he said. No doubt out-of-work designers will take great comfort from the moral lesson it teaches those wasteful creators of limited editions. To the rescue came NY design guru Murray Moss, who reacted with venom on the Design Observer website. He described Cannell’s argument as “regressive and mean-spirited” and pointed out that “design… loves a depression no more than it loves a war, a flood, or a plague.” Judging by the sheer number of comments, it was one of the most popular articles the site has ever run, and brought supportive responses from designer Constantin Boym and 2008’s Venice Biennale director Aaron Betsky who proclaimed “Amen Murray!”

Yet Cannell was by no means alone in lauding the New Depression. In a piece reviewing a new London restaurant, The Observer’s Stephen Bayley wrote a self-satisfied and confused analysis: “Times of constraint have historically stimulated architecture and design”, he said, giving precisely one example to support his case. In the Sunday Times, Hugh Pearman’s glee was palpable: “There’s nothing like a recession for bringing architecture back to its senses…. New Puritanism stalks the streets. By and large, this is a good thing.” To top it all, that king of humility Karl Lagerfeld appeared on the BBC’s Today programme, describing the worldwide economic downturn as “a healthy thing, a horrible but healthy thing. It’s a medical treatment of the world.” Doctor Karl has even been quick to label this development as “the new modesty” which will no doubt be the title of a modestly exorbitant Chanel range for 2009.  Hair-shirts are in.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. In a Guardian article by Jonathan Glancey, architects were keen to offer helpful hints on how to survive the recession. Norman Foster kindly suggested opening 22 offices worldwide. Well, it’s worked for him. Designer and Royal College of Arts professor Nigel Coates took the opportunity to coin a tart new word: “There’s been a lot of boring and plain bad new building during the boom years – frumpitecture, I call it.” Meanwhile, RIBA president Sunand Prasad spoke of the last recession:  “Luckily, architecture encourages broad thinking. Many found new careers in law, academia, catering and so on.”  So there we have it: out with frumpitecture, and in with the chef’s hat.