The Critics
Edward Cullinan, ABK and many others who have weathered the storms of the 1960s and 70s and helped to re-establish trust in architects and their intentions. Teir influence will be seen as enormous and long lasting. Among them, MacCormac is one
who comes closest to the forms of the past, while always keeping that last little bit of distance by which he retains modernist credentials. Whether the convoluted referencing is helpful to the success of the buildings is questionable, where John Soane is concerned there are many useful formal strategies to be taken. In the case of the Ruskin Library at Lancaster, the interpretation required a shift between words and built forms, producing a building that seems to lose the point by trying too hard, although it was clearly fun to do. Te use of artworks within buildings has been a specialism, and these have been imaginatively commissioned, making MacCormac a throwback to the Edwardian Arts and Crafts movement in its more fruitier manifestations. With planners and clients eager to
hear stories about buildings as justification for their forms, we seem sometimes to lose the ability to judge on visual criteria. If only architects could afford a return to the old days when, like James Stirling, you explained complex projects simply in
terms of the brief, design might escape from the current confessional culture that can produce rather literal metaphors and instead concentrate on being rather than busily doing. One revelatory aspect of the book is
the collection of MacCormac writings filling nearly 50 pages at the end. For a historian these are a treasure, since he is an unusually lucid writer and thinker. Te long review of the first phase of Tamesmead explains a lot about his future direction, given that housing was his main preoccupation when it was written in October 1972 for the AJ (AJ 18.10.72). He is fair but critical. Tamesmead, he says, ‘belongs to the period of Wilmot and Young’s Family and Kinship in East London, Jane Jacobs’ Te Death and Life of Great American Cities and Roger Mayne’s photography of the East End. It represents a reaction by architects against the middle-class values of suburbia and the feeble aesthetics of the Mark One New Towns in favour of a bold act of communal architecture which conceives the town as a building and preserves the value of street life.’ Against this intention he questions ‘whether something altogether more modest and private might have been achieved, appropriate to a potentially suburban situation, without betraying social and aesthetic ideals’. Acknowledging the argument that
tall buildings were thought desirable ‘for the town to hold its own against its neighbours, the power stations’, he suggests that ‘a row of apple trees 30ft from a ground floor window could
His career is almost a parable for architecture since 1970
40 aj 02.12.10
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