A conference by English Heritage and the Architectural Review

 The acknowledgement that Modernism can be regarded as a historical style has triggered discussions about the appropriate way in which to conserve many outstanding buildings of the 20th century.  In many cases, Modernist buildings may have been designed or built in ways which were antipathetical to long life, or ease of repair. How should we treat these buildings? Where are the exemplars that might point to mature attitudes to repair, upgrading or demolition? How are Modernist and Modernist-related buildings being kept for future generations across the world? 

This one-day conference, which took place in the Royal College of Physicians building in Regent’s Park on 14th December 2006, examined these issues through case studies and commentary by practising architects, engineers, and historians. Speeches by Simon Thurley, Chief Executive of English Heritage and Elain Harwood, English Heritage’s leading expert on 20th century architecture, are given below.

The Constructive Approach to Conserving Modernist Buildings
A Speech by Simon Thurley, Chief Executive of English Heritage

Looking at Listing Criteria, Weighing up Value
A speech by Elain Harwood, Senior Architectural Investigator for English Heritage

Modernism may now be regarded as a historical style - but it was and is also a philosophy. Modernism originally denied the historicist approach and saw itself as a deliberate fault-line in the story of architecture - but it has now acquired a time-depth and a conservation dimension of its own. 

Modernist buildings may often have been designed or built with without intention or requirement for long-life, or ease of repair, and the intellectual difficulties in adapting them were addressed by all speakers.  Questions raised about the basis on which to conserve outstanding modernist buildings of the 20th century found answers through English Heritage’s emerging Conservation Principles.

Conservation Principles - these help us to understand the historic significance of any building, and in doing so, to make informed judgements on whether and how to conserve and, where necessary, to adapt them to new or future uses.

Our Conservation Principles have been created to underpin our statutory advice and form the basis of our Constructive Conservation approach to managing the historic environment. They formalise that positive approach to managing change and provide much greater consistency and transparency of action.

Contributing to the discussion panel at the conference, Steve Bee, Planning and Development Director for English Heritage emphasised that conservation for English Heritage is not about preserving architecture and seeing the past as stopped - it is about continuity, and creating an evolving story about these rifts and changes.

When modernism was new it was seen as revolutionary.  With the passage of time it may increasingly be seen as another revolution, among many. Understanding its origins and outputs will help us and future generations value its contribution to the evolving built environment as well as its contribution to human intellectual development.  What may seem novel, separate, distinctive and unique to its creators and their contemporaries, may in time be seen by their successors as a further turn of the cycle of human invention.

The Constructive Approach to Conserving Modernist Buildings

A Speech by Simon Thurley, Chief Executive of English Heritage

 This is a hot topic, certainly the most controversial and difficult area in English conservation practice today, one that daily deluges my desk and my screen with correspondence for and against the conservation of post war buildings. I have only twenty minutes, but I want to start by talking about a listed building consent case that English Heritage London Region considered in 2004-5.

This was an application for listed building and conservation area consent for the demolition and redevelopment of the grade II listed Southside Hall of Residence built for Imperial College by Richard Sheppard, Robson and Partners between 1960 and 1968. It was listed because of the way the architects introduced the style of Le Corbusier to university architecture, fusing the principles of Oxbridge staircase planning with great slab blocks of reinforced concrete.  Imperial College argued that the student accommodation had from the start demonstrated serious design, technical and functional flaws to such an extent that retaining them in their present form or even heavily remodelled would be questionable, both functionally and economically.  Interestingly this was a point of view that was ultimately endorsed by our London Advisory Committee and eventually by the Commission itself.

This was an extraordinary decision on the face of it. For EH to support a Listed building Consent application for the demolition of a grade II building that everyone agreed was actually possible to repair – although at a £40m cost. On the economic side this is a problem faced by hundreds of highly graded buildings each year - the fact that the repair costs are greater than the eventual value of a building. What about a grade I listed medieval church in the middle of nowhere? It has a £1m repair bill; even if permission could be granted for its conversion to a house it would only be worth £50,000 at most. So do we say well, lets demolish it? Do we say that functionally it is useless? Liturgical practice has changed so much since the thirteenth century that its design is now flawed beyond adaptation? No, of course we don’t. So why could we contemplate such a conclusion for Southside? Are there special factors at work here? Does modernism need its own philosophy of conservation?

These questions were some of a wider group of problems that stimulated us at EH to start a project to codify our conservation philosophy into a set of understandable principles. These principles are based on a basic premise that places should be managed to sustain significance and that understanding the heritage values of places is vital.

To understand the significance of any place, whether it is a building like Southside, an archaeological landscape, or an urban conservation area, it is necessary to establish its value to society.  That value comprises both the relative value of its individual components and the value of the whole in relation to other places. This exercise requires us to measure its significance against a set of values that we as a society hold generally valid.  If we can do this we can overcome the individualistic, stylistic and dogmatic attitudes that tend to dominate and confuse arguments about conservation. 

So EH has adopted four values as the basis for evaluating the historic significance of a place: Evidential value; Historical value; Aesthetic value and Communal value. Now these are clearly not the only the values that can be used to assess the significance of places, but they are the ones that encapsulate heritage value.  Other values such as utility, economy and environmental sustainability are also sometimes employed and may at some stage in the planning process have to be weighed against heritage value.  But the four heritage values can be applied to any development, of any age, and help us make a judgement on how significant it is. They can then help us to decide what to keep, what to adapt, whether to repair, and if so, how authentically.

Just to clarify what we mean by these values I will give you a few examples in relation to well known modernist buildings. So there may be evidential value in, for instance, the physical record of innovative construction and materials in buildings such as Peter Jones Sloane Square.

There may be historic value in a building being the first of its kind such as the Boots Factory, Nottingham.  Or its historic value may lie in that fact that it is illustrative of a pivotal point in history.  Buildings may be associated with particular events, institutions, activities or people such as the optimism behind the foundation of the Commonwealth at the Commonwealth Institute.

Aesthetic value is sometimes seen as subjective but we should look at places with rigorous design values such as Centre Point, or the cumulative aesthetic value such as the ziggurat buildings at UEA.

The communal values of places can be seen in the post war town centre layouts of Coventry or Plymouth, promoting social value of pedestrian shopping areas and integrated parking; and experiments in social housing like the Trellick Tower or Golden Lane.

So how can these values help us make decisions about buildings like Southside Halls of Residence? The first question raised, I think, is the value of the fabric of such a structure. Most Conservation philosophy since Morris and the foundation of the SPAB in the 1870s has been based on the acceptance of the fact that the retention of the original fabric is paramount. But this assumption must be questioned when we are dealing with a building like Southside.

The origins of this dilemma are found in the structures of the industrial revolution, just like the philosophy of modernism itself. Take the grade I listed  West Pier at Brighton for example. The individual iron components of the Pier were all mass produced and surely hundreds of identical components have a lesser significance than an individually carved stone roof boss on the nave of a medieval cathedral. The pier’s components were always sacrificial. They could be unbolted and replaced if they corroded, deflected or suffered some damage. Their replacement by a new component did not in any way diminish the authenticity or significance of the pier. In other words the design of the pier - its aesthetic value was more important than its evidential value. The same goes for the famous high level bridge in Newcastle, an important engineering feat but above all of overwhelming Community value. For years iron components have been replaced by steel ones eroding its evidential value almost completely.

Does this mean that modernist buildings have low evidential value as a group? Very possibly if we can overcome the technical complexities of replacing steel and glass, concrete, aluminium and other modern materials whilst retaining the strength of the other values. If the materials are replaceable the authenticity of these buildings rests in their design – their value in their aesthetic.

But let me return to the question of the halls of residence. This was not just or even solely an argument about the value of the fabric. It was also about the effectiveness and suitability of their function and the performance of the design.

Lets look at the Grade II* Crystal Palace National Sports Centre, originally proposed for demolition by the London Development agency as a building that was functionally defunct. The wet and dry sports areas were not adequately separated giving serious environmental problems. The pool was too short to comply with the Olympic regulations and a host of other functional and performance issues. The cost of fixing the problem was going to be at least £40m and a £1m a year running cost bill thereafter. The difficulty with such buildings is their incredibly specific function that makes adaptation difficult. 

There are two further linked problems to this: Many of the most interesting and innovative early modernist buildings were built on the cheap. Many during the 1950s, like the Smithson’s famous school at Hunstanton which had to justify every inch of steel used. As a result they were engineered sparsely, with materials that sometimes have not had long life spans. The original cheap construction of these structures has often been compounded by the almost total lack of proper planned maintenance which has exacerbated the original design faults

Take the Geoffrey Chaucer School; Grade II in Harper Street SE1 another controversial listing building consent case of an important modernist building we have dealt with in the last 18 months. Here there is an extraordinary pentagonal assembly hall and a highly innovative gymnasium. They were built pushing the technical capabilities of the materials to their limits, the gymnasia to a design never before contemplated for a school. These structures were experimental. And thanks to changing attitudes to education and catastrophically poor maintenance they are now seen as having failed. 

Sometimes the structure failed from the start like the cladding on the metropolitan cathedral of Christ the King in Liverpool or the rainwater drainage systems on the roof of the central pavilion at the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington.

It would be possible to argue that in the past buildings cheaply designed, buildings of innovative structure that have not been successful and buildings with design faults have been allowed to be tossed into the waste paper basket of architectural history. Just think of the mad Victorian structures that stood and fell, like Millbank Penitentiary, our predecessors let these go and we now look back with a sense of relief. So perhaps it is not the buildings that have changed, it is our attitude to them.

Well, that’s certainly true. The widespread destruction of the historic environment in the immediate post war years that led to the glory days of the conservation movement have democratised the principles of the SPAB and attributed to all buildings of age and distinction a philosophy that was intended for medieval churches and castles. It has let to the protection of 1950’s tiled fireplaces in Georgian houses as ‘part of the history of the house’. It has led to the prevention of the reinstatement of Georgian glazing bars in eighteenth century buildings because the Victorian windows are ‘original’ in some sense. That’s why we now need the conservation principles. To distinguish what is really of significance from what is merely old.

The listing criteria for Modernist buildings are infinitely tougher than for any building built before 1800. For buildings put up before 1800 if they are in anything like their original state and of average quality they qualify for listing. For modernist building they have to demonstrate that their significance is unusually high. This means that listed modernist buildings are generally the exceptional and not just the ordinary products of their age. This brings us right back to my original dilemma this morning, Southside halls of residence.

An exceptional building. One with high evidential and historical value and therefore of high significance. So why did we agree to its demolition? Ultimately the planning system embraces more than heritage significance. This is the point when the heritage values which are encapsulated in our Conservation principles are weighed against other values that are important to society. This is enshrined in the governments planning guidance PPG15. There are two tests that PPG 15 brings in against which a proposal to demolish must be assessed. They are:

1. The condition of the building, the cost of repairing and maintaining it in relation to its importance and the value derived from its continual use;
2. the adequacy of efforts made to retain the building in use;
3. and if the first two are met the merits of alternative proposals for the site.

In the case of Southside we, and the local authority believed that all three tests were met.

So where does all this leave us? Modernist buildings do present special problems to conservationists. I have outlined some of them this morning. But ultimately if Conservation is to be a credible and constructive part of society we need to have a philosophy that embraces all building types and periods of construction. Conservation principles, our value based tool, does just that and used properly in the planning process can lead us to make sound and beneficial judgements for the future not only about castles and abbeys but about Crystal palace Sports Centre and Geoffrey Chaucer school.

Conference attendees will be interested to hear that whilst the future of the Commonwealth Institute is still pending, successful outcomes are expected at both Crystal Palace and Geoffrey Chaucer School.

 

Looking at Listing Criteria, Weighing up Value

A speech by Elain Harwood, Senior Architectural Investigator for English Heritage

 I would like to begin by asking the audience if they think that modern buildings should be preserved.  A survey by National Opinion Polls taken in 1996 found that 67% of people were in favour (or strongly in favour) of listing post-war buildings.  Ten years later we have 620 post-war listed items – that’s counting every block of flats and bin store in a housing estate as an individual item - out of a total of 350,000.  As buildings erected after 1947 are deemed to have no curtilege we have to carefully identify walls, steps and ancillary structures, resulting in some odd individual listings and long addresses that itemise attached features.  The figure of 620 also includes some sixty sculptures and war memorials and a rising number of military structures associated with the Second World War and Cold War. 

So what has happened in the ten years since English Heritage commissioned that survey and held its largest public consultation on post-war listing?  There are two great changes, one good and one bad.  Firstly, modernism has become fashionable.  The National Trust opened Ernö Goldfinger’s house in 1996, and followed it in 2004 by Patrick Gwynne’s The Homewood, both houses built in 1939 but anticipating the architectural forms of the post-war period.  You can now stay in post-war houses courtesy of the Landmark Trust and National Trust, and programmes like Grand Design and the televising of Stirling Prize Awards have put modern architecture on the map.  Upper Lawn, by Alison and Peter Smithson, is an example from 1961-2 of a modern house beautifully restored by a young couple who previously collected classic cars.  From 1968, Trees outside Newcastle an example of an architect taking on a complete 1960s’ lifestyle with the restoration of a house by the major local architect Gordon Ryder.

The downside is the condition of post-war buildings.  When English Heritage conducted its survey of building types in 1992-95, most buildings of the 1950s and 1960s survived – many much as built if not necessarily in good condition because of the lack of local authority money for maintenance.  But ten years on, these buildings have suffered great change and many have gone.  We now have a very finite resource.  Many buildings have suffered from twenty years of neglect and then inappropriate or poor maintenance programmes, for example with the installation of inappropriate windows or overcladding.  More seriously, modern buildings are disappearing all the time.  Investment in schools means that in some areas, such as Islington and Nottinghamshire, every unlisted school is targeted for demolition.  Elsewhere, housing, market buildings and even town halls have all been demolished – particularly in the north, where the demolition of Accrington Market Hall and Stirling and Gowan’s famous housing at Preston went entirely unrecorded.

Modernism was unfashionable in the 1980s because it stood for the welfare state, itself being challenged.  That remains the case.  Colin Rowe argued in 1972 in an introduction to ‘Five Architects’ of post-modernism that modernism was simply a rational approach to building, and that it lost its meaning when it was institutionalised by local authorities after the war, in Britain and Europe if not in the United States.  He asked if it is necessary that architecture should be simply a logical derivative from functional and technological facts; and, indeed, can it ever be this?  Rowe’s views are interesting because he was one of the first critics to react against modernism in favour of post-modernism, and he argued that a good building should be valued as a good building, regardless of any social and technological baggage.  This is also interesting as in looking at post-war buildings for listing, we have always given weight to a building’s social importance and technical innovation as part of an all-round assessment of a building.  The Imperial College group of residences are a good example of this because not only were they externally dramatic, they were influential in the planning of post-war student residents around staircases in the manner of Oxbridge rather than on corridors – a much cheaper option but thought too impersonal.  It’s always been much harder to get more popularist ‘period’ buildings listed such as cafés, Festival of Britain style buildings or 1960s commercial offices with their ‘pop’ architecture detailing.  This is only just beginning to change.

For a post-war building to be listed, it has to articulate its brief not only with elegance but carry its principles all the way through.

This is what I wrote in 1996, and it still remains valid.
The lists include buildings of importance to the nation for the interest of their architectural design, decoration and craftsmanship.  Our selection draws from all styles of recent architecture, giving credit to imagination and ambition.  The intelligent treatment of functional requirement is given special consideration, as is the dramatic treatment of space - a notable feature of the period thanks to new materials and engineering techniques.  Buildings that demonstrate technological innovation are eligible for listing, as occasionally are those associated with a significant historic `first'.  In some cases buildings are listed where they contribute to an important architectural or historic group.  Some recommendations are based upon a combination of several of these factors.  The integrity of a building as a total design is a key consideration.  A building of listable quality possesses a consistent idea that runs through its various components - its structure, plan, architectural form, materials, and services. 

Thus, post-war houses are a response to changes in the way we live, to the lack of servants after the war, and to innovations in central heating and the ability to produce large sheets of glass cheaply.  They also disturb our views on modern architecture, many being designed of timber as well as brick or stone, or – like Peter Aldington’s work, use concrete and steel in a reappraisal of traditional forms.  The Landmark Trust’s House at Goodleigh, Devon, is a modern response to the traditional long house set against the side of a hill.

Public housing has become the most contentious area for post-war building, because it sought new ways of building at a high density while allowing everybody kitchens and bathrooms – a third of homes had no bath in 1945 according to surveys by Seebohm Rowntree – and open space.  Attention has focussed on the point blocks and long slabs; English Heritage’s work has been to isolate the good from the bad, and flats in estates like Golden Lane and Trellick Tower now fetch high prices.  It is also worth remembering the relatively high densities of acclaimed schemes like those by Eric Lyons and Span, small houses in beautiful grounds, the subject of an exhibition at the RIBA at the moment but largely unlisted.

Buildings for education saw the greatest investment in the post-war era, apart from power stations!  Primary schools were designed to be child-centred environments, with windows at children’s level and with furniture and fittings to suit.  A new breed of secondary modern and comprehensive schools aimed at vocational as well as academic training, with large spaces devoted to crafts and technology.  University buildings were consciously designed to compete with those of earlier generations – briefs for those in Oxford and Cambridge required them to have 500 years – while reflecting the growth of combined studies in the use of continuous teaching buildings, and the growing preference of students for living in flats rather than halls of residence.  New library buildings with large lending libraries, record libraries and lecture halls responded to this growth in education, seeing it as a leisure interest. 

Similarly, while thousands of variety theatres and cinemas closed down in the post-war years, new repertory theatres responded to new forms of staging, bringing actors and audience closer together.  Many of the same ideas can be seen in churches.  A high proportion of post-war listed buildings are churches, for more churches were built in the 1960s than in any decade since the 1860s.  The Liturgical Movement brought celebrant and congregation closer together, problematic ideas in older churches, but which created glorious spaces in new buildings, enriched by art of a high quality.  One of the features of the post-war period is the number of famous artists who worked outside the gallery, producing art and sculpture for public buildings and the street, exemplified by the collections of the Harlow Art Trust and Leicestershire schools.

Churches are one area where concrete and steel could be used to create new structural forms, such as thin shell roofs that bridged wide spans.  The same techniques, in timber as well as concrete, can or could be found in industry and transport buildings such as Manchester Oxford Road Station.  Curiously, given the growth of the National Health Service, there was little investment in new buildings – expenditure went on new drugs and increased staffing.

In assessing a post-war building for listing, we often have the benefit of minute books, correspondence and articles from the time that show what the architect was being asked to do, and why.  We can see whether the architect fulfilled the original brief, successfully, and if the building lives up to the expectations gained by reading about it.  It has also been possible to interview the architect and the client – a luxury not available to colleagues dealing with other periods.   What listing cannot do is take into account factors that an architect in the 1950s and 1960s could not possibly have anticipated, such as the changes in computer technology of the last twenty years, or changes in the standard length of swimming pools required by international Olympic committees.  It also cannot make an economic judgement about viability – that is where the listed building consent regime comes in, and the work of architects and developers today in adapting listed buildings of all periods to new uses.

Since the rise of architectural journalism in Victorian times we have been able to watch changing tastes in architecture.  William Butterfield, claimed by Paul Thompson as the first Brutalist, is a perfect example of an architect who was celebrated in his day but who was totally out of favour by his death in 1900 – his obituary in the RIBA Journal suggests that Keble College chapel should be whitewashed – and who only came back into favour when rediscovered by John Summerson in the 1940s.  That pace of change is even faster now, though greater too are the myths that surround buildings.  Centre Point was widely admired when it was built, likened to the Beatles and Mary Quant by Building magazine: ‘More than any other building Centre Point made London swing.  It backed Britain’.  It became controversial in the 1970s, not so much because the developer left the offices empty so that their value would appreciate, but because he also left empty 36 flats in the rear wing.  The building was squatted in January 1974.  Camden tried to compulsorily purchase the flats in 1972, when Building Design wrote that Centre Point has been called ‘sculptural, insensitive, monumental and unlettable, but never anonymous’.  Acquired by MEPC in 1987, the first attempt to have it listed was in 1989, when Mark Whitby admired its innovative engineering.  We succeeded at the third attempt, in 1995, when it was described as having ‘a dynamic quality lacking in most 1960s’ office blocks, and many argue that it has stood the test of time’.  By the time of Seifert’s death in 2001 it was claimed as ‘iconic’ by Building Design.   Keeling House is another example of a building that has changed its image – described as Keeling Over in 1992 when first proposed for listing, it has now been converted into smart flats.  So we have to be constantly aware of changing tastes and circumstances, especially as younger people find the 1960s and 1970s ever more fascinating: what is known by Australian conservationists as the ‘Austin Powers factor’.