Open this month’s Icon magazine and you are greeted with the above question from Editor Justin McGuirk. In a letter to his readers he elaborates:
Do you think Britain cares about Architecture? Think again. A recent exchange of angry letters in the local architect’s newspaper offered a reminder of how architecture is valued in this country. In Building Design, respected architect David Chipperfield swapped diatribes with The Observer’s former architect critic, Stephen Bayley, all because the latter didn’t write about his universally praised Neues Museum in Berlin. Now those who know Bayley’s work would have been surprised if he had written about such a rich and literate project. But the real miracle is that any British newspaper covered the building at all. Ordinarily, the papers couldn’t care less about some museum in Berlin, unless maybe it’s by Zaha Hadid (her ‘wow’ factor and the inevitable wiff of controversy are irresistable).
Our international readers may be surprised to hear just how little the British media rates architecture.
Of course, you can always read Icon. But is architecture now the preserve of specialist magazines? Is it not a fit topic of discussion for the greater public? What about the state of our cities? I bet that’s something most people would have something to say about. Architecture is culture – as much as art, film or theatre – and the achievements of that culture will depend on the level of the discourse around it. So the mediocrity of British architecture and the newspaper’s lack of interest in it will continue hand in hand.
They may take the renowned architecture schools and the major international talents based here as signs that we have a rich architectural culture. Not so. What we have is a frustrated architecture culture. Newspapers rank architecture somewhere below dance and jazz in the cultural pecking order. As print publishers find themselves increasingly in crisis, architecture has fallen off the page. Ask any of the critics, and they’ll tell you that every piece of criticism they publish is a minor victory. One recently told me about the time he pitched a piece to his editor on Le Corbusier during the Barbican’s major retrospective last year. ‘Who the fuck is Le Corbusier?’ came the reply. Up against that kind of ignorance no wonder most of them find other outlets for their writing.
It’s routine for newspapers to print stories about buildings without even mentioning the architect. The design, and indeed the designer, are inconsequential. The press is only interested in stories, in controversy: is the building too expensive, is it a waste of taxpayers’ money, is it long overdue? We’re a nation of grocers, as Zorba the Greek would say. We weigh everything – except the cultural value.
On further investigation, it seems McGuirk has a point. Online, there appears to be no designated section for architecture in any of the national newspapers offerings. Is it under ‘home’? Or ‘design’? Or the ‘property’ section of ’finance’? Is it under ‘lifestyle’? If you want to explore interior design, or find out how much your home is worth, you will encounter no problems. But if you want to know about the ongoings in the world of architecture, it seems that our national British newspapers are not interested in covering it.
Image courtesy of Longzero on flickr
