Architecture, as much as architects deny it, has always been hopelessly in thrall to fashion. The battle of styles, the capricious cycle of heritage preservation, the sluggish pace of building that makes it impossible for architecture to keep up with its own trends – all are vividly shown in a new exhibition at the RIBA, about the 30-year war waged over one of the most contested sites in London.
At the busy Bank junction in the City, where the pink-striped confection of James Stirling’s No 1 Poultry stands like some mad Battenberg galleon, there was once a very different vision planned. Cloaked in a minimalist costume of bronze-tinted glass, the 19-storey tower of Mansion House Square would have been the only building by Mies van der Rohe in the UK, and his last ever built work anywhere in the world.
It was the ambitious dream of the 27-year-old millionaire property developer Peter Palumbo, who was a fan of the German-American Bauhaus maestro. He spotted his chance for a Mies of his own when he and his father were planning what to do with a prime site in the City, so in 1962 the future Lord Palumbo visited his 76-year-old hero in Chicago and commissioned him on the spot, requesting the full works, no expense spared.
A few months later, Palumbo received a big package of drawings for a project that resembled a miniature version of Mies’ seminal 1958 Seagram Building in New York, only half the height of the original and standing at the western edge of a big new public square, for which a clutch of Victorian buildings would have to be razed. In the same package was a piece of bronze mullion, a stone ashtray and a door handle with a handwritten note that simply said: “Is this what you had in mind?” It was a fairytale story of a starstruck client and a star architect on his deathbed, Mies enjoying his last chance to bestow the world with one more bronzed tower.
The City was thrilled. “Mies comes to London!” trumpeted the front page of the Evening Standard. After a few years of design development – shown in this exhibition for the first time – the project received planning permission in May 1969. Three months later, Mies was dead.
Palumbo pressed on. The architect’s assistants convinced him that Mies had all but designed every detail already with his own hand, so he carried on assembling the site. It would was a Herculean task, comprising 13 freeholds and 348 leaseholds, taking him the next 11 years and £10m to acquire – by which time the cultural and political landscape had changed beyond recognition. By 1982, when the project was again submitted for planning, what had once been a thrilling vision of corporate America was looking like a dated throwback to a bygone era. Attitudes to the Victoriana that Palumbo was planning to crush had also markedly changed: these were now endangered gems to be preserved.
“Mr Palumbo’s controversial proposals are extraordinarily reactionary,” wrote historian Gavin Stamp (AKA Private Eye’s Piloti), to then prime minister Margaret Thatcher, “not least because his architect is a 99-year-old German from another age who is dead.”
The American architect Philip Johnson, who had been instrumental in securing Mies’ first commission in the US and curated an exhibition of his work at MoMA in 1947, was frank about what he saw as a second-rate scheme. “I consider it a bad idea for one of the greatest architects in the 20th century to be represented in what may be the greatest city in the 20th century by a posthumous and unimportant piece of architecture,” he wrote in 1984, as the public inquiry into the project was launched. “The continent of America is overrepresented by the later ‘sons of Seagrams’, and London surely deserves an original and significant work.”
Richard Rogers and other modernist fans leapt to Mies’ defence. “If the building were suddenly discovered fully built in London, there would be a great outcry of joy,” he enthused. “Learned articles would be written and tourists and specialists would visit and photograph the building in their thousands, inspired by this great work of art.” Revealing the extent of Palumbo’s PR drive, a slick promotional video shown in the exhibition features the eminent broadcaster Huw Wheldon cooing over the design.
But the tide had already turned too far. True to form, Prince Charles provided the nail in the coffin, describing the tower as “a giant glass stump, better suited to downtown Chicago than the City of London”, a view that was upheld by the secretary of state.
So begins part two of the exhibition, an equally surreal and engrossing story of Palumbo turning to arch-postmodernist James Stirling, who had supported Mies’s scheme in the past, to come up with something more sympathetic to the context. With the site flanked by Lutyens’ Midland Bank, Wren’s St Stephen Walbrook church, Soane’s Bank of England and Dance’s Mansion House, it was a fruity buffet for the magpie architect to sink his teeth into.
Stirling’s voracious design process is shown in all its colourful glee in pages of sketchbooks and model photos, sampling the heavy banded rustication from one neighbour, the pointed windows from another, the curious tower from a third – with a dash of Greek Thomson’s Glasgow and bits of ancient Egypt thrown in for good measure, along with a clock face based on his own watch. Cosmic geometries collide with baronial motifs, while a chunk of ornamental garden lands on the roof, at one point including a stream that would have turned into a waterfall gushing down the facade. It exudes a level of energy, wit and originality that throws the dead hand of the cookie-cutter Mies even further into relief.
But by the time that No 1 Poultry had made it through the planning process, another public inquiry and lengthy construction, Stirling had been dead six years and the fickle pendulum of fashion had swung once again. When the building finally opened in 1998, posthumously completed by Stirling’s partner Michael Wilford, it seemed even more ridiculous than Mies’s 1960s slab had done in the 80s. As critic Jonathan Meades wrote: “It looked not only oafish, but hopelessly retardataire.”
Two decades on, you can guess the punchline. This fantastical historicist collage, voted London’s fifth-ugliest building by Time Out readers in 2005, was Grade II* listed in November as an “unsurpassed example of commercial postmodernism”, defying the 30-year rule and making it the youngest structure in the UK to receive protected designation. Historic England is now busy drawing up a list of other key products from the power-dressing era of Aztec office blocks, leopardskin laminate and pink-pedimented supermarkets before the wrecking ball arrives.
So which scheme is better? Both were posthumous, neither are masterpieces, and you’ll have to go to the exhibition to make up your own mind. But spare a thought for the little-known alternative, proposed by Terry Farrell in 1984, to retain the handsome Victorian buildings and excavate a network of alleyways and courtyards inside them, in tune with the tight medieval grain of the City. It might seem like a more intelligent response than either of the big statements on offer; but maybe that’s because, in our post-icon era, low-key adaptive reuse is simply the current mode of fashion.
• Join Oliver Wainwright and others to debate the merits of the two schemes at the RIBA, London, on 14 March. Mies van der Rohe and James Stirling: Circling the Square is at the RIBA from 8 March-25 June.
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