Theme: Centenary, 1974-1996.

Kester Rattenbury was asked to summarise the most recent period. She chooses to emphasise the Review's commitment to tectonic expression: particularly its involvement with High-Tech. And its ever changing coverage of the international scene.

James Wines' Best superstore first appeared as a curio picture caption in October 1975. Later, the editors found they had to revise their view and do several longish pieces on Wines. In the middle of the '70s, architecture was undergoing its own crisis of consciousness, and the AR, which has always been the magazine not of the avant-garde but of record was in a fully representative state of self-critical flux.

It was the end of - or at least a hiatus in - the certainties of the Modern agenda where the AR maintained a measured and conscientious critical coverage of the works of a profession which still clearly felt its hands on the ropes. This involved regular coverage not just of 'high architecture' being built - which still then included mass housing projects, offices, National Theatres, whole universities - but which could also broadly accept power stations, new out-of-town shopping centres, neo-vernacular fast food joints; along with campaigns on the saving of Bath, regular features on the British eccentric building collection like railway carriage housing, and art. The whole of the world was in view.

But during the '70s, things began to change. Ten years before the Prince of Wales noticed it, at about the time of Malcolm MacEwens' Crisis in Architecture (May '74), the profession found itself uncomfortably caught between the tradional Modernist role of delineating the forms of society from a position of vision and the uncomfortable feeling that, for all the best reasons, this hadn't actually worked. The AR went through its own period of self examination. First came Civilia, with its quest for a new, softer vision of society (p86), then came other moves. Under Lance Wright, the magazine announced a new direction: 'shift from Debrett to a new kind of architecture of sensibility' (July 1976). It called for readers' comments; tried to open up debate with a series running through the whole process of self examination 'What is architecture, then?' or 'What do architects do?' (1977). Indeed, the 'Preview' of 1978 opened 'self scrutiny and retrospection is so much a common factor of every issue of the AR that it seems unnecessary to indulge in it here'.

In this case, what the architects did was first, examine their navels, second, take a stronger grip on various architectural forms which they felt could be justly called popular or populist, like Post-Modernism, community architecture, and the Romantic Pragmatic combination of Modern Movement and Neo-Vernacular which briefly - more or less all of 1980 seemed to have permeated the future of architecture.

Under the new editorial control of Peter Davey, the magazine gradually but visibly changed its tack from catholic introspection to a clear and selective campaign for quality and a certain architectural identification with 'high-tech' - with its expressive 'arts and crafts' extension to the demonstration of how modern buildings are made. 'Toys for boys', as Peter Buchanan pointed out (July 1983), emerged steadily at the head of the field. By the time Prince Charles got round to lancing his carbuncles, the architectural mind-set had had its crisis, was out at the other side and heading upwards. The newspapers dealt with all the popular opinions; the AR responded with thumping polemical issues on High-Tech and its Arts and Crafts roots (July 84) and on Principle v Pastiche (Aug '84).

The AR had by now shifted into a theme-led format, in which buildings were grouped into various subjects by function or idea. This allowed for the polemical and built problems of the genre to be dealt with in the editorial introduction, and sometimes in longer essays later on, while the main body of the magazine was used to show the best work available. This format dealt well with the massive building output of the late '80s, and particularly with the major buildings like the Staatsgalerie, Lloyd's and the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank, with a single building considered in depth, context and from many opinions. The issue sizes climbed to 112 pages for the shopping centres issue, and a ceiling of 128 on the special editions on the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank and Lloyd's (both 1986). It was in these - which extended into the '90s with Kansai - (Nov '94) that the format was at its best.

From this perspective, it became clear that the latter half of the twentieth century belonged to Foster. While Stirling's Stuttgart (Dec '84) was a huge popular and critical success, the Clore baffled the critics in Britain. (The AR dealt with both sides of the issue, with E. M. Farrelly's contemporary criticism and John Summerson's considered and intriguing review of the Tate). Rogers continued to delight, with Lloyd's supreme in the UK boom, and undoubtedly the key tool in the second wave debate on architecture and popularism. But Foster adopted that most unanswerable of tactics: he made things look simple, while continually producing buildings of astonishing quality.

The boom's collapse in Britain involved a dispersal of interest and of building types with the AR now established in a confident if unemployed profession observing the shifts somewhat more relaxedly. It identified what later was called Deconstructivism in a special issue on 'The New Spirit' in August 1986; it described the changed patterns of the world; the varied forms of ecological arguments became central to many of the special issues like Environment (April 1991), Landscape, Art and Ecology (June 1991), Architecture and Climate (June 1991). Museums and transport buildings predominated in the new medievalism of competing city states. A range of issues on developments in Paris (1989) and Spain (1992) also described a shifting hierarchy of countries: from France to Spain to Austria to South Africa and to Japan. Buildings covered in middle America declined. The US focus shifted clearly to the Los Angeles commentary on the decay of the city - built comfortably in the form of wealthy suburban houses. The real shift was to the Far East. 'Throw away your atlases. They are all utterly obsolete' wrote Peter Buchanan.

Unless political and economic conditions are fairly stable, it is difficult for architectural journalism to be both predictive and to illustrate its predictions by built works. The combination of the two can sometimes look curious: Buchanan's claims about the Pacific rim, for example, were illustrated on the US side of the Pacific largely by the small suburban experimental houses which the West Coast has been doing for some years: albeit in a spikier form. But compressing more than 20 years of the AR has a curious sensation of a life compacted: of reliving all the significant buildings and issues of one's own lifetime, of discerning both the changes and the issues which are still current. As with all media, it becomes impossible to tell how far the magazine has accurately recounted the preoccupations and ideals of a generation, and how far it has defined and shaped them.

1974

Sprawling mass

The flight of large-scale buildings to the edge of town where land is cheap.

For the last seventy years and more the classic advice of the architect to his large-scale client has been, not to 'Go West', but to 'Go Out'. To go out from the city centre to the green fields on the outskirts, where land is cheap and there is room to do anything you want. First the factories went out, then the hospitals, then the big educational buildings, then the headquarter office buildings; and now, last of all, the supermarkets are craving permission to 'go out' also.

This advice has always seemed unexceptionable; and it is only when we are faced with the departure of the last big component of the city, the shop, that we suddenly notice the extraordinary social impeverishment this 'flight of magnets' causes.

Bald facts

The effect of management culture on the development of architecture.

What has to pass for 'Architecture' today bears exactly the same relationship to the real thing as does a Bill of Quantities to 'Literature'. If Literature were to suffer a similar decline and, pressurised by a scientific culture and management technique, were to be reduced to a catalogue of bald fact - then we might feel disinclined to found, support and attend a 'Literature Centre'.

Collage city

Colin Rowe presents his definition of collage cities, which derive meaning from their ironic, fragmented qualities.

Habitually Utopia, whether Platonic or Marxian, has been conceived of as axis mundi or as axis istoriae; but, if in this way it has operated like all totemic, traditionalist and uncriticised aggregations of ideas, if its existence has been poetically necessary and politically deplorable, then this is only to assert the idea that a collage technique, by accommodating a whole range of axis mundi (all of them pocket utopias - Swiss canton, New England Village, Dome of the Rock, Place Vendome, Campodiglio etc) might be a means of permitting us the enjoyment of Utopian poetics without our being obliged to suffer the embarrassment of Utopian politics. Which is to say that, because collage is a method deriving its virtue from its irony, because it seems to be a technique for using things and simultaneously disbelieving in them, it is also a strategy which can allow Utopia to be dealt with as an image, to be dealt with in fragments without our having to accept it in toto, which is further to suggest that collage could even be a strategy which, by supporting the Utopian illusion of changelessness and finality, might even fuel a reality of change, motion, action and history.

In-betweenies

Charles Jencks deconstructs the Metabolist theories and semantic inflation of Kisho Kurokawa.

Engawa then means the in-between space, the verandah space between two pavilions, or the street space between two buildings. In fact for Kurokawa it can mean an empty space seen positively or, the concept most dear to the Metabolists, semi-public space.

All this is really quite maddening and pretentious since there is nothing very new in this idea except the neologism, and one has to learn 30 or 40 to understand what Kurokawa explicitly intends. There is 'infra-structuring and master-spacing, fibrous form and porous space, urban connectors and clusters, point simulation and interiorisation', enough to make anyone choke. Furthermore, every other word in this list is roughly synonymous so we have, if I may add to the jargon, semantic inflation. And it is still worse because each Metabolist has a different set of neologisms. Inflation becomes stag-flation becomes don't read any further.

Jubilee herald

Ill-applied newspaper verbiage proves too much for Anthony Burgess.

'BONFIRES HERALD IN JUBILEE' is the first headline on the first page of the Daily Telegraph: June 7 1977. I think this is the first time I have met the verb herald in. Herald, a straight transitive as in 'herald the dawn' has evidently been jostling at the back of the brain of the headline writer with the word usher, conceivably both words almost physically strutting in their primary noun forms, and herald came out with ushers in stuck to his tunic.

1978

Modern myths

Roger Scruton attacks what he regards as Modern Movement moralism.

Who cares very much about lifts, light, heating, even privacy, when he feels that he does not belong where he is forced to reside, when he is always seeking his identity in a place where he cannot find it...?

But one thing that architects should not do is tO fabricate for themselves the myth of the purely 'modern' man, the man with ever new and ever changing needs, the man for whom the one vital need - the need to feel at one with his surroundings - has been somehow mysteriously abolished. It is precisely the moral significance of architecture that makes the moralism of the Modern Movement so distasteful.

Equal values

French structuralism and the power of good architecture to give convincing form to the myth of harmonious life.

The French structuralists tell us that myths perform an important social function by resolving otherwise emotionally troublesome contradictions within the values held by a society. To take an example from our own culture, the story of Cinderella, and all its latterday variants, overcomes the paradox created by the existence of both rich and poor and the obvious inequality between them in a society that maintains a belief in the Christian concept of equality. Stories, films and journalism are the usual vehicles for myths, but architectural style can perform the very same function. Through its power to create a scenery referring to the ways of life that are believed to be harmonious and stable, architecture has often been used to give an appearance of order that conceals conflicts at large within the environment. Traditionally, good architecture has been judged to be that given convincing forms to the myth of the harmonious life, and bad architecture that which has failed to do so.

Chaos reigns

Daniel Libeskind's paper architecture presents a baffling impression of chaos.

Daniel Libeskind intends to free the architectural drawing from subservience to practicality. Each of his drawings is intended as 'a prospective unfolding of future possibilities'. At first, each Libeskind design appears to be a chaotic collection of semi-architectural objects drawn in conflicting conventions (orthographic and axonometric) - a constructivist drawing gone mad. Closed inspection confirms the impression of chaos. The New White Architecture and New Classicism clash, coalesce and disintegrate in Libeskind's pure, white, Euclidian world. But here and there forms become what could be spaces, machines or buildings - then the eye moves on again through the maze to catch on another cluster and the observer starts to imagine other possible realities. Libeskind intends to make his viewers work nearly as hard as he does himself - a daunting task that only the most dedicated are prepared to undertake.

The rainmaker 

Alvin Boyarsky on his appointments as head of The Architectural Association.

Alvin Boyarsky, interviewed October 1983: "I wasn't sure that I wanted to get involved in the first place, so I told the story about the rainmaker. A southern preacher fellow dressed in black is riding a black mule through dried up cotton fields. He comes into town and says: 'give me what I ask for and I'll make rain.' So he gets his food and his drink and his women and his gold, and they want rain. 'The rain won't fall', he says, 'until 24 hours after I leave town'. And he gets onto his mule and turns his back and slowly rides off into the sunset.

I promised to make rain".

Rational homes

Erno Goldfinger gives his thoughts on the incompetence of estate managers.

"I do not like quaintness. It means nothing. I build rational dwellings for people to make home in. Nobody ever built homes for others ... The main problems with high rise blocks in this country is the incompetence of the managements:

1 Rehousing is done is a haphazard way. For instance, so-called 'problem families' are dumped in unfamiliar surroundings, saddled with rents they cannot afford and are given practically no help to adjust.

2 Maintenance is lamentable.

3 Supervision is inadequate, incompetent and spiteful.

4 Vandalism is practically encouraged by persons who are antagonistic to this sort of development.

5 Tenants who are satisfied just let it be only those who are dissatisfied complain.

6 The only complaint I came across - when I was living on the top floor of one of the buildings I designed and when I had my office at the foot of another - was high rent".

In God's Name

The God-given origins of Classicism, as expounded by Quinlan Terry.

Moses spent 40 days on Mount Sinai receiving the law and pattern of all the details of the Tabernacle direct from God. The moral law contained in the 10 Commandments distinguished the people of God from the rest of the world and has continued through the Christian church to this day - unaltered. The ceremonial law giving detailed instructions about worship and sacrifice was the clearest guide to the children of Israel until it was fulfilled in the Son of God, and continues to this day, a demonstration of His high-priestly work and sacrificial atonement. Furthermore, the visual form of the building in which the one true God was to be worshipped could not be left to the imagination of man: so a detailed description was given to Moses. And it seems that the distinctive pattern of these orders has continued in some form on all civilised public buildings until the beginning of the twentieth century.

1984

Melancholy

Charles Jencks muses on melancholy, metaphor and meaning and how these are interpreted in his temple-garage.

Clearly, all this "blackness" had to be represented, along with the "shrieks", and where better than in the garage? It is finally the temple-garage, with its green-black cylinders, that connects the two aspects of Melancholy. Here rustic lettering again spells out the message, again a mixed message of an ideal realm - the temple with round chapel and the practical space which every LA house must have - storage for garbage, automobiles and tools ("horrid shapes and sights unholy") great deal of time was spent designing the mid-tech order of green and black bolts, the black in various shades to symbolise all those qualities of depression which Milton enumerates and then finally banishes in two poems.

Power and glory 

The nature of modern monumentality dissected by Colin St John Wilson.

"Architecture immortalises and glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing to glorify" (Wittgenstein).

This is a hard saying: it hinges, like the thought of his friend Adolf Loos, upon a special interpretation of the distinction between 'architecture' and 'building'. But for those who are currently obsessed by the loudly proclaimed 'Death of Modern Architecture' it sets up a framework within which the vacuum left by an unlamented functionalism might be explored; and for this reason it is a thought beset by great dangers. Quite specifically it focuses attention upon the nature of monumentality, which is of course the sacred ground favoured by those most anxious to fill the vacuum. But it is also the enigma of architecture for at its heart lies architecture's relationship to power. That is an inherently equivocal relationship since all monuments are statements about power (the power of Pharaoh or Pope, of merchants or State) and the use of power in this way is frequently quite overt. but what if it is the sole object? And in an age that has perfected the techniques of propaganda, of calculated perfidy backed by torture and unparalleled violence it seems surely irresponsible to separate, as the aesthetes do, the nature of an art form from the kind of message it is conceived to deliver. I refer of course to those who, like Leon Krier, are trying to set up the work of Albert Speer as an indictment of the Modernist achievement. Fortunately I am saved from indulgence in the kind of moral argument that might start here by my firm belief that, since art is its own lie detector, one need not go outside the textual examination of a specific case to find transparent proof of the underlying motivates that inspired it, and that if the source of those motives is corrupt, the art will be corrupt.

British tradition

A group of leading architects and academics were asked to define their notions of a British tradition.

Is there a British Tradition?

Stirling: No. Except in the worst sense of the word - English Noddyland and I am not part of it.

Rogers: People often say how French the Pompidou Centre is; and there is a certain brashness that could be interpreted as French.

Peter Cook: Screw the English Tradition. It's a great big trap and I am delighted to be going to work in Frankfurt. I shall look to Los angeles on the one hand and Berlin on the other ... There is a tradition of lap dogs, paperback books ... I find it tedious and I don't want to discuss it.

1986

HK lease of life

Martin Pawley joins a swelling chorus of admiration for Norman Foster's new Hongkong & Shanghai Bank HQ.

Towards the close of 1985 Peter Palumbo went to Hong Kong on business and paid a visit to the new Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. That evening he wrote a letter to Norman Foster from his hotel room. 'The building is a masterpiece' he wrote 'and I know just the site for it in the city of London.'

Palumbo's admiration for the distant, almost mythical structure is by no means unique. Ioh Ming Pei took a delegation from the Bank of China to look at it and said afterwards that the atrium was the most impressive he had ever seen in his life. Harry Seidler, once shortlisted for the competition himself, did the tour and announced: 'No way could I have delivered a space like that to the bank.' As an architectural conception, mastering a complex and frequently changing brief, riding the shoal water of political uncertainty - the entire social structure that produced it will vanish into mainland China in just 11 years - and, most of all, as a massive exercise in logistics rivalling the Falklands War, the bank has no peer.

Norman Foster and Richard Rogers are now the only architects of international status who are now practising with their Modern Movement ideals more or less intact ... Foster is a very great architect indeed.

Yin and yang 

The adroit blending of contradictions - masculine and feminine, light and shade - is the key to the Bank's allure.

The blend of masculine and feminine is one of the many apparent contradictions that make the bank a truly great building: impossible to describe in words and pictures. I have never felt before to quite the same extent the inadequacy of trying to reduce three-dimensional sensual reality to two-dimensional images on a page and the drawn-out one dimension of the narrative. To really experience the Bank, you have to stand on the beautifully gradated gently-sloping floor of the plaza and feel the sunlight reflected first from the giant sunscoop, then from the top of the atrium. Your shadow is cast by sun on the granite - but you are in the middle of an enormous building.

Corb's poetry

Misunderstood Corbusier is at last poignantly and incisively reassessed, in the centenary of his birth.

... Both despite and because of his voluminous publications and the power and poetry of his buildings, Le Corbusier is the least understood of modern architects. His post-Second World War buildings in particular largely defied adequate critical exegesis, though some penetrating if partial analyses of some of the works are now appearing, and there are no doubt a few practising architects who have understood him profoundly. Here, in Britain, as well as being blamed for the tower blocks that march through London's East End and similiar razed areas of other British cities, he is usually trivialised as a great form maker ... it was not just that the forcefulness of the buildings masked their complexity and subtlety; his publications explain surprisingly little about the buildings themselves, and can even be quite misleading.

Classical gas

The dangers of Post-Modernists cherry picking Classicism, by E. M. Farrelly.

Both Stirling and Venturi have seen fit to regard Classicism not as a long-standing tradition with its own internal coherence and intricate subtlelties, its own evolving canons of rhythm, balance and counterpoint - a system with its own complexities and contradictions - but rather an open basket of goodies to be plundered at will in the service of me-ist expression.

Clore Gallery

James Stirling at the Tate Gallery provides proof of his eccentric genius.

James Stirling has done three good things here. He has provided a set of galleries, traditional in form and perfectly lit, in which the whole of the Turner bequest now gloriously hangs. He has built a building which is contextually right, at once deferring to and sharply mocking the Victorian sugar merchant's palace of art. In between these two accomplishments he has exercised his invention in a way peculiar to his eccentric genius, which does not ask for flattery but is full of high spirits and dangerous play.

1988

Theme parks

Frances Anderton on the trivialisation of culture, context and architecture.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Disney thinking is influencing Britain's leisure industry, to its detriment. Weedy imitations of his theme and water parks are popping up, without context, as great blots on the landscape. And worse, in our former total resorts such as Bath Spa, York and so on, messy vitality is repressed in favour of recreation of mythical golden epochs. As whole houses, streets, towns are enshrined and turned into objects of contemplation, or, worse, 'brought to life' with costume drama, our cities become theme parks while a theme park becomes a city.

Koolhaas fluke

Rem Koolhaas' ideas may be vindicated by The Netherlands Dance Theatre.

Perhaps the NDT at last vindicates Koolhaas' design ideas and his claim to all the attention he has received over the years. But it could equally be a fluke conjunction of a very particular problem and a site to which his approach was well suited. Koolhaas' challenge is to meet other problems with an equally suited strategy - something he has failed to do for the housing and school in Ij Plein in Amsterdam. Often he will find a scenographic shed will not suffice - and something more wholly architectural is required.

Sinister prince

Peter Davey considers the possible sinister consequences of royal interference in architecture.

But by deciding to concentrate on appearance alone, the Prince could be starting to do something very sinister indeed. He presented us with two fundamental images of what building should be like in the future: the vernacular village and the Classical civic building. His recipe has an unnerving similiarity to that produced by the Nazis who, in the 1930s, had an elaborate programme invented by Speer and Goebbels and their architectural hacks like Troost, Schultze-Naumburg and Kreis. It was precisely designed to conceal the reality of the Fascist state, to put a human seeming mask on the brutality, corporatism and horror of what was really going on. It is patently absurd to compare Thatcher's England to Nazi Germany...

On the wing

Coop Himmelblau make a dramatic, fractured landing in bourgeois Vienna; Peter Cook is there to applaud.

The essential heroism of Coop Himmelblau has been established by two events: the first, when the Blazing Wing was ignited at 8.25pm on 20 December 1980 in the courtyard of the Technical University of Graz, and more recently when it became obvious that their eagle had landed on a rooftop at the corner of Biberstasse and Falkestrasse in the first district of Vienna - some time in 1989.

How marvellous to find an establishment lawyer eschewing the game of mock reassurance and solid-oak chambers and inviting them to infiltrate the bourgeois world of the 1st District. The insidiousness of other Viennese infiltrations - Hollein's shops, the odd cafe, even their own Atelier Baumann (which only pokes a tiny toe over the pavement) - is blown open by the decision of this rooftop building not only to land, but to send the taut bow, its primary element, way out into space.

1990

Pacific Rim

Peter Buchanan analyses the world's new order - the cultural, economic and political shift towards the Pacific Rim.

Throw away your atlases. They are all utterly obsolete. Familiar projections by mercator and others are centred on the Greenwich meridian. Imprinted thousands of times over in our memories is the gestalt of continents framed by water and framing in turn between them the Atlantic and Indian oceans. The Pacific Ocean is neither framed nor properly present. Nor too, often enough, is evident how the USSR and Alaska lean towards and almost touch each other (like Michelangelo's God and Adam) across the Bering Strait. But since the bombing of Pearl Harbour drew attention to the very centre of that ocean and its accessibility from both sides, the pacific has progressively become not the edge of the world but its very centre. Perched precariously and opposite each other on the seismically unstable rim and locked in a symbiotic competitive interplay are Japan and California; the two key centres of the late twentieth century.

Beyond Style

James Stirling's work embodied a synthesis of ideas beyond mere style.

Stirling never ceased to believe in the primacy of function, so we are not conscious of a return to function, but a further unexpected exploration of the territory that lies beyond function. In this power of synthesis Stirling puts himself beyond consideration of style and fashion and brings architecture to a new level of cultural adequacy. That is, he defines an architecture rich enough to be an object of study in cultural discourse.

Zaha on fire

Zaha Hadid's fire station draws some perplexed yet admiring responses.

After Zaha Hadid left the AA she began tutoring. For a time she collaborated in the OMA office, but has not undergone the usual apprenticeship of young architects who spend years dealing under the supervision of a more experienced architect. So she has never been exposed to the conventional ways of doing things, and the fire station is put together like no other building.

If god is in the details then this would seem to be an atheists' building.

Atomic Jencks

Life, the universe and architecture reconsidered by Charles Jencks.

The dark side of Jencks' new preoccupations is the dislocation of humanity from the centre of the stage. Eisenman and friends have been going on about this for ages. The holocaust and Hiroshima have shown, they say, how fallible is our belief in the centrality of human values. Now Jencks brings up the physicist Hans Christin von Baeyer to announce 'in the twenty-first century, the atom will replace the man as the measure of all things'.

The prospect is terrifying: once you remove human values, what's left? Dear Charles Jencks is a kindly, charming, often intentionally funny man. He believes, with ruskinian intensity, 'that there is a convergence of the good, the true and the beautiful'; that nature has only 'occasional nastiness'. Yet the one thing that emerges with the greatest clarity between the lines of his tour of popular science is that universe is totally indifferent to any individual or species.

African illusions

Newly democratic South African presents harsh realities that will take many years to change.

For decades, South Africa has harboured a reassuring illusion of itself as a southern hemisphere version of California - in reality it is more like Mexico. The public realm has all but disintegrated, cities operate on the American model of tight business cores surrounded by concentric rings of (white) suburbia. Car and mall culture dominates. The fraying extremities of urban areas contain the formal hells of the townships and beyond them, the informal hells of the squatter camps. Now that the Group Areas Act has been abolished, all citizens are theoretically free to live where they like, intensifying the pressure on all major cities. The idealised housing model (both in white suburbia and black townships) is the detached house on a plot. Densification strategies are tentatively being evolved, but planning and architectural issues are complicated by social and cultural factors.

RELATED ARTICLE: Lloyd's today

Banham on Lloyd's, as a social and commercial, and cultural organism.

Surely, in the High-Tech world of electronic communications and personal computers most of these people could stay at home - stay in bed, even - and do their business without crowding onto this hopelessly overloaded site. Apparently Richard Rogers did raise this issue tentatively with the client, but without effect. However high the technology they employ, the underwriters see no alternative to their common presence, blocking the gangways and getting in one another's way generally, in this single room. Being there is what this is all about; the drama, the boredom, the irritation, the moments of high panic and all that ancient tradition, symbolised by the presence of the Lutine Bell to be rung to announce shipwrecks - under which sits a uniformed attendant calling for missing underwriters by means of a microphone and a current electronic paging system. Every item of high technology at Lloyd's, structural, environmental, mechanical or electrical, services a concept of business that still puts its ultimate faith in face-to-face contact and rumours whispered in passing ears.

If one finds this an irony - and it is extremely difficult not to - then it seems to be an irony proper to our late modern times. Architecture may have abandoned its utopian dreams of changing the world, because the world is perfectly capable of changing itself without architecture's aid, but the compulsion to try and make sense of the resulting human dilemmas is still the most essential quality of Modernism.