Oh, the show apartment is just lovely, but then with prices starting — starting — at half a million for a one-bedroom flat, it blinkin’ well should be. A little cramped, maybe, “but this is London”, says the nice lady from Barratt Homes showing me round. Perhaps the decor is a tad middle-aged, all that taupe and pussy willow. But feel the quality. Granite surfaces. Copy of Hip Hotels on the coffee table. Ripe for the oyster-eating metrosexual high-flyers in the marketing brochure for Nexus One at Visage. (All cool apartment blocks now have names like newly-privatised utility companies, early Eighties synth-pop bands or the latest Citroën.)
As the brochure says, “prepare to be amazed”. Because it’s only outside that the full eye-goggling hideousness of Nexus One at Visage is revealed. Just look. Steroidal, pumped-up, surgically enhanced architecture leering over Swiss Cottage, North London. This is trophy architecture.
Trophyism occurs when a celebrity architect designs a “signature building”, something with that wow factor, then resigns — the press release citing “differences” — aghast at the cost cuts or, as the euphemism has it, “value engineering” that he or she has been asked to perform. The actual architecture is carried out by someone with a lesser reputation.
Trophyism is all the rage in cheapskate Britain. Even the BBC’s at it. Last autumn the respected architect Richard MacCormac was removed from building the BBC’s extension to Broadcasting House, the “signature” project heralding the Beeb’s supposed return to architectural form after a decade building tin sheds. “Creative differences” apparently. This a year after David Chipperfield was, without consultation, dropped as executive architect for BBC Scotland’s HQ.
Trophy architecture occurs because more and more towns across the UK want a bit of glamour, a badge of distinction. But they should proceed with care: the day Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower opened, the council’s project manager got stuck in its lift.
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When it comes to Nexus, pity Camden Council, the local planning authority and, er, joint client (no conflict of interest there, then). Like so many in our utterly undevolved local government system, Camden Council has ambition but little money or power, so when it wants to do something big, such as regenerate Swiss Cottage, it has to go cap-in-hand to Mr Private Developer.
This, alas, is how most of our cities, most of new Labour’s new “New Deal” public works, get built these days — the Private Finance Initiative. And this is how the redevelopment of the civic heart of Swiss Cottage happened, after lip-service consultation and a bitter battle with locals (although the Council maintains the consultation was full and proper). Basil Spence’s magnificent Grade II listed 1960s library was beautifully restored. A nice new Hampstead Theatre by Bennetts Associates opened. A new crèche, a doctor’s surgery. Good, saintly stuff.
But if you want Spence’s equally magnificent swimming baths refurbished we’ll have to, oops, knock them down, rebuild them uglier, smaller, more cramped and oh, yes, privatised. And the other pound of flesh for this Faustian deal is that we’ll need to build 15 storeys of luxury developers’ apartments called Visage.
But don’t worry, we’ve got Terry Farrell to design them. Which indeed he did, until 2002, when they parted company after Farrell was asked to reduce his role from the original “full architectural service”.
S&P Architects, originally on board to do the internal fitouts, suddenly found themselves centre stage. In vague squinty outline the building resembles Farrell’s original (even that wasn’t a looker). It’s only when the eyes focus that it all goes wrong. The details. Now when architects witter on about “the details” mostly I just drift off and think about what I’m having for tea tonight. But how right they are. God is in the details.
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Farrell no doubt wanted its Deco-ish juts to resemble a cruise ship. Alas, prison ship is more accurate. Done by Farrell or Will Alsop, this stuff might have been passable. But the result is clumsy composition and mind-numbingly boring — brutal, meanly detailed façades with all the ambition to be “signature” and none of the talent, like a tone-deaf wannabe on The X Factor.
A Travelodge would be ashamed of this building. It gives nothing to the neighbourhood apart from fat-cat residents, and takes everything. The effect is worsened by being next to the new leisure centre — actually built by Farrell, and not bad — and Spence’s restored library, so that in 200 yards we can see exactly how far public architecture has slipped since the 1960s. Visages are being built everywhere. If we’re not careful we will be building them for the Olympics.
Mostly we critics tell you about the good stuff and pretend everything’s OK, that developers are finally investing in architecture, that sometimes PFI really does make nice architecture. These are the exceptions, not the rule.
Maybe things are getting better. The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment is doing its best to turn developers into modern day Medicis. They’re getting design champions in local councils, some checks and balances on the private capital required to regenerate our spaces.
And yes, I know, belt-tightening is inevitable — accountability, public money and all that. Wembley, Holyrood, the Millennium Dome — architects have to be flexible, stop being prima donnas, wise up to how buildings get built. Maybe soon we’ll have “architect-endorsed” buildings, like those chef-made pasta sauces.
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Want to know the really depressing thing? They’ve sold nearly all the flats.