The hotel problem
An exhibition and a new book, and the accompanying comment, highlight the problem of new hotel design. As Steve Rose asked in the Guardian
When was the last time you saw a purpose-built hotel that really contributed something to the built environment? …hotels have somehow exempted themselves from the ordinary rules of architecture
With more than 13,000 rooms in the development pipeline in London alone, it is important that these are better buildings – not just on the inside – than the products of our last boom in the 1960s.
Steve identifies some outstanding exceptions to the general mediocrity from the New London Architecture exhibition – the new Tower Bridge Hilton, the Zetter and the Renaissance St Pancras, for example. But the best of these are refurbishments of earlier great buildings, like the Gillette factory
What's wrong with modern architecture?
The hotel industry can't be expected to single-handedly escape a much more general malaise in current British architecture, highlighted by Edwin Heathcote in a series of articles in the Financial Times, where he is architecture correspondent. Perhaps the most scalding was entitled What's so good about British architecture?
British architecture, so often talked about as one of our biggest cultural success stories, is dull, corporate and profoundly uninspired…
Fading 1960s buildings have been flattened to make way for flash, glossy, glassy façades, as thin as paper and as intellectually deep… Contemporary architecture is what became of modernism once the politics, the social intent, the aesthetic rigour and the idealism were stripped out.
It’s the combination of commercial development and the lack of a culturally convincing architectural language that Heathcote argues has been lethal. Heathcote’s standards are very high: many hotel chains would be delighted to be housed in buildings as good as Paternoster Square, St Pauls, which he pilories as
sub-classical… the image of a dead city, the work of a culture frighteningly insecure about addressing its toughest historic building, St Pauls Cathedral.
The historical context
The Midland hotel in Morecambe, in the process of regeneration (2006) pictured by JK the Unwise
In the same week as Heathcote’s critique, the Times Literary Supplement published Andrew Saint’s review of Alan Power’s new book Britain: Modern Architectures in History. Saint, a London architect, planner and biographer of Richard Norman Shaw (1813–1912) is sympathetic to Powers’ book which is a nuanced and interesting study of twentieth century buildings. He concludes
…[Powers] contrives to persuade the reader that Britain really contributed something unique to modern architecture. What that was is hard to put into few words. It lies somewhere between an instinct for proportion and compromise, an attitude of outright stroppiness and the occasional surge of daring.
By a great irony, this article is illustrated by a picture of St George’s Wharf, London SW8 at sunset, where the stroppiness seems to have eclipsed the proportion and compromise. As Edwin Heatcote puts it:
The aesthetic pollution has become most concentrated bang opposite Parliament in Vauxhall. A stunningly inappropriate 50-storey tower has just been granted planning permission: look only as far as the incoherent piles of St George’s Wharf by the tower’s designers to see the future. Hideous.
A virtual tour of the Young’s Riverside pub at St George’s Wharf is one of our links, so you can decide for yourself.
Only very occasionally can the hotel industry lead the architecture of its age with buildings of the quality of George Gilbert Scott’s St Pancras, which will be reopening shortly. More often, like the Midland hotel in Morecambe (also reawakening – see above), it will build to a good average: let us hope we can maintain such a standard.
