British Neoclassicism

Royal Institute of British Architects recently mounted an exhibit featuring the work of Britain's three leading neoclassicists, Ben Pentreath, George Saumarez Smith, and Francis Terry. David Watkin has a glowing review. All three men have built a variety of buildings around Britain, from a hospital to private houses. Above is a design for an art gallery in London by Smith, below an office building in Tottenham Court Road by Terry.

Of course, all three architects have done work for Prince Charles. The prince is one of the biggest landlords in England, and he has lately been putting his money where his mouth is by financing new developments built in traditional styles. The most famous is Poundbury in Dorset, a complete new town built to look as much like an old one as possible.

I have two reactions to these buildings. First, I like them. I like all of the work I have seen by these men better than the average contemporary building, and I like some of them a lot, including the two I chose to illustrate. Poundbury looks to me like a really nice place to live.

It does make me a little queasy, though, to admire buildings built in frank imitation of things that belong in another time and place. I am not sure why I feel this way. Partly it may be a sense that what I am seeing is fake, some sort of Disney recreation of classicism rather than classicism itself. In a deep philosophical sense that is silly, since classicism has been derivative since the 4th century BC, but I can't shake the feeling. Also, I am just dismayed that the characteristic architectural forms of my own time are so ugly. Why can't we create something that is attractive, livable, and new? Whatever beauty there is in modernism I find cold, inhuman, and sterile. I can sometimes admire a modern building or chair for its purity of form, but I would never want to live in one. Can't there be some way of seeing architectural form that is neither mechanistic nor a straight copy of something built more than 500 years ago?