Design driven by desire

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Rowan Moore is the former architecture critic of this paper. The title of his book suggests a primer in basic matters but it offers something more selective and more incisive. It combines an account of the contemporary architectural scene, international in scope, with throwbacks to key buildings of the past, especially of the Modern Movement. Moore’s writing is lively and engaging, his language straightforward, his case studies unpredictable and instructive. Anyone with an interest in architecture will find good things here.

The highest praises are reserved for the Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914-92), whose audacious concrete-framed works are praised for combining formal invention with social engagement. This is a trophy traditionally awarded in British architectural writing to Finland’s Alvar Aalto, so it is good to meet a new exemplar. The darker side of Moore’s spectrum is represented by Dubai, with its preposterous man-made island in the shape of a palm and its skyline of frantic and meaningless spectacle. Here civic life barely exists, and new architecture serves as its own marketing tool.

From the Gulf states, the focus turns to London. The account of why — and how — we have been building in our capital in recent years spares nobody, least of all the profession’s two peers of the realm, Lords Foster and Rogers. Foster is hauled up for the shiny but lifeless More London project on the South Bank, a bastion of corporate office space to which the GLA building is the glassy appendage. If anything, Rogers has further to fall, having raised high hopes by promoting a commendable vision of urban renewal in the courts of New Labour. We follow the descent, to the Candy Brothers’ One Hyde Park scheme of flats for plutocrats (top price: £140 million). Here, for all the hype, Rogers’s practice failed even to secure an appealing public access to the park. When Moore describes the contemporary architectural scene as “a rare combination of profligacy and meanness”, it is difficult to disagree.

Some of the structuring devices do not quite come off. Architecture — and mere building too, for the terms are not kept separate here — is presented from the outset in terms of “desire”. The fashionable term has to work hard to cover everything, from the slum-dweller’s need for shelter to the dictator’s hunger for permanence. In the process it sometimes becomes all but meaningless. Enter sexual desire as a programme for architecture, and the text wanders into labyrinths of 19th-century literature (Vivant Denon’s Point de Lendemain) and the dead-end of furnishings for fetishists (the lurid apparatus of Japanese love hotels). We meet two great priapic Modernists, Adolf Loos in the Viennese corner, and Le Corbusier, representing France; Loos’s interior spaces prove to be as tactile and seductive as Corb’s are stern and uneasy. Desire is only part of the story, then. But Moore certainly knows how to make these sacred monsters come alive on the page.

One singular episode sees the critic turn patron. In 2002 Moore was appointed director of the Architecture Foundation. He tried to give it a permanent home but the competition-winning design by Zaha Hadid went hideously over-budget before work even started and the project fizzled out. The mismatch between its eye-popping architecture and the humbler purpose of usable exhibition space is admitted by Moore, now that all is dead and buried. Indeed, stress is laid throughout the book on the dangers of over-determined architecture, in which the unpredictable needs and preferences of future users can find no place. So we learn that the monumental Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing was meant to generate lively public uses within its arcades but has failed to do so. A lesson here for our own Olympic legacy.

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