Auntie turns on the vision

11 April 2012

For years BBC buildings have been like BBC coffee. Both carry the same beigegrey miasma of depression which makes it a miracle that any programme of quality ever emits from the corporation's portals.

The defining monument is the broadcast centre in west London known as White City One, a building with all the charisma of a plastic cup out of a drinks dispenser.

It was built in the 1980s after the BBC had spent millions on the abortive design of a sparkling new building by Norman Foster, who was then at his creative peak, just across Portland Place from Broadcasting House.

Foster's building would have been an inspiring place to work, and included a lofty public arcade that would have been an asset to London, but at the last minute the Beeb's accountants thought it would be smarter to sell the site of the Foster building, a decision that looks possibly less clever as the site's value has since spiralled.

The BBC exiled its best people from the heart of London and put them in White City One, designed by architects Scott Brownrigg Turner, which had earlier demonstrated its form with Terminal Four at Heathrow Airport. It was left to Channel 4 and ITN to commission well-designed headquarters, while the BBC has found, as it now admits, that it is "fantastically expensive" to move the partitions in its supposedly "budget" building.

Now the BBC has decided on a dramatic change of policy. It is to be a new Medici. "As one of the country's greatest public institutions," says BBC director of finance John Smith, "we have been responsible for setting standards in cultural, intellectual and political life." He adds that "we have an obligation to be visible, open and accessible to the public".

Both statements translate into "a property strategy of audacious scale and ambition" that will not just provide offices and recording studios, but will create civic emblems and public places, with the presence and stature of city halls or museums.

So far this policy has led to designs for a building for BBC Scotland in Glasgow, a huge extension to Broadcasting House, and a handsome collection of office buildings now under construction in White City. But the most dramatic project is for a music centre, also in White City, currently budgeted at £54 million and the subject of an architectural competition.

This will be a new home for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Singers and the BBC Symphony Chorus, who are now all based in Maida Vale, and the BBC Concert Orchestra, currently based in the Golders Green Hippodrome. Its two auditoria will be places for the rehearsal and recording of music, sometimes in front of public audiences.

The BBC is unstinting in its ambition. It says the new building will be "world class", "a flagship", " visionary", "dramatic and highly visible" and "an artistic magnet in an area which historically has been culturally dead".

"We are not afraid to champion a potentially controversial design," it declares, "indeed we relish the opportunity to rise to the challenge." You can tell how seriously it takes the project by the people it has put on the competition jury: BBC chairman Gavyn Davies, director-general Greg Dyke, Alan Yentob and five other senior executives.

THE five architects in the competition constitute an unofficial salon des refuses, practices whose ambitious designs have been welcomed as far away as Cincinnati and Yokohama, but in the recent Lottery boom somehow lost out to the more established names of Foster, Hopkins, Rogers and Grimshaw. All five practices are led by women, either on their own or in partnership with men, a first for such a project in the masculine world of architecture. They are Zaha Hadid, Future Systems, Foreign Office Architects, Ushida Findlay and the Dutch practice, MVRDV.

The winner was to have been announced by now and should be imminent, but the BBC's top management has been distracted by other matters. There is also an internal argument as to how much a visionary, miracle-working music centre should actually cost, but is clear that whoever wins the design will live up to its billing.

Future Systems, best known in London for its media centre at Lord's Cricket Ground, has designed a sensuous canopy that filters light through a mesh of interlocking steel. Zaha Hadid has put the auditoria beneath a mighty over-sailing roof. Foreign Office Architects (a Spanish-Iranian partnership that is nothing to do with the government department of a similar name) has proposed two pavilions that stand lightly on the ground like lunar landing modules.

These projects are not just spectacular objects, but also make a valiant attempt to enliven the outdoor spaces in the wilderness that is White City, defined by utilitarian housing estates, big roads, the ever-present hum of the M40.

Foreign Office, which is the likely winner, conceives its building as a piece of ground folded over itself to form roof terraces and enclose the auditoria. The latter are glazed at one end, so that the "inner life" of the building can be seen from the outside.

The BBC's architectural adventure is breathtaking, not least because the future of the corporation is in doubt. The Catholic church responded to the threat of Martin Luther with baroque architecture, and the British to their loosening grip on India with the grand buildings of New Delhi. The BBC is using architecture in the same way, to encounter the possible loss of government support, a risk that current events so dramatically illustrate.

But the overwhelming feeling is that the BBC is getting it right. Its policy is a heroic return to the best principles of the 1920s and 1930s, the age that shaped the corporation. It was a time when public bodies such as London Transport believed that "nothing was too good for the public" and built accordingly.

Broadcasting House, rich with carvings by Eric Gill, is itself a creation of this age. There will be grumbles - "Oi!" for example, "I don't want my licence fee to be spent on that" - to which there is an eloquent answer. It is the dispiriting and spectacular false economy of White City One.

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