Who knows what makes a great building? English Heritage, that’s who! Like any aesthetic response or any judgment about taste, a mixture of associational and direct factors is involved. Is this building powerfully articulate about the concerns of an age? Is it a touching memorial? Does it have intrinsic design qualities that lift it above the ordinary? Is it worth keeping? Shall we tell people about it? Who cares?
These questions are quite easily answered when architecture has been nicely patinated by the sanction of the past. The delicious, all-forgiving wash of history disguises many blemishes and, in any case, survival bias tends to mean that only the best of the old endures.\So English Heritage confidently lists everything built before 1700. But what of the modern period? Surely, unless we nurture a nasty nihilistic loathing of our own culture’s credibility, we must be able to identify quality in the here and now?
When and how do we recognise in the best of the modern the same attributes that dignify the best of the past? Half a lifetime ago in New York, when “high-tech” was journalism’s latest bright, shiny label and Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center was Manhattan’s outstanding new building, Tom Wolfe told me:
“You know, 'Modern’ is now an historical style label. You should do a book about it.” In fact, he was doing one himself: From Bauhaus to Our House, Wolfe’s hilarious, perceptive, maddening, but not wrong, account of myopic modern megalomania was published in 1981. It seemed daring at the time.
Proof that “modern” has, indeed, become an historical style label is with us now. This week English Heritage has listed the Lloyd’s Building in the City of London and given it Grade I status. Thus, a ripe 20th-century architectural fantasy inspired at once by Buckminster Fuller’s daft techno-porn, Hanna-Barbera’s lovable Jetsons and Archigram’s unbuildable cartoon cities-of-the-future, joins York Minster and Montacute House, Somerset, as an official landmark, a repository of memory and an exemplary design.