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Two new civic attractions in London, from your friendly monarch and urban government.
By Nathan Silver
November 2002
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Two new buildings--Norman Foster's London City Hall (below) and John
Simpson's Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace (above)--provide very
different expressions of the city's character.
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Top, Press Association Photos Limited; bottom, Amit Lennon
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The first trick of designing a building that encapsulates a sociopolitical
culture is knowing what the culture is. Take the new Queen's Gallery at
Buckingham Palace and the new London City Hall. Could these possibly be
for the same country, the same citizens--sorry, "subjects"? There
seems some mystery about what the British aspire to. Who the hell are we
anyway? "We" is a bit pushy for an American, but after decades
of residence in England I feel entitled to cultural squatter's rights. So
does my Australian wife, who is the proprietor of an ancient London pub.
It recently had its 400th anniversary, and because the pub is on a boundary
street between two local boroughs, she invited the Lord Mayor of Westminster
and the Worshipful Mayor of Camden to the party.
Both incumbents are women, and like Lord Mayors since time immemorial, they
arrived in coaches--well, executive cars--wearing heavy gold chains of office,
with footmen--call them chauffeurs if you prefer--standing by to guard the
mayors, not to mention the gold chains. At the party Camden's ceremonial
task was to toast the Seven Stars pub and all who drank in her, and Westminster's
was to toast Queens Elizabeth I and II.
How do such people fit into public life? (Civil architecture raises
the same question regarding buildings.) The work of these ornamental functionaries
is simply to lend weight to proceedings. Deemed necessary not just in London
but in other European cities too, they handle the decorum of ribbon-cutting
and toast-proposing on behalf of more mundane elected councillors with paid
staffs who are responsible for the dreary stuff like social welfare and
rubbish collection. In recent years that was all the urban government that
British burgs had--I exaggerate, but only slightly--until Tony Blair's administration
allowed certain larger municipalities to adopt an optional system of mayors
and assemblies more like the American model. As a result, London is now
dually served by a multitude of invested mayors who are Lords or Worshipfuls,
plus one new popularly elected, plain vanilla mayor with enhanced powers
for all of greater London: Ken Livingstone.
The mayor and his new assembly needed a new home, because after Margaret
Thatcher abolished London's last municipal government in 1986, its edifice,
County Hall, was spitefully sold off. (It was where Livingstone, then leader
of the former Greater London Council, would put the city's unemployment
figures in big numbers on the facade facing Parliament across the Thames.)
So in 1998 a developers' competition was held, won by a package that included
a proposed site alongside Tower Bridge a couple of miles to the east of
the GLC's old home and Norman Foster as architect.
Meanwhile, another British ornamental functionary since time immemorial
was ready to command new notice: the monarch. For the queen's 50th jubilee
in 2002, crown courtiers anticipated a limited profusion of adoring multitudes
and street parties, so as a celebratory event they commissioned a new gallery
for part of the vast royal art collection. Its site was the mews along the
southwest edge of Buckingham Palace, absorbing a small existing Queen's
Gallery within a new and somewhat larger one designed by the classicist
architect John Simpson.
City Hall and the Queen's Gallery are now open to visit. Their purposes
are different, but they will both be great London attractions. Of course,
their architectural statements and political subtexts draw them far apart.
The Queen's Gallery is plainly intended as a symbol of monarchy. In the
language of architecture, Doric means cultural eternity, so a new
Doric portico marks the public entrance alongside the dull gray flank
of the palace. But no ancestral boost there. Simpson's search for architectonic
timelessness is sabotaged by the gallery's weeny size and gaudy materials.
In place of discreet entasis (the slight convexity that antique architects
applied to columns to correct the visual illusion of concavity), its columns
bulge like gherkins; all of which create the impression that this built
form in baby wear leads to a toy shop.
Upon entering, the shaky Greek classicism continues to distract from its
intention. We proceed through a hallway styled like a movie set of Atlantis--designed
by George Pal--full of costumed flunkeys who search handbags and check
the timing of advance tickets. Alongside is a Greek gift shop featuring
rhinestone-studded albums and framed T-shirts imprinted with "GOD SAVE
THE QUEEN." (And what do they say on the back--"GOD SAVE US"?)
Snide ruminations are inevitable. The monarchy is not as unpopular as some
British republicans hopefully suppose, but it is deeply depressing that
this unrefined presentation is pitched at what is imagined to be the
sensibility of subjects and tourist visitors.
The climax of the Queen's Gallery, however, could never disappoint. Up a
flight of stairs, in three small rooms and three exuberantly colored
large ones, we are privileged to glimpse a wee selection from the most staggering
private art collection in the world. In the opening show this included a
brilliant Rembrandt portrait; a Vermeer, a Reynolds, and a Giorgione attribution,
all magnificent; the celebrated Van Dyck equestrian portrait of the
doleful Charles I; with lesser baubles, such as Fabergé eggs; a solid
silver dining table; the Diamond Diadem (a crown with enormous rocks); and
other tchotchkes fawningly donated to British monarchs or imperiously collected
by them. As Sid James says in the "Carry On" films when a
spectacularly endowed babe appears, Phhhhwaugh!
Criticizing coarse neoclassicism is an easy shot. The real problem with
the Queen's Gallery is that it tantalizes us with what London, and Britain,
continue to be deprived of: the true national art collection, which remains
almost entirely hidden away because of the proprietorially questionable
working assumption that the present monarch and her family own it (and charge
£6.50 a visit, when other British museums and galleries are free).
My proposal is that Buckingham Palace--a soul-deadening specter of vast
civic irrelevance in the heart of London with almost no remaining ceremonial
function--become a public museum. All of it, including its gardens. It might
then be able to show as much as a fifth of the royal collection at
a time, while the monarch relocates to Windsor. (She could hang on to the
Diamond Diadem.)
Foster's soaring, iconic building deserves a "Phhhhwaugh!" too.
Whatever galling tricks the mayor and assembly of London may get up to in
darker days ahead, Lord Foster after all is the man who made the Reichstag
look democratic. Foster's vision for City Hall resembles a large sliced
hard-boiled egg in glass, the stacked slices somewhat misaligned, full of
visible multitudes moving up ramps, staring out, looking down. It's brilliant:
as a symbol of democracy it's hard to fault chopped fragments (read battling
parties, pressure groups for affordable housing and better mass transportation,
etc.) reassembled as an imperfect ovoid form, attempting to be transparent
and nearly succeeding, precariously sited as if ready to tumble into the
river.
To enter, the assembly and staff have to sneak in through an almost secret
door. The visible entrances are for the public, leading at the lowest level
from an exterior amphitheater to a sprawling cafeteria and a huge model
of London, and from the main floor to an overhead view of the model
alongside a stepped helical ramp that climbs inside the egg. Almost the
entire circulation of the building is a public promenade.
One level up there is the Assembly Hall: a magisterial array of about 250
public seats around a fully glazed chamber encircling dignified workstations
for the assembly. From here looking farther up, it's like an interior view
of Tatlin's tower: the exciting helical ramp continues up eight more levels
within the vertical space, its elliptical coils racking sideward to follow
the egg slices. The intention is for the public to wander up and down the
interior ramps when the assembly isn't sitting.
Where is the wire slicer for this egg? Poetically/mimetically, perhaps the
suspension rods of Tower Bridge very close by. The bridge can be viewed
at leisure from "London's Living Room," the observation deck and
reception space under the rooftop, where the eggshell was sliced to get
the commonwealth's spoon in. City Hall is wonderful--maybe too wonderful.
Like Foster's recent Great Court at the British Museum, it is civic architecture
magnificently accomplished, but so "on the nose," as screenwriters
say (in disapproval), that it may take only a few visits to cover the distance
between exhilaration and ennui.
Both of these works, aiming to symbolize the life they hold, give clear
views of the counterposing sociopolitical characteristics of Britain. The
conflicted Queen's Gallery may rankle and raise new questions; the populist
City Hall may draw raves--for now. Let's check back again in ten years and
see how we feel about both.
Nathan Silver is author of Lost New York, Adhocism: the Case for Improvisation
(with Charles Jencks), and The Making of Beaubourg: A Building Biography
of the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
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