Graham Rix

There’s a wide variety of reasons.  Here are some of them.

1          Modern technology: during the last sixty or seventy years there has become available a huge range of cheap mass-produced industrial materials that previously didn’t exist.  More than a hundred years ago house builders just had to use natural materials and traditional craftsmanship.

2          Basic economics.  It’s possible to build a house for £110 per square foot, or £220 per square foot.  So, given a fixed building budget of £500,000, you could build 4500 square feet to a standard that would look cheap on a council estate, or 2250 square feet to a good standard.  The trouble is that, in modern Britain, the larger cheaper house would be worth a lot more than the beautiful house.  And that concentrates the mind of even the most sophisticated enthusiast for beautiful architecture.

3          The Planning System: that buildings were more attractive before the advent of the 1948 Town & Country Planning system is not just a coincidence. The Planning system restricts the availability of land making building plots very expensive.  When a plot becomes available the owner will be likely to accept the highest offer, and the highest offer will be from the builder planning to cram is as much as possible as the cheapest possible price.

You might think that planners would be well trained in architectural design in order to promote only high quality proposals, but the planning system was invented at around the time of the Second World War, when Britain was at its most socialist phase, and the idea of ‘planning’ was to give a broad direction to industry, commerce, housing, etc.  It never quite worked out like that, and planners these days are low paid individuals, wholly unprepared for the role the society needs.  One almost feels that local government is a way of creating employment for the unemployable.

4          A Broken Society: those who could afford to build their own houses tended, in past times, the more the educated folk, from a more sophisticated age.  Politics, popular journalism, popular television, it’s all less sophisticated than it once was, and architecture hasn’t been immune from the general trend.   These days, being able to afford a multi-million house implies no elite public school background, and what people often find most attractive is what they lack in their lives.  If you feel you lack status you’ll want a status-symbol house.  No one really needs a 10,000 square feet house: the reason people want such houses is that they will ‘be someone’ with a huge house.   The only considerations can be: ‘how big?’, ‘how cheap?’, and does it shout ‘look at me?’

5          Socialism: we’re still under the influence of the Modern Movement; and ‘Modernism’ is a socialist art form, which evolved (at least on this side of the Atlantic) at about the time of the First World War.  As with most socialist movements, it tried to turn the clock back to ‘Year Zero’. Period style became a thing of the past (and we still think of period styles ending in 1914).  We were introduced to the view that good architecture was simply the result a rational response to the demands of the site and the brief.  But the resultant buildings were more irrational and stylised than before.  Nevertheless the genius of the movement was to purloin the word ‘Modern’, as most minds are straight-jacketed by the sound of the words.  Hence, there is the idea that if you’re not ‘Modern’ you must be old fashioned, fake, or pastiche.  Wholly ridiculous of course, and if only Neo-Classicists had the inspiration to label their architecture ‘Modern’ we’d still be building with stone columns.

6          The multi-cultural society: a large percentage of people building new houses are not of English descent.  We’ve seen, after the fall of Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s captured palaces, and thought ‘what vulgarity… the taste of an evil dictator’.  But such palaces seem to be the dream of almost every man without the good fortune to be born British; and if a palace is beyond the budget, well at least he can uproot the hedges and install wrought iron railings with gold painted arrow heads, – and use pink concrete to pave over the front ‘garden’.  The latest Mercedes can then be more easily displayed to the neighbours.  (I wonder I’m in danger being thrown out of the RIBA for that view.)