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Fray Bentos
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Bliss in this dawn to be alive
Bliss in this dawn to be alive

Now don't laugh, but behind the lovely 1930s Addis building at Hertford is this retail development. Indeed, the entrance to its car park passes between the two halves ...original and extension... of the Addis building. In effect the Addis building now forms a kind of ceremonial entrance to ...well, to this. I can't think of the right word, but in literature there is something called bathos, a ludicrous descent from the exalted to the banal.
OK, some of you might be thinking, if it was alright for Addis to extend their building in the style of 20 years before, why cannot a developer do the same thing now? I don't know the answer but, without being able to put our fingers on the reason, I think most of us know that we are looking here at something unmistakeably inferior. If it were possible now to put up a building which was uncompromisingly modern and which, at the same time, everyone could appreciate as a thing of grace and seemliness, we should know that our civilisation had begun a new ascendency. But it's not. The choice open to us is between barbarism and imitation.
Apart from that I think it's the cynicism involved. Really this is just a framework of steel girders with a weatherproof skin. Notice the way the brickwork stops about five feet up. Why carry it all the way up to the roof when you can use bolt-on panels? Lots cheaper. The two glazed projections are just a decorative flourish which the developers could point out to the boys at the local authority planning office as proof of their "sensitivity". Much of what passes for architecture these days is just the assembly of ready-made components. You order the bits, they are delivered on a lorry and you put them together on the Meccano principle. The architect's part in the process is to vary the possible permutations a little from one project to another. It must be very depressing if you are seriously interested in the subject. I always used to think the same about accomplished musicians who had to earn their living from producing the "musak" they used to play in supermarkets and lifts. Nowadays, of course, you just get "adult contemporary" pop music.

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Taken on: July 3, 2008
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