It's Hip To Be Square (But Not Made of Concrete)

Changing city skylines through contemporary styles is laudable but may waste more money than it intends to generate through repopulation

Two stories in Tuesday's Guardian culture section took my eye, because I live near one and lived near the other and at first glance seemed opposite ends of the creative spectrum.

In the first. a row of rather charming terraces have sprung up in Ancoats, where a lot of my family come from in East Manchester following the painfully slow death of a Will Alsop project (my exposure to this guy is fleeting although the gist I get is a weird rococo-absurdist concoction) fronted by the Urban Splash people. Alsop is apparently emblematic of the 'champagne socialism' years of New Labour (how child's toys in Middlesbrough relate to that socioeconomic model I'll never know but eh) in the late Nineties when huge swathes of the city were reconstructed following the Commonwealth Games project win. The turnaround could not be more striking; here is Great Ancoats Street in the late Eighties:

Image from open.edu
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/society/great-ancoats-street-manchester

And here it is now following these rather charming, faintly Scandinavian (truly those Nordic monsters have never lost their pillaging prerogative) terraces in traditional red terrace brock topped with bright and breezy confections.



Image from guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2012/dec/18/social-housing-new-islington-manchester

Functionality is the term here and it's interesting to note the change in approach the respective architects have undertaken in response to the economic times they operate in. "The bones of [the plan] come from Alsop's sketch, made with a glass of wine in one hand and a thick felt pen in the other," reads the promotional page for the Urban Splash project. It's easy to perceive an almost judgement in the construction here - and I personally prefer it.

The second article concerns the long-overdue (my opinion) demolition of Preston city bus station, a monument to the Seventies fashion of brutalism (the station was completed in 1969 when, interestingly, the country was again beginning to sail into choppy political and economic waters). Here's a picture for you to vomit over:

Image from BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/travelnews/Lancashire

However. Whilst the great pieces of architecture rarely appear to be debated (everyone bar everyone loves Barcelona, Gehry's Opera House, Bilbao international airport, The Shard - okay I'm definitely pushing it there) at least to my untrained totally amateur eye it does feel that regeneration is increasingly an argument for money on style. Indeed although eye-watering to me, many protesters have announced the station as a masterpiece of a certain style which ought to be preserved as - don't chuckle - a piece of national heritage. Costs, inevitably in these times, have proved its final undoing.

Whether you agree with that or not, what is it about the functional terraces of Ancoats that are infinitely preferable to the arguably equally more functional and more stylish (i.e. it is of a style) concrete station in Preston? Clearly style - or more probably taste, which possesses a certain moral (i.e. insufferably smug) quality to it - moves on, but surely on any level the arguments here are murky at best.

I suppose my summation here is that perhaps mere functionality is the great undoing (and I recognise my own responsibilities here too) of much popular modern architecture now. Whilst I certainly prefer my red brick block of apartments to living in La Scala (yes I do) I recognise a certain guiltiness on my part; irony underlies the linear idea that the less ornate a thing, naturally the more naked it becomes. And we should be able to live with that.