Modern buildings are shiny things, all glass and steel. Some are better than others; I detest the plastic boxes that pass for blocks of flats, but the Gherkin is rather elegant. However, my worry applies to all of them. Are buildings being built simply for the moment—for the now? Are they being built to win architecture prizes and make people a lot of money? Clearly there is a need for new buildings, especially in London, which is home to any number of architectural monstrosities, many of them perpetrated in the Sixties and Seventies when clearly people decided it wasn’t worth building anything good.
But what of the future? Buildings age. People live in them, work in them. They get grubby, the sheen fades, the stone becomes grey, not white. Brass is rubbed down, tiles chip, grime accumulates. My fear is that buildings built for the moment will not grow old gracefully; they will, in twenty or thirty years, be grubby and unkempt creatures. One of the pleasures of living in London is appreciating old buildings that have stood for centuries. They have history behind them and within them; they embody the passing of time. They are no longer merely creations of the moment; they have changed with the times, their exteriors altering with the ages. The darkening of brick and stone, the chipped tiles, these things add to the texture of old buildings. In a way, they are improved, not worsened.
Have architects given thought to the future, to what their buildings will look like in fifty years, or a hundred? Have they designed them not merely to function and to appeal visually, but to age, to degrade gracefully?
