The Walkie Talkie is a sty in London's eye – and proves we can't say no to money
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Version 0 of 1. This week 20 Fenchurch Street, better known as the Walkie Talkie, was named the winner of Building Design magazine’s Carbuncle Cup, for the worst new building in Britain. Immediately, with a furious vividness usually reserved for fantasies of a sexual character, I imagined every architect and developer involved in the project getting besieged by journalists – by phone, email, in person outside their offices and homes, for several days – not asking, “Do you have any comment?” but rather “Do you see now? Do you see that what you did was wrong?” That kind of fantasy is typical of the weak. The weak are obsessed with repentance after the fact because it’s the only way we can pretend we’ve won. Excluded from the world of action, we live instead in a world of posterity and historical record. Proudly we vanquish our enemies on the battlefield of ideas, the most irrelevant of all battlefields. “Can we take it down now?” tweeted the architect Chris Romer-Lee after the Walkie Talkie’s “victory” was announced, echoing many other comments online. But a remark such as that can only be made with the grimmest irony. Because, of course, we’re stuck with it. Even if every person complicit in 20 Fenchurch Street signed an affidavit of contrition before a jeering mob, the Walkie Talkie would still be there. And on some level the Carbuncle Cup is a perverse celebration of this. It’s a sarcastic toast by a maudlin drunk. It’s an acknowledgment that opinion, taste, criticism and debate are really no more than epiphenomenal spume. That is almost universally the case, but architecture is the field in which it’s most obvious, for the simple reason that architecture involves the erection of gigantic physical indicators, visible for miles, unignorable, undeniable. As Olly Wainwright wrote in 2012, “20 Fenchurch is practically a diagram of the forces that created it.” What the Shard proves about money is only that there is a lot of it around. What the Walkie Talkie proves about money is that we have lost the ability to say no to it, even when it howls giddy demands at us like an addled drug lord riding a zebra through the corridors of his palace. “Hope must be abandoned before it can be salvaged,” write the editors of a new socialist magazine called, pointedly, Salvage. Sometimes, they argue, “pessimism is a rational response and optimism a counterproductive pathology”. The Carbuncle Cup, preferring laughter to tears, expresses the same sentiment. After all, in the face of 20 Fenchurch Street, the only alternative to gallows humour would be the architecture profession voting to dissolve itself for the good of society. Imagine the mood among liberal political advocates today if what they had to contend with was not just a general sense that their recent efforts had come to little, but an actual monument to the obsolescence of their ideals, a 500ft billboard over the Thames that read: “We don’t care what you think, losers.” And we know the visible distortion that the Walkie Talkie imposes on our capital – like a sty surgically implanted in the eye of every Londoner – is nothing compared to the invisible distortions it represents. Over the past few years, there has been talk of “iceberg” houses: mansions in Kensington and Chelsea where the basement extensions are many times bigger than the original residence. But London’s latest skyscrapers should also be thought of as icebergs. Mountains of capital shift and collide beneath our feet. The skyscraper is just the shimmering crest. In this sense, the Carbuncle Cup has an even darker significance. Preventing a building from being built is a straightforward task compared to disciplining a global financial system. A building is in one place. Everyone can see it. Either it’s built or it isn’t. But money is not like that. So if we can’t do anything about the visible part of the iceberg, then what chance do we have with the invisible part? If our institutions can’t regulate this brute insult, how can we trust them with the placeless and cryptic? “Iconic” buildings are often seen as advertisements for their cities. The Walkie Talkie will certainly have that function. Situate your headquarters in London, not Frankfurt or New York. You’re safe here. A city that permitted this excession on its skyline is not about to apply any serious impediments to your greed. More than ever, architecture seems to be where the contemporary moment is dramatised: the oligarchs in their new penthouses, the bondholders in their new office towers, and the rest of us, competing for pseudomodernist new-builds designed on the understanding that we will be grateful to find anywhere at all to live. To take just one recent example, the historic Carlton Tavern in Kilburn was illegally bulldozed during a weekend in April by an Israeli property company called CLTX that had been denied planning permission but were nevertheless determined to build luxury flats there. (They have since been ordered to rebuild it.) Gentrification; the housing crisis; asset-stripping by foreign interests; untameable capitalism; the loss of communal spaces; a spreading pall of gloom. At what other time in modern history would it have been possible for one fairly ordinary building to embody such a cross-section of worries? This is why the Carbuncle Cup feels so important. I wonder what Samuel Beckett would have made of 20 Fenchurch Street. In Beckett’s Murphy, the protagonist walks along Gray’s Inn Road looking for a place to sit down. “There was nowhere. There had once been a small public garden south of the Royal Free hospital, but now part of it lay buried under one of those malignant proliferations of urban tissue known as service flats and the rest was reserved for the bacteria.” At the moment I am in the lucky position of renting one of those “service flats”. The block, built in 1934, is called Trinity Court and, in fact, it’s gorgeous. Not all such development is “malignant”. Murphy’s views seem old-fashioned now. And defenders of 20 Fenchurch Street have pointed out that the Eiffel Tower and the National Theatre and the Sydney Opera House would each have swept the Carbuncle Cup in their day. With this in mind, on Thursday night I walked through the City to observe our villain up close. 20 Fenchurch did not seem chastened. And, admittedly, I found that in at least one sense it does just what it’s supposed to: it feels a lot smaller at ground level than you expect if you’ve seen it from a distance. Which is nice for Philpot Lane – except that the extra “public space” made possible by this innovation is as desultory as a motorway services cafe patio. Look up, and your eye is mystified by the foreshortened arcs and bristly cladding. This isn’t Trinity Court or the Eiffel Tower. Not all ugly buildings are ahead of their time. Most ugly buildings are just ugly. But, of course, “ugly” is a judgment of taste, and taste is just a strange old hobby, marginal and unrationalised, like Murphy, who, if he was staggering down Philpot Lane would probably rather die on his feet than take his ease on one of those granite anti-terrorist benches surrounding the most malignant proliferation of urban tissue that London has ever seen. |