Issue 19: 2015 09 10: New Face in Town

10 September 2015

New Face in Town

by Neil Tidmarsh

P1000582Has anyone else noticed that a new, distinct and uniform architectural style is sweeping through our towns and cities? Every office building and block of flats to go up over the last year seems to have been designed by the same architect. The style is so consistent and so pervasive that I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t a just a mere fashion but a whole new school or movement.

Where did it come from? Who started it? Does it have a name? Does it have its own aesthetic theory? Its own manifesto? Have I missed out on some grand launch or declaration?

The style is simple enough. A blank façade (flat, usually brick, square or rectangular but sometimes with a zig-zag roof-line giving an impression of irregular, asymmetrical gables) with square or rectangular holes punched through it for big, single-paned windows.

That’s it. Sounds simple and innocuous enough. Not so very different from what has gone before, perhaps, but focus on those differences and they become rather startling.

P1000586The very blankness of that façade, the very featurelessness of it, there’s something new and defiant about that. Absolutely no decoration whatsoever. Not even window-frames. Especially not window-frames. Indeed, the absence of window-frames seems to be its defining feature, its most distinctive novelty.

What’s wrong with window-frames all of a sudden?

Ever since buildings have had windows, architects and builders have framed them in one way or another. A window has to be more than just a hole in a wall – but in these new buildings, that’s all they appear to be. It’s almost like a face where the eyes don’t have eye-lashes, eye-lids or eye-brows (no wonder eye-defining cosmetics such as mascara, eye-liner and eye-shadow are beauty essentials); but blank and inscrutable – more like a face wearing dark glasses. Or a face with empty eye-sockets.

Is it an ideological statement – an honest building without any cosmetic embellishment or deception? Is it a way to keep costs down? Is it the result of some sort of new technology?

I wouldn’t call it ugly (some might – though no doubt there are others who would call it beautiful). But I do find its visual effect somehow disturbing. There’s something forbidding about its plainness, something intimidating about its blankness, its apparent refusal to do more than what is absolutely necessary. I’m reminded of barracks, prisons, fortresses, secret police HQs. An uneasiness not so powerful that you’d register it consciously, but subtle enough to be picked up by the subconscious perhaps and make you shiver without knowing why as you walk past.

P1000590And that’s why the nature of our built environment is such an important issue. It influences the mental and emotional quality of our lives even when we don’t realise it. So the next time you’re walking to or from the office and feel a sudden lift or plummet of the heart, take a good look around you. Its cause might not be the welcome e-mail or unwelcome text you’ve just received, the deadline conquered or still ominously looming. It might be the building you’ve just passed without really noticing it, the unknown architect secretly stirring your soul with his very public work.

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