Recently the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne pledged £30 million towards Thomas Heatherwick’s Garden Bridge over the Thames. It was an easy offer to make towards a conspicuous piece of design by the author of the 2012 Olympic flame. Contrast this with the Education Secretary Michael Gove’s remarks about the contribution that our profession might make to schools: "We won't be getting Richard Rogers to design your school. We won't be getting any award-winning architects to design it, because no one in this room is here to make architects richer."
Together, these events indicate that our government does not understand our profession. Genius minds may be called upon to make exceptional contributions to a built environment that otherwise need not be exposed to such frivolity and impracticality. And yet, every day architects make practical decisions that lead to great buildings. It’s about time the politicians here in the UK and abroad listened to a very ‘practical’ profession.
In his essay "Chicago Frame," published in the 1950s, architectural historian Colin Rowe describes how the ‘practical’ architect in the city of Chicago in the 1880s and 1890s was expected to abide by his speculative client’s objectives - not to embellish upon or undermine their commercial intentions: ‘Magnificently undisguised, the office buildings of the Loop owe something of their authenticity to their being no more than the rationalization of business requirements…they are scarcely, in any deliberate and overt sense, cultural symbols.’ (1) He writes as if this version of an architect was not the norm. Still though, when commentators write about architects, they rarely dwell on the practical, and yet, it was just this practicality that led to a uniquely rich seam of architecture in downtown Chicago at that time.
