So we know that the Willis Faber building in Ipswich by Norman Foster and Michael Hopkins is 1970s because of its use of bright greens and yellows: later both men eschewed applied colour completely during architecture’s Grey Period of the late 1980s and early 1990s. I note that colour is now creeping back into their work again – yet both men would probably think that they were beyond fashion. They might not even be aware that they are doing it. Similarly, every designer who picked up on the "molecule" theme of the 1950s, and applied it to everything from fabric and carpet patterns and chairs to entire buildings such as the Brussels Atomium of 1958, probably thought that this was IT – they’d arrived in design heaven, the future would be molecular, henceforward nothing would change. The attitude lingers - even today, you still find some diehard old modernists who continue to deny that the International Style was a style at all but is instead the only truly style-free way of building.
That’s bollocks, that is.
The dominant 1990s architecture in Britain is the style I call "Polite Modern" because it manages to be clearly of today while simultaneously being so thoroughly inoffensive. It often incorporates wavy roofs and makes great use of pre-patinated (that means green) copper, along with pale stone and slate and timber: materials that were last popular among modern architects in the 1950s, and which Scandinavian architects have never turned away from. But those Michael Caine movies have also stirred a revival of concrete Brutalism: so appropriate for the Irvine Welsh era. It is never called Brutalism, of course: that name has a bad name. But, with or without the presence of board-marked raw concrete, some very austere buildings indeed are at present being shaped. Can it really be true, as I am given to believe, that the South Bank Board in London is once more considering demolishing its Brutalist Hayward Gallery and/or Queen Elizabeth Hall? Do they understand nothing of the zeitgeist?
No – whatever architects and designers may think, their products are every bit as datable as flared jeans: 1970s flared jeans being readily distinguishable from late 1990s or late 1890s flared jeans for reasons too abstruse to adumbrate here. Common to all eras and styles is the implied contempt for all other eras and styles apart from the one being copied. Thus Odeon "moderne" architecture of the 1930s, which had a revival in the 1980s, is deeply uncool at the back end of the 1990s. Just go to the Odeon in London's Leicester Square, and see how the Polite Modernists have just butchered that great black façade. Design fashion is always arrogant: the trouble is, it has to be.
