Moving on

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Twenty years ago, Britain was gripped by an architectural battle of styles. The Lloyd’s building in the City opened, representing the hopes for a resurgence of modernism, while Quinlan Terry’s classical Richmond Riverside was beginning to emerge from scaffolding like a vision by Canaletto. Since 1986, a great deal has happened, but readers of Roger Scruton’s article in The Spectator of 8 April (‘Hail Quinlan Terry: our greatest living architect’) would know nothing of it. In a similar vein, articles by Thomas Sutcliffe in the Independent and Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, responding to the Modernism exhibition at the V&A, present a harsh opposition between two irreconcilable positions, both of them repeating the chain of derogatory associations that modern architecture still trails behind it.

This wave motion of ironclad prejudice breaks through a complacent assumption that ‘modern’, whatever it means, is an unmixed good, while another cycle of magazine pieces promotes the Modernism exhibition chiefly as a shopping opportunity.