Teamwork or Masterwork? The Design and Reception of the Royal Festival Hall

Extract

For us, a man is a hero and deserves special interest only if his nature and his education have rendered him able to let his individuality be almost perfectly absorbed in its hierarchic function, without at the same time forfeiting the vigorous, fresh, admirable impetus which make for the savour and worth of the individual.

Hermann Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel (1943)

One of the most enduring themes in the creation and reception of architecture has been the tension between its definition on the one hand as an autonomous ‘art’ practised on the drawing board by individual artists, and on the other as a social activity structured by complex external relationships. That tension was already evident in the Vitruvian distinction between visual, practical and structural qualities. In nineteenth-century England, the issue of individual versus collective ‘authorship’ became bound up with the Puginian tradition of moral and polemical debate, with its stress on strong polarizations of values; hence, the 1892 book, Architecture a Profession or an Art, edited by two protagonists of the latter viewpoint, Norman Shaw and T. G. Jackson. Each succeeding movement — Arts and Crafts, Beaux-Arts and so forth — put forward its own reformist reformulation of the art-versus-society relationship, but it was only in the twentieth-century Modernist years, when ‘language’ and propaganda became as essential as ‘design’ to any architect of standing, that the landscape of architectural criticism and debate finally became dominated by these rhetorical, socio-architectural recipes of reform. Diverse and impassioned concepts of the role of architecture clustered around key individuals or organizations, and around their most important buildings and programmes, whether a ‘traditional’ grand building such as Coventry Cathedral (Basil Spence, 1951–62) or an entire new town. There was high esteem for ‘heroic masters’ and iconoclastic utopianism, of the kind that was largely responsible for the break-up of CIAM in the late 1950s; and at the same time, there was the pervasive influence of communal ideologies and state intervention, and the high status of ‘public’ architectural design offices such as the London County Council (LCC) and Hertfordshire County Council. Nowhere, however, was there a simple, extreme polarization of values; rather, there was a constantly shifting mosaic.