page_4

Style is dead. In its place is the bland, the disposable, the repetitious and the ugly. Prince Charles is right, modern architecture is rubbish. Actress Lauren Bacall called it when she bemoaned that film stars aren’t lit properly for the screen anymore. Standards and quality thresholds have been replaced with an epidemic of casual slackness, surface aesthetics and lack of appreciation for the very best, in this fast, throw-away world.

Okay, so nostalgia often means that when looking back – you only reaffirm your own perspective of what you are looking for. However, bring me one person who doesn’t think that the past was better for fashion, style and craftsmanship. Architecture is probably the most obvious example; the Victorian and Edwardian streetways with their beautiful, characterful boulevards with wonderful unique buildings inspired often by the imperial ages of the Romans and ancient Greeks with materials used and crafted in similar ways to pre-industrialisation.

For any of us living in metropolitan cities, the failures and successes of architectural styles are all around us. On one hand technology and construction developments have allowed us to re-use previously abandoned warehouses, factories and turn them into dwellings. But do modern developers know how to build with curves anymore; everything is box-like, production line and I was going to say cookie-cutter, but even cookies are round. It’s just depressing that the majority of new buildings that we live and work in are just steel framed, four walls and cladded to hide the banality of what’s underneath. It’s Meccano living, IKEA flatpack homes for the modern generation. Okay, there are some exceptions, usually in London, but our fabulous regional cities are in danger of looking like Slough (sorry Slough, but it’s true).  They all look the same. Everything seems to have shrunk; quality, size, height materials – all except price. The skill to build properties from brick, stone, wood – real materials, has all but disappeared. Lost skills never to be used again. And don’t get me started on plastic windows. Unless you’re a lab-rat, why would anyone want to live in triple glazed plastic box?

Cross the channel and walk round old Paris or Barcelona – that’s how you design a city. Huge ornate buildings with decorative features, you could look at a thousand times and still see something new. Some would say most of the frills that adorned Victorian properties were unnecessary. But they were built to look pretty, tell a story and most importantly they were created by someone with an eye for style and not just for punching numbers into a computer. The old buildings as practical as they were for that time, were in fact a work of art.

With so many ugly, uninspiring buildings (by the way it’s a worldwide disease, even new builds in Rome and Paris are as bad as the stuff we chuck up), you would expect that surely part of the council planning department’s raison d’être is to question style and quality. And to the idiots who’ll paint their house bright pink, yellow or blue on a terraced street, it’s not self-expression, it just looks shit.

But one of the of the biggest crimes under Taste Police law is the overuse of different fonts and font sizes. Cast your mind back through early B&W pictures of our cities where everything looked neat and pretty.  These were the days of hand painted signs and billboards where the artist would have only his skilled eye, a stencil and a palate of about four or five different fonts. As a result, everything looked stylish and nothing outdid each other. It didn’t feel that a thousand voices were shouting at you, assaulting your senses. Crucially though, the lost art of composition is amiss from most of what we are forced to endure. As an exercise the other day, I walked past a business and counted 27 different fonts and font sizes in the various bits of messaging that it had shouting all over its frontage. I felt like I wanted to die. These days anyone can download Photoshop and have a go at making their own signage, branding and advertising but without any appreciation of style, balance and composition. Digital imagery often is the worst culprit, but at least you can turn the laptop off when you’ve had enough.

I’m not a massive petrol head, but when I visited the Ford museum in Detroit last year the vintage cars took my breath away. Yes, there were the spectacular models made for the high rollers, but the style and form that even the basic everyday models like the Chevy had, makes you wonder where it’s all gone wrong. Is it that we have become far more lazy in what we demand as consumers? Do we not see the beauty in stuff we build anymore? Has function and price overtaken form? We’ve probably all been guilty of throwing out an old set of draws or table that’s served the family for decades to replace it with something shiny and new only for the Formica veneer to come peeling off after the first week and the cheap chipboard insides to quickly fall apart. I think there has to be acknowledgement of appreciating real quality over the pale imitation. Most importantly, people need to appreciate good taste. The Style Police recruitment drive starts here. Sign up, your country needs you.

Words By Iain Hoskins