Confusion in the orders

Confirmed Classicists have taken up the Modernist call with all the zeal of the convert. But do they know what Modern really means?

Happy birthday to Perspectives, the Prince of Wales's architecture magazine; despite rumours that the monthly organ might fold (it has a monthly circulation of just 10,000), it has reached its second birthday under its second editor, Giles Worsley (Dan Cruickshank was the first). Perspectives is a charming glossy that blends a sprig of Country Life with a dash of the Architectural Review, stirs in a pinch of the Spectator and a soupcon of the World of Interiors. This recipe, not yet altogether convincing if sales figures are the sole criterion of success, makes for a pot-pourri of architectural ideas that sits, perhaps, more happily in the guest bedrooms of Georgian rectories than on the drawing-boards of city architects.

The charm of Perspectives, although I do not think the editor would put it this way himself, lies in its mixture of the learned (it is very good on history, gardens and conservation issues) and the delightfully naive. In this month's issue we have John Major (oh yes, the PM himself) revealing "his personal commitment to our heritage and encouraging tomorrow's architecture" in an "exclusive and frank article". A few pages on we get to meet the inspired Australian architect Glenn Murcutt. Murcutt's beautiful modern timber and corrugated-iron houses have been featured in Britain over the past 12 or 13 years by many architectural and interiors magazines: the introduction to the article about him in Perspectives asks "Who is he? Kenneth Powell discovers architecture's best-kept secret". Kenneth Powell, an excellent architectural historian and a polished writer, knows exactly who Glenn Murcutt is, but here he is presented, to an audience for whom architecture is still the mother art, in much the same light as the judge who asked, who, pray, are the Beatles.

Perspectives can posit such a question because, although it will protest against this mild accusation, it hankers for the past, panting for the assurance of Georgian England and the classical orders of architecture. Its attempts to embrace overtly Modern architecture are far from half- hearted, but somehow either lacking in conviction or bursting with misplaced enthusiasm.

In several issues of the magazine, a number of writers and historians who, only a few years ago, frothed at the mouth when the names of avant- garde and otherwise progressive architects were mentioned, are now converts to and enthusiasts of the most brutal and insensitive megastructures of the Sixties and Seventies. As a child it was all too easy to spot a convert at mass; they would genuflect theatrically, make signs of the cross as if they were beckoning the QE2 into dock and bow their heads low at every mention of Jesus, which made us recusants giggle, unkindly, because they looked like hens pecking at grain in a farmyard. In similar vein, Classical converts to Modernism and the avant-garde tend to protest too much: even the ugliest housing estates of the Sixties are now held in reverence and are to be protected by statutory listing so that their unfortunate residents have no chance of seeing their soul-destroying homes redeemed by remodelling or renovation. That way, a certain madness lies. Buildings that are fascinating and important as designs on the drawing board and in architectural histories are not necessarily the same as the buildings we deserve or should even keep.

What is happening, in the pages of Perspectives, in the burgeoning membership of the Twentieth Century Society and other bodies suddenly keen on the architecture of recent times, is a wholesale transference of the idea and ideals of the immensely successful conservation movement in Britain to the stark reality of modern design. This is often ironical, because one of the underlying tenets of Modern Movement architecture is that it should be functional. This does not mean skeletal or brutal, but fit for its purpose; so while a railway station is unlikely to be at its most convenient if designed along the lines of an opera house, so a luxury restaurant would be dysfunctional if rooted in the aesthetic of Broadwater Farm.

At its best, Modern architecture (as opposed to modern architecture with a small "m", or what we build now, which includes Neo-Georgian cul-de- sac housing for the newly mortgaged and Joke-Oak villas for the gin-and- Jag executive set, as well as Stansted Airport and Waterloo International) has been and is responsive to changing needs. Architecture is, in one sense, frozen music, but when we are talking homes as opposed to temples, offices as opposed to memorials, the conserve-it-at-all-cost mentality is wrong-headed and even arrogant.

The classical convert to Modernism is too zealous by half. Why is this? Partly because converts tend to be zealots and partly, perhaps, because they bring with them to an appreciation of Modern architecture the rules and metaphors of the language of Classicism.

Those who patronise, edit, write and read Perspectives are Classicists at heart. What they say about Modern architecture, although welcome in many ways, is slightly off the boil because their enthusiasm is, in part, a pretty facade behind which their undiluted faith in the England of the 18th century survives intact and unrestored.

It is easy to sympathise, on a dreary day, with those for whom no architecture will ever match the English Georgian terrace and none of them will trounce the Royal Circus, Bath, the most exquisite of all 18th- century city housing. But, while the language of classical architecture has worked well in modern times for such delightful visual escapes as Sir Clough Williams-Ellis's Portmeiron (the fantasy holiday village on the Cambrian coast), it has looked like the stuff of Toy Town when applied on a grand civic scale as seen at Richmond Riverside to the designs of St Quinlan Terry (or God's Own Architect as he is known in classical spheres).

Yet there is a way forward through which unreformed Classicists, classical converts to the late 20th century and those who pursue a progressive line of thinking can work together and agree on what constitutes good modern design. This is important, because as Perspectives knows, these various factions (real and unreal - many of the apparent divides between "Classicists" and "Modernists" are invented by magazines such as Perspectives for understandable journalistic purposes) are making redevelopments such as that of Paternoster Square, flanking the north side of St Paul's Cathedral, fraught with unnecessary difficulty. "Style was never the real issue at Paternoster," writes Giles Worsley in his leader to the second-anniversary issue of Perspectives, "however exasperated Modernists may have been by the idea that Classicism was still a valid way to design. The true battle here is about the balance to be achieved in the modern city between private interests and the civic realm." Quite. Nevertheless, this does not explain why Perspectives has championed a fruity exercise in ersatz classicism at Paternoster Square. There may well be a case for a truly modern interpretation of classical architecture on this important and sensitive site in the shadow of Wren's great temple, but no case for dressing up a concatenation of brawny office blocks and showy shops in Jane Austen costumes. At the turn of the 21st century, these will not wash.

The way forward for a reconciliation between the journalistically proposed "Classicists" and "Modernists", and the redemption classical converts to Modernism seek, can be found in such modest 20th-century buildings as Arnos Grove tube station. This handsome building, although at the hub of nothing grander than a glum-looking north London suburb, is a significant and brilliantly resolved meeting between Classical and Modern architecture. Designed by Charles Holden (1875-1960) and opened in 1932, Arnos Grove station is at once an ancient Roman temple and a functional Modern building. Its design is based resolutely on the building blocks of Vitruvius and Hadrian - the golden section and its scions, the cube, double cube, circle and sphere. It marries, too, the craftsmanship, in brick, bronze and brass, of the golden days of 18th-century English craftsmanship with the materials of our own century, principally concrete and steel.

More than this, this Modern Classical workaday civic temple enhances the otherwise characterless street in which it stands proud, while harmonising with the scale and texture of its lesser neighbours. This little railway station is quite some feat and every bit as important in the history of British architecture as the Queen's House, Greenwich, by Inigo Jones (the Renaissance meets the Stuarts) or the Red House, Blackheath, by Philip Webb (the Arts & Crafts house, that, perhaps more than most, led to the fast-breeding, free-plan suburban villa).

Along with Charles Holden, there were a number of architects who flourished between 1920 and 1940 who understood how it might be possible to teach the Modern child the language of its ancient and noble predecessors. Holden and his ilk had no intention of reviving past styles, of dressing new types of buildings in historical fancy dress and would be baffled by today's attempt at Paternoster Square and elsewhere to trivialise great urban sites with sentimental conceits. Whether tube stations, LCC hospitals or cemeteries for the fallen of the Great War, Holden ennobled the sites his buildings rose from, and dignified those, down the generations, who have used them.

If Holden's spirit (not his designs) could inform the architects who will build at Paternoster Square and enliven the pages of the third anniversary issue of Perspectives, the zealotry of the classical convert to Modernism could well be diminished and the false divide between "Modernist" and "Classicist" healed.