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It's been another mixed week for Lord Rogers. His practice has won the Stirling Prize, the award for the best building of the year, for the Maggie's cancer care centre in Hammersmith. At the same time his lawyers are chasing £2 million of fees they say he is still owed by developers Qatari Diar following the abandonment of the Rogers-designed redevelopment of Chelsea Barracks.
The barracks project failed following opposition from local residents and Prince Charles. Meanwhile, the Stirling Prize coincided with a YouGov poll that showed that, presented with snapshots of modern or traditional buildings, most people said they prefered the latter. Yet traditional buildings don't even get close to being on the Stirling Prize shortlist, and the modern-looking Rogers wins. It looks like a clear case, as the traditionalist architect Robert Adam is keen to point out, of professional elites trampling on the wishes of the public.
It isn't, exactly. In polls of people's most-loved buildings, modern structures such as the Gherkin, the London Eye and the Eden Project often come top. The Pompidou Centre in Paris, which Rogers helped design, is an extremely popular building that would never have been built if it had been first subjected to YouGov polling. Public taste is not uniform and you need professionals with a touch of arrogance to come up with the controversial monuments that become national treasures.
But a message is coming through from the public, to which architects should pay attention: there is something about old-looking buildings that they like. YouGov didn't go into detail, but I'd hazard a guess that it has something to do with scale, with buildings having bits you can relate to, with a certain familiarity of features, perhaps some tactility and delight in the materials, and the sense of something made rather than manufactured. Perhaps also a sense that a new building works with whatever is around it to create spaces with some kind of wholeness to them. Some playfulness might help.
What is wanted is charm. It's the quality that Rogers's Chelsea barracks scheme didn't have. There's a paradox here, as Lord Rogers is personally exceptionally charming - but it's not always evident in his practice's projects. So he finds himself chasing £2 million through the courts on account of a charm deficit.
Where I differ from YouGov's respondents is in the belief that you get charm by replicating charming buildings of the past. We've been round this block before, in the 1980s, when Tescos were disguised as barns, and the rich inventions of antiquity and the Renaissance were looted to disguise office blocks.
This year, outside the Serpentine Gallery, the Japanese architects Sanaa put up a pavilion that used curves and reflections of greenery to create something intensely charming - yet there wasn't a cornice or pediment in sight. In front of the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green stands a modern addition with an intricate inlaid pattern of coloured stone. It engages and intrigues. What architects need to do now is achieve the same qualities on the scale of colossal projects such as Chelsea Barracks.
