Peter Barber is the sort of architect that conservatives usually loathe. How did he become “the modernist that traditionalists like”?
Mr Barber is one of Britain’s most acclaimed modernist architects. On September 6th he received a lifetime-achievement award from, and ten days earlier his firm won four awards from the Royal Institute of British Architects. His work is animated by his socialism. He mainly builds social housing, where the absence of shareholders can make it easier to innovate. Cutting-edge young architects dream of working for him.
The sort of architect that conservatives usually loathe, then. In fact, says Ben Southwood, until recently the head of housing at Policy Exchange, a right-leaning think-tank, Mr Barber is “the modernist that traditionalists like”. One reason is his magpie tendency: he cites influences as diverse as Francesco Borromini, from the Baroque period, Le Corbusier, a modernist pioneer, and Victorian almshouses.
This convergence is striking in light of the Conservative government’s plans to boost housebuilding. In 2018 Theresa May, then prime minister, set up a commission to advise her government on how to improve style in the industry. Its final report recommended a planning regime that would “ask for beauty” and “reject ugliness”. In July Mrs May’s successor, Boris Johnson, created an Office for Place to carry on its work.
The government’s design-code guidance features photographs and plans of charming, traditional streets—and Mr Barber’s Donnybrook Quarter, a high-density, tree-lined street in Tower Hamlets completed in 2006. But the meeting of minds is by no means absolute. Mr Barber disagrees with the government’s insistence that prettier homes are the best way to ungum planning. He favours simply building lots more council houses.
Still, it hints at an intriguing possibility: the emergence of an architectural third way. Clients, says another architect, are increasingly asking for “traditional architectural language” with “something overtly modernist”. Samuel Hughes, a research fellow at the University of Oxford, sees parallels with a previous era. He compares Mr Barber’s amalgams to the interwar work of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who blended tradition with modernism, notably at Battersea Power Station.
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