Building Design magazine last week awarded 20 Fenchurch Street – the Walkie Talkie building – its “Carbuncle Cup”.

Jonathan Jones, Guardian art critic



There are two terrible differences between architecture and other art forms – permanence and prominence. No one is making us read books we don’t like and even the lousiest art exhibition soon ends, but the ludicrous warped ostentation of the Walkie Talkie is not going anywhere, no matter how many prizes for bad architecture it wins, nor can anyone in or near the City of London avoid its manic parody of modernity.

It’s time to reject this fatalistic sense that grandiose design mistakes are irreversible – that we just have to put up with them. I seriously think this building should be done away with. The reason is not just that it is silly in itself, bulging on the skyline like a model that has somehow wandered out of the 1960s TV show Thunderbirds, but even more urgently to shock developers into some sense of humility. For the Walkie Talkie, let’s face it, is just the most risible of the plague of big, bad buildings eating up the capital’s sky.

Demolish this deranged building to create a firebreak that ends the inferno of towers

London is being wrecked by outrageous crimes against architectural taste. Walking around the City, it really seems there is a competition to put up the most cynically flashy, vacuously ahistorical and insensitive eyesores. A corporate dystopia is being built before our eyes. This rush towards a chilly fake avant garde future seems unstoppable. What can anyone do, apart from moan or award the Carbuncle Cup? This is what we can do: demolish this deranged building to create a firebreak that ends the inferno of towers.

Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum



Nobody – not even, so I have reliably been told, its designer, Rafael Viñoly – is happy with the way that 20 Fenchurch Street has turned out. Nobody except maybe for Peter Rees, for two decades the City of London corporation official who presided over the firestorm of high rises that has swept over the City of London with apparent glee. Standing outside the Design Museum, you used to get the most spectacular view of Tower Bridge and the river. Now the sky you used to see framed by the bridge is blocked by Viñoly’s work, the wrong building in the wrong place.

But much as I would wish this unappetising lump gone, dynamiting it, or, more likely dismantling it piece by piece over a couple of years, is not a great idea. We demolish far too many buildings, too quickly. It is enormously wasteful, and it creates the idea that there are quick fix answers to tough problems.

When Glasgow’s once utopian high rises filled up with refugees and hard cases, the instant solution was to move them out, blow the buildings up, and start again, as if it were architects alone who were responsible for all that had gone wrong. Lousy wages, alcohol and war in the Middle East has got a lot more to do with it than Le Corbusier’s doctrines. There are places in Britain that have gone through the cycle of demolish and rebuild three times in the course of a lifetime.

You suggest that architecture leaves the public without a choice; they simply can’t ignore it. I am sure that you of all people aren’t suggesting that all new buildings should be as inoffensive as possible for fear of upsetting people?

You should also not forget the fact that while you, I, and everybody that we know hasn’t a good word to say for Viñoly, or the work of a whole host of other, more obscure architects who at this very moment are building a cluster of equally tall, and equally grim tower blocks between Vauxhall and Battersea, minds do change.

I still find it very hard to accept that Centre Point, a building that once personified hit-and-run property development, should now be a listed building. Conversely, I am dismayed when I hear that there are still people in charge of the Hayward Gallery and Queen Elizabeth Hall who still haven’t woken up to the fact that these are buildings that are worth cherishing rather than destroying.

JJ I definitely don’t blame Le Corbusier for London’s plague of architectural pretension. Or even Sant’Elia, although buildings like 20 Fenchurch Street do seem to exploit modern engineering to create futurist dreams that would be a lot better left on paper. But I think 21st-century Britain has a neurotic compulsion to overprotect the new. The reason for this is that asinine conservatism was so fashionable for so long that we’re terrified of returning to it. The Carbuncle Cup, let’s not forget, takes its name from one of Prince Charles’s less-than-progressive interventions in architecture. But now, everyone is so scared of sounding like Prince Charles or seeming to be a lover of mock-Georgian that we tremble to take the wrecking ball to this massive, tasteless monstrosity. Personally I am prepared to take the risk that a change in taste will make the Walkie Scorchie a lost masterpiece. Let it be mourned. The drawings might look lovely in a coffee table book.

This is not about experiment versus caution, danger versus cosiness. We live in a golden age of architectural creativity but London is missing the point and instead of Gehryesque poetic miracles we get... Lego City. After a day in Paris at Frank Gehry’s exhilarating fish-like, wave-like Louis Vuitton Foundation I found myself on the South Bank almost weeping at the view of 20 Fenchurch Street. What will London look like in 20 years at this rate? We can’t let a fear of turning into Prince Charles make us the timid dupes of stuff that is not brave, just bad. Truth is, I’d knock down a lot more than just this one scapegoat…

DS You suggest that the Prince of Wales is guilty of “asinine conservatism” for wanting to stop the building of the very same towers that you want to knock down? That sounds like having your cake while trying to eat it, never a good look.

What we need now is less dynamite, less sound and fury, and a hard look at how we can do things better.

Thirty years after the Prince suggested that “say what you like about the Luftwaffe, they did less damage to London than Britain’s modern architects”, it’s probably time to give him a break and move on. That view of 20 Fenchurch Street that brought you to tears is the exact opposite of what he wanted. We have ended up with the closest thing in Europe to the Shanghai skyline, not because of any individual architect, and not because of the prince, but because when Ken Livingstone became mayor he decided London’s future was to be the financial capital of the world. He wanted it to look the part. That was when he called people who didn’t agree with him the “heritage Taliban”. What we need now is less dynamite, less sound and fury, and a hard look at how we can do things better.

JJ You’re quite right of course – I was being unfair on Prince Charles. History has proved him right. But on the other hand I love modern architecture. The reason Livingstone was able to get away with caricaturing opponents as heritage Taliban is that this debate always gets so polarised in Britain – so it seems as if anyone who dislikes any modern building is calling for a return to the Victorian age. What’s needed, surely, is a much more sensitive and socially purposeful public debate about architecture. When I said earlier that architecture has more power over our lives than other art forms, that is not just its danger but its glory. No other art can do so much to make the world we live in a better place.

The London of today would be totally recognisable to the great 19th-century critic John Ruskin. He loathed the neo-Renaissance style of banks and business buildings in his day – he’d see immediately that the ugliness of buildings like the Walkie Scorchie is a raw expression of money and greed. Instead, he would say, we need architecture that sets out to truly enrich the world about it with generous and imaginative public spaces and vistas, rich detail, and above all a sense of human community.

I think Ruskin would advise pulling down this rubbish and starting again. In one of my favourite passages of his criticism he wishes a rich philanthropist would buy up all the paintings of minor Dutch masters, put them in a palace – and burn it to the ground. Well, you’d be right to call that extreme. But architecture is different from painting because it takes up real space on earth, potentially forever. Either 20 Fenchurch Street is there as long as it endures, or we do something about it. In this case the stakes are too high to be conservationist. For the sake of London’s future we need to put an end to this madness. Let’s be Ruskinian and blow up the Walkie Scorchie. And Charles can press the button. Perhaps it would make a good way of celebrating his coronation.

DS You’re wrong about architecture being something that controls people’s lives. People have the power to change the meaning of the buildings they inhabit. Even Stalin’s gift to the people of Poland, the Palace of Culture in Warsaw, has turned into something the Poles want to keep. Let’s not demolish Viñoly’s tower, let’s turn it into a refugee hostel.

Ettore Sottsass and the Poetry of Things by Deyan Sudjic is published by Phaidon, 21 September