Transcriber: Josefina Tieppo Reviewer: Hiroko Kawano
The poet Goethe said that architecture is like frozen music.
But for me, architecture is much more like live theatre.
Architecture structures space,
and space allows us to enact our stories within it.
Think of all the extraordinary stories
that have been enacted within these walls: The Banqueting House.
This is the Royal Exchange Building
in Manchester.
Until the 1960s or so,
it was the biggest trading house in Europe.
It was incredibly successful in trading cotton and textiles.
It was hugely important in allowing Manchester
to become the prosperous city that it is today.
It also inevitably had links to the slave trade
and is a building, as they say, 'steeped in history'.
My history with the building is a very personal one.
I worked here backstage.
Because in the 1970s,
this trading house was transformed into a very successful theatre -
the architect Levitt Bernstein had a very, very clever idea
of actually landing a sort of lunar pod into this trading hall
so that the Victorian space remains but a modern use is created.
Now, I worked here backstage, as I said,
and the joy of it was that working backstage here
was actually working front stage in the building.
It was almost like an informal year at architecture school,
where I got night after night to sit,
hearing the play going on in the background, inside the lunar pod,
but actually spending time gazing up at the building,
understanding how the structures worked and looking at the stock prices,
hearing the voices of the 19th-century traders.
What I learned from this experience, which was such a privilege,
was how architecture affects how we feel about ourselves.
Architecture affects how we think about where we've come from,
and very critically, architecture affects how we feel about where we're going to go.
In 1941, a bomb hit the Houses of Parliament.
At that time, some MPs thought this would be a great opportunity
to modernise what had become something of a fossil.
Architecturally speaking,
the Houses of Parliament is something of a schizophrenic structure.
It has a classical plan by Charles Barry,
and it has a gothic exterior decoration by Pugin,
which in effect means that we have a pagan temple
with a medieval church clothing.
Churchill was adamant that this was a terrible idea
and that rebuilding the Houses of Parliament
at such a critical time, when the country was at war,
was a really bad idea.
He said, 'We shape our buildings, and afterwards, they shape us.'
It seems to me that Churchill really understood
the importance of architecture, the importance of buildings,
to tell stories.
In totalitarian regimes such as Fascist Italy or Soviet Russia,
you can see that the public buildings which were built at that time
give a much more monumental and unequivocal sense of authority.
This building, which is in Rome, was commissioned by Mussolini.
And the six storeys and the nine bays are quite literally inspired
by the fact that 'Benito' has six letters and 'Mussolini' has nine.
Now that lack of sophistication, which is quite amusing today,
is actually very important in terms of the singularity of the message
that was trying to be communicated at the time.
By contrast,
buildings which are representing national democracy
have to have a much more polyphonic message.
They have to include all sorts of much more complex ideas,
and they have to include a sense of individualism.
In the 1840s,
when the Houses of Parliament was beginning to be built,
it was quite an extraordinary project
because it was the first time that a purpose-built parliament
was being created in this country.
Previous to this, the various palaces of kings and all sorts of other spaces
had been used and been adapted
for some form of parliamentary representation or discussion.
But this was the first time
that we were going to have our own parliament building.
So it was an extraordinary time.
Nonetheless, as a result of the fact that the architects Charles Barry & Pugin
had to deal with existing medieval structures,
there was an awful lot of layering, of story,
that they had to work with.
I would say largely thanks to Pugin,
this is a building that in spite of its novelty,
in spite of a sort of great innovation of democracy,
it still is a building that looks back;
it's a building that looks back to the medieval craftsmen,
and it looks back to pre-enlightenment age.
About the time it was finished in 1870, after 30 years of trying to be built,
it was already falling out of favour.
The Crystal Palace is one of the major reasons
why the Gothic architecture is falling out of favour.
The Crystal Palace, a huge structure of iron and steel,
created a whole new sense of space,
it created a whole new sense of how we might be in the world,
and it created a whole new sense and a whole new story
about the hugely exciting future we were going towards.
Crystal Palace 1851.
This was 1870.
Two very, very different stories were being told to the nation
at the same time.
So the importance of Big Ben really can't be overstimated.
It's a huge international icon.
I think it's an image of which we're all very fond.
But when I actually came to visit
and tried to connect with my own building,
tried to connect with my own democratic story,
this was the experience that I got, and it wasn't a particularly happy one.
This message to me definitely screamed, 'Keep out; you're not very welcome.'
There were lots of quite stern signs from somebody called Black Rod,
who was going to punish me sorely if I did anything wrong.
The public spaces are very cluttered,
and I didn't really feel
that I had the sense of some joy in the democratic project
that I really wanted to have.
This four-lane highway
around Parliament Square and Bridge Street
is more effective than a moat and drawbridge, I thought,
to actually keep me out from the parliamentary space.
Actually, if you look at other projects of democracy,
you can see architecture and democracy working much better together.
This is the Scottish Parliament,
in Edinburgh.
It nestles quite gently.
There's a campus of buildings, and it nestles gently into the old city.
You can just approach it very easily,
and it has a very strong physical connection -
a physical connection to the people and to the rest of the nation.
The architectural motifs are inspired by Scottish history.
And it's a national building,
but it's connected to bigger ideas about democracy.
This is based on the idea of an agora.
The agora was a traditional Greek space
of meeting, of conversation, of exchange of ideas.
The seating of the layout of the chamber is very much based on the idea of exchange
rather than 'you're with us or you're against us',
which is what comes across at Westminster.
You might say that new buildings are much easier to express democracy
because we have the new ideas, we know what democracy is today,
so if you're starting afresh, it's much easier.
This is the 19th-century parliament building in Berlin,
the Reichstag,
which had lain pretty much empty
after the Russians set fire to it during World War II.
But actually, in the 1990s, it was refurbished and repurposed
to represent the newly reunified Germany.
This fabulous new dome was set on top of it.
So a whole new layer, a whole new story
was standing on top
of the somewhat troubled history of the old building before it.
And what's extraordinary about this building
is that the German people can literally walk above and look down into the chamber.
So they can oversee, they can preside over their government,
who we think of as presiding over us.
Today, throughout the world, from Rangoon to Tahrir Square,
people are fighting for democracy.
We, in the United Kingdom, have been extraordinarily fortunate
to inherit this great gift of democracy.
And while I look at Westminster and the Houses of Parliament,
I really feel, as a designer, that the stories our buildings tell us
are not the right ones.
I think it's time to build on Pugin and Barry's ideas.
It's time to build something new and to create a much better public space.
It's time to build and revitalise democracy for our age,
and it's time to create a building that reconnects parliament
back to the people.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)