A guide to crapitecture

Two years ago on a cold November day, I visited the Nottingham Contemporary - a new centre for the arts resembling a square black box, built on the side of a hill next to the splendid High Pavement area of the City. When we had eventually found the entrance, we discovered that there were no exhibitions at all that day, although the staff did tell us that we were free to use the (over-priced) café and buy things in the large museum shop.

Nottingham Contemporary is a archetype of what should be called ‘crapitecture’, which can be recognised from these guidelines:

1.    It is difficult to find the entrance. Before the rise of crapitecture, all builders and architects strove to make the entrance as imposing as possible. This was achieved through porticos, archways, and gatehouses. Even humble dwellings had a front door, plainly visible, often painted in bright colours to indicate the pride of the inhabitant. But crapitects see their work as a personal statement of their artistic merit - a kind of very large sculpture, and there is no front door on a sculpture.

2.    It fails in the most basic sense to meet the requirements of its occupiers. Like the Nottingham Contemporary (an art gallery without any art), crapitectural buildings fail in the most basic way to fulfill their function. Roofs leak (it helps if they are flat), vast interior atriums waste most of the internal space of the building and are expensive to heat, libraries are over-heated and noisy, and so on. Of course, the lack of exhibits is not the fault of the architects who built the Nottingham Contemporary, but there is an increasing tendency for museum buildings to attract more attention and cost more than the items they supposedly exist to display.

3.    It is located with no reference to the surrounding townscape, except in the negative sense of destroying a previously attractive local view or dominating all nearby buildings. All of us have a favourite list of such crapitectural buildings. Like most British cities, much of Nottingham has been defaced by grotesque developments - the Broadmarsh Centre which blocks off a medieval street, or the utterly vile Maid Marian Way. Nottingham Contemporary does not quite deface one of the best remaining areas of townscape in the City, but it hardly adds to it. Did the architects even visit the site?

4.    It is widely praised in the architectural press. The website for the Nottingham Contemporary includes a long list of quotations extolling its virtues. Fortunately, there are rival voices in architecture, such as the annual Carbuncle Awards (website below).


All this might suggest that the people of Nottingham have neglectfully allowed their city to be defaced without protest. I suspect that is not the case, and, that like most people in this country, they are dispirited at what has been done to their beloved city, town or village. Bad architecture exists because people have limited power over what is built in their community. In the past, the aristocrats, merchants and bishops who had the power and resources to erect great buildings often had an eye for beauty, and so competed to build the most beautiful buildings. More importantly, they also erected buildings that they would themselves live, work or worship in. Monumental buildings now are often the product of corporations working with international design consultancies, and are built with an eye to the next customer in Dubai, Shanghai, and such places. Once built, they become a temporary entry in a marketing portfolio. The rest of us have to put with them for far longer.

Carbuncle awards