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

First days at work

We all remember our first day at work - the uncertainty, curiosity and fear. But some first days are a lot worse than others. In 1986 my contract with the Medical Research Council was due to come to an end, and I accepted an invitation to apply for a new post of Director of Planning and Information at what was then the Mental Health Unit of Central Birmingham Health Authority. Since I was the only candidate for the post, the job was mine. The Unit had been under the temporary management of a psychiatrist (Dr Patsy Goodyear) until the first of the new NHS general managers could take post. My appointment was intended to promote the very innovative ideas for mental health services developed by Dr Goodyear, and her colleague Dr Michael Radford. We were later joined by a superb psychogeriatrician Dr Hilary Nissenbaum.

On my first day, I arrived at the John Connolly Hospital. This was a rather battered building, dating from the 1960s,, which had originally developed a reputation as a rather non-conformist therapeutic community. By 1986, it had become a more standard inpatient unit, admitting patients from designated city wards in Birmingham, divided into ‘adult’ and ‘elderly’. Nevertheless, the Hospital was in a pleasant open space, patients could come and go easily, and patients and nurses would kick a ball around in front of the hospital at lunchtimes.

After arriving at reception, I was met by an efficient personnel officer and shown to my ‘office’. This was actually a partly-enclosed space in a corridor next to the toilets. There was a very old desk and chair, and a broken telephone. I gathered that my arrival was not welcomed by all the senior staff in the Unit. There was no induction training, or any indication of what I should do, so I wandered round making appointments to see whoever I could. Later that day, a cheery bricklayer arrived and began to wall me in to create a room. In the next few days, better office equipment arrived, I met the Unit General Manager, and began to be useful.

Over the four years I was in the post, the Unit planned and opened a phenomenal range of innovative services: inter-disciplinary mental health resource centres, the first team in the UK to treat people with acute and severe mental disorders in their own home, an intermediate treatment unit in an old people’s home, and community psychiatric nursing teams that recruited from all languages in the City, while we also planned (with Professor Ian Brockington) a new specialist academic psychiatric inpatient unit at the Queen Elizabeth site. We were therefore in process of developing something quite different from the model of psychiatric services which had been government policy from the mid 1970s. I also helped develop a low-cost computer system which generated rather better data than the expensive Patient Administration System (PAS) promoted by the computer companies and their satraps in different parts of NHS management.

Unfortunately, the satraps won. Central Birmingham Health Authority was merged with its equivalent in South Birmingham, and the combined mental health unit fell under the control of managers and senior nurses who had learnt their trade in big old-fashioned psychiatric hospitals. They were suspicious of academic clinical units, and naturally committed themselves to PAS. The new inpatient psychiatric unit opened in 1991, but became over-crowded. It was demolished 15 years later to make room for a new general hospital, and its replacement is a typically-plush product of a PFI deal. But as you pass it on the railway line, you can see the tiny exercise spaces and the high fences round the inpatient wards. This is to some degree the consequence of the very reforms we promoted. As more and more patients with acute mental illness were treated at home, only the most dangerous and disturbed were still admitted to inpatient care. Psychiatric hospitals became progressively more restrictive.   

Our dynamic staff team was also demolished. People retired or moved to new posts. The general management team fell into disarray, and the general manager developed an interest in setting up his own private nursing home. One day, without warning, his office had been cleared and he was never seen at the hospital again. I left in 1990, and, to my great surprise, became an academic. However, I still look back on my four years in the NHS as the time in my working life when I was most useful.