The towers crumble in a second. Concrete becomes dust. In the early morning light an era has ended.
A video of three cooling towers being demolished at Didcot has been watched avidly by many in south-west England who have known these imposing forms on the landscape’s skyline all their lives. Yet for some Didcot residents the live video streaming of the explosion filmed by the demolition company was not immediate enough. In spite of warnings to stay away for health and safety reasons and a deliberately antisocial timing in the early hours, a crowd turned up to witness the towers fall.
But why is the spectacle of massive modern structures vanishing in smoke and thunderous noise so seductive? Whether you found the opening ceremony of Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games entertaining or twee, it would have been a very different show if it included, as originally planned, the live demolition of the city’s Red Road flats.
Clearly, some people find the idea of blowing up buildings as entertainment tasteless. The Red Road levelling show was cancelled after 17,000 Glaswegians signed a petition, finding the idea shockingly insensitive to people who once called the estate home – not to mention the asylum seekers still living on the top floors.
Personally I am with the enthusiasts who turned out in Didcot to see their local landmark demolished. In fact I can’t get enough of buildings being destroyed. I’ve recently become fascinated by the Action Movie app, which allows you to film special effects sequences. I find it a valuable critical release to virtually demolish buildings I hate, using far more violent methods than those planned for the Commonwealth Games ceremony. For instance, I recently destroyed the Shard with photon torpedoes.
The fact is that a lot of modern architecture is monstrous, and seeing it blow up is an ecstatic release. 1960s tower blocks that were built in an ugly spirit of authoritarian design, combined with corrupt penny-pinching, deserve to be destroyed. As for cooling towers that dominate a town or, much worse, an entire rural landscape, the fewer of them there are, the better.
It raises a similar question about wind turbines. Right now they are held to be essential but it seems entirely possible that in the future their transformation of land and seascapes will seem a neurotic irrelevance that never created enough electricity to seriously help save the climate. If and when that conclusion is reached, will crowds be watching the destruction of wind turbines, clapping as they crash into the sea?
For architecture is – at its worst – the most arrogant of the arts. It occupies not a gallery for a couple of months but a skyline for tens or hundreds or thousands of years. A beautiful building adds joy to more lives than any number of novels or paintings. But so much that has been built in modern Britain is colossally mediocre – and it imposes mediocrity on its surroundings. Living in the shadow of cooling towers is like being told that beauty and utopia are not for you. It’s a looming banality, that puts you in your place every morning. Of course it matters what we see when we wake up and go outside. Buildings can make the world better or make it worse. They always do one or the other – there is no neutral architecture.
Fans of concrete, steel and glass, the bigger the better, praise the current assault by architecture on the London skyline as some kind of radical futurism. The Shard has been shortlisted for the Stirling prize, a slap down of all who question it. But those Didcot sightseers reveal the truth: it doesn’t matter how many hymns are written to bad architecture. The most popular moments in the lives of many of the grimly avant-garde structures that shape our environment will come when they topple into dust.
