Report comment

David Chipperfield is of course right that “nothing speaks louder about architecture than architecture itself”, and that “there are talented architects quietly proving that good architecture can make a difference”.

But instead of celebrating these quiet, often anonymous heroes and their quiet, often anonymous buildings, built at modest cost and fitting unobtrusively into their surroundings, he immediately proves his stararchitect isolation from reality by attacking the Education Secretary who “contaminates the debate” by “pronouncing that employing architects is a waste of money”.

This is a clear reference to Michael Gove, who in February 2011 told a Free Schools conference that “We won’t be getting Richard Rogers to design your school”, and “we won’t be getting any Award winning architects’ to design it, because no-one in this room is here to make architects richer” (BD 3 February 2011.

Just to get the facts straight: Free Schools, which Michael Gove was talking about, are local initiatives by local people, who have to squeeze costs (and particularly premises costs) down to the last penny. Mr Gove’s reference was to the Mossbourne Academy, a lovely building, but one that cost £3,000/sqm to build, compared with the Learning and Skills Council’s benchmark of £1,500/sqm for what it called ‘world-class buildings’, and a prefab supplier’s offer of £600/sqm.

Any architectural commentator who can’t see the relevance and correctness of Michael Gove’s words to an anxious audience, looking for reassurance in economically worrying times, is simply confirming people’s worst suspicions about an airy-fairy profession that is out of touch with reality.

And before we hear the usual riposte about how the Mossbourne Academy earned its astromical costs by raising pupil performance: yes, it’s a great building and it’s loved by its users – but on 2 February 2012 its former head Michael Wilshaw wrote in The Guardian: “Mossbourne Academy … now achieves results much better than the national average and sends pupils to Oxbridge, not because of a bright new building, but because of good systems and structures, good teaching, and staff who work hard and make no excuses for failure”.

So let’s praise a fine building without pretending that spending £3,000/sqm on starchitect-designed schools is money well-spent in the drive to raise educational standards.

And finally, if the Conservative Michael Gove’s views be distrusted on party-political grounds, here is Labour’s Education Minister Lord Andonis in the Sunday Times on 9 September 2012: “I made some mistakes .. I gave too free a rein to celebrity architects, which led to some excessively expensive academy projects, such the Evelyn Grace academy in London. It was designed by Zaha Hadid, a wonderful architect, but it came in at nearly £40 million”.

David Chipperfield is a thoughtful architect producing fine buildings, but like most of today’s architectural spokespersons he inhabits a rarefied world that hardly makes contact with everday reality.

Maritz Vandenberg.