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Urban Trawl
Cardiff: Baudrillard at the Eisteddfod
06 November 2009
With two districts competing for Cardiff’s administrative crown, the result is a city confused by its architectural patchwork
Cardiff is a capital of some sort. Architecturally and topographically it feels internationalist yet utterly provincial; dynamic yet afraid of innovation. If it resembles another European city, it is Brussels. A reluctant, bureaucratic capital, largely aloof from the linguistic and nationalistic conflicts that surround it, its industrial base mostly dead, but with a thriving sideline in admin.
Yet in British terms it feels somewhere between Southampton — though not quite so provincial, a bit more ambitious, freer — and Liverpool, whose port-metropolis grandeur it sometimes attempts, but can’t match. It’s a puzzle of a city, and mostly a very worthwhile one, if not always for architectural reasons.
There are two parts of central Cardiff that appear to be competing for the role of the Welsh capital’s administrative centre, both of them from a tabula rasa — one of the early 20th century, another of the early 21st. The earlier of the two is at Cathays Park, near Cardiff Castle’s gothic fantasia.
Laid out in wide, tree-lined boulevards, with plenty of green space and fittingly Francophone street names, it’s what I imagine imperialist capitals in Africa or Australia to look like — something that says odd things about Wales’s status in the United Kingdom, but complimentary things about the ambition of its politicians.
The ensemble feels a bit dated for its period, the buildings mostly examples of an imperial neoclassicism that was outmoded by the time of completion in the 1930s — but at this distance it’s thoroughly impressive, the free baroque City Hall especially. This really feels like a capital, albeit a colonial one, yet the Welsh Assembly building, the Senedd, is at the other end of the city, overlooking the port. Here is a staggeringly different urban experience.
Cardiff Bay was once Tiger Bay — for decades the UK’s most multiracial area outside of London. The name has been obliterated, along with much else, though, in a city scrabbling around for any shred of heritage, this effacement is bitterly ironic. Here there are two buildings by the architectural wing of Private Eye favourites, Capita — a thuggishly dull, spirit-crushing, dead-eyed police station by Capita Symonds, and the Millennium Centre by Capita Percy Thomas. The latter is best known for replacing Zaha Hadid’s competition-winning opera house, but is not all bad. Its futuristic vernacularisms are populist and original, if slightly patronising.
There are another two “landmark” buildings here: William Frame’s fine, rather Liverpudlian Pierhead, and Richard Rogers’ Assembly building. Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners too often tempers its gothic impulses in favour of “nice” architecture, and the Assembly building is, at least from the outside, decidedly low-voltage for its site — though the interior is reputedly impressive.
What is around it, however, is motley, to put it politely: the washed-up tube of Alsop & Störmer’s rusty visitor centre, a Norwegian Church on one side and, on the other, Benoy’s Mermaid Quay. Here are manifold fashionable gestures of the 2000s at their most banal — vaguely nautical, vaguely decon roofs aligned on “real streets”, often curiously looking like budget versions of the Assembly’s wonky-roof-over-glass-box approach.
What is especially noticeable here is how badly planned all this is, how disconnected each cluster is from the other, how each completely ignores its neighbour. None of the buildings have the architectural courage to make a virtue of this disconnection. The abundant, and universally moronic public art is really not enough to stitch it all together, wasting this gift of a site.
Along the River Taff there are two routes you could track back to the centre. West, past some abysmal new student flats, there’s the well-preserved Victoriana of Grangetown. The houses are set back from the river and, behind, there are squares, a Hindu temple and a welcoming liveliness coexisting with seaside-town sleepiness.
East is multi-disciplinary practice WYG Group’s Century Wharf — riverside yuppiedromes with no public access to the river. No surprises here. You know the drill: render, concrete balconies, irregular windows, sub-Parker Morris standards, lots of materials.
“Strata”, the newest part, features an “animal wall” for the local wildlife, which is more imaginatively designed than the human habitations. Also on this side are the few post-war municipal towers, surviving industry and call centres. It is not an uplifting landscape.
The commercial centre, meanwhile, is better in details than from a distance. While at first you notice the tacky new or clad towers, closer inspection is chaotically rewarding, with layers upon layers of conflicting styles. It is currently centred round “St Davids 2”, the latest outgrowth of the covered shopping centres that were being built here as early as the 1850s.
There is a juxtaposition that clearly wants to be a new civic “hub”, where BDP’s new library meets Benoy’s mainly unlet Hayes Apartments and John Lewis. Here the prow-like corner apparently represents the port — an easier device to justify here than in the many inland British buildings that employ it.
The library, part of the same development, is mannered on the outside; a barcode facade meeting copper cladding, with the entrance to Wagamama clearer than that of the library itself. The interior is better, balancing activity and quietness with a hint of brutalism about the materials.
From here you can survey the most striking object on the Cardiff skyline — HOK’s Millennium Stadium, which is audaciously crammed right into the area’s bustle. Its huge girders and cantilevers are vastly more dramatic than the run of the mill, and certainly far more impressive than the reclad Stadium House. On the ground it clips itself onto Cardiff Arms Park, its 1969 concrete structure still impressively harsh.
The shopping spaces are most interesting in the vicinity of St Mary Street, a rich, shabby and diverse collection of Victorian and early 20th-century bombast, often caught between Edwardian Chicago and a gauntly gabled Flanders. Permeating it are the arcades and markets, some of which are truly extraordinary. The point where Morgan Arcade’s ferro-vitreous roof curves round the streetline is fantastical, as is the adjacent secondhand bookshop, despite an incongruously twee Wedgwood paint job.
The City Market and the other arcades are similarly diverse, especially compared with the identikit fare in the St David’s malls. Near here, a couple of edifices suggest a world beyond shopping: the complex late brutalism of St David’s Hall, and a forlorn statue of Aneurin Bevan, the NHS’s founder, now stuck between McDonald’s and Bradford & Bingley.
Cardiff is marvellously rootless and cosmopolitan. It has no “vernacular”. At its edge, St Fagans brings authentic Welsh architecture to the capital. It is a park full of reconstructed rural buildings, set up from the 1940s onwards, by a landowner worried about the possible expropriation of his land by Bevan’s Labour government. Heralded by a neat, clean-lined visitor centre in the style of the day — the day being 1968 — St Fagans is a spacious, studious Portmeirion, with all the joy extracted. It started off with North Welsh farmhouses, mills, speculative prehistoric Brythonic villages and timber circles, but has since reconstructed fragments of industrial South Wales — a row of shockingly mean miners’ cottages from Merthyr, a wonderfully imaginative Miners’ Institute torn out of Oakdale, Caerphilly, all decontextualised and rebuilt for our comfortable exploration. It’s Baudrillard at the Eisteddfod. Some of it implies there might have been a real vernacular once, with steeply overhanging roofs and lots of whitewashed stone in evidence and, in the case of a pit for cockfighting, there’s some impressively complex wood framing — although why poverty ought to be emulated is mysterious.
Its paths loop around a couple of reconstructions of the future, too — a 1948 prefab and, cordoned off near the entrance, the House for the Future. Obviously a rather ambitious gesture for a place devoted to reconstructing the past, the construction of the future has been enduringly controversial. A large house by Jestico & Whiles, paid for by developer Redrow, it’s like the Merthyr cottages — flat at one end, dramatic at another. It went through a series of metamorphoses, rebranded in a more vernacular fashion as Y Ty Gwyrdd: Centre for Sustainable Living. The combination of green technology with luxury didn’t provide a realistic model of the future, so it closed recently because of “technical problems and a negative reaction from the public”.
It is not altogether surprising that a constructed past has no room for the future, but Cardiff’s centre ought to be able to offer a more convincing idea of where we should go from here. Although its civic ambitions coexist with commercial blandness, I have more hope in it than I could ever have in St Fagans.
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Readers' comments
knowledge economy is engaged optimism...but i m afraid until there s a paradigm shift in human development, we have to make do with the engaged pessimism our flunked history has made
I always think it best to visit the subject you intend to write about, research it well and approach it with an open mind - apart from those essentials - excellent piece sonny!
Sorry Owen, but you come across as an effete london-centric architectural snob who thinks nothing of worth could come from anything outside London, nevermind the 'provinces' The facts are that we all have to work within the existing built fabric and the financial realities of our Clients, as well as the often contradictory desires of the city planners. That Cardiff is somewhat disjointed would never be disputed, but it could never be as disjointed as somewhere like london. It does however add richness to the city.
He's from Southampton. He can use capital letters correctly. He did visit Cardiff. And whatever the reasons behind the acceptance that Cardiff's crud, doesn't make it less so.
Owen Hatherley writes that Cardiff is what he imagines 'imperialist capitals in Africa or Australia to look like." Having been to several such cities and Cardiff, I can assure you that Cardiff doesn't look very much like an imperialist capital in Africa or Australia. Cardiff shares very little with Canberra apart from a love of rugby. As to a city like Accra, well, I can't see the similarity myself. Indeed Mr Hatherley seems to have a pretty unique set of international references to show off in this piece. "If [Cardiff] resembles another European city it's Brussels,' he writes. How so sure? Perhaps its quite like Lille or Nantes? Perhaps even Bilbao? Maybe Augsberg... How about Ulm? Or perhaps - and here I hazard a guess - Brussels is the only European city Mr. Hatherley has ever been to. When you look at it in this context its no wonder Hatherley found Cardiff so 'confusing', he seems to have spent the majority of time comparing it to places he's never been to. On the upside, I am delighted that he found the capital of Wales 'worthwhile'. PS, Who is Owen Hatherley?
Cardiff similar to Bilbao? Don´t think so. Bilbao is nowadays famous for the Gehry museum and enthroned by people who do not live here and know nothing about how stressing it is. Bilbao remains a strongly disfunctional city. There is a line that bisects it, crossing from the old town, over the river, to the new town, where the city shows its richness and the architectural finesse of its middle and upper classes. Once out of that line, you find yourself totally disconnected from the city, lost in a shocking nightmare of seedy streets shaded by tower blocks erected mainly in the 60s and 70s in the most pure junk architecture style.
Who am I? I'm an architecture critic. Often this involves criticising architecture. Find it a bit odd that some people have such a problem with this, but anyway, as you were.