Chipperfield: BD is toying with our livelihoods

In Amanda Baillieu’s brilliantly circular editorial, she pointed out that my office had been receiving bad headlines over the last months, failing to identify that BD had written the very headlines that she based her leader on.

The summary does sound terrible, but maybe BD needs to be a bit more precise. There is no pub on the corner of the Geffrye Museum site; the building in question has not been a pub for nearly 20 years.The Café Royal has not been slated as sterile by anyone — some food critics had a bad evening in the dining room and were critical of everything from the service to the decor of that room, not of the hotel. No one has said the hotel is sterile: how can a restored 19th century parody of French rococo be sterile? But if you add it as a tag every time you mention it, does the truth then matter any more? That you decide to publish a headline along the lines of “Food critic has bad meal in dining room of hotel designed by Chipperfield” certainly puts one bad headline into your bag.

As of course did the cynical and extremely effective (even the Austrian press published it once it had become such a big story in England!) “Austrian architect who has not been to Biennale slams Chipperfield’s Biennale”, timed to coincide perfectly with the opening of the Biennale and calculated to obscure all other discussion, after nine months’ hard work by my team and everyone else.

I am sure BD’s news headlines have brought excitement to the otherwise uneventful architectural community, but to the enthusiastic teams of architects in my office, the dismissal of our projects without reviewing them is quite demoralising.

Using the device of an editorial, Baillieu makes sweeping criticisms of projects that she hasn’t seen.

Is she sure that our project at De Vere Gardens is so bad? We all thought it was looking quite good. The team who have been working on King’s Cross are quite proud and excited about their project as it nears topping out, and so is our client who has supported us in some brave decisions, especially in the making of the cast iron columns. Is she sure it is so bad? Has she seen it?

During the construction of Turner Contemporary at Margate, she publicly stated that the building was so bad that she “fell off her bike”. She didn’t say that as a member of the public but as the editor of an architectural magazine. The building has proved to be, on the whole, very well received. It looks increasingly like there is a bit of an agenda here.

BD’s journalistic treatment of the Geffrye Museum project is creating a casebook condition about everything I tried to expose in the “Common Ground” Biennale (a refusal to move beyond the stale and clichéd positions that stop all of us developing a more sophisticated dialogue of the issues that surround development and conservation). We have a serious and committed client, very responsible for the future of their museum; we have “in opposition” a group who have, perfectly reasonably, represented their interest in protecting the building on the corner of the site. The argument is a reasonable one and one that should be able to be articulated in a civilised manner. The Geffrye and their advisors point out that it has not been a pub for nearly 20 years; it is not listed and has been accepted as having little significance, especially as it is an isolated building. Furthermore they argue, and here we have to trust their sincerity, that the site is crucial to the future of the museum.

Those who oppose [demolishing the former pub] simply and not unreasonably argue that it should be possible to keep it and that we should not knock down old buildings. Both sides have made their case, the museum has gone through all the proper procedures and consultations over a period of three years. One thing stops this being calmly and objectively argued to its conclusion: a press campaign led by BD, not declaring its views, nor illuminating the argument, just enjoying the story and throwing another log on the fire. Common Ground? More a case of scorched earth.

We all enjoy the excellent pages in BD about architecture and understand that you must indulge in the desire for news but you are playing with our livelihoods when you turn gossip into a story and confuse opinion with fact.

David Chipperfield
London SE1