Stop lobbing bricks at Zaha

A certain degree of tolerance and patience has been demanded of your more liberal and visually aware readers over the last three or four years, since we have lamely come to expect a steady stream of major articles extolling the virtues of a dreary collection of buildings with certain characteristics.

Preferably brick, preferably consisting of repeated rows of windows and preferably little else to make note of. Indeed we have been subjected to a certain brand of dour, repetitive, featureless, even grim architecture, selectively to be found in parts of the Netherlands and the UK.

Of course it is a positional perspective upon the state of architecture, we know that, but the shrillness and myopia that supports it is now blown open by the quite vicious review that Mr Woodman has given to Zaha Hadid’s little Sackler Gallery restaurant (News September 27).

He has clearly found it impossible to resist a series of swipes that include the mannerism of the building but also the issue of its procurement.

Before continuing, I shudder to think of an alternative that would suit his tastes: imagine the park newly enlivened by a featureless brick box reminiscent perhaps of one of those emergency toilet blocks erected shortly after the second world war (I knew where I had seen it all before).

Not that Zaha needs my support, for sensibly she will shrug it away. Yet this article reminded me of earlier publications of her work in BD in which (justifiably) seven or eight pages of quite adequate photographs have then been accompanied by groaning, bleating, grumbling put-downs.

Internationally this doesn’t seem to matter, but there are people out there who do not get the opportunity to travel, to hear good lectures, to acquaint themselves with an international level of critical comment, and I wonder if they are suspicious: do they buy the Woodman position? Or are they ready to cry out, like the Hans Christian Andersen child: “But he has no clothes.”

Enough is enough. Who out there agrees with me?

Peter Cook
London EC1