Some of my best friends are architects, as one says - well, I know a few - and so I hope they will forgive me for what may appear to be 'architect bashing'. (Don't the bankers deserve a break?) I am in fact in awe of architects, who know so much and, sometimes, can do so much, but what I criticise is more their position in society, and I am acutely conscious that, in this respect, furniture 'designer-makers' are in no position to start calling any kettle black.
We all, these days, in our modest, if destructive, occupations, aspire to the status of artists. Perhaps as 'genuine' 'artists' (note the separate inverted commas denoting a complete breakdown of connected thought) have turned to the contemplation and arrangement of the mundane ('artists' as 'arrangers' as in 'flower arranger' or, more sinisterly, as 'fixers', as in relieving the rich of their money?) there has ceased to be any policeable boundary between 'art' and artifice (not that there was in centuries past).
Architects, as the inevitable hand-maids of Mammon, whose adherents have long dominated (after the public functionaries) the honours lists, for services either to making money or to giving some of it away in their comfortable maturity, have certainly got their feet, and other parts of the anatomy besides, into the pantheon, to the extent that they too are now the recipients of buggins-turn knighthoods and peerages.
It used to be, when I was young, just the musicians who were thus honoured by the establishment, bringing a discreet sprinkling of culture into the grown-up world, as the captains of industry snored at the opera - music being largely a safely abstract form of art. (Thus Victoria gave us Sir Arthur Sullivan, but that unpleasantly acerbic W S Gilbert remained plain Mr.) The visual arts were a little riskier but at least there was the academy to ensure a supply of properly respectable practitioners among the riff-raff. And literature - well it was always plain what that was talking about (more or less), though the recently published list of refusniks has shown a good many modern-ish writers to have declined honours. (I didn't notice any architects there.)
The trouble with architects as artists - and their work is now routinely praised or condemned in terms of a kind of lax art-speak - is that their oeuvre is so much at our feet, or in our face. We cannot avoid it in the way that we can decline to enter the gallery (the modern art asylum) or open the book. In times past, partly for that reason, architects (even the modernists - amongst themselves) subscribed to an order, or something approaching an agreed aesthetic and visual vocabulary. No longer so - at least not deliberately.
