Buildings that Speak for Us

From Planet 175

Jonathan Adams interviewed by Meic Stephens

The National Eisteddfod’s Gold Medal for Architecture in recognition of your design of the Wales Millennium Centre is an accolade equivalent to the Chair, Crown or Prose Medal to which so many Welsh-language writers aspire. You must feel the better part of pride as the Medal’s recipient, but that apart, what has been the response to your creation that now stands so magnificently in Cardiff Bay?

One of the most important things I brought to the project was an awareness of the sort of design approach that could, if properly communicated, generate the breadth of support that was vital to overcome the negative atmosphere the original opera house initiative had left behind. The warmth of the response of interested parties, and particularly of the general public, made it possible for the project to proceed. As the public warmed to it, so the Welsh media echoed that mood, and in turn, the various authorities began to see it as tenable. I feel quite proud of how that pre-construction phase was negotiated by all who contributed to making the case. It showed that the lessons of the opera house and, for me, other near misses elsewhere in the UK and Europe, had been learned.
As ever, the Welsh media were watching for English reaction, in the hope of stirring up controversy. A year or so before the building was finished, an Evening Standard journalist made a disparaging comment about the design in the context of an article condemning all the significant Millennium-funded projects. Certain Welsh papers picked up the remarks, which caused some consternation at the time, but that journalist had not been to the site, and to my knowledge has never visited the building. Understandably, as it neared completion, I was nervous about the reaction of the architectural writers in the metropolitan broadsheets to what is, in many ways, an unorthodox structure. I needn’t have worried. In general, the comments turned out to be more positive than any involved in the project had dared hope.

The intelligent observer can see this is not yet another bland statement in the “international” style, but what makes it rooted in our country, and are those elements recognised by people outside Wales?

Precisely twice to my knowledge, since WMC opened, an English commentator has criticised the building for “trying to be Welsh”. You will be familiar, in the field of literature, with the patronising attitude that underlies that kind of comment. I recognise it from the occasional uncomfortable conversation during my time in London. Though it may lurk below the surface, a broad swathe of English society holds the view that any expression of Welshness is both a cliché and an implicit provocation. Infrequent as such comments have been in connection with WMC, it still irks me that there are English commentators who are provoked, or perhaps even intimidated, by any evidence of difference between the Welsh and the English experience.
The Welsh “references” in the design of WMC are all to do with growing up here, and my own questioning, as a monoglot English speaker, of what adds up to a sense of nationhood. I felt that the place to look for ideas was in my own experience of Wales. In communicating that concept to other people, before it was built, I talked about how those small personal experiences seemed to connect to some of the grand themes of recent Welsh history. Usually, this made a connection with their perception of things, for while it is personal, my experience is far from unique.

Your first job after leaving the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff was with the Will Alsop practice in London, and so you had fourteen years at the cutting edge of the profession. What brought you back to Wales?

During our fourth year at the WSA we were required to obtain work in a practice. I found an opening in the schools architecture division of the GLC, which, at the beginning of the 1980s, was regarded as a powerhouse of innovation and conscientious design. Instead of returning to the WSA for my second degree, at the end of that year I joined the course at the Architectural Association — where I met Will Alsop, who had only just started his practice with John Lyall. We “clicked” you might say, and within a few weeks I was working in their studio. My time was divided between the hothouse of the Architectual Association and the frenzy of the tiny Alsop and Lyall practice. As time passed, the business grew remarkably, but over the fourteen or so years, my professional role and personal relationship with Will Alsop remained essentially the same. Nor, in the nature of things, could it change: if I had gone to another practice headed by a high-profile architect (and there were offers) the pattern would have been similar. I didn’t want that, or to start my own practice. Recalling the scope for individual flair that existed within the GLC, I decided to seek a much larger commercial practice where I could have responsibility for my own design work.
At about this time, our first child, Harri, was born. That changed everything. My wife and I began to talk seriously about moving to Wales. Almost simultaneously it was being reported that the Cardiff-based Percy Thomas Partnership, a large commercial practice, which had been appointed to design the proposed Millennium Centre, had run into difficulties with the project and its own finances. Like other Welsh architects at the time, I was seriously concerned that the WMC project would be a failure, compounding the misery caused by the media uproar over the rejection of the plans for the opera house. While pondering a decision, I wondered who else might be preparing to put themselves forward for what most of the architectural community regarded as a poisoned chalice, and how many, like me, were more concerned about the need in Wales for a new performing arts centre, whatever form it might take. I concluded that I had little to lose by offering myself. Some months later, I recall, I was in the lift at the Percy Thomas office in Cathedral Road with Sir Alan Cox, leader of the WMC project, which had just suffered another of its many knocks. He was in a characteristically stern mood. I told him I was confident the project would go ahead, but my optimism only served to make him more edgy. He asked me why I had given up a career in London to work on the WMC. I had to admit that it pretty much came down to a sense of duty. Judging by his reaction, it was the last thing he wanted me to say.

The lack of vision among our elected representatives accounts for almost all the drab stuff that goes up in our housing estates, town centres, retail parks and shopping malls that are “designed” and built by outside developers with no thought for the locality. And we, the public, are to blame for putting up with it. Is the same true of Scotland and Ireland, I wonder, or Barcelona and Berlin?

To me, this is the most pressing issue for Welsh architecture. The answer is no. The contemporary built environment of Scotland and Ireland, and of any other developed country you care to name, is almost certainly more distinctive to those countries than contemporary Welsh architecture is to Wales. But there is precious little politicians in Wales could ever have done about it. The nature of the built environment is decided by whoever controls the money, and where Wales is concerned, that control lies elsewhere.
When I was first researching ideas for the WMC project, I asked the WDA for information on manufacturers of building materials in Wales. I was amazed how few there were to work with. We have all the basic natural resources we need, but fewer enterprises to turn them into useable materials than we have had at any time for a couple of centuries. I was informed, for example, that Wales has a single remaining clay brickworks, in Caernarfon. I grew up within a mile of one; I used to play in the quarry, and I remember when it was shut down. The same thing happened all over the country as brickworks were bought up by one of the larger conglomerates and systematically closed to centralise production in England.
The production of building materials is an international business these days. However, contemporary architecture in other countries remains, to a degree, distinctive, because priority is given to mater-ials produced within reasonable proximity, at least within their borders. Again, it is cheaper and less risky to design buildings using materials and products from catalogues. In Wales, the great majority come from English sources. The lives of project managers and builders are more comfortable if they can simply repeat the same exercise over and over, regardless of where they are working. By invoking the twin demons of risk and cost, the construction industry successfully pressurises clients into not doing anything out of the ordinary.

To get to the stage where Welsh buildings speak for us in the same way that English buildings speak for England, it will be necessary to create a broad-based building materials industry in Wales. Political decision-making does have a part to play in this.
There is nothing uniquely lacking in the way we view architecture in Wales. The worst aspect of the opera house fall-out was the delight with which the metropolitan press impugned not just our politicians but the whole population in quite outrageous terms — as if such things could not happen anywhere else, whereas, from first hand experience, I knew they did, throughout the UK and in Europe. Indeed, the most conservative attitudes to architecture are to be found in London, while it is clear that the people of Wales have a healthy appetite for contemporary design, as demonstrated by the popularity of the Cardiff Bay Visitors Centre, which I was involved with, and which was extremely radical for its time.

Which are the buildings you admire most in Wales?

Being an architect is similar to working creatively in any other medium. There is an element of competition in it. For that reason, one rarely feels more than grudging respect for the work of a contemporary. I find more to admire in buildings of earlier periods. For me, earlier modernist buildings often take on the same qualities I find engaging in far older structures. The Brynmawr Rubber Factory, for example, seemed as mysterious and haunting as any mediaeval ruin.
Almost the whole of the architectural legacy of the coalfield has been systematically erased in recent decades. Like any great flowering of construction, the development of the coalfield produced masses of commonplace building, but also occasional remarkable achievements. Just north of Ystrad Mynach are the relics of Penallta Colliery. The Edwardian power-hall and the modernist bathhouse, both extraordinary, and in many ways admirable, are just about standing. But they are disintegrating as we speak and are unlikely to survive much longer.
I admire architecture that connects with its context. Buildings can do this most obviously by so responding to the landscape that they could not easily be moved to another setting. What this means, I suppose, is that I am more likely to be moved by a “place” than a single building. The better I know it, the more I admire the centre of Cardiff. When one takes into account the fact that most of the city was built within a few Victorian and Edwardian decades, it seems wonderful that it should have such rich complexity and subtlety. These qualities owe much to the influence of Burges, whose own achievements in Cardiff are not as well understood, or as much admired, as they should be. If I had to pick out one building of the modern era that I have always loved, it would be Castell Coch. It is undeniably beautiful, it complements its superb setting, and it is comprehensively realised. In much the same way, I think Portmeirion is a great achievement.