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The Architect - Piers Gough RA
Courtesy of the Royal Academy On the topic of local campaigners, Piers Gough says... "The deification of the destructive whinge culture is incredibly bad for us spiritually and physically. The public’s prejudices are already too well represented in the planning system. The government’s central policies and local government UDPs are constraining and protective of the uses and scale of development. The public is invited to add its views at every stage of their adoption and the result is as close to public interest coercion on private developers as is possible short of nationalisation. On top of this, edicts from Cabe, EH, the Environment Agency et al represent public attitudes in their holier-than-thou armchair advice. Increasing coercion leads to increasingly complex application requirements with ever more opportunity for errors. The public is encouraged to object to all applications in any meretricious way it pleases regardless of the facts. The supposed objective system of planning officers presenting to councillors is then gerrymandered by political self-interest, on the basis that there are more votes in refusal than approval. It is no coincidence that the most interesting buildings of the last 20 years tend to have no residents nearby. Some quite reasonable people become rabidly reactionary and nauseatingly self- righteous as local residents. That the judiciary should pander to this unrepresentative minority and extend the insanely protracted process that planning has become is an example of the fantastic decadence of institutionalised inaction. No doubt it will get worse." From bd The Architects' Website 9th March 2007 re. "Do local campaigners have too much power?" Only registered users can write comments. Powered by AkoComment 2.0! |
Piers Gough once famously and not entirely fairly described himself as a ‘B movie architect’. His work certainly has a sense of playfulness that serious modernists eschewed, though if anything this characteristic broadens its ability to engage with sophisticated social and intellectual agendas. He designed the RA’s exhibition on Sir John Soane, one of British architecture’s most intellectually demanding figures, while his Green Bridge in London’s East End turns two scrappy pieces of open space into a park by merging them into one green zone, and creates commercial opportunities in its undercroft.