Ugly old buildings

It's astonishing how the mind filters out the stuff it considers irrelevant and narrows what we actually notice down to what interests us. My son, at two and a quarter, likes cars. When he looks out of his window at the street below, his commentary generally goes something like this:

Car! Car! Mummy car! Daddy car! Car! Car! Car! Car! Car! Car! Wow, car! Car! Car! Red car! Car! Car! Car! Car! Car! Car! White car! Car! Car! Car! Car! Car! Bus! Car! Wow, car! Car! Car! Car! 'Bye car!

Of course, he'll grow out of it (or grow up to be one of those people who watch the seemingly endless repeats of Top Gear on Dave). Our attention can still stay pretty narrow, though. Here's George Orwell, writing at the end of 1943, noticing something which had escaped my attention:

If you climb to the top of the hill in Greenwich Park, you can have the mild thrill of standing exactly on longitude 0°, and you can also examine the ugliest building in the world, Greenwich Observatory. Then look down the hill towards the Thames. Spread out below you are Wren's masterpiece, Greenwich Hospital (now the Naval College) and another exquisite classical building known as the Queen's House. The architects responsible for that shapeless muddle had those other two buildings under their eyes while every brick was laid.

I've visited the Greenwich Observatory at least twice and I don't remember thinking that it was a particularly ugly building. Of course, I might just disagree with Orwell on a matter of taste, but that's not the point. I was quite interested in astronomy and I guess that most of my attention was on the instruments inside and the history. The fact is that I'd just not been looking very hard at the architecture - looking but not really seeing it clearly enough to have an opinion about whether it was beautiful or ugly. Sometimes people deceive themselves into thinking they have strong views about architecture, often when someone builds something new next to some old buildings. Generally these strong views are that the new building is spoiling the view, out of scale or proportion with the old buildings and is generally an eyesore. Sometimes, maybe often, they are right.

Comparing the old with the brand new and concluding that a new building is always worse than an old one, doesn't really prove that we're really looking closely at buildings and getting a feel for what does and doesn't look right, though. For one thing, it can be like comparing apples and pears - new and old buildings can look good (or terrible) in their own completely different ways. The view that all old buildings are beautiful and that all modern ones built near them will make things look worse just makes it even more difficult to look at the architecture on its own merits.

We all know which architectural masterpieces are supposed to be beautiful. The modern heritage industry has extended that category to include almost every old building from every age. But I think that I look at these things and don't really see enough to make a real judgement about a building. I think the antidote to this is to consider not only the finest old buildings, but to think about which ones are really quite ugly. Then, maybe, I'll know that I'm really looking, not just absorbing a received opinion from a guidebook.I still don't have a strong opinion about whether Greenwich Observatory (which they started building in 1675) is an ugly building, but I'm going to start looking at old buildings with much closer attention now. Deciding which ones are ugly may be as useful as noticing the gems I've overlooked. At the moment, for example, many people mourn the passing of the old art deco cinemas (still relatively new buildings when Orwell was writing the passage above). I used to live round the corner from one of these, the Muswell Hill Odeon. I think it's quite cool, but is it really a beautiful building, or am I just caught up in faddish nostalgia for art deco? Maybe when I start looking at buildings more closely, my views will change.