Musical Modernism

The proposed new School of Music is truly shite. I don't say that because it conflicts with the existing Gothic Revival buildings, or because it is an affront to even consider building anywhere near the sanctified works of Mountfort. However, the building's plainly bad and the idea's daft. I do not think the two facts are unrelated.

At present the School of Music is housed in one of the prettiest buildings on campus, in a pocket-sized pastoral Brutalism. There's a lovely little stage at one end facing a gently curving bank. It's of handsome proportion, each part balancing out into a harmonious unity, without falling prey to monotony. It isn't grand, and isn't pompous or overbearing. It is what a School of Music should be like: a utopianly idealistic building, human in scale, truthful in materials and a nice counterpoint to the landscape. It's just right.

The proposed structure in town, by `Sir Miles Warren and Warren and Mahoney' is ugly and clumsy. It's the awful postmodernist Sir Miles Warren that's turned out this time, not the decent modernist who designed the UCSA building and the Town Hall. It's fussy but boring, too slavish in copying the existing buildings but still entirely awkwardly out of place. The renderings are, as is traditional with these things, vague and not much use in trying to work out what the whole thing's going to look like when it is built. I hate to say it, but if it were built, it might almost replace the Law building as the ugliest building of the University.

The heritage issues are a distraction, resting on a slightly laughable idea that the only way to preserve the character of architecture is to make sure that no one dares think of doing anything new and interesting anywhere nearby. It's nonsense. To begin with, I have very little love of a Gothic Revival promoted as a way of keeping the proles in their place, Morris and Ruskin upside down at the antipodes. If the buildings of a backwards settler wannabe-aristocracy are to be interrupted by a decent modern building that believes Jack's as good as his master, then really, that should be rather perfect. If the Canterbury Association wanted a new little England here on the plains, then let us instead build a new Jerusalem of honest concrete and plain steel.

Sadly, we aren't being offered that Jerusalem. Instead, we're getting the actual Jerusalem, a rather embarrassing mess of petty rivalries, dodgy squabbles over land, and stupid old boy's clubs. The university is closing the Physical Sciences Library for lack of money, but it can afford to rent land in the city for a new building while acres go unused out at Ilam. No doubt there are elaborate justifications for this, but I can't be the only one who rather suspects that dull books about orbital mechanics for pimply physicists just aren't sexy like new auditoriums for musicians are.

The new School of Music looks more like a monument to the ego of a collection of old men than a serious attempt to deal with the long term problems arising from the structural underfunding of the arts (and, in fact, anything that isn't making lots of money) at Canterbury.