Newspaper Article

Arts: Architecture: Jewel in the town In power, Labour has become as obsessed with size as the Tories were. It could learn a thing or two from Tony Fretton. Jonathan Glancey reports

Glancey, Jonathan

1998

Overview

Triumphalist architecture will lead New Britain plc into the privatised new millennium. There's the Dome, of course, sitting in aggressive isolation on the north Greenwich peninsula, a monument to what a newly published pro-government essay - In Defence Of The Dome - describes in Orwellian terms as `a massive human resources project in New Labour groupthink'. Or what the rest of us know as corporate sponsorship and the celebration of private enterprise (the only way forward for the British economy, Peter Mandelson, the horny-headed Dome secretary told a cringeing Labour Party conference last week). And yet those of us with memories that stretch back to, ooh, 1997 will recall earnest New Labour discussions with certain politicians and ambitious members of labyrinthine quangos in which the idea of bringing art and culture to the plebs, especially those unfortunate enough to have been spawned in the provinces, was to have been rooted in a happy garden of small-scale, high-value (cultural value, that is) arts buildings. In those far-off days when New Labour was an untried and untested brand, it promised us a New Jerusalem, and many of us wanted to believe that the cultural crassness of the Thatcher years was to have been allayed. Art and culture are now the product lines of corporate desire and sponsorship. `It doesn't pay for architects to speak out today,' says Tony Fretton, a thoughtful and inspired British architect who has designed some of the finest small art galleries in Britain. `They're expected to keep their heads down. And, in any case, few younger architects are ideological in any way today. I think they're lucky. They're seemingly free from political agendas, from history and the old arguments of morality and design that beset my and older generations.'

• Publisher: Guardian News & Media Limited
• Subject: Architecture / Fretton, Tony