The 1980s Are Everywhere February 11, 2009

I am a child of the 1980s, along with everyone involved in this magazine. And it shows. These were the years of Thatcher, twats shouting down giant mobile phones, coke-fuelled orgies soundtracked by the Pet Shop Boys, pastel tones, miners’ strikes and many other clichés.

This decade has a lot to answer for, not least in its pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap attitude towards irony. Irony 40 stories high. Irony smeared across Britain. The architecture of the 1980s, the era of the high-corporate, financial service and call centre office postmodernist style has left a strange trail across British cities. Ubiquitous and genuinely charmless, these buildings don’t garner the same hatred ascribed to 1960s social architecture whose presence is generally so much more monumental, utopian, literally concrete. In contrast, 80s architecture sits on the periphery of city centres, having abandoned all social and architectural ambition of improving its surroundings, retreating inside an awkward, faulty revolving door at the end of a patterned brick paved car park.

The prevalent 80s postmodern style is characterised by knowing, ironic formal references - jokes for architects. These are notoriously unfunny. Like any style, it started as a theorised, somewhat forward thinking practice in the academies of architecture. Attempting to be humanistic in the face of scientific, technological modernism, it tried to bring back local vernacular and the value of history in architecture. This is one thing, but it also became combined along the way with the collapse between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and relativist thinking, where the facade was more important than the structure, and the more clever references the better. So there’s a return to the historical at the same time that the implicit value of everything historical is questioned, see? That’s why that Tesco looks like a fucking country house.

There’s a surprising amount of this style all around Sheffield once you start to look for it. It’s un-noticed, insipid, so banal that commenting on it seems like writing an article expressing wonder about lawns.

I think that the trouble I have with 80s architecture is its inherent lazy shitness and naffness. It’s got no redeeming romantic character or any naive ethical mission that you see in modernist buildings. It has no materiality, just a tanned skin. And it’s worse than any other generic buildings because it presents itself as a stylistic, sophisticated architecture. It’s the Alan Partridge of architecture.

Porter Brook Buildings

Good God these are bad. A series of sterile business park buildings in a classical style. Unnecessary security measures, blanked out windows, more corners than sense. If you go up close, all the people will run to the windows and stare at you.

Central Fire Station

This is weird. And huge. Looks like a big brick castle, parodying something from the top of a hill in central Europe. So many towers and slanty brick walls, with small windows for shooting arrows out of. Honestly, my eight year old cousin builds better castles out of sand and still smashes them with his spade afterwards.

Crown Court

A big Japanese transformer robot landed in Sheffield to dispense justice. He folded up into a defensive shape at the edge of the ring road, ready to take on paedophiles and car thieves. The limp Union Jack is a nice touch.

NUM Building

Arthur Scargill’s Fun Palace. A big fuck-you to government during the miners’ strike, this stone and gold tinted glass monster that looks like a municipal pool somehow got abandoned behind a pub. Some say it still contains a giant portrait of Margaret Thatcher that people stand and hurl abuse at.