Is this what you want? - a blunt instrument from the nimby toolkit

This
flyer seen on a recent trip Brussels appears to be a protest about some
planned new buildings.  Presumably the
buildings won’t actually be bright red, though.  



The ‘protest montage’ is a now familiar
ploy of those who oppose projects. Every effort is made to make schemes look as
daft and offensive as possible (equal and opposite, of course, to the efforts
of the promoters, which can be equally misleading).  The technique was used in London by opponents
of the alleged ‘steel and glass tower blocks’ that Richard Rogers planned for the
Chelsea Barracks site (for which read: ten storey buildings much the same
height as nearby 1930s mansion blocks, with big windows made of that futuristic
material ‘glass’ because even rich people deserve daylight). 

I
don’t know who started all this, but the architect planner Thomas Sharp was
certainly at it in his 1968 book Town and
Townscape.  

These intriguing images of
an abandoned scheme for university buildings in the centre of Cambridge, images which
Sharp prepared and described as not showing ‘any actually proposed
architectural treatment’, can be compared with the real designs of Lasdun (whom
Sharp, oddly, cannot bring himself to name in his book).  A provocative photomontage provided by Lasdun
himself can be found in William Curtis’s monograph.  While the his scheme for the New Museums site (where the buildings by Arup Associates are today) is pretty shocking to
today’s sensibilities, they look absolutely nothing like the banal blocks in Sharp’s
drawing, being highly articulated into vertical components, like a compressed and over-energetic
version of Kahn’s Philadelphia laboratories, to achieve a rich skyline which
clearly echoes the older buildings in the foreground – an approach more
explicitly responsive to context than many similar projects of that period – including some of Lasdun’s that were built.

Protests
of this kind call to mind the catchphrase of one of Harry Enfield’s Middle
England moaners: ‘Is that what you want? – because that’s what you’re going to
get…’  Usually, what the nimby flier show
you is not what you’re going to get. The detail matters – and the
difference between a dumb box and a complex, articulated building proposal is a
lot more than a matter of detail.