There are two stock responses
to the level of failure implied by such a monument.
Firstly the knee-jerk antimodernism
which keeps awarding "worst-place-in-UK" awards, promotes apathy at
best and derision at worst, and holds the place up as a terrible warning of
what might happen if you let eggheads with Big Ideas play with concrete and
steel.
Secondly, there is the tendency
to produce a league table of good and bad modernism, and to attempt to assign
architects and their companies to one or the other. The history of architecture
does not however support any such Manichean categorisation. While on first glance
a more balanced response, it is nonetheless deeply mistaken about the ideas
of morality and functionalism in the 20th century.
"The primary element is function. But function without a sensual component remains construction. The postulate is functional dynamics."
Erich Mendelsohn 1923
We might parallel the careers of two technocratic German-trained functionalists: Erich Mendelson and Alexander Lippisch.
Mendelsohn: Einstein Observatory. Lippisch: Me163
Mendelsohn's career intersected the arc of Romantic Modernism on 3 continents.He also brushed twice with the legacy of Einstein, in diametrically opposite ways. Alexander Lippisch may exemplify the dispassionate technocrat, and might indicate how man can less ambivalently serve two masters in an age of ideology.