Jason: Oh it’s a hierarchy, almost like a hierarchy of experience or a variation of experience. So it’s not just this modern environment which can sometimes seem quite sterile? Harry: I think it’s what makes the city of London such a fascinating place and why I love living here, because you’ve got cutting-edge modern buildings and you’ve got buildings and streets from the medieval era and just about everything in between. I read somewhere that a city without old buildings is like a person without a memory. It’s the memory. Jason: Yes. I guess it’s the construct, but it’s actually trying to invest a sense of a soul in a place as opposed to just giving it a function. Harry: I think poetically that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to give it a bit of soul and if places are built like that, it does resonate with people actually. They kind of get it. I’d like to think they do. Jason: It’s a sense that there were people here before us and that we have responsibilities to maintain, rather than simply imagining that this space is for us and we can misuse it because somebody else is going to build something new after we’ve gone. Harry: Yes, we have to preserve the best of the past. It’s our cultural and built history. It’s our memory bank.
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Jason: How political do you think architecture is? How political do you think your work is? Harry: Well I think architecture as a discipline has always had a political element. Prior to the twentieth century, architects would build for the wealthy – palaces, stately homes, private homes for rich individuals and institutions, museums, galleries, civic and public buildings, and so on. I think the Modern movement in the twentieth century was an extremely political movement. Many of the architects of that period would probably have described themselves as communists or socialists. They believed you could and should improve the lot of ‘ordinary people’ through designing and building decent housing. They were on a mission and had a vision that they could create a better society. Many in the UK worked for socially minded local authority architects and politicians. That consensual view lasted from the end of World War Two until Thatcherism when such policies as Right to Buy, which, coupled with stopping local authorities from building more housing, has led to our current chronic shortage of decent, affordable housing with security of tenure for people who can’t afford to buy. It’s the triumph of market forces and selfinterest over the egalitarian principles that many had in the 1950s through to the end of the 1970s.