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Skyscrapers aren’t always about corporate pride before a fall | Owen Hatherley

The Sheet — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:14:49 +0000

From the Empire State to the Burj Khalifa, skyscrapers predict recession. But not all towers are built by phallic capitalism

Tall buildings inviting accusations of hubris is as old as the Tower of Babel. The report this week from Barclays Capital merely puts an official stamp on the latest permutation of the myth, via a theory that has been around for at least a decade – the skyscraper index, which places the completion – or the proposal, it's not entirely clear – of a "world's tallest" tower as the sign of an incoming recession or financial crisis.

Empirically, it's true enough; skyscrapers were born of crisis in 1870s Chicago and New York, and most famous towers can be instantly tied to a collapse of some sort. The "Empty State Building", as the Empire State Building was dubbed, was finished in the Depression's deepest depths; the World Trade Centre and the Sears Tower neatly coincided with the end of the postwar settlement; the Petronas Towers accompanied the Asian crash of 1997. The current tallest, the Burj Khalifa, is self-explanatory in that sense, as its name – formerly the Burj Dubai – immortalises the bailout that the emirate received from Abu Dhabi when its bubble burst. Yet the skyscraper index has been around for so long that skyscraper designers are surely partly conscious of it. The largest residential tower in the world, also in Dubai, was quietly completed a couple of years ago. It was named the Index.

The reason why it is skyscrapers, as opposed to say, cathedral spires or telecommunications towers (which are frequently taller) that form the index are to do with what makes a skyscraper, and what differentiates it from a mere tower, office block or high-rise. The skyscraper came into being through a combination of innovation and accident, in a cauldron of unregulated capitalism. It became so tall because of rising land values on the tight, dense grids of New York and Chicago (the two cities still dispute ownership of the first skyscraper). It could get that tall because of two already extant inventions, the elevator and the steel frame, the latter used from Liverpool to Sheerness in the first half of the 19th century.

As to why these non-load bearing walls, merely tacked onto the frame, needing little craftsmanship, easily prefabricated, were so seductive to developers – well, one theory has it that the first skyscraper coincided with a strike of Chicago building workers. The towers were invariably offices, often for financial institutions, so were uniquely closely pegged to boom and bust. It bears repeating that in the middle of all this, nobody had ever deliberately intended, let alone "designed" the skyscraper – it was an effect, not an expression, of unstable financialised capitalism. This is, incidentally, one reason why the 1945-79 period was heavier on famous residential high-rises than luxurious corporate skyscrapers, at least in Europe.

Of course, there were soon attempts to consciously create skyscrapers, to make them into coherent pieces of architecture; in the 1880s, Chicago architect Louis Sullivan aimed to make of them a "proud and soaring thing", stripping off prefab baroque and applying his own original, deliberately height-emphasising ornament – but this "Chicago school" was always outnumbered by the mere stacking of Venetian, gothic or baroque detail up to 50 storeys. The result was the weird, retro-futurist towers that now appear as fascinatingly cranky as all obsolete technology, although at the time they were the ruthless expression of unmediated commercialism.

A couple of decades after Sullivan, Le Corbusier tried to create a becalmed "Cartesian skyscraper", largely for housing, leaving green space rather than traffic canyons underneath it. Not sufficiently flashy, the Cartesian skyscraper was eventually given the lumpy, prosaic English name of tower block. Accordingly, if you look at the current south London skyline, the ludicrously overpowering, overscaled, overpriced Shard is a skyscraper in its purest form; the Guy's hospital tower, next to it, is a mere high-rise. It's made of concrete, it's inexpensive and, worst of all, it serves a useful function.

All the record-setting buildings seem to have been equally useless, no matter how seductive their architecture. In the late 1940s, eight very tall skyscrapers in Europe were built, the tallest in the continent for three decades. They didn't coincide with any crisis, any financial exuberance, though their steel frames caked in pseudo-historical ornament immediately evoked 1910s New York. They were, respectively, housing towers, a university, a couple of ministries, a hotel and a "palace of culture"; the point was to build them, not what went in them, but in the process, the skyscraper stopped being stacked speculation. These skyscrapers, in Moscow and Warsaw, were an expression of ruthless dominance, but had certain curious differences. Some were and are open to the public. They were supposed to stand as points of orientation in the city, carefully planned. They were surrounded by squares and public space. Stalinists over stockbrokers might not seem like much of an improvement, but these ex-record breakers might remind us that the skyscraper need not be a combination of corporate phallus and crisis prediction instrument.

Owen Hatherley

Bethlehem’s church of the punch-up | Giles Fraser

The Sheet — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 00:05:16 +0000

The latest brawl between Armenian and Orthodox monks in Bethlehem is a product of Christianity's romance with buildings

It's become something of a Christmas tradition: the annual ecclesiastical punch-up at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. This year the Palestinian riot police had to be called in after it all kicked off again, with a hundred or so Armenian and Greek Orthodox monks bashing seven bells out of each other with brooms. Apparently one monk was provocatively brushing somewhere that was supposed to be the responsibility of someone else. In this feverishly contested space, if you clean it then you are maintaining it, and if you maintain it then you are making a claim to owning it: that is the logic, such as it is.

Which is why the three church traditions that share the administration of the Church of the Nativity still can't agree on who pays for urgent repairs to the church roof, despite the fact that water is now coming through and damaging the building. All sides want to pay, and refuse to let the others put their hands in their pockets. To pay would be to own.

Of course, it's been worse. In 1853, a similar jurisdictional squabble saw several Orthodox monks murdered and provided the Russian tsar with the excuse he needed to start the Crimean war. That time the row was between the Catholics and the Orthodox about who had the key to the main door and the hanging of a star over the manger.

In part, this nonsense originates in a longstanding romance between Christianity and architecture – a romance that began with the building of the Bethlehem church and its sister establishment, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, under the direction of the newly converted Emperor Constantine in the late 320s. Since then the church has been responsible for some of the world's finest architecture. Who would have guessed the followers of an itinerant preacher, for whom there was no room inside the building to be born in, would became the managers of such a spectacular collection of buildings?

For some, church buildings ought to be treated as little more than rain shelters. From this perspective, a church is first of all the people. And the buildings – however beautiful and impressive – are a distraction, transforming the clergy into caretakers and turning in on itself the outward-looking mission of the church. This is how the monks of Bethlehem end up being so petty and narrow-minded. Church buildings have become a fetish, admired by secular aesthetes and those who want an impressive stage set in which to celebrate life's big events, but a drain on the resources and moral imagination of the church. What we need is another dose of healthy iconoclasm to remind us that the message of the gospel is not to be confused with bricks and mortar.

In my more puritan moments I have some sympathy with this line. You cannot spend much time at St Paul's without noticing how much the needs of the building can come to dominate, and how the worship of many visitors is really that of Sir Christopher Wren. But the Christian romance with buildings is still worth defending, not least because the story of Christmas is that God comes alive in material reality.

Christianity is not some esoteric philosophy. It is rooted in time and place. It begins on the streets before it points to the stars. And church buildings are an expression of the rootedness of the incarnation. Where it all goes wrong is when those who are so caught up in the running of church buildings forget about the purpose for which the place was built, and come to believe that the stones matter in and of themselves. When that happens Christianity becomes petty and narrow, all about who cleans a few metres of floor, rather than a means of imagining human life from the context of all eternity.

Giles Fraser

At this time of year, let’s thank God for churches | Simon Jenkins

The Sheet — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:06:57 +0000

Believer or not, Christmas is a reminder of what these places of worship do so well – maintaining and expressing community

God has blessings, even for atheists. Chief among them is the British Christmas. Cleared of its commercial and religious clutter it has become the nation's collective version of a Buddhist sabbatical, an increasingly extended retreat into family and self almost devoid of externalities. It is a time when Britons behave quite unlike they do for the rest of the year. In other words, they behave quite well.

The preliminary clutter is ever more dire. Compared with any other city in Europe, London's decoration is tatty and hideous. The archbishop of Canterbury contributes a platitudinous musing on riots and St Paul's protesters, with no hint of meaningful conclusion. The prime minister declares desperately that "the United Kingdom is a Christian country" and that "we should not be afraid to say so", as if we were. His seasonal intervention recalls HL Mencken's maxim that "people say we need religion when what they mean is we need police".

Even Christmas shopping, once deplored as an irreligious commercialisation, has morphed into a public service duty, a dig for victory. "Hopes of Christmas boost for economy," cry the headlines. Analysts examine the returns from M&S and John Lewis like priests round sacred geese. Will Christmas save us from double-dip recession? The din of collective misery is insufferable.

Suddenly all goes quiet. Britain now stretches what in the US is one day off into 10. There seems nothing else to do. The volume of public life is silenced. Family is acknowledged before colleagues and friends. Duty is paid to household gods in an annual census of filial piety. Family quarrels are supposedly suppressed, while children and old people acquire a brief moment in the spotlight. We know of the strains and stresses of Christmas, but I wonder how many families have been repaired and rescued through its ritual kindnesses. What if there were no such moment?

Throughout history, church charity boards record the gifts to be made to the poor at Christmas time. They record the communal services to be performed, the visits to be made and donations acknowledged. Christmas is more than just a much-needed rest, it is a ceremony of domestic and communal pleasantry.

The festival may have replaced Easter in pre-eminence largely thanks to the Victorians, but it is none the worse for that. Charles Dickens' demolition of Scrooge's cynicism – A Christmas Carol is a harder-edged novel than any of its dramatised versions – captured popular imagination the world over. Like the Muslim obligation to hospitality, the Christian obligation to generosity at Christmas is near universal. It is not enforced or even formalised, but it is, and deep in Britain's cultural gene.

Millions of Britons do at Christmas what they never do at other times in the year. They become "pray-for-a-day" worshippers. They see in their church a repository of good neighbourliness without which the community would be poorer. The Anglican church has a genuine talent for sustaining this communal centrality through thick and mostly thin. This role in the local "establishment" is far more plausible than the state version.

Going to church at Christmas keeps alive a sense of what the Germans call heimat, an attachment to home and place of birth, a refreshment of roots, an acknowledgement of continuity and tradition. This Christmas is deeply conservative. As Roger Scruton argues in his forthcoming book Green Philosophy, it reflects a "desire to live among things that endure" that should, in his case, be harnessed to the challenge of climate change.

I constantly find myself in churches. I find them aesthetically appealing, a constant source of pleasure (or sometimes pain). They were designed for a liturgy of contemplation and repose. They are good places to sit and think, in a landscape where such places are in short supply. As Philip Larkin wrote, they are temples where our "compulsions are recognised and robed as destinies/ And that much never can be obsolete". This may have nothing to do with religion, but it is undeniably a religious legacy and I do not mind thanking someone's god for it. The world is full of unintended consequences.

As government continues to enervate and disempower communal life in Britain, churches retain their physical and emotional centrality. In most settlements, rural and urban, churches are hopelessly oversized for their congregations. Yet the great medieval buildings remain a dominant presence in the community, the architectural expression not just of its ageless faith, but of its ceremony, its history, its family life, its arts and crafts, its tithes and taxes. They are increasingly reborn as theatre and concert halls. Where else would one want to hear The Messiah?

The parish church is thus the one building in any neighbourhood that is worth saving, together with God's acre, the churchyard. Since there will for sure arise a movement within the church to abandon such monuments – under the cry "we are a church, not a museum" – there will be a corresponding need to champion their survival. I have no trouble with the German system of taxing parishes for the upkeep of the church (with a voluntary opt-out). The Germans, like the French and Scandinavians, enjoy a civic tradition that permits them to keep their mayors and town halls. In Britain an increasingly faithless land finds itself ironically turning to faith institutions as symbols of local cohesion. Long may such places survive. At Christmas we salute them.

Simon Jenkins

The Lloyd’s building is a time machine | Owen Hatherley

The Sheet — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:44:31 +0000

A monument to 'high-tech', the Lloyd's of London building marries the capitalism of gentlemen with that of the industrialists

Richard Rogers's 1986 headquarters for the insurers Lloyd's of London has just been listed Grade I. This makes it, along with the Royal Festival Hall, one of the few 20th-century structures to be placed at the same level as, say, St Paul's. But, like the gothic cathedrals it so closely resembles, Lloyd's was not meant to be an entirely finished product. Look up to the top of its facade, and you'll find cranes are still there, left when construction ended, to make clear it could still be extended up and outwards. The gothic cathedrals did grow in this manner, but then they didn't get preservation orders 25 years after they were built.

There should be no doubt whatsoever that Lloyd's deserves its listing. But for a building so famous, Lloyd's is not well served by writers and historians. It is usually interpreted in one of two completely inadequate ways. For many, it's a metallic embodiment of the Big Bang, a Thatcherite machine for underwriting. In architectural history, it's a monument to "high-tech", a style that arose in the mid 1970s as a sort of last flicker from the white heat of the technological revolution, at the hands of currently ennobled architects – Lord Foster of Thames Bank, Lord Rogers of Riverside. High-tech, or a version of it, has been the dominant form of architecture in the UK for two decades, though you can read a lot from the change in its functions: in the 70s most of the above were designing factories. Now they design office blocks, cultural centres and luxury flats with a still residual "industrial aesthetic", including the world's most expensive One Hyde Park.

Lloyd's captures the tensions between industrialism and the "new economy" of financial services, then tries to resolve them. Before Rogers, the insurers were housed in a neoclassical building built as late as the 50s – an embodiment of a practically unchanging British gentlemanly capitalism. It was meant to reassure, to look eternal. If the 1986 replacement evokes any previously existing buildings of any kind, then they're industrial, almost temporary structures – oil refineries, or the North Sea oil rigs built off the east coast of Scotland in the 70s, much beloved of high-tech architects. These are visually striking because of sheer utility, because their functional parts are in no way sheathed or hidden, and because the refining process requires the baffling, twisting intricacies of pipes and gantries. The North Sea oil that kept Thatcherism secure in its confrontations with the unions provided inadvertent inspiration for the aesthetic of the City itself at the exact point it was let off the leash.

Lloyd's marks the point in British architecture where industrial features became something to enjoy in and of themselves; not coincidentally the point where industry itself faced forcible decimation. Maybe those bared ducts, those moving parts, those steel surfaces and gigantic, top-lit open spaces for working in were all some kind of unacknowledged appeasing of the gods of industry. It's also possible that Lloyd's was and is especially thrilling for people who have never worked in a factory, the only other kind of place where services are habitually left uncovered, in those places because "nobody" is looking.

What makes Lloyd's such a bizarre place, however, is seeing how the underwriters have conserved so many elements of their atavistic previous existence. These remnants were scattered around the new building, decontextualised fragments ripped from 1763, 1799, 1925 and 1958, rudely riveted onto the ducts and pipes. There's the antiquated uniforms worn by the service staff; the front facade of their earlier neoclassical offices is held up like a severed head. Inside, the Lutine Bell sits at the foot of the enormous, multilevel trading floor and, strangest of all, a complete 18th century dining room by Robert Adam was preserved and recreated.

At first, it seems like these are tokens kept on a sort of reservation of gentlemanly capitalism in order to placate the old guard. After a while you realise that what is really happening here is more like a marriage, a reconciliation, a mockery of the notion that there should be any difference or hostility between the capitalism of gentlemen and the capitalism of industrialists.

Inside the Adam Room, Lloyd's of London are still the organisation that built itself on the slave trade; it's a time machine that physically brings "old corruption" back to the site of its inception. British capitalism plays at modernisation, but keeps this place in reserve, as its ancestral home. Now, Lloyd's itself will be kept as a time capsule, a structure that can receive only the tiniest changes. When future generations want to know what happened to power in Britain in the 1980s, their questions will be answered here.

Owen Hatherley

Response: Upgrading Broadmoor’s old buildings is not in patients’ best interests

The Sheet — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 23:06:04 +0000

NHS money will be better spent on redeveloping safer, up-to-date facilities

Your article, Battle to save Broadmoor buildings from demolition (10 October), explains the Victorian Society's rationale for including the hospital in its top 10 endangered buildings list. It doesn't, however, address the challenge of how to provide patients with the modern mental healthcare services they need in a cost-efficient way within a Victorian infrastructure. Tasked with improving on the average six-year length of stay for patients, West London Mental Health NHS Trust is seeking to manage this challenge through a carefully planned and environmentally sensitive redevelopment.

"We're not denying that [the Victorian buildings] may not be suitable for a modern psychiatric hospital," states the Victorian Society. They are not alone in this view; numerous official reports have deemed the fabric of the hospital "unfit for purpose". As your article states, the hospital was built in 1863, and was seen at the time as providing "an enlightened approach to care". However, psychiatric treatments have progressed radically in the past 148 years – and the environment in which this care takes place should be updated too.

As one of only three high-security hospitals in England, Broadmoor must be fit for purpose. As well as treating patients in a secure setting and ensuring public safety, it is imperative that the building is compatible with 21st-century design, thus ensuring patients' recovery is managed in an environment that is safe for those who work here.

In your piece, the society suggests that it might be "better to develop some of the yucky modern buildings that litter the grounds" of Broadmoor, yet our patients have benefited tremendously from these newer structures. Today, secure mental healthcare is generally conducted in purpose-built hospitals. These facilities have no ligature points, or T- or L-shaped corridors with poor visibility – instead, newer buildings provide natural light and space and have easy access to a range of treatment facilities.

The trust has a responsibility to ensure NHS resources are properly deployed, and this includes financial diligence. Spending public resources on upgrading outdated buildings with high running costs is not a good use of taxpayers' money, when the proposed redevelopment will not only reduce running costs but also deliver lasting improvements for the hospital's environment, services and the local community.

The society wants to save the hospital's listed buildings. Since our earliest redevelopment proposals, we've developed a strong working relationship with English Heritage and assured them that no listed buildings will be demolished.

The Victorian buildings' conversion into a hotel, mentioned in your article, remains a possibility. But one of our priorities is to ensure that a suitable alternative use is found for them, which will preserve their heritage and be an asset to the local community. The trust's proposals for this vital redevelopment enable us to strike a balance between our needs and the desire to preserve our heritage.

Leeanne McGee

Response: Labelling new properties ‘Noddy boxes’ is simply unfair

The Sheet — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 23:06:02 +0000

We have to build the homes the country needs, at prices our customers can afford

The recent interview with Angela Brady, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, (Sense of space, Society, 5 October) made me wonder whether Riba has lost touch with the realities of housing delivery in a desperate attempt to chase headlines.

Brady labels "buildings passing for detached homes as 'Noddy boxes'". The article states: "It is a criticism she heard time and again during this year's party conference fringe meetings which outlined Riba's Case for Space campaign, a drive to persuade house-builders to raise their game as new homes become significantly smaller."

Representatives of the Home Builders Federation didn't hear this phrase used at the conferences, but we did hear how Riba's Future Homes Commission will "find out what consumers want and make recommendations to house builders"– it seems that Riba didn't ask customers these questions before they criticised the way new homes are currently built.

That contrasts with house builders who, in difficult economic circumstances, actually have to build and sell the homes the country needs. Our members are constantly talking to their customers and building the homes that they want at prices they can afford – if they didn't they would soon go out of business.

Our latest survey showed that 84% of new home buyers are satisfied or very satisfied with their new home, with 86% saying they would recommend their builder to a friend. The people who matter, those who buy and live in the homes – rather than those commenting on the industry – are happy. And if house builders, who are in stiff competition with each other, could easily build bigger houses that customers would prefer, why don't they?

Land supply is the key. For decades the planning system has not delivered enough land for the number of homes our population needs.

As Brady says, there is a compelling argument for new homes: "We've got a huge housing crisis, a shortage of 250,000 units a year. And there should be more opportunity for better housing." If indeed she does recognise this, she would be well advised to focus Riba's efforts on supporting us as we push for a robust planning system that will deliver the land for that to happen.

Land supply, viability, the burden of regulation, local authority design and sustainability demands – these are the issues that matter.

In private, Riba staff have constantly assured us that they want to work constructively with our industry. Unfortunately their continued insistence on using provocative statements about "Noddy boxes" is deeply discouraging.

Home builders, who all work with architects on the frontline, are struggling to cope with the economic malaise and credit drought, a battle over the new planning system and hefty environmental regulation. Riba must engage in the real issues – then we'll be happy to work with the Future Homes Commission.

Stewart Baseley

Architectural fashions change, but even brutalist buildings should be saved

The Sheet — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 23:06:24 +0000

Brutalist architecture of the 1960s may not be to everyone's taste now, but that is no reason to tear it down

It was only recently, in the great scheme of architecture, that critics and historians brought up with authentic Victorian values despised pretty much any building dating from after the Regency. For decades the Midland Grand Hotel fronting St Pancras station was anathema, the vilest, most tawdry building that has ever existed.

Today, we are learning to look a little more considerately at the dramatic concrete buildings of the 1960s labelled, a little alarmingly, brutalist. Even then, it does come as rather a surprise to find that buildings like the threatened Preston bus stationand Birmingham central library as well as the culturally admired yet aesthetically reviled South Bank Centre are now the concerns of the World Monuments Fund [WMF].

The WMF is also asking us to fret about Newstead Abbey, Lord Byron's very own romantic ruin; and Quarr Abbey, the very particular Benedictine settlement designed by Dom Paul Bellot on the Isle of Wight; these are the kind of buildings you would expect historians and conservationists to alert us to when they are in need of urgent repair. But Preston bus station? Birmingham central library? Well, yes.

These are fine civic buildings and with a little imagination and care they could continue to serve and even delight future generations. I once described Preston bus station as baroque – modern baroque – and I stand by that. It is a striking and practical building that with a modicum of intelligence and skill could be transformed into one the Lancashire city, hell-bent on its destruction in the hope of more shopping malls, could yet be proud of.

It takes time though – the test of time – and the danger is that while buildings go through unfashionable phases they are in danger of falling into disrepair, and being demolished. The WMF is right to make us look at them anew before the wrecker's ball swings their hapless way. Jonathan Glancey

Jonathan Glancey

Hadid’s dynamic but disciplined school provides a lesson for Gove

The Sheet — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 23:15:55 +0000

The Evelyn Grace Academy in south London is a worthy winner of the Stirling prize, says Rowan Moore

The choice of Evelyn Grace academy has a political ring to it. At a time when Michael Gove, and his cheerleader Toby Young, are denouncing architects for robbing the public, and denying that good design has anything to do with good education, here is a prize for a school of extreme architectural ambition.

Confusingly for Gove and Young, the school's principal, Peter Walker, has established a regime of discipline and order – neat uniforms, long school days, mobile phone bans – of the kind that they might be expected to like. It is also partly funded by Ark, the charity founded by hedge fund manager Arpad Busson. In other words, its money comes from the same sort of place as much of the Tory party's funding.

The main contribution of Zaha Hadid's architecture to the school ethos is to create an energetic, if sometimes forbidding, atmosphere. It announces that the school is a serious place, not somewhere to slouch into. The design also responds to Walker's requirements for its internal arrangements.

It is not a completely perfect fit: Hadid's dynamic style is in theory more about freedom than order, and there are some crunching details where her demanding geometry encounters the budgetary and technical constraints of state school building. Nor, in straitened times, is it a model of school building that can be repeated too often. Sarah Wigglesworth's Sandal Magna school in Wakefield, which should have been shortlisted but wasn't, is a better example of how to do a lot with a little.

The Olympic velodrome was the bookmakers' favourite and, apart from the fact that it is not yet in full use, I would have agreed with them. The velodrome achieves a better match of concept, detail and purpose. But the academy is an extraordinary achievement, and there have been far dumber choices in the history of the prize.

Rowan Moore is the Observer's architecture critic

Rowan Moore

Hadid’s dynamic but disciplined school provides a lesson for Gove

The Sheet — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 23:15:55 +0000

The Evelyn Grace Academy in south London is a worthy winner of the Stirling prize, says Rowan Moore

Rowan Moore is the Observer's architecture critic

Rowan Moore

Gaudí’s unfinished Sagrada Família does not need a completion date | Jonathan Glancey

The Sheet — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:04:56 +0000

Worthwhile architecture, whether a home or a cathedral, has its seasons. There is no ultimate need to hurry its making

"My client is not in a hurry", Antoni Gaudí is said to have remarked when asked if he was concerned about the time it was taking to build the Basilica and Expiatory Church of the Holy Family in Barcelona. According to the Old Testament, Gaudí's client was in much more of a hurry than his architect: he rushed to create the world in just six days, although even He needed a rest on the seventh.

Gaudí was one of God's most loyal servants, yet nothing would make him rush the Sagrada Família. He worked on this extraordinary, vegetable-like city church from 1883 until his death in 1926.

The date of the completion of the Sagrada Família has long been hazy, a matter of conjecture rather than fact. For decades after the Spanish civil war it was widely believed that it would never be finished and many thought it was best it stayed this way. This was less to do with money – the basilica has always been self-funding through donations and ticket sales – and more to do with the architecture itself. Now that Gaudí was dead, surely God alone knew how this visionary Catalan architect would have completed the work. Gaudí's time scale and imagination were such that the architect would surely have changed his plans over the years. This was to be the work of generations.

Gaudí would have found it wrong that the one more or less realistic date set for the completion of the Sagrada Familia is the centenary of his own death in 2026. He was a man who had long swallowed his youthful vanity and buried his pride. When he was taken to hospital after being hit by a tram in 1926 it should be no surprise that he was mistaken for a tramp.

No. There should be no fixed date for the completion of the Sagrada Familia. In a world in which, increasingly, architecture has become a form of advertising and product design with showy "icons" raced up in months as if this was a virtue, the saga of Gaudí's basilica teaches us the lesson of patience.

Today, we build far too quickly for a number of banal reasons. A fast buck. An endemic and hysterical television makeover show mentality. A belief that getting things done quickly is a virtue. Management-led culture. A bullet-headed "On time, on budget" mentality. The dismal idea that rapid construction – of executive housing estates, unwanted supermarkets and other schlock – is a powerful economic lever that, when pulled, will kick a boot up the backside of a flagging economy.

Stop. Worthwhile architecture, whether a home or a cathedral, has its seasons. There is no ultimate need to hurry its making, while the very making of a building is just as important as its day-to-day use. An economy, meanwhile, can be boosted as much by having skilled craft workers shaping thoughtful buildings as it might by people shopping gormlessly in rushed-up shopping malls. Architecture – real, true and beautiful architecture in the service of our spirit and senses as well as our everyday needs – is the end result of contented producers rather than dissatisfied consumers.

Today, we treat architecture as if it was a throwaway consumer "good". We should learn to slow down. Rome wasn't built in day, nor was St Peter's. Even Barry and Pugin's Palace of Westminster was 30 years in the making.

In Ireland, a Slow Architecture movement has been formed, touring the country in gentle fashion by barge. This is a gently measured echo of the Slow Food movement founded in 1986 by Carlo Petrini when McDonald's opened its first fast food joint in Italy by the Spanish Steps in the very heart of historic and romantic Rome. Gaudí might well have approved the Irish initiative, and not least because taking architecture slowly – it has always been the slowest of the arts – allows it to breathe.

It is because the Sagrada Família has taken so long to realise that new talents with new skills have banded together to complete Gaudí's masterwork. Today, Mark Burry, a New Zealander with the very latest computer-design skills is executive architect of the emerging basilica. By taking the slow road, the Sagrada Família has embraced the skills, intelligence and craft of successive generations. And, because people from around the globe raised in a world of lightning-fast, gimmee, gimmee junkitecture find it so compelling, it is even able to pay its own slow way.

Jonathan Glancey