Supersizing Cabe

An architect asked his opinion of councillors’ ability to judge the design quality of a planning application replied: “You’re lucky if they know which is the right way up.” That just about sums up the profession’s respect for the judgments made in our town halls. It might be a little harsh perhaps (the writing on the plans might give them a bit of a clue) but there is no doubt that there is a wide variation in what gets passed by one council and rejected by another. The dismal quality of much new housing is a case in point. So the idea of Cabe joining forces with the RIBA, the Royal Town Planning Institute and the Landscape Institute to provide a national team of design-savvy professionals to review schemes and advise the planners is, if properly run, an excellent one.

The idea is to expand what Cabe already does for about 500 of the largest schemes to what could be as many as 20,000. Although there has been talk for some time about increasing the number of projects it vets, the involvement of the RIBA – whose president, Sunand Prasad, was a founder member of Cabe – and three other professional bodies gives the plan much more momentum. Prasad is even talking about statutory powers. Of course they still have to convince Whitehall that they should be given all this clout, so there is still some way to go.

Cabe has done an excellent job in stepping on some real design horrors, it promises to hugely improve school design and it has done more than any other organisation to make architecture the subject of public debate. But it also runs the risk of appearing elitist – it’s generally happy to condemn the work of “commercial” practices but seems rather reluctant to do the same for the A-listers. Rafael Viñoly’s Walkie-Talkie was a case in point: publicly the organisation backed the scheme, although some commissioners were privately horrified by it. So yes, design reviews by the design-literate by all means; but design reviews by an architects’ mafia, no thanks.

Unlikely bedfellows

Le Corbusier is the subject of a blockbuster exhibition in Liverpool next week. Without having built anything in the UK but an exhibition stand, Corb was stepfather to our national collection of mouldering council slabs. Now that they are gradually disappearing, and now that the man himself has been dead 43 years, we can make a dispassionate appraisal of his contributions to architecture and urban planning.

On pages 44-48, Building revisits his most influential building, Unité d’Habitation, completed in Marseille in 1952. As luck would have it, we are also running a column by influential architect Robert Adam, the scourge of modernism and defender of the traditionalist faith (page 36). All his points about the use of poorly understood, but reassuringly expensive, green “gadgets” to give architects and environmental engineers the aura of green pioneers are countered by the Unité, which uses nothing more than good old thermal mass and sunshades to contol internal temperatures. Which is just what Robert advocates …