Brilliant architecture can rescue even Basingstoke

This column tries to avoid politics, but occasionally culture and politics collide. So it is with public architecture, and especially with buildings designed for the less fortunate in society. Belatedly, politicians have recognised the toxic effect of bad housing and in some cases are having it pulled down, as with the hideous Heygate Estate in Walworth, south London.

Heygate was only built in 1968-69 and quickly became a sort of human dustbin. It exemplified the notion that if you give people sties to live in, they will live like pigs. Nearly 30 years ago, when the estate was not even 15 years old, Bridget Cherry wrote in the Buildings of England series that “the tall slabs, with their long glazed balconies, make an impressive sight from a distance … but that is all one can say in their favour”. Almost as soon as they were put up, such estates became squalid, and a rebuke to the profession of architect.

It is not just our great inner cities that harbour such horrors. The publication of the new volume in the Buildings of England series on Hampshire: Winchester and the North (Yale University Press, £35) reminds us that even in one of the most salubrious parts of England, somebody, also in the 1960s, allowed Basingstoke to happen. Basingstoke has six times the population now that it did 50 years ago. Development was allowed to proceed with all the care, taste and thoughtfulness that have scarred so many of our urban landscapes.

The authors of this volume reflect that the initiator of the series, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, described the nascent sprawl in 1966 as a place “singularly devoid of architectural pleasures”, and add that “that view has not been significantly altered by buildings since that date”, notably the addition of a “brutish shopping centre”. This they describe as “unfriendly”, stating that its “relationship with the earlier buildings around it is one of indifference”.

Yet our own excrescences are as nothing compared with what sees in some supposedly civilised countries abroad: one thinks of the banlieue’s of Paris, the ugly workers’ barracks outside some Italian cities, and almost any American metropolis you care to mention. In supposedly the most prosperous country on the planet, the state of the housing projects (or what we would call council estates) is absolutely dreadful. Yet as one American architect has shown, it doesn’t have to be like that: and it is as much within the power of the architect as that of the sponsoring authority that pays for social housing to ensure that people are not given sties to live in, and therefore do not have to live like pigs.

George Ranalli is an Italian-American in his early sixties. As well as being a practising architect, he is Dean of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at City College in New York. Before that, he was Professor of Architectural Design at Yale. He has won a string of awards for his work both as an architect and a teacher. Prof Ranalli wears his experience lightly and is genial and engaging: but he oozes rage at the sight of shoddy, unimaginative buildings that create an unpleasant or even positively harmful environment for people to work or live in.

One solecism he would have avoided in Basingstoke, had he had the chance, is the insult that a thoughtlessly designed building pays to something of greater distinction, or of a different era, near it. Without lapsing into pastiche, Prof Ranalli’s work blends the modern with the traditional. He builds on a scale that people find comprehensible and comfortable, in materials that do not stand at odds with those of the buildings around them. He builds in a tradition of craftsmanship, with all the care and precision that entails: but, most crucially, he does so within the usually strict budgets that public funding will allow.

Prof Ranalli’s portfolio includes renovations and re-orderings of luxurious apartments in the most fashionable districts of Manhattan. He applies the same standards to his public projects that he does to the homes of his private clients. In his public work, wood, brick and stone present a different face to the world than the steel-framed glass and concrete of so much of New York.

On a roasting day in late July, Prof Ranalli drove me out to Brooklyn, to the community centre he had recently finished in Saratoga Avenue (images of which can be found in the picture gallery of the Sartoga Avenue Community Center). The centre stands in an area of predominantly low-rise housing, though with a small 1960s tower block next to it. Although some of the streets around Saratoga are clearly going up in the world, it is a predominantly poor, black area. When Prof Ranalli began work on the project in the early 2000s, it was positively dangerous, with a high incidence of gun crime.

However, his new brick- and stone-dressed building has not just provided a much-needed facility for local people: it has lifted up the whole area. Prof Ranalli’s expertise in landscape has proved invaluable in using one building to open up the possibilities of its surroundings. An open space, with trees, in front of the entrance to the building leads the eye across to a tree-filled square and gardens diagonally opposite. The late Victorian houses around that square all seem to be in a state of improvement.

The less desirable parts of Brooklyn are marked out by their plainness, squalor and decay. This is no longer true around Saratoga. Local people come to Prof Ranalli’s community centre for their parties, wedding receptions, social evenings, even, in the case of children, to its computer room to do their homework. The architect’s design is solid, giving a sense of permanence, but also light, making the spaces within it pleasant to be in: and Prof Ranalli has, through his use of decoration and the varying of the sizes of his windows, created interest rather than blandness in his modern structure.

The local people are so proud of the place, and love what it means to them so much, that they look after it and ensure that it does not fit in with the wider character of the area. Their young people take these attitudes home with them, and it makes them better, more responsible citizens.

Given how Prof Ranalli’s work has elevated a whole district, I find it hard to see why local authorities in New York’s five boroughs have not asked him to replicate the success and effect elsewhere. He has won plaudits from, among others, the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker for his achievement, so they know he is there. Even better, perhaps we should ask him over here, to sort out south London, and possibly even Basingstoke.