Unfinished beauty

We all know that buildings, like people and animals, have life-cycles. We know they are conceived (designed), grow-up (get built) and live (stand and serve their function). We know too that they may eventually deteriorate and even depart of this world.

Mostly, the building works are, in relative terms, only a small fraction of the overall lifespan. Rarely, this isn't the case, as with the unusual example of the never-ending construction of Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, some 130-years old but still far from completion, or where, as indeed with Honeycrook Castle, described in my earlier post, the completed structure is sadly destined to have a mayfly-like existence. But, generally-speaking, we expect the bulk of a building's life to be accounted for after it is finished.

Perhaps that helps explain why, when it comes to the business of appreciating buildings - liking or disliking, judging, being moved by them - we have a tendency to focus only on that middle bit of the life-cycle: adulthood, if you will. 

We judge the finished product. We don't judge a building on the chaos of its construction site any more than we judge it on the horror of the decaying piss-stained hulk (the pitiful state of which is likely, far from being invoked to condemn, to be held up as a rallying call for efforts at conservation). This seems only fair after all. The architect's intention is represented by that bit in the middle, not the mess created in achieving it, and certainly not the wrecking-ball at the end of the story. We are nice, fair people and we like to judge people on their intentions. So we politely suspend our appreciative faculties when it comes to the beginning and end of the construction cycle.

The occasional perversity of this blindness hits you when you notice a building under construction that actually looks fantastic:

As with a lot of steel-frame builds, this early part really is the best bit. A huge lattice-work of metal girders at play with the open sky. The angles and alignments combine and recombine into shifting configurations as you walk by (or perhaps I've seen too many of those Channel 4 idents). 

The very openness of the construction seems to represent limitless possibility: mankind can do anything it wants to, you can too. It is a powerful cradle that could enable any number of possible purposes. 'What would you do with this space?' it says. It's a monument to promise and potential.

If you think about, in this particular respect, steel-frame construction is unlike the other main contemporary building techniques. A reinforced concrete apartment block is usually at its most soul-destroying when it is just a concrete shell, as are housing developments when the breeze block core has been assembled but before the exterior masonry has been laid or the windows and other such fittings installed. At that stage, the bare, grey construct that meets the eye has all the enclosed, bounded qualities of a completed building with none of the comfort or humanity.

With a concrete building even if the design is mediocre at least things can only get better as the construction progresses. The opposite is more or less true for a mediocre design constructed with a steel frame. Which the above building is destined to be:

What a contrast the banality of the completed design (for Guildford's new Waitrose) makes to the thrill of the present unclad metal frame!  And this picture is of course from the developers' own promotional materials. This is the most flattering computerised image they could conjure up, complete with bright blue sky and impossibly verdant trees growing on the pavement right outside. It still looks rubbish. So what, right this moment, as I type, rises up against the sky as a monument to potential is destined to grow up to be a monument to mediocrity.

Anyway, this made me think. Are there any examples of projects where an unfinished structure has been widely recognised for the beautiful thing that it is?  

I can think of one: when The Shard went up, we all watched on with awe as the height of the structure shot up virtually daily. Particularly when the supporting structure was completed to, say, two-thirds of the way up the pyramid, with the glazing lagging maybe ten floors or so behind, there was a real poignancy in the effect. It was if the core of the thing was desperately thrusting up to its apex, with the half-unwrapped glass skin almost slipping off in the process. I'm not sure that the developers deliberately engineered the build process to create a spectacle, but good for them if they had – it was a good show.