Bored rooms ... The HSBC building in Canary Wharf. Photograph: Sarah Lee
Architecture is all about originality, right? Otherwise what's the point in doing seven hard years of theoretical and practical training if you don't get to go off and do your own thing? Something that no one's done before. Something that the future is made of.
Yet, for all the truly wonderful one-offs - I'm thinking of the starfish-shaped country house proposed by Ushida Findlay, or the Lloyds Building - there seem to be a lot of very similar-looking buildings going up. This isn't a new problem - architects often seem to develop a sort of herd instinct where certain ideas and features are concerned.
My top five pet hates are:
Flat roofs An old and hairy complaint, this. Yes, flat roofs can sometimes look good. Yes, there's a place for modernism. Fallingwater, where everyone wants to live, has one. And I once heard former RIBA President Jack Pringle defend flat roofs with the following syllogism: We all like Edwardian terraces. Edwardian terraces use curtain walls to hide their sloping roofs and pretend they're flat. Ergo: we must all like flat roofs.
Except that we don't, and they still leak.
Square skyscrapers Mies van der Rohe was a little too successful for his own good. His magnificent Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago were brilliant, original, and so flattered by imitation that we ended up with seventy odd years of square-floorplanned skyscrapers. In clumps and clusters, like Manhattan, this can look good. In London, it's pretty much ruined the skyline. And it's just not that original. If you can build shards and cheese graters, why are architects still building square pegs like the HSBC headquarters or Citibank's or this proposal for Bishopsgate? Do you really think the Gherkin came with a round hole?
Wacky colours To me, at least, the use of wild colours on the outside of a building suggests that the design won't really work on its own. It's like slapping on an inch of makeup to hide smallpox scars. My personal bête noire is the new Hilton building by More London and London Bridge. Do they really think colouring parts of the windows with hideous orange and blue plastic panels will do anything to make people want to stay there? It attracts attention, sure, but in the same way Jordan does.
I hate to say it, but AHMM's proposal for Barking town centre also looks a heck of a lot like many of the slums councils have been trying to replace, just a lot more yellow.
Balconies Probably very nice in Tuscany or Rome. Not so nice in the middle of winter in Britain, overlooking a murky canal and scrapyard. Balconies, whilst they neatly identify a square block as residential rather than commercial (how would we have guessed otherwise?) are never used by city-dwelling Brits for anything other than storing bikes or for hanging out the washing.
Metal slats Very much a Foster trademark, it seems no office these days is complete without several rows of thin metal slats running round the outside, like the latest incarnation of a Gillette disposable. These are usually said to minimise solar gain, but, and I refer you to my previous paragraph, this is Britain, and, for most of the year, wouldn't you like as much solar gain as possible?
So there's my top five. I'm still undecided about whether the whole global warming thing necessitates quite so much sustainable hand-wringing on the part of architects, but then I've watched more than a couple of Top Gear repeats this week and may not be entirely well. Any others?
