Conservation Today: the Preservation and Re-use of Older Buildings Exhibition at the Royal Academy, 17 May–25 June 1989, and subsequently on tour

Abstract

THE axiom that people won't go to architecture exhibitions was first overturned by the astonishing success of the Lutyens Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery seven years ago. Though architecture still does not appear as regularly in the London exhibition calendar as it does in Paris, Frankfurt or Chicago, it can no longer be tenably asserted that non-architects are scared or bored by the prospect of viewing plans and sketches from architects' drawing-boards. The RIBA has been caught by surprise at the attendance figures for some of its shows not just the ones featuring contemporary architectural superstars and smaller specialist galleries have been established to catch the same tide of public attention. In 1986 the Royal Academy finally acknowledged this renewed interest in architecture by mounting a seductive exhibition about the work of its three best-known architectural Fellows Foster, Rogers, and Stirling. Though given its first showing at Burlington House, Conservation Today is in no sense a sequel, let alone a rebuttal, to the architectural spectacle that filled the main galleries there three years ago. It has been organised not by the Royal Academy, but by the Royal Fine Arts Commission as part of its campaign to spread awareness of the issues it encompasses in its deliberations. Consisting mainly of photographs and text, plus an odd collection of architectural fragments, the display has been kept deliberately small so that it can be shown around the country during the coming year. There is an accompanying book by David Pearce (Conservation Today, Routledge, £11.95) which follows the same story more fully. Since the exhibition includes nothing curious or rare the book can stand as an ample substitute for it, though in both layout and style it is a discredit to its subject. Nothing ties this exhibition to an anniversary in conservation history. The centenary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the vanguard body of its kind, has been and gone, as has the centenary of the first British legislation in the field. Likewise there has been no one outstanding project nearing completion this year that has cried out for attention. In the absence of a particular occasion for celebration the organisers have chosen instead to examine the progress of conservation over the last 14years. They have selected 1975 as their starting-point because that was both European Architectural Heritage Year and the year that SAVE Britain's Heritage was founded: two events which, in their opinion, put some much-needed backbone into the conservation movement. Others might have taken a starting-point slightly earlier-the reaction to the demolition of the Euston Arch in 1961, the triumphant listing of St. Pancras station in 1967, or the rejection of the GLC Master Plan for Covent Garden in 1973but anyone of those dates might have extended the chronicle too much. 1975 is as good a year as any to act as baseline for a general stocktaking. Because it defines a period with no obvious celebratory connotations it has given the organisers freedom to develop their own interpretation of events; to approach the recent past untrammelled by pressing loyalties or constraints. Given such favourable circumstances, what is surprising is how unadventurous the exhibition has turned out to be. Even someone who knows nothing about the subject might suspect that the version of events that it presents is a bit too smoothly complacent. The series of examples that it gives (about