Art dealer and gallery founder Chris Clifford sings the praises of a building that helps add to the character of an area of St Helier.
Hue Court, designed in the brutalist style and built in the early 70s, does not seem to be widely regarded as a great piece of architecture and I’m fully prepared to accept that my love of it may place me in a minority of one.
Perhaps this is because there is still some nostalgia attached to the area where the wholesale ‘slum clearance’ of the 1970s saw hundreds of ‘artisan houses’ in Old Street, Hue Street and Dumaresq Street swept away?
Certainly the highly successful restoration, by Save Jersey’s Heritage, of the 18th-century row of cottages on Hue Street hints at what might have been achievable but the truth is that these slums were uninhabitable and well beyond economic repair.
By demolishing a sizeable area in town and erecting large modernist and brutalist-inspired buildings, a new architectural character to St Helier was created which is now worthy of reappraisal. Modernist and brutalist architecture has always attracted criticism, including from the Prince of Wales, whose mildly eccentric speeches and writings have excoriated these styles, calling many of the structures ‘piles of concrete’.
Critics have also found it unappealing due to its ‘cold’ appearance projecting an atmosphere of totalitarianism, as well as associating the buildings, often arbitrarily, with urban decay, vandalism and graffiti. Despite this, modern and postmodern architecture is widely appreciated, as recently highlighted by the UK-based 20th Century Society, who have submitted an application via Jersey Heritage to list La Frégate café, which was built as recently as 1997 to designs by Stirling Prize-winning architect Will Alsop.
The modernist philosophical approach to architectural design strove to create simple, honest and functional buildings that accommodate their purpose, inhabitants and location. Stylistically, brutalism is a strict modernistic design language that was a reaction to the architecture of the 1940s, much of which was characterised by a ‘misty-eyed nostalgia’ for the past.
Aside from the pre-cast façade panels, the principal design feature that I admire most about Hue Court (interestingly not listed) are the vast exposed cast-concrete piloti at the base of the building that project this utopian social housing project into the sky. No doubt inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘lily pad’ dendriform columns from the SC Johnson building, there are no other examples in the Channel Islands.
Why then, in a recent makeover, was the decision taken to cover them in cladding? Was this an attempt to ‘prettify’ the architecture? If so, this seems to me to be a small act of architectural vandalism and an opportunity has been lost to celebrate this unique piece of 20th-century architectural design.
This in turn raises questions about the purpose of the Island’s many ‘heritage bodies’, who are rightly vocal about the importance of saving, where possible, buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries but seem ambivalent to good aspects of 20th-century design.
Of course, not everything about Hue Court is perfect. Surrounding the two brutalist-inspired towers at ground floor level are groupings of banal and poorly designed town houses, built, presumably, to recreate the impression of a Victorian streetscape.
In my opinion these have only served to detract from the powerful concrete structures above and seem, from a planning perspective, like a polite but mishandled attempt to pretend that St Helier is still a Victorian fishing village.
Surely the opportunity exists to remove them and create a beautiful park that could act as a catalyst for the sensitive regeneration of an area that could encompass the modernist Romerils building while also creating a large underground car park literally metres from the centre of the town’s retail core?
This would also be a fantastic way to soften the edges and harmonise the surrounding architecture, which is interesting, as it spans several centuries.
So why, you may think, is an art dealer concerned with matters of architectural history, urban design and regeneration? The answer lies in the fact that modernism, and its cultural successor, postmodernism, have both promoted important ideological principles and values that have informed the very best in art and architectural design since the beginning of the 20th century.
Art, design and architecture all speak a common language and have played an important part in helping to solve the problems of their time. From Friday 4 March to 1 April you will be able to visit an exhibition entitled Modern Postmodern, which opens at Private & Public Gallery. A large body of works by the ultimate 20th-century modernist, Pablo Picasso, will sit alongside postmodern masterpieces by Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter.
The exhibition is free and open to all from 12 to 6pm weekdays and 10am to 2pm Saturdays at the Phillips Street gallery and the accompanying catalogue contains an introduction to the differences between modern and postmodern design.
