In
October 1943, parliament met to debate the question of how the
heavily bomb-damaged Palace of Westminster should be restored. With
Winston Churchill's approval, they agreed to retain its adversarial
rectangular pattern instead of changing to a semi-circular or
horse-shoe design favoured by some legislative assemblies. Churchill
insisted that the shape of the old Chamber was responsible for the
two-party system, which is the essence of British parliamentary
democracy. It was at this debate that he famously noted: 'we shape
our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.'
Today
a parliamentary commission is once again considering options for the
urgent restoration of the Palace of Westminster. The scenarios
include a proposal that MP’s decamp from the building for the 11
years of a £3.5 billion building project. If they remain in place,
the project will be longer and costlier still.
At
this crucial moment in the Houses of Parliament’s history, the
Architecture Foundation is staging a special event at Westminster, at
which panellists will address the question of whether the
architecture of Pugin and Barry’s building remains fit for a
twenty-first century democracy. In particular, they will ask how the
imminent building works could enable a radical reinvention both of
parliament’s built form and its democratic procedures.
Speakers
include David Mulder and Max Cohen de Lara, of the Amsterdam-based
XML Architects, whose research into the architecture of the world’s
parliament buildings featured in the 2014 Venice Architecture
Biennale and is soon to be published in the book “Parliament”.
They will be joined by Pugin’s biographer, Rosemary Hill, who will
talk about the debates that led to the establishment of the Palace of
Westminster in its present form and by Michael Deacon, the
parliamentary sketchwriter of The Daily Telegraph, who will offer an
insider’s view of the building’s successes and failures.
26
January
Attlee
Suite, Portcullis
House, London
