The cuckoo in Wren’s nest?

Press, 9 March 1982, Page 21

The cuckoo in Wren’s nest?

For more than 20 years, property developer Peter Palumbo has been driven by one obsession: to acquire a group of 53 buildings in the historic core of the City of London, to demolish and replace them with an 18-storey tower-block designed by his lifelong architectural hero, Mies van der Rohe. It would, he says, be as much an aesthetic triumph as a commercial success. Sir Christopher Wren would have approved. Now Mr Palumbo is two-thirds of the way towards the realisation of his dream. He has the plans; he has the site; all he needs is the planning permission. DEYAN SUDJIC, of the London “Sunday Times,” reports.

Peter Palumbo looks more like a housemaster than a property developer. Softspoken and rather earnest, he is not at all the type you would associate with multimillion dollar gambles. Yet he had devoted 23 years and $25 million to a real-life Monopoly game, painstakingly piecing together a 1.25 acre site right in the heart of London between the Mansion House, and the Bank of England.

In the most ambitious redevelopment plan since Jack Cotton tried to knock Eros off his pedestal, he has successfully negotiated the purchase of 12 freeholds and no fewer than 345 leases. Now he is determined to call up the bulldozers and carve a new city square out of his winnings, obliterating a tangled web of ancient streets and demolishing all the existing buildings on the site to let in a new 18-storey office block.

This would, Mr Palumbo claims, be no ordinary tower. It was the last design completed by Mies van der Rohe, one of the founding fathers of modern architecture, and a man Palumbo worships with almost religious devotion. "Mies is like a god to me.” he says. So rare is it to find a developer who believes in anything beyond his balance sheet that it is hard not to sympathise with Mr Palumbo’s obsession. His enthusiasm was in no way diminished by the death of Mr van der Rohe in 1969, and of his consultant planner,’ Lord Holford, in 1975; or even by the retirement from active involvement of his own father, Rudolph Palumbo, an obsessively secretive developer whose fortune from the post-war property boom made the whole thing possible.

Nor was he deterred last year when the City of London . Corporation decided to make the entire Mansion House precinct, including all the properties he planned to demolish, a conservation area. "They are second-rate buildings,” he says, “not worthy of the treatment a Nash terrace would get. "People tell me I'm crazy to have spent half my working life on just one project. But I believe a developer without commitment to quality is no real developer at all. This is the kind of chance that comes only once in a hundred years — the creation of a new London square. The City of London could win the envy of the world as a centre for architectual excellence.":

It is an opinion that many people find hard to swallow. Despite hiring a public relations firm to try to head off opposition from influential conservationists, Mr Palumbo has been unable to prevent his scheme from falling foul of the country’s most vigorous environmental pressure group, Save Britain's Heritage. Says its chairman, Marcus Binnev: “I don’t see this

building as any kind of gain at all. It is extremely unsatisfactory to build the work of a dead architect and, in any case, the Commercial Union tower already says all we need to know about this kind of architecture. “The whole character of that part of the City depends on the fact that' the roads funnel in like the spokes of a wheel. A square would totally disrupt that effect.” Mr Binney complains that the Palumbo plan involves the destruction not only of the newly designated conservation area, but of nine

buildings which w’ere already satutorily listed as being of individual architectural and historical interest — including one in Queen Victoria Street, currently occupied by the Bank of New Zealand, which is still owned by the City of London Corporation and was expensively restored only last year. There are doubts, too, on the extent to which the quality of Mr van der Rohe’s design would compensate for the loss of the old streets. Mr van der Rohe is now remembered as much for his legions of third-rate imita-

tors asfor his own undoubted talents. ?It is the inferior adaptation of his reserved steel-and-glass style, ' remorselessly applied, which has turned our Western city centres into such dismal collections of shoeboxes.

Mr Plumbo himself is perfectly sincere in his admiration — he has his own van der Rohe-designed house in America — but he is well aware that the name of van der Rohe is not the short cut to planning permission it used to be. “Mies used to say I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good. And that is a pretty unfashionable attitude these days.” Even more unfashionable, perhaps, is the involvement in the scheme of the late Lord Holford, a former president of the Royal Institute of British Architecture and recipient of a Royal Gold medal for Architecture. Since his death in 1975 his once very considerable reputation as a planner has evaporated. It was Lord Holford who created the bleak and desolate precinct around St Paul’s, and who was only narrowly restrained from putting up a 20-storey tower which would have blocked the classic views of the dome. Between them Lord Holford and van der Rohe have

created another precinct for .the Mansion House? Mr Palumbo claims their design would be nothing less than the full realisation of Sir Christopher Wren’s visionary plan for the rebuilding of the City after the Great Fire. It would, he says, provide a prefect setting for ceremonial occasions, and would be surrounded by a collection of fine architectural monuments, ranging from the side wall of Dance's Mansion House to the facade of Lutyens' Midland Bank and Wren’s own St Mary Walbrook.

He does not point out, however, that the square would have on its south side a quite outstandingly awful 1950 s office slab, and that, like Parliament Square, it would be surrounded by busy roads. Traffic would circulate around three sides of the square, the fourth being a private roadway for the Mansion House. Just how attractive this would be as a recreational space, in which to sit out and enjoy your sandwiches, must at least be open to doubt. Nothing would remain of the present thriving collection of shops, restaurants and winebars. These would be replaced by a subterranean shopping mall with tunnel links to Bank tube station.

Mr Palumbo first applied for planning permission in 1969. The scheme was . approved in principle, but full consent was withheld until he could show that he had gained control of the whole site. This condition has now been fulfilled, and he has duly reapplied. The City planning committee is expected to discuss the proposal in full next month. On the evidence of its somewhat equivocal record, it is quite likely to ignore the opinions of its officials, who only last December included the site in the conservation area. If it does, a public inquiry would almost certainly follow, with objectors likely to include not only Save and the Victorian Society, but also the Greater London Council, which is now committed to a policy of discouraging new office development.

Mr Palumbo remains undaunted. Even at the earliest, he does not expect to start building until 1985 — 26 years after he bought his first stake in the site. In the meantime he is content to worship every day at a personal shrine to his idol. His clinically white-walled office is shared with two alsatians, an antique desk, and a mansize model of Mies van der Rohe’s Mansion House Square.