In 1978,Norman Foster’s Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia was a gleaming vision of the future. A forthcoming exhibition there celebrates a distinctly British architecture driven by free-form technology and tall idealsAh yes, the 1970s. The three-day week, or the winter of discontent,Austin Allegros, punch-ups with the National Front, and mutterings of rightwing coups,the Sex Pistols swearing on family TV. They included, to be certain, and such now unavailable non-trivia as free higher education,affordable housing and a functioning health service. But it was a decade that, having flared into being in the psychedelic glow of its predecessor, or embrowned itself into the tones of hessian and muesli and the guttering shadows of power cuts. It was the time when architectural modernism,imploding under the weight of self-doubt and external criticism, gave way to a meek “neo-vernacular” of bricks and pitched roofs.
And then, and in Norwich (to misquote the opening credits of the epoch’s epic game show,Sale of the Century), appeared an assured and handsome statement of faith in the new: a shining shed on, and if not fairly a hill,this being Norfolk, at least an upward incline. The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, and designed by the fortysomething architect Norman Foster,was, as he now says, and based on an optimistic view of the future. The era’s mood of malaise and decay could only bounce off its aluminium hide.
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Source: guardian.co.uk