Essay: The new tsar: nice for Tony's cronies, bad for good design

Stuart Lipton is now Britain's architecture supremo. What will he do, exactly? By Catherine Pepinster

Architecture has a new champion. Stuart Lipton, one of the most successful developers of the Eighties' London property boom - the man who transformed the Big Bang City with the Broadgate office complex - was last week appointed architecture tsar by the Secretary of State for Culture, Chris Smith. The brief for the two-day-a-week, pounds 30,000-a- year job is fairly simple: to be a high-profile spokesman, advocate and arbiter for architecture. Lipton, and the Architecture Commission he will chair, will inherit the funding, premises and staff of the Royal Fine Art Commission, the pounds 220,000 budget of the Arts Council's defunct Architecture Unit, and the pounds 105,000 architecture budget of the Royal Society of Arts. Smith has made it clear in the architectural press that he wanted the successful candidate to "put good-quality design in architecture very much more on the governmental and public map".

It all sounds very encouraging. But take another look at the brief - and the man who's been given it. The commission will be passing judgment on important designs - office blocks in London, for instance, of the type which made Lipton's name - and it will also be offering advice to the Government and other public bodies. Then it will also be expected to encourage interest in architecture in schools and develop more regional aspects to its work. That's an awful lot of baggage for an organisation operating for just two days a week.

Lipton's appointment was a surprise. Choosing a property developer suggests that the Culture department wanted a pragmatist, someone whose chief concern would be function rather than form. Lipton's background, however, indicates that he has long been interested in architecture: he has been on the Royal Opera House's development steering committee since 1994 and joined its board last year. He is also deputy chairman of the Architecture Foundation.

For all that, what he really knows about is money: how to make it from buildings, and how to lose it - spectacularly. At its peak, his stake in Stanhope, the property company behind Broadgate, was estimated at pounds 150m. That was when developing London office blocks was an easy game. Soaring values and fast-rising rents meant that - bar the fee you paid the architect - your completed building would be worth double the original estimate.

But the late-1980s property crash wiped out most of Lipton's fortune. When British Land snapped up the company in 1995, just before the receivers stepped in, they got it for a bargain-basement pounds 3m. Even during his successful years, Lipton had setbacks. He tried to rejuvenate King's Cross and failed. He tried to redevelop Paternoster Square, besides St Paul's Cathedral, and the design he commissioned from Ove Arup was reviled by Prince Charles. Then he got involved in a pounds 100m scheme to revive London's South Bank Centre, and that crashed in the recession too. Since then, Lipton has bounced back, and reacquired his old company from British Land. We may yet see his projects coming before the Architecture Commission for assessment - an embarrassing state of affairs, which Smith might have avoided by appointing a non-player.

That, however, is not the only reason that Lipton's appointment has architects fiddling uneasily with their bow ties. For Lipton is part of the circle of people associated with Richard Rogers. The man who designed the Lloyd's building is the chief Tony crony of the architecture world, and has the ear of the Blair government. He is chairman of the Architecture Foundation (where he works with Lipton), and chairs the Urban Task Force. In July, his partner, Marco Goldschmied, becomes president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. And the girlfriend of Rogers's son runs the Architecture Foundation. With that background, one might reasonably ask whether there is only one right way of thinking, one form of advocacy when it comes to design. Would a person caught up in such a metropolitan coterie have much to offer the regions?

And what of the other parts of the architecture tsar's remit? Key to this is his role in the promotion of good design in public buildings - essential when the Government is responsible for billions of pounds worth of building work. Lipton is clearly used to tough negotiating, yet it will be hard to hear the tsar's voice urging the merits of innovative design when he is drowned out by the number-crunchers of Gordon Brown's Treasury.

What is most likely is that the new architecture commissar will make his presence most felt in the areas where the Royal Fine Art Commission used to hold sway - over private projects in the capital. Yet London is doing just fine, thank you, and the public knows it. It's a long time since Prince Charles spoke out against proposals for an extension to the National Gallery, damning it as a carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend. Many people today seem to think the capital's crop of recently- erected buildings are along the lines of beauty spots adorning the city's visage.

On Saturday mornings, Londoners queue up to take trips entitled Architecture for the New Millennium, Docklands Regeneration and Architecture for Contemporary Living. They seem to like what they see - Cesar Pelli's Canary Wharf tower, Nick Grimshaw's snaking Eurostar terminal, Michael Hopkins's tensile Lord's Cricket Ground stadium and Future Systems' neighbouring lozenge-like Media Centre. These can stand proud in the city of Wren and Hawksmoor. London, which, thanks to the plans for its mayor and new assembly, is becoming increasingly like a city-state, can look after itself.

What are inexpressibly awful, though, are not these major edifices, but the buildings which pimple all our neighbourhoods - the banal, pattern- book junk of executive housing estates, out-of-town shopping centres, and the warehouse and distribution sheds littering every motorway exit. We have all seen them: row upon row of homes, complete with integral garage, shower room and kitchen, housing the latest offerings from Hygena and Magnet. Then there are the Po-Mo malls with water features and bum-numbing benches you have to quit after 6.37 minutes, sending you scuttling into the nearest "anchor" store.

A truly effective architecture tsar, one who could hold his head high in the pantheon of design champions alongside Ruskin, Pevsner and Betjeman, would educate people to dump these creations of the shlock jocks. One of the most significant marks of a civilised society is the quality of the housing in which people live. Too many of us still live in bland, badly designed homes. Then there is the issue of exodus. The upwardly mobile have lost confidence in urban dwelling: 1,700 people a week are leaving our cities. This decampment is a serious problem. The environmentalists fear for its effect on green space; city leaders fret that their neighbourhoods will become the province of poverty; businessmen are dismayed that the workforce no longer lives where the jobs are, and everyone is fed up with sitting in traffic jams.

If that is to change, then good design will play an essential role. In the centre of London, people are beginning to live in the thick of things once more. It is the suburbs and our regional cities that they are deserting. Great buildings of adventurous, even subversive design can enable a place to undergo a much-needed renaissance. Well-crafted smaller ones can add a sense that care is being taken - that it is worth investing in a neighbourhood by living in it. If that is to happen - and the bland and banal are to disappear - then it will take a dynamic visionary to encourage it. A hundred years ago, Ebenezer Howard, with his proposals for garden cities, was such a man. Has Stuart Lipton got what it takes to follow in his footsteps?