ARCHITECTURE THAT WOULDN'T GET MADE NOW

Works of art often rely on support, financial or otherwise, to reach the public. Tony Fretton, a partner in Tony Fretton Architects and best known for designing arts buildings such as the Lisson Gallery, and Mary Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge and author of “It’s a Don’s Life” (Profile), continue our Intelligent Life mini-series on classics that might not get a green light today.

ALVARO SIZA’S SWIMMING POOL

The public swimming pool on the beach at Leça da Palmeira in Portugal, designed by Alvaro Siza in the 1960s, is a great work that perhaps could not be made now. It is a public pool for the working people of Oporto, set in an industrial landscape, and redolent of a time when people were in contact with the world through physical work on land and sea, and less pre-occupied by ideas of public safety.

There’s an understanding of how different groups of people—children, adolescents, adults and older people—can co-exist. It is fantastically enjoyable, with places to sunbathe between the rocks, a children’s paddling pool on the beach and a swimming pool between boulders in the sea. Like all great architecture, it combines pragmatism with blatant poetry. The sea here is wonderful with crashing waves, but is a shipping lane and very polluted. The pools let you enjoy the sea from without, and at a deeper level their relations to the natural and industrialised surroundings are holistic and non-judgmental. ~ TONY FRETTON

THE COLOSSEUM

For a start, it would never get planning permission. No stadium would now be allowed within an inch of the centre of government. (Imagine the O2 arena encroaching on Parliament Square.) Besides, Health and Safety would be another killer. Just how far would you have to keep lions from the front row of the stalls? Then there is the cash. The Colosseum, commissioned by the emperor Vespasian in 70AD, was a public project paid for by profits of war (in the days when war still made a profit). The last estimate I had, from a friendly surveyor, costed the foundations alone at £35m. Not a hope. ~ MARY BEARD

Picture credit: noname_nolastname_2008 (via Flickr)