RIBA president-elect Jack Pringle vows that a former icon will rise again but would rather see a Holborn hotel buried without trace


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Powell and Moya beat 156 other entries to win the competition to build a "vertical feature" for the Festival of Britain. The Skylon's slender, aluminium-clad body was supported by just three cables.


My wonder is the Skylon, which was built for the Festival of Britain in 1951 by architects Powell and Moya with engineer Felix Samuely. Powell and Moya won the vertical feature competition when they were still students at the Architectural Association School of Architecture and Samuely was their tutor. It was a 300 ft high aluminium and steel sculpture, internally lit and with cable supports. Its space-age imagery and technology presaged the whole British high-tech and cable structure movement, not least the cable-stayed London Eye. It must have looked fantastic, particularly at night when this glowing aluminium rocket appeared to be floating in mid-air. It has never been forgotten, and while I am president of the RIBA I hope to be able to rebuild it on its original site on the South Bank on behalf of the Royal Academy where Sir Philip Powell was treasurer for many years.

The Holiday Inn at Mount Pleasant in Clerkenwell, London, is about the most crass piece of architecture I have seen in the UK. It is a piece of pure facadism with cack-handed, meaningless elevational graphics presumably intended to persuade the planners that the building had design and detail. It鈥檚 a very cynical piece of non-architecture.

Jack Pringle is a partner at Pringle Brandon and president-elect of the RIBA. Free with next week鈥檚 issue: a 10 years of Wonders & Blunders calendar