The Measures Taken

From Russia, Royal Academy and Rodchenko – Revolution in Photography, Hayward Gallery.

What would a world be like without art? And why did the most talented artists of the period immediately after the First World War end up advocating the abolition of art altogether?



‘Art is Dead! shouted the Dadaists, with their hatred of galleries and museums. ‘From the easel to the machine’, was a slogan of the Constructivists. The ten years after 1918 marked a total war on the category of ‘art’, its networks of patrons and consumers, and its unique objects. This is something which hasn’t exactly been forgotten by history, but tends to be treated rather patronisingly – an eccentric extremism that art grew out of, a failed utopia, or a juvenile biting of the hand that feeds. Two current London exhibitions, From Russia and Rodchenko – Revolution in Photography inadvertently help explain why art was slated for destruction, what it might have been replaced with, and why it survived.



Fine Art, although we think of it as something eternal and immutable, is actually a relatively recent idea. Of course, artists, craftsmen and architects have existed for thousands of years. However, with the occasional exception (the famous sculptors of ancient Athens, such as Praxitiles, maybe) art as we think of it – an individual work by a gifted individual, installed in a gallery – is modern. Art comes into existence along with the bourgeoisie, and the culture of the Renaissance ‘genius’ accompanied the birth of mercantile capitalism. Early galleries, as depicted in contemporary drawings, would have looked crass to our eyes, with their piling up of paintings as commodities. The more refined gallery as we know it, and the artist as we know him or her is a 19th century phenomenon, and funding and patronage works similarly today.



From Russia concentrates on the collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. They were particularly enlightened patrons, commissioning from the finest artists of the 1900s. Henri Matisse’s ‘The Dance’ was painted for Shchukin’s stairwell, while he kept an entire room of Picassos, which if sold together now would easily equal the GDP of a small African country. The Royal Academy is filled with a panoply of masterpieces, and hundreds of spectators crowd the galleries, awed. Aptly, as the art of this period marks the real emergence of the artist as genius, as fearless experimenter and frequently tragic hero. With Van Gogh, Gaugin, Picasso, (all here) the artist’s works become even more about a totally irreplacable object, a truly priceless possession (occasionally opened up to the public) at which one must genuflect, radiating what Walter Benjamin regarded as a fetishistic ‘aura’.



Along with the cult of the individual artist, though, comes the emergence of the artistic avant-garde, determined to epater les bourgeois, to shock their patrons’ class and create a culture they wouldn’t recognise. In the first two decades of the 20th century this pushed art to what are still frequently stunning extremes. With ‘Cubo-Futurism’ the Russian avant-garde pushed at the limits of the canvas, using it to create images redolent of the giddy dynamism of the modern mediascape and its bustling streets, as in the paintings of Liubov Popova, or representations of the terrifying, incomprehensible chaos of mechanised slaughter like Pavel Filonov’s ‘The German War’, rather than the portraits, still lifes and so forth that make up most of the RA show.



By the late 1910s the Russian avant-garde were innovating at such a rapid rate that whole movements (kinetic art, minimalism) would emerge decades later on the basis of their discarded experiments. Given extra impetus by the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the canvases of Alexander Rodchenko, Kasimir Malevich and Mikhail Matyushin that close From Russia reach an extreme of abstraction that, they imagined, would end art altogether. Malevich called his ‘Black Square’ the ‘zero of form’, after which he would go ‘beyond zero’. Finally, we have a model of Tatlin’s ‘Third International Tower’, over which the Berlin Dadaists proclaimed ‘art is dead – long live Tatlin’s machine-art!’



Which brings us to Rodchenko – Revolution in Photography. In the early 1920s another art-obituarist wrote ‘art is dead, and Rodchenko is the executioner’. He would have resented being fingered as the sole culprit. Rodchenko was a member of LEF, a group of former painters and poets who attempted to realise an art without art – abandoning anything not technically reproducible (such as the oil painting or sculpture) as a remnant of the deposed bourgeoisie. LEF’s ‘art workers’ like Varvara Stepanova or Sergei Tretiakov theorised an art against spectacle. Rather than the individual fetishised object, whether painting or sculpture, they moved into book and magazine design, fashion, film, architecture, even advertising. Most of all they tried to engage themselves in everyday life, transforming the spaces of mundanity and drudgery. The Hayward exhibition has a fragmentary, but still impressive collection of what was to replace painting – the photomontage, the photograph, the covers of popular magazines.



In 1923 Sergei Tretiakov wrote in LEF’s journal that art, like capitalism, was something that held back innate human creativity, frightening off the non-expert, with its religiose rhetoric of magic, inspiration and dreams. ‘Recall that in childhood every person draws, dances, invents precise words, sings. So why does he then grow up to be extremely inexpressive? And only occasionally go to admire the artist’s ‘creation’? Doesn’t this originate within those conditions of capitalist labour which make work processes into a curse and within which people are always longing for moments of free time? Is it normal to be converted from a skilled producer into a spectator-consumer? And to thereby lose your active creative instinct?’ For LEF, a world without capitalism was necessarily a world without such an art.



In abolishing art as we know it, and with it the museum and the gallery, LEF hoped that ‘everyone should become an artist.’ If everything is artistic, then art as a separate category need exist no longer. Today, we find all this in fragments, walking round galleries and museums, confirming their failure. Although it may be in the form of installations as much as paintings, the culture of contemplation and spectacle still suffuses the art world, and millions are still made from artistic mystique. If we follow Tretiakov’s reasoning, then art survives because drudgery survives, because we still need escapism. Maybe, then, the would-be executioners of art deserve to be taken a little more seriously?

Politics of building, aesthetics of anti-architecture


hannes meyer & hans wittwer, basel peterschule

Functionalism is a vexed term. Denounced, claimed to be impossible, or a pejorative for the ‘merely functional’. Yet for much of the 20th century functionalism was, almost inadvertently, frequently used to denote the revolutionary socialist currents in architecture. ‘Functionalism’ has always been completely central to discussions of 20th century architecture, where it is usually used to describe the Central European architecture of the 1920s, and more rarely, certain American and British currents in the 1960s. Yet no architect to my knowledge has ever described himself or herself as a functionalist, and as we will see, no unified movement known as ‘functionalism’ has ever really existed as such. Functionalism, then, has for the most part been a negative term, used to describe certain reductive, utilitarian or positivist strains in modernist architecture. What I’m going to argue here is that the critique of what is described as functionalism has frequently been an attack on the possibility of the intersection of architecture and politics as much as the intersections of form and function.


louis sullivan, carson pirie scott department store, 1902

Whenever the term is given some sort of historiography, it is said to begin with the marriage of engineering and aesthetics in late 19th century Chicago. Specifically, in the work of Louis Sullivan and his partner, the engineer Dankmar Adler. The placing of the supposedly non-aesthetic work of the engineer, quotidian, grubby and semi-proletarian, on the same plane as the rarefied artistic facility of the architect is the functionalist gesture before the fact, and the over-debated aphorism ‘form follows function’ was first popularised by Sullivan. More usefully for our purposes here though, ‘functionalism’ begins with the aestheticisation of American engineering by European intellectuals. Under the auspices of the Deutscher Werkbund, Walter Gropius, the future Bauhaus director, collected photographs of grain silos and power stations. In the early 1920s these photographs would be reproduced in books by both Le Corbusier and the Russian Constructivist Moisei Ginsburg, alongside other engineering structures such as biplanes and liners, as exemplars of the architecture of the future – devoid of historical reference, futuristic, built for purpose rather than for abstraction, and, usefully for our purposes here, devoid of what would usually be called architecture.


architecture of the future, 100 years ago

The first major use of anything resembling the term Functionalism, however, comes with the book Der Moderne Zweckbau, translated as The Modern Functional Building, by the critic Adolf Behne. This book, written in 1923 although not published until three years later, was also perhaps the first programmatic statement of the German Neues Bauen. It should be remembered exactly what the significance is of the term ‘bauen’, building, here. There was rarely talk in the 1920s that a new style, or even a new architecture had been born, but a New Building: essentially, the self-abolition of architecture. And yet when Behne uses the term Functionalism – which he distinguishes from straightforward utilitarianism – it’s often to describe the biological rhetoric of architects like Hans Scharoun, hardly the stern technocratic anti-aesthetic the term usually evokes. The illustrations that were featured in Der Moderne Zweckbau were from two distinct poles: the avant-garde and industry, bringing together Italian Futurism, American car factories, De Stijl and Soviet Constructivism. What we have here is aesthetes attempting to subsume themselves in production, a move which has led to accusations of concomitance with industrial ideology from the critic Manfredo Tafuri, who we’ll return to later.


bauhaus trade union school, entrance

In 1932 a very different programmatic book was published in the USA: The International Style, by the critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the architect and active Nazi Philip Johnson. The title here offers a clue. The Neues Bauen was here being codified for transatlantic consumption into a style, and architecture, definitively separated from building in what they called the ‘aesthetic hierarchy’ was remounted on an ornament-free pedestal. The book has a chapter entitled ‘Functionalism’, which critiques what is claimed to be a dominant idea among central European architects, that is, the belief that aesthetics should be purged from architecture, with function as the only design consideration. This view is ascribed to the second Bauhaus director, the Marxist architect Hannes Meyer, and to similarly politicised practitioners like Mart Stam. These are the people that Hitchcock and Johnson had in mind when they wrote of ‘fanatical functionalists’ bent on designing for ‘some proletarian superman of the future’.


bauhaus trade union school, accomodation blocks

So, let’s turn to the theory and practice of Hannes Meyer, the most prominent representative of the Neues Bauen’s left-wing: architects who mostly referred to themselves as Constructivists rather Functionalists. Meyer undoubtedly tries to totally separate building from art. Art, for him as for the Russian Constructivists and the Dadaists, is to be entirely abolished and transcended. Architecture’s ascription to the realm of art mythologises it, gives it what Benjamin would have called an auratic function, objects for awed contemplation rather than for use and adaption. Meyer’s buildings are architecture without aura, which includes the nascent aura of the purist planes that would make up the International Style. If there is a contradiction in Meyer’s theory, it is in the appeal both to the proletariat and to industry: to the bosses and the workers, put bluntly. Socialist architecture is to be made of standard, up-to-the-minute components, and at the same time is apparently an active part of the class struggle. There are signs that this was bearing at least some fruit. The trade union school in Bernau was collectively produced by Meyer and the Bauhaus’ Building Department. The collective aspect was stressed: Meyer claimed that ‘the architect is dead’, and that ‘my architecture students will not be architects’ but a collaborative collective. The school was both a technologically advanced environment, colour-coded, operated and adapted by a series of buttons and levers, and a functional structure designed for the use of the working class.


mart stam, van nelle factory

Nonetheless, the contradictions were clearly irresolvable in a capitalist context, and Meyer and many of his students and collaborators attempted to resolve this contradiction by moving, along with a ‘bauhaus brigade’, to the USSR, where in 1931 he drafted some ‘Theses on Marxist Architecture’. This text shows no let-up in the attack on art, but it is interesting in terms of the critique that his alleged functionalism left no room for the pleasures and effects of form. In thesis eleven, beauty is replaced by psychology, and the determinate effects of form in personality, much like the Soviet Constructivist Ginzburg, who posited that ‘form is a function’. Colour, staircases and other elements are to be scientifically evaluated for a psychological effect that could easily be mistaken for an aesthetic one, in an echo of a Reichian/Meyerholdian biomechanical Marxism of stimulus-response. This comes close to the problem of sight and spatiality as a valid question for socialist ‘building’ – although thesis thirteen declares that ‘for the Marxist architect, architecture is not an aesthetic stimulus but a keen-edged weapon in the class struggle’. The stated aim of Meyer’s Bauhaus was to replace art with science, both in the social and industrial sense. That he failed in this in the USSR of the Five-Year Plans as well as in Weimar Germany is intricately linked with changes in their social and technological make-up.


photograph by marxist antihumanist hannes meyer, 1931

Aside from Johnson and Hitchcock’s critique of the Functionalist deviation, there were other attacks that deserved to be taken more seriously. The first is that of the American ‘inventor’ Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose 1920s work, contemporary with the Neues Bauen, stressed prefabrication and serial production. In the 1950s, Fuller claimed that the Neues Bauen, or what he called, conflating the original and the recuperation ‘the Bauhaus international school’, was based not on the utilisation of advanced technology, but on its symbolism. Technology would be represented by what looked like an emphatic product of a production line, but was in fact a finely wrought aesthetic object, fairly traditionally constructed, then rendered and buffed to give an appearance of industrial modernity. Fuller pointed out that the ‘bauhaus international’ designers never looked at the plumbing and drainage, which were neatly tidied away, and were prepared to have such truly functional elements delegated out to the contractors and developers. In a nutshell, they weren’t functionalist enough.


buckminster fuller, with 'invention'

Actually, as Kenneth Frampton has pointed out, Fuller’s critique in this sense was very similar to that of Meyer and the Neues Bauen’s Marxist fringe. One of Meyer’s students later recalled that he wasn’t allowed to draw elevations, and certainly wasn’t allowed to hide the plumbing or the ‘electro-mechanical installation, pipes and even chimneys’ – much as in Fuller’s Dymaxion house, organised around a central, exposed core of services. Politically however, Fuller and the German leftist would seem to be poles apart, and Fuller always maintained an ostensible all-American political conformism. That conformism masked a conception of society and technology that strained at the limits of capitalism. Emphasising the ability of technology to do more with less, Fuller’s voluminous works contain several retrospective attacks on Malthus and the belief in the permanence of scarcity and inequality. Enough is produced to give a high standard of living to all, Fuller claims, and the ‘industrial equation’ would, seemingly by itself, and independently of class and politics, arrive at such a system of redistribution.

Fuller’s dismissal of Marxism, which was clearly not based on extensive acquaintance with Marx, centres on the belief that automation made the working-class movement obsolete. In a passage that is rather poignant to the contemporary reader, he states ‘the concepts of Karl Marx are typical of the erroneous and inadequate way in which men at first pondered the industrial equation. They thought of men chained to the machines and grievously exploited by the machine owners. With automation an increasing economic reality, we see now that the industrial equation was heading towards the complete elimination of man as a worker. The industrial equation will bring about a condition where, within a century, the word ‘worker’ will have no current meaning. It will be something you will have to look up in an early 20th century dictionary’.


bauhaus trade union school in a DDR stamp

Now, half a century after Fuller wrote this, if the word ‘worker’ could in any way be said to be disappearing, it’s more to do with post-cold war sleight of hand than the changes in the productive process – in fact, automation has brought with it proletarianisation, with even non-productive countries like the UK reliant on menial call centre and temp work rather than the fusion of science and play that Fuller had envisaged. This is no surprise, in a sense. Although Fuller loftily proclaimed socialism obsolete in the 1960s, in the next sentence he said the same about capitalism. His typological model is the space programme, in which the housing of the astronaut in the rocket is scientifically worked out to the minutest detail. The theory was that industry will at some point concentrate on the production of what he called ‘livingry’ with the same assiduousness as weaponry. Fuller is the 20th century’s Fourier, a kind of utopian idiot-genius, and it’s quite telling that his major projects, as Manfredo Tafuri pointed out, although he meant it as a criticism, were almost all for international Expos. Like his English equivalents, Cedric Price, Reyner Banham and Archigram, who built even less, these were visions of a future which even Keynesian capitalism was incapable of realising, something posited but never to be actually realised. Fuller’s domes, like his theories, are exemplars of what capitalism might once have promised but is utterly incapable of providing, and in that sense their utopianism is not merely ideological.


making a snowman in the Neue Frankfurt

The other critiques came from architects and critics associated with the New York journal Oppositions, which ran through the early 70s to 80s. The most sophisticated was Manfredo Tafuri’s. While he generally dismisses the work of Fuller and his megastructural, futurist successors – Archigram, Cedric Price, Moshe Safdie – with one-liners, his analysis of the Neues Bauen was concretely politically and economically grounded. In a close analysis of the ‘functionalist’ planning programmes of Frankfurt (by the architect Ernst May) and Berlin (under Bruno Taut) in the 1920s – another element of the Neues Bauen expunged from The International Style – he pointed out that while the Nazis sneeringly called them ‘constructed socialism’, they were in fact realised social democracy, and as such enormously compromised and contradictory. These were ‘partial utopias of the plan’, which may have been impeccably scientific and socialist in their own context, but were merely peripheral to capitalism’s totality. Interventions at the outskirts, leaving the centre to multiply its contradictions. Indeed, this is surely what drove both Taut and May to follow Hannes Meyer to the Soviet Union, where these problems were ostensibly being rectified. Tafuri is unforgiving though, and he sees these interventions as a prototype for the Keynesian project of rationalisation, which he rather naively presumed was an inextricable component of late capitalism – he was writing in 1973. Now that Keynesian capitalism has proven to have been a brief aberration based on a compromise between labour and capital, we can be rather more sympathetic to the German functional planners, if aware of their limitations.


inside the geodesic dome

Of far less intellectual depth, but of far greater influence, was the critique of Peter Eisenman. In an editorial for Oppositions in 1976, he made the equation that functionalists, by which he referred both to the Neues Bauen and to the post-Fuller ‘English Revisionist Functionalism’ of Cedric Price or Archigram, were really part of the ‘500 year-old tradition of humanism’. The jusfifcation he gave for this was that they saw architecture as a ‘moral’ pursuit. Morality, a term which appears to stand in for political commitment, is apparently the antipode to Modernism, which led him to make the rather extraordinary claim that architecture, because of this functionalist moralism and ‘ethical positivism’ had never truly been Modernist, presumably before his own work. This is apparently a Modernism distinguished by abstraction, autonomy and so forth: his admittedly erudite examples in this essay were Malevich, Mondrian, Joyce, Schoenberg, Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling. Yet even Mondrian called for art’s abolition in favour of its subsumption into everyday life. What Eisenman really meant by Modernism was Art, and his call was really for architecture to return to automous, asocial art. The reason given for this is interesting. What he called the substitution of the formal with the moral was irrelevant, because, quote, ‘the moral imperative is no longer operative within contemporary experience.’ Reading between the lines a little, this can be taken to mean that in post-Keynesian capitalism the jobs are no longer being provided by municipal authorities or schools, but by big business and its museum culture. Go where the money’s going. The question always elided is what is being built, and for whom – and recently in Eisenman’s case the latter has been everyone from Opus Dei to Spanish Francoists.


'english revisionist functionalism', archigram

Eisenman won’t leave it at that though. For him the critique within form is the only critique, and as recently as 2001 he wrote that ‘architecture can only be critical when it displays the internal struggle between the process of abstraction and figuration and the requirements of the sign’. The idea that architecture might be critical of society, as were the ‘partial utopias’ of the Neues Bauen or Buckminster Fuller, is not even imaginable. Thirty years or so after Eisenman and Tafuri’s anti-functionalism, the contemporary conjuncture within the built environment rests essentially upon the following three poles. First, the kind of self-critiquing, endlessly morphing form-giving exemplified by celebrity architects, from Eisenman to Frank Gehry. Second, the actual lived environment, usually made up of either a timid Ikea Modernism or full-on Barratt Homes revivalism, both sheathing advanced technology; and third, the utilitarian structures of production and consumption. There is very, very little crossover between these three. The guardians of architecture, with their formal extravagance propped up by the innovations of engineers, are usually expensive cloaks for functions dating from the 19th century, from the office block to the museum. The functionalist deviation always concerned itself with building for new functions – whether the Bauhaus left’s new collective society or Fuller’s interstellar-utopian ‘livingry’.


cedric price & joan littlewood, fun palace

To conclude then, with a perverse suggestion. The functionalists of the 20th century were perennially inspired by the most advanced built forms of industry. In Patrick Keiller’s film Robinson in Space, a search for what might survive of Britain as an industrial country constantly comes up against strange, vast, unreadable structures, fenced-off and anti-architectural, processing vast amounts of commodities yet with no discernible workforce. This is the landscape of the ‘big sheds’, which the likes of Martin Pawley would claim as heralds of the architecture of the future. The vast, indeterminate, cheap and amorphous out-of-town buildings which for some fulfil the formal (but certainly not political) promises of Cedric Price. A Wal-Martopolis of constant, additive or destructive yet illegible change. Abundance, automation, cheapness and accessibility, capable of being adapted, recycled and reconstructed whenever required. Would it be a step too far to imagine a new socialist functionalism based on this kind of non-architecture? Certainly the idea that the future would look like this is not exactly an inspiring rallying cry, that it would have no formal qualities whatsoever, at least at the level of the façade – but the socialist functionalist argument would be that there’s more potential for a new society within this most functional, boring, commodified and seemingly conformist environment than in any aesthete-architecture’s self-referential formal games. If utopia can be glimpsed in the architecture of a power station, then can it also be found in the forms of a supermarket warehouse? Or is production always destined to be prioritised over consumption in socialist aesthetics?

Sartorial Socialism from Huey P Newton to Honecker



Little has happened since 1989 to challenge the view that aesthetically, ‘actually existing socialism’ was one enormous bread queue, its dowdily dressed denizens no doubt dourly shivering in front of a grey concrete building housing a state bureaucracy of some sort. To this Cold War image has been added the peculiar commodity fetishes of Ostalgie, with the ridiculed attempts at consumer goods being put back into production. Judd Stitziel’s study of the East German consumer economy, Fashioning Socialism (Berg, 2007) acknowledges early on that the DDR never managed to create a distinctively socialist aesthetic – instead, via a series of misunderstandings and disavowed misappropriations of Western fashions and styles, there emerged such distinctive objects as the standardised dress, the plattenbauten apartment block and the Trabant. Nonetheless, from the title on down, it makes associative points, or takes literally Party sloganeering, to the effect that a Socialist style was considered necessary or at least possible. The unmentioned inverse, in terms of the intersection of the sartorial and the socialist of the frumpy conformism of the Eastern Bloc is Radical Chic. That is, the moment in the late 60s and early 70s when revolutionaries Cuban or African-American adorned bedsits and halls of residence. It’s customary to take this as having little more theoretical significance than the DDR’s politicised polyester. Radical Chic, best encapsulated in the infatuation with the Black Panther Party, is usually seen as macho, miltaristic or romantic, a fetish disconnected from quotidian, non-spectacular politics.



'We were an unusual sight in Richmond or any other place, dressed in our black leather jackets, wearing black berets and gloves, and carrying shotguns over our shoulders. People would stop and call to us, asking what we were distributing…walking armed through (a mainly black area) was our propaganda’
Huey P Newton

It’s worth briefly investigating the specific justifications made by the Black Panthers themselves for their spectacular aesthetic. That is, ‘a complete Panther uniform – black beret, black slacks, black shoes, black pimp socks or regular socks, shined shoes, blue shirt, and a black turtleneck ’ in Bobby Seale’s description. Curiously, neither Seale’s Seize the Time (1968-70) or Huey P Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide (1973) seem to give much significance to the ‘uniform’. Newton wrote of it as merely another facet of their ‘armed propaganda’: something to make them identifiable on the street, and to add to an imposing force necessary for their ‘patrols’ of ghetto police. It could easily be associated, however, with their explicit project to radicalise the lumpenproletariat. The organisation of a kind of revolutionary organisation of Stagolees by making politics specifically aesthetically attractive to them, taking its cues from their jarring and ostentatious fashions (those ‘pimp socks’), rather than from the earth-toned ‘roots’ prosleytised by ‘jive cultural nationalist intellectuals’. The vicarious thrills that the outfits might have given to their white and/or middle class fellow soixante-huitards was irrelevant. Nonetheless, it’s not altogether surprising that the Party leadership felt the need after a couple of years to ban the wearing of the uniform at anything other than public functions, after it was used merely for posing or intimidation (or rather, as intimidation of the Panthers’ own constituency as opposed to the Police). This was not to be an everyday outfit.



So, other than the end of the political and class spectrum that this derives from, what differentiates the black beret, leather jacket and pimp socks from the black shirt? Wasn’t this another form of (in the Benjamin line that finds its way inevitably into any discussion of fashion theory) the aestheticisation of politics? A ceremonial, militaristic style designed for the easy identification of the street-fighting vanguard? Moving away from this extreme example: is there a performative politics that wouldn’t automatically fall into the trap of exclusive countercultural consumption, where the possession of the correct look stands in for thought and praxis? The alternative, of asceticism or deliberate dressing-down risks denuding politics of any hint of excitement or libidinal charge, leading to precisely the DDR situation of an easy and quick defeat by the commodity desires of consumer capital. That is, the trajectory dramatised by Garbo’s Soviet apparatchik in Billy Wilder’s Ninotchka, exchanging her boiler suit for a glittery frock and pearls at the first shimmering sight of Parisian couture.



These questions don’t tend to be asked in Fashion Theory, nor should one especially expect them to be. Although it would be preposterous to claim that this is not an area worthy of serious theoretical and political work, much of it seems stuck in a particular degeneration of Birmingham School line Cultural Studies. In the late 70s, the likes of Dick Hebdige’s Subculture posited a ‘resistance’ through rituals, and specifically spectacularised dress – a response to particular changes in the socio-political conjuncture at the level of everyday life, affected no doubt by prejudices, deflections and so forth but still, nonetheless, in some way oppositional. What this has effectively become is a discourse where ‘resistances’ of a sort are still offered: through consumption, the capitalist subject resists paternalism, universalism, modernism and of course, a Marxism that would ‘totalise’ them, link their practices to the economy, or most appalling of all, suggest that ideology or even ‘false consciousness’ might just underpin some of these ‘choices’.



Accordingly, consumption becomes the definitive political act. A typical example like Berg Press’ anthology Fashioning the Body Politic (edited by Wendy Parkins, 2002) holds up shopping as the incommensurable force undermining all ‘totalitarianisms’. An essay here on the sartorial politics of the Falange in Spain effectively puts Franco’s eventual overthrow down to the effects of American consumer capitalism’s alleged unsettling of Fascism’s protectionist autarky. The concluding passage runs: ‘the way in which Falangist women were coming to use the language of clothes suggested an increasingly informed individual choice that subverted political, familial and religious structures in dress, and in so doing, subverted a great deal more’. What is coyly implied is that authority is not subverted by such universalist or allegedly masculine acts as collective action, but by individual choice. Another essay here, on ‘the Black shirt and the Fascist Body’, concentrates on the attempt to suppress ‘individualism’ and ‘bourgeois’ conduct such as freedom and laxity in dress as a fundamental component of a totalitarian aesthetic. After a while of this, for all its scrupulousness, a clear ideological picture emerges; it’s almost a shock when, in a study of contemporary Chinese ‘performance’ of individualism and collectivity you come across a dismissal of the binary carefully set up between emancipatory choice and collectivist oppression.



Another Berg book, Anne Massey’s Hollywood Behind the Screen, effects a similar sleight of hand. A study of, in the main, art deco design and femininity in working class and petit-bourgeois interwar Britain, we have here the familiar situation where, although the proletariat is stripped of any sort of political agency, its particular consumer choices (for Oliver Hill and against Walter Gropius in this case) are a way of contesting class by rejecting what the intellectual middle classes think is good for them. That is, by opting for gemutlichkeit against sachlichkeit, and glamour over greyness, the working class female subject emancipates herself. Authenticity is always considered suspicious in such works, except at the store counter, where suddenly mediation seems to be stripped away. Any situation in which a leftist working class and a leftist intellectual might be in alliance is entirely unimaginable , as is a socialist aesthetic that could carry as much libidinal force as Hollywood.



One of the founding works of Fashion Theory was never so blithe and schematic. Elizabeth Wilson’s Adorned in Dreams (1985) is still enormously valuable in its refusal to either dismiss or valourise sartorial choice and public aesthetic performance. While the Frankfurt School are usually a ubiquitous punching bag, for Wilson critique couldn’t be so easily sidestepped, and a similar dialectical tightrope is walked. While sceptical of any attempt to ‘subvert dominant ideologies using the very mass consumption means that constitute or contribute to (those)ideologies’ there is still some sort of politicised potential in dress and the sartorial spectacle: ‘because fashion, like capitalism itself, is so contradictory, it has at least the potential to challenge the ideologies in which it is itself enmeshed – as can all popular cultural forms, so long, that is, as we have some coherent political position from which to criticise’ . There is the possibility of an estranging cultural shock, not so much on the level of the ostentatious opposition of subcultures, but of the Suffragette smashing windows while bedecked in the height of Edwardian fashion.



‘For Germans in the West, the Wall became a mirror that told them, day in and day out, who was the fairest one of all.’
Peter Schneider

Meanwhile, the popular history has it that, presumably to the cheers of vindicated fashion theorists, consumer desire itself brought down the iron curtain, as mulleted and moustachioed Ossis leapt over the Berlin wall and joyfully exercised their individual choices for The Scorpions and stonewashed denim. While it is never so crass, there are hints of this in Stitziel’s account, though this is on the whole a careful and serious work. Based on an impressively meticulous detailing of the particular pressures, contradictions and accomodations of the DDR’s economy, this would in theory satisfy the ideologues who form the retrospective bane of most fashion theorists: base first, superstructure second. Although his identification of East German practice with a ‘Marxist-Leninist’ theory doesn’t square with the nationalistic, opportunist or on occasion outright desperate appeals to particular consumer desires that are outlined here.

As a ‘command economy’, the DDR should in theory have been entirely unsusceptible to fashion, with its mystique, its irrational cycles, and its satisfaction of non-productive desires. Yet on the contrary, the East German economy, which is painstakingly analysed in the book, is shown as being subject to particular political pressures which virtually forced the governing Socialistische Einheitspartei to attempt various engagements with fashionable dress. First, until 1961 it made increasingly forlorn attempts to compete directly with the West, especially with the heavily subsidised consumer enclave of West Berlin – centred as it was, by geographical luck as much as anything else, on the consumer thoroughfare of the Kurfurstendamm. Second, it had to avoid at any costs a repeat of the June 1953 workers’ uprising, and in the general fashion of ‘actually existing socialism’ (from the NEP to Kadar’s ‘goulash socialism’) social peace was to be achieved via an increased proletarian involvement in purchasing rather than the political process. And third, after the Wall itself went up, leading to a brief attempt at autarky, it still had to convince those caught behind it that they weren’t the ugly sisters of this Cold War settlement, by attempting to construct its own fashion, its own modernism, and its own glamour, in a continued sparring with their equivalents on the other side. However one of the flaws of the DDR economy was its seeming ability to both over and under-produce, so those desires which were courted remained mainly unsatisfied.



It is decidedly moot whether what are often described as the ideological underpinnings of East German consumerism were in any way a serious expression of ‘Marxism-Leninism’, or a post-facto justification of entirely pragmatic policies. For instance: Stitziel’s discussion of the early attempts of the SED to create a sort of Proletkult fashion points out that the particular garment they settled upon – the Tyrolean Dirndl – was precisely that which was fetishised by Nazism. This shouldn’t necessarily be a surprise, given that the Town Planners of the Stalinallee were borrowing ideas from Albert Speer at the time: it also chimed in with the widespread re-use of what was already left lying around, rather than the creation of new forms, which was left to the West until late in the 1950s. Certainly more unique to ‘actually existing socialism’ was the pantheon of heroes of labour, and a concomitant valourising of work clothing and particular working women, chiming in with the Stalinist disdain for ‘levelling’, encapsulated by the cult of the Stakhanovite. At the same time as this attempt to make a virtue of necessity, there was a marked disdain for Parisian haute couture that is, irrespective of its having been shared by the Third Reich, not particularly dubious. It’s not easy to imagine a socialist version of the dominant form of the time: Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’, with its deliberately sexualised and cumbersome return to glamour and/or the kitchen, in reaction to women’s wartime involvement in production.



There was, despite this, a conformist acceptance of what would in the 1920s been regarded as bourgeois, that led to DDR fashion essentially becoming an inferior version of its western competitor. Stitziel points out that ‘officials emphasised the ‘timelessness’ of good taste’, which meant, quoting the magazine Die Frau von Heute in 1946, an avoidance of ‘breath-taking extravagances and daring fashion stupidities’. The brief attempt at a Proletkult, for all its lumpenness, actually held out the possibility of a distinctively proletarian aesthetic, based on the clothing of production, as in the photographs reproduced here of young women, hands on hips, in the ‘work clothes for women farmers’ developed in 1955. However this was soon superseded by a rapproachement with couture, symbolised in a DDR fashion show that ‘started with ‘female farmers’ in work clothes and dirndls and ended with ‘working women’ modelling chic suits and extravagant evening apparel’. So by 1956 socialist haute couture was on the agenda. ‘Special stores’ were opened, something which Stitziel finds to be ideologically inconsistent, but which fits neatly into previous Stalinist practice. The first of these, the Sibylle boutique of 1958, was both a statement that the East could develop its own couture, and, in the boutique’s architecture, its own Modernism, reversing the earlier Socialist Realist positions on both. The phrase ‘international style’ becoming a term of praise rather than a pejorative.



Yet again, these were utterly in hock to Western aesthetics. Sibylle was followed after 1961 by a series of ‘Exquisit’ stores, which were given French names such as ‘Yvonne’, ‘Chic’, ‘Jeanette’ and so forth. These exclusive emporia would purvey, mainly no doubt to the nomenklatura as much as the ‘heroes of labour’, mostly imported Western fashions, partly as reassurance that the building of the Wall wouldn’t affect consumption, and as a way of ‘siphoning off their money quite quickly’, according to a Berlin SED official. Soon enough they were nicknamed ‘Uwubus’, short for ‘Ulbricht’s Profiteering Huts’.The official justifications actually stressed exclusivity and individuality as the raison d’etre of the Exquisit store: this is surely another example of necessity dictating ‘ideology’ rather than vice versa. Meanwhile, fashion for the working class whose state this apparently was would be limited to the DDR’s own production. This ranged from attempts at exclusive goods to the grim, faulty surpluses dumped in the short-lived BIWA (Billige Waren or Cheap Goods) stores from 1957-59, and in season-end sales. Again, this was merely a slightly shoddier version of Western practices.

‘My room was covered in Communist posters. We used to dye our clothes grey!’
Vic Godard on Subway Sect

However in the architectural experiments in this period, the return to the international style actually created some structures instantly recognisable as ‘Eastern’, if perhaps not socialist. The early 60s work of architects like Kaiser or Henselmann in East Berlin for instance exhibited an intriguing ‘getting wrong’ of their antecedents, with their patterns and murals on the Miesian grid. It would be interesting to know if in fashion a similar process occurred, yet Stitziel is quiet on this. There is one extraordinary illustration of a standardised dress & jacket plan, intended for mass production, along the lines of the Plattenbauten prefab construction techniques that were then being pioneered: Stitziel cites the baukastenprinzip or ‘building blocks principle’. The standard leaves room for all kinds of extraneous ideas to played out within the grid, and this odd alignment has perhaps some sort of socialistic potential – a mass form, accessible to all, with possibilities for ‘dotting the I’ as one commentator rather patronisingly had it. Also unsurprisingly absent from the account is a discussion of how DDR style actually had a currency in the post-punk West, when all things ‘Eastern Bloc’ and alienated were chic, its ‘greyness’ fetishised as a kind of parallel universe to Western consumerism. Joy Division, David Bowie’s Low, Joseph Beuys’ 1980 installation of DDR consumer goods, Economic Values : all of which rehearsed the recent Ostalgie vogue long before the DDR fell.

‘What writer of science fiction would have ‘imagined’ this ‘reality’ of East German factories-simulacra, factories that re-employ all the unemployed to fill all the roles and the posts of the traditional production process but that don’t produce anything, whose activity is consumed in a game of orders, of competition, of writing, of book-keeping, between one factory and another, inside a vast network?…one of these factories even ‘really’ failed, putting its own unemployed out of work a second time.’ Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation



Whether this was ever really able to compete with the more sexualised, diverse and politically charged clothes not infrequently sent over the border was a moot point. And that the aesthetic gender politics of the DDR were as conformist as those in Adenauer’s BRD is unsurprising. Much was made for a time of communist couturiers’ accomodation of the ‘stronger’ woman in their designs, rather than anathematising them as the West is still prone to do. Even this attempt at an egalitarian version of fashion was within the limits set by capitalist versions of consumption: ‘implicitly and often explicitly, the ‘normal’ or ‘ideal’ body remained thin, even under socialism. As suggested by mottoes like ‘full-figured, yet nevertheless chic’…’ So the models for the ranges aimed at the vollschlank were usually middle aged and the clothes were difficult to obtain, much to the protest of women who had been briefly convinced that the rhetoric was serious. The quotations Stitziel has unearthed are interesting, in that they record what he describes as a consumerist ‘pseudo-public sphere’: the encouragment of consumer feedback, comments and even dissension. This on one hand would serve to factor desire into a notoriously unresponsive mode of production, and on the other create a space into which, through consumer choice, an otherwise foreclosed political subjectivity could be diverted. Irrespective of whether consumer discontent brought down the DDR, this was a discourse actively encouraged by the Party leadership.



Even the baukastenprinzip had as, for all its occasional uniqueness, as much potential for a quite astonishing lack of imagination (with unintentionally surreal results) as it did for the sartorially socialistic. This is, after all, a country which responded to overproduction by establishing factories which produced nothing . A vulgarised theory of commodity fetishism enabled a straightforward puritanism, something that occasionally resembled the attempts to try and purify the thing-world under Brezhnev by the obliteration of objects. That is, the theory of razveshchestvlenie, or ‘deartefactualisation’ . What was missing was any conception of the possibility of a socialist object, something which was uncoincidentally the major preoccupation of theorists before nonconformity had been purged from 'Marxist-Leninist’ aesthetics. The object, or Veschch was the major fixation of Constructivists in their forays into industrial production. Perhaps the most successful of these were, in fact, the mid-1920s state-produced dress designs by Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova of the LEF Group.



Their fabrics were as mass-produced and cheap as the DDR’s prefab couture and standardisation was made a virtue – yet the designs were also jarring, bright, exciting and unlike anything being produced in the West at the time. And they were commercially successful: ‘without knowing it, all Moscow was wearing fabrics which Popova had designed’ . Theoretically, this was opposed to fashion in the sense of mystique and irrationalism, but not in the sense of style. The more experimental designs that didn’t make it into production, meanwhile, stressed a sexualised androgyny in the cut, coexisting with the abstractions on the surface, questioning all the certainties that lay behind the aesthetics of ‘actually existing socialism’. Christina Kiaer’s gloss on Stepanova’s fashion theories notes that ‘clothes would fall out of use, not because they start to look funny when the market generates novel fashions, but rather because the conditions of byt (everyday life) will have changed, necessitating new forms of clothing’ . This, precisely is why the DDR were unable to develop a socialist aesthetics and a socialist desire: because for them, byt had not fundamentally changed, and could not. Any Marxist theory of Fashion must harness change not to the market’s meaningless cycles, but to change in its fullest, most disruptive sense.

Architecture or Revolution: the Congres International d’Architecture Moderne, 1928-33


Ribbon City Proposal for Magnitogorsk, Sovremennaia Arkhitektura, 1930

(Some of this might be familiar from the garden cities piece: this is a paper given at the Building Centre on 19/5/07)

Perhaps the key question for the purposes of town planning today is an old problem that has occupied architects and theorists for around a hundred years now: what to do about the antithesis between city and country. Whether to urbanise, deurbanise or suburbanise. Outside of Britain and the relatively privileged global North this question is taking on a more bitterly ironic form. In Planet of Slums Mike Davis outlines how neo-liberal policies of ‘structural adjustment’ - the emasculation of civil society and the state in favour of multinational corporations – has created an entirely new form of ad-hoc, low-rise, insanitary and extremely poor urban development, where planning is all but unimaginable. As opposed to the cul de sacs and suburbs of Britain or the skyscrapers of China, the urban model of the future might equally probably be the tin shack in the favela. In this context, the role of architecture and planning seems almost non-existent. However, in an earlier period of cities riddled with slums, of widespread overcrowding, dilapidation, inequality and disease – the Europe of the Great Depression – architects and theorists were extremely vocal about proposals for its alleviation, or in some cases, for outright revolution.



This is the context in which we should consider the CIAM, the umbrella group set up in 1928 to promote Modern architecture and town planning, which lasted until 1957. The CIAM’s history is intricate and complicated: it would eventually be destroyed by the younger theorists of Team 10, who are worth discussing on their own. Here I’m going to focus on the organisation’s first five years, from its first conference in Switzerland in 1928 to its formation of a fixed body of theory in 1933. In this period there was an extraordinary density of politically charged debates between the Le Corbusier, the CIAM’s most famous exponent, and the German and Soviet architects and theorists over what kind of urbanism the CIAM should favour. Many of the more controversial ideas would later be forgotten as the CIAM’s 1933 ‘Athens Charter’ became town planning gospel after 1945. We will find a diffuse organisation much more contested, more polemical, and a great deal stranger than either the official histories and the Jane Jacobs-style denunciations.



First of all, it needs to be said for the historical record that the idea of an umbrella organisation encompassing all radical architects comes not, in fact, from the famous grand old men of the International Style like Walter Gropius, Sigfried Giedion or Le Corbusier, but from the Soviet artist El Lissitzky, who proposed in 1924 such a group to Corbusier, who turned him down on the grounds that it would be politically risky to associate with the Soviets. Corbusier’s town planning ideas from this time are best seen in Towards a New Architecture, the 1923 book in which he fairly demands that enlightened industrialists adopt an antiseptic Modernism in order to avert social unrest in the rotting slums. The closing chapter, ‘Architecture or Revolution’ concludes, famously, ‘revolution can be avoided’. Naturally this was taken rather differently by the Soviets, for whom revolution was to be encouraged. 1924’s Style and Epoch by Moisei Ginzburg was their equivalent of Corbusier’s book, and it proposed we find ‘poetry and romance’ in ‘the sounds and the noises of the new town, in the rush of the boisterous streets’.



Between then and CIAM’s formation in 1928, national organisations of Modernists had formed, like the Ring in Germany and the OSA in Soviet Union, and the decision was taken at the Weissenhof Siedlung to set up an international body. At the first international conference at Sarraz in Switzerland any ructions were kept under control. The attendants at this conference included, as well as Corbusier, Ernst May (the socialist Frankfurt town planner whose suburbs were the largest scale Modernist developments in the world at that point) and the ABC Group who described themselves as ‘Functionalist-Collectivist-Constructivist’: Hannes Meyer, the second bauhaus director, along with Mart Stam and Hans Schmidt. The theorist and historian Sigfried Giedion was elected secretary of the organisation. Although the invited Soviet delegates – Lissitzky and Moisei Ginzburg – were refused visas, the political radicalism of Soviet Constructivism infused the founding declaration, which is reckoned to be mostly the work of the ABC group, and states: ‘town planning is the organisation of the functions of collective life, as it extends over both the urban agglomeration and the countryside…the chaotic division of land, resulting from sales, speculations, inheritances, must be abolished by a collective and methodical policy’: this was essentially a demand for land nationalisation, and needless to say, such a policy was not exactly sympathetic to laissez-faire capitalism.



A glimpse of what such a policy might produce was shown by the Frankfurt developments, and accordingly the next CIAM conference held there in 1929: the picture here is of the special issue of the magazine Das Neue Frankfurt that promoted it. Thousands had been rehoused in Modernist garden suburbs, partly due to extremely economical construction methods and space standards, and nationalisation of land by the Social Democratic administration. Accordingly, the theme of the conference was ‘the dwelling for the existence minimum’ – that is, low-cost social housing: although if this sounded rather forbidding there were also Dadaist performances by Kurt Schwitters and a performance of George Antheil’s Ballet Mechanique as entertainment, as well as strolls round the New Frankfurt. The minimum dwellings were low-rise, surrounded by green space, linked by infrastructure and provided with community facilities. However some, such as the theorist and designer Karel Teige, criticised them for their lack of collectivism, seeing as they were mostly single-family houses. By this point CIAM members in Moscow like Moisei Ginzburg had been experimenting with collective apartment blocks that were like mini-towns in themselves: the most famous of these was the semi-collectivised house, the Narkomfin, under construction at the time of the conference, in which a block of flats contained a library, a canteen a gymnasium as well as duplex flats. This shows a more extensive proposal by the OSA group’s Mikhail Barsch and Vladimirov, with yet more extensive collective facilities. These blocks were to be dispersed in parkland, and housework was to be abolished by the collective facilities.



At this point I’ll digress a little into the forms that city-planning and architecture had taken at that point in the USSR. As well as the collective flats that were being experimented with, factory districts and working class areas were provided with workers’ clubs: here’s the plans and photographs of a couple, which as El Lissitzky wrote, would not be places where people passively consumed entertainment: ‘the important thing is that the mass of the members must be directly involved. They themselves must find in it the maximum of self-expression.’ So while this provided for leisure, more mundane problems were solved by the communal kitchens and laundries: these three provided for districts of St Petersburg. The idea that united all these interventions, whether the communal flats, clubs or kitchens was the ‘social condenser’: collective facilities that ensured that nearly all space in their conception of town planning would be public space.



All these were, nevertheless, essentially urban solutions in what was an overwhelmingly rural – if you will, ‘developing’ – country. In 1930 a competition was held which would overshadow the next three years of CIAM activity: the ‘Green City’ contest, for a sort of station between the urban and the rural. The contest here highlighted two competing town planning ideas among the avant-garde. The first was ‘urbanism’, led by one Leonid Sabsovich. Despite the name, this was basically a version of the garden city on a massive scale, with huge collective blocks dispersed across the countryside. Extending the ‘social condenser’ idea to whole cities, this was a particularly utopian kind of urbanism, in which marriage and property would be obliterated, with rooms of one's own for men and women, irrespective of marital status: as Sabsovich put it, everyone in the dom-kommuna was a potential 'bachelor', 'husband' or 'wife', and 'divorces' could be achieved by the sliding of the partition-like walls. But more important for the CIAM were the proposals for disurbanism. The sociologist Mikhail Okhitovich had converted Moisei Ginzburg, a member of CIRPAC, the CIAM’s central committee, and most of the OSA Group, to a radically dispersed notion of city planning. This was a response to a situation in which the city and country were virtually at civil war, and huge primitive accumulation led to cities acquiring favela-like makeshift outskirts. Instead of designing new cities or expanding the old, Okhitovich wanted them exploded into vast networks connected by advanced transportation networks, stretching all the way across the countryside.



Meanwhile, many leading CIAM activists, such as Ernst May, Mart Stam, Andre Lurcat and Hannes Meyer had moved to the USSR to plan what Nikolai Milyutin, in a widely read book, called the Sotsgorod: an acronym for ‘the socialist city’. Accordingly the CIAM was in 1930-31 mainly concerned with Soviet developments at the time of the first Five Year Plan, as well as with responses to the depression in Western Europe. Le Corbusier, whose Centrosoyus building in Moscow was then under construction, even changed his slogan at this point to ‘architecture and revolution’, and critiqued the German minimum dwellings for their lack of Soviet style ‘social condenser’ facilities. At two CIAM ‘special congresses’ in 1931 in Zurich and Berlin the poltical atmosphere was charged enough to make more apolitical architects like Mies van der Rohe decidedly uncomfortable, with Corbusier himself under attack for building private villas and for his Plan Voisin, where the skyscrapers of big business occupied the centre of the city.



At this point it’s worth looking closely at the disurbanist proposals, as these are in many ways the most atypical of what would become famous as the CIAM town planning style of slab blocks and open space. While Le Corbusier’s aesthetic was Platonic, designing huge edifices, disurbanist theory was based on fluidity and changeability. In the OSA group journal Sovremennaia Arkhitektura the architect Pasternak wrote that the fixed house was an ‘anachronism, apathetic and out of place, no longer an active participant in an active and fast moving life’. The houses being developed by the OSA at this time were prefabricated, both easy for people to assemble and dismantle, and were intended to be provided by the state to individuals who could do whatever they liked with them: this diagram here shows one of Moisei Ginzburg’s prototypes. It can, as you can see, be added to to make two linked houses, or put together to make a communal block if the inhabitants so wish. SA declared that the notion of a building built to last was henceforth over: this picture, from shows another prototype: cylindrical pods placed in untamed countryside. There was here an extreme of collectivism, with a total abolition of private property and extension of communal facilities, and at the same time an extreme of individualism, with each person having their own single dwelling, whether male or female, in a couple or not: a ‘pod of one’s own’, as it were. The plan of these settlements was in the form of interlinked ribbons, each one representing a strip of industry, agriculture, transport, cultural facilities and housing.



These proposals, when put across at the 1930 Green City contest, elicited an immediate response from Le Corbusier in his Response to Moscow, later retitled The Radiant City. The final form of this book dwells often on the follies of Soviet disurbanism. Private letters between himself and Moisei Ginzburg from 1930 showed that this was a debate in which Corbusier was the collectiviser and the Soviet architect the individualist. Ginzburg wrote that ‘you want to cure the city, because you are trying to keep it essentially the same as capitalism made it’. While the Response to Moscow eulogised the Plan, seeing it as a despotic force, a Napoleonic ‘tribune of the people’ the Soviet disurbanists eulogised a kind of democratic planning in the tradition of council communism, in which when the collective networks of industry and transport were provided and property was eliminated, then people could live wherever they decided to put their pod. Okhitovich wrote that ‘the stronger the collective links, the stronger the individual personality’. This is a conception far from the familiar opposition of on one side the fixed, monolithic plan, as in the CIAM’s postwar outgrowths, and on the other the capitalist anarchy of leaving the free market to remake the city in its image. At the same time it suggests an approach to the divide between city and country that has been resolutely untried.



This is mainly because history would soon catch up with the CIAM, and particularly its radical German and Soviet sections. Unsurprisingly, the next CIAM conference was planned to be held in Moscow in 1933. However the Palace of the Soviets competition of that year showed the direction that the rise of Stalinism was taking architecture and planning – a huge, monumental city centrepiece, although most CIAM architects took part anyway, with Corbusier’s megastructural entry being particularly stunning. But concentrating on the big city was the opposite of the OSA’s suggestions, where in Okhitovich’s words ‘the network would win, the centre would die’. Okhitovich and Ginzburg had advocated demolishing much of Moscow, which would revert to a giant park filled with monuments. Yet here was the capital stamping its authority on the country: the ‘cult of hierarchy’ that Okhitovich had warned against. The CIAM did have one small conference in Moscow in December 1932, with CIAM general secretary Sigfried Giedion and others meeting Ginzburg and the OSA group, yet the game was obviously up: the winner of the Palace of the Soviets competition was a huge neoclassical edifice. Giedion actually sent a telegram and a photomontage in protest to Stalin, which perhaps fortunately he never received. In a letter to Corbusier, Giedion outlined the contradictions of the CIAM’s position: opposed to untrammelled capitalism, yet forced to suppress their politics in order to get work. He asked: should we be technicians or politicians? If the latter, it would be ‘impossible to have an influence with anyone important at the moment’, especially after the rise of Hitler in Germany cut off the other centre of Modernism.



And rather than being held in Moscow, the 1933 CIAM conference would be held on a cruiseship on its way from Marseilles to Athens, with both the Soviets and most of the Germans absent. Here the ‘Athens Charter’ was composed, enshrining tall blocks rather than the houses proposed by the Germans or the pods and social condensers of the Soviets, and fixed zoning as opposed to the more fluid models that were in the air only a couple of years before. And this is the CIAM we know, providing a brilliant but deeply flawed model of town planning which would transform cities in the 1950s and 60s, often without the social and collective facilities that were such an important part of the original idea, reflecting the compromised social democracy of the postwar period. Nevertheless, in its first five years, the CIAM was at the centre of a much more dynamic and contradictory debate over town planning, and one in which the total demands of both big business and the state were put into question. And if there is a lesson from the first five years of the Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, it is that planning and a conception of fluidity and change are not mutually exclusive: plans can be much stranger and more romantic than the mundane chaos of capitalism.

A history of Vermilion Sands

‘A Place where I would be happy to live’
There are many agglomerations of people in the works of JG Ballard that could, at a stretch, be called ‘communities’ – the linear city on the French Riviera that provides the setting for Super-Cannes’ settlement of Eden-Olympia, the similar Estrella de Mar of Cocaine Nights, the docklands luxury flats of the eponymous High-Rise. It’s almost axiomatic that these groups of people are veering fast towards a technolgised atavism, a state of nature that enables their inhabitants to fulfil their desires and inhabit myths. Community, with the fraternity and commonality that suggests, if it even exists in Ballard, is embodied best by the opening of High-Rise, where someone is calmly eating their neighbour’s dog.



Sometimes the existing world might be infused with some sudden utopian spirit, as in The Crystal World, or the transformation of Shepperton in The Unlimited Dream Company. However there is only one instance of a speculative community approaching a Ballardian ideal – a site where we definitively leave the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the cautionary, anti-Modernist dystopia – and that is in Vermilion Sands. This is a 1971 collection of stories spanning his first published story, ‘Prima Belladonna’ (1956) to 1970, all set in the same community: a dead or dying desert resort, populated entirely by the elegantly, wanly idle, most of whom are involved in strangely calm psychodramas. Vermilion Sands is a synthetic and synaesthetic landscape of psychotropic houses that respond to their inhabitants’ desires and fears, singing sculptures, and a place where everything in sight seems to glitter, to take on the qualities of crystal, a flickering chromaticism suffusing everything from stairways to hair colour and eye pigments. It is, as Ballard writes in the 1971 introduction, a picture of an ideal he wanted and expected to see realised. The dystopian tradition is refuted in this introduction: ‘very few attempts (in SF) have been made to visualise a unique and self-contained future that contains no warnings to us. Perhaps because of this cautionary tone, so many of science fiction’s notional futures are zones of unrelieved grimness.’ So could there be here a sort of affirmative retort to the insistence that all Modernist or utopian communities inevitably end up in dystopia?



In positing an actual, liveable future utopia that is eminently possible, Ballard was, consciously or otherwise, participating in a lineage of ideal radiant cities that pervaded Modernist architects and theorists of the early 20th century. One of the most fascinating of Vermilion Sands’ unacknowledged progenitors is the German Expressionist poet, Science Fiction novelist and Architectural enthusiast Paul Scheerbart. Before his death in 1915 Scheerbart had created a distinctive world populated by jet-setting architects, the denizens of high fashion and innovative engineers, using the emancipatory technolgies developed in the 1900s to delineate an idyllic future rather than the dystopia of technologised war so frequently seen by his contemporary H.G Wells. These technologies themselves would affect the writing itself. In a prefiguring of Ballard’s use of medical and scientific textbooks, Scheerbart would adopt the tone and content of an engineering treatise or an architectural textbook. His most famous work, Glasarchitektur, would in fact find favour as an unusually technically precise analysis of the possibilities and practicalities of glass construction. Glass was Scheerbart’s obsession, waking the population from their stone-induced slumber and their pompous, bourgeois Victoriana by housing them a glittering crystal world of refracted coloured glass, which evokes the fragile, brittle crystals and chemical colours that overtake the natural world in the short story ‘The Illuminated Man’ and in the subsequent crystal worlds.

Blue Veils and Golden Sands
The most proto-Ballardian of Paul Scheerbart’s novels might be his 1913 work The Grey Cloth and Ten Percent White, the title of which refers to the recommended colours to be worn in a building constructed of coloured glass. The novel’s concerns are with glass architecture, haute couture and the activities of a mid-20th century leisure-class jetset. Its protagonist, Krug, is an architect on his honeymoon with attendant flying machine, a Wilhelmine precursor of Ballard’s numerous aviators and architects. In the midst of his travels he designs Chicago highrises, a retirement complex for air chauffeurs (something one could well imagine in Vermilion Sands), and engineers a train bridges to criss-cross Indian zoos, the owners of which he impresses upon the importance of advertising. The Grey Cloth takes place in a mediatised landscape of determined triviality, where the protagonist’s wife’s sartorial choices become headline news, yet it is also a world seemingly without poverty, without class conflict, and without any restriction on mobility and leisure. Perhaps nearest to something approximating ‘action’ here is provided by the film crew that follow Herr Krug and attempt to make from his exploits some sort of commercial picture. Scheerbart’s crystalline future is devoid of the po-facedness of serious SF: there is a gentle irony in the very dialogue-heavy proceedings, as well as a seductiveness and langour that sometimes contradicts somewhat with his cutely Edwardian ‘magnificent men in their flying machines’ tendencies. Nonethless, everything is distinctly civilised: the myths and desires that always lie behind the surface in Ballard are distinctly absent. Freud hasn’t made his appearance yet in Scheerbart’s future.



Scheerbart had the immediate effect on actual architectural practice that he evidently wanted. Soon after the publication of Glasarchitektur and The Grey Cloth he collaborated with the architect Bruno Taut on a little fragment of the glass future, a pavilion for the 1914 Werkbund exhibition in Cologne. This multifaceted, multicoloured glass house prefigured the psychotropic houses of Vermilion Sands, being specifically designed for clashing refractions and reflections, with a kaleidoscope and a waterfall provided inside to interact with the movements and perceptions of the inhabitants. After Scheerbart’s death, Taut initiated the Glaserne Kette (usually translated as the Crystal Chain) in memorial to Scheerbart, as a corresponding society of radical architects – though this was done in secret, as if to avoid the mediascape that Scheerbart blithely presents. The structures promised by the Glaserne Kette resemble living creatures of glass and flesh, such as in the extraordinary organic-artificial creations of Hermann Finsterlin: one can’t imagine this building as static, but as a pulsing, responsive thing.



The theorists of the Crystal Chain were also advocates of a decentred town planning, eradicating the centralised city and diffusing it across a wide space and low density: suburbanisation, although they would have denied it. Their ideas, if not their bulging, organic, fantastical forms, would be continued by the theorists of the ‘linear city’ in the 1920s and 30s. The most famous of these is Le Corbusier’s 1935 tract The Radiant City. The Radiant City’s locations resemble in many respects the heat haze and abstraction of the Vermilion Sands topography. Its aphoristic, oblique and at times somewhat crazed chapters defer to ‘our dictator, the sun’, and posit a society in which the filling of leisure time would be the most pressing issue. His proposals in this book, such as the curvaceous reconstruction of Algiers into a resort city of sun-terraces and snaking white concrete blocks are far from his reputation as propogator of the windswept tower block: The Radiant City is instead a basically Mediterranean, sun-worshipping society of semi-idle technocrats, sportsmen, aviators and starlets.



Perhaps one of the most thorough stabs at constructing this was in Brasilia. This, the new capital city planned for Brazil, planned and designed by former Le Corbusier collaborators Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa, is almost exactly contemporary with the Vermilion Sands stories, having been started in 1958 and completed in 1970. The picture of it that one gets from Niemeyer’s memoirs of this Radiant City is of an organic yet decidedly techno-fetishist ex nihilo city being imposed upon the desert: his memories of its design and construction devoted mainly to convivality, drinking and the romancing of beautiful and mysterious women. The parallels here are fairly obvious, and accordingly Brasilia is namechecked in stories like ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ and in the Vermilion Sands stories. The desert has always held a semi-mystical role in Ballard: 'they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time.' Brasilia's desert utopia would come to inadvertently epitomise 'brazilification': the process whereby the rich and the poor become so fissured that they almost seem to be living in different worlds altogether.

Systems of Romance
I’ve just been outlining how Ballard’s Vermilion Sands stories sit in a lineage of Modernism, of forward movement towards an ideal future, as opposed to backwards into the techno-primal that one is more accustomed to. However Vermilion Sands is the Radiant City after all this heroic construction and creation has long since been completed, and is pervaded by an atmosphere of comfortable stagnancy. Extraordinary things happen in it, but always somehow in hock to the past: cloud-sculptors in flying machines reproduce old master paintings in the sky, the singing sculptures and musical plants play Beethoven or, if they’re feeling a little outre, Schoenberg, and films are meldings together of long-forgotten midcentury classics and Greek myths. This sense of repitition and familiarity extends to the names of the protagonists: the overambitious film director is called Orson, while flitting through it we have a Van Eyck, a Chanel, a Cunard: the names echo the great artists of early Modernity, the couturiers of the Paris leisure class and the cruise ship heiresses and Modernist poets of the 1920s, setting up an irrestible world of ease and glamour, but one in which nothing will ever really happen again, much as the mythical power of the stars that populate the 60s mediascape of The Atrocity Exhibition have no contemporary analogue.



This is enabled nicely by having the stories take place during and after ‘the Recess’, an unexplained period in which the world seemingly stood still, presumably with production reaching a point whereby it could stop and be replaced with a more ludic existence: ‘Prima Belladonna’ describes it as: ‘that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer, which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years.’ Within it one merely plays at working, pretending to be architects or sculptors while spending one’s time playing ‘a sort of decelerated chess’ and embarking on affairs in the desert heat. In the context of this Baudrillard-esque ‘events strike’, myth starts to creep back in, with Freudian fantasies both Oedipal and Orphic becoming the models for the faded gods and goddesses that reside in this outpost of the linear city. There is still plenty of sex and death here, yet it never impacts on the community, unlike in his other settlements. The crises stay resolutely private, as if the suburban low density lowers its tensions and its seeming absence of an outside, and of work stripping away anything but benignly if half-heartedly creative community.



The Recess is mentioned elsewhere in the story ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’, perhaps the most perfectly compressed of the Vermilion Sands stories. One of the more precisely drawn of these echoes that purport to be artists is the architect Miles Vanden Starr, more than likely a conceptual outgrowth of Mies van der Rohe: whose distinctly Scheerbartian fixation with glass created the glass box aesthetic of the International Style, although this had an early element of dreamlike Expressionism, as in the early project for a glass skyscraper you can see here. The narrator, as always in Vermilion Sands in the first person, has just moved into a psychotropic house with his wife. He finds that the house is still so suffused with the personalities of the previous inhabitants that he is able to communicate with them, or at least have some sort of communion with them, to the point where the obsession destroys his marriage. ‘Vanden Starr’ was married to an actress who, most likely, killed him. The architect’s presence is stern, making the house contract and repulse its new inhabitant. The building itself is like a Crystal Chain fantasy gone to seed, become picturesquely ruined, described thus: ‘screened from the road by a mass of dusty rhododendrons, it consisted of six aluminum shelled spheres suspended like the elements of a mobile from an enormous concrete davit. The largest sphere contained the lounge, the others, successively smaller and spiralling upwards into the air, the bedrooms and kitchen. Many of the hull plates had been holed, and the entire slightly tarnished structure hung down into the weeds poking through the cracked concrete court like a collection of forgotten spaceships in a vacant lot.’



What we have here is remarkably close to the contemporary perception of Modernism’s remnants as a sort of graveyard of failed utopias. This is a topic Ballard has, in a manner true to his Surrealist roots, always been rather ambiguous about. His hero Dali was always derisive about the Corbusian radiant city – he had irked him in the 1930s by stating that his ideal architecture would be ‘soft and hairy’. Last year Ballard wrote ‘I have always admired modernism and wish the whole of London could be rebuilt in the style of Michael Manser’s brilliant Heathrow Hilton. But I know that most people, myself included, find it difficult to be clear-eyed at all times and rise to the demands of a pure and unadorned geometry. Architecture supplies us with camoflage, and I regret that no-one could fall in love inside the Heathrow Hilton. By contrast, people are forever falling in love inside the Louvre and the National Gallery. All of us have our dreams to reassure us. Architecture is a stage set where we need to be at ease in order to perform. Fearing ourselves, we need our illusions to protect us, even if the protection takes the form of finials and cartouches, Corinthian columns and acanthus leaves. Modernism lacked mystery and emotion, was a little too frank about the limits of human nature.’



This reads much like an admission of defeat, seeing as previously, most particularly in The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard had succeeded in an eroticisation of the abstract and cold geometries of Modernist and specifically brutalist architecture: at one point, 'Webster watched the images of the young woman on the screen, sections of her body intercut with pieces of modern architecture. All these buildings. What did Talbert want to do - sodomise the Festival Hall?' However in Vermilion Sands Ballard, amongst other things, manages to imagine a Modernism that is capable of particularly extreme illusion and emotion, and that can easily enough adapt itself to its inhabitants’ fixations, fantasies and psychopathologies. Vermilion Sands, for all its idyllic, heady beauty, is in this respect of a piece with the supposedly more cautionary Ballard, as he stressed in an interview with David Pringle, there was no disjunction 'between Vermilion Sands on the one hand, and the rest of my work on the other': it's another exemplar of technology creating a guilt-free psychopathology: only here it is a benign, controlled pathology.



However we need to look elsewhere to see what it is that causes the unambiguously seductive qualities of Vermilion Sands to veer off into the horrors of Eden-Olympia in Super-Cannes or the Estrella de Mar of Cocaine Nights. These are all more or less the same place: the linear city stretching the French Riviera which Ballard describes in his introduction to Vermilion Sands, enclaves of the hypertechnolgical populated by the more or less idle rich. The Vermilion Sands stories are a dream of what Eric Hobsbawm termed ‘The Golden Age’, the postwar burst of Welfare, leisure, consumption and culture, the Keynesian technocracy that would crash in the mid 1970s. The Vermilion Sands imagined in the 1950s and 60s has no poor, but they are present on the outside of Estrella de Mar or Eden-Olympia of the 1990s. The inhabitants know it, and are perfectly prepared to use the surrounding immigrant population as fodder for their entertainment much as they might have used the psychotropic houses and singing statues of the faded desert city of the previous future. The most striking similarity is in the sense of a time both stood still and siezed by overwhelming technical advance. In that, Ballard’s Banlieue Radieuse is both Modernism’s fulfilment and its repudiation, and Vermilion Sands, for all that it says of the leisure society that the post-Golden Age generations have been denied, is not so far from our present.

Garden Cities of To-morrow and Garden Suburbs of Yesterday



It might seem peculiar to imagine the New Towns or Garden Cities as anything especially revolutionary: places like Letchworth, Welwyn Garden City, Stevenage or Hampstead Garden Suburb are assumed to be staid and dull, their radical history generally forgotten: for many, they might be just another satellite town or suburban outpost.However, these places have a hidden history, one which spans utopian socialism and Victorian philanthopy, Modernism and Medievalism and takes us as far afield as Frankfurt or Magnitogorsk. The very idea of a ‘Garden City’ might seem merely parochial or conservative, but as the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay once claimed, ‘garden centres must become the Jacobin clubs of the new revolution’.

THE GARDEN CITY OF THE FUTURE


From Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902)

This is a story that could start with Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto in 1848. Alongside a paean to the revolutionary possibilities created by the industrial city and a dismissal of what they call ‘rural idiocy’ is the demand for the progressive elimination of the antithesis between city and country. Or alternatively it could start with the plans for small, self-contained, electric-powered autonomous communities advocated by the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. However we’ll begin instead with the work of Ebenezer Howard.

In 1898 Howard, a stenographer at the Houses of Parliament who regarded himself in his spare time as something of an inventor ‘invented’ the garden city in his book To-morrow, a Peaceful Path to Real Reform, which he republished 4 years later as Garden Cities of To-morrow. This book was typical of a certain kind of Victorian reformism in that it suggested one overwhelming idea as the solution to all the country’s ills. He outlines the overcrowding, dirt, disease and poverty of the city, the monotony of the suburbs and the isolation of the countryside and offers a solution that seems too simple to be true – to build new cities which contain the country within them. This would of necessity attract people from the city – at which point the country could re-enter the city, with the slums replaced by parks and gardens.


Garden Cities of To-morrow

The diagrams in Garden Cities of To-morrow, although they are at pains to stress that they are only guidelines, show how geometric , urban and planned the garden city would be, unlike the rural community suggested by William Morris’ News from Nowhere. While the London of ‘Nowhere’ was essentially a sort of socialist medieval town, the Garden City would be a real City. The diagram of the ‘Town-Country Magnet’, depicting the forces that will take people from the moribund country and the overcrowded city which we can see here is pretty scathing about the countryside’s lack of public spirit, stopping just short of Marx and Engels’ ‘rural idiocy’, as well as evidently rather worried by the city’s potential for violent revolution – the ‘army of unemployed’ we see here. The Garden City would have at its centre what Howard called a ‘crystal palace’, a curved, glazed shopping centre akin to the glass and iron Parisian arcades that so obsessed Walter Benjamin. Morris of course despised the original Crystal Palace of 1851, yet in Howard’s unashamed inclusion of industry and modernity in his city we can see the difference in his conception of the ideal city. A system of Garden Cities linked by railways and canals can be seen in this diagram, while others show how just outside of the factories would be all sorts of semi-rural cures for the afflicted: the ‘farms for epileptics’ and ‘asylums for blind and deaf’ – what we have here is a whole city run according to the terms of Victorian philanthropy.


From Town Planning in Practice (1908), Raymond Unwin

But what really marks Howard out from Morris, or other utopian socialists such as Robert Owen, who had organised their own communes and communities, was the realism and practicality of his book. Howard had done his maths, and set down precisely in his book how much it would cost for people to band together and purchase an area of land for the experiment, and how much the city would cost to run and maintain. The Garden City itself would be the sole landlord, essentially meaning the entire city would be owned in common. However Howard wasn’t quite a Communist – he tried, in typical late-Victorian style, to fuse Socialism and Individualism, and he had a laudable refusal to wait for the revolution for change. He notes that socialists have a tendency to criticise any attempts at creating what he calls ‘new forms’ within the old , unjust system. For Howard, the obvious justness of the Garden City would be its own argument for what he characteristically called ‘commonsense socialism’.

THE GARDEN CITY IN REALITY - LETCHWORTH


From Town Planning in Practice

For all Howard’s practicality, he had been rather naïve in assuming that people inspired by the justness of the garden city would just band together and raise the capital themselves. He was right, however, that the idea’s simplicity would quickly inspire emulation, and a Garden City Association was formed in 1901. This would be bankrolled by the Quaker philanthropists of the Cadbury family and the Lever company, both of whom had built precursors to the Garden City for their workers at Bournville near Birmingham and at Port Sunlight near Merseyside, and had as its main spokesmen a coalition of liberal MPs and reformist socialists like George Bernard Shaw. Shaw, who was charmed by Howard’s normality and diffidence, dubbed him ‘Ebenezer, the Garden City geyser’. In 1903 they settled on Letchworth in Hertfordshire as the site for their experiment.

They chose for the architect and planner of the city Raymond Unwin. Unwin is an interesting figure. Under the influence of William Morris, he was a member of the Socialist League. Despite Morris’ medievalism, the Socialist League was actually a serious, Marxist organisation dedicated to capitalism’s violent overthrow, so one of its number seems a strange choice for this group of reformers and philanthropists. As well as his theoretical commitment to class war, another thing marked Unwin out from Ebenezer Howard- his medievalism.


Letchworth

Like Morris, Unwin essentially saw the socialist future city as a sort of idealised 14th century market town. His book Town Planning in Practice has several pretty lithographs showing walled medieval towns as exemplars of true city planning – this illustration here is typical, with the ‘1908’ here seeming rather incongrous. There would be no crystal palaces in Unwin’s garden city. His attempts to hide the technological innovations of the 19th century can at times be rather comic: look here at this Railway Bridge proposed for Letchworth, which tries to look like anything other than piece of industry. Unwin and his partner Barry Parker developed a style based on steeply pitched roofs, a lack of ornament, generous gardens and open space, of course, and a tight plan designed to encourage social interaction. Accordingly there would be much enclosed space and courtyards - a typical Letchworth street, would have no hedges to spur on neighbourliness. Howard of course moved in straight away.


From Garden Cities of To-Morrow

Letchworth, although designed to ameliorate class conflict, was very popular with socialists and trade unionists, as well as numerous vegetarians, non-conformists, experimenters and fantasists – its worth noting that HG Wells was an early supporter – who would have free rein to argue for their particular positions in the city’s various institutes, which had to be fairly interesting, seeing as the town had no pubs. In this respect Letchworth can seem quite modern in its anticipation of all sorts of life-reform faddishness – a contemporary cartoon shows its ‘Food Reform Restaurant and Simple Life Hotel’, with its Health Food Store downstairs, which just about says it all. There were still utopian elements to Letchworth, and Howard put much of his energies into Homesgarth, which was a collective courtyard development that functioned as a commune, with no individual kitchens and all food collectively prepared: an experiment that would be repeated 25 years later in the Soviet Union, more of which later.

Of course Letchworth had to pay the bills, so industrialists were encouraged from the start by the promise of cheap labour, seeing as the rents were already tiny by London standards. This would exacerbate the tension between working class socialists and the Fabians and Liberals that they were newly living nearby to: although not next door to, as to encourage tenants who could help pay for their experiment, Unwin and Parker had designed clearly demarcated working class and middle class districts in the new city. In 1912-3 there was a strike wave in Letchworth, and one of its rallying cries was ‘we can’t live on Fresh Air!’ Howard’s second Garden City, planned for Welwyn, after the First World War, discarded much of the original utopianism, becoming essentially an unusually green, semi-industrial commuter town, while the architect hired for the job, Louis de Soissons, had none of Unwin’s ambitiousness, employing throughout a bland neo-Georgian style.

THE GARDEN SUBURB – PERVERSITY IN HAMPSTEAD


From Town Planning in Practice

Unwin, however, had moved on to other projects. In 1907 he was hired by Henrietta Barnett, the patron of Toynbee Hall, an outpost of East End philanthropy, to design a Garden Suburb on the edge of Hampstead Heath. This caused a fair few accusations that they had sold out, seeing as the original point of Ebenezer Howard’s book was to attract people out of London. Also, while Letchworth had some measure of democratic control, the new Hampstead Garden Suburb would always be Barnett’s autocratic creation – one of Unwin’s early maps of the Suburb has her scribbles all over it, indicating where the inhabitants would play and work: ‘this is the pond where children will sail their boats and swim’ and so forth. However the local councils would fund much of the Garden Suburb, as Hampstead had – much as it does now – a dearth of working class housing.

Although it was bordered on one side by the long, arterial Finchley Road, the Garden Suburb had the heath as its own green belt, and erected a medieval style city wall against the heath to demarcate its boundaries. Unwin’s plans were similar to Letchworth, only tighter and more urbane – curiously more city-like in the garden suburb than they were in the garden city. Similarly, the garden suburb was subtly divided by class, although the differences in class between the houses are almost imperceptible if you walk round it now. One of the hangovers from Unwin’s socialism was that commerce was banished to the edge of the suburb, to these rather extravagant shops facing Finchley Road. We’re even further here from the crystal palaces of Howard’s garden city of the future. However Unwin’s more experimental side can be seen in these buildings, the conservatism of his medievalist style giving way to a more fantastic idiom: the critic Iain Nairn was no fan of the suburb on the whole, wrote of them in his brilliant 1965 gazeteer, Nairn’s London –



‘The Suburb lives either up or down to its reputation, insufferably cosy details allied to a central blankness of imagination which shuffled the shops out to the edges, then refused to build a pub and filled the central square with churches and institutes. But when Sir Raymond Unwin finally got around to recognizing that man had got to satisfy his material needs somewhere, he provided a masterpiece’. These shops have ‘ a conviction and solidity that the twee private houses lack. Tall hipped gables like crane-hoists tower above the road, and the side elevations are brilliant asymmetrical compositions’.

That they were inhabited by workers can be seen in the picture above, where a sign warns tradesmen against ringing doorbells before 8am. Nowadays, ironically enough, one of them is now a Barclays’ bank.


Hampstead Garden Suburb's Central Square, 2007

The touch of the peculiar was continued in the suburb’s central square, the buildings for which were designed by a young Edwin Lutyens, an urbane, classicising architect rather than an arts-and-craftsist like Unwin. While one might imagine that in 1910 this square was full of heated debate and fevered plans for a new society, but it now seems a rather desolate, uncanny place. An ordered section of grassland and trees, it has at east and west a pair of churches, and an institute at the front: which, as you can see, seems fantastically deserted. This starts to become actively quite disturbing when you look at the two churches. One of them has an unnervingly steep roof, while the other, St Jude’s, which overshadows the entire suburb, has, in another of my dodgy photos, w