The Measures Taken

Modernism- Designing a New World, V&A and NFT, London

One- The Architecture of Smugness



…’Open plan living, or bungalow ranch-style…’
Roxy Music, ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache’

Alain de Botton is the easiest of easy targets. Perambulating about the place with an expression evoking a combination of intense concentration and immense self-satisfaction, he encapsulates all that is malign in British intellectual life—a kind of idiot pragmatism, where Guardian Review faves from Proust to Boethius (and currently, alas, Le Corbusier) are celebrated for how they can enhance (not, note, really change, really question the purpose of) the lives of the administrative classes of terminal capital. Hence, the series The Perfect Home (to tie in with the new book, naturlich) features our de Botton pondering what architecture does to our souls by wafting around the trophy architecture of Berlin’s new embassy district, trying to look sardonic in Dubai, and waxing horrified in Thames Gateway Subtopia.



Which is where we come in. Because, damn him, he is perhaps the only person in the British mainstream yet to have seriously investigated this numbing orthodoxy of Charlesian pastichery. The sections where de Botton talks with a property developer are genuinely chilling. The face of bovine brit-capital in full force, proudly displaying its neo-Speer fantasy- ‘imagine, going home from work and seeing that, your home, isn’t it lovely. Nah, if it was built 200 years ago it wouldn’t have a built in garage, would it?’ A couple in Ipswich are whisked from their tweedy gables to some more modernistically twee housing in Holland (blasphemously conflated with the Elementarist extremism of Rietveld’s Schroeder House by our host), and here the flaw in de Botton’s schema is at its most glaring.



The choice we are given here is essentially spurious. He exults a vision of sandals and antioxidant continental modernism- freeze-dried and smug, marked with its timber features and nihilistically blank open plans as a kind of Ikea Alvar Aalto, much as the subtopia he rightly detests is an Asda John Soane. It’s difficult to miss the hint of snobbery beneath the surface here, particularly as he totally sidesteps the question of social housing. These funny Brits, with their bizarre Mock-Tudor houses! Well, we had a Modernism in Britain- not just architectural but musical, artistic, political. We lost, but the scars of that culture-war are still too raw for de Botton to risk giving them a poking. ‘The fault doesn’t lie with the market!’ he intones, as if said often enough it’ll become true.



Richard Rogers, of all people, made the correct riposte to the Charlesists in his 1990 broadside Architecture- a Modern View. Alongside outlines of his neo-Constructivist projects for London, he assesses the modernist legacy, and declares it sabotaged by the market, by the new historicists of pomo, by underfunded local authorities. ‘…the increasing number of people who live in boxes and doorways stand as an indictment of a society which has the capacity to eradicate poverty but prefers to turn its back. …our predicament now is that the means to our emancipation threaten our very existence and the existence of our species….Thatcherism seems the confirmation of the ‘deluge up’ rather than the ‘trickle down’ theory…’form follows profit’ is the aesthetic principle of our times.’ That’s Lord Rogers, architect of that supreme symbol of Blairism’s utter vacancy, the Millennium Dome. Not, for all its strange, desolate charm, an example of a resurgent modernism.



So why Modernism now? One might suspect that one reason is that it is so utterly defeated. The few Modernists left in Britain- Rogers, Zeha Hadid, Will Alsop- are cowed, both recently receiving massive financial setbacks. The odd setpiece, a shard or a gherkin- shallow masterpieces, masking an impasse. Pop, usually Modernism’s last bastion, offers tiny flickers, nothing more. Now, presumably, that the work of PoMo is complete, the defeated adversary can be mounted on the dais, can be assessed, can even become another plunderable style. Or, on the contrary- perhaps the interest in Modernism, the endless Sunday Supplement features, are a melancholy kind of resistance: no age, surely, has been less Utopian than our own (unless one counts some of the more gonzo ideas of the Neo-Conservatives). The last 27 years of being told THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE has burrowed into everyone’s subconscious. Another thousand-year Reich declares perpetual war, an increasingly lunatic capitalism blunders its way into apocalypse. The ‘Modernism’ that is being belatedly celebrated (a not unproblematic grouping together of Constructivists, Productivists, Fuctionalists…) cried, like Eisenstein's Marfa in The General Line, that we don’t have to live like this.



The Perfect Home is unusual amongst the current glut of programmes celebrating a rather unexpected fad for Modernism, in that it actually posits solutions, of a sort. But we’ll return to that later. More typical (and frankly, vastly more enjoyable) is Dan Cruikshank’s Marvels of the Modern World, wherein he walks around the Villa Savoye and the Melnikov House and plummily exclaims ‘crikey!’ at appropriate moments. The programme is supervised by Christopher Wilk, curator of the V&A’s current modernist blockbuster, who has a surprisingly nuanced take on the movement(s). Principally in stressing, much as did the Nazis, the inextricable connection between these movements and Bolshevism. Appropriately, the fate of the projects is seemingly dictated by place in the pecking order. Cruikshank visits a pristine Unite d’habitation, looking as alien and obsessively beautiful as it must have done when the local press declared it a ‘madhouse’ in 1957. Corbusier’s inspiration meanwhile, Moisei Ginzburg’s 1929 Narkomfin Apartments, are a grotesquely dilapidated mess. Cruikshank is visibly shaken, clearly under the impression he’d ended up in a Bermondsey Council block by mistake.



The V&A’s programme is occasionally insufferable- advertainments for Habitat, make your own modernist sculpture study days- but while one could pick holes in the exhibition and the NFT’s accompanying season, it would be a little churlish. The essential rightness of the selection can be gauged from the many horrified reactions it has elicited, from Fine Art elder statesmen like Robert Hughes (‘dotty’), old Tories such as Simon Jenkins (‘chilling’) and of course Brian Sewell (‘shabby’). A peek into the comments book in the V&A similarly shows that this still has a genuine power to antagonise and to shock. Not, of course in a bohemian, bourgeois-epater sense—the reorganisation of the Bauhaus along Constructivist lines in 1922 accompanied a demand by Gropius that the students dress plainly- like the dress of Joy Division, this would be all the more shocking for its ostentatious technocratic regularity.



Rather, what disturbs here is what Jenkins, quite rightly, calls politics in the guise of art. One scribbled comment in the book asks why the connection between modernism and Nazism wasn’t emphasised (well, that would be because there wasn’t one), others use phrases like ‘cold’ or ‘brutal’…what the detractors have noticed is that much of this essentially comes from, or supports, the possibility of a system other than the one we are perpetually told is the only possible. Whether it’s the photos of militant stronghold siedlung Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna, a huge model of the Vesnin’s Pravda building, Rodchenko’s oddly alluring workers’ overalls, Corbusier taking a pen and scribbling out the centre of Paris…there are hundreds of possibilities dotted around these Victorian corners. The rest of this piece will look first at the exhibition’s treatment of Soviet technocracy and its bureaucratic underside; then discuss its technological dialectic through a reading of HG Wells and Herbert Marcuse; and will try and come to some sort of reckoning on what it is to be a modernist in a desolate age…