The Measures Taken

Perhaps the most impressive of neoliberalism's many sleights of hand has been, since the mid-1990s – from John Major's avowed intent to create a 'classless society' to New Labour's dedication to fight 'social exclusion' - the creation of a neoliberalism with a human face. The misinterpretation of this among liberals has long been that this proves the existence of some kind of 'progressive consensus', some kind of continuation of social democracy, albeit in a more realistic, less 'utopian' manner. In the built environment, the thesis of a social democratic continuum that connects, say, the Labour of Clement Attlee to the New Labour of John Prescott has appeared to be supported by the resurgence, after an eclectic postmodernist interregnum, of Modernist architecture, and an apparent focus on the city rather than the suburbs. 

Postmodernist architecture is, in a superficial sense, very much on the defensive, and has been for most of the last decade. Although it persists as the dominant aesthetic for speculative house-building outside the large cities, it is a style by now almost wholly absent from the architectural magazines and the metropolitan centres. This decline could be dated to the late 1990s, when two huge postmodernist buildings in London – the Mi6 Building designed by Terry Farrell, and Michael Hopkins' Porticullis house in Westminster – were so aggressively statist and weightily bureaucratic in form, that the signifiers given out, always important in postmodernism's sign-fixated discourse, were deeply unattractive. On the contrary, the paradigmatic buildings in London since the late 1990s have been those of Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, once vaguely avant-garde technocrats  notable for their seemingly modernist lack of deliberate architectural-historical references and jokes, with an accompanying rhetoric of transparency and sustainability. This is leads to something we could call 'pseudomodernism', which would be defined as postmodernism's incorporation of a Modernist formal language. Pseudomodernism can be, on the one hand, the cramped speculative blocks marketed as 'luxury flats' or 'stunning developments' with an attenuated, vaguely Scandinavian aesthetic, and on the other, the architectural spectacles generated by 'signature' designers, most of whom were once branded 'deconstructivists' – Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, and a legion of lesser lights such as Make architects, who manage to combine formal spectacle and moralistic sobriety. Here we will concentrate mainly on the more aggressively 'iconic' examples of this phenomenon.

Many former postmodernists are now Pseudomodernists. The most notable is Sir Terry Farrell, designer of a multitude of quintessentially Thatcherite buildings in the 1980s, from Charing Cross station to Mi6. His most Pseudomodernist work is the new Home Office building, which appropriately was a PFI scheme. With its combination of Weimar republic curves and De Stijl patterns with eager-to-please colour – which here is provided, as per the Blairite fetish for the 'creative industries' by the artist Liam Gillick - it provides a calm, ostentatiously friendly face for perhaps the most illiberal administration in British history. Nonetheless, the Home Office is merely an example of this idiom in its more domestically scaled version. Unlike most of its contemporaries, it does not aspire to that most essential of 21st century architectural aspirations: the icon. The icon is now the dominant paradigm in architecture to such an extent that at least three different buildings erected in the last few years – one in Hull by Terry Farrell, one in London at Canary Wharf, and another in Glasgow – have opted for the name 'the Icon Building', although they range in use from nondescript blocks of flats to an aquarium.

Here we see an entire skyline of competing 'icons'. The skyscrapers announced under Ken Livingstone's tenure as mayor of London – named, in a manner Charles Jencks would appreciate, after Gherkins, cheesegraters, walkie-talkies, Helter-Skelters, a shard - make none of the eclectic gestures and mashings together of different historical styles that characterised postmodernist architecture - and stone has mostly been replaced by glass. Yet one thing that survives from Postmodernism is the conception of the building as a sign, and here as an easily understandable, instantly grasped sign, as opposed to the formal rigours and typological complexities of Modernism. While it's possible that the original Gherkin received its nickname spontaneously, there's little doubt that the other towers, all announced around the same time, had a ready-made little monicker designed to immediately endear them to the general public, in order to present them as something other than the aesthetic tuning of stacked trading floors. Accordingly, by being instantly recognisable for their kinship with a household object, they would aim to become both logo and icon. Perhaps eventually they might become what Jencks describes as 'failed icons', more Millennium Dome than Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim, although always trying for the status of the latter, whose success in bringing well-heeled tourism to the Basque port has made it into a boosterist cliché, where the 'Bilbao effect' transforms a mundane city into a cultural capital, replacing unionised factory work or unemployment with insecure service industry jobs.

The other major change from the suburbanism of the Thatcher and Reagan version of neoliberalism is a new focus on the cities, something which is usually encapsulated by the under-investigated word 'regeneration' – indeed, any form of building in an urban area is usually accompanied by this term. The vaguely religious air is appropriate, as this often accompanies a fundamentally theological conception of architecture, where by standing in proximity to an outstanding architectural work, the spirit is uplifted, and the non-orthogonal geometry and hyperbolic paraboloids manage to, for instance, simulate the experience of war. One appropriate English example would be Salford Quays, where the docks of Greater Manchester were transformed into a combination of a cultural centre and a development of luxury apartments, combining both elements of pseudomodernism. Two of the architects who most exemplify these ideas are represented there. There is Daniel Libeskind, whose tendency towards memorialising piety is so pronounced that he was described by Michael Sorkin as a 'virtual, self-igniting yahrzeit candle'. His Imperial War Museum North, with its sloping ceilings and its form which apparently represents a world divided, is supposed to formally incarnate the experience of war. Meanwhile, nearby is a bridge by Santiago Calatrava, who is the infrastructural embodiment of pseudomodernism, his structures seemingly always placed in areas that are busy being transformed from proletarian spaces of work or habitation to 'regenerated' areas of bourgeois colonisation. These transformations of space are, it should be remembered, fundamentally different in their social consequences from the superficially similar 'comprehensive redevelopment' of the postwar period. Once, a slum clearance scheme would involve the slum-dweller being rehoused by the state in something which was, more often than not, superior in terms of space, security of tenure, and hygiene, irrespective of the decades of criticism these schemes have been subjected to. Now that this sort of naïve paternalism is absent, the slums are cleared so that the middle classes can settle in them, something usually excused with a rhetoric of 'social mixing', dismantling what had become 'ghettoes'. The many schemes in London and elsewhere, where 60s council blocks have been replaced with PFI blocks with their wood cladding and ostentatious irregularity, are to urban planning what pseudomodernism is to architecture. 

That is, the Modernism of the icon, of the city academies where each fundamentally alike yet bespoke design embodies a vacuous aspirationalism, a Modernism without the politics, without the utopianism, or without any conception of the polis - a Modernism that conceals rather than reveals its functions, Modernism as a shell. This return of Modernist good taste in the New Labour version of Neoliberalism has turned architectural Postmodernism, rather surprisingly, into a vanishing mediator. The keystones, references, in-jokes and alleged 'fun' of 80s-90s corporate architecture now evoke Neoliberalism's most naked phase, the period when it didn't dress itself up in social concern. In the passage from Norman Tebbit to Caroline Flint, the aesthetic of social Darwinism has become cooler, more tasteful, less ostentatiously crass and reactionary, matching the rhetoric.

However, it can be seen that the Pseudomodern takes many of its fundamental ideas, if not its stylistic tropes, from Postmodernism, and at this point we will take a historical detour. Postmodernist architecture was most intelligently formulated by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour in 1972's Learning from Las Vegas. This focused, via a critique of a caricatured corporate Modernism, on the alleged inability of Modernist architecture to adequately communicate with its users. In response, they privileged first of all, signage – the advertising signs of roadside architecture – and secondly, formal references to earlier, most often classical, styles of architecture as a means of providing an architecture outside of the 'dumb box', as they described it. Charles Jencks' Language of Postmodern Architecture, meanwhile, turned to full-blown neoclassicism, with an accompanying narrative of Modernist hubris, where the dynamiting of one of the US' rare forays into social housing in St Louis became the precise date for the 'death' of Modernism. One element of Venturi et al's argument, was, regardless of their protestations, a Modernist one – a call for an architectural montage of neon signs and jarring formal clashes. Their praise for the chaos of signage that made up Vegas is, in essence, not vastly different to the rhetoric of the Russian Constructivists, whose work was motivated by a 'component fixation' where designs were always presented with affixed billboards, posters, slogans, transmitters and tramlines, as if to plug them into the city's dynamism. Much of the architecture and signage they describe was itself in a kind of Pulp Modernist idiom. Specifically, a 1950s style usually called 'Googie' to distinguish it from the apparently more rigorous Modernism of the International Style.

Googie was usually used to draw attention to burger bars, car washes, coffee shops - the name comes from one such, designed by John Lautner. It was an architecture that adapted itself to suburban sprawl and the sheer speed of the freeway, by providing dynamic forms which seemed to mimic speed in their formal distortions, and attracting the attention of the prospective customer travelling at 80 miles an hour via stretched, angular forms and lurid colours. Alan Hess, in his book on the subject, places the style in direct opposition to the 'high-art Modernism' of Mies van der Rohe and his disciples, the classicist glass skyscraper school that became the spatial lingua franca of even the most conformist parts of American capital. What's interesting here is that in the American context, where Modernism was not as associated with Social Democracy as it was in Europe, the debate was purely aesthetic. While the opponents of 'Googie' accused it of being crass and commercial, Mies' Seagram Building was given tinted windows the colour of their client's brand of Whisky. While its outrageous geometrical illusions and structural expressionism were being criticised as mere dressing-up, Mies' towers 'expressed' their structure by entirely decorative I-beams.

So in essence, the debate between classical and pulp Modernism in the US was one of taste. On the one hand there was the luxury aesthetic of the wing of the bourgeoisie that aspired to finer things: New York's successful attempt in the 1950s to wrest from Paris the accolade of world fine art capital, with some CIA assistance. In order for this to occur it had to set itself against a more straightforward capitalist hucksterism. In fact, with their deliberate defiance of the rules of gravity and geometry, their brashness and lack of formal precedent, googie buildings were more true to the original Modernist impulse – futurists or constructivists would have recognised themselves in commercial designers such as Armet & Davis, in the architecture of McDonalds, Denny's and Big Boy, more than in Mies van der Rohe, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Seagram or Lever. It's also a reminder that the idea of Modernism as 'paternalist' imposition on the benighted proletariat, upon which Postmodernism based much of its self-justification, makes sense only if we begin with an extremely limited definition of Modernism. Principally, one that was restricted to the International Style, itself a pernicious legacy of Philip Johnson & Henry-Russell Hitchcock's dual depoliticisation and classicisation of modernist architecture for American consumption. The Modernism that made it to New York was missing both the crass Weimar commercialism of Erich Mendelsohn and the socialist fervour of those Weimar architects who proclaimed their work an anti-architecture, such as the second Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer. 

It was not, of course, commercial Modernism which was critiqued by Postmodernists, but it can be seen in retrospect as the mediator between postmodernist theory and pseudomodernist practice. The work of Frank Gehry was, from the early 1980s, an adaptation of Googie's Pulp Modernism for the purposes of architecture-as-art. The style of which he was one of the leading lights, and which was termed 'deconstructivism' by the mid-1980s, retained many of the formal strategies of the roadside architecture of the 1950s. These architects – Daniel Libeskind among them – were notable both for ignoring the postmodernist imperative to genuflect before neoclassicism or baroque, and for a vocabulary of the non-orthogonal, the exaggerated and the audaciously engineered, that owed more to LA diners than it did to the Bauhaus. This style has been applied in the last decade almost entirely for the purposes of museums, galleries, or self-contained theme park-like environments such as Gehry's Experience Music Project in Seattle, or Nigel Coates' National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield. Chin-Tao Wu's Privatising Culture lists a few of those that were erected in Britain around the turn of the Millennium:

In terms of their combined Disneyfication and intensification of the city's museum culture, these are deeply postmodernist buildings, regardless of their form.

The influence of Googie in contemporary urbanism is a largely unspoken one, but it is, I would argue, key to understanding exactly why the 'signature' wing of Pseudomodernist architecture takes the form it does. It seemingly paradoxically aligns itself very closely with the heritage zones of the old capitals. Across the road from St Paul's Cathedral is a tourist information pavilion by Make architects, formed by Ken Shuttleworth, job architect on Norman Foster's 'Gherkin'. In its improbable geometry, its jagged zig-zag showing zero interest in function or taste, it could easily be imagined serving donuts in 1950s Anaheim. There is a huge amount of architecture like this, serving most often as a key component of urban regeneration strategies. Buildings for living in are more often in an attenuated, mild, asymmetrically patterned form of Scandinavian Modernism, while buildings for culture are allowed to make somewhat wilder gestures. This process can be seen in various buildings for the creative industries in Britain, with their logo-like names: Urbis in Manchester, The Public in West Bromwich, Magna in Rotherham and so forth. Its most extensive expression is not, however, in the UK, with its remaining vestiges of representative democracy, but in the oligarchies of Russia, China and the United Arab Emirates. Abu Dhabi, for instance, has set aside a district solely for 'iconic' cultural buildings by Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster and Jean Nouvel (who has designed a branch of the Louvre). Barry Lord, the 'cultural consultant' for this cultural zone, claimed in the AJ that 'cultural tourists are older, wealthier, more educated, and they spend more. From an economic point of view, this makes sense'. No doubt this applies equally well in theory to West Bromwich or Salford. 

Much of this architecture has in common with Googie the reduction of the building to a logo, to an instantly memorable image - one which is appreciated in movement, as from a passing car, while quickly walking through an art gallery or museum on the way to the gift shop, or indeed while shopping, as in Future Systems and Rem Koolhaas' work for Selfridges and Prada, respectively. Although it may accompany exhibitions of art or simulations of war, it is not an architecture of contemplation but of distraction and speed. Yet it also continues the moralistic rhetoric of postwar Modernism, without any of the actual social uses – local authority housing, comprehensive schools, general hospitals – to which it was put. The new Modernism, like the new social democratic parties, is one emptied of all intent to actually improve the living conditions of the majority. Instead, the social use of the Pseudomodernist building, forever groping for the Bilbao effect, appears - in a rather Victorian manner - to be the uplifting of the spirit via interactive exhibits and installations. 

Nobody ever suggested that roadside diners had hyperbolic paraboloid roofs in order to make us better people or induce them to 'aspire', let alone to simulate the experience of war or the holocaust. Nonetheless, the formal links between Googie and today's apparently radical architecture does suggest a truth at its heart - its forbears are in the aesthetics of consumption, advertising, in forms designed to be seen at great speed, not in serene contemplation. It should not surprise us that a style of consumption would return under neoliberalism, but the formal affinities of pseudomodernism with this aesthetic offers an explanation for what often seems an arbitrary play of forms. By drawing on the futurism of the McCarthy era, the architecture of the neoliberal consensus establishes a link between two eras of quietism, conformism and technological acceleration. It also enables us to reinterpret what purports to be an aesthetic of edification as one of consumption. In the computer-aided creation of futuristic form, today's architects are producing enormous logos, and this is only appropriate. The architecture once described as 'deconstructivist' owes less to Derrida than it does to McDonalds.