The Measures Taken

No Rococo Palace for Buster Keaton

2009-11-30T17:44:00.000-08:00

Americanism (and Technology, Advertising, Socialism) in Weimar Architecture

To introduce this paper I'd like to point to the differences between these two images. This building was originally built in 1912, as a factory in what is now Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, near Alexanderplatz in eastern central Berlin. In 1926 it became 'Karl-Liebknecht-Haus', the headquarters of the KPD, the Communist Party of Germany. After suffering severe bomb damage during World War Two, it was restored to its current state. It is currently the headquarters of Die Linke. As it now stands, we see a minimal, rather Beidermeier-esque urban block, sober and traditional, without any extraneous detail bar some minor political advertising on the façade. In the earlier photograph, taken in 1930, the entire surface of the building has been taken over by slogans, proclaiming opposition to Fascism, the SPD, the Young Plan and so forth, culminating in the slogan 'for a Soviet Germany', with poster of Lenin added accordingly – other contemporary posters show Liebknecht and Luxemburg along with him. The significance of these two images is as follows. Within these of the same building is the promise of a polemical architecture, a socialist aesthetics that bases itself on the techniques of modern advertising. The KPD headquarters here is a slightly more low-technology version of the famous illuminated facades of the Kurfurstendamm, a Communist's spin on the 'Reklamarchitektur' or 'advertising architecture' of commercial architects such as Erich Mendelsohn. It is a fragment of something which never quite came to pass – a Communist Weimar architecture, as opposed to a reformist or consumerist architecture, which makes its form all the more interesting, particularly seeing that it derives, after one or two degrees of separation, from a particular idea of the American city.

It's notable that façade's interaction with the architecture is blaringly loud and aggressive. It is not minimalist, but makes the form of the building itself completely subservient to propaganda and sloganeering. Yet the particular approach taken at Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, where the advertising forms continuous strips of sans serif text, running in bands along the building, is indebted to the approach of commercial architects. Mendelsohn and others explicitly attempted to rationalise American advertising, stripping away its kitschy crassness into an almost – but not quite – abstract play of lights, in which the chaos of signage of a Times Square would be reworked into sheer lines and planes of neon. In this it would seem to be in opposition to the lack of ornament and lack of aesthetic 'noise' in the architecture of Weimar Modernism, the highly advanced and influential movement then known as the 'Neues Bauen' and retrospectively, dubiously rebranded by American critics as The International Style. If there is a definable Social Democratic architecture of the Weimar Republic, then it is the one constituted in the 'siedlung' low-cost housing estates planned under the SPD architect and planner Martin Wagner. These estates, part of a mass housing programme memorably described as 'built ideology' by the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri, exemplify a particular received idea of Modern architecture, with their ornament-free surfaces, their blocks dispersed across landscaped greenery. They are not wholly suburban entities, with the architecture of Bruno Taut in particular displaying a garishly artificial use of colour which would not feature in the version of this modernism that would eventually become 'the international style'. Nonetheless they do not appear metropolitan, do not partake in the onslaught of advertising, traffic and spectacle that are central to the Metropolis. If they are indebted to an American source, it is not the delirious USA of skyscrapers, jazz and neon advertisements, but rather the upper-crust architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the apparently 'enlightened' capitalism of Henry Ford.

At this point it's worth digressing into Tafuri's theories of the city and modernism, and their relation to the class compromises that marked urban planning in 1920s Berlin. Tafuri is in English-speaking scholarship the best known thinker associated with the Venice school of architectural historians, of the 1960s and 1970s, whose Workerist-inflected Marxism was shared by the architect Aldo Rossi. Their stance can be summed up in a sentence from Rossi's 1966 book The Architecture of the City - 'there is no such thing as an oppositional architecture'. Similarly, Tafuri would write 'there cannot be founded a class architecture, but only a class critique of architecture'. Nonetheless, his project, and that of his collaborators such as Francesco Dal Co and Massimo Cacciari, would return frequently to the experiments in municipal housing of the 1920s, if only in order to argue for their essential uselessness as a political instrument, as a means of achieving serious reform within the capitalist city. Although unlike their postmodernist successors, both Rossi and Tafuri appeared to believe that 'the socialist house' was at least possible, and Rossi actually identifies it in the monumental workers flats of 1920s Vienna. Nonetheless, they relegate its achievement to an 'after the revolution'.

In Architecture and Utopia, his short study of the links between the avant-garde, social democratic reformism and the rationalised metropolis, Tafuri discusses the estates on the outskirts of Berlin and Frankfurt as an example of an alliance between social democracy and rationalised capitalism, in which an attempt is made to solve capitalism’s contradictions under the conditions of a mixed economy. Tafuri lists these as

'the virtuous linkage of mass production techniques, mass consumption and advertising, based on the nuclear family household, Taylorist work organisation, collective wage bargaining, the hegemony of the large corporation, Keynesian demand management, the welfare state and the mass production of standardised housing'

Although Tafuri leaves out from his list the workers' organisations and co-operatives who were very much a part of this compact, and the analysis appears to describe post-1945 capital more closely than post-1914, the general thread is sharp enough. The estates are ‘partial utopias of the plan’. They are invariably at a remove from the Metropolis, they are pure suburban enclaves which try to cut themselves off from Metropolitan chaos and contradiction, while partaking in its networks of transportation and employment. Aesthetically, this results in an urban form that has often been considered standardised, rectilinear and stark – although it should be pointed out that this is based on a misunderstanding, via black and white photos of luridly coloured buildings – and an urban form which is essentially indebted to the garden city and the garden suburb, that Edwardian, publess emblem of arts-and-crafts reformism. It is a kind of idealised Americanism, where Fordist management, rationalised technology and the avant-garde’s mutation of industrial aesthetics is placed in the service of the dispersed, verdant enclave of the garden city.

So these estates try to have it both ways – to be both socialistic and capitalistic, to build a new city while the old continues to multiply its contradictions and inequalities. Tafuri's critique of this is distinctly similar to that of Walter Rathenau, the German industrialist and politician who was a noted thinker and planner of the rationalised, compromised capitalism that would become known as 'Fordism'. Rathenau wrote of the garden cities in his The New Society (1920)

'it is tacit lying and deception to act on the tacit assumption that thoroughgoing socialism means something like a garden city idyll, with play-houses, open-air theatres, picturesque raiment and fireside art. (...) the requirements of the population are not medievally simplified – they could not be, in view of the density of the population and the complexity of individual and professional vocations. They are many and diverse, and they are moreover intensified by the spectacle of extravagance offered by the profiteering class and the licence of social life. The traditional garden-city idyll of architects and artists-craftsmen is a Utopia with about as much reality as th pastoral Acadianism of Marie Antoinette.'

Ironically enough, after Rathenau's assassination an AEG company garden city would be named after him, but this remains a critique decidedly close to Tafuri's, although with rather different aims. The attempt at medieval simplification and the production of non-metropolitan space is critiqued in favour of the large city with all its inequalities and exploitation. In Architecture and Utopia Tafuri briefly sketches some examples of architecture that actively participates in these contradictions – we will mention here Erich Mendelsohn, Hannes Meyer, Hans Poelzig and Ludwig Hilberseimer. Erich Mendelsohn's expressionistic functionalism, to use an appropriately contradictory compound, is particularly important. Tafuri refers to Mendelsohn’s work as ‘inebriating’. It’s an architecture which, rather than sitting calmly and Platonically on the outskirts, employs all the potentialities of the metropolis in its architectural organisation. Corners are glazed, dynamic angles employed, clashes with previous architecture are accentuated, advertising is integrated, and electric light becomes a central architectural feature.

This was described as Reklamarchitektur by the critic Adolf Behne, literally ‘advertising architecture’. Tafuri appears to offer this up as the delirious, dreamlike, dynamic, somewhat seamy underside of the Neues Bauen, and one which unlike the social-democratic ‘built ideology’ of the estates on the outskirts, is entirely sanguine about an embrace of rationalised, Americanised capitalism, without illusions. However the other examplar of a politically realist architecture for the Venice school is the work of Ludwig Hilberseimer, a planner and later collaborator of Mies van der Rohe, whose urban plans are notoriously, relentlessly stark. These gigantic, repetitious city-districts, organised and designed on as standardised a principle as possible, are notable particularly for their lack of ‘signs’, whether architectural detailing, advertising, slogans, colour, and so forth, making this work, at least aesthetically, the diametric opposite of the advertising-architecture of Mendelsohn. This bareness and obsessive order gives the work a strangely classical appearance, and its deliberately blank and inhumane anti-aesthetic led Tafuri and Dal Co to call it, after Robert Musil, ‘the city without qualities’, and a repentant Hilberseimer to retrospectively call it a 'necropolis' in the 1960s. Hilberseimer considered himself a socialist, and always described his city plans as embodying the (at least implicit) logic of capital. In Groszstadtarchitektur he writes:

'The present type of large city owes its birth above all to the economic form of capitalist imperialism, which in turn is closely connected to the evolution of science and of production techniques. With the maximum concentration and an extensive and complete organisation it achieves a superabundance of intensity and energy (...) the large city appears primarily as the creation of omnipotent large capital and therefore is imprinted with anonymity...(and he goes on) at the same time the maximum isolation and the greatest crowding together of its inhabitants. In it, an enormously intensified rhythm of life very rapidly represses every local and individual element'.

It is here deeply unclear whether Hilberseimer's Metropolis is a critique of this by holding up to it a distorted mirror, or whether it attempts to rationalise still further. So while he talks about energy and intensity, his images remove all aesthetic charge, all dynamism or potential jouissance from urban architecture, as if to classicise, eternalise the repetitious forms and constant transit; while the anonymity is amplified rather than leavened. This is the inverse of advertising-architecture, in that it strips the pretty electric dressing from the skyscrapers and department stores, leaving only strips, boxes, of empty floors. If Weimar modernism was enormously indebted to images of the steel frames of American skyscrapers before their ornament was applied, Hilberseimer takes this to the extreme of there being no visible goods inside either, nothing to sell, no content in the interior no advertising on the exterior - only the system of distribution and organisation in its most abstract form is visible.

What unites the radically differing approaches of Mendelsohn and Hilberseimer, other than their immersion in the Weimar Republic’s American-funded capitalism, whether directly or ironically, is their shared roots in wilfully distorted images of the United States, the emblem at the time of a rationalised capital, of megacity metropolitanism, and of alleged dehumanisation, and also of an inadvertent assault on traditional ideas of aesthetics. So, Hilberseimer frequently reproduced, in books such as Groszstadtarchitektur, images of American skyscrapers at their most repetitious, such as the towers of General Motors Headquarters in Detroit, or McKim, Mead and White's Pennsylvania Hotel in New York City. These became, when stripped of their ornament by Hilberseimer himself, depictions of totality, of a society run entirely on the basis of the principles of Fordism. Meanwhile, Mendelsohn published Amerika in 1926, a documentary record and an architectural critique of a journey round the USA, in the company of Fritz Lang among others, who used his impressions of the trip as the basis for Metropolis. Mendelsohn admired much in American architecture, but attempted to transform it into something less mythic, less irrational, and considerably less tawdry. One of the most telling juxtapositions in the book is of two images of Broadway – one where it is glittering at night blurred into an image so abstract that El Lissitzky would later use it as the basis for this collage; followed by the same scene the morning after. While the first shows an electro-mechanical show where individual advertisements can barely be distinguished, so you can no longer see what is being sold to you, an 'ad without products' in Giorgio Agamben's phrase, the other is merely shrill, crass and obnoxious, and perfectly clear. The response to the evident irrationality of rationalised American capitalism can either be to abstract its techniques further, in the case of Mendelsohn, or to strip it completely, leaving only the outline of total organisation, in the case of Hilberseimer.

Another, equally extreme response to that of Hilberseimer was that of Hannes Meyer. K Michael Hays' study Modernism and the Posthuman Subject aligns him with Hilberseimer as a sophisticated anti-humanist thinker, but seems to miss the striking aesthetic contrast between Hilberseimer's city-planning and some speculative proposals by Meyer himself. Meyer was the avowedly Marxist second director of the Bauhaus, sacked after donating the school's money to a Miners' Strike, but before that was an architect and planner for the Swiss co-operative movement. Before becoming Bauhaus director he composed a series of works all named 'Co-Op' – linocuts mostly, abstracting his housing co-ops into suprematist compositions – the most interesting of which were the 'Co-Op Vitrines'. These are arrangements in glass cases of standardised products from co-operative stores, into what resemble miniature model cities, cities literally made out of commodities, in a dreamlike taking literally of advertising's role in architecture. While we may ponder whether Hilberseimer's city was satirical or not, the Co-Op city was meant wholly sincerely as a representation of the liberating possibilities of mass production, and Meyer was straightforward in his praise of neon lights, mechanical advertisements, traffic, and so forth. At the same time that helped politicise the Bauhaus, he also introduced an advertising department – both his Marxism and his praise for department stores and neon signs were utilised in opposition to the idea of a pure art, and both involved the use of technology as an architectural element. Meanwhile, he claimed that prospective buildings, such as his Constructivist Peterschule in Basel, would work not merely as a critique of the surrounding buildings, but would actively work for their destruction - an architecture of aesthetic war, which at least aimed to be an instrument of class war.

There is another potential architectural response to metropolitan spectacle, mass organisation, ubiquitous signage, technology and advertising which limits itself to one building, and that is in the cinema, where Mendelsohn again attempted to abstract and rationalise his image of America. This is is the Universum Kino, which Mendelsohn designed for UFA in 1926, as part of a luxury housing development in the Kurfürstendamm. In the advertisement at the top of its tower, there is a proclamation of the building's integration of light-advertising and dwelling. On the cinema's opening, Mendelsohn published a poem, which essentially argued that his cinema was more American than the Americans. While they had a cargo-cultish approach to cinema design, in which modernity and ancient or national architectural styles were mixed together to create an effect, imitated in early Weimar cinemas, that was memorably described by Siegfried Kracauer in the essay 'Cult of Distraction' as a 'pseudo-totality' which works against the radical two-dimensionality of the films themselves, attempting to return the mass, aura-free act of going to the pictures into the mythic, Wagnerian space of the gesamtkunstwerk. Consciously or otherwise, the Kino Universum was an attempt at answering Kracauer's critique – a streamlined, rationalised picture palace, with light architecture integrated into but not distracting from the film programme, working instead as a kind of city crown for the surrounding area. The Universum Kino would, he wrote, entail 'no rococo palace for Buster Keaton, no wedding cake for Potemkin'.

The 'Lichtberg' Kino in the solidly Communist district of Wedding took a similar approach, adding a floodlight for even more dramatic effect; but it was at the centre of a deliberately Americanised development of similarly streamlined rental flats called, in a combination of Rathenau's objections and his solutions, the 'Atlantic Garden City' – a speculative scheme, not one of the social democratic estates. To finally bring this back to where we started, there is another modernist picture-house built at this point, which seems to sit between the American Moorish palaces and the upright, stark approach of the Universum Kino – the Kino Babylon, designed by occasional film set designer Hans Poelzig, which was built next to Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, again as part of a housing scheme. Unfortunately I'm unaware what the KPD thought about this building, but the similarity of its strips of advertisement to that of their headquarters may have given them pause. Nonetheless, the examples I have outlined here, in the cases of Meyer's Co-Op City and the decoration of Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, are an attempt to show how an urban form traditionally opposed by left aesthetes, most obviously of late in the form of Adbusters, was once taken as a model for a left architecture, while its absence, as in the plans of Hilberseimer, was felt as a loss rather than as political progress. It suggests another form of modern architecture which Tafuri hints at, a left modernism which, rather than setting up a purism on the periphery, engages fully with the metropolis on the basis of a technological anti-aesthetic.

I'll end, however, with an excerpt from a film by Buster Keaton himself, where he erects a building which is itself far from a rococo palace. It shows what is missing both from Tafuri's urbanism and from the social democratic siedlung - the idea of a ludic architecture, of an architecture which could be self-created, a non-metropolitan but high-tech building which could entirely destroy the very idea of the permanence of architecture, and the profession of the architect, by exploiting its lines of transport and communication rather than being determined by them. If it suggests any 'radical' architecture, it is that of the 'Workers' Council For Art' of 1919, with their exhibitions of architecture by the untrained and anonymous, or the disurbanist cities of Mikhail Okhitovich. Yet it also appears as an architecture of disaster, erected and destroyed with equal carelessness.

Future Ruins

2009-06-07T11:58:00.000-07:00

Wang Bing's West of the Tracks and Industrial Film

The Dirty Secret of Production

Slavoj Žižek remarks somewhere that the most common cinematic representation of industrial production is in the Bond film. In those moments where the secret lair of the villain can be seen churning out some fearful weapon of mass destruction, with our hero dragged along as an unwilling witness, the real of production is uncovered, as something shadowy and sinister. Certainly, there's little doubt that the place of work, particularly the factory, is a dirty secret on-screen. Not the least interesting thing about Wang Bing's West of the Tracks is that it spends a large chunk of its 9 hours looking coldly, if not dispassionately, at the usually unrepresented or unrepresentable.

The hypnotic depiction of Shenyang's Tie Xi district in West of the Tracks owes very little, however, to any previous industrial film, a genre which begins with Frank Gilbreth's creepy time-and-motion studies, films of mundane work tasks designed to be viewed by scientific managers for the purposes of rearranging how the worker undertakes the task. However a more influential example provides an instructive contrast – Dziga Vertov's 1931 'industrial symphony' Enthusiasm, a touchstone, along with the likes of Viktor Turin's Turksib, for the British documentary movement, itself a pivotal moment in industrial film. This hour-long montage of industrial scenes is notable for the way in which it consciously (and unambiguously) forms the industrial material, montaging the scenes of physical extremity and industrial sublimity, but leaving out the boredom and the drudgery. This isn't to say that Vertov prettifies, or imposes a smooth, glossy aesthetic on the process of production. The film has a loud, lumbering power which the fast-cut montage doesn't wholly efface, and the work that is seen frequently appears to be difficult, no matter how much it is formed into a Taylorist ballet. Yet the machines, like the people, are tightly organised, aestheticised – something very unlike the ruination and listlessness of Wang's Tie Xi.

Two of the artists very influenced by Vertov – Joris Ivens and Hanns Eisler - developed the idea of 'blast furnace music' while making a film about the industrial new town of Magnitogorsk. This idea of harnessing the brute power and noise of industry into something coherent is precisely what Wang Bing repudiates here. Instead of organisation and fast-cutting, the tracking shots and unobtrusive scenes of canteens and waiting rooms are notable for their directorial hands-off approach. In an interview with Robert Koehler on the later Fengming, he claims to be 'concerned that I don’t impose a message, as I don’t want to visually force anything on viewers. In other words, I want to make it as loose and open as possible (...) eliminating any possible obstacles, especially those that could be created by the filming itself.' While boredom and rumination are the things which Vertov avoids at all costs, these are integral to West of the Tracks' seeming non-technique, where the drift of the camera across the dilapidated factory seems designed, in his words, 'to let the audience freely roam and observe details at their own leisure.'

Accordingly, one of the most odd and jarring elements in West of the Tracks is precisely this unobtrusiveness. Wang's camera tracks up and down factories, sits unassumingly in bathrooms full of naked men, films shocking examples of unsafe work practices, with temp workers clearly taking no precautions amidst stalactites of solidified industrial fluids littering the factories, yet nobody ever seems concerned – or, indeed seems to notice Wang at all. There are isolated examples, such as a moment in Ruins where a worker in one of the bankrupt factories makes a 'get out' gesture at the camera, or casual interjections ('quick, get that on camera! Running around, bare-arsed...'). In Rails, there is a rare direct address from the scavenger 'one-eyed Du', introducing his shack in the freight yard: 'this is my son, and this is our little house'; and near the end, when flares on the tracks are used as impromptu fireworks, a valedictory 'we wanted you to see this, a real railroad experience. Now he knows all about the fun of signal flares!' Yet overwhelmingly, it's remarkable how little Wang is noticed, and how easily he assimilates himself into this mundanely apocalyptic landscape.

Brecht, in a dig at the industrial photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch (one of whose collections was entitled The World is Beautiful) claimed that a mere photograph of a factory tells us nothing about that factory, and instead just presents a meaningless aesthetic object. Accordingly, the element of West of the Tracks that stops it being a bizarre industrial metamorphosis of Albert Speer's 'Theory of Ruin Value', a poignant journey through the rusting detritus of an obsolete industrial model, is his attention to the workers themselves. While in an Enthusiasm the workers chant the occasional exhortation or pledge themselves to produce a given amount of coal or pig-iron, in West of the Tracks the workers are allowed to speak at will. They speak at length, sometimes inconsequentially, sometimes scatologically, but mostly as people who are intelligent, conscious and wholly aware of their predicament, yet almost entirely without hope.

Letting the Workers Speak: Boredom and Class Consciousness

When most of us think of Chinese industrial capitalism, the immediate thought that comes to mind – usually mediated by photographs in anti-corporate literature – is a shiny white plant devoted to producing various kinds of consumer goods for the Western market. Machines and tat, produced at an astonishing rate to satisfy the bored desires of the neoliberal west. So in a sense China itself takes on the role of the hidden factory that Žižek talks about. Except this is given the lie by West of the Tracks, especially Rust's apocalyptic, monumental depiction of a dying industrial district. The Shenyang factories Wang charts are for heavy industry, the remnants of the first industrial revolution rather than the third. So when, as a Westerner, I watch the destruction of the Tie Xi district, it's impossible not to think of what was done in the 1980s to South Wales, to Sheffield, to the East End, Detroit, Ohio...we've heard the angry plaint of one worker, sent home with no pension after 30 years of service, who tells one of the film's many shabby offices that 'they said we had a job for life. Pensions, health care, a safety net. Doesn't seem likely now. They don't care if you get sick, much less if you die – and forget about a pension...Next thing you know, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) will be renaming itself the Republican Party'. In China, too, the neoliberal restructuring has destroyed similar lives, thrown similar people on a similar scrapheap, with a similar total lack of support.

The workers of Shenyang have few illusions about what is being done to them. As one says, commenting on the vast canyon between rich and poor that is opening up, 'we're not what you would call 'educated', but we read the papers, we watch the news. We know how we compare.' At another moment, a Robert Tressell-esque ragged trousered philanthropist patiently explains how much of even these failing factories goes on profit. Later, snatched moments of a canteen discussion show the clarity, anger and hopelessness: 'I'm telling you, this is the bosses' fault'...'what kind of society is this, anyway?'...'survival of the fittest...'. There's a sense of shame at what they've been reduced to, from workers at one of the state's 'first rank' factories, given (relative) prestige and privilege, and now: 'does this look first rank to you? Have you ever seen a sorrier bunch? We've all got lead poisoning.' Another worker insists that his children will have to 'study hard so they don't end up like us'. These people are remarkably clear-headed in their bitterness at the new grotesqueries created by the 'restructuring'. Someone explains that prostitutes are going extremely cheap, and notes that there is only one reason for this: 'layoffs. That's why there's a glut. It makes me so angry'. Similarly, the inhabitants of the soon to be razed shacks at Rainbow Row are under no illusions about the collusion between state and business that, not content with destroying their jobs, is now destroying their homes.

History and education both lurk in the background. Although the current corruption of the occasionally mentioned Party cadres is acknowledged by everyone, what came before it is acknowledged seldom, or in flashes: as when one worker, noting the lack of education that helped to leave them all at the mercy of the state and the market says that 'we didn't even learn phonics at school. If the teachers made us work, we'd struggle with them, put up big character posters', a strangely casual memory of the Cultural Revolution, something also obliquely referenced when, in Rails, it transpires that two railwaymen went to the same school – 'yeah, and Lin Biao was our teacher', one replies ironically. All this might imply that these people are merely political ciphers, shown only when they have something significant to say about their dire predicament. On the contrary, perhaps hours of digital stock are spent on seemingly endless games of cards or Mah-Jong and exchanges of insults, with the boredom reaching a kind of nadir as a group of smelting workers spend interminable days being treated for lead poisoning, in countless hours of listlessness and conviviality, where watching hardcore porn together in a shabby hospital waiting room and (an eventually deadly) spot of fishing is about all that can while away the hours.

'Great Leaders, Past and Future, Lead us into A Great New Age'

West of the Tracks is marked by an extremely mordant streak of irony, something which comes out particularly sharply in the use of songs and televisual background noise. Rust features a grim New Year's Party, where the factory boss confides, in-between toasts, that the factory has gone bankrupt: 'we've got to privatise everything we can. Will it work? Maybe not.' Yet blaring out in the corner are old revolutionary and patriotic songs, like the one quoted above, the tragicomic spectacle of a worker blaring into the microphone, searching for the tune, 'here begins the future!' Wang plays knowingly with the imagery of these old songs, with their imagery of a future at hand, provided through struggle and the efforts of the heroic Communist Party. The future as a workers' paradise, although no doubt not a freethinker's one. Yet although it's very clear that the workers of Shenyang are in no doubt about just how severely they're being screwed over, and the absurdity that it is all perpetrated by a 'Communist' Party, there's never a deliberate comment about the irony of these songs of the heroic proletariat being sung by now-destitute proletarians. These are the old songs you remember from childhood. Nursery rhymes. One person might sing a mawkish Sinopop ballad, another (as happens in Rails) might consolingly sing to themselves of 'the hardships of revolution', or melodically mutter 'my heart grows wider, as I walk towards the future'. Soon after the smelting workers arrive in the hospital to be treated for their lead poisoning, one of them plays a revolutionary song on a saxophone. We see a brief shot of an acne scarred face wincing, singing 'we welcome the liberation army'...

Yet the actual future is faced with trepidation. The tenants of Rainbow Row, for instance, who wonder how on earth they could possibly pay the rent on the new flats that they're being resettled in, as their brick and wood shacks are levelled. The young Wang Zhen, one of the most listless of the film's many listless youths, asks his father (while no doubt knowing the answer) 'why are you so fucking worried about my future?' Although these are people intent on hanging onto the little they have, and unsurprisingly suspicious of state largesse, some are guilty at going from being favoured industrial workers in a peasant country to becoming obstacles in the way of the parade of progress. As one tenant puts it, 'you can't hold back the tide of progress...but at least this place is rent-free'. What the future actually holds in store for these people is symbolically illustrated by the later shots in Remnants, after the supplies and the electricity have been cut and most of the houses are flattened, leaving something resembling Warsaw in 1945: 'what the fuck. Did everyone die or something?'

Industrial Surrealism

There is undeniably a sublimity about the sheer vastness of destruction in this film, with the criss-crossing sheds, walkways, power lines, tracks, chutes of Tie Xi presenting themselves as the ruins of a previous future. Nonetheless, what seems enduring in Wang's film is something rarer and and peculiar than the romance of the future ruin – a new Surrealism, one inflected by industrial film and cinema vérité , and based on careful observation, as opposed to the free play of images and ideas. What lingers in the mind, as the camera drifts through the derelict sheet metal factory, along the freight line or the doomed shacks of Rainbow Row, is the sheer weirdness of the short images and comments that flit past. The notion of excavating industrial waste when the whole place is levelled, as when someone notes 'there must be a metre of steel sunk in that soil. They'll be digging it up for years'. The hellish, grimy and steamy baths, where naked men discuss their unpaid wages with anger or resignation. The 'six months of winter' that someone complains about, which becomes painfully beautiful in the vivid 'night' section of Rails, where the snow is pervaded by smoking oil, lurid sodium lights, bright violets and pinks. The horrendous cold that overtakes the factories, with workers in woolly hats and gloves hacking ice off the production lines. The glimpse of a steam train. A man in a medical white coat rollerskating up the frozen wastes of Rainbow Row. The inexplicable final sequence of Remnants, where a phone rings, and with the words 'you've got a call', a man walks through an open door into a roofless house. The men of Rainbow Row dragging along tangles of wire, with slabs of metal placed on them, to sell off to anyone who'll pay. The bizarre, horrible fight between the scavenger Old Du, finally arrested, after he returns from prison, and his son, whose mood swings from supplication on bended knee to 'I hate you...fuck you all' within seconds.

Although this is the tragedy of a whole community, and one that has no need for any stars or 'human interest stories', it is Old Du and his son, with their makeshift house in a shed on the freight yards, whose small tragedy is played out in its last two hours, who encapsulate what is unprecedented in Wang's film. That is, letting those who are usually banished to the periphery, ignored, or redesigned to fit into an industrial-positivist montage, actually speak, at length. These are people who cling onto modernity at its fringes, trying to survive by staying one step ahead of those with money and power, until the inevitable time that they are found out. 'I've got no job, no home, but let me tell you, I've got connections, I've got files and records...', until he realises that none of that is relevant anymore. 'Now they've got a file on me!'

Penthouse and Pavement

2009-05-02T08:09:00.000-07:00

'Brutalist' architecture was never just an aesthetic style. It was a political aesthetic, an attitude, a weapon, dedicated to the precept that nothing was too good for ordinary people. Now, after decades of neglect, it's divided between 'eyesores' and 'icons', fine for the Barbican's stockbrokers but unacceptable for the ordinary people who were always its intended clients. When the heritage industry lays its hands on Brutalism, it unsurprisingly gets its fingers burnt.

English Heritage was formed in 1983, at the height of the reaction against the new face grafted on to England by old Labour's technological 'white heat' - Brutalism's aesthetic and the heritage ethic would seem inherently opposed. Romancing the Stone, the second episode of English Heritage, a grimly funny BBC2 series on the quango's activities, incongruously following a Jacobean mansion, profiles the 'regeneration' of Sheffield's vast, Grade II* listed Park Hill council estate. At Park Hill preservation experts worry over 'historic fabric', while Urban Splash, the property developers who are transforming it, threaten to paint the whole thing pink. Stereotypes are rife: the English Heritage contingent speak in RP, the developers are flash Mancunians, the restoration's architect a middle-aged Frenchman who dresses in lime green, and locals are presented as bluff Yorkshiremen who don't know much about architecture, but know what they like.

Enjoyable as these tensions are, they obscure a deeply complex story, one which perfectly exemplifies Britain's tortured relationship with its recent past. We would never know that Park Hill was an early response to what were considered, even in the 1950s, to be Modern architecture's failures. Empty spaces, isolation, a lack of street life, a middle-class 'this is good for you' ethos – all were fiercely critiqued by its planners and architects. Unfortunately for its advocates, the style of these buildings – reliant on 'béton brut', unpainted concrete - was christened 'the New Brutalism'. The New Brutalism's chief propagandist, Reyner Banham, pondered in a 1966 book whether the idiom was an 'Ethic or Aesthetic', so firmly marked was it by social concerns. He claimed that the Brutalists were the architectural equivalent of the 'angry young men' of the '50s, of Arnold Wesker or Alan Sillitoe. Banham wrote that these architects were of 'red brick extraction', products of post-war class mobility, usually Northerners.

Park Hill was, and still is, along with London's contrastingly affluent Barbican estate, the largest scale application of Brutalism's ethic and aesthetic. It cleared a violent slum by Sheffield's Midland Station nicknamed 'little Chicago', but rather than rehousing the residents in isolated towers, the architects – Jack Lynn, Ivor Smith and Frederick Nicklin, selected by the City Architect Lewis Womersley – attempted to replicate in the air the tightly packed street life of the area. The New Brutalists were enthusiasts for the close-knit working class life supposedly being broken up by the new estates and new towns. Books that documented these communities from the outside, such as Willmott and Young's Family and Kinship in East London, or from the inside, like Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, were required reading. So claustrophobic walk-ups or corridors were rejected in favour of 12ft wide 'streets in the sky'. These 'streets' were almost all connected with the ground, on steeply sloping land. Street corners were included where the winding building twisted around, with the spaces around the blocks filled with shops, schools and playgrounds. It even had its own tenants magazine, called Flat.

Meanwhile the architectural aesthetic was shaped by a rejection of the clean geometries of mainstream Modernism, in favour of roughness and irregularity. The marks of concrete shuttering were left on the surface, showing the imprint of manual labour rather than imitating machine production. The bricks were yellow, red and purple, its abstract patterns aided by artist John Forrester. The blocks rose from 4 storeys at the highest point of the hill to 13 at the lowest, giving a continuous roof line visible from much of the city. Despite – or because of - its aesthetic extremism, early responses to the blocks were very positive indeed, as you can see in Romancing the Stone's footage of children and OAPs praising the place's modernity and community. Over old footage of the playgrounds, a South Yorkshire voice intones 'there's no stopping this collective thinking. It's the future'.

Encouraged by these responses, the architects clearly thought they had solved the problems of Modernist housing. A 'Park Hill Mark Two' was built just behind the site – Hyde Park, which rose to an 18-story 'castle keep'. Later, a mark three, Kelvin Flats, was designed by other architects west of the city centre. In 1962, the book Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield, documenting Lewis Womersley's tenure as City architect, was published in English, French and Russian – Sheffield's council housing was world-famous. Streets in the sky were only one facet of its housing programme. The less futuristic but equally remarkable suburban counterpart to Park Hill's urbanity was Gleadless Valley, a collection of houses and flats making remarkable use of the hilly landscape, resembling a strange socialist South Yorkshire version of '50s Southern California. By the end of the '70s, nearly half of Sheffield's housing was council-owned. This is a reminder that council housing was never intended to be the emergency measure it is now, but something which was genuinely 'mixed'.

Perhaps Park Hill was too successful at recreating the space of the old rookeries - like them, it was full of escape routes and shadowy spots. Romancing the Stone mentions that the 'dream turned sour in the early 1980s', but not why that might be so – the collapse of the steel industry, which in a matter of years turned Sheffield from a prospective City of the Future into a remnant of the past; or the 'Right to Buy' council housing, which would turn unpopular estates into refuges of last resort. In an optimistic time it looked confident; as that world collapsed, it looked intimidating. In the 1990s Hyde Park was partly demolished, its remnants tackily re-clad. Kelvin flats were levelled completely. It's almost certain that Park Hill would have suffered the same fate had it not been listed in 1998. Practically inescapable in Sheffield, it is an overwhelming reminder of what it once wanted to be – the capital of the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, a rough but sociable metropolis; rather than what it wants to be now, a local service industry centre.

On a recent visit to Sheffield I interviewed two interested parties: first Ben Morris, a local Defend Council Housing campaigner, and then Simon Gawthorpe, of the property developer Urban Splash. Morris wasn't all that interested in Park Hill - though he liked the building, he had a wider story to tell. He took me to Modernist estates like Womersley's Woodside, now almost completely demolished; and to traditionalist inter-war garden suburbs like Parson's Cross and Shirecliffe, pockmarked with demolition sites. Sheffield's New Labour Council, under the administration of the unelected Bob Kerslake, was proud of its policy of demolishing council housing to create 'Housing Market Renewal', i.e to artificially stimulate a property boom. Whether tower blocks or houses with gardens, nowhere was safe. The policy, intended to invite 'mixed communities' through new buildings that seldom arrived, had created a huge council waiting list – between 2001 and 2007 it quadrupled from 14,301 to 58,706, and Morris estimates that the recession may have pushed it as high as 90,000. If you don't want council estates to become emergency refuges inhabited mainly by the desperate, this a weird way of going about it. Park Hill will lose around 600 council flats, with roughly 300 being run by a Housing Association – a fraction of the thousands lost under Kerslake.

On the basis of his 'success' in Sheffield, Sir Bob Kerslake was appointed chair of the Homes and Communities Agency, a super-quango merging the PPP sponsors English Partnerships with the Housing Corporation. This proud demolisher of council housing is now head of the agency that intends to sponsor new social housing to help people through the property crash. Appropriately, the HCA has 'frontloaded' its £14 million sponsorship of Park Hill's redevelopment, most of which is funded by Urban Splash. This Manchester-based property developer is best known for turning derelict mills, office blocks and factories into city-centre 'lofts'. It grew out of founder Tom Bloxham's record shop, and is an interesting amalgam of two New Labour fixations – the 'creative industries' and property speculation, as opposed to Old Labour's heavy industries and social housing.

This is apt in a sense, as the streets in the sky have always been a presence in Sheffield's electronic music - Kelvin Flats were referenced in the sleevenotes to The Human League's 'Dancevision', Park Hill was on the cover of their Golden Hour of the Future compilation; and later, Park Hill features as utopia and Kelvin as dystopia in Pulp's early '90s work. Urban Splash's brochure for Park Hill was elegantly rendered by The Designers Republic, who made their name as sleeve designers for Warp Records and Pulp - themselves recently claimed by the recession. It's full of quotations from Sheffield bands like the Human League and ABC, all written in infantile music-press clichés, promising to restore 'the love' to Park Hill.

Walking around Park Hill today is a surreal experience. At one end it's still inhabited, and people were indeed chatting on the streets in the sky – at the other it's a monolithic, empty frame. I asked Simon Gawthorpe why Urban Splash took so drastic an approach, and he replied that the intention was to transform the place from a 'sink estate' into 'a place where people would want to live and invest'. Some of their ideas are sensible, such as opening a four-storey entrance to relieve the block's wall-like appearance; others seem designed to make Park Hill as brightly tacky as any other piece of Regeneration architecture. In a move decided upon before market failure made money scarce, they stripped the entire North Block at great expense, when this structurally sound building could have been refurbished simply enough.

I had assumed it was space standards that dictated the stripping, but Gawthorpe says they will mostly keep its internal proportions. What they are doing is removing all the bricks, to be replaced by anodised aluminium panels, replicating John Forrester's colour scheme, if entirely abandoning truth to materials. Romancing the Stone shows English Heritage eventually reluctant about the redesign, then giving in. This might be a repudiation of Brutalism's rough Aesthetic, but neither developers or conservationists mind destroying its Ethic. Reyner Banham claimed that Park Hill was the culmination of a 'moral crusade'. Urban Splash certainly find this 'utopian' rhetoric attractive, and Gawthorpe proudly talks about about a woman who has lived there since the '60s telling them 'people think we live in a slum. They don't realise that I live in a penthouse looking out over the city'. He can't tell me where she lives now. Already 300 of the residents who were cleared have registered an interest in returning, but only 200 flats will be available for social rent.

The feeling is inescapable that a whole claque of publicly funded bodies have become subject to a property developer's whims. Perhaps the only sympathetic figure in the documentary is the estate's caretaker, who drives along the streets in the sky in a golf buggy, picking up refuse bags and drug paraphernalia. In the face of this astonishing structure, patronised by heritage and property, he comments 'I love the old girl. She's an old lady who's fallen on hard times.' Here, at least, Park Hill has inspired the sense of belonging its architects tried to create. Park Hill is a battered remnant of a very different country, one which briefly turned housing for ordinary people into futuristic monuments rather than shamefaced little hutches. The ideologies of Regeneration and Heritage, when applied to the very different ethical aesthetic of the old New Brutalism, can only destroy the thing they claim to love. Nothing in the rest of this series, back in the familiar heritage England of Victorian railway stations and Elizabethan gardens, is anywhere near as tragic.

'Director's cut' of piece originally published in The Guardian. 2009 photos by Joel Anderson, 1960s photos by Iqbal Aalam.

Pulp: Urbanism, Sexuality, Class (Part Two)

2009-01-29T16:01:00.000-08:00

(shameless plug: some of the below is taken from the first chapter of the forthcoming book Militant Modernism, published in April)

The next three Pulp singles were released on Gift Records, from 1992 to 1993. Gift was a subsidiary of Warp, and it's an interesting counterfactual to imagine the 1990s, and Pulp's 15 minutes of fame, if they had released it on Warp proper. Given that they've since besmirched their techno rep by signing all manner of indie bands, including the utterly nondescript Maximo Park, they perhaps missed a bit of a trick here. Obviously Pulp didn't make straightforward Sheffield techno records, with the exception of the so-so 'This House is Condemned', but you can't imagine them without house and techno. In a sense this is true of lots of Britpop. Noel Gallagher was, along with Pulp's members, perhaps the only ex-raver in that mileu (with Pulp and Oasis interestingly its only working class bands), and Oasis' endless, insufferable exhortations to 'shine', take me higher and so forth are really an application of rave's vague, all-purpose, non-specific euphoria to the pub and the muddy music festival, rather than the club or the orbital rave. This meaningless positivity became the perfect soundtrack to the rise of New Labour, more on which in later parts. Pulp did something far more intriguing with these forms, though, using their least classicist possibilities, taking the expansive space, non-verse/chorus song structures, and the layers of artificial textures, and applying them to a rickety glam-disco band.

The city is a woman, bigger than any other

With the major exception of 'Common People', you can't necessarily hear this in their singles, which are perfectly structured, melodramatic three minute capsules, quintessential 7" records - 'O.U', 'Razzmatazz', 'Lipgloss', 'Babies', all of them charged yet controlled pop songs. But you can hear it in the albums and in the B-Sides, and you can hear it especially on what vies with 'Common People' and 'This is Hardcore' to be their masterpiece - 'Sheffield: Sex City', b-side to the 1992 release of 'Babies'. When I was 16, I and my girlfriend were completely obsessed with this song, and we walked round Shirley in Southampton as if it were the teeming, simmering, carnal city described, peering up into the windows of its tower blocks, past the twitching curtains of the semis, imagining the couplings and perversions inside. It also soundtracked something fairly momentous between us. It's a record so improbable that even to describe it sounds fantastical. Jarvis intones a series of Sheffield place names, with luridly sensual relish - from 'Intake' onwards. The next voice you hear is Candida Doyle, deadpan and Yorkshire, reading - of all things - from one of the sexual fantasies in a Nancy Friday book. Here, as in 'My Legendary Girlfriend' (to which it is, according to the sleevenotes, 'the morning after') the city itself is the focus for all the libdinal energies. 'We were living in a big block of flats...within minutes the whole building was fucking. I mean, have you ever heard other people fucking, and really enjoying it? Not like in the movies, but when it's real...'

The most important sounds in it (aside from Jarvis' own increasingly astonishing groans, howls, gasps and ecstatic squeals) are hers, too - the banks of synths, either taken from the same jumble sale ransacked at the same time by Stereolab, or more recent sounding noises - regardless, it's these arpeggiated synths, repetitious house vamps and Russell Senior's queasily treated violin, which seem to simulate the vertiginous feeling of nervousness, anticipation and mania which underpin the ridiculous, magnificent lyric. As the metronomic kick drum pounds, and deep, relentless bass throbs, the whole city is 'getting stiff in the building heat', and Jarvis walks through its entire extent trying to find his lover. So overwhelmed is he by the sheer sexuality of Sheffield that he finds himself 'rubbing up against lamp-posts, trying to get rid of it'. The sheer detail of the places made sexual - the semis, the gardens, 'years' in the housing benefit waiting room, 'grunts from a T-reg Chevette - you bet...you bet...' and in a particularly memorable moment a 'crack in the pavement', it all builds and builds and builds until in a final explosive moment they 'make it', and they survey the wreckage left over - 'everyone on Park Hill came in unison at 4.13AM, and the whole block fell down.'

This was probably our favourite line in the song, and we always imagined it taking place in the vast slab block Shirley Towers, which loomed over this particular courtship. I was absolutely ecstatic a few years later when, as an English & History MA student developing a part-time interest in architecture, I found out just how famous and important Park Hill was, and I saw photographs of this enormous, snaking collective housing block, with its wide streets in the sky, its gradations of colours, its form rising to different storeys depending on its place on the hill. It was absolutely perfect, a sort of visual emblem of the familiar 1960s-built city turned into a utopian, libidinal megastructure, and I can to a large extent blame my interest in brutalist architecture and the city to this specific song and our reaction to it as oversexed teenagers.

Shirley is a pretty typical but nonetheless odd place, in that Victorian terraces and 1930s semis are right next to vast 1960s council estates. Because of this it was a deeply class-conscious place. As an illustration, around this time she moved with her parents to the other side of St James Road, to a semi - which counted as going up in the world, given that the street here became the more prestigious 'Upper Shirley', although the difference was a matter of yards. I lived in a short cluster of terraces at the bottom of a street of semis, and was equally keen to maintain that I wasn't in the Upper part. So the other major urbanist song on Intro was, if not as world-shattering an experience as 'Sheffield: Sex City', something which seemed to describe our environment perfectly: 'Styloroc (Nites of Suburbia)'. The detritus of the 70s was everywhere, in the many, many local charity shops and in the furnishings of our houses, and here it was described as something richly perverse - black hair, sprouting beneath bri-nylon underwear. The song actually dates from the 'Little Girl' era, but appears here as a cranky yet sweeping Stylophone epic. It's all much more mordant than the ecstatic 'Sex City', pitching itself as a vicarious tour through a 'strange land', and it's this sort of thing that leads to the accusations of voyeurism, seediness and so forth. We didn't take it as such. It was far more a way of making the city and suburbia interesting, of making our (built) environment and the people in it more than a random collection of buildings and people tediously grafting - we knew they were absolutely full of intrigue behind the fences, at the end of the plazas and above the hedges, had to believe it in order not to give way to the consumerist tedium which was then remaking our city. We were fascinated by the 'thousand fake orgasms every night, behind thick draylon curtains', and listened out for them.

Regardless of whatever we took from these songs and imposed on a Southern city, there's an undeniably a certain - if not nostalgia as such, then something nearer to the now-familiar plaint of 'nostalgia for the future', in which Pulp were paradoxically ahead of the game by a decade or so - in these city songs. In a 'Guide to Sheffield' that Pulp did for NME in the early 90s (reproduced on the invaluable Acrylic Afternoons site) there's mentions both of its role as centre of the 'Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire', when the red flag famously flew above the town hall (which comes out in a particularly quotidian way in the songs: ' I remember when the buses were only 10p to go anywhere. That's why buses are mentioned quite a lot in our songs. Anyway, it all stopped in the mid-'80s. There are about six different bus companies now, like Eager Beaver, Yorkshire Terrier... it's, ridiculous - if the driver sees the stop they're supposed to be going to hasn't got any people at it, they change the number and go to one that has. People came from Japan to see our bus service - it was the end of the Western World.") and, more particularly, the city's failure to become the modernist metropolis that Park Hill, the Miesian Sheffield University, Park Hill's more disputed successors Hyde Park and Kelvin, and the noted Castle Square 'hole in the road', and the 'peace garden!' squealed of in 'Sex City', all promised. One interview makes it especially clear: '"Sheffield's full of half-arsed visions of cities of the future that turn into a pile of rubbish," Russell Senior reflects, standing on the biggest traffic roundabout in Europe. "We grew up reading the local paper and seeing 'Sheffield, city of the future,' with a map of how it's going to be and pictures of everyone walking around in spacesuits, smiling. But we're the only ones who took it seriously..." "When I was younger I definitely thought I'd live in space," says Jarvis Cocker ruefully. "But when you realise you're not going to, it colours your life; you can't think, 'It's alright if I'm signing on because I'll be on Mars soon', you have to try and get it down here."

No-one ever really got inside Susan

It's this that lies behind all the obvious retro signifiers - the Farfisas, Stylophones and Moogs, the jumble sale clothes, the tower blocks, space hoppers and luridly bright artificial fabrics that pervade the videos - a sense of being cheated out of the future, responding by fetishising the last time that a viable future appeared to exist. Yet the songs delve deeply into 1970s nostalgia, not least as a way of talking about the stripped-pine compromises and bland conformities of the 1990s. You can hear this especially vividly in 'Inside Susan - a story in three parts', which concludes the Gift singles and B-sides collected on Intro. This tale of a 'Rotherham puberty' followed by 'wild teen years in Sheffield' and eventual middle-class stability in Camberwell, is another example of Jarvis' obsessive/sympathetic studies of women, although here with a detail and wit that shouldn't obscure how it eventually ends up, as they all do, to be about whether or not she'll sleep with the narrator. The first, 'Stacks' is Pulp at their most straightforwardly retro, albeit with the 70s parts all assembled in the wrong order. It's cheap, fizzing, and absolutely riven with nostalgia, all sports halls, gropings on the bus and 'sky blue trainer bras'. It's an enormously enjoyable bit of tat, but rather pales in comparison with 'Inside Susan', the centrepiece of the story.

The only obvious precedent for songs like this, with their detail and sympathy for their mundane protagonists elevating them into something almost mythical, is Scott Walker circa 'Plastic Palace People', but even he was never as sharp or poignant as this. Dispensing with actual singing of any sort, bar a refrain of muffled yelps and cries, this is all monologue, over a dense, bright, vividly exciting motorik pulse which intensifies at key moments in the plotless narrative. It's a bus travelogue, and develops according to where the bus is at any given point, sparking off Susan's alternately bored or intrigued thoughts, with the most mundane details easily transformed into something extraordinary -

The bus is waiting on the High Street when it suddenly begins to rain torrentially, and it sounds like someone has emptied about a million packets of dried peas onto the roof of the bus. "What if it just keeps raining?", she thinks to herself. "And it was just like being in an aquarium except it was all shoppers and office workers that were floating past the windows instead of fish."

As the bus drives on, she thinks of a party where she was hit on by 'some German exchange students who were very immature', and finally wonders: "maybe this bus won't stop", she thinks, "and I'll stay on it until I'm old enough to go into pubs on my own, and it'll drive me to a town where people with black hair are treated specially, and I can make lots of money from charging fat old men five pounds a time to look up my skirt, and they'll be queuing up to take me out to dinner'. As in Daniel Clowes' Ghost World - which is often evoked by Pulp's songs of this period, an awkward, urbane man's idea of a melancholic teenage girlhood marked by attempts to romanticise the mundane - Susan could easily be a feminised version of the author himself. Regardless, it ends with a hint of bitterness at the reactions of others towards Susan - 'they put her in a corner and let her heat up the room, warming their hands and backsides in front of her, and then slagging her off around town.'

This bitterness continues in '59 Lyndhurst Grove'. She's managed to get out of Yorkshire, is enjoying a comfortable but loveless existence with an architect in south London. The scornful lyric - delivered in a heartbroken but sly falsetto - is the first essay in what will become a major theme, the sexual politics of domestic interiors. 'There's a picture by his first wife on the wall. Stripped floorboards in the kitchen and the hall...they were dancing with children round their necks, talking business, books and records, art and sex. All things being considered, you'd call it a success, you wore your black dress.' The sound is very close to Stereolab, a droning Moog Muzak that evokes both the Romantic Moog albums of an earlier period of domestic conformity, and sounds like a sad echo of the synthetic excitement of 'Inside Susan'. Here, Susan snatches whatever fun she can in this stifling yet successful environment ('oh he's an architect, and such a lovely guy...') by having an affair with someone presumably rather more exciting, a role that Jarvis will assume many times in the next few years, Regardless, Jarvis himself claimed in the sleevenotes that the whole thing was motivated by jealousy anyway - 'I played these songs to Susan the other day - she just laughed and said I was being spiteful because she wouldn't sleep with me when we first met. She also said to tell you that she's perfectly happy where she is at the moment, thank you very much.'

Adultery & Interiors

His 'n' Hers is perhaps the only pop record which largely purports to be about domestic interiors. Or at least, uses them as a metaphor for sex, class and the usual things which are latent or blindingly obvious. It exists in a similar landscape to the Martin Parr photographs for the BBC Signs of the Times book/documentary, of matching towel sets, ornamented light switches, of carefully chosen signifiers of individuality which end up as signifiers of conservatism and conformism, of status and success. This is all filtered through a luridly 70s-damaged fixation on the erotic properties of the artificial fabrics of an earlier era. What we have here is a suburban record, where Intro was mostly vividly urban, and one marked by all the boredom and frustration that entails. The obligatory sleevenote communique links together the smugness of coupledom, the horror of interiors and the awesome tedium of the shopping malls that replaced the futurist city keenly and distortedly remembered on the earlier singles. The ballads on here - 'Happy Endings', or 'Someone like the Moon' - sound like they're coming out of some kind of supermarket tannoy, with the four-note synth chimes in the latter seeming to precede an announcement, 'could Mr Cocker come to the checkout please...', with the cavernous, reverb-drenched production implying the vast ennui-filled space of an out-of-town Asda.

It's a beautifully produced record, precisely for how far from 'live' it sounds. With a collection of antique synths (eight of them, from Korg to EMS, according to the credits) wafting around a huge, airy space. Ed Buller's piling on of effects intersects with the keyboards to create some breathtaking moments - the first few seconds of 'Do you remember the first time?', where the whines and chirps of the antique machines flutter with all the quivering nervousness of a couple of teenagers tentatively asking each other the pointed question. Odd moments and riffs abound, such as the echoed children singing at the start of 'Acrylic Afternoons'. Which is one of the strangest tracks on a deeply strange record - another slab of sexdisco, although here punctuated with high-pitched squeaks which take this approach even further from its eventual roots in, say, Isaac Hayes. All this effeminacy, Jarvis as Donna Summer orgasmatron, is dedicated to a scenario where he is the bit of rough, the bit on the side of, a suburban housewife. This isn't necessarily as part of some bit of 'Mr Jones'-bashing though, but seemingly based on a libidinal cross between the objects - the acrylics, the 'pink quilted eiderdown', the settee with the TV humming in the background, and the table set for tea for when the children come home - and the act. The atmosphere is feverish, delirious. It's weird, to say the least, to see (in the clip above) a crowd clapping along to this particularly furtive little tale, a tea-fuelled bacchanalia where the stifling, overfurnished suburban living room becomes a claustrophobically overheated space of sexual obsession.

'She's a Lady', 'Lipgloss' and 'Pink Glove' continue in this general vein, the making-sexy of all manner of quotidian tat, with the protagonist alternately attracted and repelled by the paraphernalia of suburban sexuality, almost always from an outsider's perspective, either looking in on the relationships of others or as an invasive interlocutor into the exurbs and cul-de-sacs. 'She's a Lady' is especially torrid, enlivened by the frustration and resentment of 'Countdown' - while not obsessing over the lady of the title, the protagonist is staying in bed all day, moaning about 'all this crap that holds me down'. What ends up happening is that this world, with all its ambiguities and dubiousness ('I don't know why you pretend that it causes you pain', etc etc) becomes something deeply exciting, the model of adolescent fantasies. Certainly the world of 'Lipgloss', for all its grim cuckolding and inertia, seemed so to me, although maybe less so a few years later when all that I lived on actually was the proverbial lipgloss and cigarettes.

This doesn't make it any less brutal, mind you, and these songs are marked both by a fierce erotic fascination, with women's clothes, make-up, and obviously with sex itself (all combined in 'She's a Lady's fantastic line 'wore her body back to front') and some ferocious put-downs, whether they're put into the mouths of particular characters or not: 'Lipgloss' pivots on a woman too scared to leave the house in case other women notice 'that your stomach looks bigger and your hair is a mess, and your eyes are just holes in your face'. Here, women manipulate men and vice versa, as in 'Pink Glove's tragicomic fetishism, where the lover of rayon and acrylic sneers 'it's hard to believe that you go for that stuff - baby doll nighties, synthetic fluff...' The brilliant b-side 'Street Lites' meanwhile, one of the most breathlessly sexy things they recorded, has more cuckolding - 'it wouldn't be the same, if we didn't know it was wrong', this time accompanied by a shimmering, neon-lit vision of London seen from the back of a taxi couriering illicit liasons, as opposed to the album's suburban Sheffield.

The Sisters EP is maybe this version of the group, the Spectorian stylophonic glam-pop group of Separations, Intro and His & Hers as opposed to the mostly more conventional Chris Thomas-produced thing which followed, at their absolute peak, three songs ('Seconds', 'Your Sister's Clothes', 'His 'n' Hers') which pass in a blur of flickering keyboards, yearning choruses and almost tossed-off one-liners (these are probably the songs he would later refer to as 'just another song about single mothers and sex'). It's 'His 'n' Hers', the unused title track for the album, that is most stunning. 'One man's fear of domestic interiors set to music', the clip above doesn't quite do it justice, missing the stomach-churning, pre-orgasmic synth that drones through the chorus. Here, we are again in suburban Sheffield, and with a scenario of class conflict expressed through sex and domestic interiors: 'I wanna wipe you down, and lick the smile off your face...Though we know that it's wrong: towel sets, matching combs...oh it looks so good but does it turn you on?' The track is deeply uncomfortable, queasy, with moans and wails of excitement and disgust punctuating, rising into the guiltily ecstatic chorus, where DIY, bourgeois IKEA smugness is turned into sexual metaphor - 'pull the units down!' 'shove it in sideways!' and so forth. It all spills over into absurd comedy, when the unnerved narrator, led by his clearly assured bourgeois lover, is asked what he's so afraid of, leading to a litany of '90s middle-class tat: Belgian chocolates, James Dean posters, endowment plans, figurines, 26" screens'...and obviously her straightforward response is to put his hand somewhere intimate - and we leave the scene with his defeat.

Mister, we just want your car

This is developed from an earlier song called 'Frightened', included on the reissue of His 'n' Hers, some of which also ends up in 'The Fear' a few years later. The fear of the middle classes and their design choices is not the only one here. It would be incomplete to concentrate just on the libidinous and scathing portrayals of middle class life in these songs, as there are others which talk about lumpen proletarian habits and mores with much the same ambiguity and disgust. 'Deep Fried in Kelvin', the B-side to 'Lipgloss, is like a ten-minute reversal of 'Sheffield: Sex City'. Like the latter, it centres on one of the huge collective housing blocks planned by Jack Lynn & Ivor Smith for Sheffield City Council. Park Hill got Grade II listed and is being prepared for an Urban Splash-led regeneration/gentrification, but the apparently identical Kelvin Flats - mentioned in the Human League's sleevenotes for the sublime 'Dancevision' - were demolished in the 1990s. There's little interest in the utopian possibilities of brutalist megastructures in 'Deep Fried', with its tale of a man destroying his flat by trying to turn it into a garden, and talk of walking 'on promenade with concrete walkways, where pigeons go to die'. It's a vision of a consumerist, barely literate proletariat destroyed by Thatcherism, where children are 'conceived in the toilets of Meadowhall'. It has equal disdain both for the 'fizzy orange and chips' youth of this 'ghetto' and for those who might improve it (memorably, 'we don't need your sad attempts at social conscience based on taxi rides home at night from exhibition openings. We just want your car radio and bass reflex speakers. Now'), and eventually maybe for the narrator himself and his social concern.

'Joyriders' excises the angst over exactly who is speaking, as the bored teenagers are now in the first person. It's difficult to say, though, whether it's all satire or a genuine expression of class disdain (as if it would matter) - 'we can't help it, we're so thick we can't think - can't think of anything, but shit, sleep and drink'. The bleakest of all of these songs of working class boredom and casual violence/idiocy is 'Mile End'. Here it's the old East End, repository for proleface sentimentality, which is, when surveyed from the top of a tower block as the 'pearly king of the isle of Dogs', 'just like heaven, if it didn't look like hell'. While I'm trying to avoid biographism here as much as possible (except for my own, hah), they're all songs that are more or less autobiographical, tales of dole life when you could still get a council flat without having to lose an arm or a leg or have a family in double figures. Sometimes these spaces are rather romantic; the video to 'Babies', for instance, takes place in Camberwell's Sceaux Gardens Estate, where Jarvis and Steve Mackey were living at the time, somewhere with much architectural rep: Ian Nairn writes of it that 'the magical transformation has happened, an estate transformed into a place'. The block called 'Voltaire' gets a particularly wry shot in the video, a place perfect for the song's rum, giddy nostalgia.

The council flat dystopias are, for all their justified bitterness, the correlate of the failed utopia that is re-imagined in 'My Legendary Girlfriend' and 'Sheffield: Sex City', indicators of what has happened to the working class after (then only 15 years of) Thatcherism. While Oasis took this and played up to it, constantly stressing just how bovine they were with their beery anthems to nothing in particular, Pulp were in the context of britpop, the last gasp of a literate, articulate, arty working class pop, at least in terms of bands and self-publicising acts rather than bedroom producers and MCs. Yet the unstoppable urge to get out, while very different to the latter's dreams of Champagne Supernovas and guitar-shaped swimming pools, leads to its own uncomfortable contradictions and outbreaks of sheer, resentful rage. As well it should.

(...which will bring us onto the next two albums, after a much longer break than the one between the first two)

Park Hill images taken from here, and PulpWiki was very helpful.

Pulp: Urbanism, Sexuality, Class (part one)

2009-01-27T10:49:00.000-08:00

Oh I was 17, when I heard the countdown start

I've been promising a post on Pulp for as long as I've been blogging (which will be four years, soon enough) and the self-imposed pressure of this means that what follows shouldn't be considered as anything other than tentative steps towards some eventual completed opus on the subject (that way, I'll actually be able to write the damn thing) - so, this is unfinished, unformed stuff, which at some point in the future will be pulled together. At least, this post at Aloof from Inspiration and the replies give it some sort of currency. I wanted to write about Pulp and wanted to put it off endlessly for the same reason - I feel far too close to this stuff, to a somewhat uncomfortable and unintentionally amusing extent. Some of the reasons for this I might end up confessing here (oh, losing my virginity at 16 to Intro, that sort of thing) others are none of your sodding business.

It needs to be said, and people are reluctant to say it - Pulp were not only by some measure the finest British group of the 1990s, but they compete with their more obvious forbears. Roxy Music, even at their most chillingly Helmut Newton-esque ('In Every Dream Home' etc) never created as terrifying a vision of success and opulence achieved curdling into anomie and psychosis as 'This is Hardcore'; Morrissey never managed anything as perfectly vengeful as 'Common People', and the world created on their records from 1990-1994 is easily as obsessive, lyrically dense and inspired as The Fall at their peak. There's a certain sense in which The Smiths, or maybe My Bloody Valentine, were allowed to be some sort of last gasp of British pop (not Britpop, obviously, but as a serious, non-retro phenomenon), a critical consensus which wholly ignores the fact that in 1995 a group managed to send a motorik epic about class warfare to number 2. Some of the reasons for this critical timidity are quite understandable - their collaboration with the horrible spectacle of Britpop, the notion that Pulp were dominated by their 'retro' signifiers (although frankly, I can't see what makes their 1970s any less acceptable than Roxy's 1930s - both groups made music that could only have been made at that precise moment), and most of all the ambiguous victory of Jarvis Cocker, pop celebrity. Nonetheless, this is a group that need to be taken seriously, very seriously indeed. So what I'll be doing here, over several posts, is attempting to take them as seriously as possible. The way to do this is, of course, via the three things which run through all their best work - class, sex and psychogeography.

A hole in your heart, and one between your legs

Let's start at the beginning, which in Pulp's case is a very murky thing. They start out in 1981 as a quintessential minor post-punk group, a 'John Peel band', and their first Peel session shows them trying out various modes (Aztec Camera, Pigbag, Joy Division) to quite enjoyable but hardly world-shaking effect. Then there's the first album in 1983, It, which in sound and subject matter is basically Leonard Cohen without the sex. This was never a good idea, although it's not without a lush, gawky, Gregory's Girl charm, songs about a love which has clearly never been actually experienced, with the extended metaphor of 'My Lighthouse' being the most charming and ridiculous moment. However, as detailed in their Do you remember the first time? documentary, Jarvis loses his virginity around this point, and they become an immeasurably more interesting group very quickly.

The 1985 single 'Little Girl (with Blue Eyes)' is some sort of mid-60s Eurovision entry gone awry, with the pederastic title referring to a young woman charmed into marriage and childbirth, cheated into domesticity - 'so just forget about the paintings, cause you've got to get the washing done'. What makes it especially interesting is the luridness of the delivery, and with respect to the girl with 'a hole in your heart, and one between your legs...you've never had to wonder which one he's going to fill' you wonder, not for the first time, whether the singer is an observer of the woman's plight, or a participant. The other songs from the time show a grim view of sex as either torture (the frantic punk-funk of 'Mark of the Devil', with its plaint 'your past is just a bedroom full of implements of cruelty'), or as an element in bleak little observational dramas, with remarkable attention to detail: '97 Lovers', featuring a woman who joylessly sleeps with a builder beneath a poster of Roger Moore.

I'll keep you and I'll throw myself away

This bleakness becomes particularly unpalatable on Freaks, surely one of the most lugubrious records ever made. Sex here is universally horrible. Interminable, claustrophobic relationships ('The Never-Ending Story'), masturbation and megalomania ('Master of the Universe'), anorexia, the act itself as something horrifying. 'They Suffocate at Night' is surely the peak/nadir of this, and from the opening lines - 'his body loved her/his mind was set on other things' - there's something of a dualism problem here. It's also quite a bad record, mannered, dirge-like, appallingly produced. Songs which threaten to make some sort of Walker-esque grandeur or menace out of it all stumble on strained crooning and some decidedly icky lyrics. 'I Want You' (a song performed as late as 2002) is as good as it gets here, drawing on some of the subtlety and detail of 'Little Girl', and what's most notable is that it's desire itself that is most worrying. The awkward croon sings of something which is irresistible but which nonetheless should be resisted, the asceticism summed up surely in the declaration 'you've got to stamp upon its head!' Without ever being a particularly good record, Freaks is at least worthy of a chapter in The Sex Revolts all of its own, documenting very pungently and honestly a certain fear of coupling which runs through decades of pop.

Oh, Pitsmoor Woman!

It's incredible that two years later in 1989, almost the same group recorded the Separations LP (which wasn't released until 1992, however). The first single from the album, 'My Legendary Girlfriend' is a pounding disco opus clearly informed by acid house. Candida Doyle's array of old synthesisers dominate here for the first time, as they will all the group's finest moments. Italo-house pianos, shimmering, swelling synth-strings, strange whines, burbles and hums at the track's threshold, all conveying the sheer excitement of sex and, without wanting to evoke any other connotations of the phrase, the city. Out of Sheffield and living in London, the former hometown becomes the subject matter - and this is a sexualised city, where the post-industrial landscape is suffused with carnality in its every twist, turn, alleyway and precinct. The song begins with the protagonist in bed, listening to the titular girlfriend's breathing, then they wake up and take an oneiric walk through Sheffield. The temptation just to quote huge chunks of lyric here is unavoidable:

So I woke her...and we went walking through the sleeping town... down deserted streets... Frozen gardens grey in the moonlight...fences...down to the canal... Creeping slowly past cooling towers... Deserted factories...looking for an adventure... I wandered the streets calling your name... Jumping walls...hoping to see a light in the window... Let me in...let me come in...let me in tonight ... Oh I see you shivering in the garden...silver goose-flesh in the moonlight...

The strained croon is replaced by something which really, really shouldn't work - the breathy, spoken monologue, taken from Isaac Hayes or Barry White. Now that it's fairly familiar, we should remember just how unprecedented it actually was for a skinny, pale, indie rock singer to assume such a role completely without irony, without nudging or winking, and not only that but to pull it off, and to add a vocabulary of pants, yelps and squeals to the repertoire, which build and build to orgasmic proportions. The effect of house and techno on the group is not to attempt (in that clumsy, Mancunian baggy style ushered in by the Stone Roses) some sort of fusion based on lumpy funk-rock, but to take an only ostensibly backwards step to the disco from which house emerged. Except here Jarvis himself takes on the Donna Summer role, he becomes himself the sex object, only a couple of years after 'They Suffocate at Night'. And what seems to drive it is the city itself, only before mentioned in Freaks' horribly believable tale of a beating, 'Being Followed Home'. If Sheffield itself can be sexy, then so can he.

Separations is divided into two halves, one of which continues, vastly more successfully, the tortured balladry of Freaks, and the other of which descends into the urbanist sexdisco of 'My Legendary Girlfriend'. The first half is still full of tales of broken relationships and anguished couples, only here with a passion (and compassion) which is completely absent from the earlier record. 'She's Dead' is its peak, where a chorus of cheap synthesisers - modifying Noel Coward's quip about the 'potency of cheap music' into the sheer sadness of cheap instruments - creates a charity shop requiem, rendering all but unbearable this tale of death in a northern town, with the overtones of kitsch not toyed with, as so many lesser lights would, but embraced - here, Jarvis is heaven's own mobile disco crooner. The title track is almost as good, with a fantastic, vertiginous moment where a huge, absurd swell of Slavic violins suddenly gives way to Chicory Tip soundtracking early Antonioni, aided by the new vocabulary of heavy breathing and yelps. The second side includes one reasonably straight and not entirely successful Sheffield techno effort, 'This House is Condemned' - and more interestingly, two other disco epics attempting to follow the single. 'Death II' restores the sense of tragedy to the genre which the ironists had removed - this is disco in the same way as the bleak, dead-end world of the original Saturday Night Fever: 'watch my spirit melt away, down at the D-I-S-C-O'. In fact, the song seems to catalogue some sort of attempt to break out of the world of Freaks and the record's first side, where he tries to 'fill his head with other women', with a world of glamour, music and sex, but is constantly pulled back by poverty, and, perhaps uncomfortably, by a particular woman, reminded of it at the end of the night, with the ignominious return at 2am.

'Countdown' - the superior single version of which is above - is where for the first time you hear one major theme of the next few years. That is, disco as vehicle for proletarian (over)ambition, for the imperative to escape - and not just at the end of the week, but as a means of getting out, out of the provinces, out of poverty. This is melodrama as Fassbinder made it, courting ridiculousness, cruel, lurid and cheap, where the protagonist's overwhelming ego and jealousy leave only the option of self-advancement. Yet while Saturday Night Fever documents the more familiar working class 'Friday on my Mind' mentality of work/weekend, 'Countdown' is the disco of the dole fantasist - 'it could be tonight, if I ever leave this room'. That it actually did occur is worth a book or several in itself. This is the sound of someone accentuating his most absurd features in order to make himself into a superstar, in the best Warholian manner. The dancing and hand movements are to accentuate just how tall and thin he is, the effeminate yelps and breathiness court accusations of seediness (and 'pop perv' is as far as most analyses of sexuality in these records tends to go). This is 'vengeful self-creation' of a similar, but far more ruthlessly effective manner to that of Morrissey, who in the end opted for staying in his room. Pulp were clearly more interested in conquest, with all the dubiousness that entails.

Next up, in a week or so: Intro, His & Hers and the Sisters EP...

Living Façades

2009-01-13T07:02:00.000-08:00

green urbanism and the politics of urban offsetting

Amidst the horror over the living arrangements of Josef Fritzl, one small detail emerged that, while seemingly confirming the thesis of the banality of evil, was not given much attention. The plan of his notorious basement has been anatomised in the press all over the world, in a rare foray into the rarefied world of interior design – we all know about this windowless space, the ceilings where the prisoners could not stand up, the placing of the televisions, the pictures on the wall. The photographs of the exterior, meanwhile, reveal the seeming conscientiousness of Fritzl's obsessive DIY. At the top of the house was a 'Green Roof'. Although it is obviously crass to extrapolate from the life and inclinations of this inhuman character to the wider issues of 'green' urbanism, it does suggestively make a certain connection. On the surface we have a sign of civic-mindedness and environmentalism, and on the inside – in the darkened space which apparently no-one but the jailer and the prisoners knew about – we have an unimaginable barbarism.

Land Reclamation

'A garden must have didactic qualities'

Roberto Burle Marx^¹

The history of the green roof, or the more total version, the 'living façade' (where the frontage of a building is entirely overtaken with vegetation) goes back to Romanticism, and the simultaneous shock and wonder felt by the Enlightenment consciousness at the ruins of the Roman Empire. Buildings as large, as technologically advanced (if not more) than our own, were reclaimed by nature, overrun by the very thing over which mankind thought it had achieved a victory. Accordingly, this led to the phenomenon of new buildings being designed as if they had always, already been overtaken by undergrowth, fronds, weeds cracking cement and stone. John Soane, who was very influenced by Piranesi's images of Paestum and other Roman sites in a state of ruination, commissioned the draughtsman Joseph Gandy to render his new Bank of England – an institution for the nascent, advancing force of imperial capitalism – as a crumbling, overgrown relic. The images include one of the dome with bushes growing out of it, and another wherein woodland seems to have infested the trading floors.^²

The aesthetics of the intersection of vegetation and architecture were given a somewhat less morbid and decidedly more positivist spin after the First World War. The grim situation of post-war Vienna – starving, beset by hyper-inflation and grossly overcrowded housing – gave rise to a proposal by Adolf Loos for blocks of flats with a terraced design, so that each tenant could tend their own garden in an already dense scheme, in order to provide themselves with the food that a collapsing economy could not. This suggestion has many outgrowths, from the gardens in the sky of Moshe Safdie's Habitat to the design of many blocks of luxury housing, such as the Barrier Point development in East London, which borrows particularly unimaginatively from Loos. A less urgent version was featured in Le Corbusier's Immeuble Villas, where gardens on balconies were flung up into skyscraping structures. The common factor with Loos and Le Corbusier's green roofs was a clear demarcation between technology and nature. Neither had any interest in simulating the natural by clothing their buildings in creepers or wooden panels, and instead heightened the contrast between on the one hand their faith in technology, and on the other their relocation of nature from outside of the city into the buildings themselves.

Another strain, however, aimed at something rather more exotic. The landscape gardener Roberto Burle Marx was regularly hired by the Modernist architects of Brazil to provide a surprisingly untamed outgrowth of nature to embellish their buildings. Burle Marx talked about this process, in which his curved, abstract gardens would be either atop or surrounding some uncompromising concrete building, as a deliberate intervention against an overly rationalist, colonial conception of the city. He specifically claimed that 'the penetration of the caatinga, the Amazonian rainforests, the mountains of Minas Gerais, into the heart of the city, even onto the skyscrapers, would help modern man to become more human, to belong to his land, to be more than a simple machine for living'.^³

Meanwhile, contemporary descriptions of the effects of these skyscraper gardens had their own particularly colonial tint: contemporary descriptions of roof garden atop Oscar Niemeyer, Lucio Costa, Le Corbusier et al's Rio's 1936 Ministry of Education depicts it as an incursion of the jungle into the metropolis, perhaps giving off the threat that eventually, this 'penetration' would not be so benign. This is something that is posited as specifically Latin American: one couldn't imagine vegetation growing out of Mies van der Rohe's curtain walls.

At least, not until the ever-present possibility of technological annihilation set the imagination to work. In the dystopian imaginary the ever-less 'natural', ever more rectilinear and technologically advanced form of the city becomes subject to a destruction which then becomes a renaissance of nature. While this can become a deeply reactionary fantasy of rural revenge (or morph into Albert Speer's 'Theory of Ruin Value'), it can elsewhere provide a strange and eerily beautiful perspective on the city itself. J.G Ballard's The Drowned World is perhaps exemplary here. This apocalyptic, and clearly deeply prescient 1962 novel, is set after a disaster in which melting ice caps and climate change lead to the inundation of most of the world, with mankind emigrating to the polar regions en masse.

The fascination in Ballard's novel is not the apocalyptic destruction itself, but the aftermath: a climate returning to the Triassic, in which plants and creatures not seen for millions of years return to colonise the cities, in which the atavistic creeps up upon and decisively claims the world of technological rationality. This is explicitly set in terms of exotica, of an excursion into a brashly beautiful but savage and unforgiving territory. Indeed, Victor Gollancz told Ballard he had 'stolen it all from Conrad' – news to the author, who had never read him.^⁴ Yet there is also something curiously colonial about the tale, with its scientist-protagonist surveying the swamped cities from a luxury hotel. An intriguing work clearly deeply indebted to Ballard's story is the techno-pop composer John Foxx's fragmentary story 'The Quiet Man', in which the titular character walks round a completely deserted London, a landscape where ruination has infested every corner. Denuded of people, assaulted by nature, the city has a haunting beauty.

Another Green Roof

'Above him the sky was bright blue now, and the light was going golden across the top edges of the crumbling buildings. At the bottom of Oxford Street stood the tall Centrepoint tower, its remaining upper windows glinting, while most of the base was covered in vines. (mile-a-minute vine especially had grown out from many of the gardens, and living up to its name, had swamped quite a number of roads and buildings in the city).

He often strolled through Hyde Park then on to Victoria station where thousands of birds had nested in its cast iron structure. The ammoniac stink of their droppings was choking, and the platforms and remaining carriages were covered in a greyish foot-thick crust of excrement.

Each year the city became more verdant, and each time he walked through the streets he noticed new erosions as front walls or roofs fell, revealing sections of rooms with different patterns of peeling wallpaper and furniture, often tangled with plants that had grown from seedlings blown through shattered windows.'^⁵

John Foxx, 'The Quiet Man'

'The people need houses on the ground, not greenhouses in the sky'

Alleged response of a Liverpool politician to a proposal for a 'green' high-rise

The green landscapes that a certain kind of urban design is concocting upon the seemingly far from verdant settings of the 21^st century city would seem to have little to do with either the Ballardian or romantic terrors at losing the war with nature, or for that matter with Loos and Burle Marx's belief in the potential of a tamed nature to help mankind to be less 'machine-like' and to provide for itself. However, it is a curiously under-investigated phenomenon. The accepted view is put across in a feature in A10 – New European Architecture entitled 'Flourishing Façades'.^⁶

It starts with the words 'the term “explosive growth” has never been more appropriate than over the last fifteen years', immediately conflating the growths on the roofs with the brutal, tumultuous economic growth ushered in by neoliberalism, the very growth which commentators like George Monbiot argue has to end before climate change can be seriously tackled. The piece charts the development of apparently environmentally friendly urban design via the familiar green roof, or the encasing of a building seemingly underground underneath a cave-like capping of foliage; and the 'living façade', the programming into a building of its being overtaken by nature. It claims, citing Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, that the greening of architecture is not just an aesthetic question, but a moral one, something necessary. Some of these proposals seem eminently sensible – no doubt, there are few better ways of insulating a building than chucking a few layers of sod onto it. Nonetheless, looked at in detail, what we have here is a rather superficial phenomenon – something which we could call, with a nod to the similarly vacuous policy of atoning for pollution by engaging in a bit of philanthropy, 'urban offsetting'.

Two of the projects covered in the A10 feature even seem to have emerged fully formed from the mind of JG Ballard – two designs for multi-storey car parks (by Bystrup Architects in Copenhagen, and Theo Termond (Architecten aan de Maas) for Helmond in the Netherlands). Both of these are, on the most basic level, straightforwardly technological, late capitalist structures – concrete decks, connected by ramps. Naturally, to actually leave it at this, or even to rely on the building's own material for expression (as in, say, the Brutalist car parks of Paul Rudolph or Rodney Gordon) is by now extremely unfashionable. We have to minimise our impact, no multi-storey blocks of weathered concrete this time. So the buildings are fenced, with climbing plants placed adjacent, ready to do their work. This quintessentially Modernist structure then becomes an unobtrusive, semi-rural place, not announcing its function. However, one has to be a particularly credulous kind of environmentalist to be even remotely convinced by the 'necessity' of this measure. Vines or no vines, this is a multi-storey car park, designed to store then spit out the very carbon-belching vehicles that create the problem in the first place. To build a 'green car park' is an oxymoron. The rationale here seems to be two-fold. One, the frisson of exotica, the threat of nature's revenge, a peek into a post-apocalyptic future when climate change has done its work; and two, a remarkably superficial covering of environmentally unfriendly function with an apparently 'living' facade. Morbidity and mendacity, with a hint of self-righteousness.

This is a remarkably common phenomenon. The very institutions which, with their intolerance for anything other than the bottom line, are the major destroyers of the 'environment', and whose oil and capital economy, based on the transportation of materials over huge distances by truck and jet, is exacerbating the catastrophe, are of course highly keen to use the 'living façade' and associated methods as a way of making their work of destruction look warmer, more in tune with nature – to make it seem like they're doing their bit. The weblog Landscape and Urbanism recently profiled a few instances of 'green branding' in street furniture. A McDonald's billboard with 'Fresh Salads' written in actual greenery. An iPod advert with plants growing out of it. A moss-covered vending machine.^⁷ Elsewhere, there are instances like Sainsbury's in North Greenwich, London, where a minuscule 'nature reserve' and a couple of wind turbines attempt a minor 'offsetting' of that ridiculously unsustainable institution, the supermarket.

Versions of this can also be seen in the ubiquitous 'stunning developments', luxury flats and boxes for bankers which litter British cities. The days when buildings 'expressed' their structures are long gone. Every block is clad and dressed in pine, with little wooden accoutrements and, if especially privileged, a green roof encampment on the top. These are of course deeply exclusive, replacing the public spaces of parks, squares and gardens with privatised spaces, in which one needs authorisation to enjoy the lushness. Many of these buildings are placed in ex-industrial 'brownfield' sites, which frequently have their own, often extraordinary wildlife – the future site of London's 'Olympic Park' in London's Lea Valley is a prime example. The genuinely unique, extraordinary landscape created by the conflict between nature and industry is effaced in favour of a kind of garden international style, wherein the roofs of interminable luxury flats are decorated with the same creepers, around the same pools, the towers and blocks trimmed with the same stripped pine.

This is a remarkably transparent semiotic strategy, wherein by sticking natural materials onto a building's façade, the impression is given that it is somehow 'in tune' with nature rather than a hugely expensive, un-sustainable waste of energy and resources. It is by no means clear that renewable technology itself is so picturesque. Many of those whose houses desperately attempt to look au naturel have been implacably hostile to the genuinely important and useful technology represented by wind turbines: these pugnacious forms, sticking up out of the landscape are habitually blasted as 'eyesores' in Britain. Real 'green' technology will not necessarily be 'in keeping', will not announce itself as natural – because it isn't. Nature has no interest in our survival.

The Australian weblog Mapping Melbourne analysed an interesting example of this, the 'Council House 2' or CH2 Building, a municipal office block. They point out that the way this building has been received has been in terms of its apparent 'naturalism': 'as is the fashion with many green skyscraper projects, the Council and its cheerleaders do not promote the building in technological terms. Instead we find hippyish justifications and celebrations of the buildings being 'in tune with nature'. Who are they trying to kid? Are we expected to think that if nature were allowed to dominate the environment freely we would find neatly clipped hedges in window boxes and self-sustaining air conditioning systems? These projects are the ultimate example of man's domination of nature, the taming of it to meet our needs.'^⁸ The building's artificiality is denied, its metallic forms are encased in pine. Infantile as this is, the face of green urbanism has to 'look' green, and straightforwardly technological solutions to the problems of climate change are loath to actually appear as they are, as this would shake the cosy belief that the catastrophe is somehow the fault of technology itself, of humanity getting ideas above its station, as opposed to the irrational, destructive economic system that wields it.

As it is, green urbanism reveals its true nature as a class project – a means for the metropolitan middle classes to make themselves feel better, to morally absolve themselves for the disaster they have created. As in so many cases, the best place to see this is in China. Steven Holl's 'Linked Hybrid', a determinedly futurist structure of interconnected neo-brutalist walkways, has at the top of its blocks the obligatory planting, the heaps of sod and the insulation that apparently offsets the costs of the structure. While an economy that once gave pride of place to the bicycle embraces the private car and the barbarities of 19^th century industrialists are repeated en masse, and several huge industrial towns spring up at lightning speed, a 'zero-carbon' city is pioneered at Dongtan. In essence, whether surveying the strange forms infesting the ruins or watching from the top of a newly built gated complex, the end result will look much the same. The teeming city will be viewed, by some, through a roof garden's screen of lush vegetation. Beneath that will be the asphalt, the exhaust smoke, and the ugly, disavowed reality.

1Valerie Fraser, Building the New World – Studies in the Modern Architecture of Latin America, 1930-1960 (London, 2000), p179.

2These images can be found at http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/71/45

3Fraser, 180

4See J.G Ballard, Miracles of Life (London, 2008)

5The Story is available at Foxx's website: http://www.metamatic.com/zQuietmandocs/thequietman.html

6'Flourishing Façades', Kirsten Hannema, in A10 – New European Architecture, Jan/Feb 2008

7See http://landscapeandurbanism.blogspot.com/2008/06/green-branding-literally.html

8'The Stain of Atavism', at http://mappingmelbourne.blogspot.com/2007/12/ch2-stain-of-atavism_21.html

Icons in the Fire

2008-11-10T09:58:00.000-08:00

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:

'You can experience...a simulated journey into space at the National Space Science Centre in Leicester, find out about Geological evolution a the Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh, have fun and learn about science at '@Bristol' in Bristol, or get hands-on experience of the steel industry at the 'Making it! Discovery Centre' in Mansfield'.

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.

Work and Non-Work

2008-06-06T03:47:00.000-07:00

A Short History of the Refusal of Work as a Revolutionary Strategy

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilisation holds sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny.'

Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy (1883)

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.'

Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities (1963)

One of the greatest tragedies of socialism, a movement which has had its fair share, is the in the way that, for one reason or another, it has become inextricably associated with work. Hard, manly work, the kind of work that makes you virtuous, with the early death, asbestos poisoning or desultory retirement that might entail. This is the case pretty much everywhere, although is particularly grim and acute in Britain, where the very name of the (one-time) socialist party speaks of its commitment to toil, no matter how grim or pointless – Labour. Unsurprisingly, an enthusiasm for the ennobling qualities of toil, and a concomitant contempt for the intellect, for the non-utilitarian, and for any human activity which doesn't end in profit, is the only thing retained by New Labour. Only today, it's the neo-Taylorist 'total control' of call centre software and the servile indignities of the service industry that form the definition of a hard day's slog for the managerial class of a stagnant neoliberalism, as opposed to the old model of time spent actually producing stuff.

There are, of course, some good reasons for this fetishism of labour: a statement that society will be run in future by those who actually work to produce the objects and goods society runs upon, a statement that wealth is not created by the wealthy – and as most attempts at socialism made in the 20th century were made in parlous material circumstances, the millennium of non-work was always somewhat difficult to achieve. Nonetheless, it always rested on a huge misunderstanding of what the bourgeoisie actually is. By the time socialism existed as a serious and workable idea in the mid-19th century, the ruling class was no longer the profligate, aesthetically inclined, amoral, inbred and licentious aristocracy, but the middle class, whose own commitment to a (less physically exacting) ethic of hard work was strikingly similar to that of the incipient proletariat. Thus did socialism get suckered into playing the bourgeoisie's own game of glorifying an increasingly undignified and rote practice.

Before socialism became synonymous with work, workerism and the sentimentality that came with it, there was much debate about what exactly work would become in a socialist society. One variant of the Workerist position could be found in the writings of William Morris. Although his socialism was remarkably unsentimental, work was perhaps his blind spot. In Useful Work and Useless Toil, he unsurprisingly condemns the machinic trudge imposed upon the worker by the factory system, and shocks his Victorian audience by the very suggestion that some labour was entirely pointless: 'It is assumed by most people nowadays that all work is useful, and by most well-to-do people that all work is desirable...most of those who are well-to-do cheer on the happy worker with congratulations and praises, if he is only 'industrious' enough and deprives himself of all pleasure and holidays in the sacred cause of labour.' Morris' contribution was – importantly – to insist that most work was mind-numbing, body-distorting and in no way noble. And with some prescience, he recognises that what we have here is a system in which work will be created regardless of any actual material need, a very recent dilemma.

'If we were to wake up some morning now, under our present system, and find it 'easy to live', that system would force us to set to work at once and make it hard for us to live: we should call that 'developing our resources' or some such fine name.'

William Morris, Useful Work and Useless Toil (1885)

This, in a nutshell, is the ideology of work under the hypertechnologised capital that would exist 120 years after these words were written. Morris recognises that every 'labour saving device', every innovation which could seemingly limit toil, is used by capital to expand the domain of toil. However, at the heart of Morris' socialism is the conception of a future in which work could be a 'pleasure', and it is incumbent upon the socialist to imagine ways of making work 'attractive'. Some of these measures include making sure that all physically unpleasant work is extremely short, and so forth. But, as can be seen in News from Nowhere – for all its wit, one of the drearier socialist utopias - Morris wants a revival of forms of work made obsolete by the machine: craftsmanship, ornament. Work as play. Work as part of a guild socialism in which, after the production of essentials, 'manly' labourers set to the production of beauty. The idea of a new kind of man being produced by technology would have horrified Morris, and his utopia is not too far from the Ludd island of Samuel Butler's Erewhon, after man's pre-emptive strike against the machine: steel bridges replaced with stone, women content, largely, with child-bearing and rearing.

At least on the rare occasions when the elimination of work has been considered, it has been Morris' version that has been accepted: a socialism of stick-whittling, stonemasons and wallpaper designers. Much less attention has been given to a near-immediate riposte to Morris' workerism, by Oscar Wilde in the criminally under-read The Soul of Man under Socialism. Although Wilde makes no particular bones about supporting class struggle, it is not the heroic toiling classes that he exults. Wilde's essay is the first in defence of the undeserving poor, making rational, calm and unhysterical arguments for avoiding work, for disdaining charity and philanthropy, for theft, for agitation, revolt, anger and resentment. In particular, Wilde fears a certain bourgeois arts-and-crafts exultation of hairy labour linking up with the workerism of the labour movement into something which sounds remarkably like a prophecy of Stalinism – the prospect of someone knocking on the door every morning to compel citizens to fulfil their quotas of manual labour.

'I cannot help saying that a good deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour'

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891)

Wilde wants to let the machines do it. While for Morris the industrial revolution is a worry, something which stands in the way of the conversion of useless toil into useful work, for Wilde (as for Marx) it is the very condition of socialism itself. The very fact that machines had achieved such incredible, inhuman feats under a repressive system ('there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man developed a machine to do his work he began to starve') meant that under socialism, they could be developed against labour itself. 'Man is made for something better than distributing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.' This is not some contrarian fantasy. Machines, pace a century of reactionary dystopias, will be our new race of slaves, and be especially developed to take on the most grim and laborious tasks: 'machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing'. The differences in Wilde's approach and Morris' are essentially cosmetic: both of them essentially want to abolish the litany of tasks listed above, and have no truck with hand-wringing Protestant justifications of them. Neither would regard any society as truly civilised that let them continue. However the difference in emphasis is very important indeed. Morris wants the human being of socialism to resemble the old one, only pacified, less brutal and exploitative, happier and more creative. Wilde, meanwhile, considers that such a loosening of the bounds of work and exploitation would fundamentally create a new kind of human being altogether. While Morris imagines everyone becoming village craftsmen, Wilde imagines them all becoming leisured polymaths.

There is a counter-tradition within Marxism of the refusal of work, something which begins with Paul Lafargue's tract The Right to be Lazy, a pamphlet which catalogues, horrified, the proletariat's (understandable) self-delusion that its work is in any way useful or dignified – and makes this critique from within the workers' movement, rather than as a sympathetic observer. Although Wilde is, foolishly, not taken as seriously as a socialist thinker, Lafargue's essay makes more or less the same points as The Soul of Man, only with one particular difference: he is one of the first theorists of the joys of sloth, of the pleasure of not doing, of drinking, eating, lazing, reclining, not producing. While the French revolution's Hellenism made it impervious to the cult of toil, their successors are caught in a trap: 'they proclaim as a revolutionary principle the Right to Work. Shame to the French proletariat! Only slaves would have been capable of such baseness. A Greek of the heroic times would have required twenty years of capitalist civilization before he could have conceived such vileness.' Wilde and Lafargue both remind us that, for the Ancient Greeks, the civilised man is the man who does not work. A society able to create truly great works of art, to devote itself to aesthetics, philosophy, creation of new selves and new objects, has to give its tasks to someone else, preferably some subordinate group. The new subordinate group is to be created, automated. This reaches delirious heights of rhetorical imagination: ‘Our machines, with breath of fire, with limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitfulness wonderful inexhaustible, accomplish by themselves with docility their sacred labour. And nevertheless the genius of the great philosophers of capitalism remains dominated by the prejudices of the wage system, worst of slaveries. They do not yet understand that the machine is the saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from the sordidae artes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and liberty’

'We are talking about a surplus of refusal to directly valourise capital that today can be identified within the forms of class behaviour. We are talking about the fact that once workers have reached this level of productivity and 'refinement of their talents' (that, after all, is what productivity actually consists in) they 'want to enjoy it'. That is, they no longer imagine work as a discipline but rather as a satisfaction. Workers imagine their lives not as work but as the absence of it, their activity as free and creative exercise. We are talking about the massive flight of labour from factory work towards the tertiary and service sectors. We are talking about the spontaneous refusal to accept the rules of training for abstract labour and apprenticeship to unmediated labour.'

Antonio Negri, The Workers Party Against Work (1973)

What happens to the Right to Non-Work 70, 80 years later, when capitalism has reached a temporary truce with the labour movement and absorbed the Marxist critique? At this point, we will have to conflate two seemingly diametrically opposed thinkers – Buckminster Fuller with Antonio Negri. The latter was the theorist of the 'crisis of the planner state', anatomising in the early 70s the collapse of the Keynesian compromise between Labour and capital, seemingly unaware that a far more brutal form of capitalism would succeed it; the former, meanwhile, a polymath and super-technocrat who took Keynesianism to the extent of envisaging 'total world planning'. Fuller wouldn't necessarily have appreciated being read alongside a revolutionary Marxist. He frequently reiterated that ‘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 they 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’. Today this is a poignant passage: we are nearly as far from Fuller as he was from Wilde, yet the situation he describes only makes sense as a description of Blairite sleight-of-hand.

In fact, Fuller already anatomised the situation that would characterise labour after the partial annihilation of the industrial proletariat: the production of jobs entirely for their own sake, with no useful imperative: something finessed by the service industry in 'Anglo-Saxon' economies, where work is imposed to prevent the vertiginous shock of realising that technology has made labour obsolete. 'Instead of paying boilermakers not to work and to go to research school in Florida, for fear that this is socialism, we are giving them 5.50 an hour dole to sit up there and pretend to be capitalistic workers while putting nuts on bolts.' This 'self-kidding' safeguards the work ethic, it reassures capital that it is secure. Fuller makes quite clear two facts which contemporary capitalism rests on denying: that the growth in both wealth and productive technologies that characterised the post-war golden age proved Malthusianism to a fiction, via 'the industrial equation' of producing more with less; and that, accordingly, most work is entirely superfluous. Instead, he envisages a consumer economy without a service industry, where super-engineers would replace Wilde and Lafargue's industrial Athenian or Morris' new craftsman.

What he doesn't envisage is that a useless manual labour will merely be replaced with a useless service industry. Capital would never allow the abolition of labour. The rise of services was seen by Negri in early 1970s pamphlets like The Workers Party Against Work, written as interventions in working class struggle, as a sign of the progressive obsolescence of a certain model of work, where falling rates of profit and working class militancy were making traditional factory labour not just unnecessary but dangerous for capital – something that may have been forgiveable in the flux of the moment, but now seems an illusion: as if servility were an adequate substitute for production. Nonetheless, the solution proposed by Potere Operaio and Autonomia - the refusal of work as a sign of workers' power itself – marked perhaps the first adoption of the Right to be Lazy as a serious political programme. While most of the other thinkers mentioned here based their opposition to work on theoretical and personal disdain, Operaismo based it on actual observation of and involvement in working class practice, and the hatred, refusal, sabotage of and theft from work that characterised workers in areas like the Porto Marghera chemical works. Curiously enough, this was the working class behaving precisely as The Soul of Man Under Socialism insisted it should. The aggression and lack of humility in actions like 'proletarian shopping', where supermarkets were compelled by direct action to sell at reduced prices, would no doubt have pleased Wilde. This recognised that a great many workers, contra Lafargue, hated work, avoided it whenever possible, and had no belief in the inherent nobility of their plight. They would not wait for the 'industrial equation' to make this work obsolete – instead they would refuse it from within, and transform it into a workers' power that abolishes work.

The capitalist response, of course, was not to follow either Fuller or Negri's ideas of what might replace the old capitalism based on factories, factory discipline and an urbanised industrial proletariat. In fact, solidarity could be destroyed all the better in a society based on the inanities of the service industry and its communications appendages. Meanwhile, alienation from the product of labour would be replaced with not even knowing what that product is, or if it even exists. Yet still, work goes on, as controlled, brutal and idiotic as it ever was. Thatcherism with a human face claims to have abolished the working class, but it perpetuates work to an ever more ludicrous extent, particularly when it wants to remind the 'core voters' of its roots in the movement of the toiling classes. British jobs for British workers. War on the workshy. Work more to earn more. Work trials for the disabled, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for those who don't want to work. He who does not work, neither shall he eat. Today, the only response to this has to be – the party of the workers, whatever or wherever it is, must stand against work.

Heritage against History

2008-06-03T08:47:00.000-07:00

Manufacturing a Past in London’s ‘Regeneration’

Heritage has, for some time, been a pivotal part of the process of gentrification. A kind of Fred Dibnah nostalgia for long-decommissioned industry, combined with a revulsion for 1960s style comprehensive development, has meant that factories and warehouses up and down the country have had internal walls knocked through and beige furniture shipped in. There is rather more to the use of heritage than these simple acts of conversion. Heritage itself, as a term, is deeply linked with Thatcherism: English Heritage as an organisation was created as an acquiescent quango in 1983 by the Tories, and their model of dewy-eyed longing for a pre-1960s England combined with rapacious neoliberalism has had much influence on the use of heritage in urban planning.

Heritage should be disassociated as much as possible from history, from which it borrows a few methodologies and a focus on the past. The facts, the lived experiences and struggles, are not a factor in heritage, the way they are or at least ought to be in the practice of history. However, it does have at least some affinities with art history specifically. In the 1998 book Terminal Architecture, the late Martin Pawley claimed that the 1980s saw a one-sided battle between art history and Modernism, a battle wherein cities and interiors replicated the past, frequently using extremely high-tech means, as a libidinal weapon against the socialist and futurist aspirations of Modernism, winning public affection for a politically and aesthetically retrograde project. This battle, for Pawley, ended with Art History swallowing Modernism, drawing it into its maw, with Bauhaus or Brutalist design becoming matters for the connoisseur as much as Biedermeier or the Baroque.

Accordingly, heritage is now able to take in all kinds of different and seemingly hostile forms, from military buildings to council tower blocks. The important point is that in every instance the process remains the same: places of working class labour or dwelling are transformed into housing for the upper middle class. I’m going to run through a few particularly choice examples here.

Case 1: Arsenal in Disguise

Woolwich is a London suburb best known for its contribution to warfare, as it was devoted to the production of armaments for some 400 years: although since the 1960s its Arsenal has been largely decommissioned and dormant. Today it’s a bustling, shabby, overcrowded and impoverished place, with a large West African population. It has a certain weirdness and independence that you don't get in most South-East London areas, and a large amount of council stock, which has mostly discouraged middle class settlement. It’s a place, on the whole, fairly un-'regenerated'. I read in an article by Tristram Hunt, who seemed to think this far preferable to the usual riverside blocks, that the former Arsenal, a huge complex of factories and warehouses by the river that churned out materials for maiming and murder for centuries, had been tidied up and made into a little enclave for the more comfortable. I live not far away, and had been past it a couple of times, not bothering to venture inside. So I had no idea quite how large-scale, how jarring, this project would actually be when I visited it. You cross the vastly unpleasant arterial road that runs alongside the river and the ferry, going past some fairly standard Victorian warehousing and a sign saying 'PRIVATE ROAD' - then you're in the Arsenal, and a hotchpotch of infill pokes out among the industrial utilitarianism - some designed in an achingly precise Quinlan Terry style neo-Georgian, some in the more familiar Ikea Modernism idiom of stock-brick and plastic.

What makes it so very peculiar, though, is the Arsenal buildings themselves, with their brooding darkness, their air of menace, something made all the more unnerving by the way in which the Portland stone strips and columns are still utterly smoke-blackened – in the Royal Arsenal, Heritage has decided not to be as Disney-tidy as is usually insisted upon. The plan has guaranteed all kinds of squares and public spaces, yet I've never been in a council estate precinct so empty and intimidating - literally not a soul about, all the traffic and shouting of Powis St and environs seeming miles away rather than a 3 minute walk. This is one of the most clever elements of the development: the road literally marks a border between the new area and the working class town around it, and the new DLR station being built is very convenient for ensuring the two groups never have to meet. There is, in the Arsenal area, the obligatory bijou café, in which I overheard a conversation between some new Arsenal inhabitants, one confessing shamefaced to using the local free ferry, which she called ‘poor people’s transport’.

At the end of the development, as you approach the main road and sounds other than the birds can be heard, the obligatory public art awaits. Or, at first you think, the Men In Black loom into view, consulting with each other about some sort of covert operation. Then you realise what we actually have here: iron men, with huge Neanderthal heads and hollow bodies, clipped together like the guns in the nearby museum, which is given the macho name of Firepower. With war as a part of heritage, here is the luxury development as place of terror.

Case 2: Deco is Back!

This is Wallis House, the first of the interwar factories on the Great West Road’s Golden Mile. This is in prime J.G Ballard country, where in the 1920s and 30s an attempt was made at creating a little America at London’s edges, replicating the LA formula of arterial roads, diffuse suburbia and lushly ornamented, semi-Modernist design. Many of the art deco factories built for American businesses in the 1930s still cling to this seemingly endless road, Brentford’s own little Gotham. The tallest of these has been under scaffolding for some time, during which a poster declared ‘DECO IS BACK!’ atop a drawing that reminds me somewhat of those Hed Kandi sleeves for 'chilled' 'beats', depicting a woman with a hairstyle more Jackie Kennedy than Louise Brooks. Art deco has always been a fairly slippery concept – a term invented in the 1970s by the art historian Bevis Hillier to refer to design inspired by the Paris Expo of 1925, which combined over-ornamented eclectic structures with Modernist buildings by Le Corbusier and Konstantin Melnikov. Accordingly, deco can mean pretty much anything you want it to, although it tends to refer to elements – streamlining, jagged and machine-imitating ornament, chrome and concrete as materials – that were disparagingly described at the time as ‘Moderne’ or ‘jazzy’. Unlike Modernism, which still has connotations of social housing and all that entails, deco always equals glamour: Joan Crawford, ocean liners, Paul Poiret and Coco Chanel.

This is a world away from the original purpose of Wallis House, whatever its mannerisms. It was designed by Thomas Wallis, and used first for Simmonds Aerocessories, then for munitions, and finally for pharmaceuticals. The factory as a place of fashionable living has become so familiar since the early 80s that this barely merits comment, but for the way in which that Wallis’ particular machine glamour is used as an explicit selling point. What is happening in the Great West Road is somewhat atypical of London’s gentrification process: rather than the litany of vibrancy, public-spiritedness and poverty fetishism that drives the Eastern version, in the far West the proximity to motorways and Heathrow are paramount, rather than a romanticised idea of the slums. Wallis House is the centrepiece of the ‘Great West Quarter’, in which a large area will be turned by Barratt Homes into executive housing. It’s almost inoffensive if they do this here, rather than force out inner-urban communities – but whether the appeal of the flyover and the airport corridor, regardless of the art-deco dressings, will have the same appeal for the aspirant bourgeois as an ex-council flat in Hackney remains to be seen.

Case 3: The Croydon Bauhaus

If you can stomach the antiseptic parade of stunning developments, loft conversions and suchlike, a great place to find out what is really happening in London urbanism is in property supplements and the free papers. This, which I came across in a Telegraph supplement, is what describes itself, with frankly rather admirable chutzpah as the Bauhaus building, Croydon. The skeleton of this building is one of the many office blocks erected in the southernmost outpost of London, when it was a brief proto-Canary Wharf, ‘London’s Mini Manhattan’, ambiguously featuring in the pre-Sex Pistols work of Jamie Reid, Suburban Press. These Wilsonian speculative towers were rather lacking in the colour and flash required by their distant successors, and have long been synonymous with the apparently alienating town planning of the 1960s. Accordingly the building has been given what would once have been called a ‘jazzy’ façade, declared by the developers to be ‘Constructivist’ in inspiration, and opened up to the young couples and media professionals.

For a building to have been described thus in the 60s would have been eccentric, a rare look backwards. The renaming is one of the many signs of a resurgence of interest in an ahistorically considered ‘utopianism’ in the interwar period, a nostalgia not for a rusty industrialism but for the apparently more idealistic, socially concerned ethics of the Weimar Republic. Of course, what distinguishes the ethic of this block is an act of straightforward facading, untruth to materials, the bizarre spectacle of the 2000s dressing up the 1960s to look like an imagined 1920s: there could be few things more alien to the Bauhaus’ ethos than this place. It’s hard to resent this too much, as really this is a sort of aesthetic blag, designed only to make a quick killing before the building is remade again in 20 or 30 years time. The building is interesting more as a symptom of how Modernism has become another source of heritage, another space for gentrification. This has more sinister uses outside of former Croydon office blocks.

Case 4: An Eldorado for the Middle Classes

As can be seen with the Croydon Bauhaus, the return as heritage of Modernism is beginning to have an effect on the process of London’s gentrification. The hugely successful V&A exhibition Modernism- Designing a New World a couple of years ago had an obvious appeal to a depressed, Blairite culture industry and its young professionals, as could be seen by the proliferation of spin-offs and broadsheet supplements, plus further exhibitions on Alexander Rodchenko, Josef Albers, Lazslo Moholy-Nagy, Erno Goldfinger and so forth. The idea of design promising, rather than mere comfort or style, a new and better world, a utopia, a social conscience, has a great pull for a generation who have never imagined such things might be possible. There was even for a time an estate agent called UTOPIA. Emblematic of this is the sell-off of the Peckham Pioneer Health Centre, a pivotal early Modernist building and famous 'experiment' (a social engineering/health scheme which had overtones alternately of socialist health care and of eugenics), reconstructed as a gated community, 'Pioneer Buildings'. This has also led to a revaluation as heritage of numerous former council blocks. There are several examples of this where it merely results in a shiny façade being placed over a concrete tower so that it resembles a new-build stunning development – the notorious recladding and letting to bankers of one of the Pepys Estate towers in Deptford, for instance. Another version seeks at least a formal fidelity to the Modernist event. Keeling House, Denys Lasdun’s Cluster Block in Bethnal Green, is a particularly egregious example. The arrangement of the building was intended as benign social engineering, encouraging the retention of the close community links of the old East End when they were re-housed in more sanitary conditions. The very same features were a factor in its popularity with city bankers, after Hackney Council’s sell-off of the building, as it went from engineered community to gated community. Other well-known examples of this include the enduring popularity with the wealthy of Goldfinger’s Trellick and Balfron towers.

The deregulation and selling-off of so much local authority stock means that nowhere is immune from the process of a council building being first found to be actually quite idealistic and attractive, then gradually emptied of its tenants as the idealists muscle in on it, a slower and more protracted method than the simple subterfuge and class cleansing behind the new Keeling House. For instance, Tecton’s Sivill House now has its own website, wherein ex-council flats are offered for outrageous amounts of money and the commanding views of the city of London are emphasised – and this, lest we forget, is in one of the most overcrowded and badly housed areas in the country, and one which still maintains a long council waiting list.

One of the advantages of the emptying out of lived, concrete history by heritage and its art-historical appendages, is that the past becomes something tamed, defanged, regardless of the occasional frisson at the brutal, aesthetically or socially. One doesn’t have to think about the fact that children toiled themselves to death in a Manchester mills after Urban Splash have done it up, and one doesn’t have to think about the fact that architects like Tecton considered their aim to be ‘an eldorado for the working classes’ rather than the production of all purpose space for stockbrokers(as Berthold Lubetkin put it) when moving into their flats. Via heritage, art history becomes the destruction of history in the service of capital.

Let me tell you about Scientific Management

2008-06-01T16:48:00.000-07:00

The Fall, the Factory and the Disciplined Worker, 1978-83

Two Types of Factory

Over the last few years two distinct and conflicting ideas about The Fall and their ethos have become clear, without ever really being recognised as contradictory. First, there's the old idea of Mark E Smith and the group as grim Northern disciplinarians, prone to reactionary statements in interviews and a disdain for students and the workshy; and another more recent take, via Mark Fisher's Memorex for the Krakens, perhaps the first essay to take The Fall as seriously as they deserve. This strain of thought concentrates on MES as, in Michael Bracewell's phrase, a 'Prophet in Prestwich', a kind of Lovecraftian psychic and seer opposing the technocratic rationalism of Factory records with a scrawl of scribbled disdain, grotesque and atavistic demonic visions, and a heavily encrypted Pulp Modernist linguistic deformation, in which Smith 'puts a block on the words'.

I'm going to suggest in this paper that this tension between an iron, workerist discipline, which can be heard in the grinding, repetitive sound, and the visionary revelations which pervade the lyrics, is best understood through the idea of management, training and structuring on the one hand and enshrining power on the other, and their relation to the factory as site of production. Specifically, via the supplanting of 19^th century work norms with the more efficient, apparently scientific system imported from the USA after the 1910s, under the influence of the theorist Frederick Wilmslow Taylor, whose 'rationalisation' paved the way for the assembly line and mass production: something usually associated with the kind of 'rational aesthetic' to which The Fall have always been hostile.

First of all it's worth examining the curious perceptions of the factory and industry in The Fall's early work. For all his professed workerism, MES' pre-Fall experience, after a time in a meat factory, was mostly as a dock clerk, outside of the site of production itself, followed by a far more valuable spell of unemployment and assiduous reading. The factory, in this state, becomes something observed, but not directly experienced – something studied and aestheticised to discover its effects. Accordingly, in Live at the Witch Trials industry features as a sinister presence, a centrifugal force sucking people in and spitting them out as Valium-addicted, psychically and physically warped. 'Industrial Estate' admonishes that the 'company air will fuck up your face', creating something new and bizarre out of it, a premonition of the 'impressions' and deformations to come. At this point however there is still a certain flailing element to The Fall's music, with the drums constantly clattering and falling about. There might not have been solos or displays of individual technique, but there was a certain sloppiness and franticness to the Fall that would soon be purged. Smith, too, was not sounding particularly enamoured by the English obsession with hard graft, blasting a nation 'tied to the puritan ethic' on the title track. However a particular industrial obsession had already crept in on the B-side of their first single, in 1978 – the importance of the 'Three Rs, Repetition, repetition, repetition'.

All Decadent Sins Shall Reap Discipline

Of course this has to be seen in the context of British Industry, and of Britain, and specifically Manchester, as the first area worldwide to comprehensively transform itself into a purely industrial, purely urban and anti-rural economy – it should be noted that Smith uses 'peasant' as an insult in 'CnCs Mithering' and elsewhere. The forcible remaking of the worker from relatively free agricultural labourer into an appendage to a machine was traced by Marx in Capital thus:

‘To work at a machine, the workman should be taught from childhood, in order that he may learn to adapt his own movements to the uniform and unceasing motion of an automaton…at the same time that factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity’.

This forcible simultaneous limiting and overstretching of the body's capabilities becomes a feature of the Fall's records from Dragnet onwards. The disciplines absent from the sloppy, indulgent world of rock and its derivatives are reimposed.

'Spectre Versus Rector' was cited in Memorex for the Krakens as perhaps the first truly great Fall track, the first to showcase Smith's fractured, gnostic storytelling. This is true enough, but it's also intriguing what happens to the early Fall's sound here. The song is dominated by a huge, ugly bass riff, repeating relentlessly and drawing everything (apart from Smith) into its pattern. The track resounds with dense, repetitive clatter, evoking some kind of foundry or mill, something also reinforced in the claustrophobic, noise-ridden production. Dragnet's sleeve notes, meanwhile, evoke a city more post-industrial than industrial – 'up here in the North there are no wage packet jobs for us, thank Christ.' As with sleeves at the time such as that for 'How I Wrote Elastic Man', it's the ruined factories and warehoues and their ghosts that are more redolent of the urban reality of the late 1970s than Factory's seamless new Neue Sachlichkeit. The Dragnet sleeve features an excerpt from a conversation with the local Dry-Cleaners that evokes perfectly the romantic possibilities of the dilapidated, decommissioned city:

'Paid back by the drycleaners, viz: how did your coat get so dirty Mr. Smith? What do you do for a living?' Answer:'I hang around old buildings for hours and get very dirty in one of those hours.'

Where Flair Is Punished

To go back for a moment to Taylor and Marx, and to the alleged qualitative differences between the painful overexertion of the English factory system and American scientific management. Taylor writes in Principles of Scientific Management that there are two particular fallacies obstructing the efficient management of labour: one, which places the accent on the naturally gifted individual and places the onus on extraordinary, voluntaristic excesses of labour – the Stakhanovite movement in the USSR is a fine example of this, straining to achieve deliberately excessive targets – and another, where the worker's belief that efficient labour will make their own jobs obsolete leads to slow, deliberately obstructive working. Restructuring of manual work was charted via the time and motion study, where the movement of the worker was charted in minute detail and then evaluated by management to decide the way in which he can produce the most in the smallest amount of time. The earlier Fall, with its relatively scrappy inefficiency can be seen as a remnant of the earlier, Victorian principles of management, where the workforce at least attempts to work to its own pace, leading to sudden sporadic increases in work and physical expenditure.

From Slates to Perverted by Language this becomes severely circumscribed by the dominance of Steve Hanley's bass riffs, which in their rumbling, metallic tone evoke the clangour of a brutally effective factory. The workers, the actual musicians, are severely disciplined if they shirk the steady tempo or, even worse, decide to express themselves: that oft-quoted 'don't start improvising, for Christ's sake' on 'Slags, Slates Etc', coming in over a ferociously disciplined and repetitive locked groove, with all the forward motion of Can, but none of their looseness or sensuality. In the 1981-83 records, Smith's lyrics get both more fantastical and more insistent on the need for pure, pared-down repetition, exhibiting much disdain for malingerers. While two years earlier the puritan ethic was disdained, now a certain ambiguous identification with a Cromwellian harshness could be found in his lyrics. Not just the threat of a 'New Puritan', but other telling references creeping in – a healthiness gained through decidedly unhealthy sources befitting a love of lager and Cash & Carries. 'Fit and Working Again' features Smith, over a steady, undemonstrative chug, declaring 'And I feel like (the boxer) Alan Minter/I just ate eight sheets of blotting paper/And I chucked out the Alka Seltzer' – shoving down industrial products to produce a pugilistic intensity.

Musicians Are the Lowest Form of Life

Taylorism is often associated with cybernetics, and the machine aesthetic that the Fall have often deliberately stood against, the synthesisers and robots of the early 80s, mocked in 'Lie Dream of A Casino Soul' and 'Look Know' as fashionable posing. But as much as it suggests, in the acclimatising to simple, repetitive, machine-like tasks, something beyond human, the Taylor system also implies something before the human. Antonio Gramsci's short study Americanism and Fordism reminds us that Taylorist management theorists, anticipating MES' description of musicians as cattle, were not particularly respectful of the human subjectivity of their workers. Gramsci cites Taylor's term for the rationalised worker - 'the trained gorilla' - as 'expressing with brutal cynicism' what he describes as

'...developing in the worker to the highest degree automatic and mechanical attitudes, breaking up the psycho-physical nexus of qualified professional work, which demands a certain active participation of intelligence, fantasy and initiative on the part of the worker'.

Gramsci sees this as a progressive development, eliminating the sentimentality and peasant spirituality from the working class, who will then be able to prepare for power. Taylor, meanwhile, insisted his system was fairer than the 19^th century's work norms, what he called 'the more or less open warfare which characterizes the ordinary types of management'. But in the Taylorist factory itself there would be absolutely no question about who was manager and who managed. He promised his system would not lead to unemployment, but the Fordist modes of production could only guarantee full employment briefly, although guaranteeing rather more job security than there would be in service of the Fall.

Taylor and his disciples set themselves the task of obliterating the imagination and the fantastic. Smith's aim, meanwhile, would be to eliminate the desire for initiative and display on the part of musicians, a group which tend, at least outside of classical music, to think of themselves as creatives, rather than cogs in a machine. Accordingly, the turnover of personnel becomes enormous. But while The Fall efface formal individualism, songs are far more ambiguous about the process of being subjected to the will of the machine and the manager. 'Fiery Jack' depicts a character whose repetitive job leaves him able to 'think think think' and 'burn burn burn', with no outlet - the wasting of human intelligence under the factory system, slackjawed, living on pies, drunk for three decades. Yet this isn't a moralistic expression of sociological concern so much as admiration for and identification with the speeding, simmering resentment that drives Jack.

Although it's never a good idea to impart a definitive authorial voice to any Fall song, there's a definite undercurrent in several songs from the 1980-83 period that discipline and puritanism have done something awful to the psyche of the English. Frequently this is ascribed to the survival of a peasant residue, as on the atavistic horrors of Grotesque and the anti-rock mocking of how 'all the English groups act like peasants with free milk'. Elsewhere though, this seems more a factory product, the consequence of clod-hopping utilitarianism in a drudge nation, a nation of no imagination'. 'Kicker Conspiracy' transfers this to sport, detailing how by the early 80s English football had become a grim slog, in which any individual talent is effaced for an amateurish, brutal limitation of possibilities, a place 'where flair is punished' and a dullard boardroom/managerial class replace the likes of George Best with interchangeable thugs. In The Fall meanwhile, there was always one person allowed to demonstrate flair, with Smith's indisciplined, fragmented, oblique and far from utilitarian textual/verbal collages roaming into the places which the rigours of the music blocked off. The masterful 'Wings' for instance, encapsulates this tension: a tragic, hypnotic story of flight and time travel is soundtracked by martial thumping and Craig Scanlon's bleak, scraping guitars.

This Hideous Replica

In the live version of 'Cash and Carry', Smith improvises that

'Even in Manchester, there's two types of factory there. One makes men old corpses. They stumble round like rust dogs. One lives off old dying men. One lives off the back of a dead man. You know which Factory I mean. You know.'

before declaring that in contrast to this shabbiness, ' I can see, I have dreams'. Factory Records and its protagonists have been comprehensively claimed by museum culture, with all the biopics, exhibitions and retrospectives that entails, and has even been cited as central to the 'regeneration' or gentrification of the city. The Fall have yet to be fully claimed by this history, and haven't been reduced to cliché quite yet. However, as Mark Fisher also writes in The Place I Made The Purchase No Longer Exists, the nearest thing to that claiming has been the NME caricature of Smith as grim foreman and pub bore, something to which MES willingly plays up. Perhaps, for all the flashes of brilliance – including the elliptical catalogues of televisual horror and boredom in Imperial Wax Solvent - discipline in the later Fall becomes nearer again to 19^th century production than the iron consistency of the Taylor system, in that sheer hard output supplants precision, especially in Smith's wilful drinking away of his own gifts as a writer, if not as bandleader or 'singer'. Occasionally, it's as if the intention was to turn himself into one of the industrial drudges he once satirised. Smith's ghosted autobiography quotes Carlyle's aphorism 'produce, produce, produce, what else are you here for', although often what is produced often seems less important than the mere act of production itself. Nevertheless, in the Fall's best work, the factory and production features as an utterly central but extremely ambiguous motif. It warped a people, warps minds as much as bodies. Accordingly, rather than being in conflict with the weird and fantastical, this system of discipline and drudgery inadvertently produces the weirdness itself.

Die Kunst ist Tot, es lebe die Neue Maschinenkunst

2008-02-19T12:38:00.000-08:00

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?

The Functionalist Deviation

2007-11-13T06:06:00.000-08:00

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?

Towards a Communist Couture?

2007-08-21T08:31:00.000-07:00

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.

A Pod of One's Own

2007-05-20T11:21:00.000-07:00

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.

Ballard's Banlieue Radieuse

2007-05-08T10:13:00.000-07:00

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.

Revolution in the Garden

2007-04-19T10:53:00.000-07:00

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, what seems unmistakeably to be an upside down cross. Nairn again, manages to capture the strange combination of parochial, picturesque insularity and genuine otherness that characterises the place:

‘Full of coy perverseness which ruins the inside and makes the outside unbearably giggly – ‘look at me, I’m mixing classical and Gothic, look at me’. You want to give Sir Edwin’s precocious bottom a good clout. Yet out of it all, this puzzling child produced a magnificent steeple, building up strong and sure through the belfry to an octagonal top and a bulky spire. It stamps the suburb from any angle and any distance; the way in which the styles are subordinated to and sublimated by the total idea of steeple is up to Hawksmoor’s level, yet there is no attempt to copy Hawksmoor, no precedent at all. But what about the frippery of the rest? Was it a necessary fetish, like high-heeled leather boots?’

From Town Planning in Practice

The Hampstead Garden Suburb has long since ceased to be any kind of Workers Paradise, if indeed it ever was: the narrow, winding streets are now full of aggressively huge cars, while on the rare occasions you see someone walking the streets they tend to be elderly Jewish women rather than the proletarian youth saved from the Workhouse who made up part of its original population. Meanwhile Unwin’s style became a prototype for the massive suburban expansion of the 1930s, so the enclosed garden suburb is surrounded on all sides by mock-tudor. However just at its borders there are odd little outbreaks of inter-war continental Modernism, like this block here, Belvedere Court, which makes no attempt whatsoever to evoke an idealised medieval past, looking more like something by Erich Mendelsohn. And right in the suburb itself, in one of the playing fields reserved for the tenants, is this flat roofed pavilion. However, this new style has much more in common with the Garden Suburb and the Garden City than one might expect.

Belvedere Court, 1930s

THE MODERNIST GARDEN CITY – BRUNO TAUT AND ERNST MAY

Bruchfeldstrasse Siedlung, built 1925

The Garden City had perhaps its biggest take-up in Germany, where the arts and crafts movement had less of a problem with modernity, and actually offered its services to industrialists in the Deutscher Werkbund. As with Letchworth, it was an idea fought over by visionary utopian socialists, intent on what they called ‘lebensreform’ via abolishing the difference between city and country, and more pragmatic businessmen with dreams of a pastoral arcadia that might just produce more productive and less rebellious workers than the ‘mietsakerne’ or ‘rental barracks’ popping up all over cities like Berlin. Small garden settlements were designed by radical architects like Bruno Taut in what was initially a mere adaptation of Unwin’s style to a country where the resident fairytales were those of the Brothers Grimm rather than the Beatrix Potter tendencies of the English. Interestingly the Berlin Dadaists called for the creation of garden cities in their 1919 manifesto.

However, after the First World War, and in radical contrast to the timidity of Welwyn Garden City, the German planners and architects designed for a new world that would make no more gestures at an idealised peasant past. This really begins with the work in Frankfurt of the town-planner and architect Ernst May. Now May was not only influenced by Raymond Unwin’s Garden Cities – he had actually moved to Britain for a time to be trained by Unwin himself, so we might have expected his work to aspire to the dreamlike quaintness of Letchworth or Hampstead. On the contrary. After being appointed planner and city architect to Frankfurt’s Social Democratic City Council, he began an unprecedented experiment – one which we could call the Modernist Garden Suburb.

In 1925 May designed, on the outskirts of Frankfurt the Siedlung Bruchfeldstrasse, literally the Bruchfield Street Settlement. This was laid out with landscape gardens, winding streets and plenty of open space, light and air, much as Unwin might have done. The picturesquely pointy roofs though have been sliced off, the chocolate box stucco has been painted with some sort of Mondrian pattern, while rather than using good rustic materials, May used all manner of shiny, industrial railings and balconies. The central courtyard of the Bruchfeldstrasse estate shows many traces of his English precursors, though takes them somewhere radically futuristic that they would never have dared. While one gets the sense that Unwin was always rather unsure about the ‘city’ part of Howard’s work, May’s work is entirely modern and urban.

In Frankfurt May would subsequently design, on the outskirts of the city, thousands of dwellings, all in carefully planned and arranged ‘siedlungen’, with the cafes and shops missing in Hampstead all in prominent places, along with community centres and schools. There would be a constant element of surprise about them, their angularity broken up by patterns, unexpected layouts and dramatic curves and changes of scale, as in blocks of flats like this one in his Romerstadt Siedlung which plays on ocean-liner imagery. Although these were never garden cities, being connected with the city of Frankfurt, they never became a mere suburban sprawl either.

The architect Bruno Taut, meanwhile, had been experimenting for around a decade with different adaptations of the garden city idea, from Unwin-style workers cottages pre-war that he had painted in expressionist-influenced bright colours, to wild, utopian projects for alpine garden cities that would be constructed entirely of coloured glass, something that makes him perhaps closer to Ebenezer Howard’s crystal palaces than Unwin himself ever was. None of these blueprints were ever put into practice, although he was asked by the Trade Union building society GEHAG to design garden settlements in Berlin in the mid 1920s. These followed Ernst May’s revolutionising of public housing to an even more radical extent. Like the Frankfurt developments, these didn’t have the aspirations for ameliorating class conflict that drove the English garden city: they were public housing, pure and simple.

Ernst May, Romerstadt Siedlung

It would be a decidedly complex simplicity, however. Again we have the landscaped gardens: this is the Hufeisensiedlung, the ‘Horseshoe Settlement’ in Berlin, where the central court curves around, enclosing a collective garden. Meanwhile, Taut had painted onto the stucco or concrete walls of these flats colours even more jarringly artificial than May had used in Frankfurt. In these developments the difference between city and country is abolished in a very different way to the English garden city: his ‘Waldsiedlung’, on the edge of a forest, had in walking distance real, untamed forest as well as landscaped gardens, and yet the houses and flats themselves made no attempt to look rural or rustic: Taut’s city in the garden wouldn’t lose its urbanity, would keep hold of its urban, modern identity. Famously, in Letchworth people couldn’t notice that the town was new, so successful was its work of medieval simulation. However, the original Garden Cities of To-morrow had called for ‘new forms’ - and here they were.

Bruno Taut, Hufeisensiedlung, 1925

In 1929 Bruno Taut was asked by the British magazine ‘the studio’ to write an introduction to the Modern Architecture that had made no inroads whatsoever into British cities, let alone planned whole settlements on their outskirts. At this point a property boom was transforming the outskirts of British cities. Pretend-rural mock tudor or Unwinesque mock medieval housing was in fact erasing huge swathes of the countryside outside of London, putting on a country dress for the purpose of its obliteration, all in the name of the dream of an Arcadian England that the Garden Cities had helped to popularise. While he gives his due to Unwin and Howard, he gently mocks the English fear of the modern, which he links to a fear of the collective. I’d like to quote a few passages from Taut’s book to give a sense of how his argument works:

‘Architecture is freeing itself from the cramping confinement of its old costume, putting the health of its organism before everything else, somewhat in the same way that women have given up tight lacing…The small, individual house, built in accordance with the wishes of an individual man or woman, is possibly still more indicative of the delirium of individualism. The owner has dreamt of their own little house all their lives, and when they do get that far, they are anxious for it to be the most beautiful in the whole world…The construction of a dwelling-house not only shows that the feeling of ownership is not only a menace to its quality, but even to a degree opposed to it. For where the owner-builder is more disposed to waive his possessive rights in favour of something really good and useful, there will not only disappear the sentimental, romantic delirium, but the houses will come to bear a certain resemblance and suitability, one to the other…only by its collection in a co-operative sense can the dwelling-house avoid this dreary schematicism…collectivism (is the) style forming factor. Leadership has passed to the hands of those who erect buildings…those who can, in short, produce everything that everybody needs, depending each one upon the other – to the hands of the working classes’

So while, like the planners of the Garden Cities and Suburbs in England, Taut is declaring definitely for socialism, its not a socialism imposed from above by benevolent philanthropists but one created by the workers themselves. But neither he nor Ernst May in Frankfurt had ever quite managed to design in Germany a whole new city from scratch, they had no Letchworth or Welwyn Garden City to their credit. This was about to change.

SOTSGOROD – THE SOVIET GARDEN CITIES

In 1930 Ernst May was asked to design New Towns in the Soviet Union, as was Bruno Taut two years later. The First Five Year Plan for the industrialisation of the country had enabled it to avoid the Great Depression that was then sweeping Europe, while its rejection of Modernism was still a few years off: propaganda posters like this one showed the new cities of socialism in unambiguously Modern terms. Their New Towns, like Magnitogorsk, would take many of the ideas that had been experimented with in Frankfurt and Berlin and employ them on a grander scale, although while the original garden city was the about the city in the garden, here they would be the city in the factory. All the towns designed by the Germans, the ‘sotsgorod’ or socialist cities, would be adjuncts to the huge industrial centres that were being created by the country’s accelerated industrialisation, leaving many of the original, more utopian plans on the drawing board. However, the Soviet Union had its own schools of thought on the ideal city, which were yet more innovative than the Germans.

At the time of the First Five Year Plan, the architects of the Constructivist movement had split into two factions about the shape of the socialist city: into a group that called themselves ‘urbanists’, and another known as ‘disurbanists’. The Urbanists took up one of the more idealistic elements of Letchworth and gave it a more technological spin. Ebenezer Howard’s brainchild in the town, the collective house at Homesgarth, would become the unacknowledged basis for a new kind of city-block. The most famous prototype for this was built in 1929 in a Moscow Park, the Narkomfin building, designed by Moisei Ginzburg – as in Homesgarth, there were no kitchens, while this glazed part of the block would house a library, gymnasium, laundrette, kitchens and cafes for the tenants. Family life was to be phased out in the Narkomfin and the other ‘vertical garden cities’ that were supposed to follow it, in favour of the collective rearing of children, leaving men and women to devote themselves to building a new society. The Narkomfin Building – which you can see here as it is now, looking somewhat shabby - was dubbed a ‘semi-collectivised house’, a step on the way to a full collectivisation that never occurred.

Linking the Urbanists and the Disurbanists were the proposals of Nikolai Milyutin, head of the Commissariat of Finance. Milyutin envisaged the new city as a strip-like ‘linear’ city linked by public transport where housing akin to the Narkomfin, would be set in public parks: one should remember here Erno Goldfinger’s phrase the ‘Park City’, making the distinction between the private garden and the public park. This parkland would be worked, with agricultural and industrial workers living in the same blocks of flats. Milyutin’s linear city or, in his neologism Sotsgorod, or Socialist City, would have no centre, nor the concentric circles that would connect the Garden Cities. One of the supporters of the Linear Sotsgorod, the designer Karel Tiege, wrote of how it might achieve the uniting of city and country. I’m going to quote this passage in full, as it encapsulates beautifully the whole garden city ideal, while trying its best to distance itself from its English precursors. Teige wrote -

‘In a vertical garden city, the term ‘house and garden’ is interpreted in a new way, differently than envisioned by the romantics of the English garden city movement. Here, the green open areas between the rows of high houses are not ornate show gardens, nor should they be confused with English type parks. To sum up, we are not dealing with pretentious formal gardens or even with replicas of public city parks, but simply with green areas put at the disposal of people living in the houses nearby, with lawns for their own enjoyment and without formally-laid out gravel paths. Indeed, the cool shade of shrubs and clumps of trees, quiet meadows and woods, pools and sand boxes for children to play in – in short, reservoirs of sunshine and air. As for the flower gardens that surround the private villas – let them become an integral part of the homes themselves. Flowers in window boxes, on balconies and terraces, flowers in winter gardens, clubs and children’s homes. The primary function of the garden is to extend the interior space virtually into outside, natural space: well then, let it now physically enter into our homes and merge with their interiors, which in turn extend their space into nature outside. Let us integrate our dwellings with flowers, grass and trees by uniting nature with human-built form.’

Mikhail Barsch and Moisei Ginzburg, 'Green City', 1930

Another intriguing proposal was made by Konstantin Melnikov, for the ‘Green City’, a plan for which you can see here, which was based around ensuring plenty of high-quality sleep for its inhabitants: remember the plaque in Hampstead Garden Suburb admonishing any potential noise-makers while the workers were in bed? Well here’s the Constructivist version. Melnikov wrote: ‘While undertaking to expand the scope of architecture, I surprised myself and will surprise all of you by my arithmetic: one third of life is spent lying without consciousness, without any guide in the mysterious world of sleep, and tapping the unseen depth of the source of healing secrets. Well, this may be the miracle of miracles, indeed anything can be a miracle.’ Melnikov’s Green City had as its centre something called ‘The Institute for the Transformation of Humankind’ – this starshaped thing here, in the middle, which would presumably be rather like a futurist version of the institutes at the centre of Hampstead Garden Suburb.

Konstantin Melnikov, 'Green City', 1930

The divide between city and country had a particularly harsh nature in the USSR at this point, when a forced collectivisation of farming was being imposed by the state in order to break the power of the country’s peasantry. The Disurbanists proposed a reconciliation between the two rather than the outright war that was being preached at the time. Their leading theorist was Mikhail Okhitovich, who had been expelled from the Communist Party for supporting Trotsky’s Left Opposition. His conception of the city had a great deal in common with the garden city idea, only here it was being advocated on a truly massive scale. Like the webs of interconnected, small cities envisaged in Garden Cities of Tomorrow, Okhitovich declared that in the socialist city, ‘the network would win, the centre would die’. There’s a diagram of the Disurbanist settlement here, although the plan seems a little oblique.

In fact, Disurbanism resembles the Broadacre City project of Frank Lloyd Wright – modernist single family houses, spaced far apart, linked by an individual means of transport, stretching itself out over a space the size of a small country, and in so doing abolishing the divide between city and country in a way Howard might have baulked at. This ‘ribbon city’, some designs for which you can see here in their counter-plans for Magnitogorsk, was made possible via the decentralising powers of electricity and highways, much as was the suburban expansion in England in the 30s. But production as well as housing would be distributed over these huge decentralised country-cities, in order to avert the brutalities of the war between the city and the village: this resembled individualism to the Stalinist leadership, and this wouldn’t do. For his pains, Okhitovich would be hounded throughout the 1930s, eventually dying in the gulag in 1937. The Soviet Garden City would remain a proposal never truly acted upon.

CODA - THE BRITISH NEW TOWNS

Houses at Silver End, by Burnet, Tait and Lorne, 1929

However botched they were, the many new towns that were built in the Soviet Union in the early 30s served as one of the inspirations for the New Towns built in Britain after World War Two. This would enable Howard’s ideas being played out on a grand scale, although not always in the manner he might have intended. In fact, some early efforts at Modernist Garden Cities were made in Essex, of all places, in the late 1920s and early 30s. In Silver End, a small community of Modernist dwellings, the first in England, visibly influenced by Ernst May’s work in Frankfurt, was designed to show off the generous windows made by the local factory and set appropriately alongside the flat Essex landscape: while in East Tilbury there was a direct import of Central European garden city planning. The Czech Bata shoe company created its own small town of cubic, detached houses, all with plenty of open space and gardens, which stand even now as a conception of the ideal city quite in contrast with that of Welwyn, though similarly based around the nuclear family. The more radical Soviet architect Berthold Lubetkin designed what was called ‘a vertical garden city’ in his Highpoint blocks, in Highgate.

Stevenage town centre

The heritage of the new programme was therefore somewhat controversial. The New Towns were very much opposed by the residents of the villages which would have new, semi-industrial neighbours, who usually drew attention to the dubious Leftist roots of such ideas – in the late 40s the signs on the first new town at Stevenage railway station were changed to ‘Silkingrad’, in reference to John Silkin, the Labour government’s minister for town planning . In true British style, the postwar new towns were often something of a compromise between the flat-roofed radicalism of the Germans and Russians and the cute cottages of the early English Garden Cities and Suburbs. Stevenage initally had some quite radical ideas. The central pedestrianised square, with its clocktower, modern sculptures, pool and glass walled shops, finally put Ebenezer Howard’s ideas for glass shopping arcades at the centre of garden cities into some sort of operation, and was imitated all over Europe. Meanwhile most of the housing was run by the local council, meaning that Stevenage and the 1940s new towns like it, such as Basildon, Harlow, Crawley and so forth offered decent housing and fresh air to more of the urban poor than any of the original Garden Cities ever managed.

Stevenage town centre

The New Towns would pivot between a sort of commuter-belt conservatism and the original utopian socialist hopes. The head of the New Town committee was Lord Reith, and fittingly they were often a little paternalist: areas of housing might be built around Henry Moore sculptures, for instance – ‘Family Group’ was put in front of a school in Stevenage in order to edify the former slum dwellers. They were often heavily criticised for not having strong identities, and becoming the suburbs they were designed to ward off. The New Towns designed later, like Cumbernauld in Scotland or Milton Keynes would very much have their own identity, although one that is frequently the butt of metropolitan jokes about concrete cows and shopping centres. All the New Towns though were alike in creating a massive amount of public space – parks, squares, courtyards, all municipal spaces in which no-one would try to sell you anything. However the original garden city was an attempt to dampen down class feeling as class conflict, and perhaps this accounts for the way that many of them would be centres of the turn to Conservatism of part of the English working class – Basildon for instance elected a Tory MP, much to the surprise of sociologists. The individualist side of the project might have won out over the socialist.

Henry Moore, 'Family Group', outside the Barclay school in Stevenage

In a sense, the Garden City would be replaced with the Gated Community. Its very telling that the only New Town built in Britain since the 1960s was Prince Charles’ pet community of Poundbury in Dorset, which took the most conservative, medievalist elements of a Raymond Unwin and excised the utopian socialism that lay behind his simulation of the 14th century – though ultimately Poundbury has more in common with the theme park urbanism of Celebration, the planned town set up by the Disney corporation, than it does with Letchworth. The gated communities and Disney towns do resurrect one of the most unattractive features of the original Garden Cities and suburbs – the underlying fear of the mob, of the crowd, and of the city’s chaos and diversity. Sometimes the original Garden Cities expressed themselves in terms that point to the essentially fearful impulses behind the project. Ralph Neville, a Liberal MP who helped bankroll Letchworth, wrote of how the city produces:

‘The multitude of impressions received by the brain and the rapidity of their impressions, tend to induce shallowness of thought and instability of purpose. An increase of emotionalism and a loss of steadfastness are marked characteristics of town dwellers.’ The dynamism, excitement, speed and drama of the city are part of what can so easily get lost in the Garden City idea. F.J Osborn, one of the planners of Welwyn Garden City, wrote scathingly in the 60s about Modernist architects’ attempts to introduce ‘excitement’ into the garden city, as if he found the very idea of excitement contrary to their ethos. In one of his writings on the Paris of the 19th century, Walter Benjamin quoted a passage from Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England, in which Engels expressed his horror at the transience and bustle of the city crowd. Benjamin writes that this was written by someone that had never faced ‘the temptation to lose himself in a stream of people’.

The experiments with a decentred urban planning in England, Germany and Russia offer all sorts of intriguing alternatives to the current system, where the idea of planning has almost disappeared along with the ideals of public housing and public space, while London and the South East continue to both grow and absorb the surrounding area – there’s nothing further from the ideas of Ebenzer Howard than the Thames Gateway’s mega-suburbia, currently being planned on a flood plain. The Garden Cities and Suburbs also suggest possibilities of creating cities that can survive climate change without just insulating and patching up the old city. The architects I’ve talked about - Raymond Unwin, Ernst May, Bruno Taut, Moisei Ginsburg, Nikolai Milyutin, Konstantin Melnikov, Mikhail Okhitovich, John Silkin - all had an inspirational, utopian charge to their plans and buildings. Nonetheless, underlying all these ideas is a refusal to look at cities as they actually are, but instead as what they could be. This idea can be world-transforming, and it can be just fiddling while London burns.

Industrial Island Machine

2007-04-02T07:02:00.000-07:00

Vorticism and the absence of an English Avant-Garde

Edward Wadsworth, Liverpool Shipping (1918), adapted for London Underground in the 20s

‘SOME BLEAK CIRCUS, UNCOVERED, CAREFULLY CHOSEN, VIVID NIGHT. IT IS PACKED WITH POSTERITY, SILENT AND UNEXPECTED POSTERITY IS SILENT, LIKE THE DEAD, AND MORE PATHETIC’
Wyndham Lewis, Enemy of the Stars (1914)

Old Vort

Wyndham Lewis in 1914

Something in the notion of an artistic avant-garde seems inherently un-English. Hence perhaps the employment of a French term to cover experimental or advanced cultural practices: its connotations, of war, Leninism, conflict and upheaval, seem not to accord with how the English like to see themselves. Hence also the popularity of an Arcadian, pastoral aesthetic in this most urban, industrial and warlike of nations. In the early 20th century, aesthetic innovators usually had to follow the model of the lone eccentric (think Stanley Spencer, or Ronald Firbank). The collectivity that marked the avant-garde of the first half of the century was essentially anathema to this sensibility, give or take a few emigres in St Ives.

Wyndham Lewis, Timon, 1914

In the ferment that preceded the First World War however there were two groupings that deserved the title of vanguard. Most famously, that upper-middle class clique of geniuses and talentless toffs, the Bloomsbury Group, and more significantly the Vorticists, an extremely short-lived group of painters, propagandists, sculptors and writers, active for (at a stretch) about 7 years, from 1913 to 1920: with Wyndham Lewis as its intellectual Cromwell, with a retinue including the brilliant Edward Wadsworth, Helen Saunders, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and as chief cheerleader, Ezra Pound.

‘Let us now deride the smugness of The Times. GUFFAW!’
Ezra Pound, ‘Salutation the Third’

The sheer hostility of the Edwardian arbiters of taste towards any such movement can be seen in some of the press reports of the (rather mild: Gaugin, Van Gough, Monet, with one or two more daring Kandinskys here and there) Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1910. With all the jittery force of a moral panic, the press evoked political conflict, sexual licentiousness and moral breakdown: 'anarchy and degradation' and 'morbid excresences' in the Morning Post, 'disease and pestilence' in The Nation, and 'of no interest except to the student of pathology and the specialist in abnormality' according to the Connoisseur. Naturally, the ante was upped somewhat for the Vorticists themselves; and equally unsurprisingly, their Un-Englishness was commented upon, their infection with a continental cultural disease: a 'corrupt intellectuality' to the Daily Express, 'Junkerism in Art' for The Times.

Wyndham Lewis, Red Duet, 1914

These reactions were in fact symptomatic of the terror generated by a supposedly uncharacteristic extremism creeping into English cultural and political life: the Suffragettes' move into direct action, the suppression of revolt in Ireland, and a wave of Trade Union militancy: all of which would find echoes in BLAST, the journal of the movement. The 'Blessed' here include the Suffragettes Lillie Lenton and Freda Graham, Unionist advocate of political violence and prosecutor of Oscar Wilde Edward Carson, and Trade Unionist Robert Applegarth. Note also the blessing of Cromwell, a reminder of how England precedes the continent in its penchant for revolutionary violence. Much of BLAST is taken up with a re-imagining of England as the centre of a technological primitivism that would supersede the Italian Futurism and French Cubism that preceded them.

Edward Wadsworth, Liverpool Shipping

‘You wops insist too much on the machine. You are always on about these driving belts, you are always exploding about internal combustion. We’ve had machines in England for a donkey’s years, they’re nothing new to us’
Wyndham Lewis in conversation with F.T Marinetti

The Great English Vortex

Gino Severini, Dancer and Sea, 1913

The birth of Vorticism as an independent movement involved the symbolic killing of two fathers. First, the Bloomsbury set centred around Roger Fry's Omega Workshop, and second, Marinetti and the Futurists. The former was seen to represent all that was weak, arts-and-crafts and 'amateur' in English art: the bourgeois dilettantism of Clive and Vanessa Bell, or Duncan Grant, those who would be the London fauves: 'prettiness, with the mid-Victorian languish of the neck' to the Vorticists. The early incarnation of the Vorticists was a split off from the Omega Workshop itself, the 'Rebel Art Centre', made up of Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, CRW Nevinson et al. Their ex-compatriots would soon be scorned in print as the 'BRITTANIC AESTHETE', 'AMATEUR' and 'ART PIMP'. The break with Marinetti followed soon after, although as late as 1913 Lewis' group were describing themselves as Futurists, and their early work shows the influence of Balla and Severini in particular. The latter's 1913 'Dancer and Sea', in its collection of cylinders and polygons delineating motion, bears similarity to Lewis' 'Timon of Athens' portfolio, though here the lines are sharp and angular, the sense of drama and mechanisation carried without the implication of movement. The dabs of pointillist colour and curve in Severini would soon be purged from the British offshoot. Meanwhile CRW Nevinson would be himself purged from the nascent group for co-authoring a manifesto with Marinetti, which has much in common with BLAST, in its attack on English provincials and sentimentalists 'who stupidly adore the pretty-pretty, the commonplace, the soft, sweet and mediocre, the sickly revivals of medievalism, the garden cities...' Nonetheless, Nevinson’s work, which features in BLAST, evolves contemporaneously with the Vorticists, from the dance of girders in ‘Southampton Dock’ to the bleak, foggy Gotham of his ‘New York’.

William Roberts, Combat, 1915

The justifications of the schism can be found in BLAST, in particular in Lewis' many screeds and Pound's 'Vortex Pound'. This hinges on the more advanced state of mechanisation in Britain, and on a faintly racist depiction of the Italians as excited children: 'Elephants are VERY BIG. Motor cars go quickly'. Pound's defining Vortex sees Futurism as a spending of energy, as an overenthusiastic 'DISPERSAL- the disgorging spray of a Vortex with no drive behind it' as opposed to the cool efficiency of the Vorticist. Futurist speed leads to transience, a 'state of flaccidity'. The Bergsonian temporal obsessions of the European avant-garde are linked to death, putrefaction, the organic: 'Futurists, who are only an accelerated sort of Impressionists, DENY the Vortex. They are the CORPSES of VORTICES. POPULAR BELIEFS, movements, etc, are the corpses of vortices. Marinetti is a corpse.'

Helen Saunders, Abstract Multicoloured Composition, 1915

If, then, Vorticism is to be considered as a movement apart from Futurism, then its independence lies in a few scattered artefacts. The two issues of BLAST, a selection of paintings, shown at exhibitions up until 1920's 'Group X'; related works by sympathisers like Jacob Epstein and David Bomberg; more arguably, poems by Pound and sculptures by Gaudier-Brzeska: and occasional prose works, such as Helen Saunders' 'A Vision of Mud' and the 1910s output of Lewis himself. The reproductions in BLAST show the style at a peak of metallic propulsion, but a distinctive adaptation of Cubism and Futurism can be seen in something like Lewis' 1912 'The Vorticist', a furious figure, in the act of blasting an adversary. The colour rejects European chromaticism for rust grey, while its comic-book sweeping lines of motion reveal the pulpiness of the Vortex's Modernism; a crass, Boys Own figure of Man-Machine fervour, its arm morphing into a machine gun. Compared with the accelerated impressionism of say, Boccioni's 1911 'Modern Idol', the advanced status of Vorticism is clear.

From BLAST 1

The actual human body becomes of less and less importance every day

Edward Wadsworth's work of the period is even more intense in its starkness and industrialism, explicitly influenced by the industrial landscape of urban England: the 'industrial island machine' of BLAST. His 'Newcastle' is pointedly included therein after the blessing of ports . The 1915 ‘Abstract Composition’ meanwhile veers all the way into Non-Objectivity, its rectilinear contortions and glaring colours suggesting nothing other than the experiments being made by Kasimir Malevich at the same time in Moscow. At this point these two movements – the Vorticists and the Suprematists – though it is very unlikely they were aware of each other, had gone furthest into the machine aesthetic of the international style that would dominate the avant-garde for the next half century. Put Wadsworth’s ‘Mytholmroyd’ woodcut, with its interlocking girders alongside much work created 10 years later and it would seem advanced: the early Wadsworth, and works in BLAST 2, such as the propulsive rectilinear geometry of Jessica Dismoor’s ‘The Engine’, Frederick Etchells’ ‘Progression’ and Helen Saunders’ ‘Atlantic City’ have more in common with El Lissitzky’s Prouns, the Elementarism of Theo van Doesburg, the architectural fantasies of Iakov Chernikhov, than they do with the next 50 years of British art.

David Bomberg, The Mud Bath, 1914

This was not necessarily just a formal question either. Vorticist art excelled at reproduction: it can often be slightly disappointing to see the rather painterly original of one of the xeroxed ferocities in BLAST. Wadsworth’s woodcuts like ‘Liverpool Shipping’ and ‘Drydocked for Scaling and Painting’ achieve this effacing of the orginal and the organic most impressively, like episodes from a history of what Lewis Mumford called the ‘paleotechnical’: the dirty, noisy, lumbering industry of pre-electronic industrial powers like Britain. The 1918 ‘Drydocked’ reflects the experience of mechanised war in its looming, intimidating machinery. Set in an entirely man-made landscape, the easily penetrated and bruised curves of the human are entirely absent, reduced to angular figures applying ‘dazzle paint’. The black-lined geometries present an obstructive web.

Edward Wadsworth, woodcut 1918

This slots in with the Vorticist’s eulogising ofa kind of technologised primitivism: ‘the art instinct is permanently primitive…the artist of the modern movement is a savage (in no sense an ‘advanced’, perfected, democratic, Futurist individual of Marinetti’s limited imagination); this enormous, jangling, fairy desert of modern life serves him as Nature did the more technologically primitive man’. That these woodcuts depicted ‘dazzled ships’, essentially warships with abstract painting designed to evade the enemy’s radar – given a lick of warpaint – is quite apt. Even before the outbreak of war, Vorticism was preoccupied by warfare and the potential for modern man to be reduced to a ‘savage’ or updated to a robot, and in both cases capable mainly of destruction.

Cover for BLAST 2, 1915

Many Vorticist canvases suggest a human body becoming insectoid, eschewing softness for a metallic exoskeleton. Helen Saunders’ 1915 ‘Vorticist Composition (Study for Cannon)’ depicts such a figure, adopting the posture of a praying mantis. Atypically, we have here a figure with a recognisable head and limbs, though each is straightened into lines and points. Its ‘face’ has a single eye, obstructed by stark black. The pink tone of the body suggests flesh in mockery, with the rest of the body attached to a battery of machinery. It resembles Jacob Epstein’s contemporaneous ‘Rock Drill’ or Lewis’ ‘Before Antwerp’ (used for the cover of BLAST 2) in its proto-Science Fiction qualities of a Pulp Modernist machine gothic.

B will see what is hidden to D

Wyndham Lewis, A Battery Shelled, 1919

The war, according to the received critical wisdom, is what killed off the movement, with the deaths at the Front of Gaudier-Brzeska and the sympathetic critic T.E Hulme, though its semi-official war art shares the pre-1914 preoccupations of abstracted, dehumanised combat. William Roberts’ work in BLAST 2 takes the geometric figures of David Bomberg’s ‘Mud Bath’ and sets them against each other. His state-commissioned war paintings are less extreme, in that they show rather distressed figures involved in the tedious duties and tasks that made up most of the time not being directly threatned with death. Lewis’ commissioned works like ‘A Battery Shelled’ (1919) similarly return to the figure, only to distort it with Vorticist jaggedness, treating the chaos of No Man’s Land with the same threatening geometry as his 1914 ‘Plan of War’. The shelled battery is what Tom Normand called ‘a fragmented Vorticist architecture’, stylistically consistent with his pre-war work, if now setting it in a recognisable historical time and place.

Edward Wadsworth, Rotterdam, 1914

The Vorticist attitude to war sometimes resembles Dada in its veering from a glorying in destruction to an oblique irony to deliberate nonsense. In the ‘War Number’ BLAST 2, ‘The Crowd Master’ claims that the war caused the popular press to resemble the splenetic sloganeering of BLAST itself, while ‘Super-Krupp, or War’s End’ in BLAST 2 breezily predicts perpetual war: ‘we might eventually arrive at such a point of excellence that two-thirds of the world might be exterminated with mechanical precision in a fortnight. War might be treated on the same basis as agriculture.’ Then we have the point ‘nobody but Marinetti, the Kaiser and professional soldiers actually WANT war’ followed by the more disturbing contention (which points the way to Lewis’ later Fascism, here with a more bohemian tinge): ‘all men cannot, and never will be, ‘philosophic men’. So what are they going to be: soldiers and politicians, a good many, I expect – and much happier and more amusing that way…do not let us, like Christian Missionaries, spoil the savages all around us’.

‘Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.’
Wyndham Lewis, The Code of a Herdsman

Vorticism shares with Futurism and the avant-gardes that would follow it (Constructivism, De Stijl, Neues Bauen) a desire to change much more than just art practice, to alter the city and everyday life – born of Lewis’ permanently conflicting duality of ‘art’ and ‘life’, with one or the other becoming supreme at various points – though never quite managing to fuse, unlike his inadvertent continental successors. These contradictions are worked out in the Nietzschean Code of a Herdsman and the urbanist treatise The Caliph’s Design. The former is a restatement of the artist’s primacy, with its misanthropy and misogyny unleavened by the familiar droll contrarianism. Most remarkable here is the advocation of a divided subjectivity: not the Bergsonism he derides in BLAST (and would devote much of the 1920s to demolishing) but the self as a series of contraries: a line similar to Blake’s in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘without contraries there is no progression’.

‘Never fall into the vulgarity of assuming yourself to be one ego. Each trench must have another one behind it. Each single self – that you manage to be at any given time – must have five at least in front of it. B will see what is hidden to D.’

The motif of the self divided, a mutant version of the Cartesian dualism, recurs in the stories collected as The Wild Body. These stories mostly precede Vorticism, but the statements of intent are recognisably akin to the aphoristic, telgraphed sloganeering spluttering of Vorticist prose: outlining a vision of humanity inspired by ridicule, ‘essays in a new human mathematic’ or depictions of ‘intricately moving bobbins…not creations but puppets’. The Wild Bodies are ‘not human beings. Their mechanism is a logical structure.’ The role of the satirist then, is to ‘thump us like a racing engine in the body of a car’.

From the Life of the Marionettes

CRW Nevinson, A Dawn, 1914

The 1918 version of Tarr represents an attempt to transfer this prose into an (almost) conventional novelistic form, laying the foundations for the ‘cinematic’ style that would mark his 20s-30s novels. ‘It was my object to eliminate anything less essential than a noun or a verb. Propositions, pronouns, articles – the small fry – I would abolish. Of course I was unable to do this, but for the purposes of the novel I produced a somewhat jagged prose.’ This is at work most obviously in Tarr’s descriptive passages, such as this from a dancehall scene, where the figures in conflict across the room appear as a more figurative version of a Vorticist abstract:

‘==Their hostess also was dancing. Kreisler noted her with a wink of recognition. ==Dancing very slowly, almost mournfully, he and his partner bumped into her each time they passed. The widow felt the impact, but it was only at the third round that she perceived the method and intention inducing these bumps. She realised that they were going to collide with the other lady. This collision could not be avoided. But she shrank away, made herself as small as possible, bumped gently and apologised over her shoulder with a smile and a screwing up of the eyes, full of meaning. ==At the fourth turn of the room, however, Kreisler having increased her speed sensibly, she was on her guard, in fact already suggesting that she should be taken back to her seat. He pretended to be giving the hostess a wide berth, this time, but suddenly and gently swerved, and bore down upon her. The widow veered frantically, took a false step, tripped on her dress, tearing it and fell to the ground.’

This partially successful linguistic purging results in a fitful, cicular style, fitting the geometries of the dancers. The regular use of the ‘==’ has a montage effect, rupturing the text and jolting it forwards. Used here, it suggests moments of particular intensity in the movements, stuttering the queasy flow.

The most extreme point of Vorticism in prose however is Enemy of the Stars, a play, of a sort, included in BLAST 1. To disassemble this chaotic mess of pronouncements, atrocities, apocalyptic imagery and disjointed description into a sequence of events is all but impossible. It traces the Agonistic battles of two protagonists, one of whom eventually is killed by the other. The title aligns it with the ‘Storming Heaven’ attempted by the avantgarde, with Malevich/Matyushin/Kruchenykh’s Victory over the Sun or Marinetti’s La Conquete des Etoiles, though with this utopianism dragged down into Vorticism’s industrial wasteland. The figures themselves are part of the landscape – a broken tangle of flesh, nature, machinery and industrial waste: the Yard in which part of it takes place is

‘Rouge mask in aluminium mirror, sunset’s grimace through the night.

A leaden gob, slipped at zenith, first drop of violent night, spreads cataclysmically in harsh water of coming. Caustic Reckett’s stain.

Three trees, above canal, sentimental, black and conventional in number, drive leaf flocks, with jeering cry.

Or they slightly bend their joints, impossible acrobats; step rapidly forward, faintly incline their heads.

Across the mud is pod of the canal their shadows are gawky toy crocodiles, sawed up and down by infant giant?’

The Marinetti-inspired ‘destruction of syntax’ aspired to in Tarr is here complete. The succession of incongrous yet evocative images mark it out as a rare English follower of Lautreamont’s ‘Chance Meetings’. Aside from the intriguing, horrifying maze of the style, this incarnates Lewis’ vision of a society and self in endless conflict. In his work there runs a kind of negative, irresolveable dialectic, with destruction as the only possible outcome. In a 1932 essay on the play, Lewis writes of ‘the human mind’ as ‘an enemy of life, an oddity outside the machine’. This total metaphysical pessimism would seem to come from elsewhere than a faddish, self-dramatising art movement, though this is essentially what Vorticism was, and from where it drew its strength.

Wyndham Lewis, The Crowd, 1916

‘Kill John Bull with Art! I shouted. And John and Mrs Bull leapt with joy, in a cynical convulsion, for they felt safe as houses. And so did I.’
Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering

The PLACID, NON-ENERGISED Future

Frederick Etchells, Hyde Park, 1915

Post-war, there were hints of what Vorticism could have become, an analogue of the constructive avant-gardes of Russia and Germany, with their aims to transform everyday life: though this is held back essentially by ego, by Lewis’ refusal to take his own advice in his constant insistence on his status as Artist, possessor of a superior perception. Perhaps the last Vorticist tract is the 1919 The Caliph’s Design – Architects, Where is Your Vortex? Here Lewis advocates the effective reconstruction of London along Vorticist principles. This reconstructive vision pervades the works of the 1920 ‘Group X’ exhibition, such as Wadsworth’s proto-brutalist studies for a Vorticist architecture, or a canvas like Cuthbert Hamilton’s ‘Reconstruction’, where the debris of Vorticism is given striking colour, seething with life, implying the illusory victory. This cleaning away of the wreckage of history parallels the pamphlet’s tone: ‘we are all perfectly agreed, are we not, that practically any house, railing, monument, wall, structure, thoroughfare, or lamp post in this city should be instantly pulled down..?’ Such statements are tempered by an ironic paternalism, that such a permanent revolution is necessary if only for the artist to gain acceptance: ‘when I say that I should like to see a completely transfigured world, it is not because I want to look at it. It is you who would look at it. It would be your spirit that would gain by this exhilarating spectacle. I should merely benefit, I and other painters like me, by no longer finding ourselves in the position of freaks.’

Edward Wadsworth, Abstract Composition, 1915

There is a refusal here of collectivity, which would be the real end of the movement: Lewis’ insistence on its efficacy only as a vehicle for his own aggrandisement. Undoubtedly he was the prime theorist and ideologist of the movement, but no more than, say, Van Doesburg dominated De Stijl, which certainly didn’t lead to the dissolution of the Dutch avant-garde. Lewis would claim in the 50s that ‘Vorticism was what I said and did for a certain period’, to the justified outrage of the surviving members such as William Roberts. What happens next to Lewis is fascinating, in that he morphs himself into his own collectivity, ‘shaking the Bolshevist with one hand and the Fascist with the other’, what McLuhan called a ‘one-man avant-garde’, transferring what elsewhere in Europe was the collective’s role onto his own persona as The Enemy, an inevitably quixotic campaign. However the real failure of the English avant-garde was a consequence of the outcome of the First World War: Britain smugly Victorious, yet so shaken by the experience of total war that it would shelter in its arcadian fantasy until rudely awakened again only 20 years later. It would be assisted in its slumber by the United States, gradually assuming its worldwide role and responsibility as guardian of laissez-faire and imperialism, effacing the residues of ‘the dubious continent of Europe’: the only acceptable continental influence being occasional outgrowths of Parisian art deco, which had cut itself off from the Berlin-Moscow currents of the new avant-garde, enjoying its own luxuriant slumber in a slightly more aesthetically pleasing manner than the English.

CRW Nevinson, Poster for Wembley Exhibition, 1925

This decline is swift and tragi-comic: see for instance CRW Nevinson’s deco poster for the 1925 Wembley exposition for the transition from BLAST to Betjeman. Or to see what happened instead of the Vorticist reconstruction of London, go to Aldwych, laid out in the 1920s, to Bush House’s Beaux-Arts, neoclassical tribute to British-American Friendship. Walking up from Bush House along Kingsway then turning into High Holborn is a (now rather unremarkable) office block – designed by Frederick Etchells, signatory of the Vorticist manifesto, this was the first Modernist building in London, as late as 1930. Etchells was the translator of Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture, and it's notable how for the next decade the avant-garde would be an importation along with the wave of emigres post-1933, the British adaptation of it into something as distinctive as its forbears more or less forgotten. If Vorticism returns, it is in the 1950s-60s transformation of the Corbusian beton brut into the totally English 'New Brutalism', which Reyner Banham nearly correctly called the first significant British contribution to Modernism – which in its techno-primitivism, its rictus rectilinearity, is Wadsworth’s Vorticist architecture made ferroconcrete flesh, barely imaginable anywhere else but in Britain.

Cuthbert Hamilton, Reconstruction, 1920

The other legacy of the Vortex is that of crazes and fads. The Vorticists were adepts at creating a moral panic, leading the press to make the connection between revolutionary art and revolutionary politics that they themselves refused. This reached its highpoint soon after the first BLAST, when Lewis was asked by the Prime Minister, Asquith, to assure him that he had no subversive intent. Michael Bracewell caught this as the Vorticist ‘blueprint for self-advertisement that would do credit to the most accomplished of contemporary PR companies’: but also as ‘a blueprint for punk rock’, so its no surprise that their descendants are more the likes of Mark E Smith than the proudly vacuous Britartists. It's an interesting irony though that a group so concerned with timelessness, stillness, an impregnable centre orchestrating energy, would be most influential in its use of sudden shock and the transient moment of outrage. Nonetheless, the Vorticist claim was that ‘a movement towards art and imagination could burst up in this unmusical, anti-artistic, unphilosophic country with more force than anywhere else’: and that still sounds like a precise description.

Patterns and Plans

2007-02-10T10:47:00.000-08:00

Architectural Drawings of the 1960s

Gordon Cullen, for Homes for Today and Tomorrow (Ministry of Housing, 1961)

An intriguing by-product of the 1960s' architectural fetish for the ex nihilo was its proliferation of deeply peculiar drawings. A budding Piranesi or Chernikhov would have all manner of opportunity to sketch out their own particular vision of a collective future, and in so doing created something as jarring in its schematic, rectilinear design as Library Music LPs or Penguin Book covers, only less lauded, perhaps because of the realities that the plans would degenerate into. They would be mocked by writers like Jonathan Raban by the 70s as depictions 'strangely tapering humanoids' who couldn't mess up the immaculate architecture and the geometric certainties of the town plans. Actually the images from this time veer from genuinely rather terrifying images of technocracy that evoke something to break the will of Number Six in The Prisoner, to really quite cute scribbles of happy proletarian families in their open-plan Parker Morris apartments. The pictures below, designs for projects built and unbuilt, fantastical and mundane, (all British with one obvious exception) present various different patterns of the future, unified perhaps only by their optimism, for better or worse...(click on pics to view the little peoploids)

Alison and Peter Smithson, Sheffield University Project, 1953

Gordon Cullen, for Homes for Today and Tomorrow (Ministry of Housing, 1961)

Cedric Price's Fun Palace, 1961

From the Master Plan for the unbuilt New Town at Hook, Hampshire (Greater London Council, 1961)

Alison and Peter Smithson, early sketch for Robin Hood Gardens, 1964

Cedric Price, Oxford St Corner House, 1966

From the GLC Publication Thamesmead (1968)

Norman Foster and Buckminster Fuller, 'Climatroffice', 1971

From Rolf Schonknecht, Gyorsabban- de Hogyan (Leipzig/Budapest, 1976)