The Experience of Modernism

Modern Architects and the Future City, 1928-53

John R. Gold

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136743047
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Making extensive use of information gained from in-depth interviews with architects active in the period between 1928-1953, the author provides a sympathetic understanding of the Modern Movement's architectural role in reshaping the fabric and structure of British metropolitan cities in the post-war period and traces the links between the experience of British modernists and the wider international modern movement.

1 INTRODUCTION

An ideology which states that the world is essentially meaningless but that we ought to strive, suffer and fight for it is unlikely to be powerful because of the essential contradiction among its components.… An ideology by contrast which has a clear image of a significant and exciting future and a clear view of what people have to do in order to achieve this future is likely to be powerful whether or not it is true.

Kenneth Boulding¹

Story-telling has enormous cultural significance. Traditional story-tellers memorised epic tales from the Golden Age and recounted them to new audiences with consistent content and inflection, thereby transmitting values and social memory. Their present-day equivalents may often use technological media to reach far-flung audiences but their actions have many parallels. Stories provide the structure into which detail inserts itself. They order the flux of events, resolve ambiguity, reduce the disorienting effects of change, and help to clothe the world with meaning, linking together isolated events and experiences with ‘bridges’ of causal analysis.² Above all, they retain their age-old function of identifying heroes and villains.

The word ‘story’ suggests informality, but story-telling also pervades the formal construction of historical knowledge, most notably through ‘Grand Narratives’. These are stories with unifying properties that shape historiography and act as taken-for-granted frameworks into which, consciously or otherwise, new knowledge is fitted.³ They thrive whenever it is credible to resist plurality and merge experience into a single thread. Moreover, they gain strength from appeal to profound moral principles. A Grand Narrative does not just offer seamless explanation for events. It also carries the sanction of relating the flow of those events to high ideals such as the triumph of Good over Evil, the struggle for liberation, or the path to ultimate redemption.

Powerful advocacy by their supporters lends Grand Narratives an aura of permanence but they eventually lose their hold as circumstances place them under pressure. Prevailing myths are challenged by events that yesterday they accommodated effortlessly. Statements of self-apparent truths become ideological assertions. Freshly won freedoms turn out to be old oppressions in disguise. Revered authorities suddenly acquire feet of clay. Sequences of occurrences once considered evidence of dogged persistence on the road to final success are reinterpreted as pride before an inevitable fall.

Modernism and Grand Narratives

Few branches of historical study reveal the operation of Grand Narratives more clearly than the history of modern architecture. Over the last 70 years, two Grand Narratives have codified knowledge about the origins, development and purpose of architectural modernism. Both became the unquestioned framework for scholarship in their day, even though they reached opposite conclusions about the historical trajectory of the Modern Movement. The first looked at the origins and development of modernism, celebrated its rise to prominence and heralded the imminent fulfilment of its historic mission. The second reappraised matters in the light of subsequent knowledge, chronicling modernism’s dramatic fall from grace and searching for who was to blame.

The first Grand Narrative formally appeared in the late 1920s and dominated interpretations of the history of architectural modernism for more than four decades. While it held sway, historians selectively identified key thinkers and mapped chains of events to show modern architecture as the outcome of a long and continuous process of evolution. Embracing deep social commitment, purged of applied ornamentation and other ‘paraphernalia of historical reminiscence’,⁴ modern architecture arose from the rational application of technology to building and construction. As such, it was regarded as the only authentic contemporary architecture in that it employed the materials and constructional methods specific to that age and matched built forms to the functions that they served.

When substantiating that point, historians emphasised those antecedents that heralded the emergence of a rationalist approach to modern architecture. By contrast, they downplayed the rival attractions of the organic tradition within modernism and marginalised modernist architectural movements not conforming to the idea of continuous evolution. The German Expressionist movement, for instance, was dismissed either as a ‘regrettable, but luckily temporary, Mannerist interpretation of rationalist tendencies’ or as a historic dead-end.⁵ Only much later was Expressionism’s place in the intellectual melting pot of Weimar Germany recognised, not least for its influence on leading figures at the Bauhaus – the institution usually taken as the hearth of rationalist thought.

Justification for this blatant selectivity primarily rested on the Zeitgeist (‘Spirit of the Age’), an idea devised by Romantic philosophers and elaborated by art historians such as Heinrich Wolfflin. The Zeitgeist was first applied to the history of architectural modernism by writers such as Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Nikolaus Pevsner and Sigfried Giedion.⁶ According to this perspective, every age generated a new expression of collective humanity, characterised by a spirit that invalidated all previous traditions and cultural patterns. For their part, architects were committed ‘to the revelation of the essential spirit unique to their time, morally superior to all others and tending towards ever more advanced development’.⁷

Exactly how that revelation came about was open to debate. Pevsner’s account suggested that the architect, as the individual with aesthetic awareness and expertise, was the person who uncovered the spirit of the age. Others depicted architects acting as the tools of the superhuman and elusive Zeitgeist.⁸ The precise mechanism at stake, however, made little real difference to the overall belief that modern architecture gained its validity from facing up to the challenge of modern times. Art Deco, Neo-Classicism, National Romanticism and other contemporary non-modernist movements lacked that validity, even though each in its day attracted far more adherents than modernism. Popularity was no guide to historic mission.

In due course, this Grand Narrative crumbled under pressure from two distinct directions. One source came from developments in historical scholarship (see below). The other, and more powerful source of pressure lay outside academic circles since, regardless of their intrinsic intellectual appeal, Grand Narratives are most plausible when validated by events taking place in the outside world. Widespread adoption of modernist principles in urban reconstruction programmes seemingly authenticated the historic triumph of modernism. Twenty years later, popular discontent with the products of those principles made that position untenable. Concern about the dysfunctional consequences of supposedly functional architecture led to sustained critical analysis of issues like the death of the street, social isolation and pathology, the constructional and structural failings of public housing, and the ambiguities of control in semi-public space. The self-referential and spartan aesthetics of modernist buildings were derided as boring; the associated urban planning denounced as autocratic. Even the derided slums were redesignated as homely and of human scale.⁹ As the evidence stacked up, it became progressively less feasible to treat difficulties as representing either teething troubles or poor applications of visionary principles by less-gifted architects.

A new Grand Narrative grew out of this sea-change in attitudes. This version traced chains of causation that linked the deficiencies of recently designed urban environments back to the flawed visions of pioneering modern architects. Those supporting this view reappraised buildings and environments once warmly greeted as affirmations of social progress and a brighter future as hugely expensive follies foist on an unsuspecting population. They recognised that the associated problems were persistent rather than transitory. They seriously questioned the results of applying abstract philosophies, especially functionalism and aesthetic minimalism, to public housing. Perhaps more damagingly, they decried the humanism and social engineering embraced by many modern architects as megalomania. Judged in moral terms – the hallmark of a Grand Narrative – the damage inflicted on the human and physical fabric of the city was taken as the melancholy consequence of high-handed arrogance. The culprits were a small coterie of radical European architects and their supporters.

It is easy to find commentators on the urban environment who have expressed this view. Alice Coleman¹⁰ blamed the pathology of high-rise public housing estates directly on the design deficiencies of a flawed visionary utopia. Robert Hughes¹¹ censured modern architecture for a utopianism that disastrously attempted to remake cities in the light of fanciful ideals. Christopher Booker¹² sought to show how:

a certain image of the city … [an] image of colossal buildings and restless traffic, first came to haunt a number of science-fiction writers and architects more than fifty years ago and how their ideas became the orthodoxy which hovered over the wholesale reconstruction of many of Britain’s cities in the Sixties and early Seventies.

Alison Ravetz, in a more measured analysis, drew connections between an ‘increasingly dominant’ modern style that developed in Britain after 1950 and ‘images not yet built’. Prominent among them were ‘Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse from the 1930s and, beyond that, the ferro-concrete cité industrielle of Tony Garnier, published in 1917’.¹³

The French-Swiss architect, Le Corbusier, features remarkably often in these accounts, even in the popular media. Peter Popham, for instance, noted how designers of high-rise flats were under ‘the inspiration of Le Corbusier and CIAM’. The latter acronym (standing for Les Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) received no explanation other than the inaccurate claim that it was ‘the modern movement’s ruling council’. Their vision, it was said, led to a ‘stark and simple’ solution to housing needs. This comprised ‘huge slabs or towers of housing rising majestically and disdainfully above the old towns, set in sprawling parkland and totally divorced from the historical fabric’.¹⁴

Beatrix Campbell took that theme further in her reflections on the fate of four high-rise blocks of flats in Glasgow’s Gorbals district known as ‘the Queenies’. Although only built in the 1960s, the estate’s severe structural and social problems prompted the local authority to demolish the flats in September 1993 rather than commit any further resources for repairs and modifications. Campbell primarily blamed the architect, Sir Basil Spence, and his mode of working for the resulting disaster. Spence did not consult the community. Rather, he visited France, ‘consulted Le Corbusier’s Unité flats and brought his brutalism back to one of the most optimistic and needy neighbourhoods in Western Europe’. The unfortunate Spence was not alone in falling into this trap, since the Conservative governments of the time were similarly ‘bewitched by the promise of Le Corbusier’s utilitarian urbanism’.¹⁵

The crucial role of Le Corbusier also figures in formal accounts of town planning history. Peter Hall equated Le Corbusier’s influence over the creative imagination of modern architects with the malign hold that Rasputin exerted over the Russian royal family.¹⁶ His account presented a sequence of schemes designed or influenced by Le Corbusier to illustrate the progress of modernist ideas of city form and planning from utopian ambition to popular disillusionment. In chronological order the examples included the Ville Contemporaine, the Ville Radieuse, the city of Chandigarh in India, Brasilia, Sheffield’s Park Hill and Glasgow’s ‘Queenies’.

Similarly, Jules Lubbock allotted Le Corbusier a central place in his study of the relationship between politics and architecture in Britain. Le Corbusier’s work, covering the spectrum between interior design, housing and city planning, exemplified the enlarged role played by the architect. Lubbock noted that ‘architect-planner-designers’ had exercised great influence from the 1940s until the early 1980s. Their position was sustained by a permissive framework of planning law and aesthetic control. As a result, they exercised ‘almost dictatorial powers and immunity from interference either by the owners or residents of private property or by the general public who opposed the new projects’.¹⁷

These interpretations were not confined to European writers. James Howard Kunstler,¹⁸ for example, blamed modernism for impoverishing the American environment by ‘promoting a species of urbanism that destroyed age-old social arrangements and with them, urban life as a general proposition’. His argument rested on a set of reciprocal trans-Atlantic influences that had shaped architectural practice. During the early twentieth century, America influenced Europe. European architects became enamoured with built forms that originated in North America, notably industrial architecture and the new metal-framed skyscrapers, and copied aspects of their construction and aesthetics. Later, as many architects fled to the USA to escape from Nazi persecution, they effectively reimported the results.

Quickly finding their way into leading roles in academic institutions, the refugees became ‘part of the cultural establishment … practically overnight’. From that base, Gropius, Breuer, Mies and the rest had a major impact on built forms, while Le Corbusier’s ‘particular brand of urbanism’, promoted by the refugees, dominated the thinking of the planning profession. The Radiant City appealed to architects, property developers, and city authorities alike and its combination of tall buildings and super-highways were imitated in housing projects all over America. The defects of the concept were quickly apparent but that hardly stopped anyone from building these estates, so powerful was the ostensible hegemony of the ‘Formgivers’. Their failure to create a social utopia was ultimately recognised, but not before they did ‘tremendous damage to the physical setting for civilization’.

In praise of complexity

These examples are neither atypical nor taken out of context. They give insight into the arguments, style of language and the certainties expressed. Collectively, they show the existence of a credible and persuasive story that directly associates present-day disasters with the beguiling visionary prototypes of a previous era. Nevertheless, closer examination reveals the importance of recognising the ideological context of writings about modern architecture. ‘Ideology’ is an inescapable part of the process by which people come to terms with the world around them. Defined here as the pervasive set of ideas, values, images and stories that groups employ to make the world more intelligible to themselves, an ideology is a frame that makes sense of experience, past and present, and maps hopes for the future. More often than not, it also serves to advance the interests of a particular group, placing them in the centre of the narratives that they share.¹⁹

Applying this analysis to the history of modernism, we see how ideology helps to promote tendencies towards conceptual tidiness, stripping away complexity and ambiguity in favour of simple deterministic sequences and readily identifiable outcomes. Pevsner, Giedion, Hitchcock and others who first wrote the ‘official’ history of early modernism actively promoted the movement that they studied: indeed it is fair to say that they saw no special distinction between the work of the architect and the historian in that both were actively engaged in the creation of a theory of architectural practice.²⁰ They lionised the accomplishments of leading modern architects, who were often friends and colleagues. They constructed doctrines, such as the notoriously ‘elastic’ notion of functionalism,²¹ that included architects regarded as motivated by the ‘right spirit’ and excluded those who failed to meet those exacting standards. For their part, the architects aided the historians by publishing those works recognisably permeated by modernism even though, in reality, they could fit almost any progressive historical narrative. A careful veil was drawn over early works supposedly marred by compromises or regional influences.²²

If ideological factors were involved in lionising the pioneers, they were equally implicated in the way in which modernism was subsequently denigrated. Critics are frequently advocates of alternative visions. Supporters of community architecture or renewal of Garden City ideals, for instance, have vested interests in portraying modernism as a movement that led inexorably to monumental solutions to urban reconstruction that crushed the individual. By doing so, they promote a conveniently a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Anticipations
• 3 Staking a claim
• 4 Finding one another
• 5 Exhibiting the future
• 6 Projects and plans
• 7 Marking time
• 8 Dreams and false expectations
• 9 Old and new agenda
• Notes and references
• Index