The Practice of Modernism

Modern Architects and Urban Transformation, 1954–1972

John R. Gold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415258425
• eBook ISBN: 9781134514113
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

In this sequel to his widely-acclaimed book The Experience of Modernism (1997), John Gold continues his detailed enquiry into the Modern Movement's involvement in urban planning and city design.

Making extensive use of information gained from hours of in-depth interviews with architects of the time, this new book examines the complex relationship between vision and subsequent practice in the saga of postwar urban reconstruction. The Practice of Modernism:

• traces the personal, institutional and professional backgrounds of the architects involved in schemes for reconstruction and replanning
• deals directly with the progress of urban transformation, focusing on the contribution that modern architects and architectural principles made to town centre renewal and social housing
• highlights how the exuberance of the 1960s gave way to the profound reappraisal that emerged by the early 1970s.

Written by an expert, this is a key book on the planning aspects of the modernist movement for architectural historians, urban geographers, planners and all concerned with understanding the recent history of the contemporary city.

Chapter 1
On the threshold

Gradually it becomes possible to free more kinds of buildings from controls, and make a serious start on many large projects, such as the office blocks in the City of London. I do hope that building-owners will call for modern architecture and decoration. Our generation wants a style of its own and from what I have seen since I came to the Ministry of Works, if our architects are given the chance, they will create such a style, worthy of the past and expressive of the new reign.

Sir David Eccles¹

With these words, the newly knighted Minister of Works sent a cautiously optimistic New Year’s message via the pages of the Architects’ Journal to those who might identify themselves as modern architects. Somewhat surprisingly, they were in need of encouragement. However much hindsight suggests that architectural modernism was on the threshold of its profound influence on urban reconstruction and renewal in the postwar period, there was little indication that this state of affairs was imminent in January 1954 – the starting point for this study. Few in power promised that eventuality and equally few architectural commentators predicted it. Most readers would have noticed that the writer prefaced his comments with the word ‘gradually’ and might well have concluded that they had heard it before. After all, this was the same David Eccles, who positively ‘took a pleasure in exercising his responsibilities [as Minister of Works] for the demolition’ of the Festival of Britain exhibition site on the South Bank;² primarily because his government regarded it as a monument to the socialist ideology of the previous Labour administration. At a stroke, this action symbolically punctured any lingering traces of postwar political consensus about planning for London, gratuitously removed most traces of an event that brought colour to the grey postwar city, and returned a formerly blitzed area to something resembling its former status. It was an unconvincing basis for fostering hope for the future.

Other considerations reinforced the gloom. Severe economic difficulties persisted, with national bankruptcy masked only by the availability of American loans. Queues and shortages had dragged on well into the 1950s. Indeed the prospects for Britain’s immediate economic future still alarmed policy-makers at the end of 1953, regardless of the juggernaut of patriotic sentiment about the boundless possibilities of the ‘new reign’, sometimes optimistically called the ‘new Elizabethan age’.³ The burden of public spending caused grave anxiety, with reports of the ‘nation straining at the limit’ to meet its external strategic and imperial commitments while somehow trying to reconstruct its battered towns and cities.⁴ At this time, as Philip Powell noted, ‘we were having worse rationing than in the trickiest times of the war’.⁵ The newspapers, almost certainly acting on Treasury briefing, prepared public opinion for more bad news. The Times’ ‘Special Correspondent’ warned that longer term improvements in living standards might necessitate renewed short-term sacrifice: ‘a temporary level of saving and investment entailing a drastic tightening of belts – or an increase in working hours, effort and skill which apparently many people would regard as no less painful’.⁶ In the event, this further extension of hard times did not materialise but the underlying spirit of Austerity persisted. Central government continued to decide the priorities about where to channel scarce investment. Other claimants for reconstruction funds were unlikely to receive resources, especially if meeting their needs meant boosting domestic consumption.

This, of course, did not imply that the results of the necessity-driven approach to reconstruction were negligible. The schools programme had sustained a prolonged wave of construction that kept pace with the ‘postwar bulge’ of youngsters now reaching school age. At its best, this programme had produced some outstanding new school buildings and acted as an important proving ground for modern constructional methods, especially those involving prefabrication, modularity and system building. The Hertfordshire programme and the Smithsons’ Mies-inspired competition-winning design for the school at Hunstanton (Norfolk) had contributed some of the iconic buildings of early postwar architecture. Factory construction in priority sectors continued apace. Lewis Mumford commended the ‘brisk rebuilding’ of factories of a type that ‘England forgot to build in the days of her unevenly distributed prosperity’,⁷ although in reality only a small fraction of the newly constructed industrial capacity was devoted to replacing archaic plant or to establishing new firms and projects.⁸ The housing drive too had had its undoubted achievements. The local authority sector had risen to the challenges thrown down by successive ministers; each of them determined to serve the interests of their political party by playing the ‘numbers game’ – the colloquial term for the contest between the Labour and Conservative administrations to see which could construct more residential units. Clement Attlee’s Labour Government had managed 900,000 new home completions in the first five years after the Second World War. This was somewhat short of its target of 1.25 million dwellings, but commendable enough given the prevailing economic and logistic difficulties. The momentum had continued under the Tories. In 1953, completions surpassed the official target of 300,000, with the public sector authorities contributing just over 229,000 of the new dwellings.

Yet what started to rankle, especially as labour and material shortages eased, was that so much of this effort proceeded unquestioningly on established lines. The vast majority of new housing projects, for instance, perpetuated the pattern of the interwar period. As Chapter 8 shows, 77 per cent of around 195,000 new starts in 1953 were for conventional houses and a further 20 per cent were for low-rise flats.⁹ The new estates of ‘council flats’ almost invariably lacked the breadth of vision that preoccupied the urban imaginings of the Modern Movement during the 1930s.¹⁰ Not only had the agencies responsible for their construction skimped on social facilities and landscaping, which apparently awaited the arrival of better times, but also the designs failed to inspire. When becoming City Architect for Birmingham in 1952, for instance, Alwyn Sheppard Fidler recalled his first impressions of the 12-storey blocks appearing in the city’s Duddeston and Nechells Redevelopment Area as being ‘the lumpiest things you’d ever seen’.¹¹ Observers looked in some envy at the advances in practice elsewhere; most notably in Scandinavia but also in France where the housing programme initiated in September 1948 had freely turned to rationalisation of building methods and the use of new techniques of industrial construction (see Chapter 8). Notwithstanding the wholly understandable preoccupation with short-term needs, there was little sense that British policy-makers were seriously trying to accommodate the potential of the future – at least, not the potential of the future that modern architects cherished.

To compound matters, whenever there were opportunities to rethink the design of settlements, practice seemed destined to gravitate towards the tried and tested. The first generation of 14 New Towns created between 1947 and 1950 were a case in point. Modern architects were ‘very taken with the New Town idea . . . socially they made a lot of sense’.¹² They applauded the control that the New Towns Act 1946 had devolved to the quasi-independent, task force-like development corporations to design and build their respective towns and noted that this included control over their budgets. They relished the fact that constructing the New Towns required an engagement with the principles by which the building blocks of a city combined to make a greater whole. Modern architects, ever partial to large-scale projects, welcomed the prospect of new, comprehensively planned settlements that might display what was possible when adequate resources came together with analysis of (functional) need to provide an all-inclusive answer to a particular social problem. They also endorsed the planners’ commitment to neighbourhood units, which meshed seamlessly with modernist thinking about the nature and function of towns in the modern age. All these elements aroused enthusiasm as part of a paradigm of large-scale construction and centralist planning that might inspire development elsewhere.¹³

Subsequent assessments dispelled the initial optimism. The layout, design and aesthetics of the early New Towns turned out to be direct descendants of the Garden Cities; something that was not a foregone conclusion at the outset. Supporters of modernism castigated the New Towns as never rising ‘to anything that was architecturally sufficient’ and as missing ‘the virtue of civic design’.¹⁴ In particular, they found them ‘petty, amorphous and suburban’,¹⁵ replete with their low-density residential neighbourhoods, cottage-like housing, picturesque curving tree-lined roads and ‘sterile’ semi-public open spaces.¹⁶ The passage of the Town Development Act 1952 promised even less. The Act created collaborative frameworks that would allow existing country towns to receive ‘overspill’ expansion from ‘overcrowded’ conurbations. Although potentially complementary to the New Towns as an arm of dispersal policy, the so-called ‘expanded town’ schemes took an inordinately long time to establish.¹⁷ The enabling legislation almost guaranteed that they would be more akin to a modified version of old-fashioned municipal suburbanisation – providing a formula for decanting cottage estates to the countryside – rather than realising their promise as new settlements.¹⁸ The Act made no stipulations about provision of employment and created no more than an outline for the resolution of issues concerned with the associated social and community facilities. Equally, there were no specific provisions for the necessary redesign of town centres to cope with the demands of a larger population – a question left to ad hoc arrangements.¹⁹

Put more generally, those who regarded themselves as progressive felt a growing sense of dismay that the strategic priorities and patterns of development emerging were a betrayal of the postwar vision.²⁰ The advisory plans commissioned by municipalities during the war or immediately afterwards may have offered, at best, only a restrained modernism in terms of design, but did hint at a commitment to radical reconstruction.²¹ For a brief time,

science, philosophy, art, psychology, sociology and engineering [had] seemed as one. One imagined a new kind of human rather sensitive and certainly artistic who would poetically enjoy all this and be himself very creative. The machine was going to be the method by which these possibilities were available to all. Housing was going to have all sorts of added facilities, nursery schools, workshops, sports facilities, communal halls.²²

The euphoria of that moment had long passed and scepticism had set in. Local councils’ priorities for rehousing and for the quick restoration of commercial activity militated against the longer time-spans necessary for comprehensive redevelopment and positively discouraged new ways of tackling urban problems.²³ In the country at large, the overwhelming desire to re-establish domestic life and familiar routines as quickly as possible after the dislocations of war had revived traditional housing preferences. As if to mock the pro-urban instincts of many planners and architects, it looked more likely that the future society of Britain would dwell in ‘the suburbs and the bungalows’ rather than in ‘the great cities’.²⁴ Furthermore, expert opinion seemed to have moved decisively against the visions of the future city favoured by the Modern Movement. In his book Principles and Practice of Town and Country Planning – easily the most widely read planning textbook of its day – Lewis Keeble targeted the Ville Radieuse and its ilk for particular scorn:

The proposals just outlined for the creation or re-creation of great cities are hardly of more than academic interest in relation to this country; we have not the slightest need to create a new great city and it is reasonably certain that the redevelopment of our existing ones is bound to be on fairly conservative lines, since the resources available limit us to a very slow and gradual process of rebuilding, whereas change to a radically new form necessarily involves a rapid process in order to avoid complete chaos during the interim period; indeed, it is doubtful whether a large town, unless it has been virtually destroyed, can possibly be redeveloped on lines completely dissimilar from its existing form.²⁵

Sober confidence?

Despite, or arguably because of this cheerless outlook, one might have expected the architectural press to muster a vigorous counterview. It was perfectly plausible that the prevailing gloom could have triggered the same type of utopian impulse as that seen during the 1930s, when the forbidding extent of urban problems encouraged people of goodwill to campaign in favour of the bold, radical and, above all, untried visions with which the Modern Movement was associated. Such sentiments, however, remained out of step with the dominant view among observers of the architectural scene, who seemingly struggled with the burden of expectation over hope. Although editors of mainstream periodicals did their best to exhort their readership to look to the future with ‘sober confidence’,²⁶ their contributors stubbornly preferred sobriety to confidence. They might retain a powerful urge to wave the flag for modernism and repeat familiar injunctions about the virtue of the approaches that underpinned the new architecture, but their surveys of the state-of-the-art contained only a slowly increasing inventory of familiar buildings and structures. Their prevailing introspection about the immediate prospects for modern architecture gave no impression of conviction that the hour for change had come.

Recent books by those associated with the interwar Modern Movement, for example, underlined the uncertainties of the moment. Naturally, they continued to affirm the value of modernist principles for the task ahead, at least in broad terms. In a reissued edition of a 1932 text, Sir Howard Robertson stressed the importance of modernism’s organised and scientific approach to design at all scales, in particular to ‘that wider field of architecture, town planning, wherein the organisation is applied to the grouping and setting of buildings and groups of buildings as parts of a perceived and organic whole’.²⁷ Arthur Korn’s highly selective international survey in History Builds the Town followed the same policy of regarding town planning as a ‘wider field’ of architecture.²⁸ He reiterated the analytical significance of the fourfold classification of city functions associated with the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in a work that emphasised the value of functional purpose, hierarchical organisation and modern design. Although couched in seemingly dispassionate terms, Korn concluded that a ‘planned town, in contrast to the chaotic growth of past periods, will have to be based consciously on work, housing, and amenities linked by transport, expressing the spirit of human collective work.’²⁹

At the same time, some of their erstwhile colleagues from the interwar Modern Movement expressed what looked suspiciously like second thoughts in their writings. Frederick Gibberd’s Town Design absorbed modern architecture into the flow of an argument that cast around widely for historical precedents of good practice, but without allotting modernism any privileged place in shaping the city of the future.³⁰ Christopher Tunnard injected an even greater sense of detachment into his book The City of Man.³¹ He argued that the next twenty years would see ‘a revolution in architectural taste and form which will be of tremendous significance to city planning . . . which will, in fact go hand in hand with the new urbanism’.³² At the same time, he queried the form that this revolution would take. While ‘its name will be “modern”’, Tunnard suggested, its distinguishing features would be ‘an emphasis on scale and proportion, on ensemble, on ornament, on humanism’ and would be altogether different from that promised by the ‘international style’.³³

The major British architectural periodicals – all of which, apart from the weekly publication The Builder, were broadly sympathetic to modernism by this stage – exhibited a similar wariness. Their coverage provided implicit criticism of the domestic scene by showing that the fine architecture found abundantly in other countries was singularly absent from Great Britain. The monthly periodical Architectural Design, for example, opened 1954 with a survey of ‘tropical architecture’ designed by British practices,³⁴ quickly followed by a special issue on French architecture guest-edited by Ernö...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Illustration credits
• Preface
• Chapter 1: On the threshold
• Chapter 2: Practising modernism
• Chapter 3: Public and private
• Chapter 4: Professions
• Chapter 5: Towards renewal
• Chapter 6: Heart and soul
• Chapter 7: Second generation
• Chapter 8: The pursuit of numbers
• Chapter 9: With social intent
• Chapter 10: Succession
• Chapter 11: Late-flowering modernism
• Chapter 12: Storm clouds
• Notes and references