The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Routledge Revivals)

Rod Hackney

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138778948
• eBook ISBN: 9781317671145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

First published in 1990, this title presents the personal reflections of renowned community architect Rod Hackney, who served for many years as President of both the Royal Institute of British Architects and the International Union of Architects. Educated in the Modernist tradition of architecture in Britain and Denmark, Hackney's return to England in the 1970s changed his outlook completely. Cities like Birmingham and Sheffield had been ruined by ill-conceived planning; whole communities had been torn apart by massive destruction of Victorian terraces, and relocated to grim tower block estates. To those communities that he has rescued from the threat of redevelopment, Rod Hackney is a local hero. Determined to save Britain's inner cities, he has been a major influence on Prince Charles and a powerful spokesman for the silent majority of the urban poor, who often have no say as to where and how they live.

1 The Making of a Modernist

I was born in Liverpool, shortly after the height of the Blitz, in 1942. Like all major British towns and cities, Liverpool suffered terribly from the combination of German bombs and wartime neglect. The resulting havoc and decay were to prompt some of the most significant changes ever to appear on the face of Britain. But as a small boy in the mid-forties I remained blissfully unaware of the way these changes would affect my later life.

My mother, Rose, was a dancer, and my father, Bill, was an hotel chef. As a family we soon left Liverpool, for my father’s work took us all round the country. But when I was five he found a job in North Wales and bought a house in Bethesda, where we eventually settled. At school the lessons were given in Welsh, clearly a disadvantage for an English-speaking child, but the language barrier was eventually what led to my becoming an architect. I had to learn a whole new language, and not surprisingly, my written work suffered. But I always looked forward to art lessons, where there were no such problems; there, at last, I found a subject in which I could shine.

Before studying for my A levels there were the usual discussions about careers. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but my art teacher suggested that, because I was good at drawing and had an instinctive feel for perspectives and colours, perhaps I should become an architect. In the 1950s and early 1960s architecture was still considered an art, and skill at drawing was seen as a good enough reason to enter a course. Nowadays this has all changed. For example, maths is a requirement at A level; it wasn’t for me. Indeed, I didn’t even have maths at O level. My A level subjects were history, geography and art, and it was while studying for A levels that I decided to try my hand at an architectural career. I saw architecture possibly as an extension of the enjoyable and pleasurable art lessons at school.

When the time came I applied to Manchester University. At that time, the start of the sixties, Manchester and Liverpool were considered to be the top two schools of architecture in Britain, and so I knew competition would be tough. But I got a place, and in 1961 started my seven-year course. I was among the first students to receive a training devoted entirely to Modernism, which, with its revolutionary designs and use of new materials, seemed to provide the answers to so many current building problems.

Selling the Dream

Britain was still in the grip of the post-war housing programme, and building was booming. Vast areas in the suburbs and city centres were being razed to the ground in a bid to conquer the squalor of the slums. Massive blocks were altering the skylines of almost every town and city.

The rush to build a new Britain for the twentieth century had begun immediately after World War I, when Lloyd George launched his massive ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’ project, which aimed to build 300,000 new houses. Each successive government had recognized that a large part of its sustained success and survival lay in building as many houses as possible as quickly as possible. In exchange for its votes, the population was offered the quanta-tive solution for better living conditions.

After the urban destruction of World War II Churchill had tried to meet the desperate need for new homes. However, his attempts to drag a better Britain out of the rubble had failed, due to a shortage of supplies and a programme which was never fully developed. His plans were halted late in 1945 when the Labour Party came to power and announced its ‘Operation Housing’, under the charge of Aneurin Bevan. This was an early endorsement of standardized house building and the mass production ideas that we were to inherit – Churchill’s plans had been simply an acceleration of the traditional house-building programmes carried out between the wars, relying on labour-intensive methods, accepting a rather slow production rate, and using the huge reservoir of manpower returning from the war to reconstruct Britain.

In contrast, the Labour government’s programme was tackled like a military operation, even using wartime machinery – the Ministry of Supply, for example, converted its output from munitions to housing materials. The new styles, materials and town planning were seen as the only way forward in a country which, having prevailed against the wartime enemy, now had to take on the peacetime enemies at home – poverty and poor housing.

Amongst the new styles was that of the Modern Movement, which had begun with the German Bauhaus architects in the twenties and blossomed in Europe before the war. This particular method, which used the minimum of decoration, was seen by its protagonists as fundamental. To many of the new-thinking architects buildings such as Aarhus Town Hall in Denmark, built in 1939 by Arne Jacobsen and Eric Moller, made a refreshing change from the ubiquitous Gothic and Classical styles.

The new architecture appeared at first sight to be speedy and quick in production as well as flexible and adaptable in layout – hence its eager espousal by those who would rebuild the shattered Britain. But its use was limited immediately after the war because of its reliance on high technology and materials, like steel, that had become in short supply for anything other than the war effort. The period between 1945 and 1950 was therefore very much one of transition; for practical reasons building reverted to traditional form. All the while, however, the profession of architecture was gearing itself to mechanization, which would soon allow technology to flourish and make full use of the new styles and new materials.

Le Corbusier’s vision

The war had been over for more than fifteen years when I went to university, but almost all building was still Modernist. It was a style and a philosophy admired by state and architects alike for its Utopian vision. The designs and new materials also had the advantage of being quick and cheap. The architects associated with the Bauhaus, and Le Corbusier in particular, were the heroes whom our tutors encouraged us to emulate.

Le Corbusier’s vision was beginning to be realized in Britain: ‘Dwellings, urban and suburban, will be enormous and square-built; they will incorporate the principle of mass production and of large-scale industrialization. Our towns will be ordered instead of being chaotic.’ Just as he predicted, small-scale, traditional methods of designing and building had been abandoned.

Local authorities throughout the land had admired and adopted Le Corbusier’s neat plans and clear-cut solutions. La Ville Radieuse – a collection of drawings from 1935 demonstrating his ideas of zoning – provided a model which had been imitated all around the world. It showed towns built on a grid system and divided into zones for work, education, commerce, heavy industry and living. As students we knew that work lay with the local authorities after we qualified, and so we followed the Corbusian doctrine. If he and the councils wanted order, precision, standardization and industrialization, then so did we.

Towards a New Architect

The role of the architect had also changed during the twentieth century. Before Modernism became fashionable the architect had been a universal man – a problem solver and a visionary equipped with a broad technical knowledge of how things worked, from an engine to an electrical system. He was a practical person who was not afraid to get his hands dirty. Joseph Paxton, nineteenth-century gardener to the Duke of Devonshire, railway promoter, developer, contractor, town planner and Member of Parliament, was just such a man. Born a farmer’s son, he had no formal training as an architect, yet posterity remembers him for his brilliantly innovatory Crystal Palace, designed to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. Another of his schemes was for the Great Victorian Way, an 11-mile-long ‘M25’ around central London. The road was to be covered with a glass roof to reduce noise, and lined with houses, shopping arcades and public buildings; above everything would run a railway line.

The new-style designer, however, exemplified by Le Corbusier, was smart and chic with his sharp suits and round glasses. He could produce fine drawings and persuasive arguments for replacing anything old. Architecture had become a narrow discipline. Where once an architect would have had a thorough knowledge of design, engineering, planning and building, the job had shrunk to such a degree that he (a woman architect was rare) was seen as almost purely a designer – a cool, Corbusian character poised over a drawing desk creating tall, elegant structures. He would be heading a team supported by specialist engineers, planners and builders.

We young students were imbued with a great sense of our professional importance. Equipped with the new knowledge and ideals, we were being schooled to produce the new world. We were above criticism. This egotistical outlook was another Corbusian inheritance. His unflinching belief was that architects should be allowed to work without the hindrance of the public. Ordinary mortals, particularly clients, were in his opinion ignorant. ‘A great part of the present evil state of architecture is due to the client,’ he wrote, ‘to the man who gives the order, the man who pays. We are all acquainted with too many big businessmen, bankers and merchants, who tell us: “Ah, but I am merely a man of affairs, I live entirely outside the art world, I am a Philistine.”’

Le Corbusier’s influence on students was powerful, not least because his copious advice, recorded in a series of books, was presented in stirring, revolutionary language. It was his unswerving conviction that exerted such a seductive appeal. His Towards a New Architecture was our Bible, and all students carried a copy metaphorically tucked under their arm:

A great epoch has begun.

There exists a new spirit.

Industry, overwhelming us like a flood which rolls on towards its

destined end, has furnished us with new tools adapted to this

new epoch, animated by the new spirit.

We must create the mass-production spirit.

The spirit of constructing mass-production houses.

The spirit of living in mass-production houses.

The spirit of conceiving mass-production houses.

That may all sound like empty rhetoric now that we have seen some of the results of the Modern Movement, but there can be no doubt of its good intention.

The Bauhaus School that was started by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar, and later moved to Dessau, had strong socialist aims and attracted some of the greatest teachers of the time from a variety of inter-related disciplines. Their purpose was to spread their message throughout the world.

Lyonel Feininger, printer, graphic artist and writer, produced the Bauhaus manifesto’s frontispiece, entitled The Cathedral of Socialism. Paul Klee, painter, graphic artist and writer, joined in 1921, followed a year later by Wassily Kandinsky, painter and graphic artist. The painter, theatrical designer, photographer, lithographer and typographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy became a member of the Bauhaus in 1923.

In many ways the Bauhaus school’s global thinking and belief in the marriage of the arts, both applied and fine, mirrored the thinking of William Morris and his friends. The important difference was that, unlike Morris, Gropius was not opposed to the use of machinery for the production of goods. Gropius believed, wrongly, that the machine would always be subservient to the will of the creator/designer – in the 1920s the world had not yet seen the damage that mass production could impose on individual design. The teaching of the Bauhaus was directed towards the mass production of objects such as teasets, which up until then had been mainly hand-crafted. Now only the prototype would be hand-crafted, and after that machines would mass-produce endless copies. The same would apply to buildings.

So the Bauhaus sprang from a sound philosophy. It was a reaction against Victorian and much turn-of-the-century design and architecture, seen by many an artist and architect as a hotchpotch of unblendable influences, lacking creativity or innovation. The Bauhaus members aimed to explore new materials and new techniques, and thereby offer more choice to society and free the expensive talents of the artist, craftsman and architect so that his skills could be concentrated on innovation and design, leaving the more laborious parts of his task to the machine. Little were they to know that the machine production process was to take on the fervour of a religious movement, being seen by politicians in particular as a godsend in producing cheap, mass-produced goods for ordinary people. Rather than the artist being in control of the machine, the machine was soon to dwarf the artist.

Building Blocks

In the decade after World War II building stocks had been in short supply as investment in the home market had failed to keep up with demand. Britain’s entire construction machine had been pushed to the limits and was struggling woefully to fulfil government promises to provide half a million homes a year. By the mid-fifties traditional building methods were considered slow, cumbersome and a hindrance. The only way to build new homes on a massive scale was by unrestrained use of the standardized, mass-produced materials advocated by the Modernists. A vast proportion of these systems had to be imported from France, Denmark and – ironically – West Germany. Entire rooms were shipped over and were then slotted together like Lego on site.

At university in the sixties we were instructed that time was of the essence. The world was moving fast and architecture had to keep pace. There was no time for reflection. Traditional construction methods using brick, stone, wood and slate were considered outmoded and were simply not taught. Belief in modern technology was very fashionable; disciples of the old school were considered fuddy-duddy. The radical rejection of the past was complemented by a blind faith in ‘hip’ modern building materials – off-the-peg panels, concrete, glass, metal, plastics and aluminium were our stock in trade.

It wasn’t considered important to understand how the materials performed – that was the engineer’s responsibility. If one dared question the long-term performance of the new, the reply was swift: in the same way that technology had developed the materials, it would also develop solutions to problems as and when they were required. It seems shocking now to consider that my only experience of handling materials was in the very first year of training, when balsa wood and clay were used in modelling exercises. Hardly materials which had widespread application in the outside world.

From the 1920s onwards, in his many publications Le Corbusier had predicted these changes and the rise of industrialized materials:

In the next twenty years, big industry will have co-ordinated its standardized materials, comparable with those of metallurgy; technical achievement will have carried heating and lighting and methods of rational construction far beyond anything we are acquainted with.

Contractors’ yards will no longer be sporadic dumps in which everything breathes confusion; financial and social organization, using concerted and forceful methods, will be able to solve the housing question, and the yards will be on a huge scale, run and exploited like government offices.…

As the price of building has quadrupled itself, we must reduce the old architectural pretensions and the cubage of houses by at least one-half; henceforth the problem is in the hands of the technical expert; we must enlist the discoveries made in industry and change our attitude altogether.

Construction has discovered its methods, methods which in themselves mean a liberation that earlier ages sought in vain. Everything is possible by calculation and invention, provided that there is at our disposal a sufficiently perfected body of tools, and this does exist.

Concrete and steel have entirely transformed the constructional organization hitherto known, and the exactitude with which these materials can be adapted to calculation and theory every day provides encouraging results, both in the success achieved in their appearance, which recalls natural phenomena, and constantly reproduces experiences realized in nature. If we set ourselves against the past, we can appreciate the fact that new formulas have been found which only need exploitation to bring about (if we are wise enough to break with routine) a genuine liberation from the constraints we have till now been subjected to. There has been a Revolution in methods of construction.

Less is a Bore

The revolution in materials joined forces with the revolution in design. For us architectural students, class time allotted to the study of Classical styles arid traditional pitched-roof brick buildings was minimal and treated as a straightforward historical exercise. The past was dead, and the only way was Modernism – although I know I wasn’t the only student who filled the back of notebooks with drawings of cosy, stone- and brick-built houses.

We were being programmed to be good Bauhaus clones, and so our entire architectural education was focused on the minimal. In Mies van der Rohe’s well-used catchphrase, we set out to prove that ‘less is more’. We were taught to streamline, to strip away all excess (a design philosophy to which the Post-Modernist American architect Robert Venturi made the perfect retort: ‘Less is a bore’). To the disciples of Bauhaus Classicism, and therefore ornament, was seen as decadent and bourgeois. The style was felt to imprison people because it was heavy, dowdy and dark; it was too domineering a form, .and a drain on time and money. The only way ahead, we ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword by the Rt Hon The Lord Scarman OBE
• Chapter 1 The Making of a Modernist
• Chapter 2 An Innocent Abroad
• Chapter 3 The Dream Becomes A Nightmare
• Chapter 4 The Battle of Black Road
• Chapter 5 The Wasteland
• Chapter 6 Cry For Help
• Chapter 7 Sound and Fury
• Chapter 8 Modernism is Dead
• Chapter 9 Hackney's Empire
• Bibliography
• Index