ARTS
Architecture
James MacLaren 1853-1890: Arts and Crafts Architect (RIBA Heinz Gallery, till 24 February)
Pioneers of Modernism
Gavin Stamp
Visitors to The Spectator's offices in Doughty Street who proceed north-west towards Euston soon arrive in Brunswick Square. Once it was a Georgian square, stoutly defended in a wireless broadcast in 1938 by Robert Byron and John Summer- son but in vain, for now it is entirely post-war. The north and south sides are banal but the west side is extraordinary: a colossus of concrete with stepped-back terraces and articulated by giant sloping pylons rising to towers containing conspic- uous grilled vents. This is the Brunswick Centre, designed by Patrick Hodgkinson and Sir Leslie Martin. It may well seem curious that a development of shops and flats should most resemble a futuristic power station. An explanation is now provided by an exhibition of original draw- ings at a welcome new arrival among London's cultural institutions: the Bruns- wick Centre is a Futurist electric power station. Whatever else it may represent, this piece of gratutious urban megalomania testifies to the continuing potency of the architectural visions of a young Italian architect who was killed in the Great War — half a century before.
Antonio Sant'Elia was born in Como in 1880 and died in 1916 in the assault on Trieste. He built practically nothing, but he achieved fame — mostly posthumously — by his association with the Futurists. In 1914 he wrote a Manifesto of Futurist Architecture which is full of the bombast and exaggeration typical of the Futurists' Prophet. Marinetti. As may be expected from any artist associated with a group who worshipped the machine and despised the culture of the past, Sant'Elia combated and despised 'all the pseudo-architecture of the avant-garde . . . all architecture that is Classical, solemn, hieratic, stagy, decora- tive, monumental, pretty and pleasant . . perpendicular and horizontal lines, cubic and pyramidal forms which are static, grave, oppressive and totally removed from our new sensibilities'. Instead, he proclaimed 'the architecture of reinforced Concrete, steel, glass, cardboard, textile fibres and any substitutes for wood, stone and brick that allow a maximum elasticity and lightness . . . that oblique and elliptic- al lines are dynamic, having by their very nature an emotive power a thousand times greater than that of perpendiculars and horizontals . . . that decoration applied to architecture is absurd ....' And so on.
What redeeems Sant'Elia from this post- uring pretentiousness is the fact that he could draw. In a series of pencil sketches, the frustrated architect gave convincing reality to his obsession with dynamic in-
'Study for Edifice', 1913, by Sant'Elia
dustrial forms. Whether he was imagining a hydroelectric dam, an electric power plant, a railway station, a block of apart- ments in 'the New City' or just a vague 'Edifice', Sant'Elia proposed powerful dynamic masses with strong oblique slopes and rising to ranks Of vertical towers. With Sant'Elia, indeed, comes that association between the drama of industrial forms and the design of public housing which has caused such misery to thousands of urban dwellers. But the drawings are beautiful and, thanks to the sponsorship of Premafin Finaziaria, they have almost all been col- lected together, complemented by fanta- sies by another Futurist architect, Mario Chiattone, and a few Futurist paintings. The new Accademia Italiana (24 Rutland Gate, SW7) deserves our gratitude for bringing these to London.
What, one wonders, would Sant'Elia have built had he survived the war that so undermined the glamour of Futurist machine fetishism? It is unlikely that he would have been asked to design power stations and nobody sane in Italy in the 1920s would have actually put up anything like the Brunswick Centre. It is frustrating, therefore, to learn from the excellently produced illustrated catalogue that he did, in fact, execute a house near Como in 1912 which still stands as well as several cemet- ery monuments which have been des- troyed. My one criticism of this exhibition must be that this is not illustrated. I suspect that it does not look at all Futurist, just as Sant'Elia's competition sketches for a com- mercial headquarters in Verona are in the blocky Classicism of Milan railway station. Architecture is, by its nature, a comprom- ised art — that is its strength — and real commissions, unlike the self-indulgent fan- tasy, demand practical thought and col- laboration. The Accademia Italiana is therefore naughty in endorsing that mis- chievous interpretation of the 20th century that lays more stress on ideas and concepts than real achievement. But the fantasy has an important and sometimes leading role to play in architectural development and Sant'Elia belongs with Piranesi, Bonn& and Hugh Ferriss as a master of powerful imaginary architecture.
Like Sant'Elia, James MacLaren died young, though of tuberculosis rather than bullets. Both were outstanding and original designers, but there the comparison must end. MacLaren was a late Victorian who made handsome and richly detailed build- ings out of the vernacular traditions of his native Scotland enlivened with the sophis- tication of English 'Queen Anne' and the Arts & Crafts movement. The exhibition at the Heinz Gallery (21 Portman Square, WI) has been mounted to celebrate the centenary of MacLaren's birth but, sadly, comparatively little material survives to illuminate his creative career. We really only have the buildings: a few houses in London, a collection of estate buildings in Scotland and an extension to Stirling High School. An hotel on the Canary Islands and the first and only stage of an 'Eiffel Tower' built at Wembley by the railway tycoon and Channel Tunnel promoter, Sir Edward Watkin, have both perished.
The exhibition has been created by Alan Calder, who makes a curiously old- fashioned and myopic neo-Pevsnerian in- terpretation of his hero. He asks to believe that MacLaren has been rescued from obscurity, but anyone who knows the writings of that wisest of architectural commentators, H. S. Goodhart-Rendel, is well aware of MacLaren. Rem.lel included him in his herd of 'Rogues' — original minds who stray from the herd — and in the 1930s he described the architect of the semi-detached pair of houses built for Sir Donald Currie in Palace Court, Bayswater, as 'an architect of very high ability who died young. That this remarkable work should he so little known is a sad proof that novelty, when it is rational rather than sensational, obtains scanty recognition.' Quite so.
Mr Calder, however, asks us to believe that the simplicity and geometrical model- ling of a farmhouse in Perthshire 'take late Victorian architecture to the threshold of the modern movement'. This is absurd. Simplicity is not necessarily modernity; it had its place in the Victorian scale of 'propriety' and, in this case, drew on native
vernacular tradition. MacLaren's architecture, like any other, must be evalu- ated on its own terms. If MacLaren's work anticipated anything, it was the transmuted traditionalism of his celebrated compat- riot, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. For Mackintosh's work, similarly, has far too often been discussed in terms of the Modern Movement and not enough as a product of the eclectic historicism of the Victorians.
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