The architecture of fashion
Gavin Stamp
The 'Thirties' show At the Hayward (until 13 January) may have something for everybody but it is almost indigestible; the organisers seem to have tackled the problem of historical objectivity by putting in simply everything. A problem certainly exists: the Thirties were a depressingly polarised decade and in the arts the avantgarde became inextricably identified with the young and with progressive politics — even if Auden could write, in 1937, 'Preserve me from the shape of things to be/The high-grade posters at the public meetings /The influence of Art on Industry,/The cinemas with perfect taste in seating.' The pernicious cult of 'youth' has resulted in a high proportion of famous Thirties figures being with us still and, if their memories are a little hazy about their political commitments, they are still able to perpetuate the cultural myths of their own making. The older generation during those years, especially those who were still producing good work, were caricatured as reactionaries and have had few to speak up for them since.
This is particularly true of architecture. The 'modern movement' had its propagandists and has had ever since, notably Nikolaus Pevsner and J.M. Richards, and most available studies still tell the reader that the significant buildings of the Thirties were those in the Continental 'International Style' manner: white, Cubist and machinelike. The fatuity of this approach, however, is suggested by the fact that the greatest piece of 'modern architecture' most often cited was not even constructed for human beings: the penguin pool at London Zoo. Osbert Lancaster and Evelyn Waugh knew better and their books suggest what was really going on: Waugh's 'Professor Otto Silenus' was a caricature of Gropius, fresh from the Bauhaus.
Much much more was happening than the propagandists suggest, but designed by architects who were not approved of by the young elite of the MARS Group (the Modern Architectural Research Society, whose 'radical chic' membership managed to include Gropius, Herbert Read, John Summerson and John Betjeman). While a few flashy white houses were, being built for liberal intellectuals, the real problems were being tackled by so-called 'traditionalists' — such as Giles Scott who was consulting architect for Battersea Power Station, the Guinness Brewery and Waterloo Bridge and was responsible for one of the best and most ubiquitous legacies from the period, the telephone kiosk. Even Reginald Blomfield, notorious as the author of the contemptuous Modernismus, designed the electricity pylon. 'Jazz modern' factories and cinemas, stripped-classical office blocks, 'stockbrokers' Tudor' houses, neoGeorgian town halls are, for better or for worse, the real stuff of the decade.
The exhibition at the Hayward Gallery helps to tell most of the truth, but not all of it. The 'modern movement' still has its own separate room — full of the same tired old photos (it does not do to use new ones, as so many of the 'pioneer' masterpieces have deteriotlated so badly) — while the rest of British architecture is in another. This gives an unbalanced and unfair impression. Owen Williams, of the Empire Pool, Wembley, and the Daily Express building, is annexed by the 'modern movement' even though that no-nonsense brilliant engineer had no time for fashionable talk or for the MARS Group. Otherwise, despite the architects' commitment to a planned, egalitarian, totalitarian (the word was Pevsner's) society, most British 'modern movement' work was done for rich private clients. Such houses, in concrete or faced in smooth plaster to look like concrete, ignored the accumulated building skills of centuries and seemed more appropriate on the Cote d'Azur than in damp England. This may well reflect the fact that a majority of these architects were not English but colonials or Europeans – and not necessarily refugees from Nazism. This internationalism, indeed, tells us something about the intellectual climate of Britain in the Thirties, a climate explicable above all in terms of the memory of the horror of the Great War.
Two rooms have been reconstructed. One is a blue-glass and neon bathroom designed by Paul Nash for the dancer Tilly Losch. The other is Wells Coates' depressing 'minimum' flat for intellectuals, which is surely less genuinely typical or redolent of the period than, say, a boudoir created by Syrie Maugham. The cheering sound of dance-band music issues from the wireless set but would surely not have been to the taste of Adrian Stokes, Paul Reilly or Gropius who lived in such 'minimum' conditions in Lawn Road, Hampstead – although Philip Harbin, who cooked in the communal kitchen, might have liked it.
Most of the architecture, by Lutyens, Baker, Scott, Goodhart-Rendel, Burnet Tait and Lorne, Cachmaille-Day, Holden, Oliver Hill, is in the room called 'A Spectrum of Styles' – which title suggests that such catholic stylistic variety is reprehensible. However, after the attempt to realise the MARS Group's Brave New World in the Fifties and Sixties the work of these architects now seems humane, varied, rich, solid, appropriate and altogether interesting. This room seems more enjoyable – and popular – than -the 'modern movement' room if only because it is full of superb coloured perspectives (which the 'moderns' eschewed) and models. But the greatest model is of Lutyens's lost Cathedral (only part of the crypt was ever built – but what a crypt!), a superb piece of craftsmanship scandalously vandalised as a result of neglect by the Liverpool Roman Catholic authorities. Having abandoned what would have been one of the most sublime and brilliant designs in the European tradition, the least they could have done was to look after this model – but perhaps they were worried that it might show up the mediocrity of what was eventually built. It does.
Architecture appears in two other areas of the Hayward: in the transport section, where the elegant, rational brick and con crete buildings designed by Charles Holden for London Transport are shown (a legacy which that hopeless nationalised enterprise seems less and less able to appreciate), and in connection with 'leisure'. Here, thanks to its nautical associations, the 'modern movement' was always more acceptable although, these days, any visitor to the Blackpool Casino, the Midland Hotel at Morecambe or, the product of a ludicrous cause celebre, the Bexhill Pavilion will enjoy their poignant period tawdriness rather than as a glimpse of the 'future' which should have come to pass. But above all there were the hotels, the restaurants and the cinemas, an area of practice in which architects who were neither stalwarts of the profession nor part of the MARS gang designed interiors which were entertaining, glamorous and truly fuctional. Many chrome, glass, metal and neon foyers have been stupidly destroyed (such as the excellent interior of the Strand Palace Hotel and Cumberland Hotel, designed by the father of our 'Low life' correspondent) but the flavour of the Thirties can still be savoured in the Dorchester Hotel or the New Victoria Cinema. The real genius of the period was in stylish decoration – 'art deco', 'jazz modern', imoderne' or whatever–which despite all the art-historians, seems most typical and was (and is) truly popular.
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