THE ENVIRONMENT
Architecture: the lost horizon
LIONEL BRETT
This is the first of a series of articles by Lionel Brett (Lord Esher), the distinguished architect and writer. His appointment to suc- ceed Sir Robin Darwin as Rector and Vice- Provost of the Royal College of Art was announced recently.
It is sobering to compare the half-century since 1920—the age of modernism—with the Victorian/Edwardian half-century that ended in 1914. Ours, after all, was the one that set out to build a new and better world, and had the technology to do it. What have we built? Miles of suburbs in the western world (certainly beating all records for farmland consumption), rows of tenement slabs in the eastern, a great many flat-topped office towers, and a great many package-deal block of flats, here and there, and hard to find, a bright school or a smart new univer- sity.
But compared with Haussmann's Paris. or 'Greek' Thomson's Glasgow, or the New York of the first-generation millionaires, or at the other end of the scale compared with Bedford Park or Hampstead Garden Suberb, our world conspicuously lacks a sense of place, a sense of care, and most of all that density of thought that the Victorians seemed able to convey even where they can hardly have felt it as seriously as they preten- ded. They really did build a world of their own, and whatever the rebels, whatever Ruskin or Morris or Mackintosh or Lethaby may have said, what they did seems to us not a rejection but a culmination. If we compare Brasilia with San Francisco, or the probable form of the new city we are starting at Milton Keynes with other and smaller one-generation towns like Cheltenham or Llandudno, we only rub in a painful truth.
Why does modern architecture, unlike the other modern arts that were born in the same radical age, seem to have run out of steam? We must recognise that it always did run on a different fuel mix from the others. There were three ingredients: a solid base of puritanism and socialism contri- buted by the British reformers, a spice of anarchism contributed by the central Euro- peans, and a heady brew of futurism con- tributed by the Italians. Of these the only ingredient that architecture shared with the other arts of the 'twenties was its anarchism—its rejection of the academies, its rejection of history. And of the three this was the least meaningful in architecture and so the least durable.
This was partly because it was never wholly genuine: the pioneers, Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, with the notable exception of Frank Lloyd Wright, were steeped in the French academic tradi- tion. 'Architecture or Revolution' ran Le Corbusier's slogan. More important, anarchy is against the nature of architecture as a social art : architects need clients before they can produce anything and the protest against society which is a recurring motive in the other arts is not open to them.
But in perforce rejecting anarchism, the one motive' force that has obvious con- temporary relevance, modern architecture fell back on two others which unfortunately have very little, at any rate in this country. The puritanical/socialist element did us very well in the waiting years of the war and in the Attlee era. Public men like Dalton, Reith and Silkin easily found a rapport with the then younger generation of architects which the young of today absolutely do not have with the world of Heath and Wil- son. One may regret this, because other ideologies competing for the loyalty of the young seem so far a lot worse. Miss it or not, it is another prop gone.
Superficially it may seem that Futurism, as one of the progenitors of the comic strip, has had more staying power. But what com- mended it to the pioneer modern architects were its two more serious characteristics, both of which are now under a cloud. One was what its label proposed—a visionary belief in the Future as such, and in what the City of the Future might look like, as in Sant' Elia's Citta Nuova and Le Cor- busier's Ville Radieuse. What seems to have killed this was partly mere human laziness and cynicism—those peacetime 'broad uplands' that Churchill promised us were bound to lose their appeal—and partly disillusion with the Ville Radieuse when we actually got it. The man in the bus on Route 11 has seen the Future, and it doesn't work. So we relapse, with some relief, to visions of the past, and romanticise the Victorian City somewhat in the way that the Vic- torians dreamt of the middle ages and the Georgians of ancient Rome. Historically this seems to be the more normal source of inspiration.
The other discredited element of Futurism is its faith in the Machine. If there was one characteristic of modern architecture that everybody recognised, it was its delight in and exploitation of technology. Reinforced concrete, plate glass, stainless steel, aluminium, plastics and air-conditioning were the raw material of the movement, and when in recent years it reacted against one or other of them it seemed to be denying its nature. Naive though it may be to suppose that we can tame technology except by better- directed technology, the present wave of Luddism is bound to regard the major visible achievements of modernism, its city planning and its great glass buildings, as wholly anti- life and wholly subservient to a society whose ideology it rejects.
There are, of course, cross-currents. Because of their analogies (via the comic strip) with pop art, the superficialities of Futurism have been a minor cult ih recent years: megastructures with clip-on ap- pendages, gantries, sky-vaulting expressways and other look-no-hands paraphernalia have been the toys of a London coterie now pushing middle age; but not of the present student generation, which is notably more mature. Conversely, in the us the solemnities of modern urbanism have run into sarcastic criticism from those who prefer the world as it is, whether it be Greenwich Village or Las Vegas. And of course main-stream modern architecture has all along been under fire not only from the drop-out left but from the ex- treme right: England is unique in the world in having an Establishment which never did like modern architecture, liked it least of all when it was at its best, and can now come out of cover and say so.
These phenomena should not be allowed to confuse the picture. They in fact underline the essentially middle-of-the-road nature of any conventional wisdom—boring to the with-it middle-aged, obscurely dissatisfying to the reactionary, and irrelevant to the young. Reactions from all these quarters are inevitable, and inevitably they conflict with one another.
These are, I suppose, the equivalents of the 'internal contradictions' which Marx believed would destroy capitalist society. But in addition to showing its age in these ways, modern architecture in Britain has had to contend with external- handicaps and obstacles, which I will be looking at in my next article.
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