Two tales of a city
Christopher Booker
in the first programme of his Civilisation series, Kenneth Clark quoted Ruskin as saying 'Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts. The book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art . . . of the three the only trustworthy one is the last.' Clark went on to add: 'If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by the Minister of. Housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings'. But What are we to make of a society like our °min which, for the first time in history, has virtually lost faith in its ability to put up new buildings at all?
At the end of my last article I promised to "Wore this question in the much wider context of the ebbs and"flows of our cultural self-confidence over the past five hundred Years. So I still propose to do. But before I continue, in the hope of reculer pour mieux sa.liter,
kindwould just like to interpose as a
of extended footnote to the argument SO far, two stories which I believe underline the depth of the collapse in architectural self-confidence which has so suddenly overtaken our society in the past few years. Story number one begins with the award iast week of the 1977 Royal Gold Medal for Architecture to that architect-of-the11)cir1eht Sir Denys Lasdun. This medal, instituted by Queen Victoria in 1848, is IdelY regarded as the highest honour of architectural world. It has been given In the Past to Le Corbusier, Mies van der
Alvar Aalto, Lewis Mumfcird, 'Nikolaus Pevsner and almost every great name in twentieth-century architecture.
The .award if this year's medal to the architect of the National Theatre is hardly surprising, but the nature of Lasdun's rt!Putation among his fellow architects at „Ile moment is also deeply revealing. In'the !'aSt twelve months he has been elevated 1010 a symbolic role, far beyond anything called for by his actual achievements. Lasdun is an uncompromising product of the modern movement. In his youth he was 'converted' by reading and re-reading Le Corbusier's famous tract Vers une Architecture. In the 1930s he became the youngest member of Tecton, the avant-garde partnership responsible for such landmarks of the modern movement in Britain as the Penguin Pool at the Zoo, the Finsbury Health Centre and the first 'high-rise' modern flats in Highgate. Since the war he has designed a small number of prestigious, expensive, carefully-detailed buildings (like the St James's Place flats on Green Park), all of which in recent months have been almost endlessly reproduced in 'spreads' in the architectural press, invariably accompanied by texts which strike a note-of plaintive defiance. It is as if Lasdun's work is being used by his felllow architects as a last desperate weapon to bolster up their confidence in themselves and in all the principles which have been their orthodoxy and their faith over the past thirty years.
One of Lasdun's more celebrated and influential buildings, which appears in all the magazines, is the fifteen-storey 'cluster block' of council flats which he put up in Bethnal Green in 1955. This prize exhibit of post-war British architecture is always shown with its concrete gleaming white in the sun, under a Mediterranean sky.
The other day I actually went to look at this building, in its tatty East London back street. it is a revelation. It stands bleakly in the middle of a car park, its concrete stained and discoloured by the rusting through of the reinforcement. Its outside is covered by the most rootless graffiti imaginable ('Manchester United Rules 0.K.'—not even the local team). Inside there is a smell of urine. Piles of broken bottles and old cigarette packets lie in corners, which look as if they have not been swept up for months. Glum
looking tenants queued for the only lift that was still working. It is like a complete parody of that vision of 'life in the tower block,' which has become one of the nightmare stereotypes for almost everyone in our society except those few remaining architects who still cling blindly on to the twentieth-century dream, and award each other gold medals in a desperate attempt to persuade each other that it is still in being.
My second story dates back a year or two to an interview which a friend of mine had with one of the most successful commercial architects of our time, Cecil Elsom—who has put up some of the most prominent speculative office blocks of the past fifteen years (such as the new mirror-glass ziggurats next to Westminster Cathedral). My friend talked to Elsom about his career, as an East End tailor's son whose first success, at the age of twenty, was winning the competition for the new town hall at Welwyn Garden City when he was still studying architecture at night school. Finally she asked which of all his many buildings he was most proud of. He replied by showing her a picture of the elegant Schomberg House in Pall Mall, originally built in the 1650s and later lived in by Gainsborough and 'Butcher' Cumberland. To her astonishment he asked, 'Which half do you think I built ?' Apparently half the house had long since been demolished, and in the 'sixties Elsom was commissioned to rebuild it in exact replica of the original. In other words, he considered that his finest achievement as a modern architect was simply to have recreated half a house so that it was indistinguishable from something built 300 years ago.
There is little respect for the work of Cecil Elsom among the sort of architects who today revere Lasdun as their last brave hope (indeed I remember at a debate in the Hayward Gallery some years ago one speaker waxing almost speechless with rage that Lasdun's masterpiece, the National Theatre, had to be viewed against such a trivial and vulgar backdrop as Elsom's London Weekend Television tower block behind). And yet I believe Elsom's view of modern architecture to be infinitely more honest and realistic than that of the savants of the Royal Institute of British Architects who gave their Gold Medal to Lasdun without (presumably) having the courage to go off and look again, long and hard, at the state of that 'cluster block' in Bethnal Green—in which incidentally, if it need be said, several hundred people actually have to live out their unfortunate lives. Suffice it merely to be added that when I return to this theme of the collapse in our cultural self-confidence in a much wider context next week, I shall be disregarding that rag-tag-and-bobtail of Old Believers, who still uphold what remains of the twentieth-century dream in all the arts. And I shall attempt to take as realistic a view as possible of the quite unprecedented crisis in which the collapse of the modern movement (as the last real source of optimism remaining to our post-Renaissance culture) has landed us.
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