ARTS
Architecture
Misunderstood modernism?
Gavin Stamp
Le Corbusier: Architect of the Century (Hayward, till 7 June)
The only building ever erected in Brit- ain by Charles-Edouard Jeanneret only lasted for a few weeks, but this was not owing to any of the structural or social failures often associated with Modernism. It was an exhibition stand for Venesta Trellick Tower, North Kensington, by Em6 Gold} finger, 1968 plywood at Olympia designed with Char- lotte Perriand in 1930. Jeanneret, who chose to be known as Le Corbusier, was born 100 years ago in 1887, as was Erich Mendelsohn, the most interesting and im- aginative of modern German architects of the 1920s. Mendelsohn arrived in Britain in 1933 as a refugee from Nazism. He teamed up with Serge Isaakovitch, the Russian- born Old Harrovian, who chose to be known as Serge Chermeyeff, and designed some of the best British Modern Move- ment buildings of the 1930s — the De la Warr Pavilion at Bexhill and several stylish houses — before moving on to the United States and Israel.
Yet is is Le Corbusier and not Mendel- sohn that the Arts Council of Great Britain has chosen to honour with a large exhibi- tion at the Hayward Gallery this year (until 7 June). There is justice in this, however, because the influence of Le Corbusier on British architecture has been, whether for better or for worse, colossal. Le Corbusier was once the guiding spirit of British Modernism and the grey photographs of his buildings, published in journals and the Oeuvre Complete, were imitated religious- ly from the 1930s until the 1960s. Perhaps the best compliment to the master are the amazingly sculptural pilotis of Colonel Seifert's buildings. The high point of the MARS Group exhibition of 1938 in Lon- don — that celebration of the achieve- ments of England's precious club of yowl modern architects and critics — was a visit by the great man himself. Sir John Sum- merson — who wrote the captions — remembered how 'as he entered I did just hear him emit a faint "penible". He was very nice after that, but indeed the whole show must have seemed to him — as to anyone of the Continental vanguard — a terribly belated and derivative affair.' It was an inevitable consequence of Le Corbusier's almost God-like status that, as the British public turned against the Mod- ernism that had been imposed on it, so the master should be blamed for the catas- trophic social and functional failures of urban renewal and high-rise housing com- plexes. As Adrian Forty remarks in his essay on 'Le Corbusier's British reputa- tion' in the admirable exhibition catalogue, the Swiss-born Frenchman 'is Modernism itself as far as the British are concerned. The implicit intent of the unreconstructed Modernists who planned the exhibition Is clearly to rehabilitate `Corb' and, there- fore, modern architecture and they have quite properly concentrated on his build- ings rather than on the utopian visions of new cities which had such a terrible influ- ence all over the world. For Le Corbusier was a very great architect indeed, a highly sophisticated creator of new forms and a subtle reinterpreter of historical ideas who can be seen as much as the pioneer of Post-Modernism as the towering figure of Modernism.
But those seductive, ruthless visions of serried ranks of tower blocks cannot be escaped. Le Corbusier may not have built them and, indeed, he turned away from these youthful fantasies in later life, but they inspired such things as the Piggeries in Liverpool even if, as Sam Webb, the architect who campaigned successfully for the demolition of the notorious Ronan Point tower block, remarked, 'blaming Le Corbusier for this is like blaming Mozart for Muzak'. One of the most intelligent (and well researched — whatever his furious critics may have said) attacks on Le Corbusier's legacy in the 1970s was Chris- topher Booker's television programme City of Towers — a phrase which Le Cot busici used, although he admitted that It was coined by his former master, the French concrete rationalist Auguste Per- ret. The Ville Contemporaine, a vision of formal geometry and towers in contrast to the disorder of the past, was illustrated in Vers une Architecture, published in 1923. Two years later Le Corbusier proposed rebuilding a great swathe of Paris with tower blocks. This was a total vision of a new urban civilisation which struck a chord with architects and planners who were faced with the reconstruction of Britain after the second world war. The Brave New World utopianism of post-war Britain, however, cannot alone account for Le Corbusier's extraordinary Influence here. It was partly because he wrote a great deal and, as James Gibbs realised long before, an architect who publishes his work becomes known. Two of Corb's most important books were translated into English by Frederick Etchells: Towards a New Architecture and The City of Tomorrow, published, in 1927 and 1929 respectively, by John Rodker, Who normally specialised in pornography. Here were seductive images of ocean liners, racing cars and aeroplanes which suggested the possibilty of a 'new spirit' in architecture, combined with pithy aphor- isms like 'The house is a machine for living in' and 'The plan proceeds from within to without'. All this seemed excitingly new to Young English architects, who simply did not realise that many of Le Corbusier's ideas were derived from the French rationalist tradition and, in particular, the writings of Auguste Choisy.
The provincialism of the British architectural profession in the 1930s, with no theoretical background, an exaggerated respect for intellectuals, and childishly eager for new ideas, cannot be underesti- mated. The confident egotism and high Pretentiousness of Le Corbusier, with his affected name and oracular judgements, were irresistible and his extravagant prose (often toned down by Etchells) had a dreadful influence on British architectural writing, as can be seen with the egotistical polemics of the Smithsons. Foreigners seemed immensely glamorous, which part- 1Y explains the warm reception given to Berthold Lubetkin and ErnO Goldfinger, both of whom had been associated with the master in Paris and were practical ambas- sadors for him. Lubetkin developed Le
Corbusier's Purist manner of the Twenties, and the Highpoint flats at Highgate, on their pilotis, won the praise of the master himself as 'the seed of a vertical garden city', while Goldfinger's post-war housing blocks, of massive poured concrete, are the closest in spirit to the unites d'habitation.
It is the housing schemes by English architects which are so depressing and so disastrous. At a time when the master himself changed direction towards a more sculptural, massive and often primitive architecture, which often baffled his Brit- ish admirers (James Stirling found 'little to appeal to the intellect, and nothing to analyse or stimulate curiosity' at the extraordinary and glorious new church at Ronchamp), British planners began to apply his ideas of the 1920s on a huge scale. Perhaps Le Corbusier should not be blamed for the mediocrity of such housing schemes, or for the fact that his ideas were misunderstood and that urban renewal was cynically exploited by the building indus- try, except that, back in 1923, he did recommend the real evil of these buildings: 'We must create the mass production spirit. The spirit of constructing mass- production houses . .
The faults of British public housing are partly the result of bad management but also the result of an unthinking inter- nationalism. The English (not the Scots) do not like living in flats; the French do. Corb's own buildings seem to be popular and while the Smithson's terrible Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, a sort of twisted unite d'habitation, was voted the worst building in London in 1984, the tenants of the unite in Firminy-Vert were fighting the Communist housing department to prevent demolition and stay living 'in Corbu'. That could not happen here. The pity is that British architects did not listen to another foreigner, the Dane S.E. Rasmussen, who in 1937 in his book London: The Unique City warned that 'You English should know that the Frenchman, Le Corbusier, is a modernist in his artistic form but a conservative in his planning of a city . . . the foolish mistakes of other countries are imported everywhere, and at the end of a few years all cities will be equally ugly and equally devoid of individuality. This is the bitter END.'
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