Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Sunday, June 08, 2008

 
While it goes without saying that it is the mark of a pride for any reasonable person to disagree with Roger Scuton on any conceivable subject, I did think this article was not entirely without interest:

"Humanity lives by trial and error, sometimes committing errors of a monumental scale. Architectural and urbanist modernism belong—like communism—to a class of errors from which there is little or nothing to learn or gain. . . . Modernism’s fundamental error, however, is to propose itself as a universal (i.e., unavoidable and necessary) phenomenon, legitimately replacing and excluding traditional solutions... Krier presents the first principle of architecture as a deduction from Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which tells us to act only on that maxim that we can will as a universal law. You must, Krier says, "build in such a way that you and those dear to you will use your buildings, look at them, work in them, spend their holidays in them, and grow old in them with pleasure." Krier suggests that modernists themselves follow this dictum—in private. Modernist vandals like Richard Rogers and Norman Foster—between them, responsible for some of the worst acts of destruction in our European cities—live in elegant old houses in charming locations, where artisanal styles, traditional materials, and humane scales dictate the architectural ambience. Instead of Bernard Mandeville’s famous principle of "private vices, public benefits," it seems that they follow the law of private benefits, public vice—the private benefit of a charming location paid for by the public vice of tearing our cities apart. Rogers in particular is famous for creating buildings that have no relation to their surroundings, that cannot easily change their use, that are extremely expensive to maintain, and that destroy the character of their neighborhoods.

Krier identifies the leading error of modernism as that introduced by Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: separating load-bearing and outward-facing parts. Once buildings become curtains hung on invisible frames, all of the understood ways of creating and conveying meanings lose out. Even if the curtain is shaped like a classical facade, it is a pretend facade, with only a blank expression. Usually, however, it is a sheet of glass or concrete panels, without intelligible apertures. The building itself is hidden, and its posture as a member of the city, standing among neighbors and resting its weight upon their common ground, is meaningless because unobservable. All relation to neighboring structures, to the street, and to the sky, is lost. The form conveys nothing beyond the starkness of its geometry...

The lack of vocabulary explains the alienating effect of a modern airport, such as Newark or Heathrow. Unlike the classical railway station, which guides the traveler securely and reassuringly to the ticket office, to the platform, and to the public concourse, the typical airport is a mass of written signs, all competing for attention, all amplifying the sense of urgency, yet nowhere offering a point of visual repose."


There's a great deal I have sympathy with here. I've long felt that modern architecture is a form of engineering rather than a branch of aesthetics, leading to the situation whereby one can wonder around the City of London at a weekend and find a deserted ghost town filled with modern skyscrapers whose weekday workers would never dream of living in anything that even remotely resembled them. Whereas early modernism led to the construction of private villas as well as public buildings, I'm not aware there is any significant private analogue for the Lloyds or Swiss Re buildings. On the other hand, this is all far from persuading me to endorse the tepid pastiche of Krier's Poundbury, Barratt Homes with a royal warrant, which is surely as unpleasant a form of utopianism as anything Corbusier dreamt up. Poundbury does have the rather unpleasant air of being a middle class commune.

Update: a defence of modernism from Jonathan Meades:

"Gordon was a Brutalist, probably the greatest (as well as unquestionably the youngest) of the English Brutalists and thus a ready target for indolent bien-pensants whose antipathy to the architecture of the 1960s is as drearily predictable, as dismally unseeing, as was their parents’ and grandparents’ to that of the 1860s. These people fail to differentiate between the many strains of Modernism and, more importantly, between what was good and what bad. Nor, in their arrogance, do they realise that tastes change. Today Brutalism is admired by a new generation of aesthetes as opposed to the clichéd, knee-jerk calumnisation of "concrete monstrosity", as John Betjeman and Osbert Lancaster were to "Victorian monstrosity".

The word Brutalism was coined by the architectural theorist Reyner Banham. It is a bilingual pun on the French beton brut (raw concrete) and art brut (Dubuffet’s word for outsider art) and the all too plain English word brutal. If only Professor Banham had failed to commit it to paper and had dreamt up a less loaded term, the fate of buildings in this idiom might have been happier, for their opponents, apprised only of the English component, would not have had the ammunition of what seems like a nomenclatural admission of culpable aggression.

On the other hand they might still have abhorred it, for Brutalism committed the grossest of sins in English eyes. It abjured the picturesque in favour of the sublime. It scorned prettiness. "It put on," as John Vanbrugh, a brutalist avant la lettre, had it, "a masculine show". A show which did not preclude a strangely butch delicacy, a steely effeminacy. Gordon might have worked in concrete but he made it sing. His buildings were articulated rather than monolithic. More than any other English Brutalist he had looked at Constructivism. Gordon’s professed aim was to create an architecture that was "raw, dramatic, sculptural". At the Tricorn in Portsmouth and Trinity Square in Gateshead he succeeded on a vast scale, unparalleled in Europe. These buildings were indeed extraordinarily sculptural, their silhouettes were audacious and poetic, jagged and rhetorical. They were thrilling structures that seem to be forces of nature, like fortresses in Castille which grow from the earth. "


It generally seems to me that the English vice isn't so much for prettiness as for puritanism (as with England favouring palladianism instead of rococo) and my objection to modernism tends to be that it panders to that vice, producing stark, geometric buildings that are essentially functional or utilitarian in character. They work well in a corporate or government context because they appeal to a sense of grandiosity while remaining sufficiently minimalist as to be comparatively low cost. I'm equally unsure as to why 'prettiness' and sublimity have to be opposed.

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posted by Richard 7:36 pm