Skip to content

Category: Architecture

The Last London

The London Review of Books has a brilliant, sprawling, melancholy essay by author and psychogeographer Iain Sinclair titled ‘The Last London’. It’s difficult to know what to quote from the essay as it touches on so many interesting, diverse things, but this passage about London in science fiction is perhaps most appropriate for here: 

In 1909 [Ford Madox] Ford published an essay titled ‘The Future in London’, a provocative vision of a planned last city, a London circumscribed by the sixty-mile sweep of a compass point set in Threadneedle Street. He anticipated the urban planner Sir Patrick Abercrombie in reading London as a series of orbital hoops, ring roads and parkland. Brought to life on the edge of the river, this port settlement has always been a magnet for outsiders. It was constructed that way, developed to draw in the scattered tribes, the hut dwellers, to establish the importance of a river crossing. A satellite of Colchester, it was 100 AD before Londinium became a significant entity. And then it was lost, abolished, pulled apart, before it grew again.

Ford Madox Ford’s Edwardian pipedream is ahead of its time. He sees that Oxford and Cambridge and the south coast are all part of the London microclimate. He sees the river coming into its own as an avenue for transport. He envisages escalators and moving pavements, and a population enriched and civilised by incomers. He presents himself as so much the English gentleman that he is doomed to spend most of his career in chaotic exile, in France and the US. Ford is self-condemned, like Wyndham Lewis. His London is as fantastic now as the Magnetic City, protected by river and man-made canals, in Lewis’s The Human Age trilogy: ‘The blank-gated prodigious city was isolated by its riverine moat.’

The compulsion to imagine and describe a final city runs from Richard Jefferies, with his After London; or, Wild England (1885), through Ford and Lewis, to the drowned worlds of J.G. Ballard and Will Self, the dystopian multiverses of Michael Moorcock and China Miéville. Fredric Jameson, considering postmodernism, talks about the ‘hysterical sublime’: a sort of Gothic rapture in contemplation of lastness, the voluntary abdication of power to superior aliens. This was heady stuff for my own compulsive beating of the bounds, an exploration of neural paths and autopilot drifts through the City into Whitechapel and Mile End. One of these haunted dérives brought me to the window of a bookshop in Brushfield Street, alongside Spitalfields Market. The shop, of course, is gone now and the proprietor dead. I zoomed in on an item with a striking riverside skyline on the dust-jacket: Last Men in London by W. Olaf Stapledon, published in 1932. Here was a more intimate coda to the better-known Last and First Men (1930). I had to carry the book home.

Comments closed

Brutalist Dreams

At the New York Review of Books, American architecture critic Martin Filler casts a critical eye over a slew of new books on Brutalist architecture: 

In addition to its echoes of art brut—Jean Dubuffet’s name for outsider art—New Brutalism was also an oblique riposte to New Humanism, a set of beliefs inspired by Geoffrey Scott’s hugely influential book ‘The Architecture of Humanism’ (1914). But Scott’s call for a return to Arts and Crafts design principles was scorned as escapist nostalgia by many young midcentury modernists. Among them was the period’s foremost British architecture critic, Reyner Banham, who with his scant empathy for the Arts and Crafts Movement’s focus on social reform issues belittlingly described New Humanism as “brickwork, segmental arches, pitched roofs, small windows (or small panes at any rate)—picturesque detailing without picturesque planning. It was, in fact, the so-called ‘William Morris Revival,’ now happily defunct….”

Yet it was not a utopian nineteenth-century dreamland that Brutalism countered as much as the thin, commercialized version of the International Style that after World War II gained ascendance through economic expediency. Brutalism’s striking departure from the steel-skeleton-and-glass-skin conformity of this routine, profit-oriented modernism was defined by its contrary emphasis on raw concrete (‘béton brut’ in French) in massive forms of imposing scale, idiosyncratic shape, rough finish, and uncompromising forcefulness, with a building’s inner workings and services—structure, plumbing, electricity, heating, and ventilation—unabashedly exposed. Brutalism soon became a worldwide craze, as this comparatively economical means of fabrication offered a cost-effective alternative to hand-riveted metal construction and allowed a broader array of sculptural effects than those obtainable with rectilinear frameworks.

One gets the sense Filler is no fan of Brutalism — at least its bleak British incarnation — so there is, inevitably, a reference to J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel High-Rise:

This was never a style that attempted to convey warmth, comfort, intimacy, or other qualities we tend to associate with an enjoyable way of life, and thus it never won much love except from architectural specialists. Brutalism posited an unsentimental, not to say harsh, view of the modern world, and however heroic its unflinching embodiment of hard realities may have been, most people do not enjoy a daily diet of architectural anxiety and alienation, especially in northern climates under cloudy skies.

One of the first signs of rejection came in J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel ‘High-Rise (1975), which is set in a thinly fictionalized version of Ernő Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower in London’s North Kensington (1966–1972). (It is one of fifty-four sites highlighted in the ‘Brutalist London Map’, a useful guide to landmarks of the style in the British capital.) This thirty-one-story apartment block, commissioned by the Greater London Council, was based on Le Corbusier’s original Unité in Marseilles, although Goldfinger’s scheme is nearly twice as high as its prototype. Trellick Tower was well received by its first inhabitants, but as was also true of contemporaneous public housing projects in the United States, it quickly went to pot as funds for its upkeep and security were slashed, which resulted in a rapid descent into crime and squalor.

Neoconservative critics blamed the architecture, but as sociological studies have since proven, the claim that tall residential complexes breed social malaise is groundless. After Trellick Tower was privatized in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher got the British government out of the public housing business, the building’s owner-residents increased protection from intruders, paid for long-delayed repairs, and it is now a highly desirable property rightly appreciated for its design quality. 

If anyone can point me to a review of these books by someone a little more sympathetic to Brutalism, I’d be much obliged. 

Comments closed

Darran Anderson on Imaginary Cities and Books as Maps

COV_cities_noMarks

Author Darran Anderson discusses his book Imaginary Cities with Rhys Tranter:

[M]y intention was to write something that isn’t self-contained; a book that somehow spills out of its pages and into the world… I wanted to send people out looking for Sant’Elia or Chernikhov or whoever. It would be as much a map as a book…

…We have a tendency to think of books as ends in themselves, which has always seemed somewhat ludicrous, even a bit arrogant to me; the assumption because you’ve read Isherwood’s Berlin novels, you’ve got the Weimar Republic sussed (I don’t mean that detrimentally to Isherwood, whose work I love, incidentally). It’s like that bucket list approach to experience, when you hear someone say they’ve ‘done’ Europe or Thailand. However great a book is, however ‘definitive’ it is on a subject, it strikes me as only a point of beginning or as temporarily conclusive, as time and perspectives are constantly changing. I’ve always had enough self-doubt to be resistant to definitive narratives so I wanted Imaginary Cities to be full of points of departure, contradictions and questions. That’s one of the things I loved about Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which the title is also a nod to. The sense of poetic incompleteness to it. The feeling that the story is continuing on somewhere beyond its pages.

Imaginary Cities, which is already available in the UK, will be published in the US by University of Chicago Press in April 2017.

1 Comment

Robert Caro on New York

At The Gothamist, Christopher Robbins talks to writer Robert Caro about New York and The Power Broker, his classic Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of city planner Robert Moses:

Moses had done something no one else had ever done. Everyone thought power comes from being elected. He wasn’t elected, he realizes he’s never going to get elected to anything, so he’s got to figure out a way to get all this power without getting elected, and he does it. I didn’t understand it, no one else understood it, even La Guardia says to him, “Don’t tell me what to do,” or whatever the quote is, “I’m the boss, you just work for me.”

And Moses writes, and I saw this letter in La Guardia’s papers, he sends back the letter and he writes across it, “You’d better read the contracts, mayor.”

I gradually came to understand that because he had done this thing, that no one else had ever done, gotten all this power without being elected, if I could find out how he did it and explain how he did it, I would be explaining something that no one else understood and I thought they really should understand, which is, how does power really work in cities? Not what we’re taught in textbooks, but what’s the raw, bottom, naked essence of real power?

I’m writing this book, and I suddenly say, God, this isn’t really a biography, this is a book about political power.

My favourite part of the interview, however, is at the beginning when Caro asks questions about The Gothamist. His response to Robbins’ explanation of Chartbeat is priceless:

What you just said is the worst thing I ever heard.

Comments closed

Ever Wanted Something More?

high-rise

Although the early reviews have not been especially kind to the Ben Wheatley film adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise, the trailer looks amazing.  The Anthony Royal Architecture website is also a nice touch.

I can’t wait.

Comments closed

The Real-World Architecture of Monument Valley

monument valley

Architecture critic Alexandra Lange, author of Writing About Architecture, talks to the creators of Monument Valley — an award-winning video game in which players must navigate the Princess Ida through a maze of impossible buildings and architectural puzzles — for Curbed:

Much of Monument Valley operates in the impossible space drawn by M. C. Escher, whose 1960 drawing ‘Ascending and Descending’ Monument Valley lead designer Ken Wong has acknowledged as an inspiration. The Escher drawing even features a couple of figures scratching their heads about how to get around. The connection between Escher’s drawing and Wong’s original Monument Valley concept sketch is clear; Wong’s is also strikingly similar to the finished product. The whole structure floats in space in a way that suggests infinity, and it features the same isometric perspective, same gelato colors, and a similar sequence of steps and ladders and domes to give it a touch of character. In Monument Valley, sometimes you seem to be floating on water and sometimes in space; sometimes positive and negative are reversed, and you may be underground in paths and tunnels carved from rock. “We were all so taken with [Escher’s] image,” says [Neil] McFarland, that the designers said, “We don’t know what this game is, but if we can make that into a game we will be really happy.”

For the design buff, the game seems rife with visual cues, allusions to the built world, and academic references. Even if Monument Valley’s designers aren’t familiar with deconstructivism, 1970s architecture may have infiltrated its digital world sideways, as architecture-school graduates turn into programmers and once rarefied ideas turn into placeless pins. Monument Valley’s chapters have to cover a lot of territory, in scale and geography.

Sometimes Ida seems very small, like an earlier puzzle-solving heroine in a gridded Wonderland, wending your way through a music box. Sometimes she appears to be climbing a pixel version of Philip Johnson’s concrete-block Monument to Lincoln Kirstein (1985), “a staircase to nowhere.” Sometimes she finds herself holding a red flower, laying it on a rectangular sarcophagus in a sea of sarcophagi that strongly resemble Eisenman’s Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2004). Sometimes you find yourself tripping along a wall that resembles Bofill’s La Muralla Roja housing project (1968), “characterized by a series of interlocking stairs, platforms, and bridges.” Elsewhere the game recalls Tarsem Singh’s cult movie The Fall, filmed at the Lake Palace Hotel in Udaipur (a real-life white, floating world) and the Chand Baori stepwell, a Qbert landscape made exclusively of blocks. Some scenes are more perplexing, and require your seven-year-old to show you which button to push or which screw rotates the cube so that what was once an unbridged gap closes, in digital space, and allows you to cross.

I really don’t play a lot video games, but I do love Monument Valley.

Comments closed

German Post-War Modern

atelier-de-montrouge

Focusing on European architecture, art and design in the second-half of the twentieth-century, German Post-War Modern is currently one of my favourite Tumblrs.

Comments closed

Skydweller: A Portrait of London

skydweller
Skydweller combines over 5,000 photographs of London taken from the top of Cromwell Tower, one of the three residential towers in the city’s Barbican Estate. The short film is accompanied by music specially composed by Tom Rosenthal and poetry by Paul Haworth:

(via ArchDaily)

Comments closed

I Am Not a World Improver: Mies van der Rohe and Building Seagram

Christopher Turner reviews Building Seagram by Phyllis Lambert and Mies van der Rohe by Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst for February’s London Review of Books:

Mies had dreamed of building skyscrapers since the early 1920s when, as a young architect in Berlin recently returned from the war, he’d been seduced by images of the thrusting New York skyline. Influenced by the utopian futurism of Paul Scheerbart, author of Glasarchitektur, Mies proposed a 20-storey tower completely sheathed in glass. It would have loomed over Berlin like an enormous faceted crystal: each wall was positioned at a slight angle to reflect and refract the light. He was fond of quoting St Augustine – ‘beauty is the radiance of truth’ – and wanted to celebrate rather than disguise structural form. ‘Only skyscrapers under construction reveal the bold constructive thoughts,’ Mies wrote, ‘and then the impression of the high-reaching steel skeletons is overpowering.’ In his glass tower, the bones of the building, with their cantilevered floor slabs, would have been visible through a shimmering, crystalline skin.

The glass skyscraper was, as Schulze and Windhorst put it, ‘beyond the threshold of constructability’ (and would only be possible in the 1970s – Mies was fifty years ahead of his time), but it was intended less as a realistic proposal than a radical, modernist statement. It would thrust him to the forefront of the European avant-garde.

Comments closed

Save the Rizzoli Bookstore in New York

The Rizzoli Bookstore is one of the most beautiful bookstores in the world and an icon of New York City architecture. Unfortunately the owners of 31 West 57th Street, the store’s home for 30 years, have recently announced their plan to demolish the six-story, 109-year-old building and replace it with a highrise “ultraluxury” tower.  The Landmarks Preservation Commission, whose mission is “to be responsible for protecting New York City’s architecturally, historically, and culturally significant buildings,” has declined to grant landmark status to the building on the grounds that the property “lacks the architectural significance necessary to meet the criteria for designation,” despite its apparent architectural and cultural importance. A campaign to save the store, and a petition to have 31 West 57th Street designated an individual and interior landmark have been started.

You can read more about the plans to demolish the building in The New York Times. While at The New Yorker, Jon Michaud wrote about his time working at the store:

Many of the things that Rizzoli offered its customers (and its staff) are now easily obtainable online: international periodicals, European popular music, and books in foreign languages. But there is nothing online that will replace the ambiance of the place. With its vaulted atrium, marble flooring, and wood-panelled shelving units, Rizzoli looked like the private library of a Medici prince, the sort of place where an Umberto Eco character would hunt down an ancient secret.

Please sign the petition.

Comments closed

The Absent Column

I was just in Chicago this past weekend, so I was really interested in this short documentary about the battle to preserve the former Prentice Women’s Hospital in the city. Designed by modern architect Bertrand Goldberg, the building — composed of a nine-story concrete cloverleaf tower cantilevered over a rectangular five-story podium — is owned by Northwestern University, which is in the process of demolishing it. The film is directed by journalist and Northwestern alumnus Nathan Eddy:

Comments closed