1. Architecture or
Revolution?
In the new beginning
that dates from Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture, the
machine occupied a central place: its austerity, its economy, its
geometric cleanness was claimed almost the sole virtue of the new
architecture. Thus the kitchen became a laboratory, and the bathroom
took on the characteristics of a surgical operating room; while the
other parts of the house, for a decade or so, achieved excellence
almost to the degree that they, too, were white, cleanable, empty of
human content.
Lewis Mumford, The
Case Against “Modern Architecture”, 1962.
The spectacular view
always made Laing aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete
landscape. Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that
this was an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence.
J.G. Ballard, High-Rise,
1975.
The high-rise apartment
or office tower is a perennial icon and symbol of the modern world.
It embodies the primary characteristics of high modernist
architecture: the rejection of ornamentation in favour of cool,
minimalist function, and organic complexity in favour of an austere
rectilinear geometry; the omnipresence of glass facades and curtain
walling, which prompted Lewis Mumford to pithily observe that glass
was the only material modern architects were unable to see through.
In its clean, uniform character, it evokes the age of the machine and
of mass production; in its scale and elevation, the dream of
conquering gravity which presided over the twentieth century in a
myriad forms. Most of all, the high rise represents the dream of a
fully rational, mathematically simple and predictable landscape in
which the wilder vagaries of the natural world, and human nature,
have been ousted.
A vertical village in
which nobody knows anybody else, the high-rise embodies many of the
contradictions of urban life: the close physical proximity and
emotional distance of its inhabitants, the merging of their public
and private space in its tiers of balconies, corridors and
stairwells, allows the high-rise to serve as a model for the city's
peculiar conjunction of populousness and alienation. As a symbol of
modernity and urbanism, the high-rise carries a variety of different
meanings and resonances, and provokes antithetical responses of
considerable emotional intensity. An ambiguous entity, it embodies
both the utopian and dystopian characteristics of modern life. On
the one hand, the high-rise tower block makes us think of the
disastrous structures that urban councils built to house (and
segregate) the urban poor in the 60s and 70s, with all the morass of
crime, deprivation, and hopelessness that resulted. On the other, we
think of the luxury high-rise blocks favoured by middle and upper
middle-class dwellers as the embodiment of a certain kind of sleek
urban elegance - a living space somewhere between home and hotel,
safely cloistered in the upper air from the clamour of the streets
below.
Apartment Building, Ramat Gran, Israel, 1960-65, (Alfred Neumann, Zvi Hecker and Eldar Sharon) Fuck Yeah Brutalism
Hiliard Center, Chicago, 1964, (Bertrand Goldberg) Fuck Yeah Brutalism
Orange County Government Center, Goshen, New York, 1971, (Paul Rudolph) Fuck Yeah Brutalism
Parish Church for the Resurrection of Christ, Melaten, Germany, 1964-70 (Gottfried Bohm) Fuck Yeah Brutalism.
Modernist architecture
has always been hugely divisive. For some, it has embodied all the
failings, aesthetic, intellectual, or spiritual, of modernity itself.
A common idea (or ideology) underlying modernity was that it
represented a point of total historical novelty in which a new
awareness or mode of consciousness was born, wholly unconnected to
and unencumbered by the past. This is the essence of modernity
conceived as a utopian project: a Manichean conflict between the
past, envisioned in a wholly negative light, and the salvation
offered by the novelty of the present moment, which contains in utero
a future of continual improvement and progress. Modernist
architecture was keenly informed by this sense of a radical break
with the past, and as such its towers and monuments arose with a
brash disregard for their predecessors in time and surroundings in
space, serving for some as the harbingers of a new aesthetic order,
and others as a crude effacement of the historical continuity of the
urban landscape, the city in time which is a living record of its own
history.
In the late 1960s and
70s, modernist architecture and urban planning were undergoing a
particularly sustained backlash. This perhaps provides a partial
explanation for the striking coincidence of two works of art which
appeared in 1975: JG Ballard's novel High-Rise and David
Cronenberg's feature debut Shivers (They Came from Within.)
High-Rise and Shivers are so similar in theme and basic
outline that I'd always assumed one must have influenced the other,
until I realized that they came out in the same year.
Both are apocalypses of
the middle-class in which the denizens of luxury modernist high rise
towers cumulatively descend (or perhaps ascend) into total anarchy
and violence. In Ballard's version, a series of small, petty
acrimonies gradually escalate into sectarian violence, tribalism, and
eventually a total reversion to nomadic primitivism. In Cronenberg's
more explicitly psychosexual vision of the high-rise apocalypse, our
location is Starliner Towers, a self-contained high-modernist
Montreal community where “day to day living becomes a luxury
cruise.” Starliner's placid middle-class seclusion is shattered by
the spread of an invasive parasite, however, which turns its
residents into polymorphously perverse zombies.
Ballard's novel concerns class-warfare and the effective collapse of
society, while Cronenberg's movie presents the sexual revolution in
fast-forward as a claustrophobic George Romero freak-out. Both works
hinge on the same basic set of ironic contrasts: between the
sterility of the environment and the eventual anarchy of its
inhabitants, between the geometry of modern urban architecture
and the disorder which both artists present as seething under
the surface of its human residents, or, more succinctly, between the
utopian aspirations of modernist urban planning, and the apocalypses
which Ballard and Cronenberg stage, both with a distinct gusto,
within the confines of its iconic signifier, the high-rise. In this
essay, I’m going to look at Shivers and High Rise as
critiques of Modernist utopianism which both express Freudian ideas
regarding the fragility of civilisation in the form of ambiguous,
darkly comic middle-class apocalypses.
In a broad historical sense, the word modern denotes
the whole panoply of changes which engulfed society, culture and
human identity between the 17th
and 20th
centuries: the rapid development of the physical sciences,
industrialisation, mechanisation, increasing urbanisation, the
questioning of traditional values and sources of authority, the
emergence of state bureaucracies, and so on. In his study of
modernity All That is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall
Berman quotes (and derives his title from) Karl Marx's poetic
evocation of the profound sense of upheaval engendered by modernity:
“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed
ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid
melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are
forced to face....the real conditions of their lives and their
relations with their fellow men.”
In a climate of such accelerated change and radical uncertainty, new
faiths and foundations were required to replace the old, and a faith
in the idea of modernity itself would become increasingly powerful by
the twentieth century. This was the belief that all human problems
were best served, and could indeed potentially be solved, by the
application of scientific, rationalistic, and technocratic means.
The world was no longer a conflict between good and evil so much as
one between the Utopian promise of the modern present and the dank,
superstitious follies of the past.
Lewis Mumford argued that a belief in mechanical progress was the
central underlying assumption of modern architecture: “Concealed
within this notion was the assumption that human improvement would
come about more rapidly, indeed almost automatically, through
devoting all our energies to the expansion of scientific knowledge
and to technological inventions; that traditional knowledge and
experience, traditional forms and values, acted as a brake upon such
expansion and invention, and that since the order embodied by the
machine was the highest type of order, no brakes of any kind were
desirable.” In a similar vein, James C. Scott, writing in Seeing
Like a State, describes the high-modernist faith as “a strong
(one might even say muscle-bound) version of the beliefs in
scientific and technical progress that were associated with
industrialisation in Western Europe and in North America from roughly
1830 until World War I. At its centre was a supreme self-confidence
about continued linear progress, the development of scientific and
technical knowledge, the expansion of production, the rational design
of social order, the growing satisfaction of human needs, and not
least, an increasing control over nature (including human nature)
commensurate with scientific understanding of natural laws.”
Futurist architecture by Antonio Casa Sant'Elia (via wikipedia and rust' n' concrete)
Futurist art by Tullio Crali.
Among
the most extreme of the modernist utopians were the Italian
Futurists, an avant-garde movement of the early twentieth century
whose work expressed an unqualified rejection of the past, and an
altogether rhapsodic mania for the powers unleashed by the industrial
age: “Comrades, we tell you now that that the triumphant progress
of science makes changes in humanity inevitable, changes that are
hacking an abyss between those docile slaves of tradition and us free
moderns who are confident in the radiant splendour of our future.”
(Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, 1910, F.T.
Marinetti.) Everybody was excited to some degree or another by the
sweeping march of the modern world; the Futurists were stone drunk on
it. Their intoxication focussed on images and themes which would
become uniquely expressive of the 20th century, and the
youth culture which began to flourish after the wars: the automobile,
the airplane, the industrial city, youth, speed and violence. (These
same signifiers become hugely prominent in J.G. Ballard’s fiction,
albeit viewed from a far more ambiguous perspective.)
The
first great modernist Utopian in the architectural sphere was
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Grist, an extraordinary man of
Swiss-French extraction whom the world came to know by the pseudonym
le Corbusier. An indefatigable architect, painter, author,
urban planner and visionary, the range of le Corbusier’s talents
was amply matched by the hubristic scale of his ambitions. Like the
Futurists, le Corbusier had been intoxicated by the sense of immense
power embodied in the technological world. In L’Urbanisme
(The City of Tomorrow, 1924), le Corbusier describes a kind of
“conversion” experience to the faith of modernism. The author is
taking an evening stroll on the Champs Elysées, and begins his
narrative in a mood of stereotypical alienation from the sound and
fury of the modern city. Intimidated by the speeding cars, he broods
over the loss of the era of the pedestrian, a quieter, idealized
world which moved to a statelier tempo.
An
abrupt and total change of heart overtakes him, however; he begins to
conceive of the modern world as a tidal wave of energy which the
individual can participate in, experiencing almost a theophany of
technological animism:
“On the 1st of October, 1924, I was assisting in the
titanic rebirth of a new phenomenon….traffic. Cars, cars, fast,
fast! One is seized, filled with enthusiasm, with joy…the joy of
power. The simple and naïve pleasure of being in the midst of
power, of strength. One participates in it. One takes part in this
society that is just dawning. One has confidence in this new
society: it will find a magnificent expression of its power. One
believes in it (cited in All That is Solid Melts into Air). ”
Le
Corbusier sought to create the architecture of this bold new society,
and his project is suffused with all the galvanizing energy, as well
as the unsettling autocratic undertones, of the above passage. He
becomes the theorist, prophet and practitioner of a new Machine Age
design aesthetic, with his hugely influential 1923 manifesto Towards
a New Architecture providing the iconic slogan “A House is a
Machine for Living In.” His dreams are grandiose in scale,
requiring the construction of whole cities from scratch. The Ville
Contemoraine, an unrealized project from 1920, encapsulates many
of Le Corbusier’s ideas about urbanism, and is a quintessential
example of the Utopian mega-city of the future which would become the
dystopian backdrop of science fiction like Judge Dredd and
Blade Runner. Designed to house three million inhabitants,
the focal-point of the Ville was its 24 imposing, glass
curtain-walled cruciform apartment/office blocks, “towers in a
park” which formed the commercial district, separated by
rectangular green-belts from the residential and industrial areas.
The plan shows Le Corbusier’s extreme commitment to functionalism
in urban design: a network of buses, trains, high-ways, and even
roof-top airports makes the intervening spaces almost redundant. The
city is divided very strictly into residential and work spaces, with
the traditional city’s tendency to produce bricolages of mixed
function and purpose eliminated by wide open spaces, traversed by the
modern miracle of rapid transportation.
In
1925, Le Corbusier proposed demolishing two square miles of the north
bank of the Seine in order to facilitate a smaller version of the
ideas embodied in the Ville Contemoraine. His description of the
proposed development (Plan Voisin) is typically lyrical and
rhapsodic, transforming the office towers into weightless, almost
spiritual entities:
“I
shall ask my readers to imagine they are walking in this new city,
and have begun to acclimatize themselves to its untraditional
advantages. You are under the shade of trees, vast lawns spread all
round you. The air is clear and pure; there is hardly any noise.
What, you cannot see where the buildings are ? Look through the
charmingly diapered arabesques of branches out into the sky towards
those widely-spaced crystal towers which soar higher than any
pinnacle on earth. These translucent prisms that seem to float in the
air without anchorage to the ground - flashing in summer sunshine,
softly gleaming under grey winter skies, magically glittering at
nightfall - are huge blocks of offices.”
Most
of Le Corbusier's grander schemes remained unrealized (the closest he
got to working on such a vast scale were his contributions to the
planned city of Chandigrarh in the north of India.) On more modest
terms, however, we find his ideas realized in the Unité
d'habitation residential block in Marseille which is often called the
Cité
radieuse (Radiant
City). Built in béton
brut (rough-cast
concrete) because of post-war steel frame shortages, the Cité
radieuse formed the inspiration for the confrontational Brutalist
school of architecture which Wheatley and his designers seem to have
adopted for Anthony Royal's buildings in the High-Rise
movie. Suspended on large piloti
containing
237 apartments over 12 floors, it is a fascinating, ugly/beautiful
monolith of a building. Also incorporating shops, restaurants,
medical and sporting facilities, even a hotel open to the public, the
Unité
d'habitation provides us the classic model of the self-contained,
utopian “city in the sky” which we find satirised in Shivers
and
High-Rise.
What
Le Corbusier and like-mined modernists sought to combat most of all
was the normal organic evolution of cities. Traditionally, cities
and urban settlements developed in an unplanned fashion, following
the changing needs of their citizenry. For the modernists, infused
by a passion for idealized mathematical order, this produced only a
chaos, a detestable hodgepodge. The city street is noteworthy for
its randomness: it leads us to chance encounters, unexpected detours,
and the experience of various street theatres of public exhibitionism
and desperation, pathos and comedy. This was unacceptable to the
modernists; they sought in a very real sense to destroy the street.
This was because they had a keen appreciation of what is today called
pyschogeography, allied to an
ideology of muscle-bound modernism.
The environment in which we live and work is not merely a series of
functional or aesthetically pleasing locations that we use and enjoy
in the course of our daily activities. Rather, the environment is an
intrinsic part of our total experience. Like the food that we eat
and the books that we read, it becomes a part of us, and has a
profound, though often quite subliminal effect on our mental lives.
As a corollary to the general mystery surrounding how the mental and
physical interact with one another, place and mind are intertwined in
various subtle ways. Le Corbusier and his disciples were not only
aware of this, but they believed that urban planning was explicitly a
form of social planning and control. Le Corbusier believed
that there was a Plan, as unique and precise as the solution
to an equation, for the design of urban settlements, which, once
instigated, would inevitably yield a perfectly harmonious society.
This was the meaning of his polemical slogan/question Architecture
or Revolution? Environments are no longer to be determined by
the unpredictable behaviour of people and history; rather this
situation is reversed, so that a centrally planned and controlled
environment begins to determine the behaviour of people and history.
This was why the modernists dreamed of razing vast areas of existing
cities, and building new ones from scratch. Like contemporary
neoliberal economists, they saw no room to gradually implement
change; the world had to be remade in the image of their ideology.
It is reductive, however, to view le Corbusier and early modernist
architecture exclusively in the light of its dubious political
underpinnings, and the ultimate failure of modernist urban planning.
To do so, at any rate, overlooks his brilliance as an artist, and the
fact that his buildings, viewed in isolation from his troubling
manifestos, were often striking, even beautiful creations.
Nevertheless, by the late sixties, the modernist ethos of urbanism
was increasingly being viewed as a failure. Jane Jacobs' 1961 book
The Death and Life of Great American Cities was an influential
critique, and a powerful argument for the spontaneity and ecological
intelligence of the organic street over the mono-functional blocks of
the modernist dream. In the waning fortunes of the high-rise in
Great Britain, we find probably the most direct influence on
Ballard's High-Rise: Erno Goldfinger's Trellick Tower.
Goldfinger was a six-foot tall, taciturn Hungarian-born architect who
moved to London in the '30s. He occupies a somewhat comical place in
pop culture history: Ian Fleming found his architecture and general
character disagreeable enough to christen the quintessential James
Bond villain in his honour. When Goldfinger threatened legal action,
a farcical clash between the two ensued, with Fleming threatening to
change the name to Goldprick before the matter was settled out
of court.
Commissioned by the London Council in 1966 for social housing in
North Kensington, the 98 metre concrete behemoth of Trellick Tower is
today regarded as a fashionable London icon. In its early years,
however, it was nick-named the “Tower of Terror,” having acquired
a reputation for litter, mechanical failure, and an epidemic of
serious crimes and sexual assaults.
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