“Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style. Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it.” (Le Corbusier, 3)
Can an objective architecture exist? Can architecture be malicious? Why is the British Modernist project a failure? Are these shortcomings an indictment on the totality of Modernism, an in particular, the principles espoused by Le Corbusier? The tenets of his Modernism succeed and fail to varying degrees, save one clear failure: context does matter. Although they took two different approaches to the programme, the housing projects of Alton East (1952-1955) and Alton West (1954-1958) both argue that an objective architecture cannot exist; that where there are subjects inhabiting a space, there will be subjectivity.
A place cannot be a tabula rasa if the people occupying the new space are not themselves afforded the same mental erasure. The British experience informs a profound lesson for a sinister duality in architecture: what is meant to be read as normative--as space meant to develop the inhabitant for an impending New Epoch--can simultaneously engender a critical observation of the contemporary situation. This pluralistic reading is particularly key in the context of the massive postwar housing initiatives that were “spearheaded by the LCC [London County Council]...using compulsory purchase, relocation of non-residential institutions, wholesale demolition and comprehensive redevelopment of housing estates.” (Schofield et al.) The architectonic tradition of designing either public spaces or elite private spaces allows a certain forgiveness when these spaces fail. People don’t live in opera houses, libraries or office buildings, so their failure is always limited. Mass housing is not so forgiving: it is special in its degree of use, and from this intensity of use comes a magnification of meaning.
Indeed, he warned us. In Towards a New Architecture, Le Corbusier proposes that the right state of mind is necessary for the successful adoption of the house-as-machine principle. This seems, in a sense, lost in translation, in postwar Britain. Not simply in terms of Continental principles ill-fitting in an historically more isolated architectural tradition, but in the sense that the trauma of the War could hardly be conducive to this radical re-ordering of space. Whilst Le Corbusier suggests his forms are more beautiful, imbued with a humaneness, when one's occupation of a Modernist flat is involuntary, the mechanization of the space of the home-dwelling becomes oppressive. Disallowing a "return to normalcy" exacerbates the traumatic memory, leaving little room to evoke optimism in the residents. .
Figure 1. Exterior view, Alton West Estate, across Downshire Field Of the two Alton Estates,
Corbusian principles are more closely adhered to by the LCC’s Alton West Estate. Like many Modernist buildings, they have a striking quality in photographic form; their symmetricality and rectilinearity creates a sense of great order--a sort of geometric perfection. Their narrowness creates a certain lightness that is reinforced by their pilotis. While they succeed as photographed sculpture, the very aspects that make them appealing to observe as objet d'art makes them insufferable as livable spaces. The opportunity for individuality and fluidity--essential to what Higgot calls “the poetic of the city” (82)-- is sacrificed. The lightness of the ground floor--with the buildings appearing detached from the land itself--exacerbates the sense of temporariness: an uneasy feeling to invoke for formerly forcibly displaced inhabitants. "An inevitable social evolution will have transformed the relationship between tenant and landlord, will have modified the current conception of the dwelling-house, and our towns will be ordered instead of being chaotic. A house will no longer be this solidly-built thing which sets out to defy time and decay, and which is an expensive luxury by which wealth can be shown; it will be a tool as the motor-car is becoming a tool." (Le Corbusier, 237)
Perhaps it is Le Corbusier's refutation of solidity that is most unsuccessful when implemented for emergency housing. The impermanence implied in the design only stands to reiterate traumatic memory. The ground floor pilotis, rather than intimating a futuristic moralism, makes the building feel temporary--as if, at any moment, it could be moved. While this may seem to agree with Le Corbusier's argument for transforming the relationship between house and occupant from home-and-dweller to tool-and-user-- to expurgate the antiquated ideal of permanence from the domestic structure--this design cannot signify an establishing order in a postwar context. The lightness and ephemerality imbues the space with an uncertainty that precludes order for which the strictest geometry cannot compensate while the imposed narrative of newness denies the more relevant one of resilience. In this sense, these are not the apartments of the winning side. The denial of architectural precedence creates doubt: what are these buildings trying to forget? In this sense, their disconnection with ‘Britishness’ allows for a pessimism to permeate.
Figure 2. (Left) Block of Flats, Alton West Estate (1954-1958) and (Right) High-rise building, Alton East Estate (1952-1955) Compounding the problems of the design itself, is the Modernist affinity for unadorned material. Even if one accepts the beauty of concrete in its perfect form, Alton West demonstrates that this look quickly slips away. With this weathering a new layer of failure is added: what should be perennially young becomes, in its material, worn and tired. To sustain the ideology of the space, something of a constant ecdysis is needed-- a practical impossibility for budget-restricted council housing. Thus, using concrete, these buildings appear as forgotten spaces, temporary domiciles living as relics past their expiry date.
More quintessentially British is Alton East. British Modernism’s hallmark employment of texture is a turn away from Le Corbusier toward the more humane Scandinavian Modernism incorporating “the People’s materials,” (Mallgrave, 350). Adopting this approach, Alton East's brick contextualizes the space, mitigating the coldness of the Modernist aesthetic. Red brick carries both an historicist element and a greater sense of investment in the building's lifespan. In a semantic reading, by the perceived effort it takes to construct, the laying of brick signifies the permanence of the structure.
Unfortunately, this marriage of old material with new form is an unhappy one: the brick's sturdiness fights the thin lines of the window detailing, the pilotis, and the lightness that should provided by the central stairwell's large windows. Brick requires the grand gestures like those of the American historicists or the expressionist works of the 'Amsterdam School.' The Modernist details do not provide the stature required by the material and yet, weighed down by the brick, they cannot achieve the streamlined elegance demonstrated in Unité d’Habitation. Rather than succeeding where Alton West failed--and creating a comforting sense of permanence--Alton East's stylistic hodgepodge feels hasty and unintentional: temporary structures waiting for their permanent replacements.
As the Smithson’s Huntstanton School (1949) exemplifies, it would be hyperbole to group all British Modernism as a resounding failure: it is in the adaptation from public form to large scale private space where the breakdown occurs. Post-war British Modernism, and its romanticism of functionality and denial of the past, was naive to the implications for the domestic space: imposing revolution rarely works. In their excitement to build a new Britain, the LCC architects and others were blinded to the meaning of housing to the inhabitant: that, perhaps as Joseph Rykwert argues, “what a man requires of his house is the conviction that he is, in some sense, at the centre of the universe.” (Mallgrave 373) While Le Corbusier believed the eyes could not yet discern the style of the time, it seems that British Modernist architects could not discern this relationship between the dwelling and the dweller in a context-heavy time and space.
Works Cited
“Alton West Estate Roehampton, Wandsworth, Greater London, England. LCC Architects Department: 1954-1958 photo credit: Courtauld Institute of Art, London.” Art and Architecture. 23 Nov. 2011 http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/images/conway/889932ec.html
“Block of flats, Alton West Estate , Roehampton, Wandsworth, Greater London, England: LCC Architects Department: 1954-1958. photo credit: Courtauld Institute of Art, London.” Art and Architecture. 23 Nov. 2011 http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/images/conway/b7d59f86.html
Forty, Adrian."Being or Nothingness: Private Experience and Public Architecture in Post-War Britain." Architectural History, Vol. 38 (1995), pp. 25-35.
John Schofield, et al. "London." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. 25 Nov. 2011
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