On Apartment Buildings

Structuring Memory: Modernist Objectivity and Post-War British Housing.

“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 . 

Higgot, Andrew. Mediating Modernism: Architectural cultures in Britain. New York: Routledge, 2007.

 “High-rise building, Alton East Estate Roehampton, Wandsworth, Greater London, England, LCC Architects Department 1952-1955: photo credit: Courtauld Institute of Art, London.” Art and Architecture. 23 Nov. 2011 http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/images/conway/d061677d.html Le 

Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture. New York: Dover, 1986. 

Mallgrave, Harry F. Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673-1968. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 

 Sutton, Ian. Western Architecture: From Ancient Greece to the Present. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001.

Songdo IBD (International Business District) is a stark example of the complexities of master planning in the 21st century. Whilst its website cheers for a new economic day coming for this future city, it's hard to see the reality on the ground. It feels like the end of the Earth--if it can even be attributed to Earth. It is 100 million sq feet of seemingly unoccupied space (http://www.songdo.com/songdo-international-business-district/the-city/master-plan.aspx.) Of course, it is not nearly as vacant as I am claiming, but even if there are inhabitants, the sense is one of desolation. In person it is as beautiful as the mock-ups predicted due to a complete lack of humanity to sully it.

I really did take these pictures. If it looks like walking through a 3-D project proposal, that's exactly how it feels. At points. My sense was a great tension between the shiny newness, so surreal in its forwardness, and the abandonment more akin to ruins. Perhaps it was the searing 38C heat of a mid-summer day, but it felt like venturing around future ruins. Of course, it didn't help that some areas were abandoned. While a foot bridge in Central Park had two attendants polishing it, just a short walk away, unfinished bicycle and walking paths were overgrown. Tomorrow City, the showcase of the future, had gone empty.

Maybe when the trees grow more full Songdo will feel more hospitable, but for now, the only reprieve from the climate are the overbearing bridges. One of the few places where I actually encountered people was under one such bridge. A group of seniors were taking a rest in the only place that provided shade. An interesting juxtaposition, these elderly folks resting under a hyper-modern structure built on the very place where MacArthur first landed when they were young (there is a monument to this strange factoid.) The group seemed completely out-of-place. Like they had parachuted in from elsewhere. The Songdo Master plan does not purport the city to be a city for the elderly, but a place of cutting edge innovation for the (younger) entrepreneurial class. As the trees are still too young to provided reasonable shade, this group (the majority of the people in the park all together) were occupying a space in an unpredicted way. Sitting on the footings of the bridge rather than on the allotted benches a few metres away.

The dreams of New Towns

There is something compelling about a New Town in the abstract. It shares much with buying a new car. As ephemeral as the new car smell is, as quickly outmoded as the latest superfluous features are, they are enrapturing. They are impossibly alluring. It takes monkish piety to repress the lust for them. We know on paper they mean nothing. We know if questioned, we could never fully justify them. But we can't help ourselves. As it turns out, we don't reserve this craving of the new and supremely fresh for automobile purchases. And until just a few years ago, while we may have scoffed at the stupidity of buying an overpriced never-been-driven car, we saw no connection with our housing choices. After all, a car is just a car, but a house or an apartment, that's a home. A home is a different thing. A home is not meant to be shared. We don't want to think of these rooms sullied by pasts. It is appalling that our kitchens may have known better chefs, our dining rooms may have hosted better parties, our family rooms may have seen better holidays, our bedrooms may have had more salacious dalliances. If we think too much about it, if we allow ourselves even a moment to reflect, jealousy overwhelms us. A home can only have one family. Our family, to the exclusion of all others. Anyone else is a house guest. Anyone else has to knock. Sure, we may go on to sell those special, irreplaceable members of our family. We compartmentalize this as if that home, that certain home, no longer exists. This nostalgia pushes almost to believe the physical structure itself no longer exists. And while we know in a rational sense, yes, the structure is still there, we content ourselves in knowing the inhabitants are mere imposters living in a shadow version of the platonic form. We remember a house always remembers its first. As a child I remember a woman visiting my home. She appeared unannounced one day, as people on these kinds of visits usually do. She told my mother she had grown up as a child in my house. That this house, my house, was her house. There is only one reality when you're in early elementary school, and this woman's claim came as an affront to me. She explained that her family had planted the hazelnut tree that blocked the bathroom window from plain view. She explained that her parents had built the machine shed and the outbuildings near the rear of the orchard. And interestingly, she explained that hers had not been the first family in the house. She explained why the front door did not function as the front door, but more as decorative facade to be seen from the road far below, down the hill. She explained that post World War II a doctor had moved this little wartime bungalow to the top of the hill. An ostentatious move for an 800 square foot home. While the idea of my home as a roaming nomad excited me, her claim to a childhood in this home unnerved me. My home was her home. This was too intimate a claim for a youngster to manage. It seemed unnatural, or more accurately, sinful. While many of us grow out of this attachment to place in this way, we learn to live in more transient scenarios (rental properties and sublets), we can't deny this urge, this feeling. The desire to be the only one. It is with this understanding, maybe more empathy than sympathy, that maybe we can understand the romanticism of the New Town.