Here Comes The Rain Again

Bernard Tschumi, Adverts for Architecture, 1975. 

Modern architecture can be seen in some senses as a refusal to give in to the elements. The stylistic origins of early modernism lay in the Mediterranean and its proselytisers attempted to export the sun-kissed balconies and white rendered forms of southern Europe to far less hospitable climates. The International Style abstracted architecture, removing it from the banal facts of bad weather and the traditional details that kept rain out. Copings, gutters, rainwater pipes, cornices and the whole armory of devices that architecture had developed to deal with the effects of weather became things to minimise and artfully disguise. 

Oddly, there was less squeamishness about such things on the inside where architects such as Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos both chose to put modern plumbing and sanitary ware on display. There is no external equivalent to the hand basin that Corbusier placed in the entrance hall of the Villa Savoye or the sink that welcomed visitors to Loos' Rufer House. While bodily functions played an important role in shaping the interiors of early modernism, reflective of an intense interest in functionalism, the exteriors represented a far more rhetorical version of mechanical precision. 

When modernism crossed the Atlantic it found its most natural home on the west coast where architects like Neutra and Schindler produced exquisite if paper thin hymns to Californian sunshine.  Schindler's buildings in particular were famously flimsy  and when I visited his beautiful King's Road house a few years ago I noticed that you could put your hand through some of the gaps between wall and window. You could get away with such things in LA I guess. In northern Europe, the supposed failings of modernism - all those leaking flat roofs and stained bits of concrete - were taken as proof that it was somehow impractical, a dream that could only become quickly tarnished. 

The reality of shitty weather always seems to lurk at the back of the English psyche, accounting perhaps for a lugubrious world view that assumes that everything will always turn out for the worse. Personally I have no problem with stained concrete, being rather fond of the damp moustache like stains that cling to the undersides of brutalist buildings. One of modernism's problems though - at least in popular perception - is that it doesn't age well. Ageing is seen in fact as a kind of failure in itself, a demonstration of prima donna-ish impracticality. Classical buildings are allowed to grow old. It's expected even. Worn stone and lichen are seen as evidence only of neglect and romanticised as the authentic marks of heritage. 

Modernism is allowed no such grace. In a way it is a victim of its own rhetoric. Its claim to represent the future is always hard to square with the prosaic reality of bits falling off or leaky gutters. As architects its hard to talk to clients about the effects of age on buildings. Sometimes they want to know that things won't ever change, as if such a thing were remotely possible. The problem lies perhaps in the fact that architects are as transfixed as the people they are trying to impress with the shiny, semi-translucent apparitions that appear in their renders. 

It's hard to think of any architects who have embraced the inevitability of weathering. The Smithsons in their later years at Bath perhaps where the deeply odd buildings they developed had grown enormous water shedding cornices and vast rainwater hoppers. Following them, Peter Salter's mostly un-built work addressed issues of ageing, decay and weathering. One of his few completed projects, the Mountain Pavilion in Japan, was designed to be completely covered by snow for part of the year. The AA's book on Salter's early work (with former colleague Chris McDonald) contained an enigmatic introductory essay by Peter Smithson in celebration of guttering and the poetic acceptance of the effects of weather.

Gavin Turk, Robert Morris Untitled 1965-72 (image taken from here)

While I was thinking of these things I was reminded of a sculpture by Gavin Turk and a description of it that I can't place now. Robert Morris Untitled 1965-72 is a riff on Morris' 1965 piece Mirrored Cubes, a series of four perfectly reflective boxes placed on the floor. Turk's version is like an Anglicised cousin, dog-eared and slightly rusty, as if the cubes had been left outside in the rain for seven years. Turk is of course free to propose not only a deliberately unkempt aesthetic but a melancholic and pessimistic take on the idea of perfection itself.

Architects are boosterists, involved in what Robin Evans once memorably described as "the appalling business of client sucking". We are in the business of persuading people to part with sums of money for new  buildings and it doesn't do in such a scenario to harp on about the pleasures of decay and the poetry of ruins. Architects attempt instead to render  buildings in some eternal moment of perfection and bright sunshine. The thin plane-like walls of modernism, unencumbered by banal coping stones or unsightly flashings, represents a desire to transcend time. Architects judge the success of their creations according to the degree that they have manage to hide away un-slightly reminders of corporeality and decay. 

Loos/Lutyens/Venturi

Adolf Loos' fondness for English Arts and Crafts architecture is well documented. Like Voysey and Baillie Scott, Loos' best known works were villas for the wealthy bourgeoisie and his designs concerned themselves with accommodating their desire for comfortable and relatively informal domestic interiors. Loos' ingenious Raumplan concept meant that he took the rambling room plus a corridor layout of the typical Arts and Crafts house and folded it up into a tight cubic volume.

His prismatic boxes contain serpentine routes travelling both horizontally and vertically as well as backwards and forwards. Visitors to Loos' houses are faced with labyrinthine circulation routes that double and triple the apparent available space. Corridors frequently double-back on themselves or bifurcate to offer two separate routes to the same destination. Mirrors and internal windows are placed strategically to both amplify and confound the sense of an unfolding sequence of spaces.

(Plan of the Loos' Villa Muller annotated to show the sequence from entry to main living space.)

Loos exact contemporary in the UK, Edwin Lutyens was engaged in a similar if spatially less radical project. His houses also took the rambling, picturesque Arts and Crafts plan but formalised it into compact courtyard typologies. The reduction in scale in many cases of Lutyens' houses from their classical and Elizabethan antecedents meant that he also folded internal and external routes back on themselves in order to achieve relatively grand promenades.

(Plan of Lutyens' Homewood annotated to show the sequence from entry to main living space.)

If the Villa Muller is generally recognised as Loos' finest example of the Raumplan then surely  Lutyens' equivalent is Homewood, the house he built for his mother-in-law on the Knebworth estate. In both houses the entrance marks the start of a complex route involving ninety degree turns and blind alleys. Both have corridors terminating in blank walls before opening out to relatively grand and opulent spatial centrepieces. Both avoid an overall symmetry in the plan whilst constructing a series of intense local symmetries and dualities within it. In the Villa Muller the architectural promenade switches back and forth masking the final destination whilst revealing glances back to where you have just come from. At Homewood the route drifts diagonally across the house, extending what would otherwise be a short journey into something more complex and theatrical.

(Plan of the Venturi's Mother's House annotated to show the sequence from entry to main living space.)

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown wrote about the lessons for modern architecture in Lutyens' designs in their 1969 essay Learning From Lutyens*. Previously Venturi had made extensive reference to Lutyens in Complexity and Contradiction, and an even more compacted and reduced version of the internal promenade occurs in the plan of his Mother's House. Here, the darkly recessed entrance again leads to a blank wall forcing an immediate ninety degree turn followed swiftly by another. Despite its spatial complexity, the entrance sequence is extended by no more than a couple of meters in all, suggesting that Lutyens' and Loos' richly paradoxical planning is applicable at a vastly reduced scale.

* Thinking about the much used and abused title Learning from..... it strikes me how clearly it reverses the implied spatial direction of Towards a New Architecture, one looking decisively forward and the other suggesting a glance back, at least in the sense that you can only learn from something that already exists. Quite so, you'd say, if it weren't for the fact that both titles could easily be swapped around - i.e. Learning from Las Vegas is also about a new architecture and Towards A New Architecture spends a great deal of time talking about the Parthenon. 

On the limits of anthropomorphic machines (Part 2)

(Image: Plan of the town of Radiator Springs from Pixar's Cars, taken from here)

The first half of this post wasn't intended as a rant against CGI, although it's true to say that the original Thomas drawings are for more subtle and beautiful than the current animations. The development of computer animation has created a renaissance in children's movies, particularly from the Pixar studio. It's interesting then that Pixar's own fantasy world creations are also most successful when operating in a similarly plausible but defined universe to that of the Railway Series.

Much of the humour and pathos of the Toy Story movies, for example, emanates from a tension between what the toys can and can't do, and from the fact that they are restricted to a series of plausible movements.  Their ability to stretch (Slinky Dog), disassemble themselves (Mr Potato Head) and organise military operations (Bucket O Soldiers) provides action sequences within precise physical limitations Equally important to the storyline is what the toys can't do, such as Buzz Lightyear's various heartbreaking attempts to fly. They may be 'alive' but they also only exist within a logical extension of their 'toyness'. As in Salvador Dali's Paranoiac Critical method, an absurd fantasy (of the toys being alive but still toys) is pursued with complete logic throughout.

The toys also clearly inhabit a human world although they fight for independence within it. This is in contrast to the recent Cars franchise which, interestingly, runs into many of the same problems as the new Thomas. Like Thomas, the Cars concept depends on the anthropomorphisation of machines. Unlike Thomas though the machines in Cars inhabit a people-less world, one where they have replaced the roles, characteristics and foibles of the absent humans. This conceit is wittily explored in the first film both visually (vans that look like Elvis, radiator grill moustaches that suggest redneck tendencies etc.) and structurally (a town designed by and for cars).

The action of the first film is confined to very limited spheres, essentially either the stadium in which the cars race or the isolated desert town of Radiator Springs. The choice of the town's location is important because it avoids all sorts of contradictions that would occur in a larger and more pedestrian - and thus human - orientated realm. The functions of the buildings in Radiator Springs have been altered so that the generic Italian restaurant has become a garage and the petrol station the local drive-in. This is a car-based universe and nothing breaks the logic or the suspension of disbelief required to follow their anthropomorphised autonomy.  

In the second Cars film the action has become global and follows the World Grand Prix, a series of races held in well-known cities. This creates a conceptual problem in that the cities (London, Paris, Tokyo etc) need to be rendered both plausibly recognisable and consistent with a people-less universe. Subtle scale changes are made to the sizes of doorways for instance and humour is found in car based versions of human spaces such as the rough local pub 'inhabited' by taxis and delivery trucks. And although famous landmarks have been rather fabulously 'motorised' (as detailed here) it remains impossible to imagine what they might actually be for. 

But the film still begs some fairly fundamental questions which threaten to derail it entirely. What happens in the mansard roofs of those Parisian apartments? Why have upper floors at all? Who are the double-decker buses for? Not only that but the cars themselves are thrown into a full-on spoof spy movie where they fly through the air, set off booby traps and engage in tyre-to-tyre combat Jason Bourne style. As the cars have become more human, moving beyond simply being machines with characters, the absence of humans becomes oddly more telling. 

Not only does the construction of an alternative car based society need precise rules to work but the humour depends on the careful substitution of one set of rules for another. The way that cars move, the things that they can and can't do is very important. When they can fly through the air firing machine guns and foiling international villains their car-ness becomes far less implausible (of course) but also less important. Similarly, when they inhabit an environment whose underlying logic is clearly man-made (stairs, attics, Georgian windows etc), the suspension of disbelief evaporates.

In a sense, the moral universe inhabited by the Cars is every bit as pervasive as the one in Thomas the Tank Engine. The world of duty, obedience and responsibility delineated in Thomas is no less insufferable than the homilies about friendship and staying true to oneself in Cars. There is a confused environmental narrative at the heart of the Cars storyline too, presumably as an attempt to ameliorate the obsession with motor racing to start with. But children's stories always have an explicitly moral message. The creation of alternative worlds be they miniature, anthropomorphic or whatever, allows for the creation of precise rules and limits. These serve not only to contain the fantasy but to communicate the ethical dilemmas the stories rehearse.

The 'system' which underpins the action is a kind of machine itself, a metaphor for a functioning moral universe where things have their place and people understand their role. Tests to the stability of  this universe form the narrative for individual stories, helping ultimately to reinforce the desirability of the system to start with. Character's that deviate from their roles are punished in the end and learn to accept certain limits to their freedom. This is why Thomas the Tank Engine is such a brilliant conception for children's stories. The Sodor