fables of the reconstruction

At the end of his brilliant essay on the Barcelona Pavilion – Mies Van De Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries – Robin Evans added a short post-script dismissing concerns about the buildings authenticity. The original Pavilion was built for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona and demolished shortly after. The building that Robin Evans visited was a reconstruction, completed in the 1980's.

Architecture differs significantly from other art forms in that the final product - the building - is made by people other than the architect. Architects - along with the other members of the design team - really only produce a very complex description of the building, not the thing itself. Although there are questions of authenticity that reside in the manner of a building's construction - that is, in the way that it has been made - artistic authenticity is part of a wider set of issues to do with the buildings relationship to time and place.





















The  concept of the zeitgeist is central to the rhetoric of modern architecture. The belief  that buildings should embody the 'spirit of the age' assumes that they can be the logical outcome of the contemporary forces that bring them into being. Such a belief in modernity and in the duty of art and architecture to express the unique conditions of its own period is clearly antithetical to reconstruction. To be authentically modern, one can't recreate the past.

In recent decades a small number of highly significant 'lost' buildings - including the Frauenkirche in Dresden and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow - have been reconstructed. Unlike the Barcelona Pavilion, the return of these buildings is clearly more a political issue than an aesthetic one. Their re-appearance is an attempt to heal the scars of war or a way of rejecting the political ideology that removed them in the first place.




















There can't be a site that better represents the vicissitudes of the twentieth century than Christ the Saviour. It lies in the centre of Moscow, close to the Kremlin and on the banks of the Moskva river. The original cathedral was constructed on this site in the mid-19th century. It was demolished in 1931 in order to make way for the enormous Palace of the Soviets. Only the foundations for this building were completed though and, after lying dormant for years, the site was turned into an open-air swimming pool. Then, in the last decade of the 20th century the cathedral was re-built, an immaculate copy of the original that was consecrated in August, 2000. To complete the return to a pre-revolutionary condition, the cathedral was the venue for the glorification of the last Russian Tsar as a saint.

In a sense, this story is almost too perfect an encapsulation of the retrogressive nature of reconstruction, far too neat a fable. The cathedral hasn't been rebuilt for any architectural qualities it might have had, although, like all cathedrals, it is impressive and awe inspiring when inside. It's reconstruction is a matter of attempting to erase the political events of the 20th century from the site, which from an architectural point of view seems a massive shame. The vast, circular Moksva swimming pool looked like a fabulous constructivist object, a gigantic circle from a Malevich painting spinning through the thixotropic space of the city.

Unlike books, or films, or paintings, a new building usually means the destruction of a previous one. Buildings replace each other, sometimes wrongly, and their conservation is a highly problematic issue because they always mean something to someone. In a sense, reconstructions compound the insult by demolishing the buildings that result from previous demolition. They attempt to rectify the violent erasure of the distant past by erasing the  recent past.
























The reconstruction of Christ the Saviour is an attempt to erase the crimes of Stalin, quite specifically as it was he who ordered the cathedrals destruction. Yet, re-writing history is a cliche of Stalinism. The re-built cathedral assumes that nothing of worth existed on the site and that nothing was lost in its reconstruction. The missing swimming pool has become like the people removed from official photographs and history books.

All of which assumes that buildings only exist in their physical form, rather than as a memory, or a photograph or a story. The Barcelona Pavlion only existed as such fragments for many years. It's canonic status within architectural history rested on a handful of black and white pictures and a few drawings. Arguably it's importance was, at least in part, a result of its inaccessibility. Buildings are sometimes more powerful in their absence. Certainly, its easier for a clear narrative to be developed when there is nothing left to contradict it. The perfection of the Barcelona Pavilion was preserved because, for fifty years, it never grew old. It's reconstruction allowed Robin Evans and others to reassess its qualities and contradictions, sometimes radically so.




















It's hard to make a case against reconstruction on the grounds of being true to the zeitgeist. Such a position assumes a reductive relationship between technology and form. What happens for instance if the spirit of the age is nostalgic, or inherently reactionary? Ultimately, the argument against reconstruction might be same one as for any building. What does it replace and is it worth it? The Barcelona Pavilion replaced nothing but itself. The site had remained empty and the rotting foundations found in the ground were that of the original. It's tempting to suggest that these should have been retained as a ruin, a genuine preservation of the original. But this is simply another kind of sentimentality, an aestheticisation of the past that merely speaks to a melancholic rather than optimistic frame of mind. It's not so much the ersatz, or inauthentic nature of reconstruction that is the problem, more the futility of the gesture.

A restoration debate has been rumbling away in London these past few years. The Euston Arch was demolished in 1961 and, ever since, there has been a consistent campaign to have it rebuilt. Positions are polarised, and over rehearsed to the point of meaninglessness. But there's always been one detail I've found intriguing about the story which is that the stones from the original arch lie at the bottom of the River Lea. Parts of these remarkably well preserved columns and classical details have already been raised from the river. The proposal now is to literally rebuild using the salvaged material. No doubt if the plans go ahead the stones will be cleaned and repaired and the missing parts remade to complete the whole. As all reconstructions are representations of history though, maybe a more truthful picture would be to only use what can genuinely be reclaimed. The result, with its holes and gaps and stains might be a more compelling, and more genuine, record of the building's history.

over the edge

This post follows on in some ways from several previous ones about the coastline of south-east England, a place that continues to interest me for a number of reasons which keep resurfacing here. It’s in the nature of a blog too, I guess, that certain subjects are returned to again and again, somewhat partially each time.

The clip above is taken from Quadrophenia, the 1978 film based on The Who’s rock opera about mid ‘60’s mod culture. In the film’s final scene, Jimmy – it’s ostensible hero – appears to ride his scooter over the edge of the cliff at Beachy Head, on the East Sussex coast. Beachy Head is an infamous suicide spot, a place where the rolling  south downs rise up to reveal a dizzyingly vertiginous and unprotected drop to the English Channel below. It’s a highly symbolic and ideologically charged location, a stunningly beautiful stretch of landscape where the familiar, jagged outline of England becomes physically and visually legible.

The chalky white cliffs below Beachy Head are part of a landscape overwritten with various narratives of Englishness. To such an extent, in fact, that it’s hard to write about them without being drawn into murky, nationalist sentiment. Quadrophenia is interesting thought because, in some senses, it offers a counter narrative to the familiar one of heroic resistance and national pride. For a start, Jimmy is far from an establishment or conservative figure. His suicide is prompted, at least in part, by equal parts self-disgust and disgust at the rottenness of the country around him.

Beachy Head is 60 miles to the west of Dover. Along the length of coastline between these two poinyd lie the remains of hundreds of years of defensive fortifications. The cliffs are like ideology translated into geography, furiously over-coded with symbolic significance and bearing the traces of endless assertions of nationhood. Any attempt, however ironic, to summon up the plucky fighting spirit of the English is likely to make reference to them at some point.

Nike’s Rugby World cup advert from 2007 is typical, the cliffs offering the perfect location for yet another sporting re-enactment of the second world war. Likewise, Tango’s notorious 1996 advert featuring – supposedly – a middle manager from the company taking exception to a letter of complaint from a French customer, ends with the offer of a fight in a boxing ring perched on the edge of the cliffs, while Harrier Jump Jets loom up over the rolling downs behind.

I'm on the white cliffs of Dover

Thinking it over and over

And if I jump it's all over

A cautionary tale for you

Blur, Clover over Dover, 1994

It’s strange then that these cliffs – the one’s celebrated ad-nauseum in Very Lynn’s 2^nd World War anthem There’ll Be Bluebirds Over The White Cliffs of Dover – should also act as a bleakly comic shorthand for self-surrender and despair. Blur’s song Clover over Dover manages to conflate the two, linking Quadrophenia and Vera Lynn in a queasy ode to both pastoral beauty and personal despair. Clover over Dover is, of course, a song from the album Parklife, Blur’s nostalgic requiem for Brit youth culture. The nostalgia is second, or, maybe, even third hand though, because Quadrophenia was itself a homage to the mid-sixties mod movement viewed through the resigned cynicism of the late ‘70’s.

Parklife itself can be read as a mapping of the British Isles, a concept album about various ideas of Englishness. It’s closing song This is a Low, uses the evocative place names of the BBC’s shipping forecast – Dogger Bank, Malin Head, Land’s End – to describe a hazy edge where the country disappears, the invisible line beyond the coast where national sovereignty gives way to International Waters. The sharp, jagged outline of the white cliffs – an extraordinarily graphic and highly visual boundary – becomes replaced in the song by an ambiguous, watery point somewhere out to sea.

While This is a Low is a kind of dreamy reverie, a half-in and half-out of consciousness lullaby, Clover Over Dover concerns a more specific and literal attempt to escape. The song’s narrator fantasises about physical dissolution and of rejecting the country’s suffocating and over familiar embrace.

Viewed from the sea, the white cliffs offer the illusion of an impressive, impregnable wall, a geological line of defence. They no longer provide a literal defence though. That too, has become more virtual than physical, manifest in racist political posturing and destructive legislation like the coalition government’s proposals for an immigration cap. Another kind of defensive unit still patrols the coast though. The Beachy Head Chaplaincy Team, with their disconcertingly breezy strap line “we bring people back from the brink”, regularly walk the cliff path, ready to persuade people not to jump. Or leave.

the urban picturesque

(Image; Allotment holders on Clapham Common, 1940. Via)

Our cities are growing. Growing, that is, in the horticultural sense. Recent years have seen a minor infestation of urban gardens and inner city allotments, typified by MUF's recently opened Dalston Barn (formerly Dalston Mill) and Union Street Urban Orchard on London's South Bank. What both these projects have in common, along with a certain ad-hoc, DIY charm, is a desire to invert urban/rural distinctions and bring aspects of the countryside into the city.

The gently anarchic quality of both - along with the concept of urban farming and guerrilla gardening generally - represents a curious fusion of contemporary concerns with deliberately rustic and antiquated imagery. An understandable suspicion of global agribusiness and a desire to find more sustainable methods of food production has manifested itself in re-enactments of street parties, village fetes and rural festivals.

Over the past few years there has been a general revival in the imagery of the 1940’s and '50’s. Cup cakes, coloured bunting and coal tar soap now pop up as luxury products at inner city Sunday markets and in faux-hardware shops*. Just as the intense restraint of a John Pawson interior ultimately speaks of wealth and luxury, the vogue for plain and simple pleasures reveals the nuances of well-healed gentrification. In the current context, posters exhorting war-time stoicism are as grimly ironic as a hereditary millionaire encouraging self-sacrifice and frugality.

But beyond the mend-and-make-do language of all this, it's also possible to see a kind of reverse-urbanism at work, a desire to remake the city into somewhere with the qualities of a rural village. I’ve written before about the strange inversion of contemporary consumer habits that results in people like my own village dwelling parents bemoaning the death of the local butcher whilst shopping at Tescos, while those self-same butchers pop up at the foodie markets of inner London. The cultivation of inner city scraps of land as allotments and urban farms could be seen as simply another manifestation of this phenomena. But it also echoes the colonisation of inner city bomb sites as public allotments during the second world war and another poster campaign rallying cry: Dig For Victory.

(Image: Garden built out of a bomb crater, London, 1940's. Via)

Muf's urban farm sits within this strange constellation of ideas. For a start, it's in Dalston, probably the most ubiquitously fashionable suburb of London right now, positively overflowing with mustachioed hipsters and newly connected up via the East London Line. The barn itself slips into an odd shaped plot opposite the ELL’s Dalston Junction station, over which loom the new residential towers of Dalston Square. It is a deliberately open-ended structure, ambiguous in both form and use, but very beautifully made.

It's also not immediately obvious why it's referred to as a barn. Barns are interesting, but they don't often look like the one in Dalston. No one would see them as a building typology with inherently civic, or even public, qualities either. Real barns - that is ones with animals and farm machinery in them - are, effectively, light industrial sheds; part warehouse, part distribution centre and part factory. And yet here, curiously, one is used, albeit in a highly aesthetised form, to denote civic qualities.

Such a conflation of rural and urban typologies is intended as a gently surreal gesture obviously, one made more so by the presence of people tapping away on their ipads under the building's chunky timber awning. There are deliberate echoes too of Archigram and, in particular, David Green’s dream of architecture as a kind of bucolic, high-tech paradise, a networked countryside of hidden data cables and robot gardeners.

(Image: David Greene, Archigram: Log Plug)

But, why is the countryside being imported into the city at all? Does it represent an optimistic opening up of urban spaces to new uses? Or, conversely, does it represent a fantasy of the city disappearing or returning to nature? The concept of nature in Muf’s Dalston project is clearly different to that of the Victorian legacy of urban parks and green spaces. It suggests both use - a working landscape - and a creeping reclamation, a deliberate ambiguity between urbanity and rusticity that includes, at least on some level, a return to the cult of the ruin.

Ruins exert a strong, psychological pull, a reminder of death, decay, the ends of things. The allotment gardens of war-time London existed amongst literal ruins. Today’s versions exist in more ambiguous ruins, in the spaces between regeneration and redevelopment. Diller + Scofidio and Renfros’ Highline urban park in New York, touches many of these buttons too. In colonising a disused freight railway, the park represents both the erasure of industry by leisure and the reclamation of the city by nature. Intriguingly, Piet Oudolf - responsible for the planting on the High Lin - described the project as "...a reconnection with something lost", placing it firmly within the cult of the ruin.

Projects like the High Line and Dalston Barn could be seen then as a contemporary manifestation of the picturesque movement, the overlaying of an artfully staged naturalism on existing buildings. Picturesque landscapes like Stowe Gardens in the UK were reclamations too, informal clumps of trees and vegetation planted over the rigid axial routes of earlier Baroque gardens. Such fantasies were not confined to rural locations either, as Joseph Gandy’s highly ambiguous paintings of John Soane’s designs for the Bank of England attest. Visions of cities reclaimed are a staple of science-fiction too, of course, from J G Ballard’s Drowned World to the overgrown ruins of Washington DC at the end of Logan’s Run. These post-city visions serve to expose the hubris behind human civilisation and denote its underlying fragility. But the post-city is not only a science fiction fantasy. Contemporary Detroit stands as every urbanist’s favourite dystopian vision of the post-city returned to nature, a city where whole tracts of former houses lie in ruins, covered in weeds.

(Photo: James D Griffieoen, Feral Houses, The disappearing City)

The image of the city reclaimed by nature is both a fantasy and a nightmare. Its contemporary usage is a bizarre mix of pragmatic common sense and despair. There are interesting echoes in all this too of the work of Lebrecht Migge and Adolf Loos in the 1920’s Settlement movement, the re-housing of people displaced by the First World War. Migge’s eerily prescient 1918 Green Manifesto and his proposals for inner city cottages with allotment gardens are being re-discovered as offering plausible ideas for urban agriculture today.

(Image: Self-sufficient garden for one family, 1925. Lebrecht Migge. Photo from Adolf Loss: Works & Projects)

In a recent Evening Standard piece, Kieran Long intriguingly described the kind of ground up, small scale urbanism of Dalston Barn as an example of David Cameron’s Big Society made manifest. Appropriately, the project's economic viability balances on a mixture of local government funding, volunteer help and the benign tolerance of the nearby Sainsbury’s, who own the land.

The present government's enthusiasm for cutting back the state and (supposedly) replacing it with small-scale, local philanthropy can be read as revealing a preference for rural rather than urban values. The scrapping of Regional Spatial Strategies and the promotion of local empowerment in decision making, can likewise be seen as part of a sustained attack on coherent urban planning and civic minded design. Cameron's Big Society model is an essentially pre-modern and anti-urban one, reliant on assumptions of a fair and benevolent society existing beneath our present one.

Opposite Dalston Barn, there once stood Dalston Theatre, originally a cinema and later the Four Aces Nightclub. In the '90's the building played host to Labyrinth, a club devoted to the emerging jungle and drum and bass scene, before it closed for good and lapsed into decay, a genuine urban ruin. It is easy to see Dalston Barn in some ways as a replacement of sorts, an ambiguous new growth amongst the ruins of a previous civic urbanity.

(Image: Still from Logan's Run of the reflecting pool in Washington DC as a ruin.)

* As I've been gently reminded, FAT's bakery in Heals has a certain, Keep Calm and Carry On vibe, albeit mixed with Op-Art floor patterns and a certain degree of abstraction. Nonetheless, it can't be denied that it sells cup cakes.

i trawl the megahertz

I'm back, but busy. So before a proper new post, here - apropos of nothing much - is the opening credit sequence to '80's TV show Shoestring. I loved this programme so much as a child that the episode featuring a '60's beat band and the covered up murder of a groupie still haunts me. What I particularly like about the credits though - apart from the fabulously shapeless and billowing dress worn by the lady at the end - is the attempt to make Bristol appear a little bit like gritty 1970's New York. Also, the use of the radio waveband motif sticks out as a piece of outmoded technology redolent of a time when trawling across the wavebands was a regular activity. As a metaphor for the relative difficulty of finding things to watch/listen to in those days it seems highly apposite. You had to search for culture then, by 'eck.

parade

A brief return to the once popular blogger's sport of pop song/architecture combinations, partly inspired by one of its inventors sending me this recently. This one is cheating a bit - but only a bit - because its urban associations are as much autobiographical as they are a definable presence within the song. I should add too that I was reminded of Hats - the album from which the song is taken - by a conversation on @owenhatherley's twitter feed.....

I used to listen to Hats during my last year of living at home with my parents and it accompanied me (via my extra large '80's style orange foam ear phones) on the way back from countless nights out in the spectacularly un-glamorous setting of Chelmsford, Essex. The parade of the title is a kind of provincial everywhere, summoning up images of late night high streets filled with Saturday night expectation. But it is also a very particular place, a street of shops and bars where I would hang out with friends in the months after finishing school, an odd, in-between period in life inflated with all the doomy grandeur of post adolescence.

One look at the official video (sadly un-embeddable) makes you realise the band may have had something more typically glamorous in mind than Moulsham Street*, but the slippage between aspirations of urban sophistication and the realities of (sub)urban life seems a very '80's theme. The Blue Nile never seemed to fit in anywhere particularly on the musical spectrum of the time though. The lush sophistication of their arrangements and the synthetic drum sound are a continuation of new romanticism to some extent - as is, perhaps, the faint hint of Americana (Tinseltown in the Rain!) - but the exquisite sense of melancholy isn't.

The whole of Hats seems infused with an attempt to summon up the ghosts of old nights out, a haunted echo of the thrills of urban life. The song titles - Let's Go Out Tonight, The Downtown Lights, From A Late Night Train, Saturday Night - communicate the kind of loneliness you can only feel when surrounded by lots of people having fun. They also seem to map out the spaces of an exhaustively familiar town, like the stations of some highly personal cross. It's unclear whether Paul Buchanan thinks that going out will save him, or his relationship, and offer some redemption, or whether this is all long since dead and he's merely remembering a distant, now unimaginable happiness.

On which triumphantly downbeat note I shall take my leave. At least for a while! This blog will be quiet for a couple of weeks now. I'm going on holiday. But not with Paul Buchanan. Expect to see the now standard issue holiday post featuring giant plastic ice cream cones, empty hover ports, abandoned nuclear reactors and seaside parades when I get back. Ta da.

* Strangely enough, I found myself defending another, earlier, teenage hangout this week with an old friend from school. The roof of Chelmsford's multi-storey car park was a great place from which to watch the cricket at Essex County Cricket ground as well as drop small, anti-social missiles on passers by below. Not that I'm recommending either, mind....

modern ruins

There is a haunting and uncanny quality to modern architecture in ruins. We are used to seeing classical buildings in decay. There is a history to their ruination. It has become an essential part of their narrative, which is a series of discoveries, or rediscoveries, of ruins.

But modernism has a more problematic relationship to its own history. Modern buildings are not meant to show their age but live in a perpetual present. It's the reason why any form of decay or visible ageing is seen as such a problem. But what is modernism if it's not longer modern? What happens to it when it gets old? The continued plundering of early modernism by contemporary architects masks how genuinely old it is now, allowing it to live in a perpetual present.

There is a double poignancy to Konstantin Melnikov's house. Not only is it in a state of advanced ruination, but it is an old lady's house. The old lady in question is Melnikov's granddaughter Ekaterina Karinskaya, and she lives there surrounded by her overgrown garden and the corrigated metal sheets that hide the house from the street and the thousands of architectural pilgrims like me who come to gawp at it.



Melnikov's obsession with hygiene and cleanliness (little furniture and fixed beds with no undersides where dust could collect) seems painfully comic now. A house built in the heart of Moscow that blazed a spectacularly bright trail through the early years of the twentieth century is now like a mysterious cottage in the woods. The windows are smudged and dusty but if you are rude enough to squint through them you can see the detritus of old age. Ancient floorboards sag, old clothes hang loosely from the banisters, a bare bulb illuminates the kitchen.



The house is still brilliant and strange. The lozenged windows move from foreground to background, positive to negative. Sometimes they're like an applied pattern, a decorative overlay of diamond shaped spots. At others times they are an absence and the tree-like structure between them becomes the dominant figure. Some of the windows have been filled in (deliberately) in over time which breaks up the pattern even more and makes the position of the windows (several to a floor, starting from skirting level) even more ambiguous in scale. It is both big and small, epic and quirky, a building intended as a new, universal typology that is full of individual eccentricities.



Part of the reason for its current condition lies in conflicts over its ownership. The house is currently subject to a legal battle between Melnikov's grandchildren and an organisation that wants it turned into the Melnikov Museum. The fate of the house at present is divided between two kinds of petrification, one more extreme than the other.

pop will drink itself

My father was always a big fan of gadgets. During my childhood he often brought home pioneering labour saving devices, generous 'presents' intended to make my Mum's life easier. Most of these were, it has be said, entirely useless. There was an automated ironing machine, for example, that consisted of a padded rotating drum operated by a foot pedal. When the pedal was pressed the drum revolved and a large heated panel lowered onto it. Un-ironed clothes could be fed in at one end and would plop out the other to no discernible effect.

There was also an automated potato peeler which was, in essence, a large saucepan lined with course grade emery paper. The pan was fixed via a pinion to a metal base and, when turned on, would rotate with a rocky motion, like a miniature waltzer. After five minutes of this treatment, the potatoes would emerge bruised and battered but still with their skins on.

He hit the motherlode though with Kenwood's supremely 1970's innovation, the Sodastream. This remarkable device allowed you to make your own fizzy drinks at home, an astonishing thing given the general austerity of the times. It came with a series of bottles of syrupy liquid which formed the base ingredient for any drink you wanted: cola, lemonade, ginger ale etc. A few drops of this mysterious elixir was added to a bottle filled with water and inserted into the machine. This is where the real magic happened. By holding down a lever and pressing down on a button a few times the humble bottle of water was transformed into something spectacular. An alchemical process took place inside the machine and out of it would emerge a home-made approximations of Coke, Sprite, Dr Pepper....

It was all about the bubbles. Bubbles have magical properties. They fizz on the tongue like the very essence of refreshment. The Sodastream produced nothing but bubbles in reality, which is really nothing at all. But bubbles, like gells and powders and foams, are part of the mysterious arsenal of capitalist dream products. They are the invisible but brilliant agents dreamt up by white lab coat wearing scientists in the Laboratories Garnier and the Pond's Institute. They are the mystery ingredient x of the commodity object, the flashpoint of its fetishised status.

The Sodastream was ultimately, despite its near mythical status in suburban kitchens, a clunky and flawed product. It was a consumer object that manufactured other consumer objects, assembling a passable approximation of the original in front of you. Its flaws were twofold. Firstly, by recreating simulations of branded products (homemade Coke. Just like the real thing!) it threatened to killed their allure. Coke was just black sugary water with gas in it, after all. And, secondly, it ran out of gas. The little grey bottle inside - the genie in the blue and white liveried lantern - the thing that actually carbonated the water, never lasted long enough. And, anyone who used one will recall the horror of flat cola, a glutinous, syrupy liquid that was totally undrinkable.

But, I also loved it. Having one was like living in a sweetshop with fizzy drinks literally on tap. And now, it's back, complete with ironic Rob Brydon voiced advert and limited edition Karim Rashid design. In a culture constantly consuming itself, generating ever new ways to sell the same thing over and over again, each time with an added layer of knowing affection, it was inevitable really. The product's usefulness, or otherwise, doesn't really matter. We remember it, with affection, and that's enough. The Sodastream's carbonated bubbles have been replaced by the warm splashy bubbles of nostalgia. The strange thing is though, I would really like one.

Modernism, Historicism and Julie Christie's Eyes

As an oblique follow on from my previous post about 1970's DIY habits, I've been thinking about period dramas. In particular I've been thinking about different periods of period dramas. Even though their setting is historical, such films are often more about the period in which they're made than the one in which they're set.

Take a film made in the late 1960's such as Far From The Madding crowd. It's a great film, but one of the most striking things about it if you watch it today are Julie Christie’s eyes. And Terence Stamp’s sideburns. Neither appear remotely correct for the period. Christie's eyes in particular are smudged with Kohl in an iconically late '60’s manner and her hair is made up in a beehive. Stamp’s sideburns are equally à la mode. These are not so much deliberate anachronisms as evidence of a distinct lack of interest in historical authenticity.



Far from the Madding Crowd is a Victorian period drama in as much as it is based on Hardy’s 1874 novel, but in many other respects it's a 1960’s film. Despite its period setting it looks like a 1960's film. Equally, Richard Burton and Liz Taylor’s 1963 epic Antony and Cleopatra plays fast and loose with historical verisimilitude. The interior sets for this film are completely outlandish, more redolent of a lavishly vulgar Las Vegas hotel than ancient Egypt. The fact that the film's narrative echoes the real life love affair of Burton and Taylor only increases the sense that the setting for the film, for all its self-consciously historic-epic quality, is secondary to the real story.



The muted colours and artfully dishevelled haircuts of 2005's Pride and Prejudice will no doubt become as outlandishly dated in time as Stamp's sideburns. The film's historical authenticity may be just as bogus but it also seems emblematic of a distinctly different sensibility. Pride and Prejudice is overflowing with a reverence for the past. It is as in love with its setting as the characters are with each other, the camera drooling over distressed paintwork and marble statues as if they were the real subject of the film.


Pride and Prejudice (Image source)

Not only that but there is a direct collusion between films like Pride and Prejudice and the heritage industry. The buildings and landscapes associated with such films become objects of increased touristic value as a result. In this sense period dramas form a sort of aesthetic propaganda wing of English Heritage. It's difficult to disassociate the relentless recycling of Austen adaptations from a more general and pervasive historical genuflection.

Is there a connection then between an attitude that had no time for the niceties of 19th century make-up and a lack of reverence for historic architecture? Is there a relationship between a late 1960's building such as Robin Hood Gardens, with its indifference to ideas of contexualism or 'fitting-in', and the equally startling modernity of Julie's Christie's eyes?