The Beginning Of The End

Apropos the Richard Rogers exhibition, Hugh Pearman writes in today's Sunday Times (which arrived as ever pressed and ironed on my breakfast tray this morning) of the end of high tech, it's long dominance over the (specifically) British architectural scene over, finally replaced by other directions. Yes, yes I know, the article namechecks FAT, but (seriously) my interest in pointing it out lies in a thought that high tech may not have been the straightforward and pragmatic style of architecture of popular consensus. Or rather there may have been more interesting things happening within it than even (or especially) its own advocates allowed. I started thinking about this when I visited the Rogers exhibition a while ago myself (see here) and found its hippy past considerably more interesting than its New Labour present. In this sense the practice represents a fairly classic baby boomer trajectory, a journey from youthful radicalism to establishment worthyness. The two jobs that made Rogers famous - Pompidou and Lloyds - collapse this shift into a relatively short period of time. From the socialist Grands Projets to the ultimate temple to Mammon with very little in between.

The notion of flexibility supposedly inherent in the (admittedly brilliant) Lloyd's building is a distant cousin to those that inspired the Pompidou Centre. These two buildings also then describe the journey of '60's radical architecture from the dematerialisation of building to a new monumentalism.

Below is a much longer post that comprises some rather random thoughts about this journey.

Trouble In Paradise

Architects have a periodic desire to escape architecture, to find a place without the (inhibiting, divisive) culture of building. There is a counter history to architecture which is an attempt to remove these divisions, take away the walls, and make the spaces in which we live continuous with the ‘natural’ world.

The high tech architecture of the sixties. in its attempt to dematerialise architecture, also developed a corresponding idea of a pastoral idyll in which we might dwell happily as noble savages. New technology would allow us to live in a kind of techno-primitive symbiosis with nature. In this sense high tech could be seen as an attempt to make an innocent paradise, a garden of eden.

This was in many ways a uniting of the counter culture’s embracing of the pastoral (think Laurel Canyon in LA) with the same era's love of space race technology. So, rather than start with the normal origins of high tech – modernism’s fascination for industrialisation – we might start somewhere else for a change, with its love of the bucolic.

The following is a series of pictures linked by certain similarities.

In his painting Mr and Mrs Andrews, Thomas Gainsborough depicts a wealthy landowning couple. They pose, stilted and unnatural, in the landscape as if they were in their own drawing room. The countryside around them appears as a benign extension of the domestic realm. Comically, absurdly, they are trying to look as if they belong, that they are a natural part of the land and it a natural part of them. Their house and the social structure behind is invisible, absent from the wholly unconvincing depiction of a bucolic idyll.

Another couple, almost as stilted and awkward as the previous one, sit inside a house shaped like a sphere. The stiff poses, Eisenower era haircuts and old fashioned furniture appear incongruous in this radical bubble which in turn fits strangely into its setting of suburban Illinois in the late 1950’s. The man is Buckminster Fuller who designed one of the most extreme examples of dematerialised architecture ever; a glass dome to envelop the whole of Manhattan. In this proposal architecture is erased almost entirely so that it becomes a device for modulating the atmosphere within it, a phantom enclosure that is invisible but all controlling.

A long-haired barefooted couple wander away from us, along a gridded pathway through a desert like landscape. They look like refugees from Woodstock, on some kind of pilgrimage. This is a montage of Superstudio’s Continuous Monument, an epic scaled but physically minimal intervention. Architecture here is reduced to an abstracted grid, the merest suggestion of building, the last vestige of a technocratic culture.

Inside this bubble perched over a vestigal bit of landscape sit another unlikely Adam and Eve. One of them is Reyner Banham, the architectural critic and ‘godfather’of Brutalism, the other a French artist called François Dallegret. In the centre of the bubble is a complicated looking machine that looks after the temperature and atmosphere inside. The bubble represents the barest hint of a boundary, an elegant looping line of enclosure that suggests that as far as these two are concerned, they are out in the open, at one with nature.

Archigram's work flirted most obviously between a love of high tech gizmos and a more dreamy idea of escape from architecture. David Greene’s Rockplug and Logplug seem to anticipate a similar sort of serviced landscape. These are among the most intriguing and suggestive of Archigram’s inventions. They are electrical devices camouflaged into the background but supplying all the creature comforts of the indoors. There is more than a hint of the Flintstones in their conflation of natural forms and modern conveniences.

Similarly his L.A.W.U.N projects suggest robots that could track over the landscape to deliver our needs straight to us. Here, a slightly different idea of escape is suggested, with Eve replaced by a TV set, which suggests that our technology might also divide us. These projects try to eliminate the stuff of architecture, its heaviness, its history, its tedious sense of the permanent, replacing it instead with invisible fields of electronics that provide us with comfort and entertainment.

These trajectories are linked both by their rejection of architecture’s physical, material properties and by a desire to throw off other less tangible restrictions. But also they suggest a return to some kind of Eden-like stage, a desire to get back to a more primitive state of being. Like much science fiction, this primitiveness is mixed curiously with new or as yet unrealised technology. Buckminster Fuller and his wife could not be more different from Banham and Dellegret. But Fuller’s radical experiments in a dematerialised, de-historical architecture, would be taken up by more socially radical architects a decade later.

This tendency within architecture has largely petered out, replaced by a renewed interest in the monumental and the bombastic. The idea of architecture as both socially liberating and, in some way, about a kind of loose limbed pleasure seems to have been abandoned.

When space is talked about now it is almost entirely in a formal, sculptural sense. Not the bit that we are actually in. In abandoning classical notions of inside and outside, the definition of architecture as a series of rooms and physical enclosures, the high tech architects and their lineage, looked at space as a benign landscape in which we are free to do what we want. With remote atmospheric controls in place to modulate temperature, climate and air and provide services for our high tech toys, we are able to organise ourselves however we want. The reason we went into the cave was because of the hostility of the atmosphere around us. Protect us from that and we can step back out and the world becomes our paradise again.

Some of these dreams have been fulfilled even though they may not have affected the houses we live in. Neither have they ushered in the more utopian social structures implied by and dreamt of by the 60’s avant garde. The technologies of communication and entertainment depicted in these drawings have become something we carry around with us so that we do, in a sense, always inhabit a vast landscape of social interconnectedness.

In visions of the future it is assumed that all technologies and all aspects of life keep a parallel pace of development. In reality though the dizzying effects of digital culture have left our physical culture way behind, changing our understanding of space without in-effect changing its appearance. Today’s architectural avant-garde tries to give form to that effect, rather than looking at the effects themselves. We may inhabit the same dusty old rooms but we are also, in effect, many thousands of miles away, and nearby too. Simultaneously.

Places To Visit

Primrose Hill, Staten Island, Chalk Farm, Massif Central, Gospel Oak, Sao Paolo, Boston Manor, Costa Rica, Arnos Grove, San Clemente, Tufnell Park……..(St Etienne, Girl Vii)

After the hectoring and bad humour comes something a little more…..positive.

I came across a short article in this week’s Time Out where artist Richard Dedomenici proposes a new London tube line based on places of cultural interest in South London. The idea of an underground line that describes a personal journey reminded me both of St Etienne’s song Girl vii and Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear.

Both subvert the over-familiarity of the tube map with unexpected associations. Girl vii conflates a series of exotic destinations with quotidian London tube stops. Patterson’s work completely erases the names of tube stops and replaces them with those of famous people – philosophers, engineers, Saints - giving each line its own genre so that the Northern line becomes Film Actors, the Victorian line Italian painters and the Jubliee line footballers. The seeming flippancy of this gesture slowly gives way to a deeper appreciation both of its inherent humour and of its taxonomic randomness. Green Park station for instance represents a convergence of all three lines mentioned above and becomes renamed, somewhat surreally, Gary Lineker.

In a larger sense the relationship of personal experience to maps is interesting because it calls into question the maps claims to impartiality and ultimately truth. Maps always seek authority and claim to be correct although, like the Tube map, they may only be ‘right’ in a graphic rather than geo-graphic sense. They are always partial, seen from one perspective, or one view. The Culture Tube is only slightly more partial than, say, the East London Line extension currently being built, but in a sense the whole tube map can be personalised to reflect our experience of London. There are some stations I may never go to while others are overloaded with sentimental value. If I were to draw the tube map from memory it would be grossly impartial and inaccurate, leaving off numerous stops and emphasising others, making strange connections between places and collapsing distances between different areas of London.


St Etienne’s song suggests that, like the Situationists map of Paris or Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, we remake the city in our head every day. Walking, travelling and using the city are creative acts. To take the tube to Marble Arch to work is different than to take it to walk through Hyde Park on a summers day. Peter Cook once asked: “If it’s raining on Oxford Street do you notice the buildings or the rain?”. Sometime experience is more cultural than physical, more about interpretation than infrastructure.

More than that it might be a way to design infrastructure, utilising the undermining of authorial intent - Barthe's Death of the Author - or the claims to authority of technocratic processes, to create something more more arbitrary, stranger, less known.