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?

Never Neverland

This may well be stretching everyone's patience but, seeing as how I am researching Michael Jackson's Neverland ranch for a slightly longer article, I thought I would post up a link to some fascinating photographs of it from the LA Times.

The follies and grottoes that populate the estate are now in the early stages of dereliction apparently, having never exactly been built to last. They're now appropriately merging into the picturesque tradition of ruins that the whole estate mimics, albeit in fibreglass and fake stone. All of which reminds me of this, a slightly embarrassing fictionalised account of Disneyland I wrote for a fantastically obscure German magazine a few years back.

Currently owned by LA investment company Colony Capital (who bought Jackson's loan on the property - a sort of superprime mortgage foreclosure) Neverland is slated to re-open as a shrine to the singer.

There is a good article by India Wright on the Architect's Journal website about the Architecture of Neverland which is worth reading too.

The Architecture of Degeneration

Image: Karen Russo, via

The Mole Man of Hackney has become something of a North London celebrity in recent years, making an appearance as a typically Sinclairian anti-hero in Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, as well as on TV and in numerous national newspapers. For anyone who hasn't heard of him, the Mole Man is William Lyttle, who for 40 years lived at 121 Mortimer Road, in Dalston (or De Beauvoir Town if you prefer). During that time he created an extensive network of tunnels below the house to the point where it and the surrounding pavements became structurally unstable.

Last year Lyttle was evicted from the house by Hackney Council and fined £300,000 to pay for work required to stabilise it. He is now, apparently, missing and the house has been preserved in a limbo state somewhere between dangerous and simply unlivable. I pass it every day on the bus and there appear to be large parts of it missing behind the scaffolding.


Image of 121 Mortimer Road, via

Whilst looking into the story I came across a number of photographs - the only ones that exist it seems - of the tunnels taken by artist Karen Russo. Last month she had an exhibition (here) which was partly about Lyttle's strange and obsessive creation. In an interview on Don't Panic Russo stated that her interest in Lyttle was his method, which she likened to of an artist: instinctive, sculptural, seemingly without functional or pragmatic justification. "I was amazed to discover the similarities between the thinking of Lyttle and that of the average artist", she said. "The creation of things that don’t work, without functional value, and the obsession involved in the act of making......"


Image: Karen Russo, via

Speaking as an architect there seems to me to be another way to look at it too. Lyttle's work is a form of anti-architecture, a dark mirror image of both architectural technique and its ambitions. Instead of creating gleaming towers Lyttle buried down, expanding his house outwards from below. Instead of careful, law abiding, Building Regulation compliant design he created a dangerous death-trap of a building, tunneling so close to the water tunnel that the house is in danger of flooding and propping up walls and ceilings with household appliances and makeshift supports.

Most intriguingly Lyttle's own description of the work act as a bizarre parody of architectural presentations. In an article in the The Times from 2006 Lyttle took the reporter on a tour of the tunnel layout: "This is going to be the leisure centre,” he said, sweeping his hand round a large cavern. “And this in here will be the sauna."


Image: Karen Russo, via

Apparently no drawings or sketches exist of Lyttle's designs because he never made any. Instead, his tunnels are like an architectural stream of consciousness, a seemingly unplanned, undrawn (and therefore undesigned, in conventional terms) building, where one bit links to the next instinctively and without any obvious overall order.

As he tunneled, extending the house downwards, Lyttle filled the rooms above ground with the excavated clay, rendering them literally uninhabitable. Not for him the glass walled, light filled extensions attached to any number of houses in the same area. Dark, dank and dangerous, his extensive modifications are the opposite of home improvement. The whole house in fact is like an inversion of the gentrification of Hackney and East London, a piece of de - rather than re - generation.*



* Despite this - and illustrating the immense power of land value over everything else - the house is valued at £1m.