High Tech Nostalgia

(Image courtesy Archigram)

I didn't mention this in my post on the white cliffs last week, but it fits in with many of the themes I was trying to write about. The image is from Archigram's Suburban Sets project, drawn by Ron Herron. The 1960's architectural avant garde of which Archigram were such an important part combined a number of interesting themes including a sort of high-tech pastoralism where architecture is reduced to an infrastructural support system for the countryside (Peter Cook's instant city), a love of gadgets and gizmos (Warren Chalk's gasket housing) and an interest in Do It Yourself (Ron Herron's Tuned Suburb).

Suburban Sets combines a number of these themes, reducing the 'architecture' to a vestigial, scenographic role, while adding a seam of nostalgic whimsy to the mix. The design posits a scenario where the house itself has been removed and the space given over to garden, while the occupant lives in an abandoned aeroplane parked in the weeds.

I was struck by the similarity of this scheme to the Team 4 hideway illustrated in the previous post. Both combine a fantasy of architecture's dematerialisation with a nostalgia for war-time technology: a fusing of the avant garde's preoccupation with anti-architecture and the childhood joys of Airfix kits.

The Hills Are Alive

Like most examples of high-tech architecture, Munich's 1972 Olympic Stadium can be read not only as a purely technological solution but as a richly baroque fantasy. Designed by Günter Behnisch and Frei Otto, the stadium was intended - somewhat ironically given the fact that it was for the summer Olympics - to resemble the Alps.

There are three main parts to it; the Olympic Hall, the Aquatics Centre and the enormous 80,000 seat stadium itself. All three are covered by a vast clear PVC clad canopy held up by a vertiginous network of eccentrically leaning pylons. Between them is an artificial landscape - the Olympic Park - which rises and falls so that the buildings are set into rather than on it. Wandering around it you start to realise that the peaks and troughs of the grassy hillocks and miniature mountains echo the shape of the tensile roof structure. They have a decidedly unnatural form to them, like a CGI landscape that has not been properly smoothed out.

The tent is a sort of floating corollary to the landscape and attempts to cover parts of it without interrupting the flow of space below. So, the Olympic swimming pools are placed at the bottom of a large artificial hill that continues beyond the building. Plastic seats are fixed to the cobbled setts that flow from outside to inside so that it is like sitting on a mountain side gazing down at the plunge pools below.



This theme is continued in the swooping curve of the stadium, where the speckled green seats echo the grassy hills so that the stadium is read as a quasi-natural amphitheatre. Out of this decidedly artificial landscape huge steel cables shoot several hundred feet up into the air, as well as pylons carrying floodlights stooped like stationary robots, and the enormous TV tower.



The sometimes swooping, sometimes drooping, tent structure has an almost comical quality at times. There is nothing rational about any of this despite the mathematics involved in making it all stay up. It is eccentric, extraordinary and rather fabulous. It is also - like the Baroque architecture that abounds in Bavaria - a form of stylised naturalism, a super-charged version of the real.

The stadium is also, more obviously, a continuation of the '60's dream of dematerialised architecture - lightweight barely there buildings without walls or other forms of spatial or social segregation. This lineage grew out of Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome experiments, intentionally reducing architecture to nothing more than providing - in Ryner Banham's phrase - a well-tempered environment in which sophisticated noble savages would be free to roam.



This conflation of technology and neo-pantheism reached an apogee of expression in Banham's own Un-House, where he and his collaborator Francois Dallegret appear together perched on a rock, happily naked and entertained by a vast high-tech console in their transparent bubble. It is apparent too in Superstudio's Continuous-monument and Archigram's concept of the Electronic Aborigine.



The dissolution of the architecture in the Olympic Park clearly has another, not disassociated, symbolic meaning, acting as a decisive departure from the stolid neo-classicism associated with the 1936 Olympics. And the park along with its fabulous iconic graphics has become a powerful symbol of post war Germany. The design thus conflates a benignly technological utopianism with the "innocence" of the Alpine landscape. It is, in some senses, a miniature representation of the country itself.



In fact, the architecture of the Olympic Stadium is far from dissolved. But much of the ingenuity and artifice of design has gone into the landscape which has become, in effect, the building. Bits of it are sculpted into (un)natural amphitheatres while other parts are pushed or pulled to give a better view. It is an inhabited landscape. The hills are alive.

*Appropriately this faux-naturalism was pushed to its limits when the stadium hosted the cross-country skiing competition in 2006. Hot air was combined with cold refrigerated water to form icy snow within the stadium.

** BTW the photos are meant to be rubbish. They're edgy. Or something. See last post.

Don't Whatever You Do Go Through the Door Marked Post Modernism

Image of Bankside 123 via

The following is a slightly rambling response to recent interesting posts here and here...

Ok, to summarise, the story so far....

Current architecture can be characterised by two main tendencies: On the one hand there is the neo-modernism of Allies and Morrison, Stanton Williams etc. and, on the other, the 'iconic' architecture of Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid etc.* Both these strands have a ubiquitous relationship to the urban panacea of Regeneration, either through the provision of a base level of mixed use commercial and 1/2 bed apartment blocks or through one off signature buildings striving for the 'Bilbao effect'. What's more both the writers at Sit Down Man and Entschwindet und Vergeht relate these styles directly to the broader political framework behind such regeneration projects. So that the slickly repackaged modernism that has replaced post-modernism as the Developer's architecture style of choice is directly analogous to the slickly repackaged Thatcherite policies of New Labour**.

To follow the argument to its logical endpoint implies that the pedimented post modern classicism of the 1980's is beyond the pale for contemporary architects in just the same way that the unreconstructed brutality of Thatcherism is beyond the pale for New Labour. The differences between all of them is paper thin though. A jazzed up version of International Style Modernism has become the dominant architectural style of contemporary development whether it be affordable housing or City of London office blocks, although it is a modernism emptied of its social and political content. It's triumph over post modernism is a pyric one.

Owen Hatherley interestingly uses the commercial pop architecture of 1950/60's America - or Googie as its known - as a way to deflate the radical posturing of the current architectural avant garde and expose their complicity within a rampant commercialism. While the architects concerned relate the non-orthogonal geometries and skewed angularity (or voluptuous doubly curved surfaces) of their buildings to, variously, Derridian deconstructivism or Deleuzian deterritorialisation, they bear more than a superficial resemblance to the Look At Me vulgarity of Googie. The difference being of course that the vulgar commercialism of Googie is preferable to the radical chic posturing of Liebeskind et al.



What everyone is agreed on though is that post modernism is utterly beyond the pale. No one has a good word for it although as E&V point out, there are few practices without the odd Po Mo skeleton in their plan chest. I unfortunately have more than one. My own practice's interest in post modernism grew out of both an (admittedly perverse) interest in its pariah status (the "Don't whatever you do, go through that door" appeal) and a more serious reappraisal of the work of its inadvertent spiritual godfather Robert Venturi.

Venturi is of course the man most ofter blamed (I think that's the right word) for the advent of Post Modernism through two books: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas (with Denise Scott Brown and Stven Izenour). This accusation is not entirely fair or accurate but others have made that case already, not least Robert Venturi himself. The interesting thing though is how close the arguments related above resemble the opinions of Venturi Scott Brown themselves.

The Venturi's (as the husband and wife team of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown are known) are one of the few architects to have consistently articulated a critique of both the strands articulated above: bland neo-modernism and vacuous neo-expressionism. For the Venturis, the International Style became too formally reduced to articulate either the complexity of contemporary programme or the dynamic of our social structures. What's more, as art, it lacked richness, dynamism and the messy vitality that Venturi identified in historical models and the contemporary vernacular of Main Street. However, Venturi was equally critical of the heroic sculptural tendency within late modernism which he explicitly attacked in Learning from Las Vegas. Venturi relates the expressionist sculptural tendency of 1960's modernism to roadside American architecture, the diners and fast food shacks that are shaped like giant donuts and hamburgers and, in the case of the famous Long Island Duckling, a duck. Venturi labels these buildings therefore as 'Ducks' as opposed to his preferred 'Decorate Sheds'.

The conflation of contemporary expressionist architecture with Googie is interesting because it is exactly the analogy that Venturi made in Learning from Las Vegas. The need for competing cities to aquire an 'iconic' building, one that can be instantly recognised (and reduced to a logo) in order to attract well healed cultural tourists is, on a global scale, the same as the need for fast food diners to compete for the motorists attention along the strip. After all, what is a building that can be reduced to a logo if not a Duck?

Interestingly, Venturi Scott Brown are almost alone among architects in having an interest in roadside architecture, pop symbolism and what they term the messy vitality of commercial architecture. Whilst they rejected - for the most part - the sculptural one liner of the Duck typology, they embraced the electronic dynamism of the signs and lights of Las Vegas. Their critique comes up to date with their rejection of Deconstructivist architecture and what they see as its decorative use of early modernist and industrial imagery. For the Venturis this turns the buildings of Zaha, Gehry etc. into Ducks, as they became huge pieces of decoration in themselves. What's more, in the early twenty first century the forms of constructivism and early modernism ARE historical architecture, no more or less relevant to todays construction industry than pediments and Doric columns. The borrowing of the radical clothes of pioneering modernism doesn't make you either pioneering or modern.

The Venturis claim that their work is continuing the project of Modernism in different cultural and economic circumstances. The representational language of early industrial buildings is no longer a relevant one, although the social programme of modernism and its commitment to evolving an architectural language appropriate to its age still is.

The standard critique of Post Modernism is that its use of historical and familiar elements of architecture (a pediment to denote a door, a columns to denote importance etc.) is reductive and reactionary. While it is true that the Jencksian definition of Post Modernism argued for a straightforwardly structuralist use of signifiers (although even Jencks wrote of multivalence and double coding), Venturi Scott Brown's work could hardly be accused of such simplistic reductivism.

At its best their work recombines familiar visual and spatial references into a tense, unresolved whole. Their work is frequently about dissonance, fragmentation and a sense of the uncanny that is emphatically not patronising or reactionary. Venturi didn't after all write a book called Simplicity and Straightforwardness in Architecture.

His big sin though was to suggest that both pre-modern and low brow buildings might hold clues as to a richer and more meaningful architecture. VSBA's more intriguing research into housing, the everyday and, indeed, Googie was rejected by the architectural establishment for its non- judgmental stance. Venturi was not disapproving enough of popular culture or buildings that fell outside of the accepted canon of high brow good taste.

In that respect Venturi's brand of 'post modernism' could be seen as having a political dimension too, through its recognition of taste and by extension class impacting on architecture. Not only that but it points the way to an architectural language that avoids a return to the familiar modernist language we started with. Instead it offers the potential to evolve one that doesn't only represent the dominant aesthetic tastes of the well healed. This doesn't necessarily mean that an outbreak of post modernism is what we need now. But in our own work, post modernism has offered a neglected area of interest for architects and pardoxically a way to engage with social and cultural circumstance. Equally E&V's reappraisal of the spectacular qualities of Victorian engineering in the crystal palace is an intriguing proposition.

* Somewhere in the middle and oscillating between the two is a practice like Make.

** Personally, I don't quite share that sentiment but the story has a certain logic.

Towards a Post PseudoModernism

There is an excellent discussion on the state of contemporary architecture (even worse than a cynic like myself imagined it seems) going on at both The Measures Taken (big sister site to Sit Down Man) and Entschwindet und vergeht. If I think of anything intelligent to say on the topic (and not for instance about obscure fatal accidents) I will try and post something up this week.

My one comment for now would be that Owen's conception of Googie architecture (the flamboyant camp of American roadside buildings - think a drive thru' 1950's McDonalds) as a precursor of today's decon lite (think Make's St Paul's kiosk) is a useful way to prick the bubble of pomposity of such architecture. Googie is also a lot better in my view - at least for its honest exuberance and a certain hard headed commercialism - than a lot of contemporary architecture that appropriates the empty radicalism of decon. Although that might be the effects of period charm creeping in to....

I do worry though about the neat structuralism of an argument that equates flimsy cladding panels with flimsy social policy or, alternatively, heavy draconian pediments with Thatcherite economic policies. It all seems a bit too neat. Its possible to fall into the same trap that the architects claim for their own work - i.e. transparent buildings that echo transparent social structures. Yeeeees, and no. This problem seems to be highlighted neatly by EandV when they recognise that the Lloyds building can be both radical as architecture and hugely conservative as social structure at one and the same time. Some American post modernism after all (and I am thinking of Venturi Scott Brown and Charles Moore for instance) explored a subtler relationship between conservatism and radicalism. I'm thinking particularly of VSBA's community based planning projects and anaylisis of populare housing typologies here.

Put another way, the formalist wing of the (relatively) recent architectural avant garde has always been apolitical.

Anyway, more considered responses to come.....

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.

Richard Rogers – A Round About Sort of Appreciation

Review. Richard Rogers + Partners. Centre Pompidou , Paris.

There is a bit in Paul Shepherd’s excellent book What Is Architecture? where the author, incensed by watching Richard Rogers being interviewed on television, describes himself literally jumping up and down with rage. Rogers is busy telling the interviewer how flexible the Lloyd’s building is and how putting the services on the outside is just a logical way to allow the building to be extended. Shepherd rages at the TV, unable to believe the balderdash that Rogers is getting away with. This idea, Shepherd says, this idea of flexibility is absolute hokum. Complete nonsense. Its just aesthetics. Why can’t Rogers just admit to liking pipes and grills and groovy bits of metal? What’s wrong with just putting your hands up and saying: “ I thought it looked good”. Why does everyone, Rogers included, feel the need to justify architecture through recourse to a specious logic of reductive functionalism or pseudo science?

It’s a good question. I felt a bit like asking it again standing watching a film of Rogers talking on a monitor in his firm’s retrospective in the Pompidou Centre recently. Everything he says is nonsense. Well, taken in chunks it might not be, but collectively it’s nonsense. One minute it’s all about flexibility, openness, change. The next it’s all about light and shadow. And then its about Italy, or new materials, or Louis Kahn. Can it be all of those things? Wasn’t the openness and flexibility all about getting rid of that stuff about light and shadow and Italy? He seems a nice enough chap, genuinely concerned by things we should be concerned about, but boy, does he talk some shit. All that well meaning but rather patrician stuff about cities and how we should embrace the good urban life.

Rogers loves the idea of the city and sees it as a civilising force for good. Suburbs, of course, are bad. Architects hate them. Architects like form and suburbs are formless. Architects like to know where we are and what we’re up to and you can never quite tell in the suburbs. Rogers talks about the city and how we need to live sensible, sensitive lives where we can walk to work in the city and sit in piazzas engaging in spontaneous acts of civic engagement with each other. And then he designs Terminal 5. A big shed in the suburbs dedicated to increasing social atomisation.

Which is not to say that he isn’t a good architect. Personally I am a bit of a sucker for the bright pop colours and Victorian steamboat air intakes of his work. I love the Lloyds Building. I think it’s a masterpiece and what’s more, one of the strangest, most peculiar and beautiful buildings ever built in London. For a long time it was practically the only modern building in London of note. How on earth did he get away with it too? It is extraordinary. A dark, billowing monster of a thing lurking in the narrow City streets, half Geiger alien and half hallucinogenic factory as imagined by a whacked out combination of Hugh Ferris, Ken Adam, Edward Heath Robinson, Roger Dean, Joseph Paxton and Jean Tinguely. It is part Doctor Who, part Pink Floyd Relics album cover, part Terminator 3. It is, it has to be said, pretty weird. If it is extendable then it requires the wholesale demolition of most of the City to do it. Rather than being a modest exercise in adaptability, it is more like a weird malignant spider’s web. All this designed by a nice man in a lime green jumper with a fold up bike.

Of the names mentioned above only Joseph Paxton would be one Rogers might mention, and only then as a nod to the supposed rationalism of Paxton. The glittering glass spectacle of Crystal Palace, its vast dream like collection of exhibits from around the world, the globe held captive in an infinitely extendable glass case like a megalomaniac’s menagerie, this aspect of Crystal Palace is never mentioned. Just some dull facts about large spans and cast iron.

All of which makes Roger’s justification for his creations all the more bizarre. And what about that justification anyway? Architects are funny creatures always seeking reasons and rational explanations for what they do. It’s never enough to say that you did things a certain way just because you liked it that way. So the forceful exuberance and baroque mannerism of the Lloyd’s building has to be justified by suggesting it is very practical to extend the lift lobby. Rogers colludes in this, endlessly telling us how useful he is being. How considerate and reasonable and responsible.

I’ve always found him far more fascinating though because of the sheer excess of his work. Sure, it has got cooler and more and more toned down, more, in fact, like Norman Foster and others of the sober grey concrete school. This exhibition fits with that view. There are acid colours and slightly utopian, slightly banal graphics and the show’s organisation is like that of a mini city, but the worthiness is a long way from Rogers’ hippy origins. All those endearing photos and stories of the unlikely band of long hairs that somehow scooped the Pompidou Centre competition as if from nowhere.

The drawings of this scheme are amazingly pared back and basic but still extremely beautiful. The vague patina of counter cultural cred still clings to them too, what with those giant billboards showing images of soldiers in Vietnam stuck on the giant steel frame. Even stranger then that after this Rogers went on to design the vision of corporate Armageddon that is the Lloyd’s building. And that architects – always an odd lot with a gift for myopia – should look at it and go: “Ooh, lovely detailing”.

Compared with Rogers, his former partner Renzo Piano seemed to hang onto the slightly hippy heart of the Pompidou for longer. But that always struck a slightly bogus note. Indeed, an acquaintance of mine who worked for both once told me that the benign, bearded Piano was a total tyrant in the office whilst Rogers was a genuine sweetie. I can believe it. His heart seems in the right place. But, his head….