Smoke and Mirrors

I've been watching Mad Men. A little late but with the zeal of the newly converted. The show has just started its third season in the US, but the first two have already been shown on BBC4 over here so apologies for the untimely nature of this post. Also, in proper TV critic fashion I should say that the following gives the game away on certain storylines so if you haven't been watching it and intend to be warned. I'm just saying....

There is a chi-chi shop called Mid Century Modern near my house which sells 1950's and '60's furniture. The term mid-century modern has become synonymous with a sense of ineffable stylishness, an aura of unimpeachable good taste.

At first glance Mad Men could be mistaken for being yet another example of this '60's genuflection. Its characters seem too familiar and its sets a little too chic, as if the show is simply uncritically in love with the era it depicts. As it turns out though Mad Men is obsessed with surface qualities and appearances but in a very interesting way.

Being set in a time and milieu so overcoded by previous films and TV shows allows Mad Men to subtly deconstruct these stereotypes as we watch. Like the collapsing Manhattan office of the title sequence - itself a homage to Hitchcock's North by Northwest - the familiar certainties of character begin to dissolve in front of us as the series progresses.



Mad Men reflects an ambiguous relationship with modernity*. It is in love with the slick grids and shiny surfaces of early '60's design. It also reveals the particular brand of modernism that dominated post-war US corporate culture. Modernism then was associated with money and power rather then the social egalitarianism of its European roots. Mad Men's modernism is the architecture of Philip Johnson and the novels of Ayn Rand. In fact Rand is name checked continuously in the show as a kind of intellectual cheerleader for the ferociously ambitious admen.

Mad Men revolves around a fictional Madison Avenue ad agency called Sterling Cooper. The agencies boss has a Mark Rothko painting hanging in his office, a reference to the way in which modernism (in the form of abstract expressionism) was absorbed into high style by the moneyed American classes. The arrival of this painting forms a central storyline to one of the episodes where its monetary value and artistic worth are eagerly discussed. Its aura is reinforced by its inaccessibility and the young copy writers have to break into the boss's office to finally see it.

The camera may pan lovingly up the steel mullions of curtain walled office blocks or track across the agency's open plan offices, but the show is concerned with the minute hierarchies and power plays of the people that inhabit them. The shiny surfaces and implacable grids of modernist architecture are also aligned with the smoke and mirror effects of advertising itself. Advertising is not just the background setting for the show but an important thematic concern.

Mad Men's central character is Donald Draper, the urbane and sophisticated creative director of Sterling Cooper. Draper's identity is a fabrication though. He is a hick from the sticks, a character with a murky past who has reinvented himself as a dapper ad man. His persona is analogous to the brand identities he dreams up, a clever piece of self-promotion. Interestingly, Draper is in many ways the show's most honest character. He may be a phony but he's also - as Truman Capote said about Marilyn Monroe - a real phony.

Draper's real phoniness is central to Mad Men's interest in the construction of personal identity. Towards the end of season two his life begins to unravel. He takes a trip to LA where he ends up staying with a mysterious group of idle hedonists in Richard Neutra's Kaufman House. Standing by the pool with his trilby he looks like early Connery era James Bond about to indulge in some guilt free casual sex. And yet the louche sophistication of the setting becomes a backdrop for Draper's spiraling loss of identity. The Kaufman house's lack of solidity and ambiguous reflections are contrasted with the gloomy solidity of his own home in the suburbs of New York.



Modernity - the show suggests - comes at a cost. The price being the previous certainties of life. The shifting attitudes and nascent social revolution of the early '60's permeates Mad Men. Everyone is unsure of where they stand. Interestingly too, given the tendency to view the early '60's as a period of effortless cool, the show doesn't pretend that everyone was a Kennedy voting beatnik. Sterling Cooper's admen are automatically pro-Nixon and some of the most telling scenes show them bewildered by Kennedy's hip, populist appeal.

One of the most important characters in the show is Peggy, an intensely ambitious young secretary who is quickly promoted to junior copywriter. For the other female characters this is an inexplicable achievement. Peggy's success is particularly galling for Joan, an old fashioned office manager used to getting her way within a prescribed set of rules. Peggy consistently dismisses Joan's double edged advice to dress in a more feminine way in order to achieve success. In doing so she implicitly realises that Joan's canny playing of the game is actually a trap and the exploitation of her sexuality can only bring limited success.



In a later episode we see Joan's ambitions thwarted as she tries to achieve a different kind of recognition as a TV script reader within the agency. Later on, at home, she rubs the sores on her shoulders from the straps of her bra, a reminder of the efforts she puts in her to achieve her own identity.

The show is made with an obsessive attention to period detail. What could be an overly dry authenticity actually allows the social mores of the '60's to be explored. There is a fabulous sequence for instance where Don takes his family for a picnic. The scene is saturated in cliche; Betty, the perfect blond wife, sipping coke through a straw, the children playing on the picnic rug and Don himself lying back with a can of beer. As they leave Betty shakes the rug out, scattering food wrappers, drinks cans and rubbish across the grass. She makes no attempt to pick any of it up and they drive off.



In another perfectly judged scene a new photocopier arrives in the office. This vast piece of state of the art equipment has no natural home and the characters idly speculate on where it should go as a kind of background chatter to the main story. This is mainly played for laughs until someone uses it to photocopy Joan's ID revealing that she has lied about her age. The copier is quickly utilised as a new weapon in the same old power battles.

Similarly the incessant drinking and smoking becomes a knowingly absurd device, an endlessly recurring trope that ceases to be in any way aspirational or cool. Losing it, or dissolving into complete dipsomania, is an ever present possibility. At one point a character oversteps the line, pissing himself unwittingly during a meeting. Later, swilling whiskies from huge tumblers, the agency bosses shamelessly conspire to give him the boot.

Mad Men is set at the start of an era of massive social change. It is also an era that has passed into popular folklore as a signifier of effortless cool and stylishness. The programme pulls the rug from under this gloss, showing it instead as a period of anxiety and uncertainty, more similar to ours than we would like to admit. The corporate modernism of Sterling Cooper's office suggests an allusion of egalitarian transparency but actually harbours the same old dark spaces of the mind.

* There are good photos of the empty set here, ironically enough together with some tips on how to recreate the style.

Grim Prospect

This post is perhaps more in the line of English Buildings, but there are some odd coincidences that make me want to write briefly about this building. It's by Oliver Hill, architect of the recently refurbished Midland Hotel in Morecambe, and it is, or was, called the Prospect Inn. It is on the Isle of Thanet which is the bit of Kent that sticks out into the Straits of Dover starting at Whitstable and ending at Ramsgate and with mostly potatoe fields in between. The Prospect Inn sits next to a roundabout overlooking Manston Airport in a particularly bleak bit of landscape.

A few years ago I wrote a review of a book on pub design in which Hill's inn featured. Built in 1938 it is one of the very few pubs ever to be designed in a modernist style. I became vaguely obsessed with its plan, which is eccentric to say the least, especially the biomorphic toilets which stick out from the sides of the building like slightly floppy ears. They are also on opposite sides of the bar area and you need to go outside to get to them, suggesting a playful spatial joke on the courtship rituals of friday night drinking. It also featured some rather lovely floor graphics - long since gone - and a stripped back arts and crafts style fireplace which is still there.

After lying derelict for some years (you can see some pictures of it in this state on mark.ed's flickr site here) the Prospect Inn has been refurbished, mostly pretty horrendously and with a new Holiday Inn tacked onto the back. This has been designed in a sort of pre-fab industrial style with bull-nosed escape stair protrusions that it's just possible to imagine are intended to be sympathetic to Hill's design.



Early modernism in the UK was often associated with leisure uses but these were mostly of the slightly hairshirt, self-improving kind such as lidos and health centres, so the Prospect Inn was also rare for having a populist and hedonistic function. Not that you can imagine much in the way of hedonism happening on this bit of the Isle of Thanet, which is presumably why it closed down. Now the new hotel serves the expanding Kent International Airport.

Oddly Hill also designed an estate of modernist houses (see this fabulous flickr site) in Frinton-On-Sea, a slightly sinister village on the Essex coast that until five years ago didn't have a single pub, and which has a number of bizarre local bye-laws including one forbidding ice cream vans. I know this because as a child Frinton was the nearest bit of seaside to where I grew up so I spent a lot of childhood summer days there. Years later as an architecture tutor I set a spectacularly unsuccesful design project there based on the town's endless battle to keep out the modern world*. Somewhat shamefully, I was completely unaware of Hill's work there at the time.



Anyway, I realised the other day reading this book that I had passed the Prospect Inn a number of times and not realised. So, today I took some terrible photographs of it in the rain while my wife stared out at me from the car in disbelief and my ten day old son slept on in blissful ignorance of his father's nerdish behaviour.

Finally, here is a period picture (via) of the serpentine wall that is still there along the roadside, along with a beautiful pub sign which is a miniature version of the building, which sadly isn't.

* Frinton-On-Sea was recently the subject of a BBC documentary about the resident's extraordinary conservatism. Unless I dreamt it, which is possible, it is also the temporary home to a number of ex-Radio 1 DJ's. who are starting a digital radio station there in tribute to Radio Caroline, the 1960's pirate radio station which for a while broadcast from a marine fort just off the Isle of Thanet. The original Radio Caroline pirate ship was anchored off the Essex coast in the early '70's and, somewhat bizarelly, washed up on Frinton's beach. Perhaps the residents feared a counter cultural invasion and have stepped up their vigilence ever since.

History Today

This picture is taken from The Ladybird Story of Houses and Homes. It was a book I had as a child. Despite being a children’s book though it is a document of impressive ideological purity.

The picture above is accompanied by some forceful modernist rhetoric. “New materials have made possible a new kind of building”, it states. It goes on in suitably robust form, like a junior version of Towards A New Architecture: “As the steelwork carries all the weight all rooms, windows and doors can be placed in the best positions for convenience, sunlight and fresh air”. The picture itself is charming, heroic and reassuring in the same measure. A pipe smoking chap and his wife stroll the verdant parkland created between the modernist point blocks whilst new towers march onwards towards the future.

The final image in the book is of a ‘modern country house’. It is accompanied by some more heartfelt polemic; “Architects are constantly trying to design with modern materials and building methods, houses as perfect, in the modern way as the houses of the great periods of British Architecture”. The house depicted has been designed in a sort of 1960's 'secondary school moderne'.

Running up to this flag waiving finale is a brief history of housing through the ages starting with some amusing looking cavemen. The story only really comes alive though with the Victorians who, as was the case during the period when the book was published (1963), really get it in the neck. “We have seen”, it says; “how the Industrial Revolution made some people very rich so that they could build themselves lavish, but usually ugly houses”.

Describing the interior of a ‘typical’ Victorian house the writers add; “ The room is crowded with chairs, little tables, cabinets and shelves. All available space is filled with artificial flowers, stuffed birds and useless things of all kinds” (My italics). Compared with the overbearing father and his consumptive child depicted here, the healthy looking couple engaged in outdoor pursuits of the modern country house illustrate the restorative powers of modern architecture.

None of the other houses, from the funny looking caveman's cave to the semi-detached 'homes for heroes' are treated with quite the same scorn. Which makes this book an interesting document of its time, a period when the certainties of architecture permeated down to children's history books.