0:00:02 > 0:00:04There was no such thing as architectural modernism.
0:00:04 > 0:00:09There were modernisms, plural, several, contradictory,
0:00:09 > 0:00:11at odds with each other.
0:00:11 > 0:00:14And these idioms have gradually, if grudgingly,
0:00:14 > 0:00:19come to be accepted as the norms of the last 100 or so years.
0:00:19 > 0:00:23All these idioms, save one, Brutalism,
0:00:23 > 0:00:28an offensive din to many ears, but concrete poetry to mine.
0:00:28 > 0:00:31What is it about Brutalism that prompts such derision,
0:00:31 > 0:00:33such animus, such loathing?
0:00:33 > 0:00:36Its aggression?
0:00:36 > 0:00:38Its candour?
0:00:38 > 0:00:40Its arrogance?
0:00:40 > 0:00:42Its sheer art?
0:01:16 > 0:01:20This season, as you can see, I am vivacious in fuchsia
0:01:20 > 0:01:24and lacy ruffs, whilst last season, I was a street riot of purple
0:01:24 > 0:01:29and diamante. Purple is such a very, very brave colour, don't you think?
0:01:29 > 0:01:32But had Anna Wintour
0:01:32 > 0:01:36or Karl Lagerfeld called me
0:01:36 > 0:01:39to say that I should be bedecked in a gingham, taffeta,
0:01:39 > 0:01:42scoop-necked young generation jumpsuit
0:01:42 > 0:01:46and daubed all over with fig confit spa hydration pamper,
0:01:46 > 0:01:48I would have stripped off and gone for it.
0:01:48 > 0:01:50Wasps or no wasps!
0:01:53 > 0:01:57We think of shifts in taste as being entirely manipulated,
0:01:57 > 0:02:01relentlessly, regularly, but our awareness
0:02:01 > 0:02:03of this hectoring invitation to conform,
0:02:03 > 0:02:06makes us no less conformist.
0:02:06 > 0:02:10We're persuaded of need where none exists.
0:02:10 > 0:02:13We're enjoined to subscribe to the new,
0:02:13 > 0:02:17new clothes, new phones, new cars, new cults
0:02:17 > 0:02:20and, of course, new strata of personal debt,
0:02:20 > 0:02:23raging hyper-debt.
0:02:28 > 0:02:31However, not all fashions, not all crazes,
0:02:31 > 0:02:34not all fads, not all tastes, not even all religions,
0:02:34 > 0:02:38are blatantly mercantile creations.
0:02:38 > 0:02:43Some, the worthwhile minority, are born of commonality,
0:02:43 > 0:02:47of harmonious unison, of the thread of juncture,
0:02:47 > 0:02:50over complex combination of circumstance,
0:02:50 > 0:02:53chance and coincidence and, no doubt,
0:02:53 > 0:02:58various other alliterative properties.
0:02:58 > 0:03:02Every such shift is peculiar, specific.
0:03:02 > 0:03:05Why it happens and how it happens, vary.
0:03:05 > 0:03:08Causes lurch from the obvious to the occluded.
0:03:08 > 0:03:13Processes are sometimes tangible, sometimes incomprehensible.
0:03:13 > 0:03:19All that is constant is that it most surely DOES happen.
0:03:19 > 0:03:21Spontaneous and synchronous
0:03:21 > 0:03:25are words that ought always to be in quotes.
0:03:25 > 0:03:28But nonetheless...
0:03:28 > 0:03:32A Housman wrote of Thomas Hardy, that, in 1866,
0:03:32 > 0:03:35there was a whole army of young men like himself,
0:03:35 > 0:03:38not mutually acquainted, but who, nevertheless,
0:03:38 > 0:03:41as they met in the street, could recognise each other
0:03:41 > 0:03:46as spiritual brethren because of a certain outward sign.
0:03:46 > 0:03:49That outward sign was Swinburne's Poems and Ballads,
0:03:49 > 0:03:52protruding from their breast pocket.
0:03:52 > 0:03:56This literary sartorial fashion was not imposed,
0:03:56 > 0:04:00it was not a strategy devised by the poet's publisher
0:04:00 > 0:04:04or by an opportunistic aesthete of a tailor.
0:04:26 > 0:04:31The stretched 1860s, from about 1855 to 1873,
0:04:31 > 0:04:35where the cultural apogee of Victoria's reign
0:04:35 > 0:04:39and of the French Second Empire's gaudy swagger.
0:04:39 > 0:04:46Theatre, painting and fiction were out to disturb and to shock.
0:04:46 > 0:04:51It was the time of energy, melodrama, sensation novel,
0:04:51 > 0:04:54of high art's appropriation of subjects
0:04:54 > 0:04:57that had previously been the stuff of penny dreadfuls.
0:04:57 > 0:05:01Of Alice's adventures in Wonderland, of the Paris Opera,
0:05:01 > 0:05:05the Louvre's extension, the Palais Longchamps in Marseille,
0:05:05 > 0:05:09it was the era of Courbet's The Origin of the World
0:05:09 > 0:05:12and Cezanne's horrifying painting The Murder,
0:05:12 > 0:05:15but that was Cezanne, before he was Cezanne
0:05:15 > 0:05:17when he was in thrall to Goya,
0:05:17 > 0:05:19of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White,
0:05:19 > 0:05:22Armadale and The Moonstone.
0:05:22 > 0:05:25Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend,
0:05:25 > 0:05:28of Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal,
0:05:28 > 0:05:31Les Paradis Artificiels.
0:05:34 > 0:05:38It was when Paul Du Chaillu introduced dead gorillas to Europe.
0:05:41 > 0:05:43This was when Victorian architecture
0:05:43 > 0:05:46was at its most quintessentially Victorian.
0:05:46 > 0:05:49Indeed, the very word 'Victorian'
0:05:49 > 0:05:52appears to have been coined in the late 1850s
0:05:52 > 0:05:55by the architect and pamphleteer, Thomas Harris,
0:05:55 > 0:06:00who militated for a peculiarly Victorian architecture.
0:06:00 > 0:06:03Militated successfully.
0:06:03 > 0:06:06Unlike much of the work that had preceded it,
0:06:06 > 0:06:09and much of the work that would succeed it,
0:06:09 > 0:06:12it could have belonged to no other period.
0:06:16 > 0:06:19This architecture was the so-called Modern Gothic,
0:06:19 > 0:06:21modern, certainly,
0:06:21 > 0:06:27but it had little to do with any hitherto identified form of Gothic.
0:06:27 > 0:06:30It may have lacked stylistic precursors,
0:06:30 > 0:06:33but it did possess precursors of a different kind,
0:06:33 > 0:06:35emotional precursors.
0:06:35 > 0:06:38Antecedents which provoke the same mood
0:06:38 > 0:06:40carry the same sentimental charge,
0:06:40 > 0:06:44which cause you to shiver with the same delighted horror
0:06:44 > 0:06:47or unqualified horror. Horror, full stop.
0:06:47 > 0:06:50Which presage the undisguised weight
0:06:50 > 0:06:54solidity bulk and counter-intuitive juxtapositions
0:06:54 > 0:06:56of the Modern Gothic.
0:06:56 > 0:06:59Because they create what is unfamiliar,
0:06:59 > 0:07:02what was never previously thought or revealed,
0:07:02 > 0:07:06the greatest artists incite the greatest contempt,
0:07:06 > 0:07:10the most furious denigration.
0:07:10 > 0:07:12As a playwright, John Vanbrugh,
0:07:12 > 0:07:15whose characters included Lord Foppington
0:07:15 > 0:07:17and Sir John Brute,
0:07:17 > 0:07:21prompted outrage, delight and the wrath of censors.
0:07:21 > 0:07:24As an architect, he prompted merely outrage among his contemporaries
0:07:24 > 0:07:26and for many years to come,
0:07:27 > 0:07:30from baroque beginnings at Castle Howard,
0:07:30 > 0:07:35he ascended to heights of uncompromising primitivism
0:07:35 > 0:07:37and was predictably calumnised.
0:07:58 > 0:08:02Blenheim Palace was described as a quarry of stone.
0:08:02 > 0:08:06Voltaire declared that it had neither charm nor taste,
0:08:06 > 0:08:08but so what?
0:08:08 > 0:08:12Those aren't cardinal qualities, sure, it does lack charm,
0:08:12 > 0:08:15but there never was any intention that it should possess
0:08:15 > 0:08:20such a conciliatory and welcoming quality, rather than grandeur.
0:08:20 > 0:08:24And if Voltaire equated taste with restraint and courtesy,
0:08:24 > 0:08:26then he was, again, right.
0:08:26 > 0:08:30It's not a polite building, it is dramatic, rhetorical,
0:08:30 > 0:08:36aggressive, as violent as a static object can be.
0:08:38 > 0:08:42Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope bemoaned Vanbrugh's work's
0:08:42 > 0:08:46lack of elegance, their deliberate coarseness.
0:08:46 > 0:08:51The poet and clergyman, Abel Evans, the incumbent of Great Staughton,
0:08:51 > 0:08:54a couple of miles from Vanbrugh's Kimbolton Castle,
0:08:54 > 0:08:57and a recipient of the patronage of Vanbrugh's great enemy,
0:08:57 > 0:09:01the Duchess of Marlborough, notoriously wrote...
0:09:08 > 0:09:12Scatology and Christian mercy are evidently compatible.
0:09:15 > 0:09:17After Vanbrugh had finished work at Kimbolton,
0:09:17 > 0:09:22the Florentine, Alessandro Galilei, added a portico.
0:09:22 > 0:09:27Stylistically contrary, but of an appropriate scale.
0:09:27 > 0:09:31Fifteen years later in Rome, Galilei went further,
0:09:31 > 0:09:34he just about out-Vanbrughed Vanbrugh.
0:09:34 > 0:09:38Again, the style owes little to Vanbrugh, the scale,
0:09:38 > 0:09:42the monstrous scale owes everything.
0:09:42 > 0:09:47Sinister, barbaric, sullen, distended, glowering,
0:09:47 > 0:09:50entirely classical, but Gothic in mood.
0:09:50 > 0:09:54It's a bracingly morbid display, fit for a race of giants.
0:09:59 > 0:10:01It's a matter of great regret that Piranesi
0:10:01 > 0:10:04never designed an original building.
0:10:04 > 0:10:06He restricted himself to becoming
0:10:06 > 0:10:08one of the greatest artists of the sublime.
0:10:08 > 0:10:16He etched prints, many of which depicted hallucinatory prisons, invented prisons.
0:10:21 > 0:10:24Thankfully, at the turn of the 20th century,
0:10:24 > 0:10:26Gino Coppede, better known for his
0:10:26 > 0:10:29extravagant Art Nouveau villas,
0:10:29 > 0:10:32and for the picturesque area of Rome named after him,
0:10:32 > 0:10:34designed, in Genoa,
0:10:34 > 0:10:39a number of outrageous buildings which clearly derived from Piranesi.
0:10:39 > 0:10:43They are so encrusted with swollen motifs,
0:10:43 > 0:10:46and with the frozen zoo of malevolent animals,
0:10:46 > 0:10:48and so heftily rusticated
0:10:48 > 0:10:51that they menace anyone who comes upon them,
0:10:51 > 0:10:53they bully the eye.
0:10:58 > 0:11:0180 years later, after Brutalism's short summer,
0:11:01 > 0:11:04Ricardo Bofill and Peter Hodgkinson,
0:11:04 > 0:11:06posing as neo-classicists,
0:11:06 > 0:11:08match Brutalism's aggression
0:11:08 > 0:11:10in their columned, pedimented
0:11:10 > 0:11:14top-heavy Parisian housing projects.
0:11:14 > 0:11:17As I say, it's not a matter of style
0:11:17 > 0:11:19but of mood,
0:11:19 > 0:11:21of cast of mind.
0:11:22 > 0:11:24Why should buildings be friendly?
0:11:24 > 0:11:28Why should landscapes?
0:11:28 > 0:11:31Do we really want to be chums with geological formations?
0:11:31 > 0:11:34Do we crave matey waterfalls?
0:11:36 > 0:11:39The proposition that buildings should be on a human scale -
0:11:39 > 0:11:41that is, slight and not too alarming,
0:11:41 > 0:11:43is ridiculous.
0:11:43 > 0:11:46Like many Greenish, eco-friendly dicta,
0:11:46 > 0:11:48it's a deprecation of mankind.
0:11:48 > 0:11:51A curtailment of our ambitions
0:11:51 > 0:11:53and capabilities,
0:11:53 > 0:11:56still we ought to be polite to the Earth.
0:11:58 > 0:12:02The modern Gothic also lacked stylistic successors.
0:12:02 > 0:12:06For it was deplored even as it was being built,
0:12:06 > 0:12:07it led nowhere.
0:12:07 > 0:12:10It very swiftly became to be regarded as aberrational,
0:12:10 > 0:12:13coarse, absurd, grotesque,
0:12:13 > 0:12:17uncouth, violent, excessive, degraded.
0:12:17 > 0:12:23and the supreme manifestation of the cult of ugliness.
0:12:23 > 0:12:26According to the trade newspaper, The Architect,
0:12:26 > 0:12:29"It is the first time in the history of art
0:12:29 > 0:12:32"that crudity has been directly and laboriously
0:12:32 > 0:12:34"sought out."
0:12:34 > 0:12:36It wouldn't be the last time.
0:12:37 > 0:12:40Here were architects imposing their will,
0:12:40 > 0:12:43their aggressive, looming, non-consensual,
0:12:43 > 0:12:45rampantly individualistic will,
0:12:45 > 0:12:48designing in reaction to pretty much everything,
0:12:48 > 0:12:51creating to indulge themselves,
0:12:51 > 0:12:57experimenting out loud in a spirit of absolute indifference to the public's bemusement.
0:12:58 > 0:13:01It was as though an alien sensibility ruled the collective
0:13:01 > 0:13:03architectural imagination.
0:13:05 > 0:13:09This was the architecture which several subsequent generations
0:13:09 > 0:13:11routinely calumnised
0:13:11 > 0:13:15with the epithet "Victorian monstrosity".
0:13:15 > 0:13:19They calumnised it because that was what they had learned.
0:13:19 > 0:13:21That was what was done.
0:13:21 > 0:13:22That was what was normal.
0:13:22 > 0:13:27They shared the incurious passivity of the flock, which, in other circumstances,
0:13:27 > 0:13:30allows autocrats to flourish.
0:13:30 > 0:13:32They didn't look, they didn't bother the question.
0:13:32 > 0:13:35They didn't trouble to scrub the scales from their eyes.
0:13:35 > 0:13:39They lazily accepted the received idea,
0:13:39 > 0:13:41la pensee unique,
0:13:41 > 0:13:43the unchallenged cliche.
0:13:43 > 0:13:46The consensual taste.
0:13:46 > 0:13:50Had Margaret Thatcher exhorted Britain to embrace Victorian values
0:13:50 > 0:13:53a few years before she actually did so in 1983,
0:13:53 > 0:13:57she'd have prompted incredulity.
0:13:59 > 0:14:04For most of the 20th century, "Victorian" had a narrow, pejorative meaning.
0:14:04 > 0:14:07Millions of people who had never heard of, let alone
0:14:07 > 0:14:09read Lytton Strachey
0:14:09 > 0:14:12accepted his assessment of the Victorians
0:14:12 > 0:14:15of their idolatry, of their religious mania,
0:14:15 > 0:14:17their Empire.
0:14:17 > 0:14:19The very word "Victorian"
0:14:19 > 0:14:21prompted rancour, despisal,
0:14:21 > 0:14:24and, above all, ridicule.
0:14:24 > 0:14:28On the one hand, it evoked moral and social squalor,
0:14:28 > 0:14:31inhumane working conditions, the workhouse,
0:14:31 > 0:14:34disease and extra disease,
0:14:34 > 0:14:36the exploitation of children like Little Tom
0:14:36 > 0:14:37the Chimney Sweep.
0:14:37 > 0:14:39Rookeries.
0:14:39 > 0:14:41On the other hand...
0:14:41 > 0:14:43well, another bunch of cliches.
0:14:43 > 0:14:45Preposterous sentimentality,
0:14:45 > 0:14:47bourgeois pomposity,
0:14:47 > 0:14:49spectacular philistinism,
0:14:49 > 0:14:50appalling taste,
0:14:50 > 0:14:52ostentatious piety,
0:14:52 > 0:14:54finely tuned pomposity,
0:14:54 > 0:14:58adherence to what Orwell snobbishly decried
0:14:58 > 0:15:01as "the money-grubbing Smilesian line."
0:15:01 > 0:15:03"Smiles" being Samuel Smiles,
0:15:03 > 0:15:06advocate of self-help and thrift.
0:15:14 > 0:15:18Mrs Thatcher in a line of descent from Manchester liberalism,
0:15:18 > 0:15:20and indeed from Smiles,
0:15:20 > 0:15:24was only able to get away with exhortations to emulate the Victorians
0:15:24 > 0:15:28because by 1983, a shift of taste had occurred.
0:15:28 > 0:15:31The vigour, energy, seriousness and inventiveness
0:15:31 > 0:15:35of the 19th century were at last widely recognised.
0:15:35 > 0:15:38Those qualities were most tangible
0:15:38 > 0:15:40in the buildings that surrounded us,
0:15:40 > 0:15:44the layers of lazy prejudice were being removed.
0:15:47 > 0:15:49High Victorian design,
0:15:49 > 0:15:50the modern Gothic,
0:15:50 > 0:15:51was, by the 1980s,
0:15:51 > 0:15:54beginning to be widely relished.
0:15:54 > 0:15:56the buildings' harsh weirdness
0:15:56 > 0:15:59was appreciated as something quite extraordinary
0:15:59 > 0:16:03by people who did not belong to the Victorian Society,
0:16:03 > 0:16:06who did not go on rood screen field trips,
0:16:06 > 0:16:11who did not attend polychromatic brickwork study days.
0:16:11 > 0:16:14The public was belatedly, very belatedly,
0:16:14 > 0:16:16catching on to the imaginative invention
0:16:16 > 0:16:21of long-dead artists, long-dismissed artists
0:16:21 > 0:16:23This peculiar shift of taste
0:16:23 > 0:16:27was contingent on several circumstances.
0:16:27 > 0:16:29First...
0:16:29 > 0:16:32there was by now a century's gap
0:16:32 > 0:16:36between the buildings and their growing band of admirers.
0:16:36 > 0:16:38this gap was propitious,
0:16:38 > 0:16:41People could look and gaze and appraise
0:16:41 > 0:16:44unhampered by the recent past's attitudes,
0:16:44 > 0:16:46by the routine antipathy
0:16:46 > 0:16:51by the distaste of the parents, of grandparents and great-grandparents.
0:16:51 > 0:16:53Second...
0:16:58 > 0:17:01a generation had come of age witnessing all around it
0:17:01 > 0:17:04the destruction of 19th-century buildings which,
0:17:04 > 0:17:06whilst they stood,
0:17:06 > 0:17:09were overlooked or taken for granted.
0:17:09 > 0:17:12Cuthbert Broderick was one of the geniuses of the age,
0:17:12 > 0:17:15yet his Oriental Baths in Leeds
0:17:15 > 0:17:17and his Royal Institution and Town Hall in Hull
0:17:17 > 0:17:20were ripped down by ignorant clots,
0:17:20 > 0:17:22who, if they thought about it,
0:17:22 > 0:17:24which is unlikely,
0:17:24 > 0:17:28reckon that genius and Victorian were incompatible.
0:17:28 > 0:17:31Third...
0:17:31 > 0:17:35the earliest proselytisers for Victorian architecture
0:17:35 > 0:17:37and for the era's devalued painting,
0:17:37 > 0:17:40most famously John Betjeman,
0:17:40 > 0:17:41Harry Goodhart-Rendel,
0:17:41 > 0:17:43Osbert Lancaster,
0:17:43 > 0:17:45Evelyn Waugh,
0:17:45 > 0:17:48had been regarded by their own generation
0:17:48 > 0:17:50as puzzling provocateurs,
0:17:50 > 0:17:52not quite serious,
0:17:52 > 0:17:56forever mischievously guying the public with the perverse asceticism.
0:17:56 > 0:17:58It was such people who founded
0:17:58 > 0:18:01the Victorian Society in the late 1950s
0:18:01 > 0:18:04to try to stem the tide of destruction.
0:18:04 > 0:18:07By his very presence, Nikolaus Pevsner.
0:18:07 > 0:18:09not yet a secular saint,
0:18:09 > 0:18:11endowed it with gravitas.
0:18:11 > 0:18:14Pevsner's affection for Victorian architecture
0:18:14 > 0:18:17was actually qualified.
0:18:17 > 0:18:19Fourth...
0:18:19 > 0:18:22there was a new enemy.
0:18:22 > 0:18:26Pevsner had a blind spot about the modern Gothic.
0:18:26 > 0:18:29Because he believed that modernism should be white
0:18:29 > 0:18:31an rectilinear,
0:18:31 > 0:18:33as it had been in the 1920s and '30s,
0:18:33 > 0:18:35he was entirely out of sympathy
0:18:35 > 0:18:39with the modernism that began to emerge at the end of the '50s
0:18:39 > 0:18:40and in the early '60s.
0:18:40 > 0:18:44This modernism was in reaction to the smooth, sleek,
0:18:44 > 0:18:46elegant work which had preceded it.
0:18:46 > 0:18:49It didn't seek to be pretty,
0:18:49 > 0:18:51it didn't seek to soothe.
0:18:51 > 0:18:56and it was soon the object of bien pensant loathing.
0:18:56 > 0:19:00"Monstrosity" had a new word to preface it.
0:19:00 > 0:19:01"Concrete".
0:19:03 > 0:19:05'Concrete mon...concrete mon...
0:19:05 > 0:19:07'concrete monstrosity...'
0:19:10 > 0:19:13For the first time since the 1860s,
0:19:13 > 0:19:16there was an architecture with guts, with attack.
0:19:16 > 0:19:19with what the Victorians called "go".
0:19:21 > 0:19:25An architecture which shunned sweet-natured niceness
0:19:25 > 0:19:27and emetic unction.
0:19:32 > 0:19:35We don't expect films and novels or paintings
0:19:35 > 0:19:36or sculptures to be pretty,
0:19:36 > 0:19:40so why should we expect buildings to be pretty?
0:19:40 > 0:19:43there are other qualities we seek.
0:19:43 > 0:19:46Nightmares are more captivating than sweet dreams.
0:19:46 > 0:19:48More memorable, too.
0:19:48 > 0:19:50They stick around longer.
0:19:52 > 0:19:54Georges Braque
0:19:54 > 0:19:58said that art's job is to trouble us,
0:19:58 > 0:20:01while science's job is to reassure us.
0:20:01 > 0:20:04There are too many artists who want to be scientists.
0:20:13 > 0:20:17The architecture of the 1960s and the 1860s
0:20:17 > 0:20:19are remarkably akin...
0:20:19 > 0:20:20in mood,
0:20:20 > 0:20:23in aspiration,
0:20:23 > 0:20:24in fragmentation,
0:20:24 > 0:20:26in counter-intuition,
0:20:26 > 0:20:29in discordance, in mongrelism,
0:20:29 > 0:20:31in arbitrariness,
0:20:31 > 0:20:34in impurity, in irreason.
0:20:34 > 0:20:37In offending against the most dismal
0:20:37 > 0:20:39of characteristics,
0:20:39 > 0:20:40common sense.
0:20:42 > 0:20:46They have both been habitually regarded
0:20:46 > 0:20:47as transgressive,
0:20:47 > 0:20:50for they show the architect not as a servile technician
0:20:50 > 0:20:52or social worker,
0:20:52 > 0:20:54but as a maker, an artist.
0:20:57 > 0:21:01An artist creates what he regards as necessary.
0:21:01 > 0:21:06He creates in order to achieve something which did not previously exist.
0:21:08 > 0:21:13What an artist does is not pander to his patron's taste,
0:21:13 > 0:21:17rather, he flatters the patron into believing that it is he,
0:21:17 > 0:21:20the patron, who is the creator of the scheme
0:21:20 > 0:21:24which the architect has proposed.
0:21:24 > 0:21:27The collusive first person plural is important here:
0:21:27 > 0:21:30"We think", "we do",
0:21:30 > 0:21:33"we achieve".
0:21:33 > 0:21:37Thus the architect is granted the licence to do his will.
0:21:37 > 0:21:41Again, he does not attended to a notional audience.
0:21:41 > 0:21:44Second-guessing doesn't come into it.
0:21:45 > 0:21:47Nor did focus groups,
0:21:47 > 0:21:51though they had, mercifully, not been invented in the 1860s.
0:21:51 > 0:21:54And even in the 1960s,
0:21:54 > 0:21:58they were confined to the milieu of academic sociology
0:21:58 > 0:22:01and to assessments of mass media.
0:22:01 > 0:22:04Crucially, they assessed experience.
0:22:04 > 0:22:07They focused on what had been
0:22:07 > 0:22:09and not on what was yet to come.
0:22:09 > 0:22:14They were not used as instruments of prospective urban estate planning.
0:22:14 > 0:22:18It's evident that if an audience is asked what form a new
0:22:18 > 0:22:22housing development should take, it will reply,
0:22:22 > 0:22:24"Like A", or "like B".
0:22:24 > 0:22:28Something with which it is already familiar,
0:22:28 > 0:22:29something extant.
0:22:29 > 0:22:31Not something new, not something
0:22:31 > 0:22:34which is yet uninvented.
0:22:34 > 0:22:39The consensual cannot help but be feeble.
0:22:46 > 0:22:48The architecture of both eras
0:22:48 > 0:22:50has incited irrational opposition
0:22:50 > 0:22:53and a baffled incomprehension
0:22:53 > 0:22:54disguised as moral censure.
0:22:54 > 0:22:58What is the point of having a cast of highly trained,
0:22:58 > 0:23:00often highly imaginative, architects
0:23:00 > 0:23:02if they have to heed the opinions
0:23:02 > 0:23:04and suffer the aesthetic distaste
0:23:04 > 0:23:07of oafish "I don't know much about architecture
0:23:07 > 0:23:10"but I know what I like"
0:23:10 > 0:23:12elected representatives.
0:23:12 > 0:23:15And is there any other kind of elected representative?
0:23:20 > 0:23:26Of course, such distaste should be taken as a backhanded compliment.
0:23:26 > 0:23:28But the way of the world dictates
0:23:28 > 0:23:31that it's oafish "I don't know much about architecture
0:23:31 > 0:23:33"but I know what I like"
0:23:33 > 0:23:34elected representatives
0:23:34 > 0:23:38who have access to the demolition community's hoe rams,
0:23:38 > 0:23:41wrecking balls, high-reach excavators,
0:23:41 > 0:23:43hydraulic jacks, hydraulic shears
0:23:43 > 0:23:45and explosives.
0:23:45 > 0:23:47Even the densest scum-of-the-earth,
0:23:47 > 0:23:49eager-to-ingratiate-itself politician
0:23:49 > 0:23:53knows that it will be applauded at the mere utterance of the words
0:23:53 > 0:23:56"concrete monstrosity".
0:23:56 > 0:23:59THE PHRASE REVERBERATES
0:24:02 > 0:24:06Any modest, self-effacing
0:24:06 > 0:24:08newspaper columnist
0:24:08 > 0:24:10can be sure that he will please
0:24:10 > 0:24:13readers with the same ready-made formula.
0:24:13 > 0:24:16For, as well know, concrete monstrosities
0:24:16 > 0:24:19are culpable of virtually everything.
0:24:19 > 0:24:22They promote every known social ill
0:24:22 > 0:24:24and many which have yet to be revealed.
0:24:24 > 0:24:28Addiction, family breakdown,
0:24:28 > 0:24:30sexual violence,
0:24:30 > 0:24:34they are responsible for the Teesside shoplifting epidemic.
0:24:34 > 0:24:36For paedophilia,
0:24:36 > 0:24:38long-term unemployment,
0:24:38 > 0:24:39arson,
0:24:39 > 0:24:40infanticide,
0:24:40 > 0:24:42looting,
0:24:42 > 0:24:44for a festive gamut of diseases,
0:24:44 > 0:24:46benefits fraud,
0:24:46 > 0:24:47depression,
0:24:47 > 0:24:49pre-teen pregnancies,
0:24:49 > 0:24:51incest,
0:24:51 > 0:24:56and concrete being nothing if not versatile, cannibalism.
0:25:11 > 0:25:13Cannibalism is one of war's unspoken
0:25:13 > 0:25:15enormities.
0:25:15 > 0:25:18Snacking between battles.
0:25:18 > 0:25:20It's a by-product.
0:25:20 > 0:25:25War is politically and demographically predictive.
0:25:25 > 0:25:28It creates future boundaries, future reparations,
0:25:28 > 0:25:30future migrations,
0:25:30 > 0:25:32future regimes.
0:25:32 > 0:25:35It's also technologically predictive.
0:25:40 > 0:25:43The idea, shared by Harry Lime
0:25:43 > 0:25:45and the French writer Paul Virilio,
0:25:45 > 0:25:48that war is the mother of invention
0:25:48 > 0:25:50is rather sweeping
0:25:50 > 0:25:53but much that is occasioned by belligerent necessity
0:25:53 > 0:25:55does make its way
0:25:55 > 0:25:58into Civvy Street, Civvy Plaza, Civvy Mall.
0:26:01 > 0:26:03Surgical advances, prosthetics,
0:26:03 > 0:26:06transport, fabrics, prefabricated
0:26:06 > 0:26:10structures like the Bailey bridge and the Mulberry harbour,
0:26:10 > 0:26:12chronometry, food substitutes
0:26:12 > 0:26:14other than human flesh,
0:26:14 > 0:26:16space travel, road technology,
0:26:16 > 0:26:18telecommunication systems,
0:26:18 > 0:26:20remote-control cinematography,
0:26:20 > 0:26:22surveillance systems,
0:26:22 > 0:26:24optics, computers,
0:26:24 > 0:26:26computer-controlled machine tools which
0:26:26 > 0:26:28de-skill workers,
0:26:28 > 0:26:29cartography,
0:26:29 > 0:26:31weapons, of course - a GPS is a weapon,
0:26:31 > 0:26:33we are all beneficiaries
0:26:33 > 0:26:36and victims of martial ingenuity.
0:26:45 > 0:26:48There is a sort of architecture that mimics
0:26:48 > 0:26:49defensive structures.
0:26:49 > 0:26:52Playful architecture.
0:26:52 > 0:26:55Country houses and their lodges
0:26:55 > 0:26:57were Liberaced with abundant turrets,
0:26:57 > 0:27:00crenulations, corbels, drawbridges.
0:27:00 > 0:27:04This architecture was at several centuries remove
0:27:04 > 0:27:06from that which it drew upon.
0:27:06 > 0:27:08The meaning of the model
0:27:08 > 0:27:10of what was imitated,
0:27:10 > 0:27:13one murderous lout baron building
0:27:13 > 0:27:15to protect his fiefdom
0:27:15 > 0:27:17from the dragonnades
0:27:17 > 0:27:19of a second murderous lout baron
0:27:19 > 0:27:20had all but been erased
0:27:20 > 0:27:23in a welter of neo-chivalric whimsy.
0:27:32 > 0:27:35The temporal gap between bellicose bunkers
0:27:35 > 0:27:37and the civilian buildings that took their cue from them
0:27:37 > 0:27:40was a mere few years.
0:27:40 > 0:27:43The inspiration for hospitals, laboratories,
0:27:43 > 0:27:45apartment blocks, schools,
0:27:45 > 0:27:47universities,
0:27:47 > 0:27:49was the recent past.
0:27:49 > 0:27:52The National Socialist past, as it happened.
0:27:54 > 0:27:56Are Volkswagen cars evil?
0:27:59 > 0:28:03Whilst the concrete architecture of the third quarter
0:28:03 > 0:28:05of the 20th century adopts the mood
0:28:05 > 0:28:06of the 1860s,
0:28:06 > 0:28:09it steals the forms and shapes
0:28:09 > 0:28:12of the defences built for an atrocious regime
0:28:12 > 0:28:13by slave labour
0:28:13 > 0:28:16and glorified by the German writer Ernst Junger
0:28:16 > 0:28:18as "holy".
0:28:18 > 0:28:21But then Junger did have a quasi-mystical attachment
0:28:21 > 0:28:23to the apparatus of war.
0:28:23 > 0:28:25HEAVY GUNS FIRING
0:28:27 > 0:28:28Paul Verilio
0:28:28 > 0:28:30likened them to barrows, tumuli,
0:28:30 > 0:28:32funerary sites,
0:28:32 > 0:28:37which, of course, they sometimes inadvertently became.
0:28:37 > 0:28:40Nazi Germany built thousands of fortifications:
0:28:40 > 0:28:43bunkers, observation posts,
0:28:43 > 0:28:45anti-aircraft posts,
0:28:45 > 0:28:46U-boat pens,
0:28:46 > 0:28:47flat towers.
0:28:47 > 0:28:51There were altogether about 60 types.
0:28:51 > 0:28:53They were mostly built by the Todt Organisation
0:28:53 > 0:28:56and they were mostly designed by the architect
0:28:56 > 0:28:59and engineer Friedrich Tamms.
0:29:02 > 0:29:06He described as "cathedrals of artillery".
0:29:06 > 0:29:10"To shelter is to pray."
0:29:10 > 0:29:12"They are true monuments to God
0:29:12 > 0:29:16"and the eternity of the German people."
0:29:16 > 0:29:19They are, certainly, hard to get rid of.
0:29:22 > 0:29:25For Tamms, as for Junger and Verilio,
0:29:25 > 0:29:29building was as fundamental a part of war
0:29:29 > 0:29:30as fighting.
0:29:30 > 0:29:34A creation was as essential as bombing.
0:29:37 > 0:29:40The majority of German's less-trusting artists
0:29:40 > 0:29:42emigrated while they could.
0:29:42 > 0:29:44As Billy Wilder had it...
0:29:50 > 0:29:52Those who remained were subjected, willingly or not,
0:29:52 > 0:29:54to censorious compliance
0:29:54 > 0:29:58which was as small-minded as it was sinister.
0:29:58 > 0:30:00Conditions for creation
0:30:00 > 0:30:02where hardly propitious.
0:30:02 > 0:30:05Art and architecture were propagandist instruments.
0:30:05 > 0:30:07Folksy glorifications
0:30:07 > 0:30:10of idealised peasants,
0:30:10 > 0:30:12populist glorifications
0:30:12 > 0:30:14of genitally impoverished athletes,
0:30:14 > 0:30:16kitschy essays
0:30:16 > 0:30:19in emulation of Imperial Rome.
0:30:19 > 0:30:22Though they had drawn on and exaggerated
0:30:22 > 0:30:24various strains of 1930s European art,
0:30:24 > 0:30:27they were, after the War,
0:30:27 > 0:30:29regarded as works
0:30:29 > 0:30:32which had occurred in toxic isolation
0:30:32 > 0:30:34and which were so contaminated
0:30:34 > 0:30:38that they were now in eternal quarantine.
0:30:43 > 0:30:46These fortifications are the exception.
0:30:46 > 0:30:49They were the most original and most influential
0:30:49 > 0:30:50works of art created
0:30:50 > 0:30:54during the 12 years of the National Socialist imperium.
0:30:54 > 0:30:56Accidental art?
0:30:56 > 0:30:58Art waiting to happen?
0:30:58 > 0:31:01Proto-art waiting to mutate,
0:31:01 > 0:31:04chrysalis to imago,
0:31:04 > 0:31:06accidental art whose potency
0:31:06 > 0:31:09would only be revealed by its gift
0:31:09 > 0:31:12of inspiration to a post-war civilian world.
0:31:14 > 0:31:17The fact that they might be compromised by having been built
0:31:17 > 0:31:18by forced labour
0:31:18 > 0:31:23will not concern any subsequently plagiarising architect.
0:31:23 > 0:31:25The form is the thing.
0:31:25 > 0:31:27Forget the cause, the purpose,
0:31:27 > 0:31:30the enormity of the regime that built them.
0:31:30 > 0:31:31Forget their association
0:31:31 > 0:31:33with the occluded war,
0:31:33 > 0:31:35the internal, racial war,
0:31:35 > 0:31:38the war that Apulian did win.
0:31:38 > 0:31:40The former is the thing, the appearance,
0:31:40 > 0:31:42it always is.
0:31:44 > 0:31:47Unlike folkish cottages,
0:31:47 > 0:31:50unlike pseudo-vernacular Ordensburgen,
0:31:50 > 0:31:52the elite training schools,
0:31:52 > 0:31:54unlike neoclassical arenas,
0:31:54 > 0:31:58bunkers appealed to the Modernist sensibility.
0:32:01 > 0:32:05Second-generation Modernism derived, then, from Nazi models.
0:32:05 > 0:32:09This was not, perhaps, the architectural gift
0:32:09 > 0:32:13that Hitler and Speer, with his vacuous theory
0:32:13 > 0:32:14of the value of ruins,
0:32:14 > 0:32:17had hoped to bequeath to the post-war world.
0:32:19 > 0:32:23Somehow, under the nose of the tyrant and his toady acolyte,
0:32:23 > 0:32:25Tamms had laid down the blueprint
0:32:25 > 0:32:29for the greatest of post-war architecture.
0:32:29 > 0:32:31Tamms' own practical source
0:32:31 > 0:32:34lay in the engineering structures
0:32:34 > 0:32:35that he himself had designed
0:32:35 > 0:32:39in the six years after the "glorious seizure of power".
0:32:39 > 0:32:41Autobahnen,
0:32:41 > 0:32:43their viaducts,
0:32:43 > 0:32:44their bridges,
0:32:44 > 0:32:49their landscaping, this was the greenest of regimes.
0:32:49 > 0:32:52Tamms expressed his theoretical basis thus:
0:32:56 > 0:33:00"Practical use stands in the way..."
0:33:02 > 0:33:06This must have been cheering for those who sheltered in is bunkers(!)
0:33:06 > 0:33:07He went on...
0:33:07 > 0:33:12"Rather, the Monumental must contain something unapproachable that..."
0:33:14 > 0:33:20"The Monumental is the symbol of a community bound by a common ideal."
0:33:20 > 0:33:23Save for the last sentence, this is sane enough.
0:33:25 > 0:33:29Ernst Junger called Tamms' architecture "holy",
0:33:29 > 0:33:30which can mean anything.
0:33:30 > 0:33:32He also called it "cyclopean",
0:33:32 > 0:33:36which specifically signifies a dry-stone,
0:33:36 > 0:33:38no mortar, no cement,
0:33:38 > 0:33:41method of building used by the Mycenaeans
0:33:41 > 0:33:433,500 years ago.
0:33:44 > 0:33:47It this composed of large, uncut boulders,
0:33:47 > 0:33:50many times larger than those that are typically used
0:33:50 > 0:33:53for upland walls in Britain and Spain.
0:33:53 > 0:33:56Structures are held up by gravitational force,
0:33:56 > 0:34:00by the sheer weight of stone upon stone.
0:34:01 > 0:34:04More broadly, "cyclopean" has come to mean
0:34:04 > 0:34:07"massive", "elemental", "crude",
0:34:07 > 0:34:10or rather, apparently crude.
0:34:10 > 0:34:12For although there is nothing delicate
0:34:12 > 0:34:14about cyclopean structures,
0:34:14 > 0:34:18there is nothing coarse about the thought behind them,
0:34:18 > 0:34:21any more than there was anything coarse
0:34:21 > 0:34:25about Mycenaean script, Linear B.
0:34:42 > 0:34:44In the earliest years of the 20th century,
0:34:44 > 0:34:46there was a fashion amongst occidental painters
0:34:46 > 0:34:48and sculptors
0:34:48 > 0:34:50the drawing upon Mesoamerican, Polynesian,
0:34:50 > 0:34:52Maghrebian
0:34:52 > 0:34:54and sub-Saharan African sources.
0:34:54 > 0:34:57Sculptures, masks, totems,
0:34:57 > 0:34:59ideograms, pictographs,
0:34:59 > 0:35:02Picasso and his many imitators,
0:35:02 > 0:35:04Modigliani, Matisse,
0:35:04 > 0:35:06they were all at it.
0:35:08 > 0:35:10Retrospectively,
0:35:10 > 0:35:12this fashion has been dignified
0:35:12 > 0:35:15is being founded in the spirit of anti-colonialism,
0:35:15 > 0:35:19which lends it a supposedly ethical dimension.
0:35:19 > 0:35:22So it is not then merely a question of sequestering
0:35:22 > 0:35:25a visually exciting sculptural style
0:35:25 > 0:35:29whose meanings and devices are not understood(!)
0:35:31 > 0:35:34No, it was a gesture of solidarity
0:35:34 > 0:35:37towards the victims of colonial wickedness,
0:35:37 > 0:35:39an early instance of self-congratulatory
0:35:39 > 0:35:43Western penitence and ostentatious exculpation.
0:35:43 > 0:35:47Artistic correctness, avant les lettres.
0:35:47 > 0:35:50What it is really about is a familiar trait.
0:35:50 > 0:35:53The desperate search for fresh inspiration,
0:35:53 > 0:35:56for a new trigger.
0:35:56 > 0:35:59Instead simply looking back to different eras
0:35:59 > 0:36:00of European culture,
0:36:00 > 0:36:04as architects had routinely done from the 15th to the 19th centuries,
0:36:04 > 0:36:07it extended its research,
0:36:07 > 0:36:10not just to different eras but to different continents,
0:36:10 > 0:36:12and to objects whose value had hitherto
0:36:12 > 0:36:18been held to be ethnographic rather than aesthetic.
0:36:18 > 0:36:22It was a way of escaping the continuum of the Renaissance,
0:36:22 > 0:36:26of casting off the shackles of 500 years of linear perspective
0:36:26 > 0:36:29and of abjuring illusionism,
0:36:29 > 0:36:32which had anyway been usurped by photography.
0:36:37 > 0:36:39A kindred process occurred in music,
0:36:39 > 0:36:44where jazz and ragtime, pretty much exclusively black music
0:36:44 > 0:36:46in a still-segregated United States,
0:36:46 > 0:36:51provided the foundation for works by European composers,
0:36:51 > 0:36:54Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel,
0:36:54 > 0:36:55Kurt Weill,
0:36:55 > 0:36:57Igor Stravinsky,
0:36:57 > 0:36:58Constant Lambert.
0:37:09 > 0:37:11This opportunistic rummaging
0:37:11 > 0:37:13through the artefacts of non-classical,
0:37:13 > 0:37:16non Judeo-Christian cultures
0:37:16 > 0:37:18was an oblique continuation
0:37:18 > 0:37:20of the Romantics' idealisation
0:37:20 > 0:37:21of the noble savage
0:37:21 > 0:37:24and the quest for perfectibility,
0:37:24 > 0:37:25or "reality".
0:37:25 > 0:37:27Real reality.
0:37:27 > 0:37:29Or feral salvation.
0:37:29 > 0:37:31Or natural truth.
0:37:31 > 0:37:33Or some delusional state along those lines
0:37:33 > 0:37:38through the adoption of primitivism.
0:37:38 > 0:37:40The Early Modern movement in architecture
0:37:40 > 0:37:44took a different path, different paths.
0:37:44 > 0:37:47But all led away from primitivism,
0:37:47 > 0:37:50towards a fundamentalist trust in progress,
0:37:50 > 0:37:52trust so strong it was a faith.
0:37:57 > 0:38:02In the strain of Modernism that became known as the International Style,
0:38:02 > 0:38:06future would be determined by technocrats.
0:38:06 > 0:38:09Architecture was willingly in thrall
0:38:09 > 0:38:11to such doctrines as Taylorism.
0:38:13 > 0:38:17There was the widely held belief, no proof required,
0:38:17 > 0:38:20that the state could be remodelled like a factory.
0:38:20 > 0:38:25Architects planned to create a practical Utopia.
0:38:25 > 0:38:28They did not regard themselves as builders or artists,
0:38:28 > 0:38:31but as social engineers.
0:38:31 > 0:38:34Reason didn't sleep, far from it.
0:38:34 > 0:38:36It suffered such insomnia
0:38:36 > 0:38:39that it created its own monsters.
0:38:39 > 0:38:41Monsters so hyper-rational
0:38:41 > 0:38:45that they became instruments of managerial madness.
0:38:45 > 0:38:47Machines were worshipped,
0:38:47 > 0:38:51man would be transformed into a machine.
0:38:52 > 0:38:54Photos of Le Corbusier's work
0:38:54 > 0:38:56invariably include his cars,
0:38:56 > 0:38:59which today look hopelessly old-fashioned
0:38:59 > 0:39:01beside the buildings.
0:39:01 > 0:39:03They were there to emphasise
0:39:03 > 0:39:07that the buildings, too, are machines.
0:39:07 > 0:39:11These buildings, heralds of a new society,
0:39:11 > 0:39:13lidos, airports,
0:39:13 > 0:39:16health centres, coach stations, garages,
0:39:16 > 0:39:19mostly clung to Euclidean geometry.
0:39:19 > 0:39:23Whilst International Modernism was to its adherents
0:39:23 > 0:39:25a social programme,
0:39:25 > 0:39:27rather than an architectural idiom,
0:39:27 > 0:39:30its buildings were instantly recognisable
0:39:30 > 0:39:33because they were stylistically costive.
0:39:33 > 0:39:37The same few devices were endlessly employed.
0:39:37 > 0:39:39Most had flat roofs,
0:39:39 > 0:39:40most had white walls,
0:39:40 > 0:39:42most had abundant glass.
0:39:42 > 0:39:44Most shunned ornament, which,
0:39:44 > 0:39:47as every junior draughtsman knew, was crime,
0:39:47 > 0:39:52because a dotty Austrian, Adolf Loos, had said so.
0:39:52 > 0:39:54Progress,
0:39:54 > 0:39:56the progress they would claim to represent,
0:39:56 > 0:39:58was also a pretence.
0:39:58 > 0:40:01Progress explicitly connotes movement,
0:40:01 > 0:40:02change,
0:40:02 > 0:40:04perpetual experiment.
0:40:04 > 0:40:06Equally explicitly,
0:40:06 > 0:40:08it precludes stasis.
0:40:09 > 0:40:11By the mid-to-late 1930s,
0:40:11 > 0:40:15rectilinear white modernism had ground to a halt.
0:40:15 > 0:40:17It cannibalised itself.
0:40:17 > 0:40:21At least it did if it could get out of its straitjacket.
0:40:21 > 0:40:26Its self-censorship caused it to repeat itself.
0:40:26 > 0:40:28It ignored Picasso's dictum
0:40:28 > 0:40:31"copy anyone but never copy yourself."
0:40:31 > 0:40:35Extraordinarily, he practised what he preached.
0:40:35 > 0:40:37There was the blue Picasso
0:40:37 > 0:40:39of starving beggars,
0:40:39 > 0:40:42the rose Picasso of harlequins and mountebanks,
0:40:42 > 0:40:45the sub-Saharan Picasso,
0:40:45 > 0:40:48the elephantine-women-running hand-in-hand
0:40:48 > 0:40:50and liable-to-have-a-heart-attack Picasso,
0:40:50 > 0:40:53the freaks-with-several-heads Picasso,
0:40:53 > 0:40:55the voyeuristic-primate Picasso,
0:40:55 > 0:40:57the Minotaur Picasso,
0:40:57 > 0:40:58the flying-horse Picasso,
0:40:58 > 0:41:01and, at last,
0:41:01 > 0:41:02the dead Picasso.
0:41:02 > 0:41:04They were all Picasso,
0:41:04 > 0:41:06one man was many men.
0:41:19 > 0:41:21It was not till mid-century
0:41:21 > 0:41:22that architecture caught up
0:41:22 > 0:41:25and sought to emulate the variety
0:41:25 > 0:41:27and energy which abound in modern painting,
0:41:27 > 0:41:30sculpture and literature.
0:41:30 > 0:41:32A shift of self-image occurred,
0:41:32 > 0:41:35architects began to cotton on to the idea
0:41:35 > 0:41:38that, rather than remain sterile technicians
0:41:38 > 0:41:40of a Neverland
0:41:40 > 0:41:42that had never come to be,
0:41:42 > 0:41:46they might create the Neverland that never would be
0:41:46 > 0:41:47in the guise of artists,
0:41:47 > 0:41:49unconstrained artists,
0:41:49 > 0:41:50fecund artists.
0:41:50 > 0:41:52Certainly expressive artists,
0:41:52 > 0:41:56even Expressionist artists.
0:41:57 > 0:42:01If the architectural Modernism of the long 1960s
0:42:01 > 0:42:06had as one source the grubby secret of Nazi fortifications,
0:42:06 > 0:42:10it could also claim a less compromised ancestor.
0:42:10 > 0:42:13The Expressionism of the 1910s, the 1920s
0:42:13 > 0:42:16and the early 1930s.
0:42:17 > 0:42:20The earliest attempts to use concrete as an architecturally
0:42:20 > 0:42:23sculptural medium were made by Expressionist architects
0:42:23 > 0:42:25such as Erich Mendelsohn
0:42:25 > 0:42:28at the Einstein Tower at Potsdam.
0:42:28 > 0:42:31Even though Mendelsohn soon abandoned Expressionism
0:42:31 > 0:42:34for the abstract geometry of the International Style,
0:42:34 > 0:42:38there is much more of this stuff than is generally acknowledged,
0:42:38 > 0:42:41wrought by less famous hands.
0:42:42 > 0:42:45The inventor of decaffeinated coffee,
0:42:45 > 0:42:46Ludwig Roselius,
0:42:46 > 0:42:48commission the architect
0:42:48 > 0:42:50Bernhard Hoetger
0:42:50 > 0:42:52to rebuild Boettcherstrasse in Bremen
0:42:52 > 0:42:55in an Expressionist manner.
0:42:55 > 0:42:57It included a gilded relief
0:42:57 > 0:42:59which proclaimed Hitler
0:42:59 > 0:43:01to be the "Lichtbringer".
0:43:03 > 0:43:05An unfortunate dedication,
0:43:05 > 0:43:07given that the bringer of light
0:43:07 > 0:43:09is one of Lucifer's names.
0:43:09 > 0:43:12At the 1936 Nuremberg Rally,
0:43:12 > 0:43:14Hitler responded by denouncing
0:43:14 > 0:43:17the street's architecture as degenerate.
0:43:17 > 0:43:20Having then been condemned by the Nazis,
0:43:20 > 0:43:22Expressionism was, after the war,
0:43:22 > 0:43:26disregarded because, although not exclusively German,
0:43:26 > 0:43:29it was tainted by that association.
0:43:29 > 0:43:30Moreover,
0:43:30 > 0:43:33it was an idiom of the despised North,
0:43:33 > 0:43:35it was representational.
0:43:35 > 0:43:38And its characteristic material was brick,
0:43:38 > 0:43:40which was deemed non-modern.
0:43:42 > 0:43:44No matter that many international
0:43:44 > 0:43:46modern buildings were of brick,
0:43:46 > 0:43:50rendered to give the impression that they were of concrete.
0:43:50 > 0:43:52Concrete was modern.
0:43:52 > 0:43:55So modern that watching it set
0:43:55 > 0:43:59was like watching the future arrive.
0:43:59 > 0:44:01International Modernism
0:44:01 > 0:44:03strove for standardisation,
0:44:03 > 0:44:05for production-line architecture,
0:44:05 > 0:44:07for collective anonymity
0:44:07 > 0:44:09and personal self-effacement.
0:44:09 > 0:44:11The ideal building was not only
0:44:11 > 0:44:13a machine,
0:44:13 > 0:44:15it appeared to have been designed by a machine.
0:44:18 > 0:44:22The Expressionist instinct was entirely contrary,
0:44:22 > 0:44:25undisguisedly individualistic.
0:44:25 > 0:44:27The artist is omnipresent,
0:44:27 > 0:44:29pulling the strings, performing,
0:44:29 > 0:44:31failing to be modest,
0:44:31 > 0:44:33asserting him or herself,
0:44:33 > 0:44:36in the case of architecture, it is almost certainly a him.
0:44:36 > 0:44:39It is not the moral squalor of part of its provenance
0:44:39 > 0:44:42that causes this kind of sculpted concrete
0:44:42 > 0:44:43to be called Brutalist,
0:44:43 > 0:44:46and the inventive, prolific, religiose,
0:44:46 > 0:44:49unrepentant National Socialist Friedrich Tamms
0:44:49 > 0:44:52to be considered the first Brutalist,
0:44:52 > 0:44:55though that would be reason enough.
0:44:55 > 0:44:57The term NyBrutalism -
0:44:57 > 0:44:59"new Brutalism" -
0:44:59 > 0:45:02is supposed to have been the coinage,
0:45:02 > 0:45:04the jocularly mocking coinage
0:45:04 > 0:45:07of the Swedish architect Hans Asplund.
0:45:07 > 0:45:10It referred to a house in Uppsala
0:45:10 > 0:45:12designed in 1949
0:45:12 > 0:45:16by Bengt Edman and Lennart Holm.
0:45:16 > 0:45:19In comparison with the work which would subsequently
0:45:19 > 0:45:21be labelled Brutalist,
0:45:21 > 0:45:23the house is meekness itself.
0:45:23 > 0:45:27Indeed, were it not built of industrial bricks,
0:45:27 > 0:45:30which no doubt prompted Asplund's remark,
0:45:30 > 0:45:32it might stand as the very example
0:45:32 > 0:45:34of the sweet, light, ascetic,
0:45:34 > 0:45:38puritanical Scandinavian architectural elixir
0:45:38 > 0:45:42which afflicted this country for at least 10 years after the war.
0:45:42 > 0:45:45An elixir in the image of the austere,
0:45:45 > 0:45:47sanctimonious Chancellor of the Exchequer,
0:45:47 > 0:45:49Stafford Cripps.
0:45:49 > 0:45:51Modest architecture
0:45:51 > 0:45:54which had much to be modest about.
0:45:54 > 0:45:57Its most complete expression was the 1951
0:45:57 > 0:45:58Festival of Britain.
0:45:58 > 0:46:02Ill-named, it was the Festival of Scandinavia,
0:46:02 > 0:46:04even pre-war Scandinavia.
0:46:06 > 0:46:07The word "Brutalism" caught on.
0:46:07 > 0:46:09A group of English architects
0:46:09 > 0:46:13on a then-routine pilgrimage to Scandinavian shrines
0:46:13 > 0:46:14met Asplund.
0:46:14 > 0:46:16Among them was Michael Ventris,
0:46:16 > 0:46:20the polymath who would decipher Linear B.
0:46:21 > 0:46:23He was also a polyglot
0:46:23 > 0:46:24who spoke Swedish,
0:46:24 > 0:46:28not that Asplund's coinage required much translation.
0:46:28 > 0:46:31It became popular in London's architectural circles.
0:46:31 > 0:46:35It was initially always prefixed by "new",
0:46:35 > 0:46:36which prompts the question,
0:46:36 > 0:46:38what was the "old" Brutalism
0:46:38 > 0:46:41that Asplund was alluding to?
0:46:45 > 0:46:47Either way, it was a signifier
0:46:47 > 0:46:49in search of an object,
0:46:49 > 0:46:51an -ism that lacked a movement
0:46:51 > 0:46:55or school or tendency or trend to go with it.
0:46:55 > 0:46:57This was taxonomy back-to-front.
0:46:57 > 0:47:00The title preceded the book, so to speak.
0:47:00 > 0:47:02Ventris and his colleagues
0:47:02 > 0:47:06appear to have used it in a slightly derogatory sense.
0:47:06 > 0:47:10It was adopted by the architects Alison and Peter Smithson,
0:47:10 > 0:47:12almost as a badge of defiance.
0:47:12 > 0:47:15It was further disseminated by their sometime acolyte
0:47:15 > 0:47:18and interpreter, Reyner Banham.
0:47:20 > 0:47:23The Smithsons were manifesto people.
0:47:23 > 0:47:26Joiners, doggedly avant-garde.
0:47:26 > 0:47:29Sedulously alternative,
0:47:29 > 0:47:31eagerly self-publicising.
0:47:31 > 0:47:34They had all the characteristics required
0:47:34 > 0:47:37for a successful career in the arts.
0:47:37 > 0:47:40But they had no aptitude for art itself.
0:47:43 > 0:47:45They lacked an essential perhaps THE essential,
0:47:45 > 0:47:47attribute of architects,
0:47:47 > 0:47:51they were absolutely bereft of a visual sensibility.
0:47:52 > 0:47:55Banham was a stater of the bleeding obvious,
0:47:55 > 0:47:57a committee man and academic
0:47:57 > 0:48:00who believed himself to be a perpetual rebel
0:48:00 > 0:48:03and a very unconventional indeed.
0:48:03 > 0:48:06He was an energetically tenacious follower of fashion.
0:48:06 > 0:48:10He was like the credulous who scuttled from one cult to the next
0:48:10 > 0:48:12in search of the "truth"
0:48:12 > 0:48:14when no such thing exists.
0:48:14 > 0:48:16Brutalist architecture, Pop architecture,
0:48:16 > 0:48:19Archigram architecture,
0:48:19 > 0:48:20megastructural architecture,
0:48:20 > 0:48:22green architecture,
0:48:22 > 0:48:25hi-tech architecture.
0:48:25 > 0:48:28This is a man who would have trampled on his grandmother
0:48:28 > 0:48:31to snuggle up to a passing trend.
0:48:31 > 0:48:34He positioned himself as an insider,
0:48:34 > 0:48:37magnanimously divulging
0:48:37 > 0:48:39to the "lay reader",
0:48:39 > 0:48:41his patronising expression,
0:48:41 > 0:48:45the secrets of whatever cult he was currently in thrall to.
0:48:45 > 0:48:48His prose was embarrassingly ingratiating,
0:48:48 > 0:48:49matey,
0:48:49 > 0:48:52designed to show what a right-on, finger-on-the-pulse
0:48:52 > 0:48:55kind of guy he was.
0:48:55 > 0:48:59Whilst it still had absolutely nothing material to signify
0:48:59 > 0:49:01other than a vacuum,
0:49:01 > 0:49:02the very word "Brutalism"
0:49:02 > 0:49:05became laden with further associations.
0:49:05 > 0:49:07First...
0:49:10 > 0:49:14Just as the generation before his had drawn on African art,
0:49:14 > 0:49:16so did Jean Dubuffet
0:49:16 > 0:49:19draw on the untutored, often disturbed,
0:49:19 > 0:49:21often disturbing work
0:49:21 > 0:49:25of psychiatric patients and the mentally fraught.
0:49:25 > 0:49:26Patronisingly revered
0:49:26 > 0:49:28as "idiots savants"
0:49:28 > 0:49:30when they are frequently just "idiots".
0:49:30 > 0:49:33Someone somewhere, no doubt,
0:49:33 > 0:49:35considers this a form of exploitation.
0:49:35 > 0:49:38Dubuffet also collected this work.
0:49:38 > 0:49:41He called it...
0:49:41 > 0:49:46"Brut" here meaning rough, raw, crude, spontaneous.
0:49:46 > 0:49:50Expressive of demons and back-brain horrors.
0:49:50 > 0:49:53It's also in extra-cultural phenomenon,
0:49:53 > 0:49:55which is to say that the work
0:49:55 > 0:49:57of a Mumbai taxi driver
0:49:57 > 0:50:00will resemble that of a retired gardener in Castile.
0:50:01 > 0:50:04The work is made without any reference to the cultural
0:50:04 > 0:50:08norms of the society that its makers inhabit.
0:50:08 > 0:50:12So there is, then, an unwitting internationalism about this stuff.
0:50:17 > 0:50:21Brutalism also had appended to it a link to beton brut -
0:50:21 > 0:50:24raw concrete, the stuff of bunkers.
0:50:25 > 0:50:28The material which would evidently be considered harsh and
0:50:28 > 0:50:31unaccommodating by a public,
0:50:31 > 0:50:34which apparently craved the solicious of thatch,
0:50:34 > 0:50:37pitched roofs, winking dormers,
0:50:37 > 0:50:40wicket gates, bogus beams,
0:50:40 > 0:50:43lichenous sandstone and prettiness.
0:50:43 > 0:50:45Not beauty, just prettiness.
0:50:47 > 0:50:51Most pertinently, Brutalism suggested brutality -
0:50:51 > 0:50:53physical threats and violence.
0:50:53 > 0:50:55Rumbles, stramashes.
0:50:55 > 0:50:56Bottlings.
0:50:57 > 0:51:00Had Banham and the Smithsons not been so silly,
0:51:00 > 0:51:03so smug, such defiant teenagers,
0:51:03 > 0:51:08had they ignored Ventris's and Asplund's pejorative word
0:51:08 > 0:51:11and chosen something wholly mendacious...
0:51:14 > 0:51:18..then the reception granted to this idiom might have been happier.
0:51:19 > 0:51:23For their opponents knowing nothing of art brut or of beton brut,
0:51:23 > 0:51:27and are prized only of the English component,
0:51:27 > 0:51:29it would not have had the ammunition
0:51:29 > 0:51:34of what sounds like a culpable boast of aggression.
0:51:34 > 0:51:35Or maybe not.
0:51:36 > 0:51:38With godparents like these,
0:51:38 > 0:51:41Brutalism was not off to the greatest of starts.
0:51:41 > 0:51:45Worse, the Swedish coinage, which had been adopted in Britain,
0:51:45 > 0:51:47spread rapidly.
0:51:47 > 0:51:50Hardly surprising, for with minor variations
0:51:50 > 0:51:54the same word recurs in countless languages.
0:51:58 > 0:52:01And the meanings recur too - persistently denigratory.
0:52:03 > 0:52:04To people across the world,
0:52:04 > 0:52:07Brutalism suggested merely brutality.
0:52:07 > 0:52:11They were not apprised of the French words for raw concrete.
0:52:11 > 0:52:14They knew nothing of Dubuffet's art brut.
0:52:15 > 0:52:19Here was a further instance of unwitting internationalism.
0:52:24 > 0:52:27When Friedrich Tamms began designing bunkers and flak towers,
0:52:27 > 0:52:30there was nothing new about concrete.
0:52:30 > 0:52:33It was, indeed, a very old material
0:52:33 > 0:52:36which had been used successfully by the Romans,
0:52:36 > 0:52:38the Pantheon, the Pont du Gard, et cetera.
0:52:39 > 0:52:42After several centuries' neglect,
0:52:42 > 0:52:44new interest was taken in it in the 19th century.
0:52:46 > 0:52:50But the structures made then were predominantly engineering ones.
0:52:51 > 0:52:53BELL CHIMES
0:52:53 > 0:52:56It should have appealed to architects of the Modern Gothic
0:52:56 > 0:53:01but didn't, partly because of its perceived technical limitations,
0:53:01 > 0:53:04but more than that, it was a matter of snobbery.
0:53:04 > 0:53:09There perhaps still is a footling hierarchy of materials.
0:53:10 > 0:53:15Besides stone, beside even brick, it was considered ignoble.
0:53:15 > 0:53:17The offal of the building world.
0:53:19 > 0:53:23It was left to the manager of the concrete building company to design
0:53:23 > 0:53:25this Swedenborgian Church in South London
0:53:25 > 0:53:29as a sort of advertisement for the stuff.
0:53:29 > 0:53:33The unreinforced concrete is incised and coloured to lend it
0:53:33 > 0:53:36the appearance of old red sandstone blocks.
0:53:36 > 0:53:39Hardly a typical London building material.
0:53:40 > 0:53:43But a floor on the aggregate gives the game away.
0:53:43 > 0:53:45It looks like honeycombed hokey-pokey
0:53:45 > 0:53:49and leaves no-one in doubt that it is concrete.
0:53:51 > 0:53:53The Royal Liver Building in Liverpool,
0:53:53 > 0:53:55early reinforced concrete,
0:53:55 > 0:53:59is more successful in carrying off the deception that it's stone.
0:54:01 > 0:54:03What was new almost 2,000 years
0:54:03 > 0:54:06after the construction of the Pantheon
0:54:06 > 0:54:10was Friedrich Tamms' appreciation of reinforced concrete's pliability.
0:54:10 > 0:54:13Its plastic capacity.
0:54:13 > 0:54:15Its potential as a sculptural medium.
0:54:18 > 0:54:21This last might seem an irrelevance
0:54:21 > 0:54:22in a martial structure
0:54:22 > 0:54:24with a bellicosal defensive.
0:54:25 > 0:54:27But Nazi Germany was, evidently,
0:54:27 > 0:54:31a tyranny which controlled by every means, including aesthetic ones -
0:54:31 > 0:54:34dress, ceremonial, film, painting, architecture.
0:54:36 > 0:54:40Tamms created forms, quasi-figurative forms
0:54:40 > 0:54:44that recalled fortresses, dungeons,
0:54:44 > 0:54:49megaliths, visors, fists in chainmail,
0:54:49 > 0:54:51sci-fi Mohawks, helmets,
0:54:51 > 0:54:53animals preparing to pounce.
0:54:57 > 0:55:00Part of the Atlantic Wall Lacanau in the Medoc,
0:55:00 > 0:55:05manned late in the war by members of the Indian legion of the SS,
0:55:05 > 0:55:07took the shape of a hideous reptile.
0:55:08 > 0:55:12These various forms of threatening imagery were intended
0:55:12 > 0:55:17to send messages of German might to the people of the occupied countries
0:55:17 > 0:55:19and to the German people themselves,
0:55:19 > 0:55:22who began to feel that they too were victims of occupation.
0:55:25 > 0:55:28How does an idiom that's made for war adapt to peace?
0:55:28 > 0:55:30Readily.
0:55:30 > 0:55:32What changes need to be effected?
0:55:32 > 0:55:35Few for pieces relative.
0:55:35 > 0:55:39The architecture of National Socialists' fortifications
0:55:39 > 0:55:42made for the pedigree Second World War prove to
0:55:42 > 0:55:46have multitudinous uses in the Cold war.
0:55:46 > 0:55:47The mongrel Cold War.
0:55:50 > 0:55:53Concrete took wings. You know what I mean.
0:56:04 > 0:56:08Whilst it was hardly freed of the exigencies of defence,
0:56:08 > 0:56:10of rhetorical shows of strength
0:56:10 > 0:56:13and of the deadly playground's brinkmanship,
0:56:13 > 0:56:16it was able to stretch itself with monolithic abandon.
0:56:19 > 0:56:22The Modern Gothic had effected secular building types
0:56:22 > 0:56:24with religious imagery.
0:56:25 > 0:56:28Brutalism achieved something kindred - the libraries
0:56:28 > 0:56:31and universities and shopping malls and clinics and hospitals
0:56:31 > 0:56:36and hotels and car parks of both the Soviet Bloc and of the Free World,
0:56:36 > 0:56:39which might not have been entirely free,
0:56:39 > 0:56:42but was a good deal freer than usefully idiotic
0:56:42 > 0:56:44fellow travellers would allow,
0:56:44 > 0:56:46were infected with belligerent imagery
0:56:46 > 0:56:50all drawn from the loser in the pedigree war.
0:56:51 > 0:56:53Russia's Great Patriotic War,
0:56:53 > 0:56:58the National Liberation War as it was called in Tito's Yugoslavia.
0:56:58 > 0:57:02The initial cause was not masked. Of course it wasn't.
0:57:07 > 0:57:10It was the very bombast and bellicosity
0:57:10 > 0:57:11that attracted architects
0:57:11 > 0:57:15who were browned off with monochromatic smoothness,
0:57:15 > 0:57:18with lightness of touch, with the restraints of good manners.
0:57:20 > 0:57:23No architect was more browned off with these qualities,
0:57:23 > 0:57:26the cardinal qualities of heroic modernism,
0:57:26 > 0:57:28than Le Corbusier,
0:57:28 > 0:57:30who was its unquestioned master.
0:57:31 > 0:57:36The man who would bury it, who would lead this savage reaction
0:57:36 > 0:57:40against what he himself had invented and seen replicated the world over.
0:57:42 > 0:57:45The moment was right for a new archetype,
0:57:45 > 0:57:48for a new model for the devoted flock to copy.
0:57:52 > 0:57:54Next week, here comes the Sublime.
0:57:56 > 0:57:59Marvel at the might of mountains, yardangs, earthquakes.
0:58:01 > 0:58:06Gasp as lava is pumped hundreds of metres into the air.
0:58:06 > 0:58:10Gaze at the seething ocean, basalt columns and pounding waterfalls.
0:58:11 > 0:58:15Gape at jackfruit trees and sausage trees...
0:58:15 > 0:58:18the force of the screaming wind.
0:58:21 > 0:58:23Experience the contortions of trees,
0:58:23 > 0:58:25Banyan exposed roots.
0:58:27 > 0:58:30Thrill to see tsunamis and geysers, termitaries.
0:58:30 > 0:58:34Electric storms turning day to night, tornados, snowdrifts,
0:58:34 > 0:58:36canyons and hoodoos.
0:58:36 > 0:58:37Feel the force.