0:00:57 > 0:01:04The skyscrapers of New York City are still, for most people, one of the great emblems of modernity,
0:01:04 > 0:01:09but one of the major architects of the 20th century, Le Corbusier, thought otherwise.
0:01:09 > 0:01:12He called this city "a tragic hedgehog".
0:01:12 > 0:01:16Any New Yorker knows what Corbu meant.
0:01:16 > 0:01:21He hated its contrasts, its medieval dirt and inequalities of class
0:01:21 > 0:01:27and he wanted to abolish the distance between the streets down here and the spires up there.
0:01:27 > 0:01:31He had a vision of New York as a possible, though flawed, Utopia.
0:01:31 > 0:01:36New Yorkers didn't take that seriously then. Today they still don't.
0:01:36 > 0:01:42This century has been an age of utopian propositions. They've been drawn, designed, argued about,
0:01:42 > 0:01:47sometimes even built. And in the process, it has shown that ideal cities don't work.
0:01:47 > 0:01:54To the extent that planners have tried to convert living towns into Utopia, they've destroyed them.
0:01:54 > 0:02:00It seems that, like plants, we do need the shit of others for nutriments.
0:02:00 > 0:02:04But some of the best minds of our culture have thought otherwise.
0:02:05 > 0:02:10They believed the arts could reform people, especially architecture.
0:02:10 > 0:02:16For architecture affects you most directly of all. It is the art you live in.
0:02:19 > 0:02:23Rational design would make rational societies.
0:02:23 > 0:02:28The optimistic feeling of the time is recalled by Philip Johnson.
0:02:28 > 0:02:33It was one of those illusions of the '20s, that movement in which I had the privilege to take part,
0:02:33 > 0:02:39the Modern movement, International Style. The architecture of the '20s was thoroughly of the opinion
0:02:39 > 0:02:43that if you had good architecture, lives would be improved.
0:02:43 > 0:02:49Architecture improved people and people would improve architecture until perfectibility descended on us
0:02:49 > 0:02:52and we'd be happy for ever after.
0:02:52 > 0:02:58But the architects of the Modern movement weren't the first to feel this visionary urge.
0:02:58 > 0:03:04Utopia had been around on paper since the 15th century when Alberti and Leonardo speculated
0:03:04 > 0:03:10about how to build the ideal town and Antonio Filarete planned a city named Sforzinda,
0:03:10 > 0:03:14designed to abolish the muddle and filth of the medieval warren.
0:03:14 > 0:03:20A place for every job and rank of society and every rank and job in its place.
0:03:22 > 0:03:27The dream of a didactic architecture, secular buildings that morally improved you,
0:03:27 > 0:03:33came to a climax around 1800 with the designs of a Frenchman, Etienne-Louis Boullee.
0:03:33 > 0:03:39He was a son of the French Revolution and his designs were obsessed by death, authority
0:03:39 > 0:03:42and the grandeur of the new state.
0:03:48 > 0:03:54They were never built. They would have needed a slave state to build them, but within 30 years
0:03:54 > 0:03:58the Industrial Revolution had created another kind of slave state.
0:04:11 > 0:04:17Throughout the 19th century, architecture had nothing to do with this misery or to say about it.
0:04:17 > 0:04:22Architects built palaces for the rich, villas for the upper bourgeoisie
0:04:22 > 0:04:29and ceremonial structures for the state. Some were of such splendour they became targets for Modernists
0:04:29 > 0:04:35and the main one was the Paris Opera, designed by Charles Garnier, a great whale of marble and bronze
0:04:35 > 0:04:39of such splendour that there would be no possible way to build it today.
0:04:39 > 0:04:44Although the civic pride of the 19th century expressed itself like this,
0:04:44 > 0:04:48the poor, the invisible ones, had no architecture.
0:04:48 > 0:04:51What they had was slums.
0:04:59 > 0:05:04By 1900, in the eyes of a handful of gifted and missionary designers, scattered across Europe,
0:05:04 > 0:05:11architecture itself was a symbol of inequality, and decorated architecture even more so.
0:05:13 > 0:05:19The distrust of decoration in early Modernism was not simply an aesthetic matter.
0:05:19 > 0:05:24It became a moral issue in the 1890s at about the same moment as the birth of its direct opposite,
0:05:24 > 0:05:28the European luxury style, Art Nouveau.
0:05:28 > 0:05:33Art Nouveau was the final exquisite protest of craft sensibility
0:05:33 > 0:05:37before the hand and its work were swamped by machine product.
0:05:37 > 0:05:40It was the snobbish style, consciously elitist.
0:05:40 > 0:05:46In Art Nouveau, culture parodies nature and the pre-industrial world makes its last stand
0:05:46 > 0:05:52among the twining shoots, the wavy lines and the languid stained-glass lilies.
0:05:58 > 0:06:03But the idealist radicals of the 1900s looked to the machine.
0:06:03 > 0:06:07They were in revolt against the injustices of industrial capitalism,
0:06:07 > 0:06:12but they wanted technology to reform culture. They saw themselves as social engineers
0:06:12 > 0:06:17and two such men were Mario Chiattone and Antonio Sant'Elia,
0:06:17 > 0:06:22Italians who wrote the Futurist Manifesto of Architecture in 1914.
0:06:22 > 0:06:28We are no longer the men of the cathedrals, the palaces, the assembly halls,
0:06:28 > 0:06:33but of big hotels, railway stations, immense roads, colossal ports, covered markets,
0:06:33 > 0:06:37brilliantly-lit galleries, freeways, demolition and rebuilding schemes.
0:06:38 > 0:06:44We must invent and build the futurist city, dynamic in all its parts,
0:06:44 > 0:06:49and the futurist house must be like a machine.
0:06:50 > 0:06:55These were dream cities, paper architecture that nobody expected to build.
0:06:55 > 0:07:00And Sant'Elia was killed during WWI at 28, before he could build anything.
0:07:00 > 0:07:04But he had fixed the imagery of concrete cliffs and flyovers
0:07:04 > 0:07:09that would dominate architecture and science fiction for 40 years.
0:07:09 > 0:07:15His speculative passion was shared by architects in other countries, including Soviet Russia after 1917,
0:07:15 > 0:07:22where constructivist designers like Melnikov, Rodchenko and Leonidov imagined vast community centres,
0:07:22 > 0:07:28halls, social condensers, palaces of the people, all based on the machine metaphor.
0:07:35 > 0:07:41But where in the real world could a European architect find practical shapes of the future?
0:07:41 > 0:07:47One place was America, with its industrial forms of warehouse, dock and grain elevator.
0:07:47 > 0:07:51The essence of American Modernism was concentrated in Chicago.
0:07:51 > 0:07:57The city had been wiped out by a fire in the 1870s and so the architects got
0:07:57 > 0:08:01what their European colleagues could only dream of - a clean slate.
0:08:01 > 0:08:05There was no city planning - American business took care of that.
0:08:05 > 0:08:09Grab the block, screw the neighbours.
0:08:09 > 0:08:13But a new principle of building emerged from its chaotic growth -
0:08:13 > 0:08:17skeleton construction instead of load-bearing brick or masonry walls.
0:08:17 > 0:08:24The steel frame took the load and the walls became light panels or opened out into glass.
0:08:24 > 0:08:28Because they weighed less, buildings could go higher.
0:08:28 > 0:08:35This was known as the Chicago style and its master was Louis Sullivan, the first great Modernist architect.
0:08:47 > 0:08:53Sullivan was a true American idealist. "With me, architecture is not an art, but a religion.
0:08:53 > 0:08:57"And that religion but a part of democracy."
0:08:57 > 0:09:01What this entailed for Sullivan and his colleagues in the 1880s and '90s
0:09:01 > 0:09:07was a desire to fulfil both the abstract side of building, its ability to soar and embody systems,
0:09:07 > 0:09:13and its natural side, the poetic rhythms, organic grace notes and ornaments.
0:09:13 > 0:09:19The verticals of aspiration, the horizontals of the mid-west prairie.
0:09:24 > 0:09:31For the first time, the whole centre of a large city was rebuilt in terms of a new style,
0:09:31 > 0:09:37but it was not from his ornaments, but from his structural grid that modern architecture would derive.
0:09:43 > 0:09:48Sullivan's Auditorium Building was finished in 1899 and, in the same year,
0:09:48 > 0:09:54he began the Carson Pirie Scott store, the last major project that he would have a chance to do.
0:09:56 > 0:10:00Structures like this one have come to be seen as talismans,
0:10:00 > 0:10:05the rudiments of a new world of design and construction.
0:10:17 > 0:10:21And although official European architects distrusted the grid,
0:10:21 > 0:10:25the idea had already been tried out in Europe several decades before
0:10:25 > 0:10:29and it grew straight out of the Industrial Revolution.
0:10:30 > 0:10:36The European resistance to the lessons of Chicago was partly due to its use of industrial materials.
0:10:36 > 0:10:39The basic one was metal.
0:10:39 > 0:10:43By using it structurally to actually carry the load,
0:10:43 > 0:10:48you could achieve a great degree of plainness, lightness and delicacy.
0:10:49 > 0:10:56The first man to use iron as the frame of a major public building from ground to roof was French.
0:10:56 > 0:10:58His name was Henri Labrouste.
0:10:59 > 0:11:04Labrouste was born in 1801. He was one of the geniuses of the Romantic era
0:11:04 > 0:11:10and one of his remarks became a rallying cry for functionalism 50 years after his death.
0:11:10 > 0:11:17"In architecture," he said, "form must always be appropriate to the function for which it is intended."
0:11:17 > 0:11:21This was his demonstration piece, his first significant building.
0:11:21 > 0:11:28The Sainte-Genevieve library in Paris with those exquisite barrel vaults on their wrought-iron tracery
0:11:28 > 0:11:34which floats out of the row of slender columns that runs down the centre of the building.
0:11:34 > 0:11:38And all this designed at the amazingly early date of 1843.
0:11:41 > 0:11:45This prophetic building was far ahead of its time
0:11:45 > 0:11:51and is the point from which the use of iron and steel as architecture, not simply engineering, begins.
0:11:53 > 0:11:59The second modern material was concrete, reinforced with steel rods and cables.
0:11:59 > 0:12:05Engineers had used it, but the first architect to use it expressively for other than a hangar or bridge
0:12:05 > 0:12:10was the German Max Berg, who built the Centenary Hall in Breslau in 1912,
0:12:10 > 0:12:17a vast ribbed dome covering 21,000 square feet, four times the area of the dome of St Peter's.
0:12:18 > 0:12:24When the concrete set, the workmen refused to pull away the wooden moulds because they were scared
0:12:24 > 0:12:28it would collapse, and Berg had to start tearing them down himself.
0:12:28 > 0:12:30But the hall is still there.
0:12:31 > 0:12:36However, the supreme material of Utopia was sheet glass.
0:13:58 > 0:14:05Glass was the opposite of stone and brick. It meant lightness, transparency, structural daring.
0:14:05 > 0:14:11Glass was the essence of the skyscraper and the skyscraper became the essence of the modern city -
0:14:11 > 0:14:18a thin film hung on a steel skeleton. No more load-bearing walls.
0:14:18 > 0:14:2260 years later, this is the face of every corporation -
0:14:22 > 0:14:28the glass box, the all-over grid of spandrels and mullions, the curtain wall.
0:14:32 > 0:14:37The chief architect of glass was a German, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
0:14:37 > 0:14:43He didn't put up many buildings, but the ones he did build acquired a great moral importance.
0:14:46 > 0:14:50For decades, buildings like his apartments on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago
0:14:50 > 0:14:54have been considered the epitome of reason.
0:14:55 > 0:15:03Straight lines, clear thought and extreme refinement of proportion, detail and material.
0:15:05 > 0:15:09They were acts of faith, absolute and austere.
0:15:09 > 0:15:14But Mies loved the idea of crystalline building, the pure prism.
0:15:14 > 0:15:19And so his designs in the '20s believed in salvation through glass architecture
0:15:19 > 0:15:25and the belief was almost religious. Mies' quest for purity goes right back to the Germany of 1920
0:15:25 > 0:15:31and his unbuilt design for a skyscraper on the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin.
0:15:35 > 0:15:41Though other architects were interested in towers, Mies invented the glass skyscraper as we know it.
0:15:41 > 0:15:46"Skin and bones," he said. That was architecture. "No noodles."
0:15:46 > 0:15:52But he also said at the same time, 1923, that he rejected all aesthetic speculation,
0:15:52 > 0:15:55all doctrine and all formalism,
0:15:55 > 0:16:01which is odd because the only architects who were more doctrinaire and formalist than Mies van der Rohe
0:16:01 > 0:16:03were his imitators.
0:16:03 > 0:16:09Mies believed that his buildings, like the Seagram here in New York, were objective
0:16:09 > 0:16:14because they grew out of machine culture, mass production, pre-fabrication.
0:16:14 > 0:16:20"The individual," he chillingly announced, "is losing significance. His destiny no longer interests us."
0:16:22 > 0:16:28But for all his theorising about machine culture, not one Mies design was successfully pre-fabricated.
0:16:28 > 0:16:34Why? Because he was a perfectionist and designed to tolerances that mass production simply couldn't handle.
0:16:34 > 0:16:40His whole background, after all, was involved with the tradition of craft, the action of the hand
0:16:40 > 0:16:43upon fine, traditional materials.
0:16:43 > 0:16:50He did that in a very quiet way, but he wasn't prepared to give up that idea of beauty or to compromise.
0:16:50 > 0:16:56And so when it came to designing the Seagram building, he could have used steel or aluminium cladding,
0:16:56 > 0:17:02but, no, what Mies wanted was bronze, this dark, satin-y material
0:17:02 > 0:17:06which gave him the play of shadows within shadows that he wanted.
0:17:06 > 0:17:13The result was aesthetically superb, but also fiendishly expensive and quite unrepeatable.
0:17:17 > 0:17:21But the Seagram is all balance as well, and generosity.
0:17:21 > 0:17:26Useful and ceremonious, one of the great buildings of our time.
0:17:31 > 0:17:37Mies wanted a universal grammar of architecture. Consequently, his flats look like office blocks
0:17:37 > 0:17:41and his museums look like airports or factories.
0:17:42 > 0:17:46Obsessive subtlety of form. He could spend weeks, months,
0:17:46 > 0:17:50thinking about how to turn a corner with I-beams and cladding.
0:17:50 > 0:17:57But a naivete about the larger social meanings of architecture, which in Mies' world did not count.
0:17:58 > 0:18:02And so many of Mies' projects tend to look authoritarian.
0:18:02 > 0:18:06One of the largest is the Federal Centre in Chicago,
0:18:06 > 0:18:12which today looks like an ultimate refinement of American corporate style - the big, chilly slabs
0:18:12 > 0:18:18grouped around an intimidating open space, an ideal blank table which then gets a decorative ashtray
0:18:18 > 0:18:24in the form of a sculpture, in this case a stabile by Alexander Calder.
0:18:31 > 0:18:37Philip Johnson, who collaborated with Mies on the design of the Seagram, remembers the dogmatism
0:18:37 > 0:18:39of his master's voice.
0:18:39 > 0:18:44He believed in the ultimate truth of architecture, especially his,
0:18:44 > 0:18:49that his architecture was closer to the truth - capital T - than anyone else's
0:18:49 > 0:18:55because it was simpler and could be learned. He felt his architecture could be learned and adapted
0:18:55 > 0:18:58for on into the centuries.
0:18:58 > 0:19:05But in ways his influence was bad because it made everybody realise, "Well, I'm doing Mies."
0:19:05 > 0:19:11That means it was cheaper. Every cheap architect could copy Mies and go to the clients
0:19:11 > 0:19:17and say, "I can do a building cheaper than last year because now I can do it like Mies.
0:19:17 > 0:19:23"We'll have a flat roof and glass walls and simple, factory-made curtain walls on the outsides."
0:19:23 > 0:19:29So it was a justification for cheapness that took over entirely our cityscapes today
0:19:29 > 0:19:32and it's what you see in New York.
0:19:47 > 0:19:53But the great image of the new architecture wasn't the single building. It was the town plan.
0:19:53 > 0:19:59The planners saw their paper cities with the detachment built into the view from a building like this one.
0:19:59 > 0:20:05Very high up, very abstract, like looking down on a drawing board, and somewhat nearer to God.
0:20:05 > 0:20:13What their projects had in common was an alarming obsession with social hygiene.
0:20:13 > 0:20:19In future, the human animal, instead of lurking in streets and squares, would live in tower blocks
0:20:19 > 0:20:24and commute by monorail and biplane and scurry about in allotted green spaces
0:20:24 > 0:20:29and in general be made to do one thing at one time in one specific place.
0:20:29 > 0:20:35Thus the millennium would dawn and the old cities of Europe which escaped the ravages of WWI
0:20:35 > 0:20:40would now be flattened by idealist architects.
0:20:41 > 0:20:46Most of these utopian schemes fell somewhere between the suburb and the ziggurat
0:20:46 > 0:20:49and most favoured the ziggurat.
0:20:50 > 0:20:57One motif recurs over and over - tower blocks on a rectangular grid, separated by patches of green space
0:20:57 > 0:20:59and joined by superhighways.
0:21:05 > 0:21:10It was a theme harped on by Frenchmen, Germans, Russians and Italians,
0:21:10 > 0:21:16but the lyric poet of this dreadful idea, which has influenced cities for the worse from LA to Zagreb,
0:21:16 > 0:21:23was a Swiss. His name was Charles Edouard Jeanneret, better known by his nickname, Le Corbusier.
0:21:23 > 0:21:27His ideal of good planning was summed up in one phrase.
0:21:27 > 0:21:31"La ville radieuse." The radiant city.
0:21:32 > 0:21:37His answer to the crowded towns of Europe, so unpredictable, so hard to control,
0:21:37 > 0:21:44was the tower block, glittering above the greenery, decentralisation brought about by the car.
0:21:44 > 0:21:48The car would abolish the human street, possibly even the foot.
0:21:48 > 0:21:52Everyone would have a car. Some people would have aeroplanes, too.
0:21:52 > 0:21:58The one thing nobody would have would be a place to bump into others, walk the dog, chat, strut
0:21:58 > 0:22:04or do any of the hundred other random things that one does on a street and which, being random,
0:22:04 > 0:22:07were loathed by Le Corbusier.
0:22:11 > 0:22:14La Ville Radieuse was a nightmare.
0:22:14 > 0:22:19Not only would its inhabitants surrender their freedom of movement,
0:22:19 > 0:22:25they would also have to give up their memory, insofar as it was recorded in stone and brick.
0:22:39 > 0:22:44One of Corbusier's obsessive projects was the improvement of Paris,
0:22:44 > 0:22:49which involved the assassination of the city and its rebirth as tower blocks.
0:22:50 > 0:22:57Endless repetition of one crushing unit. People would be nothing more than cells in a mass-transit system.
0:22:58 > 0:23:02His logic was Cartesian. He was French, after all.
0:23:02 > 0:23:08And the platonic, Cartesian... absolutes were in his heart.
0:23:08 > 0:23:14And they made wonderful perspectives and marvellous models of how you'd wipe out the city of Paris.
0:23:14 > 0:23:19It was a delicious intellectual exercise. How serious he was about it, I don't believe for a minute.
0:23:19 > 0:23:24The people who were serious were the Germans. They were the bad ones. They built them!
0:23:29 > 0:23:33One thing Corbusier built is here in Marseille.
0:23:33 > 0:23:36The Unite d'Habitation of 1947.
0:23:36 > 0:23:41Nine storeys high, set in green space, with an unusual roof.
0:23:44 > 0:23:51It contained a gymnasium, a space for exercise, a paddling pool for the kids and a bicycle track.
0:24:01 > 0:24:05Even today, this is one of the great roofs of the world.
0:24:05 > 0:24:08The place is a metaphor of Corbu's social aims.
0:24:08 > 0:24:13The concrete garden of ideal form, giving health to those who live in it.
0:24:13 > 0:24:19To me, the roof of the Unite has a sadness approaching that of a Greek temple.
0:24:19 > 0:24:21Corbusier finished it after WWII
0:24:21 > 0:24:28and almost 30 years after his celebrated descants on the Acropolis in his book Towards An Architecture.
0:24:28 > 0:24:34"The Greeks on the Acropolis," he then wrote, "set up buildings animated by a single thought,
0:24:34 > 0:24:39"drawing the desolate landscape around them and gathering it into one composition.
0:24:39 > 0:24:43"Thus, at every point on the horizon, the thought is singular."
0:24:43 > 0:24:49And the only place that he ever found which approached that bare singularity of the Acropolis
0:24:49 > 0:24:51was the roof of this building.
0:24:53 > 0:25:00He was so ill-informed about the habits and traditions of the society
0:25:00 > 0:25:06that he thought people would go on the roof if he made it beautiful. The real point is he was free there.
0:25:06 > 0:25:11And it's a sculptural joy to wander around the roofs of Marseille.
0:25:14 > 0:25:16The troubles begin below the roof.
0:25:16 > 0:25:22The Unite was meant as a social experiment, a prototype for mass housing.
0:25:22 > 0:25:28There is a rough nobility to this concrete, even though it's grimy and can never mellow like stone.
0:25:30 > 0:25:37The piloti or stilts are a grand muscular shape, although nobody uses the space under them for anything
0:25:37 > 0:25:41and the cars have to park in the green space.
0:25:42 > 0:25:46And as housing, the Unite has not been a success.
0:25:46 > 0:25:49Its emblem is the figure of Corbu's modular man,
0:25:49 > 0:25:53the distorted great-grandchild of Vitruvian man
0:25:53 > 0:25:59and, unintentionally, a symbol of Corbusier's lofty disregard of real human needs.
0:26:02 > 0:26:04Privacy in the flats hardly exists.
0:26:04 > 0:26:09Many of the rooms are little more than cupboards.
0:26:11 > 0:26:17The shopping mall on the fifth floor is mostly out of business because the French like real markets,
0:26:17 > 0:26:23down on the street - another fact of life that the form giver did not grasp.
0:26:26 > 0:26:32Finally, nobody wanted those plain, morally-elevating interiors with paper lamps and craft rugs
0:26:32 > 0:26:37and slung chairs and Cubist tapestries. And they are now crammed
0:26:37 > 0:26:43with exactly the sort of gaudy, fake period furniture that Corbusier struggled against all his life.
0:26:43 > 0:26:50He could never understand why the French kept wanting it, but they did and they still do.
0:26:51 > 0:26:58Corbusier only got one chance to build an ideal city - Chandigarh, the new capital of the Punjab,
0:26:58 > 0:27:02which Nehru asked him to design in 1960.
0:27:11 > 0:27:15Its site was a blank, a windy plain at the foot of the Himalayas.
0:27:15 > 0:27:19Here Corbusier could create a sculptural monument from scratch.
0:27:19 > 0:27:23There was nothing to compete with. His buildings would be absolute.
0:27:30 > 0:27:34And so they were, except that they never came to life as a city.
0:27:34 > 0:27:38They have the passionate dignity and uninhabitability of sculpture,
0:27:38 > 0:27:42but after 30 years nobody wants to live there and so Chandigarh,
0:27:42 > 0:27:48like most capitals that have been invented overnight by governments, is socially lifeless.
0:27:48 > 0:27:52Elevating as an idea and depressing after the first 24 hours.
0:27:52 > 0:27:58Yet though he failed as a sociological architect, he was a great inventor of shapes,
0:27:58 > 0:28:01the Picasso of architecture.
0:28:01 > 0:28:07And his language was based on two systems of form which seemed utterly opposed, but he saw as similar -
0:28:07 > 0:28:10classical Greek architecture in all its lucidity
0:28:10 > 0:28:14and the clear, analytic forms of machinery.
0:28:15 > 0:28:21He wanted to celebrate what he called "the white world", the world of clarity and precision,
0:28:21 > 0:28:29of exact stucco and glass, of culture standing alone against the real world of muddle and compromise.
0:28:36 > 0:28:43No building shows what he meant better than the Villa Savoye outside Paris, finished in 1930.
0:30:45 > 0:30:51The Villa Savoye was one of the classics of what came to be known as the International Style.
0:30:51 > 0:30:55The principles of this style were laid out, once and for all, in 1927
0:30:55 > 0:30:59in the Deutscher Werkbund housing exhibition in Germany,
0:30:59 > 0:31:06an architectural trade fair for which Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies, Bruno Taut, Peter Behrens
0:31:06 > 0:31:10and JP Oud built demonstration homes.
0:31:17 > 0:31:22The name International Style was coined in 1931 by two Americans,
0:31:22 > 0:31:26historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson.
0:31:26 > 0:31:31The first principle was that it was a style of volume, not of mass.
0:31:31 > 0:31:37It wasn't built up from bricks like this. It was a taut skin stretched across a frame
0:31:37 > 0:31:43and everything that that meant. Lifting buildings on piloti - even now we use the Corbusier word.
0:31:43 > 0:31:50That point came from Corbusier, lifting everything up because it had a sixth side -
0:31:50 > 0:31:56the underside. You can't see that unless you have a volumetric to look at everything.
0:31:56 > 0:32:02How could you have a ribbon window if it was mass? They would fall down if it was a brick mass building.
0:32:02 > 0:32:07Nobody would use that word "brick" because that meant mass.
0:32:07 > 0:32:10Stucco was the one weightless material that everyone could get,
0:32:10 > 0:32:16so every building in the International Style's purest form was stucco.
0:32:16 > 0:32:24From that came the principles of design of these volumes. You don't put a door here and windows in.
0:32:24 > 0:32:27You have ribbons of window and then because it's functionalist
0:32:27 > 0:32:32you put a big window for the dog and a little window for the cat.
0:32:32 > 0:32:38The third one was a non-principle, typical of our mixed-up age. The avoidance of ornament.
0:32:38 > 0:32:44Ornament had disappeared up to that time anyhow because it was too expensive
0:32:44 > 0:32:50and there were no more craftsmen. That's still true. Now we use pastiche to imitate old ornaments.
0:32:50 > 0:32:57That's the way it's come back in, but that principle of the avoidance of ornament was the easiest to do.
0:32:57 > 0:33:03If you believe in volume, not mass, you can't put tops on buildings. Any angle like that was taboo.
0:33:03 > 0:33:06It had to have a flat roof.
0:33:06 > 0:33:13But, you see, I came in in '28 and by that time it was pretty well codified, the International Style.
0:33:13 > 0:33:19We'd had Weissenhofsiedlung, which was the epitome, the high point of the International Style.
0:33:19 > 0:33:23Everybody had to do a flat roof, to be white, to use stucco.
0:33:23 > 0:33:27And they all did. They saluted and did whatever Mies said.
0:33:27 > 0:33:31He was a kid at the time. Kid, for an architect, being 40.
0:33:31 > 0:33:37And it was an amazing thing for a kid to do, to get all the great architects to do the same building.
0:33:37 > 0:33:43So I was there at that time when all idea of mysticism or anything that wasn't rational
0:33:43 > 0:33:48or couldn't be clearly explained was rigorously rooted out.
0:33:50 > 0:33:54The main place from which this style emanated was the Bauhaus,
0:33:54 > 0:33:59started in Weimar and then established in Dessau and closed by the Nazis in the '30s
0:33:59 > 0:34:05on the grounds that it was a Bolshevist conspiracy against the family and the German race.
0:34:05 > 0:34:11Bauhaus meant the rethinking of every manufactured object, not just buildings.
0:34:11 > 0:34:13During its short life, 15 years,
0:34:13 > 0:34:17it utterly transformed the idea of advanced design in Europe.
0:34:17 > 0:34:24It was a network of men and women who wanted to remake culture in terms of industrial process.
0:34:24 > 0:34:30The man who formed the school, wrote its programme and ran it for the first 10 years of its life
0:34:30 > 0:34:33was the architect Walter Gropius.
0:34:34 > 0:34:38Gropius' ambition had set early in his career.
0:34:38 > 0:34:44In his early 20s, in 1907, he had worked for the leading industrial designer in Germany, Peter Behrens.
0:34:44 > 0:34:50Today we're used to companies getting one designer to furnish their whole visual style.
0:34:50 > 0:34:5870 years ago, that was extremely rare. Behrens pioneered it through his work for one big client, AEG.
0:34:58 > 0:35:02He designed their factories, their catalogues, even their stationery.
0:35:07 > 0:35:13Behrens went as close as any man had gone to creating a general style of design
0:35:13 > 0:35:19aimed at mass production of a wide range of products from an industrial base.
0:35:21 > 0:35:27Now this point was not lost on Gropius. His major works before the Bauhaus were all industrial.
0:35:27 > 0:35:34In his Fagus factory of 1911, probably the most advanced building anyone had made before WWI,
0:35:34 > 0:35:41the wall is daringly reduced to a glass skin stretched between columns and making a transparent corner.
0:35:53 > 0:35:58The Bauhaus enabled Gropius and his colleagues to pursue the idea of a total art,
0:35:58 > 0:36:02subsuming all the divided arts under a new technology.
0:36:02 > 0:36:08- The first manifesto of the Bauhaus proclaimed:- "Let us create a new guild of craftsmen
0:36:08 > 0:36:14"without the class distinctions which raise arrogant barriers between craftsmen and artists.
0:36:14 > 0:36:19"Together, let us conceive and build the new structure of the future,
0:36:19 > 0:36:24"which will embrace architecture and painting and sculpture in one unity
0:36:24 > 0:36:30"and will rise one day towards heaven like the crystal symbol of a new faith."
0:36:33 > 0:36:39The Bauhaus view was that it was far harder to design a first-rate teapot than paint a second-rate painting.
0:36:41 > 0:36:46Later in his life, Walter Gropius explained the basic ideas of Bauhaus teaching.
0:36:46 > 0:36:52Everyone had to go through one of the craft workshops before he came into architecture.
0:36:52 > 0:36:58And some of them did not go into architecture. They stayed where they were, in the painting workshop
0:36:58 > 0:37:03or wherever else it was. But any architect should have this basis
0:37:03 > 0:37:09and I think we should have it today, too. It is much too theoretical, still.
0:37:09 > 0:37:13When you compare, for instance, the life of an architect today,
0:37:13 > 0:37:20who is expected to sit in his studio and get everything out of his head on paper and specifications...
0:37:20 > 0:37:27Then it's taken out of his hands and given to an army of workmen who have to execute his will.
0:37:27 > 0:37:34And he is not permitted any more to make any changes and the workman cannot add anything of himself.
0:37:34 > 0:37:39And you compare that with the Middle Ages when they built a cathedral.
0:37:39 > 0:37:45There was a group of people devoting themselves to that building, living on the site,
0:37:45 > 0:37:50doing everything in flesh and materials directly. There was very little designing.
0:37:50 > 0:37:56The extraordinary thing was that the journeyman and the apprentice had to follow a certain direction
0:37:56 > 0:38:02from the master who gave him some geometrical proportions he had to take in his work,
0:38:02 > 0:38:06but otherwise he gave his work individually, independently.
0:38:06 > 0:38:10It was not an execution only of some design of the master.
0:38:10 > 0:38:16They worked really in a true team together there and if something was not well done,
0:38:16 > 0:38:21they took it down again and built it again. For God's sake, it had to be very good.
0:38:23 > 0:38:30Each teapot, watch, glass or radio cabinet was designed as an industrial prototype.
0:38:30 > 0:38:33It had to be mass-produced, but few actually were.
0:38:33 > 0:38:40The demand was too small to justify mass production, hence the rarity of Bauhaus objects today.
0:38:40 > 0:38:42They were too pure to be popular.
0:38:45 > 0:38:52This was especially true of the furniture. Almost all the radical new designs of chair, table or sofa
0:38:52 > 0:38:58were done by architects - Marcel Breuer inside the Bauhaus, Corbusier and Mies outside it.
0:38:58 > 0:39:04Their ideal and often uncomfortable chairs were all of a piece with constructivist painting.
0:39:04 > 0:39:10And they were meant to go with their buildings for the least possible interruption to the flow of space,
0:39:10 > 0:39:13to echo the machine look.
0:39:13 > 0:39:19Some of them lived on into production to furnish the world's airports and corporate lobbies.
0:39:19 > 0:39:23But in their day they were not popular.
0:39:28 > 0:39:34The most severe rebuke to the pleasure-seeking body was made in 1918 by a Dutch designer
0:39:34 > 0:39:38called Gerrit Rietveld and this chair of his is considered a classic
0:39:38 > 0:39:42because it goes far beyond ordinary functionalist discomfort.
0:39:42 > 0:39:48The human body for which it was reputed to be made simply doesn't exist.
0:39:48 > 0:39:52Insofar as it ever was designed to accommodate a human bottom,
0:39:52 > 0:39:58that bottom is a platonic solid existing somewhere out in the ether but never made flesh.
0:39:58 > 0:40:03The fact about these designs is that, august as they are,
0:40:03 > 0:40:07they are not really furniture. They're sculpture.
0:40:07 > 0:40:13They're a three-dimensional development of a two-dimensional pattern,
0:40:13 > 0:40:19the grid and primary colours in the paintings of Mondrian, van Doesburg and the De Stijl group.
0:40:20 > 0:40:23De Stijl was Dutch for "the style".
0:40:23 > 0:40:27Its leader was a painter and critic, Theo van Doesburg.
0:40:27 > 0:40:34As a group, it didn't last long, just a few years during and after the end of World War One.
0:40:34 > 0:40:40Nevertheless, the half dozen artists and architects in the movement were very clear about their aims.
0:40:40 > 0:40:44After the slaughter of the Great War, they wanted to be international men
0:40:44 > 0:40:47and art could supply the model for this frame of mind.
0:40:47 > 0:40:54Down with frontiers, up with the grid. A new world of lucidity would rise from the wreckage.
0:40:55 > 0:40:59No curved lines, masonic rectitude,
0:40:59 > 0:41:05De Stijl was against the individual and for the collective and the universal.
0:41:09 > 0:41:17It laid out a general grammar of shape for every visual art, architecture no less than painting.
0:41:17 > 0:41:23This grid was van Doesburg's design for the roof of a university hall in 1923.
0:41:28 > 0:41:33The programme of De Stijl had no practical chance since art cannot cure nationalism
0:41:33 > 0:41:37and manufacturers were not idealists. But its name survives,
0:41:37 > 0:41:43partly because one of the greatest artists of the 20th century was involved. He was Piet Mondrian.
0:41:43 > 0:41:49This grave and diffident man was one of the last painters to believe that the conditions of human life
0:41:49 > 0:41:52could be changed by making pictures.
0:41:52 > 0:41:58For him, art was not an end in itself. It was a means towards an end.
0:41:58 > 0:42:02Mondrian was an intensely religious man. He had a vision of Utopia
0:42:02 > 0:42:09in which the scales would drop from man's eyes as the visible world disclosed its underlying harmonies.
0:42:09 > 0:42:12Then to see would be to know.
0:42:15 > 0:42:18Mondrian thought of art as a bridge to this clarity of vision.
0:42:18 > 0:42:21Once you had it, you no longer needed painting
0:42:21 > 0:42:25and this belief gave his work an extraordinary consistency.
0:42:28 > 0:42:32We're apt to think of Mondrian as a purely abstract painter -
0:42:32 > 0:42:34the grid and nothing but the grid,
0:42:34 > 0:42:39but his work was grounded in nature and in metaphors based on nature.
0:42:39 > 0:42:42One motif that his grids came from, for instance,
0:42:42 > 0:42:46was the coastal landscape of Holland, the dunes and the sea,
0:42:46 > 0:42:51and the glitter of light on this flatness, the movement of the waves, became a pattern of crosses
0:42:51 > 0:42:55and this criss-crossing field with its points and twinkles of energy
0:42:55 > 0:42:59became one of Mondrian's signs for all substance.
0:42:59 > 0:43:01It was the basis of his universal grammar.
0:43:04 > 0:43:09So it was appropriate that Mondrian should have come to New York - "grid city".
0:43:09 > 0:43:13He got there as a refugee from the Second World War in 1940
0:43:13 > 0:43:18and his studio was remembered as one of the shrines of Modernism in America.
0:43:28 > 0:43:31And what did he like about America?
0:43:31 > 0:43:36Well, Mondrian may not have looked like one, but he was an enthusiastic dancer.
0:43:36 > 0:43:41It's hard to imagine him boogieing to jazz, but that was what he loved to do.
0:43:41 > 0:43:44Out of that music and the New York grid,
0:43:44 > 0:43:46Mondrian distilled his late paintings -
0:43:46 > 0:43:51New York City, Broadway Boogie-Woogie and Victory Boogie-Woogie.
0:43:56 > 0:44:02These paintings are not exactly metaphors of New York and still less can they be read as plans,
0:44:02 > 0:44:08but they are diagrams of the kind of energy and order that Mondrian detected in the great, flawed city.
0:44:08 > 0:44:14The yellow blips shuttling along their paths don't necessarily represent cabs,
0:44:14 > 0:44:17but once you have seen Broadway Boogie-Woogie,
0:44:17 > 0:44:21the view from a skyscraper down into the streets is changed for ever.
0:44:22 > 0:44:26And why should Mondrian's last paintings still move us,
0:44:26 > 0:44:30whereas the Utopian city plans of the architects do not?
0:44:30 > 0:44:34Partly because the space of art is the ideal space of fiction.
0:44:34 > 0:44:37In it, things are not used and they never decay.
0:44:37 > 0:44:43You can never walk in a painting as you must imagine yourself walking in a street or a building.
0:44:43 > 0:44:47His paintings are incorruptible, the building blocks of a system
0:44:47 > 0:44:50that has no relationship at all to our bodies.
0:44:53 > 0:44:57But architecture and design have everything to do with the body
0:44:57 > 0:45:00and the unredeemed body at that.
0:46:05 > 0:46:10Without respect for the body as it is and for social memory as it stands,
0:46:10 > 0:46:13there is no such thing as a workable or humane architecture.
0:46:13 > 0:46:17That's why a place like this, La Defense outside Paris,
0:46:17 > 0:46:22is experienced by everybody, including those who live in it, as a piece of social scar tissue -
0:46:22 > 0:46:25gimmicky, condescending, alphaville Modernism.
0:46:25 > 0:46:29Stick them in concrete boxes and give them some concrete to play on
0:46:29 > 0:46:33and then paint it all bright colours because that's what the kiddies like
0:46:33 > 0:46:37and if the kiddies don't like it, they can write to the minister.
0:46:39 > 0:46:44That is why so many of the classics of Utopian planning have turned out to look inhuman or absurd
0:46:44 > 0:46:50and why they don't work, and why the social pretensions behind them seem to be so much hot air.
0:46:50 > 0:46:54After this, who believes in progress and perfectibility any more?
0:46:54 > 0:46:57Who believes in master builders and form-givers?
0:46:57 > 0:47:01That's right. Who are you? You don't believe in progress?
0:47:01 > 0:47:07But who does now believe in progress Those things have influenced the architecture more than anything else
0:47:07 > 0:47:12I think the progress, the whole Benthamite "every day in every way we're getting better" theory
0:47:12 > 0:47:14is pretty well washed up.
0:47:14 > 0:47:17So there are these waves of...
0:47:17 > 0:47:22We're anti-idealists now, anti-Utopian, anti-pies in the sky,
0:47:22 > 0:47:28and we're very anxious to make our cities work the way they are and hold on to the best we can,
0:47:28 > 0:47:31which is a far saner, more sensible way of looking at things.
0:47:33 > 0:47:36The architectural historian Charles Jencks pointed out
0:47:36 > 0:47:42that one can date the death of the Modern Movement not just to the decade or year, but to the minute.
0:47:42 > 0:47:46It happened in St Louis where the architect Minoru Yamasaki
0:47:46 > 0:47:49had designed a large, low-income housing project.
0:47:49 > 0:47:51Its name was Pruitt-Igoe.
0:47:56 > 0:48:00Tower blocks, parks, recreational streets inside the buildings,
0:48:00 > 0:48:04every sort of Corbusian amenity, most improving.
0:48:04 > 0:48:08The architectural magazines made a fuss over it. It won awards.
0:48:08 > 0:48:10That was in 1951.
0:48:10 > 0:48:16Within a few years, the place had been ripped apart by its unimproved tenants,
0:48:16 > 0:48:19old and middle-aged people were scared to live there
0:48:19 > 0:48:22and the young were in the corridors with flick knives.
0:48:22 > 0:48:29Pruitt-Igoe got so bad that in 1972, major structural alterations were called for.
0:50:15 > 0:50:20Apart from Chandigarh, the only city in the world that has ever been built from scratch
0:50:20 > 0:50:24along the Corbusian lines of rational town planning is here.
0:50:24 > 0:50:28In the '50s, the Brazilians decided they wanted a capital.
0:50:28 > 0:50:31The thing about bureaucrats is that they hate ports.
0:50:31 > 0:50:36They're too open to influence, they're too hard to control. They're too full of life.
0:50:36 > 0:50:40So although they already had one very lively port in Rio,
0:50:40 > 0:50:45the Brazilians decided to put their capital 1,200 kilometres away in the centre of the country
0:50:45 > 0:50:50on a red dirt plateau where nobody had ever lived or ever wanted to.
0:50:50 > 0:50:55Two of Corbusier's most brilliant South American disciples were called upon to design it -
0:50:55 > 0:51:01Lucio Costa did the town plan and the main ceremonial buildings were done by Oscar Niemeyer.
0:51:01 > 0:51:07Now, Brasilia, as the place is called, was going to be the city of tomorrow.
0:51:07 > 0:51:11It was going to be the triumph of reason and sunlight and the automobile.
0:51:11 > 0:51:15Here we were going to see what the international style could really do
0:51:15 > 0:51:21when it was backed with limitless quantities of cash and national enthusiasm. And we did.
0:51:26 > 0:51:29This was La Ville Radieuse all over again.
0:51:29 > 0:51:34How good it can look on film - the most photogenic new town on Earth!
0:51:40 > 0:51:46It's the reconciliation of modernist democracy with the ceremonial grandeur of the state
0:51:46 > 0:51:50that the Beaux Arts had wanted to symbolise 100 years before.
0:52:01 > 0:52:03It has always had a good press too.
0:52:03 > 0:52:07Brazilian architectural critics did not dare say anything against it
0:52:07 > 0:52:12and it's so far away that most other critics have never actually seen it.
0:52:19 > 0:52:23From the air you can see the abstract categories of layout,
0:52:23 > 0:52:26the big living blocks, the administrative core,
0:52:26 > 0:52:31the work areas, the green space, the crossing highways.
0:52:36 > 0:52:39Here, the Corbusian dream has come true.
0:52:39 > 0:52:44The car has abolished the street and the pedestrian is an irrelevance,
0:52:44 > 0:52:48a large irrelevance since most people in Brasilia do not own cars.
0:53:04 > 0:53:08The reality is worse than anything that has been said about the place.
0:53:08 > 0:53:12Brasilia is a facade, run up under political pressure,
0:53:12 > 0:53:16finished in 1960 and already falling to bits.
0:53:17 > 0:53:21Cracking stonework, flaking concrete,
0:53:21 > 0:53:23rusting metal,
0:53:23 > 0:53:25a ceremonial slum.
0:53:43 > 0:53:48So what Brasilia became in less than 20 years wasn't the city of tomorrow at all.
0:53:48 > 0:53:51It was yesterday's science fiction.
0:53:51 > 0:53:55Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future.
0:53:55 > 0:53:59This is what you get when perfectly decent, intelligent and talented men
0:53:59 > 0:54:05start thinking in terms of space, rather than place, and about single, rather than multiple meanings.
0:54:05 > 0:54:10It's what you get when you design for political aspirations and not real human needs.
0:54:10 > 0:54:15You get miles of jerry-built, platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens.
0:54:15 > 0:54:19This, one may fervently hope, is the last experiment of its kind.
0:54:19 > 0:54:22The Utopian buck stops here.
0:55:24 > 0:55:27I think Brasilia is emblematic.
0:55:27 > 0:55:31The last 50 years in architecture have witnessed the death of the future.
0:55:31 > 0:55:36Like the Baroque or the High Renaissance, the Modern Movement lived and died
0:55:36 > 0:55:42and it left behind its masterpieces which survive, but the doctrines don't inspire us so much any more.
0:55:42 > 0:55:46People are always going to be moved and delighted by buildings
0:55:46 > 0:55:49like the Villa Savoye or the Seagram Building here,
0:55:49 > 0:55:53just as they are today by, say, the Pazzi Chapel or by the Paris Opera.
0:55:53 > 0:55:56But what has gone and, I think, gone for good
0:55:56 > 0:56:01is the idea that architects or artists can lay the rudiments of paradise here on Earth
0:56:01 > 0:56:03and construct working Utopias.
0:56:03 > 0:56:06Cities are more complex than that
0:56:06 > 0:56:10and perhaps you can't purify human needs without taking away human freedom.
0:56:10 > 0:56:17In any case, you have to work with the real world and its inherited contents and memory is reality.
0:56:17 > 0:56:23It took us the best part of 50 years to find that out, but perhaps it was worth the trouble.
0:57:29 > 0:57:32Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd