Trouble in Utopia The Shock of the New


Trouble in Utopia

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The skyscrapers of New York City are still, for most people, one of the great emblems of modernity,

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but one of the major architects of the 20th century, Le Corbusier, thought otherwise.

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He called this city "a tragic hedgehog".

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Any New Yorker knows what Corbu meant.

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He hated its contrasts, its medieval dirt and inequalities of class

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and he wanted to abolish the distance between the streets down here and the spires up there.

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He had a vision of New York as a possible, though flawed, Utopia.

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New Yorkers didn't take that seriously then. Today they still don't.

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This century has been an age of utopian propositions. They've been drawn, designed, argued about,

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sometimes even built. And in the process, it has shown that ideal cities don't work.

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To the extent that planners have tried to convert living towns into Utopia, they've destroyed them.

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It seems that, like plants, we do need the shit of others for nutriments.

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But some of the best minds of our culture have thought otherwise.

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They believed the arts could reform people, especially architecture.

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For architecture affects you most directly of all. It is the art you live in.

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Rational design would make rational societies.

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The optimistic feeling of the time is recalled by Philip Johnson.

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It was one of those illusions of the '20s, that movement in which I had the privilege to take part,

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the Modern movement, International Style. The architecture of the '20s was thoroughly of the opinion

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that if you had good architecture, lives would be improved.

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Architecture improved people and people would improve architecture until perfectibility descended on us

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and we'd be happy for ever after.

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But the architects of the Modern movement weren't the first to feel this visionary urge.

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Utopia had been around on paper since the 15th century when Alberti and Leonardo speculated

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about how to build the ideal town and Antonio Filarete planned a city named Sforzinda,

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designed to abolish the muddle and filth of the medieval warren.

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A place for every job and rank of society and every rank and job in its place.

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The dream of a didactic architecture, secular buildings that morally improved you,

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came to a climax around 1800 with the designs of a Frenchman, Etienne-Louis Boullee.

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He was a son of the French Revolution and his designs were obsessed by death, authority

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and the grandeur of the new state.

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They were never built. They would have needed a slave state to build them, but within 30 years

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the Industrial Revolution had created another kind of slave state.

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Throughout the 19th century, architecture had nothing to do with this misery or to say about it.

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Architects built palaces for the rich, villas for the upper bourgeoisie

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and ceremonial structures for the state. Some were of such splendour they became targets for Modernists

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and the main one was the Paris Opera, designed by Charles Garnier, a great whale of marble and bronze

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of such splendour that there would be no possible way to build it today.

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Although the civic pride of the 19th century expressed itself like this,

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the poor, the invisible ones, had no architecture.

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What they had was slums.

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By 1900, in the eyes of a handful of gifted and missionary designers, scattered across Europe,

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architecture itself was a symbol of inequality, and decorated architecture even more so.

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The distrust of decoration in early Modernism was not simply an aesthetic matter.

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It became a moral issue in the 1890s at about the same moment as the birth of its direct opposite,

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the European luxury style, Art Nouveau.

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Art Nouveau was the final exquisite protest of craft sensibility

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before the hand and its work were swamped by machine product.

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It was the snobbish style, consciously elitist.

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In Art Nouveau, culture parodies nature and the pre-industrial world makes its last stand

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among the twining shoots, the wavy lines and the languid stained-glass lilies.

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But the idealist radicals of the 1900s looked to the machine.

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They were in revolt against the injustices of industrial capitalism,

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but they wanted technology to reform culture. They saw themselves as social engineers

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and two such men were Mario Chiattone and Antonio Sant'Elia,

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Italians who wrote the Futurist Manifesto of Architecture in 1914.

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We are no longer the men of the cathedrals, the palaces, the assembly halls,

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but of big hotels, railway stations, immense roads, colossal ports, covered markets,

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brilliantly-lit galleries, freeways, demolition and rebuilding schemes.

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We must invent and build the futurist city, dynamic in all its parts,

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and the futurist house must be like a machine.

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These were dream cities, paper architecture that nobody expected to build.

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And Sant'Elia was killed during WWI at 28, before he could build anything.

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But he had fixed the imagery of concrete cliffs and flyovers

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that would dominate architecture and science fiction for 40 years.

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His speculative passion was shared by architects in other countries, including Soviet Russia after 1917,

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where constructivist designers like Melnikov, Rodchenko and Leonidov imagined vast community centres,

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halls, social condensers, palaces of the people, all based on the machine metaphor.

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But where in the real world could a European architect find practical shapes of the future?

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One place was America, with its industrial forms of warehouse, dock and grain elevator.

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The essence of American Modernism was concentrated in Chicago.

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The city had been wiped out by a fire in the 1870s and so the architects got

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what their European colleagues could only dream of - a clean slate.

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There was no city planning - American business took care of that.

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Grab the block, screw the neighbours.

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But a new principle of building emerged from its chaotic growth -

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skeleton construction instead of load-bearing brick or masonry walls.

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The steel frame took the load and the walls became light panels or opened out into glass.

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Because they weighed less, buildings could go higher.

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This was known as the Chicago style and its master was Louis Sullivan, the first great Modernist architect.

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Sullivan was a true American idealist. "With me, architecture is not an art, but a religion.

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"And that religion but a part of democracy."

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What this entailed for Sullivan and his colleagues in the 1880s and '90s

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was a desire to fulfil both the abstract side of building, its ability to soar and embody systems,

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and its natural side, the poetic rhythms, organic grace notes and ornaments.

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The verticals of aspiration, the horizontals of the mid-west prairie.

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For the first time, the whole centre of a large city was rebuilt in terms of a new style,

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but it was not from his ornaments, but from his structural grid that modern architecture would derive.

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Sullivan's Auditorium Building was finished in 1899 and, in the same year,

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he began the Carson Pirie Scott store, the last major project that he would have a chance to do.

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Structures like this one have come to be seen as talismans,

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the rudiments of a new world of design and construction.

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And although official European architects distrusted the grid,

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the idea had already been tried out in Europe several decades before

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and it grew straight out of the Industrial Revolution.

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The European resistance to the lessons of Chicago was partly due to its use of industrial materials.

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The basic one was metal.

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By using it structurally to actually carry the load,

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you could achieve a great degree of plainness, lightness and delicacy.

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The first man to use iron as the frame of a major public building from ground to roof was French.

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His name was Henri Labrouste.

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Labrouste was born in 1801. He was one of the geniuses of the Romantic era

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and one of his remarks became a rallying cry for functionalism 50 years after his death.

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"In architecture," he said, "form must always be appropriate to the function for which it is intended."

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This was his demonstration piece, his first significant building.

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The Sainte-Genevieve library in Paris with those exquisite barrel vaults on their wrought-iron tracery

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which floats out of the row of slender columns that runs down the centre of the building.

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And all this designed at the amazingly early date of 1843.

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This prophetic building was far ahead of its time

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and is the point from which the use of iron and steel as architecture, not simply engineering, begins.

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The second modern material was concrete, reinforced with steel rods and cables.

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Engineers had used it, but the first architect to use it expressively for other than a hangar or bridge

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was the German Max Berg, who built the Centenary Hall in Breslau in 1912,

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a vast ribbed dome covering 21,000 square feet, four times the area of the dome of St Peter's.

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When the concrete set, the workmen refused to pull away the wooden moulds because they were scared

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it would collapse, and Berg had to start tearing them down himself.

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But the hall is still there.

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However, the supreme material of Utopia was sheet glass.

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Glass was the opposite of stone and brick. It meant lightness, transparency, structural daring.

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Glass was the essence of the skyscraper and the skyscraper became the essence of the modern city -

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a thin film hung on a steel skeleton. No more load-bearing walls.

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60 years later, this is the face of every corporation -

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the glass box, the all-over grid of spandrels and mullions, the curtain wall.

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The chief architect of glass was a German, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

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He didn't put up many buildings, but the ones he did build acquired a great moral importance.

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For decades, buildings like his apartments on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago

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have been considered the epitome of reason.

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Straight lines, clear thought and extreme refinement of proportion, detail and material.

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They were acts of faith, absolute and austere.

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But Mies loved the idea of crystalline building, the pure prism.

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And so his designs in the '20s believed in salvation through glass architecture

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and the belief was almost religious. Mies' quest for purity goes right back to the Germany of 1920

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and his unbuilt design for a skyscraper on the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin.

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Though other architects were interested in towers, Mies invented the glass skyscraper as we know it.

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"Skin and bones," he said. That was architecture. "No noodles."

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But he also said at the same time, 1923, that he rejected all aesthetic speculation,

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all doctrine and all formalism,

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which is odd because the only architects who were more doctrinaire and formalist than Mies van der Rohe

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were his imitators.

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Mies believed that his buildings, like the Seagram here in New York, were objective

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because they grew out of machine culture, mass production, pre-fabrication.

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"The individual," he chillingly announced, "is losing significance. His destiny no longer interests us."

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But for all his theorising about machine culture, not one Mies design was successfully pre-fabricated.

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Why? Because he was a perfectionist and designed to tolerances that mass production simply couldn't handle.

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His whole background, after all, was involved with the tradition of craft, the action of the hand

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upon fine, traditional materials.

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He did that in a very quiet way, but he wasn't prepared to give up that idea of beauty or to compromise.

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And so when it came to designing the Seagram building, he could have used steel or aluminium cladding,

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but, no, what Mies wanted was bronze, this dark, satin-y material

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which gave him the play of shadows within shadows that he wanted.

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The result was aesthetically superb, but also fiendishly expensive and quite unrepeatable.

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But the Seagram is all balance as well, and generosity.

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Useful and ceremonious, one of the great buildings of our time.

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Mies wanted a universal grammar of architecture. Consequently, his flats look like office blocks

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and his museums look like airports or factories.

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Obsessive subtlety of form. He could spend weeks, months,

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thinking about how to turn a corner with I-beams and cladding.

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But a naivete about the larger social meanings of architecture, which in Mies' world did not count.

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And so many of Mies' projects tend to look authoritarian.

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One of the largest is the Federal Centre in Chicago,

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which today looks like an ultimate refinement of American corporate style - the big, chilly slabs

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grouped around an intimidating open space, an ideal blank table which then gets a decorative ashtray

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in the form of a sculpture, in this case a stabile by Alexander Calder.

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Philip Johnson, who collaborated with Mies on the design of the Seagram, remembers the dogmatism

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of his master's voice.

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He believed in the ultimate truth of architecture, especially his,

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that his architecture was closer to the truth - capital T - than anyone else's

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because it was simpler and could be learned. He felt his architecture could be learned and adapted

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for on into the centuries.

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But in ways his influence was bad because it made everybody realise, "Well, I'm doing Mies."

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That means it was cheaper. Every cheap architect could copy Mies and go to the clients

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and say, "I can do a building cheaper than last year because now I can do it like Mies.

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"We'll have a flat roof and glass walls and simple, factory-made curtain walls on the outsides."

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So it was a justification for cheapness that took over entirely our cityscapes today

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and it's what you see in New York.

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But the great image of the new architecture wasn't the single building. It was the town plan.

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The planners saw their paper cities with the detachment built into the view from a building like this one.

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Very high up, very abstract, like looking down on a drawing board, and somewhat nearer to God.

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What their projects had in common was an alarming obsession with social hygiene.

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In future, the human animal, instead of lurking in streets and squares, would live in tower blocks

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and commute by monorail and biplane and scurry about in allotted green spaces

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and in general be made to do one thing at one time in one specific place.

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Thus the millennium would dawn and the old cities of Europe which escaped the ravages of WWI

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would now be flattened by idealist architects.

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Most of these utopian schemes fell somewhere between the suburb and the ziggurat

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and most favoured the ziggurat.

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One motif recurs over and over - tower blocks on a rectangular grid, separated by patches of green space

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and joined by superhighways.

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It was a theme harped on by Frenchmen, Germans, Russians and Italians,

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but the lyric poet of this dreadful idea, which has influenced cities for the worse from LA to Zagreb,

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was a Swiss. His name was Charles Edouard Jeanneret, better known by his nickname, Le Corbusier.

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His ideal of good planning was summed up in one phrase.

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"La ville radieuse." The radiant city.

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His answer to the crowded towns of Europe, so unpredictable, so hard to control,

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was the tower block, glittering above the greenery, decentralisation brought about by the car.

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The car would abolish the human street, possibly even the foot.

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Everyone would have a car. Some people would have aeroplanes, too.

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The one thing nobody would have would be a place to bump into others, walk the dog, chat, strut

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or do any of the hundred other random things that one does on a street and which, being random,

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were loathed by Le Corbusier.

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La Ville Radieuse was a nightmare.

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Not only would its inhabitants surrender their freedom of movement,

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they would also have to give up their memory, insofar as it was recorded in stone and brick.

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One of Corbusier's obsessive projects was the improvement of Paris,

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which involved the assassination of the city and its rebirth as tower blocks.

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Endless repetition of one crushing unit. People would be nothing more than cells in a mass-transit system.

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His logic was Cartesian. He was French, after all.

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And the platonic, Cartesian... absolutes were in his heart.

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And they made wonderful perspectives and marvellous models of how you'd wipe out the city of Paris.

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It was a delicious intellectual exercise. How serious he was about it, I don't believe for a minute.

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The people who were serious were the Germans. They were the bad ones. They built them!

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One thing Corbusier built is here in Marseille.

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The Unite d'Habitation of 1947.

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Nine storeys high, set in green space, with an unusual roof.

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It contained a gymnasium, a space for exercise, a paddling pool for the kids and a bicycle track.

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Even today, this is one of the great roofs of the world.

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The place is a metaphor of Corbu's social aims.

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The concrete garden of ideal form, giving health to those who live in it.

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To me, the roof of the Unite has a sadness approaching that of a Greek temple.

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Corbusier finished it after WWII

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and almost 30 years after his celebrated descants on the Acropolis in his book Towards An Architecture.

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"The Greeks on the Acropolis," he then wrote, "set up buildings animated by a single thought,

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"drawing the desolate landscape around them and gathering it into one composition.

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"Thus, at every point on the horizon, the thought is singular."

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And the only place that he ever found which approached that bare singularity of the Acropolis

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was the roof of this building.

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He was so ill-informed about the habits and traditions of the society

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that he thought people would go on the roof if he made it beautiful. The real point is he was free there.

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And it's a sculptural joy to wander around the roofs of Marseille.

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The troubles begin below the roof.

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The Unite was meant as a social experiment, a prototype for mass housing.

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There is a rough nobility to this concrete, even though it's grimy and can never mellow like stone.

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The piloti or stilts are a grand muscular shape, although nobody uses the space under them for anything

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and the cars have to park in the green space.

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And as housing, the Unite has not been a success.

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Its emblem is the figure of Corbu's modular man,

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the distorted great-grandchild of Vitruvian man

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and, unintentionally, a symbol of Corbusier's lofty disregard of real human needs.

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Privacy in the flats hardly exists.

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Many of the rooms are little more than cupboards.

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The shopping mall on the fifth floor is mostly out of business because the French like real markets,

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down on the street - another fact of life that the form giver did not grasp.

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Finally, nobody wanted those plain, morally-elevating interiors with paper lamps and craft rugs

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and slung chairs and Cubist tapestries. And they are now crammed

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with exactly the sort of gaudy, fake period furniture that Corbusier struggled against all his life.

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He could never understand why the French kept wanting it, but they did and they still do.

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Corbusier only got one chance to build an ideal city - Chandigarh, the new capital of the Punjab,

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which Nehru asked him to design in 1960.

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Its site was a blank, a windy plain at the foot of the Himalayas.

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Here Corbusier could create a sculptural monument from scratch.

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There was nothing to compete with. His buildings would be absolute.

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And so they were, except that they never came to life as a city.

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They have the passionate dignity and uninhabitability of sculpture,

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but after 30 years nobody wants to live there and so Chandigarh,

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like most capitals that have been invented overnight by governments, is socially lifeless.

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Elevating as an idea and depressing after the first 24 hours.

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Yet though he failed as a sociological architect, he was a great inventor of shapes,

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the Picasso of architecture.

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And his language was based on two systems of form which seemed utterly opposed, but he saw as similar -

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classical Greek architecture in all its lucidity

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and the clear, analytic forms of machinery.

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He wanted to celebrate what he called "the white world", the world of clarity and precision,

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of exact stucco and glass, of culture standing alone against the real world of muddle and compromise.

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No building shows what he meant better than the Villa Savoye outside Paris, finished in 1930.

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The Villa Savoye was one of the classics of what came to be known as the International Style.

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The principles of this style were laid out, once and for all, in 1927

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in the Deutscher Werkbund housing exhibition in Germany,

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an architectural trade fair for which Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies, Bruno Taut, Peter Behrens

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and JP Oud built demonstration homes.

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The name International Style was coined in 1931 by two Americans,

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historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson.

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The first principle was that it was a style of volume, not of mass.

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It wasn't built up from bricks like this. It was a taut skin stretched across a frame

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and everything that that meant. Lifting buildings on piloti - even now we use the Corbusier word.

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That point came from Corbusier, lifting everything up because it had a sixth side -

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the underside. You can't see that unless you have a volumetric to look at everything.

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How could you have a ribbon window if it was mass? They would fall down if it was a brick mass building.

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Nobody would use that word "brick" because that meant mass.

0:32:020:32:07

Stucco was the one weightless material that everyone could get,

0:32:070:32:10

so every building in the International Style's purest form was stucco.

0:32:100:32:16

From that came the principles of design of these volumes. You don't put a door here and windows in.

0:32:160:32:24

You have ribbons of window and then because it's functionalist

0:32:240:32:27

you put a big window for the dog and a little window for the cat.

0:32:270:32:32

The third one was a non-principle, typical of our mixed-up age. The avoidance of ornament.

0:32:320:32:38

Ornament had disappeared up to that time anyhow because it was too expensive

0:32:380:32:44

and there were no more craftsmen. That's still true. Now we use pastiche to imitate old ornaments.

0:32:440:32:50

That's the way it's come back in, but that principle of the avoidance of ornament was the easiest to do.

0:32:500:32:57

If you believe in volume, not mass, you can't put tops on buildings. Any angle like that was taboo.

0:32:570:33:03

It had to have a flat roof.

0:33:030:33:06

But, you see, I came in in '28 and by that time it was pretty well codified, the International Style.

0:33:060:33:13

We'd had Weissenhofsiedlung, which was the epitome, the high point of the International Style.

0:33:130:33:19

Everybody had to do a flat roof, to be white, to use stucco.

0:33:190:33:23

And they all did. They saluted and did whatever Mies said.

0:33:230:33:27

He was a kid at the time. Kid, for an architect, being 40.

0:33:270:33:31

And it was an amazing thing for a kid to do, to get all the great architects to do the same building.

0:33:310:33:37

So I was there at that time when all idea of mysticism or anything that wasn't rational

0:33:370:33:43

or couldn't be clearly explained was rigorously rooted out.

0:33:430:33:48

The main place from which this style emanated was the Bauhaus,

0:33:500:33:54

started in Weimar and then established in Dessau and closed by the Nazis in the '30s

0:33:540:33:59

on the grounds that it was a Bolshevist conspiracy against the family and the German race.

0:33:590:34:05

Bauhaus meant the rethinking of every manufactured object, not just buildings.

0:34:050:34:11

During its short life, 15 years,

0:34:110:34:13

it utterly transformed the idea of advanced design in Europe.

0:34:130:34:17

It was a network of men and women who wanted to remake culture in terms of industrial process.

0:34:170:34:24

The man who formed the school, wrote its programme and ran it for the first 10 years of its life

0:34:240:34:30

was the architect Walter Gropius.

0:34:300:34:33

Gropius' ambition had set early in his career.

0:34:340:34:38

In his early 20s, in 1907, he had worked for the leading industrial designer in Germany, Peter Behrens.

0:34:380:34:44

Today we're used to companies getting one designer to furnish their whole visual style.

0:34:440:34:50

70 years ago, that was extremely rare. Behrens pioneered it through his work for one big client, AEG.

0:34:500:34:58

He designed their factories, their catalogues, even their stationery.

0:34:580:35:02

Behrens went as close as any man had gone to creating a general style of design

0:35:070:35:13

aimed at mass production of a wide range of products from an industrial base.

0:35:130:35:19

Now this point was not lost on Gropius. His major works before the Bauhaus were all industrial.

0:35:210:35:27

In his Fagus factory of 1911, probably the most advanced building anyone had made before WWI,

0:35:270:35:34

the wall is daringly reduced to a glass skin stretched between columns and making a transparent corner.

0:35:340:35:41

The Bauhaus enabled Gropius and his colleagues to pursue the idea of a total art,

0:35:530:35:58

subsuming all the divided arts under a new technology.

0:35:580:36:02

-The first manifesto of the Bauhaus proclaimed:

-"Let us create a new guild of craftsmen

0:36:020:36:08

"without the class distinctions which raise arrogant barriers between craftsmen and artists.

0:36:080:36:14

"Together, let us conceive and build the new structure of the future,

0:36:140:36:19

"which will embrace architecture and painting and sculpture in one unity

0:36:190:36:24

"and will rise one day towards heaven like the crystal symbol of a new faith."

0:36:240:36:30

The Bauhaus view was that it was far harder to design a first-rate teapot than paint a second-rate painting.

0:36:330:36:39

Later in his life, Walter Gropius explained the basic ideas of Bauhaus teaching.

0:36:410:36:46

Everyone had to go through one of the craft workshops before he came into architecture.

0:36:460:36:52

And some of them did not go into architecture. They stayed where they were, in the painting workshop

0:36:520:36:58

or wherever else it was. But any architect should have this basis

0:36:580:37:03

and I think we should have it today, too. It is much too theoretical, still.

0:37:030:37:09

When you compare, for instance, the life of an architect today,

0:37:090:37:13

who is expected to sit in his studio and get everything out of his head on paper and specifications...

0:37:130:37:20

Then it's taken out of his hands and given to an army of workmen who have to execute his will.

0:37:200:37:27

And he is not permitted any more to make any changes and the workman cannot add anything of himself.

0:37:270:37:34

And you compare that with the Middle Ages when they built a cathedral.

0:37:340:37:39

There was a group of people devoting themselves to that building, living on the site,

0:37:390:37:45

doing everything in flesh and materials directly. There was very little designing.

0:37:450:37:50

The extraordinary thing was that the journeyman and the apprentice had to follow a certain direction

0:37:500:37:56

from the master who gave him some geometrical proportions he had to take in his work,

0:37:560:38:02

but otherwise he gave his work individually, independently.

0:38:020:38:06

It was not an execution only of some design of the master.

0:38:060:38:10

They worked really in a true team together there and if something was not well done,

0:38:100:38:16

they took it down again and built it again. For God's sake, it had to be very good.

0:38:160:38:21

Each teapot, watch, glass or radio cabinet was designed as an industrial prototype.

0:38:230:38:30

It had to be mass-produced, but few actually were.

0:38:300:38:33

The demand was too small to justify mass production, hence the rarity of Bauhaus objects today.

0:38:330:38:40

They were too pure to be popular.

0:38:400:38:42

This was especially true of the furniture. Almost all the radical new designs of chair, table or sofa

0:38:450:38:52

were done by architects - Marcel Breuer inside the Bauhaus, Corbusier and Mies outside it.

0:38:520:38:58

Their ideal and often uncomfortable chairs were all of a piece with constructivist painting.

0:38:580:39:04

And they were meant to go with their buildings for the least possible interruption to the flow of space,

0:39:040:39:10

to echo the machine look.

0:39:100:39:13

Some of them lived on into production to furnish the world's airports and corporate lobbies.

0:39:130:39:19

But in their day they were not popular.

0:39:190:39:23

The most severe rebuke to the pleasure-seeking body was made in 1918 by a Dutch designer

0:39:280:39:34

called Gerrit Rietveld and this chair of his is considered a classic

0:39:340:39:38

because it goes far beyond ordinary functionalist discomfort.

0:39:380:39:42

The human body for which it was reputed to be made simply doesn't exist.

0:39:420:39:48

Insofar as it ever was designed to accommodate a human bottom,

0:39:480:39:52

that bottom is a platonic solid existing somewhere out in the ether but never made flesh.

0:39:520:39:58

The fact about these designs is that, august as they are,

0:39:580:40:03

they are not really furniture. They're sculpture.

0:40:030:40:07

They're a three-dimensional development of a two-dimensional pattern,

0:40:070:40:13

the grid and primary colours in the paintings of Mondrian, van Doesburg and the De Stijl group.

0:40:130:40:19

De Stijl was Dutch for "the style".

0:40:200:40:23

Its leader was a painter and critic, Theo van Doesburg.

0:40:230:40:27

As a group, it didn't last long, just a few years during and after the end of World War One.

0:40:270:40:34

Nevertheless, the half dozen artists and architects in the movement were very clear about their aims.

0:40:340:40:40

After the slaughter of the Great War, they wanted to be international men

0:40:400:40:44

and art could supply the model for this frame of mind.

0:40:440:40:47

Down with frontiers, up with the grid. A new world of lucidity would rise from the wreckage.

0:40:470:40:54

No curved lines, masonic rectitude,

0:40:550:40:59

De Stijl was against the individual and for the collective and the universal.

0:40:590:41:05

It laid out a general grammar of shape for every visual art, architecture no less than painting.

0:41:090:41:17

This grid was van Doesburg's design for the roof of a university hall in 1923.

0:41:170:41:23

The programme of De Stijl had no practical chance since art cannot cure nationalism

0:41:280:41:33

and manufacturers were not idealists. But its name survives,

0:41:330:41:37

partly because one of the greatest artists of the 20th century was involved. He was Piet Mondrian.

0:41:370:41:43

This grave and diffident man was one of the last painters to believe that the conditions of human life

0:41:430:41:49

could be changed by making pictures.

0:41:490:41:52

For him, art was not an end in itself. It was a means towards an end.

0:41:520:41:58

Mondrian was an intensely religious man. He had a vision of Utopia

0:41:580:42:02

in which the scales would drop from man's eyes as the visible world disclosed its underlying harmonies.

0:42:020:42:09

Then to see would be to know.

0:42:090:42:12

Mondrian thought of art as a bridge to this clarity of vision.

0:42:150:42:18

Once you had it, you no longer needed painting

0:42:180:42:21

and this belief gave his work an extraordinary consistency.

0:42:210:42:25

We're apt to think of Mondrian as a purely abstract painter -

0:42:280:42:32

the grid and nothing but the grid,

0:42:320:42:34

but his work was grounded in nature and in metaphors based on nature.

0:42:340:42:39

One motif that his grids came from, for instance,

0:42:390:42:42

was the coastal landscape of Holland, the dunes and the sea,

0:42:420:42:46

and the glitter of light on this flatness, the movement of the waves, became a pattern of crosses

0:42:460:42:51

and this criss-crossing field with its points and twinkles of energy

0:42:510:42:55

became one of Mondrian's signs for all substance.

0:42:550:42:59

It was the basis of his universal grammar.

0:42:590:43:01

So it was appropriate that Mondrian should have come to New York - "grid city".

0:43:040:43:09

He got there as a refugee from the Second World War in 1940

0:43:090:43:13

and his studio was remembered as one of the shrines of Modernism in America.

0:43:130:43:18

And what did he like about America?

0:43:280:43:31

Well, Mondrian may not have looked like one, but he was an enthusiastic dancer.

0:43:310:43:36

It's hard to imagine him boogieing to jazz, but that was what he loved to do.

0:43:360:43:41

Out of that music and the New York grid,

0:43:410:43:44

Mondrian distilled his late paintings -

0:43:440:43:46

New York City, Broadway Boogie-Woogie and Victory Boogie-Woogie.

0:43:460:43:51

These paintings are not exactly metaphors of New York and still less can they be read as plans,

0:43:560:44:02

but they are diagrams of the kind of energy and order that Mondrian detected in the great, flawed city.

0:44:020:44:08

The yellow blips shuttling along their paths don't necessarily represent cabs,

0:44:080:44:14

but once you have seen Broadway Boogie-Woogie,

0:44:140:44:17

the view from a skyscraper down into the streets is changed for ever.

0:44:170:44:21

And why should Mondrian's last paintings still move us,

0:44:220:44:26

whereas the Utopian city plans of the architects do not?

0:44:260:44:30

Partly because the space of art is the ideal space of fiction.

0:44:300:44:34

In it, things are not used and they never decay.

0:44:340:44:37

You can never walk in a painting as you must imagine yourself walking in a street or a building.

0:44:370:44:43

His paintings are incorruptible, the building blocks of a system

0:44:430:44:47

that has no relationship at all to our bodies.

0:44:470:44:50

But architecture and design have everything to do with the body

0:44:530:44:57

and the unredeemed body at that.

0:44:570:45:00

Without respect for the body as it is and for social memory as it stands,

0:46:050:46:10

there is no such thing as a workable or humane architecture.

0:46:100:46:13

That's why a place like this, La Defense outside Paris,

0:46:130:46:17

is experienced by everybody, including those who live in it, as a piece of social scar tissue -

0:46:170:46:22

gimmicky, condescending, alphaville Modernism.

0:46:220:46:25

Stick them in concrete boxes and give them some concrete to play on

0:46:250:46:29

and then paint it all bright colours because that's what the kiddies like

0:46:290:46:33

and if the kiddies don't like it, they can write to the minister.

0:46:330:46:37

That is why so many of the classics of Utopian planning have turned out to look inhuman or absurd

0:46:390:46:44

and why they don't work, and why the social pretensions behind them seem to be so much hot air.

0:46:440:46:50

After this, who believes in progress and perfectibility any more?

0:46:500:46:54

Who believes in master builders and form-givers?

0:46:540:46:57

That's right. Who are you? You don't believe in progress?

0:46:570:47:01

But who does now believe in progress Those things have influenced the architecture more than anything else

0:47:010:47:07

I think the progress, the whole Benthamite "every day in every way we're getting better" theory

0:47:070:47:12

is pretty well washed up.

0:47:120:47:14

So there are these waves of...

0:47:140:47:17

We're anti-idealists now, anti-Utopian, anti-pies in the sky,

0:47:170:47:22

and we're very anxious to make our cities work the way they are and hold on to the best we can,

0:47:220:47:28

which is a far saner, more sensible way of looking at things.

0:47:280:47:31

The architectural historian Charles Jencks pointed out

0:47:330:47:36

that one can date the death of the Modern Movement not just to the decade or year, but to the minute.

0:47:360:47:42

It happened in St Louis where the architect Minoru Yamasaki

0:47:420:47:46

had designed a large, low-income housing project.

0:47:460:47:49

Its name was Pruitt-Igoe.

0:47:490:47:51

Tower blocks, parks, recreational streets inside the buildings,

0:47:560:48:00

every sort of Corbusian amenity, most improving.

0:48:000:48:04

The architectural magazines made a fuss over it. It won awards.

0:48:040:48:08

That was in 1951.

0:48:080:48:10

Within a few years, the place had been ripped apart by its unimproved tenants,

0:48:100:48:16

old and middle-aged people were scared to live there

0:48:160:48:19

and the young were in the corridors with flick knives.

0:48:190:48:22

Pruitt-Igoe got so bad that in 1972, major structural alterations were called for.

0:48:220:48:29

Apart from Chandigarh, the only city in the world that has ever been built from scratch

0:50:150:50:20

along the Corbusian lines of rational town planning is here.

0:50:200:50:24

In the '50s, the Brazilians decided they wanted a capital.

0:50:240:50:28

The thing about bureaucrats is that they hate ports.

0:50:280:50:31

They're too open to influence, they're too hard to control. They're too full of life.

0:50:310:50:36

So although they already had one very lively port in Rio,

0:50:360:50:40

the Brazilians decided to put their capital 1,200 kilometres away in the centre of the country

0:50:400:50:45

on a red dirt plateau where nobody had ever lived or ever wanted to.

0:50:450:50:50

Two of Corbusier's most brilliant South American disciples were called upon to design it -

0:50:500:50:55

Lucio Costa did the town plan and the main ceremonial buildings were done by Oscar Niemeyer.

0:50:550:51:01

Now, Brasilia, as the place is called, was going to be the city of tomorrow.

0:51:010:51:07

It was going to be the triumph of reason and sunlight and the automobile.

0:51:070:51:11

Here we were going to see what the international style could really do

0:51:110:51:15

when it was backed with limitless quantities of cash and national enthusiasm. And we did.

0:51:150:51:21

This was La Ville Radieuse all over again.

0:51:260:51:29

How good it can look on film - the most photogenic new town on Earth!

0:51:290:51:34

It's the reconciliation of modernist democracy with the ceremonial grandeur of the state

0:51:400:51:46

that the Beaux Arts had wanted to symbolise 100 years before.

0:51:460:51:50

It has always had a good press too.

0:52:010:52:03

Brazilian architectural critics did not dare say anything against it

0:52:030:52:07

and it's so far away that most other critics have never actually seen it.

0:52:070:52:12

From the air you can see the abstract categories of layout,

0:52:190:52:23

the big living blocks, the administrative core,

0:52:230:52:26

the work areas, the green space, the crossing highways.

0:52:260:52:31

Here, the Corbusian dream has come true.

0:52:360:52:39

The car has abolished the street and the pedestrian is an irrelevance,

0:52:390:52:44

a large irrelevance since most people in Brasilia do not own cars.

0:52:440:52:48

The reality is worse than anything that has been said about the place.

0:53:040:53:08

Brasilia is a facade, run up under political pressure,

0:53:080:53:12

finished in 1960 and already falling to bits.

0:53:120:53:16

Cracking stonework, flaking concrete,

0:53:170:53:21

rusting metal,

0:53:210:53:23

a ceremonial slum.

0:53:230:53:25

So what Brasilia became in less than 20 years wasn't the city of tomorrow at all.

0:53:430:53:48

It was yesterday's science fiction.

0:53:480:53:51

Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future.

0:53:510:53:55

This is what you get when perfectly decent, intelligent and talented men

0:53:550:53:59

start thinking in terms of space, rather than place, and about single, rather than multiple meanings.

0:53:590:54:05

It's what you get when you design for political aspirations and not real human needs.

0:54:050:54:10

You get miles of jerry-built, platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens.

0:54:100:54:15

This, one may fervently hope, is the last experiment of its kind.

0:54:150:54:19

The Utopian buck stops here.

0:54:190:54:22

I think Brasilia is emblematic.

0:55:240:55:27

The last 50 years in architecture have witnessed the death of the future.

0:55:270:55:31

Like the Baroque or the High Renaissance, the Modern Movement lived and died

0:55:310:55:36

and it left behind its masterpieces which survive, but the doctrines don't inspire us so much any more.

0:55:360:55:42

People are always going to be moved and delighted by buildings

0:55:420:55:46

like the Villa Savoye or the Seagram Building here,

0:55:460:55:49

just as they are today by, say, the Pazzi Chapel or by the Paris Opera.

0:55:490:55:53

But what has gone and, I think, gone for good

0:55:530:55:56

is the idea that architects or artists can lay the rudiments of paradise here on Earth

0:55:560:56:01

and construct working Utopias.

0:56:010:56:03

Cities are more complex than that

0:56:030:56:06

and perhaps you can't purify human needs without taking away human freedom.

0:56:060:56:10

In any case, you have to work with the real world and its inherited contents and memory is reality.

0:56:100:56:17

It took us the best part of 50 years to find that out, but perhaps it was worth the trouble.

0:56:170:56:23

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