Megastructures?

I have recently been trying to move my thinking on from the book, which seems as far away now as it was before I wrote it, all of 8 or so months ago. If I can summarise the book, it's either: a bunch of essays that have mostly been superseded by stuff wot other people have been writing, or if you're being charitable; it's a critique of a certain standard view of modern architecture, a critique that does its work by going back to the very origins of the concept and then working forwards until it proves that everything is basically rubbish.

What's been occupying me now is the period around the time of the emergence of the post-modern project in architecture, the early to mid 70s, before the rise of the 'new right'. Specifically, I've been thinking that I need to look back at the megastructural project (see my paean to the space-frame, my look at the LOMEX, etc...), which it seems to me was curtailed by bottom-up critique, right-ward lurch and economic recession. In the book I discuss the 'Zoom' wave, Archigram and all that sort of thing, and I discuss how it ended up as corporate high-tech. I mean, you need only look at the Lloyds building to see both the future of corporate architecture; open, ultra-efficient floor plates, neoprene gaskets and full-height glazing, service voids above and below, etc etc... But of course at the same time it's the most surreal and extravagant building in all of Britain, hesitating at the threshold between brutalism and 'Zoom', with what seems now to be the seemingly inevitable descent into the fully glazed air conditioned office building.

And the link between Brutalism and high-tech is very important. Not only were Foster & Rogers taught by Paul Rudolph while at Yale, but one of the most interesting things about Archigram is to look at what they were doing in their early years - the 'bowelism' and the hyper-brutalism. Now although these kind of projects already betray the aestheticisation that basically spoils Archigram for me, the gee-whizz attitude of those who don't really think that things are so bad, y'know... I want to take them more seriously at this point just before they slide right off into whimsy. Where could this have led?

I'm considering putting together some kind of proposal regarding this research, although of course there's no money in it anymore, but basically the idea is something along the lines of a parallel history where the future didn't necessarily occur as predicted, but where it certainly wasn't rejected in the way that it actually was. As I've mused before - what if the Yom Kippur war hadn't happened and the oil crisis hadn't occurred? What if North Sea Oil had been nationalised? etc.etc. The resulting research would be part textual critique, but would also include the design of near-historic buildings from the hypothetical past.

I'm afraid at this stage it's going to have to take the form of an 'inspirational images' type post, I'm far too busy to actually do any of it justice right now, but you never know, maybe one day!

The Failed Modern Dwelling

On Saturday last I gave a paper as part of the Historical Materialism conference. It went ok I think, the panel itself was a good mix of papers. The following text is the paper I gave.

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Basically what I'd like to do today is take you through the last 13 years of architecture, in particular housing, in the UK. The story of New Labour's architecture is one of pretty good ideas, achieved abysmally. I'll start off with a little bit of Thatcher, before moving onto Blairism. There will be a more or less equal focus on specific policies, intentions and material results, as well as the aesthetics and ideological aspects of the process.

THATCHER
To understand what has happened in the cities of the UK since 1997, we will need to at least take a brief look at the period leading up to that point.


After the massive destruction of cities in the Second World War, successive Labour and Conservative administrations took a broadly Keynesian approach to housing, whereby the welfare state engaged in large house building programmes, and housing stock was owned by local authorities and was provided mainly for rent. This was also a period where modernist urban theories were dominant, this was partly for economic reasons - building very large amounts and densities of housing with limited funds necessarily leads to a consolidatory approach, with larger single structures containing massed units. But alongside pragmatism, modernist housing was suitable partly because there was a genuine commitment to changing popular notions of what cities ought to be. Take Berthold Lubetkin's oft quoted - "Nothing is too good for ordinary people". There was a definite sense (at least in the UK) that modern architecture was a force for good, especially considering the problems of the dwellings that it generally replaced.


But of course by the late 1970s it was already clear that there were great problems in the housing practices of previous decades, from the collapse of the Ronan Point block in 1968, to the very public perceptions of 'crime ridden estates' and so on.
These problems are ideologically convoluted: some commentators to the right suggest that the very basic nature of modernist design alienates its occupants and causes social decline, crime and despair, an attitude described as architectural predeterminsism. One doesn't have wait for very long for this argument to slide into an attack on modernist design for its apparently socialist tendencies.



The arrival of Thatcher and the New Right onto the scene had a number of impacts on housing. Perhaps the most significant was the admittedly politically avant-garde policy of the 'right to buy'. Under this scheme, council tenants were encouraged to purchase their council properties at a discounted rate. The aim was partly 'positive', in the narrow sense of empowering people to become property owners, in accordance with the Tories ideological commitment to individualism, but it also had a negative aim, which was the destruction of local government. By stripping some of their most important assets, and making it impossible to replace them, the central government 'hobbled' local authorities, who famously were among the largest landlords in the world. This had further, probably undesired but deliberately ignored consequences - the right to buy was mainly exercised on council property that was already more desirable, meaning that what was left in council hands were often the lowest quality buildings, a process which further worsened the problems of council estates, both actual and perceived.



This accelerated decline in council-owned property was exacerbated by the suburban focus of the Thatcher years - the relaxed planning laws and generally light-regulation meant that most new house building was suburban, made of cul-de-sacs and 'noddy houses', linked by private transport to the new phenomenon of the out-of-town retail park. The Thatcherite period saw the wholesale adoption of the architectural mode known as postmodernism, which although first practiced by left-leaning architects concerned with the 'elitism' of high-modernism, was an almost perfect reflection of the way 80s Tories mixed radical economics with social conservatism. Postmodern architecture is generally playful, ironic and kitsch. It has no interest in 'new' form or progression, content merely to play around with well understood visual tropes.


Meanwhile, British industry was allowed, encouraged & forced into terminal decline, which along with the process of containerisation that had begun in the 1960s led to there being large areas of the inner cities lying derelict and empty.

BLAIR
The election of the Blair government was accompanied with great optimism in the architectural field - instead of the retreat to suburbia and the attendant vulgarity of post-modern architectural aesthetics, there was now an opportunity to treat cities properly, as befitting a genuinely modern country.
One of the main intellectual figures in this optimism was Richard Rogers, who originally worked with Norman Foster in the 1970s. Back then they were radical modernist architects interested in engineering, systems and infrastructure, and the work that they created became known as 'British Hi-tech'. Unsuccessful throughout much of the 70s and 80s, since the 90s their style has become the corporate architecture of choice around the world, replacing the historicist pomo style previously mentioned. The parallels between the political and aesthetic choices of big business over this period are rather blatant, but somewhat outside my remit here.



Where Foster is an apolitical technocrat, Rogers is the quintessential kind-of-leftist bourgeois. In the 80s he designed a speculative project entitled 'London As It Could Be', which was a politicised criticism of the piecemeal developer led building boom going on at the time. An enthusiast for planned development for the benefit of the people, his highly public pronouncements - such as 'Cities for a Small Planet', his Reith lectures of 1995, got him the ear of the Labour Party, and in 1999 he was drafted in to create the Urban Task Force, who published a white paper entitled 'Towards an Urban Renaissance'. This document set out a vision for cities that were dense and compact, making use of brownfield (i.e. previously built upon) land, that were environmentally and economically sustainable, well designed, and filled with public infrastructure such as parks, squares and transport. Buildings were to be mixed-use and mixed-tenure, with commercial and residential properly mixed, and neighbourhoods that were not homogenous in terms of class, culture etc… The state was to be intimately involved in this, providing subsidy, guidance and, importantly, planning to achieve these goals..


Unfortunately, despite these grand and noble aims, what has happened to the cities over the last 13 years has been mostly a failure. Although (and it may be argued that this was genuine) New Labour professed great concern about urban improvement, their chosen course of action, namely encouraging the private sector, often through substantial subsidy, to enact regeneration has not had the desired effect at all.


In behaviour that will most likely be entirely familiar to you, Labour created all sorts of peripheral organisations, partnerships, pathfinders, initiatives, agencies, what have you, in order to try to counter what they referred to slightly euphemistically as 'social exclusion'. Unfortunately, rather than any genuine redistribution or state handled building programme (which was of course desperately needed), the Tory designed PFI and PPP systems of procurement were intensified, leading to some of the most piss-poor architecture for public, state and civic functions that we've ever had, whether it be hospitals, schools or prisons.
In the housing sector, again it was left mostly up to the market. Labour's deference towards the wealthy meant that property developers have had an absolute riot over the last ten years. On the one hand, it is very true that since the mid-1990s there has been a population influx into the cities - in almost every city in the UK the city centre populations have increased by many hundreds of percent, most notably in Manchester, which of course was heavily bombed by the IRA and was almost completely unoccupied. This, in some sense, is a success.



But this success requires a very selective view of its goals. The urban regeneration of the last 13 years has been what has been described by Jonathan Meades as 'the Brandwagon'. This describes the sudden apparent revival of post-industrial land in inner cities and by riversides, areas often previously used by shipbuilding and other heavy industry, and thus mostly destroyed during the Thatcherite period. Often this process begins with the construction of a large cultural building, for example the Guggenheim Museum built in Bilbao by Frank Gehry in 1997, which according to disciples of the process acts as a catalyst for the regeneration of the surrounding area. In the UK, the signature building as regeneration catalyst has often resulted in half-hearted designs from famous architects, vapidly signifying something or other about the supposed history of the location. This then swiftly becomes surrounded by new speculative apartment buildings. However in many respects these buildings are worse than they were during the reviled post-war period. They are universally small - often worse than the Parker Morris standards that governed house building from the late 1960s. As far as design is concerned, this has been almost uniformly terrible, a shiny, plasticky, "FUN" embodiment of early-new labour values, modernism without anything that might upset the 'Mondeo Man'. Although concrete - with its ideologically loaded aesthetic - has been mostly off the menu for the external skins of recent housing buildings, the materials that they are clad in are often of the most flimsy and short-lived, and it will be interesting to watch as the bet-hedging architecture of the last ten years becomes filthy and drab. The aesthetic is one of boosterism rather than any genuine commitment to the troubled areas that these buildings were actually erected within.



And of course many of the properties were bought as investments, buy-to-let and so on - a soufflé economy. When the crash occurred a vast amount of new housing was unoccupied, and large amounts of it remain so even now.
But it gets even worse. Labour made little to no attempt to push money into social housing. The nearest thing that we got were gently nudges such as 'key worker housing' or even 'affordable housing quotas', which was an attempt to legislate with developers that their luxury apartments had to offer low-cost units within the whole. Needless to say this was strongly resisted within the industry, with such cop-outs as affordable housing being built offsite when the site itself was too valuable, and studio flats being used as affordable housing when of course the people who needed it most are often those with larger families.



In fact, New Labour continued the process of transferring social housing out of government control and into housing associations, thus setting in action loops whereby these housing associations, as profit-making entities, acted directly against their tenants. The worst example of this were the 'Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder' schemes in the North of England, whereby whole areas of housing deemed to have suffered 'market failure' were demolished as a way of stimulating demand and hopefully raising house prices. Accordingly, what has occurred is that councils have been accused of deliberately running down areas of housing in order to then make a profit through their demolition and sale to property developers.

WHAT NOW?
There's a rather horrible feeling some of us have right now, because we've spent the best part of a decade complaining about how awful the urbanism of New Labour is, and now it's about to get a whole lot worse.
CABE, the design advisory body, has been axed. Deeply flawed and borderline corrupt as it was, at the very least there was a body whose remit was to uphold standards of design. Arguably this led to the offensively mild Blairite style that I've mentioned above, as designs were made whose intent appeared to be to please absolutely everyone. Instead, at the current conjuncture the architectural charity of the Prince of Wales, bete noir of the architectural profession, has expressed an interest in taking over this advisory service. Normally an idea like this would receive nothing but scorn, but right now it seems entirely plausible.
The ConDem government's proposals on capping housing benefit payments mean that there is a strong chance that the ongoing gentrification of central London will accelerate, leading to what you might describe as 'Parisification', and the effects further north in the cities that suffer from the UK's ridiculous focus of wealth and work in London will most likely be allowed to decline yet further. Meades' film ends with the statement that the long term meaning of urban regeneration is that there will be 'no riots within the ring road', while showing footage of the 2005 Paris riots. This is a very real and dangerous possibility.
The government is also attempting to remove targets for house building, which for a long time has been the most significant challenge that the country faces in terms of its living arrangements - the ridiculously low levels of replacement and new building. This at least partially deliberate policy of scarcity has been one of the causes of the housing bubble, and shows no signs of abating. The consequences of this are very dangerous - one of the main factors that has been feeding into support for far-right groups in the UK has been the shortage of housing, and the perception that immigrants are given preferential treatment by local government housing policy. It is no coincidence that the BNP strongholds in the south of England are areas east of London where people have been forced outwards towards as the inner city becomes ever more expensive.

DIFFICULTIES
The difficulties seen now are seemingly intractable.
Architects of the 1970s were fascinated by revolutions in the form of housing. Rather than the monolithic and monumental concrete apartment blocks, the young post-68 generation were interested in indeterminacy, freedom from sedentary lifestyles and ideas of nomadism. They saw new technologies of building services as offering the potential for self-organising architecture: lightweight, cheap, replaceable, high performance.
But of course Thatcher pandered to the desire to be homeowners, and encouraged the worship of the house. A home is a fairly rudimentary object, but it is encrusted with symbolic detail, signifying deeply held desires. Although the means have been there for a long time, housing remains a technologically backward industry, reliant on 'wet' trades and bespoke construction. 1997 presented an opportunity to genuinely attempt a modernisation of the house-building industry, but it was missed by the myopic New Labour project, instead leaving us with vulgar monuments to vapid greed.
To sum up, because it is so inherently capital-intensive, change in architecture can only really come from the top-down. We cannot now, nor could we ever, trust developers and speculators to create the housing that we need, and we have been terribly let down by the last government. It seems unlikely that the housing situation will improve in the UK without a shift in ideology, and a resurrection of the notion that collective housing is a vital and civilised way of organising the way we dwell.

Dialectic of Hi-Tech - response!

Well, basically, thanks to SDMYBT for responding to my last post so very quickly. In order to push the ideas a bit further on, I’ll be partly responding to him, and partly looking at another text I recently read; ‘Plateau Beaubourg’ by Alan Colquhoun, a contemporary critique of Richard Rogers & Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Centre (1971-7).

After the astonishing paroxysm of Lloyds, where the Marcuse-quoting Labourite gives capital the best fucking building it's ever going to have, High-Tech had the choice of going further in that direction, creating an accelerationist architecture, essentially, or of pretending that this 'changing society' was still changing for the better, and toning down the harsh elements of their architecture in favour of an ornamentalism of struts that eventually ends up in Terminal 5

This is a fascinating point. Now, normally I find ‘accelerationism’ an incredibly dubious political position, whether it be the anarcho-animist Deleuzo-Guattarian type or the trendy-gauloises-nihilism type we see a lot of about these days. Now’s not the time for a proper critique of accelerationism (not that I’d be capable of it), but on a very basic level I think that it’s the wrong conclusion to draw from the obvious fact that while modern capitalism has benefited a lot of people, developing many technologies that even communist societies would use, it is simultaneously destroying everything, including the world itself. I mean; how do accelerationists organise? What is an act of accelerationism? What’s actually the difference between Paul Wolfowitz and an accelerationist?


above: Fleetguard Factory. below: Coin Street

Nevertheless, ‘accelerationist architecture’ is a fascinating concept. What was the step beyond Lloyds? I mean, chronologically the step beyond Lloyds was the Fleetguard Factory (1979-81), which is a far more sensible (dare-I-say-it?) solution to a design problem. It’s one of those early High-Tech projects with a tension-cable roof, allowing for a lighter span and a more dynamic structural presence, most of which look rather sad now, all dirty and unloved. But there’s a couple of other projects that Rogers undertook that at least come close to what Lloyds was attempting. The unbuilt Coin Street plan (1979-83) was essentially a series of Lloyds towers running around the back of the National Theatre, except in this case they were to be used for offices and housing, with a shopping arcade running along underneath. It’s strange because it’s programmatically one of those vulgar mixed-use schemes that have dulled our cities so much in the last decade, albeit in the same astonishing brutalism-in-steel-and-glass style as Lloyds. In much the same way that we hate the client of Lloyds while still loving the building, we can imagine walking around the arcade of Coin Street, marvelling at the madness of the architecture while bemoaning the fact that it was filled with nothing more than Wagamamas underneath banks, underneath flats for the very rich.


above: Patscentre. below: Inmos microprocessor factory

The Patscentre (1982-5) and the Inmos microprocessor factory (1982-7) are ridiculously constructivist buildings with a very clear logic, although again, revolutionising the factory was never going to be easy when you’re dealing with bottom-line architecture. There’s a reason why factories are built the way they are, and there are other reasons why clients might occasionally pay for a Rogers factory. What would have been more interesting here would be the same approach being used for another programme, perhaps housing, or something urban (I don’t count Homebase or an Ice-skating rink). It’s as unlikely as ever, however.



The exhibition London as it Could Be (1986), however, shows an architectural step beyond what we saw in Lloyds and Pompidou, although it again owes masses of aesthetic influence to the constructivists. On the one hand we’re seeing the crystallizing of Rogers’ urban theories – the linear parks, café culture, pedestrian routes and high density mixed-use development (beside a redundant river, natch!) that would eventually lead to Blair-space, but we shouldn’t forget that it was a polemical project aimed at the Tory bastards in power at the time, and Rogers also expected that proper, genuine state involvement would be required to make these things happen. The Blair-space we’re now unfortunately stuck with was the right idea, built for the wrong people by the wrong people, in the wrong way. Oh well. But! Look at the audacity and genuine madness of the proposal, the suspended bridge, the flamboyant structure and massing, the wilful lack of conventional order or proportion; it’s almost a forerunner of one of those deliberately ugly unbuilt OMA projects with the blue foam blocks rammed into each other willy-nilly. As far as ripping off the constructivists goes, one should take this theoretical project over early Zaha Hadid any day, as at least here we have the aesthetic being deployed with full knowledge of its radical political overtones, rather than as a plunderable bag of shapes.


two Bartlett projects c.2004

some expressive Miralles structure.

But that’s not really enough; London as it could be is a step forward but also a very obvious step back, invoking historically radical aesthetics as a deliberate provocation. It’s actually very hard to imagine a step beyond Lloyds, a more powerful expression of building services (as previously noted; the genuine engineering vanguard of the 1960s onward), a building with a more fragmented edge or envelope, lacking even any kind of façade. There are definitely historical aspects to Lloyds – the retained façade, the roof that riffs off the Crystal Palace, the oak panelled room high up inamongst the polished steel, and of course many of its details are dependent on brutalist convention, but its belligerent, alienating, anti-classical, even anti-modernist aesthetic has rarely if ever been approached since. For hints, perhaps one might take another look at the ‘Bartlett Style’ (circa 2004) of architecture; not something I usually recommend, but within this argument it would be very interesting to see a built architecture with as much perforation and resistance to ‘edge’ as some of those frivolous student projects suggested; all those hanging wires, silly devices and superfluous lines that don’t refer to anything whatsoever, they are of the same family as the overpowering texture and depth of Lloyds/Pompidou. Or maybe one could look at the expressiveness of the Catalan Modernism of Miralles et al: the flamboyance of structure, proliferation of detail, warped contextualism and symbolic formal language; one of only a few post ‘68 styles that is worthy of the ‘high modernism’ tag, a deeply knowledgeable architecture that achieves a ‘specialness’ that, at the end of the day, we humans seem to need. But neither of these two avenues are really as interesting as that first flowering of avant-tech architecture, neither are they particularly concerned with the politics of architecture – they both tend towards the ‘ornamentalism of struts’ that Owen mentions. Maybe one should look to the utilitarian structures such as the support structure I recently wrote about, structures with almost no style whatsoever. Or perhaps we have to look to science fiction for ideas, but that’s not really been my style – I’m not a futurologist – but I’d love to hear about any future cities that could be looked at as serious considerations of this idea. At the end of the day, it’s just a shame that Rogers basically gave up, becoming a polite version of himself, with nobody really pushing the ideas further. Knowing what we know now about the iconic boom, he could probably have held onto his early architectural language for long enough that big projects started rolling in again…

I'm generally not that bothered about the sin of 'solutionism' any more than I'm bothered about the 'ethical fallacy, at least until it becomes (with varying degrees of regularity) a massive fib, or at present both a fib and a pernicious cliché.

Well; yes. Perhaps my argument was too strong there. I didn’t mention Bucky Fuller in the last post partly because Foster didn’t really begin to get close to him until the seventies; but of course any reckoning of technologically focused architecture has to deal with him… but still: one of my biggest problems with solutionism is that it basically neglects any kind of reckoning with consciousness, of both the personal and the collective type. I don’t deny for one second that any major improvements in society will have to involve learning from and utilizing the architectural methods of retail parks, supermarkets and malls, but my point still stands that if you articulate a position that is so willfully blank on some of the most important aspects of architectural culture, these gaps will be quickly filled with shit. The inevitability of this outcome is of course difficult to really ascertain, I know the astoundingly negative quality of a critique that says that a theory is only as good as its ill-use, and of course a theory can only cover so much ground; there is no all-encompassing system that cannot be co-opted or applied poorly… If you’re not careful with this you end up with the faux-consensual logic of the least-worst. Having said that, perhaps there’s an irony that I’m not properly appreciating: inasmuch as all ideas fall flat, there’s a qualitative difference between the failure of, say, the ferro-vitreous ‘palaces for the people’, the post-war utopian experiments in communal living, and an architecture whose sole ideology is that it is the most efficient and sensible solution. I refer back to Spitalfields Market – the piss-poor application of what is already a very dry rhetoric is heartbreaking - “This is nothing less than the answer to what you really want!”

Or perhaps – if you’re bound to fail, then could you at least aim high?


So, anyway; Colquhoun’s essay on Beaubourg has some really prescient things to say about the problems of solutionist rhetoric. With particular significance for what I was just saying:

Once it is admitted that “functionalism” is a system of representation and not a mere instrument, then it becomes a matter of legitimate discussion as to whether the values symbolised by this architecture are desirable or not. But such a discussion is cut short by the bland statement that architecture expresses nothing but its inherent usefulness. Any questioning of its forms can then be attributed to the fact that the questioner has not yet come to terms with the “facts” of modern life.

One must never forget however, that solutionist rhetoric is something that has always been partially about relationships between stakeholders in the construction of a building – generally people want to feel that they’re getting value for money. If you went into a meeting armed with a presentation explaining the ideological system that your façade expressed, you’d find yourself without a project to finish. So one has to always be careful that one does not mistake simple business seduction with solutionism, but on the other hand that is perhaps what makes solutionism solutionism; the use of the rhetoric beyond what is pragmatically necessary for smooth dealings with clients and so on. What was that I previously said about those characters from Zizek? There is a reading to be made where the solutionist over-fondness for functionalist rhetoric opens the door for the taking seriously by others of that same rhetoric… This perhaps is neglecting the economic pressure of the construction industry somewhat, but we mustn’t also neglect the power of ideology in getting people to spend money… Going back to the Colquhoun quote, I think that it’s very important that this point is stressed against ‘pure’ functionalism. For the economic and interactive reasons mentioned above, solutionism becomes a foreclosing rhetoric, pre-emptively blocking off criticisms through a language of efficiency and inevitability.

This attitude assumes that architecture has no further task other than to perfect its own technology. It turns the problem of architecture as a representation of social values into a purely aesthetic one, since it assumes that the purpose of architecture is merely to accommodate any form of activity which may be required and has no positive attitude toward these activities. It creates institutions, while pretending that no institutionalisation of social life is necessary.

This leads us to question further; there have been radical relationships to technology before, or at least there have been more complex relationships to technology in the past. Right now, the digital manufacturing ‘scene’ has a much more complicated relationship to technology (reckoning with which is outside the scope of this piece), even beard-and-sandals environmentalism has a more subtle relationship to technology than solutionism does. I will state strongly that a pure, or at least over-invested functionalism cannot ever be adequate for the creation of architecture, as long as there is culture. Service of function is not all of what architecture, or indeed technology in general, does. Culturally, we absolutely need some kind of ‘figuring out’ of our relationship to technology, and in architectural terms, we need something better than parametric wibble and hair-shirt mud huts. The reason I bang on about Victorian ferro-vitreous architecture is because I think there is something there that is neglected that might just help figure out a few cultural problems (of architecture) in the here-and-now.

The philosophy behind the notion of flexibility is that the requirements of modern life are so complex and changeable that any attempt on the part of the designer to anticipate them results in a building which is unsuited to its function and represents, as it were, a “false consciousness” of the society in which he operates.
[…]
It is difficult to envisage any function which would require an unimpeded fifty-meter span with a height limitation of seven meters.

Again, this essay repeatedly makes points that are just as valid today. The first part of the quote presents an indictment of ‘shed-ness’, or the tendency towards blankness. This is not to say that flexibility is bad per se; the mat-building typology, or ‘roofitecture’ are both complex and interesting systems with a lot to give us, and the notion of upgrading and adaption are likely to be vital later in this century, but to abdicate responsibility for programme is not a particularly welcome thing. The second quote is a version of my ‘1889 argument’; since then, depending upon the impressiveness of engineering for the power of the architecture lends itself to a particular architectural melancholy; the hints of a larger finitude expressed by a space unfilled.

And I think I’ll just quote the last paragraph of the essay in full, seeing as it combines a number of previous points I’ve made:

But in considering whether the “symbolic gestures” are gratuitous or not we cannot just take them at their face value as an “honest” expression of the material or function of a building. The Galerie des Machines and the Eiffel Tower were structural gestures, but carried within them the idea of structural economy and minimal effort, whereas at Beaubourg the “real” structural members are in places sheathed in stainless steel and thus appear both luxurious and larger than they actually are. Nor can the Centre Pompidou be equated with the work of the Constructivists, however strident the analogy may at first seem. For the constructivists, the expression of structure and mechanical elements was connected with a social ideology and took its meaning from this. The Centre Pompidou seems to be more related to Archigram’s work of the sixties and its meaning to be in the area of science fiction. This great machine of culture seems to have no ideological message: it presents an image of total mechanisation but makes no connection between this image and the other possible images of our culture.

Food for thought, I reckon. Will have to come back to it, however...

'British' High Tech

Waiting for a train, I recently bumped into a chap I once worked with. We had a chat, and of course when you speak to an architect these days you invariably have to talk about the recession. Based upon his experiences of the early 90s, he suggested that the British architecture scene would come out of this particular trough in a stronger condition. He also mentioned that, in the early 90s, the only two acceptable styles that one could build in were either Pomo, or High-Tech.


Since ‘Pomo’ declined as the dominant force of corporate architecture, High-Tech has been the architecture of choice for business. If there was a block of offices built near you in the last twenty years, then it was probably constructed in this style, the UK’s main contribution to architectural culture of the last generation, always to be associated with the names of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. I’ve been thinking about these two a lot since I visited the ‘First Works’ show at the Architectural Association recently. ‘First Works’ was an excellent survey of ‘critical’ or ‘experimental’ practice from the period 1960-80, although somewhat spoiled by the AA’s incessant self-aggrandisement. In amongst all the usual suspects of ‘radical’ architecture (Hadid, Libeskind, Koolhaas etc…) was a little project by Foster and Rogers, as half of Team 4, the practice they set up with their respective spouses after studying at Yale. If now it seems strange, considering the ubiquity of the style with which they are associated, that these two architects would ever be included in a list of ‘experimentalists’, it wasn’t always thus; the successes their style has achieved have to a certain extent masked the strangeness of their work when its smothering influence wasn’t quite so pervasive.


But oh! How pervasive it has become! Not only the rise of the airport, but the decline of the factory, the all-conquering supermarket and the vast swathes of shimmering glass that house the only people who make any money any more… These typologies and social changes have all been draped in the garb of British High-Tech. I’ve been trying to get my head around this success for a while now – any regular readers will know about my notion of Architectural Failure, and in this instance there’s an almost perfect example of the concept. To briefly explain: the prototypes of modernism in architecture, the iron-and-glass buildings, were primarily built for a number of functions; department stores, exhibitions, glass houses and railway stations. It’s no secret that the British High-Tech architects were deeply influenced by the Victorian ‘engineer-geniuses’ who constructed these proto-modernist edifices, and a strong claim for a direct lineage from Brunel (stood as ever in front of that massive chain) is often made. But this inheritance is problematic, for a number of reasons, not least of which is the utter banality of the contemporary spaces created by our current architects. Just one example; any of you living in London might have experienced Foster’s refurbishment of Spitalfields Market in East London. A more terrifyingly blank, spiritless and depressing space I have yet to experience; this is a version of the city fit only for the smiling ghosts of computer visualisations, a purgatory of Giraffe restaurants and Walkabout bars, ‘media walls’ and used-book stalls that only sell new books by Alain de Botton, all cast in the gloomy shadow of some of the most generic commercial offices you’ve ever seen. When you think that this is the best that humanity can offer itself after a million years of gasping struggle and agonisingly slow cultural development, well…

But that’s enough hyperbole. The only question I’m really grasping at is this – if, despite superficial appearances, British High-Tech is not the unproblematic cultural successor to the Iron-and-Glass buildings of the 19th century, then where does it come from? A couple of texts I read recently have greatly helped to frame this problem.


One of these texts is Architecture and the Special Relationship, by Murray Fraser and Joe Kerr, which makes a very convincing case that, far from being the unproblematic re-enactment of Victorian engineering, British Hi-Tech is born of a naïve dream of an America which never existed. The case hinges around the fact that Rogers and Foster met each other doing their post-grad studies at Yale in the early 1960s, becoming friends and then colleagues. Feeling liberated from the stifling economic, cultural and historical environment of Europe, they studied under Paul Rudolph and John Johansen, travelled around the USA visiting buildings (something they apparently never did while in Europe) and paid particularly close attention to the educational buildings of Ehrenkrantz, early examples of ‘system building’. The lightweight architecture and simplistic rhetoric of this American scene is in marked contrast to the agony, mysticism and weight that you can see developing in European modernism at the time.

Transplanted into the confident environment of the USA, it was here that functionalism began to gradually become solutionism – just take this quote from Rogers;

Returning to Britain to set up our first architectural practice (Team 4, comprising Norman and Wendy Foster, Su Rogers and myself) we realised the importance of the American experience where the architect is a genuine problem-solver rather than a mere stylist. We understood that the traditional European approach, constrained by cultural and formal conventions, could never meet the needs of a changing society that we were going to try to serve.

Basically, in a statement like this you have a complete and utter denial of the ideological aspect of architecture. I mean; if this attitude hadn’t been so damaging in the long term you could find it endearing, this ludicrously naïve faith in the benign nature of technology, this abdication of responsibility… One of the most pernicious things about the Solutionist narrative is the idea that by declaring something insignificant, it will just go away; but time and time again in architecture we see that the cheerfully optimistic dismissal of mere trifles such as ‘style’ or ‘culture’ or ‘form’ leads to vulgarity and re-appropriation. In a mission statement like that above, one can read all kinds of premonitions; not least the impending post-modern concern with meaning and communication.


But of course one cannot merely dismiss culture and form; there has never been an insignificant building. I’ve pointed out a few times before how postmodernist architects are equally capable of working with languages of technology, and in a very Benjaminian way I think it’s vital that if architecture is to improve at all as we move further into this horrible century, the architect will have to negotiate a new cultural relationship to building technology (but that argument is for a manifesto, not these shabby notes). Architecture and the Special Relationship locates the ‘fall’ of British High Tech in one of Team 4’s very first buildings; the Reliance Controls factory:

What was most distinctive – and novel – about Reliance Controls was the fact that the structural forces acting on the building were expressed by a series of slender (and soon widely imitated) steel diagonal cross-braces between the external columns on the two main facades […] The idea of diagonal tie bracing had its first outing over a century before, in Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace of 1851 […] In fact, only one bay on each of the long facades needed to be braced to stabilise the frame against lateral collapse, but Team 4 deliberately opted to have every bay braced, for aesthetic effect […] Tony Hunt was again the engineer, and he pointed out this structural anomaly – as well as others – but visual styling won the day. Hence the Reliance Controls scheme also marked the point at which the structural rationality proclaimed by High Tech architects lapsed into exaggeration and expressionism – i.e. at its very birth.

A number of things are going on here: Tony Hunt is mentioned - he represents a further aspect of British High Tech – the proliferation of excellent engineers in the UK in the 1960s. This is where British High Tech most resembles its 19th antecedents; almost purely in terms of the skill of the engineers involved. However, as I’ve argued before, from at least 1889 (the Eiffel Tower, the Galerie des Machines) engineers had effectively solved the problem of creating any space that human activity could possibly ever require. Although Arup, Hunt and others would definitely push the boundaries of their discipline, it would be mainly in terms of the integration of building systems rather than the limits of scale; a technological revolution half way towards the most recent digital one; revolutions that are less impressive architecturally with every recurrence. The fact that High-Tech could never induce the awe of the original large engineering projects is perhaps one of the reasons that it had to aestheticise itself from the beginning; in place of transcendent size it had to focus on elegance and rationality, both of which are firmly aesthetic considerations.

However, the British High Tech aesthetic is as much born of a melancholy sense that post-war Britain had been left behind by the USA, economically, technologically & culturally, as it is by anything else. Its ludicrous optimism is at least partially performative, born of rationing and the end of empire, as well as being an all-too-gullible internalisation of American innocence. In fact, one can easily see some early High-Tech as just another form of postmodernism, born of just as much internal conflict between stories of progress and crippling doubt as anything Pomo would throw up - Architecture and the Special Relationship certainly allows for this reading, although it doesn’t go as far as I do:

High Tech was at root a vision of what US post-war architecture could have become, indeed should have become, if only American architects hadn’t lost their nerve and succumbed to pessimism and post-modernism.

The focus on a language of efficiency is something that has worked both for and against Hi-Tech. Inasmuch as it was never really genuinely about efficiency, as previously argued, Hi-Tech was vulnerable to being undermined by the very principles it championed, applied faithfully this time. Architecture and the Special Relationship states that one of the reasons that Hi-Tech failed to get much built initially in America was because it was too bespoke and expensive. The very same American ‘can-do’ attitude that influenced ‘High Tech’ so much actually manifested itself in the speedier and cheaper working methods that would come to Britain (in pomo clothes) with the architects of the Canary Wharf development (SOM & KPF etc), and would eventually morph into Design & Build contracts and PFI. These streamlined and efficient legal structures have accelerated the descent of architects from their previous standing as socially-valued ‘Professional’ persons, towards a job that we might call ‘exterior designer’. This is not necessarily a negative development, but the contract revolution has also led to some of the most worthless buildings we’ve seen, mean bastard architecture, not even fit for the render-ghosts.

In Patrick Keiller’s film ‘The Dilapidated Dwelling’, he frequently compares the architecture of housing, reliant as it is on ‘wet trades’ (bricks & mortar, concrete), with the standardised, rapidly assembled architecture of retail, especially car-accessed retail. Keiller is very much a product of the time he was educated (mid-1960s), when a radical ‘lightweight’ attitude to architecture was in the air, all tension cables and neoprene gaskets. Foster and Rogers are of course the heroes of this, but there’s also Bucky Fuller and various others. But Keiller’s frequent lingering shots on Tesco stores really hit home; these generic, banal and (if you’re anything like me) depressing structures are like those characters from a Zizek anecdote; they obey the law far more strictly what the Big Other requires of them. A Tesco superstore, with its boring white structure, its boring white spaces and its boring bottom-line materials; this is the pre-fabricated High-Tech future. I’m deeply ambivalent about this situation – a superstore is genuinely the truth of the High-Tech rhetoric, one could even picture it as a socialist’s dream come true, but of course, it might well have been what was demanded, but it certainly wasn’t what was wanted. So, for the umpteenth time, we get to that old mantra of Dr. Lacan: “Don’t give me what I ask for, because that’s not it”.

To be continued…