On The Alienation Effect
Certainly out of my depth with regards to this talk, but I did my best! I happened upon the event somewhat randomly--I was looking at Carey Young’s CV and saw she had done a show at the Architecture Foundation quite early in her career. I thought this was an interesting one, particularly when set in the context of her later work with law. Perhaps there is something more here about infrastructure and legal structure and how both of these things can be adopted as an artistic medium, or at least manipulated for the purpose of a public-facing work.
Anyway, the Architecture Foundation was hosting Owen Hatherley the next day and I thought I ought to check it out.
Hatherley, joined later by Otto Smith, was set to discuss how Eastern European immigrants impacted the urban landscape of the UK. He discussed English modernism (or a lack thereof) preceding this mass immigration event, looking at references to Edinburgh, as well as the utopian Garden city.
I couldn’t help thinking of the pages of Antic Hay where Huxley writes, through the words of the elder Gumbril, a scorching condemnation of British urban planning; I suppose this book must’ve been written around the same time as the earliest Eastern architects were taking refuge in the city. Huxley ekphrasizes the model his zealot has constructed of Christopher Wren's post-fire plan for London, which, the paternal figure laments, was tragically nixed by the city: something along the lines of how the idiot Brits preferred to keep their shanty-like state of confusing roads and wonky zoning, shirking perfection—despite its close-at-handyness—for the comfort of tradition. (Perhaps also relevant here, the lines of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana: how the British never planned a city in their itinerary of colonization, but rather just waited for it to spring up around them.) (Though poetic, there I can’t help but feel there’s something almost physiognomical about deducing a nation’s zeitgeist through their architecture…)
Hatherley, it seemed to me, understood Modern Architecture to be designed most prominently by the objective of building worker's housing. This seems so obvious now, but I never connected that. He discussed the origins of transnational (UK-Continental European) modernism, citing Studio Magazine, a British art and design magazine founded in 1893 by Charles Holme, which proved highly influential for British modernism. The magazine published Bruno Taut's book Modern Architecture in 1929. Taut was a German architect and member of the Deutscher Wekbund along with Walter Gropius, Peter Behrens, Mies van der Rohe.
In his "Five Points" (1929), Taut defines modern architecture in the following manner:
utilitarian, "first and foremost"
materially utilitarian, also
related to aesthetic pleasure through
direct relationship of structure to purpose
"natural qualities of the material"
"elegance" (?) "of construction"
precise in the usefulness of every element
"Everything that functions well, looks well. We simply do not believe that anything can look unsightly and yet function well."
neither demarcated nor isolated
"Thus repetition is not undesirable — on the contrary it is the most important factor in art."
"The aim of Architecture is the creation of the perfect, and therefore also beautiful, efficiency," he caps his manifesto.
Hatherley suggested a certain compromise which many Eastern European--and avowed progressive--architects settled into upon their arrival in London. This compromise wasn't necessarily ideological, but practical; something of fabrication, maybe. He referenced Gropius' Impington Village College building in Cambridgeshire as an example of a Modernist architect "adopting Brit", as well as Berthold Lubetkin, a rumored red army soldier who came to London to build single family terraced housing and collect staffordshire dogs. He indicated the progression in works of Siegfried Charoux, an Austrian-born sculptor, after his study at the R.A.: though the work remained realist, Hatherley pointed out, there was a certain domestication which took place.
Hatherley positioned Jewish architect Erich Mendelsohn as a foil to these Britified Eastern Architects, referencing his designs for the De La Warr Pavillion and the Trade Union of Metal Workers.
Hatherley examined the émigré contributions of Eugene Rosenberg, a Czech-born architect and co-founder of Yorke Rosenberg Mardall (YRM), who helped shape postwar British modernism with a strong emphasis on hospital and institutional design. He also noted the contributions of Egon Riss, another Viennese émigré and a student of Josef Hoffmann. Riss was famous for his design of the Isokon building’s innovative plywood furniture, a critical component of Britain’s early modernist domestic interiors.
Elizabeth (“El”) Baumfeld/Briggs, trained at the Bauhaus and contributed to the dissemination of European modernist ideals in Britain through both design and writing. Alongside them, Hatherley referenced Colin Rowe, a British architectural historian whose writings--especially "Collage City" (with Fred Koetter)--critiqued the functionalist rigidity of modernism and proposed a more contextual and historically layered urbanism. James Stirling and Leon Krier, often grouped with Rowe in the postmodern reaction, were also discussed as examples of architects who were unrelentingly modern and monumental.
I was interested also in Hatherley's discussion of architect Thomas Ford, whom he noted for his contributions in creating a distinctly non-Gothic style, and applying this to the restoration of bombed-out Churches after the second World War. (Pace--or perhaps hop?--Phyllida Barlow and her simulations of the original ruins...) Ford's work seems simple and straight and extremely unornamented; he is noted as a disciple of Soane, though his work seems to lack some of the grace of Soane's (although perhaps here I should heed Taut's warning that modern architecture can't be judged by a facade...).
The shadow of WWII bombings underscored Hatherley's whole discussion of British post-war architecture: answering the question of "why Britain was so far behind, architecturally speaking," Hatherley declared that the UK's architectural irrelevance was due to "winning the Second World War." In part, he theorized, victory had led British people to become complacent in industry due to the feeling of affirmed greatness; but more dynamically, Hatherley read shellshock between the bricks of British modernist architecture: taking the Southampton Civic Centre as an example, he describes how these buildings are "so small, even if they're monumental".
Hatherley also drew connections to E.F. Schumacher, the German-born British economist best known for Small Is Beautiful (1973), whose advocacy for human-scaled, decentralized, and ecologically sensitive development influenced architectural thinkers seeking alternatives to both modernist gigantism and neoliberal privatization.
Hatherley also examined the emergence of the Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education), developed in Vienna by Otto Neurath, Marie Neurath, and Gerd Arntz. Isotype used standardized pictograms to convey complex statistical and social information visually, which profoundly influenced modern information design and its application in urban planning, particularly in public housing and civic education campaigns.
Special attention was given to Ruth Glass, the German-British sociologist who in her mid-20th-century essay on London housing coined the term “gentrification”, though in a different sense than today's usage. Glass described how Churchill Gardens, a postwar social housing estate in Pimlico, was so successful in its design, amenities, and urban coherence that it inadvertently raised the socioeconomic status of the surrounding area. Her work foregrounded questions about the unintended consequences of high-quality public architecture, and remains foundational in urban sociology.
Hatherley, giving as an example her argument that there is an ideal number of people in a city, noted Glass's conviction regarding the significance of quantitative and statistical ideals in the process of urban planning. In this way she seems to fit into a camp of rationalist urbanism, sitting alongside Howard's model of the Garden city, Taut's five points, Wren's reconstruction of London, or even Leonardo da Vinci's perfect proportions (Hatherley referenced, in his (scourging!) discussion of Penguin publishing's origins, a da Vinci essay on the proportions of a perfect book. I could not find this online, but I am definitely curious! The Vitruvian Man drawings came up a fair amount in Philip Bealsey's talk as well, though in quite a different light...). There is something quite Roman (probably quite Vitruvian, actually) about this proportionality; Platonic with an industrial spirit.
It feels ironic to me that such focus on utility, which seems to define modernist architecture, has been inscribed in the tomes as something rather--even too--idealistic. Utilitarian optimization becomes rejected due to its undermining of tradition, perhaps. Though xenophobia is never so far, as Hatherley's discussion of the antisemitic reactions he received in the comments on his book reminded ("The Jews ruined our country"). Straightforward streets and central green spaces are read as the imposition of an outsider, rejected as an offense to British national culture, tradition, and history. Huxley's image of the unrealized Wren plan finds its modern parallel in the sidelining of the Leicester Plan, or the unbuilt cooperative village in Nottingham. These stories, as Hatherley told them, struck me in the same tragic register as the unfulfilled promise of the Tatlin Tower.
I am curious about a capitalist or strictly Western parallel to these Eastern treatises on Modern Architecture as the infrastructure of the worker. I cannot help but think of the "Michelin City" of Clermont-Ferrand, or Henry Ford's fabulously ridiculous con
struction of Fordlandia, a pre-fab town for workers involved in producing rubber in the Amazon. What is our 21st century iteration of this vein of worker's housing? Some mix of the full-service glass-and-steel highrises popping up to house investment bankers working 100 hours a week and the roaming cities of Amazon workers depicted in Nomadland?
At the end of the lecture, I had the chance to ask Hatherley a completely uninformed--and likely quite rambling--question, which probably conveyed my utter lack of architectural knowledge or familiarity with his subject matter. In my question, I tried to clumsily combine my curiosity about materiality with a more broad question about alienation, which I suppose I tend to carry with me, and which probably led me to this talk in the first place. Rather graciously, he said he hadn't thought much about how the materials (glass or concrete) relate to modern concepts of alienation. He went on, though, to discuss notions of defamiliarization within modern concepts of estrangement. He declared that there was actually an avoidance of materiality: modern artists would build with bricks and try to make them look like concrete. This is so curious and so revealing: such an emphasis on the importance of the material without any acknowledgement or appreciation for what it is. There's probably some sort of political metaphor here, but I won't be the one to say it!
