archBOSTON ARCHIVE

[briv]

A review of the new Modernism exhibit at the V&A in London. Says the obvious, basically, but says it well.

For a real exhibition of modernism, skip the V&A and go to Manchester

The human misery of crumbling estates is the malign legacy of these aesthetic authoritarians and their machine fetish

Simon Jenkins
Friday April 7, 2006
The Guardian

Go at once. Take a young person to see the Modernism show at the V&A and feel fear. It is the most terrifying exhibition I have seen, because it is politics disguised as art. It opens with a word that says it all - utopia - and ends with an unspoken lie, that this nihilist ideology became merely a style and is no longer a threat. If only.

The modernists were the neocons of 20th-century art. They took a sound methodology - the questioning of conventional wisdom - and made it a dogma that brooked no opposition, even from reality. They turned a fad into a political programme, asserting "we" as sovereign over "them". Though Hitler closed the Bauhaus and Stalin loved Corinthian columns, the modernist utopia fuelled fascism and communism and bred a tradition of stylistic authority still alive today.

The V&A show is dazzling, a rare example of pictures, objects, film and photography all feeding on each other to drive home an effect. Its utopia is that of the Victorian past replaced by the clean and healthy community of the machine. People paint as machines (L?ger and Mondrian), dance as machines (Moscow ballet), work as machines (in mass-production factories) and parade as machines (in Riefenstahl's Olympia and Nuremberg). Modernists approached the past not as an aesthete does, respectfully building on it, but as an autocrat, destroying it and substituting his own values and rules.

The worst offenders, because they became the most powerful, were architects. When Gropius said a modern artist lived "in an era of dissolution without guidance", he was declaring not a truth but a narrowness of mind. Architecture was a machine clothed in aphorism: "less is more", "form follows function". It relied on iconic names such as constructivism and suprematism. Houses should have flat roofs and chairs should be spare and uncomfortable. Everything and everyone should be at right angles.

Only now do I realise that the tawdriness of so much modernist architecture was deliberate. The constructivists sacrificed art as they rejected history, as bourgeois: "Necessity would have to defeat beauty." Harsh manufactured materials such as glass and steel were "appropriate to achieve the communist expression of structure". Hence the bleak minimalism of Mies van der Rohe and the cruel brutalism of Le Corbusier, whose creations must have inspired more human misery than any in history.

The creator of the V&A show, Christopher Wilk, half acknowledges the moral dubiety of his topic. The modernist cult took hold most firmly in countries that capitulated easily to dictatorship: Russia, Germany, Italy and France. It was resisted in more resolutely democratic Britain and America. Wilk refers patronisingly to British critics who favoured an art that "gave pleasure, physical and intellectual comfort and a sense of place" as somehow missing the point, if not off the planet.

Yet the modernist coterie was tiny and peripheral. By far the most popular manifestation of interwar culture, the cinema, preferred either art deco or revivalist fantasy. When film addressed modernism it savaged it, in the work of Fritz Lang and Chaplin. As for the public, they couldn't care less. The Ideal Home Exhibition of 1934 was the only one at which Bauhaus, or moderne, was strongly pushed. A handful of show houses were erected in Metroland, and a few survive on the road to Heathrow. But the style died the death. In Britain modernism was, and is, a leaking roof.

British modernists, many of them refugees from the continent, gained a foothold only when they won the ear of government after the second world war, claiming that they could build a socialist utopia cheaper and faster than the free market. Wilk buys the old line that high-rise system building was "urgently needed to rehouse the population". The truth was that private builders could erect and sell high-density semis for ?400-?500. The cheapest modernist industrial housing, the two-bedroom "pre-fab", cost ?1,300 ex factory. The Ministry of Works was so proud of the design that it put one in the Tate. Today the system-built estates are crumbling, their concrete stained and rotting, while the despised "historicist" suburbs seem ready to last for ever.

Modernism was never a style. It was a rejection of style, because style required hard work and talent. It ignored the human craving for ornament and aesthetic reference, instead idolising the machine. Its apologists were reduced to seeing beauty in straight lines and ball bearings, an insult to both culture and engineering. The most attractive objects at the V&A show, for instance the pottery, utensils and cars, are not "modernist" but art deco derivatives.

The V&A does not ask why modernism so failed to capture the public imagination. I am sure part of the reason is that it offered politics after the great war a notional replacement for what had failed in the Flanders mud. But winning such patronage turned its head. It fell in love with a different "ism": social authoritarianism. Wherever modernists could find a sympathetic regime - be it Moscow, Berlin, Paris or Manchester city council - they mimicked Albert Speer.

In the early 1970s I witnessed the clearance of Manchester's Hulme district to make way for Lewis Womersley's "Corbusian" slabs and crescents. Thousands who had survived Hitler's bombs now saw their homes destroyed by their home-grown gauleiters. They were herded into community centres for transportation to Skelmersdale and elsewhere. It was like a wartime displaced-persons camp, awash with tears. The resulting slabs have since been demolished as uninhabitable. Small wonder the British are none too keen on modernism. For most the word meant a very different experience from that of a South Kensington glamour exhibition.

Yet such Olympian attitudes live on in the giant glass erections planned for central London and in Yvette Cooper's proposal to demolish 150,000 Midlands and north country terrace houses. Even today, British architecture and its cheerleaders are stuck in the modernist time-warp, unable to handle historic reference in a building. Virtually every non-residential block that comes forward for planning permission is in glass and steel, a Miesian pastiche shaped as a box, shard or vegetable, devoid of adornment or charm.

British architecture cannot design streets or roofs or doors because its colleges, still ruled by nervous modernists, dare not teach their pupils how. In this the Prince of Wales was right. As a result, the present explosion of private estates across the south-east of England has, as in the 1930s, tragically turned its back on formal architecture. It has responded to the market's craving for neo-Tudor and neo-Georgian, for the architecture of Bilbo Baggins and Thomas Kinkade. This is modernism's nemesis.

The happiest valediction on the V&A show is that at least peoples across Europe rejected all it celebrates. They denied modernism's odious utopianism. They refused to live as they were ordered. They hated glass buildings. They did not buy abstract art or listen to musique concr?te. They refused to do mass callisthenics. They turned their back on "less is more" in favour of a humane environment and courtesy towards the past. They are doing so to this day. But think of the damage that was done.

[Ron Newman]

There's much to agree with here .... and yet ....

isn't the John Hancock Tower a building that most Bostonians love? isn't it on half the tourist postcards that are sold here?

A glass building can be a thing of beauty.

[Ron Newman]

And as if on cue, the Globe today publishes a paean to the Hancock Tower. I'll paste it in here, as a sort of rebuttal to the Guardian. This could produce a useful discussion.

Our signature tower

The dean of MIT's architecture school called it 'a monster,' but 30 years later, the Hancock Tower has become an icon and an emblem of the city

By Leland de la Durantaye | May 14, 2006

SKYSCRAPERS FIRST APPEARED in the 1880s, in the wake of the Chicago fire, and from the beginning, architects fought about whether they should evoke classic forms hearkening to the architectural past or modern ones pointing the way to a dynamic future. The most innovative inheritor of the modernist ideal was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In 1921, he submitted a design for a shockingly angular ''Kristall" building to a competition in Berlin. In typically radical fashion, Mies envisioned a building whose exterior walls would be made of glass alone, with a steel infrastructure freeing the exterior walls of having to serve a load-bearing function. His gleaming, sharp-edged design, however, was not chosen, and the architectural world would have to wait more than 50 years for the all-glass tower to have its first true test.

That test would happen in an unlikely place: Boston's Copley Square. At the time Mies submitted his design to the Berlin competition, it was impossible to build-because of the glass. Even if the steel infrastructure held (an unproven hypothesis at the time), no existing technology would have been able to keep the building cool enough in the summer or warm enough in the winter for human habitation. But by the time Henry Cobb sat down to his drafting table in 1967 to design what would become the John Hancock Tower, things had changed-and it was precisely Mies's quintessentially modernist form that he chose.

The choice, however, was as much motivated by site-specific realities as modernist ideals. Cobb needed to design a tower that would not feel like one-a tall building that would not give the sense that it was towering over the classic constructions in its immediate vicinity. His sleek, soaring design was conceived of not as a means of stealing the spotlight, but of respecting and reflecting the tower's surroundings. It would present its slimmest facade to Copley Square, thereby mitigating a sense of it dominating the open space at its feet, and the tower was to be further ''dematerialized" through its reflective glass. Yet it was precisely this respectful, reflective approach that was to lead to the near destruction of Cobb's career and to the strangest stormy night in Boston's history, one that would send more than 65 500-pound glass windows hurtling through the darkness.

. . .

Planning for the 60-story Hancock Tower, 30 years old this year, began under peaceful skies. Robert Slater, head of the Hancock Insurance Co. in the mid-60s, envisioned grand things for the company-things he saw as not in line with the firm's squat headquarters on Copley Square. In 1963, Hancock's rival, Prudential, had built a skyscraper that now towered over them. Slater felt that something needed to be done and that that something was a skyscraper.

Slater and his associates turned to Pei & Partners. The firm had already begun its rise to prominence, though it had yet to undertake the projects that would make its name: the Kennedy Library and additions to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Louvre. Over-extended with constructions elsewhere, I.M. Pei delegated chief architect duties to Henry Cobb, a man with a kindred architectural vision and deep family ties to the city. He described the first planning meetings as ''like a love-in." Like many loves, however, it was to endure much.

The site chosen would put the tower alongside such icons of classical American architecture as Trinity Church, the Plaza Hotel, and the Renaissance revival Boston Public Library. For many of the day, architects included, building a skyscraper on Copley Square represented a threat to the city's heritage. The dean of MIT's School of Architecture called the proposed building ''a monster." The Boston Society of Architects filed a plea to block construction that made its way to the American Institute of Architects. Institutional resistance only ended with the judgment handed down by the head of the Boston Redevelopment Agency, Edward J. Logue, who tersely remarked, ''if you don't understand a company wanting to go taller, you don't understand life."

When ground for the tower was broken in August 1968, it only stoked the public's fears. Before building high you must dig low, and the retaining walls necessary for the tower's foundation gave way under the pressure of shifting landfill, sending a shock wave round Copley Square. Windows broke and walls cracked in the Plaza Hotel, steam and power lines ruptured, and an entire transept of Trinity Church came within inches of collapsing. A less auspicious beginning was scarcely to have been imagined.

But this, of course, was merely a prelude to an even worse, and far stranger, calamity. On the night of Jan. 20, 1973, a storm hit Boston. Winds upwards of 75 miles an hour whirled around the upper floors of the skyscraper, then still under construction, and panes of glass began to fall from the sky. Miraculously, no one was hurt, but after the storm had passed, all 10,334 windows had to be boarded up, leading local wits to christen the tower the largest plywood building in the world.

The materials and know-how necessary to realize Mies's modernist ideal had proven elusive still. A special commission was formed to investigate what caused the windows to come loose, a scale model of the tower was built at MIT, and test after test was conducted to solve the mystery-which the commission did. Thanks to a cascade of lawsuits set in motion by the disaster, however, the commission's work remained a secret for decades. In 1995, the Globe's Robert Campbell finally got to the bottom of the story. Many had suspected that the windows had been blown or sucked out as a result of ''hot spots" created by the extreme angles of the tower. The real reason was simpler. The reflective coating on the glass prevented it from expanding and contracting and thereby from absorbing the forces brought to bear on it.

Plywood was eventually replaced by new glass and construction continued, though the unique design had yet to pose its final problem. In 1975, as the tower seemed to be nearing completion, a special engineer was flown in from Zurich to inspect the building. The good news was that the new windows were in no danger of falling out. The bad news was that the entire building was now in danger of falling over.

Like all skyscrapers, the Hancock Tower swayed from side to side, but a special damper had been designed to counteract its effects. There was one effect, however, it could not prevent-a modernist one. Because of the tower's extreme angles, in certain extraordinary but entirely possible wind conditions (like the ones that had sent the windows flying), the whole building might be brought down. A quiet but massive reinforcing of the building's infrastructure was laboriously undertaken-one an engineer on the job likened it to ''trying to put your socks on after your shoes." Finally, in 1976, with this last bit of engineering effected (this time without lawsuits as the building violated no code-though it led to its revision), the building was, at last, complete.

. . .

When the Eiffel Tower was first constructed, the better part of Paris denounced it. The French writer Guy de Maupassant so deplored how it marred Paris's skyline that he saw no other remedy than to lunch in its restaurant every day, as it was the only point in the city from which it was not visible. Maupassant never really changed his mind, but Paris did, and today the Eiffel Tower has become an icon and emblem of the city.

Things stand no differently with our modernist tower. Whether you use it to find which way is north; whether you stand at the corner of Dartmouth and Boylston and experience its sleek, dizzyingly narrow profile; whether you see it aglow in the setting sun from the Red Line crossing the Charles or shrouded in fog from the South End; whether you drive up Clarendon and see the images of downtown Boston gathered and reflected in its surface, or see from the far side of the bay the endlessly changing sea-greens, blues, and grays pass over its smooth surface, what you see is an integral part of Boston old and new. Modern though it may be, it is a building that changes with its city, that respects and reflects its environment, as Cobb hoped it would.

In a short story, John Updike has a narrator cross Copley Square. As he looks up at the Hancock Tower, he concludes, ''I reflect that all art, all beauty, is reflection."

Leland de la Durantaye is an assistant professor of English and American literature and language at Harvard University.

[Scott]