willofmemory

Please redirect to: www.willofmemory.com

Saturday 20 June 2009
The transfer to www.willofmemory.com is complete.

Thursday 11th June, 2009
The transfer to the website, at www.willofmemory.com, is nearing completion.

Wednesday May 13 2009
After much delay, I have now begun transferring the blog onto the website.

Sunday 25 January 2009
The contents of this blog are now being transferred, slowly, to a website. In particular, this will help readers to navigate through the material. Please feel free to take a look.

The following is a model summarising a chronology of the pathological course of post-traumatic stress disorder as applied to the aftermath of the First World War.

5 May 2008
I will be updating the entries over the coming months with some extra material, and will note these additions here.
Entry 66: Image of Mies' black slab from 1919 added.

15 May
Entry 20: Symptoms of a possible urban disorder - 'Compulsive expression' added.

23 April 2008:
To help navigate round the blogsite (particularly since it appears in reverse order), I am adding a short table of contents here.

Blog
number
1           Foreword
2           Main proposition
3           An example - Euston
4           Background MSc thesis and main architectural sites
5/6        Examples - Lillington Gardens and Marble Arch
7           Starting point
8           1958-1965: Cultural context outside architecture
9           The path of memory - Using psychology of trauma to look at architecture
10         Summary of time sequence through 20th century
11         Validity of framework, and the importance of the 'ugly' in architecture
12         A way of seeing - projections in buildings
13         What I see - symptoms and landscapes

14-21    Symptoms of a possible urban disorder

22         From general psychology to a diagnosis
23         The Modern Movement and the particular diagnosis
24         The primacy of effect over intention
25         Mirror - Marquess Road estate
26         Seeing the art of memory in architecture

27-33   Mirror images of the trenches and Sixties estates, part 1

34         Faith and architecture
35         From faith to memory
36         The unknown soldier
37         Journey's end
38         A new Jerusalem

39-49   Mirror images, part 2
[Including Pimlico School and Hitler Bunker, Blog No. 48]

50         Pause: A synopsis, and summary of Sixties cultural context

51         Trench landscapes 1: Alexandra Road estate, Kilburn
52-56    Trench landscapes 2: Robin Hood Gardens estate, Poplar
57-59    Trench landscapes 3: Park Lane pedestrian system
60-61    Trench landscapes 4: Lillington Gardens estate, Pimlico
63          Trench landscapes 5: King's Square, Gloucester

64         Unreal City
65         They think it's all over
66         The will to accept
67         The death of memory (Euston)
68         The rebirth of history
69         Echoes of war
70:        Concluding comments
71:        Contents
72:        Additions
73:        Model
74:        Transfer to website

Tuesday 19 February 2008

I have now uploaded the basic structure of the argument concerning the First World War and Sixties architecture and a broad selection of the supporting material. I will be editing and adding to this material between now and the summer of 2008 before taking it further. Please feel free to leave your comments on the entries so far. If you prefer to, you can email your comments to rorcal40@hotmail.com

Rory O'Callaghan

Boomboom, Boomboom, Boomboom (1)

Boom, Boom, Boom (2)

Boom, boom, boom, boom
Boom, boom, boom
Boom, boom, boom, boom
Boom, boom, boom (3)

(1) Tristan Tzara, Dadaist manifesto, 1918 (Dada was an art movement inspired by the horror of war).
(2) Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 1977 (His encapsulation of the end of Modernism by describing the demolition, in 1972, of the Pruitt-Igoe Project apartments in St Louis, a poverty-stricken, Modernist - and prize-winning - scheme built in 1951).
(3) Baldrick's poem The German Guns, recited in Blackadder Goes Forth, 1989, before the entire cast go over the top).

In 1931, Salvador Dali produced The Persistence of Memory in which slithery clocks drape themselves over surrealist forms. In the chronology I have suggested, this marks the moment of subduction, when conscious mourning failed, the Great Depression set in, and the subconscious began its journey towards reconstitution of itself through memory. It was as if time was melting away.

Six years later in 1937, as purist White Walls gave way to reconstitutive bare concrete, the English poet WH Auden commanded:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead.

And for the next 30 years, it is as if, in terms of creativity, time had stopped, and memory, outside of time, took centre stage.

By 1966, memory had secured its triumph. In architectural terms, it found this in the re-expression of brutalist images in the urban forms of the day.

Within the year, the great clock on the tower of St Pancras, so symbolic of Victorian time, also, finally, acquiesced. It broke down, and stopped. No one felt motivated to restart it.

However, once this melancholic journey had been completed, time could be reborn. And, in 1992, time retakes its central position in the City, in the form of an over-sized sundial set into the ground above the Tower Hill Tube station extension, itself a brutalist remnant from the early 1970s.

With memory purged, there is place enough for time.

And, for the first time in almost a century, urban forms rooted in florid historicist reference reappear. Mirroring the utopic, almost pre-lapsarian, visions for Hampstead Garden Suburb in 1906, Quinlan Terry added some villas in the early 1990s to the Outer Circle of Regent's Park:

The Unreal City of Memory had been completed, the Ideal City of History could be resurrected.

If the popularity of the black slab represents the last phase of the Modern Movement, a final, mournful expression to follow the catharsis of new brutalism, it follows that memory as motivation should fade, and that history should re-emerge as inspiration. The emergence of the Post-Modern in the early 1980s seems to represent this development, with its self-conscious, almost apologetic, application of historicist decorative motifs.

Linking these two phases are transitional buildings such as at Euston Station, which I mentioned in one of the earliest entries. It can now be seen more fully as a dense example of memorial and historical layering.

Design and construction of the complex lasted from 1968 to 1979. The squat towers, designed by Richard Seifert and Partners, are straightforward exemplars of the headstone-like black slab.

The linking, low-level block, though similar in material and colouring, is different in one aspect: a tentative layer of decoration has been added. It takes the form of deep mullions and lintels, whose front faces are silvery-white, jutting out from the windows; they serve little function save to provide a contrasting relief to the sheer towers. They could be said to provide shade for the offices, but if so, why have they not been used on the towers?

However, if looked at separately from the buildings, this mullion-and-lintel decoration forms a pattern of its own, a sort of noughts-and-crosses grid, or maybe a series of crosses.

Consider now the position of this curious pattern. It serves as a backdrop to the Euston First World War memorial, erected on this site in 1928, towards the end of the mourning phase after the war.

Given the juxtaposition, it is  worth considering that the two are linked semantically as well as by location. For it seems intriguing that the dead soldiers commemorated by the memorial were often buried under simple white crosses - and identical to those which have been added as decoration to the otherwise plain office block. Could it be that, in a final act of commemoration, the graves in which the soldiers were buried throughout north-eastern France, have also been brought home?

With this possibility in mind, and it is only a possibility, it is now worth changing perspective and stepping physically backwards, back towards the Euston Road, back between the entrance pavilions to the station. These are the only remnants of the Victorian station that were retained after it was demolished in 1962-3.

The date is significant. 1962-3 was at the height of the new brutalism and the passion for ‘comprehensive redevelopment’, the years of Britten’s War Requiem, of AJP Taylor’s First World War, of Joan Littlewood's Oh What a Lovely War. Euston station, a powerhouse of the Victorian age but representing a discredited history, was swept away with such enthusiasm that even its great classical arch could not be saved. As it transpired, the arch turned out not to have been in the way of any redevelopment.

Save for the two pavilions, it was the end of history at the site. Why were these inoffensive relics saved and not the iconic arch? Rather than the architecture, it is worth considering the inscriptions on the cornerstones. These are the names of towns and cities to which trains travelled from Euston (and other stations). They are also the same towns and cities from which Lord Kitchener drew off his Pals’ Battalions to man his new armies in readiness for the battle of the Somme.

Now the three elements can be seen in conjunction, while also considering that no other buildings have been added to this 100 metre deep and 200 metre wide space in the city. Could it be that this is the final expression of the will of memory? Here, at a place once so representative of the power of the 19th century, we are presented with a tableau of the 20th century: in front, two relics of the past which only survived because they bore the names of cities from which mourning soldiers would come, behind them those same soldiers locked in a timeless sculptural present, standing in commemoration to a war which ended history - represented by an obelisk topped out with a white cross - whose victims lie buried in another country beneath ranks of white crosses which are identical to those, in the final layer here, in the darkened background.

Through no conscious intention, rather through the force of subconscious will, could this be the retelling in visual form of the story of Britain’s experience in 1914-18 and its long aftermath? Could this be where memory is laid to rest?

And is this the source of memory?

The sequence of phases that followed the armistice of 1918 is summarised below. It uses six sub-divisions of psychological states based on a simplified version of the phases of post-traumatic stress disorder. In broad societal terms, they represent a period of around 60 years when memory, rather than history, had priority as a motivating factor in cultural expression. These six phases comprise two groups of three, conscious followed by subconscious.

Conscious mourning
(1) The will to forget: 1918-20 (eg, The Cenotaph)
(2) The will to remember: 1920-29 (eg, Jagger's Artillery memorial)
(3) The will to accept: 1929-30 (eg, Ideal House, Gt Marlborough St)
Subconscious mourning
(4) The will to forget: 1930s (white walls)
(5) The will to remember: 1940s-1965 (grey concrete, red brick)
(6) The will to accept: 1965-1980 (black steel, marble)

If this is the case, it could be predicted that, following the catharsis of July 1966, a period of sombre acceptance would follow, and this would likely be evidenced in architectural form with black slabs or towers of final mourning. In physiological terms, our gazing eyes, responsive to light levels, would be ready to open wider to, perhaps accept, the black surfaces, rather than close down when faced with the glare of white walls, or become engaged by grey concrete and mud-brown brick as prelude to introspective discourse.

And, as predicted, a passion for black slabs becomes visible.

To pause briefly, this form was not new. Malevich's Black Square dates as far back as 1914, and Mies van der Rohe (in letters to his mother, he said he had been traumatised by the war) envisioned a black slab in 1919.

He finally made it in the 1950s with the Seagram Tower in New York. Further, in the early 1960s several minimalist sculptors pared down form towards black, geometrically rigid shapes. But it was only at the end of the decade that the black slab found popular expression in architecture.

The passion can be sensed most readily in a film of the time, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, made in 1969. The film is a voyage through time, memorial, historical, imaginative, traversing past, present and future, but it ends with a man alone, in bed, pondering a black slab, enigmatic and ever-present.

And if you scanned across the skyscape of London of the time, the view would also provide evidence of the same passion:

The need to project the Western Front as memory-made-real across the London landscape seems to have reached a climax in the first half of the 1960s. The evidence of the five examples in the preceding entries serves to indicate this.

Then, around the middle of the decade, a turning point was reached. In architectural terms alone this moment is often narrowed down to the collapse of the Ronan Point tower block in 1968, when five people were killed. However, in broader cultural terms I would place the moment a little earlier, back to a single month, that of July 1966.

The mood had been set a couple of months before when, on 15th April, Time magazine dubbed the capital Swinging London. It was referring to the hedonistic mood of the times but, instead of seeing this solely as a positive expression of pent-up emotion and creativity, the moment can be seen as half of a more bivalent process which had a negative aspect rooted in the experience of Britain half a century before. This is reflected in architecture in the contrast between the futuristic plans of the Archigram group with their Plug-in City and the gloomy trench-alleyways of Darbourne & Darke's Lillington Gardens. According to this perspective, mid-Sixties London can be seen as a more bipolar place, swinging almost manically from enthusiasm for the present and a bright future, to lament for that same present and its lingering past.

To narrow down the moment, on the 1st of July 1966, commemorations were held for the 50th anniversary of the first day of the Somme, when 20,000 men were killed in the fight against German forces, the worst day in the history of the British Army. Many of those at the memorial services were survivors. All through July further acts of commemoration were held to mark other dreadful days and losses on the Somme.

Coincidentally, July 1966 was also the month of the football World Cup, the only time the competition has been held in Britain. And at the end of the month, on the 30th of July, England played, of all teams, West Germany in the final at Wembley. England won 4-2 and almost everyone in the country was jubilant. Famously, the final words of television commentary were: ‘They think it’s all over. It is now.’

Past, present and future seem to have combined in a moment of great tension. The 1st of July on the Somme in 1916 was often recollected for its footballing heroes, lads who chased a football across no-man’s-land into the storm of steel launched at them from German machine-guns. Exactly fifty years later, even as the memorial bells tolled - what passing bells - the last day of July became famous for its footballing heroes, lads who chased a football across the no-man’s-land of London's turf, gazed upon by thousands, to finally break through the defences of German opposition. Even that victory, in its last-gasp, extra-time excitement seemed to mirror the final victory of 1918.

The number one hit single on the last day of July, 1966, was by Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds: Out of time.

July 1966 seems to mark the point at which people in Britain accepted that the past could be left behind. Through historical studies and books, the war had been reassessed and pent-up anger released; through music, wrenching grief had been voiced; through architecture, the trenches had been rebuilt, gazed upon and lived in; and through the metaphorical world of football, victory, of sorts, had been achieved.

Around the same time, Churchill, architect of so much of the First World War, died. Le Corbusier and Mies, architects of the Modern Movement, soon followed. In 1968, Ronan Point fell. They think it's all over. It is now.