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:
