willofmemory

74: Transfer to website

2009-01-25T20:37:37+01:00

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.

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73: Model

2008-07-04T15:01:44+02:00

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.

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72: Additions

2008-05-05T11:27:09+02:00

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.

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71: Summary of contents

2008-04-23T15:44:10+02:00

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

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70: Concluding comments

2008-02-19T15:34:57+01:00

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

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69: Echoes of war

2008-02-14T23:13:25+01:00

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).

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68: The rebirth of history

2008-01-31T14:22:41+01:00

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.

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67: The death of memory

2008-01-28T16:52:48+01:00

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?

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66: The will to accept

2008-01-24T16:31:26+01:00

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:

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65: They think it's all over

2008-01-21T14:30:52+01:00

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.

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64: Unreal City

2008-01-18T16:22:36+01:00

The preceding entries are the sum of the evidence as I have recorded, collated and structured it up to now in terms of establishing a link between the British experience of the First World War and the architecture of the 1960s. As I mentioned earlier on, I see the latter decade as the main expressive phase along a complex path that lasted for almost six decades - and that was subconscious in its second half. The object of that path was to deal with trautmatising experience.

To sum up my understanding of this reconstructive phase, I see the unreal city of the Western Front, with all its ironic streetnames and parodic homely reminders, as having been rebuilt in the 1960s.

Expanding on this: in its scarcely imaginable, unreal way, the Western Front had been only too real. So, when the soldiers returned to the London of the Twenties, the reality of the great capital was hollow, a place without memory; all that was real for them, as for TS Eliot, was the Unreal City, the Wasteland, the city without history. The world had been turned upside down: the Front was real, the city unreal. Only when this was apprehended could the past be left behind. Only when the actuality of hideous memory was made real again, in all its unreality, could it be accepted as an aberration in time, a moment that could be left behind.

Architects were unwittingly charged with making real the memorial reality of the Front by building homes fit for heroes. This grew into the moment of the Modern Movementwhen its leading role in the Thirties was characterised by a passion that was almost missionary. Its principles and rationalisations were much more malleable than it let on, but it was driven by a commonly felt need to facilitate the emergence of memory that was urging expression.

If seen like this, the Modern Movement architects were as much psychoanalysts as builders. Their underlying motivating resources came not only from their own imaginations, but from the images held by others. Behind the tabula rasa of their drawing boards and their white walls were designs that demanded realisation. The tabula rasa, the white walls, did not rest against solid ground but against memories, often others' memories, which demanded projection through the blinding screen of the drawing board and which the architect could guide to realisation. Like good analysts they picked up on their clients’ needs, their neuroses, their memories; then they allowed the buildings to tell their story.

Seen in this light, ‘Sixties architecture’ is an astonishing success. The almost compulsive drive to untie the Gordian knot of having to build homes as trenches, with public approval, achieved its goal.

Perhaps TS Eliot’s Wasteland can be seen as prophecy: not only was London an unreal city to soldiers after the war, but it became an unreal city for its inhabitants in the early 1960s. They were living in the unreal city of the trenches, brought home.

With perhaps some inevitability, it came to be inhabited by the homeless.

War dead in a German trench Lillington Gardens, 1962, photo 2004

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63: Landscapes of war 5 - Gloucester, Kings Square

2008-01-16T17:23:10+01:00

I have concentrated so far on sites in London, but I would briefly like to show that perceiving projected memories of the Western Front in the brutalist architecture of the Sixties need not be confined to the capital. In fact, once you start seeing parallels, it can be quite difficult not to feel a strange frisson at the sight of uncannily intrusive concrete ramparts or red-brick cuttings.

As an example, I have chosen Gloucester, a medieval city complemented by 18th century developments around the inland docks. The exception to this well-built urban patchwork is Kings Square, the commercial heart, which was redeveloped in the mid-1960s. Its most prominent feature is an astonishly elaborate ramp system leading to nothing more than public conveniences and a subterranean passageway out of the square to the bus station. The passageway has been closed off.

The points to remember are that this insertion in the urban fabric is almost wholly unnecessary, and that, being within the square, it becomes an object for gazing at from all the buildings around.

It was built in 1967, just as the peak of commemoration for the war was passing, and 50 years exactly since Passchendaele:

As with so many of these site, Kings Square is about to be redeveloped again. Soon, this site of memory made real will become a memory itself.

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62: Landscapes of war 4 - Lillington Gardens 3

2008-01-14T17:17:52+01:00

As with the previous two examples, the Lillington Gardens estate in Pimlico has an evocative similarity with a trench map:

Thiepval trench system, Somme Lillington Gardens, phase 1

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61: Landscapes of war 4 - Lillington Gardens 2

2008-01-12T20:22:32+01:00

The Lillington Gardens estate in Pimlico feels like a caveman's troglodyte world, full of dark passageways and tunnels leading round unknowable corners.

A, particularly neat, German trench Lillington Gardens, public alleyway

All that seems to be missing from the photo on the right below is the soldiers lounging.

Night watch in the Ypres Salient Lillington Gardens

The point to make about the trench-alleyway in this picture on the right below is how unnecessary it is, apart from mirroring the Bayou. Steps leading directly down to the footpath would have sufficed and would not have set up the divisive alternative to the street.

Bayou de la Mort, Ypres Lillington Gardens

The winding, defensive nature of trenches is brought out in these two images, fifty years apart. (The corners were inserted in the line of the trench to muffle blast forces from exploding shells.)

Sanctuary Wood, Ypres Lillington Gardens

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60: Landscapes of war 4 - Lillington Gardens 1

2008-01-11T15:45:16+01:00

The Lillington Gardens estate in Pimlico is a dense, cloistered development that, for me, resonates with the quasi-mythical landscape of the Western Front of 50 years previously.

It was designed by John Darbourne and Geoffrey Darke after a national open competition in 1960-61, when the momentum for commemorating the First World War was gathering pace. Darbourne won the competition in 1961, aged only 26, and set up a partnership with Darke to see it through. This competition seems significant in terms of memory-images as it is the sort of committee-driven forum in which subconscious memories would evoke approval for designs without the conscious knowledge of selectors.

Construction was in three phases, from 1964 to 1972, mostly at the expense of some of Pimlico's characteristic terraces designed by the early Victorian master builder Thomas Cubitt. Again, the desire to wipe away 19th century remnants, suggestive of the conditions that led to war, is evident.

Being one of the first attempts in London to move on from high-rise planning typologies, the critic Nikolaus Pevsner said the estate held a special place in the history of British housing as a model of how low-rise dwellings could reach the same densities (210 per acre) as tower blocks.

The estate comprises 540 units built as council housing, some of which are now privately owned. It was one of the largest comprehensive developments of its time, with more than 2,000 people accommodated (comprehensive refers to the fact that social amenities such as a doctor's surgery, library and pubs were also provided).

As with the previous examples, the reactions to Lillington Gardens are striking in their range. I will present some examples before looking at the estate through photographic images and maps.

Positive critiques include:
"The housing blocks lining the perimeter project into the central landscaped area, creating a series of intimate inter-connected gardens and play spaces. The design, allowing almost half of homes to have a front door at ground level, creates a safe, overlooked public realm."

"This large, complex red-brick building, with cantilevered balconies, ‘streets in the air’, irregular profile and ample external planting, offered a popular and expressive alternative to the drab postwar tradition of mixed development."

"The brown Hasting-made brick is unusually dark for the Sixties, but the effect is never monotonous. The centre is traffic-free. The buildings seem without any overall system, reflecting the intricate internal planning, which makes use of scissor-plans and split levels. The general plan is no less ingenious, with internal courtyards and cross wings threaded through with paths and ramps. Higher levels are reached by brick-paved internal streets. In general the character is tough, not amiable, but then so is the church. But toughness does not dominate, not least because of the exceptionally careful landscaping."

"The Library was built last (1973-74). It has a split-level interior, and is claustrophobic, but was considered progressive when new."

On the other hand:
"Economics have been carelessly thrown overboard for a warped aesthetic of crumpled facades and disordered dwellings that sometimes fail to fit a recognisable structural plan; some homes have the kitchen one-and-a-half floors from the entrance and furthest from the front door; wide ‘roof-streets’ lead to cramped door access, sometimes three sharing one doormat half a flight of steps away; many living rooms have no sunlight to satisfy the architects' desire that everyone would live looking into the community garden (surely facing south over the real street is a valid as well as more interesting experience?); an even more alarming failure is the connection of the roof-streets with the real ones below – there are sordid windy porches on the ground floor and blind lifts to the upper streets, ferrying people like they were crossing the Acheron."

"The sequence of moving from one garden to the next shows a hit-and-miss picturesque anti-plan that disorientates one even more than Chesterton’s ‘rolling English road’. This is disturbing since it shows a lack of understanding of the essence of city planning – it is as though the authors had misread Camillo Sitte [an Austrian town planner who rebelled against straight boulevards and regular, grid-iron street plans]."

"John Darbourne wanted ‘a feeling of one thing opening out on to another rather than a huge, easily assimilated rectangular area’. The result is more like the Illustrated London News's comment on GE Street’s high-Gothic church on the site: 'rising … as a lily among weeds'."

"Lillington Gardens heralds a change to continuous structures on more intricate and introverted plans."

This wide range of views of itself would seem to demand a closer look.

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59: Landscapes of war 3 - Park Lane 3

2008-01-09T16:14:57+01:00

As with the example of the Robin Hood Gardens estate in previous entries, perceiving the Park Lane traffic system as a projection of memory-images from 1914-18 can be suggested by using graphic rather than photographic images.

To find a root source for the impressions I sense around Park Lane, I went to old Trench maps from the war, available today in reproduced form at map shops such as Stanfords on Long Acre. Chief among them are detailed maps from the Somme area, site of the worst disasters of the British Army in its history. Beaumont Hamel, in particular, was the site of some of the most horrific engagements on the Somme in 1916.

It had an intricate system of trenches which, because they had been stable for months on end, had acquired names, many taken from places back home, often London streets.

A detail of the British lines can be expanded, and the familiar names stand out:

Curiously, just around here, a concentration of names from the West End and Mayfair in particular seems to have occurred. These names I have emphasised in red:

It appears as if, on finding themselves settled in the troglodyte world of the Somme for months on end, soldiers stationed there named their trenches as if they were streets and, in a mood probably of nostalgia more than anything else, called them after familiar streets back home. They were reminding themselves of home.

However, after the opening of the Battle of the Somme on the 1st of July 1916 and the traumatising horror of that day when 20,000 British troops were killed, and the subsequent bogging down in the same place of horror for four more months of grinding battle, that streetscape of trenches ingrained itself as a home of its own, replacing to a certain extent the original back in England.

When, years later, it came to settling down back home again, the same nostalgic process of reminding oneself of home re-occurred, only this time, instead of bringing the names back from France, the trenches themselves were brought back, in the guise of a traffic system. In the map below, I have marked out the trenches in brown. Thus, in 1958-62, the soldiers' home in the trenches was repatriated to Piccadilly. In red, I have marked the names used on the trench map from Beaumont Hamel, and the features of the traffic scheme I think have resonance with a trench system.

In this way, in 1958-63, the home made in the trenches of the Somme was repatriated to Piccadilly, and another layer was added to the meaning of the final line from "Tipperary" traditionally sung by the soldiers heading up to the Front:
"Goodbye Piccadilly,
farewell Leicester Square,
it's a long, long way to Tipperary,
but my heart lies there".

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58: Landscapes of war 3 - Park Lane 2

2008-01-07T20:48:26+01:00

A series of double images helps to suggest why memory-images of the First World War seem to be implicated in the Park Lane landscape (here restricted to images taken at Marble Arch as later renovations have been made further south).

German trench Steps to sub-surface piazza, Marble Arch

French General inspects trenches Sub-surface piazza, Marble Arch

Underground trench junction Pedestrian subway, Marble Arch

German bunker LU Tube entrance, Marble Arch

French troops crossing the Yser Pedestrian bridge, Marble Arch

Casualty on barbed wire Traffic barrier, Marble Arch

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57: Landscapes of war 3 - Park Lane traffic system

2008-01-06T20:29:59+01:00

The Park Lane traffic system runs from Marble Arch in the north along Park Lane to Hyde Park Corner in the south. The need to record such a feature now is important here because Hyde Park Corner has already been recently renovated and plans have been submitted for major redevlopment of Marble Arch which will erase many of the elements that I find intriguing.

The conscious layer of 20th century commemoration along Park Lane is evident, from the recent memorial to animals lost in war at the north end, to the Cavalry Memorial (1920-24) further south (moved westwards into the park in 1961 to make way for the widened road) and on to Hyde Park Corner itself with the Artillery Memorial by Charles Jagger (1921-5) and the Machine-Gunners' Memorial (1925).

However, in the late 1950s, the growth of car traffic and completion of the most pressing post-war reconstruction meant focus was turned towards adapting the area for future demands. Accordingly, the London County Council approved a scheme for widening Park Lane and installing two large gyratory systems at either end. Given the timing (1958-62), and considering my previous comments on the nexus of memorialising relating to the First World War at that particular time, it is my suggestion that the entire system became imbued with a subconscious memory-projection of the Western Front.

As with the previous entries on Robin Hood Gardens, I will first present comments by architectural critics on the road scheme to give a flavour of how it came to be perceived (and it should be kept in mind that this scheme had the full backing of a team of highly trained and experienced traffic engineers and town planners whose intentions were explicit and conformed to accepted practice).

At Marble Arch, ‘the little curving cross street, the old Tyburn Way where the triangular gallows stood, is a parking place for buses, since its incorporation in the rather awkward roundabout traffic plan led, not to freedom and Oxford Street, but to hopeless congestion.’

'The lack of polish (marble works poorly in London) and [Marble Arch's] miserable setting in the middle of a poorly designed traffic roundabout, make it look a little wan.'

'Marble Arch’s present formal and forlorn setting dates from the road widening of 1961-62.'

'In the pedestrian underworld around the island are mural mosaics by William Mitchell, 1962.'

Hyde Park Corner was: 'always regarded as the most important entrance to London from the West. It is characteristically English that this important place should be called merely a Corner – perhaps it was this name that allowed the traffic engineers of the 1950s to rape it so shamelessly.

'Apsley House - the Duke of Wellington's former home with the singular address 'No 1, London' - is now marooned in the midst of the Hyde Park Corner traffic intersection, and the former neo-classical ensemble has been all but destroyed. In the 1960s the adjoining buildings were demolished for road widening.'

'Since the reconstruction of Hyde Park Corner as one of the biggest traffic roundabouts in Europe in the late 1950s, the setting of Constitution Arch has been less than satisfactory.' [This has been improved in recent years with pedestrian crossings increasing access to it].

Ironically, half-way along Park Lane is the 'Joy of Life' fountain, installed in 1963 to a design by TB Huxley Jones, after a competition in 1958. By installing it, it is as if an effort was made to counter-balance the layer of subconscious, and in some ways morbid, memorialising that I will try to show in coming entries, and that is consciously evident in Jagger's Artillery memorial (below).

Artillery Memorial, Hyde Park Corner, Charles Jagger (1921-25)

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56: Landscapes of war 2 - Robin Hood Gardens 5

2008-01-04T16:12:10+01:00

By changing the form in which we perceive the Robin Hood Gardens estate, from photographic images to graphic illustration, an uncanny convergence becomes perceptible with one of the iconic battles of the First World War, that of Hill 60 in the Ypres Salient:

Hill 60, Ypres Salient, 1917 Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar

Now, the image of the battle-scarred hill that so impressed the painter William Orpen and the soldiers who survived its horror seems to achieve greater significance, as an object for gazing upon.

And, perhaps, it is possible to blend the two impressions together.

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55: Landscapes of war 2 - Robin Hood Gardens 4

2008-01-03T13:11:50+01:00

More recent photographs of the Robin Hood Gardens estate in Poplar indicate its air of other-worldliness.

From outside, the outer walls rear up with astonishing aggression (on first approaching the estate, I didn't recognise where I was and thought this might be a nearby prison).

On the other side of the wall is a place for reflective contemplation, cut off from the world except for the roar of distant engines and the pressing sight of rough concrete walls.

Within the walls, a rearward trench cut deep below the surface allows supplies and personnel to arrive at the front and waste to be removed.

And within the front, looked down on from the flats, the bare hill.

In the next entry, I will transfer these contemporary images and descriptive words, deliberately suggestive of past significance, into juxtaposed, graphic form which may indicate a link between war and its aftermath.

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54: Landscapes of war 2 - Robin Hood Gardens 3

2008-01-02T17:18:13+01:00

The decayed GLC map for visitors to the Robin Hood Gardens estate in Poplar summarises my thoughts on the site. Looking at the patterns made on the metal sign, it seems that the no-man's-land between the two jagged housing lines has been attacked, bombed, obliterated.

To give an impression of this estate, almost sealed-off from the city around it by major roads and by its own boundaries and despite its being situated close to Canary Wharf, I will first present some early images of it from the Sixties and early Seventies.

This axonometric shows how the pair of housing lines enclose the green space, one of the few in the area. No clue is given of the form the boundary will take.

Looking within, the Smithson's drawing shows how the flats overlook the mound. What has been transformed from a spoil-heap is humanised by the girl sitting on it.

Once built, the mound is clearly visible (looking south, towards Canary Wharf).

Inside the estate, the little relaxation/play areas take on a prominent status, as does the hill. Available for gazing upon.

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53: Landscapes of war 2 - Robin Hood Gardens 2

2007-12-30T12:52:12+01:00

The Smithsons' Robin Hood Gardens estate in Poplar finally opened in 1972 and, despite praise from the architectural profession, it soon attracted criticism. Its reception wasn't helped by a shift in public mood against Modernist planning, due in particular to the collapse of the Ronan Point tower block, barely two miles away, in May 1968 when five people were killed directly as a result of poor construction techniques.

Keeping in mind the grandiosity of Peter Smithson's utopian predictions for the estate and his confidence that all details, especially at a social level, had been carefully thought through, it is shocking to read some of the more general comments: 'The planning of the flats is unsatisfactory and unresolved'; 'It is a matter of some debate as to whether this particular style of design is suitable for social housing'; ‘The lift lobbies are sordid in the extreme. One wonders why the architects did not group the lifts together thus giving the occupiers a greater choice of lifts (especially when one is out of order), and above all increasing the casual contacts between neighbours and fostering a community spirit': 'It is simply not the best place for poor families to live'; 'It is a vision of the future, by architects who thought they were saving the world'.

At a more theoretical level, the criticism is just as damning: 'On the aesthetics of the facades, there is conflict between the intellectual desire for order and the artistic desire for expression. This conflict has not been successfully resolved ... To compare these buildings with Georgian terraces, as Peter Eisenman does, may be justified by the intellectual aims of the authors, but the minor elements used are, in general too poor for a real comparison to be justified.'

But the more polemical, gut reactions, often by respected architectural critics, are almost unique in their exasperation and disgust: Robin Hood Gardens 'is like a face scoured by the raw winter wind. It is hard to imagine the sun shining here, ever. It is notorious for the violence it attracted even before it was completed. At a time when some buildings of its generation are finally being appreciated, the estate has defied rehabilitation.'

'Robin Hood Gardens is an all too brutal example of the style of architecture that proudly called itself the New Brutalism.'

'This is where it all started to go wrong. It was disastrous. The brutalist concrete structure turned out to be defective, but the social aspects turned out to be worse: Robin Hood Gardens became a hotbed of crime. The Smithsons were exposed as being both arrogant and fallible.'

'The Smithsons pretty much invented the postwar Britain we’ve been taught to hate; high-rises, walkways, the city of cars, megastructures, nasty, brooding concrete jungles roaming with rottweilers.'

However, while regularly being cited as an example of Modernist folly, the estate seems to have generated an undercurrent of unintended reference to the main themes of this work, to the First World War and its long-term psychological impact in terms of memory-image projection. [In the quotes below I have added my own italics to point these out.]

One writer opens up this thread of comment with the nagging question: 'One still wonders why Robin Hood Gardens had to look so grim?' The answer is perhaps hidden in the subconscious layers of the place...

‘Two long, cranked slab buildings of rather drab pre-cast concrete address each other across a no-man’s land of common gardens, distinguished by a large artificial mound. It must be a depressing place to live in, severed as it is from any connections with the existing city by its almost manic defence system of walls and moats ... This scheme is an example of the late modernist avant-garde determination to realise a theoretical position at all costs.'

'The estate fails because the Smithsons never found a satisfying architectural form that could be mass-produced for the ‘anonymous client’ of the welfare state [a figure who overlaps in quasi-mythological terms for me with the Unknown Soldier] without being as dully utilitarian as the classic Modernist predecessors they attacked.'

'There is no clear access, but this may be deliberate in order to make the gardens private for the residents. However, if this is so, there is a curious lack of incentive for the residents to use the gardens, since the paths and play areas are rigidly defined around the perimeter by ‘rules’ established in a printed ‘householders’ manual' - a little totalitarian to say the least. One concludes that the park is to be looked at from above and nothing more.'

'These decks have been designed as though one was always meant to be on them, to look down (psychologically as well) on the neighbourhood, but never to arrive or leave it.’

From these last quotes, I take a starting point for my own re-reading of the site.

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52: Landscapes of war 2 - Robin Hood Gardens 1

2007-12-28T13:24:48+01:00

[This section on Robin Hood Gardens will be presented over three entries. The first covers the plans and ideals behind the estate. Then I will present the criticial reaction. Finally, I will suggest my re-reading of the site, using illustrations.]

The Robin Hood Gardens estate in Poplar, east London, is the final, built reality of nearly 20 years of urban theory that began with Alison and Peter Smithson's competition entry for the Golden Lane estate, Barbican, in 1953. From the beginning, a 'low-rise snake of housing' with a network of 'streets in the air' was imagined.

At an architectural conference in Aachen, Germany, in 1953, the couple came across as the young Turks of their time, strongly criticising the housing ideas of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius as too functional and simplistic. Their architecture is the stuff of intelligence and conviction. They wrote: ‘Belonging is a basic emotional need … from it comes the enriching sense of neighbourliness. The short narrow street of the slum succeeds where spacious redevelopment frequently fails.’ Theirs was a concerted attempt at humanising Modernist urban theory.

They rejected Le Corbusier's generation of ‘wipe the slate clean’ Modernism. Rooted in a pre-1939 optimism (as they saw it) irrelevant to a 1950s generation shattered by War War II, the International Style was building ‘yesterday’s dreams, while the rest of us have woken up today.’

‘Only through construction,’ the Smithsons wrote, ‘can utopias of the present be realised.’ They wanted to use their anger to stimulate this more ‘real’, less utilitarian modern culture, plugged directly, more democratically, into the consciousness of the people.

One commentator wrote: 'The Smithsons believed in thoughtfulness, and nobility, and allowing space and time to contemplate and consider your place in the world. They were conscientious and wanted to create buildings not only for the moment, but also for an unknown future. They were extremely serious people, staring gravely at the camera in almost every picture known of them. "Our ultimate responsibility is the creation of noble space," they said.'

Their influence was felt in Park Hill, Sheffield (built 1957-1961) on the remains of a Victorian slum. They had the laudable idea of demolishing the slums while at the same time building on their better qualities. By 1960 they were even rediscovering the merits of medieval streets and alleys.

In 1962 they made a collage of a housing scheme for Manisty Street, which eventually became Robin Hood Gardens. Prominent in one of Peter Smithson's drawings of 1963 is the demolition 'spoil' piled into a hillock in the foreground.

In 1966 construction work began on the estate. Their final design was a challenge to what had become the orthodox Modern creed, promoted by Le Corbusier: that ideal, affordable mass housing should rise in aloof, detached towers on stilts high above urban parkland. He imagined his city order as being rational, noble, healthy and clean-minded, a 'democracy of Platonic guardians'. In contrast, the Smithsons argued in favour of housing that responded to local communities and local climates.

Of their plan for Poplar, they wrote: ‘The site has been organised to create a ‘stress-free’ central zone, protected from the noise and pressure of the surrounding roads by the buildings themselves. In this stress-free zone there is no vehicular movement whatever. There is a quiet green heart which all dwellings share and overlook.’ At this 'quiet, green heart' is the artificial hill, formed out of the rubble from demolition and excavation of the site.

Peter Smithson wrote, in a grand manner: ‘The theme of RHG is protection ... To achieve a calm centre, the pressures of the external world are held off by the buildings and the outworks ... This building for the socialist dream was for us a Roman activity and Roman at many levels – including state bureaucracy, heroism, aqueductal engineering, dealing with repetition, bold statement working with landforms, it provides a place for the anonymous client, it wants to be universal, greater than our little state – related to greater law.’

Criticism soon followed.

Comments

51: Landscapes of war 1 - Alexandra Road estate

2007-12-17T01:58:49+01:00

Dating from the late 1960s, the Alexandra Road estate is the latest of the group of five sites I have chosen and was designed by the Architect's Department of Camden Borough. It places pedestrians at the heart of its design, and provides ample leisure space despite residents being accommodated at high population density.

However, in spite of the great effort made to improve the lot of residents, the estate is a peculiarly challenging place in which to live. The main pedestrian throughfare is narrow and claustrophobic, the car parks underneath can be frightening, the steps up to upper-level flats are narrow, steep and unwelcoming, brutal service installations erupt and intrude in prominent positions and the main park in between the rows of apartments is a sinister maze of zig-zag walls, dark passageways and seeming dead-ends.

Rationally, it is a triumph of design; instinctively, it can be a very frightening place in which to live, a place which bears little relation to the demands of daily urban living.

Rowley Way, the main pedestrian path through the estate.

An enigmatic well in an upper deck.

A playground in the park.

A bunker-like lodge house.

Zig-zag pathways deep in the park.

The heart of the unintentional maze at the centre of the park.

Below, I give a possible re-interpretation, suggesting that the two main rows of apartments can, in fact, be seen as trench lines, with a battle zone in between, a strange, mazy no-man's land of trenches, dead ends, bunkers and craters.

And here is the possible source of its inspiration, a trench map from the Somme.

Comments

50: A pause - synopsis

2007-12-13T17:18:20+01:00

From the examples so far, it can be suggested that the layer of landscape laid down in the late Fifties and early Sixties, especially in terms of projects that achieved iconic architectural status, represents the effort of memory to project in physical form images, held in mind by many people, which needed gazing upon and re-experiencing if acceptance of the implications of such memories was to be achieved. This was a process of projected mourning which had failed in the 1920s due to the enormity and proximity of the traumatising events involved.

This explosion of projected traumatic memory-images is in part related to the aging process. By the late 1950s, survivors of the First World War were reaching old age. Many, immersed in the British culture of the stiff upper lip, had not told the story of what they had seen and had not passed on their experiences. This failure to pass on and to share a difficult story blocked the fundamental human need to mourn.

Through the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, their children experienced, for the most part, only silence about their fathers’ war experiences. They may have sensed repressed pain, but they would have been made to know where not to tread.

However, the grandchildrens’ links with the war of 1914-18 were more tenuous, particularly given the intervention of the second war. Silence denied them the patrimony of their ageing grandparents. In the 1950s, young people were said to look back in anger. The phrase may partly refer to anger over an event whose enormity had never been properly acknowledged.

And so two immensely strong forces intertwined: an older generation feeling ever more compelled to relate its own story in order to come to some sort of understanding and acceptance, and a younger generation unafraid to ask questions and to claim its birthright.

This was happening at a time when physical rebuilding was already a necessity after the Second World War; and material and social progress, fuelled by the 'white heat of technology' and unleashed by breakthroughs in everything from vinyl recordings to contraception, promised a definitive break with the past. This new world could not be born without due respect first being given to the old.

And so the schizophrenic mood of the early Sixties set in, hurtling towards the future while still in thrall to the past.

The gathering force for the reconstruction of memory, even as the future was being grasped with near manic enthusiasm, can be tracked in the milestones of the period:

1956 – ‘Look Back in Anger’ by John Osborne set the scene for the idea that the past was somehow an unacceptable place.

1959 – ‘In Flanders Fields’ by Leon Wolff began the reinterpretation of the war which began to accept that, far from being a victory, it had been a disaster.

1961 – ‘The Donkeys’ by Alan Clark was the first populist diatribe against the leaders of the British armies in 1915 and sparked off an angry and often painful debate into the need for the ‘war of attrition’ favoured by most of the General Staff.

1962 – ‘War Requiem’ by Benjamin Britten was premiered in March at Basil Spence’s new Coventry Cathedral, the old having been destroyed in the Blitz. However, it commemorated not the second but the first world war through its settings of Wilfred Owen’s war poems. The ‘Times’ reports that, as it ended, there was a prolonged, stunned silence, before the audience erupted in applause.

1962 – Destruction of Euston: At much the same time, Euston station, symbolising what was seen as a discredited Victorian past which had led only to war and great loss, was razed to the ground. The iconic Great Arch, a gateway in a sense to history, was levelled even though there was no pressing need.

1963 – ‘Oh! What a Lovely War’ by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop opened at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, on 19 March. Its sets were photographic slide images of the trenches projected on to the backdrop. Using old war songs and improvisation to give the impression that it reflected a well-spring of commonly felt emotion, the production ridiculed those responsible for the war. It was hugely popular.

1963 – ‘The First World War’ by AJP Taylor added academic weight to Clark’s essay and finally promoted acceptance of the war as profound failure, merely hinted at in the Thirties, to being the mainstream perspective.

1964 – ‘The Great War’ produced by BBC TV was the corporation’s first large-scale documentary series and a massive success. It coincided with the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of war and, through original film footage, its 26 hour-long episodes allowed viewers to see projected in front of them the experience of life in the trenches. Given that this meant reliving the war for an hour every week for six months, it might be suggested that viewing it was a real, although unacknowledged, form of therapy.

1964 – ‘Curlew River’ was Britten's next work after the Requiem and focuses on the anguish of a mother whose son has died. It deals with her madness, and ends with her final acceptance that “he is dead”.

Architecture played a unique role in this recreation and processing of traumatic memory. The Blitz and the need for new housing stock had left the stage clear for the homes fit for heroes finally to find form, for the trenches to be rebuilt.

Around 1955 ‘Comprehensive Redevelopment’ schemes began. This could be read as implying a need for ‘comprehensive redevelopment’ of mind, and one of its constituent fundamental parts, memory. It coincided with a waning of the short-lived fashion after the Second World War for a more picturesque, humane modernism (such as the Royal Festival Hall) and the emergence of the ideologically driven Alison and Peter Smithson.

Around 1958 large-scale urban transport schemes were put into practice in response to the growth of private car ownership. This presented great opportunities for the reconfiguring of much of the urban landscape and made much of it available to planners for schemes that could draw freely on the imagination, or memory.

By 1960, many architecturally notable plans were being drawn up. I will now present five such London landscapes, all well known, but through the lens of 1914-18.

Comments

49: Mirror Images 17 - Blockhouses 2

2007-12-10T12:16:29+01:00

Goumier Farm blockhouse, Ypres Electricity substation, Soho

Architect's intention: This block has been designed to house an electricity sub-station in the middle of Soho. No doors open on to the street, so access is through the retail and office building it is attached to.

Effect in practice: This massive structure kills off all interaction on this street corner in Soho. Streets around it are full of ground-level shop fronts. This is the only exception.

Visual effect: The building is on the same scale as those around it, but any functions of the street have been excluded. At the same time, its own function is hidden.

Phenomenological effect: This extraordinary structure sits mysteriously at a busy intersection of streets, drawing attention to itself as much by what it isn't as much as by what it is.

Discussion: One commentator on the depressed 1930s wrote: "There was nothing to be commercial about in the Thirties." That feeling seems to have been repeated here. The need for commerce and interaction seem to be alien to the thinking behind this structure. You wonder why a function which demands no daily, convenient access has been allowed to occupy a site where access is the main advantage of the location.
The buildings helps to destroy what the location might be used for, what its context suggests. It destroys the city as it was. It is not nothing, it is itself, but it has no known identity. Its identity, that which it is similar to, is hidden or lost. It is like an alien presence in the present, similar to Louis Kahn's Museum of British History at Yale, where a brutal, enclosed concrete staircase protrudes into a large, wood-panelled art gallery.
An electricity substation such as this could have been located in somewhere less prominent. Its function doesn't demand either this site, or such massive walls. One ends up casting round for a model, an image it may take its identity, its sameness, from given that its identity is not dictated by its function or anything near by. The Ypres blockhouse, whose ribbed concrete provided extra protection against gunfire and bombshells, would stand out if you imagine flicking through a file, or memory bank, of all the buildings that had been of any significance in the century before this strange intrusion appeared in the heart of Soho.

48: MIRROR IMAGES 16 - Blockhouses 1

As well as bunkers sunk into the ground, fortified blockhouses, usually concrete, were built overground, behind the front lines. They were used for billetting soldiers and storing supplies.

"Hitler's Blockhouse" along the Fromelles-Aubers road (between Ypres and Bethune). It is reputed that Adolf Hitler spent some of his front-line service here as a runner with the Bavarian Infantry Regiment.

Pimlico School, Lupus St. Greater London Council Architectects' Dept, led by John Bancroft. Winner of Royal Institute of British Architects' Award in 1972.

Architect's intention: Pimlico School's radical design included its own 'internal street' running the length of the school (in conformity with 'route-building' theorising of the 1950s). The sunken setting allowed it to be seen as positioned deep within the community. The angled, continuous fenestration allowed the classrooms to be bathed in daylight.
Effect in practice: The 'internal street', being cut off from the world outside and closed to passers-through and strangers, is exposed as a misnomer, being little more than a corridor. The sunken setting cuts off the school from, rather than binding it to, the community. The glazing lets in not only light but far too much heat, making the classrooms often unbearably hot.
Visual effect: Visually, this is an object at odds with its Cubitt-inspired surroundings. It gives the impression that it is part of another mind-world, an alien object dropped into Pimlico. But, at the same time, it is a powerful object, defiantly itself, defiantly something other.
Discussion: The austere minimalism of the Smithsons' Hunstanton School (which also fails, at times comically, to get its parts to function as the architects' so earnestly hoped) somehow led to the brutal otherness of the GLC's Pimlico School. Neither functions well, but both are expressive, of something. Perhaps, as expressions within an ideology of memory, one paved the way for the other. One set up the schema upon which the other could add its repressed, half-forgotten content of brutal recollection. Can it only be coincidence that young Corporal Hitler's bunker (of all those thousands of bunkers!), on the edge of the battlefield at Ypres, was also a container of raw, ribbed concrete, with angled sides, recessed into a field of soft mud?

Comments

47: Mirror Images 15 - Bunkers

2007-12-08T11:43:10+01:00

Fortified bunkers, often underground, provided protection for officers' quarters, stores and local headquarters.

Bunker at Pontavert, near Reims National Theatre (Lasdun), Belvedere Rd

Architect's Intention: These narrow slits allow light into the storage areas at the back of the National Theatre.

Effect in practice: The slits don't allow enough light in so strip lighting has to be used at all times in the storage areas.

Visual effect: These are the only openings on the broad rear facade of the theatre complex, apart from the goods door. They are ineffective, functionally almost redundant, yet draw attention to themselves by being the only features inserted into the wall. It is as if being there, as they look, lies behind any significance they might have.

Phenomenological effect: Walking by these narrow, hooded light-holes makes one feel watched and insecure.

Discussion: The back of Denys Lasdun's National Theatre has been criticised as an after-thought. It consists of a sheer brick wall, with pre-cast concrete slabs in the lower portion, a large door for heavy goods vehicles and these light slits.
        But, in such a carefully crafted building, perhaps this facade embodies a subtle eloquence. The light slits are the only feature of note on a very large element of the streetscape. The facade seems like an affront to what could be a bustling street. Its design would have been acceptable as a result of conforming to Modernist ideology. The references in the narrow openings to Modernist ideas on fenestration and deconstructing the act of looking would have helped a challenging design to be approved. Many, fairly obvious, arguments could have been used to demand more traditional fenestration, but they would have failed in the face of faith in the Modernist way.
        But, because this faith was based on an ideological system that dismissed historical reference, it could allow the references of memory to seep through and express themselves. Modernism and memory here seem to be working in parallel as ideological systems. The first is a conscious structure of first principles and prescriptions for design, derived from sense perceptions such as Le Corbusier's Grand Tour of Europe, whereas the latter is a subconscious ideology rooted in sense perceptions from the war and found among its survivors, in effect an ideology of survival.
        One of the reasons for the importance of Le Corbusier seems to be that the trajectory of his career moved in parallel with the subconscious trajectory of survivors: from blinding white tabula rasa, to reconstructive concrete (as here), to colourful post-modern release. Here, the dysfunctional openings he prepares the way for Lasdun to use emerge as the same slits embedded in the memories of survivors, the same openings that allowed machine-guns to rake across so many advancing lines of teenage gun-fodder. Here, on what at first sight seems to be a nondescript facade, the two ideological structures meet, the one based on intellect, the other on memory.

Comments

46: Mirror Images 14 - Duckboards

2007-12-07T16:15:58+01:00

In wet weather, duckboards were essential for soldiers to cross battlefields, particularly at Passchendaele where regular, torrential downpours turned the Flanders clay into a quagmire. The mud on either side often became so deep that horses and soldiers drowned, as in a swamp, if they slipped in.

French troops at Ypres, 1917 Marble Arch walkway bridge

Architect's intention: The Marble Arch footbridge has been added to carry pedestrians across a decorative pool in the middle of the traffic island. The bridge is reached by ascending steps from a subway and it leads to steps down to another subway and asub-surface plaza with public conveniences.

Effect in practice: The bridge is functional, but it sits astride a shallow pool whose decorative function is undermined by its position in the middle of a busy traffic island. In questioning why pedestrians are forced to come up from below ground simply to return below, having crossed the bridge, it seems plausible to suggest that experiencing the bridge is the intention behind the design.

Visual effect: The plain bridge jars with the decorative pool and fountains (when they work - they have since been superseded by plants). There is a dissonance between the desire to add decoration with the pool, and the refusal to design a bridge in a way that acknowledges and supplements this decoration.

Phenomenological effect: Crossing the bridge should produce the pleasant effect of crossing water, but the designers seem to have been blind to the setting of heavy traffic circling the island, overwhelming any positive experience.

Discussion: Marble Arch is an elaborate gyratory system, and the pool and bridge are an expensive, decorative element in it. Yet the assemblage is handled so crudely that the observer is left struggling to understand the reasoning or the mind-set behind what can only be described as ineptitude in terms of creating a pleasant urban space. Once again, as good an explanation as any seems to be that, given that there are no other decorative elements in this section of the system, the pool and bridge are prominent images in the minds of those involved with the design, and that this prominence derives from the commonplace existence of such swamp and duckboard landscapes on the Western Front.

Comments

45: Mirror Images 13 - Strategic Outcrops

2007-12-05T15:28:33+01:00

At some points along the Western Front small hillocks stood out, offering advantage to forces that held them. Such eminences became a crux of conflict, and a particularly prominent focus when battle came to be recalled.

Butte de Warlencourt, Somme (Orpen) Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar, 1962 plan

Architect's intention: Rubble accumulated during construction of this estate was used to make an artificial hill in the central park area, presumably as a recreational feature. It may have been considered as a Modernist quip on the idea of an ancient tumulus, such as Silbury, and, in recent years, four small standing stones have indeed been set up on the top of it (it is much higher than the scale of the woman in the drawing vis-a-vis the mound would tend to suggest).

Effect in practice: Small children like running up and down the hillock, and the view from the top is pleasant, but one is left wondering about the amount of effort needed to produce something of such limited value.

Visual effect: The main effect of the mound is in terms of the scale of its visual presence. It is in full view of all the flats on the estate: a bare, artificial, conspicuously out-of-place hill.

Phenomenological effect: The hill imposes itself on anyone within the confines of the estate. It is there, always there, and can even be climbed, if one can find the will to climb it knowing already every view from it.

Discussion: The Butte de Warlencourt was one of the pivotal points on the battlefield of the Somme. Several hideous battles were fought over it. When William Orpen painted it in 1917, most of the earth had been blown away, leaving only the denuded limestone outcrop. Thousands died fighting in and around and for this worthless lump of rock.
    When the Smithsons put forward their first designs for Robin Hood Gardens in 1962, Alan Clark's The Donkeys was a bestseller, Benjamin Britten was putting the final touches to his War Requiem and Joan Littlewood was putting her Theatre Workshop through rehearsals for Oh What a Lovely War. Then, along with a radical design for flats, the people of Poplar in the East End, many of them survivors of the war, were presented with a plan for homes featuring a stark, denuded, artificial hill at the centre.
    Coincidence, or a trick of memory? My guess is that this image, in particular, evoked a moment of recognition among many of those who considered it, and that this played a part in their approval of such a radical design.
    It is notable that the Smithsons have humanised the scene with the woman seated at the front. Is she there to detoxify the mountain of memory behind her, or to distract the eye, the mind, so that what she sits upon can be made bearable? It is no more than a hill of rubble; just identical to that at the centre of the worst day in the history of British forces 46 years before, and of a battle about which writers, composers and actors were still mesmerised decades later.

Comments

44: Mirror Images 12 - Craters 3

2007-12-04T16:25:02+01:00

As well as large mines, heavy ordnance also pockmarked ground along the Front. On the great battlefields, everything was destroyed, turned to rubble, mud and viscera. Nothing remained in the wasteland, except the craters. Soldiers hid in them for protection as more artillery shells crashed around them.

Shell Holes, Western Front Golden Lane piazza, Barbican

Architect's intention: The roof of an underground car-park has been used to provide a raised piazza in front of the Corbusier-inspired central apartment tower on this Fifties estate. The circular objects act both as car-exhaust vents and as light wells. The area has great prominence in the estate as pathways criss-cross it and the grand staircase, to the left, gives it an elevated air, hinting perhaps at the effect Michelangelo gave the Campidoglio in Rome where his spacious staircase leads up to the piazza.

Effect in practice: The space fails as a piazza as it is distanced from each of the surrounding elements, such as the tower, and so seems among them, but not of them. The vents don't allow enough light into the car-park so strip lighting has to be permanently switched on below. They also have spare capacity for exhaust fumes, and a simple air-extraction vent would have sufficed.

Visual effect: Cut off from the surrounding buildings and elevated to some prominence, the piazza achieves great presence as an object to look at, particularly from the surrounding flats, yet it looks like a barren field, pockmarked with ambiguous holes, and dropped into the city. It stands out, but in a detached way. All features and decoration have been stripped away, except an insistent, windswept barrenness, and craters.

Phenomenological effect: To walk among the craters on the piazza evokes a feeling of wonder. What are they? Why are they here? And when one finds out, and ascribes to them their intentioned function, the functions don't fit. One feels this place is out-of-place, the suggestion is that it is also out-of-time.

Discussion: The craters are dysfunctional only in terms of their intentioned function. In terms of their unintentioned, subconscious function, their function as measured by effect rather than intention, they seem to work very well. This is as objects to gaze down on, for old soldiers, mothers, survivors, remembrancers housed in the Modernist flats above, flats that have emerged from a tabula rasa, flats cut off from history and here faced only with memory, or a cratered remnant of it.

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