the-sheet.com Your Architecture Resource » Le Corbusier

Isi Metzstein obituary

The Sheet — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:06:57 +0000

Innovative architect who designed some remarkable postwar British buildings

Isi Metzstein, who has died aged 83, was jointly responsible for some of the most remarkable and distinguished modern architecture in postwar Britain. Under the umbrella of the Glasgow practice of Gillespie Kidd & Coia (GKC), for whom he worked throughout his career, he and his colleague Andrew MacMillan designed a series of striking churches in and around Glasgow, as well as school and university buildings further afield, including Robinson College, Cambridge. They were also the architects of St Peter's Seminary at Cardross, Argyll and Bute, once widely regarded as the finest modern building in Scotland but now a derelict ruin.

Metzstein was born in Berlin, the son of two Polish Jews, Efraim (who died in 1933) and Rachel. He escaped Germany in 1939 under the Kindertransport scheme. The boy, his siblings and their mother were scattered all over Britain until the family was eventually reunited. The young Isi had been taken in initially by a family in Hardgate, Clydebank, and he remained in Glasgow for the rest of his life.

In 1945, having left school, he decided he wanted to become an architect, and a chance connection led to an apprenticeship with Jack Coia, the sole surviving partner of Gillespie Kidd & Coia, the firm he had taken on in the late 1920s. At the same time, Metzstein enrolled for evening classes in architecture at the Glasgow School of Art, where he met MacMillan, whom he brought into the firm in 1954. Together, they were to transform the practice and, as "Andy and Isi", became a celebrated double-act, as designers, teachers and talkers.

Coia, the son of Italian immigrants, had reopened the office after the second world war and resumed his association with the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Glasgow, having built a number of churches in the 1930s. The archdiocese was about to embark on a programme of churchbuilding. At first, Coia's archi tecture continued in the manner of his prewar work, but soon the influence of his two and open-minded assistants became evident, familiar as they were with avant-garde buildings in continental Europe, in particular the work of the Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier.

The turning point was the church at Glenrothes, a new town in Fife, which was completed in 1957. With its tapering, open plan, austere aesthetic and white exterior, this was clearly the creation of different hands. Henceforth, Coia's task was to secure the commissions, while the work was carried out by his young and expanding office. Although GKC were responsible for schools and some housing during the late 1950s and 60s, what stood out was the series of bold and inventive churches. It is ironic that, while the Roman Catholic hierarchy believed the architect to be the almost mythical Coia, the designing was in fact carried out by a Jewish refugee from Berlin and a Glaswegian of Highland Presbyterian ancestry.

Metzstein, who described himself as a "lapsed atheist", had a strong sense of the numinous, achieved in his churches by the dramatic handling of light in dark interiors. Some of the churches were in the tradition of tall and powerful brick boxes, such as those at East Kilbride (1962) and Kilsyth (1964). Others – St Benedict's, Drumchapel (1970), Our Lady of Good Counsel, Dennistoun (1965) – had highly inventive plans and unconventional internal spaces.

However, their masterpiece was undoubtedly St Peter's (1966), where neo-Corbusian ranges with a brilliant stepped-section were disposed around an existing Victorian mansion.

The work of GKC stood out from that of their equally modern-minded contemporaries in England. As Metzstein explained: "We got the unique opportunity to design modern buildings that were not modern programmes – churches, convents, seminaries … We were relatively young and more excitable, maybe … We were designing churches, which are one-off buildings with an emotional and religious context."

By good fortune, the firm never jumped aboard the high-rise, system-building juggernaut. Metzstein and MacMillan were also unusual in having a serious interest in history, appreciating the character of Glasgow's urban fabric of stone tenements and extolling the merits of the work of the city's great architects of the past, Alexander "Greek" Thomson and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, at a time when it was either ignored or under threat.

In 1969, when Coia was awarded the Royal gold medal for architecture, he asked that his two partners be associated with the honour. But by then things were beginning to go wrong. The patronage of the archdiocese was coming to an end (although new jobs appeared in England) and problems were emerging with the firm's experimental buildings. As with Frank Lloyd Wright, stories abound about leaking roofs and structural problems. The campanile at the East Kilbride church was taken down and in 1991 the wonderfully dramatic church at Drumchapel was summarily demolished a few days before it was due to be listed. As for St Peter's, which was superbly constructed (unlike some of the churches), it was rendered almost obsolete as soon as it was finished by the new policy, after the Second Vatican Council, of training priests in urban settings. It was abandoned by the archdiocese in 1980 and fell prey to vandals. Despite its grade A listing by Historic Scotland and its inclusion on the World Monuments Fund's list of sites most at risk, the structure remains a ruin.

Metzstein later announced the foundation of the Macallan club (named after his favourite whisky), whose members are the architects of buildings "demolished or mutilated without the involvement of its designer" and who, "the victims of brutal, premature 'scrap-heaping', are witnesses to the fragility of permanence which characterises [the] century". This may have been a joke, but it all hurt – deeply.

The firm's last building was Robinson College, an complex and inventive redbrick response to the growing reaction against the Modern movement, which was completed in 1980. Metzstein then devoted himself to teaching and lecturing, at the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art (of which MacMillan was head), at the University of Edinburgh (where he was professor) and elsewhere.

He was held in great affection and respect by architects all over Britain, and was both revered and feared for his incisive and often devastating criticism of student work. It was annoying that recognition – and a growing admiration for the work of GKC – came so late. When Metzstein and MacMillan were presented with an award by the Royal Institute of British Architects for their teaching in 2008, Metzstein noted that "it would have been even better to receive this while we were still alive".

He remained until the end the conscience of a rational modernity, and was "allergic to 'starchitects' whose work fills the magazines". He much disliked the posturing arbitrariness of such buildings as Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, "which I can't take, both as an architect and as a Jew born in Berlin".

Behind Metzstein's acerbic wit, uttered in his guttural accent – a distinctive combination of German and Glaswegian – was a warm and generous personality. For an architect, he was unusually well-informed, intellectually curious and cosmopolitan in outlook.He lived with his wife, Dany, also of central European Jewish origin, and his family, in Hillhead. At home he created an ideal city made of metal tourist souvenir models of buildings which his many friends would send him from all over the world.

He is survived by Dany, his children, Mark, Saul and Ruth, and his brother and twin sister.

• Israel Metzstein, architect, born 7 July 1928; died 10 January 2012

Gavin Stamp

Constructive criticism: the week in architecture

The Sheet — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 12:19:08 +0000

Will Liverpool really sacrifice its world heritage status over the glossy banality of the dockside buildathon? The planners should take a look at the Architect's Eye photography winners …

"Life goes on day after day/Hearts torn in every way." You can just hear Gerry Marsden singing Ferry Cross the Mersey back when Liverpool was one of the world's best loved cities. Imagine if Ferry Cross the Mersey was remade in 2015 and, instead of the Liver Building, Pier Head and working docks, the backdrop was an almighty prickle of skyscrapers and other schlock shipped in from anywhere except Merseyside itself.

More than hearts may be torn if the city gives the go-ahead to the titanic and controversial £5.5bn Liverpool Waters project proposed by property developers Peel Holdings. Unesco is so angry with what its inspectors have seen of the designs that it has threatened – and not for the first time – to strip Liverpool's city centre of its World Heritage Site status. While in other parts of the world this would matter, Liverpool – to judge from comments made in the local media – doesn't appear to care what Unesco thinks.

What matters more than heritage, it seems, is shopping and new jobs in new shops. Liverpool is no museum: it wants a global skyscrapers and luxury brands. This is a little unfair, yet the city – architecturally a curate's egg (even around Giles Gilbert Scott's magisterial cathedral should aim a lot higher than the glossy banality of Liverpool Waters. A concern for local heritage proves just how innovative and memorable the city's architecture has been, whether in the design of the Three Graces, the Albert Docks or Freddie Gibberd's space capsule-style Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King. Why give up the ghost?

Meanwhile, and aside from a new generation of ultra-modern factories, shipyards, skilled jobs, schools and whatever local people suggest, what Liverpool needs is close attention to its housing stock and to its dilapidated inner suburbs.

Imagine if the kind of intelligence Le Corbusier applied to the Unité d'Habitation in the late 1940s housing scheme in Marseilles, another great and often run-down maritime city, could be resurrected in contemporary form in Liverpool. From inside, looking out, this magnificent housing block has the feel of a great concrete liner anchored between the mountains, the city and the sea. Today, Unité d'Habitation is lived in by professional people, artists, architects, academics and writers. They have come to appreciate the artistry and quality of a building originally intended to house a mix of local people. Marseilles has long needed more buildings like this, instead of the myriad low quality, global-style high-rise blocks that mar its skyline.

Often photographed to look monumental and morose, a lovely image of the roof and paddling pool of Unité d'Habitation by Neil Dusheiko, director of Neil Dusheiko Architectst has won the Architecture and People category award in the Architect's Eye photography competition. The awards were given this week at a ceremony hosted by competition organisers International Art Consultants.

The winner of the Architecture and Place category was Simon Kennedy, a freelance architect and lecturer at the Bartlett school of architecture, who photographed the condemned early 1970s Heygate Estate in south London.

Jack Pringle, chairman of the judges, noted that "The two winning photographs, both of modernist designs, demonstrate carefully and beautifully, the striking contrast between the vibrant success of the Le Corbusier building and the lifeless failure of the Heygate Estate."

Unite d'Habitation was a huge influence on the design of Britain's finest post-war housing estate, the Barbican. This challenging and imposing landscaped development has echoes of English baroque masters such as John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, too, as well as Edwin Lutyens and other architects who helped inform Chamberlin, Powell and Bon. The achievement of these architects – shadowy figures today – has been brought to fresh life by the Elain Harwood's thoughtful book Chamberlin, Powell & Bon. It would be hard to imagine any British city paying for this kind of development today, particularly as the building of an Arts Centre was considered more important than shiny shops.

To consider how we might rethink the development of our cities, the Architectural Review has announced a Battleground for Ideas at the Royal College of Art. Ranging over questions of Style, Technology, Theory and Humanity, the season begins on 6 December (appropriately in the lead-up to Christmas) with Consumption. This British obsession, and one that could tear hearts and cities in every way, will be discussed by Ricky Burdett and Joseph Rykwert. Tickets are free; email boris.cesnik@rca.ac.uk for a place.

Jonathan Glancey

Constructive criticism: the week in architecture

The Sheet — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:41:17 +0000

From a seashell-collecting Le Corbusier to a grand new college for creatives, Jonathan Glancey looks at a winning week – as architecture reaches for the moon

Stanton Williams has won Building Design magazine's architect of the year award, largely for the brilliant Central St Martin's college of art and design at King's Cross in London. The award is presented annually to the practice BD's editor "deems to have made the most significant contribution to British architecture over the past year".

"The practice," says Ellis Woodman, "has completed not just one but two of the most impressive buildings built in the UK over the past 12 months: a new home for Central St Martins and the Sainsbury in Cambridge.

Central St Martin's is a tour-de-force, a great meeting place, with studios and a theatre gathering the college's 4,000 students and 1,000 teaching staff (many part-time) in one place for the first time. Here, historic and contemporary design aren't just happily married, they're celebrated and enhanced by this exemplary education project.

Alan Stanton worked for Norman Foster before studying at UCLA in California and then assisting Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano on the design of the Pompidou Centre, Paris. He set up Stanton Williams with Paul Williams, an expert in the design of museums, galleries and exhibitions.

Jonathan Hendry won the magazine's young architect award (young means under 40 in architecture). Six years old when the Pompidou Centre opened in 1977, Hendry worked for Allies and Morrison and Jamie Fobert Architects, two practices that are as concerned with building well as making a big name for themselves. He then opened up his own practice in the Lincolnshire Wolds in 2000 where he has crafted one small building after another in decidedly modern yet modest ways: an arts and heritage centre here, a bus shelter there, a village hall and the restoration of a tenpin bowling alley. It is heartening to see such a considered talent – he could probably get a high-powered job in pretty much any major international practice – working on the small-scale projects in English country towns that need such thought, craft and care.

If there was ever an architect of the century award, the 1900s would surely have been won by Le Corbusier. Still a controversial figure, Le Corbusier has been studied in such detail you'd think there couldn't be more to say about this architect and provocateur. It's a real pleasure then to read Niklas Maak's Le Corbusier: The Architect on the Beach. Maak, who did his thesis on Corbusier, is an art critic for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Here he analyses the architect's love of beaches, sea and seashells and shows how these affected his approach to design as he moved from white cubism to new forms of geometry and organic forms. "Shells, snails, flotsam and jetsam crop up everywhere in Le Corbusier's work," says Maak. And, most of all, in the beautifully sculpted and deeply poetic pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp.

In a postscript to this confidently brief and engaging book, Maak shows how Le Corbusier's beachcombing has affected architects, through buildings as disparate as Rem Koolhaas's shell-like Seattle Public Library of 2004 and Sou Fujimoto's nest-like Final Wooden House of 2008. As for a design award, well, if there was one for British designer of the past half century, it would surely go to Terence Conran, who has just turned 80. One of his presents is The Way We Live Now at the Design Museum, London, a show of his work from his days designing for the 1951 Festival of Britain. From soup kitchens to grand brasseries, from Habitat to Storehouse, Conran has made waves as big in the world of British design as Le Corbusier made in modern architecture.

Mind, you, architects and designers – as we know them – might just vanish if scientists working for Nasa have their way. Professors Behrokh Khoshnevis (Engineering), Anders Carlson (Architecture), Neil Leach (Architecture) and Madhu Thangavelu (Astronautics) from the University of Southern California (USC) have won a prestigious Nasa grant to explore the potential use of the robotic fabrication technology, Contour Crafting, for building structures on the moon. The grant, says a USC press release, "was one of only 30 awarded to over 700 applicants by the Nasa Innovation Advanced Concepts Program.

In Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, Professor Otto Silenus, an architect, has a mission to eliminate the human element from the consideration of form. Looks like the USC professors might get there yet. If the Moonbase is built, BD may well find itself championing Design Robot of the Year 2020. A human, I suppose, might just get to program the robots. If not, beachcombing is fun. Instructive, too.

Jonathan Glancey

Iannis Xenakis: sites and sounds

The Sheet — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:05:46 +0000

A student of both Messiaen and Le Corbusier, Xenakis combined his two passions to conceive a new musical language. Christopher Fox looks at a singular creative mind

Death is a difficult career move in the arts. Without the living presence of the artist – whether that presence was compelling, tiresome, benign or objectionable – their work changes its meaning and there's nothing they can do about it. Dull work is no longer redeemed by the artist's charming personality, it's just dull and it gets forgotten. But some work takes on a life of its own, something I realised this summer when the Jack Quartet came to London and played Iannis Xenakis's Tetras at the Wigmore Hall. Too young to have studied the work with Xenakis, who died in 2001, the Jack musicians gave the music a glossy shine I had not heard before. Their Tetras had the same dynamic energy as earlier performances, but it was as if that energy came from a new power source with a leaner, cleaner burn. If it's the mark of a masterpiece that it can sustain this sort of new-generation makeover, then Tetras was confirmed as a masterpiece.

Now it's November and the Huddersfield contemporary music festival is making a major feature of Xenakis's music for the first time since his death. The festival's artistic director Graham McKenzie has also noticed the continuing power of the music. "No other composer seems to generate as much interest in successive generations of listeners as Xenakis," he says. McKenzie is also excited by the way Xenakis's music reaches out beyond the classical concert hall; he sees it as "a rich source for all sorts of diverse artistic practice, from the German noise band Zeitkratzer to dance music and club culture".

It's a bold claim, which matches the boldness of Xenakis's life. Born in 1922 in Romania to Greek parents, he grew up to be fascinated by both the arts and sciences, eventually deciding to study engineering at Athens polytechnic. Like so many people of his generation, Xenakis's life was torn apart by the second world war and in his case the tearing apart was literal and terrible. By October 1944 the German occupation of Greece had ended but there was widespread resistance to the rightwing government that the western allies wanted to install as an eastern bulwark against communism. In Athens, this resistance culminated in a series of mass demonstrations which in December escalated into a vicious armed struggle, with British tanks firing into buildings occupied by the protesters. The building Xenakis was defending was hit and a piece of shrapnel ripped open the left side of his face, permanently blinding him in that eye.

He recovered and completed his engineering qualifications but the oppressive political climate in Greece continued to worsen. As Xenakis later said, for those on the left, the choice was "recantation or the concentration camp". He fled, and by November 1947 had arrived in Paris where, with his engineering diploma in hand, he found a job in an architect's office. No ordinary architect, however; Xenakis's new boss was Le Corbusier. He became part of the team working on projects such as the huge Marseilles public housing scheme, the Unité d'Habitation, where Le Corbusier's modernist convictions about the relationship between form and function found their most extreme expression.

Many composers have day jobs, but not many find a way of connecting the day job with the business of writing music. Le Corbusier knew that Xenakis was composing but was frustrated by his lack of technique and direction, so he suggested a consultation with the leading French modern composer of the day, Olivier Messiaen. Messiaen's advice was revelatory. "You have the good fortune of being an architect and having studied special mathematics", he told Xenakis. "Take advantage of these things. Do them in your music."

Over the next few years Xenakis slowly implemented Messiaen's advice. The main Corbusier project on his desk was the Couvent de la Tourette that demanded a complex spatial geometry of intersecting planes and curves. Xenakis realised that his structural calculations could apply to sounds, too. A rising plane could be a sliding string tone, its physical mass translated into the number of violins sliding together. Tones could intersect, curve away from one another: brutalist architecture becoming brutalist music. When the first of these pieces, Metastaseis, was premiered at the 1955 Donaueschingen festival it caused a scandal; most European modern music in the 1950s was obsessed with the organisation of individual points or groups of sounds. The kinetic force of Metastaseis must have seemed like an alien invasion.

Like Le Corbusier's architecture, Xenakis's music is based on first principles rather than on received ideas about how to do things. Cut holes in a continuous surface, as Le Corbusier did with the Couvent de la Tourette, and not only do the holes let in daylight, but also divide the surface, articulating regular or irregular patterns. This works in music, too. Cut holes in a continuous musical tone and you have a rhythm; cut holes in a tone which is rising or falling and you have both a rhythm and a scale. Cut 12 holes at regular intervals in a tone that slides up an octave and you have the familiar chromatic scale represented by the black and white keys on the piano keyboard.

By the middle of the 20th century arguments about different ways of organising this 12-note scale dominated musical debate. The new orthodoxy in modernist music was that all 12 notes had to be organised into a more or less equal relationship all the time, making music without the gravitational pull of a single central note: atonal music. But architects need to maintain a healthy respect for gravity, and in Xenakis's music instability and irregularity – the default settings of so much mid-20th century modern music – co-exist with passages where a central note or a regular pulse dominate. It's music in which delicate scatterings of sounds can suddenly be supplanted by a shatteringly intense unison or by driving rhythms redolent of some lost east European folk tradition. It's the pull between these opposite forces that makes this music so immediate.

"He created something new," says Irvine Arditti, whose Arditti Quartet worked closely with Xenakis for 20 years. "Anyone can appreciate Xenakis's music without needing to know about the music of the earlier 20th century." He remembers how "in his rehearsals Xenakis was interested not in small details, but in larger shapes and characters of sound".

At the Huddersfield contemporary music festival, the Arditti Quartet will be joined by the pianist Ian Pace, who too enjoys the challenge of finding these "larger shapes and characters" in Xenakis's often very complex scores. In some of them, says Pace, "there is no way every single pitch can be played exactly … there is no way of keeping reiterated quick chords going at both ends of the keyboard and the centre at the same time, even if one plays with one's nose. Ultimately it comes down to what one thinks does most justice to the work's essence and conception." Getting to the "essence" of a piece of music, it's quite an old-fashioned idea, but Xenakis's music is uniquely ancient and modern; a decade after its composer's death it's still full of life.

Works by Xenakis are performed at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival tonight and on 24, 25 and 27 November. Details: hcmf.co.uk

The constructivists and the Russian revolution in art and achitecture

The Sheet — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:06:01 +0000

The 'Russian avant garde' created the 20th-century's most intensive art and architectural movement. Its paintings survive, but its buildings rot

The "Russian avant garde", it's usually called, though the artists themselves didn't use the term; they were known as the futurists, then productivists, and most consistently, constructivists. Even the "Russian" is a misnomer – the individuals in question were frequently Ukrainian, Latvian, Belarussian, Georgian. "Soviet" doesn't quite work either, as they emerged slightly before the October revolution, out of the futurist cafés and cabarets of the mid-1910s.

What they created was probably the most intensive and creative art and architectural movement of the 20th century, a sourcebook so copious that there's scarcely any movement since that wasn't anticipated by something tried and discarded between 1915 and 1935 – from abstraction, pop art, op art, minimalism, abstract expressionism, the graphic style of punk and post-punk, to brutalism, postmodernism, hi-tech and deconstructivism. But the people making this work largely didn't consider themselves to be artists; they even used the term as an insult. They wanted to destroy art altogether, not as a sulky nihilistic gesture, but because they thought they'd created something better to put in its place. They are currently almost ubiquitous, but they nearly disappeared from the historical record – something almost accidentally documented in the Royal Academy show Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture, 1915-35.

The bulk of the artworks in the show come from the collection of George Costakis, a Greek diplomat resident in Moscow from the 1940s until the 1980s. He created what has been called a "futurist ark", buying up drawings, paintings and sketches by artists who were dead, discredited, forgotten, prohibited, or who had moved on to the very different "socialist realism" prescribed from the 1930s onwards. Until Costakis's collection went public, there was only a vague idea that something extraordinary had happened in the former Russian empire – perhaps a couple of mentions of Kasimir Malevich or Alexander Rodchenko, usually in connection with the German artists they had inspired.

Costakis's work was aided from the 1970s on by the archaeological research of the Soviet historian Selim Khan-Magomedov and the late English architectural writer Catherine Cooke; it's no exaggeration to say that without this small group of people, the current prominence of the "Russian avant garde", which has featured in seemingly dozens of exhibitions on the heroic era of modernism over the last decade, would have been impossible. This is at least in part because it was equally useless to both sides in the cold war. For the west, with its CIA-sponsored abstract expressionism, the claim that Bolshevism led inevitably to the suppression of individual creativity was hard to square with this unprecedented visual flowering; while the Soviet bloc still clearly felt there was something dubiously Trotskyite about these internationalist, cosmopolitan art movements.

In Building the Revolution's catalogue, an essay by Jean-Louis Cohen outlines the close connections these artists and architects had with various western trends, from the Bauhaus to Le Corbusier, who was invited to Moscow to design a gargantuan office block for the Union of Co-operatives, which is still standing. No doubt this counted against them when the Soviet Union took a sharp rightwards turn towards nationalism and autarchy in the 1930s. Yet there's often a tendency to act as if the constructivists were themselves "western" in the cold war sense – that they were typical creative types who couldn't be encompassed into the "system". To paraphrase the title of a book on architect Konstantin Melnikov, they were "solo architects in a mass society", alternately either naive aesthetes or individualists who wouldn't bend to serve the new masters, whose suppression by the monolithic state was inevitable. This conception of the heroic subversive artist was one rejected by the constructivists throughout their existence, so it's an enduring irony that it is so often applied to them.

In the early days of the revolution, especially during the civil war of 1918-21, the futurists decorated the public spaces where the new power was promulgated and celebrated – the painter Nathan Altman created a temporary futuristic redesign of the Palace Square in St Petersburg, architect Nikolai Kolli symbolised the struggle with a public sculpture of a red wedge breaking a white block, while in the small provincial town of Vitebsk, the Unovis group maintained a constant barrage of quasi-abstract propaganda. The last is best represented in the exhibition by El Lissitzky's 1919 Rosa Luxemburg, a monument to the murdered communist leader in the form of polygonal forms flying around a central red circle. The futurists' paper Art of the Commune had direct state support, and though the leadership were ambivalent – Lenin was baffled and irritated by the futurists, Trotsky critically sympathetic – there was no suggestion of their being suppressed.

At every step, the artists developed their art specifically according to how useful it might be for socialism. In the early 1920s they staged an exhibition of the "First Working Group of Constructivists". A well-known photograph of this show features a series of seemingly abstract sculptures, often considered a precursor to later "kinetic art". The constructivists themselves considered this work as a precursor to going into the factories and producing useful objects, which some of them soon did, with mixed results. The intention was to move from the utopian to the quotidian (and back) – after designing the famous Monument to the Third International (a model of which sits in the grounds of Burlington House for the duration of the exhibition) sailor and Bolshevik supporter Vladimir Tatlin's next utopian project was designing a more functional stove.

Much of the Costakis collection dates from the early 1920s, when the new state was recovering from a vicious civil war, an international blockade and foreign military intervention, and facing total economic collapse. The proletariat that had participated in the revolution had been effectively wiped out, with the cities emptying and the heavy industry of St Petersburg destroyed; one delegate at a Bolshevik conference sarcastically congratulated the party on being the vanguard of a non-existent class.

Their only solution to rejuvenate the economy was to encourage small-time traders and the peasants who made up 80% of the population; the constructivists had other ideas. The drawings we see in the exhibition express the desire for a totally urban and industrialised landscape – skyscrapers, giant machine halls, mechanised bodies. Even the abstract art, the non-objective "suprematism" pioneered by the young propagandists of Vitebsk, often evokes the rectilinear precision of engineering drawings as much as it does the free play of the imagination. This was at least on some level a collective fantasy of efficiency, a dream of industry, in a country whose already fragile toehold in the 20th century had just been forcibly rescinded. When this work met western eyes, from the 1922 Russische Ausstellung in Berlin onwards, it was interpreted by people who found the industrial landscape familiar and normal. They missed the element of dreaming – but then the Soviets were often in equally furious denial of that themselves.

The manifestos of the new industrial artists, like Alexei Gan's Constructivism or Nikolai Tarabukin's From the Easel to the Machine, were unromantic, utilitarian. The flourishing of creativity happened because each competing faction of the avant garde was utterly committed and fanatical, not because of anything-goes pluralism. The most radical conceived of art as something that must abolish itself in order to become truly useful to the new society they fervently believed was being built. There wouldn't be "artists" in the old sense anymore – the Moscow art school Vkhutemas aimed instead at educating a polymathic engineer-artist-sociologist. The first casualty was painting, and the notion of the exhibition in museum or gallery, where connoisseurs drift around a collection of individual, unreproducible art works. Former painters delved into textile design, photography, book design and, most of all, architecture.

The Costakis collection shows the temporary propaganda kiosks by the Latvian Bolshevik Gustav Klutsis that were the result of this impulse. The second part of the exhibition shows the real buildings that came later, in the second half of the 1920s. The documentation here comes from two sources. One is the Moscow Shchusev Museum of Architecture's collection of historical photographs; the other is English photographer Richard Pare's archive of contemporary captures of these buildings in a usually parlous state, previously collected in his excellent 2008 book The Lost Vanguard. What these two collections have in common is their reminder of the circumstances and context of the period, something too often lost when we gaze longingly at the utopian blueprint.

In the Shchusev collection's image of the 1926 headquarters for the Soviet newspaper Izvestia, you can see the old Russia that the Bolsheviks feared would overwhelm them crowding round the building, hostile – the clean lines abutted by squat Tsarist pallazos, crenellations and Orthodox domes. Look at Pare's photographs of the same landscapes and you find that old Russia won that battle. Buildings that purport to be steel turn out to be straw; precise little machines for living in are dwarfed by Stalin's gothic skyscrapers and their ultra-kitsch post-Soviet imitations; advertising is ruthless and ubiquitous, covering every available surface. The depth of their defeat is measured here. In art, the avant garde survives; in everyday life, across the Russian Federation and the Commonwealth of Independent States, its works rot.

Given the political defeat of all that its members believed in, they would perhaps have preferred their utopian buildings not to survive. What is unavoidable in any close examination of the constructivists was just how passionately and sincerely they believed in the communist project. They often faced a similar fate to other true believers in the 1930s – Alexei Gan and Gustav Klutsis were among the "purged". Perhaps the fascination that the 1920s still retains, however dimly we perceive it in such different circumstances, is the promise of another communism, unlike the one that committed suicide in 1989 – a communism of colour, democracy and optimism rather than a monochrome despotism; an analogue to the recent return of interest in the aesthetics of social democracy, whether council housing or the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. That's as maybe. What is certain is that the constructivists would not have thanked us for our wistful, apolitical interest.

Owen Hatherley

Renzo Piano: let there be light in the convent

The Sheet — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 23:05:16 +0000

Hidden in a French hillside below Le Corbusier's famous chapel, Renzo Piano's new convent is spare, calm and quietly masterful. Lucky nuns, says Jonathan Glancey

^'At first I said no," says Renzo Piano. "We were very busy. For me, the idea of building a convent next to Le Corbusier at Ronchamp was, in any case, a bit crazy." Certainly, it must have felt like a big risk. The chapel of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp is one of the 20th century's most treasured buildings, and Le Corbusier a demigod in the architectural firmament; being asked to build alongside this French national monument, an international destination for religious and cultural pilgrims, is like receiving an invitation to knock up a postmodern extension to the Parthenon or St Peter's in Rome.

But then Piano met Sister Brigitte de Singly at his studio in Paris, caved in and said yes. The architect was busy with towering commercial projects such as Shard London Bridge, at 310metres [1,017ft] Europe's tallest building, as well as the expansion of Boston's opulent Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, both due to open next year. Meanwhile, Sister Brigitte and her nuns were hoping to leave their home of 800 years in Besançon, in order to be closer to Le Corbusier's chapel.

With an all-in budget of £9m, at least 60 times less than that of the Shard, the convent for the Clarisses, or Poor Clare Sisters, was to take up a disproportionate amount of his time over the next five years. Funding was a slow and complex process; the money was realised through local government funding, charitable and religious donations, and the sale of the nuns' former convent.

When I meet the architect and the abbess, lunching frugally with pilgrims and builders at trestle tables set on a wooded hill, below Le Corbusier's chapel, I can see why Piano said yes. "If Sister Brigitte was to be my client, then what else could I say?" Piano says. "She has a profound love of architecture, of landscape, of sacred space – and even of people without religion, like me. She wanted a place of silence and prayer. I said: 'I can't help you with prayer, but perhaps I can help with silence and a little joy.'"

Just as Le Corbusier's chapel was created for a Catholic church he did not believe in, and shaped by a very particular interpretation of the medieval monasteries he never lived in, so Piano has produced a building of quiet refinement and spirituality at Ronchamp. "Sister Brigitte reminded me of the need for quiet, for nature, for slowness, for simplicity," he says. "She reminded me of the long tradition architects have had of working with the church."

The nunnery is, for the most part, invisible – or will be when new trees have been planted, and plants have spread over the concrete roofs Piano and his Building Workshop have half-buried in the hillside. "Landscaping is half the project," Piano says. Even so, the project met great opposition when plans were unveiled three years ago. The Fondation Le Corbusier, a fierce guard of the architect's reputation, was quick on the attack. "They began to scream: you can't do this!" says Piano. At the time, the foundation's director Michel Richard argued: "We are trying to make sure the site is preserved for eternity. We are afraid that in 10 years, the sisters will go away and they will be replaced by a B&B."

"Of course, they were worried that we wanted to build too close to Le Corbusier," says Jean-François Mathey, who, with Sister Brigitte, has been the driving force behind the project. Mathey is president of the Association de l'Oeuvre Notre Dame du Haut, the organisation that commissioned the chapel from Le Corbusier 60 years ago. "In fact, they didn't want anything new built here." When Piano announced his plan to hide the building away in the hillside, Jean Louis Cohen, the distinguished French architectural historian and board member of the Fondation, told the press: "Maybe you wouldn't see it, but you would feel it."

All of this is understandable, but Mathey had been thinking about a new religious foundation for Ronchamp for some time. "The chapel is a great attraction to believers, to cultural tourists, to architects, to anyone with a soul," he explains, "and we have 100,000 visitors a year. But we didn't want [it] to become only a tourist attraction, or a funfair; we wanted to make sure it stays a place of prayer." When Archbishop Luigi Ventura, the papal envoy to France, comes to bless the convent on 2 October, Ronchamp will be reconsecrated in the hearts of the Catholic faithful.

And despite the Fondation's fears, Piano has made a great improvement to the hilltop site. A grim concrete visitors' centre that had lurked between car park and chapel has been demolished. A new visitors' centre, dug into the hill, forms the base of the convent. There is a bookshop and a gallery behind a welcoming zinc-and-glass facade; in winter, a roaring log fire set behind a glass screen will greet those who have battled with snow and fog to get here.

Above is the convent proper. This wraps itself around contours of the hill, burrowing into the landscape like the strands of a rosary pressed gently into the earth. The strings of the rosary are the convent's corridors; its beads are the rooms leading off them. The crucifix at its centre is the chapel, the Oratory.

On one side of a simple central entrance, a long corridor lined with sweet-smelling, floor-to-ceiling cedar cupboards leads to the nuns' cells and living quarters. There is room for just 12 Poor Clares. Aside from their life of prayer and work, they will look after visitors seeking more than architecture and landscape can offer.

The cells are spare, calm and chastely beautiful. They are no more than 2.7 metres square, but have custom-designed timber furniture, warm orange walls, superb natural lighting and stirring views south and west to the valley below. The rooms are fronted by private winter gardens, glazed suntraps serving as architectural gaps, or pauses, between inner and outer worlds. (They will also help keep the cells warm in winter, cool in summer.)

Every light switch, every chair

The refectory is gathered around three sides of a courtyard, with glazed walls but open to the sky. It must be wonderful to eat here as the rain or snow falls. At the heart of the convent, the chapel's concrete vault curves in two different planes, like the upturned hull of a boat (an image of the Church as a ship of souls), while a concealed slit in the chancel wall facing the hillside brings a halo of daylight into its deepest recesses. "Architecture," as Le Corbusier said, "is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light." Piano's work here is quietly masterful, built around a minimal palette of concrete, timber and zinc; the fact that he and his team have designed and crafted every last detail, from chairs to light switches, within such a modest budget is a minor modern miracle. Buried into the hillside, the convent should prove cheap to heat and light. Deep bore holes bring warmth from the ground, while daylight is reflected through the building at every turn. It felt comfortable here on the intensely humid day I came to visit.

"I have tried to make it like a little hill town," Piano says. It's an appropriate analogy. Between 1922 and 1935, Le Corbusier planned new city centres (which were never realised), inspired as much by medieval monasteries as by modern life. "I have found the solution to workers' housing," he wrote to his parents in 1907. "I saw, in the harmonious countryside of Tuscany, a modern city crowning the top of a hill. The ring of monks' cells formed the noblest silhouette on the landscape. Each cell overlooks the plain and opens at a lower level into a small, enclosed garden. I thought I had never seen such happy living arrangements."

The pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp and the monastery of Saint Marie de la Tourette at Eveux-sur-Arbresle, north-west of Lyon, were Le Corbusier's last great buildings, both built on shoestrings. Piano has many more buildings in him, and yet it is fascinating to see this thoughtful architect nurturing one of his most considered buildings on a low budget, for nuns living and praying at the foot of Le Corbusier's chapel. He was absolutely right to have said yes.

Jonathan Glancey

Constructive criticism: the week in architecture

The Sheet — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:53:59 +0000

The design world hits high-voltage this week, with flash openings at historic houses, electric cars racing to the future and RIBA unveiling the British pylons of tomorrow

London Open House takes place this weekend, allowing us to see inside hundreds of historic buildings normally closed to the public. Some, such as the hugely popular Midland Grand Hotel (fronting St Pancras station) and Jimi Hendrix's flat in Mayfair's Brook Street are sold-out, but the choice of buildings to visit is still vast.

What about that trip to Ruislip you never promised yourself, to see 97 Park Road, an unexpected house built by Connell Ward and Lucas in 1936 in the style of Le Corbusier's white Parisian villas of the 1920s? This is the best-preserved of a row of three houses that dumbfounded its neighbours (Ruislip is awash with mock-Tudor and neo-Georgian homes) when they were built. Today, though, it is No 97 that is so very desirable.

Or how about the political and architectural drama of Wrotham Park in Barnet, a magnificent English Palladian country house designed by Isaac Ware in 1754 for Admiral John Byng. The house has featured in numerous films and TV shows including Gosford Park and Sense and Sensibility; doubtless you will spot others. Voltaire satirised poor Byng's death in 1759's Candide: "In this country [England], it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others."

British design is to be encouraged in future at the Commonwealth Institute, Kensington, open to the public this weekend for the last time in its original state before John Pawson converts it into a new home for the Design Museum. With its dramatic hyperbolic paraboloid copper roof (as beautiful to look at as the words that describe it are clumsy), this "tent in the park" pavilion was designed by RMJM; it first opened in 1962.

Details of Open House, Dublin were also revealed this week. Clearly a passionate event, it offers (along with visits to many historic and new buildings) a "Destruction of Dublin" walking tour: all too much of the Georgian city has been destroyed by mindless new development over the past 50 years. Not an event, then, for those heading to Dublin for hen or stag parties and the "craic", but a time to get intelligently under the city's grey stone skin.

This Way Up: 15 Years of Architecture, Design and Fashion at the British Council is a show opening in Hoxton, east London, as part of the London design festival. It tells the story of the Council's attempts to get British creativity noticed by people worldwide. Designs by Tom Dixon, Peter Kennard, Pearson Lloyd, Sebastian Bergne, Nigel Shafran, Michael Marriott and Anthony Burrill will be on show together with four one-off dresses by Basso and Brooke, inspired by their British Council exchange to Uzbekistan.

Designers will be on hand to recycle materials left over from British Council exhibitions. Other objects will be auctioned off, including "everything from giant rolls of Sellotape to fascinating chairs commissioned for shows in Venice," says Vicky Richardson, the British Council's director of architecture, design and fashion. "We wanted to clear out all this stuff, but we didn't want to throw anything away." The money raised will fund a new British Council scholarship giving young British designers the opportunity to work in Brazil.

Audi evoked memories of the intriguing relationship between architects and automobiles when it announced its Urban Concept car this week in time for the Frankfurt motor show. This lightweight, electric two-seater has been designed, says Audi, according to Mies van der Rohe's guiding principle "less is more". More than Mies, though, it calls to mind Le Corbusier's influential, if overlooked, 1929 design for a city car.

Even Le Corbusier never had the hard task of designing an electricity pylon. Contemporary architects, however, have been much involved in the competition organised by RIBA and the Department for Energy and Climate Change for a new standard British pylon. Models by the six pylon finalists will be on show at the V&A during the London design festival. The most convincing is Silhouette by Ian Ritchie Architects and engineers Jane Wernick Associates. It takes the form of a needle-like steel obelisk with well-resolved arms to carry the cables; seen in profile, it would be fairly unobtrusive. Other designs are a little top-heavy (T-Pylon by Bystrup Architects), too flamboyant (Flower Tower by Gustafson Porter with Atelier One and Pfisterer), or simply too dramatic for mass production (the taut, bow-like Plexus by AL_A and Arup). Whichever design wins – final judging takes place on 11 October 2011 – it may yet be back to the drawing board if the existing standard design, dating from 1928, is to be superseded, both technically and aesthetically.

The connection between architecture and engineering is realised memorably in the design of Norman Foster's 1978 Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. This week the Twentieth Century Society announced it was putting forward the building for listing. Expect Grade I status. Unlike Wrotham Park, 97 Park Road or the Commonwealth Institute, this hi-tech masterpiece is open to the public throughout the year.

Jonathan Glancey

British architecture: Architects of the age – modernism

The Sheet — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 23:44:33 +0000

The brutalist style that Peter and Alison Smithson pioneered was radical, practical and beautiful. To their enemies – among whom Prince Charles holds the megaphone – their uncompromising concrete boxes are the greatest sins that have ever been committed in a planning office.

This war broke out as soon as the Smithsons' first building was completed in 1954. At the time, the blunt rectangularity of Hunstanton school, with all its glass and steel, was profoundly shocking. And worse (or better) was to come, in the form of the Economist building and then the Robin Hood Gardens housing estate, both in London.

Though the couple's idealism was obvious, they assiduously researched the habits of the people they designed for. Indeed, they saw their residential work as the compassionate reaction to Le Corbusier's huge towers. What they were building, as the doomed phrase had it, would be "streets in the sky".

Sadly, practice did not follow theory. Alison died in 1993, and Peter in 2003, but both lived long enough to see themselves ridiculed, especially for the failure of Robin Hood Gardens to realise their expectations. To many, their career now stands as a parable of the way that naive optimism can condemn the poor to squalor. Yet to others, including Richard Rogers, the story that Robin Hood Gardens tells is of a brilliant design being neglected and mismanaged. Tower Hamlets council plans to knock it down.

Leo Benedictus

British architecture: modernism

The Sheet — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 23:44:30 +0000

Postwar modernist idealism swept away the slums with hope and a fresh aesthetic, but the optimism crumbled as quick as the concrete

When the Tbilisi-born architect Berthold Lubetkin arrived in London via Paris in 1931, he searched in vain for modernist buildings. Continental Europe sparkled with white concrete and flat roofs created by architects for whom form followed function and the house was, as Le Corbusier put it, "a machine for living". But in Britain, classicism prevailed, interrupted by the odd flourish of art deco. British architects did use steel and concrete in their buildings, but covered them over with Portland stone.

Britain, Lubetkin lamented, was "about 50 years behind, as though locked in a deep provincial sleep". This was especially disappointing as he had been influenced by British aesthetics and, like other modernist architects, he admired the early 20th-century English house. The honesty of expression in the British Arts and Crafts movement had been a catalyst for European modernism. French and German architects extrapolated the British emphasis on expressing the nature of materials into a movement with overarching ambitions. In Germany, Peter Behrens and his students Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe saw buildings as, in Mies's words, "the spirit of the epoch translated into form". In France, Le Corbusier controversially insisted that humans needed space, light and order as much as they needed bread or a place to sleep. For Le Corbusier, the choice was between "architecture or revolution".

But in Britain, the more radical aims of the Arts and Crafts movement were forgotten after the first world war. Art deco cinemas sprung up across the country in the 1920s, but these frivolous pleasure palaces used the modern as a decorative style rather than a template for a new society.

There was the occasional genuine modernist building. In 1925 Peter Behrens had designed Britain's first white concrete box, New Ways in Northampton. But it was a one-off, dismissed by the Architectural Review as a mere "exercise in modernity".

It took the arrival of Lubetkin and other émigrés to wrench Britain into the future. Lubetkin provided England with several modernist masterpieces: two sleek, white, concrete apartment blocks, Highpoint Iand II, in London's Highgate, the sculpturally sublime Penguin Pool in Regent's Park, and the entirely modernist Black Country zoo. Meanwhile Erich Mendelsohn joined Serge Chermayeff in creating the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill in 1934. The white curves appealed in an age of sun worship; the seaside was ready for an architecture of space and light. For George Bernard Shaw, the Pavilion signified that Bexhill had at last "emerged from barbarism".

Mass-produced steel and concrete were quick to construct and economically attractive and some British architects went further than their European counterparts, obsessive in their attempts to pour entire buildings from a single mould. Maxwell Fry saw reinforced concrete as "the revolutionary material par excellence" and put it to use in a 1937 Ladbroke Grove housing scheme, Kensal House, intended to be "no ordinary block of flats but a community in action".

These buildings were not without their critics. Evelyn Waugh complained about the appearance of "villas like sewage farms, mansions like half-submerged Channel steamers, offices like vast beehives".

But the British like being cosy, which was hard in open-plan buildings with stark white fronts. As the 1930s progressed, all the arts retrenched from the cold abstraction of high modernism to something more accessible and familiar. The white concrete boxes morphed into a more British version of modernism, clad in brick and timber.

By 1940 JM Richards, editor of the Architectural Review, had concluded that "Englishness" was "not incompatible with modern architecture". Homegrown modernism was exemplified by Charles Holden, who designed a series of curved brick tube stations including Arnos Grove, South Wimbledon and East Finchley.

After the second world war, this compassionate (or apologetic) modernism emerged as the prevailing aesthetic in the burgeoning welfare state. Just as important in an age of bomb-damaged austerity was the speedy construction of new homes.

Of course, there was a backlash amid this new consensus. The angry young husband-and-wife partnership of Alison and Peter Smithson banished cosiness in a style known as brutalism. Architecture had become uncomfortable again, this time in the service of the community. Brutalism created Le Corbusier-inspired "streets in the sky", intended to mirror the roads in the slums they replaced, later epitomised by Erno Goldfinger's 1968 Trellick tower in North Kensington.

But the vertiginous streets did not foster a neighbourly environment. They became easy pickings for muggers and quickly fell into disrepair. It is hard to feel house-proud of a machine. Ironically, it was suburbia that flourished. In the 1950s, many people abandoned inner-city flats for suburban houses, lured by the prospect of a front door opening on to an actual street. Even the Smithsons didn't give up their Victorian house. For all the lofty dreams of two generations of utopian architects and planners, much of Britain remained ensconced in earth-bound homes, gratefully burrowed in "provincial sleep".

• Dr Lara Feigel is lecturer in English at King's College London. She is the author of Literature, Cinema Politics 1939-45: Reading Between the Frames

St Peter’s Seminary in line for redemption by Scottish arts group | Jonathan Glancey

The Sheet — Thu, 12 May 2011 15:41:05 +0000

Site-specific artists NVA given two years to raise £10m to renovate abandoned brutalist masterpiece

There are those who still think the bravura brutalist design of St Peter's Seminary in Cardross, 25 miles from Glasgow, to be an eyesore. There are those who say it was blighted by technical problems from the day it opened 45 years ago. Then there are those who believe that this is one of the greatest modern buildings in Europe. Whatever your opinion, St Peter's was deemed important enough to be placed on the World Monument Fund list of the "World's 100 Most Endangered Sites" in 2008.

Now, Scottish arts group NVA, funded by Creative Scotland and a number of UK trusts and foundations, has been given two years to raise £10m to enable the partial renovation of the great concrete structure. The aim is to transform the graffiti-plastered ruin and the surrounding Kilmahew woodland strewn with litter into an arts-led public space.

"The opportunity to purchase St Peter's/Kilmahew concludes years of speculation about the seminary buildings", says Angus Farquhar, NVA's creative director, "and marks the beginning of a new future for the site and for the many people for whom it has significance ... a new form of generative public art that develops from a long-term creative dialogue with the users and radically accepts the value of the building in its current form expanding an 'unfinished' narrative that will change over time."

That narrative has been beset with sorry circumstances: by the time its construction was completed in 1966, the number of vocations to the Catholic priesthood in Scotland had fallen dramatically, while a Vatican II encyclical from 1965 declared that priests should no longer be trained in the countryside but in the communities they were to serve. St Peter's closed in 1980, became a drug rehabilitation centre in 1983, then closed again four years later and began its rapid descent into decay. In 1993, the building, designed by Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein of Gillespie Kidd and Coia as a homage to Le Corbusier, was listed Grade A – a building of special architectural importance in Scotland.

Visitors to the site in years to come will walk through restored woodland and come across the shored up ruins of St Peter's alive with artistic adventure. This will take many forms, from teaching to live events, with the buildings acting as a sublime frame. NVA also plans to increase security, as the woods and ruins have become a less than holy haven for young people.

No one has expected the seminary to be restored to its original purpose, least of all the Archdiocese of Glasgow. Since the early 1990s there have been several attempts to find new uses for St Peter's, but the NVA proposal garnered praise internationally when it was unveiled at the 2010 Venice architecture biennale. But NVA has just two years to raise funds and to spirit the project into life. It wants people – and not just locals and artists – to join in the discussion and, hopefully, help raise funds. St Peter's is a site of international importance, but if NVA fails, the lands and ruins will return to the Archdiocese; and, then – without purpose and funding – they can only fall into further decay.

Jonathan Glancey

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds