Posts Tagged Le Corbusier
James Stirling: visionary architect, and a very naughty boy
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 20, 2011
Tate Britain reappraises James Stirling – who gave his name to Britain's premier architectural prize – and shows he could be good, and bad… but never dull
Did the great British architect James Stirling kill architecture in Great Britain? The question has to be asked since, as well as being an original and internationally admired talent, who is sometimes said to be the Francis Bacon of British architecture, he also designed some of the most notoriously malfunctioning buildings of modern times. Worse, two of these buildings were in the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge, wherein opinion formers spent their formative years. If you want to annoy as much of the establishment as possible, there are few more effective ways than this.
In particular he and his partner James Gowan designed the history faculty and library at Cambridge, completed in 1968. Here, as they struggled to study in this alternately freezing/boiling greenhouse, with dodgy acoustics, frequent leaks and falling cladding tiles, future columnists and editors incubated a deep loathing of the building, of Stirling, and by extension all forms of ambitious modern architecture. In the 1970s the young critic Gavin Stamp made his name with a remorseless hatchet job on the history faculty. In the 1980s it narrowly escaped demolition.
In 1984 the pro-Stirling critic Reyner Banham wrote that "anyone will know who keeps up with the English highbrow weeklies (professional, intellectual or satirical), the only approvable attitude to James Stirling is one of sustained execration and open or veiled accusations of incompetence."
Behind most broadsheet tirades against modern architecture in the last 40 years stands the figure of James Stirling. And, when architects are now subjected to the most elaborate forms of control and project management, squeezing out invention in the interests of reducing risk, it is in order to avoid mishaps much like the Cambridge history faculty. Stirling was seen as the very type of the award-winning architect whose buildings don't work. He was, to boot, arrogant, lecherous and sometimes boorish. At a party in the apartment of the New York architect Paul Rudolph, he chose to express himself by urinating against its huge window, from the terrace outside, facing into the crowd of guests.
Yet he continues to hold an honoured place. The Stirling prize, inaugurated shortly after his death in 1992, is named after him. Now, as the wheel of fashion grinds inevitably round, his work is up for reappraisal. Next month Tate Britain will honour him with an exhibition based on the impressive archive of his work owned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture. These drawings will reveal him as a more subtle, complex and even charming character. They are skilful, sometimes refined, sometimes informal. Some drawings, composed as presentation pieces after a design was complete, have an abstract elegance. At other times he would cover sheets of writing paper, diary pages and the backs of plane tickets and telegrams with thickets of sketches, as he worked ideas over and over. They might be plans, diagrams or three-dimensional views. They have energy, with much-repeated lines or brisk hatching or Klee-like arrows scurrying through them.
They are signs of thinking with his hands, of trying things out, of exploring and excavating. These are not the disdainful doodles that some architects dash off, hoping that it will be taken as a sign of genius that they can be done so thoughtlessly. They show complete faith that the design of buildings is a serious business, to be pursued with time, testing, consideration and debate. He might try several versions of an elevation, with differences that would not be obvious to a casual observer.
They also show faith that architecture is something like music or painting or literature, that it is something to be composed, with tensions and harmonies to be resolved within its overall structure. Stirling kept considering his art in relation to that of others, both 20th-century figures like Le Corbusier and the Russian constructivists, and architects of the Italian renaissance, or the grand industrial architecture of Liverpool, where he grew up. His designs and drawings set up multiple dialogues with other works. And, like artists and writers, he wanted to be provocative. He wanted to wake people up.
These tensions and elaborations, these interplays of forces and allusions, should make it hard to dismiss his work as mere leaky showmanship. His Florey building for Queen's College Oxford is a sort of inhabited viaduct turned into theatrical U-shaped court, a distant derivation of the Oxford quad, facing the river Cherwell. It is Oxonian and constructivist at once. It is perverse but you would have to be a dullard not to see its drama. Students there now comment on its faults but also on the atmosphere generated by this extraordinary hemi-cauldron.
His later work is more likeable and less leaky, as Stirling became slightly less reckless, and as he started building in Germany, where the building industry seemed better equipped to realise his ambitious ideas. His 1984 Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, for example, was one of the biggest tourist attractions in the country, on account of the force of the building. In this it was a prototype of the Guggenheim in Bilbao.
At its centre is a great circular stone court, like an inside-out mausoleum or a new-built ruin, with vines falling down its walls. A system of ramps takes you through the building, as if you were climbing a hillside and, at the moments when it might become too monumental, bright curves of steel and glass lighten the mood. It is romantic, potent and playful at once, and perfectly captures the balance between monumentality and motion, between eternity and perambulation, which is the essence of museums.
The Staatsgalerie wouldn't work without the pushing and pulling of ideas you can see in the drawings. It is worked and wrought in a way few buildings are nowadays. Architects still work hard, and test different ideas, but they search more for a magic formula in the cladding or the form which will make the whole building smoothly beautiful and consistent. There is less sense that a building is composed like a painting, and that the architect should leave some of his sweat and brushmarks on the canvas. Stirling's drawings bring on a nostalgia for a way of designing – among other things, without a computer in sight – that has gone the way of dodos and drafting boards.
Does his art justify the malfunctions? There is, to be sure, more than one side to the argument: Stirling's defenders always said that his projects were victims of poor construction, cost-cutting and clumsy clients. It can also be said that time casts a rosy glow over the faults of more distant architects. The shoddiness of Nash, the impracticality of Vanbrugh and the budget-busting of many great architects in history are now almost forgotten and forgiven. The same will probably happen to Stirling.
Stirling was a very naughty boy. The pleasures of his successes came at an exorbitant cost, not only in technical failures but also artistic ideas that didn't quite come off. The number of his works that are unequivocally admirable are few. Architects are mostly more careful and responsible now, which is mostly a good thing. But, at his best, Stirling showed what powerful and moving things buildings can be, and the world would have been poorer without him.
Le Corbusier’s Indian masterpiece Chandigarh is stripped for parts
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 8, 2011
Group rallies to rescue city built as monument to modernity from neglect and plunder
It is a last-ditch effort to save a city built as a monument to modernity and hope but now threatened by neglect and the fierce demands of the global art market. Chandigarh, 180 miles north of Delhi, was built by Le Corbusier 60 years ago.
Since then, many of its finest buildings, recognised as modernist masterpieces, have been neglected. Recently, international art dealers have made substantial sums selling hundreds of chairs, tables, carvings and prints designed by Le Corbusier and his assistants but obtained at knockdown prices from officials often unaware of their value.
Now a group of local architects, art historians and officials are hoping to mobilise international help to prevent further damage to Le Corbusier's unique Indian legacy. A report commissioned by the government in Chandigarh has recommended a campaign targeting the UN heritage agency, Unesco, as well as foreign governments, especially in Europe where many of the items have been auctioned. Informal approaches to embassies in Delhi have failed, the unpublished report, seen by the Guardian, says.
The campaigners are led by Manmohan Nath Sharma, who was the first assistant of Le Corbusier in Chandigarh and later took over as chief architect of the city. "What is being lost is irreplaceable," he said, speaking in the home he designed in the centre of Chandigarh and surrounded by prints and paintings given to him by Le Corbusier. "Our heritage is going to be gone forever. This matter is being taken very lightly by the authorities so now we need international help. This is a handmade city. It is unique. It can never be replaced."
A Chandigarh manhole cover recently sold for £15,000, although there is no suggestion the furniture was bought or sold illegally.
Professor Rajnish Wattas, a former principal of the Chandigarh College of Architecture, is also calling for international intervention. "We were stunned when we heard the prices for manhole covers or chairs that you can still see watchmen sitting on outside offices. This was a wake-up call but what we are losing still hasn't sunk in," he said.
Le Corbusier was commissioned by Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, to build a city that would replace Lahore, the capital of the Punjab lost to newly created Pakistan after partition in 1947. Nehru said the new metropolis was to be of a design "unfettered by the traditions of the past, a symbol of the nation's faith in the future". Working on the principle that every detail had to be meticulously planned for the whole to function, Le Corbusier's team designed everything from the vast sculptures outside the monumental high court and local assembly to the door handles in the offices within.
Last year, the Chandigarh authorities approached the British high commission in Delhi in a bid to halt the sale in London of dozens of items including chairs from the assembly buildings. Indian diplomats in London also intervened. Neither attempt was successful.
Many of the items for sale in Europe come from stocks "condemned" as unfit for use by the local administration and sold off at auction to junk dealers. Others have been bought from officials often unaware of their international value.
Campaigners hope that with international support the auctions can be halted until new laws are passed.
"We have to act before it is too late," said Sharma, 87. "The Taj Mahal was made by foreign craftsmen and admired by foreigners before Indians saw it as a major attraction. Today the Taj is a symbol of India. Tomorrow it will be Le Corbusier's work in Chandigarh."
Learning to Dwell: Adolf Loos in the Czech Lands – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 20, 2011
Riba, London
"The naked woman," said the architect Adolf Loos, "is unattractive to man." It is one of the more striking statements in the history of architectural writing, and one that may not seem to have much to do with architecture, but it is part of a theory that has done much to shape the buildings of the past 100 years. If you have eaten in a restaurant or visited a hotel describing itself as "minimalist", or ever been struck by the lack of ornament on any modernist building, you will have witnessed the after-effects of this strange thought. According to a 1930s critic: "There lives not one single architect who does not carry within himself a bit of Loos."
Women, argued Loos, have to dress and ornament themselves to appeal to "man's sickly sensuality". They have to wear impractical things such as long skirts that stress their decorative role. It would be much better if both men and women wore plain, well-made clothes like the English suits that he especially liked. Ornament, he famously said, is linked to degeneracy and crime and should be removed from objects of daily use: not just clothes, but furniture and buildings.
Loos is usually described as Austrian, but he grew up in the town of Brno, then part of the Hapsburg empire, now in the Czech Republic. Some of his best works are in that country, in Brno, Prague and Plzen. This week, an exhibition opens at the Royal Institute of British Architects that, originating in Prague, seeks to reclaim Loos for his homeland. It should also, distributed across several floors of Riba's headquarters, be a good introduction to the work of this astonishing man.
It will show the houses and apartments that Loos designed in the 1920s for prosperous bourgeoisie of a country, Czechoslovakia, minted after the Great War by the Treaty of Versailles. He built for a paediatrician, a manufacturer of screws and another of wire, a chemist serving the brewing industry and the hugely successful building contractor František Müller. These were people keen to distance themselves from the past, but also to embrace high culture, and their homes tended to be furnished with pianos and art.
The exteriors of the houses are as plain as Loos said they should be. The house he built for Müller, on a steep slope facing towards Prague Castle, is startlingly white and cubic. Villa Müller's interiors, however, are far from being puritanical boxes. They are lush with oak, flaming mahogany, poplar and elm, and marbles with evocative names: cipollino, with layered patterns like the inside of an onion, and fantastico, with dazzling patterns of black on white. He would use yellow-gold silk for curtains and lampshades and, when it suited, the newest materials of his time, with their own exotic brand names: Xylonite, linoleum, Salubra wallpaper and Duco automative paint that gave the finish of a new car.
He loved mirrors, using them to multiply rooms and dissolve their boundaries, and played games with the veining of marbles. In one convulsive music room, as in a gestalt test, you can read monsters and pudenda into the symmetrical patterns of matched fantastico panels. His shapes are severe, almost all straight-lined and right-angled, but they are full of constrained sensuality. Economy was not the purpose – one of his assistants said that you could build "a very nice detached house" for the cost of one of his rooms. These rich rooms are in fact consistent with Loos's theories of ornament, as they use the inherent patterns of natural materials rather than decoration contrived by man.
He believed that the materials of a room should match its use and mood, with marble in more public places and wood in more intimate rooms, or pale maple in a woman's dressing room and oak in a man's. The dimensions, including height, should also be varied to suit each room, with the result that his houses became three-dimensional jigsaws of interlocking spaces, with many floor and ceiling levels, connected by short flights of steps and crisscrossed by views from one to the other.
Loos was born in 1870 and died in 1933, lived in Vienna at the time of Freud, and makes an easy subject for amateur analysis. His father was a stonemason and his happy early memories of playing in his workshop were cut short at the age of nine when his father died. His mother was strict and he escaped her to join the army as early as possible, only to contract syphilis. She then cut him off, in return for paying for his fare for his three-year trip to the United States.
He married three times, had a long-term mistress, and towards the end of his life he was accused of paedophilia. He had a particular penchant for actresses and dancers. As described in a new book by Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin (Oxford University Press), he was fascinated by Josephine Baker. On the basis of a slight acquaintance, he volunteered to design her a house, never built, whose main features were a glass-walled swimming pool surrounded by corridors for viewing her body at exercise, and an exterior in vibrant black-and-white stripes which may have represented his wish to mingle his European restraint with her African-American energy.
He was, in other words, a sensualist, of a possibly twisted kind. His houses, with their blank, mask-like outsides and their intricate, lush-but-disciplined interiors, make perfect emblems of his well-dressed outer self and his complex inner self. Both buildings and writings express a singular, tortured personality, with strange views on desire, yet had a general influence. Architects such as Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier learned plainness and controlled luxury from him ("Whatever is good in Le Corbusier's work, he learned from Loos," said Loos, half-ironically.) Mies and Corb were then the dominant influences on architecture for two generations.
His interiors are inward-looking, mesmerising, sometimes a little creepy. There is an air of fragility or tragedy about them, reinforced by later events. His many Jewish clients were forced out of their marbled nests into exile or camps. In 1945, the commanding officer of the local Wehrmacht shot himself in the flat with the convulsive music room, which had been appropriated as headquarters. Old Müller was dispossessed of his fortune by the postwar Communist regime, but allowed to stay on in the house, in whose boiler room he would eventually be found dead; he had operated the equipment wrongly, whether accidentally or on purpose, and poisoned himself with fumes.
Müller's wife, Milada Müllerová, stayed on, lodged in the recesses of the house, and fought with the authorities to stop them wrecking it. Thanks to her, it survived and is now restored, opened to the public, and one of the more compelling of the many compelling sights of Prague.
Golden ratio shows maths and art come from the same place in our minds
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 28, 2009
The beauty of the golden ratio, surely, lies in the discovery of harmony in imbalance – that is, it's not a symmetrical division, it's not 1+1, but a bit more interesting and lively. In architecture, the piers and windows of Durham Cathedral seem to apply it as assiduously as in the Parthenon in Athens. But why such mystique?
The ancient Greek thinker Pythagoras was moved to find that a string only produces perfect musical notes when divided by exact mathematical fractions. He saw this as a revelation of divine beauty. This attitude to number (that it is the key to the secret harmony of the universe) survived in the middle ages in Muslim and Christian architecture.
In the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci took it to new extremes, analysing the perfect proportions of a horse and a human and finding number at the heart of nature. In 1504 he was designing fortifications for an Italian town. While researching this for a forthcoming book, I puzzled over diagrams of pyramids that keep interrupting plans for towers – until I understood that Leonardo believed so passionately in the power of proportion that he thought it could make a castle invulnerable. He illustrated his friend Fra Luca Pacioli's book The Divine Proportion, which praises the golden ratio, and so helped to create one of the most persistent cults in maths and art.
Whether or not the golden ratio really has any special significance in human psychology, it has been given that status by artists like Leonardo. Another is surely the great 15th-century painter Piero della Francesca, whose geometrically pleasing art is rooted in mathematics. The persistent pursuit of this proportion right down to Le Corbusier proves that mathematics and art come from the same beautiful place in our minds.
So how do you find this special proportion? Divide a straight line in two so that the ratio of the whole length to the larger part is the same as the ratio of the larger part to the smaller part. The result (roughly 1.62 to 1) is the golden ratio.
Jonathan Jones's book about Leonardo da Vinci will be published by Simon and Schuster in April 2010.
Britain’s art deco icons? The BBC should get its history straight
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 12, 2009
BBC4's recent series on 1930s architecture looks at Britain's art-deco history through neon-tinted glasses. The reality is a bit more complicated
There's no denying art deco's attraction: it's the style of 1930s cinemas, ocean liners and flamboyant Manhattan skyscrapers. It conjures Hollywood, Busby Berkeley musicals, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat. It makes you think of glamorous climes – whether Miami, Havana, New York or Shanghai – in which buildings that seemed to be encrusted with fashionable jewellery gleam in the summer sun. It's also a style that's been much in vogue recently, because of BBC4's Glamour's Golden Age season, which includes a series of documentaries by David Heathcote on art deco icons.
But here's the funny thing: Britain doesn't actually have much in the way of art deco architecture. Even London has just a sprinkling of buildings: Ideal House, a black granite-clad office block off Regent's Street designed by Raymond Hood; The Odeon, Leicester Square; and the glorious Daily Express building in Fleet Street, with its spectacular, cinema-style entrance lobby by Robert Atkinson. Outside London, cinemas are the most shining examples of the style – Harry Weedon's Odeons are the best (all too many converted into bingo halls or graceless multiplexes), along with shop fronts. Manchester and Glasgow have their own dramatically deco Daily Express buildings, both dramatic examples. If you look hard enough, you can detect deco influences in the buildings of Liverpool's Speke Airport (now a hotel) and even in the suburban stations of the old Southern Railway, such as Surbiton.
But it's never a style that really took root in Britain. Which makes it all the odder that the BBC has decided to label buildings art deco that aren't. In his documentaries, Heathcote devoted much time to Charles Holden's 55 Broadway, the headquarters of London Underground, describing it as "a fantastic art deco building". Holden would have turned in his grave at the description. Influenced by contemporary US architecture, yes. And detailed inside in ways that might suggest art deco. But an art deco icon? No.
This isn't entirely Heathcote's fault. Television thrives on telling stories with the broadest of brush strokes. And art deco has become something of a catch-all title in recent years, used to describe almost any building, piece of furniture, bronze lamp or ceramic dish designed between about 1925 and 1940. I've seen Albert Speer's Reich Chancellery for Adolf Hitler described as art deco and even – a mortal sin, surely? – Le Corbusier's coolly modern Villa Savoye in the suburbs of Paris tainted with the same label. The term itself was something of a latecomer. It wasn't much used before the design historian Bevis Hillier published his delightful book Art Deco of the 20s and 30s in 1968, defining a style that had more usually been known as moderne, modernistic and jazz modern.
The style emerged from the legendary Exposition Internationale des Art Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925 – a grand showing of design and decoration, from furniture and accessories to interiors and architecture, mapped out in acres of precious veneers, marble and onyx, stainless steel and aluminium, all much influenced by Egyptian, Babylonian and Assyrian archaeology. It was this licentious playfulness that provoked the contempt of the rising stars of the Modern movement – modernism – which had been rooted in the far more serious researches of the Bauhaus and, most notably, Le Corbusier. Modernists held art deco in contempt: it was all but sinful. A travesty. Low and dishonest. Downright vulgar – it was the stuff of fashion rather than function, of escapism rather than realism.
When Nikolaus Pevsner, the architecture and design historian, went to see the cinematic Hoover Factory on London's Western Avenue, built by Wallis, Gilbert and Partners (1931–5), he described it in the Middlesex volume of his The Buildings of England series as "perhaps the most offensive of the modernistic atrocities along this road of typical bypass factories". (A comment that was toned down to something substantially less angry in the revised edition of the book, published in 1991.)
And whereas Modern architecture, for better or worse, influenced the British landscape for decades to come, art deco never really took flight. It remained in domestic settings: hinted at in the stained-glass sunrises of mock-Tudor front doors, echoed in the interiors of 1930s MG sports saloons. It conjured fantasy and escapism at a time when the world could be a very grim place indeed.
Perhaps some of the same escapism touches our view of art deco. It's a way of looking at the past through neon-tinted glasses. By all means, watch Top Hat, gawp at the Chrysler Building, imagine yourself sipping cocktails aboard an ocean liner – let the dark and disturbing interwar era become the stuff of ritzy cinematic dreams. But life in the 1930s was more complicated. And while it's understandable that the BBC should have fallen for art deco's charms, it might have been better if they had got their history straight.
From Metropolis to Blade Runner: architecture that stole the show
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 5, 2009
To mark its 175th anniversary, the Royal Institute of British Architects is holding a season of films in which buildings – fantastical or factual – take a starring role. Here are my top five
In pictures: RIBA celebrates architecture in film
From the silent epics of DW Griffiths through Art Deco spectaculars like Busby Berkeley's Gold Diggers of 1933 to Pixar's wonderful WALL-E (2008), the connection between architecture and film has always been intimate. Look at how Le Corbusier defined architecture: "the masterly, correct and magnificent play of form in light." It stands as a great description of cinema as well as of buildings.
Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that many great art directors and set designers – especially those who fled Nazi Germany for Hollywood – trained as architects. And the influence runs the other way: inspired directors and their designers continue to exert an influence on architecture. The play of light is everything, whether it's in the work of Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott and David Lynch, or of Nicholas Hawksmoor, Le Corbusier and Rem Koolhaas.
This month, as part of its 175th anniversary celebrations, the Royal Institute of British Architects is holding a film season devoted to the relationship between architecture and the movies. Below, I've listed five films – the briefest list from all but endless possibilities – I can watch happily over and again, and that bring out the best in both genres. You probably have your own favourites: I'd love to hear them.
Metropolis (1927)
Fritz Lang's silent sci-fi may be best known for its wondrous female robot, Eve, but it's the set design that really takes your breath away. It features a cloud-scraping contemporary Tower of Babel, an industrial workers' production hell-hole, and super-modern, master-of-the-universe-style offices – all revealing its creators' in-depth knowledge of the very latest European architectural developments. Whether they're interpreting Art Deco, Bauhaus Modern or Expressionism, all the buildings shown are terrifying. The overall effect is curiously Gothic, shadowy, elongated, chiaroscuro. And scary.
Lang's team of set designers – including Karl Vollbrecht, credited as "film architect", and Erich Kettelhut – were led by Otto Hunte, art director and production designer. Hunte had previously art-directed Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919); a master of dark films, he went on to work on the crudely anti-semitic Jud Süß (Veit Harlan, 1940). Lang and Hunte employed the cinematographer, Eugen Schüfftan, who developed a process whereby Metropolis actors could be projected, through mirrors, into miniature sets. This bold play with "futuristic" architecture and newly developed filming techniques helped make Metropolis a powerful influence on real-life architecture for decades to come.
Blade Runner (1982)
Metropolis translated into another futuristic dystopia, this time a vision of LA in 2019. The opening shots, as the camera pans over a 700-storey skyscraper and the sky glows with industrial smoke, fire and acid rain, is as magnificent as it is disturbing. It's another interpretation of the Tower of Babel, of course; this time the headquarters of the company that makes the humanoid "replicants" that do the dirty work for human beings.
Scott says that the sets were conjured from a variety of haunting images: Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks, the skyline of Hong Kong at night, the fiery industrial landscape of Tyneside and Teesside of Scott's childhood, the French comicbook Métal Hurlant [Heavy Metal], and, quite clearly, Metropolis. Scott places these nightmarish exteriors in architectural contrast to the theatrical, spooky inside of LA's real-life Bradbury Building, designed by George Wyman in 1893, which is cast as the headquarters' interiors. Significantly, the original architect claimed that his style was influenced by Edward Bellamy's book, Looking Backward (1887) – itself a work of utopian sci-fi. Wyman admired the passage in which Bellamy describes a typical commercial building of the future as a "vast hall full of light, received not alone from the windows on all sides, but from the dome, the point of which was a hundred feet above".
Dr Strangelove (1964)
Ken Adam, set designer of Stanley Kubrick's cold war satire, tells the story of Ronald Reagan becoming president of the US and asking to see the Pentagon War Room. What War Room, asked his aides. The one in the Dr Strangelove movie, replied the president, deadly serious. No wonder Reagan was fooled. This superbly realised space, built in Shepperton Studios, was rooted in Adam's fascination with the sets of Dr Caligari and Metropolis. Born in Berlin, and later trained as an architect in London, Adam gravitated naturally to these darkly inventive productions.
Adam made his name with sets for the early James Bond films – Dr No, Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever – but this was the most powerful single interior he designed, a stark black-and-white space in which the future of humankind was played out. Adam's drawings for this and other sets, and scenes in the film rival that of any practising architect. Kubrick went on to make a number of films, notably 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971), in which architectural design was to play co-starring roles.
Nostalgia (1983)
Some 15 years ago, I spent the best part of a week sleuthing the locations that Andrei Tarkovsky chose for this exquisitely beautiful film set in what – at least in 35mm – was a permanently mist-laced Tuscany. The story is nominally about a Russian writer's research into the life of the 18th-century Russian composer, Maxim Berezovsky, who committed suicide after being recalled to Russia from Italy. Tarkovsky saw this sad tale as a reflection of his own life, alienated from the Soviet Union, and possibly his death, too. Here are composites of remote Tuscan churches and abbeys, a delightfully gloomy hotel bedroom, and best of all, a public square dominated by a sulphurous thermal bath.
It took me a while to find the real-life locations. I'm pretty sure that two of the churches were the 12th-century Abbazia di Sant'Antimo at Castelnuovo Dell'Abate and the ruined medieval church of San Galgano. The thermal baths were, without a doubt, those of the 14th-century St Catherine in Bagno Vinoni. In the saint's day, the waters were said to be laced with gold and silver; they were particularly good for ailments of the liver, spleen, stomach and skin.
Sadly, they could not cure Tarkovsky of the nostalgia that, as much any physical condition, killed him in 1986. He said that the locations in Nostalgia "overwhelmed" him. If you go to Bagno Vignoni or the Abbazia di Sant'Antimo, especially on a misty winter's day, you might well find they do the same thing to you.
Laughing Gravy (1931)
A Laurel and Hardy short in which the lovable idiots try to hide their pet dog Laughing Gravy (Prohibition-era slang for booze) from their grumpy, dog-hating landlord. I've included this in my list of favourites because the entire action takes place inside a deeply shabby, snow-blasted townhouse that is as much a star on the screen as Stan and Oliie. Every last cubic inch, every last feature, is used to get laughs as sash windows drop on heads before the same heads get stuck in chimneys. The house becomes a giant climbing frame for non-stop gags.
But Laughing Gravy isn't all laughs: a large number of Laurel and Hardy shorts were made in response to the Great Depression, and many use grim streetscapes to conjure the comfortless real-life world just outside the studio gates. The house's melancholy, down-at-heel quality – its dreadful bedroom, horrid kitchen, and butt of freezing water by the front door – is a perfect match for Stan and Ollie's glum economic status.
Video: Jonathan Glancey steps inside Le Corbusier’s cabanon
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 20, 2009
Le Corbusier's summer cabin - a tiny bolthole built in the south of France for his wife - has been reconstructed at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London. Jonathan Glancey steps inside
Lynsey Hanley: My miserable day as Le Corbusier
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 12, 2009
Never mind the bread-making and star-jumps – even after a day spent getting into character, 'Corb-hater' Lynsey Hanley is still struggling to find the humanity in the work of Le Corbusier
Utopias are built on peak fitness, I tell myself while limbering up for 45 minutes of "gentle exercise" on the windy concrete concourse of the Barbican. I've reported for duty at 11 on a Saturday morning to take part in A Day in the Life of Le Corbusier, 15 hours' worth of events which broadly represent the strict daily regime of exercise, contemplation and action taken by the "first globally-branded architect-guru" (the curators' description, not mine). He is also the subject of the Barbican's major show.
Winston Smith, the wheezing protagonist of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, wouldn't have lasted five minutes here. Our instructor, Caroline Jupp, faced with whupping a gaggle of architecture students, round-specced design junkies and a recalcitrant Corb-loather (me) into shape, has a whistle and a bunch of colourful flags, which she asks us to hold above our heads while marching on the spot.
While it's hard to envisage the godfather of modernism – who began each morning with an hour of bending and stretching – having much truck with formation star-jumps, I discover that there is such a thing as benign marching: it focuses (or numbs) the mind, creates a sense of collective purpose. None more so, however, than Jupp's claim that "you're the best exercise class I've ever had!" I suspect Corbusier would have withheld that sort of thing for fear of making us soft.
Clutching orange segments and a commemorative balsa-wood medal, at noon we run back across the Barbican's pavement-on-pillars, the Highwalk, for a bread-making brunch session with artist Alexandre Bettler. The idea is to remake in doughy form Le Corbusier's "Modulor" system of measurement, which replaced feet and inches with proportions and ratios taken from the human body. I grab a ball of dough and attempt to shape it into a cortical lobe. Brain food, you see.
Such high-concept activity can't, however, answer my core question of the day, which is whether Le Corbusier's approach to architecture and planning has caused more human pain than it sought to alleviate. So I head after lunch (a warm brain-shaped bread roll) to a talk by one of his many post-war followers, the architect Paffard Keatinge-Clay.
"Le Corbusier was a poet," begins Keatinge-Clay, who is now in his 80s and worked at the master's Paris atelier in the late 1940s (where he recalled having his work trashed by his mentor). One of a handful of students at London's Architecture Association who followed Corbusian principles, Keatinge-Clay says that he and his classmates "were interested in creating a new world". He is a moving, incantatory advocate: at the close, he repeats the words "Le Corbusier, I thank you" like a mantra. All of which leaves little room to ask whether Corb was actually right.
Don't blame the architect if buildings don't work, he seemed to suggest: blame the people who build them, then the people who live in them. A similar line is taken an hour later by Eva Branscombe of the Twentieth Century Society as she tours us round the Barbican Estate, taking in the residents' secret water garden, with its ingenious traffic noise-drowning fountains and several maddening kilometres of walkway – Barbican architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon's clearest nod to Corb.
The curious thing is, after six hours I'm even less enamoured of Le Corbusier than I was to begin with. He dealt in "habitation units", "machines for living in", days divided into productive hours. Today I've built a miniature city in a box, helped to paint an "exquisite corpse" by stencilling a wine bottle on a wall, broken bread with bespectacled Corb fanatics, and still I can't find the humanity in his work. None of it dents the impression that he was a man who felt his ideas were nothing if they couldn't be imposed on other people. If everyone got to live the kind of life he did – gentle exercise, leisurely breakfast, daily thinking time – perhaps they'd make more sense.
But neither the exhibition, nor the Barbican's attempt to help us enter the mind of Le Corbusier through his daily routine, challenges the received wisdom that only philistines and dimwits can't get a handle on modernism. If there were ever a name that needed rehabilitating in the minds of those who, like me, have wasted too many hours of their short lives getting lost on Corbusian concrete walkways, it's his.
Yet throughout the day there's no one who is prepared to explain how his 1925 "Plan Voisin", for instance, which would have turned central Paris into a giant banlieue, was sensitive to human needs. As a piece of draughtsmanship, it's extraordinary to look at, and it's important to remember that his ideas evolved – even softened somewhat – in the later years of his career. We're often tempted to blame Le Corbusier for everything that was wrong with modernism. The awful thing is, I think I still do.
Architecture review: Le Corbusier’s Cabanon 1952/2006 – The Interior 1:1
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 10, 2009
The only building the modernist master made for himself was a primitive log cabin – the inside was pretty impressive though
Roquebrune – the rocca bruna citadel of Conrad, Count of Ventimiglia – is one of the classic villages perchées of the Riviera. Below it, beyond the Gorbio torrent, is a fragrant, romantic pine- and olive-covered promontory called Cap Martin. Because of its harsh rocks and uncomfortable pebbly beach, Cap Martin never developed as a popular tourist resort, but did lure the Empress Elizabeth of Austria to winter in its hotel and became the site of some of the most fantabulous real estate of the Mediterranean, including the Villa Kyrnos built by Eugenie, last Empress of France ... after she left exile in Chislehurst and Farnborough.
And it was here that Le Corbusier, the most mercurial, influential and reviled architect of the 20th century, chose to build his own holiday home. So. Le Corbusier: concrete pioneer, machine-lover, moving spirit of brutalism, skyscraper prophet, modernist-collectivist, flat roof enthusiast, urbanist-extremist, unbending pedagogue, what did he do in the only building he ever designed for himself? The answer is on show at the RIBA in an engrossing exhibition that reconstructs his cabanon. It is strange, surprising and wonderful.
Cabanon is a diminutive of the French word for 'cabin', but carries a number of additional meanings. One is mad-house, another is bucolic-primitivism: scattered all over the south of France are little structures used by shepherds. These cabanons are a reminder that the very origins of architecture lay in the design of the primitive hut. Le Corbusier's own cabanon shows us the other side of the modern maestro.
A recent book by JK Birksted called Le Corbusier and the Occult (MIT Press) explains that freemasonry was a continuous influence on the architect. And so too were the semi-secret societies of his native La Chaux-de-Fonds in the Swiss Jura: Birksted has a wonderful photograph of the muscled, toned and rather scary Groupe de Gymnastique de l'Union Chrétienne de Jeunes Gens. Their abs and pecs were surely an influence on 'Le Modulor', Le Corbusier's human-based system of proportions which dominates the design of this primitive hut of his own.
Le Corbusier found the Cap Martin site just as he was masterplanning the city of Bogotá and work on his Marseille Unité d'Habitation, his vertical concrete garden city (one of the greatest buildings of the 20th century or a hellish abomination, according to taste) was coming to an end.
He was drawn to the area because the Anglo-Irish designer Eileen Gray had already established a much reported and photographed modernist villa there. A note in his journal for 30 December 1951, says he sat at a table in a Côte d'Azur café and sketched the cabanon in 45 minutes as a birthday present for his wife, Yvonne. Even the earliest, most free-hand sketches show a maniacal attention to dimensions and proportions.
Outside, the cabanon was roughly hewn halved tree trunks and no attempt has been made at the RIBA to replicate the exterior. It is the interior that is important and beautiful. You enter the tiny space of 14 square metres (which the modernists had determined was the essential minimum for social housing) through a narrow corridor. On your left, a painting of La Mer covers the entire wall. Inside, a plywood cocoon. Square ceiling panels of different colours and different heights allow storage above. Most of the furniture is built-in, including the bed whose chestnut headrest apes classical prototypes (he was reading Homer at the time). Fittings are from railway carriages and the focus is a work table. The window shutters are partially mirrored to bring the ravishing landscape inside, as well as to make it a 'repository of sun and light', as Le Corbusier said every home should be.
So far from being a sinister and soul-less machine à habiter, Le Corbusier's cabanon is satisfying, subtle and perfect proof of the architect's essential belief that good proportions and ample light are the constituents of excellence in building. The cabanon inspires contemplation; it is not surprising that the young Le Corbusier studied Cistercian cells. With exiguous resources and minimal cost, the cabanon shows how richly rewarding simplicity can be. Anyone who doubts the scripture of modernism should visit and be promptly disabused.
But there's one flaw. Just as Thoreau wrote his wilderness masterpiece at the bottom of his mother's garden, so Le Corbusier's cabanon was adjacent to his favourite Etoile de Mer restaurant, which provided his meals. Intended as a prototype for a Unité de Camping holiday village that was never realised, it is a paradoxical memorial to a contradictory genius. He spent his last night here before drowning on 27 August 1965.
When this gaseous burp explodes in the desert air, we’ll still have the Burj Dubai | Simon Jenkins
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 4, 2010
The 818-metre tower is a true wonder of the world, a fitting monument to Dubai as the capital of excess and irrational exuberance
The scaffolding has cleared from the most astonishing man-made structure I have seen. It is outrageous, wasteful, egotistical, ridiculous; but ask if the Burj Dubai is beautiful and I cannot deny it. When it formally opens (mostly empty) early next year, this Dubai tower will, at 818 metres, be the highest building anywhere, its "sneer of cold command" thrusting a finger at the outside world even as its Ozymandian surroundings sink beneath the economic waters of the Gulf.
With the Dubai property market plummeting, the Burj is the final grandiose gesture of the emirate's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, on his long campaign to make Ludwig of Bavaria seem like a jobbing builder on the North Circular Road.
Unlike most new skyscrapers, the $8bn (£5bn) Burj Dubai does not rise until the point where an accountant calculates the lifts can take no more. Its 20-acre base has the plan of a six-leaf desert flower, from which it launches itself into the sky in a diminishing cluster of rocket-like cylinders, spiralling and soaring to a celestial climax.
This is no pastiche Mies, pastiche Corb, pastiche Foster, like the postmodern blobs, slices, wedges and cornets that crowd every Gulf skyline, screaming "look-at-me" at the brain-dulled passerby. Burj Dubai, designed by the Chicagoan architect, Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and closely watched by the sheikh himself, leads the eye ever upwards. It has the exhilaration of a Gothic spire. At the top, a spike rises further, swaying 1.5 metres in the wind and appearing to bend towards the viewer, as if appalled at its own presumption in puncturing the heavens.
Dubai this week lay in the shadow of its new tower, a partygoer still dancing in the streets hours after the party has ended. Its hyperbolic malls are crowded, its freeways jammed and its latest attention-grabber, an international film festival, mobbed by crowds. On Monday Dubai's more sober neighbour, Abu Dhabi, tossed its defaulting property market a $10bn note for one last drink, with another $1bn in pocket money for the embarrassed Maktoum family.
The sheikh's obedient media barely mentioned the humiliation, as a drunk cares not who pays for the last round. The construction sites, once host to a quarter of the world's cranes, are mostly still building, but no one holds out much hope for the sea-girt ocean palms and "cities" planned at the height of the most reckless property bubble in history. The chairman of Dubai World, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, might cry earlier this year, "Dubai has a vision like no other place on earth," but it is a vision few want to share just now.
A quarter of new residential units stand empty and 34,000 are still under construction. Nothing is heard now of a plan to build a tower higher even than Burj Dubai in the port area. An archipelago in the form of a map of the world remains as piles of sand offshore, crazily shipped like coals to Newcastle from Australia and rumoured to have disgorged antipodean snakes into the Gulf. The capital of irrational exuberance has embarked on an almighty hangover.
Since I have long seen Dubai as a speculative accident waiting to happen, I could not resist a debate on its future, held on Monday in the rival statelet of Qatar up the coast – and held with not a little schadenfreude. Dubai's protestation of open markets, an open society and western freedoms have long been absurd. Its rulers reacted to the debate (broadcast next month by BBC World) by trying to have the Qataris suppress it and ensuring that three Dubai speakers and all Dubai journalists boycotted it.
This was absurdly self-defeating, since a motion critical of Dubai's breakneck expansion was defeated 60-40. Twitter and Facebook were flooded with the good news for Dubai, in a week when there had been precious little. Yet none of this was allowed to be reported in Dubai's censored media. Never were so many well-groomed heads buried in so much desert sand.
The surest sign of a polity that has lost confidence in itself is when its rulers cannot tolerate a debate on its affairs. Even the word default has had to be replaced in the Dubai press by "debt restructuring" or "new legal framework". Outsiders are routinely blamed for the property market collapse, which the emirate's buccaneers and paid stooges have for years been stoking with hyperbole. Property values are reported to be 50% down from their peak and are predicted by UBS analysts to be heading for 75%. Those who mimicked the 17th-century Dutch who believed that tulip prices could never fall are left with the paranoid's last gasp, blaming foreigners for their woes.
The most mesmerising thing about Dubai is not its present but its future. Will it be Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat or Fatehpur Sikri? Will it become a place of sand and weeds, so many "trunkless legs of stone" lost on a scorching Gulf shore?
What will happen when the world's funny money starts to flow elsewhere? What happens when a future sheikh goes either environmental or religious and tires of boosterism, returning to tents and camels, to order and respect for his ancestors? What happens when some political whirlwind sweeps across the Gulf from Iran, or down from Iraq, or across from Saudi Arabia?
At a certain point in the decline in property values, it no longer pays owners to maintain lifts, services and utilities (as on a British tower estate). More likely Dubai will be a desert Detroit, a place of widespread dereliction with some money remaining at the centre but with ghost towns and squatted housing in the sweltering suburbs. The smart money is already on the more cautiously developed Qatar and Abu Dhabi stealing its financial thunder and leaving Dubai with its bizarre hotels: Las Vegas to Los Angeles, or Atlantic City to New York.
There is a touch of Vegas to the gold-plated atrium of the "seven star" Burj Al-Arab hotel, with its casino baroque and computerised fountains like leaping dolphins. There is more than a touch of Disney to the $1.5bn Atlantis hotel, opened this year by Kylie Minogue, with shark-filled aquarium wall, garden gnome interior and giant conches for capitals.
Already the office towers of Dubai look like those of a pre-cyber age, when the rich had to live near the oil, and celebrities could be induced to buy off-plan and sell before the fireworks ended. Why live in Dubai and shop at an ersatz Harvey Nichols when you can live in Knightsbridge and shop at the real one?
Dubai is a gaseous burp about to explode in the desert air. But when it explodes it will leave behind the sensational Burj, standing visible across the desert, gleaming proudly in the sun. One day the cost of keeping it up will exceed its income, its steel will rot and the swaying summit will become dangerous. The mother of all demolitions will have to begin. Then Shelley can have his moment and Ozymandias his epitaph. But for the time being Dubai can at least boast a true wonder of the world.
Architecture, Art and design, Burj Dubai, Business, Comment, Culture, Dubai, Dubai World, Global economy, Global recession, Le Corbusier, Qatar, The Guardian, World news
No Comments