Eugenie Shinkle,
2018
Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 Barcelona Pavilion stood for only a few months before it was dismantled. Despite its short life, it went on to become an icon of the International Style – a status achieved almost entirely through its extensive circulation as an image. With its clean lines and open, rectangular volumes, the building lent itself well to photographs, folding three linked logics into a single form: that of architectural drawing (plan and elevation and projection), that of Renaissance perspective, and that of the camera’s own interior architecture. These overlapping languages colluded in a dialogue between two dimensions and three – a synergy that was not just conceptually lucid but that appeared to apply interchangeably to both the building and its image. Like a photograph, the Pavilion itself – composed of slabs, beams and fasteners – could be broken down into a collection of planes points, and lines. Mies’ Pavilion was an emblem not just of avant-garde design, but of the complicity between photography and architecture.
Beatriz Colomina has suggested that it was its engagement with the machinery of mass media that distinguished Modernist architecture as such. But it wasn’t just iconic buildings that made up this network. Modernist architecture was celebrated on a more modest scale in numerous reports and advertisements that appeared in the architectural press. Photographic essays and articles on New Towns and Post-War overspill developments like Harlow, Hatfield, Stevenage, Milton Keynes, Peterborough, Northampton, Luton, Corby, and Basildon appeared frequently in sister journals The Architectural Review and The Architect’s Journal from the late 1940s through the 1960s. The newly constructed factories, municipal buildings, and housing estates (often shot before they were fully tenanted) shared the geometric, gridded articulation and strong horizontals of more acclaimed buildings in the International Style.
The design of planned communities such as these was based loosely on the theories of social reformers like Ebenezer Howard – founder of the Garden City movement – and the American sociologist and philosopher Lewis Mumford, who envisioned a modern city made up of individual ‘neighbourhood units’ created to nurture health and wellbeing, cultural growth and social integration. For Mumford, ‘a habitat planned so as to form a continuous background to a delicately graded scale of human feelings and values is the prime requisite of a cultivated life.’ Architecture played a key part in this utopian vision, in whichmodern rational planning and an aesthetically pleasing townscape collaborated to encourage modern, rational ways of living.
These concerns also took visual form in an idiom used widely in architectural photography and enthusiastically endorsed by the Architectural Review. The magazine’shouse style favoured dynamic perspectives, dramatic angles, and imposing volumes. The mixture of frontal views and sweeping one- and two-point perspectives was perfectly suited not only to the design of the buildings themselves but to the open, often rectilinear spaces in which many of them were set. Tidy and newly built, the architecture of Britain’s Post-War landscape was gloriously photogenic.
Flipping through page after page of the same glassy geometry, though, you can’t help feeling that the Architectural Review’s photographers were looking for a variety that didn’t – and probably couldn’t – exist. Repeated ad infinitum, the modular forms and scrupulously ordered images start to look mannered and clinical. Rational design may have worked well in theory and plan, but as an image, it plays out – at least to the contemporary eye – as drearily homogeneous. And the strict formal rules imposed on the photographers echoed the social protocols that were implicit in the design of the New Towns themselves.
For many, the reality of living in a designed utopia was no less oppressive. The rows of identical housing units, rather than encouraging personalisation, often ended up feeling lifeless, their efficient design an incitement to conform to someone else’s values. It wasn’t just the element of social engineering that was built into these environments, however, but the fact that Modernist design itself existed in a kind of permanent present. In theory, the future that these developments were meant to hedge against was as rational and calculable as the design of the buildings themselves. In practice, it turned out to involve a byzantine mix of cultural, economic, and political factors that the designers and planners couldn’t have foreseen. At best, the architecture of the New Towns and overspill communities met these challenges with a kind of indifference; at worst, it encouraged not social conformity but precisely the opposite.
The Architectural Review took great delight in pointing out such shortcomings. Even before the paint had dried and the first tenants had moved in, essayists like Gordon Cullen and Ian Nairn were penning scathing indictments not just of Post-War municipal architecture but of the suburban lifestyle in general, and of the propensity of architects and town planners for making one place look and feel much like another. The jarring disparity between Modernist ideals and social reality is reflected in the images they used to illustrate their articles. Exaggerating the perspectives, emptying out the foregrounds and turning the camera on every neglected space they could find, they remade the Modernist photographic idiom into a bleak shibboleth, turning celebration into something like a eulogy.
James Smith’s photographs show us the landscape of Post-War development years after the cycle of aspiration and decline has run its course. The Modernist vision has had decades to bed in. Weather and wear and time have had their way with the materials; the buildings and the surrounding environments have mellowed and transformed with age. Very few of these places have survived without at least minimal alteration. Some original features have vanished and new ones have been introduced. Such transformations speak of lives lived outside the parameters of utopia.
Smith’s images are neither hyperbolic nor inflammatory. If many of his photographs appear to resist the spatial order of Modernist architectural photography, it’s not out of an explicit desire to topple its paradigms, but the result of a close observation of the complex layering of space, architecture, and infrastructure that has emerged as the New Towns grew up. The sweeping one and two-point perspectives have been replaced, in many instances, by multiple vanishing points that suggest the layered, discontinuous space of pre-perspectival imagery. Work by fourteenth-century painters like Duccio di Buoninsegna represented the built environment in terms of the way it was encountered by a body that wasn’t simply looking at it, but dwelling within it. In Smith’s photographs, the predictable rectilinearity of earlier imagery has given way to something less obviously organised, but more clearly the result of habitation rather than hypothesis.
These places no longer – indeed, may never have – lend themselves to a cosy dialogue between plan, elevation and projection. Smith’s gaze is drawn to forms that don’t conform to the camera’s gridded articulation – the sweeping curve of a pedestrian walkway, the billowing outline of trees interrupting the modular forms of terraced homes and factory buildings, the gentle swell of a hill in an otherwise bland semi-rural landscape (in fact, a park in Milton Keynes). His images embody the tension between rational design and the longer-term, organic processes of growth and decay that transform the built environment: algae creeping down concrete walls, moss growing on tiled roofs, trees and vines interfering with the tidy geometry of homes and garages. And if some images appear locked in an earlier era, looking like they might sit comfortably on the pages of the architectural press, others attest to the ongoing disruptions of reclamation, adaptation and transformation.
Smith’s lens also lingers on minutia that most people will never see: the subtle artistry of textured concrete and patterned brickwork, the flecks of gold leaf on a tiled column. Details like these are familiar to residents of these places and to the builders who made them; they go mostly unremarked by anyone else. But many of these features, and the techniques used to create them, were cutting-edge for their time, and they were celebrated in the architectural press as ringing endorsements of British talent. The essays and advertisements that fill the pages read like a who’s-who of Britain’s industrial and manufacturing heritage. The metal-framed glazing that was standard for nearly all government housing schemes from the 1920s through the 1960s, for instance, was an innovation of the Essex-based firm Crittall Windows. The November 1960 issue of the Architectural Review featured a two-page spread showcasing the installation of Crittall’s products in new municipal buildings and housing estates in and around Stevenage New Town. Other advertisements proclaim the strength and dependability of British structural steel and the unrivalled load-bearing abilities of British bricks. Reinforced concrete, plastic, aluminium and aggregate cladding panels, everything down to the electrical cabling and paint, glazing, kitchens and sanitary ware … all of it proudly made in Britain and proudly presented in beautifully designed advertisements. Smith’s images go some way towards restoring this history, or at least reminding us of its existence.
Yet the architecture of the New Towns is often dismissed out of hand as cheap and shoddily built, and blamed for large-scale social infirmities that the buildings alone didn’t bring about. Owen Hatherley has referred to it as a ‘half-hearted modernism’. But the failure of a social vision isn’t often the straightforward outcome of bad planning, and in many cases, it wasn’t the modernism of these buildings that was half-hearted, but the way that their architectural heritage was maintained and adapted to meet the needs of a changing demographic. In one memorable photograph, Smith singles out a pair of clumsily built breezeblock walls standing in a field, directly behind a pair of football goal posts. Presumably they were put there to protect the greenery behind the pitch. Unlovely, ill thought-out and almost certainly dangerous, they’ve suffered the further indignity of being painted a glaring magnolia – apart from one small section where a council worker has run his brush around the outline of a small shrub. These forlorn structures are an apt metaphor for the lack of financial, political and social investment that beset many of the New Towns and overspill communities almost from the moment the first residents moved in. The ugliness and incoherency that characterise these places in the present are less a consequence of their original design, than the result of an ongoing cycle of hasty, slipshod adaptations and failed government initiatives that made little sense either in terms of the sites’ original construction or their subsequent use.
Swiss architect Le Corbusier, another champion of the International Style, understood the photograph as a way of expressing the conceptual purity of a building perhaps better than the building itself. A retouched photograph of his Villa Schwob that appeared in the avant-garde review L’Esprit Nouveau in 1921 was purged of any details that distracted from its form. For Le Corbusier, the function of the photograph was not to record a building as it was built, but to construct it as an ideal on the space of the page. James Smith’s photographs, on the other hand, deal with the way that Modernist aspirations have played out in reality. The built environment is a fluid, living thing, and what started out as a neat abstraction – rational images of rational designs for rational living – turned out to be a confused and untidy edifice, easily destabilised by the political fault lines that began to appear as it moved off the page and out into the world.
London Overspill sorts through the remains of this fragile schema, restoring to Britain’s Post-War landscape some of the context that has been stripped out of its historical legacy – a narrative shaped in part by our long memory for failure, and by a visual idiom that left no room for irrationality or doubt. It brings the permanent present of the Modernist vision into dialogue with a future that tested the limits of this vision at every turn. Smith’s images steer clear of idealisation or nostalgia, but nor do they dwell on failure: they also retain traces of an optimism that we too readily dismiss as naïve. And his resistance to photographing in a single, easily identifiable style is a reminder that the complicity between photography and architecture is as forced as the values that it claimed to represent. London Overspill is an acknowledgement that there is no ideal way to plan or portray the complex business of living. It also points up the absence of anything as coherent or persuasive as the Modernist vision to take its place.