A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. Owen Hatherley
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glass. Yet one thing that survives from Postmodernism is the conception of the building as a sign, and here as an easily understandable, instantly grasped sign, strongly opposed to the formal rigours and typological complexities of ‘high’ Modernism, especially its Brutalist variant. While it’s possible that the original Gherkin received its nickname spontaneously, there’s little doubt that the other towers, all announced around the same time, had a ready-made little moniker designed to immediately endear them to the general public, in order to present them as something other than the aesthetic tuning of stacked trading floors. Accordingly, by being instantly recognizable for their kinship with a household object, they would aim to become both logo and icon. Perhaps they might eventually become what Jencks describes as ‘failed icons’, more Millennium Dome than Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim; although always trying for the status of the latter, whose success in bringing well-heeled tourism to the Basque port has made it into a boosterist cliché, whereby the ‘Bilbao effect’ transforms a mundane city into a cultural capital, replacing unionized factory work or unemployment with insecure service industry jobs.
The other major change from the suburbanism of the Thatcher and Reagan version of neoliberalism is a new focus on the cities, something which is usually encapsulated by the under-investigated word ‘regeneration’. Indeed, any form of building in an urban area is usually accompanied by this term. The vaguely religious air is appropriate, as it often accompanies a fundamentally theological conception of architecture, where by standing in proximity to an outstanding architectural work, the spirit is uplifted, and the non-orthogonal geometry and hyperbolic paraboloids purport, for instance, to represent the experience of war through the disorientation they induce.
Daniel Libeskind, buildings for London Metropolitan University
An appropriate English example is Salford Quays, where the Docks of Greater Manchester were transformed into a combination of cultural centre and a development of luxury apartments, neatly combining both elements of Pseudomodernism. Two of the architects who most exemplify these ideas are represented there or nearby. There is Daniel Libeskind, whose tendency towards memorializing piety is so pronounced that he was described by Martin Filler as a ‘human Yahrzeit candle’. His Imperial War Museum North, with its sloping ceilings and a form which apparently represents a world divided, is supposed to formally incarnate the experience of war. Meanwhile, not far away in central Salford is a bridge by Santiago Calatrava, who is the infrastructural embodiment of Pseudomodernism, his structures seemingly always placed in areas that are busy being transformed from proletarian spaces of work or habitation to ‘regenerated’ areas of bourgeois colonization. These transformations of space are, it should be remembered, fundamentally different in their social consequences to the superficially similar ‘comprehensive redevelopment’ of the postwar period. Once, a slum clearance scheme would involve the slum-dweller being rehoused by the state in something which was, more often than not, superior in terms of space, security of tenure, and hygiene, irrespective of the decades of criticism these schemes have been subjected to. Now that this sort of naïve paternalism is absent, the slums are cleared so that the middle classes can settle in them, something usually excused with a rhetoric of ‘social mixing’, dismantling what had become ‘ghettoes’. The many schemes where sixties council towers have been replaced with PFI blocks are to urban planning what Pseudomodernism is to architecture.
That is, the Modernism of the icon, of the city academies where each fundamentally alike yet bespoke design embodies a vacuous aspirationalism; a Modernism without the politics, without the utopianism, or without any conception of the polis; a Modernism that conceals rather than reveals its functions; Modernism as a shell. This return of Modernist good taste in the New Labour version of neoliberalism has turned architectural Postmodernism, rather surprisingly, into a vanishing mediator. The keystones, references, in-jokes and alleged ‘fun’ of eighties and nineties corporate architecture now evoke neoliberalism’s most naked phase, the period when it didn’t dress itself up in social concern. In the passage from Norman Tebbit to Caroline Flint, the aesthetic of social Darwinism has become cooler, more tasteful, less ostentatiously crass and reactionary, matching the rhetoric.
Service Stations, Service Industry
However, it can be seen that the Pseudomodern takes many of its fundamental ideas, if not its stylistic tropes, from Postmodernism. At this point, we will take a historical detour. Postmodernist architecture was most intelligently formulated by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour in their 1972 book Learning From Las Vegas. This focused, via a critique of a caricatured corporate Modernism, on the alleged inability of Modernist architecture to communicate adequately with its users. In response, they privileged first of all, signage—the advertising signs of roadside architecture—and secondly, formal references to earlier, most often classical styles of architecture as a means of providing an architecture outside of the ‘dumb box’, as they described it. Charles Jencks’s Language of Postmodern Architecture, meanwhile, turned to full-blown neoclassicism, with an accompanying narrative of Modernist hubris, where the dynamiting of one of the US’s rare forays into social housing in St Louis became the precise date for the ‘death’ of Modernism. One element of Venturi’s argument was, regardless of their protestations, a Modernist one—a call for an architectural montage of neon signs and jarring formal clashes. Their praise for the chaos of signage that made up Vegas is, in essence, not vastly different to the rhetoric of the Russian Constructivists, whose work was motivated by what historian Kestutis Paul Zygas calls a ‘component fixation’; where designs were always presented with affixed billboards, posters, slogans, transmitters and tramlines, as if to plug them into the city’s dynamism. Much of the architecture and signage they describe was itself in a kind of Pulp Modernist idiom. Specifically, a 1950s style usually called ‘Googie’ to distinguish it from the apparently more rigorous Modernism of the International Style.
Googie was usually used to draw attention to burger bars, car washes, coffee shops—the name comes from one such, designed by John Lautner. It was an architecture that adapted itself to suburban sprawl and the sheer speed of the freeway by providing dynamic forms which seemed to mimic speed in their formal distortions while attracting the attention of the prospective customer travelling at eighty miles an hour via stretched angular forms and lurid colours. In his book on the subject,6 Alan Hess places the style in direct opposition to the high-art Modernism of Mies van der Rohe and his disciples, the classicist glass-skyscraper school that became the spatial lingua franca of even the most conformist parts of American capital. What’s interesting here is that in the American context, where Modernism was not as associated with social democracy or state socialism as it was in Europe, the debate was purely aesthetic. While the opponents of ‘Googie’ accused it of being crass and commercial, Mies’s Seagram Building was given tinted windows the colour of the client’s brand of whisky. While its outrageous geometrical illusions and structural expressionism were being criticized as mere dressing-up, Mies’s towers ‘expressed’ their structure by entirely decorative I-beams.
So in essence, the debate between classical and pulp Modernism in the US was one of taste. On the one hand there was the luxury aesthetic of the wing of the bourgeoisie that aspired to finer things: New York’s successful attempt in the 1950s to wrest from Paris the accolade of world fine-art capital, with some CIA assistance. In order for this to occur it had to set itself against a more straightforward capitalist hucksterism. In fact, with their deliberate defiance of the rules of gravity and geometry, their brashness and lack of formal precedent, Googie buildings were more true to the original Modernist impulse—futurists or constructivists would have recognized themselves in commercial designers such as Armet & Davis, or in the architecture of McDonalds, Denny’s and Big Boy, more than in Mies van der Rohe, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Seagram or Lever. It’s also a reminder that the idea of Modernism as ‘paternalist’ imposition on the benighted proletariat, upon which Postmodernism based much of its self-justification, makes sense only if we begin with an extremely limited definition of Modernism. Principally, one that was restricted to the International Style, itself a pernicious legacy of the Museum of Modern Art’s dual depoliticization and