Modernist architecture commands such a stigma in Britain.
Never has a style been as maligned as modernism. Even postmodernism enjoys some popularity amongst considerable segments of society. Worse still, the worst excesses of postmodernism of the 1980s and 1990s are rearing their ugly head of late in new projects around London: Foliage, floral motifs, fluted pilasters and gilded laser-cut ornament are rife in nascent architecture.
Not modernism. It is a style largely abhorred by the public and misunderstood by many architects.
I’m not talking about seminal iconic projects like Barbican Estate or the National Theatre (there’s a special place in my heart for the works of Denys Lasdun, from Keeling House to 26 St James’s Place). These building stand out and are met with due deference from critics, in the public and from within the design profession. It’s rather these buildings that permeate the urban fabric of British cities, especially Fitzrovia. All these fine examples are not deemed worthy to save and celebrate. They are just background clutter to people.
Modernist architecture, unfortunately, has been mis-sold to the British public by the snobbery of architects: In the post-war period, haughty architects decided they knew what was best for the occupier and went on an iconoclastic rampage of designing housing that was sternly minimalist and austere. They perceived modernist architecture to be architecture devoid of ornament, bare. These projects only succeeded in the promotional footage that was produced and they sat at odds with the people inhibiting them and the public at large. These schemes came in 3 shades only: Brutalist, white or awkwardly clad in brickwork. There was a certain intentional cruelty in disfiguring town centres; vernacular and historic architecture was destroyed needlessly and methodically only to be replaced by insensitive spartan developments with no consciousness of context or scale.
As a result, modernist architecture came to mean architecture of deprivation, architecture of squalor and penury, even architecture of oppression (Clockwork Orange anyone?). An aspiring British public would view modernist architecture as the architecture to move away from, as the sepia background that is destroyed by social mobility. This is without even factoring the crime and anti-social behaviour that these modernist projects served as a setting for and as a symbol of. In other parts of the world, where I grew up for example, the public’s view of modernist architecture could not be more different. This is not to say that modernism was posited exclusively as the architecture of opulence but it was such a flexible and versatile style that was customised to both prince and pauper. This is chiefly due to that fact that modernist architecture was perceived by many of its masters as well as many of disciples, bar the iconoclastic British modernists, as the abstraction of the ornament, not the abolition of the ornament.
The pinnacle of modernism may well be Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona pavilion. This is a piece laden with ornament and sensitivity to the surrounding. This a space that fetes the relation between old and new, inside and outside, minimalism and decadence. The marbles and material finishes are employed in their primordial states as ornaments. The pavilion is a panoply of textures and colours.
Yet it is the whitewashed private residences that served as templates for British modernists. The strict iconoclasm enforced by the profession led to ornaments sneaking through the backdoor of British architecture. It would be known as British High-Tech: British High-Tech seems now to have been the only outlet for ornaments in British architecture although it was never been promoted nor has it been received as such. The machine and structure has been used for its aesthetics. In a postmodern semiotic discourse, High Tech appears to me to be a case of floating signifier, where the machine parts have do not signify what they did initially but are used for their own shapes and colours, an ornament by any other name. It is the playfulness and variegation of these ostensibly structural elements that have injected so much fun in an otherwise mirthless spectrum of British Modernism.
But High Tech was never a style to be mass-produced or rolled out. It is a distinct style that is the stuff of legends and icons. Scores of background buildings comprising a very stylish albeit underrated palette of Portland stone, Alpi Verde marble, stainless steel and mosaics deserve to receive some attention and deserve to be viewed more favourably as placemakers instead of new developments in abeyance. There is much to be learned from the rich spectrum of colours and materials, as well as from the levity of form and the subtlety of detail that many modernist buildings embraced. Taking Modernism way too seriously led to perennial postmodernism: Humans crave adornment in their life so when a style was missold to them to be devoid of it, the only outlet turned out to be Neoclassicism and kitsch.
(Below is an abandoned villa that was built in Mount-Lebanon in the 1960s.)
