TIME FOR CHANGE - THE GENESIS OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE

by Dennis Berry

Modern Architecture, like sex and religion, can evoke a great deal of passion.  An editor of The Times was known to hate it and once employed one of the most vociferous enemies of the style as his architectural correspondent; the heir to the throne of Great Britain, Prince Charles, with his epithet of  'the carbuncle on the face of a dearly loved friend', used his position to ensure that a competition winning piece of modern architecture did not get built and the architectural profession itself is split somewhere down the middle over what is called 'The Battle of the Styles'.  Such controversy would never be generated by a dead issue and perhaps its ability to continue stirring up such contention shows just how alive and well the corpus of Modern Architecture is.

It never was a popular style, of course, one with which everyone could feel comfortable, but was adopted at the time by a cultured minority only and as such ran the deadly risk of being labelled elitist!  This should have been enough to have killed it in its tracks and yet it persisted even through the lean years when the derision of the general public and then the onslaught from the Post Modernists all but buried it.   Even amongst the devotees however, there were whispered reservations.  The theory was fine, they said, but the practice could be awful!  It is true that the ‘style’ of Modern Architecture when spoken by indifferent architects is extremely boring, unlike the classical style which even when badly vulgarised by the unscholarly still retains some inherent quality.

There is a tendency to discuss the Modern Movement as though it were solely a functionalist ideology.  Modern architects have always been accused of assuming that the goal of architecture is one of rational perfection and that they have ever led progressively to that end.  They were also condemned for never referring back to earlier styles for solutions to current problems and that they were always looking for novelty in their rejection of tradition.   They were in fact looking for the most relevant and appropriate solution and to question whether this could be found in the answer to a problem of an earlier age.  It would, after all, be unrealistic for contemporary traffic planners to go back to Georgian London squares to look for a quick fix in solving our present traffic chaos.  This is not a denial of traditional wisdom but, as Le Corbusier suggested, a questioning of the influence of nostalgia in looking at contemporary problems.  Nostalgia is an enormously strong influence, but unfortunately a negative one when making artistic judgements.

The great historian Nicholas Pevsner thought that the style of the twenties was a "sort of universal rational style" - a rather lame definition of what was an amazingly complex period.  Such vague and too often ill-informed interpretations continue to be made today by many writers who perpetuate mistaken notions about the theories of the Modern Movement.  The error was probably compounded in the first place by a misquoting of Otto Wagner's famous statement - 'Form follows Function' which was later adopted by Le Corbusier.  It was too easy to spread the notion that 'Corb' was saying 'If you get the function of your building right, its form will be automatically beautiful.'  This was not what he meant at all, but he was actually reminding us that - unless you get the function right, the form will never be beautiful - because 'form follows function!'

In fact, and as I shall try to illustrate in this book, the ‘style’ of Modern Architecture evolved principally out of aesthetic, social and symbolic - even poetic - concerns rather than from a preoccupation with functionalism.  Indeed, Le Corbusier was very careful to make a clear distinction between functionalism and architecture when he wrote:  'When a thing responds to a need it is not beautiful; it satisfies all one part of our mind, the primary part, without which there is no possibility of richer satisfactions .... Architecture has another meaning and other ends to pursue than showing construction and responding to needs (and by needs I mean utility, comfort and practical arrangement)'.

We shall see how arbitrary it was in fact that Modern Architecture came to be expressed in white cubic shapes, flat roofs and glass walls.  It could all have been quite different, for Modern Architecture is not a style at all but, according to the Modernists, it is a theory, or a language, based upon the 19th century notion of 'the spirit of the age' - the zeitgeist as the Germans call it - and the belief that the spirit of the age can be expressed through its art and architecture.  To serve society properly, an aim in which he passionately believed, the Modern architect had to understand the age in which he lived and, all other questions apart, the spirit of the age was said to have influenced the pioneers in their creative work.  Thus, the zeitgeist, which Tim Benton called 'a kind of spiritual osmosis', is seen to qualify and condition the sort of architecture that society gets.  Alan Phillips wrote:  '.... architecture has a moral and ethical base that cannot be separated from the contemporaneity of its cultural and social milieu.  Palladio was as modern to the Romans as Koolhaas is to the Dutch.  The zeitgeist is not something to question; it simply exists.'.

There is something odd here however, for while the pioneers' intentions were unquestionably of the highest order, their designs were not universally accepted.  If they had been reading correctly the spirit of the age and were skillful enough in design terms to respond to it, why should their work have been less than popular?

I do not believe this paradox to be a condemnation of the theory of zeitgeist, but it has to do, amongst many other things, with the zeitgeist reflecting in the thinking of the avant garde more than that of the average man.  The spirit of the age will always be of immense complexity and not stateable in simple terms.  A society has its core characteristics and these will be stable over reasonable periods of time, like the general mood of materialism and acquisitiveness of the 1980s;  but nudging these general characteristics along will be new ones, often developing out of reactions from the main trends.  A reading of the zeitgeist must therefore take account of the dynamics of society and reflect the directions in which they are heading.  Such a reading however, is unlikely to be universally agreed at the time, although undeniably its influence will be there.  If such a belief in the influence of the zeitgeist is tenable  (was not the late 20th century pluralism in the arts generally, and architecture in particular, a fair reflection of that society's current confusion?) it follows that while the 'style' of the Modern Movement has now been identified by the historians, codified and in the process frozen, its theory is free to continue.  Thus 'the spirit of the age' can always be represented through the theory of Modern Architecture when it will produce an architecture reflective of the time.

Modern Architecture flowered for a remarkably brief period, from the early 1920s to the late 1930s, but from this mere blink of time a whole theory emerged which was to have such profound global effects.   We are now inescapably surrounded by its consequences; the houses in which we live, the tower blocks, the mass-produced furniture, mass-produced motor cars so fundamental to our society, and even the fantasy escapism we find on films and TV.

While we do not build white concrete houses with flat roofs any more - in the style of Modern Architecture - we do live in the theory of Modern Architecture with picture windows, open-planned interiors, modern furniture, modern lighting and fabrics and we do enjoy the luxury of mechanised fitted kitchens and bathrooms and benefit from working in light and airy offices.  All of these things now taken for granted were irrevocably fashioned and honed within the Modern Movement.  Whether any of this would have emerged from sources other than those of the Modernists is debatable.  I suggest that all the portents were there however, starting perhaps with the Romantic Movement in the 18th century and with William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement in the late 19th Century onwards.  Nicholas Pevsner, incidentally, called C. F. Voysey  (1857 -1941) 'one of the great pioneers of the Modern Movement', a claim which horrified Voysey at the time.

The word 'Modern' used in this context, of course, does not refer to the latest model - something bang up to date - but to a specific style and is the label which is now given to the products of the movement.  The terms 'Modern Architecture' and 'Modern Movement' have long since become a part of the language, showing just how great the revolution was in taste and fashion that took place in the 1930s.  The words 'modern', 'new' and 'novel' in other times have always been interchangeable, but we appear to have taken the word 'Modern' in this context to mean something frozen in time and clearly datable.  Modern architects, however, would not agree with this.  They would say that they are not concerned with style, or anything redolent of a frozen fashion, but rather with a styleless philosophy and a dateless product - or put another way - a design for living appropriate to the age because it reflects the age!  History, however, has to fix labels on things and immediately this happens it encapsulates them in time for ever.  While this dichotomy of viewpoints does little to help our understanding of the subject perhaps it does point up its complexity.  

It is astonishing that a movement which had such profound effects concerned so few participants at the time.  The 'pioneers' of the Modern Movement, as they were subsequently called, numbered a mere handful of men who saw their mission not in pure architectural terms but rather how through their architecture they could improve society.   They were thinking in social and political terms and as well as being architects they were a mixture of socialists, idealists and even poetic artists.  Their writings were often valuable comments upon the contemporary society which today gives them value as cultural history.  But unfortunately, no self-appointed planner of society ever finished up as flavour of the month!  Just as the great Gothic cathedrals gave form to the idea of the total work of art - the German gesamptkunstwerke - so Modern Architecture gave form to what was perceived by the pioneers as the spirit of their age.  It would have been astonishing indeed had something like this never happened to mark the technological revolution then emerging with such fury in the 20th century.

My viewpoint is that of a practising architect, as distinct from that of an architectural historian.  Therefore I warn you to beware of my prejudices ...... I am perhaps more qualified to talk about the distinctive expression of the architecture than of the social and political dynamics involved, which I properly leave to the historian.  I therefore think it necessary first to discuss what architecture is and what expressions like 'architectural form' and 'spatial organisation' mean - expressions I suspect with which the average historian would not be bothered.  But spatial organisation, after all, was one of the fundamentals of Modern Architecture.

Finally, my objective in writing this book is not to persuade you to like modern architecture, but rather to help you to gain a better understanding of it and why it ever happened in the first place and in the way it did.   If this enables greater objectivity of debate we may reduce some of the passion that often surrounds the subject. 

Dennis Berry

Kingston upon Thames
1997

TIME FOR CHANGE - THE GENESIS OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE