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In the spring of 2024, a housing justice advocacy group known as Shelter released a transformative new media campaign called Made in Social Housing. The campaign’s launch included a slickly produced short-form video featuring a diverse range of celebrities, each of whom was raised in a British social housing estate. As the camera pans across brick courtyards, playgrounds, and tower blocks, actors like Eddie Marsan tell of the ways in which social housing helped to shape generations past, offering security, stability, and comfort to the British working class. ‘We had these social homes’, we are told, ‘Now millions don’t. We’re building less and we need to be building more … so a new generation can be proud to say, “We are made in social housing”.’ With a nostalgia rarely deployed in social housing’s description, the short asks us to put our faith in a new and more hopeful reappraisal of modern social housing. As the predominant architecture of many working-class communities in Britain, social homes raised a nation full of people to be proud of (Figure 1). With a fresh investment, it seems to say, it could do so again.
The necessity of such a poignant narrative shift points to the brutalisation of modern social housing’s reputation in both British and American architectural and political discourses, a process which ultimately helped to liberalise the housing market, reduce social housing stock, and exacerbate the affordability crisis across both nations today. In 1977, historian and theorist Charles Jencks famously declared modernism ‘dead’, citing photography of the demolition of an American social housing project known as the Pruitt Igoe as evidence of a failed architectural experiment gone irredeemably wrong (1977, p. 9).
Though not the first, Jencks was chief among an influential coterie of postmodern theorists whose exploitation of photography helped contribute to the so-called ‘death of modernism’ myth.
Others, including architectural elites like Oscar Newman (1976), Peter Blake (1977), and Alice Coleman (1985), decried modern mass social housing in ways which recast the modern architectural style as inherently dystopian and despotic, transforming the master status of social housing from home to slum in the process. Many of these analyses, however, relied upon overstated behavioural pseudo-science and unproven theories of architectural determinism. Critical structural issues, such as disinvestment, community isolation, racism, bureaucratic mismanagement, and rising poverty, were often downplayed or even ignored.
Consequently, in their failure to engage with the complexity of circumstances surrounding modern social housing’s failings, many theorists incorrectly conflated estate dysfunction with architectural style, an error which continues to distort how many understand modernism today. However, it was not just their rhetoric but their use and abuse of photography that irrevocably injured the discourse. Wrenched from their contexts, photographs of struggling social housing estates were made uniquely amenable to hyperbole and ideological argument, particularly in the media (Churchill, 2024). Terry Eagleton has described this ‘haemorrhaging of meaning’ as characteristic of late-stage capitalist societies in which media consumption deliberately engages subjects subliminally rather than at consciously reflective levels (1991, pp. 37–38) . In this scenario, form, ‘overwhelms content’, inviting a passive consumption which results in a false or shallow consciousness. In other words, while seeing might be believing, it is certainly not knowing. Photography, as Susan Sontag has noted, can only ever provide a ‘semblance of knowledge’, though it’s long been mistaken for contributing something more substantial to the discourse (1977, p. 24).
In her landmark criticism of the medium, Sontag argued, by way of a comparison, that photographs were no better at interpreting the world than the metaphorical shadows in Plato’s cave (1977). Like shadows, photography is polysemic and as liable to distort, flatten, or abstract as to faithfully represent what it appropriates. In the hands of postmodern critics, photography of modern social housing was made to naturalise architectural death because that was the narrative that was desired, though that was not what was there. In fact, what was depicted were not causes of estate failure at all but the consequences of many political choices which ultimately facilitated social housing decay – causes which remained stubbornly beyond the camera’s acquisitive gaze. Recklessly exploited as both evidence and rhetorical device, photographs thus redefined estates as dystopian slums, teaching the British public to feel poorly about the entire endeavor. What’s more, these critical documentary photographs, which often traded in nineteenth-century stereotypes about the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, also permanently stained social housing’s largely working-class inhabitants. Consequently, in its re-inscription of a paternalistic economic hierarchy, critical photography helped condemn and erode the social housing system by tarring both the architecture and the recipients of state welfarism as abject failures.
Consequently, it seems nearly impossible now to understand modern architecture as revolutionary – a venture which many architects believed could go further, accomplish more, than even the most insurgent of political movements (Jameson, 1985, p. 71). As Le Corbusier famously observed, the early twentieth-century slum crisis animated much of modernism’s early anarchic impulse. ‘It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of to-day’, he argued, ‘architecture or revolution’ (1974, pp. 13–14). Whether in the raising of basic living standards, stabilisation of economic security, or attention to questions of civic health, social housing was a powerful democratic answer to an emerging social crisis (Hughes, 1991, p. 165). Despite its shortcomings, it was often revolutionary, both functionally and stylistically, as many of the best examples of social housing in Britain and elsewhere can attest.
Yet, in their adjudication of modern architecture’s utopianism, postmodern critics targeted social housing specifically, evaluating it against an impossibly high standard and without appropriate context, depriving modernism of its moral significance and rendering it appreciable in purely aesthetic terms.
As Frederic Jameson has argued such attacks were more ideologically motivated than was commonly appreciated at the time (1984). While disguised as a kind of populism, the movement’s embrace of a post-industrial consumer society was, by necessity, predicated upon the displacement of class struggle central to late-stage capitalist interests (Jameson, 1984, p. 55). What photography helped to declare dead then, was not so much modernist style, which has regained an appreciable following in recent years. Instead, what critics seemed to want to bury was the vein of social consciousness which coursed through the movement.
With the rise of housing insecurity now approaching a global scale, architecture’s relevance to social equity has urgently resurfaced; ‘revolution’ is back on the menu. But to ignore the ways in which class interests were first stripped away from the modernist project is to risk repeating the same social violence that followed its reproach. As Owen Hatherley has explained, ‘There is a general conviction that the working class were slotted into a world of concrete walkways and towers when all we ever wanted were the old back-to-backs … What can’t be imagined is a context in which we might have welcomed Modernism … as part of a specific collective project’ (2008, p. 9). However, as Jameson’s argument makes plain, the attempted rupture of social concern from architectural modernism was, at least implicitly, an attack against the working class, which in its inability to practice the unrestrained consumerism required of the new social order, revealed the inequalities inherent to the entire economic system. From this perspective, we might consider the critique of modern social housing as an attempt to banish ‘the less acceptable face of capitalism’ from the built environment (Paul Trevor cited in King 2023, p. 19).
Thus, any attempt to reform housing opportunity and achieve spatial justice must first reconcile architecture’s relationship to class. While photography may have helped to facilitate this estrangement, it may yet reconcile a reunion, as the Made in Social Housing campaign suggests. Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that this process is both awkward and fraught on account of the weaponisation of class in housing history. According to the Marxist architectural critic, Manfredo Tafuri, the radical potentiality of housing was compromised long before postmodernism’s conservative attacks undermined modernist ethics; it was implicated particularly in capitalism’s appropriation of housing as a biopolitical instrument and weapon of social reform. As Tafuri famously argued, there can be no class architecture, only a class criticism of architectural aesthetics (1979). Likewise, Florian Urban has noted the ways in which housing reform movements have tended to strengthen dominant social groups while restricting the agency of those served, meting out judgement and discipline even as it grants indispensable assistance (2011). The radical openness of first- and even second-generation modernism belied a hidden ideological agenda of condescending social engineering, which could be characterized as an ‘attack on traditional working-class and lower middle-class domestic customs’, as Paul Overy has argued (2008, p. 95). This harmful class hegemony legitimised later campaigns against modern social housing, which tended to unfold in ways that ultimately undermined provisioning even as critics sought to ‘rescue’ social housing’s inhabitants from the movement’s supposed excesses.
Consequently, attempts to reunite class and modern social housing must navigate the weaponisation of working-class identity that has undercut the last several decades of critiques. As scholars across disciplines have observed, post-war social housing was frequently exploited as the explicit architecture of a feral ‘underclass’ in print and television media (Hatherley 2008; Jones, 2011; Tyler, 2013). This toxic trope stigmatised the architecture and lay the groundwork for benefits cuts that ultimately fuelled housing’s re-appropriation by free market forces. As Owen Jones has noted, the caricature of the poor and unruly ‘council dweller’, known commonly by the derogative ‘chav’, was a deliberate by-product of Thatcher’s attacks on the Welfare State and working-class life (2011, pp. 9–10; also Hatherley, 2008, p. 10). More recently, a resurgent ethno-nationalism has also left the social housing system vulnerable to bigoted, bad-faith attacks (Thoburn, 2022a; Jones, 2011). Together, attempts to whiten and alienate the British working class have renewed historical discourses about the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor and factionalised the working class against itself.
Nonetheless, any erasure of class from architectural analysis overlooks the ways in which the built environment has historically manifested hegemonic class interests, perpetuating inequality in questions of housing, spatial justice, and the environment, (Margalit, 2023; Campkin, 2013). In Britain, the destruction of social housing stock, which has dwindled precipitously since its height in the early 1980s, has followed directly from ‘class-blind‘ assaults on social housing’s effectiveness and perceived dystopianism. For example, policies like the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme, a piece of conservative legislation which encouraged the discounted privatisation of individual social homes, has removed some two million flats from the public inventory (Bloomer, 2024). By one estimate, four in ten of those homes are now privately rented, compromising their affordability and stability (New Economics Foundation, 2024). Estate refurbishment, likewise, often results in gentrification and working-class displacement, as Paul Watt has written (2021). For example, iconic estates, such as the Grade II listed Park Hill in Sheffield, have lately been appropriated by private property developers who have displaced the original tenants and exploited the estate’s renown in a bid to attract enthusiasts of Brutalist style.
Consequently, any attempt to stem the tide of elite appropriation must engage directly with the rhetorical theft of modernism’s workingclassness. In this, there are few better examples than the demolition and museification of East London’s Robin Hood Gardens (1972). Designed by Brutalist architects Alison and Peter Smithson (1923–2003 and 1928–1993), Robin Hood was emblematic of Britain’s post-war social housing experiment — the most expansive and innovative architectural project of its kind at that time. Realised two full decades from its conceptual genesis in the unrealised Golden Lane plan (1952), Robin Hood was a remarkable illustration of the Smithsons’ famed ‘streets-in-the-sky’ approach to urban sociability and one of only a few examples of their meagre architectural output. As housing, however, Robin Hood was deeply polarising and like many of its peers, struggled against the weight of disinvestment, crime, and vandalism. After a long and bitter campaign to rehabilitate it, as well as two failed attempts to list it, Robin Hood Gardens was finally marked for death less than fifty years on from its completion. Today, the estate survives as a relic in residence at the newly opened Victoria & Albert East Storehouse (V & A East), mutely testifying to both the success and failure of the modernist movement. Like a trophy mounted in a hunting lodge, its façade exists in the liminal space between life and death, celebrated and yet lamented as a curious specimen suspended in architectural limbo.
A promotional photograph produced for a recent Guardian review of the V & A East illustrates the jarring museification of the Robin Hood Gardens Estate (Wainwright, 2025). The colour photograph, taken by Guy Bell, depicts the unmistakable two-storey, cast concrete façade in situ, which has been removed from urban Poplar, meticulously cleaned, and seamlessly integrated into the yawning 275-metre-long hangar with surgical precision. As a means of evidencing the complex’s vast scale, a young couple stands in the image’s centre, gazing contemplatively at the treasury of global goods that surrounds them from the estate’s balcony. For a moment, they appear to cosplay as two of Robin Hood’s contented former tenants. But the effect is fleeting. The estate’s façade, wrenched from its civic context, has been plunked between crates of objects filled with everything from poison darts to Frank Lloyd Wright furniture. The effect defeats the social purpose of Robin Hood Gardens as a home, sentencing the shell of what remains to perpetual confinement within a modern-day cabinet of curiosities. While conserving and preserving the legacy of British Brutalism as an architectural masterwork, the installation explicitly excises the building’s historical function as housing, thus consigning the social housing system to anthropological ‘pastness’.
Consequently, the acquisition of Brutalism within the museal system functions as the latest in a long line of attempts to evidence the failure of modern architecture’s utopianism as a well-intended though nonetheless improbable social project. In its representational strategy of awe, the display inadvertently exploits Robin Hood’s innovative design as a means of distracting from the ethical consideration of its appropriation and destruction (Thoburn, 2018a, p. 620; Price, 2021). But to what ends? As Christoph Lindner and Miriam Meissner have observed, ‘What brutalism, ruins, and slums all have in common today is that they have been appropriated by the urban imaginaries of gentrification and neoliberal renewal with the express aim of financially exploiting the social and spatial challenges they contain’ (2018: 285). One might argue then that the abstraction and objectification of Robin Hood Gardens from home to ethnographic object helps ‘normalise’ a visual imaginary of gentrification, reframing the museification of modern social housing as a sign of economic progress (Lindner and Meissner, 2018, p. 280). In this way, the V & A appears to cosign East London’s social cleansing, particularly as the institution did little to help stop Robin Hood’s destruction (Thoburn, 2022b). Such exhibitions are, therefore, hotly contested as providing aesthetic cover for the Neoliberal appropriation of modern architectural style.
Given Robin Hood Garden’s diverse ethnic composition at the time of its destruction, which consisted predominantly of Bengali immigrants, this is a charge that should not be dismissed lightly (Thoburn, 2022a). To that end, there exists several documentary projects which refute the narrative of failure within which Robin Hood Gardens was condemned and testify instead to its living, breathing presence as home to a diverse community of citizens. One such notable series, conceived of collaboratively by the sociologist Nicholas Thoburn and photographer Kois Miah between 2014–17, depicts a sense of strong social cohesion fostered, in no small part, by the design of the architecture. Through sensitive color portraits of both the buildings and their inhabitants, Miah’s photography enlivens the characteristically cold concrete of Robin Hood Gardens. Though his depiction of the architecture is uncharacteristically warm, even romantic, Miah’s most affecting photographs are his human subjects, whom he portrays as largely quiet and unassuming — in direct contravention to the unruly portrayal of ‘council dwellers’ and ‘chavs’ in the media.
In one particularly poignant photograph, we see a modest but tastefully decorated living room interior within which its elderly occupant has settled into a bold red armchair, her hands resting neatly upon her knees. With gentle eyes and a toughness that belies her silvery hair and delicate frame, she proudly confronts the camera’s penetrating gaze. Another example depicts a ‘summer fun day’, in which a group of young children has just lost a game of tug of war while their adult neighbors look on in amusement. (Figure 2) Collapsing into a heap of giggles, the children don face paint and colorful paper crowns, symbols which testify to a day filled with joyful play. A final example features a posed portrait of three generations of the Fakamus family. Freshly dressed and readied for a morning at church, the family stands in a small living room surrounded by a wall dense with framed family snapshots. Upon a corner shelf, a small, decorative knick-knack appears to summarize the scene. In bold red letters, it spells the word ‘Love’ (Figure 3).
What is perhaps most successful about Thoburn and Miah’s documentary project is its ability to materialize perspectives that were largely absent in the broader public debates about Robin Hood’s future (Thoburn, 2018b). Throughout the process, Miah and Thoburn extensively interviewed residents about their personal histories at the estate, conducting interviews in both Bengali and English often immediately preceding the photographic event. Thus, in their archive of photographs, representation is mediated by the residents’ quiet but insistent voices testifying to homes they’d long enjoyed. We see residents gardening, hanging laundry, playing, and embracing. Most importantly, perhaps, we see them smiling. The residents here are not beleaguered, dangerous, or strange. They are happy. They are proud. They are just like us. By emphasizing their humanity, Miah’s photography negates the tokenistic and stigmatising portrayal of estate residents as abject citizens and invalidates the loud and largely superficial critique of their home in word and image.
Rather, the photographs suggest that the design of modern social housing, when appropriately considered, can foster social cohesion and feelings of belonging. More specifically, they illustrate how the Smithsons’ famed ‘streets-in-the-sky’ successfully integrated home and the city, mitigating the estrangement that sometimes accompanies urban life. For the Smithsons, the idea of the street was essential to society. ‘In the suburbs and slums’, they argued, ‘the vital relationship between the house and the street survives, children run about … people stop and talk … you are outside your house in your street’ (Smithson and Smithson, 1970, p. 43). Their principal innovation in British social housing was to preserve this street, elevating its inhabitants to the safety of the skies. Even in times of trouble, and amidst chronic disinvestment, the ‘streets-in-the-sky’ helped Robin Hood feel more like home, as residents like William and Laetitia Fakamus have explained. The street decks, they argued, fostered friendships, and even provided opportunities to survey the city and contemplate ‘the wonder of God’s global embrace’ (Fakamus cited in Thoburn, 2018b). As Miah has also noted, ‘Contrary to the oft-repeated story that the aerial “streets in the sky” failed as social spaces, most of the residents interviewed spoke of them with enthusiasm’ (Kois cited in Rowan, 2016).
Against this more nuanced portrayal of Robin Hood’s efficacy, we might reconsider the image of modernism’s failure and death as it appears in artist Jesse Brennan’s (b. 1982) four-part series collectively entitled A Fall of Ordinariness and Light (2014). Produced as part of a broader community art project, Brennan’s graphite drawings depict a photograph of the seven-storey façade of Robin Hood’s west block as it endures a parody of its impending demolition in astonishing trompe-l'œil (Figure 4). In successive stages, the estate’s west block, realized in rich photo-realistic chiaroscuro, transforms from slightly rumpled to folded inward upon itself like an accordion. The title, Ordinariness and Light, refers to a key text of the same name, a book of post-war urban theory and aesthetics published by the Smithsons in 1970. Brennan’s process evokes the physical and metaphorical fall of the Smithsons’ ideas in Robin Hood’s demolition. However, her drawings also recall photographs of the spectacular trial demolition of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe, which transpired just as the last of Robin Hood Gardens was going up (Figure 5). Thus, Brennan’s drawings comment on the weaponisation of the demolition spectacle as another example of gentrification’s visual imaginary.
As Richard Martin has observed, ‘By crashing down to earth, housing estates that were ignored … became prime images of historical failure and, simultaneously, markers of today’s less naïve approach to social progress’ (Martin cited in Brennan 2015: 38).
As a photographic event, social housing demolition thus signifies a means of easy escape from the naïve and illiberal utopianism of architectural modernism and its deference to class struggle. However, the instrumentalisation of this trope, much like modernism’s museification, diminishes social housing’s performance, obscures the system’s ‘managed decline’, and colludes in the harm that ‘regeneration‘ schemes visit upon the working class. Demolition, as Thoburn has observed, is driven not by a concern for community welfare but by a convergence of interests between the city’s need for social services savings and capitalism’s relentless pursuit of profit (2023). While advertised as an opportunity to increase density, improve building quality, or reduce social stigmatisation, regeneration frequently uproots and atomises local communities, reducing social housing supply and contributing to working-class insecurity. Perhaps, as Ben Campkin argues, regeneration is not about alleviating poverty at all but an attempt to remove its negative aesthetics to the periphery of our sight (Campkin, 2023, p. 103).
Seen from this perspective, what the instrumentalisation of abject aesthetics in critical documentary photography helped to accomplish was not merely destructive. Rather, it was also generative. In his discussion of the oft-circulated images of the smoking World Trade Center towers, W.J.T. Mitchell identified a ‘new and more virulent form of iconoclasm … an image of horror that has imprinted itself in the memory of the entire world’ (2010: 14). Yet such iconoclasm was less a destructive than a ‘creative’ act, producing a secondary image that satisfied an urgent desire for a new and prescient icon in the United States’ ensuing ‘War on Terror’. Likewise, depictions of graffiti, crumbling concrete, and rough, aimless youths reinforced class anxieties regarding dirt and disorder, making of social housing an architectural icon of uncanny terror, the consequences of which helped to erode confidence in and support for its provisioning (Campkin, 2023, p. 10). But in its failure, modernism’s supposed death occasioned something new – an emergency which only the free market seemed poised to solve. Thus, the immortalisation of social housing’s domicide in and through photography obscures the violence of dispossession and reframes demolition as a prescient spectacle of creative destruction and renewal inherent to the capitalist system (Byles, 2006, p. 17).
In the short film The Black Tower (1987), however, the brutality of social housing’s erasure is flipped on its head and represented as a fatal haunting. Narrated by the film’s director, the artist John Smith (b. 1952), the short film begins with a black screen and birdsong, during which Smith details a startling first encounter with a shadowy, tectonic spectre through a first-person narration. In a moment, we see the object of the narrator’s fascination, a small black peak sitting benignly behind the roofline of a line of low rowhouses – the black tower of the film’s title. The building, visible only across its roofline, is a flat, dimensionless void, but is otherwise non-threatening. Nonetheless, the tenor of the narration becomes increasingly urgent as Smith dreams of imprisonment within the tower, his body paralyzed by some unexplained terror. In confusion, he searches for the tower, only to discover that it was recently demolished. A tower block blinks into view, now in full colour, and collapses spectacularly. Confronted with the tower’s demolition in his morning paper, Smith confronts the possibility that the tower may be tormenting him. Hereafter, the hauntings increase, the tower’s featureless silhouette swelling until it swallows the screen in darkness (Figure 6). Terrified, the narrator retreats to the safety of his apartment until an ambulance transports him to a nearby hospital, where he finds the now ominous tower still waiting. An attempt to recover in the countryside is thwarted when the tower reappears and finally seduces the narrator inside to his death.
Premised on one of the most elementary forms of cinematic illusionism, Smith’s film is commonly understood as a humorous meditation on the instability of filmic fact (Rees, 1987 cited in Smith, no date; Beckett, 2011). As Colin Beckett has argued, ‘You could understand its story as a parable of narrative film viewing, the fantasies that cinematic representation engender being, like the eponymous tower, so seductive that they continue to do psychic harm even after we know better’ (2011). To his point, the man eventually succumbs to his deadly delusions even after acknowledging the tower is imagined. However, Smith’s choice of antagonist, the ‘ghost’ of a now demolished tower block, is deserving of greater scrutiny, particularly given the animosity unleashed upon social housing during the period. In gothic literature, hauntings are variously interpreted as symbolising unresolved issues, moral transgressions, fears, and anxieties, often those brought on by a feared decline of ruling class power (see, for example, Rena Harris, 2024). From within this framework, we might also see the tower’s haunting as a stubborn act of defiance. In its refusal to succumb to its own erasure, the tower block boldly reclaims its civic space – psychically if necessary.
In an exaggerated parody of middle-class fears, the tower block is transformed from a quiet, unassuming shadow into a figure of horror and revulsion, all in the narrator’s mind. But, like Frankenstein’s monster, the tower does not suffer its master’s rejection lightly. Instead, it unleashes the full weight of its fury upon the man, ultimately killing him. Your life for mine, it seems to say. From this perspective, The Black Tower also stands as a condemnation of our own facile media habits, in which we consumed the spectacle of social housing’s death too superficially. According to Guy Debord, the power of spectacle lies, at least partly, in its manipulation of its subjects into passive spectatorship (1970). Spectacle monopolises the argument, eliminating all opportunities to respond (Debord, 1970, p. 11). Photography, however, is never fully beholden to institutional inscription – relations between the photograph and its audience remain very malleable (Crimp, 1993). Thus, when a second narrator emerges in the film’s final moments to declare that she too has seen a dreadful black tower, Smith introduces a kernel of doubt. We have seen, but do we truly know? The Black Tower reminds us that we don’t.
This is not to suggest that photography does not merit a place in the social housing discourse. As the examples above have illustrated, photography is not just a weapon to be feared but a tool which we too can wield against the same mythologies and systems of power the medium has historically upheld (Berger, 2013, p. 27). But photography is beautifully, problematically, polysemous, as Roland Barthes has famously argued (1980: 274). Consequently, it cannot be consumed uncritically, and it should never be taken as a given. In her landmark study of social documentary photography’s subjectivity, Abigail Solomon-Godeau called for a critical awareness of who was really ‘speaking’ in such images (1991). The photograph’s ‘reality effect’, she observes, tends to obscure the photographer’s subject position embedded within its making (1991, p. 180). The image presumes to speak for, not with, its subject. Consequently, we would be well served to remember that an ideology is always at play in photography’s perceived neutrality. Though it works tirelessly to disguise itself, ‘naturalising’ the cultural and the political, ideological effects impose not reality but meaning (Solomon-Godeau, 1991, p. 182).
Critical social housing photography has, historically, communicated an elite subject position, resulting in analyses of its failures that have reinforced narratives of class exclusion and obscured the state’s role in the system’s deterioration.
Through photography, the working class can be given opportunities to contest the record. Among the most effective examples is Grenfell (2017), a single-channel, documentary film which neatly turns the abject image of modern social housing against itself. Directed by artist and filmmaker Sir Steve McQueen CBE (b. 1969), the film’s simple title refers to what is undoubtedly among the most horrific episodes in recent British history, the Grenfell Tower fire (Figure 7). Occurring just after midnight on the evening of 14 June 2017, what began as a small kitchen fire tore through the West London tower block, killing seventy-two and injuring scores more. The ensuing government inquiry attributed the fire’s furious and deadly spread to the installation of a criminally flammable cladding produced by American metal engineering firm Arconic, which had been recently affixed as part of a broader ‘revitalisation’ scheme. However, given the state’s erosion of its social housing infrastructure, its weakening of building regulations, and overall disregard for social housing safety, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
Much like Smith’s Black Tower, the first thing that hits you in McQueen’s Grenfell is not vision at all but sound. From a black screen, the ceaseless rush of the highway slowly washes over you, a banal symphony of tires upon asphalt. Suddenly, an image blinks into view as the camera creeps towards the horizon. Below, a rural landscape of tiny trees and neighbourhoods slowly unfold. Next, birdsong penetrates the droning din, accompanied by the whine of a passing engine, a faint but insistent horn blast, and, eventually, a wailing siren. We have some rough coordinates now; our destination is urban though sound does not yet match vision. Instead, we glide as our bird’s-eye view turns gently towards a distant cityscape. (Figure 8) The rushing air gets louder now, more urgent. We fly into the atmospheric refraction, descending gently as the city beneath begins to grow. At last, we see the source of the sound, a highway, and beyond, our destination, a tower so black it blights the skyline. Finding its target, the camera inches closer to this towering ruin, now a shadow of its former self, and begins to circle its hideously blistered façade. Sound dies away. Silence accompanies the awful spectacle, a memento of those who can no longer cry out. What was once a home is now a dreadful icon of architectural death.
Though criminal responsibility remains blurry (and still years away from resolution), Grenfell constitutes a vital record through which justice may yet be served, as McQueen has explained (McQueen, cited in Serpentine South Gallery pamphlet, 2019, p. 10). Produced at the start of the seven-year government inquiry and filmed just a few short months following the deadly fire, the film stages an intervention in the historical record of modern architectural ruin. By returning to the scene of the crime and engrossing us in Grenfell’s ghastly corpse, he prevents the evidence from fading from memory and defends against attempts to hide abjection from our sight behind pristine white hoarding. Shot simply from the respectful distance of a hovering helicopter, his aerial footage speaks to the kind of slow social violence to which it is all too easy to become inured. Covering twenty-four floors in twenty-four minutes, McQueen spares no detail in his forensic documentation. His unmitigated attention honours each life destroyed by corporate greed and bureaucratic indifference.
According to Paul Gilroy, the Grenfell disaster demands a contemplation of which lives matter and just who can behave with impunity (Gilroy cited in Serpentine South Gallery pamphlet, 2019, p. 12). The power of McQueen’s memorialisation of the fire, however, implies we already know how to answer these questions. Haunting in its simplicity, Grenfell explicitly refutes the death of modernism's myth as inevitable. Instead, it insists we more closely examine and attend to its causes and human consequences. Perhaps the ultimate power of Grenfell, however, lies in its ability to replace the most consequential icon of architectural death that preceded it – the Pruitt-Igoe demolition photograph. What unites the deaths of both estates is an indifference to those communities social housing serves. As the Grenfell inquiry revealed, some eighty-five per cent of tenants who died in the fire were people of colour. Nearly all were working-class. In this, Grenfell Tower and the Pruitt-Igoe share an affinity beyond their own untimely ends. Part of broader investments in post-war housing construction and slum clearance in St. Louis, the Pruitt-Igoe was also home to a majority Black, working-class population. And like those at Grenfell, its residents were exiled to a place where concern could not reach, marked as failed citizens, and deemed unworthy of dignity or respect. As Susan Sontag famously argued, ‘Let the atrocious images haunt us,’ remind us of what our fellow human beings ‘are capable of doing…Don’t forget’ (2017, pp. 147–48). McQueen’s Grenfell guarantees we won’t.
Every history, as Mitchell has argued, is really two histories – ‘what actually happened’ and ‘the history of the perception of what happened’ (2010, p. xi). In our own time, both events and their perceptions are heavily mediated by mass media representation, our national narratives litigated in the gaps that exist between image and interpretation and debated endlessly across various social media channels. The housing discourse, particularly, remains woefully surface level, particularly for those most alienated from its problems – the middle and upper classes. Consequently, even such a slick and stirring media campaign as that proffered by Shelter risks becoming but one more shadow in ‘Plato’s Cave’. Because the campaign fails to reckon with the mythology of failure that compromised modernism’s moral concern for working-class life, it remains circumscribed by the false belief that the problem is buildings at all.
Perhaps what efforts to change the official narrative of modern social housing most require then are not less images but more.
When brought into dialogue with a broader canon of imagery, we might understand Shelter’s campaign as but one part of a new, class-conscious visual politics of modern social housing that includes works like those by Miah, Brennan, Smith, and McQueen. Taken together, these films, drawings, and photographs constitute an indispensable counter-archive, which turns the abject spectacle of modern social housing’s demise against itself to reveal a painful truth about who regeneration is and isn’t for. As Alice Compton has argued, photography was both complicit in and yet also revolted against the kind of ‘aesthetics of social abjection’ that eventually killed social housing’s workingclassness (2016). The aestheticisation of poverty and social dysfunction, as Tyler also notes, cuts both ways, dehumanising subjects by participating in the right’s weaponisation of ‘revolting aesthetics’, and yet also functioning as an instrument of political resistance (Tyler, 2013, pp. 4–10). The counter-archive, which includes both fine art and community-focused documentary photography, effectively seizes authority from modernism’s critics. In so doing, the works explicitly materialise the various subject positions of those directly harmed by modern social housing’s abjection. Much like the second narrator of Smith’s Tower, such works invite scepticism about those stories we’ve been told and those we continue to tell about those most unlike us.
Through the marriage of critical photography and the rhetoric of death, social housing became a cypher for social deterioration and political failure in Britain’s broader economic downturn. Its weaponisation helped to drastically curtail the Welfare State and consign the modernist project to history’s dustbin. However, photography may yet play a role in working-class modernism’s recovery, reminding us that we have not only the right but the responsibility to bear witness, particularly when the question of accountability remains unresolved (Azoulay 2012). ‘The right to look,’ Nicholas Mirzoeff argues, ‘confronts the police who say to us, “Move on, there's nothing to see here”’ (2011, p. 474). However, the new visual culture of working-class architecture must not shy away from the image of death with which modern social housing has formerly been associated. Rather, we must linger there, meditating on modernism’s untimely demise as a critical means towards understanding better who (or what) was served by its attempted execution. On the relationship between death and photography, Barthes has observed that the medium’s propensity to emote while nonetheless providing eidetic testimony renders photography an ideal means by which to face and thus ‘resolve’ death’s presence in our lives (Barthes, 2010). Through photography, we can reframe social housing’s death as a preventable social violence and begin to dismantle the myths that may yet threaten working-class security in the future. Then, and only then, can we escape the illusions shaping modernism’s perception in Plato’s Cave.
The author gratefully acknowledges the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for their support of this research and wishes to thank Shelter, Kois Miah, Nicholas Thoburn, Jessie Brennan, John Smith, Steve McQueen, and the Thomas Dane Gallery for the use of their art and images.
Commissioning architects, historians and theorists, Modernism is Almost All Right seeks to offer new knowledge and methods to reappraise the movement’s canonical and, critically, non-canonical forms and examine how its modes of theory and practice might be expanded to address the complexities of designing the future.
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Looking backwards to look forwards during a time of energy and environmental crises; shifts within gender, racial, postcolonial, and posthuman relations; and rapid technological developments, these articles pose a series of questions. What, if anything, can still be learnt from the modernist project? What is its potential to address today’s wicked problems? What continuities and discontinuities can be discerned between twentieth-century modernism and contemporary and future architectural production? Do we require new methodologies to be created and deployed to assess these important questions? How do we reflect upon the lessons of modernism within a global context? How can the definitions of function and economy within modernist architecture be redefined to respond to immediate and future contexts?
Commissioning architects, historians and theorists, Modernism is Almost All Right seeks to offer new knowledge and methods to reappraise the movement’s canonical and, critically, non-canonical forms and examine how its modes of theory and practice might be expanded to address the complexities of designing the future.
Too often, there is a fissure between the architectural discourse of the academy and discussion of architecture in the public realm. Type.ie's presentation of historical documents next to other forms of essays on today’s built environment argues for the utility of a historical perspective within contemporary discourse. Through this collaboration, Modernism is Almost All Right aims to disseminate a series of referenced, evidence-based texts to a public within and beyond academia appearing, firstly at least, as a monthly online article series, parallel to the existing dogma&opinion series. What follows is the introduction to the series. While acknowledging lacunae and limitations interms of gender, race, and environmental consciousness, it scopes the achievements of the modernist project as a way of both seeing the world, and as a method of acting within it.
To counter Manfredo Tafuri, Modernism is Almost All Right presupposes that architectural history should be – actually, must be – operative. Part of its vitality and its social and cultural function lies in its ability to think about and critique the past in order to influence the future. This is particularly relevant when, to paraphrase Rosalind Krauss, architecture is understood as an expanded field. Contemporary architectural production is part of an intricate globalised matrix of flows (of labour and information, and raw and synthetic materials), operating across legislative landscapes of trade agreements and boundaries – all financed electronically and super-nationally. Accordingly, the apparently banal and ordinary that constitutes the majority of our built environment – the supermarkets, carparks, pieces of everyday infrastructures, distribution centres, call centres, speculative housing, and so on – are sophisticated and complex phenomena. As such they are not only worthy of, but actively require, ongoing architectural investigation, as Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour began to highlight in 1972. That we reimagine the ordinary through engagement with its hidden complexities has thus become an essential aspect of the architect’s and the critic’s purpose.
Despite its attendant and ongoing controversies, architectural modernism – with its social, political, and technological components – not only concerned itself closely with the complexities of the ordinary in this way, but equipped itself with the ambition, belief, and infrastructure to propose solutions, across a series of scales, to the big problems it found there. Lessons of the recent past, in the range and scope of modernist architecture, can provide useful means of seeing, and thereby defining, the near future. Modernism is Almost Alright.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx famously lists the achievements of capitalism, insisting that the scale, impact, and complexity of the industrial revolution and wage-labour far surpassed anything realised in the previous epochs of cathedrals, palaces, slavery, serfdom, and pre-mechanised agriculture. In a section from Capital Volume 1 (1867), the wonderfully titled ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof’, he underscores the extent of this complexity by discussing what appears the most ordinary of things, the commodity.
‘A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ (p. 163).
Essentially, a commodity is anything that can be bought and sold on the market: your wristwatch, my trousers, their car. Marx is writing specifically about cotton, (he closely studied the industry in Manchester), but through the development of capitalism, his is a definition that has become more and more universalised. Henri Lefebvre (1991), for example, discusses the commodification of land as a process of disenchantment or emancipation from all previous meanings and associations into comparative, exchangeable parcels. All qualities become subsumed to quantities, homogenised within what has been described as the money nexus. While evidently this can equally be applied to buildings, it can also be extended to ephemeral as well as physical things. Commodities are complex entities, often involving large systems whose presence and qualities, conditions and means of production are discrete from and invisible within the object itself. As Marx states elsewhere, if everything was as it appears on the surface – if, in other words, everything could be intuited – then there would be no need for science (1884). But, if you look at something for long enough and through the correct lens, complexities appear. The what and the how of something like a building becomes conflated with how it is made: its means of production – industrialisation; how it is transported – logistics; where its materials come from – extraction; the social conditions of the labour force – how they live, how they are reproduced, etc. The latter recalls John Ruskin’s dictum from the ‘Nature of Gothic’ that a central question of architectural appreciation is ‘What kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy’. (Ruskin, 1892, p. 23) Writing in 1853, before Capital was published, Ruskin explodes the meaning of architecture to suggest that an ephemeral, emotional condition is both present within the form and, at the same time, discrete from it – one of a series of complex relationships that exist simultaneously within and outside the object in the conditions of its production.
Written almost a hundred years later in 1948, Sigfried Giedion’s book Mechanisation Takes Command examines the impact of mechanisation on a series of everyday items and processes. The subtitle, A Contribution to An Anonymous History, surmises a history of unknown innovators who contributed not only to the realisation of a series of what would become ordinary objects but, also, and more importantly, how these things were made. For example, Giedion tracks the evolution of farm machinery, confirming the countryside as the crucible of technological and industrial development. He devotes a whole chapter to the mechanisation of death, analysing pigs in the stock yards and abattoirs of Chicago and the de-feathering of chickens (complete with diagrams and photographs) (Figure 1) as well as the conditions necessary for their sandwich accompaniment, the mass production of bread. From here he traces how the serial killing of pigs became translated into the manufacturing of cars in the Ford factory production lines of Detroit and from there became normalised, not only in the global making of cars in Europe and elsewhere, but as a generic system of production. In the process, this connoisseur historian of architecture, and intimate of Le Corbusier et al, reveals apparently ordinary things to be extra-ordinary.
In The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (1969), Reyner Banham provides a humanities perspective on technological and environmental concerns within architecture. The book rubbed against conventional architectural history and discourse by discussing such things as Frank Lloyd Wright’s attitude toward central heating, the Northern Irish origins of air-conditioning, and the proliferation of the suspended ceiling or floor, complete with modular tiles as a prime mover, not only in the production of offices and other buildings, but also behind more theoretical propositions. The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (2000) by Rem Koolhaas, Judy Chung Chuia, and others, focuses on another lacuna within architectural discourse. It provides an introduction to key thinkers such as Victor Gruen, inventor of the suburban shopping mall in the 1950s – based on the Ringstrasse of his native Vienna – and John Jerde, who re-invented shopping mall design in the 1970s through the introduction of theatricality inspired themes. Also discussed are aspects of the technical servicing of shopping, such as the hugely influential development of the escalator, which opened up continuous vertical flow through space; and the uses of psycho-programming, which seeks to understand how and why people buy what they buy, and to get them to buy more. Kengo Kuma’s book Anti-Object: The Dissolution and Disintegration of Architecture (2007) adroitly suggests that architecture should be understood as being essentially provisional. Echoing Marx’s description of the constant revolutions of change within capital that cause ‘all that is solid [to melt] into air’, under this conception it is possible to see architecture as simply a nexus of connections and ultimately, like the city, as having no fixed form (Marx, 1848, p. 83). As the twenty-first century has progressed, we are seeing further extensions of the field into both these broader contexts, but also re-examining previous histories with an expanded reference to the non-visual. Emily Thompson’s The Soundscape of Modernity (2004) critiques Banham’s earlier work by examining not only the architectural shift in space and material, but also the electronic inventions which spurred on an entirely new sonic world as modernism gathered pace.
The expansion of the field also, of course, extended into new readings of modernism from post-colonial, feminist, queer, and post-anthropocene humanities thinkers, from those influenced by Edward Said’s formational Orientalism to those who have developed and critiqued Donna Harraway’s ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’ (1985). Practitioners and theorists such as James Corner, Stan Allen, and Charles Waldheim called for a wider practice of architecture, capable of operating across a range of scales and complex conditions, whose output might be the definition of fields of relationships as well as, or instead of, the production of buildings. The suggestion here was the reclamation not only of territories previously lost to architecture but also the recovery of a modernist ideal: architecture as an instrument capable of transforming the human condition rather than merely expressing it (Allen, 1999).
Built between 1935 and 1938, the Finsbury Health Centre by Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton is indicative of an intimate and nascent engagement between architecture and sections of society previously beyond the reach of the profession (Figure 2). It is premised on the basis that architecture could deliver, or at least facilitate, the provision of health – architecture, previously the reserve of the rich and powerful, is now placed in the position of being able to make the ordinary individual well. The scope and ambition of architecture has changed, radically, to embrace a more democratic foundation.
Also striking is another project and publication produced by the same architects at about the same time. Entitled Planned ARP (Air Raid Protection), through text, diagrams, drawings, and photographs it examines and speculates on the potential future bombing of the London borough of Finsbury in the predicted Second World War (Figures 3, 4). It provides analytical, detailed studies of types of bomb: incendiary, gas, percussion, general purpose, semi-armour piercing, and their dispersal and likely effects – impact, shock, penetration, blast, splinters, falling debris, etc. – on architecture and civic space. Against these, measures of protection – from slit trenches to the use of existing basements, surface shelters to deep excavations – are also surveyed and their attributes, qualities, and drawbacks explained and critiqued.
Designed for public consumption, the book deployed Gordon Cullen (later of The Concise Townscape fame) to make a series of vignettes communicating very clearly and evocatively the potential scenarios resulting from the inadequate provision of shelter. Finally, responding to this amassing of evidence from the fields of aerial warfare and an informed examination of how bombing might affect the city, Tecton provides a design solution in the form of an underground shelter, accessed by a helical ramp and used in peacetime as a carpark. The form was, of course, curiously and famously, replicated above ground in the architects’ penguin pavilion for London Zoo (Figure 5).
Of significance is that architectural techniques have been used to analyse the complex conditions of phenomena normally outside architectural discourse: aerial bombing. Architectural and other types of drawing are used to reveal its qualities and threats, communicating these things in a clear, precise way to a general, non-expert audience. Having defined the question of what the future bombing of London might look like, Tecton provide an answer – a shelter whose design responds not only to the variety of bombs predicted to fall, but also to other complexities surrounding the servicing of the facility and even aspects such as the psychological wellbeing of the shelter’s occupants, as well as its future use.
Throughout the twentieth century, modernism’s evolving concerns continued to seek a rapprochement between developing technologies and new ways of shaping society and its institutions – through the application of big ideas. The plan drawings for the Free University of Berlin from 1963 resemble an archaeological artefact, a coded tablet offering a transcription of a densely occupied city. In fact, the proposal by Candilis Josic Woods for a radical new form of non-hierarchical university was based partly on ideas of medieval European and Islamic urban forms (Figure 6). It sought the furthering of knowledge through the spatial breaking of disciplinary boundaries – specifically between sciences and humanities – by providing an environment analogous to a city, where chance meetings encourage dialogue between individuals and groups within otherwise un-programmed space. Described by Alison Smithson as an example of, if not the archetypical, mat building – a thick inhabited 2D – it was also technologically designed to be endless, adaptable, formless: a modular system without beginning or end, a non-fixed space of knowledge exchange, as suitable for the suburbs of Dublin as those of Berlin (Figure 7).
The architecture of the mid-twentieth century became more sophisticated in its attitude to society and more responsive, adaptive, and nuanced to criteria which modernism had previously tended to overlook such as place, site, and history. But it retained a radical agenda for remaking institutions and other spaces. In Ireland, the late 1970s mat-planning of St. Brendan’s Community School in Birr by Peter and Mary Doyle emerged out of a government-sponsored architectural competition. Birr embodies the new democratisation and secularisation of Irish education first posited in the 1960s (Figure 8). This is demonstrated in a non-hierarchical plan arrangement of courtyards, classrooms, and an internal street made possible through the application of an off-the-shelf concrete portal frame system originally manufactured for the rapid assembly of factories. Designed as inherently flexible, and described as ‘ideally of no fixed form’ by Mary Doyle, who resolutely denied any primacy of aesthetic within its design, the building is as much a political manifesto in the belief of a future Ireland as it is a piece of architecture (O’Regan, 1990, p. 14).
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Other built visions of possible futures include Piet Blom’s ‘kasbah’ housing scheme in Hengalo, 1969-73. Another mat of occupation, the entire scheme is raised on stilts leaving a free, permissive space underneath designed for children to play. Moshie Safdie’s Habitat 1967 offers a similarly dense occupation in section and a stepped and graduated relationship between inside and outside, and public and private space (Figure 9). In 1969, at a more conceptual and prophetic level, Andrea Branzi of the Italian avant-garde group Archizoom offered No Stop City, a web of networked services where people are essentially nomadic, camping between thick sectional zones of generic and universal services which look suspiciously like they belong to office space (Figure 10). In The Continuous Monument (1969) Superstudio proposes a siteless, omnipresent architecture of services where everyone is endlessly connected, apparently emancipated from previous constraints of geographical place and time but reliant on iconic landmarks such as the skyline of New York and the Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare for the potency of its messaging (Figure 11). A polemical or critical project, it is predicated on the pervasive suspended floor tile system as identified by Reyner Banham. Also in this vein, Reyner Banham himself (with Francois Dallegret), conceived A Home is Not a House (1965) which, as is well known, proposes a naked life in inflatable bubbles – albeit one with full access to essential services such as heat, water, and television.
These last projects, and those of the first wave of modernism which preceded them, responded to the question first posed by William Morris of ‘how we live and how we might live’ (1885). However, they don’t necessarily answer the question. Rather, they tend to re-ask it while communicating the terms of reference in which the question has been framed. The communicative aspect of architecture – the idea of the project as literally projecting a future – is of fundamental importance, as Stan Allen suggests:
‘An architectural drawing is an assemblage of spatial and material notations that can be decoded according to a series of shared conventions in order to effect a transformation of reality at a distance from the author. The drawing as an artefact is unimportant. It can be just as convincingly described as a script, a score, or a recipe, or a set of instructions for realizing a building’ (2010, p. 41).
To reiterate, architects don’t actually build anything – they communicate to others to build in what Allen (quoting Nelson Goodman) differentiates as autographic and allographic practices: autographic being the drawing as artefact, and allographic essentially communicating directions for others to carry out.
In Charles and Ray Eames’ 1953 film, ‘A Communications Primer’, they take exactly twenty-one minutes twenty-nine seconds to clarify and discuss the significance of Claude Shannon’s treatise, A Mathematical Model of Communication. In its explanation of Shannon’s often dense work, the film uses movement, dialogue, text, and music, but primarily visual images, to engage with the article’s complexity. Of significance is the Eameses’ close attention to the equation central to Shannon’s thesis – this artefact is distilled and analysed, its constituent parts broken up and its abstractions replaced by cognate, recognisable forms. Explanation becomes an iterative process where the central message is repeated over and over using a series of diverse examples involving space, movement, form, and the relationships between them.
These are evidently constituent elements of architecture, and of interest here is how the equation is captured, mined, interpreted, and communicated by the Eameses through the use of a series of iconic forms and patterns. In the Middle Ages, as seen explicitly in examples such as Laon Cathedral, architecture was media. To reuse Shannon’s own diagram, before Gutenberg and the advent of mass literacy, the message was scriptures (and frequently the apocalypse), the signal was architecture, and the receiver was the eyes and imagination of pilgrims and church-goers – that is, just about everyone.
In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo stressed that this is no more. Famously, he announced, ceci tuera cela: this will kill that, the book will kill the edifice. Following the invention of the printing press and the subsequent mass production of reading material, architecture was seen to have had the primacy of its communicative function severely diminished. When it did communicate, it was often reduced to an adjunct of language. And yet, at the beginning of the information age (Claude Shannon is known as the father of information theory), and in spite of their subsequent immersion in then cutting-edge exhibition techniques in their later careers, the Eameses' film uses communicative techniques that are positively medieval: resorting to the manipulation of form and space to represent abstract ideas to a chiefly illiterate audience. In the Eameses’ film, modern icons – recognisable forms from everyday life – are assembled and articulated to expand and tease out the complexities of a textual and numerical theory.
This is the application of architectural thinking as a means of communication, architecture as an interface. The end-credits reveal the level of interdisciplinary creativity across art and science that has been effectively curated and communicated by the two designers: Warren Weaver (mathematician and colleague of Shannon); Edgar Kaufmann Jnr. (architect and son of Edgar Kaufmann, patron of Falling Water); Norbert Wiener (the father of cybernetics, feedback control, and systems theory which would dominate the development of weapons from the 1950s); Oskar Morgenstern (economist, developer of Game Theory); and John Von Neumann (mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, and polymath); and, finally, Elmer Bernstein (composer of the score for the films The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, amongst others).
The film (and the Eameses) become the medium for the ideas and expressions of these experts because, like the example of Tecton’s investigation of bombing, this is about understanding and restating a question and widening its terms of reference. While the question shifts, and the context changes, what remains is an intimate engagement with the artefact – in this case, Shannon’s equation, elsewhere other diverse phenomena. As the Eameses famously stated, ‘design is a method of action’ (1972).
In 1928, Hannes Meyer stated that ‘Architecture = function x economy’.
‘All things in this world are the product of the formula: [function times economy] … building is a biological process. Building is not an aesthetic process… architecture “as an emotional act of the artist” has no justification. Architecture as “a continuation of the tradition of building” means being carried along by the history of architecture … the new house is … an industrial product and the work of a variety of specialists: economists, statisticians, hygienicists, climatologists, industrial engineers, standardization experts, heating engineers … and the architect? He [sic] was an artist and now becomes a specialist in organisation … building is nothing but organisation: social, technical, economic, psychological organisation’ (Conrads, 1970, pp. 117-120).
Far from limiting its ambitions, if a central aspect of modernism was a re-evaluation of the social and its recalibration through technology, Meyer’s conception seems to broaden architecture and the actions of the architect to facilitate a rapprochement between technology, science, and biology. As such his words seem prescient of the need for twenty-first century design to synthesise such strands as a means of coping with or overcoming the complex conditions and consequences resulting from human-activated climate change.
The German photographer Henrik Spohler’s project In-between (2020) explores global generic logistical spaces. They are captured without the presence of local context: big sheds realised within linear systems of production and flows of goods (Figure 12). Similarly, Edward Burtynsky’s Anthropocene (2018) depicts vast contemporary industrial methods and systems that would be immediately recognisable to Karl Marx. As would the photographs of Sebastião Salgado (2005) demonstrating the globalised division of labour, and the inhumanity and exploitation of mineral mining in South America, for example. Burtynsky’s photographic exploration of China (2015) included a famous image of a large structure packed with workers dressed in clinical workwear, processing chicken meat (Figure 13). If there are so many workers, you can imagine the number of chickens involved. When you consider that chickens towards the end of their lives (as Giedion knew well) are fed two thousand calories a day – more than we as humans require – it becomes immediately recognisable that Burtynsky’s work represents a snapshot of a linear, energy intensive, and destructive system.
The majority of Europe’s salad and other crops are grown in the Hook of Holland on land many metres under sea level and heated primarily by natural gas. Spohler’s and Burtynsky’s photographs of the globalised mass-production of food in greenhouses show how a repeatable generic system covers vast areas. It is the space of the near future – depicted here in fragments but already universalised in the accelerated present of fictional space in films such as Blade Runner 2049 (2017, directed by Denis Villeneuve), whose opening conveys an endless landscape of greenhouses, based on Burtynsky’s photographs.
In 2013, in his book Weak and Diffuse Modernity, Andrea Branzi of Archizoom called for:
‘reversible, evolving, provisionary forms, architecture that is less composite and more enzymatic, [that] surpasses the limits of building as a structural and typological concentration ... becoming an open system of environmental componential work’ (p. 10).
For Branzi and other practitioners such as Stan Allen, James Corner, and Kengo Kuma, architecture in the twenty-first century must slip beyond its institutional, disciplinary, and professional boundaries to creatively engage with the larger questions hinted at by Meyer – urbanism, the global provision of food, and the equitable disposition of energy, resources, and services.
At the end of the twentieth century, the architectural critic and technology writer Martin Pawley painted a bleak picture in his book Terminal Architecture (1998). He highlighted the amount of research and development time taken in producing a piece of industrial design – literally thousands of hours of refinement which is then invested in many thousands of units of the mass-produced thing. Pawley compared this to the production of architecture, in which research and development often or usually generates designs which are used just once, for one single building. A fetishising concern for the beautiful artefact over the system, and the bespoke over the iterative was, he suggested, leaving architecture ill-equipped to deal with the accelerations in technology, communication and, increasingly, crises which articulate the economy and indeed everyday life.
To reiterate, architecture is adept at projecting the future if it can find the right terms and means in which to do so. These have to be broad and far-reaching, and embedded deeply within local and global conditions, pulling together and synthesising apparently disparate forms of knowledge, methods, and techniques to first understand and then hack into and replace existing systems to provide alternatives for food production, energy consumption, and environmental injustice. This is an extension of what might be described as the interrupted modernist project that proposed an architecture capable of transforming for the good the human and post-human condition during Anthropogenic times – and not necessarily by building but by deploying architecture and design methods as means to understand, analyse, project, and communicate credible alternatives. The scale of ideas, however, must be big.
Learning from modernism
Modernism has had inherent and identifiable limitations, lacunae, and blind spots. Part of this has been a consequence of how its history has been written about and described. Modernism is Almost All Right seeks to occupy overlooked territories, and to counter and complexify Western-centric, gender, class, and race-specific narratives. It begins with a rereading of the representational and political culture wars surrounding the Brutalist welfare housing project in the United Kingdom and beyond, and continues with an examination of the work and contexts surrounding the black female architect Ethel Madison Bailey Carter Furman in the mid-century southern United States. Other essays within the project's rolling monthly programme include the re-exploration of the ‘invisible landscapes’ of Brenda Colvin and Sylvia Crowe; a repositioning of the continuing relevance and influence of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer; two examinations of aspects of modernism within India; and new thinking on the overlooked factories of Le Corbusier. We look forward to opening this discussion to an online audience via Type.ie and anticipate an ongoing, robust re-examination of these issues with a wide audience.
Note: The next issue of Modernism is Almost All Right will feature an essay by Sarah Churchill: '"Escaping Plato's Cave": How Photography Killed (and May Yet Recover) Working-Class Modernism'
Throughout the twentieth century, modernism reconceptualised and reestablished the practice of architecture to address the key societal and environmental issues of its period. One of its central precepts was the conception of architecture as an instrument capable not only of expressing the human condition but also of actively transforming it. The male-dominated, western-centric, and energy intensive universalism of modernism has latterly been exposed, catalogued, and rightly critiqued. While acknowledging the importance of this critique, this series of articles explores the continuing relevancies of modernist architecture.
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