I urge you to take a look at Rene Burri’s photographs of Le Corbusier’s,
built in Marseilles between 1947 and 1952. Look at the building but also
look at what’s around it, the cars, the people. Try to feel
the scene, deep map it, try to hear it if you can. Does it all seem to work
together or do you, like me, see a collection of different eras hanging
awkwardly together, locked in the photographs through force of
circumstance; varying stages of modernity’s maturation process?
Surely in design terms the building requires that old wartime hand cranked
Citroens should be replaced with the truly futurist lines and aspirations of
the 21st Century eco car? Wouldn’t the post ironic, Mobius Strip tripping
fashions of today work better with the beton brut? Forget the Ash
saplings, what we need here is an interesting array of strange grasses,
some of which should be black. Music wise John Coltrane might fit,
perhaps Blue Train from an open window, but that was recorded in 1957
and a pre plastic sax Ornette Coleman was just getting to grips with the
‘harmolodic method’ in 1952. While Edith Piaf’s Mon Legionnaire is of the
time (and place) it doesn’t work with the building. For this scene I think it’s
Aphex Twin.
Design, fashion, landscape and architecture don’t go together in early
pictures of Cite Radieuse and it is, of course, the building that throws the
whole thing out of whack. Created to meet the needs of a post war
Marseille, Cite Radieuse was part of Le Corbusier’s wider principle of
Unite d’Habitation. This was a radical re-think of city design and
architecture, taking the basic ‘machines for living in’ philosophical view on
architecture and modernity and making the extrapolation literally concrete.
Subsequent buildlngs have often failed to match Cite in qualitative terms
and this unique structure remains a benchmark for Brutalist ideas and is,
thankfully, very much alive and kicking; by now the photographs have
caught up.
What I wonder is why do different art forms appear to progress at different
rates? And I suppose that by rates I mean that some appear more
‘modern’ than others. Architecture has always seemed to stride
confidently into the ‘next thing’, it easily defines a new stage (at least until
the ghastly post modern 90′s) and moves, like the blocks it uses in its
realisation, cleanly from one level to the next. I would accept that
architecture has been, throughout history, touched by influences from the
past, but these seem strident and bold, “my latest work is influenced by
the Aztecs,” or “I cantilevered that in order to recall the Parthenon.”
However, brutalism, while clearly having very vague classical influences,
seems quite perfectly new.
Music flutters around, it has many more great practitioners of course and
many more genres within which to accommodate them, but it develops
and progresses in fits and starts. The truly new happens rarely, a little
glimmer: Stockhausen, Aphex Twin, Efterklang, Esbjorn Svensson, all
quickly swamped by a baseload of mediocrity. Fashion shocks from
Gaultier are moderated by Matelan, motor car design is weighed down by
the petrol it sucks on.
Perhaps the reason that some forms of art move in this way depends on
the extent the air they occupy is rarified. Maybe, at its best, architecture is
a high art form protected from the diluting forces of criticism. When a
building is commissioned and planning permission granted the debate
ends. It is at this point that all control is handed to one or two people;
great buildings are built outside democracy. Once that building exists we
live with it, we fit around it evolving at a different rate. Eventually buildings
are surrounded by the things and make the sounds that were originally
envisioned; the building waits for us to grow up.
At the staggering Royal National Theatre on the Southbank (which is my
favourite building, designed by Denys Lasdun and opened in 1976, hated
by many, including Prince Charles) they’re putting on Jean Racine’s
Phedre (1677). Meanwhile outside among the maze of twists and turns,
angular obstacles and cantilevered chins, tabbing and leaping free
runners finish the scene perfectly.
Playgrounds in Prison 