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July 22, 2020 - 7:00am
The thing about modernist architecture is that it isn’t very modern anymore. It is now well into its second century and quite frankly showing its age.
In a brief but noteworthy piece for Fast Company, Nate Berg reports on the plight of famous modernist buildings that have seen better days. Examples include Bulgaria’s — a colossal concrete flying saucer which was only built in 1981 but is now a decaying wreck “in danger of collapse”.
It was dedicated to the glory of the Bulgarian Communist Party, which may be why it’s been allowed to rot in the decades since democracy was restored. Ironically, it is American philanthropy that’s riding to the rescue of this socialist edifice — as part of the Getty Foundation’s Keeping It Modern programme.
However, as Berg explains, on this and other conservation projects they’ve got their work cut out:
However, the biggest problem with saving modernist buildings isn’t technical, but philosophical.
The essential qualities of a building were summed up by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius in his famous triad: “firmitatis, utilitatis, venustatis.” Which is to say that a building should be structurally sound, useful and beautiful.
Two thousand years later, the modernist architects decided to do away with the beauty requirement. Instead, “form follows function” became their guiding principle.
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SubscribeCroydon ought to be preserved as a kind of reservation for architectural critics and modern artists to live in after the reactionary revolution.
If they still refuse to recant then a spell in Cumbernauld might focus their minds?
A spell in any given British town, with their hideous and dehumanizing buildings, would be enough…
I think of one of my favourite cartoons of all time: a couple of Romans walking past the Forum, and one says to the other, “I bet the architect of this lot lives in a quiet villa in the country”.
I recall speaking to one of the architects of Milton Keynes many years ago, and asking where they intended to live in the new town.
They gave me horrified glance, and explained they would be living in the charming medieval,
village of Ravenstone, seven miles away.
I seem to recall that good old Erno Goldfinger went to live in a penthouse in the Trellick tower but generally Architects live as far as possible from their designs.
And it was one of Goldfinger’s assistants, James Dunnett, who found the Trellick Tower so forbidding that he described it as “Stalin’s architecture as it should have been.” Says something about what Goldfinger was trying to do with his architecture.
In some cases, modernist architecture didn’t even fulfil its function at the time. Exhibit A: Berthold Lubetkin’s Penguin Pool at Regent’s Park Zoo. Not only did the curvature capture the sunlight, making the water too warm, the penguins got infected feet from walking on concrete.
The only thing I can think of to say in support of “modern architecture” is that the insides are often a lot better than the outsides.
Some years ago I was at a lecture given by Frank Gehry. He was asked how he felt the first time one of his buildings was demolished. He was entirely unsentimental about it, pointing out that modern buildings require infrastructure and services that weren’t even considered when his first buildings went up and so demolishing buildings that were no longer viable was inevitable.
Demolish some of them; keep others as a warning. Anyway, historical preservation doesn’t need to follow either the ideological or the aesthetic preferences of the creators; we preserve significant (not always beautiful) architecture because our first duty is not to aesthetics or ideology, but to the understanding of the past.
You must be joking? Surely aesthetics must triumph? Beauty before all.
If you start “understanding” the past it soon becomes subjective, then very destructive.
Surely Thomas Cromwell might have spared our greatest Fanes, if he had been permitted to exercise aesthetic discretion for example? As it was, he was tasked with plunder and eradication. Result perhaps thirty of our greatest Fanes were totally demolished, leaving a mere twenty as recompense.
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Agree entirely. Bring on the bulldozers. My pedantic contribution would be to change the genitives for nominatives. “firmitas, utilitas, venustas”.
Ah, a follower of the great Vitruvius. He would be proud.
Marco Federighi (below) has said the rest.
With my pedant hat on: utilitatis etc are genitives. However Vitruvius used them, quoting them alone should have them in the nominative case – utilitas etc.
Having watched the political convolutions over the demolition of the Tricorn, Solent Flour Mills and Southampton Universities Faraday tower (structurally unstable and unusable due to the original architect’s miscalculations, but still standing, just) in my home county, and working in ‘award winning’ yet totally impracticable architect designed abominations, there’s much to commend removing old, and not so old, defunct buildings that cannot be recovered and repurposed.
As a rule we reject the things our parents’ generation built but love what their parents built. Fully accept that it can take a while to absorb ‘the shock of the new’, but modern architecture kicked off more than a century ago! Yet judging from the comments here, not many people like it very much. (The same can be said for so-called ‘serious’ music of the last century or so, nearly all eminently expendable). When will architects and planners get the message? Build better, build beautiful!
On a similar note, demolish damp infested terraced houses. They are no longer fit for purpose. In fact demolish any building that is no longer in use or not fit for human inhabitation.
In my view it depends on the terrace and doubtless the area. Our first house was a Victorian terrace in the West Midlands. After a decade of doing it up we thought we’d move and buy a new house – we’d had enough of fixing up an old property. So we looked at a brand new 4 bed detached house but quickly realised it had less floor space than our terrace. Very clever design was managing to squeeze in more rooms to less space. So we ended up buying a 4 bed Edwardian semi, easily twice the size of the new 4 bed we’d looked at and with more than double the character. It may seem contradictory but 20 years later those ‘new’ 4 bed houses look weirdly dated in a way that our older generation Houses don’t.
Nice try. But just briefly considering two types of theories of architecture, and only mentioning stylistic issues don’t make your question philosophical enough (of course it’s not even architectural one) Sorry, but it’s not that easy. I agree that there’s way too much buildings out there that didn’t pass the test of time. But is also true that some must be preserved, because are part of our culture. Or would you be keen on burning books that now seems ridiculous. Isn’t it?
Modern Architecture is not as simple as that. “Form follows function” was coined by Louis Sullivan, a “pre-modernist” architect, whose buildings do not fall under the category that conservative taste (the old right-and-left rage against modernist architecture) proscribe and condemn to demolition. On the other hand, “hard-line” modernists, like Mies van der Rohe didn’t care too much about “Function”. Mies was looking for the “less is more” and for the spatial quality of architecture that he could get from modern technology and materials. That resulted in a specific, I guess, “modernist venustas: a new modern aesthetic. Anyways, in my opinion, it is obvious that we should protect what help us understand the past (as another commenter said), even if that reveals to be an oxymoron in relation to the original intent.
The entire point of modernist architecture was to break with the past; to knock it down & build over it without a second thought. Just like in politics, the people trying to save this type of construction have absolutely no concern for the buildings, but what they represent; utter contempt for a traditional past.