A bit late

Not Afraid of Color

For once, Alice Rawsthorn and I think alike.

From her T Magazine piece on the Le Corbusier palette.

Whatever you imagined, I’ll bet it was in black and white. It’s a safe bet, because our perceptions of early Modernism — at the Bauhaus design school in 1920s Germany, or the purist villas that Le Corbusier was building in France — are shaped by the photographs taken at the time, and they were all in black and white.

In fact, Modernist interiors were much more vivid than the photographs suggest. When you go to those places, you’ll discover that although many of them do indeed sport gleaming glass, tubular steel and so on, there are often glorious splashes of color to complement the white walls. And one of the most gifted colorists of the era was none other than Le Corbusier himself; the vibrant shades he chose then are among the best you’ll find today.

That’s Maison La Roche-Jeanneret, now home of the Le Corbusier foundation, built in 1925.

Cranky fact-check: Can you have a nickname for a (self-bestowed) nickname? It is not as if Le Corbusier was known as such at birth. Corb is really just archi-shorthand. I always write LeC in my notes.

From “Why This Book?” in Design Research.

I wrote my dissertation on American corporate architecture and design of the 1950s and 1960s, and one of my discoveries was the amount of color and texture in the work of designers like Florence Knoll and Eero Saarinen. The black-and-white photos we typically see of their work leave that out, as do many of the history books. Caring about interiors began to seem like a subversive interest for an architectural historian, yet it turns out it was a subversive interest for architects such as Ben Thompson.

We usually see icons like Eames chairs in a vacuum: in expensive catalogues against a white background, or in minimalist apartments with white walls and oak floors. As museum pieces they seem like a cliché. But the D/R way of combining modernism and folk and crazy fabrics and fruit and flowers was much richer, more interesting, and more personal than that, as I hope this book shows. Ben Thompson was trying to overcome staid, matchy-matchy formalism; today we need to overcome matchy-matchy modernism.

Higher and Higher

In his back-page New York Times Book Review essay on The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard, Jonathan Lethem makes many good points about Ballard’s visionary writing, “desolate landscapes” and his linkages with other arts.

Every bit as striking as Ballard’s feeling for entropy is his engagement with arts from which literature too often seems quarantined: music, sculpture, painting, architecture.

It is the importance of the last, architecture, that has always struck me in Ballard’s stories. Science fiction (a tag that should not be scoffed at) spends time on architecture than any other branch of fiction, since where we live can be a shorthand for culture. We know we are not in Kansas anymore when the sleeper wakes in royal apartments, or with a leprotic virus that turns nature into glass, or in a gridiron city without an exterior. What he sees, what he walks through (there aren’t very many shes) is the beginning of our mutual exploration of this new place, and we experience the strangeness of the built environment before we encounter the new life forms, language, or climate. Some of Ballard’s architectures are truly fantastic, but I think his best cautionary tale is in the thin novel High Rise. There Ballard takes the fear of modernism to its logical extreme, transforming shelter porn into savagery in a very realistic glassy condominium tower.

The plot of the novel as I recall it (I do not own it, having run across the book by chance on the shelf of an Umbrian farmhouse my father rented from some British people) is life in a Corbusian high rise after systems start breaking down. This new building, once bruised, becomes first an annoyance, then life-threatening. There are walls of glass and many balconies, a pool and a supermarket and the rest of the city on the ground far below. But no one in the building ever goes out (it is as if they are on the moon), and so when the water stops, the air-conditioning stops, they turn on each other, establishing allegiances based on the hierarchies of floors (the higher you are, the richer you are) and fighting for scarce resources. Even  lapdogs loose their chains. It is a slim book because it just doesn’t take very long for such a civilization to devolve.

What’s interesting about this to a modern architectural historian is obvious: modernism scared people, and still does. It seems like an advance in civilization, but perhaps it is a retreat from everything but advancement. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. High rises are often occupied by the very rich and the very poor, and no one in between. Ballard takes all those fears to their end, creating a doomsday scenario. What if modern architecture was as alienating and unnatural as its critics told us it was, what would happen to its inhabitants? In exploring the possibility, Ballard performs a kind of criticism-as-exorcism, but I think his conclusions are open to interpretation.

He was no dilettante, either. Ballard was friends with the futurist crowd at the Architectural Association in London in the 1960s and early 1970s, a crowd which included Rem Koolhaas. Koolhaas’s “Manhattanism” in Delirious New York is an exploration of the same extremes of modernity as Ballard’s high rise and his short story “Build-Up,” (aka “The Concentration City”) one of my favorites. All you need to start dreaming of some city of the future is the first line.

Noon talk on Millionth Street: