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The thought of making a pop video about the most uptight of uptight modernist architects makes the mind boggle.
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Archigram’s charismatic front man, Peter Cook, was my tutor at college. Here is a rare video of his former colleague and one of my personal heros, Mike Webb, whose architectural drawings are unmatched.
Archigram at the ICA - 9: on Stage; Mike Webb
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St. Louis’ Pruitt Igoe represented the failure of modernist town planning and architectural determinism from Robert Moses to Corbusier, respectively. Shoveling up the uncomfortable mess of slums into machines for living in, threw out the soul with the sewage. The mess came back, as modernist slum replacements deteriorated, but the soul often didn’t. They also act as a reminder of how America was not really a democracy, within living memory; Pruitt was designed for Black people, Igoe for White people.
When I first came to New york in the 80s I asked the cab driver to take me to see a similar Corbusier style project in the Bronx. The first cab driver refused to even drive there, and when I went, the scenes of burning rubble in the streets and sheer squalor, were unlike anything I had ever seen in a developed country.
Koyaanisqatsi is hit or miss in parts, but the Philip Glass score has become a classic, and nowhere was the film more powerful that the scenes of the Pruitt Igoe projects prior to and during their demolition in 1972, only 20 years after their completion. Even before its use in Koyaanisqatsi, the film of the controlled destruction became the worlds most iconic footage of demolition. Architect and Critic, Charles Jencks said their destruction marked the end of modernism. Years later, this film with its powerful score, takes on an entirely different meaning, marking the end of something else, since the architect, of the Pruitt Igoe, Yamasaki - also designed New York’s World Trade Center.
Pruitt-Igoe section from Koyaanisqatsi trailer
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“A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture”. So said Pevsner, who fled Nazi Germany to the UK and is responsible for one of its greatest architectural edifices. Something that is neither a bicycle shed or a cathedral, but an inimitable 32 volume foundation to the definitive history of the “Buildings of England”.
Today’s piece of self indulgence is poached from my all time favorite Youtube user, “Meades Shrine”.
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Jonathan Meades looks at the branding and regeneration of inner cities through spectacular, but ultimately vacuous, signature buildings such as Bilbao’s “museum with nothing in it” - Gehry’s Guggenheim, and through loft style modernism light - rather like the ridiculous and vapid Phillipe Stark or Armani Casa condos being built in Wall Street, where I live.
The case is put with great wit and erudition, complete with sarcastic marketing doublespeak, throughout. The conclusion is that the end result of this insincere, marketing driven, regeneration is that the once diseased inner cities have merely relocated their problems to the areas beyond the ring roads. The places where they burn cars nightly in the Banlieus, but its not just in France.
This is the trend that was identified years ago by Mike Davis in city of quartz, but the difference is that Davis realized it is a phenomenon independent of the brand of politics, social libertarianism (read Blairism), that Meades sees as the culprit. But its worth seeing Meades do his bit because he says it so well. He understands architecture so much better than a Frank Gehry or Daniel Libeskind, who have become glorified window dressers able to plonk a building anywhere in the word, to rapturous acclaim, without actually having ever been there.
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