1SOCIAL TO PROPRIETARIAN

The studio will first focus on the period covered by the historiography opposite - “the social age” of architecture. This was an age before architecture was fully annexed to capital, where you might well find the best, most-talented architects working for local councils on public housing projects. In the words of Mark Swenarton (Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing), through their inventiveness and creativity, [these] architects have made a fundamental difference to the form of housing and thereby to the lives of the mass of the population.”

Those early architects of mass housing - at the beginning of the twentieth-century - grasped the Fordist order of western capitalism, turning it on its head politically, into a mission for egalitarian reform. Industrial production, they thought, could be used to create a fairer society, its structures playing out in a differently organised city, liberating the working class from labour and providing good, affordable housing. As Deborah Gans puts it in her essay “Big Work: Le Corbusier and capitalism,” the objective of most avantgarde movements of this period was “the reduction of work in hand towards the elimination of a permanent working class.”

In 1930s Britain, there was a plan for social regeneration through a programme of modernist architecture, most of which would be realised after the World War II. The Housing Act of 1930 required councils to prepare slum clearance plans for the first time, resulting in pioneering projects such as Berthold Lubetkin’s Spa Green Estate in Clenkenwell, London, conceived in the late 1930s and built between 1946 and 1949. Modernist housing was formally, spatially and symbolically able to instantiate new ideas for collective spaces, shared facilities and suitable densities. But despite the newly elected Labour government in 1945 introducing acts to broaden this form of “council housing” for “general needs” rather than for the working class only, the programme as a mechanism to transform a broader attitude toward “the welfare state” was short lived, successive governments adopting a much more conciliatory approach to “housing provision.” The programme peaked around 1968, before being dismantled altogether by Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s. While such socially reformist ideas in the UK at their peak led to around thirty percent of all housing and around fifty percent of rental housing being “council housing,” the use of modernist architecture for urban social regeneration existed as a fifty year reformist experiment, with arguably only a couple of decades focussed on the creation of a true “welfare state,” where housing provision, and welfare generally, were part of an understanding of collective responsibility rather than a safety net for poverty.

Postmodern anxieties – not least the Vietnam War, the Cold War, civil unrest and arguably most importantly, peak-oil predictions - led to uncertainties that struggled to maintain any foundational stabilities upon which the “machine-age” optimism of modernism was predicated. In 1966, architect Robert Venturi launched an attack on modernist housing. “. . . I am for messy vitality over obvious unity . . .” he said in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. What became a central trope of postmodernism - “the everyday is vital, the totalising force of unity in design is an imposition from above” - served as an admonishment of the early twentieth century avant-garde and their ideas of continuity and collectivity. Vitality, once again, resided in the individual. Modernist mass-housing quickly came to be considered as a form of hubris in an age where the promotion of the individual over the collective, and ideals of individual economic emancipation through entrepreneurship were having a corrosive effect, not only on statism, but on the social fabric of the western world. Without the mechanism of the state, architecture uncoupled itself from politics, abandoning its now impossible social mission. In line with the prevailing mood of the nascent neoliberal economy, a generation of postmodern architects turned against that social mission that they themselves were part of, with what the prophetic critic and historian Manfredo Tafuri described as “neurotic attitudes of self-destruction.”

In this new pluralistic landscape with its “multiplicity of issues vying for attention” (as Kate Nesbitt refers to it in her book Theorizsng a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory, 1965-1995), architecture fragmented into multiple factions, competing over just what its new position within capitalism could and should be. Commenting on architecture’s de-politicisation Tafuri notes that architecture is no longer capable of “ . . . analyzing the real causes of the crisis of design,” meaning instead “contemporary criticism concentrates all its attention on the internal problems of design itself.” It had lost its “ideological prefiguration”– and had retreated into its own internal questions, allowing it to be co-opted into the political agenda of late twentieth-century neoliberalism, while indulging in its own “ideological contortions.”

2ideology And Utopia

The studio will look to a discipline reconnected with the economic, social and political fields that surround it, eschewing the idea of architecture as a self-organising (autonomous) discipline. We will reclaim its ideological obligations to communities, and ultimately to the possibility of utopia as a stimulus for societal transformations. As Lefebvre reminds us, space is “socially produced,” and thus “…new social relationships call for a new space, and vice-versa.”1 He discuses the necessity for a “unitary theory of space,” with an equal weight to the globalised forces of capital which continually reproduces uneven spatial development across the planet.

The ability of modernism to transcend external competing ideologies - to use space in various social constructions – is dealt with by Florian Urban in his book Tower and Slab, where radically different histories of mass housing projects are explored in different global locations. Urban raises the question, “[h]ow was a building type that on the surface appears so similar able to generate so much difference?” Urban notes how the design of modernist serial housing blocks “tended to adapt to societal conditions rather than shaping them, but at the same time showed a certain degree of resistance.” He makes the point that “[m]odern architecture and planning was formulated as an explicit counterproposal to the existing city.” Such a counterproposal might well explain the central value-system of the modernist housing project. It is flexible, adaptable, but universal. It presents not the manifestation of a set of determinate social conditions, but a universal frame into which different social conditions adapt to fit, but equally, they must be reflexive to it. Its efficiency may have originated in capitalism, but capitalism does not own it. We will ask if such a universal condition might be adapted to operate in a contemporary landscape, offering a neutral field within which a resistance to the uneven housing landscape might reside.

3beyond The Figure Ground

Much of the dock landscape around the ste is “constructed” Much of it is infrastructural (DLR, roads, railways, air travel). The studio will examine this idea of a “constructed ground” as an opportunity. Today’s city has seamlessely slipped into past imaginations, daily metropolitan life continually utilising both subterranean spaces and artificial grounds, which now connect together in multiple infrastructures and programmes. London’s Crossrail project, for example, massively expands the city’s ageing tube system into a spatialised underground world. Even new buildings begin to respond to extreme land costs and height restrictions by burying as much accommodation as possible into the ground. In Hong Kong, one can navigate much of the city through a series of seemingly endless subterranean spaces which include malls, cinemas, transport interchanges, hospitality and leisure facilities, even ice rinks. Elevated grounds have also for a century or so formed part of speculations on future cities. Notable early examples are the Vesnins’ Narkomtiazhprom and El Lissitzky’s horizontal skycrapers of the 1920s and Yona Friedman’s Spatial City (1964). Today, as the mapping of Hong Kong below illustrates, reliance on urban artificial grounds in the contemporary compact city is commonplace, pedways, bridges and entangled towers now forming a crutial part of the navigational systems of our cities.

Above: Cover from Popular Science, August 1925.

Below: The Vesnins’ Narkomtiazhprom. circa 1920s.

ARRIVED AT AN UNDENIABLE IMPASSE, ARCHITECTURAL

IDEOLOGY RENOUNCES ITS PROPELLING ROLE IN REGARD TO THE CITY AND STRUCTURES OF PRODUCTION AND HIDES BEHIND A REDISCOVERED

DISCIPLINARY AUTONOMY, OR BEHIND NEUROTIC ATTITUDES OF SELF-DESTRUCTION.

Manfredo Tafuri

Infrastructures

You will analyse the existing infrastructures, including the road network, the Docklands Light Railway, London City Airport and the Thames Clippers.

Morphological Features

You will analyse the importance of key existing morphological features such as The City of London, Canary Wharf, Docklands, Thamesmead, Isle of Dogs, Greenwich, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and the new Canning Town developments.

History

You will discover and analyse the historic morphological and social histories of the site.

Daily Life and Temporal Structures

You will observe the populations that use the site, and analyse the patterns and cycles of the lifes that plays out on it.