The Modernist

«a quarterly magazine about twentieth century design»

Issue No. 3 boom & bust

£3.75

9772046290004

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Foreword by Owen Hatherley From the North Sandcastle Gone to Pot Sixties Film Bust to Bust The Modernists’ Guide to Essex Holidays in Utopia Bravo Lingotto!!

Gone Modern Reviews The Modernist Pop-Up Shop

Colophon «the modernist» Issue No. 3 boom & bust December 2011 ISSN 2046-2905 Editors Jack Hale & Maureen Ward Editorial & Marketing Assistant Emily Gee « the modernist» Pop-Up Shop Project Lucas Nightingale & Anna Lachowska Design Des Lloyd Behari Manchester Municipal Design Corporation Contributing Writers Natalie Bradbury / Christien Garcia / Stephen Hale / Owen Hatherley / Eddy Rhead / Morag Rose / Dan Russell / Benjamin Tallis / Aidan Turner-Bishop / Matthew Whitfield Publisher «manchester modernist society» Office «the modernist» 142 Chapel Street Salford / M3 6AF UK +44 (0)161 839 5460 modernist@manchestermodernistsociety.org Print Evolutionprint Advertising & Enquiries modernist@manchestermodernistsociety.org Subscriptions & Stockists www.the-modernist-mag.co.uk The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the respective authors and should not necessarily be considered to represent the opinion of the publisher or its employees.

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Foreword — Owen Hatherley

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f you regard yourself as a Modernist, then you’re fairly obliged to like or at least take an interest in the contemporary. It doesn’t imply neophilia, to be sure, but it does mean a stand against the old world, against reaction and in favour of some kind of ‘new’ force, whatever that might be. To be modern might mean embracing Salford Quays, the Beetham Tower, Chips and their ilk. Modern as in modernisation, that strangely neutral term used by Tony Blair to purge the Labour Party. Surely it couldn’t mean an interest in the past—could it?

One of the stories Manchester tells itself today is that it is, as the slogan goes, ‘Original Modern.’ To be ‘ Modern’ here leaps between the city of the future created by graft, accident and greed two hundred years ago to the one created by much the same forces over the last 15 years; Manchester Liberalism, neoliberalism, often using the same spaces—now a cotton mill, now a unique urban luxury living solution ( forgetting the 12 hour + shifts that accompanied the first or the housing crisis that accompanied the second). There’s not much room in that Modern for the Modern that happened inbetween.

Conversely, it’s just possible that it is precisely that modernism inbetween that is truly worthy of the name—rather than Old Corruption newly enlivened with barcode façades or slatted wood and aluminium balconies. A modernism that committed itself to socially useful things—education, public housing, the National Health Service, rather than shopping and property speculation—is something to fight for.

The other modernism didn’t just want things to look new; it wanted new, better content. A modernity of quality rather than (monetary) quantity. It might break with the image of Mancunia as metropolis of boom-time chancers, from cotton magnates to scallies, but it reconnects it instead with the city that pioneered socialism, the co-operative movement and communism at the same time. It might look to the untrained eye like nostalgia; but it might be plotting for a different modernity altogether.

Owen Hatherley is the author of Militant Modernism, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain and Uncommon.

From the North Eddy Rhead

ith all the hue and cry coming from the London based media about the BBC moving some of its operations to Salford, many could be forgiven for thinking that Manchester and Salford are cultural wastelands. The bright young things of the BBC are being cast it would seem into a backward and primitive land with no hope of survival. This is, of course, absurd and perhaps those creating the fuss should be reminded that Manchester, for most of the latter half of the 20th century, was home to not only nationally but sometimes internationally renowned TV production.

In 1954 the newly created Independent Television Authority awarded Granada the contract to broadcast independent television to the North of England on Monday to Friday, with the weekend contract awarded to Associated British Corporation (ABC). Granada at the time was primarily a cinema chain, headed up by the inimitable Sidney Bernstein. Bernstein was a wealthy media magnate who was also a committed Socialist, so much so that he originally opposed the introduction of independent television because he was such a strong believer in public service broadcasting, a role and monopoly occupied by the BBC. Bernstein was also a pragmatic businessman and when granted an independent broadcasting licence decided to base his television operations in the north west,

an area he had little or no attachment with, mainly on the assumptions he would not only reach the largest concentration of people but also on rainfall charts that rightly or wrongly supposed people stay in the house a lot more in the north. Also, it theoretically meant his northern television operations would not leech custom away from his mainly southern based cinema chain. His pragmatism also informed his choice of site for his nascent operations, plumping for a scruffy, unfashionable and consequently very cheap plot of land on Quay Street, an area previously dominated by Manchester ’s cattle market and abattoir.

Despite the insalubrious surroundings Bernstein showed no reluctance in employing a well renowned architect to design his offices and studio complex and accepted a design which was distinctly modern, reflecting the modernity of the business in hand. The job was given to Ralph Tubbs, an architect who had previously worked with Erno Goldfinger and had sealed his reputation with his Dome of Discovery at The Festival of Britain. Bernstein, by all accounts a skilled draughtsman himself, took an active role in the design of his building spending a great deal of time preparing his own elevations and studying Tubbs’ plans in detail.

Granada House was one of the first buildings in the city to be constructed using the curtain wall method. The initial stage of construction was the low two-storey building on New Quay Street, with the larger eight-storey Granada House added later. The outer skin of the building is of light grey granite walls with the main façades glass, their highly polished black gabbro sills separated by white marble and grey limestone supports. High building standards have meant little or no renovation has been needed to the façade of the building, leaving the original outside fabric unaltered.

Meanwhile, just up the road on Peter Street, ABC Television had chosen a site for their offices, on the corner of Mount Street. Television House has now been renamed and re clad but hopefully its association with the Reddish born architect Norman Foster will save it from becoming

a mere footnote in post war architectural history. Norman Foster ’s first job after qualifying from Manchester School of Architecture was with the architects of Television House, Beardshaw and Partners, and it was the first building he worked on in his short time at the practise. ABC, unlike Granada, did not have city centre studios but took over the former Capitol cinema on Parrs Wood Road in Didsbury to house their studio facilities. ABC ’s output was decidedly populist, with shows such as Opportunity Knocks and Armchair Theatre being filmed at the Capitol Studios. ABC struggled to make any headway with just a weekend license and in 1968 they merged with Rediffusion to form Thames Television, closing down their Manchester operations.

For a while though Manchester could easily rival London for the quality and quantity of television being produced. The BBC famously started broadcasting Top of the Pops from their Dickenson Road studios and after their move to New Broadcasting House on Oxford Road the BBC produced a wide variety of material from Manchester from A Question of Sport to Songs of Praise. Its independent cousin Granada was also responsible for a wide variety of high quality productions. University Challenge and World in Action, Cracker and Prime Suspect, Jewel in the Crown and Brideshead Revisited were all produced by Granada and it almost goes with saying that the world ’s longest running TV soap opera, Coronation Street, is made

by Granada.

Sadly the strong northern identity fostered by Bernstein, who insisted talent was either drawn from the north or those who were prepared to move to Manchester, has been undermined with the amalgamation of ITV regions into ITV plc. ITV of late has missed the OFCOM set target for 50% of its output to be produced outside London and whilst You’ve Been Framed is an excellent Granadaproduced show, it ’s unlikely something of the quality of Brideshead Revisited will be made by Granada today.

Granada will soon be moving out of their Ralph Tubbs designed home in Manchester to a smaller and architecturally inane new building on the banks of the Ship Canal in Trafford. The fate of the Quay Street buildings is ‘ to be continued…’

The BBC, however, is now seeking to reverse the creative brain drain to London by moving a small but significant proportion of their productions to Media City in Salford. The media landscape is changing out of all recognition and ITV no longer seems to have the will to produce high quality television anymore. So, it must be left up to the BBC to nurture and sustain the obvious talent we have in the north of England and let us hope we are entering a new era of good quality film and television productions, “ From The North. ”

rom the river it holds its position confidently, a solidity different from the triplicate graciousness framing the Pier Head; broader, not on the waterfront itself but set back and massed from the higher ground of Old Hall Street, blocks spread and piled towards the approximation of a pyramid. Colloquially, and by the authority vested in the Mersey Ferries commentary, this is the Sandcastle, the ribbed aggregate panels of its cladding being sufficiently golden in colour, its silhouette simultaneously martial-like and playful, that the name sticks well to its target. It is also the Royal Insurance Building, the Capital Building, New Hall Place; slippery nomenclature for such a definite article. Alongside the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, this is probably the most prominent and accomplished brutalist building in central Liverpool from a period that didn ’t otherwise make much of an impact architecturally in a city experiencing rapid economic decline, and which had lacked any notable design confidence since the 1930s.

Built between 1974 and 1976, architects the Tripe and Wakeham Partnership created for Royal Insurance an intelligent interpretation of a complicated brief, filling a large 2.8 hectare site with two stories of car parking (as a podium), placing large departments and circulation spaces on top, with additional functions placed higher up as separately readable volumes. The impression created is one of an exceptionally well arranged kit of individual rectilinear blocks. The rough texture of the ribbed panelling provides the piecework of thrillingly blank walls, but the bouncing interplay of solid and void provides the real interest. As the volume of the structure generally recedes up the storeys, buildings within buildings reveal themselves as a series of terraces breaks up the considerable bulk into the striations of a ziggurat.

Really, though, and despite the characteristic massing and texture, this was a building designed from the inside out in a strongly functional tradition. Significantly, these

functions catered as much to the social and human needs of its users as to the perfunctory requirements of office accommodation; this was a corporate landmark representing the standing of a company by means of high quality design, amenities and relationships. At the entrance floor over the parking podium was a 200 seat cinema and training suite as well as a computer centre and a printing works for in-house publications. On the level above this was the heart of the scheme, a social and recreation centre for employees that included a gym, sports hall and function rooms. Office floors and management suites rose up on decreasing plan sizes between levels two and ten to a tapered summit.

Close attention to interior detail was invested across the entire project. The interior designer, Lyle Ellard, was committed to a generous application of timber features through the fit-outs of shared social facilities and office spaces alike, with five different species of wood used as either solid plank or veneers throughout the building. In the most repetitive aspects of the floor plan, the departmental office spaces, a consistent design approach was taken with mustard yellow carpet, screens, plants, sound absorbent ceilings, work stations and equipment all forming part of a unified aesthetic, each unit clad in a veneer of American cherry wood to create a sense of enclosure and demarcation across floors. Visual consistency was aided by cladding in solid teak the service towers rising up between floors and containing the lift foyers, providing a point of navigation.

Wych elm, with its warm, decorative grain, was used throughout the social and recreation suite; English Yew, meanwhile, was used on an abstract mural on the tenth floor which sought to communicate the idea of natural growth by the complex layering of multi-dimensional planks.

As Ellard reported to Interior Design magazine, his approach was rooted in a philosophy that, first, looked to the users of the building as the most significant factor to be considered and, secondly, was concerned with the application of a brutalist aesthetic inside as much as externally. None of the finishes were intended to be maintained with polish but were intended to age within the lifetime of the building to reflect their intrinsic qualities. …timber is warm, pleasant and harmonious as well as being visually good. I wanted to surround the people who would work in the building with some humanity—not merely paint or plaster or other artificial finishes…We were determined that we wanted the whole building to be as truthful as possible by using as many natural materials as we could…

Within the last decade, the Sandcastle has been sold by Royal Insurance and passed through numerous ownerships and refurbishments. Out of paternalistic corporate hands, the sheer quality of the building has contributed somewhat to its undoing—as the cachet of its architecture has increased, so has its money-making po-

Sandcastle Matthew Whitfield

tential. A new glass atrium on Old Street has undermined the original conception of circulation at podium level, whilst every available square metre of space on every floor has been commandeered for lettable office accommodation; shared social and recreational areas converted out of existence in the search for maximum profitability. As an emblem of a socially-aware corporate capitalism, the Sandcastle must be considered defunct; even with RSA (the successor company to Royal Insurance) as a major tenant, nothing remains of their largesse. Internally, the brutalism of Ellard’s design concept has been undermined by a slick refit that has kept much of the timber detailing but seen it underlit with blue neon and accompanied by the shiny surfaces and palette of fixtures found in any office development of neoliberalism’s hubristic noughties. Externally, though, we are left with a monument to an age of corporate patronage that sought not to create an egregious building-as-logo nor maximise returns on floorplates, but something more substantial, a statement of values and meaning. Architecturally, it has always been successful and perhaps even loved a little, but the stability and values of the economic world in which it was conceived has passed; its aesthetic merits must now be disassociated with the comparatively benevolent incarnation of capitalism that provided its original rationale.

Pot

Gone to Pot —

Gone to Pot

The rise and fall of Hornsea Pottery — — The rise and fall Aidan Turner-Bishop of Hornsea Pottery —

Aidan Turner-Bishop

ry

shop

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n the late 1970s I often shopped in Lancaster.

I might treat myself to a new vinyl LP or a bottle of Yugoslavian Lutomer Riesling. I usually ended up in Midas—a Habitat-style shop in Market Street— stuffed with coconut matting, Scandinavian glassware and the latest groovy products of Lancaster’s new Hornsea Pottery factory. Should I buy a Contrast cup and saucer, a Saffron storage jar or another commemorative mug?

At that time Hornsea’s Contrast tableware and other ranges were the epitome of contemporary popular ceramics. Martin Hunt’s and John Clappison’s designs won Design Council Awards. Sales were booming: over 50% were exported mainly to Canada, USA, Australia, New Zealand and Scandinavia. In 1977–78 Contrast was the best-selling tableware range, especially in the USA. It featured in British Government design exhibitions overseas. Yet by the early 1980s the Lancaster works had closed and Touche Ross were appointed receivers in January 1984. An attempt to revive the firm failed: in 2001 the site in Hornsea was sold for a housing estate. From boom to bust in a few years: what happened to Britain’s leading successful modern oven-to-tableware manufacturer?

Hornsea Pottery beginnings were humble. The firm was set up by Desmond and Colin Rawson in 1949 in the small Yorkshire seaside town. Desmond Rawson,

the elder brother, had trained as a textile designer before the war. His right hand was shattered by a bullet—he had only a thumb and two fingers on his right hand—and he learnt to handle clay and model in plaster during his remedial exercises. The Rawson brothers’ early products were twee novelty giftware: bunny rabbits by tree stumps, doggies in boots and ickle baa-lambs. You may find cheap pieces of the Fauna range in charity shops, if they survive, if you insist. In the mid-50s the range expanded into slipware and designs became more Contemporary: polka dots, elongated slip-trails and snow crystal motifs. The shift came in July 1955 when John Clappison, on summer vacation from the Royal College of Art, designed the Elegance tableware range: Contemporary style with glazed yellow interiors and striped exteriors made by applying and removing narrow masking tape strips into the biscuit before firing the external glaze.

Elegance sold well; it was the first of Clappison’s innovative and stylish designs.

John Clappison trained at Hull College of Art and the RCA. His parents were friends of the Rawsons and invested in their company. While at the RCA Clappison experimented with screen printing ceramics—then very innovative—partly because Hornsea lacked the skilled workers of the Potteries. In March 1959 the Rawsons and Clappison visited Denmark touring the Royal Copenhagen and other potteries. He also visited Sweden in 1962 and was impressed by Stig Lindberg’s designs at Gustavsberg’s. By the early 60s Desmond Rawson was Hornsea’s Design Director; Clappison, and his talented colleague Alan Luckham, were full of Scandinavian designs; and, most importantly, Hornsea switched from fancies to tableware.

Social changes were influential. Increased car ownership meant that car customers could collect whole dinner services from the factory. Coach and rail visitors bought only small portable items like cruets and cream jugs. Open plan kitchens encouraged the display of attractively designed storage jars and dishes. Ash trays were widely used. Mugs, without saucers, ceased to be ‘common’ and became trendy, filled with ITV-advertised instant coffee.

Hornsea’s first full range of tableware, designed by Clappison, was the popular Heirloom design of 1966.

It used Colin Rawson’s lucky discovery that a relief effect in a black pattern was possible by partially glazing some screen printed pots. Heirloom was a sensation when launched at the fashionable Ceylon Tea Centre, Haymarket, London. Heirloom was followed by Saffron (1968) and Bronte (1972). Saffron featured a caramel coloured pattern with orange and

brown accents. It sold widely in Harrods, Selfridges, John Lewis and Debenhams. The range included pasta and utensiljars: Elizabeth David’s influence reaching suburbia. Bronte, also by Clappison, had a darker embossed pattern. Copper oxide was used in the print mix creating a subtle green design of dots and scrolls, finished on a brown glaze.

In 1974 Sara Vardy designed Fleur: a green-brown floral pattern resist-printed on a cream ground. Fleur sold very well in America where it was distributed by Kosta Boda USA. The best-selling Contrast range of 1974 was designed by Martin Hunt. It won a Design Council Award and every piece was placed in the Design Index. A new factory opened in Lancaster to manufacture Contrast but this was to be problematic.

Contrast needed skilled workers to glaze and polish the unique Vitramic finish. The unskilled Lancaster workers made many costly rejects. The National Westminster Bank lent in 1976 to cover the losses.

Palatine (1974–6) by Mike Walker used the Contrast shapes and Vitramic glaze but its pattern was less severely masculine. Martin Hunt’s Concept range (1977–81) was the ultimate Hornsea modern tableware design. It had an elegant contoured and ridge shape with spot glaze applied to the vitreous body. The finish—a rich cream colour—was unique. Many pieces had swan-shaped finial knobs. Concept won design awards. With Contrast and Concept Hornsea’s stylish tableware easily competed with contemporary Scandinavian ceramics.

So what went wrong? Desmond Rawson, Hornsea’s dynamic but creative President, retired in 1981, aged 60. He had bouts of anxiety and depression and, frustrated with financial worries, his criticisms were resented by some directors who asked him to retire.

Upset, his rejection played on his restless mind.

On December 10, 1984, he was found dead from an overdose of pills mixed with whisky.

Hornsea struggled on but in 1984 the firm had debts of over £1 million and NatWest pulled the plug. There’s still a lot of Hornsea in use. You can find it on eBay or in car boot sales. Maybe there’s a fine piece of Contrast or Concept in your nan’s china cabinet?

Photograph of John Clappison Many thanks to Hornsea Museum for help and access to their photographic archive. www.hornseamuseum.com

Photograph courtesy of Manchester Local Image Collection

Sixties Film: showing a Modern Britain Natalie Bradbury

any British films of the sixties were dark, dour and troubling, filmed in grainy black and white in bleak northern towns. Yet in some of the lesserknown films of the period, colour and optimism emerge from the common scenes of densely populated urban centres. As crowded, outdated housing stock was knocked down and the old ways of living were replaced by a new consumer society, these films reflected the possibility of a brighter, more modern world.

Among the most swinging of a number of films set in Manchester in the sixties is Albert Finney’s accomplished directorial debut Charlie Bubbles (1967), in which he also stars. Part road movie, part domestic drama and part whimsical fancy, it follows Finney’s eponymous Charlie Bubbles, who has left his northern roots to forge a name for himself as a successful author in London, as he makes the journey back to his Manchester origins, with a young American intern played by Liza Minnelli. Britain was undergoing big environmental changes at the time: whole areas of cities were being rebuilt to clear lingering Victorian and Edwardian slums and fill the gaps left by wartime bomb sites. In vivid colour, Finney and Minnelli tour the almost unrecognisable city where he grew up—driving past a marching band parading through wastelands of demolished terraced streets—and see the contrast with the new, high-rise, Modernist Manchester. The camera pans past Piccadilly Gardens, replete with five shiny red telephone boxes, en route to the then-new Hotel Piccadilly, where the characters stay in plush, wood lined rooms with views across the whole of the city. Modern Manchester looks vibrant and glamorous.

The White Bus, which also moves from London to Manchester and Salford and was released in the same year, was likewise based on the writing of Salford author Shelagh Delaney. In Lindsay Anderson’s surreal short film version of The White Bus, the main character embarks on a magical bus tour around the cities. Passengers are shown the old—vast, vacant plots of rubble—being replaced by the new—Kersal’s high rise blocks of flats on stilts, with a celebratory voice over by the guide about how tower block living will solve social ills. The film flits in and out of colour like a dream.

Similarly playful is the charmingly naïve musical Mrs Brown, You ’ve got a Lovely Daughter (1968), which follows pop group Herman’s Hermits as they aim to make a name for themselves by using the proceeds from racing their greyhound Mrs Brown to escape their claustrophobic lives.

The film begins with a zooming aerial view of Salford and the Manchester Ship Canal—before coming in to land in the dense, redbrick streets where three generations of Herman’s family live on top of each other in the same small terraced house. Herman spends his days working for an advertising company trying to sell consumers things they don’t yet know they want (including a comical pink hat), and the bright colours and patterns of the sixties fashions

sported by the Hermits and friends are absurdly colourful next to the dingy brownness of the house, which looks almost Victorian in its drab clutter. Herman is a jaunty figure on a personalised yellow motorbike—with a side car for Mrs Brown the dog, as he drives past rubble and blank plots of land amongst the remaining terraced streets.

In the sixties, the shortage of housing and poor condition of many existing homes meant mass building programmes were taking place. In the film, some of the Hermits spend their days labouring on building sites. Herman’s mother enthuses: “They’re ever so nice. There’s 2,000 going up. 250 little nests in each block with a telly built right into the wall. ” One of the more traditional films of the sixties, A Kind of Loving (1962), also makes a direct link between quality of life and living environment. Draftsman Vic Brown, who at the start of the film is still living at home with his parents in a cramped hillside terrace in a northern everytown, repeatedly expresses envy at his recently married sister ’s light and airy new flat: “ She ’s got a lovely flat, she’s dead lucky. ” The film captures the frustration of relationships confined by young people having to live under the constant supervision of the older generation, yet at the end Vic and his young wife, who had been on the brink of divorcing, decide to make a go of it—dependent on a renewed commitment to moving out of Vic’s wife ’s mother ’s house and finding a place of their own.

The sense that things were changing and the young would inherit a new, better world, starting with a better living environment and adequate housing for all, is explicit in the film London Nobody Knows (1967), one of the most intriguing films of the era. James Mason travels through a London that in many ways still seems Victorian, celebrating its quirks and traditions such as egg-breaking and street entertainment in quasi-documentary style. The film ends by looking to the future. A parade of close-ups of children’s smiles is juxtaposed with shots of a wrecking ball swinging through the other side of London’s past—old slums and tenements, which are described as “ out of date, inefficient, taking up too much space. ” Mason narrates “These kids finally seem to be given a decent break ” as the camera shows the type of spacious new homes with green space that will be built instead.

About the demolition of old London, Mason then says “there ’s no need to be too sad about it as, after all, most of Victorian London was fairly hideous and we can also console ourselves with the knowledge that the same fate attends our least favourite modern monstrosities. ” This sentence proved prescient and the optimism of the period short lived. Many high-rise solutions to the evils of slums soon became run-down themselves. Tower blocks such as Kersal’s Flats, celebrated by the authorities in The White Bus, had problems of their own and now, too, are long gone, turned back into rubble.

Bust to Bust Dan Russell

hen this article about the Liverpool International Garden Festival was conceived, I had a clear notion of how it would unfold: I’d describe the flash-in-the-pan Utopia created in 1984, something I presumed to be the last throw of the dice by a socialist council whose city had been decimated by a ruthless Conservative government. I’d then of course go on to bemoan the lack of a legacy, the wastefulness of letting the Festival site decay and the short sightedness of the model of regeneration that never thought, “ but what next?” In the timespan it covers we have seen one complete cycle—bust to bust. The city ’s regeneration boom, neatly bookended by two tourismcentred initiatives: the Garden Festival and 2008 ’s Capital of Culture. I was hoping to be cynical about this.

Unfortunately, I was wide of the mark. Thankfully, my lines of enquiry blew open my closed opinions.

Firstly, I spoke with my Scouse family. Like many Liverpudlians, they are vehemently anti-Tory. Had my Auntie Edna known she was to die in middle age, she would have gladly taken out Margaret Thatcher first and spent her last joyous days in prison. As such, it was with great surprise that I learned that they had a lot of respect for one of Thatcher ’s ministers. Yes, it was in fact Michael Heseltine who decided something must be done to halt the decline on Merseyside when his own party wanted to simply cut it adrift.

Secondly, I talked to local writer and self-confessed Liverpool anorak ” Kenn Taylor. Both he and my relatives were as unanimous in their praise for the Festival as they were disparaging of the Derek Hatton-led Labour council of the day.

I’m aware that the 1980s aren’ t famed for their modernism, but they are still a part of the Twentieth Century story. In my opinion the futuristic Buckminster Fuller-esque geodesic dome and huge, ARUP designed space-bullet of the Festival Hall just about scrape it into these pages by aesthetic virtue, and the philosophy of top-down Shangri-La creation by visionary outsiders gets it in on ideological merit.

Heseltine wanted to ease the memory of the Toxteth riots of 1981 and turn Boys from the Blackstuff-era Liverpool into a destination for visitors and investment. Alongside saving and developing the Albert Dock, cleaning the Mersey Basin and creating new technology parks at Wavertree and Brunswick, it was determined that a Garden Festival, based on the German Bundesgartenschau—a bi-annual regional development initiative originating in Hanover in 1951—was to be organised.

The site, a sludgy former oil terminal, was dredged and infilled in the largest urban reclamation project ever executed in the country. Two hundred and fifty acres of parkland, sixty ornamental gardens, and numerous pavilions and artworks were created.

My granddad was bought a season ticket and went almost every day such was local love for the Festival. Celebrities of the era, Acker Bilk, Worzel Gummidge, and SuperTed were all in attendance. For nine months Liverpool attracted over three million tourists, people who previously wouldn’ t have dreamt of visiting. There was pride in the city again.

In time the Festival ended and then… nothing.

A pamphlet had proclaimed that the Festival Hall was to become “the centrepiece of a planned housing, business and leisure development, for use as a multi-purpose sports and leisure centre.” Unfortunately the only sport and leisure that took place on site was quad-biking and dogging. Not forgetting the ill-fated Pleasure Beach amusement park that lasted from the late 80s to 1996.

Despite failing to use the land itself, all was not lost. Two vital things had come from the Garden Festival: the symbolic gesture that Liverpool wasn’ t dead; and a model for leisure-led regeneration. Whilst the Festival site languished, other Garden Festival Cities such as Stoke and Glasgow implemented the next phases of their development, and places like Manchester and Birmingham Urban-Splashed their way to success by adopting the development template that in some ways was pioneered in Liverpool.

It wasn’ t until it was gearing up for the Capital of Culture bid that Liverpool belatedly caught up with the style of cultural regeneration it had previously experimented with. A chain reaction had been catalysed that in turn has “

led to the events of 2008, alongside what Taylor calls “the single biggest thing to happen to the city in the last twenty years ” — a shopping centre on a grand scale: Liverpool One. Although it pains me to admit it, cities are built on commerce, and in the absence of new industry the fact is that developing a huge shopping experience on privatised city centre land has helped Liverpool to draw level with its peers. At least it is reasonably architecturally interesting.

Far from merely framing the sequence of bust to bust, Liverpool, and in particular the Garden Festival, has arguably provided a direct model for the culture-led regeneration of the UK’s cities. It’s just that where the Garden Festival itself occurred was not where this happened. This boom of regeneration was the face of the supposedly limitless growth that certainly caused the recent bust, but we might now be in a position to ensure that the “what next ” for the city—post Capital of Culture and Liverpool One—isn’ t the same as what happened to the Festival site.

Thanks to Kenn Taylor for use of the above photograph and for his time, advice and insights whilst researching this article

The Modernists’ Guide to Essex — Morag Rose

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shall start with a declaration that sadly feels like it should be a confession. I love Essex. Essex is perhaps the most maligned and derided county in contemporary culture; it’s become a shorthand for class prejudice and vulgarity; the target of countless cheap jokes. I believe this is desperately unfair and I trust, dear modernist, you are open minded enough to seek the true beauty in the area. I can’t claim there is no ugliness; of course like everywhere Essex is multifaceted and has its troubles but it also holds many thrills. Frustratingly space here allows only a whistle-stop tour of a few of its delights, so here then, in chronological order, are five of my favourite places in modernist Essex.

Labworth Café, Western Esplanade, Canvey Island (1932) — Like the other sites I am highlighting, Canvey’s fashionable heyday is over; it is no longer a bustling seaside resort but still I am enchanted by it. Largely cut off from the mainland, crossing the bridges means encountering an array of diverse environments.

You can find dilapidated funfairs, lush nature reserves, behemoths of the petrochemical industry and a 17th century pub. Of special interest to the modernist are the sumptuous curves of the International style Labworth Café, Ove Arup’s only building. Designed to resemble the bridge of the Queen Mary it has undergone various modifications, including a lamentable change of typography during its 1990s renovation. However, I believe it is still a stunner.

To appreciate Canvey’s melancholic charm at its best I suggest visiting on a blustery day and lingering in the Labworth over a large gin and tonic. The view from the window is not a twee seaside idyll but the blood, guts and toil of the Thames estuary. Captivating.

The Bata Factory, Princess Margaret Road, East Tilbury (1933) — Thomas Bata had a vision to shoe the world—and a mission to marry Garden City paternalistic care for workers (and increased productivity) with a brutalist aesthetic. Zlin in Czechoslovakia was his capital but satellite towns sprung up across the world, including a stunning enclave in East Tilbury. A workers utopia, where the line between sympathy and surveillance were intertwined, it has been called «the most modern town in Britain...Life in Bata-world seems to have been a cross between a holiday camp and a prison camp. The town had its own newspaper, and there were activities and facilities galore, but beneath it all was an almost cult-like corporate philosophy» (Rose, 2006, The Guardian). The shoe Factory is now closed and the Thames Gateway redevelopment threatens the area but Bata remains cherished by many residents.

The Roundhouse, Cliff Way, Frinton-on-Sea (1934) — Frinton confounds the usual Essex—and indeed Modernist—stereotypes. It had no pub until 2000 and battled to keep wooden level crossing gates; it is associated with conservative values and exclusivity.

However, it was here Oliver Hill was employed to design a seaside wonderland. Ambitious plans were made for a resort, including a cliffside hotel to eclipse his Midland in Morecambe. Hill «ensured that the tone of the estate would do nothing to attract day-trippers from London, keeping Frinton for the well kept and well bred, whilst making the estate a showcase for modern British design» (Oxborrow, online). Plots were allocated to the cream of contemporary architects and the Information Bureau (now The Roundhouse) was opened. It showcased cutting edge design and featured a mosaic of the estate layout by Clifford Ellis on the floor. However Hill’s vision was frustrated by practicalities including a building society that would not fund concrete constructions, inexperienced builders, and a climate which put commerce above aesthetics. Work halted in 1936 with only a fraction of the houses realised; sleek curves and classic white modernist dwellings incongruous near rows of Victorian beach huts. A dream of a brave future the rest of the town failed to embrace.

The Lawn, Harlow (1951) — In my opinion the most splendid of The New Towns, Harlow’s design was led by Frederick Gibberd. The Lawn was Britain’s first residential tower block; the nuance and care taken in its design is apparent in the south facing balconies every flat enjoys. Harlow also boasts the first pedestrian precinct, an extensive cycle track network and an array of other notable buildings, although sadly the original town hall and sports centre have been demolished. Perhaps most remarkably it has a lavish collection of public art thanks to the Harlow Art Trusts vision that everyone has the right to enjoy quality art and design every day.

The Water Gardens stunning vista has been somewhat spoiled by adjacent redevelopment but there is still much to admire. William Mitchell’s gorgeous concrete reliefs are an integral part of the pools and the surrounding area includes work by Henry Moore, Elisabeth Frink, Ralph Brown and others. Sculptures can be found nonchalant but proud in civic buildings, schools and shops. The sadness of course it that this should be so unusual and that every town does not seek to integrate creative design into banal spaces.

Albert Sloman Library, Wivenhoe Park Campus, Essex University (1965) — From its inception the new university embraced the modern, aiming to widen participation and be as accessible as possible. They sought to create an environment that would encourage interdisciplinary working; initially a philosopher was appointed in every department. Kenneth Capon, the architect, took inspiration from San Gimignano in Tuscany, building a campus based on public squares and towers which would nurture collective endeavour and creative practice. The functional elegance of the library makes it stand out even in such exceptional surroundings.

It also features—be still my beating heart!—a fully operational paternoster lift. A stunning place to work and study.

Alas, there is no time to champion The Royal Corinthian Yacht Club, The Dell, Silver End, or any of Southend’s fabulous ice-cream parlours. But if you fancy a tour I’ll meet you outside Rossi’s at 6.

Further love letters to Essex will be posted at www.sinesandwanders.wordpress.com

Holidays in Utopia Benjamin Tallis

St. Leninsburg eningrad is not a place that wears its history lightly.

Re-wrapped in the resurgent riddle of St.Petersburg, its monuments and vernaculars compete for attention with the wonders of the older imperium and the interregnums of Petrograd and Perestroika. The mandated public memory of the vast and varied memorials sits uneasily with the fitful forgetting, which shrouds the purges that decimated this ‘hero city.’ Here, one feels more acutely aware that every seeing is also blindness; that each light casts multiple shadows, within which lurk the myriad hauntings of many unquiet ghosts.

Away from the museum-like centre, confused and competing memories continue to swirl through the lived presents of Putin’s Piter. Metro-hopping South on the Red line reveals constructivist quarters linked by high-Stalinist stations, built as everyday palaces of the workers. Dusty urban highways cut through high-rise canyons where the decaying solidity of Stalinist bombast recedes before the anonymous eclecticism that characterises so many geographies of history’s end.

At the Western edge of the city, in the looming shadows of Brezhnev-era concrete expressionism, the social is most easily legible in the spatial. Beyond Vasilevskiy Island’s densely-packed southern grid, broad boulevards sweep through the Island of the Decembrists, hugging the contours of ‘sea-wall’ housing estates facing defiantly out onto the gulf of Finland. Behind the wall, uniform façades flank well-tended public gardens, tidy playgrounds and agora-like courtyards—spaces of meeting and negotiation for the young and old, sportsmen and slackers. This high-

rise, yet high-end living is testament to the reclamation of common space from the trigger-happy hoods of the unmourned Yeltsin era.

Caught between desire for stability and gloomy harbingers of stagnation, many compare Russia’s present to the Brezhnevian past, with public conscience sacrificed on the altar of slight material betterment. However, while many lament missed opportunities for other ways and other means, some see opportunity in this Russia, while many more focus on what can be done, rather than what still can’t be spoken of. These varied fictions—of present pasts and potential futures—are reflected in the uneven lustral geographies that twinkle nightly across the hulking and repetitive forms of what started out as party-sanctioned machines for living. Far from being oppressive factories of conformity, they are brought to varied life by the particularities of the people for whom they are home. This is a far cry from the tales of misery that such estates evoke under the totalising gaze of Western eyes. However, as goes Russia, so goes the neighbourhood, with even this recently reclaimed solidity beset by uncertainty. The soviet era estates are approaching the end of their projected fifty-year life span and if there is a plan to replace them, no one has told the residents.

In city watched over by seven dead Lenins, every act of walking excavates, yet sediments anew, by turn revealing and obscuring the paradoxical traces of this particular urban palimpsest. Providing all-too temporary, personal hermitage from the plutocratic politics of the present, Brezhnev’s buildings are the discontented winter palaces of our uneasy dreams…

Benjamin Tallis is a freelance critic and curator who writes on art and politics for a variety of European publications.

He is a former diplomat who worked on EU security missions in the Balkans and former Soviet Union and is currently researching a PhD on Borders in Central and Easter Europe.

W

hat does an architecturally prestigious hotel in Turin have in common with Paris’s Pompidou Centre and fans of 1960s English film The Italian Job? In 1899, at the very dawn of an Industrial Revolution which arrived late to Italy, a new company—FIAT—opened the doors of its first factory in Turin, initiating an intimate relationship with the town—and with its celebrated company owned football team, Juventus—which endures to this day. This glorified workshop was on Corso Dante and home then to the grand total of 150 day shift employees. By 1904, an iconic logo had been created, an oval containing the company name over a blue background. (This colour and typeface were resuscitated in the 21st century after experimentation in the 1990s with a less successful abstract diagonal line design.)

As the Italian auto industry boomed, larger premises were soon needed. And so began, in 1916, construction of the celebrated Lingotto fabricca, named after the Torinese suburb of its address. From the off, Lingotto had grand designs to be the largest factory in Europe, What’s more, its unique, avant-garde design would channel the Fordist processes of mass production vertically (rather than horizontally), upwards through five storeys, culminating in a magnificent Futurist test-track on the factory roof! Raw materials would enter via the ground floor as in a Venetian canal-side palazzo; from here the production-line would wind its way towards the fifth floor, from which finished vehicles would emerge into the sky against a backdrop of rolling Torinese fog and majestic Alps (Only one other rooftop test-track has ever existed—in the most unlikely setting of Trooz, Belgium, where the now defunct Imperia car manufacturer ran a 1km roof-track from 1928–58.)

The Lingotto factory was completed in 1922, the year of Mussolini’s March on Rome. The fame of its architect Matté Trucco, previously a naval architect and engineer, rests alone on this unique edifice.

Built in reinforced concrete and covering an area of 400,000sq metres, Lingotto was a forerunner of the

Bravo Lingotto!!

— Stephen Hale

aesthetic of later celebrated Italian architect, Pier Luigi Nervi. The incredibly long building had two outrageous helicoidal ramps which led up to the track. Its audacity made a tremendous impression on foreign visitors and Le Corbusier immediately used an illustration of the factory to demonstrate his own principles in Vers une Architecture, published in the same year: ‘One of the most impressive sites in industry,’ the master waxed lyrical, ‘a guideline for town planning.’ Lingotto figured prominently in the first Exhibition of Rational Architecture held in Roma in 1928 and Gruppo 7 later declared it the only fundamentally industrial building in the whole of Italy with any architectural value.

Over the next 50 years, over 80 different FIAT models emerged onto the famous track for testing, including the illustrious Topolino of 1936 and the even more iconic and celebrated Cinquecento; the tiny, affordable car which revolutionised Italian social life during the Dolce Vita years of the 1950s and ’60s boom. It was during these years, too, that tens of thousands of migrants from the Italian South moved North to Turin to become Fiat employees, Juventus supporters and Cinquecento owners, many of them taking up

employment at Lingotto, or in the newer and even larger Mirafiori plant on the outskirts of town (a historical process beautifully captured in the 1960 Luchino Visconti film Rocco and His Brothers.)

Sadly, by 1978 the Lingotto parent plant was considered, by a now globalised FIAT, to have become old-fashioned after the introduction to its other factories of Robogate, a flexible robotic system for assembling bodywork, later celebrated in the Spirto di Punto TV ads of the 1990s. Lingotto’s closure in 1982 led to frenzied polemic about the site’s future, part of a wider international debate surrounding industrial decline and the perceived move across the Western world from modernist production to post-modernist consumption. Genoa born Renzo Piano, flushed with success after the completion of Paris’s Pompidou Centre, and latterly responsible for the regeneration of his hometown’s waterfront area in time for Genoa’s turn as European City of Culture in 2005, won the open competition to revamp the site.

He envisioned a modern public space for the city containing concert halls, a theatre, a convention centre, shopping malls, a hotel and new buildings for Turin Polytechnic. This opened in 1989.

Fancy a look? The Lingotto building is featured extensively in the Alberto Lattuada film Mafioso (1962) and, of course, during the getaway sequence of The Italian Job (1969). Or if you’re feeling flush, next time you weekend in Turin head for Via Nizza on the brand new Torino Metro (station Lingotto M1, opened March 2011) and stay in Piano’s hotel, from which you can access the roof-top track and admire the cantilevered design, the 16,000 piece translucent roof and other utilitarian factory wonders. A gallery contains a series of poignant photos, prints and plans relating to the economic boom decades and the hotel’s guest rooms are unusually large and loft-like, reflecting the building’s heritage. And—wouldn’t you just know it—there’s shed-loads of parking!

Meanwhile, down the road at Mirafiori, FIAT continues to employ 15,000, (down from 27,000 in its heyday), many of them the grandchildren of those first 50s economic migrants. In a strange act of historical circularity, the company recently replaced the bicycle sheds it had gutted in the 1970s (when an earlier generation of workers had abandoned their bicicletti in pursuit of the automotive dream) due to increased demand from its contemporary bike-riding employees.

Gone Modern A very brief history of architectural modernism in Edmonton, capital of Canada’s Big Oil province Christien Garcia

Central Pentecostal Tabernacle Photograph by kind permission of City of Edmondton Archives

n 1957, the London Borough of Edmonton was preparing a gift for its young, commonwealth cousin to the west.

The Borough’s namesake, the City of Edmonton, capital of the Western Canadian province of Alberta, was celebrating the opening of its grand new City Hall. The young city was presented with a mayoral chair hand-carved in oak and brandishing the coats-of-arms and mottos of the two cities.

It is hard to know for sure how the building’s designers would have perceived this prudent gift. They may have been slightly perturbed; how would the oak fit in with the ‘pre-cast concrete panels,’ the ‘exotic American gumwood ’ or the ‘polished red granite ’ imported from Sweden?

This nine-storey curtain-walled structure with pilotis was a distinctly modern building with bold, bright colours, modernist landscape design and almost futuristic amenities, including central vacuum cleaning and adjustable office walls. As then-Mayor William Hawrelak put it: ‘ The design of the City Hall is in keeping with contemporary architectural trends. Succeeding generations will be able to place it in its period of history and, by so doing, will pay their tribute to our citizens of today.’

Edmonton had been booming since the discovery of oil ten years earlier. Between 1947 and 1957, the city ’s population more than doubled. This period marked the rise of international modernism in the city. Businesses and city planners were eagerly looking to architecture to project the confidence and optimism that came with its newfound industry and growth. The bronze Canadian Geese statuary on the grounds of the City Hall were chris-

Royal Alberta Museum Photograph by kind permission of Provincial Archives of Alberta

tened symbols of Edmonton’s ‘exceptional expansion and continuing progress.’

Since the 1950s, Edmonton’s identification with progress has rarely waned. The inevitable lapses in architectural development, which might otherwise mar this image, are dealt with accordingly. Latent economic and social anxieties are projected onto those buildings which signify the unrealised ambitions inherent to the preceding boom period—something which Edmonton-born historian Trevor Boddy has pointed out: ‘ Boom/bust cycles as extreme as ours have a direct influence on architectural ideas and styles. With each new onset of mania, the look, even the layouts of the previous cycle are discarded as unwanted mementoes of the depressing era of no-growth that followed those once-new buildings. Edmontonians come to hate their recent past with vehemence that does not exist elsewhere.’

Boddy ’s comments were made in a catalogue for an exhibition at the Alberta Gallery of Art, called Capital Modern: Edmonton Architecture & Urban Design, 1940– 1969. Ironically, the exhibition was housed in a temporary location because it coincided with the gallery’s decision to demolish and replace what was arguably the best piece in its collection, a subdued but sophisticated 1969 brutalist building designed by local architects Donald Bittorf and James Wensley. It was clear that Edmonton could no longer see the relevance of a building that reflected the cultural airs of a previous generation.

In recent years, Edmonton has suffered the loss of many of its most significant modernist buildings. MayorHawrelak’s prophesy about the City Hall being an emblem

Gone Modern

Edmonton City Hall, 1957 Photograph by kind permission of Provincial Archives of Alberta

of pride for ‘succeeding generations’ was proven wrong in 1990, when its haughty flying geese were demolished and the City Hall replaced.

The fate of other modernist landmarks is much less fair. When the Central Pentecostal Tabernacle was demolished in 2006 it was replaced with a parking lot.

Designed by Edmonton’s most famous architect, Peter Hemingway, the Tabernacle was built in phases between 1963 and 1972, and warranted the local press ’ accolade as Edmonton ’s ‘most striking works of modern architecture. ’ In 2006, the city was riding the slope of yet another building boom, fuelled by the controversial tar sands project north of the city (starting point of the proposed Keystone Pipeline). But unlike in 1947, when the untethered oil seemed to erupt from the earth like wild horses bolting from the gate, today ’s extraction happens as a result of a laborious technology that squeezes oil out of a previously useless sludge of sebaceous sands.

Needless to say, it ’s a specialised, large-scale industry, which has meant that Alberta has been largely isolated from the grim economic forecast that daunts much of today’s western economies. In 2011, a new site and £200 million were announced for the reconstruction of the city’s natural and social history museum, the Royal Alberta Museum. It ’s a larger investment in cultural infrastructure than any seen during the unanimous boom years a decade ago, perhaps the biggest since the original museum was built in 1967.

Characteristically, little has been revealed about what the government plans to do with the old building,

Royal Alberta Museum Photograph by kind permission of Provincial Archives of Alberta

which was designed by a once-formidable group of citystaff planners and architects. Like the former art gallery, the museum was executed in the pervading architectural language of the day—brutalism. But its use of natural materials, sculptural elements and pavilion-like layout also reveals a deft ability on the part of its designers for interpreting, rather than simply mimicking the idioms of mid-century design.

In response to a deluge of criticism, which has lambasted the designs for the new museum as ‘Dull. Dated.

Uninspired. Generic.’ the province ’s minister of culture retorted simply, ‘ this museum is about what is inside its walls’—a far cry from the lofty but considered architectural expressions that the government seemed so keen on conveying in previous years.

Edmonton has long represented a curious blend of international aspirations and isolationism, adolescent brashness and assured complacency. At times the city seems eager to mirror the world’s arts capitals—as was the case with the City Hall in 1947, the museum in 1967 and even the new Alberta Art Gallery in 2009. At other times it seems indifferent to such measures of design. The current ambivalence about the city’s best modernist buildings and the apathy about the design of the new museum, the city ’s newest flagship building project, are part and parcel of an acute growth complex. Counter-intuitively, they are both signs of the city’s sense of progress and its ‘maturing’ role in the global stage. In coming years, it ’s unlikely whether Edmonton city officials will feel the need to entertain any twee gifts from its ageing and hard-up cousin across the pond.

Review #1 — Building the Revolution, Soviet Art and Architecture 1915–1935

—

Richard Pare, 1995 Rusakov Workers’ Club: general view showing the three auditorium segments, 50.8 x 61cm © Richard Pare Richard Pare, courtesy of Kicken Berlin

29 October–22 January 2012 Royal Academy of Arts £9 Adults / £5 Concessions Enjoying a rare break from the office, «the modernist» editorial team found themselves in London with a few hours to spare between the ARCHIZINES press junket and its big posh evening launch in Bedford Square.

What is a modernist about town to do they thought excitedly; Tacita Dean at Turbine Hall or Soviet Art and Architecture at the Royal Academy?

— A throw of the dice found them striding along Piccadilly towards the Palladian splendour of Burlington House and its latest exhibition, ‘Building the Revolution,’ an examination of the extraordinary outburst of creativity in the arts and architecture in the aftermath of the revolution, with a new visual language being forged free from imperial and bourgeois associations.

Architects joined artists, writers and theorists to translate this radical agenda into innovative built forms suitable for such a new social order; factories, industrial plants, offices, and communal housing and facilities for the mass exodus from rural areas into the cities generated by rapid industrialisation.

— Stuffed to the rafters with queues for the Degas, the rarefied opulence of the resolutely establishment RA seems an unlikely setting, but this might be the point, as the uneasy fit acts as a subliminal reminder of just what the Soviets were working so determinedly to eradicate. So, clutching our £9 tickets (ouch, the revolution doesn’t come cheap!) we duly stormed the gallery, occasionally colliding to point out favourites; could we appropriate Gustav Klutsis ‘propaganda kiosks’ for our own purposes? (oh for a time when the very word could be used without its pesky pejorative connotations!); or exclaim at the striking similarity of the Gosprom Building—Kharkov’s Constructivist government showcase with its system of overhead walkways and individual interlinked towers—to Park Hill in Sheffield or Manchester’s Hulme crescents.

Team Modernista top tips include the evocative archive images alongside Pare’s more recent photographs of Moscow’s first mass production Bakery with its vintage wheels, buttons and conveyor belts, the mother of all bakeries; a resilient trio of potted plants peeking out of a couple of abandoned

yellow hard hats an unexpectedly homely touch against the stark minimalism of the dam and hydroelectric plant of DneproGES; the geometric elegance of the deco-esque diving board in Kiev’s Dynamo Sports Club. Also intriguing are examples of early work by Corbusier and Mendelson before they moved west to dominate European modernism, such as the Palace of the Press in Baku and the Red Banner Textile Factory in Moscow.

— Later, in the gallery shop, we compared notes (and postcards). Whilst Jack enjoyed the immediate thrill of the lavish photography and bold geometric artworks, admiring the sheer scale of the architectural vision and lamenting the poor state of so much of it today, decaying, abandoned or demolished, later he wondered if the architecturally minded might appreciate the inclusion of plans or models. But if like me you enjoy a good old rummage through the dusty recesses of a museum storeroom, lingering by silent, faded archive film footage, visuals supplemented by lots of text, some of it in washed out handwritten Cyrillic—a veritable archaeological project of an exhibition—then you’ll find lots to ponder and inform.

— As a snapshot of the early years of the revolution and the short-lived Constructivist period, when art, poetry, dance and theatre were all co-opted to the cause as eagerly as the engineer or the architect to transform culture, society, the built and physical landscape itself into the embodiment of the new soviet regime, Building the Revolution seamlessly captures the optimism, ambition, all pervading scale and sheer speed of change without avoiding the contradictions, short comings and rigid totalitarianism to come.

— «the modernist» Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts in collaboration with the SMCA-Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki, and with the participation of the Schusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow, and Richard Pare.

Review #2 —

Director, Tom Cordell © Utopia London/Alexander Short

Utopia London

Utopia London by Tom Cordell is priced £15.00 and is available to buy from www.utopialondon.com

— A documentary film

by Tom Cordell

An elderly gent turns to camera, and with all the insouciance that made legends of the Sex Pistols, flicks an ostentatious V sign. And then blows a raspberry for good measure…

— But this is no petulant rock star; this is the architect John Bancroft, watching as Pimlico School, widely regarded as his masterpiece, is demolished. «If I were a dog,» he pouts, «I’d cock my leg up against city hall…»

— ‘Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.’

— If you don’t fancy your architecture served with lashings of idealism and opinionated octogenarians then this film might not be for you. For everyone else, this is exactly what a documentary should be— spirited, informative, visually compelling.

— Tom Cordell’s examination of post war London is built on the premise that the history of Modernist housing in Britain is essentially a socialist one—hence the enduring suspicions about its buildings and legacy —explored via an affectionate, personal journey through what to him is the cityscape’s most defining but unappreciated landscape—the ordinary council estate.

— Utopia London lifts the familiar narrative of post war London—blitz, Abercrombie Plan, Festival of Britain—off the page and peoples it with a lively contemporary cast. So, apart from all the usual archive footage, vintage photographs and original plans, we meet key members of the influential LCC housing division. Even sixty years on their commitment and enthusiasm is palpable and contagious—Oliver Cox describing his desire to create space, light and air with views onto green space rather than urban sprawl and industrial pollutants as an attempt to create ‘a bit of heaven on earth,’ and his evident delight at standing on a draughty stairwell next to one of his huge murals, is a touching testament to their efforts and dedication.

‘At the time we took it for granted. We were moving towards a more equitable, socialist society. Not any more we are not.’

— George Finch’s work was central to Lambeth council’s vision of creating a modern socially inclusive borough, a young architect who placed social activities and their spaces at the heart of his schemes, such as his older residents Luncheon Club, community centres and modern laundrettes. He designed every project as if he would live in it himself and his architectural drawings invariably featured a young Finch enjoying the new London he wanted to build, splashing about at the swimming pool or sauntering through a new mall. Quirky and informal, these lively, beautiful sketches perfectly capture the mood of the times.

— Then there is the young Kate Mackintosh who describes her motivation for Dawson’s Heights, inspired by fortifications of old, such as the brochs and castles of her native Scotland and the citadels and ziggurats of her subsequent travels—designed to be imposing on the outside and protective on the inside. Suddenly her towering fortress on a hilltop in Southwark, in her words ‘a pair of mirrored, staggered and stepped ziggurats roughly following the contours of the hill and wrapped around a central garden,’ becomes a Camelot for a modern age.

— A playful sequence with an ex-resident who grew up on Rowley Way neatly sums up Utopia London.

Describing this extraordinary estate as her own magical playground, her gleeful re-enactment of her childhood activities echo an ambition suggested earlier by Oliver Cox—the flats and their secluded environment were her own bit of ‘heaven on earth.’

— In the end, the film is a celebration and a swan song; its survivors, both human and monumental, beacons of a bygone dream of a more egalitarian society. Note to future architects—what kind of film will be made about your generation in fifty years time?

— Maureen Ward

The Modernist Pop-Up Shop «the modernist» Pop-Up Shop has arrived to save Christmas from cheesy chintz—selling prints, artworks, magazines, posters, designed objects, photographs, illustrations, books…

The «manchester modernist society,» publishers of «the modernist» magazine, will launch a modernist Pop-Up Shop at modernist HQ throughout December.

The shop will feature artist/designer-made products from across the UK, with a ‘modernist’ flavour and will act as a fundraiser for the educational and artistic activities of the not-for-profit modernist society.

Featured artists’ works include a ‘Liverpool versus Manchester’ chess set by Caroline White, photographs of Manchester by Jan Chlebik, ‘Brutalist’ tee shirts from Sheffield based Article magazine and ‘Preston Bus Station’ from Preston is my Paris.

‘Modernist’ art installation and artists prints Photograph: Anna Lachowska

Opening times 1–6pm, Wednesday–Saturday throughout December.

See «the modernist» website for events and activities, late night and Sunday specials.

Address «the modernist» 142 Chapel Street Salford / M3 6AF UK Can’t get to the shop? Never fear, PayPal is here!

Selected items will be available on-line. www.the-modernist-mag.co.uk /pop-up-shop

Achtung Photograph: Jo Stafford

Preston Bus Station Photograph: Preston is my Paris

The Mancunian Way of Life Photograph: Alex Hoggarth

M A N C H E S TE R MUNICI PA L DESIGN CORP O R ATIO N ] a socially and environmentally focused multi-d ] ciplinary org an ] ation that pursues ong oing collaborations with an ever-expanding network of like minds. The fruits of these involve publications— LIK E TH E O N E YOU HOLD IN YOU R H A N DS —provocations, events, thinkin g , talks, exhibitions and interventions. M M D C aims to create a g enerali S pool of knowledg e throug h the sharing of p ecial ] ms. It currently operates out of the 4 TH F LOO R of HOTSPU R HOUSE in central Manchester.

I N F O @ M M DC . O RG . U K W W W . M M DC . O RG . U K T WIT TE R :

@ M_M_D_C

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Subscribe for one year for just £15 with free postage. www.the-modernist-mag.co.uk /subscribe

Endword

« An interest in modernism might look to the untrained eye like nostalgia; but it might be plotting for a different modernity altogether.»

Ho, ho, ho! Boom & Bust, our festive edition, flies in the face of hollow seasonal cheer as continued austerity measures bite and discontent mounts. Setting the tone in fighting mood is our foreword’s sharp rebuttal to the naysayers’ adage that a modernist is merely a reactionary wallowing in nostalgia. Between the Victorian and the Present, lies Hatherley’s ‘Inbetween’ with much to offer to an era painfully awakened from its blind enthrallment to the consumerist dream, as governments fall, regimes collapse, the euro plummets and ‘the masses’ revolt.

Unsurprisingly then, this issue sees our northern eye-view go thoroughly international, its wide ranging contributions reflecting the contemporaneousness, and pertinence, of an eye on the past. As 2011 draws to a close, we hope its contents offer respite, inspiration and even a little cheer. See you in 2012… www.the-modernist-mag.co.uk Twitter: @modernistmag