This is a pretty interesting article that deconstructs our contempt for brutalist concrete architecture and our fascination with "smashing things", as the two collide this Sunday on British TV for the premiere of 'Demolition.' But, "what of the modern ruin? Have we reached a point where we can look on the buildings of the late 20th century with nostalgia, or a thrill of regret for their passing?" The TV producers hope not. But Brian Dillon makes a compelling case for why we still appreciate decay and a ruinous landscape "of decommissioned futures." (prev)
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Futures imperfect
By Brian Dillon
Published: November 11 2005 13:01 | Last updated: November 11 2005 13:01
“The future,†wrote Vladimir Nabokov, “is but the obsolete in reverse.†From the Parthenon to Battersea Power Station, decay has a powerful glamour, reminding us of our own brief interlude among the living and the eons of rot yet to come. Everybody loves a ruin; except, it seems, when the haggard structure is an architectural spook from the recent past, in which instance we are more likely to will its swift exorcism than to linger over its metaphysical import. Consider the case of the notorious Gateshead car park, designed by Owen Luder (whose practice was responsible for the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth, recently demolished but equally disreputable in its time). The car park was completed in 1969 and famous as the multi-storey summit from which Michael Caine flings a gangland rival in the 1971 film Get Carter. That iconic moment has not saved the car park from eking out its last years as an image of all that many would like to forget about the architecture of the 1950s and 1960s, when those who designed such massive concrete monoliths were happy to label themselves “brutalistsâ€.
Is such a building worth saving? A Channel 4 series, Demolition, starting this Sunday, seems to suggest not. Luder’s great concrete strata are among the architectural remains that the public have been invited - in a reversal of the BBC’s Restoration - to vote into oblivion. Early press coverage hinted that the winner - that is, the loser - would actually be demolished: a pretty implausible denouement, given planning laws that can keep a building such as Luder’s hanging on for decades. Long enough, in fact, to attract a new kind of attention, from contemporary artists.
There are those who see a building such as the Gateshead car park not as a decaying leftover of postwar planning disasters, nor as a valuable relic of our architectural heritage, but as the ghost of a dream we used to share about the future. The artists Jane and Louise Wilson have recently completed “Broken Timeâ€, a film which intercuts footage of last year’s Great North Run with shots of athletes training in the car park’s ageing eyrie. The Wilsons’ camera treats the building like a rusting space station; it orbits above the city, chunks of its facade occasionally falling to earth.
Concrete decay is much better understood by today’s architects and engineers than it was in the heyday of modernism, though much of the scarring of buildings such as the Gateshead car park is the result of neglect as much as any inherent weaknesses in the material. I have to admit an odd affection for chunks of decaying concrete: on coastal strolls, I have been known to ignore sea and sky (also, bemused partner) in favour of some stray hulk of wartime bunker or subsiding gun emplacement. I find the vocabulary of concrete decay (courtesy of the website of the Concrete Society) strangely poetic: experts speak alliteratively of sagging, staining and spalling. Surfaces show a strange “efflorescenceâ€: a flowering of white patches caused by “lime bloom†or - even lovelier - “lime weepâ€. There is something mysterious and attractive about the processes by which air, water, bacteria and rusting reinforcement conspire to make concrete crack or erode.
A more practical perspective comes from Catherine Croft of architectural charity The Twentieth Century Society, who suggests reasons why we think of the concrete buildings of last century as ageing badly. Most people, she says, are unable to accept that signs of age or weather are as natural to concrete as they are to brick. Modern architecture was supposed to be pristine, to describe clean lines, to shine in the sun like the buildings of the great European modernists. The result is that we see many buildings of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s as already ruined, as having accelerated into the past with shocking speed, urged on by grey weather and urban pollution.
It is one of the oddities of architectural history that many mid-century buildings - especially the brutalist structures of the 1950s and 1960s, before concrete lost out to the pristine, soaring energies of glass and steel - now look older than what came before and since. Of course, attractively deceased buildings have long been part of our cultural landscape: the gothic novel is predicated on the romance of ruins; Wordsworth turned his view of the disintegrating Tintern Abbey into an allegory of his lost youth; Coleridge wrote unfinished verses that were virtually ruins in themselves. For centuries, Europe seemed to have been seized by a fetish for decay: from the painter Hubert Robert, who imagined the Louvre in ruins in 1796, to Albert Speer, who designed certain monuments of the Third Reich with their future ruin in mind.
But what of the modern ruin? Have we reached a point where we can look on the buildings of the late 20th century with nostalgia, or a thrill of regret for their passing? The producers of Demolition, presumably, are hoping that that time has not yet come. But Jane and Louise Wilson’s treatment of the Gateshead car park is just the latest in a series of films and videos in which they have explored the voids left by the absconded dreams of planners and architects. In the new town of Peterlee, they discovered the sorry, streaked remains of the Apollo Pavilion, a sculpture-cum-building designed by the artist Victor Pasmore in the late 1960s. This unloved amenity, stranded in desolate parkland, is transformed by the swooping perspective of the camera. An example of long-suppressed space-age optimism is restored to life.
The other British artist most conspicuously obsessed with the remains of the last century is Tacita Dean. In “Sound Mirrors†(1999) she filmed huge concrete listening devices - precursors of radar, abandoned since the outbreak of the war in which they were meant to serve - that have stood near Dungeness, on the Kent coast, since 1928. As they slump into the surrounding shingle, they conjure an alternative future, as peculiar now as a sky full of airships or, indeed, a Britain full of utopian tower blocks, exquisite machines for living.
Dean’s most recent film is “Palast†(2004), shot in her adopted home of Berlin. Its subject is the abandoned Palace of the Republic on Schlossplatz (formerly Marx-Engels-Platz). One of the last edicts of the GDR, in 1990, was to close this vast administrative and cultural complex, after it was found to be riddled with asbestos. It has stood empty ever since, the object of increasing controversy. Completed in 1976, it was built on the site of the original baroque City Palace: a building doomed by bomb damage and later condemned as a monument to Prussian imperialism. Now, it seems, it is to rise again; a replica will replace the Palace of the Republic. But Dean’s film, which catches the glass-clad building at sunset, reflecting golden fragments of the old and new city around it, reminds us that this grim modern ruin is as much part of Berlin’s heritage as any ersatz copy of the ornate confection it replaced.
There are other, equally resonant, examples. For a short film shown recently at London’s Beaconsfield gallery, the Swedish artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff visited Hashima Island, not far from Nagasaki. Hashima is the derelict relic of a century of coal mining: a terrifying monolith of reinforced concrete that has almost entirely obscured the original island. Until its abandonment in 1974, it is said to have had the highest population density ever recorded anywhere in the world. Close behind it in terms of claustrophobia and the dense throng of historical spectres is photographer Donovan Wylie’s recent work at the Maze Prison, near Belfast. But not all art in this line is necessarily melancholic: the German artist Vera Lutter has used a huge camera obscura to produce inspiring visions in negative of Battersea Power Station, its dark grandeur looking more than ever like Liverpool Cathedral, Giles Gilbert Scott’s other masterpiece.
This artistic scrutiny of derelict futurism is not especially new. In the late 1960s, the land artist Robert Smithson took a tour of the “monuments†of his native suburb of Passaic, New Jersey. Industrial detritus, he wrote, was the contemporary equivalent of the ruins of ancient Rome. Progress speeds up, but it also becomes entropic; it leaves a chaos of dead things in its wake. Since the same decade, the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher have captured these husks of modernity before they are blown away: an endless array of water towers, grain silos and disused mine workings.
It suits these artists that the landscape should still be littered with decommissioned futures. Reflecting on the work she and her sister have produced about derelict modernism, Jane Wilson has said: “We feel a responsibility to be articulate about it since it’s in the collective memory.†Writer Iain Sinclair claims in his new book Edge of the Orison that “decay is heritage too; we must learn to appreciate itâ€. But is there a space (cultural or literal) in contemporary Britain where this taste for corruption might be allowed to flourish? Catherine Croft acknowledges that the art of modern ruins is certainly “inspirationalâ€, and that it has drawn attention to the beauty of some maligned or forgotten structures; but it is, she says, less than realistic when it comes to the long-term future of the buildings in question. Whatever your opinion of Gateshead’s car park (â€Our view would be that it’s a very strong structure,†says Croft), in the end what it needs is a practical purpose and a workable budget.
Its detractors would argue that it needs a police cordon and some high explosive. It is unlikely that many of the structures that have intrigued artists will be preserved as ruins for the perverse aesthetic pleasure of the few. Demolition or restoration awaits. Ought we not, however, at least for the short while that they are with us, celebrate the uncanny feeling that overcomes us among the phantoms of the very recent past, the intense strangeness of knowing that the lost future in front of us was imagined in our own lifetimes? Modern ruins allow us to feel some historical humility, to open for a moment a ragged hole in the fabric of our contemporary lives.
If we cannot hang onto them, perhaps we can at least get some inkling of the sublime from their destruction. Channel 4 insists that Demolition will spark a sophisticated debate - the original impetus came from George Ferguson, outgoing president of the Royal Institute of British Architects - and not merely descend into a trashing of the architecture of the last half century or so. But surely its whole attraction comes from the prospect, or at least the dream, of seeing official visions of the future implode into dust? In an echo of the controversy in Berlin, the Scottish Parliament building has emerged as one of the least popular in the country. I certainly would not want to knock it down. But there is, as it happens, a whole other avant-garde tradition of attacking buildings as an artistic act: Gordon Matta-Clark used to cut holes in them, or literally cut them in half. And as Dostoevsky put it in Notes From Underground: “Whether it is good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.â€
“Broken Timeâ€, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle (0191 222 6059), today. Tacita Dean solo exhibition, Tate St Ives, Cornwall (01736 796226) to January 15. Brian Dillon’s “In the Dark Room: A Journey in Memory†is published by Penguin Ireland.
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