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The skyscrapers of New York City are still, for most people, one of the great
emblems of modernity,

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but one of the major architects of the 20th century, Le Corbusier, thought
otherwise.

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He called this city "a tragic hedgehog".

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Any New Yorker knows what Corbu meant.

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He hated its contrasts, its medieval dirt and inequalities of class

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and he wanted to abolish the distance between the streets down here and the spires
up there.

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He had a vision of New York as a possible, though flawed, Utopia.

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New Yorkers didn't take that seriously then. Today they still don't.

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This century has been an age of utopian propositions. They've been drawn, designed,
argued about,

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sometimes even built. And in the process, it has shown that ideal cities don't
work.

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To the extent that planners have tried to convert living towns into Utopia, they've
destroyed them.

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It seems that, like plants, we do need the shit of others for nutriments.

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But some of the best minds of our culture have thought otherwise.

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They believed the arts could reform people, especially architecture.

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For architecture affects you most directly of all. It is the art you live in.

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Rational design would make rational societies.

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The optimistic feeling of the time is recalled by Philip Johnson.

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It was one of those illusions of the '20s, that movement in which I had the
privilege to take part,

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the Modern movement, International Style. The architecture of the '20s was
thoroughly of the opinion

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that if you had good architecture, lives would be improved.

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Architecture improved people and people would improve architecture until
perfectibility descended on us

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and we'd be happy for ever after.

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But the architects of the Modern movement weren't the first to feel this visionary
urge.

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Utopia had been around on paper since the 15th century when Alberti and Leonardo
speculated

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about how to build the ideal town and Antonio Filarete planned a city named
Sforzinda,

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designed to abolish the muddle and filth of the medieval warren.

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A place for every job and rank of society and every rank and job in its place.

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The dream of a didactic architecture, secular buildings that morally improved you,

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came to a climax around 1800 with the designs of a Frenchman, Etienne-Louis
Boullee.

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He was a son of the French Revolution and his designs were obsessed by death,
authority

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and the grandeur of the new state.

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They were never built. They would have needed a slave state to build them, but
within 30 years

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the Industrial Revolution had created another kind of slave state.

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Throughout the 19th century, architecture had nothing to do with this misery or to
say about it.

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Architects built palaces for the rich, villas for the upper bourgeoisie

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and ceremonial structures for the state. Some were of such splendour they became
targets for Modernists

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and the main one was the Paris Opera, designed by Charles Garnier, a great whale of
marble and bronze

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of such splendour that there would be no possible way to build it today.

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Although the civic pride of the 19th century expressed itself like this,

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the poor, the invisible ones, had no architecture.
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What they had was slums.

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By 1900, in the eyes of a handful of gifted and missionary designers, scattered
across Europe,

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architecture itself was a symbol of inequality, and decorated architecture even
more so.

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The distrust of decoration in early Modernism was not simply an aesthetic matter.

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It became a moral issue in the 1890s at about the same moment as the birth of its
direct opposite,

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the European luxury style, Art Nouveau.

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Art Nouveau was the final exquisite protest of craft sensibility

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before the hand and its work were swamped by machine product.

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It was the snobbish style, consciously elitist.

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In Art Nouveau, culture parodies nature and the pre-industrial world makes its last
stand

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among the twining shoots, the wavy lines and the languid stained-glass lilies.

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But the idealist radicals of the 1900s looked to the machine.

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They were in revolt against the injustices of industrial capitalism,

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but they wanted technology to reform culture. They saw themselves as social
engineers

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and two such men were Mario Chiattone and Antonio Sant'Elia,

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Italians who wrote the Futurist Manifesto of Architecture in 1914.

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We are no longer the men of the cathedrals, the palaces, the assembly halls,

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but of big hotels, railway stations, immense roads, colossal ports, covered
markets,

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brilliantly-lit galleries, freeways, demolition and rebuilding schemes.

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We must invent and build the futurist city, dynamic in all its parts,

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and the futurist house must be like a machine.

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These were dream cities, paper architecture that nobody expected to build.

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And Sant'Elia was killed during WWI at 28, before he could build anything.

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But he had fixed the imagery of concrete cliffs and flyovers

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that would dominate architecture and science fiction for 40 years.

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His speculative passion was shared by architects in other countries, including
Soviet Russia after 1917,

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where constructivist designers like Melnikov, Rodchenko and Leonidov imagined vast
community centres,

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halls, social condensers, palaces of the people, all based on the machine metaphor.

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But where in the real world could a European architect find practical shapes of the
future?

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One place was America, with its industrial forms of warehouse, dock and grain
elevator.

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The essence of American Modernism was concentrated in Chicago.

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The city had been wiped out by a fire in the 1870s and so the architects got

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what their European colleagues could only dream of - a clean slate.

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There was no city planning - American business took care of that.

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Grab the block, screw the neighbours.

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But a new principle of building emerged from its chaotic growth -

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skeleton construction instead of load-bearing brick or masonry walls.

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The steel frame took the load and the walls became light panels or opened out into
glass.

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Because they weighed less, buildings could go higher.

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This was known as the Chicago style and its master was Louis Sullivan, the first
great Modernist architect.

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Sullivan was a true American idealist. "With me, architecture is not an art, but a
religion.
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"And that religion but a part of democracy."

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What this entailed for Sullivan and his colleagues in the 1880s and '90s

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was a desire to fulfil both the abstract side of building, its ability to soar and
embody systems,

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and its natural side, the poetic rhythms, organic grace notes and ornaments.

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The verticals of aspiration, the horizontals of the mid-west prairie.

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For the first time, the whole centre of a large city was rebuilt in terms of a new
style,

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but it was not from his ornaments, but from his structural grid that modern
architecture would derive.

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Sullivan's Auditorium Building was finished in 1899 and, in the same year,

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he began the Carson Pirie Scott store, the last major project that he would have a
chance to do.

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Structures like this one have come to be seen as talismans,

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the rudiments of a new world of design and construction.

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And although official European architects distrusted the grid,

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the idea had already been tried out in Europe several decades before

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and it grew straight out of the Industrial Revolution.

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The European resistance to the lessons of Chicago was partly due to its use of
industrial materials.

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The basic one was metal.

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By using it structurally to actually carry the load,

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you could achieve a great degree of plainness, lightness and delicacy.

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The first man to use iron as the frame of a major public building from ground to
roof was French.

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His name was Henri Labrouste.

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Labrouste was born in 1801. He was one of the geniuses of the Romantic era

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and one of his remarks became a rallying cry for functionalism 50 years after his
death.

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"In architecture," he said, "form must always be appropriate to the function for
which it is intended."

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This was his demonstration piece, his first significant building.

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The Sainte-Genevieve library in Paris with those exquisite barrel vaults on their
wrought-iron tracery

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which floats out of the row of slender columns that runs down the centre of the
building.

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And all this designed at the amazingly early date of 1843.
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This prophetic building was far ahead of its time

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and is the point from which the use of iron and steel as architecture, not simply
engineering, begins.

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The second modern material was concrete, reinforced with steel rods and cables.

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Engineers had used it, but the first architect to use it expressively for other
than a hangar or bridge

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was the German Max Berg, who built the Centenary Hall in Breslau in 1912,

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a vast ribbed dome covering 21,000 square feet, four times the area of the dome of
St Peter's.

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When the concrete set, the workmen refused to pull away the wooden moulds because
they were scared

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it would collapse, and Berg had to start tearing them down himself.

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But the hall is still there.

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However, the supreme material of Utopia was sheet glass.

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Glass was the opposite of stone and brick. It meant lightness, transparency,
structural daring.

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Glass was the essence of the skyscraper and the skyscraper became the essence of
the modern city -

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a thin film hung on a steel skeleton. No more load-bearing walls.
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60 years later, this is the face of every corporation -

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the glass box, the all-over grid of spandrels and mullions, the curtain wall.

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The chief architect of glass was a German, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

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He didn't put up many buildings, but the ones he did build acquired a great moral
importance.

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For decades, buildings like his apartments on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago

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have been considered the epitome of reason.

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Straight lines, clear thought and extreme refinement of proportion, detail and
material.

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They were acts of faith, absolute and austere.

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But Mies loved the idea of crystalline building, the pure prism.

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And so his designs in the '20s believed in salvation through glass architecture

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and the belief was almost religious. Mies' quest for purity goes right back to the
Germany of 1920

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and his unbuilt design for a skyscraper on the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin.

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Though other architects were interested in towers, Mies invented the glass
skyscraper as we know it.

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"Skin and bones," he said. That was architecture. "No noodles."
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But he also said at the same time, 1923, that he rejected all aesthetic
speculation,

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all doctrine and all formalism,

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which is odd because the only architects who were more doctrinaire and formalist
than Mies van der Rohe

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were his imitators.

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Mies believed that his buildings, like the Seagram here in New York, were objective

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because they grew out of machine culture, mass production, pre-fabrication.

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"The individual," he chillingly announced, "is losing significance. His destiny no
longer interests us."

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But for all his theorising about machine culture, not one Mies design was
successfully pre-fabricated.

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Why? Because he was a perfectionist and designed to tolerances that mass production
simply couldn't handle.

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His whole background, after all, was involved with the tradition of craft, the
action of the hand

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upon fine, traditional materials.

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He did that in a very quiet way, but he wasn't prepared to give up that idea of
beauty or to compromise.

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And so when it came to designing the Seagram building, he could have used steel or
aluminium cladding,

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but, no, what Mies wanted was bronze, this dark, satin-y material

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which gave him the play of shadows within shadows that he wanted.

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The result was aesthetically superb, but also fiendishly expensive and quite
unrepeatable.

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But the Seagram is all balance as well, and generosity.

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Useful and ceremonious, one of the great buildings of our time.

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Mies wanted a universal grammar of architecture. Consequently, his flats look like
office blocks

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and his museums look like airports or factories.

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Obsessive subtlety of form. He could spend weeks, months,

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thinking about how to turn a corner with I-beams and cladding.

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But a naivete about the larger social meanings of architecture, which in Mies'
world did not count.

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And so many of Mies' projects tend to look authoritarian.

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One of the largest is the Federal Centre in Chicago,

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which today looks like an ultimate refinement of American corporate style - the
big, chilly slabs

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grouped around an intimidating open space, an ideal blank table which then gets a
decorative ashtray

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in the form of a sculpture, in this case a stabile by Alexander Calder.

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Philip Johnson, who collaborated with Mies on the design of the Seagram, remembers
the dogmatism

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of his master's voice.

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He believed in the ultimate truth of architecture, especially his,

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that his architecture was closer to the truth - capital T - than anyone else's

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because it was simpler and could be learned. He felt his architecture could be
learned and adapted

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for on into the centuries.

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But in ways his influence was bad because it made everybody realise, "Well, I'm
doing Mies."

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That means it was cheaper. Every cheap architect could copy Mies and go to the
clients

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and say, "I can do a building cheaper than last year because now I can do it like
Mies.

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"We'll have a flat roof and glass walls and simple, factory-made curtain walls on
the outsides."

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So it was a justification for cheapness that took over entirely our cityscapes
today
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and it's what you see in New York.

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But the great image of the new architecture wasn't the single building. It was the
town plan.

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The planners saw their paper cities with the detachment built into the view from a
building like this one.

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Very high up, very abstract, like looking down on a drawing board, and somewhat
nearer to God.

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What their projects had in common was an alarming obsession with social hygiene.

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In future, the human animal, instead of lurking in streets and squares, would live
in tower blocks

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and commute by monorail and biplane and scurry about in allotted green spaces

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and in general be made to do one thing at one time in one specific place.

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Thus the millennium would dawn and the old cities of Europe which escaped the
ravages of WWI

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would now be flattened by idealist architects.

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Most of these utopian schemes fell somewhere between the suburb and the ziggurat

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and most favoured the ziggurat.

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One motif recurs over and over - tower blocks on a rectangular grid, separated by
patches of green space

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and joined by superhighways.

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It was a theme harped on by Frenchmen, Germans, Russians and Italians,

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but the lyric poet of this dreadful idea, which has influenced cities for the worse
from LA to Zagreb,

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was a Swiss. His name was Charles Edouard Jeanneret, better known by his nickname,
Le Corbusier.

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His ideal of good planning was summed up in one phrase.

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"La ville radieuse." The radiant city.

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His answer to the crowded towns of Europe, so unpredictable, so hard to control,

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was the tower block, glittering above the greenery, decentralisation brought about
by the car.

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The car would abolish the human street, possibly even the foot.

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Everyone would have a car. Some people would have aeroplanes, too.

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The one thing nobody would have would be a place to bump into others, walk the dog,
chat, strut

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or do any of the hundred other random things that one does on a street and which,
being random,

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were loathed by Le Corbusier.

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La Ville Radieuse was a nightmare.
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Not only would its inhabitants surrender their freedom of movement,

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they would also have to give up their memory, insofar as it was recorded in stone
and brick.

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One of Corbusier's obsessive projects was the improvement of Paris,

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which involved the assassination of the city and its rebirth as tower blocks.

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Endless repetition of one crushing unit. People would be nothing more than cells in
a mass-transit system.

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His logic was Cartesian. He was French, after all.

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And the platonic, Cartesian... absolutes were in his heart.

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00:23:08,080 --> 00:23:14,120
And they made wonderful perspectives and marvellous models of how you'd wipe out
the city of Paris.

210
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It was a delicious intellectual exercise. How serious he was about it, I don't
believe for a minute.

211
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The people who were serious were the Germans. They were the bad ones. They built
them!

212
00:23:29,600 --> 00:23:33,640
One thing Corbusier built is here in Marseille.

213
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The Unite d'Habitation of 1947.

214
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Nine storeys high, set in green space, with an unusual roof.

215
00:23:44,200 --> 00:23:51,680
It contained a gymnasium, a space for exercise, a paddling pool for the kids and a
bicycle track.

216
00:24:01,000 --> 00:24:05,040
Even today, this is one of the great roofs of the world.

217
00:24:05,040 --> 00:24:08,640
The place is a metaphor of Corbu's social aims.

218
00:24:08,640 --> 00:24:13,480
The concrete garden of ideal form, giving health to those who live in it.

219
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To me, the roof of the Unite has a sadness approaching that of a Greek temple.

220
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Corbusier finished it after WWII

221
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and almost 30 years after his celebrated descants on the Acropolis in his book
Towards An Architecture.

222
00:24:28,720 --> 00:24:34,760
"The Greeks on the Acropolis," he then wrote, "set up buildings animated by a
single thought,

223
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"drawing the desolate landscape around them and gathering it into one composition.

224
00:24:39,800 --> 00:24:43,280
"Thus, at every point on the horizon, the thought is singular."

225
00:24:43,280 --> 00:24:49,280
And the only place that he ever found which approached that bare singularity of the
Acropolis

226
00:24:49,280 --> 00:24:51,920
was the roof of this building.

227
00:24:53,400 --> 00:25:00,040
He was so ill-informed about the habits and traditions of the society

228
00:25:00,040 --> 00:25:06,840
that he thought people would go on the roof if he made it beautiful. The real point
is he was free there.
229
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And it's a sculptural joy to wander around the roofs of Marseille.

230
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The troubles begin below the roof.

231
00:25:16,720 --> 00:25:22,560
The Unite was meant as a social experiment, a prototype for mass housing.

232
00:25:22,560 --> 00:25:28,640
There is a rough nobility to this concrete, even though it's grimy and can never
mellow like stone.

233
00:25:30,280 --> 00:25:37,120
The piloti or stilts are a grand muscular shape, although nobody uses the space
under them for anything

234
00:25:37,120 --> 00:25:41,760
and the cars have to park in the green space.

235
00:25:42,720 --> 00:25:46,120
And as housing, the Unite has not been a success.

236
00:25:46,120 --> 00:25:49,560
Its emblem is the figure of Corbu's modular man,

237
00:25:49,560 --> 00:25:53,000
the distorted great-grandchild of Vitruvian man

238
00:25:53,000 --> 00:25:59,920
and, unintentionally, a symbol of Corbusier's lofty disregard of real human needs.

239
00:26:02,000 --> 00:26:04,960
Privacy in the flats hardly exists.

240
00:26:04,960 --> 00:26:09,920
Many of the rooms are little more than cupboards.

241
00:26:11,600 --> 00:26:17,440
The shopping mall on the fifth floor is mostly out of business because the French
like real markets,

242
00:26:17,440 --> 00:26:23,080
down on the street - another fact of life that the form giver did not grasp.
243
00:26:26,400 --> 00:26:32,920
Finally, nobody wanted those plain, morally-elevating interiors with paper lamps
and craft rugs

244
00:26:32,920 --> 00:26:37,080
and slung chairs and Cubist tapestries. And they are now crammed

245
00:26:37,080 --> 00:26:43,720
with exactly the sort of gaudy, fake period furniture that Corbusier struggled
against all his life.

246
00:26:43,720 --> 00:26:50,360
He could never understand why the French kept wanting it, but they did and they
still do.

247
00:26:51,880 --> 00:26:58,960
Corbusier only got one chance to build an ideal city - Chandigarh, the new capital
of the Punjab,

248
00:26:58,960 --> 00:27:02,600
which Nehru asked him to design in 1960.

249
00:27:11,000 --> 00:27:15,040
Its site was a blank, a windy plain at the foot of the Himalayas.

250
00:27:15,040 --> 00:27:19,480
Here Corbusier could create a sculptural monument from scratch.

251
00:27:19,480 --> 00:27:23,920
There was nothing to compete with. His buildings would be absolute.

252
00:27:30,000 --> 00:27:34,040
And so they were, except that they never came to life as a city.

253
00:27:34,040 --> 00:27:38,400
They have the passionate dignity and uninhabitability of sculpture,

254
00:27:38,400 --> 00:27:42,640
but after 30 years nobody wants to live there and so Chandigarh,

255
00:27:42,640 --> 00:27:48,080
like most capitals that have been invented overnight by governments, is socially
lifeless.

256
00:27:48,080 --> 00:27:52,720
Elevating as an idea and depressing after the first 24 hours.

257
00:27:52,720 --> 00:27:58,560
Yet though he failed as a sociological architect, he was a great inventor of
shapes,

258
00:27:58,560 --> 00:28:01,000
the Picasso of architecture.

259
00:28:01,000 --> 00:28:07,040
And his language was based on two systems of form which seemed utterly opposed, but
he saw as similar -

260
00:28:07,040 --> 00:28:10,680
classical Greek architecture in all its lucidity

261
00:28:10,680 --> 00:28:14,520
and the clear, analytic forms of machinery.

262
00:28:15,480 --> 00:28:21,520
He wanted to celebrate what he called "the white world", the world of clarity and
precision,

263
00:28:21,520 --> 00:28:29,320
of exact stucco and glass, of culture standing alone against the real world of
muddle and compromise.

264
00:28:36,000 --> 00:28:43,080
No building shows what he meant better than the Villa Savoye outside Paris,
finished in 1930.

265
00:30:45,000 --> 00:30:51,080
The Villa Savoye was one of the classics of what came to be known as the
International Style.

266
00:30:51,080 --> 00:30:55,520
The principles of this style were laid out, once and for all, in 1927

267
00:30:55,520 --> 00:30:59,360
in the Deutscher Werkbund housing exhibition in Germany,

268
00:30:59,360 --> 00:31:06,720
an architectural trade fair for which Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies, Bruno Taut,
Peter Behrens

269
00:31:06,720 --> 00:31:10,360
and JP Oud built demonstration homes.

270
00:31:17,240 --> 00:31:22,040
The name International Style was coined in 1931 by two Americans,

271
00:31:22,040 --> 00:31:26,680
historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson.

272
00:31:26,680 --> 00:31:31,920
The first principle was that it was a style of volume, not of mass.

273
00:31:31,920 --> 00:31:37,760
It wasn't built up from bricks like this. It was a taut skin stretched across a
frame

274
00:31:37,760 --> 00:31:43,800
and everything that that meant. Lifting buildings on piloti - even now we use the
Corbusier word.

275
00:31:43,800 --> 00:31:50,400
That point came from Corbusier, lifting everything up because it had a sixth side -

276
00:31:50,400 --> 00:31:56,240
the underside. You can't see that unless you have a volumetric to look at
everything.

277
00:31:56,240 --> 00:32:02,360
How could you have a ribbon window if it was mass? They would fall down if it was a
brick mass building.

278
00:32:02,360 --> 00:32:07,000
Nobody would use that word "brick" because that meant mass.

279
00:32:07,000 --> 00:32:10,840
Stucco was the one weightless material that everyone could get,

280
00:32:10,840 --> 00:32:16,480
so every building in the International Style's purest form was stucco.

281
00:32:16,480 --> 00:32:24,320
From that came the principles of design of these volumes. You don't put a door here
and windows in.

282
00:32:24,320 --> 00:32:27,800
You have ribbons of window and then because it's functionalist
283
00:32:27,800 --> 00:32:32,800
you put a big window for the dog and a little window for the cat.

284
00:32:32,800 --> 00:32:38,840
The third one was a non-principle, typical of our mixed-up age. The avoidance of
ornament.

285
00:32:38,840 --> 00:32:44,480
Ornament had disappeared up to that time anyhow because it was too expensive

286
00:32:44,480 --> 00:32:50,520
and there were no more craftsmen. That's still true. Now we use pastiche to imitate
old ornaments.

287
00:32:50,520 --> 00:32:57,360
That's the way it's come back in, but that principle of the avoidance of ornament
was the easiest to do.

288
00:32:57,360 --> 00:33:03,400
If you believe in volume, not mass, you can't put tops on buildings. Any angle like
that was taboo.

289
00:33:03,400 --> 00:33:06,640
It had to have a flat roof.

290
00:33:06,640 --> 00:33:13,080
But, you see, I came in in '28 and by that time it was pretty well codified, the
International Style.

291
00:33:13,080 --> 00:33:19,120
We'd had Weissenhofsiedlung, which was the epitome, the high point of the
International Style.

292
00:33:19,120 --> 00:33:23,560
Everybody had to do a flat roof, to be white, to use stucco.

293
00:33:23,560 --> 00:33:27,400
And they all did. They saluted and did whatever Mies said.

294
00:33:27,400 --> 00:33:31,440
He was a kid at the time. Kid, for an architect, being 40.

295
00:33:31,440 --> 00:33:37,480
And it was an amazing thing for a kid to do, to get all the great architects to do
the same building.
296
00:33:37,480 --> 00:33:43,920
So I was there at that time when all idea of mysticism or anything that wasn't
rational

297
00:33:43,920 --> 00:33:48,760
or couldn't be clearly explained was rigorously rooted out.

298
00:33:50,000 --> 00:33:54,040
The main place from which this style emanated was the Bauhaus,

299
00:33:54,040 --> 00:33:59,680
started in Weimar and then established in Dessau and closed by the Nazis in the
'30s

300
00:33:59,680 --> 00:34:05,720
on the grounds that it was a Bolshevist conspiracy against the family and the
German race.

301
00:34:05,720 --> 00:34:11,160
Bauhaus meant the rethinking of every manufactured object, not just buildings.

302
00:34:11,160 --> 00:34:13,600
During its short life, 15 years,

303
00:34:13,600 --> 00:34:17,640
it utterly transformed the idea of advanced design in Europe.

304
00:34:17,640 --> 00:34:24,320
It was a network of men and women who wanted to remake culture in terms of
industrial process.

305
00:34:24,320 --> 00:34:30,560
The man who formed the school, wrote its programme and ran it for the first 10
years of its life

306
00:34:30,560 --> 00:34:33,200
was the architect Walter Gropius.

307
00:34:34,160 --> 00:34:38,000
Gropius' ambition had set early in his career.

308
00:34:38,000 --> 00:34:44,600
In his early 20s, in 1907, he had worked for the leading industrial designer in
Germany, Peter Behrens.
309
00:34:44,600 --> 00:34:50,440
Today we're used to companies getting one designer to furnish their whole visual
style.

310
00:34:50,440 --> 00:34:58,280
70 years ago, that was extremely rare. Behrens pioneered it through his work for
one big client, AEG.

311
00:34:58,280 --> 00:35:02,320
He designed their factories, their catalogues, even their stationery.

312
00:35:07,840 --> 00:35:13,480
Behrens went as close as any man had gone to creating a general style of design

313
00:35:13,480 --> 00:35:19,320
aimed at mass production of a wide range of products from an industrial base.

314
00:35:21,200 --> 00:35:27,440
Now this point was not lost on Gropius. His major works before the Bauhaus were all
industrial.

315
00:35:27,440 --> 00:35:34,280
In his Fagus factory of 1911, probably the most advanced building anyone had made
before WWI,

316
00:35:34,280 --> 00:35:41,520
the wall is daringly reduced to a glass skin stretched between columns and making a
transparent corner.

317
00:35:53,000 --> 00:35:58,840
The Bauhaus enabled Gropius and his colleagues to pursue the idea of a total art,

318
00:35:58,840 --> 00:36:02,680
subsuming all the divided arts under a new technology.

319
00:36:02,680 --> 00:36:08,520
- The first manifesto of the Bauhaus proclaimed:
- "Let us create a new guild of craftsmen

320
00:36:08,520 --> 00:36:14,880
"without the class distinctions which raise arrogant barriers between craftsmen and
artists.

321
00:36:14,880 --> 00:36:19,240
"Together, let us conceive and build the new structure of the future,
322
00:36:19,240 --> 00:36:24,680
"which will embrace architecture and painting and sculpture in one unity

323
00:36:24,680 --> 00:36:30,720
"and will rise one day towards heaven like the crystal symbol of a new faith."

324
00:36:33,080 --> 00:36:39,880
The Bauhaus view was that it was far harder to design a first-rate teapot than
paint a second-rate painting.

325
00:36:41,000 --> 00:36:46,840
Later in his life, Walter Gropius explained the basic ideas of Bauhaus teaching.

326
00:36:46,840 --> 00:36:52,680
Everyone had to go through one of the craft workshops before he came into
architecture.

327
00:36:52,680 --> 00:36:58,720
And some of them did not go into architecture. They stayed where they were, in the
painting workshop

328
00:36:58,720 --> 00:37:03,720
or wherever else it was. But any architect should have this basis

329
00:37:03,720 --> 00:37:09,560
and I think we should have it today, too. It is much too theoretical, still.

330
00:37:09,560 --> 00:37:13,800
When you compare, for instance, the life of an architect today,

331
00:37:13,800 --> 00:37:20,800
who is expected to sit in his studio and get everything out of his head on paper
and specifications...

332
00:37:20,800 --> 00:37:27,440
Then it's taken out of his hands and given to an army of workmen who have to
execute his will.

333
00:37:27,440 --> 00:37:34,680
And he is not permitted any more to make any changes and the workman cannot add
anything of himself.

334
00:37:34,680 --> 00:37:39,520
And you compare that with the Middle Ages when they built a cathedral.

335
00:37:39,520 --> 00:37:45,160
There was a group of people devoting themselves to that building, living on the
site,

336
00:37:45,160 --> 00:37:50,320
doing everything in flesh and materials directly. There was very little designing.

337
00:37:50,320 --> 00:37:56,360
The extraordinary thing was that the journeyman and the apprentice had to follow a
certain direction

338
00:37:56,360 --> 00:38:02,400
from the master who gave him some geometrical proportions he had to take in his
work,

339
00:38:02,400 --> 00:38:06,240
but otherwise he gave his work individually, independently.

340
00:38:06,240 --> 00:38:10,280
It was not an execution only of some design of the master.

341
00:38:10,280 --> 00:38:16,120
They worked really in a true team together there and if something was not well
done,

342
00:38:16,120 --> 00:38:21,480
they took it down again and built it again. For God's sake, it had to be very good.

343
00:38:23,560 --> 00:38:30,040
Each teapot, watch, glass or radio cabinet was designed as an industrial prototype.

344
00:38:30,040 --> 00:38:33,680
It had to be mass-produced, but few actually were.

345
00:38:33,680 --> 00:38:40,280
The demand was too small to justify mass production, hence the rarity of Bauhaus
objects today.

346
00:38:40,280 --> 00:38:42,880
They were too pure to be popular.

347
00:38:45,800 --> 00:38:52,640
This was especially true of the furniture. Almost all the radical new designs of
chair, table or sofa

348
00:38:52,640 --> 00:38:58,880
were done by architects - Marcel Breuer inside the Bauhaus, Corbusier and Mies
outside it.

349
00:38:58,880 --> 00:39:04,720
Their ideal and often uncomfortable chairs were all of a piece with constructivist
painting.

350
00:39:04,720 --> 00:39:10,560
And they were meant to go with their buildings for the least possible interruption
to the flow of space,

351
00:39:10,560 --> 00:39:13,240
to echo the machine look.

352
00:39:13,240 --> 00:39:19,040
Some of them lived on into production to furnish the world's airports and corporate
lobbies.

353
00:39:19,040 --> 00:39:23,560
But in their day they were not popular.

354
00:39:28,400 --> 00:39:34,440
The most severe rebuke to the pleasure-seeking body was made in 1918 by a Dutch
designer

355
00:39:34,440 --> 00:39:38,680
called Gerrit Rietveld and this chair of his is considered a classic

356
00:39:38,680 --> 00:39:42,720
because it goes far beyond ordinary functionalist discomfort.

357
00:39:42,720 --> 00:39:48,240
The human body for which it was reputed to be made simply doesn't exist.

358
00:39:48,240 --> 00:39:52,280
Insofar as it ever was designed to accommodate a human bottom,

359
00:39:52,280 --> 00:39:58,520
that bottom is a platonic solid existing somewhere out in the ether but never made
flesh.

360
00:39:58,520 --> 00:40:03,160
The fact about these designs is that, august as they are,

361
00:40:03,160 --> 00:40:07,680
they are not really furniture. They're sculpture.
362
00:40:07,680 --> 00:40:13,720
They're a three-dimensional development of a two-dimensional pattern,

363
00:40:13,720 --> 00:40:19,480
the grid and primary colours in the paintings of Mondrian, van Doesburg and the De
Stijl group.

364
00:40:20,440 --> 00:40:23,280
De Stijl was Dutch for "the style".

365
00:40:23,280 --> 00:40:27,360
Its leader was a painter and critic, Theo van Doesburg.

366
00:40:27,360 --> 00:40:34,040
As a group, it didn't last long, just a few years during and after the end of World
War One.

367
00:40:34,040 --> 00:40:40,080
Nevertheless, the half dozen artists and architects in the movement were very clear
about their aims.

368
00:40:40,080 --> 00:40:44,120
After the slaughter of the Great War, they wanted to be international men

369
00:40:44,120 --> 00:40:47,960
and art could supply the model for this frame of mind.

370
00:40:47,960 --> 00:40:54,560
Down with frontiers, up with the grid. A new world of lucidity would rise from the
wreckage.

371
00:40:55,520 --> 00:40:59,560
No curved lines, masonic rectitude,

372
00:40:59,560 --> 00:41:05,200
De Stijl was against the individual and for the collective and the universal.

373
00:41:09,600 --> 00:41:17,040
It laid out a general grammar of shape for every visual art, architecture no less
than painting.

374
00:41:17,040 --> 00:41:23,080
This grid was van Doesburg's design for the roof of a university hall in 1923.

375
00:41:28,000 --> 00:41:33,840
The programme of De Stijl had no practical chance since art cannot cure nationalism

376
00:41:33,840 --> 00:41:37,680
and manufacturers were not idealists. But its name survives,

377
00:41:37,680 --> 00:41:43,920
partly because one of the greatest artists of the 20th century was involved. He was
Piet Mondrian.

378
00:41:43,920 --> 00:41:49,960
This grave and diffident man was one of the last painters to believe that the
conditions of human life

379
00:41:49,960 --> 00:41:52,480
could be changed by making pictures.

380
00:41:52,480 --> 00:41:58,160
For him, art was not an end in itself. It was a means towards an end.

381
00:41:58,160 --> 00:42:02,560
Mondrian was an intensely religious man. He had a vision of Utopia

382
00:42:02,560 --> 00:42:09,200
in which the scales would drop from man's eyes as the visible world disclosed its
underlying harmonies.

383
00:42:09,200 --> 00:42:12,040
Then to see would be to know.

384
00:42:15,000 --> 00:42:18,840
Mondrian thought of art as a bridge to this clarity of vision.

385
00:42:18,840 --> 00:42:21,880
Once you had it, you no longer needed painting

386
00:42:21,880 --> 00:42:25,720
and this belief gave his work an extraordinary consistency.

387
00:42:28,600 --> 00:42:32,440
We're apt to think of Mondrian as a purely abstract painter -

388
00:42:32,440 --> 00:42:34,760
the grid and nothing but the grid,

389
00:42:34,760 --> 00:42:39,120
but his work was grounded in nature and in metaphors based on nature.

390
00:42:39,120 --> 00:42:42,160
One motif that his grids came from, for instance,

391
00:42:42,160 --> 00:42:46,000
was the coastal landscape of Holland, the dunes and the sea,

392
00:42:46,000 --> 00:42:51,560
and the glitter of light on this flatness, the movement of the waves, became a
pattern of crosses

393
00:42:51,560 --> 00:42:55,600
and this criss-crossing field with its points and twinkles of energy

394
00:42:55,600 --> 00:42:59,040
became one of Mondrian's signs for all substance.

395
00:42:59,040 --> 00:43:01,880
It was the basis of his universal grammar.

396
00:43:04,560 --> 00:43:09,400
So it was appropriate that Mondrian should have come to New York - "grid city".

397
00:43:09,400 --> 00:43:13,680
He got there as a refugee from the Second World War in 1940

398
00:43:13,680 --> 00:43:18,720
and his studio was remembered as one of the shrines of Modernism in America.

399
00:43:28,800 --> 00:43:31,320
And what did he like about America?

400
00:43:31,320 --> 00:43:36,600
Well, Mondrian may not have looked like one, but he was an enthusiastic dancer.

401
00:43:36,600 --> 00:43:41,440
It's hard to imagine him boogieing to jazz, but that was what he loved to do.

402
00:43:41,440 --> 00:43:44,080
Out of that music and the New York grid,

403
00:43:44,080 --> 00:43:46,920
Mondrian distilled his late paintings -
404
00:43:46,920 --> 00:43:51,560
New York City, Broadway Boogie-Woogie and Victory Boogie-Woogie.

405
00:43:56,160 --> 00:44:02,280
These paintings are not exactly metaphors of New York and still less can they be
read as plans,

406
00:44:02,280 --> 00:44:08,840
but they are diagrams of the kind of energy and order that Mondrian detected in the
great, flawed city.

407
00:44:08,840 --> 00:44:14,160
The yellow blips shuttling along their paths don't necessarily represent cabs,

408
00:44:14,160 --> 00:44:17,200
but once you have seen Broadway Boogie-Woogie,

409
00:44:17,200 --> 00:44:21,520
the view from a skyscraper down into the streets is changed for ever.

410
00:44:22,960 --> 00:44:26,920
And why should Mondrian's last paintings still move us,

411
00:44:26,920 --> 00:44:30,880
whereas the Utopian city plans of the architects do not?

412
00:44:30,880 --> 00:44:34,920
Partly because the space of art is the ideal space of fiction.

413
00:44:34,920 --> 00:44:37,960
In it, things are not used and they never decay.

414
00:44:37,960 --> 00:44:43,520
You can never walk in a painting as you must imagine yourself walking in a street
or a building.

415
00:44:43,520 --> 00:44:47,560
His paintings are incorruptible, the building blocks of a system

416
00:44:47,560 --> 00:44:50,600
that has no relationship at all to our bodies.

417
00:44:53,640 --> 00:44:57,840
But architecture and design have everything to do with the body
418
00:44:57,840 --> 00:45:00,400
and the unredeemed body at that.

419
00:46:05,480 --> 00:46:10,240
Without respect for the body as it is and for social memory as it stands,

420
00:46:10,240 --> 00:46:13,760
there is no such thing as a workable or humane architecture.

421
00:46:13,760 --> 00:46:17,080
That's why a place like this, La Defense outside Paris,

422
00:46:17,080 --> 00:46:22,640
is experienced by everybody, including those who live in it, as a piece of social
scar tissue -

423
00:46:22,640 --> 00:46:25,680
gimmicky, condescending, alphaville Modernism.

424
00:46:25,680 --> 00:46:29,720
Stick them in concrete boxes and give them some concrete to play on

425
00:46:29,720 --> 00:46:33,760
and then paint it all bright colours because that's what the kiddies like

426
00:46:33,760 --> 00:46:37,600
and if the kiddies don't like it, they can write to the minister.

427
00:46:39,160 --> 00:46:44,720
That is why so many of the classics of Utopian planning have turned out to look
inhuman or absurd

428
00:46:44,720 --> 00:46:50,280
and why they don't work, and why the social pretensions behind them seem to be so
much hot air.

429
00:46:50,280 --> 00:46:54,320
After this, who believes in progress and perfectibility any more?

430
00:46:54,320 --> 00:46:57,520
Who believes in master builders and form-givers?

431
00:46:57,520 --> 00:47:01,080
That's right. Who are you? You don't believe in progress?
432
00:47:01,080 --> 00:47:07,000
But who does now believe in progress Those things have influenced the architecture
more than anything else

433
00:47:07,000 --> 00:47:12,520
I think the progress, the whole Benthamite "every day in every way we're getting
better" theory

434
00:47:12,520 --> 00:47:14,560
is pretty well washed up.

435
00:47:14,560 --> 00:47:17,000
So there are these waves of...

436
00:47:17,000 --> 00:47:22,280
We're anti-idealists now, anti-Utopian, anti-pies in the sky,

437
00:47:22,280 --> 00:47:28,120
and we're very anxious to make our cities work the way they are and hold on to the
best we can,

438
00:47:28,120 --> 00:47:31,640
which is a far saner, more sensible way of looking at things.

439
00:47:33,240 --> 00:47:36,760
The architectural historian Charles Jencks pointed out

440
00:47:36,760 --> 00:47:42,800
that one can date the death of the Modern Movement not just to the decade or year,
but to the minute.

441
00:47:42,800 --> 00:47:46,640
It happened in St Louis where the architect Minoru Yamasaki

442
00:47:46,640 --> 00:47:49,680
had designed a large, low-income housing project.

443
00:47:49,680 --> 00:47:51,720
Its name was Pruitt-Igoe.

444
00:47:56,040 --> 00:48:00,240
Tower blocks, parks, recreational streets inside the buildings,

445
00:48:00,240 --> 00:48:04,560
every sort of Corbusian amenity, most improving.

446
00:48:04,560 --> 00:48:08,600
The architectural magazines made a fuss over it. It won awards.

447
00:48:08,600 --> 00:48:10,920
That was in 1951.

448
00:48:10,920 --> 00:48:16,160
Within a few years, the place had been ripped apart by its unimproved tenants,

449
00:48:16,160 --> 00:48:19,360
old and middle-aged people were scared to live there

450
00:48:19,360 --> 00:48:22,760
and the young were in the corridors with flick knives.

451
00:48:22,760 --> 00:48:29,200
Pruitt-Igoe got so bad that in 1972, major structural alterations were called for.

452
00:50:15,240 --> 00:50:20,680
Apart from Chandigarh, the only city in the world that has ever been built from
scratch

453
00:50:20,680 --> 00:50:24,720
along the Corbusian lines of rational town planning is here.

454
00:50:24,720 --> 00:50:28,560
In the '50s, the Brazilians decided they wanted a capital.

455
00:50:28,560 --> 00:50:31,800
The thing about bureaucrats is that they hate ports.

456
00:50:31,800 --> 00:50:36,840
They're too open to influence, they're too hard to control. They're too full of
life.

457
00:50:36,840 --> 00:50:40,360
So although they already had one very lively port in Rio,

458
00:50:40,360 --> 00:50:45,880
the Brazilians decided to put their capital 1,200 kilometres away in the centre of
the country

459
00:50:45,880 --> 00:50:50,080
on a red dirt plateau where nobody had ever lived or ever wanted to.

460
00:50:50,080 --> 00:50:55,600
Two of Corbusier's most brilliant South American disciples were called upon to
design it -

461
00:50:55,600 --> 00:51:01,960
Lucio Costa did the town plan and the main ceremonial buildings were done by Oscar
Niemeyer.

462
00:51:01,960 --> 00:51:07,000
Now, Brasilia, as the place is called, was going to be the city of tomorrow.

463
00:51:07,000 --> 00:51:11,840
It was going to be the triumph of reason and sunlight and the automobile.

464
00:51:11,840 --> 00:51:15,880
Here we were going to see what the international style could really do

465
00:51:15,880 --> 00:51:21,920
when it was backed with limitless quantities of cash and national enthusiasm. And
we did.

466
00:51:26,520 --> 00:51:29,560
This was La Ville Radieuse all over again.

467
00:51:29,560 --> 00:51:34,480
How good it can look on film - the most photogenic new town on Earth!

468
00:51:40,320 --> 00:51:46,360
It's the reconciliation of modernist democracy with the ceremonial grandeur of the
state

469
00:51:46,360 --> 00:51:50,400
that the Beaux Arts had wanted to symbolise 100 years before.

470
00:52:01,160 --> 00:52:03,560
It has always had a good press too.

471
00:52:03,560 --> 00:52:07,600
Brazilian architectural critics did not dare say anything against it

472
00:52:07,600 --> 00:52:12,640
and it's so far away that most other critics have never actually seen it.

473
00:52:19,640 --> 00:52:23,480
From the air you can see the abstract categories of layout,

474
00:52:23,480 --> 00:52:26,680
the big living blocks, the administrative core,

475
00:52:26,680 --> 00:52:31,000
the work areas, the green space, the crossing highways.

476
00:52:36,240 --> 00:52:39,880
Here, the Corbusian dream has come true.

477
00:52:39,880 --> 00:52:44,120
The car has abolished the street and the pedestrian is an irrelevance,

478
00:52:44,120 --> 00:52:48,520
a large irrelevance since most people in Brasilia do not own cars.

479
00:53:04,400 --> 00:53:08,640
The reality is worse than anything that has been said about the place.

480
00:53:08,640 --> 00:53:12,360
Brasilia is a facade, run up under political pressure,

481
00:53:12,360 --> 00:53:16,240
finished in 1960 and already falling to bits.

482
00:53:17,200 --> 00:53:21,120
Cracking stonework, flaking concrete,

483
00:53:21,120 --> 00:53:23,080
rusting metal,

484
00:53:23,080 --> 00:53:25,360
a ceremonial slum.

485
00:53:43,840 --> 00:53:48,680
So what Brasilia became in less than 20 years wasn't the city of tomorrow at all.

486
00:53:48,680 --> 00:53:51,000
It was yesterday's science fiction.

487
00:53:51,000 --> 00:53:55,000
Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future.
488
00:53:55,000 --> 00:53:59,040
This is what you get when perfectly decent, intelligent and talented men

489
00:53:59,040 --> 00:54:05,080
start thinking in terms of space, rather than place, and about single, rather than
multiple meanings.

490
00:54:05,080 --> 00:54:10,120
It's what you get when you design for political aspirations and not real human
needs.

491
00:54:10,120 --> 00:54:15,160
You get miles of jerry-built, platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens.

492
00:54:15,160 --> 00:54:19,720
This, one may fervently hope, is the last experiment of its kind.

493
00:54:19,720 --> 00:54:22,960
The Utopian buck stops here.

494
00:55:24,680 --> 00:55:27,120
I think Brasilia is emblematic.

495
00:55:27,120 --> 00:55:31,960
The last 50 years in architecture have witnessed the death of the future.

496
00:55:31,960 --> 00:55:36,800
Like the Baroque or the High Renaissance, the Modern Movement lived and died

497
00:55:36,800 --> 00:55:42,840
and it left behind its masterpieces which survive, but the doctrines don't inspire
us so much any more.

498
00:55:42,840 --> 00:55:46,680
People are always going to be moved and delighted by buildings

499
00:55:46,680 --> 00:55:49,920
like the Villa Savoye or the Seagram Building here,

500
00:55:49,920 --> 00:55:53,960
just as they are today by, say, the Pazzi Chapel or by the Paris Opera.

501
00:55:53,960 --> 00:55:56,800
But what has gone and, I think, gone for good
502
00:55:56,800 --> 00:56:01,840
is the idea that architects or artists can lay the rudiments of paradise here on
Earth

503
00:56:01,840 --> 00:56:03,880
and construct working Utopias.

504
00:56:03,880 --> 00:56:06,000
Cities are more complex than that

505
00:56:06,000 --> 00:56:10,920
and perhaps you can't purify human needs without taking away human freedom.

506
00:56:10,920 --> 00:56:17,280
In any case, you have to work with the real world and its inherited contents and
memory is reality.

507
00:56:17,280 --> 00:56:23,920
It took us the best part of 50 years to find that out, but perhaps it was worth the
trouble.

508
00:57:29,080 --> 00:57:32,120
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