The problem with the best building plots is that they almost always already have buildings on them. Rigorous building control makes cities hard places to build in, and the avid protection of the countryside makes it very hard to build in the middle of nowhere. So almost the only way to build something new is to demolish something else. But then, historic buildings, city districts and skylines are protected. So the solution is to demolish something that nobody likes. And that is, almost always, modernist architecture. Yet if we lose an entire strata of our history – as looks increasingly likely – we deprive the future of the possibility of judging for itself, and learning first hand from some mistakes, and some triumphs.
There is no doubt that modernist architecture can be hard to love, and hard to defend. Few people miss the sink estates, the monolithic offices on podiums that mercilessly broke up the ancient street plans of our city centres, the rain-stained concrete or the brutal multi-storey car parks. But that is not the whole picture. There are a few undisputed monuments, protected by listing and legislation, but we are in critical danger of losing other extremely fine buildings to bland commercial development, often far more aesthetically and intellectually impoverished than what it replaces.
The biggest battles are being fought in the US, the land of the modern. Virtually every big city is suffering the loss of a major modernist building. Manhattan recently lost the eccentric and elegant 1962 facade of Two Columbus Circle, designed by Edward Durrell Stone (architect of the Museum of Modern Art), extraordinarily thanks to the Museum of Art and Design, which should have known better. Boston is contemplating the disappearance of its most visible modern building, the 1968 City Hall, a pivotal structure in the development of the architecture that came to be known as brutalism. A little way away along Federal Street it will probably also lose an innovative 13-storey tower by Paul Rudolph (1960), one of the most important American architects of the modern age. Rudolph’s name crops up again in Florida where his exquisite 1958 Riverview High School, a pioneering low-cost public building around a wonderful courtyard, is under threat of being replaced by, of all things, a car park for the new school building.
Also beginning to attract attention in Florida is the plight of MiMo, Miami Modernism, the wonderfully flamboyant commercial architecture of sun, sand and sea. Lacking the intellectual rigour and credibility of major modernist works, dozens of superb MiMo buildings have been disappearing as beachfront real estate values soar. Yet, as the restoration of the art deco district shows, historic modern architecture can itself become a vehicle for regeneration. In Las Vegas, the situation is even worse. Considering the city’s nostalgia for its Rat-Pack past, it is surprisingly unsentimental. The original Sands Casino was dynamited 11 years ago, and virtually nothing survives from the city’s golden era as huge themed developments crush everything before them. There is surprisingly little outcry but perhaps Vegas was always more theme park than city.
There is even more destruction going on at a smaller scale at the local level. Every day, historic drive-ins, diners, gas stations and storefronts are destroyed across the US, almost invariably to make way for malls that rarely even qualify as architecture. These buildings, dating from the postwar suburban building boom, constitute the physical manifestation of an era. The cars, guitars and records of the time have passed into heritage: no one would dream of destroying a ’57 Chevy or a ’54 Strat but that is what is happening to 1950s and 1960s buildings.
This kind of destruction is not confined to the pioneering west. The new heritage frontier is the old cold war enemy, Russia. The period immediately after the Russian Revolution saw a brief flowering of architectural idealism and the realisation of some visionary works of modernism. Most of these buildings survived, although severely neglected and badly altered, but the recent explosion of development in Moscow has put many under severe threat. Most famously there is Konstantin Melnikov’s extraordinary cylindrical 1927 house in Moscow, its extremely valuable central site putting it in jeopardy. There is also Moisei Ginzburg’s powerful 1928 Narkomfin Building, an experiment in communal living for civil servants, now sitting on architectural death row waiting to be replaced by a luxury hotel. These buildings have profoundly influenced the paths of modern architecture, yet their cultural, even potential touristic value remains entirely unrecognised by Moscow’s brutally pro-development mayor Yuri Luzhkov. Their fate looks bleak. A photographic exhibition at New York’s MoMA, Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922-32, documents the diversity and invention of the period’s architecture but also its extraordinary and moving dilapidation.
Asia also has its issues with modernist heritage. Booming cities have little time for architectural nostalgia. Shanghai’s fine art deco buildings are under threat, while much decent modern architecture in Beijing has already been flattened. In Japan, a surprising death sentence was recently served on one of the most influential towers of the postwar era, Kisho Kurokawa’s visionary Nakagin Capsule Tower of 1972. Rising from the now astronomically valuable real estate of Tokyo’s Ginza district, the tower was the first and most sophisticated expression of the movement towards prefabrication, pure sci-fi when it was built, and the clarity of its idea and its expression continues to exert a profound effect on architectural thinking. The building’s architect is still alive to see this masterpiece of his early career destroyed.
Britain’s position in the battle to preserve what’s left of modernism is a little eccentric. As the home of heritage, a place where the past is revered above all else, we have a poor record of protecting the more recent past. British culture never really developed a bond with modernism. We remain too intimate with its failings. And compared to the US or to continental Europe, there are few modernist masterpieces here. Yet the recent £111m refurbishment of the Royal Festival Hall demonstrates an appetite for good modern design. Hungarian émigré Erno Goldfinger’s exquisite 1939 Hampstead house became the first modern property to be acquired by the National Trust, while his Trellick Tower in North Kensington, once derided as a hideous blot on west London’s landscape, has become one of the hippest places to live. London’s own experiment in modernist communal living, Wells Coates’ 1932 Lawn Road building in Belsize Park, was recently converted into affordable housing in an exemplary scheme that shows what can be done with redundant modern works.
But these are all important works by significant architects. The real problems lie not with the masterpieces but with the mundane. It is the solid, competent, often very fine buildings that form the urban background that are most in danger, and hardest to preserve. It is impossible to argue that they represent world heritage, only that they constitute the archaeology of an era – but an era that is too close to our own, its failures too fresh. These are buildings that will be missed possibly only a generation from now. One of the triggers of the contemporary conservation movement was the pointless destruction of the Euston Arch in 1962. The grand and generous modernist concourse that crushed it is now itself under threat from development.
Another irony is that a delightful 1970s building designed by architect and academic Joseph Rykwert in Chelsea, London, is almost certain to be replaced by a gated development for the super-rich by Lord Foster, while Foster’s own heritage is up against the wall as his 1982 Renault Building in Swindon, one of the keystones of high-tech architecture, sits idle, awaiting news of its future as the site of a Chinese enterprise centre.
On the other side of the Thames stands London’s most obvious conservation problem, the vast rotting carcase of Battersea Power Station, which has been bought by an Irish developer. Its architect, Giles Gilbert Scott, was also responsible for the magnificent industrial architecture of the 1936 Guinness Brewery at Park Royal, another building under threat of demolition, yet one that would surely last a millennium if properly adapted. Then there is the Gateshead Car Park, famous for its appearance in the 1971 film Get Carter, a building with a cult following and one of the key pieces in the development of brutalism. Then there are London’s Commonwealth Institute (which I remember fondly from my childhood, on a par with the Festival Hall), Birmingham’s ambitious Central Library and rather delicate Chamber of Commerce, complete with John Piper mural, and the superb Wills Factory in Bristol, a piece of modernist industrial architecture still stunning in its elegant simplicity. Finally there is the sorry tale of Glasgow architects Gillespie, Kidd & Coia’s St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross, a monumental piece of religious architecture that fell into disuse within a decade of being completed and now stands as a magnificent, if premature, ruin.
Of course, much of what was built in the 20th century was rubbish and there is no call to conserve everything. But the drive to purge the landscape of the output of an entire generation of architects is short-sighted. We hear much about the green revolution yet the energy (physical and intellectual) embodied in these buildings is disregarded. And the success of modernist architectural tourism, from Goldfinger’s house in London to Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, indicates the level of interest in the period that laid the roots of the era in which we live. To understand where we are, we need to be able to encounter the architecture of the 20th century in an everyday setting, not preserved in aspic, but thoughtfully adapted. If we lose the bulk of our modernist architecture, as seems increasingly likely, we lose a layer of our cities and a part of ourselves.
‘Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922-32’, Museum of Modern Art, New York, to October 29
