But time has run out for the field. The patch of dandelions will soon be the living room of number 24. A few metres away, among the corn poppies, will be the garage for number 25, and there, in the white campions, its dining room, where a person not yet born will one day have an argument with his or her parents. Above the hedgerow, there’ll be a child’s room, drawn up by a woman working on a computer in an air-conditioned office in a business park near a motorway. A man in an airport on the other side of the world will miss his family and think of home, its foundations dug where a puddle now lies. Great Corsby Village will do its best to imply its age and inevitability, and nothing more will be said of the redstarts, picnics or the long summer’s evening that rang to the sound of ‘Mellom Bakkar og Berg’.
2.
The building of new houses is typically synonymous with desecration, with the birth of neighbourhoods less beautiful than the countryside they have replaced.
However bitter this equation, we conventionally accept it with passivity and resignation. Our acquiescence stems from the authority that buildings can acquire through the simple fact of their existence. Their mass and solidity, the lack of clues as to their origins, the difficulty and cost involved in removing them, lends them the unchallengeable conviction of an ugly cliff-face or hill.
We therefore refrain from raising of the tower block, the new antique village or the riverside mansion that most basic and incensed of political questions: ‘Who did this?’ Yet an investigation of the process by which buildings rise reveals that unfortunate cases can in the end always be attributed not to the hand of God, or to any immovable economic or political necessities, or to the entrenched wishes of purchasers, or to some new depths of human depravity, but to a pedestrian combination of low ambition, ignorance, greed and accident.
A development which spoils ten square miles of countryside will be the work of a few people neither particularly sinful nor malevolent. They may be called Derek or Malcolm, Hubert or Shigeru, they may love golf and animals, and yet, in a few weeks, they can put in motion plans which will substantially ruin a landscape for 300 years or more.
The same kind of banal thinking which in literature produces nothing worse than incoherent books and tedious plays can, when applied to architecture, leave wounds which will be visible from outer space. Bad architecture is a frozen mistake writ large. But it is only a mistake, and, despite the impressive amounts of scaffolding, concrete, noise, money and bluster which tend to accompany its appearance, it is no more deserving of our deference than a blunder in any other area of life. We should be as unintimidated by architectural mediocrity as we are by unjust laws or nonsensical arguments.
Christopher Wren, A Plan of the City of London, 1666
We should recover a sense of the malleability behind what is built. There is no predetermined script guiding the direction of bulldozers or cranes. While mourning the number of missed opportunities, we have no reason to abandon a belief in the ever-present possibility of moulding circumstances for the better.
3.
There was certainly no predetermined reason for parts of London to turn out as ugly as they have. In September 1666, after almost the whole of the city had burnt to the ground in the Great Fire, Christopher Wren presented Charles II with plans to rebuild the capital with boulevards and squares, perspectives and symmetrical avenues, as well as a coherent road system and an adequate riverfront. London might have had some of the grandeur of Paris and Rome; it might have been a great European city, rather than a sprawl which foreshadowed Los Angeles and Mexico City.
Charles II commended Wren on the beauty and intelligence of his scheme. But the decision about how to proceed was not solely his to take: lacking absolute power, he had to defer to the City Council, which was dominated by merchants anxious over their tax revenues and the difficulty of reconciling their competing property rights. Wren’s ideas were evaluated by a team of commissioners appointed by the council and deemed too complex. Conservatism and fear took hold, and by February of the following year the plan was dead, Wren’s boulevards having been consigned to fantasy and London itself abandoned to the interests of the merchants, who, loath to give up a sliver of their yearly profits, happily condemned the capital to three centuries and more of inferiority.
4.
The contingent nature of bad architecture is equally evident when we look at old maps of London’s suburbs and see that what are now miles of blight were once acres of orchards and open meadows. There were farms at White City and apple trees at Willesden Junction. The terrain on which the disfigured forms of Shepherd’s Bush and Harlesden stand today was at the outset an arena of pure possibility, on which streets rivalling those of Bath or Edinburgh might have been built.
The idea sounds pretentious only because we are reluctant to imagine that on a patch of ordinary ground where nothing significant ever occurred (aside from the slow gestation of generations of crab-apples), one of the great urban rooms of the world – another Royal Crescent or Charlotte Square – could be summoned to rise. We are prone to falling into a series of illogical assumptions which hold us back from being more demanding of architects: we presume that man-made beauty has been preordained to exist in certain parts of the world but not in others; that urban masterpieces are the work of people fundamentally different from, and greater than, ourselves; and that superior buildings must cost inordinately more than the uglier architecture which typically takes their place.
But, in truth, there was nothing especially promising about the hills of Bath before John Wood the Elder got to them, or about the fields near the swampy North Loch above the medieval core of Edinburgh before James Craig drew up his scheme for the New Town. Both were generic swaths of earth, furnished with grass, sheep, daisies, trees and, in Edinburgh’s case, swarms of virulent mosquitoes. And, lest we feel tempted to shift our supposed locus of predetermined greatness from places to people, we should note that Wood and Craig, imaginative and highly persevering though they both were, did not possess a unique genius. The residential squares, gardens and avenues they built followed from principles which had been well known for generations. But each of these men was fired by the prospect of bringing a legendary city into being, a new Athens or Jerusalem, and in this ambition found the confidence to overcome the innumerable practical challenges involved in turning green fields into attractive streets. Having a belief in a special destiny, a sense of standing at a privileged moment in history, may well be grandiose and misguided, but it also provides an indispensable and therefore not unprofitable means of ensuring that beauty will have an opportunity to prevail.
The promise of Shepherd’s Bush:
John Rocque, A Survey of London and Country Ten Miles Around, 1746
Money can be no excuse either. Though Bath’s crescents and Edinburgh’s New Town were not cheap to build, we would be unfairly blaming a lack of inspiration on poverty by proposing that a tight budget ever condemned a building to ugliness – as a visit to the wealthy suburbs of Riyadh and the shopkeepers’ houses of old Siena will rapidly and poignantly attest.
Fed up with hearing that no great cities could be built in the modern era because the necessary funds weren’t available, Le Corbusier asked sarcastically: ‘Do we not possess the means? Louis XIV made do with picks and shovels … Hausmann’s equipment was also meagre; the shovel, the pick, the wagon, the trowel, the wheelbarrow, the simple tools of every race before the mechanical age.’ Our cranes, diggers, quick-drying concrete and welding machines leave us with nothing to blame but our own incompetence.
5.
Ask the property development company what sort of houses will go up on the doomed field, and you’ll be sent a waxy marketing brochure showing five different house types, each named after an English monarch. The Elizabeth II boasts chrome door handles and a stainless-steel oven; the George V has a fibreglass-beamed dining room and a Neo-Arts and Crafts roof; and the Henry VIII is, inevitably, a Neo-Tudor loyalist.
If, after browsing through
the elegant presentation material, we still felt inclined to question the appearance of these buildings, the property developer would almost certainly retaliate with a familiar and apparently invincible argument: such houses have always sold rapidly and in great quantities. We would be sternly reminded that to scorn their designs would therefore be to ignore commercial logic and attempt to deny others a democratic right to their own tastes, bringing us into conflict with two of the great authoritative concepts of our civilisation, money and liberty.
But such a defence is not without its fault lines. A few of these came into focus as I flew to Japan, on my way to Huis Ten Bosch and the ryokan. Wedged in a window seat, unable to sleep, with the Arctic Circle shining a luminous green outside, I turned to a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature (1988) by the American scholar of Japan, Donald Keene.
Keene observed that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated by a love of irregularity rather than symmetry, the impermanent rather than the eternal and the simple rather than the ornate. The reason owes nothing to climate or genetics, added Keene, but is the result of the actions of writers, painters and theorists, who have actively shaped the sense of beauty of their nation.
Contrary to the Romantic belief that we each settle naturally on a fitting idea of beauty, it seems that our visual and emotional faculties in fact need constant external guidance to help them decide what they should take note of and appreciate. ‘Culture’ is the word we have assigned to the force that assists us in identifying which of our many sensations we should focus on and apportion value to.
In medieval Japan, poets and Zen priests directed the Japanese towards aspects of the world to which Westerners have seldom publicly accorded more than negligible or casual attention: cherry blossoms, deformed pieces of pottery, raked gravel, moss, rain falling on leaves, autumn skies, roof tiles and unvarnished wood. A word emerged, wabi, of which no Western language, tellingly, has a direct equivalent, which identified beauty with unpretentious, simple, unfinished, transient things. There was wabi to be enjoyed in an evening spent alone in a cottage in the woods hearing the rain fall. There was wabi in old ill-matching sets of crockery, in plain buckets, in walls with blemishes, and in rough, weathered stones covered in moss and lichen. The most wabi colours were grey, black and brown.
To immerse ourselves in Japanese aesthetics and to nurture a sympathy for its atmosphere may help to prepare us for the day when, in a museum of ceramics, we encounter traditional tea bowls, for example, by the artist Hon’ami Koetsu. We won’t believe, as we might have done without the legacy of 600 years of reflection on the appeal of wabi, that such pieces are puzzling blobs of unformed matter. We will have learnt to appreciate a beauty that we were not born seeing. And, in the process, we will puncture the simplistic notion, heavily promoted by purveyors of plastic mansions, that what a person currently finds beautiful should be taken as the limit of all that he or she can ever love.
In 1900 the Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki travelled to England and there noted, with some surprise, how few of the things he found beautiful stirred the locals: ‘I was once laughed at because I invited someone for a snow-viewing. At another time I described how deeply the feelings of Japanese are affected by the moon, and my listeners were only puzzled … I was invited to Scotland to stay at a palatial house. One day, when the master and I took a walk in the garden, I noted that the paths between the rows of trees were all thickly covered with moss. I offered a compliment, saying that these paths had magnificently acquired a look of age. Whereupon my host replied that he soon intended to get a gardener to scrape all this moss away.’
The possibility of seeing beauty where we had not previously looked:
Hon’ami Koetsu (1558–1637), tea bowls
There has, of course, always been the occasional Westerner who found beauty in rough bits of pottery or welcomed the appearance of a spread of moss. And yet it can be hard to champion such interests within a culture whose preferences run instead towards Palladian villas and Delft porcelain. We can be laughed into silence for attempting to speak in praise of phenomena which we lack the right words to describe. We may censor ourselves before others have the chance to do so. We may not even notice that we have extinguished our own curiosity, just as we may forget we had something to say until we find someone who is willing to hear it.
For all that we mock those who fake aesthetic enthusiasms in hopes of gaining respect, the opposite tendency is the more poignant, whereby we repress our true passions in order not to seem peculiar. We may stay quiet about our affection for daffodils, for instance, until a reading of Wordsworth endorses the sentiment, or suppress our fondness for ritualised, solemn snow-viewing until the merit of the practice is confirmed by Natsume Soseki.
It is books, poems and paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge. Oscar Wilde referred to this phenomenon when he quipped that there was no fog in London before Whistler started painting the Thames. Likewise, there must have been little beauty in old stones before Japanese priests and poets began writing about them.
The property developer’s reflexive defence of existing tastes constitutes, at base, a denial that human beings can ever come to love anything they have not yet noticed. But even as it plays with the language of freedom, this assertion suppresses the truth that in order to choose properly, one must know what there is to choose from.
We should remember the lessons of the moss gardens and the pieces of rough pottery the next time we consider a reactionary housing estate. We should be free to imagine how much tastes could evolve if only new styles were placed before our eyes and new words in our vocabulary. An array of hitherto ignored materials and forms could reveal their qualities while the status quo would be prevented from coercively suggesting itself to be the natural and eternal order of things.
After being properly introduced to the true range of architecture, the prospective buyers of a red-brick, Neo-Tudor house might look beyond their original wish. A few might even surprise themselves by registering an interest in a raw wabi-looking concrete box, to whose virtues they had, through a journey of aesthetic education, been led to feel newly sensitive.
6.
Lest we begin to despair at the thought of how much might be required to bring about a genuine evolution in taste, we may remind ourselves how modest were the means by which previous aesthetic revolutions were accomplished.
A few buildings and a book have usually been sufficient to provide viable models for others to follow. Nietzsche observed that the development portentously known as the ‘Italian Renaissance’, which we might imagine to have been engineered by innumerable actors, was in fact the work of only about a hundred people, while the related innovation which textbooks call the ‘rebirth of Classicism’ depended on even fewer advocates: a single structure, Brunelleschi’s Foundling Hospital, and one treatise, Leone Battista Alberti’s Ten Books on Architecture (1452), were enough to impress a new sensibility on the world. It took just one volume, Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus (1715), to entrench the Palladian style in the English landscape, and a mere 200 or so pages of Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture (1923) to decide the appearance of much of the built environment of the twentieth century. Certain buildings – the Schröder House, the Farnsworth House, the California Case Study Houses – have had an impact quite out of proportion to their size or cost.
Learning to recognise the charms of raw concrete:
Marte. Marte Architects, house, Voralberg, 1999
In all of these tectonic shifts, the tenacity of the prime movers was every bit as important as the resources at their disposal. The great architect–revolutionaries were a synthesis of the artistic and the practical. They knew how to draw and think, but also how to cajole, charm, bully, and play long, patient, careful games with their clients and with politicians. Because the days of abs
olutism are over (as Le Corbusier was not the first architect regretfully to observe), we can no longer behave like Louis XIV, who would only have to wave his hand for buildings to be moved as though they were children’s blocks.
In a more collective, democratic era, architects have had to grow into artists of the committee meeting, people like Charles Holden who (together with Frank Pick) managed to persuade a British government instinctively opposed to serious architecture to make way for several masterpieces of station design on London’s suburban underground lines. As Le Corbusier shrewdly observed: ‘We must always remember that the fates of cities are decided in the Town Hall.’
7.
There are few harsher indictments against architecture than the sadness we feel at the arrival of bulldozers, for our grief is in almost all cases fuelled more by a distaste for what is to be built than by any hatred of the idea of development itself.
When bands of workmen arrived to sketch out the crescents of Bath or Edinburgh’s New Town, as they cut their way through brambles and hammered measuring ropes into the earth, few tears would have been shed at the impending destruction. Although there were no doubt some old and noble trees standing on what would become residential streets, though there must have been burrows for foxes and nests for robins, these succumbed to the saw and the shovel with only passing sorrow from their previous denizens, for what was planned in their place was expected to provide more than adequate compensation. There was a fitting alternative to a field of daisies in St James’s Square, there was beauty of a type to which even a tree could not aspire in Calton Hill, there was serenity such as no stream could match in the Royal Crescent. As William Morris pointed out, had we lived in Venice in her early days and watched the swamplands of the lagoon – muddy-beige smears of a kind still visible on the city’s outskirts – being turned into streets and canals, ‘as islet after islet was built upon, we should have grudged it but little.’ Nor would we have been overly sad, Morris thought, to watch ‘as Oxford crept northward from its early home of Oseney … and the great Colleges and noble churches hid year by year more and more of the grass and flowers of Oxfordshire’.
The Architecture of Happiness Page 15