The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories

by Edward Hollis

  THE ANSWER WAS already on its way. In 1933, the year before Manchester’s city council began to clear away the slums of Hulme, a group of young architects, fired with the passion that only youth can provide, had hired a steamer and set sail from Marseille into the future. By the time the boat docked in Athens, the Congrès Internationale d’Architecture Moderne had worked out what that future was going to be. Standing in the shadow of the Acropolis before fifteen hundred representatives of the government of Greece, the CIAM announced “a reply to the present chaos of the cities,” a proposal that “unlocks all the doors to the urbanism of modern times . . . In the hands of the authorities, itemized, annotated, clarified with an adequate explanation, the Athens Charter is the implement by which the destiny of cities will be set right.”

  The charter began with a warning and a vision, framed in portentous sentence fragments: “An immense, total mutation takes hold of the world: the machinist civilization is moving in amid disorder, improvisation, ruins . . . It has been going on for a century! . . . But a century also in which a new sap is rising . . . A century in which visionaries have brought forth ideas, thoughts, and made proposals . . . A day will come, perhaps . . .” It continued with a doctrine of twenty-five points, which set out with scientific precision what the city of the future would and should be. And the city of the future wasn’t going to be theoretical. The congress added a political injunction to their scientific analysis: “the Charter must be placed on the table of authority, in both the municipalities and the councils of state.”

  Scientific as it sounded, the charter had been inspired by a spate of prophecies every bit as crazed as the ravings of the Futurists. In the heady first days of the Russian Revolution, Soviet architects had sketched out gigantic collective dwellings that would literally float above the steppe, suspended by the awesome power of nuclear fusion. In Germany, the poet Paul Scheerbart foresaw cities made of transparent glass, and the architect Bruno Taut imagined a crystal citadel sparkling in the clear alpine air. No wonder the architects of CIAM set sail to Athens in confident expectation that the destiny of cities was within their grasp.

  The principles of the Athens Charter were given definitive form in a book published soon after the CIAM gathering by its leading light. Le Corbusier’s The Radiant City was the blueprint for a New Jerusalem, adorned as a bride for her husband. At her feet lay her smoky factories, connected to the rest of the world by an elaborate system of railway sidings. Her head was crowned with crystal towers, from which the intellectual elite of the city would govern like the philosopher-kings of Plato’s Republic. Her body was made of the dwellings of the people, and her lungs were great green parks.

  This radiant city was the purest demonstration of the charter’s description of urbanism as “a three-dimensional, not a two-dimensional, science.” Elevated roads were suspended above the liberated verdure, feeding their traffic into great apartment buildings that sailed above the treetops. On the roofs and balconies of these towers, their inhabitants disported themselves in the sun like first-class passengers on great white ocean liners. They looked out over a seemingly empty greensward, an immaculate forest without a trace of human history. The palaces and temples of former times had been swept away, and the streets and squares of Le Corbusier’s own day had likewise disappeared, leaving only the future: an expanse, as Corbusier put it, of “sunlight, space, and greenery.” It was a paradise that could not appear until the End of Days.

  But the architects of the Congrès Internationale d’Architecture Moderne weren’t going to have to wait for the end of days for their paradise to appear. Their utopia was not consigned to an inaccessible island—the “no place”—of Thomas More. It was just around the corner. Within a decade, the Second World War had swept the old cities away, more completely, perhaps, than the communists and the Futurists could ever have imagined; and the world was ready to be made anew.

  AND MADE ANEW it was—or most of it, at least. In the years following the war, the devastated cities of Europe rebuilt themselves with remarkable speed in the image of the radiant city, but for two decades nothing happened in the empty space that had once been Hulme. In 1964, Robert Mellish, who had been appointed by the housing minister as “progress chaser,” visited the inner-city wasteland and cried out, “Why are you showing me this desolation? Why don’t you put some houses on it?”

  The city councillors of Manchester, stung by the progress chaser’s outburst, went over the Pennines to see what had been going on in nearby Sheffield. They were awestruck and envious: on top of a hill in the city center, their rivals had built the prophesied city of the modernists. Great stretches of apartments afforded sunlight, space, greenery, and indoor toilet facilities to a proletariat that until lately had barely had access to running water. What’s more, Sheffield had built a very British version of the radiant city. British architects of the postwar period were certainly enamored of dazzling liners sailing through oceans of greenery, but they were also concerned to preserve something of the sociability of the old slums that they were so busy replacing. They were, despite themselves, nostalgic for the cobbled lanes and back-to-back cottages that had once been Engels’s nightmare, for they were learning that modernist architecture could engender the most modern of afflictions: loneliness and alienation.

  The Park Hill estate in Sheffield provided the definitive solution. Huge concrete buildings bestrode the ruins of what had once been dense inner city, leaving vast areas of open green space between them. But these buildings were linked by broad concrete decks that formed a network of “streets in the sky,” with the flats opening onto them as cottages had opened onto the lanes of old. Soon, the architects confidently predicted, the decks would be filled with playing children, their mothers gossiping around the rubbish chute as if it were the village well.

  The city fathers of Manchester saw what they had to do. They poached J. S. Millar, who had been instrumental in the implementation of Park Hill, to take charge of their planning department; and Millar approached Lewis Womersley, who had also worked on the Sheffield project, to transform the wastelands of Hulme. Womersley and his partner Hugh Wilson were efficient operators. They had already provided, or were in the process of providing, plans for the modernist expansion and transformation of Skelmersdale, Redditch, Northampton, and Nottingham. In 1966, the pair presented their designs for Hulme to the Manchester city council. The bald minutes of the meeting convey little of the excitement that the design aroused in the panjandrums of the committee.

  The planning brief for Hulme stage 5 asked that densities should increase near to the neighbourhood centre and stated that the aim should be to create an urban environment on a city scale. The solution to this problem proposed by the consultants to achieve larger scale and high density is to build continuous blocks of maisonettes at six stories high in a few bold and simple forms so as to develop large open spaces.

  These continuous blocks were laid out in the form of four crescents—reminiscent, the architects claimed, of the Royal Crescent in Bath and the Nash terraces around Regent’s Park in London. The councillors were suitably impressed.

  It wasn’t all about nostalgia for Georgian elegance, though. Hulme was going to be a modern sort of place built in a modern sort of way, using the latest industrial processes. The architects’ report explained how “a high quality of finish, both internally and externally, can be obtained because structural components, fittings and services will be manufactured and supervised under factory conditions and not subjected to climatic and other hazards of an open site.” In plain terms, this meant that the entire building complex was constructed out of precast concrete. Five years after Wilson and Womersley’s presentation, the Hulme Crescents—prophesied, in their various ways, by everyone from Engels to Le Corbusier—were ready for their first inhabitants.

  SOME PEOPLE CAN still remember what the Crescents were supposed to have been like. A visitor to a Web site funereally named “exHulme” posts a message signed “Caroline.” She wr
ites:

  I was four when we moved there. My family moved to Hulme because Broughton in Salford was being cleared. We were promised from what I have been told by my mam “a bright new future in the new deck access flats.” At first and I have to say for the first few years we lived there they were lovely flats to live in . . . I remember watching what I thought was really posh the man over the way cleaning ’is Avenger, and thinking cur that’s posh. He did that every Sunday. We made friends easy and it did seem like a real community . . . we had shops, and a wash house. Cos in those days it was dead posh to have a washing machine. I watched the Crescents of Robert Adam and John Nash go up . . . and like I say for the first few years things were lovely we had every facility we could ask for . . . they were wonderful places. Full of really new ideas and loads of hope for the people living in them. People talked to each other. And I can remember laughter with a family that lived in them. They asked me and my grandad in for a cup of tea. Showed us round the strange way the flats were designed. But the flat was so clean and nice and they were so proud of it.

  But when people started to live in them, the Crescents started to lose a little of their shine. Caroline continues:

  Then suddenly about 1972 I think it was things started to go wrong. And like I say people started to move out. I remember walking over to the shops with my mam, and running across the green in front of the crescent cos there were strange people hanging about in the stairwells of the crescent. But it was all there, parks in front of the flats, shops and the lot. But it all went so wrong, don’t know how but it did. As the crescents started to get bad, the badness started to come.

  The badness: it began with damp patches on the wall. In the winter of 1971, some tenants had started complaining about condensation in their flats, dark blotches disfiguring their bright modern wallpapers. The architects and the housing officers came to see the damage and roundly berated the tenants for not opening their windows while they cooked or dried their clothes. The tenants opened the windows and put up with the icy drafts, but the dampness didn’t go away.

  In 1973, the oil crisis precipitated a massive rise in the costs of power. The Crescents were heated by electricity, so the people who lived in them were particularly badly affected; in some cases heating bills rocketed to five hundred pounds a quarter. Many tenants simply disconnected themselves from the electrical supply. They saw out the dark winter in their modern flats by old-fashioned candlelight, warming themselves around paraffin heaters. At least the gloom concealed the stains.

  But these were just the technical difficulties. There were management problems as well. The Crescents had been designed to rehouse a particularly deprived portion of the citizens of Manchester: 70 percent of the residents had come there as a result of slum clearance elsewhere, and 30 percent of them were on welfare benefits provided by the city council. The rent they owed was paid to the city by the city itself, and as their proportion increased—within two years, 44 percent of the residents of the Crescents were on benefits—the city’s income diminished accordingly. And on this ever-shrinking budget, the city fathers had to somehow manage the maintenance of two miles of building: replacing the lights, cleaning the walkways, clearing away the rubbish that fluttered along the concrete decks and littered the grass. They were unprepared to handle even the basic upkeep, let alone the plagues of rats and cockroaches that seemed to spread along the Crescents like wildfire.

  And these were just the management problems. There were serious design flaws to deal with, too. As in Sheffield’s Park Hill, all the flats in the Crescents were accessed by great decks, which stretched, in total, for several miles; and these “streets in the sky” proved to be just as sociable as the architects had hoped. Kids loved to run along their length, pushing on doorbells and running away when someone answered. They loved to climb up on the balustrades, peering over the edge to sniff the air that lay beyond. The way the balustrades were detailed just seemed to invite it, with plenty of footholds and big fat ledges to lean on. It was only a matter of time before someone fell off them. He was a little boy of four: one year older than the Crescents themselves.

  That was the last straw. In 1975, the families of the Hulme Crescents presented a petition to the Housing Committee of the city of Manchester. They were scared for their children, and their demands were clear.

  A list to be drawn up of all the families who want to be rehoused.

  These must be listed in order of priority.

  Dates must be given for rehousing.

  No new families to be put into any properties. Any flats left empty by tenants to be given to single tenants, couples without children, or students.

  All tenants should have the right to get on the transfer list regardless of rent arrears.

  “Why should we have to pay to live here in these dangerous prisons?” the petition asked, and it proclaimed emphatically, “Rehousing must start now.”

  The Housing Committee agreed with them. The families moved out, and the Crescents were left empty, ready for single tenants, couples without children, and students to move in. One of them recalls: “The day I moved in was 11th Dec. 1981, and there was deep snow everywhere—unusual for Manchester at any time. As we tiptoed around the crescents the vibe was awesome—monolithic magnificence—a complete void. I don’t think even seeing the pyramids for the first time could compare.”

  A complete void the Crescents had indeed become. So few people actually wanted to live in Hulme that the city started giving the flats away. Well, not exactly giving, as Karen recalls on the exHulme site.

  Moved to Hulme in 1982 and lived on each of the crescents . . . moving regularly with the shopping trolley that everyone used, a mains fuse and a wire to get round the meter and my Yale lock. Seemed very normal back then—choose a flat and move. It went wrong one time though when it seemed I had picked the same flat as two guys who proceeded to try and kill me with a hammer.

  All you had to do was break into an empty apartment and lock yourself in for a while. You wouldn’t need to bother with rent or landlords: by the time the authorities found out about you, you would have moved on. That was the difference between the new tenants and the families that had moved out, you see: there was nothing to tie them down.

  After the first inhabitants of the Crescents had left, the Manchester city council had installed steel gates at regular intervals along the access decks to the flats. These gates could only be opened by security codes—codes that the tenants knew, the housing officers soon forgot, and the police never found out. The council being the council, it took them some time to realize they had locked themselves out. There was no way they could keep up with the new residents, who started, in the absence of any visible authority, to invent a society all their own. They were young, shiftless, feckless, and free; they didn’t have families and jobs and possessions. The laws of property were suspended in Hulme; nothing belonged to anybody, and everything belonged to everybody. Everything was stolen, scammed, joyridden, totaled, and given away. They told one another that it was exactly what Engels had prophesied.

  The Hulmans of Hulme did whatever they wanted. The accepted modes of behavior didn’t just break down in the Crescents: they were rejected wholesale, spat on and told to fuck off. Karen recalls a déjeuner sur l’herbe.

  Remember Queenie? We were sat on the grass outside the Zion one hot sunny day, about 15–20 of us all drinking and smoking when Queenie came along swearing and shouting and offering to sit on anyone’s face! Poor Shaun (not with us now I’m afraid) was pinned to the grass whilst she did it . . . Yes, I remember Rizzla too at the precinct but also remember vividly the day he jumped off the top walkway between Robert Adam and William Kent . . . We all ran out of the pub expecting him to be splatted on the road when he suddenly got up, started swearing and went off to do it again! Crazy guy.

  By the mid-eighties, the Hulmans were a scurvy bunch that is still recalled with wistful nostalgia. Someone has even set up a MySpace page for the Crescents, a mock personal
profile in which the buildings describe whom they “would like to meet.”

  Punks, goths, ratios, scum, dickheads, junkies, bums, bummer, animal, wasters, prats, knobheads, alkies, speedfreaks, perry boys, crusties, salts, pissheads, muggers, mugs, moonies, rastas, weirdos, wannabees, the grants, mohawks, psycho billies, spikey’s mum, cockroaches, methadone queuers, arsebandits, violent bastards, depressed hippies, pidgeons, barbed up scallies wankers, acid heads, pigs, robbers, crusties, the psv, indie kids, e-heads, dopeheads, trustafarians, the scream team, stringies . . .

  They weren’t in the Athens Charter, were they?

  IN 1976, A young music journalist called Tony Wilson went to a concert at the Free Trade Hall in the center of Manchester. It was a thinly attended event, with just forty people in the audience. They had come to see an unknown new band called the Sex Pistols.

  An hour or so later, Wilson left the hall burning with a messianic fervor for punk rock. He hadn’t experienced anything so exciting since reading Engels and hearing about Tristan Tzara at the Cabaret Voltaire. He found an old working men’s club on the edge of the Crescents and opened it as the Russell Club, a place for the new music that was beginning to pour out of the housing estates. It might not have looked like much, but Wilson’s factory of art—made very much in the mold of Andy Warhol’s cooperative and the Bauhaus—proved to be a greenhouse that germinated a new avant-garde, self-consciously reminiscent of the great age of modernist prophecy in the 1920s. The Fall, Joy Division, and all the rest of them played in the club in their early days. Wilson went on to found Factory Records, a record label that put Manchester on the international map. He employed the graphic designer Peter Saville to do the club posters and the album covers, and Saville did exactly what László Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Duchamp and Georges Braque had done in the 1920s: he ripped things off, collaged them together, and passed them on, a stream of achingly hip images of a shattered past and an incomplete future.