Beside Lake Sevan in Armenia is an uncompleted hotel complex from the Soviet period. Several such sites were abandoned with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Armenia lacked the resources to complete them. Such grand projects were not, in any case, a priority. The newly ex-Soviet republic was dealing with the effects of a major earthquake, and fighting a war with its neighbour Azerbaijan. In Yerevan, street-trees were used for winter fuel because Azerbaijan had cut off the oil supply. With little international tourism, and without the party-organised workers' summer vacations for which the hotel complex had been planned, Armenia had no use for a new five hundred- room hotel. Nor was there the means to demolish it. So the project was abandoned. Being of solid construction, the empty, unfinished structures remained.

 

The hulks have begun, nearly twenty years on, to seem like the monuments of a long-dead past. Wildflowers grow around them as they endure, set in a landscape of lakes, mountains and medieval churches with their graveyards. The abandoned projects join the category of the romantic ruin. The image they present is not unlike that of a Greek Temples, or the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, but it is transmuted into the language of international modernism. Of course, I am reading backwards. This is my projection as a Western visitor (in Armenia for a summer school in art curating and criticism). I attach the image of the abandoned project which I saw to the category of the ruin. I already have this category in my mental apparatus, established through experiential and cerebral means - in previous visits to Egypt, Greece, Italy, and so forth; and in reading Shelley and other Romantic poets. My romanticised image is in keeping with a latent Ostalgie - a nostalgia for the culture of the East bloc reserved to Westerners - so that the abandoned concrete towers read to me as the detritus of a past civilisation and not merely as ex-Soviet hulks. Yet the abandoned hotel complex represents, not a lost civilisation, but a culture now encapsulated in history. It is a history which spans the nineteenth and the twentieth century, in both East and West blocs: modernism.

 

I want to revisit international modernism, the end of which began in the 1960s with the spectacular collapse and subsequent demolition of tower blocks on both sides of the Atlantic. International modernism also had a history in the East bloc. There is a striking visual parallel between, for instance, the Empire State Building (featured in the movie King Kong) and designs for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, or the Palace of Culture in Warsaw. It was an international style, and the term international denoted a utopian thread, a desire for unity and cohesion after the fracturing of Europe in the 1914-18 war. International modernism produced progressive social housing as well as public buildings and spaces; it was an expression of belief in the viability of a better world to be engineered by planning and design. That was its flaw in retrospect, and the cause of its negative image after the 1970s. The end of modernism coincided - or was accelerated by - an ideological shift, too, in the 1980s, away from the post-war consensus and the welfare state towards free-market economics and the reinvention of nineteenth-century liberalism (the movement for free trade) as neo-liberalism. While modernism used concrete to articulate its vision of a really-existing better world, it no longer had a place in the fluid economy of immaterial production in financial services, tourism, culture, and new technologies of communications. Its time was over.

 

In face of the dystopia produced by globalisation's human consequences,^[2] however, I want to ask if international modernism can be salvaged. I do not want to excuse the functionalist attitude to space which undermined the good intentions of tower-block housing estates; but could some elements of modernism's social vision be extricated in a renewed interest in cities as sites of human occupation and fulfilment rather than as the purist conceptualisations of design? After postmodern eclecticism and laissez-faire, when building design is little more than the application of a decorative coating to engineering structures for the flexible economy, is there a possibility for projects again shaped by the needs of human sociation?

 

Once as it was: a fine view

In Leipzig in the 1950s, the philosopher Ernst Bloch - an associate of T. W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, but not as such a member of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research - recalled the architecture of the inter-war period. Revising a text begun in the United States in the 1930s, Bloch writes that the basis of 'the new architecture' is 'openness: it broke the dark cave. It opened vistas through light glass walls'^[3] Later in the text Bloch cites the Bauhaus, whose masters' houses beside the new building in Dessau (1929) epitomised the use of transparency - literally seeing through the walls in which large plate glass windows replaced brick - as a metaphor for democracy. A further innovation was the use of industrial materials in the new Bauhaus, its doors and windows picked from a catalogue for factory construction. But Bloch is unsure; the rise of fascism (and industrialised annihilation of minority and dissident groups, including Jews and Marxists) is equally part of this period's history. Transparency came too early:

 

The open door, the wide open window is threatening ... The house might again become a fortress if not the catacombs. The wide window filled with a noisy outside needs an outside full of attractive strangers, not full of Nazis; the glass door down to the floor really presupposes sunshine that looks in and comes in, not the Gestapo.^[4]

 

Non-contemporaneity is a recurrent theme in Bloch's work; but here he also observes a paradox: modernism looks to 'the outside, toward the sun and the public sphere' but it also looks, at the same time, to an 'increasing desire for an enclosed security of life ... .'^[5] In retrospect this can be understood: public life is difficult under totalitarianism.

 

Bloch understands that modernism carried out a necessary cleansing of the decorative junk of the typical nineteenth-century bourgeois interior, but sees that elimination as all that remains of an architectural vocabulary - as if 'we have no ideas left.'^[6] He also foresees the perceived sterility of the modernist urban environment when, '... 'purity' consists of omissions and unimaginativeness, as long as the mirth consists of ostrich policy ... and the silver sun ... is chrome-plated misery.'^[7] This may have been in part a judgement of taste but it was also a matter of economic relations; Bloch's remarks, however rhetorical, anticipate recent calls for recognition that architecture has taken on a limited role in delivering the façades required to embellish capital's restructuring of cities. Bloch writes,

 

Architecture cannot at all flourish in the late capitalist hollow space since it is, far more than the other fine arts, a social creation ...Only the beginnings of a different society will make true architecture possible again ... The abstract engineer style will not ... become qualitative ... Rather this hollow space penetrates ... engineering as much as the latter increases the hollowness by its own emptiness.^[8]

 

Bloch does not offer guidelines for an alternative design style except to say that the human dimension fills the hollow space in better times; but his critique emphasises the ambivalence of built space, its enclosure of air which initiates a dialogue between inside and outside (too easily turned into a dualism). Turning inwards in Germany in the 1930s was, for Bloch as a Jew and a Marxist, a reaction to exterior conditions of emergency. Herbert Marcuse argues in an essay on French literature during the early 1940s (the period of German occupation ) that love poems and stories - a literature of intimacy and not of politics - was the last resort of freedom.^[9] Yet the city was always a retreat, a site of stability against the vicissitudes of weather and season, against wild nature's arbitrary wrecking of human plans, its walls a last resort against the pillaging of armies. If this image persisted, the sense of catastrophe produced when parts of a city collapsed, not as a result of bombardment but of structural and design flaws, was acute. But it happened.

 

The Falling Towers

Ronan Point, a social-housing tower block in Newham, East London collapsed on 16 May, 1968, within three months of its completion. Not the whole block fell, only one corner, but it was enough to signal the approaching end of the modernist urban era. Of course, no single event marks a shift between historical periods. Even the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was only a point in a history which began perhaps in 1917, or in 1945, or is still incomplete. Yet the spectacle of rubble around the tower block, in press and mass-media coverage, together with (as I explain below) a long enquiry conducted for the building's tenants which led to its final demolition in 1984, acts as a landmark in the reception of modernist planning and architectural design. That such new blocks were intended to provide decent homes for economically disadvantaged people after the bombing of inner and east London in the 1940s, could be overlooked. That some projects were well-resourced could be forgotten in a general perception that tower-block social housing constituted or at least contributed to urban blight. For the new tenants in the 1960s, in contrast, the indoor bathrooms and fitted kitchens inside the tower-block flats represented a life of ease, cleanliness, and social equality. Built in the welfare state, Ronan Point was intended to provide decent housing for people who previously lived in a residual and declining nineteenth-century housing stock. It seemed like a dream.

 

Ronan Point used a new system of pre-cast concrete sections and a steel frame, with in-situ concrete casting. As architect Sam Webb noted in his subsequent report for the tenants, the tolerance of error was like that of watch-making yet it had to be done '180 feet above the ground, on a wet Friday afternoon'^[10] At about 5.45 in the morning of 16 May, 1968, Ivy Hodge, a cake decorator, got up and went to her kitchen to make a cup of tea. She lit the gas and was thrown across the room by an explosion. Carole Eustace recalls that, 'the noise continued and seemed to get louder ... as I got out of bed the wall was missing.' and James Chambers that, 'The whole place shook. ... we found ourselves staring out over London, our heads just two feet away from the 80-foot drop' while showers of debris and furniture plunged past him.^[11] Four people died and seventeen were injured as a result of the gas explosion. But the explosion itself was not that powerful. Webb found litter and aluminium cans wedged into voids which should have been filled with concrete; but he also found that poor workmanship was not the only problem: the underlying cause of the collapse was structural redundancy - the inability of one pre-cast section to support the load of those above it if one element failed. This allowed a relatively minor impact to be disastrous, so that a corner section fell down. After the explosion, legislation was introduced to require greater resistance to explosions in tower blocks. Initially, the block was repaired and re-tenanted; but Webb persisted in his research, paid by the tenants not the local authority (ruining his career in process, he said),^[12] showing that the block was generically unsound. Ronan Point was eventually demolished to public rejoicing in 1984. Across the Atlantic, the televised demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe social housing blocks in St Louis, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, on 15 July, 1972 offered a second image of modernism's collapse. For Charles Jencks it marked the end not only of modernism but also of allegiance to its utopian programme.^[13] Jonathan Hughes similarly reads the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe as a sign for 'the bankruptcy of ... the modernist project and State-sponsored mass housing.'^[14] Is it over, to be junked in the dust of demolition, as defunct as state socialism?

 

A reconsideration

International modernism was developed in the inter- and post-war periods as a utopian project. Key to its development were the proceedings of the International Congress of Modern Architects (CIAM) from 1928 into the 1960s. CIAM debated planning as well as architectural design. Among its (trans-Atlantic but mainly male) members were Le Corbusier, Aldo van Eyck, Siegfried Giedion, J. M. Richards, and Josep Sert.

 

Le Corbusier stated the function of the modernist planner as creating a 'clear image of cities' in which 'Urbanism and architecture are the two hands which give order to the natural play between the individual and the group, this complex game whose goal is individual freedom and the abundant radiance of collective power ...'^[15] Marina Lathouri draws on Fran�oise Choay to interpret Le Corbusier's text as a response to the expansion of city populations and the resulting tension between the individual and the new mass public. This partly reflects the approach of the Chicago School planners and urbanists, such as Louis Wirth and E. W. Burgess, that cities were sites of conflict caused by migration, so that zones underwent transitions as the middle-classes moved to the suburbs. But it adds a European dimension, in a new relation between design and space by which urbanism comes to mean an ordering of urban spaces in particular ways - the plan, that is, determines how people live in the spaces it delineates. Built space determines behaviour, as in Materialist philosophy.

 

An outcome of the kind of urbanisation envisaged by Le Corbusier was the minimum dwelling, or basic dwelling unit. Citing the papers from the second CIAM meeting in Frankfurt in 1929, and the account of Czech architect Karel Teige, Lathouri explains, 'this idea of dwelling was not so much concerned with ... spatial scale as it was with a culture of the urban and the ideals of the future - the ideals of the new relationship between the individual, the social and the city.'^[16] The emphasis changed after 1945 (as I explain below), but Lathouri summarises the emphasis on industrial form and system in the earlier CIAM meetings:

 

The debates of the early congresses allowed ideas that were already familiar, such as that of the 'standard product', the 'mass-produced house', and the city as 'biological agglomeration', to be organized into identifiable architectural strategies, capable of operating across a number of scales.^[17]

 

The minimum dwelling could be evolved anywhere, like a transportable kit of parts to be reassembled in varying arrangements. It was also a geometric arrangement, so that parts could slot into varied patterns of related proportion, usually using industrially produced components.

 

The idea of the minimum dwelling was partially applied in Barcelona by Sert, in an apartment building at Carer Muntaner in 1930-31. It has duplex apartments, top-floor studios, terrace gardens, and metal corner balconies. Sert then collaborated with Josep Torres ClavŽ to design a larger apartment complex, the Casa Bloc (1933-36), and a dispensary in Pasaje Sant Bernat (1934-38). Casa Bloc was commissioned by the Catalan Commissariat for Workers' Housing and was intended to provide communal services and amenities such as a social club, sports club, and infant school.^[18] With the Civil War, these were replaced by police housing. Torres ClavŽ died fighting for the Republic at the front in 1939, which illustrates the alignment of progressive urbanism with Left politics (while the Right tend to prefer traditional design and materials). The same may be loosely said of the Bauhaus: Walter Gropius, its first Director, adopted a progressive but spiritual approach, writing in a letter to Ernst Hardt, 'I have large scale ideas for Weimar ... Namely, that Weimar ... is the most suitable ground for laying the cornerstone of a coming Republic of the Spirit.'^[19] Gropius urged a regeneration of craft skills to deliver his vision, and the assimilation of artists into a new 'guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist.'^[20] After moving to Dessau in 1929 and then Berlin, the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazi regime six days after it came to power, on 11 April, 1933.

 

In the same year, 1933, the rejection of Le Corbusier's design for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow led CIAM to abandon its plan to hold its fourth meeting there. Yet Susan Buck-Morss argues that the designs for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, as displayed in 1933 as the results of a competition, visually mimic that of the Empire State Building in New York (opened in 1931). Comparing Boris Iofan's design for the Palace with a poster for the movie King Kong (1933), in which the giant ape Kong is depicted on top of the Empire State Building, Buck-Morss says that in both form and content, 'the images are strikingly similar.'^[21] In another example of what appears, not a parallel modernism as occurred in some colonial situations, but the same modernism serving two ideologies, the design for Green City by Moisei Ginzburg and Mikhail Barshch, a competition entry for a new settlement, used a linear plan with separate zones for cars and dwelling, juxtaposing natural and geometric ordering, in 'the international style of the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier'^[22] To these two cases of cross-fertilization between the West and the East-bloc, I would add one which draws on the utopian concept of the Garden City Movement as well as that of modernism: the plan for Yerevan, the capital of Armenia.

 

Alexander Tamanyan drew up the plan in the 1920s, in the Stalinist period, for a city which, in Tsarist times, was a relatively minor outpost of the Empire. Tamanyan used a circular outer boulevard with a margin of green space, within which the built zone is dissected by broad avenues and a street grid. He adapted the spatial principles of both the Garden City and modernism to the conditions of the Soviet Union. Art critic and curator Nazaret Karoyan explains: ' The geometrical shape of the plan ... as well as the circular streets bordering it ... came to signify the 1930s enthusiasm for constructing a socialist, just and equal society' while 'reproducing the utopian image of Campanella's Sun-City.'^[23] Today, Tamanyan is celebrated in a bronze statue, and his plan is still clearly evident in the city's aerial view. But Yerevan is rapidly changing. It no longer expresses enthusiasm for social equality but adopts the mode of Los Angeles-style global capitalism in a new Northern Avenue of stone, steel and glass fa�ades (with a sop to a notion of a national architectural style drawn from pre-modern buildings) to create a new vista from Republic Square and the National Museum to the (ironically, Soviet-period) Opera House. While the hotel complex by Lake Sevan has been abandoned, the Northern Avenue states the triumph of postmodern eclecticism and the new economy of brands. But, as I asked above, is this the end of the story?

 

Shadows

There were shadows as well as the vistas and the bright glass walls; the entrances to the displaced dark cave (to borrow Bloch's rhetoric) simply opened in new places. International modernism articulated a vision for a better world to be brought about by design, planning, and new technologies of production, but it was brought about, too, by a fear of uncertainty which, I think, produces the recourse to functionalism which underpins and undermines modernist social housing and the modernist concept of the city. The desire for a unified and coherent entity suggests a idea of a conflict-free city, and follows from a fear of catastrophe - taken to excess in the mass slaughter of the 1914-18 war and then again in the rise of fascism and the destruction of cities, with mass civilian casualties, in the 1939-45 war. Barry Curtis writes, 'The opportunities to participate in reconstruction and the utopian potential for beginning anew have to be weighed against the impact of the erasure of place by blitz and atomic weapons and the ultimate challenge to humanist-based theories posed by the creation of non-places like Auschwitz.'^[24] After 1945 the imperative was to rebuild, to draw a line under a past which could not be allowed to return, and which could be admitted into public memory only with difficulty. For Zygmunt Bauman, that past was not an anomaly but a product, the default position, of the industrialisation of consciousness which enabled mass production but also the efficient dehumanization of victims.^[25]

 

Michael Sorkin reads modernist housing design as informed not by fear but by the perhaps equally restrictive framework of 'the Calvinist parsimony ... that offered both a ... chaste, disciplinary atmosphere and the putative rationality of visibility ... that guaranteed a clarity of replicability ...'^[26] So, one person's house is just like another's of equal status. If rational design ensures equity, however, is this an expression of a Kantian disinterest? In one way such disinterest would eliminate personal and vested interests, as in reliance on professional expertise in planning (not the rival interests of politicians) in the rational-comprehensive planning model;^[27] in another way it sets the actualities of use and occupation apart from the design process, which becomes as if a meta-process in a purified realm. It was a brittle dream. And it was compounded by a reliance on a preconceived image of an ideal city.

 

Utopias from Campanella's City of the Sun onwards (or at least modern readings of them) tend to entail a prescriptive and sometimes regressive approach. A projection of an idealised remote past becomes the informing principle for a future world, as if it is a matter not of confidently inventing a future but of reinstituting one which was once there and can therefore be restored. The brittle dream conjured a world which never was except as aspiration. Can that aspiration be extricated now?

 

A rehabilitation?

Recently there have been calls for a rehabilitation of international modernism. Writing on Southampton, a city the centre of which was rebuilt after wartime bombing, Owen Hatherley sums up the modernist project as building '... a new world on the ruins of the old.' but asks, 'what ... if the new society never emerged? We have been cheated out of the future, yet the future's ruins lie about us.' yet also, 'can we ... excavate utopia?'^[28] After Ronan Point and Pruett-Igoe the modern project seemed defunct. If there had been a trajectory of human progress reflected in the development of the new concept of the city, that concept dissolved into the multiple images of cities of post-modernism, and the abandonment of boundaries between art, design, architecture, fashion, advertising, mass media, and public relations. Utopianism was discredited as either unrealistic or tainted by totalitarianism, and in England seen as rather European.

 

Despite the failures, however, I want to argue that the utopian stand of international modernism can, as Hatherley argues, be recovered. This is not to say it can be brought back into use as it was, but that some of the critical elements of modernist planning and architecture are worth reconsidering today.

 

As evidence of a renewed interest in modernism, Hatherley cites the exhibition Modernism: Designing a New World at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, in 2006: 'Modernism has not been this accepted in Britain since the 1970s.'^[29] He notes that Erno Goldfinger's Trellick Tower in north-west London has been re-framed, no longer taken as an icon of planning blight but preserved - a listed building. In contrast, other buildings by Goldfinger - a cinema and two buildings for the British Communist Party - have been demolished. And a tower block in Shadwell, east London, identical with Trellick, receives less critical acclaim. But if Trellick is now positively re-coded, and is now a block in which people want to live - because it has been refurbished, and because media attention has made it fashionable - what aspects of modernism are open to recovery?

 

CIAM's aim was to rebuild the world after catastrophe. Christopher Hight notes that surveys of modernist architecture describe post-war housing as reflecting sociological, ideological and functionalist criteria.^[30] Failure was not in general a result of bad work or false economy, as at Ronan Point. The Thamesmead estate in south-east London, for instance, was well-resourced, and in some ways typical of 1960s and 1970s social housing in offering residents a relatively good standard of space and amenities, with high specifications and plentiful green space. Thamesmead was (and is) peripheral, however, badly served by public transport and a long journey from London's cultural life, department stores, and centres of employment. Today it exhibits security features - like barbed wire on the fence around a health centre - which denote a pervasive sense of insecurity. The broad, open walkways which the designers saw as public spaces for mingling are now sites of watchfulness.

 

A generic difficulty in post-war re-housing was that members of hitherto closely knit communities, acting as extended families within a street or group of streets, were dispersed to different sites so that the informal support networks which they provided were lost. That was a failure of town planning. The equivalent failure of design was that space was rigidly demarcated, as if to tell the people re-housed in sites such as Thamesmead that they were deemed unable to organise space for themselves.^[31]

 

Complex social relations and occupations of space do not easily translate into plans. Activity in narrow inner-city streets may seem spontaneous or beyond mapping, and is understood through tacit rather than technical or intellectual knowledge. Then, as Edward Robbins argues, what is read as the chaos of an inner-city street is its real attraction: 'shared understandings of the rules of engagement make the street [an] ordered and organized place.'^[32] The inner-city street is a multiple-use zone in planning terms, as subtle as the Dutch home-zone, but its organization is informal and invisible to outsiders; nor does it use professional expertise. The tacit knowledge of dwellers, nonetheless, enabled generations to grow up with a sense of belonging and inclusion, and ability to learn the tactics of everyday life from those, slightly older and more worldly than themselves, who used them all the time, in spaces which were (and are) described as sites of deprivation or chaos, suitable for wholesale clearance. The model of clearance creating a tabula rasa on which to inscribe new plans is, to me, the key difficulty in modernist urbanism.

 

Should spatial organisation be handed over to dwellers? Ben Franks argues that the non-plan approach - which was proposed in the 1960s - has ambiguous connotations. He cites the paper 'Non-Plan: an experiment in freedom' by Rayner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall and Cedric Price^[33] but sees a conflict between a participatory ambition on the part of these writers and the alignment of that ambition to what seems in retrospect as if the precursor of neo-liberal de-regulation, epitomised by the writing of Friedrich Hayek. Franks summarises Hayek's position:

 

Social planning for given outcomes ... was insufficiently flexible to deal with the myriad needs and desires of a large population. An imposed order ... was ... identified with socialism ... [This was] contrasted with ... the spontaneous order created by individuals obeying certain economic rules, specifically those of the market economy, modifying their behaviour as that of their neighbours and competitors altered. The board game was a good analogy ... The rules were set but the outcome was undecided.^[34]

 

Hayek seems to me to fundamentally misunderstand the situation: he assumes two rival ideologies (writing in the Cold War) and takes a partisan position for Western liberalism as representing an organic spontaneity with its own (invisible and ineffable) mechanism for ensuring equilibrium, against the East-bloc's prescriptive and rigid control of life (totalitarianism), as if people in a market system can do as they like regardless of the divisions and demands placed on them by the market and its (equally prescriptive) mechanisms of exchange. What Hayek describes is, to me, a polarity of two command economies: one of the state and another of the market. The differences between them are therefore an inadequate explanation of the failure of modernism, not least because there are as many similarities as differences between the inter- and post-war architecture of both East and West blocs (as Buck-Morss shows, cited above). The peripheral tower blocks and expressways are found in both camps, as are sites of power and domination.

 

Having said that, the reception of utopian ideas in England has tended to be coloured by distrust - too bright a light. In this manner, Hatherley cites George Orwell on the failure of socialism in Britain as a failure of presentation:

 

Socialism was associated with ... two tendencies ... First, the back-to-nature 'prig's paradise' of the garden cities, 'sandal wearers', faddists and ruralists; and second, ... science fiction machine utopianism ... all those Constructivist photos of glittering tractors ... .^[35]

 

More than presentation is involved, perhaps, but this cultural current helps explain a readiness for modernism's demise when events ruptured its claims to the engineering of a better world. Franks aligns a non-plan approach with de-regulation, but, while it is difficult to map the experiments of, say, self-build housing schemes onto the scale of a metropolitan city, I suggest an underlying difficulty is the pursuit of a pre-existing model, in effect becoming an instrumentalism which may assist delivery of the dream yet, immediately and internally, compromises it. The means, that is, are inappropriate to the envisaged ends. Only means which enact those ends will bring them to life.

 

I want to address one further issue. The idealised city of international modernism, and especially in the post-war period, was a reaction to the mass destruction of the war. This both created a blank space for new inscription, and lent the planner or designer the role of displacer of memories of war. In the ideal city, space is not contested, nor are voices raised in antagonistic claims to space and visibility. As Hight says, the modernist housing project is a device to mediate conflict between 'social order and subjective effects' and does so through proportion and scale.^[36]

 

A quite different means of conflict resolution occurs in radical planning, and in the diversification of planning knowledge introduced by what Leonie Sandercock calls listening to voices from the borderlands. Sandercock has in mind women, people of colour, and members of minority groups: '... the voices of the multicultural city, of those who have been marginalized, displaced, oppressed or dominated. They are the subjective voices of experience...'^[37] Much of radical planning's theory is based on experiential learning in the majority world, in projects for social housing (and in the growing recognition that self-build housing - or the informal settlement - has many advantages over the rigid and typically over-prescriptive government housing scheme. It seems as though, far away from the power centres of the free market economy - a lesson in handing-over has begun to take root.^[38] Jonathan Hughes notes that architects have begun to consider the agency of social groups in the affluent world as well, even if they 'have listened ... [but] not always talked' to them.'^[39] To a limited extent, self-build housing is gaining a foothold, too, four decades after Walter Segal's project in Lewisham, south London in the 1970s.^[40] As Hughes puts it,

 

Both the aesthetic and programmatic concerns of architects embraced alternative approaches, although a common aim prevailed: to re-engineer a sense of agency on the part of the public in the design process, to address the imbalance of power which appeared to operate in favour of developers and officials.^[41]

 

Lathouri argues that, in any case, after 1945, functionalism ceased to be the dominant allegiance in CIAM, the minimum dwelling being displaced by a concept of a human habitat which merged into broader cultural and geographical systems and networks.^[42] CIAM was also divided within itself. For some contributors, the city was a matter of relations between the block, the street, the square, and the region, in an extension of inter-war rationalism. Writing on CIAM 8, in 1951 (in Hoddesdon, England), Curtis notes the influence of Cold War politics, extant in a perception of totalitarianism in the more prescriptive model of the inter-war congresses, and in a feeling that planning might not prevent recurrence of totalitarianism in Europe. Nonetheless, the paradox was whether the prevention of catastrophe 'was best done by contriving a plan which excluded those possibilities or by abandoning the concept of planning altogether.'^[43]

 

At this point, some younger members of CIAM turned to a direct materialism in the Brutalism which subsequently produced concrete tower blocks with walkways designed as equivalent to the village street with its informal communications between neighbours. Alison and Peter Smithson saw older figures in CIAM as 'losing the visionary plot and ... failing to understand the relationship between form and ... the complexity of human need and response.'^[44] while, 'the short narrow street of the slum succeeds where spacious redevelopment frequently fails.'^[45] Their transposition of the inner-city street was - now it can be seen - problematic; probably it failed because it was only ever an idea, as remote as Eden or Arcadia, thus reproducing in a new way the abstraction of the model they sought to supersede. The Brutalism of the blocks was well-intentioned, however, and to me it is not the form which is the problem so much as the instrumentalism of its imposition for others - thereby yet again deemed unable to understand or enact spatial dynamics for themselves. Hence the popularity of demolition, when a tower block is toppled and the aims which hasd once informed it are as lost among the rubble as the dreams of a workers' paradise lie wrecked in the weeds and the empty concrete hulk by Lake Sevan.

 

Conclusion

Today, in the ex-East bloc, the styles of modernism are adapted, with an added post-modern eclecticism, to denote the new empire of consumption. In a renewed similarity between what is now the ex-East and ex-West, cities representing affluence rise in the spaces of a further wave of urban clearance. Meanwhile, the unfinished projects of the Soviet time stand abandoned, too sturdily constructed to fall down. The disgraced edifices of modernism offer an opportunity for dismissal or reconsideration, not far removed from the opportunity for erasure or remembering offered by the displaced statues of Marx and Lenin which once stood in East-bloc public squares.^[46] I keep returning to the mirroring of the failure of modernism and that of state socialism; this reflects my reluctance to let go of a history in which there were two ideologies (one of which sought freedom as the end of history). So if my aspiration that something of the principles of international modernism might be reclaimed - without the functionalism or the avant-gardism by which architects and planners interpreted the world for others – then this echoes my Ostalgie.

 

But that is not all. Thinking of self-build housing, I am reminded that there is an ingenuity of design in everyday life, based in tacit knowledge. This is inadequate to produce sustainable future cities, yet shows that the expertise of dwellers has a potential to be of equal value beside the technical or intellectual knowledges of the professionals who have dominated urbanism since the nineteenth century. Lathouri writes of a post-war sense of collective identity based on the regulatory state acting for the public good, but that this gave way to 'the penetrative power of capital, productivity, technology and affluence.'^[47] The human content was subsumed in geographical divisions and ideologies as a 'universal ... condition, which did not deny altogether the ideologically powerful notion of progress.'^[48] I support the regulatory state, but that state, if it has an ethos of public welfare, can accommodate the informal architecture of self-build housing, allotment huts, and the diverse ways in which dwellers create identity within their surroundings. The empty hulks of abandoned modernism are an image of a past now captured by history, but may also – in imagination - be a point of departure for a new utopian urbanism which accepts that cities are ever-unfinished.

Malcolm Miles