Brutalism Exposed: Photography and the Zoom Wave

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Brutalism Exposed: Photography and the Zoom WaveAuthor(s): Hadas A. SteinerSource: Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), Vol. 59, No. 3 (Feb., 2006), pp. 15-27Published by: on behalf of theTaylor & Francis, Ltd. Association of Collegiate Schools ofArchitecture, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40480642Accessed: 14-03-2016 11:50 UTC

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HADAS A. STEINER

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Brutalism Exposed

Photography and the Zoom Wave

Photography was instrumental in conceiving representation as the effort to grasp the variable

rather than the objective appraisal of reality. This paper explores how avant-garde practitioners in

the mid-1960s harnessed reproductive technology for its momentary meanings. Using the

confluence of the Economist complex, the film Blow-Up, and Archigram 7, the phenomenon is

examined in the context of London-based architectural discourse. While the embrace of unstable

signification would present further challenges, possibility still dominated over loss at this critical

juncture. The allusiveness of representation intimated the potentials of a milieu where nothing

stagnated and images, in and of themselves, constituted architectural practice.

Blow-Up

The opening scene of Blow-Up, Michelangelo

Antonioni's film of 1966 set in London; takes place

in the courtyard of the recently completed

Economist complex (1959-1964) (Figure I).1 With

this commission, Peter and Alison Smithson put the

vision they had expounded over the previous

decade to the test, not on the margins, but right

in the hub of London. The project entailed a cluster

of three stone-clad buildings- an office tower,

a bank, and a residential block- grouped around

a plaza that was raised above street level. "The city

is left outside the site boundary," the Smithsons

explained, with the plaza providing a transitional

zone from the encounters of the street.2 The

varying sizes of the buildings were further scaled

for the intimacy of program by the adaptation of

the bays on the elevations. The roach limestone

chosen for the cladding was a highly textured

durable material, distinctive for being scattered

throughout with hollows left by dislodged

fossils. Unlike the detachment of structure

and glass apparent in the paradigm of the

curtain wall, here the frame, shell, and services

were integrated.

Blow-Up begins with a jeep overflowing with

mimes and clowns circling the empty courtyard of the

complex.3 The costumed party spills out of the

vehicle and then from the bare plaza into the ani-

mated streets of the West End to engulf the con-

vertible of a jaded celebrity photographer as he

returns from documenting a night in a Camberwell

flophouse (Figure 2). From this initial disruption of

the separation of site from city, social and spatial

collocations abound throughout the narrative, always

encapsulated by differentiations, even polarities, in

the urban environment. The time was ripe for the

observation of such contrasts given the range of

construction and reconstruction in many European

cities, from corporate headquarters in the municipal

core to megastructures being built to accommodate

the urban poor on the outskirts. The theme is

encapsulated by the work of the protagonist, who,

addicted to the ephemeral sensations of his imme-

diate environment, prods everything he encounters

with his lens. When bored of his lavish lifestyle and

hedonistic fashion shoots, he turns his hand to cap-

turing the gritty aspects of London life in black and

white documentary-style photographs of the realist

kind. Against the background of housing estates on

the one hand and mews conversions on the other, the

dichotomy of ¡mage versus reality unravels as the film

progresses. When he discovers that he may have

inadvertently recorded a murder in the process of

sneaking photographs of what appeared to be a tryst,

he scours the images for evidence. Ambiguity of the

¡mage leads to obsessive scrutiny of the photo-

graphic grain (Figure 3). Pictures, the photographer

discovers ¡n the end, are as elusive as the transient

events they capture. The existential nature of truth

unravels.

Blow-Up is a film about the language of

¡mages. There is a minimum of dialog and, during

the blow-up sequences, none at all. For a story that

includes the possibility of a murder, there is also

little in the way of action, even mystery. We watch

along with the photographer as the instability of his

world ¡s displayed to him. The narrative emphasis is

less on his exploits than on how the environment

affects him or, more accurately, fails to do so. The

film is, in the end, about the contemporary condi-

tion and the ambiguity inherent in the process of

communication. Its two featured modes of photo-

graphy-the stark ¡mages of photojournalism and

the commercial practices on which the fashion

15 STEINER Journal of Architectural Education,

pp. 15-27 ©2006 ACSA

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1. Economist Plaza, 1964. (©Michael Carapetian)

2. Mimes in the Economist Plaza, still from "Blow-Up," 1966. (©Warner Bros.)

industry thrived- were hallmarks of postwar image

culture.4 Black and white representations of spon-

taneity, especially blue-collar artlessness, reflected

a serious endeavor aimed at capturing the essence

of social reality. Color photography, on the other

hand, was circulated through the glossy mass media

and belonged to the cosmopolitan, if transient,

domain of consumerism. The film, however, ques-

tions the authenticity of one mode of representation

over another. Is captured contingency more real

than the composed pliancy of the fashion shoot?

The by-now familiar observation dramatized is that

documentation of any kind, whether of homeless-

ness or of couture, comes about through dominance

and transforms the subject to aesthetic object.5

Distinctions between life and art- city and site-

from the intrusion of the clowns on come undone

along with the protagonist.

Parallels of Life and Art

Both of the photographic practices exemplified in

Blow-Up, replete with their ideological implications,

infiltrated the confines of architectural graphics.

While pop art had taken hold in London in the fifties,

the flooding of consumer imagery into architectural

imagery proper was a phenomenon of the next

decade. For a standard that had been drained for the

most part even of color, such an assimilation of

external modes of representation was notable.

Modernism had continued the academic rejection of

subjective techniques, such as perspective and

atmospheric rendering.6 Modernist graphics assumed

that representation was a transparent tool for com-

municating a philosophy of design; drawings were

treated as objective, measurable portrayals of

objects. Plan, section, and elevation were the desir-

able modes of conveying architectural information, as

well as their amalgam in the axonometric projection

that migrated into architectural practice from scien-

tific disciplines such as cartography and engineering.7

Axonometric projection represented not a way of

seeing, as perspective and photography did, but

a way of drawing.8 Subjective representations would

disturb the balance.

When the Smithsons included photographs

taken by Nigel Henderson of children playing in the

streets of Bethnal Green as part of their presentation

for the ninth Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture

Moderne (CIAM) held at Aix-en-Provence in 1953,

they were thus making a statement in form as well as

content (Figure 4). This run down area of East

London was familiar to Congrès Internationaux

d'Architecture Moderne attendees from a study of

that slum presented to the congress by José Lluïs

Sert.9 The unaltered photographs provided snapshots

of engaged city life within the more technical

language of urban reform. The notion of a genuine

Brutalism Exposed: Photography and the Zoom Wave 16




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3. Blow-up scene, still from "Blow-Up," 1966. (©Warner Bros.)

encounter was grounded further by the fact that the

¡mages were of children at play, itself the subject in

the 1950s of discourse about as-yet uncorrupted

artistic expression. In the context of the conventions

of the presentation "grille/' these nonorchestrated

photographs functioned in the manner of orthogra-

phy, as measurable documents of reality.10 Though

the use of photographs in Congrès Internationaux

A. Detail of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne Grid by Alison and Peter

Smithson showing Nigel Henderson's photography, 1953. (©Smithson Archive)

d'Architecture Moderne display boards was not

unprecedented, the harsh photoreportage, captured

contingency of these slum images certainly was. The

images represented a contrast of the fluid nature of

the urban fabric with the diagrammatic purity of the

grid's divisions. These photographs of recreation in

working-class areas, the Smithsons believed, con-

veyed the same quality of captured contingency,

what they called the "as found," that needed to be

reintroduced to architecture to equate a method of

building with a way of life.11 The ethos of realist

photography migrated right into the heart of official

architectural business.

To the eye of the contemporary critic, the

interplay of scales in the Economist complex followed

the logic of realist photography- for better and

worse: "This change of scale between the two

buildings has resulted in a giant trompe-d'œil with

which one is only to experience further perceptual

difficulty as one enters the centre of the plaza,"

wrote Kenneth Frampton in Architectural Design . "In

the centre of the plaza the 'photographic' reduction

in scale of the residential block vis-á-vis the main

tower has the optical effect of 'zooming' this block

away from the observer, with a consequent dramatic

enlargement in the apparent space of the plaza. This

perceptual sleight of hand is brilliant but not in the

last instance felicitous, for the observer does not

remain rooted in the centre and moving on he quickly

discovers the deception."12

When the Smithsons turned to the blow-up,

they drew different conclusions from those implied

by the ordeal of loss endured by Antonioni's

photographer. In the film, the protagonist finds that

the closer he tries to get to the ¡mage, the more it

dissolves, an experience akin to the study of the

Pollock-like paintings dribbled by the painter in an

adjacent studio. In the exhibition, "Parallel of Life

and Art," organized by the Smithsons with

Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi in 1953, instead of

a diminution of reality, the photographic image was

used to draw structural equivalence between the

manmade and the natural: the anatomical

17 STEINER




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dissection of a typewriter or the analogy between the

drips of abstract expressionism and the patterns on

the egg of a sea bird, for example (Figure 5).13 The

influence of László Mohofy-Nag/s heavily

illustrated, seminal postwar text, Vision in Motion

(1947), and its promotion of photographic literacy

reigned throughout. The technologies of homing in

and zooming out- the photographic enlarger, the

aerial photograph, the x-ray, the wide-angle lens, and

the microscope- demonstrated the expanded field

of vision brought about by new tools. What unified

the ¡mages was their ability to demonstrate the

significance of the camera to extend the visual range.

This agenda was furthered by the reproduction of the

source material for the show. Henderson used a plate

camera to replicate the photographic reproductions

with the intention of cultivating the misleading sense

of scale inherent in the photographic medium.14

Formal leveling of scale highlighted the: role of the

camera as a tool for the investigation of reality. All

the reproductions, whether of paintings or cells,

shared a grainy texture.

One hundred twenty-two panels of diverse

dimensions were suspended at various heights and

angles from the ceiling and walls. The ¡mages were

culled from a range of fields, including photojour-

nalism, medicine, and art and the subject matter too

was wide ranging, from the anthropological to the

geological, archeological, and metallurgical. The

point, through a form of three-dimensional collage,

was to expose similarities through juxtaposition of

things that otherwise would not be seen in proximity

and that without the photographic record could not

be compared. Due to the aggregate of imagery and

manipulation of scale, the experience of the exhibi-

tion combined estrangement from the familiar with

the equation of things of disparate natures. With no

captions or commentary to distract the attention, the

visitor could focus on the variations in the perspec-

tivai relationships between the ¡mages. The result was

an amalgam of signs that presented ¡n a condensed

spatiotemporal field ideally would provoke multiple

significations in a viewer.15 Denial of scale increased

knowledge, rather than obfuscated it. The blow-up

was employed in the service of investigating reality,

not as an endeavor in frustration.

Absent from the visual field of "Parallel" were

images drawn from the popular repertoire. Despite

5. Installation view of "Parallel of Life and Art," 1953. (©Henderson Archive)

the fact that a number of their associates, Paolozzi

included, drew inspiration from the more ubiquitous

and visceral realm of glossy photography, indeed the

primary form of ¡mage making engaged in by the

photographer of Blow-Up, the Smithsons rarely did.

While claiming to collect ads, they were not com-

fortable using the language of consumer culture,

even for subversive ends.16 The flooding of these

¡mages ¡nto architectural imagery proper as would

happen ¡n the collages of the Archigram group was

a phenomenon of the next decade and the milieu in

which the Economist Building was destined to

emerge. The slowness of architectural production

often defeats the theoretical process of design. The

Smithsons' architecture of captured contingencies

and ready-made components would have contrasted

with the revivalist styles of the West End under any

circumstances; by the mid-sixties, the solemnity of

their approach was also being overtaken by the

ambient escalation of consumer culture in that

vicinity. The visual dominance of the mass media at

the center swallowed up the grim realities at the

margin.

Zoom Wave

In 1966, Reyner Banham, who at the onset had been

a chief promoter of the Smithsons' built and written

work, reassessed that support. Banham had pub-

lished a definitive article in 1955 that explained the

"as found" philosophy under the title of "The New

Brutalism" (Figure 6). For Banham, Parallel of Life

and Art was the "locus classicus" of the New

Brutalism as it firmly established the priority of ¡mage

over beauty.17 The exhibition demonstrated all the

tenets of the doctrine in its structural incorporation

of scale, composition, and texture. More than the

built architecture of the landmark Hunstanton School

(1950-1954), "when Parallel of Life and Art had

enabled Brutalists to define their relationship to the

visual world in terms of something other than

geometry, then formality was discarded."18

Photographic documentation enabled the theory.





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6. Illustrations for Reyner Banham's article on the "New Brutalism," Architectural Review, December 1955.

Over the course of the decade that followed his

article, however, Banham came to suspect the

acceptance of the abstraction inherent in photo-

graphic reproduction, as well as the graininess and

chiaroscuro of the overenlargement.19 The critique

was clearly articulated in the successive text, also

called The New Brutalism, followed by the subtitle,

"Ethic or Aesthetic?"20 If the reduction down to basic

elements, as the photographer discovered in Blow-

Up, merely revealed patterns, the New Brutalism was

left depleted of all its social aspirations. "For all its

brave talk of 'an ethic, not an aesthetic/ Brutalism

never quite broke out of the aesthetic frame of ref-

erence," Banham concluded.21

For Banham, avant-gardism had always implied

engagement with technology and he turned, at this

critical juncture, away from the raw materials and

untreated surfaces of industrial production to the

emerging domain of consumer-ready digital services

and the cooption of its visual sensibilities for archi-

tecture. In March 1966, Banham published another

key article, "Zoom Wave Hits Architecture," in New

Society.22 In it, he listed four little magazines at the

core of this trend. Polygon out of the Regent's Street

Polytechnic was the oldest of the bunch. The newest

was Clip-Kit, headed by Peter Murray at the Archi-

tectural Association. The third was Murray's previous

effort, Megascope, started at Bristol University

(Figure 7).23 The "reigning champion of protest

mags" was, of course, Archigram (Figure 8).24 Not

only was Banham's article illustrated with ¡mages

from that magazine but also the other publications

looked to Archigram for inspiration, as well as

reproducing its projects and interests: Fuller and

geodesies, plug-ins and megastructures, and plastics

and inflatables.

These magazines emerging from the architec-

ture schools possessed a dispositional resemblance to

the manifestos of the avant-gardes of the teens and

twenties that Banham had struggled to rehabilitate

7. Cover of Megascope, November 1965.

19 STEINER




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9. Plan and section for Living City, 1963. (©Archigram Archives)

advertising, science, science-fiction or pop-art

material, were presented in a deliberately disjointed

or random fashion/'32

Living City deployed the jumble of photographic

¡mages as signs from across the visual field, "from

trivia to valued drawings, and monster versions to

minuscule versions of everyday things," albeit of

different objects and for a different message

(Figure II).33 Significantly, the allegiance to the

camera lens, the prioritization of the visual, and the

holism of the ¡mage were absent. The camera was, in

fact, represented as part of a broader collage

dedicated to the subject of communications that

encompassed the written word, the film reel, the eye,

the phonograph record, the highway interchange, the

clock, and the corporate logos (Figure 12). The

organizers hoped to express as urban content "the

triviality of lighting a cigarette, or the hard fact of

moving 2 million commuters a day."34 Here the

21 STEINER

equation of scale is in the treatment of these two

events, both dependent on time, location, and

circumstance, as "equal- as facts of the shared

experience of the city."35 The ¡mages employed for

this end were described as being of the moment, with

the unavoidable admixture of past forms.36 Each

section of the exhibition- Man, Survival, Crowd,

Movement, Communication, Place and

Situation- utilized imagery for its own purposes.

An implicit premise was that architects rely on

prevailing vocabularies and that these expressions,

like those of fashion, have geographic specificity and

vary over time. While a designer might be keenly in

touch with the cultural moment, conventional

architecture inevitably outlasts methodology due to

its duration. There were already things in the urban

environment that had evolved to the point that they

were discarded upon outliving their use. Like the

proliferation of disposables, the life of the city was

becoming increasingly more detached from the

aggregate of municipal building types. The objects

that made up the content of the urban "Survival Kit,"

for example, provided a possible sample of material

urban life, ranging from necessities for generic bodily

maintenance to personal preferences for leisure

activities. Some forms of shelter already had ele-

ments of the expendable built into their production.

Urban vitality, however, was generated not by the

demarcations of the built environment, or even

objects at all, but rather by the discourse that took

place when people gathered.37 Those things and

conditions that enabled inhabitants to lead a vital

form of life relied on the opportunities that arose for

communication. The exhibition addressed this hier-

archy in spatial terms. Man, Crowd, and Survival, the

categories that addressed the inhabitants, formed

a cluster to the left of the entrance point. These

categories were contingencies dependent on the

variables of Movement, Place, and Situation that

unfolded in a crescent to the right. Communication,

the stimulant that enabled all the social conditions

for activity, had pride of place on entrance right.

From Big Ben to transportation systems, the images

in the exhibition were presented as the signs and

symbols of transmission.

"We are in pursuit," wrote Warren Chalk, the

senior member of the group in the catalog, "of an

idea, a new vernacular, something to stand alongside

the space capsules, computers and throw-away

packages of an atomic/electronic age."38 The "new

vernacular" on display in the exhibition was not one

of authentic naivete but rather the urbane accretions

of plenty. Take, for example, the photomontage of

the modishly dressed woman glancing over her

shoulder, mouth obscured by a furry stole as she

touches her seamed calf, that accompanied Chalk's

statement declaring the quest for an updated

vocabulary in the exhibition catalog (Figure 13). It is

an overtly voyeuristic ¡mage of a contemporary

woman caught from behind in a vulnerable posi-

tion.39 In a convergence of the glamor shot with stark

realism, the damp street on which she stoops is lined




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12. "Communications" collage, for the Living City exhibition, 1963. (©Archigram Archives)

that went much deeper than the introduction of

unorthodox forms.

Beyond Architecture, 1966

By the time Banham defined the Zoom Wave, the

Archigram project was already into its fifth year

and on its seventh newsletter, Beyond Architecture .41

From the expendables that still were, after all,

predominantly the product of an industrial culture,

they had graduated to the heightened transience of

networks. The cover sheet of Archigram 7 featured an

intricate weave of circuitry. The issue, assembled at

the end of 1 966, consisted of fifteen loose pages of

varying sizes printed in inks of red, green, blue,

brown, or black that came sheathed together in

a plastic bag. It was, certainly in terms of format, the

least coherent of the Archigrams. Still, Peter Cook's

editorial reflections commented on the manner in

which the ideas of previous issues, such as networks,

had begun to converge:

In Archigram 7 we are looking at several

interpretations of basic ideas thrown up in

23 STEINER

previous numbers: growth, change,

metamorphosis, indeterminacy, anti-zoning,

expendability, freezones, etc .... What started

out as separate threads seem now to be

meshing together, and like any catalysts they

are undergoing their own metamorphosis:

suddenly a much bigger conversation looms

(one which could not be imagined when we

started Archigram, which is more than the sum

of its parts): does architecture have anything to

do with life anymore? Are there any abstract

values worth waiting around for whilst we fall

further and further behind reality?

In conclusion came the warning, "there may be

no buildings at all in Archigram 8."

That architecture might not involve building was

among the convictions that the Archigram project

shared with Cedric Price, a figure who was a role

model for the group and a frequent contributor to the

publication. In a three-page essay included in the

seventh Archigram, Price explained that an interro-

gation from outside the discipline also required

a mode of representation that came from without.

13. Warren Chalk, "The Passing Presence," for the

Living City exhibition, 1963. (©Archigram Archives)

"Mathematical modernism," Price assessed, only

continued the tradition of "puerile pattern making"

from within. Interpolations of the grille, for example,

would fall into this category. He further criticized




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14. Warren Chalk, "Ghosts," Archigram 7, 1966. (©Archigram Archives)

diagrammatic propositions, singling out by way of

example the techniques proposed by Christopher

Alexander. He asserted that the manner in which an

idea was expressed set the tone for built work, as

analytical techniques were often mistaken for work-

ing drawings. Even the computer, Price observed at

this early juncture, was being used by most to reit-

erate what had been done before it was available

instead of opening up new possibilities. "This is yet

another plea," he wrote by way of explanation, "for

the architect to increase others' range of choice, but

in the context of the future planning it requires

conscious design application in calculated uncer-

tainty." To design for calculated uncertainty required

a language that did not fall back on past conceptions

or mistake the diagram for the finished product.42

The question that remained was how architectural

language could develop the capacity to represent

objects and, more complicatedly, conditions that

were always in transition.

Ghosts

Archigram 7 is redolent of loss. From the lack of

binding to the elimination of buildings, it mostly tells

a story about what architecture can no longer be.

Tucked in among the loose pages of expected

Archigram visuals, including several variations on the

plug-in concept and a dymaxion-style cut out puzzle,

was a letter written by Warren Chalk to David Greene

that addressed the losses of visual language directly.

Under the heading, "'Ghosts' (by Albert Ayler)," this

contribution dealt directly with the pressures of

influence that were brought to bear on the creation

of the new language, both from within the discipline

and from the cultural realm without.43 Chalk wrote

Greene:

Architecture is probably a hoax, a fantasy world

brought about through a desire to locate,

absorb and integrate into an overall obsession

a self-interpretation of the every-day world

around us. An impossible attempt to rationalise

the irrational. It is difficult to be exact about

influences, but those influences that enter our

unconscious consciousness are what I call

ghosts.

Our lives exist within a complex web of these

influences which we either accept or reject;

those we find acceptable are turned to

advantage; they become our preoccupations,

prejudices or preconceptions.

To demonstrate how architecture served as

a method to assimilate the everyday world, Chalk

prepared an array of ¡mages as a supplement to the

letter (Figure 14). On both sides of a sheet of inked

paper (15.5 x 12.5 inch), white ¡mages emerged

from a black background. The "A" side was dedicated

to the "unconscious consciousness" of preconcep-

tion. Surrounding a picture of Ayler with his saxo-

phone hovering over the word "GHOSTS" with an

adjustable compass strategically placed off to the

right were the apparitions of modernism's variations

on a framework.44 Included in the array were side

elevations of tubular steel chairs by Marcel Breuer,

the design for a Spherical Theater (1924) by Andreas

Weininger, the plan of the 5O-by-5O House (1950-

1 951 ) by Mies van der Rohe, and a plan of Ronchamp

(1955). These choices were not necessarily paradig-

matic items, but personal, more fanciful- an

impossible theater for spectacle, an unbuilt prototype

for mass housing by Mies, Le Corbusie^s more

whimsical later work. Strewn among those were

¡mages from without, including a silhouette of

a crane, outlines of tailor's mannequins, and a film-

strip by Richard Smith and Robert Freeman featuring





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15. Warren Chalk, "Phantoms," Archigram 7, 1966. (©Archigram Archives)

a man in profile.45 Drawings of one of modernism's

most enduring ghosts, the four-door sedan, were

also incorporated.

Chalk continued:

Ghosts help reinforce and establish attitudes,

build a very personal language, a complex

labyrinth of ¡deals, constraints, theories, half-

remembered rules, symbols, words that

ultimately digested affect our concepts. It is

unpopular, but essential, that existing attitudes

come in for constant and rigorous renewal or

reappraisal. We are confronted with a dynamic

shifting pattern of events at both popular and

intellectual levels, both stimulating and

confusing. In this ever-changing climate, old

ghosts may be cast out and replaced by new;

25 STEINER

it is right that influences should last only as

long as they are useful to us, and our

architecture should reflect this. At a general

level it is becoming increasingly apparent that

due to historical circumstances the more

tangible ghosts of the past- those grim,

humourless, static, literary or visual

¡mages- will succumb to the onslaught of the

invisible media; the psychedelic vision; the

insight accompanying a joke; the phantoms of

the future.

Thus, the static things that linger and preoc-

cupy must be allowed to interact with the newer

dynamic conditions all around, even be supplanted

by them. The capacity for architecture to adapt to

the ever-changing climate directly correlated with

the capacity for its language to incorporate the

range of ever-changing influences from outside.

The "B" side, "Phantoms," to which the "Ghosts"

will succumb, included no works of architecture as

such (Figure 15). These included diagrams of geo-

desic triangulations, op art abstractions, a model

against a leopard print, diagrams of fleeting

impulses of various kinds, and a schema of a rocket

with hovering spiky, comic-style speech bubbles.

Whether an aerial, a telephone cord, a satellite dish,

or a strip of punched code, all forms of electronics-

age cultural production were architecturally

suggestive.

Other projects in the Archigram further

addressed the "onslaught of the invisible media":

the Free Time Node by Herron and Barry Snowden,

for example, was a serviced spine of programmatic

"cages" for leisure, education, shopping, and other

urban activities that allowed for freedom of

mobility within the urban framework. Mike Webb's

Rent-a-Wall provided some insight to accompany

a joke.46

Phantoms (of the Future)

If the language of captured contingency had once

appeared bold in the context of institutional

modernism, the juxtaposition of the design philos-

ophy of one decade with the built practice of

another exposed the contingencies of duration for

the process of ¡mage making. The Economist

Building stood in the heart of the city like one of

modernism's ghosts among the phantoms of the

future. Architecture as a vehicle of communications

had by then dramatically increased the reliance of

the discipline on the visual domain outside of

modern graphic strategies. Images of consumer

culture were drawn upon to generate the

atmosphere of transience and circulation, or even

equate lifestyle and architecture. Architecture as

a web of imagery implied that building was not

of the essence after all. Representation was

architecture in itself.




13/14


14/14

22. Reprinted in Design by Choice (London: Academy Editions 1981),

pp. 64-65.

23. Murray later became the art editor for Architectural Design.

24. Despite its authors' claim of institutional neutrality (e.g., Archigram 5

declared: "This magazine is completely independent of any organization,

school of architecture, etc. It is registered as a business name"), the Ar-

chigrom was part of this phenomenon of the architectural schools and was

initially distributed by students at the AA and the Regent's Street

Polytechnic.

25. Editorial, Archigram 2, unpaginated.

26. Peter Cook, "Introduction," Living Arts 2 (1963): 69.

27. Maxwell's review noted that the group originally considered using

smells as well. When asked what sort of smells they might have contem-

plated and about the composition of the soundtrack, Dennis Crompton

responded, "I don't recall anything very positive, but city smells come to

mind. You must have noticed the different characteristic smells of Paris,

Milan, London and New York just for a start. Bob also refers to 'discon-

tinuous sound track'- cannot be much help with this either except to

suggest that you should first check on the availability of tape recorders in

1 963 as I'm not sure that we had them at that time. The earliest 1 /4" tape

that I have on my shelves is the Beatles 'Revolver dated 1966. We did

have records and Coltrane/Coleman would have been high on the hit list.

But it could just have easily been the ICA barman's radio " (e-mail,

December^ 1998).

28. In the working documents for an early version of the exhibition

proposal, Peter Smithson stated, "The first great creative period of

modern architecture finished in 1929 and work subsequent to this can be

regarded as exploratory work for the second great creative period

beginning now .... The second great period should be proclaimed by an

exhibition in which the juxtaposition of phenomenon from our various

fields would make obvious the existence of a new attitude" (Walsh,

Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art, p. 90). "Living City"

also claimed to speak for its generation (Editorial, Living Arts

2 [1963]: 1).

29. Many critics disliked this feature.

30. Cook, p. 66.

31 . A section of "Living Arts," a new journal founded by Theo Crosby for

the ICA, provided the textual accompaniment for the exhibition.

32. Robert Maxwell, "The Living City Exhibition at the ICA," Living Arts 3

(1964): 98.

33. Cook, p. 71 .

34. Ibid., p. 70.

35. Ibid., p. 70.

36. Ibid., p. 71.

37. Peter Cook, "Come-Co: The Key to the Vitality of the City," Living

Arts 2 (1963): 80.

38. Warren Chalk, "Cloop 7: Situation," Living Arts 2 (1963): 112.

39. Simon Sadler remarks on the issue of masculine identity with

relation to this image in "Living City Survival Kit: A Portrait of the

Architect as a Young Man," Art History, 26/4 (September 2003):

556-575.

40. The colors, however, were not reproduced in the Archigram publi-

cation where the feel of a zine was self-consciously maintained until its

demise.

41 . An exhibition, "Beyond Architecture: A Projection of 640 Images,"

opened on February 22, 1967 at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art.

42. This came to be the judgment directed at the Pompidou Center,

despite the commonplace that one of the few British architectural exports

of the twentieth century, the style known as "High Tech," followed in the

footsteps of Archigram. Indeed, a group bus trip was undertaken to see

the completed Pompidou Center (1977), some highlights of which were

caught on film. The arrival in Paris, inevitably, was accompanied by

disappointment. Though they recognized their cartoons in the work, the

literal application of diagrammatic color to the overblown external ducts

converted what in the drawings was a metaphor of circulation and

exchange into a monumentalization of services. On-camera musings

reveal bewilderment at the fundamental lack of dynamism on display.

While the frame enabled internal flexibility of program, the core issue

of transience, from the structural incorporation of time to the exchanges

of technology and consumption, was untouched. The consensus was

that the Pompidou Center was, though filtered through the

representational lens of Archigram, a static building. Thus, the Archigram

project was converted into a traditional one. Dennis Postle recorded the

bus trip from London to France and the observations of Price and the

others as part of Four Films, Tatooist International Productions, Arts

Council, 1980.

43. Ayler first recorded "Ghosts" on Spiritual Unity (1964).

44. Chalk was an avid enthusiast of jazz and sought to extend the analogy

of "jamming" to design.

45. The image came from the first issue of Living Art magazine,

captioned "A film made by Richard Smith and Robert Freeman in 8mm

colour (running time 10 minutes)."

46. "You'll appreciate Rent-a-Wall's good looks and versatility. . . . says

president Fred X. Shooman."

47. "International Ideas," Archigram 7, unpaginated.

48. Conversation with Greene (June 1, 1998).

49. Joseph Kosuth, "Art After Philosophy," in C. Harrison and P. Wood,

eds., Art In Theory 1900-1990, An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1992), p. 864. Or as number ten of Sol LeWitt's "Sentences on

Conceptual Art" claimed, "Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in

a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas

need not be made physical" (ibid., pp. 837-839).

50. "When it is raining in Oxford Street the architecture is no more im-

portant than the rain; in fact the weather has probably more to do with the

pulsation of the living city at that given moment" ("Introduction," pp.

70-71).

27 STEINER


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