Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 40 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Crimes of the Fifties
Many years ago, I talked with a friend in Eastern Europe about their endless sprawl of tall, identical brick apartment buildings, stretching for mile after depressing mile. “Ah, yes,” she said. “We have an expression: We call them ‘the crimes of the Fifties.’” In their part of the world, Trushchoby is Russian for “slums.” After the war, vast ugly housing projects taking the place of war-ravaged rubble sprang up. Cynical Muscovites mockingly dubbed them khrushchoby—the “Khrushchev slums.”
Filmmakers with dystopian futuristic stories often don’t build outdoor sets; they just use existing modern architecture. James Lileks knew why: it’s because the buildings had brutalism and conformity woven into their design DNA, right from the beginning.
The original vision of 20th-century progressives was Garden Cities, two-story apartment buildings in the suburbs with plenty of landscaping. Left-wing documentary filmmakers of the late Thirties contrasted city slums with the healthier life outside of town.
Imagine a faded, black-and-white family photo from the early Fifties, taken in the streets, complete with brick walls, faded graffiti, and corrugated metal trash cans. I’m from the south Bronx, the part they demolished in 1956 to build an expressway. We ended up only a few miles away, across the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, but it might as well have been another dimension: old private houses, quiet streets, trees.
Other families, my parents’ friends from the old neighborhood, gratefully took the city’s offer of one of the new apartments and universally regretted it later. I often heard my relatives say, in varying words, “Thank God we didn’t end up in the damn projects.”
“The damn projects.” You could probably have heard it in most of the cities of the world.
Cabrini Green is a notorious example of big-city good intentions gone big-time wrong. Most of the people who moved there in the late Forties or early Fifties felt they were a huge improvement on old Chicago’s decrepit walkups; but as more and more people were packed in, opinions changed radically. When the first units went up during the war, they weren’t as overwhelmingly large as the project would become in the Fifties, when the politicians, construction unions, local vote-seekers and mobsters “induced” Chicago to pack many more, much taller apartment buildings, on to what was now a crowded, charmless piece of land.
Finally, in a surrender to reality that would have disheartened Chicago city planners of the Fifties, Cabrini Green was demolished, literally blown to smithereens to the loud cheers of the people who were supposed to have benefited from it.
Of course we can’t blame all that on the architects. They shrugged and gave their clients the buildings they were willing to pay for. Some social problems were especially acute in Chicago: Welfare policies, black migration from the South during and after the War, the subsequent collapse of black family formation, and an unprecedented crime wave turned Cabrini Green into a nightmarish no-go zone. But Chicago was far from unique: Paris has long had versions of its own, and so has Amsterdam.
Le Corbusier, aka Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, was a Swiss-French architect who is key to understanding what happened to housing projects. “Corbu” (The Raven) was very influential in twentieth-century modern architecture. Le Corbusier’s most copied prewar idea was the “tower in a park” style of apartment design. Until then, really tall buildings were for offices, not homes.
Old time city apartments were often over stores or restaurants. Now everything would be a bus or train ride away. It’s now associated with some of the world’s dreariest housing developments. To be fair, overuse and misuse of the style weren’t Corbu’s fault. To others, though, modern architecture for apartment houses was merely artistic license to cram ‘em in. It fits a political agenda.
Corbu was a frustrated utopian from way back. He lost the 1927 contest to design a headquarters for the League of Nations, and for the rest of his life he never stopped grousing about it. Later, in the design of the United Nations headquarters, he was only one voice among several other world-famous architects, and he wasn’t the one entrusted with building the design. In fairness to the UN, he had relatively little experience supervising very large-scale construction, and none in the US. This prompted a line from his biographer: “In short, in this instance Corbu showed himself to be that most regrettable of social creatures, the sore loser.” True. He acted like a jilted would-be lover, someone who had a dream about success in America that hadn’t worked out, personally or politically.
Some powerful people try something radically different in their old age. Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. Tony Bennett sang with Lady Gaga. Chrysler’s Virgil Exner bailed on tailfins. Le Corbusier, the modernist supreme, suddenly made flashy gestures towards abandoning machine-age design. The extraordinarily talented old snob modified some hallowed aspects of 20th-century modernism as he and others had practiced it up until then, softening them and making them less inhuman. The basics hadn’t changed; the roofs were still flat, but now each had the artistic presentation of a sculpture garden, a futuristic or otherworldly look. He tried to make “developments” more palatable.
The building’s visible surfaces, in Corbu’s youth as close to geometrically flat and white as he could make them, were now “brut” concrete, where the rough, unrefined surfaces retain the impression of the wooden forms that molded them. It gave a name to a movement—brutalism. The new style became for a time nearly as influential as the ruler-straight cold European modernism that preceded it.
An afterward, after the Wall came down: With German efficiency, the new post-Communist government after reunification set about destroying some of the worst of the Stalin-era flats while making an enormous, part-successful, part-tragicomic attempt to dress up east Berlin’s acres and acres of faceless identical apartment buildings, because, regrettably, they were indispensable for the time being. Some results of millions of Marks and Euros of remodeling, eccentric design, and vivid paint are remarkably good. Give them credit for that.
Others still look like, well, crimes of the Fifties.
Published in General
I didn’t know that about brutalism. Guess I have to look for the marks to know if I’m using it correctly.
Good stuff, Gary.
Thanks as always, Judge!
Lileks was right. Broadly speaking, if the building and its setting have been rented as Hollywood settings for scenes in the Planets of the Apes franchise, or the Klingon Hall of Justice, or the intelligence headquarters of an alt history Nazi regime, there may be something broodingly evil about the inhuman design from the get-go.
Mies van der Rohe was the other giant of mid-20th century modern architecture. (Frank Lloyd Wright’s big accomplishments were a little earlier, and he doesn’t fit many categories easily.)
There was a sour joke about famous artists and their pretensions of nobility. “Mies claims he fled Germany over his profound moral objections. Yeah, sure. Indignant, he was, because Hitler didn’t like flat roofs.”
There’s a new project for the “homeless” going up in – perhaps already up in, or in progress – Los Angeles, where they’re spending $165 Million (so they claim – cost overruns not yet included) for rather luxurious units and fitness rooms etc, that will cost (again, before inevitable overruns) $600,000 per units. And they’re mostly STUDIOS! With some ONE-bedrooms too.
If you replace this:
with this:
that’s pretty brutal.
Both of them are courthouses. One of them says “respect this place, for this is where justice shall be sought.” The other one says “respect this place or else.”
Both of them are gone. One of them is lamented. The latter … not so much.
Yep. Thanks again, Gary.
PJ O’Rourke, from Parliament of Whores, on a visit to a housing project in New Jersey.
“Le Corbusier was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform. In one sense, he had less excuse for his activities than Pol Pot: for unlike the Cambodian, he possessed great talent, even genius. Unfortunately, he turned his gifts to destructive ends, and it is no coincidence that he willingly served both Stalin and Vichy. Like Pol Pot, he wanted to start from Year Zero: before me, nothing; after me, everything. By their very presence, the raw-concrete-clad rectangular towers that obsessed him canceled out centuries of architecture. Hardly any town or city in Britain (to take just one nation) has not had its composition wrecked by architects and planners inspired by his ideas.”
Dalrymple
Minimalist architecture is designed to diminish the individual. It has infected church architecture that produces churches that have all the charm of a Cold War East German railway station waiting room.
Another great post, thank you.
This kind of architecture dominates many colleges and universities, especially the state-run schools.
They haven’t given up as city planners continue to try to wipe out the single family home.
Great post, Gary!
As I passed through my own city the other day, I glanced up at the skyscrapers of the 1950’s and thought to myself that they were not so beautiful as I once thought. The old county jail and the new one reflect remarkably the contrast shown in @percival ‘s photos above. The newer buildings are not always totally horrible, but they lack the artistry of some of the old, which in this case is often tarnished by years of soot from steel mills.
DMVs.
I work in an office building in which the off-white shades on every window on every floor are identical and can be all the way up or down or exactly halfway–no one-third or 3/4ths. Corbu would approve.
I still love the remark by Robert Hughes in Shock of the New in the episode savaging much of modern architecture in which he stood in front NY state govt office buildings and said to picture a large American eagle on top, then a swastika, then a hammer and sickle–“the building doesn’t care.” That would not work on a gothic cathedral or Westminster. Designs that expressly refuse to embrace any cultural heritage are as vulnerable to totalitarian influence as are the people who think they have “transcended” their unhip heritage. So much of modernism seems to be both anti-human and narcissistic.
That quote is a great find, JC, very relevant.
Another style of his caught on, but it doesn’t fit the housing-for-all spirit of the Red Thirties: ritzy hotels.
He favored wide, shallow shapes of buildings, angled for sun and views. There are no units without windows. Those sunny exposures often got Corbu’s signature louvers and canopies to deal with the light. It became a model for hotels from Stockholm to Honolulu, from Hong Kong to Rio de Janeiro: everybody gets a balcony.
We talk a lot about SCOTUS on Ricochet, but not about the building itself. Its classic style, its columns and staircase makes you think it’s one of a piece with the Capitol and the White House. But it’s less than a century old. The choice was deliberate. Even at the time, modernists decried it as a lost opportunity.
The Supreme Court is damn nice looking. It could have been no more noble and inspiring than a White Castle or a Packard showroom.
The new courthouse is a typical van der Rohe Rohe Rohe yer boat structure of no architectural significance. Its most memorable event so far was when a local attorney climbed out on its ten story roof and jumped. He had the bad taste to use a parachute, though landing in the parking lot of the police department headquarters made things more convenient for them.
Or a recreational vehicle factory.
The anti-colonial wars that reduced European empires in India, the middle east, Vietnam, Algeria, and elsewhere in Africa had a profound effect on continental writers and artists. Some of it was expressly political and anti-imperialist, and most of it hypocritically worked both sides of that street. French writers wrote up the joys of easy sex with “native” women while condemning the influence of Coca-Cola; architects like Corbu played up new styles of attempting to honor local artistic forms and traditions, while profiting from authoritarian regimes’ commissions to build them.
It isn’t so much what Le Corbusier said or did, but his unevenly gifted disciples have left both masterpieces and messes.
Chicago has some of the best of the new, standing shoulder to shoulder with the old. Take a Chicago River night cruise sometime.
The Fifties were an era of great frustration for Europeans, seeing so much of art and commerce shine brighter on the other side of the Atlantic. To read some of their paranoid rantings, you’d think MoMA (New York’s Museum of Modern Art, admittedly a Rockefeller-supported charity) was a branch of the CIA. Le Corbusier flattered himself with the groundless belief that he’d been singled out by the sinister Rockefellers.
I do recall reading once about a CIA anti-Communist plot in Italy that involved some sort of art deal, so if that was true I’m not saying this would be impossible.
As usual, I agree with The Balzer Insight. Yeah, something sort of like this is more than possible. But I doubt it’s much more organized than some late Fifties attempts to influence student art groups or buy out subversive magazines.
Funny that Le Corbusier seemed to largely get a pass regarding WWII. As Jimmah’s skillful quote-finding shows, Dalyrimple notes acidly that Corbu, at different times, stood on the side of Stalin and Vichy. It was a long time before the French admitted to themselves that their conduct under occupation was unheroic. This didn’t make everyone who showed up for work each day into a Nazi sympathizer, though it depends what they did.
For European intellectuals, it wasn’t a question of left v. right, but of which quadrant of the left you belonged to. Le Corbusier, from the orthodox 50s left Euro-thinker point of view, was unhelpfully apolitical, because he was also politically amoral. But he was a man of his time.
When I see the pictures of shattered Soviet-era apartment blocks in Ukraine, I wonder whether post-war, they will take the opportunity to leave that style and those memories behind.
Ah, so much here to discuss, and so many great points. What to add?
My personal motto: every city is made better by one Miesian International Style skyscraper. And every city is made worse by ten.
I might disagree. I have a website on modern churches (called “Nearer my God to Mies,” har har) that has some good and regrettable examples. The stark interiors tend to cut away the clutter of yore, all the gothic gee-gaws, and concentrate the attention on an object of instruction or veneration. They have an antiseptic clarity. The windows are not didactic, because the congregants are literate and do not need things spelled out in pictures.
I prefer the traditional, but there is something bracing about a good modernist church. It depends. The great church of Iceland is almost amusing in its modernism, because the whole thing screams “well we don’t actually believe in God, but if we did, we imagine this is the sort of thing we might visit on the odd Sunday.”
The US has Crimes of the Fifties as well, as you noted, but it’s not just the projects. Post-war small apartment blocks are almost entirely blank and unadorned, and ubiquitous in first-ring suburbs and the fringes of old cities. In the twenties, the blocks were gussied up in a rotating series of historical styles – Tudor, Spanish, Italianate, Classical. In the thirties, if they built them at all, they had some Moderne attributes. After the war, with modernism ascendent, the developers realized that spending absolutely nothing whatsoever on stylistic encrustations was coincident with the new style! Hurrah! You could build a blank brick box and it would be the latest thing.
Since architects are herd animals, they turned these boxes out by the thousands. I think they kept a jealous eye on vulgar commercial architecture – the interesting, fun stuff – and wished they could work on a restaurant or bowling alley, but since the 50s styles had the imprimatur of rigorous modernism, well, that’s what they made. Until someone put an ugly mansard roof on an apartment building, and hello: something new! The other architects looked around, saw everyone else nodding, and before you knew it the nation was littered with white-brick boxes wearing heavy hats. And because they were new, that’s where the secretaries and young couples wanted to live.
The Crimes of the Seventies.
the crimes of the 70s didn’t just effect Architecture – fashion, car design and disco made it a decade of rot.
Another great observation by Robert Hughes was about the fascist architectural stylings favored by Mussolini. It would have died out but for the US federal government and southern California university presidents.
I think the root of the problem is that when an architect sets out to make a statement rather than a useful and visually pleasing building, bad things happen.
“They” being Robert Moses, of the plural pronoun cited in a million epithets.
So Gary, was it for the Cross Bronx, the Sheridan, or the Bruckner? His Eminents had so many.
Moses’ roads weren’t all examples of New York brutalism. (The parkways on Long Island were and remain beautiful.) He did, however, drive many an ugly housing project and otherwise occupy the city’s most skilled architects for decades. His highways, bridges, tunnels, and buildings (plus the much publicized parks, playgrounds, and World’s Fairs) made him arguably the most powerful public sector bureaucrat we ever had.
Along the way his independent Authority’s, like the Triboro Bridge and Tunnel, created a model for financially independent control of all-within-reach by a tenured bureaucracy untouchable by voters and elected officials alike.
The Bruckner. When it was just Bruckner Boulevard, I used to sit on the fire escape and name the makes of cars going by. “Chevy. Kaiser. Mercury.” If you look at a NYC map, we were right at the T-intersection where I-278 meets the Major Deegan. The neighborhood is called Mott Haven, and you can’t get more south than that in the south Bronx.
Robert Moses has been a figure of hate for a very long time, some of it deserved, some of it not. His unelected status made him impossible to remove. He had thin skin and a long memory for slights. He may well be one of the biggest reasons why the Dodgers left Brooklyn, because he was not willing to accommodate a new stadium in that location. NYC’s leaders were unable to budge him from his preferred option, across from the site of the 1939-40 World’s Fair. We knew it as Shea Stadium.