A handful of dust
The
modernists wanted to strip the world of mystery and emotion. No wonder
they excelled at the architecture of death, says JG Ballard.
Monday March 20, 2006
The Guardian
Architecture on Utah beach
War of the worlds ... architecture on Utah beach. Photograph: Sergio Gaudenti
Few people today visit Utah beach. The sand seems colder and flatter
than anywhere else along the Normandy coast where the Allies landed on
D-day. The town of Arromanches - a few miles to the east and closer to
Omaha, Gold and Sword beaches - is a crowded theme park of war museums,
cemeteries and souvenir shops, bunkers and bunting. Guidebooks in hand,
tourists edge gingerly around the German gun emplacements and try to
imagine what it was like to stare down the gun sights at the vast
armada approaching the shore.
But Utah beach, on the western edge of the landing grounds, is silent.
A few waves swill over the sand as if too bored to think of anything
else. The coastal land seems lower than the sea, and fails to echo the
sounds of war inside one's head.
Walking along the beach some years ago, I noticed a dark structure
emerging from the mist ahead of me. Three storeys high, and larger than
a parish church, it was one of the huge blockhouses that formed
Hitler's Atlantic wall, the chain of fortifications that ran from the
French coast all the way to Denmark and Norway. This blockhouse, as
indifferent to time as the pyramids, was a mass of black concrete once
poured by the slave labourers of the Todt Organisation, pockmarked by
the shellfire of the attacking allied warships.
A flight of steps at its rear led me into the dank interior with its
gun platforms and sinister letter box view of the sea. Generations of
tramps had dossed here, and in the stairwells were the remains of small
fires, piles of ancient excrement and a vague stench of urine.
At first sight, the blockhouse reminded me of the German forts at
Tsingtao, the beach resort in north China that my family visited in the
1930s. Tsingtao had been a German naval base during the first world
war, and I was taken on a tourist trip to the forts, a vast complex of
tunnels and gun emplacements built into the cliffs. The cathedral-like
vaults with their hydraulic platforms resembled Piranesi's prisons,
endless concrete galleries leading to vertical shafts and even further
galleries. The Chinese guides took special pleasure in pointing out the
bloody handprints of the German gunners driven mad by the British naval
bombardment.
Years later, in that Utah beach blockhouse, I was looking at similar
stains on the concrete walls, but the scattered rubbish and tang of
urine made me think of structures closer to home in England - run-down
tower blocks and motorway exit ramps, pedestrian underpasses sprung
from the drawing boards of enlightened planners who would never have to
live in or near them, and who were careful never to stray too far from
their Georgian squares in the heart of heritage London.
From the rooftop barbette I looked along Utah Beach towards an
identical blockhouse 800 yards away, and beyond that to the faint
silhouette of a third. The Atlantic wall was only part of a huge system
of German fortifications that included the Siegfried line, submarine
pens and huge flak towers that threatened the surrounding land like
lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had survived the war and seemed
to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior
scientists obsessed with geometry and death.
Death was what the Atlantic wall and Siegfried line were all about.
Whenever I came across these grim fortifications along France's Channel
coast and German border, I realised I was exploring a set of concrete
tombs whose dark ghosts haunted the brutalist architecture so popular
in Britain in the 1950s. Out of favour now, modernism survives in every
high-rise sink estate of the time, in the Barbican development and the
Hayward Gallery in London, in new towns such as Cumbernauld and the
ziggurat residential blocks at the University of East Anglia.
But modernism of the heroic period, from 1920 to 1939, is dead, and it
died first in the blockhouses of Utah beach and the Siegfried line. Yet
in its heyday between the wars, modernism was a vast utopian project,
and perhaps the last utopian project we will ever see, now that we are
well aware that all utopias have their dark side.
Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were two utopian projects that turned
into the greatest dystopias the world has known. Modernism briefly
survived them both, but lost its nerve in the 1960s when the municipal
high-rise estates in St Louis, Missouri, were deemed social
catastrophes and dynamited. However, I sometimes think that social
catastrophe was what the dirt-poor residents secretly longed for.
Modernism's attempt to build a better world with the aid of science and
technology now seems almost heroic. Bertolt Brecht, no fan of
modernism, remarked that the mud, blood and carnage of the first world
war trenches left its survivors longing for a future that resembled a
white-tiled bathroom. Architects were in the vanguard of the new
movement, led by Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus design school. The old
models were thrown out. Function defined form, expressed in a pure
geometry that the eye could easily grasp in its entirety. Above all,
there should be no ornamentation. "Less is more," was the war cry, to
which Robert Venturi, avatar of the tricksy postmodernism that gave us
the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery, retorted: "Less is a bore."
But the modernists maintained that ornamentation concealed rather than
embellished. Classical columns, pediments and pilasters defined a
hierarchical order. Power and authority were separated from the common
street by huge flights of steps that we were forced to climb on our way
to law courts, parliaments and town halls. Gothic ornament, with all
its spikes and barbs, expressed pain, Christ's crown of thorns and
agony on the cross. The Gothic expressed our guilt, pointing to a
heaven we could never reach. The Baroque was a defensive fantasy,
architecture as aristocratic playpen, a set of conjuring tricks to ward
off the Age of Reason.
So modernism was a breath of fresh air and possibility. Housing
schemes, factories and office blocks designed by modernist architects
were clear-headed and geometric, suggesting clean and unembellished
lives for the people inside them. Gone were suburban pretension,
mock-Tudor beams and columned porticos disguising modest front doors.
Hitler and Stalin were intrigued by modernism, which seemed part of a
new world of aviation, radio, public health and mass consciousness. But
the dictators were nervous of clear-headed people who thought for
themselves. The Nazis promptly closed the Bauhaus when they came to
power and turned it into an SS training school.
Modernism saw off the dictators, and among its last flings were
Brasilia, the Festival of Britain and Corbusier's state capital
buildings at Chandigarh in India. But it was dying on its pilotis,
those load-bearing pillars with which Corbusier lifted his buildings
into the sky. Its slow death can be seen, not only in the Siegfried
line and the Atlantic wall, but in the styling of Mercedes cars, at
once paranoid and aggressive, like medieval German armour. We see its
demise in 1960s kitchens and bathrooms, white-tiled laboratories that
are above all clean and aseptic, as if human beings were some kind of
disease. We see its death in motorways and autobahns, stone dreams that
will never awake, and in the turbine hall at that middle-class disco,
Tate Modern - a vast totalitarian space that Albert Speer would have
admired, so authoritarian that it overwhelms any work of art inside it.
Modernism was never popular in Britain - a little too frank for its
repressed natives, except at lidos and the seaside, where people take
their clothes off. The few modernist houses and apartments look
genuinely odd. Why?
I have always admired modernism and wish the whole of London could be
rebuilt in the style of Michael Manser's brilliant Heathrow Hilton. But
I know that most people, myself included, find it difficult to be
clear-eyed at all times and rise to the demands of a pure and unadorned
geometry. Architecture supplies us with camouflage, and I regret that
no one could fall in love inside the Heathrow Hilton. By contrast,
people are forever falling in love inside the Louvre and the National
Gallery.
All of us have our dreams to reassure us. Architecture is a stage set
where we need to be at ease in order to perform. Fearing ourselves, we
need our illusions to protect us, even if the protection takes the form
of finials and cartouches, corinthian columns and acanthus leaves.
Modernism lacked mystery and emotion, was a little too frank about the
limits of human nature and never prepared us for our eventual end.
But all is not lost for admirers of modernism. They should visit the
mortuary island of San Michele in the Venice lagoon, where many
pioneers of modernism such as Igor Stravinsky, Serge Diaghilev and Ezra
Pound are interred. After taking the ferry, you disembark at a gloomy
landing stage worthy of Böcklin's Island of the Dead. This is a place
beyond hope, of haunted gateways and melancholy statues.
But then, in the heart of the cemetery, there is a sudden lightening of
tone, and you find you are strolling through what might be a Modern
suburb of Tunis or Tel Aviv. The lines of family tombs resemble
cheerful vacation bungalows, airy structures of white walls and glass
that might have been designed by Le Corbusier or Richard Neutra. One
could holiday for a long time in these pleasant villas, and a few of us
probably will.
So, there is one place where modernism triumphs. As in the cases of the
pyramids and the Taj Mahal, the Siegfried line and the Atlantic wall,
death always calls on the very best architects.
