Professor Silenus, Corbusier and the architect as God

Professor Silenus, known only for the "rejected design of a chewing-gum factory", declares against man: The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men. All ill comes from man. - Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh, 1928

Oh how times have changed! What a difference 80 years makes! No, Mr Silenus, all ill comes from the machine. If you could get in a time capsule and come to 2009 I would show you Big Brother and cctv cameras, global warming, traffic jams, cyber stalking and nuclear war.

I can understand Silenus's fascination with the machine, just as I understand Corbusier's. Imagine living in a world that is developing so rapidly you blink and miss a thousand things. Imagine never having seen a car before, a skyscraper or even a fridge. This new modern world would've been earth-shatteringly exciting when you contemplate the possibilities laid out before you and for an architect it would've been so immense I would be surprised if Corbusier didn't wet himself with anticipation.
Is it any wonder a new generation of designers became obsessed with new technology? I, like a lot of my colleagues, probably would've done. Machines were so perfect, so efficient. Wasn't it only logical to begin to look at architecture in this mechanical way too?
So that's what Corb did - the house became a machine for living in. Cities became factories for the machines. Everything would run litter ally like clockwork and everyone would have the most fantastic lives, free from ordinary responsibility and reaching a "maximum individual liberty".
But this is exactly where the dream of buildings and cities as machines stops and becomes a nightmare. This mechanisation of architecture extended to the mechanisation of society, to institutionalisation and depersonalisation. People weren't individual anymore, they were no longer free, they had become trapped in the machine. What if you didn't want to live in a vertical street? What if you couldn't drive a car? Well, then you would damage the machine, you would stop it from working so efficiently. The machine would start to grumble and kick out smoke and make your life Hell, but like an old German banger it would just keep on going, spilling oil everywhere and making a mess.
But this is the beauty of hindsight, Corb wasn't to know what his little science project would do to architecture and planning in the century to follow. All we can do as the next generation is learn from the mistakes of the past, not to get too carried away with new and exciting ideas. We need to remember we are only human, we ourselves are now part of the machine. There can be no detaching of the architect from society, no looking down from a higher place. We cannot pretend we are God and our ideals cannot be projected upon the masses with Utopian results, we cannot make an Eden - trying to fix the machine is enough for one eternity.

Howl, High Rise and Archigram

This week we read Howl by Allen Ginsberg (1955). The poem is split into three parts, the first of which describes scenes and characters from Ginsberg's colourful life "The best minds of my generation". He waxes about psychopathic friends, musicians, painters, drug users, gays and alcoholics. The final part, as Ginsberg describes, is "a litany of affirmation of the Lamb in all its glory". An ode to his close friend Carl, whom he met in a psychiatric hospital; the word lamb evoking images of the innocent , weak and vulnerable. In part two Carl (and his contemporaries) - the lamb - have been preyed on by "the monster of mental consciousness", they have fallen victim to society and are trapped inside a controlling bureaucratic machine. Ginsberg names this machine Moloch, a metaphor for capitalism and industrial civilization. It is also a word heavy with reference; a hallucination describing a San Francisco hotel with a monstrous facade to which Ginsberg's friends have been sacrificed/ the horror as men are devoured by their work in Fritz Laing's Metropolis (1927)/ a Middle-Eastern god to which children must be sacrificed.

In 1923 Corbusier declared "A house is a machine for living in", architecture would be refined, simplified and made efficiently, as if on a factory production line. Technology would be embraced and function would rule over style. By the 1960s a huge percentage of architecture had been built using Corbusier's model, though often without the finesse or the Utopian ideals that Corbusier had originally intended. Tower blocks meant for the war-homeless working classes were instead filled by the bourgeoisie seeking a contemporary, trendy way of living. Around the same time a new architectural collective in London were forming their own manifesto. Archigram took inspiration from science fiction, consumerism and technology. Their hypothetical projects made an almost literal satire of Corbusier's original "machine" by producing works that glamourised a future machine age where people lived in pods and became electric nomads of great moving cities.

In J.G.Ballard's 1975 High Rise, a perfect tower block is built, it is the epitome of efficient and convenient living. It is so perfect in fact that its residents no longer need to leave and to venture to the outside world for their needs. The high rise becomes inverted and a closed society is formed within its walls. The society soon divides into three warring classes, and violence, murder and deception soon follow. Ballard is trying to "offer a vision of how modern life in an urban landscape and the advances of technology could warp the human psyche in hitherto unexplored ways". He is showing us the frightening possibilities of Archigram and Le Corbusier played out to their full potential. He is taking Ginsberg's tragedy to the next level. (See Doctor Who's 'Paradise Towers', 1987, for an eerie but entertaining view of the Ballardian building and society).

It is now 2009, technology has come a thousand times further than it was in Ginsberg's or Ballard's time. How much longer before we all start falling victim to the machine, both physically and metaphorically. Has it already started? We have been warned...

歌舞伎町-眠らない街 I've never been to Vegas but I have been to Tokyo!

Whilst reading Tom Wolfe's "Las Vegas" I couldn't get over the similarities between the author's interpretation of the city and my own experiences of Kabukicho, Tokyo.

I'm lucky enough to have spent six months living and working in Japan and suffice to say it left a lasting impression on me. Wolfe's text re-ignited my senses and brought back to the surface the intense feelings experienced the first few times I walked through the Japanese streets.

Literally meaning 'theatre district', Kabukicho emerged in the late 40s following a boom in post-war rebuilding. Chinese businesses were quick to buy and develop the land, with one of the first buildings being a cabaret. Now it is an entertainments centre home to hundreds of hostess bars, arcades, nightclubs and shops and is often called "sleepless town".

Kabukicho is an assault on the senses. The narrow streets are closely packed, buildings nine or ten stories high are literally draped and hanging with lights. There's neon, flashing, pulsating, flickering. Signs beckoning you to sing some karaoke, eat some yakitori, see a show. Advertisements for 'soap' entice the old business men through shimmery curtains and down into the belly of the streets to gawp at the furry-genitals of Korean working girls. Outside the love hotels bubbling fluorescent fish tanks mesmerise office girls, whilst their baby-faced lovers check out a glowing photograph of the pay-by-the-hour suites within. Then there's the noise - a constant din of shouts from bars, giggles of micro-skirted girls and excited shrieks from the arcades; where teenage boys spend all their pocket money reaching number one on the 'dance dance revolution' leader board. Cigarette smoke drifts from the pachinko parlours creating a blue haze filled with the shrill ringing of the gambling machines and the incessant tinker of metal beads falling into the winners' troughs. In the back-rooms of these mirrored parlours the Yakuza and Triads count their yen and down sinister labyrinth alleys hunched-up men sip sake in silence like a scene out of Blade Runner.

Kabukicho gets under the skin, I can't help but love it - probably as much as Paul loves Vegas.