Review - Book - Modern Architecture Through Case Studies, 1945-1990
- Published: 12 October 2007 13:42
- Last Updated: 12 October 2007 13:42
- Reader Responses
One of the most illuminating case studies in the book deals with Gunter Behnisch’s Munich Olympics complex
BOOK
By Murray Fraser
Modern Architecture Through Case Studies, 1945-1990.
By Peter Blundell Jones and Eamonn Canniffe.
Architectural Press,
2007. £29.99
Peter Blundell Jones holds a particular place among British architectural historians. Anti-establishment by instinct, his work tends to champion the underdog, the unsung hero. In his earlier writings this meant attacking the Modernist orthodoxy formed by Sigfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner, with its fetish for the abstract tendencies of the ‘Neues Bauen’ (New Building). In his efforts to show there were other approaches to Modernism, Blundell Jones greatly enhanced our appreciation of figures like Hugo Häring and Hans Scharoun, who’d been unfairly expunged from the canon.
More recently Blundell Jones has concentrated on unpicking the impact of critical theory on British architectural writing since the 1990s. He does this by conducting a forensic study of completed buildings, using these as the acid test of architects’ design ideas and their impact on clients, users and cities. His first volume of case studies looked mainly at examples of inter-war Modernism (AJ 13.03.03); now, helped by a colleague, Eamonn Canniffe, he takes the same approach to post-war architecture.
The polemical intention of both volumes is clear. Rightly sceptical of much current discourse, Blundell Jones and Canniffe aim to show that built architecture, like lived experience, is far more complex and nuanced than generalist theories can account for. ‘As so often happens, reality has displaced the neat intellectual models of the academy,’ Canniffe observes of one of his case studies.
What we are presented with instead are 18 fascinating investigations, beginning with Case Study House No 8 in Pacific Palisades, by Charles and Ray Eames, and travelling through in chronological order to Venturi Scott Brown’s National Gallery extension in Trafalgar Square. Blundell Jones generally talks about continental European buildings typified by a softer, ‘organic’ vision of Modernism, usually set delicately in a historical urban context. Canniffe takes on harder-edged, technologically derived designs which often sit in opposition to their surroundings, including Foster’s Willis Faber Dumas offices in Ipswich and Rogers and Piano’s Pompidou Centre in Paris.
while the ‘community architecture’ ideals of Ralph Erskine’s Byker Wall in Newcastle are ‘picked apart’
The book succeeds best with those buildings where Blundell Jones’ sheer knowledge and enthusiasm for the architects shine through. His chapters on Aldo van Eyck’s Orphanage in Amsterdam and Gunter Behnisch’s Munich Olympics complex are particularly illuminating. The former is especially strong because Blundell Jones doesn’t shirk the inherent limitation of Dutch Structuralism; that is, by seeking to design for the role of the user in such prescriptive detail, the approach unwittingly became the handmaiden of the worst institutional tendencies of the welfare state.
Indeed the whole volume carries an unstated theme: a re-examination of an era of social condescension in Britain and Europe – one in which middle-class architects beat their breasts openly so as to appear to be acting democratically for a passive working-class constituency. Those twin totems of the ‘community architecture’ ideal – Ralph Erskine’s Byker Wall in Newcastle and Lucien Kroll’s Maison Médicale in Brussels – are among the examples picked apart here.
But for all its desire to reject simplistic categorisations, the book has its own problems. The apparent distaste for the contribution of American architects skews the entire selection. For most of the era from 1945-1990, America (harbouring key European émigrés) dominated the world architectural scene, and yet we find only two buildings from the USA, plus one in Britain by an American practice. Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies and Louis Kahn were discussed in Blundell Jones’ previous book, but that doesn’t explain the omission here of Eero Saarinen, Gordon Bunshaft, Paul Rudolph, Frank Gehry and Richard Meier.
Including some relatively obscure European architects – like Egon Eiermann, Helmut Stiffler and Karljosef Schattner – comes across like a displacement activity to avoid facing up to the sheer extent of American dominance. Double standards are also in evidence: Charles and Ray Eames get rather a pasting for portraying the jolly face of US commercialism, whereas Eiermann is graciously let off for designing Nazi armaments factories during the Second World War. Forgiveness clearly only travels in one direction, and it isn’t westwards.
Murray Fraser is a professor at
the University of Westminster
