The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (35 page)

T
HE NEW ORDER
that Marx and Engels predicted was a utopia of sorts, but they didn’t expect that the fulfillment of their vision would come about peacefully. “Communists know only too well,” they wrote, “that the development of the proletariat in nearly all civilized countries has been violently suppressed . . . If the oppressed proletariat is finally driven to revolution, then we communists will defend the interests of the proletarians with deeds as we now defend them with words.”

And the communists weren’t the only ones who believed that the world needed a strong push in the right direction. Indeed, calls for a violent upheaval became the standard leitmotif of modernist manifestos all across Europe—and not just in the field of politics. One crazy night in 1909, a group of young men who called themselves the Futurists sat up in their flat, writing down anything that came into their heads. They were in backward Italy, and they were bored. What had horrified Engels at first hand intoxicated them at a distance. They might as well have been dreaming of Manchester.

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter
of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

And after they’d had enough of whatever they were having, they went out and totaled a sports car in a ditch. Standing amid the wreckage, covered in oil, they issued their manifesto. It involved the total vandalism and destruction of the past.

We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! . . . Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? . . . Come on! Set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums! . . . Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded! . . . Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!

A quarter of a century later, pickaxes and hammers were exactly what the city fathers of Manchester decided would be best for Hulme. They weren’t motivated by their love of “the polyphonic tides of revolution”; in fact, the city fathers decided to obliterate Hulme precisely because they were afraid of an uprising. “In spite of disease and death and tottering houses,” the
Manchester Guardian
had reported, “the population has been compelled since the [1918] armistice to huddle into the area in even greater numbers than ever.” Such a huddled mass of humanity was all too liable to turn into one of the great crowds the Futurists had described, excited, if not by work or pleasure, then by riot.

So the city fathers bought the whole of Hulme, lock, stock, and barrel. They relocated all the slum dwellers out to brick cottages in the suburbs, softening the blow by calling the houses “homes for heroes.” Then they flattened the entire district, leaving an empty wasteland behind. The old high street became nothing more than a dusty
path through the yellowed summer grass. No one had any idea what to do with it.

T
HE ANSWER WAS
already on its way. In 1933, the year before Manchester’s city council began to clear away the slums of Hulme, a group of young architects, fired with the passion that only youth can provide, had hired a steamer and set sail from Marseille into the future. By the time the boat docked in Athens, the Congrès Internationale d’Architecture Moderne had worked out what that future was going to be. Standing in the shadow of the Acropolis before fifteen hundred representatives of the government of Greece, the CIAM announced “a reply to the present chaos of the cities,” a proposal that “unlocks all the doors to the urbanism of modern times . . . In the hands of the authorities, itemized, annotated, clarified with an adequate explanation, the Athens Charter is the implement by which the destiny of cities will be set right.”

The charter began with a warning and a vision, framed in portentous sentence fragments: “An immense, total mutation takes hold of the world: the machinist civilization is moving in amid disorder, improvisation, ruins . . . It has been going on for a century! . . . But a century also in which a new sap is rising . . . A century in which visionaries have brought forth ideas, thoughts, and made proposals . . . A day will come, perhaps . . .” It continued with a doctrine of twenty-five points, which set out with scientific precision what the city of the future would and should be. And the city of the future wasn’t going to be theoretical. The congress added a political injunction to their scientific analysis: “the Charter must be placed on the table of authority, in both the municipalities and the councils of state.”

Scientific as it sounded, the charter had been inspired by a spate of prophecies every bit as crazed as the ravings of the Futurists. In the heady first days of the Russian Revolution, Soviet architects had sketched out gigantic collective dwellings that would literally float above the steppe, suspended by the awesome power of nuclear fusion. In Germany, the poet Paul Scheerbart foresaw cities made of transparent glass, and the architect Bruno Taut imagined a crystal citadel sparkling in the clear alpine air. No wonder the architects of CIAM set
sail to Athens in confident expectation that the destiny of cities was within their grasp.

The principles of the Athens Charter were given definitive form in a book published soon after the CIAM gathering by its leading light. Le Corbusier’s
The Radiant City
was the blueprint for a New Jerusalem, adorned as a bride for her husband. At her feet lay her smoky factories, connected to the rest of the world by an elaborate system of railway sidings. Her head was crowned with crystal towers, from which the intellectual elite of the city would govern like the philosopher-kings of Plato’s
Republic
. Her body was made of the dwellings of the people, and her lungs were great green parks.

This radiant city was the purest demonstration of the charter’s description of urbanism as “a three-dimensional, not a two-dimensional, science.” Elevated roads were suspended above the liberated verdure, feeding their traffic into great apartment buildings that sailed above the treetops. On the roofs and balconies of these towers, their inhabitants disported themselves in the sun like first-class passengers on great white ocean liners. They looked out over a seemingly empty greensward, an immaculate forest without a trace of human history. The palaces and temples of former times had been swept away, and the streets and squares of Le Corbusier’s own day had likewise disappeared, leaving only the future: an expanse, as Corbusier put it, of “sunlight, space, and greenery.” It was a paradise that could not appear until the End of Days.

But the architects of the Congrès Internationale d’Architecture Moderne weren’t going to have to wait for the end of days for their paradise to appear. Their utopia was not consigned to an inaccessible island—the “no place”—of Thomas More. It was just around the corner. Within a decade, the Second World War had swept the old cities away, more completely, perhaps, than the communists and the Futurists could ever have imagined; and the world was ready to be made anew.

A
ND MADE ANEW
it was—or most of it, at least. In the years following the war, the devastated cities of Europe rebuilt themselves with remarkable speed in the image of the radiant city, but for two
decades nothing happened in the empty space that had once been Hulme. In 1964, Robert Mellish, who had been appointed by the housing minister as “progress chaser,” visited the inner-city wasteland and cried out, “Why are you showing me this desolation? Why don’t you put some houses on it?”

The city councillors of Manchester, stung by the progress chaser’s outburst, went over the Pennines to see what had been going on in nearby Sheffield. They were awestruck and envious: on top of a hill in the city center, their rivals had built the prophesied city of the modernists. Great stretches of apartments afforded sunlight, space, greenery, and indoor toilet facilities to a proletariat that until lately had barely had access to running water. What’s more, Sheffield had built a very British version of the radiant city. British architects of the postwar period were certainly enamored of dazzling liners sailing through oceans of greenery, but they were also concerned to preserve something of the sociability of the old slums that they were so busy replacing. They were, despite themselves, nostalgic for the cobbled lanes and back-to-back cottages that had once been Engels’s nightmare, for they were learning that modernist architecture could engender the most modern of afflictions: loneliness and alienation.

The Park Hill estate in Sheffield provided the definitive solution. Huge concrete buildings bestrode the ruins of what had once been dense inner city, leaving vast areas of open green space between them. But these buildings were linked by broad concrete decks that formed a network of “streets in the sky,” with the flats opening onto them as cottages had opened onto the lanes of old. Soon, the architects confidently predicted, the decks would be filled with playing children, their mothers gossiping around the rubbish chute as if it were the village well.

The city fathers of Manchester saw what they had to do. They poached J. S. Millar, who had been instrumental in the implementation of Park Hill, to take charge of their planning department; and Millar approached Lewis Womersley, who had also worked on the Sheffield project, to transform the wastelands of Hulme. Womersley and his partner Hugh Wilson were efficient operators. They had already provided, or were in the process of providing, plans for the modernist expansion and transformation of Skelmersdale, Redditch, Northampton,
and Nottingham. In 1966, the pair presented their designs for Hulme to the Manchester city council. The bald minutes of the meeting convey little of the excitement that the design aroused in the panjandrums of the committee.

The planning brief for Hulme stage 5 asked that densities should increase near to the neighbourhood centre and stated that the aim should be to create an urban environment on a city scale. The solution to this problem proposed by the consultants to achieve larger scale and high density is to build continuous blocks of maisonettes at six stories high in a few bold and simple forms so as to develop large open spaces.

These continuous blocks were laid out in the form of four crescents—reminiscent, the architects claimed, of the Royal Crescent in Bath and the Nash terraces around Regent’s Park in London. The councillors were suitably impressed.

It wasn’t all about nostalgia for Georgian elegance, though. Hulme was going to be a modern sort of place built in a modern sort of way, using the latest industrial processes. The architects’ report explained how “a high quality of finish, both internally and externally, can be obtained because structural components, fittings and services will be manufactured and supervised under factory conditions and not subjected to climatic and other hazards of an open site.” In plain terms, this meant that the entire building complex was constructed out of precast concrete. Five years after Wilson and Womersley’s presentation, the Hulme Crescents—prophesied, in their various ways, by everyone from Engels to Le Corbusier—were ready for their first inhabitants.