The View From the Train (9 page)

This was the essay invoked by Kenneth Frampton towards the end of his
Modern Architecture: A Critical History
as a recognition of a quality of experience that many believed most modern building had lost; this loss being, they said, why many people had rejected modern architecture, and why, perhaps, we have speculative house-builders who build houses for sale that are supposed to resemble the tied cottages of Victorian farm workers.

Richard Sennett, in a lecture in 1992, pointed out that Heidegger neglected the stupefying nature of
dwelling
, and that in fact
dwelling
and
thinking
are antithetical. The creativity of cities, said Sennett, arises from their being sites of unresolved conflict between
thinking
and
dwelling
.

It is easy to poke fun at Heidegger's notion of dwelling – so nostalgic, so conservative, so agricultural – so at odds with a quasi-nomadic hunter-gatherer present as to be unhelpful, if not actually undesirable, especially in the context of Heidegger's
involvement with Nazism in the 1930s. Although the house he evokes is exemplary as a work of architecture (and has the required longevity), the social fabric – the
dwelling –
that produced it is almost unattainable, unsupportable, though perhaps not quite. In a letter responding to some questions about house-building, a friend wrote:

Frampton has described Siedlung Halen as ‘one of the most seminal pieces of land settlement built in Europe since the end of the Second World War … a model for reconciling development with place-creation and with the maintenance of ecological balance'.
¹⁵
If Halen represents something approaching the modern attainment of Heidegger's
dwelling
, as Frampton seems to suggest by his subsequent reference to Heidegger, it is intriguing to learn that many of those who live there occupy the houses of their parents.

We are more familiar with this kind of
dwelling
in the context of its loss. In a World Service radio interview, a Bosnian refugee in Mostar longs to return to his house in Stolac, fifty kilometres away, from which he was evicted by his Croat neighbours, even though the town is still under Croat control: ‘My family has lived in Stolac for centuries … I love the smell of the river.' For most of us, there is another kind of
dwelling
:

If we think of ourselves as
consumers
in this way, perhaps our difficulties with housing are easier to understand. How is housing
consumed
?

In the context of the urban home in the UK, de Certeau's notion of ‘tactics' as a response to the predicament of being a consumer evokes not so much do-it-yourself – currently a bigger market in the UK than new house-building – but the way that the character of the public-sector housing ‘estate' is changing ‘as local stabilities break down'. In inner London and elsewhere, the system of allocating public-sector housing on a basis which reflected its philanthropic origins in the nineteenth century has been fractured since the 1970s by ideas like the ‘hard-to-let' flat, by the ‘right to buy' and by an increase in social mobility generally. Public-sector housing was financed by sixty-year loans, and was often designed by critically respected architects. It aimed to be of far better quality than that produced by the private sector. Often the more architecturally ambitious developments (including some influenced by the model of Halen) were difficult to build and were regarded as problematic early in their history, but some of them have aged well and have gradually accumulated populations who find them attractive as places to live.

Alexandra Road Estate, London NW8, in 1999, designed by Neave Brown of London Borough of Camden's Architects Department in 1968, completed in 1978

Whatever the wider implications, perhaps architects can take some comfort from this. The notion of ‘the everyday' in architecture offers a welcome relief from conventional interpretations of architectural value, especially in a culture where most ‘everyday' building is not produced with much architectural intention, but it seems to affirm the spatial quality and detail of architects' architecture where it exists. Similarly, the subjective transformations of spatial experience characteristic of both the Surrealists and the Situationists might seem to promise a way of transcending assumptions of spatial poverty, of transforming ‘even the most colourless' localities, as Breton said of Aragon's ‘spellbinding romantic inventiveness',
¹⁷
but in practice both groups were quite selective about the sites they favoured. In the long run, spatial and other architectural qualities seem to survive, though often not in the way that was expected.

The UK's new Labour government seems to be prepared to leave house-building to the private sector, even for the showcase Millennium Village development next to the dome at Greenwich. The long-term success of the Lansbury estate in Poplar, which was built as the housing showcase for the 1951 Festival of Britain, has not prompted Labour to recall that its commitment to public-sector housing produced so many internationally acclaimed housing
developments between 1945 and the early 1970s. Not long before the 1997 election, Richard, Lord Rogers, newly ennobled in preparation for a Labour victory, presented an edition of the BBC's
Building Sights –
in which celebrities present favourite buildings – for which he selected the former London County Council's Alton Estate at Roehampton in south-west London – the Modern Movement landmark of 1952–59. This timely endorsement of the heroic period of public-sector housing seems not to have awakened any enthusiasms among members of the new government.

Instead, Labour has said little about housing, but appears to be giving tacit support to various private-sector proposals for ‘supervillages': 5,200 new houses near Peterborough; 3,000 at Micheldever in Hampshire; between 5,000 and 10,000 houses west of Stevenage, and 3,300 houses in three new villages near Cambridge, ‘masterplanned' by the architect Terry Farrell for a consortium of Alfred McAlpine, Bryant and Bovis in ‘Cambridgeshire vernacular', an attempt to create ‘a traditional village, with village greens with cricket pavilions, local shops and pubs' and a 69,677-square-metre business park. With or without cricket pavilions, none of these developments sound as if they will have much chance of either ‘reconciling development with place-creation and the maintenance of ecological balance' or attempting to reconfigure the house as something approaching a successful industrial product.

Labour's belief in finding an accommodation with the market seems to preclude a revival of public-sector house-building on anything like its former scale, but the history of house-building suggests that the market will never be able to modernise
dwelling
on its own, and Labour is committed to modernisation. If there is to be any possibility for a more promising approach to
dwelling
, it is very unlikely to come from the conventional house-building industry. Some of the most successful house-building projects in the UK during the last two decades have been non-commercial initiatives that included houses for sale. In the Netherlands, the government's VINEX policy aims to build 800,000 dwellings by the year 2000, in a planned programme with commitments to credible architectural design and environmental and transport
policies. This approach produces domestic architecture for sale of a quality that house buyers in the UK can only dream about. If house production in the UK is to undergo any kind of consumer-led reform, it looks as if this can only happen in the context of similar collectivist initiatives.

During the 1980s, I spent a lot of time looking out of a window of the third-floor flat in which I lived and worked in London. The window faced west towards Battersea Power Station, about three kilometres away. I lived in this flat for almost exactly ten years, during which the landscape that it overlooked changed in various ways. In 1983, the Central Electricity Generating Board (as it then was) ceased to operate Battersea, arguing that a relatively small power station in the middle of London was uneconomic. A competition was announced for commercial developers to propose new uses for the building and the surrounding site, which was large and extremely valuable. The winner was the owner of the most successful theme park in the UK who, with the explicit approval of the then prime minister, proposed to turn the structure into a theme park and invited her to return in two years' time to open it. Contractors gutted the building and removed the roof, installing two cranes which stuck out above the empty shell. The project then stalled amid suspicion that the long-term goal was to demolish the building and develop the site in more profitable ways. The developer sold the most successful theme park in the UK to raise funds to complete the project, but was unable to do so, and for some years the cranes remained on the site free to move in the wind – as they had to be so as not to be blown over. Sometimes they both faced one way, sometimes the other; sometimes they faced each other, sometimes in opposite directions. Their movements were not that frequent, and didn't seem to be much connected with the weather, but gave the impression that the building was alive, and was perhaps thinking.

Battersea Power Station, London SW8, 1992

Inside the flat, we were thinking it would have been better if the power station had gone on working, or perhaps been replaced by a more modern one. In its day, Battersea Power Station was exemplary. Its exterior was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, a leading architect; its flue gases were ‘scrubbed' clean; its city-centre position meant that energy lost in transmission was kept to a minimum, and its cooling water provided heating and hot water to a large number of dwellings on the opposite bank of the river. When it was closed, a boiler house had to be constructed to replace this function. Similar joint heat and power schemes are common in other countries. In England in the 1980s none of this counted for anything, but as a monument the building's future had to be guaranteed. The nearby Bankside Power Station opposite St Paul's Cathedral, also a work of Scott, has now been converted into the new Tate Gallery of Modern Art.

As we felt ourselves losing ground, both politically and economically, our sense of loss was partly mollified by observing these visible
changes in the detail of the landscape, as spectators at some sporting event might watch the opposition winning. We might not like the way things were going, but at least we had a good view. Satellite dishes began to appear on the houses and flats visible from the window. We would notice them for the first time in the morning when they caught the sun, so that they seemed to have grown in the night. Soon we could see about twenty, then the rate of increase slowed. A couple of years later the dishes began to disappear. I began to think of the entire view as a very slow but visible movement of self-organising matter. Apollinaire's impression of the south London suburbs, seen from the train, was of ‘wounds bleeding in the fog'. Sometimes it seemed possible to perceive the view as an organic phenomenon. There was a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet nearby, so there was always plenty of animal protein lying about the streets. At other times, the perception was of molecular vibration, turbulence, consciousness even. From
The Importance of Being Earnest
, I recalled: ‘Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else.' In the narration of a film, I quoted Democritus: ‘According to convention, there is a sweet and a bitter; a hot and a cold; and according to convention there is colour. In truth, there are atoms and a void.' Such abstraction leads to irony. I began to think it might be possible to predict the future by looking out of the window. In
The Anatomy of Melancholy
Robert Burton (who styled himself Democritus Junior, and is said to have accurately foretold the date of his own death) wrote: ‘Democritus … was so far carried with this ironical passion, that the citizens of Abdera took him to be mad, and sent therefore ambassadors to Hippocrates the physician, that he would exercise his skill upon him.'
¹
I decided to cure myself by making a film about London. Many details of the view from the window appeared in the film. Shortly before it was finished, we moved out of the flat.