Schwarz
View current page
...more recent posts
Sixties architects wanted us to live like aliens. Our correspondent spies a parallel universe
Vision, vision, vision, it’s everywhere. Can’t move for it. Architects are living in one of those all-too-brief moments in which the world seems to be swimming with fat wallets — cities, Middle Eastern oil states, capitalist dictatorships — with the means and the egos to indulge in fantastical visions.Not in Britain, naturally. We prefer to get our visionary fantasies in the sale aisle at Matalan. No, it’s in China, of course, and Dubai, but also in culturally adventurous continental Europe, and even in the once architecturally cautious America, that experimentation is flourishing.
Next week a major exhibition, Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture 1956-2006, opens at the Barbican. This vast survey of the avant-garde since the Second World War has been thrillingly designed by the modern-day experimentalists Foreign Office Architects as a labyrinthine city within what is the last old-school utopian complex built in Britain. Almost all the (living) architects in the show are building, and on a scale: FOA are co-designing the 2012 Olympic Park, if the shindig’s accountants allow them; Coop Himmelblau are realising their Sixties fantasy Cloud as a show complex for BMW in Munich; America’s king of crazy shapes Thom Mayne last year won architecture’s highest honour, the Pritzker Prize.
We can chuckle at the models’ fashions in the Smithsons’ House of the Future, the Austin Powers-style inflatable cells Haus-Rucker-Co thought of to expand Manhattan. But these dreams are coming true. There’s a market for Utopias these days. And yet they all began with one man.
Constant Niewenhuys died in August, at the age of 85. There were few obituaries beyond his home country, the Netherlands. True, the man hadn’t exactly been front-page news for a decade or three. But still, this was the intellectual leader of the Provos, those pot-smoking anarchists whose artsy pranks in the 1960s ushered in the stereotype of liberal, libertarian Netherlands.
Constant co-founded the Situationiste Internationale, too, Jean-Luc Godard’s “children of Marx and Coca-Cola”, inspiration for every sulky counter-cultural movement from Beatniks through May 1968 and punk to the anti-globalisation protestors. The man was also a leading light of CoBrA, whose paintings — great childlike scrawls designed to put a bat up the nightdress of bourgeois society — are today the kind more admired by art theoreticians than by anyone with eyes in their head. And he also happened to be the most influential architect since the war.
Of course you’ve never heard of him. The man didn’t lay a brick in his entire life. But his one great conceptual work, New Babylon, was so powerful a vision of the future, the true heir to great architectural fantasists on paper from Piranesi to Sant’Elia, that there are few architects since who don’t owe him an intellectual debt. New Babylon begat the swirling forms of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, the technopop of Archigram and Cedric Price, the playful naivety of Will Alsop, even the pragmatic high-tech of Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, and certainly the provocations of Rem Koolhaas.