The New Monumentality”, an exhibition of films at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, is about architecture and everyday life – or, rather, the disjunction between the two. The three artists involved, Gerard Byrne, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Dorit Margreiter, wrestle with the ways that the strangest of buildings have to be lived in. Byrne and Margreiter do so in the context of a building that stands just around the corner from the gallery – the University of Leeds campus, designed and built by Chamberlin, Powell & Bon between 1958 and 1968.

Local rumour has it that the complex served as a set for the 1970s science-fiction TV series Blake’s 7. This should come as no surprise. There is a divide, in the perception of these buildings, between the future they seem to suggest – a Space Age society with egalitarian buildings that make no reference to anything so prosaic as local materials – and the past they are more often seen to represent. That is, the other 1960s: not the decade reminisced over by ageing soixante-huitards, but the era of towers and slabs, walkways and motorways, which is only now, very slowly, starting to come back into favour.

Unexpectedly, given its tweedy reputation, Britain was briefly at the forefront of modernism. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, foreign directors came to the UK to film this new world, usually projecting it into the immediate future. In the earliest example, the 1966 film of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, François Truffaut shot a book-burning in front of the towers of the Alton Estate, Roehampton. Alton was once described by an American journalist as “the finest low-cost housing estate in the world”. In the film, it represented a frightening future where old media – books – are outlawed.

- bill 7-19-2009 10:41 pm




add a comment to this page:

Your post will be captioned "posted by anonymous,"
or you may enter a guest username below:


Line breaks work. HTML tags will be stripped.