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Highmore, B (2010) 'Streets in the Air', in Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in

Britain and Beyond (Studies in British Art 21), edited by Clare Zimmerman and Mark Crinson, New

Haven and London: Yale University Press (ISBN: 9780300166187) pp. 79-100.

Streets in the Air:

Alison and Peter Smithson’s Doorstep Philosophy

That the architecture of the next step is in

pursuit of the ordinary and banal does

not mean that it has lost sight of its

objective. Ordinariness and banality are

the art-source of the new situation.1

In this chapter I want to explore the specific temporal logic in operation in the

work of the British post-war architects Alison and Peter Smithson. Rather than

arguing that the Smithsons’ practice belongs to postmodernism or the neo-avant-garde

I want to suspend such a discussion until the end of this essay. Even though some of

the most influential accounts of postmodernism and the neo-avant-garde have

problematized a linear, developmental idea of time, where one movement is displaced

and replaced by another more “advanced” one, the idea of architectural history as

constituted by a progression of “one thing after another” is often secured through the

use of the terms modernism/postmodernism and avant-garde/neo-avant-garde.2

Instead of mobilising these terms I want to pursue an insight offered by Jacques

Rancière in his discussion of what he terms “the aesthetic regime of the arts.”

Rancière, who purposefully refuses such designations as modernism and avant-

gardism, suggests that the arts (which would include visual art, design, architecture,

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music and so on) follow a much longer periodisation, and that it is in the nineteenth-

century that they are fundamentally transformed by the rejection of the hierarchy of

subject matter (which would automatically make historical or biblical subject matter

far superior to a domestic scene). The argument is premised on the idea that the

writers and painters associated with realism provide “the horizon of possibility” for

what followed, whether this was abstraction or photography. Nineteenth-century

realism heralded a new regime of the arts which began “with the idea that painting a

cook with her kitchen utensils was as noble as painting a general on a battlefield.”3

Arguments about the productivity of Rancière’s refusal of the current

distribution of art historical periods and his insistence on a much longer and larger

categorization are not the issue that this essay addresses. More pertinent to my

concerns is his suggestion that “the temporality specific to the aesthetic regime of the

arts is a co-presence of heterogeneous temporalities.”4 If the aesthetic regime of the

arts is characterised by a general indifference to subject matter (cooks and generals

could be seen as equivalently valuable for art) as well as by the recognition that what

was once insignificant is newly perceivable as significant (one example that Rancière

uses is Stendhal’s remembrance of how important the sound of the village water

pump was for him as a child) then such a regime can include what is both new and

old, or more pertinently it can figure the production of newness as the inclusion of

what is not just old, but what is age-old. This connects to the epigraph that begins this

essay: when the Smithsons suggest that the “next step” is the ordinary and banal, it is

a way of staging the co-presence of the durability of the mundane and the ordinary as

part of the latest aesthetic shift. It is, in many ways, a crucial component to the story

of architecture in the twentieth century: how to be new without being modish; how to

be contemporary while also being timeless. A solution to this problem (though as we

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will see it doesn’t resolve the contradictions that it points to) was to re-kindle interest

in vernacular building and informal dwelling as the next step. The age-old is

refashioned as the very latest.

Following Rancière’s argument here would mean recognising that all of the

work produced within the aesthetic regime of the arts exhibit the “co-presence of

heterogeneous temporalities.” But this doesn’t necessitate a flattening out of

differences across the vast terrain that Rancière wants to include in his grouping. As I

want to show in this essay, it matters enormously what heterogeneous temporalities

are included within a particular practice. More crucially, I want to suggest, the

vividness of temporal heterogeneity and the level of temporal dissonance it produces,

alongside the range of temporalities included, offer a particularly productive prism for

examining post-war architecture. Looking at the particularity of “heterogeneous

temporalities” is a way of getting a sense of the way architecture is both in time and

out of time; it is a way of recognising that its untimeliness is what may well

characterise its contact with its wider social moment.

In the work of Alison and Peter Smithson we find elements that are clearly

anachronistic alongside elements that connote a glamorous technological futurism; we

find the age-old creaturely practices of improvised and informal dwelling alongside

very recent developments in advertising. As architects, Alison and Peter Smithson

were not unusual in producing books, articles, collages, exhibitions alongside their

building practice, but they were relatively unusual in the extraordinary amount of

extra-architectural material they produced in relation to the small amount of built

work they achieved.5 And it is in the books, exhibitions and collages that we find the

most emphatic evidence of the “co-presence of heterogeneous temporalities”, and it is

with these that I want to concentrate. It is here in the paperwork of architecture that

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we get the most vivid sense of the Smithsons’ architectural imaginary and its

associated temporal logic. The Smithsons, alongside some of their colleagues in the

Independent Group6, had a number of phrases for their approach to architecture: the

aesthetics of the “as found”; New Brutalism; and “doorstep philosophy”. If these are

not equivalent terms there is a clear sense of continuity between the terms, to the point

where you would fail to understand Brutalism if you didn’t also understand the

practice of the “as found” or “doorstep philosophy”. In looking at the paperwork of

the Smithsons we find the “next step”, not in some far off era, or distant land, but

right there on the doorstep of habitation.

GOLDEN LANE

Between 1952 and 1953 Alison and Peter Smithson worked on the designs for

a competition to redevelop a large bombsite in the East End of London. The various

drawings and graphic representations that they produced for the Golden Lane Housing

project include an image of one of their proposed “streets in the air”, which was an

essential element of the scheme. In figure one we see a wide deck stretching into the

distance and the pattern of similar decks as part of a large block of housing placed at a

right angle. In the foreground, on the left hand side, there are two figures who look as

if they are about to take one of the staircases up to a maisonette. The figures are either

Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio or their impersonators. Further along we see a

man crouched on all fours playing with a baby, and across from them the figure of the

actor Peter Ustinov. For the Smithsons these street decks were not going to be

anonymous corridors, merely connecting the multiple housing units and allowing

horizontal as well as vertical access: “streets will be places and not corridors or

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balconies.”7 And like “real” streets these “thoroughfares can house small shops, post-

boxes, telephone kiosks, etc. – the flat block disappears and vertical living becomes a

reality. The refuse chute takes the place of the village pump.”8

Figure one: Alison and Peter Smithson, Golden Lane Housing Competition,

Photomontage, 1953.

The graphic representation seems to combine proto Pop Art elements with a

commitment to futuristic solutions to housing needs (elevated living, elevated

mobility). The visual presentation looks insistently contemporary: the celebrities of

the day casually distributed across the platforms of an ultra-modern housing complex.

Yet it is when the imagined social practices are juxtaposed with this image that the

“heterogeneous temporalities” are most vividly disclosed. The street decks were not to

be thought of as just instrumental solutions to the problem of navigating the vast

blocks of housing, they were there to replicate a lively sociability to be found in much

older conurbations, found in both urban and rural environments. Indeed it is the

historically obsolete “village pump” (whose sound was so important to Stendhal) that

provides a model for the informal sociability of necessary daily congregation.

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Whether the Smithsons recognise the bathos of swapping a water pump for a refuse

chute is difficult to fathom: clearly though in practical terms it would seem highly

unlikely that what would probably be a smelly and festering area of a housing

complex would encourage the dawdling necessary to facilitate easy sociability in the

way that a water pump might.

In the drawn plans for Golden Lane (figure two) these streets in the air would

stretch not just along and across one block to another of the Golden Lane site, but

from one infill cluster of housing to the next, connecting any number of post-war

developments and providing a new lattice of street life taking place above London,

but not obliterating the London that was already there.9 The patterning of clusters as a

random order, networked together and overlaying a city in a state of uneven repair

echoed with the work of artists like Jackson Pollock and their friend Eduardo

Paolozzi: “It was necessary in the early ‘50s to look to the works of painter Pollock

and sculptor Paolozzi for a complete image system, for an order with a structure and a

certain tension, where every piece was correspondingly new in a system of

relationship.”10

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Figure two: Alison and Peter Smithson, Study of street deck complex. Golden Lane

Housing Competition, drawing, 1952-3.

The aleatory ordering found in Pollock and Paolozzi was a crucial component

of the Smithsons’ New Brutalist aesthetic. Initially, of course, such haphazard

patterning (often associated with automatic or involuntary ways of painting) was

closely aligned with surrealism and with the seemingly wilful jumps and

juxtapositions of the unconscious. In the context of New Brutalism and in the close-

knit milieu of the Smithsons (which in the early 1950s included Eduardo Paolozzi and

Nigel Henderson as part of a “family” group) the aleatory was given a new

accentuation.11 There are several points that need to be made here. Within the context

of post-war British culture, Surrealism was in crisis. If Surrealism favoured chance as

an artistic and social provocation, then it could be seen to be invalidated by the way

that chance had been activated with much more devastating effects by the recent

reality of aerial bombardment: as Nigel Henderson remembers, “Houses chopped by

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bombs while ladies were still sitting on the lavatory, the rest of the house gone but the

wallpaper and the fires still burning in the grate. Who can hold a candle to that kind of

real life Surrealism?”12 The aleatory aspect of New Brutalism engaged with this “real

life Surrealism”, not as the discovery of the marvellous, but as the devastating re-

ordering of the ordinary.

In this way the haphazard patterning of Paolozzi’s work (particularly his

textiles and wall hangings of the early 1950s) relates much more closely to the New

Brutalist notion of the “as found”, than it does to the celebration of the “chance

encounter” promoted by Surrealism. In formal terms the patterns produced by the “as

found” (see figure three for a “real life” example of this) offered the Smithsons a

“complete image system” that allowed them an alternative order to the polar choice of

austere geometry or human and botanical morphology that dominates the design

aesthetics of the first half of the twentieth century (where it finds its most emphatic

representation in Art Deco and Art Nouveau). In this the aleatory aspect of the “as

found” enacts a new networks of relations that are neither constituted by the

abstraction of geometry nor the over-familiar look of nature.13

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Figure Three: Nigel Henderson, Wall painting, stopping out. Grove Road, Bethnal

Green. Photograph 1949-53.

More crucially though the aesthetic of the “as found” locates many of its

materials in the immediate surroundings of habitation and in the age-old processes of

contingent growth and make-do-and-mend living. The patterns that the Smithsons

found so intriguing and productive were catalogued most vividly in the photographic

work of Henderson. Henderson was an “elder brother” figure within the Smithsons’

milieu and was, at the time, living with his wife and children in a terraced street in the

impoverished and war-torn area of London’s East End. While his wife was

undertaking a project of working-class ethnography associated with Mass-

Observation (a project called “Discover Your Neighbour”, which involved participant

observation with one particular family), Henderson was roaming the streets searching

out the “as found”.14 For the Smithsons’ accompanying Henderson on these walks and

looking at his photographs were crucial lessons in Brutalist aesthetics:

10

In architecture, the “as found” aesthetic was something we thought we named

in the early 1950s when we first knew Nigel Henderson and saw in his

photographs a perceptive recognition of the actuality around his house in

Bethnal Green: children’s pavement play-graphics; repetitions of “kind” in

doors used as site hoardings; the items in the detritus on bombed sites, such as

the old boot, heaps of nails, fragments of sack or mesh and so on.

Setting ourselves the task of rethinking architecture in the early 1950s, we

meant by the “as found” not only adjacent buildings but all those marks that

constitute remembrancers [sic] in a place and that are there to be read through

finding out how the existing built fabric of the place had come to be as it

was.15

The “as found” connected the built residence, located in a continual present, with

patterns of living that spilt out of the house and registered the slow accretions of

historical transformation and continuity.

It is here that the doorstep becomes so important, registering a commonality

that is always singular (it is the threshold from the public space of collectivity to the

individualised spaces of residence), while also suggesting that the immediate

surroundings of residence aren’t just important amenities but are a part of our intimate

lives. The network of “sky decks” that are proposed by the Smithsons attempt to

recreate the doorstep culture of neighbourhoods like the ones they became acquainted

with in the East End and to have them suspended across a London that was in a varied

state of ill-repair. The complex intermeshing of at least three temporalities (a bomb-

damaged London, a new housing project, the age-old practice of “making-do”) are

most vividly shown in another of the collages that make up the Golden Lane Proposal.

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BOMBSITES, BICYCLES AND NEHRU

Unlike the first collage I discussed this does not show the cluster blocks from

the internal street decks but views them externally, from a distance. It is an odd

collage, looking more like a premonition of French nouvelle vague cinema (think of

Godard’s Two or three things I know about her from 1967) than what was then

customary in architectural drawings. The mass housing blocks sit like transparent

phantoms amongst the rubble-strewn bombsite of the contemporary actuality of

Golden Lane. The ground, with the skeletal footprints of former building, is much

more materially evident than the proposed buildings.

Figure four: Alison and Peter Smithson, montage for Golden Lane competition, 1952

In the collage, pen and ink drawings of the housing project overlay the

volcanic-looking bombsite of the Golden Lane area of East London. In the foreground

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stands a nonchalant looking Garard Phillipe (a French film star); looking out from the

ground floor deck on the left we see two design students from the Royal College of

Art, one of them is Terence Conran who will make his name with the Habitat chain of

furnishing stores in the 1960s. From the upper decks we see various anonymous

figures, but the figure to the left who is waiving is Jawaharlal Nehru who was the first

prime minister of independent India. In the middle distance we see a man on a bicycle

navigating across this impossible and scarified earth.

We can’t decode these motifs in any systematic way, but we can connect them

to a variety of interests, preoccupations and signs that we find elsewhere in the

architectural imaginary of the Smithsons and their associates. In some senses the

figure of Garard Phillipe works like the images of Monroe and DiMaggio: at once an

element of advertising culture, a celebrity endorsement underwriting a new

architectural brand; but also there to make the space inhabitable, not for an

anonymous mass, but for identifiable occupants, who also happen to be glamorous

and part of popular culture.

The very fact that the ground for Golden Lane is the actual bombsite rather

than the blankness of white paper should alert us, not simply to the way that the

Smithsons insist on the actuality of the site, but to the persistence of the recent

bombardment as part of the urban imaginary of the project.16 It is there not simply as

“non space” but as scarified earth, a recalcitrant and insistent reminder of destruction.

The bicycle is also an insistent motif in both the imagery and thought of the

Smithsons. It is also there in the photographs of Henderson that were such a central

resource for the Smithsons. For Henderson boys cycling in the street suggested “a

certain delirium in which a boy may fantasize and divert himself for hours on end.”17

The Smithsons imagined bicycle tinkering as a central component of back yard

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culture in the Victorian terraces that the Golden Lane project would replace, and they

imagined that such activity would continue in the street decks and in the outdoor

alcoves provided for the various maisonettes. Any number of Kitchen Sink dramas

from later in the decade would secure the association of bicycle with working class

masculinity (see for instance Albert Finney in Saturday Night, Sunday Morning).

Bicycles, like pigeon coops, would similarly contribute to the fantasised world of

doorstep philosophy: a crucial space of sociality on the doorstep of the house.

The figure of Nehru might at first seem distinctly out of place, yet Nehru

figured centrally in the post-war period particularly for the liberal left who saw in the

socialism that Nehru fostered a “third way” beyond the intransigence of the cold war

ideologies. Nehru’s socialism was a world away from Jarrow hunger marches or

Stalinist dogmas. It was a socialism minted in the intense optimism of independence

and it took its belief system not so much from Marx and Lenin as from the belief that

technological progress promised unlimited solutions to the desperate needs of the

country. It would be technology, humanism and craft that would be privileged in the

attempt to bring a primarily rural, scattered population up to the living standards of

the rest of the world (or at least to head in that direction). For a whole range of

designers, architects, politicians and others the technological, soft-socialism

associated with Nehru would be the central figure for social optimism in the mid

twentieth century.18

The collage brings together a range of geographical and temporal motifs: the

mass-media image of a film star; an impossible image of working class mobility; an

icon of techno-socialism – all arranged across a ground of destruction and a phantom

image of future living. But if the collage brings these elements together we might also

ask whether the collage makes them fit together. What for instance is the role of

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Phillipe (or Monroe) for an architectural proposal for a mass housing project designed

to cater for the needs of working class Londoners? It might be that the glamour of the

celebrity image is a rhetorical ploy, a sort of updated version of saying that while this

is mass housing it is housing “fit for kings”. More likely, I think, these celebrity

images work in a number of ways some of which are clearly ironic (a play on

advertising endorsement, rather than a naive or cynical belief in it) and some are

designed to produce an implicit dissonance within the image. In a crucial way the

collage doesn’t “sit”, it doesn’t hold together these various components that are

dislocated not simply by ideological differences but by the collage itself: the cyclist

riding across terrain that would impossible to cycle across; Nehru declaiming from the

window of London council estate; Phillipe holding a pose on a bombsite.

THE CHEMISTRY OF THE 1950s

There isn’t the space here to undertake an analytic comparison between these

collages and other collage practices. By way of shorthand we can say that the classic

collages of the 1920s (associated with dada, Surrealism and the agit-prop work of

artists like John Heartfield) rely on juxtaposition, and that such juxtapositions are

resolved precisely to the degree that they constitute something larger than their

constituent elements, and that they do so in the name of satire, or humour, or the

uncanny. In the Smithsons’ collages the elements remain unresolved producing

dissonance because there is no overarching figural schema of juxtaposition that would

allow them to interrelate. We can also say that unlike advertising collages the

elements aren’t sutured together into a coherent space or image. In this the collages

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are much closer to the work of a collage artist like Robert Rauschenberg, than they are

to the heritage of photomontage.19

In 1954, a year or so after the collages for Golden Lane were produced,

Raymond Williams (along with Michael Orrom) published a book called Preface to

Film. It was Williams’ attempt to establish the conditions for understanding film as

part of a general and changing dramatic tradition, rather than as an isolated

phenomenon. In it he specifically privileges the role of convention. The negative

connotations of the term ‘convention’ (the sense that being conventional rendered

cultural forms outmoded and unengaged) are unhelpful for Williams. For Williams

conventions are the very life blood of culture and cannot be judged from the vantage

point of the latest dramatic theories (which are themselves either conventional or on

the brink of conventionality). The ‘stagey’ acting of one school of drama is no more

‘natural’ than the mumbling of another: the direct address of internal thinking to the

audience (in a soliloquy) is no more ‘unnatural’ than to pretend that there is no

audience there at all. Drama, and cultural production more generally, changes as one

convention replaces another. When a new ‘way of telling’ appears it establishes itself

as a refusal of convention (a shrugging off of the old ways of doing things), yet

because there is no zero-degree of telling, it inevitably (if it is successful, at least)

institutes a new convention, a new tacit agreement of how to register the world.

Whether conventions change according to the fits-and-starts of avant-garde energies,

or to the longer processes of changing cultural sensibilities, the outcome will always

result in the conventionalisation of approaches (this is what makes them

understandable, popular, and vividly of their time).

This is neither a process to be condemned nor condoned; it simply is the state

of affairs that exists for cultural production, popular or elite. More important, for

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Williams, is to take convention seriously, not as the ossification of the new, but as the

deep form of cultural experience. The manner of production, the routine stylisation of

an art form takes us to a world registered by the “whole” ensemble of production, not

simply the declared content or intention of a specific piece of rhetoric. It is an

argument for formalism dedicated to exploring the full social animation of culture.

In Preface to Film Williams first introduces the phrase “structures of feeling”,

and it is clear that the goal of his social formalism is precisely aimed at elucidating the

structures of feeling for a milieu, for an epoch, for a culture. In describing the

productivity of his approach he writes that:

All the products of a community in a given period are, we now commonly

believe, essentially related, although in practice, and in detail, this is not

always easy to see. [...] But while we may, in the study of a past period,

separate out particular aspects of life, and treat them as if they were self-

contained, it is obvious that this is only how they may be studied, not how

they were experienced. We examine each element as a precipitate, but in the

living experience of the time every element was in solution, an inseparable

part of a complex whole.20

I mention Raymond Williams here not to provide a methodological foundation for my

discussion of the Smithsons (one that shares the same cultural moment) but to suggest

an historical corollary that will help elucidate something that worries and intrigues me

about the Smithsons’ Golden Lane collages. Williams belonged to the same

generation as the Smithsons and their colleagues at the Independent Group. Like them

he had known war; like them he was as interested in advertising as high culture.21 For

Williams the terms for discussing “structures of feeling” won’t change over the

decades in which he discusses this project: culture is a solution, it is experienced as

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such; the problem with the study of culture is that it tends to treat it as an array of

distinct and finished items, as precipitates. But if culture is in solution he

acknowledges that at times the relationship between things are hard to fathom, hard to

connect.

1950s culture might be in solution, but for many practitioners it was also in

dissolution. While the connections between the feeling of nuclear anxiety, for

instance, might sit in the same cultural solution with the optimism generated by an

age of plenty, they were not in practice easy for many to reconcile. The Smithsons’

collages are a very specific ‘solution’ (in both the chemical sense and the design

sense) that articulates dissolution. In continuing the chemical analogy it is more like a

suspension than a solution, a suspension that can contain the various precipitates in

close proximity without them ever dissolving into a coherent whole. Nehru is not

integrated into the scene in any straightforward sense, but neither is the bicycle

navigating the rubble of the bombsite. In a literal sense the streets in the air is a

suspension too, of course, suspending the lively forms of association above the

machine-crowded ground. The precipitates that congealed in the collage were

elements that were impossible to think of in isolation, but they were also impossible

to knit together into a coherent whole.

DOORSTEP PHILOSOPHY

In an interview with Beatriz Colomina published in 2000, Peter Smithson

(Alison Smithson had died in 1993) looks back on the period of the Golden Lane

proposal to consider the importance of the street in their architectural thinking. The

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street and the house exist in a symbiotic relationship, so that to rethink housing would

mean necessarily rethinking the street, and vice versa:

[...] the invention of a new house is the invention of a new kind of street.

Because the street in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century was where the

children were, and where the people talked and all that, despite the climate

being against it. The street was the arena of life. To perceive that the invention

of another sort of house was the invention of another kind of street, of another

arena, or maybe not an arena, wasn’t [...] a question of saying the street must

be revived. It is a matter of thinking what the street did, and what is equivalent

of it if it is no longer necessary, if the street is dead.22

Of course the street wasn’t dead and the growing popularity of the centrifugal urban

growth of the suburbs was a testimony to this. Yet the working-class street, with its

cheek-by-jowl vibrancy, its partly mythologized loyalties and community, was

threatened by inadequate housing, by bomb damage, by mass industrial transport

(primarily the private car) and slum-clearance. What Nigel Henderson, an outsider

within the East End, recognised as the working-class’s “savage humility begotten of

limited means”23 was no longer imagined (by architects, local councils, government)

as taking place within the confines of Victorian terraces and tenements. What was

important for the Smithsons and others was to get a precise sense of the qualities that

street life afforded, to see what values needed preserving, so that any retrofitting of

Victorian slum housing would both modernise working-class life while maintaining

age-old practices of collective conviviality.24

If community, neighbourliness, and conviviality are the qualities that might

seem most in evidence in the discourses around working-class urbanism in this

period, they are underwritten by a value that is hinted at in Henderson’s words quoted

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above. The sense of making a lively social space out of “limited means” is in many

ways the main quality that the Smithsons most associate with working-class culture.

The sense of a community who constantly demonstrate a dogged resilience and

stubborn ingenuity in the face of squalor is the force that seems to dominate the

photographs of Henderson and contributes to the architectural thinking of the

Smithsons. It is the energy that activates their “doorstep philosophy”.

For architecture to recognise the ability of a community to make lively living

conditions out of impoverished means offers no immediate practical materials to

architects. On the face of it, it places architectural practice on the back foot,

suggesting that socially relevant architecture will not be made on the drawing board

but only when it is actualised by the “art of inhabitation”. Architects would need to

have a more modest role: rather than supplying the accoutrements to good living they

would need to provide the stage-sets for age-old practices of sociality. Or more

modestly still: architecture’s role in finding new configurations of the street and house

would have to pay heed to an ethical demand, not to prevent age-old patterns of

sociality from occurring. And this is where “doorstep philosophy” has to find a

practical purchase, even if it is in such bizarre suggestions that a refuse chute could

take the place of a village water pump.

The Smithsons’ Golden Lane project didn’t win the competition (it wasn’t

even shortlisted) but it did have a social life that exceeds its role as an unrealised

architectural project. In 1953 the Smithsons participated in the ninth meeting of the

Congrés Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) at Aix-en-Provence, where

they showed the project as part of a large presentation called the Urban Re-

Identification Grid. As the Smithsons saw it: “one of the results of CIAM 9 was the

spontaneous recognising by several younger groups of a shared way of thinking.

20

These groups were drawn to each other by two things; by their bewilderment with the

activities and work presented at Aix-en-Provence, and by what can be called their

‘doorstep philosophy’.”25 In many ways CIAM 9 marks the beginning of the end of

CIAM as “doorstep philosophy” challenges some of the basic tenants of the modern

movement.

What is shared by these younger groups is both a negative response to the

main structural interests of CIAM, and a positive interest in more informal patterns of

habitation. The fourth CIAM meeting in 1933 in Athens produced the Athens Charter

which established the four main conceptual and functional priorities of CIAM as

“Dwellings”, “Recreation”, “Work” and “Transportation”. For the Smithsons, and by

implication the other architects and urbanists of the fledgling “team 10”:

The planning technique of the Charte d’Athene was analysis of functions.

Although it made it possible to think clearly about the mechanical disorders of

towns it proved inadequate in practice because it was too diagrammatic a

concept. Urbanism considered in terms of the Charte d’Athene tends to

produce communities in which the vital human associations are inadequately

expressed. It became obvious that town building was beyond the scope of

purely analytic thinking – the problem of human relations fell through the net

of the ‘four functions’.26

The “vital human associations” that escape the mechanistic net of CIAM find

expression in three display grids presented at Aix. Display grids were an institutional

convention of CIAM (and a requirement from 1948 onwards) and were designed to

systematise the presentation of visual material and to effectively ensure that the four

functions were kept centre stage.

21

Perhaps the most striking grid was the one presented by CIAM-Alger as the

“Bidonville Mahieddine Grid” (1953). Unlike many grids which used supporting

documentation to showcase particular architectural projects, this grid was, in a sense,

all supporting documentation. Sociological in orientation it strived to understand a

specific bidonville (squatter settlement) on the outskirts of Algiers. But whereas

traditional sociologists and urbanists might have treated the settlement primarily as an

urban problem that needed to be corrected, the grid took these practices of habitation

as evidence of an informal social urbanism that, with severely limited means, still

managed to produce a vibrant sociality in built form. The CIAM-Alger grid

demonstrated not just resourcefulness in the face of extreme poverty, but a vibrant

community urbanism that could teach modern architects a whole host of practical

solutions to the often sterile urban environments that were being produced.

The grid presented by GAMMA (Groupe d’architectes moderns Marocains)

was entitled “Habitat du plus grand nombre” (the habitat of the largest number).

While it shared CIAM Alger’s socio-anthropological interest in squatter communities,

it also presented material related to the Carrières-Centrales housing project in

Casablanca (1952) – a joint project by ATBAT (Alelier des Bâtisseurs) under the

direction of Georges Candilis and Serves de l’Urbanisme under Michel Ecochard. The

images of squatter encampments around Casablanca were more evidence of urbanism-

from-below: the making of a communal sociality with extremely impoverished

means. Here too we find a range of values that had been down-played in modernist

urbanism: ritual, symbolism and religion. Next to a photograph of a ramshackle

Mosque the authors note “in the shanty town, mosques are more plentiful than

anywhere else”.27

22

Figure five: Alison and Peter Smithson, Urban Re-Identification Grid 1953,

photographs by Nigel Henderson.

The Smithsons’ presentation was titled the Urban Re-identification Grid

(1953) and it effectively substituted the four functions for terms at once more banal

and more physically concrete: House, Street, District, City. The left hand side of the

panel was dominated by Nigel Henderson’s photographs of children playing in a

street in Bethnal Green, while the right hand side presented material related to their

entry for the Golden Lane competition from the previous year. The photographs were

taken by Henderson from his doorstep and first floor window and show

neighbourhood children playing (skipping, playing hopscotch, roller-skating, cycling,

somersaulting, and so on). The scattered choreography of the play produces informal

23

clusters of bodies both connected and disconnected, and these random patternings will

be echoed in the scattered shapes of the urban layout for the Golden Lane project.

Together the three grids focus on examples of extremely impoverished

housing. Out of such inauspicious materials the grids attempt to rescue dignity,

inventiveness, and forms of spontaneous sociality. These are not planned urban forms

but provisional arrangements made on the wing and under desperate circumstances. It

is an improvisational culture that is being celebrated, one heavy in symbolism but

spontaneous in performance, provisional in their occupation but seemingly timeless in

the social associations being forged and re-forged.

Relations and associations are everything. For the Smithsons the street is the

key. If doorstep philosophy means anything it means that the crucial element of a

social architecture will be the relationship between the unit of dwelling and the

immediate social environment. The Smithsons spelt it out in the left hand side of the

grid: house, street, relationship. The question then was what was the key to the

sociability that they witnessed (along with Henderson) in the streets of Bethnal

Green?

In the suburbs and slums the vital relationship between house and street

survives, children run about, people stop and talk, vehicles are parked and

tinkered with: in the back gardens are pigeons and pets and the shops are

round the corner: you know the milkman, you are outside your house in your

street.

Here then the question is answered. It is the vitality of belonging that is the key. The

street itself in its present form is simply the medium with in which those vital

relationships are being practiced.

24

Already in 1952 the Smithsons recognised that the street as it presently existed

was in danger. Not simply that the streets that they knew in Bethnal Green were

mostly in slum conditions (with no inside washing and toilet facilities) but that one of

the biggest and most evident threats to these convivial streets was the automobile. So

while the street is the solution to the vital associations that characterise urban

sociality, the street is also the problem: “we have not yet discovered an equivalent to

the street form for the present day. All we know is that the street has been invalidated

by the motor car, rising standards of living and changing values.”28

The architecture of “streets in the air” is one answer to this problem. It raises

the street away from the potentially dangerous road, allowing space to re-create the

improvised spontaneity of Victorian working-class street culture. Such housing

systems oppose the centrifugal pull of suburbanisation and maintain the density and

proximity of Victorian terraces, for the vibrant energy that underwrites “doorstep

philosophy”. It does so by providing new places of congregation, places for passing

the time of day, for doing nothing, safe from the danger of increased traffic:

There are three levels of ‘streets-in-the-air’, each level we call a ‘deck’. Off

each ‘deck’ live 90 families and their group activity is concentrated in two

crossings at the street intersections, these crossings are triple volumes

contrasting with the single volume streets inviting one to linger and pass the

time of day.

Vertical circulation is possible at crossings and street ends (which are similar

triple volume). A new dimension has been added to the life of the street.29

The idea of streets in the air also allowed the Smithsons to think about urban

architecture, not as a root-and-branch refashioning of the city, but as a layering of new

urban solutions within an urban fabric already heavy with habitation.

25

In their draft document for the theme of CIAM 10 in Dubrovnik, the

Smithsons are clear that their doorstep philosophy can’t simply face backwards to the

Victorian housing now being demolished as part of a massive slum clearance. The

street needs to answer a whole host of questions to do with the increased

mechanisation and alienation of the urban environment:

Re-thinking the basic relationship between people and life as it is today, with

the impact of mechanisation, impersonisation [sic] of contact etc. etc. Trying

to find the new patterns of Habitat for this new reality, taking upon oneself the

responsibility of accepting or rejecting, drawing the line at which

mechanisation must stop. Always starting our thinking at the bottom with the

primer [sic] contact at the Doorstep between man and men.

Remembering always that what is important at this moment is the relationship

between things.30

Streets in the air were designed to forge a new “relationship between things”, to

concretize patterns of association both old and new. But while the “doorstep’ is where

the “one” meets the “many” it is no longer imagined as taking place on the ground.

THE TIME OF THE NEO AVANT-GARDE

My aim in this essay has been to implicitly suggest that the temporalities of

avant-gardism can obscure the complex polychronic aspect of particular architectural

practices. But, of course, avant-gardism isn’t only a preoccupation with historians and

commentators on architecture and art; it is also a living relationship across generations

of architects in the twentieth century. In the 1950s, and prompted in part by the sort of

“doorstep philosophy” circulating around the proposal for Golden Lane, avant-gardist

26

tussles were very much in evidence. The last full meeting of CIAM was held in

Dubrovnik in 1956. At this, the tenth meeting of CIAM, the institutional arm of

international modernist architecture shut up shop for good. In essence the story of

CIAM’s dissolution reads like a generational spat, a changing of the guard, an

Oedipal saga. Certainly it was seen that way at the time. Le Corbusier, by then the

effective leader of CIAM, stayed away from the Dubrovnik meeting, claiming that it

was only really those between the ages of 25 to 40 (he was 69 at the time) who ‘find

themselves in the heart of the present period and are: “the only ones capable of feeling

actual problems, personally, profoundly, the goals to follow, the means to reach them,

the pathetic urgency of the present situation. They are in the know. Their predecessors

no longer are, they are out, they are no longer subject to the direct impact of the

situation.”31

More pragmatically Theo Crosby, who in the mid 1950s was the technical

editor of Architectural Design and a close friend of Alison and Peter Smithson,

explained the dissolution as the result of institutional unwieldiness and the powerful

ambitions of a younger generation: “At Dubrovnik it became evident that CIAM, with

over 3,000 members, had become too diffuse to cover any subject other than by the

merest generalization. There was also a cleavage between the founders, old, famous

and very busy, and the followers, young, underworked and ravenous for power.”32

The old give way to the young as institutional forms undergo entropic decline. No

doubt this is a familiar tale that could be told about many institutions, both

commercial and non-commercial, but it is always a pertinent tale to be told about

those who see themselves at the cutting edge of cultural movements.

That the Smithsons’ saw themselves within the temporal logic of avant-

gardism is without doubt; their writings are filled with phrases like the “next step” and

27

a sense of a “new movement”: “What is new about the New Brutalism among

Movements is that it finds its closest affinities not in a past architectural style, but in

peasant dwelling forms, which have style and are stylish but were never modish: a

poetry without rhetoric.”33 Yet as soon as they introduce the “new” they perform a

difficult negotiation with the past: it is not “the past” as specific slice of history that is

being called on but a sense of the age-old, the durability of the ordinary. On the other

hand the Smithsons’ inclusion of Pop Art elements (the images of celebrities, for

instance) might suggest that this work is best understood as a form of neo-avant-

gardism. After all Pop Art was Peter Bürger’s privileged example of a cultural

production that “can no longer even have the limited effectiveness the historical

avant-gardes achieved.”34 Pop art, for Bürger, replays the historical avant-garde’s use

of a readymade culture but this time it lacks the critical purchase that the historic

avant-garde wanted to effect. Partly this has to do with the altered status of the avant-

garde: for Bürger the neo-avant-garde is stymied by the very fact that avant-gardism

has become the new form of institutional art. Again we could see this played out

across the institution of CIAM, which becomes the main target for avant-gardist

disquiet.

“Streets in the air” don’t remain paperwork. Alison and Peter Smithson use

them at the end of the 1960s in the building of Robin Hood Gardens. Most famously,

though, streets in the air become the central element of the Park Hill flats in Sheffield

(Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, 1961). In many ways this was the palpable outcome of the

Smithson’s Golden Lane competition entry. Park Hill (figure six) was all street

decking and cluster arrangements that followed the contours of the hills behind the

main railway station. Like so many housing projects in the post-war reconstruction

period Park Hill was mass working-class housing. Unlike the stacked bungalows of

28

many high rise buildings, usable social space was built into the design at the

“doorstep”.

Figure six: Street deck in Park Hill, Sheffield, architects Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith.

The street decks of Park Hill were deemed a success by people such as Reyner

Banham who claimed that “toddlers play on them; teens mend bikes, keep dates, swap

gossip on them, teds occasionally brawl; heroic grans sit, legs akimbo, at the street-

deck door”.35 Writing about their play-potential when compared to the limitations of

balconies, Lady Allen of Hurtwood, writing in 1966 would describe the Park Hill flats

as the best solution within multi-storey architecture:

The old houses, built during the nineteenth century, were in narrow streets,

and the new homes that have replaced them, within the multi-storey buildings,

have a system of access by means of 10-foot-wide street decks. These street-

29

decks, open to the air and named after the demolished streets, run through the

whole length of the buildings, often for over half a mile. As only specially

designed electric trolleys for delivering milk and bread are allowed on these

street-decks, they are virtually traffic-free. They have proved to be a useful

meeting-place for mothers outside their front doors and a place where children

can play in safety close to their homes.36

At least for a while the Brutalist architecture of “streets in the air” lived up to the

ethical demand to provide the settings for age-old practices of sociality. Within a

decade or two, such architecture had fallen into disrepair and had become the very

image of the sink estate. The intervening years witnessed a sea change in the social

imaginary of housing: council housing changed from being an ordinary aspect of

dwelling to became a sign of social failure; a shift occurred between the amount of

people renting and ownership; local council expenditure on social housing was

drastically cut, leaving behemoths like Park Hill to quickly decay. In this sense the

“streets in the air” retain a promise of a world that was already on the brink of

obsolescence.

The contrasting images of “streets in the air” as either successful recreations of

the improvised sociability of working-class enclaves or alienating and dankly

threatening warrens peopled by muggers and drug dealers, doesn’t help arrest the

peculiar seductions of the Smithsons’ collages of Golden Lane in 1952. And it is here

in the collages that the impossibility of the “streets in the air” seems most compelling.

They are not impossible as a practical attempt to reformat slum housing without

destroying the resilient and improvised sociability that they exhibited (the early

history of Park Hill is a testimony to that). But they seem impossible in 1952 mainly

because they call on so many temporalities, and they call on them all at once. What

30

sort of world is it that the collages imagine? I imagine those street decks busy with

children playing hopscotch and cycling; of groups of adults gathered round the refuse

chute to pass the time of day; of celebrities out for a stroll. But most compelling of all,

I imagine this all taking place in the air while on the ground there is a bombed-out

London that was never rebuilt.

1 Alison and Peter Smithson ‘The Ordinary and the Banal’ (23.11.1964) A + P

Smithson Archive, London, reproduced in As Found: The Discovery of the Ordinary,

edited by Claude Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger (Baden: Lars Müller

Publishers, 2001) p. 141.

2 The most widely circulated account of art and architectural history as one movement

after another is probably Robert Hughes The Shock of the New (London: BBC Books,

1980). In Jean-François Lyotard’s account of postmodernism he declares that

postmodernism “is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state” (The

Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge [Manchester: Manchester University

Press, 1986] p. 79). For Hal Foster the Neo-Avant-Garde has to be understood within

the logic of “deferred action” and therefore both the historical and neo-avant-gardes

are “constituted in a similar way [...] that throws over any simple scheme of before

and after, cause and effect, origin and repetition” (The Return of the Real

[Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996], p. 29).

3 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible,

translated by Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum) p. 54.

31

4 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible p. 26.

5 Obviously there are precedents here and Le Corbusier is an extraordinary example

of productivity of both architecture and the extra-architectural.

6 For information about the Independent Group see Anne Massey, The Independent

Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain 1945-59 (Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 1995) and David Robbins ed. The Independent Group: Postwar

Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press,

1990).

7 Alison and Peter Smithson, The Charged Void: Architecture (New York: Monacelli

Press, 2001), p. 86. The quotation is probably from early 1952.

8 Alison and Peter Smithson, The Charged Void: Architecture, p. 86. The quotation is

probably from early 1952.

9 This would also be the focus of their 1957 project with Peter Sigmond “Berlin

Hauptstadt”, with more explicit attention to the presence of the automobile in the city,

see Alison and Peter Smithson, The Charged Void: Urbanism, pp. 45-63.

10 Alison and Peter Smithson, Urban Structuring (London: Studio Vista, 1967) p. 34.

11 For an account of these friendships as familial see Beatriz Colomina, “Friends of

the Future: A Conversation with Peter Smithson”, October, 94, 2000, pp. 3-30.

32

12 Nigel Henderson cited in Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art

(London: Thames and Hudson, 2001), p. 50. See also Julian Trevelyan words:

“Surrealism lost much of its impetus during the war. It became absurd to compose

Surrealist confections when high explosives could do it so much better, and when

German soldiers with Tommy-guns descended from the clouds on parachutes dressed

as nuns. Life had caught up with Surrealism or Surrealism with life, and for a giddy

moment we in England lived the irrational movement to its death.” Julian Trevelyan,

Indigo Days (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1957), p. 80

13 For the vast range of patterns that might be included within an “as found” aesthetic

see the 1953 exhibition Parallel of Life and Art devised by the Smithsons, Paolozzi

and Henderson which included aerial photography, pictures of cellular tissue, mud

patterns, alongside the work of Henderson, Paolozzi and Pollock. The “as found”

could include patterns found in nature but usually these required the mediation of

visual technologies (microscopes, x-ray machines, and so on). Like many other artists

involved in the discussions of the Independent Group the Smithsons, Henderson and

Paolozzi were influenced by D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form first

published in 1917 (for an abridged version see D’Arcy Thompson On Growth and

Form [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992]).

14 For more information on this project see Ben Highmore, “Hopscotch Modernism:

On Everyday Life and the Blurring of Art and Social Science”, Modernist Cultures, 2,

1, 2006, pp. 70-79 http://www.js-modcult.bham.ac.uk/articles/Issue3_Highmore.pdf

33

15 Alison and Peter Smithson, “The ‘As Found’ and the ‘Found’”, The Independent

Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty, edited by David Robbins

(Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1990) p. 201.

16 For a different account that connects the work of the Smithsons to war see Beatriz

Colomina, Domesticity at War (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), chapter six.

17 Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art, p. 35.

18 At the same time as the Smithsons were working on the Golden Lane Proposal, Le

Corbusier was working in India on a project for the new Indian state: see

Vikramaditya Prakash, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in

Postcolonial India (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002).

19 For an extensive treatment of the particularity of the Smithsons’ collages and of the

associated collages of Richard Hamilton see: Ben Highmore “Richard Hamilton at the

Ideal Home Exhibition of 1958: Gallery for a Collector of Brutalist and Tachiste Art”,

Art History, 30, 5, 2007, pp. 712-737; Ben Highmore “Rough Poetry: Patio and

Pavilion Revisited”, Oxford Art Journal, 29, 2, 2006, pp. 269-290; Ben Highmore,

“Home Furnishings: Richard Hamilton, Domesticity and ‘Post-Avant-Gardism’”, in

Neo-Avant Garde, ed David Hopkins, (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi,

2007), pp. 243-262.

20 Raymond Williams and Michael Orrom, Preface to Film, London: Film Drama, p.

21.

34

21 There is no direct link between the Smithsons and Raymond Williams, but given

the Smithsons’ interest in theatre it would seem likely that they would have been

familiar with aspects of Williams’ work. Other Independent Group members were

familiar with the discourses around popular culture that would shape the nascent

discipline of cultural studies and which were authored by writers like Raymond

Williams and Richard Hoggart. To get a sense of the striking connections and

disconnections between the Independent Group and Williams it is worth comparing

two autobiographical pieces: Raymond Williams “Culture is Ordinary” in Resources

of Hope (London: Verso,1989), pp.3-14 (first published in 1958) and Reyner Banham

“The Atavism of the Short-Distance Mini-Cyclist”, Living Arts, 3, 1964, pp. 91-97.

22 Beatriz Colomina, “Friends of the Future: A Conversation with Peter Smithson”, p.

9.

23 Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art, p. 49.

24 The centrality of this question is evident in a number of landmark publications

produced in this era. In particular Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and

Kinship in East London (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) originally published by

Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1957 and Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great

American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961).

35

25 Alison and Peter Smithson, Draft Framework 4, 1956, pp. 3-4. Reproduced in Team

10 1953-81: In Search of a Utopia of the Present, edited by Max Risselada and Dirk

van den Heuvel, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005, p. 48.

26 Alison and Peter Smithson, Urban Structuring, p. 18.

27 For material on these grids as well as excellent reproductions of them see Max

Risselada and Dirk van den Heuvel eds Team 10 1953-81: In Search of a Utopia of

the Present (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005).

28 Alison and Peter Smithson, Urban Structuring, p. 10.

29 Alison and Peter Smithson, from ‘An Urban Project’ (1953) cited in John R. Gold,

The Practice of Modernism: Modern Architects and Urban Transformation, 1954-

1972, Abingdon and New York: Routledge 2007, p. 213.

30 Alison and Peter Smithson, Draft Framework 4, 1956, pp. 3-4. Reproduced in

Team 10 1953-81: In Search of a Utopia of the Present, p. 49.

31 Le Corbusier, 1956, cited in Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical

History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), p. 271-2.

32 Theo Crosby ‘Introduction’, to Alison and Peter Smithson, Urban Structuring, p. 7.

36

33 Alison and Peter Smithson, Without Rhetoric: An Architectural Aesthetic 1955-

1972 (London: Latimer New Directions, 1973), p. 6.

34 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, translated by Michael Shaw (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 58.

35 Banham 1961 cited in Alan Powers, Britain (London: Reaktion books, 2007), p.

114.

36 Lady Allen of Hurtwood, Planning for Play (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968),

p. 19. Lady Allen of Hurtwood is referring to a survey conducted in the Park Hill

buildings in Sheffield undertaken by Mrs J. F. Demers in 1966.