1
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,
2
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
3
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
4
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
5
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.
6
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
7
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
8
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
9
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.
11
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
12
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
13
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
14
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
15
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
16
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
17
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
18
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
19
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.
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