B is for Blueprint - B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

Trapped halfway down the stack of ancient magazines sitting on the floor of my study is a yellowing copy of Blueprint, the monthly started in London in 1983 by Peter Murray, with a group of journalists, photographers, writers and designers. We thought we were going to turn the world of design and architecture upside down. As is usually the case, this took the form of doing all that we could to trash the reputations of a previous generation of designers, architects, and so, by implication, of a previous generation of critics too. We were championing a new group of names, drawn from our contemporaries, to help them in their struggle to supplant their predecessors.

And of course, as they floated apparently effortlessly to the top of the professional tree, so would we. Now we wait with more or less resignation for another generation to dispatch us, in electronic haikus, 140 characters at a time. Or, if we are quick enough, we contemplate knifing our own discoveries and finding a fresh set of designers and architects to champion, if necessary, repeating the same trick once more in a few years’ time.

Fashion cycles are the natural means for one generation to be edged out of the way to make room for another, but they don’t always make for the most reliable of critical judgements. When I began writing about architecture for newspapers in the 1980s, the politely provincial British architectural world of the time was evidently running out of steam. A thrusting fifty-year-old Norman Foster had just ushered in the gleaming aluminium-skinned face of the future with the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia, which looked more like an aircraft hangar than a museum. But there wasn’t much else of interest being built, and that meant it was a free-fire zone on almost everybody else. Blueprint set out to be iconoclastic, disposable, and tried to root architecture, design, graphics, fashion and the visual world in the popular culture of the time.

There was an undeniable frisson to be enjoyed from the slaughter of so many sacred cows. Poor Sir Hugh Casson, architect by royal appointment, was a particular target. Now it’s not just Norman Foster who is in the cross hairs of another generation of critics. It is Zaha Hadid, who was described as a safe choice just six years after her Cardiff Bay Opera House was said to be unbuildable. David Chipperfield and Will Alsop are also taking the heat. For those who are looking to supplant them, they are establishment figures and fair game.

It is part of the natural order of things for one generation to turn on the last. Critics face the same process. The opportunity for architectural critics to overturn conventional wisdom doesn’t come that often. But very occasionally a few of them get to tell us that something we had accustomed ourselves to seeing as irretrievably awful is in fact an unacknowledged masterpiece, and, having told us so, they manage to persuade us to believe them. In the 1950s, it was John Betjeman who took most of the credit for opening our eyes to the qualities of Victorian architecture - though John Summerson probably did more of the spadework and Nikolaus Pevsner also played his part. After their efforts, what had been seen as at best an amusing embarrassment became priceless heritage.

Iain Nairn, the maverick RAF pilot-turned-critic, made us look at what we thought of as the commonplace and understand it for what it really was. He explored Essex suburbs, provincial factories, bypass architecture and industrial estates. He had a gift for the kind of turn of phrase that stays with you. ‘Doomed, and grimly magnificent,’ is how he once described Hawksmoor’s great Christ Church in Spitalfields, words that still go through my mind every time I see the building.

Succeeding generations play off each other. We are inspired by our predecessors, but we also threaten them, just as we are threatened by our successors. My first job at the Sunday Times was to write Ian Nairn’s obituary. Three decades later, I was reviewing Owen Hatherley’s book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. I found myself reading the words of somebody from a generation younger than mine, who was also looking back to Nairn, and attempting, like him, to make us look at what we take to be the ordinary elements of the world around us, and to make us understand them as anything but ordinary. In Hatherley’s case it is a plea for the brutalism of the English provinces. But, of course, reviewing the work of a member of a generation that is upstaging yours is not the most objective of processes.

Hatherley’s history reads something like Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, with the action of Hamlet seen through the eyes of two minor characters. His account of the past thirty years of British architecture reduces Norman Foster, James Stirling, Alison and Peter Smithson and Denys Lasdun to walk-on parts; the greater part of the action is focused on such figures as Owen Luder, Rodney Gordon and Robert Lister, responsible for provincial shopping-centre megastructures, bush-hammered concrete car parks and trade union offices.

Blueprint’s tabloid format, powerfully designed by Simon Esterson, was borrowed from Skyline, a short-lived New York magazine art directed by Massimo Vignelli that set a worrying precedent by going under just before our first issue came out. The range of subject matter, from fashion to car design by way of architecture, came from Domus, the Milanese magazine established by Giò Ponti. Blueprint’s main aim was to be everything that the once crucial Architectural Review, by that stage, was not. When the Review had Betjeman, Pevsner and Reyner Banham on its staff, it set the pace in its approach to layout and the ambition of its ideas. But by the time Blueprint emerged, the AR had faded into timid irrelevance. It found anywhere more remote than Finland alarmingly foreign.

Blueprint offered a chance to ask questions and to look at places that seemed interesting. We began to explore exotic new centres of design that were making an impact. Tokyo suddenly came into focus as the first fax machines started up, with their curious electronic whine bringing news of mysterious commissions in the small hours from various locations around the planet.

The particular issue of Blueprint on my study floor is a quarter of a century old, and the cover features the portrait of an angelic-looking David Chipperfield, posed in the foreground of the shop that he had just completed for Issey Miyake in London. Behind David is Ken Armstrong, his business partner at the time, once an equally promising young architect, now somewhat off the radar. Chipperfield, with offices in Berlin, Milan and Shanghai as well as London, is still working and has built in China, Korea, America, Japan, Italy, Spain and Germany. He has been knighted, collected the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture and lost some hair.

Our attempt at making design and architecture accessible beyond the professional ghetto involved putting photographs of our designer heroes (and, regrettably, not nearly enough heroines) on the cover. The idea was to give a face to the abstractions of architecture, even to offer a design magazine that could make eye contact with you from the newsstands. But there were never that many buyers, and in the end we were simply making our own small contribution to the dismal celebrity cult that has threatened to overwhelm architecture and design. Pretty soon we found that there was some sort of curse overshadowing the operation. Partnerships that had appeared on Blueprint covers had an uncomfortable habit of splitting up shortly afterwards, just like the celebrity weddings pictured on the cover of Hello! magazine that end in divorce. Armstrong disappeared to Paris soon after the issue with his picture on the cover came out, to build the Maison de la Culture du Japon on his own. I knew something was wrong when he called me after the photograph was taken to complain that the nature of his partnership with Chipperfield had been misrepresented. He was standing, while David was seated, and in front of him.

Chipperfield took longer to get a project to match the visibility of Armstrong’s first solo work, which, for a brief moment, looked as if it would be the next Institut du Monde Arabe, Jean Nouvel’s breakthrough building on the banks of the Seine. The introduction to Miyake, through the shop, was enough to get Chipperfield to Japan, where he was one of the earliest Western architects to build in the Tokyo of the Bubble Economy.

London in 1985, as depicted by Blueprint, was an unimaginably different place from the London presided over by Boris Johnson. As unlike the present incarnation of the magazine to the one written on typewriters and prepared for press by pasting down photographs and columns of type on layout boards with Cow Gum glue. In fact, the very first issues used an ancient technology, Letraset, the dry-transfer lettering system, for headlines.

Chipperfield had an office in the same semi-derelict building as Blueprint. Unlike architectural practices starting out today, who can’t afford Hoxton and end up banished to the outer limits of the city, we were able to rent space in the West End, just off Marylebone High Street, in Cramer Street. Chipperfield had room to spare and turned the basement of the building into the 9H architecture gallery, with space for its associated magazine of the same name. Unlike Blueprint, 9H was serious, scholarly and intellectually committed. Named after the hardest of hard lead pencils, 9H’s editorial board (Chipperfield, Ricky Burdett, Yehuda Safran and Wilfried Wang) were determined to bring the unsentimental ethos of what were then seen as obscure Swiss firms, such as Herzog & de Meuron, and assorted Austrians to the blinkered attention of the Anglo-Saxon world. Later 9H turned into the Architecture Foundation, an outfit dedicated to getting the subject of contemporary architecture taken seriously in Britain. The Architecture Foundation regarded the Royal Institute of British Architects as dismayingly provincial, and incapable of taking the intellectual fight to the Prince of Wales, whose petulant crusade against anything that he did not like the look of was just getting underway.

If Blueprint was an attempt to transform magazines, 9H, and subsequently the foundation, wanted to do the same for architectural institutions. Ricky Burdett, its first director, shrewdly signed up Nicholas Serota, Alan Yentob, Doris Saatchi and Andreas Whittam Smith as board members, ensuring that its message percolated out of the professional ghetto.

For the London of those days, whose self-regarding insularity led to an unjustified faith in its own pre-eminence as an architectural centre, the astringency of 9H was something of a departure. Indeed, 9H’s policy was to have some unintended consequences. Herzog & de Meuron were selected to rebuild the derelict Bankside Power Station for the Tate, not Chipperfield. He had put everything that he could into his competition design, including a last-minute plan to castrate the building by removing the landmark chimney, but it wasn’t enough for him to win.

No less than three directors of the Venice Architecture Biennale emerged from Cramer Street. I did the job in 2002, followed by Ricky Burdett in 2008, and ten years later by David Chipperfield.

Look closely at the Miyake shop portrayed on that Blueprint cover, Chipperfield’s first substantial project, and you see veined white marble, wide timber floorboards, and an intricate palette for the supporting cast of materials. A little rich for the Chipperfield of today, perhaps, but a sophisticated exercise in place-making that, in its intentions and ambitions, is not so far from what he is doing now. Even then he was ready to say that it was important not to do too much; all that a shop might need could simply be to install a very beautiful floor.

Early on in his career there were a couple of bruising encounters with the militantly philistine nature of the British way of doing things. When Chipperfield designed a sober house for the photographer Nick Knight, in an undistinguished suburb west of London, the neighbours, unabashed by the pebble-dash banality of their street, did all they could to prevent what they saw as an intrusion from being built. Chipperfield had an equally hard time with his own offices in a mews in Camden. The Evening Standard gleefully egged on opponents of what it called his ‘aggressively modernist, and out of scale design’. Chipperfield realized that to have any chance of building, or indeed surviving, he would have to look beyond Britain, to mainland Europe. Here he could see himself as part of a group of architects who brought a seriousness and a certain intellectual ambition to their work that went further than stylistic mannerisms. Chipperfield, who is in so many ways quintessentially English, has become the most European of British architects.

It is a complex position in which to find himself, especially for an architect who believes in rooting his work in place, memory and material qualities. When you have joined the international flying circus, how do you resist the tendency it encourages towards the showy gesture and the quick fix?

Chipperfield’s work can be seen as conservative in the best sense. He is looking for architecture that lasts that resists the culture of spectacle. I remember seeing him present his design for a new BBC headquarters in Glasgow to a competition jury that included an enthusiastic Greg Dyke, then the BBC’s director general, who got down on his hands and knees for a closer look at the model. The site was on the edge of a derelict dock on the fringes of the city, surrounded by a howling void of anonymous business parks and apartment towers.

Chipperfield described his task as trying to find a way to give some sense of permanence and place to an environment that looked, as he put it, as if it might blow away with the first gust of wind. The other contenders included Richard Rogers, who was not having a good day, Wilkinson Eyre, who could not find the right words to meet the occasion, and Mecanoo, the Dutch practice who came up with a Hawaiian shirt: a design that might look fine on the day of the presentation, but would have been pretty embarrassing for the day-to-day operations of the BBC ten years later.

Given the restrictions of the budget and the brutal simple-mindedness of a procurement procedure that saw the BBC outsourcing the project to a finance house, there were not too many options for Chipperfield. But he came up with a project that made the most of its interior. As though preparing an Adolf Loos Raumplan - and Loos was a particular hero of the 9H group - Chipperfield took the fixed elements of the brief (the studios) and placed them on the floor of the building like giant steps. He put the social spaces on top of them in a cascading sequence of volumes that rise up through the height of the interior. In the process, he made somewhere out of nowhere and, despite a near-terminal falling-out with the executive architects for the project, succeeded in producing a handsome building.

His most complex and hard-to-categorize work is the Berlin Neues Museum. Almost twelve years in the making, it stands as his most impressive achievement to date, and is perhaps also the building in which he has taken the biggest conceptual risks. His solutions are traditional, in that they refer back to the restoration strategies advocated by William Morris when he set up the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in the nineteenth century, and yet have an entirely contemporary astringency.

The Neues Museum, with its painstaking approach to preserving every flake of paint from a building mutilated by war and dissolving after decades of post-war neglect, represents a new departure in its attitude to history. It is a museum in which the container has itself become content. It was a shell-shattered ruin for half a century, destroyed during the closing stages of the Second World War. Before that, its history closely reflected the genesis of the modern museum. When the building first opened in 1850, Prussia had little in the way of actual archaeological artefacts. Instead the museum was a kind of interpretation centre, full of evocations and simulations, rather than authentic objects. The walls were painted to represent Egyptian temples, the Athenian acropolis and the Roman pantheon. After teams of German archaeologists started bringing home the real thing, the original interior became an embarrassment, and quickly vanished underneath an all-enveloping blanket of Bauhaus-inspired restraint that provided the setting for the booty from excavations throughout the Middle East.

The impact of bombing during the war unevenly peeled away fragments from every layer, to leave a new kind of reality. The brickwork, the cast-iron underlying structure that had never been meant to be visible, the fragments of old plaster, the patches of flaking murals, the traces of dropped ceilings that had been used to hide the original layers, they were all in themselves part of the history of the building. Chipperfield spent more than a decade stitching together the shattered remains of a dead building, bringing it back to warm life, not by what is conventionally understood as a restoration, but by finding a new quality in the layered traces of the past.

This approach is only one strand in his work. The building he did for Valencia’s waterfront when it hosted the America’s Cup is a reminder of his interest in the relationship between architecture and urbanism, and his concern for the social aspects of a building. Chipperfield gently subverted what was intended to be a viewing platform for an elite group of sponsors for the yacht-racing season by connecting it with the city and making it partly permeable to the public.

Equally original, in its own way, is the emergence of a group of buildings that began with Germany’s Museum of Literature in Marbach. With a clifftop setting, alongside a classical neighbour, Chipperfield broke the greatest post-war taboo of German architecture. He ignored the authoritarian taint associated with classicism, and introduced what can only be understood as a modernized classical building, with a colonnade, though no entablature or capitals on its columns.

In a period when much architectural production has been overtaken by a mania for promiscuous shape-making, these are all designs that have a certain sobriety that are immersed in the traditional architectural concerns. For Chipperfield, the impact of sunshine on a white wall, the sense of enclosure and release that moving through a sequence of rooms can offer, are important issues. He has a sophisticated understanding of the imperative for an architect to find meaning in a project, rather than blithely build more space. For Chipperfield, a master plan is more than the disposition of blocks on a map, or a kind of large-scale architecture, but is a means of articulating a shared vision about what a university might be like, or how a cultural centre can be part of the life of a city. He is a pragmatist, of course. Anybody with a large office to maintain has to be. He is ready to make silk purses out of the sow’s-ear scheme; bringing a certain dignity to an affordable mass-housing programme on the edge of Madrid, for example. But he has stuck to his belief in an architecture of substance.

The first time I went to Barcelona was in 1980, to look at the architectural hippy commune that Ricardo Bofill had established in a derelict cement factory at Sant Just Desvern. There were cypress trees planted on the roof, tables designed by Antoni Gaudí at the foot of soaring concrete silos, and a resident poet. In those days, Bofill had yet to embark on his relentless precast-concrete classicism that purported to offer the masses social housing that looked as palatial as Versailles but had the usual shoebox plans behind the pretentious façades. His intricate and colourful early buildings were attracting a lot of attention. Nothing could be more different from Chipperfield’s huge and sober law court complex in the city.

Most of Barcelona in those days looked as if it were living off its ample supply of memories from better times. The Gothic core of the city was half derelict, the business district had a clump of would-be skyscrapers, and its ramshackle suburbs spilled out over the dusty hills beyond the city’s boundaries.

I went back to Barcelona to work on a Blueprint special issue on the city on a warm November night, in an attempt to find out what it was that had made it come to life in the intervening years. The differences were startling. Two hours after midnight and things were only just getting started at Otto Zutz. It was a raw concrete and black-painted steel playground, embellished by gritty murals in muted grey and a network of catwalks, threaded over the vertiginous, cavern-like void above the dance floor. The pace quickened after the neighbouring bars started to close. Customers came in from Bar 33 (cava served in a mirror-and-Perspex environment), from the Universal (the ambience of a Lower East Side loft) and from the Bar Snooker (proud owner of a shiny new billiard table).

It was a hedonistic Spain, far from the stereotype as a Third World outpost that many Brits cherished then, in which public kissing let alone topless bathing landed people in jail. Its bar life managed to make Barcelona look sophisticated, even if it was still building SEAT cars from time-expired Fiat designs.

Javier Mariscal put his finger on what was behind the sense of discovery outsiders experienced when they went to Barcelona in those days. ‘Unlike Paris, Hollywood had never created a sense of what Barcelona looked like; we had to make our own image of it,’ Mariscal told The New York Times. And of course that is exactly what his BAR/CEL/ONA poster did, as surely and effectively as Milton Glaser’s I NY.

Mariscal was a key figure in Barcelona’s reemergence; he worked with others, cross-fertilizing and collaborating. He went beyond illustration and cartoons to design furniture, interiors and objects. Mariscal had the connections to get drafted in as the Spanish member of Ettore Sottsass’s Memphis Group in Milan, which changed the design landscape in the 1980s. But we missed a trick at Blueprint. When we got back to London with the portraits our photographer, David Banks, had taken for us, we didn’t put the image we had of a boyish Mariscal, in his John Lennon glasses, looking a lot like Harry Potter, in Pep Cortes’s metal workshop, on our cover. Instead we had Cristian Cirici, his arm wrapped protectively around a steel I-beam holding up the roof of his reconstruction of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, which he had just finished. That remarkable project, bringing back the memory of the brief but intense flowering of the luxurious modernism of 1929, was a reminder that Barcelona in the 1980s was still a city of many conflicted aesthetic attitudes.

Barcelona at that time was still in the first flush of enthusiasm for design. By the 1990s, it had become more confident. No longer seeing itself as an echo of Milan, it had stopped trying to replicate the smooth, tasteful polish of the Italian approach to design and was ready to take a more flamboyant path. Barcelona was remaking itself, investing in the city infrastructure, preparing for staging the Olympics in 1992, and it was trying ever harder to recapture the optimism it had experienced when it first seemed possible to make a new city after Franco’s death.

Despite having been born in Valencia and remaining sceptical about the Catalans, Mariscal had a very visible part in this process. He worked with Fernando Amat, the proprietor of Vinçon, Barcelona’s first design store. Mariscal and Alfredo Arribas designed the most baroque of all Barcelona’s nightclubs, the Torres de Avila, a project which the ever-more-grumpy Robert Hughes was quite spectacularly dyspeptic about when he went to gather material for his book on Barcelona. For Hughes, Barcelona was a place which ‘moved into the 1990s obsessed with design, designers are to it, what the cigar-chomping art stars were to New York in the 1980s’. Hughes claimed that ‘it was the sheer awfulness of Torres de Avila and its PoMo clichés that might make it worth preserving’. It is a view that has more to do with Hughes’s self-absorption than anything else.

There was nothing quite like Barcelona’s design at its most playful and exuberant. It never acquired the intellectual baggage of the Memphis group. Rather it was spectacular and hedonistic. It was identified so strongly with the new Spain that Mariscal moved effortlessly from the underground at the fringes of society to the mainstream. For the Olympic Games of 1992, it was Mariscal who designed Cobi, the mascot that became its official embodiment. He was able to change the tone of voice with which a country could present itself to the world.

Barcelona, while it did a remarkable job investing in infrastructure, new roads and mass-transit systems, new airports and civic buildings, has started to flounder. As Herzog & de Meuron’s Forum project, shuttered and empty just a few years after it was completed, has demonstrated, the city has an alarming tendency to build things first and work out what to do with them afterwards. And this was even before the debt crisis engulfed Spain.

In the same issue of Blueprint we published a piece about Michael Graves’s skyscraper for the Humana Building in Louisville - the high-water mark of the postmodern tide in the form of an astonishingly monumental pastel-coloured temple. It looks like a museum piece now. It was a commission won in a competition against Norman Foster and it would be difficult to imagine two more polarized designs. In fact, Graves went so far as to suggest that he would rather practise law than build high-tech architecture. For a moment Graves was being described by Charles Jencks as the greatest American architect since Frank Lloyd Wright, and he acquired much the same aura that Frank Gehry attained a quarter of a century later when he completed the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Since then, Graves has declined into the construction of a sequence of exhibitionistic holiday resorts on a huge scale.

There is a melancholy feel to looking at those ancient copies of Blueprint now. Why would anybody set out to start a new magazine once Amazon had sold more Kindle downloads than physical hardback books for the first time? It is a format that has perhaps reached the end of the line, displaced at one end by newer, cheaper media, and at the other by the physical, shared experience of the exhibition. And yet still the new magazines keep coming, still relishing the scent of fresh ink and the tactility of paper. And they continue to have the energy and the optimism that Blueprint once had.

One of the most striking differences I found in making the transition from editing architecture and design magazines to directing a museum was discovering the impact of seeing the audience face to face. To edit a magazine is to find yourself putting messages in bottles and floating them out to sea. Occasionally there is some feedback: an angry letter to my Italian publisher at Domus, from Mario Botta, an architect claiming to have been victimized by the Anglo-Saxon mercenaries that I had hired to attack his evisceration of La Scala in Milan; or threats of legal action. The most common form of enquiry, however, is a request for more detail from a technical library about the precise grade of concrete used in Zaha Hadid’s Zaragoza Bridge Pavilion.

Running a museum is more like running a theatre. There is a visible response to the programme. If people like what the museum is doing they come and spend time there. You can see when they enjoy what they find. You hear them talking to each other about it. You see them taking photographs of the captions on their mobile phones. Of course, if they don’t like it, you can see that too. They don’t come.

The numbers are very different. Architectural exhibitions can very occasionally attract a hundred thousand paying customers or more. No issue of any architecture or design magazine in the world sells anything like that number. This is not to make any qualitative judgements about the value of one medium against another. But it is clear that there is something about an exhibition that, when it works, will persuade many more people to pay for the experience than would invest the same amount in a book or a magazine. It is too easy a commonplace to repeat the threadbare observation that an architectural exhibition cannot replicate the primary experience of architecture; that what is on show is in some way second best when compared, for example, with the primary experience of confronting an autonomous artwork. An engaging physical exhibition on architecture does indeed offer a richer, more immersive, experience that speaks to more people than any depiction in a book or magazine. In the same way that live performances continue to flourish even as sales of recorded music have been decimated, so the primary shared physical experience that an exhibition offers has a future. The magazine, at the moment, does not look so promising, unless as a place to offer an antidote to the savagery of what debate on the web has become.