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

The techniques by which identity is manufactured, and which constitute a key aspect of the practice of design, have always fascinated me. I can remember wondering why the 1,000-dinar note in what was once called Yugoslavia, where I spent summers as a child, came with an image of a steelworker, in cap and overalls, posed in front of a blast furnace on one side, and a cluster of burning torches and red stars on the other. In Britain, as I had already noticed, money was signified by representations of eighteenth-century notables with whiskers and sizeable wigs, along with portraits of the queen.

A couple of decades later, just at the time that Yugoslavia was degenerating into blood-soaked chaos, I organized an exhibition in Copenhagen that was about the way design is used to construct a national identity. I tried to chart the ways in which Croatia and Slovenia were redesigning themselves as new nations. The Slovenes were happy to help, lending us the material we needed on the handsome new toller currency that they were working on even before the war started. My German assistant told me that she had a much tougher time in Zagreb looking for similar help on the kuna that the Croats had devised to look as much like the Deutschmark as possible. Anonymous security sources wanted to look into my origins before any cooperation could be considered.

National identity was the same subject that I was billed to discuss at Belgrade’s first-ever design festival in 2007, taking me back to a city I had not seen in twenty-five years. The hotel and the hulking conference centre wrapped around it, where the festival was based, were the high-water mark of Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia. They were finished in 1979, in time to allow Belgrade to host one of those innumerable non-aligned summits that seemed so important at the time, no matter how endlessly inconclusive they were. The building was a showcase, designed to let the country look the developed world in the eye. The architect got the chance to do a tour of convention centres all around the West, and learned enough to design a huge glass-skinned box with an uncomfortable resemblance to a giant fan heater. He used it to scoop up all the bits and pieces from the brief: shops and restaurants as well as the auditorium. It was hardly beautiful, but with one bound a notionally Communist state had introduced those of its people with access to hard currency to five-star hotels and shopping malls, even if none of the international chains which usually populated them were allowed into the country.

Inside the complex, you can still believe the illusion of Tito’s Yugoslavia for a moment. Nothing has been touched since the flawed leader opened it. The orange-and-lime-green colour scheme has faded now but is still intact. The Pompidou Centre-style exposed duct work still snakes through the structure. A mirage of a state that claimed to have been built on brotherhood and unity, but required the apparatus of an all-pervasive secret police to function, still lingers here. It seems progressive, competent and modern. But the mirage quickly evaporates once you get outside. The approach roads are potholed and across from the hotel’s taxi rank is an encampment of ragpickers and their horse-drawn carts.

Under the chandeliers in the hotel lobby is a little onion-domed church built from plasterboard, complete with fake icons and ersatz revolutionary posters. It is there to provide the mood music for the Rasputin Café that serves coffee here, a theme in somewhat questionable taste given that this is where the homicidal Serbian warlord Arkan was shot dead by three attackers armed with Heckler & Koch machine guns.

Even now, identity is not an entirely comfortable subject to bring up in Belgrade. The cable channel on the TV in my room at the InterContinental played a continuous loop of films celebrating Serbia’s armies, marching to victory in the Balkan wars of 1912, with a stream of text messages of support for Karadžić and Mladić rolling out at the bottom of the screen. I scratched whole paragraphs from the talk I had planned to give.

Architecture had played its part in the lead-up to the conflict in Yugoslavia, but going into too much detail in this particular setting didn’t seem like a good idea. The Croats and the Serbs engaged in a bout of competitive church-building in order to lay claim to disputed areas. It was immediately visible which side was which. The Roman Catholic Croats built demonstratively modern churches, in concrete and glass. The Orthodox Serbs built equally demonstrative Byzantine domed ‘traditional’ structures in stone and tile. The message was not just about which community an area belonged to. The Croat churches seemed to be suggesting that they belonged to a state looking West rather than East. That openness to the new might also be understood as part of a programme to use culture in a deliberate effort to create a distinctive identity. Such a use of architectural style can be described as a kind of cultural nationalism, a tactic with which both the Croats and the Serbs were familiar. All the Marxist states were inculcated with the political uses of culture.

Once the wars of Yugoslav succession had started, the obverse side of this policy was the deliberate targeting for destruction of the architectural landmarks of the peoples that the Serb extremists were trying to destroy. After the other warring parties in the former Yugoslavia joined in, the Croats and Bosnian Muslims and the Kosovans engaged in round upon round of mutual destruction. Minarets in Bosnia were blown up by the Serbs. Mostar’s medieval bridge was destroyed by Croats. The national library in Sarajevo, with its collection of precious books going back centuries, was obliterated by Bosnian Serbs. I took the view that this was not the time or the place to bring any of this up, and stuck instead to architectural politics well away from the Balkans.

I delivered my speech, suitably toned down. Afterwards I met a wistful architect who talked about the sense of isolation here. ‘My worst student is the one who is doing the best, building houses with balustrades for the nouveau riche.’

From my taxi window on the way back to the airport I saw the Hotel Yugoslavia, huge, modern and empty. Its current owners have no interest in running it; all that they wanted was the casino licence that came with it. Next door is the equally massive, and equally empty, former home of the Federal Government of Yugoslavia, built in a fit of modernization in the 1980s, with nobody left inside it to govern a country that has ceased to exist.

There is yet another memorial to a dead Yugoslavia just outside the airport: a glass bubble that houses the Aircraft Museum. Outside it, the ground is littered with rank upon rank of elderly helicopters and enough trainers to equip a squadron. The once-glossy glass skin is decayed and stained. But the building is still open, and I find myself touring a collection of immaculately restored aircraft. They tell a political, as well as a technological, story. It starts with a string-and-wood biplane of 1912, from the Austro-Hungarian empire. Then comes a Messerschmitt, representing the military aid given to the pro-German Royal Yugoslav government just ahead of the country’s entry into the Second World War in 1941. It is one of the planes that fought against the invading axis powers in the desperate, ill-fated defence of Belgrade that lasted just nine days, when anti-Nazi officers seized power. In the next gallery, there is a Spitfire, used to give the Partisans air support. Then there is an American Thunderbolt: a reflection of Cold War realities. Tito may have been a Communist, but he was also Stalin’s enemy, and so America and Britain equipped the Yugoslav Air Force in order to deter the Soviet Union from extending its dominion to the Adriatic Sea. The last group of exhibits is more disturbing: a Tomahawk land-attack missile shot down near Kraljevo in March 1999. One of the three fins has snapped off, and the guidance system has been removed, most likely sold to the Chinese government. The missile carries the stencilled message next to the manufacturer’s name ‘Caution, warranty void if equipment misused.’ Next to it is the tail fin and canopy of an F-16 shot down outside Belgrade. There is a painted eagle on the distressed fin, camouflage blistering, carbon-fibre components unravelling. The number of missions flown is signified by a neat row of bombs painted beneath the registration number. Also on show is the General Electric M61 Vulcan six-barrel cannon salvaged from the crash, with a bent-nosed round still in the chamber. A predator drone, landing gear in place, hangs from the ceiling. In a glass case is the canopy from an F-117A stealth jet, the name ‘Capt Ken “Wizz” Dwelle’ painted underneath the escape hatch. These are difficult things to look at.

When the F-16 was in the air over the skies of Serbia, I was in Glasgow worrying about design exhibitions. In the few moments that I did think about Belgrade, I believed that bombing was the only way for NATO to stop a bloodbath in Kosovo. Now I know a bit more about what it would have felt like to be on the ground, waiting for the bombs, an experience faced by two of my uncles, their wives and my cousins. And it posed a question of identity far sharper than anything I had experienced in Scotland.

‘As a prominent Englishman, working in Scotland, have you ever experienced any examples of racial prejudice?’ It was the kind of question to which there is no right answer. It was put to me on the telephone by a reporter from the Scotsman the morning after the country had voted for a devolved parliament of its own in Edinburgh. I didn’t know whether to be flattered by the attention or, in some kind of subtle way, mildly humiliated. Was I being told that I didn’t belong? Certainly it made me realize how much people judge who or what you are by how you sound rather than what you say. And in Glasgow, where I was halfway through my time as director of the city’s Year of Architecture and Design programme, there is no doubt that, despite having a name which most English people, never mind Scots, need a certain amount of coaching to pronounce, I did sound pretty English.

Clearly an accent is an essential part of anybody’s identity. And mine is the product of growing up in London in the 1950s and 1960s with parents who didn’t speak English to each other at home. Couldn’t the man from the Scotsman pick up on the fact that I belonged to a very specific subset of Londoners, or its Glaswegian equivalent, just by the way I sounded on the phone? My accent is the product of a constant diet of the BBC Home Service between the ages of one and five. Back before it was called Radio 4, the Home Service relayed the authentic sound of received pronunciation in the incarnation of Daphne Oxenford booming out of a beige plastic wireless set to invite me to listen with mother every afternoon. ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ Daphne would ask. ‘Then I’ll begin.’

I didn’t, I was told afterwards, say anything much until I was three or so, but when I did begin to speak it all came in a rush. I was fluent in the English of the BBC, as well as my parents’ native Serbo-Croat. Heaven knows how they must have felt at producing an offspring whose ever so slightly snotty version of English would have made them feel how acutely foreign they were becoming to me every time I opened my mouth. But in fact I had no idea that they had an accent that was different from mine, or that they had a command of English that was anything but perfect, until I was well into my first pair of long trousers. I realized then, for the first time, that when other people used the word ‘aunt’ it did not rhyme with ‘count’. And I hadn’t understood that parents could get embarrassed about these things until I tried correcting my mother. I used English to blend as much as I could into a suburban London that still had milk bottles delivered every morning on a horse-drawn float steered by a man in peaked cap. It was a London in which the red trolleybus that ran past the end of my street disappeared one day to be replaced by a new kind of bus that didn’t have sticks protruding from its roof. I didn’t know it at the time, but the Second World War was still close enough for the sugar and tea to be stored in recycled cream-coloured tin cans embellished with a royal crown and the initials of George VI. They had originally contained the powdered milk ration that wartime nursing mothers were entitled to.

We lived in a modest semi-detached house on a quiet suburban street where coal was delivered every autumn, poured one sack at a time by a muscled man in a flat cap into the cellar through a hole in the pavement with a cast-iron lid. For a minute or two, the whole street filled with the acrid sweet tang of anthracite.

Since I became an adult, I’ve been back to see the house a couple of times, trying to remember the thrill of anticipation I felt on summer Thursday mornings when I would get up at seven o’clock to sit on the bottom step of the stairs, waiting for a glimpse of the paper-delivery boy through the stained-glass panel in the door, so I could snatch up the latest copy of the Eagle. The Eagle was a worthily upmarket comic designed for middle-class boys, which came on china-clay-coated paper rather than downmarket newsprint. It introduced me to the special pleasures of opening a magazine reeking of fresh ink. The big attraction was the chance to catch up on the latest episode of the adventures of Dan Dare, in Pilot of the Future. Frank Hampson’s exquisitely detailed visions of the city of the future, in which Dare and his faithful batman, Digby, battled the evil Mekon and his Treens, were modelled on Frank Lloyd Wright’s version of urbanism. The strip may even have got me started on the path that culminated in my studying architecture.

The west London of the 1950s was still a place in which the most exotic sight was the delicatessen on the high street, where melancholy Polish refugees would stock up on pickled cucumbers from a pine barrel by the door. I was more interested in the local drapery store, which had an amazing contraption to whiz my mother’s change to her by way of an overhead system of electrically driven containers that shot back and forth from a central till.

I never really understood how my parents would have seen their lives in London. But eleven-year-olds, especially ones who spend most of their time withdrawing into the world of books and the radio, don’t on the whole spend much time thinking about what life feels like for other people.

For a while, my father worked for the BBC World Service, reading the news in front of one of those big old microphones hanging on coiled springs in a metal circle. I would occasionally be taken to the studio, deep in Bush House’s bowels, to watch him at work through the glass wall of the control room. He had an upright typewriter at home to write his bulletins, which he would pound away on with two fingers, using carbons, and smoking Player’s Navy Cut, like something out of The Front Page. That was when he developed the discreet attention-demanding cough that I realize to my dismay I have inherited. He didn’t have a fedora, but in his drawer one day I found his pass for the press gallery for the Nuremberg War Crimes trials. I was proud of him. Not as proud as if he had been English, of course. Somehow being a journalist in a language nobody else could understand had the same relationship to the real thing as the Bulgarian Riviera has to Saint-Tropez. And I was not as proud as if it had been a real job, rather than simply the occasional shift to help out while he worked sporadically on ill-fated plans to make a fortune, successively by getting big in non-stick frying pans, holiday lets and DIY.

It hadn’t always been like this. After the war, he and my mother had lived well on his salary as a foreign correspondent for Tanjug, Belgrade’s state-run news agency, and the extras from the slush fund he hinted he was operating for Tito’s government to try to win friends and influence people. There was a mansion flat in Kensington, nannies, and private schools for my two elder brothers. He had a regular table at the Gay Hussar, and holidays in France. Later, a lot later, I found a picture of my father sitting next to Marshal Tito himself, interpreting for some group of visiting British politicians.

My world in Acton felt secure and solid compared to the unknown, anxious uncertainties of the world my parents had left behind. The Balkans would intrude only occasionally with the arrival of one or other of my grandmothers, dressed from head to foot in black. We would collect them from Victoria station, accompanied by the terrifying crescendo of a departing steam engine. My grandmothers would arrive with, to my eyes, embarrassing gifts: a whole roast suckling pig wrapped in brown paper, boxes of sugary cakes, and alien vegetables. And they stayed just long enough to get on everybody’s nerves. My mother’s mother, however, was equipped with the highly prized skill of making apple strudel, a process that involved taking over the kitchen table and laboriously stretching pastry in thin sheets right across it.

At first the Balkans seemed a scary and threatening place that was overshadowing my childhood. I was too young to understand that the Second World War had ended years earlier, but I still associated the country with violence. From this distance the memories seem like a presentiment of what had not yet happened. By the time I was ten, I had started shuttling back and forth every summer between these two worlds. It involved a two-day journey that started at Victoria, with a ride on the boat train to Dover, and ended on the stone jetty of the village harbour in Montenegro that my father’s mother still lived in. Self-contained English schoolboys, in Clark’s sandals, find it hard to adjust to emotionally demonstrative village life infested by moustachioed aunts who are going to give you a hug no matter how much you shrink away.

For my parents, both citizens of countries that had ceased to exist before they started school, who then owed allegiance to another state that also vanished, and who became citizens of yet another state when they eventually secured British nationality, the questions of identity and belonging were constant issues. For year after year they had to have their passports stamped by the Home Office in London with the precious words ‘Granted leave to remain’.

Understanding that made me realize for the first time how their experiences have coloured my own preoccupation with understanding how buildings and everyday objects shape our sense of who we are. It made me see, beyond the narrow world of design, just a little of what it must feel like now to be an asylum seeker; a member of a more visible migrant community caught between identities.

My father was never a very organized man. Though he had trouble forgetting about certain things, he certainly wasn’t good at keeping anything. When he died, he had no more than a few shopping bags full of carbon-copy typescripts, a lot of books and some old clothes with which to make something like sense out of the eighty-three years of the life that he had lived with varying degrees of success. If he had been more careful, he could have left behind a six-thick stack of passports, each from a different nation.

When my grandmother Draga (meaning ‘dearest’ in English) married my grandfather Jovo Sudjic, who had emigrated to America from the little Adriatic town of Petrovac (accessible at that time only by boat or donkey track), she went to live with him in Bisbee, Arizona. It was a copper-mining town which, in the first decade of the twentieth century, was full of Eastern Europeans looking for work and a more secure life.

My grandmother had two children, my father, Miša, and my uncle, who died in infancy and is buried in Arizona. My grandfather, a clerk in a dry-goods store, succumbed to influenza shortly afterwards on a trip back home. Draga decided to stay in the security of her family home, with my father, and her American passport. Montenegro’s coast in 1912 was still a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire. During the course of the First World War, its borders shifted back and forth, but by the time of the Armistice, the Kingdom of Montenegro was ready to sink into the newly formed Kingdom of Yugoslavia. When Italy and Germany invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, Montenegro was reconstituted as a puppet kingdom. Tito in turn declared the formation of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, of which the Socialist Republic of Montenegro was a constituent state. A decade later, my father had moved permanently to London and was in the process of swapping identities, no longer Yugoslav but British. Before he died, the Yugoslav state of which he had once been extravagantly proud had dissolved into bloody anarchy.

It is a stack of passports that never existed. In 1912, the United States of America did not expect many of its citizens to have passports. Miša travelled on his mother’s documents. But I have always tried to imagine them. At the bottom of the pile would be a folded and creased sheet of paper with a red paper seal fixed to one side, beneath the outstretched wings of an engraved American eagle. The Austro-Hungarian passport at the turn of the century was an eight-inch-by-nine-inch rectangle of paper. On the front was Austria’s double eagle, the emperor’s insignia, and a physical description of the bearer. On the obverse were detailed instructions for travellers negotiating the various imperial provinces.

I did get to see my father’s passport from the People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. It was a maroon-covered cardboard booklet, with the burning torches and star insignia on the cover. It was replaced by the dark navy-blue cover with gold embossed lions and unicorns that characterized pre-European Union Great Britain.

It’s a ghostly collection that has always made me regard the whole idea of national identity as somehow provisional and yet also utterly compelling. And every kind of design is still put to work to achieve these ends.