Unmutual! Unmutual!

'If you have another attack of egotism, Number 6, please report to the hospital immediately'

Lately I've spent a fair bit of time reading some of the 'classic' texts on modernism (seeing as, despite appearances to the contrary, I don't actually know anything about architecture I have to do all this backwards). The sheer formal sobriety and quasi-puritanism that fairly radiates off Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of Modern Design or Walter Gropius' The New Architecture and the Bauhaus is oddly surprising: for these people the betrayal of the modern started with the stylistic fripperies of 50s and 60s design, with pomo only the last nail in the coffin of sanity and rationalism.

For Pevsner, deviations from the functionalist path landed their makers in the dubious waters of Art Nouveau, in wilful eccentricity, 'signature' architecture, art for art's sake: Pevsner's discussion of Gaudi's cathedrals and flats is hilarious in its undoubted admiration for its formal bravery and the Teutonic disdain for his sheer silliness: 'who would be ready to live in rooms of such curvy shapes, under roofs like the back of dinosaurs, behind walls bending and bulging so precariously and on balconies whose ironwork might stab you at any moment? Who but an out-and-out aesthete or a compatriot of Gaudi or Picasso?'



It's with this in mind that one should consider K-Punk's question from a long while ago with respect to Clough Williams Ellis' Portmeirion (and now that I've finished watching The Prisoner) - why can't we all live in a De Chirico? 'Ellis recognized, that is to say, that the production of the aesthetic as a category separate from the 'necessary' was complicit in a kind of (from any rational POV) inexplicable diminution of the possibilities of human experience. Why must architecture be part of a banalizing culture of vampiric undeath? Why should only the privileged be able to enjoy their surroundings? Why should the poor be penned into miserable concrete blocks? And why should we live in boring, utilitarian spaces when we could live in grottoes and crooked caverns?'



This is the Situationist critique of urbanism, put at its most gnomically brilliant in Ivan Chchteglov's Formulary for a New Urbanism, or the critique at the heart of Tati's Playtime, with its fantasy functionalist self-contained city. But for Pevsner or Gropius' beauty and utility were never mutually exclusive: Debord or Vaneigem looked at the concrete boxes they brought about and dreamt again of the grottoes and caves that were last attempted by art nouveau and their more hardline utopian successors, the activist Expressionists. The problem with the K-Punk take on this is that, as he acknowledges, Portmeirion is itself a terrific exemplar of the reactionary, self-assured and fundamentally Empiricist yet irrationalist English master class.

An instructive comparison would be with another late 60s/early 70s depiction of an incipient British fascism, and setting Kubrick's dystopia with McGoohan's. When the Tavy Bridge area of the Modernist New Town Thamesmead was demolished last year, a local paper headline declared 'NO MORE CLOCKWORK ORANGE'. Could one ever imagine a situation in which Portmeirion were demolished and the North Wales Argus declared 'NO MORE PRISONER'? Portemeirion IS The Prisoner, is the irrationalist, infantilising politesse of the Brit bourgeois; in the same way that Thamesmead, in its stylishness, elegance and brutality IS A Clockwork Orange. Yet Portmeirion gets the tourists that stopped going to Thamesmead some time in the late 70s, and has books about it co-written by Jools Holland: England likes to think of itself as The Village, and perhaps, for once, it is right.