The Last Days of Functionalism

The Great Expositions were always about the spectacularised vision of the future. A showy reservation containing idealised versions of the shape of things to come, without the grubby marks that history might leave. 40 years ago at Expo 1967 in Montreal was erected one of the most comprehensive of these vsions of the future: Moshe Safdie’s Habitat, a vast, multi-level arrangement of little concrete boxes, exploding all the regularities and certainties of the international style into seemingly randomly aligned arrangements. In textbooks like the beautifully illustrated Hamlyn paperback Architecture, this was the exemplar of what the 21st century city might be, as envisaged in the window between the dissatisfaction with ‘classical modernism’ and the wholesale rejection of postmodernism. In years we’re now as far away from Habitat as Safdie was from Mies’ plan of the future at the Weissenhof Werkbund Expo, so it’s as much of a museum piece: only with even less of a lived trace.



Safdie’s book Beyond Habitat (1970) is a fascinating little document of the aforementioned window, the same space occupied by the Metabolists or Archigram, only without the latter’s edge of Futurist-Popist Nihilism. The inspirations for the design are claimed to be the cubic, clustered non-design of Arab villages (this was of course the Nazi insult for Weissenhof), but not as an ahistorical abstraction, but as an example of how building and environment intersect and work with each other. Safdie, as an Israeli, was very conscious of how the international style imposed on the area was akin to the colonising tendency in Zionist state building. So the other element, with the revived city-cluster, was the Kibbutz: kibbutz-style voluntarist, co-operative (what the Constructivists would have called ‘Byt-reformist’) socialism he claims to have been ‘the highest social development achieved anywhere this century’. So from this combustible, contradictory mix comes what was basically his first draft of Habitat: a self-building megastructure designed for the use of Palestinian refugees, an idea he returned to after the Six-Day War.



Yet the other element is the 1930s international style architecture of Haifa, built by the colonisers: and reading Beyond Habitat, one realises that his problem with the official modern movement was precisely that it wasn’t Functionalist enough. For Safdie, Mies’ structural expressionism wasn’t rationalist, because it ignored wider, more important structures: society, the environment, weather, class, science, urbanism – and this is exactly Hannes Meyer or Karel Teige’s critique. But there’s nothing further, aesthetically, from the sobriety of Left-Bauhaus Functionalism than Habitat. Maybe because of its ostentatious irregularity, its clear lack of sachlichkeit and its naturalist mimeticism, but also the ambitiousness: Buckminster Fuller’s techno-utopianism shod with a very 60s attempt at solving all social problems in one vaulting concrete act.Each box has its own garden and is carefully placed for light and to be individually recognisable to the tenant, in a more dispersed equivalent to Denys Lasdun’s Bethnal Green clusters.



Fuller’s influence can also be seen in Safdie’s enthusiasm for prefabrication. There are photos of Habitat where an entire box/house can be seen lifted into place, and the complete fibreglass kitchens being hoisted and slotted in. He cites the Soviet achievements in total prefabrication, but is horrified by all that regularity and rectilinearity. It’s just not American enough: this was a prefab fabulation, where technology creates fantasy. He presciently predicted a world in which only opera houses and galleries are architect-designed, and the rest left to systems: only the system now is based on a reduced version of the 19th century, rather than those of Habitat. If architects are to avoid just becoming irrelevant, they have to react against this, not by ‘playing stylistic games with ornaments, grilles and decoration’, but by immersing themselves in social science and technological research.



Like the postmodernists he called for a ‘new vernacular’, but one recognising that ‘the aircraft is the vernacular design of our time’: a vernacular that would somehow meld the casbah and the concorde. One could ruefully list all the (presented as rather modest and mild) proposals made in this book: from free public transport to Israel becoming part of a middle-eastern confederation, and the general weird Fuller-esque co-operative corporatism. The real strength of the book and the concept – it’s call for a renewed, non-idealist, socialistic Functionalism – is exactly what those who sustained some sort of Modernism through the 80s lost, or thought unattainable in the first place. Safdie went very pomo at some point in the ‘80s, and it’s not too surprising, given the many tirades against repetitive, anti-humanist Miesian Modernism in Beyond Habitat.



One could imagine him turning to the sort of prefabricated Socialist Realism (the original Postmodernist architecture, as Jonathan Meades has pointed out) of fellow soixante-huitards Ricardo Bofill and the Taller d'Arquitectura, turning dense, urban social housing into huge monuments, expressions of power and entitlement (no more true, no doubt, than it was in the Stalinallee). But his Functionalism held him back, at least at the time of this book, and Habitat is full of the very things most hated by pomo and even most contemporary Modernists: bare concrete, walkways and skyways, unashamed collectivism. There are vitalist, hippy tendencies to Safdie, though with a techno-fetishism that they’d baulk at – it is rather hairy for my tastes. Since the 60s he's designed neo-classical colosseums, some pretty dubious projects in Jerusalem and the hilariously named United States Institute of Peace. Yet reading Beyond Habitat – which is in more than a few second hand bookshops, indicating the importance these ideas were once thought to have – is worthwhile mainly, perhaps, to remind of what was once thought entirely, unimpressively possible.