Paul Overy RIP

Fine obituary by Tim Benton - oh for the days when architecture correspondents regularly got sacked for getting too political. As an inadequate tribute, here's my short, over-compressed review for Blueprint earlier this year of his excellent Light Air and Openness, one of the very few serious theoretical books on Modernism published in Britain. Among the things not mentioned in here are the remarkable African prefabs designed by Ernst May, lost to history before this book was published, and a bit on the Magic Mountain-esque romance of sanatoria, which Overy interestingly places as the root form of Modernism...



Get yourself fitter, cleaner, healthier…Paul Overy’s Light Air and Openness, a new history of the interwar Modern Movement, recalls the predecessors of today’s cult of home and body improvement, all those TV shows in which members of the public have their defective taste or hygiene examined by media professionals: imagine How Clean is Your House presented by Adolf Loos.



The return of a rather attenuated modernism as design orthodoxy in the last few years has led to a flurry of publications on its interwar antecedents, before the grubbier business of Brutalism set in. While most of these have been pretty and inconsequential, Overy’s book has a strong historical thrust behind it. The thesis is that behind the plate glass and rendered concrete was an ideology, shared across the political spectrum, of health and hygiene. Through a survey of buildings, some familiar and others obscure, these underpinnings are investigated. Where many today see only sweetness and light, this book faces the heavy imprints of history, class, (occasionally pseudo-)science, industrialisation and politics.


This is Modernism as ‘clean living under difficult circumstances‘, to quote the Mod Pete Meaden, with fastidiousness springing up in reaction to disease and overcrowding. At times this became rather eccentric: the conception of ‘health’ held by Le Corbusier left a place for the joys of nicotine. The links made between fitness and Fordist production, as in Brinkman and Van der Vlugt’s glacial Van Nelle Factory, are equally peculiar to post-industrial eyes.




Fittingly for Modernism’s ‘heroic age’, many of the book’s protagonists resemble J.G Ballard characters, psychoanalysed industrialists who practice theosophy and train as aviators, a hobby that would take the lives of Thomas Bata, sponsor of the Modernist company town of Zlin, and the sons of Van Nelle boss Kees Van der Leeuw. This is fascinating, but it’s a shame the socialist patrons of social housing and health services aren‘t given the same attention. Overy makes much of ‘paternalism‘, but what did the trade unionists who commissioned buildings like Duiker’s Zonnestraal Sanatorium see in Modernism? Isn’t it possible that the apparently voiceless proletarians who moved into Karl-Marx-Hof might have wanted cleanliness, education and self-improvement every bit as much as the LA doctors of Neutra’s Lovell Health House?



Although the democratic socialists, paternalistic ‘enlightened capitalists’ and Communists who were the patrons of interwar Modernism have all but disappeared, their architecture has not. In the closing pages, Overy ponders the dilapidation and subsequent restoration of buildings deliberately not built to last, and reaches an ambiguous conclusion. One wonders if leaving these buildings as ill, ruined edifices rather than restoring them to pristine health might do their memory more justice - leaving the marks of the history that this book so admirably recovers.