Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair .. .
Jonathan Benthall
Megastructures: Urban Futures of the Recent Past Reyner Banham (Thames and Hudson £10.00)
Urbane and articulate, fair-minded, factually authoritative, attractively presented, this book is intended for the student of recent architectural history. But it is also of interest as a cultural document in itself, suggesting some answers to anyone who asks 'How is it that modern architecture, which once stood so proud, has so failed to live up to its promises ?'
Not all big buildings fall into Professor Banham's category of 'megastructures,' but the definition is fairly elastic. Roughly speaking, a megastructure is any large 'permanent and dominating frame containing subordinate and transient accommodations.' Historical anticipations of this concept include the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Old London Bridge, and Santa Monica Pier in Los Angeles. Well-known recent examples of realised megastructures are the Town Centre at Cumbernauld in Scotland, the new Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the impressive Byker redevelopment by Ralph Erskine in Newcastle-upon-Tyne—a long serpentine block of flats backing onto a motorway with tiny windows to deaden noise, but on the other side opening out into a riot of small coloured balconies and canopies with a view of the town. But much of the book is devoted to projects not eventually realised because of cost, or other impediments; and also to fictive projects by imaginative draughtsmen such as the Archigram group, whose aim has been solely to stimulate professional debate about architectural ideas and principles.
Banham wryly points out that megastructures went out of favour with the architectural avant-garde during the 'sixties before they had actually been experienced by ordinary people as part of the cityscape. 'Insofar,' he writes, as megastructures were the children of fashion at the time of their conception, they were doomed, given the normal ten-year cycle of style and taste in the present century, to be newly, and therefore absolutely, out of fashion at the time of their completion.' The disturbing feature of his book is that, far from inferring that there is anything superficial about a 'ten-year cycle of style and taste,' any need to pause a moment and take stock after running fast to keep abreast, this hectic and youthful pace is what Professor Banham seems to relish most about architectural theory.
For example, Ban ham writes with admirable sobriety in the closing paragraph of his book : Some time around 1968 it seems to have been perceived that a city or a large part of a city designed by one man, or by any group unified enough to produce a comprehensible design, would be a parlously thin, starved and impoverished environment, both visually and in larger, less precise cultural terms.
But did it need the evenements de mai and Herbert Marcuse to perceive this? Had it not been a commonplace for many years before 1968 that cities thrive on variety, such as the variety of the high street of any old English town? Again, Professor Banham records that the proponents of megastructures ignored the consistent objections of people like Lewis Mumford, since these 'could be brushed aside as "old men doing their usual dreary old numbers": Banham does not say that he endorses this brushing aside of people who do not fit into the alleged ten-year cycle; but he does not suggest that he finds such reactions juvenile, nor that it is possible for the elders of a profession to symbolise certain durable principles—as Lewis Mumford surely does— even when its cadets are impatient with their detailed analyses and prescriptions.
Banham is a shrewd ethnographer of the small international sub-culture of trendy architects—with their newspeak prose, their love of the glamour of technical jargon, yet (in the case of the English) their choice of Victorian houses for actually living in themselves. But Banham is sometimes overawed. It is certainly a fact that 'a distinguished magazine like Damns of Milan could publish, in 1969, a project by two apparently sane young British architects ... for a single-building city stretching in a straight line from New York to San Francisco—and call it "Comprehensive City": But such a fact Must be set in the context of what other magazines were publishing at that period. The significance of this fact is really much the same as that of a spread in Vogue.
It is clear, anyway, that we are now wit nessing a thoroughgoing reaction against megastructures and the megalomania of architects and town-planners. It is now widely accepted that most people prefer to live if they can in houses built of traditional materials, with porches, gardens, and smoke twisting out of the chimneys. Banham would no doubt argue as a historian that this is simply a phase in the cycle of fashion. And he would be correct ; for an intemperate reaction against planning, against architectural fantasy and the glamour of technology cannot go on for many years without a counter-swing. But as a critic of architecture as well as a historian, Banham should think a little further than this. It is only unwittingly that his book suggests what is the main defect of architectural theorising and teaching: a matter of tone, or the implied deportment of a practitioner in relation to his colleagues and his public. Heroes and whizz-kids have had equally bad effects on the tone of architectural discourse. Surely the architect or planner should adopt a much more discreet rale, comparable perhaps to that of a good set-designer in the theatre? The architect can never guarantee the success of a project, since so much depends on 'factors outside his control; whereas his mistakes can damage the lives of several generations. When a project does succeed, a quiet modesty best befits the architect.
The current reaction against megastructure-mania comes in many shapes: ecological, sociological, Marxist. But I hope that an architectural student today would respond favourably to a quotation such as this, from Ruskin's The Seven Lamps of Architecture:
It would be better if, in every possible instance, men built their own houses on a scale commensurate rather with their condition at the commencement, than their attainments at the termination, of their worldly career; and built them to stand as long as human work at its strongest can be hoped to stand ... And when houses are thus built, we may have that true domestic architecture, the beginning of all other, which does not disdain to treat with respect and thoughtfulness the small habitation as well as the large ...
Or to this, from Adrian Stokes's The Invitation in Art (1965):
believe that everything we feel to be out of harmony with the body's image and with the ways of natural growth or change, everything we feel today to be harshly mechanical, mirrors, in a onesided manner, an unsettlement of the inner life.
Reyner Banham conforms very well himself to his own definition of a megastructure —a 'permanent and dominating frame containing subordinate and transient accommodations.' It is of some reassurance that there is a distinguished tradition of thought about architecture which resists such accommodations, even when they are offered with Professor Banham's geniality.
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