A design for life?

Last November, there were areas of Paris where you could be forgiven for imagining the rioting was someone else’s problem. To many affluent Parisians, within the city limits and behind their digicoded front gates, these rioting youths could just as easily be in some far off country, instead of a handful of miles away, across the peripherique.

Surprisingly, one of those quiet places was La Caravelle, a 1,600 apartment, social housing project in Villeneuve la Garenne, an estate in the 92nd departement with a history of youth violence, car burning and other vandalism. What made La Caravelle different?

Two weeks before the rioting began, La Caravelle had been officially opened. But not for the first time. La Caravelle used to be a high-rise, crime-ridden manifestation of Le Corbusier’s ideal Radiant City. After years of decline, the city had invested in a massive redesign, which culminated in the official opening just before the riots. Buildings had been literally split in two, with open spaces landscaped with park “demand goods” like basketball courts, and the buildings themselves were refurbished with larger windows overlooking public space creating a system of mutual surveillance. Throughout the riots, the only sign of violence in this housing project, for all its previously incendiary history, was a dustbin that was set on fire and which residents quickly put out.

It just goes to show that design really does make a tangible impact on our lives, and that when you get it wrong, there can be dire consequences. Housing design has surfaced in public discourse this year for a variety of reasons. First, the release of Alain de Botton’s book “Architecture and Happiness” and its complementary TV programme “The Perfect Home”, second, the opening of this summer’s blockbuster exhibition “Modernism” at the V&A, and third, the national furore over the Housing Market Renewal Initiative.

I’ll start with the last. The newly emasculated* Deputy Prime Minister is buying up largely empty, decaying properties in declining areas and, depending on local economic circumstance, either tearing down or refurbishing them. Despite the relatively cautious plans for demolition itself, it’s that word that has caught the public imagination and brought people out in droves to protest.

The reality is: we don’t demolish enough in the UK. We only pull down 20,000 properties a year, and build about five times that. At this rate, every new home will have to last something like 1300 years. What people are objecting to, it seems, is not demolition in and of itself, but demolition of Victorian houses, when all new build houses look like they came from toytown and noddy and bigears will be along any minute to take up residence to begin their new life together, now that civil partnerships are legal.

One of the questions that Alain de Botton is trying to answer is why all volume housebuilders are fixated on these kind of chocolate box architectural styles. What developers say is that there is a demand for it, but considering how dangerously undersupplied the UK housing market is, people will pay an average of five times their salary for anything with three bedrooms less than two hours from London, no matter how tiny or twee.

Cursory surveys would seem to confirm this view: people want a detached house with a bit of garden and housebuilders argue that these pastiche designs are the most cost effective way to achieve that. De Botton himself asks a pair of prospective housebuyers in a new development what they want in a house and they answer: “made of brick, nice double glazed windows, a chimney, and a bit of garden.” But when he takes them to Holland to see a very modern, very affordable housing development by a pair of British architects, after their initial shock, they begin to wonder where they could find such bright, open, modern homes in the UK at a similar price.

As the UK is obviously gripped with a national fervor for interior design, de Botton finds it astonishing that we are so incurious and undemanding about architecture. De Botton argues that one of the reasons people don’t demand high quality, well-design modern architecture as standard is because developers refuse to build it.

Britain’s developers feel they have a very good reason not to offer modern architecture, as they recognise that the public underwent something approaching a national trauma in the 1960’s under the thumb of some particularly bad utopian ideals of Radiant Cities. The public’s view of modern buildings in this country can be epitomised in Poulson. He was the most prolific and productive architect of the time. He was also a shady crook who won tenders on the basis of the holidays he gave public officials and whose eyesores (at least, the ones that haven’t fallen down yet) beset the country still to an alarming degree, reminding us not to mess with “modern” again.

De Botton argues that until we get away from the negative emotional associations we have with “modernism”, Britain’s natural enthusiasm for innovative design shan’t resurface, and he posits the need for national public education about architecture.

There is some evidence that this national therapy is underway already. Programmes like “Restoration” and “Demolition” show how many people feel they can discern what makes a good building, and “Grand designs” showcases people who refuse to accept thet tat that housebuilders offer. And, of course, this summer’s ‘must see’ exhibition here in London is the V&A’s “Modernism.”

The show traces modernism from its origins on paper as a utopian socialist ideal, obsessed with new technology, mass production and machinery, to the currency that its philosophy gained in planning and design circles. We see drawings of Le Corbusier’s original concept for the Radiant City, and photographs of his later housing projects.

Notably, much of the architecture showcased here is celebrated not as peopled places, as habitats**, but as newly built, yet to be unoccupied, shells. It acknowledges that often these buildings failed to function. De Botton also tells us in his book that Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoie was so leaky that the owners’ son nearly died from pneumonia and their legal proceedings against the architect only ended with the onset of world war.

But the V&A shows beautiful photographs and models of the buildings, empty of people and furniture and objects that make a house into a home. In short, where the show celebrates modernist architecture is for its value not as homes, but as art.

On the non-architectural front, we are shown how modernism actually infiltrates our every day lives already, with items like ashtrays, anglepoise lamps and teapots from the 20’s and 30’s looking as bang up to date as the first ever fitted kitchen, saved from a housing project in Frankfurt. Although built in 1926, this kitchen, give or take a smeg fridge, could be in the house of any design-conscious Briton. My teutonic companion mentioned that the distinctive shovel-shaped drawers for flour and sugar were in high demand in Germany still.

These objects were useful and beautiful then and are useful and beautiful today. The impression that they conspire to produce in us is that modernism succeeds as a style, not as an ideal. Where modernism went wrong was when designers and architects were blinded by their utopias, and were unable to listen to what the people who were going to use their designs wanted. Where we recognise modernism in our everyday lives is where the style reflects the function we want to put it to.

The show rehabilitates modern architecture by promising that it doesn’t mean high-rise blocks based on fallacious social ideals about how we should live. It dangles before our eyes the possibility that, done right, designed for how we do actually live, modern architecture can be inspiring in a way that current new build housing design isn’t. And if you’re worried about history repeating itself, and utopian, Prescottian ideas about how we ought to live sullying the vision of art for living in, this exhibition also firmly places those ideas in the best place for them: in a museum.

* Not that, according to the Sun, there was much there to be missed, if you get my drift.

** Habitat is, ironically, the sponsor.