The View From the Train (10 page)

In the summer of 1989, there were several bankruptcies among London property developers. The political atmosphere in the UK began to change. At first, this change seemed rather rapid, but it
slowed. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, one vague unease was replaced by another. As we now know, on average, people in the DDR lived longer than Westerners – even wealthy Westerners – because they were more equal, and it is said that in the advanced economies more people now die as a result of depression than in car crashes. In a somewhat similar way, since pure science began taking a serious interest in the weather and other indeterminate, complex phenomena, the second law of thermodynamics has lost much of its melancholy allure, but phenomena like the fluctuations of the stock market have become part of ‘nature'. Everything is ‘nature'. Everything that exists in actuality, perhaps even every thought, dream or fantasy, must have some material basis or it wouldn't exist at all. Probably artists have always known this, but for many people it is distressing. How can human aberrations like nuclear power stations, neoliberal governments or uncomfortable clothing be ‘natural' in the same way as wild flowers or thunderstorms? A spoilsport might assert that, though everything may be natural, not everything comes about in quite the same way; but that doesn't seem to diminish the sense of enlightenment.

In
Laughter
(1900), Henri Bergson wrote: ‘Could reality come into direct contact with sense and consciousness, could we enter into immediate communion with things and with ourselves, probably art would be useless, or rather we should all be artists.'
²
About thirty years later, in Prague, in an essay ‘What is Poetry?', Roman Jakobson wrote:

In the twentieth century, images of already-existing modern urban and industrial landscapes were involved in the production of new and influential buildings, and hence new landscapes: the
photographs in Le Corbusier's
Vers une Architecture
(1923), those in László Moholy-Nagy's
Von Material zu Architektur
(1929), in Erich Mendelsohn's
Amerika
(1926). Though not realised, Archigram's proposals, similarly derived from observations of the already-existing, have diffused into much of the mainstream of international architecture in various ways, via the Pompidou Centre in Paris, for instance, or the Lloyd's building in London. OMA's buildings are accompanied by Rem Koolhaas's polemic of
bigness
, which is identified as a crucial characteristic of already-existing built environments beyond the conventional value systems of architectural criticism. In many of these modern examples, representational space – the image – and representations of space – the design – are the work of the same individual, or of practitioners of the same art form. Representational space – to use Lefebvre's term – and built environments are more usually produced by the practitioners of different art forms, and often at different times. For instance, the tradition of literary urbanism – if one can call it that – which includes De Quincey, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Aragon, Benjamin and Bataille – became highly influential in the architectural culture of the 1970s, so much so that many of these writers' texts are now required reading for shopping mall designers.

This division of labour is not surprising when one compares the work involved. Radical subjectivities tend to be inclusive, whereas design is ultimately a process of selection. Radical subjectivities in art, on the other hand, usually presuppose some outcome other than the artwork – ‘a bridge between imagination and reality must be built' (Raoul Vaneigem, in
The Revolution of Everyday Life
), and ‘to change life, however, we must first change space' (Henri Lefebvre, in
The Production of Space
). The
dérive
was not an end in itself – among the Situationists were architects: Constant's
New Babylon
was a physical proposal that offered a new built form for the society of
homo ludens
. In the UK recently there has been a remarkable revival of interest in the Situationist subjectivity of place, in psychogeography, but so far there has been little interest in the Situationists' architecture.
New Babylon
was based on an early recognition of the
implications of information technology and automated production, which was to bring a freedom from work that has to some extent been realised, though not in quite the way it was envisaged. What has not been realised at all is any corresponding automation of the production of built structures. This has meant that in relative terms buildings have continued to become more expensive, while other goods have become cheaper. The volume of new construction is now less than it used to be, and western cities have not changed anything like as much as was expected in, say, the early 1960s. Most of the new landscapes which have evolved as a result of computer-driven change have been peripheral, and either ephemeral and relatively insubstantial – the logistics warehouse, the container port, the business park – or, if more substantial, have been realised only because they generate very high profits – the shopping mall, the airport. It is intriguing that some of the forms of these last two examples somewhat resemble those of Constant's unrealised architecture.

I am inclined to set the growing interest in the poeticisation of experience of landscapes – typically urban landscapes, but also those of railways, airports and various other industries, even agriculture – in an economic and political context. In the UK now there is a lot of official and other thinking about ways in which the anomalous high cost of built structures can be reduced. In the 1950s, for example, a new suburban house in the UK cost about as much as three new family cars. The price of a similar house in the 1990s would probably be about that of ten new cars. These cars will be more impressive products than the cars of the 1950s, and will last longer, whereas received opinion is that the houses of the 1990s are no better than those of the 1950s, and may well not last as long. This relative increase in the cost of buildings is evident in most ‘advanced' economies, but is particularly marked in the UK, where the building industry is less mechanised and more deskilled, and the supply of land for building is highly constrained. Buildings and other infrastructure often seem surprisingly rudimentary or dilapidated to visitors from other industrialised countries, and in London especially, even relatively wealthy people often live in
houses that are small, old and architecturally impoverished, but extraordinarily expensive.

In a context where building – not just the building of houses, but all building – has become more expensive, so that the volume of new construction is less than it used to be, new architecture has assumed a kind of scarcity value. It has become exotic, so that its representation and discussion in various media is now much more widespread than was the case when encounters with actual built architecture were more common. For most people, in most of the landscapes of ‘advanced' economies, the transformation of everyday surroundings is achieved much less by physical rebuilding than by other means. Perhaps this is why an interest in the subjective transformation of landscape has become so widespread in recent years. In London now, psychogeography leads not so much to avant-garde architecture as to gentrification.

One wonders what to make of this. For government, the encouragement of gentrification, or some euphemism for it, seems to be a central strategy both for cities and in housing policy. The great irony of the UK's psychogeography phenomenon is that its invocation of the
flâneur
only narrowly preceded an almost immediate commodification of café culture. Downing Street advisors just back from Barcelona marvel at the sudden appearance of aluminium furniture on the pavements of northern cities. This phenomenon, and its residential counterpart, the ‘loft', is now regarded as a principal means of urban regeneration. Lifestyle magazines discover the collectable qualities of Modern Movement public-sector housing developments, as flats in them begin to change hands on the open market. This notion of regeneration, where existing physical structures are socially reconstructed through acquisition and improvement, has been a familiar feature of life in London and other cities since the 1960s, when middle-class buyers ‘discovered' run-down districts, usually in inner cities, and in doing so increased their value, rather in the way that the Surrealists ‘discovered' the bric-a-brac of the flea market.

In the UK, the subjective transformation of landscape seems to offer the individual a way to oppose the poverty of everyday
surroundings. As individuals, we can't rebuild the public transport system, or re-empower local democracy, but we can poeticise our relationship with their dilapidation. Perhaps this is a legacy of the 1980s when, in London at least, large parts of the city were visibly altered by a political force that was shocking, especially after the stagnation of the 1970s. Perhaps the impulse to poeticise landscape in this way always coincides with times of heightened political tension. In 1948, the Czech Surrealist Vratislav Effenberger made a film,
The Outline of a Study of a Fraction of Reality
, which survived only as a retrospectively created script, but apparently included images ‘from the Prague loading dock and other deserted corners of the city'.
⁴
Effenberger's film was made in the same year as the Stalinist coup.

In 1974, in his introduction to
The Practice of Everyday Life
, Michel de Certeau identified the same predicament in a slightly different way:

Capitalism both destroys and creates places, but the places it creates seem always, at least to begin with, less substantial, less rich, than
the places it destroys; as in the cases of, say, the mechanisation of agriculture and the ports, or the replacement of mining and other industries by landscapes of distribution and retailing. It is difficult to be certain, but judged simply by the numbers of people present, a modern port, for example, seems a reduced phenomenon compared with the seaports of earlier times. On the other hand, modern capitalism also gives place high value – partly by making its sought-after qualities scarce, partly by concentrating power in the global system in particular places: New York, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Paris, London, and so on. In the interstices of all this – in more or less dilapidated domestic spaces, as ‘consumers' (neither passive nor docile) – we live our lives.

The Surrealists admired Gaudí, though Surrealism itself produced no architecture until the 1940s, in New York, when Frederick Kiesler aligned himself with the movement and developed a polemic for ‘magic architecture', largely unbuilt but now influential. In a gesture which can be read in various ways, the Royal Institute of British Architects recently awarded its 1999 Royal Gold Medal to the city of Barcelona. A report of the award ceremony quoted Pasqual Maragall, former socialist mayor of Barcelona, comparing London under Thatcher with Barcelona under Franco: ‘Cities have periods in history in which they do nothing because of their politicians', and ‘the radical puritanism of Mrs Thatcher's government condemned the destitute to remain entrenched in their destitution'. Incapable of magic architecture, we made art out of our deprivation. I hadn't realised it was quite that bad. ‘When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.'

Since its invention, the cinema has offered glimpses of what Henri Lefebvre described, in another context, as ‘the preconditions of another life'.
¹
As the most extensive way of reconstructing experience of the world, it was also the most extensive way of getting out of it, and into another one. It's not surprising that so much of cinema was created by, and to some extent for, people with first-hand experience of emigration.

The new, virtual world of cinema was typically a world transformed – by eroticism, love, solidarity, crime, war or some similarly extraordinary experience. It differed from that offered by, say, the novel in that it was visible, and in that usually the spaces of the new world were made by photographing fragments of the old one. These fragments were very often specially created for the purpose, but in practice it seems to make very little difference whether the
décor
of a film is real or artificial, or even whether a film is fiction or documentary. The newness of the spaces of the cinema is a product, not of set-building, but of cinematography. It's the phenomenon of
photogénie
.

The earliest reference that I know of to something like this is made in Louis Aragon's essay ‘On
Décor'
, which was first published in September 1918 in Louis Delluc's
Le Film
. This was Aragon's first published writing, in which he wrote: