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| Filmhuset, home of the Swedish Film Institute. Photo: Tove Falk Olsson. |
No other city has changed as much as Stockholm. During twenty years,
more than seven hundred buildings vanished. My whole childhood town was laid in
ruins. It was like walking in a bombed Dresden. And more was meant to be
demolished, but eventually there was an end to this political madness. A living
city sacrificed, the city of my heart. Instead, we got those ugly 60s bunkers,
buildings that are unlikely to go down in architectural history.
– Anders Wahlgren, Staden i mitt hjärta (The City of My
Heart) (Sveriges Television, 1992)
The weather was clear, the
temperature a few degrees below zero in the evening of February 22, 1944. Stockholm
at 8:30 pm was a city of lights. Minutes later a one-hundred-kilo bomb and a
few smaller ones fell from the sky. There was a world at war out there but the
Swedes were “neutral” (on the whole pro-German), and the Swedish Armed Forces
remained idle and inviting when three unknown bombers came in low over the
capital, with position lights on, made their mark and returned to the base in
Leningrad. That is how Stockholm was scarred in the World War II. A singular
blast and the little crater it left behind in an empty park.
It was the morbid social
engineering of the Social Democrats and their political narrative of a soulless
Eden that maimed the central parts of Stockholm, not the Russians or the
Luftwaffe. “Sure enough: the Blitz paved the way for London’s new City, the US
Eight Air Force took care of old Berlin. In Stockholm we had Hjalmar Mehr, a man
and his vision,” writes journalist and PR man Claes Britton in his essay
collection Sekelskifte i Stockholm
(Turn of the Century Stockholm). “In this gloomy company, he is known as
‘Demolition Man’ – the man who turned the royal capital’s heart to shit.”
In his book The New Totalitarians: A Terrifying Portrait of an “Ideal” Society That
Has Destroyed Democracy from 1971, Roland Huntford perfectly demonstrated how
“modern Sweden has fulfilled Huxley’s specifications”: “It requires no special
philosophy to recognise that men are affected by their surroundings. But only a
confirmed behaviourist would deliberately seek to modulate personality by
varying the human habitat. What is perhaps not so obvious is that a country outside
the Communist Bloc would pay it so much attention. But the Swedes have pursued
broadly the same aims as the Russians, the creation of the new man for the new
society, the restraint of individuality, the generation of a collective
mentality and the advancement of central direction. What is more, Sweden even
seems to have outstripped the Soviet Union. Other considerations aside, this is
probably because she has better engineers and administrators, and because
Swedish architects have willingly become servants of ideology. When the Swedes change ideas, they do it to the full, leaving no room for criticism or reservation.”
“In their mental world, departure
from the accepted norm is a kind of treachery. It is part of conditioning to
group thinking, which makes personal divergence a sin, and acceptance of the
collective opinion a cardinal virtue. They have an urge to think as everybody
else does [however] while the Swede is immersed in the collective, and looks
upon community and solidarity as the most desirable of attributes, he is locked
up in himself, isolated from other human beings.”
Huntford argued that Swedish
architecture and its rabble of advocates only mirrored the servitude of the
public mind: “The architect is customarily a man of independence, with certain
aesthetic and social ideas which he wishes to embody in a building. This is not
so in Sweden. Architecture, with the acquiescence of the architects, has become
the servant of the State and the agent of its ideology […] Destruction of the
centre of Stockholm has had the effect of cutting off the past. It was done
with a callousness and ruthlessness that suggests a fear or hatred of what had
gone before.” The Functionalism of the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 wanted to
do away with dirty living conditions; the housing policy in the 1960s and the
following decade was about getting rid of “dirty” people.
Swedish Social Democracy and the
idea of Folkhemmet – the People’s
Home – was a muddle of Eastern Bloc politics, Italian Fascism, noncarbonated American
Capitalism, Scandinavian Law of Jante and a monomania on the practice of
eugenics. The manual for the Swedish Model of the welfare state was Nobel
laureates Alva and Gunnar Myrdal’s book Crisis
in the Population Question (1934), the couple’s modest proposal on how to
“root out all types of physical and mental inferiority within the population
both the mentally retarded and mentally ill, the genetically defective and
persons of bad character”. Chapter seven starts off as loud and clear as a BNW
nightmare: “The direct task of prophylactic social policies is creating better
human material.” 36,000 people (more than in the US) with “undesirable genes” were
coerced under the circumstances of the Sterilisation Act between 1934 and 1975,
the Folkhemmet era.
“Perhaps I expected too much of
Sweden, the celebrated paradise of Social Democracy,” Susan Sontag explained in
her comprehensive essay “A Letter from Sweden” in Ramparts magazine (July 1969). “Sweden is the only country I know
of where misanthropy is a respectable attitude.” (The Swedish Film Institute
invited Sontag to Stockholm to come and work here in the late 1960s.) “The lack
of personal sophistication and finesse, the emotional naiveté, the childish
self-centeredness, the anti-erotic character of many people here” were some
national “deficiencies” that Sontag listed in her text. The charmless attributes
of the Swedes became the concrete conclusions of what replaced the seven
hundred apartment buildings and centuries-old palaces that the Stockholm bureaucrats
destroyed full-throttle in their own municipal World War. The city’s political
strongman Hjalmar Mehr urged that, “Politics, when at its best, is great art
and should be ranged among the fine arts. Municipal policy is – in its finest
moments – applied art.”
The current resurgence of Brutalism
is evident in the recent number of books that celebrate the senseless, the
horrible and the unavoidable in our built environment. Architectural historian
Martin Rörby is unable to explain why the odium now is shifting into feelings
of affection for these urban flak towers, but asserts in the book he has done
together with photographer Tove Falk Olsson – Sthlm brutal: Innerstadens arkitektur under 60- och 70-tal (Sthlm
Brutal: Inner City Architecture During the 60s and 70s) – that “Stockholm city
centre broods on an architectural treasure just waiting to be discovered by
anyone who is willing to look around without preconceptions.”
Sthlm brutal is like a CCCP cookbook of
selling arguments and seducing photographs of the remains of a stern and creepy
society hypnotised by its socio-political doctrines on the strength of a grey
new world. The sculptural concrete monoliths that characterised British
Brutalism did not gain much ground in Stockholm, however, and the book is keen
on highlighting buildings where traditional façade materials apply to some
truly unusual constellations. It is nonetheless the concrete elephants that are
the lesser misfits among the city’s totalitarian structures, for example
Radiohuset (home of the national broadcaster), the former Embassy of Czechoslovakia,
the previous building for Arkitekturskolan, and of course Filmhuset (home of
the SFI) with the perforated façade, the entrance ramp, and the big mysterious
eye – like the Eyes of TJ Eckleburg, the billboard doc in The Great Gatsby (1925) – looking down on people’s soullessness.
Much of the heartless heart of
Stockholm is obviously avoided in the book. It is impossible though to ignore architect
Peter Celsing’s bulky DDR version of Centre Pompidou – Kulturhuset – a zombie
birdhouse that forms a massive concrete wall on the back, and the inhuman (“intimate”)
alley towards the next monstrosity. What were they thinking? Sthlm brutal will not provide the
answers (nor the voices of the time) but Rörby mentions the Battle of the Elms,
the altercation between the police and one thousand civilians when many Stockholmers
had finally had enough of the destruction of their city and went out to stop
the chainsaws in Kungsträdgården, the central garden patch, in May 1971. The
fight was over a few trees.
“In the past decade, the centre of
Stockholm had suffered violent and radical transformation, whole neighbourhoods
were razed and new ones erected. The city’s structure changed, traffic spread
out more and more, and the new layout was least of all marked by a desire to
create a people-friendly environment,” protested Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö in The Abominable Man (1971). “Stockholm
residents watched with sorrow and resentment as functional and irreplaceable
old apartment buildings were razed to make room for sterile office buildings,
powerless they let themselves be deported to distant dormitory towns, while the
cosy and vibrant neighbourhoods where they lived and worked were put in ruins.
Inner city became an impassable and clamorous construction site from which,
slowly but inexorably, the new City stood with wide noisy highways, gleaming
façades of glass and light metal, dead surfaces of smooth concrete, coldness
and desolation.”
Sjöwall–Wahlöö’s globally
appreciated series of ten police novels about the human superintendent Martin
Beck – and Swedish life in the 1960s and much of the 1970s – has the collective
subtitle The Story of a Crime, which actually
applied to the Social Democrats and their ravages of the Scandinavian
wonderland.
“In the aftermath of the most
destructive warfare in European, if not world history, it seemed clear that
architecture should assume a new role in society, a role dissociated from
politics as such and focussed on human needs in the simplest sense. It was in response
to that perception that the first practitioners of Brutalism chose to employ
exposed materials, rough textures, and seemingly awkward compositions, and it
was those physical characteristics that came to typify the movement in the
general understanding,” writes BM Boyle in Encyclopaedia
of 20th-Century Architecture, arguing that Brutalism was only
one of several contemporary manifestations of postwar despair and existential
rage in art which “displayed a rejection not just of the war and its seemingly
pointless waste of lives and resources but also of the seemingly continuation
of the attitudes and practices of the past”.
This echoes a key sentiment by the
beardy architectural critic Reyner Banham in a text from 1955: “Even if it were
true that the Brutalists speak only to one another, the fact that they have
stopped speaking to Mansart, to Palladio and to Alberti would make the New
Brutalism, even its more private sense, a major contribution to the
architecture of today.” In his essay “The New Brutalism” in that year’s
December issue of Architectural Review,
he explained that he saw the phrase “as something between a slogan and a
brickbat flung in the public’s face” (Banham was a devotee of the shockingly
new): “The ruthless adherence to one of the basic moral imperatives of the
Modern Movement – honesty in structure and material – has precipitated a
situation to which only the pen of Ibsen could do justice,” he suggested. “In
the last resort what characterises the New Brutalism in architecture as in painting
is precisely its brutality, its je-m’en-foutisme [couldn’t-care-less attitude],
its bloody-mindedness.”
When Rodney Gordon was interviewed
atop of his Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth for the BBC television series Dreamspaces in 2003, he told fellow architect
David Adjaye that “Any piece of architecture worth being called architecture is
usually both hated and loved.” Adjaye is remembering Gordon as “a sensitive,
articulate, incredibly positive man – and it seems incongruous that his
buildings might have generated a negative response”. Few things were as hated, and
now loved, as Gordon’s elephants in Portsmouth and Gateshead: “Gordon might
have worked in concrete but he made it sing. His buildings were articulated
rather than monolithic,” as Jonathan Meades declares in Museum Without Walls. “At the Tricorn in Portsmouth and Trinity
Square in Gateshead he succeeded on a vast scale, unparalleled in Europe. These
buildings were indeed extraordinarily sculptural, their silhouettes were
audacious and poetic, jagged and rhetorical.”
You can see Jack Carter with one of
his brutally handled sex kittens in a sports vehicle on Trinity Square’s blocky
outboard ramps, speeding up to the unfinished top of its seven-storey car park
in Get Carter (1971). Owen Luder – who
claims to have designed these two concrete structures which were dismantled
after only four decades, half a human lifetime – talks about the vexed style in
the documentary short Get Luder
(2010): “In the 60s my buildings were awarded, in the 70s they were applauded,
in the 80s they were questioned, in the 90s they were ridiculed. And when we
get through to 2000, the ones I like most are the ones that have been
demolished.”
In his new book Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism,
Barnabas Calder speaks up for the style with a bit of trumpery: “Brutalism was
the high point of architecture in the entire history of humanity. It takes only
a fairly basic level of expertise to start to recognise it as one of the
greatest ever flowerings of human creativity and ingenuity.” The etymology of Brutalism
is the French word for roughcast, unadorned concrete, béton brut. Le Corbusier utilised this compressive as much as
tensile building material to rebel against his own finesse after World War II. Raw
concrete looked so good in the French sunshine, and nowhere so primitive and
accurate and beautiful as with his “radiant city” in Marseille, the Unité
d’Habitation where Jonathan Meades lives.
“A main aspiration of architects
over the past forty years has been not to give offence. There is a terrible
timidity, whereas Brutalism was very aggressive. It was anti focus groups and
consensus. The architects were ahead of their time and it has taken half a
century for people to see that this stuff was done with spirit and invention,”
Meades told The Independent (February
23, 2014). “There was hubris, but there wasn’t a desire to please,” Meades made
clear. “There is something about being excited by this stuff which is
terrifying and slightly sinister that I find very appealing.” (Brutalism
provided the necessary sceneries for Kubrick when he used West London’s Brunel
University and the city’s most unsightly spaces for his thug dystopia A Clockwork Orange in 1971.)
Tom Wilkinson argues in Bricks and Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and
the People They Made that “There is another moral to the story of
Brutalism, besides the question of what it does to its inhabitants: its
advocates argued that the rough poetry of its concrete structures told the
truth.” As Christopher Beanland asserts in Concrete
Concept: Brutalist Buildings: “These buildings, these spaces, these chunks
of engineering all look like they do because they were meant to stand up to the
city, to answer back to it, to challenge it: not to hammer the human.” He means
that although there were artists among the Brutalist architects, “Many more
were copycats, functionaries on meat-and-potatoes missions to put up cheap bits
of vernacular work which might have been hack jobs but still stand out like
gloriously grisly sore thumbs on streets across the globe.”
The political and institutional priorities
behind the ethos of egalitarianism were in actual truth about implementing a
harsh demand for conformity and to grant a socialist elite society of upstairs-and-downstairs
citizens. Alexander Clement writes in his book Brutalism: Postwar British Architecture that “Britain possessed the
optimum political and cultural environment” for Brutalism to emerge after the
World War II and, as others have marked out as well, that the style was part of
a wider cultural movement “driven by a hungry young element of profession,
eager to get their hands on whatever opportunities arouse, ready to do battle
with the town planners, the architectural establishment and the prevailing
reactionary conservatism of the general public”.
A man by the name of Goldfinger was
part of the people for two months. Well, almost. When or if ever members of the
elite moved into these new and enormous housing blocks, they always occupied
the upper floors. The Hungarian-born architect Ernö Goldfinger – Ian Fleming
used his name for the Bond villain because he hated what Goldfinger did to
London – had a room at the top, on the twenty-fourth floor of his own creation
Balfron Tower (erected in 1963). The identical Trellick Tower was completed
nine years later. Both were alienating quality buildings, unlike much of the
rest of the Brutalist high-rises that were made to crumble. But regardless how
they were constructed, the high-rises always came with – and they always provoked
– social problems.
“The drive to build tower blocks
was inseparable from the emergence of the post-1945 welfare state – alongside a
national health-service and education system, good cheap housing was central to
Labour’s reformist agenda,” as Andrzej Gasiorek informs in his book on JG
Ballard. “The pressure to keep costs low militated against the desire of
architects to create decent living conditions for large numbers of people. Add
to this dubious quality control, property speculation and shoddy building practices,
and the result was the erection of tower blocks that were in some cases so
poorly constructed that they started to malfunction as soon as their tenants
moved in.”
One of those residential blocks is the main prop in Ballard’s High-Rise (1975), the author’s dystopian novel that retraces the barbarian fall of its tenants: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within his huge apartment building during the previous three months.”
Christopher Beanland suggests that “Brutalism
was the visual language of a postwar welfare state on which the sun is setting
[…] In appearance, Brutalism is about severity, abstraction, ambition;
angles that promote nausea, shapes that promote dizziness, spaces that
occasionally evoke terror.”
Brutalism was a one-sided
factuality cast in concrete. It was the ideal expression of a community lacking
traces of genuine life and character. JG Ballard claimed in an interview in
2003 that he saw the Hilton Garden Inn at Heathrow as the place to be.
Why?
“Within this remarkable building
one feels no emotions and could never fall in love, or need to.”
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| The spiral staircase in the belly of Filmhuset. Photo: Tove Falk Olsson. |