owen hatherley, militant modernism — ideas
hatherley's militant modernism offers us a great guide into finding out where we're actually supposed to go to read about brutalism, but fortunately also sometimes how to think about it
hatherley says about park hill "park hill, with its endless walkways and constructivist/brutalist intersections and permutations, exemplifies the truly visionary potentialities of the post-war moment perhaps better than any other structure, its vaulting over-ambitiousness almost ensuring that the inhabitants never had to touch the ground". hatherley says this because of a few intertwined views he presents in his interconnected narrative, connected to the way in which peter smithson (one of the key creators of brutalism) would argue “their development would be dense, it would be urban, and while it would unashamedly house the poor … it would be glamorous.” the glamorosity of brutalism carries with it a notion of "glamorosity everywhere", one that works against the backdrop of an "assumed modernity" carried by brutalism. as we will see, hatherley develops a narrative where cultural perception of brutalism organizes more around the conditions surrounding it than about its fundamental self-positioning or intentions, where the perspective of it shifts on how well-off the people living there end up being.
brutalism allows itself to be easily positionable, and is therefore much easier subsumed by media that wants to portray it in countless different ways than it would necessarily please, such as in the clockwork orange example. and even though in a sense it is successful in the goal of being modular, it is only modular in perspective, whereas in reality, brutalism still cultivates a very specific mental perspective regardless of the conditions around it, one that absolutely doesn't appear glamorous, but is instead the perfect backdrop for societal rot, but heavenly rot, rot in the best possible manner, rot that is simultaneously shielded from lassez faire development through passive institutional power, but only by institutions that secretly dont actually exist at all. brutalism is in this sense a ghost of itself, far from trying to cultivate the vibrant "auto-city" in the sky it imagines itself to be attempting to aid in its own fantasies, it creates the dead space necessary for people who can only live outside of their own self-idea. brutalism displaces the subject far better than capitalism possibly can, but it doesnt alienate the subject into modularity or into functionalization, brutalism paradoxically creates the means of non-living as a compromise between those who envision themselves as being allowed to consist "in-the-world" without "being-of-the-world".
hatherley views the development of brutalism as connected to the vision that even poor areas should be urbanised along with modernity's general logic, and that brutalism offers a way into being able to do this without having to rely on the cultural specificity of aristocratic forms. the "street-in-the-sky" phenomenon is enabled by this prospect, and is a vision where the ground is entirely freed from commerical activity so that higher layers of social scaling can prosper socially independently of commerical districts. however, this street in the sky doesnt and cant actually exist, primarily because the way that most people would end up treating brutalism shortly after its development is that they would allow its monumentalism to intentionally cause empty space, shadows, and staining to cover patinas over.
this would make brutalism more like a space-shuttle that connects to the ground if the community living there feels grounded in its enviornment, but it would make a lot of its "corporate/office" metaphorization-engrained hallway enviornments mostly empty, and the railway stations and megastructures it creates would further solidify into their own mass rather than serving any real "circulation work". circulation is instead moved into elevators, taxis and staircases historically, and all the "middle areas" of brutalist structures would remain dormant. brutalist-occupied zones would be spent in the "corners" of a structure. take for example, the central post office in skopje, which has extremely tall and functionally usable towers that poke out of it in the form of parrots, or "envisioners" of this world. they "foreground" the area around them beautifully, but on the bottom, there are large beam-like castles with extremely massive windows and basically no doors at all. every brutalist corridor is equally empty, and every brutalist bridge is useless and inaccessible.
this isnt about how many people actually live in these structures, if you dumped a hundred thousand people in the central post office of skopje and forced them all to live there, they'd still somehow find a way to desert it so that none of them are visible immediately. you'd find thousands of people tucked behind glass somewhere, in hal-shaded ballardian corners and offices, stacked in bathrooms, hiding under staircases, never actually sitting anywhere that a good view can be permitted, especially not in any of the upper-facing windows. people in brutalist buildings dont actually "make use of the buildings", they end up only momentarily meeting the glass. in a sense, even the tenants of brutalist buildings dont really "live there", its almost like they occupy the space "around" the building like a ghost, or only end up somehow being in the kitchen half the time. truly, brutalism vacates everything around it, because it knows that it isn't truly a castle or a mega-structure or a remnant of a medieval time.
every brutalist building is, immediately upon being built, aware that as a pure simulacrum and as an ideological placement, its best possible role is to be as beautifully void as possible. brutalist "mass" doesn't exist at all, anyone who has actually lived in brutalist establishments is aware of how truly soft they are, padded, covered, desacrated, uncovered, open, deployed almost instantly. in a sense, the la cobuserian vibe of a building doesn't last even a moment, the hauntological spirit of the building triumphs over the yugoslavian fantasy as a feature of the space around it. in a sense, this may even be because brutalism is simply too powerful for civilian residents, who realize that they must desert it, that they are unworthy to socialize in such a grand sector. "socialism", if it took itself literally, would have to re-consider what the socius even is, because in all of its industrial triumph, it never actually understood what to do with large spaces. as a consequence, brutalist buildings dont actually have a gallery access (the exterior walkway giving access to apartments), they only have a massive backyard that seemingly spans miles with little stores nearby. brutalist building literally segment themselves away from having a "grand hotel-esque" entrance the way industrial or corporate firms do, because the brutalist building's vibe would be soiled and ruined by having a real working lobby-setup.
this isnt about how tenants generally spend their time in space, but its about the specific feeling of phenomenological loneliness that brutalism produces. brutalism "shields" the occupier "away from itself" but "into itself", whereas corporate-financialized-privatized estates block the unoccupied away from itself whilst swallowing the occupier towards the center but away from the "openess" of its own enviornment. generally the terms i use for capital's spread in real estate is "speculative firm", and for brutalist buildings "monumental masses" but a more aesthetic alternative are the terms "black box" (for the buildings of new/recent modernity) and "new castle" for brutalism, mostly because these are the "underneath/yet primary" vibes that either of these blocks carry with them.
park hill may seem grandiose, but this perspective only appears if you look at the building either from above, where its like a spiralling snake ascending outwards and twisting in on itself, or from the front of one specific building-side, where it looks like a series of seemingly neverending columns, driven by an illusion caused by the red-yellow-orange color coded windows and the blue steel glass they sometimes hit from the side view. yet, if you look at another building of the complex, when it meets a tree and when it rests on the side of a hillside and doesnt have color-coded windows, it looks much more barren and empty, it presents itself in bleak browns, and looks like its being cut intentionally short. yet if you look at it from another angle, in "phase 2" of the building, only the side of the windows are color-coded in pastiche. in all of these modes of the building, what you can clearly see are its limits, its shades, its textures - you can almost squish it like a box, all of its windows are demystified, its total cover is all-the-time exposed, at every level, except for just the one distractive second that it appears.
as opposed to park hill, look no further than the harbour central docklands to show you what real monumentality and grandiosity looks like. canary warf has the same exact "bridge-connecting-window" aesthetic as park hill, along with two front chunks that have the same orange-yellow-red covers across the glass panes. it also has a bunch of "squares" stacked ontop of eachother in its tall-towers, ones that almost look like a pulsating gun from a video game. the aesthetic, in real monumental fashion, is entirely unpenetrable by the gaze, it looks like an unfinished mall that was also slimed from the inside by a giant bug in a way that left it with an incommensurable void. the monumentality of a building, then, is clearly caused by its undescribable function, total hostility to basic living expectations, and the violence caused by gentrification-oriented efforts to look humane, such as patios that are clearly too thin, to dangerous, or too entirely devoid of any function, that want to appear livable.
a similar black box to this one are the grand river and east gate living in skopje respectively. both of them feature tall, infested-looking towers, square blocks that want to appear modular but are entirely rigid in construction, and large, uniform, cube-shaped, mall-esque patios that feature a particular kind of ruthless plywood that is supposed to make the eye rest but really only concerns it even more due to the way that the material doesnt allow any imprints to actually attach to it. these buildings, since they are devoid of staining, literally become walls, rather than serving as the metaphor of a wall-castle like in the case of brutalism.
and, also unlike brutalism, the ads that supposedly portray the "sky-garden cities" actually do exist in these buildings, but only because they pornographically and psychosocially force all its residents to follow particular gym, atheltics, gardening etc. codes, they force everyone's appearance through architectural traps that spy on and modify everyones experience actively. they are also likely missing cruical features such as actual staircases inside the building, walkable windows, walkable doors, walkable squares, walkable galleries, walkable anything really. walkable as in walk-to-able, you cannot physically approach a majority of the construction. in this sense, the actual, real logic of the castle is revealed, one that doesnt require the display of a "castle-based" architecture to "modernize" its residents.
black boxes actually display ballard's vision and put it into real life "meanwhile, the wives of several top-floor tenants claimed that they had been abused in the eleva- tors. other residents, as they left for their offices that morning, had found that their car tyres had been slashed. vandals had broken into the classrooms of the junior school on the 10th floor and torn down the children's posters. the lobbies of the five lower floors had been mysteriously fouled by dog excrement; the residents had promptly scooped this into an express elevator and delivered it back to the top floor."
this is an over-exaggerated fantasy in soviet high-rises, one that today appears, if anything, overtly social. in black boxes, excrement does appear, but without social spectacle. black boxes "highlight" certain areas of themselves, they literally laser-point the sun into certain features of themselves, boxing you into them, whereas new castles accidentally point to their own desertion. the cruical difference is that black boxes arent "deserted", since only their outsides are constantly spied-on. elevators are forced in black boxes since only elevators really truly exist.
in fact, black boxes are built in such a way that makes monsters inc possible, a fully open room that only consists of elevators pulled up by cranes, or random labyrinth-esque doors that feature entirely black hallways devoid of all matter or life, or simply, they can be built in such a way as to give the accidental impression that spatial travel through portals has actually been unlocked. in new castles, car tyres being slashed are related to screaming children, whereas in black boxes, car tyres being slashed are quite literally phenomenologically related to your morning breakfast or your evening plans, in the sense that your every day routine is compromised by the physical presence of a constant undescribable weight.
hatherley says "round the corner from golden lane, where a more sober project that beat the smithsons’ still stands, the barbican is one of the most obvious vindications of their theories. a recent tourist guide describes this complex, designed by chamberlin, powell and bon over a nearly 20 year period, as a ‘monumental concrete ghetto’. and, if one tries to ignore the wealth of the inhabitants, this is what we have here. three utterly enormous towers, the largest residential buildings in europe at the time: curves and spikes, carrying excitement and a hint of fear – and lower but no less fierce blocks curving round some showpiece lakes, linked by a series of seemingly endless walkways, under and overpasses and smithsonian streets in the sky. rather than intimidating and bleak, the barbican is as attractive and mysterious as a j.g ballard heroine. this isn’t entirely an accident. the barbican was not built as social housing, and its inhabitants are comfortable enough to be able to handle the old ultraviolence."
hatherley's description is both nearly perfect and very telling of the narrative espoused thus far. its not about the building not containing beton brut, or being full of random gentrified garden-areas covered by glass panes, or even the fact it is dispersed with walkways, umbrella restaurants and a man-made beach-fountain area. rather, the building is very much a woman like hatherley says, or also in the ways he connects it to a wider corbusianism, and it captures his idea well that reichianism is about avoiding hypersexualisation whilst still containing sexual freedom, without sexual irrationality being connected to capital's irrational spread, a ballardian heroine that is a building in the sense of being freely deployed and openly sexual, but without the hidden perversities that highlight a more mysterious capitalistic sexual drive, where the "trotskyian" ideal is achieved, where hatherley notes that a “stalinist” building is a more rigid, official modernism (clean, repetitive, controlled), whereas a “trotskyist” one features radical continuation, claiming to be more faithful to the original revolutionary idea.
in a sense, the fact that brutalism's pillars are unconquerable directly feed into this idea of the woman being almost "open to view" yet sublime and profound in its display. the erotic motive of brutalism is foreshadowed by its presentation - the barbican almost resembles skopje's city trade centers, it has rigid pillars with weird gapey openings sequentially holding together partially closed off lines with giant terraces, under which a more traditional unit sits, with front-side tables and stores. the pillars "peak through" the establishment and almost vulgarly expose it. the rest of the building is almost like a giant sandwhich, held together by a few slim pillars. the barbican, even in all its grandiosity, still looks like an open artifact, its walls look funny and underwritten in todays standards. in a sense, it is as close as a housing unit can get to a mall, yet, as all brutalist buildings, it effortlessly folds into its enviornment, even as it sprawls across the field, its structures curve in such a way that they become integrated with the nearby street, and all of its individual pillars "make way" for giant garden-regions in the middle
as opposed to it, westfield london is a giant pile of crap, a massive establishment that looks like a factory that itself produces buildings - if not for any other reason - so as to excuse its own size. it has massive front-facing blocks, with stained black concrete on the roof, and what looks like giant garages all across its periphery - none of which are likely even garages. it mimics skopje's east gate, giant cyllindrical blocks, whole squares placed individually and collectively along a periphery, with zero intersecting logic with nearby streets, the penultimate black box. hatherley himself understands the simulacrum of brutalism "the british were the first people to have no contact with the ‘soil’, were mainly urban by the mid-19th century, and the imaginary return to arcadia can only be understood in this context: as a myth, something longed for because it no longer exists.", yet, westfield is not brutal in the same way as the barbican.
hatherley says "but over thirty years later, thamesmead doesn’t look violent, so much as melancholy". the myth that brutalism actually is supposed to showcase violence emerges from the post-war builders, ones who did not realize how modernity will actually develop. even this work, written in 2009, is far too early in the conversation, seemingly unaware of how monumental modernity will want to present itself, and what real violence will ultimately look like. westfield itself only opened a year before this book published, likely around the time it was written. if the barbican is supposed to be violent, distant, tall, powerful, it is totally defeated by modernity, it simply looks like a small little hotel department with a nice pool.
hatherley clearly understands this too, he describes contemporary modernity as either "the ultra-timid ikea modernism or the semi-victorian developers’ vernacular of barratt homes and their ilk". yet, if he saw it from today's perspective, he would realize thamesmead is in fact equivalent to the barbican, and both of them display the nostalgia of empty spaces not-yet-divorced from the logic of life itself. brutalism is the negotiation between the living enviornment otherwise known as the "shelter" and "the space that comes into it", whereas ikea modernism (black boxes) are the pure distinction between the container and the space around it as a negotiation for how much can be contained. everything, every single building that looks like a shelter now no longer looks monumental, so to even speak about brutalism as if you are speaking about magnitude is a fundamental misunderstanding of its current reality.
in the same way that old castles now look like cute museums to us, new castles look like museums for real estate instead of for militaries. the scale metaphor is not just about spatial negotation, scale itself now triumphs over the living. it cannot possibly be said that there is "soil" at all anymore. east gate destroys whole lakes and rivers, packs entire traffic stations, powers whole highways, ruins mountaintops, and it does all of it without even being anything but an open room. it doesn't require architecture, in fact, the less design it has, the more people apparently want to be there. the brutalist office-space reality is confirmed again, the current people, the ones addicted with platforms, surfaces, gidgets, artifacts and so on, don't actually feel the need to compromise against geometry, or to even pay it any mind. to them, the existence of something precious is reason less to be there. all the flowers of this world, all the cute little terraces, all the beautiful chair designs, all the walkable stairways, they are a distraction from the wall, the one big primal wall that urbanism ultimately gives you
even the redesign, the new supposedly empty center of the thamesmead, it tinted its own windows by highlighting them in an ugly orange. if you walk past the vardar walkway, and you turn at a certain angle, the disgusting, morbid, fake-modular, parasitical, weirdly twisted east gate living residential flats pop out from the distance. the black boxes are built hologrammatically, meaning, somebody looks at the satellite view and places the establishment in a way so that they can block as much of the sky as possible. and then they position it in a way where it can be seen from any direction you look at it, so that it doesnt just rupture space, but so that it warps it as well, so that whichever angle you peak at, you will be met with singlehandedly the most disgusting thing humanity has ever created (and it knows that its this).
"robin hood gardens looks like a stronghold, but one can’t imagine anyone defending it right now. around six miles west is the smithsons’ famous ensemble of buildings for the economist: building for the capitalist reality, elegant and impeccably up-kept, a quiet enclave rather than an embattled encampment. robin hood gardens is the sort of social housing that the economist would abhor, a stain on the architects’ reputation. a ‘sink estate’, passed over with unseemly haste in the many academic discussions of the smithsons’ work. it won’t stay obscure for long, though, seeing as it borders the huge new town for finance capital at canary wharf.
demolition has just been proposed at the time of writing" robin hood gardens is now permamently closed, and it is a parody of itself, or rather, the idea that by entering modernity you can somehow become a part of the market system, all whilst never actually being involved in it. "robin hood" is really about trying to rob the hood of its own significance, about transferring the value of sky-rises onto yourself without knowing what makes them all so special. in doing so, you actually create the most isolating enviornment possible, one that is all about monumentality-in-its-idea.
even actual sky-monuments like london's gherkin have more authentic livability than these towers simply because it doesn't feel the need to excuse itself in the same way. soviet parasitism is mostly about disguising everything that makes modernity great so that you can enjoy it secretly, which explains why soviet hallways are inauthentically empty. if the trump tower is authentically empty, that's because everyone chose to suffer the moment they walked in. but in belgrade's 72 new residential blocks, you can only enjoy capitalism as long as you run away from the world (and from sunlight). one article from yugotour reads:
"the buildings were made according to the athens charter, a document about urban planning published by famous architect le corbusier. among other things, the charter demands that each housing unit has at least 2 hours of direct sunlight in the winter time and that there should be a certain distance between the buildings. almost every building is tall and made of bare concrete. however, his model was criticized for creating an isolating atmosphere."
these are arguably the only real monumental brutalist buildings yet, not because they look like a radiohead album cover, but because they are so busy in their encrappyfying quality that there might still be organic mystery left in them. naturally, this mystery will never be unpacked, but poverty and misery are all the only things holding together yugoslavian structures authentically. if a single tenant decides he wants to "live a better life" he will join the dark side and force the construction of a cheap building, kill a bunch of trees, stack residential spots next to one another, limit his own use of gardens, allow the opening of a hardware store nearby, and avoid ever looking at the sky, and he will be able to escape the feeling that he lives surrounded by real human wonder.
the big problem that modernity has is that it can no longer install significance, since it grows from conditions — from people living and dying in places across generations, from the slow accumulation of shared reference, from the physical environment holding those traces. but the conspiracy the whole time was that modernity never wanted to do that. its modularity was about emptying the significance of subjectivity itself. "the terraforming" is not about taking away the earth's soil, its about taking away the conditions for subjectivity to emerge and then claiming it never existed, at least, until inevitably 500 years later is it revealed that it did.
hatherley knows that the first experiments in modernity were actually conducted on the communists "whether, as per lyotard, it would be the proletariat itself that would develop these strange new tastes or not, it was certainly they who were the organic matter upon which these experiments were made", yet, it is odd, because if anything this points to the contradiction that foreigners, importers, migrants, those who are already used to navigating the world with an app rather than through a network of neighbours, paradoxically convinced those who least wanted to do that to do it the most. its almost as if for them, it never mattered where they lived since they werent symbolically connected to the enviornment, but monumentality itself was only a fake front, something they could convince the communists to build for them, all whilst they secretly continued to live in the little cabin across the city in the lake-side resort.