Review / THROW AWAY “IKEA MODERNISM”, HERE COMES “MILITANT MODERNISM”

Owen Hatherley: Militantní modernismus. Prague: UMPRUM, 2021

Last year, a book Militant Modernism by British cultural theorist, blogger, columnist and critic Owen Hatherley was published in Czech translation. Despite the fact that his book debut dates back to 2009, even today it has lost none of its relevance (post-war architecture continues to crumble and the world hasn’t changed much since the markets collapsed into a more pleasant place to live). The appeal defending modernism in its many forms, which is carried throughout the book, can thus still be stimulating for our Czech-Slovak environment as well.

In four chapters, Hatherley writes about architecture, music, sexuality, film, and theatre. Moreover, he writes politically. From openly left-wing positions, he looks at modernism (both pre-war and post-war), which in his view is not a dead historicism with a totalitarian tinge. Although rejected, reviled, perhaps already in a state of clinical death, it still smolders somewhere in the bowels of the ruins, waiting for its reincarnation, transformation and updating for today.

In a small space (150 p.), he gives us, with personal interest, broader analyses and glimpses of the diverse cultural products of socialist modernism: whether it be the artistic avant-garde of the 1920s in the form of British Vorticism, post-war New Brutalism, Soviet Constructivist buildings and films, or the ideas of communist sexual liberation and the work of Bertolt Brecht.

The nature of the book as a collection of short, loosely sequenced essays sometimes results in certain motifs and ideas being found repeatedly in the text. At the same time, the many references from past and contemporary popular culture that Hatherley addresses, particularly to a British audience, may not be easily understood by everyone. The already extensive annotation apparatus could perhaps stand a few more explanatory translator’s notes.

The lack of a rigid structure and the author’s overwhelming range of references may seem confusing on first encounter. Herein lies a certain weakness of the book. Nevertheless, it is an entertaining but no less intellectually dense way of stepping out of the established ruts of traditional writing about (not only) architecture. It’s worth pausing, at least for a moment, on some of the themes that Hatherley raises.

The many shades of British brutalism

Do you find brutalist architecture repulsive? And do you also mean The Economist’s headquarters in London, or just social housing projects like Robin Hood Garden? Because both represent a form of British brutalism. Both projects were even designed by the same architects, Alison and Peter Smithson. The beautiful, elegant concrete, clean glass of the late 1950s and early 1960s are now meticulously maintained. By contrast, the East London housing complex of the late 1960s, which materialised the idea of Cloud Street as a shared space for the working class, and which still physically existed at the time of Hatherley’s writing, has now been demolished.

Imagine it in reverse. The rubble of neoliberal dogma instead of the rubble of post-war social policy. Unimaginable?
Well, it’s the content that matters. The political conflation of pop architecture and urban, densified new urbanism for the less well-off has been battered since the Thatcher-Blair era. At one time from traditionalists (now King Charles III) picking only the right parts of history worth remembering, at other times from the position of elites who have suddenly discovered Brutalism as a profitable investment commodity or status symbol, and are participating in the current practice of evicting residents from formerly social housing developments.

Hatherley shows us a brutalism that is different at the centre and different at the margins. What was once considered by many to be a frightening concrete housing estate (Thamesmead) can now be a living space that residents can identify with. What is now automatically taken as a failure of post-war development may have been an object of wonder, curiosity and perhaps even hope at the time of its creation.

Everyday life as a field of architectural experiment

We know the Soviet avant-garde primarily through examples of paper, never built/unbuildable projects (Tatlin, Krutikov, Malevich, El Lissitzky…). It is the designs of “flying cities” or technicistically virtuosic constructivist buildings that are often mentioned as illustrative material to confirm the thesis of the inevitable relegation of revolutionary social ideals to the realm of utopias.

Owen Hatherley, however, offers us a different perspective. What does the real, built modernism look like on the territory of the former Soviet Union The Derzhprom building in Kharkiv, the workers’ clubs in Baku or Moscow, the realisations and designs of the OSA group or the ASNOVA architects’ association, represent a singular and brief attempt, hampered and then ended by the onset of Stalinist terror, to assign to architecture the role of a social catalyst for change. This constructed communist theory of architecture, which somehow did not fit into the official canon of the International Style of the 1930s and, unlike its counterparts in Germany or the Netherlands, is not largely restored and protected today, never managed to develop its socialist promise. Its physical and symbolic ruins of the future, however, still spark the imagination with their bold entry into everyday life.

Sexuality and politics

Hatherley confronts the idea of a sterile and ascetic modernism with the ideas of the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and his “Sexpol” programme. The main agenda here is not to do away with love and carnality, but to liberate it from the grip of the traditional constructs of bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic period – to demystify it with the help of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis.

What is meant by this? The rejection of authoritarian moralism, the repudiation of the coercive suppression of gratification and, last but not least, another old familiar thing, sexual freedom and economic emancipation as two sides of the same coin. In Hatherley’s conception, however, supplemented by a range of examples of culture where echoes of Sexpol are manifest. From avant-garde collective houses redefining new relationships to the loose sexual morality of sixties films.

The unbearability of modernism

Militant modernism is meant to disturb us. But not lightly, banally, as when someone in the audience at a chamber piano recital coughs whisperingly. This is a disturbance in a big way. Brash and uncompromising. It’s the Brechtian effect of turning to the audience during a play with the banner “GLOTZT NICHT SO ROMANTISCH!”. Well please take a stand, “don’t look so romantic”. These are images of brutalist buildings that, in the words of Reyner Banham, are meant to “be a piece of brick thrown in the public’s face.”

When was the last time you were disturbed by a massive building from the seventies with an adjacent area of a huge plaza? What about that former, slowly decaying community centre on your estate? It’s modernism that a lot of people can’t stomach. Oh, how much the Brechtian artistic concept of socially engaged epic theatre grates on them. “Can’t we just enjoy art for art’s sake ?” And how they would rather enjoy the insulated aesthetics of wood, leather, plastic or the sleek chrome of a chair from the workshop of (fill in any “mid-century” designer name you like) displayed for visitors in the living room.

The examples mentioned by the authors provide a stimulus to reflect on the socialist modernist legacy. What is more, they are models of a counterculture on whose foundations one can build reflections on alternatives for the present and the future.

Isn’t it high time to grasp it firmly, to recognize its products (ideology and practice), to expose its limits, to subject it to a fair critique instead of rejecting it with reference to the historical inevitability of failure…and finally to start moving forward?

For Owen Hatherley, the path to a greener, fairer agenda for the future is clear. In the meantime, we can ask whether it is even possible to enrich our culture and our politics with new visions today.