Modern Architecture Since 1900

"It’s such a weird and wonderful world, architecture from the 20th century and a lot of people find it very confounding, not very appealing. Modernist buildings, high-rise buildings, office towers – people just feel that it’s not their world. This book’s interesting if you want to try and understand the artistic forces, the technical forces and the debates that took place from the 1900s to now, leading to the creation of big modernist buildings which often seem quite daunting. This is a very good introduction and it’s readable for the layman. Anyone who’s curious about contemporary architecture – what’s all that about post-war housing blocks, Parkhill, what’s the theory, what’s the intention? They are unsuccessful housing but they came from the highest principles of trying to deal with Victorian slums with egalitarian and enlightened public housing. All very admirable things. This book isn’t an apology but offers an explanation and understanding of buildings that we very often find inexplicable. I do, funnily enough. I did a series about wonders of the modern age, a five-part series looking at modernist architecture around the world and it was an eye-opener and I had to tackle all these issues, buildings I find quite daunting. For example, I went to Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, the great prototypical Corbusian slab-block high-rise housing, which so many British public housing blocks were based on in the 60s and 70s, and I tried to explore it and understand it. There is, of course, a poetry and a ruthless beauty at work. Many modernist architects were grounded in Classicism and applied the proportional principles. The Seagram building in New York, the prototype of so many office buildings… looking at that, all the proportions are Palladian, so it’s interesting. These guys were not ignorant; they knew what they were doing but they were just trying to find a new way of doing things. Often the layman finds it confusing. Well, it’s interesting, because all the early Soviet stuff is modernist, but then Stalin had this great decree in the 30s and these guys were sent into limbo if not gulags, and from the early 30s Soviet style is no longer the revolutionary modernist constructivism, but it becomes neoclassical on a massive scale. It’s extraordinary but incredibly reactionary. The Metro in Moscow is incredible. He’s making underground Tsarist palaces for the people. Stalin, or the people around him, recognised that the ordinary working man in Russia did not understand or like modernist architecture. It may have been theoretically revolutionary but it didn’t work, so he goes back and promotes a return to Tsarist classical architecture. Really bizarre and fascinating."