The View From the Train

by Patrick Keiller

  Labour’s belief in finding an accommodation with the market seems to preclude a revival of public-sector house-building on anything like its former scale, but the history of house-building suggests that the market will never be able to modernise dwelling on its own, and Labour is committed to modernisation. If there is to be any possibility for a more promising approach to dwelling, it is very unlikely to come from the conventional house-building industry. Some of the most successful house-building projects in the UK during the last two decades have been non-commercial initiatives that included houses for sale. In the Netherlands, the government’s VINEX policy aims to build 800,000 dwellings by the year 2000, in a planned programme with commitments to credible architectural design and environmental and transport policies. This approach produces domestic architecture for sale of a quality that house buyers in the UK can only dream about. If house production in the UK is to undergo any kind of consumer-led reform, it looks as if this can only happen in the context of similar collectivist initiatives.

  5

  Popular Science

  During the 1980s, I spent a lot of time looking out of a window of the third-floor flat in which I lived and worked in London. The window faced west towards Battersea Power Station, about three kilometres away. I lived in this flat for almost exactly ten years, during which the landscape that it overlooked changed in various ways. In 1983, the Central Electricity Generating Board (as it then was) ceased to operate Battersea, arguing that a relatively small power station in the middle of London was uneconomic. A competition was announced for commercial developers to propose new uses for the building and the surrounding site, which was large and extremely valuable. The winner was the owner of the most successful theme park in the UK who, with the explicit approval of the then prime minister, proposed to turn the structure into a theme park and invited her to return in two years’ time to open it. Contractors gutted the building and removed the roof, installing two cranes which stuck out above the empty shell. The project then stalled amid suspicion that the long-term goal was to demolish the building and develop the site in more profitable ways. The developer sold the most successful theme park in the UK to raise funds to complete the project, but was unable to do so, and for some years the cranes remained on the site free to move in the wind – as they had to be so as not to be blown over. Sometimes they both faced one way, sometimes the other; sometimes they faced each other, sometimes in opposite directions. Their movements were not that frequent, and didn’t seem to be much connected with the weather, but gave the impression that the building was alive, and was perhaps thinking.

  Battersea Power Station, London SW8, 1992

  Inside the flat, we were thinking it would have been better if the power station had gone on working, or perhaps been replaced by a more modern one. In its day, Battersea Power Station was exemplary. Its exterior was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, a leading architect; its flue gases were ‘scrubbed’ clean; its city-centre position meant that energy lost in transmission was kept to a minimum, and its cooling water provided heating and hot water to a large number of dwellings on the opposite bank of the river. When it was closed, a boiler house had to be constructed to replace this function. Similar joint heat and power schemes are common in other countries. In England in the 1980s none of this counted for anything, but as a monument the building’s future had to be guaranteed. The nearby Bankside Power Station opposite St Paul’s Cathedral, also a work of Scott, has now been converted into the new Tate Gallery of Modern Art.

  As we felt ourselves losing ground, both politically and economically, our sense of loss was partly mollified by observing these visible changes in the detail of the landscape, as spectators at some sporting event might watch the opposition winning. We might not like the way things were going, but at least we had a good view. Satellite dishes began to appear on the houses and flats visible from the window. We would notice them for the first time in the morning when they caught the sun, so that they seemed to have grown in the night. Soon we could see about twenty, then the rate of increase slowed. A couple of years later the dishes began to disappear. I began to think of the entire view as a very slow but visible movement of self-organising matter. Apollinaire’s impression of the south London suburbs, seen from the train, was of ‘wounds bleeding in the fog’. Sometimes it seemed possible to perceive the view as an organic phenomenon. There was a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet nearby, so there was always plenty of animal protein lying about the streets. At other times, the perception was of molecular vibration, turbulence, consciousness even. From The Importance of Being Earnest, I recalled: ‘Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else.’ In the narration of a film, I quoted Democritus: ‘According to convention, there is a sweet and a bitter; a hot and a cold; and according to convention there is colour. In truth, there are atoms and a void.’ Such abstraction leads to irony. I began to think it might be possible to predict the future by looking out of the window. In The Anatomy of Melancholy Robert Burton (who styled himself Democritus Junior, and is said to have accurately foretold the date of his own death) wrote: ‘Democritus … was so far carried with this ironical passion, that the citizens of Abdera took him to be mad, and sent therefore ambassadors to Hippocrates the physician, that he would exercise his skill upon him.’1 I decided to cure myself by making a film about London. Many details of the view from the window appeared in the film. Shortly before it was finished, we moved out of the flat.

  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:

  Nowadays, the department-store mirror monstrosity and the village inn’s tiny fly-bespattered pane of glass are considered to be of equal poetic worth. And just about anything can come flying out of them … No nook or cranny, no activity, landscape, or thought stands outside the pale of poetic subject matter.3

  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 Par
is, 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:

  The purpose of this work is to … bring to light the models of action characteristic of users whose status as the dominated element in society (a status that does not mean that they are either passive or docile) is concealed by the euphemistic term ‘consumers’.

  … Increasingly constrained, yet less and less concerned with these vast frameworks, the individual detaches himself from them without being able to escape them and can henceforth only try to outwit them, to pull tricks on them, to rediscover, within an electro-nicised and computerised megalopolis, the ‘art’ of the hunters and rural folk of earlier days.

  … Witold Gombrowicz, an acute visionary, gave this politics its hero … whose refrain is ‘When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has’: ‘I have had, you see, to resort more and more to very small, almost invisible pleasures, little extras … You’ve no idea how great one becomes with these little details, it’s incredible how one grows.’5

  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 replacemen
t 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.’

  6

  Architectural Cinematography

  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.