The View From the Train

by Patrick Keiller

  During the century since, mechanisation and subsequently automation have radically transformed the availability, production and distribution of material things like food, consumer goods and other mass-produced items, especially since the widespread application of computers during the last three decades. As a result, though construction has been mechanised to a limited extent, the cost of building has increased enormously compared with that of most other artefacts, and has probably also increased when compared with average earnings, so that building has become more expensive.14 For this and other reasons (planning constraints, for instance) the production and maintenance of built space is now a good deal more difficult than it was a century ago.

  The results of both these trends are very visible, especially in the UK, as if the increased relative cost of building and the proliferation of virtual space, and of economic activity that takes place in or via virtual space, have disadvantaged the visible landscape. Although people in the UK are, on average, far better off than their predecessors of a hundred years ago, and are much better housed, the built environment is characterised by high levels of dilapidation, poor maintenance and new buildings of a far lower quality than the alleged success of the UK’s economy might lead one to expect. Even inadequate property is often very expensive, as is seen in the housing market and elsewhere, as in the UK’s curiously overpriced, poor-quality hotels. The building industry is perceived as an unattractive career choice, so that building skills are in short supply. There are official attempts to address the perceived inadequacies of the UK’s building industry,15 but so far without widespread success. In less deregulated, more social-democratic economies in Europe, the standard of the built environment is much higher, but the pressures are the same.

  IBM advertisement, Weekend Telegraph, 27 May 1966

  The predicament of building in advanced economies does seem to be relatively recent, dating from the early twentieth century. For example, considered as an artefact, the English vernacular house appears to have reached a kind of peak in the arts-and-crafts-influenced examples of the years between 1900 and the First World War. These houses were often more conscientiously put together than their Victorian predecessors, with improvements such as damp courses, but they were built by building tradesmen whose wages improved after the First World War,16 so that new middle-class houses became more expensive and less sophisticated, a trend that continues today. The predicament of surviving late Victorian and Edwardian public buildings – art galleries, museums, town halls and so on – suggests a similar subsequent decline in the affordability of building since the years before the First World War.

  A similar phenomenon is visible in central London. A balloon view of the area between the Strand and Battersea in 1851 shows a city with a physical form that has changed quite significantly since. In 1851, the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall still survived, and the expanse of elevated track that now dominates the landscape south of the river between Battersea and Waterloo Station was still comparatively narrow. On the opposite bank of the river stood the enormous Millbank Penitentiary. Brunel’s Hungerford suspension bridge connected the south bank to Hungerford Market, the future site of Charing Cross Station. At the north-east corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, there was a brewery.

  Balloon view of London seen from Hampstead, 1851 (detail)

  During the following decades, the railways extended to Charing Cross and Victoria Stations; the Victoria and Albert embankments were built, and the construction of Admiralty Arch, Charing Cross Road, Shaftesbury Avenue, Kingsway and the Aldwych all involved large-scale replacement of the previous fabric. By about 1910, however, this part of the city was recognisably the space it is today. Individual buildings have since been replaced (some with replicas), but it would appear that, at least in this part of London, a degree of stasis set in. Even in the City of London, where replacement of individual buildings is a continual process, the general form – the street layout, the scale of most of the buildings – is not radically different from that of circa 1910. London is much bigger than it was in 1910, but most of the fabric that existed then has not changed anything like as much as might have been expected early in the twentieth century. Much of inner London’s housing stock is older than that of other UK and European cities, so that many Londoners spend most of their time in spaces built and formerly inhabited by previous generations, and psychogeography, and Gombrowicz’s irony, suit the predicament of London very well.

  Although the onset of this relative stasis in city space, such as it is, appears to date from the period of early moving pictures, it seems unlikely that there is any very direct connection (as there might be with, for example, the survival and recycling of fashions in clothing). The proliferation of moving pictures is only one of many elements in a much wider technological and economic evolution that might have disadvantaged building. In any case, during the last few decades, moving pictures themselves have been subjected to exactly the same kind of pressure as urban space. The spread of electronic image formats has pushed up the relative cost of photo-chemically originated films distributed as 35mm prints; years of low-resolution video have softened up audiences’ expectations of picture quality; computer games and so on compete for cinema audiences’ spending; budgets rise, and cinemas themselves, empty or nearly empty for most of the day, appear increasingly unprofitable as real estate. On the other hand, the representation of urban space in films does seem to be a factor in the current scenarios of urban regeneration. Popular cinema is a conservative industry, so films are rarely a vehicle for the initial artistic ‘rediscovery’ of a place, but the sight of a familiar space in a film can momentarily banish the sense of marginality that haunts even the most central urban locations. This transformation is enabled by the combination of fiction and photogénie that characterises a successful film, and is very like the attraction that led audiences to queue up to see themselves on screen in the factory-gate and other local films that were exhibited at fairgrounds all over the north of England in the 1900s.

  The Surrealist sensitivity to urban space is perhaps most explicit in Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris, first published in 1926, the book to which Walter Benjamin refers as having inspired his Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century. Aragon’s first published writing, however, was the essay ‘On Décor’, which appeared in September 1918 in Louis Delluc’s Le Film, in which he wrote:

  To endow with a poetic value that which does not yet possess it, to wilfully restrict the field of vision so as to intensify expression: these are two properties that help make cinematic décor the adequate setting of modern beauty.17

  The desire for a poetic experience of ordinary, everyday phenomena was central to Surrealism and many other strands of modernism, from Baudelaire or even De Quincey onwards, but it was perhaps most readily achieved through photography and cinematography. It seems quite possible, therefore, that it was Aragon’s experience of the cinema – as he describes it in ‘On Décor’ – that led him to the Surrealist sensitivity to actual everyday surroundings explored in Le Paysan de Paris, a sensibility recalled by present-day writers’ and artists’ treatments of already-existing urban spaces.

  During the 1970s, the film–architecture relationship became a fashionable subject in architectural discourse. It seemed odd that it should have taken architects so long to develop a theoretical interest in cinema, but previous attempts were probably frustrated by the relative inaccessibility of film space as a research subject before the introduction of the video recorder. Critically significant architects such as Jean Nouvel and Bernard Tschumi have produced buildings informed by their readings of cinematic space, which seem to draw mainly on the idea of cinematic montage. In these, film space was considered as a model for architectural space, but more recently much of the discussion of film in architectural circles appears to have declined into an exploration of influences that the imageries of architecture and cinema exert on one another. The spaces of cinema are among those that Henri Lefebvre i
dentifies as representational spaces,18 and representational spaces exert an influence on architecture, but cinema is only one of many such sources among which literature, for instance, might be thought at least as important. The imagery of architecture, inevitably, influences the look of films, and the imagery of cinema might influence the look of architecture, though probably rather less than has sometimes been suggested; but such observations seem to miss the point, which is that what distinguishes film space more than anything else is the extent to which it is very unlike actual space as we experience it.

  In The Production of Space, Lefebvre writes:

  The idea of a new life is at once realistic and illusory – and hence neither true nor false. What is true is that the preconditions for a different life have already been created, and that that other life is thus on the cards. What is false is the assumption that being on the cards and being imminent are the same thing, that what is immediately possible is necessarily a world away from what is only a distant possibility, or even an impossibility. The fact is that the space which contains the realized preconditions of another life is the same one as prohibits what those preconditions make possible.

  In the spaces of cinema, ‘the realized preconditions of another life’ are made visible and, within the film, permanent. In everyday life, they might be glimpsed, but ultimately remain ephemeral.

  Lefebvre continues:

  The seeming limpidity of that space is therefore a delusion: it appears to make elucidation unnecessary, but in reality it urgently requires elucidation. A total revolution – material, economic, social, political, psychic, cultural, erotic, etc. – seems to be in the offing, as though already immanent to the present. To change life, however, we must first change space.19

  It seems unlikely that Lefebvre intended this statement to be read as a polemic for a radical physical transformation of the built environment but, equally, he is not referring to space merely as it is socially and politically constructed. A longed-for social reconstruction of already-existing spaces, however emancipating, would not overcome their physical shortcomings. Cinematic reconstruction of everyday space might suggest the possibility of its social and political reconstruction,20 but the materiality of architectural space remains, and appears increasingly problematic.

  In Part III of his Modern Architecture: A Critical History, published in 1980, Kenneth Frampton quotes Shadrach Woods, co-architect of the Free University in Berlin, writing in 1967:

  What are we waiting for? To read the news about a new armed attack with even more esoteric weapons, news which comes to us through the air captured by our marvellous transistorized instruments somewhere deep in our more and more savaged dwellings? Our weapons become more sophisticated; our houses more and more brutish. Is that the balance sheet for the richest civilisation since time began?

  Frampton follows this with another quotation, from Giancarlo de Carlo’s Legitimizing Architecture of 1968, which includes:

  At the same time, we have a right to ask ‘why’ housing should be as cheap as possible and not, for example, rather expensive; ‘why’ instead of making every effort to reduce it to minimum levels of surface, of thickness, of materials, we should not try to make it spacious, protected, isolated, comfortable, well equipped, rich in opportunities for privacy, communication, exchange, personal creativity. No one, in fact, can be satisfied by an answer which appeals to the scarcity of available resources, when we all know how much is spent on wars, on the construction of missiles and anti-ballistic systems, on moon projects, on research for the defoliation of forests inhabited by partisans and for the paralyzation of the demonstrators emerging from the ghettos, on hidden persuasion, on the invention of artificial needs, etc.21

  In the decades since, ‘marvellous transistorized instruments’ and similar devices have continued to proliferate. In advanced economies, reductions in the cost of consumer items, air travel and so on might suggest that nearly everyone has become wealthier since the late 1960s, but it is not difficult to argue otherwise. In 1997, a study by the UK’s New Economics Foundation concluded that an index of sustainable economic welfare in the UK had risen from 1950 until the mid 1970s, but between 1976 and 1996 had declined by 25 per cent, despite an increase in GDP per capita of 44 per cent.22 Increases in consumption had been offset by environmental damage, increased inequality and other factors.

  In retrospect, the 1970s appear increasingly intriguing, not least as the period during which computers and similar technology first became widespread for large-scale applications in industry and administration, and the personal computer was developed. Although often characterised as a decade of failure, economic stagnation and the slide into neoliberalism, in which the emancipatory promises of the 1960s signally failed to materialise, the 1970s were the period in which many aspects of our present economic reality were first put in place.23 We live now in a future, not as it was imagined in the 1960s, but as it was actually constructed during the 1970s. The early 1970s are also the period most often associated with the ‘shift in the structure of feeling’ that separates modernity from postmodernity, since when the coherent imagination of alternative ‘better’ futures has largely disappeared, so that while we might see ourselves living in a version of a previous period’s future, we have no such imagined future of our own.24

  The late 1960s and early 1970s were a relatively successful period for films made in the UK, so one might look in some of these for evidence of what, if anything, has changed. In the spaces of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), Joseph Losey’s Accident (1967), Lindsay Anderson’s If.… (1968), Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970) or even Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), there is a definite sense of the materiality of the period, which does seem rather luxurious when compared with that of today’s landscapes and artefacts, however abundant these may be. In If .…, for example, roads near Cheltenham are lined with enormous elm trees, long gone, and the town centre seems in much better physical condition than it is today, though the citizens of today’s Cheltenham are almost certainly more prosperous. It also seems extremely odd (in the era of penny-pinching private-sector prisons) that Kubrick should have imagined a near future in which a correctional facility might be represented by the pristine spaces of the nearly new Brunel University. Much of this feeling of material quality can be put down to the skills of cinematographers and art directors (and the manufacturers of filmstock), though these too have become scarce. An everyday landscape of 35mm cine colour images made by outstanding cinematographers25 compares very favourably with today’s space routinely represented in indifferent electronic imagery. Nonetheless, the experience offered by these and other films is extremely valuable. Moving pictures offer a number of possibilities to architecture – in representing spaces that do not yet exist, or as a model for new architecture and architectural theory – but as the medium ages, one wonders if perhaps it offers most as an approach to experiencing the spaces of other times. Architecture is increasingly seen as a process structured in time. In films, one can explore the spaces of the past, in order to better anticipate the spaces of the future.

  11

  Film as Spatial Critique

  Before films were distributed on video, it was difficult to explore their spaces unless one had access to specialised equipment – an ‘analytical’ projector or an editing table. The continual and often rapid succession of images that generally constitutes the experience of watching a film is not very conducive to accurate recollection, especially of anything peripheral to a narrative, and it is difficult to draw or make notes in the darkness of a cinema. Perhaps this is why, with a few significant exceptions, architects’ theoretical engagement with film was delayed until recent decades. With the introduction of domestic video recorders, and the refinement of the possibility to pause and search, cinema became more accessible for architectural exploration.1

  Since the 1970s, architects have explored cinema as a source of spatial concepts applicable to architectu
re, but the excitement that accompanied this discovery seems to have passed. In retrospect, it seems to me – as an architect diverted into making films – that film has a more general significance for architecture as a means of developing a critique, temporal and otherwise, of actual architectural and urban space. What initially attracted – and continues to attract – me to the medium is that it offers the possibility, albeit constrained, to experience non-existent spaces, and in particular to experience spatial qualities seldom, not yet, or no longer encountered in ordinary experience. These spaces may be non-existent either because they have not yet been produced, or because they no longer exist. ‘Spaces that have not yet been produced’ might exist physically, but not experientially or socially, while ‘spaces that no longer exist’ may still exist physically, but not socially, or they may no longer exist at all. Films can represent physically imaginary spaces, or proposals for spaces to be realised in the future, but for me the medium’s allure has always derived from its capacity to imaginatively transform already-existing space, and from the possibility it offers to experience spaces of the past to somewhat similar effect.