Book Read Free

The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories

Page 21

by Edward Hollis


  And then the drawing was set into practice. The scenery of Louis XIV’s baroque sanctuary was pried away, and behind it was revealed a ring of pointed Gothic arches that matched those of the nave. Viollet ordered his workmen to scrape away all the eighteenth-century whitewash, and soon walls that had appeared to be made of nothing more substantial than painted pasteboard took on the weight and the integrity of stone.

  Viollet prepared another drawing, presenting the west front of Notre Dame as he imagined it had been before the revolutionaries had destroyed its statuary. Then he set his masons to work to restore to their original habitations all the disappeared inhabitants of that great city of God, from the angels and the saints to the vilest of the gargoyles. The west front became once more an image of the medieval universe itself, “that divine creation,” as Hugo wrote, “whose twin characteristics of variety and eternity it seems to have purloined.”

  Viollet’s most difficult problem, however, was what to do with the flying buttresses and the tall clerestory windows of the nave. These had not been part of the original conception of bishop de Sully, so they presented Viollet with a choice. He could remove all traces of any later, lighter design, restoring the cathedral to the state intended by Sully. Alternatively, he could leave the buttresses intact and repair the building in its altered form.

  Viollet chose neither option. Instead, he adopted an ingenious strategy: he invented a design that combined, for practical and archaeological advantages, the various different states of the cathedral from its long course of construction. He retained the thirteenth-century improvements—the arcs boutants and tall clerestories—around the entire nave and apse except for the areas around the crossing. In the bays that adjoined the crossing he reinstated Sully’s original scheme, with large expanses of solid wall pierced by small windows. The bays rebuilt according to Sully’s design were symmetrically disposed around the center of the cathedral, lending it both literal and visual strength, drawing the building together toward its heart. Above the crossing, Viollet replaced the spire that had been torn down in the revolution, further reinforcing the symmetry of the composition and further suggesting that the building was complete and whole, a virgin.

  NOTRE DAME HAD never been whole before. There never had been an original, completed state to which it could be restored. The Notre Dame that Viollet-le-Duc finished in 1864 was an attempt to fix a moving target in time, and archaeologists and historians still lament the restoration as they attempt to untangle the story of the cathedral. Despite his best efforts, Viollet’s work was less an operation of historical science than a romantic fiction, an allegory, a manifesto that destroyed as much as it preserved.

  Of this, Viollet himself was quite aware. “The term restoration and the thing itself are both modern,” he wrote. “To restore a building is not to preserve it, to repair, or rebuild it; it is to reinstate it in a condition of completeness that could never have existed at any given time.”

  John Ruskin, the celebrated English art critic, was appalled, describing restoration as “a destruction accompanied by the false description of the thing destroyed.” If Notre Dame was the work of centuries, there was no particular scientific reason to strip away the contribution of the eighteenth century, say, rather than any other. Removing those layers that former ages had deemed necessary to add to a building was a violation of their trust in posterity. And restoring the things that had been taken away was also a crime, for it falsely pretended to resurrect the obsolete societies that had originally made them. As Ruskin’s disciple William Morris commented, “Surely it is a curious thing that we are ready to laugh at the idea of the possibility of the Greek workman turning out a Gothic building, or a Gothic workman turning out a Greek one, but we see nothing preposterous in the Victorian workman producing a Gothic one.”

  Ruskin proposed a much more radical strategy. Do nothing, he said, or rather do as little as possible. “Watch an old building with an anxious care; guard it as best you may, and at any cost, from every influence of dilapidation . . . bind it together with iron where it loosens; stay it with timber where it declines; do not care about the unsightliness of the aid.” Morris was even more radical: “If it has become inconvenient for its present use . . . raise another building rather than alter or enlarge the old one.”

  “We understand the rigour of these principles,” Viollet retorted, “and we accept them completely: but only when we are dealing with a curious ruin, without a future or an actual use.” Notre Dame de Paris was no curious ruin, but the chief temple of the most advanced nation on earth. She had been desecrated amid the disasters of the revolution, those years of tumult that divided the ancient from the modern regime; and just as it had proved necessary to restore the monarchy, so was it necessary to restore the seat of its religious authority.

  But just as the restored monarchy (and then the Second Empire) was nothing like the ancien régime, so the restored Notre Dame was no copy of the original. It was a very nineteenth-century romance, a manifesto of the modern rather than the medieval era. “Gothic construction . . . is supple, free, and as enquiring as the modern spirit,” Viollet had written, and he pressed the architects of his own day to be as inventive as the masons of Notre Dame.

  To Viollet, Gothic architecture was modern architecture: he prophesied buildings whose luminosity and thinness would rival the stained-glass filigree of the clerestories of Notre Dame, whose rigorous structural logic would be inspired by the vaults and the flying buttresses of medieval masons. His Notre Dame de Paris was every bit as typical of the Paris of the nineteenth century as the Galeries Lafayette and the engineered glass roofs of the Gare d’Orsay.

  It is ironic that some of the Communards chose to vent their fury on the cathedral in 1871. If they required a monument to reason and progress and all the rest of it, they only had to look around them at the vaults and buttresses of Notre Dame.

  The Hulme Crescents, Manchester

  In Which the Prophecies of the Future Are Fulfilled

  REMEMBER TOMORROW

  Fake magazine cover created by Joshua Bolchover and Shumon Basar

  for an exhibition about the Hulme Crescents in 2004.

  PROPHECY

  Lord Byron wished that the dilettanti and the scholars of his time would leave the Parthenon to die alone. Now his wish is coming true. The building is melting into air, and all the restoration and conservation in the world can only postpone its disappearance.

  Restoration was, as Viollet-le-Duc pointed out, an entirely modern approach to old buildings. It was founded in a consciousness that the past, having been detached from the present by historic upheaval, was a legitimate object of disinterested study. The generation of architects who succeeded Viollet (and saw him as a prophet of modernity) turned his methods back to front: they wrote histories of what was still to come, documenting the future with the same rigor that their nineteenth-century forebears had devoted to the investigations of bygone days. It was as if Thomas Cole’s architect, reclining on his column, had turned away from the monuments of Egypt, Greece, and Rome to dream instead about splendors yet to be built.

  In the timeless dream of the architect, all ages appear simultaneous before him; but in the waking world, each generation supplants the ones before it, only to be supplanted by others in turn. The realization of the avant-garde utopias of modernism involved the destruction of everything that had preceded them; yet soon these new worlds became old themselves, ready to be devoured by other visions.

  The Hulme* Crescents in Manchester were just such a utopia once, the fulfillment of modernist prophecy; and alone among all the buildings in this book, they have now passed away. Today they are just memories, preserved behind screens of liquid crystal. Logging on to scattered Web sites, the Crescents’ former residents swap stories about what the future was like, once upon a time.

  *Pronounced hume.

  Hello, good evening, and welcome to Hulme, Manchester, Great Britain! It is my immense honour to say to all you slum dwel
lers: your prayers have been answered. Welcome to Paradiiiiise!

  IT’S MARCH 1993, and it certainly doesn’t look like paradise. Peering into darkness, the video camera finds no purchase in the light that flickers over burning grass. A hooded procession emerges from the flames, and the lens zooms in on a vacant face crudely daubed in black and white, animated, if by anything at all, only by a mixture of pity and contempt. A strangled cry pierces the night as a solitary muffled drum beats out a doleful march.

  Then the solemn scene explodes into flashing strobes and thrashing music, and the slum dwellers of the Hulme Crescents burst into dance. Searchlights bring a vast building into focus: sliding flashes of stained concrete, glittering shards of glass, and dully gleaming security fences. A white sheet has been hung across the front of this building, stretching from the roof to the ground, and at the top of this shroud a small group of people is struggling with some unwieldy object.

  One by one the searchlights move into position; the beat intensifies, and so does the roar of the crowd. The spectral figures gather at the parapet and briefly hold still. Then they all move in concert, pushing their burden—a small white car—to the edge of the roof. It teeters there for a moment, and then the concrete parapet shatters. The car falls past the screen, so slowly that it might be sinking in water. The crowd roars and rushes forward, the mob submerging the wreck under their bodies. They scarcely notice the explosions in the air above them.

  IT WASN’T MEANT to happen that way. No one could have predicted it back in 1971, when the Crescents were first opened and everybody gathered at the Zion center for tea. Then it was as though some wonderful revelation had been delivered, on time, on budget, and looking fantastic. The Manchester Evening News ran an article titled “A Mini Town with All Mod Cons.” It hailed the “complex of overways, underways, and linkways . . . houses with central heating and double glazed windows” as a self-contained “quiet refuge,” complete with their own “walks, shops and a library.”

  There were four crescents, each half a mile long, set amid a vast open park. Each crescent was seven stories tall, with hundreds of flats, all of them designed to the latest ergonomic space standards and all of them accessed by open decks that overlooked acres of greenery. The designers of the Crescents, Hugh Wilson and Lewis Womersley, had named each of the four buildings for a great British architect—William Kent, Robert Adam, John Nash, and Charles Barry—and Wilson and Womersley clearly hoped to join their august company. “It is our endeavour at Hulme,” they announced, “to achieve a solution to the problems of twentieth-century living which would be the equivalent in quality of that reached for the requirements of eighteenth-century living in Bloomsbury and Bath.” It was a bold claim: the smart Georgian terraces of Bloomsbury and Bath were a long way from working-class Hulme. But in 1971 anything seemed possible.

  THE CRESCENTS HAD been a long time in coming; but the future always is, isn’t it? It had been more than a hundred years since a young German businessman named Friedrich Engels first arrived in Manchester. His father had sent him to that white-hot crucible of the industrial revolution hoping that a good dose of work at the family mill would make the young man abandon his naive idealism; but Engels junior loathed his new job, and it did nothing to moderate his radical views. He took up with a certain Mary Burns, who brought him to all the parts of Manchester that weren’t on his father’s itinerary. Engels was so horrified that he published a book describing what he saw. The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 painted a vivid picture.

  In a rather deep hole, in a curve of the Medlock and surrounded on all sides by tall factories and high embankments covered with buildings, stand two groups of about two hundred cottages, built chiefly back to back, in which live about four thousand human beings . . . Masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen factory chimneys . . . In this atmosphere penned in as if with a purpose, this race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity.

  Engels left the city and his father’s job soon afterward and ran away with Mary Burns to Paris, where he met Karl Marx. In 1848, as revolutions swept across Europe, they published The Communist Manifesto, in which they demanded, among other things:

  Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

  A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

  Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

  Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

  Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

  Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

  Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

  Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.

  By 1971 many of these demands had been met. If you required a monument to Marx and Engels, all you had to do was go to Hulme. All property belonged to the City Corporation of Manchester, and everyone drew their state benefits from the state-owned post office. No one inherited anything; they had nothing to pass on, and even if they had it would have gone to taxes. People traveled into town on the state-run public transport system, the unions and corporations formed industrial armies, and comprehensive education was available to all children. The Hulme Crescents, gigantic concrete buildings in a sea of greenery, even completed the “gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country.”

  THE NEW ORDER that Marx and Engels predicted was a utopia of sorts, but they didn’t expect that the fulfillment of their vision would come about peacefully. “Communists know only too well,” they wrote, “that the development of the proletariat in nearly all civilized countries has been violently suppressed . . . If the oppressed proletariat is finally driven to revolution, then we communists will defend the interests of the proletarians with deeds as we now defend them with words.”

  And the communists weren’t the only ones who believed that the world needed a strong push in the right direction. Indeed, calls for a violent upheaval became the standard leitmotif of modernist manifestos all across Europe—and not just in the field of politics. One crazy night in 1909, a group of young men who called themselves the Futurists sat up in their flat, writing down anything that came into their heads. They were in backward Italy, and they were bored. What had horrified Engels at first hand intoxicated them at a distance. They might as well have been dreaming of Manchester.

  We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

  And after they’d had enough of whatever they were having, they went out and totaled a sports car in a ditch. Standing amid the wreckage, covered in oil, they issued their manifesto. It involved the total vandalism and destruction of the past.

  We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! . . . Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossibl
e? . . . Come on! Set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums! . . . Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded! . . . Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!

  A quarter of a century later, pickaxes and hammers were exactly what the city fathers of Manchester decided would be best for Hulme. They weren’t motivated by their love of “the polyphonic tides of revolution”; in fact, the city fathers decided to obliterate Hulme precisely because they were afraid of an uprising. “In spite of disease and death and tottering houses,” the Manchester Guardian had reported, “the population has been compelled since the [1918] armistice to huddle into the area in even greater numbers than ever.” Such a huddled mass of humanity was all too liable to turn into one of the great crowds the Futurists had described, excited, if not by work or pleasure, then by riot.

  So the city fathers bought the whole of Hulme, lock, stock, and barrel. They relocated all the slum dwellers out to brick cottages in the suburbs, softening the blow by calling the houses “homes for heroes.” Then they flattened the entire district, leaving an empty wasteland behind. The old high street became nothing more than a dusty path through the yellowed summer grass. No one had any idea what to do with it.

 

‹ Prev