Terry Farrell with Liam Gillick, Home Office
Many former postmodernists are now pseudomodernists. The most notable is Sir Terry Farrell, designer of a multitude of quintessentially Thatcherite buildings in the 1980s, from Charing Cross station to MI6. His most pseudomodernist work is the new Home Office building, appropriately a PFI scheme, the first for a government building. With its combination of Weimar Republic curves and De Stijl patterns with eager-to-please colour—which here is provided, as per the Blairite fetish for the ‘creative industries’, by the artist Liam Gillick—it provides a calm, ostentatiously friendly face for the most illiberal administration in the history of British democracy. Nonetheless, the Home Office is merely an example of this idiom in its more domestically scaled version. Unlike most of its contemporaries, it does not aim to be that most essential of twenty-first-century architectural aspirations: an icon. The icon is now the dominant paradigm in architecture to such an extent that at least four different buildings erected in the last few years—one in Hull by Terry Farrell, one in London at Canary Wharf, another in Glasgow, plus an ‘Icona’ near the Olympic site in Stratford—have opted for some variant on the very name ‘Icon’, although they range in use from nondescript blocks of flats to an aquarium.
A prospective image of London’s ‘Olympic Skyline’ in 2012 released in the mid 2000s showed an entire skyline of competing icons. The skyscrapers announced under Ken Livingstone’s tenure as mayor of London—named, in a manner Charles Jencks would appreciate, after gherkins, cheese-graters, walkie-talkies, helter-skelters, a shard—make none of the eclectic gestures and mashings together of different historical styles that characterized postmodernist architecture in developments like Broadgate and the original Canary Wharf. Stone has mostly been replaced by glass. Yet one thing that survives from Postmodernism is the conception of the building as a sign, and here as an easily understandable, instantly grasped sign, strongly opposed to the formal rigours and typological complexities of ‘high’ Modernism, especially its Brutalist variant. While it’s possible that the original Gherkin received its nickname spontaneously, there’s little doubt that the other towers, all announced around the same time, had a ready-made little moniker designed to immediately endear them to the general public, in order to present them as something other than the aesthetic tuning of stacked trading floors. Accordingly, by being instantly recognizable for their kinship with a household object, they would aim to become both logo and icon. Perhaps they might eventually become what Jencks describes as ‘failed icons’, more Millennium Dome than Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim; although always trying for the status of the latter, whose success in bringing well-heeled tourism to the Basque port has made it into a boosterist cliché, whereby the ‘Bilbao effect’ transforms a mundane city into a cultural capital, replacing unionized factory work or unemployment with insecure service industry jobs.
The other major change from the suburbanism of the Thatcher and Reagan version of neoliberalism is a new focus on the cities, something which is usually encapsulated by the under-investigated word ‘regeneration’. Indeed, any form of building in an urban area is usually accompanied by this term. The vaguely religious air is appropriate, as it often accompanies a fundamentally theological conception of architecture, where by standing in proximity to an outstanding architectural work, the spirit is uplifted, and the non-orthogonal geometry and hyperbolic paraboloids purport, for instance, to represent the experience of war through the disorientation they induce.
Daniel Libeskind, buildings for London Metropolitan University
An appropriate English example is Salford Quays, where the Docks of Greater Manchester were transformed into a combination of cultural centre and a development of luxury apartments, neatly combining both elements of Pseudomodernism. Two of the architects who most exemplify these ideas are represented there or nearby. There is Daniel Libeskind, whose tendency towards memorializing piety is so pronounced that he was described by Martin Filler as a ‘human Yahrzeit candle’. His Imperial War Museum North, with its sloping ceilings and a form which apparently represents a world divided, is supposed to formally incarnate the experience of war. Meanwhile, not far away in central Salford is a bridge by Santiago Calatrava, who is the infrastructural embodiment of Pseudomodernism, his structures seemingly always placed in areas that are busy being transformed from proletarian spaces of work or habitation to ‘regenerated’ areas of bourgeois colonization. These transformations of space are, it should be remembered, fundamentally different in their social consequences to the superficially similar ‘comprehensive redevelopment’ of the postwar period. Once, a slum clearance scheme would involve the slum-dweller being rehoused by the state in something which was, more often than not, superior in terms of space, security of tenure, and hygiene, irrespective of the decades of criticism these schemes have been subjected to. Now that this sort of naïve paternalism is absent, the slums are cleared so that the middle classes can settle in them, something usually excused with a rhetoric of ‘social mixing’, dismantling what had become ‘ghettoes’. The many schemes where sixties council towers have been replaced with PFI blocks are to urban planning what Pseudomodernism is to architecture.
That is, the Modernism of the icon, of the city academies where each fundamentally alike yet bespoke design embodies a vacuous aspirationalism; a Modernism without the politics, without the utopianism, or without any conception of the polis; a Modernism that conceals rather than reveals its functions; Modernism as a shell. This return of Modernist good taste in the New Labour version of neoliberalism has turned architectural Postmodernism, rather surprisingly, into a vanishing mediator. The keystones, references, in-jokes and alleged ‘fun’ of eighties and nineties corporate architecture now evoke neoliberalism’s most naked phase, the period when it didn’t dress itself up in social concern. In the passage from Norman Tebbit to Caroline Flint, the aesthetic of social Darwinism has become cooler, more tasteful, less ostentatiously crass and reactionary, matching the rhetoric.
Service Stations, Service Industry
However, it can be seen that the Pseudomodern takes many of its fundamental ideas, if not its stylistic tropes, from Postmodernism. At this point, we will take a historical detour. Postmodernist architecture was most intelligently formulated by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour in their 1972 book Learning From Las Vegas. This focused, via a critique of a caricatured corporate Modernism, on the alleged inability of Modernist architecture to communicate adequately with its users. In response, they privileged first of all, signage—the advertising signs of roadside architecture—and secondly, formal references to earlier, most often classical styles of architecture as a means of providing an architecture outside of the ‘dumb box’, as they described it. Charles Jencks’s Language of Postmodern Architecture, meanwhile, turned to full-blown neoclassicism, with an accompanying narrative of Modernist hubris, where the dynamiting of one of the US’s rare forays into social housing in St Louis became the precise date for the ‘death’ of Modernism. One element of Venturi’s argument was, regardless of their protestations, a Modernist one—a call for an architectural montage of neon signs and jarring formal clashes. Their praise for the chaos of signage that made up Vegas is, in essence, not vastly different to the rhetoric of the Russian Constructivists, whose work was motivated by what historian Kestutis Paul Zygas calls a ‘component fixation’; where designs were always presented with affixed billboards, posters, slogans, transmitters and tramlines, as if to plug them into the city’s dynamism. Much of the architecture and signage they describe was itself in a kind of Pulp Modernist idiom. Specifically, a 1950s style usually called ‘Googie’ to distinguish it from the apparently more rigorous Modernism of the International Style.
Googie was usually used to draw attention to burger bars, car washes, coffee shops—the name comes from one such, designed by John Lautner. It was an architecture that adapted itself to suburban sprawl and the sheer speed of the freeway by providing dynamic forms which
