travelling at eighty miles an hour via stretched angular forms and lurid colours. In his book on the subject,6 Alan Hess places the style in direct opposition to the high-art Modernism of Mies van der Rohe and his disciples, the classicist glass-skyscraper school that became the spatial lingua franca of even the most conformist parts of American capital. What’s interesting here is that in the American context, where Modernism was not as associated with social democracy or state socialism as it was in Europe, the debate was purely aesthetic. While the opponents of ‘Googie’ accused it of being crass and commercial, Mies’s Seagram Building was given tinted windows the colour of the client’s brand of whisky. While its outrageous geometrical illusions and structural expressionism were being criticized as mere dressing-up, Mies’s towers ‘expressed’ their structure by entirely decorative I-beams.
So in essence, the debate between classical and pulp Modernism in the US was one of taste. On the one hand there was the luxury aesthetic of the wing of the bourgeoisie that aspired to finer things: New York’s successful attempt in the 1950s to wrest from Paris the accolade of world fine-art capital, with some CIA assistance. In order for this to occur it had to set itself against a more straightforward capitalist hucksterism. In fact, with their deliberate defiance of the rules of gravity and geometry, their brashness and lack of formal precedent, Googie buildings were more true to the original Modernist impulse—futurists or constructivists would have recognized themselves in commercial designers such as Armet & Davis, or in the architecture of McDonalds, Denny’s and Big Boy, more than in Mies van der Rohe, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Seagram or Lever. It’s also a reminder that the idea of Modernism as ‘paternalist’ imposition on the benighted proletariat, upon which Postmodernism based much of its self-justification, makes sense only if we begin with an extremely limited definition of Modernism. Principally, one that was restricted to the International Style, itself a pernicious legacy of the Museum of Modern Art’s dual depoliticization and classicization of Modernist architecture for American consumption. The Modernism that made it to New York was missing both the crass, neon-lit commercialism of the Berlin department stores and cinemas and the socialist fervour of the ‘New Building’, an anti-architecture for a new society.
It was not, of course, commercial Modernism which was critiqued by Postmodernists, but it can be seen in retrospect as the mediator between postmodernist theory and pseudomodernist practice. The work of Frank Gehry was, from the early 1980s, an adaptation of Googie’s Pulp Modernism for the purposes of architecture as art. The style of which he was one of the leading lights, which was termed Deconstructivism by the mid 1980s (in reference to its grounding both in Jacques Derrida’s philosophy and Russian Constructivist form) actually continued many of the formal strategies of the roadside architecture of the 1950s. These architects—Daniel Libeskind among them—were notable both for ignoring the postmodernist imperative to genuflect before neoclassicism, baroque and the traditional street, and for a vocabulary of the non-orthogonal, the exaggerated and the audaciously engineered that owed more to LA diners than it did to the Bauhaus. This style has been applied in the last decade principally for the purposes of museums, galleries and self-contained theme park-like environments such as Gehry’s Experience Music Project in Seattle, or Nigel Coates’s National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield. Chin-Tao Wu’s Privatising Culture lists a few of those that were erected in Britain around the turn of the millennium: ‘you can experience … a simulated journey into space at the National Space Science Centre in Leicester, find out about geological evolution at the Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh, have fun and learn about science at “@Bristol” in Bristol, or get hands-on experience of the steel industry at the “Making it! Discovery Centre” in Mansfield.’7 In terms of their combined Disneyfication and intensification of the city’s museum culture, these are deeply postmodernist buildings, regardless of their form.
St Paul’s Visitor Centre, Make Architects
The influence of Googie in contemporary urbanism is largely unacknowledged, but it is, I would argue, key to understanding exactly why the ‘signature’ wing of pseudomodernist architecture takes the form it does. Seemingly paradoxically, it aligns itself very closely with the heritage zones of the old capitals. Across the road from St Paul’s Cathedral is a tourist information pavilion by Make architects, the group established by Ken Shuttleworth, job architect on Norman Foster’s Gherkin. In its improbable geometry, its jagged zigzag showing zero interest in the expression of function or good taste, it could easily be selling donuts in 1950s Anaheim. There is by now a large amount of architecture like this, serving most often as a key component of urban regeneration strategies. Buildings for living in are more often done in a mild, asymmetrically patterned form of Scandinavian Modernism, while buildings for culture are allowed to make somewhat wilder gestures. This process can be seen in various buildings for the creative industries in Britain, with their logo-like names: Urbis in Manchester, The Public in West Bromwich, FACT in Liverpool. Its most extensive expression is not, however, in the UK, with its remaining vestiges of representative democracy, but in the oligarchies of Russia, China and the United Arab Emirates. Abu Dhabi, for instance, has set aside a district solely for ‘iconic’ cultural buildings by Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster and Jean Nouvel (who has designed a branch of the Louvre). Barry Lord, the (English) ‘cultural consultant’ for this zone, notes that ‘cultural tourists are older, wealthier, more educated, and they spend more. From an economic point of view, this makes sense’.8 No doubt this applies equally well in theory to West Bromwich or Salford.
Much of this architecture has in common with Googie the reduction of the building to a logo, to an instantly memorable image: one that is appreciated in movement, as from a passing car, while quickly walking through an art gallery or museum on the way to the gift shop; or indeed while shopping, as with Future Systems and Rem Koolhaas’s work for Selfridges and Prada in Birmingham and New York, respectively. Although it may accompany exhibitions of art or simulations of war, it is not an architecture of contemplation but of distraction and speed. Yet it also continues the moralistic rhetoric of postwar Modernism, without any of the actual social uses—local authority housing, comprehensive schools, general hospitals—to which it was originally put. The new Modernism, like the new social democratic parties, is one emptied of all intent to actually improve the living conditions of the majority. Instead, the social use of the pseudo-modernist building, forever groping for the Bilbao effect, appears in a rather Victorian manner to be the uplifting of the spirit via interactive exhibits and installations.
Nobody ever suggested that roadside diners had hyperbolic paraboloid roofs in order to make us better people or induce us to ‘aspire’, let alone to simulate the experience of war or the Holocaust. Nonetheless, the formal links between Googie and today’s apparently radical architecture does suggest a truth at its heart—its forbears are in the aesthetics of consumption and advertising, in forms designed to be seen at great speed, not in serene contemplation. It should not surprise us that a style of consumption would return under neoliberalism, but the formal affinities of Pseudomodernism with this aesthetic offers an alternative explanation for what often seems an arbitrary play of forms. By drawing on the futurism of the McCarthy era, the architecture of the equally conformist neoliberal consensus establishes a link between two eras of political stagnation and technological acceleration. It also allows us to reinterpret what purports to be an aesthetic of edification as one of consumption. In the computer-aided creation of futuristic form, today’s architects are producing enormous logos, and this is only appropriate. The architecture once described as deconstructivist owes less to Derrida than it does to McDonalds.
In (Partial) Praise of Urban Britain
The ‘Urban Renaissance’ is key to all this, and irrespective of its courting of suburbia, New Labour was very much an urban party. Its bases remained in ex-industrial cities, and its hierarchy was drawn from North London, Greater Manchester and Edinburgh. The Tories, irrespective of their capture of the Greater London Authority, are essentially an outer-suburban and rural party, so it will be instructive to find
