Berthold Lubetkin has been up since 8:00 a.m. being interviewed by the local radio station and, later, a television company. The BBC came round yesterday. The Sundays are due tomorrow.
This audience is purely a matter of chance, he informs me, shuffling painfully on crutches to his chair: I had simply been the first of an “avalanche” of calls from the architectural press on the announcement of his Gold Medal, awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects.
“I told the others I was in Barbados,” he confides with a twinkle in his eye.
He is weary and not a little disdainful of his dramatically revived popularity. Old colleagues have suddenly rung to renew acquaintances that lapsed more than thirty years ago. Lubetkin withdrew from architecture in the 1950s because he foresaw its demise into the kind of fashionable merry-go-round of which my very presence is a symptom. He regards the belated accolade as paradoxical.
“On the one hand I am very grateful, but on the other I am very surprised. It seems to me that what is now being done in architecture, and in art in general, is hysterical irrationality, which is diametrically opposed to what our architecture purported to be. Therefore, to grant the medal in these circumstances for something which is so out-of-date is puzzling.”
A couple of things temper his skepticism. He was encouraged to discover a party of students had travelled from London recently, to meet him at the exhibition of his work with Tecton at Oxford’s Museum of Modern Art. “I was amazed to find how many young people are enthusiastic about the whole thing and wish to pursue the rational. I thought it was mummified.”
Besides this glimmer of hope, he looks forward to the Gold Medal address in June—“if I am still alive”—which promises an opportunity “to be sting-y, satirical, though I mustn’t be too rude.”
He quickly dispenses with most of my intended questions: “the modern tendency toward biography” is not something he supports. “After the war, I went to Auschwitz, and there was a road as white as the paper you are writing on. White with the bones of people. That shows how unimportant biography is. One should be interested in architecture, not architects.”
It is a conversation heavy with despair, gloomy as the cluttered Clifton room in which he passes the hours writing his memoirs in dedication to his late wife and reading philosophy. György Lukács’s book Goethe and His Age lies between us, next to a Rubik’s Cube and this week’s New Statesman.
Eyes cloudy with disillusion and poor health, chin on hands on wooden stick, he explains in a firm, authoritative voice why he gave up architecture. There are many reasons, he says, but to put it briefly: “I was disappointed with the development of modern architecture as I understood it and practised it. To me, and incidentally to my partners—I’m concerned that it’s a bit egocentric—speaking collectively of the partners, we imagined the new architecture as a sort of symbol, a metaphor of the new world. I abandoned architecture because it had lost its line. It was the harbinger of a better world and it turned out to be like . . . miniskirts.”
Coming to England in 1931 from France, “where everything was sleepy,” Lubetkin perceived the resentment for all the unfulfilled Homes for Heroes promises following World War One. “People were appalled. After the sacrifices—having their guts and lungs hung on the barbed wire . . .” He detected a swell of feeling for change, especially among the working class. “That was what was so inspiring: searching for new ways and new roads to it. But don’t make any mistake,” he raises a finger, “I was never a member of the Communist Party.” The mid-1930s was the period of greatest change, he recalls. Since then “things have settled into a sort of routine; the world as it is now is in a tragic state.”
Fundamental to this malaise, Lubetkin is convinced, is the universal abandonment of reason, evidenced in the lack of interest in theory. “If any theory was available, then there would be some hope of putting it into practice. It is a fact that we have no theory of modern architecture.” Empiricism, as a theory, “has a grip on this nation,” which, though progressive in the days of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, Lubetkin now believes to be “regressive.”
The recurrent theme of our conversation is this ubiquitous tendency in art and architecture toward “irrationalism.”
“People attack reason because reason leads to understanding and understanding leads to change. Plenty of people have a vested interest in what there is, for one reason or another, and don’t want to recognize the supremacy of reason, which dictates and organises. They want to give chaos a favorable interpretation. Even modern science is being used simply to bamboozle us, which is an extraordinary affair.”
Lubetkin thinks the socioeconomic situation today is “very much more severe” than his heyday in the 1930s, with which there are many parallels. “The decay has gone so far that it is hard to mobilise any hope. Look at the atomic question. There is no doubt about it: we are all going to be pulverised in Europe. People don’t think, or don’t want to think. It’s the same for architecture. Some prefer things as they are now because the effort to change is so big and complicated. Change is no longer a question of preference. It is a question of survival. You have to espouse reason and not, as Hitler said, ‘think with blood.’ People don’t want a reasonable architecture because, as I said before, reason is the enemy.”
He remains steadfast in his convictions about what architecture is. “The instant emotional impact, lyricism of . . . [appassionato] WHITE sharp-edged geometric regularity. Geometry is so precious because it gets rid of ephemerals, of whims.”
He despises “the domination of the arbitrary. An artist who just does something because he says ‘I like it’ is not a creator but a consumer. He is consuming his own work.”
Lubetkin cites examples of this rampant decadence: “The ICA exhibiting used nappies; artists filling tins with human excrement; buildings wrapped in WC pipes—I think we know which building we’re talking about”—excesses which have ceased even to rouse most people’s indignation.
Why then has the ordered discipline of modern architecture been so spurned and colour and decoration resurrected? Lubetkin regards this as “simply a manifestation of the tendency which we have talked about. That’s why you have Venturiism, or whatever he’s called, apparently building houses from tea chests and filling them with concrete. And those supermarkets with a wall designed to lean, or a missing corner, or you have to jump through a window or God-knows-what, provided it is all unreasonable. They are not architects. They are clowns.” His contempt for the degeneration of modern architecture is such that when he and his wife went on driving holidays through Europe, they planned routes and often undertook huge detours to avoid known examples.
A second phone call interrupts, from a Parisian trying to get the Oxford show across the Channel. One of Lubetkin’s remarks singes the airwaves: “Ce n’est pas le post-modernisme. C’est le Stalinisme.”
It is impossible to fix the discussion on architecture past or present. Never a member of RIBA or ARCUK (Architects’ Registration Council of the UK), he spent almost the last thirty years farming in Gloucestershire and swears he hasn’t read an architectural publication for nearly twenty. “I can tell you about stock breeding, pig breeding, various diseases, but to tell you exactly what an architect can do requires knowledge of the circumstances under which it works.”
Still, he admits he views the growth of bureaucracy as a parallel evil to irrationality. “When we started, I was one of the main advocates of town planning regulations to give some control over appearances, neighbourliness. Now we’ve got it, I don’t like it.”
In an effort to tie the subject down to something more manageable than life itself, I rattle off some unambiguous questions. Of Peterlee, he gets as far as saying it was “one of the biggest tragedies of my practice” before he remembers some earlier matter unconcluded, and returns to it. Often, instead of speaking, he selects from his autobiographical papers some trenchant, telling extract. I cannot help thinking of the impassioned letter he wrote to Dr. Monica Felton, chairman of the Peterlee Development Corporation, in July 1943:
I have the unfashionable conviction that the proper concern of architecture is more than self-display. It is a thesis, a declaration, a statement of the social aims of the age. Its compelling geometrical regularities affirm man’s hope to understand, to explain and to control his surroundings. By thus asserting itself against subjectivity and equivocation, it discloses a universal purposeful order and clarity in what often appears to be a mental wilderness . . . It can be a potent weapon, a committed driving force on the side of enlightenment, aiming, however indirectly, at the transformation of our present make-believe society, where images outstrip reality and rewards outpace achievement.
What, if anything, does he think of the Peter Palumbo/Mies van der Rohe proposal? “It’s a financial matter, that’s all. The City’s been so buggered up anyway. The issue is, of course, the society which allows such defacing of the landscape.” Does the fact that it is a Mies building make any difference? “I don’t think so. I’m not an admirer of Mies.”
Who, then, does he admire? This question unleashes a torrent of enthusiasm.
“I’m still very fond of early Corbusier. His original thoughts, not necessarily the buildings. Garches, Citrohan, certainly not that fungus, Ronchamp. The bold way they sat in the landscape without the bother of that preacher—Frank Lloyd Wright. The straightforward affirmation of the independence of the building from outside, like ships on the sea. That is, after all, what inspired Whipsnade. They are just put in, each of those buildings, as a statement.
“The Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau was a revelation, just opposite where I was working on the Russian pavilion [translating Konstantin Melnikov’s design]. It produced a vision of what life directed by reason and sensibility could be. He exorcises in his early work all the irrationalisms, comes as near as possible to functionalism, in what he was saying if not in his buildings. He was reflecting certain necessities he was intellectually convinced about.
“But there was a built-in contradiction: he was talking about techniques and function but in reality he was aware this was not enough. He was advocating the physical, but he welcomed the sun on his roofs. Although he didn’t acknowledge that lyricism in his writing, it was there because he was a damn good architect. The organic unity of the physical and the spiritual, which is the secret of existence, is lost. That’s what’s wrong with architecture today.”
What can be done to redeem it? Is it any longer possible to “build socialistically”?
“We not only can, but must. Otherwise we will drown in the juice of publicity-sniffing. The only weapon at our disposal is classicism; cool repose and grandeur of eloquence without gesticulation and emotional crisis and hysteria.” He points out that Dadaism and derivative nihilistic art forms have only been subverted by the very establishment—“which landed us in this horrible mess”—against which they were intended as a protest. “You have to be as cool as you possibly can, because that’s the only enemy which the establishment can’t stick.”
A vein of stoic cynicism relieves the general despondency. “When I am asked about the future, I always remember Bertolt Brecht saying: ‘If you see a light at the end of the tunnel, jump aside: it’s the express train coming in the opposite direction.’ My dear, I am sorry to say I am very pessimistic about our survival, let alone about architecture. To the point where I am writing all these things and I know they are going to be cinders. But that is the privilege of being more than eighty years old.”
I leave him to his work, my copy of Lubetkin and Tecton: Architecture and Social Commitment (the catalogue of the recent Arts Council touring exhibition) now inscribed with a quotation from the dying Emperor Vespasian: Ut puto deus fio—“I believe I am becoming a god.”