Conclusion

Ugliness and Its Consequences

The history of aesthetic judgment and its social valuation, spanning three centuries as it is reconstructed through the particulars of the historical episodes in the preceding chapters, can help establish a different perspective on the architectural events of the contemporary moment, even as the significance of those events will change and refract as their consequences unfold over time. Consider, for example, two events that shared a week in June 2017, both of which seemed to underscore the distance between the aesthetic dimension of architecture and the urgencies of social existence, and both of which have their connections to the fitful debate on ugliness reconstructed in this book. The first event was the listing of the Isle of Dogs Water Pumping Station designed by John Outram Associates. (Figure 69) Built in the late 1980s, this building was one of three pumping stations installed to manage rainwater runoff in the Isle of Dogs, a regeneration project covering some five thousand acres of former docklands in east London. While the development project was, at the insistence of the Thatcher government, privately financed and built, below-ground infrastructure was the responsibility of the public sector. The pumping stations, though above ground, could be fit reasonably enough into the category of infrastructure that the chief architect of the Docklands Development Corporation (DCC) was able not only to build them with public financing, but commissioned leading architects for the designs.¹

A simple shed in essence, the small structure contains nothing more glamorous than pumping equipment, intended to operate unmanned, and yet it is a decisively dramatic building, a shed willfully transformed into a temple. Two oversize columns with exaggerated and colorful capitals flank a small industrial door; above the door a large, and functioning, exhaust fan hangs below a shallow pediment faced with corrugated metal; deep eaves with projecting and again colorfully painted rafter tails supported by pilasters and brick buttresses complete the arrangement. This playful classicism, familiar within the broader movement of historicist postmodernism, was typical of Outram’s work. The Temple of Storms, as the architect called it, was brought forward for consideration for listing because it exemplified this aesthetic tendency, the refashioning of classical referents in modern materials and for modern purposes with a sense of experimentation curtailed by a desire to remain within what was often capriciously defined as an architectural tradition. That the building was utilitarian, and public, certainly added to its retrospective attraction, for it was not to be associated with the personal whimsy that often exposed private commissions in this stylistic vein to strong criticism; it could be placed within the lineage of Victorian metropolitan infrastructures rather than in the lineage of bank buildings and corporate headquarters. The listing happened at a moment of favorable distance, when sufficient disciplinary curiosity existed toward a postmodernism retrospectively viewed as an important theoretical turn to temper rehearsals of the vitriolic arguments of the 1980s in which a polychromatic and allusionistic design such as the pumping station would have been deemed ugly by at least one side of critics. Instead, the building could be regarded as an important example of its historical moment and an important surviving work by Outram, sufficient grounds for listing in the absence of debate over aesthetic value, or more precisely, in the absence of debate over how aesthetic value connects to social value.

The Isle of Dogs Water Pumping Station received its Grade II* listing on June 19, five days after another architectural event of a very different nature, the Grenfell Tower fire of June 14. A high-rise council housing block in northwest London, the Grenfell Tower caught fire at its lower floors and was rapidly consumed by a blaze that spread up the exterior cladding of the building, causing the deaths of approximately eighty residents. The charred hulk with blackened scars that traced the rise of the fire could be seen the next day and in the days that followed, not only from the neighboring streets but in pictures distributed across Britain and around the world; it was the image of architectural ugliness. (Figure 70) The ugliness of the ruin, the ugliness of the stain of combustion and soot, but much more than that, here was ugliness of the most visceral sort, the ugly consequence of inequity, of rapacity, and, above all, of institutional indifference. Because following the fire, once the accidental cause was known but before official inquests and inquiries had been initiated, a constellation of contributing factors came into view, bearing upon governmental housing policies, the financing and oversight of maintenance in the public sector, the existence and nonexistence of certain construction and safety regulations, and the unquiet coexistence of highly differentiated housing markets in London.

Grenfell Tower was built in 1974 for the Kensington and Chelsea Council (the same council that had hosted the architectural confrontations at Chelsea Hospital and Chelsea Barracks). Designed by Clifford Wearden and Associates, a private firm commissioned by the council, the tower was constructed in concrete, for columns and slabs as well as for its exterior panels. Gray and spare in its outward appearance, with the vertical line of external columns used to compensate for the squatness of proportion, the tower fit the tendencies of late modern housing blocks in Britain of the early 1970s and certainly also fit within the conceptions of ugliness brandished by the aesthetic criticism directed at late modernism at that time. In 2012, the council announced a regeneration plan to upgrade the mechanical services in the tower, replace the existing windows with double glazing, and install an insulated aluminum cladding on the exterior surfaces. This cladding, attached to the concrete structure of the building, was intended to improve thermal performance, but it was also suggested that it would “improve the external appearance of the building.”² It consisted of aluminum panels sandwiched on a polyethylene core, set in place over a thermal insulation bonded to the concrete; elements of this cladding system were combustible, and caused the rapid spread of fire up the exterior of the tower. The new aluminum cladding was thus a central cause of the disaster, responsible certainly for the magnitude and speed of the fire. The scale of the tragedy was exacerbated by deficiencies such as the lack of a second stair for egress and the lack of sprinkler systems—the latter could have been retrofitted in the renovation—and these causes were in turn attached to other failings, systemic and institutional, in the inadequacies of building codes and fire safety requirements, the parsimoniousness of the council and its privately contracted management firms, and the fecklessness of national oversight and foresight in regard to public housing.³

This then is now the ugliness of the Grenfell Tower, an ugliness of the most grotesque degree. And it is this ugliness of social failure and the preventable deaths resulting from it that begs the question as to whether the aesthetic register of architecture is something that ought to be given much attention at all. Taken together as coincidental companions in time, the Isle of Dogs Pumping Station and Grenfell Tower seem to underscore the distance between the aesthetic and the social dimensions of architecture, seem to suggest that if a civic aesthetics exists, it exists at a remove sufficient enough that it can be listed for preservation as a historical relic. Ought the aesthetic capacity of architecture—and discussion of that aesthetic capacity—be understood now as an irrelevance or a luxury, and architectural ugliness as the capricious squandering even of that luxury? I hope that the historical episodes in this book, and my accounting of them, have suggested the possibility of a different perspective. After all, both of these architectural events of June 2017 bear the legacy of John Wood’s initiation of speculations upon a civic aesthetics in the early eighteenth century. Both would be legible under the conceptual framework of improvement that he and his contemporaries employed, with the “regeneration” of Grenfell Tower intended to repair the perceived disorder of the existing building with a new, precisely machined facade, successor to Wood’s precisely cut stones; and the ornate temple of the pumping station a clear echo of Wood’s imagining of a noble temple to stand above the ordinary coal pit beside the Bristol road. These are resonances only, with different outcomes in the tangency of architecture and social circumstance; but such resonances suggest the possible recognition of ugliness as a malleable conjunction of the aesthetic and the social, with the former contributing to the instruments of the latter.

The argument of this book, in distilled form, is that the judgment of ugliness signals the participation of architecture in a social circumstance in which resolution is not achieved by aesthetic means; instead, the aesthetic dimension of architecture, precisely because of its insufficiency, is transferred into other instruments of social consequence. Ugliness, therefore, is the judgment of an irresolution and an insufficiency, but additionally is the instantiation of that insufficiency into social technologies, into concrete processes, customs, and institutions. Such instruments of social consequence include, in the historical episodes explored here, legal mechanisms like the formulation of laws of libel to shape the cultural role of criticism, and the development of statutory regimes and new interpretations of nuisance law to manage the economic and physical effects of industrialization; they also include institutional concepts such as the reasonable man or the profession, and the recalibration of those concepts to answer unresolved social transformations in the modern city. The settings in which such instruments gained efficacy ranged across distinct realms of the social production of knowledge, from the laboratory to the club, from committee rooms to courtrooms, and to the social institutions that these entities embody such as the public, the state, or the law; they also include settings that seek to exist slightly apart from the more consolidated, interwoven elements of the social sphere, settings such as the ecclesiastical court or the monarchy, in which new, perhaps anachronistic formulations are either echoes of a past possibility or premonitions of a future one.⁴

Assembled together, these elements do not trace a history of ugliness as such, nor do they render a systematic philosophical account of the aesthetics of ugliness. By gathering up the myriad synonyms, symptoms, and cognates of ugliness into an inquiry into episodes of aesthetic judgment, the history presented here offers a view of the instrumentality of those judgments in the emergence or development of social technologies in Great Britain. This inquiry into the judgment of ugliness attempts to modify the relevance of two primary categories, style and taste, that often signal the relegation or detachment of aesthetic judgment rather than its instrumental participation in social debates; and to see these entrenched categories not as conclusive in themselves but as only the most rudimentary of lenses through which to gain a perspective on judgments of ugliness. Style and taste appear throughout both parts of this book, with style more present in the first part, focused on the materiality of architecture, and taste more present in the second, focused on the personae of architecture. In the chapters of Part I, the recurring theme of stone, with concrete as a modern corollary in the case of brutalism, draws a relation between broad currencies of style and the empirical reality of materials. In the chapters of Part II, the recurring theme of taste draws a relation between the designations of individual or collective opinion and the structures and processes that impersonally define personhood. Both of these displacements, of style into empiricism and taste into impersonality, should suggest the way in which judgments about ugliness in particular are seen to be movements or transactions between an aesthetic register and other social dimensions. In each chapter of the book, architecture—as objects and as discourse—plays a role as a site and as a catalyst for debate on a broader social circumstance of change or conflict: pollution and coexistence in London, for example, or the delineation of English norms of privacy and publicity, or the constitutional standing of the British monarchy. These contested circumstances are negotiated through instruments such as nuisance law, libel law, or constitutional convention, which are modified into novel forms, taking on new capacities as social technologies of diagnosis, regulation, or anticipation. But within these capacities remains the influence of aesthetic judgment, which, though more often assumed to exist at a remove from such social realities, cannot readily be separated from other modes of judgment employed in each episode. Specifically, it is the judgment of ugliness that precipitates this process of architecture’s participation, because the judgment of ugliness (in the various implicit and explicit forms encountered through these episodes) signals friction, incompatibility, excess, or insufficiency as well as the immediate proximity of aesthetic concern to social materials.

The consequences in these cases, distributed across centuries, are cumulative evidence of the influence of aesthetic judgment rather than its detachment, and of the participation of architecture in the civic realm, though not in the conventional manner. Throughout the book, the deliberate use of history (rather than philosophy, or connoisseurial opinion, or other approaches to aesthetic matters) is an attempt to show the judgment of ugliness to be proximate to the constellation of social realities of processes, customs, and institutions; to demonstrate the ways in which debates about architectural ugliness do not conclude in buildings themselves, nor in judgments about buildings as such, but move laterally, migrating into the sponsorship of other social techniques in other spheres of civil society. By recognizing that ugliness has a determinate proximity to various manifestations of social reality—materiality, legality, cost, liability, and so on—it becomes possible to see that though the effect of ugliness may be aesthetic, its consequences can occur in the multiple registers of this social reality. But, crucially, ugliness is not, in the episodes explored in this book, a resolution of the circumstances in which it emerges; it is, rather, an accommodation of those circumstances, a persistence within them that is transferred to and prompts consequences in adjacent registers of social debate. Architectural ugliness can thus be understood not just as an aesthetic quality but as a manifestation of uncertainty, or better, as an event that brings into view, momentarily at least, the horizon that distinguishes the possibilities and impossibilities of a given historical moment.