The City of the Future

 

Patrick Keiller

THE CITY OF THE FUTURE

 

[an extract]

The Surrealist sensitivity to urban space is perhaps most explicit in Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris, first published in 1926, the book to which Walter Benjamin refers as having inspired his Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century. Aragon’s first published writing, however, was the essay ‘On Décor’, which appeared in September 1918 in Louis Delluc’s Le Film, in which he wrote:

To endow with a poetic value that which does not yet possess it, to wilfully restrict the field of vision so as to intensify expression: these are two properties that help make cinematic décor the adequate setting of modern beauty.

The desire for poetic experience of ordinary, everyday phenomena was central to Surrealism and many other strands of modernism, from Baudelaire or even de Quincey onwards, but it was perhaps most readily achieved through photography and cinematography. It seems quite possible, therefore, that it was Aragon’s experience of the cinema – as he describes it in ‘On Décor’ – that led him to the Surrealist sensitivity to actual everyday surroundings explored in Le Paysan de Paris, a sensibility recalled by present-day writers’ and artists’ treatments of already-existing urban spaces.

During the 1970s, the film-architecture relationship became a fashionable subject in architectural discourse. It seemed odd that it should have taken architects so long to develop a theoretical interest in cinema, but previous attempts were probably frustrated by the relative inaccessibility of film space as a research subject before the introduction of the video recorder. Critically significant architects such as Jean Nouvel and Bernard Tschumi have produced buildings informed by their readings of cinematic space, which seem to draw mainly on the idea of cinematic montage. In these, film space was considered as a model for architectural space, but more recently much of the discussion of film in architectural circles appears to have declined into an exploration of influences that the imageries of architecture and cinema exert on one another. The spaces of cinema are among those that Henri Lefebvre identifies as representational spaces, and representational spaces exert an influence on architecture, but cinema is only one of many such sources among which literature, for instance, might be thought at least as important. The imagery of architecture, inevitably, influences the look of films, and the imagery of cinema might influence the look of architecture, though probably rather less than has sometimes been suggested; but such observations seem to miss the point, which is that what distinguishes film space more than anything else is the extent to which it is very unlike actual space as we experience it.

In The Production of Space, Lefebvre writes:

The idea of a new life is at once realistic and illusory – and hence neither true nor false. What is true is that the preconditions for a different life have already been created, and that that other life is thus on the cards. What is false is the assumption that being on the cards and being imminent are the same thing, that what is immediately possible is necessarily a world way from what is only a distant possibility, or even an impossibility. The fact is that the space which contains the realized preconditions of another life is the same one as prohibits what those preconditions make possible.

In the spaces of cinema, ‘the realized preconditions of another life’ are made visible and, within the film, permanent. In everyday life, they might be glimpsed, but ultimately remain ephemeral.

Lefebvre continues:

The seeming limpidity of that space is therefore a delusion: it appears to make elucidation unnecessary, but in reality it urgently requires elucidation. A total revolution – material, economic, social, political, psychic, cultural, erotic, etc. – seems to be in the offing, as though already immanent to the present. To change life, however, we must first change space.

It seems unlikely that Lefebvre intended this statement to be read as a polemic for a radical physical transformation of the built environment but, equally, he is not referring to space merely as it is socially and politically constructed. A longed-for social reconstruction of already-existing spaces, however emancipating, would not overcome their physical shortcomings. Cinematic reconstruction of everyday space might suggest the possibility of its social and political reconstruction, but the materiality of architectural space remains, and appears increasingly problematic.

In Part III of his Modern Architecture, a Critical History, published in 1980, Kenneth Frampton quotes Shadrach Woods, co-architect of the Free University in Berlin, writing in 1967:

What are we waiting for? To read the news about a new armed attack with even more esoteric weapons, news which comes to us through the air captured b our marvellous transistorized instruments somewhere deep in our more and more savaged dwellings? Our weapons become more sophisticated; our houses more and more brutish. Is that the balance sheet for the richest civilisation since time began?

Frampton follows this with another quotation, from Giancarlo de Carlo’s Legitimizing Architecture of 1968, which includes:

At the same time, w have a right to ask ‘why’ housing should be as cheap as possible and not, for example, rather expensive; ‘why’ instead of making every effort to reduce it to minimum levels of surface, of thickness, of materials, we should not try to make it spacious, protected, isolated, comfortable, well equipped, rich in opportunities for privacy, communication, exchange, personal creativity. No one, in fact, can be satisfied by an answer which appeals to the scarcity of available resources, when we all know how much is spent on wars, on the construction of missiles and anti-ballistic systems, on moon projects, on research for the defoliation of forests inhabited by partisans and for the paralyzation of the demonstrators emerging from the ghettos, on hidden persuasion, on the invention of artificial needs, etc

In the decades since, ‘marvellous transistorized instruments’ and similar devices have continued to proliferate. In advanced economies, reductions in the cost of consumer items, air travel and so on might suggest that nearly everyone has become wealthier since the late 1960s, but it is not difficult to argue otherwise. In 1997, a study by the UK’s New Economics foundation concluded that an index of sustainable economic welfare in the UK had risen from 1950 until the mid 1970s, but between 1976 and 1996 had declined by 25 per cent, despite an increase in GDP per capita of 44 per cent. Increases in consumption had been offset by environmental damage, increased inequality and other factors,

In retrospect, the 1970s appear increasingly intriguing, not least as the period during which computers and similar technology first became widespread for large-scale applications in industry and administration, and the personal computer was developed. Although often characterised as a decade of failure, economic stagnation and the slide into neoliberalism, in which the emancipatory promises of the 1960s signally failed to materialise, the 1970s were the period in which many aspects of our present economic reality were first put in place. We live now in a future, not as it was imagined in the 1960s, but as it was actually constructed during the 1970s. The early 1970s are also the period most often associated with the ‘shift in the structure of feeling’ that separates modernity from postmodernity, since when the coherent imagination of alternative ‘better’ futures has largely disappeared, so that while we might see ourselves living in a version of a previous period’s future, we have no such imagined future of our own.

The late 1960s and early 1970s were a relatively successful period for films in the UK, so one might look in some of these for evidence of what, if anything, has changed. In the spaces of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), Joseph Losey’s Accident (1967), Lindsay Anderson’s If…. (1968), Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970) or even Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), there is a definite sense of the materiality of the period, which does seem rather luxurious when compared with that of today’s landscapes and artefacts, however abundant these may be. In If …, for example, roads near Cheltenham are lined with enormous elm trees, long gone, and the town centre seems in much better physical condition than it is today, though the citizens of today’s Cheltenham are almost certainly more prosperous. It also seems extremely odd (in the era of penny-pinching private-sector prisons) that Kubrick should have imagined a near future in which a correctional facility might be represented by the pristine spaces of the nearly new Brunel University. Much of this feeling of material quality can be put down to the skills of cinematographers and art directors (and the manufacturers of filmstock), though these too have become scarce. An everyday landscape of 35mm cine colour images made by outstanding cinematographers compares very favourably with today’s space routinely represented in indifferent electronic imagery. Nonetheless, the experience offered by these and other films is extremely valuable. Moving pictures offer a number of possibilities to architecture – in representing spaces that do not yet exist, or as a model for new architecture and architectural theory – but as the medium ages, one wonders if perhaps it offers most as an approach to experiencing the spaces of other ties. Architecture is increasingly seen as a process structured in time. In films, one can explore the spaces of the past, in order to better anticipate the spaces of the future.

 

 

Originally published in: Patrick Keiller, The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes. (London, New York: Verso, 2013; pp 141-145).

With thanks to Verso.

 

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