Figure C.1 ‘Man must travel’. Illustration of a section from the children’s book Adventure of the World by James Fisher 1954: the artwork for the book is attributed to Kempster and Evans, also known to have painted a mural for the Festival of Britain. William Kempster (1914–1976) was probably responsible for this image, as it rhymes with his pictures of 1930s aircraft in London’s Science Museum
Conclusion
One page in a now obscure children’s book of 1954, Adventure of the World, epitomises the excitement of modernity (Figure C.1).1 It shows the landscape of a modern town with distant hills behind, and boxy modernist buildings with generous areas of grass between. It is overrun with every possible kind of vehicle whizzing about: not only cars and trucks on highways, but suspended monorails, aeroplanes and helicopters. The thrill of speed and freedom is presented as the very epicentre of modern life. Consciously or unconsciously, the artists, Kempster and Evans,2 leading illustrators who had been involved in the Festival of Britain, were drawing on ideas from CIAM and the Charter of Athens, particularly the division of the city by four functions and the obsession with sunlight and air,3 but perhaps inspiration came also from science-fiction films such as Metropolis and The Shape of Things to Come. If so, the sanitised view presented to the child lacks the sinister, dystopian moments of those films. A glorious future is depicted, with the new world of gadgets and the relatively new freedom of driving at unrestricted speed on empty roads, or flashing across the landscape in a clean electric train, personal flight still a promise. There seems no limit to economic growth, no end to resources, no oil crisis and certainly no ‘spaceship-earth’. Everest had just been conquered, parts of the globe were still being explored, but the hills and dales punctuated by cottages and steeples continued their cosy existence. The homely landscape of ‘on foot’ was taken for granted, and the walking of short distances remained as essential as it was banal.
Not until 20 years later was Bauen als Umweltzerstörung published by the Swiss architect Rolf Keller (Figure C.2). This picture book for architects was inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and its title translates as Building as Pollution.4 Keller fulminated against the destruction of the Swiss landscape, criticising not only the imposition of the motorways, but also suburban sprawl and the growth of non-places. In a determined swipe against orthodox modern architecture, he showed how the same housing models were being adopted worldwide, and buildings for different functions were all becoming the same. Page after page of before and after showed how places once attractive had been desecrated, buildings always replaced by something worse. For this wake-up call, he naturally selected the worst cases, but the point was well made and reflected widespread experience, coinciding with a wave of conservation, of pleas for a return to ‘meaning in architecture’, and doubts about modernism.5 All the same, a growing population had to be housed, better communications were needed for economic growth, health and hygiene had to be improved, and there had to be economies of scale. For numerous reasons, modernist ways of doing things had become inevitable, but they did not have to be done so hastily, blindly, and with such complete priority given to technical and economic imperatives.
Figure C.2 Cover of Bauen als Umweltzerztörung by Rolf Keller, 1973, an architect’s response to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
Functional efficiency and circulation
Movement everywhere in these decades shifted from foot to vehicles, which was seen at first as a liberation. Post-war schools and hospitals were built at the edges of towns on greenfield sites, because there was space to spread out, land was cheaper, and there was the pleasure of a fresh start. In the hospital’s case, quick accessibility by vehicle was helped by its being placed on the ring road. It also suited architects infatuated with the modern movement to be given a tabula rasa on which to compose their sculptural objects, in the manner of Mies or Le Corbusier.6 It is telling that, in the booklet of over 100 pages called Hospital Description, published in 1968 by the King’s Fund to portray an exemplary modernist hospital,7 there was almost nothing about context: no map showing relation to the town to which it belonged, no discussion of how to approach it on foot. The aerial photo shows the small, free car park half empty, today’s parking problems unforeseen. The discussion of movements inside the building is highly selective, great emphasis being placed on the way the ‘running-track’ ward layout allowed maximum surveillance from nurses’ stations. Clean thresholds to germ-free areas such as operating theatres were a high priority, and elaborate flow diagrams show clean equipment being separated from dirty in the basement, but there is almost no discussion of the experience of movement for patients and visitors, nor of way-finding as an issue. The report has little to say on the relative positions and hierarchy of departments, not noticing the sharing of the lowest ward floor between psychiatry and gynaecology, for example, nor justifying the chapel on the roof being shared as doctors’ lecture theatre, a displacement of religion by science.8 Nor is the decision to put the mortuary in the most distant basement explained. Servicing was the primary aim, delivery of patients being treated like delivery of heating, hot water, electricity or medical gases.
Powell and Moya’s Wycombe General was actually well planned for movement and progression (Figure C.3). The drive swept up to an obvious front door, leading to a double-height foyer with generous reception area and gallery to the next floor, and the way to the inevitable lifts was clear and direct. Although lifts always bring the difficulty of suppressing the sense of vertical progression, the architects did create landing spaces on each level with windows on to the outside world, to let visitors reorientate themselves.9 With its relatively narrow plan, the building allowed frequent views out and daylight (Figure C.4). There was a generous staffroom on the ground floor and a spectacular stair down to the staff canteen. However, in the lengthy Hospital Description, these virtues went undiscussed, so that, in the hospital’s presentation as a model, they could have been, and probably were, missed.
Figure C.3 Photograph of the new Wycombe General Hospital by Powell and Moya, published in The Hospital Description, Gainsborough 1968
The treatment of circulation as plumbing was widespread and is even more evident in one of the most prestigious hospitals of the period, the extension of King Edward VII by Yorke Rosenberg and Mardall, sited opposite the Houses of Parliament in London and completed in 1966 (Figure C.5). Here, the stacking of floors and central placing of ducts with lifts made for efficient servicing, but the logical counterpart of giving views to patients at the edge was that all else, including teaching and consulting rooms, had to be internal. Corridors became labyrinthine. One would arrive by lift in an artificially lit and ventilated interior, deprived of all natural sense of direction and dependent on signs. There would be several blind, right-angle turns. This was a brand new building, again by ‘good architects’, uncompromised by the alterations and compromises that make most British hospitals even more confusing, but, for that reason, it lays bare the 1960s blind spot. In large and complex buildings, we probably cannot do without signs and numbered rooms, but they do not replace the sense of progression given by the building itself, which is all the more needed in a building that people visit just a few times, as patient or visitor, rather than every day. We need to retain our natural sense of progression just to feel the assurance of being able to retrace our steps, let alone the confidence of finding the place again on the next visit. In recent years, Roger Ulrich in the United States has conducted systematic psychological studies of way-finding in hospitals, showing that people’s confusion wastes endless staff time in redirection, so that bad planning for the experience of movement is inefficient as well as generating increased anxiety among patients, and this disadvantage can be costed.10
Figure C.5 Plan of King Edward VII Hospital extension, 1966, by Yorke Rosenberg and Mardall
Source: redrawn by Diego Carrasco after a published plan in Thompson and Goldin 1975
This criticism does not apply to hospitals alone. One of the largest and most famous mixed developments in 1960s London, the Barbican by Chamberlin Powell and Bon, is equally guilty. No expense was spared, and its architecture was celebrated as visually exciting, but innocent visitors arrived to find blind corners, lack of hierarchy, difficulties in knowing where they were and which way to go. The main pedestrian deck is so confusing that guidelines in yellow paint have had to be added (Figure C.6). Even within the cultural centre, the proliferation of levels and directions is hard to fathom, but look at the floor plans and there is geometric clarity (Figure C.7). One can imagine that the architects, familiar from the start with the order of their plans, recognised without difficulty where they were in the finished building and so failed to appreciate the problem for other people. One problem was the loss of the old street pattern and clear connections at the edges, for the redevelopment’s planning logic ignored the city’s pattern to follow the grid of the drawing board, the architect’s rational world, which answered claims of standardisation and dimensional coordination. The T-square produces architects’ space, criticised mercilessly by Henri Lefebvre as taking over from space as understood by people in everyday life.11 The architects look down on their plans from above in a godlike manner, but the inhabitants are denied that privilege: they just scuttle around at street level trying to find their way.
Figure C.6 The Barbican, London: painted yellow line as Ariadne’s thread
Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones