Crimes of the Fifties

Many years ago, I talked with a friend in eastern Europe about their endless sprawl of tall, identical brick apartment buildings, stretching for mile after depressing mile. “Ah, yes” she said. “We have an expression: We call them ‘the crimes of the Fifties’”. In their part of the world, Trushchoby is Russian for “slums”. After the war, vast ugly housing projects taking the place of war-ravaged rubble sprang up. Cynical Muscovites mockingly dubbed them khrushchoby—the “Khrushchev slums.”

Filmmakers with dystopian futuristic stories often don’t build outdoor sets; they just use existing modern architecture. James Lileks knew why: it’s because the buildings had brutalism and conformity woven into their design DNA, right from the beginning.

The original vision of 20^th century progressives was Garden Cities, two story apartment buildings in the suburbs with plenty of landscaping. Left wing documentary filmmakers of the late Thirties contrasted city slums with the healthier life outside of town.

Imagine a faded, black and white family photo from the early Fifties, taken in the streets, complete with brick walls, faded graffiti, and corrugated metal trash cans. I’m from the south Bronx, the part they demolished in 1956 to build an expressway. We ended up only a few miles away, across the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, but it might as well have been another dimension: old private houses, quiet streets, trees.

Other families, my parents’ friends from the old neighborhood, gratefully took the city’s offer of one of the new apartments and universally regretted it later. I often heard my relatives say, in varying words, “Thank God we didn’t end up in the damn projects.”

“The damn projects.” You could probably have heard it in most of the cities of the world.

Cabrini Green is a notorious example of big city good intentions gone big-time wrong. Most of the people who moved there in the late Forties or early Fifties felt they were a huge improvement on old Chicago’s decrepit walkups; but as more and more people were packed in, opinions changed radically. When the first units went up during the war, they weren’t as overwhelmingly large as the project would become in the Fifties, when the politicians, construction unions, local vote-seekers and mobsters “induced” Chicago to pack many more, much taller apartment buildings, on to what was now a crowded, charmless piece of land.

Finally, in a surrender to reality that would have disheartened Chicago city planners of the Fifties, Cabrini Green was demolished, literally blown to smithereens to the loud cheers of the people who were supposed to have benefited from it.

Of course we can’t blame all that on the architects. They shrugged and gave their clients the buildings they were willing to pay for. Some social problems were especially acute in Chicago: Welfare policies, black migration from the South during and after the War, the subsequent collapse of black family formation, and an unprecedented crime wave turned Cabrini Green into a nightmarish no-go zone. But Chicago was far from unique: Paris has long had versions of its own, and so has Amsterdam.

Le Corbusier, aka Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, was a Swiss-French architect who is key to understanding what happened to housing projects. “Corbu” (The Raven) was very influential in twentieth-century modern architecture. Le Corbusier’s most copied prewar idea was the “tower in a park” style of apartment design. Until then, really tall buildings were for offices, not homes.

Old time city apartments were often over stores or restaurants. Now everything would be a bus or train ride away. It’s now associated with some of the world’s dreariest housing developments. To be fair, overuse and misuse of the style wasn’t Corbu’s fault. To others, though, modern architecture for apartment houses was merely artistic license to cram ‘em in. It fit a political agenda.

Corbu was a frustrated utopian from way back. He lost the 1927 contest to design a headquarters for the League of Nations, and for the rest of his life he never stopped grousing about it. Later, in the design of the United Nations headquarters, he was only one voice among several other world-famous architects, and he wasn’t the one entrusted with building the design. In fairness to the UN, he had relatively little experience supervising very large-scale construction, and none in the US. This prompted a line from his biographer: “In short, in this instance Corbu showed himself to be that most regrettable of social creatures, the sore loser.” True. He acted like a jilted would-be lover, someone who had a dream about success in America that hadn’t worked out, personally or politically.

Some powerful people try something radically different in their old age. Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. Tony Bennett sang with Lady Gaga. Chrysler’s Virgil Exner bailed on tailfins. Le Corbusier, the modernist supreme, suddenly made flashy gestures towards abandoning machine age design. The extraordinarily talented old snob modified some hallowed aspects of 20^th century modernism as he and others had practiced it up until then, softening them and making them less inhuman. The basics hadn’t changed; the roofs were still flat, but now each had the artistic presentation of a sculpture garden, a futuristic or otherworldly look. He tried to make “developments” more palatable.

The building’s visible surfaces, in Corbu’s youth as close to geometrically flat and white as he could make them, were now “brut” concrete, where the rough, unrefined surfaces retain the impression of the wooden forms that molded them. It gave a name to a movement—brutalism. The new style became for a time nearly as influential as the ruler-straight cold European modernism that preceded it.

An afterward, after the Wall came down. With German efficiency, the new post-Communist government after reunification set about destroying some of the worst of the Stalin-era flats, while making an enormous, part-successful, part-tragicomic attempt to dress up east Berlin’s acres and acres of faceless identical apartment buildings, because regrettably they were indispensable for the time being. Some results of millions of Marks and Euros of remodeling, eccentric design, and vivid paint are remarkably good. Give them credit for that.

Others still look like, well, crimes of the Fifties.