the progressive state on both sides of the Cold War divide was unusually active.
The post-World War Two combination of demographic growth and rapid urbanization placed unprecedented demands upon urban planners. In Eastern Europe, where many urban centers had been destroyed or half abandoned by the end of the war, twenty million people moved from the countryside into towns and cities in the first two post-war decades. In Lithuania by 1970 half the population lived in towns; twenty years before the figure had been just 28 percent. In Yugoslavia, where the agricultural population declined by 50 percent between the liberation and 1970, there was a great surge of migration from the countryside to the cities: between 1948 and 1970 the Croatian capital, Zagreb, doubled in size, from 280,000 inhabitants to 566,000; likewise the national capital, Belgrade, which grew from 368,000 to 746,000.
Bucharest grew from 886,000 to 1,475,000 between 1950 and 1970. In Sofia the number of inhabitants rose from 435,000 to 877,000. In the USSR, where the urban population overtook the rural one in 1961, Minsk— the capital of the Belorussian Republic—went from 509,000 in 1959 to 907,000 just twelve years later. The result in all these cities, from Berlin to Stalingrad, was the classic Soviet-era housing solution: mile upon mile of identical gray or brown cement blocks; cheap, poorly-constructed, with no distinguishing architectural features and lacking any aesthetic indulgence (or public facilities).
Where the inner city had survived undamaged (as in Prague), or had been carefully rebuilt from old plans (Warsaw, Leningrad), most of the new building took place on the edge of the city, forming a long string of suburban dormitories reaching into the countryside. Elsewhere—in the Slovak capital Bratislava, for example—the new slums were erected in the very heart of the town. As for smaller towns and rural villages, constrained to absorb the tens of thousands of former peasants now recycled as miners or steelworkers, they had nothing to preserve and were transformed, virtually overnight, into industrial dormitories, lacking even the grace of a remnant of an old town. Collective farm workers were forced into agro-towns, pioneered in the 1950s by Nikita Khrushchev and later perfected by Nicolae Ceausescu. Such new public architecture as there was—Technical School, Culture House, Party offices—was carefully modeled on the Soviet precedent: sometimes consciously Socialist Realist, always oversize, rarely attractive.
Forced industrialization, rural collectivization and an aggressive disdain for private needs help explain the calamity of Communist town planning. But Western European city fathers did not do much better. In Mediterranean Europe especially, the mass migration from countryside to cities placed comparable strains on urban resources. Greater Athens grew from 1,389,000 people in 1951 to 2,540,000 in 1971. Milan’s population rose from 1,260,000 to 1,724,000 in the same period; Barcelona’s from 1,280,000 to 1,785,000. In all these places, as in smaller towns across northern Italy and in the rapidly expanding outer suburbs of London, Paris, Madrid and elsewhere, planners could not keep up with demand. Like their contemporaries in Communist city offices, their instinct was to construct large blocks of homogenous housing—either on space cleared by war and urban renewal, or else on green-field sites at the edges of cities. In Milan and Barcelona in particular, where the first generation of migrants from the south began moving from shanty towns into high-rise apartments in the course of the 1960s, the result was depressingly reminiscent of the Soviet bloc—but with the additional handicap that many would-be tenants could not afford to rent anywhere near their place of work. They were thus forced into long daily journeys on inadequate public transport—or else in their newly-acquired cars, further straining the urban infrastructure.
But the distinctive ugliness of urban architecture in Western Europe in these years cannot be attributed to demographic pressures alone. The ‘New Brutalism’ (as it was dubbed by the architectural critic Rayner Banham) was not an accident or oversight. In West Germany, where many of the country’s major cities were rebuilt with a breathtaking lack of imagination and vision; or in London—where the Architect’s Department of the London County Council authorized mass housing projects like the aggressively linear, windswept, Le Corbusier-inspired Alton estate in Roehampton—ugliness appeared almost deliberate, the product of careful design. Milan’s awful Torre Velasco, a reinforced concrete skyscraper built between 1957 and 1960 by a private Anglo-Italian consortium, was typical of the aggressive hyper-modernism of the age, in which the point was to break all attachments to the past. When, in March 1959, the Council of Buildings of France approved the design for the future Tour Montparnasse, their report concluded: ‘Paris cannot afford to lose herself in her past. In the years to come, Paris must undergo imposing metamorphoses.’
The result was not just the Tour Montparnasse (or its natural child, the hideous complex of buildings at La Defense) but a rash of new towns: ultra-high density, multiple housing block-units (
This break with the past was deliberate. The European ‘style’ so much admired in other spheres of life was here nowhere in evidence. Indeed, it was consciously and carefully eschewed. The architecture of the 1950s and, especially, the 1960s was self-consciously ahistorical; it broke with the past in design, in scale and in materials (steel, glass and reinforced concrete being much the most favoured).[154] The result was not necessarily any more imaginative than what had gone before: on the contrary, the ‘urban redevelopment’ schemes that transformed the face of so many European towns in these decades were a colossal missed opportunity.
In Britain as elsewhere, urban ‘planning’ was at best tactical, a patch-up: no long-term strategies were worked out to integrate housing, services, jobs or leisure (hardly any of the new towns and housing complexes had cinemas, much less sports facilities or adequate public transport).[155] The goal was to clear urban slums and accommodate growing populations, quickly and cheaply: between 1964 and 1974, 384 tower blocks were thrown up in London alone. Many of these would be abandoned within twenty years. One of the most egregious, ‘Ronan Point’ in London’s East End, actually had the good taste to fall down of its own accord in 1968.
Public architecture fared little better. The Pompidou Center (a 1960s design, though not opened until January 1977)—like the Halles complex to its west—may have brought an assortment of popular cultural resources to central Paris but it failed miserably in the longer run to integrate with the surrounding district or complement the older architecture around it. The same was true of London University’s new Institute of Education, ostentatiously installed on Woburn Square, at the heart of old Bloomsbury—‘uniquely hideous’, in the words of Roy Porter, the historian of London. In a similar vein, London’s South Bank complex brought together an invaluable assortment of performing arts and artistic services; but its grim, low elevations, its windswept alleys and cracking concrete facades, remain a depressing testimony to what the urban critic Jane Jacobs called ‘the Blight of Dullness’.
Just why post-war European politicians and planners should have made so very many mistakes remains unclear, even if we allow that in the wake of two world wars and an extended economic depression there was a craving for anything fresh, new and unlinked to the past. It is not as though contemporaries were unaware of the ugliness of their new environment: the occupants of the giant housing complexes, tower blocks and new towns never liked them, and they said so clearly enough to anyone who cared to enquire. Architects and sociologists may not have understood that their projects would, within one generation, breed social outcasts and violent gangs, but that prospect was clear enough to the residents. Even European cinema—which only a few years before had paid loving, nostalgic attention to old cities and city life—now focused instead on the cold, hard impersonality of the modern metropolis. Directors like Godard or Antonioni took an almost sensuous pleasure in filming the tawdry new urban and industrial environment in films like
A particular victim of post-war architectural iconoclasm was the railway station, the lapidary incarnation of Victorian achievement and often a significant architectural monument in its own right. Railway stations suffered in the United States, too (the destruction of New York’s Pennsylvania Station in 1966 is still remembered by many as the defining moment of official hooliganism); but American city planners at least had the excuse that, squeezed between the car and the airplane, the prospects for rail travel appeared grim. But in the overcrowded circumstances of a small continent, the future of train travel was never seriously in question. The stations that were torn down in Europe were replaced by insipid, unappealing buildings performing the identical function. The destruction of Euston Station in London, or Paris’s Gare Montparnasse, or the elegant Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin had no practical purpose and was aesthetically indefensible.
