Stephen Bayley

Houses of ill repute

The tragedy of modernism's failure is a recurrent theme in the Wellcome Collection's new show – but are things really that simple?

Architects and politicians have a lot in common. Each seeks to influence the way we live, and on account of that both, generally, are reviled. But architecture is more important than politics. Unless you are an anchorite or a polar bear, it’s unavoidable. And it lasts longer.

The best architecture affects our mood. Exaltation, if you are lucky. And the worst influences our behaviour: a riot with burning Renaults, if you live in a French banlieue. But, as a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection suggests, architecture may also, in one way or another, affect our health.

At ground level, this is quite obvious. Damp, foul air, extreme temperatures, bad drains, structural collapse, fire risks, asbestos and socially hostile environments can all, alas, be experienced in buildings. And these are good for no one’s health.

But in the 1970s a belief took hold that design itself was the culprit. It was in 1972 that Erno Goldfinger’s infamous Trellick Tower was approaching completion, so forbidding a building that even one of his own assistants described it as ‘Stalin’s architecture as it should have been’. The same year we reached a high tide of revulsion against this building type and the debased culture it was thought to encourage: lobbies littered with cigarettes, syringes, bottles, the reek of urine, lifts not working, pensioners isolated 300 feet above the ground, smashed lights and blocked rubbish chutes.

And it was in 1972 that an American architect called Oscar Newman published his book Defensible Space. Newman argued that a lot of this horror, presented in vox pop at the Wellcome, might be mitigated if individual dwellings were made characterful and common areas could be under popular surveillance. These ideas fed into urban geographer Alice Coleman’s controversial Utopia on Trial of 1985. Coleman had done her homework. Her analysis of more than 4,000 council blocks in south London saw correlations between the levels of litter, graffiti, vandalism and the number of flats per entrance.

‘Bad design does not determine anything,’ Coleman wrote, ‘but it increases the odds against which people have to struggle to maintain civilised standards.’

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