To believe or trust in the wisdom of crowds just because crowds are composed of
many people and two heads are better than one seems to me absurd; but equally
it is wrong to reject an opinion merely because it is held by a crowd. We are
condemned, or privileged, or both, constantly to have to make up our own minds
about things: to be nonjudgmental, as the cant word has it, means
not to participate fully in or of human life. And what most people probably
mean when they describe themselves (almost always in a self-congratulatory way)
as being nonjudgmental is that they are uncensorious – other than
about people who are censorious, of course. An inadequate vocabulary can be
pregnant with consequences.
An article in the French
leftish-liberal newspaper, Le Monde, for 15 September, drew
attention with evident unease or even mild disapproval to the results of a poll
conducted in France by the fine arts magazine, Beaux Arts. To the
question of whether it is more important to safeguard the treasures of the past
or to promote creativity, the respondents replied by a very large majority that
the former is the more important. The article implied that, pacethe
advertisement, forty million Frenchman can be wrong.
Of course, France is in a
slightly unusual position by comparison with many other countries. It is by far
the most visited country in the world, with 70 million tourists annually; more
than twice as many Frenchmen now live by tourism as by agriculture. And it
isn’t French modernity that people come to see: it is the French past
(together, of course, with the pleasures, comforts and conveniences of the
present, in which the country is by no means
deficient).
But I doubt very much that
those who answered the poll were thinking of their pocketbooks or economic
interests as they answered. They were thinking of their country; and if I had
been asked I would have answered in the same way.
The unease or disapproval of
the writer in Le Monde derived from more than one
consideration. The rapid increase in the number of buildings (or even
landscapes) deemed to be part of the national patrimony, and the difficulty or
impossibility of withdrawing them from it once they are inscribed as such, means
that France is at risk, at least in the estimation of the writer, of becoming a
vast museum or theme park. Moreover, by declaring this or that building to be
part of the national patrimony, the state takes on more and more financial
obligations, for upkeep does not come cheap. Many of the buildings or sites of
the patrimony do not pay for themselves by means of tourist receipts; and these
are not times propitious for yet more government expenditure.
But I think the main concern
of the author of the article is what might be called that of cultural
psychology. For the author, the poll (the actual figures of which she does not
give) indicates that the French are now a backward looking people, with no
confidence in the future and not much ability to create one either. They are
living the dream of a past than cannot be recaptured.
I will leave aside the
question of whether, if one is concerned to conserve the past, one is destined
to be uncreative: in other words, whether the dichotomy between preservation
and creativity is a genuine one. Personally, I do not think that it is;
attachment to what exists does not inhibit creative effort and in my opinion
might ever spur it. The fact that so many classic books have been written has
not, so far as I am aware, inhibited anyone from putting pen to paper or finger
to keyboard in the hope of adding another.
But the article itself gives
us a clue to the reason why the French who were polled by Beaux Arts magazine
(who are almost certainly not a cross section of the general population,
perhaps we should remember) voted the way they did. On the second page of the
article is a photograph of la cité de l’Etoile, a housing project
in Bobigny on the outskirts of Paris designed by the architect Georges Candilis
and built in 1962.
These ugly, soulless,
prefabricated concrete blocks have been declared by the authorities to be part
of the ‘patrimony of the Twentieth Century,’ and therefore as being too
culturally important to demolish or replace. The people who have been trapped
into living in these concrete ant-heaps have protested vigorously at the
designation: they know in their own persons what it is to live out the
social-cum-futuristic fantasies of nth-rate French architects like
Candilis, and they are demanding demolition. The only thing to do with such
architecture, as far as they are concerned, is to grind it into the dust and
try to forget that it ever existed.
Actually, I believe one or two
such buildings ought to be deliberately preserved, to remind us of the
aesthetic incompetence, lack of imagination or even criminality, of such as
Candilis. But of course there is a question that haunts me: if le cité
de l’Etoile were pulled down as it deserves, would it be replaced by
anything better?
If what is built nowadays
(that is to say half a century later) is anything to go by, the answer must be
equivocal. I don’t think anything quite as bad would be built,
but almost certainly it would not be much better; almost
certainly it would look gimcrack and not as if anyone really intended it to
last longer than thirty years. The fact is that, after hundreds of years, the
French have lost altogether the knack of building something that someone in the
future might look upon with pleasure. They are not the only European nation to
have done so; but their architects are definitely among the worst and most
incompetent in the world.
It was in this context that
the magazine Beaux Arts took the poll. With a few notable
exceptions, all that has been erected in the last ninety years in France has
been ugly. It is true that the worst phase in the double-millennial history of
French architecture has been passed, that office blocks that are now erected in
France sometimes have the kind of glassy elegance that might be pleasing to men
with the souls of insects or other cold-blooded creatures (but are not to be
distinguished in the slightest from such buildings erected on the other side of
the globe); but where architecture is concerned, the Mandate of Heaven has
passed from France, though whether it has arrived somewhere else might be
doubted.
That modernism in France was
and is more than a merely aesthetic mistake, but was and is motivated by a
mean-spirited, envious, ideological levelling impulse, is something that the
article in Le Monde makes clear:
The classification or
labelling [of buildings to be preserved], without regard to the social
class protected, could be a brake on modernity… It also limits brave new
forms in architecture. It promotes the process of gentrification, chasing
the least well-off classes from the city centres when real estate prices rise
with the growth of tourism.
It seems to me that this
amounts to something like the following: I cannot, and will never be able to,
afford to live in the best part of Paris, therefore I would prefer that no one
should live in the best part of Paris, at least as it currently exists; I would
prefer it to be the kind of place that I could afford to live in, that is to
say much uglier and less desirable. For this to happen, it must be ruined by,
for example, the kind of buildings erected in la cité de l’Etoile -
a single one of which, incidentally, would be more than enough to destroy the
appearance of whole quarters of Paris. (If you doubt my word, look down the rue
de Rennes in the direction of la tour Montparnasse; I might, of
course, say the same of any of the better parts of any of the old cities of the
world.) In other words, if not everyone can live in a beautiful place then no
one should be able to do so, and no one should be protected merely by his money
from the corrosive effect of ugliness, because an ugliness shared is an
ugliness halved. Social engineering thus trumps aesthetics; the assuaging of my
resentment that others are richer, better born, more fortunate, more talented
than I, is more important than the aesthetic legacy I leave to my descendants,
or that I have been fortunate enough to receive myself.
The problem would not arise so
acutely, perhaps, were modern French architects able to create something of
worth, but they are not, and haven’t been able for decades. You have only to
look at the exterior of Jean Nouvel’sMusée du quai Branly, President
Chirac’s equivalent of the Pyramid of Cheops, not far from the Eiffel Tower, to
understand the terminal incapability of modern French architects. Indeed, I am
not in favour of the guillotine except prophylactically for modern French
architects. (They should, of course, be given the choice between the guillotine
and the fate of the architects of St Basil’s Cathedral and the Taj Mahal. The
latter had their eyes put out so that they would not build anything as
beautiful again. Modern French architects should have their eyes put out, but
for precisely the opposite reason. They do not use them anyway.)
Just as in England you cannot
bring up the question of public drunkenness without someone piping up about Gin
Lane, as if nothing had happened in England between 1740 and 2010, so you
cannot mention the depredations of modern French architects without someone
mentioning Baron Haussmann who, at the behest of Louis Napoleon, refashioned a
lot of Paris, in the process pulling down a huge number of ancient buildings,
mainly so that troops could take easy pot-shots at revolutionary rabbles
gathering in the new boulevards. Whether the Haussmannian reconfiguration of
Paris was a good thing or not, an important, indeed vital, distinction between
him and modern French architects is that he not only had taste but humanity, in
the sense that he knew what a civilised urban life consisted of and required.
He didn’t pull down old Paris in order to build Rostov-on-Don or Pyongyang.
According to one person quoted
in the article in Le Monde, the ‘over-patrimonialisation’ of
France, that is to say the over-protection of buildings that already exist, is
an undesirable and retrograde manifestation of the French fear of globalisation
(which in other contexts, such as the preservation of les acquis,
that is to say the social charges that render French labour so uncompetitive
compared with German, it would praise as anti-neoliberal). This, it seems to
me, is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is, or what is needed, to be
modern in the best sense. It is magical thinking. It is as if I decided that,
in order to take advantage of high-speed internet connections, I had to pull my
300 year-old house in England down and put up a glass and steel box, and then
use the internet mainly to gain access to pornography because that is what the
majority of people use it for.
Again, one has only to see the
vast wasteland by which Paris is surrounded to understand why the French who
were polled by Beaux Arts magazine might come to the conclusion
that it would be better to preserve what exists than to give French architects
and town planners their head. Of the latters’ financial corruption I will not
speak (how they must be salivating at the thought of Tours Montparnasses
equivalents overlooking the Place de la Concorde – think of
the penthouse prices!)
They – the architects and town
planners – would retire to the few unspoilt parts of the city, which would
undergo not gentrification as much as super-gentrification, where only marquis and ducs of
the new dispensation, not mere barons and comtes, could
afford, or would have sufficient political connections, to
live.
Our problem is not that we
preserve the past; it is that we produce so little that is, or ever will be,
worth preserving. Destroying the past will not improve our performance, only
make us less aware of how deficient our performance actually is. I suppose that is a solution of a kind.
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