1. Alastair Donald, Richard J Williams, Karl Sharro, Alan Fairlie, Debby Kuypers, Austin Williams, Manifesto: Towards a New Humanism in Architecture, 3 July 2008

2. London Festival of Architecture, 20 June to 20 July 2008, posted on www.LFA2008.org

3. Austin Williams, A Time for Manifestos, The Future Cities Project, 8 May 2008

4. Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky, Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art 1938

5. Turner Classic Movies, on www.tcm.com

6. Kino International, on www.kino.com

7. Neal Bascomb, Red Mutiny: Eleven Fateful Days on the Battleship Potemkin, Boston, Massachusetts, Houghton Mifflin, 2007

8. Le Corbusier, translated by Frederick Etchells, Towards a New Architecture, New York, Dover Publications, 1986, p 288 and 289, first translated into English and published in London in 1931, first published as Vers une Architecture in 1923

9. Karel Teige, translated by Eric Dluhosch, The Minimum Dwelling, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002, first published 1932

10. Peter Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past, London, Thames and Hudson, 1976, p 9

11. Austin Williams, The Enemies of Progress - The Dangers of Sustainability, Exeter, Imprint Academic, Societas, 2008, p 152

12. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, published on the front page of Le Figaro, Paris, 20 February 1909, in Umbro Apollonio, editor, Futurist Manifestos, Museum of Fine Arts Publications, Boston, 2001, p 21

13. Antonio Sant'Elia, The Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, published in Lacerba, Florence, 1 August 1914, in Umbro Apollonio, editor, Futurist Manifestos, Museum of Fine Arts Publications, Boston, 2001, p 171

14. Ibid, p 172

15. Jean Gottmann, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1961

MANTOWNHUMAN... Manifesto: Towards a New Humanism in Architecture

The Manifesto: Towards a New Humanism in Architecture, (1) launched on 3 July 2008 as one of over 500 events in the month long London Festival of Architecture, (2) is in Austin William's words '... a return to the radical, avant-gardism of the past but with a clear eye on the future.' (3) Available in a hard copy it is posted for download on the website www.mantownhuman.org.

One of the six founding authors, Williams clearly understands the project of MANTOWNHUMAN to be an acknowledgement of Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky’s Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, published 70 years earlier as the second world war approached in 1938:

'The communist revolution is not afraid of art. It realizes that the role of the artist in a decadent capitalist society is determined by the conflict between the individual and various social forms which are hostile to him. This fact alone, insofar as he is conscious of it, makes the artist the natural ally of revolution.' (4)

This is not 1938. Neither is it 1988, when the Cold War appeared to have no obvious end in sight. When hopes for the sort of international communism that Trotsky worked towards, alongside the remains of Stalinism he had brilliantly criticised, rumbled on. Two decades later and it is conventional to promote sustainability in capitalist economies, societies, and environments, rather than human progress through artistic, technical, and social revolt. The unconventional architects that MANTOWNHUMAN are appealing to are expected to be interested in artistic and technical advance, if not revolution, which some of the authors and supporters, if not all, will recognise as complimentary to social revolution, however remote a post-capitalist future is in 2008.

The implication of social revolution explains the showing of Battleship Potemkin at the launch of MANTOWNHUMAN. Sergei Eisenstein's film marked the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 revolution in Russia, a year after his debut feature Strike of 1924. Successive generations have seen Battleship Potemkin in censored and recut forms until 2005, when a restored version was produced by the Deutsche Kinemathek. This enjoyed the support of Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, the British Film Institute, the Munich Filmmuseum, and Gosfilmofond of Russia.

The 2005 Battleship Potemkin premiered on TCM. (5) The "Ultimate Edition" became available on DVD in 2007, (6) the same year as Neal Bascomb's account of Red Mutiny: Eleven Fateful Days on the Battleship Potemkin was written with access to Soviet archives. He tells the story of how, after being served rancid meat, more than seven hundred Russian sailors mutinied against their officers aboard what was then one of the most powerful battleships in the world. (7)

The Russian revolution of 1905 is more nostalgic as a crisis than that of 1917, and Battleship Potemkin finds support on emotional and aesthetic levels amongst "radical" architects today. It was not so much 1905 but the revolutionary threat of 1917 that alarmed "radical" architects of yesterday, alongside politicians. In Britain thought turned to housing provision in 1919, for fear of "mutiny" amongst poorly housed workers returning home from the slaughter of the First World War. Charles Edouard Jeanneret, who would become Le Corbusier, was similarly alarmed enough at the possibility of working class revolution to write and organise around Vers une Architecture in 1923, which became the architectural manifesto of Towards a New Architecture:

'Society is filled with a violent desire for something which it may obtain or may not. Everything lies in that: everything depends on the effort made and the attention paid to these alarming symptoms.

Architecture or Revolution.

Revolution can be avoided.' (8)

Technological revolution was indeed devoted to the revolution of the art of architecture, in an explicit effort to avoid social revolution. A reminder in our age that the meaning of "humanism" is pivotal in Towards a New Humanism in Architecture. Is "humanism" once again to be about revolutionising construction and architecture to sustain capitalism, just as it was for Le Corbusier's motivated and experimental generation of architects, or about a revolution of society, technique, and art against all those who would sustain any aspect of life without progress?

That battle for a human-centred world view was lost before under totally different political and economic circumstances. The Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art hoped for '... the assembling of a world congress which will officially mark the foundation of the International Federation.' (4.) The problem for revolutionaries in 1938 was that the vast majority of architects had already been lost to any social revolutionary cause. The functionalist Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne had been established in 1928, and those who did not follow Le Corbusier's reformism from the start tended to support the faux-marxism of "radicals" like Karel Teige. (9) Internationally architects were seeking to develop "the minimum dwelling", and still do of course.

CIAM had criticised the formalism of the schools of architecture, but after the Second World War and as early as CIAM VIII, hosted in 1951 at Hoddesdon, England, the year of the Festival of Britain, the possibility of total urban design was increasingly questioned. Not that surprising as Europe emerged from total war, and with the professional enthusiasm for comprehensive planning having inter-war origins. Pop Art was underway. (10) CIAM collapsed around its tenth congress between 1955 and 1959. The divisive uncertainties between the Stalinist "East" and the capitalist "West" had been established, with the welfare state as Britain's innovative compromise. That included the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act as a regulatory nationalisation of development rights, and not a socialist nationalisation of land itself.

After the end of the Cold War in 1989 it has not been difficult for architects in general, and has been easy for British architects in particular, to see environmental virtue and an aesthetic in "the minimum dwelling" for the world's populations. Meanwhile architectural marvels are built for social elites. As Williams rightly says, '... what we have today is a decadent society filled with indulgent architectural and artistic expression.' (3) What more people need in abundance is "the maximum dwelling", but '... not for environmentalists the audacious, progressive, explorative, human endeavour.' (11) In The Enemies of Progress Williams understands, with his characteristic acuteness, that "greens" put nature first, and humans are relegated to a miserable second. That is clear in the subtitle of The Dangers of Sustainability.

Austin Williams unpicks Sustainability to identify eight Enemies of Progress 06.05.2008

Now MANTOWNHUMAN is a collective work. There are a number of ideas in the mix, drawing inspiration from a sweep of architectural and artistic manifestos, and it will be fascinating to see how they combine and draw out. Not least the promotion of "daring", with the authors expecting architects to '... become confident in architecture for architecture's sake.' (page 12) In 1909 the Italian Futurists insisted that '... courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.' (12) Five years later Antonio Sant'Elia specifically wrote that:

'The Futurist architecture is the architecture of calculation, of audacious temerity and of simplicity; the architecture of reinforced concrete, of steel, glass, cardboard, textile fibre, and of all those substitutes for wood, stone and brick that enable us to obtain maximum elasticity and lightness.' (13)

Sant'Elia was against an architecture of "practicality and usefulness" in which most people must live, and wanted architecture to be art synthesised with engineering in a complete expression.

Personally I don't have the Futurist dislike for wood, stone and brick, while I know that many architects today reject these familiar technologies as "boring". They are invariably not thinking hard enough. I do object when environmentalists imagine these materials to be somehow more natural than their supposed "substitutes". We enjoy today a cornucopia of materials, old and new. Materials that could not be imagined a century ago, or if imagined could not be afforded. I like the Futurists as artists, and despise them as belligerent misogynistic proto-fascists who, after many died in the First World War, became actual Fascists. Sant'Elia died in combat on a bicycle, and so his personal history was cut short. I like Sant'Elia best for his sense of agency and transformation, when he apreciates and declares, in capitals, that:

'THINGS WILL ENDURE LESS THAN US. EVERY GENERATION MUST BUILD ITS OWN CITY.' (14)

We are obviously not yet in a society where every generation owns its own city, and Sant'Elia was no communist. That requires a social revolution, which the Futurists were not interested in. We are not even in a society in which every generation of landowner is free to build, even though that concerns the majority in Britain today. We can revolt against the planning system that, by inflating the value of land, ensures that only capitalists can be architecturally audacious. Particularly so at a time like the present, when capitalists lack the courage to compete on an industrial scale to satisfy mass markets with something as ordinary as spacious housing paid for out of household income. It would be "daring" to let the majority build freely at a time when, as MANTOWNHUMAN observes, '... architects have become afraid of freedom.' (page 9) It is my experience that architects will argue for their freedom within the planning system, but not the freedom for the majority to build.

The freedom to build what? Architects and planners are seriously confused about the meaning or importance of "city". MANTOWNHUMAN explicitly looks to found a '... new metropolitan dynamic,' (page 3) and aims to '... truly aspire to move the city forward.' (page 12) The argument is that '... lacking the confidence to impose principles, ideals and a sense of purpose, architects commonly defend virgin green fields over the expansive reach of the metropolis.' Adding that words like "sprawl" and "suburbia" have '... become euphemisms for irresponsible expansion as opposed to a representation of a social dynamic.' (page 5)

If the aim is to move society forward, why focus on the metropolitan city?

Why not recognise as Jean Gottmann had done in 1961 that most of us live not in an "urb" but in a megalopolis? (15) Why not also explain that in stark contrast to Gottmann's time, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, there is no "polis" to move society forward, neither in the horribly named megalopolis, nor in the metropolis?

Echoing the Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, Williams insists that MANTOWNHUMAN '... is bound to irritate, challenge and polarise opinion but is intended to draw out anyone with a sense of anger at the state of contemporary architecture.' He and his fellow authors welcome argument and dissent. 'By no means do we insist on every idea put forth in our manifesto, but in an era of uncritical non-debate, we urge you to form your own opinion on the state of architecture today and its remedy.' (3) Sounds good to me, except that I am looking forward to the discussion getting beyond mere "opinion".

Architects tend to be self-interested in moving the metropolis forward as an urban entity, as a series of promising capital commissions in the service of "the planet". You don't have to be an architect to consciously attempt to address the political and economic peculiarity at the start of the twenty-first century; That entire populations have ceased to act as a self-interested polis at the historic moment the majority of humanity no longer suffers a rural way of life. Indeed, that conundrum will be better explained by those not preoccupied with architecture or urbanism.

Hopefully MANTOWNHUMAN can rise above architecture as a "mercenary profession", and attract those who have not made servility a career and lying for pay a custom, as Breton and Trotsky put it in 1938. (4) In 2008 a sense of "stewardship" and a reliance on "environmental impact assessments" abound in the commercial architectural profession, and nowhere more so than in "sustainable" Britain.

Let's get over the idea of the metropolis as the "city" so that we can better critique "eco-towns", and prepare to throw the sustainability officers overboard.

Ian Abley 05.07.2008

Cities can't create a better society 17.05.2008

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