Modern life

THE THIN VENEER

The veneer of civilization is perilously thin. I was living in Montreal during the 1969 policemen and firemen’s strike. It lasted only sixteen hours but that was long enough for things to unravel. For the first half day, drivers observed traffic light signals, then they started to go through orange lights, and pretty soon they were disregarding red lights altogether. That was only the beginning. According to the CBC, which called it a night of terror: “At first, the strike’s impact was limited to more bank robberies than normal. But as night fell, a taxi drivers’ union seized upon the police absence to violently protest a competitor’s exclusive right to airport  .

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A PRIVATE FUTURE

In 1973, my friend Martin Pawley published The Private Future: Causes and Consequences of Community Collapse in the West. According to his  Guardian obituary (he died in 2008) the book “foresaw a society with ever greater technical means of communication becoming paradoxically more insular and dysfunctional.” Here is an extract (which appeared in full on the jacket of the original hardcover): “Alone in a centrally heated, air-conditioned capsule, drugged, fed with music and erotic imagery, the parts of his consciousness separated into components that reach everywhere and nowhere, the private citizen of the future will become one with the end of effort and the triumph of sensation divorced from action.

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i-BAUHAUS

Nicholas Fox Webber, the author of a biography of Le Corbusier, has recently published iBauhaus. I have not read the book yet, but the subtitle, “The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design,” says it all. There is no doubt that the iPhone is a minimalist, no frills machine and proud of it. It is also a quintessentially Bauhaus example of form follows predetermined aesthetics rather than form follows function. The iPhone doesn’t fit the human hand particularly well, certainly not as well as the classic Western Telephone Model 500 handset designed by Henry Dreyfuss in the 1940s.

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POST-PANDEMIC

According to the United Nations Secretary-General, the coronavirus pandemic is the “greatest test” the world has faced since the United Nations was formed in the wake of the Second World War. One of the results of that global war was the ascendancy of modernist architecture, which until then had been a distinctly Bohemian side show of little import. It was not until the postwar 1950s that steel and glass office towers and precast concrete housing blocks appeared—and came to dominate the built environment. One wonders if a post-pandemic world will see a comparable phenomenon. Of course, a plague does not materially lay waste cities,

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SNEAKERS VS. BROGUES

“Classic designs have the charm of a good pair of brogues. They last for years and the older they are the better they fit.” So begins the abstract to a recent article in New Design Ideas on the advantages of architecture that is built to last. The advantages are legion: energy savings over the long run, less disruption to the environment, buildings that gain the affection of generations of users. The authors point out that the limited range of building materials that are durable and can last has been developed over centuries of trial and error.

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THE CROWN

As a confirmed Anglophile I can’t resist another season of The Crown. But the episode “Dangling Man” that dealt with the Duke of Windsor left me dissatisfied. In a BBC interview, the Duke (played by Derek Jacobi) gives the impression that he was forced to abdicate in large part because of his progressive views of the role of the monarchy. He was hardly a progressive. In 1937, after his abdication and marriage to Wallis Simpson, the couple visited Germany, were well received by Hitler, and thereafter proved active appeasers. There was much talk of their pro-Nazi sympathies and intrigues with highly-placed Nazis.

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AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

I recently received my new passport. The pages for stamps and visas are decorated with images, as they have been in the past, but this is the first time I looked at them closely: a windjammer and a lighthouse; a steam engine pulling a train in a Western landscape; a farmer plowing a field with a team of oxen. Not one of the images is contemporary, with the exception of a communications satellite on the inside back cover. The pictures generally invoke a (rosy) pre-industrial past. And except for Independence Hall, there is not a hint of urbanity. America is apparently a land of open spaces,

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