JG Ballard on Modern Architecture

By at 11:22 am Monday, Mar 20

In The Guardian, my favorite living novelist and culture critic JG Ballard explores modern architecture. His point-of-entry is the massive blockhouse, Hitler's fortifications on the French coast. From the article (photo by Sergio Gaudenti):
Blockhouse Death was what the Atlantic wall and Siegfried line were all about. Whenever I came across these grim fortifications along France's Channel coast and German border, I realised I was exploring a set of concrete tombs whose dark ghosts haunted the brutalist architecture so popular in Britain in the 1950s. Out of favour now, modernism survives in every high-rise sink estate of the time, in the Barbican development and the Hayward Gallery in London, in new towns such as Cumbernauld and the ziggurat residential blocks at the University of East Anglia.

But modernism of the heroic period, from 1920 to 1939, is dead, and it died first in the blockhouses of Utah beach and the Siegfried line. Yet in its heyday between the wars, modernism was a vast utopian project, and perhaps the last utopian project we will ever see, now that we are well aware that all utopias have their dark side.
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David Pescovitz

Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.

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