Cool and modern...

Once upon a time I lived in a big, old house in south London. Though I loved the place, there were certain minor inconveniences. The huge, sash windows made the building difficult to heat in winter. At night, if you were lying in bed while someone else ascended or descended the staircase, you were rocked about in bed, gently or otherwise. This was not always an unpleasant experience, but it was a constant reminder that every house begins slowly descending back to nature from the day that it is built.
However, this old house had one great advantage. On the hottest of hot summer days – and there were plenty – the stairwell that ran through the building acted like a cooling tower. It was oriented so that little sun shone there after ten in the morning, its one window facing east. It was also blessed with a mosaic ground floor. On really hot afternoons, it was a joy to recline against the newel post in a cane chair, making believe you were hanging out in the Alhambra.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls….

One disadvantage of modernism in summertime is its copious use of glass. Le Corbusier built the Villa Savoye with a sunroof to compensate for this. But if you don’t wish to follow the sunbathing craze, newly fledged in the 1930s and now discredited, what do you do? Now that summers are getting hotter, I envisage a new type of modernism. Keep the pale walls – great for bouncing back the rays of the sun – and the flat roofs, and the (specially-coated) windows and glass walls. But instead of expensive and environmentally unfriendly air conditioning, adopt – and adapt – the Arabic principle of the cooling tower.

This could possibly be a ‘revet’ added to the north face of every domestic dwelling. In the case of apartments, the revets could be spaced between apartment in the block. In either case, vents connected to the revet could be opened or closed, and would open onto each room in the dwelling. And the revets need not be ugly. It is not long since chimney places formed the ‘hub’ of domestic houses, well, the revet could be the new hub. Well-designed and harmoniously paced, these new, hubbed houses would become as much a part of the modernist landscape as wind turbines and solar panels. So, that be the principle. Architects and engineers, over to you.

Glassism, cubism and futurism

Several post ago, I alluded to the recent innovation of an interior wall of glass blocks that transformed the house I grew up in from a quasi country cottage to one with, er, an interior wall of glass blocks. What is the connection between glass and modernism? Modernist buildings tend to use copious amounts of glass; glass that was first manufactured en mass in the foundries of the nineteenth century. Glass may appear to be a static substance but it is not. Glass is made primarily of silica, a substance drawn from sand and gravel. When molten it can be moulded into a variety of shapes – think of glass ornaments.

It can be rolled into flat sheets, or rounded forms, or cut into blocks. Glass can be plain, coloured, frosted, muted, gilded or polarised, rendering it impervious to UV rays. During the day a mirrored glass building reflects the surrounding world; the tide of moving traffic and pedestrians at ground level. Further up it reflects the ever-changing vista of sky and cloud. At night, light inside a building renders its inhabitants visible to the outside world. How about a movement in art called glassism?

Cubism in art was a blossoming of futurism, a movement sparked off in 1909 by Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. In painting, futurism and cubism are concerned with the representation of dynamism and movement. When you try to perceive the world through a wall of glass blocks, you see it reproduced as many times as there are blocks and reduced in size. Not the real world, you may say, but what is the real world? No doubt painters like Picasso and Carra pondered on this as they created their images of worlds splintered and distorted in many ways.