Ports of France (1912)

Liebig trade cards taking the collector on a trip around the great sea ports of France - Boulogne, Toulon, Marseille, Brest, Le Havre and Cherbourg. A rather partial selection, almost certain to offend the citizens of St-Nazaire, Bordeaux and Nantes. Each card offers an overview of the port plus two vignettes - one is a local landmark, the second is a character with local connections. A third vignette is an image of the precious meat extract. By way of contrast with these elaborate and floridly coloured compositions a selection of more prosaic images in the form of postcards are included.

 

Round the Docks

The work was demanding and dangerous, the workforce was casualised and routinely exploited and the workplace was disorderly and perilous but the image of the docks held a special place in the imperialist imagination. All of Britain’s maritime supremacy and economic power as a nation that traded to survive was focused on the dockside. Despite the development of mechanised lifting gear the greater part of the labour involved came from physical effort – enormous quantities of finished goods and raw materials were loaded on and off ships by hand. A picture of ceaseless activity is placed before us. Rail mounted cranes, teams of horses, motor vehicles and railway wagons compete for space on the quayside, above them swing cradles of locomotives or turbines and hoists bearing cotton bales, sacks of sugar or animal carcasses. A compelling theatrical scene of wonder for the spectator and a raucous, turbulent and unstable environment for the manual labourers where the threat of serious physical injury could come from any direction at any moment. 

Our old friend the shipping container killed off this spectacle and replaced it with a highly formalised aerial display of bar-coded containers – all very fascinating in a different way but totally inaccessible to the general public. It’s a world of computer commanded reach-stackers, gantry cranes and side-lifters manoeuvring outsize boxes from ship to shore and back again with maximum cost effectiveness in an anonymous intermodal zone where the most frequently heard sound is the warning beep of reversing vehicles. 

Great Railway Stations Number 8: Marseille, Gare de la Blancarde

Suburban stations often seem strangely bypassed by the tide of human affairs. They may be neat and tidy but an air of inertia prevails. The busy district of Blancarde in Marseille is served by the city’s Métro line and both of the two tram routes that cross the city. It also has a mainline railway station of the sort that accountants would long ago have condemned as unremunerative on Britain’s skeletal rail network. A fully staffed ticket office, largely untroubled by customers graces the foyer beyond which passengers must cross on foot a lightly used, weed infested freight line to access the platforms. This feature alone would have been seized on in Britain as a totally unacceptable risk to passenger safety and the station summarily closed.

The main building has the air of a typical SNCF country station transplanted into the city. On the platform, the shelters are of prefabricated concrete construction with the station name lettered in relief. Local trains to and from Toulon stop every hour and the freight branch line serves a domestic waste transfer depot. In the distant past, some travellers for Marseille would alight at Blancarde to avoid the congestion at Gare St-Charles, taking a tram to the city centre. There are transport planners who dream of a return to this practice but while the TGVs continue to glide through without stopping there’s little chance of that happening. So for the present the station remains as an island of tranquillity in a busy neighbourhood. 

Past and Present No. 8: Marseille

I always travel with a small selection of faded vintage postcards in the hope that it might be possible to pair them with some contemporary views. Marseille proved to be intractable – economic forces and the Nazi occupation having obliterated all but the most securely rooted landmarks. The Vieux Port and the docks at la Joliette have been abandoned by maritime commerce in favour of leisure, culture and urban motorways. When I found a potential match I was often at a disadvantage – early postcard photographers being adept in the art of talking their way into neighbouring buildings to obtain an elevated viewpoint. In the absence of a personal drone or cherry-picker these are the best. Most frustrating was the trip to the corniche where I could see an almost perfect match if I had the power to hover in space some 4 metres from the seaward side of the path on which I was standing. It was pleasing to see that a bus passed the exact location of the tram in the postcard as the photo was taken. 

Living with Modulor Man - Cité Radieuse

Modulor Man welcomes two visitors to the Cité Radieuse in Marseille. We are all imperfect versions of Modulor but despite this he offers us shelter in an ideally proportioned structure and an accelerated progression into an inconceivably sublime future. The question is – are we really worth it? To fully inhabit the universe of Le Corbusier demands that we submit to the will of the master with a joyful elevation of spirit and transform ourselves into worthy descendants of Modulor. How dare we blame the architect if we lack the self-discipline to live up to his vision? 

J M Richards was editor of the Architectural Review from 1937 to 1971 and two of his books, High Street (he wrote the text that accompanied the superb illustrations of Eric Ravilious) and An Introduction to Modern Architecture (Penguin Books, 1940, revised 1953 and 1963) have left a mark. High Street has become the Holy Grail for collectors of illustrated books, exceedingly difficult to find and astronomically expensive. While the Penguin book was my introduction to Modernist design at the impressionable age of 15 – its pages resonated with an innocent belief in the ultimate triumph of Modernism in transforming the post-war built environment, a process, it was felt by many, that would endure for generations as a new era of conflict-free prosperity unfolded. Another key message was that Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, as it was then known, held a very special place in this narrative. 

After 1945 the French government established a Ministry for Reconstruction and Urbanism and Le Corbusier who had spent the war beavering away on projects without a client, getting uncomfortably close to the Vichy regime at one point before returning to his Parisian studio, was invited to design a housing complex for the city of Marseille. The hidden agenda here was to keep Le Corbusier as far away as possible from projects in the Val de Seine and the Paris region. The grotesque pre-war Le Corbusier Plan Voisin that would have replaced a vast swathe of central Paris with 18 massive tower blocks and an urban expressway had clearly not been forgotten. Thus the implacable Calvinist (as Richard Cobb rechristened him) came to test his urbanist theories in Bouche du Rhône. With him came Modulor Man, the brise-soleil, béton brut and the doctrine of the house as a machine à habiter. 

Construction of the Cité Radieuse began on the Boulevard Michelet site in the autumn of 1947 and the completed building was handed over in August 1951 after a protracted and difficult build. The finished block had 19 floors supported by 36 reinforced concrete columns and accommodated 337 apartments (of 23 configurations) accessed via seven internal street levels. Each apartment was spread over two floors with a double height room and windows to both sides of the building. Spatial provision was generous and the physical proportions embodied the Le Corbusier philosophy of golden section guided harmonics. The package came with an internal retail zone, a restaurant and a roof deck providing community facilities including a gym, a pool, a running track and a nursery school. 

With a building as exhaustively examined as this one the chances of coming away with new insight that will illuminate the thinking of future generations are negligible. But there is some value in testing some of the more common assumptions and interpretations. Le Corbusier’s public enthusiasm for maritime architecture and the great ocean liners of the inter-war decades has encouraged many observers to note an affinity between the building and an ocean going vessel. The distant view across Boulevard Michelet as the nautically inspired roof structures become visible confirms this interpretation, as does the way in which the mass of the block is visually uplifted by the reinforced concrete supports when seen at close quarters. There are arguments about the efficacy of the brises-soleil in capturing winter sun and restricting summer sun and the alignment of the building gives rise to some uneven results. The dimensions of the projections are identical on both east and west facing façades, which additionally undermines their effectiveness though in visual terms the repetition of shadows, colours and forms delivers an animated façade that engages the eye. 

Modulor Man, armed with fifteen controlling dimensions was the orchestrator of formal harmony – every space and every linear dimension was subordinate to his power to impose proportion. His British counterpart, Parker Morris man, was no match for his expansive generosity and when equivalent developments were planned in Britain (Park Hill in Sheffield for example) the occupants found themselves in much more cramped accommodation. The third member of Le Corbusier’s entourage, béton brut, generated the most significant legacy. The coarse finish of rough cast concrete left an indelible mark over two decades, in equal part esteemed by the construction industry for whom it was a commercial bonanza and loathed by the public for its ubiquity, its physical repellence and its insensitivity. Le Corbusier was measured in his use of concrete surfaces and had the ability to handle it with delicacy and balance. This lesson was lost on many lesser practitioners whose crude and unforgiving buildings, offered to us as paragons of Modernism, did so much to bring the profession of architect into disrepute. 

No pilgrimage to a Modernist landmark would be complete without some abuse or obstruction. On this occasion, the much venerated rooftop ensemble was in the process of restoration - thus no public access and the weekly guided visits were suspended due to fire damage in the show apartment. The ritual harangue from an enraged local duly took place – how could anyone in their right mind travel so far to look at such an eyesore? With his glacial uncompromising personality, Le Corbusier continues to be a convenient hate-figure and scapegoat for the excesses and conspicuous failures of Modernism – frequently blamed for social breakdown, racism and delinquency – see any discussion thread on the subject of Le Corbusier. As for the triumph of Modernism, it has been a melancholy episode. The world of conflict-free prosperity and leisure is as far away as ever and many of the places where Modernism has truly prevailed (Dubai, Las Vegas, Brasilia) have added the least to the sum of human happiness.