Four Seasons

These four substantial townhouses are positioned at each point of a crossroads at the corner of Van Merlen Straat and Waterloo Straat in the Antwerp suburb of Zurenborg. Designed as a group in 1904 by architect Joseph Bascourt, they differ only in detail and each is faced in white glazed brick and displays a pictorial mosaic panel relating to one of the four seasons of the year. The mosaics and wrought iron work are heavily Art Nouveau influenced but the buildings themselves have a more restrained and rectilinear character suggesting the influence of the Vienna Secession, with horizontal bands of coloured brickwork to relieve the monotony. Each house has two tall and eccentrically ornamented oriel windows that also serve to break up the façades. I was informed by a passing local resident that the group had been recently renovated and restored to their original condition.

Postcard of the Day No. 51, Palm Beach Chariot

Two people have their images forever imprisoned in this postcard, condemned to an eternity of circulation through the broad boulevards of mid-century Palm Beach. On the left is a man whose face bears some resemblance to that of the great Chicago bluesman, Howlin’ Wolf. Impassive and dignified with just a flash of the defiance that was ever present in the voice of Howlin’ Wolf. On the right is a female face that gives away virtually nothing – the eyes squint against the sunlight, the lips slightly parted in an unreadable smile. The story is that when the oilman and railroad tycoon, Henry Flagler, developed Palm Beach as a resort, he autocratically banned the use of horse-drawn or motor vehicles, giving rise to these cycle-mounted wicker chairs that were propelled by employees of the local hotels. In another cultural context this might look like a colourful image of a novel method of transport devised for the entertainment of tourists and as a source of income for the locals. But in the context of the United States in the pre-Civil Rights era it expresses some deeply insensitive attitudes to race and ethnicity. It may be less abhorrent than the postcard genre of demeaning and patronising ‘picaninny’ imagery but it remains a distinctly unsettling picture even after the passage of more than 50 years.

Rietveld Schröder House

If there was such a thing as a long-service medal for Modernism it would surely go to Truus Schröder who lived in the Rietveld Schröder House in the Dutch city of Utrecht for 60 years from its completion in 1925 to her death in 1985. When she moved into the house that Gerrit Rietveld designed for her, she was a single parent with three young children to care for. Rietveld had for more than a decade been a designer-maker of avant-garde furniture. Although closely associated with the De Stijl group and Theo van Doesburg, this was the first building he designed. From design to realisation was a rapid process of less than 12 months with architect and client more than usually closely involved. It was Truus Schröder who pressed for the flexible division of space on the first floor and her relationship with Rietveld seems to have been exceptionally productive and harmonious.


First impressions – the house has only three façades, being essentially an end of terrace and it’s unexpectedly compact. The façades, with their recessions and projections are wonderfully animated by light and shade in accordance with one of architecture’s first principles. The compositional balance of primary colours and rectilinear forms is perfect. Inside, the ground floor is relatively conventional with enclosed rooms of modest dimensions apart from the deployment of colour to demarcate areas with separate functions and the purpose built furniture, often designed to fold away. The first floor accommodation can be configured as a single undivided space within which bedrooms and a living/dining area (again equipped with fold-down, stow-away furnishings) can be defined by sliding moveable partitions around. Long horizontal bands of glazing flood the unified space with daylight – all the windows open to ninety degrees and some smart engineering enables the southeast corner to disappear when the two windows, normally at right angles, are fully opened. The effect is to break the barrier between internal and external space and take full advantage of the panoramic rural views (now emphatically lost since the construction of an elevated motorway in 1963) that existed in 1924.


In the Sixties the Schröder House (by then some 40 years old) was explained to students like myself as a crucial point in the long march of Modernism – a popular fallacious academic narrative in which conceptual rationalism, purity of form and functionalism distilled from a fusion of Cubism and Constructivism would converge in triumph over lingering Victorian decadence, the insidious ornamentation of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, and the sordid dream world of the Surrealists. But matters would become much more complicated as a new narrative emerged in which Modernism was the godfather of alienation and the servant of Totalitarianism. The story went that new urban environments, planned and constructed according to Modernist principles de-humanised the populations for whom they were designed, leading to widespread social breakdown. At the same time the Modernist tendency towards grandiose scale achieved by means of unitary construction techniques provided a blueprint for the high command of business and finance when it came to developing corporate flagship projects. Post-Modern architects would address this by rejecting the stylistic tyranny of Modernism in favour of a non-prescriptive idiom where historical styles could be borrowed and combined at will while new materials and technologies expanded formal possibilities, permitting designers to explore a new vocabulary of free-form structures and gravity defying configurations. Since Post-Modernism seems to have expired in a flourish of empty stylistic gestures and off-the-peg irony the smoke has cleared enabling a new assessment of the pioneering Modernist buildings. The Schröder House now has the protection of Unesco World Heritage Status and exists as a carefully conserved relic that will never be lived in again. Its fascination lies in its dual function as a critical point of departure in the development of Modernist architecture and its role as a modest family home for Truus Schröder where in 1925 she turned her back on traditional domestic comforts and boldly stepped into a new future, a place that to many of us, even 90 years later, seems as far away as ever.

Hands of the Martyrs

Charlotte Corday's fateful letter of introduction gripped by the hand of the dying Marat - a detail from Jacques-Louis David's saintly portrayal of the assassinated citoyen Marat. The painting is a star attraction in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels and retains its power and fascination as a brilliantly calculated image of political martyrdom. According to Wikipedia the original letter still exists as the property of the Earl of Crawford. The marble hands below are a likeness of those belonging to Bishop Marius Ambrosius Capello (1597-1676) seen on his tomb in Antwerp Cathedral. While the hands of Marat would be deeply stained with ink from decades of subversive journalism, we would expect the hands of the Bishop to be more accustomed to the delivery of blessings and the splashing of holy water. What distinguished Bishop Capello from all his fellow Bishops of Antwerp was his generosity to the poor of the city to whom he bequeathed all his worldly wealth.

Ramblin’ Man

Hank Williams travelled his Lost Highway and Chuck Berry searched for The Promised Land but only Lemon Jelly captured an Englishman’s passage through the wider world in the sublime Ramblin’ Man. It’s the loose-footed Psycho-geographer’s Anthem with a litany of place-names, famous and obscure, in sober tones redolent of Wilfred Thesiger or Patrick Leigh Fermor. Later this week I shall visit two locations from Lemon Jelly’s list. Last month we added another verse to our own list:

Chorleywood
Sheffield
Kingston upon Hull
Chalfont St Giles
Youlgreave

The task is to match each photo to a location – the only prize is a sense of self-satisfaction.

Vélodrome d'hiver

In Eric Hazan’s fascinating book, The Invention of Paris, he observes that the Vélodrome d'hiver is a classic example of a place that was very good, in the sense that as an indoor venue for cycle racing it provided entertainment for millions of Parisians, that later became very bad, as the site of immense human suffering and a staging post along the road to mass murder and genocide. In an era when unremarkable human beings, some of them otherwise decent, were induced to develop a capacity for callous brutality, the events at the Vélodrome d'hiver were exceptional. More than 13,000 Jewish arrests were made by the Paris police on July 16th. 1942 following detailed plans prepared with the enthusiastic cooperation of the Vichy regime, prominent among them the grotesque figure of Louis Darquier de Pellepoix who featured here in an earlier post. Up to 7,500 Jewish men, women and children were interned in stifling summer heat in a covered arena that allowed for little more than standing room and deliberately denied access to any toilet facilities with a single tap to provide water. After 8 days the survivors were transferred to Drancy in the outer north-eastern suburbs before being conveyed by train to concentration camps. This inglorious episode was the ultimate achievement of the cagoulard tendency, ensuring that henceforth their reputation for inhuman cruelty would stand comparison with any Nazi war criminal.


On the perimeter of the former site on boulevard de Grenelle there is a memorial in the form of a small garden and a wall mounted plaque. It is wedged between the entrance to an underground car park and a barrier-controlled vehicle entrance to the Ministry of the Interior building (that replaced the Vélodrome d'hiver after its demolition in 1959), the implacable façades of which form an unforgiving backdrop to the memorial. Some municipal bedding plants and a ragged sward of grass have a depressing perfunctory air and undermine the good intentions that inspired it. Understatement in these features can be a positive but in this instance the installation is catastrophically overwhelmed by its unsightly surroundings. It was a long journey for the French to recognise the enormity of this event and the extent of their complicity, making it all the more disappointing that this monument seems so inadequate. If the intention was to provide a single point of calm amid the clamour of city life for quiet reflection it was doomed to fail in the absence of any tangible or dramatic representation of the tragedy being commemorated that would hold an audience. There is a more substantial memorial featuring a sculpted group of internees at Quai de Grenelle, commissioned by the Mitterand administration in 1993. The figures, carved by Walter Spitzer (himself a survivor of deportation) are naturalistic, deliberately non-rhetorical, and in a quiet way, emotionally convincing. Yet another memorial, Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation (photographs below) can be seen at the eastern tip of Île de la Cité. It dates back to 1962 and was designed in what might be called a considered Brutalist idiom by Georges-Henri Pingusson – the harsh geometry and unyielding surfaces are surprisingly effective in conveying a sense of the enormity of the crime.

Split Levels

Enthusiasts for urban planning get very excited about creating multi-level locations. The idea of elevating transport and services into the infinity of the atmosphere seems like an excellent recipe for maximising efficiency in the use of space. In these postcard examples we see three or even four levels intersecting like spatial vectors. They are not as popular with the general public who have an aversion to endless flights of steps or a simple dislike of vertigo. For myself, the sensation of vertigo is something to be savoured and I find these locations immensely satisfying despite the widely held view that they disfigure the landscape. These cards are all from Germany or the USA and support my contention that the great 19th. century American cities of the North-East and Mid-West were primarily built upon a Teutonic template.