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TOM BURR

BODY/BUILDING
BODY/BUILDING

A selection of material to accompany the exhibition


Tom Burr / New Haven, an Artist / City project
BY ADRIAN GAUT TEXT BY MARK OWENS PHOTOGRAPHY BY ADRIAN GAUT TEXT BY MARK OWENS PHOTOGRAP

BRUTAL RECALL

A SELECTIVE ROADMAP OF SOME OF NEW HAVEN’S


MOST ICONIC CONCRETE LANDMARKS

Entering New Haven by car along Interstate 95 offers a tour through one of America’s last remaining
Brutalist corridors. Approaching the Oak Street Connector, you can still catch a glimpse of the briskly
fenestrated raw-concrete façade of Marcel Breuer’s striking Armstrong Rubber Company Building
(1968), which now sits vacant in a vast IKEA parking lot. Heading towards George Street along Martin
Luther King Jr. Boulevard, a stoplight just outside the town’s commercial center brings you momen-
tarily to rest at the foot of Roche-Dinkeloo’s enigmatic Knights of Columbus Building (1969), whose
23 raw-steel stories are slung between four colossal brick-clad concrete columns. Further along the
boulevard on the right rises the distinctive silhouette of Paul Rudolph’s Crawford Manor housing block
(1966), whose “heroic and origi-
automobile. It’s perhaps ironically fitting, then, that in order to complete this Brutalist
nal” striated-cement cladding
promenade you’re best off proceeding on foot. Continuing down Temple Street and
was famously contrasted with
making a left turn onto Chapel Street, you eventually come to the entrance of Louis
the “ugly and ordinary” visage
Kahn’s Yale University Art Gallery (1951–53), an expressive use of brick, concrete, and
of Venturi and Rauch’s Guild
curtain wall that was completed a year before the Alison and Peter Smithson’s Hun-
House in the pages of Learning
stanton School (Norfolk, England, 1949–54), generally considered the opening salvo
from Las Vegas. M a k i n g a
of New Brutalism in Britain. Fully renovated in 2012, Kahn’s gallery can now be expe-
U-turn back down Martin Luther
rienced largely as it was intended, a tour de force of open space, restraint, and material
King Jr. Boulevard, we find
mastery. It was Kahn’s first significant building; two decades later, across the street,
another Paul Rudolph monu-
he built his last, the Yale Center for British Art (1974), which was completed just after
ment, the massive 1,235-capac-
his death. A masterpiece of spatial sophistication, its second-floor Library Court is
ity Temple Street Parking
dominated by a massive raw-concrete staircase cylinder — a final Brutalist gesture.
Garage (1963), a concrete hulk
Opposite the Yale University Art Gallery stands what is perhaps New Haven’s most
whose otherworldly sculptural
famous Brutalist landmark, Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building (aka Paul Rudolph
arches span two city blocks.
Hall, 1963). Designed and completed during his tenure as head of Yale’s architecture
Alternately maligned as a
program, the building was incredibly personal for Rudolph and aimed both to stimulate
gloomy eyesore or lamented as
the pedagogic integration of the arts it housed and to address the perceived failures
a missed opportunity, the
of what had become understood as an orthodox Miesian functionalism. A study in
garage formed the centerpiece
monumentality, urban context, and the expressive potential of decoration and detail,
of an ambitious urban-redevel-
the building’s intersecting volumes are clad, inside and out, in the heavily textured
opment scheme that was meant
concrete “corduroy” panels that would become a signature of Rudolph’s work and of
to reshape the 1960s city in
Brutalism in general. Created through a painstaking process — the concrete was cast
accordance with the rise of the
in ridged formwork and afterwards bush-hammered by hand to reveal the underlying
aggregate — the panels’ texturing attempts to capture the highly graphic effect of
Rudolph’s presentation drawings in three dimensions. The result is what might be
described as a kind of Brutalist camp, in which low relief is elevated to a structural
principle. As examples of the utopian urge of late Modernism and the exertions of
political and civic power to shape what Kevin Lynch has called the city’s “imageabil-
ity,” these buildings are graphic gestures that remind us of a period when architects,
planners, and highly-skilled tradesmen attempted to make New Haven literally anew.

194
YALE ART AND
A R C H I T E C T U R E
BUILDING, PAUL
RUDOLPH (1963).
180 YORK STREET,
NEW HAVEN.

P O R T FO L
LII O
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This second, so-called ‘as found’ aesthetic was itself that shaped the Ballardian psychic
exemplified in the ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ terrain of life in the cities of late 70s Britain. As
exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Banham explains, over the course of the 1960s
Arts in 1953. Designed by Paolozzi, Henderson the New Brutalist aesthetic had emerged as a Is thi
and the Smithsons, the exhibition featured over widely adopted architectural vernacular.6 But Da
one hundred black-and-white photographic within a decade the failures of social housing
enlargements displayed in a dynamic experiments like Ernö Goldfinger’s Trellick In the Br
arrangement throughout the gallery. As Tower and the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens of New R
Banham explains, the exhibition was installed had signalled the end of the vogue for exposed underpin
in an effort to maximise the abstract, graphic concrete. Nevertheless, Brutalism still retained David Bo
quality of the collected images: much of its futuristic resonance and formal suggests)
punch even as many buildings fell into disrepair. masterpi
Indeed, following from Walter Benjamin’s the reclu
reflections on late-nineteenth century the locati
commodity culture at the turn of the twentieth guideboo
century, I would argue that it was only in the large (lite
1970s, at its moment of near-outmodedness, The first
that the ‘hardware’ of New Brutalism emerged south Lo
as the wish-image of a future that had failed DeLarge,
to arrive — a future finally glimpsed in the along a g
‘software’ of the synthesised sounds and DIY to his flat
fashions of New Romantic bands like The Brunel U
Human League, Japan, Visage, Ultravox, as the Lu
Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran. undergoe
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futuristic
Although ‘Parallel’ was one of the crucial stages in control th
the demolition of the intellectual prestige of abstract
art in Britain, it is worth noting that it accepted
one form of abstraction without question, that
of photographic reproduction in two dimensions
and put a high value on the qualities of grain and
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‘chiaroscuro’ that resulted from printing-down
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gross over-enlargements on unglazed photographic
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paper. 5

‘Parallel of Life and Art’ thus established a


high-contrast brutalist aesthetic grounded in
the spatial application of technical processes
adopted from graphic design and commercial ��������
art. So doing, its photographic enlargements Pho
inaugurated a set of visual practices that
would go on to find important echoes both in Against t
Warhol’s silkscreen prints and Peter Saville’s dress in m
diagrammatic black-and-white cover art for Joy of workin
Division’s Unknown Pleasures. fashion w
If ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ thereby allows cufflinks
us to trace an initial thread from the Brutalist applied t
‘as found’ aesthetic, through Pop Art, to the has been
stark formalisms of postpunk, Jubilee reminds �������������������������������������������� David Pe
us that it is the built form of the tower block Photo: ������������������������������������� Penguin

146
c ��� which depicts a cog-wheel in the place of the
tain. As ������������ eye of an abstract human figure.7 Translated
e 1960s into a set of false eyelashes, this gesture
d as a Is this concrete all around, or is it in my head? transforms the human face into an abstract
r.6 But David Bowie, All The Young Dudes (1973) graphic composition, anticipating the dramatic
using application of cosmetics by the New Romantics.
lick In the British popular unconscious the origins Equally anticipatory, in another well-known
Gardens of New Romantic dandyism and its Brutalist scene Alex visits a record shop dressed in an
xposed underpinnings lie, I would argue, not only with Edwardian greatcoat and frilled shirt. There,
etained David Bowie and glam (as the above quotation he picks up two teenyboppers who ask him
mal suggests), but with Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 sci-fi about the new album by The Heaven 17. In 1980,
disrepair. masterpiece A Clockwork Orange. Famously, Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh would take
n’s the reclusive Kubrick was said to have selected the name for their new band after the break-up
the locations for the film from architectural of the first incarnation of The Human League.
entieth guidebooks and two Brutalist structures loom
n the large (literally) in the onscreen narrative.
ness, The first is the Thamesmead housing estate in
merged south London, where the film’s anti-hero, Alex
ailed DeLarge, played by Malcom McDowell, strides
the along a garbage-strewn walkway on the way
d DIY to his flat. The second is the Lecture Centre at
The Brunel University in Uxbridge, which serves
x, as the Ludovico Medical Facility where Alex
undergoes aversion therapy by being forced to
watch rapid sequences of violent film footage
under the influence of a nausea-inducing drug.
In both of these scenes the striking silhouettes
of New Brutalism operate as a synecdoche for a �������������������������������������������
futuristic authoritarian society bent on social �������������������
control through media manipulation.

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Against this backdrop Alex and his droogs


dress in matching outfits that combine elements
of working-class, boots-and-braces skinhead
fashion with flourishes like bowler hats, eyeball ���������������������������������������������������
cufflinks and a single set of false eyelashes ©���������������������
applied to the right eye. This last detail, it
has been suggested, was perhaps a homage to Interestingly, the Penguin paperback also
���� David Pelham’s iconic cover illustration for the proved central to the creation of Walter Carlos’s
����� Penguin paperback edition of Burgess’s novel, groundbreaking electronic music for the film.

147
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148
As the liner notes to the 1972 complete score to electronic instrumentation centred around
explain, Carlos had already begun work on the creation of textures and soundscapes rather
the Moog composition ‘Timesteps’ when he than traditional pop hooks. In particular, his
was given a paperback copy of the novel and collaborations with Bowie on his Berlin Trilogy
realised that the ‘music seemed to capture the — Low (1977), ‘Heroes’ (1977) and Lodger
exact feeling of the opening scene of Burgess’ (1979) — conjured images of a grey, Teutonic
book.’8 A newspaper article mentioning urban landscape that would serve as a creative
Kubrick’s adaptation prompted Carlos to seek wellspring for the scene that grew up around the
out a meeting with the director, resulting in the Bowie Nights first held at Billy’s nightclub in
compositions being used in the film. Although SoHo in 1978 and, later, at The Blitz in Covent
Kubrick withdrew A Clockwork Orange from Garden beginning in 1979.
release in Britain shortly after its premiere
amidst considerable controversy, Carlos’s
soundtrack (with its fantastic cover art by
Karenlee Grant) would become an enduring
touchstone for musicians who turned to the
new technology of synthesisers in the wake of
punk. In turn, Kubrick’s film exerted a strong
influence on David Bowie, who would serve as
a kind of godfather for the New Romantics.
Bowie has even described the aesthetic of early
Ziggy Stardust concerts as a ‘de-violencing’
of the look of A Clockwork Orange combined
with elements of Kabuki and musical theatre,
going so far as to use selections from Carlos’s ����������������������
soundtrack as his opening music. Later, Bowie’s
performance as the television-addicted alien As Rimmer notes, the imaginative pull of
Mr Newton in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 sci-fi film ‘decadent’ Berlin was irresistible at The Blitz,
The Man Who Fell to Earth (shot during his a grungy after-hours wine bar adorned with
Thin White Duke phase) would take a number large-scale black and white photographs of
of visual and thematic cues from Kubrick’s WWII London and vintage propaganda posters.
Clockwork. And while the club’s decor may have shared
As Dave Rimmer explains in his something of the Brutalist shock of the ‘Parallel
exhaustively researched book, New Romantics: of Life and Art’ exhibition mixed with Weimar-
The Look, while Bowie’s influence cannot be era cabaret, its soundtrack, provided by DJ
overstated, the New Romantics were equally Rusty Egan, combined the music of Bowie and
endebted to Roxy Music.9 In the combined Roxy with the German electropop of Kraftwerk
figures of Bryan Ferry’s fashionable, crooning and Giorgio Moroder’s Munich Machine. On
aesthete and Brian Eno’s electro-futuristic the door, host Steve Strange selected the chosen
androgene the scene found the building blocks few from an eager crowd of fashionistas drawn
of its aesthetic nearly fully formed. Ferry had from the squats in nearby Warren Street and
studied at the University of Newcastle under Saint Martins School of Art, such that the club
Richard Hamilton and Roxy’s sophisticated effectively became a kind of creative pressure-
blend of high-culture intellectualism and cooker. Within this context, tracks by a small
50s kitsch can be traced back directly to the group of homegrown UK bands immediately
Pop innovations of the Independent Group. became dancefloor favourites, especially The
Ferry was also an important early fashion Human League’s 1978 single ‘Being Boiled’.
maven, working with the menswear designer Although the club scene was centred in
Antony Price to create the image of a jetsetting London, most of the Blitz Kids came from
European playboy that scarcely masked an the suburbs and the provinces. The Human
undercurrent of working-class aspiration. League themselves had emerged from Sheffield,
Meanwhile, Eno’s pioneering experiments where Britain’s largest Brutalist housing block,
with synthesisers introduced a new approach Park Hill, dominates the skyline. Founded by

149
computer operators and Kraftwerk fans Martyn ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’, with its spare synth Blitz. So
Ware and Ian Craig Marsh, and fronted by line and resonant cinematic image of ‘Riding just an em
asymmetrically coiffed singer Philip Oakey, inter-city trains/Dressed in European grey’. entire po
The Human League made a point of creating Japan were also well ahead of the curve. Like Hatherle
songs in the studio exclusively using electronic Ultravox, they had started out as a glam act, but with som
instrumentation, save for the human voice. by the late 70s they had changed their look and pop from
Their sparse electronic rhythms, paired with begun to embrace the possibilities of keyboards. Berlin of
Oakey’s deadpan delivery, fit in perfectly with In 1978 Japan recorded the single ‘Life in a synthes
the techno-decadent ambience of The Blitz. Tokyo’ with Giorgio Moroder producing. In Grey’s ce
As Martyn Ware has remarked, the primitive, addition to capturing an important strand of platform
DIY studio techniques that the band employed Asiaphilia, the single opened the door to a new Eastern B
on their early self-produced recordings failed musical direction for the band with the addition was in th
to capture the ‘brutal’ quality they were aiming of Moroder’s trademark München Discoteca, Romanti
for. Nevertheless, The Human League’s live resulting in the breakthrough Quiet Life LP of New B
performances — with the technology of the in 1979. For many, the combination of David tactile co
reel-to-reel prominently placed centrestage Sylvian’s Ferry-esque baritone, Mick Karn’s
and augmented by multi-screen projections glassy fretless bass, Rob Dean’s splintered
provided by ‘Director of Visuals’ Adrian Wright guitarwork and Richard Barbieri’s atmospheric
— would provide a template for the first wave synths was a revelation, and Japan’s Quiet Life
of New Romantic bands. sound (as well as Sylvian’s distinctive look) ��
would later be adopted almost wholesale by
Birmingham’s Duran Duran, to worldwide Outside o
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Still, it wasn’t until late 1980 that any of stuck, th
the British bands associated with The Blitz ‘Futurist
scene found any real widespread commercial recognis
acceptance. Surprisingly, despite the hype which m
around Spandau Ballet, it was Visage, a studio of moder
project formed by Rusty Egan, Steve Strange and exposed
Midge Ure, that was the first to break into the roughly t
mainstream with their hit single ‘Fade to Grey’. ancient-s
�������������������������������������������������������� Written with the help of Ultravox’s Billie Currie ruins’ Ne
and Gary Numan’s keyboardist Christopher perfect a
Apart from The Human League, the inklings of Payne, the song managed to bring together (or A car
an emergent aesthetic were also legible in the rather, ‘synthesise’) nearly all of the various also mad
work of a handful of other UK bands on The musical and thematic strands that had been consciou
Blitz playlist, in particular Ultravox’s 1977 track circulating in the creative atmosphere of The and her 1

150
synth Blitz. So doing, ‘Fade to Grey’ tapped into not exported to America that year by way of Adam
iding just an emergent musical phenomenon, but an Ant’s MTV-friendly, war-painted dandy
rey’. entire pop-cultural zeitgeist. For, as critic Owen highwayman in music videos and on the cover of
Like Hatherley has observed, ‘… seemingly everyone his hit album Prince Charming. Architecturally,
act, but with something interesting to say in [British] at least, the connection with pirates and piracy
ok and pop from around 1977‒1983 inhabited an East makes complete sense. For, remembering
yboards. Berlin of the mind, barricading themselves into Jubilee’s prophetic scene of a young Adam Ant
n a synthesised plattenbau’.10 And while Fade to (his right eye mascara’d, presumably in a nod
g. In Grey’s central image of ‘one man on a lonely to Alex DeLarge) standing atop a building
nd of platform’ perfectly captured the Brutalist, overlooking a landscape of London towerblocks,
o a new Eastern Bloc psychogeography of synthpop, it we might recall that Le Corbusier himself often
addition was in the excessive sartorial drapery of New used the metaphor of ships on the high seas to
oteca, Romantic scarf-itecture that the surface effects
e LP of New Brutalism found their graphic and
David tactile correlatives.11
rn’s
ed
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et Life
ok) ����������������������
e by
ide Outside of the music charts the New Romantics
made their most significant contributions to
British pop culture in the realm of fashion. And
although the broader Blitz scene accommodated
a range of possibilities — from ecclesiastical
robes and toy soldier jackets to full-on drag
— the popular media image of the New �����������������������������������
Romantic ‘look’ can be distilled to a few key
ingredients. This included Robin Hood boots,
frilled shirts, baggy cossack trousers with
wide belts, headbands, sashes and voluminous
scarves, all augmented with wedge haircuts
and the judicious application of make-up.
As exemplified in the designs of PX and the
early look of bands like Spandau, the overall
effect was of a kind of primitivist neo-glam
shot through with technophiliac and sci-fi
overtones. Not surprisingly, before the name
stuck, the New Romantics were briefly known as
itz ‘Futurists’. Described this way, one can begin to
ercial recognise the resonances with New Brutalism,
pe which married a celebration of the technology
studio of modernist architecture (in the form of
ange and exposed services, ducts and piping) with
to the roughly textured exteriors and monumental,
o Grey’. ancient-seeming concrete forms. As ‘future
e Currie ruins’ New Brutalist buildings thus provided the �������������������������������
pher perfect analogue to New Romantic tribalism.
her (or A cartoon version of New Romanticism describe the way the buildings of his Plan
ous also made its way into the larger public Voisin seemed to float above the urban fabric.
een consciousness thanks to Vivienne Westwood This shadow-figure of a swashbuckling New
f The and her 1981 Pirates Collection, which was Romantic striding across a Brutalist skywalk

151
thus points us in two directions simultaneously: journals, Rudolph developed a highly graphic,
back, to the near-future of Kubrick’s A expressionistic drawing style tailored for
Clockwork Orange, and forward, to the future- mechanical reproduction that he then strived
present of Visage’s ‘Fade To Grey’. to reproduce in the controlled play of light and
In effect, Adam Ant became the first New shadow on the surfaces of the actual buildings
Romantic sex-symbol, although his music had themselves.15
scarcely anything in common with the synthpop
of bands like Visage, Spandau Ballet and Duran
Duran. Still, his popularity opened the door
for the mainstreaming of the New Romantics’
gender-bending fashion innovations and the
popular realisation that men in make-up could
be sexy. As though anticipating Judith Butler
by a decade, New Romantic fashion thereby
exposed gender as a construction, something
performed on the dancefloor through an excess
of sartorial surface. Another name for this
excess, as Susan Sontag reminds us, is camp.
Writing in her 1964 essay ‘Notes on Camp’, ����������������������������������������������
Sontag described the camp sensibility as ������������������������������������
‘dandyism in the age of mass culture’, whose
essence is characterised by ‘a love of the As with the Smithsons, Rudolph’s brand of
unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration’ and Brutalism was a critique launched from within
an emphasis on ‘texture, sensuous surface, and the ranks of modernist architecture itself as a
style’.12 As a camp response to the severity of reaction against the reflective surfaces of the
punk, New Romantic fashion opted for yardage corporatised International Style. And as New
over bondage, favouring the look of fields of Brutalism’s most thoughtful observer it’s not
colour and bold patterns offset by billowing surprising that Banham should be the first
sleeves and layers of fabric. to make the connection between Rudolph’s
If we accept the basic punk : modernist : surface textures and the graphic techniques of
postpunk : Brutalist analogy, something architectural reproduction and commercial
similar can be seen in the play of surfaces in art. For, as a member of the Independent
New Brutalist architecture. For, as Tim Rohan Group, it was Banham himself who had made a
has shown in his work on Paul Rudolph’s Art similar observation with regard to the images
& Architecture Building at Yale (one of New in the ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ exhibition,
Brutalism’s closest American counterparts), whose photographic enlargements, as we have
it is possible to read the textured concrete of already seen, inaugurated a Brutalist aesthetic
Brutalism as itself a form of excessive ornament grounded in the techniques of graphic design.
or decoration.13 Specifically, Rohan describes Although Rohan is keen to limit his remarks
the corrugated concrete surface of Yale’s A&A to Rudolph’s work alone (he dismisses any
as a kind of all-over low-relief resulting from similarity to Le Corbusier or the Smithsons in
Rudolph’s distinctive, meticulous rendering a brief paragraph), the connection by way of
style. Building on Reyner Banham’s remarks in Banham might nevertheless allow us to extend
an early discussion of the building, Rohan goes his observations to implicate the graphic quality
on to show that the striated appearance of the of the surfaces of New Brutalism more broadly.
A&A’s concrete surface ‘was not just derived Still, to give him his due, it is Rohan, not
from draftsmanship, but from the methods Banham, who broaches the subject of sexuality
of graphic reproduction used to reproduce and architectural surface when he suggests
architectural images in printed books’, as well as that Rudolph’s placement of a selection of
illustrations in magazines and advertisements.14 Beaux-Arts casts in a decorative programme
Aiming to capture something of the impact of throughout the interior of the A&A might be
illustrations he had seen of buildings by Wright read as an instance of ‘homosexual camp’.16
and Le Corbusier reproduced in books and Nevertheless, I am quick to reject Rohan’s

153
larger argument, reliant as it is on the language eyeshado
of sublimation, concealment, repression and suspende
masquerade to advance his reading of Rudolph’s the way h
‘hypermasculine’ surface as a ‘closeted’, I would li
compensatory form of decoration.17 Without departur
wanting to psychologise Rudolph, I would, of graphi
instead, want to borrow a term from queer far: the co
theory and make a claim for the way in which Tubeway
the ornamental function of Rudolph’s concrete released i
surfaces discloses fashion and decoration as following
the ‘open secret’ of modernist architecture.18 Electric?’
And while much remains to be done on the following
imbrication of sexuality, fashion and surface and-whit
in Ruldoph’s work (the ‘haute minimalism’ of Robson o
his New York townhouse for Halston would ������������������������������ become t
be one place to start), Mark Wigley’s White reproduc
Walls, Designer Dresses (as I have noted) has pop’s firs
already gone a long way towards unpacking Numan’s
such connections with respect to modernist less musi
architecture in the early decades of the that the T
twentieth century.19 a model f
The preceding discussion is meant as a up. As wi
supplement to and extension of this history. facade be
As parallel and related forms, the dramatic Beari
play of light and shadow across the surfaces of begin to o
New Brutalism and the excessive patterns and the forma
textures of New Romantic fashion can be seen to a New
to share a common geneaology in the techniques 1982. Com
of graphic and textile design. Activating the Army LP
surface of the body, New Romantic fashions for WHA
mobilised a popular destabilisation of the 12” single
heteronormative assumptions of gender and ���������������������������������� in Saville
sexuality not seen since glam. (The emergence ���������������� human fa
of Boy George as a kind of Britsh national icon abstract g
in the mid-80s is a case in point.) In turn, as memorably showcased in Godley and Creme’s Tubeway
a form of Brutalist camp the graphic surface- video for Visage’s ‘Fade to Grey’, in which strictly b
effects of New Brutalism exposed not just the Steve Strange is shown modelling the work of band nam
functional dimensions of particular buildings, legendary make-up artist Richard Sharah. In Eurostile
but the apparatus of late modern architecture’s the video Strange’s face appears in a variety graphic d
complex, mutually constitutive relationship of mostly black-and-white compositions typograp
with the discourse of fashion and ornament. emphasising his lips, eyes and the arch of his while the
brows, and near the end his eyes and mouth rendered
are briefly seen to float free of one another, technique
��� as if they are being rearranged. In effect, the cover eve
video operates as a meditation on the potential manipula
������������������ of the face as an abstract, graphic canvas, graphic d
and variations on Strange’s look could be a signatu
Meanwhile, the high-contrast graphic effects found throughout the New Romantic scene, a remnan
writ large across the facades of New Brutalist particularly in its representation in the fashion process in
architecture also found themselves writ small on press. colour ba
the surface of the human face in the form of the The temptation is to trace all this back to the end o
New Romantics’ penchant for the highly stylised the close-ups in Mick Rock’s classic 1973 video It is a
application of cosmetics. This was perhaps most for ‘Life on Mars?’ in which Bowie’s electric blue LP shows

154
eyeshadow, orange mullet and pink lips appear Numan himself, while the WHAM! 12” features
suspended in a seamless white field formed by an unmistakably female cover model. The
the way his face bleeds into the background. But comparison thus allows us to see a shift from a
I would like to suggest another possible point of kind of high-contrast futurism to a full-colour
departure more closely linked to the techniques command of technology that was echoed in
of graphic design we have been following thus the transition from the ‘queer’ sounds of New
far: the cover of Gary Numan’s debut 1979 Romantic synthpop to the decidedly more
Tubeway Army album. Although originally hetero, R&B-influenced New Pop that arose in
released in 1978 with a different sleeve, the mid-1980s. Flush with major label dollars,
following the success of the ‘Are “Friends” it is not surprising that New Romantic bands
Electric?’ single the record was re-released the changed their look along with their music,
following year featuring a high-contrast, black- trading drapery and synths for custom-tailored
and-white illustration of Numan’s face by Garry suits and blue-eyed soul. Indeed, nearly all
Robson on the cover. Retrospectively, this would of the most successful New Romantic groups
become the iconic image of Numan, widely — Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, The Human
reproduced on t-shirts and badges. As British League — were characterised by two-part
pop’s first synth superstar it is arguable that careers marked by a distinct shift in sound.
Numan’s influence on the New Romantics was This transition corresponded directly with the
less musical than it was visual, so it’s no surprise rise of the producer as a central figure in pop
that the Tubeway Army cover should become — Martin Rushent in the case of the Human
a model for the look of New Romantic make- League, Duran Duran with Nile Rodgers and
up. As with the surfaces of New Brutalism, the Tony Swain and Steve Jolley for Spandau. As
facade begins as a graphic effect. a result, the later, and often most successful,
Bearing this in mind, graphic design can New Pop hits by former New Romantic bands
begin to offer us an economical way of charting were elaborate studio creations whose lush
the formal transition from the New Romantic arrangements, Like Saville’s cover for WHAM!,
to a New Pop aesthetic that occurred around revelled in a mastery of technique.
1982. Compare, for example, the Tubeway The early 1980s brought a similar shift in
Army LP cover with Peter Saville’s 1984 sleeve the legacy of New Brutalism as its original tenets
for WHAM!’s ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go Go’ were revived by a coterie of British architects
12” single, admittedly something of a footnote — a number of whom had studied under the
�� in Saville’s oeuvre.19 Both designs feature the Smithsons at the Architectural Association
human face as the ground for an essentially and, later, with Rudolph at Yale — to inform
abstract graphic composition. But whereas the a new style of architecture collectively known
reme’s Tubeway Army LP is limited to a high-contrast, as High Tech.20 As Colin Davies has written,
ch strictly black-and-white rendering with the the work of these architects (including Richard
ork of band name written in a futuristic lowercase Rogers, Norman Foster, Nicholas Grimshaw
ah. In Eurostile, the WHAM! 12” is a tour de force of and Michael Hopkins) can be understood as a
iety graphic design, integrating colour, pattern and return to the modernist belief that architecture
typography in a dynamic composition. And should reflect ‘the spirit of the age.’ And like the
of his while the Tubeway Army cover is clearly hand- New Brutalists, High Tech architects insisted on
outh rendered, wearing its stripped-down graphic the frank expression of services and materials,
her, technique on its sleeve (as it were), Saville’s taking advantage of the latest advances in
, the cover everywhere announces itself as a virtuoso building technology. However, for most
otential manipulation of the combined technologies of High Tech practitioners this became less of a
s, graphic design, photography and printing. In functional mandate than a set of purely formal,
e a signature gesture, Saville even incorporates even graphic, choices, as they abandoned
ene, a remnant of the technology of the printing exposed concrete, opting instead for the bold
fashion process in the form of the vertical greyscale look of prefabricated materials like metal and
colour bar that forms the exclamation point at glass, large exterior steel spaceframes and a
ck to the end of the band’s name. proliferation of exposed services and piping,
3 video It is also crucial to note that the Tubeway often painted in bright primary colours. The net
tric blue LP shows the androgynous, alien face of effect is of an architecture tailor-made for the

155
flexible needs of industry and manufacture and ��
entirely complicit with the demands of advanced ����������������
capitalism.
In March 1977, following the temporary break-
up of Roxy Music and with the Sex Pistols newly
signed to A&M, Bryan Ferry released his first
solo album of all-original material, In Your
Mind. Often considered a ‘lost’ Roxy album (it
features guitarist Phil Manzanera and drummer
Paul Thompson), the record yielded two modest
hits, including the single, ‘This is Tomorrow’.
The title is almost certainly a reference to
Ferry’s mentor Richard Hamilton and the The
Independent Group, for it was also the name of
a watershed 1956 show at the Whitechapel Art
�������������������������������������� Gallery, generally considered the first exhibition
����������������������� of Pop Art. Composed of twelve teams of artists,
���������������������������������������������� architects and graphic designers working in
collaboration, ‘This is Tomorrow’ imagined the
Like the hyper-produced sounds of New possibilities for representing the near future in
Pop it was also an architecture that fitted in the form of a series of innovative installations
perfectly with the ideologies of Thatcherism and that aimed to emphasise the intersection of the
Reganomics, and it remained a dominant style fine and applied arts. Arguably the two most
well into the 1980s. However, with the move to important contributions to the show were the
increasingly ‘soft’ technologies and the rise of Pop phantasmagoria created by Hamilton, John
networked communications and the personal McHale and John Voelcker, and the Brutalist
computer in the second half of decade, the ‘hard’ ‘Patio and Pavilion,’ designed by Henderson,
materials of High Tech began to seem less in Paolozzi and the Smithsons, the team that had
step with ‘the spirit of the age.’ Indeed, Davies organised ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ just three
dates the end of High Tech precisely to the year years earlier. 21
1986 and the tragedy of the Challenger space With its chorus, ‘This is tomorrow callin’/
shuttle disaster, which effectively halted the Wishin’ you were here’, Ferry’s 1977 single
movement’s deep investment in the imagery re-enunciated the Independent Group’s desire
and optimism of the space race. As it happens, to imagine possibilities that lay just on the
1986 also marked an end point for a number horizon, flying in the face of Punk’s defeatest
of the most successful bands who traced their declaration of ‘No Future’. As if taking their cue
roots to the New Romantic scene of the early from Ferry, the ur-Romantic, it is this wish-
80s. Culture Club released their final album image that is taken up, however briefly, by the
that year, Duran Duran lost two core members, New Romantics as they emerge from the New
The Human League had their last number-one Brutalist psychogeography of late-70s urban
single, Ultravox dissolved and Spandau Ballet Britain. As I have hoped to show, this common
embarked on a three-year hiatus, never to repeat lineage is made legible when understood
their former chart success. Even in decline through the lens of graphic design. For, like the
the fortunes of the New Romantics, it would interdisciplinary ‘This is Tomorrow’ exhibition,
seem, were inevitably yoked to those of New the New Romantic aesthetic is best understood
Brutalism. in terms of the way it implicates multiple
domains: not just music, but the interrelated
fields of architecture, fashion and graphic
design. Grounded in a shared set of scriptive
practices, the New Brutalists and the New
Romantics are united by a particular kind of
magic realism — at once fantastic and bloody-
minded — that is uniquely British.

157
NOTES 17. Roh
It should not be surprising, then, that we have 1. For recent discussions of the New Romantics see Simon 18. For
begun to see a parallel resurgence of interest in Reynolds’s Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978‒1984, theory class
both the New Brutalists and the New Romantics Penguin Books, 2005, especially pp. 296‒351, and Dave and the Poli
in recent years. A number of New Brutalist Rimmer’s New Romantics: The Look, Omnibus Press, 2003. Eve Kosofsk
The New Romantics were also the subject of a 2001 BBC University o
buildings are experiencing a renaissance,
documentary titled ‘A Fine Romance: The Story of the New 19. Sav
including the recent wholesale renovation Romantics,’ as well as a 1999 Channel Four episode of the Top George Mic
of the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury and Ten video programme with interview footage and hosted by in the studi
the emergence of Trellick Tower as a highly Boy George called ‘Top Ten 80s Romantics’. A more wide- Princeton A
desirable address. Meanwhile, David Sylvian ranging reconsideration of 1970s architecture, including New 20. See
Brutalist structures like the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens 1988, pp. 6‒
and Bryan Ferry have emerged as style icons,
has been taken up in a special issue of the architectural journal 21. The
and fashion designers like Andrew Harmon OASE titled ‘1970s Revisited’, OASE no. 57, 2001. See also As is Tomorrow
are revisiting the pattern and drapery of New Found: The Discovery of the Ordinary, eds. Claude Lichtenstein graphic des
Romantic scarf-itecture. 22 High-contrast and Thomas Schregenberger, Lars Muller Publishers, 2001. 22. See
graphics and black-and-white photography are 2. Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Season’, The
Fashioning of Modern Architecture, MIT Press, 1995. Fall 2006, p
also back in vogue. As I write this the original
3. For a discussion of this often neglected social context Ferry in GQ
line-up of Duran Duran (minus one) are poised and the importance of the notion of encounter see the
to release a new album, and synthpop is back introduction to the OASE issue ‘1970s Revisited’.
on the radar as part of a widescale revaluation 4. My discussion of New Brutalism here relies heavily
of postpunk and its legacy. As part of this on Banham’s important study, which remains the definitive
book-length consideration of the subject, now sadly out of
revaluation the recent exhibition ‘Panic Attack!:
print: Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic,
Art in the Punk Years’ took place, appropriately, Reinhold, 1966. I have my brother, Matt, to thank for my copy.
at the Barbican Art Gallery. Rumour has it 5. Banham, p. 61.
Martyn Ware has even proposed a plan to 6. Banham, p. 89.
perform the first two Human League albums 7. I owe this point to the graphic designers Experimental
Jetset in their article ‘Lazy Sunday Afterthoughts’, Dot Dot
live, on a stage amongst the concrete buildings
Dot 7, Winter 2003, p. 79. As it happens the suggestion is false,
and walkways of London’s Southbank Centre but the anticipatory value of Pelham’s paperback cover seems
— now that really would be ‘brutal’. to me to be indisputable.
8. Wendy Carlos, Walter Carlos’ Clockwork Orange,
Columbia Records, 1972.
9. Dave Rimmer, New Romantics: The Look, Omnibus
Press, 2003, p. 24
10. Owen Hatherley, ‘Define Decadence, Darling.’
http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_
archive.html. In the course of writing this essay I discovered
Hatherley’s blog, ‘Nasty Brutalist and Short,’ and his
observations on the connections between synthpop and
architecture have proven to be an invaluable spur to my
thinking. See also Lynsey Hanley’s important recent book
Estates: An Intimate History, Granta Books, 2007. While
Hanley is, rightly, quite critical of estates architecture and
Brutalism more generally, not surprisingly she is also a Bowie
fan. See pp. 156‒7.
11. My thanks to Jason Gnewikow for coining the term
‘scarf‒itecture’.
12. Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’ reprinted in Against
Interpretation, Dell Publishing Co., 1965.
13. Timothy M Rohan. ‘Rendering the Surface: Paul
Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale’, Grey Room
01, Fall 2000, pp. 84‒107.
14. Rohan, p. 87. Rohan is paraphrasing Reyner
Banham’s ‘Convenient Benches and Handy Hooks: Functional
Considerations in the Criticism of the Art and Architecture’,
in Marcus Whiffen, ed. The History, Theory and Criticism
of Architecture, Papers from the 1964 AIA-ACSA Teacher
Seminar, MIT Press, 1965, p 102.
15. Rohan, pp. 89‒90.
16. Rohan, p. 93.

158
17. Rohan, p. 100.
s see Simon 18. For the term ‘open secret’ see D A Miller’s queer
8‒1984, theory classic ‘Secret Subjects, Open Secrets’ in The Novel
Dave and the Police, University of California Press, 1989. See also
s, 2003. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essential Epistemology of the Closet,
BBC University of California Press, 1990.
he New 19. Saville offers a revealing anecdote about meeting
of the Top George Michael and hearing Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go
osted by in the studio in Emily King, ed. Designed by Peter Saville,
e wide- Princeton Architectural Press, 2003, p. 30.
uding New 20. See Colin Davies, High Tech Architecture, Rizzoli,
d Gardens 1988, pp. 6‒21.
ural journal 21. The lo-fi, spiral-bound exhibition catalogue for ‘This
e also As is Tomorrow’ also has its own, yet-to-be-written place in
Lichtenstein graphic design history.
s, 2001. 22. See the profile of David Sylvian, ‘A Man for this
s: The Season’, The New York Times Style Magazine: Men’s Fashion
5. Fall 2006, pp. 122‒4, and the recent fashion spread with Bryan
al context Ferry in GQ, July 2007.
he

heavily
efinitive
y out of
Aesthetic,
or my copy.

perimental
Dot Dot
ion is false,
ver seems

range,

mnibus

ng.’
01_01_
iscovered
is
and
o my
nt book
While
ure and
so a Bowie

the term

n Against

: Paul
Grey Room

r
Functional
hitecture’,
ticism
acher

159
SOURCES:
in sequential order

Mark Owens, “Brutal Recall: A Selective Roadmap of Some of New Haven’s Most Iconic
Concrete Landmarks,” Pin-Up, Fall/Winter (2016-17): 194-5.

Tom Burr, “Untitled” in Tom Burr: Anthology: Writings 1991-2015, ed. by Florence Derieux,
(Reims: FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, 2015), 111.

Isabelle Hyman and Marcel Breuer, Marcel Breuer, Architect: The Career and the
Buildings, (New York: H.N. Abrams, 2001), 270-1.

Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media,


(Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1994), 61.

Burr, “Make-Up,” Tom Burr: Anthology, 67-71.

Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, 38.

Mignon Nixon and Louise Bourgeois, Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of
Modern Art, (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005), 52-6.

Beatriz Colomina, “X-ray Architecture: Illness as Metaphor,” Positions, No. 0 (2008): 33.

Colomina, “X-ray Architecture,” 34.

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The
Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1977), 55.

Douglas W. Rae, City: Urbanism And Its End, (New Haven: Yale UP, 2003), 330-8.

Illustration: View of the building system employed at the Armstrong Rubber Co. / Pirelli
Tire Building.

Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” in Junkspace with Running Room, Rem Koolhaas and
Hal Foster, (London: Notting Hill Editions, 2013), 14-15.

Mark Owens, “New Brutalists / New Romantics,” in Forms of Inquiry: The Architecture
of Critical Graphic Design, ed. by Zak Kyes and Mark Owens, (London: Architectural
Association, 2007), 144-59.

Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, 73.

Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” 26-7.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Spanking and Poetry,” in Tendencies, (Durham: Duke UP, 1993),
181-4.

Illustration: A Marcel Breuer drawing for tower façade details from: Robert F. Gatje,
Marcel Breuer: A Memoir, ( New York: Monacelli, 2000).

Burr, “Private Poperty,” Tom Burr: Anthology, 62-3.

Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” 20-1.

Illustration: Anonymous photograph of IKEA New Haven signage on the Armstrong


Rubber Co. / Pirelli Tire Building, date unknown.

Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 156.

Tom Burr
Body / Building

Edited by Emma Fernberger


Designed by Kristian Laudrup

Edition of 100 copies

Artist / City, Bortolami, 2016


TOM BURR / NEW HAVEN 2016 - 2017 BORTOLAMI

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