Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (78 page)

Italian cinema lacked the seductive intellectuality of French (or Swedish) films, but what they shared in abundance was
style
. It was this European style—a variable balance of artistic self-confidence, intellectual pretension and cultivated wit—that distinguished the continental European scene for foreign (especially American) observers. By the end of the 1950s western Europe had not merely recovered from depression and war; it was once again a magnet for aspiring sophisticates. New York had the money and perhaps, too, the modern art. But America was still, as it seemed even to many Americans, a little raw. Part of the attraction of John F. Kennedy, as candidate and as President, was the cultivated cosmopolitanism of his Washington entourage: ‘Camelot’. And Camelot, in turn, owed much to the European background and continental self-presentation of the President’s wife.

If Jacqueline Kennedy imported European style to the White House, this was hardly surprising. European ‘design’ in the later Fifties and Sixties flourished as never before, the
imprimatur
of status and quality. A European label—attached to a commodity, an idea or a person—ensured distinction, and thus a price premium. This development was actually quite recent. To be sure,
‘articles de Paris’
had a longstanding place in the luxury goods trade, dating at least to the late eighteenth century; and Swiss watches had been well regarded for many decades. But the notion that cars made in Germany would
ipso facto
be better crafted than others, or that Italian-designed clothing, Belgian chocolates, French kitchenware or Danish furniture were unquestionably the best to be had: this would have seemed curious indeed just a generation before.

If anything, it was English manufacture that had until quite recently carried this reputation, a legacy of Britain’s nineteenth-century industrial supremacy. British-made domestic goods, vehicles, tools or weapons had for long been highly prized on foreign markets. But in the course of the 1930s and 1940s British producers had so successfully undermined their own standing in almost every commodity save men’s clothing that the only niche left to Britain’s retail merchants by the 1960s was high profile, low quality ‘trendy’ fads—a market they were to exploit ruthlessly in the following decade.

What was remarkable about European commercial style was its segmentation by product as well as country. Italian cars—FIAT, Alfa Romeo, Lancia—were notoriously shoddy and unreliable; yet their embarrassing reputation did no discernible harm to Italy’s elevated standing in other markets, such as leather goods,
haute couture
and even, in a less exalted sector, domestic white goods.
¹⁴⁹
International demand for Germanclothing or food products was all but non-existent, and deservedly so. But by 1965, anything turned on a German lathe or conceived by German-speaking engineers could walk out of a British or American showroom at a price of its own asking. Only Scandinavia had acquired a general reputation for quality across an eclectic range of products, but even there the market had distinctive variations. Well-heeled foreigners filled their homes with high-styled Swedish or Danish furniture, even if it was a little fragile, because it was so ‘modern’. But the same consumer would be attracted to Sweden’s Volvo cars, despite their resolute
lack
of style, precisely because they appeared indestructible. Both qualities, however—‘style’ and ‘value’—were now inextricably identified with ‘Europe’: often in contrast with America.

Paris remained the capital of high fashion in women’s clothing. But Italy, with lower labour costs and unconstrained by textile rationing (unlike France or Britain), was already a serious competitor as early as 1952, when the first international Men’s Fashion Festival was staged in San Remo. However innovative its styling, French
haute couture
—from Christian Dior to Yves St Laurent—was quite socially conventional: as late as 1960, magazine editors and columnists in France and elsewhere not only wore hats and gloves when attending annual fashion shows, they wore them at their desks too. So long as middle-class women took their clothing cues from a handful of Parisian designers and fashion houses, the latter’s status (and profits) remained secure. But by the early sixties European women—like men—were no longer wearing formal hats, styled outer garments or evening wear as a matter of routine. The mass market in clothing was taking its cues as much from below as from above. Europe’s reputation as the capital of style and chic was secure, but the future lay with more eclectic vogues, many of them European adaptations of American and even Asian prototypes, something at which Italians proved especially adept. In clothing as in ideas, Paris dominated the European scene and would do so for a little while to come. But the future lay elsewhere.

At a March 1955 gathering in Milan of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Raymond Aron proposed as a topic for discussion ‘the End of the Ideological Age’. At the time some of his audience found the suggestion a touch premature—after all, across the Iron Curtain, and not only there, ideology appeared all too alive and well. But Aron had a point. The western European state, as it emerged in those years, was increasingly detached from any doctrinal project; and, as we have seen, the rise of the welfare state had defused the old political animosities. More people than ever before had a direct interest in the policies and expenditures of the state, but they no longer came to blows over who should control it. Western Europeans seemed to have arrived rather sooner than anticipated at the ‘broad, sunlit uplands’ (Churchill) of prosperity and peace: where politics was giving way to government, and government was increasingly confined to administration.

However: the predictable consequence of the nanny state, even the post-ideological nanny state, was that for anyone who had grown up knowing nothing different it was the duty of the state to make good on its promise of an ever better society—and thus the fault of the state when things did not turn out well. The apparent routinization of public affairs in the hands of a benevolent caste of overseers was no guarantee of public apathy. In this respect, at least, Aron’s prognosis was off target. Thus it was that the very generation which came of age in the Social Democratic paradise of its parents’ longings was most irritated and resentful at its shortcomings. A pregnant symptom of this paradox can be seen—quite literally—in an area of public planning and works in which the progressive state on both sides of the Cold War divide was unusually active.

The post-World War Two combination of demographic growth and rapid urbanization placed unprecedented demands upon urban planners. In Eastern Europe, where many urban centers had been destroyed or half abandoned by the end of the war, twenty million people moved from the countryside into towns and cities in the first two post-war decades. In Lithuania by 1970 half the population lived in towns; twenty years before the figure had been just 28 percent. In Yugoslavia, where the agricultural population declined by 50 percent between the liberation and 1970, there was a great surge of migration from the countryside to the cities: between 1948 and 1970 the Croatian capital, Zagreb, doubled in size, from 280,000 inhabitants to 566,000; likewise the national capital, Belgrade, which grew from 368,000 to 746,000.

Bucharest grew from 886,000 to 1,475,000 between 1950 and 1970. In Sofia the number of inhabitants rose from 435,000 to 877,000. In the USSR, where the urban population overtook the rural one in 1961, Minsk—the capital of the Belorussian Republic—went from 509,000 in 1959 to 907,000 just twelve years later. The result in all these cities, from Berlin to Stalingrad, was the classic Soviet-era housing solution: mile upon mile of identical gray or brown cement blocks; cheap, poorly-constructed, with no distinguishing architectural features and lacking any aesthetic indulgence (or public facilities).

Where the inner city had survived undamaged (as in Prague), or had been carefully rebuilt from old plans (Warsaw, Leningrad), most of the new building took place on the edge of the city, forming a long string of suburban dormitories reaching into the countryside. Elsewhere—in the Slovak capital Bratislava, for example—the new slums were erected in the very heart of the town. As for smaller towns and rural villages, constrained to absorb the tens of thousands of former peasants now recycled as miners or steelworkers, they had nothing to preserve and were transformed, virtually overnight, into industrial dormitories, lacking even the grace of a remnant of an old town. Collective farm workers were forced into agro-towns, pioneered in the 1950s by Nikita Khrushchev and later perfected by Nicolae Ceauşescu. Such new public architecture as there was—Technical School, Culture House, Party offices—was carefully modeled on the Soviet precedent: sometimes consciously Socialist Realist, always oversize, rarely attractive.

Forced industrialization, rural collectivization and an aggressive disdain for private needs help explain the calamity of Communist town planning. But Western European city fathers did not do much better. In Mediterranean Europe especially, the mass migration from countryside to cities placed comparable strains on urban resources. Greater Athens grew from 1,389,000 people in 1951 to 2,540,000 in 1971. Milan’s population rose from 1,260,000 to 1,724,000 in the same period; Barcelona’s from 1,280,000 to 1,785,000. In all these places, as in smaller towns across northern Italy and in the rapidly expanding outer suburbs of London, Paris, Madrid and elsewhere, planners could not keep up with demand. Like their contemporaries in Communist city offices, their instinct was to construct large blocks of homogenous housing—either on space cleared by war and urban renewal, or else on green-field sites at the edges of cities. In Milan and Barcelona in particular, where the first generation of migrants from the south began moving from shanty towns into high-rise apartments in the course of the 1960s, the result was depressingly reminiscent of the Soviet bloc—but with the additional handicap that many would-be tenants could not afford to rent anywhere near their place of work. They were thus forced into long daily journeys on inadequate public transport—or else in their newly-acquired cars, further straining the urban infrastructure.

But the distinctive ugliness of urban architecture in Western Europe in these years cannot be attributed to demographic pressures alone. The ‘New Brutalism’ (as it was dubbed by the architectural critic Rayner Banham) was not an accident or oversight. In West Germany, where many of the country’s major cities were rebuilt with a breathtaking lack of imagination and vision; or in London—where the Architect’s Department of the London County Council authorized mass housing projects like the aggressively linear, windswept, Le Corbusier-inspired Alton estate in Roehampton—ugliness appeared almost deliberate, the product of careful design. Milan’s awful Torre Velasco, a reinforced concrete skyscraper built between 1957 and 1960 by a private Anglo-Italian consortium, was typical of the aggressive hyper-modernism of the age, in which the point was to break all attachments to the past. When, in March 1959, the Council of Buildings of France approved the design for the future Tour Montparnasse, their report concluded: ‘Paris cannot afford to lose herself in her past. In the years to come, Paris must undergo imposing metamorphoses. ’

The result was not just the Tour Montparnasse (or its natural child, the hideous complex of buildings at La Défense) but a rash of new towns: ultra-high density, multiple housing block-units (
‘grands ensembles’
, as they were symptomatically designated), bereft of employment opportunities or local services, parked at the edge of greater Paris. The earliest and therefore best known of these, at Sarcelles, north of Paris, grew from a population of just 8,000 in 1954 to 35,000 seven years later. Sociologically and aesthetically it was rootless, resembling contemporary worker-dormitory suburbs in other countries (like the remarkably similar settlement of Lazdynai at the edge of Vilnius, in Lithuania) far more than anything in indigenous French housing design or urban tradition.

This break with the past was deliberate. The European ‘style’ so much admired in other spheres of life was here nowhere in evidence. Indeed, it was consciously and carefully eschewed. The architecture of the 1950s and, especially, the 1960s was self-consciously ahistorical; it broke with the past in design, in scale and in materials (steel, glass and reinforced concrete being much the most favoured).
¹⁵⁰
The result was not necessarily any more imaginative than what had gone before: on the contrary, the ‘urban redevelopment’ schemes that transformed the face of so many European towns in these decades were a colossal missed opportunity.

In Britain as elsewhere, urban ‘planning’ was at best tactical, a patch-up: no long-term strategies were worked out to integrate housing, services, jobs or leisure (hardly any of the new towns and housing complexes had cinemas, much less sports facilities or adequate public transport).
¹⁵¹
The goal was to clear urban slums and accommodate growing populations, quickly and cheaply: between 1964 and 1974, 384 tower blocks were thrown up in London alone. Many of these would be abandoned within twenty years. One of the most egregious, ‘Ronan Point’ in London’s East End, actually had the good taste to fall down of its own accord in 1968.

Public architecture fared little better. The Pompidou Center (a 1960s design, though not opened until January 1977)—like the Halles complex to its west—may have brought an assortment of popular cultural resources to central Paris but it failed miserably in the longer run to integrate with the surrounding district or complement the older architecture around it. The same was true of London University’s new Institute of Education, ostentatiously installed on Woburn Square, at the heart of old Bloomsbury—‘uniquely hideous’, in the words of Roy Porter, the historian of London. In a similar vein, London’s South Bank complex brought together an invaluable assortment of performing arts and artistic services; but its grim, low elevations, its windswept alleys and cracking concrete facades, remain a depressing testimony to what the urban critic Jane Jacobs called ‘the Blight of Dullness’.