October 2008

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A sad farewell ceremony took place in Oxford Street just before Christmas when the last red double-decker Routemaster bus on a regular route left on its final journey across London. A huge crowd had gathered, and the event had been preceded by massive coverage in the press. So did the (premature) extinction of a familiar London mobile landmark deserve so much fuss? Surely yes. The first Routemaster may have appeared exactly sixty years ago, but there was life in the vehicle yet. It does more miles to the gallon than its replacements (so is more environmentally friendly), is more comfortable to ride, and is just better designed. What did for it was the Mayor of London’s craven subservience to that charter for vandalism, the Disability Act, for wheelchairs could not negotiate its popular feature of an open rear platform that allows passengers to board and alight where they choose, rather than be trapped behind automatic doors.

Machines may have a shorter life than buildings, as their parts wear out (although buildings of the 1960s were often designed – criminally – for a life of thirty years or less, and it shows), but there is no necessary reason why an efficient design should become obsolete. The Routemaster’s excellence was a consequence of both its technology and its design being the products of evolution. The bus was developed over many years by London Transport, and the design, by Douglas Scott, was the product of careful thought. The curves of both the exterior and interior, the ergonomic design of handles and rails, the avoidance of conflicting movement by placing the stairs at the rear, and the seeming inevitability of every detail, were all a joy to see and experience, especially in comparison with the newer, alien boxy buses, full of sharp projections and discordances inside. (The story is well told by Travis Elborough in The Bus We Loved: London’s Affair with the Routemaster, recently published by Granta Books.)

However, the Routemaster was not the most beautiful of buses. Its ungimmicky appearance is slightly stodgy: hence its timelessness, perhaps. No, the most elegant public conveyance ever to grace London was its predecessor, the rt, which had evolved just before and after World War ii. Slightly narrower than the Routemaster, while having the same rounded corners and interior treatment, it was characterised by a more pronounced slope at the front, curving back from its vertical radiator, while the rear was proudly vertical. Such vehicles were admired by Le Corbusier, who, on a visit to London in 1936, wrote how ‘The buses are splendid – red, covered with beautiful lettering; tall, strategic towers’.

Mention of Le Corbusier, the apparent apostle of a purely functional architecture, invites discussion of the strange formal relationship between buildings and technology. This works two ways. There are machines that are treated as architecture, such as pumping stations with the engines supported on cast-iron Doric columns, or such conceits as Pope Pius ix’s railway carriage, with its balcony and roof supported on twisted columns. And then there are buildings that try to look like machines, such as Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower at Potsdam, which resembles the conning tower of a submarine. Such ideas of an architecture parlante or literal symbolism go back to C.-N. Ledoux’s ideal city, Chaux in France, in which the cooper’s house is inspired by the circular form of a barrel, and the Oikéma, or House of Pleasure, has a phallic plan. But is was Le Corbusier’s book Vers une Architecture, with its photographs of cars juxtaposed with classical temples and such compelling slogans as ‘A house is a machine for living in’, that did most to encourage machine imagery in architecture. The message was clear: buildings need to be efficient like machinery. This ignores the fact that buildings are obstinately static objects with, ideally, a much longer life than machines, and emotional and psychological functions as well as purely physical ones.

The machine aesthetic was particularly influential between the world wars, when so much new architecture was streamlined with rounded corners and horizontal banding, even though, by their nature, buildings do not move and do not need to be aerodynamic in form. Two machines – forms of transport – particularly inspired architects: the aeroplane and the ocean liner. Le Corbusier’s book, first published in France in 1923, had chapters about machines entitled ‘Eyes which do not see’. One was devoted to ‘Airplanes’ and illustrated with photographs of early biplanes and triplanes, with their wings connected by struts. The consequences were soon manifest – for what are the ‘pilotis’ or thin columns on which Le Corbusier and his imitators raised up their creations but aeroplane struts?

Yet by the end of the 1930s the biplane had largely been replaced by sleek monoplanes, just as the 1921 Delage ‘Grand-Sport’ that Le Corbusier juxtaposed with the Parthenon soon looked much more old-fashioned than a Greek temple. Machines soon date, and become obsolete, but gullible architects did not mind. The desirability of pilotis, together with the moral necessity of a flat roof, soon became articles of faith. But perhaps raising structures on struts to free the ground floor is less absurd than giving buildings cantilevered reinforced concrete wings, as at Norman & Dawbarn’s airport at Birmingham. The best example of this was the elegant Ramsgate Aerodrome terminal by David Pleydell-Bouverie, which had a thin projecting flat roof supported on metal piers that tapered towards the extremities; from the air it apparently looked like an aeroplane.

And then there were ships – those magnificent, glamorous liners that enabled passengers to cross the Atlantic at speed and in comfort. It is interesting how the white-painted upper decks and promenades of the SS France or Aquitania, sometimes curved and cantilevered outwards, resemble early modern-movement houses. Indeed, what are the sun-roofs of such houses, often reached by metal ladders, but the First Class decks of ocean liners? By the sea, of course, nautical imagery has more purpose. Marine Court at St Leonards on the Sussex coast is but a huge liner of brick and concrete, while at the Pleasure Beach at Blackpool Joseph Emberton played with funnel-like shapes and modish porthole windows. Such buildings are paralleled by countless examples in the United States, but few are quite as literal as the homage to the great French liner the Normandie that sails among the sand dunes on the Belgian coast near La Panne: a hotel and restaurant of solid masonry complete with bow, stern and funnels, designed by L. Bruggemanon.

Much architectural thought remains essentially childish as ever, and it is undeniable that much of the imagery of the ‘high tec’ architecture that emerged in the 1960s came from the Dan Dare comic strip in the Eagle and other science-fiction publications. The external glass lifts on, say, Richard Rogers’s Lloyd’s building hark back to those lifts whizzing up and down in glass tubes in Alexander Korda’s futuristic nightmare, The Shape of Things to Come of 1936. And I recall that in Norman Foster’s old office in Fitzroy Street the internal doors were all like bulkhead doors on a ship, that is, with rounded corners and a raised sill to trip over. So much for functionalism: architects seem to be peculiarly susceptible to the promises of technology, so that machine-worship continues to triumph over common-sense and practicality. Even so, I have yet to experience a high-tec building that is as efficient, as ergonomically sensitive and as elegant as the interior of that architectural masterpiece on wheels, the Routemaster bus.

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