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| The Grade I listed Isokon apartment block has been compared to an ocean liner Photo: Rachael Smith |
Lawn Road Flats in north London, also known as the Isokon building, is long and thin, with cantilevered exterior walkways that resemble the promenades on a ship. Built in 1934 by the Canadian architect Wells Coates, a follower of Le Corbusier.
The four-story block, with its 32 “deck-access” apartments, was one of the first modernist buildings in Britain. The “minimum” flats were fully furnished and serviced, and all occupants shared a laundry, communal kitchen and the Isobar.
The Isokon was a modernist utopia made concrete, inspired by Pritchard and Coates’s visit to see Mies van der Rohe’s Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, a model community that included houses by Mies, alongside others by modernist pioneers such as Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier.
The previous year Mies had built a disputed brick monument to the martyred German communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Pritchard and Coates also made a pilgrimage to the Bauhaus school in Dessau, which had been directed by Gropius and then Mies, but was now deserted after having being forcibly closed by the Nazis, its staff accused of fostering “cultural bolshevism”.
Pritchard offered refugees from the Bauhaus free accommodation in the Isokon. These included Gropius, the furniture maker Marcel Breuer, and the artist László Moholy-Nagy.
As David Burke reveals in his book The Lawn Road Flats, in the 1930s the Isokon was also home to a succession of Soviet spies, the most prominent of which was Arnold Deutsch.
Deutsch lived in Flat 7, from which he recruited 20 agents, including Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and the rest of the “Cambridge five”. Indeed, no fewer than 11 Soviet spies lived at Lawn Road between the mid-1930s and mid-40s. (By coincidence, Agatha Christie also lived for six years in the Isokon, where she wrote her only spy novel, N or M?)
The building, with its international community and communitarian ethos, was not only a fitting statement of their utopian ideological beliefs.
Utopia is a particularly urban invention: as Lewis Mumford observed, “the first utopia was the city itself”, which represented man’s technological triumph over nature. More’s Utopia – a neologism meaning both “good place” and “no place” – is a man-made island with 54 identical cities that are described as a triumph of design. Led by the enlightened Utopos, the Platonic philosopher-king after which the island took its name, the citizens of Utopia reject the idea of money or private property, work a six-hour day, share everything, are without greed and pride, and place a premium on human happiness.
Architecture, the most utopian of the arts, was interpreted as a harmonising force, able to shape not only space, but to use technology to mould attitudes and beliefs for the better.
Countries and large corporations spent enormous sums promoting their values and aspirations through architecture, design and technology at these international pageants. Against the background of the depression, the 1939 World of Tomorrow fair in New York reflected this technological optimism. Exhibits for Chrysler and General Motors by the industrial designers Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes presented panoramic visions of the city of the future and its avant-garde transport systems. The GM pavilion was a roller coaster ride over a kinetic vision of the atomic US of the 1960s – a monumental landscape punctuated by glass domes, revolving airports and, in tune with its sponsor, seven-lane superhighways.
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| An imagined underwater colony, part of the General Motors’ Futurama 2 ride at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. Photo: Anonymous/AP |
In 1964, with Futurama II, GM updated the exhibition to show underwater cities, as well as urban conglomerations in a deforested Amazon, in Antarctica and on the moon. Utopia was the new frontier, even if it was still just around the corner.
However in the book Last Futures: Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture, Douglas Murphy presents history of failed utopian architectural schemes.
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| Candidates for the Biosphere II project line up on the ‘lung’ of its enclosed environment. Photo: Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis |
The most extravagant of these utopian architectural failure was Biosphere 2, built in the early 1990s at a cost of $150m, which Douglas describes as “the last countercultural blast in architecture”. Situated in the Arizona desert, it was a hermetically sealed, three-acre complex of Mesoamerican pyramids and geodesic domes that was designed as a self-regulating, man-made paradise. Biosphere 2 (the first being Earth) was a high-tech experiment inspired by ecological fear to see if the colonisation of space might one day be possible. Eight “bionauts”, as they called themselves, lived for two years locked inside this crystalline, nuclear bunker. Its huge vaulted structures contained a tropical rain forest, a grassland savannah, a mangrove wetland and salt-water ocean, complete with coral reef – everything one might possibly need to weather the apocalypse. It was described in the press as a “planet in a bottle”, “Eden revisited” and “Greenhouse Ark”.
Despite being schooled in The Whole Earth Catalog and studying manuals with titles such as “How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine”, yields harvested in the Biosphere were disappointing and the bionauts began to starve. They lost 18% of their body weight, mostly in the first six months. Food was carefully measured into equal portions, and the larder had to be locked because it was being raided by the ravenous bionauts. An infestation of ants and cockroaches managed to get through, nevertheless, further depleting precious stocks. When carbon dioxide levels rose, extra oxygen had to be pumped in to keep the inhabitants alive. Tourists came in thousands to peer into the vivarium at the laboratory rats – the Biosphere was an acknowledged precursor to the Big Brother reality-TV show. The emaciated pioneers, engaged in a power struggle, split into two factions who scarcely spoke to each other. By the time they emerged, the utopia they envisaged had descended into chaos, and the experiment was acknowledged as a failure. Time magazine would call it one of the “50 worst ideas of the 20th century”.
But “A map of the world that does not include utopia is not even worth glancing at,” quipped Oscar Wilde, “for it leaves out the country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”
Source: Bohemians, Bauhaus and bionauts: the utopian dreams that became architectural nightmares
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