Modernism is back in architecture. But it’s not all bad — really

There’s many ways to define what modernism is, or was, or is again, and one of them might be as a war between architects and the rest of us. From around the 1920s onwards, writing started to become deliberately difficult, music resistant to deep-seated ideas of beauty, and painting abstracted entirely from showing us stuff.

None of that really mattered per se; there was still Gershwin and Edward Hopper, and scholars of the future may well conclude that the most significant book of the last twenty years was Fifty Shades of Grey.

Architecture is different, obviously. The same spirit that animated modernism — active rejection of the past, of an idea of natural beauty — involves the destruction of whole cities, the breach with living memory, and the imposition of regimes against ornament and detail, and all the pleasures that people build back into their lives and environments when they get the chance.

The rise of functionalist modernist architecture, fetishising repetition, invariance, minimalism and cold materials, probably did no more damage to everyday life over its reign from the 1940s to the 1980s than any cultural phenomenon of the period; its totalitarian spirit, its means of spread, its adoption by capitalism, which was happy to adopt an aesthetic which substantially cut the costs of detailing and finish.

Its arid victory ensured its early failure; postmodernism began in architecture because no one was required to live in a William Gaddis novel, or look at a Xenakis composition everyday of their lives. But both high postmodernism — where a three floor office block was decked out in nine colours shifting panels and a series of knowing references to Palladio in the styling of the door handles — brought with it all the problems that modernism had warned against; a descent into kitsch and triviality, for which as examples I give you RMIT and UTS.

Now, if this year’s Australian Institute of Architects (AIA) Awards are anything to go by, modernism is back, baby.

In every category the key prizes have gone to those emphasising expression of form over freewheeling detail or decoration, with even the past buildings chosen conforming to this aesthetic.

Does this represent some new push by the profession to return to an aesthetic of purity and restraint, in which its own sensibility is prized and preferred over that of a wider public? Or does it represent the utter exhaustion of high postmodernism and the high ornamentalism that followed it, as its adoption by lesser talents have reduced it to triviality and clutter?

The shift is striking. Leaving aside the heritage restoration awards, the dozen or so winners, pictured at the AIA’s website, represent a sea of steel and concrete dominated by grey, so much so that the occasional burst of white or — gasp — red lands like a colour riot.

The most striking and programmatic example of this is the winner of the Zelman Cowan award for public architecture, the Woodside Building for Technology and Design at Monash University, whose very nature tells us a lot about the forces behind the new modernist spirit.

Designed by Grimshaw in collaboration with Monash — more than 30 architects are credited — it is an engineering and IT teaching building sponsored by a petrol and gas company to achieve net zero carbon output on this small footprint, while the gross carbon output continues elsewhere.

Perhaps, then, the building’s aesthetic is appropriate, because this is an expression of power: a set of grey and glass (and a bit of red) boxes interconnected to form a larger box. Some of this is hardcore, man. The aspect that looks out over the carpark is, to this writer’s eye, not indistinguishable from US prison architecture. It’s as if the criticisms levelled at the Monash campus over the decades — its composition as a space to champion austere modernism, which generations of students remember with a shudder — have been readopted as a proud statement of intent.

No one could deny that the massing and detailing are better composed than the galumphing buildings of the past. But if the intent was to let engineering and IT students know that they were the factory product of the education system, well, mission accomplished. 

That is not to say that there’s nothing expressive in the prizewinners. The most freeform building in the mix is Penleigh Essendon Grammar School Music House by McBride Charles Ryan — you really have to leave your morality at the door in architecture criticism; under other funding regimes, a state school would have these sorts of buildings — whose undulating, white-patterned wall suggests both the flow of a sound wave, and music on stave paper, without descending to kitsch (although let’s check in again in ten years’ time).

The best building in the mix is the Barker College Rosewood Centre, winner of the Daryl Jackson award for educational architecture, by Neeson Murcutt + Neele. A long white three-storey building, one side all windows, set among gums and the college’s broad grounds.

The Murcutt in the firm’s name is the late Nick Murcutt (son of Glenn Murcutt), who founded it with his partner Rachel Neeson. Thus, the building is [Glenn] Murcuttian in its massing, its floating setting among the mulga, and the variant patterned minimalism of the window. That said, it’s not as good as a Glenn Murcutt — but nothing ever would be, so that is no real criticism. It’s certainly the direction this correspondent would want institutional architecture to develop, and a “Murcuttian movement” is really the best hope for a genuinely distinct and place-and-history responsive Australian architecture to develop.

But the most interesting award, in terms of trying to work out what the awards are saying, is the commercial architecture award for Wangaratta Street by MAArchitects, a small infill building in Richmond, Melbourne.

Done in plain grey and glass, it’s a mildly expressive modernism of intersecting curved concrete edges and asymmetrical massing. It gains much of its effect by having a contrasting austerity to the textural history of brick and wood around it.

Indeed that’s the paradox, because while I can now see the elegance of its design, I must have passed it a couple of dozen times in the past and been repeatedly mildly depressed by the sight of it, as an example of the tidal wave of grey that is taking over the area.

Much of that is simple, artless slab walling, but that simply emphasises the paradox of artistic modernism: if the quality has to be pointed out to you, then something ain’t working, at least in an urban setting. One of the main points that prompted the rise of postmodern architecture was the strong possibility that modernist architecture was simply wrong about human needs and desires.

They’re not infinitely malleable, and any building that is going to be seen thousands of times by the same people should have a bias towards detail, variation, colour and ornament. There’s better and worse ways of doing that, but if one whole approach yields tedium and mild melancholy, a disengagement from space, then it’s pretty important to have that debate — far more so than as applies to poetry or music. 

The surest sign that the modernists are on the march? The selection of the 1956 Melbourne Olympic swimming pool for the “National Award for Enduring Architecture”. And well deserved too, for a building that is expressive and striking by being functional to the needs of a competition swimming pool.

But that merely shows the road not travelled, especially in Australia — that of a fully expressive modernism, using the mutability of steel and concrete to create new forms.

There’s very little of that, not because it was tried and found difficult, but because it was found expensive and not tried. Now if the “new spirit” of the profession, as our inner cities are wholly reconstructed, is to renew its tight alliance with capital and give us architectural S&M with Fifty Shades of Grey, they may have a fight on their hands.

Note: Penleigh Essendon Grammar Music House and Barker College I’m assessing from pictures only. The rest I’ve seen in the steel flesh.