FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Architecture & Terror

Rant Number 342 5 March 2009

Roger Scruton, the greatest living English philosopher, impelled me to go and view Le Corbusier – The Art of Architecture exhibition at the Barbican Gallery. Aesthetic urge? Pas du tout. Rather, a distinct desire to grasp the unlikely roots of terrorism. It was well worth it and I recommend it. You have got to see what one man behind the 9/11 attack on the twin towers was all about - according to Roger, anyway.

‘The skyscrapers are too small’ Le Corbusier judged when he first saw Manhattan. A remark that puts him in a nutshell. This bow-tied, bespectacled and bourgeois Swiss is the father of the modern megalopolis. The author of a crime against nature. Whenever you see hideous, rising tower blocks, gridlocked city traffic, a maze of elevated motorways…it’s him. The alienation the sane person feels in big, inhuman Western cities is his fault. Brutalism, minimalism, buildings of grey, reinforced concrete, wanton destruction of historic centres – the sledgehammer praxis of architecture: Le Corbusier created them all.

1931 was the centenary of French colonial rule in Algeria. The government drew up a new city plan. Corbu believed that colonisation was by then fait accompli. (A prophet he was not.) He wanted to make Algiers into the modern capital of European Africa. So he produced his notorious Plan Obus. ‘Obus’ is French for ‘bombshell’. Really apt. It entailed blowing up the historical heart of the Arab city, with callous disregard for its cultural and religious heritage. Building a gigantic apartment block, extending for miles across the bay. Rising directly over the Casbah, the Muslim quarter. Predictable elevated highway and bridges would speed traffic along the labyrinth of narrow lanes and low dwellings below. Setting Arab and French city life further apart from each other. A dream of European supremacy. Corbu’s new, utopian Algiers would replace ‘the leprous sore which had sullied the gulf’ with a ‘masterly, correct and magnificent play of shapes in the light’, he wrote. Wallahi! Truly enlightened. To give them credit, the French authorities rejected plan Obus. They had better foresight than Corbu. By 1962 the French quit Algeria, forced out by a popular revolution born out of that backward casbah our visionary architect had sought to marginalise.

In ‘The West and the Rest’ Roger Scruton recalls how some leaders of Egyptian Islamists were graduates in scientific or technical subjects. Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers and suicide bombers, had studied architecture in Cairo. In Hamburg he continued his studies, surrounded by the type of modernist buildings that today spoil many an old German city. But Atta was no admirer of Le Corbusier. Rather, he chose to write his thesis on the restoration of the ancient city of Aleppo, in Syria. Chance? Not so, Roger suggests. It was nostalgia for the ancestral Arab and Muslim city, now invaded and desecrated by Western urban arrogance. With its human-sized buildings no higher than mosques, its religious schools and bazaars, its lanes of private houses, its inner patios and courtyards and its minarets lancing up into the sky, pointing man towards Eternity, the Muslim city is above all a city of believers. A city of God.

Contrast that with the contemporary metropolis Corbu helped to create. Looming skyscrapers dwarf churches and cathedrals. High-rise towers in steel and glass may gleam but they also repel in their functionality and anonymity. Veritable temples of Mammon, they house mostly banks and financial institutions. And the streets are too wide and aseptic, the interiors too standardised, the spaces too open and impersonal. Did Atta seethe with rage at the arrogance, the hubris of the builders of cities which exemplify a denial of the life of piety and prayer? If so, his murderous fury, his targeting of the twin towers in New York would make sense…

C’est pittoresque mai c’est ne pas l’histoire, you might opine. Too far-fetched. Al Qaeda does not produce monographs in town planning. Atta was certainly a devout Muslim but so are innumerable others, architects and bricklayers alike, and they do not go about blowing people or offices up. Furthermore, you can’t crudely demonise Le Corbusier. There is also real elegance, pure geometry, light and simplicity in his conceptions. I would not at all mind inhabiting the delightful Villa La Roche-Jeanneret, with its slender supporting columns, its luminous interiors, wide horizontal windows and open plan. I am no fan, though, of his ungainly roughcast church at Ronchamp. It was inspired by a crab shell and it looks it. Significantly, it replaced a Gothic Church. In the Gothic the eye is drawn upwards, it reaches towards the infinite. Particularly in Gothic interiors, with their vertical lines and apparent ceilinglessness. Corbu’s crabbed shell refers to nothing higher. The priest is no crusty Lefevriste but, if that botched-up shape stands for Vatican II, he’d rather stick to Vatican I.

Rage at modernist architects is not confined to Islamist bombers, of course. Prince Charles has accused the same gang of having done more harm to London than the Luftwaffe in WWII. (Not that he intends to follow Atta’s example, I am sure. Camilla would never allow it, anyway.) His Highness’ ideal, neoclassicism, is perhaps a little frigid and unexciting but he has a point. Carbuncles like the faintly obscene City Gherkin may draw the gawping tourists’ eye. They also attract the man of taste’s execration, I hope.

When I lived in little Qatar, on the Arab-Persian Gulf, I daily beheld the cluster of skyscrapers forming the Doha business centre, by the bay. It’s like that all over the Gulf, and Saudi, too. They are the haunting icons of Western supremacy. What Le Corbusier could not accomplish in Algiers, his post-modern heirs have succeeded in inflicting into the very heart of Arabia. I might well believe that 9/11 was a bloody pay-back for that.

As for myself, my favourite Doha recreation was sitting in the small souq. Sipping Arab coffee, eating sticky baklawa and chatting in broken Arabic with the happy locals. Not quite like the Baghdad of the Arabian Nights, no. Only a humble priest’s idea of simple pleasures. Know what? Must be a bit of an Arab at heart.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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