In the wake of British architect James Stirling’s beloved Postmodernist landmark No 1 Poultry receiving a Grade II historic listing in late 2016, a prior narrative of the site’s architectural past begins to emerge. Famed modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had developed his last and only U.K.-based project for the London site proposed originally as Mansion House Square. Commissioned by private developer Lord Peter Palumbo in the early 1960s, the unprecedented plan to erect a modernist glass tower in one of London’s municipal centers was eventually denigrated and denied planning permission by the early ’80s. Following the demise of the project, Palumbo withheld all physical records of the skyscraper, shrouding the last works of one of architecture’s greatest figures in obscurity.
Now, over 50 years since the project’s inception, Jack Self of London-based architectural institute the REAL foundation has garnered access to Palumbo’s archives of Mansion House Square. The foundation — which aims to excavate how architecture and real estate are inherently shaped by political and economic forces — has launched a Kickstarter campaign in the hopes of generating enough revenue to produce a print publication of the project materials entitled Mies in London. Following the curation of the British Pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale and the production of crowdfunded architecture journal, the Real Review, the foundation hopes the creation of the Mies in London publication will continue its mission of broadening architecture’s relevance beyond the immediate discipline. Architizer recently spoke with Self to uncover the ambition behind the Mansion House project, its turbulent history and its relevancy to our contemporary political climate.
©John Donat, courtesy Drawing Matter and REAL foundation
Joanna Kloppenburg: How did you become involved with the project?
Jack Self: I only found out about the Mansion House Square project about two years ago, almost by accident. It was in the context of another project, when an acquaintance of Lord Palumbo mentioned that after more than 30 years, he was beginning to consider publishing or making the drawing sets available. So I wrote to him at the House of Lords, and I slowly convinced him REAL were the right publishers for the project. We’ve been working on the book for about 18 months in total, and it has been absolutely insane to know you’re looking at Mies drawings, doorhandles, ashtrays, bits of mullion that no one has seen since the mid 1980s …
Why do you think Lord Palumbo obscured the details of the plans for so long?
The project was so controversial for many different reasons. Almost any architect over the age of 40 has a very strong opinion about it in the U.K., but for those under 40, the project is almost completely unknown. It was very complex for Lord Palumbo because of the politics that were involved. The project struggled for a long time through planning, almost 20 years, while Palumbo attempted to accumulate all the pieces of land that were required to make the project. There were likely more than 100 leases and different pieces of property that needed to be settled. Mies always knew that it would be a posthumous project. He always knew that it wouldn’t be possible to actually execute it until the early ’80s.
By the early ’80s, the spirit of the project had changed enormously. The English were no longer pro-modernists and were really interested in these very clean, classical but elegant office towers. They were suddenly very interested in preserving history. There was this postmodern, past-age historical moment, and within that [context] the building became very unpopular. Lord Palumbo was really demonized by a number of public figures, particularly the Prince of Wales, who called it a “glass stump,” was very openly critical and indeed intervened rather unkindly in the inquiry process for planning. In many ways, a lot of personal friends of Palumbo ended up being very much against it.
I think Palumbo is still really disappointed about the fact that it didn’t go forward. I think if you’re engaged in a project of that public dimension, for such a long period of time, it’s not surprising that you need some time to get over it.
©John Donat, courtesy Drawing Matter and REAL foundation
In your interview with Lord Palumbo, he repeatedly insists that Mies’ design for Mansion House was quite classical, particularly in his approach to materials and construction processes. And the building was even quite late on the Modernist timeline; why do you think this was obscured by the Conservative Party and wide popular opinion?
It wasn’t by international standards, but, by British standards, it was pretty cutting-edge because Britain came very late to modernism. At the time when you had futurism, de Stijl and the Bauhaus, in Britain you were still seeing arts and crafts and very rudimentary attempts at modernism. In the 1930s while the Bauhaus was in full swing, Britain was characterized by Edwin Lutyens, who was a classical architect.
“In the 1960s, a building of this kind was considered extremely radical for Britain. By the 1980s, it was seen as totally inappropriate.”
Britain didn’t really embrace modernism as a style until after the Second World War, when it was attempting to rapidly modernize its infrastructure, its housing and its society. In many ways I think you can argue that Modernism is a style — particularly Brutalism — that became so associated with social democracy that when it became social dystopia in the style of “A Clockwork Orange,” popular opinion turned against both that structure of politics and that structure of society. At the same time, [popular] architectural aesthetic turned back towards historical styles.
In the 1960s, a building of this kind was considered extremely radical for Britain. By the 1980s, it was seen as totally inappropriate. I think that’s also because Mies is still very much misunderstood as an architect, precisely because his archives are so difficult to access. There are no publications of them except this one 20-volume set that is insanely expensive at over $1,000 per copy. The only complete collection in Europe belongs to John Pawson, and the most complete public collection in Europe is at the Architectural Association.
S.R. Crown Hall at Chicago’s IIT campus designed by Mies in 1956; Image via
What sets Mies apart from many other great modernists is that he never had utopian visions for a total way of life. With the exception of Lafayette Park and the IIT Campus, he always did individual or small classes of buildings. He never had Corbusian ideas of completely changing the landscape and creating new forms of city. He was therefore very sensitive to context and adjusting buildings to suit their environment. The entire structure of all of his buildings was taken from the rhythm of the adjacent grid patterns. What he did at Mansion House, which is probably the greatest genius move, was to take a scrambled, dangerous collection of medieval streets and turn them into a square that was actually very classical and followed a very regular grid.
©John Donat, courtesy Drawing Matter and REAL foundation
It appears Mies heavily considered how London functioned as a network. Could you talk a little bit more about how that was embedded in the approach to the square?
Mies was somewhat disingenuous in the way in which he presented it. He suggested the reason for doing it was that there were many underground structures, principally the London Underground railway tunnels, which made it impossible to put deep foundations across the whole site. It either had to be a very thin, narrow building, or it had to be a tower. He made the kind of economic justification by moving the building to one side of the site and freeing up the rest. What he really did was to create a space of exception in order to give coherence to the whole area, and he gave up the value of some of that site as a public gesture in order to improve all of the buildings that were around it.
“What sets Mies apart from many other great modernists is that he never had utopian visions for a total way of life.”
Of course, in the 1960s, this space was seen as completely uncontroversial in the original planning because it was seen as being such a generous and civic act, but by the 1980s, Britain was really in a state of turmoil. You had IRA [Irish Republican Army] bombings on an almost monthly basis; you had race riots; you had antigovernment protests all the way across London, which meant that public space was something that was beginning to be seen as not necessarily a positive thing. In fact, potentially having large crowds was dangerous. In this context, my argument would be that the reason the project didn’t go ahead has, in the end, nothing to do with Mies, or very little. It has much more to do with a deep anxiety that the British had about the creation of this public space.
James Stirling’s No 1 Poultry now occupies the proposed site for Mansion House Square; Image via
I imagine that this project has surfaced amidst the controversy surrounding No 1 Poultry’s being awarded a Grade II Listing. Do you consider it also timely to broadcast the circumstances that prohibited the realization of Mies’s building in a post-Brexit-vote U.K.?
I think the relevance of this project coming to light at this particular moment is manifold. When I was involved in the Occupy movement in 2011, the reason I ended up spending several nights in a tent on the steps of Saint Paul’s Cathedral is because there are no other truly public spaces in the city except for this churchyard. Public space in the City of London has been systematically eradicated and privatized. That’s been an ongoing process since the Thatcher era, which is when this project was denied planning. This is really the beginning of the process, which we’re still going through. One of the other really important aspects, I think, is the fact that Mies was denigrated for being German and being a foreigner.
What’s strange is that in the 1960s, which is of course closer to World War II, this wasn’t considered a problem at all. By the 1980s, there was this anxiety about English nationalism and British nationalism — which still seems to go hand in hand with the idea of neoliberalism — and it’s still impacting Europe now. There is a lot of discussion in the British architectural press at the moment about what is going to happen to international architects in the post-Brexit environment. I think the Mies project really serves as a cautionary tale.
Protesters camping in front of Saint Paul’s Cathedral during Occupy London; Image via
In your opinion, why has the British monarch and Conservative Party so actively enforced a historic aesthetic of architecture?
I think that, for me, all forms of Conservatism are what Freud would categorize as “forms of negation.” Freud says that often one fear surfaces as its opposite. It is sometimes the case that people who are very arrogant and conceited are in fact very insecure. It’s that insecurity that manifests as arrogance. In the 1980s, there was terrific and extreme social change going on. There was a completely new type of liberalized economy and completely new working and living conditions; a lot of people were extremely anxious and were looking for something that was familiar.
“Public space in the City of London has been systematically eradicated and privatized.”
In a global world where everyone is suddenly a citizen of the world, it’s very comfortable to fall back on traditional notions of national identity. That’s also something that we’re seeing at the moment, which is a fear of the fact that the 21st century is bringing profound changes to our relationships with each other and our relationships with the planet. It brings with it a strong desire for — in the case of both our nations — some sort of mysterious desire for the 1950s and early ’60s, which was of course the peak of material scientific progress and social equality, if you were white, male and heterosexual …
An ambition of the REAL foundation is to engage the larger public within a dialog about architecture; are you attempting to achieve a similar goal with this book?
The first audience of this book is really architects. It’s providing them with material about one of the last projects that Mies ever worked on. He completed it literally a few weeks before he died. For the reasons that I’ve described to do with its broader relevance, we want to excavate the context in which it emerged, the moment at which modernism began to fall out of favor and what the relevance to that might be. What can we learn from that period in terms of what happens when you stop believing in the future, when you start fixing your eyes on the past? I think that relevance has a much broader feel outside of just the spirit of architecture.
©John Donat, courtesy Drawing Matter and REAL foundation
How do you plan for the production and for dissemination of the book?
Even though REAL foundation is a rather unorthodox institution and believes in inclusivity, democracy and alternative forms of ownership, we are nonetheless bound by the classical laws of capitalist economy. Therefore, we have to find innovative ways to produce publications within those conditions. One of them is that it’s very unprofitable and difficult to make a publication, especially one which is of such a high quality as this one is and which deserves a refined and expensive treatment.
Something like Kickstarter — which allows us to effectively prefinance the book — reduces or eliminates the risk. Once we’ve produced it, hopefully it will go into public sale, although the urgency at the moment is that Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing system. Either we’ll make it and the book will happen, or we won’t. It’s impossible to know how long Palumbo will allow us to have access to this material. There is a certain vulnerability to the project in that sense. Therefore there is a real urgency to make sure that it hits its Kickstarter goal.
The REAL Review, issues 1 and 2
What is your interest in producing a physical book?
There’s two really important aspects to why I think physical publications are still relevant. The first is that books have a finitude. They have a finite number of pages, and therefore they force you to make a priority about how you present information. It forces you to complete a satisfyingly comprehensive vision of the subject.
That isn’t the case on the internet, where often we say, “Well, we’ll allow that story to unfold. We can update it was we go.” There’s no attempt at a coherent vision. The other thing is that books play a vital part in spatial memory. The reason that we have libraries as opposed to just lists of titles that we own is that when we see those books arranged next to each other and we hold the information about them in our head, we draw relationships and that supplies new ideas and creates new occurrences that we couldn’t imagine previously.
Excerpt from the REAL Review’s coverage of Mansion House Square.
The Real Review also was funded by a Kickstarter campaign, and I know the foundation felt some concern over whether the world wanted another architecture journal. Why do you think it was supported so enthusiastically?
I think there is rising popular interest in architecture, but it remains a very insular and introspective discipline. Particularly after 2008, there was a lot going around about subjects — especially housing — and the role that speculation and other economic forces had in shaping our relationship to the built environment. There was not yet, what you might call, a popular magazine about architecture, which tried to make those invisible conditions that influence the way that we live visible and apparent.
We’d like to create an understanding of how the spaces around the general public influence their behavior and shape their relationship to other objects and other people. We’re all effectively looking for greater levels of freedom in our life and greater freedom from coercion. The more we understand that the design of the spaces around us makes possible or prevents certain activities, the more we’re able to critically engage with that. I think that the Real Review hit a certain nerve at the moment at which the magazine launched.
More information on how to back the REAL foundation’s Kickstarter campaign to fund Mies in London, can be found here. The campaign will close on Feb. 17, 2017.
