Читать книгу A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground - Marko Jobst - Страница 6

Object

You might recall a message from a few months ago, you might have found it on a train you took from King’s Cross, or was it from Liverpool Street Station – Charing Cross, perhaps? – it was in one of the places on the Underground where I knew to leave them for you, forbidden from meeting as we were and confined to the surface the moment the other one disappeared underneath. I wrote to you about buildings back then, and what constituted architectural objects, that simplest way of defining architecture. Hardest to undo as well. And it was by accident, if one highly appropriate, that I told you of forms, the way they were to be understood in the history of architecture, resurfacing at unexpected junctions, mutating with each new incarnation, inherent, to this day, in every geometry that desires to mould matter to perfection. This is an issue closely related to what I want to speak of now: the story of architectural objects. You might think that I am veering off script here, that this is a different matter altogether. But bear with me, it will become clear why I speak of objects when I speak of the Underground.

I learned about the term from Jan, the first of my many guides. We met in one of the Library cafes, always the same, where the internal tower provided an apt backdrop: a tower of books encased in glass, a mock literary edifice bearing the name of a king long dead. We sat in the rectangular booths, our bodies cut off at the shoulders, figurines sinking into the limestone landscape. His smile remained fixed throughout our conversations and every time he left I wondered what would happen once there was no one to observe it. But what he said, peering from behind spectacles that seemed to cloud with endless perspectives of metal and glass, of fountains reaching for the skies, landscapes re-enacting histories of nature, stayed with me. It awaited this moment perhaps: the emergence of my audience of one. An insider to the city, perpetually plotting escape.

This journey starts with a building in more ways than one, and the building I speak of here is key to rethinking the history of the Underground, even if it might not be obvious at first glance. This is the fable, then, the first story of significant buildings you will hear. Quite possibly the last. It is not what you expect, no doubt, but you signed up for deviations the moment you decided to and read my messages behind your father’s back.

It was called The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations and it saw more than six million bodies flow through the crystal frame of its architecture. For the five-and-a-half months that it lasted, one fifth of the population would have visited; a sea of people, the swarming of bodies. It was to reflect the whole world, this crystal frame, and the world would flow through it, filling in waves that peculiar cabinet of curiosities. That’s what Jan said. This was the middle of the nineteenth century, remember, and to collect meant to systematise, classify, a century of such tradition already behind the crowds gathered to observe the spectacle. The Prince’s ‘generic’ division – whose wife had hijacked the century, stamping her name on it – was likened to a living encyclopaedia, an image of the world, Jan told me and smiled. It wasn’t just the objects that underwent the process of classification here, people did as well: living tribesmen, the so-called ‘ethnographic examples,’ transformed into statues by the time of the second Palace.

This second Palace would hold a collection of architectural forms as well, neatly arranged within its crystal frame, a museum of architectural models built one-to-one in scale, another classification yet – of architectural objects this time, in the various forms they assume. And hidden among the exhibits, in the multitude of objects and various carefully listed items, there was ‘machinery in motion’, as the organisers of the exhibition had called it. Housed in the Industrial Courts, it contained displays of manufacturing, and proved to be among the most popular exhibits, Jan said. I nodded, expectant. There were steam engines here, cotton-weaving facilities, ‘portable’ houses even. Motion and mobility was everywhere.

The building itself was a collection of machine-like parts, prefabricated as it was, its columns, beams and girders made of cast iron, the glass laid by a wagon that ran on wheels in special gutters along the roof while it was still being constructed. The speed of construction was like nothing anyone had ever seen before, Jan said and leaned across the table. One week and eighty men, eighteen thousand glass panes lined up, to be put in place.

The palace was a factory and a display cabinet. This building, an architectural object, this veritable technological edifice had been fast-assembled: a peculiar kind of a machine itself. And it could, and indeed did, migrate across London, like all the walking architectures the avant-gardes would later dream up in vain. All the way to Sydenham, south and east of the original Hyde Park location. How could a building that had materialised with such unprecedented speed not resonate with machinery in motion? How could it not be the prototype for what the Underground itself would become one day, when it finally emerged a few decades later?

As I sat there, I knew that Jan hadn’t grasped this yet. None of the army of researchers and historians plaguing this building, none of the distinguished academics stood in front of audiences proclaiming verities (especially when making their words appear relative). They were blind, sightless people. But we know this, you and I, children of the Underground that we are, arrested by its tunnels, unable to leave, even when traversing the city’s surface.

From the beginning, then, there was a building here and there wasn’t one – that is what you should understand as we begin this journey. Time was called on this architectural object from the outset, both of them in fact: the original and its simulated sibling. As for originality, though, the first iteration wasn’t an original at all but a copy itself, and of an unexpected model at that, which was deemed less monumental an edifice than the Palace could ever aspire to be: Crystal Palace had been modelled on a conservatory.

The first exhibition would close on 11 October 1851, Jan continued, oblivious to my reverie. There were talks of dismantling it, of shipping it to New York, for the exhibition that was to take place there the following year (the century littered with similar events). Paxton himself had wanted it to become a garden. Charles Burton proposed it be re-assembled as a tower, one thousand feet in height, a belvedere of sorts and a winter garden, as well a display collection: all rolled into one. Some said it should be turned into baths, others into an extension of the British Museum. It could have become a residence for invalids; a picture gallery; a library; a theatre. A riding school even. Trivial and sublime, a conservatory enlarged out of all proportion, with horses galloping down its monstrous nave. It’s something out of those fictions of science, a parallel history that never happened, just another phantasm to add to the hubris of the century. This was a building of redundancies; it remains so to this day. There are plans to resurrect it once again, a third iteration is on its way.

I kept listening to Jan’s story, hour after hour, day after day, inside a building elusive in its own sprawling ways. The second Palace was planned and executed with even greater speed, he insisted, it came to be twice as large and forty-four feet higher, able to house the Monument to the Fire of London, he claimed. A container of containers, large enough to swallow other buildings, other architectures. It was a monument to architecture itself and would become a monument to fire in the end, to destruction and dissolution, which sooner or later turn on every edifice. Look at the black-and-white footage, at the sky as it screams. Observe the way iron frames melt. Watch the repetition of structural order as it dissolves in the blaze.

We will speak of images later, and I will tell you all you need to know about the way your father’s art is defined by them. But note that, from the very outset, this building was a vision machine as well, a palace made of windows, as the irrepressible wit of journalists had it. A particular, peculiar viewing device. The Palace revolved around the eye of the observer, it constructed the world around it, I mused as I listened to Jan on a late afternoon, watching light filter through the ceiling far above our heads. The second Palace would offer us the Telescope Gallery, a series of cast-iron ‘bull’s eye’ girders, circular and ordered at twenty foot intervals. A tunnel, that is. Do you see it now? The first exhibition had offered ‘the education of the eye,’ Jan said, a slogan that would be taken up by the promoters of the second Palace (Piggott, 2004: 21). And that is exactly what the building did, I thought then, and not because of the displays and exhibits but for its relation to repetition instead, to light and scale.

In many ways, then, it was the object that crystallised key issues of modernity in architecture: through the question of materials, the use of iron and glass, the structural logic that allowed us to dictate ways in which a building can appear, the ways in which it would be perceived. As an object, an architectural edifice, it was a building of modernity par excellence. It embodied key themes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, establishing a paradigm of what was to be seen – from inside as well as from without – and to what extent the line separating the two would become blurred.

But by being an object, the Palace was still clearly identifiable, autonomous if you will. It was, after all, a building. While constructed in and of light, it remained identifiable. This is what I need you to understand: that the Crystal Palace initiated a lineage of highly visible objects of architecture to the point that visibility became their ultimate purpose. Despite its size, its structural logic and formal presence, it demonstrated the impermanent nature of modernity’s architectures. The Crystal Palace embodied the processes of construction and dissolution, resulting in the impermanence of all of its architecture, yet remained visually identifiable, a building clearly present. It had brought into question a number of aspects defining the discipline, but remained, clearly, an object.

Which the emergence of the Underground would topple. Everything would be swallowed by the unstable surface and, rather than dissolve in light, infuse all of architecture with the darkness of earth.

The Crystal Palace represents only one juncture in the development of the buildings of modernity however, of modernity’s architectural object. It lends itself to thinking architecture in terms of structure, materials and image, yet there is another, more ambiguous trajectory to pursue here, that of railway station buildings, which took certain aspects of the Palace and hybridised them in ways never before seen. It is a trajectory initiated at the time of the building of the Palace, a parallel architectural history more overtly wedded to movement.

Urban railway stations were dual from the outset: that is what my next guide proclaimed. They disallowed easy absorption of new materials and technologies into unified objects, and clear wholes. The world’s first long distance railway operated from around the corner from where I write this. Simon, my guide, spoke from behind the joyful facade of his face, all Victorian colours and exuberance for no reason other than to court pleasure. It was Euston, the year was 1837. There was no precedent for this kind of a building, he said, so Euston introduced a number of features that would never be repeated. And yet, it holds the key to what would come later, under the surface.

It had a free-standing Doric portico, this first of London’s railway stations, and an oversized one at that. As for the train platforms – that technological necessity every building accommodating railways has had to address ever since – they were not of a piece with the rest, but an afterthought, tucked away at the back. It was the portico that was key, the archway that marked the triumph of entering the city. The relief of escaping it, perhaps.

The design was split between architects and engineers, Simon told me as we pondered the missing station entrance around the corner from where we sat. He had insisted we meet in the courtyard, peering on some days through the narrow passageway towards St Pancras, facing the direction of Euston on others. The train shed was designed by Charles Fox, the man who would later work on Crystal Palace. ‘Euston’s train shed was relatively low and was covered by parallel pitched-roof spans of ‘ridge and furrow’ type made of wrought iron and glass,’ Simon said to me in the voice of a teacher (Bradley, 2007: 60).

But the curious thing about Euston, I thought, was the way it divorced the various components that had come to form it. The shed, the hall, the hotel and portico (that most interesting part of the disparate assemblage that emphasised the threshold, marked the gateway), they were all separate units. It has a direct bearing on what would emerge as the Underground railway station, I thought, hinting at something that would become much more radical once the Underground was instituted: the peculiar discontinuity between inside and outside, which would play itself out again when we disappear under the surface. But I said nothing, I wasn’t ready to rebel.

King’s Cross opened in 1852, Simon continued as I watched a pigeon circle Newton’s statue in The British Library courtyard. A year after Crystal Palace. It was quite unlike Euston, all its elements designed by the same man, Lewis Cubitt. The station’s outer walls were made of brick. There were two large glazed openings facing Euston Road. They followed the curve of the train-shed arches, making the facade perfectly fit the interior. Modernist historians would find this acceptable, Simon said and smiled, as if everything modernist historians claimed should be taken with a pinch of salt. This relationship between the shed and the building would announce the emergence of modernist logic.

The question is always one of unity of the two aspects of building, the train shed with its industrial heritage, and the station building, its traditional architecture, I thought. The train shed needed to merge with the rest of the building, in order to form a legitimate, unified object. The case of underground railways would turn out to be more complex, yet it remains unacknowledged. An Underground station, unlike the main line railway station, does not allow for this form of specialisation: it is engineering forcing architecture to adjust and disappear, and architecture striking back by co-opting through design the technological aesthetic. Simon couldn’t help me with this, so I never met him again.

Before it had anything to do with station buildings, before it was a city-wide enclosure under the Earth’s surface, the nascent Underground was another form of architecture, a different kind of a hybrid. Few people notice this trajectory, but you will be able to follow, even if you haven’t heard of arcades before. You understand the Underground, or so I’m led to believe.

I started exchanging letters with your father soon upon my arrival in this city, despite the context of my visit. Perhaps he suspected who I was, or imagined me to be. He shared his knowledge with me in any case, and everything I know about the history of the Underground I stole from him. In his first letter – which I read in that odd niche by the staircase – he wrote that to have a railway run under London had first been conceived by Charles Pearson in a pamphlet published in 1845. The initial idea was for a railway to run down Fleet valley to Farringdon, covered by glass. An arcade, of sorts; remember that.

There were other types of schemes at the time, all following the notion of arcades. William Moseley had proposed a railway that would run twelve feet below the surface, more or less following the route of the Central Line later in the century. It would be surrounded by shops, houses, hotels and a walkway above. ‘The second scheme for a ‘Grand Girdle Railway and Boulevard under Glass’, suggested by Sir Joseph Paxton,’ your father wrote me, ‘was even grander, a twelve-mile railway built above ground but within a glass arcade and, like Moseley’s scheme, also containing houses and shops. It too broadly followed the route of what would eventually become an Underground line, since the aim was to link London’s railway termini, as forty years later the Circle (which fortunately escaped the fate of being called the Girdle) was to do. Paxton’s scheme, for which he sought public funding and which he cannily called the Great Victoria Way to curry royal favour, was quite liked by the committee but was ultimately rejected on the grounds of cost’ (Wolmar, 2005: 24).

It was to run down the route of what would become the Circle line in the 1880s once again, and, most importantly, be constructed of the prefabricated units that the Crystal Palace had been made of. A hugely stretched version of the Palace, shops and houses lining its sides, with a colossal arcade connecting the railway stations with the Palace of Westminster. Its width was that of the transept of the Crystal Palace exactly: 72 feet. It would have been one hundred and eighty feet high. It was to have two railway tracks. And a road above them. And then, there was a double wall, the supposed guarantee of acoustic separation between the two realms: that of the railways, with their noise and steam, and the shops and houses. Epic madness, no less.

But that was all the information I got from your father, in that first of many letters I’d receive from him. You see where this is going: an extended Crystal Palace was to house a railway line, then insinuate itself into the urban environment. An object as much as a mere tunnel, and a passageway as well.

A manifold conductor of movement, that thing. And then, while the Palace might have been about the geometry of the line in part only, this one would cut through the existing composition of objects. A line, a cut; a never-ending gesture that could go on for ever. Exactly like our Underground tunnels.

Built during the first half of the nineteenth century, before Baron Georges Haussmann had got his hands on the city, Parisian arcades were pedestrian passages of iron and glass, connecting the main thoroughfares. Walter saw them as transitional spaces, simultaneously inside and out, private and public; they were ambiguous and never lent themselves to any single, fixed activity, which is what drew Walter to them, Walter, who would conduct a never-ending, life-long research into them. He described the arcades as places where you could linger and observe, shop perhaps, or simply pass from one part of the city to another; shortcuts, passageways. Passagenwerk, the original title, remember that.

The source I was reading – this wasn’t Walter himself, you understand, but was one of the many commentators who keep sifting through his thoughts, the host of bodies hunched over his writing in The British Library reading rooms – this source of mine claimed the passages had no fixed meaning. They didn’t constitute autonomous places, they were ‘parasitic’ upon existing ones. That is the term the source used, the informant that he was. Open to light yet sheltered from the elements, they were private even when carved from public space. Magic, phantasmagorical, intoxicating: the residue of dreams. Walter wandering through the arcades of his mind, a guide to others, lost to himself.

Residues of a dream world. Isn’t that what makes the experience of the Underground’s endless tunnels what it is, utterly concrete and always somewhat unreal? It was the technologies of glass and iron that had made the arcades possible (my source claimed Walter had said) and they offered a glimpse of the kind of experience based on a new relationship with nature, with society as well, as a consequence. But they wouldn’t last. They would lose their ambiguous character quickly – Walter had claimed, the source maintained – and emerge fully defined, either as spaces of fixed use, or as routes, ways of mere passage. They became department stores, associated with commerce and slave to its laws; or dwellings and homes, as in Fourier’s phalansteries. That is what the source claimed, the absence of the Underground palpable in what was written.

In Walter’s writings, the Parisian arcade was the threshold, a ‘point of passage’; that was what gave it its ‘disquieting’ sense of ambiguity (Caygill, 1998: 132-3). The challenge to the distinction between private and public, artifice and nature, was erased. Sell. Sleep. Pass through and move away. This is how Walter understood the arcades, as containing latent, unrealised futures. Does this sound familiar? But isn’t it the Underground he describes?

There was another source on my table, here, in the British Library reading room (as the woman across the table pulled a scarf over her shoulders to protect herself from recycled air, no fresher here than in the tunnels you walked through as you read my message). This other book, the source I let whisper in my ear, pointed out that the separation of the two would always be relative: ‘Benjamin writes of arcades themselves as kinds of interiors in the city, spaces that reorganise relations between inside and outside,’ he wrote, then related what Walter had written. ‘The domestic interior moves outside…. The street becomes room and the room becomes street.’ And also, ‘Arcades are houses or passages having no outside – like the dream’ (Rice, 2007: 10). In Benjamin’s project, the arcades were physical, material embodiments of ‘technological, commercial and spatial developments of the nineteenth century,’ representative of that century only (Rice, 2007: 11). That’s what the source maintained.