I’ve been working on this for ever, and it could be still expanded and improved quite a bit, but I just wanted to publish something on this dormant site. It’s a tribute/poison-pen letter to Cambridge at the end of my first year. Sorry about my terrible photographs.

I remember climbing the wide, narrow steps of Harvey Court, where there is a good café and accommodation for students at Gonville and Caius, and finding the world had utterly changed. It was one of those days when people say that the rain washes everything clean, though that never happens in Cambridge – except here, on Sir Leslie Martin’s quiet raised court. The rain had seeped into the yellow stock bricks and made them darker and more iridescent, so to come up to that small expanse, bare of anything but an odd protruding skylight – and, since it is on the roof, it is always a surprise to find anything here at all, this is not where a courtyard should be in Cambridge – was to enter a kingdom of yellow light, very gentle, very exact. The strange pillars to the left, only a couple of bricks wide and a metre long, moved in and out of the light, and the wooden casements basked in it, silently contented. Here, no melodrama was possible and anguish was absurd; light comes from every surface, but it does not reflect yourself back at you,  just leads you on a short, not excessively playful dance, through columns, into a recessed doorway, up to an inadequate sculpture of a skylight, and in between the cracks of the bricks, into their endless, meaningless variations. It was the very ideal of peace, peace which was not emptiness but very close to it, some slight touches of thought on the void, to reassure you, to keep your interest.

I think it was like that, anyway. I may have made this up, I can’t remember: that’s true of all the descriptions of buildings in this essay. I like what I say I like, of course, and don’t like what I say I don’t, mostly, and it’s true, generally speaking, that Harvey Court is an almost non-existent building, that its deviations from some imaginary mean for a yellow-brick mid-century English modernist educational structure are so noticeable precisely because they are so tiny, but I have no real recollection of specific moments. I don’t think that matters though, it’s just a way of drawing attention to the basic paradox of writing about architecture; we see a building, we love or hate it in a few seconds, and then we live there and forget all about it, and we never know what it did to us, what possibilities it opened and destroyed, what moods it assisted or altered, what vistas, literal or metaphorical, we saw only because it was there. All buildings are mysterious, as mysterious as our lives while we are living them, which is not surprising since they do so much to make our lives when we are living them, and sometimes after that as well (Cambridge has no good crematoria). 

This essay is about modernism in Cambridge, and modernism all over the world, and very good it is going to be as well, but it is hobbled by this basic fact, that I know nothing about any modernist building in Cambridge, or any other building anywhere. I can’t remember what they were like, because I don’t remember what they were like when they weren’t there, and so I have nothing to compare them to. But broadly speaking, what I feel is this: that if there were no modernist buildings in Cambridge I would surely have died, or done a runner or bunked off, a long time ago, that I simply could not abide living in a place without any evidence of the twentieth century. That there are times when I think to myself that if I don’t see some glass and concrete in the next five seconds I am going to scream. That I often feel that I would like to smash King’s College Chapel and replace it with a housing estate by Berthold Lubetkin. That I am becoming a sort of East Anglian Italian Futurist, with a particular animus against flowering hedges. 

The problem is that the pre-twentieth-century buildings of Cambridge, although they are very beautiful, are also insufferable. They are insufferable because they are so light and flighty and ready to go home, and they have stood for hundreds of years. They are permanently picturesque, and their indifference to anything which goes on within them – great experiments, furious intellectual arguments, sex – proclaims the triumph of the insubstantial and the endlessness of the unreal; they are the physical embodiment of māyā, the fact that the world is a delusion. More precisely: they are the greatest English examples of what the early Modernist architects called ‘façadism’ – and England is the most façadist of architectural cultures. Almost every pre-modernist college building is just a big box, the plan extraordinarily elementary. A courtyard, and then another, and then another: rectangles on all sides. So it’s what you do with the frontage that counts, whether that’s grand and manorial, like St John’s, or twee like Corpus Christi, or expansive and discreetly classical like Trinity, or charming in a silly, hack-ish Victorian way like Sidney Sussex, or overdecorated like Caius. 

The modernists thought of façadism as wrong, morally wrong, because it was dishonest. That’s obvious rubbish – there is no reason architecture need be honest. But there is a danger with façadism, more aesthetic than moral, though at the border of the two: if you walk into Second Court at St John’s from First, the whole court is imprinted instantly on your retina – and from that moment it never changes, except when you turn around to look at the wall behind you. Once you have those two views, you have everything, because all the invention has gone into making an image, or four images, and all you can do is see them. You can move around as much as you like, go from the centre of the court to the corner by the Buttery, and the only novelty will be how much of Gilbert Scott’s church spire – a masterpiece of façadism which I find outrageously clumsy on some days and pleasantly sinewy on others – comes into vision. The court is impassive, it does not care that you live in it or walk through it, it just wants to be looked at. And thus it savagely cleaves public and private, the internal and external environment; the architecture’s lack of response forces you inside your head. It is an architecture for daydreaming in, or for waking nightmares.  

 Second Court is extreme – the barest court in Cambridge – but is for that reason exemplary. Nor are the ‘prettier’ college buildings, or the non-university churches, any different; they too declare themselves straight away, demand you recognise their cuteness as soon as you come in. Almost all the pre-modern buildings of Cambridge submit to only one interpretation. King’s College Chapel is the great exception; its riches really are inexhaustible, and the view from the other side of First Court of a wall of glass like a Mies skyscraper, or up to the perfect fan vaulting, or along the stained glass held in Perpendicular suspension, presents images to stupefy and ever-ramifying incident. The Wren library has similar depth. But walk round Robinson and watch the skyline, the friendly turrets in their equable rhythms, the staircases and the bridges, the cut-away rooms, the diagonal brick mouldings. Go to the lavatory with its diagonal door cut into diagonal brick. Watch a formal in the diagonally-roofed hall, on the balcony, dark and low-ceilinged. And go down that long ramp with those ubiquitous mouldings on each side of you and see the enveloping sweep of the college, rising and falling tastefully – this is still Cambridge, it still itches to please. Best of all, there are no courtyards anywhere, the garden opens onto marooned Victorian houses, and inside the fortress the ‘courts’ are irregular patches of weird brick ground, almost blinding on a sunny day, and full of dips and dives and odd perspectives, at one moment the bare obverse of the chapel’s roiling stained glass, a gash in the sheer brick wall; the next a homely neo-vernacular arrangement of verticals and upright windows and potted plants, like a late-70s housing estate; the next a bridge which pursues you down to the ground and into the corridor, hems you in with the ziggurats on each side, suddenly leaps to all the majesty of Neave Brown’s Alexandra Road Estate in Camden – is, like that great building, at once utterly solid and looks ready to slide down on you at any moment, a red-brick avalanche.

Robinson is not perfect; a friend tells me that due to funding diminished by  inflation it was built in such a rush that the architects did not design an interior for their megastructure before building started, and forgot to include a toilet next to the Hall. Once this was discovered, it required putting a long and winding corridor through the middle of the building, which messed everything else up. You can tell: the ceilings are too low and the spaces too narrow. Also, the diagonal moulding sometimes seems a bit cute; you wish they had been less fawning. But there are regular jolts of happiness here, and they are genuinely architectural, not borrowed from painting or sculpture – they are the result of moving through a building, seeing it differently, and for different reasons, hurrying or stopping, under different skies, going to or from, with or without others, in a word living in it, a fulfilment of Le Corbusier’s dictum which is said to have started modern architecture, Une maison est une machine-à-habiter (A house is a machine for living in) which always seems to me more ambiguous than it is given credit for, given how much it is to habiter, how complex, how un-mechanical, a machine for doing that would have to be. Even more ambiguous in English, for living includes vivre, leading a life, for which a house, or a home, is also a machine, if where you vivre can be a machine. 

The odd thing is that a college was supposed to be a machine-à-habiter or à-vivre, and much of the inspiration for modern architecture in Britain, particularly in the 1950s and 60s, among the welfare-state builders and heroic Brutalists, was found in Oxford and Cambridge courts: the quads of a Festival-of-Britain housing estate, the picturesque juxtapositions of a Brutalist megastructure. Fellows and, especially, students, are supposed to be people with nothing to do but live, to be coming together and apart freely, doing work which somehow is not work, is unalienated. And their architecture is supposed to reflect this – prettiness, seclusion, the lawns rolling over the eccentricities of the occupants, bringing irascible historians and hip English lecturers and dour particle physicists together briefly, at hall or in the common room, or just giving them somewhere to live, somewhere to protect them from the world. The facelessness, the passivity, is the price paid for the freedom of the inhabitants to be left to their mad intellectual and personal schemes. You can see the influence of the college particularly in the more intellectual, restrained, British modernists – Denys Lasdun, for instance, (a hero of mine) in the University of East Anglia, or even here, at New Court in Christ’s (‘the typewriter’). Not that the building, with its stepped-back rows of rooms – the windows are always larger than you remember, it is a more generous building than it first appears –  is formally anything like a college, but it shares the same spirit, or what the spirit of a college was supposed to be. The individual decently contained, allowed their expressivity, but slotted neatly into an impermanent community, open to the world and yet with their own garden.

Except I am never convinced that the college worked as it was meant to; that image-problem gets at it. They are too romantic to be truly liberating: they are self-centred buildings. You need some other understanding of architectural space to allow those who have too much time on their hands to find sufficient support in their environments, so they won’t start blooming inwardly, malice turned against themselves. So the modernists abstracted not the set-pieces but the straggling, unpictorial bits, like the door onto the  arcade at Cloister Court in Queens’, under the half-timbered east range, or the smoking area outside Sidney Sussex where you can see the Garden Building looming placidly above you, and the master’s lawn on the other side, or the forecourt in front of the Buttery at St. John’s, on one side the chapel lantern playing against the blank chimneys of Trinity, the rhythmic brick gables at the back of Great Court, on the other, tripartite dark brick chimneys of Second Court at John’s, carrying up over the wooden ground-hugging cafeteria so that the space above it seems suddenly vast. They took these spaces, which require and reward your constant interest, your noticing of juxtapositions, your moving round to get a better view, which need you to throw yourself into the building – and they wrapped them round the whole structure, made buildings continually interesting, wanting and inviting participation. Like the Cripps Buildings at Queens’ or, especially, John’s, both by Powell and Moya – the latter is perhaps the most masterly modernist structure in Cambridge, with those sloping articulated window-frames, the perfect bounce of the wide white columns as you walk through – especially in the sunken area by the river, where they first bunch and then expand out, opening up the view – with the haunting, weird roof structures, mixtures of industrial flue and space-ship, and, most of all, the staircases. I have lived here for a year and have not gotten over the exhilaration of those staircases, delicately stepping up, without supports, into the belly of the building, crossing gently, light pouring in from the window. Cripps at Queens’ too, despite its slightly ungainly exterior, has lovely interior courtyard staircases, a fine high hall, an odd curving bar, is full of God in the details. 

These buildings allow a person to expand into their surroundings, to see themselves and reality match up. They are also ostentatiously humane, studiously in-keeping, bowing down to the older buildings they face even as they occasionally (the rocky mass of the St. John’s Cripps from the car park) discreetly show them the finger. After a while, such virtue gets a little boring – more than that, seems an inadequate response to everything that’s so irritating about Cambridge and its architecture, Philistinism and cuteness and self-obsession and nostalgia and perpetuation of the most ludicrous traditions, in a word Englishness, everything that makes me want to get out, out, out. You need stronger stuff, need something with all the power of the modern, all its bearing down on you to crush you, to thrill you, to break you open. There’s some of that here – James Stirling’s History Faculty, perhaps, which Owen Hatherley described as a massive ‘fuck you’ to Hugh Casson’s ultra-polite Raised Faculty Building. And yes, the History Faculty is dramatic, yes it looks great in the photos, yes the library, so soft and white, is the most memorable space in Cambridge; but as Hatherley also says, Stirling’s buildings all look smaller in reality than in the pictures, and in fact, you notice if you go over and over, the strength of the building is in the odd little places round the back, where the wings meet the protruding glass at the front and extravagant, functionally dubious staircases run up and down excitably; it’s as English as cream tea, as the worst cancer survival rates in Europe.

What else is there? Churchill? Lovely, my favourite college, those two brick pylons flanking the door, the concrete blanks on the Margaret Thatcher archive (form very much an improvement on function, though I suppose it’s some consolation that she would certainly have hated it), the shallow concrete vaults high above, crossed by massive beams, the seriousness of the whole thing, its uncompromising concern for space and air and good views and good sculpture and irregular, interesting courts and façades. It’s very apparent when set against the disastrous sub-Po-Mo additions by the fields, though it does seem to have rubbed off on the delicate Japanese-style Cowan Court. And yet…too ‘50s, too staid, no swagger, just all the resources of humanity the twentieth century had to offer – we are not out of England yet. The top-heavy David Attenborough building, at the New Museums site, with its black-clad grain silo on ultra-slim poles, hulking and flamboyant lit up at night? Yes, but it too is precise, finicky, clever, in the arrangement of the terraces, in how it squeezes in the Zoological Museum. That bare green thing in the New Museums Site, the former Pharmacy Building apparently? Yes, totally unEnglish – a terrible copy of Peter Behrens. I have sometimes been reduced to making a special trip. 

Really it is about England, about being English. Not British – I have nothing to do with Scotland – unusual for non-white people. At the end of the year I climbed the St John’s chapel tower and looked at the grey horizon and thought of England – and isn’t it appropriate, that that phrase means that what should be a pleasure is often, actually, a bore? That thinking of England should be thinking about disappointment and irritation and the loss of innocence. But I thought of England and its density, thought of a clipped German Jew, converted to Lutheranism, driven round it by his wife, stopping, getting out, inspecting churches and factories and municipal centres, delivering his judgement, the whole place in Nikolaus Pevsner’s little books, complicated, various, interesting, manageable. He lived here once, in New Court, with an octagonal bathroom. 

But sometimes things get out of hand. Why English, of all things I could have been? So much fantasy, so little self-understanding, so many dreams, urban dreams, rural dreams, imperial dreams, domestic dreams, radical EP Thompson dreams and reactionary Peter Hitchens dreams, no reality anywhere. You will understand if when I pass the Gibbs Building at King’s from the other bank of the river, and I think of that great Scottish architect, trained in Rome, who built on the Strand in London a perfect Roman Baroque church – to see him reduced to this beautiful classical vacuum, this marmoreal stupidity which would not know an idea if one smashed it in the Diocletian window – then it is hard not to think Look what the English do to themselves! Look at how they cosset themselves in their Arcadian wet-dreams, look at them turning their bodies to slurry and their minds to treacle in their fantasy kingdoms. Look at the savagery of the repression, the density of the fortifications, the malice at the outside world. Look, what’s worse, at the indifference. Look at them burrowing in on themselves, look at the old in wooden rooms, maturing resentment like poison wine. Look at young fogeys and bright young things, look at the shy and the fearful, look at that masterpiece of black comedy, the English class system, hatching in their skulls so they hardly notice – by the time they are out of here they will be packaged neatly, jobs lined up for them, ready to be served. Look how pretty it all is. 

Then I have to remind myself. Virtuous cosmopolitan liberalism can also be a device for hiding contempt’s mucus, the hatred is hatred of myself. I am one of the greatest beneficiaries of the English class system in this university, and I too like pretty things, suburban villas, Derbyshire landscapes, magnolia. 

Nikolas Pevsner was fascinated by why we, the British, not only to failed to invent modernism but were and are so resistant to it, although, as Pevsner showed in his book Pioneers of the Modern Movement, so many of its precursors were British – the Victorian engineers, builders of factories and railway stations; Arts and Crafts movement, in particular the plain, well-crafted houses of Charles Voysey; the highly-strung genius of Charles Rennie and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. And despite our inventing industrial capitalism, despite having the largest city in the world, the largest empire – we had modernity but not modernism. In the Introduction to Owen Hatherley’s wonderful Modern Buildings in Britain: A Gazetteer, a book I used to read every night before going to bed, a prophylactic against homesickness, against pining for the Barbican, he distinguishes the two: modernity is the random drive of industrial capitalism, which encourages stylistic anarchy, Neo-Gothic, Neo-Classical, Art Nouveau, Indo-Arabian-Moorish-Mongol train stations, Romanesque synagogues, hotels like Flemish town halls; modernism is an artistic reaction to all that, which uses the technology it creates, in the service, for the Marxist Hatherley at least, of a radical egalitarian politics. Modernism means disciplining the wildness of modernity, taking its astonishing materials and fragmented spaces and using them with aesthetic flair and political vision, to create public housing estates and theatres and cultural centres and other structures by which the architectural pleasures could extend to everyone. 

That story explains England well; we liked modernity’s profit-generating power, we had plenty of idiosyncratic architects developing imaginative uses of it, but were always suspicious of the public provision and regulation modernism usually thrived under. Except – and this is Hatherley’s brilliance, in that book and all his work – you could also switch the terms around. ‘Modernity’ can be the endlessly proliferating variety of styles and thoughts, which may or may not link back to tradition, but it can also be the ceaseless expansion of capitalism that breaks links with the past with a speed and thoroughness unlike any social system ever seen before; ‘modernism’ can be the programme of harnessing these energies in the service of social improvement, but it can also be a refined artistic reaction to the homogenising forces of modernity which seeks to respond sensitively to context and function. Modernity is something that releases you, the architect, the inhabitant, to do as you please, and also what crams you into a tiny space, awes you, crushes you. Modernism is the same. What is control, what is liberation, is never clear. 

Really it is about human freedom. Modernism was always about that, more than equality – though it was an egalitarian sort of freedom, the freedom which comes from being genuinely in public. And what you discover about human freedom is that you give in to fantasy as soon as you start talking about it, which is why it’s such an easy target for puritans, why it sometimes seems so laughable and so limited an aim. Look at the poeticising of this article, these descriptions that may match up to nothing in reality. Or rather, I do not know what it would be for them to match up to reality, do not know, as I said, anything about the secret lives of buildings, the lives they have when we are not looking at them, or thinking about them, the lives I would need to know to understand them, and human freedom. All I have is a series of fantasies, projected on the surface of these buildings, fantasies which are sometimes hideous, malicious dreams. Too often, especially this year, in this strange place, this non-existent city. Buildings may support any number of such fantasies, in any order, nor do the fantasies last for long; architecture cannot hide or much mitigate the humiliations of our social world or the more general ills we all bear. Yet – I do believe there is a totality of fantasies, or that the fantasies get into the corners of the buildings, they seep into the bricks, they come to constitute its essence, that some buildings – for me those, pre-eminently, of the twentieth century, which had its hopes and fears and fantasies on a larger scale than any other – receive them with more grace, or impose them with more benign ferocity, than others, that for a moment they may allow you to move more easily, to breathe freely,and that, just very occasionally, this may be a briefly adequate simulacrum, of something called human freedom.