Motley Crue’s autobiography is called The
Dirt. It’s a no-holds-barred story chronicling the band’s spiralling descent
into debauchery, addiction, near death and snorting ants off the pavement
with Ozzy Osbourne. What the Crue mean by The Dirt is the whole story. In
rock ’n’ roll, dirt equates to authenticity; being dirty means being real.
Sometimes it can symbolise very particular positions. Hippie dirt was about
being natural, punks’ filth was an eloquent statement of opposition to the
establishment: The Clash dirty like freedom fighters, the Sex Pistols filthy
as Dickensian urchins. But being revolutionary didn’t always mean being
dirty.
For early Modernist architects, dirt meant the squalor of the recently
industrialised city: slums, disease, poverty. Architects and planners wanted
to erase these old cities, filthy with history, and build clean environments
fit for what they described as the ‘industrial artisan’.
If you look back across the landscape of history, the view helps explain why
Modernist architecture looked like it did. Those beautiful white Modernist
villas of the 1920s and ’30s are set against a backdrop of belching dark
clouds of late nineteenth-century pollution – the kinds of urban scenes
described by Marx and Dickens. The London smog became personified in fiction
as a thick fog that shrouded evil. It sometimes assumed solid form as a
criminal, murderer or mythical half-man, half-beast.
Modernist architecture used rational logic and science to combat ignorance,
dust and disease, just like Sherlock Holmes’s scientific proto-forensic
techniques against Victorian urban sin. Cleanliness was central to the
Modernist project. Its ambition was clean Euclidian space, manufactured by
industrial processes. Cleanliness meant honesty and authenticity.
Cleanliness was utopian. It was political in the eyes of Le Corbusier, who
warned that cities were so terrible that there was a stark choice:
‘architecture or revolution’. Cleanliness was aesthetically resolved by Mies
van der Rohe in projects like the Barcelona pavilion, where chrome columns
reflect polished marble through large sheets of glazing.
You can still see the nineteenth-century filth that turned London black, but
you have to look harder each year. Those once sooty buildings are gradually
being cleaned. St Paul’s is the latest. It is halfway through a £40 million
pound restoration project to mark its 300th anniversary in 2008. The West
Front – the main entrance facing the top of Ludgate Hill – has recently been
unveiled. This part of the project cost five million of the late Sir Paul
Getty’s pounds. The work comprised mainly stone cleaning and repair, but
also included the re-carving of eroded stones, re-gilding, repairs to the
clock face and bells and the relaying of the west steps. Lady Getty says:
‘Paul remembered St Paul’s from a boyhood visit to London with its West
Front looming in the fog above Ludgate Hill. He loved the Great Northern
Baroque Cathedral of his Patron Saint and would be overjoyed to see it
shining and clean again.’ Like many of London’s other significant
institutions, it is built from white Portland stone. The change of colour,
before and after restoration, is high-contrast dramatic; the transformation
from black to white is as startling as Michael Jackson’s and almost as
strange.
Gleaming white and gold, St Paul’s looks odd, as though newly born or a
heavenly apparition. In some ways a layer of meaning has been removed from
the building: the dirt and filth had built up over the centuries, reflecting
the life of the city around it. In its most famous photograph, St Paul’s is
solid amongst the billowing smoke and flames of the Blitz, symbolic of
London’s finest hour. And the dirt in and on St Paul’s itself assumed
significance when Cornelia Parker collected dust from the Whispering
Gallery, forming it into ear plugs. Perhaps she was suggesting that we are
deaf to history’s whisper.
Conservation is assumed to be benign and essentially neutral, but actually,
cleaning is a highly charged act. Restoration is like rewinding history, and
as anyone who has seen the Back to the Future films knows, this can get
complicated. The process of cleaning idealises the object and, just as there
are different kinds of dirt, there are many varieties of cleanliness:
scrubbed up and plain like the front step of a house, or polished by
minimum-wage guest workers into a state that feels unreal by machines
pushed.
The Grey Blanket is a project by graphic designers A Practice for Everyday
Life. The phrase refers to the layer of filth that coats London and their
intervention was to rub out pollution build-up to create four metre-long
typographic messages. It is a kind of anti-graffiti, inscribed by taking
away rather than adding. The messages are ephemeral, existing as Emma Thomas
puts it, until ‘the city is completely cleaned up, or enough pollutants
build up again for the message to vanish’. The project suggests that
cleaning could be used in imaginative ways to create temporary interventions
in the fabric of the city. Imagine cleaning new patterns across the face of
St Paul’s. Like the finger that traces text into the grimy canvas of a white
van: ‘I wish my wife was as dirty as this’.
Anthropologist Mary Douglas studied dirt and its cultural significance in
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
(1966). Douglas cross-culturally examined definitions of impurity and argued
that pollutants play an important role in maintaining social structures. She
defined dirt as ‘matter out of place’, suggesting that dirt is culturally
constructed rather than a naturally occurring phenomenon. Dirt is more than
mess. It is as alive with culture and meaning as bacteria.
Dirt is also an intrinsically architectural material. Both architecture and
grime are by-products of the grinding wheels of civilisation. Architecture’s
unnatural and artificial environments help define what dirt is. Look under
your sink at those products designed to help keep your house clean if you
need evidence: Cillit Bang!, Cif, Mr Muscle, polish, bleaches, peroxides,
detergents. Think of the time, money and physical effort spent cleaning
architecture. Think of contract cleaners polishing the marble foyer of a
Wall Street bank after-hours. Think of crumbs falling from a croissant and
being trodden into a carpet. Imagine the action of a vacuum that disturbs
the carpet fibres, dislodging the crumb while the force of the vacuum drags
it upwards into a stainless steel tube. Think of the constant leaking,
flaking, staining, smearing, shedding, spilling of everyday life. Think of
the action of detergent – imagine it dissolving dirt like an animation in a
washing powder commercial. Think of an abrasive scouring action in
concentric circles.
Sometimes, architects take an alternative approach, where dirt and
architecture enjoy a more positive and constructive relationship. Caruso St
John’s recent entry for the London’s Architecture Foundation competition
recalls the streaky façades of London buildings. They liken the polluted
surfaces ‘to the effect of mascara and blush in beauty treatment’. They
propose ‘a building of pure white concrete with a surface of fine grooves
and polished aggregates. Over time, the rougher surfaces will gather dirt
and darken, highlighting the brilliant smoother surfaces, and revealing the
figures of huge typography, spelling out the letters AF, interwoven into the
façade’. The patina of history would make a thoroughly contemporary
super-graphic on the building’s elevation. Adam Caruso adds ‘I suppose that
it has something to do with being provocative. Perspectives of mainstream
architecture always show thousands of people, purposefully milling about the
new project, looking into the Books etc. window and drinking Costa coffee.
The building and the people are always very clean. Good cities are not shiny
and new like this, places like Rome and London can tolerate a lot of dirt,
emptiness and pathos, and good architecture should not rely on “newness” to
be valid.’
I’d heard that Adam had been in a punk band with artist Mark Pimlott. So I
asked if this dirt was a kind of punk filth creeping into his work: ‘Our
band played some Jam and Who covers, two famously “sharp” bands, so the dirt
has nothing to do with punk.’ While the Jam might have been suit-sporting
mode revivialists, they also wrote Mr Clean, to whom Paul Weller sang ‘if I
get the chance I’ll fuck up your life’. Like different kinds of dirt, there
are different kinds of clean too.
French firm R&Sie are working on a project for an art gallery in Bangkok
called B-mu. Their response was not to the local building vernacular or the
massing of the neighbourhood, but to the dusty atmosphere of the city:
‘Bangkok is a very dusty and luminous city. The pollution cloud, CO2
residue, filters and standardises the light with only grey spectral
qualities.’ The building itself is a jumbled stack of boxes – white cubes
arranged as a kind of 3-D labyrinth. An aluminium lattice is draped over
this with an electrostatic charge running through it. The static attracts
and holds dust, which gradually forms the exterior of the building. It would
be filthy on the outside, clean as a cosmetics counter on the inside, as
though a Victorian dust-yard has enveloped a space station. It’s a
juxtaposition of states as striking as baked Alsaka, dramatising and
exaggerating the difference between interior and exterior: the exterior skin
as an interface with the outside world and the interior as an artificial
world. Francois Roche describes it as ‘schizophrenic’ and the exterior as
‘plunged into an intoxicating urban chaos’ – like shifting sands of a
desert, in a state of flux over the solid lumps of the city. The project is
a kind of perverse high-tech, hijacking technological innovation to achieve
a disturbing end. Most high-tech architecture uses machinery to the point of
fetishism in order to deliver a well-tempered environment (beautiful
air-conditioning ducts, exquisitely detailed window cleaners’ lifts and so
on). The B-mu looks like it will offer an experience similar to the last
hours of Pompeii, delivered with a detached coolness.
Dirt is a symptom of the passing of time over an object. Its use as an
active design element shows an acceptance of the real context of
architecture, which is place and time. Idealised versions of architecture
are often seductive precisely because they brush the mess of everyday
reality under the carpet. Dirty architecture suggests high concept buildings
with their feet in the gutter.
Sam Jacob is a member of FAT and Architecture Editor for contemporary