The Shock of the New - Ep 4 - Trouble in Utopia

[@EnglishAddict]

'Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future'.

[@samuelelsby1800]

Possibly the most instructive hour of television ever transmitted.

[@hmda.]

personal research bookmarks: 2:16 - the arts could reform people 5:13 - architecture itself a symbol of inequality 6:15 - technology to reform culture 7:58 - Chicago’s clean slate 9:21 - desire to fulfill both the abstract and natural side of architecture 9:51 - city rebuilt in new style 10:59 - Chicago style, first usage of iron as frame of public building 11:32 - in architecture form must always be appropriate to the function for which it is intended 14:36 - glass 19:20 - dogmatism of ludwig mies 20:40 - great image of new architecture 21:36 - Le Corbusier’s theme 23:10 - Le Corbusier nightmare of ideas, surrendering freedom of movement 23:39 - Corbusier’s obsessive projects, the improvement of paris 25:04 - unite de habitacion, metaphor of Corbusier’s social aims 26:00 - roofs of marseille 26:21 - social experiment (unite de habitacion) 28:27 - Corbusier and his absolute buildings, chandigarh, socially lifeless - 28:47 29:30 - “the white world” 32:48 - first principle of international-style 37:27 - the first manifesto of the Bauhaus 38:17 - the basic ideas of Bauhaus teaching 40:41 - furniture meant to go with buildings, “least possible interruption to the flow of space” 41:26 - chair designs of gerrit rietveld 42:33 - new world of lucidity, de steel, general grammar of shape, architecture no less than painting 43:16 - art cannot cure nationalism 46:19 - space of art is the ideal space of fiction 47:32 - 47:39 belief in architectural progress 48:17 - date the death of the modern movement - 49:08 54:50 - 56:29 nothing dates faster than people’s fantasies about the future (most important one)

[@caroledaley7846]

This 8-part series is an unparalleled exploration of the 20th century; specifically how architecture, social needs and politics led us to our current state of living. Visual arts became less about social change and all about money as the century progressed. Hughes does an excellent job showing how the commodification of visual art developed. It's a BBC production, written and narrated by an Australian, consequently more open-minded and critical than an American production would be. I've watched the first four episodes and am grateful to have this much important history presented in an entertaining way. I only wish someone could update the format to make it more palatable to our 21st century need for crystal clear viewing. AND, it's full of great lines!

[@seanyeo5514]

Carole Daley the thing is The Shock of the New is like any masterpiece in film-making; a resurrection may make images sharper, but without Robert Hughes’ voice and gorgeous prose and those perfectly chosen pieces of music, not to mention those long continuous pans over various details of an artwork (which will be far choppier thanks to the current mania for editing) it will be a shadow of this production. The same can be said of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, another brilliant documentary series. I think now with the ease of digging up the most obscure artworks online, we can always use this documentary as s springboard to more detailed research of the various tidbits that interest us.

[@SWANATEE]

you might try Jonathan Meades documentaries, also Adam Curtis.

[@NigelMessenger-ks1py]

A brilliant programme for those of us who know nothing about architecture. And it is obvious that ego had a lot more to do with "progress' than was ever admitted.

[@lionsbite5728]

I remember this from TV in 1980, it's one of the best espisodes, the rhetoric is so compelling. Hughes was brilliant. There is no one to replace him.

[@mencken8]

You got that right- the prophet of the 21st century, cf. ‘Culture of Complaint.’

[@altered_statuses]

Hughes is poetically brutal in his assessment of Brasilia.

[@brooke9807]

I hate the poorly planned suburban neighborhood I live in. The disconnect between architect and the people living where I live is wild.

[@tomd6704]

he's just a journalist

[@stonward]

"Major structural alterations were called for" - LMAO - these are great, and I'd not seen them before!

[@JohnAutry]

Thank you for posting this series Wanted Robot... Very enlightning...SO WELL DONE.

[@JamesParsonsDunckervon]

just a devastating critic of modern architecture and city planning.

[@tomd6704]

well, no, it was a bit other than that. He is a journalist, not a critic.

[@junkettarp8942]

Oh man...I cant take it no more...No way.......Let me out of here....awe Bob...you know what i like.

[@junkettarp8942]

In the beginning ......back in 1993....Browbrowzinski was born.......That was a bad day.

[@amandavalentine7502]

In the US, I didn't know we could have more than strip malls and Holidays Inns until I visited colonial WIlliamsburg.

[@junkettarp8942]

Robert was a great man.

[@marcoaslan]

It saddens me architects still revere Corbusier while the same architects live in traditional homes and in towns that still have traces of traditionalism. Meanwhile people end up in modern architecture finish by living and working in a place that resembles an asylum.

[@tomwebster6094]

“Major structural alterations”

[@realityisanalog]

indeed, Mr Webster.

[@luckyman1071]

"Villa Savoye" music is the 2nd movement, "Andante", from Francis Poulenc: Trio for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano, FP 43. Good version with score: kzbin.info/www/bejne/p4XVd6mAarSaf5Y. Andante starts at about 5". Enjoy.

[@LIAMMAGEE-t4i]

Great television programme and great title sequence and music. They just don't make them like this anymore.

[@KR-nv3ru]

49:09 Master of the understatement! 🤣

[@TahRahJoh]

It look old back then.

[@Diaghilev1000]

Why is there block on downloading this episode? All the other episodes are downloadable. Is there a problem?

[@Hostoryproject]

9/11?

[@MichaelFlynn0]

and with a bit of Brian Eno thrown in for good measure

[@tasallp]

I thought Hausmann's Paris is another example of completely reworking a city. Seems conveniently ignored as an example of successful urban planning (if not fitting the Modern timeframe)

[@samuelelsby1800]

Philip Tapsall Exactly: not connected to Modernism

[@hazelwray4184]

It crossed my mind too: Paris, Capital of Modernity. David Harvey.

[@litabell9560]

Does anyone know what the orchestral music is between 3'40" and 4'25"?

[@troutphosphor7792]

It's the opening of Hector Berlioz's 'Grande Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale', op.15, from 1840.

[@BreconWalsh]

The late Robert Hughes knows his oils and much more besides.Sometimes his superb knowledge and perspicacity seems to be casting his pearls before swine who are simply uncultivated and unread.Meritocracy not plutocracy is his mantra!

[@kennethbrady]

Perfect description, Brecon.

[@dedetolrilke6925]

It's funny how these "functional" buildings now look quite beautiful. I remember myself not liking that style and now, after some time, after styles has moved on, these retro futuristic buildings don't seem so drab and lifeless. I guess it was just the shock of the new. Though having said that the council housing and HLMs that followed this style were awful, in general.

[@nikola8363]

please disable this KZbin stabilization shit

[@calmeilles]

In the two instances - the Unité d'habitation, Marseilles (aka Cité Radieuse) and Chandrigarh - with which I am familiar I'd say that Hughes is just plain wrong. It's a polemic not a critique.

[@colet1096]

Eh, no. They're both rather awful and inhuman.

[@paulklee5790]

Thing is, enthusiasts for ‘The Crow’ never ever own up to his legacy.... and a fuckin awful one it is too. They all claim he was misunderstood and travestied by others... ha bloody ha....

[@renzo6490]

I don't want to live in a machine high off the ground. Storage units for the living! I prefer buildings and neighborhoods built to human scale.I like to be near the earth.I prefer a garden to a window box on a balcony 30 stories in the air. I want to see a tree outside my window not the grid pattern of another building.I like personal features like alcoves and window seats and double hung windows that open .I like to see evidence of human craftsmanship.Let the corporations build their towers downtown and let the corporate workers populate those soulless, angular prisons.Give me two squashy armchairs in front of a real fireplace. The modern architectural style typified by works of Mies van de Rohe and Le Corbusier, the so called International style, has been proven bankrupt and unworkable as living spaces. The designs work well on paper but that is as far as they should ever go.

[@renzo6490]

I was reacting to the content of the video and the type of architecture being discussed. The term 'soulless angular prisons' pretty well describes what I saw. The current world population is about 7 billion. It is projected to be 10 Billion in 30 years unless our intrepid new president touches off some sort of global catastrophe. If we are required to adapt living conditions to population, we will surely see more horrific and inhumane living 'cells'. At some point what we like to call 'home' will be little more than a module*. The trend has started in Japan. Standards of what we call 'livability' keep going down. New generations are born into an already altered world and don't know of anything better. I will stand with those who call it unacceptable. If you live inside a machine, you start to feel like a machine part. Would you like to live in a Mondrian with no curves, no visible brush strokes? Environment has an effect on the psyche.The Nazis knew the power of structure. How can a man walk among enormous, brutal, regimental and soulless city structures and not feel overwhelmed and insignificant? It's the difference between pushing an aluminum shopping cart down long, high, florescent lit supermarket aisles lined by row after row of boxes and cans up to a checkout counter with a conveyor belt at one end and a human at the other end who is little more than an adjunct to the cash register...and strolling along "main st." with mom and pop shops or an open air market like ones you see in every European town square. Over population might call for regimentation and uniformity for practical reasons, but I do not wish to spend 8 hours of my day in a cubicle only to commute to another cubicle ! These structures cut people off from one another. Life used to be different. There were communities. Ok. Let me just finish this rant by saying I don't like the architecture known as the International style. I don't want to live in it or work in it. Push for population control before it is too late ! * Article in The Huffington News 2/14/17 People in Hong Kong are moving into 20-square-foot 'coffin homes' to save money Simon Wong has spent the last 20 years learning the hard way how to live with less. Less clutter, less money, and, most noticeably, less space. Wong, a 61-year-old Hong Kong resident, is one of a growing number of citizens forced into so-called "coffin homes," 20-square-foot cages that offer just enough space to lie down and hang a few shirts and pairs of pants. His monthly rent of $226 would be enough to share a roomy one-bedroom apartment in many American towns (though admittedly it would only be enough to rent a closet in big cities like New York City and San Francisco). Instead, his living space measures just 4'x6'.

[@kennethbrady]

I'm with you Renzo, tell it like it is!

[@davidrobert1229]

the music is so stoney ~

[@denismurrell6716]

Australia's capital city, Canberra, was designed from scratch. Brasilia was not the first such city. If we want to we can nominate Washington DC as the very first.

[@colet1096]

He said first designed from scratch under Le Corbusier's principles after Chandighar

[@jackbailey7037]

Oh, scratch-bult cites date from at least Persepolis in circa 500BC

[@westender.]

institutionalised architecture

[@marcoaslan]

And we haven't learned a thing. We doubled down with postmodernism

[@hazelwray4184]

'we haven't' (present tense). 'we doubled down' (past tense). I associate postmodern architecture with the 1970's/80's.

[@marcoaslan]

@@hazelwray4184 Regarding the dates. We are still culturally in postmodernism. Perhaps not the postmodernist architecture as you might imagine but the cultural deconstructionist postmodernist born out of France. So the architecture remains a branch of today’s culture. Narcissistic, egotistical, and modern.

[@marysbahr4386]

Art history wasn't presented so well and in such great depth as Hughes does here when I was a photographer / asst. to curator in the art history department at Johns Hopkins Univ. Instead of being neutral and pointing to the truth (as Hughes does), the art history professors aligned themselves with art + history according to their own tastes.

[@luckyman1071]

As is said in French: "corriger la fortune" (to correct the destiny). Be well.

[@clydecessna737]

Note that Le Unité d'habitation does not have the shops on the ground floor but on the fifth; shops inside apartment blocks rarely work as the customer base is far too small to be profitable. Planned economics even on a small scale rarely work. This building was state funded i.e. funds were taken away by taxation from hard working people and profitable enterprise to masturbate an intellectual exercise. I too found the roof space exciting; though I had the devil of a time getting bureaucratic permission from a "functionair"to visit it. Visit the Paris banlieue of Creteil for a vast desert vista of such projects.

[@Game_Hero]

55:17 *Laughs in Naypyidaw*

[@J0hnC0ltrane]

Ar nuvo, how posh.

[@KR-nv3ru]

I wonder what he would have made of China's huge, empty, sprawling ghost cities. 🤔

[@jorgemedinavelten1976]

Thank you "Wanted Robot" for sharing this BBC video produced in 1980. It's a very interesting compilation of the architecture and urban design from XIX century to the seventies. Nevertheless, I agree with other opinions left here about the statements made by narrator Robert Hughes, and the interviewed Architect Phillip Johnson. I feel them very pesimist and making a total disqualification of the legacy of those many brilliant architects and urban designers from that period of our history. May be there's a conection with the general disenchantment feeling in the late seventies, but this video narration transmit a very sad and negative feeling. Is like if Robert Hughes favorite book were "Murphys Law". My opinion about the great architects from the past (mainly from mid XIX century to the last works of Zaha Hadid) is that all of them leaved us a great legacy. I`m very positive about the wonderful changes architecture will bring for the next decades. Greetings from Cuernavaca, México :-)

[@bababoouey9882]

He looks like the guy from Harry Potter

[@dias9469]

38:22

[@Novalty_]

13:07/15:09

[@dferreira2844]

Probably my least favorite episode in the series. Hughes just shows how ignorant of the history of architecture he could be. Also, guys - what we have today, the giant generic blocks, the McHouses, all that bullshit - it's not modernism's fault. I know people who have never studied architecture properly can think like that, as I did too. But it's as far from any modernist principles and techniques as it is from baroque architecture's. Ironically, as some of you claim that this was "against heritage buildings" today these modernist buildings are in even more danger of destruction and abandon than most pre-modern ones, as contemporary builders vow to destroy those in favor of huge style-less condo and office blocks. Utopic visions will always have their problems. But it's better to dream than to live in our corporative late capitalist world where imagination is forbidden by the construction market.

[@jackbailey7037]

So, you're entitled to your opinions, but no one else is entitled to theirs. Is that in bubby?

[@marcoaslan]

"Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future".

[@hazelwray4184]

JFK, TWA Airport looks great. A fine example of retro futurism.

[@marcoaslan]

@@hazelwray4184 Delusional.

[@hazelwray4184]

@@marcoaslan LOL