Filling the void.

THE CHARGED VOID: URBANISM

By Peter and Alison Smithson. New York: The Monacelli Press. 2005. [pounds sterling]45

An ample self-confidence comes through powerfully in Peter and Alison Smithson's The Charged Void: Urbanism, the companion volume in their oeuvre complete to The Charged Void: Buildings. Apart from the implicit, electrical reference to Michael Faraday, there's an association with both Michelozzo and Michaelangelo in equating the infill in the colonnade under the Economist building with the reworked corner of the Palazzo Medici, while the book ends with the assumption of Pericles' mantle. The Athenian statesman, they portentously claim, 'would have chosen this [ie, their choice] site for his Acropolis Place'.

Schematically these references cover technology, culture and politics, three fundamental constituents of urbanism. The Smithson's problem was that they never transcended schematic thinking. Their great insight, shared with Aldo van Eyck, Ralph Erskine, Sandy Wilson et al, was that CIAM's urban prescriptions were dangerously naive, but the only tools they had to develop it were diagrammatic. 'Cluster', 'scatter', 'connection', 'pavilion and route' are recurring terms and all lend themselves to delineation in spidery sketches.

The accompanying texts trope the graphic technique, opening with opinion masquerading as fact: ('The time has come for the lyricism of control, for calm as an ideal, for bringing the Virgilian dream, the peace of the countryside enjoyed with the self-consciousness of the city-dweller, into the notion of the city itself') before describing what they found and what they did. Such overtly rhetorical statements fit ill with their much-vaunted claim to be 'without rhetoric'. They actually meant 'without debate', and their entire oeuvre is shot through with such slippages and misunderstandings.

The great tragedy is not of the Smithsons alone, nor the benighted residents of Robin Hood Gardens, whose central green mound was a 'stress-free zone, an area of quietude'--or so we are told--but of the entire machinery of the post war politico-architectural complex. In that the mental, conceptual and technical voids were even more gaping and glaring than the physical ones in bombed-out cities.

Nature abhors a vacuum and the Smithsons helpfully expanded to fill it. We are still paying the charges.

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