This Is Tomorrow. Installation views, Whitechapel Gallery. 1956.

This Is Tomorrow

REYNER BANHAM

OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 32–34. © Architectural Review, September 1956, pp. 186–88.

In this review of the This Is Tomorrow exhibition, published just nine months after theappearance of his New Brutalism essay, Reyner Banham criticizes Henderson, Paolozzi, andthe Smithsons’ Patio & Pavilion for its adherence to “traditional values,” championinginstead the proto-Pop environment of Richard Hamilton, John McHale, and John Voelcker.Ringing a New Brutalist note in his conclusion, Banham says that despite these differences,both contributions ultimately deal with “concrete images.”—A.K.

The synthesis of the major arts is a consecrated theme in the ModernMovement, one of the shining abstractions that gather, halo-wise, about the headsof its Masters, though it has been left mostly to their followers to thrash out thepracticalities that stand between wish and achievement. The most used threshing-floor so far has been CIAM, but a new and most instructive one has been providedlately by the exhibition, unfortunately labeled This Is Tomorrow, which continues atthe Whitechapel Gallery until September 9.

Collaboration between practitioners of the different arts was its only pro-gram; its aesthetics were entirely permissive, and anything could, in theory, havebeen done. The results were inevitably diverse, but so were the premises fromwhich different groups of collaborators worked. Even the idea of synthesis wasinterpreted, at one extreme, simply as a requirement to house or decorate oneanother’s work, and at the other extreme, as an invitation to smash all bound-aries between the arts, to treat them all as modes of communicating experiencefrom person to person, as the Holroyd-Alloway-del Renzio group did—modesthat could embrace all the available channels of human perception, as set out ina table, which appeared in the catalogue entry for the Voelcker-Hamilton-McHale section.

But even if the concept is as wide and fluid as this, practical considerationstend to reduce the means employed to a set of recognizable elements, classifiableunder the heads of Structure, Plasticity, Symbol, and Sign, even if pictures weremerely hung on a wall these four elements were all employed, if only accidentally.

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Some concepts of structure—geometry clothed in substance—proved to bethe basic, or unifying postulate of most groups’ offerings, and in one case, thepartnership of John Weeks and Adrian Heath, structure was the totality of theexhibit, a wall of standard bricks which were displaced or omitted to give it theplasticity and symbolic significance of an abstract sculpture.

More complex structure-sculptures were seen in the Catleugh-Thornton-Hull screen, but a note of ambiguity, more consciously exploited in other sections,appears in the composition of curved planes on which Peter Carter, Colin St. J.Wilson, and Robert Adams collaborated. Normal scale-effects are reversed, andthat part which is large enough to admit a standing man is clearly sculptural infeeling, while the manifestly structural element beyond is sited and displayed likea free-standing statue.

This ambiguity was part of a general feeling of broken barriers and ques-tioned categories that constituted the most stimulating aspect of the whole exhibi-tion. And yet the technique of category-smashing could not be used as a basis forforming value-judgments about the exhibits. Thus, the Smithson-Henderson-Paolozzi contribution showed the New Brutalists at their most submissive to tradi-tional values. They erected a pavilion within a patio and stocked it with sculpturessignifying the most time-honored of man’s activities and needs. This was, in anexalted sense, a confirmation of accepted values and symbols.

Voelcker, Hamilton, and McHale, on the other hand, employed optical illu-sions, scale reversions, oblique structures and fragmented images to disrupt stockresponses, and put the viewer back on a tabula rasa of individual responsibility forhis own atomized sensory awareness of images of only local and contemporary sig-nificance. Yet, curiously, their section seemed to have more in common with thatof the New Brutalists than any other, and the clue to this kinship would appear tolie in the fact that neither relied on abstract concepts, but on concrete images—images that can carry the mass of tradition and association, or the energy of nov-elty and technology, but resist classification by the geometrical disciplines bywhich most other exhibits were dominated.

—Architectural Review 120 (September 1956), pp. 186–88.