Site specifics
Multi-coloured scaffolding encased the entire length of the central staircase of Berthold Lubetkin’s Bevin Court for restoration purposes in 2012. Although it denies the aesthetic experience of the staircase’s bespoke beauty, the scaffolding is evidence of the vitality of this post-war residential block. Bevin Court was built during a prolific era in Lubetkin’s career; however, his time in London following World War II was filled with bureaucratic obstacles and budgetary cuts, leading the architect to characterise this period in his life as one of abandonment. Lubetkin was raised in Georgia, Russia, and Poland during the Russian Revolution, and his education and early architectural realisations took place in Paris and London in the 1920s and 1930s, respectively. The strong set of beliefs, skills, and experience cultivated within these environments ultimately led Lubetkin to an acute sense of futility in attempting to design and build during the unprecedented austerity of post-war England.
In his comprehensive biography Lubetkin and the Tradition of Progress, author John Allan discusses the staircase at Bevin Court: ‘Its functional logic as the focus for access and servicing is self-evident, but in its symbolic suggestion of “social dynamo” this astounding pivotal space reverberates with Constructivist echoes.’[1] Whether attributable to the ideological echoes, the central stair fulfils more than its perfunctory duty: it is a congregation point for the building’s residents. An outsider need not spend much time in the stair to observe social interaction between neighbours from the three arms of the building or to participate in its friendly micro-culture – I was received with smiles and hellos while taking photographs.
A much taller council housing block by Lubetkin, located in a nearby borough of east London, also features a central stair. According to Allan, the Sivill House presents ‘the familiar Constructivist dynamic of the spiral ascent’, where ‘the curved landings and ceremonious loggia at ground level […] endow the communal areas with greater social importance and spatial identity’.[2] The allocation of decorative railings, large windows, and landings throughout its nineteen storeys provides an inspiring atmosphere for a space with a functional designation that is little more than a fire exit. Heavy with intention and symbolism, it could be argued that the stair’s function remains underdetermined. Does the stair’s symbolic provision justify such underdeterminacy? Is the presence of the initial flight of stairs in the entranceway a sufficient indication of the entire, impressive height of the staircase and the meaning it was intended to convey?
Architectural intention
In the conservative architectural atmosphere of post-war England, the staircase was a building element to which Berthold Lubetkin applied his exceptional aesthetic and engineering skills to communicate his steadfast political beliefs. Despite his embittered position in relation to the social and political circumstance, Lubetkin continued to apply his constructivist notion that technology and architecture could be used as tools of social transformation to projects in the 1950s and 1960s, including the residential estate commissions Bevin Court and the Sivill House. Both buildings are revered for their spiralled central staircases (albeit an irregular spiral at Bevin Court) evocative of the constructivist movement. The attention paid to these singular architectural components is a credit to their exceptional design. According to Lubetkin, his Beaux Arts education set him apart from his English colleagues:
In all the ateliers of Beaux Arts we had to spend infinite time […] balancing the staircase in various ways on the curve. […] Now on the other hand in this country [England] I have never seen this problem arise; the question is, you have got a formula of height and width and you just apply it automatically; as long as you are absolutely certain that you are not going to fall down because it is too steep or something, it’s all right, it fulfils its purpose.[3]
The appeal of this approach is the prioritisation of the aesthetic in order to transform the resident’s experience within the stairwell.
Discussing his post war buildings, Lubetkin said that 'the philosophical aim and orderly character of these designs are diametrically opposed to the intellectual climate in which we live […] my personal interpretation is that these buildings cry out for a world that has never come into being'.[4] Owen Hatherley includes this quotation in his book Militant Modernism because it reflects the pervasiveness of the unfulfilled utopian ideals of modernist architecture in Britain. Lubetkin regarded these staircases as elegant cries of protest, muffled by the limitations of the austerity measures that dictated most building decisions.
Movement intervention
The previous two sections demonstrate my accumulation and synthesis of primarily text-based information regarding Lubetkin’s London tower-block housing. The physical encounter with the architecture during site visits also informed creative decisions regarding the eventual intervention. According to Paul Crowther, 'whilst one can experience architecture as an ideal of artifactual creation at the level of ideas alone, in the actual presence of an architectural work things can be very different. Here what we engage with is not just the idea but the concrete way in which it is realized in this particular case.'[5] I visited Bevin Court and the Sivill House on multiple occasions before bringing the performers to the site. These visits were made possible by ease of entry into these private buildings. Residents were friendly and trusting at both buildings, holding the main door open for a non-resident on repeated occasions.
However, the staircases in each building provided experiences that were more different than similar. At Bevin Court, entering the building involves moving from the outdoors through to another open-air space where the main stair is located. The large diameter and overall scale of the stair and the light and air allowed into this central space are not typical of London housing. In this central space, the concrete surface of the stairs generates echoes as people move and converse and as lifts operate. These sounds, the light, the fresh air, and the unique geometries and dynamic lines create an inviting atmosphere. The extroverted nature of the Bevin Court stair finds its opposite at the Sivill House. There, the stair’s narrow and enclosed space is separate from the main entrance way and lift. When occupying the stair, the proximity of the concrete floors and walls, painted metal railings, and ribbon of windows every five floors provide a more personal and even intimate experience with the structure. The spiral instils a sense of wonder as its distant termination point is difficult to determine and, insulated from the sounds of the city and the building’s residents, the space feels apart or away from the urban activity outside. Despite these disparities, in both instances the visual and spatial experiencing of the two stairs’ geometries and the sense of balance make returning to the city outside less appealing.
These visits influenced the eventual interventions by suggesting to me the idea of drawing lines with the body to correspond to those of the staircases. Work with the linear quality of the performers’ movement, as defined by Sheets-Johnstone, was integrated into the idea of locomotion as a cooperative effort, in keeping with Lubetkin’s spirit of constructivism. At Bevin Court the line of the walking performer’s path is interrupted and sometimes redirected by the stationary performer. Their interactions create occasionally static shapes with their bodies that echo the geometries created by the architectural materials around them. At the Sivill House, one performer glides up the stair by sitting on the back of the other as she slowly crawls on hands and knees. In this way, the up and down movement involved in stair stepping is smoothed out, and the linear trajectory of the assisted performer becomes that of the spiral stair. Crowther discusses resonances between body and architecture, such as their respective inner and outer components, erect stance, and composition from parts that create a whole, and that both are characterised by symmetry and balance. He then posits that these resonances 'create an expressive orientation which points beyond the work’s purely functional significance', and 'can involve [an] extremely active perception'.[6] The interventions presented here shift the performer’s active perception into actual activity, inviting viewers to perceive this activity simultaneous in their own perception of architecture.
The movement intervention at Bevin Court calls on basic acrobatic techniques involving one performer as the ‘base’ and the other as the ‘flyer’ (to use acrobatic terminology). The flyer’s movement shifts from a normative traversal of steps to horizontal rotations and suspensions and seated balances as her points of contact with the stair become drastically altered or nonexistent. These movements do not fit into a category of utility; she is performing an act more akin to Lubetkin’s description of a staircase, that of a dance. These movements relate to Lubetkin’s intention that architecture to supersede the mundane as the 'staircase as a dance' is populated by ‘dancing’ figures. They demonstrate the potential for connection between the building's constructivist ideals and its residents. Might this connection have aided these buildings to evade the demolition that has been the fate of so many other public housing schemes of the same vintage?
The video starts with a jump roper whose regular beat metres the time throughout the footage at Bevin Court. This resident emerged from a corridor of flats, arranged his laptop on the outward-facing ledge in a manner suggesting routine, and began jumping rope, all within the already-framed shot. His actions were entirely candid, with no knowledge of the movement intervention. The underdeterminacy of the communal stair's large volume in relation to the living spaces invites an overlap of actions. The layering of the rope jumping and the movement intervention becomes the artwork because the context of creation yields unforeseen results. At the Sivill House, the kaleidoscopic stair allows the physical arrangement of the same two female performers to be revealed at a deliberate pace. Furthermore, by offering no indication of the start or end of the architectural feature or of the performers’ ascent, the camera frame and movement phrase together suggest the infinite spiral of the stair. Through investigating such a dynamic architectural component situated within a building with an innocuous facade, movement intervention demonstrates its ability to approach certain finer points of a built space.
[1] John Allan, Berthold Lubetkin: Architecture and the Tradition of Progress (London: RIBA Publications, 1992), p. 424.
[2] Allan, p. 540.
[3] Berthold Lubetkin, ‘A Commentary on Western Architecture’, History of Architecture and Design, 1890–1939, Open University arts course, A305, 27/28, side 1, 1978.
[4] Allan, p. 366.
[5] Paul Crowther, The Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 185.
[6] Crowther, p. 185.
'Naturally any staircase is a sort of machine to climb up or to descend, but in the best Beaux Arts interpretation it is a display, it is a dance; and it certainly enriches the conception of human surroundings and the body if architecture can bring into everyday experience a sort of ballet-like quality – semi-poetic choice – in which [sic] otherwise is a purely utilitarian conception.' (Berthold Lubetkin, ‘A Commentary on Western Architecture’, History of Architecture and Design, 1890–1939, Open University arts course, A305, 27/28, side 1, 1978)
