Modern Cities Are Haunted by the Ghost of British Empire
Cities in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are indelibly marked by the British Empire. Imperial outposts, structured in accord with the schemes of long-dead aristocrats, form the foundation for the uncanny architecture of today’s commonwealth capitals.
In his new book, Artificial Islands, Owen Hatherley describes the Supreme Court of Canada building in Ottawa as a “bland facade,” raised “solely to create a silhouette.” (Archive Photos / Getty Images)
The Supreme Court of Canada sits on a bluff overlooking the Ottawa River, a few blocks west from Parliament Hill. Where that latter complex twists Gothic spires aloft, the Supreme Court is a flat stone hulk, with a copper château-style roof seemingly bolted on as punishment. Long-tenured prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King demanded the addition after walking his dog past the half-finished building. A charmless bachelor who owed his position to a Stalinesque fluency with bureaucracy, Mackenzie King also shared Joseph Stalin’s habit of meddling with architecture. He thought the Supreme Court should mimic the archaic and exquisite skyline behind it — a model of dutiful Canadian conformity.
During school trips to Ottawa, the cityscape always bemused me. I had visited the United States’ capital once, and that town at least made sense: clustered in marble temples, its rulers could play Cicero while segregating themselves away from the underclass. Why did our own places of power all look faintly camp?
In his new book, Artificial Islands, Owen Hatherley describes that Supreme Court as a “bland facade,” raised “solely to create a silhouette.” An architecture critic of Marxist sympathies and Jacobin commissioning editor, Hatherley recently published a six-hundred-page guide to modern British buildings. Artificial Islands does not aim for the encyclopedic. Instead, it gives passing impressions of uncanny architecture throughout the old imperial “dominions” in Melbourne, Auckland, Wellington, Ottawa, and Montreal. These lands were colonized following the Irish model: dissolve indigenous society amid your own settlers, commerce, and imported environments.
Elbowing aside any native birds in the nest, empire’s haughty cuckoo began shaping twigs into baroque stuccos. Each country Hatherley visits planned their capital city in advance, taking lessons from the metropole for designing bureaucracy. London had enviable aesthetics, but its unruly map left ministers and judges dangerously close to the industrial masses.
One Part Praise, One Part Scorn
Anglo-conservatives sometimes fantasize about reuniting the dominions under “CANZUK,” a trade bloc where workers could be exploited freely. In Europe’s most regionally unequal economy, the United Kingdom, desiccated from years of austerity, this is what passes for political ambition: necromancers sewing each other’s zombies together. As Hatherley notes, the empire’s administrators were always reluctant to codify the deliberate chaos that governed it, since “informal and unwritten” rules proved to be so lucrative. By tracing neoimperial schemes back to the past crimes that inspired them, his book knowingly joins the conflict over historical context.
To the reactionaries opposing such education, the real outrage is not beheading a statue but questioning why the British state found this or that genocidal maniac so useful in the first place. Their wounded response looks almost hysterical, the theater of a henchman interrupted mid-toadying. Scowling through its cocktail glass, Tory magazine the Spectator compared the logo of Hatherley’s publisher to Hezbollah’s flag.
Bracing as it is to imagine Hatherley firing a rocket launcher at Ottawa’s parliamentary library, the Gothic-Islamic rotunda actually thrills him: “polychromatic, overloaded with crockets and spikes, and in its sheer oddness the epitome of this preposterous project.” Praise and scorn sometimes blur together here. Discussing the cubist mountain of Montreal’s Habitat 67, a gentrified housing complex not entirely suited to the subarctic climate, Hatherley writes that “you can run your eyes over the deceptive complexities, cantilevers, overlaps and sudden vertiginous gaps in the structure for some time, until you get too cold and have to go back to the bus stop.”
He has a taste for the withering adjective (“thumpingly ugly,” “bafflingly praised”) and an ear for dissonant notes, like those made by the art deco sculptures of indigenous Canadians covering one Ottawa bank. Mischievous captions abound: a photograph of Melbourne’s well-preserved streetcar system, featuring local boys AC/DC, bears the legend “For those about to Tram we salute you.”
Imperial Contempt
Many of the architects featured in Artificial Islands were modernist émigrés escaping from fascism, described with discreet emotion as “Frank Lloyd Wright’s unacknowledged children.” They designed public housing throughout the settler zones, at least until capital’s concessions finally smothered the once-militant labor unions. During the 1980s, New Zealand converted to neoliberalism more fervently than even Britain, a spasm of privatization so rapid and consuming it brings to mind, like Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, the worshipper speaking in tongues.
Walking the Atherton Gardens apartment block in Melbourne, a gathering place for the city’s Aboriginal population, Hatherley writes, “Melbourne’s most unforgivingly modernist space is also the one which gives the most room to those very people its original construction was based on crushing underfoot.” He lingers at humbler spots too, whether toilets wrought from ornate iron or the Victorian atrium, strangely futuristic, where Chinese immigrants shop beneath gaslight — a form of social life unplanned by dead aristocrats.
Hatherley reserves his harshest judgments for buildings that reveal imperial contempt as indifference toward the landscape itself. Entering Auckland, he finds Dallas skyscrapers carelessly shoved into paradise: “The center is on a grid, but one which takes no account at all of the volcanic topography, so the flat land of Queen Street, the main thoroughfare, is attacked, Dr Caligari–style, by jagged high-rises from all sides.” Auckland’s National Museum would be a typically fatuous slab of Edwardian worthiness in some London suburb. Here, the stone seems to threaten a warning shot against nature.
“It was impossible to ground the building in such a way that it could reproduce the actual visual effect of a Greek temple,” Hatherley writes, “so all long views have a grass hillock obscuring the lower levels of the portico. The effect is as if the Parthenon was built not atop the Acropolis but nestled midway into the hills of a golf course.”
Elsewhere in New Zealand — or Aotearoa — Hatherley comes across the Fale Pasifika, an assembly hall built by indigenous artists and architects, whose vast wooden dome “gives a real sense of communal space.” Compare this edifice with the Melbourne residential tower that arranged balconies to form an image of nineteenth-century Aboriginal leader William Barak — a fine gesture, and little more, since the luxury flats inside are all priced accordingly.
Hatherley ends his Ottawa journey at the National Gallery of Canada, which recently combined its “Canadian and Indigenous” collections to reckon with the story of happy forward progress, whether framed in tory or liberal terms. “The juxtapositions between Indigenous artists depicting their own way of seeing the world,” Hatherley writes, “and European artists depicting, first, these people from a curious distance, and then celebrating the absence after their displacement and massacre, remain disturbing and jarring, and hard to assimilate into a cheerful new narrative of peace and reconciliation.”
The Exception That Proves the Rule
Montreal is the unwilling guest in this club. One of the few places where Britain imposed its rule on rival colonizers, it is also a thoroughly modernist city, more akin to Berlin or the Soviet bloc. The province was long governed by a syndicate of Catholic priests and Anglo bankers, a period of stagnation called la Grande Noirceur. The backlash to these doldrums, the 1960s social upheaval known as the Quiet Revolution, culminated in an attempt at politician-kidnapping revolution, which saw civil liberties suspended across Canada throughout the ensuing government crackdown.
In Montreal the development of colonial architecture takes a detour. Its brutally cold climate led planners to envision new ways of living. Experimental megastructures lead down into an underground city warmed by concrete, all linked together through the Metro’s abstract space stations. Hatherley plainly adores the town and made this Canadian yearn once again for its mad Cronenbergian logic: “Burrowing into the purest artificiality, this place feels much less like a contrivance than those miniaturised Englands and Scotlands, but rather like itself, a phenomenon that could happen only in this particular place.”
The CANZUK project of low-tax Britannia nostalgia would come off as a sick joke to Montrealers, many of whom live there because it doesn’t even feel like the rest of Canada. Montreal wears its imperial traces lightly, but it was still a settler city, a bauble wrested away from New France by British redcoats during the mid-eighteenth-century then passed down to London insurance firms. Unable to imagine solidarity with the land’s first inhabitants or its immigrant newcomers, the project of an independent Quebec came apart. The province is currently run by the well-named CAQ (Coalition Avenir Québec), conservative nationalists playing on ethnic resentment. Cast away from the motherland, they can still share that creepy hijab obsession. The left-autonomists of Québec Solidaire, meanwhile, suggest a different escape route from CANZUK. Their program of free public transit and collectively owned industry is popular in Montreal, which Hatherley ascribes to the city’s “continued independence of mind.”
Artificial Islands argues that we can only demolish the colonial landscape of acquisition and exploitation by unmaking capitalism, empire’s insatiable engine. Symbols are easier to pry lose — Australia will likely become a republic at some point during Charles III’s reign, more out of a desire to avoid its awkward relative than revolutionary fervor. The new monarch’s own ideal architecture would be castles for himself and leprous hobbit villages for the rest of us.
At the end of the book Hatherley travels to Scotland’s northern islands, both physically and culturally remote from the rest of Britain, and in this “Pictish-Norse Neverland” one can still visit a local landowner’s hideous ancestral seat and see the Bolshevik banner his predecessor captured during the Russian Civil War.
In the 1920s, not far from that laird’s manor, the Marxist archaeologist V. Gordon Childe dug up Skara Brae, a Neolithic settlement built five thousand years before. Hatherley describes it as a “village of non-hierarchal stone homes where none is larger than the other, with space for neither chief or king,” explaining how Childe believed he found proto-socialism in windswept Orkney. Modern utopia proved more elusive. Childe later returned from Britain to his native Australia and despaired at the sprawl spreading complacently everywhere. A voyage across the oceans took him no further than the empire’s suburbs.