Form Follows Fun: Modernism and Modernity in British Pleasure Architecture 1925-1940 (review)

The subject of Bruce Peter's new study is a promising one; its title indicative of an interrogative approach to an area of British architectural practice which has received little attention from historians. Peter's focus is on what he calls "the architecture of pleasure" or "modernism of a more popular kind" (11): the lidos, greyhound stadia, cinemas, casinos, and pleasure beaches which were built in British towns, cities, and seaside resorts in the late 1920s and 1930s. His concern is to bring such architectures under the wing of modernist studies and he does so on the initial premise that they share a "progressive aesthetics" (11) with works of "canonical modernism" (10), such as Mendelsohn and Chermayeff's serene De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea, on England's South Coast of 1935, or Wells Coates's sophisticated block of minimal flats at Lawn Road in Hampstead, north London, of 1934. Ultimately, Peter's intention is to show how ". . . the Modern Movement in Britain was manifested more extensively and consumed by a more popular and geographically-dispersed audience than has generally been acknowledged" (14).

Peter's intent for his book suggests that he has drawn inspiration from the broader turn in the writing of the history of architectural modernism, and British architectural modernism in particular, which has taken place in the last decade. This has seen historians move away from simplistic definitions of modernism as a monolithic discourse often defined in narrow stylistic terms (put crudely, something is only modernist if it has a flat roof, no ornament, its interior is open plan, and it is built from concrete) and, in the British case, an idiom imposed upon, rather than generated from, native concerns and mores. In its place historians today talk increasingly of modernisms—conservative, regional, high, alternative—and, drawing on the theorization of modernism by scholars such as Marshall Berman, have sought to relate modernist architecture's formal, spatial, and social innovations to clients' and architects' attempts to use new technologies to solve the problems of living in modern times.¹

Certainly, the observations which Peter makes in his introduction suggest an author who seeks to complicate our understanding of what and where modernism was in interwar Britain. He comments, "perhaps . . . definitions of modernism in architecture have tended to exclude its more popular and mass-oriented aspects" (11). He has chapters titled "Theorising the Architecture of Pleasure," "Modernism and the Typology of Pleasure," "Consuming and Experiencing the Architecture of Pleasure," and considers, in passing, and very absorbingly, the contribution of engineers to architectural design in the interwar decades, and the phenomenon that was suburban development.

That the book does not quite live up to the ambition of these chapter titles and subsections reflects two things. More negatively, this reviewer was troubled by Peter's reluctance in the end to go beyond a formalist definition of what constituted the modernism of which he speaks. In general, it is the stylistic (rarely spatial) similarities which he points to in order to make a link between the architecture of stadia or cinemas with work which might more commonly be labeled "modernist." Although he offers some historical background in each of his chapters, the discussion is often general in tone. There is never a thoroughgoing study of one of his examples through which he might have demonstrated how the design (exterior and interior, and in its use of technology) of a site of popular leisure such as a cinema or holiday camp represented a considered attempt to rethink the typology of the architecture of entertainment to meet the needs and demands of a population which, for the first time, had the time to go to the pictures or enjoy a family holiday. This reflects, perhaps, the fact that much of Peter's research is from secondary sources (although there is not much of the growing secondary literature on the history of mass leisure in...