Jonathan Meades documentary Joy of Essex

Last night I watched the Jonathan Meades documentary Joy of Essex on BBC4  http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01qfr95/Jonathan_Meades_The_Joy_of_Essex/

The programme was an examination of utopian and quasi-millennarian planned communities in the county over the last hundred years or so, as expressed in architecture.  Almost everything in the documentary was new to me, although I thought I knew Essex fairly well.  The Jonathan Meades style is detached and deliberate - there are no extemporary touches (interviews for instance), just carefully composed lucid narration combined with beautiful images.

So convincing is Jonathan Meades as a presenter that one can unwittingly fall into the trap of agreeing with him.

He is an unrepentant champion of modernism, and dismissed the reluctance of elderly people in Frinton-on-Sea to live in modernist houses as mere snobbery.

Modernist houses can, of course, look wonderful.  One thinks of High & Over in Amersham, one of the most beautiful houses in the northern home counties (ie you count Buckinghamshire as a home county).  However it is important not to be taken in by the surface beauty.

As Le Corbusier told us, modernist houses are machines for living in.  Modernism represents the industrialisation of architecture in the same way that machine guns and conscription represent the industrialisation of war and totalitarian faiths such as Marxism and Fascism represent the industrialisation of politics.  Industrialised architecture means commitment to a social ideal of maximum utility (maximum beauty, maximum efficiency, maximum control over every aspect of the designed life).

This is fine if you want to live a life designed by someone else, but even the most ardent enthusiast must eventually tire of it.

It would be like being patted until you bruise.