Laurent Stalder’s On Arrows

“The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men,” announced Professor Silenus (a surrogate for Walter Gropius) in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall (1928). Laurent Stalder’s volume of essays on postwar British architecture features many Silenus-sympathizers who would prefer the various substances and bodies moving through their buildings to be as reliable as machines.1 A diplomatic architectural historian—neither luddite nor techno-optimist—Stalder, too, is concerned with architecture vis-à-vis machines: most specifically in regard to the subsequent functioning and performance of buildings and their contents.

Noting the cultural and scientific precedents—from material innovation to discoveries in molecular structure—that have fostered new approaches to architecture and town-planning, Stalder’s book explores how postwar architects began to see buildings in terms of totalizing environments. Open-plan and glass promoted transparency, and sunlight and breeze were considered as important as bricks and mortar. What was at stake was “the control of a multilayered visual, climatic, spatial environment”: or, as László Moholy-Nagy put it, why should one “live between stone walls when one could live under the blue sky between green trees with all the advantages of perfect insulation?”2 That control began in the architectural plan, cohering in a specific symbol: the arrow. Despite hardly appearing a few decades before or after, the 1950s saw an eruption of arrows in the drawing plans of British architects.

Architects’ arrows represent volatile and ephemeral substances—such as water, gases, people, goods, vehicles, heat, and information—which circulate through the built environment. Stalder’s book puckishly begins not with an architectural plan but with a 1958 section-drawing of a refrigerator, arrows weaving through, set in motion by a small compressor. Some pages later, in James Stirling’s plan for the History Library at the University of Cambridge, straight, curved, thick, and thin arrows depict the direction of gazes, organizational matters, and “environmental mechanics.”

Stalder assures us that in the architectural press of the 1950s and ’60s, “the word environment is everywhere.” Yet he does not acknowledge postwar Britain’s actual climatic conditions. We read nothing of air quality, of the 1952 Great Smog, which killed around 4,000 Londoners. And whilst attentive to service infrastructure, from ventilation to insulation and waste management (Silenus’s favorite part of the building, after all, was the drains), Stalder does not call into question the sociopolitical biases determining supposedly “ideal” environments and their levels of thermal comfort. There is little mention of real-world environmental ramifications: only in the final chapter does Stalder mention that Reyner Banham, a figure we’ve encountered regularly throughout the volume, “while celebrating the industrial age as the era of invention also named it the dark satanic century due to pollution caused by those very inventions.” Instead, the majority of Stalder’s focus remains at a technocratic remove: “the challenges of urban design are first and foremost problems of circulation and the containment of flow.”

For Stalder, the (diagrammatic) arrow is the generator of architecture: it doesn’t mimic movement, but creates the conditions for it. Stalder cites Milton Keynes, “not planned for existing inhabitants but targeted population,” where data (people and cars) precedes inhabitants, both logically and temporally. Everything, it seems, could be pre-programmed, with representation and efficiency part of the same endeavor.

Yet whilst many of these arrowed plans advanced utopian ideals, they were not exempt from failure (especially if success is measured by functionality), a fact little acknowledged until Stalder’s penultimate chapter. Some 170 pages in—having surveyed new representations and new towns—Stadler finally asks: what happens when the new gets old? Stirling’s History Library became an uninhabitable hothouse. So much for efficient air-flow. John Bancroft’s Pimlico School, once “a historical moment for the future,” was demolished when the failure of one ventilator led the entire climate system to collapse.

Stalder considers that such “accidents” resulted from the new materials and new regulations that informed postwar architecture. Forgoing the tired analogy of house-as-machine (individual and autonomous), he rethinks the machine as an ensemble of relations operating both within and outside buildings, a “total technological complex of a society and epoch.” Social contexts reorder the architectural environment more dramatically than stylistic movements or technical developments. But, sympathetic to the architect’s plight, Stalder nevertheless underplays the catastrophic fallout of building failure. Although it is implied, I only wish Stalder took a more impassioned position on the importance of a nuanced regulatory framework that adequately distributes responsibility beyond The Architect to encompass the ensemble (in short, the failure of the building is not the failure of modernist architecture). I’m reminded of the findings of the inquiry into the 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower that left seventy-two Londoners dead, which revealed gross negligence around who was responsible for safety standards during the building’s refit, resulting in an “unedifying ‘merry-go-round of buck-passing.’”3

During the 1960s, buildings of the prior decade were already deteriorating, and their decline was reframed as “expendability,” while Richard Llewelyn Davies coined the term “functional obsolescence.” These terms are now the parlance of Silicon Valley. Moreover, digital infrastructures similarly treat bodies and brains as “bits” mobilized by binary logics. If refrigerators were analogous to 1950s architectural plans, perhaps today’s analogy is the GPU chip upon which AI depends. In the abstract, GPUs facilitate the frictionless flow of information. In reality, they are at the mercy of everything from mineral access, manufacturing expertise, supply chains, and geopolitical relations.

A lucid and welcome, if idiosyncratic, addition to writing on postwar architecture, Stalder’s On Arrows reassesses individual technological objects as dependent on constellations of factors that determine performance, subsequently nodding to wider debates outside the architectural canon. Whilst beyond Stalder’s scope, today’s relatively unregulated AI arms race is an ever-more insidious manifestation of everyday life as “codable.” It would be wise to heed the lessons of postwar architecture, both its innovations and failures.

Laurent Stalder’s On Arrows: Essays in British Architecture and its Environments was published by MIT Press in January 2025.