Hellman cartoon, The Architects’ Journal, 21 February 1968
We should all follow Nero Coldfinger’s example 
[Coldfinger is awoken by a rattling window] 
And get the ‘feel’ of our buildings 
[Wind howls through the window as he opens it]
Experience, at first hand, the size of the rooms etc. 
[Coldfinger knocks over his toiletries as he dresses in the bathroom]
And any problems which might arise from our designs 
[An aeroplane passes close by, this scene features a photograph of the building from below] 
Not only would we benefit from such an exercise, but so would – 
[Coldfinger peers nervously from his front door down the corridor]
The tenants! 
[He is chased down the corridor by angry tenants – children and adults alike, wielding rolling pins, knives and toy guns whilst rolling up sleeves and shouting ‘There he goes!’ ‘After him’ and ‘Kill’ among other expletives].

 

James Hunter, Please come down, Ernö, Architect’s Journal, Volume 147, Number 10, 6 March 1968
A couple of months back, during a book at bedtime type session, I happened to be browsing through Bernard Newman’s To Russia and back (Herbert Jenkins, 35s in last year’s lists). But the effect wasn’t quite the hoped for soporific. The bit that really got me going was this reference to the Russian’s high handed approach to the delicate matter of professional responsibility: ‘On the Gilbertian principle of fitting the punishment to the crime, an architect who forgot to equip a ten-storey block of flats with a lift was sentenced to live on the top floor for two years’.

I went quite cold when I read that the first time. How could those Russian swine [sic] be so damned undemocratic? After all, forgetting the lift for a ten-storey block is something that could happen to anyone. We all make mistakes, I mused, and as the old saw has it. ‘the man who never made a mistake never made anything’. To preserve my peace of mind, I tore out the offending page, and hoped that none of the book’s other readers would think ‘what a good idea - let’s give it a go over here’.

It was, therefore, with a sinking heart that I read the GLC’s recent press release covering Ernö Goldfinger’s extraordinary decision to take the clouds over London’s East End. This could hardly be the usual spot of pr ploymanship, I thought. 

In the handout, Goldfinger announced his intention to move intone of the top floor pads in Balfront [sic] Tower, Poplar - a point block he had just designed for the council. The idea being that in this way he would be sure to pick up a stack of first hand news about how the building responded to the needs of the tenants. By experiencing any problems which might arise, he hoped to be able to correct them in the future.

I should have thought that Mr Goldfinger’s little experiment might have stood a better chance if he had opted for a stealthy move-in under an appropriate nom de plume - Joe Smith, truck driver, for instance; or Ernie Silverthumb, tadpole tamer.

But that’s beyond the point. The really disturbing aspect of the affair is that Goldfinger would appear to have unwittingly imported the afore-mentioned Gilbertian principle onto the home architectural front. The big danger here is that the general public could cotton on and demand an extension of the principle to cover all architectural and planning products. I can just imagine it. Specially selected panels of consumers would be set up to decide the remedial punishment appropriate to each case. 

Members of local council housing committees, housing managers and housing department chief architects might suddenly find a clause written into their conditions of service to ensure that they live for three months every year in a dwelling specifically chosen by a panel of council tenants. And just think how frightful it would be for education officers and architects if they were obliged to send their little ones to those much publicised but still-as-neglected-as-ever slum schools in one of our less salubrious urban ghettoes.

Consider the possible plight of a poor old planning offer - forcible extraction from his Georgian terrace on the posh side of the tracks, to be deposited in an inter-war tenement block overlooked by the planner’s pièce-de resistance, new elevated six-lane urban motorway. 

And who would change places with the architect unlucky enough to have just completed a prison - if he is expected to do a three-month stretch before collecting his fee? Three months up the river may be the best way to judge the security and reforming aspects of your newly completed jailhouse, but frankly I wouldn’t anticipate any great rush for the job.

My own particular little worry is the prospect of being forced to pay back that couple of thousand quid that the last job went over the top - result of tricky details. I have a horrible feeling that they’ll be coming to get me any time now, dammit - just as I had also saved up the deposit on a new paid of roller skates.

Brother Ernö, won’t you please recant? Let’s have another press release - tell us all it was just a little central European type joke: it’s not too late. Or is it?

 

Dennis Sharp, Goldfinger on the ground, The Architects’ Journal, 17 July 1968
Following on from the press conference and the report he prepared on his stay in his own high rise block, Balfron Tower (AJ 22.5.68). Ernö Goldfinger spoke more informally - without jacket and tie, but with the characteristic cigar and a glass of whisky - about his findings at the AA recently.

Clearly his experience has reinforced his self-confessed ‘romantic’ conviction that high density, high rise building are the old answer to metropolitan living - at least for the mass working population. The ground is freed for other uses and for landscaping, the blocks add a new dimension to grotty, congested area and the views out are magnificent.

Although an attempt was made after the talk to broaden the argument (the chairman, Hal Moggridge, had little sympathy with Mr Goldfinger’s high rise views), the lecturer would have none of it. Justifiably so perhaps, for here was an architect talking about a group of buildings (stage one was for a twenty-six-storey tower, a one- and two-storey old people’s block and shop) that was successful from many points of view.

The powerfully modelled tower, which rehouses 146 families from Tower Hamlets, was filled in record time and without doubt many of the new tenants enjoy the building immensely. There have been no complaints of feeling unsafe in the block but there were problems, most of which were of a technical or design nature. The high windows on the external walls in some of the rooms were disliked, the indoor play area was not large enough for supervised play, the separated service tower and the bridge access points had fallen foul of the local vandals.

The main points in the success of the building include the individual front doors that give access to three floors from a central street, the artificially ventilated bathrooms and the external lighting operated from the top of the building, which obviates the need for lamp posts.

Two other small points were of interest. Mr Goldfinger had furnished his flat with Meredew furniture that tenants admired for its simplicity but could not purchase in the area. Perhaps there is a lesson here for a bright firm of furniture package dealers who could move into the high density market. In many cases new furniture was bought but of the traditional kind. Mr Goldfinger’s own protests over the size of sink units have persuaded the GLC to adopt sinks with double drainers and missing taps into the future.

What one admires about this experiment is the intensity of thought and public response that has come out of it. It is not for nothing that Goldfinger has been made an honorary member of the Tenants’ Association. Few architects can claim that distinction.

‘Out of touch’, The Architect & Building News, 6 Mar 68
When Erno Goldfinger occupied one of the Poplar flats for the purpose of ‘sociological experiments’, he was tacitly making an admission for the whole profession, by and large, that architects are out of touch with the community which they supposedly serve. This lamentable situation has nothing whatever to do with the integrity, talent, or degree of dedication of our architects as opposed to those of other nations and ages. It is simply a result or urbanism, its size and complexity, its anarchy, its differentiation and contrast; and its power to create isolation and alienation in the maze and tangle of unconsidered concentration. There is an irony here which the profession must face: the architect is the victim of that same built-environment to which he has dedicated his talent and his life.

For the architect, as a member of a profession, enjoys economic and social privileges which lift him out of the mainstream of daily experience shared by the majority of the population - a disastrous situation for an artist. Professionally and socially, his life is hermetic. His office and place of residence, frequently the same premises, are located in the best and most convenient area of the metropolis. His business and personal life is interwoven with the best amenities which the central area can offer: the clubs, the boardrooms, restaurants, and even afternoon trips to the golf links, are extensions of his lounge and kitchen and garden. How can he know what urbanism means to others, the majority, who are less favourably placed? How can he assess what life is like in a council flat served by the amenities of Wapping? How can he devise the best form of envelope to contain a way of life he does not understand?

He could as easily design the habitations of moon-men, whom he also never meets. And this is not simply because of his higher income, but because the shape and pattern of urbanism today has formalized the segregation of the various income groups. The first walled cities enclosed disparities of wealth, but the major facilities were enjoyed in common by lord, thane and peasant. In the Elizabethan period all classes shared the same amenities, the inn, the market place, the playhouse, the fair. But today the sheer diameter of radial and concentric cities have physically fragmented society. Today the heart of the city is too feeble to serve the vast body of megalopolis. Perhaps we need a polycentric form of urbanism, and perhaps the architect needs a professional sociologist to mediate for him and to interpret the needs of this relativistic society.

The longer the architect delays, the more insuperable the problem becomes. For the built environment is active, not passive, and it exerts a tremendous force on human consciousness. The urban world must appear as inevitable and unquestionable to its inhabitants as the jungle, the desert, and the sea are to those creatures which inhabit them. But the urban world is a man-made and it would be a pity if its maker, too, beheld it and saw it was perfect, because it’s not.

The High Life, Building, 5 April 1968
Whatever practical results may emerge from Erno Goldfinger’s evercise in user research at Poplar, the most obvious fact at present is how much he is enjoying himself. Now in his seventh week in a flat at the top of the 26-storey tower block he has designed for the GLC, his ‘few weeks’ stay’ seems likely to extend to nearly three months.

Goldfinger is a large and somewhat daunting figure, but this has not deterred his new East End neighbours. Both he and his wife have established “very pally relationships. They visit me all the time, they stop me in the lifts, they speak to me in the streets,” he says. “There is already a terrific sense of community, an atmosphere of an East End Street, but elevated, with views.”

He claims that his stay has already confirmed his ideas of design for living high; he has used only 9% of the land for building on, leaving the rest free for play space, grass and trees, ‘instead of covering it with high-density, low-rise back-to-backs.’ He is adamant that sociologists’ and others’ criticisms of high-rise building have been forestalled by the play facilities provided, the club-room and day nursery (yet to be built), the relegation of cars to an underground garage and by such facilities as a pram room.

Although he plans no fundamental alterations in the other four blocks to be built, one or two modifications may be made. ‘There are not enough lifts. If one did go out of order, then the remaining capacity would not be adequate.’ Wind, he claims, is no more of a problem than anywhere else, although the wrong kind of window gasket has been used, and he is experimenting with that.

At £11 10s a week rent, the experiment will cost him something over £100, but he dismisses this as ‘a factor not worth considering.’ Did he think that more architects should follow his example? “I would not presume to suggest that other architects should follow my example,” he says, adding rather wickedly, “presumably they are clever enough not to have to check their designs pragmatically.”