The architect Ernö Goldfinger will for ever be associated with the dramatic silhouette that you see rising above north Kensington when you drive along the Westway, London’s urban motorway. Trellick Tower, with its distinctive lift shaft joined by walkways to the main building, has become an unlikely symbol of urban cool. It even gets name-checked in Blur’s song "Best Days" ("Trellick Tower’s been calling/I know she’ll leave me in the morning"). It has also made Goldfinger a hate figure for traditionalists such as Brian Sewell, who once described him as "no more than a pimple on the rump of Wren".
Avant-garde architects are often accused of being unconcerned about the mundane lives of their buildings after the dramatic moment of their completion. They retire to their Hampstead town houses, leaving the poor residents on the 20th floor to worry about leaking roofs, broken lifts and dodgy boilers. As Nigel Warburton shows in his scholarly but readable biography, Goldfinger does not fit this caricature. He lived in one of his own high-rises for two months, paying the full rent and hosting champagne parties for the grateful but bemused residents. Goldfinger may have enjoyed the minor celebrity that this temporary residence granted him, but it seems to have been motivated by a genuine desire to iron out snags in the building.
Untroubled by self-doubt or modesty, Goldfinger still thought carefully about how a building worked for its inhabitants. He colour-coded each of Trellick Tower’s floors so that, when the lift doors opened, residents would know immediately if they were on the right level - a useful prop, he half joked, for anyone staggering home drunk. As Warburton argues, the failure of high-rise council flats in Britain was often owing to local authority budget cuts rather than architectural shortcomings. It was the stinginess of the Greater London Council in refusing to provide a concierge for the tower that led to Trellick’s lifts and corridors being overrun by vandals and criminals in the 1970s, earning it the sobriquet "Tower of Terror".
Warburton adopts an architectural historian’s version of the auteur theory, which assumes that major artists impose their personality on each work. The approach works well for Goldfinger, a compelling character who alternately bullied and charmed employees and clients, and was generally used to getting his own way. When the journalists at his Daily Worker building in the Farringdon Road in London complained that the toilet bowls were too low, for example, he gave them a lecture about the health benefits of squatting in the French style while defecating.
Warburton does not always manage to place his subject within the broader context of postwar British architecture and social housing. In many ways, Goldfinger’s charisma and charmed life reinforce the Prince Charles myth about high-rise housing: that arrogant, avant-garde architects connived with paternalist state planners to thwart the more trustworthy instincts of ordinary people. The biography of this original "Gucci socialist" - born into a wealthy Hungarian family, impeccably well connected, with a taste for the finer things and a fondness for the royal family - is unlikely to convert the Brian Sewells of this world.
Yet Goldfinger’s role in high-rise housing was atypical. Most of Britain’s tower blocks were not the work of "elitist" architects but of large contracting firms such as Wimpey and Laing, which had stand-ardised designs, in-house engineers and package deals with local authorities. The responsibility of state socialism for the high-rise experiment is well documented; capitalism’s role, for some strange reason, seems to have been written out of history.
Goldfinger died in 1987, and so did not live to see Trellick Tower fêted in the media as a newly fashionable dwelling for urban professionals. In fact, as Warburton points out, this is partly a myth: most of its residents still rent from the council. Tower-block chic has done wonders for Gold-finger’s posthumous reputation, but it is an uneven phenomenon. Trellick’s trendiness is largely a product of its Notting Hill postcode, and the arrival of bourgeois-bohemian gastropubs and coffee shops on Golborne Road. Goldfinger’s other London high-rise, the very similar-looking Balfron Tower, near the Blackwall Tunnel, is not such a fashionable address.
Moreover, the yuppification of the tower block is an entirely London-based phenomenon, the city’s property values putting a high premium on anywhere near the centre, and quelling the anxieties of the most conservative mortgage-lenders. Goldfinger, a lifelong Marxist with a passionate commitment to social housing, would not have appreciated the irony. Trellick Tower’s coolness has simply confirmed the estate agent’s cliché: "Location, location, location."
Joe Moran’s book Reading the Everyday is newly published by Routledge
