System
2025 - By Owen Hatherley, Source Magazine
901 Words
When looking at John MacLean’s photo series System, I flicked through the pictures and then, with a sudden shock, recognised a building I knew – one that I used to live very near to. It’s a building that stands at the edge of a council housing estate in Southampton, a port city on the south coast of England. The estate was built in the late 1920s- so, contemporary with the white walls and flat roofs of modernist housing estates then being built in Berlin or Rotterdam or Prague – but was in a firmly traditionalist style. Each pebbledashed house had a big pitched roof and a faintly Tudor porch, and a huge garden, predicated on the idea that the dockers and car factory workers who lived there might want to grow their own vegetables after a 10 hour shift at the machinery. Firmly in a twentieth century of Ford factories, mechanised ports and mass housing, but dreaming of a vanished world. On its edge was a big pub in Mock Tudor style, with fake boards stuck onto the gables of the brick structure. When I lived there in the mid 1990s it was derelict, but at some point in the 2000s it was turned into a drive-thru McDonald’s, and there it is, in MacLean’s series, standing blank and gnomic, an image of overlapping obsessions with the past.
MacLean has described his approach as ’tilting my lens towards paradoxical subjects’, to reflect what he calls his own ‘tragicomic worldview’. It’s easy to look at these photographs as an example of simple bathos – juxtapositions of apparently unlike things, or a lament at how these lovely Tudor or Georgian buildings have been subverted by the most quintessentially homogeneous institution of global capitalism, the burger chain whose appeal rests entirely on total sameness – the fact that your Big Mac, your Quarter Pounder, your Filet-O-Fish, will be absolutely identical whether you order it in Southampton, Seattle, Shanghai, Sydney or Dar es Salaam. To be sure, there’s plenty of examples of McDonald’s having to tone down their signs and ads and lights in historic cities, depending on how strong the local laws are: I’ve seen an art deco McDonald’s in Porto, a Renaissance McDonald’s in Bologna. But however traditional these buildings might look, none of them are ‘real’ either. None of the Georgian McDonald’s are from the 18th century, none of the Baroque McDonald’s are from the 17th century, none of the Tudor McDonald’s are from the 16th. In fact, most of them are barely a couple of decades older than McDonald’s own foundation in 1940, in California. There’s no real here at all, but for the real people eating real chips and real burgers and drinking real cokes. It’s a vision of radical inauthenticity, a series about historical cosplay.
As the captions make clear, most of these photographs were taken in Outer London, in Travelcard Zones 5, 6, and beyond – suburbs built on open country between the two world wars and linked to the centre by parkways and tube lines, like Chingford, Borehamwood, Bromley, Heathrow, Orpington, Northolt, Southall, Watford – though there are also two in Oxford, one in the Midlands, and one in Brighton, typically a little more flamboyant and modern than others. As an architectural historian I can make a reasonably educated guess about when others were built. Nearly all will date from between 1918 and 1939, bar perhaps the one in Slough that looks more a product of the 1980s Harvester style: closely linked in ethos, but much cheaper in execution after sixty years of further deskilling in the building industry.
This shouldn’t be so surprising. In British architecture, the interwar years and the Thatcher and Major years were both periods during which the British Isles seemed to have raised the drawbridge. Modernism was continental, scary, harsh, un-English. The shock of the First World War, and the terrified reaction to urban modernity that helped bring Thatcher to power, each entailed a collective, unconscious decision to return to English certainties, to make anything that was new look old, so that it would no longer be frightening – so that the sting could be taken out of the modern world. But making Britain less European meant making it ever more American.
The main visual influence on these pictures is, pointedly, German and highly modernist. The precedent of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typological work on 19th and early 20th century industry, selected, isolated, framed and cropped as repeated series, is obvious enough: a suitably frontal view is enabled by MacLean’s taking the photographs from a height, with the camera elevated on a 3.5 metre telescopic pole. But the point is that the mass production of McDonald’s and the mass production in the 20s, 30s, 80s and 90s of traditionalist buildings come from a remarkably similar place. MacLean has commented on the obviously Freudian resonances of McDonald’s – a memory of childhood, mammarial golden arches, ‘soft and sweet’ food that you could have been given when you were a toddler; this extends to the buildings. ‘Location value alone’, he says, ‘does not explain why McDonald’s bought and retained the Tudorbethan edifices of faux wattle and daub in my photographs. Perhaps this does: nostalgia is one of the chain’s core marketing strategies.’ That’s why this series isn’t a mere architectural joke, but something a little more serious: a serial snapshot of a country that absolutely refuses to grow up.