Introduction: Mobility, Concealment, Transparency

Summary

Invisible Architecture

What is invisible architecture? It is what holds the modern city together, but also what prevents it from appearing as a unified and knowable entity, since it means there is always some part of the city which is hidden. It is structure which traverses the transparent, the unseen and the mobile, yet is resistant to interpretation as a totality. Like the psychoanalytic unconscious, it cannot be grasped directly, though its existence can be inferred or projected. It organises city space by limiting and directing perception, especially visual perception. It typically conceals or represses what is unpleasant under capitalism, such as the connections between rich and poor, or wealth and waste, but it can also provide a space for the possible reimagining or reshaping of the city. It brings together the reactionary, paranoid, ideological and molar aspects of the modern city with its capacity for the utopian, fluctuating and destabilising, without simply collapsing or reconciling these things.

The contention of this book is that what I am calling invisible architecture plays a significant role in the literary and cultural imaginary of the years between approximately 1830 and 1910, in ways which only become apparent when the city is analysed as the meeting point of intersecting drives towards mobility, concealment and transparency. This was a period when cities in Britain and elsewhere seemed no longer graspable or comprehensible as a single whole (if they ever were), unless perhaps as a ‘mass’, a concept which unifies the city's population only to render it more unknowable. William Cook Taylor, whom Asa Briggs calls ‘an apologist of the new industrial system’, described northern English industrial towns in the 1840s as ‘an aggregate of masses, our conception of which clothe themselves in terms which express something portentous and fearful’. Raymond Williams notes that ‘the great city was […] so overwhelming, that its people were often seen in a single way: as a crowd, as “masses” or as a “workforce”’. For Charles Baudelaire, the modern city is ungraspable because it disallows totalisation, like modernity itself, which he calls ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable’.