6 - The Whiteness of the City

Summary

This chapter examines spatial and architectural whiteness in the nineteenth-century city, taking it as a final example of invisible architecture in the period. I propose that such whiteness is both a precursor and a counterpoint to the white walls that would come to define modernist architecture in the early twentieth century. In line with a number of critics in recent decades, the chapter therefore reads the nineteenth century, or the ‘Victorian Age’, as neither hermetically sealed nor uniform, but rather as porous and temporally fractured, while still recognising that it displays recurrent features and patterns which cut across texts and spaces.

I begin from Mark Wigley's suggestion that the hidden logic of modernist architecture is to make decoration and the absence of decoration one and the same while claiming to erase ornament completely, and that this is exemplified by the white wall, where ‘having been stripped of decoration, the white surface itself takes over the space-defining role of decorative art’. I argue that in contrast to this erasing role within modernism, nineteenth-century whiteness is strikingly multiple and unsettled, alive with the contradictions which are typically submerged in the white walls of the International Style practised by Gropius, Le Corbusier and their contemporaries. The whiteness of the nineteenth-century city cleanses but also dirties, erases but also exposes, conceals ornamentation but also functions as ornament. Such whiteness is a compelling example of invisible architecture. Like the other forms of invisible architecture discussed in this book, it carries a powerful ideological force yet also retains a utopian aspect, seeming to offer in its blankness the hope of limitless possibilities. Though not itself a space, urban whiteness is nonetheless paradigmatic of the spaces and structures I have considered so far, operating as an aesthetic feature that is both fascinating and disturbing, at once dazzlingly visible and hauntingly empty. To begin to explore these contradictions, I turn first to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) and its celebrated chapter ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’, which although not concerned directly with the city, acts as a point of departure for the issues I wish to consider.