Modernist architecture may have been brutal, it may have been conceived on an inhuman scale, it may have swept the decorative forms of the past aside and replaced them with a desert of plazas and shadowy underpasses – but it had elegance. Clean lines, sharp edges, soaring masses balanced on the slenderest of concrete legs: nothing wasted, nothing incorporated unless it served a function, no tower that wasn’t also a ventilation shaft. Berthold Lubetkin, the Georgian-born architect who became a British citizen in 1939, was one of modernism’s most graceful exponents, a believer in architecture as a humanising, life-improving force, expressed in his well‑known dictum: “Nothing is too good for ordinary people.”
That phrase serves as the epigraph for Marina Lewycka’s new novel. As a tribute to the great architect, however, The Lubetkin Legacy falls disappointingly short. If it was a building it would be adorned with gargoyles and pointless pinnacles. Where Lubetkin’s functionalism put nothing to waste, here there are whole tranches of narrative that could be lost without any cost to the novel as a whole. Indeed, I suspect that nearly half of it is almost completely irrelevant. The question is, which half?
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