Ahead in the Clouds

Modernists have always adored aeroplanes. Le Corbusier loved them for their economy; like ocean liners and grain silos, which he also admired, they were structures defined by their purpose, with nothing superfluous about them. Norman Foster once described the Boeing 747 as his favourite building, for much the same reasons – although he understood, unlike Corbusier, that it wasn’t simply a product of circumstance, but designed. He loved the look of the galleys, ‘all stainless steel and black plastic’, partly an expression of function, partly American 1950s’ style. Reyner Banham, the great architectural historian, liked aeroplanes too, with good reason, for in an earlier life he had been an aerospace engineer. In an elegant 1962 piece for the Architect’s Journal, he praised the Modernist integrity of the Douglas Corporation. Unlike their rivals Boeing or, even worse, Vickers in Britain, Douglas planes were ‘designed with innate style by people who cared about designing airliners and built a good one’. His formalist analysis of the rivet-heads on the DC8 wing is as good as anything by Clement Greenberg on Jackson Pollock.

None of these Modernists would have been pleased by the ubiquitous Boeing 737, the 5,000th example of which has just been built. What they saw in aircraft was economy and fitness of purpose, the sense of form uniquely expressing function. The 737 is something else entirely: a mongrel design, all market forces and compromise. It was designed in 1964 by Joe Sutter and Jack Steiner as a response to growing competition in the market for short-range jets. But to save money the designers were obliged to use the fuselage and nose from the much bigger 707. The result was a short, stumpy thing, every inch a compromise. You see this most of all in the treatment of the engines – one stuffed under each wing. The 737’s undercarriage (the wheels and their supports) is short to save weight, and it sits low on the ground like a dachshund. As a result, there’s no room between the wing and the tarmac for the engines. Boeing’s solution was simple: squash them to fit. Look at them the next time you fly Ryanair, and you will see what I mean. The upper part of the engine casing is round, the lower part flat: one of the ugliest compromises in aviation history.

A thoroughly pragmatic, opportunistic piece of work, it is the opposite of the engineering adage that ‘if it looks right, it is right’. But it is a staggering success story. According to the trade journal Flight International, the 737 makes up a quarter of the world’s fleet of jet airliners. It is so common, Flight notes, that at any given moment well over a thousand 737s are in the air. This is not bad going for an aircraft that was nearly cancelled in 1973. With orders down to 14 that year, Boeing held talks with Japanese manufacturers, offering to sell them the entire programme, factories and all. But the 737 survived, and it has, even now, more of a future than a past: 5,000 have been built, but no fewer than 6,100 are on order. During the 42 years of its existence it has seen off much of the competition. The Caravelle, the BAC 1-11, the DC9, the MD80, the BAe 146 and the Tupolev 143 have all been and gone. Only Airbus’ A320 remains.

Most remarkably of all, the 737 – subject to steady, incremental change, involving minimal risk – remains, despite its age, contemporary. I cannot think of another industrial product with quite the same history. The VW Beetle remained in production in one form or another for 60 years, but for much of its life it was an anachronism that survived in odd interstices. In Mexico, its last home, it supplied a unique, indigenous market for two-door taxi cabs, and was discontinued precisely because it failed to adapt. Leaving aside industrial products, I can barely think of a building from 1964 that has adapted to changing circumstances so well. It has often been easier to adapt Victorian buildings to contemporary purposes than Modernist ones.

Perhaps the lesson of the 737 is that we should reconsider what we think of as good design. When in 1962 Reyner Banham admired the ordered pattern of rivets on the DC8’s wing, he was describing an aesthetic experience. He then projected this impression of order onto his experience of flight, implying that the rivets and the smoothness of ride were related phenomena. It is the Modernist view that holds form and function equivalent. The problem with it, looking back over 40-odd years, is that it has nothing much to do with the way the world is. They stopped making Banham’s beloved DC8 after only a decade. The design produced no real derivatives, and Boeing swallowed up the whole Douglas company in the 1990s. Meanwhile Boeing’s humble 737 kept on evolving. It’s an ‘ugly and ordinary’ object, to invoke the architect Robert Venturi, yet precisely because of its ordinariness, worth talking about – much more so than the supposed ‘icons’ which are barely used by most of us. Almost all design criticism still celebrates exclusivity and difference; in doing so it tends to miss the objects, like the 737, used by most of us most of the time.

Richard J. Williams teaches art history at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The Anxious City (2004).