An international committee of architects was invited to design New Hav, and the plan they drew up was patently consensus architecture, a little dull. What it lacks in genius, however, it makes up for in an unexpected and sometimes comic caprice of detail. The idea was to balance the roughly circular walled city of the Arabs, on the western side of the harbour, with a second walled city on the eastern side, leaving the Serai and the castle in between. The harbour gate of New Hav opening on to a promenade upon the western quay, looks directly across the harbour to the Market Gate of the Medina. At the same time, the northern axis of the new city was to be aligned upon the castle hill, so that you could see the rock of the acropolis from the very middle of New Hav; but since this did not in the event prove possible in the city’s geometrically tripartite form, the northern boulevard had to be twisted out of true, causing agonizing disputes between the French and the Italians, whose concessions it separated (in the end the Italians were compensated by being given possession of the promenade upon the harbour).
Everything else about New Hav is excessively symmetrical, and there is almost nothing that is not balanced by something else, and almost no vista that is not suitably closed. From the central Place des Nations, below my balcony, radiate the three dividing boulevards, Avenue de France northwards towards the Serai and the castle hill, Viale Roma westwards to the harbour, Unter den Südlinden eastwards towards nowhere in particular. The city was supposed to be a physical representation of the League’s visionary initiative — a place of reconciliation and cooperation, of unity in variety. Its circular shape was meant to symbolize eternal peace, and each boulevard was planted with a different species of tree (planes, catalpas and ilexes) to express the joy of amicable difference.
The façades of Place and boulevards are all uniform — grandly neoclassical, in a Beaux-Arts style, arcaded at street level, mansard-roofed above — and they are marked with elegant tiled street-signs, in four languages, contributed to this old haven of the Armenians by the Armenian Pottery in Jerusalem. But the liberty allowed to the powers to do what they liked in their own quarters saves the place from sterile monumentality. Resolutely internationalist though they were, none of the three could resist the claims of patriotism when they were let loose on the side-streets, and there are few facets of French, Italian or German architecture that are not represented somewhere within the pattern of New Hav. There are mock-Bavarian inns. There is a music-hall (the Lux Palace) straight from Montmartre. There is a classic Fascist railway station, modelled on Milan’s, which since no railway enters New Hav, was used as the Italian Post Office instead. If the French decided to build a cathedral, what else but a little Rheims would do? If the Germans wanted a Residenz, what but a small Schloss? Though everything is cracked and peeling now, it is all there to this day, Beaux-Arts to Bauhaus, neo-Imperial to late Nihilist (the Casa Frioli in the Italian quarter, a marvel of swirled concrete decorated with mosaics of glaring purple, is the least avoidable building in New Hav).
Two world-famous architects are represented. The glass-and-concrete Maison de la Culture in the French quarter, with its stilts and green cladding, is one of Le Corbusier’s less inspired works: in it, between the wars, everyone from Colette to Malraux gave lectures on The Meaning of Frenchness or Allegory in Provençal Folk-Dance. More importantly, you may notice scattered fitfully through the German quarter a certain distinction of design in matters electricaclass="underline" lamp-standards, light-switches, even a few antique electric fires and toasters all seem to obey some central directive of taste. This is because the German administration entrusted the power system of its quarter to the Berlin company AEG, and it was their great consultant architect Peter Behrens who, during a visit to Hav in 1925, drew up designs for the whole electrical network. Unfortunately he had no say in the power station, which had been built by the Russians and supplied the whole peninsula, but within the German quarter everything electrical was his — the bold transformer station, like a whale-back beside the Ostgatte, the powerful street-light pylons, the solid square switches of brown Bakelite. Of course much of it is lost, but even now, so ubiquitous was Behrens’ influence, there is a kind of subliminal strength to the style of the German quarter which is distributed, I like to think, directly through the frequently fused and multitudinously patched circuits of AEG-Hav.
For the rest, there is nothing of supreme quality. It is all a bit of a lark. All was done, one feels, even the Italian Post Office, in a spirit of genial optimism, elevated sometimes into parody. Architectural purists of the 1920s sneered mercilessly at New Hav, and Lutyens, invited to attend its formal opening in 1928, said privately that it reminded him of the ghost train on Brighton pier, so dizzy did it make him, and so often did damp objects slap him in the face.
But at least it possesses, as few such artificial towns do, an air of hopeful guilelessness. Just this once, it seems to say, just for this moment, even our separate patriotisms are merely amusing. And most guilelessly amusing of all, to my mind, are the three arches by which each radial boulevard, as it debauches into the central Place, is ornamentally bridged. I can see all three from my terrace, if I lean out far enough. Close to the left a replica of the Bridge of Sighs ambiguously links our quarter with the French. Further round the Place, the Avenue de France is spanned by a squashed and potted representation of the towered bridge at Cahors. And opposite me stands an elevated Brandenburg Gate, splendid indeed when a No. 2 tram comes storming underneath with its rocking red trailer.
Armand thinks them all very silly, but he should not scorn Hav’s follies, for the most gloriously ludicrous of them all was contributed by his own country. In those days it was an official French custom to distribute among Francophone communities across the world small iron replicas of the Eiffel Tower, still to be seen in places like Mauritius or Madagascar. It was thought improper, I suppose, to make such an offering to Tripartite Hav, so instead the French government presented the Conveyor Bridge which spans the harbour mouth beside the Iron Dog, perhaps ten miles south of the city centre, as a gesture of France’s profound respect for the people and civilization of the peninsula. Only the French could build conveyor bridges — archetype was Lanvedin’s magnificent Pont Transbordent at Marseilles — so its unmistakable outline on the finest site in Hav would be a perpetual reminder of French skill and generosity.
No matter that almost nobody wanted to cross the harbour down there, or that the elaborate solution of a conveyer bridge was perfectly unnecessary anyway. The French mind was majestically made up, and to this day the bridge operates with the help of generous subsidies from Paris — besides being, thanks to its regular maintenance by French engineers, the most efficient piece of mechanism in Hav. Twelve times a day its platform, slung on steel wires from the girders high above, sets off in a gentle swaying motion across the harbour mouth, guided by a captain wearing a derivation of French naval uniform in his small wooden cabin in the middle. The pace is measured. The machinery is silent. A long chequered pennant streams from the cabin roof. To the north you can see the castle, rising on its rock above the city, to the south the Mediterranean sea lies blue, green and flecked with foam. Below you, perhaps, a white salt-ship slips elegantly out of the haven for Port Said and the Red Sea. In all Hav there is nothing much more foolish than the Conveyor Bridge — but nothing much grander, either!