The Modern City Revisited

The Modern City Revisited

The Modern City Revisited

Edited by

Thomas Deckker

London and New York

First published 2000 by Spon Press 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Spon Press 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Spon Press is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2000 Thomas Deckker; selection and editorial matter The contributors; individual chapters The right of Thomas Deckker to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The publisher makes no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data The modern city revisited / edited by Thomas Deckker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. City planning. I. Deckker, Thomas HT166 .M582 2000 307.1'216–dc21 ISBN 0-203-99203-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-419-25640-7 (Print Edition)

00-030085

Contents

Contributors Acknowledgements

vii viiii

Foreword Michael Sorkin

ix

Introduction Thomas Deckker

1

PART 1 Alternative visions 1

2

The symphony of the metropolis: Berlin as ‘Newlin’ in the twentieth century Bernd Nicolai Cities of socialism: technology and ideology in the Soviet Union in the 1920s Catherine Cooke

3

Le Corbusier and the city without streets James Dunnett

4

Towards the functional city? MARS, CIAM and the London plans 1933–42 John Gold

7

9

26

56

80

PART 2 Vision versus reality

101

5

103

Lubetkin and Peterlee John Allan

vi

Contents

6

QT8: a neglected chapter in the history of modern town planning Judi Loach

125

7

Birmingham: building the modern city Andrew Higgott

150

8

Brasília: city versus landscape Thomas Deckker

167

PART 3 The decline of Modernism 9

Post-war town planning in its mid-life crisis: dilemmas in redevelopment from a policy point of view Rob Doctor

10 Looking back on our future: conflicting visions and realities of the modern American city Paul Adamson

195

197

214

The Modern City revisited – envoi Allen Cunningham

247

Index

251

Contributors

Paul Adamson received a Masters in Architecture from Columbia University in New York, and is a practicing architect in San Francisco. He is the author of a forthcoming book on the modernist Eichler homes in California, and has lectured widely on the subject. John Allan is principal of Avanti Architects and has restored such Modern Movement buildings as the Penguin Pool, the Gorilla House, Highpoint and the Finsbury Health Centre by Berthold Lubetkin, and Willow Road by Erno Goldfinger. He is author of Berthold Lubetkin: Architecture and the Tradition of Progress. Catherine Cooke is a Lecturer in Design at the Open University and an authority on the architecture of the Soviet period in the USSR. Allen Cunningham was Head of the School of Architecture at the University of Westminster and Chairman of docomomo-UK. He is author of Modern Movement Heritage. Thomas Deckker is an architect and was Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture at the University of East London from 1991 to 1999. He has lived and practised in Brasília. Rob Docter was Head of the Architecture Section of the Arts Directorate at the Netherlands Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, and Secretary to the Netherlands docomomo Foundation. Heis currently Director of the Berlage Institute, Amsterdam James Dunnett is an architect and has written widely on the work of Le Corbusier and Erno Goldfinger. John Gold is Professor in the School of Social Sciences and Law at Oxford Brookes University and author of The Experience of Modernism. Judi Loach is Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture at Cardiff University and has written widely on the work of Le Corbusier. Andrew Higgott is Principal Lecturer in the School of Architecture at the University of East London and has written widely on Modernism in Britain. Bernd Nicolai is Professor of Art History at the University of Trier. He is author of Modernity and Exile: German-speaking Architects in Turkey 1925–1955. Michael Sorkin is an architect and critic and Visiting Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Vienna. His books include Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the end of Public Space.

Acknowledgements

The two people to whom most thanks are due for this book are Allen Cunningham, who supported the project in his capacities as Chairman of docomomo-UK and consultant to Spon Press, and Caroline Mallinder, Commissioning Editor of Spon Press. The hard work of her assistant, Rebecca Casey, should also be acknowledged. This book was developed from a conference also called ‘The Modern City Revisited’ that I organised at the University of East London on 27 and 28 March 1999. This conference would not have been possible without the generous financial support of Peter Salter, Head of the School of Architecture, and the equally generous moral and intellectual support of Nick Weaver, Deputy Head, and Jan Birksted, Senior Lecturer. The comments of Zilah Quezado Deckker on my article on Brasília were invaluable, as was the hospitality of Dr Maria Quezado Soares and Alice Quezado Duval in Brasília.

Foreword

At the conference at the source of this book, an image recurred in the slides of speaker after speaker. It was one of Le Corbusier’s famous sketches of his ‘City of Three Million’, the one with those cruciform slabs in sketchy verdure, drawn in that funky one-point perspective of his. Although this was an image more derided than praised by the conferees, it clearly hadn’t lost its aura: if modernist planning has a sacred cow, this was it. Corb’s was a vision that took and it continues to be the default for large-scale housing around the world, from Brooklyn to Belgrade to Beijing. As the slides flicked by, though, another image under the influence swam into mind, a view down the Vegas strip (recently visited), more 40-storey slabs marching down the line, linked by traffic. The Corbusian signifier had drifted only slightly: behind the veneer of kitschy festivity, the tourist class was housed in a frequent flier existenzminimum (good-bye Frankfurt kitchen, hello mini-bar . . .), a global architecture of which Corb could scarcely have dreamed. But the latest in Vegas Corbusian, the Parisian – a slab branded with mansardic details and a half-sized Eiffel Tower out front – brings it all home. Beneath the plastic, the cinder block, three thousand rooms on panoptic corridors atop a casino, the most intensely surveilled environment on the planet. The superficially antinomial formal relationship between Vegas and the Ville Radieuse betrays a struggle at the heart of modernity, a suppressed light side that was always there but could not thrive within the ideological borders of European modernism. Although the trope of ornament’s criminality dominates the official expressive palette, this has long been purchased at the cost of wilder impulses. The world’s two most Bauhaus-inflected cities – Miami and Tel Aviv – vividly participate in this difference. Twin ’20s Jewish utopias, the one celebrates the worker, the other the retiree. Identically scaled metropolises in identical climates, Miami releases the repressed unconscious of Tel Aviv and, by extension, modernist urbanism in general which approaches heaven’s gate clad in bright pastels and deco decor. The same tension between pleasure and austerity recurs in my favourite slogan from Paris ’68, ‘underneath the pavement the beach’. Here was a battle cry for the union of modernity with the leisure society, joy fighting back against bureaucracy. This was also a very Parisian refrain. May ’68 was an urban movement, its spectacle and success linked to the street, its theorists (in the ripe surrealist/situationist tradition) full

x

Foreword

of strategies for both goofy and passionate revisitations of the town. The critique was, among other things, directed against the alienated structures of the modern city and the dissipation by space of any solidarity that class (or generation) might produce. In hindsight, this droll sloganeering is proto-post-modernism, charmed by its own irony. As an artistic strategy, such deadpan worked best in the movies, producing Godard and his skewering riffs on modern styles of alienation. In architecture, the impetus was still-born, impossible, just clumsy excess, a translation of content into image, a bridge to the more wanton styles of consumption that characterise the city today. This rhetorical over-the-topness cleared the ground for the more deadly selfpossessed American Psycho style of consuming which in turn undergirds the current promotion of the idea of ‘branding’ by the architectural avant-garde. The irony forgotten, conformity becomes indistinguishable from transgression. The situation of the modernist city today cannot be isolated from this revisitation of the connections between innovations of form and the social life of architecture. In a bizarre working out of the fraught politics of identity, architecture and urbanism are increasingly absorbed in the gyre of marketing and the cultural routines of multinational capital. The retirement paradise of Miami Beach – the old worker’s reward – has become South Beach, ratcheting up the aesthetics in the direction of a totally prosthetic environment, where the beautiful waiters aspire to be models and the newcomers aspire to be waiters. Miami Beach is the town with the highest incidence of plastic surgery in the world, where the continuous perfection of form becomes a reason to live. Miami’s point of departure, whether the broad beach crying for the contours of inhabitation, old hotels calling for Philippe Starckification, or the waiter’s overly broad nose demanding its own civilising recontouring, is what’s found. Likewise, the primal substrate – the site of operations for both historic modernist and ‘new’ urbanist practices – continues to be the foundational original ‘nature’. Corb’s project – whether intended for uninhabited spaces or the living city itself – was a fantasy of a clean green slate. This reflected both a cultural notion of renewal and an idea of nature – in its evolutionary innocence – as specifically salubrious for the bodies in the body politic. It’s no coincidence that Vegas flourished in desert antithesis, a potlatch of controlled civility in an alien environment. Nor is it an accident that Miami and Tel Aviv both offer the profit of freshening – urban and human renewing – breezes from the innocent sea. Modernity invented nature and at the minute of its creation moved to civilise it. Nature was born alienated: the coinage described a mental and physical environment of which we could claim to be not exactly a part. The dissatisfaction with existing forms of urban culture growing from a sense of their newly defined irrationality created – in the proto-modern manoeuvres of eighteenth-century landscaping – two distinct, superficially antithetical strategies to ‘tame’ the natural: the French style of geometricizing the natural and the English simulacrum of the ‘wild’. This distinction was easily transferred to ideologies of the city in general, reflected in a continuing urban debate that enjoys ideological peaks in the oppositions of Camillo Sitte and Otto Wagner or Ebenezer Howard and Corb, all of whom attempted to rationalize the wild with romance and technology.

Foreword

xi

This regress of impositions has now flipped and flopped into the Vegas phenomenon – mid-wifed by the indelible Corbusian picture of slabs growing like sequoias – in which the structures of modernist orthodoxy themselves now stand in as a natural substrate. Over the pliant abstraction of modernist tradition, the shifting veneerings of culture can be confidently slipped and branded reproducing the slippery tango of nature and culture that continues as the score of contemporary urbanism with its own refreshed agendas of planetary sustainability and the protection of nature from urban culture. Expressed both in a variety of growth management practices, in a fresh symbology of ‘natural’ form and in a spate of ideological graftings, consonance with some idea of nature continues to undergird all of our urbanisms, the ‘new urbanists’, for example, romanticise the small town in a Disneyesque reverie of artificial halcyon, celebrating the captive nature of the front lawn, that perfect plane of green, minima naturalia. But the new urbanists are obsessional lovers, close to stalkers, designing doll-houses for artificial subjects out of E.T.A. Hoffman. They celebrate urban interaction but their vision structures every arrangement along the contours of a scary fantasy of whitebread civility and order. Like the carefully-managed landscapes of the eighteenth-century, these are places that exclude the other, expunged like weeds. Deviance pent-up is released not in the jostling of the crowd but in solitary cellars with a garrotte around a little girl’s neck. The phoney-baloney universality of new urbanism yields, at best, a kind of focusgroup architecture that at least feints at the idea of satisfying the desires of its inhabiting subjects. More sinister is the rapidly-spreading ideological apologetics of the ‘generic’ city, a defence of the inevitability of a familiar set of basic structures, types, and arrangements relentlessly deployed around the globe. This, in fact, is a city produced not by designers but by a series of operational protocols organised in the interests of global capital. The remnant forms of modernity, however mythified by styling, are simply a convenience and a cover. The idea of the generic gains its vaguely ideological cachet by upping the ante, by standing in directly for the idea of nature. The generic city produces its own organic architecture, continuous with its interests. Thus naturalised, the generic becomes a setting rather than an invention. Ironically, generic avatars – Rem Koolhaas the high lama – are the most devoted legatees of modernity, still working out its formal themes. Only the politics have changed. The generation of ’68 takes an ironic look at the generation of ’68 and finds its passions wanting. The deepest irony, though, is that modernism’s mantra of an ameliorative urbanism been taken over by the new urbanists whose discourse is, at least, suffused with a kind of hope. If I am glum about the future of modernist urbanism, it comes from a sense of loss. The prospective cities of modernity, from Lubetkin to Miliutin to Corb to Ebenezer Howard have a great deal to teach. Taken as a whole, they embody a formal range that the official history of modernity – in which all of its urbanism is read as a prelude to urban renewal or the suburbs – seldom suggests. This diversity of architecture actually embraces replication and idiosyncrasy both, the very large and the personably small. It is a rich architecture, grappling with mixed success with both the historic riddles of form and the shifting conundrums of content.

xii

Foreword

It is also an urbanism that – in many of its guises – seeks to make its peace with the planet. While the mentalities of big scale and universal content that so much of it evidences may beg many questions of locality and intimacy, the credo of sun, space, and greenery is a prototype for a loving relationship between architecture and earth. Indeed, the gamut of strategies, ranging from the extension of the visual field from indoors to out, to attempts to raise structures off the ground to intervene minimally in the soil, to the inclusion of greenery at the heart of the project, to a special sensitivity to topography, to a variety of calculations of self-sufficiency, are all a prelude to a more sophisticated integration of urban form and environment. Finally, it was an urbanism that articulated its relationship to its prospective inhabitants not just in terms of health or image but of rights. This linking of the project of architecture and urbanism to a universal and democratic generosity is at the core of the continuing value of the modernist project. That this sense of a right to be housed was fatally attracted to the fantasy of a uniform subject should not detract from the beauty and necessity of the impulse. Indeed, as the world grows exponentially and as the net of technology exposes us to an ever greater diet of human misery, the idea of the city and of building as a source of the most fundamental forms of happiness is something we must return to again and again. Michael Sorkin

The Modern City Revisited Thomas Deckker

The ardour with which Modern architects promoted their ideals of the Modern city can scarcely match the vehemence with which the public, and public authorities, opposed them. In Britain, for a brief period after the Second World War, however, Modern architects thought they might have won the battle. Britain had survived the war by a strategy of long-term planning, essentially the planning of civilian life: ‘Years of chaos and mismanagement . . . end on the beaches of Dunkirk. Months of careful planning . . . lead to D-Day’.1 The election of a Labour government in 1945 seemed to cement the historic relationship between Modernism and the Left in Britain. The County of London Plan by Forshaw and Abercrombie in 1943 is as much a monument to Modernism as the Royal Festival Hall by Leslie Martin in 1951. Disillusion that the public would embrace Modernism was swift, but the consequence of war-time planning was that many of the central beliefs of Modernism came to dominate urban planning: the rigorous separation of functions (which, unfortunately, killed many industries) and the provision of low-cost housing (unfortunately, generally low quality, too). By the 1980s, however, the public seemed to have won. The idea of planning had died not only as a political platform, but as a pragmatic activity. The monolithic political and industrial structures inherited from the war could not cope with the simple demands of making goods which sold or houses which people wanted to live in.2 Neo-liberal economics swept aside the quite moribund socialist policies of the exhausted Labour government. In London, the steady de-population facilitated in part by the ‘New Towns’ policy began to be reversed through popular desire to live in an urban place with urban facilities; the resulting pressure for living and working space over-rode planning restrictions. Planning, in the sense of making provision for the future, seemed to be dead as public authorities built so little. Numerous populist authors acquired fame with anti-Modern tracts. On one hand, the death of planning was a good thing. In London, areas such as Shoreditch and Clerkenwell not only developed in a way which fulfilled the classic prescription of mixed use by the more serious and perceptive critics of Functionalism, such as Jane Jacobs, but became the centre of a new wave of creative industries themselves.3 This was partly due to the relaxing of planning restrictions on living and working in disused warehouses, which became a symbol of a successful urban lifestyle and then a lifestyle in itself. One of the most extraordinary changes to

2

Thomas Deckker

the West End of London in the last ten years has been its steady re-population and the concurrent rise in the number of restaurants and bars. Who would have predicted the rapid conversion of 1960s office buildings into ‘luxury apartments’ at the same rate that Georgian houses were converted into ‘executive offices’ while those same office buildings were under construction? Shoreditch and Clerkenwell were at least in the city; the areas which developed most, however, were not in the centre, which in many cases were returning to their original condition of mixed uses (albeit at a highly elevated social level) but the amorphous areas of the periphery – shopping centres, multiplex cinemas, and clearspan office floors. These dispersed areas characterise the urban landscape of the neo-liberal economy. The continual – and largely unnecessary – pressure to build in the green belt when so much vacant land is available is one unfortunate side-effect of the collapse of the planning system. The massive transfer of public money into road-building schemes such as the East India Dock Road Link while the Underground system decays is another. The opposition to the Modern vision of the city was to a large extent justified, although the populist alternatives had less to offer. The main problem was an almost total lack of civic space – that is, space which supported public uses appropriate for a high density urban environment. Public social space was a problematic area of Modern urbanism. The concepts of rationality and efficiency of CIAM urban planning principles – as we now know, rather more supposed than actual – did not include civic space among the four essential classifications of dwelling, work, leisure, and circulation. Such concepts were happily in accord with the pressure from corporations and governments to de-politicise and de-populate the city. The solution offered was landscape. While the provision of grass and trees was not unwelcome in residential parts of the city – some schemes, in theory at least, looked not unlike the Georgian squares in which so many British architects lived – it was certainly inappropriate for areas of social interaction in their centres. The reaction among architects to this simple-minded dialectic began soon after the construction of the first masterpieces – the Ministry of Education, Rio de Janeiro (1936–42) by Lucio Costa and Lever House, New York (1950–2) by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill – simply because the many poor imitations showed that the resulting ‘leftover’ spaces could offer no strategy of benefit to the city. The concerns of Modern architects to replace what might be called ‘Beaux-Arts’ urban planning, in which social life could be simply ascribed to ‘the street’, now seems curiously dated; even though it was an option seriously presented as part of the populist reaction to Modernism in the 1980s. The life of the street which Modern architects found so ‘inefficient’ died with the Second World War, as any reader of the works of Walter Benjamin or Stefan Zweig will recognise. The way of life of those who create and inhabit the new urban areas on the periphery has changed beyond any possibility of reconciliation with pre-war concerns: cars, television, green-field super-stores. For those in the centres it is little different. At exactly the time when it seemed that Modern architecture was totally excluded from making a contribution to the city, various schemes emerged which proved the contrary. In places such as Barcelona and Ticino recognisably Modern

The Modern City Revisited

3

architecture – in the case of Barcelona, wonderfully and inventively Modern – was used to repair historical urban fabrics. Humane urban environments were being formed as a direct result of modern aesthetics and concepts, although ones which bore little relationship to the ‘high’ Modern urbanism of the 1920s. In some cases, such as in the work of Luigi Snozzi in Ticino, it was undertaken at the request of the inhabitants against the more populist cantonal government.4 In Barcelona, it was an initiative of the mayor.5 That architects have both overcome the sterile inheritance of Modern urbanism without losing the spatial inventiveness of its architecture and without sinking into populism is a sign that the ability of architecture to make place is not dead. Some critics, such as David Harvey, rather thought it might be.6 Others, such as Kenneth Frampton, saw a potential for resistance in the end of the universal imperatives of Modernism.7 Luigi Snozzi’s Quartière Morenal housing in Monte Carasso (1995–8) and Alvaro Siza’s Quinta da Malagueira housing in Évora (1987–98), both on urban peripheries, are recognisably urban. To many observers the failure of Modern planning is exemplified by the city of Brasília. They point out, with some justification, problems such as the almost total lack of public space in the city, resting their cases on the animosity of its inhabitants towards the city. Despite the invective hurled against the city, and the relentless destruction of its fabric by developers, it nevertheless continues to impress not by the rationality of its planning, nor the relationship to its landscape, but because it offers a workable vision of the private space of Modern Man and the public space of a Modern city in distinction to the populist alternatives. That no public social space developed was not entirely the fault of the original plan, as it was founded at a time when the concept of public space was dissolving in the onset of the neoliberal economy: the out-of-town shopping centre directly and observably led to the decline of the central shopping area. Nevertheless, despite the hope invested in it by its architects and supporters, little public social space is evident. That the absolute Modern city, Brasília, is Corbusian reflects the dominance of Modernism that Le Corbusier consciously sought and acquired during the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the schemes – all Modern – in this book refer to Le Corbusier, and all attempt to remedy the defects which his unrealised schemes contained. These defects were on the political level, as in the Constructivists, or in the use of site planning, as in Quartiere Triennale 8 in Milan, or in the use of urban space, as in Brasília. The lack of civic space was undoubtedly the main problem in Le Corbusier’s urban vision – he was simply uninterested in ownership, transport or even democratic representation. Such civic beliefs were fully in accord with his technocratic political beliefs – he believed in industrialists, as well as architects, as the vanguard of a Modern society. Despite the almost hysterical level of invective levelled against Le Corbusier, he continues to be relevant, not least because the dialectics which he had expressed so poetically in his early buildings became problems whose veracity was challenged in complex rhetorical statements in his later ones. Such an emphasis on the particular qualities of site and programme could only lead one to wonder if Le Corbusier’s theoretical urban plans were necessarily expressed in terms of an absolute and

4

Thomas Deckker

exclusive order. There is no doubt that the Pavilon d’Esprit Nouveau of 1925 (at least in its reconstruction in Bologna) makes an inventive and beautiful interior urban space, but one wonders what political and social (rather than aesthetic) relations were presumed in the technocratic city depicted on its walls. The dialectic opposition of Le Corbusier’s buildings to their sites – which reached its apotheosis in the Villa Savoye – was less successful in an urban fabric. The urban fabric, for Le Corbusier, was always, to some extent – greater rather than lesser – analogous with landscape: it was never a repository of public social space. He was often unsure, as Alan Colquhuon pointed out in relation to Centrosoyuz, if a building should be an autonomous fragment of a future ideal plan or a sensitive adaptation to local conditions.8 It was left to later architects such as Lucio Costa at the Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro and Wallace K. Harrison at the United Nations in New York to experiment with his manner, successfully or unsuccessfully. So great was Le Corbusier’s desire to claim these buildings as his own that when his unsolicited counter-proposals, framed in terms of Centrosoyuz and the, as yet uncommissioned Capitol in Chandigarh, respectively, necessarily remained unrealised, he opportunistically tried to claim their designs as his own.9 For those with an evangelical zeal towards Le Corbusier, such deceit seemed not only plausible but proof of his omnipotence. In fact, Modernism was never the monolithic corpus it appears to us now as it dwindles into history. The range of alternatives within Modernism has generally become obscured in Britain, because of the dominance of Le Corbusier. How Le Corbusier – Mediterranean, rational and lyrical (and with so much outdoor space sustained, at the very least, by a better climate), came to be revered in Britain, in which architectural thought was dominated by John Ruskin, is an interesting question. Part of the answer must be that Britain did not evolve a Modern culture during the 1930s, unlike many European neighbours. A further explanation lies in the antipathy to urban life among planners initiated by Ebenezer Howard. Such an antipathy occurred despite Britain being the most highly urbanised industrial country with one of the world’s largest cities. One would hesitate to say it occurred because of this urban condition, because the popularity of London shows no sign of abating, as the constant conversational topic of house prices shows. There is a very good reason to revisit the Modern city. Architects, and hopefully, the public, need to have some basis for understanding the variety of approaches actually taken within Modernism and for assessing the successes and failures of the built results. As Rob Docter, Secretary to the Netherlands docomomo Foundation, put it: ‘Let us not be too narrow-minded in our conservation policies and be open for respectful renewal or we will eventually end up with nothing left at all.’10 For those who love Modern architecture, rather than want to parade its corpse, it is good advice.

The Modern City Revisited

5

Notes 1 Labour Party election manifesto, 1945, quoted in Anthony Jackson: The Politics of Architecture (London: Architectural Press 1970) p.165. 2 See, for example, David Harvey: ‘Flexible Accumulation through Urbanization’ Perspecta 26 (1990) pp.251–72. 3 Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities: The Failure of Town Planning (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1965), first published in 1961. 4 See, for example, Thomas Deckker: ‘The Rediscovery of the Site’ in Jan Birksted (ed.): Relating Landscape to Architecture (London: Routledge 1999). 5 The City of Barcelona won the RIBA Gold Medal for Architecture in 1999. 6 David Harvey: ‘Flexible Accumulation through Urbanization’ Perspecta 26 (1990) pp.251–72. 7 Kenneth Frampton: Modern Architecture, a critical history (London: Thames and Hudson 1980; 2nd edn. 1985) pp.328–43. 8 A process fully described by Alan Colquhuon: ‘The Strategies of the Grand Travaux’ assemblage 4 (October 1987) pp.66–81. 9 See Zilah Quezado Deckker: Brazil Built: The Architecture of the Modern Movement in Brazil (Spon Press 2000). 10 Rob Docter: correspondence to the author (5 January 2000).

PART 1 ALTERNATIVE VISIONS

The urbanism of the Modern Movement was not a fixed set of ideas: it varied from country to country and evolved over time. In Berlin in the 1920s, as Bernd Nicolai describes in his article, Modernism meant a vision of the city as an American metropolis, a business city with bustling sidewalks and fast-flowing traffic punctuated by skyscrapers. In the Soviet Union, according to Catherine Cooke, a disurbanist concept emerged virtually simultaneously in opposition to this equally desirable ‘American’ model. Both concepts were predicated on differing interpretations of Marxist social analysis, although neither bore much reality to the extraordinary backwardness of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. James Dunnett’s article addresses how later solutions to the perceived failings of CIAM urbanism, and of Le Corbusier in particular, were themselves founded in contradictions which made them equally problematic, while the strong anti-urban bias in Britain, described in more detail by John Gold in his article on the MARS group, made the hyperactive and Metropolitan urbanism of New York unacceptable.

1 The symphony of the metropolis Berlin as ‘Newlin’ in the twentieth century Bernd Nicolai In 1929 the journal Das Neue Berlin (The New Berlin) was established by Berlin’s chief town planner Martin Wagner and the famous art critic Adolf Behne, who in 1926 had published the programmatic book Der Moderne Zweckbau (The Modern Functional Building) (Figure 1.1).1 Behne, in a letter to the avant-garde Dada artist Hannah Hoech, ended with the words: ‘with best regards from Neulin’, which can be translated as ‘Newlin’.2 The New Berlin was an issue that people believed in, and it was the mirror of a city which had just started to find its own identity. In this sense, Siegfried Kracauer could claim that ‘Spatial images are the dreams of society. Wherever the hieroglyphics of any spatial image are deciphered, there the basis of reality represents itself.’3

Figure 1.1 Martin Wagner, portrait of the 1920s

10

Bernd Nicolai

The reconsideration of the Modernism in Berlin during the 1920s also makes clear that the myth of the Weltstadt, the Metropolis, was part of the marketing strategy that Martin Wagner and others devised in the Neue Berlin. In the present debate about the architectural shape of unified Berlin, this myth reveals the platform for reconstructing the capital’s new identity for the last time this century. Nowadays, self-mystification and self-historicism go hand in hand. There is a undeniable lack of serious investigation of projects and conceptions of the 1920s and of questioning whether or not these are still relevant for current planning. Berlin is going to re-invent itself, without being aware of the modern heritage it actually has. This paper will focus on Berlin’s urban modernism as an early strategy of business architecture in twentieth-century architecture.4 We have to remember that fundamental changes had taken place in Berlin’s society before and after 1918, and new patterns in social, economic and political relationships had also emerged. Berlin, since the early 1920s, had been forced into modernisation, which was a mirror of a different society. The aesthetics of culture, one of the Werkbund principles before World War I, was no longer valid as the expression of the leading bourgeois class, but there arose a new idea of mass society, as Walter Rathenau and Hermann Muthesius claimed at the end of World War I. This had consequences not only in terms of the political culture of the Weimar republic, where democracy was not rooted very deep, but was also influential on the ‘Gestalt’ – the overall form – of Berlin itself. The new practicability led to more ‘objectivity’ instead of ‘personal form’. In this sense Adolf Behne could claim the goal of architecture as the ‘fulfiller of reality’; not individual form, but shaped space and at least designed reality should be characteristic of Neues Bauen as an architecture of mass society, but nevertheless with an avant-garde approach. The Weimar capital was Berlin under the town planner Martin Wagner, who became the conductor of the ‘Symphony of Metropolis’ between 1926 and 1933. Six short years were the incarnation of the ‘Golden Twenties’ and the fulfilment of modern architecture. The coherence between mass society and an austere mass architecture, especially in the Berlin housing estates like the famous ‘horse shoe’ of Bruno Taut, built between 1925 and 1931, was represented by the person of Wagner himself.5 But here we will not follow the cliché of housing as the only expression of modernity. We have to focus on the structural alteration of the city centre of Berlin as the neglected side of the unwritten history of urban modernism.6 The Berlin municipality was blocked on several projects, not only by private interests, but also because of the strong position that the German Reich and the Prussian State held in the town. For that reason the position of the Berlin city planner was not very strong. In comparison to Ernst May in Frankfurt, it was not possible for Wagner to establish one central planning department which could unify traffic, infrastructure and town planning. Only Albert Speer who was appointed directly by Hitler as chief city planner in 1937, with the rank of a Minister of the Reich, was an exception, a result of the centralised Nazi dictatorship. The structural problems of the municipal town-planning administration since the 1920s remain valid today. The Federal government has tried to get control over

The symphony of the metropolis

11

central areas of the city and has installed a government quarter at the same site as the refurbished, or better, rebuilt, House of Parliament (the old Reichstag) by Norman Foster. This is the very site where Hitler’s congenial architect had planned the Great Hall and the Führer’s palace.7 In the ‘Golden Twenties’, Martin Wagner was the first who wanted to run the city like a company in a capitalist society. Town planning became part of the new city management: the town planner became a city engineer. This resulted also in a different meaning of architecture for the city: it should be a logical organic design for a new kind of business town, and no longer a piece of ‘Stadtbaukunst’ – town building art – which was a consequence of Otto Wagner’s manifesto ‘Großstadt’ (Metropolis), published in 1911. Before we come back to Martin Wagner, we have to concentrate on the rise of the city’s modern architecture before 1925. The architectural avant-garde which left behind all Expressionist utopias after 1921–22 was now ready to start with an austere architecture, which combined vision and the paradigm of industry and technology. It was supported by the changed situation of the first German Republic. After the dissolution of the old social order in the revolution of 1918–19 and the inflation that followed, the avant-garde, including the architectural avant-garde, epitomised Weimar culture. Art was provocative, but was also regarded by a wider audience. Culture was not only the art of the establishment, but a young, fresh, critical movement. This situation differentiated Berlin from the cultural situation of metropolises like Paris and London; only that of Moscow was comparable. The USA became an idol in terms of both technical progress and Broadway revue-culture. Berlin was in a fever of admiration for all things American. Berlin became the melting pot of several avant-garde movements: the city itself was a ‘laboratory of the metropolis’. The vision of a glass skyscraper by Mies van der Rohe in 1921 was followed by a modern office building in 1922, ready to be built. But it was Erich Mendelsohn who started the sequence of modern buildings in the same year. His Mosse Haus, a reconstruction of a building damaged in the Revolution of 1919, brought a new horizontal articulation of fenestration and, as a metaphor of metropolis, the dynamic corner. The nervous atmosphere and the invention of speed should be responded to by buildings.8 These elements, like horizontality and the rounded corner, had been introduced in pre-war Berlin, for example the Nordstern building of Paul Mebes in 1914, or the office building of Paul Zimmerreiner of 1912, but Mendelsohn was the first to transform it into a unique creation of the modern metropolis. In Berlin, Mendelsohn was one of the most successful business architects, but he had a singular position in that he focused on Jewish clientele. After 1925 he left dynamic forms to create the perfect architecture as an advertisement, like the Deukon Haus of 1927, which became a light-sculpture at night. Another very progressive movement, which is now almost neglected, arose with the Trade Unions.9 It is important because of its social character and the link to the working class. While Mendelsohn embodied the bourgeois architect, Max Taut was called the socialist architect. The Trade Union office buildings became the first representative architecture of Weimar – Republican – Berlin.

12

Bernd Nicolai

Max Taut constructed the General Headquarters of the German Trade Unions in 1923–24 (Figure 1.2). Some expressionist elements can be seen, but the most remarkable feature was the reinforced-concrete framework which became the grid element of the facade. Although Max Taut can be described as chief architect of the Unions, other architects also received commission: Bruno Taut, his brother, designed the Public Transport Union building in 1929, and Erich Mendelsohn designed the Metal-Workers’ Union building, one of the few public buildings of Mendelsohn which survived. Besides this, another topic was part of the debate about modern architecture in Berlin: the USA and the high-rise building. The ‘Germanification’ of the skyscraper had started around 1910. In 1912, the brochure Berlin’s Third Dimension was published with contributions by Peter Behrens, Bruno Möhring, Werner Hegemann and Walter Rathenau who all favoured skyscrapers in the inner city.10 In contrast to the United States and the conceptions of Le Corbusier, Werner Hegemann and other critics in the 1920s wanted to have only solitary skyscrapers which could accentuate the city skyline. In 1921, Otto Kohtz made a proposal for a new Reichs administration building which would house all the ministries next to the Reichstag.11 This is where the Federal Chancellery and the Parliament office block are currently under construction. The ziggurat shape of Kohtz was intended to bring Wilhelmine monumentality to the Weimar Republic, but the Reich could not afford those large-scale buildings. High-rise buildings were built only under private commission. At the end of the 1920s, steel skeleton structures, which followed American models, were used for construction. Bruno Paul erected the Kathreiner building in 1928, which was located in the centre of a block. In 1930–2 Emil Fahrenkamp constructed a stepped-back building which followed the quay of the Landwehrkanal and became the symbol of modern Berlin. It was the time when Amédée Ozenfant made a remarkable statement about the international character of the city: ‘Paul Morand describes Berlin as a failed New York. Who knows if in twenty years time New York will be seen as a failed Berlin.’12 A more conservative, but most impressive vision, was the Karstadt departmentstore of Philipp Schaefer in 1927–9. It was called ‘Manhattan at the Hermann Square’ (Figure 1.3). Art Deco and paraphrased gothic elements, together with a hitherto unknown scale, made it famous. It was located, however, in one of the south-east working-class districts and not in the city centre, so there was no economic effect. All these projects make clear that there was a wide movement of modernity with a highly-functional aesthetic in the 1920s. Various commissioners wanted to represent their companies or institutions in modern forms: an objective approach, a clear shape, the strength and dynamism of the city, and architecture as advertising were reflected through these buildings. But single buildings do not create a town. Although the Baedecker in 1912 had spoken of Berlin as ‘the greatest purely modern city in Europe’, and even Paul Westheim had claimed Berlin as ‘the most objective under the European metropolis’, the city structure was the same as when Berlin was the Prussian residence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1870, when Berlin started to become a major city, the observation of Rumor was

Figure 1.2 Max Taut: Trade-Union General Headquarters, Berlin 1922–4

Figure 1.3 Philipp Schaefer: Karstadt Department Store, Hermann-Platz, Berlin 1927–9, roof terrace

The symphony of the metropolis

15

still valid: ‘Berlin is the country, Paris is the city, but London makes the world.’ This relationship would turn around after 1910. Berlin, however, had still to transform the achievements of the new university discipline of town planning, which had been founded in Vienna and Berlin around 1910. This was necessary because of the speedy growth of the city from 800,000 inhabitants in 1870 to 3.8 million in 1925 and finally 4.5 million in the 1930s. But the highest density was in the nineteenth-century inner city which formed the municipality of Berlin until 1920, with 2.1 million inhabitants. This metropolis was surrounded by another eight major cities. Out of these, Greater Berlin was created in 1920. This was a process of great importance for the further development of the city. It only became possible after 1918, when the German Empire was no longer a monarchy and the Prussian State no longer resisted a huge capital with no direct Prussian influence. The Hobrecht Plan of 1861 was responsible for the recent city structure but it is obvious that the inner city was not touched by this plan. All Wagner’s attempts to reorganise the city centre failed for economic and political reasons. The two bestknown squares in the centre, Alexander Platz and Potsdamer Platz, which he had started to rebuild, had to stop in 1930 because of world economic crisis; other projects had to surrender for political reasons or private interests. Wagner wanted to clear the city centre for a new traffic infra-structure combining its eastern and western parts. First the air-raids of the allied bombers, however, and then the post-war clearing of the city centre gave Wagner’s plans a new, more frightening reality. One of the main problems was the westwards connection of the Baroque Friedrichstadt extension, which had become the city of the 1920s. Only two major boulevards, Unter den Linden and Leipzigerstraße, reached the western areas of the Tiergarten. All other streets had a dead end. On the other hand, the central Friedrichstrasse, which was the main north–south connection, could not contain the rising traffic. For that reason Ludwig Hilberseimer developed the project Vertical City,13 a response to Le Corbusier’s plan voisin of Paris between 1924 and 1928, to replace the central parts of the Friedrichstadt with new buildings on different traffic levels. This project was utopian from the very beginning, because all property was in private hands. Hilberseimer also planned a new central station, which was to be located north of the Reichstag, in exactly the place where the new central station designed by Gerkan, Marg & Partners is under construction and which will open in 2002. Hilberseimer himself, however, stood in the tradition of the projects which had been shown in the competition designs for a Greater Berlin in 1910. This competition must be considered highly influential for all central planning in the twentieth century. Wagner as well as Speer and planners in the present Berlin deal with these sites. In 1910, the main issue was to create an Imperial capital with a highly modern infrastructure.14 All terminal stations were to be unified in two main stations, a north and south railway station, which were shown in the widely-published renderings of Schmitz, Havestadt and Contag. Besides these stations, a new north–south axis to relieve the old Friedrichstrasse was planned as the main boulevard of Berlin. In 1920, Martin Mächler, a city

16

Bernd Nicolai

planner like Martin Wagner, again repeated this proposal in a more radical way, to connect the northern and southern circle line of Berlin. This was the direct forerunner of Albert Speer’s grand axis, which was ready to be executed in 1939, but of which only some parts came under construction, like the area where the Debis buildings of Potsdamer Platz are now located, or the actual government quarter north of the Reichstag – the river Spree curve. Wagner’s new ideas of town planning can be exemplified with the projects for the Alexanderplatz, 1928–30, and the Potsdamer Platz of 1929–30 (Figure 1.4). For the first time, Wagner established a private–public partnership to reconstruct one of the central node-points of the old Berlin. But this was only the starting point: Wagner saw the improvement of the traffic infrastructure as the most urgent problem. He developed the idea of ‘clearing-points’ of the circulation of the metropolis. Under the motto ‘a metropolitan square is not the square of a small town’, Wagner believed that functional plans, combined with a convincing design would

Figure 1.4 Martin Wagner: Plan of the Alexanderplatz, Berlin 1929

The symphony of the metropolis

17

create ‘an organic unity’. ‘Metropolitan squares are an organism with a distinctive, designed face.’15 The architecture of these squares should be planned for a duration of not longer than 25 years, just the period of economic amortisation. Under these conditions modern business architecture was created. Together with Martin Wagner, Ernst Reuter was employed as a traffic councillor. He founded the BVG as the unification of all public transport lines, and pushed through the electrification of the S-Bahn between 1924 and 1928. Reuter used the subway construction to redevelop parts of the inner city of Berlin, for example the Alexanderplatz: he was aware of ‘the possibility, of bringing fresh air to the old quarters on the basis of far-sighted planning. Behind friendly looking facades you have to pull down the old lumber, which has to disappear when you really want to create what nowadays is called a city, that means an efficient, modern built and fully utilised business town in the centre of Berlin.’ Wagner added: ‘The enterprise we can manage in the field of the reform of the metropolis means detailed work – as Corbusier claimed: anatomy.’16 The idea of an organic design was presented by Wassili and Hans Luckhardt, who won the first prize in 1929 (Figure 1.5). The clearly-shaped round-square contrasted with the rendering of Mies van der Rohe who articulated the square with several solitary buildings. This spatial design would become the paradigm of the

Figure 1.5 Wassili and Hans Luckhardt: competition design for the Alexanderplatz, Berlin. Competition design, first prize, 1929

18

Bernd Nicolai

post-war architecture of the 1950s and 1960s. Although Luckhardt had won the competition, Peter Behrens, who delivered a very similar design, was commissioned. The front two buildings, quite close to the railway station, were built in 1930–2. They have a similar structure to Max Taut’s Trade Union building. Luckhardt’s draft design was a model for the central square of Hans Kollhoff’s project for a skyscraper city at Alexanderplatz, which hopefully will never be executed. The second project that Wagner launched was for the Potsdamer Platz (Figure 1.6). It was much more spectacular. The baroque octagonal shape of the Leipziger Platz, where Alfred Messel’s famous Wertheim department-store was located, was to be combined with the Potsdamer Platz, which was a junction in front of the Leipziger Platz. In 1930, Marcel Breuer designed a radical reconstruction where all old building would have been demolished (Figure 1.7). The new building would be like ‘bodies which the changing times would clothe in various actual modes’.17 This responded to Wagner’s project of a multi-level structure for different traffic lines. So speed could be differentiated, high speed without traffic jams and the clear arrangement of roadways were fundamental to his design. Finally, Wagner defined the place of the pedestrian as a link between square, traffic and the surrounding architecture: ‘The fluent traffic inside the square must contrast with the staying traffic, which holds the power of consumption of the masses which cross the square. In this sense, one has to develop a concentration of buildings, which reacts with their alignment to the pedestrians’ walking lines, that means to the power of consumption.’18 Erich Mendelsohn actually started reconstruction of the Potsdamer Platz with his Columbus Haus (1930–2), his last work in Berlin, before he fled to London in 1933 (Figure 1.8). He enlarged the Potsdamer square and constructed a ten-storey highrise building with a concrete skeleton structure. In his studies to redesign the square, he made a remarkable shift to overcome the old structure of the octagon (Figure 1.9). Balfour claimed that these sketches were Mendelsohn’s political vision: The future city would be horizontally unified in a continuously moving layer of space [quite similar to the Luckhardts’ design for the Alexanderplatz]; The first drawing completes the Leipziger Platz in regular form. The second destroys the idea of the Achteck and Schinkel Gate, transforming rational geometry into dynamic disorder. Mendelsohn, as with all the architects of Modernism, rises above the stage of the city. His perspective becomes omniscient.19 This contrasted fundamentally with the Luckhardts’ symmetrical proposal to repeat Mendelsohn’s Columbus Haus with the addition of a central tower as a proper front of the new square (Figure 1.10). They had taken over that conception from Martin Wagner himself. At the west front of Potsdamer Platz, Wagner, in his draft design, had projected a high-rise building, which would replace the famous Josty coffee-shop, the meeting point of the Berlin intelligentsia. The tower house as a point de vue of the Leipziger Strasse shows the traditional link of that conception with projects which were launched by Hermann Schmitz in the Greater Berlin competition in 1910. But furthermore, neither the Luckhardts nor Wagner were

Figure 1.6 Three views of the Potsdamer Platz, Berlin in 1928, with (below) the Josty coffee-shop

20

Bernd Nicolai

Figure 1.7 Marcel Breuer: proposal for the Potsdamer Platz, Berlin 1929

able to find an adequate modern solution for the edge of the place, as Mendelsohn had done. It was Erwin Gutkind who found an appropriate solution for a skyscraper as a landmark (Figure 1.11).20 Based on his ‘American experience’, he designed a new Josty high-rise building which had a cantilever structure in the upper parts. According to the street lines, this building should have a dynamic appearance. Like the famous ‘cloud-clip’ of El Lissitzky, a new city gate was intended, and horizontal and vertical elements were articulated in a striking balance. Gutkind used the skyscraper, in contrast to the American building type, as a single landmark. It is no wonder that Renzo Piano’s Debis competition project in 1993 is based on that concept (Figure 1.12). Finally, three high-rise buildings, built by Hans Kolhoff, Helmut Jahn and Lauber & Wöhr, form the new city gate, which will be completed in 2000. The Potsdamer Platz was heavily damaged in World War II. The riot of East Berliners in 1953 closed the border which crossed the square. All buildings, including Mendelsohn’s Columbus Haus and Messel’s Wertheim department store, were demolished. In 1990, Oswald Matthias Ungers presented his rendering ‘Berlin Tomorrow’. Along the river Spree, some of the most important architectural visions of the twentieth century were virtually located, like Mies’ sky-scraper for Berlin, Loos’ Chicago Tribune project, Leonidov’s Lenin Institute and El Lissitzky’s Cloud Clip. After the wall had collapsed, Berlin was to be the place where the avant-garde had its legacy. At the same time Shimon Attie in his light projection Mulack Street 37 emphasised

The symphony of the metropolis

21

Figure 1.8 Erich Mendelsohn: Columbus Haus (Galleries Lafayette), Berlin. First project 1929, not executed

the violation and fragmentary character of the city under the graffiti headline: ‘What the war spared . . .’, a momento for the Berlin avant-garde, and a reference to the disastrous history of the city since 1933.21 For the second time in our century, Berlin has had the chance to become a laboratory of art, architecture and town planning. Some of the links between the 1920s and the present are important to understand Berlin’s actual building policy.

Figure 1.9 Erich Mendelsohn: two sketches for the re-organisation of Potsdamer Platz

Figure 1.10 Wassili and Hans Luckhardt, Alfons Anker: project for the Potsdamer Platz, Berlin 1929–31

Figure 1.11 Erwin Gutkind: project for the Josty high-rise building, Berlin 1929

24

Bernd Nicolai

Figure 1.12 The Debis and Sony Towers in front of the Potsdamer Platz, Berlin 1999

Nowadays, when Berlin refers to the glorious twenties, no one is really interested in the city conception of the Modernists. On the contrary, Modernism is denounced as the main destroyer of the embellisment city. But those who are claiming Schinkel’s and Haussmann’s legacy go even further to extinguish the lively texture of the city than the normative backwards-looking attitude of Stadtbaukunst. Nowadays, nobody can escape Wagner’s conception of the city as a company: developers’ interests are first, not social vision. Although Wagner could not execute his idea of a modern city and was displaced as the city planner of Berlin in 1933, he made an important contribution to the city which had its legacy in East and West Berlin in the 1950s and 1960s. His vision tried to reconcile the modern machine-like city and the genius loci with a carefully designed architecture. It is not surprising that form still plays an important role for Wagner. It is not arbitrary design, but form, which is a metaphor for the inner power of the city. And that is what we miss today.

The symphony of the metropolis

25

Notes 1 Adolf Behne: The Modern Functional Building, with an introduction by Rosemarie Hag-Blaetter (Santa Monica: Getty text and documents 1995). Das Neue Berlin was only published as one volume in 1929. It was cancelled because of the economic situation of the city of Berlin after the world economic crisis in 1929. A reprint of this excellent volume was published by Ernst & Sohn, Berlin 1989. 2 The letter is collected in the Hanna Hoech archive of the Berlinische Gallery, Berlin. An edition of Behne’s letters and articles, edited by Magdalena Bushart, is forthcoming in 2000, (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag). 3 cf. David Frisby: Deciphering the hieroglyphics of Weimar Berlin. Siegfried Kracauer, Charles Haxthausen & Heide Suhr (eds): Berlin: Culture and Metropolis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1990) pp.152–65, quote p.152. 4 On the recent discussion cf. the Berlin issue of The Journal of Architecture vol.2 No.3 (Autumn 1997), especially the article by Matthias Sauerbruch: ‘Berlin 2000: a missed opportunity’ pp.283–9. 5 The only recent books so far on Wagner are Ludovica Scarpa: Martin Wagner. Regisseur der Großstadt (Wiesbaden, Brunswick: Vieweg 1995) and the exhibition catalogue Martin Wagner, Wohnungsbau und Welstadtplanung (Berlin: Akademie der Künste 1985). 6 cf. Jean-Louis Cohen: ‘Urban Architecture and the Crisis of the Modern Metropolis’ in Russell Fergusson (ed.): At the End of the Century: 100 Years of built visions, exhibition catalogue (Cologne: JosefHaubrich Kunsthalle, Stuttgart: Hatje 1999; Los Angeles: MCA 2000) pp.228–74. 7 About that discussion cf. the recent book of Michael Wise: Capital Dilemma. Germany’s search for a new architecture of democracy (New York: Princeton Architectural Press 1998) esp. pp.57, 89, 121. 8 These and other buildings quoted below are published in the important photograph-documentation of Geza Hajos and Paul Zahn: Berliner Architektur der Nachkriegszei (Berlin 1927, repr. Brunswick 1955). 9 cf. Bernd Nicolai: ‘L’architecture oubliée d’une capitale. Les immeubles des syndicats dans le Berlin des années vingt’ in: Faces, Journal d’architecture 18 (Geneva: L’école d’architecture de l’université de Genéve 1990) pp.6–9. 10 Jochen Meyer: ‘The power that subjugates space’ in Diadalos 61 ‘On Bigness’ (September 1996) pp.50–61. 11 Sylvia Mack: ‘La Maison du Reich’ in La Ville exhibition catalogue (Paris: Centre Pompidou 1994) p.308. 12 Iain Boyd Whyte: ‘National Socialism and Modernism’ in Art and Power: Europe under the dictators exhibition catalogue (London: Hayward Gallery 1995) pp.258–69, quote p.258. 13 cf. Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani: ‘Ludwig Hiberseimer’ in La Ville exhibition catalogue (Paris: Centre Pompidou 1994) pp.283, 300–5. 14 cf. Dieter Frick: ‘Le concours du Grand Berlin 1910’ in La Ville exhibition catalogue (Paris: Centre Pompidou 1994) pp.140–3. 15 Martin Wagner: ‘Das Formproblem eines Weltstadtplatzes’ in Das Neue Berlin 1 (1929) pp.33–8, quote p.38. 16 Ernst Reuter: ‘Berliner Verkehr’ in Das Neue Berlin 1 (1929) pp.213–15, quote p.214, and Martin Wagner: ‘Städtebauliche Probleme der Großstadt’ (Berlin 1929) quoted from the exhibition catatalogue Martin Wagner, Wohnungsbau und Welstadtplanung p.104. 17 Marcel Breuer: ‘Verkehrarchitektur. Ein Vorschlag zur Neuordnung des Potsdamer Platzes’ in Das Neue Berlin 1 (1929) pp.136–41, quote p.141. 18 Martin Wagner: ‘Städtebauliche Probleme der Großstadt’ (Berlin 1929) quoted from the exhibition catatalogue Martin Wagner, Wohnungsbau und Welstadtplanung p.106. 19 Alan Balfour: Berlin. The politics of order 1737–1989 (New York: Rizzoli 1990) p.119. 20 Rudolf Hierl: Erwin Gutkind, Architektur als Stadtraumkunst (Basel, Berlin & Boston: Birkhäuser 1992) pp.131–9. 21 La Ville exhibition catalogue (Paris: Centre Pompidou 1994) p.384.

2 Cities of socialism Technology and ideology in the Soviet Union in the 1920s Catherine Cooke

In the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, the Soviet Union underwent a programme of urban development and new-town construction on a scale unimaginable in Europe. Its mission was to ‘catch up and outstrip’ the capitalist world in industrial output and to do so, in Lenin’s famous words, by ‘building upon those reserves of knowledge developed over the centuries by capitalism’.1 In urban planning and management, as in industry, Russia’s own ‘reserves of knowledge’ were modest, and after ten years lost in revolution and civil war, that knowledge was outdated and the fabric appallingly run down. The new Soviet state, therefore, had to acquire and apply the latest technologies available from the capitalist West. But the organisational aspirations, and hence the spatial organisation, were to be socialist. What this meant in economic and administrative terms – even in terms of actual social organisation – was still highly nebulous when the First Five Year Plan was officially launched in 1929. This was despite a number of staged moves towards central economic planning and the more collectivist organisation of daily life adopted during the preceding decade. But even as national development plans were being formulated, the question of what ‘a socialist organisation’ meant in spatial terms was still undefined. Indeed the question did not start to be seriously raised until after the massive programme of new-town building had already started on sites across the continent in the summer of 1929. Marx and Engels had insisted that socialism would be accompanied by and manifested in some ‘new settlement of mankind, which eliminated the differences between town and country’.2 The technologies of capitalism, they argued, were preparing the ground for it. But this dimension of the revolutionary programme was submerged during the 1920s under the constant exigencies of maintaining a primitive ideological and psychological symbiosis between urban and rural populations to ensure that the towns could be fed.3 The larger historic and strategic issues only surfaced again through a fierce and highly political debate which began with the launch of the 1929 building season and ran on until the spring of 1931. During the autumn and winter of 1929–30, in particular, it raged through the Soviet public and press. By opening up fundamental questions across every related field, this debate not only filled the vacuum which had surrounded town planning issues, it overwhelmed and reframed those hitherto rather limitedly professional issues by relocating them within a larger system of social aims and technical means. The focus

Cities of socialism

27

shifted from green-space norms and building height controls to the proper shape of a socialist pattern of settlement on the whole Soviet continent. More specifically, and crucially, the whole approach shifted from what might be called a normative concern with the technologies that constitute a city to a pro-active concern with how those should be utilised to fulfil socialism’s environmental promises. Prior to this time, Russian and Soviet thinking about the city was characterised above all by an awareness of the technical backwardness of the blagoustroistvo – literally ‘the arrangements for well being’ – that is, the technical infrastructure of utilities and services. On the eve of World War I, Russians who travelled abroad wrote with astonishment of the technical marvels like street lighting, drainage and public transport which they found even in the modest provincial towns of Europe.4 Russian cities were not only backward, by international standards they were also very small. Even by 1914, only St Petersburg and Moscow exceeded a population of one million; Kiev was the next largest at a mere 500,000. Most provincial cities, though culturally rich and economically lively, had populations of only one- or twohundred thousand.5 One consequence of this relative homogeneity was the lack of any distinction between ‘town’ and ‘city’ in the Russian language: to this day, both are a gorod, and translation depends on context. By 1926, those provincial cities which became growth points in the industrial revival following the civil war had seen explosive growth, typically doubling or tripling in population.6 But what planning process had controlled this growth? Virtually none. The Soviet Union inherited from the Empire literally a handful of people who in any Western sense could be called town planners. Typically they had read the textbooks of Stübben and Unwin and travelled to international conferences abroad. In 1910, enthusiasts in Petersburg launched Russia’s first professional course in city planning, but events overwhelmed their efforts and key people were lost in the hostilities.7 By the eve of the war, a few socially-aware professionals from medicine and the law, often reinforced by their links with international movements for Garden Cities or housing reform, were trying to educate their municipalities in the importance of a healthier urban environment both for the workers’ welfare and for the larger public good. During the early 1920s, the surviving handful left the meaningless grand planning exercises for Moscow, the new capital, to architects.8 They took posts in the new government’s state construction hierarchy where they could establish basic planning norms and procedures that would have a far wider and more practical effect.9 Their principal achievements were two acts, passed in 1926 and 1927, which made it obligatory for settlements over a certain size to make surveys of their existing layout and draw up 15-year plans for their future growth. These plans were to be based on simple principles of functional zoning and be controlled by certain street widths, ratios of green space, and so on.10 The very simplicity of these requirements and the slowness with which even the basic surveys were done reflected the vacuum which prevailed. Some handbooks were produced ‘for workers in the municipal sector’ that mixed technical data with educative sections on foreign cities and planning history, but they presented this material as more-or-less culture-neutral.11 Typically it was only among the political

28

Catherine Cooke

sophisticates who led the Housing Co-operative movement, the most practical and effective agency of such change amongst the general population since the early 1920s, that we find an insistence that the revolution’s much-vaunted promise ‘to solve the housing problem’ could not be fulfilled without ‘scientific analysis and working out of theoretical principles for urban transport’. It was these practical people who understood ‘the various hypotheses which exist as a starting point: the static theory of circulation, the dynamic and the hydraulic.’ Educated Marxists, they recognised this was a multi-dimensional problem, ‘distinguished by its social character and depending on a whole complex of factors: political, economic, technical and others.’12 This same Housing Co-operative movement, led as it was by people of genuinely revolutionary vision, also instigated the practical small-scale changes towards a more collectivist organisation of daily life which Marxist theory saw as a catalyst for ‘the new revolutionary consciousness’ amongst workers. When most new construction still comprised traditional two-to-three bedroom apartments which were irrelevant to the scale of the urban housing crisis and socially outdated as a type, it was only the Housing Co-operative movement, aside from a few progressive architects, who attempted to rethink housing in parallel to the Existenzminimum being pursued in Europe.13 When shared rooms and communal kitchens were the norm for workers resettled in formerly middle-class apartments, even the replacement of massive traditional Russian furniture and cooking stoves by something smaller and lighter could influence people’s living conditions dramatically. Leningrad was more progressive in integrating collective facilities into its new housing districts than Moscow, and it was agencies here that became responsible for industrial settlements across Siberia. But their first ‘new town’ projects like the showpiece Uralmash near Sverdlovsk showed all too clearly that their progressive models for expanding postrevolutionary Leningrad were not adequate as models for the industrial development of a future Soviet Union (Figure 2.1).14 By the mid-1920s, the population of Moscow was approaching two million. It was tiny amongst international capitals but the primitive legacy of utilities was now so outdated and outworn it threatened collapse. In pursuit of help and information, in early 1926 the Moscow City Administration sent leading council officers to Berlin, Paris and London to study everything from metros and sewers to abattoirs and crematoria. Their report, Large Cities of Western Europe, became a bible of up-to-date technical information and comparative data. It extended to such details as the traffic-control gestures used by Berlin and London policemen and the psychometric tests by which the Paris Transport Authority checked the aptitude of its bus and tram drivers for safe driving. Amongst the many sharply-observed sections of the report is an unusually perceptive discussion of how transport technologies make it possible to expand the city’s habitable territory while preserving its functional unity. The focus on transport clearly reflected their current preoccupations, but their discussion still approached the issue from a palliative or prophylactic view.15 Not until the summer of 1929 did anyone seriously step back from current tasks and start to explore how new technologies – of transport, energy transmission, water-supply, sewage, communications – could be seen in a radical way as space-making, rather

Figure 2.1 Uralmash. Preliminary plan for the Uralmash socialist town as proposed in 1928 by Gipromez in Leningrad. Within a year this classical plan with the machine-building plant as an appendage was reconfigured locally to produce a functionally organised and more informal plan whose main routes focused directly upon the plant

30

Catherine Cooke

than merely as remedial or space-modifying. And more than that: how could they be used to build a socialist rather than a capitalist space? The political agenda The debate which started in that summer was dramatically wider than any contemporaneous exploration of the issue in the West and this difference of breadth and objective was well understood by its leading participants. It differed from Western debates in the same way that architectural agendas of the Soviet Modernists had differed from those of their European colleagues in preceding years. While technical detail was obscuring ideology in the emergent literature of town planning, leading theorists of the new architecture referred to this ideological difference constantly, though few as unequivocally as one future participant in the planning debate, Moisei Ginzburg. His speech to the Constructivists’ First Conference in April 1928 left no doubt as to the basis of the distinction as they saw it: The unresolved deadlock of Western Functionalism is this: that it is prevented by the social structure it works under and the conditions of work that these impose on the architect, from conceiving all individual problems as part of an organic whole . . . This cannot be like our Constructivism when we see that outside and beyond the individual architect-loner in those societies there does not exist any kind of social architectural force. There is no single social goal in those societies which can expand their Functionalism to become like our Constructivism . . . What our method is trying to define is the truest and most ideologically correct path to new forms which will respond maximally to the new social content. We are approaching form not as an end in itself but as a path towards the development of a social goal.16 By early 1930 Ginzburg was making the same point to Le Corbusier personally, when he visited Moscow for another discussion of his Tsentrosoyuz design and saw the radically anti-urban ideas some of the Constructivists were proposing.17 ‘During our stroll down Tverskaya Street,’ wrote Ginzburg, in a letter to Le Corbusier following his departure, ‘you yourself admitted that a radical solution is impossible . . . in spite of your brilliant gifts you find yourself powerless to overcome the objective contradictions of modern capitalism.’ He continued, respectful of the great man but confident in their own mission: You are the finest surgeon of the modern city. You want to cure its ills whatever the cost . . . because you are trying to keep it essentially the same as capitalism made it. We in the USSR are in a more favourable position. We are not tied by the past. History confronts us with problems that can only have a revolutionary solution and however feeble our resources, we will solve them no matter what. We are making a diagnosis of the modern city. We say: Yes, it is sick, mor-

Cities of socialism

31

tally sick. But we do not want to cure it. We prefer to destroy it and intend to begin work on a new form of human settlement that will be free of internal contradictions and might be called socialist.18 As Ginzburg admitted, ‘We have yet to find the solution to this whole very difficult problem but we cannot refrain from posing it’. Like other leading protagonists in the Soviet debate, these architects saw it as their ideological duty to reframe the issue of city form, to expand the boundary of city planning to embrace what was actually the whole city-forming process. How far this correspondence with Ginzburg or his brief exposure to the Soviet debate influenced Le Corbusier’s thinking about the city or his input to CIAM’s planning discussions is not clear. On the evidence of his own later proposals for Moscow a year later (which became the basis of the Ville Radieuse) the answer must be ‘not much’.19 Chronologically, however, this Soviet debate about ‘the city of socialism’ was neatly and somewhat ironically framed by two key events in the history of CIAM which form landmarks in the attention European Modern architects paid to urban issues. The first was CIAM’s founding declaration at La Sarraz in June 1928, which contained five rather general intentions about city planning,20 and the second was its refusal in spring 1932 to bring its fourth conference on ‘the functional city’ to Moscow.21 These two events were ironic because, in the ignorance and myopia typical of its time, CIAM plainly knew nothing of the rich and penetrating debate in which the Constructivists in the USSR had been engaged during that interval. In a sense, as Ginzburg had explained to Le Corbusier, it was a debate from which they were precluded by the nature of their regimes. But there was no hint in CIAM’s letters or actions about the conference that they might have learned something from the Soviets’ exploration of relevant issues. With the stylistics of architecture still dominating their view and a wall of language and ideology keeping them distant, they manifestly had no idea that these architects whom they had seen beaten by historicism in the architectural competition for the Palace of the Soviets were simultaneously emerging from the debate about city planning as victors in theory and methodology. Sabsovich: the ‘socialist town’ The debate about the future form of the city was intensely political and developed very quickly. Its face-to-face encounters took place mainly in Moscow but were fed by debates in the national press. As the forum moved from Pravda to workers’ clubs to architectural studios and to specially-convened conferences of state economic planners, the discussion was generated entirely by the often commonsensical questions of participants, by logics manifestly inherent in the issues and by theoretical issues naturally raised by those whose thinking was now shaped, through conviction or necessity, by the holistic, systems-oriented approach of Marxism. If it referred to debates or cases abroad it was for only historical authority to ‘prove’ the ideological correlates of certain forms. Its rigour derived precisely from being a

32

Catherine Cooke

return to fundamentals conducted amongst people from every sort of relevant field, not a collage of forms culled from other precedents.22 Though rapidly probing into deepest fundamentals, the debate started as a bit of fire-fighting. When the building season of 1929 opened, the long-promised First Five Year Plan for transformation of Soviet industry, agriculture and society was finally under way.23 Outputs were generally now restored to the levels of 1913. After years of work by economists and industrial planners to describe the reviving economy in a sequence of Annual Control Figures, the whole economic machine was now being driven forward under extreme pressure.24 Despite the fact that political orthodoxy was being increasingly actively enforced throughout Soviet society, there were still informed individuals bold enough to point out that this much-acclaimed Plan for the transformation of society was lacking in two fundamental respects. First, it was not actually based on any clear social aims, that is, on any plan of how people were to live or what was to be, in the Russian word, their byt, their way of life. Second, despite being a massive construction plan, it lacked any underlying theoretical argument about how ‘new towns’ were actually to be shaped, and in particular, how they should differ from the capitalist towns which Soviet Russia had inherited. Far less was there any underlying argument about how these two dimensions of the problem were inter-related. How was daily life within the workforce to be organised in order that it maximally facilitated the larger economic effort of rapid industrial development? This was the kind of holism on which Marxism prided itself, yet with the Plan already launched, with 108 entirely new towns being created and innumerable others being vastly expanded, no one had linked the macro to the micro in this way. Among those bold and independent thinkers throughout the 1920s was a personality well-known in economic planning circles, Leonid Sabsovich. In the earlier economic and technical discussions which led to framing of the Five Year Plan, Sabsovich had repeatedly urged that the country must adopt the planners’ so-called Maximum variant, which had higher growth aspirations than their Basic variant.25 To Sabsovich, that policy was inappropriate for activities like building which involved vast capital investments over long periods of time for results that might be socially or ideologically outdated long before they were amortised. If they were late, or were designed for stages of social development already passed by the time they were ready, they would hold back the economic drive and the entire revolutionary process. The young Soviet Union could not afford even to risk this, said Sabsovich: every ruble, every man-hour and every brick must be used in the most ideologicallyeffective manner. But the Party’s determination to be ‘realistic’ caused them to proceed more cautiously. According to the Party’s ‘general line’, change should be achieved not by the maximalism of Sabsovich’s type but by ‘carefully weighing up each step, only leading the masses steadily from one stage to a higher one.’26 In one important respect, Sabsovich’s arguments actually had greater realism than the more cautious line of the Party. He constantly pointed out the practical roots of productivity in the day-to-day efficiency of each individual worker, which in turn depended on their living conditions. He had long favoured high investment in consumer goods industries – unsocialist as this appeared – precisely because it was

Cities of socialism

33

these goods which liberated individuals to spend more of their time on production.27 The essence of this argument was familiar enough: the same logic underpinned the whole programme for communal laundries and childminding, public dining rooms and much else that was fundamental to liberating women for the labour force during the 1920s.28 Such programmes were the domestic equivalent of efforts to improve the workers’ use of time and to introduce Taylorist practices in industry, both central to the government’s campaigns for ‘rationalisation’.29 From today’s perspective, these hint at regimentation and interference with choice; in the crippled state of Soviet Russia at that time, however, the working citizen’s only alternative was hours of queuing to buy some crude raw materials and more hours waiting to cook them on a communal Primus stove after neighbours had boiled their laundry. So throughout the 1920s such rationalisations were the common currency of so-called byt reform, the universal campaign to communalise domestic practices; Sabsovich merely took the logic further.30 Now, in early 1929, Sabsovich was arguing that all the new industrial settlements proposed by the Five Year Plan should be built not ‘minimally’, for an ascetic lifestyle, but to the very highest technological levels and standards of servicing. In the new towns where no capital was already tied up in plant or services, the ‘American’ living standards and reduced ratios of economic dependency of what he called ‘a socialist settlement’ would make it possible to exploit the productive potential of sophisticated plant to the full with a smaller-than-normal overall population. The budget sums allocated for accommodation would initially be higher per head, but the real income and money wages per family would be higher thereafter. Government figures which showed the Soviet Union was imminently facing a labour shortage served only to strengthen his case.31 By the time the Party hierarchy met to affirm the Five Year Plan at its 16th Party Congress in April 1929, Sabsovich had focused his arguments down onto the detailed means of achieving these benefits. He had fine-tuned his figures and produced specific proposals about optimum size for his highly serviced communal dwelling units – his calculations showed each should ideally house and service about four thousand people. By this approach, he said, ‘we can build full socialism within fifteen years’.32 The outrage which his proposals produced was partly a response to the pace of social transformation which he envisaged, but also his radical attack on the family unit. ‘For the ends of the general plan’ even child-rearing by politically ignorant parents within the reactionary climate of ‘a family hearth’ must go and ‘the isolated flats and little houses’ which that implied. Sabsovich’s insistence that the Plan lacked a social strategy found powerful support from another independent-minded Party member, Iuri Larin, prominent as a former leader of the Housing Co-operative movement amongst much else. At the Party Congress Larin demanded that State planners should listen to the Communist Academy, the Party and its economists, instead of the dangerously apolitical managers and engineers.33 Larin was typical of the Old Bolshevik left-wingers to whom ‘cultural construction’, or the building of ‘a new way of living’ – the new socialist byt – was the essence and core of the revolution. Sabsovich and Larin represented a

34

Catherine Cooke

certain fundamentalist revolutionary conscience which, combined with such practical logic, could not readily be ignored by the Party. On 11 July 1929, Sabsovich presented a further elaboration of his ideas in a paper entitled ‘The problem of the town as a settlement of consistently socialist type’ read to the Moscow branch of Varnitso, the All-Union Association of Scientific and Technical Workers, an organisation whose aim was to activate such professionals politically. His text was the classic passage from Lenin which no one had heard for years but which was to become the touchstone of the forthcoming debate: Capitalism is finally ripping rural agriculture asunder from industry, but at the same time, as it develops towards a higher form, it is preparing the elements for their re-connection, preparing for the union of industry with agriculture on the soil of the conscious application of science and collective labour. It is preparing for the new settlement system of mankind with the abolition of rural backwardness and isolation from the world, and abolition of the anti-natural accumulation of gigantic masses into large towns.34 His audience on that day were ‘representatives of the organisations that are designing and building new factories’. In a series of highly-detailed points he elaborated on his concept of fully-collectivised ‘socialist towns’ of forty- to fifty-thousand people throughout the Soviet Union, linked by the new mean of transport and powered by electricity. Varnitso’s members were so enthused that they urged Sabsovich to do radio talks on this theme in their name. His lecture was immediately published in the July issue of Gosplan’s official journal.35 Within weeks the state technical publishers were issuing it as a popular booklet entitled Towns of the future and the organisation of the socialist way of life.36 Okhitovich: the centrifugal force of technology The Constructivist architects had been building up to these issues independently for some time. They were by far the most active Soviet Modernist group and were the only people who had seriously attempted to develop a global design logic premised upon the new social and technical priorities of the state.37 Their whole notion of the building as ‘social condenser’ was founded on the same arguments which Sabsovich and Larin deployed: that spatial organisation and equipment influence activities and hence individual and collective psychology.38 Soviet conditions prevented such architects travelling abroad, but in April 1928, just weeks before CIAM met to formulate its rather primitive but socialistic statements about the city at La Sarraz, they had convened their supporters from across the USSR to their own First Conference in Moscow.39 In a robust resolution on housing and city planning, the Constructivists committed themselves to considering the city ‘only in the context of all the factors having an influence on its character and in consideration of its role in the socialist reconstruction of the country.’ In terms far bolder, if more general, than those of CIAM they declared that ‘the functions of the city must henceforth be studied not in their

Cities of socialism

35

static condition, but dynamically, in terms of their change, dialectically, looking as far as it is possible to see into their future development.’40 Two factors were already clearly visible in that future; indeed, Sabsovich had mentioned them both. The first was electrification; Lenin’s great Goelro plan for electrifying Russia had been launched in 1920 and was already, as Sabsovich said, liberating industrial location from dependence on transport of fuel.41 The second was avtomobilizatsiia, a term which embraced all motorised vehicles. In 1927, Russia possessed only 12,000 such vehicles against the USA’s 23 million. During 1928, a campaign for rapid expansion of all motor-vehicle production raged through Soviet economic circles and the press, led by the famous government statistician Nikolai Osinskii. In 1929, the first Ford cars, buses, lorries and tractors emerged from the turn-key factory in Nizhny Novgorod and were heralded as the first step towards ‘putting every Soviet citizen on wheels’ (Figure 2.2).42 This was what Sabsovich called ‘the massive expansion in transport now envisaged’. The first issue of the Constructivist journal SA in 1929 announced that its August–September edition would focus on town planning.43 So it did, and with a dramatically radical paper by Mikhail Okhitovich, a sociologist of Trotskyist connections. This precipitated them into the heart of the growing debate on urban form and set up the other pole of its argument, which became known as the ‘disurbanist’. Okhitovich was not an architect and it is not clear how he became connected with the Constructivists, although he was plainly conversant with the logic of their ‘design method’ which organised building form around the dynamic patterns of human activity.44 By looking at the impact of future technologies, his paper ‘On the problem of the city’ extended this logic from the building to the whole Soviet system of settlement (Figure 2.3). Only once did Okhitovich appear to refer directly to Sabsovich’s ideas, when he said: ‘The process of eliminating the conflict between town and country is not one of urbanising the village or of agrarianising the town, as adherents of the socialist town think.’ He condemned the very concept of a ‘socialist town’ as deriving from ‘a bourgeois form of socialism’ and therefore ‘reactionary’. In a manner befitting a sociologist, he analysed the historic city in terms of access to transport, and the permanence or otherwise of building materials in relation to the capital costs of land. Since the values of all these parameters have now changed, he said, no micro-level design decisions could be taken without considering every factor in the new economic and political context. In his words: ‘It is necessary to reassess the nature of the possible in accordance with the requirement of the epoch.’ And that, as he said, led to a very radical question: Does it emerge that the crowded town is the inevitable result of the technical and economic possibilities? Does it emerge that all other solutions to the problem are technically or economically impossible?45 In the Constructivist’s design theory, the method of establishing spatial organisation had been modelled upon Taylorist flow principles as applied by Henry Ford.46 In Ford’s Autobiography, Okhitovich had discovered that he no longer concentrated all

Figure 2.2 Avtomobilizatsiia: the imminent explosion of automobile production. The first ten Ford lorries assembled at the turnkey plant in Nizhny-Novgorod driving out of the factory gates in 1929. The banner reads: ‘We are fulfilling the Five Year Plan. The first Soviet Ford.’ Frontispiece of Nikolai Osinskii’s book Avtomobilizatsiia SSSR (Automobilisation of the USSR) of 1930

Cities of socialism

37

Figure 2.3 Okhitovich: ‘On the problem of the city’. The capitalist city is ‘unloaded’ as its elements move out to optimal locations elsewhere under the influence of transport and communications technology. One of Okhitovich’s diagrams from his article ‘On the problem of the city’ in SA, August–September 1929

production on one site. The transport system in America now made it more efficient for the plants producing Ford subassemblies to be scattered across America. In his logic, this ‘spatial dismantling’ which Ford has applied to car production could now be applied to the city. The exceptional growth in the strength, quality, quantity and speed of the means of mechanical transport now permits separation from centres: space is now measured by time and this time itself is being shortened. In this situation, the old scalar concepts become relative. At a certain level, ‘the tundra populated at three persons a square kilometre is also a point, and the city is a territorial region.’ Urbanisation had been ‘the product of a general striving towards centres’. Disurbanisation would be ‘based on the centrifugal tendency in technology’ so that ‘proximity is now a function of distance and community a function of separateness’. Their next task, he said, was ‘to try to verify the realism and the revolutionary character of our ideas of disurbanisation’: Let us call it, shall we say, the Red City of the Planet of Communism. If one talks about the essence, then this new complex will not be called a point, a place or a city, but a process, and this process will be called disurbanisation.47 ‘The cross-fire of an unprecedented battle of ideas’48 By their provocative analyses, Sabsovich and Okhitovich had opened up questions which had not had serious attention since the utopian socialists, whose names were often invoked in the debates that followed. In the popular shorthand of the time their arguments became known respectively as the ‘urbanist’ and the ‘disurbanist’, but it should be noted that both were against further uncontrolled growth of existing urban centres. Their solutions differed but they were united in opposition to two key assumptions underlying the government’s Five Year Plan: first, that considerable amounts of new plant and its accompanying housing should be located around existing centres; second, that the settlements being created at the new industrial sites were destined eventually to become large cities.

38

Catherine Cooke

It should also be noted that both men were advancing economic and technical arguments, not offering designs. In this respect their role was analogous to Ebenezer Howard’s three decades earlier: they still awaited the Raymond Unwins who would give such arguments physical form.49 That process took place during the autumn in parallel with widespread exploration and argument about the larger connectivities they had opened up. Soon both men were regularly speaking at public meetings and writing in newspapers and journals. Okhitovich (and maybe others) deployed film and showed it at one of the three special sessions held by the august Communist Academy.50 Professionals from every related field debated alongside the public. The calendar of events became hectic and the resulting literature, both popular and serious, was vast.51 In Moscow no one could escape the issue as reports flowed back to the centre about the chaos which had characterised this first building season on new-town sites across the continent. On 4 November, the Party newspaper Pravda launched a major public campaign against what it called ‘the anarchy and lack of planning in the building of towns’ and the ‘opportunist incompetence characterising the work of urban municipalities’. Practical absurdities were being reported daily and Pravda declared these were caused by ‘the pre-Revolutionary and capitalist models’ being applied and that ‘both must be relinquished’. Worse still, they said, most of the settlements were going up without any drawn plans at all, because the Soviet Union lacked trained personnel.52 A new body was created under the Interior Ministry called Giprogor, the State Institute for the Designing of Towns, ‘in order to ensure the technical adequacy of planning proposals and to make rational use of the very few technical and specialist personnel available to us in this field.’53 One official from the Interior Ministry admitted at a Gosplan conference in Moscow in late November, that ‘We have only fifty town planning specialists in the whole USSR’.54 Gosplan was the state agency responsible for the whole national planning operation of which the Five Year Plan was the tool. The Gosplan conference was indicative of the status the town planning issue now had. Its proceedings were immediately published in full.55 As a gathering of specialists from every relevant field, it was very revealing of how issues were emerging and their interconnectedness explored. Over 20 papers were read and discussion was disarmingly frank. Answers were few, but by drawing together the topics over which they ranged, we can see how a sense of the connectivities of issues and decisions was beginning to emerge that reflected the logics which Sabsovich (who was there) and Okhitovich (who was not) had started to indicate (Figure 2.4). Meanwhile both proposals were acquiring physical form through their authors’ alliances with different architects in the Constructivist group. One of Sabsovich’s most frequently-used models for the basic unit of his compact, fully-socialised town, the unit he called the ‘housing combine’, was a fully serviced ‘communal house’ scheme by the Vesnin brothers for part of Stalingrad (Figures 2.5 and 2.6).56 Other Constructivists lead by Ginzburg were supporters of Okhitovich. They used the two big planning competitions of that autumn, for the new industrial city of Magnitogorsk in the Urals and a so-called Green Town near Moscow, as demonstration projects for disurbanism.57

Figure 2.4 The Gosplan conference: ‘On the problem of building the socialist city’. Present authors’ diagram showing the issues explored and the connections traced during the two-day multi-disciplinary discussions at the Gosplan conference ‘On the problem of building the socialist city’, Moscow 26 and 29 November 1929

Figure 2.5 The Constructivists compact socialist town. Stalingrad developed on Sabsovich’s principles, from his Sotsialisticheskie goroda (Socialist towns) of early 1930. Along the Volga five production units stand in the wooden riverside strip, from left: chemical combine at the hydro-electric plant; food production combine; metallurgical plant; ‘Red October’ tractor plant; bus and motor-car plant. Between them, one for each, is a compact district of housing combines with schools, etc. and a central hospital. Inland of these are leisure parks and the agricultural area of collective farms. Each housing district is linked to its own sports complex across the Volga

Cities of socialism

41

Figure 2.6 The Constructivists compact socialist town. Axonometric view of a single ‘housing combine’ by Alexander and Leonid Vesnin, with: (1) five-storied housing blocks for adults where first floor in the centre of each contains rooms for individual and group activities. The long block (2) contains collective services including communal dining rooms, library, reading room, rooms for clubs, etc. and a winter garden. Central block (3) is a sports complex with swimming pool surrounded by a running track and four tennis courts. The caption notes that this central space ‘is only slightly smaller than Theatre Square in front of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow’. Lower blocks (4) are housing for infants, ‘linked by heated walkways to the adult blocks’. Northerly blocks (5) are for pre-school children, (6) is a sports pitch, (7) is an orangery

By early 1930, Okhitovich was also discussing the effect of such new technologies as radio and even television in changing the nature of ‘community’. ‘Not a communal house but a community of houses’ was his slogan.58 His nonnodal, ‘even’ settlement system was emerging as a triangulated network of lowdensity ‘ribbons of settlement’ extending across the Soviet Union. Alongside the

42

Catherine Cooke

highways already required for industry and agriculture, car-driving or bus-borne individuals lived ‘close to nature’ in tiny prefabricated units with autonomous services and composted waste. The communal facilities of socialist life were distributed ‘rhythmically’ along the routes, spaced according to frequency of need (Figures 2.7–2.12).59 With designers of such quality, both sets of proposals resulted in compelling architectural solutions. Both were underpinned by compelling costings and by equally compelling arguments about modes of life into which socialism might evolve.60 In the first months of 1930, with every kind of journal from the political to the technical running articles, the debate threatened to get out of hand. A consistent theme started emerging from Party spokesmen: that the underdeveloped political consciousness of the Soviet population and the limited resources actually available to the state made these proposals ‘incorrect for the present stage’. Both were therefore dangerous, even counter-revolutionary. But it was recognised that their contributions to creating a more sophisticated understanding of ‘the problem of socialist settlement’ and a correctly Marxist approach to it were very different. The clearest statements of the Party line appeared through a spokesman named Chernya in the serious theoretical fortnightly Revolution and Culture.61 Sabsovich’s ‘mistakes’ were ‘significantly more important and harmful’ than those of the disurbanists. ‘To assert that we can eliminate conflicts between town and country and outstrip America’ in just a few years was ‘suggesting we should cheat the working

Figure 2.7 The Disurbanist ‘ribbon of settlement’. Disurbanist concept of ‘rhythmic’ distribution of services along the ‘ribbon of settlement’. Left: the ‘kilometre station’ with sports and recreational facilities, laundry, planning and administration centre, distribution centre for essential products, cinema and club. The Curves show rhythmic distribution of other facilities along the Disurbanist ribbon according to need. In increasing frequency: postal, telegraph and telephone centres; newspaper and publishing units; sanitation centres; nurseries, kindergartens and schools; water stations

Figure 2.8 The Disurbanist ‘ribbon of settlement’. A portion of the Disurbanist ‘ribbon of settlement’ straddling the highway

44

Catherine Cooke

Figure 2.9 The Disurbanist ‘ribbon of settlement’. Detail of the ‘ribbon of settlement’ showing a ‘kilometre station’, centre, beside the main highway and individual housing units in their own plots linking to the collectively farmed land, where some residents work, left and right

class by handing out promissory notes we cannot hope to pay’. The disurbanists were also ‘jumping over stages’ but ‘they are a group of most serious workers, actively participating in the working out of problems and the building of socialism.’62 As a well-known political figure, Sabsovich loved to dismiss the disurbanists as upstarts who ‘know nothing of the economic and political realities’. Others recognised that his ‘urbanism’ was merely a one-off solution whereas the disurbanists were trying to analyse an objective process over time. One leading Gosplan economist said they were as different ‘as a scholar of higher mathematics is from those knowing only arithmetic or algebra’.63 In mid-April, however, Chernya insisted that We are not arguing with comrade Okhitovich about the future. Within research institutes it is entirely appropriate to debate the concrete form of human settlement under socialism, under communism. But to propose (disurbanisation) in public meetings as a concrete form for the present day is to be occupied with a fruitless utopia, with harmful fantasies unrelated to reality.

Figure 2.10 The Disurbanist ‘ribbon of settlement’. Axonometric view of the typical ‘kilometre station’ bridging the highway

46

Catherine Cooke

Figure 2.11 The Disurbanist ‘ribbon of settlement’. The kit for an individual house arrives by automobile: montage from the Disurbanists’ explanatory panels

One level of that reality was technological: ‘Our automobile economy is still in a new-born state and our roads are the worst in the world’. But there was another level: Even if that was not the case such dispersal could not be adopted. Not for one moment can one forget that we still find ourselves, even now, in a country where the petit-bourgeois mentality prevails. Not for a moment must we forget that we are surrounded by a desirous and powerful enemy: the capitalist world. In these conditions it is vital to concentrate the proletariat in a confined space to rally their forces . . . The conditions for any other type of human organisation are not yet ripe with us . . . We are building forms of settlement and housing for the transitional period and must work with those human and material resources we have at present. Only by leading the masses steadily from one stage of development to the next higher one is victory possible. Only that way can the new mode of life be built. Anything else is infantile leftism and has nothing to do with Bolshevism.64 On 16 May, the Party’s Central Committee finally denounced the ‘urbanist’ camp in an official decree ‘On work for reconstructing the way of life’. This declared that ‘the attempts of Sabsovich and to a lesser extent of Larin’ to over-rapidly force the population into a fully collectivised way of life were ‘unfounded, semi-fantastical and therefore extremely harmful’.65 Sabsovich and Larin were thus finally discred-

Figure 2.12 The Disurbanist ‘ribbon of settlement’. On-site assembly of the Disurbanists’ housing type No.30, the minimal ‘one-roomed unit’

48

Catherine Cooke

ited, but the disurbanists were not. A special new Socialist Settlement section was created in Gosplan where Ginzburg, his competition teams and Okhitovich were employed to develop their ideas further. They reported back in the autumn and their last-ever issue of SA published the work.66 Meanwhile it was recognised that lessons from the debate must be digested into some usable planning principles. Nikolai Miliutin, former Commissar of Finance and an experienced Old Bolshevik, was client and penthouse dweller of Ginzburg’s Narkomfin building in Moscow.67 He was also a key figure in the Communist Academy. He became a mediator within architectural and planning circles and under the Academy’s aegis formulated a ‘system to form the basis of the socialist planning of new towns and to guide the replanning of existing ones.’68 He started from an analysis of production flows and functional circulation; he applied basic principles of zoning, a sensible degree of socialisation in housing units and integration of agricultural and industrial workers to produce a settlement type which genuinely embodied the new priorities. In their simplicity these principles were akin to the regulations that had accompanied the planning decree of 1927, but they differed in having a strong ideological basis. Elements of Miliutin’s approach appeared in his stylish little book Sotsgorod (The Socialist Town) which was almost the only document of this debate to become known in the West (Figure 2.13).69 The end of the debate At the Plenum of the Party Central Committee in June 1931 the new orthodoxy was consolidated further. Moscow Party Secretary Kaganovich quite explicitly drew a line under the whole urbanist–disurbanist debate. There was no question of ‘dissolving’ Soviet towns and cities. They would remain as the citadels of new social order and Moscow would be the laboratory and showpiece. His long speech was rich in technical detail that returned the issues of blagoustroistvo to the forefront.70 This was a conservative strategy but it now had the force of ideological argument behind it. An equivalent aesthetic logic was soon being developed through the competition which was launched in July for the central building of that new Moscow: the Palace of the Soviets.71 This competition was to become the test-bed for determining what socialist realism would mean in architecture and it was the anti-Modernist outcome in spring 1932 which caused CIAM to cancel plans for their ‘functional city’ conference to be held in Moscow. Dispatched to distant and inhospitable sites with superhuman tasks and inadequate resource, the German Modernists who came to the Soviet Union so hopefully in 1930 found their left-wing sympathies stretched to breaking. Invited from Frankfurt or fleeing Nazi hostility at the Bauhaus, the teams who came with Ernst May, Hannes Mayer and others saw the Soviet Union as a worthy place to invest their experience. They were welcomed by Giprogor as much-needed technicians, but efforts to adapt their models and experience to Soviet cultural and technical conditions had little real success.72 Although seeming to represent a direct connection with this debate, they actually learned little of the battle of ideas which had preceded their arrival. By the time they returned home, tired, unpopular and disillu-

Cities of socialism

49

Figure 2.13 Miliutin’s system. Miliutin’s ‘system of functional-flow planning’ as illustrated in his Sotsgorod of summer 1930. His diagrammatic schema for Stalingrad (compare Sabosovich): alongside the River Volga run successive parallel zones of natural park, housing, the main road, a green zone with public buildings, the production zone and the railway serving it

sioned, they cared even less. They characteristically declined even to talk about their experiences, far less to talk about theory and principle. Thus a curtain came down on the whole polemic that had taken place in the Soviet Union and it was threeand-a-half decades before anyone in East or West dared to start lifting it. Among Soviet architects, planners and scholars, this whole episode became something to be mentioned only in whispers, if known at all. Even in the middle and late 1960s it remained censored. The French architect and Communist Anatole Kopp assembled the outline story from SA and other sources in his Ville et révolution of 1967.73 These were seminal revelations for a new generation including myself. When I started research later that year, with a whiff from various sources and encouragement from Kopp, the door to Moscow slammed shut at the mention of such a topic. Luckily, enough scraps had washed up in scattered Western libraries for the story to be assembled outside Soviet borders. Meanwhile the distinguished and well-protected Moscow historian Vigdaria Khazanova had simultaneously worked through the literature in detail. Her first volume of ‘documents and materials’ covering Soviet architecture of the earlier 1920s appeared in Moscow in 1963, the last year of Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’. When its

50

Catherine Cooke

sequel on the years 1926–32 came out in 1970, under Brezhnev, this key material from one-half of that period was represented only by article titles carefully dispersed in a long bibliography.74 Her next volume presenting an extensive selection of those planning articles reached the typesetting stage in 1975 before the censorial plug was pulled.75 Meanwhile Kopp had managed by good connections to remain an acceptable visitor to the USSR and ultimately engineered enough protection to link us all up. Khazanova eventually published a narrative and non-analytical account of these planning debates in a modest, unillustrated, Soviet book of 1980.76 The history has remained so distorted, however, that even in the 1990s the American Hugh Hudson could write a fascinating account of Okhitovich’s later fate at the mercy of the Stalinist establishment from newly opened ‘secret archives’, but seem oblivious to this seminal episode in which the man’s infamy originated.77 As will be clear from this account, neither urbanist nor disurbanist schemes led to building. Much of the work which theoretically followed Miliutin’s official principles was highly compromised in reality. Many of those promised ‘new towns’ ended up as barrack settlements. The byt which Sabsovich envisaged became a reality for many citizens, but in improvised buildings and through the state’s poverty, not through positive principle. In industrial cities, new and old, there remains some built work of real architectural quality and some remnants of planning inspired by Miliutin’s compromise. Under the Soviet regime these remained unvalued and little known internally, principally due to limited internal movement, the closure of industrial cities to foreigners and the larger silence over events of this period. Since the regime’s collapse, this veil has also been lifted. Indeed Docomomo has brave groups in the Urals–Siberian regions documenting local developments even if practically powerless to conserve. The failure of Modern architects on either side of the debate to realise their urban plans was not confined to Soviet Russia, of course. We only have to examine some of the plans advanced in the West in the light of these larger models of social and spatial interaction which the Russians started to frame in order to see why the worthy ‘city plans’ of most Modern architects in the West were doomed. Most of the real city-forming forces of capitalism – social policies, interest rates, amortisation periods, legislative agendas, class politics – were not just excluded from their consideration, they lay outside the boundary of any sub-system which architects could hope to control. In one case history after another that is the root cause of failure. Indeed the Soviets repeatedly laughed at the naivety of Corbusier, for example, ‘in imagining that French capitalism is going to demolish Paris just in order to rebuild it on his model.’78 In looking back over the range of solutions advanced by Modern Movement architects in the West, the Soviet perspective is salutary and highly informative. The Russians too ‘failed’, in design terms, through the impossibility of embracing the actuality of their context with its overwhelming complexities, its dire technical exigencies, the actual political agendas that remained unstated. Where they succeeded was in establishing within Soviet planning theory and practice the concept of rasselenie – literally the ‘distribution pattern of settlement’ – as a topic larger than town planning.79 In demonstrating the wide range of factors that must be considered in

Cities of socialism

51

determining that pattern under any given conditions, they anticipated the multifactoral, systems approach which has later become the methodological norm. They saw that transportation was the key. Meanwhile their underlying approach was sufficiently resonant with Marxist thinking for the party spokesman to recognise, in complimenting the disurbanists’ seriousness, that ‘they might be right about the future’.80

Notes 1 V.I. Lenin: ‘Speech to the 3rd All-Russian Congress of the Komsomol’, 2 October 1920, in Lenin: Collected Works 31 (Moscow 1965) pp.283–99. 2 Elimination of the differences in living standard and other ‘conflicts’ and ‘contradictions’ between town and country was a theme that went back to volume 1 of Marx’s Das Kapital and Engels’ Principles of Communism, and was embodied in the ninth of the ten Principles of their Communist Manifesto of 1848. There they saw the solution in ‘a more equable distribution of the population over the country’. The phrase ‘a new settlement of mankind’ seems to have been Lenin’s, though I have not managed to identify its first appearance. Soviet authors commonly quoted such canonical statements without reference to date or location. 3 The unifying of these populations was one of the Bolsheviks’ main problems of the 1920s and the word for it, smychka, became one of the most common in every form of political discussion and propaganda. 4 A typical example was A.N. Nikitin: Ocherki gorodskago blagoustroistva zagranitsei: putev’iia zametki (Observations on the Blagoustroistvo of Cities Abroad: Notes from a Journey) (St Petersburg 1891). 5 An attractive general source on the populations and character of Russian provincial cities at this date is Baedecker: Russia (Leipzig–London 1914). 6 Typical growth figures for 30 years 1897–1926 were: Kiev ⫹99 per cent; Rostov-on-Don ⫹154 per cent; Ekaterinburg-Sverdlovsk ⫹165 per cent; Kharkov ⫹298 per cent, and Novosibirsk, capital of Siberia ⫹2,310 per cent. 7 On pre-Revolutionary awakening of an interest in modern planning, see Catherine Cooke: ‘The Town of Socialism’ PhD thesis, University of Cambridge (1974) Part 1. On the Garden City dimension, see Catherine Cooke: ‘Russian responses to the Garden City idea’ Architectural Review (June 1978) pp.353–63. 8 For a range of documents and drawings see V. Khazanova (comp.): Iz istorii sovetskoi arkhitektury 1917–25: dokumenty i materialy (From the History of Soviet Architecture 1917–25: documents and materials) (Moscow 1963) Documents 18–45. Also Cooke: ‘The Town of Socialism’ pp.52–7. 9 Cooke: ‘The Town of Socialism’ pp.41–7. 10 Decrees of VTsIK an Sovnarkom RSFSR 4 October 1926: ‘On the obligation for urban settlements and villages to have plans and planning projects’ Sobranie zakonov (Collection of laws) (1926) article 512 and 4 November 1927: ‘Concerning the timing and regulations for the compiling, scrutiny and approval of plans of existing dispositions and planning projects for urban settlements and villages’ ibid, article 799. 11 Typical were Engr. L.N. Voronin: Ratsional’noe ustroistvo zhilishch, poselkov i gorodov: posobie (The Rational Arrangement of Housing, Settlements and Cities: Textbook) (Moscow 1926) and Engr. I.V. Preis: Planirovka gorodov i poselkov (The Planning of Towns and Villages) (Moscow-Leningrad 1927). 12 M.G. Dikanskii: Problemy sovremennykh gorodov. Dvizhenie v bol’shikh gorodakh. Krizis zhilishcha (Problems of contemporary cities. Movement in large cities. The crisis of housing) (Moscow 1926) pp.67, 77. 13 The housing cooperatives’ contribution was well documented in Iu. Larin and V. Belousov (eds): Za novoye zhilishche: sb. stat. 5-letiiu zhilishchnoi kooperatsii (For the new housing: collected articles on five years of housing cooperation) (Moscow 1930). The Constructivists contributed some of their work in this field to the international survey compiled at CIAM II, Frankfurt in October 1929, published as S. Giedion et al (eds): Die Wohnung für das Existenzminimum (Frankfurt 1930). The Moscow example is no.201. Page 40 here lists Ginzburg and Kolli as the two délégués to CIAM from Russia but there is no evidence either managed to attend any conferences. 14 Gipromez SSSR: Uralskii mashinostroitel’nyi zavod v Sverdlovske: proekt (The Urals Machine-building

52

15

16 17

18 19

20

21

22

23 24 25 26 27 28

Catherine Cooke Plant in Sverdlovsk: the Project) (Leningrad: 1928). The plan of the new workers’ town and the Uralmash plant is fig. 48. I. Liubimov (ed.): Bol’shie goroda Zapadnoi Evropy, Berlin, Parizh, London: po dannym zagranichnoi delegatsii Moskovskogo Soveta (Large Cities of Western Europe, Berlin, Paris and London: report of a Mossoviet delegation abroad) (Moscow 1926) esp. ‘Transportnoe delo’ (Transportation) pp.133–240. For other details of the trip and its context see N.M. Aleshchenko: Moskovskii sovet v 1917–1941 gg (Moscow Soviet from 1917–1941) (Moscow 1976) p.394. M. Ginzburg: ‘Konstruktivizm v arkhitekture’ (Constructivism in architecture). Lecture to First Conference of OSA. SA (1928) no.5 pp.143–5. Le Corbusier made three trips to Moscow, in mid-October 1928, 6–17 June 1929, and 5–17 March 1930. For accounts of these, see Jean-Louis Cohen: Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR (Princeton, New Jersey 1992). On the Constructivists’ earlier attitude to him, see Catherine Cooke: Russian Avant-Garde: Theories of Art, Architecture and the City (London 1995) Chapter 6: ‘Ginzburg and Le Corbusier: engineering and the modern state of mind’ pp.122–9. Letters, Le Corbusier to Ginzburg and Ginzburg to Le Corbusier SA (1930) no.1–2 pp.61–2; in English in Anatole Kopp: Town and Revolution (London 1970) pp.252–4. On Le Corbusier’s planning for Moscow and its development into the Ville Radieuse, see Cohen: Le Corbusier and the Mystique Chapter 6, pp.126–63. This includes numerous illustrations from the Fondation Corbusier archives. His ‘Réponse à Moscou’ following a questionnaire of June 1930 was published in the Soviet translation of Urbanisme. His answer to ‘How should existing housing stock be adapted for the new communal way of life?’ was ‘Demolish it all as much Moscow stock is relatively unsound’. Korbiuz’e: Planirovka goroda (Planning the City) (Moscow 1933) pp.175–208. Interestingly, Le Corbusier reported having visited two recently completed communal-housing (dom kommuna) buildings in Moscow, one designed by engineer–architects, the other by artist–architects (this presumably was Ginzburg’s Narkomfin), and noting how the difference in ‘feeling’ indicates ‘the danger of ignoring the fact that besides satisfying purely utilitarian needs, such buildings must infuse their inhabitants – whether they feel it consciously or only unconsciously – with a feeling of harmony.’ ‘Housing deficient in everything that feeds the rational intellect will induce melancholia’ Planirovka goroda pp.186–7. The full text of the La Sarraz Declaration appears in Ulrich Conrads (ed.): Programmes and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture (London 1970) pp.109–13. For an account of every CIAM conference see Auke van der Woud: CIAM Volkshuisvesting Stedebouw, Housing Town Planning (Delft 1983). The key documents are Minutes of a CIRPAC meeting of 29 March 1932 in Barcelona, and letters of 20 and 28 April 1932 to Stalin from van Esteren, Bourgeois and Giedion as officers of CIAM, in the CIAM archives, ETH Zurich; documents 4-1-51-54 and 4-1-61-66 refer. The idea had originated in June–July 1931 when Ernst May was back from Moscow to lecture in Berlin and Frankfurt at CIAM’s invitation. Hugh Hudson has found an account in Soviet archives of an attempt by Karo Alabian to attract CIAM V to Moscow, which involved Mart Stam being arrested by British police on entry to England in 1934. Hugh Hudson: Blueprints and Blood: The Stalinisation of Soviet Architecture (Princeton, New Jersey 1994) pp.166–7. For the fullest account of this debate, see Cooke: ‘The Town of Socialism’ Part 3: ‘Diary of a debate, 1929–31’. For a less analytical account in Russian, see V.E. Khazanova: Sovetskaia arkhitektura pervoi piatiletki: problemy goroda budushchego (Soviet architecture of the First Five Year plan: questions of the future city) (Moscow 1980) Chapter 2. The First Five Year plan was affirmed and ‘started on sites’ in 1929 but backdated to an official start in 1928. For detailed accounts of this process, see E.H. Carr’s successive volumes on Soviet affairs in the 1920s, notably Socialism in One Country and Foundations of a Planned Economy (London 1958–69). Carr: Foundations p.309 refers. G. Krzhizhanovsky, Gosplan chairman, in preamble to the 16th Party Conference, in Gosplan’s journal Plannovoe khoziaistvo (The Planned Economy) (March 1929). He refers in L. Sabsovich: ‘Problemy rabochego byta’ (Problems of the workers’ way of life) Torgopromyshlennaia gazeta (Trade and Industry Newspaper) (8 March 1929). I.V. Larin and V. Belousov: Za novoe zhilishche; Victor Buchli: An Archaeology of Socialism (Oxford 1999) Chapter 2.

Cities of socialism

53

29 S.G. Strumilin: Biudzhet vremeni sovetskogo rabochego (Time budget of the Russian Worker) (Moscow 1923) and Rabochyi byt v tsifrakh (The worker’s way of life in figures) (Moscow–Leningrad: 1926). On the Taylorist ‘Central Institute of Labour’ see Cooke: Russian Avant-Garde p.112. 30 Again Buchli: An Archaeology has an accessible account. 31 Sabsovich: ‘Problemy rabochego byta’. 32 Sabsovich’s speech in Shestnadtsataia konferentsiia VKP(b) (Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party) (Moscow 1929). 33 Shestnadtsataia konferentsiia pp.143–7. 34 This quote which Sabsovich boldly attributes (as did others) to Lenin is among those I have never managed to source precisely. The first sentence is straight from Marx in vol.1 of Das Kapital. 35 L. Sabsovich: ‘SSSR cherez 15 let. Gipotez postroeniia sotsializma v SSSR’ (The USSR in 15 years’ time. Hypothesis for building socialism in the USSR) Plannovoe khoziaistvo (The Planned Economy) (1929) no.7. 36 L.M. Sabsovich: Goroda budushchego i organizatsiia sotsialisticheskogo byta (Moscow 1929). 37 Cooke: Russian Avant-Garde Chapter 5 pp.99–121. 38 Cooke: Russian Avant-Garde pp.112–13 and Documents 6 and 8 pp.120–1. 39 An example of their invitation letter to a regional group of OSA (that in Sverdlovsk) is preserved in the Ekaterinburg City archives and indicates the difficulty which travel and costs created for such a gathering. 40 ‘Rezoliutsii’ (Resolutions of the Housing and Town Planning Section of OSA’s First Conference, April 1928) SA (1928) no.4 p.123. 41 Of many sources on the Goelro plan, interesting ones in this context are Huntly Carter: ‘Rebuilding Soviet Russia 1: Ambitious Soviet plans’ The Architects Journal (13 September 1922) pp.336–9, and H.G. Wells’ report of his conversation with Lenin on this subject in 1920 in: Russia in the Shadows (New York 1921) p.160. 42 Articles and speeches from this campaign during 1927–9 were collected in: N. Osinsky: Avtomobilizatsiia SSSR (Moscow 1930). 43 SA (1929) no.1, inside front cover. 44 The earliest mention of Okhitovich’s link with the Constructivists that I have found is in recollections of the Gosplan economist Leonid Puzis, a colleague of the Constructivists. In 1973, Puzis told Anatole Kopp that Okhitovich had come to a meeting at Ginzburg’s apartment in autumn 1928 and declared his conviction that the future lay with ‘small portable houses for individuals that could be grouped together and dispersed as required’. ‘Une interview de L.P. 23 Dec 1973’ in A. Kopp et al: Architecture soviétique 1928–41 research report to CORDA (Paris 1975) p.276. Hudson: Blueprints and Blood pp.147–65 deals extensively with Okhitovich’s career and fate after 1931. 45 M. Okhitovich: ‘K probleme goroda’ (On the problem of the city) SA (1929) no.4 pp.130–4. 46 Cooke: Russian Avant-Garde pp.109–18. 47 Okhitovich: ‘K probleme goroda’. 48 The phrase is Okhitovich’s, in ‘Zametki po teorii rasseleniia’ (Notes on the theory of settlement) SA (1930) no.1–2 pp.7–16. 49 Howard’s Tomorrow. A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (London 1898) was translated into Russian in 1911 and was always well understood by commentators there to be above all an economic argument. On Unwin’s work for Letchworth and other architectural embodiments of Howard’s argument, see papers on UK, Germany, France and Russia in Architectural Review (June 1978) special issue ‘The Garden City Idea’. 50 The tantalising mention of Okhitovich showing a film appears in a report of the Communist Academy’s discussions on 20 and 21 May 1930. Miliutin criticised it for again displaying various typical ‘mistakes’ of the disurbanist idea, for instance, the distance of dwellings from industrial sites. See ‘K probleme planirovka sotsgoroda’ (On the problem of planning the socialist town) Vestnik (Courier) of the Communist Academy no.42 (1930) pp.109–47. The audience for these discussions totalled ‘about a thousand’. They were accompanied by a big exhibition of projects from new-town planning offices and the recent competitions. Okhitovich’s his first presentation to the Communist Academy was on 1 October 1929. See Vestnik no.35–6 (1929) pp.335–8. Discussions of it followed on 31 October and 5 November. See Vestnik no.37–8 (1930) pp.344–88. Le Corbusier also made a passing reference to films being made (The Radiant City p.74). He had been in Moscow 5–17 March 1930.

54

Catherine Cooke

51 Cooke: ‘The Town of Socialism’ Part 3: ‘Diary of a Debate’. 52 Pravda had major features on 4, 12, 15, 23 November and a constant flow of small items throughout the month. 53 Pravda (12 November 1929). 54 Statement by Gubevich. K probleme stroitel’stva sotsialisticheskikh gorodov: diskusia v klube im. Krzhizhanovskogo, 26 & 29 noiabria 1929 (On the problem of building socialist cities: discussion in the Krzhizhanovsky workers’ club, 26 & 29 November 1929) (Moscow 1930). 55 K probleme stroitel’stva. 56 For example, L.M. Sabsovich: Sotsialisticheskie goroda (Moscow 1930) p.47. 57 These were most fully published in their own journal SA. M. Barshch, V. Vladimirov, M. Okhitovich, N. Sokolov: ‘Magnitogor’e’ SA (1930) no.1–2 pp.38–56; M. Barshch and M. Ginzburg: ‘Zelenyi gorod: sotsialistichesaya rekonstruktsiia Moskvy’ (Green City: the socialist reconstruction of Moscow) SA (1930) no.1–2 pp.17–37. In Miliutin’s Sotsgorod, illustrations of ‘one-storey corridorless dwelling by Stroikom RSFSR’ on pp.84, 87, 88 are this Green City project except that figure 35 on p.87 (wrongly captioned) shows the Magnitogorsk project with individual houses. For more images of Green City see A. Kopp: Constructivist Architecture in the USSR (London 1985) pp.148–9, and Cohen: Le Corbusier and the Mystique pp.130, 131, 135. 58 M. Okhitovich: ‘Ne gorod a novyi tip rasseleniia’ (Not a city but a new type of settlement pattern) Ekonomicheskaya zhizn (Economic life) (7 Dec 1929); also ‘Zametki po teorii rasseleniia’ (Notes on the theory of settlement) SA (1930) no.1–2, pp.7–16, which further elaborated the technical underpinnings of his argument. The later ‘ “Marksistskaya” zashchita kommunal’nogo sotsializma’ (A ‘Marxist’ defence of communal socialism) SA (1930) no.5, spreads 7–13, versos, was a response to political criticisms and elaborated the roots of his argument in pronouncements of Engels, Marx and Lenin. 59 The triangulation and rhythmic distribution were elaborated in the account in: N.L. Meshcheriakov: O sotsialisticheskikh gorodakh (On Socialist Towns) (Moscow 1931) from their detailed development of the idea in summer 1930, on which see their special issue of SA (1930) no.6. 60 The Magnitogorsk project was published with fullest costings of transport, building materials, etc., in SA (1930) no.1–2. 61 Principally I. Chernya: ‘Sotsialisticheskie goroda’ (Socialist cities) Revoliutsiia i kul’tura (1930) no.1 pp.14–16; ‘Otvet tov. Okhitovichu; kritika tov. Sabsovicha’ (An answer to comrade Ohitovich; a critique of comrade Sabsovich) no.2; ‘Na zemiu!’ (To the land) no.7 pp.35–45. 62 Chernya: ‘Otvet’. 63 L. Puzis: ‘ O novom sposobe rasseleniia’ (On a new mode of settlement) Revoliutsiia i kul’tura (1930) no.7 pp.46–53. 64 Chernya: ‘Na zemliu!’. 65 Decree of Central Committee of the Communist Party, ‘O rabote po perestroike byta’ (On work for reconstruction of the way of life), passed 16 May 1930, published Pravda (29 May 1930). 66 The final issue of SA, SA (1930) no.6, was devoted to the work of this Sotsrass (Socialist Settlement) section. 67 Miliutin was an active revolutionary who rose through his contributions to establishing the new Soviet social security system to become Commissar of Finance of the Russian Republic, i.e. head of Narkomfin RSFSR. The eponymous building was commissioned for its employees. Victor Buchl: An Archaeology of Socialism (Oxford 1999) documents its whole history. Some further biography on Miliutin appears in the MIT translation of his book (see note 69 below). 68 When the Constructivists’ journal SA was closed down at the end of 1930 Miliutin acquired a platform as editor, from 1931–3, of the new ‘official’ replacement, Sovetskaia arkhitektura (Soviet Architecture). His ‘system’ appears in N.A. Miliutin: ‘Osnovy sotsialisticheskoi planirovki nasenennykh mest’ (Foundations for the socialist planning of populated places) Sovetskaia arkhitektura (1931) no.4. By a government decree of 1 August 1932 this became the basis of Soviet planning law. See Sovetskaia arkhitektura (1932) no.4 pp.3–7. 69 N.A. Miliutin: Sotsgorod: Problema stroitel’stva sotsialisticheskikh gorodov (Sotsgorod: The Problem of Building Socialist Cities) (Moscow: 1930). The copy Miliutin sent to Le Corbusier was inscribed on 25 October 1930 (in Fondation Corbusier, Paris). A near-facsimile English edition was published by MIT Press in 1974 under the same title with useful introductions by George Collins and Arthur Sprague.

Cities of socialism

55

70 L. Kaganovich: ‘O Moskovskom gorodskom khoziaistve i o razvitii gorodskogo khoziaistva SSSR’ (On the Moscow urban economy and on the urban economy of the USSR). Speech to the June Plenum of TsK VKP(b). Pravda (4 July 1931) pp.3–4. 71 For a good account of this competition see Antonia Cunliffe: ‘The competition for the Palace of Soviets in Moscow 1931–33’ Architectural Association Quarterly Vol.11 no.2 (1979) pp.36–48. See also, for original drawings in colour, Catherine Cooke and Igor Kazus: Soviet Architectural Competitions 1920s–1930s (London 1992) pp.58–93. 72 For a general account see Christian Borngräber: ‘Foreign architects in the USSR: Bruno Taut and the brigades of Ernst May, Hannes Meyer, Hans Schmidt’ Architectural Association Quarterly vol.11 no.1 (1979) pp.50–62. 73 Anatole Kopp: Ville et révolution: architecture et urbanisme sovietiques des années vingts (Paris 1967). An English edition appeared as Town and Revolution (London 1970). 74 Khazanova (comp.): Iz istorii sovetskoi arkhitektury, 1917–1925; and parallel volume for 1926–1932 (Moscow 1970). 75 V.E. Khazanova (comp.): Iz istorii sovetskoi arkhitektury, 1929–1932 dokumenty i materialy: diskussii o sotsialisticheskom gorode; (similar, on ‘discussions on the socialist town), unpublished volume, typeset Moscow 1975. 76 Khazanova: Sovetskaia arkhitektura pervoi piatiletki. See Chapter 2. 77 Hudson: Blueprints and Blood. 78 For example, Meshcheriakov: O sotsialisticheskikh gorodakh p.87. 79 Cooke: ‘The Town of Socialism’ Parts 3 and 4. 80 H. Chernya: ‘Na zemliu!’.

3 Le Corbusier and the city without streets James Dunnett

Le Corbusier’s concepts of urban form were the target of heavy criticism from their first appearance at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1922.1 Nearly 80 years later, they are still criticised, often in much the same terms, and it is safe to say that they now have very little influence, if any at all. In the UK, however, we are now again examining the question of urban form in light of the projected massive demand for new housing, particularly in the South East, and the fear of consequential further encroachment on the countryside. High density urban living is widely promoted as the solution, and suitable models are sought. Le Corbusier was an advocate of highdensity urban living (even if his later proposals for linear industrial cities imply partial dispersal), and his ideas concerning urban form are certainly worth re-examining, together with the criticisms levelled at them. In this paper I propose to do so with particular reference to two schools of criticism, which I shall label the ‘Cambridge’ school (based on the theoretical work of Professor Sir Leslie Martin and his circle there from the 1960s) and the ‘New York’ school (based on the writings about New York of the architect/planner Rem Koolhaas of the late 1970s, with roots in those of the author Jane Jacobs 20 years earlier). These may be characterised as criticisms founded respectively on mathematical and on emotive grounds. Summary of Le Corbusier’s urban models Le Corbusier’s model of urban form was not static but evolved during his lifetime. Its first definitive form was the City of Three Million of 1922, a remarkably ambitious study for an entire capital city (with particular reference to Paris), in which a high density high-rise residential and administrative core for an élite was to be surrounded, beyond a green belt, by an extensive band of low density suburbs.2 This was followed in 1932 by the Radiant City (with particular reference to Moscow) – the model to which this paper will particularly refer – in which it was envisaged that the entire population would live in high density conditions, with low density suburbs banished altogether.3 Finally, in the Three Human Establishments of 1941–2, it was proposed that industrial employment and population would be dispersed into loose linear cities linking compact ‘radial–concentric cities of exchange’.4 Housing in the form of 12-storey enlarged-courtyard blocks, landscaped and communally-serviced, was proposed as the predominant form in the core of the City of Three Million,

Le Corbusier and the city without streets

57

which retained something of the character of traditional urban streets between them. In the Radiant City, these were abandoned in favour of 15-storey serpentine blocks ‘à redents’ set in parkland and following a pattern independent of the road layout, thus departing from the concept of a ‘street’ altogether, but retaining some of the feeling of horizontal continuity of a traditional city (Figure 3.1). Finally, the Linear Industrial City was associated with the Unité d’Habitation, a free-standing 20storey slab block combining residential accommodation with the essential sources of domestic supply, in which the traditional continuity of urban form was completely abandoned. But a constant feature remained throughout his commitment to achieving a green city, a landscaped city offering its inhabitants ‘sun, space, and greenery’, and at the same time to ensuring adequate circulation of transport within the city without which it could not perform its economic and cultural functions effectively. His solutions involved the progressive elimination of the Street as the dominant organising principle of urban form. This was and has remained the most controversial aspect of his proposals, and it is one on which both the schools of criticism to be discussed focused in their quite different ways.

Figure 3.1 Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, 1932. A typical residential area, with housing in the serpentine blocks called á redents, elevated roads, and ground surface devoted to swimming, football, tennis, athletics, and games. Plan FLC 24902 © Fondation Le Corbusier

58

James Dunnett

The ‘Cambridge’ school Professor Sir Leslie Martin, the key figure in the ‘Cambridge’ school, whose career dates from the pioneering world of Modern architecture in Britain in the 1930s, has carried very considerable authority. He was joint-editor with the artists Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo of the review Circle in 1936, a notable early British affirmation of Modern constructive and abstract values in art and architecture, and in 1948–51 was in overall charge of the design of the now Grade-1 listed Festival Hall in the London County Council (LCC) Architect’s Department, of which he subsequently became head. He was appointed Professor of Architecture at Cambridge in 1956, and established a substantial, largely academic, architectural practice. In the 1970s he was credited with having proved by his later theoretical work that ‘tower blocks’ were inefficient in the use of land, and his arguments were influential in Britain in moving housing design away from ‘high-rise, high density’ towards ‘low-rise, high density’ solutions – and hence away from the supposed influence of Le Corbusier. There had in fact always been a ‘low-rise high density’ strand in Le Corbusier’s urban thinking, starting with his student housing published in Towards A New Architecture in 1923,5 continuing with projects such as the ‘Lotissement’ housing for Barcelona of 1933 and the ‘Roq et Rob’ projects for the Mediterranean seaboard of 1949, and culminating in the Venice hospital project of the 1960s. His focus was on the need for light, greenery and a sense of space rather than on the question of height in itself. But the proposal that taller, more widely-spaced blocks – exemplified by his phrase the Vertical Garden City – could be used to this end was an important part of his theory, and the influence of his ideas was felt in the UK mainly as promoting high-rise living. They were most influential during the 1950s, the decade of the LCC’s Roehampton Estate and the start of the Park Hill estate in Sheffield. But already in the mid-1950s, and from an avowedly Modern Movement point-of-view, Martin (who had had overall responsibility for Roehampton at the LCC) was working with Patrick Hodgkinson on low-rise high density designs for housing as an alternative to high-rise. The unbuilt designs of 1957 for ‘cross-over section’ terrace housing for St Pancras Borough, developed by Hodgkinson in Martin’s office, are an example.6 Atelier 5’s Siedlung Halen at Bern, a notable housing development of this kind inspired by Le Corbusier’s ‘Roq et Rob’ project, was built in 1960, and in 1968 Martin set up the Land Use and Built Form Study Centre (‘LUBFS’, now called the Martin Centre) at Cambridge essentially to study the high density alternatives to high-rise. He hoped to demonstrate mathematically the properties of different built form and land use configurations, as Gropius had done in his 1931 demonstration of the advantages for day-lighting or density (or both) of building taller, more widely-spaced blocks in the parallel rows of zeilenbau estates – but with very different conclusions.7 It was in the potential of low-rise courtyard forms that Martin was interested rather than in taller parallel blocks, perhaps inspired by the courts of the Cambridge colleges now surrounding him, and by more recent examples such as Aalto’s Säynätsalo Town Hall of 1949–52 or the ‘extroverted’ courtyard of Le Corbusier’s monastery at La Tourette of 1957. The courtyard was a plan type from which the Modern Movement had hitherto largely turned away, on a number of

Le Corbusier and the city without streets

59

Figure 3.2 Leslie Martin’s diagram showing courtyard and pavilion forms offering equivalent floor spaces, from ‘The Grid as Generator’ 1967

grounds: the impossibility of ensuring correct solar orientation for all sides, the difficulties of planning at the internal angles, as well as for its urban and spatial consequences. But Martin believed that a ‘stepped section’ – with the courtyard walls stepping inward at the base – could mitigate the problems of overshadowing on northern faces, and he had a positive preference for the enclosed urban forms – streets and squares – that it generated. His basic diagram (Figure 3.2) illustrated a courtyard and its equivalent tower form on an identical site. The tower needed to be three times as high as the courtyard to provide the same amount of floor area. Mathematical studies of three typical ‘built forms’ – the tower (or pavilion), the street, and the courtyard – showed that: When the built potential is plotted against the number of storeys for each one of the three built forms described, assuming all other factors are constant, then it is seen that after a certain height the tower form ceases to use land with increasing efficiency and lower towers more closely packed together, but with no change in the angle between contiguous towers, will give the same degree of built potential. . . . This could be one reason that the ‘City of Towers’, free standing towers in a park-like setting, has never been built. It is inherently inefficient in terms of land use. In comparison to the pavilion or tower form at its maximum, the built potential of the street form has twice its value, and the built potential of the court form is no less than three times as great.8 A reference to Le Corbusier can be presumed in the phrase ‘towers in a park-like setting’. The lower height of the courtyard form was generally presented as an overriding advantage in itself, as in the quoted passage, without the need for further explanation. ‘Of course no one may want this (courtyard) alternative,’ wrote Martin, ‘but it is important to know that the possibility exists, and that when high buildings and their skyline are being described, the talk is precisely about this and not about the best way of putting built space on to ground space.’9 A subtle shift has here occurred from ‘alternative’ to ‘best’.

60

James Dunnett

Martin’s basic diagram can be read as an inversion of an equally programmatic sketch by Le Corbusier of 1937 (Figure 3.3). The sketch illustrates a ‘new way of using the ground’ embodied in the Ministry of Education at Rio de Janeiro, for which Le Corbusier was consultant architect, by comparison with the ‘traditional’ way of using such a site. He writes of the sketch that ‘The left hand side shows the usual way of using such sites in Rio: facades facing narrow streets and internal courtyards. The project under construction constitutes a great urbanistic innovation: it has drawn an acceptable solution from the noxious grid of streets and blocks, and will re-introduce space to the urban scene, as well as offering an effective means for dealing with traffic.’10 So eager had Le Corbusier in fact been to provide the civil servants of the Ministry with an open view of the ‘splendours of Rio bay’ that he insisted on making design proposals for a site on the foreshore, different from the one intended, using a slab of horizontal overall proportions, like his Pavilion Suisse of 1930–2. By building a slab (not a ‘tower’) across the centre of the site, rather than a block around its perimeter in the traditional ‘courtyard’ manner, he hoped to provide more light, calm, green, and view for the office workers, as well as more space for pedestrians – and for the car. The Ministry, however, would not be moved, and it was the Brazilian architect Lucio Costa, with Oscar Niemeyer, Eduardo Affonso Reidy and others, who realised that this design idea could effectively be transferred to the original site by adopting a vertical format for the slab. But it is a solution that Le Corbusier was ready to present with his own sketches and supporting text in the Œuvre Complète by implication, as his own. Though the dramatic landscape of Rio, so lovingly rendered in the drawings for his preferred site, is now absent, the grandeur of the open forecourt defined by the slab, softened by vegetation, and dramatised by the colossal statue of a seated figure, remains. What was built is a worthy embodiment of his conception of urban space, and has high civic quality.11 Martin’s diagram (Figure 3.4) showing that Portland House, a 28-storey office slab with forecourt near Victoria Station in London could be rebuilt on the same site and with the same floor area in the form of six- or ten-storey ‘stepped-section’ courtyards, was effectively an applied counter-example to Rio, on a similar site,

Figure 3.3 Le Corbusier shows how courtyards – ‘the traditional way of using a site’ – can be replaced by a slab, in the context of Lucio Costa’s Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro, 1936 © FLC

Le Corbusier and the city without streets

61

reversing Le Corbusier’s message.12 Some of the built designs that emerged from Martin’s practise based on his courtyard theory, such as Harvey Court in Cambridge of 1958 (a student residence designed with Patrick Hodgkinson), and the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury of 1960–70 (a mixed housing and commercial development taken over wholly by Hodgkinson) (Figure 3.5), show the hard interior courts that were the result, sometimes with a problematic relationship to the exterior generated by the stepped section. The predominant justification offered for this approach, as in the huge unbuilt Whitehall Plan of 1965, was that existing heights would not be exceeded, integrating the new building with the surrounding fabric and street pattern. But this was often denied by the scale of the new building, and the issues of urban space, greenery, and outlook which pre-occupied Le Corbusier were sidelined. More attractively, Martin also showed that a section of central Manhattan itself – between Eighth and Park Avenues and 42nd and 57th Streets – could be rebuilt with the same floor area in the form of large landscaped courtyards the size of Washington Square surrounded by stepped-section buildings only eight storeys high (FIgure 3.6).13 At the other extreme of scale his Cambridge colleague Lionel March demonstrated in Homes Beyond the Fringe of 1967 that it was possible to build semi-detached two-storey houses in a hexagonal grid of extended courtyards at a density of 200 persons per acre (500 per hectare), a density normally thought to call for high-rise.14 This arrangement he called ‘dispersed high density’, and proposed that it might be extended across the whole country. Density comparisons Examination of the courtyard theory suggests that a number of quite disparate factors were in fact embodied within it. For example, the possibility that a section of Manhattan could be rebuilt in seven-storey garden courtyards was in reality the product not of the mathematical properties of the Fresnel Square, as one was encouraged to think, but of suppressing the cross streets and allocating their area to

Figure 3.4 Sir Leslie Martin shows how a slab – Portland House near Victoria Station, London – might be replaced by a courtyard

62

James Dunnett

Figure 3.5 The Martin model: Patrick Hodgkinson’s Foundling Estate in Bloomsbury, London 1967

Figure 3.6 Manhattan rebuilt in the form of courtyards, as proposed by Sir Leslie Martin

the gardens. This idea had been anticipated in Raymond Unwin’s essay Nothing Gained by Overcrowding of 1912, in which a group of terraced houses was compared to a looser group around a communal garden.15 Martin’s Speculation 6 deals with a very similar specific example in the case of a plot of ground the size of Parker’s Piece, a familiar open space in Cambridge (Figure 3.7). He showed that with a four-

Le Corbusier and the city without streets

63

Figure 3.7 Parker’s Piece in Cambridge, England, as it might be developed with terraced housing (left), or with perimeter blocks and schools in the centre (right) – comparison by Sir Leslie Martin and Lionel March, 1968

and-a-half-storey perimeter development overlooking a single central open area, a school, open space, and playing fields could be accommodated in addition to the housing, whilst a development of parallel two-storey terraced housing on the same site could accommodate little else.16 This attractive result in terms of open space, sympathetic to Corbusian ideals, was again due, apart from the modest increase in height and elimination of private gardens, to the saving in road space: nine per cent of the site is devoted to roadway in the case of the perimeter development, nearly 25 per cent in the case of the parallel terraces. These examples were influential, for example on linear projects such as Neave Browne’s Alexandra Road Estate in Camden of 1970 onwards and Richard McCormac’s Duffryn housing of 1978 which, however, tend to show that the extended unbroken lengths of low building resulting from this theory are difficult to manage architecturally. In relation specifically to Le Corbusier’s work, the fundamental question that seemed to require explanation was: if two-storey semi-detached housing could be built at 500 persons per hectare, as claimed by Lionel March, why was Le Corbusier achieving only 1,000 per hectare with about 17 storeys in the Radiant City? Analysis shows that March’s sensational claim was based on the fact that the ground over which his semi-detached houses would look out was not included in the site area for the purpose of density calculations. This is a quite different theoretical principle from the Fresnel Square or the economy in road length resulting from perimeter developments. His site comprised essentially only the ground occupied by the houses themselves and half the width of the roadway in front (Figure 3.8). March was quite explicit about this. He wrote: The matter of density is essentially a matter of how much or how little private open space a household is to have. The confusion of road, open space, and house plot areas in the general term ‘residential area’ disguises the fact that

64

James Dunnett

Figure 3.8 Lionel March’s diagram showing how semi-detached houses might be built at 200 persons to the acre (500 to the hectare), from ‘Homes Beyond the Fringe’, 1967. Plan FLC 14918 © FLC

less and less residential land is owned and maintained by the occupiers, and a growing amount of land is becoming public open space although not accounted as such. [My diagram] shows a group of semi-detached houses along a small farm road. The house stands with its back to a paddock and has a small flower border in front. The arrangement is typical of many pleasant cottage developments in the country. There is room for a car alongside the house. This is semi-detached living at 200 persons per acre.17 The key word here is ‘paddock’. It means that the land onto which the houses back directly is classified as agricultural land and is not included in the residential site area for the purposes of density calculations. The ‘outlook’ area of the houses is thus not included as part of the site when calculating the density. If the same principle is applied to the Radiant City, remarkably high densities are also achieved. Le Corbusier claims a density of 1,000 persons per hectare of residential land, and says that only 12 per cent of the ground surface is built over (see Figure 3.1). Calculation reveals that of this, ten per cent is covered by the residential, and two per cent by other uses, but that the areas devoted to roadway and parking are not included. A total of about 29 per cent of the ground surface is occupied by residential buildings, roadway and parking. If the remainder of the land is excluded from the residential site area for density calculations – as well it might be because it is occupied by football fields, schools, nurseries, tennis courts (all non-residential land-use classifications) – then the density becomes not 1,000 per hectare but 1,000 per 0.29 hectare, or 3,448 per hectare. This is some seven times the density of Lionel March’s semidetached houses which might readily be explained by the Radiant City having seven times as many storeys. This is simply to re-assert the commonsense expectation, which had seemed to be questioned, that if you build taller you get more people onto the

Le Corbusier and the city without streets

65

land. But this kind of super-density is only achieved statistically if the open space around the buildings is not included in the site area for the purposes of density calculation. It does, however, seem reasonable to exclude it provided it really is of a kind that can be used for another function. The ‘super-density’ is only achievable if the two distinct use classifications – housing/offices, and recreational/educational – are interwoven. In this case, it does achieve real economy on the use of land. Ministry of Housing and Local Government Circular 36/67, current at the time of March’s paper, stated that the density was to be found by ‘dividing the number of bed spaces by the site area in acres’. The site area was to include space occupied by dwellings, cars, private gardens, ‘small incidental open space such as drying yards and play areas’, and roads internal to the layout. But it should exclude ‘1: land proper for appropriation for public open space. 2: land used for all other types of development, e.g. schools’ (my emphases). On both these counts, 71 per cent of the ground area of the Radiant City should be excluded from the ‘site area’. The point is that if the blocks of the Vertical Garden City were built sufficiently far apart, then the spaces between them, rather than being ‘small incidental open spaces’ (included in the site area), would be large enough to be classified as ‘public open space’ (excluded from the residential site area), or used for alternative purposes such as playing fields, schools, and libraries. Furthermore, because the principal buildings of the Radiant City were to be raised on pilotis three storeys high, they would overlook lower structures of this kind. This is as we see them illustrated in Le Corbusier’s drawings (Figure 3.9). They can be compared to a development such as the Hallfield Estate in Paddington of 1948 by Lasdun and Tecton – very much influenced by the Radiant City ideal but at half the scale and without pilotis – where the spaces between the blocks, pleasant and well-treed though they are, are not large enough to be used for anything much beyond looking at (Figure 3.10). There is a paradox, however. If 71 per cent of the ground surface of the Radiant City was to be Public Open Space, its performance would be nearly optimal in terms of the LUBFS ‘Proximity to Open Space Indicator’ because the distance to reach any given area of Open Space would approach the radius of that area.18 But in terms of total area of Public Open Space per head of population the Radiant City would appear to have a serious deficiency. In the planning of the GLC’s proposed Hook New Town in the 1960s, for example, 16 acres or 6.4 hectares of public open space were to have been provided per 1,000 population, of which 2.4 hectares were to be sports fields in line with the recommendations of the National Playing Fields Association.19 In the Radiant City, however, only 0.71 hectares of public open space at most are shown as provided, of which no more than 0.5 hectares could be playing fields. Accessible and visible though it would be, the green space provided by the Radiant City would thus appear to be very limited in quantity in relation to the population – despite Le Corbusier’s claim to have designed a city for the Leisure Age. The shortfall in playing fields and open space could, however, arguably be easily made good outside the built-up city boundaries, at no great distance because of the City’s compactness. As designed, the Radiant City would indeed be compact. Of Le Corbusier’s three principal models of urban form, it alone provided that all housing and most

Figure 3.9 The Radiant City model applied to Antwerp: perspective view of anywhere in the residential quarter of Le Corbusier’s plan for the Left Bank of the Scheldt, 1933

Le Corbusier and the city without streets

67

Figure 3.10 The Corbusian model: the Hallfield Estate, Paddington, London, 1948, by Tecton, succeeded by Drake and Lasdun, 1948

employment would be high-rise: housing in linear blocks of 14 storeys, offices in ‘Cartesian’ skyscrapers of 70 storeys, and manufacture mostly in flatted factories of seven storeys. This intense use of the land, combined with the limited amount of open space and the extremely high residential density achieved by combining the housing with other land uses as described above, produced a city of remarkably compact dimensions. A comparison with the city of Cambridge for example, with a population of about 100,000, shows that the Radiant City occupies an area of similar overall dimensions with an apparent population of 1.5 million – some fifteen times larger (Figure 3.11). A planned ‘theoretical’ city can always seem very efficient in land use compared to one that has grown up haphazardly. Nevertheless, this does demonstrate the potential for very significant economies in the use of land, a demonstration which may well have relevance to those currently considering where and how to accommodate the extra 4 million homes considered to be needed in Britain. In fact, similar economies need to be found in all land uses, including industrial and commercial, because residential areas, as their density increases, play a decreasing part in a city’s total land take. Transport in the Radiant City The compactness of the Radiant City would not only save land but would also clearly help the transport problem. It would suit public transport, to which Le Corbusier devoted a considerable amount of detailed attention especially in his 1932 plan for Antwerp (closely modelled on the Radiant City), and it would also suit

68

James Dunnett

Figure 3.11 Le Corbusier’s Radiant City (right), population 1.5 million, and Cambridge, England (left), population 100,000, to the same scale

pedestrian traffic.20 But it was to the problem of how to accommodate the car that he devoted most energy, and the drawings of this aspect of the Radiant City are technically amongst the most impressive and intriguing. He seemed to have found a very comprehensive answer to this thorny problem. There was to be pedestrian segregation by level (pedestrians on the ground, vehicles in the air – not the other way round), grade-separation at all major vehicular crossings, widely-spaced limitedaccess dual-carriageway highways without any building frontages, and parking structures at every door. Local distribution would be on foot within the buildings. It was a solution that required a radical break from the traditional city street which combines vehicles, pedestrians, and building frontages in a single hard-surfaced channel. On the contrary, the city floor is green, crossed by a light network of elevated roads remote from the buildings (thus removed from the noise and fumes of traffic), and with the car apparently kept visually well under control. Why then has this not been achieved? Why does the environment in so many housing estates which reflect at least some Corbusian urban ideas, such as Stuyvesant Town in New York, tend to be dominated at ground level by cars and tarmac rather than greenery? And why did elevated motorways neither solve the urban transport problem nor in practice fit as neatly into the urban fabric as they seem to do on the plans of the Radiant City? The principal answer is that, as with Public Open Space, and despite the ideological importance Le Corbusier gave to accommodating the car and the ingenuity of his principles proposed for doing so, his plans actually make little provision for the car

Le Corbusier and the city without streets

69

numerically, even by the standards of the time. The small amount of space given to the car is, in fact, one factor contributing to the compactness of the city. In the text of the book The Radiant City, Le Corbusier writes of the office towers that their ‘four autoports provide parking for a thousand cars at the level of the bay itself, a thousand more on the ground beneath, and another thousand still in the auto-basement. Total 3,000 cars per skyscraper – far more than will be needed!’.21 Yet each skyscraper was to house up to 30,000 employees, which means that little more than 10 per cent could come to work by car – much less than was already normal in many places in the United States in 1932. Similarly, only about 150–200 parking spaces are shown at each apartment house, though these house 2,700 people each. At a modest rate of one car space per household, at least 1,000 spaces would be required. The road network does not appear to be totally adequate even for the number of cars envisaged. If all 42,000 cars for which parking is provided in the Business City of the Radiant City were to set off on the homeward journey in the hour between 5.30 and 6.30 p.m., they would require 30 traffic lanes at a typical current flow rate of 1,400 Passenger Car Units per hour, but only 15 lanes are provided in each direction. A system of reversing the direction of flow on some lanes might help – but there would be a further difficulty: the traffic flow per lane would in fact be much less than this because the cloverleaf intersections have very tight radii of curvature. My diagram shows Le Corbusier’s cloverleaf intersections for the Radiant City as compared with those recommended by the Ministry of Transport in Roads in Urban Areas (1967) for a turning speed of thirty miles an hour (Figure 3.12). His

Figure 3.12 A cloverleaf intersection as proposed by Le Corbusier for the Radiant City (left), with a radius of curvature on the loop roads of 10 metres, compared to the same scale with a cloverleaf as proposed by the British Ministry of Transport, 1966, with a curvature of 55 metres on the loops, to allow a turning speed of 25 mph

70

James Dunnett

cloverleaf intersections fit in well because they are much too small by current standards (though more typical of the few pre-war examples), and the parking is unobtrusive because there is not much of it. On the other hand, calculation of the office and industrial floorspace in the Radiant City suggests that considerably more is provided than necessary, thus also overstating the traffic generated. An industrial city with a population of 1.5 million (based on the amount of residential accommodation), is unlikely to need space for 420,000 office workers in addition to very substantial manufacturing and service employment, assuming an economic activity rate of about 45 per cent of the population as in the UK at present. Only six years later, after Le Corbusier’s visit to the United States in 1935 (sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art), his tone had changed when the scale of the motor car problem had really become apparent to him. He wrote of the Radiant City in the third volume of the Œuvre Complète: ‘The new city is compact – the transport problem solves itself. We learn to walk again – the motor car (there are 1.5 million of them in New York every day) is a malady, a cancer. It will be valuable at the weekend or even everyday to disport oneself amidst the tender verdure of nature, two steps away.’22 The tender verdure of nature was what Le Corbusier craved above all, and he thus came to value the car primarily as a means of reaching it. If easy pedestrian movement and public transport were the primary means of circulation, and the car was indeed used primarily for leisure purposes, it is conceivable that the scale of the provision for it could be as modest as in the Radiant City. The insistence on the omni-presence of nature is the distinguishing and perennial feature of Le Corbusier’s urban ideals and distinguishes them from those of many others of the time – from the Futurists’, and from Hilbersheimer’s lugubrious medievalism as much as from contemporary film images of the city of the future such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (Figure 3.13). Nature for him was not just greenery but also space, light and form – the desire to enter into a dialogue with the forms of the surrounding hills and mountains, which can be seen clearly and evocatively in the drawings for Chandigarh and St Dié, and experienced at the Unité at Marseilles. Though the demand for a green outlook was recognised by Leslie Martin, the dynamic and open relationship with nature and landscape envisaged by Le Corbusier is not one that was compatible with his proposed enclosed garden courtyards. In fact, the valuable principle of mathematical analysis established by Martin allows different conclusions from his own to be reached. The built form conception of the Radiant City can be shown to have achieved a high efficiency in land use. As regards transportation, it is arguable that the motorcar was allowed more influence in the design than was justified by the numerically small contribution it made to transport needs. But the principles by which Le Corbusier sought to deal with it, radically widening the spacing of the street grid, keeping the roads segregated from pedestrians (except in the case of certain ‘parades’), and remote from the buildings except at points of transfer, are widely accepted. Public transport and pedestrian movement were by no means disregarded, and the conditions were well suited to them. As a model of urban form, the Radiant City was potentially viable for a

Le Corbusier and the city without streets

71

Figure 3.13 A scene from Metropolis, the would-be architect Fritz Lang’s 1926 film, inspired by a visit to New York two years earlier. The ruling class lived in sun-dappled gardens above

community wishing to live in apartments in a green, cultured and highly serviced environment, with low car use. Those seeking to perpetuate the city broadly in the form that it exists today will have to find solutions to the environmental and transport problems addressed by Le Corbusier. Residential middle-class communities have indeed survived in the centres of the very largest contemporary conurbations where distant greenery is effectively beyond reach, kept there by the social, cultural, and economic facilities of the city. But the general desire for a green environment has been amply demonstrated at least in Northern Europe by the general move to the suburbs. Despite his love of nature, Le Corbusier was himself too dedicated to the cultural and productive role of the city based on close physical proximity to wish to abandon it. The Radiant City would make enjoyment of a green environment possible without exile from the facilities of the city.

72

James Dunnett

The ‘New York’ school Leslie Martin attempted to establish objective criteria of assessment, but the most common criticism of Le Corbusier’s urbanism is based on the subjective argument that, by opening up the city, by abolishing the sense of compression generated by the street, he was destroying the essence and excitement of urban life. I have called this the ‘New York school’ (though it is widespread) because Jane Jacobs, in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities of 1961, was one of the first and most effective exponents of it, whilst one of the most recent – the one I wish to deal with here – has been Rem Koolhaas, in his book Delirious New York of 1978.23 It is a criticism that prefers chance to order and sound to silence. I argued in The Architecture of Silence that Le Corbusier’s vision of the city was as a place of meditation, of cultural creativity inspired by the example of Cubist art which was both highly urban and which he saw as ‘meditative’. He wrote in The Four Routes: Many years ago I threw into the confused discussion of styles, fashions, snobberies, this argument which was a ‘knock out’: ‘the house is a machine for living-in’. A thousand staves have been produced to beat me with for having dared that utterance. But when I say ‘living’ I am not talking of mere material requirements only. I admit certain important extensions which must crown the edifice of man’s daily needs. To be able to think, or meditate, after the day’s work is essential. But in order to become a centre of creative thought, the home must take on an entirely new character. And that necessitates for its realisation a change in the entire layout of the city, a new arrangement of transport, a new and daring concept of space relationships, a new method of construction for human habitation.24 And in The Radiant City: To a healthy body, to a mind kept in a continual state of optimism by daily physical exercise, the city if the right measures are taken can also provide healthy mental activity. This would take two forms: first, meditation in a new kind of dwelling, a vessel of silence and lofty solitude, secondly, civic activity achieved by the harmonious grouping of creative impulses towards the public good.25 The contact with nature would in itself contribute to this end because, he wrote to the Russian architect Moisei Ginsburg ‘Intimacy with nature (radiant spring, winter storms) is a stimulus to meditation, to introspection’.26 Meditation requires calm and serenity, ‘lofty solitude’ and ‘nature’, and to see that these might be compatible with urban life was perhaps Le Corbusier’s most significant contribution to town planning. One of the ways he sought to provide for them was by opening up the city with taller and more widely spaced buildings, offering a sense of distance and space. The Radiant City might be described as ‘the only city where you can be alone with nature’. In this light he had long presented

Le Corbusier and the city without streets

73

Figure 3.14 Hugh Ferris’ proposed translation of New York light angle codes into built form, from his 1929 book Metropolis of Tomorrow, as reproduced with horror by Le Corbusier in The Radiant City, 1933, and with enthusiasm by Rem Koolhaas in Delirious New York, 1978

New York as the antithesis of what he sought to achieve: an illustration of Broadway and the Flatiron Building in his book The City of Tomorrow of 1925 is captioned ‘Here is the exact opposite of what the Voisin scheme proposes for Paris.27 He presented New York as the chaotic, exploitative, inhuman ‘city of hard labour’. He opposed the bristling skyline and density of Manhattan to the calm and spacious openness of his City of Three Million with its horizontal roofline. The zigguratical configuration of American skyscrapers of the time, stepped back at the summit in accordance with statutory light angles, he dubbed ‘The City of Panic’, and the renderings of them by Hugh Ferriss illustrated ‘Tumult, bristling chaos, the first explosive state of a new medievalism’ (Figure 3.14). When Le Corbusier actually visited New York, he found things to like – such as the Avenues running north-south along Manhattan for nearly fifteen kilometres in a straight line, the banks of elevators and automatic doors in the Rockefeller Center, and the Renaissance-style skyscrapers which, with conscious paradox, he found to be of much better quality than the Art Deco ones: In New York then, I learn to appreciate the Italian Renaissance. The oldest skyscrapers of Wall Street add the superimposed orders of Bramante all the way up to the top with a clearness of moulding and proportion which delights me.28 When he was appointed onto the advisory committee for the design of the UN headquarters on the East River in 1947, he saw it as his opportunity to introduce his own spatial conception to New York. There is little doubt that the UN building as executed is based on his concept, though not realised by him in detail, and it may be considered the nearest he came to realising his ideas for the modern Western city.29 The experience of emerging from the dark chasm of 42nd Street onto the light and openness of the UN Plaza is a stunning experience for those who understand his intention. The proposed second office slab at right angles to the first, had it been built as intended, would have articulated the space even more dramatically. He captioned an aerial rendering of the UN complex in its surroundings (by Ferriss) as ‘The first appearance of the ‘Ville Radieuse’ in the urban fabric of Manhattan’,

Figure 3.15 The United Nations Headquarters in its context, rendering by Hugh Ferris reproduced in Le Corbusier’s Complete Works 1938–46, with the caption ‘First appearance of the Radiant City in the urban fabric of Manhattan’

Le Corbusier and the city without streets

75

and a silhouette of it as the ‘Appearance of a Cartesian skyscraper in the New York sky’ (Figure 3.15)30. Well-maintained as it is, beautifully landscaped, and competently detailed by the executive architects Harrison and Abramowitz, it is a convincing demonstration of the principles illustrated in his sketch of the Rio ‘Alternatives’, on a larger scale and, finally, on a water-front site (Figure 3.3). He created offices that were indeed ‘vessels of silence and lofty solitude’. This aspiration to calm and space, however, is to Rem Koolhaas the antithesis of the city. His book Delirious New York is an extended rejection of Le Corbusier’s objectives for the city and an attack on the UN building. It is precisely the dense, bristling, congested New York of 42nd Street, which he terms ‘delirious’ (borrowing the dubious phraseology of Salvador Dalí), that he extols. His book is a ‘Blueprint for the Culture of Congestion’ and a ‘Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattanism’. Even the end-papers of the 1994 edition of the book present as quintessential opposites a typical area of the New York street grid at the front, and the UN Plaza at the back. Koolhaas lauds the romantic–expressionist imagery of Hugh Ferriss decried by Le Corbusier, and the focal ideal of his book is the dense Rockefeller Center of 1930 onwards (by Raymond Hood and others). He wrote of Le Corbusier’s ‘Cartesian’ skyscraper that it: means business only. Its lack of a base (no place for a Murray’s) and a top (no seductive claims of competing realities), the merciless overexposure to the sun implied by the thin cruciform of its plan, all preclude occupation by any of the forms of social intercourse that have begun to invade Manhattan, floor by floor. [Le Corbusier] introduces honesty on such a scale that it exists only at the price of total banality. The glass walls of the Horizontal Skyscraper enclose a complete cultural void. In designing the Cartesian Skyscraper as universal accommodation for business, to the exclusion of those indefinable emotional services that have been built into the Ferrissian Mountain, Le Corbusier has been the credulous victim of the pragmatic fairy tales of Manhattan’s builders. But his real intention in the Radiant City is even more destructive: to really solve the problems of congestion. Marooned in grass, his Cartesian convicts are lined up 400 meters apart (i.e. eight Manhattan blocks – about the distance between Hood’s super-peaks but with nothing in between). They are spaced out beyond any possible association. The dullness of Le Corbusier’s urbanism has never been more ruthlessly exposed than in the modest renderings [of the UN building] by Manhattanism’s automatic pilot [i.e. Ferriss].31 There are several points here open to question. On one not unimportant detail, Le Corbusier’s Cartesian Skyscrapers would not, at 400 metres, be eight Manhattan blocks apart, but two or five blocks apart depending on orientation: Manhattan blocks are typically 213 ⫻ 81 metres (700 ⫻ 266 feet) including roadway. It is also incorrect to say that Le Corbusier envisaged no facilities for social life in his office skyscrapers beyond their business function. He painted this romantic picture of life

76

James Dunnett

in the City of Three Million in his article ‘The Street’, first published in the newspaper L’Intransigeant in 1928: In the new business centre office work will be performed, not in the persistent dimness of joyless streets, but in the fullness of daylight and an abundance of fresh air. Its 400,000 clerks will be able to scan a landscape such as that one looks down on from the lofty crests above the Seine near Rouen and behold a serried mass of trees swaying beneath them. When night intervenes the passage of cars along the autostrada traces luminous tracks that are like the tails of meteors flashing across the summer heavens. Two hundred metres above it lie the spacious roof-gardens of these office skyscrapers, planted with spindleberries, thuyas, laurels, and ivy. Overhead electric lamps shed a peaceful radiance. The depth of the night makes the prevailing calmness but the deeper. Armchairs are scattered about. There are groups in conversation, bands playing, couples dancing. And all around are the suspended golden disks of other gardens floating at the same level. The offices are in darkness, their façades obscured; the city seems to sleep.32 Le Corbusier was not quite the Puritan Koolhaas imagines. He was a sensualist, as study of his figurative work as artist (if of nothing else) must reveal. A more fundamental question is whether there would be ‘nothing’ between Le Corbusier’s office skyscrapers, as Koolhaas avers. The image of the ground surface between the tall buildings presented in Le Corbusier’s drawings, and visible in the part model of the Radiant City illustrated in the book, is remote from the blank and featureless spaces with which we are familiar in countless high rise housing estates. The ‘open space’ as illustrated is replete with the ancillary functions and facilities of urban life, sporting, educational, and recreational – quite apart from its luxuriant vegetation. A particularly well-known drawing shows tiered structures in the parkland with restaurants and luxury shops opening onto terraces overlooking the skyscrapers (Figure 3.16). The parkland could be open and public – or, like the garden squares of London, railed off and private to the blocks traversing it, as explained in The City of Tomorrow.33 What interested him was the presence of greenery and space, rather than the nature of its ownership. There is no question, however, but that the quality and quantity of the planting and its maintenance at ground level would be as critical to the environment of the Vertical Garden City as to the horizontal, and that it is neglect of this factor that has so often undermined attempts to realise the idea. The nature of the ‘Open Space’, the space between the principal buildings, is thus a key question both in the assessment of the Radiant City in relation to Cambridge land use criteria and to the New York criticism of the ‘sterility’ of his urbanism. If this space is, in fact, such that it can be used for a definite purpose, it can permit enormous economies in the use of land. At the same time, if it has a use it will not be ‘sterile’ but a cared for and valued part of the urban fabric. Its ability to accommodate these secondary uses seems dependent, as discussed above in relation to the ‘Cambridge’ school, on its being of a sufficient scale to do so without

Le Corbusier and the city without streets

77

Figure 3.16 ‘A Contemporary City’ – rendering by Le Corbusier of his Plan Voisin for Paris, 1925, based on his earlier City of Three Million. Plan FLC 31910 © FLC

interfering with the primary functions around it. It should also be recognised, however, that space and greenery are ‘in use’ even when they are only gazed at: they provide the relief and calm which the human eye craves. It is this relief and calm of which Koolhaas sees no need. He prefers the ‘congestion’ of the New York street grid. Congestion, however, is a literary rather than a visual value. It is a value of which Le Corbusier was far from unaware but which he rejected through conscious choice. Earlier in his article ‘The Street’, Le Corbusier had made clear his understanding of the drama of street life (as though we might have doubted this in the disciple of Camillo Sitte that he had been), and his decision to reject it: The street consists of a thousand different buildings, but we have got used to the beauty of ugliness for that has meant making the best of our misfortune. Those thousand houses are dingy and utterly discordant with one another. It is appalling, but we pass on our way. On Sundays, when they are empty, the streets reveal their full horror. But except during those dismal hours men and women are elbowing their way along them, the shops ablaze, and every aspect of human life pullulates throughout their length. Those who have eyes in their heads can find plenty to amuse them in this sea of lusts and faces. It is better than the theatre, better than what we read in novels. Nothing of all this exalts us with the joy that architecture provokes. There is neither the pride which results from order, nor the spirit of initiative which is engendered by wide spaces . . .34

78

James Dunnett

After further decrying those of a ‘Balzacian mentality’ who would be content to leave our streets as they are because these murky canyons offer them the fascinating spectacle of human physiognomy’, he opens his description of his own City of Three Million with the words ‘I should like to draw a picture of “the street” as it would appear in a truly up-to-date city’. He has rejected the ‘sea of lusts and faces’ in favour of ‘the pride which results from order (and the) spirit of initiative which is engendered by wide spaces’. Le Corbusier’s choice was a conscious rather than a blind one, and it is one we have to understand if we are to criticise it effectively. Koolhaas’ perception of Le Corbusier’s urbanism as ‘dull’ reflects a failure to recognise the drama of space and potential for the play of form, and play of light on form, with which he proposed to replace the drama of the street. The interaction between landscape and city, which Le Corbusier envisaged, is incompatible with the continuation of the Street as the central organising principle of the city. The solution he envisaged to urban transport, which may be right in principle if wrong in quantity, is also incompatible with the continuation of the Street. The Street is therefore the battleground, whose re-discovery or re-establishment (since it was called into question by the Modern Movement) is the staple of ‘urban design groups’, and which is now the orthodoxy entrenched in the UK planning control system. In the 1960s Leslie Martin sought to re-establish the Street between the backs of his stepped section courtyards. In the 1970s, Norman Foster made his name at Ipswich by re-establishing the street line around his Willis Faber Dumas building, albeit with a reflective glass façade. In the 1980s, James Stirling’s Mansion House Square office building in the City of London, filling its site and re-asserting the street, supplanted Mies van der Rohe’s free-standing tower. But the disadvantages of the ‘corridor street’ against which Le Corbusier inveighed, a channel for pedestrians and vehicles between walls of masonry, can still be experienced all too clearly in the principal thoroughfares of London today, as of most western cities. If the city is to attract those who have a choice, it is going to have to offer them the conditions of greenery and calm and space – and easy mobility – which the present street and urban environment denies them but which, at least in northern Europe, they seek by going out to the suburbs. We must create the city to live in, though we may enjoy visiting for short periods the tumultuous cores of our cities as they are. The ideal of space, calm and verdure in the city is not tied to Corbusian or even Modern Movement architectural forms or technical solutions – though it may be inspired by them. At root, it is an expression of a scale of architectural values and priorities. That past attempts to realise it have very often been unsuccessful no one would deny. As an objective it can seem paradoxical, even destructive of the city. Yet the search for a new idea of the city in which it can find a place must go on. For, in whatever form, the choice for the future must surely be the City of Contemplation rather than the City of Delirium. Acknowledgement The permission of the Fondation Le Corbusier to reproduce images by Le Corbusier is gratefully acknowledged.

Le Corbusier and the city without streets

79

Notes 1 Le Corbusier: The City of Tomorrow (3rd English edn London: Architectural Press 1971) p.133. Original publication under the title Urbanisme (Paris: Editions Crè 1925; repr. Paris: Vincent Fréal 1960; first English edn London: Rodker 1929). 2 Le Corbusier: The City of Tomorrow Part II. 3 Le Corbusier: The Radiant City (London 1967; London: Faber and Faber 1957). Original publication under the title La Ville Radieuse (Boulogne-sur-Seine: Editions de L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 1935; repr. Paris: Vincent Fréal 1964). 4 Le Corbusier: The Four Routes (London: Dennis Dobson 1947). Original publication under the title Sur Les Quatres Routes (Paris: Gallimard 1941). 5 Le Corbusier: Towards A New Architecture (London: Rodker 1927). Original publication under the title Vers une Architecture (Paris 1923). 6 Leslie Martin: Architectural Design (July 1959). 7 Walter Gropius: The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (London 1935) pp.104–5. 8 Leslie Martin and Lionel March (eds): ‘Speculation 4’ (Martin & March 1966)’ in Urban Space and Structures (Cambridge 1972) p.37. 9 Martin and March (eds): ‘The Grid as Generator’ Urban Space and Structures p.22. 10 Le Corbusier: Œuvre Complète 1934–38 (London 1964; first publ. 1939) p.81. 11 For further explanation of the Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro see Thomas Deckker: Brasília: City vs. Landscape pp.168–70. 12 Leslie Martin: ‘Sir Leslie Martin: Architects’ Approach to Architecture’ RIBAJ (May 1967) pp.191–200. 13 Martin and March (eds): Urban Space and Structures p.22. 14 Lionel March: ‘Homes Beyond the Fringe’ RIBAJ (August 1967) pp.334–7. 15 Raymond Unwin: ‘Nothing Gained by Overcrowding’ (1912) in W.L. Creese (ed.) The Legacy of Raymond Unwin: A Human Pattern for Planning (Cambridge, Mass. 1967). 16 Martin and March (eds): Urban Space and Structures p.40. 17 March: ‘Homes Beyond the Fringe’. 18 Marcial Echenique, D. Crowther, and W. Lindsay: ‘A structural comparison of three generations of New Towns’ in Martin and March (eds): Urban Space and Structures pp.219–59. 19 London County Council: The Planning of a New Town: Data and Design Based on a Study for a New Town of 100,000 at Hook Hampshire (London 1961). 20 Le Corbusier: The Radiant City pp.270–87. 21 Le Corbusier: The Radiant City p.132. 22 Le Corbusier: Œuvre Complète 1934–38 p.21. 23 Rem Koolhaas: Delirious New York (1st published 1978; new edn Rotterdam: 010 1994). 24 Le Corbusier: The Four Routes p.161. 25 Le Corbusier: The Radiant City p.67. 26 Letter dated 17 March 1930 in Le Corbusier: Précisions sur un état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (Paris: Editions Crè 1930) p.268. 27 Le Corbusier: The City of Tomorrow p.288. 28 Le Corbusier: When the Cathedrals Were White (London 1947; first publ. Quand les Cathédrales etaient Blanche Paris: Plon) p.59. 29 Victoria Newhouse: Wallace K. Harrison, Architect (New York: Rizzoli 1989) p.125. 30 Le Corbusier Œuvre Complète 1938–46, Zurich 1964, pp.196–7. 31 Koolhaas: Delirious New York pp.255–7 and p.281. 32 Le Corbusier: ‘The Street’ in Œuvre Complète 1910–29 pp.118–19; reprinted from L’Intransigeant (May 1929). 33 Le Corbusier: The City of Tomorrow pp.228–9. 34 Le Corbusier: ‘The Street’.

4 Towards the functional city? MARS, CIAM and the London plans, 1933–421 John Gold The English are town-birds through and through today as the inevitable result of their complete industrialisation. Yet they don’t know how to build a city, how to think of one, or how to live in one. They are all suburban, pseudo-cottagy, and not one of them knows how to be truly urban. D.H. Lawrence2 Introduction In June 1942, the Town Planning Committee of the Modern Architectural Research (MARS) Group published its ‘Master Plan for London’ in the Architectural Review.3 In many respects, there was little unusual about this event. The early 1940s saw the publication of many articles and reports on post-war planning and reconstruction, with London often the prime focus.4 While provincial cities also sustained severe losses from aerial bombardment and had infrastructures that were becoming rundown through lack of investment, London’s size and stature meant that its problems were of a different order of magnitude. Even before the war, concern about the insanitary and squalid condition of huge swatches of housing in the east and southeast of the city had prompted the beginnings of large-scale clearance programmes. There had also been growing pressure for improvement of London’s congested road networks,5 for curbing the city’s centrifugal tendencies,6 and for comprehensive systems of planning.7 Given the added stimulus of imminent post-war reconstruction, many privately-sponsored organisations and committees were now eagerly working on plans that might advance their particular visions for the future London.8 Most of this effort is long forgotten, but the 1942 MARS Plan has continued to intrigue historians.9 Its best known element, a striking image of a linear city with spines of residential development located north and south of a central transport corridor (Figure 4.1), has been regularly reprinted in commentaries on the development of British planning and reconstruction. It is also frequently cited as representing the uncompromising visionary stance said to have characterised the thinking of the inter-war Modern Movement towards the future city. Yet this plan is almost always presented as a discrete exercise. There is rarely any sense that it was the culmination of a discontinuous series of separate exercises and was shaped, directly and indirectly, by different authors with varying views and intentions.

Towards the functional city?

81

Figure 4.1 Master plan for London, 1942, from Arthur Korn and Felix J. Samuely: ‘A Master Plan for London’ Architectural Review 91 (1942) p.150

This chapter sets out to trace and interpret its distinctive history. It contains seven sections. It opens by providing essential context about the town planning ideas of the MARS Group by examining its close connections with the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and its fourth Congress (known as CIAM IV). The next four sections trace how the MARS Group gradually moved beyond analysis to synthesis. They chart the development of a linear city plan presented at CIAM V in Paris (1937), a scheme for a nested hierarchy of social units devised in 1938, and finally the 1942 Plan (elements of which, however, were not published until 1944). The penultimate section discusses immediate and lasting reactions to the MARS Plan, reflecting on the intentions of its main authors. The conclusion draws on the material presented here to challenge the widely-held view that there was an international consensus among early modernists about principles of urban planning and reconstruction. It also emphasises the importance of recognising the experimental and pluralistic nature of early modernist thought on the subject of the future city. MARS and CIAM From its inception, the MARS Group enjoyed close links with the international Modern Movement generally and with CIAM in particular.10 The Secretary-General of CIAM, Sigfried Giedion, had indirectly promoted the foundation of the MARS Group through his approaches to P. Morton Shand and subsequently Wells Coates

82

John Gold

to find British representatives for CIAM meetings. These approaches provided Coates and three other founding members of MARS (Maxwell Fry, Shand and David Pleydell-Bouverie) with the credentials to propose the establishment of a new architectural grouping. Moreover, when formed in February 1933, the Group’s principles of association were consciously derived from CIAM’s own statutes. Not surprisingly, therefore, MARS was immediately accredited on its formation as the official British delegation to CIAM.11 This status had a material impact on the group’s activities. Although only a small core of members participated in CIAM’s infrequent Congresses or meetings of its ruling council, the Comité International pour la Réalisation des Problèmes de l’Architecture Contemporaine (CIRPAC),12 the MARS Group was strongly influenced by CIAM’s agenda. In 1933, that agenda was firmly focused on preparations for CIAM IV.13 Originally scheduled for Moscow in 1932, the fourth Congress was now to be held between 29 July–14 August 1933 on a ship, the SS ‘Patris II’, cruising between Marseilles and Athens with an eight-day stop-over in the Greek capital. CIAM IV aimed to consolidate the organisation’s interests in the urban scale and town planning issues after earlier Congresses at Frankfurt (1929) and Brussels (1930) had dealt primarily with housing. As a result, it took the theme of the ‘Functional City’, although quite what was meant by that, or by the notion of ‘functionalism’ to which it alluded, was open to debate.14 In practice, however, such debate could be sidestepped since member organisations did not need to subscribe to any common philosophy of the relationship between function and form; they were merely asked to use a standard typology of urban functions when preparing their exhibits. This typology stemmed from the deliberations of the first Congress of CIAM, held at La Sarraz in Switzerland in 1928. It saw the workings of the city as comprising three key functional elements – dwelling, work and leisure – connected by a fourth – circulation (transport and communications). Member organisations were asked to use this classification when collecting information about a major city (or cities) in their home nations, supplying evidence in both written form, in response to the sections of a questionnaire, and in maps.15 With only a short time available to prepare their exhibits, the MARS Group quickly compiled an analysis of London, their home base, comprising written material on the city’s historical development and future growth patterns, along with nine transport maps and a large general map of London and its region. The finished products were exhibited in Athens and discussed in the shipboard discussions on the SS ‘Patris II’.16 The details of that display lie beyond the scope of this essay, but it is worth highlighting two elements arising from work for CIAM IV that persisted in other projects subsequently undertaken by the MARS Group. The first, as the ensuing sections show, was a lasting engagement with the specific problems of London and the possible solution of those problems through comprehensive or ‘master’ planning. The second was a general approach to town planning, partly based on the Geddesian sequence of survey-analysis-plan,17 but with each stage constrained by the predetermined functional approach. Survey and analysis, for example, were predicated on the requirements of looking for and mapping data

Towards the functional city?

83

that fitted the four functional categories and reporting the general features of needs and wants which that data revealed. That, in turn, would inevitably influence the shape of any broader principles that might emerge from the resulting plan. The first London Plan Extended discussions followed in MARS meetings to decide how things might proceed after the positive start made at CIAM IV. A project to devise a ‘general housing scheme’ for the London borough of Bethnal Green, initially for an exhibition held in September 1934, foundered for want of agreement about design ideas and intentions.18 Further activities connected with CIAM meetings failed to yield much more. The MARS representatives at CIAM IV had agreed to lead an international study of housing and planning legislation, but when asked to contribute a section on ‘Housing Legislation’ to the CIRPAC meeting in Amsterdam (June 1935), they were only able to re-display the London map produced for CIAM IV.19 Reporting back after that meeting, Fry noted dryly that ‘delegates felt that the English group had put in very little actual work except the proposed work on legislation which had not yet been started.’20 Only the approach of CIAM V in 1937 rekindled substantive discussion on town planning issues. While there remained a commitment to organise a contribution on ‘Housing Legislation’ for CIAM V, it was eventually realised that this would not be forthcoming.21 The report of the MARS Group’s Annual General Meeting in February 1937, for instance, stated that Fry had informed CIAM’s Executive Committee that ‘all work from the English Group would be limited as all efforts were being concentrated on (their 1938) Exhibition’.22 In the absence of any alternative, it was suggested that the endeavours of the MARS Group’s Town Planning Committee could be adopted as its contribution to CIAM V to be held in Paris (September 1937). This Committee, established in late 1935, then consisted of just three individuals: the chairman, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, and the husband and wife team of William and Aileen Tatton Brown. They had, however, been exploring the potential of linear city principles – a prototype of urban development that envisaged future cities as being arranged in corridors along the routes of high-speed transport lines. Although they had not yet produced any definitive schemes, they agreed to prepare a report for CIAM V that offered some idea of their thinking. Their report, entitled ‘The Theory of Contacts’ and its application to the Future of London, had three main sections.23 The opening part analysed London’s problems, including its deteriorating physical fabric and the stresses caused by demographic growth, suburbanisation and changes in the industrial structure. Emphasis was placed on the implications of a projected doubling in car ownership from 1.5 to 3 million between 1935–50. The second section discussed the lack of comprehensive powers and direction in the contemporary planning system and the limitations of other initiatives intended to improve matters – such as Garden Cities, Trystan Edwards’ campaign for ‘A Hundred New Towns’,24 and the strangulation that Green Belts imposed on metropolitan growth. The third section set out the alternative approach. This began with a ‘theory of contacts’. It was argued that existing

84

John Gold

proposals for planning the future city paid insufficient attention to the need for contacts between people. Functionally, cities could be viewed as centres that facilitated human contacts (or transactions) of all types – whether intellectual, social or commercial, but this meant more than just efficient communication. Contacts were the root of social harmony, with the city’s effectiveness depending on both the quality and quantity of the contacts that it provided. Not surprisingly, transport occupied prime position in determining how well the future city would maximise the potential for effective and harmonious contacts. For discussion purposes, the plan divided trips into four categories: pedestrian movement (below 10 kilometres per hour), local traffic (up to 100 km/hr), rapid highway traffic (more than 100 km/hour), and air travel. Each form of movement placed different demands on the transport system, which in turn had implications for urban form. Figure 4.2 applied these principles to planning the future London.25 Growth for 15 years to 1950 would be channelled into 13 designated corridors that would radiate into the surrounding countryside. These sought to convert the dynamic that caused unplanned ribbon development into the precursors of a new urban form. Factories for expanding industries or for forms decentralising from London were positioned in planned cells of development along the linear strips, where the highspeed road arteries would give easy access to the metropolitan and national economies. Residential areas were sited near the spinal roads, but would be separated from them by screening earthworks and by placing the through-routes at sunken levels. There would be multi-level intersections at one-mile intervals, frequent enough to provide access for traffic destined for, or leaving, the residential areas but not so frequent as to impede the flow of through traffic. An important innovation adopted when designing the residential areas was the ‘neighbourhood unit’– a physical planning concept that co-ordinated provision of housing and service facilities and which purported to offer a basic building block for urban development.26 Figure 4.3 shows a design for a one-mile long neighbourhood unit intended to supply homes, amenities and a substantial part of the employment for a population of 3,340. Dwellings comprised 380 conventional houses and 480 flats. As seen in Figure 3, the houses situated along the sinuous distribution road consisted of both larger villas and modern, continuous row housing, with an average density of 12.5 houses per hectare. The flats were clustered around the neighbourhood centre and comprised eight multi-storey blocks, each of 60 flats, with a double-cruciform plan reminiscent of Tecton’s design for the newly-opened Highpoint One.27 Social and retail services for the community, as well as premises for the factories and offices, were also situated in the central area. A neighbourhood unit of this size would have sufficient children to justify two schools, (each to take 400 pupils), with the schools placed at half-mile intervals in the interstices between the loops of the distribution road. Everyone would enjoy ready access to playing fields and open countryside by virtue of the wedges of protected land adjacent to the neighbourhood unit. The plan also offered insight into how individual neighbourhood units might aggregate into fully-formed linear strips. Figure 4.4 shows how ten neighbourhood units could be assembled to provide homes and employment for approximately

Figure 4.2 Projected development of the linear strips, 1935–50, personal papers, W.E. Tatton Brown

86

John Gold

Figure 4.3 One mile unit (neighbourhood unit), personal papers, W.E. Tatton Brown

30,000 people. The units here are connected laterally along the line of the throughroad and form mirror-images of each other on either side of that road, albeit without any suggestion of how services and amenities that required a higher population threshold might be accommodated. At first glance, the 1937 plan might be said to share an pernicious characteristic that many modernists laid at the door of the Garden City movement, namely: supplying a vision of how to build new settlements on green-field sites beyond the urban fringe while saying little about the existing metropolis. Against this, it was stressed that in the longer-term the creation of linear strips was intended to transform the entire city region. Although the report was presented in terms of preventing the further expansion of the built-up area of London and planning for new growth by decentralising population and industry, it was hinted that any redevelopment of the metropolitan area might extend the linear city corridors inwards towards the core. This, in turn, might extend the wedges of green space. As William Tatton Brown explained: ‘Development would have taken place naturally along these axes, with people leaving the slums and moving out to these new nodes. You

Figure 4.4 Example of a linear strip, personal papers, W.E. Tatton Brown

Towards the functional city?

87

could then drive green wedges of countryside into the heart of London as opposed to the constriction improved by a green belt’.28 Seen in retrospect, the 1937 plan was an innovative undertaking that offered efficient road transport arteries, new relationships between housing and open space, and a pioneering attempt to develop neighbourhood units in a British context. At the same time, various aspects of its demographic and social structure were at best tentatively formulated. There was no formal explanation of why such neighbourhoods would operate with a much lower population size (3,340) than the norm of 5,000–10,000 figure employed elsewhere, nor how the varying housing provision would relate to the social structure. The provision of schools for 800 pupils would suggest the unlikely situation where almost 25 per cent of the population would be aged between 5–14 years. Moreover, its unusual mixture of flatted accommodation and conventional housing did not appeal to many other members of the MARS Group, for whom the plan smacked too much of compromise with the established order. As Fry noted: ‘houses-with-gardens had no place then in our view of the future.’29 Social units The palpable sense of distance between the ideas put forward in this plan and the general views of MARS members influenced further development of the London project. It may have been expedient to use the 1937 plan when there was no alternative but within the MARS Group it was regarded as no more than a provisional basis for future research.30 That research came from a reconvened Town Planning Committee, which met in December 1937 with a new and enlarged membership.31 Writing to the MARS Group’s Central Executive Committee in February 1938, the Town Planning Committee’s chairman, Arthur Korn, stated that his colleagues were working on a new plan for London.32 The letter also mentioned many features that would appear in the final product – CIAM’s four-fold typology of urban functions, a preference for flats, attention to mass transport and allusion to the idea of the linear city. Nevertheless, the letter stressed that much research was necessary before arriving at a final synthesis. Some indication of the problems encountered in arriving at that synthesis was indicated in a letter from the Committee’s previous chairman, William Tatton Brown, to José Luis Sert in August 1938: Tomorrow I lunch with Quorn [sic] . . . I am having a big fight with the English group [of CIAM] on the scheme for London. It is very “woolly” at the moment and the arguments are a trifle fruitless – as each one makes a different set of assumptions such as the following: 1 The Thames is diverted. 2 The existing railways do not exist and can be moved where we like. 3 Everyone travels to work on the L.T.P.B. (Public Transport). 4 Everyone travels to work in his own car. 5 Everyone lives within direct communication with his work.

88

John Gold 6 No private cars are allowed near the centre. According to one set of assumptions – the core of the town should be a park – according to another – a railway terminus. It just depends on the assumption! I think that the scheme should start from a little closer analysis of the existing conditions . . .’33

Apparently the lunch did not go well. Later the same month, Tatton Brown wrote again, reporting that he and his wife were having ‘tremendous battles’ with Korn and Samuely in trying to win them away from their particular conception of linear city planning and its dependence on railways. He added optimistically that it ‘is a long and painful business but we will succeed in the end. I think’.34 His optimism was misplaced. The Tatton Browns remained part of the group that discussed the new London Plan, but they regarded the new emphasis on railways rather than roads as being retrograde and decided to develop their ideas about the car and the street separately.35 The emerging plan would involve a new group of MARS members, owing most to the contribution of Arthur Korn and Arthur Ling. As chairman, Korn supplied an infectious enthusiasm that drove the project forward. He was respected both for his standing in the continental European Modern Movement36 and his general grasp of town planning matters. Arthur Ling, the Committee’s Secretary in 1937–8, provided the conceptual framework for the 1942 plan. Ling had recently completed a Town Planning Diploma thesis at the Bartlett School (University College London) under the supervision of Professor Patrick Abercrombie that surveyed current thinking on the structure of neighbourhoods and cities.37 Its key innovation was to propose a hierarchical arrangement of urban ‘social units’ that could be fitted together in a coherent and orderly manner. His hierarchy contained five levels: residential units of 1,000 people, neighbourhood units (6,000), town or borough units (50,000), city or regional units (500,000) and the capital city (5 million). Ling had shown Korn this scheme as a possible contribution to discussion on the social and administrative structure of a future London. For his part, Korn endorsed the conceptual value of this schema of social units but asked Ling to modify his design to make flats the sole form of residential accommodation rather than a mixture of flats and houses-with-gardens. Ling noted that while this change made the task of draughtsmanship easier, it eroded the plausibility of the resulting plan, taking ‘the schemes still further away from the reality of London and the human needs of its people’.38 Nevertheless, he agreed to the request in order to assist the plan-making exercise. A set of drawings, accompanied by explanatory notes, were delivered to the Town Planning Committee in mid-1938. In many respects, they stemmed from a different tradition from that of the 1937 plan. Their starting point was a historic and comparative analysis of the structure of neighbourhoods and cities rather than an emphasis on transport; recognising the varying thresholds required for different services and the need to tie service provision to access for residents.39 Ling stressed that the exact relationships between any of the levels in his hierarchy depended on local conditions. The idealised forms expressed in these diagrams were simply intended to illustrate a set of principles.40 Nevertheless, the ease with which his hierarchical

Towards the functional city?

89

Figure 4.5 Neighbourhood unit, personal papers, Professor A.G. Ling

scheme could be included in a linear city plan allowed it to be accepted as the one of the foundations of the new MARS plan. Figure 4.5, for example, depicts the resulting design of a specimen neighbourhood unit, with its component residential units. The projected size of the neighbourhood units (6,000) was larger than in the 1937 plan and much more in keeping with the norm employed elsewhere. The design of the blocks of flats was influenced by Le Corbusier’s notion of the unité d’habitation, with the layout of the flats reflecting the Zeilenbau pattern.41 The residential units themselves fitted together in a cellular structure arranged around a central corridor in which were placed the educational and community services for the neighbourhood. Traffic within the residential units would be solely for access, while traffic within the wider neighbourhood units would be purely local. Through-traffic was kept to the outside margins. Moving up the hierarchy, eight neighbourhood units would constitute a borough unit. As shown in Figure 4.6, a borough unit comprised four neighbourhood units laid out north and four south of a corridor that contained civic amenities, sports facilities and parkland. The borough unit was bounded by through-roads, with connecting routes at regular intervals.

90

John Gold

Figure 4.6 Diagrammatic key to Ling’s urban hierarchy, personal papers, Professor A.G. Ling

Preparations Even with this framework, it was decided that more research was needed on the state of contemporary London, with reports being prepared on dwelling, work, leisure and transport. The landscape architect Christopher Tunnard, for instance, delivered sketches of how the open spaces might be consolidated into wedges penetrating back into the heart of London. Early outline plans showed a preference for radical reconstruction rather than piecemeal steering of growth. The version shown in Figure 4.7 is thought to date from early 1939. At its core, running east–west along the line of the River Thames, was the historic centre which would be left largely untouched. To the east were riverside industrial zones. Ten linear strips of development were placed at right-angles to the historic centre. These, in turn, would be separated from one another by wedges of green space. Together, the alternating strips of urban development and open space would have obliterated most of north and south London. Scarcely less radical would have been the changes to the transport systems. These would have been reorganised by adding orbital road and rail networks to avoid the bottle-neck of central London and building a grid of new arterial roads to serve the linear strips and provide connection with the orbital roads. The advent of war in September 1939, the conscription of many MARS members, and the 18-month internment of Korn in the Isle of Man as an enemy alien brought work on the plan to a halt, despite public announcements that planmaking was actively continuing.42 At the end of 1941, an intensive burst of meetings attempted to inject greater urgency into the Committee’s proceedings. At a meeting on 8 December 1941, for example, Felix Samuely provided a summary of suggested axioms: the separation of home and workplace; major units being designed for 600,000 people; everyone able to reach public transport and open space within ten minutes’ walking time; crossings between main and secondary arteries being on different levels with the crossings themselves in open space. The plan would be based around a new rail system that would supply the main form of mass transport along the linear strips.43 Tellingly, the Committee then heavily criticised these proposals. Their recorded comments reveal that the members had very

Towards the functional city?

91

Figure 4.7 An early sketch of the Linear City Plan, c.1939 from Thomas W. Sharp: Town Planning (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1940) p.63

little previous knowledge of what was being proposed and were ‘not prepared to accept the Linear Plan without further investigation’.44 At an ensuing meeting on 2 January 1942, the lack of any real progress was indicated when Jane Drew proposed that the Committee should draw up a programme of work for the next 18 months, beginning with a statement of principles. The turning point came in late January 1942 when Korn returned to the MARS Group after a long absence caused by his internment and the need to re-establish his affairs. Acting largely independently of the rest of the Group, Korn brought matters to a speedy conclusion. Recovering the only existing copy of the preliminary drawings to have survived bomb damage,45 Korn put together the final plan, with Samuely supplying material on costings and on the rail proposals, and Fry helping with the drawings. Given a standing invitation from de Cronin Hastings for MARS to contribute to the Architectural Review’s ‘Destruction and Reconstruction’ series,46 the essence of the MARS plan appeared there in June 1942, although publication of the full set of drawings awaited the appearance of Maxwell Fry’s book Fine Building in 1944.47

92

John Gold

Master Plan for London The 1942 Plan superimposed a new gridded pattern on London – or, at least, the space occupied by London – to produce a dramatically reconstructed city of ten million people (see Figure 4.1 above). With even less restraint than shown in the 1939 sketch (Figure 4.7), almost the entire city would have been swept away apart from a few historic buildings of national significance. At the heart of the new pattern was an east-west corridor, some 25 miles long and two wide, containing London’s vital industrial commercial and administrative functions. Radiating north and south would now be 16 strips of urban development, each roughly one-mile across and bordered by belts of protected countryside that would prevent sprawl and allow inhabitants easy access to open space. Besides recognising the authors’ a priori commitment to the linear city, the key to understanding this pattern lies, first, in the application of a version of Ling’s hierarchy of social units and, secondly, in the primacy given to the economics and operational efficiency of transport. Taking these in reverse order, Korn and Samuely believed that the legacy of the past left London with a congested, outmoded and inefficient transport system. Railways would take priority in the reorganised system; a striking difference from the 1937 plan’s emphasis on road transport. The central corridor would contain rapid through-routes as well as a high-capacity system for London’s own needs, with the ten existing termini reduced to three through-stations. Branching off from this corridor were the secondary rail arteries, roughly six miles long, that formed the core of the residential linear strips. Housing would extend half-a-mile on each side of the transport artery, with stations allocated to serve populations of approximately 100,000. Each of these strips would have a goods station situated at its outer edge and these would be linked by an orbital railway to ensure that goods traffic was segregated from passenger traffic. Industry would be reorganised according to four main proposals. The central corridor would retain heavy and port-related industry, but all housing would be eliminated from industrial zones. Light industry would be concentrated into a sector of north-west London and into smaller estates created at the outer edges of the city districts to balance the inward flow of traffic. Small home industries ‘provided with communally-controlled workshop accommodation ‘might be allowed in the residential areas or even the green areas.48 Finally, some industry would be decentralised to ‘satellite towns’, with populations of up to 25,000, situated on extensions to the spinal transport lines of the residential areas. Plans for housing provision flowed from a critique of the status quo. In the minds of Korn and Samuely, London was an amorphous sprawl with little underlying social cohesion. Such isolation would continue: unless there is some organisation of social life and its expression in architecture and town planning; for the visual effect on the mind is considerable. The vast crowds must be split into groups in which the individual does not feel so overwhelmed that he is forced to retire to his own home almost entirely for his social life. Only by forming clearly defined units, which in turn are part of larger units, can social life be organised.49

Towards the functional city?

93

The place allotted to town planning and architecture in this enterprise was striking. The authors sketched a world in which the hierarchical organisation of social units appeared to offer the only workable pattern for the future city, a pattern that could be fostered by sensitive arrangement of the urban environment. The proposed hierarchy, derived from Ling’s earlier study, had five levels: the residential unit (for a population of 1,000); the neighbourhood unit (6,000) made up of six residential units; the borough unit (50,000) consisting of eight neighbourhood units; the city district (600,000) comprising 12 borough units; and the city itself (10 million). Each level would have a recognisable focus to which people could give their allegiance. Added to these calculations was a requirement that 14 acres of openspace should be supplied per 1,000 dwellings, with no dwelling more than half-amile from access to open space. Figure 4.8 shows the proposal for residential and neighbourhood units.50 While it incorporated similar ideas as those in Ling’s original version, the disposition of residential units vis-à-vis community services was different as was the reliance on tenstorey unité blocks as the sole form of residence. It was stated on several occasions in the published plan that dwellings could be either flats or houses-with-gardens,51 but this is misleading. As Fry noted when recalling discussion about the plan: ‘It was far too much biassed in favour of flats. Quite simply, we weren’t looking any further.’52 The six residential units cluster around the neighbourhood’s school and local civic amenities.

Figure 4.8 Neighbourhood unit, 1942 plan from E. Maxwell Fry: Fine Building (London: Faber 1944) facing p.94

94

John Gold

Figure 4.9 Borough plan, 1942 plan from E. Maxwell Fry: Fine Building (London: Faber 1944) facing p.96

Figure 4.9 shows a borough unit, with its component neighbourhood units arranged on either side of a central corridor that contained the town hall, central park and civic buildings. Schools were placed on the edge of the built-up area so that their playing fields would merge into the parkland and countryside. The dominant impression is of a sharply-bounded settlement; on one side by open space and on the other by the central rail artery. Ten such borough units comprise each of the spines (‘city districts’) shown previously on Figure 1, each with a population of 500,000. These 16 spines, plus some smaller satellite towns, would then make up the full population of ten million. Reactions Judgement about this plan always depended on whether it was regarded as comprising definite recommendations for London’s future reconstruction or illustrative analyses of principles of land-use and transport that were applied to London as an example. This remains a contentious matter. Arthur Korn later argued that it was essentially intended as a theoretical exercise that illustrated design principles,53 but the description of this scheme was a ‘Master Plan for London’; the extensive calculations of costs and benefits made it seem that this was presented as a serious proposal for reconstruction. That impression was reinforced by several members of the Town Planning Committee who argued that Korn and Samuely did believe that this was a practical suggestion for reconstruction, although they were probably alone in doing so.54 There was broad agreement that neither Korn nor Samuely had much regard for the existing London, which they regarded as formless, and saw war-time

Towards the functional city?

95

destruction as creating the opportunity for a fresh start. It was also felt that savings from greater efficiency and reduced congestion in the new metropolis would, in the long-term, more than offset the ferocious costs of the reconstruction.55 Indeed, years later, Korn would continue to argue that 900,000 houses accommodating four million people were built in Greater London between the two world wars, providing proof of what the building industry could do if directed to a common goal.56 Such arguments gained little support elsewhere and strained the credulity even of MARS Group members. Lionel Brett, for instance, described the plan as ‘characteristic of the simplicities of our time’, decried the hypnotism that geometric planmaking seemed to have exerted, and argued for a ‘much more sensitive use of what exists’.57 Thomas Sharp argued earlier that the linear city plan suffered from inadequate understanding of urban transport, the difficulty of generating civic loyalty among the prospective residents of the linear strips, from ‘its extreme extravagance in public services’, and from the extent of destruction necessary to realise the scheme. He concluded that it was ‘not only a wild dream but also a rather bad one’.58 Perhaps the most telling assessment was that the MARS Group itself largely excluded the 1942 Plan from its own deliberations on future planning for the Metropolis in favour of the 1943 County of London Plan which it informally ‘adopted’.59 Even those who had participated in the work of the Town Planning Committee were mostly critical. Ernö Goldfinger considered the plan ‘a good idea’ and applauded its willingness to fly in the face of British resistance to axial planning, but regarded it as flawed in its application.60 Ling felt the ‘concept of neighbourhood structure, adopted in the new and expanding towns of the post-war period, was helped along by the MARS Plan, even if it did not develop directly from it.’ At the same time the ‘MARS Plan itself had no influence on the planning of London – which I can state with some authority from my own work on the County of London Plan.’61 Johnson Marshall criticised the plan for its rigidity, its disregard for the existing historical centre of London, its over-reliance on flats, and in Korn’s belief: that it was a real solution to London’s problems. That was entirely an illusion, but I could never shake Arthur from his convictions. However as a demonstration of one way of putting urban components together, it was a useful contribution.62 This view was echoed by Fry.63 He emphasised that the war meant that the MARS Group had virtually ceased to operate at this time and that the Master Plan was a well-intentioned, if ill-judged attempt to contribute to the debate about the postwar reconstruction of London. Conclusion This perspective is valuable because too much emphasis on reaction on the specific details of the plan per se can obscure important lessons that can be learned from viewing the 1942 Master Plan in its broader context. Despite its date of publication,

96

John Gold

it was the product of inter-war rather than war-time thinking and the culmination of a set of loosely-related but essentially discontinuous exercises rather than a single isolated project. There were common features, notably linearity and advocacy of neighbourhood units, but there were strikingly few cross-references between one project and another. Moreover, each succeeding project grew out of the contested territory of the one before without, in the process, acquiring discernibly greater support. Even the version of the MARS Plan published in 1942 was fiercely disputed within the MARS Group. This lack of consensus was not only a feature of the work of the MARS Group. To return to the wider context, modern architects elsewhere in Europe and beyond were also engaged in town planning and urban reconstruction schemes in the interwar years and during World War II. Their schemes similarly started life as spare-time projects, were seldom backed by exhaustive research or resources, and mostly produced exploratory schemes for debate rather than giving expression to aspects of widely-shared consensus. Nowhere was this more true than in the work of CIAM after the fourth Congress. While it is still often believed that the deliberations of CIAM IV about the ‘Functional City’ led directly to a consensual document called the Athens Charter, interview and documentary research challenges this view.64 The timetable of the Congress reveals a crowded schedule that combined vacation and work. Most of the time on the sea voyages on the SS ‘Patris II’ was spent debating, one by one, the analytic city plans that each of the 33 national delegations had prepared. There was a large exhibition in Athens that displayed the city plans along with other projects that members wished to exhibit. There were few opportunities for the lengthy meetings that would have been necessary to thrash out the true nature of the Functional City or to create formal charters of town planning. At best, there were communiqués and, within three months, lists of ‘statements’ drawn from the Congress proceedings, but they were the products of delegated working groups and not the full Congress. Moreover, analysis of CIAM records for the rest of the 1930s shows that the desired synthesising works, the books codifying the protocols of town planning, did not appear. The reasons partly involved resources and logistics, but it is clear too that ideas about town planning matters were still deeply contested within the organisation. Certainly when the two books relating to CIAM IV eventually emerged in the early 1940s, the agenda had moved on. Sert’s Can Our Cities Survive? and Le Corbusier’s Athens Charter65 appropriated the spirit of CIAM IV to create urgently needed manifestos, but their writings did not mirror accurately the inconclusive findings of CIAM IV. Neither merits being taken as the source of dogmatic certainty about the urban future as so many commentators have insisted. With that in mind, it seems that the difficulties experienced by the MARS Group in preparing a planning scheme for London may be representative of the wider picture. Quite simply, paper is cheap: it is not obligatory to think through every implication of the resulting design before picking up the drafting pen. Nor is it necessary to have full belief and commitment in something that might have only been produced for discussion purposes. What the various MARS plans for London

Towards the functional city?

97

reveal in microcosm is that there was no consensus at this time on any particular prototype for the urban future. The many plans and drawings of prospective city forms contain some recurrent themes, but none had the status of blueprints. They were at best experimental projects devised by a movement that was intensely pluralistic. Grasping that point is vital if we are to make proper sense of the nature and significance of the Modern Movement’s urban vision in the inter-war and early war years. Notes 1 Earlier versions of the material covered in this essay were developed in John R. Gold: ‘The MARS Plans for London, 1933–1942: plurality and experimentation in the city plans of the early British Modern Movement’, Town Planning Review 66 (1995) pp.243–67 and in John R. Gold: The Experience of Modernism: modern architects and the future city, 1928–53 (London: E. & F.N. Spon 1997). 2 D.H. Lawrence: ‘Nottingham and the Mining Country’ in D.H. Lawrence Selected Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1950) pp.121–2 (this essay was originally written in 1929). 3 Arthur Korn and Felix J. Samuely: ‘A Master Plan for London’ Architectural Review 91 (1942) pp.143–50. 4 For example, see the wide selection of literature listed in Frederic J. Osborn: Planning and Reconstruction Yearbook, 1943, (London: Todd 1943). The pages of the Architectural Review themselves acted as an important vehicle for debate about urban reconstruction: a point reinforced below, see note 46. For a survey of plans produced in the 1930s, see John R. Gold ‘In Search of Modernity: the urban projects of the Modern Movement, 1929–1939’ in James Peto and Donna Loveday (eds) Modern Britain, 1929–1939 (London: Design Museum 1999) pp.40–51. 5 For example, the recently-published report by Sir Charles Bressey and Sir Edwin Lutyens: Highway Development Survey (Greater London) (London: HMSO 1937). 6 For example, Hebbert talks of the city’s shadow effect, with increased leisure time activities promoting a new landscape of kiosks, cafés, billboards, holiday camps, filling stations, holiday bungalows and roundabouts with ‘roadside’ inns that spread throughout the Home Counties. See Michael Hebbert: London: More by Fortune than Design (Chichester: John Wiley 1998) pp.59. 7 See Gordon E. Cherry: Cities and Plans: the shaping of urban Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (London: Edward Arnold 1988) especially pp.78–107. 8 See, for example, the list supplied in Anon: ‘Research Activities’ Architectural Review 90 (1941) pp.40–4. 9 To sample the varying treatment of this plan by historians, see E. Carter: The Future of London (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1962); Percy Johnson Marshall: Rebuilding Cities (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press 1966); Anthony Jackson (1970) The Politics of Architecture: a history of modern architecture in Britain, London: Architectural Press; Dennis Sharp: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Architecture (London: Heinemann/Secker and Warburg 1972); R. Warburton ‘Christopher Tunnard: outline of a career’ Planning History 14(2) (1992) pp.20–32; K.F. Fischer: ‘MARS, Academy and Abercrombie: British plans and their Continental counterparts’, unpublished paper read to the International Planning History Conference, London (April 1994); and E. Marmaras and A. Sutcliffe: ‘ Planning for post-war London: the three independent plans, 1942–3’ Planning Perspectives 9 (1994) pp.431–53. 10 The material in the ensuing section is based on documentation found in Boxes 11 and 12 of the Wells Coates Archive, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Canada and from the MGF folder, Library, Architectural Association, London. 11 These events are described in Gold: The Experience of Modernism pp.110–13. 12 While MARS sent delegates to CIAM and paid a subvention towards it, MARS members were not automatically members of CIAM. The Minutes of an early MARS meeting note that: ‘The names of all MARS members who wish to become members of CIAM will be sent, with photographs of their work, to the Secretariat in Switzerland for election’. See British Architectural Library (henceforth BAL) file: ArO/1/2/3/i. 13 For background on CIAM, see Martin Steinmann: Internationale Kongresse für Neues Bauen: Dokumente, 1928–1939 (Basle: Birkhäuser Verlag 1979); and Auke van der Woud: Het Nieuwe Bouwen Internationaal/CIAM Volkshuisvesting/Stedebouw (Delft: Delft University Press 1982). For more

98

14

15

16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26

27 28 29 30

31

32

33

John Gold discussion of the principles of urbanism and town planning held by CIAM, see Eric Mumford: ‘CIAM urbanism after the Athens Charter’ Planning Perspectives 7 (1992) 391–417; and John R. Gold: ‘Creating the Charter of Athens: CIAM and the Functional City, 1933–43’ Town Planning Review 69 (1998) 221–43. For more on functionalism and its interpretation, see Edward R. De Zurko: Origins of Functionalist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press 1957); L.L. Ligo: The Concept of Function in TwentiethCentury Architectural Criticism (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press 1984); and see Maurice Lagueux: ‘Reconfiguring four key “-isms” commonly used in architectural theory’ British Journal of Aesthetics 39 (1999) pp.179–88. The maps used a set of standardised cartographic and presentation conventions derived from ones originally formulated for the Greater Amsterdam Plan. They are reproduced in José Luis Sert: Can Our Cities Survive? an ABC of Urban Problems, Their Analysis, Their Solutions, Based on the Proposals Formulated by the CIAM (International Congresses for Modern Architecture/Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne), (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1942) pp.7–9. For more on the background to CIAM IV and its programme, see Gold: ‘Creating the Charter of Athens’; for more on the maps themselves see Astragal: ‘Notes and Topics’ Architects’ Journal (17 August 1933) pp.196–7; and Sert: Can Our Cities Survive? p.170. Patrick Geddes: Cities in Evolution: an introduction to the town planning movement and the study of civics (London: Benn 1915). See John R. Gold: ‘ “Commoditie, Firmenes and Delight”: Modernism, the MARS Group’s “New Architecture” Exhibition, 1938, and imagery of the urban future’ Planning Perspectives 8 (1993) pp.357–76. BAL file: ArO/1/58/ii. BAL file: ArO/1/2/16/ii. Minutes for 1 July 1936. BAL file: ArO/1/2/20/ii. BAL file: ArO/1/4/6/ii. The exhibition in question was the MARS Group’s ‘New Architecture’ exhibition, held at London’s New Burlington Galleries in January 1938. CIAM: Logis et Loisirs (Paris: Les Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne 1937) pp.79–80. See Ex-Serviceman AJ/47485 (A.T. Edwards): 100 New Towns for Britain (London: Simpkin Marshall 1933). William Tatton Brown (personal communication, 5 June 1994) stressed that this and the illustrations that follow (Figures 3–5) were polemical diagrams illustrating principles of city design rather than actual town plans. The idea of the neighbourhood unit had recently originated in the New York Regional Plan, see Clarence A. Perry: ‘The Neighbourhood Unit’ The Regional Plan of New York and its Environs vol.3 ‘Neighbourhood and Community Planning’ (New York: New York Port Authority 1929). For further insight into then contemporary thinking about neighbourhood units, see E.G.S. Elliot: ‘American Housing before the New Deal’ Town Planning Review 16 (1935) 247–53; and E.C. Kaufmann: ‘Neighbourhood Units as New Elements of Town Planning’ Royal Institute of British Architects’ Journal 44 (1936) pp.165–75. James M. Richards (ed.): ‘Highpoint One’ special section Architectural Review 79 (1936) pp.5–16. William Tatton-Brown, interview with J.R. Gold, 5 December 1986, revised by personal communication, 5 June 1994. Maxwell Fry, interview with J.R. Gold, 24 November 1986. It would have one more outing where it appeared as part of the ‘Town Planning’ Screen at the MARS Exhibition in January 1938. It was again used because it was available and because MARS lacked an alternative exhibit on this subject, but the caption that it was produced by ‘a section of the MARS Group’ indicates the sense of distance that the MARS Group wished to place between official Group policy and this exhibit. See Gold: ‘ “Commoditie, Firmenes and Delight” ’. They included, at various times, Elizabeth Denby, Jane Drew, Ernö Goldfinger, Percy Johnson-Marshall, Bronek Katz, Arthur Korn, Arthur Ling, Aleck Low, Godfrey Samuel, Felix Samuely, Robert Shaw, Peter Shepheard, William Tatton Brown, Christopher Tunnard. Letter from Arthur Korn to MARS Group’s Central Executive Committee, 15 February 1938. Reprinted in Dennis Sharp: ‘Concept and interpretation: the aims and principles of the MARS Plan for London’ Perspecta 13 (1971) pp.164–5. Letter from William Tatton Brown to José Luis Sert, 7 August 1938. Folder C2, CIAM Archive, Frances Loeb Library, Harvard University.

Towards the functional city?

99

34 Letter from William Tatton Brown to José Luis Sert, 31 August 1938. Folder C2, CIAM Archive, Frances Loeb Library, Harvard University. 35 See Aileen Tatton Brown and William E. Tatton Brown: (1941–2) ‘Three-dimensional town planning: parts 1 and 2’ Architectural Review 90 (1941) pp.82–8; 91 (1942) pp.17–21. Hastings also lost sympathy with the new direction: see E. Maxwell Fry: ‘The MARS Group Plan of London’ Perspecta 13 (1971) p.164. 36 For example, he had been a member of seminal German modernist groupings, such as the Novembergruppe and the Berlin Ring, in the 1920s. 37 A.G. Ling: Social Units (unpublished Diploma thesis, Department of Town and Country Planning, University College, University of London 1938). 38 Arthur Ling, interview with J.R. Gold, 30 January 1987. 39 An emphasis that would recur in Ling’s later work on neighbourhood structure for the County of London Plan. See J.H. Forshaw and L. Patrick Abercrombie: County of London Plan (London: Macmillan 1943). 40 Arthur Ling, interview with J.R. Gold, 30 January 1987. 41 The Zeilenbau pattern, pioneered in Germany during the 1920s, aligned blocks north–south alignment so that their east- or west-facing windows would receive the maximum sunlight. 42 For example, see Anon: ‘Research Activities’ p.42 (see footnote 8). 43 BAL file: Ar0/2/10/1. 44 BAL file: Ar0/2/10/1/i. 45 Percy Johnson-Marshall, in an interview with J.R. Gold on 9 December 1986, recalled that: I was in my flat in the centre of Coventry and it suffered a direct hit from a bomb. The windows were shattered. I had the MARS Plan rolled up with quite a number of other plans on the wall, in rolls, and several slivers of glass went through it. And then I got a desperate message from Arthur Korn saying that I had the only extant copy, because a bomb had destroyed all the others. 46 This was a year-long series of articles that lasted from July 1941–June 1942. Previous articles in the series had included several by MARS Group members, e.g. by Aileen Tatton Brown and William E. Tatton Brown (see footnote 35 above); and James M. Richards: ‘A theoretical basis for physical planning’, parts 1 and 2 Architectural Review 91 (1942) pp.43–6 and pp.63–70. 47 Korn and Samuely: ‘A Master Plan for London’; E. Maxwell Fry: Fine Building (London: Faber 1944). 48 Cited in Sharp: ‘Concept and interpretation’ p.168. 49 Korn and Samuely: ‘A Master Plan for London’ p.145. 50 It is worth emphasising again that these and the ensuing diagrams of the various orders of the urban hierarchy were not published until the appearance of Fry’s book Fine Building. 51 For example, Fry: Fine Building p.148. 52 Maxwell Fry, interview with J.R. Gold, 24 November 1986. 53 I am grateful to Dennis Sharp for a valuable discussion of this theme. 54 Percy Johnson Marshall, interview with J.R. Gold, 9 December 1986. 55 There is not room here to provide a detailed analysis of the plan’s costing proposals and balance sheet. See Korn and Samuely: ‘A Master Plan for London’ p.144. 56 Arthur Korn: History Builds the Town (London: Lund Humphries 1955) p.90. 57 Lionel Brett: ‘Doubts on the MARS Plan for London’ Architects’ Journal 96 (9 July 1942) pp.23–5. William Tatton Brown (personal communication, 5 June 1994) argued that Hastings wholeheartedly concurred with this view. 58 Thomas W. Sharp: Town Planning (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1940) pp.59–64. 59 See Gold: The Experience of Modernism Chapter 7. 60 Ernö Goldfinger, interview with J.R. Gold, 16 December 1986. 61 Arthur Ling, interview with J.R. Gold, 30 January 1987. 62 Percy Johnson Marshall, interview with J.R. Gold, 18 December 1986. 63 Maxwell Fry, interview with J.R. Gold, 24 December 1986. 64 For discussion of conventional views of the ‘Athens Charter’ and analysis of the documents connected with CIAM IV and its aftermath, see Gold: ‘Creating the Charter of Athens’. 65 Respectively Sert: Can Our Cities Survive?; and Le Corbusier: La Charte d’Athènes (Paris: La Librairie Plon 1943; version used here was English language version, trans. A. Eardley (New York: Grossman 1973) as The Athens Charter).

PART 2 VISION VERSUS REALITY

The urban visions of pre-war Modernism barely survived their contact with reality after the war. The distrust of Modernism in England resulted in the very unhappy compromise and then demise of Lubetkin’s project for Peterlee, as summarised by John Allan. The most successful – by Piero Bottoni at the Quartiere Triennale 8 in Milan, described by Judi Loach, or Lucio Costa in Brasília, described by Thomas Deckker – directly continued the utopian aspects of pre-war Modernism. Where such utopianism was absent, such as in Birmingham, the results were almost farcical, as Andrew Higgott describes in his article. This utopianism was scarcely realisable at an everyday level, however. The Quartiere Triennale 8 and Brasília were enormously expensive and spatially extravagant symbols of Modernity. While the Quartiere Triennale 8 could rely on Milan for urban life, Brasília, however, has failed to generate its own. Whether the lack of urban life in Brasília should be blamed on external or historic factors or on the concepts of Modernist urban practices – the planned separation of functions and the isolation of buildings in a landscape – is examined in this article.

5 Lubetkin and Peterlee John Allan

Half a century ago, Peterlee was the most exciting, radical and ambitious urban development project in Britain, with uniquely favourable pre-conditions – unqualified Government backing, a splendid site, solid local support, and the most talented and dynamic modern architect in England at the helm – Berthold Lubetkin. Two years later, the project lay in ruins and Lubetkin himself had withdrawn into a 30year voluntary exile. This paper examines how this rare opportunity arose and was then lost, considers the form Lubetkin’s Peterlee might have taken, and draws conclusions on the difficulties of achieving such visions of the modern city. It is necessarily a simplified and greatly abbreviated account but I will try to address what seem to me to be the key questions arising from this complex, probably avoidable and certainly tragic episode in recent British town building history.1 These questions might be articulated as follows: 1 2 3 4 5

What were Peterlee’s origins? What made it special? What actually happened in Lubetkin’s tenure as Architect-Planner? What might Lubetkin’s Peterlee have been like? What conclusions can be drawn from this experience?

What were Peterlee’s origins? There are really two answers to this question; the first – dealing with its official genesis – might better be described as the means by which Peterlee was made feasible. The second concerns its deeper roots in the local culture of the Durham coalfield which is considered next in addressing the factors that made it so special. The proposal to build Peterlee must be placed within the context of the British New Towns programme which was given legislative form in the Labour Government’s New Towns Act of 1946. This milestone in official policy represented the fruits of half a century of development of the Garden City ideas propounded by Ebenezer Howard in 1898, and demonstrated at Letchworth and Welwyn. Howard’s theories had developed in reaction to the social and environmental degradation of the nineteenth century metropolis and envisaged a new quality of human settlement which he called ‘Town-Country’ to signify the proposed resolution of the pros

104

John Allan

and con’s of urban and rural living – that is, combining full employment and social opportunity with low outgoings and a healthy environment. The gradual acceptance of these ideas may be seen in the rise of planning legislation both before and after World War I and the development of such institutions as The Town & Country Planning Association through the zeal of Howard’s disciple Frederick Osborn. The Barlow Report of 1940, to which Osborn made an influential contribution, together with the parallel reports of the Scott and Uthwatt Commissions both of 1942, effectively translated the Garden City concept from its origins in nineteenth-century Fabian evangelism into a system of official administrative mechanisms. The New Town concept became a complementary instrument of central policy alongside metropolitan reconstruction, Green Belt protection and decanting overspill. Following Labour’s election victory of 1945, Lewis Silkin was appointed to lead the new Ministry of Town and Country Planning, now armed with the Reith Committee Report; and with the speedy passage of the New Towns legislation in 1946, together with the major Town and Country Planning Act of the following year, a new era of British town building began. Labour’s interventionist approach was consistent with the underlying ideals of New Town development. Instead of urban growth occurring as a more or less unpredictable consequence of private industrial and residential capital, trade fluctuations and market economics only lightly regulated – if at all – by public policy, the new communities would be constructed through pre-designed and positively administered plans. These would accommodate the contribution of the private sector but only insofar as it was consistent with the social and economic objectives enshrined in the Master Plans. Development Corporations (responsible to the Ministry of Town & Country Planning) were to be the vehicle for procurement. These would plan, build and manage each new town. The corporations would be headed up by a General Manager, in effect the Chief Executive, responsible directly to the Chairman of the corporation and its committee of members, and served by officers including normally the chief architect, or architect–planner, the engineer, the estates officer and legal officer. Consultation with the local planning authorities was required, but not formal approval. New town sites were to be selected and designated by the Minister after local enquiries but before the Development Corporation’s appointment, and financing was through central government, with Treasury approval of budgets, loans and expenditure. What made Peterlee special? So much for the generic origins and administrative structure of the British new towns, but what made Peterlee in particular so special? Peterlee was the seventh New Town to be declared under the Act. The first four – Stevenage, Crawley, Hemel Hemstead and Harlow – were all conceived as complementary to the metropolitan plan for London. In effect, they were thought of as satellites to limit its further expansion, albeit self-sustaining satellites. The fifth and sixth designations – Aycliffe and East Kilbride – were effectively industrial

Lubetkin and Peterlee

105

suburbs of Darlington and Glasgow, and were equally products of the policy of social dispersal from larger nearby conurbations. However, Peterlee was different both in origin and objective from these antecedents. Firstly, the original proposal to build a new town on the east Durham coalfield had not come from bureaucratic planners in Whitehall; it had arisen from the local community itself as a direct result of its economic and social history. Then, again contrary to precedent, Peterlee was to be the product of centripetal not centrifugal forces, an exercise in concentration not dispersal, with the creation of an urban centre forming a primary element of the programme. Finally, unlike the generally unspecific social character of the preceding new towns, Peterlee was to be a city of miners, an unusually cohesive, politicised occupational group, ‘the cockpit of the industrial struggle’. To Lubetkin this surely offered a rare opportunity to fuse architectural form and social content, ‘to paraphrase in terms of visual composition the solidarity of the mining community.’ What was this local context that was to produce such a Utopian vision? The east Durham coalfields contained some of the richest coal seams in the country, and was worked from some two dozen scattered mining settlements (originally all privately owned but nationalised after the war). These villages had developed sporadically from the 1830s as the new shafts had been sunk but in location and character had been governed exclusively by mining requirements, with the result that large or small, new or old, they were uniformly devoid of cultural or social opportunity, recreational facilities, higher or technical education, alternative employment for miners’ families, and, until the 1930s, even sufficient public transport to gain easy access to the ‘outside world’ – Durham, Newcastle or Hartlepool, for example. ‘None of them is really a village in the traditionally understood sense’, wrote Monica Felton (the first Lady Chairman of Peterlee Development Corporation) ‘and though the largest has a population of 15,000, none of them is really a town. They are mining camps, but camps built with a dreadful terrifying permanence.’2 With nearly 90 per cent of the local working population absorbed in the mining industry, the domination of coal – visually, socially and economically – was absolute (Figure 5.1). Against these dire conditions the Local Authority, Easington Rural District Council, had waged a determined though unequal struggle through slum clearance and building programmes in the 1930s. The Miners’ Welfare Commission, established under the Mining Industry Act of 1920, had also achieved a measure of progress in the introduction of pithead baths and improved social and recreational facilities. But the more intractable evils of cultural privation and lack of economic or industrial diversity remained. There was no question, however, as to the area’s rich future in terms of its mineral wealth. Estimated coal reserves in 1942 exceeded 550 million tons, with an extraction programme in the case of Easington and Blackhall collieries extending to the end of the century. Clearly, as long as the East Durham coalfield had a mineral future, then it must grapple with, and seek to improve, its social future. It was out of this searing history that the local vision of a New Town was born. Quite independently of the New Towns policies being hatched down south, C.W.

106

John Allan

Figure 5.1 Typical view of the old mining ‘camps’ of the east Durham coalfield

Clarke, the Easington Council Engineer, and a unanimous Easington Council had resolved that rather than continue with piecemeal improvements dispersed over the existing settlements, they should build anew to a comprehensive plan on a fresh location. Clarke’s proposals, based on this principle of ‘centralised development upon one suitable site’ were published in December 1946 in a report entitled ‘Farewell Squalor’.3 This initiative was accepted in Whitehall and the Draft Easington New Town (Designation) Order was signed in October 1947. Clarke proposed the town be named after Peter Lee (1864–1934), who had started as a pony driver in Trimdon colliery at the age of ten, and had gone on to become a loved and admired leader of the Durham miners. Thus the key essentials of an ideal new town had coincided – genuine local commitment and vigorous official backing. But there was one more vital and unique advantage – a simply magnificent site. The Designated Area, roughly halfway between Newcastle and Hartlepool and comprising some 2,350 acres, was characterised by a large, roughly square central basin – marvellously legible and ideally suited to the principle of concentric development (Figure 5.2). To an observer standing in the middle of this gentle saucer of land looking outwards towards the north, east or west, virtually all the old pithead squalor was just beyond the horizon line. Meanwhile, along the southern boundary, and cutting in to the heart of the area, ran a spectacular system of deep wooded gorges – The Denes – bringing a wild and mature landscape to the doorstep of the town. In such a natural amphitheatre, to a designer of Lubetkin’s calibre, it was easy to imagine an ordered arrangement of housing looking down towards – and itself visible from – the urban centre, which in

Lubetkin and Peterlee

107

Figure 5.2 The Designated Area showing principal features influencing development. Note ‘containment’ of site within the horizon line

turn could exploit the central gorge, Blunts Dene, with some dramatic system of bridges or causeways. Lubetkin recalled: The miners, and the site itself, were an inspiration, ‘Their work and way of life was too dangerous, too serious, for picturesque gimmicks or trivialities, and the usual bourgeois conflicts were quite absent. Those villages were like Roman army camps, born out of geometry, and seemed to express the cohesive force of the whole community. The miners accepted the discipline of the terraces as an endorsement of their industrial solidarity. The site was like an amphitheatre, allowing a design in which the formal order would not just be imposed architecturally but arise directly from the genius loci. The atmosphere was charged with expectation, and it seemed to me a unique opportunity to demonstrate town planning not simply as an administrative exercise of animating statistics, but as the art of expressing a social vision in an urban ensemble.’4 These were not simply private dreams of Lubetkin’s. The expectation that something extraordinary was about to happen was shared by all the participants. As Monica Felton recounted, We were to build, we were agreed, neither a suburb nor a garden-city, but a town that would be as truly urban in character, as compact in planning, and as

108

John Allan distinguished in architecture as any of the great cities that belong to the great ages of town building . . . Our first step, we decided, must be to find an architect who would not only plan the town but build it. We wanted, in short, a revolutionary who was in the tradition of Nash or Christopher Wren. We found him in Berthold Lubetkin.5

Lubetkin, at this point in his mid-40s, was widely regarded as the leading modern architect in Britain, having arrived in 1931 from an exotic background in Russia, Poland, Germany and France, and blazed a trail through the 1930s with his partnership with Tecton and their series of outstanding buildings. It seemed that the man, the job and hour had coincided: Lewis Silkin called me to his office, and rhapsodised for three hours. He and Monica Felton persuaded me that Peterlee would be a sort of monument to glorify the loyalty, cohesion and courage of the mining community which at that time was supposed to hold the key to the country’s industrial future. It seemed like a fulfilment of those hopes I had when first moving to England. The drive, the faith, the inspiration of the early ’30’s, which had dissipated, suddenly reappeared on the horizon. I forget Silkin’s technical arguments; he was speaking poetry. Peterlee would be Number One for England, and I’d be in the front line. I promised Silkin I’d do it. I remember walking out of the Ministry into St James’ Park on a wave of optimistic joy, thinking ‘At last, something is going to happen in this country’.6 What actually happened in Lubetkin’s tenure as Architect–Planner? This is the section of this paper that has been most subject to compression and simplification as the detailed account of two years’ project development – that is 1948 to 1950, when Lubetkin left – with all its causalities and complexities is impossible to convey in such abbreviated form. No doubt this is also why Lubetkin’s tenure at Peterlee became the subject of so many myths and misconceptions – for example the old canard that he resigned when refused permission to build a city of tower blocks – allegedly because he argued that miners were used to travelling in lifts. What follows is necessarily but a broad outline of the story, but the central and supremely ironical feature that dominates all others, that was at once the raison d’etre of Peterlee and also its undoing, was coal. It had been taken for granted at the time of selecting the site, (prior to Lubetkin’s appointment) that the need to locate Peterlee near both to the A19 (the main North–South trunk route) and to the long life coastal pits would entail building over the active coalfield. In fact the Designated Area overlay five coal seams in various stages of extraction (Figure 5.3). In administrative terms this meant that one government department – The Ministry of Town and Country Planning (MTCP) – would be literally working on top of another – The Ministry of Fuel and Power (the sponsoring Department for the National Coal Board NCB).

Lubetkin and Peterlee

109

Figure 5.3 Coal under Peterlee. Hatching increases with number of seams still to be extracted. The clear strips running under, and beyond, the Denes indicate barriers between adjacent colliery workings

But concern over loss of productive value in developing the Designated Area had focused exclusively on agriculture. Astonishingly, almost no consideration whatsoever had been given to the possible effects of subsidence that could result from building on undermined land and for which the Coal Board were obliged to pay compensation in the event of structural damage. However, the low profile maintained by the NCB over the designation and at the Public Inquiry stage (January–March 1948) did not stem from indifference to the New Town project. On the contrary, it resulted from a supposedly conclusive agreement safeguarding its interests, negotiated with the Regional Office of the MTCP the previous summer – again, long before Lubetkin’s involvement. This agreement effectively presumed that Peterlee should be designed and phased according to the layout suggested by C.W. Clarke, with the housing consisting almost entirely of semi-detached rows around three dispersed ‘neighbourhood centres’, and with a notional programme lasting 40 years! To Lubetkin, who had been quite unaware of these prior negotiations, such an agreement was simply not compatible with the remit of the Development Corporation, nor indeed with the type of town he had agreed to design. On the matter of programming alone, delaying development to allow prior coal extraction and then

110

John Allan

ground settlement, was quite inconsistent with the rapid Peterlee build-up urged by Silkin to stem migration from the area. Moreover, the NCB had no detailed predetermined scheme for mining the area, proceeding largely empirically as conditions dictated. To Lubetkin, apart from its obvious philosophic unpalatability, such an approach precluded any possibility of rational, causal, planning. Conversely, abandoning the coal and sterilising the site to produce stable ground for development would effectively deprive the miners of their livelihood. The ensuing two years may be read as an agonising struggle between all the parties involved to resolve the hideous difficulties of this conundrum. Lubetkin immediately initiated detailed investigations of the mining problem with a view to negotiating a more satisfactory agreement with the NCB, realising that any acceptable resolution must entail a far more sophisticated analysis of the interrelationship of development above and below ground. From these enquiries it became clear that combining overground and underground development was feasible with careful planning and the adoption of certain technical measures including stowage (that is, the backfilling of worked coal seams) and leaving pillars of support to produce viable sites for building purposes. Meetings ensued between the Development Corporation and the NCB but the situation remained deadlocked and was referred to a special committee of the Ministry of Works. Its findings, known as The Webster Report, eventually appeared at the end of January 1949 but effectively maintained all the previous NCB restrictions. As these prevented Lubetkin’s department from making any meaningful progress, the impasse was referred up to a committee of the Cabinet which directed that a Peterlee plan be agreed between representatives of the Treasury, the Ministries of Town and Country Planning, Health, Fuel and Power, the NCB and Peterlee Development Corporation, in a joint Working Party to be convened for that purpose. After preliminary examination of the problem, it was further delegated to a Regional Working Party. Here the NCB advised their intention not to leave any coal seams unworked and argued that buildings other than semi-detached houses could not be built for many years, and even then only in areas where only two coal seams remained to be mined (a condition later formalised as ‘the 2-seam rule’). For his part Lubetkin requested sterilisation of only a small acreage for town centre purposes, conceding to twostorey houses on unstable ground elsewhere, provided that specific areas were systematically stabilised by extraction for the later siting of larger buildings. He also called for relaxation of ‘the 2-seam rule’ in favour of three seams to allow earlier release of buildable land to maintain the momentum of the development. This strategy would still have permitted a town of 30,000 within fifteen years. But the NCB remained intransigent, so the impasse was again referred back up to the Cabinet for adjudication. On 27th July 1949, the Cabinet dismissed the NCB case in favour of the Corporation. Land for the town centre, plus 300 stable acres, was to be made immediately available, irrespective of the coal loss. This decision might seem to have opened the way for progress but the ruling was too crude to be sustainable. The precise terms had not been formalised in a map or drawing, and there was uncertainty over phasing and transferability of avail-

Lubetkin and Peterlee

111

able areas for development. The decision was, in fact, harsher on the Coal Board than even Lubetkin had sought. Reports appeared in a local newspaper forecasting the sterilisation of 7.5 million tons of coal and loss of work for 2,000 men over fifty years.7 A press statement was issued by the Minister of Town and Country Planning denying ‘false rumours’, but the local mood, previously so supportive, was turning to apprehension and scepticism. A real resolution of the coal conundrum was no nearer, but political pressure to ‘get on with’ the New Town was now becoming acute. The Corporation duly directed that the Master Plan must be presented on 1st January 1950. At this point a brief reference to personnel problems is necessary. As might be imagined, the difficulties of the coal negotiations were causing increasing frustration within the Development Corporation. But this vexed situation was also compounded by differences between Lubetkin and the General Manager, A.V. Williams, as to the Architect–Planner’s role and the consequent direction of work – at one point involving a proposal by Williams to appoint an engineer to underwrite Lubetkin’s plan. By autumn 1949, the atmosphere at the Corporation had deteriorated so gravely that Lubetkin offered his resignation. It was agreed that Lubetkin should be reappointed as an independent consultant for outstanding planning work and the design of principal buildings. But the detailed terms of the consultancy also became contentious, and shortly before it was due to take effect a fresh outbreak of disputes prevented any further appointment. Lubetkin’s position at this crucial moment was probably not helped by the departure of Monica Felton, who had given notice of her own relinquishment of the post of Chairman to take up the equivalent position at Stevenage. She was succeeded by William (Lord) Beveridge who, rather than pursuing further coal negotiations, simply directed that alternative solutions allowing for the possibility of an improved coal settlement must ‘be built into’ the Master Plan to be presented in January 1950. The resulting document embodied all the essential advice on which a decision to complete the formal Master Plan could be taken. But the vital question of phasing required final agreement between the Minister of Planning and the Minister of Fuel and Power, that is, between Lewis Silkin and Hugh Gaitskell.8 Deliberately or otherwise, the finely wrought logic of Lubetkin’s technical alternatives was lost in upward transmission through the Civil Service, and the distinction between two and threeseam rules was omitted from the official briefing ‘to avoid Ministerial confusion’.9 Scene changes on the larger political stage now introduced new difficulties. The General Election of February 1950 reduced Attlee’s overall majority to 17, and in the new Cabinet Hugh Dalton replaced Lewis Silkin as Minister of Town and Country Planning. The upheaval provided a pretext for procrastination of the final decision, and a reappraisal of PDC policy. Two years had elapsed since Peterlee’s designation but not a single dwelling had been built in the new town. A socialist government with a slim majority could ill-afford such a record, least of all in a mining community with raised hopes. Lubetkin recalled becoming aware of more sinister interpretations. What if the Peterlee project was actually intended as a dream – a political placebo deliberately devised to suspend discontent with existing conditions while dismantling the

112

John Allan

coal industry? Such an effect could hardly have been better accomplished on purpose. Lubetkin once told me: The prospect of a ‘miners’ capital’ had originally seemed credible, he once recalled to me, but after the Ministry’s lighthearted agreement with the Coal Board, and the incessant official prevarication – not to mention the current low price of oil – we began to realise we were merely intended to build a few houses. The miners often said they suspected Peterlee was a trick to avoid improvement of the villages, and gradually this interpretation of the task began to haunt me. My position with the miners became unbearable – I simply couldn’t face the audience.10 On 31st March 1950, in an atmosphere of confusion and distrust, Lubetkin’s tenure of the post of Peterlee’s Architect-Planner expired, with no re-appointment arranged.11 Four days later, the new Minister of Town and Country Planning met the Coal Board Chairman and completely revised the coal settlement. Henceforward the Ministry would only support Corporation claims for stabilisation of the eastern town centre, all others being dropped. Of three-seam rules, co-ordinated extraction, of later terrace infilling, of stowage – no mention was made. The exact terms of the Master Plan were to be regarded as secondary, and a housing scheme was to be initiated at once, using secondhand type-plans supplied by George Grenfell Baines, architect at Aycliffe New Town. So it came to pass that two year’ work was abandoned in a single afternoon, and the Corporation effectively reverted to the NCB arrangement preceding Designation. Lubetkin’s Draft Outline Plan, published in the national and local press at the end of April 1950, was already history.12 Of course, the long hard task of actually building the new town was only now to begin. But when Berthold Lubetkin left Peterlee in the spring of 1950 its crisis of identity was over; its unique challenge forfeited. While Peterlee as eventually built bears no relationship to Lubetkin’s plan, it would be incorrect to suppose that, after his departure, its difficulties were over. Even by 1980, 33 years after its designation, the population had only reached 25,500.13 But that is another story.14 It was not easy to get Lubetkin to talk about Peterlee. When I met him in 1970, twenty years after the trauma of his departure, the wound had still not healed. As he once reflected to me, There was no easier town to imagine as a visual and social unity, both because of the site and because of the miners. But it was denied. Whenever we were faced with a technical objection we answered it; but official sabotage we couldn’t match. Honestly, even when I speak about it now, it aches.15 What might Lubetkin’s Peterlee have been like? So much for the narrative. What of the content? What might this town that Lubetkin found ’so easy to imagine’ have been like? Well, despite his premature

Lubetkin and Peterlee

113

departure and the fact that nothing he proposed was actually built there is enough evidence to be able at least to understand his intentions. I will say little about the background research undertaken by Lubetkin and his team, because it is too voluminous and also difficult to illustrate. But it is clear from the considerable surviving documentation that Lubetkin regarded planning as an art of constructive engineering, whether economic, physical or social. The chain of causal connection was to follow through everything. In social terms the special challenge of Peterlee, as interpreted by Lubetkin, consisted of maintaining the comradeship and solidarity of the mining village tradition, while at the same time broadening and diversifying the narrow, cramping patterns of economic and social life associated with it. This implied modifying the existing demographic structure to produce a ‘Peterlee constructed population’. This policy was to be managed by the Development Corporation and dovetail with an industrial strategy whereby Peterlee should diversify its range of employment and become less exclusively dependent on coal mining. Meanwhile, to achieve its intended centripetal function, Peterlee must seek to establish its ‘gravitational pull’ up to the equivalent boundaries of its three principal neighbours, Durham, Sunderland and Hartlepool. Research in this area indicated a potential population catchment for Peterlee’s sphere of influence in excess of 70,000. From this, it was possible to arrive at an assessment of the size and makeup of the town centre, which to function successfully also implied a radical new strategy for public transport in the whole district involving the eventual re-orientation of all local bus routes to pass through Peterlee. ‘Peterlee will not become a shopping or entertainment centre unless it first becomes a bus centre,’ remarked Lubetkin in one of his reports. Even the bus station took on a heroic character in Lubetkin’s imagination – ‘a blaze of lights and activity, with fleets of buses fetching and carrying the shifts of miners, these aristocrats of industry at all hours of the day and night.’ In achieving these vital new connections Lubetkin also had a higher ambition – to re-route the A19 itself through the town centre, to end a century of local isolation and ‘put Peterlee on the map’. This bold suggestion, later refused on cost grounds, was gratuitous to the Master Plan. But it was as much its visual as its social implications that appealed to him – wishing to broaden the town’s industrial consciousness with the spectacle of huge boilers and engineering components moving along the North–South coastal highway. Moreover the requisite bridging would in itself provide a brilliant coup de theatre, as, in the final moments of the southern approach, the traveller mounted a clear 650-foot span over the vertiginous depths of Castle Eden Dene. As to the main disposition of functions on the site, the principal built-up area was to be formed around the basin of Blunts Dene. The new town development would thus be screened from the surrounding pithead sprawl and enjoy the basin’s natural shelter. The civic centre would join the east and west ‘halves’ of the site in a system of bridge links across the gorge. On this point Lubetkin was clearly determined to exploit the contrast between the man-made and the natural. This strategy enabled virtually all dwellings to be located within reasonable

114

John Allan

walking distance of the centre, and thus, in marked contrast to C.W. Clarke’s plan, avoided the need to establish separate residential neighbourhoods with dispersed sub-groups of shops, etc., that could only dilute the pull of the central area. By the same logic of pyramidal massing, the large areas of open space required for recreation, playing fields, etc. would be located on the perimeter, on or beyond the rim of the basin. A special case was the main public sports arena which would form one of the focal attractions and was therefore an early priority. This fitted perfectly on the triangular ‘peninsula’, an outstanding natural feature south of the town centre between the two denes, and could be linked across Castle Eden Dene to the eighteenth century park on the southern boundary, providing a fine recreational area for the region as a whole. New industry for reasons of servicing and economy was to be concentrated on a single site adjacent to the Peterlee boundary. (This again differed from Clarke, whose industrial locations fell far beyond the town, west of the A19). The most suitable site was considered to be against the extreme northern edge of the Designated Area, conveniently close to the A19/A182 junction, and reached from Peterlee through a ‘funnel’ by the main axial road. This ’site use’ strategy, was examined in various permutations of town centre and road pattern, but with the placing of all these elements being correlated with coal workings below. There were three variations of road layout – the Cross Plan, the S Plan and the Fork Plan – but in each of these the major land uses were the same. The residential areas, some 650 acres in high and low densities, were contained as a coherent visual unit within the horizon line of the ‘amphitheatre’. Two thousand people would live in the town centre itself, in apartment blocks. Schools and playing fields were located towards the perimeter, except for primary schools, which were retained within the housing. To what extent was Lubetkin’s Peterlee land use strategy an application of CIAM’s urban principles? It is, of course, not hard to identify the CIAM zoning categories in this arrangement of functions – as Lubetkin himself was ready to admit. It is less easy to attribute this to their deliberate adoption or to simply a logical exploitation of the site’s inherent conditions and the practicalities of working at town rather than city scale. Lubetkin himself was not a ‘CIAM man’, and though he was aware of their pronouncements he was rather disparaging of those he referred to as ‘the high priests of CIRPAC’. Far more important in understanding Lubetkin’s design motivation is to consider his personal experience in the formation of his own urban sensibilities. I will return to this in a moment in studying his scheme for the town centre. But first a few words on the so-called ‘Hundred Houses’ scheme (Figure 5.4). This was initiated soon after Lubetkin’s engagement as a pilot project to allow experimentation with dwelling types and construction, and provide early and tangible evidence of building activity. The scheme was to be developed and located independently from the principal town development. In the typical Tecton manner Lubetkin worked his way through numerous alternatives before arriving at his chosen solution. This comprised a feeder road and secondary culs-de-sac drawn together in a central crossing establishing a focus and allowing optimum placing and orientation

Lubetkin and Peterlee

115

Figure 5.4 The Hundred Houses scheme, Thorntree Gill, Peterlee

of dwellings. With typical sensitivity, the road geometry is refined from a simple diagonal intersection into a figure of paired parabolas, joined at their apex. ‘This correction,’ he wrote, ‘has a very great importance, inasmuch as it enables us to substitute, for two straight intersecting roads, each leading with a very marked direction to nowhere, as roads on new estates so often do, a subtler directional layout . . . Thus the composition is knit into the undulating limestone country, rather than imposed mechanically upon it.’16 The series of proposed house types sought maximum individual variation within a simple common identity. To counteract subsidence, the ground floor raft and side walls were conceived as a ‘hollow channel’, enclosing the desired accommodation, roofed by a shallow monopitch draining to a single side gutter, and crossbraced by a deep structural parapet. This left the ends to be treated independently as entirely interchangeable diaphragm panels – ‘two gables that speak’ – within a surrounding frame that was so visually strong that, in Lubetkin’s words, ‘any design from suburban to cubist could theoretically be inserted.’ Unfortunately, the Hundred Houses project also became controversial and delayed by various bureacratic obstacles, so that, apart from the road layout, nothing of Lubetkin’s design was eventually built. I want now to consider the town centre, for it is really in this that Lubetkin’s urban design intentions for Peterlee are most clearly glimpsed. A seminal sketch conveys the essence of his intention – an open ’spatial vortex’ located by three

116

John Allan

architectural co-ordinates. Three slim slabs of about 12 storeys (residential accommodation above ground floor shops and offices), define the urban focus, ‘holding’ the central space like the jaws of a chuck. These blocks were the only tall buildings (if you call twelve stories tall) and were to stand as visual markers that would permit many variations of secondary detail (so much for the myth of Lubetkin’s Peterlee consisting of a city of skyscrapers). Around and between these three, in an anthology of geometric figures, are disposed the commercial, cultural and social buildings – depicted as cerebral abstractions setting off the wild drama of the denes (Figure 5.5). Lubetkin himself described its component parts as joined by ‘vectored space’, and Peterlee’s centre was evidently designed to stand in the urban traditions of the Champs Elysees or the Place de la Concorde – not enclosed but suggested, not compartmentalised but continuous. This reference to the great urban set-pieces of Europe should remind us of the formative influences on Lubetkin’s own development. The impact of these places – the Nevsky Prospekt, the Bourse at Vasilievsky Island, the Place de la Concorde, the Etoile, the Place de l’Opera, and so on was profound, and is almost impossible to over-estimate. Lubetkin once wrote: Standing in front of the Champs Elysees, you can write a book about such an experience, or you could remain silent and open-mouthed, looking at architecture devoid of buildings . . . dematerialised architecture, a form of orderly precision meeting the onlooker frontally, exhibiting purpose and resolve amongst gigantic stores of energy . . . Direction, drive, momentum, that thrusts by asserting itself against the distance . . . Where have I seen it before? Was it at the promontery of St Basil’s Island as I watched the oncoming roaring river?17 What is absolutely certain, both from what survives of Lubetkin’s designs for Peterlee and from other large scale urban interventions that he did achieve, is that after all the research, the statistics, the engineering and the politicking, he saw the town as a composition – a coherent three-dimensional statement of buildings, routes, views and natural features orchestrated in space – and that he drew on these early lessons in urban form for his inspiration. His tools were the concept of energised space and an ambitious use of geometry in the organisation of buildings and land. I want to emphasise the conjunction of these two elements – buildings and land design – because for Lubetkin they assumed vital reciprocal roles in arriving at a meaningful system of urban space. To help illustrate this point, I refer to Edmund Bacon’s Design of Cities where he contrasted two drawings dating from 1922, one by M. Giroud and the other by Le Corbusier – the former presenting space flowing through and round buildings in a continuous totality; the latter showing the modern technique of divorcing buildings from the ground by pilotis with unrelated landscaping and independent systems of pathways and circulation. As Bacon observed: Here we see the overlapping of the two phases of development, the Beaux-Arts plan marking the close of one phase, the Le Corbusier drawing heralding the

Figure 5.5 Detailed study of one of Lubetkin’s schemes for the town centre

118

John Allan new. Whatever else one may say for it, the Rome Prize drawing is an attempt at a vast and coordinated design for land development. The building forms are derived from the land design. The very representation of the buildings by their structural points of contact with the land rather than by their mass as blocks, shows clearly that the designer was thinking of the flow of space through them. However this type of exercise had become separated from reality. It represented academic caprice and was swept away. The drawing of Le Corbusier clearly shows one of the most decisive consequences of the architectural revolution, the cutting off of the building from the land. The mass of the structure is suspended above the land, and the design of each is independent from the other. This concept, in the hands of a master, can produce great work. However, the effect on the architectural profession was a disaster. No longer was the designer subject to the discipline of land design. Since the design of the building and the design of the land could now be treated separately, and since most architects were interested in buildings and not in land, the result has been concentration on building design independent of its environment, and the thoughtless, arbitrary placing of it on the land, without regard to total design principles. By the great liberation of Le Corbusier, the great surgical amputation of the building from the land, we have a new liberty of design for which we have paid a great price because, in the process, the total environment has suffered.18

I interpret Lubetkin’s aspirations in urban design as a conscious and militant attack on the causes and consequences of this ‘great amputation’ as Bacon called it. Both at Peterlee and elsewhere he sought a more ambitious system of urban morphology which transcended the conventional polarity of building-as-object or buildings-asreceptacle, using instead the energy generated by dramatised inter-relationships of buildings and nature as the primary means of ordering urban space. What we see in almost all Lubetkin’s larger works, and what is discernible in the Peterlee plan, is his exploitation of the urban axis – or as he preferred to call it, the spatial vector – in the search for coherence between buildings and their environment. The buildings and their surroundings are engaged in an intensive geometrical dialogue, which is heightened by deliberately contrasting arabesques of minor pathways and planting. This is the exact opposite of arbitrariness. It is a studied configuration of certain details to ‘represent’ the supposed capriciousness of nature in contradistinction to the order of human rationality (Figure 5.6). The other common factor to notice is that unlike many of the historical examples, where as often as not the main axis points toward a building (whether of church, monarchy or state), in Lubetkin’s case in his later and larger works the axis invariably passes beyond the limit of building on a larger trajectory towards nature or the adjoining environment. The result is that the energy generated by the directional thrust of the axis itself is not dissipated against a specific building (with its inevitable hierarchical symbolism or undue fixation on an entrance door, a central window or a grand staircase). Rather it is maintained, indeed intensified, by a prospect of distance – the suggested ‘beyond’.

Lubetkin and Peterlee

119

Figure 5.6 Analysis of Lubetkin’s idea of the Peterlee town centre

It may seem far-fetched to allude to the historical traditions of classical and baroque in a discussion of a New Town for east Durham miners, but we can only get close to Berthold Lubetkin’s intentions and motivation if we invoke a far wider timeframe than the specific circumstances of early post-war Britain. Lubetkin worked with the whole range of artistic and cultural resources at his disposal, which included all the inspirational resonances of European city building accumulated in his years of travel. His mission, largely but not wholly self-imposed, was not to try and build an eighteenth-century European town in the Durham coalfield. It was to re-interpret in contemporary terms the sense of order and coherence achieved in such places that might be imagined by their designers if they had been living in the twentieth century.

120

John Allan

What conclusions can be drawn from this experience? Whether the demise of Lubetkin’s Peterlee is attributed to sabotage, timidity or mere incompetence depends on what level and on which episode the story is judged. Certainly, the record reveals too many avoidable errors to permit a verdict of blameless misadventure. However, at least in my view, Lubetkin’s cynical suspicion that the whole enterprise was an elaborately preconceived plot to phase out the local mining industry while appearing to do the exact opposite places undue credence in the conspiracy theory of history. The roots of the debacle can surely be traced back to the ‘big idea’ on trial at Peterlee – the modern dream of making a town a social and compositional unity. Such a goal is only achievable if two traditionally separate disciplines are brought into intimate correlation – that of demographic and administrative planning (at most a two-dimensional activity), and that of architectural and urban design (unavoidably a three-dimensional one). This conjunction assumes a very great significance, particularly in this case, where a high degree of causal linkage between the various disciplines was crucial to the realisation of Lubetkin’s plan. Running through the whole Peterlee story is a denial of this idea of causal connection, either through passive incomprehension or by active disavowal, stacking the odds against Lubetkin even before he started. Indeed one cannot help likening his arrival on the scene following the Ministry’s fateful prior ‘deal’ with the Coal Board to that of a military commander reaching a battle just after some decisive moment of advantage has passed. The failure of the Ministry of Town and Country Planning to grasp the subsidence problem before Designation stage was the first inexcusable blunder. Yet even this must be linked to Clarke’s pamphlet, ‘Farewell Squalor’, which although invaluable in mobilising local aspiration, was also almost certainly counter-productive in prematurely establishing in official quarters a conventional image of the new town, that would not have required unusual interdisciplinary co-ordination. It is a grotesque version of that phenomenon so familiar to architects – the incomprehension of non-designers concerning the transforming effect of design itself in defining the parameters of the tasks it is called upon to address. Thus the Regional Planner’s prior agreements with the Coal Board – the predisposing transaction distorted by this image – was a fatal act of maladministration providing specious excuse for the Board’s subsequent intransigence. However, this monumental inflexibility after Lubetkin’s demonstrations of the need for reappraisal also betokened a woeful failure of technical courage on the part of the Coal Board. Then Lewis Silkin’s ill-judged delegation of the coal conundrum to the Webster Committee interrupted Lubetkin’s dialogue with the Coal Board at the very moment when it should have become more intimate, while the Webster Report itself merely compounded the deadlock. The Cabinet’s first contribution – establishing the unwieldy Regional Working party – was administratively ‘correct’ but wholly unimaginative. A more astute solution would have sought a true marriage of minds, by bringing together on the basis of total trust, say, only Lubetkin and a colleague and one or two really inventive

Lubetkin and Peterlee

121

mining engineers with full authority to act for the Coal Board. The Cabinet’s second intervention, ill-briefed by the Ministry of Planning, was far too clumsy to promote the genuine consensus needed for real technical progress. To the main official participants – General Manager Williams and Lord Beveridge – possessed of a conventional new town image, Lubetkin’s implacable resolve to secure alternative pre-conditions for the Master Plan must have seemed incomprehensible and exasperating; and with the departure at critical moments of his principal allies, Monica Felton and Lewis Silkin, both of whom had shared the initial vision, his position became increasingly isolated and vulnerable. Meanwhile, with two years’ delay and no visible results, the irreplaceable fund of local goodwill was exhausted. To those touched by the vision of what might have been, the Peterlee story leaves a distinct sense of loss. But the loss may be reckoned on at least three counts – social, technical and personal – the last of which has already been indicated above. What of the social loss? This must be registered in the way the miners lost their town – if Peterlee’s crisis of identity is read as a contemporary parable of the struggle between democracy and bureaucracy. The original ideal of a centralised miners’ capital was conceived in the local community, but it needed an equal quality of administrative imagination to achieve realisation. Lubetkin’s proposals were not impossible, but they were more difficult, and thus called for a quality of skill and motivation in official support quite beyond the normal order of practice (Figure 5.7). The departments concerned, however, were either unwilling or unable to rise to the occasion, such that the political vision was perforce modified to suit. At the technical level, Peterlee’s demise was a grievous loss for British town planning. As early as 1953, in the first critical appraisal of the New Towns, J.M. Richards

Figure 5.7 The Draft Master Plan, April 1950

122

John Allan

deplored the social and economic failure of the achievements to date. But his fiercest indictment was of their lack of urban identity: the greatest disappointment, when we come to compare expectation with achievement, is on the architectural side. The new towns constitute collectively the biggest building enterprise of the post-war era; yet, looking at them, one might almost imagine oneself back, not only in the era before the war but in that of the nineteen-twenties, when the little red-roofed villa scattered over mile upon mile of countryside was the only kind of housing thought of. Those were the days when it was justly said that the Englishman had forgotten how to build towns; he built garden suburbs instead. Today he goes on building suburbs which he dignifies by the name of towns19 With its centripetal programme and Lubetkin’s rare design skill, Peterlee would surely have provided a dynamic alternative to break this mould. And even if the surviving sketches stop tantalisingly short of detailed architectural information, it does appear that the main type of housing he wished to use, outside the apartment blocks in the town centre, was the continuous terrace or linked villas in various geometric formations. It was certainly by such means that he intended to suggest the coherent character of the mining community, and for that reason so desperately held out against the technically more straightforward but socially less symbolic alternative of semi-detached scatter. In later life, Lubetkin often expressed his admiration of historic planned towns, such as Richelieu, Eguisheim and Neuf-Brisach, when referring to his vision of Peterlee – which might perhaps be taken to imply an oversimplified ‘formalistic’ perception of the modern task of urban planning. But is it fair to suppose someone of Lubetkin’s calibre was not well aware of the compromising pressures of indeterminate growth and the need for built-in flexibility? In a long letter he wrote to Wells Coates in 1951, he suggested that such considerations on a macro-scale were very much part of his understanding. If there is any difference at all between architecture and town-planning, it can be reduced to the fact that in architecture it is possible to plan a building independent of the time-factor involved in its execution, whereas in town-planning everything depends on timing . . . During my crazy experience at Peterlee I was forced to introduce, as the main formative factor in preparing the Master Plan, the principle of elasticity . . . we had to limit ourselves to a solution based on topography, and on the system of communications, and to create architecturally certain accents which, through their scale and arrangement, would enclose a reservoir of space, to be filled with buildings as and when required . . . The modern architect is reduced to designing the town as a series of architectural strong points, kind of Martello Towers, from which to dominate the future jungle that is to be the development.20 This surely returns us to the key question that Lubetkin sought to answer – whether it is possible to plan a modern town as a visual and social unity. We have perhaps

Lubetkin and Peterlee

123

Figure 5.8 Application of urban land design and the ‘spatial vector’ in Lubetkin’s later work. The Cranbrook Estate in East London, 1955–66

become so cynical as a result of recent failures, that we tend to assume that the very attempt to do so in a modern pluralist society must be somehow undemocratic. Lubetkin’s response to the question in the context in which he faced it was a qualified ‘yes’, clearly fortified by Peterlee’s extraordinary pre-conditions and – at least initially – the requisite will of those involved. But as we have seen, such a combination of favourable circumstances is rare and poignantly fragile (Figure 5.8). This takes me back to Bacon’s book, and his opening essay entitled ‘The City as an Act of Will’. The building of cities is one of man’s greatest achievements. The form of his city always has been and always will be a pitiless indicator of the state of his civilisation. This form is determined by the multiplicity of decisions made by the people who live in it. In certain circumstances these decisions have interacted to produce a force of such clarity and form that a noble city has been born. He went on in words that could almost have been written by Lubetkin himself: My hope is to dispel the idea, so widely and uncritically held, that cities are a kind of grand accident, and that they respond only to some immutable law. I contend that the human will can be exercised effectively on our cities now, so that the form they take will be a true expression of the highest aspirations of our civilisation.21

124

John Allan

Peterlee may not have been realised according to Lubetkin’s ideals, but his unbuilt proposals will remain as a challenge to later generations, including ours, to keep returning to this question in the conditions and with the resources of their own times. Notes 1 Anyone wishing to study the Peterlee story in detail may wish to consult my book on Lubetkin where I attempt a complete reconstruction of the project narrative from original documentary sources. References to these sources are cited in that text, and for reasons of brevity have not generally been repeated here. See John Allan: Berthold Lubetkin – Architecture and the tradition of progress (London: RIBA Publications 1992) Chapter 10. 2 Monica Felton: ‘Blueprint for Peterlee: A Town for Miners’ in People On The Move (Contact Publications February 1949) pp.61–4. 3 C.W. Clarke: Farewell Squalor – A design for a New Town and proposals for the Re-Development of the Easington Rural District (Easington R.D.C. December 1946). 4 Lubetkin in conversation with the author, November 1979. 5 Monica Felton: ‘Blueprint for Peterlee: A Town for Miners’ p.63. 6 Lubetkin in conversation with the author, March 1981. 7 The Northern Echo (1st and 7th October 1949). 8 ‘Peterlee – Analysis of Planning Problems’ Report of the Architect Planner, Peterlee Development Corporation (16 January 1950). 9 Minutes of Meeting between M.T.C.P. Officials and Officers (including Lubetkin) of P.D.C. (17 January 1950). 10 Lubetkin in conversation with the author, October 1980. 11 The detailed circumstances of Lubetkin’s departure from post are too complex to be recounted adequately here. See John Allan Berthold Lubetkin Chapter 10, especially notes 64, 65 and 79. 12 ‘New Town On A Coalfield: Draft Plan for Peterlee’ The Times (29 April 1950). See also “Plan for Peterlee: New Town with a difference” The Northern Echo (29 April 1950). 13 Town and Country Planning, November 1980, volume 49, No.10, p.370, cites population at 31st March 1980 as 25,500. 14 For an account of the subsequent history of Peterlee New Town, see Gary Philipson: Aycliffe and Peterlee New Towns (Publications for Companies 1988). 15 B. Lubetkin in conversation with the author, December 1980. 16 2nd Interim Report on Provision of Housing in the South-East Extremity of the Designated Area. Peterlee Development Corporation. Report written by Lubetkin, giving full account of the Thorntree Gill project. 17 B. Lubetkin, from notes for Samizdat by Anarchitect, unpublished personal memoir begun 1978. 18 Edmund Bacon: Design of Cities (Thames and Hudson 1967; 1978) p.231. 19 J.M. Richards: ‘Failure of the New Towns’ Architectural Review (July 1953) pp.29–32. 20 B. Lubetkin to Wells Coates (21 February 1951). 21 Edmund Bacon: Design of Cities p.13.

6 QT8 A neglected chapter in the history of modern town planning Judi Loach

‘QT8’ stands for ‘Quartiere Triennale Otto’, the ‘district of the Eighth Triennale’, being the centre-piece of that Milanese exhibition which opened in 1948. It was to serve as an experimental building site, to inform the urgent reconstruction of the city of Milan after war-time bombing, and especially to address the problem of working class housing, by demonstrating the potential of pre-fabrication and industrialised construction. At the time of its inception it was widely published at home1 and abroad2, but it never served as the springboard for further developments in town planning in Italy for which it was intended. Despite the exceptional publicity it received at the outset, it is little known today, and still awaits any in-depth study, even from Milanese architectural historians. Yet, unlike many contemporary avantgarde schemes, it has aged well and become a desirable residential district; this alone would suggest that it merits further attention. Perhaps its current oblivion is also due, at least in part, to its quiet success. Both its neglect by architectural historians and its success as a residential environment may be explained by a single factor, which arose directly from the principles that underlay Rationalism, the specifically Northern Italian version of Modernism which developed from the 1930s on. These principles led Italian Modernism to be far more regionally specific and historically sympathetic than was usual in the Modern Movement, engendering an attractive appearance which resulted in its wide acceptance by the public. They also led, however, to the Italian contingent being denounced at the final CIAM meeting in 1956 as ‘historicist’, after which most Italian Modernist architecture and town planning was effectively excluded from the Modernist canon as published outside Italy. Yet what were grounds for criticism in the late 1950s – regional specificity and historical contextualism – have now acquired positive values, and give this scheme particular relevance within the current architectural debate. Few people today – whether visitors to, or residents of, Milan – visit QT8, although it lies only some six kilometres from the Duomo, well within the city boundaries and a mere 20 minutes ride from the city centre by Metro. The visitor arriving by this means emerges in the middle of a quiet and pleasant, mainly lower middle class, residential district, remarkable in this busy, noisy and densely-built-up city for its sense of open space and calm, with an almost overwhelming predominance of green thanks to the mature trees and vast lawns throughout. Moving

126

Judi Loach

Figure 6.1 General view of QT8. Photograph by the author, 1998

along the central thoroughfare – a broad, tree-lined boulevard – an unusually wide range of building types and styles come into view. Construction materials are varied, although brick predominates (Figure 6.1). Behind this diversity, the overall layout of the district soon becomes clear. A spine-like central thoroughfare is flanked and intersected by service roads. Further back, footpaths are almost pressed against the buildings, separated from the roads by wide lawns. The insertion of such generous green spaces inbetween these various types of circulation has ensured the legibility of the scheme and the optimum environment for pedestrians. Most buildings are comparatively low-rise – two to four storeys high – with a few high-rise blocks, notably two 11-storey blocks, serving as landmarks; these higher buildings, however, are sufficiently surrounded by open space as to permit views all around them, thus in no way obscuring the visitor’s grasp of the overall layout (Figure 6.2). Moving around the district one comes across schools and clinics, a social centre and church, a bustling covered market and small workshops, a garage, a particularly delightful home for unmarried mothers and their children and even the city’s youth hostel, all knitted into this essentially residential fabric (Figure 6.3). Strolling around on any weekday one is aware that the open-air spaces, far from being mere left-over gaps between the buildings, are extraordinarily well-used throughout the day, with young mothers (or grandparents) watching over children in playgrounds and elderly folk sitting on benches in the sun; in the early evening, teenagers play football and middle-aged men meet together and chat. The buildings

Figure 6.2 Bottoni: Casa INCIS (1953–6), QT8. Photograph by the author, 1998

128

Judi Loach

Figure 6.3 Alberto Scarzella Mazzocchi: Infant School (1957–8), QT8. Photograph by the author, 1998

peeping out between the trees and bushes are somewhat picturesque, due to their variety of silhouettes and – for modern architecture – the unusually vivid colouring and textures of their facades. There is some graffiti, but less than elsewhere. Most of the small shops have closed in the face of competition from the supermarkets which have arrived just beyond its boundaries. Entry-phones have been installed in the high-rise blocks of flats and wire fencing has been erected around the freestanding tower block. Nevertheless, overall, the district is manifestly a rather pleasant place in which to live, and especially to bring up a family, spend one’s retirement or simply to return to after a day’s hard grind in an office in town or a factory on an industrial estate further out. Milan and its Triennale Otto QT8 was launched in 1946 to be the centrepiece of the first post-war Milan Triennale and a long-term experiment in modern planning. It sprang directly from proposals put forward at the 1934 Triennale by Giuseppe Pagano, editor of Domus from 1933 and effective leader of the Rationalists, and fellow Rationalist architects Mario Pucci and Piero Bottoni, who had suggested setting up such a district expressly for the purpose of monitoring the outcomes of Modernist planning and architectural theories.3 In the immediate, local perspective, it was now to serve as an experimental building site, to inform the urgent reconstruction of the city of Milan after war-time bombing, and especially to address the problem of working-class housing.

QT8

129

The architects organising the Triennale were led by Piero Bottoni. He was a Communist with a particularly strong belief in the social function of architecture: a lifelong commitment to public housing, the integration of architecture with town planning, and the exploitation of the latest materials and technologies in construction, including a commitment to optimise standardisation and prefabrication (notably in order to build more cheaply and more efficiently). This emphasis on introducing industrialisation and mass-production into the building industry had precedents in Northern Italy dating from the inter-war period. No doubt Lombardy’s pre-eminence in Italian industry explains why architects there had been those most committed to these ideals then.4 In the last Triennale before QT8, in 1940, Giuseppe Pagano had mounted an exhibition on ‘produzione in serie’ (mass production) in the new pavilion at the Palazzo dell’Arte (the display itself being a lightweight steel structure).5 In his preface to the catalogue of the 1948 Triennale, Bottoni underlined how the first post-war Triennale, in dedicating itself to the needs of the poorly housed, broke away from the exhibition’s accustomed role of concerning itself exclusively with the ‘well-housed’.6 He and his group thus seized the opportunity to adapt a form of architecture hitherto only produced in Northern Italy for intellectuals and professionals – that of Rationalist Modernism – to the needs of the working classes. At the same time, they published a socio-political manifesto, The Social, Economic and Constructional Problem of Housing, which drew on their research into housing typology and their codification of building techniques (largely craft-based) actually available in the region; this document formed the basis for their development of Modernist housing in the subsidised sector. Bottoni went so far as to claim this ‘model experimental district’ as being ‘unique in Europe and the world’, which was at least true in terms of its experimental character; Public Health faculties from many universities treated it as a laboratory, and a meteorological observatory being set up to provide them with local climatic data.7 QT8 was deemed worthy of being disseminated abroad through architectural magazines such as Domus, edited by Gio Ponti, and Casabella, edited by Ernesto Rogers, published in Milan but widely read world-wide.8 It is worth recalling the role played by Northern Italy in the international architectural scene at this time, and the attention secured for it through these publications. It is not coincidental that when CIAM VII met in Bergamo, in the province of Lombardy, in 1947 it was perceived – by foreigners – as being ‘near Milan’.9 The Triennale organisers, concerned by Italy’s loss of an international film festival to Cannes, were determined that the eighth Triennale should confirm Italy’s role as the primary locus of international design exhibitions.10 To appreciate the sense of urgency attached to social housing, one needs to realise that Milan, especially the city centre, had been heavily bombed during World War II.11 Those exciting new buildings which caught the imagination of designers world-wide – notably Gio Ponti’s and Pier Luigi Nervi’s elegant 36-storey Pirelli Tower (1955–61) or BBPR’s controversial Torre Velasca (1952–8) – appeared where and when they did precisely because of the wholesale destruction of the central

130

Judi Loach

districts around the main railway station and the Duomo (Figure 6.4). Reconstruction was of paramount importance throughout the city. Between 1945 and 1950, over 7,000 dwellings were rebuilt as a direct result of bomb damage, and a further 44,000 repaired.12 Milan’s urgent need for construction was accentuated by being the focus of the economic boom then taking off in Northern Italy.13 This resulted in the mass immigration of unskilled workers from more depressed regions. Between 1931 and 1951, the population of Milan rose by just under 30 per cent, whilst that of Lombardy rose by 25 per cent; average population density rose correspondingly, increasing by about 50 per cent between the early 1930s and the late 1950s. By 1948, Milan was one of the most densely-populated cities in Europe, with correspondingly little green space, and such population growth continued throughout the 1950s.14 This massive influx exacerbated an already acute shortage of affordable workingclass housing, leading to overcrowding and insanitary living conditions for these newly-arrived workers, and a dearth of complementary public facilities. Between 1945 and mid-1952, 10,312 dwellings were provided, either by building in new districts or by completing unfinished schemes within the existing city.15 In 1946 these preoccupations – the post-war reconstruction of the city, and even more with the pressing need to provide vast quantities of decent housing for the increasing labour force – led the organisers of the Eighth Triennale to decide (exceptionally) to adopt a single theme for the entire Triennale, to the exclusion of such issues usually covered in the Triennale as commercial and recreational developments: ‘A Home for Everyone’.16 To this end, all the exhibitions in the Palazzo dell’Arte focused exclusively on QT8.17 After entering past Nizzoli’s diorama of the future district, the photographic section presented images of comparable schemes abroad. The town planning section then showed models of QT8’s proposed layout and the housing section showed examples of low cost but healthy housing types, including sample rooms from prefabricated flats or houses. Finally, the furnishing and decorative arts sections exhibited furnishings and household objects recommended for use in the homes to be built at QT8.18 A series of conferences took place during the exhibition – on modern art and design, building technology (emphasising modularisation, standardisation and prefabrication), housing and town planning – so as to further inform the district’s design.19 Rationalism and the design of QT8 The design of QT8 drew on a series of unexecuted town planning projects which had been elaborated by Rationalist architects in Northern Italy since 1934. Bottoni and Pagano had represented Italy at the fourth CIAM congress in 1933 which culminated in the ‘Athens Charter’. The following year, these two young architects (working with Pietro Lingeri, Mario Pucci and Cesare Cattaneo) had demonstrated how these principles could be applied to an average-sized Italian town, in their competition-winning scheme for the master plan of Como: slums were cleared away and replaced by orderly housing estates, whilst the city centre was defined as a separate pedestrian zone.20

Figure 6.4 Photograph of the site of QT8 before construction started in 1948

132

Judi Loach

Other precedents appeared in competition entries by Bottoni, Terragni, Lingeri, Pucci and Mucchi for the Fiera Campionaria buildings in 1937 (ironically, the same site as QT8 in 1948); by Sartoris, Terragni and Lingeri for a workers satellite town outside Rebbio, the project by Albini, Gardella and Pagano for ‘Milano Verde’, research by Bottoni and Pucci for workers’ housing commissioned by the province of Milan,21 and the project for four autonomous satellite towns for 65,000 inhabitants by another group of Modernist architects, again including Bottoni, Pucci and Albini, commissioned by the Institute for Working Class Housing (Istituto Autonomo delle Case Popolari), all in 1938.22 In Casabella, Pagano acclaimed these four town designs as ‘presages for the city of tomorrow’.23 They would, to a considerable extent, become Bottoni’s principal model for his plan for QT8 immediately after the war. These schemes exhibited features common to the Modern Movement across Europe: a belief in the socio-political role of planning and architecture in improving the living conditions of the working classes; the introduction of open spaces and greenery; functionalist planning, zoning and differentiation between various levels of vehicular circulation. At the same time, however, they also demonstrated features specific to Rationalism, notably a positive attitude towards the past, both in terms of material fabric and of principles to be abstracted from it; this can be seen in the concern to preserve rather than replace historic urban fabric (hence satellite towns to relieve pressure on city centres), the alignment of housing blocks along streets (instead of isolating them in open space) and the introduction of arcaded shopping streets (an element derived from study of existing urban fabric), together with a strong commitment to the concept of building typology. This attitude towards both the past and regional specificity constituted the key feature distinguishing Northern Italian Rationalism from the mainstream Modern Movement. The name ‘Rationalism’ derives from its effective manifesto, published in the Italian magazine Rassegna in 1926–7 (thus predating CIAM 1) by Gruppo 7 (Group of 7), seven recent graduates from Milan Polytechnic.24 These young men – including Terragni, Libera, Figini and Pollini – shared a belief that the architectural styles most in evidence in twentieth-century developments in Northern Italy were inappropriate for its major towns and cities, given that this was one of the most industrialised and economically vibrant regions of Europe. It was their plea that: New architecture, true architecture, must emerge from a strict adherence to logic and rationality. We don’t pretend to be creating a new style, but through the constant application of rationality, by letting a building meet the needs of the problem as closely as possible, we are sure that a style will arise through this process of selection.25 The Rationalists opened their founding manifesto by disassociating themselves from their notorious Milanese predecessors, the Futurists; they stressed the need for a kind of modern architecture which would learn from the past: There is no incompatibility between our past and present. We do not want to break with tradition, with our heritage; we do not want to ignore it. Tradition

QT8

133

transforms itself and takes on new appearances, beneath which that tradition only remains recognisable to a few people. . . . Classical foundations and the spirit of tradition (which is quite a different thing from traditional forms) are so deeply embedded in Italy that our new architecture will be unable to leave a mark entirely its own.26 This positive embracing of the past, drawing invisible principles from Classicism rather than repeating motifs from it, would thus set the Rationalists apart from the mainstream Modern Movement.27 Such ideas would be digested, developed and refined over the following decades, so that by the mid 1950s the best modern buildings in Italy stood out from contemporary architecture elsewhere precisely because of their ‘felicitous admixture of old and new’.28 Within the Fascist state, however, the national specificity imputed to Classical culture progressively attained greater importance within Rationalist discourse. This led to its advocacy of proportional systems as a means of incorporating this essence of Classicism into modern architecture, another preoccupation which would later contribute to the particular quality of QT8. The Rationalists were therefore adamant in stressing the necessity of going beyond mere Functionalism, ‘ennobling architecture with the indefinable, abstract perfection of pure rhythm, the simple expression of construction, which would not be beautiful on its own.’29 This apparent paradox was, in fact, fundamental to their notion of function. As Ernesto Rogers explained, ‘functionalism is not only the finest means of expressing every construction according to its specific character, but also of adapting every building to the problems of its site and its cultural situation.’30 From 1926 until 1931, the Rationalists developed as a cultural force within Italian society, through widespread exhibitions and the construction of their first buildings.31 During this period, they maintained close contact with Modernists elsewhere on the continent, visiting the Werkbund’s Weissenhof Siedlung at Stuttgart in 1927 and sending representatives to CIAM’s gatherings from the inaugural meeting the year after. Nevertheless they already demonstrated a certain independence from the narrow Functionalism propounded by a CIAM initially dominated by German attitudes.32 Political circumstances were to reinforce this uniquely rich approach in Italian Modernism which also characterised the post-war work in QT8. Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 was condemned by all of Europe except Hitler. From 1936 Italy therefore found herself isolated, and her economy consequently in free-fall. In response the Fascists imposed a policy of ‘Economic Independence’, forbidding virtually all imports, including those of building materials. This had a dramatic effect on the subsequent development of Rationalist architecture. The construction industry found itself reliant upon indigenous materials alone and, since Italy lacked natural resources in iron, construction was entirely deprived of steel; the presence of calcareous rocks in Northern Italy, however, provided the lime and chalk required for cement, thus leading to the replacement of steel by concrete for all structural frames. The ferreto clay so plentiful in the region had been exploited for brick manufacture since before Roman times, and had also long been used to produce the

134

Judi Loach

hollow tiles commonly used for construction in the region. Although marble and other native stones remained accessible, their higher prices ensured that brick became the major constructional material, at least for infill, although often covered with a veneer of stone in prestigious buildings.33 This established a vocabulary of building materials whose dominance persisted through the post-war years of economic exigencies. Furthermore, since it was easier to obtain traditional materials intrinsically associated more with craft-based than mass-produced construction, any vision of standardisation was inevitably compromised, as became apparent at QT8, despite its explicit objective of promoting the industrialisation of the building industry. Italian Modernists, being largely constrained to using traditional materials, tended to compensate by expressing modernity through originality of form instead of material, leading to a more expressive kind of architecture; this was in turn accentuated by the colour and texture inherent in these materials. The Rationalists, committed to seeking continuity with tradition at the level of principle rather than appearance, began to research the construction techniques traditionally employed for these materials, and specifically as they had developed in Lombardy. This investigation initially resulted only in publications, but from the late 1930s it led to a series of buildings which reinterpreted these techniques – for instance, waffle walls in brick, such as are used in barns across the Po valley – to create wholly modern buildings.34 One of the clearest example of this is Gardella’s Anti-Tuberculosis Clinic in Alessandria (1935–8), with its clearly expressed concrete frame infilled by brick waffle panels; in the clinic, as in the barns before, this waffle facade ensured natural ventilation and shading of the interior, in a region which suffers from high temperatures combined with a low rate of air flow during the summer months.35 Such a uniquely North Italian form of Modernism would – quite literally – vividly colour the appearance of QT8. The planning of the district The QT8 district covers 9.5 hectares; it was originally designed for 13,000 residents, although it eventually housed 18,000.36 It was intended that further elements be added, and existing elements modified in the light of their usage, over the course of the following years.37 It was thus intended to be revisited, both physically and conceptually, over successive Triennales. In order to optimise the district’s potential as both an exhibition and a laboratory, a wide range of building types were built by a large number of architects (usually appointed by competition); to finance such an ambitious development, a variety of funding sources were involved, both public and private.38 The overall plan (Piano Regolatore) was therefore crucial, not least in coordinating such a diversity of constituent schemes and designers.39 Three plans succeeded each other for the layout of the district, although Bottoni remained in charge throughout.40 These were respectively elaborated prior to the three successive Triennales held in 1948, 1951 and 1954. Plan 1 was devised in 1946, with Bottoni leading an extensive team, which included Mario Pucci, his collaborator on previous urban planning projects, and Gino Pollini, one of the two

QT8

135

leading Milanese architects from Gruppo 7, the original Rationalists. By the time this Triennale opened, Bottoni had been put in charge of the new master plan for Milan itself, thus confirming his widespread recognition as the leading contemporary planner in Northern Italy. Plan 2 was devised in 1950 by Bottoni, now assisted by Ezio Cerutti alone; plan 3 was devised in 1953 by Bottoni in collaboration with the Divisione Urbanistica del Commune di Milano, the department responsible for planning the whole city.41 The first plan seems to have been an outline plan for the entire site, with detailed design confined almost entirely to the area south of the central boulevard (Figure 6.5). Subsequent plans revised this outline and designed the remaining areas in detail in response to the district’s actual usage, thus to some extent fulfilling the original aim of treating the district as a laboratory in which Modernist planning and architectural theories could be tested. Nevertheless, the key elements remained the same throughout: vehicular circulation was separated into fast through-roads along the east–west and north–south axes – thus cutting the district into four quadrants – and around the perimeter, slower service roads (providing access to each building) and pedestrian paths. The centre, containing major public amenities – church, cinema, municipal offices and covered market – was surrounded by parkland.42 Other public amenities were distributed throughout the residential fabric – a nursery school and row of half-a-dozen local shops in each quadrant, and two primary schools serving two quadrants each. Playing fields were provided beside each highrise block and each low-rise neighbourhood. The high-rise housing was sited along the edge of the district, so as to avoid shading low-rise housing.43 Furthermore, the same two architects – Professor Piero Porcinai & Vittoriano Viganò – were responsible for the landscaping in all three plans, which consisted principally of open green spaces.44 Porcinai was particularly concerned to continue what he saw as a specifically Italian tradition of open green spaces, that of the parks around historic villas. Across Italy these parks had been retained when large private houses had been replaced by modern blocks of luxury flats for the professional classes, the open space being transformed into collective gardens; Porcinai now wanted, for the first time, to bring this experience to working-class residents.45 The single radical alteration to the first plan concerned its major landscape feature, originally a lake fed by the River Olona which crosses the site; this feature had derived as much from a pragmatic need, the reclamation of a gravel quarry (which occupied most of the north-western quarter of the site) as from aesthetic considerations.46 During the first phase of execution, however, the city authorities began to dump rubble from bomb sites throughout Milan beside the future lake.47 By 1947, it was evident that this dump would become so large as to overshadow the lake, thereby forcing a change of design; the hill thus took over the lake’s former role (Figure 6.6). By 1953 it had acquired the rather grandiose name of ‘Monte Stella’, this ‘mountain for Milan’ (100 metres high) now being intended to function on a larger scale than the lake had been, creating a new landmark on the horizon of the city as a whole.48 It was to attract citizens from the entire city, in turn helping to prevent QT8’s isolation from the rest of the urban fabric, as had occurred with several earlier suburban estates. Originally it was intended to install a lift inside

Figure 6.5 Model of QT8 in 1948, viewed from the south-east

QT8

137

Figure 6.6 The artificial hill in 1948

this artificial hill, to take visitors up to a restaurant and a series of panoramic terraces overlooking the city in one direction and the Lombard plain in the other.49 Although the hill was eventually completed (in 1967), neither lift nor restaurant was incorporated. The city’s failure to support the Triennale’s master plan during phase 1 is striking; at the least it suggests an unwillingness to co-operate with the Triennale’s architects. Gio Ponti’s account of the district as it appeared in 1951 hinted at the city planning office’s jealousy towards this exemplary scheme, mounted within its boundaries but by an independent body.50 Ponti decried the city authority’s failure to provide QT8 with such basic services as comprehensive road surfacing, street lighting and rainwater drainage, let alone amenities such as a church and small market, on which he believed that the sense of community essential for the future success of the district depended.51 Such a seeming lack of concern by local authorities for anything other than housing was, unfortunately, commonplace throughout Italy in this period.52 In the wake of this public denunciation, the city subsequently involved itself directly in the planning of the district, the final plan being drawn up by the city planning department, under Bottoni’s direction. Yet the city’s increased involvement seems to have been won at the expense of the Triennale’s commitment to the scheme, for the Tenth Triennale (1954) turned out to be the last in which the district appeared, being virtually ignored by the Triennales of 1957, 1960 and 1963. This probably reflects a division within the Triennale itself between those who emphasised its role in promoting the aesthetic quality of luxury products and those, like Bottoni, who were more concerned with its potential as a catalyst for social change. In any case, since the land belonged to the city (who had acquired it on the Triennale’s behalf) it had always had a say in the use of each site within the district.53

138

Judi Loach

The buildings of QT8 At the outset, in 1946–7, the state supported the Triennale’s concept of QT8 as an urban and architectural laboratory, two ministries each sponsoring a ‘built experiment’ on adjacent sites in the south-western corner of the district. The first, inspired by Bottoni’s interest in typology, was devised to stimulate the development of innovatory family house types for the subsidised sector. A national competition resulted in eleven designs being selected, the executed schemes turning the Via Diomede into ‘a true, and appropriate, sample book, such as was needed at the moment of their construction, as far as the limited means available allowed, and so as to provide the maximum number of models . . . (for) Italian reconstruction.’ Building began in June 1947, and by late summer 1948, 38 of these homes had been completed, following six terraced and eight semi-detached models.54 Despite the proclaimed aims of QT8, their interest lay not in the construction methods used (most were of load bearing brick with prefabricated concrete floors), but in their threedimensional planning of a single type, the family home (Figure 6.7 and Figure 6.8).55 The other ministry concerned simultaneously launched a competition for fourstorey, pre-fabricated blocks of flats, designed specifically to evaluate alternative construction processes.56 To ensure maximum objectivity for this experiment the Triennale architects prepared a standard plan (with two flats per floor, except the ground floor, which only contained a single flat); the competition then required architects to adapt this to various pre-fabrication systems. By August 1948, five designs had been planned and two were already under construction,57 but these experimental flats proceeded more slowly than the nearby houses, only one further block being completed in the three years leading up to the next Triennale.58 Although the aim of the district as a laboratory was to monitor experiments such as the construction and long-term performance of such experimental buildings,

Figure 6.7 Prefabricated flats: The Giarlino System 1948

QT8

139

Figure 6.8 Experimental Family Houses, as built in 1948

virtually all the Italian-produced buildings at QT8, apart from these prefabricated blocks of flats, were of traditional construction. This reflected the current state of affairs in Italy, where the construction industry was still primarily craft-based (Figure 6.9).59 Instead of designing complete prefabricated systems, architects exploited standardised, industrialised elements – for instance, small-scale off-the-peg elements such as steel grills and sanitary fittings – to create modern functionalist build-

Figure 6.9 ‘Mechanical means for earth-moving and road construction. 1) The Steamroller’. Mechanised building site, Italian style, 1948

Figure 6.10 QT8 in 1951

QT8

141

ings.60 Nevertheless, the most widely employed mass-produced components remained more traditional – principally clay-based – ones, notably bricks, ceramic tiles or mosaic. It was not, however, until the Ninth Triennale (in 1951) that enough buildings had been completed for the district to begin to fulfil its intended purpose as a living exhibition of housing types; moreover, construction was still confined to the southern half of the site (Figure 6.10). Work for this Triennale also included an 11-storey block of flats (108 dwellings) designed by Lingeri, Terragni’s old partner, and Zuccoli. This building would become one of the most acclaimed in QT8 (Figure 6.11).61 It followed the local vernacular in adopting an east–west orientation to exploit sunlight. As in Terragni’s pre-war flats in Milan, access decks ran slightly below the floor level of the flats, with individual entrances in protective niches set back to increase privacy.62

Figure 6.11 The block of flats by Lingeri with the exhibition pavilion by Bottoni in 1951

142

Judi Loach

This block became the centrepiece of the Ninth Triennale, with mosaic decoration commissioned for the entrance hall from the eminent painters Crippa, Dove and Soldati serving both as signage to draw visitors in during the exhibition and afterwards to commemorate both the Ninth Triennale and the completion of the first building by this government housing agency in the district. Bottoni also designed a circular pavilion at the foot of this block to house an exhibition illustrating the scheme for the entire district. Several flats in the block were specially decorated and furnished, mainly according to designs by Bottoni, Ponti and Mucchi, to demonstrate how workers could benefit from contemporary interior design (Figure 6.12).63 The Milan Triennales had acquired a well-deserved reputation before the war for building innovatory houses, but its organisers had perhaps lacked experience in relating such buildings to one another so as to create cohesive urban fabric. Since the Triennale’s international reputation was primarily due to its high standard of exhibition design, it is not surprising that the press deemed the furnishing of Lingeri’s flats as the most noteworthy aspect of QT8 at the Ninth Triennale. Visiting designers and other professionals (including foreigners) especially admired the refined nature of furniture and lighting design. Yet their response illustrates the inherent contradictions of a working-class district arranged and designed by avant-garde Modernists. Moreover, as Gardella pointed out in an article on Italian

Figure 6.12 An architect-designed sitting room in the Lingeri block of flats: an element of the 1951 Milan Triennale exhibition

QT8

143

furniture and fittings, this reputation of Italian designers in general and Milanese ones in particular was due to the artisanal nature of the national economy whilst, ironically, its replacement by industrialised production was one of QT8’s principal aims.64 In principle each room might be furnished with different combinations from a single range of constructional or furnishing elements, thus representing a development of ideas explored by Bottoni and Griffini in their ‘Elementi di case popolari’, a range of interchangeable, dimensionally co-ordinated furniture units covering the entire furnishing of a home, which had been exhibited at the Fifth Triennale in 1933.65 While, in 1933, it had been possible only to carry out experiments or prototypes, after the war these could be translated into concrete solutions to the problem of working-class living conditions.66 In accordance with Bottoni’s objectives for QT8, a common, hygienist-inspired emphasis on light and cleanliness was evident (despite the variety of designers involved): the word ‘washable’ appeared in virtually every caption in subsequent publications. Separate living and dining rooms were replaced by a single – but larger – room, exploiting low storage units or sliding panels to define different areas within it, sometimes including a kitchenette; light colours were used throughout, and patterns largely avoided; walls were painted or clad with veneers (such as masonite), whilst floors were covered with rubber tiles or lino; the number of pieces of furniture was reduced, built-in storage units and easily portable (even stacking) chairs or stools and fold-away tables or beds were introduced to both optimise the space available and facilitate cleaning; furniture was made of light-coloured woods, varnished or painted white (rather than stained), and upholstered in equally lightcoloured fabrics, exploiting innate texture rather than applied pattern; standard lamps or hanging lights, all of modern design, sported glass or metal shades. In 1948 some members of the Triennale, notably Ernesto Rogers, had already voiced misgivings over Bottoni’s exclusive focus on housing in the Eighth Triennale.67 It seems that in order to respond to such criticisms a team ‘open to many tendencies’ was appointed to organise the Ninth Triennale, intending this to ensure a broader approach. The result, however, was more a fragmentation into a series of separate, unrelated initiatives and a virtual disassociation between the disorderly building site of QT8 and the Palazzo dell’Arte, where elegant exhibitions reflected the more traditional concerns of international designers promoting Italy’s reputation in luxury goods for a high-class market.68 These latter exhibitions were condemned by the younger generation as a retreat into academicism and formalism, taking the Triennale away from the European position it had attained in the 1930s as leader of the avant-garde and also a social and technological pioneer.69 The Rationalist preoccupation with proportional theory had led to an exhibition on ‘The study of proportions’, covering works from the Middle Ages and Renaissance onwards, as studied by Rudolph Wittkower, Roberto Longhi, Ernst Panofsky and James Ackermann and developed in Le Corbusier’s Modulor,70 alongside a related international conference on ‘Proportions in art and architecture’. Given the latter’s glittering line-up of international stars – the former authors being joined by Vantongerloo, Max Bill, Sigfried Giedion, Carlo Mollino, Pier Luigi Nervi, Bruno Zevi,

144

Judi Loach

Gio Ponti and Ernesto Rogers, to name but the most eminent71 – it is hardly surprising that the journals, most notably Ernesto Rogers’ Casabella, devoted far more pages to this than to QT8. By the Tenth Triennale in 1954, relatively few further buildings had been completed. The Ministry of Public Works’ programme of prefabricated blocks of flats was proceeding at snail’s pace, only one more block having been completed since the previous Triennale, although six more were now under construction.72 The most notable addition in 1954 was probably Bottoni’s own, innovative terrace of shops with housing above and stores or workshops in a semi-basement below level opening onto delivery and parking spaces behind (1950–3).73 Nevertheless, despite – or perhaps because of – the Triennale’s seeming declining interest in QT8, Bottoni seems to have felt it opportune to publish the official monograph on the district Il quartiere sperimentale della Triennale di Milano, QT8. From the outset the architects of the Triennale had intended QT8 to display examples of well-designed, industrially produced, housing from abroad. In the event only two such ‘little demonstration houses’ were built, the first – the Casa Belga – being erected in 1950, virtually as an entrance lodge. In fact, this house mixed prefabricated elements in the latest materials – walls of hollow prefabricated blocks, planes of ‘Securit’ plate glass and ‘Eternit’ slabs for the roof – with others in traditional materials – stone facing to the lower part of the walls outside and pitch pine fixings inside, black marble floors downstairs and parquet or terrazzo upstairs. By contrast the unpretentious pre-fabricated timber house sent by a Finnish company for the Tenth Triennale in 1954 was genuinely mass-produced, consisting entirely of a standardised timber framework supporting modularised wall panels (of high thermal performance), doors and windows, with an enamel panelled bathroom and similarly industrially produced units for the fitted kitchen and the built-in wardrobes in the bedrooms; its only concession to its new Italian context comprised substituting pantiles on the roof. Evidently this example was hardly relevant in a region whose indigenous resources excluded timber, and whose economic situation precluded its importation. Further buildings appeared over the following years, the scheme being officially completed in 1961, although some buildings were not actually finished until a little later. These final additions included further housing; more significant, however, was the number – and quality – of the public buildings erected during this final period: Bottoni’s last two major buildings, a Social Centre for INA-CASA (1954–7) and (only after the scheme’s official completion) his Garage (1961–2); Vico Magistretti and Mario Tedeschi’s church (1947–55); Fabio Mello and Alberto Scarzella Mazzocchi’s home for unmarried mothers and their children (1956–7); Scarzella’s Infants School (1957–8); Mario Righini’s Youth Hostel (1960–1).74 These last buildings at QT8 – notably those by the lesser known local architects Scarzella and Righini – best illustrated the regional specificity of late Rationalism: the adaptation of rigorous Modernism to indigenous materials and those traditional construction techniques observed in the region’s vernacular architecture, now reinterpreted within a modern and urban context. The vast majority of buildings in QT8 embody such an approach, being characterised by clearly visible concrete frames,

QT8

145

usually infilled with pinky-orange brick, to the extent that the policy of ‘Economic Independence’ alone has exerted a greater effect than has anything else on the appearance of the district; the most vivid examples all date from this last period. The use of such indigenous and well-tried materials in the production of overtly modern architecture has resulted in buildings which have weathered well. Moreover the district is also perceived by its residents as attractive and humane, thereby generating relatively little graffiti or vandalism. Conclusion Although QT8 was much praised at the time of its design – in terms both of its aims and of the manner in which the Triennale’s architects tried to fulfil them – it was evident even before its completion that it could not usefully act as the kind of model for future development originally envisaged. As Virgilio Vercelloni sadly observed in Casabella in 1961, ‘The social and political developments of future years prevented this district from accomplishing its function as guide and as realistic experiment: unfortunately it will remain a successful but isolated attempt.’75 This situation deserves some explanation. Firstly, QT8 benefited from a much lower density than did any comparable contemporary schemes, let alone any of the subsequent developments for which it was supposed to serve as a model. The estate designed by BBPR for Cesate, a satellite community north-west of Milan, in 1950–2, was of slightly higher density, despite the much lower land values prevailing in such a location.76 The situation is starker for schemes in more comparable locations, such as the nearby estate on Vias Harrar and Dessié (1951–3), designed by Figini and Pollini with Gio Ponti; although it resembles QT8 in its mixture of two-storey houses (with their own gardens) and medium-rise (6–7 storey) blocks of flats, all standing in a public park, its overall density is more than double.77 Nevertheless this particular scheme was referred to at the time as having a relatively low density.78 QT8’s privileged position seems to have stemmed from its economic basis more closely resembling that of a Werkbund siedlung type of development than a typical low-cost, working-class housing estate. Despite the inclusion of some sizeable blocks and terraces of subsidised housing, the district also contained terraces intended for sale, thus raising the overall cost yardstick and so enabling a lower density.79 It is worth noting that the social mix due to this combination of subsidised and free market housing has probably been a significant factor in assuring the estate’s long-term success. The economics of the scheme were further helped by the Triennale persuading two government Ministries to pay for 300 low-cost dwellings (the new types of house and the adjacent blocks of flats exploiting new systems of industrialised construction) and giving the Commune di Milano 60 million lire towards infrastructure expenses, such as laying out streets and sewers.80 Secondly, as working class immigration into greater Milan continued through the 1950s, property speculation took off, land values rising acutely and the city attaining the highest land values in Italy; in most districts of the city land costs came to exceed construction costs for redevelopment.81 Such a rise in land values made the kind of density enjoyed at QT8 progressively unattainable. The estate at Vialba

146

Judi Loach

(1958), a northern suburb considerably further out than QT8, designed by Lingeri and others, was built at over double the density; green space was only maintained by introducing tower blocks among the medium-rise (four-storey) blocks which had hitherto been the norm in such estates.82 The estate designed the same year by a team led by Pollini for a site in Via Feltre, similarly distant from the centre as QT8 but to the (cheaper) east, was built to three times its density; a green setting was still retained, but at the cost of raising the height of the blocks (most now reaching nine storeys) and pulling them closer together.83 In short, social and economic circumstances combined to render QT8 too optimistic a model to serve its original purpose as an exemplar for subsequent design of working-class districts. Furthermore, as land values rose during the 1950s, the building of subsidised housing in the Milanese suburbs not only became less economically feasible but also less necessary, since such rises in land values led industry to relocate outside the city boundaries, notably in new satellite communities across the province. A primarily residential district like QT8, which assumed that its inhabitants would commute to work outside, did not offer a useful model for such autonomous settlements. The fact that QT8 could not therefore function as intended – as a model for future working-class settlement in Northern Italy – may explain why its role as a laboratory was not followed through, there being little evidence of any evaluation of its experiments in innovatory housing types or industrialised construction. Yet even if the district as a whole could not be used as a model for later developments, both its spirit and various features from it have proved influential. Moreover, many of the individual designers responsible for QT8 took the experience gained there to other developments; most significantly, Bottoni became the planner for Gallaratese (1956), thus establishing an unacknowledged link between QT8 and the Tendenza (or neo-Rationalists). Only in the 1990s have Italian critics begun to assert their appreciation of it. Claudio Camponogara and Fernanda Sabatelli refer to it as ‘an important episode in Italian urban culture’,84 whilst Sergio Polano describes it as ‘an exceptional opportunity, unfinished and isolated, in its definition of typological, layout, constructional and expressive solutions in the field of low-cost building during the reconstruction era.’85 This belated recognition, coming as it does from acknowledged writers in the field, seems to confirm the scheme’s relevance to the contemporary debate about architecture and urban development. Furthermore, as outlined at the beginning, QT8 has become a desirable residential district, and in many ways this must surely be the most important test of the validity of those Modernist, or at least Rationalist, theories which it embodies. Notes 1 V.V. (Virgilio Vercelloni): ‘Alcuni quartieri di edilizia sovvenzionata a Milano’ Casabella 252 (June 1961) p.37. See also Claudio Camponogara and Fernanda Sabatelli: ‘Bottoni e Milano’ Domus 721 (November 1990) map supplement, and Sergio Polano: Guida all’architettura italiana del Novecento (Milan: Electa 1991) p.128. 2 In 1951 Gio Ponti noted how ‘QT8 . . . has been sufficiently written about in Italy and abroad’, adding that ‘at Stockholm, QT8 is “all the new city” ’. G.P. (Gio Ponti): ‘La Triennale nel suo quartiere sperimen-

QT8

3

4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22

23 24

25 26 27

147

tale QT8’ Domus 263 (November 1951) p.2. The special edition of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (22–3) devoted to Italy the following year (June 1952) allocated more space to QT8 than to any other scheme; André Bloc opened the ‘Habitat populaire’ section within his article on ‘La Contribution à l’Architecture contemporaine’ with QT8. Metron 1 (1946) p.76; (Bottoni): ‘Il Quartiere sperimentale modello QT8 della Triennale di Milano’ Metron 26–7 (August–September 1948) p.14; ‘Il Quartiere sperimentale della Triennale di Milano (QT8)’ Metron 43 (November-December 1951) p.56; Camponogara and Sabatelli: ‘Bottoni e Milano’ Domus 721 No.9. Gaetano Ciocca’s prefabricated concrete houses for rural areas were illustrated by Alberto Sartoris in Gli Elementi dell’Architettura Funzionale (Milan 1932; 1941 edn) pp.616–8. Sartoris: Elementi pp.584–8; Encyclopédie de l’Architecture Nouvelle (Milan 1948) pp.298–9. Domus 221 (July 1947) p.2. Metron 26–7 pp.15 and 17. See in particular M.T.: ‘Le casette per i reduci al QT8’ Domus 217 (1947) pp.2–4; Ponti: ‘La Triennale nel suo quartiere sperimentale QT8’ Domus 263 pp.2–9; ‘Chiesa al quartiere QT8 a Milano’ Casabella 208 (November–December 1955) pp.42–8; ‘QT8 (1946–60)’ Casabella 252 (June 1961) pp.37 and 42. ‘Bergame, près de Milan’. André Bloc: ‘La contribution à l’Architecture Contemporaine’ L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 22–3 p.3. Metron 26–7 p.14. More than 60 per cent of buildings in Milan had been either damaged or destroyed. G.E. Kidder Smith: Italy Builds (London: Architectural Press 1955) p.120. L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 22–3 pp.32–3. By 1955 Milan alone produced 16 per cent of national industrial production. Virgilio Vercelloni: ‘Milano 1861–1961: Un secolo di occasioni mancate’ Casabella 252 (June 1961) p.38. Metron 26–7 p.20. Between 1931 and 1951 the population of Milan rose by 29 per cent from 992,000 to 1,276,521, whilst that of the larger province rose by 25 per cent from 2,001,875 to 2,505,638; within the next few years, up to 1958, the city’s population rose by another 12 per cent to 1,426,426 whilst the province’s grew by 14 per cent to 2,844,715. Density rose from 724 inhabitants/km2 in 1931, by 25 per cent to 908/km2 in 1951 and then by a further 14 per cent to 1,031 in 1958. Virgilio Vercelloni: ‘Milano 1861–1961’ Casabella 252 pp.28–41. L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 22–3 pp.32–3. Metron 26–7 p.14. Metron 11 (November 1946) p.77. ‘QT8: un quartiere modello’ Metron 11 (November 1946) p.77; Ernesto Rogers: ‘Esperienza dell’ottava Triennale’ Domus 221 p.2. Metron 26–7 pp.8–12. Luigi Spinelli: ‘Terragni e Como’ Domus 670 (March 1986) map supplement, No.13; Architettura (December 1934). Indagine sul problema dell’abitazione operaia nella provincia di Milano e proposte (1938–9) Casabella (November 1940) pp.4–17; Camponogara and Sabatelli: ‘Bottoni e Milano’ Domus 721 map supplement, No.7; Letizia Caruzzo: ‘Milano-hinterland, 1860–1943: dal dualismo produttivo alla subordinazione insediativa’ Casabella 476 (January–February 1982) p.44. The first working-class housing estate designed according to Rationalist principles, the Fabio Filzi estate in Eastern Milan (1936), had been commissioned by this body, with Albini as its lead designer with Camus and Palanti. Vittorio Prino: ‘Albini e Milano’ Domus 729 (July–August 1991) map supplement, No.36. See also Sartoris: Gli elementi pp.561–6. Giuseppe Pagano: ‘Un oasi d’ordine’ Casabella-Costruzioni (December 1939). The series of articles published in Rassegna Italiana were: I: ‘Architettura’ (December 1926); II: ‘Gli stranieri’ (February 1927); III: ‘Impreparazione, incomprensione, pregiudizi’ (March 1927); IV: ‘Una nuova epoca arcaica’ (May 1927). This manifesto predated the first CIAM in 1928. Gruppo 7: Rassegna Italiana (December 1926). Author’s italics. Gruppo 7: Rassegna Italiana (December 1926). The Rationalists were well aware that Gruppo 7 predated CIAM; Ernesto Rogers noted that the Italian Group of CIAM was a direct result of Gruppo 7’s existence, but claims that it was founded in 1927 (Ernesto Rogers: ‘The Tradition of Modern Architecture in Italy’ in Kidder Smith: Italy Builds p.11.

148 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63

Judi Loach

Kidder Smith: Italy Builds p.123. Gruppo 7: Rassegna Italiana. Kidder Smith: Italy Builds p.11. The first was Terragni and Lingeri’s Novocomum flats in Como in 1927–9. This can be discerned in Novocomum’s dynamic form, probably more indebted to Soviet Constructivism than to German functionalism. Sartoris saw Rationalism as deriving from Cubism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Surrealism, neo-plasticism and, above all, Elementism. Sartoris: Le Rationalisme Italien (1929). Kidder Smith: Italy Builds pp.16 and 130. The first of these was Giuseppe Pagano and Daniel Guarniero’s Architettura Rurale Italiana (Milan: Hoepli 1936), published specifically for the Sixth Triennale. Sartoris: Elementi pp.503–10; Encyclopédie pp.262–5. Piero Bottoni: ‘Il Quartiere sperimentale modello QT8 della Triennale di Milano’ Metron 26–7 p.21. It eventually comprised 16,000 habitable rooms. Piero Bottoni: Antologia di Edifici Moderni in Milano (Milan: Domus 1954) p.199. ‘QT8: un quartiere modello’ Metron 1 (1946) p.76; Bottoni: Antologia p.199. Metron 26–7 p.16. Metron 11 (1946) p.77. Piero Bottoni: Il quartiere sperimentale della Triennale di Milano, QT8 (Milan: Domus 1954). See also ‘Le quartier experimental de la Triennale’ L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 22–3 p.35. The full team comprised Ezio Cerutti, Vittorio Gandolfi, Mario Morini, Gino Pollini, Mario Pucci and Aldo Putelli (Vercelloni: ‘Alcuni quartieri di edilizia sovvenzionata’ Casabella 252 p.43). 2.5 hectares. Bottoni: Antologia p.199. Metron (1948) pp.21–2; Camponogara and Sabatelli: ‘Bottoni e Milano’ Domus 721 map supplement, No.9. See also Bottoni: Il quartiere sperimentale . . . QT8 pp.68–9; Bottoni: Antologia p.199. ‘Le Quartier expérimental de la Triennale de Milan QT8’ L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 22–3 p.35. Piero Porcinai: ‘Jardins et Espaces Verts en Italie’ L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 22–3 pp.76–7. Bottoni: Antologia p.199. Camponogara and Sabatelli: ‘Bottoni e Milano’ Domus 721 map supplement, No.20. See also Bottoni: Il quartiere sperimentale della Triennale di Milano, QT8 pp.24–32. Bottoni: Antologia p.199. Camponogara and Sabatelli: ‘Bottoni e Milano’ Domus 721 map supplement, No.20. See also Bottoni: Il quartiere sperimentale della Triennale di Milano, QT8 pp.24–32. Ponti: ‘La Triennale nel suo quartiere sperimentale QT8’ Domus 263 p.5. Ponti: ‘La Triennale nel suo quartiere sperimentale QT8’ Domus 263 p.4. Kidder Smith: Italy Builds p.129. Metron 26–7 p.15. Metron 26–7 pp.24–32. See also Bottoni: Antologia 63–7 pp.214–26 and 309. Of these Carlo Villa’s was the most acclaimed (Bottoni: Antologia pp.218–19; NB articles on this design alone: Metron 22; Metron 48 pp.38–46). Bottoni: Antologia p.215. Bottoni: Antologia p.230. Metron, 26–7 p.32. Bottoni: Antologia p.230. Kidder Smith: Italy Builds p.126. Bottoni’s contemporary use of such standardised and prefabricated components appears in his INACASA blocks of flats at Vialba (1949–53). Camponogara and Sabatelli: ‘Bottoni e Milano’ Domus 721 map supplement, No.13. It was, for instance, the single QT8 building covered separately in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 22–3 pp.36–7. Francesca Alé and Tomasso Lingeri: ‘Lingeri e Milano’ Domus 741 (September 1992) map supplement; Ponti: ‘La Triennale nel suo quartiere sperimentale QT8’ Domus 263 pp.3–4. Ponti: ‘La Triennale nel suo quartiere sperimentale QT8’ Domus 263 pp.6–9; ‘Dans quelques-uns de ces immeubles, des apartements types de 3 et 5 pièces ont été présentés équipés et meublés, les meubles ont été dessinés specialement.’ L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 22–3 p.35.

QT8

149

64 Ignazio Gardella: ‘Meubles et éléments d’équipement’ Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 22–3 pp.84ff. 65 Camponogara and Sabatelli: ‘Bottoni e Milano’ Domus 721 map supplement, No.3; Piero Bottoni and Enrico Griffini: ‘Elementi di case popolari’ Quadrante I 3 (1933) pp.4–23. 66 Letizia Caruzzo: ‘Milano-hinterland, 1860–1943’ Casabella 476 p.44. 67 Ernesto Rogers: ‘Esperienza dell’ottava Triennale’ Domus 221 pp.1–4, NB p.2. 68 Franco Albini and Eugenio Gentili: ‘Esperienze della T9’ Metron 43 pp.21–4. 69 Carlo Doglio: ‘Accademia e formalismo alla base della Nona Triennale’ Metron 43 pp.18–19. 70 The official pretext for the exhibition was the quattrocentenary of the publication of Luca Pacioli’s De Divina Proportione, hence the preponderance of academics involved; Triennale events were usually organised by practising designers. The organising committee included the avant-garde composer Dalla Piccola, art historians Roberto Longhi and Rudolph Wittkower, the architect Muzio and the historian of mathematics Sinisgalli. The exhibition also included the work of Matila Ghyka. Domus 261 (September 1951) pp.14–16. The exhibition was organised by Carla Marzoli and designed by Francesco Gnecchi (in cages proportioned to the Golden Section). Kidder Smith: Italy Builds pp.196–7. For further information see the catalogue to the exhibition Nova Triennale di Milano, Studi sulle proporzioni (Milan 1951). 71 ‘Primo Convegno Internazionale sulle Proporzioni nelle arte’; for summaries of the papers see Atti e Rassegna Technica della Società degli Ingegneri e degli Architetti in Torino (1952) 6 pp.119–35. Ernesto Rogers published several of the papers delivered there in Casabella: Ernesto Rogers: ‘Architettura, misura dell’uomo: l’architettura, espressione concreta dell’uomo, sintesi della sua misura fisica e spirituale’ Domus 260 (July–August 1951) pp.1–5. (This also related to the exhibition of this name, organised by Rogers and designed by him, with Vittorio Gregotti and Luigi Stoppino, for this triennale see Kidder Smith: Italy Builds pp.194–5). Nervi: ‘Le proporzione nella tecnica’ Domus 264–5 (December 1951) p.45. Bruno Zevi: ‘La quarta dimensione e i problemi della proporzione’ Domus 264–5 (December 1951) p.48. See also Henry Millon: ‘Rudolph Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism: Its Influence on the development and Interpretation of Modern Architecture’ JSAH XXXI 2 (May 1972), p.85; Alina Payne: ‘Rudolph Wittkower and Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism’ JSAH 53 (1994) p.339; Eva-Marie Neumann: ‘Architectural Proportion in Britain 1945–1957’ Architectural History 10 (1996) p.200. 72 By Magnaghi, Terzaghi and Tevarotto. Bottoni: Antologia p.230. 73 Bottoni: Antologia pp.206–8 and p.308; Camponogara and Sabatelli: ‘Bottoni e Milano’ Domus 721 map supplement, No.14. 74 Other housing included: 9-storey tower blocks (1956–60), Bottoni’s enlargement of the Villa Belga (1951–5), 11-storey Casa INCIS (1953–6) (Camponogara and Sabatelli: ‘Bottoni e Milano’ Domus 721 map supplement No.13) and his Case Stellari (1955–9) and Montu’s flats in via Cimabue (1958). ‘Chiesa al quartiere QT8 a Milano’ Casabella 208 pp.42–8; ‘L’Eglise San Siro’ Art Sacré 1–2 (September/October 1959) pp.24–5. 75 Vercelloni: ‘Alcuni quartieri di edilizia sovvenzionata’ Casabella 252 p.37. 76 6,100 rooms/3 hectares. Vercelloni: ‘Alcuni quartieri di edilizia sovvenzionata’ Casabella 252 p.45. 77 4,800 dwellings/1.37 hectares. Vercelloni: ‘Alcuni quartieri di edilizia sovvenzionata’ Casabella 252 p.46. 78 L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 22–3 p.20. 79 ‘QT8: un quartiere modello’ Metron 11 (1946) p.77. Although the ground belonged to the city it could be sold ‘under certain regulations’. Bottoni: Antologia p.307. 80 Metron 11 (1946) p.77. 81 Virgilio Vercelloni: ‘Milano 1861–1961’ Casabella 252 p.37. 82 13,000 rooms/3.2 hectares. Vercelloni: ‘Alcuni quartieri di edilizia sovvenzionata’ Casabella 252 p.48. 83 9,387 rooms/2.3 hectares. Vercelloni: ‘Alcuni quartieri di edilizia sovvenzionata’ Casabella 252 p.49. 84 Camponogara and Sabatelli: ‘Bottoni e Milano’ Domus 721 map supplement, No.9. 85 Sergio Polano: Guida p.128.

7 Birmingham Building the modern city Andrew Higgott

There was a time, starting late in the 1950s and lasting for something over a decade, when Birmingham seemed to be a city to be admired, and to be emulated, by others. It was a place which had grasped the possibilities which others had done little more than discuss, and built a modern city, recreating much of the city’s fabric. This renewed city, in the image of modernism, had been created with the huge enterprise and civic will to erase a great deal of its nineteenth-century past, and had recreated itself as a new and shining city. As Anthony Sutcliffe wrote in 1970: Much of the city’s attraction lay in its almost transatlantic modernity, which made a striking contrast to many other provincial centres. Of course numerous old buildings had been demolished to make way for the new, but very few of them had been worth preserving . . . In Birmingham action had replaced talk. That action had already, by 1970, laid the foundations of one of the most visually dynamic and exciting cities in Britain, if not in Europe.1 Later critics, both inside and outside the city, have taken a diametrically opposed view. The city council, for example, currently seems to see the work of its predecessors as an unmitigated disaster to befall the city. An enterprise of similar scale has been under way since the late 1980s to erase as much as possible of the modern city created with such vigour in the recent past.2 However, one might see this reaction as an over-reaction: the qualities of what was achieved in Birmingham’s modernist reconstruction might rather be seen in a larger, more global context as an actualisation of prevalent ideas of how a modern city should be. To develop a narrative about Birmingham as a model of the modern city is indeed to tell the story of a huge amount of building work over two decades, the 1950s and 1960s, when this vast industrial city reconstructed itself at an unparalleled scale, certainly compared to that of anywhere else in Britain. Large tracts of the inner city were totally redeveloped according to concepts of modernist planning: an extensive programme of new road building created a city in the unique position of being reshaped for the car; while much of the city centre was reconstructed in the image of modernity. This enormous programme of realised building projects demonstrates as clearly

Birmingham

151

as can be seen anywhere how modernist building processes and ideologies became a kind of vernacular in the years following the end of World War II. Cities all over the world transformed themselves with buildings derived from prototypes created in the vanguard of modernist vision. In a sense, although not quite literally, one is talking about architecture without architects: modernist practices and modernist forms moved out of the experiment of pre-war radicals and into the policies and programmes of large city authorities. This shift was not, of course, only to be seen in the example of Birmingham. In London, the official plan drawn up by Forshaw and Abercrombie in 1943, the County of London Plan, followed Corbusian dicta on housing, parks and road building; the work of the London County Council from the early 1950s onwards discussed, proposed and built new modernist forms in its extensive housing programme.3 Public commissions, notably the developments at the Barbican and South Bank followed, while later, commercial developers began to adopt designs derived in particular from Mies van der Rohe – Thorn House being the first of many such blocks in 1959. In all other British cities, redevelopments also took place – the vast housing programmes of Glasgow and Sheffield might be mentioned in particular: while comprehensive city centre developments such as the Piccadilly Centre in Manchester had become the norm by the date of its completion in 1968. However, the scale of development, both public and private, municipally funded and developer-led, was far more extensive in Birmingham in relation to its size as Britain’s largest provincial city. It was not accidental, it can be argued, that this should be so. The city has had a tradition of the untraditional, of being open to new ideas. In 1970, Neville Borg, the highly effective Birmingham City Engineer, said: ‘The function of this city is to be an experimental establishment, a growth point . . . we’re a kind of frontier town.’4 More recently, the planning writer Judy Hillman has said: ‘There is an underlying spirit of enterprise, determination and belief that all things are possible which is almost North American.’5 Without a mountain, a lake, even a large river, without a historic cathedral, castle, or even a dominant ruling influence, it could be said that Birmingham is defined by its absences. Developing instead as a working city created simply as a means to make things, rather than to reflect on its nature as a city, it might be seen as a kind of void. Thus as a void, it can become an opening for possibilities. Birmingham might be interpreted as a neutral space into which conditions can be introduced. Unrestricted by the kinds of tradition which characterise other British cities, it constitutes a tabula rasa, an open territory on which might be projected desires and intentions. Thus, it can be argued, it was particularly ready for the modernist approach of reinvention of city forms, and consequently reconstructed itself with an enormous vigour and commitment. During the 1950s and 1960s, the forms invented by the artists of the modernist avant-garde were adopted into the vernacular of the modern world.6 Birmingham’s reconstruction was rooted in the widely-shared desire to make things new, culturally steered by the architects and artists of pre-war theory and practice. The city aimed to eradicate the heavy weight of history and its cultural load: its underlying purpose was to erase Victorian forms and the attitudes they appeared to represent, and,

152

Andrew Higgott

with the enterprise of redevelopment, to create a gleaming new city. It achieved this in a surprisingly indirect way: rather than by adopting a grand city plan, such as was proposed for any number of other European cities, it went for what later would have been called a public–private partnership. In the city centre almost all redevelopment was effected by the means of the city council leasing land to developers, while keeping some control over the form and content. In the case of the building of public housing, particularly in the inner city redevelopment areas, it was adept in using available government legislation and gaining high levels of funding. It might also be seen as a comparatively efficient operation in terms of its use of firms of building contractors.7 Two figures can be seen as particularly significant in Birmingham’s development. The local councillor Frank Price, from 1953–9 the powerful Chair of the Public Works Committee, had grown up in the impoverished inner city area of Nechells, itself part of the city’s redevelopment programme. More than other local politician, he expressed an ambition for the city to be the leader in urban renewal, so, as he frequently reiterated, ‘we can truthfully say we are leading the country if not the world’.8 His ambition was a simple one; describing how, in the city, ‘there is an inevitable air of stagnation and squalor . . . It follows that the spirit of drabness affects the people.’ This condition could be changed by the agency of an effective planning programme, by ‘building areas that will have character and personality of their own, and add dignity colour and atmosphere to the city.’9 This aim, widely shared among others in Birmingham, could be achieved largely through the work of Herbert Manzoni, the Birkenhead-born City Engineer from 1935 to 1969. It was through him that the rebuilding programme was accomplished, and through him that it had the character and qualities that it did. His work was pragmatically based, primarily concerned with miles of new roads built, and numbers of new housing units occupied. Any social intention he may have had was at most implicit: and differing from other city authorities, his practicality was not tempered by the contrasting values of a city architect. It may appear incredible that Birmingham, a city of a million people embarking on a vast redevelopment programme, did not have a city architect at all until 1952, but even after that date major decisions and the real power remained with Manzoni, and the politicians who advocated his work. Forward is a telling motto for the city of Birmingham to have adopted on its incorporation as a city in 1889. Laconic, devoid of the pretension of a Latin phrase; and the city has indeed had a constant drive to forward movement. In the early nineteenth century, a music hall song ‘I can’t find Brummagem’ was the tale of a Brummie returning to the city after a few years’ absence and finding most of it gone.10 The first major example of this drive to reconstruction – the construction of the mile-long Corporation Street and several associated streets in the 1880s – was the work of Joseph Chamberlain, a former Mayor of the city, who intended that a Haussmannian boulevard should re-order and beautify the centre of the city. ‘It might run as a great street, as broad as a Parisian boulevard, from New Street to Aston Road: it might open up a street such as Birmingham has not got, and was almost stifling for the want of, for all the best streets were too narrow. The council might demolish the houses on each side of the street, and let or sell the frontage

Birmingham

153

land,’ proposed Chamberlain in 1875.11 This proposal, effectively carried out in the following decade, was one of several visionary enterprises carried out under Chamberlain’s leadership, and one which accurately prefigures the processes of Birmingham’s modern conditions of redevelopment. A plan by William Haywood in 1917 did far more to propose a new aesthetic enhancement of the entire central area, an arrangement of new streets with grand elevations on Beaux-Arts lines.12 While this plan was not carried out, aspects of its detailed plans, as well as of its overall intention, were carried forward into the rather different building programme of the inner ring road. The objective to rebuild the city, to make it more impressive, more attractive, more progressive, had become part of the city’s condition. Along with this drive for reconstruction and renewal, there is a second equally fundamental reason for this match between the city and the modernist project. And that is seen by describing how Birmingham was the first city truly created by the Industrial Revolution. Appropriately named the ‘workshop of the world’, developing its multifarious trades in metalworking and allied crafts from the founding of the Soho Manufactory, the prototype of the modern factory, by Matthew Boulton in the mid eighteenth century, it had become a vast industrial metropolis of a million people by the middle of the twentieth. The theorists of modernism had the intention, central to their mission, to make new forms which would respond to the conditions set up by the industrial revolution. Rather than being conditioned by past traditions, this new vocabulary of forms shaped by the machine, of industriallyproduced artefacts, of buildings, and of cities would bring into being a new and more appropriate world. It is as if these theories, and their intentions for a new synthesis, had been designed for Birmingham, a city itself totally shaped by industry rather than tradition or topography. As discussed above, London as well as other cities had had officially commissioned reports which prefigured large scale urban reconstruction and the provision of new highways and parks. Abercrombie and Forshaw’s County of London Plan (1943), proposed large scale physical re-ordering of the conurbation, particularly with its plans for the reconstruction of inner city areas. Abercrombie also wrote a report on the replanning of the West Midlands, published in 1947, and five socalled ‘new towns’ were proposed for areas of inner Birmingham.13 As with the larger scale London proposals, these were meant to be comprehensively developed communities, with new housing, schools, shops and other public facilities, as well as re-housed industry. The difference, however, is that Birmingham largely fulfilled these intentions of erasure and reinvention. It is as if only through comprehensive planning in which the modern city was ordered as a rational industrial assemblage could its apparent disorder be controlled, and could the potential benefits of modern life be extended to all its citizens. Such an intention, however understated, applies to those, such as Herbert Manzoni, who put into effect the city’s reconstruction. From a 1957 report, the Council wrote of their ‘Intention to create . . . a balanced community’, and quoted Patrick Geddes’ interpretation of the aim of town planning to create a fuller, greater and happier life for a city’s inhabitants.14 In the ‘new towns’, each area was zoned into different defined functions: a

154

Andrew Higgott

substantial amount of public open space was incorporated, and through traffic restricted to certain routes rebuilt to a high standard. These five areas were largely rebuilt by the end of the 1960s. In the preparation of the sites for these reconstruction areas, the council took over 2,000 factories, 2,500 shops and 30,000 houses. And in a colossal enterprise of urban erasure, they were practically all demolished. Contemporary reports speak of the unease which this created, especially as large tracts of the inner city remained voids for years at a time. But the prevalent optimism that, when reconstruction did take place, it would create a better world, sustained most sceptical citizens. The reconstruction area to the north-east of the city centre came to be named Nechells Green (Figures 7.1–7.3).15 Predating Abercrombie’s plan, it originated with a proposal made in 1937, centred around the building of a dual carriageway ‘Parkway’ flanked by tower blocks of flats. According to Manzoni, ‘practically the whole of the property is old and dilapidated (thus) the area is suitable for the redevelopment of a single and unified scheme.’16 Further, the area was largely defined by such boundaries as two canals, a main rail line and gas works. After the war, 267 acres were compulsorily purchased and a plan adopted with a strict zoning system of the separation of housing, industry and open space, adapted to the site’s topography and parts of the existing street layout. But the council’s intention was not simply concerned with the numbers of flats built, nor with the speed and efficiency of its programme. There was some intention to create new and better forms of

Figure 7.1 Nechells Green redevelopment area: urban erasure and subsequent modernist redevelopment shown in an aerial photograph c.1962: 55,000 houses were demolished in the city in the post-war years

Birmingham

155

community, which is illustrated by this assertion from a report given to professional visitors to Birmingham redevelopments: Redevelopment of built-up areas is not just a matter of replacing slum houses; the atmosphere which prevails should not be that of a slum clearance area or of a housing estate, but that of a new town in which a balanced community is provided with all the facilities – domestic, industrial, commercial, educational, spiritual, social and recreational which it needs for a full and happy life.17 The Nechells Green area indeed became a showpiece to illustrate how a new Birmingham might take shape. The city’s first tall flats, a series of 12-storey point blocks, were begun in 1951, adjacent to the Parkway which was built later with a double-Y plan. These large blocks, with steel frames but brick clad and overlooking cleared open grassed space, gave some impression of a city of the future. Elsewhere in the area were lower rise housing blocks, new schools and shops: some of the small factories which had existed on the site were removed to more distant sites, while others occupied a new building type, the ‘flatted factory’.18 The experience of Nechells Green, however slowly the complete plan was realised, was one of modernity: the whole area was the product of erasure, with nothing of the earlier drabness and disorder remaining, and the nineteenth-century urban fabric had disappeared.

Figure 7.2 Nechells Green: one of the five so-called ‘new town’ areas of the inner city, totally re-planned and rebuilt, seen near completion in the late 1960s

Figure 7.3 Plan of the inner city showing the five development areas encircling the city centre. Ring and radial roads were built and each area was zoned into such functions as housing, industry, open space and education

Birmingham

157

The first Birmingham City Architect, A.G. Sheppard Fidler, took up his position in 1952. He was nevertheless, as has been described, ‘under the thumb of Manzoni’ with his department ‘created in a fit of absentmindedness’.19 With little autonomy, his impact on the redevelopment areas was, initially, slight. The area of Lee Bank, located immediately to the south-west of the city centre, was begun after extensive clearances in the early 1950s. The first section includes a number of brick-built, 6–8-storey housing blocks. However, the Architects’ Department managed to eventually modify the process of design and building, as can be seen in later sections: he appointed landscape architect Mary Mitchell who worked on the western part of the site, providing a setting for a dramatic series of 10–20-storey concrete frame blocks designed by Sheppard Fidler’s Department. However, the qualities of his design here and elsewhere were lost in the face of a new drive to raise the number of flats built. Harry Watton, Leader of the council from 1962–6, was perhaps primarily motivated by a wish for municipal efficiency, but in any case the subordination of design to rapid production led to Sheppard Fidler’s resignation in 1964 over the discarding of his plan for the Castle Vale estate. The drive to build ever more housing increased in Birmingham, as elsewhere in Britain, during the decade. As well as the continuation of the other inner-city development areas of Highgate, New Town and Ladywood, several large schemes were built on the periphery of the city. A former airfield to the east provided the site for Castle Vale (Figure 7.4). Built rapidly from 1964, it provided housing for 20,000

Figure 7.4 Castle Vale estate, built on a site on the eastern edge of the city formerly occupied by an airfield. It was begun in 1964 and provided housing for some 20,000 people, the majority in tower blocks

158

Andrew Higgott

people, two-thirds of whom were in tower blocks. Its poor links to the city and relative lack of social provision made a contrast to the earlier ‘new town’ schemes. Nevertheless, there was indeed a rise in the completion of new social housing: 4,728 flats and houses were occupied in 1966, and 9,023 in 1967. This was far greater than any other city authority, even the Greater London Council. Over the whole post-war period from 1945–70, 55,000 houses were demolished in Birmingham, while 81,000 were built. The overall effect was to completely transform the image of the city: while grids of two-storey brick terraced streets remained, modern blocks, both singly and in groups, dominated much of the city’s fabric. Its citizens’ lives were transformed with it: a Birmingham resident was more likely to live in a tower block than the resident of any other English city. The road-building programme adopted and carried out by the city was also without parallel. The British government publication ‘The Design and Layout of Roads in built up areas’ was published in 1946 but related to work of research done in the 1930s: it introduced the new subject of the urban road rather than the road connecting cities.20 The major contributor to this report appears to have been Herbert Manzoni, the Birmingham City engineer, several case studies being based on examples from the city, and demonstrates his commitment to working with the problems of urban traffic. In the city, vastly improved radial routes and three ring roads were built between 1954 and 1972: the middle ring route connected the five redeveloped inner city areas. But it is for the building of the inner ring road that his work is most notable. From the 1930s onward, Manzoni had tirelessly argued for its building, and detailed proposals were adopted in 1946, including the compulsory acquisition of over 1,300 separate pieces of property. Needless to say, the urgency expressed here for facilitating a projected huge growth in road traffic was in advance of any other such city scheme in Britain. Three-and-three-quarter miles long, the inner ring road would remove traffic from the congested central streets, and serve the dual purpose of carrying heavy traffic and also enlargement of the centre by creating boulevards which would have shopping and other urban facilities along their length. In other words they would be hybrid streets, neither urban motorway nor shopping street but somehow both. The inner ring road would intercept the thirteen radial routes leading to the centre, and part of the plan was to provide car parking for 10,000 cars accessed from the road. Thus a major engineering undertaking was put into effect, creating multi-level highways, long viaducts and an immense amount of demolition and rebuilding along its periphery – all in a small area of less than a square mile. In two places in particular it was not a ring road at all: it cut directly through the civic centre, passing between the Council House and other civic offices, and it cut directly across the working class heart of the city, the open market area of the Bull Ring which had existed for eight centuries (Figures 7.5–7.6). Manzoni was a highly-pragmatic man – his published account of the project is quite devoid of any vision of the new Birmingham.21 One might, however, interpret Manzoni’s advocacy of the primacy of the car, and the astounding cost which the inner ring road entailed, as his attempt at creating an ordered modern city which erased the confusion, complexity and the kind of historical loading which lowered

Figure 7.5 The Bull Ring Centre (Sidney Greenwood and T.J. Hirst), perspective as built, opened in 1964. The rebuilt Bull Ring, while replacing the city’s open market, was bisected by a new high speed road – the inner ring road – as well as providing a complex multi-level indoor shopping centre, which was described as ‘the most advanced in Europe’

Figure 7.6 The Bull Ring area looking north-west, with part of the inner ring road and open market, and the Rotunda (James Roberts) in 1965

160

Andrew Higgott

the sights of the city’s inhabitants. Far more than just coping with increases in traffic, the scheme addressed larger questions of just how living in the modern city might be. The inner ring road should also be seen as the generator of a larger post-war recreation of Birmingham city centre. Proposals were predicated on the construction of the inner ring road, itself close to the five ‘new town’ areas to undergo total reconstruction. There was, quite deliberately, no plan for the city centre. Instead, the strategy was to encourage interest from developers, who might have been alienated by too precise physical planning requirements. The Act of Parliament in respect of the new road had been passed in 1944: left-over land acquired by the Council was opened to developers’ bids, and the City Architect was only consulted after the principal features of their proposals had been agreed by the Public Works Department. Other city centre redevelopments on main streets started with the New Street bombed site known as the ‘Big Top’, built by local developer Jack Cotton and begun in 1952. Schemes on several large Corporation Street sites, begun a few years later, helped to make Birmingham’s city centre the first where modern developments predominated. Without substantial modification of the 1944 plan, construction work on the inner ring road began in 1957 on the south-western section from Horsefair, going on a viaduct across Dudley Street, forming a two-level elliptical roundabout slicing through the Bull Ring and ending at Moor Street. Smallbrook Ringway, as it was originally called, was the new street: like the rest of the project, the road was partfinanced by the sale of leases on the frontages, left-over land from the council’s compulsory purchase (Figure 7.7). The odd-shaped site on the south which had resulted led to a remarkably unified project, a continuous terrace which bridges the intervening Hurst Street and, with its curve, mirrors the speeding cars in the street below it: its emphasis on the horizontal line, with its continuous bands of glazing, and it flying over the side street, similarly gives an impression of speed and implicit movement. The architect for the building, the Ringway Centre, was the Birmingham architect James A. Roberts, and it was completed in 1961. Adjacent, and also designed by Roberts, is the Rotunda, which rapidly became the image of modern Birmingham. On its elevated site, it looks taller than its 22 storeys. Its cylindrical form gives it an omni-directionality suitable for its pivotal site, above the large open space of the Bull Ring and a marker for travellers from the south-east: it relates also to the ‘old’ city centre of New Street. The Bull Ring Centre, opened in May 1964 and designed by Sidney Greenwood in association with T.J. Hirst, must form the focus of any re-evaluation of Birmingham’s building programme of the 1960s (Figure 7.8). It is a complicated story, since it relates to other redevelopment schemes on its periphery, since the road scheme dictated overall formal constraints, and since an earlier James Roberts scheme prefigured that actually built. The land falls steeply from New Street down to St Martin’s Church, and this along with the two levels of ring road traversing the centre gave five different pedestrian levels within the centre’s area and at least as many directions of access. The focus of the centre was an indoor shopping mall – Britain’s first fully-enclosed and air-conditioned. The centre was designed to

Figure 7.7 Smallbrook Ringway: the first section of the inner ring road to be opened, was lined by the Ringway Centre, a development of offices and shops which unified a series of left-over sites with a single linear block designed by James Roberts, completed in 1961

162

Andrew Higgott

Figure 7.8 The Bull Ring Centre visited by the Queen, shortly after its completion in 1964

accommodate 140 shops, an open market, an indoor market, department stores, a major bus station, a car park for 500 cars and various other facilities. Among other statistics, there were 19 escalators, 40 lifts, 96 public doors, 6 miles of air ducting, 33 miles of pipe work and 350,000 square feet of developed space. There was a highly-complex rear-access system for loading for shops within the centre which extended over three levels, and a complete segregation of the circulation systems for traffic and pedestrians. The architect Owen Luder wrote: ‘As a piece of machinery for receiving goods, distributing them to the various shops and selling them to the customer the buildings appear to work very well. He concluded that the centre was highly advanced in conception and technical efficiency.22 Evidently – but not at all in the form of street and city blocks, the Bull Ring formed a complex mat of pedestrian and vehicle routes. Its highly-developed threedimensional planning was partly due to its own complexity, and partly to the complication of the site. However unsatisfactorily resolved, it was an assemblage of volumes, volumes which intersect and mutually interpenetrate, and which engage with the surrounding space. As a formal type related to the Bauhaus, it was a building which was a free-standing object, a building without a facade and without a single centre. A building which flew in space, and a building itself smashed through in Futurist fashion by the southern carriageway of the ring road. The Bull Ring complex could also be seen as related to the notion of the megastructure but not quite in the sense of the word defined by Reyner Banham, who limits the term more

Birmingham

163

strictly as a consistency in section.23 However it is a complex of various functions integrated into one three dimensional form. A complete separation of traffic and the pedestrian: routes through, servicing routes, inside/outside spaces extend the complexity. Its concentration, its modern monumentality, represent a new kind of civic building, one which has links with certain American work such as that by Victor Gruen.24 Tracing the later story of the reshaping of the centre of the city, the redeveloped New Street Rail Station was opened in 1971. It acts as a physical extension of the Bull Ring megastructure. The shopper could pass through the new shopping mall built two levels above the rail tracks, and scarcely notice that they were passing from one development to another, despite the layering of roads, railways, pedestrian bridges and shopping floors in their elaborate configuration. By contrast, however, the New Street Station development is monolithic, without open spaces and without any attempt to create an exterior form for the station and shopping centre. A second late example of a modernist building is the new Public Library and associated buildings for the Birmingham Conservatoire. Designed by the John Madin Design Group and completed in 1973, its form of an inverted concrete ziggurat is the main element of a complex, built over the section of the inner ring road, Paradise Circus, passing right through the civic area. This was also the first building to be modified, the courtyard space enclosed as a kind of mall – Paradise Forum – and made into a through-route as early as 1988. With a general economic downturn in the 1970s, most development ceased. Birmingham suffered far more than most, as during the decade many of its industries closed: the car industry suffered, smaller factories went out of business: 50,000 industrial jobs were lost between 1971 and 1976. It rapidly became clear that industrial activity, the basis of the city’s existence for two centuries, was unlikely to regenerate. A new set of goals emerged, which valued the city as a business centre: supporting this, the National Exhibition Centre had opened in 1976. But the modernity of the city centre was seen as problematic: as elsewhere at this time, regrets over what had been lost, the failures of what had been built, were increasingly voiced. The City Centre Symposium or Highbury Initiative, held in 1988, can be seen as the key moment in the city’s rejection of its modernist achievement. A number of leading architects, planners and critics – mostly invited from London – discussed what might be done. Predictably, but ironically given the very recent achievement of its road building programme, pedestrianisation was high on the new list of priorities. A second was the improvement in architectural standards of future developments. But as one speaker said, Birmingham’s most regrettable tendency was to think big – that the large comprehensive solution to its problems was always preferable to the smaller, more subtle gesture, the intervention which shifted relationships with what was already there. ‘I continue to be amazed at Birmingham’s “sledgehammer” approach to everything. They seem to exaggerate everything that needs to be done. It troubles me that they think bigness is synonymous with quality.’25 In the case of this just criticism, the city seems to have learnt very little. The Brindley Place development begun in 1994 has made a whole new commercial quarter of the city, with new traditionally-formed urban spaces and the domination of pedestrian routes. This development of one million square feet of offices along-

164

Andrew Higgott

side other public facilities is described as the largest city centre development in Britain. Architecturally it is a hybrid, with a neo-vernacular canal-side development sitting alongside both Foster’s metallic shed for the Sealife Centre and Porphyrios’s office development which attempts a new interpretation of the Classical. These and other contrasts are presumably meant to give the image of a quartier which has been created over time, rather than the instant city it essentially is. Pedestrianisation of most of the main shopping streets was completed in 1993, while the modern boulevard of Smallbrook, built along a Manzoni-designed viaduct, was lowered at vast expense in 1997 to remove the subway which connected Hill Street and Hurst Street. The 1999 demolition of the Bull Ring Centre is replacing the modern complex and its associated road structures with the far larger volume of an indoor shopping centre. Like its 1964 predecessor, it is described as ‘the most advanced shopping centre in Europe’ and promises untold delights to its future users.26 Urban erasure and redevelopment continue to be Birmingham’s permanent urban condition: and thus the city will soon have far less of the image of modernity it once so proudly displayed. Parts of the city, whether central developments or inner city communities, had successfully recreated the city and its inhabitants’ relationship with it. The experience of the modern city, however unfamiliar, and unrecognisable in relation to traditional city forms, had become part of life. But a second re-invention of the city has now taken hold. Instead the modern, as a state of constant change and lack of stability, reflecting modern life as a condition of flux, becomes the city’s evident fate (Figures 7.9–7.11).

Figure 7.9 Smallbrook Queensway showing the inner ring road and Ringway Centre building, as modified in 1998 by the lowering of the viaduct which carried the road, and removal of the subway which was perceived as dangerous

Figure 7.10 Dudley Street behind the Bull Ring Centre: the flyover carrying the inner ring road, reached by a staircase, is bridged by a shop link which is a part of the Bull Ring complex and connects to New Street rail station, photographed in 1999

Figure 7.11 Lee Bank inner city redevelopment area: housing blocks and the middle ring road, photographed in 1999

166

Andrew Higgott

Notes 1 Anthony Sutcliffe: History of Birmingham (Oxford: O.U.P. 1970) p.473. 2 The demolition of the Bull Ring Centre and closure of parts of the Inner Ring Road are among other physical evidence of this: the Highbury Symposium (1988) was held by the City Council to discuss possibilities for a new reshaping of the city centre. 3 See Andrew Higgott: ‘A Modest Proposal: Abercrombie’s County of London Plan’ in Issues in Architecture Art and Design Vol.2 no.1 (Winter 1991–2) pp.38–57. 4 From an interview in Architects’ Journal (15 July 1970) p.19. 5 ‘Highbury Initiative’ Symposium Report (Birmingham City Council unpublished) p.11. 6 The forms adopted in the reconstruction may be seen to have several points of origin. As with much city redevelopment, the C.I.A.M. Charter of Athens (1933) and Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse and earlier city schemes must be read as influential. However, the influence of a different tradition which is related to Constructivism can also be interpreted: see the present author’s article ‘From the Bauhaus to Birmingham: a city that built Modernism’ in Alan Powers (ed.): Rethinking the Sixties (1999). 7 Birmingham’s housing programme is discussed in Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius: Tower Block (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1994), particularly pp.247–54. 8 Frank Price: ‘Making a clean sweep to a city of the future’ in The New Birmingham (Birmingham: Birmingham Mail 1960) p.4. 9 Price: ‘Making a clean sweep to a city of the future’ p.4. 10 Quoted in Vivian Bird: Portrait of Birmingham (London: Robert Hale 1970) p.15. 11 Quoted in Chris Upton: A History of Birmingham (Chichester: Phillimore 1993) p.152. 12 William Haywood: A Plan for Birmingham (1917). 13 Patrick Abercrombie and H. Jackson: West Midlands Plan (Ministry of Town Planning 1948). 14 From The Redevelopment of the Central Areas (Birmingham City Council unpublished 1957). 15 The area was originally referred to as the Duddeston and Nechells redevelopment area. 16 Herbert Manzoni: Duddeston and Nechells Redevelopment Area: Report to Public Works Committee (27 May 1943). 17 From The Redevelopment of the Central Areas (Birmingham City Council unpublished 1957). 18 Apart from other sites in the Birmingham redevelopment, the only flatted factories built were in Shoreditch, London. 19 See Glendinning and Muthesius: Tower Block p.167. 20 The Design and Layout of Roads in Built-up areas (London H.M.S.O 1946). 21 Herbert Manzoni in Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers (March 1961) p.265ff. 22 See Architect and Building News (26 August 1964) p.400–8. 23 See Reyner Banham: Megastructure (London: Thames and Hudson 1976). 24 For example, his downtown Fort Worth project (1956). 25 ‘Highbury Initiative’ Symposium Report p.20. 26 From LET Trust Developers’ brochure 1994.

8 Brasília City versus Landscape Thomas Deckker

The definitive verdict on Brasília would seem to have been delivered by the critic and long-time scourge of architects, Colin Ward, embarrassingly soon after its inauguration: A Brazilian dictator built Brasília, the new capital of his country. A friend of mine who went there remembers only the real life of the place in the Ciudad Libre or Free City where the people who built Brasília live in their home-made sheds and shanties, sixteen kilometres out of town.1 Ward illustrated this with a photograph of the Alvorada Palace (the official presidential residence) which implied that the formal architecture and empty landscape spaces were opposed to the ‘real life’ of the shanty-towns. The appearance of a soldier in the photograph (guarding the palace) connects this scene in the viewer’s mind with the typical Latin-American dictatorship with little regard for human rights and less for urban planning. This description of Brasília contains two errors of fact and makes an extraordinary assumption about urban culture. Firstly, Brasília was built by a socialist government, not a dictator. Secondly, ‘Ciudad Libre’ is in Spanish, not Portuguese, the language of Brazil. In Portuguese, it is ‘Cidade Livre’ (did his friend actually visit, or was this a typographical error?); furthermore, his friend must have visited before 1961, when the Cidade Livre changed its name to Núcleo Bandeirante, and Brasília was still under construction. The implication that the life in the Cidade Livre – ‘home-made sheds and shanties’, and, at the time, mud streets – was ‘real’ is reminiscent of the colonial preoccupation with ‘local colour’ rather than the more rational arguments against Modern planning that were then prevalent;2 such a culture was not considered appropriate for a capital city within Brazil, nor would it be in Britain. Despite these shortcomings, Ward’s claim cannot be dismissed – Brasília has undeniably failed to develop an appropriate form of civic life. Brasília is often thought, with some justification, to be the culmination of Modern architecture in Brazil, as it epitomised and effectively ended the distinctive style of Modernism known as the ‘Brazilian Style’. This name is misleading, however: Brazil, as a Federal state, harboured huge differences in culture and politics among its regions. The ‘Brazilian Style’ was a distinct product of a small group of Modern

168

Thomas Deckker

architects from Rio de Janeiro, and was synonymous with a Federal Government that was virtually continuous from 1930 to 1964. It represented directly their material constraints – the use of reinforced concrete – their aesthetic predisposition – the relationship of pure building forms to landscape, and their political imperative – of Modernisation. During the 1920s, São Paulo was being transformed into Brazil’s major industrial centre, and although economically dynamic, remained culturally provincial; Rio de Janeiro, the Federal capital, was culturally dormant.3 Brazilian architects and engineers were building some of the most advanced concrete buildings in the world, but they remained in traditional styles.4 The first Modern buildings in Brazil were built in São Paulo, but these did not embody the exciting vision of Modernism that would foster the ‘Brazilian Style’.5 Modernism in Brazil is, above all, Corbusian; to Brazilian architects, especially to their undisputed leader at the time, Lucio Costa, he seemed to be the only Modern architect to present a complete social and technical, as well as aesthetic, basis for Modern architecture.6 Le Corbusier’s influence on Brazilian Modern architects, however, was more as a teacher and exemplar, principally during his second visit to Brazil in 1936. His first lecture tour in 1929, during which he proselytised the Ville Contemporaine (1922), the Centrosoyuz building, Moscow and the Villa Savoye, Poissy (both still under construction) made little impact.7 It was not until the publication of the Œuvre Complète 1910–29, and even more so, Précisions, in 1930 and the Œuvre Complète 1929–34 and La Ville Radieuse in 1935, in which he showed how his work might be applicable to Brazil, that he began to be regarded favourably there.8 On the other hand, while he was proselytising the mechanistic world of ‘L’Esprit Nouveau’, his own work underwent a transformation: the extraordinary landscape of Rio and the extraordinary warmth of the cariocas (inhabitants of Rio) marked the appearance of objets à réaction poétique in his work, and the change from a Cartesian dialectic of architecture and landscape to an accommodation with site.9 He filled his sketchbooks with drawings of the tropical landscape and mulatto women.10 His new sensuousness may be seen quite clearly in the difference between the projects for Buenos Aires, Montevideo and São Paulo – with a cruciform arrangement of roads laid indiscriminately over the landscape – and Rio – with an enormous curved road forming a counterpoint to the ‘paysage violent et sublime’.11 While he was in Rio, Le Corbusier seemed oblivious to the Crash that totally destroyed Brazil’s economy and oligarchic political structure. At that time, Brazil had undergone several ‘cycles’ of agricultural production – sugar, rubber, and most recently coffee – on which the whole economy and political structure were based. During the Crash, the price of coffee fell to the point at which Brazil could no longer import essential materials; the economy and political structure collapsed. The resulting power vacuum was filled in 1930 by Getúlio Vargas in the ‘Revolução de 30’ (Revolution of 1930).12 Vargas was determined to modernise the country: he strove to develop industries and implement social and political reforms, for which he had the support of an important group of Modernist intellectuals. The regime was necessarily highly nationalistic: during the 1930s, Brazil was a strategic battleground between Nazi German, Imperial Japanese, and Soviet Russian interest groups.13 The

Brasília

169

Soviet-backed communist revolution of 1935 was suppressed, as was the right-wing Integralist uprising in 1938.14 Above all, the intention of the government was to Modernise, and Rio was to be the showpiece of that Modernisation. One part of this programme was the creation of new ministries, including the Ministry of Education and Public Health. As part of the reform of education, Lucio Costa was appointed Director of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (National School of Fine Art) in 1930, where he introduced a ‘Functionalist’ course supposedly based on the teaching programme of the Bauhaus. Although he taught for only one year, the students on his course included almost all of the famous Modern Brazilian architects, most notably Oscar Niemeyer and Roberto Burle Marx. The trajectory of Modern architecture in Brazil changed radically when Vargas appointed another Modernist intellectual, Gustavo Capanema, a young lawyer from the state of Minas Gerais, Minister of Education and Public Health in 1934. By any standards, Capanema was an extraordinary patron of the arts: he desired and actively promoted that Brazil develop a national Modern architecture. He created the Universidade do Brasil (University of Brazil) from the various independent schools and the Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional (SPHAN) (National Historic and Artistic Heritage Service), and commissioned a complete plan for the Cidade Universitária (Campus of the University of Brazil, unbuilt) and a building for the Ministry of Education and Public Health (1935–45).15 This latter building brought its architects immediate international recognition and launched what became known as the ‘Brazilian Style’.16 Capanema appointed Costa architect for the new Ministry of Education building and the Cidade Universitária in 1935; Costa formed a team which included his former students Oscar Niemeyer and Roberto Burle Marx as landscape architect.17 Although the major theoretician of Modernism in Brazil, Costa was uncertain what Modernism actually entailed in practice. He had not seen any Modern architecture in Europe, and Brazil was far from the rich cultural interchange possible there. Furthermore, he had never built any large buildings, let alone Modern ones; he had built nothing between 1932–5 because of the middle-class preference for the socalled ‘Colonial’ style.18 He therefore invited the architect whose work he considered closest to Brazil to comment on his proposals: Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier’s second visit to Rio, in 1936, had an enormous impact on Brazilian architecture, although it hardly affected him. It was not his own – uncommissioned – proposals which were influential, however, but rather the affinity of his work to conditions in Brazil which acted as a catalyst to Costa and Niemeyer, particularly the use of reinforced concrete and the increasingly lyrical relationship of form to landscape which he had started to develop during his first visit. Although Le Corbusier’s vision of Modern life was so far removed from the contemporary reality of Brazil – at that time still largely rural and agricultural – as to be almost ludicrous, ironically this vision was able to have some resonance during its emergent urbanisation and industrialisation. Costa and Niemeyer collaborated on three projects – the Ministry of Education, the Cidade Universitária and the Brazilian Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair 1939. They transformed Le Corbusier’s Purist architectural language –

170

Thomas Deckker

at exactly the point at which Le Corbusier himself had begun to abandon it – into one both more spatially dynamic and regionally specific. This transformation of Le Corbusier’s problematic urbanism – largely attributable to Costa – would characterise the ‘Brazilian Style’ as much as the transformation of his formal language – largely attributable to Niemeyer – or the tropical landscapes of Burle Marx.19 Unusually among Modern architects at that time, Costa was not concerned exclusively with new buildings: in 1937 he was invited to join the newly-founded SPHAN. SPHAN included Modernist intellectuals from diverse fields: its head was the journalist Rodrigo Mello Franco de Andrade; other members included the writer Mario de Andrade and the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, the sociologist Gilberto Freire, the engineer Joaquim Cardoso, and the poet Vinícius de Morais, later to become famous as author of the lyrics for the song Garota de Ipanema (The Girl from Ipanema) in 1962.20 Costa was thus instrumental not only in the development of Modern architecture in Brazil but in the discovery of its historic architecture, and involved, tangentially at least, in popular culture. This gave the ‘Brazilian Style’ its particularly carioca character. Among the first tasks of SPHAN was the restoration of Colonial towns in the state of Minas Gerais, especially Ouro Preto, the old capital of the state. Minas Gerais is the only state in the interior of Brazil with important historic urban centres. It had been the centre of gold mining and the home of the Brazilian independence movement in the eighteenth century – the Inconfidência Mineira (Minas Gerais Uprising) of 1788. Partly because of the combination of its wealth and isolation, it developed a very strong indigenous Baroque architecture (Ouro Preto is now a World Heritage Site).21 Ouro Preto was of enormous symbolic importance in Minas Gerais, especially in the new capital, Belo Horizonte, founded in 1897. In 1940, Vargas appointed Juscelino Kubitschek, a young doctor from Diamantina, another Colonial town in Minas Gerais, prefeito (mayor) of Belo Horizonte, which marked the beginning of his political career that was to end in the presidency of Brazil, and of his dream of an ideal city which was to culminate in Brasília. Kubitschek immediately started his trajectory with the development of Pampulha, a garden suburb of Belo Horizonte. He intended that the mixture of leisure and cultural buildings, including a Church (1942) and a Casino (1942) around an artificial lake embody a kind of ideal life for the modern mineiro (person from Minas Gerais) – a mixture of nature, culture, and leisure. He chose Niemeyer as architect for these buildings because he had just built an extremely modern hotel (1940) in Ouro Preto as part of the restoration commissioned by SPHAN. To some degree, Kubitschek intended to embody this life himself: he commissioned Niemeyer to build an extremely modern weekend house (1946) there at the same time. Kubitschek was elected governador (governor) of Minas Gerais in 1950. He embarked on a campaign of industrialisation which established Minas Gerais as a major industrial centre in Brazil. Niemeyer started to work extensively in Minas Gerais on projects such as the Julia Kubitschek School (1951), a hotel (1951) in Diamantina, the Bank of Minas Gerais (1953), and a Public Library (unbuilt) in Belo Horizonte. In 1956, Kubitschek was elected president of Brazil, effectively succeeding Vargas.22 He continued his campaign of industrialisation at a national level which

Brasília

171

almost doubled Brazil’s industrial capacity in four years. In a few years, Brazil had moved from a rural and agricultural country to an urban and industrial one, and there could be no more obvious symbol of that change, for Kubitschek, than a new capital. As part of his campaign platform, Kubitschek promised to implement a long-neglected clause of the constitution – to found a new capital in the interior. Brasília was the declared fulfilment of the dream of a Federal capital in interior.23 But this is, in itself, a mineiro interpretation of Brazilian history, as an inland capital had been under discussion since the sixteenth century, long before the discovery of gold in Minas Gerais. No one took the idea seriously, although an inland capital was acknowledged as essential for the development of the interior: the interior was incredibly isolated with a terrible climate. Nevertheless, several commissions had been set up to find a site, and the Cruls Commission of 1891 had identified a possible site in the state of Goiás, bordering the state of Minas Gerais, which was later to become the official Distrito Federal (Federal District).24 The new capital – as yet unnamed – was to be another ideal city around an artificial lake. There was a further reason cited at the time for the construction of a new capital: congestion in Rio.25 The city had grown along a narrow strip between the mountains and the sea, except for the low-lying and marshy areas of the port and industrial zone in the north. Road connections along the coast were poor because of the promontories which Le Corbusier had praised. The Federal buildings were distributed haphazardly in an urban fabric of wildly mixed ages and conditions. Areas such as Copacabana, the prime residential district, had a density of approximately 260 persons per hectare in 1960, which was considered excessive.26 At the time Brasília was being planned, however, Rio was taking two steps to ease this congestion: the construction of a series of tunnels linking the centre with the residential areas of the beaches, and the aterro, infill along the beaches into the Bay of Guanabara and in the lagoon, which provided much-needed roads and public facilities. Some parts of the aterro, such as the Praia da Flamengo – the famous gardens of the Museum of Modern Art (Affonso Eduardo Reidy, 1954–60) – and the pavement in Copacabana, were designed by Burle Marx.27 With the benefit of hindsight, one can see the 1950s as a ‘golden age’ in Rio. Niemeyer’s spectacular house in Canoas (1953), a mountain-side overlooking Rio, Burle Marx’s lyrical designs for the aterro, and Costa’s highly-regarded Parque Guinle (1948–54), the first Modern apartment blocks in Rio, convinced many that Rio was the centre of a tropical ‘free-form’ modernism.28 Rio became a major artistic centre, with artists such as Lygia Clark and Sergio Camargo receiving international acclaim, and a popular musical centre – bossa nova – which popularised this lyricism.29 The deliberate vilification of Rio, in particular the attribution of the atrophy of political life to the pursuit of ‘luxury and pleasure’ on the beaches, rather than to the stifling bureaucracy, seems in hindsight quite ludicrous.30 The loss of the economic base, of the benefits of the international community, and of prestige became serious problems in Rio; on the other hand, the concerns of lyrical architecture and landscape were consciously continued in Brasília. According to Niemeyer, Brasília was conceived one night in 1956 in his house in Canoas when Kubitschek came to discuss the possibility of the project with him

Figure 8.1 Road sign of the Distrito Federal c.1980. © Thomas Deckker

Brasília

173

(Figure 8.1). Not only was the proposed site in Goiás unimaginably isolated, but the city had to be finished by 1960, when Kubitschek’s presidential term expired.31 To convince Kubitschek of its feasibility, Niemeyer, with a group of friends, designed and built in 10 days the first construction in Brasília – the Catetinho Palace – to be Kubitschek’s provisional presidential residence, and gave it to him, staffed with cook and butler, as a present (Figure 8.2).32 Despite its rustic appearance, it was fully equipped with running hot water, still a rare feature in houses in Brasília today. Kubitschek’s appreciation was later reproduced on a wall of the monument commemorating the inauguration of Brasília: From this central plateau, this solitude which will soon be transformed into the nerve centre for the most important national decisions, I cast my eyes once more to the future of my country and foresee the dawn, with unbreakable faith and unlimited confidence, of its great destiny.33 Convinced of the feasibility of constructing a new city quite literally in the middle of nowhere, Kubitschek decided to press ahead with an official presidential residence, the Alvorada Palace. Niemeyer took over space in the Ministry of Education to design it, but convinced Kubitschek to hold a competition for the plan of the city.34 There was also considerable pressure from IAB, the Institute of Brazilian Architects, for a competition. The competition attracted 26 Brazilian architectural practices,

Figure 8.2 The Catetinho Palace (Oscar Niemeyer 1956). Niemeyer designed and built this to be Kubitschek’s provisional presidential residence, and gave it to him, staffed with cook and butler, as a present. Despite its rustic appearance, it was fully equipped with running hot water (the pipes are visible running along the back façade), still a rare feature in houses in Brasília today. © Thomas Deckker

174

Thomas Deckker

including most of the major Modern practices; the jury included Niemeyer, Israel Pinheiro (President of NOVACAP, the construction organisation), Paulo Antunes Riberiro (President of IAB), Horta Barbosa (from the Society of Engineers), Stamo Papadaki (who had published Niemeyer’s work extensively in the United States), André Sive (consultant to the Minister of Reconstruction and Housing in France) and Sir William Holford (who had been head of the technical division of the Ministry of Town and Country Planning and was then Professor of Town Planning, University College, London). Famously, Costa did not intend to enter: during the competition he had been lecturing at the Parsons School of Design in New York.35 At the last minute, he drew out a complete and highly-detailed plan free-hand on five small pieces of paper. The Costa plan was chosen because it was not really functional (all the plans were based on the separation of functions of CIAM urban planning principles: dwelling, work, leisure, and circulation): it was intended to be, and recognised as, symbolic of a capital city.36 It appears that, as the most senior member of the jury, Holford’s opinion was decisive; there was considerable opposition from the IAB.37 In his accompanying statement, Costa stressed that: It should be conceived of not as a simple organism capable of administering, satisfactorily and effortlessly, the vital functions of any modern city, not as an URBS, but as a CIVITAS, having the attributes inherent in a capital city.38 He later cited among his influences his memories of Paris and of the lawns of English country houses from his childhood, Brazilian Colonial towns, ancient Chinese irrigation works, and the Parkways he had just seen around the city of New York.39 His admiration for Paris may be seen in the distinction between the open ceremonial spaces (related to, for example, the Champs de Mars) and the housing blocks which form a dense and anonymous background.40 Costa made no provision for expansion: all future growth was to take place in satellite cities, as yet undefined. Despite having cited these influences, Costa’s plan was apparently based most closely on Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse of 1935. Costa, however, made a significant transformation of Le Corbusier’s plan, the same transformation that he had made at the Ministry of Education building: unlike the Ville Radieuse, which disregarded civic space, it projected a dynamic urban landscape with distinct public spaces. Areas such as the Praça dos Tres Poderes (Plaza of the Three Powers), the Praça Municipal (Municipal Plaza) and the central plataforma rodoviária (bus-station platform) were intended to be the foci of civic life. It was the only plan for a Modern city that was intentionally urban rather than suburban, as Holford recognised, at least as far as the projected urban life followed the concept of the Modern brasileiro (Brazilian).41 The Pilot Plan organised the city along into three parts: the straight eixo monumental (monumental axis) which contained the government buildings, business districts and Town Hall, and the residential axis of superquadras, groups of apartment blocks, curved to follow, at some distance, the lake (see Figure 8.1). At the junction of the two axes, around the plataforma rodoviária, was located what was intended

Brasília

175

Figure 8.3 The Esplanada dos Ministérios and Setor de Diversões. This was intended to be the ‘Piccadilly Circus, Times Square, and Champs Elysées’ of Brasília. © Thomas Deckker

to be the ‘Piccadilly Circus, Times Square, and Champs Elysées’ of Brasília (Figure 8.3). Adjacent to the business districts was located the Setor de Diversões – a shopping and entertainment centre, which was to contain various cinemas and theatres linked by loggias containing bars and cafes. On the side of the Esplanada dos Ministérios was a cultural centre, which was to include ‘museums, library, planetarium, academies, institutes, etc.’, of which only the National Theatre (Oscar Niemeyer, 1960) was built.42 The Esplanada dos Ministérios (Esplanade of the Ministries) on the eixo monumental forms a ceremonial space unique in Modern urban design. It runs from the plataforma rodoviária to the Congresso (Congress), flanked by the Ministérios (Ministries).43 Costa thought of this as similar to the Mall.44 A curious feature is that this slope is artificial: spoil from the excavations of the bus station was used to make an artificial ground, level with the roof of the Congresso. It is largely symbolic: the true public space (like the cour d’honneur of the École Militaire) is in the Praça dos Tres Poderes behind the Congresso (Figure 8.4). While the ceremonial and civic spaces of the eixo monumental have no equivalent in the Ville Radieuse, the superquadras appear to be derived almost entirely from Le Corbusier’s project. Instead of the continuous flux of the bloc à redents of the Ville Radieuse, however, in the superquadras the residential blocks and public facilities were grouped into distinct units. Costa intended this to address two weaknesses in the Ville Radieuse: the total lack of services and the lack of an identifiable scale in the housing blocks. This arrangement was certainly derived from his experience at Parque Guinle. Costa’s plan projected comércios (local shopping

176

Thomas Deckker

Figure 8.4 The Praça dos Tres Poderes behind the Congresso. The Praça dos Tres Poderes is a genuinely popular space, as may be seen on any Sunday or holiday. © Thomas Deckker

streets), with the all-important bakeries, on one side of each superquadra and local cultural and leisure facilities – churches, cinemas, schools, libraries and sports centres – on the other, all connected by a system of footpaths (Figures 8.5 and 8.6). A didactic purpose may be read into this choice of facilities, similar to that at Pampulha: in these superquadras may be seen the project for the complete way of life of the Modern brasileiro, or at least the middle-class civil servant for whom these blocks were intended. The design of the external space in each superquadra, and the relationship of the apartments to it, reinforces the sense of public space, despite the blocks being nominally free-standing. In an archetypal original superquadra, apartment blocks were paired closely around car parking areas, leaving the remaining space quite open and freely arranged (Figures 8.7–8.9). This hierarchy continued into the plan of the apartments: the social spaces – living rooms and bedrooms – faced the gardens, while the kitchens and service areas faced the car parking areas (Figure 8.10). Surprisingly, the interior arrangements vary widely, from single-bedroom apartments to luxurious four-bedroom apartments with a dependência completa (full servant’s quarters) within the same building envelope; these plans, too, were based on those at Parque Guinle, although somewhat smaller. An important feature was the suppression of the autonomy of the block, especially the omission of balconies; Costa compared this to Haussmann’s garabit for Paris.45 The superquadras were intended only for the middle class, however. An area of low-income terrace housing, the Setor de Habitações Individuais Germinadas, was planned parallel to the superquadras adjacent to the W3, mainly as very simple

Figure 8.5 The superquadras originais: comércios (local shopping streets). © Thomas Deckker

Figure 8.6 The superquadras originais: Cine Brasília (Oscar Niemeyer, 1960). © Thomas Deckker

178

Thomas Deckker

Figure 8.7 The superquadras originais: the space around the blocks is quite open and freely arranged. © Thomas Deckker

single-storey houses. Despite Costa’s intention – even wishful thinking – of mixing classes within the city itself, this area was immediately occupied by the middle classes. There was no support at a political or administrative level for this social programme. Costa is often blamed for the failure of this aspect of the plan, but this criticism is unjustified; there is almost no provision at all for the poor throughout Brazil. For the richer middle classes, on the other hand, an area of individual private houses was planned adjacent to the lake, and this began to be occupied immediately.46 Le Corbusier provocatively proposed a density of 1,000 persons per hectare in the Ville Radieuse; within the superquadras the density reaches 400 persons per hectare, far in excess of ‘new town’ densities, but comparable to the density of Copacabana.47 The overall density of the city is, of course, much lower, due to the enormous landscape spaces. This density, and the mix of public facilities, gives life in these apartments a very urban quality. The original apartments and superquadras are, without doubt, successful domestic spaces. Astonishingly, there is no evidence that Costa, in marked contrast to the other entrants, made any calculations at all for any part of the plan. Like the Ville Radieuse, Brasília is dominated by its road layout. An extraordinarily complex system of clover-leaf junctions was proposed for the residential axes; like Le Corbusier’s, they are too small for free-moving traffic.48 The landscaping of the main roads certainly owed something to the Parkways around New York which Costa had just seen. Similarly, the separate superquadras possibly owed something to the Radburn layout (although at a substantially higher density), especially the division into ’service’ and ‘garden’ sides; the zones of private houses follow contemporary

Brasília

179

Figure 8.8 The superquadras originais: the apartment blocks were paired closely around car parking areas, faced by the kitchens and service areas. © Thomas Deckker

American layouts almost exactly. Another necessary feature was the airport: not only were the roads poor and the distances enormous, but Brazil had developed an advanced system of civil aviation. This domination by the ‘aeroplane and the autostrada’ must have struck some resonance with Kubitschek, then developing the car industry in adjacent Minas Gerais.49 Unsurprisingly, it is the car which sets the limit on density in the superquadras: even at only 400 persons per hectare, they are overflowing. Whatever density was achieved within the superquadras, however, would have little effect on the size and density – of 4.5 persons/hectare – of the city as a whole.50 Costa’s design aspired to the image of the Ville Radieuse, which was as limited with regard to services as to civic space. What was not predicted was the large number of zones – necessarily outside the central area – required to service the city, such as the Setor de Indústrias e Abastecimento (Industrial and Wholesale

180

Thomas Deckker

Figure 8.9 The superquadras originais: landscaping by Roberto Burle Marx. © Thomas Deckker

Food Zone), Setor de Armazenagem e Abastecimento (Warehouse and Wholesale Food Zone), Setor de Indústrias Gráficas (Printing Industry Zone) and Setor de Oficinas (Garage Zone), which effectively form an extraordinarily dispersed counter-site to the city. The uses to which these zones are put – small industries, supermarkets, car repair, and so on – was far from the ‘rational’ classifications of the Charte d’Athène. While the public transport system is inadequate anyway, it is hard to conceive of a viable system which could serve such a dispersed city. The construction of Brasília was the most extraordinary adventure. The site was, in Niemeyer’s words, an immense desert lost in the planalto (central plateau).51 Niemeyer drove 600 km each way along dirt roads to get from Belo Horizonte and back: With Brasília, I recommenced my journeys by car on roads still under construction. More arduous this time, 1,200 kilometres through mud or the red dust of the savannah.52

Brasília

181

Figure 8.10 The superquadras originais: the social spaces – living rooms and bedrooms – face the gardens. © Thomas Deckker

Even today most building materials come by road from at least Belo Horizonte, if not São Paulo. Because the candangos, the construction workers, were illiterate, Niemeyer made daily rounds of all the building sites giving instructions (Figure 8.11). He lived in one of several encampments which had been built to house the candangos (as they could not live on the construction site itself), and to distract himself from the arduous working conditions, would either hold parties there or go to the Cidade Livre (Figure 8.12). Niemeyer remembered the Cidade Livre as: the ‘wild west’ of the new capital. A wide street covered in mud, full of jeeps, horses and carts, lined with low constructions of brickwork, where the bars, restaurants, night-clubs and the prostitutes of the city were to be found.53 That such areas were popular should not obscure that they did not contain the substance of a new capital city. The intention was to create a city form which symbolised the modernity of the country: The idea of JK – ours, too – was not to build whatever city, poor and provincial, but a city contemporary and modern, which could represent the importance of our country.54 Initially, at least, the city was widely acknowledged as a successful representation of the importance of Brazil. Contemporary pictures are neither propaganda nor exaggeration: it was a genuinely popular Utopia (see Cover) (Figure 8.13).

182

Thomas Deckker

Figure 8.11 The Alvorada Palace (Oscar Niemeyer 1956–7), the official presidential palace, under construction c.1956. Contemporary photograph courtesy of Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal

Figure 8.12 Encampment for candangos, the construction workers c.1956. Contemporary photograph courtesy of Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal

The utopian aspect of Brasília foundered almost immediately on the reality of producing it. The most immediate problem was that the inhabitants – not only the candangos, but also the civil servants – were drawn from the poorest and least-

Figure 8.13 The inauguration of Brasília in 1960. Only 10 of the projected 92 main superquadras had any form of construction. Contemporary photograph courtesy of Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal

Figure 8.14 Candangos arriving in Brasília c.1956. They were drawn from the poorest and least-developed parts of Brazil. Contemporary photograph courtesy of Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal

184

Thomas Deckker

developed parts of Brazil – the interior and north-east (Figure 8.14). For these people, Brasília was a dream come true – apartments were virtually given away to encourage people to move there. It also meant jobs: no civil servant lost their job in Rio; the bureaucracy simply increased in number. No Brazilian in their right mind would want to leave the ‘luxury and pleasure’ of the beaches in Rio, and none did. Today, 90 per cent of population is drawn from the interior and north-east, and 5 per cent each from Rio and São Paulo.55 These people were the least able to cope with the culture of Modernism of Brasília – the way of life of the Modern brasileiro. Ironically, these people came from places that the Italian architect Aldo Rossi considered paradigmatically urban. Rossi visited Brazil in 1978; the small towns in the interior, and the warm urban life, had a powerful effect on him: the housing and the district of Belo Horizonte, full of life, warmth – the warmth of life – repeated the rhythm of the Baroque cathedrals, that is, allowed things to happen: and this was an aspect of the architecture . . . the continuation of the insula, the space of the people.56 It is possible that, at the time of his visit, some of the small towns of the interior and the north-east still maintained some sense of public life, but this was before the urban demographic explosion and the cultural changes which occurred during the 1970s effectively destroyed any sense of civic life. Rossi had remarked on the integration of theatres (although many of these were, in fact, cinemas) into the urban fabric: in the little cities of inland Brazil, the theatre is distinguished by nothing more than the clear articulation of the tympanum, by the unique and subtle devices of the facade.57 The most characteristic evidence of culture now is not the facades of theatres but innumerable television aerials and even satellite antennae on even the poorest favela (shanty). Brasília was inaugurated in 1960. At this time Brazil was not considered a Third World country; on the contrary, it was widely believed that it would become the regional superpower. This situation changed with the military coup against Kubitschek’s effective successor João Goulart in 1964.58 Although inflation caused by the development of Brasília is often cited as the reason for the coup, the socialist direction of the government and Brazil’s international position offer a more realistic explanation. Kubitschek had withdrawn Brazil from the International Monetary Fund in 1959 and, in 1961, Goulart had awarded the Order of the Southern Cross, Brazil’s highest honour, to ‘Ché’ Guevara, who had led the successful defence of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba against a CIA-backed invasion. The United States had been sensitive about Latin America after the Revolution in Cuba in 1958, which had received popular support throughout Latin America, and more so after the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs; the Cold War intensified after the Berlin Wall was built in 1964. Intense diplomatic pressure, as well as more covert support by the CIA, gave the military confidence to act in Brazil, as in other Latin American

Brasília

185

countries during the Cold War. There were sound historical precedents for these actions: the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 asserted North American interest in Latin America; the Truman Doctrine of 1947 identified Communism as the main threat to the United States. The result in Brazil was catastrophic, although the ditadura (dictatorship) never sank to the depths of Chile and Argentina. Intellectuals were expelled from universities, especially the University of Brasília, which was consciously left-wing.59 Both Costa and Niemeyer spent a considerable time abroad. Niemeyer, who by that time had developed an international reputation, worked in France, Italy and Algeria; he was invited, as a Communist, to design the headquarters of the Parti Communiste Français (1967–80) in Paris, among many other prestigious commissions. The military government generally took a laissez-faire attitude to economics – inflation often reached 2,000 per cent per annum – as well as planning. The ditadura increasingly ignored the Pilot Plan for Brasília: one would not expect that a government vague on human rights would respect an urban plan which was openly left-wing. In this respect, Brasília was not unique: they were also unable to formulate development plans to cope with the rapid population increases of other Brazilian cities. Rio entered a period of violence and poverty, with an explosion of the population of the favelas (shanty-towns).60 It is worth remembering that when Le Corbusier visited the favelas of Rio in 1929, at a time when all European cities had îlot insalubres, he considered them models of cleanliness and dignity.61 Brazil was totally closed until 1985, the abertura (opening), when a civilian president took over. The Cold War was effectively over in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. Since 1995, Brazil has been generally open and increasingly prosperous, under Fernando Henrique Cardoso (who, as Minister of Finance, ended inflation one day in 1994 through economic deregulation) – an intellectual in the tradition of Kubitschek, although neo-liberal not nationalist.62 When Brazil emerged from the ditadura, it emerged into a mature culture of global consumerism – and found itself almost totally dominated, economically and culturally, by the United States. Not only was this consumer culture directly opposed to the essentially pre-war European Modern culture initiated by Vargas but, ironically, his state-controlled economy became confused with and linked to the ditadura. The project of the Modern brasileiro has been abandoned by government and citizens alike. Television, especially the famous novelas (soap operas), dominates cultural life as shopping malls do social life. Concurrent with television and shopping malls came a paranoia about public space.63 While Brazil was in the grip of the ditadura, the world economy, according to David Harvey, emerged from a crisis engendered by the failure of monolithic and supposedly rational national structures – exactly the type of government which had fostered the ‘Brazilian Style’ and which Brasília symbolised – through the development of flexible and pragmatic global structures, a process he defined as the ‘flexible accumulation’ of private and corporate wealth. Concurrent with this, Harvey believed, came an end to the dominance of the concepts of rationality and efficiency in urban planning and a re-engagement with spectacle and ornamentation in architecture.64 While this transformation principally denigrated the public

186

Thomas Deckker

Figure 8.15 A new block in the superquadras. These new blocks do not follow the original layout, and in the new Setores are often only 20 metres apart. Balconies are almost useless in the savannah climate of Brasília; they are generally subsequently shut to increase the small plan areas of new apartments. Promotional brochure, collection of Thomas Deckker

realm, it equally sanctioned the recognition and recuperation of some of the problems created by Modern planning. Whatever the defects of the Pilot Plan may have been, however, the current condition of Brasília owes little to them. In 1964, only 10 of the projected 92 main superquadras had a significant amount of construction, all except one in the asa sul (south wing).65 Of these, only six, known in Brasília as the superquadras originais (original superquadras), contained the original public facilities and landscaping designed by Niemeyer and Burle Marx. After 1964, buildings increasingly diverged from the spirit and letter of the Pilot Plan. Against Costa’s intentions, whole superquadras as well as individual blocks were sold to developers, initially in an attempt to speed up construction, which opened the development of the city to new, more populist, pressures (Figure 8.15).66 The construction of ParkShopping in 1979, the first out-of-town shopping mall, led to the immediate decline of the Setor de Diversões, the central shopping area, which is now only used by those who use the bus station, the poorest segment of Brazilian society. The new commercial blocks adjacent to the W3 and the superquadras in the asa norte (north wing), the most recent to have been developed, bear little relationship to Costa’s intentions. They have neither dignified interior spaces nor public exterior space, and of course no public dimension; the original concept of a relationship between building and site was lost in awkward internal planning and ignored in favour of an ostentatious display of materials. The latest fashion is for balconies, which are generally subsequently shut to increase the small plan areas of new apartments.67 In the new areas of expansion, such as the Setor Sudoeste (South-West Zone), blocks clad in brightly-coloured marble and totally encircled by balconies overlook each other

Brasília

187

Figure 8.16 The zone of low-income terrace housing, the Setor de Habitações Individuais Germinadas, adjacent to the superquadras originais which have now all been transformed into ‘casas do interior’ (houses from the interior). Little remains of the original terrace houses. © Thomas Deckker

only 20 metres apart.68 The original zone of low-income terrace housing in the W3 adjacent to the superquadras originais have now all been transformed into ‘casas do interior’ (houses from the interior) which makes a bizarre contrast with the still-intact blocks on the other side of the street. Significantly, these areas look exactly like ‘whatever city, poor and provincial’ to be found in the interior of Brazil; they form the type of city street evoked by Colin Ward (Figure 8.16). The new commercial buildings in the central Setores Comerciais (Commercial Zones) – offices, apart-hotels and shopping malls – are in sharp contrast to the original buildings. In the original plan, car parking was broken down into smaller areas which interpenetrated with the various blocks, leaving the central area of the Setor free as a pedestrian zone. The new blocks are isolated in the middle of enormous car parks, without any pedestrian access or landscaping. Instead of Costa’s original simple blocks interacting to form a visual whole, new blocks are ostentatiously representational. When the Centro Empresarial Varig (1995) was built, people in Brasília were very proud that Brasília looked like New York or Miami.69 In this, they are right: it has the same attributes – gestural image, nasty internal spaces, and poor material quality – as similar buildings anywhere. In other words, the populist creation of public space is more anonymous and hostile than the Modern it replaces. What has emerged since the original plan, and was in no way predicted or desired, was the dominance of the cidades satélites (satellite cities). Out of a total population of two million in the Distrito Federal, only 250,000 live in Brasília; 1,750,000, seven times the planned 250,000, live in the satellite cities. The project

188

Thomas Deckker

to develop the interior of Brazil through the construction of Brasília seems to have succeeded beyond all expectations. The term ’satellite city’ covers a wide variety of types, from the latest ‘official’ cities such as Águas Claras, ostensibly an extension to the Pilot Plan with a fixed plan and a single developer, to ‘unofficial’ cities such as Recanto das Emas which are little more than un-serviced loteamentos (building plots). As might be imagined, living conditions vary widely in this urban agglomeration. Taguatinga, an original satellite city, far exceeds the Pilot Plan in population and has substantial middle-class districts; the Cidade Livre, renamed Núcleo Bandeirante (Pioneer Settlement) in 1961, has become a well-established middle-class suburb. Recanto das Emas, further out in the Distrito Federal (with a journey time of one hour by bus to Brasília), is inhabited by poorer people, and Valparaiso, outside the Distrito Federal in the state of Goiás (with a journey time of at least one-and-a-half hours by bus to Brasília), by the even poorer. Planning in the satellite cities never achieves more than a vague and generalised distribution of zones, often subverted in practice; public facilities are minimal, if not entirely absent. The right-wing government of the Distrito Federal gives building plots to the flood of migrants from the interior and north-east – but not jobs, which has resulted in a high degree of unemployment and violence in the newer satellite cities. Recanto das Emas, for example, has no drainage services at all; dirty water is thrown onto the unpaved streets. Águas Claras has been abandoned for several years after the developer went bankrupt. The situation for even the moderately rich is quite different. Those in receipt of government patronage or benefiting from the neo-liberal economy have a way of life apparently in excess of all but their richest European equivalents. From the inception of Brasília, this class preferred the areas of detached houses around the lake – the Lago Sul (South Lake) and Lago Norte (North Lake) – which formed part of the Pilot Plan but which have now far exceeded their intended size. These houses are virtually a satire on architecture: each is what their owners euphemistically describe as ‘Colonial’, but are really ostentatious and vulgar displays of wealth with little relationship to real colonial architecture, about which their owners know or care little.70 They are, almost without exception, bizarrely badly planned, dark, and stuffy; the main design inspiration comes from the fantastically exaggerated fictions of the lives of the super-rich in São Paulo to be seen in the novelas.71 Because, perhaps, this class does not originate in the established urban centres, their way of life and expectations rarely resemble their more urbane equivalents in Rio or São Paulo. The forces against Brasília are now deeply rooted within the political institution and the structure of the city is under threat from both local government and developers. Any pretence at respecting the Pilot Plan has long been abandoned; only listing as a World Heritage Site (in 1987) has put a brake on some quite ludicrous schemes, such as walling off each superquadra.72 One of the senators for the Distrito Federal is the head of the biggest development company and fought his election campaign explicitly on the promise of construction jobs. On the other hand, the socialist mayor managed to implement pedestrian crossings for the footpaths within

Brasília

189

the Pilot Plan during his brief term from 1994–8, which appear to be revolutionising pedestrian movement within the city. Brasília was occupied at a time when the conception of a public realm was destroyed, and Brazil’s emerging prosperity was linked to global consumerism. In the popular imagination, Brasília was built by dictators, and modern architecture is dictatorial. The Universities could not sustain any resistance to these falsehoods. For these reasons, the many ‘user satisfaction’ surveys carried out by Schools of Architecture among residents of the superquadras must be treated with caution. While some of the common changes to apartments, such as changing the maid’s bedroom into a second bathroom, are practical adjustments to changing circumstances – livein maids are not so common a feature of middle-class life today – the accelerating ‘post-modernisation’ of the blocks – the application of ‘Colonial’ decorative features – is clearly a reaction against the Pilot Plan.73 The populist development of Brasília is unequivocal evidence that populism cannot sustain architecture or urban planning of any sophistication. The complex historical circumstances which meant an almost total rejection of the city and its architecture by its inhabitants should not disguise that the original concept of urbanity did not really embody an adequate representation of civic space. However utopian the superquadras originais appear, the cultural facilities do not form a cohesive whole; the city simply has no institutions where people can meet and enjoy the public realm. The lack of any public realm in Brasília means that the city is virtually impenetrable for the outsider and offers a very limited scope for the inhabitants themselves. There are almost no cultural events in the city at all. It may even be ventured that the lack of public institutions in Brasília has contributed to the lack of civic life of its essentially rural population, as the urban nature of the city is hardly apparent. The lack of a public realm in Brasília is, to a large degree, directly attributable to two principal tenets of Modern planning: the separation of functions and the quantity of landscape space. Costa was undoubtedly aware of these shortcomings, but the supposedly scientific concepts of the Charte d’Athène allowed limited scope to conceive or project a public realm. The lack of a central cultural area deprived the city of a focus of cultural life; the National Theatre is totally isolated on the eixo monumental. Among the superquadras originais, the Cine Brasília (Oscar Niemeyer, 1960) is widely acknowledged as the most comfortable cinema in Brasília, but it is intimidating to walk to it at night across its landscape space from the adjacent superquadras. There are no bars or cafes to provide urban life, let alone refreshment, in either place. The general public prefer the shopping malls with cinema complexes and ‘fast-food’ outlets, a simulacrum of urban life. Brasília has very few restaurants and bars, even fewer good ones. It is not just the quality of food, however, but also the place these have in urban life which is important: a loophole in planning regulations, for example, allows petrol stations to set up bars, with predictable results.74 The planning apparatus is totally inimical to the city. This situation is in contrast to that in Rio. The recuperation of the aterro in Lagoa is a significant part of the re-urbanisation of Rio after the deterioration of the 1970s and 1980s (even a return to ‘luxury and pleasure’) and is part of a renewed interest

190

Thomas Deckker

in the architecture of the city.75 Lagoa is an anomalous middle-class residential area in Rio because it is not on the beach, but rather resembles Brasília in being set around a lagoon. Two of the best restaurants in Rio – Claude Troisgros and Clube Gourmet – are in Lagoa, as is the fashionable Bar Lagoa; the theatre centre is adjacent in Ipanema. Bars and restaurants play an important role in carioca life. During the 1950s, Niemeyer was a great fan of the then-fashionable Juca’s Bar in Copacabana; he planned the making of the Catetinho Palace with his friends there, and poached the barman for the President’s butler.76 The aterro in Lagoa was part of the urban improvements of the 1950s, but was hardly used. What it was supposed to be, and now is, is an area where people can exercise, walk, play with their children, look at the scenery, have a drink, and eat good food, a few minutes from their homes, shops and theatres; it signals a diminution of the paranoia about public life inherent in consumerism. The landscape – the lagoon and Corcovado – forms the backdrop to these activities. It was facilitated, at an official level, by controlling the traffic, adding lighting and ignoring the zoning requirements on the barraquinhas, the small open-air restaurants; in other words, by the end of planning. Spaces with such diverse uses and interpretations of use might be called essentially civic. CIAM and the Charte d’Athène, by rigidly separating functions, did not allow for such civic spaces, nor did the concept form part of their supposedly scientific analyses of urban life. Le Corbusier’s vision was of the solitary observer of a well-ordered urban life: it contained no view on what constituted urban culture nor on how it was formed and transmitted; the centre of the Ville Radieuse was just landscape. It is significant that the recuperation of Rio has been through spaces of mixed use, rather than further zoning. The return of urban life in Rio has been one of the rare benefits of the end of planning, as it has been in cities in Europe. Brasília, nevertheless, appears as a model of sanity among contemporary populist developments in Brazil, and urban compared to contemporary suburban ‘new towns’ elsewhere. Modernism, without any doubt, was the cultural high point in recent history in Brazil. The conception of the Modern brasileiro was dignified and even beautiful. There is no reason to assume that the present binge of consumerism will continue. The failure of a pubic realm to emerge from that inherent in the Pilot Plan cannot be blamed totally on consumerist paranoia, however. The great dream of Modern planning – the planned separation of functions set in a landscape – was inimical to the formation of institutions of public life. The evidence of the built projects of Modernism is that spaces of mixed use, rather than zoned functions set in an open landscape, is the major requirement of a city. It may be readily acknowledged that Brasília is not a model for urban planning in the future, but as an urban plan of the recent past it is almost viable. How to accommodate spaces of mixed use and interpretations of use within its fabric is the major question facing Brasília today.

Brasília

191

Notes 1 Colin Ward: Utopia (Harmondsworth: Penguin Education 1974) p.31. Perhaps his friend was George Balcombe, who admired the Alvorada Palace. See ‘Conversation in Brasilia: Robert Harbinson and George Balcombe’ Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (November 1961) pp.490–4. 2 Such as those put forward by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: The Failure of Town Planning (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1965), first published in 1961. 3 Claude Lévi-Strauss: Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon 1955; London: Picador 1989). 4 The ‘A Noite’ building in Rio was the tallest reinforced concrete building in the world when it was completed in 1928. Concrete was practical in Brazil because all steel was imported and thus expensive; on the other hand, concrete required only unskilled labour. 5 Such as the house in the Rua Itápolis (1929) by the Russian emigré Gregori Warchavchik. Geraldo Ferraz: Warchavchik e a Introdução da Nova Arquitetura no Brasil 1925 a 1940 (São Paulo: Museu de Arte de São Paulo 1965). 6 Conversation with Lucio Costa, December 1988. Costa (1902–98) was born in Toulon and moved to Newcastle in 1910; he arrived in Brazil in 1916. He graduated from the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in 1924. 7 These may be seen in Le Corbusier: Précisions sur un état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (Paris: Editions Crè 1930). 8 Conversation with Costa, December 1988. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret: Œuvre Complète 1910–29 (Zurich: Girsberger 1930); Œuvre Complète 1929–34 (Zurich: Girsberger 1935); Le Corbusier: La Ville Radieuse (Boulogne-sur-Seine: Editions de L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 1935). 9 These reactions may be seen in the ‘Brazilian Corollary’ in Précisions pp.233–45. For Le Corbusier’s work in Rio see Yannis Tsiomis (ed.): Le Corbusier Rio de Janeiro 1929–1936 (Centro de Arquitetura e Urbanismo do Rio de Janeiro: Prefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro 1998). 10 His earlier experiments in life drawing appear to have been made from pornographic postcards. Stanislaus von Moos: ‘Le Corbusier as Painter’ pp.90–1 and Christopher Green: ‘The Architect as Artist’ p.126 in Le Corbusier: Architect of the Century (London: Arts Council of Great Britain 1987). 11 Précisions p.244. Œuvre Complète 1929–34 pp.138–9. 12 Thomas E. Skidmore: Politics in Brazil 1930–1964: An Experiment in Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press 1967). 13 The regime should not be considered fascist on the European model as is often claimed. Eric Hobsbawm: The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (London: Abacus 1995; first publ. 1994) p.135. 14 The competition between Germany and the United States for Brazilian raw materials during the early stages of World War II is portrayed in the film ‘Notorious’ (1946) by Alfred Hitchcock. 15 The Cidade Universitária, a much bigger and more complex project, was abandoned at the outbreak of World War II. 16 See Zilah Quezado Deckker: Brazil Built: The Architecture of the Modern Movement in Brazil (Routledge 2000). 17 The team also included Carlos Leão, Jorge Moreira, Ernani Vasconcellos and Affonso Eduardo Reidy. 18 Lucio Costa, interview with Mário Cesar Carvalho, 10 July 1995. Lucio Costa: registro de uma vivência (São Paulo: Empresa das Artes 1995) unpaginated supplement. 19 For a discussion of some problems in Le Corbusier’s urbanism see Alan Colquhuon: ‘The Strategies of the Grand Travaux’ assemblage 4 (October 1987) pp.66–81; for some technical problems see Jean-Louis Cohen: ‘Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR’ Oppositions 23 (1981) pp.85–121. 20 Rodrigo e seus Tempos (Rio de Janeiro: SPHAN Pró-Memória 1986) pp.20–1. Gilberto Freire was author of Casa Grande e Senzala (From Slave House to Manor House), the definitive sociological study of the north-east of Brazil, the economic and political capital from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Joaquim Cardoso was later engineer at Pampulha and Brasília. 21 Antonio Francisco Lisboa, ‘O Aleijadinho’ (1738–1814) was Brazil’s foremost Baroque architect and sculptor. 22 Vargas was overthrown in a military coup in 1945, but re-elected in 1951. He committed suicide in 1954, leading to a caretaker government until elections in 1955. 23 This is fully elaborated by J.O. de Meira Penna in an article ‘Brazil Builds a New Capital’ in the catalogue

192

24

25

26 27

28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51

Thomas Deckker

Brasília (Rio de Janeiro: Divisão Cultural, Ministério de Relações Exteriores c.1958) published for an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London June 11–28 1958. Norma Evenson reported that Theodore Roosevelt, president of the USA 1901–9, had visited and praised the site in 1913. Two Brazilian Capitals (New Haven: Yale University Press 1973) p.101. Roosevelt seems to have had a penchant for such sites, having been instrumental in the disastrous settlement of Montana. See the semi-fictionalised account by Jonathan Raban in Bad land: an American romance (London: Picador 1996). This reason formed the first sentence of William Holford’s article ‘Brasilia: a new Capital City for Brazil’ in the Architectural Review (December 1957) p.395, as well as being cited by Penna in ‘Brazil Builds a New Capital’. 1950 census: 129,000 (180 persons/hectare); 1960 census: 185,650 (260 persons/hectare). Evenson: Two Brazilian Capitals p.14. It has since risen dramatically. Pietro Maria Bardi: The Tropical Gardens of Roberto Burle Marx (Rio de Janeiro and Amsterdam: Colibris 1964). Construction of the aterro started in 1952. Evenson: Two Brazilian Capitals p.68. The Praia de Flamengo was listed in 1966. Parque Guinle, built within the grounds of a former mansion, has been subsequently overlooked. Costa projected six blocks, of which he built three. This is described in Ruy Castro: Chega de Saudade: A História e as Histórias da Bossa Nova (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras 1990). The light-hearted combination of Modern architecture (including the Ministry of Education building) and bossa nova may be seen in the film ‘Black Orpheus’ (1959) by Marcel Camus. ‘Black Orpheus’ was based on the play ‘Orfeu da Conceição’ by Vinícius de Morais, first staged at the Teatro Municipal, Rio de Janeiro in 1956, with a set by Oscar Niemeyer. Vinícius de Morais lived in Parque Guinle. Penna: ‘Brazil Builds a New Capital’. At this time the presidential mandate could extend only one term. Oscar Niemeyer: As Curvas do Tempo: Memórias (Rio de Janeiro: Revan 1998) pp.109–11. Catetinho (little Catete) was a pun on the presidential palace in Rio, the Catete Palace. Juscelino Kubitschek, 3 October 1956. Author’s translation. Niemeyer: As Curvas do Tempo: Memórias pp.109–11. ‘Alvorada’ means ‘dawn’. Costa, interview with Carvalho, 10 July 1995. Lucio Costa: registro de uma vivência. Holford: ‘Brasilia’ Architectural Review (December 1957) pp.395–8. According to Holford, the IAB preferred to distribute the prizes – and workload – among the other short-listed architects. ‘Brasilia’ Architectural Review (December 1957) p.397. Lucio Costa: ‘Memória Decscritiva do Plano Piloto’ (Report on the Pilot Plan) Lucio Costa: registro de uma vivência pp.283–95. Author’s translation. Lucio Costa: ‘ “Ingredientes” da concepção urbanística de Brasília’ (‘Ingredients’ of the urban concept for Brasília) Lucio Costa: registro de uma vivência (São Paulo: Empresa das Artes 1995) p.282. Conversation with Costa, December 1988. Holford: ‘Brasilia’ Architectural Review (December 1957) p.396. Costa: ‘Memória Decscritiva do Plano Piloto’ Lucio Costa: registro de uma vivência p.289. The Esplanada dos Ministérios is the same length as the Champs de Mars. Costa: ‘Memória Decscritiva do Plano Piloto’ Lucio Costa: registro de uma vivência p.289. The Mall runs from Admiralty Arch to Buckingham Palace. Conversation with Costa, December 1988. As noticed by Richards in 1959. ‘Brasília’ Architectural Review (February 1959) pp.94–104. This figure is the bed spaces/hectare within a typical superquadra. J.M. Richards’ claim that the superquadras held 3,000 people, giving a density closer to 600 persons/hectare, is not born out by his other figures. ‘Brasília’ Architectural Review (February 1959) pp.94–104. The roads in the Ville Radieuse were also derived from American practice, but were not so heavily landscaped as the Parkways. Costa: ‘Memória Decscritiva do Plano Piloto’ Lucio Costa: registro de uma vivência p.295. ‘Dados Complementares’ in Andréa da Costa Brava (ed.): Guia de Urbanismo, Arquitetura e Arte de Brasília (Brasília: Fundação Athos Bulcão 1997). Niemeyer: As Curvas do Tempo: Memórias p.110. Even today, the isolation and the extraordinary ration-

Brasília

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

193

ality of the city are brought home by a trip by car from the chaos of São Paulo along 1000 km of very bad roads; the city appears as if on another planet. Niemeyer: As Curvas do Tempo: Memórias p.117. Author’s translation. Niemeyer has an aversion to air travel. Niemeyer: As Curvas do Tempo: Memórias p.113. Author’s translation. Niemeyer: As Curvas do Tempo: Memórias p.114. Author’s translation. Statistics of this kind appear frequently in the local press. For small towns see Aldo Rossi: A Scientific Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT 1981) p.76; for Belo Horizonte p.52. Rossi: A Scientific Autobiography p.30. A president in-between resigned after only a few months in office. Goulart was Minister of Labour in Kubitschek’s government. The University of Brasília had been set up by Darcy Ribeiro, a prominent left-wing intellectual, who was its first Rector. Darcy Ribeiro: Confissões (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras 1997) pp.235–64. A favela, a shanty-town, is visually and culturally distinct from a cortiço, an urban slum, even when in city centres. Le Corbusier: Précisions p.235. Fernando Henrique Cardoso was a professor at the Sorbonne during the ditadura. See Margaret Crawford: ‘The World in a Shopping Mall’ in Michael Sorkin (ed.): Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang 1992). David Harvey: ‘Flexible Accumulation through Urbanization’ Perspecta 26 (1990) pp.251–72. That is, the 100, 200 and 300 series. Twelve of the projected 28 400 series, intended for poorer people and architecturally less significant, had been built. These can be seen in the map which accompanies Willy Stäubli: Brasília (Stuttgart: Alexander Koch c.1965; London: Leonard Hill 1966). Costa intended that only shares be sold, specifically to avoid this type of development. Costa: ‘Memória Decscritiva do Plano Piloto’ Lucio Costa: registro de uma vivência pp.294–5. Balconies are almost useless in the savannah climate of Brasília; it would be more correct to say that their use is representative of holiday houses on the beach. Problems of overlooking are often reported in the local press. In the superquadras, the service sides of the blocks are normally 20 metres apart but these obviously contain no inhabitable space. Statements of this kind appear frequently in the local press. The equivalent in England might be estates of ‘executive’ houses in Neo-Georgian and neo-vernacular styles in the Home Counties. The houses shown in the novelas are, of course, sets. Closed blocks, known as condomínio fechado, are a common form of middle-class development in Brazil. The maid’s bedroom and bathroom usually form the last rooms of the dependência, so are easy to change. As ‘convenience stores’. Two recent exhibitions on the city, after a very long period without any, have been ‘O Rio Jamais Visto’ (Unbuilt Rio) and ‘Le Corbusier Rio de Janeiro 1929–1936’. The new Mayor is an architect. Niemeyer: As Curvas do Tempo: Memórias p.110.

PART 3 THE DECLINE OF MODERNISM

The book ends with contrasting views of the legacy of Modernism in the Netherlands and the United States. Modernism had been accepted universally and uncritically in the Netherlands for its programme of post-war reconstruction; as this utopian programme succumbed to the more modest realities of planning large new suburbs and over-spill cities in the 1960s and 1970s, the social problems inherent in Modernism began to emerge more markedly. Rob Docter examines the way in which spatial anonymity has been identified and dealt with as a matter of planning policy, especially in the infamous Amsterdam Bijlmermeer district. In the United States, however, European Modernism never found much acceptance. Paul Adamson describes the history of urban planning in the United States, and the compromises made by Ludwig Hilbersheimer and Richard Neutra in accommodating European Modernism to its radically democratic and populist society. Curiously, the end of Modernism in Europe and anti-Modernism in the United States have come to resemble one another. Both are low-density, functionally dispersed and spatially anonymous. One thing is clear: that any way forward for contemporary urbanism will come from dedicated and idealistic architects, not from market forces. The challenge of providing cities for the new millennium will certainly come not from an uncritical revival of Modernism but from a critical reassessment of the successes and failures of what, and how, Modern cities were built.

9 Post-war town planning in its mid-life crisis Dilemmas in redevelopment from a policy point of view Rob Docter

Introduction A new city, surmounting a war, facing a new future. Over the years there has been fervent praise for the urban landscapes of the 1950s and 1960s. Today, almost half a century later, those wonderfully ingenious neighbourhoods are being decried with equal fervour. Where once life was pleasant, now problems are accumulating. What has happened and what can we do about it? Some of those buildings were truly amazing creations. Controversial, frightfully austere and irrepressible modern – was the response of those who had learned to regard the historic city, with its leaning monuments, as beautiful. The traditional reference picture of urban elegance disappeared for good after the war. Beauty was no longer synonymous with picturesque. It had acquired a wide cultural connotation, a new world of significance, from which buildings derived their beauty. The modern architects in the 1920s and 1930s had already introduced a new aesthetic, the aesthetic of engineering, of constructive purity. While traditionalists continued to build on the traditional beauty of the older days, after the war modernists were looking for ways to represent the newly-emerging society – a society that would soon rid itself of obsolete values and concentrate on a new and just future. Architecture in the 1950s and 1960s is a reflection of radical social and economic change which typified the redevelopment period. In the Netherlands, the ‘Stitching van Na de Oorlog’ (The Post-War Foundation) managed successfully to place the significance of post-war districts on the political agenda. Private initiative is essential for ensuring that values do not get lost in the political desert. By simply demanding attention and getting it, the DOCOMOMO Foundation regularly succeeded in pointing out the value of buildings that the public no longer found beautiful and which stood in the way of the politicians. Nevertheless, many of these neighbourhoods embody unique systems of social and cultural values. The residents, many of whom have lived in them since they were built, are a community unto themselves. Relatively few people move out of these

198

Rob Docter

neighbourhoods. The architects and urban developers of the time wrought a sturdy, versatile, recognisable and timeless concept. Timeless, yes, unless it fell victim to some passing delusion. In the past years, a number of interesting initiatives have been undertaken in the Netherlands to investigate and revitalise urban districts from the 1950s and 1960s. The government of the Netherlands is now confronted with the questions of if, how and when preservation and redevelopment of the post-war period should become part of municipal planning and urban renewal practices. It has been a standing policy in the Netherlands to encourage local authorities, planners, architects, owners and developers to contribute to a high standard of quality in architecture, town planning and landscape design, which includes taking cultural and historical values into account in development plans. This policy of encouragement is, by priority, aimed at new development, but also stretches to preservation. Preservation is conceived and defined as re-designing the existing environment, according to current needs, using existing cultural values and adding new cultural values to the developed environment. This policy is referred to as integrated preservation. The city of Rotterdam The urban heritage of the post-war reconstruction period (1940–70) today forms a very specific issue in preservation in the Netherlands. The drawing-up of rebuilding plans began directly after the devastation of Rotterdam (and later during the war for other towns that had been bombed mistakenly by the Allied forces), but the actual rebuilding began, of course, a few years after the end of the war, around 1950 (Figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1 Rotterdam arising as a modern city, clear, straight and functional from its war-wounds, around Zadkine’s famous statue ‘Devastated City’ (in the background)

Post-war town planning in its mid-life crisis

199

Figure 9.2 The ‘Lijnbaan’ shopping mall, by Van den Broek and Bakema, became an icon of modernity. It embodied a new way of life in a new era even more than the spacious new flats and motorways that were constructed after American examples

The devastation of Rotterdam created an interesting socio-cultural phenomenon. The post-war ’spirit of redevelopment’ found a good breeding ground in Rotterdam, a city that had always had a modern, progressive character. Futurist thinking in architecture and town planning took root easier in Rotterdam than in other cities, it seems. In other cities that had to repair the war damage, the traditional face of architecture was often placed in the forefront, as if the trauma of the war could be negated by choosing a building form that had close reference to the original (historic) situation. In Rotterdam the new society and the new city required an image that was futuristic, optimistic – the modern face of architecture (Figure 9.2). ‘Together, our shoulders to the wheel’ was the motto that led to an unprecedented building spree. In retrospect, it is amazing how much energy and will-power post-war society was able to bundle to build a new future. This was especially true of Rotterdam where there were no dogged efforts to repair the past; but where industry and the building trades flourished, producing some admirable feats. Nowadays, Rotterdam still has a non-retrospective urban culture, an atmosphere of creation, renewal and progress. This has resulted in a strange sort of nostalgia for the recent past. It is remarkable how the urban districts that came into being in the 1950s and 1960s are appreciated in Rotterdam in the same way other cities cherish their mediaeval town centres. The attention of the local authorities to the recent history of the city has been strengthened by private initiatives. Two private organisations, the ‘Stitching van Na de Oorlog’ and the ‘Committee Wederopbouw’ have started to do research and take stock. They are actively appealing to the authorities

200

Rob Docter

and private parties concerned to take the special value of this urban heritage into account. Maybe these organisations are so successful in gaining public interest because post-war reconstruction is so closely related to the historic city and has become part of the collective memory rather easily. In new towns, however, it seems to be a quite different story. New land, new towns The post-war reconstruction of the Netherlands had to provide quick and adequate housing with scarce materials. Modern methods of land allotment and industrialised building techniques, which had been the subjects of experiments in the 1930s, could now be applied on a large scale in order to rationalise and speed up building production. The euphoria of post-war social, economic and urban redevelopment was a good breeding ground for bringing the ideals of the Modern Movement into practice in the field of architecture and town planning. Especially on the ‘new land’, the large IJsselmeer polders, and in the large town-extensions, new functional and spatial concepts could be realised. The most important principles were those of concrete constructions in open building zones. The new city was presented to and accepted by the public as a new, clean and healthy environment for happy family life. CIAM’s line of reasoning, as applied in the Netherlands by urban developers such as Cor van Eesteren, seemed to satisfy the requirements of industrial housing production and notions about modern living. Land division principles developed before the war were now being applied on a grand scale, forming a fixed plan that would serve as a model for Dutch urban expansion until far into the 1970s. The Hague Southwest forms a good showcase for these urban development views. In general the construction of these new town parts took place tabula rasa – on new polders or building lots outside the city, on flat land where the new infrastructure and building pattern could be projected at will. On the one hand, this made a pure application of the functionalist design principles of the Modern Movement possible; on the other hand, however, it meant a break with the tradition of historic stratification of urban development in the Netherlands. The occupation of the ‘new land’, the making of the new city, was realised in one turn, without any reference to underlying historic patterns. It seemed that existing social ties could easily be transplanted to the new rational residential suburbs; society was still pliable, at least to planners, sociologists and architects. In this sense, the new cities in the IJsselmeer polders were not only urban development experiments but also, most definitely, sociological experiments. Lelystad, for example, was intended as an ‘overflow city’ for cities in the western part of the country (particularly The Hague and Amsterdam). Attractive offers and removal premiums enticed many to the new land. Many, however, were unable to thrive there, experiencing the transition to a new residential location as a social and cultural uprooting. The pioneering nature of removal seldom resulted in the close-knit social bonding that many had expected originally. In general, it would take a generation before people began to identify with this new residential environment.

Post-war town planning in its mid-life crisis

201

Mid life crisis . . . Not much is left of the social idealism of those days. The ideal city of the 1950s and 1960s has become today’s ghetto. It is especially in the post-war residential areas that social, economic, psychological and functional problems of the city seem to be concentrated. High unemployment, ethnic tensions, high crime rates, declining public facilities and technical decay are the symptoms, as are well-known in urban areas all over the world. The ideal city of the Modern Movement has in many cases not even lasted for 40 years. At first, these neighbourhoods met the modern standard of their time and were very much in demand, but nowadays they suffer from a severe lack of public interest. In fact, nowadays they are considered to be the low end of the residential market. An additional problem is that public appreciation for the Modern Movement is not very enthusiastic: the buildings and urban environments are often regarded as ugly. There is no large public affection, as with (older) historic towns. Attempts at preservation are often considered to be academic eccentricity and find little political acceptance.

. . . or end of the story? In less than 40 years, this originally well respected and appreciated part of our architectural and urban heritage ended in a crisis. The question now is, is there still a future for these neighbourhoods? Can they still meet the current demands of the residential market? Can they be adapted and renovated for a new, and hopefully more prosperous, future, or is there no hope at all? In other words, are they just in a mid-life crisis or is this the end of the story for them? In our view, CIAM’s ideas no longer apply automatically to contemporary urban society. The ideas of CIAM have to be updated or even reconsidered to be able to give answers to present-day problems such as the rapid, radical change of social structures, the changes in consumer behaviour or the enormous increase in motorised traffic. By today’s standards, the dwellings are small and lacking in comfort and – especially in the case of high-rise blocks of flats – the original concept of safety and comfort of the living environment has become inverted into a general feeling of insecurity and even danger. Many people who could afford it have moved to the suburbs with more comfortable family houses, leaving the post-war housing stock for the lowest income groups. In particular, the often rigidly-adhered-to functional separations in the redevelopment neighbourhoods seems to be at odds with contemporary views, which are specifically geared towards functional mixing and integration. Where once post-war urban expansion was spacious and green, today the emphasis is on compact urban development, with multiple and intensive utilisation of space. Park zones and lines of vision fall victim to consolidation plans. One after the other, neighbourhood centres have succumbed to competition from peripheral shopping centres.

202

Rob Docter

The CIAM heritage reconsidered Many post-war neighbourhoods have mainly two groups of residents: older people, who have mostly been living there from the start, and newcomers, mainly young people just starting in the residential market, and immigrants. This causes a rather fundamental problem: originally these neighbourhoods were based upon a clear concept of society and of the kind of people who would be accommodated there. They were differentiated in a socio-economic way, but were homogeneous from a socio-cultural point of view. Nowadays the situation is exactly the other way around. There is a great socio-economic uniformity together with large socio-cultural differences. The divide is sharpest between native Dutch inhabitants and immigrants. Without going into that matter too deeply at this point, it may be clear that handling the post-war neighbourhoods is a matter to be dealt with by sociologists and economists rather than by architects and town planners alone. Today’s new, more intensified residential building stream (the ‘Vinex’), is being built for the same population as the new building production of the past. These are families with children and above-average incomes that can no longer find suitable housing in the cities, but which have come to depend on urban facilities in the area of employment and education. Today, however, one-sided socio-economic stratification of the new districts is seen as a problem. Policy aims to provide more differentiation in residents. As a result of the privatisation of public housing in the 1980s, however, the market mechanism has become dominant, which has produced a ‘mono-culture’ in housing and types of residents. The migration from the cities of residents with purchasing power has had a negative impact on post-war neighbourhoods. The gradual over-representation of residents with lower purchasing power reduces the chances of successful revitalisation. After all, the non-profit housing associations can only re-value their properties in these districts if an economic basis is present, while districts that have expanded successfully are being commercially exploited by private developers. The redevelopment plans that have been designed during the past years have a number of characteristics in common. The current exercise is in the mixing of functions rather than in functional separation, in designing integration and complexity, rather than social and spatial transparency. The first priority seems to be to diversify the social structure. The second important point of attention is the creation of employment by the establishment of businesses in the neighbourhood and the upgrading of the public facilities. The post-war neighbourhoods occupy favourable positions in the cities, which could be turned into success factors. Situated as they are between the inner cities and the districts that expanded later, mostly in the vicinity of railway lines and arterial roads, the redevelopment neighbourhoods are entirely capable of attracting new economic activities. When one meticulously seeks consolidation and transformation possibilities, the strategic locations of the neighbourhoods could be used to attract new economic carriers. This would make it possible to rehabilitate the weaker residential function and, in this way, break the downward spiral. Recent studies have been carried out in the context of the debate on the future

Post-war town planning in its mid-life crisis

203

of town parts from the period 1945–70, in which the choice seems to be between radical change and demolition. One of the interesting developments in thinking about the future of these CIAM neighbourhoods is the reconsideration of the allotment principle of free-standing building blocks surrounded by public greenery. Nowadays the principle of the closed building block with a quiet and semi-private inner open space is being reassessed, not only because it provides privacy and safety, but – most of all – because the maintenance of vast areas of public green space (in square meters per inhabitant) is no longer sustainable. Solutions that mean an essential divergence of the original features are inevitable. Amsterdam Bijlmermeer In a study for redevelopment possibilities of a part of the Bijlmermeer, architect Pi de Bruijn (de Architecten Cie, Amsterdam) proposed some rather drastic interventions in the building pattern and the traffic system. In fact, many of the present problems with regard to public safety are considered to be the result of the extreme separation of motorised and pedestrian traffic in the original layout. The monotony of identical building blocks in regular patterns is also seen as one of the main causes of the current lack of appreciation for the Bijlmermeer as a residential area (Figure 9.3). De Bruijn’s study included a programme of 1,100 dwellings, 4,200 m2 of new retail space and 10,900 m2 of new office space (Figure 9.4). More differentiation in dwellings, more privately-occupied green space and the neutralising of the sharp division between roads and green pedestrian areas (by lowering elevated roads or by making them accessible through green slopes) were the main ingredients of De Bruijn’s remedy. The result was a rather essential change in the urban layout, a higher density, a more differentiated and identifiable residential area, including

Figure 9.3 An aerial view of the Bijlmermeer shortly after completion

204

Rob Docter

Figure 9.4 A study after redevelopment possibilities, ‘Plan Kraaiennest’ (1996), De Architecten Cie (Pi de Bruijn, Laura Weeber and Joris Smits), showing low-rise apartment buildings along the central Bijlmerdreef

employment, retail and commercial functions in the neighbourhood. The monotony and lack of orientation are compensated by more variation in landscape design (Figures 9.5–9.7). The value of the Bijlmermeer as a monument of urban planning is respected, but cannot be kept without affecting the original CIAM ideology. De Bruijn tried to use the positive sides of the original concept, making the necessary improvements at the same time. The compromise between saving as much as possible of the urban history and (re)creating a safe and pleasant living environment results in quite a different urban image, but one that essentially blends with the underlying social idealism. The urban development idea behind the Bijlmermeer, with its honeycomb pattern, seems clear. In actuality, however, it makes orientation difficult. In particular, the large amorphous green areas and the uniformity of the parcel divisions are disadvantages. In his plan for the Ganzenhoef complex, Donald Lambert of the Kraaijvanger-Urbis office developed a new spatial vocabulary, designed to fit in with existing qualities, but which solves several structural problems. In the first instance, his plan reinforces the hierarchy of avenues and green zones, which strengthens orientation. In addition, new neighbourhoods, particularly in rows of low-rise buildings, will occupy the area where the existing honeycomb ‘ensembles’ cannot be maintained (Figure 9.8). From the standpoint of housing differentiation and social safety, the choice of low-rise buildings seems obvious. However, it represents a break with the transparent urban development idiom of the original concept. The lowering of the central

Post-war town planning in its mid-life crisis

205

Figure 9.5 The rigid separation of motorised and pedestrian traffic was expected to create a well-tempered public realm, with plenty of opportunities for play and leisure

access road, de Bijlmeerdreef, represents a fundamental intervention in the original concept, with the goal of improving the social infrastructure. In addition, new form elements will be introduced in the public areas. Examples include the planting of lanes with plane trees, the Bijlmerdreef, while the original greenery plan had an informal landscaping approach. The functional aesthetics of the road as a line through the urban landscape has to give way to the notion of an ‘avenue’, which apparently fits in better with the modern outlook on city ‘furnishings’. The use of low-rise buildings and bringing back the motorway to ground level represent a fundamental attack on the most essential features of the original plan.

Figures 9.6 and 9.7 Tearing down or redeveloping parking garages. Some rigorous parking garages are still rising up like fortresses. They were supposed to be the functional interface between the motorised traffic system and the pedestrian realm of green park-space surrounding the apartment buildings, but became a hostile environment, the concealed scene of affairs that cannot stand up to examination, ruled by dealers and drifters. By making the ground floor level accessible for cars they have become even more uncontrolled and inhospitable. A number of parking garages have been or will be demolished. In other cases, the unfriendly character and the lack of social control is compensated for by adding new functions, like schools or health centres. The attraction of public activity has a positive effect on the surroundings and it seems the hostile anonymity has made way for a more sociable environment

Post-war town planning in its mid-life crisis

207

Figure 9.8 Desegregation of the traffic system. The central access road, Bijlmerdreef, has been transformed into a wide lane with low-rise apartment buildings, resulting in a distinct suburban, high quality residential character, but without a clear reference to the identity of the original urban concept. The remaining honeycomb blocks in the background still function as icons of the original layout, but without the negative connotations from the past. As it seems, the desegregation of the traffic system has been the key-remedy in upgrading the Bijlmermeer, rather than the architectural interventions. Maybe even the separated traffic system was the real backbone of the Bijlmermeer concept after all – and its biggest failure. It was Rem Koolhaas who noted that ‘There is more grey in the Bijlmermeer than anywhere else in the world. The collective life, if there at all, has been hidden behind elevated highways. But the most serious omission, waste even, is the total neglect of the highway as a possible instrument of social activity.’ (Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Revision Bijlmer, 1986.) The lay-out of the new access roads on ground-floor level is generously dimensioned and giving place to a number of provisions, parking-space and room for playing. They form the new interface between the motorised traffic system and the pedestrian area, based upon the idea of meeting and social interaction rather than separation. Even waiting for the bus has become a pleasure: instead of waiting in a windy no-man’s land, there is activity and social life all around

To be able to park near one’s house, the covered parking garage has been abandoned. In this way, there is a dilution of the distinctive features of the original idea, to the standard idiom of contemporary new-building neighbourhoods. Is this unavoidable in order to provide a future for parts of the neighbourhood that could be maintained? Would it not have been possible to carry out the necessary improvements with more respect for the original ideas? In our view, in principle, this could very well have been done, were it not for the fact that the negative image and charged political decision-making about restructuring the district would necessarily and eventually require more than minimum intervention. Will the Bijlmeer, as an icon of modern post-war urban development in the Netherlands, in which one could detect something of Le Corbusier’s transparent

208

Rob Docter

urban Utopia, be consigned to a patchwork of styles and lifestyles that, while perhaps socially acceptable, is an urban development concept without form or substance? Or will the introduction of alien urban development elements be unavoidable to compensate for the negative image of the complexes to be retained? Lambert defends his plan by arguing that, with the addition of new, quaint flats, which can carry on a dialogue between the new and the existing, there will be a future for the existing flats. They need no longer be seen as inferior dwellings. To overcome social problems in and around the remaining Bijlmeer flats, public access to the flats (stairwells, inner streets) will be drastically reduced. Social control will be added at the ground level in the form of urban activities and other functions (childcare, small businesses) (Figures 9.9–9.12).1 The Hague Southwest The spacious urban development scheme is perhaps a distinctive characteristic of post-war cities in the Netherlands. The spacious neighbourhood access roads, the open green areas within blocks of flats and the generous district parks provide breathing space that contributes considerably to a positive valuation by residents and to the strong position of these districts in the housing market. In The Hague, urban reformers cast their glances longingly on these green, undeveloped areas. The occurrence of demographic thinning and the wish to maintain the quality of facilities necessitated consolidation. The argument put forth was simple: there are enough building sites left over. The wide lanes were narrowed to create a confined building zone. The parks were subdivided to create new residential streets. The spacious parcels of greenery were utilised down to the last square centimetre. The threat was that what had happened frequently in post-war neighbourhoods would happen here. These residential areas, with their narrow flats and elementary living comfort, are nevertheless very popular, due to the spacious greenery in the living environment. As a result of the consolidation plans, they are losing the very qualities that make them attractive. While the residents accepted this for the time being, since they were offered improved living conditions and new support for facilities, in the long run the equilibrium was lost and dissatisfaction increased. The right-angled pattern of streets, blocks of flats and green zones cannot endlessly be compressed without destroying their essence. You could say that living

Figure 9.9 (facing page) A new face to the urban lay-out . . . The changes in the urban lay-out are fundamental and deviate from the original urban vocabulary. Nevertheless it has been a fortunate decision to give the new urban and architectural interventions their own distinct idiom. A contemporary form, free and uninhibited, differing from the original standard. The new apartment-buildings are well designed and characteristic, having a positive influence on the residential market of the whole area. Thanks to the high-quality new development, the Bijlmermeer is no longer the ghetto it was, but slowly getting a more positive reputation. The strategy of mixed interventions, from renovation to demolition and redevelopment, the Bijlmermeer has transformed into an amalgam of urban and architectonic views and forms. The relatively radical developments along the central lowered lanes still fits more or less within the original urban pattern and adds new qualities, without harming the qualities that were still present

210

Rob Docter

Figure 9.10 . . . and a new architectural language. In the plan for the rehabilitation of the ‘K-area’ the following quality demands were placed on the new residential development: sustainable construction, flexibility, good floor plans, sufficient parking-space, a safe living-environment, differentiation in low-rise environments (40–60 units per acre, different sizes front and back-yards or roof gardens), optimal usage of the present public green and attention to the ‘fifth façade’ (e.g. grass roofs).

pleasure declines proportionately with an increase in the number of dwellings per hectare. By weaving in new directions, by reducing the width of the mesh or simply by pulling it apart, the fabric will be damaged. Its very nature will change, even in those parts where no intervention takes place. The image of the neighbourhood, as a whole, will change. A major cause of this can be found in living differentials. The post-war districts generally have low rental levels, which their occupants clearly appreciate. However, the landlords see this as a problem. Social differentiation lags behind the average, due to the absence of more expensive dwellings in the neighbourhood, with the danger of being labelled a problem neighbourhood. Here, too, it is necessary to find a balance between interventions that are necessary from the standpoint of sustainable quality of life and respect for the original neighbourhood concept and its specific characteristics. In a study by the Berlage Institute for The Hague, Northon Flores Troche proposed to transform the half-open blocks of flats into a new type of pattern, by adding a new top storey with a slanting roof to each existing block of flats. This would bring about consolidation without intervening in the amount of greenery. Kohei Kashimoto solved this problem by introducing a new axis in the middle of the neighbourhood, in the shape of an elongated, ridge-roofed building. Such slight but severe intervention would easily double the floor space in the neighbourhood, without interfering with the existing buildings.2 Such studies clearly show that there

Figures 9.11 and 9.12 One of the most important causes of the problems with the honeycomb apartment blocks was the lack of functions on the ground-floor level, other than storage-boxes and central entrances. By using the ground-floor level for more extrovert purposes, like apartments, small businesses or other public functions, the social control of the environment is intensified, with a direct positive effect on the liveability of the neighbourhood as a whole. On the south side of the apartment blocks for example, strips are reserved for private gardens. In general the aim is to give the terrain around the blocks a natural border, using water, for instance and to give the management to the owners and residents. In this way the Bijlmermeer is being transformed from a collection of separate apartment-blocks into a sequence of residential parks. This increases not only the liveability, but also the leasibility. Also the green park-area among the honeycomb-blocks is being redesigned. A new clear lay-out, without dark corners and hiding places, with new paths and vistas will make the park-area surveyable and safer. By introducing recreational elements, like water, the public use will be intensified.

212

Rob Docter

are possibilities for realising new programmes within an existing spatial context, without violating the specific qualities. It is only by seeking consolidation locations that fit in with the original, functional, spatial hierarchy that justice can be done to the specific spatial character of a neighbourhood. In addition, efforts can be made to have revenues from land exploitation through consolidation benefit the recovery of the weaker economic areas of the district, as has been tried in The Hague Southwest. This is only possible if there is an integral neighbourhood approach in a close-knit public–private partnership. Conclusion The way in which the dilemma between maintenance and renewal manifests itself in the redevelopment districts closely resembles the consideration discussed in connection with restoration of low-cost housing complexes built between world wars. For example, during renovation of the Kiefhoek, dwellings were combined to meet modern standards of living comfort. In other words, these were the requirements that the future residents of these dwellings would demand. The level of investment results in rental prices that far exceed the level that the original occupants paid. Everything looks splendid now, but is it really essentially the same? The workers’ houses of the past have become the middle-class houses of today. The functional, compact street map, on which Oud showed how spacious a small surface area could be, has doubled. The facade rhythms, determined by the switching of mirrored pairs of front doors with equal intervals, has become a syncopation resulting from the blind doors of the combined dwellings. Would it not be possible to say that the nature of the occupants, the related way of living, is as essentially important for the value of the neighbourhood as the architecture? Taking that a step further, does the architecture not lose in significance fatally when the original use disappears to make room for a new type? Would it not have been more correct to redo these unique small dwellings so they would again be suitable for small households with low incomes? Does not the thinning of inhabitants also affect the intensive social interaction of small, modern working-class areas, which Oud had in mind? The Kiefhoek has been restored as a property, as an image, but it is lacking in essence without the spirit of Oud’s concept. The approach to residential building complexes and residential neighbourhoods is a problem that traditional preservation of monuments and historic buildings, geared towards individual buildings, finds difficult to deal with. As the scale of such complexes or neighbourhoods increases, there seems to be an increasing impotence to respect the original styling and socio-cultural values. Could it be that too little time has gone by to be able to estimate the value of specific qualities of redevelopment neighbourhoods? Or is traditional preservation of monuments and historic buildings no longer satisfactory? Should we look for new approaches to incorporate cultural-historic considerations in the decision process concerning management and renewal? No doubt the most important task in the first instance is to jack up the image of redevelopment neighbourhoods in the eyes of the public. Only then will

Post-war town planning in its mid-life crisis

213

there be sufficient political support to employ the proper instruments. However, time is running out, if we wish to utilise the huge social and cultural potential of these neighbourhoods and pass them on to the following generation of occupants. There is no reason for further development of the Modern Movement neighbourhoods. There is no point in preserving them as they are, since they no longer respond to current needs. There is only one solution: to find a compromise between historic integrity and the need for functional and social adaptation and change. Preservation with consideration for the original intentions is not always possible, but we can always try to bring new life and a new meaning to these neighbourhoods with respect for the underlying range of ideas and use their potential for further development. When we do so, we must not be too dogmatic about the original concepts of modernism or functionalism, but we must try to be open-hearted in adding to them, giving them a new meaning. This can be done with respect for and with use of the main principles of the Modern Movement – sobriety, economical use of resources, social and technical integrity. These principles are still of topical interest and can be an important source of inspiration for new design. A contemporary application of these principles can save the urban heritage of the Modern Movement as a social, economic and cultural asset. It will definitely only have been a mid-life crisis for these urban districts if we give them a second chance and redesign them to fit present needs, in accordance with the original conceptual values. Notes 1 2

Donald Lambert: ‘De Bijlmermeer’ Atlantis Volume 9 no.5 (June 1998). The Berlage Institute: Strategic Sites for The Hague (Amsterdam 1996).

10 Looking back on our future Conflicting visions and realities of the modern American city Paul Adamson

The city disperses The history of American post-war development is most characterized by the country’s transformation from urban to suburban settlement patterns, a process of expansion that has continued unabated into the present. The resulting Modern Cities comprise enormous, sprawling, low-density developments reaching far beyond the historical limits of the country’s major urban centers. This Modern City has grown with staggering speed, and now threatens our environment at large. Roughly 50 years into its evolution, the contemporary metropolis consumes nearly 400,000 acres of farmland in the USA each year.1 The resulting traffic congestion, the loss of arable lands, increased pollution, and the neutralising of distinctive regional communities threatens our health, our social well-being and our economy. As the American Metropolis approaches this critical juncture, an analysis of its origins may prove useful when considering the future of urban growth. Americans were in an expansive mood in the immediate post-war period. Buoyed by an exceptional optimism toward the benefits of modern industry, the US sought ways to keep production levels high. Motivated to make up for years of war-time domestic privation, and with nearly 10 million returning veterans soon to induce an unprecedented housing crisis, the Federal government encouraged a nationwide housing campaign. Instilled with an enormous faith in the American industrial process – it was this industry that during the war enabled the US to launch successful battles and reach decisive armistices simultaneously on two fronts a world apart – the Federal government unleashed this seemingly infinite capacity on the problem of badly-needed new building. The political climate, however, was not entirely forward-looking, and the United States would prove less than receptive to notions of comprehensive development planning that might otherwise have shaped post-war metropolitan growth. In fact, the philosophical belief that a speculative market, left to its own devices, would provide economic prosperity prevented government and regional institutions from investing in effective urban planning for many years after the new building efforts

Looking back on our future

215

had begun. Concepts of regional planning implied government control of private investment, and overtly socialist concepts of that nature had gained comparatively little acceptance since their initiation during the less prosperous 1930s. The war had sewn the seeds of suspicion with socialist ideologies, and many expressed disappointment with the war’s outcome in Europe. As the Historian David Halberstam noted, many felt as though ‘a peace that permitted Soviet hegemony over Western Europe was unacceptable’.2 This disappointment lingered through the 1940s and gradually developed into a growing sentiment for a return to ‘Americanism’ and away from the potentially corrupting influences of foreign ideas, including the socially-motivated theories of Modernist design and planning. Growing hostility toward liberal domestic politics further encouraged reactionary feelings, particularly toward the progressive ‘New Deal’ policies enacted during more than a dozen years of President Roosevelt’s administrations. The Democraticallycontrolled Congress under Franklin Roosevelt, who had been elected four times, largely due to a need for consistent leadership during the war, had been responsible for several significant entitlement programs, and other government-supported economic strategies connected with his ‘New Deal’ legislation, that contradicted many Americans’ core beliefs in a republican government and ‘free market’ economics.3 By the mid-1940s, simmering resentment toward New Deal economics and other more liberal policies perceived to be foreign in origin would contribute to a conflicted response to unified theories of urban planning and design, including Modernist ideas coming out of Europe. This deliberate avoidance of comprehensive planning led to a hectic period of largely commercially-driven development, and it would not be until the early 1950s that effective ideas about planning for urban growth in the USA would begin to take shape. However, the shape those ideas eventually took did not resemble strategies familiar to European Modernists; rather they took on sprawling, open-ended forms reflective of the free-wheeling and ambitious process of the USA’s abundant post-war economic expansion (Figure 10.1). Encouraged by a pro-business and increasingly anti-socialist government, those who developed the post-war modern American city would operate largely without knowledge of, or insight from, Modernist theory. Ideological Modernism was, in fact, rarely practiced in America in the way its original framers in Europe had intended. Popular perceptions of Modernist architecture, for instance, were largely formed by the influential 1932 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, ‘The International Style,’ the catalogue to which, authored by Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, largely cleansed the subject matter of any significant social meaning.4 The typically socialist ideologies of Modernism would be acceptable in America only in very localized instances, usually in state-sponsored housing for the poor, and few would feel the urgency for this type of building until the 1960s. When it came to middle-class housing, high-density schemes were seen as a poor substitute for detached dwellings.5 Hence the war-induced housing shortage, coupled with the popularity of the single-family house type prompted instead a rapid expansion of residential suburbs. During the immediate post-war period, urban planners were therefore relied upon largely to evolve strategies designed to ease the path for this privately-funded speculative residential development. Until urban decay during the

Figure 10.1 Proposed modern landscape as depicted by General Motors in their ‘Futurama’ exhibit at the New York World’s Fair 1939

Looking back on our future

217

latter 1960s (caused in large part by 20 years of suburban expansion) re-focused national attention on city centers, American planning theory collected around a search for methods to impart a suitable form to this newest type of metropolitan growth. Even those who were involved with more socially-conscious ideas of city planning, including Modernist architects and planners who had emigrated from Europe, found that to remain effective in the USA meant revising their typically socialist philosophies, and adapting their formal notions, to serve the causes of expansionist capitalism. The American emphasis on suburban development over urban building was further supported by deep-seated popular sentiments. Historically, Americans have regarded the semi-rural domestic environment as inherently morally superior to city life. In the post-war period, this traditional belief was paired with a new-found faith in the benefits of modernity, which it seemed to many, were embodied in the new subdivisions. As early as 1945, the Saturday Evening Post reported that only 14 per cent of the population it had polled were willing to live in an apartment or a ‘used house’. As Gwendolyn Wright noted in her book Building the Dream, ‘The post war buyers wanted a new house, with a modern floor plan, up to date materials and the latest appliances’.6 American industries, bolstered to satisfy wartime demands, had developed modernized products and building methods that they then aimed toward the domestic market. The Congress, in turn, sought to liberate the nation’s economy from wartime price controls with the expectation that a ‘free market’ would satisfy housing demands. Further, building industry lobbyists argued the housing stock would improve naturally through the trickle-down phenomenon, as families buying better houses would sell to the classes below.7 Further, from the point of view of new homeowners, important elements affecting the quality of domestic life including health and privacy seemed better served in the newer, suburban context. The older, less consistent environment of the city became less desirable to an expanding middle-class population who felt increasingly able to purchase the advantages of their burgeoning industrial culture (Figure 10.2). Middle-class families were generally optimistic about their economic security, and despite the occasionally volatile boom–bust cycles of the post-war American economy, the promise of individual success remained nonetheless a core American belief. As the Columbia University Sociologist, C. Wright Mills, noted in 1951, ‘The idea of the successful individual was linked to the liberal ideology of expanding capitalism’. Further, he wrote that Americans’ traditional belief in the system of laissez-faire capitalism ‘in which everyone is rewarded according to his ability and effort, has paid less attention to the fate of groups or classes than to the solitary individual’.8 The advent of a ‘consumer culture’ that emphasized individuality over the community effectively generated a de-facto political class, and the process by which this new population shaped its own destiny, would replace traditional urban form with a more open-ended alternative. The theorist Albert Pope has described the formal implications of this social phenomenon: The Modern City sought to diffuse and disperse the anonymous metropolitan mass and promote the emergence of the discrete ego out of its faceless ranks.

218

Paul Adamson In so doing it systematically traded off public life and communal representation in a strict observance of the privileged and private. As plazas, streets and monumental construction were traded for private open space, detached housing, and the transportation infrastructure necessary to access them, metropolitan representation quickly disappeared.9

Figure 10.2 ‘Moving Day’, J.R. Eyerman for Life Magazine 1953

Looking back on our future

219

Figure 10.3 Advertisement for National Homes

In this context of an increasingly individuated society, unregulated suburban development of single-family detached housing became the modern alternative to the traditional city (Figure 10.3). This modern alternative was reified when municipal agencies, responding to Federal policies, imposed formal requirements that irradicated traditional urban functions and relationships. The Federal government invested heavily in the suburbs, providing loans to veterans and guaranteeing home purchase loans with little or no down payments. These programs were in turn supported by municipal regulators who designed restrictive covenants and zoning laws intended to protect homeowners’ purchases, and by extension, the government’s investments. Distinct from municipal planning efforts of the sort common to Europe, which typically required

220

Paul Adamson

the transfer of land ownership to public entities, as well as integrated housing policies that involved the mixing of dwelling types and classes of residents, American development processes tended to rely more heavily on private initiatives. Their cultural desire for discrete living environments coupled with the need to preserve personal and governmental economic security, suggested development strategies that separated suburban neighborhoods from any typically urban elements that might be perceived as threatening to the stability of property values. The separation of residential areas from working districts (and the near complete segregation of family neighborhoods from all other types of housing) was formalised when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) – the agency set up to insure individual home loans to first-time homebuyers – endorsed local zoning laws to prevent the mixing of single family neighborhoods with multi-family housing, or commercial uses of almost any kind, including shops, offices, pre-schools or even rental units.10 With Federal policy encouraging the construction of more than a million housing units a year, this transformation of settlement patterns occurred with remarkable speed, and by 1950 the populations of the urban centers and the outlying areas had reached parity. America’s prosperity during the post-war period and the development of Federal programs, including the FHA loans, and the GI Bill of Rights (which provided financing to returning veterans) helped to launch families into the middle class at an unprecedented rate. Modernizing forces, including the distribution of cheap energy, affordable automobiles, as well as improvements in telecommunications technology, and centralized banking effectively expanded the scale of economic practices in general, which led the government to institutionalize formal networks to facilitate this expansion. The resulting super-positioning of a modern scale of elements including highways, transnational telephone services, and regional electrical supplies on premodern built fabrics in parallel with the creation of entirely new environments – including the suburban tract developments and mega-structured urban business cores – defined the context for post-war American planners. However, these urban transformations took place so rapidly following the end of the war, and the forms they implied were so different from previous urban models, that several years past before planning professionals and theorists were able to sufficiently account for the new trends, and to propose more methodical alternatives. Their efforts were further hampered by the fact that the enactment of general planning strategies, that originated in the early part of the century and would have offered municipalities basic conceptual parameters for urban planning, were delayed by more than two generations during the world wars and the economic depression of the 1930s. The exigencies of those times diverted public attention from more conventional domestic issues. By the late 1940s, a number of visionary proposals emerged that acknowledged the popular acceptance of expansionist policy while offering strategies for channelling and organizing its growth. Their plans, while influential as theory, in reality proved difficult to enact due to what was by then an overwhelmingly privatized condition of the metropolitan regions. What eventually emerged, more or less spontaneously, from these various forces were urban patterns of uniquely modern

Looking back on our future

221

form. Driven by popular ideologies, but largely defined by commercial, rather than municipal, controls, they represented the USA’s struggle to resolve its public spaces with its private concerns. Post-war economic shifts and the limits of local planning The privatization of the metropolitan landscapes was in effect an extension of America’s historically westward expansion. As the prosperity of the post-war period grew however, the scale of economic investment began to exceed the scope of local municipal control. Local planners would face the increasingly difficult task of negotiating a continual balancing and re-balancing of the relationships between public policy, private development and individual liberties. The challenge that arose, which went largely un-met as the post-war economy advanced, was to guide commercial development such that it would not eventually overwhelm either the land’s ability to provide environmental and agricultural support, or the social bonds that define local and regional identities, and by extension, the USA’s collective nationhood. Conflict inevitably arose between the over-arching Federal and regional efforts to modernize the American economy, and local efforts to preserve and extend regional and cultural contexts. Albert Pope described this phenomenon: two key pieces of New Deal legislation, The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1938, and the National Housing Act of 1934, set into motion these large-scale organizational forces that subsequently flourished after the war. Later augmented by the 1956 Federal Highway Act and the GI Bill respectively, the bureaucratic standardization of roads, residential construction, and subdivision standards set the parameters of the postwar urban construction. These large-scale government-sponsored modernizing efforts clashed with more traditional municipal organizing patterns. The resulting conceptual rift between increasingly large-scale capitalist interests (aided and ensured by Federal policy), and local humanist concerns eventually led the typical US city to become a rapidly growing, but formally ill-defined, metropolis increasingly unrecognizable as traditional city form. This emerging phase of large-scale, state-assisted capitalism that began almost immediately following the war led to a shift in the scale of the building industry. Previously limited to either land improvements, or to the construction of only a few houses at a time, Federal loan programs meant post-war developers could afford to both purchase land and build the tracts themselves. The effect of this assistance was the accelerated development of land in increasingly large sizes. In Kaiser’s Panorama City, California, for example, there were 3,000 uniform houses. In Frank Sharp’s Oak Forrest near Houston, there were 5,000.11 Increases in the scale of the building industry, and other manufacturing concerns quickly forced the USA to become dependent upon large-scale and relatively rapid growth to remain economically healthy. This point is illustrated by the creation of the ‘Index of Economic Indicators,’ a collection of data used to chart the health of the US economy, which, since 1945, has listed among its most important statistics the number of ‘new home-starts’ – or houses under construction. These development patterns and the intervention of major services, such as interstate freeway systems required

222

Paul Adamson

Figure 10.4 Aerial photograph of Lakewood California by William Garnett

to supply them, would effectively supercede the authority of local municipalities which would struggle to organize manageable neighborhoods within parameters that were largely imposed upon them by Federally-supported development practices. Perhaps the greatest difficulty facing post-war planners was that development was spurred forward at such a rapid pace, and in increasingly large parcels, that its momentum tended to overwhelm more methodical efforts to curb its effects (Figure 10.4). The origins of American planning Fundamental to the inability of planners during the immediate post-war period to negotiate the demands of the Federal mandates or the desires of property developers was the near total absence of general planning theory. Unfortunately for these new metropolitan areas, it would not be until the mid-1950s that any major municipalities in the United States were able to draft plans of sufficient depth and clarity that they could be enacted as public policy. By that time municipalities faced an uphill battle to impart more methodical strategies. Comprehensive urban planning concepts were, in fact, formally introduced to US cities as early as the beginning of the century. However, philosophical resistance to the idea of long-range planning,

Looking back on our future

223

and a pervasive confusion regarding methods for enacting comprehensive plans, delayed the initial construction of acceptable guidelines.12 In 1911, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr, son of the famous designer of New York’s Central Park, drafted a statement, which he presented to the National Conference on City Planning, describing the concept of an urban General Plan. His concept dealt with the physical location and extent of three basic categories of city function: 1 2 3

The working-and-living areas; the community facilities related to the first category; and an effective circulation pattern.

During the 1910s and 1920s municipalities were relatively successful in administering the construction of public projects. However, long-range planning methods proved difficult to enact comprehensively because no municipal agencies yet existed to administer privately-held properties, which amounted to fully half of the total area of every city.13 During the 1920s, Olmsted was joined in the design of a strategy for general planning by Alfred Bettman, a Cincinnati lawyer and self-taught city-planning expert. In 1928, Bettman described in more detail than Olmsted’s initial address the essential elements of a general plan. In Bettman’s statement, he described the basic intention of a general plan as the design of physical arrangements for ‘the division of land between public and private uses’. This re-writing of Olmsted’s initial concepts led that same year to the adoption by the Federal government of the 1928 Standard Act that defined the elements of an urban general plan and the principle duties of city planning commissions. The Standard Act largely reiterated Olmsted’s and Bettman’s intentions for a general planing document with one crucial exception. In the main, the authors of the Standard Act were careful to make only general guidelines to ensure that, similar to the way Congress enacts the nation’s Constitution, municipalities could freely interpret the provisions of their general plan to suit local conditions. However, when it came to defining controls for private property, municipal officials felt they could not exercise restrictions without a legally-defined process. Seeking to offer guidance for dealing with this particularly difficult issue, which challenged core American beliefs about the sanctity of private property, the framers of the Standard Act included, among the otherwise non-specific elements of the general plan, the provision for a specific and detailed zoning plan. This contradictory nature of the Standards Act led to 20 years of confusion among municipal planners, who often resorted to zoning regulations, an inherently short term methodology, as the principal device for resolving long-term urban planning issues. This confusion among planning agencies left municipalities vulnerable to the onslaught of changes in the urban condition caused by the paradigm shift in economic and governmental relations that followed the war. World War II had consolidated national interests, and from then on the economies of the US and Europe would be linked to a greater degree than ever before, effectively growing the scale of domestic economic practice to the point where trade and commerce would soon

224

Paul Adamson

be capable of over-reaching local power bases, including those responsible for urban construction.14 The development of a globalised economy as we understand it today would take another generation, but, the organizational strategies required to maintain large-scale construction efforts for the war effort had already established a precedent for peacetime development, and with it an economic system that required an enormous scale of activity to ensure the economic welfare of the country. The Federal government directed this scaled-up building industry toward producing middle-class suburban tracts. The resulting shift in middle-class populations from the urban centers to segregated outlying areas precipitated a trend toward the separation of elements that made up traditional urban form, and with that separation came a divergence between social groups as well. The FHA and large-scale commercial builders encouraged uniform building practices devoted almost exclusively to the perpetuation of suburban residential developments. Unprepared with general planning guidelines, municipalities were unable to offer alternatives should they need to negotiate for local concessions with these larger entities seeking to expand in their areas. Furthermore, popular opinion supported the notions behind the government’s expansion, which described the suburbs as the only safe environment for family life. According to Gwendolyn Wright, many Americans were convinced of this notion by what amounted to state-sponsored propaganda. She wrote, ‘This is what the government, the builders, the bankers, and the magazines told them, and many believed it – or felt they had to.’15 Cities and suburbs would both continue to grow throughout the 1950s, but they would grow apart in terms of their purposes and in terms of the cultural groups they served. Formal changes in the modern city The expansion of dormitory suburbs constituted a modern urban form not previously imagined by the authors of the general plan. Beginning at the end of the 1940s, efforts to re-establish clear urban planning strategies began to coalesce, and between 1950 and 1960 a number of cities including Cincinnati, Seattle, Berkeley, Detroit and Cleveland developed and enacted general plans for their traditional urban areas. However, the suburban context was outside the scope of the general plan, as it was originally defined in the 1928 Standard Act, and as a result there developed a conceptual rift between the understanding of urban centers and that of the outlying regions. Unable to conceive of these two elements of a metropolis in the same context, urban planners in the late 1940s began to seek an understanding of the formal nature of metropolitan development. What they witnessed during the immediate post-war period was a nearly wholesale transformation of settlement patterns, from predominantly densely-populated areas surrounding centralized urban cores to a field of moderately-populated regions, one town blending into another, forming a continuous metropolis. Previous models for urban growth had not conceived of quite such comprehensive sprawl. Assuming a more manageable rate of expansion, pre-war notions of future urban development tended to resemble Garden City ideas. The central exhibit at the 1939

Looking back on our future

225

Figure 10.5 ‘Democracity’ exhibit at the New York World’s fair 1939

New York World’s Fair, for example, was a 200 foot diameter model of a prototypical American metropolis of the future (Figure 10.5). Nicknamed ‘Democracity,’ the model, which visitors viewed from above while riding on a circular, mechanically-conveyed walkway, showed a concentrically-planned river-front city of multistorey buildings contained within a perimeter ring road. Radial boulevards turned to high-speed motorways at the city’s perimeter, and snaked into the surrounding countryside, where they spawned discrete satellite developments among parks and farmlands. This was the central city and polynuclear field structure that would be revived after the initial post-war boom, but the USA’s entrance into World War II would interrupt the advancement of plans of this sort. When building restarted in 1945, consultation of any such model of urban growth was pushed aside in the haste to make up for lost time. The subsequent commercial land rush created a city without form – a quick fix for new building needs on a grand scale that changed fundamental perceptions of city form. The famous urban theorist Hans Blumenfeld would later describe these formal changes in the urban context, noting in 1957 that many felt as though the ‘urban scene’ was being replaced with the ‘urban region’. Citing as an example the continuous urban fabric along the eastern seaboard of the US stretching from Boston to Washington, D.C., Blumenfeld described a profound change in urban development during the post-war period when, for the first time in 5,000 years of human settlement, the city and suburb were growing together as one.16 The result was a sprawling fabric of development that contained all of the elements of the

226

Paul Adamson

traditional urban center, but spread further apart, segregated from one another, and often oversized to accept modern large-scale activities. These new, large-scale developments soon transformed the city centers as well, when rising land costs and the growth of corporate wealth combined to induce builders to construct urban buildings of unprecedented scale. In 1948, for example, the Chicago property developer Herbert Greenwald commissioned Mies van der Rohe to design the twin residential towers at 860 Lakeshore Drive.17 Here the undifferentiated masses of these rectangular 26-storey twin towers introduced a uniquely modern scale to the largely nineteenth-century urban fabric of central Chicago. Ten years later, Mies’ monumental 39-storey office building for the Seagram Company in New York City established the urban standard for modern large-scale commercial development, inspiring a spate of over-scaled and formally abstract corporate structures that would transform the urban core of every major city.18 High-rises were one response to escalating land costs, which placed additional pressure on developers to perpetuate the expanding suburbs. During the late 1940s and 1950s, the combination of rising prices and the lack of urban residential development would force middle-class urbanites to move unwillingly to the suburbs. In fact, suburban single-family housing was rapidly becoming the only affordable residential alternative for middle-class families. In 1949, major Federal legislation was passed that continued to assure the establishment of new housing, yet as Gwendolyn Wright has pointed out, government officials did not see financial assistance as a way to help families in the cities, since they associated healthy family life with non-urban settings.19 The spread of post-war subdivisions comprised an environment, as yet without precedent in planning terms. These so-called dormitory suburbs, consisting of continuous tracts of three to four hundred almost identical houses at a time, and accessible almost exclusively by car, manifested fundamental changes in the shape of American cities that, in turn, would usher in social conditions peculiar to the modern period. Social changes in the modern city One profound result of this modern evolution in urban form was an increasing polarity of social functions and a resulting physical separation of societal groups – first between rural and urban areas, and later within differing regions of suburbia. Work was conducted almost exclusively in the city, and domestic life was increasingly isolated to the suburbs – an absolute reversal of prevailing conditions prior to the industrial period. This separation of working areas from residential areas also contributed to class-based and racial divisions. The migration of middle classes to the suburbs coincided with an influx of Southern poor, mostly Black, families hoping to benefit from America’s booming post-war economy through better-paying jobs in the more affluent northern states. However, the exodus of middle-class families from the urban core meant that many of the services that would have given the immigrating southerners entry-level jobs went with them. The result was a steady emptying-out of traditional neighborhoods that were then re-filled with under-

Looking back on our future

227

educated poor who faced a dwindling supply of sources for employment. Previously middle-class urban neighborhoods began a 20-year period of decay that would be further exacerbated by the intrusion into the urban fabric of Federally-financed freeways built to convey the suburban commuters in and out of the downtown corporate employment zones. By the middle of the 1960s, once-stable urban neighborhoods in cities throughout the country would disintegrate. The decay that began with the initial, rapidly-constructed suburbs was anticipated by some, who attacked the builders, the banks and the Federal government for the violent transformation of the social order.20 Some in Federal government acknowledged the problems caused by the urban/suburban transition, however the Federal policies that supported suburban development remained intact due to the pervasive belief that a mixing of social and economic groups would threaten the safety of private property investment. Modernism and the American philosophy The desire among Americans to acquire private property, while encouraged by postwar government policy and large-scale financial institutions was, in fact, ingrained in the national psyche. A carry-over from the nation’s agricultural roots, and reinforced though the rhetoric of the nation’s founders, the issue of property ownership had been fundamental to the American sense of identity since the country’s founding in the eighteenth century. The inability of colonists to obtain the private use of land in any way other than by lease from the British monarchy was one of the core issues that lead to their quest for independence. In fact, the subsequent settlement of the continent by small landowners was seen as fundamental to establishing a stable society. President Thomas Jefferson had stated as much when he conceived a comprehensive survey of the continent. This survey, begun in 1785, proposed to divide the entire landscape of the continental United States with an equilateral one-mile by one-mile grid, which made the entire country, theoretically in any case, easily parcelled for the process of land speculation that would follow. It was Jefferson’s belief that the combination of life lived in the context of nature, and individual land ownership, would induce the evolution of a virtuous citizenry. As the cultural historian, J.B. Jackson, described it, Jefferson’s ideal society would emerge from ‘an agrarian utopia composed of a democratic society of small land owners’.21 In the nineteenth century, the concept of social betterment through the cultivation of individuality was expanded upon by the transcendentalist authors Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose belief in the moral superiority of an agrarian lifestyle lent ethical justification to the westward expansion of the continent. The concept of social benefit through rural expansion was renewed in the high industrial period when designers realized the life-improving potentials of modern industrial development, including electrical power and the mass-produced automobile. Frank Lloyd Wright, for instance, who was a promoter of Jeffersonian idealism as well as the transcendental notions of Thoreau and Emerson, termed these products of modern industry the ‘twin liberators’ of modern democracy, and envisioned that these new forces would transform the modern city almost spontaneously. Kenneth Framton

228

Paul Adamson

pointed out that Wright, in fact, had anticipated the modern form of the American metropolis in 1932 when he wrote his first book on planning, entitled The Disappearing City following the completion of his Broadacre City study. Frampton wrote, ‘Wright declared the future city would be everywhere and nowhere, and that “it will be a city so greatly different from the ancient city or any city of today that we will probably fail to recognize its coming as a city at all”.’22 It should come, therefore, as no surprise that the General Motors Corporation, the largest of the country’s principal auto-makers, would make one of the most bold and influential efforts to popularize the benefits of the USA’s rural expansion. GM, as the company was popularly known, introduced its vision for a decentralized USA in the company’s pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair (Figure 10.1). The central exhibit comprised a detailed diorama describing a master plan for a network of high-speed motorways that would span the country. The creation of the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, this 36,000 square foot exhibit, set inside a futuristic free-formed concrete shell-like structure, consisted of a model representing a prototypical section of the American landscape, laced with roadways of varying sizes connecting cities to the country and to one another in a seamless flow of continuous energy. In a book he wrote defining his proposal, entitled Magic Motorways, published in 1940, Bel Geddes described a modern highway system that ‘would expand a city’s commuting radius six times’. Thus Bel Geddes proposed the segregation of city and country would be complete. ‘Cities,’ he wrote, ‘become centers for working and country districts for living.’23 Bel Geddes’ model of the future live/work relationship is notable for its lack of any mention of urban living. The complete disparity between work and ‘living,’ and city and country, leaves out any mention of an urban residential condition, nor is there a mention of accommodation for a diversity of classes. In fact, Bel Geddes sees the highway system as a social equalizer, allowing for the mixing of peoples from disparate regions through high-speed travel.24 The combination of a laissez-faire capitalist economic system and the desire to promote individual land ownership resulted in a somewhat hectic and largely unplanned building-over of rural landscapes around large cities. Lacking established planning criteria for the cultivation of the suburban form, other than the inherited sense of eminent domain and the belief in the organic problem-solving process of a free market economy, post-war suburban development proceeded with little recognition of traditional relationships between public and private spaces. Ironically, considering the historically popular interest in a pervasively agrarian domestic condition, even parks and playgrounds were rarely included in the conventionally-planned post-war subdivisions.25 Even provisions for grocery markets and other basic retail services were left up to developers as well. The origin of the contemporary retail mall owes its beginning to the Midwestern entrepreneur Martin Bucksbaum, who, seeing the need for a ‘main street’ in the newly emerging suburban townscapes, established the ’shopping center’. His first, built in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1956, set the precedent for the increasingly large-scale ‘one-stop’ shopping malls that Bucksbaum called ‘the new downtowns’, set alongside highways, that would become an indispensable staple of suburban communities across the country. Under the devel-

Looking back on our future

229

opers’ influence, suburban town planning grew as an organic inevitability. This phenomenon further bore out Wright’s predictions in The Disappearing City where he wrote, ‘America needs no help to build Broadacre City. It will build itself, haphazard.’26 Similarly, Paul Goldberger wrote of the entrepreneurial inventor of the shopping center: ‘Martin Bucksbaum proceeded with no kind of all-encompassing vision of the city. What he had was a sense of pragmatic good will; he saw himself as providing an innovative service, which was convenient shopping for an increasingly auto-oriented society.’27 Publicly-organized regional planning during the first ten years of post-war expansion was, in fact, minimal; local municipalities resorted mostly to the relatively blunt tool of zoning – the most expedient method in the over-heated climate of speculative construction – to ensure private properties would retain their value. What was missing from either the government policies or the visionary proposals to aid in the suburban development is an acknowledgement of class differences. Acknowledgement of class has always been a sticking point in American ideology. Many Americans have traditionally felt as though theirs is a classless society; and discussions of how land development might accommodate various income groups was dealt with peripherally at best. Bel Geddes, for instance, suggested that the freeway-driven suburban expansion might displace farmers, but proposed that economic benefit would nonetheless be derived from this displacement in the form of delivery services previously unneeded in the preceding, more centralized, condition. The dispersal of the urban form, what became known as ‘centrifugal’ movement, did, however, lead to physical segregation of classes, and a number of socially corrosive effects. Hans Blumenfeld would write in the 1960s that this suburban shift in populations had led to ‘an increasing segregation of the population by income, which in the United States is compounded (and partly obscured) by segregation by race’. Further, he wrote ‘The situation is more disquieting in the metropolis (the expanded suburban context), than it was in the smaller city or town. There, although the poor lived in older shabbier houses, they at least shared the schools and other public facilities with the higher-income groups. In the metropolis the people living in low-income districts, particularly the housewives and children, never even meet or come to know the rest of their fellow citizens.’28 Planning the modern metropolis: Theories of acceptance and resistance By 1950, some observers of the urban scene began to detect socially-corrosive effects in the pervasive developer-driven suburban towns. Hans Blumenthal and others, in fact, echoed the concerns of earlier critics as well. Lewis Mumford, for example, had been an adamant critic of suburbia as early as the mid-1920s, citing what he called, ‘the selfishness and aimlessness’29 of developers’ subdivisions. Christine Frederick told readers of Outlook in 1928 why she wanted to move back to an apartment in the city, and leave behind the ‘delusion of the suburbs’.30 Yet, by the 1950s, many suburbanites still cherished the image of the suburbs as a haven of normality, a safe alternative to the unpredictable social climates of the cities. In

230

Paul Adamson

response to the intellectual critics, they cited earlier arguments, like those of President Herbert Hoover, who had reiterated Thomas Jefferson’s idea that private homeownership was fundamental to social stability. In 1923, Hoover had written, ‘The large proportion of families that own their own homes is both the foundation of a sound economic and social system and a guarantee that our society will continue to develop rationally as changing conditions demand.’31 What post-war critics like Mumford continued to object to the most in the new metropolis was the formlessness of the typical subdivision, and contrary to the claims of suburbia’s advocates, he saw signs of a weakening of community ties. Regardless of these elite commentaries, however, suburban residents by and large remained content. When the issues of segregation and cultural blandness were raised in connection with the suburbs, residents actively sought to defend their communities and the way of life their developments evoked for them.32 The two sides of this debate reflected the theories that would define the principle schools of modern planning theory in the latter post-war period. Both sides offered visionary proposals for post-war American planning – one radically modern, the other espousing more traditional values. Among the strongest of the modernist visions were those defined by Ludwig Hilbersheimer’s proposals published in his 1949 book The New Regional Pattern, and Richard Neutra’s planning projects called ‘Rush City’, published in a collection of his works with an introduction by Siegfried Gedion in 1951. These books celebrated the democratizing benefits of industrialized culture, the power and individual liberty represented by the automobile and the potential of scientific organization, to manage the cultivation of a modern community life. A more traditional vision was represented by Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, in a book Stein authored, called Towards New Towns for America, published in 1951. In this book, Stein analysed his projects, and explained his concepts, which involved a carrying forward of older ideas initiated by the English planners Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin in the 1920s and a re-working of the turn-of-thecentury Garden City concepts initiated by Ebenezer Howard. Stein and Wright’s proposals for ‘New Towns’, many of which were built during the more politically progressive 1920s and 1930s, were un-apologetically socialist, and studiously mindful of necessary negotiations between public and private space. Neutra’s and Hilbersheimer’s proposals of the late 1940s, by comparison, were boldly futuristic, illustrated with dramatic vigor, as in the case of Neutra’s Rush City, and in Hilbersheimer’s case by characteristically severe scientific purity. Stein and Wright’s New Towns were critically acclaimed communities that reinforced the concepts of traditional village life, in resistance to the developer-driven trend toward an even and undifferentiated distribution of similar houses. By contrast, Neutra and Hilbersheimer chose not to resist the forces inherent in speculative development but rather to acquiesce to these intrinsically American tendencies and proposed visionary designs that supported the wide dispersal of semi-rural development with carefully ordered, but fairly straightforward, repetitive structures. While both visions for new planning acknowledge and accommodate the tendency toward suburbanization, it was the less resistant of the two alternatives that would prove to be the more accepted model for the future of American post-war growth.

Looking back on our future

231

Strategies such as the Garden City-inspired New Towns of Stein and Wright, which implied a resistance to free market speculative development, would prove increasingly difficult to enact during the latter post-war period. Interestingly, commercial culture – setting aside the ideological underpinnings of European Modernism – tended to identify with the more universal formalism of modernist design. The Modern design ideas in the open-ended organizational patterns of Hilbersheimer and Neutra, were, in fact, perceived by business leaders and many civic officials who supported them, as compatible with the democratic goals of an improved standard of living and increased individual opportunities. Town planning in the manner Clarence Stein advocated necessarily involved governmental intervention in order to purchase lands and redistribute them for public and private uses. This inherently socialist methodology ran counter to American popular sentiments in the late 1940s that favored a free-market economy and discouraged government intervention in the operations of private enterprise. An outright fear of socialism during the late 1940s – particularly following President Truman’s re-election – prompted a popular yearning for a return to individualism.33 In this climate of increasing suspicion toward progressive ideas, often associated with Europe, the planning concepts proposed by Stein and others rarely found acceptance on any significant scale. In fact Modernism, as practised in Europe, had never really been fully accepted into popular American philosophy, and socially progressive designers would have to moderate their views in deference to the prevailing American attitudes. The European Modernists who immigrated in the 1930s found that their brand of socially conscious design was, even at that more liberal time, not well suited to prevailing American attitudes. As Marcel Breuer would recall, the Bauhaus was not made for America; ‘it was made for a destroyed society,’ he said.34 The Europeans would find it necessary to alter their assumptions about the social implications of their design aesthetic to accommodate their new context. As Joan Ockman has written, their notions of an original philosophy required adjustment: ‘To start from zero and aspire to a new cultural totality was to dream of a New World in the ashes of a tired and war-damaged Europe. In contrast, as these architectural refugees realized, the US was already a ‘New World,’ young and vigorous.’35 A fundamental accommodation to American ideas would be necessary if they were to find success in their new context. As Ockman explains, these transplanted Modernists were forced to realign the agenda of modernist design to accommodate ‘the imperatives of American capitalist society’.36 Thus we find Ludwig Hilbersheimer’s deliberations on regional planning concerned with strategies intended to ensure full employment within the free enterprise system without resort to social welfare. His plans for a decentralized polynuclear regional pattern were designed to integrate agriculture with industry. In this way he hoped to provide everyone with at least part-time work in either the farming or the industrial sectors. Hilbersheimer had realized, as did others studying the post-war urban-tosuburban transformation, that the American trend toward decentralization was driven by the force of a cultural imperative, and he turned his planning efforts toward organizational strategies intended to rationalize that inevitable process. He wrote in 1949 that ‘The trend toward decentralization is beyond our power to stem

232

Paul Adamson

or to prevent. It is, therefore, of vital importance that we realize the possibilities of this development, in order to activate and direct them toward a good end.’37 Hilbersheimer’s planning strategy relied upon a formal typology of multiple self-sustaining industrial and residential centers spread more or less evenly across the exurban landscape. Hans Blumenfeld would later identify and recommend this methodology – generally speaking, the polynuclear field theory – as a way of rationalizing the indefinite structure of the spreading metropolis. In 1956, Blumenfeld would note that the metropolitan area had evolved to the point that it no longer showed clear divisions between the densely-built town and the open country. Furthermore this ‘field’ of development had evolved to such an extent that the distances between the corporate centers and the resources they required were becoming impracticably large. He recommended that industries should be distributed throughout the metropolitan area ’so that in each of its sections there is an approximate balance between the labor force and available jobs’.38 Fundamental to the success of any polynuclear pattern was an efficient transportation system. Hilbersheimer’s proposal of a network of arterial beltways would provide for the rapid dispersal of goods and services, and would connect residential areas with centers of employment. His highway pattern, which resembled a network of ladders, was formed by a major artery crossed with a series of tributary roads each with a cluster of residential cul-de-sacs at one end and an industrial hub on the opposite end. Much like the linear form of Neutra’s earlier Rush City proposals, the conduits for mass communication are condensed into a few high-speed roadways connecting the older urban center with its younger, more distant nuclei. The precedent for the polynuclear field was Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, but the Modernist planners in post-war America, however, tailored their interpretation of this traditionally humanist model to suit the abstract aims of the free market. Accommodating the free-flow of capital and unrestricted access to speculative development, post-war American planning consistently rejected the centralization and hierarchy of the Garden City model, retaining only its innovation of the polynuclear field (Figures 10.6–10.8). This hyper-rationalized planning was endemic to late Modernist thinking, but its use to forward the aims of large-scale economic expansion contrasted with the early European ideals that posited industrial production as an agent of state-sponsored building campaigns for urban workers. In the mature American post-war context, post-humanist philosophy became the agent of capitalist development. In Joan Ockman’s words, ‘Levittown and Lever House were mirror images’.39 In effect, the ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ was drafted into the service of free-market capitalism. The super-efficient organizational methodology that characterized Hilbersheimer’s regional planning was also common to Neutra’s futurist-like strategies illustrated in his proposal for ‘Rush City Reformed’. Neutra’s plans were less all-encompassing than Hilbersheimer’s; rather they were directed to improve conditions already extant. In suburban planning, this meant a scientific survey of the ‘changing factors’ of family life resulting in data used to program residential development in three distinct zones, based on the proportion of space required to serve each age group. Neutra divided each zone by a module of allotted property based on areas

Figure 10.6 Diagrams of proposed modern regional settlement patterns by Ludwig Hilbersheimer

Figure 10.7 Diagrams of proposed modern regional settlement patterns by Ludwig Hilbersheimer

Figure 10.8 Diagrams of proposed modern regional settlement patterns by Ludwig Hilbersheimer

236

Paul Adamson

proscribed by the activities required during each of four phases of family growth. Discretely segregated, each neighborhood zone would contain living areas either for ‘adults living as couples before the stage of raising the next generation’, ‘families in the first decade’ or ‘the advanced family’.40 A separate zone for adults living singly, or together in retirement was allotted the least area. While this clinically logo-centric staging of residential areas for the cultivation of the ‘next generation’ seems the epitome of post-humanist reasoning, Neutra’s visionary Rush City suburbia did attempt to address several important issues, such as segregation and undifferentiated housing types, that had so concerned critics of the predominantly developercreated subdivisions of the immediate post-war.41 Neutra’s recommended fixes for the urban core resembled a blend of Wiley Corbett’s futuristic multi-tiered circulation systems for 1920s Manhattan and the prototypical highway interventions of Norman Bel Geddes’ 1939 World’s Fair proposal. Neutra, for example, proposed, Haussman-like, the ‘re-cutting of downtown city blocks into long and narrow shapes for optimum sun exposure’ and the street widths ‘dimensioned in proportion to an amount of traffic, carefully computed as to the daily use of each district’. Pedestrian walkways were to be elevated above the continuous flow of automobile traffic and served by elevators at street intersections. These megastructural strategies would, by the 1960s and 1970s, have great appeal to large-scale corporate developers who sought to protect investor’s interests with multi-functional complexes connected to parking structures with bridges and atria to provide safe and efficient access for suburban visitors to the services of the urban core.42 Not dissimilarly, suburban planners, including Stein and Wright, developed community plans designed to harmonize with the emerging centripetal urban form. Indeed, as Lewis Mumford pointed out in his 1951 introduction to Stein’s Towards New Towns for America, Stein had, by 1928, acknowledged the role of the automobile in modern planning when he composed the plans for Radburn, New Jersey. In that case he separated all the pedestrian paths within the community from roadways by underpasses. More significantly, in terms of regional planning, however, Stein would adopt as a planning module, the ’superblock’, pioneered by Parker and Unwin, as the basic modular settlement unit in schemes that strung clusters of residential cul-de-sacs in ladder-like form along an avenue. This, in turn, was pushed to its logical conclusion to function solely as a means of communication.43 Stein and Wright’s planning was intended to offer a stability that would resist the potential for social entropy implied in the dynamic decentralization of rapid developer-controlled suburban growth. Stein’s plans for Radburn, for example, as well as his subsequent suburban developments, acknowledged the centrifugal nature of modern development, while also resisting its tendency toward complete decentralization. By basing his proposals on Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City ideas, Stein was retaining the traditional hierarchical relationship of Howard’s polynuclear developments with a dominant urban center (Figure 10.9). This strategy, however, was to some degree flawed, because the cities it sought to protect could not retain their relevance if, as Stein suggested, the polynuclear

Looking back on our future

237

Figure 10.9 Plan of Radburn, New Jersey

settlements remained disconnected from it. Stein’s New Towns were domestically appealing on an intimate scale, balancing the needs for private and public space with the efficiency of easy freeway access and shared services, such as schools and shopping centers within walkable distances from the homes. However their dependency upon a city that was simultaneously kept at commuter-distance away preempted the very integration of urban and suburban realms necessary to sustain the health of the city center. Hilbersheimer by comparison had advocated the complete

238

Paul Adamson

Figure 10.10 Aerial photograph of Lakewood California by William Garnett

remaking of the city into a series of economically self-sufficient entities that would have replaced the urban core altogether. On this point Stein’s and Hilbersheimer’s strategies converge, but neither vision could achieve praxis in the privatized suburban settings that had by that time spontaneously evolved. Neither Stein’s constructed New Towns, nor Hilbersheimer’s theoretical ‘ladder’ schemes would be complete without the integration of urban functions, such as industrial employment centers, that would support a variety of residents. Generally unable to resist the thrust of homogeneous developer subdivisions of uniform single family residences, and lacking the authority to readjust restrictive zoning practices, municipalities failed to respond to either of these recommendations. By the latter part of the 1950s, undifferentiated suburban development, derived from near-pure operations of the free market, would precipitate a crisis. As Gwendolyn Wright described, ‘The suburban boom masked the fact that not all housing demand was being satisfied. Many people – childless couples, urbanites, ethnic families, the poor who could not afford homeownership, wanted some alternative to suburban sprawl.’ The lack of a coherent program for financing and construction of a variety of housing types would lead to an economic recession at the end of the 1950s (Figure 10.10).44

Looking back on our future

239

The post-war legacy The development of the suburbs and the resulting decline in quality of the urban centers formed a pair of interdependent trends during the post-war period. Their troubled relationship was conducted over a commuter-long distance and while many benefited from their separation, others observed significant social costs. Critical planning appraisals began to appear as early as the late 1940s, recommending the tempering of large-scale private investment in metropolitan growth with proposals designed to guide the apparently inevitable forces of decentralization into orderly patterns. Planning strategies varied, but designers tended to agree upon the motive to resist speculative development’s tendency toward an unremitting sameness. While admitting that continued development was in the national interest, planning theorists in the latter post-war era sought to curb the appetite of the industrial complex, to plan its consumption of land and resources more selectively.45 Hilbersheimer summed up his book, The New Regional Pattern by appealing to his readers to take part in the refinement of modern development. He wrote, ‘Man is more than a producing and consuming animal. Man has a creative spirit and must have a fair share in shaping his destiny.’46 Theoretical planners would seek to describe urban forms that might promote a reconciliation of the conflicted relationship between the traditional urban cores and the modern polynuclear fields expanding around them. This binary relationship that stranded its product, the developer subdivision, in between the forces of tradition and innovation perpetuated a state of immature suspension where it could neither live nor die. As Peter Blake pointed out in his book God’s Own Junkyard, the initial post-war growth was so rapid that few had developed even a conceptual framework to account for it, let alone plan for its future. The linear models of Hilbersheimer and Neutra defined one formal proposal and the supergrid and superblock proposed by Stein and Wright the other. While neither of these strategies was entirely accepted, contemporary development nonetheless has come to resemble them (Figures 10.11 and 10.12). These forms are, in fact, intrinsically American in character. Although one might well argue that the desires that promoted them are universal, the American postwar condition of spontaneous economic growth, coupled with extensive areas of untrammelled land, would give rise to specific formal responses. The evolution of these models represents planners’ answers for both the dynamic qualities of the post-war American economy and the resulting promotion of the individual ego. The re-emergence during the late 1940s of a popular preference for laissez-faire democracy over the New Deal socialism that had extended through President Truman’s term of office meant there would be a conflict between public planning efforts and the private ownership and development of land. This in turn meant that any formalisation of a planning strategy that did emerge was obliged to reflect the political climate. As Hans Blumenfeld observed, ‘people pursue the same goals as citizens through the political process as buyers and sellers do through the market’.47 Having recognized the power of the American socio-economic process in the creation of the modern city, Blumenfeld then argued in 1957 against the idea of the

Figure 10.11 Aerial views of present-day Houston, Texas

Looking back on our future

241

Figure 10.12 Aerial view of contemporary Houston, Texas

comparatively nostalgic form of the Greenbelt that Clarence Stein and others had so avidly pursued. Instead he advocated the use of dynamic forms, which he saw as better suited to the character of the modern metropolis.48 The acquiescence of planning theorists to the driving forces of rapid large-scale post-war American development marked a transformation of their creative roles. Unable to stop the desire for expansion, planners of the modern city would need to relinquish their position as

242

Paul Adamson

formgivers and instead respond to citizens’ desires for progress through a more open-ended organizational philosophy. The American suburban landscape, regardless of its ad-hoc development, represents a clear expression of modern industrialized culture. Identified as ’sprawl’ in numerous essays on urban planning since the late 1940s, the modern suburban metropolis continues to draw scrutiny, and today’s analysts focus on the same issues as those that concerned critics in the immediate post-war: excessive demand for transportation and the lack of public open space. However, critics often fail to respect the realities of the modern condition, and when positing planning solutions for its improvement, often resort to reactionary approaches. The recent proposals by the so-called ‘New Urbanists’ offer a case in point. In 1948, Hans Blumenfeld defined the salient characteristics of industrialized cultures, noting that, regardless of their national or political origins, whether in Europe or Russia, the characteristics of modern industrialized societies are the same, including, first, that the place of residence is separated from the place of work – this, he points out, is the most striking change from the pre-industrial way of life; second, that many places of work are large, in area and employment; third, that there is a division of labor with everincreasing specialization. This last factor, he argues, is perhaps the most basic, because specialization of labor is an interdependent condition that forces workers to live in big cities. Hilbersheimer and Stein alike recommended controlling the spread of the modern city by limiting the size of its population centers. Whether it was through the use of satellite towns as in Clarence Stein’s proposals or the ladder-like distributions of Hilbersheimer, post-war planning theorists sought to interrupt the neutral formalism of the expanding metropolis. However, the contradiction between these formal proposals and the fundamental characteristics of modern culture, as defined by Blumenthal, point to the relative futility of their approaches. Neither of these diagrammatic solutions to the issues of the modern city indicates a full realization of the modern condition of economic mutual dependency. Further, their reliance on private automobiles as the primary means of transportation, which while enabling the dispersal of populations, tends to encourage land speculation in areas essentially disconnected with the originating city. Formal interconnectedness, as Blumenfeld pointed out, is essential to a society dependent upon specialized employment, and community health is improved by continuous and equally accessible means of communication. These factors imply the design of the Modern City will likely involve strategies not yet realized. Whatever form the resolution of the Modern City may take, however, a keen recognition of its origins and continuing motivations will be essential to those who attempt future efforts to either intervene in existing conditions or to initiate entirely new developments.

Notes 1 Charles Lockwood: ‘Sprawl’ in Hemispheres (September 1999) p.84. 2 David Halberstam: The Fifties (New York: Villard Books 1993) p.9.

Looking back on our future

243

3 Halberstam: The Fifties p.4. In a 1949 meeting Senator Thomas Dewy had with Dwight Eisenhower after the inaugurations following the 1948 elections (in which the Republicans suffered another humiliating defeat – including the loss of the presidential campaign to Harry Truman) Dewy stated what he perceived to be an as-yet unrecognized, but increasing, public resentment toward New Deal liberalism when he said ‘All middle-class citizens of education believe patronage and centralization should be stopped.’ 4 Joan Ockman: ‘Toward a Theory of Normative Architecture’ in Steven Harris and Deborah Burke (eds): Architecture of the Everyday (New York: Princeton Architectural Press 1997) p.124. 5 Peter Blake (1964): God’s Own Junkyard (?). 6 Gwendolyn Wright: Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge: MIT Press 1983) p.253. 7 Wright: Building the Dream p.244. 8 C. Wright Mills: White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press 1951) p.260. 9 Albert Pope: Ladders (New York: Princeton Architectural Press 1997) p.187. 10 Wright: Building the Dream p.248. 11 Wright: Building the Dream p.248. 12 T.J. Kent: The Urban General Plan (San Francisco: Chandler 1964) p.33. Kent explains early attempts to enact planning following the Standard Act of 1928 were fraught with difficulties including the use of zoning regulations, piecemeal adoption processes, and a general distrust of the ‘Municipal Legislative Body’. 13 Kent: The Urban General Plan pp.28–31. 14 Pope: Ladders p.102. 15 Wright: Building the Dream p.258. 16 Paul D. Spreiregen (ed.): The Modern Metropolis, Its Origins, Growth, Characteristics, and Planning. The Essays of Hans Blumenfeld (MIT Press 1967) p.236. 17 Kenneth Frampton: Modern Architecture: A Critical History (New York: Thames and Hudson 1980; 1992 edn) p.235. 18 Pope: Ladders p.134. Pope writes that the Seagram Building provided a model for insensitive urban commercial development. The Seagram Building, he wrote: ‘inspired a re-building of Park Avenue that led to a spatial and temporal indeterminacy – ultimately abstract and divested of temporal coordinates.’ 19 Wright: Building the Dream. Wright notes that the 1949 ‘Omnibus’ Housing Bill that offered a range of supports for new house construction and aid for first-time buyers was largely directed toward suburban development. 20 Wright: Building the Dream p.255. Wright cites John Keats and the planner Catherine Bauer who advocated introducing diversity of ages and social groups into the nearly homogeneous suburban demography. However Federal policy that supported suburban development remained in place because of the fear that mixing of social and economic groups would threaten the safety of private property investment. 21 Ervin H. Zube (ed.): Landscapes: Selected Writings of J.B. Jackson (Boston: The University of Massachusetts Press) p.5. 22 Frampton: Modern Architecture p.190. 23 Norman Bel Geddes: Magic Motorways (New York: Random House 1940) p.238. 24 Bel Geddes: Magic Motorways p.294. 25 Wright: Building the Dream p.255. 26 Frampton: Modern Architecture p.191. 27 Paul Goldberger: ‘Settling the Suburban Frontier’ The New York Times Magazine (31 December 1995) p.34. 28 The Essays of Hans Blumenfeld p.72. 29 Lewis Mumford: ‘The Wilderness of Suburbia’ New Republic 28 (7 September 1921) pp.44–5. 30 Wright: Building the Dream p.195. 31 Wright: Building the Dream p.195–6. 32 Wright: Building the Dream p.273. 33 Halberstam: The Fifties p.7. 34 Ockman: ‘Toward a Theory of Normative Architecture’ p.125.

244

Paul Adamson

35 Ockman: ‘Toward a Theory of Normative Architecture’ p.125. 36 Ockman: ‘Toward a Theory of Normative Architecture’ p.127. 37 Ludwig Hilbersheimer: The New Regional Pattern, Industries and Gardens, Workshops and Farms (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1949) p.194. 38 The Essays of Hans Blumenfeld p.82. 39 Ockman: ‘Toward a Theory of Normative Architecture’ p.141. Ockman cites a comparison between the archetypal suburban developments of William Levitt and Sons on Long Island, in New York, and oncerural Pennsylvania with the iconic midtown New York office building for the Lever Brothers soap manufacturing company, designed in 1954 by Skidmore Owings and Merrill. 40 Richard Neutra: Buildings and Projects (Zurich: Girsberger Verlag 1950) pp.196–9. 41 Neutra: Buildings and Projects p.199. Interestingly, Lewis Mumford wrote enthusiastically of Neutra’s planning ideas in an endorsement of the 1950 monograph. Mumford wrote ‘The sort of thinking that Richard Neutra began almost a generation ago in his visualization of an “ideal” modern town, which he called “Rush City Reformed”, should now be resumed, and perhaps public competitions should be held to enlist the imagination of the younger generation of architects and planners.’ 42 Early precedents for megastructure urban solutions include the Rockefeller Center by Raymond Hood, Whiley Corbett and others and the 42nd Street viaduct connecting Upper and Lower Park Avenue through the Municipal Railway Building at Grand Central Station, both in New York. Albert Pope noted in Ladders that proposals such as Neutra’s and Hilbersheimer’s matched the perceived needs of speculative development. He writes ‘While the subsequent developments of the post-war city did not follow the simple, elegant and sterile transitions imagined in his [Hilbersheimer’s] proposals, they arrived at essentially the same place’ (p.105). 43 Lewis Mumford: Introduction to Towards New Towns for America (?) p.16. 44 Wright: Building the Dream p.258. 45 The Index of Economic Indicators, a collection of data used to chart the health of the US economy, always lists among its most important statistics the number of ‘new home starts’ or houses under construction. 46 Hilbersheimer: The New Regional Pattern p.194. 47 The Essays of Hans Blumenfeld p.304. 48 The Essays of Hans Blumenfeld pp.241–2.

AFTERWORD

The Modern City Revisited – envoi Allen Cunningham

In the evolution of architecture and urbanism, the twentieth-century Modern Movement is unique for inventing the idea that the future could be ‘designed’, and that the promise anticipated spiritually and physically improving conditions over those inherited. The optimism generated by this extraordinary intellectual and technical revolution has been frustrated by events beyond the control of designers unable to harness the forces which shape our environment. The declarations which emanated from this movement not only adopted an ethical stance, architecture being distinguished from the other fine arts by its social function, but assumed that in a democratic age architecture and planning would actively help to shape new common philosophical and social values. Such aspirations were demonstrated in a succession of idealised urban models, but it has transpired that these could not, for the most part, be realised as coherent entities according to master-plans. However, they did articulate visions that fuel frustration with an urban future which is increasingly projected in terms of remedial operations rather than visionary concepts. The static images of drawing board Modernist urbanism have been replaced by the dynamic of market forces which now determines our environment from the habitat hearth via the primacy of private transport to urban centres composed of buildings posing as corporate virility symbols. Idealism has yielded to economic power, political expediency and pragmatism, late capitalism appearing reluctant to commit itself to any form of land settlement consistent with the production of an urban form in which its inhabitants can find coherence. Architecture offers intelligible order, giving space form, but Modern Movement urbanism predicated on the extension of this potential for the benefit of society has transpired as a phase of frustrated ambition. In our society ’space’ is not there for free use but as a commodity working within the logic of the market economy. The dimensions, shapes and surfaces of public areas in modern cities are determined by road transport. The city is sliced into linear spaces for the car driver whose experience of it is limited in the interests of speed, legibility and convenience. The eye has become the sole arbiter of the urban environment reduced to linear, spatial abstractions. The city is an instrument of concentration, the car an instrument of dispersal; contrary to the received wisdom of Modern Movement urbanism, they are antithetical. Nor has unlimited car ownership increased accessibility – in 1900 the average speed

248

Allen Cunningham

of circulation in London was 11 miles per hour – in 2000 it is 17.7 kilometres per hour – only the unit of measurement has changed. The worst aspects of modern cities are the product of the technical ’specialist’ serving powerful vested interests. To counter this domination, architecture as a value-laden activity must be redefined as the art of constructing cities and become pro-active in influencing outcomes – it provides a metaphysical clarity and renders the world less threatening. Buildings are long-lived testimony to their times, a cultural sedimentation allowing the place where things happened to be experienced. The city is associated with the desire to create memorable places. By 2025, 60 per cent of the world’s population, which is increasing by 90 million per year, will be living in cities. There are now 57 cities with populations of over 5 million, of which 44 are in the developing world. These cities concentrate environmental hazards in acute form generating the majority of greenhouse gases, today’s urban centres consuming three-quarters of the world’s energy and creating threequarters of the world’s pollution. Cars now emit more pollution than industrial production. The climatic changes caused by emissions from the very instruments of modernism – environmentally-controlled buildings and motor cars – will cause massive life-threatening floods and droughts. The irony thus revealed is of cities that, on the one hand, are the cradle of our civilisation within which cultural patterns are determined, while, on the other, they threaten the physical welfare of the world’s population. The view of the global village at the start of a new century reveals at least 600 million people now living in life-threatening urban environments with the divide between rich and poor continuing to widen. At worst, cities loom as ghettos of economic greed and ecological disaster and, at best, the promise of urban centres as sources of inspiration and beauty, places of social, cultural and intellectual development and joy, now appears precarious. The programme espoused by the Modern Movement proposed harnessing the forces in society for the benefit of future generations, but wherein now lies the promise of that movement? Are its ethical ideals outdated, or can the social aspirations and humanist creeds be reformulated to inform a global, urban future? It is widely accepted that alternative programmes, which exploit the partnership of political ambition and the dynamism of market forces for the greater good, must now be articulated. The promise of twentieth-century urbanism was never realised but it changed our perception of the possible and it is this which must be constantly reviewed so as to inspire and inform the daunting task of humanising future programmes of urbanisation, generated by sustainability as the new, global ethic. The crucial question posed as one century of frustrated ambition gives way to another which poses seemingly intractable problems is what should be the legitimate role for the architect? The last word may be left with Bernard Tschumi who, in Architecture and Disjunction, asks: How could architects avoid seeing architecture and planning as the faithful product of dominant society, viewing their craft, on the contrary, as a catalyst for change? Could architects reverse the proposition and, instead of serving a

The Modern City Revisited – envoi

249

conservative society that acted upon our cities, have the city itself act upon society? . . . Could space be made a peaceful instrument of social transformation, a means of changing the relationship between the individual and society by generating a new lifestyle?

Index

Entries in bold type denote figures.

Aalto, Alvar Säynätsalo Town Hall 58 Abercrombie, Patrick 88 County of London Plan 1943 1, 151, 153 America (United States) as exemplar of modernity 11–12, 33, 42, 72, 73, 151 Federal Highway Act 1956 221 Federal Housing Administration 220 GI Bill 1956 220, 221 Houston, Texas 221, 240, 241 Lakewood, California 222, 238 metropolitan development 214–19, 221, 224, 228, 229, 232 Monroe Doctrine 1823 185 New Deal 215 Federal-Aid Highway Act 1938 221 National Housing Act, 1934 221 Panorama City, California 221 post-war development 214 shopping malls 228–29 skyscrapers 12, 73 Standard Act 1928 223, 224 suburbs 215–20, 216, 218, 219, 222, 224–27, 238, 239–42, 240 Truman Doctrine 1947 185 Amsterdam Bijlmermeer 203, 203, 204, 207, 209, 210, 210, 211 traffic layout 205, 206

Atelier 5 Siedlung Halen, Bern 58 Attie, Simon ‘Mulack Street 37’ 20–21 Bacon, Edmund Design of Cities 116–18, 123 Barcelona 2 BBPR Torre Velasca, Milan 129 Behne, Adolf 9, 10 Behrens, Peter 12 Bel Geddes, Norman Magic Motorways 228, 225, 236 Benjamin, Walter 2 Berlin Alexander Platz 17–18 project by Hans Kollhoff 20 project by Mies van der Rohe 17 project by Wassili & Hans Luckhardt 18, 22 as metropolis 10 ColumbusHaus 18, 21 Debis Building 20, 24 Deukon Haus 11 Friedrichstrasse 15 glass skyscraper projects by Mies van der Rohe 11 Vertical City project by Ludwig Hilbersheimer 15

252

Index

Berlin continued Great Hall and Führer’s Palace 11 Josty Building 20, 23 Karstadt department store 12, 14 Metal-Workers’ Union Building 12 Mosse Haus 11 Nordstern Building 11 planning 10 post-war reconstruction 15 Potsdamer Platz 18–20, 19 project by Erich Mendelsohn 18, 22 project by Marcel Breuer 18 project by Wassili & Hans Luckhardt 18, 22 Public Transport Union Building 12 Reichstag 11 trade unions 11 Trade Unions Headquarters 12, 13 Wertheim department store 18 Bern Siedlung Halen 58 Bettman, Alfred 223 Birmingham Birmingham Conservatoire 163 Brindleyplace 163–64 Bull Ring Centre 158, 159, 150–63, 162, 165 Castle Vale redevelopment area 157 Lee Bank redevelopment area 165 National Exhibition Centre 163 Nechells Green redevelopment area 154–56, 154, 155, 156 New Street Rail Station 163 post-war reconstruction 153–54 Ringway 160, 161, 164 Rotunda 160, 159 Sealife Centre 164 Blake, Peter God’s Own Junkyard 239 Blumenfeld, Hans 225, 229, 232 Borg, Neville 151 Bottoni, Piero 128 plan for QT8, Milan 128–29, 127, 134–37, 136, 140, 141 The Social, Economic and

Constructional problem of Housing 126 Bottoni, Piero, Giuseppe Terragni, Pietro Lingeri and Mario Pucci Fiera Campionaria competition, Milan 132 Boulton, Matthew 153 Brasília 3, 172 Alvorada Palace 167, 173, 182 Catetinho Palace 173, 173, 190 cidades satélites 187–88 comércios 175–76, 177 Cine Brasília 176, 177, 189 Congresso 175, 175 density 178, 179 inauguration 183, 184, 186 National Theatre 175, 189 Núcleo Bandeirante (Cidade Livre) 167, 181, 182, 188 Praça dos Tres Poderes 175, 176 road layout 178 Setor de Diversões 174–75, 175 Setor de Habitações Individuais Germinadas 176, 186, 187 superquadras 175–76, 178, 179, 180, 181, 186 Brett, Lionel 95 Breuer, Marcel project for Potsdamer Platz, Berlin 18, 20 van den Broek & Bakema Lijnbaan shopping mall, Rotterdam 199, 199 Brown, Neave Alexandra Road Housing, London 63 de Bruijn, Pi Plan for Amsterdam Bijlmermeer 203, 204 Bucksbaum, Martin 228–29 Burle Marx, Roberto 169 Ministry of Education, Rio de Janeiro 169 Praia do Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro 171 superquadras, Brasília 180, 186

Index Cambridge Harvey Court 61 Capanema, Gustavo 169 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique 185 Chamberlain, Joseph 152 Chicago 220 860 Lakeshore Drive 226 Bucksbaum, Martin 228–29 Congrès internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) CIAM I: La Sarraz 1928 82, 132 La Sarraz declaration 2, 31, 34, 82, 174 CIAM IV: ‘Functional City’, Athens 1933 31, 82–83, 96, 130 appropriation by Le Corbusier as La charte d’Athènes 96 CIAM V: ‘Housing Legislation’, Paris 1937 83 CIAM VII: Bergamo 1947 129 urban planning principles 2, 82–83, 96, 114, 174, 200–1, 200–4, 213 Coates, Wells 81 Colquhuon, Alan ‘The Strategies of the Grand Travaux’ 3 Constructivism First Conference 1928 30, 34 town planning principles 35, 38 Corbett, Wiley 236 Costa, Lucio Brazilian Pavilion, New York 169 Cidade Universitária, Rio de Janeiro 169 Escola Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro 169 Ministry of Education, Rio de Janeiro 2, 4, 60, 60, 169, 174 Parque Guinle Apartments, Rio de Janeiro 171 plan for Brasília 174–80 David Halberstam The Fifties 215 Drew, Jane 91 El Lissitzky 20

253

Emerson, Ralph Waldo 227 van Eesteren, Cor 200 Felton, Monica 105, 107–8, 111 Ferriss, Hugh 73, 73, 74 Ford, Henry 35 Foster, Norman Reichstag, Berlin 11 Sealife Centre, Birmingham 164 Willis Faber Dumas Building, Ipswich 78 Frampton, Kenneth 3, 227 Fry, Maxwell 82, 83, 87, 93, 95 Fine Building 91, 93, 94 Futurism 70, 132 Gabo, Naum 57 Circle 58 Garden Cities 83, 86, 230, 232, 236 Geddes, Patrick 82, 153 Giedion, Sigfried 81, 230 Ginzburg, Moisei 30, 31, 38, 72 Narkomfin Building, Moscow 48 Goldberger, Paul 229 Goldfinger, Ernö 95 Goulart, João 184 Greenwald, Herbert 226 Greenwood, Sidney Bull Ring Centre, Birmingham 158, 159, 160–63, 162, 165 Guevara, ‘Ché’ 184 Gutkind, Erwin Josty Building, Berlin 20, 23 den Haag (The Hague) 208–12 Harrison & Abromovitz Rockefeller Center, New York 73 United Nations, New York 4, 73, 74 Harvey, David 3 ‘Flexible Accumulation through Urbanization’ 185 Hastings, Hubert de Cronin 83 Hegemann, Werner 12 Hilbersheimer, Ludwig 70 The New Regional Pattern 230–32, 233, 234, 235 Vertical City project, Berlin 15

254

Index

Hillman, Judy 151 Hitchcock, Henry Russell International Style: Architecture since 1922 215 Hitler, Adolf 10 Hodgkinson, Patrick 57 Brunswick Centre, London 61, 62 Holford, William 174 Hoover, Herbert 230 Howard, Ebenezer x, xi, 38, 230, 232, 236 Hudson, Hugh Blueprints and Blood 50 Ipswich Willis Faber Dumas Building 78 Jackson, John Brinkerhof 227 Jacobs, Jane 1 The Death and Life of Great American Cities 72 Jefferson, Thomas 227, 230 John Madin Design Group Birmingham Conservatoire 163 Johnson Marshall, Percy 95 Johnson, Philip International Style: Architecture since 1922 215 Khazanova, Vigdaria Iz istorii sovetskoi arkhitektury, 1917–1925 49 Kollhoff, Hans project for Alexander Platz, Berlin 20 Koolhaas, Rem Delirious New York 72, 75 project for Amsterdam Bijlmermeer 207 Kopp, Anatole Ville et révolution 49 Korn, Arthur 87–88, 91 Kracauer, Siegfried 9 Kubitschek, Juscelino 170–73, 184 Lambert, Donald

Plan for Ganzenhoef 204 Lang, Fritz Metropolis 70, 71 Larin, Iuri 33 Las Vegas ix, x Lasdun, Denis Hallfield Estate, London 65, 67 Lawrence, D.H. 80 Le Corbusier xi Capitol, Chandigarh 4 Centrosoyuz Building, Moscow 4, 30, 168 City of Three Million ix, 56 criticism of urban concepts 30–31, 75, 116–118, 175 La charte d’Athènes 96, 190 appropriation from CIAM IV 1933 96 La Tourette 58 Linear Industrial City 57 nature x, 76–77 Plan Voisin 77 political naiveté 50, 168 Précisions 168 project for Antwerp 66 Sur les quatre routes 72 Les trois établissements humains 56 urban concepts 56–57, 72 Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles 57, 89 Villa Savoye, Poissy 4, 168 Ville Contemporaine 168 La Ville radieuse ix, 4, 31, 56, 57, 68, 174 density 61–65, 178 road layout 67–70, 69, 178 visit to Moscow 1930 30 visit to New York 1935 70 visit to Rio de Janeiro 1929 168 visit to Rio de Janeiro 1936 169 Lenin, V.I. 26, 34 Leningrad 28 Ling, Arthur 88, 89, 90 London Alexandra Road Housing 63 Brunswick Centre 61, 62

Index Cranbrook Estate 123 depopulation 1 garden squares 2, 76 Hallfield Estate 65, 67 Highpoint I 84 Mansion House Square 78 project by Mies van der Rohe 78 metropolitan development 2, 80 Nº 1 Poultry 78 post-war reconstruction 1, 95 repopulation 1 Roehampton Estate 58 Royal Festival Hall 58 Lubetkin, Berthold xi Cranbrook Estate, London 123 plan for Peterlee 106–19, 107, 115, 117, 121 Lubetkin & Tecton Highpoint I, London 84 Luckhardt, Wassili & Hans project for Alexanderplatz, Berlin 17, 17 project for Potsdamer Platz, Berlin 18, 22 Luder, Owen 162 Mächler, Martin 15 Manzoni, Herbert 152, 153–54, 158–60 March, Lionel Homes Beyond the Fringe 61, 64 MARS ‘The Theory of Contacts’ 83 neighbourhood unit 84, 86, 89, 93 Plan for London 1937 83–87 Plan for London 1942 80, 81, 92–94 density 93 transport 92 Martin, Leslie 58, 59, 61, 62, 63 Circle 58 Harvey Court, Cambridge 61 Land Use and Built Form Study Centre, Cambridge University 58 Roehampton Estate, London 58 Royal Festival Hall, London 58 May, Ernst 10, 48 Mayer, Hannes 48

255

McCormac, Richard Duffryn housing 63 Mebes, Paul Nordstern Building, Berlin 11 Mendelsohn, Erich ColumbusHaus, Berlin 18, 21 Deukon Haus, Berlin 11 Metal-Workers’ Union Building, Berlin 12 Mosse Haus, Berlin 11 project for the Potsdamer Platz, Berlin 18, 22 Messel, Alfred Wertheim department store, Berlin 18 Miami ix, x Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 860 Lakeshore Drive, Chicago 226 project for Mansion House Square, London 78 project for Alexander Platz, Berlin 17 glass skyscraper projects for Friedrichstrasse, Berlin 11 Seagram Building, New York 226 Milan Gallaratese Housing 146 post-war reconstruction 129–30 Pirelli Tower 129 Torre Velasca 129 QT8 125–30, 126, 127, 128, 131, 134–46, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142 Miliutin, Nikolai xi, 48, 49, 50 project for Stalingrad 49 Mills, C. Wright White Collar: The American Middle Classes 217 Mitchell, Mary 157 Modern City as Metropolis 10–11, 164 as alternative to Metropolis 70, 72, 229–38 popular acceptance 126–27, 150–51, 181, 199 popular rejection xi, 2, 163, 185–87, 189, 213, 215, 217–18, 231

256

Index

Modern planning issues adaptation of Modern planning to present needs 4, 24, 122, 190, 198, 201, 212–13, 230–32, 242 decentralisation 35–37, 41–48, 214, 224, 231, 237, 239–42 economic factors 24, 26, 32–33, 35–37, 42–44, 50, 95, 129, 152, 185–86, 214–22, 227, 230–32, 242 free-market planning 1, 186–87, 188, 190, 214–19, 221–22, 224, 241–42 public social space 2, 75–76, 116–18, 176, 189–90 separation of functions 42, 66–67, 75, 76, 82, 93–94, 135, 189–90, 201–3, 208, 211, 219, 221 social factors xi, xii, 2, 3, 72, 75, 82, 92, 189, 190, 202, 217–19, 221 traffic 16–18, 28, 35, 67–70, 88, 92, 154, 178, 203–7, 220, 226–27, 232 urban landscape space x, 2, 72–73, 76–78, 84–87, 93–94, 116–18, 125–28, 135, 189–90, 204–8 Möhring, Bruno 12 Moscow 27–28 Centrosoyuz Building 4, 30, 168 Narkomfin Building 48 transport 28 Mumford, Lewis 229, 230, 236 Mussolini, Benito 133 Muthesius, Hermann 10 Neutra, Richard Rush City 230, 232–36 New York Lever House 2 Rockefeller Center 73 Seagram Building 226 United Nations 4, 73, 74 World’s Fair 1939 224–25 Brazilian Pavilion 169 ‘Democracity’ 25, 225 ‘Futurama’ 216, 228 Nicholson, Ben Circle 58

Niemeyer, Oscar 169 Alvorada Palace, Brasília 173, 182 Catetinho Palace, Brasília 173, 173, 190 Cine Brasília 176, 177, 189 Congresso, Brasília 175, 175 National Theatre, Brasília 175, 189 Niemeyer House, Rio de Janeiro 171 Parti Communiste Français, Paris 185 Praça dos Tres Poderes, Brasília 175, 176 Ockman, Joan Toward a Theory of Normative Architecture 231 Okhitovich, Mikhail 34–37, 38, 41, 48 ‘On the problem of the city’ 35, 37 Olmsted, Frederick Law, jr. 223 Oud, J.J.P. Kiefhoek, Rotterdam 212 Ozenfant, Amédée 12 Pagano, Giuseppe 128, 130 Paris as exemplar of urbanity 116, 152, 174 May ‘68 ix–x, xi Parti Communiste Français 185 Parker, Barry 230, 236 Peterlee 107, 115, 117, 121 Durham coal fields 105, 106, 109 social interaction 113 transport 113 Piano, Renzo Debis Building, Berlin 20, 24 Pleydell-Bouverie, David 82 Ponti, Gio Domus 129 Ponti, Gio and Pier Luigi Nervi Pirelli Tower, Milan 129 Pope, Albert Ladders 217 Porcinai, Piero 135 Porphyrios, Dimitri Office Building, Birmingham 164 Price, Frank 152

Index Pucci, Mario 128 Rathenau, Walter 10, 12 Rationalism 130–34, 144 Reuter, Ernst 17 Rio de Janeiro 168, 171 Cidade Universitária 169 density 171 Ministry of Education 2, 4, 60, 60, 169, 174 Niemeyer House 171 Parque Guinle Apartments 171 Praia do Flamengo 171 urban regeneration 189 Roberts, James A. Ringway Centre, Birmingham 160, 161 Rotunda, Birmingham 160, 159 Rogers, Ernesto Casabella 129 Rossi, Aldo 184 Gallaratese Housing, Milan 146 Rotterdam Kiefhoek 212 Lijnbaan shopping mall 199, 199 post-war reconstruction 198–99, 198 Ruskin, John 4 Sabsovich, Leonid 31–34, 37, 38, 44, 46, 50 plan for Stalingrad 40 Samuely, Felix 88, 90 São Paulo 168 Sartoris, Alberto, Giuseppe Terragni and Pietro Lingeri Rebbio 132 Schaeffer, Philipp Karstadt department store, Berlin 14 Sert, José Luis Can Our Cities Survive? 96 Shand, P. Morton 81 Sharp, Thomas 91, 95 Sheppard Fidler, A.G. 157 Sitte, Camillo x Siza, Alvaro

257

Quinta da Malagueira housing, Évora 3 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill Lever House, New York 2 Snozzi, Luigi Quartière Morenal housing, Monte Carasso 3 Soviet Union avtomobilizatsiia 35, 36 disurbanism 35–37, 38, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48 electrifcation 35 First Five Year Plan 26, 32, 33 Gosplan 34, 38, 39 Housing Co-operative movement 28, 33 Magnitogorsk 38 new towns policies 28, 32, 33, 34, 37, 50 Speer, Albert 10, 16 Great Hall and Führer’s Palace, Berlin 11 Stalingrad 38, 40, 41, 49 Stein, Clarence Radburn, New Jersey 178, 236, 237 superblock 236, 239 Towards New Towns for America 230, 231, 236 Stein, Clarence, and Henry Wright New Towns 230 Stirling, James Nº 1 Poultry, London 78 Sutcliffe, Anthony 150 Tatton Brown, William and Aileen 83, 86, 87–88, 85, 86 Taut, Bruno Public Transport Union Building, Berlin 12 Taut, Max Trade Unions Headquarters, Berlin 12, 13 Taylorism 31, 33 Tel Aviv ix, x Thoreau, Henry 227

258

Index

Ticino 2 Truman, Harry 231, 233 Truman Doctrine 1947 185 Tschumi, Bernard 248 Architecture and Disjunction 248 Tunnard, Christopher 90 Unwin, Raymond 27, 34 Nothing Gained by Overcrowding 62 Uralmash 28, 29 Vargas, Getúlio 168–70 Vesnin, Alexander and Leonid 38 project for Stalingrad 40, 41 Viganò, Vittoriano 135

Wagner, Martin 9, 9 plan for Berlin 11 Wagner, Otto x, 11 Ward, Colin 167 Watton, Harry 157 Wright, Frank Lloyd Broadacre City 228 The Disappearing City 228 Wright, Gwendolyn Building the Dream 217, 224, 226, 238 Zimmerreiner, Paul Office Building, Berlin 11 Zweig, Stefan 2