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Architecture Without Architects

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Architecture Without Architects The title of this text is a hybrid of two existing titles. “Architecture without Architects” was the name of an influential exhibition by the architect Bernard Rudofsky at the MoMA in 1964; “Housing: An Anarchist Approach” was the name of a famous book by the English architect and anarchist Colin Ward in which the author 01/25 proclaims the rights and productivity of self-built housing and squatting in postwar Europe. Whereas the latter’s collection of essays discussed specific cases of European and Latin American squatter movements from the 1940s to the 1970s, Rudofsky’s exhibition presented photographs of local vernacular architecture from all over the world, with the claim that architects Marion von Osten should learn from premodern architectural forms. Both of these perspectives identify a condition that emerged during decolonization, in which a Architecture massive crack appeared in the modernist movement and its vision of top-down planning. Without But they were also two very different interpretations of the simple fact that, Architects – throughout the ages and around the world, architecture has been produced without the intervention of planners or architects. Whereas Another Rudofsky’s approach suggested an aesthetical and methodological shift, Colin Ward’s was a Anarchist political reading of spatial self-expressions that might offer new methodologies and an alternative understanding of society. In my article, after more Approach than thirty years of debates about High Modernism, I will try to bring into play a third way h of thinking that attempts to connect the question c a o of design with that of the political, from the r p p perspective of a globalized world. These ideas A t have been informed by many conversations, much s i h research, and invitations to Egypt, Morocco, and c n r e a t Israel. I would like to thank everyone who was n s A O r involved in these discussions: Nezar AlSayyad, n e o h v t Kader Attia, Tom Avermaete, Dana Diminescu, o n o n i Noam Dvir, Zvi Efrat, Sherif El-Azma, Monique r A a – Eleb, Jesko Fezer, Tom Holert, Shahira Issa, M s Ê t c 9 Serhat Karakayali, Abderrahim Kassou, Brian e 0 t i 0 2 h Kuan Wood, Andreas Müller, Omar Nagati, c y r a Françoise Navez Bouchanine, Horia Serhane, A m t u Katja Reichard, Peter Spillmann, and Daniel o — h 6 t Weiss. i # W l ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ a e r n r u t u c o j e t A Colonial Global Modernity x i u h l c f “Travelling between any two cities in the world, r - e A passing through airports along ring roads and into business districts or tourist hotels, seems, at least in part, always to be a return home. In the main this is because modern architecture is a global phenomenon and what contains and helps to define or frame our experiences are usually buildings of familiar appearance,” says the English art historian Mark Crinson in the introduction to his book Modern Architecture and 08.25.10 / 20:02:54 UTC 02/25 The highway was built to connect the new urban developments around Cairo that came about to serve the needs of emerging middle and upper class urban developments - the so-called “Desert Cities.” Cairo, January 2009. Photo: Marion von Osten. 08.25.10 / 20:02:54 UTC In the suburbs of Casablanca the Holcim Factory erected a new branch on an older concrete base. Behind the fences, workers have started to settle. Holcim Ltd. is a Swiss Company and on of the largest global players in concrete production. Photo: Marion von Osten. These brick houses have not yet been erased by the World Bank's “Villes sans Bidonvilles” program to turn these informal settlements into stable neighborhoods. The urban fabric of Cassblanca is still filled with many informal neighborhoods, such as the shantytowns, which were created under colonial rule. Photo: Marion von Osten. 08.25.10 / 20:02:54 UTC Self-built growing neighborhood in the center of Casablanca, 2008. Photo: Marion von Osten. Erased self-built neighborhood at the Avenue Mehdi Ben Barka becomes the construction site for new seaside developments near the corniche in Casablanca, 2008. 08.25.10 / 20:02:54 UTC 05/25 After the CIAM IX meeting, not only the young generation, but central figures of the modernist movement such as Siegfried Gideon began to reflect upon the influence of vernacular architecture on new architectural concepts that he called “The New Regionalism.” His eclectic historical examples included patio houses for workers from Ancient Egypt or a mountain village in Morocco. Meanwhile, the new building examples, like “South American Patio Houses for Indigenous People” by Sert and Wiener, the standardized workers’ homes of the “Cité Verticale” by Candilis and Woods, and the first cast for the “Sidi Othman” settlement by Studer are presented as a synthesis. Courtesy the GTA Archive Zurich. 08.25.10 / 20:02:54 UTC 06/25 In many international magazines of the 1950s and 1960s, the discussion on vernacular architecture was widely publicized and discussed by Team 10 members in Forum Magazine Nr.7, 19. Courtesy GTA Archive Zurich. 08.25.10 / 20:02:54 UTC 07/25 A Chart of the French Protectorate's Urban development office showing the perimeters that had been created far outside the city center where Moroccan workers started to settle in self-built huts. The informal settelemts were called “Bidonvilles” and thi chart tries to evaluate their inhabitants. From Casablanca, le roman d’une ville, by Michel Ecochard, 1954. 08.25.10 / 20:02:54 UTC 08/25 The “Carrière centrale” developments were built next to one of the largest Bidonvilles settlements to house growing numbers of rural immigrants in Casablanca. The “Cité Horizontale” was tested as a series of low-rise patio houses, while the “Cité Verticale” was tested as a series of high-rise patio houses. The idea behind this field study was to create homes for workers and local employees who worked for the Protectorate. However, the rent was so high for most of the people living in the Bidonvilles that few could afford a flat that was “built for them.” Arial view from 1952. Courtesy Photothèque Rabat. 08.25.10 / 20:02:54 UTC the End of Empire. He argues here that this only from Europe and America to the global global similarity and formal analogy concerns South, but also moved in the opposite direction. more than just modern architecture: “More In essence, Modern city planning has always specifically it is modernist architecture: that been bound to colonialism and imperialism – embrace of technology, that imagined escape many large-scale technical developments were from history, that desire for transparency and even tested and realized on colonial ground. health, that litany of abstract forms . .”1 For Colonial modernity not only created global Crinson, this universal formal language, with its 09/25 political and economic structures, pressing for norms and forms, has created the global the adoption of the nation state and capitalist language and appearance sufficient to suggest a forms of production, accompanied by common trajectory shared by globalized cities oppression, exploitation, and the today. systematization of racial divisions, but it also ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊAt first glance, modernist architecture and produced, as Crinson remarks, the aesthetical urban planning appear to have little in common and infrastructural basis for a globalized world, with New Urbanism’s gated communities and for the global modernity we live in, as the post- upper-class boulevards, built far away from the colonial historian Arif Dirlik has it.2 Global City center and the informal settlements ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe travel experience in a globalized world, growing up on its outskirts. The differences formed by a colonial modernity, is today become even more obvious as we learn that additionally structured by a global elite and its modernist discourse on urban planning was not flows of capital, its production sites, its meant to serve only the new urban elites; on the aesthetics, infrastructures, and urban lifestyles. contrary, modernist architecture and urban Cities are influenced by multiple simultaneous utopias were designed to be the ultimate urban trajectories – the new geometries of a network fabric, creating and realizing entirely new society, as Manuel Castells describes them – societies and modern citizens. The function of drawn by the telos of globalization.3 Global Cities modernist architecture as both symbol and today seem to be governed and structured more organizational model for the “new modern man” by privatized initiatives than they were in in Europe and America, as well as in the colonies, modernist and Fordist times, in which the must be highlighted here. Housing and urban nation-state was the central actor in both Europe planning projects symbolized a new society, and America and in the colonized South. Many representing a modern, industrialized way of studies, books, and exhibitions in the last living, working, and consuming. Moreover, urban decades have focused on global flows of capital planning as such was an invention of Euro- h and transnational enterprise, as well as on the c a American modernity, having emerged towards o informal network economies and migrations that r p the end of the eighteenth century, in times of p accompany them. In these cases, the activities A aggressive colonial expansion and the t of non-governmental organizations and s i advancement of a new world order. The spirit of h enterprises seem to be the key players in c n r e a social reform, based on new forms of industrial t determining how urban landscapes are created n s A O manufacturing and consumption, was translated r and used in very particular ways.
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