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Architecture, Design and Conservation Danish Portal for Artistic and Scientific Research Aarhus School of Architecture // Design School Kolding // Royal Danish Academy Rethinking the modern programme Hauberg, Jørgen; Bjerrum, Peter Publication date: 2016 Document Version: Peer reviewed version Link to publication Citation for pulished version (APA): Hauberg, J., & Bjerrum, P. (Accepted/In press). Rethinking the modern programme: - a retrospective review into the possibilities of a social and natural sustainable urbanization.. Paper presented at Regional Urbanism in the Era of Globalisation, Huddersfield, United Kingdom. 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Institute of Architecture and Planning The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture Email: [email protected] Jørgen Hauberg, Assoc.Prof. Institute of Architecture and Design The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture Email: [email protected] 1 Introduction: As indicated in the above title the subject at hand - dealing with the hypothetical relation between the modern programme and sustainable urbanization – explicitly questions the capabilities of the Modern Movement (MM), its programmes and ideas, vis-à-vis the crucial agenda on sustainability and architecture. The inquiry into the modern programme is about unfolding MM’s inner capabilities and outer possibilities towards housing and urban development, i.e. to clarify what it means to rethinking the inner constitutive ideology of MM and in the same process – given said hypothesis – relate to the overwhelming actuality of the outer global agenda of depletion of resources and climate change. How, in not so many words, to cope with the span between MM’s heroic utopia e.g. Le Corbusier’s in ‘Precision’1 propagated World City and the late modern dissolution of the city altogether e.g. Rem Koolhass’s parting shot in ‘The generic City’: ”That is the story of the city. The city is no longer. We can leave the theatre now...”2 The present paper does not fulfil those tasks, it is primarily a theoretical sketch around key elements of the stated: ‘retrospective review’, which – besides the actual meaning of the term re- think and the relating -re’s – intents to lay down guidelines towards the complex assemblage of programmes and projects inside the realm of urbanism both in the sense of the academic discipline and in the sense of the real urban culture. Fulfilling those tasks would mean to re-design the below mentioned example of programmes and of projects as diagrams, re-sampling embedded intensions and embodied implementations, which is beyond the limits of an article. ‘Re-‘: In his essay, Rewriting Modernity3, Lyotard states “the pointlessness of any periodization of cultural history in terms of ‘pre-’ and ‘post-’, before and after, for the single reason that it leaves unquestioned the position of the ‘now’, of the present from which one is supposed to be able to achieve a legitimate perspective on a chronological succession.” From the point of view of this position the heretical ‘now’ dissolves modernity as a clearly circumscribed entity fixed chronological between ‘pre-‘ and ‘post-’, let alone a modernity out dated by the alleged postmodernity. We use the term modernity being well aware that it might be confined successively to any earlier events in history: Enlightenment, Renaissance, Christianity or Antiquity, i.e. that a retrospective review is only justified in so far as we are consulting history simultaneously, memorizing and elaborating in order to inscribe modernity into the present. Rewriting as well as rethinking and all these other ‘re-s’ are not about striving for a new beginning to be found in some forgotten authenticity. In the wording of Lyotard: “the ‘re-‘ in no way signifies a return to the beginning but rather what Freud called a ‘working through’, Durcharbeitung,” which is essentially linked to thinking, writing or modelling as far as these processes initiate, what we do not know yet. So, memorizing and elaborating in order to re-inscribe the modern program into the present is this Durcharbeitung, this ‘working through’, as an open minded imaginative process, simultaneous memorizing, what’s ‘no longer’, elaborating, what’s ‘not yet’ and thus inscribing, what’s ‘now’. It’s not about the closures of periodization, revitalisation or reconstruction but about unsealing what is constitutively hidden in the event of a thought breaking through, MM’s, and resisting the prejudices of the -ism’s, of the modern-ism and its pre-, late and post-. It’s about elaborating its pro-grammes, pro-jects and pro-posals constituted between ‘not yet, ‘no longer’ and ‘now’, 2 opposite the impossible succession of before, now and after, which succumb the present as “a legitimate perspective on a chronological succession.” Remodelling: Taken as programme the modern house and the modern city were elaborated by more architects, a few of which explicitly contributed to a wider vision of the modern city, e.g. Le Corbusier, Ludwig Hilbersheimer or Raymond Hood, whose radical urbanism signified the opposed tendency of other of their fellow contemporaries, e.g. Bruno Taut or Frank Lloyd Wright, representing the trend towards sub-urbanization of the City. Far from being a consensual programme, as indicated in the Nordic term Functionalism or the later American invention International Style, MM was ‘in statu nascendi’ split between conflicting positions towards urban density or suburban dispersal – towards Urb or Suburb. The modern house or the modern city did not, does not, develop towards a common vision, let alone the conflicting aspirations of MM. It has no definite ending – be it good or bad – but is composed of initiations and terminations of various programmes and models carried out during time and space; it is not the model of a laboratory – the legendary amalgamating pot – rather it is a laboratory of the models. So, remodelling the modern programme, particularly Le Corbusier and the circle of CIAM4, is not about revitalising its overall vision. Rather, it’s about confronting the various models of e.g. Le Corbusier, Radiant City; Ludwig Hilbersheimer, High-rise City; Ivan Leonidov, Magnitogorsk, or Raymond Hood, The city of Towers, Bruno Taut, Stadtkrone, or Frank Lloyd Wright, Broad Acre City, etc. against their actual outcome within the urban laboratory of regional models e.g. the planning of London, Milton Keynes, Stockholm, Järvafältet, or Copenhagen, Fingerplanen, etc. – i.e. reconsidering intentions against results, focussing on those features of the modern programme, which can actually be 'sustained as sustainable' – so to speak. It’s about remodelling said laboratory of the models under the nexus of MM’s entire impact on contemporary urbanization, which as just as many fragments are merged with the former Metropolis and the meshwork of the recent Mega City. Accordingly the aforementioned examples those models are sampled under the headlines: The high-rise, garden and linear City, the latter through its distinct urban structure embedding the features of the former as embodied entities. The extract of those entities are overlapping the linear City, which comprise the elements, the equipment, of either or both the high-rise City and that of the garden City. The Linear City: Linear cities, as urban planning proposals, were elaborated in the late 19th Century by Arturo Soria y Mata for an area outside Madrid, and by Tony Garnier, La Cité Industrielle. At the late 1920th’s and 30th more linear city were proposed by the Russian architects N.A. Milyutin, I. Leonidov and M. Ginzburg. Later plans and proposals for linear cities or urban structures based on linear growth were Ludwig Hilbersheimer’s structure plan for eastern USA, Brasilia from the late 50th by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo Bay5, and Metabolic urban visions, such as Kisho Kurokawa’s Helix City from 1961. Recent proposal is The Arch6 for a Palestinian linear city connecting the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with high-speed trains, water and energy supply, linking together the mayor cities in the area. 3 Parallel hereto, reports by UN and The World Bank conclude, that the largest impacts of urban development is achieved by controlling the urban growth along public transit routes, establishing more efficient transport corridors.7. La Ciudad Lineal: In the late 19th century the Spanish journalist and republican Arturo Soria y Mata proposed a linear city, which he published as articles in El Progreso in 1882: ”The city is shaped by its flows of traffic as 500m wide city-band with any necessary length. … When in the middle of this band is placed tramways and trains, supply lines of water, gas and electricity; basins, gardens and occasionally public buildings, nearly all the overpopulated city’s would be solved.” Soria proposed three applications of the linear city: as ring around an existing city, as a string connecting cities through open land, and new cities in nonurban areas like Andalucía or along the Catalan coast. In 1894 he was commissioned by Companiá Madrilena de Urbanisatión to realise a neighbourhood in Madrid as a ribbon of garden residences along a tramway.