The Organic Language of Arturo Soria. the Antecedent of Ecological Urban Planning1 José Manuel De Andrés Moncayo

The organic language of Arturo Soria. The antecedent of ecological urban planning1 José Manuel de Andrés Moncayo

“To each his own. I follow mine, which consists of destroying the weapons of discourse, far more effective than iron and fire, the external form and the internal organization of large cities. New Towers of Babel, erected in the present times by unpredictability and greed, you will fall to the blows of my pick!”

Arturo Soria y Mata, ‘La cuestión social y la Ciudad Lineal’ in El Progreso. Madrid, March 5, 1883.

The politician, inventor, and geometrician Arturo Soria y Mata (1844-1920) is strongly linked to the project that he promoted and disseminated internationally for more than forty years: The Linear City (Ciudad Lineal), a pioneering proposal in what its author called ‘architecture of cities’2 [Fig. 01]. Prior to the consolidation of modern urbanism, the principles of this new discipline were outlined in various publications without being conclusively systematized. The core of his thought was presented in a series of urban-themed texts published between 1881 and 1883 in the newspaper El Progreso, in which he sought to reveal the laws behind the growth of modern cities while influencing local politics. This unfinished theory, laid down in the form of short newspaper articles, combined theoretical aspirations with the first attempts to come up with a Linear City. In 1892, a decade after the publication of his first texts, Soria announced a matured revision of his proposal, and two years later he began to pave the way for its construction through the company he founded, the Compañía Madrileña de Urbanización (hereinafter CMU). The beginning of his work as an urban developer meant the abandonment of his theoretical ambitions, the intuitions behind which were subordinated to the dissemination and promotion of his company. This research seeks to weaken the correlations of influences on Arturo Soria’s thought3 with the aim of clarifying his most relevant contributions, exposing his principles and contextualizing all in the germinal debate of modern urbanism as well as in contemporary ecological concerns. When the key points of his urban vision are exposed, it becomes clear that, for Soria, the Linear City is the definitive answer, but what are the terms of his question? How does the author explain the phenomena of the origin and expansion of cities? What analysis does

JOSÉ MANUEL DE ANDRÉS MONCAYO 117

CAP_Cuaderno10__ENG_DEF-DEF-op-OK.indd 117 19/03/2021 17:35:03 he carry out around urban issues and what Soria in these texts was the result of a The origin of most of these terms lies in tools does he use? search for an operational instrument with modern biology, a discipline which despite which to carry out a two-fold task: on the Aristotelian roots developed its current form Since the late 1960s, when authors like one hand, to portray and understand the at the beginning of the 19th century, with Fernando Terán, George R. Collins or transformation that modern cities were going Goethe10 (1749-1832), and culminated in the Carlos Flores stressed the importance of through; and on the other hand, to transform mid-century years with the formulation of the Linear City, numerous researchers4 municipal policies and the urban form of his Darwin’s theory of evolution (1809-1882). have shed light on the biography of Arturo hometown, namely Madrid at the beginning Darwinian theory did not only turn around Soria y Mata, unraveling multiple aspects of the Bourbon Restoration era. In this local the biblical morphological hypotheses, of his thought and work. In this research, context, Soria’s articles supported a critical but its influence meant a real earthquake however, we will not focus on his biography, stance against incumbent municipal urban with repercussions reaching far beyond but rather on an analysis of his abundant policies and their corresponding strategies the disciplinary field of biology and writings. In studying Soria’s written work, of intervention on the traditional city. profoundly transforming all other fields of the research has distinguished different Hence, if there were two transformation knowledge. Even before Darwin, the English stages in the development of his thought strategies in the 19th century, namely internal philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) which correspond to successive languages refurbishment and expansion (the so-called developed a conception of evolution that adopted and the overlap between them. ‘Ensanche’), Soria condemned the former, touched on a wide range of disciplines: First, a primitive organic language5 (1881- and upheld the latter, with some reservations. ethics, anthropology, economics, political 1883) is identified, on which this article Soria faced the challenge of addressing the theory, philosophy, sociology, and many is focused and which we believe to be the urban problem with no other tool than an more. It is commonly catalogued under most relevant, constituting, as it does, the intuition of the potential lurking within the ‘Social Darwinism’ and largely configured mental framework in which his intuition of new technological discoveries of the time, in the substrate of intellectual thought in the the Linear City germinated. From the dating particular the railway’s capacity to structure second half of the 19th century. Spencer we glean it is one of the most original and urban growth in a way that differed from developed the concept of ‘super-organism’ transcendental proto-urbanistic languages, the way the ‘Plan Castro’ expansion had applied to social organizations, ‘organisms and hence deserves to be recognized as one done for Madrid. With the aim of clearly of organisms’ capable of developing their of the sources of modern urban thought, demonstrating the general principles of own properties and functions, beyond the the influence of which can be traced to Soria’s thought, we will henceforth ignore sum of their parts. Likewise, the thought the present. Second, we must mention a allusions to the local urban debate – the of the German naturalist and philosopher later, obscure neo-Pythagorean language subject of other historical studies – and focus Ernst Haeckel11, whose works contributed to which was born with ‘El Origen Poliédrico exclusively on its conceptual instruments. disseminating and consolidating evolutionary de las Especies’ (1894), the publication theories throughout the world, was one of where the author tried to explain the The metaphor of the ‘Urban Organism’ the sources of the notion of a progressive origin of natural forms by means of the universal complexity based on simple combination of polyhedrons, and whose The cornerstone of Soria’s urban approach geometric elements that Soria y Mata connection to his urban theory remains method is a simple analogy: the metaphor exposed in his work ‘El Origen Poliédrico de controversial [Fig. 02]. This theosophy- of the city as a human body7. This method las Especies’ (1899), and where the author inspired language manifested Soria’s deploys language as an instrument in naming identified the figures of the Tetrahedron, the natural inclination towards mathematics the basic parts and systems that make up Betatetrahedron and the Pentatetrahedron as and geometry, becoming the vehicle with the city, and identifying them using our the primitive elements of all forms [Fig. 03]. which Soria profiles his Linear City with a familiarity with human anatomy. Once they high degree of precision in the details and are described and transferred to the field of Genesis proportions and an immutable aspiration to our corporeal knowledge, all the parts and an ideal. Finally, Soria developed an eclectic systems are reassembled in a vision of the The influence of Herbert Spencer’s thought speculative language, where fragments of city as a single organism, subject to the same is openly recognized by Soria himself as one the aforementioned languages are integrated vital processes and functions as every living of the essential sources of his social vision. as scientific endorsement of the invention being: birth, growth, reproduction, death. In It is not difficult to guess his influence after of the Linear City. The eclectic language Soria’s writings, the organic analogy grows his first reflections on the origin of the city, in was used as much by Soria y Mata as by his and branches out until it constitutes what which he considers it a living organism (albeit followers at CMU in presenting the linear Bachelard calls ‘a syntax of metaphors’8, a seriously ill, as can be seen from his critical model to the general public as a natural system of knowledge of an apparently chaotic writing) whose birth and growth would be evolution of cities, the genuine product of and out-of-control phenomenon: the growth subject ‘to perfectly clear and defined laws’12, a scientific invention and a very lucrative, of cities in the industrial revolution9. although these were never enunciated, and safe investment. This language appeared whose natural evolution – ‘slow in past in 1894 and is characteristic of La Ciudad The metaphor of the body-city or ‘urban centuries, fast in the present’ – would lead to Lineal, the promotional publication of CMU organism’ became a commonplace in 20th- the Linear City13 [Fig. 04]. In order to prove and considered the world’s first urbanistic century urban planning theory, and is so this determinism between the evolution of magazine. La Ciudad Lineal was the media widespread in our thoughts and daily lives the urban form and the emergence of the through which Soria’s ideas – mixed with that we quite commonly use it unconsciously. Linear City, Soria sketched in his article administrative information and real estate We make use of rhetorical figures when ‘Cómo crecen las ciudades’ (1882) an account advertising – were disseminated in a we call the urban center the ‘heart of the of the morphogenesis of the city which, systematic way for more than three decades city’, the parks ‘green lungs’, the highways despite lacking the coherence of a proper (1897-1932). ‘arteries’, and so on. The first urban texts of urban theory, constitutes one of the most Soria, with titles such as ‘Anatomía Urbana’ complete exercises in expanding the organic In the written production of the organic stage (1882) or ‘Tisis Municipal’ (1882), contain language beyond local political criticism and we can recognize a mature Soria (he was hundreds of allusions based on this analogy: the mere justification of his project. In it 37 years old when he began to collaborate ‘the intestinal apparatus of a city’ to refer to he defends a morpho-biological hypothesis with the newspaper El Progreso), one with a sewerage, ‘bony framework’ to refer to streets where ‘the embryo, egg or principle of the vast knowledge of American and European and railways. He calls urban intervention city-capital organism [...] is always a castle technological advances, in addition to ‘medicine’, compares the obsolescence of or fortress’, whose contact with large bodies plenty of experience in the development armor and chain mail to that of medieval of water would enable it to develop, and and management of urban railway lines walls, seeks inspiration in the ‘forms of whose ‘central position’ would provide the which had been operating for a decade6. reptiles, annelids, some crustaceans and prosperity associated with the great Western The materials analyzed make up a total of other lower organisms’… He even equates the capitals. Once the conditions mentioned 56 articles published in the column ‘Cosas spread of fires caused by population density by Soria have been met, the city organism de Madrid’. The language developed by with the fever of a sick body. emerges and ‘demands a protective wall that

118 TRADUCCIONES / TRANSLATIONS

CAP_Cuaderno10__ENG_DEF-DEF-op-OK.indd 118 19/03/2021 17:35:03 completely isolates it from the territory’, and The identification of infrastructure as urban text-network are, however, an inestimable help if its growth continues, ‘the houses multiply structure is followed by the definition of in showing the cracks and interstices of its outside the fortified enclosure, and it becomes a ‘cell’, the ultimate syntactic element on conceptual sieve, through which many aspects necessary to build a second, more extensive which Soria’s urban language rests: the house. of the urban phenomena pass without being circle of walls’. For Soria, this phenomenon Soria’s predilection for single-family housing trapped by his critical analysis, giving shape, was proof of the acceleration of the growth of has hygienic, political and speculative in some way, to the counter-form of the text’s cities, an easily recognizable fact in multiple motivations, but also syntactic ones: the implicit structure. cases that ‘confirm evolutionist ideas’ and Aristotelian social cell, the family, must have can be observed ‘as the geologist evokes the another equivalent architectural unit, the Also inherent in Soria’s organic writing is the succession of times in the stratification of house. The definition of this minimal unit search for a notion of beauty that expands the ground, the urban architect can study and its association, forming packages called the nature-based classical sense of the word, the complete evolution from the fossil city blocks, was where the true architectural with its exaltation of harmony, proportion to the modern city’. The influence of this and political content of Soria’s proposal lies: and symmetry. Soria, a fervent geometrician, idea also covered the sociological field in a social image where we can live together, exalts beauty understood as ‘classification and comparisons of the obsolescence of fortified capable of terrorizing us through its harmonious linking of different parts, number, defense perimeters with the process of monotony and at the same time dazzling us measure, the integral of all integrals’, which ‘substitution that the citizens have made from with the clear promise of a life in harmony would no longer rest on what is immutable, but the helmet to the bowler hat, from the armour with nature, where ‘the palace of the powerful, rather embraces the dynamic and expansive, to the frock coat and from the chainmail to the adorned with magnificent gardens, and the a scalar notion of systems and subsystems shirt’. Soria also extended this deduction to poor man’s hut, with a modest barnyard simply coexisting and articulating their operations observe a general trend in European capitals embellished with useful plants and scented on the basis of simple, immutable rules of (Vienna, Brussels, Amsterdam, and some flowers, live close together’18 [Fig. 06]. combination and growth that would be present others), the demolition of their old walls for in nature. From the study of Nature and the the sake of urban expansion, a process which The invention of an organic image definition of elements comprising the urban was for him the definitive confirmation of phenomenon, an architectural and urban the universal validity of the organic tropism “Perhaps, following Fourier, we should call an discipline that had not yet been formulated applied to the city: ‘the body grows incessantly, inventor (and not a writer or a philosopher) he emerged for Soria, and it was from this that and as the stone belt that holds it grows, it who brings to light new formulas, occupying, by his Linear City many other related projects jumps to pieces’. means of fragments, immensely and in detail, were deduced. What form did Soria set for the space of the signifier.” these future developments? ‘The one that the Urban Anatomy tree branches draw in the air, the rivers on the Roland Barthes. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. (París: ground, the veins in the human body’20. For Soria, the urban form ‘must be Éditions du Seuil, 1971), 107 subordinated to the needs of urban life’14 and Conclusions attests to each city’s stage of evolution, in By recomposing the fragments of Sorias its generalized trend towards regularity. He discourse, dispersed in articles, manifestos Perhaps Soria’s most genuine contribution repeatedly used the term ‘form’ as something and various conferences, we are able to was establishing a fundamental break with equivalent to ‘structure’, referring almost visualize the deterministic and reductionist the historical urban thought through the exclusively to the layout of the road system notions of his urban theory, a theory incapable mineral-organic opposition. Soria renounced of streets and squares that constitutes of satisfying the growing complexity of the historical strategy of intervention in the infrastructural support and negative urban phenomena in our contemporary consolidated urban centers through the of the built mass. Soria suggests that in metropolises, but analysis of which gives us juxtaposition of parts and ‘excavation’ in the the structure-skeleton of the city there back one of the most powerful instruments built mass. Faced with the established tradition are different categories of bearing-linear developed by urban writing: the possibility of internal refurbishment, Soria envisioned elements or bones: the streets, avenues and of a total urban image. Soria’s writings offer a paradigm shift in the urban transformation boulevards that should accommodate the an attractive answer with a holistic capacity of European capitals, one where historical layout of the railways and whose relationship to bring together advances in knowledge and perimeters gave way to structured growth and hierarchy vary according to their technique in areas as diverse as locomotion, around modernized infrastructural networks. width. In this way, Soria clarified that the telecommunications or sanitation, and In this way, the mineral-organic opposition growth of the city is based on the layout integrate them in an organic whole, which is achieved the two-fold task: placing the of infrastructures and their coordination necessary if individual projects called upon incipient urban discipline in the frame of with the transportation system as a whole. to transform the city are to be able to support reference of history, even though to renounce Consequently, it is only possible to describe and satisfy the needs of life from the house to and surpass it; and simultaneously establishing the shape of the traditional city as anti- the city and from the city to the territory. For and contextualizing our view of it in the most organic, a formless mass (or invertebrate) Soria, in our cities ‘There has been a lack of popular scientific and philosophical thought where ‘the variable angles, the sinuses, the organization and linkage of valuable elements. of his time, the evolutionism of Darwin and irregular contours of the non-crystallized It is in the syntactic composition of simple Spencer. mineral dominate; it is the image of chaos’15. elements, in the synchronized articulation of urban systems that, wisely arranged, they can In these first writings of Soria, an organic vision On the contrary, the cities that were planned give amazing results, in the same way that of urban phenomena underlies what integrates according to regular grids or checkerboards the seed, well fertilized soil and the separated the processes of consumption of matter and where ‘two series of parallel streets intersecting water are inactive riches, and together they are energy that are necessary for the development at right angles’16, e.g. the New York City layout, transformed into the infinite wonders of the of urban life in a concept of city that is at once would represent the most advanced stage of plant kingdom’19. unique and complex. Development of the urban evolution, which Soria praised as ‘the organic metaphor involves recognizing urban most advanced and closest to perfection’. He This text presents a continuous reiteration metabolism as a place of opportunity and a also suggested a stage beyond the hypodamic of basic concepts that come in different project for improving living conditions. The plan or checkerboard layout: ‘The square form time contexts to help push through the parallelism between the urban organism and of the American ones, thanks to the wonderful developmentalist aims of Arturo Soria. This is the human body is the key to this operational intuition of the Spanish conquerors, is a result fostered by the intertwining, in a continuous methodology, through which it conceives of the transition from the military to the reading of Soria’s written thought, of concise advanced supply, communication or waste industrial organization that now predominates. fragments of information, such as manifestos collection systems based on the potential of The latter will lean more and more towards or lectures, followed by other more elaborate new technologies to organize and improve the linear form, in which the fact that trams texts focused less on presenting the Linear urban life. It was from this vision that led to and railways are the same thing takes on City project than on studying of phenomena Soria’s definitive proposal for urban growth, extraordinary importance’17 [Fig. 05]. tangential to it. These temporary folds of the the Linear City, which was destined to establish

JOSÉ MANUEL DE ANDRÉS MONCAYO 119

CAP_Cuaderno10__ENG_DEF-DEF-op-OK.indd 119 19/03/2021 17:35:03 In “The Architecture of Science in Art. Public intimacy: An Anatomy Lesson”, Bruno establishes a relationship between science and art through Architecture and the forms of observing the human body and visual arts the evolution of exhibition spaces intended for this. The origin is located in Naples, Javier de Esteban Garbayo in a show of the anatomical lesson as an antecedent of cinema. Its research base and the fragmentation of the human body relate the anatomical with the cinematographic gaze, the latter from a corporeal form of visuality. In this relationship between the cinematographic and anatomical eye, the text owes to The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, where Walter In Collection and Recollection: On Film Benjamin pointed out that “the boldness Itineraries and Museum Walks, Bruno of the cameraman is comparable to that delves into the concepts of memory and of the surgeon”. Bruno analyses José de imagination from the space of the museum, Ribera’s 1631 painting Magdalena Ventura film and architecture. She underlines with Her Husband, stressing not only high the interest in mnemonic processes in culture’s interest in an image of popular (low) cinema, as in the films Memento or Blade culture, but also the interest in anatomical Runner, where memory is portrayed as the abnormalities, especially those of the female sum of “fragments of an archival process body. This “epistemological movement porously embedded in our path, part of toward the body-object” from culture has our own shifting geography”. From the contributed to the regarding of the body as angle of this idea, the boundaries between a “privileged object of knowledge, pleasure cinema and museum are blurred, with and power”. In contrast, Bruno points an increasing use of moving images that out medicin’s debt to cinema in terms of turn museum rooms into projection observation and perception modes. rooms. This connection is observed in the experimentation on cinematographic In “Mind Works: Rebecca Horn’s Interior language that artists such as Chris Marker, Art”, the work of the German artist serves Douglas Gordon or Bill Viola have carried as a guide for Bruno to delve deeper into out. Regarding the urban passage and the idea of appropriation as an extension the transit through the museum, Bruno of our intimacy, where the human body is relates picturesque aesthetics, his legacy shown as an instrument of possession. In of “making feel through the eye”, with “Berlin Exercises”, “Dreaming Underwater” cinematographic optics, where “a double or “White Body Fan”, corporeal prostheses movement connects the external to the determine the body’s ability to explore space, internal topography”. There is prominent while in “River of the Moon” or “Station mention of Montage and Architecture Amoureuses”, the hotel room is understood (1930) by Sergei Eisenstein and Le as a superposition of stories where space Corbusiers ‘promenade architecturale’, emerges as a geography of subjectivities. where cinematographic montage and Regarding the relationship between body and architectural itinerary converge and the technology, Horn explores the coordination observer becomes a consumer of views. of movements and the automation of the The museum, the gallery or the room, body to delve into how technology merges therefore, are conceived as “places of with the body to accentuate a shared texture”, “fabrications of visual fabrics” or intimacy. “emotional archives of the imagination”. “Fashions of Living. Intimacy in Art and “Modernist Ruins, Filmic Archaelogies” Film” begins with the “Femme-Maison” runs through “A Free and Anonymous series of Louise Bourgeois, which fuses the Monument”, the installation that Jane silhouette of a woman with a house. The and Louise Wilson presented at the drawing makes explicit the connection BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art between home and female subject, eliciting (Newcastle) in 2003. The installation an emotional gaze linked to the idea of travel, reconstructs through a succession of at the same time that this idea triggers a suspended screens, like a Lev Kuleshov transitory relationship with the home as montage, the Apollo Pavilion design by a wandering cartography. In this journey the artist Victor Pasmore. It stimulates through the house, the first stop is in Dorothy the sensory character of the exhibition Arzner’s film “Craig’s Wife”, where the house space itself, as well as acting as suspended becomes the protagonist in a domesticity memories of the work. Attention is drawn that problematizes the relationship to the relationship that Bruno points out between space and sexuality. In The New between modernity and landscape culture, Dwelling: Woman as Creator by Bruno Taut, where the pavilion, transition between city domesticity is fused with movement, the and nature, is conceived as a privileged planes are interpreted as maps for living, and spectator of the perceptual, cultural and the female subject as a performative object. social transformations of the modern The relationship between architecture and era. The installation, thus, represents the living continues with works like the Urban “multiple, fractured, disjointed, fluid and maps of Guillermo Kuitca, “Crying Wall” by unstable nature” of space and the modern Ann Hamilton, “House” by Rachel Whiteread subject – or the ‘flaneur’, as poetically or “Untitled” by Dores Salcedo, resulting in a defined by Charles Baudelaire. complete geography of intimacy.

120 TRADUCCIONES / TRANSLATIONS

CAP_Cuaderno10__ENG_DEF-DEF-op-OK.indd 120 19/03/2021 17:35:03