Michał Wiśniewski CONCRETE GARDEN housing estate – a grey linear The desire to build a new world was an idea Transforming themselves from engineers of The reality of Polish towns – rarely which frequently accompanied disagreement beauty into engineers of society, architects arouses positive emotions. It is most com- on the subject of the encountered reality. The of the modern era also made attempts to monly perceived as a sick whim and a great history of modern architecture is full of rebel- define anew the real living needs of people. mistake of modern architecture. Alienation lion and desire to fight the social system and Full of faith in technology, architects and social pathologies lurking beneath pre- diseases of civilisation, which pushed artists sought to subordinate people’s everyday fabricated architecture have cast a shadow and builders towards a vision of a new – and rhythm, habits and environment to the log- on the rich discourse of modernism, which thus a better – world. Since the end of the 19th ic of the machine. The appearance of steel, lay at the heart of post-war mass urbanisa- century, architectural modernity has been tempered glass and reinforced concrete tion. Its motor was a utopian vision of a understood in military terms – as a heroic turned aesthetic paradigms in architec- brave new world, a Garden of Eden without struggle with tuberculosis, illiteracy, poverty ture upside down and pushed architecture wars, sickness or hunger. Unlike many and inequalities of a society based on class. towards abstraction, the simplest forms and earlier utopias, the post-war one was im- According to war logic, architects of the mod- meanings. The departure from the ‘zero plemented. Showing no consideration for ern era pushed their own statue of arbiter of point’ propagated by modernists allowed surroundings nor energy usage costs, 20th beauty off its pedestal, which – aware of tradi- construction of both the world and humans century modernists created an extremely tion and history – they themselves had erected anew. While the end of the First World War anthropocentric programme that forever with the aim of expressing higher ideas and brought about a collapse of faith in the changed the human environment. Mod- feelings. Instead of remaining in the hitherto bourgeois and aristocratic ideals of the 19th ernism triumphed throughout almost the splendour of being connoisseurs of the ideal, century, the end of the Second World War entire world with a series of monumental architects ‘descended from the heights’ to deal saw a whole generation of designers shaped complexes, with Polish ones being just one with the real current problems of everyday in a new spirit faced with the task of re- example among many, and not necessarily life, which they could almost touch in the building from the destruction caused by the the most intriguing or irritating. increasingly large and complicated towns of military cataclysm. the era of the industrial revolution. autoportret 2 [34] 2011 | 61 A fragment of Le Corbusier’s letter to Jacob Berend Bakema from 5 July 1961. The drawing presents Team 10 standing on the shoulders of CIAM. This new phenomenon constituted a huge op- portunity and challenge for architects work- ing after the war. The permanent political crisis and the demographic boom coincided in time with technological advances driven by Cold War military rivalry. The development of aviation, including civil aviation, resulted in the emergence of a new building material – aluminium. The conquest of space, which began at the end of the 1950s, the increasingly fast development of motorisation and the ever netherlands architecture institute, rotterdam − bakema archive netherlands architecture institute, rotterdam greater availability of mass media, including television, also brought about changes in the The end of the biggest war in modern history, plot – into which crime and personal tragedy way of thinking about towns and the human and a turning point in Europe, pushed a gener- are interwoven – was the symbolic expression environment. The more time elapsed from ation of pupils of the first modernists towards of a vision of youth and innocence brutally the Second World War, the more technological creation of a utopian vision of the world of the confronted with the atrophy of the world. developments were applied in construction. future. Instead of looking to the wisdom of the past – the 19th century ideal – there was a sud- Rossellini’s picture expressed the need for a The first changes were felt just after the war. den desire to discover the future and realise it new beginning (which was important in the In 1947, after a ten year break, CIAM, the In- here and now. This breakthrough moment re- post-war epoch) which was faced with the vio- ternational Congress of Modern Architecture, turned repeatedly on various cultural planes. lence of a successive conflict – this time the met again in the British town of Bridgwater. In 1948, Roberto Rossellini in the last film in Cold War – where the main victors of the fight From this moment, successive meetings of an his war trilogy, Germany – Year Zero, directed his with Nazi Germany turned on each other. increasingly large group of modern planners camera on a thirteen year old boy wandering The first nuclear explosions carried out on and architects were organised regularly every aimlessly through the rubble of ruined Berlin. both sides of the Iron Curtain now dividing two years. Post-war CIAM activities were The world in which he had grown up had just Europe added to the atmosphere of fear and characterised by an atmosphere of growing collapsed. The church, school, state, and fam- uncertainty regarding the future. Successive generational conflict. While the doyen of ily which shaped his identity had ceased to ex- Cold War crises were played out far away from the group, Le Corbusier, presented plans of ist or were no longer of any significance. Sur- Europe, mainly in former colonies, but at the the Marseille Unité d’Habitation, his junior rounded by rubble – both real and social – the same time they cast a long shadow on life in colleagues, including people who had until boy was a symbol of hope for the emergence of the whole post-war world. Almost in spite of recently been his collaborators, increasingly a new world. In the brutal image of the Italian this ominous atmosphere, and following on boldly criticised the master. The 9th CIAM neorealist, the life of the young German was from the need for a new beginning, the post- Congress, organised in the town of Aix-en- crushed by the environment, dominated by war world experienced a demographic explo- Provence near Marseille, was a watershed. the defeated and humiliated Nazis. However, sion instead of a nuclear explosion. During this meeting, the younger participants more important than the complexities of the openly criticised their senior colleagues and autoportret 2 [34] 2011 | 62 Design of the Golden Lane Estate, Alison and Peter Smithson, 1952 ultimately caused a split in the group, leading the idea that the duty of the architect was to the setting up of a new body – Team X. to design individual houses and instead preached the need to understand a building One of the leaders of the rebellion, Peter as an element in a broad social context. The Smithson, argued that the development of focus of the architect’s creativity was to be the modernism up to that point had led archi- Habitat, the environment of human life and tects astray. Fascination with technology functioning of the community, whose shape and thinking about living in terms of an and degree of density should be dependent on industrial machine meant that although 19th availability of means of transport. century slums had disappeared, alienating boredom, predictability and repeatability had Interaction was one of the concepts eagerly za: http://archiflux.wordpress.com appeared in their place. Architecture, in his analysed by participants in Team X; the opinion, should go further, in the direction of stimulator of social life and the generator of At the same time, the two Britons who had construction of a new human environment. identity. Peter Smithson and his wife Alison worked briefly for the London County Council, For this reason, for Smithson’s generation, also considered that architects should ask where they were involved in planning of the the key to the building of a new classless, themselves the question: ethics or aesthet- rebuilding of London, took part in a compe- democratic environment was harnessing the ics? Humans and their way of functioning in tition for the Golden Lane Estate project, a possibilities inherent in urban planning. modern civilisation, as ideas located at the vast residential complex situated in a part The core of Team X was made up of Jacob B. heart of utopia, necessitated the application of town that had suffered heavy bombing. Bakema and Aldo van Eyck from Holland, of specific urban solutions. In 1953, in parallel Their vision was a complex of buildings, in Alison and Peter Smithson from Great Britain, with the split within CIAM, the Smithsons fact one multi-story housing block, which, Giancarlo De Carlo from Italy, and also the managed to implement one of the first of like a snake, zigzagged its way through the Greek architect Georges Candilis, working their own projects, a secondary school in the defragmented building development. Smith- in France, as well as the American Shadrach British town of Hunstanton. The complex of sons’ Golden Lane Estate was supposed to be Woods. They were all involved in planning simple modernist buildings at first sight re- composed of linear brutalist structures and, projects, shaping the post-war order in their sembles a factory. The architects rejected the at its inception, was the first of these types of countries.