East West Central East West Central Re-Building Europe, 1950–1990 Edited by Ákos Moravánszky, Torsten Lange, Judith Hopfengärtner, Karl R. Kegler Ákos Moravánszky, Torsten Lange (Eds.) Re-Framing Identities Architecture’s Turn to History, 1970–1990 East West Central Re-Building Europe 1950–1990 Vol. 3 Birkhäuser Basel Editors Prof. Dr. Ákos Moravánszky Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich, Switzerland Dr. Torsten Lange Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich, Switzerland [email protected] Editors’ proofreading: Alan Lockwood, PL-Warsaw Publishers’ proofreading: Alun Brown, A-Vienna Project and production management: Angelika Heller, Birkhäuser Verlag, A-Vienna Layout and typography: Ekke Wolf, typic.at, A-Vienna Cover design: Martin Gaal, A-Vienna Printing and binding: Holzhausen Druck GmbH, A-Wolkersdorf Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustra- tions, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in databases. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. This publication is also available as an e-book (ISBN PDF 978-3-0356-0815-1). © 2017 Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, Basel P.O. Box 44, 4009 Basel, Switzerland Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston © Cover image: Martin Maleschka, San Cataldo Cemetary, Modena (Architect: Aldo Rossi, 1971–1978). Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. We would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who has not been acknowledged here and will rectify any omissions in future editions of the publication. Printed on acid-free paper produced from chlorine-free pulp. TCF ∞ Printed in Austria ISBN 978-3-0356-1015-4 Volume 1 ISBN 978-3-0356-1016-1 Volume 2 ISBN 978-3-0356-1017-8 Volume 3 ISBN 978-3-0356-1014-7 Set Volume 1–3 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 www.birkhauser.com Contents Foreword 7 Ákos Moravánszky Introduction 13 Torsten Lange I Identity Construct(ion)s 25 Piercing the Wall: East-West Encounters in Architecture, 1970–1990 27 Ákos Moravánszky Notes on Centers and Peripheries in Eastern Bloc Architectures 45 Georgi Stanishev (senior), Georgi Stanishev (junior) An Image and Its Performance: Techno-Export from Socialist Poland 59 Łukasz Stanek Postmodern Architectural Exchanges Between East Germany and Japan 73 Max Hirsh Being Underground: Dalibor Vesely, Phenomenology and Architectural Education during the Cold War 89 Joseph Bedford From the Hungarian Tulip Dispute to a Post-Socialist Kulturkampf 105 Daniel Kiss II The Turn to History 119 Russia, Europe, America: The Venice School Between the U.S.S.R and the U.S.A. 121 Joan Ockman Deconstructing Constructivism 149 Alla Vronskaya The (New) Concept of Tradition: Aldo Rossi’s First Theoretical Essay 165 Angelika Schnell Paolo Portoghesi and the Postmodern Project 179 Silvia Micheli, Léa-Catherine Szacka Boris Magaš and the Emergence of Postmodernist Themes in the Croatian Modernist Tradition 191 Karin Šerman “Keep Your Hands Off Modern Architecture”: Hans Hollein and History as Critique in Cold War Vienna 209 Ruth Hanisch III Public Criticism and the Rediscovery of the City 225 Heritage, Populism and Anti-Modernism in the Controversy of the Mansion House Square Scheme 227 Michela Rosso Preservationism, Postmodernism, and the Public across the Iron Curtain in Leipzig and Frankfurt/Main 245 Andrew Demshuk “Le Monopole du Passéisme”: A Left-Historicist Critique of Late Capitalism in Brussels 261 Sebastiaan Loosen Keeping West Berlin “As Found”: Alison Smithson, Hardt-Waltherr Hämer and 1970s Proto-Preservation Urban Renewal 275 Johannes Warda Humane Spontaneity: Teaching New Belgrade Lessons of the Past 289 Tijana Stevanović Quality of Life or Life-in-Truth? A Late-Socialist Critique of Housing Estates in Czechoslovakia 303 Maroš Krivý Appendix 319 Notes on Contributors 321 Index 329 165 Angelika Schnell The (New) Concept of Tradition: Aldo Rossi’s First Theoretical Essay In 1956, Aldo Rossi, whose impact on architecture’s “turn to history” is among the most influential, published his first notable essay on architecture and urbanism: “Il concetto di tradizione nell’architettura neoclassica milanese.”1 The author was still an architecture student, and it might be concluded from the title that he sought to deliver a solid historical examination.2 Indeed, in this quite long essay, Rossi seemed to rehabilitate the late eighteenth-century architecture of his hometown; in particular the works of Giuseppe Piermarini, Luigi Cagnola, Luigi Canonica and Giovanni Antonio Antolini, which are not counted among the masterpieces of neoclassical architecture by certain archi- tecture historians.3 However, “Il concetto di tradizione nell’architettura neoclassica milanese” [“The Concept of Tradition in Neoclassical Milanese Architecture”] is nei- ther a historical essay nor an early postmodern example of a neo-historicist approach. In the essay, Rossi pursued a renewal of architecture and architec- ture theory as such, which he thought should be derived from an important but rather misunderstood concept of tradition invented in the late eighteenth century. According to Rossi, this concept of tradition was at the same time a progressive concept of renewal. It was thus not based on the conventional notion of tradition based on submission – becoming servile – to the archi- tectural past, but rather entailed a fundamental revision of modernism that, according to the author, had lost its philosophical basis. It turns out that Rossi imagined a singular historiographical model that already contained most of 166 Angelika Schnell his fundamental theoretical ideas on architecture and urbanism and differed significantly from those of his contemporaries. A New Historiographical Model The first sentences leave no doubt about the young author’s self-confident position: When one explores the historical development of some motifs that had the highest impact on the discontinuous and often contradictory devel- opment of architecture from the nineteenth century until today, then one will encounter neoclassical architecture. Those motifs branch out from here and show increasing complexity along the way. The most original and valuable outcomes of neoclassical architecture – as the depository of the great humanistic arts – refer to the origins of their complex formal experience and review them on the basis of the new social, political and economic conditions.4 Obviously the main topic of this abstract, dense, even compressed overture is neoclassical architecture and not modernism or the modern movement. However, reading on, we quickly learn that Rossi does not discuss terms such as “modern” or “neoclassical” in the way art historians would use them, as distinct categories of style. Referring to the writer Carlo Muscetta – then edi- tor of the journal Società, where Rossi’s essay appeared – he instead intro- duces two different theoretical types of classicism: an “archaeological and platonic” classicism that, according to Rossi, was introduced by historians such as Francesco Milizia, Johann Joachim Winckelmann and others, and a classicism that was “visionary and materialistic” and belonged to the modern culture of the Enlightenment.5 To Rossi, the former type of classicism is to be considered as mere formalism; it is “abstract,” “academic,” a “dead” for- mula, and Rossi even terms it contra-classicismo. (This is the classicism that would later become the basis for its postmodern renewal.) The latter type, on the other hand, as “the depository of the great humanistic arts,” has to be conceived as a philosophical category with progressive ambitions. It almost goes without saying that this latter classicism is where Rossi discovered the significant “concept of tradition.” It is in fact the first type of art and architec- ture that legitimizes its classical legacy (presumably the architecture of Greek and Roman antiquity, and the architecture of the Renaissance) by reviewing and evaluating it “on the basis of the new social, political and economic con- ditions.” Precisely this autonomous critical evaluation was the beginning of modernism, since from then on architecture became an inseparable “part of the general history of society.”6 The (New) Concept of Tradition: Aldo Rossi’s First Theoretical Essay 167 To Rossi, modern architecture and neoclassical architecture are not nec- essarily different or even contradictory, since they are both rooted in the phi- losophy of the Enlightenment. In order to understand modern architecture as such, we have to study its legitimate precursor: neoclassical architecture. By analogy with the different types of classicism, it follows that there must also be two types of modernism. In particular from the 1960s onward, Rossi distinguished between valuable modernism (to which “rationalist” architects such as Ludwig Hilberseimer, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Hannes Meyer belong) and a modern architecture that he criticized as “naive functionalism.”7 Since the modern architecture of the postwar