Imagining the Organic City Modern Tropes of Organization Meike Schalk Faculty of Landscape Planning, Horticulture and Agricultural Sciences Department of Landscape Architecture/Alnarp Doctoral thesis Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences Alnarp 2007 Acta Universitatis Agriculturae Sueciae 2007: 28 ISSN 1652-6880 ISBN 978-91-576-7327-5 © 2007 Meike Schalk, Alnarp Tryck: SLU Service/Repro, Alnarp 2007 Abstract Meike Schalk (2007) Imagining the Organic City. Modern Tropes of Organization Acta Universitatis Agriculturae Sueciae. Doctoral Thesis No 2007:28 ISSN:1652-6880 ISBN:978-91-576-7327-5 This thesis examines three ’organic tropes’ of modern architecture and urban design, addressing different crucial moments of change within modernist discourse. Attention is focused on the institutionalization of ‘town planning’ at the turn of the last century; the shift during the post-war years; and the beginning of urban debate in Japan during the early 1960s. The study builds upon the thesis that ‘the organic’ constitutes a basic trope of a modernism that reinvents the term over and over again. In its ambivalent relationship to modernity, which it both embraces and rejects, the organic hovers between progressivist and nostalgic imaginations. There has been relatively little enquiry into ‘the organic’ as part of the larger system of modernism in architecture and urbanism. This is because of its unclear identity. Historically, urban organic rhetoric emerged in times of change, revision, or when a debate about basic principles of planning practice was at stake, in times that were experienced as crisis. The rhetoric of the organic springs from the desire or need to reconcile conflicting parts into a coherent whole. The urban schemes discussed here, such as Patrick Geddes’ vision of an organic city, or the megastructures of the metabolists, are based on contradictions taking in aspects of individual agency and collectivity, or fragmentation and totality. Attempting to take a holistic perspective on urban processes and city change, they opened up for a range of political issues concerning authority in city planning and the status of the citizens in this procedure. Beside formal questions we find organizational concerns that go beyond static plans in envisioning sustainable futures through the thinking in processes and the proposal of programs. This text explores discursive and theoretical works with a distinct programmatic character, which have primarily taken place at the level of visions rather than through actual materializations in the city fabric. These works are considered in the context of their projective model character, and their relevance for the discourse on cities and citizens, the nature of planning, and urban design. Keywords: organic, nature, organism, prototype, model, types, objèt type, evolution, morphology, division of labour, city, cell, society, biology, modernism, vision, Patrick Geddes, valley section, urban design, CIAM, Team 10, megastructure, metabolism, group form, structure, symbol, Japan, information, organization. Meike Schalk, Department of Landscape Architecture Alnarp, SLU, Box 58, 23053 Alnarp, Sweden [email protected] Content Acknowledgements 4 Introduction 6 Nature and anthropocentrism 7 Organic city 9 The aesthetic organic 10 The functional organic 11 Organic post-war rhetoric 12 Urbanism and modernity 14 Outline 17 I Nature, organisms and architecture 20 1 An archaeology of the organic 21 Nature as paradigm 22 The advent of the organism in Kant 25 Foucault’s notion of archaeology 29 The shift from character to function 31 Organic principles 34 Origin and evolution 35 Nature in the natural and human sciences 37 2 The ‘natural’ development of architectural form 42 The origin of architecture: from static model to generic types 42 Modern organic architecture in America 51 Le Corbusier’s ‘objèt type’ 54 II Organic tropes in western city planning 60 3 Labour, cities and technology 61 The division of labour in Marx, Spencer, and Durkheim 62 Shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft in Tönnies and Ruskin 66 Geddes visualizes the organic city 70 ‘Social metabolism’ in the Chicago School of Urban Sociology 79 Mumford’s biotechnics and Jünger’s organic construction 85 4 ‘Emotional needs’ of the ‘common man’ in the post-war years 94 Design and democracy 95 Organic critique from within CIAM 97 Team 10 and the recycling of the Valley Section 106 New vision and the art of environment 113 III Organic images 126 5 ‘Westernization’ 127 ‘Japanese spirit and western knowledge’ 127 Japanese national identity and the problem of style 130 Reforming the domestic 136 Planning the nation 141 6 Western images of Japan 146 Wright’s Organic Architecture in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo 146 Modern architecture and the traditional Japanese house in Taut 153 Imitation 163 7 Metabolism 164 Architectural culture of reconstruction 164 The death of CIAM and the World Design Conference 169 ‘Metabolism’ 173 Structural and symbolic reorganization 174 International Models 181 Megastructure and Group Form 183 Space, place and image 185 Reception 187 Conclusion 190 The organism, cell, and society 190 The city 191 Information and the visual paradigm 191 Metabolism 192 The organic 194 Bibliography 196 Illustrations 211 Acknowledgements First and foremost I wish to express deep gratitude to my advisors Kenneth Olwig, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, and Helena Mattsson for inspiring discussions, constructive criticism, and valuable advice. This thesis has benefited immensely from the reading and comments of my opponent at the final PhD seminar, Katja Grillner, and at a PhD seminar from my opponent Lars-Henrik Ståhl. Thanks to both of you. I am grateful for the support and feedback from colleagues and friends at the Department for Landscape Planning in Alnarp, among them Maria Hellström, Eva Gustavsson, Mattias Qviström, Åsa Ahlklo, and Anders Larsson. Thank you also to Tiina Sarap, former dean, and Gunilla Lindholm, head of the department now, for their support along the way, and to Christina Heintz and Agneta Borg-Nilsson for all help with practical issues. At the School of Architecture, KTH, in Stockholm, it was above all the seminars and conferences of the critical theory research group xakt that have provided an important forum for debate. Here I owe special thanks to Thordis Arrhenius. Thank you also to Staffan Schmidt for valuable comments. My thanks should be extended to Apolonija Šušteršiþ who invited me to participate in a Patrick-Geddes-workshop at the DCA in Dundee. In Japan, my deepest gratitude goes to Kisho Kurokawa for an interview, and to Kenta Kishi for all help, and finding my way at the Tokyo University Library. Thanks is owed to Knut & Alice Wallenbergs Stiftelse and the Helgo Zettervall Fond that allowed for necessary study visits. I want to thank all the librarians and archivists of KTH Arkitekturbiblioteket, Kungliga Biblioteket, Arbetarrörelsens archive och biblioteket in Stockholm, Alnarpsbiblioteket, Orkanenbiblioteket, Biblioteket för arkitektur och design LTH, Tokyo University Library, MoMA’s Museum Library in New York, Dundee University Archives, and Baukunstarchiv of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Thank you to Jeff Kinkle and Michael Perlmutter for a final assessment of the language, and to Brian Manning Delaney for the translation of German quotations into proper English. I thank Knut Bayer for the fine layout of the jacket. Finally, thank you to my family for their understanding and support over all these years. My deepest gratitude goes also to Antje, Katrin, Ulrike and Jack for their encouragement in taking this work to a conclusion. Above all, thank you so much Axel for the beautiful cover image and so much more! 4 5 Introduction Anthropocentrisms – Organic city – The aesthetic organic – The functional organic – Urbanism and modernity – Outline This dissertation examines three ’organic tropes’ of modern architecture and urban design, addressing different crucial moments of change within modernist discourse. Attention is focused on the institutionalization of ‘town planning’ and its inauguration as an academic subject at the turn of the last century, the shift during the post-war years, and the beginning of urban debate in Japan during the early 1960s. The study builds upon the thesis that ‘the organic’ constitutes a basic trope of a modernism that reinvents the term over and over again, continuously adapting it to the shifts in an urban discourse. In its ambivalent relationship to modernity, which it both embraces and rejects, the organic hovers between progressivist and nostalgic imaginations. The thesis concentrates on clarifying several organic positions, to highlight in which way they differed, and in what respect their arguments had also grown out from one another, and had partly returned transformed, in the dress of novelty. In this way the thesis reveals critical moments in the debate of city planning and architecture that have consciously and unconsciously organized and reorganized both fields. This text hereby explores discursive and theoretical works with a distinct programmatic character, which have primarily taken place at the level of visions rather than through actual materializations in the city fabric. These works are considered in the context of their projective model character, and their relevance for the discourse on cities and citizens, the nature of planning, and urban design. Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking Les mots et les choses (1966)1 has provided an understanding of the discourse