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Rethinking the modern programme

Hauberg, Jørgen; Bjerrum, Peter

Publication date:2016

Document Version:Peer reviewed version

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Citation for pulished version (APA):Hauberg, J., & Bjerrum, P. (Accepted/In press). Rethinking the modern programme: - a retrospective review intothe possibilities of a social and natural sustainable urbanization.. Paper presented at Regional Urbanism in theEra of Globalisation, Huddersfield, United Kingdom.

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Rethinking the modern programme - a retrospective review into the possibilities of a social and natural sustainable urbanization. Peter Bjerrum, Emeritus dr.arch. Institute of Architecture and Planning The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture Email: pbjer@kadk.dk Jørgen Hauberg, Assoc.Prof. Institute of Architecture and Design The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture Email: jhau@kadk.dk

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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’,

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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.

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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. 8

Une Cité-Industrielle: An industrial City was elaborated by Tony Garnier, and exhibited as an ideal city in 1904: ”It is a fictional city: let us imagine that cities in Rive-de-Gier, Saint-Etienne, Saint Chaumont, Chasse and Givors have conditions like this city. The location of the project is in a region of the South-eastern France, and the city is constructed with local materials.”9 This Industrial, linear city was based upon the utopian socialist,

foremost Charles Fourier and Jean Baptiste Godin, and their ideas and projects. The city comprises 35.000 inhabitants and is located on a plateau sloping down to a river. Factory areas are located separately and between these and the dwellings is the railroad. In close vicinity lies an older city. The city is divided in blocks by 30 m of width north south and 150m of length east west; streets are east west 13-19m, north south 20m. All areas around buildings are public, shaping a continuous green park. This final proposal was published 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution. The Russian Revolutions’ linear cities: In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution o. 1930 more proposals and contributions towards the social rebuilding were presented. Among the city planners were proponents of both centralisation and decentralisation. The former alleged urbanists’ proposal was gigantic urban blocks housing a thousand or more inhabitants. These cornbinats were to be equipped with facilities such as nurseries, gymnasia, sports halls, and communal cafeterias, while the latter alleged de-urbanists’ alternative was continuous city-bands of individual housing-units supplied with zones of social amenities, equally facilitating the development in sparsely populated areas and unite isolated communities.10 N.A. Milyutin: In 1930 Milyutin elaborated a proposal to the development of Volgograd, which in accordance with the existing linearity along the river, Volga, proposed 6 lengthwise zones of functions. These were all relatively narrow to shorten the distance crosswise e.g. between work

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and home. Milyutin put forward 6 zones organised preferable along rivers, lakes or closely to nature. The order of the zones was: 1.: railroad, 2.: industries and institutions, 3.: park bands, 4.: residential areas comprising: common facilities, private homes and childcare, 5.: sport facilities, 6.: Farming with horticulture and livestock.

Magnitogorsk: Ivan Leonidov’s ”project for a socialist resettlement” at the Magnitogorsk chemical-metallurgical plant was based at the criteria that the prime aim was "first, a new social concept, and second, its translation into architecture." The project merged the urbanists’ and the de-urbanists’ ideas of new social concepts and translated into an architecture, which comprised both low-rise housing of two storey and high-rises of thirteen storey. In the project the low-rise housing inhabited groups of sixteen people occupying a house in a group of eight houses, which formed a neighborhood of 128 inhabitants. The

high-rises were formed in pairs of twin towers, each inhabiting 96 people, and so forming a neighborhood of 192 people. Both designs were supplied with common amenities for hygiene, leisure and consumption. In the surrounding parkscape were located: nurseries, a kindergarten, a central club for cultural activities, a cinema, a meeting hall/auditorium and fields for physical exercise and for mass meetings. The overall plan was o linear city of three bands as a continuous overlapping nine square grid, distributing the counterposed housing sectors of high-rise towers and low-rise houses with interposed sectors of common social and recreational facilities, including sectors left over to horticulture. The public transportation arteries along the linear city-band between the housing neighborhoods to the industrial plant were supplied with pedestrian overpasses to bigger recreational complexes. Leonidov’s basic idea of the new social concept and its translation into architecture were expressed in the following aims: 1.: The arrangement of a group living in such a way as to avoid enforced socialization and excessive densities, which would inhibit the spontaneity of daily life; 2.: To establish a close relationship between architecture and nature thereby abolishing private lots and gardens; 3.: To provide a maximum freedom for living arrangements and for interpersonal relationships; 3.: To create a state of resilience (elan de vie) through the planned organization of a given territory.11 The New Regional Pattern: Besides the High-rice City from 1927 Ludvig Hilbersheimer’s sketched in 1949 a linear regional structure of “industries and gardens, workshops and farms”12 alongside existing rail track and highways, connecting the major cities of the east coast and Lake Michigan. The new linear structure were zones of agriculture, industry and habitation following rivers and major mining and quarrying. The proposal dispersed the industrial production of the big cities, pushing the growth of industry and habitation southwards. In the urban areas of these linear cities the distance to a railway station was 15-20 minutes on foot, in the rural areas 15-20 minutes by car.

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Le Corbusier and the linear city: Through CIAM Le Corbusier became involved in the Russian discussion on the side of the ‘centralists’ but was at the same time fascinated by the ideas of The linear City13, The Russian ‘decentralists’ criticised his La Ville Contemporaine for being a traditional concentric city, and as a response he wrote Réponse a Moscou14, in which he modified the project to La Ville Radieuse. The urban design was still centred on high density, but now the concentric part was merged with an extensible linear city. In the 1950th the ideas of linear cities were rediscovered under the auspices of ASCORAL15, and was presented by LC as a solution to regional transportation and localization i.e. to urbanisation.

After his many proposals, and his experience from Chandigarh, he recognized the idea of linear cities and stressed the question of proper localization as the key question, la clef, of urban design. Later in his testament, Mise au point, July 1965, he wrote that“the Linear Industrial City, was a necessary and redeeming form for solution of problems that had preoccupied reformers of good will, of all points of view, … We must localize industry and discover the meaning of the term to localize.”16 The term emerges from a critique of the cities of the industrialized world and his array of alternatives e.g. The three human settlements, where he sketches the relations between centered cities, the rural settlements and the proposed linear industrial city.

Brasilia: The construction of Brazil’s new capital was initiated 1956 and inaugurated 1960. Brasilia realized a long time plan to move the Central Government from the Atlantic Coast, intending to strengthen industrially and habitually the country’s inland. The urban plan was the winning competition entry by Lucio Costa, while Oscar Niemeyer was commissioned as architect of the majority of the governmental institutions. The urban design is a wing formed linear city following the shore of the nearby Lago Paranoás. The plan is lengthwise organised around a traffic axis following the wing form, which crosswise

is split by the axis of governmental buildings, like an arrow on a bow. At the junction of the axis is located the city centre. The wing formed linear city, the alleged Pilotes Plan,, comprises two zones of superquadres on each side of the 160 m traffic axis, comprising a highway with local roads on each side. A superquadre is a green residential neighbourhood of 6 stories apartment blocks on pilots facilitated with local stores, childcare centres, schools, sports etc. In each superquadre live 3.900 inhabitants equal to 500 pr. ha. Brasilia was planned to 750.000 inhabitants inside the Pilotes Plan, today increased to o. 3 m. incl. urban sprawl of gated communities and informal settlements outside the original Pilotes Plan. As is manifest in the above brief representation, the ideas and proposals for linear cities, as the progressive solution for the local concentric cities as well as their urban regional pattern, are closely linked to on-going concerns of generations of modern architects and city planners towards

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a social and natural sustainable urbanization. Nonetheless linear cities were never – besides Brasilia – a wide-ranging alternative to the concentric or gridded central cities of the former Metropolis or recent Mega City, but at most an alternative for their addendums in the suburbs, and then never more than a conglomerate of The garden City and few elements of higher density, let alone of the High-rise City.

The Finger Plan: The ideas of linear cities were implemented in Denmark by a group of architects led by Peter Bredsdorff, which designed the Finger Plan17 for the regional urban growth around Copenhagen as a linear city in 1948. The Finger Plan was an alternative to the most recognized post-war answer to the problem of urban sprawl The Greater London Plan18 by Patrick Abercrombie, who designed the London Green Belt of autonomous satellite cities around the central city, guiding growth towards 8 New Towns: e.g. Stevenage 1946, Basildon 1949, Milton Keynes 1967. Opposed to the unregulated growth of major cities, where layer upon layer were added to the city perimeter, ‘new towns’ like satellites around the central city became the preferred regional strategy for major cities after WWII, e.g. Stockholm: Vällingby 1954, Skärholmen 1964, Tensta 1970.

The Finger Plan was a different answer; like the satellite strategy it proposed new centres and laid out areas for housing, institutions and industries outside the central city, but the plan further organically linked the new suburbs and the old central city, locating the new regional growth along the infrastructure of roads and railroads. The plan attempted to balance residence and work to limit commuting, where possible at each finger, and where the fingers met the palm of the hand zones for industries were localized and connected crosswise, following the concentric perimeter of the central city. The basic idea of the plan was to freehold the countryside with greens, forests and agriculture between the linear city-fingers. The Finger plan attracted worldwide attention and was, as a realized linear city, beside the satellite plans of new towns a model for urban growth. It was simple, based on existing conditions, economically sensible and technically facile; it presupposed no major changes to the inner city areas and secured for both the new and the old city easy access to parks and greens. Today the plan is still functioning, some space are still freehold between the fingers, but visibly “webbed” by urban sprawl, and the density in the fingers is low. The housing is mostly suburban single-family homes, which makes the public transportation less efficient and the boundary between city and open landscape less clear and less necessary. There is a clear graduation of density and balanced zoning between housing, institutions and industries from north through west to south, following the distribution of social classes. The northern finger along the coast of Øresund being the most affluent and less dense, while the southern finger along the coast to Køge, and the newly planned finger, Ørestad, close to the central city are the more consistent implemented fingers, or linear cities. In Ørestad the density is high and the urban area is from the start provided with a Metro, housing, institutions and industries lengthwise, and with the open landscape closely crosswise.

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Resilient strategies: Throughout history, architects have mostly been dealing with the institutions and residences of the rich and mighty, while the dwelling of the people were at the mercy of property speculation or left to self-organization. With the modern programme MM progressively placed social housing on architecture’s agenda, bearing in mind the shortage of housing under the 1920th crisis in the aftermath of WWI and the Russian revolution. Accordingly Le Corbusier, in Towards a New Architecture from 1922, the question was “Architecture or revolution?” – Also stated in his manifesto The Home of Man from 1942: “… people live in poor conditions, this is the real, the most profound reason for the battles and upheavals of our time.” The 19th and early 20th century Metropolis and the 21st century Mega City encompass the major social changes of past and current history towards modern liberal capitalism. For better or worse, this is the 21st century’s challenge concerning global and local regulations to restore social and natural damages in the slipstream of peoples migration from rural areas to still bigger urban agglomerations, let alone to prevent hazards caused by depletion of resources and liability to climate change, In the 21st century, this goes on with even bigger pace in the emergent regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America, endlessly shifting the allocation and reallocation of production, and transforming past century Metropolis to recent Mega City regions. Cities of various scales hold since the turn of the century 50% of the world population, estimated at 65% in 2050. Hence Le Corbusier’s concern for the home of man is met by new concerns for the local and global milieu, as a conflict between keeping pace with the social demand of the masses and its long-term impact on the environment – between the needs of man and the need of Mankind. The manifestoes and projects of MM, and in particular those of LC, have been crucial to modern architecture’s approach to culture and nature, and subsequently to cities and landscapes. Controversial at times regarding its impact on urban planning MM’s potentials have often been ignored as relevant to current concerns and discussions on sustainable urbanization. The restoration of lost urbanity included in late modern criticism joint with the gentrification processes of the central city have dismissed the modern programme from architecture’s agenda on urban planning, and more or less succumbed earlier ideas of master plans for localisation of housing, institutions and industries. Nevertheless the above advocated modern programme on housing with light, air and view – unifying home, city and nature around the modern apartment block of dwellings – might be valued not only for its proximity to greens but also for its high-density potential. Being a key issue of sustainability in urban contexts this potential puts the modern programme back on architecture’s agenda, still holding relevance, as for incorporating the ‘Home of Man’ in a sustainable setting. With reference to modernism’s tabula rasa, the objectives of our research cannot be a new universal programme – another heroic utopia. It has be an inquiry into the diversity of the prevailing global urbanism, taking into account the conflicting aspirations of past and current architectural conduct and knowledge, as stated above. Far from unravelling these urban conflicts, we adopt a perspective on architectural practice and theory, embodying the 19th and 20th century’s urban history, which we claim still provides a paradigmatic discourse for researchers, educators and practitioners. Hence our objective is – on the basis of the inherited material urban history – to affirm the crevices within the likewise inherited

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dichotomies embedded in modern architecture’s views on art, culture and nature as openings into the acknowledgement of the complexity and entanglement of architecture and sustainability. It is in the realm of the urban laboratory of applied models by the self-same MM that we are identifying a territory to question and investigate. Hence, the rationale of our research is that rethinking the modern program, eloquently questioning the formative influence of MM might uncover a more sensitive path towards sustainable urbanisation – in so far as it implies not only critical but also affirmative strategies. Globally, the discourse on sustainability is an apocalyptic political agenda influencing all major issues of urbanization and of architecture. Locally, however, there subsists a resiliently pragmatic approach to the apocalyptic scenarios of present and future urbanization. Given the dispersal of previous urbanization, extensibility is locally a major pragmatic, task of architecture towards a sustainable density of the build environment. Said concept of the city as a ‘laboratory of the models’ might offer an affirmative conduct in line with the above subheading, as for the possibilities of a socially and naturally sustainable urbanization.

Emeritus dr.arch. Peter Bjerrum and assoc. prof. Jørgen Hauberg

1 LC, Precisions on the present state of Architecture and City Planning, Cambridge Mass.: The MIT Press 1991, pp. 213-231. 2 Cf. Rem Koolhaas, Mau, Hans Werlemann, S. M. L. XL, New York: Monacelli, 1998, pp. 1239-1264. 3 Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman, California: Stanford University Press, 1991, pp 24-35. 4 Congrès International d’Architecture Modern, Founded 1928 in Chateau de la Sarraz in Switzerland by a group of 28 architects among others: Le Corbusier, Siegfried Gideon, Pierre Charreau, Karl Moser, Gerrit Rietveld, Hannes Meyer, Andre Lurcat. The organization held 11 Congresses until its dissolution in 1959. 5 Boyd, Robin. Kenzo Tange, makers of contemporary architecture. London: Prentice-Hall International, 1962. 6 Suisman, D.; Simon, S. N.; Robinson, G. E.; Anthony, C. R.; and Schoenbaum, M., The Arc: A formal Structure for a Palestinian State, Centre for Middle East Public Policy, The Rand Corporation, 2007. 7 World Bank, Development Report 1999-2000: Entering the 21th century, Published by the World Bank, Oxford University Press, 2000. 8 Choay, Francoise, The Modern City: Planning in the 19th Century, London: Studio Vista, 1969. 9 Wiebenson, Dora, Tony Garnier, Une Cité Industrielle, London: Planning and Cities, Studio Vista, 1969. 10 ed. Frampton, Kenneth; Kolbowski, Silvia, Ivan Leonidov, USA: Rizzoli International Publications, 1981. 11 Ibid. 12 Hilbersheimer, Ludwig, The New Regional Pattern: Industries and gardens, workshops and farms. Paul Theobald, Chicago, 1949. 13 Corbusier & CIAM, The Athens Charter, New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973. 14 Mumford, E., The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism 1928-1960, MIT Press, 2002. 15 Assemblée de Constructeurs pour une Rénovation Architecturale. 16 Le Corbusier, The Final Testament of Père Corbu (Mise au Point), New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967, p 93. 17 Egnsplankontoret, Skitse til Egnsplan for Storkøbenhavn. Dansk Byplanlaboratorium, 1947. 18 Abercrombie, Patrick, Greater London Plan, London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1944.