Urban dilemmas: Prussian Rationalism, French folies de grandeur, Catalonian civility, Norwegian urbanity.

A couple of decades before Prince Charles started to build his hameau at Poundbury (p51), a quite different approach to urban planning was being explored in Berlin. West Berlin was still run down and isolated, while the eastern half of the city (the capital of the communist German Democratic Republic, the DDR) was in some ways comparatively flourishing. The federal government in Bonn was determined to make its half of the city (an island in the middle of the DDR) into a showcase for Western values, to sweep away the remains of war damage and give the outlying enclave a vigorous economic and cultural life. Much of the fabric had to be rebuilt or renewed, and the federal authorities poured billions into the task. West Berlin became a forcing house for new ideas about urban architecture and planning.

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Since the beginning of the century, Germany had fostered a tradition of organizing exhibitions in which the buildings were permanent and intended to act as types for further developments (Mies's 1927 Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung was one of the most famous). In Berlin, the Internationales Bau Ausstellung (IBA) was set up to perform the same function in the 1980s. Lavishly funded by the federal government concerned and under the immediate control of the Berlin Senate, the IBA was divided into two parts: Neubau (new building) under J. P. Kleihues and Altbau (old building) under H.-W. Hamer.

In fact, the two were not solely concerned with either old or new buildings but rather worked in different parts of the city. Hamer's group was largely concerned with the poorer areas, places like Kreuzberg and Luisenstadt with their large immigrant populations. Altbau put emphasis on participation and renovation of the huge Miethaus complexes, very dense housing deeply planned round semipublic courtyards to accommodate the peasants from the south and east who flooded to Berlin in the industrial revolution that followed the unification of Germany in 1871.

Much fine and socially important work was done by the Altbau group, but it was Neubau that attracted most of the headlines. In his own work, Kleihues was much influenced by the Italian variety of Rationalism (the Tendenza), forcibly promoted by Aldo Rossi in books like L'Architettura delle Citta (1962) and Architettura Razionale (1982). The aim of urban Rationalism was to reknit the civic fabric that had so obviously been exploded by the precepts of the Charte d'Athenes (and in Berlin's case by war). Traditional types and spaces: tenement blocks, streets and squares were to be reinterpreted in austere, unornamented buildings which, some thought, would acquire gentler qualities under the influences of use and time.

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Kleihues and his group were mainly concerned with the much destroyed dense fabric of Baroque Berlin, southern Friedrichstadt, though they had responsibility for more outlying areas such as Tegel as well. The group set up numerous competitions for schemes intended to knit the city together; most of them were for social housing, but there were other elements as well, particularly schools. Most of the people asked to enter the competitions were Rationalists, though there were exceptions--in relatively suburban Tegel for instance, American PoMo was promoted and large blocks by people like Stanley Tigerman and Moore, Ruble, Yudell emerged; they are some of the most modest and urbane products of the usually flashy genre.

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But in Friedrichstadt, Rationalism drove. Its austerity was not inappropriate. Berlin is a tough, hard city, for so much of its pre-1945 fabric was created under the auspices of Prussian militarism and ruthless industrialization. Rob Krier, Giorgio Grassi and Aldo Rossi himself were some of the most well-known IBA competition winners. (1) Rossi's corner housing block in Rauchstrasse (AR April 1987) was derived from patterns to be found in the harsh industrial building of the late nineteenth century; some critics were ravished by Rossi's decision to use British racing green to paint the metal elements of his glazed walls. No one asked the inhabitants what they thought.

This austerity and apparent lack of humanity was one of the drawbacks of the IBA programme, and so was the fact that, because of the funding system, the city was to be re-awakened almost entirely with social housing. Bureaucratic Modernist financial structures ensured that much of the spirit of the Charte d'Athenes lived on in IBA's work, however much the architects and planners resented the fact. Colin Rowe criticized the IBA programme as 'several suburbs in search of a city', (2) which it was bound to be, for the division between Eastern and Western zones of the city had given the prosperous residential areas to the Federal Republic, while the DDR held the city centre and most of the industrial parts. Even so, the IBA was an immensely important event in urban thinking. The AR made two special issues on its achievements (September 1984 for projects, and April 1987 for some of the completed work), but as we published the second one, it was becoming clear that IBA's achievements were not directly replicable in other cities, partly because of its strange geographical and political status--and because Rationalism was not enough. In any case, the whole world in which IBA had been conceived was about to change utterly when the Wall came down in 1989 (an event almost totally inconceivable even in 1987). After the two halves of the city were reunited, architectural attention naturally moved to the city centre and the desert strip that had been established on both sides of the Wall.

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In the mid '80s, the French government (inspired perhaps by the achievements of IBA) decided to revitalize Paris. Unlike Berlin or London, the city was virtually untouched by war, but like many previous French heads of state, Mitterrand was determined to make his mark on his capital. Mitterrand's government generated a series of contemporary focal monuments intended firmly to establish the capital as a showground for late twentieth-century architectural and urban thinking. Competitions were held and huge buildings were made. Sadly, results were more grandiose than convincing. The Finance Ministry by Chemetov & Huidobro that juts out into the river is one of the most aggressive buildings made in the city in the second half of the century. The Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris by Dominique Perrault is a ludicrous diagram of how not to build a library, with book stacks arranged in four separate glass towers that absurdly physically divide knowledge and overheat the books. When seen from the Place du Carrousel, the huge elementary form of the Grande Arche at La Defense by Otto von Spreckelsen terminates the great axis of the Champs-Elysees and brings some sort of order to the collection of remarkably nasty commercial buildings that surrounds it. (Unlike London, Paris had the very good sense to save its delicate centre by putting its '60s business sector on the edge of the traditional city.) But the Arche is empty and meaning-less--and a most unpleasant place to work in; it symbolizes the grandiose vacuity of most of Mitterrand's Projets.

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Barcelona had a different approach to urban regeneration. A socialist administration was concerned to make the city a suitable setting for the 1992 Olympic Games and, under the guidance of Oriol Bohigas of the local practice MBM, numerous small local initiatives were undertaken, parks, squares and so on, creating and enhancing the public realm, knitting together the decayed and unfinished parts of the city's famous Cerda planning grid (AR special issue August 1992). While the results may not be as dramatic as those of IBA or the Grands Projets, Barcelona undoubtedly provides a more sustainable approach to mending cities, but it does depend on having an existing structure that needs repair.

Oslo has a very precise and beautiful city centre dating from the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But it had always had a shipyard on the harbour next door to the Town Hall. When this became redundant in the 1980s, its huge site, Akerbrygge, became available for building, but few guidelines for development could be derived from what already existed. A team led by Niels Torp and others evolved a masterplan that involved creation of a new set of urban spaces that lock into the surrounding city; they range from piazza and boulevard to quay and alley. Most importantly, Akerbrygge had a developer prepared to support mixed-use buildings, so flats can be found over offices, themselves on top of cinemas and shops; restaurants, shopping and entertainment fill the remaining shipyard buildings (AR August 1990). For all the derivative quality of Akerbrygge's buildings (inspirations range from Erskine to Rossi), and for all its problems (mainly that it is expensive), it remains one of the finest and richest major urban developments of the second half of the twentieth century.

Berlin came back into focus in the mid '90s when, reinstated as the capital of Germany, its centre became the largest building site in the world. A new centre for the democratic state gradually evolved round the Reichstag (dramatically and controversially reworked by Foster and Partners, AR July 1999) and in the areas left abandoned round the Wall. One of the most important of these was the totally razed Potsdamer Platz, in pre-war Berlin, the entertainment and commercial focus of the city. Renzo Piano's interpretation of Hilmer & Sattler's masterplan set out to make a lively piece of real city, with mixed uses, varied heights and new public spaces; the development also had to link the eastern and western parts of the city by connecting to Scharoun's Neue Staatsbibliothek. AR January 1999 hailed the unfinished scheme as a triumph, enticing people from all over the city to its multifarious sparkling attractions, just as its predecessor had done in the 1920s. It was as successful as Akerbrygge, but on an even larger scale, and in a city that had become the cynosure of all Europe. Sadly, Potsdamer Platz has as yet had no convincing successor.

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While the form of the city was being rethought, so were some of its constituents, particularly buildings for transport such as Erskine's Stockholm bus station, which for the first time ever civilized a normally unpleasant and sometimes revolting building type (AR December 1989), as did Niels Torp's Gothenburg bus station (AR March 1997). Nicholas Grimshaw's reworking of the train shed for the Channel Tunnel services at Waterloo station in London (with engineer Tony Hunt) produced a more elegant interpretation of the type than anything seen since the nineteenth century (AR September 1993). Numerous less grand railway stations on both main lines and metros, from the West Coast of North America to old cities of Europe like Paris, Berlin and London have helped invigorate urban districts. Museums have been one of the most well documented building types of the last quarter century, and many have made important contributions to civic figure and life, both by renovating old buildings (the British Museum and the Louvre for instance) and by making new ones which become urban foci (such as the Guggenheim, Bilbao and the Getty in Los Angeles). The most extraordinary of these is surely the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie by Stirling and Wilford (finished 1984). It is an amazing collage of wit, learning, ingenuity and invention: Stirling's masterpiece. On its revisit to the building for the Stirling memorial issue (AR December 1992), the AR commented that 'there is an extraordinary interweaving of major and minor routes, the public and the private, offering sudden revelations of small places and unexpected paths as well as the obvious grand routes and formal spaces. The complexity allows each of us to interpret the building in an individual and personal way. In the best sense of the term, this is a brilliant post-modern building.

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'It is a democratic monument because it takes some of the monumental types of the past and translates them for our less socially hierachical time. It makes all of us into actors and spectators at the same time ... It makes a grand figure in the city, celebrates qualities of site, artefact and nature ... And it works--both as gallery and urban path. How many other twentieth-century buildings can offer this richness?'

1 Others included Peter Eisenman, who was posing as a part-time Rationalist at the time, and Alvaro Siza, who produced his saddest building in the Altban section, which the tenants actually labelled 'Bonjour tristesse' in graffiti.

2 AR September 1984, p93.

RELATED ARTICLE: excerpts

BERLIN ORIGINS TO IBA

Peter Davey and Douglas Clelland

April 1987

For all the limitations of the programme, and the problems that the bureaucracy and the funding organization have created, IBA's achievement has been heroic. Much yet needs to be built, but large parts of the main IBA areas have been fleshed out and the life restored to the areas which have been worked on begins to justify the hope and passion invested in the project by Kleihues, Hamer and their teams.

They hoped that IBA would be an example to the world and so it should be--but it is one to be interpreted with caution. It will be disastrous if the architecture and planning which have emerged in the main IBA areas were to become a style. They are regional in the best sense--highly specific to West Berlin: to its existing fabric, topography and life patterns. To some, inner Berlin is a grim city made of walk-up flats round dingy courtyards--but the ways of living that these embody are loved by the citizens. Even though the IBA work mitigates the grimmest aspects of Berlin, it scarcely seems sensible to make the physical pattern of West Berlin one for the world in general. IBA's essential lessons for other cities are in its commitment to inner-city living and its processes of planning and realization.

Heroically, IBA has shown that it is possible to produce contemporary architecture which does relate to the city and can help to regenerate inner urban life. But the IBA experience demonstrates that such architecture can only be achieved by deep study of history and the existing: each city quarter should consider its own past and each must be different in the present.

IBA REFLECTIONS, Colin Rowe, September 1984

A SPECIES OF ARCHITECTURAL ZOO

We are at present threatened with a species of architectural zoo which, by that woman who calls herself Claire Obscure, has already been itemized--a Catalonian fort by Bohigas, an esquise by Rossi, a quadrillage esoterique by Eisenman, and a collection of Hanseatic warehouses from Lugano.

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At present the Kulturforum is everything that I have described it as being, and particularly so at night. The Kulturforum could only begin to become redeemed and approach brilliance if the Nationalgalerie were willing to stay open very late. For try to imagine that Miesian objet de luxe, that glass box, that lantern of hospitality and Weimar 'illumination', as it was presumably supposed to appear ... The transparent Nationalgalerie ought to become a beacon, a lighthouse of whatever values the city represents. And the basic problem remains the settlement of the Zentraler Bereich, as it passes by the Potsdamer Tor. And, about this, either IBA or the city continues to be embarrassingly diffident ...

In spite of the deficiencies which I have alleged, I am sure that IBA is still the best that exists. It is charged, I am sure, with an impossible mission. Its constitution is an evident conflict of interests. As far as I can see no city can be made out of Sozialewohnungsbauen alone. The great city requires something in excess of that. It requires far more than the measuring mind of twentieth-century government and bureaucracy are willing to contribute. For the happiness and the amour propre of the people living within it, in order to make them proud, the great city requires the elaborate display of otherwise useless emblems.

LANDSCAPE, ARCHITECTURE, URBANISM

Peter Buchanan, June 1984

We seem to be searching for some new paradigm for urban life. Just because the Modernist city and its architecture perfectly reflect the alienating effects of modern civilization is no good reason for persisting with them. Is it really naive and regressive to want cities that once again dignify man as central to their frame--cities in which citizens can promenade proudly, rather than circulate as consumers?...

Landscape has its own poetics--to which even the most deracinated of Modern architects cannot help but respond. The current widespread interest among architects in landscape and gardens is because they retain an undeniable magic that buildings and cities have lost. Yet this magic can be achieved without embarrassing iconography and ornament from the past ... For the modern architect, nature's ornament is a wonderful boon ... Yet in desperately turning to increasingly large tubbed ficus benjamina something still eludes these architects. For in the best landscape and gardens the magic is experienced not just because they contain plants, but because they are conceived as realms for the free play of the imagination, as triggers for contemplation, dreams and even the wildest flights of the imagination. And instead of diluting urban life, such poetics deepen its meanings.

NEW LIGHT ON LA

Frances Anderton, December 1987

Driving in Los Angeles can be a pleasure but the liberating, efficient, independent lifestyle engendered by the freeway network is available only to those aware of the essentially logical workings of a highly-tuned mechanism. One incompetent driver and the system, like a string of dominoes, goes out of sync. LA's apparent ability to infinitely absorb and expand is exhausting itself. The ever-increasing immigrant population cannot be comfortably accommodated and the freeways are simply clogging up. The future of LA rests on the efficacy of its transport. John Pastier examines the possibilities for a public transport system in a city that caters exclusively for the private car.

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This city is coming into its own. Still leaping, with unabashed enthusiasm, up unexplored creative and technological avenues, it is also developing a respect for its past and surprising ways of dealing with the present. Los Angeles is one of the pioneer cities of the Pacific Century.

BARCELONA, A CITY REGENERATED

Peter Buchanan, August 1992

WHAT CIVIC LIFE COULD BE LIKE

What Barcelona offers the world is no less than an alternative vision of what civic life and form in the late twentieth century could be like. The vision might be characterized as modernity with a memory, a modernity highly respectful of and particular to local conditions and culture, so tempering its usual destructive impulses. Barcelona proves that providing all the choices and conveniences of modern life does not necessitate the substitution of pungent character for a bland internationalism. Nor does it necessitate the fragmentation and dispersal of the fabric of the city and the resulting reflection of this in the lives and psyches of its citizens. In the typical modern city, life is fragmented into separate and partial roles played out in differing settings: home, work, leisure and so on. Though preferred by most people, such a life style minimizes the chances of encountering and getting to know others and so ultimately oneself too.

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The regeneration of Barcelona is radical in that it could be seen as the antithesis to this seemingly inexorable trend. The compactness of the city helps. But most important is its contiguous and richly varied public realm, which instead of being eroded, has been so thoroughly enhanced and extended. The implications of this are potentially profound. Here it seems is a city that, like a traditional one, might frustrate easy retreat into self-deluding fantasy. Whether such ideas prove to be of any substance or long term benefit, we can only wait and see.

But it is interesting to speculate that, just as the destruction of the natural environment is leading to constantly better understandings of our dependencies on it, so the destruction of historic cities might lead to us discovering much about the complex ways they nurtured our many facets and their full development. Though this understanding will quite correctly encourage conservation, it should not so much stop change as guide it more satisfactorily. The inexorable evolution of society and technology will continue to necessitate change. But it is important that this should cease to result in an impoverishment of our world, and lead instead to its enrichment in complexity and viability. In these terms, Barcelona might be a model for the post-industrial city, a post-modern rather than Post-Modern one. As such it is certainly far more important and forward-looking than, for example, Prince Charles' unrealistically regressive Urban Villages.

TURNING POINT, BARCELONA

Oriol Bohigas, December 1984

Stirling & Wilford's new Staatsgalerie sums up the most positive aspects of the current turning point in architecture. The best of contemporary architecture, far from being in a state of phoney crisis and reactionary 'Post' stances, is following a process common to periods of stability and continuity throughout architectural history. Today, the root of this process can be found in the rational period of the Modern Movement. The process is one of gradual re-adjustment to the postulates formulated at the beginning of the period in a challenging and Utopian spirit ...

One could define the present moment by analysing a few of its characteristics: a renewed interest in public buildings versus the former emphasis on social housing; the adaptation of Modern Movement prototypes to the urban context; a move beyond the merely functionial, as a compositional device, to now include the monumental; the use of colour in lieu of monochrome; an upgrading of the pioneering days' stylistic narrowness by legitimizing eclecticism in a critical re-evaluation of history.

All this is obvious in the magnificent Staatsgalerie at Stuttgart. The new museum brings together, in an almost polemical way, the grand themes of monumental public buildings. Inside and outside there is simultaneous expression of architectural and urban forms as well as of functional and symbolical requirements. The interiors not only constitute a competent art gallery design, but also offer sequences of rooms that go far beyond their immediate use and constitute an extension within the building of the city's forms and symbols. The exterior spaces, on the other hand, not only allow for pedestrian movement from one street to another, but constitute an itinerary with constant visual references to the museum.

There is no strain between the building and the urban environment. Further, interiors and exteriors cannot be understood as positive and negative aspects of the same composition. The building becomes city and the city becomes building. In a way, the Staatsgalerie revives the great works of engineering's long-lost tradition, in which a logical relationship was automatically established between functional problems and the transformation of the environment: in other words, siting constituted a functional requirement ...

It is difficult to find another building that conveys, with such perfection, a linguistic coherence and faithfulness to the syntax of the most radical avant-garde of the Modern Movement, and this despite the use of various historical quotations. These quotations--Neo-Classical, Baroque, Corbusian, Constructivist or Loosian--have another important programmatic value: they demonstrate how eclecticism can use recent traditions, and thus, how the Modern Movement can be included in the continuum of history. ORIOL BOHIGAS Translated from Spanish by ODILE RENAULT

THE NEW SPIRIT, E. M. Farrelly, August 1986

Post-Modernism is dead. Some have known from the start that it was no more than a painted corpse, but for others it has taken a little longer to work through the deceptively populist arguments of the pasticheurs, the quasi-Classicists and the toy-town tarter-uppers towards the realization that while 'giving the people what they want' may sound like all-too-rare architectural humility, it has, with frightening rapidity, become no more than the pretty plaything of rampant capitalism. The success it has had (and is still, in its obedient, bankable way enjoying) has been achieved by offering an aesthetic path of least resistance and by appealing, after the demands and constraints of Modernism, to some of the least endearing aspects of human nature--indolence, ignorance, oppression and greed.

Now, however, something else is happening. Something new. After the relentless ossification of the Post-Modern era, things are beginning to stir again. Like the first breath of spring after a long and stultifying winter, these first stirrings are signs of hope.

There are, of course, those who prefer winter, who would choose the closed door, the airless room, the neatly shuttered mind over the demands of even the possibility of freedom. Those for whom the future holds only fear, for whom the past is something known and safe, to be therefore not only preserved but imitated, at any cost. For architecture, however, the cost has been silence, docility and despair, the tacit admission that there is nothing left to discover, nowhere left to go, and nothing left to say--in short, a sell-out.

LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF STOCKHOLM

Peter Davey, August 1983

All windows on the south, east and west sides are provided with orange canvas awnings like those on old-fashioned shops in English country towns. In the public areas these are operated automatically according to light conditions so the building has a life of its own, constantly changing its appearance in response to the weather. Where the square is gnawed into to make way for the oaks in the south-east corner, the hard, layered, grammar of the carapace is discarded to indicate the soft inside of the double-height reading space contained by membranes of glass and timber and brown plastic-coated corrugated steel. These membranes spread out over the ends of the concourse to indicate that here, too, is a big space tenuously contained. Frescati's richness is partly derived from the conflation of wildly disparate images--insect, liner, grove, railway station, internal village. And it comes from the way in whlch diverse materials and methods of construction are brought together. Erskine's easy assurance mixes stainless steel, timber and concrete panels ... Compared to this serene competence, the passion for consistency of British High-Tech architects seems timid. Equally trivial seem the efforts of Classical Post-Modernists to induce popular acceptance for their buildings by making pop facades to an essentially un-rethought standard plan. The planning of the Frescati library shows a profound understanding of the needs of the individual and his relationship to the wider community. It demonstrates how the latter twentieth century can come to terms with an institution in a civilized and previously impossible fashion. The forms and spaces with which the plan is realized reflect and emblify its humanity and variety and yet achieve a monumentality appropriate to the university's powerhouse.

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RESPONSIVE IRREGULARITY 

Peter Blundell Jones, February 1992

Irregular, asymmetrical buildings have been about for a long time, indeed there is a tradition of them running right back through the Modern Movement and beyond, to National Romanticism, Jugendstil and English Free Architecture. The aim has not been disorder or the inspiration despair. Rather a kind of idiosyncratic ordering has been sought in relation to the place and task, as opposed to the ready-made orders of type and technique. It has led to a new kind of architectural space, which is certainly related to our time and beliefs, but is neither primarily ironical nor negative in intention. Through and through, the emphasis has been not on empty form, but inhabited space: form and content only make sense in terms of one another ...

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This lineage ... has never yet gained consensus recognition by historians. Under the reign of Pevsner's Gropius-inspired Modernism, no heresies were allowed, and later, when that narrow creed was rejected, the whole of Modernism was rejected.

TRAVELLING HOPEFULLY, Peter Davey, May 1997

Anyone who has travelled on the British railway system in the last few years will have noticed the way in which the authorities now refer to the people who are (usually) suffering from lateness, filth, surly employees, and a generally distasteful and mucky experience as 'customers' rather than 'passengers'. The new lingo emphasizes the relationship of the provider of transport to the poor folk in the trains. A passenger is a person who experiences the moving (in all senses) experience of being taken from one place to another under someone else's guidance. A customer is a much more casual person, engaging in no more than a process of buying a packet of detergent or a kilo of apples. The sinister distortion of language is, of course, quite deliberate--an Orwellian manipulation of words by carriers to attempt to slough off responsibilities, ones that have been deeply built into cultural experiences of travel and our understanding of it since Charon started to row his boat across the Styx ...

Passage should have its rites, even if these are as unpleasant as being pushed into a commuter train in the Tokyo suburbs or being cosseted in Concorde's supersonic cocoon. Thank goodness, most of us have to experience neither of these often, but the extremes make clear that the purchase of passage is not the same as a supermarket transaction, and that beginnings and endings of journeys are moments of great psychological importance.

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