COLLAGE CITY

Colin Rowe + Fred Koetter MIT Press 1978

The first double page presents the argument of the book as an enigmatic pictogram; from Francesco do Giorgio Martini’s UTOPIAN city c. 1490 designed for the Duke of Milan to the revolutionary Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning 1911 -12.

This is a true binary which is resolved on page 140

Even before we start reading R+K offer the reader a playful new vision of a collaged architecture which will get the name “contextualist” in later

critical thought; a graphic designed by Griffin and Kolhoff called “City of Composite Presence”.

Introduction

a summary: page 181:

“The disintegration of modern architecture seems to call for …a strategy… an enlightened pluralism… and possibly

even common sense”

By page 4 we are made aware that we should embrace a liberal political reading of the failures of post war Utopian city planning as it had been interpreted in the United States. There is also an implication that these grand schemes were segregating sectors of city population, in particular black and Hispanic groups who were already rejecting the planners’ high rise blocks by trashing them.

P. 4 “impoverished banalities of public housing which stand around like the undernourished symbols of a new world which refused to be born”

P. 4 “the city of modern architecture has been rendered tragically ridiculous”

PRUITT- IGOE video debate + demolition

1956 -1971

Providence Journal August 30 2012

TRAGEDY

The proposal

R+K suggest “a constructive dis-illusion” (The “illusionist” will turn out to be Le Corbusier and his school of post war adherents)

Introduction: the problem of contemporary urban thinking; binary oppositions, contradictory positions, paradox

P.5 modern architecture.... both repulsive......two polarised positions neither of which offer the solution to the problem

Despotism of science:- let science build the town

The tyranny of the majority :- let people build the town

naïve idealism sterile scientific rigour

NATURE CUSTOM

IN DOUBT“the authenticity of the new”

the architect who is seen as a “a human Ouija board” (conducts a sort of communion with the dead architects of the past and possesses a supernatural power to see the future)

Meanwhile...

“The rape of the cities of the world proceeds”

Chapter 1: Utopia: Decline and Fall

p.11 MODERN ARCHITECTURE IS A THINLY DISGUISED ALIBIIts ideal was to exhibit the virtues of an apostolic poverty:

“a kingdom of heaven on earth”

FINSTERLIN: HYSTERICAL ecstatic GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM seen here in the illustrations of BRUNO TAUT’S fairy tale mountain communities

Chapter 1:

UTOPIANISM is the “the highly volcanic species of psychological lava which is the substratum of the modern city”

Frank Lloyd Wright saw the architect as the saviour of the culture of modern American society

or

Le Corbusier the great machine to be put in motion...the exact prescription for its ills

These architects display messianic passion:-

“they want to end the world and begin it anew”

MORE UTOPIAN fallacies

By the 18th century ARCADIAN activist Newtonian rationalism = society could be explained like physics

Henri de Saint Simon proposed universal ruling body/authority of the learned; the golden age is not behind us but in front and to be realised by the

perfection of the social order

-the activist / blueprint for utopia was born

The science of man: politics would be a branch of physics all knowledge was to act in concert artistic avant gardes were crucial to the destiny of the human race

All this led to“Utopian inflammation”

Science rules; Boullee ; Cenotaph to Newton c.1784

Even in 1914Antonio di Sant’Elia also can be traced backto the Saint-SimonUtopian school

Fourier ; PHALANSTERY; 1829 based on Versailles and a model for a sort of Marxist proletarian mega palace where the workers occupy the simulacrum/archetype of aristocratic privilege

p17 So if utopian plans were limited maybe society could change as a natural man who is a sort of utopian construct; the mythical noble

savage enters here. He lives in a pastoral arcadia leading us to a widest variety of performances – never a convincing possibility 1844 Darley ‘Scenes from Indian Life’ or Le Corbusier ‘ The Natural Man’ c 1929

Chapter 2: After the

Millennium

“A certain aimlessness has afflicted the modern architect”p. 33

Two opposing cults have emerged:

townscape Cubism and townscape are linked

“beer and yachts”. Ref: Gosling, D., 1996, Gordon Cullen, Visions

of Urban Design, AD Academy editions, London

science fiction.

THIS IS A REVIVAL process; hyper rationalization

townscape science fiction

THERE IS THE ASSUMPTION THAT THE EXISTING CITY WILL BE MADE TO GO AWAY.

p.40 “WE LIVE IN TOWNSCAPE AND WE SHOP IN FUTURISM”

That is we live in suburban streets with little gardens which make the townscape but our commercial and economic life is in the modern city

Later 20th century studios+ progressive modern architecture can be summarised as :

“a bout with destiny (followed by) a morning after nausea”Here are the named ateliers which are accused of one of a kind projects that fail to produce anything other than a series of prize winning exempla………..

• Superstudio• Friedman• Nakajima and GAUS• NER groupUSSR• Cumbernauld• Archigram• Team X

was “all this activity worth-while?”

Meanwhile popular preference is for a bijou sugar coated munchkin land………………

“Disneyworld is nearer to what people want than

architects have ever given them”

Roberto Venturi

P46 But the real Main street…… “registers an optimistic desperation”

FRANCES YATES: memory and the Gothic Cathedral

P.48 Frances Yates saw gothic cathedrals as

mnemonic devices - repositories of memory that also seem to predict the future

“theatres of memory” (conservative) . or

“theatres of prophecy” – (radicals)

“(There is a) failure to recognise the complementary relationship of processes of anticipation and retrospection”

Chapter 3; Crisis of the Object:

Predicament of Texture

p.52”

“Visually oriented minded architects and planners occupied with the trophies and triumphs of culture … had for the most part shamefully compromised not only the pleasurable possibilities but worse than this the essential sanitary bases of that more intimate world within which ’real’ people … actually do exist”

(TEXTURE=plan/matrix/pattern)

The 3 questionsp.49

1 why are we compelled to prefer a nostalgia for the future to that of the past?

2 could the imagined ideal city reflect /allow for our psychological constitution?

3 could this ideal city behave as theatres of memory (conservative) and theatres of prophecy – (radicals)?

The return to nature:“Great blocks of dwellings run through the town. What does it matter? They are

behind the screen of trees. Nature is entered into the lease” 1948 Le Corbusier The Home of Man

Le Corbusier ; Ville Radieuse 1930

1

Interwar emphasis on honesty and hygiene; freedom , nature and spirit

DE STIJL: Theo Van Doesburg;s architecture will develop in an all round plastic way; see Gropius’ 1929 development of rows of apartment blocks of different heights……

THE FIXATION of modern architecture: the building as interesting and detached object?

• Buildings are needed but also made to go away – • a contradiction• The positions of 1933 ATHENS CIAM to 1947 CIAM see an

acceptance that there is a city “core”NEW TOWN eg HARLOW c.1959p.61 “a foreign body interjectedinto a garden suburb without the benefit of quotation marks”

p.62-63 SOLID and VOID. Le Corbusier Saint–Die compared with the city of Parma; A figure / ground plan gestalt

opposition: the “proliferation of objects”

p.66; from diagnosis to prognosis

Vittoria, Spain Plaza Mayor

OR

Le Corbusier Plan Voisin 1925

Solid and void: “The Uffizi is Marseilles turned outside in… ajelly mould for the Unite”

VOIDS; the public realm as apologetic ghost

The city in the park became the city in the parking lot

p.65 it is just possible that alternatives are to be found………..

Tenet of modern architecture 1;

Why must all outdoor space be in public ownership?

memory and prophecy continued

Gunnar Asplund (memory) compared to Le Corbusier (prophecy). “Asplund attempts to make of his buildings as

much as possible a part of the urban continuum”

“we are concerned with their reconciliation” (memory and prophecy).

S.M della CONSOLAZIONE at TODI can become Sant’ Agnese in Piazza Navona ; “fluctuates between building as object and its reinterpretation as texture” Sant Agnese “simultaneously ‘compromised’ and intact”

“POCHE”; understood as the imprint of the plan upon the traditional heavy structure…

“But building as infill! The idea can seem deplorably passive…”

p.83

Allow for the joint existence of the overtly planned and the genuinely unplanned

Wiesbaden c1900

Chapter 4:

p. 88 “The garden as criticism of the city…” has its clearest expression at Versailles in the planning of LeNotre; “ an aristocratic Disney World”

Compare this autocratic plan with that of the apparently disorganised Villa Adriana at Tivoli constructed by the Emperor Hadrian based on his understanding of the City of Rome.

Versailles / Villa Adriana; “which is the most useful model for us?” “these are laboratory specimens” p. 93

fox + hedgehog

“The fox knows many things but a hedgehog knows one big thing “ Isaiah Berlin

Versailles is of the hedgehog and Hadrian’s Villa is of the fox…

Post world war II architects understandably had to operate the hedgehog big idea to save humanity

There is the utopian promise of the new city to emerge from this post war psycho-cultural context.

Against this is the freedom of vox populi; let the people decide what they want; these are foxes attacking a hedgehog. The “fantasy” of organic growth

WE NEED BRICOLEURS p.102

The key to “the prognosis” for R+K

Claude Levi-Strauss ‘The Savage Mind’ 1966 employed the term as a way of understanding the complexity of customs employed by primitive tribes “ the bricoleur is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks;……..the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions….. There are different kinds of projects… they are ‘operators’ …”

WE NEED BRICOLAGERome; “a resiliant traffic jam of intentions”p.106-7

THE COLLISION CITY“Rome is offered as some sort of model which might be

envisaged as alternative to the disastrous urbanism of social engineering and total design”

The theory of “politics and perception” is put together in this chapter. Politics of black segregation

We have an urgent need for the fox and the bricoleur

R+K include 13 photos of the plan of Rome in this chapter

Examples of architectural bricolage

Chapter 5:Collage City and the

Reconquest of Time

TIME

an iconic, cosmic, dramatic narrative enigma page repeated twice by R+K

This can be related to “image” “memory”“prophecy”

“solid”“void”

MODERNISM BETRAYED?Tradition and “Traduttore” = Traitor

what is this betrayal?

P125 The 20th century architect’s comparable rejection of tradition… but maintains a tacit affiliation to what is by now a distinctly traditional body of attitudes and proceduresThis explains the aspects of tradition which explain the 20th century architect’s distaste for this element in architectural design and by taking on tradition “betrays” the profession

MUSEUM CITYThe city as museum + the “museum predicament”

A positive concert of culture and educational purposeMunich became eclectic; “ a supremely conscientious profusion of references; Florentine, medieval, Byzantine, Roman, Greek”.

A city of objects and episodes

Its significance has remained unassessed

MUSEUM = scaffold vs EXHIBITS = demonstrations

Which dominates? Structure or eventModern architecture resolved this as an all

pervasive scaffold (structure)SOLUTIONA two way commerce/dialogue/dialectic is

required between these two forces

structure event

Modern architectural ethics; the tradition of modern architecture

always professing a distaste for art

Increasing poverty of meaning and decline of invention

Picasso + IMAGE“I have never made trials or experiments. Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth, at least the truth it is given to understand” “To me there is no past and no future in art…”

•Bulls head or handlebars; art or function. A metamorphosis.•A dialectic between past and future.•What is antique and what is of today?

Collage is simultaneously innocent and devious. A combination of dissimilar things

Still Life with Chair Caning 1911-12This painting is a cubist

collage

“DISPARATE OBJECTS HELD TOGETHER BY VARIOUS MEANS” P140

OBJECTS

• The objects introduced into the collage can be either aristocratic or they can be “folkish”

• Collage accommodates both hybrid display and the requirements of self determination

Le Corbusier is a collage maker!

• Nestle Pavilion 1928 + Marseilles Unite 1946

UTOPIA has been a MANDALA ; device for concentrating and protecting ideas. “The government of laws not men”Liberty must exist…IN THE ETERNAL PRESENT

RE-SOLUTION• p148 a collage technique insists on a balancing act• “it is suggested a collage approach …. is at present the only

way of dealing with the ultimate problems of either or both utopia and tradition”

• Samuel Johnson;

“wit…… the discovery of some occult relation between images and appearance remote from each other”

An action plan?p149;

“collage could even be a strategy which by supporting the utopian illusion of

changelessness and finality might even fuel a reality of change , motion, action, history.”

Plato; “ in heaven there is laid up a pattern of such an (IDEAL- UTOPIAN) city.. But it is of no

importance for the individual will act according to the rules of that city and no other”

30 pages of “EXCURSUS” ; a sort of appendix of their examples of

image/architecture that need to inform this coming revolution that they advocate

1. Memorable streets2. Stabilizers3. Potentially interminable set pieces4. Splendid public terraces5. Ambiguous and composite buildings6. Nostalgia producing instruments7. The garden8. Commentary

1. Memorable streets

2.Stabilizers

3. Potentially interminable set pieces

4. Splendid public terraces

5.Ambiguous and composite buildings

6.Nostalgia producing instruments

7.The garden

8.Commentary

The disintegration of modern architecture seems to call for …a

strategy… an enlightened pluralism…

and possibly even common sense

Reviews of Rowe and KoetterThis group of pdfs offers the complete download of Collage City and discusses

the book in context and some of its subsequent debate

KEY REFERENCES• CIAM The Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne – CIAM

(International Congresses of Modern Architecture) was an organization founded in 1928 and disbanded in 1959 28 European architects organized by Le Corbusier, Hélène de Mandrot (owner of the castle), and Sigfried Giedion (the first secretary-general). CIAM meant to advance the cause of "architecture as a social art". saw architecture as an economic and political tool that could be used to improve the world through the design of buildings and through urban planning principles of "The Functional City",

• Team 10 was active from 1953• CIRPAC, the Comité international pour la résolution des problèmes

de l’architecture contemporaine (International Committee for the Resolution of Problems in Contemporary Architecture).

R+K summarise and critically engage with a substantial body of theory to demonstrate the way urbanism developed into the 1970s

• BRUNO TAUT Bruno Julius Florian Taut (4 May 1880 – 24 December 1938) was a prolific German architect, urban planner and author active during the Weimar period.

• Taut is known for his theoretical work, speculative writings and the buildings he designed. His sketches for the publication "Alpine Architecture" (1917) are the work of an unabashed Utopian visionary. The Reform estate was built between 1912-15 in the southwest of Magdeburg. The estate comprises one storey terrace houses for a housing trust. It was the first project where Taut used colour as a design principle.

• CHILIASM the doctrine of Christ's expected return to reign on earth for 1000 years; millennialism. • FOURIER Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (21 March 1768 – 16 May 1830) was a French mathematician and physicist born

in Auxerre and best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations. The Fourier transform and Fourier's Law are also named in his honour. Fourier is also generally credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect.

• Auguste comte (28 January 1794 – 21 September 1859), better known as Auguste Comte (French: [oɡyst k tɔ̃� ]), was a French philosopher. He was a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism. He is sometimes regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term.[2]

• Strongly influenced by the utopian socialist Henri Saint-Simon, • Henri Saint-Simon, (17 October 1760 – 19 May 1825) was a French early socialist theorist whose thought influenced

the foundations of various 19th century philosophies; perhaps most notably Marxism, positivism and the discipline of sociology.

R+K summarise and critically engage with a substantial body of theory to demonstrate the way urbanism developed into the 1970s

• ATHENS CHARTER proceedings went unpublished from 1933 until 1942, when Le Corbusier, acting alone, published them in heavily edited form as the "Athens Charter."

• Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism - 1928-1960, Cambridge Mass. and London 2000. (Foreword by Kenneth Frampton).

• Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture - The Growth of a New Tradition, Cambridge Mass. 2009, 5th edition. (CIAM, summary in Part VI).

• Max Risselada and Dirk van den Heuvel (eds.), TEAM 10 - In Search of a Utopia of the Present - 1953-1981, Rotterdam 2005. (TEAM 10 out of CIAM).

• DANIEL BURNHAM FAIA (September 4, 1846 – June 1, 1912) was an American architect and urban designer. He was the Director of Works for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He took a leading role in the creation of master plans for the development of a number of cities, including Chicago and downtown Washington, D.C. He also designed several famous buildings, including the Flatiron Building in New York City and Union Station in Washington D.C

• SANTAYANA Santayana was an early adherent of epiphenomenalism. He also influenced many of his prominent students, perhaps most notably the poet Wallace Stevens

• "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", "only the dead have seen the end of war." The Sense of Beauty

• CASSIRER he developed a theory of symbolism, and used it to expand phenomenology of knowledge into a more general philosophy of culture. He is one of the leading 20th century advocates of philosophical idealism. The Myth of the State

• Cassirer's last work The Myth of the State (1946) The book discusses the opposition of logos and mythos in Greek thought