The New Urbanism: A Visual Essay

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The New Urbanism:

By: Alexander Bahr

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The Context After World War II, the psychology and treatment of cities around the world was altered because of the realization that society has the technology to completely change and destroy the global environment.

Arata Isozaki describes this change in architecture in his essay “Invisible City” and answers why does Japan lack an urbanism; he says, “Things that might have served as a prototype were reduced to rubble… everything I considered enduring and immutable in architecture was obliterated… the war ruins were created before my very eyes… but even destroyed the cities persisted.” 11 What is clear in Isozaki’s quote is that not just the physical obliteration of cities after World War II but also a programmatical,ideological, metaphorical and social obliteration that is feeding a sense to create a new urbanism of multitiered uses, dynamism and rapid change.

Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima. 1945 Caron, George R. (American) New York UPI/Bettmann 7982/ C293/ 1945a

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Architecture Culture 1943–1968. pp 402–7

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A Re-Thinking of the problem Because of the need to create a new urbanism embracing rapid change, the mythology and logic in which to create new cities also needs to be rethought and changed. Systems of logic to build cities based on percentage of populated land use, as seen on the left, or by types of geographical climates highlights the importance of mapping in this era of design and a new thinking of a more global urbanism.

Architects like Christopher Alexander are beginning to reconceive the current system of urbanism and the relationships that individual parts have on the whole. In his essay “A City is not a Tree” Alexander diagrams the current logic of urbanism as a tree where branches radiate outwards with no connection to any other point on that tree. Alexander then goes on to propose a semi-lattice organization where individual parts of the city are interconnected and respond to each other. Alexander says when describing the old model of urbanism,“Another favorite concept of CIAM theorist is the separation of recreation from everything else. This has crystalized in our real cities in the form of playgrounds. The playground, asphalted and fenced in, is nothing but pictorial acknowledgment that play exists…it has nothing to do with the life of play itself.”11 This new conception urbanism and the relationship of the parts that make up a city is driver for many architects in the post-war period and will begin to not only influence how cities are made but also how architecture is conceived and thought of.

World Map On Dymaxion Projection Buckminster Fuller The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller 11.

Architecture Culture 1943–1968. pp 379–88

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What is housing and what can it do?

With the conception of a new urbanism and questioning the relationships of individual parts to the totality of the city, architects are thinking of the implications of building and the function that architecture has for its inhabitance. After World War II an embrace of new technology is happening in society and as a result more technological advances have begun to infiltrate architecture. This infiltration of technology has made architects question what is the function of buildings? and what do people rely on buildings for? These questions are what Reyner Banham is answering in his essay “A house is not a home” where he questions that the physical building of a house embodies less the idea of home than the stuff and technology that the house shelters and collects. Thus the house is no more than an empty shell in which to shelter the things people want and need to survive in buildings. This psychological analysis of the function of buildings has empowered architects to re-concieve what other functions architecture and urbanism can have and how does that new function connect with the collective totality of the city.

Home is not a House Rayner Banham. 1965 Image drawn by Francois Dellegret 11.

Architecture Culture 1943–1968. pp 370–78

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Fulling the needs of the American G.I. The American condition to urbanism after World War II is far different than that elsewhere around the world and thus the American reaction to urbanism starts to take shape in a different context. Because of the lack of the need to reconstruct American cities, unlike in Europe and Japan, and the influx of American G.I.s returning home, the want and desire for a better standard of living in America begins to rise. This causes a rise in consumerism in post-war America and a new condition of urbanism based not on land efficiency and population density but on the organization and collection of individual homes and properties to take shape. This new expansive and rural urbanism, or sub-urbanism, created communities like Levittown, Pennsylvania, where the architecture of the home stays the same but the orientation and organization in the community changes.

Proposed Rendering of Southdale Mall Victor Gruen, 1954

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Slum Surgery With the rise and popularity of sub-urbanism in the 1950s America, the negative connotations of the dense existing parts of the city and the people that live there began to rise. The demand to change and completely re-build whole sections of densely populated areas in the city became a very viable option for architects and projects like Pruitt-Igoe in St.Louis and Cabrini-Green in Chicago are examples of suburban architects solution to the urban problem.

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Slum Surgery in St.Louis Architectural Forum, 1951 Cover

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Pruitt-Igoe. St. Louis, Missouri. 1954 Minoru Yamasaki

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Urbanism to accomdate change Because of the need of urbanism to facilitate more than just individual functions of separate parts, architecture begins to respond with designs that don’t only accommodate current solutions to current problems but can be re-configured to solve future problems as well. Expansive grids, mega-structures, impermanent and deployable structures are being conceived by architects as formal ways to accommodate change at an urban scale. The sky house project by Kiyonori Kikutake, shown on the left, is an example of this re-conception of function in architecture where the project is a raised plinth, or waffle slab, that can be cut to accommodate new rooms and functions as the number and age of the occupants changes.

Sky House, Tokyo. 1958 Kiyonori Kikutake

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Urbanism to accomdate play The psychological and physical change that urbanism is asking of architecture is making architects not only accommodate thinking of the composition of the whole and the facilitation of change over time but also architecture’s ability to create a sense of play and spectacle in the city. Georg Simmel wrote about the tendency of the inhabitant of the city to be bombarded with sensory effects to the point of which the “blase attitude” grows and serves as a barrier of the preservation of societies’ nerves. Architects are still cognizant of Simmel’s argument and conceive of ways in which the collection of buildings, or parts, can create a sense of play of the whole. Projects like Cedric Price’s Fun Palace are examples of this discussion and are in dialog with the writing of Guy Debord who says, “ The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by an image.”13 Thus giving the responsibility to architecture to not just accommodate change in an urban context but also build the social relationships of the people that occupy architecture.

Fun Palace, 1964 Cedric Price 12 13

Simmel, Georg. pp 325- 339 Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle.

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Urbanism to Facilitate Growth Along with architecture asking how it can accommodate the changing need of its users, architects of this new urbanism are producing schemes and organizations in which the city can grow smartly and expand into areas of the landscape first thought of as unbuildable. Schemes like Kenzo Tange’s plan for Tokyo Bay demonstrates a shift in urbanism from Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin and City for Three Million inhabitants into the new dynamic urbanism which does not look to destroy but enhance the accumulative parts that make up the city’s whole. Thus through the celebration of all parts of the city, urbanism can begin to work collectively and not as separate parts.

Plan for Tokyo Bay, 1960 Kenzo Tange

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Urbanism to accommodate any site Like Kenzo Tange’s project for Tokyo Bay and Kikutake Kiyonori’s marine city project, groups of architects like Archigram and Superstudio envision ways in which cities can become less site specific and deployable at a global scale. Archigram’s plug-in city and walking city and Superstudio’s continuous monument project highlights the questioning that architects are having on what urbanism can do and thinking about architecture and design at a global scale. The result of which is architects beginning to think about systems of interconnected structures in which is more expansive than simple part to whole relationship in any one city.

Walking City, 1964 Archigram

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Urbanism in a new global context The repercussion of the growth of technology and architects’ expanding questions on what architecture and urbanism can do to create cities that are apart of an interconnected global web is the surfacing of global disputes over territorial claims and international issues of military crises. In 1960, the World Design Conference (WoDeCo) met in Tokyo introducing post-war Japanese architects, like Kenzo Tange, to their peers in Europe and America such as Paul Rudolph and Louis Kahn. Organizations like WoDeCo and the United Nations highlight the importance of communication of a global community of designers and architects but also speaks to the polemic between the public and private faces of nations. This polemic creates nations to have a public face in which they project an image to the world and a private face in which a nation strategically plans their advantage to gain territory and resources. Thus the architectural and urban expansion of cities have created a global discussion of design to enhance the global standard of living but also has created an environment in which nations privately plan their strategic advantage over each other and thus grow the global military industrial complex.

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Scene of War Room Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Stanely Kubrick, 1964

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World Design Conference. 1960

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Biblography Image Citations By Page 1. Caron, George R. Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima. 1945. Digital image. New York UPI/ Bettmann Archives, n.d. Web. 2. Marks, Robert W., and R. Buckminster Fuller. The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1973. Print.

3. Art in America. April 1965. pp. 109-18. republished with commentary in Charles Jencks and George Baird, eds. Meaning in Architecture (New York: George Braziller, 1969) pp. 109-118.

4. Wall, Alex. Victor Gruen: From Urban Shop to New City. Barcelona: Actar, 2005. Print.

5. Hirsch, Arnold R., and Raymond A. Mohl. “Slum Surgery.” Urban Policy in Twentieth-century America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1993. N. pag. Print.

6. Kikutake, Kiyonori. Kiyonori Kikutake: From Tradition to Utopia. Milano: L’Arca Edizioni, 1997. Print.

7. Mathews, J. Stanley. From Agit-prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price. London: Black Dog Pub., 2007.

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8. Kuan, Seng, and Yukio Lippit. Kenzo Tange: Architecture for the World. Baden: Lars Müller, 2012. Print.

9. Cook, Peter. Archigram. New York: Praeger, 1973. Print.

10. Dr. Strangelove; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Hawk Films. Released by Columbia Pictures Corp., 1963. Still.

World Design Conference 1960 in Tokyo = Sekai Dezain Kaigi Gijiroku. Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1960. Print.

Quotation Citations 11. Ockman, Joan. Architecture Culture 1943–1968. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

12. Simmel, Georg. On Individuality and Social Forms; Selected Writings. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1971. Print.

13. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone, 1994. Print.