Architecture has always been engaged in a dialogue with the city—a relationship often dominated by tension. The architectural avantgarde in particular is commonly understood in its opposition to the existing metropolitan terrain (architectural form vs. urban formlessness). This book, however, unearths strands of thought in the history of 20th-century architecture that actively endorsed and productively engaged with the formless metropolis. Revisiting early experiments how the formless metropolis has long been a prevalent force within architectural discourse. The works analyzed span almost an entire century: They range from August Endell’s urban optics and Karl Scheffler’s metropolitan architecture in Berlin, through Reyner Banham’s motorized vision of Los Angeles and Situationist performances in Paris, to OMA’s city architectures and Bernard Tschumi’s cinematic urbanisms. The author constructs new narratives that reposition architecture vis-à-vis the city, by exposing hidden histories. He uncovers architecture’s continuing interest in the formless city and elucidates our current fascination with and anxiety about ongoing urbanization, revealing the “good metropolis” that was there all along.
able, unknowable, and out-of-control metropolitan condition—seemingly the assassin of architecture and of “the good city”—became an exhilarating resource for architecture (think of the enormously influential work of Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, for example). Moreover, the book’s deep scholarship of Berlin reinstates that city as a veritable laboratory of modernization, alongside London, Paris, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, in effect combining two long-needed studies into one.
Simon Sadler, University of California Davis Modern urban history frequently grounds the postmodern recognition of the city’s indeterminate dynamism in earlier planners’ failed efforts to wring rational and geometric order from the rough currents of industrialization, rapid technological change, and unprecedented demographic growth. The Good Metropolis presents an alternative trajectory: a searching determination on the part of key figures over more than a century to see in the alleged chaos of the city alien and potentially productive orders otherwise impossible to envision. In this theoretically crisp and elegantly written essay, Eisenschmidt identifies the generative tradition of urban inquiry that designers forged to come to terms with, and to learn from, a human creation beyond human comprehension: the modern city.
www.birkhauser.com
Sandy Isenstadt, University of Delaware
The good Metropolis
The Good Metropolis brilliantly explains how the formless, unpredict-
Alexander Eisenschmidt
that question the city/architecture dichotomy, Eisenschmidt reveals
Alexander Eisenschmidt
From Urban Formlessness to Metropolitan Architecture
 Alexander Eisenschmidt
From Urban Formlessness to Metropolitan Architecture Birkhäuser Basel
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1 Imagination
New Urban Optics and the Specter of a Beautiful Metropolis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2 Extrapolation Urban Spielraum and the Project of a Metropolitan Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . 76 3 Narration
City Exhibition and the Broadcasting of a “Détourned” Urbanism . . . . . . . 134
4 Conclusion
The City Is Dead, Long Live the City! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194 Acknowledgements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 Illustration Credits. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 About the Author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
Only the metropolis can be the location for the struggle toward a new building art. Karl Scheffler, Die Architektur der Großstadt, 1913
Metropolitan Architecture … is born out of necessity and driven by objectivity and economy, materials and construction, and economic and sociological factors. Ludwig Hilberseimer, Großstadtarchitektur, 1927
Manhattan … keeps the illusion of architecture intact, while surrendering wholeheartedly to the metropolis. This architecture relates to the forces of the Groszstadt like a surfer to the waves. Rem Koolhaas, “Delirious New York,” in S, M, L, XL: Office for Metropolitan Architecture, 1995
2 Extrapolation Urban Spielraum and the Project of a Metropolitan Architecture The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed a definition of architecture that would challenge the conventional relationship between city and building, and haunt architects for decades to come. Introducing the concept of a “metropolitan architecture,” the critic and theorist Karl Scheffler set out to define an architecture born from within the metropolis. Not only was this concept of building intimately related to the modern city, but the city’s spatial, programmatic, logistical, and commercial pressures propelled it forward. What Scheffler saw most vividly expressed in the warehouses, apartment buildings, and department stores of his hometown Berlin would become the driver for his investigations into a new architectural paradigm and a new relationship of architecture to the city. To him, the forces of the metropolis had brought about (and literally shaped) novel spatial and organizational conditions that architects until then had failed to recognize. The building types of the modern city, unique to the current urban condition, announced a new architecture of the metropolis, which he called “Großstadtarchitek-
tur” (metropolitan architecture). While acknowledging the direct relationship of this evolving architecture to the commercial and industrial circumstances of the modern city, and the problems that came with it, he saw architectural innovations in locations that by many were viewed at best as mere residues of the modern city and in building typologies that were often deemed harmful to architecture. In his rejection of an outright resistance to, or unconditional embrace of, metropolitan forces, one can detect an openness that counters both the rigid Städtebau (city building) mentalities of the time and the more definitive modernisms of the 1920s and 1930s.1 But rather than being merely transitional, his engagement with the metropolis offers an alternative to the categorical discourse of modernity as well as a tactical device instructive for architects to come. After all, these insights not only fueled the thoughts of critics and architects in his immediate vicinity, but also resonated in the ideas of an urban architecture that would captivate later generations: from Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Großstadtarchitektur to the Office for Metropolitan Architecture.2 By beginning with Scheffler’s theories, this chapter presents an alternative trajectory within architectural modernism and beyond, one that is not predicated on the narratives of tectonics, functionalism, or technology, but on architecture’s profound relationship with the modern and contemporary city.
78 The Good Metropolis
Karl Scheffler’s Metropo litan Spielraum Berlin was the stage on which Scheffler saw the tensions of modernity play out. As a city of asymmetry, difference, and multiplicity, Berlin was self-conscious about its potentials, unsentimental in its attitude toward culture, obsessive about technology, unapologetic in its taste for progress, ironic about its lack of history, and uncritical yet passionate in its optimism.3 “Nowhere,” Scheffler further argued, “is the character of modern building art—in positive and negative terms—more instructive.”4 Berlin – ein
Stadtschicksal (Berlin – destiny of a city), his first book to focus entirely on the modern city, appeared in 1910 during a time when Berlin’s new metropolitan culture was becoming accustomed to a recently constructed modern environment. As Scheffler recalled in retrospect: Construction at Museum Island, Berlin, 1911. Photo-
“Never was Berlin more loved for its
graph of excavation works revealing existing networks
lifestyle and more hated for its cultural
and historical layers of the city.
irresponsibility as in these years.”5 Cultural irresponsibility was for Scheffler a
highly problematic yet unavoidable trait of metropolitan urbanity. In fact, the book detects in Berlin’s recklessness the origins for its urban modernity. Torn between the problems and productivities of the modern city, Berlin embodied a dualism that he viewed as its destiny, “condemned always to become and never to be.”6 The never-ceasing incompleteness of modernity was for Scheffler most clearly expressed in Berlin’s imminent and always pending urbanity. He saw this city that “overnight” had become a metropolis as the incubator for all things modern. Here, the quintessential conditions of modernity, which Charles Baudelaire defined as “transitory, fugitive, and contingent,”7 joined a formless urban maelstrom that was in a perpetual state of advancement, persistently striving toward culmination without the possibility of ever reaching it.
Extrapolation 81
Map of the city center, Berlin, 1910. Published in the same year as Berlin – ein Stadtschicksal; Scheffler likely referred to such a map when speaking about Berlin’s irregular layout.
Bülowstraße 70, Berlin, 1905. The photograph captures the moment when an elevated train drives through a housing block.
102  The Good Metropolis
Extrapolation  103
118 The Good Metropolis
Archizoom Associati, No-Stop City, 1968–1972. Plan configuration of endless interiors.
olis.”108 What Michael Hays identified in the work of Hilberseimer, namely an intensified subject-object dialectic through the reduction of architectural form into serial urban patterns,109 was for Archizoom already reason enough to define Hilberseimer’s city as “amoral.” Outlining a city that existed beyond quality was a reference as much to Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften as to Hilberseimer’s organizational urban constructs. The two projects intersected in 1930, when Hilberseimer completed his City-Center proposal and Musil began his magnum opus. Archi zoom’s project took clues from both, inferring the existing conditions of the capitalist city in order to first lay it bare and then extrapolate from it. While Tafuri’s reading of the early work of Hilberseimer was important for Archizoom’s rediscovery of these projects, they disagreed on the ways to continue past it. Tafuri saw Archizoom’s work pessimistically as “nothing but a provocation for the elite,”110 whereas Branzi believed the head-on engagement of the contemporary city was the only way to push beyond its current state. The strategy was not to resist any of the existing conditions, but to extrapolate from them until a level of urban surplus brought about a new kind of city entirely. Through Hilberseimer, Archizoom found an alternative (if not a counter-position) to resistance. Both expand infinitely in all directions by deploying a grid-like organization, where the repetition of the superblock achieves a relentlessness that is so far unmatched. In fact, what makes both schemes possible is the typology of the superblock with its functional hybridity—by holding all aspects of contemporary life, each is identical in appearance in the city. But Archizoom made two important contributions: the group no longer relied on the street-building relationship, and
Extrapolation 119
Archizoom Associati, No-Stop City, 1968–1972. Mock-ups of interiors.
Architecture has always been engaged in a dialogue with the city—a relationship often dominated by tension. The architectural avantgarde in particular is commonly understood in its opposition to the existing metropolitan terrain (architectural form vs. urban formlessness). This book, however, unearths strands of thought in the history of 20th-century architecture that actively endorsed and productively engaged with the formless metropolis. Revisiting early experiments how the formless metropolis has long been a prevalent force within architectural discourse. The works analyzed span almost an entire century: They range from August Endell’s urban optics and Karl Scheffler’s metropolitan architecture in Berlin, through Reyner Banham’s motorized vision of Los Angeles and Situationist performances in Paris, to OMA’s city architectures and Bernard Tschumi’s cinematic urbanisms. The author constructs new narratives that reposition architecture vis-à-vis the city, by exposing hidden histories. He uncovers architecture’s continuing interest in the formless city and elucidates our current fascination with and anxiety about ongoing urbanization, revealing the “good metropolis” that was there all along.
able, unknowable, and out-of-control metropolitan condition—seemingly the assassin of architecture and of “the good city”—became an exhilarating resource for architecture (think of the enormously influential work of Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, for example). Moreover, the book’s deep scholarship of Berlin reinstates that city as a veritable laboratory of modernization, alongside London, Paris, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, in effect combining two long-needed studies into one.
Simon Sadler, University of California Davis Modern urban history frequently grounds the postmodern recognition of the city’s indeterminate dynamism in earlier planners’ failed efforts to wring rational and geometric order from the rough currents of industrialization, rapid technological change, and unprecedented demographic growth. The Good Metropolis presents an alternative trajectory: a searching determination on the part of key figures over more than a century to see in the alleged chaos of the city alien and potentially productive orders otherwise impossible to envision. In this theoretically crisp and elegantly written essay, Eisenschmidt identifies the generative tradition of urban inquiry that designers forged to come to terms with, and to learn from, a human creation beyond human comprehension: the modern city.
www.birkhauser.com
Sandy Isenstadt, University of Delaware
The good Metropolis
The Good Metropolis brilliantly explains how the formless, unpredict-
Alexander Eisenschmidt
that question the city/architecture dichotomy, Eisenschmidt reveals
Alexander Eisenschmidt
From Urban Formlessness to Metropolitan Architecture