Metamorphosis. The Continuity of Change. 2|2

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Session 10_REINVENTING PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS

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Session Chair: Claes Caldenby (Sweden)

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Public institutions, such as schools, universities and health care facilities, have, besides housing, been considered main tasks of modernist architecture. This was the case already in the 1930s and still more so in the post-war period, with the building of welfare societies. When the American architectural photographer and writer G E Kidder Smith published his book Sweden Builds in 1950 he claimed that Sweden had the highest average standard of architecture in the world. Choosing one word to characterize Swedish architecture he made up his mind for “civilized”, referring to the everyday architecture of housing as well as of public institutions, as opposed to the exceptional monuments. On the cover of the book was the new big hospital, Södersjukhuset, in Stockholm from the early 1940s. The allure of these institutions for modernism was in their mass character and their content of repeated units, which favoured standardization and rational plans. But for the schools it was also about the democratization of formerly very authoritarian institutions and for the health care facilities about their emphasis on hygiene, clean forms and evidence based design. But built into the shifting pedagogical ideals and often disputed design of schools and the rapidly changing technologies of health care is the problem of continuous change of such institutions. Conservation is here faced with a threefold challenge: 1. The incremental changes caused by highly respectable everyday practical needs which must be met. 2. The lack of understanding from local clients and users for the historical and architectural value of the building. 3. The inherent paradox of how an architecture favouring innovation could be preserved in the face of deep functional changes of its contents. The third point was met in the post-war period with structuralist architecture, not least in public institutions, with its emphasis on an architecture for continuous change. One conclusion of this might be that “reinventing” the architecture of these institutions is just as important, or even more so, than Claes Caldenby Reinventing Public Institutions

“restoring” or “conserving” it. This is a challenge to professional knowledge, which is not always asked for or even prepared to face this challenge. To this could be added another need for reinvention today, that of the publicness of the institutions. Since the 1980s there has been a global neoliberal wave, favouring private good over public good and trying to control quality with measurement methods inspired by private business. New Public Management and Private Public Partnership are frequently used concepts coupled to this. Modernism has a somewhat ambivalent attitude here, on the one hand often supporting the public good, on the other hand with a strong belief in quantitative and evidence based methods.1 The four papers in this session illustrate the challenges meeting conservation and reinvention of public institutions in different countries. Roberta Grignolo’s paper on Livio Vacchini’s Saleggi Primary School in Locarno describes a school built according to contested progressive pedagogical ideas on “school democratisation” in the 1970s: ”Classrooms should be structured to encourage the active work of students, the practice of individual and group work”. Despite being listed the school has been facing changes in regulations and pedagogical ideas as well as ”the short-sightedness of its owners and users”. This has forced heritage authorities to act coercively, in this case with good result, even if the ideal would be a more proactive role. Maria Bacharel’s and others’ study of the renovation of two schools in Portugal, one from the 1930s and one from the 1960s, also discuss “the need to cope heritage values with functional requirements, current legal standards and community demands”. They propose a method in two stages, starting with a survey of the cultural, technical and functional status of the building, followed by an identification of constraints “in face of current educational, functional, technical requirements and regulations”. Susan Ross in her paper presents the case of University of British Columbia in Vancouver, a university mainly built in 357

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