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thE NEW RADIANt cItY Mark Jarzombek Preface Le Corbusier’s Radiant City of 1925 broke the hold of emotionalism on the city. Curved streets, picturesque layouts, alleés, and majestic civic structures were crossed out. Instead, the city was seen through the lens of science and pragmatism, corresponding to the precepts of the modern age. It was a powerful moment in the history of thinking about urban design. Le Corbusier looked at the city not as just an improvement or clarification of older prototypes but with new categories all together: living, working, traffic, and leisure. At the center was the modern man. Though this served at the time as an excellent strategy to dismember the 19thcentury city, it did not create a new unity. The failure of Le Corbusier’s urbanism—and of CIAM principles in general—lay in the circumstance that it assumed that leisure was separate from work, living separate from industry, and the city separate from the rural. In the 1960s, with the failures of cities looming over history, cities developed Master Plans as a way to restore confidence in the future, to create a sense of destiny and common purpose. Traditionally, the Master Plan had been merely the basis upon which the zoning ordinance and site-usage regulations were defined. Now they began to include questions of tourism and local culture. City centers were no longer to be torn down arbitrarily but preserved as cultural environments. In that sense, the ideals of the modernist city came to be fused with the remnants of the traditional city. Holding this together was the image of a city that was not too modern and not too old. This became the prototype of the contemporary Master Plan that is still in use today: part rationalism, part neosentimentality. But the Master Plan always promised more than it could deliver. Most preserved the notion of static square blocks; most preserved the notion of individual buildings conforming to conventions of land ownership. Most Master Plans did not accept their artificiality, aspiring as they do to simulate organic modernity. It is against this that I protest.
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With the Master Plan in mind, and thinking back to Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, there is one aspect that I admire: the critique of sentimentality. In our design for the New Radiant City we want to challenge the sentimentality that has crept back into the equation in most Master Plans since the 1970s.
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2005 Brisbane
PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT: Increasing Density Natalie Mccorkle 2005
Brisbane’s population is forecasted to grow from 2.65 million to 3.7 million by 2026, requiring 550,000 new dwellings. To discourage sprawl and preserve open space, the South East Queensland Regional Plan’s Urban Footprint recommends that new growth take place as compact infill development, increasing residential density in key areas with adequate infrastructure.
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However, although the majority of residents agree it is necessary to increase Brisbane’s residential density, many feel threatened by the region’s increasing urbanization. A survey of community response to the Urban Footprint demonstrates that higher levels of density are equated with slums, increased criminal activity, and the loss of privacy as well as individual and communal space. Density, therefore, is perceived as a spatial threat and an indicator of social and economic decline. A factor contributing to the city’s residents’ feeling threatened by increasing density is that unlike most cities, 70% of Brisbane’s dwelling stock consists of detached single-family homes, which predisposes a stronger desire and expectation of spatial privacy. The traditional regional house, the Queenslander, is characterized by a low, horizontal massing with a generous overhanging roof. The basic elements of the Queenslander—roof, interior, land, and veranda—interact to create zones of public and private space. The roof is a shielding element providing shade and protection. The interior of the house is the private zone. The land constitutes multiple zones; for example, the house is typically raised on stumps, creating an additional protected outdoor space. The veranda is a transition element facing the street regardless of the sun orientation: “A veranda is not part of 1 Analysis of Residential Density and Housing Typology 2 Queenslander: analysis of the roof element 3 Queenslander: analysis of the interior element 4 Queenslander: analysis of the Verandah velement 5 Queenslander: analysis of the underside velement 6 Identifying and reinterpreting the public and private zones of the Queenslander House 7 Diagram of the interaction of people and place and the creation of public and private space 8 Identifying and reconstituting the basic elements of the Queenslander house 9 Proposal
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I want to preserve the position that the modern city can be both beautiful and yet a product of unsentimental exactitude. In other words, the age of the Master Plan has exhausted itself; it was a transition helping cities survive in an age of doubt. Cities today are thriving, and more and more people are living in them. We need to develop a new understanding of the city, one that can, once again, only be brought out once stripped of sentimental associations. To repeat: CIAM of the 1930s and Master Plan urbanism of the 1970s were determining moments in the history of how we understand the city, transitions into the more full-scale modern metropolis of tomorrow. The first attempted to cut away lingering attachments to a still agrarianbased notion of the city, a city with a symbolic core, industrial ring, and agrarian hinterland. The Master Plan compromised that model by returning to the conventions of a core, surrounded not by industry, but by suburbs. If from the first Radiant City there was something that can be redeemed, this is also true for the Master Plan; it taught an important lesson, despite itself: the city was just as much image as substance. The energies behind the Master Plan were commerce and tourism, and by the 1980s, this interplay became a key element in the urban ideal. The two poles of our new city are thus science and image.
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The New Radiant City does not even have to determine all that is built or even how it is built. The New Radiant City does, however, have to commit itself to the principles of our age. The new city is both a scientific project and an imaginary one. It is confirmed in the languages of knowledge and projected in the images of the mind. We should recategorize Construction, Economy, Circulation, Environment
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Our categories are purposefully abstract. Unlike Le Corbusier’s, which had man at the center, albeit a modern man, ours focus on the larger transhuman forces that now define the science and image of cities. This is not because we reject designing a city from the point of view of human experience, but because we think human experience finds itself within, around, and through these transhuman forces. For a century, industrialization has broken up the city and been responsible for its disintegration into slums, industrial quarters, and urban peripheries. But
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2005 Brisbane
PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT: Increasing Density
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Natalie Mccorkle 2005
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the house…It is what allows traveling salesmen with one foot on the step to heave their cases over the threshold and show their wares with no embarrassment on either side, no sense of privacy violated…Verandas are noman’s land, border zones that keep contact with the house and its activities on one face but are open on the other to the street…’ (David Malouf, 12 Edmondstone Street) The premise behind this project is that by reinterpreting and manipulating the traditional Queenslander elements, density can be increased while its perception is minimized. Indeed, perception management, a concept introduced by the U.S. military, is defined as an action to convey or deny select information and indicators to influence emotions, motives, and objective reasoning. Perception management can use deception to influence behavior and attitudes. Therefore, this concept, applied to architecture, can alter the perception of the built environment, the boundaries of which distinguish public and private space and define how people interact with each other. Density may be increased, and its negative perception managed, by manipulating these boundaries. Shared public spaces can reinforce community interaction. A sense of privacy can be fostered by using buffering devices such as landscape and interlocking elements of open and closed space. Reinterpreting the Queenslander elements, at varying levels of density, can reinforce a sense or privacy, autonomy, and community.
1 Proposal for increased residential densiry: basic elements are reconstituted at two infill sites 2 The perception of space is heightened by introducing shared space as a buffer zone and landscape as a screening element 3 Higher levels of density may be achieved by arranging the dwelling units to screen and enclose their neighbors 4 Perceived spatial boundaries 5 Projected visual boundaries 6 Private outdoor zone PRIVATE OWNERSHIP COMMON OWNERSHIP VIEW 3
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we can project something better by renouncing the dualities that were used to hold the city together in its artificiality: work-leisure, habitat-villa quarter, and coreperiphery. The suburbs after WWII were a search for a new, alternative coherency, more integrative and more network/image based. But the suburbs were not urban. The new cities of tomorrow will have many of the qualities of both the suburb and the city. From the point of view of cities, the core can be abandoned, but not density. From the point of view of the suburb, the shopping malls and the highways can be abandoned, but not retail marketing and the need for mobility. Construction, Economy, Circulation, Environment are not separate categories. Each modifies the others, and in this, our New Radiant City is different from the Radiant City of old. There is no single place where “circulation� takes place, for example. Though for practical reasons, we might put traffic under the heading of circulation, one has to remember that money circulates; that human waste circulates, and that even politics circulates. Imperatives 1. The old view of city was through the differentiation between city and hinterland. The mountains were for recreation, the flat lands for farming, and the city for global distribution networks (i.e. trains, ships, and airplanes) and their regulators (government). In the cities of tomorrow the mountains belong to the tourist industry, the flatlands to agro-industry, and the city to distribution industries. The entire landscape is regulated. This already defines Switzerland, and indeed most of Europe, where there is not a single natural tree line. 2. The cities of tomorrow will not have large centralized cores that house the financial district and condos for the elite. There will be financial districts, but they will not define the symbolic core of the city. 3. The cities of tomorrow will have to integrate both large-, mid-, and small-scale production into effective ways of circulation and control. 4. The cities of tomorrow have to incorporate trash and waste disposal as part of their form-economy. These cities will not export trash to third-world countries or to distant places. Cities of tomorrow will generate their own landscape of hills. Landscape artists will work with urban designers to accommodate the hills. 5. The cities of tomorrow will be designed with wind farms and sun-powered generators —along highways or in parks. 6. Urban branding and urban design will be equal in importance. Tourism already is a US $6 trillion industry globally. Cities will
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2005
THE ADAPTABLE MODULE PROJECT Mathieu de Genot de Nieukerken
Threat in Brisbane! Fear in Queensland! Terror in Australia! Terror is highly effective because fear costs nothing to produce and it spreads very easily. Be afraid, something could harm you! You start being paranoid and having delusions of persecution. You hide. You blend in. You camouflage. You are suspicious. You denounce. Suspicion and denunciation feed into paranoia. Hiding, blending in, and camouflaging threaten identity. There is a higher possibility of hurting ourselves than there is of suffering an external attack. Just take a look at the amount of waste our lifestyle produces and imagine its increase as the population grows. Or see how the standardization of every street in every city in every country is really threatening local identities. Let’s recycle endangered identities. Let’s re-use ready made objects. Let’s reappropriate existing sites. Let’s use an adaptable module, an interactive space to heal old wounds of a mutilated city. A double-skin architectural device: light and protective outside, open and personalized inside. A plug-in box. A cozy-corner. The exterior adapts to the site, the interior to its use. Do you want a kitchen module for an old factory turned into a loft? No problem; just order a cooking module, a washing module, and a storage module. Do you need an information booth for a new tourist destination? Fine. Order the office module, a couple of display modules, and the souvenir shop module! Everything is provided with the module, except flavors and identity. Those come with the site. The adaptable module helps the existing site stay alive, keeping its identity safe.
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be designed as tourist attractions from the beginnings. Cities will be branded from the beginning. The branding of cities—indeed of countries—is already underway. 7. In the cities of tomorrow, distribution networks will be defined according to their own inner logic and requirements. This is already true with most airports today: Hong Kong International Airport and the Denver International Airport, for example—and will be true with a new generation of offshore ports. Cities are no longer necessarily hubs, but in reverse, all hubs are cities. 8. The street as the carrier of infrastructure defining a “plot,” basically a void without infrastructure that is filled with architecture: This should be rejected. A street is a type of construction just like architecture. 9. The old system of superhighways with cloverleafs connecting regional highways to streets, with an overlay of episodic rapid transit, is obsolete, based on a model generated in the 1940s, when the primary need for highways was intercity traffic. Highways today need to be rethought. Highways, rapid transit, and differentdensity traffic can be coordinated to create more integrated flow systems. 10. Spatial density and proximity are still a necessity. Though distribution means that an office can be in contact with a client next door just as easily as 1,000 miles away, the city provides a psychological frame for life and its experiences. The cities of tomorrow should, however, be designed without sentimentality. Nonetheless, cities are places of sentiment. To bridge this gap, the cities of tomorrow, like those now increasingly of today, will be designed along a different philosophy of private-public.