Existing Potentials by Gizem Asıcı

Existing Potentials

Edited by Eda Kuzu Gizem Asıcı Reem Alami

“Everything that exist is a fascination for him”

Sebastien Marot

context & process The Unselfconscious Process

The Selfconscious Process

The City in The City

architect & architecture The Source of Good Fit

Berlin Influences and Ramifications

Berlin: A Green Archipleago

architecture as provocation

The Genesis of a Hopeful Monster

“But Most of All Ungers”: Berlin Stories

134

An Exciting Excercise

138

1 6

context & process

THE UNSELFCONSCIOUS PROCESS

The rigidity of tradition is at its clearest, though, in the case where builders of form are forced to work within definitely given limitations. The Samoan, if he is to make a good house, must use wood from the breadfruit tree. The Italian peasant making his trullo at Alberobello is allowed latitude for individual expression only in the lump of plaster which crowns the cone of the

Let us turn our attention, first of all , to the un selfconscious cultures. It will be necessary first to outline the conditions under which forms in unselfconscious cultures are produced . We know by definition that building skills are learned informally, without the help of formulated rules.1 However, although there are no formulated rules (or perhaps indeed, as we shall see later, just because there are none), the unspoken rules are of great complexity, and are rigidly maintained. There is a way to do things, a way not to do them . There is a firmly set tradition, accepted

roof. The Wanoe has a chant which tells him precisely the sequence of operations he is to follow while building his house. The Welshman must make the crucks which support his roof precisely according to the pattern of tradition. The Sumatran gives his roofs their special shape, not because this is structurally essential, but because this is the way to make roofs in Sumatra. Every one of these examples points in the same direction:

beyond question by all builders of form, and this tradition strongly resists change. The existence of such powerful traditions, and evidence oftheir rigidity, already are shown to some extent in those aspects of unselfconscious cultures which have been discussed. It is clear, for instance, that forms do not remain the same for centuries without traditions springing up about them . If the Egyptian houses of the Nile have the same plan now as the houses whose plans were pictured in the hieroglyphs/ we can be fairly certain that their makers are in the grip of a tradition. Anywhere where forms are virtually the same now as they were thousands of years ago, the bonds must be extremely strong . In southern Italy, neither the trulli of Apulia nor the coalburners’ capanne of Anzio near Rome have changed since prehistoric times.3 The same is known to be true of the black houses of the Outer Hebrides, and of the hogans of the Navaho. The most visible feature of architectural tradition in such unselfconscious cultures is the wealth of myth and legend attached to building habits. While the stories rarely deal exclusively with dwellings, nevertheless descriptions of the house, its form, its origins, are woven into many of the global myths which lie at the yery root of culture ; and wherever”this occurs, not only is the architectural tradition made unassailable, but its constant repetition is assured. The black tents, for example, common among nomads from Tunisia to Afghanistan , figure more than once in the Old Testament. In a similar way the folk tales of old Ireland and the Outer Hebrides are full of oblique references to the shape of houses. The age of these examples gives us an inkling of the age and strength of the traditions which maintain the shape of unselfconscious dwelling forms. Wherever the house is mentioned in a myth or lore, it at once becomes part of the higher order, ineffable, immutable, not to be changed. When certain Indians of the Amazon believe that after death the soul retires to a house at the source of a mysterious river/ the mere association of the

MONTE VERDE DWELLINGS PLAN, CHILE

house with a story of this kind discourages all thoughtful criticism of the standard form, and sets its “rightness” well beyond the bounds of question. More forceful still, of course, are rituals and taboos connected with the dwelling. Throughout Polynesia the resistance to change makes itself felt quite unequivocally in the fact that the building of a house is a ceremonial occasion. The performance of the priests, and of the workers, though different from one island to the next, is always clearly specified; and the rigidity of these behavior patterns, by preserving techniques, preserves the forms themselves and makes change extremely difficult. The Navaho Indians, too, make their hogans the center of the most elaborate performance. Again the gravity of the rituals, and their rigidity, make it impossible that the form of the hogan should be lightly changed. 1

ROYAL PALACE, KNOSSOS, PLAN. Ancient Greek

GOBEKLITEPE First temples in human history before the start of agriculture.

THE BABYLON OF NEBUCHADNEZZAR, PLAN, MESOPOTAMIA

Unselfconscious cultures contain, as a feature of their formproducing systems, a certain built-in fixity- patterns of myth, tradition, and taboo which resist willful change. Formbuilders will only introduce changes under strong compulsion where there are powerful (and obvious) irritations in the existing forms which demand correction. 3

THE BABYLON OF NEBUCHADNEZZAR, ISHTAR GATE

Now when there are such irritations, how fast does the failure lead to action, how quickly

to change; good fit provides none. In theory the process is eventually bound to reach the

does it lead to a change of form? Think first, perhaps, of man’s closeness to the ground in the

equilibrium of wellfitting forms. However, for the fit to occur in practice, one vital condition

unselfconscious culture, and of the materials he uses when he makes his house. The Hebridean

must be satisfied. It must have time to happen . The process must be able to achieve its

crofter uses stone and clay and sods and grass and straw, all from the near surroundings. The

equilibrium before the next culture change upsets it again. It must actually have time to reach

Indian’s tent used to be made of hide from the buffalo he ate. The Apulian uses as building

its equilibrium every time it is di sturbed- or, if we see the process as continuous rather than

stones the very rocks which he has taken from the ground to make his agriculture possible.

intermittent,the adj ustment of forms must proceed more quickly than the drift of the culture

These men have a highly developed eye for the trees and stones and animals which contain the

context. Unless this condition is fulfilled the system can never produce well-fitting forms, for

means of their livelihood, their food, their medicine, their furniture, their tools. To an African tribesman the materials available are not simply objects, but are full of life. He knows them

CATALHOYUK DWELLINGS, TURKEY

the equilibrium of the adaptation will not be sustained.

through and through; and they are always close to hand.

As we saw in Chapter 3, the speed of adaptation depends essentially on whether the adaptation

Closely associated with this immediacy is the fact that the owner is his own builder, that the

can take place in independent and restricted subsystems, or not. Although we

form-maker not only makes the form but lives in it. Indeed, not only is the man who lives in

cannot actually see these subsystems in the unselfconscious process, we can infer their activity

the form the one who made it, but there is a special closeness of contact between man and form

from the very two characteristics of the process which we have been discussing:

which leads to constant rearrangement of unsatisfactory detail, constant improvement. The

directness and tradition .

man, already responsible for the original shaping of the form, is also alive to its demands while he inhabits it19. And anything which needs to be changed is changed at once. The Abipon, whose dwelling was the simplest tent made of two poles and a mat, dug a

The direct response is the feedback of the process . If the process is to maintain the good fit of CRO-MAGNON DWELLING, UKRAIN

dwelling forms while the culture drifts, it needs a feedback sensitive enough to take action the moment that one of the potential failures actually occurs. The vital feature of the feedback is

trench to carry off the rain if it bothered him. The Eskimo reacts constantly to every change

its immediacy. For only through prompt action can it prevent the build-up of multiple failures

in temperature inside the igloo by opening holes or closing them with lumps of snow. The

which would then demand simultaneous correction - a task which might, as we have seen, take

very special directness of these actions may be made clearer, possibly, as follows. Think of the

too long to be feasible in practice.

moment when the melting snow dripping from the roof is no longer bearable, and the man goes to do something about it. He makes a hole which lets some cold air in, perhaps. The

However, the sensitivity of feedback is not in itself enough to lead to equilibrium . The feedback

man realizes that he has to do something about it- but he does not do so by remembering the

must be controlled, or damped , somehow.Such control is provided by the resistance to change

general rule and then applying it (“When the snow starts to melt it is too hot inside the igloo

the unselfconscious culture has built into its traditions. We might say of these traditions,

and therefore time to ...” ). He simply does it. And though words may accompany his action,

possibly, that they make the system viscous. This viscosity damps the changes made, and

they play no essential part in it. This is the important point. The failure or inadequacy of the form leads directly to the action.

TERRA AMATA, ERECTUS DWELLING, FRANCE

prevents their extension to other aspects of the form. As a result only urgent changes are allowed . Once a form fits well, changes are not made again until it fails to fit again. Without this action of tradition , the repercussion and rip ples started by the slightest failure could grow

This directness is the second crucial feature of the unselfconscious system’s form-production.

wider and wider until they were spreading too fast to be corrected.

Failure and correction go side by side. There is no deliberation in between the recognition of a failure and the reaction to it. The directness is enhanced, too, by the fact that building

On the one hand the directness of the response to misfit ensures that each failure is corrected

and repair are so much an everyday affair. The Eskimo, on winter hunts, makes a new igloo

as soon as it occurs, and thereby restricts the change to one subsystem at a time. And on the

every night. The Indian’s tepee cover rarely lasts more than a single season. The mud walls of the Tallensi hut need frequent daubs.25 Even the elaborate communal dwellings of the Amazon tribes are abandoned every two or three years, and new ones built.26 Impermanent materials and unsettled ways of life demand constant reconstruction and repair, with the result that the shaping of form is a task perpetually before the dweller’s eyes and hands. If a form is made the same way several times over, or even simply left unchanged, we can be fairly sure that its inhabitant finds little wrong with it. Since its materials are close to hand, and their use his own responsibility, he will not hesitate to act if there are any minor changes which seem worth making. Let us return now to the question of adaptation. The basic principle of adaptation depends on the simple fact that the process toward equilibrium is irreversible. Misfit provides an incentive 5

19. It is true that craftsmen d o appear in certain cultures which we should want to call unselfconscious (e.g., carpenters in the Marquesas , thatchers in South Wales) , but their effect is never more than partial. They have no monopoly on skill, but simply do what they do rather better than most other men . And while thatchers or carpenters may be employed during the construction of the house, repairs are still undertaken by the owner . The skills needed are universal, and at some level or other practiced by everyone. Ralph Linton , Material Culture of the Marquesas, pages 47-49 / 2 o 2 Bernice P. Bishop Museum Memoirs, Vol. 8., No. 5 (Honolulu, 1923) , p. 268. Peate, The Welsh House, pp. 201-5.

other hand the force of tradition, by resisting needless change , holds steady all the variables not in the relevant subsystem , and prevents those minor disturbances outside the subsystem from taking hold. Rigid tradition and immediate action may seem contradictory . But it is the very contrast between these two which makes the process selfadjusting. It is just the fast reaction to single failures, complemented by resistance to all other change, which allows the process to make series of minor adjustments instead of spasmodic global ones: it is able to adjust subsystem by subsystem , so that the process of adjustment is faster than the rate at which the culture changes; equilibrium is certain to be re-established whenever slight disturbances occur; and the forms are not simply well-fitted to their cultures, but in active equilibrium with them. The operation of such a process hardly taxes the individual craftsman ‘s ability at all . The man who makes the form is an agent simply, and very little is required of him during the form’s development . Even the most aimless changes will eventually lead to well-fitting forms, because 6

of the tendency to equilibrium inherent in the organization of the process. All the agent need do is to recognize failures when they occur, and to react to them . And this even the simplest man can do. For although only few men have sufficient integrative ability to invent form of any clarity, we are all able to criticize existing forms. It is especially important to understand that the agent in such a process needs no creative strength. He does not need to be able to improve the form, only to make· some sort of change when he notices a failure. The changes may not be always for the better ; but it is not necessary that they should be, since the operation of the process allows only the improvements to persist. To make the foregoing analysis quite clear , I shall use it to illuminate a rather curious phenomenon . The Slovakian peasants used to be famous for the shawls they made . These shawls were wonderfully colored and patterned, woven of yarns which had been dipped in homemade dyes. Early in the twentieth century aniline dyes were made available to them. And at once the glory of the shawls was spoiled ; they were now no longer delicate and subtle, but crude. This change cannot have come about because the new dyes were somehow inferior . They were as brillian t, and the variety of colors was much greater than before . Yet somehow the new shawls turned out vulgar and uninteresting. Now if, as it is so pleasant to suppose , the shawlmakers had had some innate artistry, had been so gifted that they were simply “ able “ to make beautiful shawls, it would be almost impossible to explain their later clumsiness. But if we look at the situation differently, it is very easy to explain . The shawlmakers were simply able , as many of us are , to recognize bad shawls, and their own mistakes .

There is no deliberation in between the recognition of a failure and the reaction to it.

Over the generations the shawls had doubtless often been made extremely badly . But whenever a bad one was made, it was recognized as such, and therefore not repeated. And though nothing is to say that the change made would be for the better, it would still be a change . When the results of such changes were still bad, further changes would be made. The changes would go on until the shawls were good . And only at this point would the incentive to go on changing the patterns disappear. So we do not need to pretend that these craftsmen had special ability. They made beautiful shawls by standing in a long tradition, and by making minor changes whenever something seemed to need improvement. But once presented with more complicated choices, their apparent mastery and judgment disappeared. Faced with the complex unfamiliar task of actually inventing forms from scratch, they were unsuccessful.

THE SELFCONSCIOUS PROCESS

In the unselfconscious culture a clear pattern has emerged. Being self-adjusting, its action allows the production of wellfitting forms to persist in active equilibrium with the system.

Town map of Berlin

High Density Areas

Objects And Water

Objects And Streets

Islands And Water

Islands And Streets

The way forms are made in the selfconscious culture is very different. I shall try to show how , just as it is a property of the unselfconscious system ‘s organization that it produces well-fitting forms, so it is a property of the emergent selfconscious system that its forms fit badly. In one way it is easy enough to see what goes wrong with the arrival of selfconsciousness. The very features which we have found responsible for stability in the unselfconscious process begin to disappear. The reaction to failure, once so direct , now becomes less and less direct . Materials are no

Water

Streets

longer close to hand. Buildings are more permanent, frequent repair and readjustment less common, than they used to be. Construction is no longer in the hands of the inhabitants; failures, when they occur, have to be several times reported and described before the specialist will recognize them and make some permanent adjustment. Each of these changes blunts the hair-fine sensitivity of the unselfconscious process’ response to failure, so that failures now need to be quite considerable before they will induce correction. The firmness of tradition too, dissolves. The resistance to willful change weakens, and change for its own sake becomes acceptable. Instead of forms being held constant in all respects but

Objects And Axis

Islands ( minicities )

Objects And Water

Island, Water. Objects and Streets

one, so that correction can be immediately effective, the interplay of simultaneous changes is now uncontrolled. To put it playfully, the viscosity which brought the unselfconscious process to rest when there were no failures left, is thinned by the high temperature of selfconsciousness. And as a result the system’s drive to equilibrium is no longer irreversible; any equilibrium the system finds will not now be sustained; those aspects of the process which could sustain it have dropped away. In any case, the culture that once was slow-moving, and allowed ample time for adaptation, now changes so rapidly that adaptation cannot keep up with it. No sooner is adjustment of one kind begun than the culture takes a further turn and forces the adjustment in a new direction. No adjustment is ever finished. And the essential condition on the process- that it should in fact have time to reach its equilibrium - is violated. This has all actually happened. In our own civilization, the process of adaptation and selection which we have seen at work in unselfconscious cultures has plainly disappeared. But that is not in itself enough to account for the fact that the selfconscious culture does not manage to produce clearly organized, well-fitting forms in its own way. Though we may easily be right in putting our present unsuccess down to our selfconsciousness, we must find out just what it is about selfconscious form-production that causes trouble. The pathology of the selfconscious culture is puzzling in its own right, and is not to be explained simply by the passing of the unselfconscious process. 9

The punctual realization of prototypical examples illustrating the whole concept might be the purpose and subject of a building exhibition in the 1980s. Along the way, exhibitions could be organized every year, during the Bauwochen, to showcase the different work stages in progress. In a continuation of the first Summer School held in Berlin this year, certain topics from the overall concept could be reexamined and theoretically re-elaborated. International architects should be invited for extended stays in Berlin to work on these projects. An independent group of experts should be set up to organize the entire planning. 10

I do not wish to imply here that there is any unique process of development that makes selfconscious culcures out of unselfconscious ones. Let us remember anyway that the

The selfconscious process is different. The artist’s selfconscious recognition of his individuality

distinction between the two is artificial. And, besides, the facts of history suggest that the

has deep effect on the process of form-making. Each form is now seen as the work of a single

development from one to the other can happen in rather different ways . From the point of

man, and its success is his achievement only . Selfconsciousness brings with it the desire to

view of my present argument it is immaterial how the development occurs. All that matters,

break loose, the taste for individual expression, the escape from tradi tion and taboo, the will

actually, is that sooner or later the phenomenon of the master craftsman takes control of the

to self-determination. But the wildness of the desire is tempered by man ‘s limited invention.

form-making activities.

To achieve in a few hours at the drawing board what once took centuries of adaptation and

One example, of an early kind, of developing selfconsciousness is found in Samoa. Although ordinary Samoan houses are built by their inhabitants-to-be, custom demands that guest houses be built exclusively by carpenters. Since these carpenters need to find clients, they are in business as artists; and they begin to make personal innovations and changes for no reason except that prospective clients will judge their work for its inventiveness. The form-maker’s assertion of his individuality is an important feature of selfconsciousness.

1 Thus selfconsciousness can arise as a natural outcome of scientific and technological development, by impo sition from a conquering culture, by infiltration as in the underdeveloped countries today. See Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (Cambridge, Mass., 1953) , chapter 10, “The Origin of Scientific Thought.”

development, to invent a form suddenly which clearly fits its context- the extent of the invention necessary is beyond the average designer. A man who sets out to achieve this adaptation in a single leap is not unlike the child who shakes his glass-topped puzzle fretfully, expecting at one shake to arrange the bits inside correctly. The designer’s attempt is hardly random as the child’s is ; but the difficulties are the same . His chances of success are small because the number of factors which must fall simultaneously into place is so enormous.

Think of the willful forms of our own limelight-bound architects. The individual, since his livelihood depends on the reputation he achieves, is anxious to distinguish himself from his

Now, in a sense, the limited capacity of the individual designer makes further treatment of the

fellow architects, to make innovations, and to be a star.

failure of selfconsciousness superfluous. If the selfconscious culture relies on the individual to produce its forms, and the individual isn’t up to it, there seems nothing more to say. But it is

The development of architectural individualism is the clearest manifestation of the moment

not so simple . The individual is not merely weak. The moment he becomes aware of his own

when architecture first turns into a selfconscious discipline. And the selfconscious architect’s

weakness in the face of the enormous challenge of a new design problem, he takes steps to

individualism is not entirely willful either. It is a natural consequence of a man’s decision

overcome his weakness ; and strangely enough these steps themselves exert a very positive bad

to devote his life exclusively to the one activity called “architecture .” Clearly it is at this

influence on the way he develops forms. In fact, we shall see that the selfconscious system’s lack

stage too that the activity first becomes ripe for serious thought and theory . Then, with

of success really doesn’t lie so much in the individual’s lack of capacity as in the kind of efforts

architecture once established as a discipline, and the individual architect established, entire

he makes, when he is selfconscious, to overcome this incapacity.

institutions are soon devoted exclusively to the study and development of design . The

academies are formed. As the academies develop , the unformulated precepts of tradition

Let us look again at just what kind of difficulty the designer faces. Take, for example, the design

give way to clearly formulated concepts whose very formulation invites criticism and debate

of a simple kettle. He has to invent a kettle which fits the context of its use. It must not be too

. Question leads to unrest, architectural freedom to further selfconsciousness, until it turns

small. It must not be hard to pick up when it is hot. It must not be easy to let go of by mistake.

out that (for the moment anyway) the form-maker’s freedom has been dearly bought. For

It must not be hard to store in the kitchen. It must not be hard to get the water out of. It must

the discovery of architecture as an in dependent discipline costs the form-making process

pour cleanly. It must not let the water in it cool too quickly. The material it is made of must not

many fundamental changes. Indeed, in the sense I shall now try to describe, architecture

cost too much. It must be able to withstand the temperature of boiling water. It must not be too

did actually fail from the very moment of its incepti on . With the invention of a teachable

hard to clean on the outside. It must not be a shape which is too hard to machine. It must not

discipline called “architecture, “ the old process of making form was adulterated and its

be a shape which is unsuitable for whatever reasonably priced metal it is made of. It must not

chances of success destroyed.

be too hard to assemble, since this costs man-hours of labor.

The source of this trouble lies with the individual. In the unselfconscious system the

It must not corrode in steamy kitchens. Its inside must not be too difficult to keep free of scale. It

individual is no more than an agent. He does what he knows how to do as best he can .

must not be hard to fill with water. It must not be uneconomical to heat small quantities of water

Very little demand is made of him . He need not himself be able to invent forms at all . All

in, when it is not full. It must not appeal to such a minority that it cannot be manufactured in

that is required is that he should recognize misfits and respond to them by making minor

an appropriate way because of its small demand. It must not be so tricky to hold that accidents

changes. It is not even necessary that these changes be for the better. As we have seen , the

occur when children or invalids try to use it. It must not be able to boil dry and burn out

system , being selfadjusting, finds its own equilibrium - provided only that misfit incites

without warning. It must not be unstable on the stove while it is boiling.

some reaction in the craftsman . The forms produced in such a system are not the work of

I have deliberately filled a page with the list of these twenty-one detailed requirements or

individuals, and their success does not depend on any one man’s artistry, but only on the

misfit variables so as to bring home the amorphous nature of design problems as they present

artist ‘s place within the process.

themselves to the designer. Naturally the design of a complex object like a motor car is much 12

more difficult and requires a much longer list. It is hardly necessary

design . In other words, the generation of verbal concepts and

to speculate as to the length and apparent disorder of a list which

rules need not only be seen abstractly as the supposed result of the

could adequately define the problem of designing a complete urban

individual’s predicament, but may be observed wherever the kind of

environment.

formal education we have called selfconscious occurs.

Since we cannot refer to the list in full each time we think about

A novice in the unselfconscious situation learns by being put right

the problem, we invent a shorthand notation. We classify the items,

whenever he goes wrong . “No, not that way, this way.” No attempt is

and then think about the names of the classes: since there are fewer

made to formulate abstractry just what the right way involves. The

of these, we can think about them much more easily. To put it

right way is the residue when all the wrong ways are eradicated. But

in the language of psychology, there are limits on the number of

in an intellectual atmosphere free from the inhibition of tradition,

distinct concepts which we can manipulate cognitively at any one

the picture changes. The moment the student is free to question what

time, and we. are therefore forced, if we wish to get a view of the

he is told, and value is put on explanation, it becomes important to

whole problem, to re-encode these items. Thus, in the case of the

decide why “this “ is the right way rather than “ that , “ and to look

kettle, we might think about the class of requirements generated

for general reasons. Attempts are made to aggregate the specific

by the process of the kettle’s manufacture, its capacity, its safety

failures and successes which occur, into principles. And each such

requirements, the economics of heating water, and its good looks.

general principle now takes the place of many separate and specific

Each of these concepts is a general name for a number of the specific

admonitions. It tells us to avoid this kind of form, perhap s, or praises

requirements. If we were in a very great hurry (or for some reason

that kind. With failure and success defined, the training of the

wanted to simplify the problem even further), we might even classify

architect develops rapidly. The huge list of specific misfits which can

these concepts in turn, and deal with the problem simply in terms

occur, too complex for the student to absorb abstractly and for that

of ( 1 ) its function and (2) its economics. In this case we would

reason usually to be grasped only through direct experience, as it is

have erected a four-level hierarchy like that in the diagram on the

in the unselfconscious culture , can now be learned - because it has

next page. By erecting such a hierarchy of concepts for himself, the

been given form. The misfit variables are patterned into categories

designer is, after all, able to face the problem all at once. He achieves

like “ economics “ or “ acoustics. “ And condensed, like this, they

a powerful economy of thought, and can by this means thread his

can be taught, discussed, and criticized. It is this point, where these

way through far more difficult problems than he could cope with

concept-determined principles begin to figure in the training and

otherwise. If hierarchies seem lesscommon in practice than I seem

practice of the architect, that the ill-effect of selfconsciousness on

to suggest, we have only to look at the contents of any engineering

form begins to show itself.

manual or architects’ catalogue; the hierarchy of chapter headings

Urban villa typologies, Ungers, 1977

and subheadings is organized the way it is, precisely for cognitive

I shall now try to draw attention to the peculiar and damaging

convenience.

arbitrariness of the concepts which are invented. Let us remember that the system of interdependent requirements or misfit variables

To help himself overcome the difficulties of complexity, the designer

active in the unselfconscious ensemble is still present underneath

tries to organize his problem. He classifies its various aspects,

the surface.

thereby gives it shape, and makes it easier to handle. What bothers

Alongside the architectural principles that he puts forward ( the dinstiction between the planned and the accidental, morphological declension, the urban dimension of architecture, and the principle of adaptibility) the most significant is still the “dialectic relationship with existing reality, “this ambition to intensify the place,” which he emphisizes as sharing a relative affinity with the as found of the Smithsons or the contextualism of Colin Rowe. How is a designer to deal with this highly amorphous and diffuse condition of the problem as it confronts him? What would any of us do? 13

him is not only the difficulty of the problem either. The constant

Suppose, as before, we picture the system crudely by drawing a

burden of decision which he comes across, once freed from

link between every pair of interdependent requirements : we get

tradition, is a tiring one. So he avoids it where he can by using rules

something that looks like this.

(or general principles) , which he formulates in terms of his invented concepts. These principles are at the root of all so-called “theories”

As we have seen before, the variables of such a system can be

of architectural design. They are prescriptions which relieve the

adjusted to meet the specified conditions in a reasonable time only

burden of selfconsciousness and of too much responsibility.

if its subsystems are adjusted independently of one another. A subsystem, roughly speaking, is one of the obvious components of

It is rash, perhaps, to call the invention of either concepts or

the system, like the parts shown with a circle round them . If we try

prescriptions a conscious attempt to simplify problems. In practice

to adj ust a set of variables which does not constitute a subsystem,

they unfold as the natural outcome of critical discussion about

the repercussions of the adjustment affect others outside the set, 14

because the set is not sufficiently independent. What we saw in Chapter 4, effectively, was that

everyday language by relating their meanings to those of other words at present available in

the procedure of the unselfconscious system’ s so organized that adjustment can take place in

English.

each one of these subsystems independently. This is the reason for its success. In the selfconscious situation, on the other hand, the designer is faced with all the variables simultaneously. Yet we know from the simple computation on page 40 that if he tries to manipulate them all at once he will not manage to find a well-fitting form in any reasonable time . When he himself senses this difficulty, he tries to break the problem down, and so invents

17 It could be argued possibly that the word “acoustics” is not arbitrary but corresponds to a clearly objective collection of requirementsnamely those which deal with auditory phenomena. But this only serves to emphasize its arbitrariness. After all, what has the fact that we happen to have ears got to do with the problem’s causal structure?

Yet this part played by language in the invention of new concepts, though very important from the point of view of communication and understanding, is almost entirely irrelevant from the point of view of a problem’s structure17. The demand that a new concept be definable and comprehensible is important from the point of view of teaching and selfconscious design . Take the concept “safety, “ for example. Its existence as a common word is convenient and helps hammer home the very general importance of keeping designs dangerfree . But it is used

concepts to help himself decide which subsets of requirements to deal with independently.

in the statement of such dissimilar problems as the design of a tea kettle and the design of a

Now what are these concepts, in terms of the system of variables? Each concept identifies a

highway interchange. As far as its meaning is concerned it is relevant to both. But as far as

certain collection of the variables. “ Economics “ identifies one part of the system, “ safety “

the individual structure of the two problems goes, it seems unlikely that the one word should

another, “ acoustics “ another, and so on.

successfully identify a principal component subsystem in each of these two very dissimilar problems. Unfortunately, although every problem has its own structure, and there are many

My contention is this. These concepts will not help the designer in finding a well-adapted

different problems, the words we have available to describe the components of these problems

solution unless they happen to correspond to the system’s subsystems. But since the concepts

are generated by forces in the langu age, not by the problems, and are therefore rather limited

are on the whole the result of arbitrary historical accidents, there is no reason to expect that

in number and cannot describe more than a few cases correctly .

they will in fact correspond to these subsystems. They are just as likely to identify any other parts of the system, like this :

Take the simple problem of the kettle. I have listed 21 requirements which must take values within specified limits in an acceptably designed kettle . Given a set of n things, there are 2n

Of course this demonstrates only that concepts can easily be arbitrary . It does not show that

different subsets of these things. This means that there are 221 distinct subsets of variables any

the concepts used in practice actually are so. Indeed, clearly , their arbitrariness can only be

one of which may possibly be an important component subsystem of the kettle problem. To

established for individual and specific cases. Detailed analysis of the problem of designing

name each of these components alone we should already need more than a million different

urban family houses, for instance, has shown that the usually accepted functional categories

words - more than there are in the English language .

like acoustics, circulation, and accommodation are inappropriate for this problemP Similarly, the principle of the “ neighborhood , “ one of the old chestnuts of city-planning theory, has been

A designer may object that his thinking is never as verbal as I have implied, and that, instead of

shown to be an inadequate mental component of the residential planning problem. But since

using verbal concepts, he prepares himself for a complicated problem by making diagrams of

such demonstrations can only be made for special cases, let us examine a more general, rather

its various aspects. This is true. Let us remember, however, just what things a designer tries to

plausible reason for believing that such verbal concepts always will be of this arbitrarykind.

diagram. Physical concepts like “neighborhood “ or “circulation pattern” have no more universal

Every concept can be defined and understood in two complementary ways. We may think of it

validity than verbal concepts. They are still bound by the conceptual habits of the draftsman. A

as the name of a class of objects or subsidiary concepts ; or we may think of what it means. We

typical sequence of diagrams which precede an architectural problem will include a circulation

define a concept in extension when we specify all the elements of the class it refers to. And we

diagram, a diagram of acoustics, a diagram of the load-bearing structure, a diagram of sun and

define a concept in intension when we try to explain its meaning analytically in terms of other

wind perhaps, a diagram of the social neighborhoods. I maintain that these diagrams are used

concepts at the same level.

only because the principles which define them - acoustics, circulation , weather, neighborhood - happen to be part of current architectural usage , not because they bear a well-understood

For the sake of argument I have just been treating terms like “acoustics “ as class names, as a

fundamental relation to any particular problem being investigated.

collective way of talking about a number of more specific requirements. The “neighborhood, “ too, though less abstract and more physical, is still a concept which summarizes mentally all

As it stands, the selfconscious design procedure provides no structural correspondence

those specific requirements, like primary schooling, pedestrian safety, and community, which

between the problem and the means devised for solving it. The complexity of the problem is

a physical neighborhood is supposed to meet. In other words, each of the concepts “acoustics

never fully disentangled, and the forms produced not only fail to meet their specifications as

“ and “neighborhood “ is a variable whose value extension is the same as that given by the conj

fully as they should, but also lack the formal clarity which they would have if the organization

unction of all the value extensions of the specific acoustic variables, or the specific community-

of the problem they are fitted to were better understood.

living variables, respectively.l6 This extensional view of the concept is convenient for the sake

of mathematical clarity. But in practice, as a rule, concepts are not generated or defined in

It is perhaps worth adding, as a footnote , a slightly different angle on the same difficulty. The

extension; they are generated in intension. That is, we fit new concepts into the pattern of

arbitrariness of the existing verbal concepts is not their only disadvan tage, for once they are 16

invented, verbal concepts have a further ill-effect on us. We lose the ability to modify them . In the un selfconscious situation the action of culture on form is a very subtle business, made up of many minute concrete influences. But once these concrete influences are represented symbolically in verbal terms, and these symbolic representations or names subsumed under larger and still more abstract categories to make them amenable to thought, they begin seriously to impair our ability to see beyond them20. Where a number of issues are being taken into account in a design decision , inevitably the ones which can be most clearly expressed carry the greatest weight, and are best reflected in the form . Other factors, important too but less well expressed, are not so well reflected . Caught in a net of language of our own invention, we overestimate the language ‘s impartiality. Each concept, at the time of its invention no more than a concise way of grasping many issues, quickly becomesa precept. We take the step from description to criterion too easily, so that what is at first a useful tool becomes a bigoted preoccupation.

20 Whorf, “Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language,” p. 76. Whorf, who worked for a time as a fire insurance agent, found that certain fires were started because workmen, though careful with matches and cigarettes when they were near full gasoline drums, became careless near empty ones. Actually the empty drums, containing vapor, are more dangerous then the relatively inert full drums. But the word “empty” carries with it the idea of safety, while the word “full” seems to suggest pregnant danger. Thus the concepts “ full” and “ empty” actually reverse the real structure of the situation, and hence lead to fire. pages 6r-69 / 2 o 5 The effect of concepts on the structure of architectural problems is much the same. Ibid., pp. 75-76. See also Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford, 1958) , pp. 1 7-20.

The Roman bias toward functionalism and engineering did not reach its peak until after Vitruvius had formulated the functionalist doctrine. The Parthenon could only have been created during a time of preoccupation with aesthetic problems, after the earlier Greek invention of the concept “beauty”. England ‘ s nineteenth century low-cost slums were conceived only after monetary values had explicitly been given great importance through the concept “economics” invented not long before . In this fashion the selfconscious individual ‘s grasp of problems is constantly misled. His concepts and categories, besides being arbitrary and unsuitable, are self-perpetuating. Under the influence of concepts, he not only does things from a biased point of view, but sees them biasedly as well. The

Active equilibrium with the ‘system’.

concepts control his perception of fit and misfit- until in the end he sees nothing but deviations from his conceptual dogmas, and loses not only the urge but even the mental opportunity to frame his problems more appropriately .

THE CITY IN THE CITY The model of the city in the city was conceived during the Summer School organized in Berlin in 1977 by Cornell University, the senator in charge of building and housing systems, the IDZ, and the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien. The villa as a form of urban housing and the city in

Thesis 1 Berlin’s Population Drop

the city were the subjects discussed at that Summer School. Cornell University architectural students drew up their proposals for the urban villa during an eight-week course held at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien. Immediately after the end of the Summer School, Ungers, eager to promote the idea of the

Thesis 2 Criticism of Current Planning Theories

city in the city as a possible theme and focus for a new building exhibition in Berlin, deploys and reformats the whole argument into a fully fledged demonstration in eleven theses, each scolastically accompanied by an exlanation and a conclusion.

Thesis 3 The Problem of Shrinkage in General

Thesis 4 The Differentiated Urban Structure in Berlin

Thesis 5 The Concept of the City in the City

Thesis 6 The Location of Urban Islands

Thesis 7 Berlin as a Green Archipelago

Thesis 8 The Urban Villa as a Form of Urban Housing

Thesis 9 19

Thesis 1 Berlin’s Population Drop

Thesis 2 Criticism of Current Planning Theories

Current evaluations prodict that Berlin, by the 1900s, will have lost more than ten percent of its

The opinion that prevails today, whereby the historic parts of the city can be preserved and saved

population, dropping from 2 to 1.7 million inhabitants.

only through additional and supplementary construction, stems from erroneous assumptions and is therefore illusory.

Explanation If we start from the assumption that these estimates are fairly exact, then it must be borne

Explanation

in mind that the real figures may exceed the estimated reduction, because once the decrease

Two urban design tendencies must be avoided on the theoretical and operative plane, due to

is In progress, it ends up by causing a bigger effect. A certain percentage of anxiety-prone

their illusory character: one starts from the assumption that the city can be repaired3 to its

inhabitants will be caught up in the end by an exodus psychosis, with the result that the

former historic substance and configuration. Programs of this kind are, at best, the result of a

population will slip below the estimated. Experience, however, has shown that this figure will

misunderstood wave of nostalgia. As statistical forecasts seem to indicate, future demand will

subsequently tend to swing back to a somewhat higher level, assuming that the quality of

simply not be large enough to sustain them. The reduction process, however, cannot be left

life improves and the city becomes a more congenial place to live in after a reorganization of

to chance. The hazardous development that would inevitably ensue not only spells chaos but

the urban environment. Without a radically improved offer no one will want to remain In a

would ultimately have disastrous consequences for the city. The realization of the idea of “urban

bankrupt city of his own accord or, still less, go back there.

repair,” which, if wrongly interpreted, may paradoxically lead, in practice, to the destruction of the city, implies an inevitable thrust toward an increase in buildings, homes, shops, social

Conclusion

services, and so on/The postulate of urban repair denies an established fact, namely, that most

Any future planning for Berlin must therefore come to grips with the problem of a city that has

areas have by now ended in ruins precisely because, in almost all cases and especially in Berlin,

shrunk. Since the total surface of Berlin is fixed and political reality is such that It can be neither

the necessity to increase their density does not exist anymore. In effect, recommendations of

reduced nor increased, future strategies mustbe devised that will allow for a controlled decrease

this kind lead to a general confusion of real necessities and to a consequent outburst of kitsch

in the population density, without jeopardizing the general quality of the urban environment.

produced in the name of goodwill and good taste, because the supposed necessity is just as contrived as its ensuing results.

Conclusion In Berlin, the theory of urban repair, in the sense of a historic reconstruction, would be particularly detrimental, since the inexorable depopulation process would only be camouflaged and all action taken to improve reality would be pointlessly deferred, to the consequent disadvantage of the city.

High Density Areas in Berlin

Thesis 3 The Problem of Shrinkage in General

Thesis 4 The Differentiated Urban Structure in Berlin

In Frankfurt, a number of Social Democratic local politicians met recently to discuss the

Large cities are characterized by an overlapping of many mutually exclusive and divergent

problem of the population drop in big cities and to draw up the necessary countermeasures.

conceptions. This is what differentiates them from villages, housing developments, urban

In the majority of big German cities, the tendency is regressive. As in America, here, too,

Plan of Berlin

districts, and small or medium-size towns. Here, the chief characteristic is expressed in the

the migration to the periphery is mounting. The consequence of this constant exodus is a

predominance of a single basic principle or, if more than one exists, complementary principles.

general impoverishment and in a broader perspective, a partial decay of the city center. The

The ideal would be to find an urban configuration in which both unity and an atmosphere of

depopulation process in some major cities, such as Cologne, Frankfurt, and Berlin, which have

clarity exist.

a high percentage of foreign labor, is already in progress. Explanation Explanation

A structure loses its functional capacity in the measure in which its monolithic character

Clearly, however, this flight from the city also results from a changed way of life. As shown by

increares, be it in the economy, politics, nature, or the urban environment. When, for

a recent survey by the Demoscopic Bureau of Allensbach, big cities are steadily losing their

Plan of Neukölln

residential value.

example, General Motors became too big and ungovernable, the management decided on a transformation of the production facilities into reasonably-sized units. When Europe’s largest industrial complex, the British National Coal Board, reached a no longer functional dimension,

The survey shows that 74 percent of the population prefer an apartment in the country to

the monolith was divided into a group of semi-independent units, each with different tasks and

an apartment in the city. Country life seems to offer more attractions.The automobile and

motivations.

television play an important role in this respect. For a long time now, moving to the country does not anymore mean fleeing from society. With improvements in means of communication,

Plan of Friedenau

The situation is no different in the city. Although it is difficult to establish what constitutes a

both spatial and psychological distances have been considerably reduced. This process of

reasonable size for a city, it is still clear that a convenient size is somewhere around 250,000

depopulation does notapply only to Berlin either. Most of the major cities of the world, with

inhabitants. Zurich, Florence, Trier, or Freiburg are places in which the human atmosphere

very few exceptions, have been hit by the same phenomenon. Since 1970, the population drop

Plan of Kreuzberg, Görlitzer banhof

outweighs the hustle and bustle of the big city. These examples show that an increase in size

in New York City has reached 650,000 inhabitants, and this trend seems likely to continue. In

does not mean an improvement in the quality of life. In Tokyo, New York, or London,10

some parts of the city, more than 70 percent of the inhabitants have left, with the result that

the millions of inhabitants do not raise the effective value of these cities, but create instead

entire districts have virtually been wiped off the map. In their place, the city administration

enormous technical and organizational problems, and end up ruining the human environment.

now plans to install agricultural concerns, or “urban farms.” At present, more than 1,000 are

Today, we suffer from a sense of universal respect for giantism, perhaps because we think that

scheduled in a once highly populated district of Brooklyn.

what is bigger must be better. Reality has instead shown that reduction and diminution also

Plan of Wedding

make for better quality, and not least in the quality of life itself. For this reason, small and Conclusion

legible units ought to be created. This applies to production, the way of life, and any other

Since, as the examples mentioned show, this process of shrinkage is not a local phenomenon

Plan of Sudliche Friedrichstadt

component of our environment.

but rather a sign of a much more general tendency, the future task will no longer be to plan the growth of cities but rather to develop new proposals and concepts for dealing with this exodus

Conclusion

by protecting the better aspects of cities. Faced with this assignment, urban planners today

These considerations suggest that, within the context of a selective program for the reduction

are unprepared and certainly incapable of solving the problem with the means that have been

of urban overpopulation, or even of a partial demolition of those districts that are superfluous

employed hitherto. Berlin, which has such radical and idiosyncratic features, is particularly well suited to act as a laboratory of this set of problems.

and work badly, the reduction of the population in Berlin might provide an outstanding Plan of Charlottenburg

opportunity to redevelop zones that are no longer satisfactory on the technical, social, and structural levels. Simultaneously, those zones that deserve to be preserved should be identified, and their characteristics be either underlined or, if incomplete, completed. These enclaves liberated from the anonymity of the city would in their quality of quasi islands form a green urban archipelago In a natural lagoon.

Thesis 5 The Concept of the City in the City

Explanation The first step to be taken ought to be to identify and select those districts of the city that possess clearly identifiable features likely to justify their preservation and accentuation. These socalled “identity-spaces” should not be chosen on the basis of a particular taste or aesthetic conceptions.

The idea of the city in the city is the basic concept for a future urbanistic model of Berlin. It is

The second step toward a redevelopment is the completion of the fragments to be preserved

substantiated in the image of Berlin as a city-archipelago. The urban islands have an identity

that, in the course of this process, would receive their definitive architectural and urbanistic

in keeping with their history, social structure, and environmental characteristics.The city as a

form. This task requires the development of a whole repertoire of completive strategies of a

whole is formed by the federation of all these urban entities with different structures, developed

clearly unemotional kind. In quarters with a high building density, the existing bulk of building

in a deliberately antithetic manner. A decisive criterion for the selection of these islands ought

ought to be diminished through the creation of free spaces, such as city parks, public gardens,

to be the degree of clarity and legibility of their underlying ideas and concepts

and squares, while districts with a low density, such as Westend, could be intensified by the integration of social condensers. The architectural and planning intentions for the future consist solely in enucleating the true configuration of each urban island on the basis of which it was first chosen. It is essentially a matter of establishing, in a way, the “physiognomy” of the part of the city in question, and leaving one’s stamp on it to such an extent that it finds its proper expression. Each part of the city taken in itself will thus receive an identity of its own that will fundamentally differentiate it from the others. More specifically, therefore, the Märkische Viertel, Westend, Kreuzberg, and Lichterfelde are necessarily included as components of the concept and should be regarded as complementary elements with different characteristics having the capacity to raise the supply and hence the freedom of choice. Conclusion The urban concept of the city in the city, pluralistic in this respect, is the antithesis of current planning theory, which stems from a definition of the city as a single whole. It corresponds to the contemporary structure of society, which develops more and more as a society of individuals with different demands, desires, and conceptions. The concept also involves an individualization of the city and therefore a moving away from type- casting and standardization. It is In this sense that its openness, on the one hand, and its variety, on the other, must be understood. This concept is not simply that of an open urban system, in which many different places together form a diversified and complex urban environment. It is also, from a political and social point of view, a pluralist concept, in which many different Ideological visions find their own places next to one another. For the city dweller, the environment will be legible again, and thereby endowed with a human quality. For personal initiative and participation, the small entity always provides a much better field of operations than the city as a whole. With the individualization of the city, the issue of citizens identifying with the city is also addressed. While an anonymous city composed along a unifying principle provokes a loss of identity and a loss of personality, the city dweller in an open system may choose the identityspace that corresponds to his desires and expectations.

Thesis 6 The Location of Urban Islands

The phase of selection of the so-colled urban islands is as much a question of programmatic identification and description as it is a formal and urbanistic procedure. Not all new integrations have to be planned afresh.Through analogy and comparisons with models it Is possible to gain design insights that can be transposed in a typological sense. Explanation Upon preliminary analytical examination, a number of zones in the city stand out clearly, set apart from the others by their quality and collective distinctiveness. Areas of the city that are exemplary through their closed structure include the Südliche Friedrichstadt, the Görlitz station, the Schloss- strasse,16 Siemensstadt, Spandau, and the area known as the “city,” but also the

Comparison of Urban Structures: The Street Unter den Eichen - Leonidov’s project for Magnitogorsk

Märkische Viertel, the Gropiusstadt, and such typical housing developments [Siedlungen) as the Tempelhofer Feld, th Hufeisen Siedlung, Onkel Tom’s Hütte,’7 but also the cultural island of Kemperplatz,18 which offers a replica of the historic Museumsinsel. The zones just mentioned represent extremely different structures in content and form; they contain not only buildings in blocks but also single, radial, linear, and reticular urban layouts, open and closed systems, regular and irregular street networks, while also having different graphic, spatial, functional, and social characteristics. Conclusion To establish the characteristics of the city, one could take into consideration a number of typical cases that were designed at other times for other situations and may have comparable typological features. For example, the ideal project of Karlsruhe, with its radial axis, might serve as an example for a configuration of the Südliche Friedrichstadt, or the project for Manhattan’s Central Park be transferred just as it is into the Görlitz station zone. The urban planning structure of the

Comparison of Urban Structures: Sudliche Friedrichstadt- Karlshure

Schlossstrasse is identical to the Baroque structure of Mannheim. Leonidov’s linear design for Magnitogorsk is similar from a typological point of view to the built structure along the avenue Unterden Eichen.

Comparison of Urban Structures: Görlitz Station - Central park, New York

Thesis 7 Berlin as a Green Archipelago

Conclusion In the open zones between the urban islands,29 projects of suburban quality, similar to proposals already known, should be realized, such as:

The concept of the city in the city, which proceeds from a collage of different urban entities, will be completed antithetically by the space in between the urban islands. Here, the structures, by now valueless, ought to be allowed to gradually retrans- form into natural zones and pastures, without any rebuilding. This concerns in particular the areas of Kemperplatz.the stations of Görlitz and Potsdam, and, at a later stage, the Tempelhofer airport. Hence, the urban islands would be divided from each other by strips of nature and green, thus defining the framework of the city in the city and thereby explaining the metaphor of the city as a green archipelago. Explanation The green interspaces form a system of modified nature, and contain a repertoire of types that range from suburban zones to parks and woodland to urban areas put to agricultural use

the building of low-density detached individual housing, in accordance with Hllberseimer’s

recommendations for Chicago - the building of complexes of temporary residential areas with mobile homes as an alternative to city-center living, which would stimulate living in the open and a way of life oriented toward leisure time - the building of sports, rest, and recreational facilities, beginning with park and play areas and extending to shooting preserves and artificial landscapes, and to amusement zones of the Disneyland type and National Parks for the friends of nature

(allotment gardens). Suburbs could be of different densities, and integrate existing districts. The surfaces earmarked for agriculture could penetrate all parts of the city and at the same time create an additional source of industry and employment, as is already planned, for example in New York. As for the wooded areas designated as natural reserve, they could be completed and

- the setting aside of production areas in the “industrial park”-style of American cities, with leisure time, play and sport facilities for the Workers.

stimulated by wildparks, and encourage a form of inner tourism. The polarity between nature and culture, or nature and metropolis, which has been generally lost or compromised today, would be given a new impulse by this concept. Since this natureculture system would have to be fundamentally designed-as a purely synthetic nature-its strong contrast would intensify rather than diminish the experience of the metropolis. The natural grid ought also to incorporate the infrastructure of the modern technological age, that is to say, beyond an extended motorway network linking the urban islands to one another, it ought also to include supermarkets, drive-in cinemas, drive-in banks, and similar automobile- related services, as well as all the other 20th century typologies that rely not on space but on mobility. Next to the suburban zones with different densities, the wooded areas, shooting preserves, natural parks, allotment gardens, land for urban agriculture, and the infrastructural services of the modern age, the greenbelts should also be used to “park” temporary mobile facilities. This would encourage the emergence of a new type of city dwellers whose main interest is the employment of leisure time and who show a predilection for living in tent-houses and mobile units: new inhabitants who do not remain attached to any fixed spot, but whose existence is indeed stimulated by a transitory way of life.

Rental Villas from the Gründerzeit preiod (1871 - 1919)

Villa architecture as found, Berlin vernacular

Thesis 8 The Urban Villa as a Form of Urban Housing

Residential building in general has hitherto been limited to two types of buildings: the detached dwelling and the apartment block. Leaving aside the transformation of the detached home into rows of houses, we are left essentially with these two types. To an ever-increasing extent, the apartment block is seen as a renunciation of the detached dwelling. Various studies have shown that nearly 70 percent of the population prefer a detached home to one in a block. Explanation In the last few years, the tendency toward detached homes has risen in step with increased affluence, even if this potentially meant accepting considerable inconvenience, such as higher costs, long commutes, and disruptions in supplies. At the same time, moreover, valuable recreational areas, particularly on the outskirts of the city, have been colonized by detached houses, thus permanently stripping the local community of a further benefit. The actual reason behind this trend toward owning a house is determined less by economic considerations and much more by the desire for independence and the need to freely develop one’s personality; in other words, by increasing individualization and improvement in the quality of life. Apartment blocks cannot fulfill this wish because they impose certain obligations upon those who live in them and restrict their living space. And so it is no coincidence that the building of apartment blocks is continually diminishing to the advantage of detached homes. The question, therefore, is whether, between these two extreme types of dwelling, there exists a form of housing that offers the advantages of the detached home while avoiding the disadvantages of the apartment block. The answer is that the type of home that evidently fulfills this function is the old rented villa. It is a type of house containing four to eight apartments of different ground plans. On account of its relatively limited volume and resulting adaptability Housing Project by K. F. Schinkel 1798

Villa Pflug by E. Knoblauch 1959

House at Victoriastrasse 9 by F. Hitzig 1858

Villa Rosenburg 1902

to the particular wishes of its occupants, this type of house allows for individualized design. In its outward appearance, it resembles the fin-desiècle type of villa, and comes closer than any other known form of housing to fulfilling the desire for individualization. Furthermore, it offers essential advantages in terms of urban planning, since it has a character that creates an urban atmosphere, as can be seen in the residential areas built at the turn of the century. Conclusion In the housebuilding sector, the construction of town houses as rented villas ought to be

Simple Design of Urban Rental Villas

encouraged much more than it has been so far. The transformation of historic villas to meet the reduced requirements of today has demonstrated that this type of home is suitable not only for residential purposes but also lends itself to other functions. In an ideal way, it satisfies the desire of those who wish to personalize their environment, while also accommodating public interest not least with regard to infrastructures and social density. Villa-type houses with a limited number of individually designed apartments fit fairly easily into a historic urban fabric. While the building of big housing blocks in each case results in a redevelopment of the urban fabric, with all the ensuing social, economic, and planning disadvantages, with urban villas all this is Corner villa

Cross plan villa with pergola

Villa with commercial arcades

Villa with interior square

avoided because they are more an integrative than a substitutive urbanistic element. 32

Thesis 9 Transformation of the City in the Course of History

of seven centuries has given the city its present form. The plan of the current situation is a book of events in which the traces of history have remained clearly visible. It is not a unified image but a living collage, a collection of fragments.41 From a historical point of view, the simultaneous juxtaposition of contrasting elements is the expression of the dialectic process

The history of Berlin shows the development of a city from many different places. The difference

In which the city has always found itself and still does. The concept of critical antithesis and

and variety that manifest themselves in its historic quarters are what constitute Berlin’s identity

divergent multiplicity is the very essence and unique character of Berlin.

and urbanistic quality. It is a city in which opposite elements have always found clear expression, and where attempts at standardization under the aegis of a single principle have always failed. Berlin has never followed one idea alone, but proceeded simultaneously from diverging ideas. Theses and antitheses respond here to one another like breathing in and breathing out. Explanation The history of Berlin is the history of the transformation of one type of city into another. In the

Stages in Historical Development of Berlin

course of 700 years, Berlin has been several different cities. It began by being two cities, Berlin and Kölln, the one for fishermen, the other for traders. It soon became a market3’1 city, then a residential one,35 a capital36 and, in the 19th century, an industrial city. Finally, it became a metropolis and ultimately, once again, a double city. As early as the 18th century, Berlin was formed by six different cities: Berlin, Kölln, Friedrichwerder, Dorotheenstadt, Friedrichstadt, and the eastern suburb. These different urban entities each had their own administration, different planning structures, and independent functions. Berlin was the commercial town, Kölln the industrial town, Friedrichwerder the administrative and Dorotheenstadt the residential town, while Friedrichstadt was the military town and the eastern suburb the factory town. Together they formed a kind of federation of towns. At the end of the 19th century, greater Berlin was a network of towns, small and medium in size, stretching over a wide area. The invention of the automobile, the emergence of railroads, and industrial progress led to increased mobility among the population and prompted an increase in the number of homes and workplaces on the outskirts of the historic city center. These were either completely new outposts, or additions to existing settlements. Districts such as Spandau, Friedenau, Lichterfelde, Siemensstadt, and Charlottenburg are quite different urban structures that visually clarify the model of the “city in the city.”

The double city of Berlin - Kölln

A collage of cities in early 19th century

From a historic point of view, this model also transposes the project drawn up by William IV for the Havel landscape between Berlin and Potsdam. Here, in the 19th century, a humanistic cultural landscape was composed with commemorative monuments borrowed from different historic styles, in which the romantic fragment of the Pfaueninsel castle, the Neo-Classical Heilandskirche, the country church of Saints Peter and Paul, reminis- cent of Islamic architecture, the classicist objects of Glienicke Park, the Neo-Gothic Babelsberg Palace, Persius’s house for the court gardener and the machine house, conceived in the late Italian style, and finally the classicist monuments of Potsdam were all embedded as special places in themselves, thus forming an archipelago of architectonic phenomena. The configuration of the Havel landscape holds the key to regarding Berlin as an archipelago of many different sites and places. Beyond all practical and rational reasons, the idea of Berlin as an archipelago is the expression of this humanistic tradition transposed into the present. Conclusion The superimposition of ideas, concepts, decisions, coincidences, and realities across the arc 33

A regional network of the cities in the industrial area

Divided city

Thesis 10 Criteria and Definition of Objectives for the Future

Thesis 11 Schedule and Realization of the Planning Project

The inevitable drive toward reduction, the improvement of the urban quality, the preservation of the

The project ought to be carried out in several stages over a long period of time. The first phase is

historic substance, the individualization of architecture, the humanization of living space in the city,

concerned with the formal and content-related description of the characteristics of the city. The second

and the improvement of the environment are implied topics that will need to be discussed within the

phase deals with the development of alternative models. The third phase covers the evaluation of the

framework of the reconstruction of the city and for whose solution new proposals must be developed.

different models and the formulation of programs. The fourth is the design phase and the fifth is that of the actual realization. If we grant one year to each of these phases, it will take at least five years to

Explanation

complete the whole project.

The issue in question is no longer the design of a completely new environment, but rather the rebuilding of what already exists. The task at hand is not the invention of a new urban system, but the

Explanation

improvement of what is already there; not the discovery of a new order, but the rediscovery of proven

The results of the first phase, which principally consists in cataloging the elements and structures of

principles, not the construction of new cities, but the restructuring of the old ones-this is

the city, ought to be presented in an exhibition and discussed during the Bauwochen. In terms of

the real problem for the future. What is needed is not a new Utopia, but rather a blueprint for a better

method, this research should be organized as a system of fairly open morphological lines so as to allow

reality. And this is something that applies not only to Berlin but also to the majority of other large

integrations during the work.

cities. Berlin might, however, prompt initiatives that go beyond its own particular problematic and thus assume an exemplary and universal character.

The second phase, the development of alternative models, serves to go more deeply into the architectonic and urban planning vocabulary. The possible Utopias for the future should also be compared and

Conclusion

contrasted with each other. The alternatives serve to prepare the decision-making phase. As Popper

The concept of the archipelago-city answers a series of fundamental urban design demands, such as:

recommends, hypotheses should be put forward that, in subsequent phases and through critical evaluation based on realistic criteria, are then either confirmed, modified, or rejected. The appraisal of

- finding a solution to the problem of reduction that goes hand in hand with improvement in quality,

these alternatives would, for the main part, be the task of political commissions, and also of individual

as opposed to the loss in quality that is concomitant to constant growth and unlimited expansion

citizens. The results of the two phases could later be discussed in public meetings and then published. After the formulation of the programs comes the phase of designing the urban islands and the green

- improving urban quality by offering varied and versatile spaces for living and activities

zones between them. At this stage, we ought to avoid showing a preference for a unified architectural style. Rather, the rule of maintaining as wide as possible an architectural spectrum should be adhered

- creating a pluralistic system of unresolved contradictions, instead of a unitary and centralized

to.

system Conclusion - restoring identity in urban spaces

establishing a close link between city and country, which means renewing the relationship between

culture and nature

year, during the Bauwochen, to showcase the different work stages in progress. In a continuation of the first Summer School held in Berlin this year, certain topics from the overall concept could be reexamined and theoretically re-elaborated. International architects should be invited for extended

- the intensification of places, along with the preservation of collective memory and historical

stays in Berlin to work on these projects.

consciousness, understood as a continuity of space and time An independent group of experts should be set up to organize the entire planning. - the individualization of architecture and, simultaneously, an improved adaptability to the wishes and expectations of inhabitants - the need for smaller units so as to create more manageable living and working areas at the scale of the city, and that of individual buildings.

2 37

architect & architecture

THE SOURCE OF GOOD FIT

The complaint that macroscopic clarity is missing in these cases is no aesthetic whim. While it is true that an individual problem can often be solved adequately without regard for the fundamental physical order it implies, we cannot solve a whole net of such problems so casually, and get away with it. It is inconceivable that we should succeed in organizing an ensemble as complex as the modern city until we have a clear enough view of simpler design problems and their implications to produce houses which are physically clear as total organizations.

We must now try to find out how we should go about getting good fit. Where do we find it?

Yet at present, in our own civilization, house forms which are clearly organized and also

What is the characteristic of processes which create fit successfully?

satisfactory in all the respects demanded by the context are almost unknown.

It has often been claimed in architectural circles that the houses of simpler civilizations than

If we look at a peasant farmhouse by comparison, or at an igloo, or at an African’s mud hut, this

our own are in some sense better than our own houses.1 While these claims have perhaps been

combination of good fit and clarity is not quite so hard to find. Take the Mousgoum hut, for

exaggerated, the observation is still sometimes correct. I shall try to show that the facts behind

instance, built by African tribesmen in the northern section of the French Cameroun.5 Apart

it, if correctly interpreted, are of great practical consequence for an intelligently conceived

from the variation caused by slight changes in site and occupancy, the huts vary very little.

process of design.

Even superficial examination shows that they are all versions of the same single form type, and

Let us consider a few famous modern houses for a moment, from the point of view of their

convey a powerful sense of their own adequacy and nonarbitrariness.

good fit. Mies Van der Rohe’s Farnsworth house, though marvelously clear, and organized under the impulse of certain tight formal rules, is certainly not a triumph economically or

Whether by coincidence or not, the hemispherical shape of the hut provides the most efficient

from the point of view of the Illinois floods.2 Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes have

surface for minimum heat transfer, and keeps the inside reasonably well protected from the

solved the weight problem of spanning space, but you can hardly put doors in them. Again,

heat of the equatorial sun. Its shape is maintained by a series of vertical reinforcing ribs. Besides

his dymaxion house, though efficient as a rapid-distribution mass-produced package, takes no

helping to support the main fabric, these ribs also act as guides for rainwater, and are at the

account whatever of the incongruity of single free-standing houses set in the acoustic turmoil

same time used by the builder of the hut as footholds which give him access to the upper

and service complexity of a modern city. Even Le Corbusier in the Villa Savoie, for example, or

part of the outside during its construction.6 Instead of using disposable scaffolding (wood is

in the Marseilles apartments, achieves his clarity of form at the expense of certain elementary

very scarce), he builds the scaffolding in as part of the structure. What is more, months later

comforts and conveniences.

this “scaffolding” is still there when the owner needs to climb up on it to repair the hut. The Mousgoum cannot afford, as we do, to regard maintenance as a nuisance which is best forgotten

Laymen like to charge sometimes that these designers have sacrificed function for the sake of

until it is time to call the local plumber. It is in the same hands as the building operation itself,

clarity, because they are out of touch with the practical details of the housewife’s world, and

and its exigencies are as likely to shape the form as those of the initial construction.

preoccupied with their own interests. This is a misleading charge. What is true is that designers

Again, each hut nestles beautifully in the dips and hollows of the terrain. It must, because

do often develop one part of a functional program at the expense of another. But they do it

its fabric is as weak structurally as the earth it sits on, and any foreignness or discontinuity

because the only way they seem able to organize form clearly is to design under the driving

caused by careless sitting would not have survived the stresses of erosion. The weather-defying

force of some comparatively simple concept. On the other hand, if designers do not aim principally at clear organization, but do try to consider all the requirements equally, we find a kind of anomaly at the other extreme. Take the average developer-built house; it is built with an eye for the market, and in a sense, therefore, fits its context well, even if superficially. But in this case the various demands made on the form are met piecemeal, without any sense of the overall organization the form needs in order to contribute as a whole to the working order of the ensemble. Since everything in the human environment can nowadays be modified by suitable purchases at the five and ten, very little actually has to be taken care of in the house’s basic organization. Instead of orienting the house carefully for sun and wind, the builder conceives its organization without concern for orientation, and light, heat, and ventilation are taken care of by fans, lamps, and other kinds of peripheral devices. Bedrooms are not separated from living rooms in plan, but are placed next to one another and the walls between them then stuffed with acoustic insulation.

concrete foundations which we rely on, and which permit the arbitrary siting of our own Topological Representation of the Atlas of Metropolitan Islands for Madrid. This Archipelago offers a draft project, an action plan, for the European metropolis. This is based on the differentiation of fragments: islands with a concentrated function, regarded as a coherent whole, specifically located in the public sphere and the surrounding metropolitan mass. Each piece, each scene, each island, behaves as a laboratory. The questions still stand: Could this multiplicity help to negotiate the apparently inevitable juxtapositions and incompatibilities of the European metropolis? Can architecture then become the city, while the city becomes a congested vacuum?

houses, are unknown to the Mousgoum. The grouping of the huts reflects the social order of their inhabitants. Each man’s hut is surrounded by the huts of his wives and his subservients, as social customs require — and in such a way, moreover, that these subsidiary huts also form a wall round the chief ’s hut and thereby protect it and themselves from wild beasts and invaders.

This kind of dual coherence is common in simple cultures. Yet in our own culture the only forms which match these simpler forms for overall clarity of conception are those we have already mentioned, designed under the impulse of very special preoccupations. And these forms, just because they derive their clarity from simplification of the problem, fail to meet all the context’s demands. It is true that our functional standards are higher than those in the simple situation. It is true, and important to remember, that the simple cultures never face the problems of complexity which we face in design. And it is true that if they did face them, they would probably not make any better a showing than we do. When we admire the simple situation for its good qualities, this doesn’t mean that we wish we were back in the same situation. The dream of innocence is of little comfort to us; our problem, the problem of organizing form under complex constraints, is new and all our own. But in their own way the simple cultures do their simple job better than we do ours. I believe that only careful examination of their success can give us the insight we need to solve the problem of complexity. Let us ask, therefore, where this success comes from.

the 1755 edition of the Essai sur l’Architecture, Abbe Marc-Antoine Laugier provides a drawing of the primitive hut. For Laugier, the primitive hut represents the first architectural idea. The hut is an abstract concept. While it is an imaginary “house”, it has important meaning to us because it is an emblem of material construction, well-being and the art of dwelling.

To answer this question we shall first have to draw a sharp and arbitrary line between those

criticism are too poorly developed to make such self-criticism possible; indeed the architecture

cultures we want to call simple, for the purposes of argument, and those we wish to classify with

itself is hardly tangibly enough conceived as such to criticize.

ours. I propose calling certain cultures unselfconscious, to contrast them with others, including our own, which I propose to call self conscious.

To be sure that such a distinction between unself conscious and selfconscious cultures is

Of course, the contrast in quality between the forms produced in the two different kinds of

permissible, we need a definition which will tell us whether to call a culture unself conscious

culture is by no means as marked as I shall suggest. Nor are the two form-making processes

or selfconscious on the basis of visible and reportable facts alone. We find a clearly visible

sharply distinguished, as my text pretends. But I have deliberately exaggerated the contrast,

distinction when we look at the way the crafts of form-building are taught and learned, the

simply to draw attention to certain matters, important and illuminating in their own right,

institutions under which skills pass from one generation to the next.

which we must understand before we can map out a new approach to design. It is far more

For there are essentially two ways in which such education can operate, and they may be

important that we should understand the particular contrast I am trying to bring out, than that

distinguished without difficulty.

the facts about any given culture should be accurate or telling. This is not an anthropological

At one extreme we have a kind of teaching that relies on the novice’s very gradual exposure

treatise, and it is therefore best to think of the first part of the following discussion simply as a

to the craft in question, on his ability to imitate by practice, on his response to sanctions,

comparison of two descriptive constructs, the un self conscious culture and the selfconscious

penalties, and reinforcing smiles and frowns. The great example of this kind of learning is the

culture.

child’s learning of elementary skills, like bicycle riding. He topples almost randomly at first, but

The cultures I choose to call “unselfconscious” have, in the past, been called by many other

each time he does something wrong, it fails; when he happens to do it right, its success and the

names — each name chosen to illuminate whatever aspect of the contrast between kinds of

fact that his success is recognized make him more likely to repeat it right.18 Extended learning

culture the writer was most anxious to bring out. Thus they have been called “primitive,” to

of this kind gives him a “total” feeling for the thing learned — whether it is how to ride a

distinguish them from those where kinship plays a less important part in social structure;11

bicycle, or a skill like swimming, or the craft of housebuilding or weaving. The most important

“folk,” to set them apart from urban cultures;12 “closed,” to draw attention to the responsibility

feature of this kind of learning is that the rules are not made explicit, but are, as it were, revealed

of the individual in today’s more open situation;13 “anonymous,” to distinguish them from

through the correction of mistakes.

cultures in which a profession called “architecture” exists. The particular distinction I wish to make touches only the last of these: the method of making things and buildings. Broadly, we may distinguish between our own culture, which is very selfconscious about its architecture, art, and engineering, and certain specimen cultures which are rather unselfconscious about theirs.15 The features which distinguish architecturally unself conscious cultures from selfconscious ones are easy to describe loosely. In the unself conscious culture there is little thought about architecture or design as such. There is a right way to make buildings and a wrong way; but while there may be generally accepted remedies for specific failures, there are no general principles comparable to Alberti’s treatises or Le Corbusier’s. Since the division of labor is very limited, specialization of any sort is rare, there are no architects, and each man builds his own house. The technology of communication is underdeveloped. There are no written records or architectural drawings, and little intercultural exchange. This lack of written records and lack of information about other cultures and situations means that the same experience has to be won over and over again generation after generation — without opportunity for development or change. With no variety of experience, people have no chance to see their own actions as alternatives to other possibilities, and instead of becoming selfconscious, they simply repeat the patterns of tradition, because these are the only ones they can imagine. In a word, actions are governed by habit.17 Design decisions are made more according to custom than according to any individual’s new ideas. Indeed, there is little value attached to the individual’s ideas as such. There is no special market for his inventiveness. Ritual and taboo discourage innovation and self-criticism. Besides, since there is no such thing as “architecture” or “design,” and no abstractly formulated problems of design, the kinds of concept needed for architectural self43

The second kind of teaching tries, in some degree, to make the rules explicit. Here the novice learns much more rapidly, on the basis of general “principles. ” The education becomes a formal one; it relies on instruction and on teachers who train their pupils, not just by pointing out mistakes, but by inculcating positive explicit rules. A good example is lifesaving, where people rarely have the chance to learn by trial and error. In the informal situation there are no “teachers,” for the novice’s mistakes will be corrected by anybody who knows more than he. But in the formal situation, where learning is a specialized activity and no longer happens automatically, there are distinct “teachers” from whom the craft is learned.20 These teachers, or instructors, have to condense the knowledge which was once laboriously acquired in experience, for without such condensation the teaching problem would be unwieldy and unmanageable. The teacher cannot refer explicitly to each single mistake which can be made, for even if there were time to do so, such a list could not be learned. A list needs a structure for mnemonic purposes.21 So the teacher invents teachable rules within which he accommodates as much of his unconscious training as he can — a set of shorthand principles. In the unselfconscious culture the same form is made over and over again; in order to learn form-making, people need only learn to repeat a single familiar physical pattern. In the self conscious culture new purposes are occurring all the time; the people who make forms are constantly required to deal with problems that are either entirely new or at best modifications of old problems. Under these circumstances it is not enough to copy old physical patterns. So that people will be able to make innovations and modifications as required, ideas about how and why things get their shape must be introduced. Teaching must be based on explicit general principles of function, rather than unmentioned and specific principles of shape. I shall call a culture unself conscious if its form-making is learned informally, through imitation and correction. And I shall call a culture selfconscious if its form-making is taught academically, according to explicit rules.22 Now why are forms made in the selfconscious culture not so well fitting or so clearly made as those in the unselfconscious culture? In one case the form-making process is a good one, in the other bad. What is it that makes a form-making process good or bad? In explaining why the unselfconscious process is a good one, hardly anyone bothers, nowadays, to argue the myth of the primitive genius, the unsophisticated craftsman supposedly more gifted than his sophisticated counterpart. The myth of architectural Darwinism has taken its place.24 Yet though this new myth is more acceptable, in its usual form it is not really any more informative than the other. It says, roughly, that primitive forms are good as a result of a process of gradual adaptation — that over many centuries such forms have gradually been fitted to their cultures by an intermittent white wooden frame architectural black building in north greenwich london in the united kingdom unfolding the classical minimalism in facade and form of the modern type high riseportraying the principles of modern design culture.

though persistent series of corrections. But this explanation is vague hand-waving.25 It doesn’t tell us what it is that prevents such adaptation from taking place successfully in the selfconscious culture, which is what we want to know most urgently. And even as an explanation of good fit in the unselfconscious culture, the raw concept of adaptation is something less than satisfactory. If forms in an unself conscious culture fit now, the chances are that they always did. We know of no outstanding differences between the present states and past states of unself conscious cultures; and this assumption, that the fit of forms in such cultures is the result of gradual adjustment (that is, improvement) over time, does not illuminate what must actually be a dynamic process in which both form and context change continuously, and yet stay mutually well adjusted all the time.

This example shows how the pattern of the building operation, the pattern of the building’s maintenance, the constraints of the surrounding conditions, and also the pattern of daily life, are fused in the form. The form has a dual coherence. It is coherently related to its context. And it is physically coherent. 47

To understand the nature of the form-making process, it is not enough to give a quick one-word account of unself conscious form-making: adaptation. We shall have to compare the detailed Christopher Alexander challenges the standard permaculture view of design as a process of assembling pre-existing elements (or parts) into wholes. For Alexander, naturemimicking or what he calls living design process differentiates preexisting wholes into parts.

inner working of the unselfconscious form-making process with that of the selfconscious process, asking why one works and the other fails. Roughly speaking, I shall argue that the unselfconscious process has a structure that makes it homeostatic (self-organizing), and that it therefore consistently produces well-fitting forms, even in the face of change. And I shall argue that in a selfconscious culture the homeostatic structure of the process is broken down, so that the production of forms which fail to fit their contexts is not only possible, but likely. Whether a form-making process is selfconscious or unselfconscious, these misfit variables are always present, lingering in the background of the process, as thoughts in a designer’s mind, or as actions, criticisms, failures, doubts. Only the thought or the experience of possible failure provides the impetus to make new form. At any moment in a form-making process, whether the form is in use, a prototype, as yet only a sketch, or obsolete, each of the variables is in a state of either fit or misfit. We may describe the state of all the variables at once by a row of l’s and 0’s, one for each variable: for instance, for twenty variables, 0 0100110101110110000 would be one state. Each possible row of Vs and 0’s is a possible state of the ensemble. As form-making proceeds, so the system of variables changes state. One misfit is eradicated, another misfit occurs, and these changes in their turn set off reactions within the system that affect the states of other variables. As form and culture change, state follows state. The sequence of states which the system passes through is a record or history of the adaptation between form and context. The history of the system displays the form-making process at work. To compare unself conscious and selfconscious form-making processes, we have only to examine the kinds of history which the system of variables can have in these two processes. As we shall see, the kinds of history which the system can have in the unselfconscious and self conscious processes are very different. If we now consider the process of form-making, we see an easy way to make explicit the distinction between processes which work and those which don’t. Let us remind ourselves of the precise sense in which there is a system active in a form-making process. It is a purely fictitious system. Its variables are the conditions which must be met by good fit between form and context. Its interactions are the causal linkages which connect the variables to one another. If there is not enough light in a house, for instance, and more windows are added to correct this failure, the change may improve the light but allow too little privacy; another change for more light makes the windows bigger, perhaps, but thereby makes the house more likely to collapse. These are examples of inter-variable linkage. If we represent this system by drawing a point for each misfit variable, and a link between two points for each such causal linkage, we get a structure which looks something like this: Now, let us go back to the question of adaptation. Clearly these misfit variables, being interconnected, cannot adjust independently, one by one. On the other hand, since not all the variables are equally strongly connected (in other words there are not only dependences among the variables, but also independences), there will always be subsystems like those circled below, which can, in principle, operate fairly independently. We may therefore picture the process of

form-making as the action of a series of subsystems, all interlinked, yet sufficiently free of one another to adjust independently in a feasible amount of time. It works, because the cycles of correction and recorrection, which occur during adaptation, are restricted to one subsystem at a time. We shall not be able to see, directly, whether or not the unselfconscious and selfconscious form-making processes operate by subsystems. Instead we shall infer their modes of operation indirectly. The greatest clue to the inner structure of any dynamic process lies in its reaction to change. A culture does not move from one change to the next in discrete steps, of course. New threads are being woven all the time, making changes continuous and smooth. But from the point of view of its effect on a form, change only becomes significant at that moment when a failure or misfit reaches critical importance — at that moment when it is recognized, and people feel the form has something wrong with it. It is therefore legitimate, for our purpose, to consider a culture as changing in discrete steps.33 We wish to know, now, how the form-making process reacts to one such change. Whether a new, previously unknown misfit occurs or a known one recurs, in both cases, from our point of view, some one variable changes value from 0 to 1. The reaction of the system to the disturbance is the reaction of the form-making process to the misfit. If we detect the active presence of subsystems in a process, we may then argue (by induction, as it were) that this is fully responsible for the good fit of the forms being produced by the process. For if good forms can always be adjusted correctly the moment any slight misfit occurs, then no sequence of changes will destroy the good fit ever (at least while the process maintains this character); and provided there was good fit at some stage in the past, no matter how remote (the first term of the induction), it will have persisted, because there is an active stability at work.34 If, on the other hand, a form-making process is such that a minor culture change can upset the good fit of the forms it produces, then any well-fit ting forms we may observe at one time or another fit only by accident; and the next cultural deflection may once more lead to the production of badly fitting forms. It is the inner nature of the process which counts. The vital point that underlies the following discussion is that the formbuilders in unselfconscious cultures respond to small changes in a way that allows the subsystems of the misfit system to work independently — but that because the selfconscious response to change cannot take place subsystem by subsystem, its forms are arbitrary.

Within this process, every individual act of building is a process in which space gets differentiated. It is not a process of addition, in which pre-formed parts are combined to create a whole: but a process of unfolding, like the evolution of an embryo, in which the whole precedes its parts, and actually gives birth to them, by splitting. 51

BERLIN INFLUENCES & RAMIFICATIONS

in West Berlin that was especially pronounced in the 1970».’ This explains the admonishment in the first sentence of the manifesto: “Any future ‘plan* for Berlin has to be a plan for a city in retrenchment.” In contrast to the then popular school of urban restoration, derived from the Neo- Rationalist theories of Aldo Rossi and from Léon Krier’s dogma of the “reconstruction of the European city,“ Ungers and Koolhaas saw Berlin as a raw material to be approached critically, from which an alternative theory might emerge. The authors’ interest in the phenomenon of the shrinking city predates this project by some years. In 1971, Ungers published an article on “urban problems in a pluralistic mass society,” in which he criticized the postwar consumcrist society, describing its clVcct on cities and

The major city on the Spree-which is such a well-loved city today-was chosen as the primary

landscapes thus: “worn-out roads and bridges, run-down railway stations, abandoned farms,

locus of this book chiefly because of factors in civic politics. In 1976, almost two decades after

deserted villages and cities that finish up as ghost towns.”’ A year later, he and his family

the most recent construction exhibition—Ihc hierban exhibition n new event to provide the

embarked on a two- month journey through the US to collect material for a planned book on

isolated half-city with new Idcus und impetus was on the agenda of West Berlin’s government,

ghost towns, which, unfortunately, he never wrote. Lectures given by him during this period

the Senate. Over the course of the following ycur, two protagonists and two concepts competed

show that Ungers’s theories were increasingly becoming influenced by the phenomenon of

for control of the architecture exhibition that later became known as the IBA. In a scries of

thinning inner cities, which he experienced during his time in the US. The truth was that many

articles in the Berliner Morgenposl, the first of which appeared in January. Josef Paul Kleihucs

major American cities had been witnessing a decline in population similar to Berlin’s since

argued for the Siadireparaiur or “urban repair” approach. Oswald Mathias Ungers, on the

the 1950s. which was then accelerated by the oil crisis of 1973 and the subsequent economic

other hand, espoused a different strategy. As a professor at Cornell University, he organized

crisis. At the same time, late capitalism’s ideal of unbounded growth was now being questioned:

a Summer School at the Kiinstlcrhaus Bethanien, dividing it into two sections: while his

by critics such as Vance Packard, who first attacked the excesses of American consumerist

assistants Hans KollhofTand Arthur Ovaska declined the subject of the urban villa with their

society in 1960, by the pioneering Meadows report The Limits to Growth, and by sociological

American students. Peter Kicm.tnn approached, from a graphic angle, the topic of the city in the city, for which Rem Koolhaas provided the raw text, entitled Berlin: A Green Archipelago and published here for the first time. At the sume time, it number of architects were invited to give lectures, including Aldo Rossi, Jumes Stirling. Alison and Peter Smithson, Peter Eisenman, Hans Hollcin, and Roll Krier. On September 23—after the results had been shown to the public in the form of an exhibition Ungers presented the reworked version, converted into u sel of theses. to the executive committee of the Social Democratic Party, which was responsible for appointing the senator in charge of construction within Berlin’s newly elected state government. The degree of determination with which Ungers positioned this “urban planning concept” against the approach taken by Kleihues is evident in the second thesis: “In Berlin in particular, the consequences of the theory of a restored city, in the sense of a historic reconstruction, would be the reverse of those expected, since the inexorable depopulation process would only be camouflaged land all action ulen to improve reality would be pointlessly deferred, to the consequent disadvantage of the dty.|”-which is why Koolhaas originally even argued in favor of “exorcising” this approach. Ungers and Koolhaas thus implied that urban repair carried with it a fundamental contradiction, that within the context of demographic decline there is no demand for new living spucc. Berlin had. in fuel, been struggling with the effects of deindustrialization since the building of the Witll. Industry, present in abundance prior to the war. hud relocated to the Federal Republic’s other major cities, and the resulting scarcity of employment prospects, together with the city’s isolated situation, created a state of economic und demographic decline

ROO KRIBRiIDEAL PLAN FOR FRIEORICHSTAOT, 1977 Th« iMp«it MMSiinMtt tor tho Oerel «»ment of »outtiern Frledrlchutadt. comrm«»kir»«d n December 1977 by Barta’a biAUng d“ec1or. Nun« Christ an Miner. esempldlaa tha urban ropo» approach Rob Krter protected n regular aucc«eaion al city blockt. Mraot*. and aquoros on the bast* oí I he herow-e urban figura and IMti-canUay Hoc* Mruc- tjro In an echo ce Hermann Jemen’» green corridor, in« achrma Intagratad a groan ‘culture ring’* m II» northern oeclion. The upper and towar lul. aa of tho plan at lop roprooent, respectnely. Iha urben cnmCtion bafora and irflur Iha deabuctlon during World WarII

theses on postindustrial society. Prior to this, architects had barely addressed this theme at all-and the

“previous baggage.’ was interested in the Berlin Wall, discussing it one year later in his travel

originality of the Archipelago manifesto lies above all in the fact that it provided, for the first time, an

piece The Berlin Wall as Architecture and subsequently in his Architectural Association School

urbanislic thought model to fit this new- situation of economic and demographic shrinkage, whereas

of Architecture graduation thesis “Exodus, or The Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture.” The

all previous theories of urban planning had presupposed growth. The fact that West Berlin was already

suggestions in the rough draft of the manifesto that is our subject here include the creation of a

a perfect exumple of a posiindusliial major city during this period absolutely fascinated Ungers and

linear park to absorb the “death strip” in the event of political union and the dismantling of the

Koolhaas-thcy expressed the belief that this city had the potential “to achieve a prototypical ‘pilot*

Wall. In 1981, Koolhaas incorporated this idea into his competition project for the Friedrich-

status that could inject new models in a zero-growth Europe.” This meant perceiving demographic

strasse’s Block 4. Following the actual fall of the Wall, it was adopted by Zaha Hadid. Jean

shrinkage not as a negative phenomenon per se. but as an opportunity to distill a new city profile. For

Nouvel and Norman Foster, without ever being implemented. In an interview he gave to the

this reason, Ungers began his presentation to the executive committee of the Social Democratic Party

magazine Archplus in the mid-eighties, Koolhaas made the following comments about Berlin:

with a plea for the réévaluation of a seemingly apocalyptic situation, quoting an aphorism of F.mst

“Since working on my project about the Wall at the AA School, I have felt a great affinity for this

Friedrich Schumacher, the author of Small Is Beau ttful: “The art of living is always to make good things

city, which my contacts with Ungers have served to reinforce. I find the coexistence of history,

out of a bad thing.”

destruction, and the reconstruction of the fifties and sixties in Berlin fascinating.”

Ultimately, the choice of Berlin as the subject of this book is due, above all, to the special relationship that

The two men would later get to know each other at lthaca-as a scholarship student, Koolhaas

both authors had with the city. In 1963, Ungers, then thirty-seven years old. was given a chair at Berlin’s

decided (as Hans KollhofT and Peter Riemann would later do) to go to Cornell to study under

Technical University, where, until his move to the US five years Inter, he developed an experimental

Ungers, who was reputed to be a stimulating tutor. “His whole physical being.” Koolhaas later

curriculum that-as Koolhaas was later to write-declared Berlin “the single, obsessive subject of his

wrote, “thought, felt, absorbed, imagined, and communicated architecture In a way that was

students for years lo come.“* In their analyses and designs, his students thoroughly examined all the

accessible, contagious. and almost sensual.”4 He. like KollhofT and Ovaska, collaborated with

components of Berlin’s urban organism and developed designs that were sometimes intriguing and

Ungers on several competition entries: first on Russelshcim ( 1972) and Düren ( 1973), then

sometimes peculiar, while Ungers himself evolved theoretical arguments from the perforated city:

the Landwchrkanal-Ticrgartcn in Berlin (1973), which initialed the idea of a new building

Grossformen im Wohnungsbau, for instance, which constitutes an early manifestation of Ungers’s

exhibition, and finally Bcrlin-Lichlerfelde, Fourth Ring (1974). These competition projects

analytical approach of treating historic and Modernist typologies equally; or the examination of the

already acted out a number of ideas and thoughts that would later form pan of the Archipelago

quintessential symbol of Berlin’s history of destruction. the Brantlwãnde or “firewalls.” The publications

manifesto: in Düren and at the Landwehrkanal, a broad range of typologies in close proximity;

in which these speculative ideas appeured-known as the Veröffentlichungen zur Architektur—wok

in addition to this, a variety of architectural islands inscribed into Berlin’s damaged urban

discovered by Rem Koolhaas in Ihe summer of 1971 in a bookshop in Berlin during his first visit to

organism at the Landwehrkanal. The urban villa idea was finally put down on paper for the

the city. He was so electrified that he took all the available brochures with him back to London. To this

first time in a plan for Lichtcrfeldc. As Jasper Ccpl aptly expresses it in his biography of lingers,

extent, Berlin could be said to be the first point of contact between the two “Rhinelanders.” Although

the collaboration with Koolhaas allowed Ungers to find his way “back to the old form” after

this is a theme that docs not Figure in Ungers’s writings from the 1960s. the Dutchmun, who had no

years of research and conceptual imprecision.’ Today, Koolhaas considers himself to have acted in the capacity of a ghostwriter, helping Ungers “to reinvent his goals.” This collaboration was curried on in what might be called a “telepathic” manner.4 and the Archipelago manifesto should therefore be seen as a synthesis, bom out of a fertile relationship between two extreme versatile personalities. Before 1 delineate the ramifications of this manifesto for urban planning though. I would like to summarize some of the implications. OSWALD MATHIAS UNGERS, “ STADTPROB LE ME DER PLURALISTISCHEN MASSENGESELLSCHAFT/ 1971 In a departure from his work on the growth scenarios of the sixties, on relocating to the USA, Ungers took on the issue of urban decay.

of volumes.““ As early as 1914. Friedrich OstendorTs disparaging verdict was that Schinkel derived his plans “not from spatial concepts, but from physical volumes.” and that he therefore “had nothing to offer to modem urbanism”0—an argument that would later be deployed by proponents of Sradireparaiur against modern urbanism. As a matter of fact, Schinkel may have emphasized the architectural body over the spatial body, but he also conceived these structures in a symbiosis with nature-even in the case of projects sited in the center of the Prussian capital. “Instead of disconnecting themselves from nature.“ Ungers writes in the catalog of the largescale Schinkel exhibition of 1981. “his structures and designs combine with nature to form a single morphological whole, so that they become a pan of nature, and. conversely, nature becomes a part of the structures.” n Glienicke represents an ideal condensation of this concept of landscape, which was originally inspired by English landscape gardening. The plots on which Schinkel was to design estates for Crown Prince Friedrich and Prince Karl-Chariottcn- hof and Glienicke-were situated in the picturesque Haveltal. located between Berlin and Potsdam. This valley’s gentle slopes and combination of woodland and water give it a Mediterranean character. The association with the Mediterranean landscape had previously influenced Friedrich Wilhelm IPs plans lor the Pfaueninsel in the late 18th century. It inspired Schinkel not merely to create country houses integrated into nature, as described in the letters of Pliny, but to create an Arcadian landscape with a wealth of architectonic typologies: a small temple, the famous Casino, the greater and lesser Weugierde (curiosities), the Jägerhol’, the Kavalierhaus, and lhe Schweizerhaus. Simultaneously, the architectural plan of this cultural landscape was linked to landscapcarchitcctonic typologies by Peter Joseph Lemié. It was subsequently filled in by his students, among them Ludwig Persius. On the subject of this architectural manifesto. Schinkel himself wrote that: “A number of idyllic notions were to be combined within a picturesque style to constitute a group of diverse architectural objects that blend pleasantly with nature.”“ It is not this interplay of architecture and sculpted nature that primarily interests Ungers, but the conceptual reciprocity of location and idea: the Havel landscape, which, for Schinkel, evoked an Arcadian landscape, and the analogies derived from it, which in turn reshape the Havel GUENICKE The landscape concept of Karl Friedrich Schinkel constitutes our first point of reference. Ungers was already interested in Schinkel’s Glienicke work during his lime at the Technische Universität, and he continued to be so in his subsequent career, in his lectures, articles, and projects. While Schinkel is not mentioned in the rough draft, he is the principul reference in the first revised version: “The Havel Landschaft contains the key and the essence of the idea of Berlin as a green archipelago.” At this lime, there was no consensus among Schinkel researchers that the Prussian Baumeister was fundamentally opposed to urban repair. For instance, in his 1972 study Schinkei’sBerlin. Hermann Pundt (whose writings were well known to Ungers) asserted that: “[Schinkel) constantly endeavored to respect the context. to integrate his architecture in an organic manner, to allow a harmony between the old and the new to arise.“0 Since the nineties, however, a different view has steadily gained ground: that Schinkel, driven by a dislike of the old city, wished to transform Baroque Berlin into the cityscape equivalent of a landscape, in which “every building would stand alone as a self-contained, coherent volume and would function as a keystone of the urban plan.”^ His urban plan is far from being a composed sequence of roads, plazas, and blocks of houses-instead, it is a scénographie “articulation and contraposition 59

landscape. As Ungers remarked in 1984 in a différent context, this proccss-a process that was morphological in the Goeihean sense—meant that Schinkel was not imposing principles of order on the location at random in the form of axes and symmetries. Instead, he gave the place its spirit by connecting the objects subtly and sensitively. It is worth noting that Schinkel and his fellows brought different cultures to Berlin, in order to represent “a whole universe ... in all its multiplicity and diversity.”16 In other words, for Ungers, the complex around Schloss Glienicke functioned as a miniature archipelago of differentiated architectural events, or, conversely, as Rem Koolhaas puls it, the Archipelago manifesto turned Berlin into “a colossal enlargement of Schinkel’s Schloss Glienicke.”* Whereas the islands of the Havel landscape are architectonic in character, those of the Archipelago manifesto constitute urban fragments. As with the F.ntschede project, these fragments represent both architectural bodies and spatial bodies, and their typologies are as diverse as those of the Havel landscape: from block and single building developments to linear, radial, and grid forms, from the southerly Friedrichstadt and Tempelhofer Feld to Siemensstadt. Ungers and his comrade-in-arms did not select the islands for their aesthetic qualities, but because of the extent to which they “embody, in a pure and legible form, ideas and concepts, so that the history of architecture would coincide with the history of ideas once more’—a concept 60

that is both utopian and highly sensory. ’Ihis was of a piece with the seemingly bizarre call for the islands to “receive their final architectural interventions.” Koolhaas also imagined the transplantation of retrospective projects-such as Ivan Ilyich Leonidov’s “Palace of Culture” in an open area in Kreuzberg, or his Magnitogorsk project along the Avus. Implementations of Mies’s high-rise project for the Friedrich- strasse or of Taut’s dome at the Olympic site were also considered. It is hardly surprising that Ungers watered down these concepts of a “retroactive” architecture for presentation to politicians and for subsequent publication. After all, texts or images describing what architects would understand to be a though! model—along the lines of Superstudio’s Continuous Monument or Koolhaas’s “The City of the Captive Globe’-mighl create alienation if taken at face value. It is precisely in this fiction of a “retroactive” architecture, however, that a relationship with architectural history is expressed that would, at the time, have been highly liberating. In contrast to the dogma of urban repair and the Post- Modernist altitude to history in general, in the Archipelago manifesto, premodern period models and classic Modernism are treated equally. If the proponents of urban repair ultimately aimed to reconstruct premodern urban spaces, and possibly also to reverse the effects of modern urban KARL FRIEDRICH SCHINKEL, DESIGN FOR A PALACE FOR PRINCE WILHELM. 1832 ScNnkel’s second design lor tho pelsoe makes Clear now Kilo Schlnkol was ooncornod with urban repair: it calls lor the Frtder.zianscho Bibliothek to mako way for terraced gardent. Schinkel confirmed his radical transformative will in h>» Sammlung architektonisch*/ Entwürfe: “By means of this vertical arrangement of the gardens in the middle of the city, the principal floor of the palace assumes the character of a site on a mountainside ... The dismal sight due to the high library building would be transformed Into a pleasant,chearfiri one, and tt>« culminating featuro of tha light, arcaded hall at tho top would completely mask the city behind it, keeping the displeasing beckcourtyard houses and gables out of inew.’

and traffic planning, Koolhaas’s and Ungers’s contribution was to significantly expand the resources available for contemporary urban planning to draw on. Just as Goethe searched Tor the Ur- pflanze (primordial plant), what they wished to do was to seek out the original urban fragment structures in an open-minded, unprejudiced way. This approach had previously made itself felt in the 1967 Paderborn urban planning study, and had figured particularly heavily in the previous year’s Braunschweiger Schlosspark competition, in which Hans KollholT was also involved. Here, also, the various urban fragments were excised from the urban figure and linked to historical analogies in order to “surgically remove” them from the surrounding structures. This morphological process translates preexisting structures into the sphere of ideas and imagines the city as a compendium of these original ideas, designs, and projects-an attitude also articulated by Ungers in his essay “Designing and Thinking with Images. Metaphors, and Analogies,” published that year. For Berlin, this offered the prospect of turning a seemingly confused situation on its head: after all. if Ungers saw Glienicke as his model, then from his perspective the path from a city that was falling apart to an ideal city was shorter than might be expected If the process of shrinkage were to continue, it would not be a stretch to see the city as a latter-day Glienicke. This dream may have first come to him in the 1960s. when he walked through the Friedrichsiadi. which “[seemed to him| like a landscape littered with individual, unconnected objects. Like a landscape with some of its teeth knocked out.””

STADTLANDSCHAFT Schinkel’s landscape concept is not the only model or project from architectural. history1 that plays a role in the Archipelago manifesto. Some of the other influences are mentioned in the text, while others arc implicit. The most obvious parallel is with Hermann Jansen’s winning design for the Gross-Berlin (Greater Berlin) development, which was first presented to the public in 1910. This project deserves close aiteniion. as il relaies specifically to the Berlin situation and represents for Ungers an important reference. One striking thing about this competition process is that the area included the last industrial sites and even extended beyond Potsdam. This considerable leap in scale was due to the dramatic population growth around the turn of the century and its effects on the polycentric arrangement of Berlin’s urban area: it had led to the various internal urhun entities each developing their own economic and social dynamic. Charlottenburg, with its population of over 300.000. was one of the most prosperous towns in the Deutsches Reich, whereas Neukölln, with its population of over 200.000. was a working-class stronghold. This had created a situation of functional and social dissociation that could no longer be countered with an urban plan restricted to the old Berlin. At the same lime. Berlin proper was bursting at the scams. Following the transformation of the metropolis into a high-density city of tenements ns a consequence of the Bauordnung (building regulations) of 1853 and the llobrccht-Plan of 1862, and the subsequent acceleration of real estate speculation to exceptional levels, the expected sustained growth was to be catered for by means of an alternative and more generous plan that would be more expansive and hygienic. In his work on Berlin. Julius Posener notes that: “If one could not destroy Megalopolis, or even apply a brake to it, one could ai least give its expansion a new face. The new areas of the city were no longer to be the domain of tenements; instead, they were to be greened in all areas, with a polycentric plan.”

HERMANN JANSEN. PROJECT FOR GREATER BERLIN: GREEM SPACE PLAN. 1909-1910 In the early 200» century, Hermann Jansen developed a plan for e massive, branching system ol green space for Berlin’s expanded urban territory that nould have created a great number ol urban Islands. The perspective drawing of his proposal for the Temoetiof district Idus trates the scale of the projected gieen ares, which here has tho appearance ol a river.

Saarinen’s project to decentralize Helsinki (1918-1919). followed by Ernst May’s plan to expand Breslau (1920); Fritz Schumacher’s Cologne “green belt” concept (1923), anti also Rudolf Schwarz’s urban landscape concept (1946), which he later reworked as a proposal for Cologne

Jansen responded to this context by proposing a branching green strip that would encircle the

(1949-1950). The “Green City” design for Moscow developed by the Soviet disurbanists ( 1930)

whole region, completely infiltrating the new city districts and petering out only in old Berlin.

is also part of this genealogy of the polyccntric urban form, described by Walter Christaller in

Jansen did call part of his green strip a “Wald- und Wiesengürtel” (woodland and meadow

his theory’ of central places in the 1930s. It is no coincidence that a specialized strand in this

strip), but the proposed pattern is more like a green network. The individual “strands” were

history of ideas focuses on Berlin: Jansen’s and the other proposals for Gross- Berlin, Martin

to be approximately 100 meters wide, allowing them to contain facilities such as playgrounds

Wagner’s radioconccntric green strip schema (1915).

and sports fields. This green strip was to be framed by public buildings such as schools, kindergartens, or courts of justice, and the urban islands between them were to contain both

Bruno Taut’s Dissolution of Cities (1920), Max Taut’s “Star City” (1946), and-with dilTcrcnt form

industrial sites and homes. The scale and pattern of Jansen’s green strip is as radical as the urban

and content-the green spaces plan in Albert Speer’s general development plan. In 1932, Ludwig

physiognomy that he suggests is conventional. It would have transformed the urban region into

Hilbcrscimcr presented his Dezentralisierte Stadt—a radical schema in which the dichotomy of

a gigantic urban archipelago. although its islands, unlike those of Ungcrs’s design, would have

center and periphery is completely removed. This history of ideas ultimately culminates in Hans

produced primarily spatial bodies.

Scharoun’s concept for an extensively greened Siathlantlschafi. on which he writes: “(The urban landscape] makes it possible to divide something that is incomprehensible and that eludes any

Jansen’s plan for Gross-Bcrlin is part of a genealogy that began with English garden design and

sense of scale into sections that are comprehensible and to scale, and to arrange these sections

includes Schinkel’s concept of landscape. Johann Anton Wilhelm von Carstcnn’s concept of a

in relation to one another, so that woodland, mcadowland. hills, and lakes interact in a beautiful

villa landscape permeated by green spaces extending from Berlin to Potsdam, and the “garden

landscape In line with the Kollekthplan (collective plan) of 1946 and its injection of islands of

city” concept. In the 20ih century, these principles were taken further on a regional level: Eliel

industry into the redesigned urban organism that had been liberated from the old structures

by the bombardment. Scharoun’s ‘Hauptstadt Berlin” competition project of 1957/58—in which scattered objects and huge megastructures were positioned amid selected remaining structures in the heart of what was once the most dense major city in Europe-represented the ultimate urban landscape configuration. His was not the only competition entry design to suggest a polyccntric urban form for Berlin: in particular, the plan by Jorn Utzon called for urban islands—some the same, some very dilTcrcnt—embedded in a park landscape. A final influence that might be mentioned is the concept presented by Peter Smithson in 1964. in which he imagined Berlin as “a flowing park with individual large landscape chateaux.” All these attempts to decentralize Berlin and to turn the city into a huge, green, “architectonic landscape garden’*’ were unlike the Archipelago manifesto in that they were drawn up in the context of a real or expected growth in population, They were manifestations of modernity, conceived partly as a reaction to extremely poor living conditions in the tenement city, but also with the aim of imposing a car-friendly infrastructure on the urban region. The Archipelago manifesto, by contrast, arose from an attitude to Modernism-which. for the proponents of urban repair, appeared to be inseparably linked to the decentralization and greening approach-that was critical, verging on hostile. Léon Kricr’s 1976 concept submission “The City within the City.” for instance, is fundamentally dilTcrcnt from the Archipelago manifesto. The Luxcmbourgbom architect envisaged a confederation of identical, self-suflicicnt city districts divided by boulevards, each holding from 10,000 to 15,000 inhabitants, with the dimensions to be based on the distance that a pedestrian would be able to cover.

LUDWIG HIlBERSEiMER. DECENTRALIZED CITY. 1932 Like his hioh-nse c»» of 1924. Hilberselmer’s proposal for BeiBn is s radical, schematic configuration that divides the urban landscape into uniform islands.

PALIMPSEST

of the historic Lustgarten ensemble During his rule, Berlin

Although Jansen’s Berlin ideas (like the other polycentric whole-

endured what was to be the most extensive destruction of the

city designs named here) were never implemented, almost the

city until the bombing raids of World War II. as well as its most

whole or the erstwhile competition area was incorporated into

massive transformation. “The Emperor, who loved his history

Greater Berlin with the administrative reforms of 1920. With the

so much that he dedicated an avenue of statues to his dynasty,

administrative incorporation of eight previously independent

erased the likeness they had lel\ in the form of a city.

towns such as Spandau, Köpenick, and Charlottcnburg. 59 independent rural municipalities such as Friedenau and

At the end, all thaï remains of his residence is a sea of houses.”7’

LichterfeLde. and 27 independent estates such as Dahlcm and

The Gestaltgesciz von Berlin” (the law of the form of Berlin), was

Tcgcl. the previous city area was expanded thirtecnfold and

to remain in force throughout the remainder of the 20th century.

now comprised 65 x 878 square kilometers. It was also officially

Mans to turn Berlin into a global metropolis, with promising

declared a polycentrip_ metropolis. Many literary voices attest

projects such as the new Alexanderpl.it/. were swept away by

to the fact that Berlin was also experienced as an extensive,

Berlin’s intended transformation into Germania. Speer’s plans

multipolar city landscape. Bernard von Brentano remarked with

for redesigning the city reinforce that a constant succession

22lement that: “If you travel slowly through Berlin in a car. you

of initiatives to radically rebuild the city often resulted only

move from one small town to another.”” The American author

in destruction rather than new city spaces. Although the

Henry Urban also recognized the city’s polyccntric character,

kilometer-wide strip required to create a north-south axis was

writing in 1901 that: “As a New Yorker. 1 find it particularly

carved through the body of the city, the only part of the complex

strange that there is no Berlin-only a mass of villages called

ever to be built was a single group of buildings. In the postwar

Bcrlin.’,3, This observation echoes the well-known comment of

years, this “cycle of patricide”1* was continued by a policy of

Berlin architect and future director of urhan development in

demolition and urban renewal in the hope of generating a

Berlin. Werner Düttnunn: “Berlin it many towns.*1*

more efficient and better society by means of a new urban plan and transport net. Although much new infrastructure and u

Berlin’s profile at a collage of very different city districts,

number of residential complexcs-such as the Gropiusstadt, the

however, it noi due solely to the amalgamation of disparate

new Hansaviertel, and the Màrkisches Viertel—were built, the

satellite towns and villages—it is also a product of its political

principles of the whole-urea design by- Hans Scharoun and

status and its exceptional historical development. In the

the other planners were now only fragmentarily applied- even

18th century, the idea took hold to inscribe the ascendancy

though the bombardment of 1944/45 had cleared extensive

of Prussia, and. subsequently, the Deutsches Reich into the

sections of the urban area.

urban space the properties of a landscape. In Berlin’s heterogeneous urban space. Ungers saw

physiognomy of the territory’s most significant city—un

This constant cycle of grand overall designs followed by

Berlin as a Colncidentlo Opposiiomm-the coinciding of opposites as defined by Nicholas of

undertaking thut reached its peak in Wilhclminism. In the 20th

destruction and partial rebuilding has produced a palimpsest

Cusa. He used this idea to justify not only the urban garden and urban villa concepts and the

century, the city was also subjected to Widely divergent forms

whose folios contain architectural and urban planning

union of urban and rural territory in general, but also the morphological design process itself.

of government and social models. “Berlin has been transformed

features that are fragments of all the overall designs. The most

From this reading of Berlin as a conglomeration of diverging city fragments, he developed the

over the centuries by u veritable bombardment ofever-new

remarkable thing about Ungers’* Manifest der Stadt in der

figure of the city within the city, whose individual urban units were to make visible the various

concepts and ideologies,’’ writes Philipp Oswalt in his treatise on

Stadt is that it does not seek to standardize this typological

strata of history in a pure form.

Berlin. Stadl ohne FormP This state of affairs has set in train a

and stylistic conglomerate. Instead. Ungers responds to it in a

history of destruction not confined to the destructive Modernist

positive way: “The history of Berlin shows us the development

While this thought was also applied to social demographic profiles and legitimized with

impulses experienced by other major cities as a consequence of

of a city of many different zones. The difference and multiplicity

reference to the increasing individualization of society, what we today perceive to be vastly

industrialization* Schinkel did not hesitate to adapt the existing

of its histone quarter express the importance of Berlin and are

more fruitful is the mnemotechnical aspect of this thought model: not only docs it make

erty to his personal landscape vision, sometimes removing

its main urban design feature.” This demonstrates, once more,

architectural history available to ardiitcds in all its multiplicity, it also allows the city to be

buildings that disrupted it. Wilhelm II had. in his turn, a low

Ungcrs’s finely discriminating sense of history and his belief

perceived by all as the bricks-and-morlar result of a complex and sometimes very painful

opinion of Schinkel, considering his work to be insufficientl>

in deriving something positive from preexisting structures,

history. Wim Wenders would later justify his choice of Berlin as his new home by saying that it

monumental for instance, he had Schinkel’s redesign of

however little they have in common with classical aesthetic

was an open city, ‘‘whose wounds teach history better than any history book or document.”11’

the Berliner Dorn replaced with a completely out- of-scale

ideals of beauty, regularity, and homogeneity—in this, he is

This is probably the reason why Kenneth Frampton described the Archipelago manifesto as

monument, creating a lasting breach in the urban proportions

like Siegfried Kracauer. who recognized in Berlin’s fragmented

“one of the most liberating strategics” that has ever been presented-at least for Berlin.” 68

NATURE METROPOLIS

The divergent and sometimes asynchronous development of Berlin’s urban body has produced

The utilization of the in-between areas also plays a significant role in the Archipelago manifesto.

gaps-in-bctwccn areas that. as. Julius Poscner remarks, belong to none of the city’s various

The authors see demographic decline as an opportunity to return to nature those city districts

districts.“ Jansen’s plan for these in-belwccn areas was not to utilize them by means of a

that no longer serve a purpose. The resulting grid of natural spaces could then he used to

continuous development, but to give them n landscape-architectonic form and to site a number

contain a series of landscape- architectonic typologies-from park landscapes to dense woods

of different activities within them. This reveals the historical influence of Camillo Sitte, who

to agricultural production areas. Their ideas, however, extend far beyond the activities that

experimented with planted yards and with the green strip form in a number of projects around

Wagner and Migge associated with “healthy green space.” For instance, they considered the

the turn of the century-and it is no coincidence that this combination of architecture and nature

setting up of urban farms and “ecological preserves” with forests and wild parks, which could

in an open area within a major city puts one in mind of Vienna’s Wiener Ring. Sitte introduced

potentially stimulate “new forms of tounsm such as hunting safaris.” In addition to a fully

the concept of “sanitäres Grün” (healthy green space), into tum-of-thc-century urban planning

developed highway system to connect the islands, the natural space grid structure would also

discourse-as opposed to the “decorative green” of the preindustrial city. Martin Wagner refined

be capable of housing supermarkets. drive-in cinemas, churches, and banks. This shows the

this concept in his 1915 dissertation “Das sanitäre Grün der Städte, ein Beitrag zur Frei-

extent to which Koolhaas and Ungers considered modem infrastructures and facilities to be

llächentheorie” (Healthy green space in the city: u contribution to open space theory“). The

incompatible with historic citics-a belief that Koolhaas was later to elaborate on in his “Bigness“

role of decorative greenery is to improve the appearance of a metropolis. whereas the role of

theory. Their green grid is like a (lowing landscape with sections designated for a number of

healthy green space is to improve ventilation and to compensate for the unhygienic qualities

uses, which can be traversed by animals and motorists alike. This is extended to the idea that

of basement and backyard apartments-the idea was to give the confined inhabitants of the

the natural grid also be used to contain mobile services-“with mobile homes. Airflows, Fairs.

city the opportunity to amuse themselves and to engage in sport in the open air. In an era of

Markets, Circuses, that could travel for years on the coordinates of the nature grid, without ever

increased^ interest in health and the rise of the Körperkuli (cult of the body). Wugner called

entering the city.”

for all inhabitants to have a minimum number of different types of open space within a certain distance of their homes—children’s play areas, sports areas, promenades. parkland, and urban

This fiction reaches its height in the notion of new “tribes” of “Metropolitan gypsies...

woodland. These urban open spaces were also “to be projected lo dovetail closely with the

pensioners... who do not benefit from a fixed location in the city and whose existence would be

predominating construction style.’

stimulated by a more roving lifestyle.” Just as the completion of the islands is to be understood as a provocative thought model, this transformation of the in-between areas into a surreal

A few years later, this pica by Berlin’s future director for urban development for a city shot

nature lagoon with hunting safaris and mobile retirees is to be seen as an exhortation to

through with open spaces designated for various pursuits was elaborated by ihc landscape

evaluate these areas in a way that differed from the ideas of the proponents of urban repair. It is

architect Leberecht Migge. In his “grünes Manifest“ (green manifesto) of 1918, Migge, who

remarkable that Ungers included these thoughts on open spaces for the city in his presentation

would later work on the Hufeisensiedlung development with Wagner and Bruno Taut in the

to the executive committee of the Social Democratic Party, with only minor modifications. For

1920s, demanded that “the hundred thousand” disused hectares of the city be equipped with

instance, he points to the urban farms conceived for a formerly densely populated residential

public gardens, allotments. model farms, and communal gardens.** His intention was to generate “the industrious, productive green” of sports parks, playgrounds, and youth parks, rather than “wearying, romantic, decadent green.” Migge believed that this urban greenery should provide space for agriculture as well as for recreational space, and should also be used as a catalyst for waste utilization. The allotments-of which there were 137,000 in Berlin in 1927, usually situated on the urban periphery-were to be brought into the city: into the open stretches of wasteland, but also into the yards of the housing blocks und even onto the roofs of the residential complexes. With his concept of a “Landstadt” (rural city), Migge negated the polarity of city and country, promoting the concept of an entirely colonized and cultivated natural environment that would serve society.

33. Martin Wagner. “Das sanitäre Grün der Städte.” PhD diss.. Berlin. 1915.92. 34. Leberecht Migge. “Das grüne Manifest” [1918]. in: »dem.. Der soziale Garten. Das grüne Manifest (Berlin. 1999), 7-8 35. Daniel Libeskind. “Die Banalität der Ordnung,” in: Gert Kahler (eö.). Einfach schv/ierig. Eine deutsche Architektur debatte. Ausgewählte Beiträge 1993-1995 (Braunschweig/ Wiesbaden. 1995). 35. 36. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau. S.M,L,XL (Rotterdam. 1995). 200 f. Koolhaas mistakenly dated the Manifest as originating from 1976.

area in Brooklyn as a response to demographic shrinkage in New York City. This fictionalization of the in-between areas makes clear how Koolhaas and Ungers see ihc posiinduslrial city: not as a structure isolated from its rural surroundings consisting of a homogeneous succession of roads, house blocks, and plazas, in which nuture appears only in the form of avenues or dearly delineated parks, but a natural metropolis, dedicated to a new relationship of city and country, of culture and nuture, or, as it is pul in the rough draft (similar lo Leberecht Migge’s thinking), a locality: “whose essence is to be an environment completely invented by men.”

RAMIFICATION

death strip along the cast side of the Wall would then turn into. In his plan for the new town of Melun-Sénart, south of Paris {1987), Itc increasingly focused his

In spile of this, a diametrically opposed concept of the city became established in Berlin. The

attention on the intermediate spaces, because what mattered here was not so much a question

IBA of 1984 to 1987 saw the urban repair approach split into two sections: the A/ibau-IBA.

of “where to build’ as “how to abstain from architecture.”1111 lis design concentrated on the

directed by Hardt-Waltherr Hamer and primarily concerned with renovating old structures

delimitation and use of corridors of open spaces, with the intention of creating an archipelago

“sensitively,” and the Neubau-1 BA, which was dedicated to Josef Paul Kleihues’s efforts to

of residual spaces- islands of various sizes and shapes that Koolhaas did not elaborate on.

“critically reconstruct” the urban ground plan. The block became established as a functionally

Koolhaas deployed some of these green corridors to preserve the existing landscape and

and aesthetically differentiated urban form-like Ungers‘s concept of the Urban Block—

histone ensembles, others are to contain motorways, supermarkets, or company headquarter

and as the preeminent urban planning instrument in Berlin’s civic development. “Critical

buildings as with the Archipelago manifesto. Four years later, in his Grande Arche La Défense

reconstruction” however, was not characteristic only of the West Berlin of the 1980s; it would

competition entry, Koolhaas« also took on ideas from the Archipelago manifesto. He annotated

also dominate the reconstruction of the united Berlin in the 1990s. Under Berlin’s senator

a soft-focus photograph of the diffuse urbun landscape that spreads out behind the Défense

in charge of construction, Hans Stimmann, however, “critical reconstruction” became an

with the rhetorical question: “How many of these buildings deserve eternal life?“, answering

architectural doctrine of blocks rather like large stone buildings, which were frequently uniform

himself thus: “This question is essentially forbidden in a Europe’ in which “urban context is

also in terms of their functionality. Disappointment over the unimpressive architectonic results

assumed to be something that should be preserved und respected, not destroyed. In many

of the IBA led to a strategy of building the image of an imagined 19th-century metropolis in

cases, of course, that is entirely legitimate, but when we look at these buildings ... it becomes

stone. Fortunately, this historical strategy did not succeed in homogenizing the magnificent

difficult to consider them purl of Europe in a historical sense. They were not conceived with

palimpsest of Berlin.

claims of permanence; they arc a kind of provisional-short-term-architecture.”“ For this reason, as in Berlin ten years before, he suggested the demolition of siruciures-in this

In the early stages of the debate on the rebuilding of Berlin following the fall of the Wall, Ungers

ease, of buildings more than 25 years old-while preserving “buildings with merit” and “buildings

reintroduced the idea of the urban archipelago. In his 1990 contribution to the exhibition

with sentimental value “ This demolition would have momentarily created a green archipelago

Beilin Mo/gen, entitled “Das Neue Berlin. Stadl- inscln im Meer der Metropole” (The new

of architectural events before the filling-in of the new open space with a Manhattan-stylc grid.

Berlin: urban islands in the metropolitan ocean), he again presumes a future shrinkage of the

Since the deindustrialization-related spread of shrinkage to whole regions seen in the 1990s.

city—in which, at least until today, he was proved to be right—and reasserts his understanding

the Archipelago manifesto has again become purt of architectural discourse after decades of

of cities “as a locus of continual formation and transformation of concepts”. He insists that

obscurity. “Urban development planning.” writes Hart- mut Hüussermunn, must do its pari

Berlin should be seen as “a gigantic puzzle.” not as “an ordered and logical who!e”-just as.

“to enable orderly shrinkage.” Hiusscrmann, an urban sociologist, claims that this entails

three years later. Daniel Libeskind would speak of Berlin as “a many-colored urban mosaic.”3*

“giving preference to the use of wasteland sites and not designating any new construction

This contribution is in principle similar to that of the Archipelago manifesto from the 1970s,

sites. Additionally, concepts must be developed Tor vacant commercial sites. These need not

except that Ungers has now incorporated the idea of erecting significant designs that were

necessarily involve a new commercial use-cultural and social activities should also be given

never realized, and has also added other retroactive projects, such as Kahn’s City Tower

more of a chance.”4’ This was the approach taken by the IBA Emchrt Park 1989- 1999. which,

for Philadelphia. A perspective drawing by lingers shows his vision of the unified Berlin: a

also in the context of deindustrialization, transformed a planning area containing 17 cities into

collection of new, old, and retroactive “icons of architecture,” with the block structures brought

a sustainably interconnected natural metropolis, utilizing disused industrial sites for cultural

together to form huge masses.

and other activities. Thomas Sieverts, one of those responsible for this IBA. formulated a theory

The idea of an “urban archipelago” was also to play a role in the further work of Rem Koolhaas,

for this that he described as the “Zwischenstadt” (in-between city) theory. The Archipelago

who reiterated the key ideas of the manifesto in S.M.L.XL.* Three years after the Summer School,

manifesto is first mentioned in detail in Philipp Oswalt’s research work on shrinking cities,

he presented an archipelago of retroactive protects to the IBA competition for Kochsirassc and

and it also played a role in the IBA in Sachsen-Anhalt, which took place in a region with one

Friedrichstrasse—Mies’s high- rise building again, along with Hilherseimer’s business city for

of the highest rates of shrinkage in Europe.’5 Meanwhile, many other concepts and plans,

the Gendarmenmarkt and a project by Erich Mendelsohn-the scope of which extended beyond

such as the “network city” theory’ of Franz Oswald, who worked with Ungers on the Grün/

the territory of West Berlin. His design for the city island in the competition area was of course

ug Süd project in 1962. or Hidc- toshi Ono’s project Fiber City/Tokyo 2050. could be related

directed against the dogma of urban repair, since this forms pan of the “negative sequence with

to the Archipelago manifesto, whose similiuity to visions for a number of other major cities,

which each successive generation ridicules the generation that has gone before.’* Contran to

such as Paris and Shanghai, is striking. Finn Gcipcl. for instance, saw Paris’s urban area as an

the IRA directive. Koolhaas also wanted to integrate unpopular postwar buildings, which were

archipelago of gray and green islands, which should be intensified and interconnected still

a priori incompatible with the block structure For Block 4. he eventually developed a row of

more closely with each other. After long years of Paris being considered the model for Berlin

courtyard houses in keeping with Berlin’s shrinking population. In Koolhaas’s view, -the low

par excellence, now Berlin seems to be serving as a model lor the most radioconccntric and

density and low height’ of the courtyard houses “anticipated the future reunification of the two

densely developed of all European maior cities. Perhaps Berlin will be a testing ground for a

halves of the city.”18 for they would facilitate the transition to a linear park, which is what the

zero-growth Europe after all. 74

OMA/REM KOOLHAAS. COMPETITION DESION FOR BERLIN KOCHSTRASSE/FHIEOHICMSIRASSE, 1980 Throa years a« er iha Sunnm School, Koolhaas’s design for Fnadrichslrasso plays retroactiva variations on the architecture ol Ludnig Mies von der Rohe. Ludwig Hllberseimer and Erich Mendelsohn. Orvorgmg from the IBA doctrine of ‘critical reconstruction.’ ha conceived for Block 4 8 heterogeneous struct ure that includes tho attempt lo Integrate Mode-mat typologtoe. 75

BERLIN: A GREEN ARCHIPELLAGO

Any futuro ‘plan’ for Berlin has to be a plan for a city in retrenchment. But since the total surface of the city is finite and given, and can, for obvious political reasons, not be reduced, It follows that the city will have to develop strategies for the controlled decrease of its density in order not to lose Its over-all urbanity. This inevitable process of retrenchment could be seen as a negative experience, to be hidden behind manifestations of a fake vitality, but it could also be an experimental project to intensify the experience of Berlin as an architectural ensemble. (Berlin is not the only city to face the predicament of shrinkage. But its extreme and idcosyncraUc’ character of laboratory would allow the strategies it develops to deal with its retrenchment’ to achieve a prototypical ‘pilot’ status’ that could inject new models in a Zerogrowth Europe.)’ The present idea that inner-city areas can only be rehabilitated through more construction that restores a primordial state is counterproductive and should be exorcised. On the contrary: In the context of a program of selective deflation of urban pressure, even of a partial dismantling of malfunctioning parts of the present city, Berlin’s human shrinkage offers a clear and unique opportunity to identify and ’weed out’ those parts of the city that are now substandard, for architectural or other reasons, and to intensify and even complete the fragments that would be

FINN GEIPEL, GIULIA ANDI. GRAMO PARIS/ MÉTROPOLE DOUCE. 2010 Drawing on tne idea of the urban archipelago. Geipel Interprets the Paris metropolitan area as a sustainably Interconnected cluster of gray and groan Islands.

Pressure in overcrowded areas should be deflated by the creation of voids - narks, pools, etc. while if low-key area’s such as West and should be iritensified by the construction of high-intensity centers. The only further architectural or design activity would consist in completing and revealing the Gestalt of the particular islands that are selected. This phase would be as much an exercise in briefwriting and programmatic sophistication,

preserved. The remaining enclaves that are thus ‘saved’ and disengaged would lie like islands

as it would deal with formal issues. Hot all the new insertions have to be designed anew.

on the otherwise liberated plain of the city, and form an archipelago of architectures In a green

The most relevant examples of such an approach are still offered by certain Constructivist

lagoon of natures.

proposlas

where the architects, through extreme material shortages, developed an

economy of both conceptual and material means and minimal architectural expenditure The first operation of such a project - a Berlin as an archipellago ought to be the identification

had maximum social benefit. It would therefore be possible to realise projects that were

and selection of those areas that already have a strong existing identity that deserves to be

once proposed for other parts of the world, but were , for whatever reasons aborted , in

preserved and reinforced. These enclaves would not be selected on the basis of a particular

retrospect. (For instance, Leonidovs ‘Palace of Culture1 could be built in the vacant strip. at

taste or even for their esthetic qualities, but only the extent to which they embody , in a pure

the center of Kreutzberg, and his linear Magnitogorsk project along the linear strip between

and legible form,ideas and concepts, so that the history o rchitecture would coincide with the

unter den eichan and the s bahus.

history of ideas once more. (The area’s would range for instance, from the Olympic Stadium site, to the Tiergarten

other examples of retroactive architecture related more specifically to the history of Berlin

Viertel,the Charlottenburg area and the Härkisches Viertel.)

, would correct important ommissions by constructing such essential projects such as Mies rectangular skyscrapers at the end of mullerstrasse or roof over the 1936 Olympic Stadium

The next step in the operation is the ‘completion’ of the preserved fragments, that will now

with one of Taut’s domes. Along the havel could be a series of Rivertowns completing

receive their final architectural intervention. the objective needs of each ‘island’ would be

Wilhms the II plan for for the Havellandschaft.

identified once and for all and be met trough the insertion of a series of Social Condensers to answer the particular needs of each island or mini city

Around the ‘tuned-up’ and ‘completed’ enclaves, the renaining fabric of the city would be

This project would lead to the development of a repertoire of complementary facilities of an

allowed to deteriorate and turn slowly into nature. Parts of rcdundants infrastructures,

explicitly anti-thctical nature.

whose corpses now litter whole parts of the city , and other insalubrious properties should be condemned in such a pattern that together, they would eventually form a system of nature -a green grid - a catalogue of types that range from suburb, to parkland,to dense forests and even to urban farmland. This nature grid would isolate the islands; establish the metaphor of an ‘green’ archipellago and define the structure of the city in a city.

The -green grid could accomodate suburbs at a variety of densities, belts of farmland that

ParticularProjects

penetrate all parts of the city, and parts that are developed as ecological presses - forests and

Wildparks» that would stimulate new forms of tourism, such as hunting safaris

Th« insertion ot Leonidov’s Pataco of Culture into Ernst Reuter Plats 2

Th» polarity of Nature-Culture or Nature-Metropolis that is now, in most instances, latent,

The realization of Mies angular skyscraper as a multipurpose social center in the Theoder

compromised and diluted, win be intensified and mado expttctt.

Heuse Plats

Since such a system of Nature1 would be fundamentally designed, i-O. synthetic, it would

through its rich juxtapositions intensify rather than diminish the sense of a Metropolis, whose

The placement of Addtloo’s chicago tubune skyscraper on Scholsplots

essence is to be: an environment completely invented by man.

4 The transplantation of the Magnitogorsk plan along the street Unter Den Eichen

Tho Nature Grid would also accommodate the Infrastructure ol the Modern Age; l.e. apart

from an extended hlghwoy system that connects the islonds, it would absorb supermarkets,

The insertion of Central Park into the area of Goelitser Bahut

drlve-ln cinemas, churches, banks, etc., and all those 20th-century typologies that roly not on

‘place’ but on mobility, and that cannot bo inserted In existing urban fabrics without ruining

The transplantation of of the royal cresent in Bath to the Volkspark

them.

Tho completion of the Olympic stadium through the injection of Expressionism in the prosont

Apart from the various densities of suburban development, forests, wildlife preserves, urban

landscape of fascism and modernism. (Taut crystal dome over the Olypic stadium)

farms, and the infrastructure of the Modern Age, the greenbelt would also be used to ‘park’

temporary mobile facilities-such as mobilo homos, Airflows, Fairs. Markets, Circuses-that

The insertion of the palace of the united matroa by Haumnes Meyer in the Tregarten area to the

could travel for years on the coordinates of the nature grid without ovor entering the city.“

Philhramonix Hall and the national library.

Such facilities v/ould generate urban ‘tribes’ of Metropolitan gypsies: those culogorleB of

inhabitants-penslonoors for instance11-who do not benefit from a flxod location in the city

The construction of El Litssitsky Wolkenbeguel on the intersections of Generotsug.

and whose existence would be stimulated by a moro roving lifestyle.

9 The realisation of the Algierproject of Le Corbusier along the Spere.

The differentiations of the islands should not be only of an architectural nature. Social and

political differences should be superimposed on the system of islands, so that the units function

The construction of the double towers of the world trade center at the end of the of the Miller

also socially as identifiable enclaves

Strasse as a gateway to east Berlin or entrance gate to the West. 11 The development of a linear Wall Park along the Berlin wall, which, after unit Kation, could be Joined, at regular intervals with the existing wall zone on East German territory. 12 The dovolopmcnt of the Tiergarten area as a polemic against the ideology of Urban repair. Urban Repair assumes an Inexhaustible demand on oach urban location for ever more housing, over more shops, ever more social facilities, that can then be made manliest by a simple operation, tho creation of a more healthy urban fabric. But such assumptions overtook the fact that those areas may be in disrepair exactly because such a pressure does not exist. Hot only do such proposals load to a confusion of real and synthetic history, with all the attendant threats of the production of Kitsch-- in the name of good taste, but the need to which they address themselves is also equally synthetic. Especially in Berlin, where the atmosphere of inflated vitality Is evident In almost every construction, such nn approach would exacerbate the issue of rotronchment and only postpono tho final moment of reckoning.

The Tiergarten Vierte and the area of the suiedliche Triedrichstall offers an opportunity to accept the retenchment model and turn it into a strength: all the existing villas, no matter how contaminated their ideological pasts, would be faithfully restored in an operation of ideological daxidermy; and then embedded in a park. Then one would need no new museums , no new architecture,only a garden and a scattered social facility. In the open areas in between the urban islands of the green archipellago, an alternative suburban grid should be inserted with Ludwig Hilbrosliners suburban housing developments planned for Chcago, mobile home parks as retirement cities. Frank Lloyd Wrigh’s Broadacre City developmentand Le Corbusier’s collective farming projects. This area would contain all the facilities that make up a metropolitan fabric combined with green pattern of widly different nature reaching from wilderness areas, hunting groun d, forest lands to parks, playgrounds and sportfields. This urban model would satisfy several major goals. 1. The restoration of identityin the city fabric 2. The closeness to nature and open space 3. The problem of planning how to make the city smaller instead of making it bigger. 4. The improvment of the urban quality 5. The pluralistic order as opposed to a centralised system. 6. The intensification of the complexity of the city as a contemporary organsation.

26. Although this project is not crossed out In A”, it is not numbered by Ungers, and will be. in effect, suppressed from the list in B. even though the idea of covering the stadium with one of Taut’s domes is indeed present earlier in the text. Maybe RK’s formula here was felt to be possibly shocking for the visitors to the exhibition in Berlin 27. A” adds seven new ideas of transplantations to the list given in A. and reorders this list These new suggestions, interspersed with those of RK. are listed m the following order: “The placement of Adolf Loos’ Chicago Tribune skyscraper on Schoizplatz “ (3rd) “The insertion of ‘Central Park’ into the area of Goerlitzer Bahnhof” (5th) “The transplantation ol the royal crescent in Bath to the Volkspark.” (6th) “The insertion of the palace of the League ol Nations by Hannes Meyer in the Tiergarten area next to the Phdharmonica Hall and the National Library.“ (7th)

3 87

architecture as provocation

THE GENESIS OF A HOPEFUL MONSTER

Thirty-five years after it was first published, The City in the City Berlin: A Green Archipelago

has not received the critical acclaim and broad dissemination it deserves, primarily due to its hybrid status, oscillating between an evocation of a contemplative Utopia and a strategic arsenal of arguments for a project developed for a specific city in a given set of circumstances: Berlin in the late 1970s.

A further reason for this neglect lies in the text’s dual authorship, which, strangely enough,

has made it a kind of bastard or orphan. If we are to grasp its meaning, we must turn the spotlight on an important episode in recent architectural history, namely the five intense years (1972-1977) during which a resonance developed between the realms explored by Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas. In a sense, this paradoxical manifesto is the hopeful monster that their meeting ultimately produced.3 GALAHAD

Oswald Mathias Ungers, born in 1926 into a family of modest means from the Eifel valley

near Cologne, begins his architecture studies only after his return from prisoner-of-war camps. Driven by an “emotional interest in modernity,” he enrolls at Karlsruhe’s school of architecture, where he encounters two generations of the Modernist movement: the pioneers, who are more theoretically inclined, and the pragmatic constructors (such as Egon Eiermann), who are much more literate in technology, but in his view also much less cultivated. In this ’”Germany year zero,” its cultural and moral tabula rasa rendered even more absolute by wartime bombings, Ungers develops an enthusiasm for the history of architecture, drawing “all of the palazzi ... the facades ... the entire arrangement and such.” His initial projects resolutely distance 4

themselves from technological credos, concentrating instead on typological variation and a skillful intermeshing of volumes and spaces that endow a quasi-urban complexity on the houses he constructs. The combined house and office he builds in Cologne in 1958 exemplify this approach, linking its relatively autonomous spatial and sculptural grammar with the conditions of the site and its built environment: “The house enters into a dialogue with its context in a way that is as original as it is respectful. While the roof profile and the choice of materials harmonize with the adjacent structures, the building at the same time consciously

3 The expression “hopeful monster” popularized by German geneetic expert Richard Goldschmidt, designates the agent and product of a kind of evolutionary leap. The painter Jean-Baptiste Marot has in turn deployed the term to evoke threedimensional “landscapes” that break out of the constraints of conventional formats. In as much as it evokes the notion of a bastard or a hybrid, seemingly sterile yet comprising the hope of a renaissance or an evolutionnary turninng point, it seems eentirely fitting in this context. The present essay is essentially based on our still unpublished 2008 PhD, “Palimpsestous Ithaca: A Relative Manifesto for SubUrbanism.” 4 “Die Rationalisierung des Bestehenden,” Interview, Oswald Mathias Ungers with Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrlst, Archplus 179 (Aachen. July 2006): 7. English translation in Log 16 (summer 2009): 77. 5 Fritz Neumeyer, “L’enigma dell’architettura: Un tutto a sé stante e un’unità di particolari,” in: Oswald Matthias Ungers: Architetture 1951 -1990 (Milan, 1991), 8.

THE MUSE OF THE EXISTING Oswald Mathias Ungers, illustration for the Grünzug Süd project (1962-65)

asserts itself as a sui generis cosmos, in which the old and the new strike a balance in a process of interactive continuity.”5 As the project catches the attention of several critics, including Aldo Rossi and Nikolaus Pevsner, it immediately garners a degree of international renown for Ungers. Symptomatically, these critics give very different interpretations of Ungers’s original undertaking. While Pevsner places it within the Expressionist tradition, which is rather alien to the architect himself, the young Aldo Rossi expresses a view fairly close to Ungers’s own, 6 Quoted by Aldo Rossi, “Un giovane architetto tedesco: Oswald Mathias Ungers,” in: Casabella 244 (Milan, October 1960): 22-35. 7 Ungers and Gieselmann. Zu einer neuen Architektur, 1960. Cf. Ulrich Conrads. Programmes et manifestes de ¡’architecture du XXe siècle (Paris. 1991), 203-04.

lauding responsible architecture that draws its premises directly from reality rather than hiding behind an exclusively social line of argument or seeking merely to express vaguely personal feelings. Rossi also cites the architect’s clearly pluralist statements: “Europe does not feed on a single universal idea. It is multiform. It is a continent in which many images and many opinions coexist in great vicinity to one another, a land in which there has been equal growth of mysticism and Enlightenment, and a new vitality has developed in the tension between these two extremes.”6

In the same period, Ungers circulates a brief manifesto, written with Rheinhard Gieselmann.

Zu einer neuen Architektur (Towards a New Architecture). Rejecting the impoverishing reign of Functionalism and technology, it calls for a celebration of architecture as art and as the creative expression of the “vital clash between the active individual and his environment”: “architecture is a vital penetration into a multilayered, mysterious, evolved, and structured reality. Its creative function is to manifest the task by which it is confronted, to integrate itself into that which already exists, to accentuate and amplify its surroundings. It always consists in the recognition of the genius loci out of which it grows.”7 89

A RATINALIZATION OF THE EXISTING

published by his assistants.11 These publications bear witness to the resolutely rationalist

By heightening his latent passion for the cosmos of architecture, the diametrically

twist Ungers gives to his leaching, encouraging his students to tease out the syntaxes and

opposed critical interpretations of his work drive Ungers to delve into the historical,

architectural types latent in the structures and elementary programs of the Großstadt. These

theoretical, and iconographic orpus of the discipline, which will lead him to celebrate the

large-scale programs, together with the constructive and formal systems associated with them,

richness and autonomy of its language. In the early 1960s, his studio thus assumes the air

are also addressed in seminars and publications focusing specifically on these topics, and

of an ideal library, with successive projects simultaneously drawing on its resources and

anticipating subsequent investigations on the architecture of bigness by several decades.12 The

enriching it.

projects developed by the students under Ungers’s direction explore, in situ and with striking vigor, the ways in which these elementary programs interact or are mixed together, extracting

On the one hand, in terms of urban design, these projects bear witness to a profound

from them geometrically ordered typologies with clearly asserted figures. The heritage of

empathy for the situations that they reshape, and are connceived as transformations that

Constructivism, explored on study trips to the Soviet Union, manifestly inform these projects,

generate orderly typologies, rationally inflected on the basics of logics and syntaxes abstracted

which, as Kenneth Frampton puls it, “seem to fuse two fundamentally antithetical traditions;

from the existitng situation. The Grünzug Süd project (1962) illustrates this attitude,

on the one hand, the Russian avant-gardist thrust toward monumental and dynamic structural

presenting itself as a precise elucidation of a heterogenous series of urban situations, whose

form; on the other, a fragmentary Piranesian poetic appropriate to the devastated landscape of

morphologies, reinterpreted and rationalized, provide the underlying themes for the various

Berlin.”13

configurations proposed. This offers the most striking illustration of the procedure that

Ungers will later describe as the ”rationalization of the existing”. In 1966, he would indeed

produce an astonishing apology for this unrealized project, literally runninng sections of

Märkisches Viertel ensemble, Ungers flings himself body and soul into teaching and into

his plan like a streeet right through a two page spreead covered with views of existing site…

elucidating what he considers to be the fundamental concepts or themes of architecture. The

as if the site is, in essence, the actual material of the project. “Ungers had entered into an

whole teaching program he sets up as professor and then director of the school works toward

interaction with history-not just in the insignificant sense of building in a way that could be

a rational anamnesis of the history of architecture and its corpus, with Berlin acting at one and

said to ‘take into account the old city,’ but in the sense of drawing upon history for formative

the same time as palette and receptacle. To stimulate this anamnesis, Ungers invites numerous

principles that could be transferred to the present. It can be said that the “determination of

foreign architects and critics to Berlin, including Peter Blake. Lucius Burkhardt, Giancarlo de

the design through interpretation of given factors” was the design principle.

Carlo, James Stirling, Shadrach Woods, Louis Kahn, Colin Rowe, or Peter Cook, and in 1965

In the course of these five years, in which he will construct only his project for the large

even hosts a congress of Team 10 architects, although their sociological bent, leavened with a

On the other hand, from an architectural perspective, Ungers’s projects delve into

a skillful manipulation of primary geometric forms or of archetypical elements of the discipline’s vocabulary (atrium, portico, loggia, amphitheatre, etc.), which he draws together, adjusts, juxtaposes, intermeshes, and assembles like fragments of composite mosaics. Several projects developed in 1963-65 bear witness to this quest to devise a morphological architecture, capable of “bringing together the greatest possible number of ideas and concepts within a stratified whole.”9 These projects are all manifestations of “possible models of a pluralist city” and are the theaters of a coincidencia oppositorum in which the variety 10

of forms and spaces assembled provide a palette for a whole panoply of uses and lifestyles. In a sense, they are also all imaginary museums, forums of contradictions, Noah’s Arks in which the genetic heritage of architecture would have taken shelter to survive the deluge of

13 Kenneth Frampton. “O. M Ungers and the Architecture of Coincidence,” in: O. M. Ungers, Work in Progress, 1976-1980. IAUS no. 6 (New York, 1981): 1. 14 With the notable exception of Peter and Allison Smithson, whose interest tor the “as found” resonate rather intimately with Ungers’s own preoccupations. 15 Oswald Mathias Ungers, “Five Lessons from Schinkel’s Work.” in: The Cornell Journal of Architecture I (Nov/ York, 1981): 118-19. 16 “Die Rationalisierung des Bestehenden,” in: ibid., p. 10. English translation in Log 16 (summer 2009), p. 77.

pinch of Germanophobia. does not necessarily make them very receptive to his empathy for history and the existing.14 However, Ungers does not seek interlocutors solely in the present, and it is during this period that he develops an intellectual and emotional relationship with Schinkel’s œuvre that will lead him to see this body of work as a masterful condensation of the essential principles of architecture, which in his view are the coincidentia oppositorum, the primacy of the idea, transformation, or morphological metamorphosis, the interpretation of tradition and of the genius loci, and unity in diversity.15 For Ungers, all of the morphological lessons of the master are most clearly legible in the architect’s interventions in the Glienicke park in Potsdam, in this Havel Landschaft designed as a scattered collection of edifices “à reaction poétique “(“of poetic reaction”)—and as a genuine “città analoga” (“analogous city”). As he would later say: “Glienicke was practically the textbook for my theoretical work in Berlin.”16

Functionalism and the amnesia it triggers. For Ungers, the “rationalization of the existing” involves rallying the discipline’s entire theoretical and morphological culture. BERLIN

In 1963, Hans Scharoun, who also believes that in Ungers he has identified a new

representative of the Expressionist tendency he heads, has him hired as a professor at Berlin’s Technische Universität. However, Ungers soon declares that he does not belong to this camp, and that Expressionism is an impossible ambition in architecture. Almost as soon as he assumes his Lehrstuhl, he designates West Berlin, which has only just been encircled by the Wall, as the terrain and subject matter of all his teaching activities, structuring these in an intense cycle of theoretical and design seminars, the results of which are systematically 93

RADICALITY 1 Student project, in Schnellbahn und Gebäude, TU Berlin, December 1966

“Each bastard gets his own genealogical tree.” Rem Koolhaas

RADICALITY 2 Student project for Leipziger Platz (Eckart Reissinger), in Plätze und Strassen, TU Berlin, June 1967 95

urban situations more resolutely, making use in his morphological urbanism of the fashionable analytİcal tools of the era: modeling, simulation, and computers. Very soon, as with Scharoun in Berlin, the emente cordiale between Rowe and Ungers collapses and is replaced first by mutual incomprehension and subsequently by turf wars within the school; clearly, all the initiatives undertaken by the recently appointed chair to give a new direction to its teaching, such as inviting the Team 10 members to teach as guest lecturers, do not facilitate matters.

There is something of a sense of starting over again in Ungers’s exile in Ithaca. With his

wife, Liselotte, he begins enthusiastically studying the movement that led religious or utopian communities, which had met with scant acceptance in Europe, to emigrate to America in order to live in keeping with their principles, viewing hippy communities as their heirs.17 Deeply affected by the cultural and ideological transformations unfolding in the West, he is naturally inclined to draw lessons from them. However, in this atmosphere of pedagogical conflict, his exile also comes to resemble time spent in the wilderness. Isolated, cut off from his professional EXILE

roots, Ungers finds himself in a kind of dead end and his only realwellspring of energy is in his

In December 1967, against the backdrop of student protest sweeping across Berlin, Ungers

Studio of Architectural and Regional Design, among the handful of active students attracted by

chairs an international congress at the TU on architectural theory, to which he has invited an

his reputation. In 1972, the year in which The Rolling Stones bring out their famous Exile on

esteemed collection of speakers, including Sigfried Giedion, Julius Posener, Reyner Banham,

Main Street, a new student joins him in Ithaca. Taller and more determined than most of the

Ulrich Conrads, André Corboz, and Colin Rowe. However, the event is cut short when a crowd

other students, he cannot fail to be noticed in the school: “Colin Rowe used to ask loudly, ‘So

of students bursts into the room brandishing a banner: “All houses are beautiful—go out and

who on earth is this cool ass?’”18

build!” Even worse, the students will soon stigmatize the Märkisches Viertel as symbolizing the social order that must be overturned. Ungers, whose reformist spirit has little in common with

ARCHIPELAGO

these moves to break with the past, experiences the episode as a brutal rejection. Perplexed,

the architectural theorists gradually scatter, and Ungers trails Colin Rowe through Berlin’s

acquired a latent interest in the architecture and the imaginary of the Großstadt at a very early

bookshops and on long walks around the city. Rowe, who will later declare that he gleaned

age from his maternal grandfather-one of the great Dutch architects of Dudok’s generation.

his deepest understanding of Berlin’s texture that winter with Ungers as his guide, cannot fail

However, his first notions of the world seem to have been shaped on the other side on the

to feel a certain affinity for the cultivated dimension of his colleague’s intellectual project. In a

world, in post-colonial Indnesia, where he spent four years (1952-1956): “My first awareness

gesture of empathy he will soon regret, seeing it as his greatest mistake, he suggests that Ungers

of archipelago was in Indonesia, as a child. I was fascinated that there were more than 400

join him in Cornell and lake charge of the architecture school there.

islands... The word always had an incredible resonance. It symbolized the separateness, but also

Born at the end of the war in Rotterdam, a city devastated by bombing, Rem Koolhaas

the larger entity of something. Il is a really poetic model of both separated and closed systems ...

A year later, Ungers burns his bridges and moves with his family to Ithaca. NY, precisely as

It seemed to have a great relevance in conditions where the whole had been broken. It became

a wave of student protest unfurls in Cornell. By the 1960s, under theleadership of Colin Rowe

a very verifiable model to me then of, let’s say, the closest you could come to entity and unity in

and the Texas Rangers. Cornell has become the American Mecca of Neo-Corbusian “space

the contemporary world.”19 lie adds that this intense experience proves highly liberating: “The

talk” and of a “contextualist” urbanism that draws inspiration from the pochés in Nolli’s plan

tropics gave the neurotic Northerner 1 was back then a kind of determined frivolity.”20

of Rome (1747) and from all the compositional precedents found in classical cities. When

Ungers arrives at the school, this ambition of reconciling the “theaters of prophecy”’ (the

masterpieces of modern architecture) with the “theaters of memory” (the fabric of ancient

he discovers through magazines, fires up the adolescent’s dreams of architecture: “All I wanted

cities) is on the verge of taking a more conservative turn, both aesthetically and politically. For

was to be an architect, a Brazilian architect. Niemeyer ... I really thought that I would emigrate

the “contexturalists,” Rome is the “open” city par excellence (in Karl Poppers sense), and Colin Rowe organizes increasingly frequent trips there for his students.

Although he has much in common with Rowe, Ungers’s belief in architecture’s ability to

embody and intensify the site is much more radical than this notion of formal bricolage, which conceives architecture’s mission as melding with and simultaneously activating a context. Furthermore. Ungers’s Rationalist agenda drives him to confront the reality of contemporary 97

When the family returns to the Netherlands in 1956, the bold enterprise of Brasilia, which

to Brazil However, other passions later take center stage, in particular writing. Al the age of 18 Elia Zenghelis, in a private conversation, December 2007. 19 “Archipelago,” in: Rem Koolhaas A-Y,” conversation with Beatriz Colomina, El Croquis 134/135 ( Madrid. 2007); 379. 20 “La deuxième chance de l’architecture moderne? in: L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui 238 (Paris, April 1985): 2.

sixteen, shocked by a National Geographic article describing the new attractions of Disneyland, he flings himself into writing a novel, Johann in Disneyland: “I was fascinated by Disneyland because it demonstrated that the artificial can be better, more complex. and more efficient than reality; that it is also the only way to respond to the demands of the masses, to these very large groups ...” His taste for the cinema and for screenwriting also takes off when Koolhaas forms a friendship with a schoolmate, Rene Daalder. who shares his instinct for tracking down 98

the taboos of the era in particular the most repressed taboo of all in postwar Dutch society:

INTENSIFYING REALITY

Germany. “I wanted to become a filmmaker, and I forgot my dreams of architecture to become a

scriptwriter, then a journalist.” They both become central figures in 1,2,3, etc., an avant-garde

akin to the scribe in the group. WI wasn’t really a gifted writer. I always found it very difficult.

group with a fluctuating membership, which rejects the notion of cinema d’auteur, arguing

But I wanted to write for certain papers, like Rolling Stone.25 In 1963. he becomes a typographer

that cinema, like jazz, is all about teamwork, and that the actors, the director, camera crew, and

and compositor, as well as a critic and journalist, at the Haagse Post. This magazine, close to

scriptwriters all make an equally important—and interchangeable—contribution.

the liberal right, is a rather aggressive advocate of capitalism, the free market, and intellectual

As the only member of 1,2,3, etc. who is not a film student, Koolhaas becomes something

independence, and to that end has recruited “a series of non-conformist younger journalists, a strange mix of intellectuals and ragamuffins, that were all to become part of the sixties’ avantgarde.”26 The philosophy of this journal, which goes against the grain of the emotional and ‘alternative’ style of the era, is defined concisely by the writer, painter, and boxer Armando, who is in charge of its cultural section: “Not moralizing or interpreting the reality, but intensifying it. Starting point: an uncompromising acceptance of reality.... Working method: isolating, 23 “La deuxième chance de l’architecture moderne,” mt. cit., 1985. p. 2. 24 Bari Lootsma, “Now Switch off the Sound and Reverse the Film: Koolhaas, Constant, and Dutch Culture In the 1960s,” in; Hunch 1 (Rotterdam, 1999): 162. 25 Int. cit with Olivier Botssière and Dominique, Lyon, 1986.

annexing... Facts are more interesting than commentaries and guesses ... most critics are the bastards of journalism... These bastards have to leave the stage.”27 The articles and interviews that Koolhaas writes from 1964 on, exploring contemporary figures from the world of cinema, literature, architecture, and the arts (Fellini, Hermans, Le Corbusier...), are particular caustic gems of this cold, rational, and literal conception of journalism, which deliberately ignore the hierarchy of facts, viewing the interviewee’s gestures or their secretary’s outfits as being just as important as what is said in the interview.

In 1966, Koolhaas moves into the limelight at Haagse Post when he steps up to dissect—

with the clinical spirit of the Nul-Journalism-the ideas, motifs, and figures involved in the Provo protest movement then spreading across the Netherlands. At the very height of events, the vigorous interview he conducts with the movement’s leaders portrays them “as a bunch of spoiled adolescents who have taken Constant’s ideas about the homo ludens a bit too literally,” giving the impression of being “confused reactionaries rather than progressives.”28 However, Koolhaas’s polemical spirit is seasoned with a good pinch of curiosity, and perhaps his interview with Constant on his fantastic project for a nomadic and networked city, New Babylon, helps to spark the young man’s renewed interest in architecture.29 A priori, the journalist and the ex Cobra/ex Situ artist have nothing in common, yet when the latter explains to Koolhaas that the point is not so much to change the world but rather to anticipate its necessary evolution, the utopian project suddenly assumes the speculative form of a scenario well suited to illuminating and intensifying an emerging reality. In any event, just a year later, when architecture historian Gerrit Oorthuys invites 1,2,3, etc. to take part in a seminar on cinema and architecture at Delft University, Koolhaas explains to his audience—and maybe convinces himself—that architecture is actually more interesting, more important, and less boring than cinema.

100

NETWORK “Haagse Post (Koolhaas): And then the time has come for New Babylon... When that moment has arrived, will it cover the entire surface of the earth? Constant: Yes, it will indeeed. A network of sectors will span the globe. I have abandoned the idea of the city sa a kind of node, this round shape marked on the map like a red blot. I am thinking about a very open structuree, entirely coherent, so that you can travel through it, and with all the fragments of the ladscape integrated within it. Haagse Post: Like a football in a net. Constant: Yes like a net draped over the globe. And in the meshes of this net life will unfold...”

101

102

LONDON With hindsight, Koolhaas has always claimed that his background in screenwriting, compositing, and journalism provided a perfect preparation for architecture. And so, in 1968, it is with this intellectual baggage that he moves to London to study at the Architectural Association. The four years he spends at the AA are both stimulating and disappointing. Koolhaas is entirely out of step with the Flower Power mood, the Pop wave, and all the counterculture paraphernalia that have taken hold of the institution, which at the time is dominated by members of the Archigram group. With this prevailing ambience, after just three weeks, Peter Cook is already stigmatizing the newcomer as the ‘‘boring fascist.” At the same time Koolhaas benefits to the utmost from the visual media revolution underway in this anylhing-goes setting. What’s more, the AA is not a monolithic block, and a “Formalist” student, who is convinced by the power of architecture and fascinated by the Constructivists—and who spends his summers tracking down relics of (heir work in the Soviet capital-can certainly find people on the same wavelength. As a result, he grows very close to Elia Zenghelis, a young Greek teacher who feels passionately about Modernist heroes (Mies, Scharoun, Niemeyer), is steeped in the history of cities (Léon Krier will also join his studio), and is, like Koolhaas, repelled by the students’ laidback attitudes. As early as 1969-70 both architects, together with their respective spouses, the couple of couples who will found O.MA five years later, have already formed a school within the school. The AA is also a good vantage point that allows Koolhaas to tune into more convincing ideas than those emanating from the AA, and in particular those of Italian Architettura Radicale. Its protagonists, taking an approach diametrically opposite to the fun vibe of Archigram. coolly appraise in “critical utopias” or “counter-utopias” 103

the vanishing points of the modern production mechanisms of architecture and urbanism, exacerbating (these same processes, which they like to describe in clinical or psychoanalytic terms (paranoia, schizophrenia, lobotomy, etc.). Among these strange tales, it is above all the “image-based discourse” of Superstudio’s Continuous Monument, with its narrative mode akin to that of editing and scriptwriting, that grabs Koolhaas’s attention. Exceedingly ambiguous, this disturbing fable of a ubiquitous monument colonizing the world demonstrated the power of architecture. And if Superstudio was able to illustrate this Utopia so realistically via existing cities and landscapes, perhaps this proved that the matrix of this Utopia was already there, latent, within the reality of those sites. Furthermore, the Monument had something of the opacity of a wall, and on one of the montages, its while, abstract mass could be seen superimposed (superfluously?) on the Wall that had already divided Berlin, and Europe, for almost ten years. THE WALL In the course of the summer of 1971, Koolhaas is therefore following his most profound intuitions when he decides to devote his field trip to the Berlin Wall; twenty years later, he will explain that it is the shock produced by this experience that suddenly turned him into a “serious student.” This twofold rendezvous with the “blank page” of Germany and the “taboo” of architecture holds a series of surprises for him. First of all, he realizes that, paradoxically, it is the West, the “open society,” that is encircled by the Wall and made free by it. However, he also realizes that the Wall presents a series of iterations, with a stupefying variety of situations and inflections, and that its disturbing presence is rile with plots; “Apart from the daily routine of inspection—military in the East and touristic in the West—a vast system of ritual in itself, the wall was a script, effortlessly blurring divisions between

tragedy, comedy, melodrama?’30 In order to characterize the lessons from this experience, Koolhaas has coined the concept of “reverse epiphanies.” “The Berlin Wall was a very graphic demonstration of the power of architecture and some of its unpleasant consequences ... In comparison, the sixties’ dream of architecture’s liberating potential—in which I had been marinating for years as a student—seemed feeble rhetorical play. It evaporated on the spot.” He adds, even more emphatically: “The Wall suggested that architecture’s beauty was directly proportional to its horror.” So much for the smug optimism that in his view has inspired the AA’s teaching. Furthermore, the very impossibility of expressing the Wall’s significance through its formal analysis as an object provides him with definitive confirmation of the “less is more” doctrine: “In fact, in narrowly architectural terms, the Wall was not an object but an erasure, a freshly created absence. For me, it was a first demonstration of the capacity of the void -of nothingness- to ‘function’ with more efficiency, subtlety, and flexibility than any object you could imagine in its place. It was a warning that—in architecture absence would always win a contest with presence.” So much for zealous defenders of the object and for the semiotic arsenal his friend Jencks is just about to launch. In Koolhaas’s eyes, the bomb of Post-Modernism will never be powerful enough to destroy this obvious insight. Finally, the whole catalog of inflections and metamorphoses displayed by the dispositive according to the specific situations it crosses through seem to Koolhaas to teach a striking new lesson: “I had never seen such a textbook demonstration of dialectics since witnessing the drill of the guards at Lenin’s tomb on Red Square: a fantastically intimidating goose step— legs lifted higher than those of chorus girls—that disintegrated meters in front of the Kremlin gate into a motley group of loose-limbed Petrushkas.”33 These morphological iterations of the various

states of the Wall will also remind him of “the sophistication of Schinkel’s thematic variations on architectural themes at Schloss Glienicke.”

30 Rem Koolhaas, “Field Trip: A(A), Memoir”. in S,M,L,XL

Clearly introduced from the stance of hindsight in his text Field Trip: A (A) Memoir, written twenty years later, the references to dialectics and to Schinkel allude directly to the second discovery of this field trip, for Koolhaas will also stumble upon the mine of publications from Ungers’s seminars in Berlin. This encounter, as decisive as his encounter with the Wall, is a pure and simple revelation. which resonate deeply with some of his intuitions. What Koolhaas thus discovers in

the heart of the blank page of Germany is not solely a confirmation that reality (the Wall) can be stranger than fiction (the Continuous Monument), but also a demonstration that reality is itself pregnant with fictions that architecture, alternating between the roles of analyst and midwife, can bring into the world. “To impregnate the past and beget the future—let that be the present for me,”35 as Nietzsche wrote. If the adventurous journey of OMA does indeed begin with “Delirious Berlin,” it is not solely due to the reverse epiphanies the Wall provided to Koolhaas, but thanks to the valuable testament he was insightful enough to delect in the city.

Rem Koolhaas The Berlin Wall as Architecture, 1971 Superstudio, The Continuous Monument, 1969

104

105

106

TRAVELLING MONUMENT Superstudio, The Continuous Monument, 1969 “The wall leaving the old city untouched”

107

108

SHIP

In 1971 the “boring fascist” gives his presentation on “The Berlin Wall as Architecture”

at the AA to an audience comprising Peter Smithson. Cedric Price, Charles Jencks, Alvin Boyarsky. Elia Zcnghelis, and the Archigrammesque teachers from the school: “They were all there ... in a mood of semifestive. semicynical expectation (this s chool was nothing if not fun). The images that appeared on the screen—former conditions, concepts, workings, evolution, ‘plots’—assumed their positions in a sequence that was gripping almost beyond my control; words were redundant. There was a long silence. Then Boyarsky asked ominously: ‘Where do you go from here?’”

While the “polemical shock” of this presentation suddenly causes the teachers from the

school to “see him in a different light,” his Berlin discoveries lead Koolhaas to look beyond their heads and set his sights on a more distant horizon than that of the AA. The project he embarks on subsequently, “Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture,” is a vessel specially chartered to carry him there. This new scenario, with elements of both fable and manifesto, takes the form of a colossal “metropolitan” strip flung across London, with its two parallel walls hermetically enclosing a dozen “squares” designed as a series of collective monuments. Branching out from this strip, which is intended to grow at the expense of the existing city, are secondary’ strips, all identical, devoted to the private accommodation of voluntary prisoners and “cut through the most depressed slum areas of the old London ... Their magnificent presence forces these slums to turn into ghost towns and picturesque ruins.”37 Exodus is thus a praying mantis, a splendid succubus designed to drain every ounce of energy from its victim: “We witness the Exodus of London. The physical structure of the old town will not be able to 37 Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture in: Exit Utopia

stand the continuing competition of this new architectural presence. London as we know it will become a pack of ruins.”

Koolhaas condenses within this project—with the Square of the Arts completly flattening

the AA’s environs—all the obsessions dear to his heart: the reverse epiphanies of the Berlin Wall, the powerful impact of Leonidov’s Magnitogorsk and “social condensers,” the “sympathy for the Devil” of Superstudio’s immoral tales... and the inebriating speculative acceleration he has discovered in Ungers’s publications. This polemical project affirms that architecture is taking over from nature in the Metropolis: “Under the threat of doom, the common concern, that is the fulfillment of all private desires within a subliminally collective and deliriously permissive common effort produces phantom proposals in the knowledge that phantom reality is the only possible successor to the present reality shortage.” Clearly, Exodus already comprises, in the form of a contemplative Utopia, “the vague idea” that will become the central theme in Delirious New York. That explains the numerous New York allusions Exodus will gradually take on board (such as the silhouettes of incandescent skyscrapers). Indeed, the fact that Koolhaas always dates Exodus from 1972 when it serves as his final project at the AA should not lead us to forget that the first version will not be published until June 1973 and that it will not take on its definitive form until 1974, in other words, after Koolhaas has reached his destination: Manhattan. Just like the square of the Captive Globe that Koolhaas will add to the configuration during his stay in Cornell (conceiving it as the Strip’s university), Exodus is in fact an itinerant school, a vessel that, eager to take advantage of Ungers’s teaching, will remain moored in the port of Ithaca for a year. 109

110

SHIP Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis, with Madelon Vriesendorp and Zoe Zenghelis “Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture” (1972-74) Plan and aerial view of the main strip

111

112

113

114

TRIANGLE

The year that Koolhaas spends in intimate intellectual communion with Ungers in Ithaca is

an extremely fruitful and instructive experience for him. It is there, while completing Exodus, that he will mature and hone the ingredients of his theoretical narrative about New York (the paranoid critical method, the grid, etc.). It is there, too, inspired by Alvin Boyarsky’s “Chicago à la carte,” that he begins to collect the postcards that will make up his own “image-based discourse.” It is in Ithaca, too, on the eve of the oil crisis, that he reads The Limits to Growth, the first book to resolutely sound the alarm about the state of planetary resources, and draw attention to a global phenomenon that Koolhaas himself describes as a “reality shortage.” Finally, it is there that he discovers, in the window of the campus store, a copy of Learning from Las Vegas, which leads him to the “realization that you could no longer write manifestos but that you could write about cities as if they themselves were a manifesto.”41 In other words, it is in Ithaca, in close proximity to Ungers, that the ghostwriter begins to develop the notion of a “retroactive manifesto” for Manhattan.

41 Rem Koolhaas, interview with Peter Fichli, in: Las Vegas Studio, Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi.

OMU/OMA

In 1973, when Koolhaas ends up moving to New York to conduct his studies on

“Manhattanism” and develop the idealized projects that will inform the annex to his book Delirious New York, Ungers has almost broken out of the orbit of Team 10 and is focusing once again on the intuitions and principles that have originally served as his lodestones. This personal recentering corresponds to a more widespread critical development on the international scene, which Aldo Rossi then promotes at the Milan Triennale under the banner of Architeitura Razionale. Several different strands will come together more or less spontaneously in this Tendenza, with its diverse representatives (Rossi, Grassi, Scolari, the Krier brothers, the New York Five, Stirling, Superstudio, Botta, Boffil ...) soon being nicknamed the Rats. Koolhaas will not escape this label entirely and indeed, Jencks will coin the specific fringe concept of Surralionalism to characterize him (and Hejduk). The more or less common denominator for all these architects is their shared conviction that architecture is not about problem-solving, but is instead a cultivated art, rich with a whole series of precedents in the corpus of concepts, forms, and figures, capable of teasing out from reality (the reality of the site? Of the program? Of history?) themes to transmogrify, typologies to inflect, motifs to refine, or latencies to reveal. The forms of architecture are not indexed on elementary functions, but are significant in and of themselves and relatively autonomous. Ungers does not need to make any rhetorical effort to feel at home in the heart of this Neo-Ralionalist nebula, and indeed he will be viewed, on an equal footing with Rossi, as one of its principal sources. A text he will publish in 1976, Planning Criteria, clearly situates his original position within this galaxy. Alongside the other architectural principles that he puts forward (the distinction between the planned and the accidental, morphological declension, the urban dimension of architecture, and the principle of adaptability), the most significant is still the “dialectical relationship with existing reality,” this ambition to “intensify the place,” which he emphasizes as sharing a relative affinity with the as found of the Smithsons or the contextualism of Colin Rowe.42 Quite apparently, if Ungers’s oeuvre becomes such a point of reference among self-styled Neo-Rationalists, it is not because it represents their shared doxa, but because it manifests, to a much greater extent than the work of any other architect, an ambition to overcome the dramatic tension between the rational order and the dense, contingency-laden nature of the real.

115

116

METAPHORS Oswald Mathias Ungers, City Metaphors, at the exhibition Man TransForms, New York, 1976

117

118

DRY ARCHIPELAGO AND VALHALLA “At the time of drawing the captive Globe, it seemed to me that the drawing was an exaggerated extrapolation of an essentially unconscious Metropolitan landscape, in which certain latent precepts about Metropolitanism had been turned into a manifesto. But on closer inspectionn it appeared that many of New York’s skyscrapers had in fact ideological ambitions, to the extent that they represented in mnay ways the realizations of those European avant-garde-movements such as Futurism, Constructivism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Socialist Realism- that had each in their own way been preoccupied with the invention and subsequent imposition of a completeely new way of life. But in Europe ,where they had been invennted, these movements considered themselves absolutely imcompatible and their conclusions irreconcilable. Each of them therefore sought to impose the hegemony of its doctrines at the expense of the others. But in Manhattan where they lived ‘incognito’, so to speak, they coexisteed within the grid as if they had always been intended as each other’s neceessary complement without any tempering of their truculence.” Rem Koolhaas, “The City of the Captive Globe” (1972) 119

120

ISLANDS

a morphological idealism that draws its references from Kant’s

“transcendental schematism.” The imagination is the principal

In 1975, OMA and Ungers both take part in a competition

for Roosevelt Island in the East River in New York. The

faculty that makes it possible to extract from reality patterns

contrast between their two proposals illustrates the variety of

or images that can in turn be manipulated and transformed.

interpretations that may be produced by acting out Ungers’s

The imagination is thus the principal lever of a dialectical

concept of morphological urbanism. OMA’s project is defined

relationship with reality, and the role of architecture has always

as “a distillation of elements, concepts, and strategies that

been “conceptualizing an unrelated, diverse reality through the

have evolved on the Mother island.”

use of images, metaphors, analogies, models, signs, symbols and

Its underlying principle

involves annexing this island district to Manhattan by indexing

allegories.”46

it on the city grid, and creating four new’ blocks, which combines rows of synthetic brownstones (glass, stone, plastic,

The summer session on New York (“Gotham City:

aluminum, marble) and very high buildings, all arranged to

Metaphors and Metamorphosis”) therefore aims explicitly

form one single wall when seen from Manhattan. Despite

to develop this approach of morphological urbanism

this calculated reutilization of the ingredients of Manhattan

with reference to the urban block. The students first of all

urbanism, this project, which is rooted in the typical contrast

undertake a systematic analysis of a range of examples that

“between ‘agitated’ low-rise and ‘serene’ high-rise elements,”

illustrate the formal variety of the block, which confirms the

nevertheless cuts a poor figure alongside the iconic force

relative independence of this type vis-à-vis the “criterion of

of Ungers’s proposal, which transposes the actual plan of

functionality” and fosters combinatory agility in juggling

Manhattan’s layout to Roosevelt Island. This project takes the

with these references. However, the prime aim of the session

form of a micro-Manhattan, with a grid of twenty-eight blocks

is to explore the specific potential of the block in New York,

arranged around a miniature replica of Central Park. All the

where, rather than determining the city’s urban context (as in

ingredients of the genius loci (blocks, streets, avenues, the park)

Barcelona), it is to a large extent determined by this context:

are thus transposed and precipitated into a kind of laboratory in

“The relationship of housing to urban design in Manhattan

which their process of evolutive metamorphosis is accelerated.

... is a backward one, the housing forced to conform to the

OMA and OMU competition entries for Roosevelt Island, 1975

rigid street and ownership pattern.”47 In stark contrast to those

As becomes apparent here, while Koolhaas regularly

architects who have come up with ingenious ways to transgress

contributes to Ungers’s German projects as a ghostwriter, it is

the grid, considering it to be an anti-context, or who have

in turn Koolhaas’s influence that leads his friend to turn his

seen it instead as a foil to their alternative models for a better

attention to New York. Indeed, when Ungers decides in 1976

metropolis (Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller, Yona Friedman),

to offer his first Summer School for Cornell students, he quite

the students are encouraged to recognize and heighten the

naturally selects Manhattan, and its particular typology of the

grid’s iconic power. The influence of Koolhaas’s studies on

urban block. This session coincides with the opening of the

Manhattanism is apparent, right down to the references (Ferriss,

group show Man TransForms ( conceived by Hans Hollein)

Hood, Corbett) proposed by Ungers and his assistants (Werner

at the Cooper Hewitt Museum, for which Ungers develops an

Goehner, Hans Kohlhoff, and Arthur Ovaska) to justify their

exhibition design that systematically pairs a series of city plans

profound attachment to the genius of the grid and to New

with images and concepts that have translated and interpreted

York’s urbanism. For his part, the ghostwriter makes the most

them. The text he writes for the catalog, “Designing and

of this morphological approach, which he will indeed attribute,

Thinking with Images, Metaphors, and Analogies,” advocates

retroactively, to the heroes of Delirious New York.

46 Oswald Mathias Ungers, “Designing and Thinking with Images, Metaphors and Analogies” in: Oswald Mathias Ungers (ed.), The Urban Block and Gotham City, Metaphors and Metamorphosis (Ithaca, 1976). 47 Arthur Ovaska, “New York City: Urban Morphology, Historical Precedent for Design”

121

122

THE URBAN VILLA

Ungers’s decision to focus on the topic of the block in his first Summer School is certainly

related to the typological agenda of Neo-Rationalism. A few months earlier, the young Léon Krier, a proponent of the most “revisionist” version of the Tendenza, had organized an exhibition in London criticizing Rossi’s show and reserving a central role for Ungcrs’s œuvre: “The purpose [of my exhibition! was to establish some common basis for discussing urbanism and architecture beyond the then fashionable political categories. That is why the exhibits were organized in a typological order: the quarter, the street, the square, the block, the park, the urban fabric, the monument, and so on.”48 Even if Ungers is not entirely in tune with Krier’s message, this exhibition, which called vigorously for historic centers to be preserved and for the “reconstruction of the European city,” had made a considerable contribution to setting him once again at the heart of the architectural scene in Europe. In 1976-77, while Ungers is actively canvassing several institutions in Germany to try to promote his views on architecture and obtain commissions again, his teaching in Cornell continues to explore the topic of the block,

ruined or residual villas, mobile, divorced, hairy villas, etc., and even “villas within villas”...

but in situations that are much more critical than Manhattan’s: Buffalo’s fragmented urban

A whole panoply of variants is thus proposed, which offers scope to conceive of “conceptual

fabric, devitalized small towns around Ithaca, etc. Fascinated by the problem of urban decline

alternatives” to the standard models of the dispositive and to put forward a range of new

he observes in the United States, and by the associated suburbanization of the surrounding

variants that will be able to regenerate, with materials drawn from its own genetic code, an

countryside. Ungers sends his students out to develop site-specific projects that can stem this

urban fabric threatened by decline. In a nutshell, Ungers sees in the urban villa an architectural

phenomenon or overcome its contradictions. The topic of the urban villa that he chooses for

organism that in and of itself synthesizes the gene of urbanity, a microcity, a “city within the

his second Summer School (1977) corresponds precisely to this ambition. This second session,

city,” a precipitate of urbanism with which to imagine cities better able to ingest their suburbia

held in Berlin, marks Ungers’s return to the city, almost ten years after leaving the TU. His

and to withstand pressures to simply dissolve into these. The urban villa is at one and the same

two assistants/collaborators (Kollhoff and Ovaska) are with him, as is Peter Riemann, another

time the object, the instrument, and the model of a new dialectical contract between the city

of his German students in Cornell, whose skills as a draftsman he particularly appreciates.

and the countryside.

Riemann’s role is to provide drawings, maps, and graphic analyses to underpin the arguments on morphological urbanism that Ungers intends to develop, aimed at the city’s political decision-makers. Ungers’s introductory statement for this session sounds the alarm: “The city is now competing, particularly as far as the environmental qualities are concerned, with life in the country. The future of the city therefore depends entirely on the solution of the dichotomy between city and country. If the city is going to survive as a social, political, economic, and not the least as a cultural entity, the survival is only possible if living and environmental conditions can be provided in the city similar to those of a more natural environment.” The oxymoronic 49

type of the “urban villa” (a hybrid of city and countryside) is thus foregrounded as a model that could generate an ideal compromise between the respective advantages of individual houses and collective apartment buildings, and hence stem the hemorrhage ... by planning it.

Berlin is the ideal arena to demonstrate this. In addition to the significant urban “thinning”

experienced by the city during this period, the model of the urban villa with changing uses over the course of lime is illustrated with particular clarity in Berlin’s history. From the urban palazzo to the subdivided suburban villa, the full spectrum of variants of this type is found in Berlin, to such an extent that it offers scope to catalog the city’s entire built environment. The categories dreamt up by the students to categorize the highly varied structures they managed to interpret as “villas as found” testify to the breadth and range of this spectrum and to the extraordinary potential of this type: alongside symmetrical, square, romantic, bourgeois, ordinary, palatial, modern, suburban, monumental, or Brutalist villas, we find tower-villas, castle-villas, industrial villas, villas of the dead or villas of God, but also mini-villas, baby-villas, 123

47 Arthur Ovaska. “New York City: Urban Morphology, Historical Precedent for Design.” in ibid. 48 Léon Krier, “Looking Back without Anger,” in: Exit Utopia 49 Oswald Mathias Ungers, “The Urban Villa; A Prototype for Inner City Residences.” In; Oswald Malhias Ungers. Hans Kollhoff. and Arthur Ovaska. Tbo Urban Villa (Ithaca, New York/Cologne.1977)

50 Roberto Gargiani. Rem Koolhaas/OMA The Construction of Merveilles (Lausanne, 2008), 53. Zenghelis also evokes this rivalry: “Rising above the mêlée of the AA, Rem Koolhaas and Léon Kner, already on the verge of setting off on their parallel yet radically opposed roots, could be seen as the rival twins (even their names suggest this image: Rem and Leo - Leo and Rem}. Like Calvino s Castle of Crossed Destinies, my studio became a school within the school, a theatre of figures with contrasting characters, but who, on the whole, believed in the urgent need to endow architecture with its full force once again.” Ella Zenghelis. “Text and Architecture: Architecture as Text,” in: Exit Utopia. 51 Léon Kner “Proiect for a New Quartier (a city within the city) in the city of Pans in the year 1976,” in: Exit Utopia. 52 Cf. Delirious New York. (Rotterdam. 1994), p. 197. At the time. Koolhaas also used the expression “city within a city” to refer to OMA’s idealized project for the Welfare Palace Hotel (1976-77)

During the summer of 1977, Koolhaas is immersed in assembling his retroactive manifesto,

and is preparing a kind of prepublication preview that will be published that same year in the journal Architectural Design, which devotes an entire issue to OMA’s work.53 Symptomatically, the notion of the archipelago crops up in this preview to describe the “conceptual-metaphorical” project of The City of the Captive Globe, which Koolhaas initially envisaged while he was in Ithaca as a “square” within Exodus, and which he presents here as “a first, intuitive approximation of the architecture of Manhattan, drawn before later research for Delirious New York would substantiate many of its conjectures.”54 In this script, which in his view synthesizes the grid’s genius, the grid is described as “a dry archipelago where each block represents an individual ‘island’ while the fast-moving traffic that ensures their relative isolation corresponds to the water.” Contrary to the confederation of neighborhoods advocated by Krier, each island celebrates radically different values, “all in the reassuring certainty that the unity of the archipelago can only be expressed and reinforced through the maximum heterogeneity of each of the component islands.” Indeed, this dry archipelago brings together on an allegorical plane “the ingredients of OMA’s private Valhalla,” and it is no surprise to find that this collection includes—alongside the great highlights of Manhattanism (the Waldorf Astoria, the RCA, the Trylon, and the Perisphere from the 1939 World’s Fair), Expressionist or Surrealist references (The Cabinet of Doctor Calligari, Dali’s Angelus Architectural). and Modernist architectural

53 Architectural Design, vol. 47. no. 5 (London, 1977).

and urban design manifestos (the Plan Voisin. Mies)—three contemporary references: an

54 “The City of the Captive Globe” (1972), in: ibid., p. 331

“architecture in the process of reproducing itself ” that alludes to Ungers’s oeuvre, “generated by

homage to Superstudio right next to an evocation of the Berlin Wall, and a celebration of an unstoppable impulse of continuous transformation, reinterpretation, and regeneration.” 124

EXTRAPOLATION: STRIP/GRID/ARCHIPELAGO

Die Stadt in der Stadt ( The Cityin the City), reappropriating this notion, which he probably

The six pages with the sober title Berlin: A Green Archipelago, which Koolhaas brings

believes he has been the first to defend, well before Krier adopted it. In Ungers’s view, urban

Ungers at the start of his Summer School, can be read on two levels. In one sense, they are

islands are “cities within the city” or “minicities.” The second change involves beeting up the

the ghostwriter’s ultimate contribution to the political-pedagogical undertaking his colleague

list of these islands and of reference projects that could be “realized” or “transplanted” there.

has embarked on there. Taking as its point of departure the realization, shared with Ungers,

Whereas Koolhaas cited Leonidov’s Palace of Culture (in Kreuzberg). Magnitogorsk (along

that European cities are shrinking, the text seeks to draw the design consequences from

the Avus). Mies’s angular skyscraper (in Kreuzberg), the expressionist completion of Speer’s

this, but transposes the strategy Ungers develops with the urban villa to a meta-urbanistic

Olympic Stadium, the creation of a linear park along the Wall (prior to reunification), and the

plane. By lapping into his friend’s metaphorical approach, Koolhaas reads and selects within

development of the

the metropolis distinct urban figures, metamorphosed into an archipelago of islands and

Tiergarten district as a “polemic against the ideology of urban reparation,” Ungers adds a

ideologies, designated as potential receptacles for more or less utopian projects, once imagined

whole series of ideas, blending Modernism (Loos’s Chicago Tribune project, Hannes Meyer’s

for Berlin or other cities, while envisaging all the green interstitial ocean as a territory that can

scheme for the Palace of Nations, El Lizzitsky’s Wolkenbügel design, and Le Corbusier’s

incubate and offer multiple iterations of all the “exteriors” of the metropolis (ranging from

plan for Algeria) with much older developments (Central Park, Royal Crescent in Bath) and

highways and suburban projects right through to farmland, parks, sports grounds, forest, and

contemporary undertakings (the twin towers of the World Trade Center). Finally, as the third

nature reserves). Koolhaas thus provides Ungers with a scenario to use in reflecting on the

major addition, he introduces into the debate the local precedent of the Havel Landschaft, “the

future of the urban condition in Europe, and with an exhibition concept: Berlin as an urban

key and the essence of the idea of Berlin as a green archipelago”:56 basically, the project would

design theme park.

simply transpose the eclectic collection of architectural mementos assembled in Glienicke Park into a collection of minicities right across West Berlin. This revised and expanded text, along

with Riemann’s maps and drawings, is presented, together with works on the urban villa, at the

At the same time, this concept clearly continues Koolhaas’s trajectory through theory

and the series of “conceptual-metaphorical” projects that the simultaneous discovery of the Berlin Wall and Ungers’s pedagogical work had inspired him to develop: Exodus and “The

56 Oswald Mathias Ungeers, second version of the manifesto

exhibition marking the conclusion of the Summer School. The metamorphosis is, however, not yet complete.

City of the Captive Globe.” The collective monuments of Exodus—having left London strung together like the coaches of a train designed to cut right through the reality of the existing

Over the next few weeks, Ungers, keen to convince the political authorities, redeploys

city—had, upon arrival in Manhattan, disbanded in order to relocate on their respective

the entire argument, in German, in a demonstration structured into eleven successive theses,

podiums within the fantastic incubator of the city’s competitive grid, and to coexist within

each accompanied by an explanation and a conclusion. This official text, the only one that

this dry archipelago of granite islands. The “square” of the Captive Globe, at first conceived

will be published, picks up on the essence of the previous versions, but above all incorporates

as a simple link in the Exodus strip, had thus gradually imposed itself as the synecdoche

new developments of a practical and historical nature, which relativize the conceptual-

and metamorphosis of the entire project, and as the script of its relaunch in the shape of

metaphorical, or contemplative, dimension of the original. First of all, it expands the arguments

a retroactive manifesto for the American metropolis. In the same way, Berlin: A Green

on the demographic decline of cities, and particularly Berlin, and highlights the shortcomings

Archipelago triggers a new transposition, corresponding to the awakening of metropolitan

of strategies for urban reconstruction or repair. Above all, it develops a retroactive line of

architecture within the historic reality of the European city. It can therefore be read as the

argument to demonstrate that the idea of the archipelago is inherent in the history of a city

fruit of a dialectic parabola which comes into being in Berlin, makes its way through London

that has always developed like a “pluralist” confederation of distinct Dörfer. In other words,

(where the metropolitan project is initially staged against the city), then via New York (where

the concept of the city as archipelago, far from being a fantasy superimposed upon reality,

it finds itself realized in the grid), before finally returning to Berlin to envisage the city’s

would actually only need to be revealed as the city’s underlying reality, and pursued. Finally.

enclosed territory and its latencies as the test bed for a contemporary relaunch of this project

Ungers brings the urban villa back into his argument, as if to emphasize that this strategy,

in the form of the archipelago. In essence, this scenario was a way of repaying Ungers, with

which is probably impossible to realize on the scale of an entire city, can at least be deployed

interest, for all the inspiration Koolhaas had drawn from his work (and brought to fruition in

on the smaller scale of one “city within the city” (which probably explains why this title is

his own way), while at the same time teasing out the conceptual-metaphorical basis to pursue

phrased in the singular). Indeed, it is of course a minicity—the devastated neighborhood of

their collaboration in Europe.

the Südliche Friedrichstadt—that he would focus on in his third and last Summer School, which concentrates on the theme of the Urban Garden (1978). On this site, the great champion

125

THE CITY IN THE CITY

of the matryoshka nesting doll approach would indeed be able to shift down—but without

This script immediately provides the thematic focus and the underlying concept for the

Koolhaas—to a smaller scale, that of a microcosm of the whole, with villas assuming the role of

strategic reflections that Ungers has initiated with Riemann with a view to giving direction

islands, while gardens would play the part of the interstitial ocean. From this point on—even

to the project for a new Bauausstellung in Berlin. However, his brainstorming sessions with

though their paths would continue to cross frequently, notably to fight against the “critical

Koolhaas, and subsequently with his assistants during the Summer School, lead him to

reconstruction” of Berlin—the courses steered by the two men (who remained friends up until

make a number of corrections and additions to the text. First of all, he changes the title to

Ungers’s death) would move in significantly different directions. 126

“BUT MOST OF ALL, UNGERS”: BERLIN STORIES Rem Koolhaas

Nobody can imagine the excitement of discovering, in Berlin, summer 1971—ten years

after the Wall was built-the work of Oswald Mathias Ungers. In a bookstore, I found maybe 15 to 20 cahiers—extremely modest publications in black and white that were published as part of Ungers’s seminar at Berlin’s Technical University. What Ungers had done was to take the city-at that point an enclave, surrounded by the Wall, embedded in East Germany—and declare it the single, obsessive subject, for years, of his students: a degree of inspired narrowness unimaginable today. He had divided the work/agenda into seemingly simple subjects—“parks and plazas,” “architecture and highways’’—and had been able to use his students’ architecture as an inventory of potentials. How can a building relate to a park? How can a building relate to a motorway? How can a piece of contemporary architecture be inserted into an existing, damaged street wall? How can “average” contemporary architecture coexist with Nazi ruins?

Other parts of the seminar were deadpan recordings—almost like Ed Ruscha’s books on

L.A.—of Berlin’s inconspicuous features. The blind firewalls exceptionally long and tall—which once separated the Mietkasemen and which still exposed the war damage that the city had sustained. The Wall did not figure in Ungers’s inventory. He had simply ignored it and made the East as mucha subject of his research as the West. “One of the most exciting brochures was a series of designs for Leipziger Platz that did not conform to any of its past octagonal configurations, but simply imagined a number of breathtaking shapes there—a very thin slab, or a series of very complex villas. The booklet on highways was perhaps most surprising: next to the speed and noise of the infrastructure, the student—already a mythical “genius’’ called Christian Meyer(?)—had imagined an incredibly complex series of apartments—their absurdly intricate detail and defiant obliviousness to the monstrous infrastructure next to it an inspiring “moral triumph” for what architecture could do.

What was, for that lime, absolutely unusual was that there was no reference whatsoever

to guilt, or the war. No trace, yet, of a monument or fabricated memory. The seminar simply took the city as a given, including the evidence of its monstrous history. The work seemed very German, or rather, through the work, it became possible to become excited again-for the first time?-by the German. A certain softness combined with a passion for system and theory, slipping immediately into extravagant romanticism, harsh precision revealing private obsession, suffering bordering on pleasure, an almost masochistic delicacy about decay in a profession that can only move forward. When the poetic potential of the city and architecture’s tenuous contribution to it were exhausted. Ungers’s seminar went into a speculative, visionary overdrive, taking Berlin as a template for a futuristic overhaul, in which no site was too insignificant not to be overbuilt by proliferating megastructures, insanely ambitious institutions, 127

128

megalomaniac universities, colossal offices, housing clusters, entertainment nodes... The project was completely over the top, but still showed that Berlin was a natural ground—perhaps through the very impossibility of changing its character—for futuristic speculations; Ungers’s defiance of history’s gravity showed his vulnerability to histories’ charms; or more precisely, how for him, the connection between history and modern architecture was a fully functioning umbilical cord.

When I came back to London, I shared this unexpected and mysterious treasure with my

astonished friends and tried to find out more about this architect. Nobody knew about him except people close to Colin Rowe. Their story was that “Colin” had discovered “Mathias,” too, and had been intrumental in making him chairman at Cornell, but had had a change of heart just before Ungers’s arrival in the Slates, because the formalist virtuoso had suddenly “embraced the computer” in a competition for a new, definitive German Parliament in Bonn. Apparently. British Mentor and German Discoverer were barely on speaking terms in the small American village.

In 1972, I won a fellowship that enabled me to study in the Slates. Before deciding. I

checked out Ithaca, met first Colin Rowe then Ungers ... With the first, I listened to an exiting monologue, with the second, I was involved, from the first moment, in an exciting dialogue that resumed every time I met him again as if there had been no real interruption. Ungers was the most mesmerizing talker/ thinker about architecture. Not as an intellectual discipline, you felt, but as a body; his whole physical being thought, felt, absorbed, imagined, and communicated architecture in a way that was accessible, contagious, and almost sensual...

From September 1972 to 1973, I spent one year in Ithaca: the unraveling of Vietnam,

Watergate, Damish, Jencks, Foucault ... But most of all, Ungers. His seminar, a weekly bombardment of slides, connections, intuitions, flashbacks, guesses, presented whith almost orgasmic drive that left students panting. But as Rowe’s disapproval escalated into academic warfare, the embattled private Ungers showed disbelief and doubt—where to go in architecture? I had never worked for anyone, but spent months with Ungers, working on his competitions—usually for minor, provincial towns in West Germany ... understanding the subtle probing of Ungers’s formalism, the resonances, rhymes, contrasts, and repetitions, revisiting earlier work, debriefing him about his career: detailed reports about being a German architect in the sixties—the not-quile-part-of-it status that his nationality then implied for

129

CIAM or Team 10; the Berlin career, ending in the ignominy of the 1968 student protests.

Conspiratorially almost, Ungers showed me his alleged surrender to the computer, the Bonn

Berlin again, which seemed to “undo” his earlier speculations. After the utopian buildup, the

Back in Europe in the late seventies, I participated in an almost retroactive seminar on

competition: a weird, pixelated study in randomness—a field of democratic, orange particles

question now became how to “delete” Berlin ... In a “green archipelago,” we devised a strategy

in search of a center... or beyond center... For a brief moment. I could invest all my empathy

to “design the cities’ decay” based on raw, naked value judgments— esthetic, political, social. In

and enthusiasm in a reconstructive effort to restore Ungers to himself. At the end of that year,

a city facing, like most of Europe, serious depopulation, we tried to anticipate which complexes

we even worked briefly on Berlin together: in the fragmented, still divided metropolis. Ungers

to maintain, which undeserving parts to erase, turning the city as a whole into an Arcadian

proposed a sequence of five separate landmarks, modern fortresses that, like the individual

landscape of built remnants surrounded by a sea of green, in which the infrastructures of

stops of a metro line, established a new order, invisible on the surface ... It seemed that the year

contemporary life were hidden ... Berlin as a colossal enlargment of Schinkel’s Schloss Glienicke

of living with doubt was over...

...

130

AN EXCITING EXERCISE Hans Kolhoff in conversation with Florian Hertweck and Sebastien Marot May 2009

sm: So you really didn’t know much about him before you met Goehner? HK: No, I didn’t know him. Goehner showed me one or two Bauwelt publications. One of them, I remember clearly, was about the Fourth Ring competition for Lichterfelde. I read the text and was absolutely fascinated. What stunned me, was how he conceptualized what he did. The very fact that someone was able to put the design process into a theoretical framework was unusual at that lime. It was also lacking in the office of Hollein. Hollein was Hollein. It was the cosmos of one person, whereas the intriguing thing about Ungers was that you were able to translate what ever he did into something of your own. And you could use it for yourself without being bound to any formal repertoire, especially when it came down to morphological research in design. That, even today, for me is his most important contribution when you compare him with all the other figures of his generation. SM: What do you mean: his openness to all kinds of inputs and references? HK: No, it is not that simple. Ungers developed an uncompromising morphological approach, and this was how we worked with him. If you take the Marburg houses or the study for Braunschweig, both projects 1 was involved in, he said: just start, produce something, design alternatives. Then we talked things over, and began to sort out the alternatives. Progressively, things changed from one concept to the next, and the stabilization of the idea and the communication respectively was thus somehow standardized. Certain images emerged that were able to transport the essence of a certain concept. That made it easy to clarify the strategy with him. He always thought and worked in alternatives. This is what I still do today, both with the students and in the office. We test alternatives in order to approach what a thing wants to be. It is not at all about having an idea and imposing it on something, but rather a way of getting things to become what they want to be.

But to talk rigorously, very precisely about what is happening when you are sketching, you

have to find verbal expressions for what you are doing. You need a tremendous repertoire. Images can help to make this process easier. And you also need a sense for when and how things may change into something else, as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Actaeon transformed into a stag with antlers. This is Ungers at his best, and it is, I think, much stronger than the typological method that was used at that time by the Italians, Aldo Rossi for example, and also much closer to architecture than the approach developed by Rem Koolhaas, which is more a kind of film script. Rem always wants to be a movie director, but Ungers’s approach was equally open. It could go this or that way. The next morning the concept happened to be something else. Working like that was extremely exciting. 131

132

FH: So, what did he do specifically at Cornell?

During his first semesters at Cornell, he experimented with a variety of things. He tried,

for instance with his students, to build this house for homeless people, but halfway through the process he found out that these people were intelligent enough to solve the problem themselves, better than anything he would have been able to contribute.

Then he started to do competitions and Werner Goehner was involved in some of these

early morphological projects, such as Blauer See, Heiliger Stuhl, Berlin Tiergarten. Ungers had already gone in that direction earlier, with Jonas Geist for the Enschede project. The bias was more geometrical, after the time with Sawade. which was rather repetitive and technocratic. His entries for Rüsselsheim or Düren, which he started at Cornell, were morphological projects, especially Düren, where he took a map—and this is very close to the Archipelago way of thinking—and just took what was there. You see forests, a river, tracks of high-voltage lines, and the superimposition of these elements with topography. Altogether, this established a sort of embryonic structure for the design. He started to speak about a concept as found, or a design as found, and finally a project as found: the project is the interpretation of the material that is already there, that happens to be there. You are not inventing the project. You have to look closely at the situation instead, and the closer you look, the more precise the project becomes.

133

134

MORPHOLOGY/TYPOLOGY

very much into Ungers’s morphological thinking. But today, I am absolutely convinced that it

was a piece of good fortune that Kleihues got the job. because Kleihues more or less went back

In the field of urbanism and architecture, the seventies reached the lowest intellectual

level you could imagine. There was the failure of the functionalist ideas, and the land-use plan

operations proved to be nothing but helpless attempts to prevent urban decay. Urban design

how the city developed throughout history. You organize transportation on earth. You

did not exist. In Berlin, the most beautiful houses were destroyed not by war but by planning

create private properties, parcellation. When density increases and streets get too long, they

and piling up these gigantic satellite cities instead. It was the time when Aldo Rossi started the

turn into a grid and define blocks. The individual house faces the street, it needs a facade.

Tendenza, the time when students like me entered this debate. I was fascinated by the Italian

You know, Kleihues’s logic was not a question of artistic interpretation as with Ungers, but

contribution. L’Architettura della Città was published in 1966, and translated a few years later.

simply one of resuming the way cities had effectively and successfully developed up to the

In 1973. the Triennale finally provided the basis for a new approach to urbanism.

Modernist interruption. And I think this simple strategy today is even more successful than the morphological approach—if taken exclusively—and superior to the typological approach

FH; There was also Siedler’s book on the destruction of Berlin.

as well.

HK: Yes, but this was not even implicitly a theory; it was a powerful, provocative statement. Rossi, on the contrary, came up with an urbanistic theory based on typological permanence.

SM: At that time. Ungers was decidedly back in Germany, and involved in projects.

And Ungers looked at the textures of the city and interpreted them morphologically. I think he

HK: Yes. there were the projects I just mentioned, and especially the Hotel Berlin competition

regarded the Archipelago project as an interesting exercise, but it was clear to him that it had

that Ungers won. He was so happy to say: This will change our life. It did not change anybody’s

no chance to be converted into reality. But with this involvement in Berlin, he became more

life, it just did not happen. Then he started to build his first project in Schillerstrasse, which

and more excited up to the point when the IBA discussion started. Then, the morphological

turned out to be a total disaster. He tried to realize in one small project his whole cosmos

approach became his strategic tool, whereas the Archipelago idea appeared to be overly

of ideas, but was confronted with the rudest and crudest conditions of social housing. He

formalistic. It was not possible to envision those forms and figures as types the way Rossi

was designing windows while the guys had already bought windows somewhere round the

understood them. In fact, the typological approach turned out to be more adaptable to the

corner. For him, it was a terrible experience. And it is clear to me that this was the main reason

current problems in the city. The morphological strategy is more flexible but it tends to become

for the reductiveness of his subsequent projects, their obsession with geometry in order to

complicated. You have to talk a lot in order to convince people.

control everything and to make the design overly simple even banal: one window format, square of course. It is a pity, because the possibility of enriching the project by developing

At some point, the question was raised as to who should be the director of the IBA ?

layers and layers of morphological interpretation from the urban plan to the detail seemed

Kleihues or Ungers? Those were the alternatives. Kleihues raised three objectives: first, the plan

to be a fantastic opportunity. The obsession with the square undermined his previous artistic

of the city, then the volume, and finally the facades. It made me smile at the time because I was

conviction completely.

135

136

ARCHIPELAGO

How old are those figures?

What kind of architecture do they belong to?

Going from there to the Archipelago is quite a different story. You are not in the countryside

anymore, with hills and forests and things like that. You are in the middle of the city. At that time

Are these figures essential for the urban development or not?

in Berlin, the situation was quite similar to what we have today in many German cities—not

Are they real figures or just stupid mirages?

just East German cities—where the population is shrinking and where the authorities wonder

what they should do with the vacant apartments, houses, and quarters that are becoming a

You know, a figure can look fantastic in plan view, but actually turn out to be a disaster when

problem, for Rem, of course, the idea of shrinking cities was a fantastic scenario and Ungers

you take the pain to check it out on site. It could be just a storage place that looked like a

was open to all kinds of hypotheses. But you also have to test the hypotheses. Hypotheses

Baroque castle.

are just half the story, however fascinating they may be. Unfortunately, the second half of the

137

exercise usually just didn’t happen.

FH: The Märkisches Viertel was a bit like that, wasn’t it?

HK: Yes. This was the problem of this exercise. You were just looking at the map, taking these

And this, in my opinion, was the problem with the Archipelago project. Because when you

figures and asking yourself what would happen if you just preserved these, intensified them,

start looking at the map, you see certain figures that stand out, and you tend to preserve the

and let everything else be ruined, grown over, flooded by a Metropolitan Spreewald kind of sea.

most interesting figures. But you are of course, at the same time abstracting from important

Very exciting for a movie, of course, but a disaster in reality. In any case: absolutely exciting as

questions such as:

a teaching exercise.

138

Berlin: Green Archipelago, Oswald Mathias Ungers

139

Figure-ground of Berlin: Green Archipelago

140

141

142