Transcript Cities and Space

Cities and Space
Lefevre on Space
Not many years ago, the word ‘space’ had
strictly geometrical meaning: the idea it
evoked was simply that of an empty area.
In scholarly use it was generally
accompanied by some such epithet as
‘Euclidian’, ‘isotropic’, or ‘infinite’. And the
general feeling was that the concept of
space was ultimately a mathematical one.
To speak of ‘social space’ therefore, would
have sounded strange.’
Henri Lefevre, The Production of
Space,1974
The failure of the Modernist ‘functional’ city
Failure as function
Failure as politics and social organisation
Failure as symbol
Failure as physical fabric
Planning as a technical operation only
Rationalism without humanity
Submitting the city to the needs of the car
Destruction of memory
‘The Almost Perfect Town’ J. B. Jackson 1952
‘Optimo city has its zones, but they are
organically related to one another.’
‘The square ceased to be thought of in nineteenth
century America as a vacant space: iy became a
container or (if you prefer) a frame. A frame, so it
happened, not merely for the courthouse, but for
all activity of a communal sort. Few aesthetic
experiments have produced such brilliantly
practical results …Optimo acquired something to
be proud of, something to moderate that
American tendency to think of every town as
existing entirely for money-making purposes.’
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American
Cities, 1961
‘When we deal with cities we are dealing with
life at its most complex and intense. Because
this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on
what can be done with cities. A city cannot be a
work of art …
‘Why have cities not, long since, been identified,
understood and treated as problems of
organized complexity? …The theorists of
conventional city planning have consistently
mistaken cities as problems of simplicity and
disorganised complexity.’
Westway, London
Vision and reality,
c.1967
The Bauhaus Exhibition and a commentary, September
1968
Christopher Alexander ‘A City is not a Tree’ 1965
‘We are trading the humanity and richness of the
living city for the conceptual simplicity which
benefits only designers, planners, administrators
and developers. …
The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle
severs the overlap of the strands of life within it,
because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor
blades on edge, ready to cut up whatever is
entrusted to it. … If we make cities which are trees,
they will cut our life within to pieces.’
Christopher Alexander: Semi-latticeversus a Tree
1968
hippies, Martin Luther King, Student and worker riots
Paris in May, Russian tanks in Prague August, antiVietnam War riots London, October
Typology
Derived from the Greek word typos, type refers
to ‘model’, ‘matrix’ or ‘mould.’ The body of antecedents
provides types against which new design concepts can
be modified or evolved. Typology refers to the distillation
and classification of existing building types and urban
forms as prototypes in terms of function and efficacy.
Analytical typology describes the various elements of a
building or a city and how these elements
compositionally fit together. The study of typology can
provide a platform on which to base possible design
decisions and, depending on the situation, generate new
design types.’
Tom Porter, Archi Speak,2004
Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 1966
Critique of Naïve Functionalism
We have indicated that the principal questions that arise
In relation to an urban artifact - among them,
individuality, locus, memory, design itself. Function was
not mentioned …this explanation is regressive because
it impedes us from studying forms and knowing the
world of architecture according to its true laws.’
‘The complex structure of the city emerges from a
discourse whose terms of references are still
somewhat fragmentary. Perhaps, the laws of the city
are exactly like those that regulate the life and
destiny of individual men. Every biography has its
own interest, even though it is circumscribed by birth
and death. Certainly the architecture of the city, the
human thing par excellence, is the physical sign of
this biography, beyond the meanings and the feelings
with which we recognise it.’
Lucca, from Aldo Rossi, The
Architecture of the City,
1966/1982
James Stirling, project for Derby Civic Centre, 1974
Covent Garden protest, 1970
Florian Beigel, Half Moon Theatre, Mile End Road, 1984
Analogies between urban theory and literary theory
Liberal humanist theory - values the individual and
their ‘agency’. Rational means of creating change.
‘Modernism’
Structuralism - based on anthropology.
Emphasis on the structures of society that operate
without people being aware of them, including religious
belief about the world. Seen in Rossi, Rowe and
Rationalism
Phenomenology - based on unmediated experience
of the world rather than intellectual constructs includes Heidegger
Post-Structuralism - takes Structuralism’s pairs of
opposites and muddles them up, because the world is
contradictory and impure.
Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City, 1975
Civilized mind versus savage mind
Bricolage ‘the process by which people acquire
objects from across social divisions to create new
cultural identities, for example punks using safety pins
as jewellery.’ from Wikipedia
‘imperial Rome… illustrates something of the
‘bricolage mentality’ at its most lavish – an obelisk
from here, a column from there, a range of statues
from somewhere else’
Collage ‘a technique for using things and
simultaneously disbelieving in them.’
Anthony Vidler, The Third Typology, 1978
‘When typical forms are selected from the past of a
city, they do not come, however dismembered,
deprived of their original political and social
meaning. The original sense of form, the layers of
accrued implication deposited by time and human
experience cannot be lightly brushed away… The
technique or rather the fundamental compositional
method suggested by the Rationalists is the
transformation of selected types - partial or whole –
into entirely new entities that draw their
communicative power and potential critiera from the
understanding of this transformation.’
1978 and 1994
From Delirious
New York
Dali and Le
Corbusier
conquer New
York