One of the most useful analytic tools we developed emerged out of our goal to understand the dynamics of change and innovation in terms of urban and architectural practice. The method we devised was to simultaneously read the city backward and forward chronologically; to start with the present and peel back the accumulated spatiotemporal layers of the built fabric to discover moments of alteration, addition, erasure, misalignment and realignment, etc. A very different narrative from the standard historical reading emerges from such a process. In the reverse reading, action precedes intention. In urban architectural terms, the built intervention or object is encountered before the preexisting condition of the site, and (in effect) without prior knowledge of its author’s intentions. In other words, the chronologically backward reading of the urban fabric constructs a narrative that foregrounds action—what the intervention or object actually does—rather than what it was intended or designed to do. It thereby reproduces the lived experience of encounter with the built object. This method of reading the city defamiliarizes it, and casts the built fabric in an active role as protagonist in its own making. The reverse reading produces a kind of knowledge that is spatial and fundamentally architectural—a form of knowledge that is not contained in written documents, and, most important of all, that highlights departures from the norm and therefore also moments of deviation and innovation. When read across historical time—that is, chronologically forward as well as backward—the interactive (dialectical) process by which the city is generated over time and through authored urban and architectural projects, becomes clearly legible. This method of reading and analysis brings into sharp focus the role of practice, and of urban architectural knowledge, in the process of generating the city. The Freedom of the Periphery The edge or glacis condition of Zagreb—on the periphery of territorial powers and dominant cultures—has been theorized within the region in terms of the “freedom of the periphery.” Ljubo Karaman, the twentieth-century historian of Croatian and Dalmatian art, developed the concept of the “peripheral milieu” as a particular kind of (cultural) edge condition that is radically different in terms of its relation to the center from the provincial milieu. Unlike provincial regions, peripheral milieus have no strong gravitational pull to any one center, but are drawn to many centers. This is a condition that offers considerable “freedom of creation” that allows artists “to draw from two or more sources and to make creative synthesis in auspicious moments.” The peripheral milieu is one in which multidirectional vectors offer access to many centers, and in which an “intensification of culture” occurs—an intensification and differentiation that fosters experimentation and innovation and generates originality. The periphery in this way has the capacity to 5
6
5 Ljubo Karaman, O djelovanju domace sredine u umjetnosti hrvatshih krajeva (On the Effect of the Native Environment in the Art of the Croatian Lands) (Zagreb, 1963), 89. 6 Ibid.
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become its own center. Transition from Condition to Strategy Generated by modernity, Zagreb was shaped by political transition. Between 1850 and 1991, the city weathered eighteen major political shifts, each accompanied by intense periods of economic instability and almost continuous political realignment and administrative reorganization. How, under such conditions, was it possible for architecture and urban planning—disciplines that are predicated on stability, continuity, and durability, that require substantial capital investment and the ability to take the long view—to operate effectively? How was it possible for the city to modernize, industrialize, and grow more than one-hundredfold during that time? Did the permanently transitional environment of modern Zagreb generate new techniques for city making? The answers to these questions, we propose, are embedded in the fabric of the city itself. Close examination of that fabric and its spatial logic, with all its multi-authored and multilayered complexity, reveals the processes by which the condition of transition in Zagreb generated urban architectural strategies for dealing with the continuously unresolved. Those strategies, once implemented, achieve a temporary stability in the production of form that has a logic capable of reproduction, that is open to further innovation, and available to practice. But first we must define our terms. Strategy We define strategy as a highly organized plan of action devised in response to conditions that are unstable or otherwise uncertain, which is both constrained and directed toward the achievement of specific objectives. It is also predicated on contestation, intelligent opposition, and conflict. Strategy must plot a course of action that anticipates a range of possible countermoves. Uncertainty is the fundamental condition of strategy, just as agility is its mode of operation. Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century Prussian theorist of war, made an important distinction between strategy and tactics. Tactics, in military operations, is an activity concerned with individual acts; it deals with the form of individual engagements. Strategy, by contrast, is concerned with the use and significance of the totality of engagements to achieve the larger objectives of the conflict. Tactics are opportunistic; they exploit opportunities. Strategy is generative; it creates opportunities. Whether or not it is successful in achieving a desired outcome, strategy—by imagining, planning, and rationally projecting actions and their consequences onto existing conditions—transforms those conditions into possibilities. It is this projective, creative aspect of strategy that interests us here. In Clausewitz’s words, strategy “must give an aim to the whole military action that corresponds to the goal of the war. Strategy, then, determines the plans for the individual campaigns, and orders the engagements within them. Because most of these things are based on assumptions that do not always materialize and on a number