City Planning and Bricolage Technique
a conceptual framework that varied widely in configuration, number of parts, size, and degree of complexity. Yet, the armature was sufficiently consistent to ensure a recognizably Roman genericity. The armature was essentially composed of public buildings, streets, and squares—an architecture of passage like the Peutinger Table diagram. Thus the organization of the single components was not based on an ideal configuration but rather on movement, intersections, and assembly. Though Koolhaas does not plan Melun-Sénart as an urban armature in the way of a genericity so that the system of types forms a conceptual framework, he conceives of the city as symbolic pattern by inscribing a unique figure of Bands onto the city fabric. Yet, he avoids any kind of zoning of the Islands in between, instead promoting complexity and diversity within these “quarters.” It is noteworthy that, like in the Roman city, the organizing scheme of the Bands is also based on the means of movement and the junctions between the different systems (highways, TGV line, the River Seine, green belts). Since Koolhaas does not define individual building types or function attributions, Melun-Sénart does not form a recognizable pattern in the way of an individual operating system but proposes a 100% site-specific diagram with 100% generic components.
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CHAPTER 2: VOID
(42) “Rome’s business was to conquer the world and govern it. Strategy, recruiting, legislation: the spirit of order.” Source: Le Corbusier, Towards an Architecture, 154–155 © 2015 VBK Wien
Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter describe an alternative model to imperial urbanism and overall design and argue that “the physics and politics of Rome provide perhaps the most graphic example of collusive fields and interstitial debris.” [160] Rowe and Koetter’s Collage City (1978) puts forward a more contextual urbanism that again focuses on the relationships between type and context. [161] They contrast the open space of the traditional city with Le Corbusier’s “city in the park” that placed the buildings in unstructured void space. Rowe and Koetter’s main thesis is that modern city planning inverts the relation of building to open space in comparison to the city’s pre-modern European public space. This turn has generated isolated buildings, divided neighborhoods, and urban wastelands devoid of quality for social vitality. Rowe and Koetter therefore promote a collage method of fragmentary independent elements that allows for democratic pluralism and coexistence in a composite plan. They adopted the tool of the figure-ground plan from Gian Battista Nolli’s Map of Rome (1748), in which the public spaces—including the enclosed public space, such as the Pantheon, the colonnades in St. Peter’s Square, churches, and palaces—are represented as open civic spaces in the same way as streets and squares. In contrast, the private buildings are shaded as if they form a dark, inaccessible block. Instead of an aerial viewpoint that shows buildings on a void background, the Nolli map essentially changes the relationship between built and void space. Public space, outside and inside a building alike, becomes an available and usable void figure, surrounded by solid blocks. This notion of public space as presented in Nolli’s Map of Rome is contrary to the modern concepts of freestanding objects and uncontained void space. Rowe and Koetter’s strategy of collage avoids finality by dealing with fragments that allow for change and difference without having to refute the scheme in toto. In a similar way as the Roman urban armature does, their contextual urbanism investigates the relationship between ideal type (a central idea in modernism) and the existing context. They take up the idea of bricolage, a term borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind (1969), to describe an unsystematic tinkering that avoids totalizing concepts, which is first and foremost a political reaction to the total design approach of modernism. [162] [160]
[161] [162]
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Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, “Collage City,” in Architectural Review 158 (August 1975): 66–90, reprinted in Theorizing a New Agenda: An Anthology of Architecture Theory 1965–1995, ed. by Kate Nesbitt (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 266–93, here 285. Rowe and Koetter, “Collage City.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 17–8; see also “Collision City and the Politics of ‘Bricolage,’” in Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978).
THE ARMATURE OF GENERICITY