The World as an Architectural Project [PREVIEW] by Gabriel Kozlowski

The World

as an Architectural Project

Hashim Sarkis and Roi Salgueiro Barrio with Gabriel Kozlowski

The World as an Architectural Project

The World as an Architectural Project Hashim Sarkis and Roi Salgueiro Barrio with Gabriel Kozlowski

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

The World as an Architectural Project

Authors: Hashim Sarkis and Roi Salgueiro Barrio with Gabriel Kozlowski Principal Investigator: Hashim Sarkis Lead Research and Writing (Entry Numbers): Roi Salgueiro Barrio (1—6, 8—13, 15—20, 22—26, 29—34, 36—39, 41—45, 47—48, 50) Gabriel Kozlowski (6—7, 14, 19, 21, 27—29, 35, 36, 40, 46, 49) Initial Research Collaborators: Daniel Ibáñez and Pablo Pérez-Ramos

Manuscript Editor: Xhulio Binjaku Copyeditor: Patsy Baudoin Proofreading: Matthew Abbate and Michael Sims Illustrators: Milap Dixit and Nitzan Zilberman Graphic Design and Cover: Gabriel Kozlowski

© 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Avenir Next, Avenir Next Condensed, and Adobe Caslon Pro. Printed and bound in Canada. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN 978-0-262-04396-0 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Acknowledgments This book stems from “The World According to Architecture,” a course and research project initiated at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and further developed and consolidated at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Over the past six years, we have benefited from the dialogue with a number of architects and scholars in the conceptual development of the book. Among them, special credit should be given to Peder Anker, Eve Blau, Sibel Bozdogan, Neil Brenner, Adrià Carbonell, Daniel Daou, Daniel Ibáñez, Rania Ghosn, El Hadi Jazairy, Nikos Katsikis, Jarrad Morgan, Erkin Ozay, Pablo Pérez-Ramos, Chris Roach, Dima Srouji, and Brent Sturlaugson. The numerous students who have participated in seminars about this research have also helped us notably to better frame the topic. The research project has generated several outputs, including papers published in a variety of venues and a traveling exhibition that was featured at the Yale School of Architecture, Lisbon Triennale 2016, and the School of Architecture at the University of São Paulo. This book has benefited enormously from these earlier products and their reception. We would like to thank many of the architects included in the book, as well as many of their heirs and legal representatives, for having generously allowed us to reproduce their work. Our gratitude to Kykah Bernardes, Lonnie van Brummelen, Andrea Branzi, Angelo Bucci, Luc Deleu, Design Earth, Yona Friedman, Siebren de Haan, Renata Hejduk, Joyce Hsiang, Frauke Huber, Regina Khidekel, Uwe H. Martin, Bimal Mendis, Peter Mörtenböck, Helge Mooshammer, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Franco Purini, Volker Sayn, Carl Steinitz, Urban Theory Lab, Elina Zenetou and Dinos Michalaros, the Arcosanti Archives, the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller, the Constantinos and Emma Doxiadis Foundation, the Zaha Hadid Foundation, the Het Nieuwe Instituut, the Foundation Le Corbusier, the Mundaneum, the Fondazione Aldo Rossi, the Valparaiso School of Architecture, the Department of Special Collections at Stanford University Libraries, the Frances Loeb Library at Harvard Graduate School of Design, the gta Archives/ ETH Zürich, and the MIT ACT Archives and Special Collections.

The help of several individuals has been essential to obtain information and establish relations with some architects and archives; among them particularly Benjamin Albrecht, Panos Dragonas, GinĂŠs Garrido, Chiara Geroldi, Ignacio Moreno, Melina Philippou, and Silvia Tagliazucchi. The archives that preserve the legacy of architects represented in the book have been very generous in facilitating the publication of their images. The production of this book would not have been possible without the support of MIT. We would like to thank Melissa Vaughn, who always provided excellent guidance on the shape and content of the book. Peggy Cain, Makeela Searles, Dineen Doucette, Ramona Allen, and Ken Goldsmith all helped in different ways in facilitating the research and production of the book. On a personal level, Diala Ezzeddine and Dunia Sarkis; Carmen Parga and Alvar Salgueiro Parga; and Michelle Mendlewicz and Maria Kozlowski for championing the different iterations of this project. We would like to thank Patsy Baudoin for her help in editing the manuscript, and the reviewers MIT Press selected for their valuable comments. Last but not least, our gratitude to Victoria Hindley and Gabriela Bueno Gibbs, as well as Janet Rossi and the production staff of the MIT Press, for their constant support of this project.

Acknowledgments

Catalogue List

List of Themes

xii

Prologue: Architecture and the World Scale

Catalogue: The World According to Architecture

Epilogue: Five Wishes for the Next Fifty Worlds

520

Bibliography

529

Image Credits

558

Catalogue List

Entry

Date

1882—1913

1892—1906

1895—1898

1917—1919

1925—1930

1927—1932

1927—1952

1928—1929

1929—1930

1928

1929

1934—1935

1943—1965

1943—1945

1951—1953

1957

1957—1974

1957—1968

1958—1975

1959—1962

1962—1975

1963

Project Title. Architects

Nationality Page

The Linear City. Arturo Soria y Mata

Spain

Scotland

France

Germany

USSR

USA

Germany

Switzerland, Belgium

The Outlook Tower. Patrick Geddes

Terrestrial Globe at the Scale 1:100,000. Élisée Reclus and Louis Bonnier Alpine Architecture. Bruno Taut Aero-Cities. Lazar Khidekel

Airocean World Town Plan — 4D Tower. Richard Buckminster Fuller Atlantropa. Herman Sörgel

The Mundaneum — The World City. Le Corbusier and Paul Otlet Club of a New Social Type. Ivan Leonidov

USSR

100

USSR

110

USSR

120

USSR

130

Switzerland

140

USA, Japan

150

Switzerland

160

Germany

170

Germany

180

England

190

Netherlands

200

USSR

210

Japan

220

France

230

Greece

240

Hungary

250

England

260

Disurbanism. Mikhail Okhitovich and Moisei Ginzburg The City of the Future. Georgii Krutikov Saturnia. Viktor Kalmykov

Historical Chart of Urbanism. Rudolf Steiger et al.

Airocean World Map and Geoscope. Richard Buckminster Fuller et al. The Three Human Establishments. Le Corbusier and ASCORAL The Cultivation of the Earth. Rudolf Schwarz

The Expanding Environment. Erwin Anton Gutkind

Berlin Hauptstadt — Ecological Table. Alison and Peter Smithson New Babylon. Constant Nieuwenhuys

The New Unit of Settlement (NUS). Alexei Gutnov et al. Marine Cities. Kiyonori Kikutake

Air Architecture. Yves Klein and Claude Parent Ecumenopolis. Constantinos A. Doxiadis

Seven Bridge Cities to Link Four Continents. Yona Friedman Dream City. Archigram (David Greene with Michael Webb)

Catalogue List

Entry

Date

1962—1974

1961—1967

1965

1966—

1966

1967—1973

1968

1968—1971

1968—1975

1969—2013

1971

1971—1975

1972—1973

1977—1983

1979—1980

1981—2000

2000

2006—

2011—

2012

2014—

2017

2015—2019

Project Title. Architects

Nationality Page

Electronic Urbanism. Takis Zenetos

Greece

270

Austria

280

Brazil

290

Chile

300

Italy

310

Italy

320

Germany

330

England

340

Switzerland

350

Italy

360

Italy

370

Spain

380

Italy

390

Netherlands

400

Iraq

410

Italy

420

USA

430

Italy

440

Belgium

450

Extreme Territories of Urbanization. Neil Brenner and the Urban Theory Lab USA, Various

460

USA

470

Brazil, Various

480

Lebanon, Algeria

490

Brazil

500

USA, Zimbabwe

510

Imaginary Cities. Raimund Abraham

The World in the Cybernetics Era. Sergio Bernardes

Amereida and Travesías. Alberto Cruz, Godofredo Iommi, et al. Form of Territory. Vittorio Gregotti et al.

Study for an Operational History of Territory. Saverio Muratori Contribution to the Planetarization of the Earth. Volker Sayn The Continuous City. Alan Boutwell and Michael Mitchell integral urban, a global model. Fritz Haller Arcology. Paolo Soleri

No-Stop City. Archizoom Associates (Andrea Branzi et al.) Gates. Juan Navarro Baldeweg

Fundamental Acts. Superstudio (Adolfo Natalini et al.)

The City of the Captive Globe. Rem Koolhaas with Madelon Vriesendorp Planetary Architecture. Zaha Hadid Theater of the World. Aldo Rossi Masques. John Hejduk

The Equal City. Franco Purini with Laura Thermes

Orban Space. T.O.P. Office (Luc Deleu, Isabelle De Smet, and Steven Van den Bergh) Geodesign. Carl Steinitz

World of Matter. World of Matter (Mabe Bethônico et al.)

Geostories. Design Earth (Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy) Satellights. Angelo Bucci

City of 7 Billion. Plan B (Joyce Hsiang and Bimal Mendis)

List of Themes

Themes. Architects 9

3 5

Abstraction. Yves Klein and Claude Parent / Volker Sayn / Fritz Haller / Archizoom Associates / Superstudio / Rem Koolhaas with Madelon Vriesendorp / Zaha Hadid / Franco Purini / Angelo Bucci Aerial View. Élisée Reclus and Louis Bonnier / Le Corbusier and Paul Otlet / Rudolf Schwarz Automation. Constant Nieuwenhuys / Kiyonori Kikutake / Takis Zenetos / Sergio Bernardes / Fritz Haller Autonomy. Lazar Khidekel / Ivan Leonidov / Mikhail Okhitovich and Moisei Ginzburg / Raimund Abraham / Paolo Soleri / Rem Koolhaas with Madelon Vriesendorp / Zaha Hadid / Aldo Rossi / John Hejduk Circulation. Arturo Soria y Mata / Georgii Krutikov / Le Corbusier and ASCORAL / Yona Friedman / Volker Sayn / Alan Boutwell and Michael Mitchell Colonialism. Herman Sörgel / Rudolf Steiger / Erwin Anton Gutkind / Alberto Cruz, Godofredo Iommi, et al. / T.O.P. Office (Luc Deleu et al.) Cybernetics. Alexei Gutnov et al. / Archigram (David Greene with Michael Webb) / Takis Zenetos / Sergio Bernardes / Juan Navarro Baldeweg Decentralization. Bruno Taut / Mikhail Okhitovich and Moisei Ginzburg / Le Corbusier and ASCORAL / Rudolf Schwarz / Erwin Anton Gutkind / Alexei Gutnov et al. / Juan Navarro Baldeweg Ecology. Alison and Peter Smithson / Sergio Bernardes / Paolo Soleri / Design Earth (Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy) Environmental Control. R. Buckminster Fuller / Herman Sörgel / R. Buckminster Fuller et al. / Yves Klein and Claude Parent / Superstudio Geography. Patrick Geddes / Élisée Reclus and Louis Bonnier / Bruno Taut / Lazar Khidekel / Le Corbusier and Paul Otlet / Rudolf Schwarz / Alexei Gutnov et al. / Vittorio Gregotti et al. / Saverio Muratori / Angelo Bucci Geopolitics. Bruno Taut / Herman Sörgel / Rudolf Steiger / Alberto Cruz, Godofredo Iommi, et al. / T.O.P Office (Luc Deleu et al.) / Neil Brenner and Urban Theory Lab / Carl Steinitz Geo-visualization. Patrick Geddes / Élisée Reclus and Louis Bonnier / Rudolf Steiger / R. Buckminster Fuller et al. / Constantinos Doxiadis / Alberto Cruz, Godofredo Iommi, et al. / Vittorio Gregotti et al. / Saverio Muratori / T.O.P. Office (Luc Deleu et al.) / Neil Brenner and Urban Theory Lab / Carl Steinitz / Design Earth / Plan B (Joyce Hsiang and Bimal Mendis) Human-Earth System. Bruno Taut / R. Buckminster Fuller et al. / Saverio Muratori / Paolo Soleri / Design Earth (Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy) Human-Nature Split. Georgii Krutikov / Kiyonori Kikutake / Takis Zenetos / Zaha Hadid

xii

List of Themes

Themes. Architects 4

3 5

3 8

Immateriality. R. Buckminster Fuller / Yves Klein and Claude Parent / Archigram (David Greene with Michael Webb) / Zaha Hadid Infrastructure. Lazar Khidekel / Herman Sörgel / Alison and Peter Smithson / Yves Klein and Claude Parent / Yona Friedman / Archizoom Associates / Plan B (Joyce Hsiang and Bimal Mendis) Interiorization. Constant Nieuwenhuys / Alan Boutwell and Michael Mitchell / Archizoom Associates Linearity. Arturo Soria y Mata / Le Corbusier and ASCORAL / Constantinos Doxiadis / Raimund Abraham / Volker Sayn Megastructure. Kiyonori Kikutake / Volker Sayn / Alan Boutwell and Michael Mitchell Monumentality. Le Corbusier and Paul Otlet / Viktor Kalmykov / Raimund Abraham / Paolo Soleri / Superstudio / Aldo Rossi / Design Earth (Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy) / Angelo Bucci Nomadism. Mikhail Okhitovich and Moisei Ginzburg / Viktor Kalmykov / Constant Nieuwenhuys / Sergio Bernardes / John Hejduk Parallelism. Lazar Khidekel / Georgii Krutikov / Viktor Kalmykov / Alison and Peter Smithson / Constant Nieuwenhuys / Yona Friedman / Archigram (David Greene with Michael Webb) / Takis Zenetos / Alan Boutwell and Michael Mitchell Place(lessness). Patrick Geddes / Ivan Leonidov / Yona Friedman / Alberto Cruz, Godofredo Iommi, et al. / Aldo Rossi / Franco Purini Remoteness. R. Buckminster Fuller / Georgii Krutikov / Viktor Kalmykov / Kiyonori Kikutake / Raimund Abraham / Angelo Bucci Taxonomy. Patrick Geddes / Le Corbusier and Paul Otlet / John Hejduk / T.O.P. Office (Luc Deleu et al.) / Carl Steinitz / Plan B (Joyce Hsiang and Bimal Mendis) Telecommunications. R. Buckminster Fuller / Ivan Leonidov / Mikhail Okhitovich and Moisei Ginzburg / R. Buckminster Fuller et al. / Alison and Peter Smithson / Archigram (David Greene with Michael Webb) / Juan Navarro Baldeweg / Superstudio / Franco Purini Territorial Gestalt. Le Corbusier and ASCORAL / Constantinos Doxiadis / Vittorio Gregotti et al. / Saverio Muratori Territorial Intensification. Rudolf Schwarz / Erwin Anton Gutkind / Vittorio Gregotti et al. / Neil Brenner and Urban Theory Lab Total Urbanization. Alexei Gutnov et al. / Archizoom Associates / Rem Koolhaas with Madelon Vriesendorp / Neil Brenner and Urban Theory Lab / Plan B (Joyce Hsiang and Bimal Mendis) Typology. Arturo Soria y Mata / Ivan Leonidov / Fritz Haller / Juan Navarro Baldeweg / Rem Koolhaas with Madelon Vriesendorp / Aldo Rossi / John Hejduk / Franco Purini World Urbanization. Arturo Soria y Mata / Élisée Reclus and Louis Bonnier / Rudolf Steiger / Erwin Anton Gutkind / Constantinos Doxiadis / Fritz Haller / Carl Steinitz

xiii

Prologue

Architecture and the World Scale History, Geography, and the World A world does not predate its images. It is shaped by them. 1. Le Corbusier, The Four Routes, trans. Dorothy Todd (London: D. Dobson, 1947), 104. 2. For a detailed bibliography about Le Corbusier’s interest in the planetary scale see projects 8 and 15.

In 1929, on a flight over Buenos Aires with the pilot and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Swiss architect Le Corbusier confronts a scale that he has not visually encountered before. Writing in The Four Routes, he attributes to this flight a moment where he “began to think in terms of geography and world.”1 Le Corbusier is reacting to the advent of commercial aviation, which is transforming the perception of a new cadre of civilian travelers. It gives them new eyes and a new vantage point. This perspective had been imagined long before but never occupied by ordinary citizens until after World War I. Seeing the earth from the plane, Le Corbusier realizes that modern architecture needs to transcend its context and enable a larger vision. Until then, his architectural imagination stopped at cities. After this momentous flight, he proposes a two-dimensional architecture to be perceived from high above and grafted onto the geography of the earth. True, in his iconic 1922 City of Three Million People, the plane already flies into the city center and its citizens see the city from above; but even from that vantage point, a flat horizon line confines the city’s space. After 1929 the surface of the earth replaces the sky as the background of the city, and the scope of his architectural operations expands to regions, territories, and the world at large. In the second postwar Le Corbusier will coin the notion of “geo-architecture” to reflect these scalar possibilities. Yet, he will hardly develop the notion beyond the neologism. It will be muddled with republications of older writings on cities, and the impact of his flight with Saint-Exupéry will be lost. Even though Le Corbusier is the most canonical and exhaustively studied representative of modern architecture, his engagement with the planet constitutes a relatively unknown episode of his career. It has been effectively reduced to a mere footnote in his lifelong involvement in the two truly important realms of action the discipline of architecture has accepted as its areas of expertise: buildings and cities.2 Le Corbusier’s geo-architectural works are among this book’s fifty projects dealing with the world scale. His enthusiastic, geographic epiphany seems today the product of a bygone era. Today, encounters with the planet are a quotidian phenomenon, dulled by increasing international relations and new means 1

Prologue

of communication. At the same time, too often we face the globe in darker, more somber ways. Contemporary perceptions of the world are unavoidably associated with critical phenomena that are in themselves the deleterious, unanticipated results of the modernity Le Corbusier embraced: urban expansion across the planet; transcontinental migratory flows; environmental hazards; sea level rise; and global warming. All these changes bring the world scale within our daily experiences and, without a doubt, to the core of our most pressing social concerns. Architectureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s responses to these contemporary, global challenges has mostly favored technical solutions. Architects are addressing environmental questions and global warming through a new ethics of construction supporting hard choices of renewable materials and passive environmental systems. On another front, when mobilized to respond to the problems of refugees, migratory movements, and other humanitarian crises, architects justifiably tend to switch hats and take on the role of relief workers focused on shelter and delivering it quickly. As indispensable as these responses are, they stop short of addressing all the scalar complexities environmental and migratory phenomena present. By addressing problems of a planetary scale with a predominantly problem-solving attitude, architects often stop short of questioning the causes of the problems they are facing. The more recent projects presented in this book suggest a different, complementary mode of operation. That is, to understand the spatial, technological, and social processes that are shaping the planet, in order to define types and scales of architectural intervention that can challenge the ways in which globalization takes place. The purpose of this book is to reconnect this trend of contemporary architectural inquiry to a broader disciplinary history that has shaped the ways in which we live and think about our present. The book exposes a profound, but still little-known relation between architecture and the global scale, which starts, roughly, in the late nineteenth century. Today, we need to address a planet that has been intensely shaped by the spatial logics of modernity and that continues to be produced through systems of geospatial control and technical rationality that are a direct continuation of them. And yet, we have an insufficient understanding of the many ways in which architectural modernity has addressed the world as a scale of reflection or intervention. In an effort to fill this historiographic gap, this book describes how architects have historically thought and imagined at the world scale well before the advent of 2

Architecture and the World Scale

contemporary globalization. It unpacks the complex and contested relation architecture maintained with these sociospatial processes; the ways in which the discipline sometimes anticipated, sometimes contributed to, sometimes reacted against the emergence of global systems. It presents how architects embraced and helped formulate globalizing ideologies, at times uncritically accepting or reinforcing associated projects of domination, discrimination, and inequality, while sometimes profoundly challenging them. It shows how some proposals were critical of the inequalities these ideologies might generate, and how some predicted global risks, including the environmental crisis and the morass of urbanization. By extending these histories into the present, the book shows how modern interest in the planetary scale is being recovered as well as reconsidered and challenged today. Why has this history been suppressed? What forces and voices silenced it? For one, national discourses and ideologies marginalized it by adopting as their instrument of realization a version of modernism devoid of any global ambitions. Associating world-scale projects with communism may have also contributed to its elision. At a practical level, there were no commissions for architects to design worlds, except as the unexamined, broader context of their work. Importantly, the suppression of this dimension of architectural modernism may have to do with the neglect of geography as an influential discipline on architecture. Until recently, histories of modern architecture generally disregarded the role that geography played in shaping architectural thinking and in helping architects situate their work in broader cultural and transregional settings. Countering this tendency, many of the architects featured in this book used geography as a guide to help them apprehend, perceive, and reconfigure the scales and conditions of their interventions. By recovering their legacy, this book lays claim to the importance of a geographical imagination. It posits that the scale and challenges of the world, beyond the city and beyond the nation-state, constitute a vital architectural project—one that needs the same level of disciplinary debate and analysis that it enjoyed in the past. “Fill the earth” Our history of projects begins in the late nineteenth century with the almost contemporaneous works of town planners Arturo Soria y Mata and Patrick Geddes. While we acknowledge the futility of determining a definitive origin of architecture’s engagement at this scale, this beginning point is an important 3

Prologue

part of our undertaking. German historian Jürgen Osterhammel maintains in The Transformation of the World that the nineteenth century creates the framework for the global systems that continue until today.3 Similarly, geographer Giovanni Arrighi dates the beginning of the world-system that dominates the long twentieth century at around 1870. This world-system reinforces the domination of European countries and, especially, the United States over world-economic space and culminates in the phenomenon we term globalization.4 The first projects in our book coincide with this period, reflecting architecture’s early participation in a world that is starting to operate globally. Indeed, the late nineteenth century witnesses the constitution of the first truly effective forms of globalization and recognizes the strong influence humans have in shaping the planet. As Karl Marx notes in his 1848 Communist Manifesto, the international consolidation of capitalism causes a series of social and spatial changes—the rise of cities and domination over the countryside, clearing whole continents for cultivation, and creating networks of global transport—that are instrumental to extend the market across the “whole surface of the globe.”5 Natural sciences detect equivalent scalar phenomena in their field of study. Welsh geologist Thomas Jenkyn proposes the term “anthropozoic” to describe this contemporaneous “human epoch.”6 His suggestion, followed in 1865 by Reverend William Houghton, thus establishes a framework to describe the human modification of the planet that resurfaces insistently after atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer introduce the thesis of the Anthropocene in 2000.7 The promoter of the Arts & Crafts movement, William Morris, expresses a similar awareness of the human influence on the planet in his 1881 lecture “The Prospects of Architecture in Civilisation,” when he affirms that architecture must intervene in a process of development that has implied “the molding and altering to human needs of the very face of the earth itself, except in the outermost desert.”8 From the beginning, our selection responds to this global dimension in very physical, almost literal terms. Taking Ildefons Cerdà’s 1848 motto “Fill the earth!” as the basis for his own urban program, Arturo Soria y Mata imagines in 1882 how the planet can be connected through an urban network. One decade later, influenced by his friendship with anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus, author of The Universal Geography. Earth and Its Inhabitants, Patrick Geddes conceives his Outlook Tower to make legible the diverse scales of planetary interconnectedness. Although the ambition to represent the cosmos architec4

3. Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 4. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 1994). Arrighi develops the world-systems theories that had been developed, among others, by Immanuel Wallerstein in the four volumes of The Modern World System (1974–2011). 5. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (Marxists Internet Archive, 2010 [1848]), 17. Accessed online May 17, 2019: https:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/download/pdf/Manifesto. pdf 6. Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519, no. 7542 (March 12, 2015): 174–175. Quoted in T. J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and the Environment Today (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017), 10. 7. Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” Global Change Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 17–18. 8. William Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art: Five Lectures Delivered in Birmingham, London, and Nottingham, 1878–1881 (New York: Garland, 1979 [1882]), 170–171.

Architecture and the World Scale

9. Robert David Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Antoine Picon, French Architects and Engineers in the Age of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Antoine Picon, Les Saint-Simoniens: Raison, Imaginaire et Utopie (Paris: Belin, 2002). Among the diverse approximations to the world as an architectural topic in the architecture of the French eighteenth century see the works of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (Cemetery for the Ville de Chaux, and House for the Agricultural Guard of Maupertuis, ca. 1785), Étienne-Louis Boullée (Newton Cenotaph, 1784, and Temple of Nature, 1793), Antoine Vaudoyer (House for a Cosmopolitan, 1785), and Jean-Jacques Lequeu (Temple of Equality and Temple of the Earth, 1794). 10. Jordi Claramonte, La República de los fines. Contribución a una crítica de la autonomía del arte (Murcia: Cendeac, 2013), 35–107. 11. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2004).

turally certainly predates Geddes’s Tower, his work redirects the architectural imagination toward a more precise and material engagement with the order and construction of the earth. This engagement offers a different story of the spatial questions motivating modern architecture and urbanism. Among some of modernism’s most prominent precursors—such as Cerdà, author of the General Theory of Urbanization, and his follower Soria y Mata; Geddes, who coined the term “conurbation”; and Morris, who so influentially shaped the ethics of modern design—there is already present an emphatic interest in charting a space for action well beyond cities or regional space. Without a doubt, there are design precedents and intellectual preconditions that support the emergence at this moment of architectural projects dealing with the planetary scale, ranging from the pre-Magellan use of architecture to articulate territorial power, to the imperial and cosmopolitan projects of some French revolutionary architects, to the Saint-Simonian, positivist proposals of territorial ordering.9 Among these diverse precedents, what for us is more influential is the simultaneous development, during the Enlightenment, of the concepts of aesthetic autonomy and of cosmopolitanism. The separation of the aesthetic realm from other aspects of social life opens spaces of discussion testing hypotheses about modes of perceiving and being that are independent, for the first time, of naturalistic or cosmotheological ideas of predetermined order.10 This separation, or autonomy, allows artists to speculate about what is possible to do aesthetically and politically. Far from implying the creation of spaces of isolation and exile from actual social space, the movement toward autonomy helps to define new modes of socialization that can be then mobilized to transform actual social space.11 The interrogation about the possible universal validity of these new, imagined, and acted modes of being helps to initiate, in turn, the cosmopolitan discourse about forms of living together. The fifty projects included in this book exhibit a vast range of cosmopolitan thinking: from the most naïve to the most sophisticated, from the most politically motivated to the least and from the optimistic to the grim. They also show that the notion of autonomy is a persistent leitmotif among the selected projects—a fact that interestingly counters the common doxa that tends to associate tightly ideas of planetary totality with the imposition of totalizing systems, and which suggests the possibility of producing new worlds from interrelated, independent acts. 5

Prologue

While at first blush, our emphasis on addressing the planet exposes the biases of modernism, whether colonialist, ideological, or megalomaniacal, we also hope to show that the universalist aspirations of some of these projects (e.g., spatial interventions connecting distant regions) can be separated from the totalizing tendencies of others (e.g., the imposition of a single form of governance worldwide). Inevitably, by juxtaposing these ambitions we hope readers will discern vaster differences in attitude within the modernist project that would otherwise continue to remain unnoticed. At this scale, doctrines and canons acquire complexities that reveal nuances, internal contradictions, or simply additional layers, all of which need to be written back into the normative readings of architectural modernity. A Different Vision of Modernism To affirm the historical correspondence between architecture’s attention to the world scale and the rise of modernism may seem almost tautological. After all, the modern movement is also known as the international style, and it is promoted from the start as part of a broader process of economic and social transformation that requires unifying formal languages as well as construction technologies. Moreover, the development of architectural modernity entails the global spread of a series of techniques supporting the advent of urbanization; a fact that historians like Marino Folin and Manfredo Tafuri denounce, the latter famously describing the entire course of modern architecture as an attempt to solve the problems produced by the capitalistic reorganization of the world market.12 Our purpose in this book is to reach beyond these readings of modernity. Surely, the international style quickly settled into a shorthand for what a cosmopolitan aesthetics of architecture could be. Yet, modernity’s attention to the world scale was not limited to the definition of a single formal language to be implemented at the architectural scale. Modern architects were also trying to spatialize the cosmopolitan ideal ahead of its realization in politics. Correspondingly, this book focuses on plans for the whole earth, geopolitical proposals, analyses of continental processes, and interventions in them. Projects for cities or buildings are also included, but only if they are explicitly conceived as contributing to the definition of a world system.

12. Marino Folin, La Città del capitale: Per una fondazione materialistica dell’architettura (Bari: De Donato, 1976). Manfredo Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” in Architecture Theory since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998 [1969]), 32.

Architecture and the World Scale

13. While important architectural historians such as Kenneth Frampton have produced historical narratives that incorporate speculative architectures, there is still a marked tendency to treat the fictional as a subject in itself, detached from the realm of practice. Significant attempts of mediation appear in the scholarship of Pier Vittorio Aureli, Manuel Orazi, Martin Van Schaik, and Otakar Máčel. See Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007 [1980]). Pier Vittorio Aureli, “Archizoom, Superstudio and the Critique of Architectural Ideology,” in Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, ed. Peggy Deamer (New York: Routledge, 2014), 132–147. Pier Vittorio Aureli and Manuel Orazi, “The Solitude of the Project,” Log 7 (2006): 21–32. Martin Van Schaik and Otakar Máčel, eds., Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocations 1956–76 (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2005). 14. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978). Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005). Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 52.

To address the discipline’s engagement with the planetary requires departing from some well-settled analytical conventions about what architectural design is. Important among them is the privilege of the implementable over the speculative.13 The scalar ambition of these projects tends to impede actual realization. Often, they lack a direct impact. Acknowledging this fact, our work purposefully conflates utopian and dystopian propositions with feasible ones, futuristic speculations with analytical and realistic studies. The book strategically refuses to differentiate among these contrasting possibilities. It accepts that architecture can operate like other artistic practices that use documentary procedures, analysis, and fiction indistinctly to produce visions of social totalities. The projects included in this book that approach the realm of fiction are analyzed through that intellectual lens. In line with Ernst Cassirer and Suzanne Langer’s studies of the symbolic, or most explicitly, with Nelson Goodman’s pluralistic theorization of world-making, Fredric Jameson’s analysis of the utopian, and Lauren Berlant’s understanding of realism not as a genre, but as an effect produced by the possible continuity between proposition and world, we consider the projects for their capacity to represent the whole, and, through that representation, to suggest possible transformations of actual space.14 The book focuses on designed worlds, not just represented ones. Our preoccupation is with how design can address the world scale—by proposing projects or by contributing with design tools to theory and analysis—rather than presenting only how architects have textually theorized the planet. The book unfolds as a catalogue of fifty projects, each with an analytical text explaining the proposal, its context, and its relation to other projects. Two symmetrical questions structure those texts, namely: what does architecture do for the world? And, conversely, what does the world do for architecture? While the first question addresses how the planet could be otherwise, that is, how architecture suggests modes of organization and promotes specific spatial, aesthetic, political, and ideological conditions, it also ponders the particular modalities of knowledge architecture produces. In other words, our first question addresses how architects have sought to intervene at the world scale and to provide practical and theoretical knowledge about it to complement other disciplines like geography, political science, and ecology. Our second question focuses on the repercussions of this scale on the discipline of architecture. Enlarging the table of the architect to fit the planet requires developing the tools to tackle this scale. The book highlights such changes in architectural language, means of representation, and techniques of construction. 7

Prologue

What Does Architecture Do for the World? 1. To spatialize and visualize contrasting conceptions of the world. The fifty projects in The World as an Architectural Project develop numerous, often highly contrasting propositions about structuring the earth. Spatially, they range from the attempt to concentrate the whole of humanity in a dozen huge settlements, to the desire to entirely abolish cities and scatter the population across the countryside. Politically, they move from overtly imperialistic ambitions to counterhegemonic territorial visions. We have avoided making choices based on our personal views in order to better highlight the breadth of architectural thinking that these projects reveal. Their common denominator is the production of a vision of a possible whole. They spatialize and make visible various and varied ideological aspirations, and they anticipate their physical and material dimensions. In so doing, their first contribution is to open social and spatial positions to public scrutiny, turning them into visible, vulnerable objects of contestation and debate. These visualizations reveal the many occasions in which architecture has favored totalizing agendas. Yet, they also show how many other proposals entail a form of totality, but not a project of totalization. This oscillation, and the consequent possibility of differentiating between totality and totalization, constitutes a central motif of architectural inquiry running throughout our study; one which our question, “what does architecture do for the world?” would like to highlight above all, as it resonates with ongoing debates about the conditions of globalization and about the ways of conceiving alternatives to it. Since the early 1990s, philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Michel Serres, and Peter Sloterdijk and anthropologists such as Tim Ingold and Bruno Latour have criticized the assimilation of the planet to the notion of globe, arguing from different positions against the homogenizing tendencies of globalization.15 The reasons for such a critique have been carefully delineated in Sloterdijk’s Spheres, a philosophic history of globalization that presents the notion of globe as the conceptual precondition for thinking of the planet as an integrated, unitary totality. The globe and thus its planetary equivalent, the spherical earth, are a geometrically perfect, self-contained object, a seamless surface capable of encompassing everything, and perceived from outside as a 8

15. Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World, or, Globalization (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). Michel Serres, Atlas (Paris: Editions Julliard, 1994). Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres. Volume 2: Globes. Macrospherology (Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2014 [1999]). Tim Ingold, “Globes and Spheres: The Topology of Environmentalism,” in Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology, ed. Kay Milton (London: Routledge, 1993), 31–43. Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017).

Architecture and the World Scale

16. Sloterdijk, Spheres. Volume 2: Globes. Macrospherology, 134. 17. Bruno Latour and Christophe Leclercq, eds., Reset Modernity! (Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM Center for Art and Media, 2016). 18. Fred Evans, “Cosmopolitanism to Come: Derrida’s Response to Globalization,” in A Companion to Derrida, ed. Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 550–564. 19. Ernesto Laclau, “Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity,” October 61 (1992): 83–90.

closed unity. This form of conceptualizing the planet constitutes, in Sloterdijk’s idealistic vision of history, the fundamental tool for imposing upon the planet any totalizing, unitary views—significantly, those imposed by the capitalist and colonial project. Modernity is, in this view, the summit of the spherical project. In it, the consolidation of circuits of capital and transport definitively transforms the planet’s geography into its spherical reference: every location acquires the same valence once it becomes a mere point within a network. Geography becomes geometry. While this narration fails to notice that globalization simultaneously promotes homogeneity and exploits and increases geographical disparities, its argument is nonetheless important. Its corollary is that the contestation of contemporary globalization requires abandoning the spherical model of the planet that modernity culminated, and finding new ways of relating the world to its internal multiplicity. To overcome the idea of globe thus implies finding alternative models for thinking and creating a totality. This challenge remains open. Sloterdijk’s pessimistic conclusion is that after breaking with the globe the only possible totality is the planetary sum of immunized isolations, of individual monads protected from the outside.16 For Latour, the response to the contemporary social and ecological crises can only appear by reformulating or resetting modernity in a manner that ensures the existence of irreducible singularities, (re)positioned at last in particular locations.17 In Derrida’s and Nancy’s attempt to reconcile difference and universal commonality, the idea of globalization needs to be replaced with a project of mondialisation (world-forming), but the vision of such a totality must incessantly be propelled forward by our imagination, as the cosmopolitan project of a universal democracy always “to come.”18 By unfolding the many scenarios that architecture developed in order to address the world scale, The World as an Architectural Project seeks to disentangle the conception of globes from the imposition of the global, as well as to help to overcome reductionist dichotomies between circulation and location, between global totality and fragmentation, and, as Ernesto Laclau points out, between particularity and universality.19 Countering the many times in which the

discipline has entertained totalizing visions of the globe, architects have also imagined multiple ways to conceive of a common planet while acknowledging and fostering its internal singularities. Examples of this reconciliation abound: conceiving of territorial systems based on the free association of globally connected, autonomous collectives from the 1920s on; designing urban systems 9

Prologue

that reveal the structuring importance of physical geography in the aftermath of the two world wars; showing the potential of the vertical overlay of contrasting spatial and social logics during the 1950s and 1960s; recognizing that a just social system requires both subverting existing territorial and geopolitical hierarchies and imagining new possibilities of integration that run the gamut from the Soviet disurbanist discourse to the Metabolist designs for a maritime planet, to the South American projects of the 1960s, or to the attempt to globally balance the relation between urbanization and nature that dominates ecological thought. What is more, this corpus of modern projects and its continuation to the present shows how ideating world systems does not depend on conceiving of and implementing a single global spatial logic or on operating at vast transcontinental scales. The world can be addressed by means that range from designing a building typology to conceiving of new methods of cartographic projection, from defining wearable devices to developing urban models, from constructing ephemeral interventions to producing visual narratives. Through all these means, design is oriented toward the act of building but also, importantly, to intellectual production. In this sense, architecture’s engagement with the global does not simply seek to transform existing conditions, but also to know them. For the architectural criticism of modernity, one of the most problematic consequences of architecture’s participation in the generating and influencing of larger systems (be they political or environmental, or be they urban, territorial, or global) is the loss of architecture’s function as an instrument of knowledge.20 Architecture is often instrumentalized for fixing or organizing a specific aspect of the totalities rather than a way to understand and question them. Common among most of the projects in this book is an intended reaction to this loss and a parallel interest in using architecture as a cognitive tool, either by defining spatial devices or by using design to investigate, analyze, and understand world phenomena. From this point of view, The World as an Architectural Project expands that the second crucial contribution of architecture to the world is to add to its knowledge.

20. Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” 22.

Architecture and the World Scale

21. Hashim Sarkis with Roi Salgueiro Barrio and Gabriel Kozlowski, “The World in the Architectural Imaginary,” New Geographies 08 (2016): 176–194. Roi Salgueiro Barrio, “Micro, Partial, Parallel, (In)visible,” New Geographies 8 (2016): 194–203.

What Does Architecture Do for the World? 2. To help to know and question the existing conditions of the world. To that end, architecture has developed strategies to link spatial conditions and cognitive goals. Admittedly, categorizing these strategies risks reducing their diversity. Yet, many of the proposals studied in this book share key methods: microcosmic concentration, partiality, (in)visibility, and parallelism.21 Present from the very first entries of this collection, these four strategies are often deployed as the spatial equivalents of rhetoric and literary mechanisms aimed at facilitating the transition between part and whole. From Geddes’s Outlook Tower to Franco Purini’s Equal City, the microcosmic approach constructs buildings that allow their occupants to understand the whole world from a localized spot. Enclosed and dissociated from its immediate context, each microcosm acts like a monad: it creates in its interior a spatial analogy of the architect’s understanding of world order. Instead of using this analogical procedure, partial strategies treat architecture as if it were a synecdoche, a part that is capable of representing a larger whole. In this case, the approach is typological: partial strategies proceed by classifying the most relevant elements that constitute the world and, based on this classification, by defining prototypes or typologies that represent segments of the broader totality. The section of Soria y Mata’s Linear City or the typologies of Fuller’s 4D Tower represent this second strategy, as each of their elements acts as a piece of a planetary system it creates. Microcosms and partial strategies thus operate in contrasting manners. While each microcosm can diverge from the others, fostering pluralism and multiple manners of understanding the world, the use of partiality favors sameness and repetition. The strategy of making (in)visible extends from the well-established dialectic strategy of revelation and negation. In this third form, architecture seeks to bring to light specific aspects of the globe, for instance, as in Bruno Taut’s Alpine Architecture, by selecting key places that could help to structure a planetary system and by defining building and urban forms that highlight geographic factors. Yet, this act of revealing often requires a symmetrical operation: radically eliminating those elements which contradict that reading of the world structure in order to emphasize the preserved aspects. The problematic rela11

La Ciudad Lineal The Linear City Project: 1. Author: Arturo Soria y Mata (1844—1920). Date: 1882—1913. Themes: Circulation. Linearity. Typology. World Urbanization.

Figure 0. Transverse section and plan of the first neighborhoods of the Linear City. After Arturo Soria y Mata. ca. 1894.

Arturo Soria y Mata

1. Arturo Soria y Mata, “La Ciudad Lineal” [04/10/1882], in Arturo Soria y La Ciudad Lineal, ed. George Roseborough Collins and Carlos Flores (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1968), 171–173. 2. Arturo Soria y Mata, La Cité linéaire: Conception nouvelle pour l’aménagement des villes (Paris: Centre d’Études et de Recherches Architecturales, 1979), 16. 3. The terms Cerdà coins in Spanish are: “urbe” and “urbanización.” Cerdà, who is very interested in etymology, devotes part of his book to justifying the necessity of creating a new term to address settlements, and his reasons for selecting the word “urbe.” In particular, he establishes a clear contrast between the Latin notions of civitas and urbs, and explains his predilection for the second based on the necessity of finding an encompassing term that can refer to every possible type of settlements: “While we understand that there must be a logical reason behind the proper name of every urbs, we have no objection to confessing our inability to understand this reason, to analyze it and to express it.” See Ildefons Cerdà, Vicente Guallart, Angela Kay Bunning, Anne Ludlow, Graham Thomson, Institut d’Arquitectura Avançada de Catalunya, General Theory of Urbanization, 1867 (Barcelona: Actar Publishers, 2018), 65–71 and 443–494. 4. We take these observations from George R. Collins, “Introducción,” in Collins and Flores, Arturo Soria y La Ciudad Lineal, 29. 5. As noted, Cerdà is extremely careful about terminology. The word he uses to refer to the planet, or the “worldwide,” was in Spanish “orbe,” which stems directly from the Latin orbis. Compared with the other Latin words that designate the planet (tellum, terra) that have informed Spanish language, “orbe” is the one that most directly reflects the spherical condition of the planet, and thus, the possibility of circumscribing the earth. It is also, a word extremely close to “urbe.”

“Ruralize the city . . . urbanize the countryside. Fill the earth! (Replete terram!)”1 Arturo Soria y Mata choses this motto to promote his “theory of the Linear City.”2 The phrase comes from Ildefons Cerdà’s General Theory of Urbanization (1867), the text that coins the terms “urban” and “urbanization.”3 Cerdà’s biblical reference (“replete terram” is the expression the god of the Old Testament uses to exhort Adam, and later Noah, to populate Earth) already expresses the universalist aspirations of the very first theorization of urbanization.4 After

carrying out a survey of models of cities across the world, Cerdà not only establishes a series of standards for city design, he also advances the main conceptual traits that should characterize the urban: association of urban expansion to infrastructural networks of transport, diminution of the differences between city and countryside, and potential “worldwide” dimension.5 Cerdà gives to the notion of urbanization an ideological content and a scale that predates the actual urbanization of the planet during the twentieth century, but it is Soria y Mata who gives these ideological notions their first spatial formalization by conceiving of a system of linear cities that can cover the whole “surface of the earth.”6

The transition from Cerdà to Soria y Mata shows how, in just fifteen years, the theorization of urbanization as a force capable of transforming the planet progresses into formal strategies that can make effective that territorial dimension. Cerdà, an engineer immersed in Saint-Simonian positivism and technological optimism, considers that the new means of mechanical transport, such as steam railways and ships, will foster the social and economic development of rural areas and produce a new scale of territorial relations.7 Cerdà’s theory translates this belief in the transformative power of communications to a spatial ideology structured around the notion of “circulation” in which cities cease to be thought of as distinct communal and political structures of collective living in a particular place, in order to become part of the generic spatial substance of a system of interchanges.8 By replacing the notion of “city” by the term “urban,” Cerdà aims to offer a new signifier for the spatial condition that will emerge out of the territorial encounter between circulation and settlement. Such a conceptual operation is not, though, entirely explored in design terms. Cerdà’s planning proposals are still centered on the spatial characteristics of the city, and his intention to define schemas for territorial urbanization around water canals and lines of transport remains incomplete at the moment of his death in 1876.9 Soria y Mata, instead, strictly addresses the territorial implications of urban21

The Outlook Tower Project: 2. Author: Patrick Geddes (1854—1932). Date: 1892—1906. Themes: Geo-visualization. Geography. Taxonomy. Place(lessness).

Figure 0. Sketch of the Outlook Tower showing the vision of the world facilitated by the Episcope. After Patrick Geddes. ca. 1890.

Patrick Geddes

1. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 27. 2. “A View of Edinburgh. An Advertisement for Robert Barker’s Panorama Exhibited at Leicester Square.” National Galleries of Scotland. Accessed February 21, 2019. https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/63244/ view-edinburgh-advertisement-robert-barkers-panorama-exhibited-leicester-square. 3. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 183–190.

The camera obscura and the panorama are two visual technologies that represent contrasting epistemological models. In a camera obscura light passes through a small hole into an enclosed and dark interior, projecting on the wall opposite the hole a mirror image of the outside world. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this form of projection constituted, as the art critic Jonathan Crary has analyzed, “the most widely used model for explaining human vision, and for representing the relation of a perceiver and the position of a knowing subject to an external world.”1 On one hand, the camera obscura seems to replicate the mechanism of retinal vision and thus to demonstrate that the images humans perceive truthfully match reality. On the other, the camera’s closed room represents the schism between the interior self and the exterior world, which dominated European ontology at the time. In short, the camera obscura was thought of as a visual device that showed both how individuals perceive and where they stand in relation to the world. A panorama offers a very different model of vision and cognition. Instead of symbolizing the subject’s perception of a particular scene, panoramas represent the collective apprehension of a totality. Used for the first time in Robert Barker’s A View of Edinburgh (1788), panoramas are a drawing technique that allows painters to depict a 360-degree view of an area. The neologism panorama— which Barker coined by joining the Greek words pan (all) and horama (view)— reflects his intention to offer a “comprehensive view” by pictorial means.2 An extremely popular attraction during the nineteenth century, precisely when the use of camerae obscurae starts to decline, panoramas represent a totality from a particular spot. As theorized by the French thinker Bruno Latour, panoramas constitute a metaphor for any comprehensive form of knowledge, and, specifically, for the totalizing philosophical systems that accompany the consolidation of modernity during the nineteenth century.3 These two opposing visual devices are central to Patrick Geddes’s transformation of Short’s Observatory in Edinburgh into the Outlook Tower. Geddes acquires the observatory in 1892, fascinated by two of its features: the building was centrally located in the Old Town promontory, and its terrace housed a cylindrical chamber where a camera obscura projected, on top of a circular table, a full panorama of Edinburgh’s surroundings. Both conditions eloquently bring together two central theses of Geddes’s urban thinking: respectively, the value of city centers as symbolic spaces that condense the meaning of their 31

Un Globe Terrestre à l’Échelle du 100.000e Terrestrial Globe at the Scale 1:100,000 Project: 3. Authors: Élisée Reclus (1830—1905) and Louis Bonnier (1856—1946). Date: 1895—1898. Themes: Aerial Vision. Geo-visualization. Geography. World Urbanization.

Enveloppe au 80,000". Surface vitrée... ... ... ... Attaches du vitrage aux fers ... Fers méridiens ... ... ... Fers sulvant les grands cercles verticaux Cointure helicordale externe... ... interne... ... ‘’ ‘’ Poutres principales meridiénnes ... Contrefiches, tirants, contreventements Poutres des triangles de support ... Fers a planchers ... ... ... Gonssets et sabots ... ... ... Gouttieres, escaliers, ascenseure ... Plachers, menuiserie... ... ... Imprevu ... ... ... ... Total ... ... ... ... Globe au 100,000''' Relief en platre, attaches ... ... Pers méridiens et ceinture helicoidale Poutres principales méridiennes ... Contrefiches, tirants, contreventements Fers a planchers ... ... ... Goussets et sabots ... ... ... Poutres droites du support ... ... Installation mecanique ascenseurs... Armature de la sphere céleste ... Planchers, menniserie, etc ... ... Total

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

12,000,000 k. 6,000,000 18,000 tonnes. 300,000 k 1,350,000 1,000,000 650,000 200,000 800,000 480,000 720,000 700,000

2,000,000 k

800,000

6,200,000 k 2,800,000 k 9,000 tonnes.

...

Prix approximatif. Fondations ... ... ... Maconneries ... ... ... Construction métallique ... Planchers, menuiscrie, etc. ...

... ... ... ...

Globe Enveloppe 500,000 fr. 100,000 fr. ... 2,000,000 ... 8,400,000 ... 4,500000 600,000 ... 200,000

...

Fers et toles. Autres matériaux 2,400,000 k. 960,000 800,000 800,000 850,000 620,000 2,100,000 1,200,000 840,000 2,120,000 910,000 800,000 2,600,000 1,000,000

...

Total

...

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

...

5,200,000 12,000,000 17,200,000 francs.

Figure 0. Estimated cost of the Terrestrial Globe at the Scale of 1:100,000. After Élisée Reclus. 1895.

Élisée Reclus

1. Élisée Reclus, “Projet de construction d’un globe terrestre à l’échelle du 100.000e,” in Report of the Sixth International Geographical Congress, ed. The secretaries (London: John Murray, 1896), 625.

In 1895, at the Sixth International Geographical Congress, the French geog-

2. Marie-Claire Robic, “Élisée Reclus Visited and Revisited” (paper presented at the Axel Baudoin Homage, Trondheim, Norway, 2006), 8; and Jean-Marc Besse, Face au monde. Atlas, jardins, géorama (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2003).

Universal Geography (1876–1894). After finishing this encyclopedic work, Re-

3. Reclus, “Projet de construction d’un globe terrestre à l’échelle du 100.000e,” 626. Our translation. 4. Reclus, “Projet de construction d’un globe terrestre à l’échelle du 100.000e,” 629. 5. Gary S. Dunbar, “Élisée Reclus and the Great Globe,” Scottish Geographical Magazine 9, no. 1 (1974): 63. 6. Dunbar, “Élisée Reclus and the Great Globe,” 59. 7. Soizic Alavoine-Muller, “Un Globe terrestre pour l’exposition universelle de 1900. L’utopie géographique d’Élisée Reclus,” L’Espace Géographique 32, no. 2 (2003): 165.

rapher Élisée Reclus presents an ambitious proposal to construct a terrestrial

globe at the scale of 1:100,000. The globe would be the culmination of Reclus’s

geographical work: the conclusion of his pioneering, nineteen-volume New clus is convinced that texts, and even more critically, maps, are only imperfect, partial approximations to understanding the earth.1 For the universalist ideol-

ogy of Reclus, an anarchist-socialist, only a physical globe can visually render the unity of the planet.2 Yet, not every globe: “A representation of the terrestrial

sphere that is worth its name cannot be a simple piece of furniture, but a work

of such importance that it becomes a building of its own, of vast dimensions, easily accessible, and permanently at the disposal for the research of scholars.”3

His extremely detailed proposal is thus for a magnificent building, measuring

127.5 meters in diameter and 400 meters of equatorial circumference [fig. 0]. This huge object should be more than 30 meters aboveground and placed on a promontory, thus standing above the trees and buildings of the city because

it is “indispensable” to see it entirely from afar.4 In Reclus’s more ambitious

speculations, such a piece would be built in every major city.5

Reclus works intensely on the idea between 1895 and 1898, with the goal of

building this globe in the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition. For a time, he develops the design with architect Paul Louis Albert Galeron. It is the architect

who initially contacts the geographer.6 Galeron had proposed to the Universal

Exhibition Commission an idea that he considered close to Reclus’s project

and that he had named Cosmorama: a globe whose internal surface would

deploy the celestial sphere [fig. 1]. The collaboration to develop this project,

though, does not succeed. What Reclus conceives of as a scientific, educational, and political endeavor is for Galeron simply a visual spectacle.7 Galeron thus

finishes the project on his own—and later designs a reduced version in the proposed Hollow Terrestrial Sphere for Patrick Geddes’s Outlook Tower [project

2]. Reclus, in turn, contacts architect Louis Bonnier to design a much smaller piece at a scale of 1:500,000 [figs. 2, 3, and 4]. Although the geographer and

the architect define the building with constructive precision, they abandon the idea in 1898 for lack of funding. 41

Alpine Architektur Alpine Architecture Project: 4. Author: Bruno Taut (1880—1938). Date: 1917—1919. Themes: Decentralization. Geography. Geopolitics. Human-Earth System.

Figure 0. Part 4: Earth’s Crust Building. After Bruno Taut. 1917.

Bruno Taut

1. Bruno Taut, “Appeal to the Europeans,” in Bruno Taut: Alpine Architektur: Eine Utopie—A Utopia, by Matthias Schirren and Bruno Taut (Munich: Prestel, 2004), 72. 2. Bruno Taut worked on the notion of city crown also in 1919; see Bruno Taut, Paul Scheerbart, Erich Baron, and Adolf Behne, Die Stadtkrone (Jena: E. Diedrichs, 1919). However, in Alpine Architecture, Taut states that the notion, if understood as dealing only with the city scale, is insufficient: “Yesterday morning it became entirely clear to me: the city crown is obsolete, building beautiful cities and crowning them does not take people much farther—you have to show them the great lonely heights and yoke them to tasks so gigantic that everything is subordinated to these tasks alone. Beauty first and foremost. . . . Just imagine, we— our children—will surely use the aeroplane as a matter of course, as we today use trains or cabs. And then, below them, the radiant, continually growing splendor! . . . If people can then create this greatness, which has begun in rudiments in India, China, Egypt, then their works will appear like a piece of nature which will later speak as profoundly as a tree in the forest.” Bruno Taut, “Letter to Wife,” in Schirren and Taut, Bruno Taut: Alpine Architecture, 120. On the notion of city crown see Iain Boyd Whyte, “The Expressionist Utopia,” Mac Journal 4 (1999): 81. 3. On the notion of Weltbauen— world-building or world-making— see Antonio Petrov, “Rescaling Transnational Geographies,” MONU 22 “Transnational Urbanism” (Spring 2015): 16–17; Iñaki Ábalos, Atlas Pintoresco, vol. 2: Los Viajes (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2008), 150–174; and Rosemarie Haag, “Global Earthworks,” Art Journal 42, no. 3 (1982): 222–225.

Bruno Taut responds to the unprecedented atrocities of World War I with the pacifist and internationalist utopia of Alpine Architecture. In the project, conceived in 1917, when Europe was at the peak of the conflict, Taut turns away from destruction and calls on Europeans to construct a peaceful common environment: “NATIONS OF EUROPE / SHAPE YOUR SACRED ASSETS! – BUILD! / BE A THOUGHT OF YOUR PLANET, EARTH / WHICH WISHES TO ADORN ITSELF – THROUGH YOU!”1 For Taut, to build is the path to peace: a huge collective enterprise that represents the common goal of the European population. Their cooperative work would create a symbolic center for Europe—a city crown for the totality of the continent—by placing monumental buildings in isolated locations of the Alps.2 The primary decision of the project is, thus, geographical. The design intervenes in the space that marks the geographical divisions of Europe—between the northern and Mediterranean countries, between east and west—and that contains the continent’s most elevated peaks. The physical attributes of centrality and elevation become symbolic and political ones. The Alps, the geographical link among the powers that constitute the Triple Alliance during the war, are transformed into a symbol of the continent’s union. Alpine Architecture is a project in the form of a book. The designs for the Alps that occupy the central portion of the volume are but a sample of the book’s broader terrestrial project. As per the title of one of Taut’s later publications, Die Weltbauermeister (The world-builder, 1919–1920), the task of the architect is that of world-building or world-making.3 The fourth section of Alpine

Architecture, “The Earth-Crust Building,” explicitly illustrates this ambition. Graphically summarized through a small diagram of the globe, this section extends the Alps projects to other locations around the world [fig. 0]. Taut’s designs cover the Atlas Mountains and the Caucasus; the area between the Himalayas and Kamchatka; Southeast Asia; and the entire western coast of the American continent. The total figure that these conglomerations create can only be perceived from the air [fig. 1]. The image of civilization and the image of Earth coincide. Glittering in the night, Taut’s structures celebrate a united world and present it to the universe. Seen globally, they herald the fantasy of a world operating in unison. The two images of the globe that represent the scope of Taut’s planetary project—“Earth: Asiatic Side” and “Earth: American Side”—significantly displace

АЭРО Город Aero-Cities Project: 5. Author: Lazar Khidekel (1904—1986). Date: 1925—1930. Themes: Autonomy. Geography. Infrastructure. Parallelism.

Figure 0. Futuristic City. After Lazar Khidekel. 1929.

Lazar Khidekel

1. Allan Rosenfeld, “Between Suprematist Utopia and Stalinist Reality,” in Lazar Khidekel & Suprematism, ed. Regina Khidekel and Tatiana V. Goriacheva (New York: Prestel, 2014), 37. 2. Lazar Khidekel quoted in Tatiana V. Goriacheva, “‘Research in the plane of the Suprematist Field’: Lazar Khidekel’s Suprematism,” in Khidekel and Goriacheva, Lazar Khidekel & Suprematism, 18

Between 1925 and 1930 Russian architect Lazar Khidekel draws several views of cities elevated above Earth’s surface, to which he collectively refers as aero-cities. The drawings show an interconnected system of overlaid horizontal bars, which are supported in a few points by enormous prismatic columns. The distances between columns are irregular and vast. Although the drawings lack scale, the supports seem to span between dozens and hundreds of meters. As a result, a strong sense of horizontality prevails in the designs. The buildings suggest a form of life that takes place in constructed horizontal layers that are parallel to Earth: an entirely new aerial space that necessitates only occasional contact with the ground, and whose form of spatial organization is completely independent of the terrain’s morphological conditions [fig. 0]. The drawings emphasize the independence of the natural and urban systems. The aero-cities always follow a strict orthogonal system, which allows the bars to extend along different perpendicular directions while, below them, the landscape remains unaltered. This separation is a tool to exacerbate the value of nature and the beauty of Earth. The drawings situate the aero-cities in locations where several natural systems are simultaneously present: waterways, hills, forests, the sky. The role of the buildings is to mediate among these different elements. The bars span from the ground to the water, or they ascend from the top of the trees toward the sky [fig. 1]. In fact, Khidekel’s descriptions of the cities unfold a sort of protoecological argument. Not only does he justify elevating the aero-cities as a way to break the correlation between the construction of cities and the destruction of nature—since, by raising the cities from the ground, they can be placed in the landscape while preserving nature’s original state—but the cities support a holistic project of reconfiguration of the “figural-chaotic world,” which reorients industrial civilization toward a new system where machines and nature should mutually reinforce each other to generate a new form of life:1 “Construction should not only denote the machine, but also water and wind, living motion, in order to apprehend and explain the opposition and hidden forces of nonmechanical nature, which are forced to operate in a united collective summarizing the figural sensations of the vital dynamic. . . . The construction of future creativity leads to the convergence of all creative spheres of the new life, to the path of economy and a vital dynamic. This should master the whole spatial figural-chaotic world, leading to the unification of life-creating construction.”2 61

Airocean World Town Plan — 4D Tower Project: 6. Author: Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895—1983). Date: 1927—1932. Themes: Environmental Control. Immateriality. Remoteness. Telecommunications.

Figure 0. The Airocean World Town Plan. After Richard Buckminster Fuller. 1927.

Richard Buckminster Fuller

1. K. Michael Hays, “Fuller’s Geological Engagements with Architecture,” in Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, ed. K. Michael Hays and Dana A. Miller (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2008), 2. 2. R. Buckminster Fuller, “We Call It Earth,” in Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1938), 60. 3. See Shelter 2, no. 5 (November 1932): n.p. The magazine also includes articles about “Pan-Continental Service Systems,” and other type of “scientific” shelters based on the use of tensile structures. 4. Stanford Libraries, “R. Buckminster Fuller Timeline,” https://library.stanford.edu/spc/ manuscripts-division/r-buckminster-fuller-timeline. Accessed February 5, 2019.

Although Buckminster Fuller was a pluralistic inventor, who designed from

rowing sculls to whole new structural systems and held patents for twenty-four

of his creations, few concepts were enough for him to summarize his ideas. A reductionist by nature, Fuller always broke down complex systems to their fundamental constituents, seeking answers that represented pure syntheses— whether the single central mast solution for housing, the pure-compression/

pure-tension of the elements in tensegrity structures, Earth as a spaceship, or the rules of nature and thought responding to the principle of synergy. Expanding progressively, what started as a few ideas under the name Lightful

evolved into a handful of explorations under 4D [fig. 0]. From 4D, the few components turned into a plethora of mature, executable inventions like hous-

es or vehicles under Dymaxion, and from there the whole universe would be encompassed into Synergies.1

Initially named Lightful Tower, the 4D Tower is Fuller’s answer to the problem

of mass housing and to the processes of “world integration” he perceived [fig. 1].2 Following his characteristic method of reasoning, the Tower is far from being a finite object in itself; it is, rather, an open system designed to respond

to the growing challenges of an interconnected world. Fuller disseminates the

project through Shelter, the journal of architecture he starts editing in 1930 in order to investigate how architectural design can be informed by scientific inquiry and technical innovation.3 Coherently with the journal’s agenda, even

if the Tower’s purpose is to shelter, it is hardly possible to conceptualize the project as a traditional house. The design can be better understood by analogy

with contemporaneous machines and technologies. Instead of being fixed to the ground, the Tower is mobile, like a ship; instead of being heavy and rigid like masonry, it is light and flexible, like steel cables; instead of replicating

traditional concepts of ownership and property, it is leased and replaced, like a

telephone; instead of being uniquely crafted, it is industrially mass-produced; and instead of being assembled on site, it is delivered complete and fixed in place by a Zeppelin [figs. 2 and 3].

The 4D Tower is one of Fuller’s designs for the company 4D, which he founds in 1927 to develop new, light systems of architectural and technical construc-

tion.4 The intellectual basis of the project derives from his design of the 4D

Dymaxion House (1927–1931) and from the 1927 article “Universal Require-

ments of a Dwelling Advantage,” where Fuller establishes the “Checklist of 71

Atlantropa Project: 7. Author: Herman Sörgel (1885—1952). Date: 1927—1952. Themes: Colonialism. Environmental Control. Geopolitics. Infrastructure.

merika lantropa sien

HERMAN SÖRGEL A

Figure 0. The Three Big A’s. After Herman Sörgel. 1938.

Herman Sörgel

1. Peter Christensen, “Dam Nation: Imaging and Imagining the ‘Middle East’ in Herman Sörgel’s Atlantropa,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 1, no. 2 (2012): 327. 2. Antonio Petrov, “Rescaling Transnational Geographies,” Monu: Magazine on Urbanism 22 (2015): 21. Philipp Nicolas Lehmann, “Infinite Power to Change the World: Hydroelectricity and Engineered Climate Change in the Atlantropa Project,” American Historical Review 121, no. 1 (February 2016): 77. 3. Petrov, “Rescaling Transnational Geographies,” 73. 4. Christensen, “Dam Nation,” 328. 5. Herman Sörgel, Atlantropa: Wesenszüge eines Projekts (Künzelsau: Seemann, 1949).

Herman Sörgel studies architecture in the Technische Universität München during the early 1900s. The school’s strong emphasis on civil engineering and Sörgel’s personal interest in geography are particularly aligned with the expansionist moment of the German Empire at the time. The Empire’s twenty-six constituent territories are going through a massive urbanization process, doubling their population in the thirty years around the turn of the century and achieving the status of the largest European economy. Geographers such as Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), the director of the Geographic Institute at the Universität Leipzig, are crucial for building German identity and the country’s geopolitical agenda.1 Ratzel, in fact, coins the notions of Geopolitik and Lebensraum that naturalized German colonialism. Sörgel initially conceives Atlantropa as Panropa in 1927. The project’s roots go back to 1923 with the foundation of the Pan-European Union and to 1925 when Sörgel visits the Pan American Union Building in Washington, DC, where he is fascinated by the potential for international cooperation.2 The project’s origins also coincide with multiple, large-scale, infrastructural initiatives. The interwar years see a series of proposals for the construction of European power grids aimed at optimizing energy distribution and at facilitating the continent’s political integration. In the United States, the New Deal’s hydroengineering projects for the Hoover Dam, the Grand Coulee Dam, and the Tennessee Valley Authority interventions mark the 1930s.3 Germany, in turn, promotes the Bagdadbahn: the Berlin–Baghdad Railway (1903–1940). This ambitious 1,600-kilometer connection is designed to provide the country with a direct link to the port of Basra, access to the Mesopotamian oil fields, and the possibility of avoiding the Suez Canal, which is controlled by the British.4 Atlantropa is Sörgel’s grand vision for this technocratic period of vast infrastructural undertakings [figs. 0 and 1]. The project proposes merging the European and African continents into one superpower block. The union between the two forms a continuous landmass, structured through a reconfigured Mediterranean Sea around which flows of capital, products, and people revolve. Physically and functionally integrated, the “new continent” would enable Europe to explore the raw natural resources of Africa and the Middle East, while offering technology and finished goods in return.5 To establish this transcontinental connection, the Mediterranean Sea becomes the focus of Atlantropa’s main interventions. It is the geographic center where 81

Le Mundaneum — La Cité Mondiale The Mundaneum — The World City Project: 8. Authors: Le Corbusier (1887—1965) and Paul Otlet (1868—1944). Date: 1928—1929. Themes: Aerial Vision. Geography. Monumentality. Taxonomy.

ASSOCIATIONS INTERN.

MUSÉE MONDIAL ARIANA

S.D.D. ACTUELLE

BIBLIOTHÈQUE MONDIALE UNIVERSITÉ STADE SECRETARIAT S.D.N. SALLE DES ASSEMBLÉES S.D.N. BIBLIOTÈQUE S.D.N. ESPLANADES DU PALAIS SUR VOIE FERÉE B.I.T.

Figure 0. Elevation of the World-City. After Le Corbusier. ca. 1929.

Le Corbusier and Paul Otlet

1. Paul Otlet, quoted in Willy Boesiger and Oscar Stonorov, Le Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret: oeuvre complète 1910–1929 (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1995 [1929]), 190. Our translation. 2. Wouter Van Acker, “Internationalist Utopias of Visual Education: The Graphic and Scenographic Transformation of the Universal Encyclopaedia in the Work of Paul Otlet, Patrick Geddes, and Otto Neurath,” Perspectives on Science 19, no. 1 (2011): 33. 3. William Whyte, Ghent Planning Congress 1913: Premier congrès international et exposition comparée des villes (Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 2013), vi. 4. The institution was, it must be noted, a derivative of the Université Nouvelle that had been created as a result of Élisée Reclus’s expulsion from the Université Libre of Brussels.

“Mundaneum: an intellectual Center of union, relation, cooperation, coordination; a representation of the World and what it contains; mirror and survey; a synthetic expression of universal life and a comparator of civilizations; a symbol of the Intellectual Unity of the World and of Humanity: an image of the Community of Nations; the Headquarters of International Associations; a free forum for the discussion and orientation of major interests common to all countries; a way to make People know one another and to get them to collaborate; an assistant to international Administration; an emporium of the works of the spirit; an instrument of documentation, information and studies for the Workers; the Center of a network of local, regional, national, international, connected stations for the intellectual work and the development of world relations. The desire is: that at one point of the Globe, the total image and meaning of the World can be perceived and understood . . .”1 Le Corbusier uses these words of Belgian thinker Paul Otlet, promoter of the Mundaneum, to introduce the project in his Complete Works. Otlet considers the Mundaneum the apex of his lifelong commitment to universalism. His initiatives in that respect are unceasing. In 1893, he founds, with lawyer Henri La Fontaine, the Office International de Bibliographie et d’Informations Sociologiques, and works with him until 1904 on a global standard of bibliographic classification. In 1907, the couple constitutes the Office International des Associations Internationales, which becomes the Union of International Associations in 1910.2 In 1913, Otlet, politician Emile Vinck (1870–1950), and architect

Paul Saintenoy (1862–1952) organize the very first international conference on town planning, the Premier Congrès International de l’Art de Construire Villes et Organisation de la Vie Municipale—in which Arturo Soria y Mata and Otlet’s friend Patrick Geddes participate [projects 1 and 2]. As a result of the congress, they create the first international association for the analysis of urban questions, the Union Internationale des Villes.3 World War I does not diminish Otlet’s belief in international cooperation. In 1919, he starts lecturing on the topic “L’Universalisme, doctrine philosophique et économie mondiale” at the Institut des Hautes Études de Bruxelles.4 In 1925, he starts working on the Mundaneum. The Mundaneum stems from Otlet’s dissatisfaction with how governments attempt to reconstruct international relations after World War I. In 1919 he at91

Проект Клуба Нового Социального Типа Club of a New Social Type Project: 9. Author: Ivan Leonidov (1902—1959). Date: 1928—1929. Themes: Autonomy. Place(lessness). Telecommunications. Typology.

РЛАН 2 ЗТАЩА

ВАРИАНТ Б. ФАСАА

Figure 0. Second-floor plan and façade of Club of a New Social Type: Variant B. After Leonidov. 1928.

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Ivan Leonidov

1. About telecommunications see Richard Anderson, “A Screen That Receives Images by Radio,” AA Files 67 (2013): 3–15, and Anatole Kopp, Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning, 1917–1935 (New York: G. Braziller, 1970), 200. 2. Kopp, Town and Revolution, 189. 3. Richard Anderson, “Montage and the Mediation of Constructivist Architecture,” in Before Publication: Montage in Art, Architecture, and Book Design, ed. Nanni Baltzer, Martino Stierli, and Richard Anderson (Zurich: Park Books, 2016), 37. 4. El Lissitzky, Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), 43–45. 5. Vieri Quilici, “Introduction,” in Ivan Leonidov (New York: Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, 1981), 6.

Among the work of his Russian contemporaries, Ivan Leonidov’s projects stand out for addressing the world scale only through a strict attention to the architectural object and to the spatial relations between objects. For him, the articulation of a world spatial system and of a universal society fundamentally requires developing a new architectural vocabulary and a new spatial syntax. His is a poetics of microcosms, characterized by an extreme tension between encapsulated objects and their planetary referent. Counterintuitively, the autonomy, and even the isolation of the architectural piece, are his tools to initiate a universal spatial system. In it, sparse architectural units are the cells of a world society interconnected through aerial transport and telecommunications. That is, through means that are then emerging or which—as television—are still unavailable.1 Leonidov pursues this research through a succession of projects designed at the very beginning of his career. The Lenin Institute (1927), the Club of a New Social Type (1928–1929), the Columbus Memorial (1929), and the Palace of Culture (1930) constitute a family of designs sharing the same conceptual intentions.2 In them, Leonidov tests a unique set of formal procedures in different programs and contexts in order to show its universal applicability. The typological ambition of the projects reinforces his repetition of formal strategies. All of the projects aim to be models that can be replicated anywhere or extended infinitely.3 The design procedures used in the Club of a New Social Type are, thus, common to the other projects. The club’s singularity is not formal, but programmatic and strategic. With it Leonidov reveals how a crucial typology for the construction of communist society can serve to organize the world scale. After the October Revolution, workers’ clubs are considered key elements for articulating the new Soviet state.4 Ideally, they should exist in every city in order to facilitate the social life of workers, to visualize their collective identity, and to encourage the emergence of a collective class consciousness.5 Leonidov’s prototype—presented with great polemic at the first Congress of the Organization of Contemporary Architects (OSA), the group of constructivist architects to which Leonidov belongs—shares these political ambitions while it rejects the formal, programmatic, and urban conventions that characterized the clubs so far. After supporting his critique with images of aerial transport, scientific work, and space exploration, Leonidov shows a design that completely contradicts existing club typologies. Instead of a single building, Leonidov 101

Дезурбанизма Disurbanism Project: 10. Authors: Mikhail Okhitovich (1896—1937) and Moisei Ginzburg (1892—1946). Date: 1929—1930. Themes: Autonomy. Decentralization. Nomadism. Telecommunications.

AССЕЛЕНКН

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AССЕЛЕНКН

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AССЕЛЕНКН

ГОСПЛАНА РСФСР

AССЕЛЕНКН

ГОСПЛАНА РСФСР

Figure 0. Section for socialist settlement according to the USSR state plan. 1920. Settlement scheme 1: Disurbanize Settlement scheme 2: Decentralize Settlement scheme 3: Acentric Settlement scheme 4: Dispersive 110

Mikhail Okhitovich and Moisei Ginzburg

1. Hugh D. Hudson, Jr., Blueprints and Blood: The Stalinization of Soviet Architecture, 1917–1937 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 62. 2. Through the work of constructivist architects, Okhitovich’s theories inform the discussions of the Socialist Settlement Section of Gosplan (the State Planning Commission). Disurbanist work is also supported by the State Institute for the Planning of Cities (Gigopror). See S. O. KhanMagomedov, Pioneers of Soviet Architecture: The Search for New Solutions in the 1920s and 1930s (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 335; S. O. Khan-Magomedov, Mikhail Okhitovich (Moscow: Russkii Avangard, 2009), 103–125; S. Frederick Starr, “Visionary Town Planning during the Cultural Revolution,” in Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978): 224. 3. Mikhail Okhitovich, “On the Problem of the City,” Sovremennaia Arkhitektura (SA) 4 (1929): 130–134; and “Notes on the Theory of Resettlement,” Sovremennaia Arkhitektura (SA) 1–2 (1930): 7–13. A whole transcript of the first article appears also in Khan-Magomedov, Mikhail Okhitovich, 46–70. There is a partial English translation in Catherine Cooke, Russian Avant-garde: Theories of Art, Architecture and the City (London: Academy Editions, 1995), 199. The second article is partially translated in Anatole Kopp, Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning 1917–1935 (New York: George Braziller, 1970), 248–250, under the title “Editorial Favoring Urbanization.” For Okhitovich’s critique of the city, see the Russian urbanist’s quote in Hudson, Blueprints and Blood, 64: “The city must perish in the ruins of the capitalist mode of production, for the city was a requirement of trade-capitalist society. When these requirements vanish, so will the city, their product. The city is the form, the condition, of the social relations of capitalist society.”

With the implementation of the first Five Year Plan, the authorities of the USSR aim to leave behind the long decade of turmoil that follows the October Revolution. The plan sets the foundation for the consolidation of socialism by determining the objectives of mass collectivization and State-led economic development that are to be accomplished in the period 1928–1932. Crucial among these objectives is the transformation of the USSR into an urban country. The document establishes goals for the construction of towns at a scale hitherto unimaginable: two hundred new industrial towns and around one thousand agricultural towns have to be built during the validity of the plan.1 The theories and projects of disurbanism emerge in this context of deep transformation. They constitute an influential contribution to the efforts of urbanization and State-building, but also a harsh critique of their rationale.2 Disurbanism negates the division of agricultural and industrial cities prescribed in the Plan. It provides, instead, a territorial and political model aimed at entirely abolishing the dichotomy between city and countryside through a process of progressive decentralization, which, oblivious to national boundaries, was to transform the whole Earth. The main theoretician of disurbanism is a sociologist turned urbanist: Mikhail Okhitovich. In a series of papers published between 1929 and 1930 in Sovremennaia Arkhitektura (SA), the journal of the constructivist collective OSA (Organization of Contemporary Architects), Okhitovich argues that socialism has to supersede the notion of city as a spatially bounded, discrete unit, itself an instrumental concept of the capitalist mode of production.3 Under

socialism, instead, cities have to be understood as “a specific socially, not territorially, determined human entity”; that is, as a conglomerate of relations unconstrained by any particular spatial form.4 The main facilitators of this change are emerging forms of transportation, energy production, and communication, which socialism can utilize to foster a process of dispersal based on the “principles of maximum freedom, ease and speed of communication.”5 This dispersal, termed “disurbanism,” has to be conceived of with the same scalar ambitions as the planning of industrial conglomerates operating at the world scale.6 Okhitovich’s description of the resulting world system as the “Red City of the planet of communism” is only a deliberate, symbolic concession to the old, spatial terminology. Disurbanism would not produce a city, but a “single organizational complex” for the “resettlement of mankind.”7 111

Летающий Город The City of the Future Project: 11. Author: Georgii Krutikov (1899—1958). Date: 1928. Themes: Circulation. Human-Nature Split. Parallelism. Remoteness.

Figure 0. The City of the Future. Planetary scheme. After Georgii Krutikov. 1928.

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Georgii Krutikov

1. S. O. Khan-Magomedov, Viktor Kalmykov (Moscow: Russkii Avangard, 2011), 35.

Without a doubt, the most radical proposition in Georgii Krutikov’s The City of the Future is the abandonment of planet Earth. In his scheme, the planet becomes completely depopulated. Its function is limited to support industrial production, provide material resources, and offer an occasional space for recreational visits and leisure amid a recovered nature. Permanent human residence, and the elements that used to constitute cities, are located in the atmosphere, in clusters of buildings suspended above the many industrial centers that punctuate the terrestrial surface. Only individual travel capsules link Earth and the aerial settlements, revealing that the design is not only about the stable structures of industry and residence, but also about the movement between the aerial and terrestrial layers. The project is thus characterized by an absolute dissociation between humanity and nature. Krutikov takes to the extreme the idea that architecture and settlements are artificial environments that protect humans from nature. As a way to supplant Earth, ultimately, these artificial domains can altogether do without the planet’s spatial support. The buildings of the City of the Future are aerial structures, closed and protected, propelled by their own atomic motors. Being independent from Earth, they can be used to colonize other planets [fig. 0]. The City of the Future is Krutikov’s highly polemical diploma project at the VKhUTEIN, the avant-garde Higher Artistic and Technical Institute in Moscow.1 To defend the project, Krutikov establishes a series of theses, grouped under the headings “social,” “architectural,” and “technical.” As is common among Soviet avant-garde architects, the social ones link the project to the construction of a communist society. Yet, instead of using architecture to imagine the spatial form of communist social relations, as happens in the works of Ivan Leonidov, Mikhail Okhitovich, and Moisei Ginzburg, Krutikov uses socialism as the precondition for a possible future planetary project [projects 9 and 10]: “1. Social Aspects. The international nature of the mobile capsule. Expanding horizons. The disappearance of the state. Communist society. A higher level of spatial organisation, corresponding to a higher level of social organisation. Instead of linear chaos on the chaotic surface of the Earth there is a graceful organisation in the freedom of three-dimensional space. Linear chaos and 121

Сатурий Saturnia Project: 12. Author: Viktor Petrovich Kalmykov (1908—1981) Date: 1929. Themes: Monumentality. Nomadism. Parallelism. Remoteness.

Figure 0. Saturnia. After Viktor Kalmykov. 1929.

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Viktor Kalmykov

1. Avant-garde education in architecture in Moscow takes place, since 1923, in the Higher Artistic-Technical Studios (VKhUTEMAS), which is rebranded as Higher Artistic-Technical Institute (VKhUTEIN) in 1927. The center closes in 1930. See Elena Ovsyannikova and Vladimir Shukhov, “Phenomenon of the Russian Avant-Garde. Moscow Architectural School of the 1920s,” Docomomo Journal 49 (2013): 23. 2. S. O. Khan-Magomedov, Viktor Kalmykov (Moscow: Russkii Avangard, 2011), 35. 3. Important members of the Bolshevik party or active socialist ideologies use science-fiction to depict their political views. Such is the case of Anatoly Lunacharsky (who was in charge of the People’s Commissariat for Education) and of the founder of the Proletkult movement, Alexander Bogdanov. Lenin himself titles his key political pamphlet What Is to Be Done? after Nikolai Chernyshevsky‘s eponymous utopian and science-fiction text. Cosmist thinkers such as the scientist Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky also cultivate the genre.

The presentation of Georgii Krutikov’s The City of the Future generates a strong polemic at VKhUTEIN about the limits of architectural education [project 11]. Krutikov’s exploration of aerial settlements seduces some students. Yet, most of the school faculty discredits it because of its detachment from existing problems and its absolute disregard of realistic implementation. The increasing difficulty of developing such a project becomes evident with Viktor Kalmykov’s Saturnia. As a last-year student of VKhUTEIN, Kalmykov asks his unit master, Nikolai Ladovskii (1888–1941), if he can design a planetary, extraterrestrial city for his diploma thesis.1 Even though Ladovskii consents, Kalmykov ends up abandoning the topic, afraid of the criticism the thesis could raise.2 The few drawings that represent the project are thus done without academic support. They are simple freehand, ink sketches; a series of vignettes that preliminarily show the central idea the author wants to develop in the project: the creation of an extraterrestrial, inhabited ring surrounding Earth [figs. 0 and 1]. By adding this ring, Kalmykov seeks to transform our planet into a new entity: Saturnia. The project’s title and its visual language associate his work to science-fiction and thus to the goals and conventions of a literary genre often used in the first years of the USSR to suggest new forms of social articulation.3 The simplicity of Saturnia’s representations does not hinder the expressivity and capacity for communication of the project. Saturnia’s ring, placed above the Equator, provides a powerful symbol of humanity’s integration as well as Earth’s transformation into a single society that reflects socialism’s internationalist political ambition. The drawings show both the planetary dimension of this new entity as seen from outer space and the ways in which it is perceived from Earth. When seen from the ground, the ring creates a new visual horizon; a sort of artificial Milky Way that expands the perception of the reach of human civilization [fig. 2]. Rotating with the same speed as Earth, Saturnia creates a permanent link between terrestrial and extraterrestrial spaces, enabled by the use of rockets and huge elevators. In this way, human life takes place indistinctly on the ground and in the air; alternating between public and residential uses equally distributed between the two layers. The key difference between Earth and ring is hence not functional, but organizational. Whereas the ground admits a plurality of urban forms, the aerial band is uniform across the planet in order to emphasize the unity of civilization. Saturnia acts as an inhabited monument. Its possible supplementation with a second ring—placed in some of Kalmykov’s sketches along a meridian—would only reinforce that monumental condition [fig. 3]. 131

Historical Chart of Urbanism Project: 13. Authors: Rudolf Steiger (1900—1982), Wilhelm Hess (1906—1982), and Georg Schmidt (1896—1965). Date: 1934—1935. Themes: Colonialism. Geo-visualization. Geopolitics. World Urbanization.

türkensperren sperrenden den türken landwegnach nachindien indien landweg

entdedkung amerikas entdedkung amerikas

papst teilt die erde papst teilt teile die erde in zwei in zwei teile spanisch portugiesisch, portugiesisch, spanisch

Figure 0. Fragment of Historical Chart of Urbanism. Transoceanic transportation of goods and development of colonial coastal cities. After Steiger, Hess, and Schmidt. 1934.

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Rudolf Steiger, Wilhelm Hess, and Georg Schmidt

The Historical Chart of Urbanism is a five-meter-long visualization that analyzes the historical and geographical expansion of cities and of the terrestrial systems of organization associated with them [figs. 0 and 1]. The Chart is structured as a grid. The horizontal axis is a timeline, each of whose segments represents a historical period, from prehistory until 1934, when the table is drawn. The vertical axis is thematic. The rows present six topics, most of them usually disregarded in urban studies at the time. With this display, the authors seek to produce a materialist analysis of urban processes. To this end, they add to conventional elements of urban analyses, such as form of settlement and means of transport, four other factors: social structure, weapons, exploitation of geographic resources, and forms of production. The authors also employ a variety of graphic mechanisms to explain each cell and the relations among them. Again, few were common in contemporary urban studies. Photographs, aerial views, photomontages, global and continental maps, data charts, texts, arrows indicating relations, and icons predominate in the urban plans. One of the Chart’s main effects is to create a system of violent juxtapositions, which provides a critical understanding of urbanization. In the Chart, architectural, urban, and territorial systems are both the result and the generators of conflicts, forms of production, and social relations. A vertical reading of the last column, for instance, shows the “Commercial Metropolis” as an urban form. The metropolis sits upon a skyscraper—the Empire State Building—representing a finance corporation, around which some building typologies orbit, which are related to industrial production and resource extraction. War submarines and aerial bombs, ocean liners, and railroads support these buildings. Below them, a world map shows how the earth is divided among five great geographic powers and the areas in which they have economic interests, while a pictorial chart represents the regions from which these geographic powers get their material resources. The bottom row shows, through two photographs, that the base of the urban and territorial system is both the result of industrialized production and of semi-slave manual work. The other crucial message of the chart is that urban forms are inseparable from territorial systems operating at the world scale. These territorial systems link cities and areas of production by means of transportation. The chart shows how the initial system of human settlements evolved through the influence of commercial interchanges and processes of colonization. It depicts, progressively, the development of cities in the interior of Europe, of coastal areas associated with 141

Airocean World Map and Geoscope Project: 14. Author: Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895—1983), Shoji Sadao (1927), and John McHale (1922—1978). Date: 1943—1965. Themes: Environmental Control. Geo-visualization. Human-Earth System. Telecommunications.

S T U D E N T 1 9 43

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Figure 0. Dymaxion Airocean World Map. After Richard Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao. 1943.

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Richard Buckminster Fuller, Shoji Sadao, and John McHale

1. Jordan Branch, The Cartographic State: Maps, Territory and the Origins of Sovereignty (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 6. 2. R. Buckminster Fuller, World Game Series—Document One: The World Game: Integrative Resource Utilization Planning Tool (Carbondale: World Resources Inventory, Southern Illinois University, 1971), 75. 3. Fuller, World Game Series, 75. 4. The first publication of the Airocean map is in Life, March 1, 1943. 5. R. Buckminster Fuller, “Fluid Geography,” in Fuller, The Buckminster Fuller Reader, ed. James Meller (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 141–142. 6. While Fuller’s Dymaxion Projection is usually credited for mapping the world as a continuous landmass, it is predated by architect Bernard Cahill in his Butterfly Projection in the early 1900’s. See Xhulio Binjaku, “The Issue of Geography,” Log 43 (2018): 35—39.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century, Ptolemy’s Geography, a 150 AD treatise on cartography that compiled the Roman Empire’s geographical knowledge, is reintroduced to Western Europe. The treatise describes the technique of mapping territorial points with mathematical projections by geometrically locating them through the celestial coordinate system of latitude and longitude. Before this, city-states were mainly depicted through bird’s-eye views, and flags imprecisely marked off stretches and areas of land. New representational tools subsequently change the politics of geographical location, the constitution of states’ sovereignty, and the international system. Ptolemy’s work inaugurates an era in which geographical space is translated into geometry.1 Five centuries later, Buckminster Fuller elaborates a process to project a sphere on a plane while preserving the former’s geometric properties and relations.2 Cartographically, it is an answer to the problem that only one fourth of a globe can be seen at a time and that planar representations employ large distortions and wield political biases. For example, the 1569 Mercator map, still the most commonly used projection to date, is only true to scale at the Equator. This is a map whose production heavily relies on political hierarchies and navigation purposes. It subdivides the planet into three oceans and depicts colonizing countries north “above” the rest of the world, in a size that substantially magnifies their actual dimension. Fuller’s Airocean World Map, later rebranded as Dymaxion Map, breaks with these divisions and geographic exaggerations. The twenty-faced, icosahedron-derived map reinterprets the world as one-continent surrounded by oneworld-ocean [fig. 0].3 When Fuller designs the map, his vision is undoubtedly

politically charged. Fuller publishes the first version of the map in 1943, when the Allies’ victory over the Axis powers starts to be seen as the outcome of World War II.4 A substantial part of Fuller’s argument to develop the map is his belief in the necessity of creating documents that support a “dynamic world citizenry” after the war, but also, and more politically, documents that impede future attitudes in favor of “isolationism.”5 The argument in favor of Dymaxion thus contains a critique of the United States’ reluctance and late engagement in the two World Wars. The unfolding of the continents around the North Pole in the first version of the map shows how isolationism is impossible when most of the planet’s population lives on an almost continuous landmass.6 In addition, Fuller’s projection creates the technical support to connect this population by revealing the geometric efficiency of the polar hemispheres for air 151

Les Trois Établissements Humains The Three Human Establishments Project: 15. Authors: Le Corbusier (1887—1965) and ASCORAL. Date: 1943—1945. Themes: Circulation. Decentralization. Linearity. Territorial Gestalt.

Figure 0. Natural Occupation of the Territory. The Map of Europe by Ascoral. After Le Corbusier. 1943.

160

Le Corbusier and ASCORAL

1. Le Corbusier, The Four Routes, trans. Dorothy Todd (London: D. Dobson, 1947), 104. 2. Le Corbusier, The Four Routes, 204. 3. Le Corbusier, The Three Human Establishments (Chandigarh: Punjab Government, Department of Town & Country Planning, 1979 [1945]), 77. 4. Le Corbusier, Looking at City Planning, trans. Eleanor Levieux (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1971 [1946]), 114. For the image with the connections between cities see Le Corbusier, Concerning Town Planning, trans. Clive Entwistle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948 [1946]), 97. 5. Hashim Sarkis, “Geo-architecture: A Prehistory for an Emerging Aesthetic,” Harvard Design Magazine 37 (2014): 126. 6. Jean Pierre Giordani, “Territoire,” in Le Corbusier, une encyclopédie, ed. Jacques Lucan (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, Collection Monographie, 1987), 404. Le Corbusier, The Three Human Establishments, 154.

Stimulated by the design of the Mundaneum and by his South American travel in 1929, Le Corbusier says “[I] began to think in terms of geography and world.”1 The architect’s confession appears in the Four Routes (1943), the text where he starts pondering how to reconstruct Europe after the Second World War. In the book’s conclusions, the large scale reappears as an architectural leitmotif: “we can only divine a scale, the proportion of things to come, a dimension for to-morrow . . . immense, spread to the farthest horizons, universal.”2 The treatise The Three Human Establishments (1945) continues this concept and demands architects “to make human geography and geo-architecture”3 [fig. 0]. One year later, Le Corbusier accompanies his claim of the universality of techniques with a world map reflecting the links among major world cities and asks himself to create “the history and the geography . . . that have yet to come” [fig. 1].4 The war and immediate postwar period constitute the moment of sedimentation of Le Corbusier’s thinking about the world scale. Even if his proposals of the period are conceived for France or Europe, the architect’s vocabulary constantly refers to broader scales: “earth,” “world,” “geography,” “cosmos,” “totality,” are the terms through which Le Corbusier deploys his postwar discourse. The consolidation of his thinking about terrestrial organization leads Le Corbusier to expand his previous strategies of spatial production. A sectional representation of South America exemplifies his prewar, 1929 declaration about the discovery of the world and geography as architectural themes [fig. 3]. The section concludes with two operations—the Buenos Aires city of affairs and airport—which serve to extend the continent and to connect it to the Atlantic Ocean and the sky: two spaces of transportation and interchange. The drawing’s thematic is twofold: it reflects Le Corbusier’s conception of the head of the city as a node within a global circuit of international relations, as well as his reliance on architecture as a tool to measure physical geography and to calibrate our relation to the horizon.5 The discourse he elaborates during the war abandons the sole focus on architecture and the city. He is increasingly concerned with infrastructures of communication and with the organization of a territorial gestalt that goes beyond mere intercity relations. To do so, instead of the section, it privileges horizontality and planar representation.6 These two strategies are not irreconcilable. Both are preserved in the author’s late thinking, but they tend to be used for different purposes. In Looking at City Planning (1946), architecture serves Le Corbusier to visualize intercity linkages while 161

Von der Bebauung der Erde The Cultivation of the Earth Project: 16. Author: Rudolf Schwarz (1897â&#x20AC;&#x201D;1961). Date: 1943â&#x20AC;&#x201D;1945. Themes: Aerial View. Decentralization. Geography. Territorial Intensification.

Figure 0. The four powers of society: Sovereignty, Education, Worship, and Economy. After Rudolf Schwarz. 1949.

170

Rudolf Schwarz

1. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 129–130.

Modernity is, for Martin Heidegger, the historical epoch that reduces the

2. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 136.

rationalization of human activities, the subjection of all world phenomena to

3. Panos Mantziaras, “Rudolf Schwarz and the Concept of Stadtlandschaft,” Planning Perspectives 18, no. 2 (2003): 163. 4. Maurice François Rouge, La géonomie; ou, L’organisation de l’espace (Paris: Librairie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1947), 2. Rouge’s selection of terms coincides—although with a completely different meaning—to Carl Schmitt’s selection in his 1950 book on geopolitical theory, The Nomos of the Earth (New York: Telos Press, 2006). 5. Jean Gohier, “Un cours à l’E.P.H.E., la géonomie de Maurice François Rouge,” Les Annales de la recherche urbaine 37 (1988): 94. Accessed online June 7, 2018: doi: https: //doi.rog/10.3406/ aru.1988.1353. 6. Rouge, La géonomie, 156. 7. Rouge, La géonomie, 48.

world to a representation. As the philosopher explains in the 1938 lecture “The

Age of the World Picture,” the key features of the modern age—the domina-

tion of scientific research over any other forms of knowledge, the planning and mathematical calculation—are enabled by a previous, metaphysical, operation.1

This operation consists in transforming the world into an entity that can be

accessed only indirectly, through its image, and it consequently disregards all

conditions that cannot be reduced to that representation. This conversion of the world into a picture severs modernity from the previous medieval and classical

ages. Heidegger’s philosophical program, structured around the existential re-

cuperation of an unmediated sense of being-in-the world (Dasein), is a reaction to this epochal fracture.

“The Age of the World Picture” reacts to the existential tensions that result from early twentieth-century modernization by establishing a conceptual

opposition between scientific and nonscientific understandings of the world. Even if Heidegger himself considers that the recuperation of Dasein should operate within the conditions modern science imposes, the text emphasizes that scientific calculation and existential apprehension are, initially, opposed

possibilities, and claims that it is necessary to think the world beyond the pa-

rameters mere calculation imposes.2 This confrontation between world picture and being-in-the-world will become spatially articulated immediately after World War II by urban theory. Two contemporary and contrasting treatises

represent the different poles of Heidegger’s analysis. Maurice François Rouge’s

La géonomie; ou, L’organisation de l’espace (Geonomy, or the organization of space, 1947) supports a scientific view of world planning. Rudolf Schwarz’s Von der Bebauung der Erde (The cultivation of the earth, 1949), which is the main

object of this article, conceives in turn a world project outside the scientific episteme, conceptually close to Heideggerian postulates [fig. 0].3

Rouge creates the neologism geonomy by merging the Greek terms ge (earth), and nomos (law).4 His intention is to denominate a new spatial science, aimed at complementing the existing geosciences of geography, geology, or geometry.5 Contrary to the mostly descriptive goals of those disciplines, the new science

would be an operative instrument devoted to “organizing” terrestrial space.6 Geonomy’s scope matches the totality of human “biome.”7 The science aims 171

The Expanding Environment Project: 17. Author: Erwin Anton Gutkind (1886—1968). Date: 1951—1953. Themes: Colonialism. Decentralization. Territorial Intensification. World Urbanization.

ANGOLA PORTOGOHESE CONGO BELOA

RHODESIA BECHUANALAND MOZAMBICO

OCEANO ATLANTICO

OCEANO INDIANO

Figure 0. Schematic map for the union of South Africa indicating the main mineral and natural resources . After Erwin Anton Gutkind. 1952.

180

Erwin Anton Gutkind

1. Erwin Anton Gutkind, “Universal Planning,” Building (UK) 11, no. 2 (February 1936): 70.

In 1936, German architect Erwin Anton Gutkind publishes a short journal

2. Gutkind, “Universal Planning,” 70.

expatriate from Nazi Germany for racial and ideological reasons. Yet, his text

3. Stephen Grabow, “The Outsider in Retrospect: E. A. Gutkind,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 41, no. 3 (1975): 201. 4. Erwin Anton Gutkind, Creative Demobilisation (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1943), ix.

article, almost a manifesto, titled “Universal Planning.” At the time he is an completely ignores the political convulsions that will soon lead to World War

II, instead claiming that the pressing conditions to which architects should respond are none other than world integration: “A proper town-planning specialist labours never for one or even two generations ahead: the result of his work

shows itself only after a much longer period. Then let us have no ‘town-planning,’ nor even ‘regional-planning,’ but universal planning.”1 A variety of fac-

tors produce this imperative to work at the universal scale. Gutkind believes that demographic growth is leading to the total utilization of all the world’s

resources, and that the increase of communications and commercial linkages is fostering a synthesis of civilizations. These factors conspire against the par-

tition of the earth into national “cells.” It behooves architects and planners to organize the trans-scalar, spatial consequences this world unification entails. In fact, some signs of the phenomenon can already be perceived and have to be

addressed. Power and economic relations are being rebalanced, fostering the

development of hitherto economically disadvantaged countries and the loss of relevance of Western powers. The differences between town and country-

side are tending to disappear. New settlements are appearing to facilitate interchanges along transportation corridors, seaports, and national frontiers.2

“Universal Planning” sets Gutkind’s conceptual agenda for the following two decades. During the war, he directs the United Kingdom’s Demographic Sur-

vey and Plan.3 As a result of this experience, in 1943 he publishes the book

Creative Demobilisation: Principles of National Planning. The text focuses on national planning and considers this scale nothing less than a piece within a broader strategy of world planning, one in which a “shrinking world” is “ad-

ministered as one coherent unit.”4 Gutkind’s subsequent works directly address

this global scale, both through research and theoretical and design speculations. The two examples this article analyzes, his studies about colonization and the

book The Expanding Environment: The End of Cities, the Rise of Communities, epitomize, respectively, each of these intellectual quests.

Gutkind publishes the studies “La colonizzazione del Nord America,” “La

colonizzazione dell’Africa,” and “La colonizzazione dell’Australia” (The col181

Berlin Hauptstadt — Ecological Table Project: 18. Authors: Alison Smithson (1928—1993) and Peter Smithson (1923—2003). Date: 1957. Themes: Ecology. Parallelism. Infrastructures. Telecommunications.

Figure 0. Berlin Hauptstadt, Spree river and railroad. After Alison and Peter Smithson. 1957.

190

Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson

1. Alison and Peter Smithson, Urban Re-Identification, in Ordinariness and Light: Urban Theories 1952–1960 and Their Application in a Building Project 1963–1970 (London: Faber, 1970), 21. 2. Smithson and Smithson, Urban Re-Identification, 58. 3. Already at this point, the Smithsons start to be interested in understanding local patterns, and thus in particularization. See Peter Smithson, “The Slow Growth of Another Sensibility. Architecture as Town Building,” in A Continuing Experiment: Learning and Teaching at the Architectural Association, ed. James Gowan (London: Architectural Association, 1975), 58. 4. See Aneurin Bevan’s quote in Smithson and Smithson, Urban Re-Identification, 19. 5. Kingsley Davis, “The Origin and Growth of Urbanization in the World,” American Journal of Sociology 5 (1955): 429–437. 6. Ian Nairn, ed., “Outrage,” Architectural Review 117 (1955) and “Outrage 2,” Architectural Review 120 (1956); Erwin Anton Gutkind, The Expanding Environment; the End of Cities, the Rise of Communities (London: Freedom Press, 1953), and Erwin Anton Gutkind, Our World from the Air: An International Survey of Man and His Environment (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952).

The 1957 competition entry for Berlin Hauptstadt caps the research that Alison and Peter Smithson initiate with their designs for the Golden Lane building and the Golden Lane Study (1952–1953). In this five-year period, the architects seek a new formal system, “ordered, but not geometric,” to serve as a radical alternative to the forms of architecture, urbanism, and territorial order of early modernity.1 They relate the formal attributes of this new system to contemporary developments in art. In their early manifesto, Urban Re-Identification (1953), the description of Jackson Pollock’s work—“It is more like a natural phenomenon, a manifestation rather than an artifact; complex, timeless, n-dimensional and multi-evocative”—is a declaration of the qualities that the Smithsons are trying to achieve: the conflation of artifice and nature, the overlay of contrasting forms, complexity.2 By exploring these formal conditions, the couple does not intend to generate a single world project. Without a doubt, the architects would harshly condemn any ambitions to design or plan the globe.3 What the Smithsons do is to explore the repercussions that the ongoing consolidation of the world scale might have on architecture and urbanism and to investigate how to express this scale. Berlin Hauptstadt is the most accomplished representation of this search [figs. 0 and 1]. The key conceptual questions the Smithsons address in Berlin Hauptstadt are initially formulated in Urban Re-Identification. Supporting their argument with lengthy quotes from In Place of Fear (1952) by Labour Party politician Aneurin Bevan, the Smithsons claim that architecture has to intervene in a historic situation where humanity ceases to be a “product” of nature in order to become a result of urban society.4 Bevan is not alone in detecting this ep-

ochal change. The intensification of urbanization at the world scale that demographer Kingsley Davis starts to chart in 1955 is a central concern of the intellectual milieu that surrounds the Smithsons.5 In 1950, Canadian architect Christopher Tunnard publishes in the British journal Architectural Review his first analyses of the total urbanization of the United States, a work that will eventually lead to the writing of Man-Made America, and which influences the 1955 issue of Architectural Review devoted to the urbanization of the UK, edited by Ian Nairn.6 Some of the images included in Urban Re-Identification are taken from Our World from the Air: An International Survey of Man and His Environment by Erwin Anton Gutkind, who at the time is initiating his studies about continental territorial structures and divulging his credo of worldwide urban decentralization [project 17]. The Smithsons adopt a singular perspec191

New Babylon Project: 19. Author: Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920â&#x20AC;&#x201D;2005). Date: 1957â&#x20AC;&#x201D;1974. Themes: Automation. Interiorization. Nomadism. Parallelism.

Figure 0. Principle of a covered city. After Constant. 1959.

200

Constant Nieuwenhuys

1. About Constant’s position toward constructivism, see Constant, “About the Meaning of Construction” [1966], in Mark Wigley, Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1998), 174. He also sustains political positions about earth structuring that are close to constructivism. See Constant, “A Few Propositions Concerning the Concepts ‘Face of The Earth,’ ‘Urban Development,’ And ‘Art’” [1971], in Wigley, Constant’s New Babylon, 209. His whole movement from painting to architecture is related to an appreciation of the technical dimension of society that he borrows from Sigfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (1948). See Constant, “From Collaboration to Absolute Unity among the Plastic Arts” [1955], in Wigley, Constant’s New Babylon, 75. 2. Interestingly, Constant also emphasizes that the inhabitants of New Babylon will not distinguish between art and non-art. A similar belief structured also the Proletkult ideology that informed 1920s Soviet constructivism [projects 9 and 10]. 3. Constant, “New Babylon, een schets voor een cultuur,” in New Babylon, ed. Hans Locher (The Hague: Haags Gemeentemuseum, 1974). Quoted in Wigley, Constant’s New Babylon, 13. 4. Constant, “New Babylon. Outline of a Culture” [1960–1965], in Wigley, Constant’s New Babylon, 160. 5. Constant, “New Babylon. Outline of a Culture,” 165.

According to Constant Nieuwenhuys, New Babylon continues and reformulates the technological and political ethos of early twentieth-century constructivism [projects 9 and 10]. Like the Soviet constructivists, Constant believes that it is possible to create a universal formal language based on the logics of technology [fig. 0].1 Yet, he also criticizes the privilege of work as the driving force for reorganizing social relations and artistic production, which he believes characterized constructivism, and proposes to replace it with the ideas of human play and creativity derived from sociologist Johan Huizinga’s concept of homo ludens.2 Famously described by its architect as “a camp for nomads in a planetary scale,” New Babylon acts as the armature for a society of extremely mobile individuals who no longer need to work thanks to radical advances in automation and cybernetics.3 The liberation from work generates a surplus of time, which allows humans to dedicate their entire lives to social interchange and creative enterprises free of utilitarian concerns. The result is a society in perpetual change whose physical manifestation consists in the incessant production of new and different spaces. Constant’s descriptions present the project as a paroxysm of creation. Nothing in New Babylon is fixed. The activities and words of individuals produce chain reactions among other subjects. Changes in the form of space and in the forms of inhabiting it follow one another with vertiginous speed.4 The project’s most palpable paradox lies in the contradiction between these ideas of change and Constant’s necessity to formalize the project as a framework for imagining humanity’s future. While he works on the project for more than fifteen years, defining many, almost obsessive, variations of a fixed set of spatial leitmotifs, his texts insist on the tentative character of the work. Every image of New Babylon is a snapshot of a potential, still unknown sociospatial transformation: “New Babylon is the world of the New Babylonians alone, the product of their culture. For us, it is only a model of reflection and play.”5 New Babylon’s multiple visualizations are thus an enactment of the creative form of life the project proposes, more than its actual physical form. As a result, the process of reflection Constant seeks to trigger does not depend so much on the specific conditions of each of the countless visualizations of the project—including hundreds of paintings, architectural models, photographs, maps, sketches, and some technical drawings—as on their overwhelming multiplicity and their organization. There are three structuring levels in Constant’s 201

Новый элемент расселения (НЭР) The New Unit of Settlement (NUS) Project: 20. Authors: Alexei Gutnov (1937—1986), A. Baburov, G. Djumenton, S. Kharitonova, I. Lezava, and S. Sadovskij. Date: 1957—1968. Themes: Cybernetics. Decentralization. Geography. Total Urbanization.

Figure 0. Continuity and discontinuity: two contradictory features linked indissolubly together, and found generally in natural, social, and mental phenomena. After Alexei Gutnov et al. 1966.

210

Alexei Gutnov et al.

1. The activities of the NER collective expand, though, until 1977. See Program of the International Scientific Symposium “Tracing the Future City,” Graduate School of Urbanism of the Faculty of Urban and Regional Development, Moscow. December 20–22, 2018. Unpaged. Accessed online January 24, 2019: https://urban. hse.ru/en/ner_programme/ 2. Alexei Gutnov et al., Idee per la città comunista (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1968); and Alexei Gutnov et al., The Ideal Communist City, trans. Renee Neu Watkins (New York: George Braziller, 1971), respectively. 3. Masha Panteleyeva, “Alexei Gutnov, the NER Group (‘New Element of Settlement’) and Giancarlo De Carlo.” Accessed online May 17, 2018: http://radicalpedagogies.com/search-cases/ e06-moscow-institutearchitecture-triennale-milano/. 4. In fact, the authors even recuperate some of the typological elements that were at the core of the Soviet avant-garde proposals, such as the workers’ club, which, as in Ivan Leonidov’s design, is also a club for “Cultural and Scientific Projects” [project 9]. See Gutnov et al., The Ideal Communist City, 90–94. 5. Gutnov et al., The Ideal Communist City, 101. 6. Gutnov et al., The Ideal Communist City, 166. 7. Giancarlo de Carlo, “Preface,” in Gutnov et al., The Ideal Communist City, ix. For a contemporary Italian critique of the naturalist ideologies of the city see Antonio Monestiroli, “La città come avventura della conoscenza. Architettura e teoria dell’architettura nella città dell’Illuminismo,” in L’Architettura della realtà (Turin: Umberto Allemani & Co., 1979), 139–175. 8. Gutnov et al., The Ideal Communist City, 7–8. 9. Gutnov et al., The Ideal Communist City, 105.

The New Unit of Settlement (NUS), or Novyj Ėlement Rasselenija (NER) in Russian, is the central piece of the urban system designed by a team of young Russian architects, led by Alexei Gutnov, from 1957 to 1968.1 Originally part of their common diploma thesis at the Moscow Institute of Architecture, the group’s research on urban systems expands until the publication in 1966 of the book NER: Po sledam goroda budushchego (NER, Tracing the Future City), which portrays how to create a regional urban system by linking autonomous and independent cells, each dedicated to specific uses [fig. 0 and 1]. Later translated into Italian (1968), and into English (1971) as The Ideal Communist City, the work of Gutnov and his team seeks to define an ideal urban schema.2 Profiting from the climate of intellectual and ideological debate that follows Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, the NUS team wants to define an alternative to the forms of urban planning that had become hegemonic in the USSR during his three decade long presidency.3 In fact, the team’s critique of the urban status quo goes hand in hand with a desire to recuperate the avant-garde tradition of speculative thinking about architecture and urbanism that disappeared in the 1930s.4 As the 1920s avant-garde projects did, the NUS also establishes a new model for urbanization to eventually replace the existing ones altogether. As the authors state: “The goal is to transform the whole planet into a unified sociological environment.”5 For them, “NUS represents an attempt to involve the thought and imagination of the architect on a global scale, outside of which the search for the new is impossible.”6 In his preface to the Italian edition of the book, Giancarlo de Carlo avers that the NUS proposal encourages “world-wide urbanization,” and thus abandons the naturalistic ideologies of assimilation of the city to the countryside that had dominated urban planning since the nineteenth century.7 Certainly, the architects understand the emergence in the postwar era of “gigantic urban centers” as the preamble to an even bigger wave of urbanization, and support their proposal with demographic projections that estimate a 75 percent increase in urban population by the year 2000.8 The proposal is then an anticipatory mechanism to address this immense level of urbanization and the technical and social transformations that will accompany it. Substantively, the authors envision the technological improvement of productive systems and a corresponding trend toward automatization, and they conclude from these trends that it is necessary to conceive unified urban environments that are able to rationalize the “interdependence of the different environmental elements.”9 The authors 211

海上都市 Marine Cities Project: 21. Author: Kiyonori Kikutake (1928—2011). Date: 1958—1975. Themes: Automation. Human-Nature Split. Megastructure. Remoteness.

A) B) F)

C) D)

C-2)

B-3)

C-1)

B-2)

B-1)

Figure 0. Interrelations among Marine City towers. After Kiyonori Kikutake. 1978.

220

Kiyonori Kikutake

1. Noboru Kawazoe, “Material and Man,” in Noboru Kawazoe et al., Metabolism: The Proposals for New Urbanism (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1960), 51.

“I want to be a bacterium. . . . In the future, man will fill the whole earth, and fly into the sky. I am a cell of bacteria that is in constant propagation. . . . There is no more individual consciousness, only the will of mankind as a whole.”1

2. Kiyonori Kikutake interviewed by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist, in Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist, et al., Project Japan: Metabolism Talks (Cologne: Taschen, 2011), 135.

In 1960, architectural critic and theorist Noboru Kawazoe, alongside architect Kenzo Tange, brings together a group of young Japanese architects to speculate on designs for a possible coming future and inquire about the “unique qualities and ideas Japan could bring to the world.”2 Under the name Metabolism, the group, including architects Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa, Masato Otaka, and Fumihiko Maki, and designers Kenji Ekuan and Kiyoshi Awazu, proposes that human society should be understood as a process of continuous development intrinsically dependent on, and resulting from, the progress of design and technology, which, in turn, emulates a biological logic of life, death, and constant renewal [fig. 0]. “From atom to nebula,” both micro- and macrocosms are thought of as one single unit integrating man and its artificial built environment with nature.3

3. Kawazoe et al., Metabolism: The Proposals for New Urbanism, 3. 4. Meike Schalk, “Inventing a Culture of Resilience,” Arts 3, no. 2 (2014): 283. 5. Arata Isozaki, “Foreword,” in Zhongjie Lin, Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan (New York: Routledge, 2010), xiv. 6. Lin, Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement, 20. 7. The presentation of two of Kikutake’s projects preceded the group’s formation. Tange, who was not a direct member of the group, presents the projects. James Steele, Contemporary Japanese Architecture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 106. Yuriko Furuhata, “Architecture as Atmospheric Media: Tange Lab and Cybernetics,” in Media Theory in Japan, ed. Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 52–79.

As the atom-to-nebula image illustrates, for the Metabolists it is crucial to address trans-scalar phenomena [fig. 1]. The relation between the local and the global and between the domesticity of Japan and its position in the world are at the center of their concerns. In the aftermath of WWII and during the American occupation, Japan is strictly closed, with restrictions ranging from external commerce to travel and mobility outside the country.4 Reacting against this context, the team feels the need to own a place in the discourse of international architecture that can broaden and facilitate the movement of ideas between the West and Japan, if not an immediate physical displacement. In this sense, Metabolism, with Team X, can be seen within the history of architecture as one of the last cohesive movements seeking to address global development. It can also be seen as the first non-Western architectural movement truly impacting the international architectural scene.5 For Kawazoe, it is a “theory originating from Japan but applicable to the world in general.”6 Congruent with this understanding of the group’s goals, from the very beginning the Metabolists participate in international architectural associations and conferences. The very first, albeit indirect and unofficial, exposure of the Metabolists’ ideas takes place at the CIAM meeting at Otterlo (1959), led by Team X [project 18]. In the following decade, Tange and Maki occasionally attend the Delos symposia, which Constantinos Doxiadis organized [project 23].7 221

Architecture de l’Air Air Architecture Project: 22. Authors: Yves Klein (1928—1962) and Claude Parent (1923—2016). Date: 1959—1962. Themes: Abstraction. Environmental Control. Immateriality. Infrastructure.

Figure 0. Air Architecture: Climate-controlled city (roof of air, beds of air, and walls of fire). After Yves Klein and Claude Parent. ca. 1961.

230

Yves Klein and Claude Parent

1. For a complete description of the project see Peter Noever and François Perrin, eds., Air Architecture: Yves Klein (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2004); Dominique Rouillard, Superarchitecture: Le Futur de l’architecture, 1950–1970 (Paris: Editions de la Villette, 2004); Larry Busbea, Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960–1970 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); and Roi Salgueiro Barrio, “Birds Must Be Eliminated: Air Architecture and the Planetary Reenactment of the Modern Void,” Journal of Architectural Education 70, no. 2 (2016): 311–323. 2. Yves Klein, “Chelsea Hotel Manifesto,” in Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, ed. Klaus Ottman (Putnam, CO: Spring Publications, 2007), 192. 3. Text contained in Yves Klein’s 1961 painting Architecture de l’air. 4. Benjamin Buchloch, “Plenty or Nothing: From Yves Klein’s Le Vide to Arman’s Le Plein,” in Premises: Invested Spaces in Visual Arts, Architecture and Design from France, 1958–1998, ed. Blistene Bernard (New York: Guggenheim, 1998), 86–99.

The air-conditioning of large urban spaces is a constant theme of architectural exploration during the mid-1950s and early 1960s. Projects as diverse as Frei Otto’s pioneering Arctic cities, Yona Friedman’s Spatial City (1956), or Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s Manhattan Dome (1960) share the conviction that the overall climatic control of settlements is necessary to create more efficient and sustainable urban environments [projects 14 and 24]. Air Architecture is the extreme case of this exploration. The project, which Yves Klein develops first in collaboration with German architect Werner Ruhnau, himself in contact with Otto and Friedman, and later with Claude Parent, is at once part of Klein’s artistic work and a radical incursion into the central architectural and urban debates of the time.1 By 1961 Klein declares himself the inventor of the architecture and urbanism of air, and proclaims that this new conception “transcends the traditional meaning of the terms ‘architecture’ and ‘urbanism.’”2 The declaration, although grandiloquent, is not unjustified. Air Architecture uses air-conditioning to create a novel, extremely abstract type of environment: a flat, unlimited void, undisturbed by any kind of construction [figs. 0 and 1]. The elimination of architecture in favor of the void is the central piece through which the project articulates three interrelated themes: the sociospatial conditions of the emerging society of mass consumption; the intensification of modern urban spatiality in the postwar era; and the expansion of the urban condition to the world scale. Instead of using air-conditioning to control the climate of discrete settlements—à la Otto, Friedman, or Buckminster Fuller— Air Architecture uses this technology to turn the whole Earth into an urban system. As Klein states: “Air Architecture is at the surface of our globe. The technical and scientific conclusion of our civilization is buried in the depths of the earth and ensures the absolute control of the climate on the surface of all continents, which have become vast communal living rooms” [fig. 3].3 Air Architecture operates at a predominantly discursive level. Klein and Parent inaugurate a way of addressing the world scale in which architectural design ceases to be an instrument to define a new spatial system in order to become an intellectual tool to reflect upon ongoing social conditions. In this case generalized, worldwide urbanization. For developing their intellectual proposition, Klein and Parent use a logic that is more retroactive than projective.4 Air Architecture faces the consolidation of global urbanization, which informs the works of Alison and Peter Smithson, Constant, or Friedman through a strategy that contradicts, in general terms, the work of those architects [projects 18, 19, 231

Οικουμενόπολη Ecumenopolis Project: 23. Author: Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis (1913—1975). Date: ca. 1962—1975. Themes: Geo-visualization. Linearity. Territorial Gestalt. World Urbanization.

50-200 inh/ha 10 - 30 2 - 10 0,3 - 2

Figure 0. Ecumenopolis at the end of the 21st century. After Constantinos Doxiadis. 1970.

240

Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis

1. The first published mention of the notion of Ecumenopolis appears in Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis, “Ecumenopolis: Toward a Universal City,” Ekistics 13, no. 75 (1962): 3–18. The author will devote many articles and lectures to the topic, until the publication in 1974 of a monograph about the question. See Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis, John Papaiōannou, and Athēnaïko Kentro Oikistikēs, Ecumenopolis: The Inevitable City of the Future (New York: Norton, 1974). 2. Panayiota Ioanni Pyla, “Ekistics, Architecture, and Environmental Politics, 1945–1976: A Prehistory of Sustainable Development” (PhD diss., MIT, 2003), 121–151; and Panayiota Ioanni Pyla, “Planetary Home and Garden: Ekistics and Environmental-Developmental Politics,” Grey Room 36 (2009): 10 and 17.

Ecumenopolis is the “inevitable city of the future” [fig. 0].1 We see here the

world in the year 2100. After the period of crises and transitions of the twen-

tieth and twenty-first centuries during which cities grew from metropolises, to megalopolises, to eperopolises (cities-continents), the world’s settlements have

finally merged into a single, continuous, planetary city. Ecumenopolis, or the Universal Human Settlement, thus represents a culminating moment, a final

stage where urbanization, population growth, and the natural resources of the planet have found a successful equilibrium. Its mirrors and counterparts are Ecumenokepos, the planetary garden of food production that puts Ecumenopolis into permanent contact with nature, and Ecumenohydor, which supplies

this global system with water [fig. 1].2 Together, the city, the garden, and the

water constitute the three broad categories through which Constantinos Doxiadis conceives the totality of Anthropocosmos—the human terrestrial space—

and thus the main spatial conditions that humanity will have to manage and

3. Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis, Ecology and Ekistics (Boulder: Westview Press, 1977), 7; and Nikos Katsikis, “Two Approaches to ‘World Management’: C.A. Doxiadis, and R.B. Fuller,” in Implosions/Explosions, ed. Neil Brenner (Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2014), 482–489. Ecology and Ekistics is a posthumous publication, edited by Gerald Dix from Doxiadis’s draft. About the uses of nature in Doxiadis see also Gerald Dix, “Ekistics, Ecumenopolis and the Wilderness,” Land Use Policy 2, no. 1 (1985): 41–53. For more on Fuller, see projects 6 and 14.

protect [fig. 2].

4. Doxiadis, Ecology and Ekistics, 9 and 50–51.

summarizes in the Anthropocosmos model is only part of a broader political

5. John Papaioannou, “Geography and the Future of Human Settlements,” Ekistics 24, no. 145 (1967): 452. 6. Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis, Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 200–264. See also in this respect Doxiadis’s criticism of previous model of linear cities,

Total world management is the corollary of Doxiadis’s vision of an urban planet.3 Ecumenopolis abolishes all distance and all externalities. All parts of the

city-world are contiguous and face the necessity of controlling the earth’s re-

sources in order to warrant the stability of the global system and, conversely, to avoid a general catastrophe.4 The need for world management implies the

complete mobilization of nature for human purposes and an absolute confidence in scientific control: land apportionment, geoengineering, and even cli-

mate control are its tools [fig. 3].5 Yet, the technocratic utopia that Doxiadis

and socio-ontological eschatology. All the dynamics that lead to Ecumenopolis

are described as evolutionary and natural [fig. 4].6 As a result of this natural logic, Ecumenopolis will necessarily secrete its own political structure: a world

democratic federation. The city-world will also end up constituting a sort of

organism, a unified body. Its population of twenty billion people will coincide, Doxiadis points out, with the number of cells of the human brain.7 The world

will be a huge, collective thinking entity.

241

Seven Bridge Cities to Link Four Continents Project: 24. Author: Yona Friedman (1923). Date: 1963. Themes: Circulation. Infrastructure. Parallelism. Place(lessness).

Figure 0. The World in Polar Projection . 9 bridge cities assure continuous terrestrial circulation. After Yona Friedman. 1963.

250

Yona Friedman

1. Peter Sloterdijk, “Waterworld: On the Change of the Central Element in the Modern Age,” in In the World Interior of Capital: For a Philosophical Theory of Globalization, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014). 2. William Gilpin, The Cosmopolitan Railway: Compacting and Fusing Together All the World’s Continents (San Francisco: The History Company, 1890). Quoted in Marc Shell, Islandology: Geography, Rhetoric, Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 78 and 276 (note 117). Shell explains that Gilpin initially formulates his proposal in 1860, and that its design materialization by Strauss is a sign of the Hegelian thinking that dominated University of Cincinnati at the time. 3. Yona Friedman, “Une Architecture pour des milliards d’hommes,” in Les Visionnaires de l’architecture, ed. Jean Balladur (Paris: R. Laffont, 1965), 73. 4. Friedman, “Une Architecture pour des milliards d’hommes,” 73. It must be noted that bridges are a constant reference in the imaginary of the megastructural movement, as Reyner Banham explains. Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 13–15.

The Seven Bridge Cities unite the world’s continents, creating a new form of Pangea. The project begins by displacing the conventional point of view through which we tend to picture Earth [fig. 0]. Since the sixteenth century, post-Mercator cartographic representations have depicted a maritime planet oriented from North to South. These maps represent sea distances with dimensional accuracy, reflecting the maritime routes that connect a Eurocentric world system.1 Yona Friedman’s project employs, in turn, a polar projection that shows the continents almost as a single landmass—as Buckminster Fuller had already suggested [project 14]. The Seven Bridge Cities are strategic interventions in this map: a supplement to existing natural conditions that take advantage of the fact that, in the most distant cases, fewer than 150 km separate the continental shores. On a first level, the bridges play an infrastructural role, facilitating the construction of a continuous, global system of land transportation. They are, even if Friedman is unaware of it, the ultimate manifestation of two nineteenth-century dreams of infrastructural connectivity: the idea of building a railroad bridge at the Bering Strait, and William Gilpin’s 1890 proposal for a Cosmopolitan Railway “compacting and fusing together all the world’s continents,” which engineer Joseph Baerman Strauss formalized in his 1892 design [fig. 1].2 Yet, the power of these interventions is also symbolic. For Friedman, bridges have always been “artificial continents” that establish terrestrial links where water imposes a natural barrier, thereby generating new relationships between disparate parts and creating moments of intensified activities.3 Taking this logic to the scale of the planet, Friedman’s Bridge Cities create nodal points of world union that symbolize the interrelations of the human collective. Their explicit models are Florence’s Ponte Vecchio, Paris’s Pont-Neuf, and Venice’s Rialto: bridges that are inhabited and occupied.4 Converted into actors at the world scale, these historic, inhabited bridges, formerly parts of a city, become cities in themselves that integrate infrastructural, productive, and residential uses [fig. 2].

Although Friedman indicates that the construction techniques and the functional conditions of the Bridge Cities will vary according to their location, the drawings repeatedly present them as an implementation of the principles he had previously defined for Mobile Architecture (1956–1959). The Bridge Cities adopt the major formal characteristics of that project—they are discrete and elevated urban units conceived using a systematic logic that is infrastructural, not architectural—and culminate its conceptual goals. For Friedman, Mobile 251

Dream City Project: 25. Authors: Archigram: David Greene (1937) with Michael Webb (1937). Date: 1963. Themes: Cybernetics. Immateriality. Parallelism. Telecommunication.

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Figure 0. Dream City. Fragment Story of the Thing. After David Greene and Michael Webb. 1963.

260

Archigram

1. Cook, Greene, and Webb start editing the magazine Archigram in 1961. The collective thus takes the name from the magazine, to which Chalk, Crompton, and Herron contributed starting with the third issue, “Expendability: Towards Throwaway Architecture,” also edited in 1963. 2. From the presentation of the exhibition. See Living City Exhibition. Archigram Archival project. Accessed online at The Archigram Archival Project, March 6, 2018: http://archigram.westminster. ac.uk/project.php?id=36 3. Hadas A. Steiner, “Bathrooms, Bubbles and Systems: Archigram and the Landscapes of Transience” (PhD diss., MIT, 2001), 134.

Dream City is one of the segments of the Living City Exhibition (1963), the show that brings together for the first time all the members of Archigram: Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Michael Webb [fig. 0].1 Both chronologically and conceptually, the project is, thus, part of one of the group’s seminal works, as the Living City introduces some of the major themes that will inform Archigram’s later production. Starting with the claim that the city must be considered a “unique organism” and with severe criticism as to the uniformity and dullness of suburbia, the Living City explores how design can contribute to intensifying the urban experience.2 The exhibition presents the urban environment as a domain shaped by two contrasting and yet deeply intertwined social conditions: a newly acquired capacity for subjective expression and the omnipresent, technologically produced, mass forms of communication and consumption. To respond to this situation, Archigram proposes, it is necessary to situate architecture anew, rescaling it as just one among the many material and social constituents of the urban, and to embrace the transience that increasingly pervades Western societies. Instead of being designed as static elements, oblivious to the changes of social life, architecture and the city should be conceived with the same level of dynamism that characterizes social and individual life. The Living City advances Archigram’s interest in the design of spatial systems that admit change, that can respond to individual desires and grant subjective gratification; and reveals an intellectual attitude that is consonant with Karl Popper’s theorization of the “open society” and with emerging critiques of spatial planning.3 Dream City can be partially understood as the extrapolation of

these ideas to the scale of the world. The project proposes building an extremely light aerial net, covering the earth, which acts as a scaffold for individual appropriation and as the basis for extending the urban environment to the whole planet. At the same time, Dream City is, explicitly, a fantasy—and arguably a dark one. The image that summarizes the project uses a symmetrical disposition reminiscent of the Rorschach tests employed to reveal unconscious psychological conditions and mental disorders [fig. 1]. The urban world of Dream City, hovering above a derelict rural landscape, is the projection of our social desires. It is a condition that still doesn’t exist, an unconscious social project, at once desired and feared. It is a world occupied by dismembered, technologized bodies that enjoy occupying the sky while they lack an Earth to rest on [figs. 2]. It is a fragmentary space, made of explosions and violent juxtapositions [fig. 3 and 4]. 261

Ἠλεκτρονικὴ Πολεοδομια Electronic Urbanism Project: 26. Author: Takis Zenetos (1926—1977). Date: 1962—1974. Themes: Automation. Cybernetics. Human-Nature Split. Parallelism.

Figure 0. A: Satellite-towns. B: Satellite-continents (articulate spherical surfaces). After Takis Zenetos. 1963.

270

Takis Zenetos

1. For a complete description of the project see Takis Zenetos, “Town and Dwelling in the Future. Town Planning in Space. A study, 1962,” Architektoniki 41 (1963): 48–55; and Takis Zenetos, Electronic Urbanism—City Planning and Electronics, Parallel Structures (Athens: Architecture in Greece Press, 1969). The study was subsequently expanded in Takis Zenetos, “Electronic Urbanism, City Planning and Electronics,” Architecture in Greece 3 (1969): 112–119; Takis Zenetos, “Electronic Urbanism, Town Planning and Electronics,” Architecture in Greece 7 (1973): 112–119; and Takis Zenetos, “Electronic Urbanism, Town Planning and Electronics,” Architecture in Greece 8 (1974): 122–135. Zenetos dates the first version of the project in 1962, when he presents it at the Annual Exhibition of the Organization of the Model Home. In this text we use the date 1963 to refer to the first version of the project, published that year. 2. Zenetos, “Town and Dwelling in the Future,” not numbered. This is for Zenetos, in any case, a stage previous to the human occupation of other planets. 3. Zenetos, “Electronic Urbanism, City Planning and Electronics” (1969), 117. 4. Zenetos summarized his technical credo in three main points: “1) minimise structural loads; 2) make the least possible use of earth surface; 3) take into account technologies.” See Zenetos, “Electronic Urbanism, City Planning and Electronics” (1969), 117. 5. It must be noted that, despite the detail, Zenetos suggests that his system could be replaced in the future by a completely tensile system, where all the buildings would hang from floating columns.

Greek architect Takis Zenetos explicitly articulates his planetary project Electronic Urbanism around the notion of parallelism, the definition of a settlement system in layers above Earth. The project’s initial title (1963) is “Town and Dwelling in the Future. Town Planning in Space,” but between 1969 and 1974, Zenetos denominates the work with variations of the title of his book Electronic Urbanism—City Planning and Electronics, Parallel Structures (1969).1 Humanity’s future, electronics, and parallelism are thus the interlinked themes of the project throughout its decade long elaboration. Zenetos argues that a series of global problems—intense urbanization, population growth, environmental degradation, and lack of food resources—can be solved if humans “exploit all the altitude of the atmosphere.”2 For him, the development of ongoing trends in construction and digital technologies should facilitate the construction of a planetary network of elevated buildings, rising as high as one thousand floors, and the consequent recuperation of most of the earth’s surface for nature and agriculture [fig. 0]. No doubt, this is a utopian vision, imagined for the distant future. Yet, Zenetos believes that the construction of such a system could begin as early as 1980, once the technologies that make it possible become widely available.3 Hence Zenetos’s project oscillates between determining actions to implement it in the short-term and a vision of a condition to be achieved in the long run. In this final stage, Electronic Urbanism would restructure the earth as an all-encompassing, collective construction visible from outer space [fig. 1]. Technical rationality drives the futuristic character of Zenetos’s world project.4 A member of many scientific societies, Zenetos supports any design decision based on factual considerations: lists of inventions, research, and patents justify the technologies that appear in the project and the architect’s claims about the plausibility of absolute automation and digitization of communications and experiences. Parallelism is also technically justified. Electronic Urbanism radically investigates structural suspension as a way to minimize the use of material. Only widely separated supports, containing vertical communications, work in compression, while tensioned cables suspend the rest of the vertical and horizontal forces [fig. 2]. Zenetos’s representations emphasize this technical rigor. Structures are carefully detailed [fig. 3].5 So are the utilities, the partitions, and even the furniture; all of them presented as elements of a technical catalogue that can be implemented, by any individual, in a variety of ways [fig. 4]. The society of Electronic Urbanism is also entirely shaped by technological systems. On the project, information and communications flow through digital chan271

Imaginary Cities Project: 27. Author: Raimund Abraham (1933â&#x20AC;&#x201D;2010). Date: 1961â&#x20AC;&#x201D;1967. Themes: Autonomy. Linearity. Monumentality. Remoteness.

Figure 0. Air Ocean City. Living capsule. After Raimund Abraham. 1966.

280

Raimund Abraham

1. Eric Owen Moss, “The Presence of Absence,” in In the Absence of Raimund Abraham: Vienna Architecture Conference 2010, ed. Peter Noever and Wolf D. Prix (Vienna: MAK, 2011), 53. 2. Carlos Brillembourg and Raimund Abraham, “Raimund Abraham,” BOMB 77 (2001): 60. 3. Norbert Miller, “Imagination and the Calculus of Reality,” in Raimund Abraham (Un)Built, ed. Brigitte Groihofer (New York: Springer, 1996), 11. 4. Raimund Abraham, “The Enigma of the Muses,” in Groihofer, Raimund Abraham (Un)Built, 124. 5. Raimund Abraham, “In Anticipation of Architecture,” in Groihofer, Raimund Abraham (Un)Built, 114. 6. John Hejduk, “Raimund Abraham, Architect,” in Groihofer, Raimund Abraham (Un)Built, 214. On this point, Hejduk recalls the image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Annunciation, whose angel gently touches Earth after descending from the sky.

“Raimund was a cosmologist. I have really no word for what I thought he was looking for.”1 In cosmology the formation of theories and hypotheses about the formation of the universe derives from mathematics and physics; Raimund Abraham believes one expresses such hypotheses through drawings. As long as architecture is not built, drawing is inevitably the predominant means through which one conveys meaning. Abraham’s work takes this fact to the extreme and stretches the practice of drawing to the point of divorcing it from its secondary, functional role, until it acquires its own, autonomous status. Drawing, then, is no longer attached to a necessary representation of an anticipated reality, but it is a reality of its own.2 When displaced from process to end, drawings become the mechanism to conceive other worlds that, through dissimilitude, comment on the one we live in. Abraham uses this method not only to reflect on society, but also to attack the profession of architecture, which he criticizes for being too centered on the act of building. In his view, investing drawing with autonomy is a step of resistance against “the ignorant self-confidence displayed by the building architects . . . victims of their own compulsion to build.”3 Abraham’s desire is to imagine architecture [fig. 0].4 The relation between architecture and architectural drawing starts with a collision. That is the basis of Abraham’s view regarding the ontological grounds of the discipline. An idea violates a silence; a drawing cuts a space onto which it places an idea; thoughts collide with matter. Only then does design surface to reconcile the original encounter. Design is a secondary act. The collision, however, is primary and manifests in architecture in different forms: from denying function to emancipating objects from gravity. Architecture happens in that moment of contact, which Abraham refers back to the archetypal image of the horizon, the site where Earth touches sky.5 The horizon is the line that holds maximal tension. It holds the suspension and anticipation of the meeting between “the uppermost surface of the earth” and “the undermost surface of the sky.” Commenting on this exact moment prior to the touching of the surfaces, John Hejduk mentions how emblematically that represents Abraham’s work for it involves mystery, grace, and creation.6 The horizon does not belong to either of the two sides that create it. As a result, it concentrates all its potential between the two, reducing “the whole world to a line where two dimensions collide.” It is like the contraction of language to its 281

O Mundo na Idade da CibernĂŠtica The World in the Cybernetics Era Project: 28. Author: Sergio Bernardes (1919â&#x20AC;&#x201D;2002). Date: 1965. Themes: Automation. Cybernetics. Ecology. Nomadism.

Figure 0. The Sun Never Sets for the Man of the Future. After Sergio Bernardes. 1965.

290

Sergio Bernardes

1. Sergio Bernardes, “Revolução,” in Módulo Especial: Sergio Bernardes (Rio de Janeiro, 1983), 3. 2. Bernardes, directed by Gustavo Gama Rodrigues and Paulo de Barros (6D Filmes e Rinoceronte Produções, 2014), DVD. 3. Sergio Bernardes, “Letter to Clarice Bernardes” [November 2, 1968], referenced in Rodrigues and Barros, Bernardes.

One of the most important and controversial figures of Brazil’s late modernism is Rio de Janeiro–born architect Sergio Bernardes. If it weren’t for his disdain for the word “revolution,” it would not be an overstatement to call Bernardes a revolutionary. The architect prefers thinking about his work as “evolutionary” for, in his terms, evolution is a natural human process, whereas revolution is an unnatural rupture to be avoided.1 Bernardes’s work can be read, though, through each of those lenses. On one hand, Bernardes situates even his most radical visions on the fringe of the sequence of events that build up the present. On the other hand, his work and thought are neither confined to nor limited by established conventions and the status quo, but rather addresses wide-reaching organizational changes on the existing spatial and social structures. Evolution to Bernardes also means that humans should look beyond established conventions. Coherently, the architect develops a radical ethics of work. Bernardes avoids looking back at past projects, to the point that he plans to burn his whole archive more than once. Similarly, at the peak of his professional career, he secretly leaves for New York, disappearing and leaving everything behind.2 Later, in a letter, he states that he needed to dedicate his life solely to his work to be able to properly engage with the scale at which the world should be addressed. A scale that is so large that it makes any of his personal affairs insignificantly small and ultimately forces him to deny that the past can play a role in the present.3 Evolution is thus for Bernardes relentless change, rather than continuity. In the early 1960s, Brazil is going through a strong process of modernization. Juscelino Kubitschek’s controversial presidency (1956–1961) politically and economically stabilizes the country. In this context, the construction of Brasília, which the president starts promoting in 1957, not only acts as the sign of the country’s territorial consolidation, but also as the symbol of its integration within international political and economic circuits. Additionally, Brasília consolidates the recognition of such prominent architects as Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer as well as Brazil’s position as a global agent with its own cultural voice and a distinct way of addressing modernity. Bernardes distances himself from this context of architectural production and seeks the references for his own vision of internationalization outside Brazil. In 1965, MoMA’s Visionary Architecture is exhibited at the VIII São Paulo Architecture Biennale, helping Bernardes to align his intellectual concerns with 291

Amereida and Travesías Project: 29. Authors: Alberto Cruz (1917—2013), Godofredo Iommi (1917—2001), et al. Date: 1966—. Themes: Colonialism. Geo-visualization. Geopolitics. Place(lessness).

Manila

Tahiti

Cadiz

Frente Espanol Frente Viajes

Figure 0. The Americas between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. After Oscar Butazzoni et al. 1970.

300

Alberto Cruz, Godofredo Iommi, et al.

1. Fernando Pérez Oyarzun, “The Valparaiso School,” in Valparaíso School: Open City Group, ed. Raúl Rispa, Rodrigo Pérez de Arce, and Fernando Pérez Oyarzun (Montreal: MQUP, 2003), 8. 2. Oscar Buttazoni, Manuel Casanueva, Alberto Cruz, Claudio Díaz, Godofredo Iommi, Jorge Sánchez, and Juan Verchueren, Para una Situación de América Latina en el Pacífico. Work presented to the Centro de Estudios del Pacífico for the Conferencia del Pacífico (September 27 to October 3, 1970), 2. Accessed online October 10, 2018: https://wiki.ead.pucv.cl/ Para_una_Situación_de_América_Latina_en_el_Pac%C3%ADfico. See also “Claves de Amereida son presentadas en la 13 Bienal de Venecia,” https://www.ead. pucv.cl/2012/bienal-venecia/. Accessed October 15, 2018.

How can the merging of architecture and poetry contribute to uniting the South American continent? How can it produce a collective idea of the continent that situates South America once again within the global imaginary and global political relations [fig. 0]? Chilean architect Alberto Cruz, Argentinian poet Godofredo Iommi, and the collective of architects who join them in the early 1950s to launch the Valparaiso School of Architecture anew, turn these questions into a leitmotif for architectural education and for the practice of building. As the School’s founders and most influential faculty members, Cruz, Iommi, and their colleagues shape the pedagogical methods and objectives of the institution. Originally, the group seeks to reveal that architecture is a collective, poetic enterprise. With that goal, they promote the writing of collective poems called phalenes to define the School’s common objectives.1 The most significant of those poems, Amereida, expresses their collective vision of South America and becomes the milestone for all the school’s activities for years. Not only are there two later versions expanding the original text, but for five decades now, the School has developed a range of activities extending the purpose of Amereida into different domains of action. Initiatives as diverse as creating a legal document for the reform of university education in 1968, the self-constructed Valparaiso Open City, and, especially, the series of journeys and architectural interventions across South America referred to as Travesías (journeys) are all conceived as continuations of Amereida’s continental project by other means.2 Amereida results, in fact, from a voyage that anticipates the Travesías. In 1965, Cruz, Iommi, and a group of architects, philosophers, and poets travel from Cape Horn to Bolivia, following an almost straight path from South to North. The end of the journey, in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, reveals this city as South America’s symbolic and geometrical core. The poem, written immediately after the trip, presents similar revelations about South America’s structure and conditions, establishing them as the foundations for the collective construction of a united continent. Amereida’s title makes that foundational intention explicit by referencing the Aeneid, Virgil’s poem about Rome’s mythical origins. In so doing, the title also highlights that South America is united through Latin culture and not only through its indigenous origins. Amereida’s theoretical underpinnings derive from the writings of Edmundo O’Gorman (1906–1995), a Mexican historian and thinker who devoted his work to understanding what the notion of America means as a spatial and 301

La Forma del Territorio Form of Territory Project: 30. Authors: Vittorio Gregotti (1927) with Emilio Battisti, Dario Borradori, Paolo Caruso, Pierluigi Crosta, Sergio Crotti, Roberto Orefice, Cesare Pellegrini. Date: 1966. Themes: Geo-visualization. Geography. Territorial Gestalt. Territorial Intensification.

Figure 0. Scheme of an urban development on a hilly terrain. After Giorgio Piccinato. 1965.

310

Vittorio Gregotti et al.

1. Significantly, the English translation of Gregotti’s editorial included in Edilizia Moderna is titled “The Shape of Landscape,” and not “Form of Territory,” as it was later more literally translated (see Vittorio Gregotti, “Form of Territory,” OASE 80 (2009): 7–22). The translation highlights not only the limited diffusion that the notion of territory had in the 1960s in English-language architectural discourse, but also the strong intermingling between the notions of landscape and territory in the discourse of the authors. Paolo Caruso, Emilio Battisti, Sergio Crotti, and Cesare Pellegrini use the word paesaggio (landscape) in the titles of their essays. Assimilating the two concepts, which Gregotti acknowledges in his editorial, derives in many ways from the geographic literature that the authors privilege. See especially in this respect Emilio Battisti and Sergio Crotti, “Note sulla lettura del paesaggio antropogeografico,” Edilizia Moderna 87–88 (1966): 53–59. 2. Arturo Lanzani, Immagini del territorio e idee di piano, 1943– 1963: dagli approcci generalizzanti all’interpretazione dei contesti locali (Milan: F. Angeli, 1996).

Tens of aerial pictures of agricultural fields and productive landscapes, from millenary terraced hills in Israel, to large states of industrialized cereal cultivation in Napa, California. Photographs and technical drawings of dams, highways, and infrastructures. Underground tanks. Fragments of villages, towns, cities, metropolises. Natural landscapes—mountains, deserts, rivers, oceans— affected by different degrees of human occupation. Cultivated fields in the Sahara. Photographs of lunar relief. Cartographies of lunar relief. Archaeological sites. Still inhabited prehistoric settlements. Medieval cities. New York skyscrapers. Hiroshima devastated in 1945. Volcanic eruptions. Different forms of monumental symbolization of geography: the Carnac menhirs, Fischer von Erlach’s imaginary reconstruction of Mount Athos, Mount Rushmore. The list may continue. La Forma del territorio (The form of territory), a special issue of Edilizia Moderna that Vittorio Gregotti edited in 1966, presents the world in all its exuberance through constant conceptual, scalar, and temporal superpositions [figs. 0 and 1]. The graphic organization of the journal is in itself the visual expression of a world project. The journal’s proposition about how the world should be seen—extremely concrete, physical, fragmented, multifarious, nonhierarchical, synchronic—is a statement about how it must be built: these very properties pervade the essays through which Gregotti and the other contributors to Edilizia Moderna explain their worldview and the role architecture plays in building it. To resituate the discipline of architecture as an agent of territorial construction is, for Gregotti and his peers, the key step toward that new form of world project. Admittedly, their use of the concept of territory is a malleable one: it integrates, in an indistinct manner, notions as diverse as geography, landscape (paesaggio), or surroundings (circomdante)1. The open character of the term,

even its imprecision, is nonetheless indicative of the group’s determined attempt to change the ways in which contemporary Italian architecture and culture is considering the topic, and of their ambition to use the term as to invoke and address a new set of themes. From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, the idea of territory in Italy is mostly associated with the expansion of the city—in debates about the “città-territorio” and “la nuova dimensione”—or with ideas of regional planning.2 For Gregotti, it is in turn a way to address global conditions of sociospatial structuring which exceed the regional and urban limits: “In five years we can build polders or colonize a desert; a hydro-electric dam transforms the entire configuration of a valley in a few years; it is possible 311

Studi per una Operante Storia del Territorio Study for an Operational History of Territory Project: 31. Author: Saverio Muratori (1910â&#x20AC;&#x201D;1973). Date: 1967â&#x20AC;&#x201D;1973. Themes: Geo-visualization. Geography. Human-Earth System. Territorial Gestalt.

Figure 0. Lines of propagation and seasonal migration. After Saverio Muratori. ca. 1969.

320

Saverio Muratori

1. Saverio Muratori, Civiltà e territorio (Rome: Centro studi di storia urbanistica, 1963), 28–30. Additionally, the notion of crisis is the central object of the book Muratori wrote immediately before Civiltà e territorio. See Saverio Muratori, Architettura e civiltà in crisi (Rome: Centro studi di storia urbanistica, 1963). All the translations are by the author. 2. Muratori, Civiltà e territorio, 491. 3. Muratori, Civiltà e territorio, 491. 4. Muratori, Civiltà e territorio, 28.

It is only at a late, conclusive moment in his career that Saverio Muratori becomes preoccupied with the territorial articulation of the “ecumene” and the “world” (mondo). He publishes his theoretical treatise on this topic, Civiltà e territorio (Civilization and territory) in 1967 at the age of fifty-seven. The accompanying, unfinished cartographic project Studi per una operante storia del territorio (Study for an operative history of territory) is interrupted by the author’s death in 1973. Until then Muratori had sought to formulate an alternative to what he understood as the modern “ideologies of crisis”—in which the relentless drive toward social and spatial transformation disrupted environmental equilibriums—by investigating a nonmodern form of intervening at the architectural and urban scales.1 With that goal his seminal research Studi per una operante storia de Venezia (Study for an operative history of Venice, 1959) established the notion of operative history and the methodological fundamentals of typomorphological analysis and design. The procedures of historic reconstruction by cartographic means developed in that study show the historic processes of construction of the city and reveal how these rely on a series of recurrent architectural types. In Muratori’s view, it is the recognition of these types, their recuperation as the primary mechanism of urban design, which can set the base for anticritical forms of urban development that preserve the continuity of history. Conceived as an operational-oriented form of making history, cartographic reconstruction is then a tool of design. His works on territory share the goal of finding alternatives to the ideologies of crisis and cartographic procedures of his studies on cities, but Muratori now understands that solutions to crises can only come after a reflection about the spatial articulation of the world scale. Civiltà e territorio sets the theoretical basis of Studi per una operante storia del territorio. The book’s explicit theme, the “planning of the world,” reflects Muratori’s attempt to find the conceptual and methodological support to intervene in a situation where civilization—his term for humanity’s social and spatial organization—has found its dimensional limits.2 Formerly an expanding phenomenon that affected only parts of the earth, civilization now constitutes a dimensionally fixed system: the “ecumene” covers the entire surface of the globe, “remaining always identical to itself.”3 This situation, which only permits internal growth, requires for Muratori finding a “relatively stable way of putting into orbit the system man-Earth” by determining the laws that can govern the spatial organization of humanity.4 It is at this point where the notion of 321

Beitrag zur Planetarisierung der Erde Contribution to the Planetarization of the Earth Project: 32. Author: Volker Sayn (1937). Date: 1968. Themes: Abstraction. Circulation. Linearity. Megastructure.

Zustand 1

ZUSTAND 2

ZUSTAND 3

Figure 0. Soria y Mataâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Linear City as model, and evolution from existing distribution of cities to proposed scheme. After Volker Sayn. 1968.

330

Volker Sayn

1. André Bideau, “Elusive Ungers,” AA Files 64 (2012): 3–16. According to the author, the urban landscape resulting from the war, “dominated by voids rather than by buildings, will be the mark of the city for another three decades.” 2. Volker Sayn, Modifiziertes Bewertungssystem (hier Hassloch System gennant) für den bewohnbaren Himmelskörper von Enine, dargestellt am Beispiel der Erde als Beitrag zur ‘Planetarisierung, Oswald Mathias Ungers’s studio booklet 13 (May 1968): 1.

A victim of the geopolitical conflicts that follow World War II, West Berlin is a walled-in city in 1968, a segment of a historic capital divided between two antagonist political regimes. The city’s landscape displays all too well the consequences of the war and of its aftermath. Since 1961 the Berlin Wall encircles the city, impeding free circulation between East and West Berlin. A broad area of urban wastelands surrounds this huge concrete frontier, and multiple, vast, empty spaces remain where the many buildings destroyed by the war previously stood.1 Contribution to the Planetarization of the Earth directly faces this physical and geopolitical context. The project is Volker Sayn’s entry into the 1968 Schinkel competition. As West Berlin could not expand physically to house its new inhabitants, the competition brief proposed to densify the city by designing a building over a clover-leaf highway intersection in Berlin Zehlendorf. Sayn’s response to the brief cannot be more provocative. A recent graduate from Technical University Berlin, where he was a disciple of Oswald Mathias Ungers, Sayn defies the type of piecemeal intervention that the competition promotes, which he decries as “purely futile attempts (Sisyphus attempts) to solve the contradiction by perfecting the existing system.”2 Instead of a building for the intersection, he proposes a hybrid between transportation infrastructure and building that circumscribes the whole globe [fig. 1]. Oblivious to all political frontiers, the building grows following the lines of parallels and meridians, creating a gridded graticule system that Sayn names the Hassloch system [fig. 2]. The name Hassloch suggests a drastic, but also humorous, alteration of existing territorial logics. Hassloch is a minuscule German rural village whose houses form built ribbons along the roads, preserving big areas of landscape between them [fig. 3]. Sayn’s proposal is an augmented version of this system. The design superimposes ribbons of buildings over the highway system, creating huge, highly technical, built complexes. Between them, however, the natural space remains unaltered by any form of construction. The upscaling of Hassloch’s spatial logic seeks the coexistence of dense metropolitan conditions and natural systems. It contests the forms of dispersion and sprawl that characterize metropolitan systems as well as their environmental externalities of degradation and pollution. At the same time, the design avoids any form of rural nostalgia by fostering an ambitious project of modernization and population redistribution. One of the rationales of the project is to concentrate all the economic 331

The Continuous City Project: 33. Authors: Alan Boutwell and Michael Mitchell. Date: 1968â&#x20AC;&#x201D;1971. Themes: Circulation. Interiorization. Megastructure. Parallelism.

Figure 0. Continuous Urbanism. A City around the world. After Alan Boutwell. 1971.

340

Alan Boutwell and Michael Mitchell

1. Alan Boutwell and Michael Mitchell, “Planning on a National Scale,” Domus 470 (January 1969): 2. The authors had previously elaborated the notion of comprehensive design in Alan Boutwell and Michael Mitchell, “Das umfassende Bausystem,” Bauen + Wohnen 2 (1965): 71–76; and in Alan Boutwell and Mike Mitchell, “Das umfassende Bausystem,” Werk 53 (April 1966): 143. 2. See in this respect Cornelia Escher, “Alan Boutwell: From the Modular Housing System to the Continuous City,” in Megastructure Reloaded: Visionäre Stadtentwürfe der Sechzigerjahre Reflektiert von Zeitgenössischen Künstlern = Visionary Architecture and Urban Design of the Sixties Reflected by Contemporary Artists, ed. Sabrina Van Der Ley and Markus Richter (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 165–167. Escher traces the relation of Boutwell’s work to the investigations on the rationalization and systematization of construction techniques carried out in Germany by Konrad Wachsmann, Eckhard Schultze-Fielitz (see project 24), and, especially, Max Mengeringhausen. 3. Peter Hall, The World Cities (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 3–4 and 15.

When English architects Alan Boutwell and Michael Mitchell publish their project for a Continuous City in Domus, they present themselves as “comprehensive designers.”1 This ambitious, overarching self-identification reflects its authors’ attempt to conceive a project that can exceed the conceptual and dimensional limits of architecture—their design is as much a large building as it is a city and a way to reorganize geography—and that considers integrally all the aspects human existence may require. The more detailed drawings of the Continuous City [figs. 1 and 2] show a vast, multilevel building, measuring roughly ten kilometers in length, standing around one hundred meters above the ground. Its organization and form of construction are approached from a highly technical perspective.2 The elevated city is halved by a bridge. One half comprises residential, cultural, administrative, and leisure functions, and the other one half comprises industries and research and educational centers. Together with these conventional functions of an urban plan, the proposal integrates infrastructures for energy production (a nuclear plant), water treatment, and vertical and horizontal circulation (heliports, elevators, escalators, monorails) in order to ensure that the building is able to carry out every necessary function. At ground level, connected to the city through elevators, there are enormous parking areas from which a new road structure emerges. It segregates means of transportation according to their speed, and geometrically orders the territory in a systematic triangular pattern. The technical rationality of the Continuous City thus operates at both the scale of the city itself and of the territory it aims to reorganize. One of the project’s plans shows how the design might be placed in Germany, in the Ruhr region [fig. 3]. Beyond biographical reasons (Boutwell lived in Dusseldorf ) the selection of this area is highly significant. The Ruhr’s coal mining economy and industrial production generated a booming urban system, where original settlements spread into a quasi-continuous, sprawling, one-hundred-kilometer city. Acknowledging the importance and novelty of these conditions, in the mid-1960s the Ruhr starts being analyzed as a megalopolis, as a conglomeration of cities whose relations are creating a unified urban region—notably, by the English geographer Peter Hall, for whom the Ruhr operates at the world scale and represents a global trend of urbanization.3 Boutwell and Mitchell address some of the spatial consequences of this process with technical rigor. For the designers of the Continuous City, housing population growth in the air serves as an antidote to the uncontrolled consumption of land urban expansion 341

totale stadt, ein globales modell integral urban, a global model Project: 34. Author: Fritz Haller (1924â&#x20AC;&#x201D;2012). Date: 1968â&#x20AC;&#x201D;1975. Themes: Abstraction. Typology. Automation. World Urbanization.

Figure 0. Third Order Unit. After Fritz Haller. 1975.

350

Fritz Haller

1. Fritz Haller, totale stadt, ein modell. integral urban, a model (Olten: Walter-Verlag, 1968), 60. 2. Nils Röller, “Architekturen der Bodenlosigkeit. Haller und Flusser im Dialog,” in Fritz Haller: Architekt und Forscher, ed. Laurent Stalder and Georg Vrachliotis (Zurich: GTA Verlag, 2015), 169. 3. Haller, totale stadt, ein globales modell, 9. 4. Already in the first integral urban project, Haller states: “it would seem that the step into the cosmos, which so often appears foolish to us, will give us the necessary experience and methods which are indispensable to the creation of a world worth living in.” See Haller, totale stadt, ein globales modell, 8.

integral urban, a global model (1975) is the second volume amid Fritz Haller’s trilogy of projects about the future of settlements and the world scale. In his first exploration of the theme, integral urban, a model (1968), the idea of integration supports an urban project of nested scales where architecture, technical systems, and means of transportation are designed to operate coordinately. A first order unit of settlement—a single building for 3,200 people—is progressively assembled within a second order unit for 120,000 inhabitants, a third order unit for 4,500,000, and a fourth order unit for 61,000,0000, but without reaching the definition of a fifth unit for the world scale.1 In turn, the third piece of the trilogy, space colony (1987), abandons Earth in order to explore the utmost case of integrated, self-sufficient settlement: the space station. The space colony defines an absolute interior that considers and reconciles every social and material necessity, be it the negotiation between collective life and individual freedom, the ratio of energy production and consumption, or the processes of recycling waste.2 Sitting between the 1968 and the 1987 designs, integral urban, a global model synthesizes the ambitions of both projects. It extends the system of progressive scalar articulation of the first work to the world scale. The fifth order unit of “integral urban is a system of resting and moving objects and energies covering the entire world.” It constitutes a possible “global model” [fig. 1]. At the same time, Haller conceives the internal conditions of the design through the same lens as the project of the space capsule.3 The most important element of integral urban, a global model—the second order unit for 80,000 inhabitants—is a totally interior environment, coordinated in all its aspects through cybernetics and automation, as is the rest of the project [fig. 4].4 The

grouping of these units into vaster complexes apportions the spaces required for the production and supply of food, materials, and energy, thus granting the self-sustainability of the ensemble. Haller’s is a world without mismatches, working always in optimal, efficient coordination. Haller describes integral urban, a global model in a book that combines extremely precise technical drawings—always abstract and diagrammatic plans and sections—with an explanatory, rhetorically quasiscientific, textual apparatus. The book’s format and size, the order and techniques of argumentation, and the means of representation rigorously continue those employed in Haller’s previous integral urban, a model, in order to emphasize that both books constitute a continuous experiment. There is, however, a significant novelty in the second work. The sequential representation of increasingly bigger scales of urban orga-

351

Arcology Project: 35. Author: Paolo Soleri (1919—2013) Date: 1969—2013. Themes: Autonomy. Ecology. Human-Earth System. Monumentality.

LIGHT WELLS PUBLIC NEIGHBORHOOD

PROMENADE

CITY CENTER

PARK

COMMERCIAL FACTORIES AND UTILITIES WAREHOUSING

AUTOMATED PRODUCTION

Figure 0. Babel IIB, a city for 550,000 people. Section. After Paolo Soleri. 1969.

360

Paolo Soleri

1. Antonietta Iolanda Lima, Soleri: Architecture as Human Ecology (New York: Monacelli Press, 2003), 22. 2. Lima, Soleri: Architecture as Human Ecology, 160. 3. Lima, Soleri: Architecture as Human Ecology, 231. 4. Paolo Soleri, Arcosanti: An Urban Laboratory? (San Diego, CA: Avant Books, 1984), 59.

Arcology, a neologism contracting “architecture” and “ecology,” is both the concept through which Paolo Soleri expresses his ideals on the relationship between human-made and natural ecosystems, as well as the architectural and urban forms necessary to bring this relation to life. It is a worldview whose very beginnings can be found in Soleri’s first contact with the Arizona desert and Frank Lloyd Wright, while he was a Taliesin Fellow in 1947. His contact with Wright helped Soleri define his architectural language, either by affinity—admiring the master’s manipulation of light, forms, and materials, for example—or by opposition—such as rejecting Wright’s city–territory ideas.1 The harshness of the desert, in turn, imprinted on Soleri notions of frugality and the cosmic interconnectedness among humans, landscape, and nature. Soleri leaves Taliesin within less than two years to start building a community based on his ecological thinking. In 1956, after concluding a couple of architectural projects, he and some followers begin the construction of Cosanti on a 5-acre plot in Paradise Valley, on the outskirts of Phoenix. Initially conceived as an openly experimental research center for binding nature and architecture, Cosanti later becomes a nonprofit foundation to extend Soleri’s ecological vision. Preceding Arcology, but in similar fashion, the name Cosanti is a combination of two words: cosa (“thing” in Italian), and anti, celebrating the antimaterialistic attitude that guides the philosophy of the group.2 In 1969, the year that marks the publication of Arcology, Soleri takes a big step to “urbanize the (Cosanti) foundation” and to broaden its scope by preparing the construction of Arcosanti. Conceived as a prototype of Arcology and envisioned to house 5,000 people, construction on Arcosanti starts a year later in the middle of the Arizona desert.3 It is organized as an urban laboratory, a

real-time building site for empirical workshops, where students will test new types of habitats. Knowledge will be generated through “doing” and, as such, it will be unashamedly connected to failure. Everything will be a living process without the pretense of finality. Therefore, according to Soleri, it is the antithesis of utopia.4 The most comprehensive view of Arcology becomes available to the broader public with two tandem events. First, in 1969, MIT Press publishes Arcology: The City in the Image of Man. Then, in 1970, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, opens Soleri’s landmark exhibit The Architectural Vision of Paolo Soleri, which by the end of the following year had traveled to the Whit361

No-Stop City Project: 36. Author: Archizoom Associates: Andrea Branzi (1938), Gilberto Corretti, Paolo Deganello, and Massimo Morozzi. Date: 1971. Themes: Abstraction. Infrastructure. Interiorization. Total Urbanization.

Figure 0. Example of a Continuous Plan for Inhabitation. After Archizoom. 1971.

370

Archizoom Associates

1. Manfredo Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” in Architecture Theory Since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998 [1969]), 20 and 29. 2. Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architecture Ideology,” 32. 3. The term “Architettura Radicale” is credited to have been coined post festum by art historian Germano Celant. The coinage referred, with Archizoom, to the collectives Superstudio, U.F.O., Zziggurat, and 9999, and individuals Gianni Pettena and Remo Buti, in Florence; Ugo La Pietra, Alessandro Mendini, Gaetano Pesce, Franco Raggi, and Ettore Sottsass, in Milan; Riccardo Dalisi, in Naples; and the groups Libidarch and Strum, in Turin. See Marie Theres Stauffer, “Utopian Reflections, Reflected Utopias: Urban Designs by Archizoom and Superstudio,” AA Files 47 (2002): 25. Archizoom begins its activities in a shared exhibition with Superstudio initially displayed in Pistoia in 1966 and later in Modena in 1967 and entitled “Superarchitettura.” For Tafuri’s critique of radical architecture, see Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” 30—31. See also Pier Vittorio Aureli, “Manfredo Tafuri, Archizoom, Superstudio, and the Critique of Architectural Ideology,” in Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, ed. Peggy Deamer (New York: Routledge, 2014), 132—150. 4. Emilio Ambasz, “Email 09,” Domus 943 (2011): 34.

The publication of Manfredo Tafuri’s article “Toward a Critique of Architec-

tural Ideology” in 1969 epitomizes the consolidation in Italy of a highly critical

vision of the discipline’s social and political role during the twentieth century. Tafuri reads the evolution of modern architecture in political–economic terms. In this light, the role of the discipline has been to show how “planning” can be an effective technique of control, affecting increasingly large scales of the so-

cial system. Contrary to the confidence that conventional historiography places in the progressive character of modernity, Tafuri believes that architecture is

dominated by an “ideology of planning” whose ultimate effect is to support the

necessities of capital.1 In so doing, the discipline has interiorized the necessity of addressing world processes, but only with the purpose of redressing the imbalances capitalism creates, not challenging them:

“We must realize one thing: that the entire course of modern architecture and the new systems of visual communication was born, developed and brought

into crisis in a grandiose attempt—the last of bourgeois culture—to resolve on the level of an ideology all the more insidious because it lies entirely within

concrete activities and real production cycles, the imbalances, contradictions and delays typical of the capitalistic reorganization of the world market.”2

The work of Italian collective Archizoom has to be read against this critical background. As the most politically committed members of the Architettura

Radicale movement, a loosely organized group of architects that Tafuri se-

verely condemns, Archizoom investigates through its projects how architecture can critically operate under post-Fordist social conditions [project 38].3 The

team shares the Tafurian preoccupation with how architecture addresses pro-

ductive processes and the urge to respond to their global dimension. Similarly, Archizoom assumes Tafuri’s skepticism toward the capacity of architecture to

actually transform the status quo—an incapacity that post-Fordism has nothing but reinforced.

For Archizoom’s members, architecture can only become a positive social force

after a change of political settings.4 Consequently, their capacity to foster that change does not derive from the activity of building—a possibility that was

also extremely difficult in the Italian economic context—but through a refor371

Puertas Gates Project: 37. Author: Juan Navarro Baldeweg (1939). Date: 1971â&#x20AC;&#x201D;1975. Themes: Cybernetics. Decentralization. Telecommunication. Typology.

Figure 0. Global interactions between users of ISOFO transducers. After Juan Navarro Baldeweg. 1970.

380

Juan Navarro Baldeweg

1. For the use of geometry see, for example, the Canal Theatre in Madrid (2000–2008) or the New Bibliotheca Hertziana (1995–2013). For the ways of manipulating light see, for example, the Salvador Allende Cultural Center (1993). For the uses of materials see the Salzburg Congress Hall (1992), the Bois Performance Centre (1991), or the Classrooms for the Pompeu Fabra University (1996–2004). 2. Juan Navarro Baldeweg, “La Geometría complementaria,” in Navarro, La Habitación Vacante, ed. José Muñoz Millanes (Paterna, Spain: Editorial Pre-Textos, 1999), 13–21. 3. Juan Navarro Baldeweg, “Tapiz, Aire, Red,” and “Un Objeto es una sección,” in Navarro, La Habitación Vacante, 39–43 and 43–47. See also Luis Rojo de Castro, “Conversation with Juan Navarro Baldeweg,” El Croquis 73 [II] (1995): 34–36. 4. Navarro, “La Geometría Complementaria,” 37. Partial translation. 5. Among the intellectual references Navarro uses in the work of this period are the pioneer of cybernetics William Ross Ashby; the founder of systems theory Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy; ecologist and systems theorist Howard T. Odum; anthropologist Edward T. Hall, who developed the concept of proxemics to understand the human use of space; and mathematicians Claude Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver, authors of The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948). 6. The research unit, directed by Peter Cowan, was a joint program created by the Bartlett School of Architecture and London School of Economics. See Ignacio Moreno, Dibujos Mentales. Principios del universo creativo de Juan Navarro Baldeweg (Madrid: Ediciones Asimétricas, 2017), 86 and 326, note 18.

Since the mid-1970s the goal of architect and visual artist Juan Navarro has been to express the universal constituents of the natural environment, such as light, atmospheric effects, and gravity. By dealing with intangible and variable forces that belong to the realm of energy and not to solid materiality, Navarro’s work aims to overcome the fixed, static, and isolated character of matter and location. In his buildings, this ambition implies challenging the specific conditions of the site. The forms of plan and section are often disassociated from the geometries of the context, or they combine these geometries in such a way that they negate each other. The use of skylights creates different light effects, but these are zenithal and thus avoid visual links to the particular location. The selection of colors and surface materials multiplies the temporal variations light produces.1 The interaction of these elements favors a sense of dematerialization, as if the buildings were merged with the energies that traverse them. To describe this work, Navarro has developed a conceptual vocabulary that connects architecture to the phenomena that lie beyond it. The architect presents his buildings as “resonance chambers” or as “complementary geometries” of the universal energies that surround us.2 Denying the notion of isolated objects, his buildings are segments or “sections” of an “infinite tapestry” of natural forces.3 Yet, Navarro’s interest in revealing those natural, universal constituents of space that grant “our participation in the world that surround us” is born of a seemingly opposite understanding of human engagement with the world.4 His early work from 1967 to 1975 addresses the artificial and technological organization of the planet. It focuses on the global emergence of what he terms “artificial systems,” and uses systems theory, cybernetics, and theories of proxemics and information to explore the role of architecture in this new context.5 This research employs a variety of means. In 1969, Navarro completes his PhD dissertation, titled “Sistemas urbanos: Exploraciones para la elaboración de modelos urbanos desde el punto de vista cibernético” (Urban systems: explorations to elaborate urban models from a cybernetic point of view), which is greatly influenced by his previous participation in London in the Joint Unit for Planning Research.6 Between 1969 and 1971, he combines his teaching at the Madrid School of Architecture with design research at the Centro de Cálculo of Madrid University on the topic “Aplicaciones de la teoría de autómatas en arquitectura y urbanismo” (Uses of automatons theory on architecture and urbanism). Between 1971 and 1975, he is a Research Fellow at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), after being invited by the center’s 381

Atti Fundamentale Fundamental Acts Project: 38. Author: Superstudio: Adolfo Natalini (1941), Cristiano Toraldo di Francia (1941), Roberto Magris (1935), Alessandro Poli (1941), Alessandro Magris (1941), Gian Piero Frassinelli (1939). Date: 1972â&#x20AC;&#x201D;1973. Themes: Abstraction. Environmental Control. Monumentality. Telecommunications.

STAZIONE ORBITANTE DI RINVIO

TRANSMETTITORE LUNARE ELABORATORE

STAZIONE RICEVENTE

CONO DI TRANSMISSIONE

Figure 0. Five Fundamental Acts: Education. After Superstudio. 1972.

390

Superstudio

1. Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, “Memories of Superstudio,” in Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocations, 1956–1976, ed. Martin Van Schaik and Otakar Máčel (Munich: Prestel, 2005), 70.

One of the most powerful representations of Superstudio’s Continuous Monument (1969) depicts a fish-eye view of the project stretching from East River to Manhattan to the extremely curved horizon. By occupying both foreground and background with the Monument, the image represents the unstoppable continuity of the project around the planet, and offers a seemingly impossible scalar reconciliation between the monument, the skyscrapers of the transformed New York City—renamed as New New York—and the globe. Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, a founding member with Adolfo Natalini of Superstudio, notes yet another of the central propositions contained in the image.1 In Manhattan, the Continuous Monument frames and contains a fragment of the city, the downtown skyscrapers preserved within a rectangle. Toraldo di Francia argues that the tradition of modern urbanism conceived the metropolis as the way to transform an original nature, which was preserved as a vestige within the urban fabric—paradigmatically in Le Corbusier’s voids and, to the case, in New York’s Central Park [project 15]. By preserving skyscrapers as relics, the Continuous Monument emphasizes that it represents a new stage and a new scale of civilization, one for which the modern metropolis is only an archaeological remain. At this stage, the planet is the only possible scale of reference. The first sketches Superstudio does for the project—titled Viaduct of Architecture as a competition entry for the 1969 Tri-national Biennial Trigon, in Graz, Austria—depict the thesis even more dramatically. All the metropolises of the world explode. The dispersed elements of their urban fabric at first orbit above the earth and then progressively coalesce to form a single built structure around the world. Superstudio’s whole production in the period 1968–1972 constitutes a constant investigation of this postmetropolitan world scale. In the Continuous Monument, a built infrastructure circumvents the world as a new parallel. Interplanetary Architecture (1970–1971) envisages a single Earth-Moon entity, bringing the satellite closer to our planet and linking both by building a connective infrastructure. Three Projects for the Planet (1971) suggests three planetary alternatives: to contain the earth within a cube, to dig a gigantic cube in it—from the earth’s crust to its core—and to create an equatorial, built ring. During the same years, Twelve Ideal Cities proposes to reconfigure the settlement structure of the planet with new urban models. They occupy rivers, deserts, prairies, the atmosphere, and the interplanetary space. Five Fundamental Acts (1972) addresses “the relationship between architecture (as the conscious formalization

391

The City of the Captive Globe Project: 39. Authors: Rem Koolhaas (1944) with Madelon Vriesendorp (1945). Date: 1972â&#x20AC;&#x201D;1973. Themes: Abstraction. Autonomy. Total Urbanization. Typology.

Figure 0. The City of the Captive Globe. Fragments. After Rem Koolhaas and Madelon Vriesendorp. 1978.

400

Rem Koolhaas with Madelon Vriesendorp

1. Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, and Zoe Zenghelis, “Exodus,” Casabella 378 (1973): 42–45. The OMA partnership includes Elia Zenghelis until 1987, when the Greek architect starts his own professional practice with Eleni Gigantes.

The axonometric view that represents The Square of the Captive Globe was

2. For complete information about the Exodus project see Rem Koolhaas, Bruce Mau, and Office for Metropolitan Architecture, SMLXL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 2–21. See also Martin Van Schaik and Otakar Máčel, eds., Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocations, 1956–1976 (Munich: Prestel, 2005), 236–253.

Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) [figs. 0 and 1].1 Their entry complements

originally designed in 1972 for Exodus, or The Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture—the project that Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesen-

dorp, and Zoe Zenghelis submitted to The City as a Meaningful Environment competition and that marks the beginning of activities for their Office for Koolhaas’s recently finished diploma project at the Architectural Association

(AA) with some texts and additional collages. Its argument begins with the division of London into two parts: the Good Half, a continuous rectangular

band delimited by two gigantic walls that frame the space of new constructions, and the Bad Half, or London’s existing urban fabric.2 The Good Half is an area

3. Importantly, the representation is similar to the cover of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited. See Ingrid Böck, Six Canonical Projects by Rem Koolhaas (Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2015), 42.

of voluntary seclusion, inhabited by the citizens who wish to live in it, perma-

4. Böck, Six Canonical Projects by Rem Koolhaas, 42.

of spatial and social division that Koolhaas had discovered in his study of the

5. Böck, Six Canonical Projects by Rem Koolhaas, 42.

nently separated from those condemned to remain in the Bad Half. Dominated by the idea of voluntary confinement, the tone of Exodus is dystopian and cynical: it presents as a positive project the use of architecture as a means Berlin Wall (1970–1972). For the authors, it is only by accepting Exodus’s

architectural constraints that the real fruition of the possibilities of life and imagination can take place. Each of the transversal sectors that form the central band allows for a radical exploration of a form of life, experience, or social

relation. The one named The Square of the Captive Globe is the symbol of this vision of Exodus as an incubator of social and spatial possibilities. The drawing

depicts the terrestrial globe, confined within a sunken square and surrounded by a field of contrasting architectural images.3 This coexistence of architectural

visions represents the very theme of the project: “This square is devoted to the

artificial conception and accelerated birth of theories, interpretations, mental constructions and proposals, and their infliction on the World.”4 Later the text

presents the different architectures of the square as: “an enormous incubator for the World itself. They are breeding on the globe, changing it, adding something to its contents.”5

Exodus ends with an ironic negation of its status of unrealizable fiction: in the

project’s “Epilogue,” the authors affirm that its construction only presuppos-

es “a fundamental belief in cities.” The second life of the Captive Globe emphasizes the urban nature of the project. The design, now retitled The City of

the Captive Globe, reappears in the “Appendix” of Delirious New York (1978), 401

Planetary Architecture Project: 40. Author: Zaha Hadid (1950â&#x20AC;&#x201D;2016). Date: 1977â&#x20AC;&#x201D;1983. Themes: Abstraction. Autonomy. Human-Nature Split. Immateriality.

Figure 0. The Peak. Fragment. After Zaha Hadid. 1983.

410

Zaha Hadid

1. Rem Koolhaas, quoted in Alvin Boyarsky, “Alvin Boyarsky Interviews Zaha Hadid,” in Zaha Hadid, Planetary Architecture Two (London: Architectural Association, 1983), 4.

“Now she is a PLANET, in her own inimitable orbit.”1

2. Zaha Hadid, interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, “The Russian Avant-Garde or Zaha Hadid’s Influences,” in Zaha Hadid: Early Paintings and Drawings, ed. Amira Gad and Agnes Gryczkowska (London: Serpentine Galleries, 2016), 91.

ertoire by borrowing from modern Soviet art. Hadid’s interest in the Russian

3. Hadid, Planetary Architecture Two, 1.

ming his elemental monolith as a hotel.2 Hadid docks the Architekton to Lon-

4. Lebbeus Woods, “Zaha Hadid’s Drawings 1,” Lebbeus Woods (blog), 2009. Accessed online March 2, 2019: https:// lebbeuswoods.wordpress. com/2009/03/23/zaha-hadids-drawings-1/ 5. Kazimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1959), 68. 6. Malevich, The Non-Objective World, 100.

Zaha Hadid graduates from the Architectural Association (AA) in 1977 with a project that inquires into the possibility of expanding the architectural repavant-garde, sparked by Elia Zenghelis’s teachings, her readings of El Lissitz-

ky’s books and, more specifically, Anatole Kopp’s Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning 1917–1935, culminates in a thesis project that appropriates Kazimir Malevich’s Alpha Architekton (1920) while reprogram-

don’s Hungerford Bridge and, after a series of manipulations through drawing

and painting, brings the configuration to a point of shedding new light on Malevich’s heritage and its potential to reinvent architecture’s vocabulary [fig. 1].

In the six years that follow, Hadid vigorously develops the explorations she started at the AA, to the extent of creating her own architectural tools and

language and moving a step further to investigate the application of her new techniques to real projects. Hadid continues following the thread of the Rus-

sian avant-garde she had investigated during her thesis year, however, evolving to release herself from the constraints of a repertoire of predefined forms. She extracts from those art movements operational concepts to free her practice

from disciplinary constraints, thus distancing her work from the historicism and emphasis on popular culture, irony, and wit, characteristic of post-modern-

ism. In fact, for Hadid, modernity itself is an incomplete project to be resumed: “I came to realize that architecture’s role had yet to be fulfilled and that there

were new territories which were yet to be explored . . . We, the authors of architecture, have to take on the task of reinvestigating Modernity.”3 This is a task

already modernist in nature and clearly present in her early work, positive of architecture’s role in reforming the world.4

Among Hadid’s Russian references, suprematism’s nonobjective world and

its search for the substitution of “thing” and “concept” for feeling is especially

influential.5 Dispossessed of utilitarian aims, the forms generated under suprematism materialize this goal by a reduction toward their elementary geom-

etries and the interaction between them. Malevich’s art generates new elements

that he concludes will eventually transition from canvas to architectural space [project 5].6 Hadid’s early work ventures in this translation from the two- to 411

Teatro del Mondo Theater of the World Project: 41. Author: Aldo Rossi (1931â&#x20AC;&#x201D;1997). Date: 1979â&#x20AC;&#x201D;1980. Themes: Autonomy. Monumentality. Place(lessness). Typology.

Figure 0. Teatro del Mondo. Study Sketches. After Aldo Rossi. 1979.

420

Aldo Rossi

1. Manfredo Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” in Architecture Theory Since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998 [1969]), 32–33.

Autonomy. Limitation. Finitude. Singularity. Discreteness. History. Memory.

2. Aldo Rossi and Silvano Tintori, “Aspetti urbanistici del problema delle zone arretrate in Italia e in Europa,” in Giovanni Demaria et al., Problemi sullo sviluppo delle aree arretrate (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1960), 248–249. Aldo Rossi, “Nuovi Problemi,” in Rossi, Scritti scelti sull’architettura e la città 1956–1972, ed. Rosado Bonicalzi (Milan: Clup, 1989 [1975]), 190.

tial articulation of the world scale. Notably, Manfredo Tafuri closes “Toward a

3. Manlio Brusatin, “Theatrum Mundi Novissimi,” in Aldo Rossi: Teatro del Mondo, ed. Manlio Brusatin and Alberto Prandi (Venice: Cluva, 1982), 41–43. 4. Aldo Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography, trans. Lawrence Venuti (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010 [1981]), 67.

The central topics of Aldo Rossi’s work reflect his utter commitment to the

value of the architectural object and to the formal and typological questions that affect its production, and a parallel disinclination toward the possible spa-

Critique of Architectural Ideology” by stating that a radical alternative to modern architecture’s connivance with the spatial articulation of the world market

can be found primordially in the retreat to the architectural object that Rossi

praises.1 Rossi himself does not dissimulate his dissatisfaction with previous

totalizing approaches to urbanism that are based on structural readings of the global spatial organization, such as Le Corbusier’s Three Human Establishments

or Erwin Anton Gutkind’s decentralization theories.2 And yet, in 1979 Rossi

builds the Teatro del Mondo, a project that includes the world in its very name

[fig. 0]. Certainly, the design’s title is, first and foremost, an appropriation of the name given to some of the floating theaters built in Venice during the 1500s.3 At the same time, supported by images of Noah’s Ark, a construction

that had to contain the world for its reproduction, it is pertinent to question

if the Teatro is also a project that actually reflects upon the relations between architecture and world, and in what forms it allows us to discern how Rossi’s work addresses the topic [fig. 1].

Rossi builds the Teatro del Mondo for the 1980 Venice Biennale. The extreme-

ly simple form of its components—a square-plan, prismatic volume for the

theater, surrounded by two regular volumes for the stairs that surround it— generates a building that is reminiscent of Italian baptisteries on the outside

and of anatomic theaters inside [fig. 2]. Built in 1979, and dismantled in 1980, it was a brief, ephemeral structure. This temporal aspect has a spatial correlate: the project disregards permanence in place, too. During its short life the Teatro

travels, always supported by a barge, from its site of construction in Fusina, to

Venice and Dubrovnik; traversing Po Valley canals and the Adriatic Sea [fig. 3]. The building’s engagement with the city of Venice is, in this sense, temporally and spatially limited. As Rossi indicates, in Venice the Teatro is placed in the threshold between land and sea, like a “lighthouse.”4 But even this liminal

condition is only a momentary stage, a phase of the building’s broader commitment through its travel to the geographic scale.

421

Masques Project: 42. Author: John Hejduk (1929—2000). Date: 1981—2000. Themes: Autonomy. Nomadism. Taxonomy. Typology.

Figure 0. Lancaster/Hanover Masque. Objects. After John Hejduk. 1990.

430

John Hejduk

1. John Hejduk and David Shapiro, “John Hejduk or the Architect Who Drew Angels,” Architecture and Urbanism 471 (2009): 75. Transcript of the film John Hejduk: Builder of Worlds, commented by John Hejduk and David Shapiro (San Francisco: Kanopy Streaming, 2014), DVD. 2. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). 3. James McGregor, “The Architect as Storyteller: Making Places in John Hejduk’s Masques,” Architectural Theory Review 7, no. 2 (2009): 64. 4. Hejduk and Shapiro, “John Hejduk or the Architect Who Drew Angels,” 76. 5. See in this respect John Hejduk, The Lancaster/Hanover Masque = Le masque Lancaster/ Hanover (London: Architectural Association, 1992); John Hejduk and Kim Shkapich, Riga, Vladivostok, Lake Baikal: A Work (New York: Rizzoli, 1989); and John Hejduk, Victims: A Work (London: Architectural Association, 1986).

“I cannot do buildings without building a new repertoire of characters of sto-

ries of language, and it’s all parallel. It’s not just building per se. It’s building worlds,” John Hejduk explains to poet David Shapiro.1 In his Masques proj-

ects, architecture no longer consists of designing unique, self-sufficient build-

ings. Designs operate, rather, as the characters in a theatrical play. Even if they can exist individually, the final sense of the pieces results from their grouping together to generate a particular ensemble. Every piece references—and contains, in nuce—a broader whole, or world [fig. 0].

The term “world” here is metaphorical. Its meaning is similar to the one American philosopher Nelson Goodman uses in his 1978 book Ways of Worldmaking:

a world is a formal structure governed by an internally consistent logic.2 In

this sense Hejduk’s definition of a multitude of architectural characters and of a cohesive formal system is a poetic act, which seeks to have an impact

upon the physical world, but which disdains designing the planet as such. His position goes against modernity’s globalizing, panoramic view and any pretensions of imposing a single form of universality.3 In his conversation with

Shapiro, Hejduk emphatically rejects the form of utopia that for him Le Cor-

busier’s universalism represents. For Hejduk, instead of the utopian nonplace, only “places” exist.4 “Building worlds” is, thus, a pluralistic project, seeking to

substitute modernity’s global ambitions for a multitude of distinct—and yet related—singularities.

To create worlds was not the initial object of Hejduk’s work. Until the mid1970s his designs focus on exploring the multiple possibilities of predefined architectural systems: the nine-square grid, walls, Le Corbusier’s free plan. This

way of producing forms through iterative variations of a settled architectural grammar, which Hejduk defines as the “Theory of Accumulation,” also consti-

tutes Masques’s generative mechanism: they are always recombinations of a set of predetermined elements. To this formal procedure, Hejduk’s world-building projects add two other key components. The first one recovers the symbolic

and semantic dimensions that characterized architecture historically but that modernity diminished. Hejduk boosts the symbolism of Masques by treating them as literary artifacts. The form of each piece alludes to its role and mean-

ing, which the architect explains with texts about the characteristics of each

architectural “object,” of the “subject” that inhabits it, and of the events that

take place in it.5 The result is a symbolic and figurative formal system, an inver431

The Equal City Project: 43. Authors: Franco Purini (1941) with Laura Thermes (1943). Date: 2000. Themes: Abstraction. Place(lessness). Telecommunications. Typology.

4 5

6 7

B C D E F

G H

Figure 0. The Sky. Fragment. After Franco Purini. 2000.

440

Franco Purini with Laura Thermes

1. Franco Purini and Laura Thermes, “Três caminhos,” in O que está feito está por fazer: Anonimato, fragmento, descontinuidade, ed. Jorge Czajkowski (Rio de Janeiro: Centro de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, 1998), 10. Text originally dated 1997. 2. Purini and Thermes, “Três caminhos,” 10. 3. Franco Purini, Scrivere Architettura. Alcuni temi sui quali abbiamo dovuto cambiare idea (Rome: Prospettive Edizioni, 2012), 41. Our translation. 4. Franco Purini, “Un disegno plurale,” 59, and Franco Purini, “Il transito nel Simbolico,” in Dal Progetto: Scritti teorici di Franco Purini 1966–1991, ed. Francesco Moschini and Gianfranco Neri (Rome: A.A.M., Architettura Arte Moderna, 1992), 169. 5. Purini, “Un disegno plurale,” 59. 6. Purini, “Un disegno plurale,” 59. Our translation. 7. Purini and Thermes, “Três caminhos,” 10. Our translation. 8. Purini and Thermes, “Três caminhos,” 13. Our translation.

In the most economically developed countries, in those most actively involved in globalization, architecture has become a superfluous activity.1 Its role, thinks Franco Purini, no longer consists of fulfilling fundamental material needs. It has stopped being, in Marxist terms, a part of the social structure in order to become pure ideological superstructure—part of our systems of representing the social whole.2 This reorientation of the discipline toward ideological production has evolved in parallel to two processes that are instrumental to globalization. The first is the increasing reduction of architecture to its image, which has served to transform buildings into cultural commodities circulating within worldwide networks of exchange. For Purini this transformation is a “negative utopia of communication,” a bastardized form of universalism whose only message is to support the enclosure of public space by private interests.3 The second is the “de-terriorialization of the world,” the diminution of any traces of spatial identity in order to facilitate a process of “planetary homologation.”4 Purini suggests two possible ways of operating critically in this context, each of which accepts and replies to one of the aforementioned conditions. The first is to resolutely acknowledge “universal atopism,” or the absence of place, as a design leitmotif.5 This means to promote a new type of linguistic commonality, in which architectural forms are entirely liberated from their original, local origins. The objective here is, in Edgar Morin’s expression, to “recover the terrestrial identity of the world” by using architecture as a means to destabilize and transcend the local.6 The second is to accept the ongoing transformation of design into a means of communication, but to carefully limit the “signals” each project emits to those who critically interrogate our reality.7 Purini refers to this

strategy as the “renaming of the existing” and suggests a three-tier process of design that goes from the “recognition” of a segment of reality to its intentional “appropriation” to the final creation of a “difference” with the current status quo through the configuration of spatial arrangements that suggest alternative forms of the future.8 The use of design as a means of renaming the “existing” challenges the vision of reality as an inalterable given. It proposes, instead, that the existing is an arena subject to multiple, possible reconfigurations, each of which can become a different articulation of the social whole. Most of these reflections appear in writings spanning from 1990 to the early 2000s. In historic terms they constitute an attempt to reconsider architectural practice at a time that witnesses the collapse of Eastern European commu-

441

Orban Space Project: 44. Author: T.O.P. Office: Luc Deleu (1944) with Isabelle De Smet and Steven Van den Bergh. Date: 2006â&#x20AC;&#x201D;. Themes: Colonialism. Geo-visualization. Geopolitics. Taxonomy.

Figure 0. T.O.P Office logo. After Luc Deleu. 1970.

450

T.O.P. Office

1. Luc Deleu, De Onaangepaste Stad: Werkdocumenten NAi96 = The Unadapted City: Work in Progress NAi96 (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1996), 14. 2. Luc Deleu, Urbi et Orbi: De Onaangepaste Stad (Gent: Ludion, 2002), 22. 3. Deleu, Urbi et Orbi, 22. 4. Luc Deleu, Éthique de l’architecture (Saint-Benoît Du Sault: Tarabuste, 1989), 6. 5. Luc Deleu, Orbanistic (Orban Planning) Manifesto. Accessed online March 1, 2019: http:// www.topoffice.to/Orban%20Planning%20Manifesto.html

“Orbanism,” affirms Luc Deleu, is the opposite of “Globalism.”1 The latter term stands only for capitalism and especially for the neoliberal order that has become dominant since the disappearance of the communist systems of Eastern Europe and the USSR. Orbanism—a term Deleu coins by merging the Latin word orbis with the term urbanism—represents, instead, a form of resistance that calls for the construction of a common public sphere and for the emergence of different forms of political and social organization. Nowhere is this ambition to change how we conceive and project the world more evident than in the logo Deleu designs in 1970 for T.O.P Office, the architectural firm that he founds that year with his wife Laurette Gillemont. The O in T.O.P, an acronym of Turn On Planning, is an upside-down globe. Antarctica sits on top. The positions of East and West are inverted. The Indian Ocean occupies the center of the earth [fig. 0]. Deleu’s critique of globalism is not, by any means, an attempt to reduce international social and economic integration. On the contrary, the intensification of the relations between countries is “not only evident but also indispensable.”2

His hope is the consolidation of “a world with global people and global institutions, in which there is a clearer view of our global rights, obligations, and responsibilities.”3 The many facets of Deleu’s production since 1970 constitutes a series of architectural acts destined to create the circumstances for the emergence of such a world by revealing the conditions of contemporary globalization and the means through which society can change its course. These, the architect insists, do not imply the impossible task of designing the whole planet, but the situation of its scale as the horizon of every architectural production.4 Orban space is a contribution to such a possible transformation; one that interrogates how we can articulate forms of public space that operate at the scale of the planet. Deleu’s interest in open, public space dates back to his first formulation of orbanism in the 1980 Orbanism (Orban Planning) Manifesto, where the architect states: “Free Space is his [the architect’s] goal from now on.”5 This affirmation will acquire new relevance after the 1989 collapse of communism. In a historic situation in which, according to Deleu, architects are asked to design the ultimate image of capitalist society, it becomes increasingly important to reorient the discipline toward the construction of the public sphere [project 43]. It is through this commitment to the public that urban planning can create “an or451

Extreme Territories of Urbanization Project: 45. Authors: Neil Brenner (1969) and Urban Theory Lab. Date: 2011—. Themes: Geo-visualization. Geopolitics. Territorial Intensification. Total Urbanization.

Figure 0. Planetary Urbanization. Daniel Ibáñez and Nikos Katsikis, Urban Theory Lab. 2014.

460

Neil Brenner and Urban Theory Lab

1. Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, eds., The Endless City: The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society (London: Phaidon Press, 2007). 2. Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, “Planetary Urbanization,” in Urban Constellations, ed. Matthew Gandy (Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2011). The same year, Andy Merrifield presents a paper based on the notion of “planetary urbanization” at the 2011 meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Seattle. See Andy Merrifield, “The Urban Question Under Planetary Urbanization,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, no. 2 (2013): 909–922. 3. Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, “The ‘Urban Age’ in Question,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38, no. 3 (2014): 1.

This book begins with Soria y Mata’s intuition that cities will spread across the whole globe [project 1]. Throughout its pages it is possible to detect how architecture addressed territorial processes involving production and the exploitation of natural resources [projects 15, 16, 17 and 30]. It is also possible to see a recurrent interrogation about how urban expansion affects the scales of settlements, and, as a consequence, the very notion of what a settlement is [projects 23, 34, and 36]. The work of Neil Brenner with the Harvard University Urban Theory Lab (UTL) accumulates these multiple research interests about the urbanization of the globe as well as challenges some of the epistemological conventions through which urbanization has often been analyzed. Mostly produced after 2010, Brenner’s work about the world scale coincides with the consolidation of the idea of “Urban Age,” a notion the United Nations Settlement Program starts promoting in 1996 to describe the expected surpassing of the rural population by the urban one, and which gains new currency after 2005 when it was estimated that this demographic shift had already happened. Recognition of this fact immediately affects architectural discourse, leading to the organization of multiple academic and architectural events late in the first decade of the 2000s in which the notion of Urban Age serves to portray a planet dominated by cities.1 Brenner’s work directly addresses these assertions in order to contest the city centrism they entail. It questions: What does the notion of an urban world actually mean? What are its conditions? In which ways does this idea question and challenge the forms in which we have understood the urban? Are we using the right concepts to describe urbanization? Brenner’s definition of the urban world through the expression “planetary urbanization” originates in an article co-written in 2011 with Swiss geographer Christian Schmid, a frequent collaborator.2 The core of the authors’ argument

is that urban studies originally define its analytical categories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and do so in response to the massive migrations from rural areas to cities that are then taking place. The necessity at that moment of defining the specificity of the city in contrast to other forms of settlement and spatial organization motivates the assimilation between the ideas of urbanization and city creation. The urban is, as a result, originally conceptualized in opposition to a non-city condition, often referred to as rural. This methodological lens persists in urban studies nowadays, supporting ideas of an “urban age,” in which cities reign supreme.3 Brenner and Schmid adopt a different perspective. For them, the urban is now an overarching, yet highly 461

Geodesign Project: 46. Author: Carl Steinitz (1937). Date: 2012. Themes: Geo-visualization. Geopolitics. Taxonomy. World Urbanization.

0000 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 0 0000 0 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 000 0 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 000 00000000 0 0 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 000 Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ 0000000 0000000 1 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 000 Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ 0000000 0 0 0 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 000 ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 0000000 00 0 0 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 000 ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 0000000 00 0 0 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 000 ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 00000000 000 0 0 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 000 ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 000000 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 000 ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 000000 1 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 000 ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 00000000 0 0 0 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 000 ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 00000000 0 0 0 0 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 00 ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 00000000 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 000 ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 0000000 0000000 ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 000000000 00 00 00 0 0 0 0 000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 000000000 0 0 0 0 0 00000 0 0 0 0 0 0 ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 000000000 0 0 0 000000 ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 0 0 0 000000 ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 0000000 00000000000000 0 ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 0 0 0 000000 ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 000000 00000000000000 ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 0 0 0 00000 3 0 Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ 4Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 00 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 0 0 0 000000 0 0 00 Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ 0 0 0 0 0 00000 0 0 0 0 0 Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ 0 0 0 0 00000 0 0 0 ѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲ 0 0 0 000000 0 0 0000 Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ 0 0 0 00000 0 0 ѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 0 0 000000 0 0 0 ѲѲѲ 0 Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 0 ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ 4 ѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ Ѳ 4 ѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲ 5 ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ Ѳ Ѳ Ѳ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ Ѳ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ Ѳ ѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲѲѲѲѲѲ ѲѲѲ

L 5

SYNAP

L 2

MANTEGNA BAY

L = LIGHTHOUSE

0.2 MINUTES FOR MAP

TIME = 405.e

Figure 0. SYMAP contour map. After Howard Fischer. 1963.

470

Carl Steinitz

1. Carl Steinitz, “Congruence and Meaning: The Influence of Consistency Between Urban Form and Activity Upon Environmental Knowledge” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1967), v. 2. SYMAP is initially developed at the Northwestern Technological Institute in 1963 and later completed at the Harvard Graduate School of Design within Fisher’s Lab. 3. The software packages developed at the time are systems such as CALFORM, SYMVU, GRID, POLYVRT, and ODYSSEY. Nigel Water, “GIS: History,” in The International Encyclopedia of Geography, ed. Douglas Richardson (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 3. 4. Carl Steinitz, “Beginning of Geodesign: A Personal Historical Perspective,” in Geodesign: Past, Present and Future (Redlands, CA: Esri, 2013), 12. 5. Water, “GIS: History,” 3. “The Canada Land Inventory (CLI) was undertaken in the early 1960s as a cooperative, federal-provincial effort. This program resulted in the production of over 12,000 map sheets pertaining to the capability of Canada’s lands to support various uses. The Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS) was designed to read, store, manipulate, and analyze thematic map information.” Terry Fisher and Connie MacDonald, “An Overview of the Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS),” in Canada Land Data Systems Selected Papers I, 1979–1980, vol. 4, Ian Crain Collection, LAC, 610. 6. Water, “GIS: History,” 2. 7. Water, “GIS: History,” 3.

In 1965 Carl Steinitz finishes his doctoral dissertation in City and Regional Planning at MIT, “Congruence and Meaning: The Influence of Consistency Between Urban Form and Activity Upon Environmental Knowledge,” supervised by Kevin Lynch. The dissertation uses a new methodological lens to study the perceptual geography of central Boston after Lynch’s own Image of the City (1960). By acquiring, processing, mapping, and analyzing data the dissertation asks why certain parts of the city were either included or excluded from Lynch’s book. Steinitz’s develops his research methods also under the advice of Howard Fisher, the architect who had just invented the Synagraphic Mapping System (SYMAP) [fig. 0].1 Concluded in 1965 within his newly formed Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis, this software is among the first computer programs applied to mapping that integrated functions for spatial analysis.2 Fisher’s Lab grows to become a powerhouse in the expansion of computer mapping, with a handful of other major packages coming from his Lab in the following years.3 Steinitz’s thesis is the first applied test of SYMAP and the very beginnings of processes used in Geographic Information System (GIS), among them: the acquisition of data and its digital encoding for the production of maps [fig. 1].4 These are processes that Steinitz will evolve to become the very basis of his method to potentially design at the scale of the world. The 1960s are the formative years of GIS, and the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis, where Steinitz soon becomes an affiliate, spearheads the process within academic circles. Meanwhile, major advances are also taking place in the public and private sectors. Early in that decade, in collaboration with English geographer Roger Tomlinson (often acknowledged as the father of GIS) and the company Spartan Air Services of Ottawa, where Tomlinson works, the Canadian Government’s Canada Land Inventory develops the first “fully functional vector-based GIS.”5 Around the same time, the US military also expands the field of analytical cartography with the “US CORONA program of reconnaissance satellites operated by the Central Intelligence Agency from 1959 to 1972 along with the associated SAGE program for processing the imagery.”6 These initiatives become consolidated during the 1970s, when government-supported GIS research starts having a broad applied use, one of the earliest instances being the first geocoded census produced by the US Census Bureau in 1970.7

471

World of Matter Project: 47. Authors: World of Matter: Mabe Bethônico, Ursula Biemann, Lonnie von Brummelen, Siebren de Haan, Uwe H. Martin, Frauke Huber, Helge Mooshammer, Peter Mörtenböck, Emily Eliza Scott, Paulo Tavares. Date: 2014—. Themes: Ecology. Geopolitics. Human-Earth System. Territorial Intensification.

Figure 0. Deadly Environment. Politically motivated assassinations of nature rights defenders in Brazil. After Paulo Tavares. 2013.

480

Mabe Bethônico et al.

1. About these different terminological debates see “Prologue: Architecture and the World Scale” in this book. 2. Plantationocene is a term Haraway borrows. It was collectively generated during a recorded conversation for Ethnos at Aarhus University in 2014. See Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 160 and 162 footnote 5. 3. As credited by Haraway. See Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” 160 and 162 footnote 6. 4. See in this respect T.J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and the Environment Today (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017), 39–57. Demos also focuses on the work of World of Matter. See also T.J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 199–228. 5. Nicanor Parra, Temporal (Santiago, Chile: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2014). Our translation.

Since its formulation in 2000, Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer’s Anthropocene hypothesis has become a dominant way of conceptualizing the planet, even if the hypothesis is still scientifically contested. Yet the questioning of the idea of the Anthropocene is not only a matter of scientific controversy. The concept is only one possible way of conceiving of Earth, one that focuses on the transformation of the planet’s ecological conditions from a geological standpoint. The Anthropocene’s methods of verification do not depend on analyzing social factors, but on data-gathering procedures and scientific discourse. They focus on conditions, while neglecting their causes. To this extent and despite its overarching ambition and influence, the idea of the Anthropocene remains a partial concept: other ways of thinking about the world need to complement and interrogate it. Ideas of globalization, mondialisation (world-forming), and planetary urbanization open up other ways of understanding our planet’s processes of social and environmental transformation.1 They thus offer other modes of intervening upon its conditions. Similarly, the idea of the Anthropocene has already motivated the emergence of alternative notions that question some of its main postulates. Donna Haraway proposes Plantationocene to describe the enclosure of vegetal life within economic circuits of production, and Chthulucene to refer to the possible emergence of a world of assemblages and to the coexistence between the human and the other-than-human.2 She also supports Capitalocene, which geographer Andreas Malm and environmental historian and geographer Jason W. Moore first introduced to counter the idea of Anthropocene.3 While the Anthropocene hypothesis suggests a universal, “anthropic” responsibility for the environmental processes that are damaging the planet, Malm and Moore’s Capitalocene points to the responsibility of a major agent of change: the capitalist system.4 Not all humankind is causing environmental problems and transforming Earth. On the contrary, a good number of the world’s inhabitants only suffer the consequences of ecological changes derived from the often-violent imposition across the globe of an economic system that is alien to their own social and productive structures. The world entirely modified by sociotechnical processes, which we currently inhabit, mostly arises from capitalism’s profit-driven relation to nature and its relentless exploitation of natural resources no matter the environmental consequences. As Chilean poet Nicanor Parra critically expressed: “We will defeat nature / In the same way we defeated Marxism.”5 For the proponents of the Capitalocene idea, global warming 481

Geostories Project: 48. Author: Design Earth: Rania Ghosn (1977) and El Hadi Jazairy (1970). Date: 2014â&#x20AC;&#x201D;. Themes: Ecology. Geo-visualization. Human-Earth System. Monumentality.

Figure 0. Blue Marble Circus. Plan and section. After Design Earth. 2017.

490

Design Earth

1. Originally presented at the Sharjah Biennial 13: Tamawuj (2017). For a full explanation of the project see Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (New York: Actar, 2018), 29–37.

One of the drawings of After Oil—Design Earth’s speculation about a Persian Gulf no longer depending on fossil fuels—depicts two individuals on the top of a mountain, facing the Red Sea [fig. 1].1 Their situation is not unlike that of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. As in the romantic painting, the subjects occupy an elevated position on a mountain. In both cases, a vast and flat landscape surrounds them: two different types of sea, an atmospheric and an aquatic one. But here the similarities stop. Instead of the undoubtedly European figure of Friedrich’s work, the subjects of Design Earth’s drawings are two Arabs, correspondingly dressed with the clothes of the area. The mountain on which they stand is not a purely natural phenomenon, but an artificial crystalline structure; a replica of the Alpine peaks Bruno Taut conceived of [project 4]. The characters do not stand directly against the landscape. Instead, they survey it with the help of a telescope. It is difficult, at least initially, to assimilate what the two After Oil observers see to a sublime romantic landscape. The Red Sea of the image is populated by a multitude of cruise and cargo ships, their lines of movement traced above the surface of the water. The sea is a space of transit, occupied by technologies, humans, and animals alike: there are numerous birds flying above the water, clustered in the same areas as the ships; human figures stand on platforms placed above the water surface. Similarly, the horizon of this scene is a line of heterogeneous contacts: between the sea and the sky, and between them and the extremely dense group of skyscrapers that characterize the metropolises of the region. It is the relation between the mountain, the skyscrapers, and the sea platforms that defines the drawing’s main theme. The post-1973 boom in oil prices propelled the rise of entirely new cities around the Persian Gulf, crowned by some of the highest skyscrapers of the planet. Increasingly deep oil drilling wells, excavated to intensify the exploitation of underground conditions, and growing building heights mirror each other vertically above and below the surface. The platforms on the sea represent the relationship between the two processes by intervening at the Emirati oil and gas industrial facility Das Island. Design Earth’s project there, rendered in section, intertwines the architectural and geological conditions of the area. It measures the huge vertical tunnels of all exploited reservoirs by placing inside them the biggest architectural landmarks of the region. The excavated material is used to create the artificial mountain 491

Satellights Project: 49. Author: Angelo Bucci (1963). Date: 2017. Themes: Abstraction. Geography. Monumentality. Remoteness.

NORTH EARTH

NORTH CELESTIAL SATELLIGHT NORTH STATION distance 38,944 km

IT O

LIM

IGH

M PER

LA TC

CLARKE ORBIT GEOSTATIONARY radius 42,164 km

MOON radius 1,738 km 384,405 km >

SUN radius 696,000 km < distance 149,600,000 km

ato

equ

A ERM

LIG

IT O

LIM

CLA

O PRIC

SATELLIGHT SOUTH STATION distance 35,884 km

O KE

SOUTH CELESTIAL

SOUTH EARTH

Figure 0. Satellights over SÃ£o Paulo. After Angelo Bucci. 2017.

500

Angelo Bucci

1. Megan Garber, “Tower of Light: When Electricity Was New, People Used It to Mimic the Moon,” The Atlantic, March 6, 2013. Accessed online March 8, 2019, https://www. theatlantic.com/technology/ archive/2013/03/tower-oflight-when-electricity-was-newpeople-used-it-to-mimic-themoon/273445/.

In the late nineteenth century, in the race for modernization and the frenzy to

2. Ernest Freeberg, The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America (New York: Penguin Press, 2013).

different from oil derricks but graceful and elegant.1 In The Age of Edison: Elec-

3. Angelo Bucci, São Paulo, Reasons for Architecture: The Dissolution of Buildings and How to Pass through Walls, trans. Kristine Stiphany (Austin, TX: School of Architecture, the University of Texas at Austin, 2011), 55–56. 4. Bucci, São Paulo, Reasons for Architecture, 55–56. 5. Bucci, São Paulo, Reasons for Architecture, 55–56.

bring electric light to their streets, American cities start experimenting with

alternatives to the grid of electric lamps, which had been mimicking the in-

frastructure of gas lamps but were too expensive and complicated to install. Instead cities sought to build artificial moons to light up their nights. This new

public lighting, called “moonlight towers,” consisted of four to six arc lamps

suspended 50 meters above the ground by iron space truss towers, not much

tric Light and the Invention of Modern America, Ernest Freeberg characterizes those cities under their new man-made moons and the spectacle around the promise of replacing night for day.2 One individual tower was powerful enough

to illuminate a diameter of approximately 900 meters, or 60 hectares. Reflecting on the impact of such structures and delighted by the homage their name

played to Earth’s natural satellite, Brazilian architect Angelo Bucci calculated

that, under a density of 500 people per hectare, the brightness generated from

this single source of light could potentially reach thirty-thousand inhabitants. This became his starting point to rethink the way we light up the world while formulating a broader understanding of humanity’s place in it.

Satellite-produced visualizations of Earth at night reminds one of a constellation of stars over a dark sky. “The boundaries between continents and oceans disappear and give way to another geography. In place of land and water there

is darkness and light. Billions of points of light. It is the planet lit with small light bulbs that were, each single one, screwed into their sockets with the palm

of a hand!”3 The high-contrast image that emerges from the combination of

light and no light falsely depicts the world’s surface as an interplay of inhabited

and vacant spaces. The same way it ignores fixed settlements in which electrici-

ty is not available, owing to development status, indigenous/natural conditions, or even size, it also fails to capture transient situations, such as the “100,000 people [who] at any given time of day or night are flying over the Atlantic

Ocean.”4 This lack of nuance also contributes to the flattening of social and cultural differences, homogenizing the complexity of the built world in favor

of the portrayal of one civilizational aspect only, the consumption of energy. Nevertheless, in the abstract, it does not fall short in beautifully representing “the most recent expression of our world: the shallowest archaeological layer in

the construction of cities.”5 Bucci reminds us that this layer is not attached to the ground, but floats above it, carrying the thickness humanity built below it.

501

City of 7 Billion Project: 50. Author: Plan B: Joyce Hsiang (1977) and Bimal Mendis (1976). Date: 2015â&#x20AC;&#x201D;2019. Themes: Geo-visualization. Infrastructure. Taxonomy. Total Urbanization.

Figure 0. A400: Section. 2015.

510

Plan B

1. Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” Global Change Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 17–18.

Joyce Hsiang and Bimal Mendis’s City of 7 Billion looks at the world as if it were a single urban entity: a city-world encompassing both occupied and uninhabited areas. City of 7 Billion is, in this sense, an architectural project that adopts a position not unlike Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s notion of planetary urbanization [project 45]. The work rejects seeing Earth as a planet of discrete cities, and presents instead one where geography, infrastructure, and urbanization coalesce, tending to produce a deeply intermingled planetary space. The project’s visualizations aim to elucidate how the world can be considered through this unitary vision and the implications this has for architectural discourse and practice. The primary means of Hsiang and Mendis’s work is a type of cartographic production intended to create a dialogue between urban theory and architectural speculation. On one hand, the project uses multiple cartographic means to elaborate a series of propositions regarding the status of urbanization today. These propositions address ongoing theories about the urban, its scales, and its interactions with nature, which have become prominent in relation to the notions of globalization and Anthropocene.1 On the other hand, the project offers a projective image about the possible conditions of this planetary city. Its theoretical and speculative dimensions are not different parts of the work. On the contrary, they operate simultaneously and through the same cartographic tools. The type of cartography that City of 7 Billion explores is both descriptive and projective. It acknowledges that spatial propositions cannot exist without an initial conceptualization and visualization of their objects of intervention, without an initial act of framing, which, because it inevitably establishes the confines and possibilities of the project, is, often inadvertently, a project in itself. The exhaustive work of cartographic representation in City of 7 Billion insists upon this complex circularity between description and proposition as well as upon the breaches this relation contains. In dialogic terms, this makes the project interrogate not only urban theory, but also the forms of knowledge and data visualization that support contemporary considerations of the global scale. The maps of City of 7 Billion are the assembly of a diversity; albeit a very structured one. The project’s parts, namely Set of Drawings, Figures and Ground, The Sphere of the Unknown, Urban Core, and Scenes from the Horizon, systematically insist on four questions: 1) the variety of elements that constitute the city-world fabric; 2) the overlapping in this fabric of natural and manmade elements; 3) the different and contrasting points of view from which the 511

Epilogue

520

Five Wishes for the Next Fifty Worlds. Hashim Sarkis A historical overview of speculative visions about architecture such as this book is bound to generate cross-historical associations, entanglements, and time warps. Some associations, however, are chronologically consecutive, the result of direct intragenerational dialogue. Think of the relation between Patrick Geddes, Élisée Reclus, Paul Otlet, Le Corbusier, and Rudolf Steiger. Reclus praises and supports Geddes’s Outlook Tower. Later he develops with Louis Bonnier his own world-project: a colossal terrestrial globe. Paul Otlet, also in dialogue with Geddes, shares with these two authors the desire to create a building that can represent the planet, and asks Le Corbusier to design the Mundaneum in Geneva. Otto Neurath, after meeting Otlet, creates the Vienna Mundaneum. Rudolf Steiger, Wilhelm Hess, and Georg Schmidt collaborate with Neurath, adopting his symbols for graphic representation. Think also of the recurrence among Soviet architects of imagining how the more just society they are seeking can transform the world at large; of the often-polemical dialogue among Alison and Peter Smithson, Yona Friedman, and Constant. The book also exhibits some family trees and strategies that straddle generations and continents. Linear urban forms, spatial structures elevated over the earth, new forms of cartography, and other techniques of geovisualization are recurrent approaches to world-making. Additionally, our research exposes time warps. Klein and Parent in the late 1950s, and Hadid two decades later, recover suprematist spatial strategies developed during the 1920s. In the year 2000 Purini adopts some of Leonidov’s methods. Design Earth recovers now the techniques of visual argumentation Superstudio elaborated in the 1960s. Yet, even these warps, when examined carefully, resonate with the very times they escape. No matter how much architects aspire to being atemporal or aspatial, to suspend their time and context, their works are always bound by the moment they are trying to escape. After all, the exercise of imagining alternative worlds through architecture entails delegating to design the role of a time machine, a time machine of its time. As in Navarro Baldeweg’s Gates, the memory of the city and the city’s future are outcomes of a single operation. The next fifty worlds may very well be produced with a different attitude about time and place, especially because of the sense of urgency we feel today to imagine a way out of global environmental and social challenges, and because we are increasingly realizing that alternative worlds have to be construed within this one. There is not much time left and there is no other place to go. Moreover, we will no doubt witness a proliferation of worlds in a much shorter period 521

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Hashim Sarkis is Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) at MIT and principal architect in Hashim Sarkis Studios. He is Curator of the 2020 Venice Architectural Biennale. Roi Salgueiro Barrio, an architect and urbanist and founder of RSAU, is an instructor and Research Scientist at the MIT SA+P. Gabriel Kozlowski, an architect and curator, is an instructor and Research Associate at the MIT SA+P and was cocurator of the Brazilian pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architectural Biennale.

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The World as an Architectural Project Hashim Sarkis and Roi Salgueiro Barrio with Gabriel Kozlowski Architects imagine the world: fifty projects reveal a discipline reflecting on its own responsibility at the planetary scale, from Patrick Geddes to Alison and Peter Smithson, Kiyonori Kikutake, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Luc Deleu, Plan B, and others. The World as an Architectural Project seeks to inspire architecture’s renewed commitment to global issues.

“Informative, inspirational, refreshing, this elegantly articulated book is a timely reminder of architects’ commitment to the global commons and an appeal for reengagement with the multiple layers of global issues.”

—M. Christine Boyer, Princeton University, author of Not Quite Architecture: Writings around Alison and Peter Smithson

“What does architecture do for the world? And what does the world do for architecture? This masterful romp through history helps us comprehend the scale of our global challenges—and what to do about it.” —Peder Anker, New York University, author of

From Bauhaus to Eco-House: A History of Ecological Design

“The World as an Architectural Project gathers some of the most visually stunning

and important urban architectural projects of the last 150 years and makes a compelling case for the agency of architecture itself as a mode of thinking and operating in the world that is projective, interscalar, and relational.” —Eve Blau, Harvard University, author of The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934

Printed and bound in Canada

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The MIT Press Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 http://mitpress.mit.edu Architecture

ISBN ISBN978-0-262-04396-0 978-0-262-04396-0

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99 780262 780262 043960 043960