HORIZONTE - Journal for Architectural Discourse No. 12 – Plan

#12 PLAN

Der Plan wird als universelles Medium der Kommunikation und Produktion von Architektur betrachtet, in dem die soziologischen und politischen Dimensionen der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart eingeschrieben sind. Er ist Sprache und ein kollektives, graphisches Werkzeug, das die Dinge ordnet. Er ist Speicher des Wissens.

Gleichzeitig erkennen wir eine Möglichkeit der differenzierten Betrachtung, der Plan offenbart Erfahrungen, Gefühle, Widerstand gegen Konventionen und die Manifestation des Nützlichen. Indifferenz und Unschuld — wie sie Rem Kohlhaas in seinem Essay „Typical Plan” beschreibt — weichen Fantasie und persönlichem Ausdruck. Das Unpräzise und Unbekannte wird dann zur Möglichkeitsbedingung, um ein neues Geflecht von

Beziehungen zu eröffnen. Der Akt des Zeichnens ist vielleicht eine Suche nach dem Verlangen, Festlegungen in der Realität durch das Unterbewusste und Zufällige zu treffen. Dennoch kommen Zweifel auf, wenn wir versuchen, Strukturen der Stadt im Plan zu erkennen. Wir haben gelernt, die physischen Objekte zu lesen und zu benennen — Areale, Monumente und Straßen. Im eigenen Entwurf werden diese oft nur zu Trägern von Geschichte und die Komplexität der Wirklichkeit lässt sich schwer in Beziehung zu unseren Arbeiten setzen. „Als Architekt komme ich mir oft wie ein Schachspieler vor, der nur die Figuren kennt”, schreibt Marcel Meili.

Die technologische Evolution schreitet weiter voran und wir fragen uns, welche Bedeutung dem Plan in dieser Entwicklung zukommt. Wie wird Architektur produziert, wenn Bilder eine immer präzisere, gleichzeitig konfuse Hyperrealität formen und die Technologie die Typologie ablöst? Digitale Zeichnungen sind von einer trügerischen Präzision geprägt, sie suggerieren eine Genauigkeit, die niemals erreicht wird. Die Flucht in Dissonanzen und Chaos führt dann zu einem Weg abseits von perfekten Linien und Normen. Kann der Plan immer noch als Mittel der Positionierung eingesetzt werden oder wird die Suche nach dem individuellen Ausdruck innerhalb einer diffusen Architekturproduktion immer wichtiger? Wir denken an Pläne, die Revolutionen in sich tragen und Zeichnungen, die sich gegen die Wiederholung des Gleichen stellen.

Letztendlich ist der Plan ein Mittel, um unsere Gegenwart und Realität zu interpretieren.

Wir lernen aus der Vergangenheit und versuchen, in die Zukunft zu blicken. Und oft können wir nicht sagen, warum uns ein Plan als richtig oder falsch erscheint, warum er angenehm oder unangenehm ist.

Horizonte sucht in seiner zwölften Ausgabe nach Positionen, die Pläne in sich tragen — zwischen und innerhalb von Wänden. Als Träger von Erinnerung, von Konfrontation, normiert und einzigartig. Gestoßen sind wir auf Thesen und Zeichnungen, die dem Plan Elemente und Realitäten einschreiben, auf Untersuchungen über das Verhältnis von Plan und Wirklichkeit, auf Erzählungen über Architekturen ohne Plan, die durch das Naive und Alltägliche dem klassischen Bild des Plans entgegenstehen; Pläne, die sich der Manifestation in der Wirklichkeit entziehen, kaum wahrnehmbar hierarchische Kategorien einführen, das philosophisch-naturwissenschaftlich geprägte Weltbild eines Menschen oder gar einer Generation in sich vereinen und solche, die sich der Perfektion widersetzen. Welche Attribute kann ein Plan tragen? Naiv, unschuldig, schön, imperfekt, abstrakt, konkret? Kann er der Lüge bezichtigt werden?

Wir begegnen Plänen des Digitalen, die aus der Verknüpfung singulär bedeutungsloser Informationspartikel bestehen, mit jeder neuen Ausgrabung weiter wachsen und sich heimlich, jedoch unweigerlich in der Wirklichkeit abzeichnen; Anekdoten über die Ideengeschichte des Plans und komplexe Realitäten, die er nicht mehr darzustellen vermag.

Gedanken zu instrumentalisierten Plänen, die, obschon ohne explizites Wertesystem er01. Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall stellt, doch soziale Bedeutung tragen. and Cedric Price, „Non-Plan: An experiment Wir hoffen, dass die Lektüre dieser Ausgabe gein Freedom”, in New Society, special issue nauso viel Freude bereitet wie ihr Erstellen from 20th of March 1969. und danken den Autoren. „Die eine Sache, die nicht getan wird, ist der härteste Test, das wertvollste Experiment von allen. Was würde passieren, wenn es keinen Plan gäbe?“ 01

The plan is considered as a universal medium for the communication and production of architecture in which the sociological and political dimensions of the past and present are inscribed. It is a language and a collective, graphical tool that maps thoughts and ideas. It is memory of knowledge. At the same time, we recognize a possibility of sophisticated perspectives — the plan reveals experiences, feelings, resistance to conventions and the manifestation of the useful. Indifference and innocence — as Rem Kohlhaas describes it in his essay ‘Typical Plan’ — gives way to fantasy and personal expression. The imprecise and unknown then

becomes the condition, in order to open a complexity of relations. The act of drawing is perhaps a search for the desire to make determinations in reality through the subconscious and accidental. Nevertheless, doubts arise when we try to recognize structures of the city in the plan. We have learned to read and name physical objects — areas, monuments and streets. In conceptual work, these are often only carriers of history and the complexity of reality is difficult to relate to our work. “As an architect, I often come across as a chess player, who knows only the characters”, writes Marcel Meili. Technological evolution is progressing further, and we ask ourselves, what role the plan will play in this development. How is architecture produced when pictures form an increasingly precise, simultaneously confusing hyper-reality and the technology replaces the typology? Digital drawings are characterized by deceptive precision, they suggest an accuracy that is never achieved. The flight into dissonances and chaos then leads to a path away from perfect lines and norms.

Can the plan still be used as a medium of positioning or does the search for individual expression become more and more important within diffuse architectural production?

We are thinking of plans that contain revolutions and drawings that stand against the repetition of the same. Ultimately, the plan is a medium to interpret our present and reality. We learn from the past and try to look into the future.

And often we cannot say why a plan seems right or wrong, why it is pleasant or unpleasant. For its twelfth edition, Horizonte is looking for various positions that carry plans — between and within walls. As a bearer of memory, on confrontation, normed and unique.

We came across theses and drawings that inscribe elements and realities into the plan, investigations into the relationship between plan and reality, narratives of architectures without a plan, which oppose the classical picture of it through the naive and the everyday; plans that defy manifestation in reality introducing barely perceptible hierarchical categories, that combine the philosophical-scientific world view of a human being or even of a generation, and those that defy perfection. What attributes can a plan carry? Naive, innocent, beautiful, imperfect, abstract, concrete? Can it be accused of lying?

We encounter plans of the digital, consisting of the singularly meaningless information particles that grow with each new edition and secretly but inevitably emerge in reality; anecdotes about the history of ideas of the plan and com-

plex realities that it can no longer portray. Thoughts on instrumentalized plans that, though created without an explicit system of values, nevertheless have social significance.

We thank the authors and hope that reading this edition is as enjoyable as creating it was. „The one thing that is not being done is the harshest test, the most valuable experiment of all. What would happen if there were no plans?“ 01 01. Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall and Cedric Price, „Non-Plan: An experiment in Freedom”, in New Society, special issue from 20th of March 1969.

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Inhalt/content

Editorial

17

A. J. P. Artemel — Plans and Aerial Photography: Reforming or Replacing Modernism?

29

A. Polze — Doppelt Negativ. Pläne des digitalen Raums um 1969.

43

L. Samovich — Pics or it didn’t happen. / Or / The heroic act of forgetting.

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Dr.–Ing. A. H. Smolian — Rudolf Schwarz — Eine „erste Architektur“.

67

W. Mazan, R. Śliwa — Naïve architecture, plans of polish allotment huts.

89

B. Cash — Radical Artistic Production in Berlin: Cinema Takes Center Stage.

111

K. Faschingeder — Architektur, die künstliche Intelligenz.

121

V. C. Ciborro — Narrative cartographies: Spatial sensations in ‘Crime and Punishment’.

135

Interview mit V. C. Ciborro.

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M. Gleich — Bewegung entwerfen. Eine kurze Geschichte des Pfeils im architektonischen Plan.

155

A. A. Dutto — The Decorated Diagram is almost alright.

173

T. Fromme — Ohne Titel K. Marouf — »EXXON«

02, 190 193, 200

Further reading

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Impressum

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Form, D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, and Norbert Weiner’s The Human Use of Human Beings, among others.

in publications: the aerial photograph and the plan.

In 1965, a reasonable, if slightly paranoid, question rang out through San Francisco’s counter-cultural community of environmentalists, LSD experimenters, and hippies: “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?” Printed on buttons, the question was posed by Stewart Brand in response to the human exploration of space. Meant to pressure NASA into releasing images taken on recent space missions, this quest was evidence of the growing need in the 1960s to see the world from a different point of view.

The children of the post-war era had seen Sputnik arching above, photos from U-2 flights, and were developing a profound sense that, despite Cold War divisions of the world into political spheres of influence, the earth was one. Cities had been demolished in the name of rationalized urban planning, favored by an ascendant and dominant capitalist bureaucracy, and Modernism was already suspect due to its reliance on a machine metaphor for functionalism, even after a war that featured mechanized mass destruction rather than mass production. By the late 1960s, there were two very different challenges to Modernism emerging in publications, each using a different means of conveying architectural information from above: the aerial photograph and the plan.

Once released, the image of earth as seen from space adorned the cover of the first issue of the “Whole Earth Catalog”, a resource guide for a growing community of builders, activists, and back-to-the-landers who actively sought to challenge the automated and inflexible outcomes of Modernist orthodoxy, which they saw to be the cause of society’s ills.01 In sections with names like “Nomadics” and “Industry and Craft” the “Whole Earth Catalog” proposed a decentralized way of life. On the one 01. This image was taken the unmanned satellite hand, it was a mail-order catalog promoting all the necessities by ATS-3 on November 10, 1967.

— instructional guides, farming tools, composting bins — for living off the grid. On the other, it theorized, through a handful of texts, an information theory-based method for bringing the world into balance.02 Throughout, architecture occupies an important place among the various skills and 02. These works include the General Systems Yearbook, literatures needed for a rapid physical manifestation of this Christopher Alexander’s new utopian lifestyle. A profile of Buckminster Fuller and Notes on the Synthesis of 01

01 — Architecture Without Architects, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Matrix of Man,The Family of Man

Plans and Aerial Photography: Reforming or Replacing Modernism?

There were two very different challenges to Modernism emerging

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Whole Earth Catalog l

31 Whole Earth Catalog ll

In the late 1960s there surfaced yet another effort to recuperexcerpts from his books kick off the catalog, later followed by listings for books by Frei Otto, Archigram, for the “Inflatables Cookbook”, and other examples of DIY construction.

These all propose a dematerialized architecture, where buildings are freed from semiotics and solidity in order to serve as extensions of the human organism: second skins, protective membranes, skeletal systems, shells, and even body suits. That is to say, a rehabilitation of Modernist functionalism, this time based on a biological metaphor rather than a mechanical one.

This metaphor was put forward most strongly in the “Whole Earth Catalog” through visual means; aerial photographs served as the statements of this thesis. First, the cover, an image of the whole earth as seen from space, immediately conjured the Gaia hypothesis, the notion that the earth was a single organism, of which humans are merely cells. Then, on page six, aerial photographs — of river deltas, settlements, and topography — were juxtaposed with photographs of the human body — arm veins, hip bones, the surface of the skin.03 Altogether, it amounts to a powerful statement 03. Steward Brand, Whole Earth Catalog (Menlo Park, on analogous functions between organisms, the earth’s Calif: Portola Institute, surface, and architecture. Other publications from this time 1968), 6. This page compares The World From Above period picked up on this criticism of Modernism through a (1966) by Hanns Reich and similar comparative play of images, not least the catalog for Surface Anatomy (1965) by Joseph Royce.

“Architecture Without Architects”, the 1964 MoMA exhibition curated by Bernard Rudofsky.04 Both the catalog and the exhibi04. Architecture Without Architects was in fact featured tion attempted to define a glossary of urban formal typologies by in later issues of the Whole grouping images of settlements from around the world into categoEarth Catalog under the section “Shelter and Land Use.” ries based on function — town structures, nomadic architecture, architecture by subtraction, storage fortresses, etc. Rudofsky repeatedly turned to aerial images to convey the full complexity of the built structures in question. Though geographical locations are noted, the survey builds a powerful argument in the pattern of Modernist internationalism — an argument based on functional similarities rather than cultural differences.

In fact, the juxtaposition of images from various cultures into a non-hierarchical and simultaneous display was most famously deployed in the 1955 travelling exhibition “The Family of Man”, which invited the viewer to compare images 05. To emphasize the point, the exhibition and catalog depicting how different cultures deal with aspects of life are accompanied by a poem. including work, dancing, marriage and death, with the viewer A representative excerpt: flung wide and far, ideally concluding that humans are more similar than differ- “People! born into toil, struggle, blood 05 ent. In his book “The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and dreams, among lovers, eaters, drinkers, workers, and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psycheloafers, fighters, players, delic Sixties”, Fred Turner terms this 06. Turner defines surgamblers. Here are ironworkrounds as “multi-image, ers, bridgemen, musicians, technique of using simultaneous visual multi-sound-source media sandhogs, miners, builders inputs to advance the thesis of “the environments.” Fred Turner, of huts and skyscrapers, The Democratic Surround: hunters, landlords and democratic surround.”06 The “Architec- jungle Multimedia & American Lithe landless, the loved and ture Without Architects” exhibition beralism from World War II the unloved, the lonely and to the Psychedelic Sixties abandoned, the brutal and catalog and the “Whole Earth Catalog” (Chicago: The University of the compassionate — one big both use printed approximations of the family hugging close to the Chicago Press, 2013), 3. ball of Earth for its life and surround to show that buildings and being.” Carl Sandburg, Prourban accretions are much like coral reefs — human exo-skel- logue to The Family of Man, Edward Steichen (New etons serving the function of protection and definition of an ed.

York, NY: the Museum of Modern Art, 1955), 2.

ate Modernism from its machine metaphor.

Architecture Without Architects

The Family of Man

individual’s space for growth. In these surrounds, aerial photographs do much of the heavy lifting.07 In the late 1960s there surfaced yet another effort to recuperate Modernism from its machine metaphor, but rather than relying on science and ecology, it relied on history and humanism; and rather than making an argument through aerial imagery, it put forward its theses through that clearest marker of architectural purity, that Modernist specialty, the plan.

In 1968, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, professor at the Pratt Institute and wife of László MoholyNagy, released “Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of Urban Environment”, which purported to document the mutations of urban morphology from ancient times to the present day (The title seems to have been chosen to position the book as an architecture-focused extension of “The Family of Man”). The volume’s organizing schema groups the plans of various cities into formal typologies: geomorphic, concentric, orthogonalconnective, orthogonal-modular, and clustered. For example, she cites the Nahalal kibbuz, Vienna, and the Hittite Cincirli citadel as concentric cities, and Ostia, Zurich, and Cleveland as orthogonalconnective cities.

Despite the echoing of “Architecture Without Architects”’ formal approach, and the use of “environment” in the title of the book, Moholy-Nagy’s introduction begins with a broadside of invective against the architects and urbanists featured in the “Whole Earth Catalog”, with Buckminster Fuller, Archigram, and Christopher Alexander singled out for scorn.

Following a block quote from Buckminster Fuller’s “Considerations for a Curriculum” she writes, “Such an idea might produce geodesic domes; it will never produce cities.”08 She then captions a comparison of network diagrams — systems theory has indeed arrived in architectural discourse — by sarcastically calling out their formal simi- 08. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, of Man: An Illuslarity: “Three sets of similar symbols represent problem solutions relat- Matrix trated History of the Urban ing to totally dissimilar levels of human experience. Set (a) exemplifies Environment (New York: Frederick A. Praeger the origin of spermatazoa and ovum; set (b) demonstrates Christopher Publishers, 1968), 13.

07. Another Rudofsky exhibition at MoMA, Are Clothes Modern? (1944), critiques the non-shelter (semiotic, social) functions of clothing and shows that designed extensions of the human body had long been on his mind.

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The plan contains the hope of the designer and the indeteminacy inherent in not

yet being realized. The aerial photograph portays what already ex-

Matrix of Man l

Matrix of Man ll

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