RE/03

RE/03

RE/03 RE-MASTER 2020–2021

Edited by Thordis Arrhenius and Mikael Bergquist

KTH Royal Institute of Technology — School of Architecture Stockholm

COLOPHON RE-Master Studio is an advanced architectural

Acknowledgements

course run at KTH Royal Institute of Technology School of Architecture in Stockholm.

Thanks to our many guests, hosts and critics who joined us during the academic year 2020–2021.

It is taught by Thordis Arrhenius and Mikael Bergquist

Helena Matthsson (KTH), Josef Eder (General Architects), Marcelo Torres, Nina Lundvall

Publication Design

(Caruso St. John), Dan Lindau, Mikael Olsson,

Matthew Ashton

Claes Sörstedt (KTH), Oliver Lütjens (Lütjens Padmanabhan), Irina Davidovici (ETH Zürich),

About the type

Ulrika Karlsson (KTH), James Taylor Foster

Univers is used throughout this publication. The

(ArkDes), Frida Melin (ArkDes), Anders Bodin,

typeface was designed by the Swiss typographer

Rasmus Wærn (Wingårdh Arkitekter), Léa–

Adrian Frutiger and released by Deberny &

Catherine Szacka (University of Manchester),

Peignot in 1957 — the same year as Helvetica.

Frida Grahn (ISA,Accademia di Architettura Mendrisio), Beata Labuhn (Oslo School of

© For all texts, drawings and images the

Architecture), Samuel Lundberg (HHL Arkitekter),

respective authors, unless otherwise stated.

Björn Ehrlemark (Arkitektens grannar), Carlos Mínguez Carrasco (ArkDes), Charlotte von

All rights reserved. No part of this publication

Moos (Sauter von Moos), Léone Drapeaud

may be reproduced in any manner without

(Traumnovelle), Oliver Lütjens (Lütjens &

permission from the authors and the publisher.

Padmanabhan Architekten), Philip Christou (London Metropolitan University), Thomas

ISBN 978-91-519-2350-5

Padmanabhan (Lütjens & Padmanabhan Architekten), Tor Lindstrand (Konstfack) and Torsten Lange (TU Munchen)

CONTENTS

Re-Master

10

Södra Station

27

Square

36

Market

66

Tower

84

Crescent

100

Station

116

Boulevard

136

Landscape

152

Archive

168

Afterwords

260

[6]

| JA, HC, AZ

CHANGE

A central effect of global capitalism is the pressure of change. Urban patterns and building programs are increasingly becoming redundant, demanding change to accommodate new functions, identities and economies. At an accelerating speed, dominated by the logic of obsolescence, the built becomes outdated and turned into waste. This in turn raises a new urgency for contemporary architectural culture to start addressing the pressure of change in alternative modes.

PRESERVATION

With the fundamental shift in our contemporary understanding of spatial and material resources, the architect is no longer primarily occupied with making the new from scratch, but with making the new out of the past. In this condition preservation has won a new relevance for architecture that goes far beyond saving its canon of buildings. In the urgent context of climate change preservation is moving from the fringe of architectural culture into its core.

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PEOPLE RE-2020–21

PROJECTS 2020–2021

Station

Teachers

Södra stationsområdet Urban plan by Jan Inhe-Hagström 1981–91

Stockholm södra station Axelsson & Borowski Arkitektkontor, Coordinator Arkitektkontor 1988-90

Thordis Arrhenius (TA) Mikael Bergquist (MB)

Square Students Jim Andersson (JA) Sogol Baghban (SB) Hedvig Carlin (HC) Karin Edsälv (KE) Andrea Ekman (AE) Sara Grebner (SG) Hjalti Gudlaugsson (HG) Anna Hellström (AH) Victoria Israelsson (VI) Vilhelm Larsson Regnström (VLR) Kim Lidman (KL) Fredrika Linde (FL) Ellen Lindskog (EL) Blanca Obrador Urquijo (BOU) Lovisa Orebrand (LO) Declan Quirke (DQ) Sara Salman (SS) Vanesa Santillan Messina (VSM) Alma Segerholm (AS) Mikael Svensson (MS) Ludwig Söderqvist (LS) Johan Torarp (JT) Lauri Vaher (LV) Karin Weissenegger (KW) Max Wolstencroft (MW) Nora Yous (NY) Anna Zander (AZ)

Boulevard Medborgarhuset K M Westerberg 1939 Kv Nederland 21 Riksbyggens arkitektavdelning, Claes Mellin 1983?

Göta Arkhuset Riksbyggens arkitektavdelning, Claes Mellin 1983 Market Söderhallarna Bo Kjessel Arkitektkontor 1988-92 Tower Söder torn Henning Larsen* 1997 Crescent Bofills Båge Ricardo Bofill 1988-90 Fatabursparken White arkitekter 1991

Kv Brinckan 1, 2 och 3 EGÅ Arkitektkontor, Coordinator, Riksbyggen konsult Landscape Kv Svärdet and Ånghästparken Bengt Lindroos 1980-1990

ARCHIVES ArkDes Archive [arkdes.se/en/library-and-collections] Digital Museum [https://digitaltmuseum.se] Stockholm Källan [sok.stadsarkivet.stockholm.se] Stockholm Stad Archive [sok.stadsarkivet.stockholm.se] Stockholm City Planning Office [https://bygglov.stockholm/ hitta-ritningar] KTH Library [https://www.kth.se/biblioteket] Tidskriften Arkitektur [https://arkitektur.se/arkivet]

* Henning Larsen left the project before its completion in protest against the many compromises made by the construction company, refusing to have his name associated with the final building.

[8]

| Re-Masters Studio in Stockholm. 2020

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RE­-MASTER 2020–2021 Studio Re- addresses the notion of change, permanence and resilience through the means of re-storation, re-use and re-pair. The overall methodological and pedagogical strategy is to explore the already present, the already built, the already thought and imagined.

Re-storing Postmodernism Architectural restoration is conditioned by an underlying uncertainty about where its object is to be found; whether in the objects ‘ideal’ historical form, or in its actual physical materiality. The search for the ‘real’ object in preservation is surrounded by this ambiguity; to distinguish between true and false, beginning and end, original and appliqué. When it comes to postmodernism this ambiguity—which has shaped preservation as a field of architectural enquiry since the 1800’s—gets its own special twist. A new orientation towards history and preservation has often been associated with the postmodern turn in architecture in the 1980’s, yet how do the central guiding concepts of architectural preservation, such as authenticity and authorship; original and copy; context and contrast, relate to a postmodern discourse imbued with a playful thinking around these concepts themselves?

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Monument Exploring Stockholm’s postmodern heritage, Re-master studio has speculated on how to restore, re-use and repair postmodernism. By focusing on buildings and urban assemblages that were materialized in the period of the 1980s and 1990’s we have kept an open discussion about which particular buildings and urban areas qualify as examples of Swedish postmodern architecture. We have discussed postmodernism not just as a question of style, but foremost as a shift in the architectural discourse that relates directly or indirectly to the new political landscape of the Swedish welfare state in the late 1970s.

Due to political, economic, and material reasons many building from the 1980s and 1990s are currently facing major changes and alterations. This pressure of change, often initiated by new planning proposals and the privatization of formerly public owned properties, tends to start up new processes of historization and resistance. In regards to sustainability, it is becoming increasingly hard to argue for extensive transformations or exclusive modernizations of these often healthy, but slightly worn and outdated buildings.

This also relates to preservation, as new appreciations and re-evaluation emerge when these middle-aged buildings are radically rebuilt, altered or even demolished. Several of the buildings we investigated, for example, have only recently become re-classified as buildings of historic significance with heritage value. They are also—despite or perhaps due to their tired appearance—gaining increasing support and interest from the general public, and yet again returning into fashion.

These processes of canonizations and historizations open up questions regarding what point in history postmodernism itself became a thing of the past? What happens to postmodernism when it finally becomes properly historical? Not only playing with historical references but representing one itself?

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Authenticity When postmodernism becomes heritage a series of intriguing question arise that reflect back upon, and challenge the doxa of preservation. How does a symbolic referential architecture, already strongly dependent on surface effects, acknowledge material authenticity and historical integrity? What is the actual material authenticity of a postmodern building?

Where is the originality and authenticity of the building positioned —in the archive or on the field? Indeed, how do you restore the copied, the simulated and the anachronistic?

Digging through archives, photographing, filming, scanning, modelling, imprinting and drawing we have started to collected documentary and material evidence of buildings on the brink of turning into history. This open-ended archive has been the working material of Studio Re- and the source for a series of architectural speculation. Searching and re-searching these buildings and urban areas, their prehistories, makings and multiple afterlives, we have started to identify and build alternative postmodern histories. Throughout our investigations into the restoration of postmodernism the notion of economy of means has been a consistent theme, steering design decisions and program, and as architects ask how we can pay attention to our common resources—material, spatial, social as well as aesthetic—in the present situation of the earth.

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Representation What is often defined as the postmodern turn in architectural discourse coincides with the introduction and widespread application of the computer drawing. In the 1980s architectural drawing was transformed from a preoccupation with shadow and line into one of pixel and colour. Also, crucially, and to an unforeseen extent, the emergence of the computer rendered image in the architectural office was to fundamentally transform the architectural profession from one of building-making to one of image-making.

In the ‘pre- digital era’ the act of rendering referred to the process of finishing and making ready a drawing by adding a final layer of colour or shade. Now-a-days, when we talk about a rendering, we usually refer to the use of a various digital technologies to produce an architectural image. In both cases however the act of rendering aims to a enhance the depth and materiality of the architecture depicted—to make it more ‘real’ and convincing. Crucial for the work in the studio is to reflect , test and most importantly, advance architectural representational tools and technologies—to become aware of the function of the image in architectural thinking. How the render translates between drawing and building, between the image and the architectural project is of importance for the pedagogics of the studio. In these terms we have also understood and discussed preservation as a form of image making that curates and re-curate the materiality of a building with the tool of drawing and rendering.

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[14]

| MS

| MS, DQ

[15]

[16]

| AH, KW

| SG

[17]

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| LS, HG, AS, FL

| AS, FL

[19]

[20]

| AE, VI

| HC, BOU, AH

[21]

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| SS, HC

| VSM

[23]

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| SB

URBAN INTERIOR, LOVISA OREBRAND

| LO

[25] THE IMAGE, LOVI

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| EL, VLR

| LS, KL

[27]

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| STOCKHOLM STADSMUSEET

LEARNING FROM SÖDRA STATION

The focus for our investigation into postmodernism and preservation has been an inner-city neighbourhood popularly named Södra Station (the South Station), build during the 1980s. Situated on the island of Södermalm in Stockholm and built upon the site of a former railway yard, Södra Station constitutes one of the most comprehensive and fully developed postmodern developments in Sweden. The area begins at the large public square of Medborgarplatsen and stretches one kilometre to the west until it reaches the parklands of Tanto and the shores of Årstaviken and lake Mälaren. The site was originally occupied by a small lake (or rather a swamp), having a lower elevation than the surrounding city landscape.

The site was previously the main railway terminus for people and goods entering the city from the south, however when Stockholm Central Station was built in 1871 closer to the city center, the importance of Södra Station diminished.

In the late 1970s Stockholm City bought the land from the Swedish public railway company (SJ) with the objective to develop the site into a public housing area. This was the first time since the 1930s that the city of Stockholm planned to develop and build public housing at the core of the city.

This can be related to a new postmodern interest in the historical urban core and in urban life, which for Stockholm’s City Planning Office would result in a totally new approach to the development of public housing. In Sweden every public housing development in one way or another related to the so called Million Homes Program, the state-initiated housing

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scheme that built over one million new dwellings during a 10-year span (1965 to 1974) through rationalizing and industrializing the building sector. Södra Station was conceived as a radical break from the modernist planning doctrines that underpinned the million homes program, rejecting uniformity and rational building methods in favour of a return to the traditional city, with its street grids, eclectic housing forms and communal courtyards. However, it is crucial to note that despite the difference in approach and appearance, the housing built at Södra Station utilised the same building components and rational construction methods that the Million Homes Program pioneered in the preceding decade. In fact, the same public housing developers were involved and same housing standards and regulations were applied. One major difference however was the level of aesthetic ambition and control from the Stockholm City Planning Office, heavily determining the look and form of building façades, street patterns and public spaces. To achieve this a new type of planning tool was introduced, called an environmental program, which listed and defined architectural qualities such as variation of colour and façade features such as balconies, vaults and more. The city office had borrowed the idea of using a descriptive environmental quality program from a previous case of preservation of a historic district in Stockholm, yet at Södra station these tools of historic preservation would be applied to new construction, suggesting a totally novel postmodern way of using and re-using history.

Following a large architectural competition 1981 the idea to make the area into a new residential neighbourhood was confirmed and Södra Station would become a test ground for postmodernism in Sweden. It is noteworthy that the competition was open to all (including non-professionals), inviting the public to come forth with suggestions in a new quest for populism and bottom-up design. The radical scenographer and

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engineer Sören Brunes took up the call and participated with a highly scenography urban plan featuring a series of crescents laid out over the area. Sören Brunes did not win, but his proposal set the stage for a novel approach to the city as performative set of urban spaces and indicatively Brunes was later to design the on-site exhibition explaining the Södra station project to the public The term postmodernism was never very popular in Sweden among architects, but at Södra Station postmodern architecture was designed and built. The most obvious project is perhaps the market hall Söderhallarna at Medborgarplasten, designed by the architect Bo Kjessel in a playful metaphorical language unusual for Swedish architecture at the time. With a transparent curtainwall façade incorporating Palladian windows turned upside down and a set of obscure ornamental pilasters the interior of the market hall is loosely organized around a branching tree and a giant-sized rotunda of pillars suggesting a flexible and dynamic program. The Swedish architect Bengt Lindroos is another dominant figure in the design of Södra Station. Lindroos was engaged in the initial urban plans for the whole area of Södra station from the beginning as well as participating in almost all the different open idea completions and parallel commissions. Alongside the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill, Lindroos was selected to make a proposal for a large-scale apartment building in the form of a crescent, however in the end Bofill designed it in a neo classical style resembling his earlier projects in Paris, featuring a special Swedish concrete mix for the pre-casted concrete panels that was carefully researched. Of Lindroos many proposals for Södra station only the housing area Svärdet at the far end of the site was finally built, carefully set in the landscape as a megastructure yet featuring dense intimate courtyards with inward facing balconies for social interactions. Architect and developer Mischa Borowski, who

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was a bit of an outside player on the Swedish architectural scene, designed the large-scale glassed arcade of the station that in a novel postmodern way mixed private commercial offices with public space. The architectural firm Coordinator designed the station building itself, which included not only office space but also for the first time public housing built on top of a railway. The highest building in the area was Söders torn by Henning Larsen, one of the last to be built in the area in the early 1990s in a neo classical style. A building that after many conflicts ended with the architect Larsen’s dramatic decision to withdraw from the project, The architect in charge for the planning at the City office was Jan Inghe-Hagström. He was influenced by the postmodernism being built in Berlin such as IBA 1987 and the urban designs of the Krier brothers, as well as and maybe foremost of Norwegian architectural historian Christian Norberg Schultz and his writing on identity, belonging and homecoming. The neighbourhood adjoins the old city fabric, yet the traffic separation favoured in many suburban areas during the 1960s and 70s was also implemented here, as in central parts of Stockholm. This cut off the area from its surrounding urban context and necessitates a series of stairs to bridge the height differences. The area was initially planned as a public and accessible area with open courtyards and intimate ”urban interiors” yet over time this has changed, as most of the apartments are today privately owned and former public spaces are now enclosed behind locked gates and fences.

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How does one work with an area like Södra Station today?

What can be learnt from it and what are the difficulties? From its inauguration Södra Station was heavily criticized for being poorly built and executed, and today some 30 years later the need for repair and renovation (and possibly even restoration) is urgent in many respects.

Studio Re- have tried to look at the area without judgement or preconceptions, but with an open mind, curiosity and a critical eye at the same time.

Sketch by Bengt Lindroos of his architectural office working on Södra Station.

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LAN

DSC

APE

D VAR E L OU

B

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ARE SQU ER TOW KET R A M ENT

SC CRE ION STAT

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SQUARE

| STOCKHOLM STADSMUSEET

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| BOU, VSM

| BOU, VSM

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| JA, HC, AZ

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| STOCKHOLM STADSMUSEET, SG

| SG, STOCKHOLM STADSMUSEET

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| HG

| JA

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| JA, HC, AZ

| HC, AZ

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| BOU

| BOU

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| DQ

| DQ

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| VSM

| BOU

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| JA

| JA

[55]

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| FL, SG

| FL, SG

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[58]

| LS

| HG

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| KL

| MS

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DIALOGUE With three distinctly different projects designed for the same site, Declan, Mikael and Kim spoke together to extrapolate the reasonings behind our different methods.

How did you approach this context?

MS // My starting point was to use the arcade from Bengt Lindroos’ competition proposal for Söder torn.

It was more of a reference for an appearance, how I wanted my project to look, than a thought-through site approach. I liked the strong and straightforward form of the arcade.

I would say it shaped how I worked with the program and urban questions. The coherence of it allowed me to close and open certain parts of the project in plan, while keeping a unity in elevation. I also like how this unified elevation clashes with the organic forms of the trees and the varying topography of the site.

KL // In my opinion, this variegated corner of Medborgarplatsen makes the square feel incomplete.

The ground material between Lillienhoffska, Medborgarhuset and the bar pavilions being the same, you get the feeling that these buildings form a single unit, one in which the pavilions do not fit. To me, this is a place that can handle, almost requires, a larger building with clarity and prominence, one that is not overshadowed by its neighbors.

I wanted to do a project that heals the place, with a gesture towards the Square and Medborgarhuset and a gesture towards Lillienhoffska.

These facades are essential in the project, while the facades towards Noes Arksgränd and Repslagargatan are secondary. In order not to be

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too brutal towards the secondary facades however, I have cut off the northwest corner of the building and placed a staircase here to connect Repslagargatan with the square, similar to how it is today.

centuate the present lines; those from the Lilienhofska, the square, the garden and the building-line from Repslagargatan. I did try options where I broke these lines but it always felt somehow wrong.

DQ // I think I started with a similar idea to you, Kim, wanting to ‘heal’ this place. It felt so disorganised and dirty. But I did sense that there was a popular culture alive here that was valuable, soI thought it would be interesting to try make the site work better in its character as it exists. I started playing with the levels and facades to make the surrounding spaces stronger in their own character; the square more square-like, the garden more garden-like, etc. The pavilion itself became quite small, and seeing the strength of your facades now, maybe too small!

KL // It is not something I gave a lot of consideration while working with the project, it came rather intuitively, but it became very apparent when seeing my project next to yours. It makes me think about the tools and the techniques that you (we) work with. I believe both of you had the same Cad-drawing as I had, made by others in the class as a starting point. In this drawing the pattern of the ground is very prominent, more so than in reality. Interrupting this very defined square feels like quite a stretch when working with this plan.

I wonder if our projects would have looked different if the ground material of the square had been different, or if the distinct square-shape had been broken up somewhere else around it.

Our projects each occupy different parts of the site, but we all quite strictly follow the north/south extent of Lilienhofska, not intervening on the square nor arksgränd. Why do you think that is?

DQ // Lilienhoffska has become a kind of “urban artefact” that the rest of the city is evolving about; the street and square were both built much later but hold to its edges. Because I had started by trying to strengthen the character of the place, it seemed right to further ac-

MS // I agree with you both, it was intuitive not to expand the site onto the square. Lindroos placed his arcade on the square, so moving it back was one of the first things I did differently from his proposal (if we at all can compare the proposals at this point). I think following the lines of Lilienhofska makes for a much more clean framing of Medborgarplatsen.

The borders are very strong and clear around the square, except for where

our site is. Here the lines are blurred.

The transition to Repslagargatan feels very awkward; you must either zig zag between Göta Ark and the Kvarnen pavilion or find your way to the partly blocked stairs. I think we all made this more accessible.

There is a strong history around the square; from Lillienhoffska to Medborgarhuset to Söderhallarna, each with distinctive architectural styles relating to the time they were designed. How did you relate to them, to the task of designing something of today?

of the buildings are composed with grandeur; Medborgarhuset with its large staircases and monumental division, Söderhallarna with its round windows spanning two floors and Lilienhofska being a 17th century palace.

I wanted to pick up this monumentality and reinforce the sense of permanence of the site, as opposed to how the northern corner is composed today.

DQ // The diversity of styles and materials around the square gives a great freedom when designing something new, anything’s possible!

Myself, I looked at the smaller pavilions, the weaker buildings, for I feel that they allow a certain ad-hoc culture. These were primarily made in green steel and glass with tiles, so I used these as my materials.

MS // I think “anything is possible” is quite spot on here. Sure, relating to architectural styles is more than just sampling, I would say it is more about trying to make you think of a building in a certain way, may it be composition, structural rhythm, or materiality. But what makes Medborgarplatsen special is the sense of allowance at the site.

There is no ruling stylistic expression. A common thread is that many

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| MS

| KL, DQ

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MARKET

| STOCKHOLM STADSMUSEET

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| BO KJESSEL / ARKDES

| KL 21.02.25

[69] RE- Store

Kim Lidman

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| BO KJESSEL / ARKDES

| MS

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| LV

| LV

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| LV

| LV

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| MS

| MS

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| BO KJESSEL / ARKDES, DQ

| LV

Model of the corner pilaster Scale 1:20

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RE -

SÖDERHALLARNA

söderhallarna

BIO

APOTEK

VINBUTIK

RESTAURANGER

SALUHALL

BUTIKER

A L L A R N A

BANK

Line drawing 1:100 SÖDERHALLARNA

SALUHALL

Never Land

Medborgarplatsen kv. Fatburen

1-5

OPEN

VECKANS ÖL 39:-

PUBLIC FACADE

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ANNA ZANDER

| AZ

| AZ

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Model of entrance to the market hall from Tjärhovsgränd 1:20

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| MS, BO KJESSEL / ARKDES

Working model 1:100

| MS

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TOWER

| ARKDES

Fatburstrappan 20-6

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| VI

| VI

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| HENNING LARSEN’S ARCHIVE

| SG

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| VI

| HENNING LARSEN’S ARCHIVE

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| LO

| LO

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| LO, CARL-AXEL ACKING / ARKDES

| LO

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| LO

| LO

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| MO

Göta Arkhuset in the archive Competition proposal for Södertorn

Re master studio VT 2021

| BENGT LINDROOS / ARKDES

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CRESCENT

BOFILLS BÅGE A FAIRY TALE FOR THE PEOPLE Karin Edsälv Hjalti Guðlaugsson Fredrika Linde Alma Segerholm Max Wolstencroft

| ARKDES

[102] Högbergsgatan

Fatburssjön

| HC

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High Expectations, Theatrical Romantic Proposal Architect’s presentation model

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| RICARDO BOFILL / STOCKHOLM STADSARKIVET

| KE

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| LV

| DQ

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| STOCKHOLM STADSARKIVET

The Pre-fabricated Ruin Pre-construction? Post-construction? A post-modern monument, disassembled

| MW

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| MW

| AS

[111]

A Pre-fabricated Monument, Re-evaluated [112]

Ambiguous

| MW

Pu Publi

| SG

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| LS

model photo | KW

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STATION

| STOCKHOLM STADSMUSEET

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| PHOTOGRAPH OF MARIA AND MISCHA BOROWSKI, SKETCH BY COORDINATOR ARKITEKTER

| SG

Södra station from Bangårdsgången, model

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| VI

| BOU

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| BOU

| BOU

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| SB

| SB

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| SB

| SB

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| NY

Seating area towards Södra Station.

I NTERIO R VIEW

Brinckan Café

| AE

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| LO

| LO

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| HC

| FORMER RAIL YARDS OF SÖDRA STATION, 1970.

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BOULEVARD

| STOCKHOLM STADSMUSEET

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| SS

STUDENT / SARAH SALMAN // TUTORS / THORDIS ARRHENIUS / MIKAEL BERGQUIST

SÖDERMALMSALLÉN .

COLLAGE

S C HE M ATI C S KE TC H STUDIO RE // CRIT // 2020.12.10

| SS

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| VSM

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M AP P ING SÖDERMALMSALLÉN .

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| SS

FACADE AND PLAN | SS

SÖDE R M A L M S A L L É N .

COLLAGE DRAWING

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| FL

| FL

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| AZ

| AZ

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| VSM

| VSM

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| VLR

| VLR

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| VSM

| DQ

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LANDSCAPE

| STOCKHOLM STADSMUSEET

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| KL

Sketch Sketch

References

Sketch Sketch

Sketch

References

| KL, STOCKHOLM STADSMUSEET

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| KE

Be | KE

[157]

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| KL

| KL

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Mar

ia B an

g ata

Ro s e nlun dsga

Ri

tan

Ånghästparken ng vä ge n

Skö

ldga

tan

Kv. Svärdet

Ånghästparken 1:500 (A2)

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| KE

Leon Krier, Artist studio on Central Park

Site photo | LEON KRIER, EL

L [161]

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| KE

| EL

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Proposal - Site A

Proposal - Site A

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| KL

Sven Markelius och Olof Lundgren, Års | KL, STOCKHOLM STADSMUSEET

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| EL

| ÅRSTA BRIDGE, 1934. PHOTO: OSCAR BLADH / STOCKHOLM STADSMUSEET

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ARCHIVE

Ever since the early competitions, all through the building process and up until the early 1990s when Södra Station was finished, the project has generated an enormous amount of archival material in the form of drawings, models, texts, newspaper articles, etc.

The studio has collected a heterogeneous selection of material from different sources and archives.

We thank the following archives;

ArkDes Archive [arkdes.se/en/library-and-collections] Digital Museum [https://digitaltmuseum.se] Stockholm Källan [sok.stadsarkivet.stockholm.se] Stockholm Stad Archive [sok.stadsarkivet.stockholm.se] Stockholm City Planning Office [https://bygglov.stockholm/hitta-ritningar] KTH Library [https://www.kth.se/biblioteket] Tidskriften Arkitektur [https://arkitektur.se/arkivet]

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[2]

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I bildens nedre del syns Söderledens norra tunnelmynning vid Högbergsgatan.

Parallellt med Götgatan tv passerar leden under bebyggelsen på Södermalm, över Johanneshovsbron till Nynäsvägen.

The north portal of Söderleden tunnel at Högbergsgatan is visible in the lower part of the photograph. Parallell with Götgatan (left) the road passes below the buildings on Södermalm before crossing Johanneshov bridge to Nynäsvägen.

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A

D

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“The central space ends with a lantern with a dense roof with vertical glass surfaces. The intention with this is that the space should have the character of an interior space and not a glazed courtyard. By doing this we want to achieve a more beautifully illuminated space and a softer and more friendly atmosphere. Visually the central spiral staircase should be experienced as a “stem” holding a large “leaf” sheltering the yard.”

-Systemhandling 1988

[43]

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“The central space of the market hall ends in a corresponding way as the office building, but in another shape. We strive for a beautifully illuminated space! Here too heavy stems grow to the sky and unite in a crown, which by its design brings down light to the hall. The interplay between the stem and the crown strengthens the market hall as a central function in the building and should be perceptible from the outside as well as the inside.”

-Systemhandling 1988

oof hat ace to ter ral ga

A Model photo, Bo Kjessel 1988 B Model photo, Bo Kjessel 1988

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Medborgarplatsen, 1940s

MEDBORGARPLATSEN 1900 - PRESENT STUDIO RE

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P1

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DRAWINGS AND WORKING MODELS, MARKET PLACE AND OFFICES

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DRAWINGS, SECTIONS STUDIO RE

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P1

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UPPSTAIRS

DOWNSTAIRS

UPPSTAIRS

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INTERIORS, DRAWINGS AND FOOD STALLS

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INTERIOR ORNAMENTS AND COLOURS STUDIO RE

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P1

NORA YOUS

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EXTERIOR AND INTERIOR FOOD STALLS, MEDBORGARPLATSEN, SALUHALLEN, EXTERIOR COLOURS STUDIO RE

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P1

NORA YOUS

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„Tornprojektvid vidMedborgarplatsen“ Medborgarplatsen“ „Tornprojekt

developmentofofthe thedesign designofofthe thetower towerover overtht development

nts that are d here:

peeew w was was for or ssiirize ze n

arround 70 proposals stadsbyggnadskontoret + ark. Alexis Pontvik publish a study of the tower design. The study was mainly intended to analyze different cityscape consequences of the fundamentally different tower designs. „Tornprojekt vid Medborgarplatsen“

de

Södertorn tornoriginalvorslag originalvorslagHenning HenningLarsen Larsen Söder

1986 1986 floors 4040floors

1985 1985 Stockholmscity cityplanning planning Stockholms office(Stockholms (Stockholmsstadsstadsoffice byggnadskontor)announannounbyggnadskontor) cesideas ideascompetition competitionfor for ces high-risebuilding buildingininthe the a ahigh-rise southofofStockholm.

Stockholm. south

campanile.Office, Office,shops, shops,spinning spinningresrescampanile. taurant taurant

Söder torn originalvorslag Henning Larsen

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1961

1985

Hening Larsen won competition for Stockholms new university in Frescati, he was designated as too young for such a big project, the assignment went to second prize winner David Helldèn

Stockholms city planning office (Stockholms stadsbyggnadskontor) announces ideas competition for a high-rise building in the south of Stockholm.

1988 1988 floors 3232floors office,shops, shops,spinning spinningrestaurant, restaurant,maybe maybe office, childrenand andyouth youth children

office,sho sh office,

1986 40 floors campanile. Office, shops, spinning restaurant

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office, sho

nt, maybe

1988

1989

1990

23 floors

15 floors

9 floors

office, shops, spinning restaurant, children and youth

proposal by city planning office children and youth center, all activity house, maybe spinning restaurant

lots of office, stores, finance and public service in fairly small area

0

1991

s

„Back to the city“ Fredric Bedoire

nance and public small area

1993 23 floors, housing „reasonably high house“, which means approximately height Skatteskrapan

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„Haglunds stick“ - An architects dream with nine lives. DagensNyheter 931203

Henning Larsen won the competition for the Malmö city library (various changes for financial reasons)

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„Haglunds stick“ a pole of shame. SvenskaDagbladet 950725

s for financial reasons)

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1995

23 floors, final design housing

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[71] | ARCHIVE

Detailed plan Fatburshöjden, 1995, Jan Inghe archive

[72]

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Arkitekt hoppar av Söder torn. DagensNyheter 961002

Haglund wanted to open the house to the public. SvenskaDagbladet 961026

(may: in

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Arkitekt hoppar av Söder torn. Dagens

Danish architect does not give up. ??? 960511

1996

In one of S Torn, or H built in th Haglund wanted to open thearchitect house toHt

So another stand out, a little neit eyes was th can the Da

Over time, houses

Because w Henning‘s line. In add was also ch Henning t from the p Arc

When you like when the The questi if they are each archit with, not g mes to bra ment“. Wh implement Visionless for the ver

Beauty contest or city life? Arkitektur 5-98

1998 | TOWER

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Proposal Långhög

Proposal Igor

Reward 50 000 kr

Reward 50 000 kr

First competition Selected proposals From Brf Söder torn’s webpage

Proposal Lyftet

Proposal Stolpe in

Reward 75 000 kr

Reward 75 000 kr

First competition Selected proposals From Brf Söder torn’s webpage

Proposal Solitär

Proposal Medborgarporten

Proposal Body and Soul

Purchase 25 000 kr

Purchase 25 000 kr

Honorable mention

[196]

First competition Selected proposals From Brf Söder torn’s webpage

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By Ahlgren/Edblom/AOS

By Brygghuset Arkitekter

By Bengt Lindroos

By GWSK Arkitektkontor

By Pontvik/Tengbom

By Henning Larsen

Second competition All proposals From Arkitektur 5-1988

Original proposal

By Henning Larsen

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[197]

Plan 3

Plan 4

Plan 5

Plan 6

Plan 7

Plan 8

Plan 9

Plan 10

Drawings Apartment floor plans Scale 1:300

Plan 11

Plan 12

Plan 13

Plan 14

Plan 15

Plan 16

Plan 17

Plan 18

Plan 21

Plan 22

Drawings Apartment floor plans Scale 1:300

Plan 19

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Plan 20

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Söder torn halfway through.

Söder torn halfway through.

Söder torn almost done.

Construction photos From Brf Söder torn’s webpage

Söder torn foundation.

Söder torn 7 floors high.

Construction photos From Brf Söder torn’s webpage

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doors

doors

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les maisons temple

les maisons temple

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concept

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THE PORTICO KUBEN ÖST OCH VÄST ALMA SEGERHOLM

DAYTIME

THE PORTICO; THE ENTRANCES KUBEN ÖST OCH VÄST

NIGHTTIME

ALMA SEGERHOLM

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[203]

BOFILLS BÅGE A FAIRY TALE FOR THE PEOPLE Karin Edsälv Hjalti Guðlaugsson Fredrika Linde Alma Segerholm Max Wolstencroft

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[4]

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[8]

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THE ORNAMENTATION

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FACADE KUBEN ÖST OCH VÄST ALMA SEGERHOLM

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1855

1996 [218]

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2019 | STATION

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The railway came to Stockholm in 1860. At that time, Stockholm's southern station, the city's first railway station, was built. The station was located at Medborgarplatsen, approximately where Söderhallarna is today.

In accordance with the 1923 railway station agreement, it was decided that the passenger station would be moved west to the main line. The old station building was demolished and a new one was placed in the north part of the area. The building was completed in 1926 and designed by Folke Zetterwall.

Södra station was used for both freight trains and passenger traffic. The freight station closed down in the 1980s. Today, the railway tracks run in tunnels under Södermalm. Now only the commuter trains stop at Södra station.

The station was completed in 1989. Statens Järnvägar (SJ) was the client and Coordinator Architects was responsible for the design of the station itself. It was the first time in Sweden that a regular railway was built over with residential buildings, they were designed by EGÅ Arkitektkontor, Coordinator arkitekter and Riksbyggen konsult. The building properties were Brinckan (1,2,3) and Stadens Dike (6,7).

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Drawings of Södra station, train station

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” I worked with the room created by the pillars placed throughout the station and the colouring of the surfaces that were covered with tiles. I constructed a waving pattern which never repeats itself to make it exciting to move through the approximately 5000 square meters of the station.

The pattern is made out of two shapes based upon the angles of The Golden Section. The material is terrazzo, and the colours (pink, green, and grey) are light to make the floor reflect light from above. When light reflects off of the floor these colours blend to create a warm yellowish light. ” - Gösta Wessel (description from his website)

Source pictures: https://www.wessel.se/ portfolio_page/sodra-station-railway-station/ [228]

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Södra station 1988 - train station floor

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arkitektur 6 / 1987

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EQUAL DISTRIBUTION

MIXED MATERIALS TO CREATE VARIATION

ROOF OVER THE LAST BALCONY

DOMINANT BALCONIES

NORTH ELEVATION BRINCKAN 2, BERGSGRUVAN 1:300 (A3)

ASYMMETRIC PLACING

THE BALCONY __________________ VILHELM REGNSTRÖM WORKSHOP 1 STUDIO RE FALL 2020

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NORTH ELEVATION 1:500 (A3)

SOUTH ELEVATION 1:500 (A3)

PLACING OF BALCONIES __________________ | BOULEVARD

BOFILLS BÅGE

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NORTH ELEVATION 1:500 (A3)

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SOUTH ELEVATION 1:500 (A3)

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| BOULEVARD

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COMPETITION BRIEF SÖD

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PROJECT: SÖDRA STATIONSOMRÅDET 20.09.17

STUDENT: SARAH SALMAN

DRA STATIONSOMRÅDET | BOULEVARD

SCANNED DOCUMENTS

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PROJECT: SÖDRA STATIONSOMRÅDET 20.09.17

ARCHIVE MATERIAL SÖDRA STATIONS

SCANNE [238]

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STUDENT: SARAH SALMAN

STUDENT: SARAH SALMAN

TERIAL SÖDRA STATIONSOMRÅDET SCANNED DOCUMENTS

RA STATIONSOMRÅDET | BOULEVARD SCANNED DOCUMENTS

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ARCHIVE MATERIAL

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PROJECT: SÖDRA STATIONSOMRÅDET 20.09.17

STUDENT: SARAH SALMAN

L SÖDRA STATIONSOMRÅDET SCANNED DOCUMENTS | BOULEVARD

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PROJECT: SÖDRA STATIONSOMRÅDET 20.09.17 [242]

COMPETITION PROPOSAL HSB | ARCHIVE

SÖDR

STUDENT: SARAH SALMAN

RA STATIONSOMRÅDET | BOULEVARD

SCANNED DOCUMENTS

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PROJECT: SÖDRA STATIONSOMRÅDET 20.09.22 STUDENT: SARAH SALMAN

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ENTRANCES S Ö D E R M A L M S A L L É N PHOTOS / SITEPLAN

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ENTRANCES S Ö D E R M A L M S A L L É N PHOTOS / SITEPLAN

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KV SVÄRDET, BENGT LINDROOS 1980-88

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[251]

[252]

STOCKHOLM SOUTH RAILWAY STATION

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STRANDLINJEN CA 1500 F KR

STRANDLINJEN CA 1200 E KR

Fatburen was a lake located on Södermalm in Stockholm.

At the end of the 1850s the lake was filled, a new railway was to be built.

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RAILWAY BUILT IN 1861

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STUDIO RE

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FREDRIKA LINDE

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ALLMÄN IDÉTÄVLING SÖDRA STATIONSOMRÅDET BENGT LINDROOS 1981

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[259]

AFTERWORDS

We kindly thank Stanislaus von Moos, Lea-Catherine Szacka, Irina Davidovici, Frida Grahn and Ramus Wærn for their permission to reprint these texts.

Stanislaus von Moos

A View from the Gondola: Notes on History, Spectacle and Modern Architecture First published in: Stanislaus von Moos and Martino Stierli, Eds., Eyes That Saw: Architecture after Las Vegas, (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2020)

Lea-Catherine Szacka

Ephemeral: Life and Death of the Postmodern Architecture First published in: arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, Volume 22 , Issue 3 , (September 2018)

Irina Davidovici

Constructing the Site: Ticino and critical regionalism, 1978–1987 First published in: OASE Journal #103 (2019) with the theme: Critical Regionalism Revisited.

Frida Grahn

Aspects of pop and the Postmodern: The Theory of Denise Scott Brown Article part of Frida Grahn’s forthcoming doctoral thesis.

Ramus Wærn

Södra Station First published in: Dan Hallemar, Ed., Tio byggnader som definierade 80-talet, (Stockholm: Arkitektur förlag, 2020)

A VIEW FROM THE GONDOLA: NOTES ON HISTORY, SPECTACLE AND MODERN ARCHITECTURE Stanislaus von Moos

Compared to the certitudes of “Roma Aeterna,” the gondola offers but an unstable perspective, subject to change in time and cultural weather condition. For Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the author of the Manifesto of Futurism, Venice was the very antithesis to modernity: “Cloaca maxima of passatism, playing field of antiquarians and falsifiers, calamity of universal snobbism and imbecility, a bed worn through by caravans of lovers . . . ,” etc. — and consequently, gondolas were no more than “rocking chairs for idiots”.1 Yet, 100 years later we have come around to acknowledging that, rather than being its opposite, the passatismo castigated

by Marinetti is a powerful aspect of modernity: Byron’s “Ode to Venice” of 1817, evoking “thirteen hundred years of wealth and glory turned into dust and tears,” along with Ruskin’s incantations of the waves of the Lagoon dangerously rippling against the “Stones of Venice,” have since transformed the city into one of the twentieth century’s proverbial tourist destinations and a typical backdrop for fantasies of decay, crime, and passion, culminating perhaps in the video clip of Madonna’s 1984 song “Like a Virgin” that would have chagrined Ruskin, vexed Thomas Mann, and perhaps amused Visconti.

This said, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown consider Rome, not Venice, as the benchmark of their work. A volume of their collected essays is entitled A View from the Campidoglio (1984) and before that, an exhibition had already summa-

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rized their trajectory as originating in Rome (From Rome to Las Vegas, 1968).2 Nor can one forget the crepuscular cross-fading of Giambattista Nolli’s eighteenth-century plan of Rome with a sign of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas (in the collage they submitted to the “Roma Interrotta” exhibition in 1978). Compared to the overpowering presence of Rome in the VSBA mythology the architects’ occasional references to Venice may appear marginal. Yet in terms of many among the issues involved in their practice as architects — cultural, sociological, architectural — it is tempting nevertheless to choose Venice as a viewpoint. After all that city has been, and continues to be, the enlightened Anglo-Saxon’s imaginary city par excellence, and mass tourism has multiplied that effect notably since the 1980s. As latter-day Grand Tourists, Venturi and Denise Scott Brown have spent more time in Rome than in any other European city (and Rome is clearly the vantage point from which Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was written) — yet I suspect they seldom visited Italy without stopping in Venice, Rome’s mythical “Other,” and not only because of the Biennale.3 The spectacular, seemingly almost 1 : 1 reconstruction of the Doge’s Palace and the Campanile di San Marco, as well as the Rialto Bridge and the Torre dell’Orologio at the foot of the Venetian /Palazzo / Sands Expo Megacenter in Las Vegas obviously hadn’t existed when Learning from Las Vegas was written (It was

inaugurated in 1999 and appears to have somewhat eclipsed Caesars Palace since). Together with the pasticcio of Venetian palaces at its foot, “the world’s largest hotel complex,” whose 8108 rooms and suites are stacked into a colossal piece of quasi-Corbusian Ville Radieuse, is a veritable empire within the entertainment industry. Its prehistory reaches back at least to the second half of the nineteenth century, when the “myth of Venice” 4 had become a pan-European phenomenon that resulted, among other things, in extravagant reconstructions of parts of Venice at international fairs and on fairgrounds, a history that by the end of the twentieth century reached a Pantagruelian climax in Las Vegas.

As a marketing idea, a trade-mark, and a type of urban composition, The Venetian has since been exported to Asia, and so The “Venetian Macao”, inaugurated in 2007, not only houses the largest casino ever built since this type was invented (in ­ Venice, by the way), but actually is also the world’s largest inhabitable building altogether.5 Meanwhile Venice itself, with its rapidly shrinking population (from 178,000 in 1950 to fewer than 60,000 in 2018), survives as the hub of a global network of “Venetian” destinations, all served by a booming souvenir industry. Early in this century, according to one source, the city hosted 12 million tourists per year, while in 2010 the count was approximately 21 million, ­i. e., an average of 51,000 per day (except for the carnival season when the number explodes to 170,000), plus an

| AFTERWORDS

increasing population of immigrant workers who try to make a living in the margins of the tourist boom.6 The Ville Radieuse and Its Ghost When architects and historians refer to “spectacle” they often imply that there must have been a time prior to movies, television, and mass tourism when architecture and urban space were “authentic” and when architects, unfettered by the mystification caused by today’s media ecology, were able to act directly upon urbanity and the way it is lived. 7 Yet, when exactly was this condition lost?

Some may think it happened with the demise of Modern architecture, but that of course is nonsense. As to Venice, whose reverberation in art covers half a millenium, it has been so thoroughly intertwined with its mediated representations as to make it difficult to even imagine a pre-spectacle condition. The universal multiplication of the city’s image in the culture of the veduta especially since the eighteenth century, and continuing with its replications in the context of fairs and entertainment venues either physical (from The Venetian in Macao to the proverbial corner pizzeria) or virtual (from James Bond to Instagram), has been around as a global phenomenon for at least as long as tourism. It has left the city with virtually no choice but to perpetually restore itself as its own petrified veduta. The 1964 Venice Charter, which proscribed the “fake” in restoration, may have altered the terms of the process yet has not prevented Venice from becoming the world’s largest theme park.8 As a result Venice and Modern architecture continue to make an odd couple, at least in terms of twentieth-century stereotypes: Venice is synonymous with the mystery of art and the tears of decay against a background of antiquated splen-

| STANISLAUS VON MOOS

Fig. 1. Learning From Las Vegas 1972, Original edition, design by Muriel Cooper.

dor, while Modern architecture up to World War II typically stands for reason, progress, biotechnical expediency, and socialism. Yet technological progress also creates access and thus brings about new spectacles of history. Le Corbusier is a case in point; not only was the phenomenon “Modern Architecture,” which he pioneered, itself an elaborately staged media operation, but history also played a topical role in it — and precisely as “spectacle.” If his Plan

Voisin — the ultimate synonym of technocratic and millenial solutions to urban problems — implied the demolition of historic urban tissue, it did so (at least partly) by way of selective preservation. The historic monument survives as tourist commodity: “the historic past, universal patrimony, is respected. More than that, it is saved,” Le Corbusier insists.9 The architect’s lifelong fascination with the melancholic charms of Venice is thus anything but a par-

[263]

adox.10 For a short moment, marrying Venice to the “Ville Radieuse” appeared to be almost within reach when, after a visit to the city in 1934, Le Corbusier tried to lure the industrial magnate Giuseppe Volpi into building a city of highrise apartment blocks within sight of Venice, west of Porto Marghera. While the proposal never reached the project stage (not even that of a generic master plan),11 Le Corbusier turned to the existing old city and produced a collage that highlights its picturesque canals and bridges as an anticipated Disneyland.

The “rationalization” proposed by the high-rise city on the other side of the nearby Porto Marghera thus implies the romanticization of the old city as a ready-made backdrop for leisure and shopping. Here, perhaps even more blatantly than in the case of Paris (with its guard of four Gratte-ciels cartésiens at the foot of Montmartre, Fig. 4), modernity and nostalgia depend on each other and represent the two sides of the coin, as with the casino that will later reframe the formula as a simple business proposition.12 After World War II the demise of functionalism and the universally felt urgency of preservation (to be codified in the Venice Charter) once again secured the city a top rank on Le Corbusier’s agenda. Rather than the psychogeography of alleys and canals that fascinated the Situationists, it is the Piazza San Marco that becomes Corbusier’s stereotyped reference; it will be the lodestar in the postwar CIAM’s call 13 for a “Humanization of the City.”

Granted, nothing resulted from the architect’s relentless self-promotion as an expert on tourism (“Organize tourism, yet a tourism that would be adorable, admirable, human, brotherly, for simple people as well as for the aristocrats and the millionaires . . . ”) — and the conflicts between conservation and re-use as well as

[264]

between elite and popular or mass tourism they involve — except for the hospital commission whose program, a hotel for the sick, reframes the type in terms of its quasi-biblical origins in Samaritan mercy. 14 Mobility and “Flux” Thanks to the automobile, the rubber tire, and asphalt (a peculiar mix of sand and tar that guarantees the perfect combination of resistance and smoothness to the runway), all of Modernism’s romanticizations of “speed” revolve around the promise of flux. Flux is reflected in everyday language, wherein a drive becomes a cruise and a number of cars serving the same purpose become a fleet.

This is seen even more so in design, wherein cars are made to resemble fish or birds stranded on beaches of asphalt. For Le Corbusier the idea that “the city that has speed has success” is part of the dream and so is Sigfried Giedion’s comparison of the joy of the driver navigating the freeways surrounding Manhattan to the skier’s delight as he flies down the slopes of the Swiss Alps.15 The photographer Stephen Shore documents the promise of flux in its most disillusioned form as the reality of a street crossing in the American Midwest: in his work the weather is often gray (not sunny, as in all of Le Corbusier’s renderings) and asphalt is ubiquitous as a promise of escape.

It is a world “at once well known and remote, half remembered and half forgotten” (Robert Venturi). Shore captures the essence of the American landscape “by framing particular, ordinary elements so that they reveal the universal and the extraordinary.

The viewpoint of his camera is ( . . . ) that of our own absentminded eyes as we wander through familiar places doing ordinary things — waiting for a bus or running an errand.” 16 One is reminded that in the late 1960s the

Venturis, aside from Las Vegas, also explored Levittown as a topical site of the contemporary sublime. A hint at Jeff Wall’s 1969 book Landscape Manual is enough to suggest just how much in those years the sensibility for the magic of the everyday coincided with that of the New Landscape Photography. 17 As to the aquatic metaphor of flux, one can’t help noting that one of the cars in Shore’s picture, a small van, like a snail even carries the mark of its amphibian unconscious on its back in the form of a barge, while immediately above a sign says “Tires,” thus indicating the technical means by which the experience of “flow” has become a universal form of life. Seen in this perspective, Shore’s melancholic city portrait indeed carries an echo of Francesco Guardi and the tradition of eighteenth-century vedute, with their carefully crafted renderings of rustic life (or, looking closer, unplanned preindustrial sprawl), of often abandoned farmhouses scattered amid ruins and churches — idyllic archipelagos surrounded not by asphalt but by water.18 Maybe there is even more to be said on the Venetian Lagoon and its nature as an unencumbered circulation space and precursor of the culture of sprawl: if Los Angeles is a city that lives by the car, Venice lives by the gondola. And, more specifically: if Los Angeles as a subject of photography is the city as seen from the car as you drive through it — as documented in Ed Ruscha’s legendary Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) and on another level in Reyner Banham’s seminal book and TV program on Los Angeles — then Venice as a spectacle has always, or at least since the advent of modern tourism, also been a spectacle to be seen from the gondola. In either city, the car and the boat allow the passenger to concentrate on what he is looking at, i.e., to concentrate on the spectacle seen laterally.19 Ruscha’s continuous image of Sunset

| AFTERWORDS

Boulevard has often been compared to the panoramic images of famous street fronts published in early tourist guides of London and Paris.

While Tallis’s London Street Views of 1838–40 is a classic among them, the somewhat earlier strip image of the palaces along the Grand Canal put together in 1828 by the engineer Dionisio Moretti is even more striking in our context. 20 Only the gondola reveals the spectacle documented in those images, as Karl Friedrich Schinkel noted in 1803, more than two decades earlier, when he spoke about the “splendid and powerful effect” that Venetian palaces make along the Grand Canal “as one rides past them.” 21 No wonder that it was indeed the gondola that triggered the invention of the traveling shot in film, owing to Alexandre Promio, the cameraman who produced the first such shots. Only the gondola, as opposed to the horse-drawn carriage on bumpy city streets, was capable of securing the smoothness of movement required for this form of spacetime representation of urban space (1896). 22 “Duck” and “Decorated Shed” That the first important film footage devoted to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown — in Martin Filler’s 1983 documentary entitled “Beyond Utopia” — was shot in Venice, but begins with a sweeping celebration of traffic flow on an American freeway, maybe a mere coincidence (the film, by the way, also involves a memorable passage showing Bob 23 Soon and Denise in a gondola). enough, however, the experience of being flushed through space so as to easily grasp the giant letters on the BEST Products and BASCO facades in Pennsylvania is abruptly stopped as one finds oneself thrown onto the Piazzetta San Marco. Here, in the space between Sansovino’s Library and the Doge’s Palace, using

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the two buildings as the springboard for their argument, Venturi and Scott Brown sententiously unfold the tale of the “duck” and the “decorated shed.”24 The two buildings must have appeared to be the perfect backdrop for their dimostrazione of the nature and appropriateness of the latter, as opposed to the former, in architecture today.

However, the legendary “Pop” comparison of duck and shed that is here distilled from Renaissance Venice also refers to more contemporary contexts. Three years prior to the shooting of the film Venice had become something like the world capital of Post-modernism. No better platform could have been imagined for polemics at the service of territorial claims within the increasing numbers of those who had grown tired of Modernism. Millions must have strolled through the Corderie dell’Arsenale since 1980 when the grandiose sixteenth-century structure became accessible to the public as the seat for the “First International 25 Paolo Exhibition of Architecture.”

Portoghesi, the director of the first Architecture Biennale, had staged two parallel rows of ten ornamental facade mock-ups forming the two sides of what he called La Strada Novissima — a grandiose way for the twenty selected architects to be incorporated into the canon of architectural Postmodernism (that some of the facades displayed an overt reticence with regard to the installation’s historicist agenda added to its inclusivist allure). The Venturis had first refused to be part of the show; they didn’t feel like going out to “play with the kids,” Denise Scott Brown later reminisced. 26 But the curators insisted, and Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown finally submitted a two-dimensional, i.e., strictly flat stage-set-like, representation of a burlesque “temple.” By organizing the Strada Novissima in such a way

as to make sure that the Venturi facade and “slot” would be situated directly across from that of Robert A. M. Stern’s, the curators thus involuntarily clarified the American implications of Venturi’s paragone of the National Library as duck versus the Doge’s Palace as decorated shed. 27 In fact Stern’s exaggeratedly Sansovinian — if not Napoleonian — portal with its boldly rusticated columns made the issue even clearer than the National Library had done (or Le Corbusier’s La Tourette, to which Venturi likes to refer as an archetypal Modernist duck): seen against the background of the mercilessly flat Venturian porch, the muscular articulations of Stern’s classicism look even more “ducky.”

Nor is it a coincidence that Venice appears to be at stake, either as a location or as a corpus of images, whenever Venturi and Scott Brown pushes the decorated shed to its polemical extreme. Calling the Grand Canal itself into the witness stand, the architects claim that in the case of the renovation of the Ponte dell’Accademia, the structure itself — except for need not be beautiful its applied decoration (1985; Fig. 2).

Like the two-dimensional parody of a temple front in the Corderie, the Ponte dell’Accademia thus is a “polemical” proposal, poignant in its perhaps unintended sarcasm with respect to Venice’s second nature as the closest European relative of Las Vegas, since the Cosmatipatterned bridge sign would occupy the space of the Grand Canal much like a place-name sign occupies the space of a freeway — i. e., positioned to catch the driver’s attention instead of that of the passenger. 28 The same goes for the proposed mock-reconstruction of the Doge’s Palace on a square in Philadelphia and its PopVictorian evocation of the Palace’s brick pattern. 29

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Fig. 2. Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown. Ponte dell’Accademia project. Collage, 1985.

Secret Physiology As Neil Levine has demonstrated, the theory of the duck and the decorated shed addresses fundamental issues of nineteenth- and twenti30 eth-century architectural thought.

In a Modernist context, where the exterior of a building needs to express the functions within, the decorated shed restores the idea of the facade and its relative autonomy with respect to how buildings are made and how they want to be used. Yet none of the buildings produced by Venturi Scott Brown & Associates in the forty years since the duck and the decorated shed entered the stage could seriously be ranked as a pure example of either of those types, not to mention the work done before Learning from Las Vegas. Retroactively applied to most buildings ever done by the firm, the pair of concepts hardly scratches the surface. Is what architects choose to rationalize as theory (let alone Pop theory) inevitably also a way of diverting the public’s attention from what is specific about a work?

Theoretical preoccupations don’t necessarily match with job opportunities. Gaps between theory and built work are therefore inevitable.

Venturi and Scott Brown note that the

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“modest” programs they had been confronted with at the beginning of their careers prevented them from realizing “rich,” i. e., truly “complex,” projects. 31 Rather than exemplifying complexity and contradiction, among the best known early projects — most emblematically, the Fire Station No. 4 in Columbus, Indiana — in fact anticipated the idea of the decorated shed.

But, by the time the decorated shed was theorized in Learning from Las Vegas in 1972, the firm began tackling large projects of institutional buildings that, for inviting multiple complexities and contradictions, could not possibly be dealt with adequately in terms of the categories of duck and shed. In short, by the time the architects analyzed Las Vegas, the findings of the study were no longer central to their own projects.

The critic / historian has therefore no other choice but to develop a sixth sense for the unspoken concerns that go into making these projects. And the “blind passengers” in their theory, for better or for worse, are many things except “Pop,” “Complexity,” or “Contradiction.” Generally, in the case of Venturi and Scott Brown, those implied concerns refer to the conventional ABC of Modernist design and involve familiar notions of pragmatism, functionalism, and organicism.

One may even go one step further: in so far as their organicist functionalism transcends ergonomics and technics and aims towards what the architects perceive as a sociobiological logic of human relations, it could be described as “transcendentalist.”

In the end, history and theory — what we tend to subsume as either eclecticism or historicism — are part of this more encompassing agenda. 32 The paradigms of flux or fluidity, and the mix of techniques necessary for translating fluidity into built substance, are topical in the firm’s adaptations of “organicist” approaches to form. The unbuilt Yale Mathematics Building addition may have little to do with Venice, unless one wants to associate its shape with the bow of a ship.

For Colin Rowe the “clumsy” juxtaposition of old and new in this project is a sign of Venturi’s failure to deal successfully with the problem of bulk imposed by the brief. Yet, should this “failure” not rather be seen as part of an aesthetic program or even as part of a design strategy concerned with the nature of the city as the physical result of growth processes? 33 And, by the way, is not the “oversized” mass of Ignazio Gardella’s House on the Zattere in Venice (1953–58) an intriguing precedent, especially considering

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its awkward dialogue with its much 34 smaller neighbor (a church)?

A somewhat different result is reached in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, with contours that passively follow the existing rooflines and street pattern while also accomodating highly conflicting needs of the program. The strategy is one of camouflage, and while the surface of the building appears to be merely mimicking the given architectural and urban contexts, the overall effect is that of a plant or fungus-like excretion.

Echoing features of Wilkins’s neoclassical museum facade, the new building turns them into a “soft” configuration, a body without bones, like one of Oldenburg’s “Soft Plugs” — or the heaps of tar spilled down a hillside in one of Robert Smithson’s drawings.

Intriguingly, San Barnaba, a seventeenth-century church in Venice, appears to have helped translate this unspoken program into architectural form. 35 . . . and the “Fluid City” How could the architectural “body language” or “secret physiology” of these and many other projects by the firm fit into the terminology of duck and decorated shed? Before serving the logic of Pop, this “secret physiology” articulates the vital issues of space and circulation, as perhaps any architecture must do. In this respect the biomorphology of these shapes relates to an understanding of the city as the result of process and of curvilinear movement within ever-changing contextual parameters of growth — in short, to an understanding of the city as “fluid,” indeterminate, and systems-driven rather than form-driven. 36 As with most cities of the past the growth inscribed in these footprints has occurred incrementally, by movements of expansion and contraction responding to the changing parame-

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ters of a given topography and circulation pattern. Flow, by definition, follows the law of gravity — valleys and canyons are shaped in this way, loops of rivers, deltas built up by the ongoing deposit of sediment, etc. — but in the universe of civilization, there is arguably no better example for an aquatic determinism of urban form than Venice. Like a liver or a heart displayed on the operating table, served by its blood vessels, the city appears on sixteenth-­century maps (such as those of Jacopo de Barbari, dated 1500, and of Benedetto Bordone, dated 1528), as well as contemporary hydrographic schemes: powerful prefigurations of what Fumihiko Maki may have had in mind when he spoke of 37 Torcello, a one-hour “fluid cities.” vaporetto ride from Venice, is today’s best illustration of the city’s origins from “the primordial fluid that slowly coagulates and allows vegetation to grow on the mud that is the origin of life,” as Marcel Brion and René Huyghe put it.38 As to the basic rectangles of palaces, shipyards, churches, etc. that constitute the urban fabric, they can’t help being stretched and squeezed in order to fit into the curvilinear city form. Even the Basilica di San Marco, the Doge’s Palace, and the Piazza San Marco itself have to painstakingly negotiate their orthogonal layout with the organoid form of the city as a whole (Figs. 20, 21).

It is hard not to be struck by the way the plan of Venturi and Scott Brown’s National Gallery extension in London resonates with the site plan of Piazza San Marco and even with San Marco itself. In either case, rectangularly organized interiors are accommodated within irregularly defined sites, resulting in rhomboidal interstices that turn out to be uniquely vivid urban “rooms.”

The “fluid” city as a concept did not originate in Venice, yet the Venetian Lagoon that so powerfully forced its blueprint upon the city’s form appears

to have offered an inspiring context for the study of the dynamics at work in the life of cities and of the patterns that determine urban growth. 39 The CIAM Summer School held in Venice in 1956 was a turning point in that respect. It was run by Giuseppe Samonà, the head of the Istituto universitario di architettura, Venezia (Iuav) jointly with Franco Albini, but the gray eminence among the faculty was Ludovico Quaroni. That year marked both the beginning of CIAM’s terminal agony and the emergence of Team 10. 40 As the architect Gabriele Scimeni reported in Casabella, the Athens Charter was already considered totally obsolete by the younger generation of CIAM architects who ran the school.41 Instead of understanding the city in terms of static functions, they began to study socioeconomic and circulatory forces as key factors of its underlying dynamics. A group of the summer school participants — among them Denise and her first husband Robert Scott Brown — proposed using the transportation lines connecting Venice, Mestre, and Marghera as generators of settlement form. Other groups explicitly visualized “flows” as models of urban form in their plans. 42 If this paradigmatic shift away from CIAM dogma cannot be attributed to the flows that determined the making of Venice, the idea of flow had certainly been topical in the students’ work and in the thinking of Ludovico Quaroni who was a determined advocate of the unity of architecture and city planning. Quaroni used to sketch vigorous drawings of cityscapes on tracing paper “which found their inspiration in Venice’s primary and natural element, water.” 43 Though in the long run the social sciences were more decisive in shaping her approach to planning and architecture, Denise Scott Brown may not have been altogether insensible to Quaroni’s aquatic visualizations of urban phenomena.44 Note that flow was a pop-

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ular metaphor in the social sciences at this time too. A few years after the Summer School the sociologist David Crane, Scott Brown’s student advisor at Pennsylvania University (and her 45 “role model as studio teacher”), referred to the “navigational analogy” in city planning as a key to the Dynamic City idea that involves the idea of future change as a determinant of form as well as “time as the fourth dimension in design.” Crane’s philosophy of form change could not be more topical in this context.

In this essay, entitled “Chandigarh­ Reconsidered,” Crane can be said to have written the brief of what Venturi and Scott Brown were later to aestheticize and materialize as architecture. 46 The Venice of Ludovico Quaroni appears to have directly participated in this “decide-as-you-go city making idea” postulated by Crane. The very kernel of the latter-day CIAM’s answer to the Ville Radieuse lies here.

“Iconic Recyclings” and Metaphysical Disgust When in 1985, the year of Aldo Rossi’s Biennale, Manfredo Tafuri in his book Venezia e il Rinascimento lambasted the “iconic recyclings” that had become characteristic of recent architecture, he did not think of Disney World, much less Las Vegas or Macao (the two Venetian complexes were built more than ten years after his book was published). Nor is it clear whom he had in mind when he spoke of architects practicing in Venice and their alleged problem with the city: “Fascinated by a crystallized continuity, often mistaken as a matter of simple organic growth — synonymous with a lost quality that some believe should be reconquered — they are unable to stand the challenge that Venice represents in their eyes. They multiply the attempts at violence and treason, with sadistic traits only poorly veiled behind the masks of the ‘respectful project,’ the ‘friend-

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ly past,’ the ‘Nuovo Capriccio,’ the mummification, the ephemeral re-­ vitalization.” 47 Did he think of Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown’s Ponte dell’Accademia project that had just been assigned the “Leone di pietra” in 1985? The term “capriccio,” of course, brings to mind Canaletto and his “surreal” groupings of famous historic projects and buildings in the midst of an idealized Venice. Aldo Rossi has resuscitated the genre: one of his architectural pastiches from the same year 1985 brings together the Chiesa delle Zitelle in Venice with the so-called house of Palladio in Vicenza, the famous wooden bridge in Bassano, and Rossi’s own temporary entrance building to the Corderie dell’Arsenale in Venice, all grouped around the latter’s enigmatic Teatro del Mondo, rocking on its raft in the waters of the Lagoon.48 When, more than one and a half centuries before Rossi, Lord Byron meditated about Venice and her “silent rows of songless gondoliers” and her palaces that are “crumbling to the shore,” the causes were abandonment and poverty. After World War II similar conditions prevailed and the city had little choice but to stake its future on tourism. Be that as it may, the moment had come to “accept the romantic hypothesis of stylistic re-make up to the brutal point of copy,” Rossi wrote, when, in 1978, he proposed a 1 : 1 reconstruction of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi next to the railway station in an optimistic attempt to highlight the city’s sense of identity. 49 In hindsight, it may have been one of his most visionary utterings.

For, while his critic friends castigated the increasing gap between project and reality in such proposals and the tendency among architects to “retreat into narrow cubicles of metaphore,”50 the “brutality of stylistic re-make” resulted in yet another heyday of architectural replication — be it in the form of extravagant min-

iatures of the Doge’s Palace (as in Disneyworld, Orlando) or, much later, in der form of colossal “Venetian” casino complexes around the world.

As for Tafuri, he concentrated on digging into the archive of Venice’s architectural patrimony, occasionally investing his formidable energy into projects of conservative restoration.

Meanwhile his one-time political and academic allies, now in charge of the city’s administration, appeared to have no choice but to look out for new ways of negotiating archaeology, preservation, welfare politics, cultural spectacle, and tax politics (not to mention bold maritime engineering) in order to slow down the city’s seemingly fatal decline.

As a result of this “New Realism” in architectural and urban politics, the “real” Fondaco dei Tedeschi, located at the heart of the city and adjacent to the Rialto Bridge, its most cherished tourist attraction, has become another hub of Venice’s second nature as the world’s archetypal Disneyland, as Rem Koolhaas and OMA transformed it into the Lagoon’s most beautiful shrine of high-end consumption.

While carefully restoring the building’s envelope, the architects covered its once open court-yard with a spectacular viewing platform, thus duplicating the sixteenth-­ century crenellation by a frieze of visitors responding to their fellow tourists cruising the Grand Canal on the vaporetto below. 51 Alla Veneziana?

With Palladio’s Quattro libri (1570), Serlio’s Tutte l’opere d’architettura (1584), and Ruskin’s Stones (1851–53), Venice long ago entered the universe of canonic references in Western architecture. As a result of this, when Colin Rowe engaged in the study of Le Corbusier’s handling of proportion, nothing appeared more obvious to him than to place the latter’s

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Villa Stein in Garches of 1927 next to Palladio’s Villa Foscari — known more commonly as La Malcontenta — as an archetype of the “Mathematics of the Ideal Villa.” 52 Such posthumous contaminations prove little in terms of actual influence, while illustrating plainly the degree to which the flow of images has been intrinsic to architectural culture throughout the first half of the twentieth century. 53 With Le Corbusier this flow was merely implied; in the universe of Venturi and Scott Brown it became a reservoir of references that the architects chose to deliberately play with. The bridge proposal that Rossi admired, or the Disneyesque dummy of the Doge’s Palace to be erected in Philadelphia, were not the only Venetian moments in Venturi and Scott Brown’s complete works: in the firm’s often used ornamental facade patterns (as in the Allen Memorial Museum addition in Oberlin, OH) or more generally the “flatbed” treatment of the facade, the presence of the thermal window in so many of their projects echoes canonic themes of Italian architecture, including contemporary variations such as Giuseppe Vaccaro’s church in Recoaro (1953).54 Venice as an urban conglomerate provides the most obvious model for Venturi and Scott Brown’s parenthetical method of combining them into complex and contradictory wholes. That the Guild House in Philadelphia (1963)

by Venturi and William Short reminds one of Palladio, as well as partly anonymous Venetian buildings and sites, is thus not necessarily owing to a specifically Postmodern condition. What is new, in comparison to Corbusier’s Villa Stein, is that the adaptation of historic imagery is explicit and limited to the facade. As to the quasi-thermal window of the Guild House, the minuscule reproduction of Palladio’s Villa Zeno in Cessalto in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture would hardly be necessary as a clue .55

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More specifically Postmodern, in turn, is the emphatically urban character of the architectural composition that constitutes Guild House.

While the plan mostly obeys a functional-organicist logic typical of the incremental dynamics of city growth — Venetian or not — the dominant central part with its whitewashed base and suggested colossal order accentuates the hierarchy that defines the relation between the formal core building and its more “contemporary” lateral wings, similar to what we find in many sixteenth-century Venetian churches, convents, and hospices. 56 In a quirky way the articulation of the facade even relates to an eighteenth-century-ruins aesthetic, as reflected in Guardi’s vedute. Speaking of the openings cut into the thin “immaterial” brick facade so as to reveal the “cheap” concrete frame behind it, it is difficult not to think of Gordon Matta-Clark and many of his somewhat later works (such as his 1974 “Splitting” and 1975 “Day’s End”), where the “ruin”-effect of revelation is dramatized by actually wrecking the given structure.

“Venice is made of a number of unambiguous elements,” Le Corbusier stated in a lecture given at the 1952 CIAM Summer School (not the one Scott Brown attended): “. . . so that it is possible to recognize in Venice the entire range of typical manifestations of architecture and urbanism.” The verticality of domes, facades with classical pediments, and bridges — as well as gondolas — are the constituent elements of this Venetian vocabulary, plus what Le Corbusier called the “stairwells to the sky” located in the city’s essential locations: “the bridges, certain bridges, on which the crowds are moving. . . . I call them ‘stair-wells to the sky’. . . forms [that] are eminent, essential, decisive for architecture as well as urbanism . . . ”.57 Domes and facades with classical pediments

were taboo for Le Corbusier’s generation, yet not so the stair, synonymous as it is with a form of circulation that is necessarily pedestrian. Gordon Cullen, a generation younger than Le Corbusier, codified the rhetoric of the stair for the Townscape movement when he mused about “those times when, walking up a road one is convinced that the sea is beyond the crest. Here that sense of immediacy is caught and perpetuated in architecture when it comes down the stairs.”

Variations on the theme of “les escaliers du ciel” were also present in the work of Venturi and Scott Brown, as they had been, by the way, in the work of Paul Rudolph. Interrupting the flow of people pushing through the streets, stairs function like a beam of light, instantly transforming the crowd on which it is projected into a group of individuals. Le Corbusier’s sketch is about that moment: a crowd seen from afar that becomes a flock of individuals, each of them a dot that emerges on the horizon before evaporating into nothing. In her 1983 series of photographs titled Suite vénitienne, accompanied by an essay by Jean Baudrillard entitled “Please Follow Me,” the artist Sophie Calle documents her trailing of an unknown man, randomly selected, through the maze of Venice’s streets over the course of twelve days. As she follows the man, street by street, bridge by bridge, it is the stairs that intermittently close the vistas along the narrow Venetian “Calle,” allowing her to focus on her subject, albeit momentarily. Literally en passant, the artist thus managed to take the pulse of what makes the singular urbanity of this city. 58 Suite vénitienne may be called a cinematographic work, if not a variation on a theme often foregrounded in movies — such as in Visconti’s “Morte a Venezia”: A group of tourists rushing through a Venetian alley emerges in the distance, running up the

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stairs of a bridge, searchingly examined by a despaired follower. In the next scene, the haunter, Gustav von Aschenbach, is himself caught up by the camera as he rushes towards that vanishing point, harassed by beggars and jobless gondoliers in the very moment he is climbing the stairs.

Venetian painting often exploited the scenic potential of stairs, as seen in well-known works by Veronese, Tintoretto, and Titian, among others.

As has Venetian statecraft: by its freestanding position in the courtyard of the Doge’s Palace and its combination with the elevated tribuna at its top, the Scala dei Giganti is an archetype of the ceremonial stairway. Its location directly opposite the Clock Tower of San Marco but separated from the campanile by a tunnel created by a long arcade (“key-hole,” as Gordon Cullen would have called it), transforms whatever act is performed on it into a public spectacle.

This effect was made all the more magic owing to the Scala’s physical remoteness from the public arena of the Piazzetta. It is no coincidence that the painter Delacroix, who had never been to Venice, in one of his most famous works erroneously located the legendary decapitation of the fourteenth-century Doge Marino Faliero on the steps of the Scala dei Giganti (1825–26), thus initiating a tradition of bloodthirsty nineteenth-century history painting featuring this scene with 59 the flight of steps as a backdrop.

It is interesting that Denise Scott Brown explicitly refers to the Scala dei Giganti in connection with one of the firm’s earlier projects.60 Seen in this perspective, the main stairwell of Gordon Wu Hall at Princeton, not to mention the main reception and channeling space of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, may be far more Venetian in character that the firm’s Pop use of a Cosmati pattern for the decoration of the Ponte dell’Accademia.

Endnotes

Casciato, Dorothée Imbert, Martino Stierli, +Karin Theunissen, William Whitaker, Florian

Fifty years after Learning from Las Vegas,

Sauter and Francesco Dal Co.

Venice is still Venice (technically so), whereas Las Vegas does not look even remotely like it

2. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown,

did when Venturi and Scott Brown invented

A View from the Campidoglio, eds. Peter

the “duck” and the “decorated shed.” Granted

Arnell, Ted Bickford, and Catherine Bergart

that, as architects, they have remained margin-

(Cambridge, Philadelphia, San Francisco,

al in the present universe of architectural spec-

London: Icon Editions, 1984); on the exhibition

tacle: their commitment to the unspectacular

“From Rome to Las Vegas”, shown at the

variant of the decorated shed has made much

Philadelphia Art Alliance in 1968, see Venturi,

of their firm’s work look somewhat woolly

Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning

compared to the ducks produced by a major-

from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

ity of their colleagues — though this quality is

1972), 125. More recently, Martino Stierli has

also what makes the work intriguing to those

discussed the relevance of Venturi’s­Rome

who grant architecture a second glance. May

experience for his work and thought in “In the

the irony often implied in their historicism have

Academy’s Garden: Robert ­Venturi, the Grand

turned out to be equivocal in terms of both the Empire of the Fake-Venetian and of main-

3. I am not concerned with biography in this

stream Modernism: What Venturi and Scott

paper except for noting that at least four

Brown claimed to have learned from Las Vegas

among my personal encounters with the

is obviously only part of the story with respect

Venturis were scheduled in Venice: one among

to the strategies of perception, the body lan-

them, in 1984, included a visit of the Carlo

guage, the social rhetoric, the space concep-

Scarpa exhibit at the Accademia together with

tion, the stage-craft, and the elaborate graphics

its curator, Francesco Dal Co. As to the idea

at work in the making of their architecture. As

of Venice as “Rome’s counterimage,” it is a

to the theoretical shortcuts they have distilled

classical trope in art history as discussed by

from a historical context that is now gone — the

Eduard Hüttinger in “Il Mito Di Venezia,” in

Las Vegas Strip of the 1960s — they have altered

Venezia Vienna. Il mito della cultura veneziana

our understanding of the last two centuries of

nella cultura asburgica, ed. Carlo Pirovano

architectural history. No wonder the “duck”

(Milano: Electa, 1983), 187–226 and in particular

and the “decorated shed” still rumble in the

198–201. Tour and the Revision of Modern

architectural studio jargon. 61

Architecture,” in AA Files, 2007, pp. 56–63.

1. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Guerra, Sola

4. For a summary of the late nineteenth and

Igiene Del Mondo (Milano: Edizioni Futuriste

early twentieth-century “myths of Venice” see

de Poesia, 1915), 53 f f.; and Marinetti, Umberto

Francesco Dal Co in “Venezia e il moderno,”

Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Luigi Russolo,

in 10 Immagini per Venezia (Rome: Officina

“Contro Venezia passatista,” in Archivi del

Edizioni, 1980), 9–11; for a more circumstantial

Futurismo, eds. M. Drudi Gambillo and T. Fiori

discussion see Dal Co, Massimo Cacciari, and

(Rome: De Luca Editore, 1958), 19. The text had

Manfredo Tafuri, “Il Mito di Venezia,” Rassegna,

been stamped on pamphlets and was dropped

(vii) 22.2 (1985): 7–9.

from the Torre dell’Orologio on April 27, 1910.

5. For an illustrated summary of information An early version of the present essay had

regarding the Venetian syndrome see Wolfgang

been delivered as the introductory talk to the

Scheppe and the IUAV Class on Politics of

2010 Yale conference, “Architecture after Las

Representation, Migropolis: Venice /Atlas of a

Vegas,” which may account for its somewhat

Global Situation (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009),

kaleidoscopic and meandering logic. Among

vol. I, 54–63; vol. II, 1228–51.

the friends and colleagues who provided subsequent occasions to present my thoughts,

6. The impossibility of calculating exact

as well as help and advice, I am particularly

population figures and tourist / inhabitant

grateful to Carolina Vaccaro, Maristella

ratios in the case of Venice has already been

***

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| AFTERWORDS

discussed by Aldo Bonomi in Il distretto del

8. Aldo Bonomi, Il distretto, 42. See also

Le Corbusier’s sketches of historic cityscapes,

piacere (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000),

Martino Stierli’s review of Wolfgang Scheppe’s

the view of Piazza San Marco reproduced in

42–43 (consequently, the figures vary from one

book in this context: “Die Europäische Stadt in

Propos d’urbanisme (Paris: Éditions Bourrelier,

author to the other); see, e.g., Robert C. Davis

Zeiten der Globalisierung,” NZZ 13 (November

1946) dates from his 1915 visits to the

and Garry R. Marvin, Venice: The Tourist Maze

2009).

Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

4, 55; Franco Mancuso, Venezia è una città.

9. Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (Paris: Crès, 1925),

14. The quote is from a letter Le Corbusier

Come è stata costruita e come vive (Venezia:

272–73.

wrote to Giovanni Favaretto Fisca, Mayor of

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004),

Venice, October 3, 1962; see Stanislaus von

Corte del Fontego, 2009), 138–44; and Scheppe, Migropolis, vol. I, 510–49. On the role of the

10. See in particular Le Corbusier’s notes

Moos, “Alla Veneziana. Le Corbusier, il turismo,

immigrant workers in Venice’s economy see

on Venice in Quand les cathédrales étaient

e la crisi dell’utopia,” in L’Italia di Le Corbusier,

Scheppe, Migropolis, vol. II, 678–921. Tourism

blanches (Paris: Plon, 1937) and the discussion

ed. Marida Talamone (Rome/Milan: MA X XI /

as the origin of Venice’s inescapable downfall

of Le Corbusier’s notion of the historic city as

Electa, 2012), 201. On the hospital project see

has long been a journalistic trope. One more

“museum” in Manfredo Tafuri, Teorie e storia

Valeria Farinati, H VEN LC Hôpital de Venise.

recent example is Raffaele Oriani, “Venezia

dell’architettura (Bari: Laterza, 1970, originally

Inventario analitico degli atti nuovo ospedale

ultimo atto,” Il venerdì di Repubblica (October 7,

published in 1968), 68–74.

(Venezia and Mendrisio: IUAV/Archivio del moderno, Accademia di architettura, 1999) and

2016): 48–53.

11. As had similar proposals in the cases of

Amadeo Petrilli, Il testamento di Le Corbusier.

7. “Spectacle” has become a key issue in

Antwerp, Barcelona, Stockholm, Nemours,

Il progetto per l’ospedale di Venezia (Venice:

discussions of architecture and urban space

or indeed Paris; see Le Corbusier, La Ville

Marsilio, 1999).

in capitalism since Guy Debord’s La société

Radieuse (Paris: Vincent Fréal & Cie., 1964,

du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967). I

originally published in 1933), 268–87, 305–18; Le

15. Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (Paris: Crès,

am borrowing the term “media ecology” from

Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret: Oeuvre Complete:

1925), and Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and

McLain Clutter, Imaginary Apparatus: New

1929–1934, ed. Willy Boesiger (Zurich:

Architecture (Cambridge: Harvard University

York City and Its Mediated Representation

Girsberger /Artemis Verlag für Architektur,

Press, 1974, originally published in 1941), 825.

(Zurich: Park Books, 2015). In the introduction

1964), 156–59; Le Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret:

to his book Clutter offers a succinct summary

Oeuvre complète 1934–1938, ed. Max Bill

16. Robert Venturi in a note on the dust cover

of the premises and reverberations of the

(Zurich: Girsberger /

of Stephen Shore, Uncommon Places: The

Baudrillard’s Amérique (Paris: Grasset, 1986),

12. Le Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret: Oeuvre

Hudson, 2004).

Complete Works (London / New York: Thames &

notion of “spectacle” in writings such as Jean M. Christine Boyer’s The City of Collective

complète 1934–1938, 46 f f. Note that the radical

Memory (Cambridge, MA / London: MIT Press,

“cleaning up” of the Louvre as proposed by

17. See, e.g., Jeff Wall, “Über das Machen von

1994), and Michael Sorkin’s “See You in

the plan literally anticipates the project of the

Landschaften /About Making Landscapes,”

Disneyland,” in Variations on a Theme Park: The

“Grand Louvre” as enacted under President

in Jeff Wall: Landscapes and Other Pictures

New American City and the End of Public Space

François Mitterrand in the 1980s.

(Wolfsburg: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg / Cantz, 1996), 8–12; and Carter Ratcliff, “Route 66

(New York: The Noonday Press, 1992), 205–32.

Clutter uses New York as an example of how

Artemis Verlag für Architektur, 1958), 26–29,

Revisited: The New Landscape Photography,”

capacities historically grounded in architecture,

46 f f. For the details of the Venice­episode

Art in America no. 64 (January /February 1976).

like framing the common experience or

see Antonio Foscari, “À Venise en 1934,” in

representing community, are now “shared by

L’Italie de Le Corbusier, ed. Marida Talamona

18. On Francesco Guardi and the Venetian

mediated representations. Rather than deny,

(Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier /Editions de la

veduta see in particular Bernard Aikema and

lament, or resist this disciplinary slippage,”

Villette, 2010), 200–09; and for a more general

Boudwijn Bakker, Painters of Venice: The Story

he continues, architects and urban designers

discussion of Le Corbusier and Venice, my “Le

of the Venetian “Veduta” (Amsterdam: Den

should “engage the vaporized disciplinary

Corbusier, Tourism, and the Myth of Venice,”

Haag / Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, 1990); Dario

border between urban reality and repre-

Liber Amicorum Max Risselada, eds. Dick

Succi, “Veduta. Il vedere, la vista. Lat. visus,”

sentation as the context in which any project

van Gameren and Dirk van de Heuvel (Delft:

in Luca Carlevarijs e la veduta veneziana del

for the contemporary city must be conceived”

Delft University of Technology Department of

settecento, eds. Isabella Reale and Dario Succi

(Clutter, Imaginary Apparatus, 32). What follows

Architecture, 2014), 46–67.

(Milan: Electa, 1994), 15–20; and Annalisa Scarpa Sonnino, Maurizio Fagiolo Dell’Arco,

makes Venturi and Scott Brown’s engagement with mass culture as theorized in Learning from

13. Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, José Luis Sert, and

and Ferdinando Perretti, Landscapes and

Las Vegas—and perhaps even more so their

Ernesto N. Rogers, eds., The Heart of the City:

Veduta Paintings: Venice and Rome in the 18 th

built work—look like an anticipated response to

Towards the Humanization of Urban Life (New

Century (Helsinki: Sinebrychoff Art Museum,

this admonition.

York: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1952). Like many of

1996).

| STANISLAUS VON MOOS

[271]

19. Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset

Carlo Pirovano (Venice: Edizioni La Biennale di

Mathematics Building,” Oppositions 6 (fall

Strip (Los Angeles: National Excelsior

Venezia, 1980), 9–13; and Pirovano, “La Strada

1976), 11–19.

Press, 1966) and Reyner Banham, Los

Novissima,” 38–48.

34. “An uneasy dweller” despite its precious

Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). The best

26. Apparently varying a remark once made by

detailing, as Margaret Plant notes in Venice,

discussion of Ruscha is by Alexandra Schwartz,

Frank Lloyd Wright; see Szacka, Exhibiting the

Fragile City: 1797–1997 (New Haven / London:

Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles (Cambridge, MA /

Postmodern, 160.

Yale University Press, 2002), 344.

London: MIT Press, 2010), 146–60.

27. According to Francesco Cellini, one of the

35. The columnar order of the facade is here

20. On Tallis and Ruscha see Martino Stierli,

curators, apart from technical considerations

folded across the corner so as to be seen from

Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in

the disposition of the pavilions was “purely

the streets that approach the facade sideways.

Theory, Photography and Film (Los Angeles:

random.” But can the centrality of the two

In a 2009 conversation, Denise Scott Brown

Getty Research Institute, 2013), 134–36.

pavilions and their direct confrontation across

has confirmed that this detail played a role in

the alley have been a coincidence given

the conception of the “syncopated” columns

21. See Kurt W. Forster, “Schinkel’s Panoramic

Stern’s role as the coordinator of the American

used at the National Gallery. For images of the

Planning of Central Berlin,” Modulus 16 (1983):

participants? See Szacka, Exhibiting the

Sainsbury Wing see von Moos, Venturi, Scott

62–77.

Postmodern, 148.

Brown & Associates, 122–39.

22. Stierli, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror, 162,

28. See Stanislaus von Moos, Venturi, Rauch &

36. In the 1950s and 1960s, systems theory

186. Promio used a stationary camera inside

Scott Brown (Fribourg/Munich/New York: Office

was most notoriously used as a key to urban

a gondola for the 1896 Lumière brothers film

du Livre / Schirmer Mosel / Rizzoli, 1987), 141–43.

plan-ning by Konstantinos Doxiadis. See, in

“Panorama du Grand Canal pris d’un bateau”.

The project was awarded the Leone d’Oro in

this context, Mark Wigley, “Network Fever,”

1985, the Biennale’s highest distinction.

Grey Room 4 (summer 2001), 82–122. On the role of “systems theory” for the Venturis see

23. Martin Filler, Beyond Utopia: Changing Attitudes in American Architecture (New York:

29. See ibid., 144.

my Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates, 15 f f.; and, with much more detail, Denise Scott

Blackwood Productions, 1983).

30. Neil Levine, „Robert Venturi and Denise

Brown, “Between Three Stools: a Personal

24. For the “canonic” version of this

Scott Brown‘s Duck / Decorated Shed Dyad

View of Urban Design Pedagogy,” in Urban

programmatic opposition see Denise Scott

in a Historical Perspective“, in Eyes That Saw.

Concepts (London / New York: Academy

Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour,

Architecture After Las Vegas, ed. Stanislaus von

Editions / St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 9–20. Note in

Learning from Las Vegas, (Cambridge, MA:

Moos and Martini Stierli (Zurich: Scheidegger &

particular her discussion of her Forms, Forces

MIT Press, 1972; rev. ed., 1977), 88 f f.; and for

Spiess, 2020), 267-289.

and Functions seminar and “Architecture as

a discussion of the implications and potential

31. Learning from Las Vegas (1977 ed.), 128.

Patterns and System: Learning from Planning,” in Venturi and Scott Brown, Architecture as

limits of the theory of duck and decorated shed in the discussion of buildings see Aaron

32. For a more detailed discussion of the

Signs and Systems, 103–223. Doxiadis’s name

Vinegar, “The Melodrama of Expression and

“organicism” of Venturi­and Scott Brown’s

does not appear in Scott Brown’s writing.

Inexpression in the Duck and Decorated Shed,”

work see the notes on “Secret Physiology,”

in Relearning from Las Vegas, eds. Michael

in my Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates:

J. Golec and Vinegar (Minneapolis: University of

Buildings and Projects, 1986–1998 (New

Form (St. Louis: Washington University School

Minnesota Press, 2009), 163–94.

York: The Monacelli Press, 1999), 34–45. My

of Architecture, 1964).

37. Fumihiko Maki, Investigations in Collective

observations on the “footprints” of architecture 25. However, the crowd drawn in 1980 didn’t

and city growth owe much to conversations

38. Marcel Brion and René Huyghe, Se perdre

exceed 40,000. In her superb study on the

with Denise Scott Brown who has since written

dans Venise (Granvilliers: La tour verte, 2013,

Strada Novissima, Léa-Catherine Szacka

more extensively about the firm’s interest in

originally published 1986), 19.

discusses the question of the degree to which

the dynamics of growth and interaction as

the exhibition itself or its impact on professional

factors of formgiving; see notably “Activities as

39. On the history of mapping the Lagoon and

discourse was the cause for its long-lasting

Patterns,” in Robert­Venturi­and Denise Scott

its impact on the conceptualizations of ­Venice’s

resonance. Szacka, Exhibiting the Postmodern:

Brown, Architecture as Signs and Systems for a

“forma urbis” see Plant, Venice, Fragile City,

The 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale (Venice:

Mannerist Time (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap

392–93.

Marsilio, 2016), 31. The founding texts regarding

Press of Harvard University Press, 2004),

the exhibition are Paolo Portoghesi, “La Fine

120–41.

Prima Mostra Internazionale di Architettura, ed.

[272]

40. Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Del Proibizionismo,” in La Presenza del Passato.

33. Colin Rowe, “Robert Venturi and the Yale

Press, 2000), 247–65.

| AFTERWORDS

41. Gabriele Scimeni, “La quarta scuola estiva

at the exhibition entitled “10 Immagini

57. Le Corbusier, “A propos di Venezia,” quoted

del CIAM a Venezia,” Casabella-continuità

per Venezia”, see ed. Francesco Dal Co, 10

from the Italian version of a transcript published

(1956): 69–73.

Immagini per Venezia (Rome: Officina Edizioni,

in the Giornale economico di Venezia, (Paris:

1980), 138.’

Fondation Le Corbusier, n. d.). Translation by

50. Ibid, 22–27, 22.

(September 1952).

“Docks,” etc., Denise Scott Brown will later

51. Francesco Dal Co, “Dove Danzano Grilli

58. Sophie Calle and Jean Baudrillard, Suite

rename them “rivers,” “canals,” “harbors,” etc.

Mirabili. Venezia, Il Fondaco Dei Tedeschi,

Vénitienne / Please Follow Me (Seattle: Bay

in “A Worm’s-Eye-View of Recent Architec-

OMA: Paradossi e Reinvenzioni,” Casabella

Press, 1988, originally published in 1983). Note

tural History,” Having Words (London: A A

863–864 (2016): 26–37. See ibid., pp. 38–49 for

that, with mass tourism, the stairs can also

Publications, 2009, originally published 1984),

the project itself.

play the opposite role as ideal outlook posts for

the author. See also Gazzetta di Venezia no. 27

42. Ibid. Interestingly, when referring to Louis Kahn’s proverbial categorization of urban traffic lines into “Go” Streets, “Stop” Streets,

crowd watching - while often contributing to the

97–118, 104. For Kahn’s terminology see “Toward a Plan for Midtown Philadelphia,”

52. Colin Rowe, “The Mathematics of the Ideal

“human traffic jams” typical of contemporary

Perspecta 2 (1953): 11–27.

Villa,” The Architectural Review (1947): 101– 104;

Venice noted by Robert C. Davis and Garry

reprinted in Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal

R. Marvin in Venice: The Tourist Maze, 73–5; 108.

43. As Maristella Casciato put it, in “Learning

Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT

from Italy (1954–66): Transatlantic Exchanges

Press, 1976), 1–28.

59. Francesco Hayez’s variation on the theme of Delacroix’s “The Execution of the Doge

and Encounters,” Yale School of Architecture, 53. Except for the evidence of various formal

Marino Faliero” probably being the best-known

analogies, brilliantly exposed in Rowe’s essay,

example. For a classic introduction to the

44. On the CIAM Summer Schools in Venice see

there is no indication that Le Corbusier had a

political symbolism of architecture and public

Maddalena Scimeni, “Venezia Inter­nazionale.

specific notion of the Malcontenta when he

space in Renaissance Italy see Wolfgang Lotz,

La CIAM Summer School 1952–1957,” in

designed the Villa in Garches. And when he

“Sixteenth-Century Italian Squares,” in Studies

IUAV 83 (1983): 5–6. For Denise Scott Brown’s

visited the Malcontenta in 1934, it was arguably

in Italian Renaissance Architecture (Cambridge,

own recollections on her Italian experience

less for the architecture than because he

MA and London: MIT Press, 1977), 74–116 (for

in 1955/56 see her “Lavorando per Giuseppe

hoped to get a commission from the woman

the Piazza San Marco see in particular 83 f f.).

Vaccaro (Working for Giuseppe Vaccaro),” in

who inhabited the villa at that moment. See

Edilizia Popolare 243 (1996): 5–12.

Antonio Foscari, “À Venise en 1934,” in L’Italie

60. In connection with the stair that concludes

de Le Corbusier, ed. Marida Talamona (Paris:

the long hall of the Humanities Building at

45. See Mary McLeod, “Wrestling with

Fondation Le Corbusier / Editions de la Villette,

the State University of New York / Purchase,

Meaning in Architecture: Learning from Las

2010), 200–09.

in many ways a typological precedent to the

unpublished manuscript (2010).

Sainsbury Wing stairwell, see von Moos,

Vegas”, in Eyes That Saw, 67-92, esp. 71 and Denise Scott Brown, “Las Vegas Learning, Las

54. I am borrowing the term “flatbed facade”

Vegas Teaching”, ibid., 381-407, esp. 389.

from Allan Plattus, “The Flatbed Façades of

Venturi,­Rauch & Scott Brown, 165.

Venturi and Scott Brown: Cities and Civilizations

61. To give but two examples: Philip Johnson,

46. David Crane, “Chandigarh Reconsidered,”

in a Very Narrow Space,” unpublished

who claimed his Pennzoil Building in Houston

Journal of the American Institute of Architects

manuscript (2010). On Vaccaro see Robert

is a duck and his AT & T Building a decorated

(1953): 32–9.

Venturi,­“La Chiesa Di Recoaro / the Church of

shed (see Denise Scott Brown, “The Making

Recoaro,” Edilizia Popolare, 243 (1996): 22–25.

of an Eclectic,” in Having Words (London: AA Publications, 2009), 95), and Peter Eisenman,

47. Manfredo Tafuri, Venezia e il Rinascimento.

Religione, Scienza, Architettura (Torino: Einaudi,­

55. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 94.

whom I have overheard as commenting on student work in terms of ducks and decorated

1985), xxi (author’s translation).

56. Among the later projects of the firm that 48. On the Teatro del Mondo see again Tafuri,

use the finestra termale, Gordon Wu Hall at

“L’ephémère est éternel: Aldo Rossi a Venezia,”

Princeton is even more “Venetian” (completed

Domus, 602 (1980): 7–12. The best recent

1983; see von Moos, Venturi, Rauch & Scott

summary of architectural undertakings and

Brown, 202–07). Here the asymmetrical parti

exhibitions leading up to the Strada Novissima

arranged around the dominant feature of the

is by Szacka, Exhibiting the Postmodern,

arched reading room window suggest the

39–105.

irregularity of a Venetian cityscape “controlled”

sheds as late as 2014.

by the thermal window of a church nave located 49. In the presentation of his project shown

| STANISLAUS VON MOOS

in its midst.

[273]

EPHEMERAL: LIFE AND DEATH OF THE POSTMODERN ARCHITECTURE

Lea-Catherine Szacka

In De Arquitectura, Marcus Vitruvius lists three interrelated Latin terms — firmitas (strength or structural stability), utilitas (functionality or appropriate spatial accommodation), and venustas (beauty or attractive appearance), as being the basis of any good architecture.

With firmitas, he implies that a good architect needs to choose the best and more solid materials, regardless of their cost. Yet, perhaps dismissing Vitruvius’ advises, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, most postmodern architects went on to erect buildings which often looked more like stage sets than anything truly strong and durable or structurally stable.

Postmodern designers applied colour, pattern and ornament to buildings, transferring ordinary and everyday popular imagery, forms and material into high culture. By rejecting modern design and aesthetics, they also disallowed the building techniques and materials used by their predecessors.

As explained by experts from the Portland-based architecture firm Peter Meijer Architect, PC (PMA) “there is an inherent impermanence of the original materials based on a default decision making process that limited a building’s longevity to a twenty-five (25) year life-cycle”1 for Postmodern architecture.

In other words, Postmodern buildings were often built as ephemeral constructions, for which longevity was not an absolute value.

[274]

Ephemeral – Etymology

Iconic Ephemeral Architecture

Ephemeral is an adjective derived from the Greek ephemeros, and meaning “lasting for a very short time” or “lasting for a day”.

Ephemeral architecture, like paper architecture, constitutes a genre of itself; a genre defined not so much by its life span, than by the initial intention of its creators.2 Thus, ephemeral architecture is defined by its erection but also — and perhaps more importantly — by its eventual and imminent destruction. It permanently lies in a sort of indeterminate time and space. And while the word “ephemeral” could perhaps be interchanged with other words such as temporary, transitory, transient or fleeting, “ephemeral” implies that something is not only short-lived but also inconsequential or of limited value.3

Probably the most iconic example of ephemeral architecture, the Teatro del Mondo, designed and built in 1979 by Italian architect Aldo Rossi, was a floating temporary construction made of a metal tubular structure and cladded with wood. It was meant to last only a few months, acting as a sign for the reactivation of historic city centre and announcing the creation of the Venice Architecture Biennale. Part theatre, part pavilion, and part billboard, the Teatro was the paradigmatic example of a nascent Postmodern tendency towards performativeness and the architecture of image and event.

The Teatro’s ephemerality contributed to its appeal,6 and the building remains – despite lasting for just a very short time – one of the most important works of Rossi and even one of the most significant examples of Postmodern architecture ever built.

In recent years, and challenging ideas of ephemerality versus permanence, many discussions emerged on the historical value of Postmodern buildings.4 As part of this movement, in May 2018 Historic England announced that "seventeen bold, playful, brightly coloured Post-Modern buildings of the late 1970s to 1990s" had been granted listed status and were now protected by law.5 Yet, if there exists a direct link between the idea of architecture’s ephemerality and the Postmodern style in architecture, what is the value of preserving building that emerged in the 1980s, given the apparent fragility of many of these constructions? How should something that was not built to last be preserved?

Often recognised as the first built example of civic-scale Postmodern architecture, the Portland Municipal Building, was completed by Michael Grave’s office in 1982. While this fifteen-story office building was not meant to be ephemeral, huge problems – such as seismic deficiencies and water ingress issues – appeared just eight years after the building’s opening. And despite its inscription to the National Register of Historic Places in 2011 in recognition of its importance in the history of architecture, the Portland Municipal building was threatened with demolition

| AFTERWORDS

by 2014. Preservationists, helped by Michael Graves himself, managed to salvage the building, and the city council adopted a “reconstruction plan that aims to preserve the building’s appearance, while replacing original materials with contemporary updates.”7 The reconstruction plan budget reached $200 million, in contrast to the original building which cost only $28.9 million; “a figure considered exceptionally low even for the time.”8 These numbers immediately reveal some of the challenges linked to the preservation of Postmodern buildings.

Behind the Facades In Postmodern architecture, ephemerality is also often linked to facadism and the idea of the decorated shed. Decoration and ornaments are applied to a building, almost as interchangeable and temporary masks.

The “decorated shed” — as opposed to the “duck”, as termed by Robert Venturi in the 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas — favours image over process or form, and is defined as an architecture in which systems of space and structure are directly at the service of program, with ornament applied independently of them.

An iconic example of American decorated sheds is the series of nine showroom facades commissioned by the Lewis family — the owners and operators of catalogue company BEST Products — which gave full creative freedom to the members of Sculpture In The Environment (SITE) in the mid 1970s. From the indeterminate facade, to the inside outside facade, the forest facade, the notch facade, the peeling facade, the anti-sign facade, the cultural ridge facade, the water facade, and the tilt facade, BEST showrooms were “an incredible series of architectural commentaries on consumerism”9.

Using avant-garde art and irony to mock the culture of disposable ob-

| LEA-CATHERINE SZACKA

Fig. 1. Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo, leaving the building site, Venice, Italy, 1979.

jects and rapid obsolescence, SITE’s ephemeral façades proceeded of a re-branding of BEST Products. But, in the late 1990s, after BEST’s liquidation, all but one of SITE’s facades fell into disuse and were quickly demolished or replaced by conventional facades. Reflecting in 2014 on the faith of BEST stores’ patrons, Margaret McCormick started to raise questions linked to preservation and authenticity in relation to Postmodern building’s preservation, rightfully asking “if the buildings aren’t around anymore, does that mean they’re dead?”

From Nursery to Television In the UK, architect Terry Farrell is particularly known for having built some projects for which the lifespan

was intentionally short. In the late 1970s, Farrell was commissioned by the Clifton Nurseries to build an ingenious garden shop (or nursery) in Covent Garden. Constructed on a short-lease site as part of an effort to revitalise a vacant site in the city, the scheme was both a retail outlet and a project that would provide environmental improvement for the community. A witty pastiche of the portico of St Paul’s church, the building was a mix of Postmodern aesthetic and High Tech servicing. In the design, Farrell put all his efforts into conceiving a postmodern screen closing the long vista down King Street, arguing that: “this is where the impact should be”. 10 The design of the nursery started in 1978 and the building opened in 1981, after being quickly erect-

[275]

ed on site with the help of students from the AA. In 1986, Clifton nurseries decide not to renew the lease, and the building was converted into Judy’s Pantry café. Its external and internal appearance was altered, and the building quickly started to show signs of degradation. Finally, in 1993, only twelve years after its erection, the building was demolished to make way for the new extension of the Royal Opera House.

Even more connected to ideas of ephemerality and the power of (moving) images, was Farrell’s TV-am studio, a conversion project completed in 1983 for a new television channel which intended to broadcast exclusively between 6am and 9.25am, 7 days a week, every day of the year.11 From the outset, the new television company TV-am consciously adopted the aesthetic strategy of the so-called ‘eternal summer’ using cheerful colours across their studio building and visual identity as a way to brighten up people’s early morning hours by suggesting that a fresh and promising new day was ahead.12 After identifying a suitable site in Camden Town, TV-am commissioned Farrell to design a new and revolutionary studio for breakfast television. With a total budget of £5 million, including the cost of the land and all equipment, TV-am’s station were the cheapest television studios ever built.13 Farrell, who saw the commission as “an opportunity to create an identity through a building”14 both inside and outside, designed a lavish, and, at the time outrageous studio building. His designs incorporated Memphis inspired furniture as well as a series of highly performative interiors dominated by bold colours, shapes and motifs, and disposed along a central atrium, running east to west to follow the sun's path. The aesthetic concepts for these spaces included a hospitality suite styled as

[276]

a Japanese temple, a bright yellow central monumental staircase modelled on a Mesopotamian ziggurat, a bridge mimicking the form of a Classical temple. At the far end of the atrium framed by an ionic arch was a Mediterranean garden, followed by a Wild West, space, decorated with sand and cacti. In an attempt to “thematise” the building, Farrell added monumental fibreglass eggcups on each peak of sawtooth roof of the back façade. Offering a mixture of historicism and pop culture, the TV-am eggcups became the symbol for breakfast time television and, eventually, the brand image for the station.15 In 1992, TV-am lost its broadcast franchise and Farrell’s Postmodern building was sold to music channel MTV. Whilst MTV initially made some major alterations to the design, removing the sunrise colours on the main façade and hiding the ornamental TV-am lettering and egg cups to the canal side — it was in 2012 that the real and major alteration of Camden Town’s temple to Postmodernism occurred, replacing the main street elevation with an entirely new facade of colourful metal cladding. The controversial revamp of the station’s building left no traces of what used to be TV-am studio, an architecture of great fun. Interestingly, in 2011, Farrell refused to back the campaign to preserve the TV-am studio, since the original interiors were, in the most part, already gone. Farrell’s main argument at the time was that “the ephemeral nature of the design was a big part of what made it so successful,”16 leaving him a greater freedom to experiment.17

And nothing is more ephemeral than fashion. Whilst preservation bodies such as Heritage England and DoCoMoMo19 are now turning their gaze towards Postmodern gems, there is a real consideration — both material and theoretical — which now needs to be undertaken to address the difficult question of how to preserve something that is meant to be ephemeral. ***

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the students of the 2017–2018 “The Afterlife of Postmodernism” Master research and method workshop at Manchester School of Architecture, University of Manchester, for their enthusiasm in exploring questions of preservation in relation to postmodern architecture, as well as Ian White, who runs the TV-am archive from his home near Leeds, for his time and dedication.

Between fashion and preservation In his Twentieth Century Architecture: A Visual History, Dennis Sharp wrote that: “the decade of the 1980s was obsessed with fads and fashion.”18

| AFTERWORDS

Endnotes

created in 2015 by designer and researcher

13. Amy Frearson, Postmodern architecture:

Adam Nathaniel Furman.

TV-am television studios, London by Terry Farrell, Dezeen, 26 August 2015 < https://

1. Post Modern Building Materials Part One, PMA Findings, Peter Meijer Architect,

5. See “1980s Buildings Officially Become

www.dezeen.com/2015/08/26/postmodern-

PC (PMA) < http://pmapdx.com/blog-

Heritage” < https://historicengland.org.uk/

architecture-tv-am-television-studios-

pmafindings/1930/postmodern-building-

whats-new/news/Post-Modern-Buildings-

camden-london-terry-farrell/>

materials>

Listed>.

2. See Architecture éphémère in

6. See Léa-Catherine Szacka, Exhibiting the

the Legacy of Postmodernism. London:

Encyclopaedia Universalis < http://www.

Postmodern: the 1980 Venice Architecture

Laurence King Publishing, 2011, p.123.

universalis.fr/encyclopedie/architecture-

Biennale, Venice: Marsilio, 2017 and Léa-

ephemere/>.

Catherine Szacka, “Città analoga. Aldo

15. In September 2015, the eggcups

Rossi’s visual theory on display”, Terms

were sold as part of Christie’s “Out of

3. Ephemeral implies that something is not

of appropriation. Modern Architecture and

the Ordinary” sale. Christie’s catalogue

only short-lived but also inconsequential

Global Exchange, Amanda Reeser Lawrence

listed the item as: Polychrome decorated

or of limited value (ephemeral material like

and Ana Miljački eds, Routledge, 2017.

fiberglass eggcup from the British Television

14. Terry Farrell, Terry Farrell: Interiors and

Center Building, circa 1980, designed by

leaflets, posters, postcards, etc.)

7. See Patrick Lynch, “Facade of Michael

Terry Farrell, 40 ½ in. (103 cm) high; 14x14

4. In November 2014, the architectural

Graves' Postmodernist Portland Building

in (36x36cm.) square base. £1,000-1,500

magazine Metropolis published ‘The

Dismantled in Preparation for Recladding”,

($1,600-2,300; €1,5000-2,100).

Postmodern Watchlist’, including around

Arch Daily, 9 March 2018 < https://www.

two dozen ‘overlooked gems that will start

archdaily.com/890490/michael-graves-

16. Amy Frearson, Postmodern architecture:

the debate over Postmodern architecture

postmodernist-portland-building-facade-

TV-am television studios, London by Terry

and design’s contribution to Manhattan’. In

dismantled-in-preparation-for-recladding>.

Farrell, Dezeen, 26 August 2015 < https:// www.dezeen.com/2015/08/26/postmodern-

December 2014, after a long debate, it was announced that the Portland public services

8. See nextportland, “Rebuild of Portland

architecture-tv-am-television-studios-

Building (1982, Portland Oregon) would be

Building Approved”, 11 October 2017 <http://

camden-london-terry-farrell/>

spared from demolition, despite requiring

www.nextportland.com/2017/10/11/portland-

an estimated $95 million for renovation. In

building-approved/>

17. Merlin Fulcher, Controversial revamp of Farrell's TV-am hq slammed, Architects’

August 2015, the British architect Charles Holland published an article on Dezeen

9. Margaret McCormick, “The Ironic Loss

Journal 6 October 2011, <https://

magazine with the title ’11 lost icons of

of Postmodern Best Store” in FA Failed

www.architectsjournal.co.uk/home/

Postmodern Architecture’. In October

Architecture, 22 July 2014 < https://

controversial-revamp-of-farrells-tv-am-hq-

2015, the event ‘Postmodern Architecture:

failedarchitecture.com/the-ironic-loss-of-

slammed/8620781.article>

Preservation’s New Frontier’ was held as

the-postmodern-best-store-facades/>.

18. Dennis Sharp, Twentieth Century

part of the Chicago Architecture Biennale.

This event - part of an ongoing program

10. Letter from Terry Farrell to Jacob

Architecture: A Visual History (Victoria:

of Postmodern design preservation by

Rothschild, 27 November 1980

Images Publishing), 1972 (2002), p.358.

architecture of Chicago as a case study,

11. A new and revolutionary form of

19. At the April 2013 DoCoMoMo US

to explore the evolving concepts and

making television in Britain, TV-am started

Modern Matters conference in Sarasota,

issues surrounding the presentation and

broadcasting 31 years after the very first

Florida, DoCoMoMo Oregon presented a

interpretation of history and context in urban

morning show, Today, started in the United

debate on the merits of Michael Graves

architecture. In December 2015, architectural

States on NBC in 1952.

Portland Building and on the larger context

Metropolis magazine - used the Postmodern

of Postmodernism in general. See Post

critic Rowan Moore published, “Are these PoMo palaces really worth saving?” in

12. The TV-am sunrise logo was designed

Modern Building Materials Part One, PMA

The Guardian. In addition, two Facebook

by Douglas Maxwell. The logo was the

Findings, Peter Meijer Architect, PC (PMA), <

groups concerned with the preservation of

on air station ident, and was also seen on

http://pmapdx.com/blog-pmafindings/1930/

postmodern buildings have recently been

stationery, vehicles and promotional items.

postmodern-building-materials>

created: ’The Postmodern Appreciation

There were several variations over the years,

Society’ (3420 members) created in 2014

with the last change being made in 1988.

by DAM curator Oliver Elser and the

Source: “A-Z of TV-am” in <https://www.tv-

’Postmodern Society’ (2283 members)

am.org.uk/> [accessed 3 May 2018].

| LEA-CATHERINE SZACKA

[277]

CONSTRUCTING THE SITE: TICINO AND CRITICAL REGIONALISM, 1978–1987

Irina Davidovici

Occasionally, the architectural production of a peripheral region comes to the sudden attention of central cultural networks. Distracted from the contemplation of its inner workings, the established discourse then proceeds to explain this concomitant emergence of several buildings of interest as one overarching phenomenon. Whether or not the projects are the result of individual, un-coordinated creative acts, they are amalgamated and a common vision externally projected upon them. Clustered in professional publications and group exhibitions, stalked by devotees, probed by critics, the production of the margin becomes an intellectual commodity efficiently consumed by the centre. This traffic provides cultural capital for the previously marginal protagonists, who acquire the professional and academic recognition that projects them beyond their immediate area of activity. The more visible and outwardly active, however, the less are these actors able to replicate the erstwhile regional ethos. Once aligned with a centrist value-system, they begin to propagate it.

Such a scenario played out in the 1960s and 1970s in the Ticino, the Italian-speaking Swiss canton, where a new generation of architects produced a number of remarkable projects, mostly private houses and educational buildings. The nominal centre’s ‘discovery’ of this architecture began with the group exhibition Tendenzen — Neuere Architektur im Tessin, curated by German-Swiss architect Martin Steinmann in 1975.

[278]

First mounted at ETH in Zurich, the exhibition then travelled extensively, projecting with surprising authority this little-known regional production throughout Europe and North America. Over several editions, the accompanying catalogue significantly increased the information traffic,1 while the coverage of the same buildings in international publications such as Architecture + Urbanism (1976), L’architecture d’aujourd’hui (1977) and Oppositions (1978) cemented the external perception of the Ticinese work as a collective oeuvre.2 I have argued elsewhere that the international appeal of this production partly resided in its receptiveness to extraneous theoretical readings, which rendered it as a replicable formal and methodological model that is still perceptible in Swiss architecture.3 This paper addresses a different facet of the Ticinese Tendenzen, namely its instrumental role in the formulation of Kenneth Frampton’s theoretical construct of Critical Regionalism. While, thus packaged, Ticino architecture gained access to an elite critical discourse, it did so in a schematic and partial manner.

The Ticinese production was defined by its debt to postwar Italian theory, namely the topics of realism, neo-rationalism, and the ‘relative’ autonomy of architecture.4 For Frampton, these notions represented alternatives to the generic cartesian space of late capitalism, promoted worldwide through international modernism.5 Through the definition of a sense

of place, architecture could defy the undifferentiated march of global hegemonies. One can understand what attracted the British critic to Ticino’s 60s and 70s architecture, set up as an ethically-motivated impulse against the corporate, speculative, and culturally anonymous suburban sprawl decimating the Ticinese landscape.

Refreshingly, this production placed building once again at the core of the discipline. In contrast to the undifferentiated technocratic architecture of corporate modernism, it could be promoted as a creative synthesis of vernacular and avant-garde models, forging clear connections to local history and culture while claiming a progressive outlook, unencumbered by populist nostalgia.

If the Ticinese production shored up Frampton’s critical regionalist thesis, his own weighty profile strengthened its international status. Unintentionally, he thus contributed to the construction of what the German historian Frank Werner called ‘the nebulous concept of the Ticino School’.6 Frampton’s input to this myth-formation began in 1978 with the Oppositions article ‘Mario Botta and the School of the Ticino’, in which he developed a dialectical reading between the collective Ticinese context and Botta’s singular artistic personality. Repeatedly, in subsequent essays Frampton singled Botta out as representative of a critical regionalist attitude, a reading that took liberties in two respects: firstly, by conflating the neo-rationalist roots of Ticinese architecture with

| AFTERWORDS

the notion of Critical Regionalism, and, secondly, by equating Botta’s work with a nominally collective production.

A heterogenous construct Ticino’s cultural production reflects a precarious balance between Italy, its traditional next-of-kin, and the Swiss Confederation as its economic and administrative centre. In parallel, its architectural narratives juxtapose the local stone vernacular with modernist imports from Italy and Germany — a hybrid legacy overshadowed, for the architects active in the 1960s and 70s, by their collective devotion to Le Corbusier.

Tita Carloni, a prominent mentor of this younger generation, described its outlook as ‘entirely shaped within contemporary architecture, without explicit connections to the origins of modernism or a pre-industrial past’.7 The search for a suitable modernist vocabulary forged, in this narrow professional setting, a generational self-understanding exploring a range of relationships with history.

The collective identity that arose from the training of most protagonists at ETH in Zurich, then nurtured in the studios of local masters, such as Tita Carloni, Peppo Brivio, Franco Ponti and Rino Tami, led to numerous architectural collaborations, some more durable than others. Bruno Reichlin and Fabio Reinhart, as well as Aurelio Galfetti, Flora Ruchat and Ivo Trümpy gained notoriety in early partnerships before going separate ways. Others, such as Luigi Snozzi, Livio Vacchini, Mario Botta and again Galfetti (after his partnership with Ruchat and Trümpy ended) made their name as sole practitioners, while having collaborated on several projects.8 These fluid work alliances were highly circumstantial, and should not be confused with a sense of professional collectivism.

| IRINA DAVIDOVICH

Fig. 1. Kenneth Frampton’s seminal essay Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance was first published in the book The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture edited by Hal Foster, (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983)

The architects’ different agendas and political allegiances were echoed by their varied built production, whose heterogeneity resisted coherent readings as a group. At a formal level, the production demonstrated an affinity with cubic volumes, barefaced concrete, abstracted vernacular forms, and sensitive relations to the topography. Moreover, even in rural settings, the buildings’ ambition of cultural recovery generated a sense of fragmented urbanity.9 Modernist, vernacular, even classi-

cal sources were used in a polemic and intellectualized fashion — not as a way of smoothing the prismatic architecture into its locale, but to highlight its rootedness in a highbrow cultural tradition.

Even though the leftist tendencies of several architects explain their declared interest in collective housing, such projects were few, due to Ticino’s historical and cultural penchant for individualism.10 The architectural output largely depended

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on a regional economy of private middle-income residences and historical refurbishments, punctuated by refurbishments. The opportunity for this production to declare a social ambition arose with the 1960s educational reform, which funded a large number of new educational buildings in Ticino and effectively launched the young architects’ careers. The access to public commissions, through a mix of competitions and direct appointments by progressive officials, remains to date largely unexplored and would require an intimate knowledge of the politically intricate, often tribal Ticinese society.

This complexity led the international audience of critics and historians to focus on the graspable aspects of the architecture — its formal characteristics — and extract from them a priori theoretical readings, detached from its historical conditioning.

Frampton on Ticino If Italian Neo-Rationalism provided a theoretical input for Ticino architecture, Critical Regionalism could be seen as one of its most visible outputs. Frampton first turned his attention to Ticino in the 1978 Oppositions article ‘Mario Botta and the School of the Ticino’, describing the canton’s insularity as a ‘frontier-culture’ between Italy and the rest of Switzerland.11 Like previous commentators (Martin Steinmann and Bruno Reichlin, Bernard Huet), he presented the architecture as the built embodiment of Italian Tendenza, defined by the cornerstones of ‘relative’ architectural autonomy, the cultural significance of the city, and the use of history as design resource. Similarly to Steinmann, Frampton underestimated the pluralism of Ticino architecture to formulate a unified theoretical construct. Moreover, by positing the titular ‘School of the Ticino’ as a demonstration of ‘the cultural sur-

[280]

vival of the European city-state’, he prepared the ground for its subsequent placement in the Critical Regionalist arena.12 In a significant departure from the local discourse, Frampton singled out Mario Botta as playing a ‘central and catalytic role’ in this production.13 While acknowledging that some of Botta’s most important urban projects had been achieved in collaboration with Luigi Snozzi and Rudy Hunziker, Frampton elected him as representative figurehead, whose designs were both ‘unique’ and ‘typical’. The typical aspects related implicitly to the common background of Ticinese praxis, and explicitly to the referential field of Italian theory: the focus on history, types, city and territory, and the disciplinary definition of architecture as a ‘problem of form’.14 Factually, Botta sat apart from his contemporaries, most of whom had trained at ETH Zurich, on account of his training at the IUAV in Venice. He made much of his training in Venice under Carlo Scarpa and, later on, of his brief but intense working experiences with Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn. These individual markers highlighted his personal narrative as distinct from, indeed ‘unique’, among the Ticinese protagonists.

Frampton reprised his vision of a Botta-fronted regional school in his 1980s essays on Critical Regionalism.

These could be seen to fall into two categories: those where Ticinese and other regional architectures are subjected to full-fledged assessments, as illustrations of Critical Regionalism; and the ones in which the theoretical framework takes over and is expounded by points, with nominal references to the regional architects. The first category reworked the material initially included in the Oppositions article, namely the Perspecta article ‘Prospects for

a Critical Regionalism’ (1983) and a new chapter in the second edition of Modern Architecture, ‘Critical Regionalism. Modern Architecture and Cultural Identity’ (1985).15 Both texts astutely situated the Ticinese production within the Swiss political system, in the field of tension between ‘the cantonal system [that] serves to sustain local culture’ and federal standards that enable ‘the penetration and assimilation of foreign ideas’.16 Frampton thus conceived of canton and federation as dialectically opposed terms, mirroring at a regional scale the conflict between culture and civilization of his Critical Regionalism construct.

Ticinese architecture was acclaimed for ‘its capacity to condense the artistic potential of the region while reinterpreting cultural influences coming from the outside’.17 That Frampton shored up his argument with Botta’s work could be explained through the latter’s design method, described as ‘building the site’: formulation that would have strongly appealed to the critic.18 Originally inspired by Vittorio Gregotti’s Il Territorio dell’architettura (1966), this strategy of complementing landscape formations with built forms was capable of evoking the geological (natural), as well as agricultural (man-made), character of the region.

Frampton’s interest was validated

by Ticino’s dramatic topography, which counteracted the ‘absolute placelessness’ of technocratically flattened ground.19 Botta’s buildings thus helped illustrate Frampton’s notion of ‘bounded place-forms’, rooted in the Heideggerian idea of boundary as an experiential, rather than actual, enclosure.20 Botta’s projects qualified as such through spatial articulations that signalled different conditions of topography, use and land ownership. Frampton described the houses as ‘bunker-belvederes’, editing out undesired views of speculative ‘placeless’ suburbs and

| AFTERWORDS

framing more salient aspects of the landscape. Conversely, the city projects in which Botta had collaborated with Luigi Snozzi were articulated as large urban figures, deploying the imagery of specific types (gallerias, viaducts) and materialising ‘an indistinct urban boundary’ without competing with the historical fabric.

However, the inner contradiction that arose from the buildings’ anchorage into the existing land- or cityscapes, while creating strong topographical figures in their own right, was not highlighted. Their ambivalence as both ‘bounded’ and ‘primary forms’ was subsumed under their capacity to ‘harmonise’ with their location through interpretations of local types and ‘analogical’ forms and finishes.21 In the second category, two polemical texts, in 1983 and 1987, defined Critical Regionalism as an ‘architecture of resistance’: the earlier in six points, the latter in ten.22 Botta’s name featured again at the forefront of the Ticinese production, as in the formulation ‘the recent Ticinese school of Mario Botta et al.’23 While, in the first essay, Botta’s ‘building the site’ was adduced as exemplary design strategy into the section ‘Culture versus nature’,24 the latter one placed the ‘recent Ticinese school’ under a new heading, ‘The Myth and the Reality of the Region’.25 Thus, besides his regional identification with Botta, Frampton’s acknowledged the ideas of ‘school’ and ‘region’ as cultural and institutional constructs, ‘necessary myths, as any self-consciously created culture must be’.26 This deliberateness points for the first time towards an instrumentalization of the ethical concept of resistance, which in the first essay was a primarily political proposition. Indeed, given the production’s ultimate dependency on capitalist development, in Botta’s case the question of resistance was reduced to an aesthetic editing out of spoiled views.

| IRINA DAVIDOVICH

The Ticinese production did not subscribe equally to all points of Critical Regionalism. To be sure, in its ‘recuperative, self-conscious, critical endeavor’, it proved highly adept at adapting the historical forms of the local vernacular and creating a current dialogue with the past. 27 At the same time, the architecture was nothing if not visual. For this generation enthralled by Le Corbusier, smooth concrete became the default building material, clearly distinguishable from the pervasive vernacular materiality of rough masonry and render. Those projects using brick or stone emphasised hard surfaces and sharp contours, eliminating handicraft traces and any sense of inherent ‘warmth’. Through its aversion towards ‘nostalgic’ materials and techniques, the Ticinese production emphasised the visuality of architecture and thus slid into the domain of ‘scenography’, denying other prerequisites of Critical Regionalism, such as tactility and tectonic coherence.

The leverage of the Archimedean point Frampton’s association of the Ticinese production with the tension between regional ‘culture’ and universalizing ‘civilization’ mirrors, at a deeper level, the relation between local conditions and external readings.

His use of the Ticinese production to illustrate Critical Regionalism significantly raised its profile worldwide, at the cost of detaching it from the context that had nurtured and shaped it.

By fusing the incompatible personal approaches of Ticinese architects into one theoretical construct, and furthermore by subordinating their collective significance under one dominating personality, Frampton might have overstepped into the domain of operative criticism.

As a consequence of Frampton’s ratification, Botta’s professional

‘currency’ increased considerably, projecting him into the realm of international stardom. Set apart from his Ticinese colleagues, Botta withdrew from the collective narrative and, at the same time, from the common conditions encountered by all architects in the Ticino. Poignantly, the catalogue of his personal retrospective at MOMA in 1987 (the only Ticinese to be thus celebrated) did not mention his colleagues in the Tendenzen exhibition twelve years earlier, nor the common context of their work. Instead, the introductory essay by Stuart Wrede formulated a heroic personal narrative that positioned Botta directly in the global modernist lineage of Le Corbusier, Scarpa and Kahn.28 Ticino, the actively formative background to Botta’s work, was demoted to a passive topography for individual experimentation. This trajectory, from the collective to the individual and from the specific to the general, openly defied Frampton’s thesis of Critical Regionalism. Jorge Otero-Pailos’s observation that the construct was too subtle to escape misappropriation was confirmed: Botta belongs to the critical regionalists who were ‘invited back from the repressed margin into the centre of architectural discourse, at the price of exacting from them the language of the centre’.29 From Maastricht to Tokyo and from San Francisco to Seoul, his subsequent architecture became itself an agent of ‘placelessness’.

Within Switzerland, there has been hardly any response to the Critical Regionalist interpretation. There have been however more nuanced and far less visible readings of the work that emerged both within Ticino — notably those of historian Virgilio Gilardoni, architects Tita Carloni and Paolo Fumagalli — and in the rest of Switzerland — Martin Tschanz, André Bideau, Nott Caviezel and again Steinmann come to

[281]

mind. Published mostly in Italian and German, these interpretations renounced tight theoretical frameworks in favour of depicting a pluralist scenery of diverging personalities and agendas, loosely if fundamentally connected by a collective conscience.30 Protagonist Bruno Reichlin critiqued in no uncertain terms the local advantages of association with internationally-circulated theories.

While ‘united in a mystical community through the grace of genius loci’, he argued, Ticinese architects were forced to compete inside the limiting context granted by this very grace.31 In these circumstances, international attention became local currency, underlining the parochial attitude of regional hierarchies: As everyone knows, inside a regional socio-economic basin, the battle for survival imposes among the socalled ‘local’ architects a subtle game of distinction, and hence the affiliation to external tendencies, groups and manifestos, cultural perfusions, the umbilical cord with the place of origin etc., meant to dazzle and turn green with envy the provincial architect next door.32

formations of ‘large, uniform, highly centralised cultural / political entities’.35 Difference, Colquhoun contended, has become a matter of individual preference, ‘the result of the choices of individual architects who are operating from within multiple codes’ and who are themselves ‘the product of modern rationalization and the division of labour’.36

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1. Steinmann, Martin, and Thomas Boga.

Tendenzen: Neuere Architektur im Tessin (Zürich: ETHZ, 1975). Subsequent editions in 1976, 1977 and 2010.

2. Toshio Nakamura, (ed.), A+U, 69 (1976), 23-145; Bernard Huet, ‘La ‘tendenza’, ou l’architecture de la raison comme architecture de tendance’, L’architecture

While this reading validates the nuanced criticism of Ticino architecture by local figures, they remain mostly overlooked by the international discourse. It was the programmatic theoretical projections from the outside that arguably had further-reaching consequences. Botta’s privileged position on Frampton’s Critical Regionalist agenda helped him accrue the political leverage he later used to found the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio, his home town, in 1996. Between 1998 and 2001, at Botta’s invitation, Frampton taught there. Twenty years after coining the term the ‘School of the Ticino’, his early pronouncement had metamorphosed into self-fulfilling prophecy.

d’aujourd’hui 190 (1977), 47-70; Kenneth Frampton, ‘Mario Botta and the School of the Ticino’, Oppositions 14 (1978), 1-25.

3. Irina Davidovici, ‘The Autonomy of Theory’, paper presented at Theory’s history 196X-199X Challenges in the historiography of architectural knowledge, KU Leuwen, 9 February 2017.

4. Frampton, ‘Mario Botta and the School of the Ticino’, 2.

5. Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2007), 294.

6. Frank Werner, ‘Der nebülose Begriff der ‚Tessiner Schule‘’, in: Frank Werner and Sabine Schneider (eds.), Neue Tessiner Architektur: Perspektiven Einer Utopie

*** Listing Critical Regionalism’s many refutations and revisions is not the aim of this paper. It is worth rehearsing, however, Keith Eggener’s insistence that as a top-down theoretical reading, reinforced by authority figures, Critical Regionalism is itself ‘a postcolonialist concept’.33 Eggener argued that critical examinations of regional identity should include an analysis of their underlining political and ideological agendas — work that, in Botta’s case, is yet to be undertaken.34 Furthermore, Alan Colquhoun presented Critical Regionalism as an anachronism. If local specificity was once the preserve of autonomous, closed-off cultural regions, nowadays differences occur in unpredictable fashion within current

Endnotes

(Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1989), 9, 37.

7. Tita Carloni, ‘Tra conservazione e innovazione’, in: Peter Disch (ed.), 50 Anni di architettura in Ticino 1930-1980 (Lugano: Grassico Pubblicità, 1983), 9.

8. These constellations produced some notable projects, such as the competition for the campus EPFL Lausanne- Dorigny by Mario Botta, Tita Carloni, Aurelio Galfetti, Flora Ruchat and Luigi Snozzi (1970), and the Scoula Media in Losone by Vacchini and Galfetti (1973).

9. See Martin Steinmann, ‘La Scuola ticinese all’uscita da scuola,’ in: Nicola Navone (ed.), Il bagno di Bellinzona di Aurelio Galfetti, Flora Ruchat-Roncati, Ivo Trümpy, Mendrisio: Mendrisio Academy Press, 2010), 35–44;

| AFTERWORDS

Paolo Fumagalli, ‘L’architettura degli anni

20. Frampton ‘Towards a Critical

Disch (ed.), 50 Anni Di Architettura in

Settanta nel Ticino’, Kunst + Architektur in

Regionalism’, 25.

Ticino 1930-1980, Quaderno Della Rivista Tecnica Della Svizzera Italiana (Lugano:

der Schweiz 45 (1995), 28-35.

10. For the cultural and political resistance

21. Frampton, ‘Prospects for a Critical

Grassico Pubblicità, 1983); Martin Tschanz,

Regionalism’, 157.

‘Tendenzen und Konstruktionen: von 1968 bis heute’, in: Martin Tschanz, Anne

to collective housing in the Ticino, as well as the 1970s architects’ efforts to overcome it,

22. Frampton, ‘Towards a Critical

Meseure, and Wilfried Wang (eds.), Schweiz

see Fumagalli, Paolo. “Il Collettivo in Ticino.”

Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture

(Munich: Prestel, 1998), 45–53; André Bideau,

Archi : Rivista Svizzera Di Architettura,

of Resistance’, in: Hal Foster (ed.) The

‘Tessiner und andere Tendenzen’, in: Werk,

Ingegneria e Urbanistica = Swiss Review

Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern

Bauen + Wohnen 84 (12, 1997), 22-36; Nott

of Architecture, Engineering and Urban

Culture (New York: New Press, 1983),

Caviezel, ‘Switzerland since the 1970s: From

Planning, no. 6 (2013): 65–71.

17–34; and ‘Ten Points on an Architecture of

Ticino Tendenza to Pluralism’, in: Čeferin and

Regionalism: A Provisional Polemic’, Centre

Cvetka Požar (eds.), Architectural Epicentres:

11. Frampton, ‘Mario Botta and the School of

3, 1987, reprinted in: Vincent Canizaro (ed.),

Inventing Architecture, Intervening in Reality

the Ticino’, 2-3.

Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings

(Ljubljana: Arhitekturni Muzej, 2008), 90–103;

on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition

Steinmann, ‘La Scuola ticinese all’uscita da

12. Frampton, ‘Mario Botta and the School of

(New York: Princeton Architectural Press,

scuola’, 2010.

the Ticino’, 3.

2006), 375–85.

13. Frampton, ‘Mario Botta and the School of

23. Frampton, ‘Ten Points’, 380.

31. Bruno Reichlin, ‘Quand Les Architectes

24. Frampton, ‘Towards a Critical 14. Luigi Snozzi, ‘Design Motivation’, in: Boga

Geschichte Der Alpen 16 (2011), 173–200.

Regionalism’, 26.

32. Bruno Reichlin, ‘Quand Les Architectes

and Steinmann (eds.), Tendenzen – Neuere Architektur im Tessin (Zurich: ETH Zurich,

Modernes Construisent En Montagne’, in: Histoire Des Alpes = Storia Delle Alpi =

the Ticino’, 3.

25. Frampton, ‘Ten Points’, 380.

Modernes Construisent En Montagne’, 174.

26. Frampton, ‘Ten Points’, 380.

33. Keith Eggener, ‘Placing Resistance: A

1976), 164.

Critique of Critical Regionalism’ in: Journal of

15. Kenneth Frampton, ‘Prospects for a 27. Frampton, ‘Ten Points’, 378.

Architectural Education 4 (2002), 234.

Modern Architecture and Cultural Identity’,

28. Stuart Wrede, Mario Botta (New York:

34. Eggener, ‘Placing Resistance’, 231.

in: Modern Architecture. A Critical History

Museum of Modern Art, 1986).

Critical Regionalism’, Perspecta 20 (1983), 174-162 and ‘Chapter 5. Critical Regionalism.

35. Alan Colquhoun, ‘Regionalism 1 (1992)’,

(London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 29. Jorge Otero-Pailos, ‘Surplus Experience:

in: Alan Colquhoun, Collected Essays in

Kenneth Frampton and the Subterfuges of

Architectural Criticism, (London: Black Dog,

16. Frampton, ‘Prospects for a Critical

Bourgeois Taste’, in: Architecture’s Historical

2009), 285.

Regionalism’, 156.

Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the

1985 [4th ed. 2007]), 314-327.

17. Frampton, ‘Prospects for a Critical

Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of

36. Alan Colquhoun, ‘Regionalism 1 (1992)’,

Minnesota Press, 2010), 248-249.

284.

Regionalism’, 156.

30. Virgilio Gilardoni, ‘Die Moral und die 18. Mario Botta, ‘Academic High School in

Wirklichkeit. Ein Gespräch mit dem Historiker

Morbio Inferiore. Intervention Criteria and

Virgilio Gilardoni’, in: Dieter Bachmann

Design Objectives’, in: Boga and Steinmann

and Gerardo Zanetti (eds.), Architektur des

(eds.), Tendenzen – Neuere Architektur im

Aufbegehrens: Bauen im Tessin (Basel ;

Tessin (Zurich: ETH Zurich, 1976), 160.

Boston: Birkhäuser, 1985), 178-184; Paolo Fumagalli, ‘L‘architettura degli anni Settanta

19. Frampton, ‘Towards a Critical

nel Ticino’, in: Kunst + Architektur in der

Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture

Schweiz = Art + architecture en Suisse =

of Resistance’, in: Hal Foster (ed.) The Anti-

Arte + architettura in Svizzera, 45 (1, 1995),

Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture

28-35; Tita Carloni, ‘Tra conservazione e

(New York: New Press, 1983), 26.

innovazione. Appunti sull’architettura nel canton Ticino dal 1930 al 1980’, in: Peter

| IRINA DAVIDOVICH

[283]

ASPECTS OF POP AND THE POSTMODERN: THE THEORY OF DENISE SCOTT BROWN

Frida Grahn

Denise Scott Brown (b. 1931) and Robert Venturi (1925–2018) are known as two originators of Postmodernism in architecture. Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) would inspire a new interest in the architectural past and a wave of historical quotation. However, their influence went beyond historicism: a second publication, Learning from Las Vegas (1972), sought to learn from the present — from the sprawling cities of the American Southwest. The genesis of the book is particularly intertwined with the biography of Scott Brown. Central is her research on the everyday urban landscape and her ties to AngloSaxon Pop Art, forming a crucial link between Pop and Postmodernism.

Born in Zambia in 1931, Scott Brown (née Lakofski), began her education in Johannesburg — a South African metropolis with a rich folk-popular culture. She was encouraged by an art teacher to learn from her immediate surroundings in order to be truly creative. Observation and photographic documentation would become some of Scott Brown’s most important investigative tools — in Johannesburg, London, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

Scott Brown continued her studies at the Architectural Association in London 1952–54 where she met Alison and Peter Smithson. The Smithsons were members of the

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artist collective the Independent Group and took part in the exhibition ‘This is Tomorrow’ (1956) — popularly known as the birth of Pop Art. Pop Art developed in the wake of the postwar Americanization of the West and the emergence of mass media and consumerism. New cultural expressions, seen in advertisement in glossy magazines, the commercial vernacular, and ordinary street life, were used as raw material in collages. The scrap book aesthetics were accompanied by an appreciation for the existing environment, seen in the growing opposition to radical renewal projects of eastern London.

Scott Brown would follow the discussions closely and comment on them in later writings. The dual interest of pop and preservation would follow her throughout her career.

In 1958 Scott Brown moved to Philadelphia to study city planning and urban sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. The American situation was partly similar to the British — there were downtown, low-income areas threatened by demolition — but there was also the new challenge of car-dependent, sprawling cities. The success of “chaotic” cities such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas was subject to discussion. After graduating Scott Brown joined the faculty and would teach her students to look for hidden patterns, spatial configurations and forces influencing the development of cities.

Scott Brown and Venturi met at a faculty meeting in 1960 and initiated what would become a life-long collaboration. Scott Brown influenced Venturi to consider complexity and contradiction also in a “broader social framework,” as architecture historian Mary McLeod writes. Venturi’s famous assessment of Main Street as being “almost all right” can be seen as a summary of Scott Brown’s position. As an assistant professor and later advocate planner, Scott Brown argued for preserving what worked for people, as opposed to Modernist tabula rasa.

In 1965 Scott Brown was invited to teach at UC Berkeley and at UCLA in Los Angeles and made a stop in Las Vegas on her way. The desert city would remind Scott Brown of her native Africa and she would later refer to her way of perceiving it as “an African view of Las Vegas.” She decided to run a studio at the UCLA on the city and returned three times on her own. The plan changed after she invited Venturi to join her for another trip in November 1966. Two years later Scott Brown and Venturi would run the Las Vegas Studio together at Yale School of Architecture.

In the studio, the city of Las Vegas was used as a case-study for exploring the readability of cities. The car-dependent environment of high speeds and vast distances had created a “Pop landscape” with an abundance of signs, as seen on the

| AFTERWORDS

Fig. 1. Denise Scott Brown in her home in Philadelphia in June 2019, discussing her upcoming book Wayward Eye. Photo: Carl C. Paatz Fig. 2. Las Vegas, Architettura Minore on The Strip, 1966 Photo: Denise Scott Brown Fig. 3. Pico Boulevard, Santa Monica, 1966 Photo: Denise Scott Brown

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ornate casino facades. The results were compiled together with the teaching assistant Steven Izenour and published as Learning from Las Vegas (1972). The treatise, which would become one of the most referenced texts on architectural theory, presented universal conclusions on the function on symbolism and ornament in architecture. It would argue for architecture as a vehicle of meaning, thus diverging from the abstraction of Late Modernism.

The notion became a cornerstone for nascent Postmodernism, as seen in Charles Jencks’ The Language of Postmodern Architecture (1977).

Scott Brown’s expertise in urban analysis was crucial for the investigation of the new kind of city. Her preoccupation with topics such as readability, communication, and Pop Art is seen in articles published in the mid 1960s. A reoccurring theme is how architects and planners can learn from the Pop artists’ attentiveness to the everyday. This was implemented in the Las Vegas project, where the Los Angeles-based artist Ed Ruscha’s photographic style, seen in his Every Building on Sunset Strip (1966), would serve as an inspiration.

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Another aspect inherited from Pop Art was the artistic transformation of sources. This can be seen in the work of Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Claes Oldenburg, and also in the architectural production of Scott Brown, Venturi, and their partners.

The transformations took place through a change of context, scale or material of a conventional architectural element, which can be exemplified by the “ironic column” at Allen Memorial Art Museum (1976) in Oberlin, Ohio. It was crucial for them to use references in a symbolic way in order to avoid literal, historical pastiche. By emphasizing this, Scott Brown and Venturi sought to make up for any misreading of Complexity and Contradiction.

Scott Brown and Venturi would strive to make architectural Postmodernism more pluralist, artistic, and symbolic — informed by the Pop Art movement. Scott Brown played a crucial role in this endeavor, contributing considerably to recent architectural history. ***

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Fig. 4. Mojave Desert, California, before end of 1968 Photo: Denise Scott Brown Fig. 5. Denise Scott Brown in front of the Las Vegas Strip, 1966 Credit: the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown Photo: Robert Venturi Fig. 6. Guild House, Philadelphia, 2019 (Venturi and Rauch, 1963) Photo: Frida Grahn Fig. 7. Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia, 2019 (Venturi and Rauch, 1978) Photo: Frida Grahn

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SÖDRA STATION

Rasmus Wærn

Stadsdelen Södra station påstår några saker: Att storslagna byggnader hör till vår nedärvda bild av staden. Att innerstaden skulle ha något att lära sig av förorten. Att det fanns det som var bättre förr, det hade inget område av den storleken sagt förr.

Det är över huvud taget en stadsdel som påstår en massa. Vilket gjorde att många blev upprörda över det den hävdade.

Nu, mer än trettio år sedan det byggdes, har det sagts så länge, att man inte längre hör vad den säger.

Men medan andra kulturlager från 1980-talet som Grace Jones, videokassetten och tevesåpan Dallas sedan länge bäddats in av nya sediment, står de flammande appellerna i Bofills båge och husen däromkring kvar som blekta slagord. Men hur kunde detta över huvud taget vara något att bli upprörd över?

Det var för alla förhoppningars skull. Södra Station skulle bli stadens renässans, det skulle bli den nya arkitekturens manifest, humanismens triumf över decenniers teknokrati. När drömmen om staden som visste allt visade sig vara just en dröm, låg redan nya områden på ritborden. Södra station sjönk in i den vardag det egentligen var byggt för och de stora orden blev till sand.

Det här var staden som tog i. Vad som tidigare varit högt, blev nu högre. Se på själva stationshallen

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skulle jag kunna säga, om inte just den kom att få ett lock på sig härom året. Men portikerna mellan bostadshusen vittnar ännu om en sprudlande självmedvetenhet hon arkitekterna. Långa, raka promenader blev rakare och längre än någonsin tidigare. Klassicismen blev mer klassisk, samtidigt som modernismen blev nymodern.

Därför sprack ambitionerna att bygga ett område lika enhetligt som den gamla staden i bitar. Området byggdes under nittonhundratalets, ja hela den svenska arkitekturens mest förvirrade tid någonsin. När allt plötsligt var möjligt, byggdes också allt möjligt. Områdets pappa, planarkitekten Jan Inghe-Hagström på Stockholms stadsbyggnadskontor, dolde inte sin besvikelse: En av de lärdomar jag har dragit av detta, det är att det krävs verkligen att någon tar på sig ett sådant här samordningsansvar. Vi försökte utveckla nya planinstrument som vi kallade för kvalitetsprogram för att tvinga arkitekterna och byggherrarna att tidigt redovisa vad de ville göra och sedan försöka samordna detta.

Men det behövs mycket kraftfullare styrning tidigare i planprocessen för att få ett bättre resultat än vad vi stundtals har nått här på Södra station. Och det där är ju intressant för att det går precis på tvären mot vad många av de politiska önskemålen nu är, nämligen att man ska låta marknaden, arkitekterna och byggherrarna få ännu större frihet. Det där tror jag inte ett dugg på. Precis

motsatsen är erfarenheterna vi har dragit på Stadsbyggnadskontoret av det här projektet.

Citatet kommer från filmen ”En stadsdel föds” från 1995 där filmarna Knut Ekström och Erik Strömdahl under tio års tid följde några av de människor som fick sin nya hembygd i det gamla stationsområdet.

Samt Jan Inghe, som han allmän kallades. Han höll i hela planprocessen från början till slut. Projektet Södra Station famnar hela åttiotalet.

Det började med att staden köpte marken av SJ 1979 och det hela blev i stort sett inflyttat när bågen stod klar 1991. Tornet, Haglunds pinne, tog några år till på sig men blev också en sak för sig själv. Och först nu blir hela Fatbursparken klar, efter många års tjänstgöring som depå för pendeltågstunneln.

När projektet började var Jan Inghe inte mer än 35 år. Allt för ung, kom han senare att tycka; för ung för att agera med pondus mot de byggherrar och arkitekter vars planer inte brydde sig särskilt mycket om husen på andra sidan gatan. Men också för ung för att veta hur kvaliteten skulle kunna pressas upp och genom byggsystemens glastak. Det lärde han sig med tiden, erfarenheterna skulle han använda i planeringen av Hammarby sjöstad.

En viktig del av Södra Stations historia hittar man dock några kilometer längre västerut. På Brommalandets udde ut mot Ulfsundasjön hittar man Minneberg. Det var Sveriges första

| AFTERWORDS

Fig. 1. Axonometri över Södra station från norr med Jan Inghes namn i husrelief. Gunnar Lantz november 1985.

postmoderna bostadsområde, planerat 1980. Här stod husen för första gången på länge ordnade så att mellanrummen blev huvudsaken. För att förstå Södra Station behöver man förstå Minneberg. Och för att förstå Minneberg behöver man förstå de långa linjalernas natt, den tid då allt av värde kunde uttryckas i siffror – den svenska efterkrigstidens tilltro till det mätbara.

Minneberg var Jan Inghes första egna uppgift som stadsplanerare.

Tidigare planer för området hade räknat med att bergknallarna skulle sprängas bort och husen radas upp.

Han lyckades vända allt detta så att berget bestod och husen byggdes efter människors och inte efter kranbanors behov men att det fortfarande var betongelementen som

| RASMUS WÆRN

styrde estetiken gick inte att ändra på. Det hela blev en slags teater, en uppsättning av pjäsen ”Den europeiska staden” med kulisser och allt.

Idag är det lätt att se bristerna, men pjäsen blev en stor framgång och Inghe fick ta sig an stadens största uppgift sedan miljonprogrammets dagar. I Minneberg ritades alla hus av en och samma arkitekt och byggdes av en och samma byggare.

Här skulle nu tjugo olika arkitekter och byggherrar komma att samsas.

Direkt efter programutredningen drog den första av flera arkitekttävlingar för Södra station igång, en idétävling som skulle vaska fram grundanslaget.

I tävlingen flöt alla samtidens idéer om staden upp. Eller, egentligen var

de bara två: Å ena sidan en ny kärlek till den gamla staden gator, å andra sidan väl omhändertagna hus och doften av linolja. Den falangen fick sitt kanske mest extrema uttryck i Léon Kriers tävlingsförslag ”Not the tavlingsomrade” som gick ut på att spara Södra Station som en öppen park och bygga om hela Södermalm till ett knippe Gamla-Stan-stora enklaver med trånga gränder. En slags revansch på Le Corbusiers förslag att ersätta hela Söder med ett enda hus för 110 000 människor.

Den andra idén satte mer faktiska spår. Det var HSB som lanserade sin vision om ett ”Söders Manhattan” med eldunderstöd av författaren Bernt Rosengren. Kontrasten mellan Rosengrens romantiskt-nostalgiska Söderskildringar och HSBs bom-

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som rörde sig från väster till öster.

Stadsbyggnadskontorets vision att bygga en stad där ena sidan vette mot en smal gata och den andra mot bilfria stråk var ett arv från förortsplaneringen man inte ville göra sig av med. Oron för att bli påkörd var konkret, då omkring tusen personer dog i trafiken varje år mot ett par hundra idag.

Södra Stations trafikseparering var en källa till vrede för kritiker utifrån, men uppskattat av de boende.

En av de som fostrat en familj i dessa kvarter heter Per Kraft. ” ”Trafiksepareringen har varit av godo för oss, vår gata är lugn och barnen har kunnat röra sig tryggt i närområdet när de var små” berättar Per idag. ”Men samtidigt isolerar den området och gör det till en enklav som på sätt och vis parasiterar på omgivande stad och parker”.

Jan Inghe själv var inte särskilt nöjd.

I ett PM från 2004 rannsakar han sig själv: Misslyckat eller inte därom må vi tycka. Men med uppenbara brister ändå.

Fig. 2. Axonometri över kvarteret Fatbursviken 2 med stationshuset i förgrunden.

bastiska vision som såg ut som ett Hötorgscity på stereoider kunde inte vara större. Men Rosengren vision om att ladda Stockholm med så mycket människor som möjligt hade tiden för sig och höghusfrågan blev en het potatis som Jan Inghe sköt framför sig ända tills det till slut blev dags för Tornet. Jag återkommer till det.

Om Krier och Rosengren satte ideologiska spår, fanns det andra i debatten vars idéer fick mer praktiskt genomslag. Framför allt Mischa Borowski, en polskfödd arkitekt som kom till Sverige som nittonåring tillsammans med sin mamma. De satte båda stora spår i debatten, modern Maria med sitt engagemang för ett fritt Polen och sonen med det stads-

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byggnadsengagemang han ärvt från fadern. Han blev sedermera stadsarkitekt i Warszawa, men under åttiotalet ägnade han sin energi åt Södra Station. Först som debattör, sedan som arkitekt. Han drev linjen att stationen måste däckas över, något som staden först inte tänkt sig, det skulle bli för dyrt. Men med Gunnar Strängs pendeltågsavtal ordnade sig den saken, och Borowski fick rita själva stationshuset. Åttiotalet bjöd på ett nytt debattklimat. Internationellt, efter en lång tid av självvalt navelskådande. Jan Inghe bjöd in brett till tävlingarna och dagspressen gav arkitekturdebatten stora (de var större då) helsidor. Debatten följde planeringen

Exploateringen är ställvis alltför hög Snarare enklav än stad, dåliga samband Parkytorna är för små och hårt slitna Arkitekturen är för lite samordnad och ställvis för dålig Det byggnadstekniska utförandet på hus och stadens markanläggningar är för dåligt Den underjordiska stationsmiljön är undermålig Det är bara att hålla med. Om Södra Station skulle byggts något rymligare, mer integrerat med gamla Söder, med väl omhändertagna parker av olika sorter, med en mer samlad och mer omsorgsfullt gestaltad bebyggelse och en station i klass med de

| AFTERWORDS

grandiosa, hade vi börjat närma oss en stad i dess fulla betydelse. Men ändå. Helt fel blev det ju inte.

Det mest intressanta, mest genomritade och mest välbyggda huset är utan tvekan Bofills båge och dess annex, ”templen” och ”kuberna”.

Få hus har namn, och de som bär sin arkitekts namn är riktigt sällsynta: Eiffeltornet; Aaltobiblioteket; Garnieroperan; Martin-Gropius-Bau; Semperoper.

Och Bofills båge. Själva bågformen kom dock före Bofill, även om han hade spänt flera stora bågar tidigare: i Montpellier, Saint-Quentin-enYvelines och Marne La Vallée, där hans ”Abraxas” från 1982 snabbt blev en ikon för futuristisk klassicism.

Bofill ville rita palats för folket. Det var kraftfulla gester med överdrivna former. Ifall palatsens status kunde mätas i kolonnernas bredd, blev rejäla kolonner en demokratifråga.

Att en sådan ideologi stod i konflikt med svensk måttfullhet konstaterade Aftonbladets kritiker Bosse Bergman redan fem år (13/7 1980) innan Bofill blev inbjuden till att tävla på Södra station.

Postmodernismen var ett uppbrott från Bauhausskolans rationella estetik, men modernismens kris bottnade i en kritik mot hela idén om ett rationellt tänkande. Att vara modernist var att tro på att varje fråga hade ett svar som var bättre än alla andra tänkbara svar. Att vara postmodernist var att acceptera olika svar. En sådan behövde inte acceptera andras argument, men kunde heller inte hävda sitt svar framför någon annans. När vetande började betraktas som uppfattningar uppstod en explosiv blandning. Det hände på Södra station.

Med valet av Bofill kulminerade den svenska debatten om postmodernismen. Att flirta med historien var

| RASMUS WÆRN

okej, men att beundra den hängivet var en annan femma. Styrkan i den jordbävning som arkitekturen orsakade bevisas av att det mest rasande angreppet kom från Göteborg.

Elias Cornell, tidigare professor i arkitekturens teori och historia samt vänsterradikal kritiker av rivningsraseriet, larmade nu om den spanske arkitektens katastrofala förslag.

Bofill var en charlatan! Det tog, menade Cornell, mer än en mansålder att skaffa sig helt och fullt självförtroende på nytt efter att Stüler, en utlänning, ritat Nationalmuseum.

När man nu för första gången sedan dess på nytt släppte in en utländsk arkitekt skulle förödelsen upprepas: ”Bofills orimliga förslag [var] ett vidunder av billigt attitydmakeri. […] Ett gigantiskt requiem över en stendöd borgerlighet” som skulle ”kasta arkitekturen tillbaks till 1850. […] Omoget, dödfött, utan mänsklig omtanke, utan allvarlig konstnärlig genomarbetning ska påkostade men värdelösa dekorationer pösa fram över fasaderna, i entréerna och kanske till och med i rummen” skrev Cornell i GP den 18/8 1985.

Håkan Brunnberg som satt i den jury som valde Bofill framför förslagen från Bengt Lindroos samt Gunnar Malm på HSBs arkitektkontor svarade med att arkitekturen höll för all saklig granskning och att hela den svenska arkitekturen skulle vinna på de lektioner i avancerat elementbyggeri som Bofill erbjöd. Men Björn Linn, som efterträtt Cornell på professorsstolen i Göteborg, lät sig inte övertygas utan såg den monumentala gesten som ett alibi för en sekunda arkitektur.

Inte heller i Stockholm stod Bofill högt i kurs. Den kraftigaste salvan laddade Skönhetsrådet, där Klas Tham som arkitekternas representant förklarade att den stora bågen var oacceptabel och att den gestaltnin-

gen enbart en kulissarkitektur vars förebild användes för att förhärliga det franska enväldet. ”En stadsbyggnadskonst som djupast sett uttrycker ett ointresse för människan.”

Det kom att dröja femton år innan nästa debatt som kom i närheten av dessa brösttoner. Också då var det HSB som drog ihop veden till brasan. Men debatten om Turning Torso drevs ändå inte av samma ideologiska energi som debatten kring Bofills båge. Tornet skälldes ut som onödigt, orimligt och oekonomiskt.

Bågen drabbade de sociologiska stadsbyggnadsprinciperna på ett djupare plan. Att en övergripande form, och därtill av en så främmande sort, skulle gälla framför det svenska bostadsbyggandets gedigna erfarenheter provocerade hela den svenska projekteringsmodellen. Klassicismen som sådan retade egentligen bara Cornell; kvaliteterna i det svenska tjugotalets nyklassicism var de flesta ense om, Linn såg dess metodik till och med som oöverträffad i sin professionalism. Men att arkitekturens kompromisslöshet, något man idag ser som självklarhet, skulle vara en kvalitet skar sig mot idén om bostadens mjuka värden. Det var inte miljonprogrammets formalism som bågen bröt emot – den dörren var sedan länge inslagen – utan mot dess alternativ, det intima grannskapstänkandet såsom det speglades i till exempel Bo85, bostadsmässan i Upplands Väsby(s xx).

Historien om Bofills båge börjar i det tidiga åttiotalets idétävling. Staden satte samman en områdesplan där flera av tävlingsresultaten fanns med: Johansson och Linnman (Joliark), då på Ahlséngruppen, fångade upp Borowskis idé om en lång, övertäckt pendeltågsstation; den tog man med.

Bengt Lindroos föreslog en väldig byggnad mellan Medborgarplatsen och Fatbursparken – den överlevde inte, men väl grundtanken att

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gränssnittet krävde särskild omsorg.

Scenografen Sören Brunes lanserade en idé om staden som en väldig scen med runda och krökta byggnader – där någonstans föddes tanken på bågen. Det var egentligen bara det mest uppmärksammade förslaget – HSBs Söders Manhattan – som nogsamt sopades åt sidan, även om det till slut ändå blev ett torn.

Två av de kontor som premierats i tävlingen, CAN arkitekter och VBB arkitekter, fick i uppdrag att utveckla iden om ett bågformat hus och med stöd i dessa studier fick HSB en markanvisning. De hade lärt sig av kritiken mot höghusstaden, och förstod också de speciella möjligheterna med denna plats. Därför bjöd de in till en tävling mellan tre kontor: HSBs egna arkitektkontor med Gunnar Malm i spetsen, Bengt Lindroos samt Ricardo Bofill från Barcelona.

På Södra station förenades Bågen och Tornet. Två klassiska stadsbyggnadselement som skulle förstås tillsammans. Idén med ett högt hus vid Medborgarplatsen växte fram samtidigt med bågen, de två skulle förhålla sig till varandra. Samtidigt med den inbjudna tävlingen om bågen hölls en öppen tävling om tornet. Den samlade 90 bidrag, men de flesta landade i en trivialt glasad Dallasskrapa.

Bofill var också med. Han föreslog en mycket hög och slank kampanil.

Med 50 våningars höjd och proportionerna 1:7 skulle den visserligen stå vackert mot bågen, men stadsbyggnadskontoret värjde sig mot dess verkan i stadsbilden. Men borgarrådet Sune Haglund blir förtjust, och även om ingen vinnare utsågs, bjöds fem arkitekter, bland andra Henning Larsen, in till en ny tävling om tornet. Signalerna var motsägelsefulla.

Fastighetsdirektören ville att arkitekterna skulle strunta i alla höjdbegränsningar och sikt högt, medan stadsbyggnadsborgarrådet helst ville se

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en måttlig vertikal markör som bara höjde sig något lite över omgivningen. Larsen vann tävlingen, men de dramatiska kasten hans hus fick utstå gjorde att han till slut avsade sig allt samröre med ”Haglunds pinne”.

Bofills båge introducerade visserligen ett nytt kvalitetstänkande i svensk betongproduktion, liksom Nationalmuseum 140 år tidigare för ett ögonblick förde tillbaka naturstenen i svensk arkitektur. Men trots kvaliteterna fick inga av dessa båda byggnader, som båda strävade efter att lyfta den svenska arkitekturen genom att ta in internationella kompetenser, några efterföljare.

Nationalmuseum var före sin tid med en industrialiserad stenproduktion, och Bofills betongelement allt för avancerade för att tåla totalentreprenadernas prispress.

Kraven på såväl betong som ballast gjorde att man köpte den första från Danmark och den andra från Kiruna.

Gjutformarna svetsades samman i Frankrike, och elementen doppades i saltsyra efter en metod som Bofill introducerat och Ohlsson & Skarne sedan utvecklade. Resultatet blev en sandstensliknande yta.

Byggnadsprincipen skiljer sig från vanliga betongelementfasader, eftersom de vertikala skarvarna täcks av pilastrar i samma gula ton som fasaden i sin helhet. Tekniskt har de fungerat väl. Doppningen i saltsyra var en slags patinering som tog bort gjuthuden och blottade en yta som enbart bestod av ballast. Det är en process som naturen förr eller senare ändå skulle åstadkommit, men ytan är svår att imitera om den behöver repareras.

Bågen var utan tvekan det mest genomarbetade, mest uttrycksfulla och mest stadsrumsskapande bostadshuset i hela Södra stationsprojektet. Det säger i och för sig lika mycket om områdets arkitektur i stort,

som om huset som sådant. Försöken att få Bofill att knäppa upp den strama kostymen en smula lyckades inte. Helst skulle han velat ha parken framför lika fundamentalistisk som arkitekturen. Nu blev landskapet som White ritade där Fatburssjön tidigare låg snarare en välgörande kontrast till fasadernas militanta rytm: Bombom-bang, bom-bom-bang.

Att fönstersättningen på bågens insida fick underordna sig fasaden hindrade dock inte att lägenheterna blev bra. Fasadrytmen bidrog snarast till deras speciella karaktär. Att de blev möblerbara var den svenska produktionsarkitekten Gerhard Herkommers förtjänst. Att det blev ljusa berodde framför allt på husets ringa djup, 11,4 meter. Det var enkla material i Bågen och dess syskon Templen och Kuberna, men ytorna var generösa. Tvåorna var på mellan 63,5 och 83,5 kvadratmeter och de gemensamma ytorna, såväl i trapphus som gemensamhetslokaler, slående stora jämfört med dagens produktion.

Att huset inte fick några efterföljare berodde framför allt på att nyklassicismen anspråk på att leverera svar som skulle vara giltiga alltid och överallt misstänkliggjordes. Här levererades en lika kategorisk postmodernism som den mest rigida modernismen en gång var. Även om de mest banala anklagelserna om en ”Mussolini-stil” (stadsdelsnämndens ord) aldrig fick betydelse fanns det ett totalitärt anslag i den absoluta formen som störde till och med en postmodern banérförare som den amerikanske arkitekten Robert Stern.

Bofills djupa plastik hade visserligen plattats ut till en mycket tunn relief med så lite som 30 millimeters djup mellan vissa delar, men de räckte för att vittna om arkitekturens anspråk på sanningen. Det rimmade illa med den pluralistiska ornamentik som började ta sina första stapplande

| AFTERWORDS

steg 1992, samtidigt som huset stod klart. Det var nu Herzog & de Meurons lager för Ricola med fasader av stora fotografier på glas stod klar och det var nu de första små tatueringarna började dyka upp ovanför t-shirtens ärm; gärna en tribal från filmen ”Krigarens själ”.

I grund och botten handlade Södra Station inte om arkitektur; i alla fall inte så som man ser den idag, att presentera aldrig tidigare sedda former. För Bofill var det raka motsatsen, kunde hans hus sjunka in i vilken ny-nyantik epok som helst skulle ingen varit gladare än han.

Många av de andra husen önskade kanske detsamma, men förmådde inte ens försöka. Södra Station ville åt våra mer existentiella behov.

Platser som skapade särskilda erfarenheter. Palats åt minnena snarare än åt folket, som Bofill lite översåtligt resonerade.

Minnen kan fastna vid alla platser. Förmodligen fäster de lika bra på betong som på tegel. Det viktigaste är att de har något speciellt.

Förväxlingsbara miljöer är teflon för hemkänslan. Södra Station nådde inte hela vägen fram på alla ställen.

Men det finns något älskvärt i dess försök. Det här är inget åttiotal som sviker. Med axelvaddar av stål står det stolt när vinden tar fart utmed Bangårdsgången. ***

Fig. 3. Ricardo Bofill och Taller de Arquitectura. Situationsplan över Fatbursparken.

Fig. 4. Ricardo Bofill och Taller de Arquitectura, vy från en lägenhet.

| RASMUS WÆRN

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