SAMUELS / U R B A N F O R M S : T H E D E A T H A N D L I F E O F T H E U R B A N B L O C K
THE RATIONALIZATION OF THE BLOCK AND RATIONALIST ARCHITECTURE The epithet ‘functionalist’ is today regarded as pejorative but the rediscovery of the architecture of the twenties and thirties went together with a return to fashion of the word ‘rationalism’. Suddenly, all types of architecture that did not comply with the canons of CIAM were implicitly designated as irrational. While all architecture, which today reuses its formal vocabulary, even though the theoretical, economic and technical conditions are no more the same as fifty years ago, is protected from any criticism by the fact of having belonged to that heroic period. This can lead to confusion. Those who have analysed Le Corbusier’s houses at Pessac, especially those called ‘the skyscrapers’, found it difficult to find there a rational and logical answer to the problems of the workers of Bordeaux in 1925 or to the problem of mass production of dwellings, apart from the charm and interest of the project. When we deal with the issue of the rationalization of the block, we do not look in the first instance for a ‘rational architecture’. An emerging rationality within an urban order usually appears when the following two factors converge. First the necessity or opportunity to rapidly construct a large number of buildings and an agency that can assume this responsibility. Without going back to Roman cities or to the bastides of Guyenne, the problem existed and was generally solved since the seventeenth century in France and England, to cite only two examples. In France this happened in the case of limited speculative operations such as the Place des Vosges and later the plot subdivision of the Palais Royal, which only rarely achieved the rationalization of the urban tissue as was the case of the city of Richelieu. In England an urban order on a large scale was achieved at the time of the reconstruction of London after the Great Fire of 1666 and also the systematic plot subdivision of the estates, where one can clearly see the acquired awareness of the block as a basic unit for the construction of a city. Since it starts with the Paris of Haussmann, this investigation does not really attempt to find the origins of the rationalization of the block. Paradoxically, the English example had not been taken up by Haussmann in spite of the attraction Napole´on III had for London. Except in some rare cases, the Parisian block remains a collection of independent parts, built by different developers. Its rationalization, which happened in the quest for maximum possible rent obtainable from the buildable volume, shows itself in the loss of autonomy of the plot – the courtyards are joined together in order to occupy the least possible area – and also through the homogeneity of the types used and the uniformity of fac¸ades. In the garden city, which ignored the city, the close is experimented with in a further attempt to turn the space inside out. The Dutch, especially in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, renewed the tradition of the urban block and gave a last spectacular demonstration of its possibilities. During a period of 21 years, from 1913 to 1934, Holland gave the most accomplished interpretation of the rationalization of the block. 156