Architects and Architecture of London (original) (raw)
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The Good Metropolis: From Urban Formlessness to Metropolitan Architecture
The Good Metropolis, 2019
Architecture has always been engaged in a dialogue with the city--a relationship often dominated by tension. The architectural avant-garde in particular is commonly understood in its opposition to the existing metropolitan terrain (architectural form vs. urban formlessness). This book, however, unearths strands of thought in the history of 20th-century architecture that actively endorsed and productively engaged with the formless metropolis. Revisiting early experiments that question the city/architecture dichotomy, Eisenschmidt reveals how the formless metropolis has long been a prevalent force within architectural discourse. The works analyzed span almost an entire century: They range from August Endell's urban optics and Karl Scheffler's metropolitan architecture in Berlin, through Reyner Banham's motorized vision of Los Angeles and Situationist performances in Paris, to OMA's city architectures and Bernard Tschumi's cinematic urbanisms. The author constructs new narratives that reposition architecture vis-à-vis the city, by exposing hidden histories. He uncovers architecture's continuing interest in the formless city and elucidates our current fascination with and anxiety about ongoing urbanization, revealing the "good metropolis" that was there all along. Reviews: "The Good Metropolis brilliantly explains how the formless, unpredictable, unknowable, and out-of-control metropolitan condition--seemingly the assassin of architecture and of "the good city"--became an exhilarating resource for architecture (think of the enormously influential work of Rem Koolhaas's Office for Metropolitan Architecture, for example). Moreover, the book's deep scholarship of Berlin reinstates that city as a veritable laboratory of modernization, alongside London, Paris, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, in effect combining two long-needed studies into one." Simon Sadler, University of California Davis "Modern urban history frequently grounds the postmodern recognition of the city's indeterminate dynamism in earlier planners' failed efforts to wring rational and geometric order from the rough currents of industrialization, rapid technological change, and unprecedented demographic growth. The Good Metropolis presents an alternative trajectory: a searching determination on the part of key figures over more than a century to see in the alleged chaos of the city alien and potentially productive orders otherwise impossible to envision. In this theoretically crisp and elegantly written essay, Eisenschmidt identifies the generative tradition of urban inquiry that designers forged to come to terms with, and to learn from, a human creation beyond human comprehension: the modern city." Sandy Isenstadt, University of Delaware
Public Culture
The concept of the city as a territorial and political form has long anchored social thought. By the twentieth century, the city figured prominently as a laboratory for testing modern techniques of governance. In the twenty-first century this discourse incarnates anew in visions of future mega-and smart cities. Then, as now, cities-as signs of the modern-are the elephants in a room full of adjacent concepts such as the state, the market, citizenship, collectivity, property, and care. This issue picks up a thread from the 1996 special issue and 1998 book of prizewinning essays on Cities and Citizenship (edited by James Holston and Arjun Appadurai). The contributors focused on the role of cities in the making of modern subjects by attending to associations between urbanism and modernity and thus with imperialism, colonialism, and extraction. Now, we reconfigure that line of inquiry to consider Urbanism beyond the City while bearing projections of the future in mind. The United Nations projects that by 2050, two-thirds of the global population will live in cities or other urban centers. But this new density will be greatest in a small number of countries, none which are in the Global North (United Nations 2018). Yet even as cities take unprecedented forms without discernible limits, spatial theorizing continues to invest in a particular concept of the city and to expand that concept's reach into other areas of study, planning, and investment (Amin 2013). Spatial professions capitalize on the city's capacity for generating complex intersections of social, economic, and political forces. Theorists attribute a capacity to distinguish among divergent possibilities mingling unpredictably to the urban apparatus (Martin 2017). Even critical methods remain attached to the idea that cities-whether as infrastructures, instruments, or morphologies-anchor a very particular sense of social life. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994: 4) noted, philosophy coincides with the "contribution of cities: the formation of societies of friends or equals but also the promotion of relationships of rivalry between and within them." We position the concept of the city by treating it as a "friend" accompanying us through the journey presented in this special issue.
2008
This important book revives core issues from age-old albeit recently half forgotten debates over urbanity, its problems and advantages. The author suggests that the city concept itself is ripe for being transcended, socio-material condensation serving as its successor. He further outlines a dialectics of today's hardships and comforts of city/condensation life, in the grand tradition of a Howard (1902), Mumford (1938), Le Corbusier (1935), or a Williams (1973). To-day's condensations are analysed as socio-material sediments, each with its political code. Sartre's thinking is the main theoretical basis. A number of hardships and their remedies are discussed and a proposal for reform outlined. As important, a whole family of new concepts are put to use, e.g. the sub-individual, the imaginary.-We analyse the local reviews of the book as a "howl of hurt habitus": While most objections are repudiated, we
Journal of Historical Geography, 1982
the handmaiden of private property interests. At the end of the book Sutcliffe points out that town planning provided a resolution of public and private interests that had counterrevolutionary implications : The years 1890-1914 were a time of growing social tensions in which the idea ofrationalizing the structure of cities acquired an unprecedented appeal. If lower rents, better housing and richer community facilities could remove the need for a major redistribution of income or wealth, then urban planning had a great deal to offer the middle and upper classes in addition to the simple creation of a pleasant urban environment. This is a provocative statement and an antidote to the complacency of much planning history but although implied in parts of the main text it remains a hypothesis tagged on to the end of the study not a conclusion to it. The issues Sutcliffe raises here about social and ideological control are clearly central to an adequate understanding of town planning and need to be argued through with close attention to particular planning projects, to details of economic and social developments and also to the current theoretical debate among historians on bourgeois hegemony. The theoretical implications of Sutcliffe's book are considerable, particularly on the question of the role of the State, but it is for others to pursue them. Sutcliffe's only theorizing-on the spread of planning ideas-is a mixture of art criticism, psychology and economic history and is the least convincing part of the book. But it did yield two delightfully absurd examples of international influence: the Teutonic turrets of Hampstead Garden Suburb and the "Beautify Bolton" movement. The originality of Sutcliffe's study is its international perspective. Its strength is a lucid and scrupulously researched reconstruction of the mentality of the early movement and here the author conveys something of the excitement of town planning before disenchantment and cynicism set in.
L'ADC 3-4-5 (2014) The City in the Evolutionary Age (Foreword)
Prior to the Second World War Europe’s ruling classes had no perception of the destiny of the modern city. This despite the fact that almost a century earlier Baudelaire had intoned the decadence of their most beautiful city. Proud of their ordered, authoritative, and often authoritarian capitals, Europeans saw history as a course predestined to create that miracle of civilisation exemplified by the metropolis of the old continent: wealthy, with a rigid social hierarchy, symbolically, physically and culturally rooted in history, firmly established at the summit of a providential, though still highly dramatic process. The metropolises of Europe were perceived, in the end, as organisms at the pinnacle of their conscious maturity and the height of their industrial and financial might. They appeared to posses an ability to self-regulate internal and external conflicts, imposing models of assimilation and reciprocal adaptation upon sources of imbalances, conceived by imagining the possible effects of disturbances and anticipating their transformations – thus adopting planning in the form of a series of direct systematic operations. Two years later, in 1939, Claude Lévi Strauss went much further; his direct experience with São Paulo, Brazil (and New York) convinced him that the modern metropolis, which he observed and which observed him with a thousand hidden eyes as he, a foreigner, crossed it, cannot be judged according to the parameters of architecture (thus also excluding those of planning), but with those of the landscape; and to the same degree that everything in the natural landscape is in transformation, simultaneously luxuriance and putrefaction, he claimed that «the cities of the New World […] pass from first youth to decrepitude with no intermediary stage». With no intermediate stage: this is the most important clue, the tag that for the great anthropologist implicitly, though peremptorily, invalidated the idea that the cities of the New World are truly part of history. Lévi Strauss, who certainly learned to be a narrator of cultures and ethnographic contexts as Walter Benjamin learned to be a narrator of cities, froze – despite being captivated – in front of the metropolises of the New World, home to a coexistence between past and present, and between proximity and distance. Perhaps the time has come to truly study the world’s metropolises as individuals in the midst – or at the beginning – of their evolutionary age seeking to establish their stage of development and that of their parts, in the concreteness of reality. The term stage is used here to refer to a recognisable and well-characterised structure that is organised and relatively balanced – equivalent to one of the stages of Jean Piaget’s theory of development. This would make it possible in the most appropriate terms to solicit different urban communities to autonomously imagine the effects of on-going disturbances, accompanying them as they realistically express their fears and desires and anticipate the form and objectives of tangible operations to be implemented within the limits of a community’s available resources and level of organisation and the pedagogic capacities of the city and its government.
MUTUALLY DISAFFECTING: THE DYNAMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE CITY AND ITS CHARACTERS
Having recognized the city as transcending its physical mores and emerging as more than a mere setting and backdrop for the story to unfold, this essay sets out to show that characterizations within three selected texts produce an aggregated and calculated image of the city which mirrors the psychological and sociological burdens of the 21st century. Further anchoring the essay are the chameleonic perspectives of a city and making a case for how a city’s depiction can be used to expound on the sensitivities of its characters.