At the fall of Utopia (original) (raw)
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The Afterlives of Modern Housing
The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Architectural History, 2022
High-rise mass housing has long held a paradoxical place in modern architectural history. Despite the widespread celebration of canonical works by avant-garde architects, the reputation of these buildings as a type is highly mixed in practice. The negative views toward standardized high-rise dwellings intensified in the 1970s, when it became clear that many social housing projects initiated in Europe and America in the postwar period fell short of fulfilling their social agendas in enabling greater equity and human progress. In recent years however, the environmental-determinist narratives associated with social housing took on a new turn with growing calls to conserve some of these projects and turn them into mixed-tenure communities through privatization. While the arrangement follows global trends favoring market solutions for the delivery of housing and has perpetuated social disparities in many places, the ways in which these initiatives were implemented and the extent to which they were challenged were shaped by specific historical experiences and existing discourses about the role of the state and market in social provision. To explore these trajectories, the chapter discusses the 'afterlives' of three modern social housing projects: the Park Hill in Sheffield, the Columbia Point in Boston, and the Hunghom Peninsula Estate in Hong Kong, which have all been significantly transformed in recent years and in each case diverted away from the original social purposes for which they were first built. The attempt is to situate each case within the discourse of modern architecture while linking their development to emergent global narratives of housing. By doing so, the chapter invites critical evaluation on the ways in which modernist housing design facilitated new patterns of living, the contested values that became inscribed in specific built forms, and the emergent rationalities behind their ongoing transformation. The examination of the changing architectural intention in each project also aims to prompt reflections on the presumed linkages between the social and aesthetic ideals of modern architecture, as well as the ethical positions of architectural professionals in the twenty-first century.
Trace Notes on adaptive reuse N°2 On Modernity, 2020
In the aftermath of WWII, many cities in Europe suffered from considerable housing shortages, leading to new housing developments, many of which were high-rise housing estates, built following the principles of the Modern Movement and CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne). The ideology is based on the concept of the ‘Functional City’, implemented through ideas such as function-based city zones, with minimum dwellings together with collective infrastructures; low-rise and high-rise buildings in extensive green areas; the ideal of ‘air, light and nature’ combined with high-density living and standardisation; open ground-floor plans and pedestrian areas separated from traffic routes. In the context of an urgent need for housing, the strong, uncompromising approach was accepted without hesitation. Politicians and planners built according to architectural notions, in which high-rise served as a potent symbol of a ‘new architecture for new people’ in a modern post-war age of multi-family living, communal facilities and social equality. Despite the lofty ambitions of the Modern Movement, many of these projects have undergone a critical shift in meaning, and are today associated with problematic living conditions, deprived areas, isolated locations, a low-income population, social isolation, pollution, crime etc. As a consequence, questions emerge about how to solve these problems, in many cases resulting in demolition, even of the most iconic projects, such as the Pruitt-Igoe in St, Louis, USA, or the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens in London. Despite the negative connotations of this architectural typology, some interesting refurbishment projects have been executed over the past decades, in which the pre-existing was not eliminated. This article illustrates three refurbishment projects in which the architects succeeded in adapting the original ideologies and aspirations of a different generation to those of today: Park Hill Estate in Sheffield, Kleiburg in Amsterdam, and Tour Bois-le-Prêtre in Paris. These projects will be analysed based on their origins and evolution, transformation, and re-interpretation of modernist ideas.
On account of their size, their social importance and the radical way in which they are architecturally formulated the housing complexes of the post–war period provoke an ongoing critical discussion of the questions: “How do we want to live?” and “How should we live?” Opinions are very much divided over the dimensions, the normative floor plans, and the social structure of these large housing developments. The debate seems to be conducted between three different camps. There are those who suggest that there is a direct causality between form and function and attribute the social tensions within housing complexes to their external structure. Others uphold the autonomy of architecture and in the process either do not consider social policy and the residents or even hold them responsible for the negative image of this form of housing. The text that follows below can be allotted to the third camp: this viewpoint recognizes the complex interaction between form and political, economic, and social practices and examines their relationship to the autonomous development of the form of housing, which has its own history of development and an inherent rationality. Starting from architecture’s ability to operate using its own tools in a heterogeneous field between ideological, economic, and political practices, in this text consideration is given not only to how new social demands on existing housing can be met but also to how, in view of these hotly debated buildings, architects can in the first place adopt a critical and socially relevant approach.
1. The Future of Modernist Housing
transcript Verlag eBooks, 2024
In cities, almost no topic is as intensely discussed as housing. The attractiveness of cities and the resulting steady influx of new residents have led to shortages in the housing supply. Above all, there is a lack of affordable accommodation. The higher demand has led to tensions in the low-price segment of the housing market, which, in turn, have led to an increase in rent burden for lower-and middle-income groups. The need to build affordable housing is also a topic of intense discussion in the large cities of Germany, Russia, and Ukraine. The release of formerly state-owned and communal housing onto the private market, exploding rent prices, and a lack of new construction cumulatively mean that inhabitants are becoming increasingly worried about having a roof over their head. In Germany, some initial steps have been taken by public administrations and politicians to cope with this problem. These steps include the (re-)establishment of municipal housing associations, testing and initiating new models for allocating and developing land, and a great deal more. Housing cooperatives have become popular again. But further steps must follow. Above all, local communities face the task of building new dwellings that meet the needs of the population. This requires proposals for innovative concepts of use, innovative building types, and innovative architectural design concepts. In addition, the development of inclusively designed residential space in cities must be addressed. Moreover, issues of housing are always a political and social question that must be answered in a differentiated manner in view of the divergent situations in each city.
New Perspectives on the II CIAM onwards: How Does Housing Build Cities?
Urban Planning, 2019
Far from nostalgically celebrate the 90th anniversary of the second CIAM, which indeed opened in October 1929 in Frankfurt, the present issue is intended as collective work, a springboard which aims to widen the debate over housing experiences beyond geographical and temporal frameworks. The focus of that event, the Existenzminimum, has often been cited as representing a fundamental contribution to the rational design of the modern dwelling. But the debates during that event went beyond the definition of this concept, because demonstrated, on the one hand, how the responsibility of architects would imply the resolution of multiple technical aspects, starting from the typological concern stretching towards the town planning aspects, and on the other hand, the calling to develop a multifaceted intellectual vision of society. Though the title selected for the present issue, namely 'Housing Builds Cities', denotes the different scales of the project, the aim is to achieve a something more. First and foremost, the objective is not strictly confined to a historical understanding of facts around the 1929 congress. Today a critically objective approach is useful to examine past contributions and, if applicable, their actualization. Secondly, this special issue intends to address the CIAMs' theoretical and architectural legacy. The hypothesis on their interpretation suggests that these are still topical issues today. The issue comprises fourteen articles which investigate, through different applied methodologies, the years from the first steps of the CIAMs to the 1929 aftermath, analyze the postwar production and explore many case-studies, of which some are also geographically far from a Euro-centric vision as well as contemporary realities.
Silent utopias: The multiple negations of architectural politics
The 1960s and 1970s represented an important moment of reflection and critique of the body of the principles of modern architecture. The main targets of the critiques were the various forms through which the profession of architecture would assert its social role as a constructor of utopias. Nevertheless, this paper aims to delineate how the various critiques failed to deconstruct the principle of the architect as a Virtuous Prince, resulting in 'silent utopias'. To do so, we will investigate the assumptions of three key utopian critiques: the pacification of the utopia, which aimed to eliminate political and social pretentions among the profession; the accelerationist utopia, based on a progressive perspective (progress as a goal); and the negative utopia, which condemns all proposals as ideologies, resulting in anti-architecture as the only solution to the paradox. This analysis will help to delineate another form of utopia, in which the proposals are not virtuous ideals conceived by an enlightened humanist but reflect a process of struggle.
Palace on Mortgage. The Collapse of a Social Housing Monument in France
Cupers, Gabrielsson, Mattsson (eds.), Neoliberalism on the Ground. Architecture and Transformation from the 1960s to the Present. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020, 19–44., 2020
Similar to other industrialized countries in the Global North benefiting from Keynesian welfare state policies, France underwent a radical change from centralized interventionism (dirigisme) to neoliberal market adjustments over the course of the 1970s. This change affected housing pol- icies and production alike, and it reinforced existing fracture lines of social, ethnic, and urban segregation. In this chapter I look into the way housing and architecture as concrete material and symbolic practices participated in this change, and, within this investigation, I frame architecture as a process that unfolds within temporary urban constellations and political-economic shifts. The case study of my investigation is the colossally inflated project Les Espaces d’Abraxas, in the Parisian new town of Marne-la-Vallée, planned and realized by the Catalan architecture firm Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectu- ra between 1978 and 1983 (plate 1). The three-part complex consists of some six hundred apartments, and its eighteen-story silhouette, with its eclectic pillared façade of precast concrete panels, towers like a symbolic city gate above its suburban surroundings. Because of its expressive formal language, Abraxas is considered a canonical example of postmodern architecture, which many philosophers, geographers, and cultural practitioners at the time de- clared to be a paradigm of reactionary social change. Since Abraxas is also an exemplary case of the consequences of the debt crisis that ensued after the neoliberal reforms of 1977, it can indeed serve as a paradigm of post-Fordist conditions of production, particularly regarding the disjunction between its aesthetics, its material production, and financing. On the other hand, both the materialization and the media representation of Abraxas include intentions and procedures that emerge from a logic of Fordist production, centralized interventionism, and a welfare state policy of social redistribution—intellec- tual, political, and economic. The sociopolitical background to the spectac- ular downfall of this project unveils the complex imbrication of neoliberal restructuring processes and the demise of the welfare state. In what follows, I frame this history—as the first main aspect of this chapter—through the lens of personal narratives, based on interviews with Abraxas residents conducted during my six-month stay in the building in 2012. In a first step, I investigate the constellation of Abraxas in the early 1980s; in a second step, I reconstruct the political and conceptual background of France’s neoliberal housing re- forms of 1977 through a close reading of the eighth lecture of Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics. Finally, I show the consequences and effects of these reforms on the French urban landscape in general and on Abraxas in particular. Here, I develop the second main aspect of this chapter, which consists in conceptualizing “architecture” as a constellation of disparate instances and which I illustrate by referencing the speed of the downfall of this housing monument and the radical disjunctions of its representations.
Moderate utopias : the reconstruction of urban space and modernist principles in postwar France
2007
This thesis explores the implementation of the American Marshall Plan in France and its precipitation of structural changes within the realms of economics, politics, and cultural subjectivity, studying their manifestations in both the built work of the postwar reconstruction and its concurrent discourse on architecture and urbanism. In the turn from the interwar classical to the postwar Keynesian economy, there followed a cultural transformation that resulted in the social welfare state. The consequence is what Deleuze would describe as a shift from mechanisms of discipline to societies of control, where the mass subject controlled by centralized agents would transform to the active subject of a middle class physically operating of the mechanisms of agency that control them, this thesis studies the architectural manifestation of this transformation. Through the discursive projects set out in the journals I'Architecture d'aujourd'hui and Techniues et Architecture, as well...
Utopia and the Dirty Secret of Architecture
2017
In the theorization of Utopia in critical theory two paths of development have been widely acknowledged. On the one hand there is the Utopian plan, or project, identified by Fredric Jameson (among others) as a sweeping design that claims to solve and negate a social and political situation, in favour of an actually built, and better one. On the other hand, we find the Utopian impulse, a markedly different affair, having to do not with building a brand new society or revolution, but with a displaced, striving desire or "wish" to be something else under limited conditions, and a hint at a different future or unresolved present, an idea Jameson borrows from Ernst Bloch. This paper is invested in both varieties, from the already complicated and complicating perspective of architecture.