Bauhaus Kolleg X 2008/2009 :: Cities of Tomorrow

Bauhaus Kolleg X 2008/2009

Cities of Tomorrow – CIAM Urbanism
Transdisciplinary studies on modern urbanism

The Bauhaus Kolleg’s new programme “Cities of Tomorrow – CIAM Urbanism” plans to review international approaches to urban planning and design in the 1950s and 1960s from the present-day perspective, focusing on an era when the modern movement’s concepts were first disseminated and realised on the international stage.
Nowadays, to design cities in broad strokes, as if cast from one mould, in the hope that this also transforms their inhabitants’ societies, is an outmoded concept. However, the prime urban development market currently shows a nostalgic bent for the built musings of the post-war era.
Modernism has nevertheless been held responsible for the ruin of the 20th century city. Critique has centred on the fact that the era’s modern cities and residential areas are characterised by a dearth of appropriate urban qualities and vital public spaces. Moreover, the model cities for the “masses” are seen as social flashpoints. The burning banlieues of Paris, the demolition of prefabricated housing blocks in East Germany and crumbling Russian microrayons demonstrated the collapse of an architectonic and urban culture, whose “formal” approach to the city did little justice to its proven complexity.
A quasi post-modern realism emerged in response to this critically espoused totalitarian approach to the city, where local urban practice or the pragmatism of hard facts in terms of a “reality as found” (Peter Smithson), won the upper hand.
Nowadays, this pragmatism nourishes a critique of contemporary practices in planning and architecture, which has little to contribute to the question of how the spatial concept and form of the city as a social model may be upheld today.

Cities of tomorrow – critical approach
In the 20th century in particular, the city provided so much more than just a framework or a horizon for architecture: the city itself became the place and practice of architects. It became the central point of reference in debates about a new architectonic culture (Tom Avermaete). Conversely, architecture also played a crucial role in the shaping of urban practices and the city itself. After WWII, one important debate focused on the social, cultural and physical position of the traditional city in Western Europe. Diverse paradigms reflected the attempt to master rapidly changing urban realities. Ultimately, the logic of the welfare state and consumer society presented new conditions for the post-war era. Rapid urbanisation, mass mobility, modern leisure concepts and tourism opened up new avenues for architecture and urban development. Modern cities were the training grounds for social and cultural transformations, where residents would be conditioned in the modern ways of life.
Nevertheless, by the post-war era, the functional model of the city was already controversial. Endeavours to elaborate on the “Athens Charter” with a “Charter of Habitat” arose from a series of debates about the rigidity of the four categories ascribed to the functional city. After WWII, under the influence of groups such as Team 10, there was a critical revision of the progress of international urban development. This focused less on a general critique of modern urban development, and more on its uniform application. The protagonists countered “poor Modernism” with a creative reinterpretation of the principles of the modern movement. As such, the coexistence of diverse strategies such as “regionalism”, the inclusion of everyday practices and the user, and the new role of popular culture signalised a paradigm shift in the culture of urban architecture in the post-war era, while stopping short of a complete departure from Modernism.
In this discourse, it becomes evident that the “Cities of Tomorrow” carry an inherent contradiction, between the built space of control of social processes and the associated articulation of a moral order on the one hand, and the space that permits and stimulates social processes on the other. This is what distinguishes yesterday’s “Cities of Tomorrow” from their 21st century successors in China or Dubai. Curiously, these cities lack ideas of how life might be lived differently in such a space. This field of tension between controlled space and the mobilisation of social processes also supplies the point of departure for critical practice in urban architecture and planning today.

Multiple Modernism
Meanwhile, it is agreed that the international urban development projects realised within the context of CIAM cannot be explained away as the “globalisation of European Modernism”. The concept of the triumphal procession of the “International Style” in the post-war era as a worldwide homogenisation of planning and construction practice – as a one-track transfer from the centres of civilisation to the edges of the “Third World” – underwent critical revision in the postcolonial theoretical discourse. How the cities modernised themselves is affected by the very varied transformation dynamics, protagonists and cultures, which form the backdrop for their modernisation processes. If one intends to consider this Modernism today, one must contend with a complexity of intersecting, locally varying “multiple” Modernisms: local versions of modernity, which often receive scant regard in view of the western-dominated, universal concept of Modernism. Today, it has become important to look at this variety of local modernities, and to use these as points of departure for the location-specific further development of the “Cities of Tomorrow”.
To put such a change of perspective into practice at the Bauhaus Kolleg in Dessau means that the reception of the architecture of Modernism, which tends to focus on protagonists and projects, must be widened to include the constitutive contexts and everyday life in modern cities. Moreover, it must also consider the current debate surrounding these built structures, as an open process of negotiation between different concepts of modernity. With this approach, the Bauhaus Kolleg aims to contribute to the debate surrounding the topicality and sustainability of the built structures of modern urbanism. It seems appropriate to make the Bauhaus in Dessau a location for creative debate on the relevance of modern urbanism: it is one of the hotbeds for the avant-garde in architecture and art, which redefined the role of design in modern urban society.

Literature:

Mark Lewis: Ist die Moderne unsere Antike In: DOCUMENTA Magazine No. 1-3 2007 Reader p. 40-66

Regina Göckede: Der koloniale Le Corbusier Die Algier Projekte in postkolonialer Lesart In: Wolkenkuckusheim Internationale Zeitschrift für Theorie und Wissenschaft der Architektur, Vol. 10, issue 1, 2006, special edition. From outer space Architekturtheorie außerhalb der Disziplin (1)

Tom Avermaete: Another Modernism, The Post-War Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods, Rotterdam 2005

Eric Mumford: The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism 1928-1960 MIT Press 2000

Lucy Bullivant: Cumbernauld Tomorrow`s Town Today Cor Wagenaar Happy Cities and Public Happiness in Post-War Europe NAI Rotterdam 2004 p. 165- 175

O.M.A Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau: S,M,L,XL New York 1998 p. 1019