The Second History of the Urban Project

8/13/2019 The Second History of the Urban Project

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The Second History of the Urban ProjectAnother modern tradition

Decomposing European cities produced in the past forty years, has launched a rangeof serious guilt about urban ideology derived from the functional architecture.

Critics like Bernard Huet and Leon Krier, concentrated in the Athens Charter and itsfollowers the most serious charges to civility. Previously, Gordon Cullen andtownscape in the sixties, and academia morfotipolgica in the seventies, emphasizedappreciation for diverse compact city, and the interlocking between streets andbuildings. Many other commentators have joined the bandwagon of coursedetractors sometimes more opportunism that reason, and so are widespreadwhipping banally zoning, urban policy and the management plans, to pretend tocross off wrong or negative any element of reason in the layout of cities.

It is not the purpose of this analysis do functional urban defense: quite the contrary.But keep trying to make him the scapegoat to justify other whims, no, I think, nointerest, and I would not be confused between operators such Manichaeism. Neitherthe Byzantine confrontation between "general" and "specific" or political-economicdiscussion between "regulatory" and "deregulatory". I am interested in reviewingthe origins of the current theoretical vacuum, precisely to support the new practices.Watching conceptual breakthrough that functionalism meant for urbanism, witheyes more current and more practical than those who only have taken it as anexcuse.

The principles of the functional city, started in Germany in the 20s, were based onthe will to order the cities on the criteria of role specialization, the importance ofroad traffic, and the opening of closed spaces hygienist, both in buildings and onpublic roads. Vista today, among the many judgments that may suggest, the mostsurprising was his illusion that doctrine in the complete eradication of the formertowns and the construction of an urban setting ex-novo for all civilization. Inproposals that would have the greatest impact, the radical denial of any historicalvalue to the city was to couple the ingenuity with which they hoped to build theirown slogans cities "of the future."

Fortunately, this was not the only way in which modern architecture was changingcities. Since a few years, a new figuration had already entered the urban landscapethrough the work of the innovators of Expressionism and "Sezzession". Proposals formodern architecture-linked with advanced social projects in municipalities Dutchsocialist or new uses collective-Central Europe or Scandinavia had already notedchanges in the urban fabric, some potentialists, according to the principles of a newculture.

In Holland, the work of Dudock and Oud,-much as the most classic of De Klerk or-Berlage, denotes a style Urban Project and the situation as meddling novel that

breaks with the established context. The work of De Finetti, Lancia or own Muzio inMilan, the Fisher or Bentsen Petersen in Copenhagen, and Markelius Saarinen in


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Helsinki, Ljubljana Pleznic those, such as Folguera in Cataluna, or Zuazo in Madrid,the city handled the new architecture field without ever losing its reference this as atool for urban planning. Discipline wise, it is truth, love and not hate the existing city,and therefore seeks its transformation more rigorous.

That was an urbanism that enjoyed the different condition of each urban part, withthe understanding of the big city as complex artifact, but always rich and diversified.I think it is there, in that complexity, where you have to recognize the true traditionof modern, unmitigated or quotes. Quite the opposite of the schemes they willdefend functionalism, culture of the big city, born in the industrial revolution of thenineteenth century, and exuberant in large metropolitan capital XX, never wanted toshorten its complications simplifying their problems. The notion of modernmetropolis never resort to reduced schematic principle of its design. On thecontrary, the power of the urbanist metropolis idea has been the progressiveincorporation of cultural themes and issues in the city, which are progressivelytaking a naturalization and enrich the discussion of it. It is also the son of thecomplexity and overlap, as the "Project-Urban" is born and is becoming the mostappropriate time to draft, rich, varied and able to proyecccion modern city.

Urban Project object for the big city are already in the 20s, three or four majorissues. One of them, perhaps most important, was the project of residentialneighborhoods. Taking housing as material no quintessential urban, theneighborhood became the catalyst for growth in the new scale, in Italy with INAhouse groups and other populist experiences in Northern Europe and the Centrealbeit with very different characteristics. Neighborhood projects were starting a test

with the ideas of city, that wanted to put into practice a monitored suppressed formand more subtle than direct theoretical discussion.

Another source of urban projects, was based on the formulation in updated form ofthe classic themes of the architecture civil, now posed as architecture, urban center.They were the Scandinavian countries tested,-before others, attempting to project amodern urban center for some of their cities. The work of Pedersen and Berner inNorway, or Fisher, Petersen and Bentsen in Denmark, are exemplary in this regard.With civil architecture and monuments, the city center was configured asoutstanding specific project.

Parallel to these new issues, also traces of streets, as a way of sort of mid-sizedurban areas, continued as an established procedure to deal with urban form-fortables from scales, with a theme and perfectly dominated interdisciplinaryknowledge. Its further development was produced in England, Belgium, France, andgenerally throughout the area of the garden city movement.

Recognizing these issues as design issues involved identifying parts of the metropolisas projects in themselves, and also, not to be confused or repetition. We sought tomoderate the technical requirements of large infrastructure with attention to

monumental and landscape value of the public works worked, finally, for an idea ofintervention is not architecture or plan, but Urban Project.


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Urban Project is based on the geography of the city because of their requests andsuggestions, and introduce the architecture language elements that shape the place.Urban Project is relying more on the complexity of the work to be done, that insimplifying rational urban structure. It is also working inductively, generalizing theparticular, the strategic, local, generative and model.

Sometimes these projects were joining laterally with a comprehensive plan logic, asin the work of Berlage or Unwin, but in most cases, rather than the horizontalcoherence in a joint program is the intensity with which the episodes roads orarchitectural urban express condition that gives them a master role in the big city.

It is already there, since the beginning of the century until the thirties, a vast urbanproject culture that has much in common with the ideas that today more committedoriented urbanism. Have something like these efforts to overcome the current slumpof almost fifty years that a gradual withdrawal of the condition of the urban project,finished paranoia sometimes in professional and public incompetence.

It seems, therefore, of interest in that tradition scrutinizes usable history ofcharacters and moments, perhaps less publicized, that have made substantivecontributions or even unorthodox modern idea of Urban Design. Unorthodox, atleast regarding the historiography that taking CIAM history as history of ModernArchitecture, breaks from any reference to the year 30 urban project. And in doingso, has confused some of the most significant passages in the construction of thecontemporary city and obscured the contradictions that implies cultural progress.

The rupture of the year 30

Because something happened in Brussels, after that CIAM congress and 1929 whenVictor Bourgeois, the great Belgian city planner, had introduced himself as presidentof the act work on residential districts developed by the various nationalcommissions. The Belgians had brought the beautiful plants and Kapelleveld CitModerne, drawn by Louis van der Swaelmen still associate certain studies.

The title of the conference was on "forms built ground-forms", whose theme now

(we have not stopped claiming for some time and that, fortunately, start findingsome echoes) would be so interesting today as then. Congress developed the shapeof the city at their neighborhoods and districts. Congress followed the 1929Frankfurt on existentialism, which had focused on the housing ladder. Conestos twoconferences on housing and neighborhood, respectively, was preparing to jump tothe next two had to devote to city in the whole of Moscow (later Athens, 1933), andthe urban region (Paris, 1935). It was that leap between the two scales whichshowed, with the break that occurred between groups and individuals, also breakingmethodology in projecting city. The broad theoretical gap between the building'sarchitecture and urbanism, which should have been covered vacuum with progress

in projecting this intermediate scale hitherto had produced many results, coveredvery ideology instead. The intellectual and organizational brilliance of Le Corbusier


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and Gropius programmatic tensions and postures Giedion to image advertising,cornered the defenders of Urban Design as intermediate field of discussion and workand caused the leak in the assembly toward ideological issues of "functional city"and "The Athens Charter".

The project of the city and sublimated in the discussion of great principles, almostphilosophical, political and sociological, that summarizes the Athens Charter. Andthe proposed urban form resulting overlap method adopted as any urban specificityof a deductive process from the general rules (the diagram of Chandigarh,Hilbersheimer repetitive orders), or direct expansion of modern buildingmacroscopic (Obus Project).

That's when the serious dichotomy materialized why, as he settled the discussion ofthe city to the level of general principles, architecture switched off the city, alwaystaking refuge in the excuse of not complying with those principles. The great alibiwas invented and opened the gap between urban planning and architecture that stillremains to seal.

Significant piece of those episodes: the general secretary of the CIAM would go tothe front Giedion and Giedion - Le Corbusier, seized power in Dutch and Peripheralssweeping and leaving Van Esteren commitment as president.

The Urban Project, as intermediate labor camp where the scales are intertwined andwhere the architect is reasonable authority in the form of the city precisely becauseit started Architectural Building, was then overwhelmed by the official art and

distracted from the usual commentary advertisements. But would find locallysuccessful development in the work of many independent designers in variousEuropean and American cities.

The modern urban project.

Van Eesteren, Martin and UR Quaroni are teachers who bring examples of moderntradition of Urban Design. In different positions, theoretical and circumstantial forceteach attention to urban form dimensions explored projectiles own andunconventional. Fully organic CIAM (was its president from 1930 to 1939), although

the fraction aligned loser, Van Eesteren spread that vision body material distrustedurban utopia propagandist Le Corbusier and symbolism, as if his mystification guessthe idealization could result. Rationalist on principle, without concessions, LeslieMartin teaches wealth of nuances that half a tradition as strong as the British urbancollects the message modeled modern and their cultural and social. Quaroni,however, from the roots of Mediterranean classicism, brand experience a culture inwhich the city and architecture, inseparable, ranging in a continual battle to clarifyconceptual discipline their own instruments and rules of its projection, with internalanguish a duvet could never understand. The city project goes through these threeteachers as a constant reference, and their jobs, even in different dimensional

terrain, always offer true urban scale today makes us see them as individuals in theprojection of the cities.


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proposed-in a way I believe clairvoyant-syntactic variety of situations that are set ina spacious flat contact road (highway) with the ground, and steps through. Yourproject is paradigmatic in recognition of his subject and I think it may exemplify amodern statement of equivalent solutions manualistics traditional road. His answerto the problem of Monterusciello, is nothing to do with the highway fully formalizedan artifact. You can not stop this goal recognized that click on one of the hardestbones of urban planning is needed today.

Le Corbusier, the Smithsons, Tange, tried to architecture with walkways. We trustover Vazquez approach, not only because it's 50 years later and, therefore,incorporates lessons and failures of teachers, but it also moves the problem to anintermediate, more useful to change practices in flawed poor construction of roads,safer and likely effects of the project, less theoretical than the large dimension inwhich teachers moved.

Urbanism is the design of streets and buildings is an obvious statement if you thinkabout the old, and instead seems problematic at the present time. However, thevery nature of the fact that urban is as physical fact, today even more than before,for the simple building-street interdependence, based on the richness, variety anddifficulty of the urban project.

Joan Busquets in the same area for Monterusciello (always among the proposals for"La Citta immaginate" responsible for the Triennale of Milan, 1987), the importancegiven to the road sections and road-house units, could indicate a willingnessneoclassical repetitive order. The strength of this project is rigorously street to the

big avenues, as typological real axis, organizing entire building sector units preciselythrough the streets. The remarkable thing about this project is the greater autonomythat together these various strands keep road-ready as a disorder typologicalvoluntary Is that possible? Is this an order of fragmentation?

Do not forget that the consultation concerned the restructuring of a large estate, stillunder construction, but invertebrate, and that responses to the same diagnosisinevitably involved intentional about what exists. Busquets, unlike VazquezConsuegra, ignores the highway and is interested precisely intermediate paths forthat road as organizer of buildings in packages or separate axes, leaving the territory,

with its powerful forms, the only unifying factor settlements. It is a proposal fordissection of the modern city, in mechanical parts scattered on the ground, withoutmuch concern for the conflict of circulatory axes, home orders, or dead spaces, butfinding ways to articulate a "walk-houses to flush variable "" Highway-street children"," neighborhood-access frontage road ", etc.. The research, part road, part oftypological organization, opens new questions on how to build the city'sneighborhoods and major contemporary massive infrastructural systems havedramatically shown. And Busquets collected as urban design issues that he wants tohave as valid and proper. The dramatic at times, and now perhaps interesting,breaks ground between land and roads; tangencies and penetrations between

building guidelines and geometries of railways, highways or links, the contradictorytopography from the large plazas, open spaces and sports and great public buildings


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or half empty, and ultimately, the delusions regarding the mapping section in thecity that today is, are their battlefield. Perhaps angry because today's cities, wherecoups and grow quickly, have lost respect for the land, and then it comes, withoutmercy, the rate of contempt.

The tissues

The corbuseriano anathema against street-runner has not died. Fifty years after thatoutburst, the architects which will continue to look for the good relationshipbetween streets and houses, homeless identity since the Renaissance dress hadserved us comfortably.

Still Siola and Siza, in its proposals for Naples, no doubt the effectiveness of roadalignment as trace (de Sol Morales 2007)edition: with very different intentions,certainly, but with the same ease in getting through houses forming streets. Thedraft Siola cares especially for the development of typological order to developvaried with the large area to the east of the historic center, which would be availableafter the transfer of the railway and the central station. Along the center directionalprojected pro Tange, and encourage direct and controversial alternative, the newframe is composed of blocks, rectangular and square, sized me-days, with perhapsexcessive reliance on repetition as under continuous urban forms. The central greenaxis force is not just rhetoric in a city like Naples, where the magnitude of the urbanagglomeration obviously no warrants as to its scale composition. Maybe since theseventeenth century and the viceroyalty, no town planning has sought, until thedramatic tangenziale of the past decade, establishing forms of urban order reference

for a general. In this sense, Beaux-Arts formalism is here thankfully unfashionable,efficient and economical, but without the stimulus of those grains of irony thatwould add to the mixture prepared tasty dressing.

Actually this is a discussion about the city fabric. Regularity and typology are thestakes that grips the project, linked together in a monolithic manner. The greatestinterest is provided by the morphological subsystem articulation present amongthemselves how the different fragments interfere frame, and how urban few generalguidelines result in ruptures of order.

This will happen to Alvaro Siza, because he starts precisely at this scale, to give anorder to the paths of urban place. Siza also projects the final analysis, only blocksand streets. But Siza little concerned about the rigor of apples, nothing matterstypology - blessed be! - But shape the outer-space form his small port specificallyurban layout with a simple and secure urbanization. Create a port as a regular venue:350 meters front is a confidence scale for that space. The contrast with the sea isenhanced not by a panoramic view, but by the vertical force of the facades on thewater, by the contact of the solid and liquid. The pieces are -50 meters-conventionaldimension and coordination with the city is the historical sequence that starts inPiazza Mercato.


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With strange simplicity, Siza built especially apparent solutions based on trivial butevilly intentioned. In the end, all the urban elements are summarized in the projectwithout drama, with ease: the port, the shaft of the square perimeter circulationthrough the blocks, which borders the park ...

More difficult would this simplicity create completely new urban spaces, away fromthe existing city, where only the geography, perhaps, but not the story, give ourlimping gait projecting. It's nice, in this sense, the proposed Giurgola and Cicognanito the area of Campi Flegrei. This really is a proposed new urban fabric, directlysuggestive of forms and expressions of the built fabric of the formal and functionalvariety of types, their different position in apples and plots. The grain of sensitivity isvery often, even for a large extension design. But it feels that every building isdifferent, the apple-town order is not enough, and that the modern way of living andbuilding the city has as much as the previous relationship, the formal game marginfrom the block to the plot and still, between the land and the building. From apple tothis plot and the building will not set or rigid orders and repetitive, but its flexibilitygoes perhaps the best guarantee if it would today still ideal city.

As a tribute to plan Lamont Young of the century, geomorphological interpretation-of-area, displays his three radial fingers clear a path as infrastructural support tissue.It is very well the relationship between the large scale of the project and attention tothe different forms of occupation: the axis of grouping under Mount St. Teresa, theresidential units as radburns water in the pouch, the grain often anecdotal andpicturesque of the building, the more important that the geometries of the plant.

The proposal Giurgola recognize comfortable suburban housing as a form of urbangrowth. Some of the images in this piece meal rating framed in urban road networkmay well turn geographic research topic for a modern residential area, so left-topicas necessary, in the last years. This project makes for a very different path, forexample, to single family superblocks Milton Keynes or compact superblock Gregottiin Palermo. The recognition of individual character and private housing, promotionand design flexibility, and the mix of uses and types of contributions seem greatexperimental and theoretical interest.

Giurgola, is a man who has shown great master and medium scale urbanisticos

multiple jobs. Maybe not as widespread as it should, the appreciation of the historiccity is reflected in the strength of their formal guidelines, to direct attention to theAmerican city and contemporary forms of residential consumption. Alert since.

If tissues are plotted and key issues of the current urban projection, no less so is theresolution of spaces or strategic points in the city both its meaning and its centrality.

The suggestion of the place is surely leading to the proposal of Toni Diaz Park BuenosAires. Developed as controversial idea for a public debate citizen, expressed, even inits graphics, somewhat archaic, the illusion that city sound made by the overlapping

surfaces and straight green infrastructure with the ubiquitous high Le Corbusierplayed a progressive future for Buenos Aires.


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In Salzburg an ambitious urban renewal program piloted by the assessor "green",launches a series of contests on critical areas in the city. Among them, the adequacyof Station Square, space particularly active in that city and is presented with theconfusion of forms characteristic of modern urban transformations. The square,dominated by a noble building of the century rail, was enlarged and remodeled inthe postwar period. Partly to accommodate late urban trips (bus, metro, tram, etc..),Emptying vast stops and parking spaces, and replacing part suburban residentialbuilding block adjacent longitudinal and apartment towers, commercial warehousesuperstores, and vertical screen panoramic hotel. All this in normal operation. Andyet, the city raises the importance of involving today, demolish, replace, changetraffic, build new terminals, etc.. Sum of questions involving the entire city andsummarized in a very specific area. Project work is to be immediate, while aconceptual hypothesis entire urban structure, and requires the interpretation ofurban place as a starting point.

When replacing Pierluigi Nicolin railroad strikes in Porta Genova, is implicit strategyespecially the southern sector of Milan and at the same time, a host of projectivehypothesis about the occupation of large interstitial voids in existing cities, old andnew infrastructure of the city and on the scale of contemporary urban form. It isindeed a project that brings a sense of direct interpretation of where they are placedand which seeks to find its inner logic precisely the wealth of references andapplications. The urban place is imposed as projecting content itself, withoutreference to architectural models, typological or monumental. The configuration ofthe urban place stems from the strategic position in the city, the conflict and the

functional heterogeneity of symbolic and referential sense of their collectiveexperience, topography and infrastructure as media forms. The language and styleare unique, different, independent of pure architectural aesthetics, painting ordesign.

The proposed recognition Nicolin rail frames just mimetic is a historical fact: it isabove all the opportunity to gather for the new implementation, all the strength thaturban form had gotten there.

The spindles surprisingly sharp in the project are produced to the body under the

tertiary center or to the craft market and trade on the Naviglio Grande would be indifficulty if a huge imprint imaginative perception of the entire eastern outskirts ofthe city. The redundancy between the trace road, the channel, the long rows ofbuildings that are drawn and senses ring general movement in a city as radial andconcentric as Milan, make this project a proposed method for transforming urbanfractures.

There is a question of large scale and ambitious. There is also a clear conscience toact with effects beyond the scope of the project itself. I do not mind repeating thatthe scale is not the scale. The same teaches John Navarro in Turin project, unlike, the

sad-contests for Bicoca or the Giudecca, where no designer has recognized thesignificance of a part for the whole city. I speak not only to recognize the interlocking


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with the tissues or the surrounding landscape, nor to connect general infrastructuresystems and movements, or even meet some claim symbolic, but above all tounderstand and look for innovative effects on conception the city as a whole.

Why Juan Navarro project beyond himself? Your text explains: "maintain a balancebetween demands complex and contradictory", "to the extent of Turin", creating aspontaneous meeting between the free and natural structure of the river channeland the fabric of the city flood its banks. The Dora, as the general form of urbangeography, geometry involved in the conflict with the forms built by urbanism andarchitecture. The logic of the project, being strictly rational in design, not part of anypredetermined compositional order, of any formal model ideologically desired, butan empirical effort to interpret and invent inventing playing.

Railroad traces give rise, with the number of its three bridges, a flush elegant design,modeling as a field coil excavated between different parts of the city. The bend inthe river, leads to the formation of an artificial aquatic track, thinking Corso urbanauthority Umbria: sequences industrial office towers on one side and the othersports halls looking landscape scale fluvial axis as order urban composition. Notablyalways Beldeweg Navarro, the game between the apparent subtlest autonomy thatstrongly raises each of the main buildings of their projects, and the ground motion asa fundamental instrument of its syntax. His drawings always seem to express, forthose who like to look at them, those long sections in which both are entrusted withvery slight inflections of the profile. Only slight inflections in the graph, because it isknown for its huge real effect because they become the very matter of the project,always understood as different game variations conceptual reference plane of the

territory. Geography abstract, if you will. Urban Project provided by the expandedstate of their ideas.

Large urban engineering systems (railways, canals, bridges, towers, streets) haveinterested Navarro Nicolin and to do it with the city architecture. Architecture of thecity that is the opposite of urban architecture buildings themselves and each other,however, architectural order of the physical body (spaces, fabrics and places) of thecity. Created a significant burden on these projects takes typological expression ofspecific applications. The Baldeweg Navarro, has reduced tracks and sports halls tostrictly modulated beautiful geometric units. Nicolin develops, very original, variants

of the square block from intensive forms staggered in height to nearly detachedhouse online, always an idea for urban housing that seeks the comfort and flexibilityof use as well as the contribution of the building outside the urban form.

Projecting the place is, well, the main method of what we call urban projects. Someprojects that are not those of urban design Harvardian 60 (Sert, Soltan, Makki) northe townscape of Cullen, nor the structuralism of Smithson, De Carlo, Bakkema,Tange and Team 10. Nor are the great design that Bacon sought the Philadelphia orHugo Wilson in Cumbernauld. Do not believe in either or Glossling Krier, Alexanderand Colin Rowe. Although some have, of course, all of them will have a pragmatic

and operational, and professional ethics more ideological, because they also have a


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great distrust of principles and appreciation for the finals too. As if there was asimplicity to trust the talent in building our cities ...

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The Second History of the Urban Project