Introduction
“The history of the twenty years after 1973 is that of a world which lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis. And yet, until the 1980s it was not clear how irretrievably the foundations of the Golden Age had crumbled.”
Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian, in his book “The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914 -1991”, divides the past century into three different moments, “The Age of Catastrophe”, “The Golden Age” and “The Landslide”. He identifies the Landslide as the very terminal phase before the catastrophe occurs again, a moment of disorientation that has yet to be fully understood, and that it’s almost impossible to reverse.
Now more than ever we are at the terminal phase of the landslide, the final crumbling of a long standing equilibrium, a moment of reckoning and necessary renewal that we still cannot or are unwilling to see.
With no exception architecture has to play a central role in this moment of dizziness with cities around the world becoming the mirror of each other, an intricate jungle of sky-high glass-and-steel buildings topping everywhere, spreading like wildfire and putting a shadow on the city’s identity; a fundamental value to be preserved.
The essay aims at analysing the aspects of modern society by breaking down the second half of the 20th century, and by taking Hobsbawm’s book “The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1994-1991” as a base. It spans from the years just after the World War II, seen here as the Golden Age of architecture, to the Fall of the Berlin Wall until today, questioning the role of architecture in the cities and in society.
Main Body
The man of the 19th century is the true inhabitant of the city
Living as ants has been part of life in big cities since the invention of the first underground system in London in 1863, a great step forward that came little after the invention of the modern elevator by Elisha Otis in 1852, together shaping forever the life in cities, thus making people spend less time on the ground and more under and above it. We now start our day by plunging ourselves in the nearest underground station to re-emerge a while later in a different place, quickly slipping into a building and climbing up trough its floors. We have no clue of how we got there, where our starting point was, and carrying with us the strange feeling that the built environment around us has changed as if we just arrived in a different city, still being in the same one. Ultimately we might end up not even recognising the street behind our house. But the modern man is fast and efficient, nothing else matters.
On the contrary, the man of the 19th century must have known the city much better than us, having to go through all the narrow alleys, bumpy streets and chaotic neighbourhoods to get to his destination. He must have been a trained connoisseur of the smells, faces and heritage that all together generate the kaleidoscopic diversity of the city, ultimately its true essence. The man of the 19th century was wiser than us; he would not have taken the tube. He was indeed the true inhabitant of the city.
It is when we started to dive below the ground that we started losing that precious knowledge, perhaps what we already lost, that feeling of being blended with the city into a one moving machine; a special awareness that identifies a citizen.
Walter Benjamin writes in a 1929 newspaper article about the city of Marseille:
“Marseille – the yellow studded maw of a seal with salt water running out between the teeth. When this gullet opens to catch the black and brown proletarian bodies thrown to it by ship’s companies according to their timetables, it exhales a stink of oil, urine and printer’s ink.”
With this image he puts the reader back in those days providing him with a deep and almost touchable description of the city’s most authentic nature, as if he and the city were blended together in one thing.
The Misuse of Progress / The Golden Age
“ […] The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
This is the interpretation that Walter Benjamin gave in 1940 of Paul Klee’s drawing “The Angel of History” that he purchased from him in 1921. There is not strong evidence in support of Walter Benjamin’s interpretation, but by looking closely at the drawing, he is possibly suggesting that the “wind of progress” ultimately acted as a catalyst further empowering the catastrophe of the war. If not properly handled, progress can be the deadliest weapon. Breakthroughs made in the fields of technology and sciences during those times were often employed for awful purposes, whatever the reason was.
Considerable findings in the field of the physics of the atom made by brilliant minds of the time were employed for The Manhattan project, which awful and sole scope was the realisation of the nuclear bomb. Nazi Germany developed the world’s first ballistic missile, the V-2 rocket, to hit Britain. And governments secretly kept Fleming’s discovery of Penicillin in 1928 until the end of the war.
But with the end of the War all these breakthroughs were made public and used for social purposes, so that the nuclear fission was used to produce electricity and it later became a pivotal source for the world, the Nazi findings on the V-2 missile were used by the USSR and US to eventually get to space in the 1950s, and Penicillin was used diffused dramatically increasing the global health. For once progress was used again for social purposes, in aid of the masses, improving their conditions.
And as things slowly started to get back on track, architecture too found its way again. First an extensive and … reparation of the damages caused by the war was carried, then new shiny proposals on the planning of cities were theorized by great architects of the time.
The Master Plan of the city of Chandigarh in India, the dream city of India’s prime minster Sh. Jawahar Lal Nehru, “ […] is known as one of the best experiments in urban planning and modern architecture in the twentieth century”, involving Albert Mayer and then Le Corbusier in its planning,
“the city plan was conceived as post war ‘Garden City’ wherein vertical and high rise buildings were ruled out, keeping in view the socio economic-conditions and living habits of the people.” “The metaphor of a human being was being employed in the plan – the ‘head’ contained the capital complex, the ‘heart’ the commercial centre, and the ‘arms’, which were perpendicular to the main axis, had the academic and leisure facilities. The plan incorporated Le Corbusier’s principles of light, space and greenery. What had been named an “Urban Village” in Mayer’s plan, Le Corbusier renamed a “Sector””.
The same idea of the human figure being incorporated into the city plan happened in the utopian development of the capital of Brazil, Brasilia, founded at the end of the 50s, as part of Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitshek’s plan “fifty years of prosperity in five”.
This whole new ideas were meant to bring people of social classes close again and to recreate that social unification that had been broken by the Wars through the careful study of architectural planning, involving minds from all backgrounds; a great exchange of ideas, to achieve a quintessential situation of mutual benefit. [ARGOMENTARE MEGLIO DIO SBIRRO]
The Landslide
“But the Marseille Benjamin savoured, and that scared Woon, scarcely exists any more. The red-light district of the Rue Bouterie survives only as collectable postcards from the wicked era of the later 1920s. So too Basso’s, one of the restaurants in which Benjamin dined that night, nearly nine decades ago, to stave off the munchies. […]. A different Marseille – sandblasted, primped and cultureified – is rising in its place. On the Quai d’Arenc, where once Benjamin found beauty in ugliness, an old silo building has been repurposed as a 2,000-seater auditorium. […] and, my personal favourite, a museum devoted to La Marseillaise, the French national anthem where, depending on your taste, you can hear Serge Gainsbourg croaking a reggae version of Stephane Grappelli.
But the worry here is that what Benjamin’s colleagues of the Frankfurt School – Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer – excoriated as “the culture industry” becomes a means of ripping the soul out of the place while making it look as though the opposite is happening. Without being unduly cynical, culture has become part of capitalism’s sanitising redevelopment of one of the most cherishably wicked of world cities.”
The The Guardian’s columnist Stuart Jeff gives an accurate description of today’s Marseille, comparing it with Walter Benjamin’s writings who oversaw what was the start of a process that would have reached its climax 60 years later. The transformation of Marseille has been part of a much bigger system which origins can be traced back on the post-war redevelopment of the Potsdamer Platz.
After the Fall of the Berlin wall, the area of Potsdamer Platz, once a vibrant space of mixed use and the very symbol of cosmopolitanism, was bombed by the Allies, becoming an empty lot of public property, which was then sold to four big private corporations: Sony, Daimler Chrysler, Hertie and Asea Brown Boveri, eventually promoting it as the symbol of the post- reunification.
“But this insistence on mixed uses as a guarantee of urban life ignores the fact that, in “traditional” cities (and the old Potsdamer Platz), variety of use is generated gradually, by social practices and transactions rooted in the everyday, developed and altered over time. The Potsdamer Platz of today, however, was created in a relatively short amount of time and is owned not by many different businesses and individuals, but by four international mega-corporations. In turn, the whole “variety” of buildings, functions, and enterprises is controlled by these four companies.” Despite the great masterplans proposed by great architects of the time promising to integrate the new redevelopment with the city’s heritage they all failed, resulting in the Postdamer Platz becoming a private fortress only standing out as what it really was, a big space creadted by private corporations for their own self-advertisement, “a way of obscuring the “dark” side of their main objective: to promote the accumulation of capital. Moreover, this capital does not revert back as a form of collective benefit for the whole of society, and indeed often increases social inequality. This is to say, the promotion of cultural events is construed as a form of social benefit for Berliners, directed at a vague notion of the “public.” But the “public” of these events is not the collective social body – it is a paying audience. It comprises those who can afford to know about and visit the essentially commerce-oriented Potsdamer Platz. Even more than during the day, Potsdamer Platz at night resembles a giant luminous billboard.”
As a conclusion, Potsdamer Platz was proposed as to be a continuation of Modern Architecture but it miserably failed to to so and the “tenets of Modernism have nonetheless survived”. From then on architecture, particularly that of the cities has lost its identity, making its inhabitants loose them too, what Walter Benkamin had somehow predicted in his 1929 article. This ultimately resulted in the start of the landslide.
But the origins of the landslide do not only lie in the architecture of the post-war redevelopment of the Potsdamer Platz, as it is just one of many other factor that lead the post-truth society to where it is now. Another cause lies in the model of vertical growth, primarily of richness, that took place in America from the 60s onward. Until the 50s institutions, namely the universities, the pillars on which the future of society lies, where people are formed, were based on an common interchange, on a variety, a mix of people coming from all the different backgrounds, those from the countryside and those from the cities, people with a high cultural level, and those with a lower one; it was a much more horizontal system, allowing a great exchange between people. From that moment on though, to make the process more efficient, but mostly to increase the level of the grades, the American society turned itself into a machine, which fuel is the efficiency of and the …….. . They did it by using the human intelligence as the one and only criteria, the IQ; this selection only contributed in creating a stratification between people, only allowing the best individuals to stay in. As a consequence, companies would only hire their employees on the basis of that system, minimising in this way the chance of making a mistake, the same way machines work. As a result the society was further split, making the two parts watertight, thus reducing even further the communication between them. Ultimately they did not to understand each other anymore, as there was no more sharing, no more contact point, with the individual living in the east coast, in his “ivory tower” of the big city, who started with prep schools, then with the best universities and finally hired in a big law firm. That individual has never seen people struggling to make it end the end of the month, and in turn the farmer has never seen the east coast urban rich; he does not know him. There’s no exchange. Over the years, this increasing efficiency, this focus on the best of the best, only widened that gap between the two. The financial crisis was the fuse that made this whole situation to explode; growth had stopped for some time, and the rising dissatisfaction of the farmer, perhaps constituting the biggest part of society, drove him to put himself against those who instead got even richer after the crisis. This is what has lead us to the terminal phase, the one that eventually lead to the vote of a populist (Trump), The farmer is exhausted by the system and decides to rather destroy himself providing also the others will be destroyed with him. He has nothing to loose anymore. In the whole sense of this much bigger scheme, the physical point that has been missed in the communication between these two parts has been the city, it being the crossroad in which these two parts used to meet, the Agorà. The modern city has increasingly lost its sense of Agorà, and it has not stopped there, it has instead made it even worst by increasing the costs as in the case of the central London area. How would it now be possible for a person from the countryside to come to a big city and be able to live there? This model is increasingly restrictive.
As a result, alike Marseille and Berlin, many of today’s big cities have met the same fate in being excluding, in having failed to be the crossway between the two parts, and London is no exception.
Everywhere, from the East to the West End areas, construction sites slowly took over the whole city, transforming it into the “incarnation of a city-turned-building-site”; ultimately producing an anonymous-efficient “modern” architecture. This new architecture is sold to people as a lie in this post-truth society, telling them what they want to hear, luring them that cities are inclusive and for everyone.
“Appealing to emotions is more important than truth”.
In the same way private corporations of the Potsdamer Platz were selling lies to the Berliners, promoting the redevelopment as a benefit for the whole society, today’s society is selling the “losers” lies, exploiting their emotions. The truth behind it has nevertheless never changed, namely the accumulation of capital; cities are indeed exclusive, they push people out; they are meant to intimidate and exclude the masses, the same people that feel they are on the second row. They are the ones left behind by globalization, financializaiton, technology, even though they are convinced they are active members of it. Architecture is now for the rich, for those on the first row, for the “winners”. This all caused the two worlds to stop communicating between each other.
Conclusion
Architecture has to find a utopic vision to overcome this, looking back at the past, in the 50s when the exchange was still there. The new city has to find a way to reunify the two distant worlds.
It is beyond the Landslide that is hidden the new challenge architecture is facing today. To find a new model for the upcoming “catastrophe”, an architectural utopia that is a way to entice a cross fertilisation between the two worlds that have stopped feeding each other for some time now. A synthesis where the thesis and the antithesis can find a new, revolutionary mutually beneficial exchange. The utopian city of the future goes back to the old city, to accomplish what the Greek Agorà was able to to 2000 years ago; a venue of exchange between different worlds.