THE TERRITORIALIZATION OF THE CITY

Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.
Genesis 1:28

Everything that Cerdà talked about had been already fictionalized by Simon Tyssot de Passot about one hundred and fifty years before. Specifically, in his “Voyages et avantures de Jaques Massé”. Where he describes a country without a city and the entire population is statistically redistributed throughout the territory. A territory organized on the basis of a grid with strictly orthogonal channels and paths. Even Gabriel de Foigny in his “La Terre australe connué”, two centuries before Cerdà and half a century before Tyssot himself, tells us about a society made up by a geometric urbanism, a domestication of the land and an egalitarianism guaranteed by the absence of private property and possession of particular goods.

Almost contemporaneously, William Penn devised his Philadelphia Plan. A plan, with a hygienic vocation, developed according to the Quaker principles of his own mentor: religious, racial and gender equality. The future city was organized according to a network of streets perpendicular to each other where two axes with civic and commercial vocation stood out. Two axes that formed the main layouts of the grid. Each quadrant had its public square, conceived as a green lung. Similarly, the plots of houses were evenly spaced to ensure a private green space for each neighbor. That fact allowed to maintain a certain sense of rural life within a fast growing city.

William Penn's Plan for Philadelphia, 1684

A century later, Thomas Jefferson goes beyond Penn when he lays the groundwork, three years before the Constitution of the United States, for the Land Ordinance. A territorial ordinance which plans its expansion to the West following a reticular mesh structure. In fact, an unknown and still uncharted territory is ordered. The abstraction of the mesh becomes the supporting structure of future continental colonization. In this sense, the map precedes the territory. As André Corboz state, project-space overlaps with substrate-space. The grid is based on roads and highways that materialize it as a guarantee of equality and social justice, order and stability. It does not equip, it distributes. It does not argue, it disposes. For Jefferson, utopia and reality are not two opposite categories but convertible into one another. The first serves to prepare the second.

Jefferson-Hartley Map of the United States East of the Mississipi River, 1784

The most paradoxical thing is that all the current defenders of the dense and compact city take Barcelona's Eixample as a reference. Ignoring the biblical maximum of Cerdà himself in his “Teoría general de la urbanización” (General Theory of Urbanization):

«Rurizad lo urbano: urbanizad lo rural:... Replete terram.»*

And by sublimating urbanization, the true territorial vocation of a Saint Simonian like Cerdà has been hidden from us. As well as his general and analogous theory of rurization. If urbanization consisted of opening the land to inhabit it, ruralization consisted of opening it to cultivate it. Anyway, to defend that the current Eixample is the work of Cerdà is like saying that the current Sagrada Família is the work of Gaudí. For some reason both are the result of an unfinished project. Like modernity.

[*] «Ruralise the urban, urbanise the rural:... Replete terram.»

EUROPAHAUS

But one thing people like us cannot do without: the big city, where the lights are bright at night.

KURT TUCHOLSKY

With the passing of time, the myth of Potsdamer Platz has grown so big it has ended up casting a huge shadow over neighboring Askanischer Platz. However, it should be remembered that, during the first half of the last century, it had become one of the neuralgic centers of Berlin. Then everything revolved around the big train stations. At Askanischer Platz was the Anhalter Bahnhof, the largest and busiest train station in the city. From 1841, the year of its inauguration, large hotels were established in its surroundings. First the Harsburger Hof and later the Excelsior, once the largest hotel on the european continent.

Ideenwettbewerb zur Verbauung der Prinz-Albrecht-Gärten in Berlin, 1924

In 1924, with a desire to take advantage of this dynamic, the promoters of the famous skyscraper at Friedrichstrasse station promoted a new competition. Its aim was to define the western part of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais, where the royal stables were, with a large building that gave facade to the square and preserved its garden at maximum. The main building, an 18th-century palace, later modified by K.F. Schinkel, occupied its eastern part. The winning proposal of the competition was presented by the architects Richard Bielenberg and Josef Moser, also authors of the Hotel Fürstenhof near Potsdamer Platz. It should be noted that their proposal had nothing to do with what was later eventually built. In fact, the authors went from proposing a neoclassical styled building to a complex of buildings designed according to the principles of the Neue Sachlichkeit, more similar to the proposal presented by Otto Firle.

Europahaus am Anhalter Bahnhof, 1936-37

This complex of buildings, in a certain sense, wanted to be a replica, on the Askanischer Platz, of  Haus Vaterland, located just in front of the Potsdamer Bahnhof. Opened in 1911 as Haus Potsdam, the building was designed by Franz Schwechten. Curiously, the same architect who, a few years earlier, had designed the Anhalter Bahnhof. It housed Café Piccadilly, the world’s largest restaurant with 2,500 seats, a theater, with a capacity of 1,200 seats, and numerous offices. In 1928 it was renovated and re-opened, under the motto of the world in a house, with its theater transformed into a cinema and offices into multiple themed restaurants. In addition, Carl Stahl-Vrach, the architect of its renovationa and set designer for films such as Fritz Lang's "Doctor Mabuse", transformed the building into one of the first exponents of the Lichtarchitektur, or architecture of the night.

Saarlandstraße (heute Stresemannstraße), 1941-42

On the other hand, the Askanischer Platz complex had a façade about 280-meter-length and a total area of ​​35,000 square meters and was built in two phases. In the first phase, completed in 1926, Deutschlandhaus was built. A building which contained a mall, a theater, a ballroom, and a movie theater. Very similar to Tauentzienpalast. A complex of offices, shops and a ballroom of which Bielenberg and Moser were also the authors. The second, after many troubles and the death of Bielenberg, could not be completed until 1931. And it is in this last phase, designed by Moser and Otto Firle, that one of the first tall buildings in Berlin with steel structure was built: the Europahaus. A 12-storey tower that would eventually give its name to the whole complex. Firle surely contributed many of his own ideas, previously included in his competition proposal. One of them, no doubt, was the transformation of the Europahaus into another showcase in Berlin of the architecture of the night. But it was not until 1935 that a 15-meter-high structure was added to the central tower, crowned with the luminous logos of Allianz and Odol, adding up to a total of 50 meters, which broke definitely with the marked horizontality of the winning project.

Abraham Pisarek 'Auf Berliner Straßen', 1945-46

Nazism ended up stripping Europahaus of all its neons lights and turning it into the Reich's ministry of labor headquarters. During that period of darkness, the Anhalter Banhnhof became one of the three main Berlin stations where, between 1941 and 1945, almost a third of Berlin's Jews were deported. From this station, thanks to the infamous and disciplined task developed by Adolf Eichmann, they were sent, in groups of 50 to 100 people, to Theresienstadt Ghetto, in passenger convoys added to regular trains. But RAF's strategic bombing ended up devastating the station and its environs. However, Albert Speer's insane plan to transform Berlin into Welthaupstadt Germania had already envisaged closing the station and turning it into a public swimming pool. In fact, it was not until 1960 that the Anhalter Bahnhof was completely dismantled. And with its closure, and subsequent demolition, a part of Berlin’s history fell into the pit of oblivion. Except for Europahaus which still stands today, but in the darkness originally imposed by the Nazis.

COMPARATIVE ARCHITECTURE (IV)

Architektur des Gerüstes, des in All geöffneten Raumes. 

BRUNO TAUT 

In 1919 Bruno Taut published his Alpine Architektur. An utopian project he began to devise, according to himself, on All Saints' Day 1917, in the midst of the Great War. A project which was outlined and re-drawn throughout 1918. A kind of utopia based on the empathic possibilities of Paul Scheerbart's Glasarchitektur, to whom Taut himself had already dedicated his Glashaus, the glass pavilion built during the first Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne.

Bruno Taut 'Alpine Architektur' (1919)

For Scheerbart, the roots of war and therefore of destruction is boredom. So, to avoid this, Taut proposes this collective project which has the ambition to create a better structured universe capable of contributing to perpetual peace. Because, deep down, alpine architecture is a mystical fable that advocates for a complete reconstruction of the world, trying to fuse nature with architecture. But with a glass architecture, understood as the metaphor of a new and more splendid life. Because only this architecture can help us to transform the life and environment in which we live.

Jakob Tigges 'The Berg' (2009)

Ninety years later, also the architect Jakob Tigges presented a shocking proposal in the contest of ideas for the reorganization of the old and mythical Berlin Tempelhof Airport. Instead of a new neighborhood development or a new park, Tigges proposed building what Berlin lacks: a mountain. But not a simple hill, like the Teufelsberg, but a real alpine architecture: 'The Berg'. An absolutely unusual idea with a strong evocative power. A trully city icon that, in fact, will never have to be built, because no one denies that making it real is completely impossible. Instead, it has only been necessary to imagine it to end up becoming a whole collective utopia.

COMPARATIVE ARCHITECTURE (I)

Simultaneously with his entry as a teacher at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Ludwig Hilberseimer designed a City in the heart of the Friedrichstadt in Berlin. A project that becomes a kind of test of his Hochhausstadt of 1924.

Ludwig Hilberseimer 'Vorschlag zur Bebauung der Berliner City' (1929)

In that case, Hilberseimer took the capitalist logic of functionalism to the extreme. An extreme where the city was confused with the same system that generated it, where it no longer re-presented society but only re-produced it. Against the chaos of the Großstadt: order and uniformity.

Forty years later, Archizoom Associati include this photomontage in "Discorsi per immagini", an expression used by them and Superstudio as the title of their two contributions dedicated to a series of photomontages published in the December issue of Domus, where a whole set of non-functional objects inserted in the territory are represented. Images that show us the utopian conditions of our own reality.

Archizoom 'Quartieri paralleli per Berlino' (1969)

In this case, the multiplication, to infinity, of the Berlin Wall inspires this urban vision of transparent wall-buildings which croses and divides the city into multiple closed areas connected by a motorway.