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 (III)

Ce n'est pas une tour. 

JEAN NOUVEL 

To state that the decline of monumentality coincides with the rise of modernity it is not anything original. According to Charles Jencks, the appearance of this new genre, which he himself named the iconic building, has finally replaced the urban monument. When people stops to believe in God, they don’t believe in anything. They believe in anything. As banal as it may be. So if, in principle, anything can be a work of art, anything could also be an icon. But it is not so. If a building wants to be iconic must have a provocative image that generates controversy. Let anyone talk about you even if it is to criticize you. In essence, the iconic building is the simple application of the shock and awe military doctrine and the wow effect factor, as Mayor Bloomberg a few years ago called for the new singular New York City buildings. Although Deyan Sudjic argues that the iconic building is a fading fashion and it will eventually disappear, Jencks claims that the iconic building is here to stay.

Jean Nouvel 'Torre Agbar, Barcelona' (1999-2005)

It is said that, after dismissing the Italian architect Renzo Piano, Agbar chose Jean Nouvel as the architect in charge of designing their new headquarters. In a first meeting with the client, the French architect presented three tower proposals. At one point during the presentation, Nouvel took out a Montecristo cigar, the same one that Mies van der Rohe usually smoked, from his jacket, and, placing it upside down, said: “but this one is my favorite”. Decontextualizing, shamelessly, both  ‘La trahison des images’ by René Magritte and the Adolf Loos’ Dadaist proposal for the Chicago’s Tribune Tower Competition. Next he added that “I think it also evokes the towers of Gaudí's Sagrada Família, and the stone millstones of Montserrat too” and ended up prophesying that “I am convinced that it can become a city icon”.

Norman Foster 'Swiss Re HQ, London' (1997-2004)

Two years earlier, Norman Foster had received a similar commission from Swiss Re. The insurance company wanted to build a new headquarters on the ruins of the Old Baltic Exchange. A building destroyed by an IRA bomb on 10 April 1992 at 9:20 pm, in the heart of the City of London. To justify its absolutely banal form, Lord Foster was forced to bring together a good number of excuses. At the end, the energy performance of the building, which is supposed to consume 50% less compared to other similar buildings, ended up becoming its main, if not the only, argument. However, Madelon Vriesendrop, playing with possible analogies, ended up disguising it in a missile, a lipstick, a matryoshka doll or a cucumber form. And that's how it's finally known today: The Gherkin.

Ivan Leonidov 'Institut des Statistiques, Moscou' (1929-1930)

A few years ago, while walking through one of Centre Pompidou's lost corridors, I discovered a project by Ivan Leonidov which I have never seen published anywhere before. So much controversy, if one had copied the other, and it turned out that both had plagiarized a project, still unpublished today, with more than half a century of existence. A kind of unusual building-manifesto for which the city seems to be nothing more than a mere backdrop. In this case, its shape is explained as a container of new functions. An object in the service of the then new socialist man. The fact is that if Nouvel states that this type is not a tower, it may be because he, intimately, thinks that it is, paradoxically, a socialist icon. Looking at it again, but from a historical perspective, this Leonidovism* revelation as a forerunner of this new architectural genre, which is the iconic building, would not be so strange either.

[*] In a 1930 Stalinist purge report on the petty-bourgeois tendency in Soviet architecture, Leonidovism (a term referring to the work of Leonidov and his disciples) is described as pure aestheticizing graphism, of technical and professional insufficiency, contrary to dialectical materialism and, of course, of being cosmopolitan.

COMPARATIVE ARCHITECTURE (II)

Thirty years, two continents and two natural disasters separate one from each other.

Kisho Kurokawa 'Agricultural City' (1960)

It was 1960 when the Japanese metabolist Kisho Kurokawa designed an agricultural town in Aichi Prefecture, with the intention of replacing the agricultural settlements in Ise Bay that were razed the previous year by Typhoon Vera. A seemingly utopian project which aspired to solve the classical contraposition between city and countryside by integrating agricultural production into an urban structure. The city was made up of multiple communities. Each one of them located on a squared concrete platform, about 300 meters to 500 meters by side, elevated on pilotis, about 4 meters off the ground, to deal with future flooding. This platform was both a structure and an infrastructure, thus reserving all soil for agricultural production. Each community, subdivided by a grid of 25 blocks and 100 meters by side, housed a population of about 2,000 inhabitants. The central block was reserved for public facilities such as an elementary school, a shrine and a temple. The remaining blocks were where the housing of these new settlements was located.

OMA 'Agadir Convention Centre' (1990)

Simultaneously to Kurokawa's project, the Moroccan city of Agadir was destroyed by an earthquake, despite its moderate magnitude of 5.7 on the Richter scale. After this earthquake, it was rebuilt, about two kilometers to the south, as the typical post-Corbusierian new town. And it is from this tabula rasa where thirty years later, the form of this project, with clear metabolic reminiscences, designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) arises. The project is a single building divided into two parts: a socle, which takes the sinuous shapes of the surrounding dunes; and a roof, which takes the form of a cloud. The socle is where the convention center is located, with auditoriums, conference rooms, etc. And the roof is occupied by a large hotel. The remaining in-between space, supported by a forest of pilotis, becomes a huge concrete covered plaza open to the beach and the vastness of the ocean.

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.