New Babylon and the end of the avant-garde
(day 1, 26-01-2000)

contributions:
John Linke Heintz
Mark Wigley
Jean-Clarence Lambert
Bart Lootsma
Simon Sadler
Thilo Hilpert
Peter Cook
Adolfo Natalini

1. John Linke Heintz (1959) - assistant Professor of Project Management at the Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology.

++ contribution: 'New Babylon, problems of interpretation' ++

Heintz focused his introduction on the elements of violence and danger, inherent to play, which are all about New Babylon. Other than most other speakers, he considered this a positive and realistic position. Every game has elements of danger, and risk. Heintz mentioned Hilde Heynen's critique on modernism and New Babylon in particular. He analysed this as a petit bourgeois position. As a result petit bourgeouis became the running gag of the two day seminar.

2. Mark Wigley (1956) - professor of Architectural History and Theory at Princeton University)

++ contribution: 'The Hyper-architecture of Desire' ++

At the start of his lecture Mark Wigley, author of the book 'The Hyper-architecture of Desire', states the value of this happening: "In two days maybe one of the invited monsters will tell something interesting". Wigley states it is quite ironical that exactly on New Babylon a symposium is organised at a University institution. Wigley hopes this symposium will provoke a lot of discussion and immediately kicks-off with a fierce reaction on the previous speaker (John Heintz) who argues against Hilde Heynen's conclusions in her essay on New Babylon.

According to Wigley the theory of Constant takes a switch in 1968 with a kind of self-criticism. He starts to consider the aspect of violence an unavoidable part of freedom and one can see this in the work of Constant. In that respect Heynen is at a good track and delivered an important work with her essay.

We should not invest in trying to speculate at what Constant was thinking during the making of the New Babylon project. If we would like to know, we can better ask him. Besides, after Freud we should know that even if we would ask Constant, he cannot give us a true answer because of his own 'desires'. Much more important at the moment is the question what the space of desire could be.

New Babylon is important, as we are dealing with a painter who pretends for 20 years to be an architect. In doing so, he is able to talk about the desires of an architect. During these 20 years of work on the project, a lot changes, also in society. To track how the project develops, we will have look closely at the details.

New Babylon starts with Constant making models, over a period of two years. Wigley shows the first photo by Guy Debord of the model, with the title 'Ambience of a city of the future, with the cars of today'. Constant produces perfect models, which still look like our favourite architect has made them today.

Wigley introduces the topic of the drawing; the abstract, intellectual world of the drawing.
The first drawings of New Babylon start to appear as soon as the key-models have been finished. They are exact representations of the models. As soon as the first drawings start to appear also the separation between Constant and Guy Debord starts. Constant gets at that time fascinated by architecture, by the technique of building, by the materials like nylon and titanium which was all of no interest to and rejected by Debord. This results in a complete disaster at the time of the first publication in Forum (Forum no. 6, Amsterdam, 1955).

Constant starts to make a series of drawings, which get more and more expressionistic. But he never shows these drawings in public. It is a remarkable way of working, opposite to what we would normally do. An architect would first make the drawings, then the models. In the making of New Babylon the drawings remain of secondary importance throughout the project.

To understand this, we have to look at the nature of the drawing. In drawings not the support (paper) counts, but the medium (paint, pencil, ink). A drawing remains always on the edge of the imaginary. Therefore you cannot draw desire; this is the central paradox of the project. Instead, Constant produces the structure that makes the desire possible.

Constant does not make real architectural drawings, but something which looks closely like one. Drawings show the structures that make the life possible in the project. New Babylon has the status of the paper in a classical understanding: the inhabitants draw their life at the intersection of imagination and reality. The building keeps disappearing.

<top>

3. Jean-Clarence Lambert - art historian, artist, poet

++ contribution: 'New Babylon - Art and Utopia' ++

Jean-Clarence Lambert portrays Constant as an artist - a wish spoken out by Constant himself. To understand the context of Constant Lambert reflects on the Calvinistic Dutch society between the two World Wars and the, as he describes it, equally narrow-minded atmosphere of De Stijl. The only exception among De Stijl group was the painter Mondriaan, who (we should not forget) was living in Paris. Constant was amazed and at the same time repulsed with Mondriaan's first large exhibition after the WW2.

The events of the Second World War influenced Constant very much - which afterwards resulted in a continual appearance of wars as a theme in his work. Also, it gave him a strong believe in the positive approach and vision as was shown by the communists - but he rejected their methods. To Constant the factor of play and creativity is a very fundamental part of life, therefore also of painting and of art. He believed in the negation of style and the freedom for the experiment.

After CoBrA was abandoned, Constant moved progressively away from art. With the Situationists he starts to work on a generic implementation of architecture, developing systems and structures for cities throughout the world. It was a plan develop for a society after the revolution. After the New Babylon project, Constant started gradually to get back to painting. He would get far away from New Babylon. Lambert concludes: The Revolution didn't happen.

<top>

4. Bart Lootsma (1957) - architectural historian, critic

++ chairman of the afternoon session, contributes a short story ++

Lootsma introduces the 'almost sarcastic' interview of Constant by Rem Koolhaas, which took place for the newspaper Haagse post in 1966. Koolhaas portrays Constant with an overdose of details as a prototypical 'provo' artist - not as an architect at all. Lootsma explains (The berlage Institute Amsterdam (BiA), Hunch 1/1999, p. 152 - p. 173):

"We learn that Constant drives an 'Eend' ( a 'Duck' the Dutch expression for a Citroen 2CV; the prototypical car for people with an alternative lifestyle at that moment); that he is an 'enthusiastic, dark-haired, beer-drinking erudite' who lives in an apartment on the ground floor in a pretty bourgeois neighbourhood in Amsterdam; that they share this apartment with a German shepherd called Herta, a big hairy monkey that 'unfortunately became life threateningly dangerous…" etc etc.

In the course of the interview the New Babylon project becomes portrayed less and less utopian. Constant explains that New Babylon is not designed to change the world, but that is an answer to how the world will actually evolve. Constant draws here, in front of Koolhaas, the first model of a generic city.

<top>

5. Simon Sadler - architectural historian, Trinity College Dublin

++ contribution: 'The Situationist city' ++

In his contribution Simon Sadler explains how 'Modern' architecture since its very start tries to get away from the idea of fixed plans, similarly like societies try to break away from fixed ideologies. The Situationists on their hand try to get away from the zoned world as it is developed by the Modernist intellectuals in their series of CIAM congresses.

"But the most telling example of the extent to which the town planners' pragmatism has distanced them from the reality of life, and stands in the way of a creative approach to urbanism, is undoubtedly the Athens Charter. In this declaration drawn up in 1933 by the CIAM (with Le Corbusier in the lead) and since then neither updated or amplified, urban living is summed up in four functions: living, working, transport, and recreation, with total disregard for everything to do with culture." ++++ (extract from Unitary Urbanism, manuscript of a lecture held by Constant at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, 1960)+++

The idea of fixity - as described above - becomes quite questionable during the fifties. An awareness arises that the human is a very variable element. Popper says in respect to this: plans which are collectively imposed on people are immoral and injuste.

The Situationist theory, partly originating from Marxism, was finally able to stir up the left movement that was in a complete inertia. Situationists see architecture as a situation, an event, in the way Archigram did. It is not about objects you just want to look at, but objects you want to be in. Life is continually negotiated, it is continually changing.

The Team Ten members - as a 'division' of the CIAM thinkers - has been excavating the deep structures of human communities. It became an almost archaeological, regressive exercise. In contradiction to this, the Situationists involve with action; try to stimulate change. It gets clear at a symbolic level: A lightweight component structure is chosen for New Babylon, instead of the Ferro-concrete slabs of the modern movement.

New Babylon is all about the idea of non-planning, of continuous indeterminacy. Constant presents for this a very powerful structure, but in the details, in the content of it, he only presents vague notions. New Babylon is projected as a giant game.

"(…) I would prefer to define unitary urbanism as a very complex, very changeable, constant activity, a deliberate intervention in the praxis of everyday life and in the daily environment; an intervention aimed at bringing our lives into lasting harmony with our real needs and with the new possibilities that will arise and that will in turn transform these needs." +++ (extract from Unitary Urbanism, manuscript of a lecture held by Constant at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, 1960) +++

With New Babylon Constant is researching the cybernetics for interfacing men and machine. It will be one of the last projects of utopian architecture before - as Sadler calls it - the dark period of the seventies and eighties will appear.

<top>

6. Thilo Hilpert - architectural historian, FH Wiesbaden

++ contribution: 'The polemics of Homo Ludens' ++

The first introduction Thilo Hilpert got to the thoughts of New Babylon was by reading the book 'The society of the spectacle' by Guy Debord. The group of people connected to the development of New Babylon was a very diverse group (with sometimes radically different points of view), but they made a very important theoretical move in rethinking architecture after the WW2.

Visions, according to Hilpert, have always been a part of architectural thinking. The most important of Constants' New Babylon is not the appearance of a vision, but the fact that he gave up the traditional co-operation between artist and architect - in an architectural project.

In New Babylon we can see what happens when an artist decides to deal with urbanism, something much more connected to a cold, administrative way of thinking.

If - for the sake of city planning - you just start multiplying units, you can provide good housing for everyone but you will have a bad sustainability, because the inhabitants can not identify anymore with the created environment. Therefore architects should engage into this, with the help of new techniques. Thus we can create active architecture, activated by art.

The critical position New Babylon takes, gives it a special place in the movement towards all kind of city-structures. The Situationists are dealing with a conception of space without a clear determinacy. A social action that liberates you from the role of spectator.

"…because the city is, or should be, an active and integral part of our game of life. I deliberately refer to the 'game of life' here - thinking of Huizinga's Homo Ludens - rather than to '; culture', because culture could be easily misunderstood; it has already been too much compromised by the disintegration of the traditional cultural forms of recent centuries and the attendant phenomenon of mass pseudo-culture. Literature, painting, music - these typical individual forms of creative play - are in the process of losing their meaning, together with the individualism that gave rise to them." +++ (extract from Unitary Urbanism, manuscript of a lecture held by Constant at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, 1960) +++

Hilpert thinks that especially we in Holland need to rethink urbanism. "You in Holland have a whole landscape full of small boxes, without any appropriate garden-architecture!"

<top>

7. Peter Cook - architect, co-founder of Archigram, dean of Bartlett School of Architecture in London

"In 1961 a small group of frustrated architecture graduates in London put together a wild, woolly broadsheet: an 'Archigram'. Instantaneousness, openendedness and invention have sustained the group through an ever-widening series of experimental projects that have carries the name of that original broadsheet. (…) The idea of metamorphosis, the continually changing but always existing environment, is at the core of Archigram's thinking."
(from: Archigram, edited by Peter Cook, Studio Vista Publishers, London 1972)

++ contribution: 'Archigram - Fun and flexibility, designing a social critique' ++

"Here we are in this land, (ed.: Holland) not particularly fruity, talking about something very fruity."

Cook explains the beginning of Archigram, the spirit of doing ("I like doing it and someone else afterwards theorising it"), spending months on making weird structures. He questions the work - Are we being funny or very serious?

Archigram (in contradiction to Constant's New Babylon) is very specific. It does not start from an artistic point of view but more the kind of view of an industrial designer. It forces you to be naïve and it prevents you from losing track.

Cook works still on something similar to New Babylon (Super Houston). 'What happens when there is no hierarchy, but there is just stuff. Miles and miles, kilometres and kilometres of stuff? The interplay between control and choice… Utopia still exists.

<top>

8. Adolfo Natalini - architect, professor at the university of Florence, founding member of the collective Superstudio

++ contribution: 'Superstudio' ++

To witness Natalini speaking about Superstudio is something remarkable: for years he has been refusing to talk about the work. He states: "It is a long time ago and the sixties were after all not just fabulous."

Superstudio started its existence on the day of the flooding of Florence - and therefore it has always been fascinated by the idea of the crises.

The work of Superstudio is linked to social criteria using architectural tools. The social and political situation at that time in Italy was very important - in the middle of the '68 movement.

As the clients were not to be regarded special people, houses for them were also not spatial designs. More catalogue objects. Abandoning the ambiguity of design, writing texts as a sort of religious terrorism. The work of Superstudio should be understood as a negative utopia, a critical condition.

In the work of Superstudio the grid is used to reduce the 'architectural approach to minimum' to have energy to do other things.

Natalini introduced the project - '12 ideal cities'. It's main occupation is to push ideas to their extreme consequences in order to show the stupidities of common senses. He was showing a film from that period. It is about "A Grid for the rational distribution of resources", where a new human kind can survive with the help of grid and plugs. Every point will be same as all the others. (… Natalini is laughing himself…) Since contradiction no longer exists it is a matter of complementary … We will listen to our own harts, we will examine the texture of our skins. One day our mind will be in contact with the whole world, we will be in contact with philosophy. We will play wonderful games. Life will be the only environmental factor.

<top>

8. Panel discussion

In the discussion, Peter Cook states he does not like his work to be called utopian. To him that is a position in a box, you are classified safely as a utopian.

Natalini reacts his works were in fact simple essays on the utopian. Superstudio used the utopia in a negative sense; the technical destruction of architecture, by use of architectural elements.

Wigley carefully avoided using the word utopia and used the word desire instead. "I don't think utopia is a useful concept. Utopia has always been the dream that never succeeded to be build. (…) Maybe now you can build anything, so it is useful again. That is a contemporary discussion among philosophers.

Constant was using every device in his capacity to destroy the discipline of art by art, because by living in New Babylon everyone becomes an artist.

On the other hand, Wigley himself does not believe in the utopian. Visionaries end up killing each other.

day two >