The history of art and architecture has always been a profession from which I've tried to escape. Analysing in a detached manner the deeper intentions and social views of an architect through the buildings, drawings and written documents he left behind is still a sorry activity, even though my book* isn't entirely innocent on this point. Ever since I was first exposed to the reality of an architecture office, there has been one thing that first stunned and then attracted me, and that is the dirtiness and fiercely hectic nature of the architectural profession. To realise a building, never mind a piece of city, designers have to rely on negligible information yet have to display an almost laughable authority on subjects as diverse as traffic engineering and education psychology, have to explain their own obsessions in thousands of different way, each one inconsistent with the one before, to have them approved by all the appropriate bodies, and all to get that one idea built, something with which they can make a difference. From the isolation cells of academia this can seem like the systematic sell-out and defeat of social and aesthetic ideals. But I see it the other way round; in the constant struggle with banality and mediocrity, bureaucracy and politics, I see a more deeply rooted idealism, something of a fanaticism that has worked its way into the professional DNA, to exercise influence on something that seems to resist every form of influence: modern urban society. In my thesis I try to explain that the importance of the architect J.H. van den Broek in the first half of the twentieth century lies in the ultra-pragmatic way in which he did all he could to shape the development of Rotterdam, in a period in which this city seemed to be tossed about by external factors. By both forming alliances with the most unlikely of parties and also deploying a design method that was analytic yet also steeped in common sense, Van den Broek succeeded in occupying a central position in the urban web, and his influence is still felt in Rotterdam today. Projects by architects like Van den Broek are so intertwined with the city that if you reconstruct their origins you can fathom the layered nature, the contradictions and the element of chance in the city itself in concentrated form. A process that for the researcher who's even slightly interested can scarcely be controlled, illustrated by the fact that my book is slightly more about Rotterdam that about Van den Broek himself.
Besides the dirty hands of architecture and of architectural history, there's another form of filth that occupies me more and more but that is of only minor importance in the book, and that's the filth of history as it has stuck to buildings decades after they were completed. In Maak een Stad this aspect is highlighted indirectly by the fact that all photos of Van den Broek's buildings were taken within the past three years and are thus full of Islamic immigrants, Japanese cars, civic guards, Leefbaar Rotterdam posters - all against the background of a port that scarcely functions any longer. Van den Broek's buildings are used in a totally different way to when they were built; they practically disappear behind a thick crust of urban life that no-one envisaged.
This poses a unique problem for the architectural historian: accurately conveying the considerations of the architect and his clients in designing and constructing these buildings blinds him to the role that these buildings now play in the city. Most architectural historians solve this problem by simply ignoring the fact that the buildings exist in the here and now and using only photos that were taken directly upon completion. For that's the moment the building is still clean and, hence, can be fully understood on the strength of the architect's ideas. Now that architectural history increasingly deals with the post-war period, this pure view of the profession, focusing on the designer's ideas, starts to take on extremely strange forms. I'd like to illustrate this with a current example.
On show at the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam this fall was an exhibition about Team 10, and the NAi bookshop is stacked with monographs and studies dedicated to this group of architects active from the 1950s to the 1970s. Team 10 was an international group of very idealistic young modern architects who had an almost sociological interpretation of their work and who wanted to set themselves off from the older, technocratic generation. The Team 10 architects, however, among them Van den Broek & Bakema and Aldo van Eyck in the Netherlands and Candilis, Josic & Woods in France, were building within the enormous industrialised post-war construction sector. But by applying sociological and organic metaphors in their grands ensembles and villes nouvelles - the backbone, the petal, the African mud settlement and the friendship model - they attempted to counter alienation in the suburbs. According to the exhibition compilers, this amendment by Team 10 to the technocratic approach of international modernism is still of vital importance in the context of current debate on physical planing.
The Belgian architectural historian Ton Avermaete in particular makes a convincing case in his wonderful doctoral thesis on Candilis, Josic & Woods, called Another Modern. And indeed, the drawings and models and the photos taken just after the completion of the new town of Toulouse-le-Mirail in the south of France show the scale of the huge high-rise complexes is steadily reduced thanks to an almost village-like structure offering space for spontaneous streetlife that looks as if it can match that in the old city centre. Avermaete relates this way of design to the discussions held within Team 10 and influenced by urban sociologists and geographers like Chombart-de Lauwe and Erwin Gutkind.
It is perhaps an abrupt way to change topic, but I read this book just as Toulouse-le-Mirail was turning into one of the worst hotbeds in the pandemic of rioting that erupted in all the post-war grands ensembles in the French banlieues. Sarkozy's 'racaille' were not very impressed by Candilis's efforts to create places of encounter, identity and variety in the grands ensembles. You'd be hard-pushed right now to find any fundamental difference between the apparently banal grands ensembles and Toulouse-le-Mirail, created to offer a radical alternative. With this example I don't want to claim that the architect was wrong and a failure but that an architectural historian who refuses to describe buildings from today's perspective is on the wrong track. Soon after its completion in the early 1970s Toulouse-le-Mirail developed into a immigrant district surrounded by le banlieue pavillionaire where white French people lived. At a certain moment all the pavilions in the organic backbone structure by Candilis were occupied by Islamic shops alone and unemployment reached 40%. The area was seen as a gigantic vertical ghetto instead of as an organic outgrowth of the city. To describe Toulouse-le-Mirail and thousands of other New Towns built in the post-war period as the historical objects they are, it is necessary to forget, tactically and temporarily, the intentions, the intellectual context and the design views of the architect and pay no attention to them.
This form of temporary self-deception is necessary in order to understand an important aspect about these environments: they are, with a few exceptions in Scandinavia and Switzerland, almost all used and occupied in a totally different way to that envisaged by the architect. We almost have to treat them as pure hardware, architecture without architects, concrete deposits left behind millions of years ago and now colonised and adapted by groups of people never envisaged by the designer and all of whom have left their mark. The Bijlmermeer, Toulouse-le-Mirail, Hoogvliet, Cumbernauld, La Courneuve and Marzahn can no longer be understood on the basis of the original views of their designers and the time in which they worked. If we architectural historians continue to describe these places with the help of their architects' ideas, then we deny that they are urban spaces that have been occupied by hundreds of millions of people for generations. We contribute indirectly to a one-dimensional caricature, as though we were dealing with planning blunders, failed utopias, tragic mistakes that can best be demolished.
To me the task of the architectural historian is to free the heritage of twentieth-century urban-design from the virtual reality of architectural history and to approach it from today. Picture if you will some sort of Indiana Jones archaeologist who has to chop his way through the urban jungles that have smothered the post-war districts. He probably left home with the aim of finding the Holy Grail of the original utopia, but what he came across by way of strange races, sparkling works of art, curious rituals, amazing women and undiscovered animal species was so fascinating and valuable that he had no difficulty forgetting his original ambition.
