Fuck Functionalism

An essay first written in 2013 discussing the quotation below:

“We reject the concept of functionalism, dictated by an ingenuous empiricism, which holds that function brings forms together and, in themselves, constitute urban artefacts and the city.” 

Aldo Rossi, Architecture and the City 1966

The city is entwined with the destiny of man. It is inherently anthropocentric and thus is generated by the true nature of humankind. Man has always sought shelter, both physically and cognitively. To understand the city is to understand ourselves. The first dwellings were the result of primitive peoples’ attempts to protect themselves from their environment. Constructed to control their immediate surroundings, these initial groupings of people were not fundamentally different from other social species. It was only as people began to occupy places in greater concentrations did the genesis of civilisation truly begin. It is important to note, at this point, that while the focus here is on the rise of Western Civilisation, the development of eastern cultures follow a near identical model, with both Indian and Chinese civilisations developing on the Indus Delta and the Yellow River respectively.

The confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers in modern-day Iraq created ideal conditions for the nomadic peoples of the area. Their move from Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers to settled agriculturalists was provided by the cycle of fertility generated by the area’s topography and climate. The city of Uruk was first constructed c5000 BC and named the period of Mesopotamian history spanning from 4000 – 3100 BC. This is the generative point for all discussion on the Western city and could thus be named the birthplace of its civilisations. Until this point, primitive culture rigidly delineated the religious from the mundane. Objects held sacred or significant were detached from the main living areas. This is confirmed by the built structure of that period. Dwellings and monuments were constructed with two entirely separate criteria, often in different locations, connected only by the identity of their creator. 

Further investigation of these initial types illuminates the embryonic state of architecture within Early Man. The first was the home, built with the specific purpose of shelter.  They were impermanent and pragmatic, forming the basis of mundane domestic life.  It feels almost deliberate that very little evidence of these first structures existence and their absence from history suggests the attitude of their occupants. A study of the second type is what truly reveals the mindset of early settlers.  The monument represents any structure or building of significance, as their exact nature alters over time and our primary understanding of these periods stems from analysing of these monuments. They are typified by a permanence that speaks of enormous effort for little enhancement of survivability or propagation. It is here that we begin to see Humanity’s divergence from the rest of the Animal Kingdom.

At the site of Uruk in Southern Mesopotamia, this proto-architecture coalesced into the first true city; defined by the deliberate arrangement of type into a culturally significant morphology. The placement of the home and the monument in direct adjacency displays a consideration of the environment beyond the creation of a micro-climate. Uruk’s central position in the southlands of the Fertile Crescent created a generation point for the newly burgeoning concept of trade. This coincided with the rapid evolution of economics, politics and religion, as different tribes began to form complex social relationships and implemented systems of activity and ritual recognisable today. The arrival of the city met the new requirements of the Mesopotamian social model and defines the transformation of the vernacular to the architectural and the progression of culture into civilisation (Baker, 2007). 

This leads to one to question why cities formed in the first place and what their significance is to urban science? As mentioned previously, architecture has no model in nature and must be treated in the same manner as other purely human behaviour. It would follow that architecture was synthesised entirely in the human mind.  If this so, then the condition of the city and the condition of its creator must be reciprocal. One finds a striking comparison between the zeitgeist of a civilisation and the morphology its cities. Indeed the city plan often presents a diagram for the ideals of the era. Further evidence is found in the convoluted transmutation of the First City to any preceding it. The quintessential typologies of house and monument are omnipresent within the urban environment’s history. Whilst a direct comparison is impossible, a lineage can always be traced to Uruk. The inextricable link between humanity and the city means that the creation of a new city must embody the complete nature of man.  

Human thought is inherently dichotomous and its implications on behaviour render us contradictory. We are constantly presented with dualist concepts like logic or emotion, good or evil, life or death. It is the causality of our actions that shapes our environment and its success is dependent upon the formation of a symbiotic relationship between each side of our consciousness. Freud likens the city to the human mind analogously in his explanation of the permanence of ego states.  His metaphor of the simultaneous existence of various monuments within Roman history refers to retention of our various ego-feelings from infancy to maturity (1930).  This is exemplified in Nolli’s 1748 plan of Rome, that treats both the churches and the ancient ruins as significant (Graves 1979). His analogy was admittedly flawed psychologically, but the metaphor can be extended with veracity on a sociological level. Culture is inherently evolutionary, often erasing the necessity of various aspects of its precedent to better suit the zeitgeist. Again we see these parallels in the rise and fall of the city.

Beginning with Nolli and the first truly analytical representation of the city (Graves 1979), a steady stream of models and theories regarding urban science emerged from the Enlightenment. However it was the Modernist movement that established the problems of the city as architectural. The heroic ideal of the architect as the arbiter societal change defined the architectural thinking of the early 20th century. Driven largely by the socialist theories of Marxism and Communism, movements like the Bauhaus and CIAM concerned themselves with a utopian future of the technocentric man. Their failure was uncovered in the devastation wreaked by the Second World War on the collective psyche. Aldo Rossi belonged to a generation of architects maturing into this paradigm shift. Disenchanted with the failure of modernism, as man started to fear technology in the wake of the atomic bomb, he began to search for a more robust understanding of the city. Rossi’s rejection of the modernist manifesto influenced much of his exploration into the understanding of type. However another branch of his contemporaries reacted more to the giddy optimism of pop culture. 

The English collective Archigram was formed in 1961 and attempted to save architecture from the sterility of early Modernism. Whilst Rossi rejected the principles of Modernism entirely, Archigram sought to revitalise them. They attempted to create a new urban language that engaged with the fast paced lifestyle of the consumer. Their work presented the city as consumer entity, infinitely configurable to meet the hedonistic demands of capitalism. Each theoretical project embraced the new technological possibilities offered by the Space Age. This futurist attitude stemmed from the myth of functionalism; the realisation that the forceful polemic of “function over form” was illusory and International Style was no less superficial than the historicism it replaced. They developed an enlightened functionalism, dispensing with form entirely and treated buildings as products; standardised components to be mass-produced and inserted into a flexible framework. This irreverent attitude towards architecture combined with the earnest pursuit of technological functionalism allowed proposals to truly embody the full spectrum of culture and counter-culture. The walking cities of Ron Herron posited the concept of an utterly transient city. Contained within a literalisation of Corbusier’s “machine for living in” (1923), each urban nomad would be able roam the city freely, parasitically engaging with infrastructure to replenish resources. Corbusier’s principle of detachment is satirised by Herron’s literal representation of its logical conclusion. This commentary is saved from farce by the darker undertones of the project’s hypothetical situation. Envisioned as an architectural response to the aftermath of nuclear war, the optimism of Herron’s inspiration in consumer culture and space capsules belies a rapid and pragmatic response to the utter annihilation of the urban landscape. Here the naivety of Corbusier’s fundamentally egotistical desires to produce architecture in Cartesian space is truly revealed. The significance of Herron’s work is discovered in the dichotomy of liberal consumerism and fearful pragmatism that polarised the Cold War period. 

The culmination of Archigram’s crusade to liberate architecture was Peter Cook’s 1964 Plug-In-City. It reduced the city to a single mega-structure, supported by an infinitely expansible framework of infrastructure. Each section of the frame would support modular pods that could be literally plugged in to expand the city. Different permutations of modules dictated the different aspects of urban life, functioning as a singular capitalist machine (Curtis 1982). Here we see yet more examples of contemporary urban design mirroring the condition of mankind at the time.  Cook’s city encapsulated the quintessence of western capitalist society; people stepped out of their customised pod and moved, like raw material in a factory, through the city. People would enjoy the experience as it provided them with more time to indulge in the new pleasures of the 1960s. This is attested to by Cook’s use of advertising principles and aesthetic references to Pop Art to promote the happy consumerist agenda of Western society (Sadler, 2005). 

Rossi’s disenchantment with the myth of functionalism also led him to question the nature of architecture regarding the city. However he sought to establish a truly analytical method by which to understand it. His theory proposed an analysis based in reality and drew great inspiration from Nolli and Enlightenment scholars like Poeté and Milizia (Rossi, 1966). Positing a methodology that dictated type as the principle organising force behind the city, he stated that the quality of urban artefacts and the relationships created by their forms, over time, defined a totalising morphology of the city. Each urban artefact is comprised of various forms that define recognisable typologies. The occupation of these forms generates activity within the city, adapting and demolishing them to suit the requirements of the current inhabitants. Rossi goes on to discuss the importance of memory and history in the understanding of the city. Poeté’s Theory of Persistences states that monuments are physical manifestations of the past being experienced in the present. This condition also occurs in the basic organisation of a city.  Therefore the consequences of the past have direct bearing on the present and, by implication, the future. Rossi placed great significance on the permanence of monuments and the city plan because their study develops the hindsight required to provide meaningful analysis. He posits two conditions for the monument that reflect its temporally holistic function within the city. His example of the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua displays the vital character of a retroactive form that continues to adapt and influence it urban context. Its simultaneous existence as both work of art and functioning market exemplifies the potential vitality monuments can bring to the city. Furthermore Poeté discovered that cities and towns develop an initial imprint of the original layout and expand in relation to the location and significance of monuments. Similar to Lynch’s understanding of nodes and paths, this model analyses the city’s connective tissue by examining the juxtaposition of space, as dictated by the relationship between buildings (1960). So in addition to acting as permanent hubs of activity, monuments also dictate the growth of any future activity. The second condition explores the effects of a monument rendered functionally obsolete by the passing of time and evolution of society. This concept cements the key distinction between Rossi and his contemporaries. He argues that, although essentially functionless, their physical forms remain in exhausted autonomy, creating inextricable elements of the genius loci. This enduring significance is historically generated and forms a link between one society of people and their ancestors, better establishing the legibility of a civilisation. Monuments are crucial to Rossi’s analysis of the city because they represent society’s relationship with previous elements in the built environment and, by inference, the relationship to its own past (Rossi, 1966).

At this stage a relationship between the two polar theories of Archigram and Aldo Rossi emerges. When considered in the framework discussed earlier we can begin to imagine them as two essential states of mankind. On the surface the manifesto of Archigram appears to be a profound understanding of the city. It is intrinsically linked to man’s capacity for rational thought and his continually evolving set of societal priorities. It represents the manifestation of our desire to live tomorrow, tempered with the understanding that we may die today. Their almost totalitarian adherence to functionalism appears to represent the true nature of the city with considerable validity. Necessity lay at the heart of the genesis of the city and, with it, the impetus of civilisation. The city of Uruk developed to meet the growing multiplicity of requirements imposed by emergent concepts of agricultural trade, politics and religion. The new opportunities offered by the city’s capacity to concentrate human activity within distinct loci created an interdependent societal structure, that accelerated the advancement of knowledge and culture. 

Archigram disseminated architecture to create the utopia heroic modernism failed to deliver. However they did not address the problem of the city holistically and so suffered the same inherent flaw as the architecture they held so contemptuously. Although we are driven towards the future by our dualistic understanding of life and death, these actions are dictated by the memory of previous experience. The most crucial element in the formation our current ego-state, i.e. our delineation between our sense of self and the exterior world, is the pathology of the previous relationship (Freud 1930). The cognitive success of the human mind relies on the symbiotic dualism of the human condition, generated by a complex pattern of immediate and distant decisions and determined by our memory of previous decisions. The impermanence of Archigram’s urbanism prevented society from evaluating the health of its culture. Without no fundamental ability to bias decisions, the concept of choice erodes and, with it, the individual. As a result, Archigram and their antecedents were doomed to repeat the early Modernists in failing to recognise the Utopian paradox and the inherent weakness in both capitalism and socialism. Rossi’s understanding of the importance of type and the reciprocal impact of form on function, led to a more profound understanding. His emphasis on permanence and history formed a realisation that function is merely a product of causality and one can only derive a superficial understanding of the city. (Rossi, 1966)

The functionalist does not assign meaning to the past, in his haste to ensure the needs of the present are met. His lack of acknowledgement diminishes his understanding of the city because he concerns himself with what people do. Therefore the city must be derived from form because its raison d’être is the embodiment of what people are.