THE GRID: Washington and Utopia Part 2

A Versailles for the People

What the States required was a common social contract, a means to bind these individual entities into a cohesive whole. The foundation of a capital was crucial to this, as it manifested the creation of this new world in physical terms; the translation of utopia into reality. However, an American visual language had not yet formed. The only real option was to import values from Europe and reinterpret them to better suit American thinking. Jefferson saw in classicism the means to achieve this goal. Its heroic connotations of a glorious pinnacle in human development established a myth that could be re-figured for American minds. The weight of history would validate the new civic institutions, but to work as values these classical imports needed to embody an accessible social dimension (Tafuri 1976).

An example of this can be seen in Jefferson’s design for the Richmond Capitol in 1786 (Brownell 1992). Aside from changing the exterior order of the columns, the Maison Carée was lifted readymade into Virginia. The use of a Roman temple allowed for the glorification of democracy, by alluding to the archetypal republic (Tafuri 1976). Its literal transposition into a virgin landscape emancipated the model from the historical baggage accreted in Europe. Selectively contextualised antiquity became the resource for the new world. Therefore the proposal for Washington DC was entirely political in motive. The nation’s isolation and new social agenda meant that European values and models could be carefully selected and shaped autonomously. Their sole purpose then became the political construction of the US and subsequently manufacturing authority and credence for its ideals. It transcends the District of Columbia and establishes itself as the generator of the whole nation’s values. 

Richmond Capitol & Maison Caree. Or is it the other way around?

This utopian ambition manifests itself in several ways. Firstly, L’Enfant’s scheme expands the Roman metaphor at Richmond to an urban scale. Replacing the Tiber is the Potomac; like Rome, the city is surrounded by hills. With the majority of the city held within the meander of the river, the Potomac provides the salient geographical feature possessed by ‘true cities’. Ancient Rome developed a fabric of dwelling around the central Campo Marzio district. This district formed both the secular and religious centre to Rome and by extension the rest of the Empire. L’Enfant’s plan does the same thing morphologically. The street patterns weave a fabric of urbs, to accommodate the government workers and their families. At the functional and metaphorical heart of the plan is the Mall. This reinterpretation of the Roman Forum condensed the US into a single point, with all the armatures of its power arranged around a monumental park. With a monument to the first president as a fulcrum, the Capitol and White House set the primary axes and imply a zone for all other government buildings.  A critical difference between the Mall and Forum is the notable absence of religious buildings on the former. The National Cathedral (initially designed by L’Enfant in 1791), supposedly a prerequisite of ‘cityhood’ and the centre of many European cities, was banished to the periphery. Instead, temples to the secular age, like the Botanic Gardens, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Museums, populate the gaps left by the democratic institutions.

Nolli’s survey of Rome superimposed with L’Enfant’s plan of Washington

Secondly, the plan employs two grids. In Washington the colonial grid defines a substrate, an initial imprint into which the symbolism of the plan can be inserted with the empirical rigour demanded by rationalism. It also perhaps reinforces the Roman paradigm and entrenches the concept of urbs (Aureli 2011). Cut across it are broad avenues that emanate diagonally from the Mall. These boulevards define the Capitol and White House as focal points and their intersections create public squares. The generative effect of these grids on the form of the city sits at odds with the ‘planless’ form of Rome, both ancient and contemporary (Aureli 2011). Whilst the Eternal City is defined by a juxtaposition of monumental forms where streets become incidental (Corbusier 1931), the root of the Washington plan is infrastructural and was based upon contemporary principles of urban planning. This lifts the plan above mere historicist metaphor and highlights the priority Jefferson et al placed when importing culture. The importance lay in the values espoused, rather than the forms created. Washington is not a copy of Rome. It is a descendant, built to manifest the same ideals but accepting of its temporal distance.

Aerial Image of Washington DC Capitol with radial and orthogonal grids superimposed

The grids also form vital elements in another strand in creating the capital of the US. A synthesis of their principles provided the counter-position necessary in formation of a new democracy.  Both these grids are inherently European: the first used to impose supremacy over new territories, whilst the second reinforced aristocratic supremacy of the domestic. Furthermore, they are polar opposites, their governing principles and underlying meanings appear to contradict one another. Whereas the isotropic gridiron removes any hierarchy from the city, the radial grid is predicated on such hierarchies. The gridiron defines the expansion of and movement through the city. The radial grid prioritises the city’s concentration into key nodes and the axes that frame these main points. This is beautifully exemplified at Versailles. Though not strictly a city plan, the landscaping performs a similar duty to street patterns. The message is very clear: the king of France sits at the centre of his universe, second only to God (Tafuri 1976). The radial grid is therefore the ultimate regressive metaphor. It uses progressive ideas put forward during the Renaissance and Enlightenment to enforce the medieval construct of absolute monarchy. This model exemplifies the despotism and inequality endemic to Europe that spawned both the French Revolution in 1789 and the American Revolution before it. 

Aerial images of Washington and Versailles. Democratic and autocratic form seem eerily similar 

Washington’s radial grid is therefore highly subversive, but not because its use in city planning was particularly radical. Examples can be found in Wren’s proposal for London, in Karlsruhe and in Paris before any conception of Washington (Tafuri 1976). Indeed, the formal ideas expressed in the capital form the vanguard of contemporary urban thought. Essentially the grid does the same things here as in Europe, focusing attention and placing symbolic importance on the objects at their nexus. The subversion derives from replacing the autocratic palace at Versailles and Antoinette’s decadent ‘farm’ with the Capitol building and the White House. The diagonal Pennsylvania Avenue connects these symbols of legislative and executive power. Outwith the Mall the intersections of radial and colonial grid create spaces intended for general public use, fifteen to represent the members of the US as of 1792. Apparently gimmicky, this move is crucial to understanding the symbolism behind Washington’s morphology. These squares encircle the Mall, sitting within the mundane fabric of the colonial grid. They are connected back to the Mall and one another by the radial grid. One could find a route using the orthogonal streets, but the most direct (and most symbolic connection) is formed by the diagonal boulevards. Therefore each state has a relationship to the other and they all relate back to the central government, i.e. the Capitol. The national government is at the centre of this universe and, with it, democracy.  

Idyllic views of Washington

The realisation of Washington DC was entirely due to a collective need for cohesive political identity, an identity that was ultimately misleading. The intention of generating new ideals, rather than representing existing ones, using something as fixed as a city, placed L’Enfant’s plan squarely within utopian territory. This highlights the fundamental flaw of Washington DC. It does not relate to the actuality of American culture and its development. Instead it represents a single strand of thought about the potential of this new country and the need to validate that existence on comparable terms with the European powers. What Tafuri calls America’s ‘bad conscience’, Washington DC became a political monument to values that were being rapidly eroded by the vicissitudes of the economic and industrial development that actually defined recognisably American urban planning (1976). The grid here is propaganda.

A Twentysomething architect's checklist

A checklist of priorities for twentysomething architects. 
For everyone else, a young person yelling about things they probably don't understand. In my defence I don't think it's meant to be understood.

If it hurts your feelings, I am sorry. ish.
If it makes you angry, good. Do something about it.
If it makes you happy, I'd advise medical attention.

Contains bad language 

•             Fuck Critical Regionalism
•      Fuck Parametricism
•          Fuck Zaha Hadid
•          Fuck Revit
•          Fuck urbanisation
•          Fuck neoliberals
•          Fuck socialists
•          Fuck extremists
•          Fuck disciplines
•          Fuck Frank Gehry
•          Fuck suburbs
•          Fuck High Rise
•          Fuck facadism
•          Fuck technologists
•          Fuck project managing
•          Fuck consultants
•          Fuck convention
•          Fuck conformity
•          Fuck meetings
•          Fuck facebook groups
•          Fuck methodology diagrams
•          Fuck flow charts
•          Fuck laser cutting
•          Fuck hashtags
•          Fuck crits
•          Fuck groupwork
•          Fuck railroads
•          Fuck results
•          Fuck outcomes
•          Fuck advertising
•          Fuck CVs
•          Fuck competitions
•          Fuck megacites
•      FUCK BANALITY

Meditations on Metropolis

Of all the modernists Ludwig Hilbersheimer is perhaps the most compelling, prescient and relevant to anyone with the slightest inkling of a project for the city. He has been of enormous influence on my thinking and below is an abortive attempt to unpick his concept of Metropolis.

A table comparing the idea of 'City' with the idea of 'Metropolis'

Text (unfinished) that begins to describe the difference between city and metropolis

We are fifteen years into the 3^rd Millennium. The statement appears overly portentous, but it is necessary to highlight the extraordinary shift humanity has undertaken in the past thirty five years.

 The 20^th Century was defined by a dichotomous, almost paradoxical, relationship between conflict and expansion; our capacity to stand on the Moon and commit genocide were realised within the same epoch. This era is now history. However the ideologies wrought, the discoveries made and the cultures formed, when coupled with our innate desire for persistence, had consequences that continue to shape our present. An exhaustive compilation and analysis would be futile and unhelpful. There are however a number of elements that underpin our existence, reduced for now to the paradigmatic conclusion that; that the way we think is out of step with our technological means. 

The most salient element germinated in the early 20^th Century and eventually defined it. The drastic revaluation of economics became the primary driver of human existence. Whilst this irrefutably brought great improvements to life during that period, in our contemporary predicament economics has begun to subversively counteract progress. The production of capital and its primacy in economics was exaggerated per absurdum by the neoliberal capitalism of the late 20^th Century. Everything is now put to work, everything is productive.  An innocuous ideal at face value, in fact our entire existence is underwritten by the continued survival of a system is built on several paradoxes. Firstly in theory, everything must simultaneously be both limitless and totally organised (to ensure maximum productivity). Try organising infinity and the ramifications become damningly apparent. When this absurd theory is applied to practice, the paradox mutates and poses the question: how can the production of capital be limitless in a world of very finite resources? The resultant conflicts and contradictions underpin all endeavours to perpetuate and propagate capitalism. One of the most malignant ‘solutions’ merely presents another paradox. In order to ensure that the aforementioned resources never run out, nothing in our world can be discounted as productive, nothing is absolute from exploitation. Economics (recently synonymous with capitalism) has thus subsumed every other aspect of human life, bending it to conform to principles of the market. Economics becomes the relative field into which humanity can be further subdivided and refined into increasingly atomised cells.  However, occurring in tandem and in contrast to this artificial multiplication of culture is the almost pathological need to make this process efficient, to reduce anything and everything to its most basic incarnation. The reductive logic results in a fundamental sameness that rejects any and all costs, perceived to be extraneous in regard to profit. How then does one reconcile the desire for a maximal variety presented by atomisation, with the totalitarian compulsion to strip that variety back to its most cost efficient form? The world enters a state of insanity, mimicking ingenuous progress by perpetually consuming and reconstructing itself. Each time the most superficial layer is altered purely for the sake of newness, giving the impression we have moved forward.  Are we doomed to our Promethean fate? Will we ever break this cycle of bad infinity?

Urban form has been reduced by market forces to fragmented islands of emeralds labyrinths and fortresses

We must question the resounding impact of our immediate history and examine its impact upon our lives, to discern a less bleak direction for this epoch. Our concern in this work is architectural inquiry.  It is bounded to understanding the manifestation of this problem within the construct of the city. Nowhere has the impact of capitalism been more explicit or more damaging than on our urban environment. Therefore we will explore the role of architecture and its complicity in this transformation. 

A pessimistic view of what remains to architects (Archifactory project, will elucidate in a future post)

   

To begin a clear distinction must be made. The urban environment can be viewed as a blanket term for human settlement. The aforementioned changes can be most quickly surmised in the question what is a city and what is a metropolis?

Cities and metropolises both occupy physical space. Both entities are composed of the same elements. They both have streets and a wide variety of building types. The physical size and population of a settlement only offer cursory understandings of either entity, more important are the desires of its populace. How a settlement is defined is based upon the forces governing its creation. We can therefore state that ‘city’ and ‘metropolis’ are descriptors. Identifiable by specific conditions present within a settlement, crucially they define its generative identity. This identity is what allows us to understand society and diagnose its problems. Differentiating between the city and the metropolis, how they evolved and the resultant conflicts that arise is unlikely to provide a comprehensive solution to the problems of society. The aim of this thesis is to establish a coherent understanding of the contemporary urban environment, in order to suggest a platform for reclaiming that environment. Maybe the metropolis is simply the natural evolution of the urban environment. Maybe it cannot be resisted and should not be destroyed, maybe the only answer its to embrace it. Plunge headlong into developing the concept of the metropolis based upon its principles. What does that mean for people?

The relationship between politics, economics and the city has been evolving since the 18^th Century when Giovanni Batista Nolli charted the ‘Eternal City’ of Rome as a system for infrastructural management, with isolated architectural islands. Nolli’s map made cartographic distinction between architecture, drawn in poche and the urban fabric, block footprints drawn with a linear hatch. The former’s inclusion of the interior plan establish architecture as immutable and fixed, the later free to be altered and reformed according to newly emerging principles of urban management. Emerging just a few decades before Adam Smith’s paradigmatic treatise The Wealth of Nations, the Nolli map becomes a prescient project for the city that foresees the shift towards economics and resultant concept of the modern metropolis. The city is a fundamentally political entity. Its growth form and life is both governed by a collective will and a manifestation of it. This collective will is usually represented by some form of government. As a manifestation of collective the city is an absolute idea, the flow of people and economics is governed by the political identity of a recognisable artefact.

Venturi compounds the metropolitan nature of Nolli's Rome

The word metropolis has existed in English since the medieval period. Initially used to define the capital or primary city of a state the word evolved to mean a large and busy city, manifested in the capitalist cities that were expanding from the late 18^th Century onward. This semantic mutation coupled with its etymology surmise the shifts in humanity explored in this thesis. Translated literally to ‘mother city’ there is an inference to the most enduring and intimate interpersonal relationship, that of mother and child. The metropolis therefore evokes a deep connection between it and its inhabitants. When viewed in this context we see the change in our mother from a political to an economic entity as a re-balancing of settlement patterns, emphasising the urban over the rural. Use of the word metropolis is not synonymous with the word city; indeed the difference in meaning and connotation exemplifies the problem at hand. The metropolis is a private entity, propelled by the singular desires of an assembled multitude. Unity cannot be achieved because civic ideology is too constrictive. The foundation of a metropolitan society relies instead upon the impartiality of free markets, that the trade of goods and services is determined by economic laws of supply and demand. The role of politics then changes, no longer the forge of life and purpose, it now just acts as a failsafe. The actions of the population are now a reaction to market changes and more or less political shepherding and private will becomes mutual self interest.

The key distinction between the metropolis and the city lies in relationship to two polar conditions exhibited by humanity. Both entities are composed of the same elements. They both have streets and a wide variety of building types. The city presupposes form, governed by an architectonic manifestation of the inhabitants’ political will. It is a discrete object, to be understood as absolute from its territory. In the metropolis however morphology is secondary to systems that ensure its productivity. 

Hilbersheimer's Hochhausstadt and a plan of Dunfermline inspired by Piranesi's Scenografia
Paradigms of Metropolis and City

We're off to see the Wizard

Victor Fleming’s 1939 film the Wizard of Oz is a dark, disturbing and downright dystopian fantasy. The plot unfolds around the hopelessly naive daughter of a Midwestern farmer. After trudging through the first  few dreary scenes, a cataclysmic event results in the manslaughter of a citizen from a nation entirely foreign to her (for a start everything is now in colour, critically for us). She is manipulated into staging political revolution and destabilising an entire region over a pair of shoes, before being summarily dismissed back home.  Of course ultimately it could all be the ravings of a mentally ill girl in 1930s Kansas but that would make the whole thing even more horrific and in poor taste, surely no-one would ever actually suggest that... Return to Oz.

Drone Strikes are getting a little silly nowadays

As much fun as it is re-evaluating the messages of films in light of contemporary events, the ham-fisted and wholesale destruction of a standing social order before merrily absconding from any sense of responsibility, resulting in sequel even grimmer and more fucked up than before, is entirely tangential to the thrust of this post. What interests me is the possibility of alluding to a particular urban condition by using popular and evocative imagery. By developing a visual shorthand recognisable to anyone, the intention is to create polemical statements about architecture and the city that can be assessed, appropriated or rejected by near enough anyone.

I’ll explain this through an example; the Emerald City. Dorothy’s first main task is to seek out the assistance of the titular Wizard of Oz, who resides in the Emerald City. The city itself is portrayed as a glistening cluster of jagged crystals. Framed against the sky it sparkles and glimmers with promise. However things are not exactly as they seem, the city has a staged look that doesn’t derive from filmmaking’s limitations in the 1939. There is a brittleness to it all that is underlined by their visit to the Wizard. Full of bombast, pomp and self importance the Emerald City’s great man seems to have been particularly influential on a young Donald Trump. The revelation that he is a fraud is where things get pertinent for us. Throughout the film the Emerald City has evoked associations with capitalist city, especially as glass and steel construction is normative in the ‘development’ of city centres. At first it is utopian, an image of salvation after the perilous road. However the glamour and the gloss soon give way to a seriously hostile environment, ubiquitous in character and threatening in scale (complete with obnoxious security personnel). Ultimately we learn it’s all a sham, concocted by small men with a big need to impress their importance upon everyone else.

Mies van der Rohe and Robert Venturi, totally comfortable theoretical bedfellows

By riffing on Venturi’s research into signage and image (Learning from Las Vegas) and taking visual inspiration from Mies van der Rohe’s Friedrichstrasse tower proposal (made all the more pertinent because it wasn’t actually built). This series of images explores a descent into a real life ‘Emerald City’ growing up around the industrial ruins around Nine Elms in London. Whilst the photographs are site specific, these islands of corporate greed are becoming evermore ubiquitous within cities across the globe, the Emerald City is therefore a franchise. A morphology that is emerging in the city and colonising any area it can rapaciously and without any thought to quality of place. The images were initially conceived as part of a site study in the area, where I was quite taken with the stark contrast between the gritty existing fabric and the glass protuberances being constructed. Given that the prevailing buyer of these ludicrously expensive properties are non resident non domiciles, the shadowy and insidious nature hidden behind a glittering facade of glass seems especially aligned with image of the creepily perfect citadel in the Wizard of Oz and its corrupted machinations within.

 

Head in the Clouds

Series of photographs snapped on the M6 (one in Manchester). Mostly as something to pass the time, but it seems to suggest an emerging fascination with clouds, will post when the thoughts have coalesced a bit.

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.

THE GRID: Washington and Utopia Part 1

It seems hypocritical for the newly emergent Americans to adopt such a reminder of colonial oppression, yet in 1791 a plan for Washington DC by Pierre Charles L’Enfant was created using that gridiron as a basis for the layout. However, what distinguishes Washington from contemporaries like Philedelphia and New York was the deliberate use of two grids, both radial and orthogonal to generate the plan. Until this point the complex layering of street patterns was a signifier of age in cities and was thus a uniquely European phenomenon (from the perspective of this discussion). Centuries of political conflict would leave its scars on urban fabric as the city was constructed and reconstructed over time. Multiple street patterns are one of the clearest signs of this conflict. They invariably contradict the intentions of the pattern and embody the image of the city as a dynamic clash of ideas, functions and cultures. It brings to mind Haussmann’s laceration of Paris or Sixtus IV’s pilgrim routes before him (Aureli 2011). This simultaneity was quintessentially urban and perfectly represented a society that drove people to the colonies in the first place. Framed thus the scheme for a revolutionary capital seems paradoxical. When viewed pathologically it provides insight into both the American psyche and a shift in meaning for the grid in the city.

Phildelphia 1683

Philedelphia 2016

When viewed at face value, the integration of radial and colonial grids in Washington simply created buildings that were more difficult to construct, more expensive and less practical than purely orthogonal blocks (Ballon 2012). However, to contest issues of pragmatism here is to miss the point; as Tafuri notes ‘the least economically necessary city in America is also the most configured’ (1976). 

What then was the point of the radial grid? Within the answer lies a more fundamental issue, what was the point of Washington DC? Indeed the notion of attempting to centralise the control of a region as vast as America before mass transit and communication seemed foolish. Whereas the ports of the Eastern Seaboard found a clear driver in trade and economics, the capital was purely an act of political will. The Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1788 made clear that any central government needed to operate and convene autonomously from its member states. The District of Columbia was created to this end, only as a result of negotiation, and its existence justified purely in the legal terms of the Constitution (Article One, Section Eight) (1776). However, even such a hallowed document did not solely provide an ingenuous reason for the physical existence of Washington DC in a real place within America. Only through a quid pro quo between the government and member states was the Potomac site chosen (Crew, Webb & Woolridge 1892). Unlike the strategic defensibility of Edinburgh’s volcanoes or the connectivity offered to London by the Thames, there was no intrinsic reason for DC’s placement. The square could literally be dropped anywhere, highlighted in the city’s lack of relationship to the Potomac. When compared to other capitals the justification for Washington’s existence seems very fragile. It can be seen therefore that only the idea of the District has any pre-existing veracity. The creation of its city (Washington) was not a pragmatic response to the needs of its inhabitants, it was an attempt to realise a utopia (Tafuri 1976). The need here was validation, the innate human desire to claim and to own their environment. The birth of Washington DC was the concrete expression of what America aimed to be. It sought to construct this image as a physical manifestation of the Revolution, artificially defining its identity. In place of ingenuous growth dictated by need and culture, the point of Washington was to symbolise a new culture. Its purpose was defining America, not representing it. 

How does the apparently paradoxical design of the plan fulfil this political will? 

It was Jefferson who provided the philosophical basis for L’Enfant’s design and with it laid the foundations for American self-image. Jefferson envisioned this new utopian democracy as distinctly anti-urban with a strong bias towards agrarian economy. This vision opposed the laissez faire capitalism of America’s imperial parents and the resultant industrialisation the United Kingdom was undertaking and contradicted other views of America as an entity driven by economic progressiveness. Jefferson feared the authoritarianism of capitalist economics and consequently rejected urbanisation, making his utopia thoroughly regressive (Tafuri 1976). Jefferson wanted the foundation of a democracy without its logical consequences of industrialisation and economic imperialism, a contradiction that highlights how radical L’Enfant’s design for Washington was.

Hamilton vs Jefferson

In response to the chaos of European cities and opposing the conceptual fragility of the Baroque in the new age, classicism’s underlying rationality provided order to the form and management that cities desperately required both politically and economically. However, there also existed several competing reactions and interpretations of ideal city form. The complex and conflicting ideological mesh that intensified during Europe’s Enlightenment resulted from the relative intimacy of the territory and meant no unified position could form. This was not the case for the USA. Physical and philosophical separation precluded Americans from influencing the debate. Indeed though abundant in resources and enterprise, the fledgling nation remained an isolated composite of quite divergent ideals.