Contents

III The Urban Context

197

Bogdan Bogdanovi and the Search for a Meaningful City

199

From New Units of Settlement to the Old Arbat:

The Soviet NR Groups Search for Spaces of Community

211

Theories and Practices of Re-Humanizing Postwar Italian Architecture:

Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Giancarlo De Carlo

229

Urban Planning and Christian Humanism: The Institut

Suprieur dUrbanisme Appliqu in Brussels under Gaston Bardet

243

The Monumentality of the Matchbox: On Slabs and Politics in the Cold War

255

Between City and University: New Monumentality

in the Student Center of the Campus of Coimbra

283

IV

295

Vladimir Kuli

Foreword

kos Moravnszky

Introduction

Elke Beyer

13

Judith Hopfengrtner

Discourses on Humanism

Luca Molinari

21

Re-Humanizing Architecture: The Search for a Common Ground

in the Postwar Years, 19501970

23

CIAM: From Spirit of the Age to the Spiritual Needs of People

43

Sven Sterken, Eva Weyns

kos Moravnszky

Stanislaus von Moos

Annie Pedret

Was Humanized Socialist Modernism Possible After All?

The Promise and Failure of Mass Housing in Hungary

63

Mieczysaw Porbski: Man and Architecture in the Iconosphere

85

Susana Constantino

Bla Kerkgyrt
Wojciech Baus

II Building New Societies

99

Continuity or Discontinuity? Narratives on Modern Architecture

in East and West Germany during the Cold War

101

Building Together: Construction Sites in a Divided Europe During the 1950s

115

Building a New Warsaw, Building a Social Warsaw:

The First Reconstruction Plans and Their International Review

129

Building a New Community A Comparison Between

the Netherlands and Czechoslovakia

145

Social Efficiency and Humanistic Specificity:

A Double Discourse in Romanian Architecture in the 1960s

173

Sociological and Environmental-Psychology Research in Estonia

during the 1960s and 1970s: A Critique of Soviet Mass-Housing

185

The Inhabited Nature

Socialist Pastoral: The Role of Folklore in Socialist

Architectural Culture, 1950s and 1960s

297

Dwelling in the Middle Landscape:

Rethinking the Architecture of Rural Communities at CIAM 10

311

A Desire for Innocence? Community and Recreational

Architecture around Lake Balaton (19571968)

325

Unexpected Side Effects: Indirect Benefits

of International Mass Tourism on Croatias Adriatic Coast

339

Appendix

361

Notes on Contributors
Index

363
371

Juliana Maxim

Hilde Heynen

Nelson Mota

Nikolas Drosos

Domonkos Wettstein

Marcela Hankov

Michael Zinganel

Marijke Martin, Cor Wagenaar

Dana Vais

Karin Hallas-Murula

kos Moravnszky

Foreword
East West Central: Re-Building Europe

The Iron Curtain stood for the static immutability of the status quo. From
Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended
across the Continent Winston Churchill told his audience in a famous
speech on March 5, 1946. Like most metaphors, the term Iron Curtain has
imprinted itself into the perception of reality and was associated with the
fortified border, erected to block the movement of people and information
between East and West. Architectural historiography followed suit, presenting the history of modernization and modernism in Europe from a perspective determined and limited by this political boundary. The imagery produced by the dissolution of the Soviet Union: the fall, the lifting or the
raising of the curtain, the breaching of the wall, is a sign of confusion
regarding not only metaphors, but also underlying assumptions, methods
and categories of architectural historiography.
Writing in the 1920s, art historian Erwin Panofsky famously referred to
the perspective as a symbolic form. By this he meant that representing reality by means of a cohesive set of rules and symbols would give shape to a
specific worldview. The exchange of views between cultures can therefore be
studied using examples of visual representations, based on differing concepts
of the relationship between observer and reality. When Panofsky gave his
seminal lecture on Western perspective, Russian philosopher-physicist-inventor-priest Pavel Florensky wrote a study on the reverse perspective used
in icon painting. He compared it to Renaissance representations of space in
order to point out the differences between the two types of visual representation and their respective philosophical and theological underpinnings.
The exchange of glances as expressed in the German word Blickwechsel
is a suggestive image: we are invited to switch between the viewpoints of the
observer and the observed, so that our image of the world is suddenly no
longer taken for granted. The metaphor of the Iron Curtain, however, sug-

kos Moravnszky

gests that after WWII the boundary between the two halves of Europe was
hermetic and impermeable, even to the gaze. Western and Eastern Europe
regarded each other as their own dark others: communism and capitalism,
divided by the Iron Curtain, were the Twin Empires on the mythical map of
Europe. Yet, the perfect symmetry of the image eschewed the evidently more
complex reality. As an image, the Iron Curtain was able to trigger both Western
fear and desire, but actually it was far from being impenetrable. Rather, the
Iron Curtains semi-permeability, which turned it into an osmotic membrane,
refuted the supposed symmetry of the East-West division. Contrary to the
widespread identification in the West with the concept of Western Europe
and its corresponding values, the idea of a shared Eastern European identity
has never been popular among the inhabitants of this region. Architects in
the East were generally very well informed about the latest developments in
Western architecture. One could hardly survive as an architect without having browsed the latest issues of LArchitecture dAujourdhui, The Architectural
Review or the magazines from Scandinavian countries, all of which were
available in the libraries of the large state-owned design offices. The optical
metaphor, however, held true: images were floating around but remained disembodied signifiers, as they werent grounded in personal experience. At the
same time, travels of architects and professional organizations from the West
to the East intensified during 1970s and 1980s. The lessons that participants
drew from such exchanges more often than not depended on their respective
viewpoints of the perspective.
The discrepancy between the bipolarity of block-thinking and the more
complex and heterogeneous civilizational and political reality of Europe has
led historians to develop different concepts to describe the historical identity of European regions more adequately than the East-West dichotomy. The
term Mitteleuropa has never been merely a geographical term. It was a political one as well, just as East and West were connected with distinct political
ideas or concepts. With the active support of intellectuals from the United
States and England in the 1980s, Central Europe became a program to affirm
a particular identity of the region: politically part of the Eastern Bloc, but
without losing its Western cultural orientation a result of the regions specific historical development and its political affiliations before the war. The
phrase, a peculiar one, a hybrid of sorts, hearkened back to the Cold War
period; while it reflected a certain deference to the ideas of Milan Kundera
and others, it avoided the outright suggestion that the notion of Eastern
Europe was outmoded, essentially a fabrication of the age of Stalin, that it
brought together in a single category societies that remained significantly
different wrote Stephen R. Graubard, editor of Daedalus, the journal of

Moravnszky/East West Central Set Vol. 13 978-3-0356-1014-7 December 2016

www.birkhauser.com

80

Bla Kerkgyrt

81

Was Humanized Socialist Modernism Possible After All?

fig. 15 Cover of the
book Sociological Problems
of New Housing Estates
written by Gyrgy Konrd
and Ivn Szelnyi (Budapest: Akadmiai Kiad
1969).

fig. 13 Drawing
from the periodical
Vrospts (City Building) accompanying the
text Social problems in
the urban architecture in
Budapest written by Ivn
Szelnyi. 8:1 (1971), p. 10.

fig. 14 Drawing from

the periodical Vrospts
(City Building) accompanying the text Housing
construction in Budapest,
8:6 (1971), p. 7.

space, along with the unalterable appearance of buildings. Similarly, housing

estates built almost simultaneously on the scale of entire city districts hindered both further development and any adaptation to changing needs and
circumstances. He argued for a more variable and flexible building practice,
which made some changes necessary even in the methods of industrialized
housing production38 (figs. 13, 14).
The third critique came from the urban sociologist Ivn Szelnyi and the
well-known novelist Gyrgy Konrd, who worked together in the 1960s, criticizing both the ineffective economic and political model of socialist urbanization and the negative social consequences of mass-housing estates. Szelnyi
and Konrd refuted the official line and general belief about the excessive
urbanization of socialist urban development. They demonstrated statistically that the degree of urbanization was actually lower than at the outset
of the twentieth century. Forced and ineffective industrialization under
the socialist system demanded a great amount of resources and hindered
the appropriate development of infrastructure and housing.39 Szelnyi and
Konrd conducted empirical research on housing estates in Hungarian cities

116

Nikolas Drosos

Such parallels were particularly pronounced in Europes eastern half,

where postwar reconstruction coincided with the new constitution of Peoples
Democracies closely aligned with Moscow. Drawing on Soviet precedents
from the 1930s, such as photographs in the widely circulated journal USSR
in Construction, collaborative building became a central trope in both architectural and artistic practice, as well as in official political discourse. While
for Le Corbusier the chantiers de synthse were visions that still remained to
be realized, images of existing, socialist construction sites were constantly
conjured in different media as potent stand-ins of the new political system
being built from the ground up.
Warsaw, which underwent tremendous destruction during the final stage
of the war, became iconic in that respect. In July 1949, the Stalinist President
of the Peoples Republic of Poland, Bolesaw Bierut, presented a six-year plan
for the reconstruction of Warsaw, a significant component of which was the
Marszakowska Housing District (Marszakowska Dzielnica Mieszkaniowa,
known by its Polish initials MDM), the Warsaw equivalent to the contemporaneous Stalinallee in Berlin (fig. 1).4 Designed in socialist-realist style by a
team of architects lead by Jzef Sigalin and Stanisaw Jankowski, the project
was intended to provide housing for 45,000 people, along with communal
facilities such as schools and kindergartens, clinics, theaters and shops. It was
developed along the prewar axis of Marszakowska Street, which was significantly widened to accommodate colossal ionic colonnades of boxy pilasters
in grey granite. The monumental Constitution Square was placed at the center
of the ensemble; it was named for the new Polish constitution, which had
been modeled on the Soviet one and was inaugurated in 1952 on the annual
Holiday of Rebirth, when the first section of the MDM was opened with a
grand procession through the square. This double inauguration of new political and architectural structures marked the apex of Stalinization in Poland a
process that had already begun in 1948.
On the north side of Constitution Square, a series of six limestone reliefs
prominently placed above arches depict the process of the projects creation,
from its conception and design to its construction (figs. 2, 3). As in the other
reliefs of the MDM, men and women are equally represented, reflecting the
greater belief that socialism ought to be built through the equal participation
of genders. This rhetoric of equality governs the entire series: equal space is
given to different professions, from the administrators, architects and engineers, through artists and craftspeople responsible for the decorations, to the
welders and bricklayers.
As works of art integrated into architecture, the Constitution Square reliefs
are an example of the synthesis of the arts; at the same time, they give concrete

as early as the late 1960s. Their profound analysis addressed the systems social
vision and promises. The housing shortage triggered competition for relatively scarce new flats from which white-collar workers and the intelligentsia
benefited in opposition to state ideology. Standardized, expensive housing
production resulted in a homogeneous and inflexible housing stock without
the necessary differentiation: without the construction of cheaper flats for
first-time buyers, for example, in order to foster mobility40 (fig. 15).
The newly built city districts were, according to these urban sociologists,
neither urban nor rural in character. These highly subsidized, territorially
concentrated housing developments had other undesirable consequences:
neglected old-city districts declined, the middle class moved away (to new
housing estates, for instance) and slums arose. Their final conclusion was as
follows: when the differentiation in architecture does not match the real differences in society in an appropriate manner, it fosters the increase of social
differences and inequalities and causes new segregation.41
The efforts towards pluralism, social control and autonomy ran against
the very principles of the existing centralized system and its institutions. The

117

Building Together
fig. 1 Jzef Sigalin,
Stanisaw Jankowski and
others, Marszakowska
Housing District
(Marszakowska Dzielnica
Mieszkaniowa MDM),
Warsaw, 195052.
Photograph: Edmund
Zdanowski.

fig. 2 J. Chojnacki, Stone relief from Constitution Square, 1952. Photograph:

Tomasz Kubaczyk.

fig. 3 J. Chojnacki, Stone relief from Constitution Square, 1952. Photograph:

Tomasz Kubaczyk.

form to the discourse on synthesis by depicting the process of the concepts

materialization. Their focus on the community of the construction site encapsulates the equivalence between artistic synthesis and social harmony that

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156

Marijke Martin, Cor Wagenaar

157

Building a New Community

fig. 9 Proposal for a regulation and building plan for Stranice/Prague,

including Solidarita neighborhood at north-western border (prepared by State
Regulatory Commission), 1928. IPR Prague.

fig. 11 State Regulation Plan for Nusle/Prague with sdlit Zelen lika: its
realized parts are in blue, the not-yet-realized parts in red; Pankrs is projected
North of Zelen lika, 1938. IPR Prague.

fig. 10 Detailed lay-out Solidarita by Frantiek Jech, Hanu Majer, Karel

Storch, 1947. IPR Prague.

nist coup of February 1948, most investments were channeled towards heavy
industries (which, apart from producing industrial products also expanded
the class of industrial workers). Housing lagged behind and in the late 1940s
and 1950s only a few sdlits were built (figs. 9, 10).
With Klement Gottwalds rise to power, architects and urbanists were
expected to contribute to what should be communist in nature. Remarkably,
Czechoslovakia could boast a sizable and influential group of designers who
had already committed themselves to this task before the Second World War.
A prime example is the neighborhood of Zelen lika (Green Fox), a lowincome housing estate situated at Pragues left Vltava river bank, south of the
future Pankrs district. Zelen likas realization was based on Pavel Janks
winning entry for the 1931 competition; it replaced the plan made by the same

236

Luca Molinari

ject in his career where the experience of Casabella Continuit met with the
strong influence of Team 10, which he had been part of since 1958.
De Carlo presented his project for Collegio del Colle in Urbino at the 1965
Team 10 meeting in Berlin. The axonometric schemes effectively interpreted
the idea of connective spaces as the new, communitarian places for students
as well as fundamental elements of visual connection between the modern
architecture and the pre-existing context (figs. 4 and 5). The voids connecting
different student units suddenly became the new, original actor of the project,
and the system of pedestrian connections, seats and open windows onto the
landscape represented a different way of imagining public space for the student community. In this project, De Carlo definitively merged the cultural
experience of the continuit with the incentive of Team 10s discussion on
urban mega-structures and infrastructures.30
Rather than exchanging any ostensible stylistic features, De Carlos attraction to Team 10 rested in a shared cultural interest and the urge to explore
new ways of implementing architectural and urban projects with regard to
their social effects on people and communities. Aldo van Eyck formulated
this in 1966:
What makes this building so house- and city-like (hence successful)? []
It is at once both places; a way of access and communication; both open
and closed; both inside and outside; both large and small; and has, above
all, both individual and collective meaning. It belongs to the building as
much as it belongs to the site, in fact through it the building is the site,
the site is the building.31

architect in 192712 (fig. 11). Its program and typologies mirror contemporary
modern trends: a mathematical rhythm of abstract row buildings combined
with the then already assumed collectivization of daily life as exemplified
by the provision of collective facilities: a launderette, cooking facilities, a
kindergarten and schools, most of them situated along the central axis. Of the
collective facilities, only a school and launderette had been built during the
first building phase between 1936 and 1938. Individual small dwellings (with
an average surface of 34 m2, a minimum norm that had been defined in the
Housing for the Poor Act of 1930) were provided in pavlaov (gallery flats),
the entrance galleries of which were explicitly meant to promote a collective
lifestyle. The architecture was designed by different architects, among them
the well-known Antonn ern, in an international modernist vocabulary
of plastered cubical masses. The architecture of Zelen lika illustrates that
in Czechoslovakia, modernism had not withered away as it had done in
most European countries including the Netherlands. On the contrary: The
interwar years up until the late 1930s had been a period of over boiling
building activity, as the architect Jii Novotn would later call it, partly the
result of an extremely active, leftish, and internationally imbedded generation
of architects and ground-breaking juridical reforms.13 Scientific research

237

Theories and Practices of Re-Humanizing Postwar Italian Architecture

fig. 4 Giancarlo De Carlo, Collegio del Colle: Urbino, 1965, axonometry.

Source: Archivio Giancarlo De Carlo, IUAV.
fig. 5 Giancarlo De
Carlo, Collegio del Colle:
Urbino. Source: Photo by
Luca Molinari

Van Eyck is echoed a few years later by a statement De Carlo made about
Urbino:
My study sought to decipher the system of relationships, present and
potential, between the built and the natural, treating them as a single
whole, which is what they in fact are: because the natural is also entirely
constructed and repeats the forms and rhythms characteristic of the fabric of the city.32
The student residences are conceived as a sophisticated complex of relationships between the spaces and their inhabitants, between the new buildings
and the landscape, between the inhabitants and their experience of the environment. Perhaps this principle is the concept that brings us closest to experiments being conducted at the same time by other members of Team 10, in
which the rigidity of the Grille CIAM is molded and folded under the weight
of concern with the social and environmental community, its psychology,

Moravnszky/East West Central Set Vol. 13 978-3-0356-1014-7 December 2016

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III Practices and Agencies

197

Architectural Intelligence and Scarcity-Driven Design

in the 1960s Yugoslavia

199

From New Empiricism to Structuralism. The Swedish National

Board of Public Building (KBS)

215

Courtyards, Corners, Streetfronts: Re-Imagining Mass Housing Areas

in Tallinn

233

Complex Projects: Landscape Architecture as the Integrating Discipline

253

41

UIA, R. Buckminster Fuller and the Architectural Consequences

of Total Environment

271

Rittels Riddles: Design Education and Democratic Planning

in the Age of Information

61

New Agencies: Convergent Frameworks of Research

and Architectural Design

291

Nested Utopias: GEAMs Large-Scale Designs

81

On Bees and Bolts: kolka SIAL An Architects Commune

in Czechoslowakia

Appendix

307

97

Notes on Contributors
Index

309

Contents

Foreword

Liljana Blagojevi

kos Moravnszky

Introduction

13

Erik Sigge

Karl R. Kegler

Technology: New Scales and Projects

21

Zooming In: The Powers of Scale, 19601980

Andres Kurg

23

kos Moravnszky

Axel Zutz

The Choreography of the Console:

Electronic Environments and their Operators
David Crowley

Andreas Kalpakci

Torsten Lange

Piotr Bujas, Alicja Gzowska

Cornelia Escher

Mirko Baum

II Planning, Design and Territory

113

Le Corbusiers Geo-Architecture and the Emergence

of Territorial Aesthetics

115

Projective Geographies Between East and West

135

Towards the Functional Society: Paradigm Shifts

in the Regional Planning of West and East Germany

153

Vacationing within the Walls. The Design and Development

of Holiday Resorts in the GDR

173

Urbanism and Academia: Teaching Urban Design in the East

189

315

Hashim Sarkis

Kenny Cupers, Igor Demchenko

Karl R. Kegler

Daniela Spiegel

Tams Meggyesi

kos Moravnszky

Foreword
East West Central: Re-Building Europe

The Iron Curtain stood for the static immutability of the status quo. From
Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended
across the Continent Winston Churchill told his audience in a famous
speech on March 5, 1946. Like most metaphors, the term Iron Curtain has
imprinted itself into the perception of reality and was associated with the
fortified border, erected to block the movement of people and information
between East and West. Architectural historiography followed suit, presenting the history of modernization and modernism in Europe from a perspective determined and limited by this political boundary. The imagery produced by the dissolution of the Soviet Union: the fall, the lifting or the
raising of the curtain, the breaching of the wall, is a sign of confusion
regarding not only metaphors, but also underlying assumptions, methods
and categories of architectural historiography.
Writing in the 1920s, art historian Erwin Panofsky famously referred to
the perspective as a symbolic form. By this he meant that representing reality by means of a cohesive set of rules and symbols would give shape to a
specific worldview. The exchange of views between cultures can therefore be
studied using examples of visual representations, based on differing concepts
of the relationship between observer and reality. When Panofsky gave his
seminal lecture on Western perspective, Russian philosopher-physicist-inventor-priest Pavel Florensky wrote a study on the reverse perspective used
in icon painting. He compared it to Renaissance representations of space in
order to point out the differences between the two types of visual representation and their respective philosophical and theological underpinnings.
The exchange of glances as expressed in the German word Blickwechsel
is a suggestive image: we are invited to switch between the viewpoints of the
observer and the observed, so that our image of the world is suddenly no
longer taken for granted. The metaphor of the Iron Curtain, however, sug-

kos Moravnszky

gests that after WWII the boundary between the two halves of Europe was
hermetic and impermeable, even to the gaze. Western and Eastern Europe
regarded each other as their own dark others: communism and capitalism,
divided by the Iron Curtain, were the Twin Empires on the mythical map of
Europe. Yet, the perfect symmetry of the image eschewed the evidently more
complex reality. As an image, the Iron Curtain was able to trigger both Western
fear and desire, but actually it was far from being impenetrable. Rather, the
Iron Curtains semi-permeability, which turned it into an osmotic membrane,
refuted the supposed symmetry of the East-West division. Contrary to the
widespread identification in the West with the concept of Western Europe
and its corresponding values, the idea of a shared Eastern European identity
has never been popular among the inhabitants of this region. Architects in
the East were generally very well informed about the latest developments in
Western architecture. One could hardly survive as an architect without having browsed the latest issues of LArchitecture dAujourdhui, The Architectural
Review or the magazines from Scandinavian countries, all of which were
available in the libraries of the large state-owned design offices. The optical
metaphor, however, held true: images were floating around but remained disembodied signifiers, as they werent grounded in personal experience. At the
same time, travels of architects and professional organizations from the West
to the East intensified during 1970s and 1980s. The lessons that participants
drew from such exchanges more often than not depended on their respective
viewpoints of the perspective.
The discrepancy between the bipolarity of block-thinking and the more
complex and heterogeneous civilizational and political reality of Europe has
led historians to develop different concepts to describe the historical identity of European regions more adequately than the East-West dichotomy. The
term Mitteleuropa has never been merely a geographical term. It was a political one as well, just as East and West were connected with distinct political
ideas or concepts. With the active support of intellectuals from the United
States and England in the 1980s, Central Europe became a program to affirm
a particular identity of the region: politically part of the Eastern Bloc, but
without losing its Western cultural orientation a result of the regions specific historical development and its political affiliations before the war. The
phrase, a peculiar one, a hybrid of sorts, hearkened back to the Cold War
period; while it reflected a certain deference to the ideas of Milan Kundera
and others, it avoided the outright suggestion that the notion of Eastern
Europe was outmoded, essentially a fabrication of the age of Stalin, that it
brought together in a single category societies that remained significantly
different wrote Stephen R. Graubard, editor of Daedalus, the journal of

Moravnszky/East West Central Set Vol. 13 978-3-0356-1014-7 December 2016

www.birkhauser.com

84

Cornelia Escher

fig. 1 Oskar Hansen,

Zofia Hansen and Lech
Tomaszewski, Pavilion
Wachlarz, Sao Paolo, 1959.
Zofia & Oskar Hansen
Foundation.

Biotechnica that was designed for a fair in Rio de Janeiro in 1957 and finally
assembled at Sao Paolo in 1959. The pavilion consisted of a thin membrane
that protected the visitors and the objects exposed from tropical rain and sun.
The membrane directed the wind along its surface, but it was also permeable
and reactive. Moving with the currents of the wind, it staged an amorphous
breathing and seemed to be imbued with life (fig. 1).
Other examples are Ottos early designs for individual houses in which
he studied how the building could be inscribed into its natural surroundings,
how heat could be gained from the sunlight falling in through the windows
and how heat would slowly pass back outside through the architectural envelope.3 In his writings, Otto highlighted the connection between the individual
and nature and the role of architecture as an active membrane in between.
He illustrated his idea by using images of bubbles that enclosed individuals
or groups, thus circumscribing the human environment. As his drawing suggests, these bubbles would react to growing spatial needs (fig. 2).4
These metaphors of natural growth also influenced the perception and
description of socio-spatial processes inside housing units. In 1957, Jan
Trapman, a Dutch member of the group, published his project Kristallbouw,
in which inhabitants were to have been able to crystallize freely, i.e. choose
their own place and their personalized layouts inside a pre-established building structure (fig. 3). These ideas circulated among the members, and Otto
and Friedman designed their own versions of adaptable architectures. Their
main features were a fixed structure or grid, in which flexible elements
walls, windows and flexible furniture could be inserted at will, and were
able to remain continuously exchangeable and mobile.5
2. Large Scale Design and International Planning Euphoria
From the early 1960s onwards, GEAM architects addressed new scales and
redirected their interest from housing towards urbanism and territorial planning. Their designs bore utopian features as they were projected into a near
but radically different future. However, they were rooted in their contexts of
origin and bound up with contemporary tendencies in architectural debate.
The field of planning, at the time when GEAM members began to envisage it,
was undergoing rapid expansion: New alliances between political and technocratic planning experts became possible, as institutions of territorial planning and large-scale projects were integrated into governmental practice a
phenomenon that could be observed in European countries on both sides of
the iron curtain.
Referring to the 1960s as the point of culmination of modern planning
initiatives, historians such as Dirk van Laak have argued that these years were

92

Cornelia Escher

85

Nested Utopias: GEAMs Large-Scale Designs

fig. 2 Frei Otto,

Growing Cells for Living,
c. 1959. Frei Otto, Das
Wachsen der Wohnzellen,
in: Mitteilung Entwicklungssttte fr den Leichtbau 6 (1959), p. 53.

fig. 3 Jan Trapman, Kristallbouw, c. 1957. Jan Trapman, Principile

mogelijkheden van de flexibiliteit in de woningbouw, nieuwe lettertekens voor
de taal van de stedebouw/ Essential Possibilities of Flexibility in Housing, New
Characters in the Town-Planning Language, Forum 18, no. 4 (1964), p. 15.

93

Nested Utopias: GEAMs Large-Scale Designs

fig. 9 Henri van Lier, Power and information, 1968. Henri van Lier, Architecture
synergique, Cahiers du centre dtudes architecturales 4 (Brussels: Mignot, 1968).

fig. 7 Yona Friedman, Comprehensive Systems, 1963. VG Bild-Kunst,

Bonn 2016.

fig. 8 Frei Otto, German Pavilion for the Universal and International Exhibition
Montreal, Model for wind tunnel experiments, c. 1966. saai | Sdwestdeutsches
Archiv fr Architektur und Ingenieurbau, Karlsruher Institut fr Technologie, Werkarchiv Frei Otto. Foto: Atelier Frei Otto Warmbronn, FO_KB-P_1966-01_01-01.

late an interaction of human and material forces and the emergence of spatial orders through this interaction. These designs respond to descriptions
of space present in GEAMs writings, where it can be noted how the idea of
a flexible system of forces replaced the idea of function as the driving force
behind form.23 Physical forces were used to describe the formation of human
agglomeration and the built environment.
Following this imagery, Ottos designs of the times offered the most
appropriate symbolic forms for a society that no longer conceived of itself
as an indistinct mass. Parallel to the experiments with path systems, Otto
designed the German Pavilion for the world exhibition in Montreal 1967
together with Rolf Gutbrod. Its complex shape had been developed with the
help of soap film experiments (fig. 8). Indeed, for the Belgian philosopher
Henri van Lier, its spatial layout represented a contemporary society that was
structured according to the principles of communication. In this society, van
Lier claimed, power could not be organized hierarchically, but would follow
the complex layering and the polycentric arrangements created by the interactions between individuals (fig. 9).24
Comparing the projects by Hansen and Otto, one may conclude that
Hansens designs were influenced by a more pronounced institutional context, whereas the idea of the self-regulation of society appeared more prominently in Ottos proposals. Friedman in turn had an equally strong interest in
the latter, but his projects also answered directly to the framework of French
institutional planning. Despite these differences, GEAMs ideas originated
from a shared type of environmental thinking. Their approach was not exclu-

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Karl R. Kegler

161

Towards the Functional Society

fig. 5 Ruhrtangente
near Hagen, early 1960s.
Deutsche Autobahnen im
Luftbild, 40.

fig. 6 Forty-kilometer
catchment areas of existing and planned highways
on the federal territory.
Source: Rudolf Hoffmann,
Autobahn und Raumordnung, 190191.

fig. 4 Gerhard Isbary, The Arterial Network of Densification Ribbons and

Central Places in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1969. Isbary, von der Heide,
Mller, Gebiete mit gesunden Strukturen, map 9.

Commission of Regional Planning of 1961. Now rural areas and not-urbanized agglomerations would be seen as problematic an interpretation that
could also be stressed by unemployment statistics that, at that time, marked
a much higher number of unemployed in rural districts than in agglomerations. Isbary, in contrast to the experts commission that had published its

202

Ljiljana Blagojevi

along the state border between the former Yugoslavia and Albania.6 I will
focus on three crucial operational points in these two projects, unique for
their time and place and introduced by their architect Milan Zlokovi in coauthorship with his son ore Zlokovi, architect and structural engineer,
and his daughter, architect Milica Mojovi (ne Zlokovi).7 The projects discussed are the Teachers School (19591960) and Pedagogical College (design
1965, 19681969; construction 19691970) in Prizren (fig. 2),8 and the tourist
colony Hotel Mediterranean in Ulcinj (design 19591961; construction 1962
1963 (fig.3), first phase, and 19631964).9
First, operative methodology in both projects is shifted from object to
system design and from site to landscape/townscape planning. Second, both
projects introduce consistent dimensional modular coordination throughout,
as well as prefabricated, assembled types of construction. The Prizren project
plans, for instance, are annotated solely with grid numbers and letters indicating modular positions and relations, with no dimensions annotated anywhere
on the drawings. This innovation not only made design documentation more
efficient to produce but decreased error margins and enabled direct communication on multilingual (Serbo-Croat and Albanian) construction sites. The
Ulcinj project, on the other hand, combined local stonemason handicraft
with efficient use of a very limited number of simple prefabricated elements;
to great cost-cutting effect, needless to say. Third, I would point to the elastic
typification as an effective method of socio-spatial and aesthetic differentiation, invented through typology studies of accommodation units for the
Ulcinj project.10
The decisive moment that triggered this particular path to innovation, I
would argue, was the change of operational mode; that is, the restructuring
of a sole-practitioner prewar type of private architectural-design practice of
Zlokovi toward an effective collaborative teamwork with his son and daughter in the organizational troika mode, and the subsequent operationalization
of detail design and research stages through the Institute of Architecture and
Urban Planning of Serbia (IAUS). I would contend that the chosen mode of
practice relates closely to Zlokovis advanced research of modular coordination and his role in the federal bodies for standardization that led to meetings and intersections with colleagues through his participation as a delegate in international organizations and networks including the International
Organization for Standardization (ISO), the European Productivity Agency
(EPA), the Congress of the Conseil International du Btiment (CIB) and the
International Modular Group (IMG).
For the purposes of the present study, I would single out relations between
Zlokovi, Guiuseppe Ciribini11 and Konrad Wachsmann12 that are argued to

results eight years before, characterized the arterial network of urban concentrations as one of the most positive features in the distribution of population
and spatial development in Germany. Regional planning should develop this
network following the logic of the social economic evolution and not work
against it.22
The logic of territorial networks and accessibility may be traced exemplarily in West Germany in the large-scale project of expanding the autobahn
system (established in the 1930s) over the course of the 1960s and 1970s (fig.5).
In the view of traffic experts, access to the next planned autobahn became as
important as Isbary considered access to a diverse market for labor, residence,
service and other opportunities to be (fig. 6).23 Infrastructures of traffic and
especially the network of autobahns and suburban trains were interpreted as
a basic grid that would no longer distinguish between urbanized and nonurbanized areas; the network of traffic would develop a region as a whole and
not just in relation to existing urban nodes or centers (fig. 7). Traffic infrastruc-

203

Architectural Intelligence and Scarcity-Driven Design

fig. 2 Milan Zlokovi, ore Zlokovi and Milica Mojovi, Teachers College in
Prizren, 19591960. Site plan, in Zlokovi, Mojovi and Zlokovi, Nova uiteljska
kola u Prizrenu: studijska primena modularne koordinacije mera na projektat
zgrade montanog tipa, Zbornik radova IAUS, 1 (1961), 16.

fig. 3 Zlokovi, Zlokovi and Mojovi, Tourist Colony Hotel Mediterranean in

Ulcinj, 19591961, 19611964. Site plan of phase 1 showing structure of accommodation pavilions superimposed on the topography, in Milan Zlokovi, Novo
turistiko naselje u Ulcinju, Arhitektura urbanizam, IV: 2223 (1963), 49.

have been decisive for procuring operational intelligence in the Prizren and
Ulcinj projects. The direct intersections of the three experts are recorded in
several instances, outlined here: as members of IMG and CIB, Ciribini and
Zlokovi met at regular intervals in international forums in the mid-1950s
and mid-1960s; along with Wachsmann, all three crossed paths as authors of
research articles in the thematic issue of the journal La Casa published in 1957
by the Italian National Institute for the State Employees (Istituto nazionale
per le case degli impiegati dello Stato, INCIS).13 As guest lecturers, all three
took part in the course on current culture of industrialized construction at

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Contents

Foreword

III Public Criticism and the Rediscovery of the City

225

Heritage, Populism and Anti-Modernism in the Controversy

of the Mansion House Square Scheme

227

Preservationism, Postmodernism, and the Public

across the Iron Curtain in Leipzig and Frankfurt/Main

245

Le Monopole du Passisme: A Left-Historicist Critique of Late Capitalism

in Brussels

261

Keeping West Berlin As Found: Alison Smithson, Hardt-Waltherr Hmer

and 1970s Proto-Preservation Urban Renewal

275

Humane Spontaneity: Teaching New Belgrade Lessons of the Past

289

Quality of Life or Life-in-Truth? A Late-Socialist Critique

of Housing Estates in Czechoslovakia

303

Appendix

319

Notes on Contributors
Index

321

Michela Rosso

kos Moravnszky

Introduction

13

Andrew Demshuk

Torsten Lange

Identity Construct(ion)s

25

Piercing the Wall: East-West Encounters in Architecture, 19701990

27

Notes on Centers and Peripheries in Eastern Bloc Architectures

45

Sebastiaan Loosen

kos Moravnszky

Johannes Warda

Georgi Stanishev (senior), Georgi Stanishev (junior)

An Image and Its Performance: Techno-Export from Socialist Poland

Tijana Stevanovi

59

ukasz Stanek

Postmodern Architectural Exchanges Between East Germany and Japan

73

Maro Kriv

Max Hirsh

Being Underground: Dalibor Vesely, Phenomenology

and Architectural Education during the Cold War

89

Joseph Bedford

From the Hungarian Tulip Dispute to a Post-Socialist Kulturkampf

105

II The Turn to History

119

Russia, Europe, America: The Venice School Between

the U.S.S.R and the U.S.A.

121

Deconstructing Constructivism

149

The (New) Concept of Tradition: Aldo Rossis First Theoretical Essay

165

Paolo Portoghesi and the Postmodern Project

179

Boris Maga and theEmergence of Postmodernist Themes

in the Croatian Modernist Tradition

191

Keep Your Hands Off Modern Architecture: Hans Hollein

and History as Critique in Cold War Vienna

209

Daniel Kiss

329

Joan Ockman

Alla Vronskaya

Angelika Schnell

Silvia Micheli, La-Catherine Szacka

Karin erman

Ruth Hanisch

kos Moravnszky

Foreword
East West Central: Re-Building Europe

The Iron Curtain stood for the static immutability of the status quo. From
Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended
across the Continent Winston Churchill told his audience in a famous
speech on March 5, 1946. Like most metaphors, the term Iron Curtain has
imprinted itself into the perception of reality and was associated with the
fortified border, erected to block the movement of people and information
between East and West. Architectural historiography followed suit, presenting the history of modernization and modernism in Europe from a perspective determined and limited by this political boundary. The imagery produced by the dissolution of the Soviet Union: the fall, the lifting or the
raising of the curtain, the breaching of the wall, is a sign of confusion
regarding not only metaphors, but also underlying assumptions, methods
and categories of architectural historiography.
Writing in the 1920s, art historian Erwin Panofsky famously referred to
the perspective as a symbolic form. By this he meant that representing reality by means of a cohesive set of rules and symbols would give shape to a
specific worldview. The exchange of views between cultures can therefore be
studied using examples of visual representations, based on differing concepts
of the relationship between observer and reality. When Panofsky gave his
seminal lecture on Western perspective, Russian philosopher-physicist-inventor-priest Pavel Florensky wrote a study on the reverse perspective used
in icon painting. He compared it to Renaissance representations of space in
order to point out the differences between the two types of visual representation and their respective philosophical and theological underpinnings.
The exchange of glances as expressed in the German word Blickwechsel
is a suggestive image: we are invited to switch between the viewpoints of the
observer and the observed, so that our image of the world is suddenly no
longer taken for granted. The metaphor of the Iron Curtain, however, sug-

kos Moravnszky

gests that after WWII the boundary between the two halves of Europe was
hermetic and impermeable, even to the gaze. Western and Eastern Europe
regarded each other as their own dark others: communism and capitalism,
divided by the Iron Curtain, were the Twin Empires on the mythical map of
Europe. Yet, the perfect symmetry of the image eschewed the evidently more
complex reality. As an image, the Iron Curtain was able to trigger both Western
fear and desire, but actually it was far from being impenetrable. Rather, the
Iron Curtains semi-permeability, which turned it into an osmotic membrane,
refuted the supposed symmetry of the East-West division. Contrary to the
widespread identification in the West with the concept of Western Europe
and its corresponding values, the idea of a shared Eastern European identity
has never been popular among the inhabitants of this region. Architects in
the East were generally very well informed about the latest developments in
Western architecture. One could hardly survive as an architect without having browsed the latest issues of LArchitecture dAujourdhui, The Architectural
Review or the magazines from Scandinavian countries, all of which were
available in the libraries of the large state-owned design offices. The optical
metaphor, however, held true: images were floating around but remained disembodied signifiers, as they werent grounded in personal experience. At the
same time, travels of architects and professional organizations from the West
to the East intensified during 1970s and 1980s. The lessons that participants
drew from such exchanges more often than not depended on their respective
viewpoints of the perspective.
The discrepancy between the bipolarity of block-thinking and the more
complex and heterogeneous civilizational and political reality of Europe has
led historians to develop different concepts to describe the historical identity of European regions more adequately than the East-West dichotomy. The
term Mitteleuropa has never been merely a geographical term. It was a political one as well, just as East and West were connected with distinct political
ideas or concepts. With the active support of intellectuals from the United
States and England in the 1980s, Central Europe became a program to affirm
a particular identity of the region: politically part of the Eastern Bloc, but
without losing its Western cultural orientation a result of the regions specific historical development and its political affiliations before the war. The
phrase, a peculiar one, a hybrid of sorts, hearkened back to the Cold War
period; while it reflected a certain deference to the ideas of Milan Kundera
and others, it avoided the outright suggestion that the notion of Eastern
Europe was outmoded, essentially a fabrication of the age of Stalin, that it
brought together in a single category societies that remained significantly
different wrote Stephen R. Graubard, editor of Daedalus, the journal of

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32

kos Moravnszky

fig. 5 Cover of the

journal Bercsnyi 2830,
issue on Robert Venturi,
1976. Source: Archive of the
author.

press.14 The journal Werk, in its 9/1971 issue, published statements about the
crisis from the ETH president, who rejected any education in political ideology, from former and recent students, and from Lucius Burckhardt.15 Was it a
coincidence that in the same issue a longer essay by Urs and Rs Graf on the
open form concept of Polish architect Oskar Hansen was published, quoting
Hansen at length and calling for an architecture engaging the active participation of the user? A reader could certainly understand this as a possible
response to the questions discussed above.16
It was in the midst of such turbulences that Bruno Reichlin and Fabio
Reinhart, future assistants of Aldo Rossi, wrote a letter to Bernhard Hoesli in
January 1971. They proposed an invitation to Aldo Rossi, whose professorship
in Milan had been suspended because of his participation in student revolts.
To hire a guest lecturer from Italy, a member of the Communist Party, must
have appeared as a risky step but in fact it turned out to be a brilliant move.
Rossis reputation as a person with a clear political message, who had visited Moscow and East Germany and was impressed by the Karl-Marx-Allee
socialist-realist development in Berlin, made him acceptable to the rebellious
student body. He shackled them to the drafting table: former revolutionary
students spent hundreds of hours drafting cities street by street, as a former
student reported.17 He also made them aware of the significance of history, in
the sense that Rossi described it in his notebooks.
I learned about these developments only later, however, when I visited
Rainer Senn in Basel the next summer and we went to see Lucius Burckhardt.

86

33

Piercing the Wall: East-West Encounters in Architecture, 19701990

fig. 4 Leonhard Lapin,

Isometrics for detached
houses, Creation II and III,
1973. Source: Archive of
the author.

Max Hirsh
fig. 11 Study for the
Mitsukoshi department
store in Hiroshima. Image
courtesy of Inoue Takeshi.

During the Lehrcanap visit in Budapest, I had no idea about the goals and
political underpinnings of the project. I invested my energy into the coorganization of another study trip to Budapest for architecture and engineering students from technical universities and art schools in France, Finland,
Estonia, Switzerland and Poland. After a month in the Hungarian capital,
a small part of that group took the train to Tallinn, capital of the Soviet
Republic of Estonia. The camp and the Estonian trip had been initiated by
the Technical University Budapest, so it not only had official blessing but was
financed by our school as well.
The Tallinn month was exciting. We worked as bricklayers on the construction site of a sports stadium, and after work we visited young Estonian
architects who were not only very knowledgeable about the Anglo-American
discourse of postmodernism, but had already realized some buildings, which
they called at that time Neo-Functionalist. Soviet constructivism, international modernism and Anglo-American postmodernism had a considerable
influence on their work although, remarkably, Estonian architectural historiography today treats this same group as the Tallin school of the critique of
modernism [Tallinna kooli modernismi kriitika].18
As the composition of the summer camp suggests, identity was a major
issue this probably explains the emphasis on the Finno-Ugric: the FinnishEstonian-Hungarian component. It was an experimental balloon, an experiment closely observed by the communist youth organization (KISZ) of the
university.

87

Postmodern Architectural Exchanges Between East Germany and Japan

Cottbus, Karl-Marx-Stadt, Erfurt who had come together to harness the

collective strength of the entire republic in order to rebuild the national
capital.23 Grand Hotel certainly hosted an unusual confluence of architects,
engineers and construction workers but they werent just from Cottbus and
Karl-Marx-Stadt, but also from Tokyo and Thessaloniki. Indeed, the patriotic
discourse that surrounded historicist renewal projects is rendered problematic when one considers the syncretic conditions surrounding the genesis of
these hotels, which were designed by Japanese and East German architects,
and which relied on construction workers from the Balkans to assemble West
German technical equipment and prefabricated panels from Scandinavia.
Moreover, the hotels catered primarily to foreign tourists and investors. After
all, these were so-called Devisenhotels: where payment could only be made
in hard currency, and which remained beyond the grasp of the average East
German. In effect, the visual language of contextualism and the political
discourse of national solidarity masked the incipient globalization of East
Germanys construction industry. Both projects were built with the publicly
averred commitment to the preservation of national culture and local identity
yet their ultimate effect was to accelerate the influx of global capital, migrant
labor, and foreign visitors into East German cities.

Endnotes
1

Hotel in Berlin were motivated by a desire to return to regional styles and

local traditions, the means by which they were produced portended a fundamental shift away from national building cultures and towards the globalization of architectural practice. Beneath the neo-Wilhelmine facade of the
Grand Hotel and the Baroque fixtures of the Bellevue lay design, engineering,
and construction processes that incorporated goods, people, and ideas from
Japan, Sweden, Yugoslavia, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, West Germany,
France, the United Kingdom and Greece. In that sense, the two hotels can be
read as the loci of a nascent European integration: coordinated, somewhat
incongruously, by design professionals from Japan.
Contemporary publications about these hotels tended to elide the transnational dimensions of their production. One womens magazine, for example, published a full-color spread of the Grand Hotel, accompanied by a text
that suggested that its superior design was the product of fruitful collaboration between workers hailing from all over the GDR Berlin, Schwerin,

2
3
4
5

This chapter is part of a larger research project on architectural exchanges

between Japan and the GDR. The author would like to thank Kohei
Kitayama, Setsuo Maruyama, Tadao Nodeki, Ken Tadashi Oshima, Hiroki
Sugiyama, Takeshi Inoue and Osamu Ueno for their critical support during
the fieldwork stage of this project. He also thanks Kirsten Angermann,
Regina Bittner, Eve Blau, Bruno Flierl, Seng Kuan, Alexander Rehding,
Tanja Scheffler, Thomas Topfstedt, Daniel Trambaiolo, Manfred Zache, and
Jun Zhang for their helpful comments and suggestions; as well as Sayuri
Kakiuchi and Anri Maruyama for their research assistance. The project
was funded through the generous support of the Hang Seng Bank Golden
Jubilee Education Fund for Research.
Hans Modrow et al., eds., Die DDR und Japan (East Berlin: Dietz Verlag,
1983), 101102.
On the GDRs debt problem see Charles Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of
Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,
1997).
Hans-Christian Herrmann, Japan ein kapitalistisches Vorbild fr die
DDR?, Deutschland Archiv 39:6 (2006), 1033, 1041.
Kazuo Sasagawa, Vier groe Bauprojekte in der ehemaligen DDR: Die
schlsselfertigen Bauprojekte durch [sic] Bauunternehmer Kajima, Tokio,
Japan, Lecture at Brandenburg Technical University of Cottbus, June 1999.
See also Cocom: Ein Relikt des Kalten Krieges, Der Spiegel 34 (1988),
8083.

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Angelika Schnell

173

The (New) Concept of Tradition: Aldo Rossis First Theoretical Essay

fig. 4 Giovanni Antonio Antolini, Foro Bonaparte, perspective

Source: Bibliothque nationale de France, Paris.

The Concept of History

One might still wonder why Rossi insisted on classical architectural language for any progressive renewal. Why did he ignore vernacular, regional
and popular architecture, which had become a theme among Italian leftist
architects at the time?20 As a Communist, he may have been looking for a
revolutionary architecture; it is worth noting that the essay The Concept of
Tradition in Neoclassical Milanese Architecture appeared in Societ, which
was not an architecture journal but a leftist social and political periodical. In
the essay, he ultimately concluded that neoclassical Milanese architecture was
realista e populare.21
However, Rossi refused any servile ingratiation to the people. His
notion of realismo had nothing to do with the neorealism of postwar Italian
filmmakers such as Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica and Luchino Visconti
(although Rossi admired the latters work). Their films celebrated everyday
life and included nonprofessional actors speaking in dialect. Yet Rossi deliberately did not pursue an analogous vernacular or popular architecture. In his
essay, he clearly explains that the history of architecture as cultural history
is the history of the upper and literate classes. According to him, the search
for spontaneous or autonomous characteristics in vernacular solutions makes
no sense at all.22
With this historiographical model of a self-critical rebirth of classical
architecture of the upper classes, Rossi was referring less to the popular,
somewhat lavish architecture of socialist realism that he had encountered

238

Michela Rosso

fig. 5 Giacomo Pinchetti, map of Milan, 1801, including Giovanni Antonio

Antolinis design for the unrealized Foro Bonaparte.

in Moscow than to Italian neo-Marxist architects of the time. He quoted

Antonio Gramsci and, implicitly, Gramscis materialistic theory of cultural
hegemony, according to which new ideas are born as renewed expression
of the historical development of reality,23 that is, of the existing cultural
products. Among these can undoubtedly be counted the classical architectural language that stands for order, logic and outstanding quality of execution. In particular, Rossi referred to Cesare Luporini, a contemporary Italian
philosopher who like Louis Althusser was one of those intellectuals who
tried to link Marxism with structuralism, and was also one of the editors of
Societ. Just two years before Rossis essay appeared, Luporini had published
an essay, Il concetto della storia e lilluminismo [The Concept of History

239

Heritage, Populism and Anti-Modernism

the perils of an imminent foreign invasion as a serious threat to the integrity

of national culture.
What exactly did this indigenous idiom consist of? How did it apply to
this specific section of the City of London?
The Familiar and Cherished Local Scene
When asked to give his evidence before the inspector at the Guildhall, the
architect Roy Worskett, principal architectural witness for the City of London,
would speculate at length on this crucial point. For Worskett, the Mansion
House Square project suffered from all the defects of the times in which it had
been conceived, when the same architectural expression [had been] repeated
worldwide.31 In the view of the former City Architect of Bath, the Mansion
House Square project was to be a test case of local and national importance,
proving the effectiveness and intentions of conservation legislation.32 Its
subject matter was not ultimately, nor simply about architecture but []
about the character and significance of the City as a place in which to live and
work.33 In this light, it could only be seen as the largely outdated product of
a bygone age, which urgently needed to be reassessed against the backdrop of
a radically changed cultural scenario. This one had been significantly marked
by the emergence of a new public awareness towards matters of conservation.34 By quoting Circular 23/77, that public opinion is now overwhelmingly in favor of conserving and enhancing the familiar and cherished local
scene,35 Worskett made it clear enough what that changed cultural scenario
was about. The Citys townscape, a unique urban and architectural quality
made up of subtle hierarchies, visual variety and informal spaces, constituted,
in Worsketts terms, the quintessence of the Citys character.
But was this character a culturally or even nationally determined feature,
as David Watkin had seemed to suggest when he claimed that buildings with
monumental porticos like the Mansion House, the Ashmolean [Museum],
the British Museum [] if built in the Continent would all have been fronted
with monumental piazzas approached along axial avenues, further arguing
that rightly or wrongly the English tradition had been different?36 Or rather,
was this insistence on an alleged genetic code of architecture and urbanism
no more than the rhetoric of a polemic that had gone well beyond academic
and professional circles, reaching the public at large in widely read magazines
and newspapers as well as on TV screens?
Townscape, a term so frequently used during the Mansion House
Square scheme debate, had entered the New Oxford Dictionary in 1880. Its
possible pseudonym, the expression urban landscape, was introduced by
The Architectural Review in an article on the art of making urban landscape

fig. 10 Mansion House Square Trial of the Century. The 1984 public inquiry
seen by Architects Journals architectural cartoonist Louis Hellman, showing on
the left: the Citys defense represented by Marcus Binney (SAVE), a caricatural
personification of the City Character pictured as a stereotyped London tycoon
smoking a cigar, the Lord Mayor of London and the head of the Greater London
Council, Ken Livingstone; on the plaintiffs side, Palumbo, the architectural historian John Summerson, and Richard Rogers; in the middle: the Secretary of the Environment Patrick Jenkin, and Miess coffin pictured in the shape of a steel and glass
tower and displaying the headings Less Is Mort (a parody of Miess renowned
aphorism Less is More) and Rest in Peace Modern Movement. Source: Hellman
and Diary, The Architects Journal, May 29, 1985, 27. Gift of Louis Hellman .

published in January 1944.37 The term had also been widely employed by
members of the Reviews editorial board, J. M. Richards, Hubert de Cronin
Hastings, Nikolaus Pevsner and Gordon Cullen, and adopted in the 1950s in
plans promoted by the Civic Trust. During the 1940s, townscape, a planning practice founded on the application of the eighteenth-century landscape
principles of visual surprise, accident and variety, had been the focus of the
Reviews agenda.38 As has been argued, townscape was set in direct contrast to continental European ideas of planning and architecture [] it was
politically compatible with the English spirit and an English aesthetic based
around an appreciation of age and quaintness.39 Through the re-elaboration
of a viable national tradition, at a crucial time for Britains postwar reconstruction, a group of architects, planners, historians and critics had attempted
to define a theory of vision and design deeply rooted in the English architec-

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