Universitetsholmen is situated immediately adjacent to the
heart of the Malmö city centre. It's partly made up by
undeveloped land which formerly was a part of the harbour
and shipyard district. The site constitutes an important
area where Malmö can fulfil it's ambition to expand
towards the sea. The development area is suitable for both
national and regional functions, and the future University
College is expected to boost Malmö's competitiveness in
the increasingly integrated Öresund region. Ilmar
Reepalu, head of the municipality of Malmö, opened up
the conference by stating that Malmö hopes to acquire a
new image as the City of knowledge, and it's his firm
conviction that the inhabitant of Malmö already
embraces this very statement. He recalled a recent trip to
Manhattan, where the New York City University had struck him
as a useful idea about what a university in a city could be,
as opposed to University campus' detached from city life.
All the dorms are located nearby, while the library of
Philip Johnson and Richard Foster ads a strong architectural
mark.
What will follow here is not a proper summary. Added to some
sketchy recapitulations of the main lectures given by such
diverse exponents as Peter Wilson and Josep Martorell, the
professors Josef P Kleihues and Bernardo Secchi, the main
text contains some reflections and further extensions of the
debate that followed. The main questions at hand can be
stated as such: how will we be able to build a university in
a city and in the same time avoiding all the pitfalls of
20-century architecture? The challenge presented to the
competition of the new Universitetsholmen involves
discussions on three issues: architecture, town planning as
well as urbanism in a general sense. Architecture involves
themes as different as semiotics and xx. Town planning takes
into consideration the experience of IBA as well as Berlin
capital of Germany, and what is it that makes a space into a
place? Lastly we have the relationship between Malmö
and Universitetsholmen. Conferance chairman xx Thomas
Hellqusti stated that the main issue is this integration,
the linkage city centre and the university area. And this is
important in a broader perspective, with the bridge-lin,
just passing Malö, to make it visible, and here talking
about image, which sometimes can be opposed to this today so
fashionable integration. Image is what makes a space into a
place...
Some reflections on the conference,
commentary by Leo Gullbring
Imagineering the city
Referring to the image of a city, Ilmar Reepalu focused on
one of the fundamental questions of contemporary
architecture. Space is not only transformed into place
because of buildings, the role played by image is essential
in this regard. Architecture responds not only to our
physical needs, but also to our spiritual needs, and here
it's worth considering the concept of imagineering. Usually
we don't talk much about image in Sweden, possibly because
we are culturally more down to earth, and furthermore
because our architects still largely embraces the
materialistic attitude of modern architecture. Today though,
we have a tendency to subordinate the new to the old, as if
wise to the fact that we lack these more holistic qualities
present in the architecture of the past. The ensuing debate
between professor Josef Kleihues, on one side, and professor
Bernardo Secchi and Peter Wilson, on the other side, focused
on the morphology of the modern city. In the evening, at the
centre for Design and Form, Professor Kleihues repetitively
said that what is needed in contemporary urban planning is
'modesty'. And while Peter Wilsons mentioned Rotterdam as a
city in search of an image, Professor Kleihues called it an
outright disaster. Here we can discern a dividing line
between an architecture still hooked to the modernist search
of new solutions, and on the other hand postmodern,
historicist as well as the more ambitious 'critical
reconstruction' by Professor Kleihues, which is ever more
present in the contemporary architectural debate.
One is inclined to reflect that to be modern is only a
desire, never to be fulfilled, therefore the buildings of
the Modern Movement has had a hard time being accepted.
There is also an philosophical division between the
structuralists belief in society, as well as its build form,
as a fixed pattern which man has to adjust himself to, as
opposed to a more 'liberal' belief that the structures of
society are shaped in interrelationships with man,
ultimately the belief by Heidegger that the only home that
man possesses is language. Thus the question of image is
undoubtedly of fundamental importance to architecture as
well as urban planning, it eventually has to do with how
individuals do relate to the city. And this is of outermost
concern at Universitetsholmen since academics as well as
artist are supposed to be the true individualists of our
time. In his lecture the Danish architect and critic Jens
Kvorning hinted at some crucial questions. What is the
possibility for the individual to realise his ambitions in a
city? How can we improve the relationship between the city
and the individual? And what does a city for the
intellectual look like?
Image is clearly a pivotal issue in the creating of a total
new area in the city of Malmö. And we don't have to go
to such extremes as the skyscrapers of Manhattan to
recognise the need of imagineering. Imagineering has
connotations with semiotics in treating the city not only as
an material fact, but in ascribing images as expressions of
wishes, of dreams, in short, what we wish to experience and
what we do perceive. It has to do with framing and how we
add significance. And images can be so strong that they
overturn a deeply rooted conception of a city, at best they
are self fulfilling prophecy, at worst superficial
postmodern or deconstructivist exclamation marks where
architecture is reduced to mediation. Entering the
postindustrial age Malmö strives to be something more
than the third largest town of Sweden. During the last
decade art has come to be an ever increasingly valued part
of the city. The chairman of the conference Tomas Hellquist,
from the museum of Architecture in Stockholm, pointed out
that with the new bridge connecting Denmark to Sweden,
Malmö requires visible architecture and other strong
images to attract visitors as well as culture and commerce.
It's only to regret that the big crane, which today
dominates the competition site, is to be removed, although
it has a double sided image, both as a landmark and as a
symbol for the demise of Malmö's industrial era.
The IBA experience
The concept of image raises some fundamental questions
regarding what will be the content of the University. It
also questions the role of architecture itself. Here it
would be important to digress on the urban renewal schemes
of the last decades. We can discern different approaches to
the contemporary city, ranging from extremes like Disneyland
and gated communities of the US, to the Lille of Rem
Koolhaas, the Docklands of London, the Fukuoka of Japan. IBA
represents one of the most interesting projects, not only
because of the presence of professor Kleihues, but mainly as
an attempt to preserve the city character that has been
influential in Sweden as well. Here we have a sort of an
archaic notion of 'Raum' or place, as opposed to the free,
limit-less space of the modernist tradition. This
preoccupation with urban morphology, inspired by Aldo Rossi,
Robert Venturi and the Krier brothers, has been adopted in
some Swedish urban renewal objects which were pointed out by
Olof Hultin. Södra Station and Hammarby Sjöstad in
Stockholm, not to forget 'Potatisåkern' in Malmö
which were directly inspired by Tegel in Berlin. IBA raises
fundamental question on the modern city, and has caused much
debate in Berlin.
In the seventies IBA, promoted and shaped by Professor
Kleihues, gave an architectural answer to the demands of
Berliners whom wanted their inner city rescued and rebuilt.
Already at the time of the 1957 Interbau exhibition
residents occupied buildings to be torn down, and rejected
the Modernist's solution for housing shortage with either
skyscrapers or public housing on the outskirts of the city.
In Sweden the Modernist housing program were carried out
nevertheless, a giant social experiment with much debated
consequences, which might have turned quite different had
architects and politicians read Jane Jacob's book 'The Death
and Life of Great American Cities' which was published some
years ahead. IBA on the other hand recognised that the
principles of modern architecture had come under attack
since the mid-'60s and tried to adopt a different
perspective on the city. Josef P Kleihues saw, like Josep
Martorell points out with regard to Barcelona, the car and
the postwar growth of the cities as the main problems. With
a 'critical reconstruction' it should be possible to
reinterpretate the traditional typology of the street, the
arcade, the perimeter block and the quarter. IBA produced
some postmodern, as well a rational, as well as new-modern
architecture (not to forget some deconstructivist
manifestations). But one of the main drawbacks, which is to
be blamed on the planning authorities, was the failure to
generate mixed uses, one of the main goals of Professor
Kleihues' urban strategy.
The historicist trap
But although we talk about a critical reconstruction, the
risk is overwhelming, as professor Bernardo Secchi asserted
during his lecture, that we might fall in the historicist
trap. The problem, as Francesco Dal Co, another Venetian
points out, is that our difficulty to understand our own
time lead us to look for solutions in the past. But history
has no fixed solutions to our time, history can only
challenge and problemetise our present. Dal Cos critique can
be read thus that solutions of the past are always part of a
whole, and the postmodern way of choosing separated
fragments out of history to answer present problems is
doomed to fail, if we believe, as opposed to the
postmodernists, in the need of unified solutions to present
problems. And Dal Co points out how easily misunderstood
history might be. Where some architects find harmony in
historical places like San Marco or Piazza della Signoria in
Florence, Dal Co discerns a acute conflictuality between
different buildings, and it's this very conflictuality which
can give such a fruitful state of tension to a place. A
critical suggestion might be that it is the conception of
harmony which is at stake. This would be true both of
modernist as well as neoclassical utopical architecture,
which both strived after a perfect order, a harmony without
conflicts, a perfection where the rules of God had been
substituted by the rules of man himself, but where the rules
were as strict as ever.
This of course has to do with values, which in this
postmodern or should we say neo-baroque age, are more
dissimilar than ever. Chaos-theory at least makes amends for
the belief that neither God or any deterministic order is
really needed, or as the Nobel prizewinner Ilya Prigogine
puts it, the maximum organisational complexity attainable in
a given system is determinated by the velocity of
communication. The problem, as Professor Bernardo Secchi
state it, is to reconcile continuity with our present
cultures' dispersion and fragmentation. Maybe our cities
represents no real home to modern man, this nomad in
perpetual search of his own identity. And here Professor
Secchi focuses on the crisis of traditional artistic
language, i e the problem of continuity, and points to the
necessity of a deeper understanding of the relationship
between the urban pattern and our contemporary culture. The
question at large is if there is any unifying aspect of the
city today, and if there is, which one? Nevertheless, maybe
it's only now architecture can embrace the original
definition of modernism, which was the spirit of much of the
modern art movement, with important exceptions in Mondrian
and others, that modernity implies the ever a changing, the
perpetually reborn, the irrevocable insight that "all that
is solid melt into the air". One is of course left to
consider if this pluralistic society, built 'note by note'
is what we want, or if we should treat our architectural
heritage as 'points of resistance', or if they can be
included in a new type of city, where the megastructures of
the Archigram-movement has been traded for our architectural
heritage as 'points of resistance' and the networks of the
information society, and where all those plug-in units have
been replaced by the gadgetry of our information age, where
the Plug-in city has been renamed the Plug 'n Play city.
Writing the city
In a sense Professor Josef Kleihues' lecture poses
anew this age old question as if we should opt for radical
experimentation or a bourgeois 'modesty' and 'solidity'. Is
the city block an unavoidable building stone of the city, or
is the 'infrastructural' city Peter Wilson referred to, a
possibility neglected by the major part of the architects
themselves? After the IBA, Berlin is now becoming the
capital of Germany, and the urban transformation poses
different challenges. If we see to the debate on the
proposals for the Potsdamer Platz, Professor Kleihues has
altogether deserted his original preoccupation with the city
block. And while Daniel Libeskind has been one of the most
bitter critics of the development in Berlin, his
Jüdisches museum stands in sharp contrast with the
prevailing ideas. It's a protest against the demystified
perfectionist utopia of Modernism. Libeskind does critizise
the town planners of Berlin of treating tradition as had it
one and only definitive meaning. He maintains that one
chooses ad hoc what fits our present time's need for an
Prussian order, under the pretext that this would be a
traditional architecture in the spirit of Schinkel, thus
neglecting the fact that traditional architecture were at
least as pluralistic as contemporary architecture. Libeskind
asserts that these surgical operations are reshaping whole
blocks just to achieve order, to accomplish a new
simplicity, a new uniformity, a mute city which levels out
all differences and suppresses all individuality. Libeskind
questions the relation between power and architecture, and
he opts for a solution not far away from the MBA-scheme
realised in Barcelona, and also in coherence with the ideas
of Professor Secchi. New buildings or places are to be
inserted on strategic points, thus reinforcing and reshaping
the present character of the city blocks, adding new
functions to old ones, and where existing town is no
obstacle to development. And this is based on a belief that
a city is a process, a metamorphosis without an end, where
there is no 'final solution'.
A part from the discussion on European urban renewal
schemes, it's necessary to note that traditional
town-planning seldom succeed since parameters as
unemployment, stockexchange-rates, the decisions by
politicians and speculators, will irrevocably change the
outcome long before the plans are eventually completed. It's
questionable utopia to think that traditional static
planning is possible in an ever a changing society, that an
absolute control of the urban project can eliminate the
unforeseen, the unpredicted. But the present insistence in
every urban project, at least in Sweden and in Berlin, to
plan and design every square meter is disastrous, there is
no leftover space, in a sense no space for the unforeseen,
for the future itself.
One is certainly attracted by the strategy used by MBA in
the urban redevelopment of Barcelona, where the city has
been edited like a book, enhancing, underlining certain
values, where letters and words might change, but not whole
chapters. On the other hand this attitude might feel like
resignation, where architecture renounce all claims to
vision for the future, where architecture lends itself to
the same provocative style which is the distinctive mark of
the information society. But confronting Libeskind with our
need for stable references where to dwell, he retorts citing
Paul Valéry's belief in that the greatest threat
against humanity is order and chaos. Harmony is not
to be aspired, cities can't be more perfect than our own
lives.
Jens Kvorning talked about 'points of resistance' in
abandoned industrial landscape, archeological relics of the
industrialisation age, this 'terrain vague' left in our
inner cities. The existing buildings can act as reference
points in the metrics of transformation, and where the
singular nature of these spaces, as well as the urban
organisation in itself, might deserve the same kind of
attention which we normally pay to the value of context. The
heterogeneity and discontinuity of these places might act as
important clues to the analysis of the city as a whole,
rediscovering that the traditional city is in itself a
result of the same kind of unilinear process where order and
disorder always has coexisted, where chance never have been
totally eliminated.
This leads to the relation of Universitetsholmen to
Malmö, the question concerning building the a
university in the city, which according to Ilmar Reepalu is
the great challenge at hand. Universitetsholmen will be
crucial to the urban pattern of Malmö. Historically
Malmö was built in an east-western direction, but in
modern time the city has evolved in a south-northern path.
The new University College will further enhance this
redirection of the city, and will anchor it to the sea. The
site is nevertheless exposed to the the forces of nature in
a susceptible way. Jens Kvorning warned from letting the
University dominating the site. The experience of the
University of Copenhagen city shows that students tends to
use the city much more active than ordinary citizens, while
too many faculties in one place might actually silence the
area.
An architecture for the information age
When Professor Secchi stresses the need to 'build' the open
space connecting the different parts of an urban landscape,
we could go further and dwell on the possibilities of the
information society, which constitutes a kind of virtual
infrastructure. Our urban space is immersed in an enormous
amount of energy and flow of information, and this is as
important as once topography or the geometrical grid. Maybe
architecture as we have known it, in its built form, is
partially an anachronism. When I write this very commentary
on my laptop sitting in a bar, the traditional office is not
indispensable anymore. Maybe the city nomads in 'Strange
Days', the sf-movie by James Cameron, are not so
unrealistic. Who will need architects when you can connect
to the 'world' by a 'squid' from your own quarter, a human
interface which lets you experience more than reality itself
ever can offer, a situation already present on account of
the television and the simulated computer games. In many
ways the information society radically questions and changes
our use of buildings. The Japanese architect Toyo Ito
asserts that one of the main challenges of contemporary
architecture is the reconciling of our virtual and physical
bodies, one which is dependent on and subliminally reacts to
the information flow, and the other one which reacts to the
forces of nature like light, water and wind. This focus on
an architecture for the information age, a kind of a third
reality, might be even more interesting while talking about
Universitetsholmen, since the universities of today as well
as tomorrow is ever more dependent on radically new kind of
communications systems. Toyo Ito contends that we are
related to the city and to architecture by our physical as
well as virtual bodies. It's natural for the physical body
to pursue physical comfort, but what kind of space is apt
for our virtual body? In his project for a
Médiathèque for the city of Sendai, Toyo Ito
tries to find a new type of architectural and urban space
which can accommodate these two bodies.
In a sense this commentary ends up with a question to what
is the role of the historical city today, assuming that the
city is a representation of our culture, hidden or not. Is
the physical urban pattern the main problem to be solved
through different kind of urban renewal schemes, or is it
the city as a meeting point, where ideas are exchanged,
where relations are tied, where decisions are made which is
the main consideration at hand? Building a university in the
city poses the fundamental questions as to what our future
city looks like.
Referat
'Berlin - IBA and the new development', lecture by Professor
Josef Kleihues
According to Professor Josef Kleihues the IBA-experience is
a part of the living history of Berlin, but today Berlin is
the capital of Germany and the solutions required are quite
different. With some slides he demonstrates how modernism
has simplified the city, and how modernism has used other
kind of materials than the traditional ones. The conclusion
is that the city has been deconstructed in a sense. His
leading theme is appropriateness, and he is nonetheless
convinced that experimentation is needed, but the problem
with modernism is this greed for novelty, one has
misunderstood the autonomy of the individual. Architecture
should be a response to a self-destructive world. And
Professor Kleihues shows different proposals by modernists
like Le Corbusier and Peter Smithsons which glorified
traffic and reduced the historical city to a machine in an
ambition to open up the city. The most significant move was
the destruction of the city block.
Although the fifties and the sixties brought the
deconstruction of the European city, there were also critics
like Aldo Rossi and the Krier brothers, which showed the
need of an reconstruction of the European city. And this was
the fundamental stimulus for IBA. He points out that IBA
aspired to quality and simplicity in urban design, and this
should also be applicable to Malmö.
Since there's is an obvious risk of a nostalgic
reconstruction, Professor Josef Kleihues calls this for a
critical reconstruction. The spirit of enlightenment, of
humanism is important, and solidity and modesty are asked
for. This was also the ideas which accompanied Schinkel, and
also Behrens. This strive for modesty doesn't necessarily
imply historicism, rather Kleihues opts for a 'poetic'
rational architecture.
Josef P Kleihues was born 1933, Rheine, Westphalea.
1974-94 professor at the University of Dortmund, since 1994
Professor of architecture at the Academy of Art in
Düsseldorf. In 1977 he wrote a series of articles
together with Wolf J Siedler in the "Berliner Morgonpost"
suggesting that IBA should engage Berlin's historic fabric
and oscial problems through a combination of new as well as
rehabilitated buildings. From 1979-1987 Kleihues served as
planning commissioner of the IBA in Berlin.
'Hidden values', lecture by Professor Bernardo Secchi
In his lecture Professor Bernardo Secchi took as his
starting point the growing discontent with the urban
situation in all Europe. The failure to respond to this
unhappiness with urban 'chaos', urban sprawl, dispersion,
fragmentation, heterogeneity and lack of continuity of the
urban space, shows that a more theoretical approach to the
contemporary city is needed. We might to readily blame bad
administration, speculators, bureaucratic planning and
architects, while it's rather our inability to understand
contemporary society and its 'hidden values' which is the
problem. What is at stake is the readability of the urban
space, and this is also the reason why planners and
architects have this tendency to idealise the city of the
past.
Professor Bernardo Secchi showed some slides that he and
Paola Viganò prepared for the plan of Prato, an
Italian town of 200 000 inhabitant. With a history as a
textile town, the main spatial feature of Prato is
heterogeneity; the pervasive and continuous matching,
without an apparent order, of heterogeneous architectural
objects, of heterogeneous 'materials'. This differentiated
urban pattern was showed on a drawing where houses,
factories, schools, shops, sports grounds and so on where
individualised with different colours. Professor Secchi
propose this mapping as a kind of a 'deconstruction' of the
urban space into its element components, into its
'materials'.
Together with different kind of artists, including writers,
photographers, painters, musicians the urban space has been
analysed from different points of view, as an attempt to a
careful 'description' of the urban space. Professor Secchi
shows that the result was the discovery of three main
aspects. First of all the 'corporality' of the urban space,
the city as a space we cross and use by the means of our
body, how we perceive it and how we move in it, or as Michel
Foucault and Richard Sennet put it, the body at the centre
of our thinking. Secondly (with a reference to the Pillow
book, the Sei Shonagon book, as proposed in Greenways movie)
that the contemporary urban space is made by small pieces,
like a puzzle, a 'collage' of small sequences, each one with
its own identity, matched together without a general order,
but according to form, as well as to rules, which combined
creates strong structures. Thirdly Professor Secchi cites
Charles Rosen, a musician and a professor of music: "what
disappeared between Mozart and Schoenberg was the
possibility of using large blocks of prefabricated material
in music. The meaning of an element of form in Mozart was
given essentially by the structure of each work, but the
element was sometimes a large cadential formula lasting many
measures.... By the end of the nineteenth century, these
blocks of prefabricated material were no longer acceptable
to composers with styles as widely variant as Debussy,
Schoenberg, and Skryabin. To employ these blocks of material
resulted immediately in pastiche: giving them up, however,
led to a kind of panic. It seemed as if music now had to be
written note by note". And Professor Secchi concludes that
"many contemporary cities...is written 'note by note', piece
by piece, stamp by stamp, and this 'fractality' of the urban
space leads to a kind of panic" "we have to recognise...that
the attempts to employ again the old blocks of prefabricated
materials, as in Berlin or in many urban projects in Europa,
returning to the block, the boulevard, the corridor street,
results immediately ... in a pastiche."
Professor Secchi's claim is that what has disappeared in the
contemporary city is the possibility to use some important
figures which gives order and intelligibility to the urban
space. The figure of continuity dominated the urban scene
from the renaissance up to the last century - during the
renaissance this figure implied a 'search of infinity',
during the baroque the 'sublime', then the 'regularity'
during the political and industrial revolution, until it met
with hierarchy and specialisation during the XIX century.
These figures gave unity to the city, "linking, from a
physical, functional and symbolical point of view, the
working and meaning of each urban element to the working and
significance of the city as a whole". Nevertheless they were
weak 'structures' with ample room for a so-called free play,
and this openness to interpretation was their immense value.
In contrast "A city written note by note has to create a new
structure... a structure able to link the different pieces
of the puzzle in a significant unity", much as Schoenberg,
Webern and Berg ha to do it in the twenties. Professor
Secchi concludes that "in an urban space written note by
note, the expressive value of each element, of each
architectural object, of each material, takes an in-ordinate
significance and replaces syntax." And this might be the
reason why so many city planners, as well as architects, has
gone back to a 'neoclassical' view. Professor Secchis
hypothesis, nevertheless, is "that we can search for a new
structure studying the relationships between what has to be
continuous, and what can be variant."
And Professor Secchi points out that we continuously meet
different languages since we live in a dispersed society, in
a fragmented urban space. And that this dispersed language
is an undeniable aspect of our culture, was already stressed
by Joyce and Musil more than fifty years ago, and further
underlined by Calvino and Pasolini. According to Professor
Secchi we acknowledge the importance of 'differences' in
revenues and ways of life today, we have a certain
intolerance for 'repetition', furthermore ideologies and
values has a decreasing importance and a less unifying power
than before. The importance of 'body' and of 'difference' is
according to Professor Secchi, "the latest stage of a long
process of individual emancipation and progress of
laicism."
Professor Secchi is convinced that it's not new buildings
which are needed to give a new structure to the urban space,
but mainly by the design of open spaces, and setting rules
for the 'play' different form the past. In Prato the
distinction is between very large surfaces, i e natural
preserves, " and some point like gardens and parks in the
urban texture and some lines, as 'connections', links
between the surfaces and the points." These points, lines
and surfaces can give a form, a figure, to an urban chaotic
scene.
Professor Secchi acknowledges that "to build the city ... to
modify and transform it, to adequate it to our way of life,
to our technology, consuming and cultural
attitudes...modifying functional and social geography of the
existing city, takes a very long time." And here we have a
discrepancy of two different horizons: the short time
horizon of the social common values, and the long time
horizon of every undertaking for the transformation of the
actual urban situation. In short he points out a
contradictions between the mobility, the volatility of the
political and financial movements, and on the other hand the
stability of the infra-structural system, the so-called
'social capital' with its technical constraints, in short a
contradiction between the horizons of politics and
technics.
To conclude his speech Professor Secchi stated that "Writing
the city architecture, I mean designing the cities and their
architectures, we have to combine these two aspects: the
'epic' character of a design in which the hidden values of
the society are represented, and the polyphonic free play
for the different social groups, the different minorities by
which our societies are made. Obviously what I'm stressing
here is the need to come back to an 'epic' writing and
planning; to Joyce and Musil, not to the general,
comprehensive, bureaucratic plan as we knew in the European
experience of the past forty or fifty years." This requires
a plan in which continuity matches dispersion and
fragmentation.
Bernardo Secchi was born 1934. Formerly he was
professor at the Geneva School of Architecture, today he is
Professor of urbanism at the Venice School of Architecture.
He has a long experience as a town planner and
architect.
'Educating - The City, some waterfront and inland
examples in Holland and Germany', lecture by Peter
Wilson
Peter Wilson polemically states that their is no absolute
concepts in architecture and therefore we cannot simplicise.
The city is a complex entity and while Berlin might have a
fixed image, Rotterdam might be looking for an image. Wilson
showed a slide from Münster and explained that these
beautiful gothic houses are actually only facades, behind
them are modern buildings from the '60. Without going
further into this aspect, he nevertheless underlined that
architecture is not a background, but rather at catalyst.
Architecture has to be active and our city is not only an
object, it's also an idea. Buildings therefore play an
active role in the city and with his library of Münster
as an example, Peter Wilson dwelled on the choreography of
the use of the building in the city.
Peter L Wilson was born 1950, Melbourne, Australia.
1978-88 he was Professor at the AA School in London. Since
1987 he lives and works in Münster, Germany.
'Some approaches to the form of the city,' lecture
by Josep Martorell
According to Josep Martorell the urban character of the
European cities has since the Middle Ages been determined
formally by two very precise features, which are firstly the
organisation of the public spaces as articulators of the
city, by means of streets, squares and parks. Secondly we
have the organisation of constructions which are primarily
based on the traditional city block. But during the present
century we have been forced to take two new facts into
consideration, that the car and the pedestrian can co-exist
in the street, and secondly that the growth of the city does
not destroy its urban character. What is needed is a street
system which is consistent and as homogeneous as possible,
facilitating to the maximum communication in all directions,
and which responds to the complexity of the city.
Furthermore we have the unique identity of each different
part of the city. And finally the monumental aspect of
certain points or areas which accentuate a piece of the city
as an entity and indicate its urban centrality.
Although Martorell doesn't believe in the unformal results
of the urban proposals of the CIAM, a new element has
nevertheless to be added to the above mentioned features.
"The city now requires the presence of the building
typologies derived form the Modern Movement and the great
value placed on sunlight, fresh air, and green spaces."
"this involves a certain contradiction: we must accept the
challenge of harmonising the urbanity of the traditional
form of the European city, reinforced during the last
century, with the unavoidable use of modern typologies."
This contradiction between traditional form and modern
typologies has been an important challenge in a series of
projects regarding the form of the city which MBM has
accomplished since the end of the fifties. The slides
Martorell showed do underline the necessity of making the
city legible and here streets and squares are important
structuring elements. One of the major projects has been the
Barcelona Olympic Village in the Poblenou district, which
gave Barcelona back the sea front, formerly blocked by its
own port, industry and railway lines. Here Cerdà's
plan has been reinstated, but at the same time adapted to
the new building typologies developed with the Modern
Movement.
Josep Martorell was born 1925, Barcelona. Together
with Oriol Bohigas and David Mackay he founded the MBM
arquits. He was Head Director of Urbanism and Architecture
for the Vila Olimpica in Barcelona. MBM has been largely
responsible for the urban renewal of Barcelona.
'Perspectives on Urban realism', speeches by
Bjørn Larsen, Olof Hultin and Jens Kvorning
Bjørn Larsen is the chief editor of Byggekunst, Olof
Hultin of Arkitektur and Jens Kvorning is Ass. Professor at
the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts with a long record of
published books and articles about urban planning.
Bjørn Larsen , chief editor of
Norwegian 'Byggekunst', showed Akers brygge in Oslo as an
interesting example of a conversion of an old industrial
area to new uses. The site is some 250 sq meters and 22% is
used for housing. To avoid a too unform architecture the
architects has given the different buildings outspoken
facades with individual marks.
Jens Kvorning showed Sweden as seen from a
Danish beach facing Malmö, and the sight is null.
Redirecting the view towards Copenhagen what you at
nighttime experience is mainly the lights and sounds of the
industrial city. Jens Kvorning stressed that one of the most
interesting changes going on right now is the transformation
of obsolete industrial space. Another picture shows a
Rauschenberg painting, where he has been scraping and adding
to a picture of a city.
In central Copenhagen large industrial areas are now being
converted to new uses. But some old structures can be used
as 'points of resistance' to enhance the play between
permanence and dynamism. Old buildings can give identity to
the site. He also stressed the fact that the industrial
landscape has been able to organise the urban sprawl, that
this an another kind of architecture.
Copenhagen has a long experience of a University in the
city-centre. And Jens Kvorning points out that students more
actively than other citizens use the city. An important
blend is appreciated, but a University must not grow to big,
otherwise it might cause silence to reign in the city.
Olof Hultin , chief editor of Swedish
'Arkitektur', refers to some recent projects in Sweden, like
Hammarby Sjöstad and Södra Station in Stockholm,
where the city-block has been reinstated. He deplored the
large public housing projects of the sixties and the
seventies, and pointed out that the big building sites of
that time led one to believe Sweden had took part in the
second world war, a comparison once made by Kenneth
Frampton. After the war Universities has been located as
campus outside the cities. Frescati is one example, where
Ralph Erskine nonetheless has managed to convert the trite
site into something much more compelling. That a University
adds value to a city, outside mere education, is an
undeniable fact, and this is clearly shown in the
controversy raised by a competition on the new University at
Södertörn.
GENERAL CONDITIONS FOR
MALMÖ UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE.
The recent resolution of the Riksdag
(Swedish parliament) to set up a
university college in Malmö is highly
significant for what is set to become
Sweden's most dynamic region. The
College will have a unique location, in
the heart of a city centre. The
competition area Universitetsholmen
("University Island") is part of the
harbour and shipyard district of Malmö,
which constitutes an important area of
expansion for the city centre, with
major natural qualities. The facilities can
be sited on partially undeveloped land
immediately adjacent to Malmö city
centre and to an extensive
public-transport system. The site is
among Sweden's most interesting
development areas, and is particularly
suitable for both national and regional
functions.
The aim of establishing a university
college in Malmö is to boost the city's
competitiveness in an increasingly
integrated Öresund region. The
Riksdag has emphasised that the supply
of well-educated labour is crucially
important for business and industry and
for employment, but also for
community development in general.
Accordingly, the College will play a
vital part in Malmö's development, of
which two striking features are a
thriving cultural life and, of course, the
new Öresund bridge.
These questions again implicated semiotics which not only
has to do with what a building tells us, but also a more
intertextual approach, how buildings relate to each other
and to the site itself. Modernist buildings tended to stand
out as enskilda solitärer, whereas Swedish architecture
of today in many cases seem to be subordinated to the older
urban fabric. Peter Eisenman has in his works insisted on
these relationships, xx how do we relate to the existing
urban structure?Dekonstrutivsm is about adopting, but so
much that loose coherence, and the result dominates instead
of relating. Also semiotics, do we underordna oss, dominate
like modernism, or we exclude this two extremes, how do we
relate? jmf Eisenman.
Leo Gullbring
Published by the City Planning Office of Malmö
UPP
© 2001 Calimero
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