Modernism and the Spirit of the City

Iain Boyd Whyte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135158668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

Modernism and the Spirit of the City offers a new reading of the architectural modernism that emerged and flourished in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Rejecting the fashionable postmodernist arguments of the 1980s and '90s which damned modernist architecture as banal and monotonous, this collection of essays by eminent scholars investigates the complex cultural, social, and religious imperatives that lay below the smooth, white surfaces of new architecture.

Part I

Geist

The German word Geist defines a human quality that combines both rationality and spirituality. It embraces mind and intellect on the one hand, and metaphysical belief or spiritual faith, on the other. Geist points to a richness that characterised architectural modernism between the 1890s and the late 1920s, with the ‘Geist der Großstadt’ — the spirit of the city — defined variously as the implementation of the ultra-rationalist circulation plans at one extreme, to the construction of cultural beacons, symbols of redemption, and city crowns at the other. Diverse strategies employed to define the ‘spirit’ of the city are addressed in the first three chapters.

Chapter 1

From locus genii to
heart of the city

Embracing the spirit of the city

Volker M. Welter

What is most striking in London is its vastness … London overpowers us with its vastness. Place a Forum or an Acropolis in its centre, and the effect of the metropolitan mass, which now has neither head nor heart, instead of being stupefying, would be ennobling. Nothing more completely represents a nation than a public building … monuments to which all should be able to look up with pride, and which should exercise an elevating influence upon the spirit of the humblest.

(Benjamin Disraeli, 1847, p. 112)¹

Obviously, the towns which are already growing so fast will grow yet faster, or rather they will melt into the distant country … What was once the most densely inhabited part of the city is precisely the part which is now becoming deserted, because it is becoming common property, or at least a common centre of intermittent life … The heart of the city is the patrimony of all … Every town should have its agora, where all who are animated by a common passion can meet together.

(Elisée Reclus, 1895, pp. 263–4)²

The big city, the residential neighbourhood, small towns, and country villages … each must have its own heart or nucleus or Core … The Core is not the seat of civic dignity: the Core is the gathering place of the people … The market place? The cathedral square? The city hall? The common? The crossroads? Somewhere, whether planned or not planned, a place exists that provides a physical setting for the expression of collective emotion.

(Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, CIAM 8, 1951, p. 103)³

When in 1951 the eighth Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) assembled in Hoddesdon, England, its theme was the core of the city. Following on from CIAM 6 (1947) in Bridgwater, England, and CIAM 7 (1949) in Bergamo, Italy, CIAM 8 was the third meeting since the end of World War II dedicated to a reassessment of CIAM's principles of functional modern architecture and urban planning. Recent scholarship has emphasised that CIAM 8 was the climax of a self-reflective interrogative process, which had begun when CIAM reconvened, after an interval of ten years, in 1947 in order to re-establish contacts and to reaffirm its goals by surveying which of its existing principles were still relevant.⁴ The discussions about humanism in architecture and planning during the 1951 conference expressed an inclination among architects and planners to reconsider the potential importance of empiricist and humanist values for modern architecture and urban planning. Pre-war CIAM conferences had investigated housing and minimum habitations (Existenzminimum) or the advantageous division of modern cities into the four functional zones of work, living, recreation, and transportation. This rational approach to the modem urban question had culminated in the Charter of Athens, which was based on the CIAM 4 meeting in 1933 but only published a decade later by the French CIAM group.⁵

With the conference on the core of the city CIAM 8 focused its interest on the centre of the city. One of the most obvious explanations offered for this shift in interest was the need for the reconstruction of many major historic European cities following their destruction during World War II.⁶ Yet this explanation falls short in two respects. First, it does not account for the numerous designs for urban cores at the centre of new cities presented during CIAM 8. Second, it does not fully explain the interest in the potentially symbolic function of the core of a city, in the case of CIAM 8, for example, as the embodiment of humanist values. Indeed, the attempts made at CIAMs 6–8 to broaden the strictly functional and rational basis of architectural and planning thought that had informed the founding tenets of CIAM can be traced further back into the history of the discourse on the modern city than to the immediate aftermath of World War II. Since the late 1930s, urban theoreticians, historians, and architects such as Lewis Mumford, José Luis Sert, Sigfried Giedion, and Louis I. Kahn had developed an interest in notions of monumentality in urban settings.⁷ Broadly speaking, they aimed at complementing, or indeed overcoming, an exclusive focus in architecture on the functional fulfilment of rationally established human needs.

A pointer to the sources of CIAM's intellectual reorientation is provided by the theme of CIAM 8, the core of the city, and the title of the subsequent published proceedings, The Heart of the City. Under these headings, CIAM 8 harked back to a tradition of urban thought that was relatively little concerned with a utilitarian and functional reordering and extension of the urban fabric. Instead, this particular approach to the modern city aimed first and foremost at providing a symbolic urban focus such as a prominent community building, a meeting square, or other central spaces or structures. Such a focus would bestow upon the city an ideal order by capturing and making visible the spirit of the city, the genius loci, in a space for the spirit, a locus genii. The locus genii as the urban core was considered to be the most important means of creating a city. It would not only transform the urban fabric into a holistic whole larger than the constituting functional zones, but would also elevate the town's inhabitants into a community of citizens.

The three quotes cited at the beginning of this chapter map out broadly the history of this concept.⁸ From a literary motif to anarchosocialist visionary essay to conference proceedings, the concept of a heart of the city gradually gained acceptance as an urban design tool, after its emergence as a reaction to the massive expansion of the city during industrialisation. Disraeli, for example, specifically demands a heart for London to counter the blandness of the modern, endlessly expanding city:

Though London is vast, it is very monotonous. All those new districts that have sprung up within the last half-century, the creatures of our commercial and colonial wealth, it is impossible to conceive anything more tame, more insipid, more uniform. Pancras is like Mary-le-bone, Mary-le-bone is like Paddington; all the streets resemble each other … This amount of building capital ought to have produced a great city … It did nothing.⁹

Roughly a generation later the French geographer and anarchist Elisée Reclus argued in a comparable manner. When speculating about the origin and future of the city, Reclus stated his satisfaction that cities were expanding into the surrounding countryside, which was a sign of healthy growth of human civilisation. However, in order to incorporate fully the newly urbanised areas into the city, they had to be brought under its spell. This Reclus intended to achieve by transforming the evacuated historic urban centre into a cultural and social core of the rapidly growing city. It was this cultural core that ultimately defined the city as a city. Disraeli's prescription of a heart for London and Reclus's transformation of a historic city centre into the core of a vastly expanded modem town are early examples of the figurative and symbolically charged approach to the modern city that culminated in the discussion of the core of the city at CIAM 8.

Genius loci

The concept of a genius is of ancient Roman origin. A genius was for the Romans a tutelary spirit that existed outside the human being. Throughout their entire lives, human beings were accompanied by their genius: human life began at the very moment when a genius joined a human being and ended when the genius departed. Furthermore, the genius influenced man's character, modes of life, states of happiness, and good or bad fortunes. Yet such genii existed not only for human beings, but also for families, for professional groups such as craftsmen or artists, for societies and states, for such localities as theatres, baths, stables, streets, for whole cities as well as for rural locations. Most importantly, the genius existed outside the object of its tutelage and acted as a generator and preservator of this object, its life and characteristics. In return, the genius demanded attention from its tutee in the form, for example, of sacrifice or prayer.

In more recent times the understanding of the genius, especially of the genius loci, has shifted considerably. Christian Norberg-Schulz argues in his book Genius Loci that a location is elevated to a place when it expresses a distinct character or genius loci. He explains that ‘this identity, or “spirit”, may be described by means of the kind of concrete, “qualitative” terms Heidegger uses to characterize earth and sky’. Referring to Heidegger's idea of dwelling, which is defined as ‘the way ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Geist
• PART II Place
• PART III Faith
• Bibliography
• Index