Trabajos futuros

at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries

Examples of intensively built-up closed blocks can be found most frequently in Berlin districts of the so-called Found-ing Years. Werner Hegemann called them “Das Steinerne Berlin” [the Granite Berlin] and considered Berlin the city with the greatest number of housing barracks in the world.

Example of the effect of existing building regula-tions on housing con-struction in residential districts: the result is densely built-up closed blocks with inner court-yards. Rental barracks without air and sun. No green areas.

Berlin

razed them, set them ablaze, and bombarded them to pieces. Subsequently, when Napoleon III invited Baron Haussmann to clean up these dangerous quarters, the center of the 1830 and 1848 uprisings, the avenues were straightened out for the purpose of providing a clean shot for artillery fire and not to accommodate today’s automobile traffic.⁵In his introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France, Engels comments on this: “The straight, wide, and long av-enues in the new quarters, built after 1848, are as if purposely modified to adapt to the range of the new rifles and cannon. A revolutionary would have to be insane to choose to build bar-ricades in the new workers’ quarters in the north and the east of Berlin. . . . The conditions for street fighting have become progressively less favorable for rebels and certainly more favor-able for the army. Any victory in future street fighting would be possible only if these disad-vantages were outweighed by other factors.”

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The most mature expression of the capitalist city is the metropolises of the United States, which reflect capitalist urban development in the most exemplary way. They grew faster than the cities of old Europe; but unlike in Europe, they grew in the vast, more or less open terrain of a new continent; and unlike our Gothic or medieval cities, they did not grow intra muros.

They are relatively young, new cities, without crooked streets, laid out orthogonally on a grid-iron plan. The layout of American cities is based on a single planning scheme, common to all:

they are mechanically subdivided into quarters in a highly standardized manner, as is the whole map of the United States. The most frequently used geometry, which is essentially based on a Renaissance principle, resembles a checkerboard: New York, Baltimore, and, the most characteristic of all, Burnham’s plan for Chicago, whose system is unfortunately con-founded by a certain lack of clarity caused by the difficulty of connecting the diagonals with the orthogonal grid. In contrast, other grid or triangulated systems (San Francisco) avoid these difficulties and offer considerable advantages for traffic circulation; but they also have their disadvantage, creating blocks with acute angles and difficult diagonal connections. The most favorable system has proved to be the combination of an orthogonal grid with diagonal penetrations, as used, for example, in Philadelphia. In spite of their orthogonal layouts, Amer-ican cities exhibit traffic shortcomings even more catastrophic than those encountered in the cities of old Europe. The main cause of these traffic difficulties is that in the planning of cir-culation systems in the general scheme of the city, vertical movement systems (elevators in skyscrapers) were not coordinated with the horizontal.

Urban centralization has led to enormous increases in the price of land in the city center. In-tensive exploitation of these expensive plots leads to further traffic congestion in the center.

Until recently, no restrictions were placed on the height of buildings in American cities, which have become a forest of skyscrapers, dark and congested. The desire to maximize use of the entire surface area of an expensive plot has made it necessary to build vertically, thus leading to the introduction of a new type of building, the house of countless floors, the American sky-scraper.

The first skyscrapers were built in the business district of Chicago, which is spatially a rela-tively constricted piece of real estate, bordered by Lake Michigan, the Chicago River, and the

5) Haussmann’s replanning of Paris during the reign of Napoleon III was not only an antirevolu-tionary act but also a vast land speculation scheme, similar to that proposed by Le Corbusier to fi-nance his Plan Voisin; his method, too, is a typical Bonapartist financial fraud and the source of astonishing private enrichment.

main railroad station. The need to maximize space called for an increase in the number of floors, which, in turn, led to the discovery of a number of significant economic advantages to building upward. The main reasons that the American building industry opted for the sky-scraper can be traced to the desire to exploit constricted building sites in the business centers of large cities, coupled with the hope of profiting from the administrative, technical, and eco-nomic advantages to be gained from this new construction type. Initially, skyscrapers were still built with conventional construction methods; they were not much better than more ad-vanced versions of outdated load-bearing masonry structures with an increased number of floors, often developed as closed blocks with an interior courtyard. Because of the increased height of these buildings, the courtyards ended up as bottomless pits without sun and air. The famous Chicago Manadnock Building, built in 1891 and designed by the architect Root, is one of the first skyscrapers ever realized in masonry. It is interesting only by virtue of the austere form of its facade (devoid of any decoration); it certainly does not represent a new concept in its construction principles. The principle of load-bearing masonry walls was still retained in the construction of early skyscrapers (as the number of stories increased, these necessarily had to withstand enormous loads), but it had to be abandoned as impractical for even higher structures.

The new steel frame system of construction with light infill walls proved to be the only alter-native that made it possible to increase the number of floors beyond the capacity of masonry construction, while at the same time providing clients with more usable space. Later, this sys-tem was improved even further when flexible layouts were provided. At first, the full devel-opment of the advantages of the new steel frame system was impeded by newly imposed building regulations, which became law in New York and Chicago in 1924 and which divided the city into a number of individual functional use zones with different height restrictions:

these zones were designated as business, residential, mixed use, and industrial. The residen-tial zone was divided into two categories: districts of private residences and districts of rental apartments. The code states that up to a certain height, which is determined in turn by street width, a building is not permitted to extend beyond a straight line drawn from the center of the street to the top of the facade wall of predetermined height, rising vertically from the edge of the property line. This results in a terracelike recession of the floors on the street side. In practical terms, the ratio of building height to street width in the center of cities is usually no more than 1 to ¹⁄4. For all intents and purposes, with the exception of small plots, this means that there are essentially no real height restrictions.

On the contrary, the new law (see Stavba 5, no. 8 [1927]: 119) actually encourages the ex-ploitation of lots by high buildings, since the determination of the allowable height of a build-ing is made contbuild-ingent on depth of site, and a buildbuild-ing is allowed to reach its maximum height when neighboring parcels between two street fronts are joined and built over as a single lot.

This leads to the consolidation of smaller parcels previously owned by different individuals.

Thus, by encouraging the consolidation of small parcels by big corporate developers, the law in fact guarantees the owners of large parcels the greatest economic advantage. The full eco-nomic utilization of American building codes by developers is further predicated on replacing access to natural daylight with electrical illumination and likewise replacing natural ventila-tion with artificial mechanical means, leaving many spaces without direct access to light and air; as a consequence, the center of the city is turned into a granite canyon. And so, after open-ing up the structural frame to gain increased access to light and air, builders end up with deep, dark floor plans that are permitted to cover 100 percent of the site. Thus the appearance of North American cities, with their dynamic, spatial development of vertical sites, must be rec-ognized for what it really is: namely, the expression of the maximum exploitation of building

codes originally intended to restrict linear heights of street facades. The newest type of sky-scraper is the slim high-rise tower.⁶

The American skyscraper has petrified the city. American cities are cliff cities. Their streets are narrow canyons. In the age of speed, the city is choked up. During certain hours, skyscraper offices, banks, and department stores disgorge thousands of their employees, and the pace of the metropolis reaches its maximum. At the end of a day, millions are on the move. The best example is the tip of the Manhattan peninsula, where a veritable mass migration of nations occurs on a daily basis. All of its land area is densely built up; the Eskimo Amarulunguaq de-scribed this situation as follows: “it is a stone steppe; hemmed in between the skyscrapers I see crowded streets, choked by traffic.” In New York alone, 4 million automobiles move about.

During its times of “eternal” prosperity, America produced approximately half a million auto-mobiles per month.

The crisis of the metropolis is basically a crisis of traffic and housing. Both problems result from the turbulent growth of cities during the nineteenth century and reflect the economic and social conditions under which this growth took place. The desire to realize the highest possible rate of return on the development of building lots called for their maximum exploita-tion in terms of their coverage by buildings, resulting in turn in maximum populaexploita-tion densi-ties. By and large, building regulations, which were supposed to reconcile the requirements of health and safety and the needs of private owners, have always favored land and rent specu-lation and have always been subordinate to the interests of the property owners. As a result, it has become impossible to solve any one of the problems besetting the city by comprehen-sive planning action.

The evolutionary growth of cities during the nineteenth century had not been anticipated, though it could have been, as the theories of Henri Saint-Simon prove. As early as 1820 and long before mechanized industry had reached its mature stage of development, he had al-ready anticipated the concentration of industrial production centers employing thousands of workers, along with the establishment and growth of large cities. Fourier, Owen, Dézamy, and Considerant as well voiced the need for aboliting the differences between the city and the country. It should also be remembered that the transformation of France from an exclu-sively agricultural country to a major industrial power started only at the end of the thirties.

Incidentally, the quotation (see page 107) from The Communist Manifesto of 1847 also demon-strates that even then it was possible to anticipate and predict in sociological terms the de-velopment of cities and the deepening of the rift between the city and the country, at a time when large industry was still in its infancy and when the farmers, who then made up the ma-jority of the European population, were still waiting to be freed from the bonds of servitude, which effectively prevented them from migrating to the cities in any significant numbers.

The civic shortsightedness and organizational ineptitude of the capitalist age therefore have very deep roots: urbanism, defined as the scientific and rational approach to managing cities, requires the correct evaluation of a city’s individual determinants (the topography and geol-ogy of its territory, economic assumptions, etc.) and the planning necessary to secure the city’s organic development in time and space, that is, the ability to see the world in terms of its universal historical march forward. Urbanism intends to look forward and establish plans

6) The inspiration for the American skyscraper was the Eiffel Tower: in historical terms, the au-thorship of the first skyscraper is questionable. The first high-rise buildings in Chicago were built by Root, Adler, Sullivan, Jenny, Holabird, and Roche, and in New York (Tower Building) by L.

Gilbert. But the fact remains that before the erection of the Paris tower in 1898, buildings seldom exceeded eleven to twelve stories; they depended mostly on bearing wall rather than light steel skeleton construction systems.

for the future. Instead, especially in the nineteenth century, we observe that the time of planned city building, the time of great city founders, the time of Charles IV, Louis XIV, or Pe-ter the Great, has passed: it seems that the political system of republican democracy is averse to contemplating grand urban schemes and that it is difficult to include the sums necessary for any long-term development in the budgets that parliaments must vote on and approve. For these reasons one can easily understand why Le Corbusier proposes the establishment of a ministry of public works independent of the “whims of parliament,” and why other urban planners as well talk more or less openly of the need for a political and economic dictatorship to realize urban planning initiatives.

The inability of contemporary society to organize policies to ensure viable living conditions in the city is mainly the result of a basic lack of planning and the anarchy of today’s economic sit-uation. The crisis of the city can be overcome only by comprehensive planned interventions, which are made impossible by the very nature of today’s economic system. Today’s cities are a chaotic and weak agglomeration of diverse forces, which remain unfocused and which lack the collective and planned will to be channeled in the direction of a higher unity. They are ant heaps, with people living there like ants; like a black disease carrying flies, factories descend on green pastures, poisoning the air, water, and soil. The vault of the sky is far away and ob-scured — unreachable — as if without hope. Streets are dark pits of more hope without hope:

“to walk the streets with hopeless hope”—these words of Vildracov’s poem capture the psy-chological effect of the city’s environment with chilling accuracy. Verhaeren, composes somber odes to inhuman, black, and despairing city monsters with antennas reaching into the void, calling them “Villes tentaculaires.” Ignoring the voices of these prophets, both European and the American cities have become a social disaster.