122 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 302 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 1 2
Intimate Metropolis
122 2 3 4 5
Intimate Metropolis Urban Subjects in the
6 7
Modern City
8 9 10 1 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 302 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 1 2
Edited by Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri
First published 2009 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 2009 Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri for selection and editorial matter; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The publisher makes no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Intimate metropolis: urban subjects in the modern city/edited by Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Architecture – Human factors. 2. Domestic space. I. Di Palma, Vittoria. II. Periton, Diana. III. Lathouri, Marina. NA9053.H76I58 2008 720.103 – dc22 ISBN 0-203-89005-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0–415–41506–3 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–41507–1 (pbk) ISBN10: 0–203–89005–1 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–41506–4 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–41507–1 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–89005–9 (ebk)
2008014906
122 2 3
Contents
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Notes on Contributors
1
Acknowledgements
vii x
3
Intimate Metropolis: Introduction
1
4
Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri
2
522 6
1
2
Heads: Philip-Lorca diCorcia and the Paradox of
9
Urban Portraiture
20
Hugh Campbell
1 2
3
4
‘So the flâneur goes for a walk in his room’: Interior,
6
Arcade, Cinema, Metropolis
7
Charles Rice
9
5
Exhibitionism: John Soane’s ‘Model House’
6
90
Private House, Public House: Victor Horta’s Ubiquitous
2
Domesticity
3
Amy Catania Kulper
4
72
Helene Furján
302 1
58
Kathryn Brown
4
8
41
A Space for the Imagination: Depicting Women Readers in the Nineteenth-Century City
3 5
9
Diana Periton
7 8
Urban Life
7
5
Drawing and Dispute: The Strategies of the Berlin Block
110
132
Katharina Borsi
6 7
8
Collective Intimacies
8
153
Marina Lathouri
9 40
‘The necessity of the plan’: Visions of Individuality and
9
City Is House and House Is City: Aldo van Eyck, Piet Blom
1
and the Architecture of Homecoming
2
Karin Jaschke
175
v
Contents
10
Urban Play: Intimate Space and Postwar Subjectivity
195
Roy Kozlovsky 11
Pervasive Intimacy: The Unité d’Habitation and Golden Lane as Instruments of Postwar Domesticity
218
Christopher Hight 12
Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy
239
Vittoria Di Palma Index
vi
271
122 2 3 4 5
Notes on Contributors
6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3
Sue Barr (cover image) is a photographer and tutor at the Architectural
4
Association, London. Her work has been published in a wide variety of
522
books and journals. She is currently working on The Architecture of Transit:
6
An International History of Motorway Architecture and Engineering. See
7
www.heathcotebarr.eu.
8 9
Katharina Borsi teaches Urban Design at Nottingham University. She has
20
previously taught at Greenwich University, the Architectural Association
1
Graduate School, London and the Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow.
2
Her research investigates the intersection between architecture and urbanism,
3
both in its genealogy and in current applications.
4 5
Kathryn Brown is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History,
6
Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Her area
7
of speciality is nineteenth-century French art and literature and she is currently
8
working on the themes of reading, privacy and concealment, particularly in the
9
works of Manet and Degas.
302 1
Hugh Campbell is Professor in Architecture at University College Dublin. His
2
current projects include a book on the relationship between the self and space
3
as well as a series of essays on aspects of photography and urban space. He
4
is editing a collection of essays entitled Defining Space, and has been appointed
5
editor for the modern architecture volume of the Dictionary of Irish Art and
6
Architecture.
7 8
Vittoria Di Palma is Assistant Professor of Architectural History in the
9
Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, New York.
40
From 1999 to 2003 she taught at the Architectural Association, where she co-
1
directed the Histories and Theories MA programme. Her current book project
2
is a cultural history of abandoned and derelict landscapes, entitled Wasteland. vii
Notes on Contributors
Helene Furján is Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at PennDesign, University of Pennsylvania. She has had essays and reviews published in journals including Gray Room, AAFiles, Assemblage, Casabella,
Journal of Architecture, JAE and Interstices. She has recently published Crib Sheets: Notes on the Contemporary Architectural Conversation, co-edited with Sylvia Lavin (Monacelli, 2005), and has chapters in Softspace (Routledge, 2006), 306090: Models (2008), the forthcoming Temporalism (PAP) and an
AD Special Issue, Energies: New Material Boundaries. Helene is co-editor of the PennDesign book series, VIA. Christopher Hight is Assistant Professor at the Rice School of Architecture, Houston. He previously taught in the Architectural Association’s Design Research Laboratory, and has worked for the Renzo Piano Building Workshop. He co-edited AD: Collective Intelligence in Design (2006) and has recently published a book on cybernetics, post-humanism, formalism and post-World War Two architectural design, Architectural Principles in the Age of Cybernetics (Routledge, 2008). Karin Jaschke is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history and theory at the University of Brighton. She holds degrees from Technische Universität Berlin, the Bartlett School London, and Princeton University and has previously taught at various schools including the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Her research interests include modern architecture’s links to anthropology, entertainment architecture and ludic environments, and the cultural dimensions of sustainable building. She is co-editor of Stripping Las Vegas: A Contextual Review of Casino
Resort Architecture. Roy Kozlovsky is an Adjunct Professor at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture, New York and a PhD candidate at the Princeton University School of Architecture. His dissertation examines postwar architecture and urbanism in Great Britain through buildings and environments that were commissioned specifically for children. Amy Catania Kulper is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and recently completed her doctoral work at the University of Cambridge. Her current research will culminate in a book with the working title Immanent Natures that examines the propagation of an interiorized, introverted, and instrumentalized version of the natural world in architectural discourse within the disparate historical contexts of the fin-de-siècle, the 1960s and the present. Marina Lathouri co-directs the Histories and Theories Graduate Programme at the Architectural Association, London, and teaches history of architecture viii
Notes on Contributors
122
and urbanism at the University of Cambridge. She has previously taught theory
2
and design at the Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania.
3
Her current research focuses on mid-twentieth-century and contemporary
4
urban thinking and forms of architectural practice.
5 6
Diana Periton is an architectural historian and critic. Between 2004 and 2007
7
she was Head of History and Theory at the Mackintosh School of Architecture,
8
Glasgow. From 1990 to 2004, she taught at the Architectural Association,
9
London, where she was co-director, first of the undergraduate General Studies
10
Programme, and subsequently of the Histories and Theories MA. She is
1
currently completing a PhD at the University of Cambridge on Parisian urbanism
2
in the early twentieth century.
3 4
Charles Rice is Senior Lecturer and MArch course director in the School of
522
Architecture at the University of Technology, Sydney. He has also taught in
6
the Histories and Theories MA programme at the Architectural Association,
7
London. He is author of The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity,
8
Domesticity (Routledge, 2007), and is a member of the design research
9
network OCEAN.
20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 302 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 1 2 ix
Acknowledgements
This book originated in a conference, ‘The Intimate Metropolis: Domesticating the City, Infiltrating the Room’, held at the Architectural Association, London, in October 2003. It contains expanded versions of some of the papers presented there, and a number of chapters that have been specifically commissioned. We would like to thank all of those who gave papers at the conference and participated in its discussions, as well as those who made the event possible in other ways: Mohsen Mostafavi, Chairman of the Architectural Association, Mark Cousins, Director of General Studies, Belinda Flaherty, Micki Hawkes, Marilyn Dyer, Joel Newman, Nicola Bailey, Stephania Batoeva, Nicola Quinn and Pascal Babeau. David Terrien meticulously edited a first selection of conference papers, which was published in AA Files 51 (Spring 2005). We are also heavily indebted to our editors at Routledge – to Caroline Mallinder, who set the project in motion, as well as Georgina Johnson, Eleanor Rivers, Kate McDevitt, Jane Wilde and Katy Low. Considerable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of images. The authors, editors and publishers apologize for any errors and omissions and, if notified, will endeavour to correct these at the earliest possible opportunity.
x
122 2 3 4 5
Intimate Metropolis Introduction
6 7 8 9
Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri
10 1 2 3 4 522
At first glance, our title Intimate Metropolis may seem a provocation: surely
6
the modern city has little to do with intimacy. In many ways, our juxtaposition
7
of terms is intended to challenge a discourse structuring numerous recent
8
studies of the modern city, one that assumes rigid divisions between public
9
and private, urban and domestic. Yet, if we consider Benjamin Constant’s
20
assertion that in the modern polis it is in private, rather than in public that
1
freedom and fulfilment are to be experienced, or Walter Benjamin’s declaration
2
that it is in the 1830s that the ‘private citizen’ appears, it seems that this
3
recasting of concepts of public and private is integral to the metropolis itself,
4
that the modern city’s emergence transformed a dichotomous and hierarchical
5
relationship between public and private into a close and mutually implicating
6
association between the intimate and the social.1
7
‘Public’ refers to the collective, ‘private’ to the individual. Our choice
8
of the word ‘intimate’ reinforces the extent to which the modern city is
9 302 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 1 2
predicated on the concept of the private individual, and on the sanctity of the individual’s inmost thoughts and feelings. ‘Intimate’ is a term used in conjunction with objects or ideas that are held close – ones that are worn next to the skin, or that lie within the recesses of the mind or heart. But it also implies an unveiling of the self, a sharing of hopes and fears with a selected few. Something intimate is not restricted to a single person; the word connotes instead a close community, a republic of initiates who are brought together by their common participation in rare and selective acts. And whereas the notion of the ‘metropolis’, or ‘mother city’ dates back to classical times, our interest is in its specifically modern configuration, in the period from the turn of the nineteenth century when the city begins to be conceptualized as a continuously growing agglomeration of people, rather than as an abstract political entity, or as a static object rigidly demarcated and defined by walls. 1
Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri
The juxtaposition of ‘intimate’ and ‘metropolis’, then, brings the question of subjectivity to the fore, and with it the way the modern city establishes relationships between individual and collective, its particular versions of community. In the chapters that follow, the modern city – that is, its concepts, its citizens, its spaces and its architecture – is considered through the way it shapes, and is shaped by, ideas of the self. Some chapters investigate identities formed through the imaginative freedoms afforded by the city; others reveal the ideas of individual well-being that are fundamental to programmes of urban reform. While assumptions about the reciprocal relationship between space and identity can be traced back to eighteenth-century concepts of environmental determinism, several chapters in this volume read these configurations through a Foucauldian lens, casting a critical eye on Utopian claims, and keeping clearly in sight the caveat that communities based on subjective notions of identity internalize, and indeed render intimate, their mechanisms of control. The intimate metropolis is thus a place in which boundaries between public and private, individual and multitude have been blurred. Through a wide variety of objects and sources – houses, apartment blocks, streets and playgrounds; paintings, photographs, films, plans and sections; cities that include London and Paris, New York and Berlin – this book’s chapters seek out the continuities and contingencies, interactions and reciprocities engendered by the intimate metropolis. Interrogating the categories of urban and domestic, individual and collective, public and private in both material and conceptual terms, they investigate how these interactions are structured, and the uses, benevolent and malign, wittingly and unwittingly, to which they are put. The first chapter, Diana Periton’s ‘Urban Life’, focuses directly on methods by which the modern city came to be constituted by its individual citizens. Examining the development of the use of statistics in nineteenthcentury Paris, Periton investigates how the aggregation, categorization and tabulation of individuals were used to assess and to regulate the collective moral and physical health of the city. By imagining the city as an organism – as an entity in flux, capable of variation, growth and decline, rather than as an assembly of fixed parts; as a collective made up of subjects whose actions, needs and proclivities change constantly, rather than following the predictable dictates of ‘human nature’ – the developing techniques of statistics suggested the possibility of a fluid model of city planning, in which the general laws regulating urban life could be ascertained. Periton shows that the search for statistical laws generated new kinds of people, new collective urban types, shaped by the city, their typicality understood as a statistically derived normality. Hugh Campbell’s ‘Heads: PhilipLorca diCorcia and the Paradox of Urban Portraiture’ reveals a catalogue of urban types who stand in for the city in a different way. Focusing on the photographs 2
Introduction
122
of diCorcia, Harry Callahan and Walker Evans, Campbell shows how Evans’
2
‘portraits’ of anonymous people in the New York subway, captured ‘when the
3
guard is down and the mask is off’, were crucial to the work of later
4
photographers who sought to convey the energy and vitality of the modern
5
city through the portrayal of its inhabitants. For a photographer such as diCorcia,
6
the city is unseen, but registered in terms of its impact on his subjects: his
7
work chronicles the ways in which its most public of places encourage the
8
revelation of our most private selves. Drawing on the writings of Georg Simmel
9
and Richard Sennett, Campbell shows how, in the context of the modern city,
10
the private self is both protected from the public gaze, and projected theatrically:
1
the metropolis furnishes anonymity, but that very anonymity is what allows an
2
individual’s interiority to be revealed. In the work of Campbell’s chosen
3
photographers, public and private are thus posited as inseparable categories,
4
and the city as a milieu in which each produces and sustains the other.
522 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Kathryn Brown’s ‘A Space for the Imagination: Women Readers in the Nineteenth-Century City’ argues that it is the particular nature of what it means to be ‘in public’ in the modern city that affords the individual anonymity, and thus the possibility of something akin to a public privacy. Focusing on depictions of women reading in the paintings of Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas, she describes the ‘portable privacy’ the subjects of these works seem to create for themselves, and their inhabitation of an intimate world of the imagination carved out of the public realm of the bustling metropolis, away from their traditional roles inside the family. But reading in public, Brown suggests, is not simply a retreat. Rather, it allows these women to be indifferent to the acquisitive gaze of the male flâneur as they browse in their own way through the city’s wares. The experiences of a recast flâneur are central to Charles Rice’s chapter ‘“So the flâneur goes for a walk in his room”: Interior, Arcade, Cinema,
302
Metropolis’. Rice explores the role of the imagination, of our propensity to
1
invest material things with our own fantasies and desires, in the ‘constitution
2
of the intimate metropolitan’, a figure he pursues through the urban types of
3
the rentier, the collector, the flâneur himself and, more recently, the cinephile.
4
Beginning with the imaginary urban perambulations of Xavier de Maistre,
5
experienced within the bounded confines of a room, Rice identifies a moment
6
at the end of the eighteenth century when the domestic interior began to
7
emerge as a specific condition: both a refuge from the city and dependent on
8
it. In the imaginary excursions of writers such as de Maistre, Baudelaire,
9
Benjamin and Kierkegaard, the self, the interior and the city interpenetrate, in
40
a kind of mutual appropriation, making the domestic interior a crucial site for
1
the production of an experience of the city generated in the imagination, and,
2
with it, of a new kind of citizen. 3
Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri
The way the interior conjures in our minds worlds beyond its walls, traced by Rice through the inner experiences of its inhabitants, is explored in specifically architectural terms by Helene Furján in ‘Exhibitionism: John Soane’s “Model House”’. Furján posits Soane’s London house, built at the turn of the nineteenth century, as a model of a hybrid architecture: as home, museum, memorial, architect’s office and teaching studio, it synthesized a range of roles. With its collections of architectural fragments, framed views, surprising juxtapositions, and play of shadows and coloured light, the house’s interior was conceived as a variegated environment through which to travel, explicitly designed to evoke aesthetic experiences similar to those of the Grand Tour. In this interior landscape, public and private, past and present, real and imagined conflate and commingle. Even as it came to be identified as a distinct category, the domestic interior was characterized by its struggle to contain the fantasies it generated, or to keep the city at bay. Soane’s hybrid house was a model that actively deployed this condition, using processes of subjective engagement to generate new architectural ideas. For Benjamin, as Rice explains, it is Art Nouveau architecture, such as that of Victor Horta, that ultimately brings about the ‘liquidation of the interior’ at the end of the nineteenth century. Amy Catania Kulper describes the result of this liquidation as a ‘ubiquitous domesticity’, in which the interior, rather than providing a refuge from the city, fully appropriates the external world of spectacle. Her ‘Private House, Public House’ studies Horta’s 1897 Hôtel Tassel, home for a university professor, and his 1899 ‘Maison du Peuple’, headquarters for Belgium’s nascent socialist party, both in Brussels. Kulper proposes that Horta’s architecture, like Soane’s, relies on programmatic amalgamations, on the use of elements – like the salon and the café – that are simultaneously public and private. She shows how the professor’s home subsumes the department store, the public garden, the exhibition and the theatre to portray its owner as Hannah Arendt’s social being, neither a fully private, nor a fully public citizen. At the same time, the ‘house for the people’ choreographs theatrical projections of workers and the products of their labour, as if to reveal them to themselves. Kulper argues that, although intended to lead to social amelioration, Horta’s architecture of ubiquitous domesticity extended ‘the horizon of domesticity . . . indiscriminately . . . into the public realm’, imposing a single, generic and thus limiting notion of well-being on the subjects it constructs. Katharina Borsi does not use the term ‘ubiquitous domesticity’, but its appearance is what she, too, traces in her chapter ‘Drawing and Dispute: The Strategies of the Berlin Block’. Borsi describes the development of the block from 1860 to 1910, showing how it became both Berlin’s standard housing type and its principal urban component – the city’s ubiquitous typology. In contrast to earlier historical interpretations, which have declared modernist 4
Introduction
122
Siedlungen to be a response to – even a rebellion against – the density and
2
supposed rigidity of the nineteenth-century Berlin block, Borsi shows that the
3
block’s early versions provided generic spaces that blurred distinctions between
4
public and private, inside and outside, in a typology characterized by flexibility
5
and permeability. But because the block was also the site across which the
6
‘disputes’ of the city were articulated, as techniques of urban study and
7
diagnosis were developed in order to define, manage and control the urban
8
population, it became increasingly codified, its spaces ever more rigidly
9
differentiated. Borsi links the gradual congealing of the block’s form into
10
regularized domestic spaces both to its repetition in neighbourhoods or districts
1
and to the emergence of the modern family noted by Foucault and Jacques
2
Donzelot. This is a family whose autonomy, its freedom to exist in privacy, is
3
conditioned by the mutual surveillance of the community’s members, in
4
mechanisms of control that are woven into its social and its physical structure.
522 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
The city Borsi describes is a differentiated spatial field that is also a field of knowledge – knowledge about, and operating on, the city’s subjects. The way the city is configured, conceptually and spatially, objectifies the practices of its inhabitants, rendering them visible and manipulable. If this understanding of the city was still largely implicit in late nineteenth-century Berlin, it was fundamental to the builders of the new postwar society of the 1950s and 1960s, and is central to the arguments of the four chapters that follow. Marina Lathouri’s ‘“The necessity of the plan”: Visions of Individuality and Collective Intimacies’ looks at forms of subjectivity that emerged in nineteenth-century modes of organization, and became generalized in arguments about the Functional City. By analysing themes and graphic practices that prevailed in the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) from 1928 to 1959, this chapter suggests that the realm of the intimate in its different forms has been an ideal framework for the formalization of con-
302
nections between systems of inhabitation and processes of production of the
1
urban field. Lathouri discusses how the plans and diagrams of the ‘typical
2
dwelling unit’ were primarily used to imagine the links between individual
3
experience and a general system of spatial organization. Her chapter argues
4
that registers of experience and concepts of the subject that prevailed after
5
the Second World War further intensified the theme of inhabitation as an
6
integrated form of living that always bore a collective dimension. ‘Human
7
habitat’ replaced the ‘typical dwelling unit’, thus incorporating a wider civic and
8
governmental imperative and rendering the intimate part of an urban ecology.
9
For Lathouri, these practices, the questions they introduced regarding how the
40
individual enters into the production of a collective coercion, and the ways in
1
which dwelling occurs within this field, established a framework fundamental
2
to the subsequent course of architectural and urban thinking. 5
Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri
Karin Jaschke’s ‘City Is House and House Is City: Aldo van Eyck, Piet Blom and the Architecture of Homecoming’ studies the way a particular group of architects associated with Dutch structuralism attempted literally to reconfigure the relationship between the ‘dwelling unit’ and the urban plan. Their critique of CIAM’s prewar model of the Functional City became an investigation of the urban condition in terms of a multiscalar spatiality that sought to interweave interior and exterior spaces, intimate settings and public encounters, the domestic and the civic realms. Van Eyck’s concept of ‘configurative design’ depended on a basic figure understood as a Gestalt form which could be multiplied, extended or contracted in order to address a range of orders of human association, from house to street to district to city. Elevating the subjective experiences of encounter and communication, van Eyck’s student Blom focused on such elements as ‘doorstep’ and ‘threshold’; he emphasized components such as semi-open courtyards, open stairs and access platforms, which he saw as constituent parts of an extended urban plan conceived as a network, generating a concept of form understood in terms of pattern and structure rather than as an assembly of isolated objects. The multiscalar basis of ‘configurative design’ thus recast urban space as an extension of the domestic, and domestic space as an interiorized urbanity. Roy Kozlovsky’s ‘Urban Play: Intimate Space and Postwar Subjectivity’ examines the prominence given to children’s play in postwar city planning theories. He investigates a discourse that idealized street play as a spontaneous, identity-forming activity, one that provided a model for a creative and participatory appropriation of urban space, but that simultaneously contributed to new forms of surveillance used to scrutinize the child-rearing practices of the British working classes. While in the interwar years, planners associated with CIAM used images of children and their play to indict the unplanned metropolis and advocate urban reform, in postwar debates the figure of the child at play was used to signify desirable qualities of urban space, and to propagate social regeneration. The free movement of self-initiated play (in contrast to more regimented calisthenics) was thought to foster the development of an individuality fundamental to a democratic model of citizenship. Drawing on the arguments of Nikolas Rose, Kozlovsky suggests that this focus on play indicates a model of citizenship in which one was, paradoxically, ‘obliged to be free’; playgrounds that fostered children’s agency were but part of a larger attempt to govern subjects from within, by making their inner impulses visible and measurable. Christopher Hight’s ‘Pervasive Intimacy: The Unité d’Habitation and Golden Lane as Instruments of Postwar Domesticity’ turns to prototypes conceived for mass-production housing to identify a new subjective order sought by planners and architects. Juxtaposing Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille with Alison and Peter Smithson’s Golden Lane project for 6
Introduction
122
London, Hight shows how Le Corbusier continued to rely on a dichotomy
2
between domestic interiority and urban exteriority, while the Smithsons, like
3
van Eyck and Blom, rendered such divisions moot. To Hight, the boundless and
4
interdependent world sketched out by Le Corbusier in his Modulor books
5
signals, not only his own Unité, but also, and more strongly, the spatial con-
6
figuration of Golden Lane, where categories of public and private, interior and
7
exterior are subsumed in a topological network of relations. Hight describes the
8
differences between the versions of order intended by the two housing projects
9
in terms of the way the inhabitant-as-subject sees and is seen. The Smithsons’
10
understanding of space as an extended network displaces the subject from
1
the fixed viewing position established by the Unité, positing instead a complex
2
web that offers a multitude of viewing positions. With differences in size, loca-
3
tion and scale made less important than the continuity of a consistent set of
4
relationships, these non-scalar networks are symptomatic of a radical relativism.
522
For Hight, they indicate the transformation of a Foucauldian model of biopolitics
6
into one that is closer to Hardt and Negri’s concept of Empire.2
7
Our final chapter takes Hight’s emphasis on the viewing subject in
8
a network of non-scalar relations to a global level. Vittoria Di Palma’s ‘Zoom:
9
Google Earth and Global Intimacy’ analyses the techniques of Google’s global
20
imaging program in order to consider the implications of its representational
1
conventions for the structuring of relationships between viewer, community
2
and planet. The chapter shows how Google Earth’s reliance on the aerial view
3
and the zoom creates a new correspondence between the individual and the
4
cosmos in which everything, from the minuscule to the gigantic, is made
5
equivalent. The zoom’s configuration of visual experience replaces a situated
6
viewer with a disembodied one, generating a perspective that collapses the
7
global and the local into a non-scalar seamless continuum. Di Palma argues
8
that the ways in which Google Earth enables its users to manipulate and
9
configure these flows of images on their own computers restructures concepts
302
of community. The implicit suggestion is that just as our ideas of the modern
1
metropolis are dependent on the construct of the ‘private citizen’, so our
2
postmodern notions of a global order are based on interactions construed in
3
intimate terms.
4
Some years ago, Michael Sorkin identified our era as having
5
witnessed the end of public space.3 More recently, it has been argued by Paul
6
Virilio, among others, that the internet and processes of globalization have finally
7
rendered the dichotomy between concepts of public and private anachronistic.4
8
The blurring of these categories, addressed in different ways by the chapters
9
of this book, has resulted in new kinds of interactions, reciprocities and
40
configurations. This collection explores what could be termed the rise of the
1
intimate, a condition partaking of both the public and the private, the urban and
2
the domestic, the individual and the collective. But this new era of intimacy, 7
Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri
fostered by the internet and a culture of celebrity that encourages individuals to share the details of their daily lives with an anonymous multitude, though heralded by some as a step toward a more harmonious, or even democratic, global condition, leads also to concepts of community in which the individual, rather than the citizen, reigns supreme. The intimate metropolis shapes, and is shaped by, our changing hopes, desires and fears. In its elevation of the personal, its erasure of boundaries, its conflation of categories, its fluid and multifaceted nature, it is symptomatic of our culture, and of our current predicament. With this book, we hope not simply to confirm the demise of older notions of urban life, but also, and more importantly, to provide a framework for a debate concerning the history of the intimate metropolis, and its possible futures. Notes 1
Benjamin Constant, ‘De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes – discours prononcé à l’Athénée Royale de Paris en 1819’, in De la liberté chez les modernes, ed. Marcel Gauchet (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1980). Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in Peter Demetz (ed.) Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), p. 154. This close association between the intimate and the social is discussed by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 39 ff., and developed further by Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1976).
2
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
3
Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, edited by
4
Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, trans. Daniel Moshenberg (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991
Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992). [1984]).
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Chapter 1
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1 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 9
Introduction
20 1
In Paris Peasant, published in 1926, Louis Aragon describes a visit he made
2
with two friends, André Breton and Marcel Noll, to the Parc des Buttes-
3
Chaumont, on the north-eastern fringes of Paris. Chased there by boredom,
4
they roamed through the park after dark on a spring evening. Both to them and
5
to its nineteenth-century creators, the park seemed a place of constant
6
experiment, a place heavy with possibility (see Figure 1.1).1
7
The park was a major ingredient in Haussmann’s ‘transformation
8
de Paris’, built and planted in the 1860s on land next to the hangman’s gibbet
9
that had been extensively quarried for gypsum and used as a dump for night
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soil.2 Haussmann described it as uninhabited wasteland, pervaded principally
1
by noxious fumes. He proudly records that, once its metamorphosis had taken
2
place, the 25-hectare site contained 5 kilometres of carriageways and footpaths,
3
a specially pumped stream and a 32-metre waterfall, a lake with a temple-
4
topped island reached by 2 bridges, extensive lawns, 3 chalet-restaurants, a
5
belvedere, and the ‘inevitable grotto’. The chemin de fer de ceinture, Paris’
6
orbital railway, ran through a tunnel, then a ravine, across its eastern edge.3
7
The entry in the Paris Guide of 1867 reinforces and expands Haussmann’s facts
8
and figures – 5,940 square metres of path were gravel, 10,000 were sand; one
9
of the two bridges was a suspension bridge with a span of 63 metres; the cliffs
40
around the lake reached a height of 50 metres. It is also more forthcoming
1
than Haussmann about the former inhabitants of the site, and the park’s
2
intended effect on them: 9
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The area known as the Buttes-Chaumont was a place of ill-repute, home of thieves, bohemians and vagabonds. The City of Paris was well aware that material improvements have a great influence on behaviour, and that by cleaning up this domain, its population would also be transformed, or forced to leave.4 In Aragon’s account, the area is a ‘test-tube of human chemistry, in which the precipitates have the power of speech and eyes of a particular colour’. Its thieves, bohemians and vagabonds, or, in his taxonomy, its rag-pickers and market gardeners (both dealers in human detritus) have mutated to become ‘postmen and middlemen’, the properly municipal subjects of Paris’ new XIXth
arrondissement, annexed to the city along with the other outer arrondissements on 31 December 1859.5 Several pages of Aragon’s account are dedicated to the description of a bronze column that stood at a high point on the southern edge of the park (see Figure 1.2).6 By match-light, Aragon and his companions transcribed the information given on its four faces. Embossed figures declared it had been unveiled on 14 July 1883 ‘by kind permission of the municipal administration’. An inscription on the base gave the exact location of the column according to its height above sea level and that of the river Seine. Its cardinal points, the direction of and distance to the local town hall, as well as to several of Paris’ city gates, were also provided. The column recorded the postal addresses of the arrondissement’s nursery and elementary schools (and the number of places in each), of its municipal trade school, its hospital, markets both local and for the city as a whole, its religious establishments, police stations, post offices, tax collectors’ offices, squares and parks, railway stations, and the main routes (road, rail and canal) connecting it to ‘the exterior’.7 It also gave the total area of the arrondissement (566 hectares), the length of its streets, quays and boulevards (52.383 kilometres), the size of its population (117,885), and the number of dwelling houses – mostly full of rented rooms – it contained (3,162). Set into the faces of the column were a barometer, a thermometer and a clock. The column thus acted both as a monument to its new arrondisse-
ment and as a recording device. The figures giving its geographical position in quasi-absolute terms endowed the more fleeting statistics of population with the apparent stability of cardinal points. Cast in bronze, the transient was literally monumentalized, given the fixity of the universal. Yet the very abstraction of the measurement of location, and its triangulation with the rest of Paris, simultaneously made the column relative to much larger systems of organization, its calibrations of time, air temperature and pressure further parameters of its contingent status. The details Aragon transcribed allow us to make conjectures about the population that inhabited this enduring but ever-changing setting: its potential educational status (through the provision of schools), its 10
122 2 3 4 5 6 7
1.1 The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, Paris, XIXth arrondissement. Photograph by Christopher Schulte, March 2008.
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1.2 La colonne du Parc des ButtesChaumont, Paris, XIXth arrondissement, c.1910. © Roger-Viollet/Rex Features.
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morals (through the provision of religious and administrative institutions), its productive possibilities (through its markets and transport connections), its leisure activities and its health are hinted at – and we can, should we wish, calculate its density. Aragon saw the column as a cipher for the urban life it registered, a life that ‘no doubt has the local cinema as its social centre, an industrious and ill-rewarded [life] . . ., glowing with happiness and drunk with knowledge acquired at night school’.8 My own interest in the column’s inscriptions – and in Aragon’s decision to copy and preserve them – is in how these statistical hieroglyphs could be read as such a cipher. It is in how the collection and display of this data began to inform and to alter the conceptualization of Paris and Parisians, becoming not only a record but also a tool for the transformation of the city and its citizens. The range of countings carved and cast into the column could be found, amplified, in the Annuaires Statistiques de la Ville de Paris, published from 1880 onwards.9 These large volumes printed annual information on the state and distribution of Paris’ population (marital status, births, deaths, employment, etc., listed by arrondissement or quartier), on their economic and cultural activity (import and export of goods, taxes, savings accounts, municipal credit, the numbers of pupils at schools, colleges, etc.), and on their health (hospital admissions, distribution of poor relief). They also documented the city’s meteorological and geological conditions and its infrastructural systems. If the effect of the column was to still the data it displayed by gathering them to the hillside in the Buttes-Chaumont, once those data were understood as part of the constantly multiplied municipal statistics they became no more than a momentary reading of a fragment of the city, useful only insofar as they could be related to other information. Over time, the sheer quantity of readings collected, categorized and collated could be used to suggest relationships of cause and effect, to establish norms and to identify trends. Information concerning people could be juxtaposed with that on the properties of place, the fleeting with the long-lasting, until patterns of the city’s flux could be revealed. In 1919, five years before Aragon’s excursion to the park, a government edict required all French towns and cities to draw up plans for their development and growth;10 in Paris, the École des Hautes Études Urbaines was founded, a ‘municipal laboratory of research’ whose remit was the methodical study of the factors influencing the formation and transformation of the metropolis.11 Through the standardization of the way information concerning the ‘social, demographic, topographic and climatic’ state of cities was gathered and displayed, and the consequent accumulation of comparative studies, the members of the new school hoped that the ‘general laws’ of an incipient ‘urban science’ might emerge.12
12
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1.3 Louis Bonnier, ‘La Population de Paris en mouvement’, La Vie Urbaine, nos. 1–2, 1919. From first series: ‘Paris’, maps showing population density in 1841, 1881, 1906 and 1911 (by permission of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University).
1.4 Louis Bonnier, ‘La Population de Paris en mouvement’, La Vie Urbaine, nos. 1–2, 1919. From second series: L’Agglomération parisienne, maps showing population density in 1841 and 1911 (by permission of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University).
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The inaugural article of the institute’s journal, La Vie Urbaine,
2
indicated the kind of study proposed. Architect Louis Bonnier’s ‘La Population
3
de Paris en mouvement’ consisted of two series of maps that chronicled
4
the city’s growth from 1800 to 1911. The 16 images of the first series showed
5
what Bonnier called ‘Paris’, an entity constituted by quartiers or communes
6
containing at least 100 people per hectare (see Figure 1.3). Against a constant
7
but ghostly background in which the Thiers walls (built outside the city in the
8
1840s) and the curve of the river are the most prominent features, this ‘Paris’
9
mutated and pulsated, like a cell growing and dividing. Increasing densities were
10
shown in ever darker shades of grey. Although not officially part of the city
1
until 1860, the commune of Belleville, which contained the future Parc des
2
Buttes-Chaumont, was by 1841 already an excrescence of Bonnier’s ‘Paris’.
3
The annexation by the city of the ring of territory between the eighteenth-
4
century tax walls and Thiers’ fortifications altered the administrative boundaries,
522
splitting Belleville in two, literally dividing and subdividing it into new quartiers.13
6
By 1881, all of the new XIXth arrondissement except for the zone of La Villette’s
7
livestock market and abattoirs had been absorbed into Bonnier’s voracious
8
‘Paris’, dissipating the cancerous blackness of high density as it spread
9
outwards from the original nucleus. By 1911, ‘Paris’ had ingested La Villette,
20
and grown considerably beyond its new official boundary. Bonnier’s second
1
series plotted the development of the ‘agglomération parisienne’, created by
2
lower densities of 10 to 100 people per hectare (see Figure 1.4), its final map
3
a projection of the extent of this agglomeration in 1961.
4
Both series of maps were made into films, in order to convey more
5
strikingly ‘the sensation of our Parisian population in motion’, and to reinforce
6
the vision of the city as an ‘organism as powerful as it is fragile’.14 For the
7
members of the École des Hautes Études Urbaines, this identification of the
8
city with an organism was no isolated analogy: the school and its journal had
9
been explicitly established to study the ‘urban agglomeration, seen as a living
302
organism that evolves both in time and in space’.15 Statistical data provided
1
the primary tools for analysing the city thus conceptualized, and for attempting
2
to discover the ‘general laws’ of its ‘urban life’, of its processes of transform-
3
ation. In Bonnier’s opening article, Paris’ inhabitants, aggregated to produce
4
the ‘statistical unit of density’, were subsumed within this mutating creature.16
5 6 7
The anatomy of the urban organism17
8 9
To describe the city as an organism was not new, but the way in which that
40
organism was understood – and what was seen to constitute it – was constantly
1
altered and refined, and the rigour with which the identification was pursued
2
varied. It might be a metaphor or a model, a rhetorical device or a concept used 15
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to support a specific method of reasoning. By the late eighteenth century, the Renaissance emphasis on the harmonious formal arrangement of the body of the city had given way to a concern for its ability to function as an organic entity, albeit not yet the all-embracing, self-generating, powerful but fragile being of Bonnier and his colleagues.18 Pierre Patte’s Mémoires sur les objets les plus importans de
l’architecture of 1769, addressed to the Parisian governing elite, was the first architectural treatise – perhaps better described as a Utopian critique – to focus on the city as a malfunctioning entity whose operations should be analysed and improved.19 Like many of his contemporaries, whether writers of popular or of technical literature, Patte personified the city and its constituent parts: its streets and houses breathe the unclean air exhaled by its cemeteries and hospitals, it is ‘teeming with impurities’; but its ‘defective . . . constitution’ can be ‘rectified’ – it can be ‘purged’.20 After advocating that the major sources of infection should be expelled to the suburbs or beyond (as was already the case with Paris’ night soil, removed to the foot of the Buttes-Chaumont), Patte’s primary purging strategy was the construction of the ideal city street, which he showed as a section, drawn with the precision of an anatomical cut (see Figure 1.5).21 Following the techniques of eighteenth-century anatomists, Patte used this cut to study the relationship between the street’s structure and the function of each distinct part; his street optimizes the construction of the parts, and reassembles them in a coherent organization. Thus it is framed by buildings no more than three storeys high, the same height as its width, in order to allow the free passage of air; waxed canvas awnings attached to the buildings can be pulled out to protect the pavement from rain and other abuses.22 Paving is laid to prevent stagnant puddles from forming, and to allow for the easy and separate passage of pedestrians and vehicles. Various channels and openings connect both the buildings and the street surface to a stoutly built subterranean duct into which street filth can be swept and household effluent flushed – the duct also carries pipes that deliver an abundant supply of fresh water.23 Again like the eighteenth-century anatomist, Patte’s model for analysing the city-as-organism was that of the machine; its inert structure must be animated if its functions are to be demonstrated. Patte’s city street must be brought to life by the people whose well-being it is intended to serve. It is their circulation, and the movement of water, air and waste that they rely on, that the street facilitates – but it is their evacuation that the act of dissection has brought about, rendering the organs of the street we see lifeless. As eighteenth-century scientists were increasingly aware, the limitation of the mechanical model is that, unlike a genuine living being, it is incapable of spontaneous action, let alone self-generation. The machine analogy posits a fixed relationship between an organ and the functions it enables; 16
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1.5 Pierre Patte, ‘Profil d’une rue’, Mémoires sur les objets les plus importans de l’architecture, 1769. © The British Library. All Rights Reserved. Shelf mark 61.f.7.
it assumes that functions are repetitive, rather than evolutionary.24 In Patte’s street, the people who will stimulate its functions are themselves viewed as unchanging, undifferentiated and machine-like, their well-being reduced to the optimum accommodation of a number of involuntary reflexes: they all urinate and defecate, avoid vehicular traffic, and do not like to get wet. They have no reciprocal effect on the environment they activate. Unable to transform itself from within, the mechanical model relies on external additions if it is to grow, additions that must be suitably synthesized to become part of a reconfigured, larger whole. So Patte’s composite of devices that constitutes the city, although
4
coherent in itself, is merely the sum of its parts, and these address only the
5
problems Patte identified. He acknowledged that he lacked the ‘general and
6
adequately detailed plan’ that would be necessary properly to understand Paris
7
as a totality in both its extent and its complexity, and thus to ‘rectify its
8
constitution’ in a holistic way.25
9
This lack was satisfied by the comprehensive vision that Hauss-
40
mann’s methodical topographic surveys of the city made possible in the 1850s
1
and 1860s. His Service du plan produced a fully triangulated 1:500 map of the
2
entire city, and the Service des eaux refined the organization of sewers, drains 17
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and water supply, so that a more sophisticated version of Patte’s technique of surgery could be implemented on a vast scale. In Haussmann’s language, the congested city was ‘cut’ and ‘pierced’, even ‘disembowelled’ where necessary, in order to ensure free-flowing circulatory and respiratory systems.26 The metamorphosis of the Buttes-Chaumont (the cesspools that once occupied its lower reaches now moved yet further out of Paris, to the forêt de Bondy) allowed it to become an organ in the remodelled body of Paris whose function was to be a ‘dispenser of salubrity’, connected to other organs via newly opened tree-lined arteries, Haussmann’s own version of the ideal city street.27 Like Patte, Haussmann understood the city as an entity that acted
on its citizens, rather than being constituted by them. In his Mémoires, Haussmann’s analogy between city and body was restricted to ideas about organs, circulation and flow in descriptions of the city’s physical structures – of parks, streets and sewers. Other commentators on the new Paris pursued the organic analogy further, allowing it to permeate the city more thoroughly. Writer Maxime du Camp’s Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions, sa vie, for instance, provided a detailed documentary of Paris’ ‘administrative organs’, the bureaucratic systems introduced or extended and refined under the Second Empire.28 Du Camp included both infrastructure and people; his account is not only of the sewerage, water and transport systems, but also of the system of markets, abattoirs and associated taxes, the criminal justice system, the systems of welfare and education, etc. – all of them interrelated. Unlike Patte’s or Haussmann’s descriptions of physical mechanisms, awaiting activation, these administrative organs are understood to be inseparable from their function. Paris’ population – its fonctionnaires and those on whom they acted – are incorporated as purveyors of a vital force within the body of the city.29 Closer to Patte’s street, but indicative of the pervasiveness of the city-as-organism revealed by Du Camp, is an illustration entitled ‘Électricité chez soi’, published in the Magasin Pittoresque in 1891 (see Figure 1.6). It is part of the ubiquitous, didactic popular literature that explained the postHaussmannian city to its citizens. A celebrated French surgeon of the eighteenth century had commented ‘we anatomists are like the deliverymen of Paris, who know even the smallest, most out-of-the-way streets but have no idea what goes on inside people’s homes’.30 In ‘Électricité chez soi’, that domestic interior is exactly what the brightly lit sectional drawing has allowed the anatomist of the city to investigate. A network of subterranean cables now supplements gas and water supplies, so that businessmen can hold a late board meeting on the mezzanine, and on the étage noble a bourgeois family can host a sparkling soirée. On the upper floors, reached by electrically operated lift, electric light allows students to study, and piece workers to make dresses and fake flowers. Incorporated into the city’s mechanisms, these people and their ongoing tasks imply that its structures are animated from within. 18
