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Abstract
This article investigates the universalist problematic in Modern Movement town planning predominantly through the Indian phase of the career of Otto Koenigsberger (1909–99). Educated in Germany during the Weimar Republic but subjected to Nazi persecution, Koenigsberger migrated via Egypt to Bangalore and employment by the Tata Dynasty in 1939. Upon independence, he was appointed to Director of Housing in charge of New Town Development across India, including the organization of the Chandigarh commission. Koenigsberger’s architecture and town planning, in particular for Jamshedpur, mobilized current transatlantic modernist practice. It was predicated on the potential of abstract aesthetic and functionalist form to embody radical socio‐political change that surmounted both pre‐colonial and imperial conventions. While accommodating some features of Indian architectural tradition, Koenigsberger espoused non‐sectarian and standard solution, especially for housing. This thinking was most evident in his partially realized scheme for pan‐regional prefabricated dwelling units. The failure of this enterprise and ensuing political controversy caused him to resign and move to London. It is argued here that Koenigsberger’s experience in India informed his inauguration in 1957 of the School of Tropical Architectures at the Architectural Association and the department of Development Planning at University College London in 1972; these teaching posts coincided with successive reconsideration of his concept of urban design that culminated in the locally conditioned concept of Action Planning. The analytic is discursive, reading shifts in design thought out of Koenigsberger’s photographic and textual archive as well as his architectural and urban design work in India.
Acknowledgements
The research for this article was supported by grants for research on intersections between Modern Movement design and later British imperial policy from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a Fellowship from the J. S. Guggenheim Foundation, and enabled by Renate Koenigsberger who, most generously, allowed the author to examine Otto Koenigsberger’s remaining papers and discussed his career in India and Britain during interviews in 2000 and 2002. The author also gratefully acknowledges the astute and helpful comments kindly provided by the editor and anonymous reviewers of this journal.
Notes
1. Koenigsberger’s career is summarized in the 1983 Festschrift, edited by W. Aldhous, S. Groak, B. Mumtaz and M. Safir, including P. Wakeley’s essay, The Development of a School, 337–46 (Oxford, Pergamon Press); see also, among several major obituaries, Wakely’s Cities of light from slums of darkness. The Observer (January16, 1999). University College London Calendar 1971–2, specifically noting, with reference to his courses in Environmental Studies, that these offered ‘a general education in the arts and sciences concerned with the construction aspects of the human environment … also a first stage in the training of future architects, planners, builders and environmental engineers’. Renate Koenigsberger has compiled abstracts of his publications recorded on the website of the Development Planning Unit (www.ubcl.ac.ukdpu).
The imperial dimension of the movement is briefly considered in the standard literature on Modernism, K. Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1991, revised edition) and J. Gold, The Experience of Modernism. Modern architects and the future city 1928–1953 (London: Spon, 1997). Thus far the main studies of the application of Modernist design to colonial territories have examined Dutch and French episodes, notably A. Kusno, Behind the Postcolonial. Architecture. Urban space and political cultures in Indonesia (London: Routledge, 2000), J‐L. Cohen and M. Eleb, Casablanca. Colonial Myths and Architectural Ventures (New York, Monticelli, 2002) and G. Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). One study of the British sphere is provided by N. Perera, Society and Space: Colonialism, Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity in Sri Lanka (Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1998). Additionally there have been a series of publications that address issues of reception to diverse political‐cultural no less than geographical conditions in Palestine–Israel under the British Mandate, including G. Herbert and S. Sosnovsky, Bauhaus on the Carmel and the crossroads of Empire, (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben‐Zvi, 1993), I. Heinze‐Mulieb, Erich Mendelsohn. Bauten and Projekte in Palastina (Munich: Scaneg, 1986) and A. Nitzan‐Shiften, Contested Zionism – alternative Modernism: Erich Mendelsohn and the Tel Aviv Chug in Mandate Palestine. Architectural History 39 (1996) 147–80. The wider arena of colonial urbanism is examined in A. D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment (London: Routledge, 1976).
2. This period, the subject of several important post‐colonial novels and particularly Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (London: J. Cape, 1981) is examined in V. K. Menon, India since independence (Delhi: S. Chand, 1970), P. R. Brass, The politics of India since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1994), T. Hubel, Whose India? The independence struggle in British and Indian fictional history (Durham, N.C.: Duke U.P., 1996) and C. P. Bhambhri, The Indian State after Independence (Delhi: Shipra Publications, 2000).
3. Koenigsberger’s contribution is reviewed in J. Lang and M. and M. Desai, Architecture and Independence. The Search for Identity. India 1880 to 1980 (London and Delhi: Oxford U.P. 1997).
4. New Towns in India. Town Planning Review 23 (July 1952) 94–131. Earlier he had prepared the Report of the Committee set up for Examining the Schemes of Rehabilitation (1950) for the Indian Government assisted by P. A. Narielwak and S. K. Day. With Charles Adams, and for the United Nations, Koenigsberger wrote the Report on Housing in Pakistan (New York, 1957).
5. This theorization modifies the vein of postmodern (or more properly post‐structural) cultural geography exemplified by D. Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); it is also informed by the post‐colonial discourse reviewed in B. Moore‐Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory. Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997) and E. San Juan, Beyond Postcolonial Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). The appropriation of Modernism for the legitimation and devolution of colonial power is the subject of a forthcoming book by this author.
6. R. Knowles, New Towns in India. The Work of Otto Koenigsberger. BA Thesis, University of Newcastle, UK, 1991; and R. Kalia, Bhubaneswar. From a Temple Town to a Capital City. Delhi: OUP, 1994.
7. The history of the Chandigarh commission and its changing significance for contemporaries in both India and Europe is recounted by N. Evenson, Chandigarh (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1966); R. Kalia, Chandigarh: the making of an Indian city (Delhi: OUP, 1999) and V. Prakesh, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: the struggle for modernity in postcolonial India (Seattle: U. of Washington Press, 2002).
8. The Canadian aspect of this phenomenon is discussed by the author in The New Spirit: Modern Architecture in Vancouver 1938–1963. Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1997.
9. The New Towns were the chief theme of positivist exhibitions held at London, UK in 1956 and 1958, respectively, by the Arts Council of Great Britain (Ten Years of British Architecture ′45–′55, with the text by John Summerson) and the British Council (The New Towns). Their assessment was modified in the subsequent literature, including New towns: why and for whom? (New York: Praeger, 1973; the proceedings of the 1972 New Towns Symposium in Los Angeles) and A. J. Robinson, Economics and new towns: a comparative study of the U.S., UK and Australia (Milton Keynes UK: International Federation for Housing and Planning, 1986).
10. For this aspect of twentieth‐century Indian social politics see C. A. Bayly, Origins of nationality in South Asia: patriotism and ethnical, a government in the making of modern India (Delhi: OUP, 1998) and S. Bayly, Caste, society and politics in India from the eighteenth century to the modern age (Cambridge, CUP, 1999). The early biographies of Nehru, notably G. Prashad, Nehru: a study in colonial liberalism (New Delhi: Sterling, 1976), help recover the contemporary attitudes about the possibility of unifying social and political reform; see also J. M. Brown, Nehru. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1994.
11. The difficulties in achieving an equitable yet distinctive international political order and social culture have been amply demonstrated by late modern historical and theoretical scholarship, exemplified by F. Jameson, The Culture of Globalization (Durham, N.C.: Duke U.P. 1993); D. Harvey, The new imperialism (Oxford: OUP, 2003) and G. C. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard U.P., 1999). See also R. Eaton, Ideal Cities. Utopianism and the [un]built environment (London, Thames & Hudson, 2002) and this author’s position paper, The Ideal City (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 2004) for the larger issues involved in architectural, urban and societal design.
12. These photographs, together with those of his Indian architecture are preserved in the archive assembled by Renate Koenigsberger.
13. This redefinition depended on the negotiation between Nehru, Mountbatten and the Cabinet of Clement Atlee and resulted in the reclassification of the British sovereign as the figure‐head of the Commonwealth, N. Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience II. From British to Multiracial Commonwealth, second edition. London: Macmillan, 1982. esp. p. 134.
14. T. Jeal, Baden‐Powell. London: Hutchinson, 1989; and R. H. MacDonald, Sons of Empire: the frontier and the Boy Scout Movement 1890–1918. Toronto: U. of Toronto Press, 1993. The literature on the representational processes and operations of photographic representation is extensive, including M. J. Shapiro, The politics of representation: writing practices in biography, photography and policy analysis (Madison, Wis: U. of Wisconsin Press, 1988); J. Tagg, The burden of representation: essays on photography and history (London: Macmillan, 1988) and S. McGuire, Visions of modernity: representation, memory, time and space in the age of the camera (London: Sage, 1998).
15. Besides the pioneering works on colonial appropriation by Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978) and Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1983), partially critiqued in J. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1995) see also C. Gosden and C. Knowles, Collecting colonialism: material culture and colonial change (Oxford, New York: Berg 2001).
16. The various manifestations of the renewed classicism in early twentieth‐century architecture are examined in A. Colquhoun, Modernity and the classical tradition: architectural essays, 1980–87. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989.
17. In his seminal polemical text Vers une architecture (Paris: G. Cres, 1923), Le Corbusier compared ancient Greek temples with contemporary automobiles and celebrated the completion of his hostel for the Salvation Army in Paris, 1928, with a photograph of the latest Voisin saloon parked in front of the main entrance. Neutra’s use of the automobile as a figure of modernity is discussed by T. Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture (New York: OUP, 1989).
18. Heidegger’s major works include Basic Writings, edited by D. F. Krell (London: Routledge 1993) and Poetry. Language. Thought, translated by A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
19. The Greek philosopher became part of the cultural pantheon of elite British and Continental imperial education while Fawcett was a historical geographer whose publications include Frontiers, a study in political geography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1918), Relation of Geography and History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924) and Political Geography of the British Empire (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1933).
20. The theoretical and historical territory is reviewed in E. S. Morris, British Town Planning and Urban Design: Principles and Policies (London: Longmans, 1997) and placed in a larger cultural context in P. Hall, Cities in Civilization. Culture, Innovation and Urban Order (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002).
21. V. Welker, The City after Patrick Geddes. New York: P. Lang, 2000; and Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002). The Tata dynasty, active in the industrial, technological and sociological development of later modern India are related in V. Elwin, The Story of Tata Steel (Bombay: Tata, 1958), B. Saklatvala, Jamsetji Tata (New Delhi: Government of India, 1970) and S. N. Pandey, Social side of Tata Steel (New York; Tata‐McGraw Hill, 1991). Indicative of the Tata’s longstanding interest in urban design, their international publishing house, Tata‐McGraw Hill, published a book by C. A. Doxiades, founder of the Ekistics Foundation, The Human settlement that we need (New Delhi, 1976).
22. J. Tyrwhitt, Geddes in India. London: Lund Humphries, 1944. Tyrwhitt published her analysis of Fatephur Sikri in an article entitled The Moving Eye. Explorations 4 (February 1955). She taught (1951–5) at the University of Toronto and collaborated with the Canadian cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan, for which see R. Windsor‐Liscombe, Perceptions in the conception of the Modernist urban environment: Canadian perspectives on the spatial theory of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, in I. B. Whyte (ed.) The Man‐Made Future. London: Routledge, 2005, pp. forthcoming.
23. New Towns, op. cit. [Footnote4] 107.
24. Koenigsberger probably based his version on the concepts of townscape developed in Germany during the 1920s by members of the Free German Academy of Urban Planning, including Ernst May; for this group and their influence, E. Sohn, Hans Bernard Reichow and the concept of Stadtslandschaft in German Planning. Planning Perspectives 18 (2003) 119–46. This reference is courtesy of Dr Stephen Ward.
25. Architectural Forum 80 (1944) 133–40; the issue was devoted to ‘Planned Neighbourhoods for 194X’; Herrey was a graduate of the Polytechnic Institute in Berlin and also forced into exile by the Nazis. The March 1944 issue had published Neutra’s Channel Heights shipyard workers housing development in San Pedro, California and the sectional houses developed for the Tennessee Valley Authority.
26. Jamshedpur Development Plan (Bombay, Tata Ltd, 1948), p. 5 quoting Herrey and Pertzoff in Architectural Forum (note xxvi).
27. Ibid., p. 40.
28. The interweaving of new ideas with older convention was defined as cultural hermeneutics by Steven Mailloux in Rhetorical Power (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U.P., 1989).
29. Jamshedpur Development Plan, op. cit. [Footnote26], Foreword.
30. Trystan Edwards, Good and Bad manners in Architecture. An Essay on the Social Aspects of Civic Design. London: Tiranti, 1924 republished in 1945; and Julian Leathart, Style in Architecture. London: Architectural Press, 1940. The Second World War and its immediate aftermath temporarily increased the influence of British architects, planners and educators in the promotion of Modernist ideas and iconography – recalling the brief moment of prior importance with the exile of Erich Mendelsohn and Walter Gropius among others in Britain in the 1930s – partly due to the continuation of global imperial networks in education, finance and Reconstruction politics. One instance is the pivotal part Jaqueline Tyrwhitt played in maintaining the Congrés internationaux de l’architecture moderne including compilation of Can Our Cities Survive? (1943), and assisting Siegfried Giedion with his research and writing for Space, Time and Architecture (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard U.P., 1941).
31. J. Leathart, ibid., p. 130; on p. 57 Leathart defined modernism as being based on the ‘three‐phase factor in the development of original architectural style: first, materials influence constructional methods; second, constructional methods influence planning; third, the conjoining of constructional methods and planning influences architectural form’.
32. T. Edwards, op. cit. [Footnote30], p. 162; Edwards shared Walter Gropius’ distaste for idiosyncratic design, writing on p. 173, ‘The doctrine that a building should proclaim the personality of its designer has been the cause of much vulgarity in architecture’.
33. In 1936 Neurath published International Picture Language: The First Rules of ISOTYPE (London: Kegan Paul). Indicative of this universalizing cast of mind, Neurath instigated the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science series published by the University of Chicago from 1938, contributing papers on ‘Unified Science as Encyclopedic Integration’ and ‘Foundations of the Social Sciences’, respectively, in volumes 1 and 2.
34. Otto Koenigsberger Archive, in the collection of Renate Koenigsberger, London.
35. Vers, translated by Frederic Etchells as Towards a New Architecture (London, Architectural Press [1927] 1946), p. 9 and the title of the fourth section, pp. 81–138, defining the ‘new spirit’ in design in terms of modern transportation technologies that demonstrated ‘a spirit of construction and of synthesis guided by a clear conception’.
36. Koenigsberger Archive.
37. The history of the BRS is summarized in R. Courtney, Building Research Establishment‐past, present and future. Building Research and Information 25 (1997) 5, 285–91, and G. A. Atkinson, Raymond Unwin: founding father of BRS. Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architecture 78 (October 1971) 446–8. Having worked at the BRS, Atkinson was in 1953 appointed Building and Housing Advisor to the Colonial Office; in this capacity he gave a paper, ‘Tropical Architecture and Building Studies’, together with Koenigsberger who spoke on ‘Tropical Planning Problems’, at the March 1953 Conference on Tropical Architecture organized by University College London.
38. Notes, Koenigsberger Archive, London.
39. New Towns, op. cit. [Footnote4] 95.
40. The continued force of imperial institutions, especially with regard to architecture and planning is evident in accounts of the careers of such individuals as K. Watts, author of Outwards from Home: A Planner’s Odyssey (Lewes, UK: Book Guild, 1997), or through organizations such as the Commonwealth Association of Architects. It also forms an important, if conflictual, part of post‐colonial discourse. Among many influential interventions on early post‐colonial development was the series of advisory missions financed by the United Nations Technical Assistance Programme Koenigsberger undertook in Ghana ([Gold Coast] 1954), Pakistan (1957–8), Nigeria (1962) and Singapore (1963) typified by the report Koenigsberger wrote in 1963 with C. Adams and S. Kobe for the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Growth and Urban Renewal in Singapore. Published in shortened form in Habitat International 5 (1980) 85–127, this articulated his concept of Action Planning.
41. Architectural Association Journal (May 1964). For the Association, and in collaboration with R. Lynn, Koenigsberger compiled Roofs in the warm humid tropics, AA Paper 1, published in London by Lund Humphries in 1965.