Transatlantic crossings: new forms of meaning in the city of the 1970s

Abstract

This micro-narrative explores transatlantic meetings of influential European and American figures at Cornell University in the 1970s. It focuses on Colin Rowe, Oswald Ungers, and Rem Koolhaas, respectively authors of the widely known books Collage City (1978), The City within the City (1977), and Delirious New York (1978). The article argues that their time in the USA led them to produce a body of urban thought that may be seen as a tipping point in design, both for European cities and the USA urban landscape. The twentieth-century discourse on the city is markedly transnational and has often sought a neutral logic for configuring the built environment, yet it also bears the marks of the places in which it was conceived. The disillusionment with the universalizing and technocratic discourse of modernism was already tangible throughout the European debates on the city at the time. The Cornell period incited these three figures to abandon a societally engaged approach to the city in architecture in order to develop a body of work that reclaimed architecture and urban space as domains of cultural meaning. From a background of the social agendas of Europe and confronted with the unselfconscious American environment, Rowe, Ungers, and Koolhaas developed a specifically architectural perspective on planning and urban ideas.

Keywords:

• postwar architecture
• urban planning
• architecture theory
• 1970s

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Lara Schrijver is Professor in Architecture at the University of Antwerp, Faculty of Design Sciences. In 2013–2014 she was DAAD guest professor at the Dessau Institute of Architecture. She holds degrees in architecture from Princeton University and Delft University of Technology, and received her Ph.D. from Eindhoven University of Technology. Before coming to Antwerp, she taught at Delft University of Technology and the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture. She was an editor for OASE for ten years, and served four years on the advisory committee of the Netherlands Fund for Architecture. Her work has been published in the Journal of Architecture, Footprint, and Volume. Her book Radical Games was shortlisted for the 2011 CICA Bruno Zevi Book Award. Her research focus is on twentieth-century architecture and its theories.

Notes

1. Van den Heuvel and Risselada, Team 10.

2. Schrijver, Radical Games.

3. On the transformation of planning discourse to urban design, see also Orillard, “Transnational building”.

4. Schumacher, “Contextualism,” 81.

5. The central position of Cornell/Ithaca and the influence of its campus planning has been studied in detail by Sébastien Marot in his dissertation ‘Palimpsestuous Ithaca'. Marot offers an extensive treatment of the persons as well as their ideas. Marot suggests that Colin Rowe's Collage City may be read as one of the principal results of a 30-year teaching career at Cornell (221).

6. Koolhaas, “The Terrifying Beauty,” 206. By some accounts, Ungers was also a founding member. There was certainly some early collaboration, but nothing seems to indicate a substantial contribution by Ungers to the work of OMA beyond the continual exchange of ideas. Archival evidence at this point suggests that Ungers’ position as ‘founding member’ of OMA was primarily a matter of convenience.

7. Ungers, “Autonomous Language”.

8. Banham, Los Angeles; Venturi and Scott Brown, On Houses and Housing; and Ungers and Heyde, Lysander New City.

9. Drexler, Five Architects, 1.

10. Stern, “Five on Five”. The five architects writing ‘against’ the New York Five here were Robert Stern, Romaldo Giurgola, Jacquelin Robertson, Charles Moore and Allan Greenberg. See also Watson, “Whites vs the Grays”.

11. Drexler, Five Architects, 63–85, 111–133.

12. Rowe, “Introduction,” 3–7.

13. Rowe and Koetter, Collage City, 105

14. Joch, ‘‘Must Our Cities Remain Ugly?’’

15. Cohen, “Physical Context/Cultural Context”.

16. Ibid.

17. Schweizer, Die Architektonische Grossform, 56. ‘Architektonische Bedeutung’ of the single building to the ‘Grossordnung des Gebauten’.

18. ‘Die Voraussetzung für das Werden der Großform ist eine veränderte Blickeinstellung: eine Ausweiterung des Sehens, eine Wendung des Blickes vom Einzelnen auf das Ganze’ Schweizer, Die Architektonische Grossform, 55.

19. ‘das differenzierter Leben eines modernen Großstadt hat neue Gestaltungskomponenten in Erscheinung treten lassen’ Schweizer, Die Architektonische Grossform, 55.

20. Koolhaas, “Visual Language: Architect's Notes”.

21. See in particular: Hein, “Exchange of Planning Ideas” and Wakeman, “Rethinking Postwar Planning History”.

22. Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse; Wakeman, “Rethinking Postwar Planning History”.

23. Kentgens-Craig, The Bauhaus and America; Albrecht, Designing Dreams; Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse; Huyssen, After the Great Divide.