In memoriam Koos Bosma

On 10 September 2015, Koos Bosma passed away. The international planning history community responded with shock upon hearing the news. The responses spoke of Koos’ qualities as a scholar and as a person. Stephen Ward, from Oxford Brookes University, captures the general sentiment describing Koos as:

an exceptional planning historian and an even better man. It is almost three years since I last saw him at Michel Geertse’s thesis defense, when he was a wonderful host to us, the visiting examiners, and made a warm and humorous speech at the end of the formal defense about Michel to close the occasion. It was in Dutch so I followed almost nothing but the humanity and warmth behind it were unmistakable.

Heart failure made an end to his life and cut short the career of a planning historian who chose to work at the frontiers of his discipline, continuously exploring new grounds. Koos’ home base was the Netherlands. There he made a fundamental contribution to a remarkable shift in the study of architectural and urban as well as planning history. Until well into the 1970s, the field was firmly embedded in art history, which implied a strong focus on the artistic dimension; to some extent, it operated at the periphery of a discipline that concentrated mainly on the visual arts. Likewise, the role of history in architectural schools was also marginal: there, it was subordinated to the education of designers and had little opportunity to develop its own agenda. Nor did the science of spatial planning (called ‘planology’ in the Netherlands) offer an appropriate setting for historical work: though Peter de Ruijter should be credited for authoring the first historical Ph.D. thesis, his premature death marked the end of what, for a time, promised to become a lively field. Thus, planning history had to find a niche within art history, a discipline that can hardly be seen as its natural habitat.

All this began to change when Ed Taverne was appointed professor in Groningen in 1981. He saw the physical environment as the consequence of historical processes: politics, the economy, social changes, technology, and incorporated all these aspects into the historical narratives that explain why the world around us looks the way it does. That was the beginning of a process that enhanced the discipline’s professional autonomy. When the design schools, notably Delft University of Technology, discovered the morphological and typological innovations of French and especially Italian scholars, new alliances developed that gave Dutch architectural and urban history a tremendous boost. Koos played a pivotal role right from the start. Analysing the reconstruction of Dutch cities after the Second World War, he recognized the need for in-depth knowledge about the political context, the administrative structures, technological and managerial innovations, and the emergence of entirely new ways of planning – not the type of themes traditional art historians were interested in. He increasingly focused on buildings and urban phenomena that could not possibly be seen as works of art. In Koos’ immense oeuvre, his work on bunkers stands out – these concrete monsters occupied him for many years, resulting in his Shelter City.¹ Early in his career, he became fascinated by J.M. de Casseres, an urban planner and theorist who coined the term ‘planologist’ in order to underline the scientific qualities of planning. Much later, Koos wrote a book on De Casseres.²

Planners who want to improve the world often develop grand visions, and architecture and urbanism are ideal tools to propagate and even actually build these visions – this became the next theme in Koos’ work. It culminated in a dissertation entitled Ruimte voor een Nieuwe Tijd (Space for a New Era).³ Admiration of the planners’ bold ideas and sometimes beautiful projects alternate with a deeply felt suspicion: as soon as these plans got backed up with political authority, they carried in them the seeds of totalitarian suppression allegedly justified by scientific reasoning. His dissertation covers the entire spectrum of planning while focusing on the way the Netherlands was thoroughly reconstructed on the basis of daring regional plans. The IJsselmeer project that reshaped a subsidiary of the North Sea in fertile land is best known; working with Gerrie Andela, Koos unravelled the decision-making processes, the design, and the planning concepts that produced this entirely artificial landscape, explaining the constant friction between urbanists and engineers. Koos shared his interest in these megaprojects with Wolfgang Voigt, who became a close personal friend:

We shared the passion for new subjects aside of the traditional fields of our disciplines. It all began in 1988, when we met first and we found out, that we both were interested in hydraulic utopias on different scales; Koos looked after the Zuiderzee project, while I was about to start a research of the macroproject Atlantropa aiming at the alteration of two continents, based on a dam at Gibraltar. At the end it was Koos who contacted a Dutch foundation that made it possible for me to publish the book.

One of the town planners working in the Ijsselmeer Polders was M.J. Granpré Molière, who designed the villages in the Wieringermeer. For most historians, he represented traditionalism, which implied for them: that he obstructed the cause of modernism. Praise of modernism had become the politically correct attitude among historians, who tended to see it as the perfect expression of a social and democratic attitude. Designers accused of being traditional almost by default figured as representatives for opposite political views. Koos was one of the first to question this interpretation, and even more the allegedly scientific procedures that produced it. What did these historians think they were doing? What was the scientific validity of these views? Thus, historiography became part and parcel of his work. As a contributor to Planning Perspectives, he wrote on Town and Regional Planning in the Netherlands, 1920–1945 and developed fresh ideas on the International Town Planning Congress in Amsterdam 1924.

Since the early 1990s, Koos began to explore the architectural and urban heritage of the countries that had been fenced off by the Iron Curtain, which resulted in articles in Planning Perspectives that dealt with New Socialist Cities, the work of foreign architects in the USSR 1920–1940 and the models for visionary planning they presented there between 1928 and 1933. He frequently visited Ukraine. Bohdan Tscherkes, dean of Lviv University of Technology, praises his pioneering role:

I think everybody has his own recollection of Koos. For me he will forever be associated with a ray of light on a dark, snowy December evening in 1995 when I met him at L’viv’s Stalinist airport building. With Elisabeth Hofer and Martin Kubelik I organized a seminar on Architecture as the Reflection of Ideologies at the «Lvivska Politechnika», where he presented his views. Then he asked me to contribute a chapter on the competition for the socialist reconstruction plans of Kiev of the 1930s; the entire architectural elite of the soviet union participated, representatives of constructivism emphatically opposing the plans of the Stalinist colleagues.⁴

In recent years, Koos began to explore the world of air travel. ‘With my help’, Wolfgang Voigt remembers,

Koos got into the most airy section of all of his themes: the architectures of air travel, the airports and their role in the region. When the Art Institute of Chicago asked me to study aviation in Europe, I decided to share the job with Koos. He stuck to the subject much longer than I did; it became one of his permanent lines of research, and it made him a respected authority in this. Twenty years later, he published his work about Schiphol, the megastructure that manifests itself in such a massive way in the core of Holland’s rural landscape near Amsterdam.

The university became Koos’ home base. For many years, he worked at the Institute of Art History of Groningen University; after a short interlude at the Dutch Architectural Institute, he moved to the Vrije Universiteit (Free University) in Amsterdam, where Auke van der Woud – another highly successful scholar who broke away from traditional art history – had been appointed professor; in 2004, Koos became his successor. The university was also the starting point for Koos’ wanderings through the rapidly expanding universe of Dutch architectural and urban history. One of Koos’ merits is his attempt to give the discipline a second life outside academia. In the 1990s, the national government created a myriad of new funding opportunities, among then, the Architecture Fund. It provided historians with the opportunity to work freelance. The Dutch Architectural Institute initiated a study centre that offered scholars, both academic and self-employed, the opportunity to work in semi-private study spaces; publishers such as NAi and 010 produced books in quantities and often of a quality that made many a foreign visitor jealous. Thanks to this professional infrastructure, publications as De Geruisloze Doorbraak (a Silent Revolution) could be written; it documents the reconstruction of most Dutch cities in the 1940s and 1950s.⁵ Mastering the City, the book that accompanied an international exhibition in the Dutch Architectural Institute, was an instant success – all these initiatives benefited from the new scientific horizon and the discipline’s newly gained autonomy.

Almost all projects were successful – but not all. The plan for an exhibition that was launched under the ominous title of Glück-Stadt-Raum, originally intended to become the opening show of the new building of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin (at Pariser Platz near the Brandenburger Tor), developed into a battlefield between the Akademie and the Dutch Architectural Institute; when the Dutch sponsors decided to drop the exhibition, this grand project collapsed; several years later, the Akademie organized a modest show in its old premises, and the Dutch produced a book entitled Happy … ⁶ It marked a turning point in Koos’ views on the freelance world: while it offered unique opportunities, it was also very risky.

Even before the public authorities converted themselves to neo-liberal ideologies and began to dismantle the luxurious infrastructure they had initiated in the 1990s, Koos redirected his attention to his university, encouraging students and colleagues. Carola Hein recalls:

I first met Koos around 1989 when doing research for my diploma thesis on the international planning competition Hauptstadt Berlin 1957/58. The political events of that year, the fall of the Berlin Wall, provided me with the opportunity to show my research in an exhibition and catalogue at the Berlinische Galerie. While the then head of the institution published my findings largely under his name, Koos invited me to give a talk at the Rotterdam Academie van Bouwkunst – the very first public talk that I have ever given. Koos stayed a valued mentor and colleague ever since, our paths crossing in research on European regional planning and capital design.

‘Koos had a rare talent of inspiring and encouraging people’, Bohdan Tcherkes remembers. ‘He warmly supported our new journal, Architectural Studies in L’viv and gladly joined its editorial board – it’s a shame he did not live to see its first issue.’

As professor in Amsterdam, he could define the scope of architectural and urban history himself – albeit within the limited financial resources of the humanities department. He managed to benefit from the growing interest in cultural heritage, a field the public authorities were still willing to invest in. It became one of the pillars of his Institute and culminated in CLUE+, the Research Institute for the Heritage of the Culture Landscape and Urban Environment. Its English name exemplifies one of the three fundamental changes in the Dutch academic world: the international scope, the transfer of financial resources from the state to state-sponsored advisory committees (complement with urgent pleas to secure private money), and the introduction of a publication culture based on articles: quantifiable output became more important than making historical findings available in the public domain, where they may inspire the solution of contemporary problems.

Had Koos been prone to sadness, he might have begun to doubt the merits of universities as the pillars of independent thinking and safe havens for academics who wish to engage in long-term research that may not yield immediate results. The world outside academia might also have given him reasons for concern. There, new institutional and ideological frameworks have developed that were incompatible with the fundamentals of architectural, urban, and planning history as autonomous disciplines. They have reduced everything related to the built environment to the domain of designers, a limitation even more catastrophic than the straightjacket of art history used to be. It resulted in the monstrous and in all likelihood characteristically Dutch concept of the ‘creative industry’, a construct motivated by the utterly untenable idea that creativity is the exact same thing in every domain, and design the only factor that determines the shape of buildings, cities, and landscapes. There are more than enough reasons to worry – but Koos was just not the type for that kind of sentiments. He enjoyed life too much to ruin it by negative feelings and succeeded in preventing less happy events from giving him a bad temper.

Koos’ unexpected death deprived the professional community of planning historians from one of the most original thinkers. Carola Hein recalls,

Since my appointment at TU Delft, we had discussed several collective projects, each of which benefited from his enthusiasm, intellect, and joy of life. Only days before his passing he was working on an issue for the series Inaugural Speeches in the Built Environment that would have discussed the speeches by M. J. Granpré Molière and H.T. Zwiers. Koos had also planned to participate in the International Planning History Society conference in Delft in 2016, offering to lead a one-day fieldtrip on Water in the Netherlands. He will be dearly missed by the community of international planning historians.

‘For me, Koos was much more than a colleague and a friend’, Wolfgang Voigt states.

He was like a brother: always helpful, always standby and ready to help. It is hard to accept, that he has left us.’ Bohdan Tcherkes and Elisabeth Hofer heard the tragic news of Koos’ death in Edinburg. ‘We still cannot believe that he left us – he lives on as a ray of light, now illuminating other worlds … ’

Notes on contributor

Cor Wagenaar studied history at the University of Groningen before specializing in the history of architecture and urbanism at the same university. In 1993, he published a Ph.D. thesis on the reconstruction of Rotterdam. In 2001, he joined the Institute of History of Art, Architecture and Urbanism at Delft University of Technology as Assistant Professor and, since 2006, Associate Professor. In 2014, he was appointed Thomassen à Thuessink Professor at the University of Groningen, which focuses on the relation between architecture, urbanism, and health. His work revolves around two closely related themes: the history and theory of urban planning since 1750 (the topic of Town Planning in the Netherlands since 1800. Responses to Enlightenment Ideas and Geopolitical Realities (2011, second edition 2015), and healthcare architecture and urbanism. He organized an international conference on this theme on behalf of the University Medical Center of Groningen in 2005, which culminated in The Architecture of Hospitals, 2006. Cor Wagenaar lives and works in Rotterdam and Berlin.

Notes

1. Bosma, Shelter City.

2. Bosma, J.M. de Casseres.

3. Bosma, Ruimte voor een nieuwe tijd.

4. Bosma and Hellinga, ed. De regie van de stad; Bosma and Hellinga. Mastering the City.

5. Bosma and Wagenaar, Een Geruisloze Doorbraak.

6. Wagenaar. Happy. Cities and Public Happiness.