Superarchitecture

Abstract

The short text translated here is Rouillard's introduction to her book Superarchitecture: The Future of Architecture (Paris: La Villette, 2004) which offers a critical interpretation of the architectural utopias of the 1950–1970s as well as their influence on the contemporary context. Following the publication of this book, Rouillard has pursued her analysis of the future analyzing the globalized resurgence of this concept in recent urban branding strategies (Rouillard, Dominique, “The Future was back” in Action Architecture, edited by Alain Guiheux (Paris: Editions de la Vilette, 2012), 23–47.

Notes

Originally published as the “Introduction” to Superarchitecture: Le Futur de l'Architecture, 1950–1970 (Paris: Editions de la Villette, 2004), 9–18

1. Hans Hollein, “Zukunft der Architektur,” Bau 20, no. 1 (January 1965): 1. It is also the general theme of the journal issue as announced on the cover.

2. The question is asked by Hollein in a first text written in Chicago in 1958: “What is Architecture?,” published in the collection of texts Protokolle '66. Weiner Jahresschrift für Literatur, Bildende Kunst und Musik, Verlag für Jugend und Folk (Vienne-Munich: Jugend und Volk, 1966). “Was ist Architektur?,” the question is asked again during his lecture at the Nächst St. Stephen Galerie in Vienna in 1962, “Zurück zur Architektur” (in Protokolle '66). Hans Hollein, graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1956, completed his training in Chicago and at Berkeley in 1960. Upon his return to Vienna, he gave a first lecture in 1962 at the Nächst St. Stephan Gallery (“Zurück zur Architektur”), where he met the sculptor Walter Pichler. They exhibited their work together in 1963 in the same gallery: “Architektur. Work in Progress.” Their collaboration continued during their time at the journal Bau. Close to the Viennese artistic underground, where the first “actionnism” manifestos were produced beginning in 1960, Pichler was therefore the ideal partner for an exhibition that brought to Austria the British pop avant-garde, coloring it with obvious provocation—with the scandalous tone of actionnism—with the transformations of objects and the peremptory declarations on “absolute” architecture. (H. Hollein illustrated his 1968 article “Alles ist Architektur” with Otto Mühl's 1965 Dematerialaktion.) On Pichler's relationship with actionnism, see Dominique Rouillard, Superarchitecture, Le Futur de l'Architecture 1950–1970, (Paris: Editions de la Vilette, 2004), 232-246; chapter on “Environnement minimal, existence maximale.” Along with Hollein, and Pichler, Raimund Abraham would be the third master of these Austrian versions of the visionary project, as acclaimed by the MoMA in1967. The institution revisited, using the same title, the first version of their show Visionary Architecture, directed by A. Drexler in 1960.

3. Team 10 was not a team, but the outcome of critiques made by a generation of architects against modernist functionalism, represented by CIAM, which they judged as rigid and reductive. The principle and most active participants were the couple Alison and Peter Smithson, John Voelcker, Aldo Van Eyck and Jaap B. Bakema, Georges Candilis, Alexis Josic and Shadrach Woods, Giancarlo de Carlo, and Ralph Erskine. CIAM 9, which took place at Aix-en-Provence in 1953, constituted their first meeting; it was followed by a “manifesto” (Doorn Manifesto, 1954). CIAM 10, which was held in Dubrovnik in 1956, would be the last congress organized by the founding participants. The future members of Team 10 would therefore decide to stop at this number. By taking the initiative to organize the gathering for international modern architecture in Otterlo in 1959 they, in fact, declared the dissolution of CIAM.

4. Peter Smithson, “Reflexions on Kenzo Tange's Tokyo Bay Plan” (dated May 15, 1962), Architectural Design 34 (October, 1964): 479-480.

5. Megastructure: Urban Structures of a Recent Past (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976). Fumiihiko Maki's 1964 article “Investigations in Collective Form” is referenced in detail. See also the very similar text by Maki and Masato Ohtaka, “Some Thoughts on Collective Form,” in Structure in Art and and Science, ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New York: George Braziller, 1965), 116–26.

6. This opposition takes on a variety of forms throughout the 1960s, until Justus Dahinden, who brought together the paradigms within a single “solidified” definition to face the future, which he continues to attempt to predict. J. Dahinden, Structures Urbaines de Demain (Paris: Le Chêne, 1972). In a 1973 lecture he gave in Naples on the subject, Banham, all the while declaring the megastructure “dead” and a “wandering knight in search of architecture,” recalls its four characteristics: constructed of modular units; capable of “unlimited” extensions; a structural framework into which minor units can be built; and a structural skeleton expected to have a useful life much longer than that of the smaller units which it might support. Reyner Banham, “La Megastruttura è Morta,” Casabella no. 375 (March, 1973):2.

7. Kenzo Tange declared at Otterlo in 1959: “The development of atomic energy and the new technological revolution force us to give new attention to ‘humanity'—the consciousness of the human race, prior to ‘class consciousness' or ‘patriotism'. This new humanity, however, has nothing to do with the abstract concept of an ideal human being. Rather it represents the naked existence of the human being, without preoccupations with races and nations. In this sense the world will be one.” CIAM 59 in Otterlo: Group for the Research of Social and Visual Inter-relationships, dir. Oscar Newman, ed. K. Kramer (London: Alec Tiranti Ltd., 1961), 170.

8. Banham, Megastructure (note 6), 203.

9. Bernard Huet, “Les Méga-Structures en Ligne,” L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui 183 (January–February, 1976); “L'Architecture Contre la Ville,” Architecture Mouvement Continuité 14 (December, 1986).

10. Banham, Megastructure (note 6), 209.

11. The retrospectives, triggered momentarily at the end of the 1970s by Banham's book, will reinforce the approach of a global history of the megastructure as a realized or surpassed utopia, and this to the detriment of any proper analysis of its very conceptual contributions. As such, the exhibition Immaginazione Megastructurale del Futurismo a Oggi (Venice Biennale, 1978) proposes a strict chronological order to develop the history of the megastructure, and finds a new beginning—not in the Ponte Vecchio, which introduced Banham's book, but in the Sant' Elia—and an Italian finale with the “ironic variation of international utopianism” of Superstudio and Archizoom. The following year, George Collins will attempt to “typify the modern visionary projects” with the exhibition Visionary Drawings of Architecture and Planning: XXth Century through the 1960s (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979). But Collins foregoes an analysis of specificity: “The major groups of avant-garde visionaries of the 1960s flourished in the United Kingdom (Archigram), Italy (Superstudio), Austria (albeit some of them working elsewhere), France, and Japan (the Metabolists). These dramates personae put on such a delightful charade in those years that I prefer not to describe the individuals in detail, but rather to let their drawings speak for themselves” (28). We reiterate the very question formulated by Alan Colquhoun in his critique of Banham's book, which fails to explain the rapid demise of the megastructure nor to “demonstrate in what way its ideas might still be valid” (“Frames to Framework” [orig.1977], in Alan Colquhoun, Collected Essays in Architectural Criticism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 92. What is required is an evaluation of these contributions and of what the megastructure introduced by deregulation—by overflow and “extremization”—into design thinking.

12. This expression is of uncertain origin—proposed by Germano Celant, by Ettore Sottsass, or by an American journalist on assignment in Florence who made a parallel between the “radical” feminist groups and their journal Radical America? In “Senza titolo,” IN 2-3 (1971). G. Celant opposes a “radical” architecture to one which follows the client's orders. Yet one must wait until 1972 for the recognition brought about by the New York exhibition on Italian design to see an identification of “radical architecture” per se. G. Celant: “This is an architecture that has no intention of being subservient to the client or becoming his tool; it offers nothing but its ideological and behavioral attitudes.” (“Radical Architecture,” in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, dir. Emilio Ambasz (New York: Museum of Modern Art; Florence: Centro Di Florence, 1972), 382. Or Andrea Branzi: “As a term, ‘radical architecture' includes all the experiments of the last few years—experiments often difficult to interpret—which have the common characteristic of lying outside the strictly professional line and launching, often in opposite directions, as a kind of radical (of course) revision of the whole architectural field” (“Radical Notes No. 1,” Casabella, no. 370 (October, 1972): 12-13). The book Architettura “rradicale,” begun originally as the dissertation of Paola Navone and Bruno Orlandoni (Documento di Cassabella, ed. G. Milani, Segrate, 1974), and largely informed by Andrea Branzi, takes stock almost immediately of a movement and simultaneously acts to save, following the decisive blow that it was dealt at the 25th Triennale of Milan in 1973, devoted to the Italian neo-rationalist movement led by Aldo Rossi (La Tendenza). The actors of Architettura “radicale” gathered as many participants as possible around this term, building a united front and multiplying the designations (conceptual architecture, unconscious architecture, architecture of evasion and invention, of the possible, of animation, of poverty, of the absolute, compartmental, elemental, super, etc.), just as there are in art diverse currents (pop, op, body, land, etc.). In the same way as the study of the megastructure could be limited to its model “figures”—Banham provided without delay a complete history of the megastructure—similarly, it would not seem necessary to present every iteration of radical architecture to understand its theoretical reach and its essential forms. Rather it is in the analysis of the material fabrication of the projects and their progressive and cumulative construction that the formation and the workings of radical thought can be grasped. Today, the use that could be made once again of these expressions with their often striking iconography—based on a first “survey” beginning in the early seventies—risks reducing radical architecture to a rather inconsistent moment of encounter between art and architecture, or even to the assimilation of architecture to pure iconography. What is missing from a comprehensive understanding of radical architecture is a history of its construction, a genealogy of its forms and its ideas.