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“Nothing, my dear Watson, is so fantastic as reality!” [1]
Can utopia become reality?
This appears to be the guiding question of Enrico Prandi in his "atlas"
entitled "The architecture of the linear city", published by Franco
Angeli. A sort of "apology of the line".
The "utopian" text - in the sense of eu-topos, the place of happiness -
aims at the apex of the state of the art on applied research to a
phenomenal topic, still confined to the realm of utopia, launched since
the end of the 800 and perhaps never really ended. Starting from the
results achieved by George R. Collins, still considered today the
"largest (and almost unique) historical of linear planning", the author
assumes as a field of investigation, a vast series of examples that
animated an architectural imaginary projected towards new social and
urban paradigms. The very rich miscellany of linear city projects
presented in the book is described and cataloged according to new
interpretative-analytical categories. The methodological approach to
the theme, by the author, is rooted in the tradition of studies on
architecture and the city, of which "The architecture of the city" by
Aldo Rossi is manifest. Linear cities, intended as sets of minimal
elements that configure continuous-growth settlements, are investigated
by Enrico Prandi in an almost anatomical way, with continuous leaps of
scale that allow the real understanding of these complex organisms in
constant dialectic between architecture, city and territory.
At the base of these experiments, there was an ethical, moral and practical dream.
Rationalize the use of the territory, welcoming the advent of the
prophesied "city of networks", through the experimentation of new urban
modular models based on the road as “backbone”. This is the
synthesized thought of Soria y Mata, a republican with philosophical
skills, the inventor of the linear city typology inhabited by "linear
citizens". According to Prandi, linear cities represent the last
bastion of sustainable urban planning, because it is still based on the
anthropocentric concept of "ideal city", which pursues an order that is
even more mental than spatial.
The index, accompanied by a synoptic table very useful for the reader
to frame the theoretical palimpsest of the book, transforms the
above-mentioned interpretative categories identified by the author into
chapters.
The structure of the publication can be metaphorically understood as a
space-time journey between the evolutionary thresholds of the urban
model in question. We start from the origins triggered by a vision
confined between utopia and ideal cities, and we arrive at the
demonstration of the almost physiological advent of the contemporary
"natural linear cities", real polycentric territorial systems
innervated by the infrastructure (Città Emilia, Roadtown ER,
FO-CE, Adriati-città, NOMARE, Hyper Adriatica, Future GRA).
Extreme ratio, are two contemporary examples of linear city projects,
demonstrating the fact that research on the theme of linearism has
never really ended: the North-West Director of Milan, by Guido Canella
(1993) and VE_MA of Franco Purini (2006).
The Ciudad Lineal by Arturo Soria y Mata (1882) and the Cytè
Linéaire Belge by Gonzalez del Castillo (1919) referable to the
Kandinsky triptych “dot, line, surface”, represent
the prototypes of the linear city, developed then in the world in the
coming years . The two geo-political rivals America and the
Soviet Union had considerable importance. The first, territory of large
abandoned spaces, protagonists of Blake's "God's own junkyard", is the
canvas of Wright's organic formations (Broadacre City), of the
sociological findings of Richard Neutra, translated into his "running
city" (Rush City) ) and of the first experiments of Ville Radieuse by
Le Corbusier of 1933 with its "three human settlements" in the systemic
logic of a "great urban assembly line". From the linear city we passed
to the experiments of the "linear metropolis" of Reginald Malcomson.
Hence, the project by Michael Graves and Peter Eisenmann of the Jersey
Corridor which anticipates the concept of "Bigness, or the problem of
large size" (R. Koolhaas) and which sets out the principle of "cluster
point". The Soviet Union, always anti-capitalist, puts man at the
center of linearist experimentations. Le Corbusier himself was a great
supporter of the USSR as fertile context for an urban revolution.
The models of socialist linear cities, from the projects for Miljutin
and Leonidov's Magnitogorsk, to the Green City of Ginzburg and Barsc,
are the emblem of a community vision of urban settlement on a human
scale, in part analogous to the principles of the “city humanized
" by Lluis Sert.
Europe also played a fundamental role in the development of the linear
urban model; the region became the application area of linear cities in
constant tension between small and large scale as expressed by Ludwig
Hilberseimer. His vertical city, whose atmosphere that transpires from
the drawings is worthy of a scene of Inception so that the same author
compares it to a necropolis, goes in the sense of regionalization. A
key passage in the book is the analysis of linearity in the expansion
plans of the built city, starting from Plan Obus with the concept of
"fifth façade" and of Plan Voison, both of Le Corbusier. The
Great London Plan, signed by the collective MARS (Modern Architectural
Research Group), promoters of modern architecture through the
dissemination of matter, assumes the typical linearity of the socialist
approach as a directrix of the urban expansion of the city of London
set on " contact theory ". This vision, abandoned because it was
considered too radical, was initially supported by the Architectural
Review magazine.
The realm of utopia comes to interface with the built city.
The analysis of the historical episodes of interaction of the linear
city project with the constructed matter of the consolidated city, is a
fundamental step of the book towards the answer to the initial guide
question. The twentieth century is assumed by the author as a season of
great urban transformations. The practice of building substitution and
the reconstruction of significant parts of the city starts. Linearity
is forcefully imposed as a refounding matrix through the insertion of
real prostheses in the existing, and no longer just conjunctions
between full and full. Derived articulated patterns composed of
interconnected architectural elements according to lines of force,
within urban fabrics. Examples of this remodeling of the built are the
project for Market Street East by L. Kahn and Unter Der Linden by Van
Eesteren for Berlin. In both cases, the design choices are dictated by
the predominant advent of the machine as the main means of transport.
The parking lot was therefore seen as a potential destructive element
of the urban order. Kahn, for Philadelphia, inflicts the theme of
parking to pursue the exact opposite with his linear regenerative
strategy. The Philadelphia reimagined by Kahn is, therefore, a city
able to defend itself from the car, in analogy with the medieval
fortified cities for reasons of a completely different kind, through
intermodal exchange points called "docks".
The author, in the practice of inserting linear devices (prosthetics)
in the existing building, analyzes in parallel to the professional
experiments, the academic ones. The Urban Renewal, a movement born from
laboratory realities within the four American university landmarks
(Princeton University, Cornell University, Columbia University,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology), immediately confronted the
issue of Harlem-Manhattan regeneration. The area was divided into four
project areas with a wide linear extension and each of them was
entrusted to one of the university working groups. The outcomes led by
group leaders, including Peter Eisenmann, Michael Graves and Colin Row,
are evidently mindful of the linear city models of Chambless (Road
Town) and Le Corbusier (Algiers and Rio).
Another example of a linear prosthesis inside the building was the
LOMEX (LOwer Manhattan EXpress) by Paul Rudolph. This is a linear city
that transports all the infrastructure of the peninsula of Manhattan to
the hypogeum level, bringing out from the country floor, highly
monumental pyramid elements, assembled in order to create an urban
corridor and containing the various typical functions of its own
functional mixité of the great experimental "vectors" of the
period. The idea behind LOMEX flows into that utopian territory,
defined by the author "Manhattismo", then denounced by "Delirius New
York" by R. Koolhaas.
The linear city then became the type adopted in the experiments of the so-called "Ecocittà".
Projects born as an alternative to the chaos of contemporary cities
from which some of the designers themselves escaped. Paolo Soleri above
all, found refuge in the context of his training as an architect, the
Arizona desert. Right here, in Arcosanti, a self-built city of
foundation with the help of a changing community set up specifically on
site, he carried forward the ideas of his Mesa City and Lean Linear
Arcology.
Less radical in the choices of life but not in the ideas of the city,
were Marcello D'Olivo with his Eco-Town and Luigi Pellegrin with its
"habitats" made up of vectors composed of neo-lines and neo-mounds.
According to the writer, the maximum level of utopia dealt with in the
book is that of "megastructures". 1964 was the "mega-year" of
megastructures' maximum production of megastructures (E. Prandi). Kenzo
Tange, Alan Boutwell and Mike Mitchell, Yona Friedman, Superstudio,
Archigram, Archizoom, OMA; all struggling with the collage technique to
create new fantastic cities suspended and superimposed on the old,
almost denying them.
A dense book, straddling historiography, architectural and urban
composition, which answers the initial question, despite the
demonstration of the advent of contemporary natural linear cities,
thus: "Perhaps the most interesting aspect (of linearist experience) is
constituted by the "not feasible", that is from those visionary
prefigurations that, anticipating the future, stimulate the cultural
debate. The value of these proposals resides on the
scientific-figurative level rather than on the technical-practical one.
[What Giorgio Grassi writes about the Tange Plan for Tokyo can
generally be applied to multiple proliferated solutions (...). The
study of Tange has value (...) as research, where the concrete result
is necessarily partial, where the synthesis is valid as a deepening of
the topics contained (...); if it is usable or not I do not think it
has (...) importance.] (G. Grassi, 1961)”.
[1] Title extracted from the
beginning of the Peter Assmann lecture, in occasion of the "Paradisi
immaginari" hexibition in the Polytechnic of Milan, headquarter of
Mantua. Assmann introduced the lecture by an extract of Sharlock Holmes
adventures: “Nothing, my dear Watson, is so fantastic as
reality!”.
Paolo Strina
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