17-02 Lecture Slides
17-02 Lecture Slides
17-02 Lecture Slides
Dr Asa Roast
Starting place:
There are many different kinds of modernism
Competing and contradictory
http://pierrefacon.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/sauvegardons-le-patrimoine-vert.html
Solution 2: Les grands ensembles (Large housing estates)
1969: 1 in 6 persons in
Paris lived in a grand
ensemble (Evenson, 1971:
238)
‘At night the windows would light up
and inside there were only happy
families, happy families, happy
families. Going by you could see
them beneath the ceiling bulbs,
through the big windows. One
happiness after another, all alike as
twins, or a nightmare. The
happinesses facing west could look
out of their houses and see the
happinesses that faced east as if they
were seeing themselves in a mirror.’
- Life in the grands ensembles: Chritiane
Rochfort, Les petits enfants du siècle, 1961,
translated as Children of Heaven (New York:
David McKay, 1962, quoted in Evenson, 1979, p.
241)
The critique:
Kitchens vs living rooms
Architects separated the kitchen from the dining
areas, making the cooking area quite small.
“such a design was supposed to force workers
out of the kitchen, the typical location of the
working class table and into a room more
deemed more appropriate for proper meals
and socialization” (Newsome 2004: p. 81)
1947 survey found 50% of the general public
(>72% of the working class) preferred to
socialise around the kitchen table
Government officials disregarded these findings.
“state official were trying to provide homes
for fellow citizens but they were so convinced
of the validity of their own social preferences
and so obsessed with the technical means to
accelerate construction that they lost sight of
the people who had to inhabit these spaces”
(Newsome 2004: p. 802).
https://www.manonvergerio.com/a-critical-atlas-of-the-grand-paris-2
Part 2: High Modernism and Post-
Colonialism
Previously: High Modernism and Colonialism and the city.
High Modernism after WW2 coincides with liberation and independence of previously colonised
countries.
Transferring planning ideas
Different types of diffusion Practices of diffusion
(I) Authoritarian imposition Appointing imperial planners
(II) Contested imposition and architects
(III) Negotiated imposition Borrowing “indigenous”
(IV) Undiluted borrowing motives
(V) Selective borrowing Invitation of famous architects
(VI) Synthetic innovation Indigenous bourgeoisie
Westernized architectural
schools
Situated in Sector 45
Village maintained
political autonomy
Centre of migrant
housing and informal
economy
https://thefunambulist.net/archi
tectural-projects/proletarian-for
tresses-the-corbusean-grids-ano
maly-burail-in-chandigarh
Indira Colony: An informal settlement on the periphery
Fixing slums, or
moving them around?
The legacy: critiques and reassessment
“Colonial Africa
was transformed
into a laboratory
for Western
modernity.”
• Fredenucci, J.-C. 2003. L’entregent colonial des
ingénieurs des Ponts et Chaussées dans l’urbanisme
(Scheer, 2010)
des années 1950–1970. Vingtième Siècle. Revue
d’histoire, 79(3), pp. 79–91.
• Picard, A. 1994. Architecture et urbanisme en
Algérie. D’une rive à l’autre (1830–1962). Revue du
monde musulman et de la Méditerranée, 73(1), pp.
121–36
African Modernisms
Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew (UK)
introduce modernist architecture in
West Africa during colonialism – Ghana National Museum (1955-56)
and continue after independence:
‘Tropical Modernism’
Guidelines for modern
construction widely adopted.
Symbols of independence
constructed by colonial architects.
Capital of Brazil
constructed 1956-1960