November 01, 2003
A different city for a different life
Modernist architecture was all about re-creating the modern city, which in turn was suppose to create a better society. Architecture as a "high" art had a goal of building the utopian city through an abstract formalism devoid of any past references. Architects must erase the past to make way for the future.
The question that arises is: how can mere organization and built forms make people's life more free? Removing decorative clutter, introducing straight lines, right angles and bare white walls may improve living arrangments. So too good design and quality production.
Le Corbusier, Savoye Villa
But how can the cubes & rectangles, concrete and glass, freeways and skyscrapers of machine aesthetics make an individual more free?
Basically they can't. More than architectural form is needed. Aesthetics alone cannot change or revolutionize our society.
The response by the European Situationist International to the functional and utilitarian modernist urbanism, which still rules our cites, was to encourage experimentation and diversity in relation to the emotions and feelings of the city's inhabitants. Form was subordinated to the "situation."
The city was to be a city of play and the free creation of everyday life, rather than a city of work and commerce that structured our lives in terms of commute, work, commute, sleep. That modernist conception means that we navigate the city in the the car and not on foot.
The Declaration of Amsterdam talked in terms of unitary urbanism that creates an urban environment in which playfulness, spontaneity and freedom are the prime features.
A different city for a different life.
An initial step to a life based on eros would be to loosen up the codes of behaviour of work and commerce contolled by men in suits. These codes and beaviours imprison us, isolate us from one another, send messages that we are passive workers and consumers, and discourage us from thinking that we can contribute to making the metropolis more human.
The metropolis is certainly not a human place. it is about cars, work, pollution, work and shopping. Only the parks offer a respite from this commercial urbanism. And they are hostile places avoided at night because of psycho's drunks, agro street kids. And it is not just the inner city. Teenage gangs cruse the suburbs striking terror into the very heart of suburbia so that little kiddies care to afraid to go to birthday parties.
Do not the strict zoning laws and rigid compartmentalization, based on Cartesian grids and spaces, create desert-like urban spaces and desert-like minds?
The Situationist strategy for breaking this commute, work, commute sleep routine down is through art creating situations, which liberate energy that will permit people to make their own history. The situationists stand in opposition to the pop artists, who celebrate the consumerism of the time, mass producing much of their art and thus adapt and resign themselves to the capitalist system of the 1960s.
The capitalist system was what the Situationists wanted to destroy. Capitalism created the spectacle and the show business in the city.
Playfulness and freedom? That requires a lot of free time. It means that work becomws obsolete through automation and that eventually the entire society could free itself to drift about the city.
It is all so 1968, isn't it. But the 1968 became the no future of the punks.
Free time? That is something that is increasingly dominated by the career demands and pressures of work, unless you are unemployed, excluded from consumer society, living in poverty and abused as welfare cheats. Even the unemployed have to work for the dole.
Today, in Adelaide, these ideas of the situationists are recycled in terms of the art industry creating an exciting and vibrant sector in the inner city, thereby making Adelaide a less boring and complacent place.
Yet the situationist city is worth remembering. It is full of people walking in the neighourhoods enjoying themselves; parks full of old timers on benchers; others aimless strolling; doing philosophy and music on the footpaths; plenty of festivals that broke the old patterns of commute, work, commute; and plenty of surrealism in the streets and in-your-face politics. This city is a negotiable, plastic, ever changing carnival of celebration.
You can see traces of the situationist city in the carvinalesque ambience of the anti-globalization protestors. Maybe there are other traces.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 1, 2003 12:42 PM | TrackBack