Le Corbusier - Towards a new architecture 1931

Informationpoint
by Gerco Kolbach

It was in the year 490 b.C. that the people from Athens won the battle of Marathon. After they beat the Persian army a messenger ran the 42 kilometers back to their city to tell king Miltiades. In early history it was already so that long-distance communication was important to maintain an empire. The Inkas for instance, had a system of runners that could take a message 402 kilometers a day.

Due to the technological innovations of the last one and a half century we ran trough different stages. First we had indirect contribution that was dependant on trans-port techno-logy like the mail coach. Second half of the last century we not only had a progress in transport technology with trains and steamships, more important was the innovation of the electric telegraph that separated the message from the human carrier. In the beginning of our century there was an explosi-on of information technology innovation. But strange enough this was not electrical but mechanical in character. A good combination of electricity and information came after the second worldwar. Of course significant developments took place in transport technology (jetengine), the far more fundamental innovations were informational. A new concept and a new standard for speed was ushered in. Speed became a system of absolute and abstract units of time and distance.

Lyotard wrote in the early seventies that the most-important sciences and techniques have language as their subject. Computerized telecommunications and so are technological changes that have major impact on the thinking about knowledge. The spread of knowledge is influenced by the increased amount of information machines like it was influenced by the development of transport of first people and later sound and images. Knowledge can only use the new technology if information can be translated in information-entities. That what cannot be translated will get lost. Research will aim at results that can be translated in machine language. The principle that gaining knowledge is connected with the ‘Bildung’ of the human mind will get even more unusual than it already is. Knowledge will be produced to be sold to be consumed. As informational matter becomes the most important production-force, it will become one of the most important aspects in the global war for power. As the countries fought eachother for colonies, after that for raw material and cheap labor, it is not unimaginable that they will fight for information in the future.

Data run the world via a network of telematics. Although every single place in the world can and will be connected to the global network, we see a concentration of information and the control over them on certain places. The pro-duction sites for the leading industries of our time, the information industries, are the cities. These industries have outputs that are hypermobile and their professionals have a high level of expertise. Funny fact is that economic benefits derived from telematics are maximized by conventional infrastructure.

Information is still communicated in two entirely different ways: by electronic transfer, but also by direct face to face communication. The American economist Haig recognized long ago that the face to face way encourages agglomeration in the global cities, because of their historically strong concentrations of information-gathering and informational-exchanging activitites and their position as nodes for national and international movement, especially by air and now also by higspeed train. As global activity increased under capitalism, so transport networks multiplied, connecting these face to face agglomerations.

In the older European or Asian city the central business area often shows amazing continuity over time. The centre of London, or Paris, or Cologne is where the Romans put it two thousand years ago; that of Tokyo where a warrior established his fort in the fifteenth century. Even the site of Manhattan was picked out by the first Dutch arrivals in the early seventeenth century. Yet though the geographical form remains the same, the economic reality has often showed large changes. This is the paradox of the old centre of a world city. On the one hand it has to be conserved for its cultural value, on the other hand it has to be the most contemporary and thus flexible for its ’being the most important place’. Invisible transformation has to take place.

There no longer is a strict relation between geographic entities like downtown or Central Business District and centrality. New centres are built on a tabula rasa. A grid of nodes with intense business activity can be formed if the centres in a metropolitan area extend through cyber routes or digital highways. This grid is embedded in conventional forms of communications infrastructure, rapid rail systems and highways connecting to airports. The nodes that are articulated through cyberspace represent the most advanced type of centre. Cyberspace, like any other space, can be inscribed in a multiplicity of ways. Structures for economic power are being built in electronic space, and their highly comlex configurations contain points of coordination and centralization. This form of centrality is closest to what we know as the city.

Architecture makes centrality visible. Its historical forms had to do with ceremony, politics and religion. Nowadays economy has taken over most central functions and that is also displayed in the architecture of the last decades: the hyperspace of international business. This new environment of centrality has been profoundly made possible by new technologies and globalization. Today centrality in our economic system is constituted by two things: first there are transactions that occur through technologies that neutralize distance and place on a global scale and second there is the historical types of built environment and urban form.

Rem Koolhaas calls the new type of urban form ‘Generic Cities’. Those cities that can both be old or new are liberated from the straitjacket of identity, he says. Their architecture brings buildings based on Mies: boredom before interest. The apparantly solid substances are misleading. Most buildings are void, the classical atrium tries to give a sense of class. Public space doesnot exist anymore. The style is postmodern, because that is the only one that can pace up with the developments. Everyday a new identity. Whether it should be a Roman Temple or a Tuscan hilltown, the Generic City doesnot care. The Generic City is able to absorb anything that is wished for at any moment.

You see a lot has changed since the Charter of Athens the CIAM held only a few years ago. Once we had this modernistic dream of light, air and space that could be visualized in a functional city with separated zones and wide-spread highrise buildings with fenêtres en longeur and green in between. Nowadays the structure of cities is too complex to understand them on our own. Non-linear dynamics, behavioral aspects, different scales, all fused to one image: the mega-city at the end of the twentieth century. If you want to study or even design them, you need a better integration of the different sciences that are related to the problems and challenges of the city. It is impossible to make this world a better place by means of architecture only.

The architecture of the city is the result of the interpretation of urban space. What is the relation between the buildings and what is the space they define actually. What are the concequences of a certain ordering for practical use. When we are looking for a new urban architecture we have to realize that it has become impossible to reproduce the image of the old city. We should try to develop an architecture that matches with the urban reality of our time. All of this can be seen as the conditions in which we have to make our architecture. An architecture that celebrates space. Even as space is changing, the work of an architect remains the same: he has to define the world so processes can take place in such a way that they give an experience to their parttakers. This is where art enters in.

sources:

Anywise Cynthia C. Davidson 1995, the MIT Press, Cambridge

La condition postmoderne Jean-François Lyotard 1979, Minuit, Paris

Megacities, world cities and global cities Peter Hall 1997, Megacities 2000 Foundation

S, M, L, XL Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau 1995, 010Publishers, Rotterdam

The world cities Peter Hall 1966, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London