We live here: how residents can transform the modern city
A smartly staged exhibition at deSingel shows how the inhabitants of iconic post-war building projects in Morocco, India and Brazil creatively updated the architecture and adapted it to current times
A lesson for architects
“Let it be a lesson for today’s architects and designers,” says Tom Avermaete, a professor in architecture at Delft University of Technology and co-curator of Lived-In. “Architecture is not perfect or static, but it will always be adapted and changed by its users, constructors and the following generations of architects.”
That’s exactly what visitors will notice when they stroll along the tables with drawings, photos and scale models, and it is emphasised by a double narrative. On one side of the six tables are the stories of the planners and the architects, the ones who come up with the big concepts. On the other side are the stories of the people who live there.
A different story
“We noticed that, after multiple decades, there’s a completely different story to be told,” says Avermaete. “Sometimes the big concepts worked out, other times there was resistance. Even more interestingly, we saw that inhabitants, developers, contractors or new architects started to transform these buildings. That’s why the title of the exhibition is Lived-In.”
“Our case studies don’t have a normative plan; their plans embedded ideas of how to live,” adds co-curator Maristella Casciati, a professor of architectural history at the University of Bologna. “These icons of architecture became icons of different ways of living. We noticed users wanted to identify with their place, make it their own. Especially in our mixed society, people want to create a synergy between the place they live in and who they are.”
“That’s why we’re talking about the modern city as a performative structure,” says Avermaete. “People don’t want a certain lifestyle imposed on them, so it’s only logical that urban planners and architects are taking their preferences into account.”
These icons of architecture became icons of different ways of living
The big city extension of Casablanca, Morocco, by the French urban planner Michel Ecochard in the 1940s is illustrative. After a thorough analysis of where the new residents came from, he developed a planning system based on grids, all consisting of a traditional courtyard dwelling. “So even in a hyper-modern city, they had something that reminded them of their previous rural lifestyle,” explains Avermaete.
Ecochard thought people would only make little extensions to their horizontal housing, he explains, but actually something completely different happened. Residents started to add layers, making it a vertical city.
New floors were rented out, or taken by family members, but the traditional patterns of the original plan, such as the courtyard, survived. “It’s what we call the generosity of the generic,” explains Casciati. “The architects offer a coherent framework but leaves space for further development.”
The same can be seen in Chandigarh, the capital of the Punjab region in post-independence India. A French team led by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret introduced aesthetic controls by which some parts of the building could be changed, while others couldn’t.
In both Casablanca and Chandigarh, the landscape was crucial. The vertical update of Casablanca, for instance, was only possible because urban planners incorporated the green environment into the modern city. “Compared to this, it’s such a pity to see that our own landscapes are so badly maintained,” says Avermaete. “Often they are just turned into uninviting parking spaces.”
No surprise, then, that the curators prefer the city of Brasília. This icon of modern architecture, developed by Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa, was conceived in the middle of the Brazilian jungle. For Avermaete, it’s living proof that the landscape can allow a city to be updated to fit with contemporary living.
“Very big dwelling clusters, called superquadras, were put in a very strong natural environment, encouraging inhabitants to appropriate their surroundings.”
Architecture to blame
You only have to look at the photographs showing the facades of these superquadras to see that he is right. The BBC documentary The Shock of the New, shot in the 1980s at the end of a military dictatorship, stresses the failures of utopian architecture. Avermaete: “But actually, if we look at the city right now, three decades later, we see that a more democratic Brasília had the capacity to update itself to contemporary living.”
Three more cases show other ways of appropriation. In the 1950s, when Paris suffered an enormous shortage of housing, urban developers started to build prefabricated skyscrapers for the masses in the suburbs. La Courneuve (pictured) was such a ville nouvelle, providing living space for people coming from rural areas and from the colonies.
But it was frequently criticised, as is shown here in press clippings and in the movie Two or Three Things I Know About Her by the leading nouvelle vague director Jean-Luc Godard.
“The situation among the residents was problematic, and the architecture was held responsible for the squalid conditions,” says Avermaete. “Now people no longer want to demolish these buildings; they want to reinterpret them, by adding a thick facade, for instance, with terraces providing a more comfortable environment, or by investing in urban gardening initiatives.”
Reflecting on architecture is about the negotiation between what is planned and what is lived
Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the concept of prefabrication was even more visible in the Berlin extension of Marzahn. Standardised and very basic Plattenbau elements were assembled on location.
“Since it’s too difficult to transform these elements on a collective scale, Germany has now developed a programme to deconstruct the separate elements and reuse them for single family houses,” says Avermaete.
He adds that the people behind the new neighbourhood of Skjetten near Oslo learned from the Marzahn case, creating a building system and delivering, with every key, a user’s manual, explaining how residents can adapt their own houses.
“As a result, you see transformations, allowing a variety of individual lifestyles, but keeping a collective coherence,” says Avermate, pointing out that our own Flemish modern heritage is far too often frozen. “It can’t be touched, while all of our case studies show that transformation is a natural process. Reflecting on architecture is always about the negotiation between what is planned and what is lived.”
Casciati: “Maybe someone has to say we have to stop building and live with the contradictions of what’s already built. No one is saying that the projects in the exhibition are perfect. But we can learn to live with them, and make them better.”
Lived-In: The Modern City as a Performative Structure, until 10 January, deSingel, Desguinlei 25, Antwerp
Photo © Le Monde
More exhibitions this week
Echo • Tina Gillen
The Luxemburg-born, Brussels-based artist is known for depicting a layered reality, somewhere between figuration and abstraction, and between two and three dimensions. Happily incorporating the exhibition space into her work, her monumental Echo, a site-specific installation for Bozar, includes a massive mural and yearns for an intimidating interaction with the visitor. Until 7 February, Bozar, Brussels
Guy de Cointet
The late Guy de Cointet was a native French artist who moved to the US in the mid-1960s, where he was heavily influenced by Pop Art and collaborated with Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy. His first retrospective in Belgium shows drawings, sculpture and sketchbooks, focusing on his fascination for language, text and meaning. Check out the performance Comme il est blonde! at Leuven’s Playground Festival in November. Until 10 January, M, Leuven
The Bottom Line
About 50 international artists show what a pencil means to their work, to the contemporary art scene and to the world. The difference in perspective, scale and style of the sketches by artists as diverse as Francis Alÿs, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Paul McCarthy and Tacita Dean promises to instigate a broad range of emotions. Some drawings will be created especially for this exhibition, some even in situ. 10 October to 31 January, SMAK, Ghent
