Concrete Islands is a group exhibition of photography and video exploring contemporary experiences of utopian architectural projects. For many architects modernism was a physical manifestation of human progress and, as architectural historian Colin Rowe wrote in The Architecture of Good Intentions, “The architect could stipulate an intrinsic connection between the form of his buildings and the condition of society.” The works in Concrete Islands, by a selection of international contemporary artists, document, celebrate and critique architectural projects designed with inherent social and political values that now exist in various stages of inhabitation, dereliction and destruction.
More info at http://www.eliasredstone.com/#1203107/Concrete-Islands
Photos at http://galleries.purple-diary.com/tags/concrete-islands-analix-forever-gallery-paris-april-2011
What is your inference or interpretation of the affects of such buildings on living and inhabitants?
That’s a very modernist “Le Corbusier” question. The whole modernist architecture was driven by the industrial age ideology that everything can be planed and optimised top-to-bottom. Le Corbusier even called his buildings living machines. Basically ignoring all grown structures, he proclaimed that this new age deserved a brand-new architecture. “We must start again from zero”.
Most people see his work as to stark to inhuman and to authoritarian, simply to much driven by the ideology of industrialising urban living.
Hence the exhibition above sees these left over structures as monuments of certain modernist ideologies. I think what unifies these modernist ideologies be it Industrialism or Communism is the element of control. The believe that because one can control production one can control live and society in the same way.
Jane Jacobs was one of the most famous critics of Modernist Planing. “Jacobs argued that modernist urban planning rejects the city, because it rejects human beings living in a community characterized by layered complexity and seeming chaos. The modernist planners used deductive reasoning to find principles by which to plan cities. Among these policies the most violent was urban renewal; the most prevalent was and is the separation of uses (i.e. residential, industrial, commercial). These policies, she claimed, destroy communities and innovative economies by creating isolated, unnatural urban spaces. ”
However when talking to people who have been living in some of these modernist high-rises one often finds people who are really happy living there. There is a very interesting documentary on arguably one of the ugliest high-rise buildings in southern Germany in the Stuttgart area which portraits this issue. Unfortunately I can’t find a link to it at the moment.
I guess what these modernist buildings allow you to do, due to their high density of people living together, is a much higher social exchange and people enjoy that. Which is in line with Jan Gehls claim for a need of contact of people.
I guess you have suburban sprawl on one end and high-rises on the other end of the density spectrum and the golden middle is some kind of low rise compact mixed-use neighbourhood where you have a certain density for social exchange but at the same time a less industrial machine like building aesthetic. Jane Jacobs for example referees to Greenwich Village as a good example of a vibrant urban community.