Architects of disorder - public housing design and construction

RECENTLY-BUILT public housing estates cannot by any stretch of the imagination be regarded as examples of haphazard design. On the contrary, they suffer from an excessive enthusiasm for order on the part of their planners. The order that reigns in them is so oppressive and simplified that it distracts attention from the shape of the buildings. It is the expression of an earthbound conceptual art that pays too little attention to the estate-dweller's desire for a genuine urban environment.

This discrepancy has always existed and has never been resolved. Art is not, in this case, ahead of its time but off on a side-track strewn with history's bright but mistaken ideas, ideas that should perhaps have been looked into cautiously before large-scale building operations began. As it is, the frustration of estate-dwellers, provided with a roof over their heads but deprived of an urban environment, is one of the discontents of modern times.

The situation varies little from one country to another. The rows of dreary blocks lining the broad, empty avenues of the Moscow suburbs arc variations on a town-planning theme that recurs in Barcelona, Santiago, Milan, Essen and the Paris working-class suburb of La Courneuve. With a few allowances for climatic differences, the picture is the same everywhere: long, narrow horizontal slabs, the same back and front, or "high-rises" multistorey flats reaching up into the power lines rather than into the clouds.

The only thing not in order about these endless vistas, these repetitious excrescences that bear so little resemblance to real buildings, these unfinished but already run-down blocks, was the decision to build them in the first place. Ever since, it has been one long tale of false reasoning, miscalculation and mistaken designations immediately shown up for what they are: "green spaces" can never take the place of natural greenery, and the "amenities" provided scarcely qualify as public buildings.

IMPROVISED ARCHITECTURE

Let us now look at the favelas, cases, villas-miserias, barriadas and other shantytowns that have mushroomed around nearly all major agglomerations, from Lima to Lagos and from Cairo to Mexico City. These indescribable encrustations are archetypes of a modern urban and architectural phenomenon. Once peripheral, like the ring of shacks that used to occupy the "zone" just outside the former fortifications of Paris, this type of habitat has become commonplace, perhaps even the commonest type--it would, incidentally, be interesting to compare the area covered, respectively, by shantytowns and by conventional types of habitat in a Third World conurbation.

Slums, run-down or derelict dwellings--the traditional answers to the demand for urban housing--are no longer sufficient to accommodate the masses of people moving in from rural areas that can no longer feed them. The drift from the land is not an organized movement of population; it just happens. The cities, the first places the migrants from the countryside head for, have done nothing to cater for the newcomers, perhaps because there was nothing they could do.

It took Paris fifteen hundred years to reach a population of a million. How long will it take to reach ten million? As for Mexico City, it is heading for a population of twenty million.

A city is a cumbersome structure and its growth is hard to control. An overnight decision to triple its area and population, extend its highways and its water-supply and sewage systems, or increase the capacity of its public transport and schools, would set a technically and physically impossible task.

Shantytowns are therefore improvised structures, created out of anything that comes to hand and by definition haphazard. It goes without saying that planners and architects have had nothing to do with them, nor do they meet normal town-planning standards. But which of these, strictly laid-out housing estates or higgledy-piggledy shantytowns, are the more representative of the spirit of modern architecture?

In the late 1960s, John Turner, a British-born architect who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, emerged as a passionate advocate of the architectural merits of shantytowns. His message, relayed through the world's leading schools of architecture and avant-garde publications, is that there is much to be learned from this architecture without architects, an architecture dictated by need and urgency, which he sees as being richly imaginative. This form of self-built housing is extremely well adapted to the requirements of the inhabitants, who do not receive welfare handouts but are the protagonists in a tragedy they are obliged to act out in order to survive.

At the other extreme, large-scale housing projects planned, built and managed by a centralized institution are the outcome of a ruthless rationalization of social needs. The context of their construction and of the decision-making processes on which they depend is more often than not a bureaucratic one, even in the most free-market-oriented countries.

Turner's point of departure is the idea that, in the conditions of extreme deprivation that prevail in shantytowns, the mode of production takes precedence over technical or aesthetic considerations. Basically, he believes that architecture, as usually practised, is either a luxury reserved for developed societies or an art that is out of place outside a stable social context: it requires, if not order, at least a certain degree of methodical organization. The new urban society of the shantytowns, however, is a prime example of a social body in the throes of change.

Do shantytowns open new horizons or do they point up the need to rethink the hierarchies, values and methods of architecture?

As a good dialectician of social progress, Turner plays on the inseparability of the two possibilities. According to him, it should be possible to reconcile modern architecture with disorder and foresight with spontaneity and achieve a kind of hybrid form, something like jazz or the music of Stravinsky or Gershwin, a mixture of improvisation and highly complex orchestration. But Turner has so far failed to carry opinion with him, and modern architecture has still to find its philosopher's stone.

A FRUITFUL ECLECTICISM

Fifty years earlier, Picasso, with his usual perspicacity, had also put his finger on this dilemma. In the middle of his cubist period, he said that, after Van Gogh, everything had become possible disorder), but that what had been gained in freedom had been lost in self-confidence.

History does not move forward in a straight line but follows a strange kind of trajectory, swinging one way then back again, leaping forward, stopping and accelerating. The innocent observer might think that it never points the way clearly, that it is constantly correcting its course and changing tack.

The twentieth century, which got off to a flying start in architecture only to finish in low gear, has seen the pendulum swing time and again and has had its share of skids and knocks as well, but it may well have made an original contribution to the history of art in that it has been a time of greater eclecticism and diversity than ever before. This characteristic feature of the times is perhaps linked with the development of the communication media and data-storage facilities, which enables the particular and the universal to coexist in the spirit of the global village, combining the parochial with the planet-wide.

For centuries, the memory of humanity was oral, written or pictorial. As its storage capacity was very limited, its contents had constantly to be weeded out. Thanks to chemical and electronic devices, the storage capacity has increased immeasurably. We no longer need to discard whatever is out of date or offbeat to make room for mainstream ideas. The two can exist side by side, just below the surface of our memories, waiting for the moment to re-emerge. That moment may come quite soon: the wheel of history, we are told, is turning faster and faster.

FERNANDO MONTES is Chilean architect who has taught architecture in a number of universities and schools of South and North

DIEGO MONTES is a French student of architecture and the theatre who is currently preparing a production of Albert Camus' play Caligula.

COPYRIGHT 1993 UNESCO
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