Cartes d’ambiance - Guy E. Debord, Espace psychogéographique de la dérive [psychogéographie : étude des lois et des effets précis d'un milieu géographique consciemment aménagé ou non, agissant directement sur le comportement affectif »],
Guy Debord, Guide psychogéographique de Paris, 1957
R. Smithson, Hypothetical Continent in Stone: Cathaysia; Hypothetical Continent in Shells: Lemuria; Hypothetical Continent of Gondwanaland-Ice Cap; Hypothetical Continent-Map of Broken Glass: Atlantis 1969
Streets don’t just conduct anymore to places, they are places themselves - J. B. Jackson, A sense of Place, a sense of Time, 1994
The ciudad lineal project arises from the end of 19th Century, when the expansion of industrialization and of the city-machine provokes the born of first tendencies of comeback to naturalism: these theories are to intend as answers to modernity, which were concretized in imagining urban landscapes where the natural equilibrium by then lost was restored; where leisure, culture, sport and especially the human role in binomial man-nature would be conditioned by a full life, in contrast to the mere exist or resist produced by huge first metropolis.
Ciudad Lineal is a utopian reformist project conceived by the Spanish engineer Arturo Soria y Mata, and published for the first time in 1862 in the propagandistic journal of the Compañia Madrileña de Urbanizaciòn . The city is changing, new transportation systems are dilating human time, the speed of transfer is becoming essential. For this reason Paris is ravaged for making space to boulevards, enormous avenues able to rapidly and efficiently put in contact various city neighborhoods, unattainable until that moment. In that very moment the traffic made its appearance in history, the chaos of carriages and horses and mud where the archetype of modern man is thrown into, dealing with this heavy, rapid and lethal agglomerate of mass and energy. It’s exactly from Paris that the conception of linear city comes from: considering the streets of the French capital unable to sustain problems of modern circulation, Arturo Soria envisaged its resolving alternative, that was a linear city plan supposed to link the extremities of two cities-point, with a big calle of 40 meters of breadth and 5.200 meters of length (heart and supporting axis of the whole city) surrounded by houses and buildings on both sides.
For the first time the urban architecture starts to move forward the antiurban concept of nomadism, and the space of staying is substituted by the space of going. In Soria’s design the centrality of street instead of square or historical center, with its consequent linear development instead of a radial one, would also determinate a very democratic subdivision of lands: there wouldn’t exist price differences caused by the proximity to the center or by the isolation in periphery, but everyone would have the same value, with variations due only to their extension.
The Spanish planner realizes very soon the fundamental importance of traffic/displacement of people in modern cities (it’s sufficient thinking that the current 2/3 of Los Angeles surface are occupied by cars, parked or in movement),and foresees the role that streets will have in determining the morphology of all contemporary urbanscapes.
The utopian city called New Babylon and designed by Constant goes even further than Soria’s ciudad lineal and becomes the first city plan in history where the act of walking materializes again a whole architecture conceived as space of going. The artist Constant Nieuwenhuys participates to the movement of Unitary Urbanism during the 50’s, which proposed a vigorous critique of the contemporary modernist urbanism, refusing the utilitarian logic of the consumer society and predicating in contrast a dynamic city, where freedom and play would have a central role. Constant, in designing a city for the nomadic gipsy people of Alba (Piemonte, Italy), confronts Dadaism and Nomadism with the intention of overtaking both of them: as a great definition of Dada essence was “an artistic movement that denies art is a nonsense: Dada is that nonsense” 6, we could transpose the same quote to his project: “designing a city for a nomadic population who denies the city is a nonsense. New Babylon is this nonsense.” 7 With New Babylon the Situationist dérive finds new unity: Debord’s explosion of urban space in plaques, sectors and neighborhoods is now unified in a continue and planetary sequence, where different cities and heterogenic cultures follow one to another without an end. The entire urban space is thought as a single place of limitless drift. While Soria’s urban ideal was intended as a proposal of a real city plan for Madrid, New Babylon is not offering a physical reinterpretation of the concept of inhabiting, but rather a psychological and ephemeral one.
New Babylon urban landscape was formed by some temporary living constructions endlessly built, remade and transferred somewhere else. Therefore the city structure was the easiest possible, able to permit every kind of realizable transformation on its surface: an horizontal skeleton lied on huge columns raising from the ground, the underlying part of it devoted to mechanized agricultural industry and cut through by huge autoroutes for speed traffic. In the upper part of the platform the constructive elements had to be of the highest flexibility, removable, easy to assemble and to dismantle: in this way the relationships built between people and structural forms were never fixed, in accordance to relationships pursued in nomadic urbanities.
One of the first maps showing a system of trails was found in Bedolina (Val Camonica), engraved on a rock and dating back to 10 000 bc. The image presents the network of daily connections in a paleolithic village. The map portrays the dynamic of a complex system where path lines intersect together into void for distributing the different full elements on the territory: we can recognize scenes of usual activities, trails, ladders, sheds, palafittes, fenced fields and livestock areas.
"Whenever, for an absurd possibility, we could reveal and graphically translate the meaning of the city resulting from the inconscious experience of every inhabitant, and then put all these graphics on top by transparency, we would get a cartography very similar to the one of a Jackson Pollock painting."
Carlo Giulio Argan, Storia dell'arte come storia della città, 1983
our daily urban trajectories can be compared to a sort of dripping, as a chart of arbitrary and apparently inconscious itineraries that articulate the "urban time", our being-in-the-city.
"Maybe the zone is a very complex system of tolls... I have no idea what goes on here in the absence of man. But as soon as someone arrives everything goes haywire... the zone is exactly how we created it ourselves, like the state of our spirits... but what is happening, that does not depend on the zone, that depends on us." - Stalker, A. Tarkovskij, 1979
The importance of the street architectural element in modern times is symptomatic of a bigger tendency towards which the humanity is reaching: the urban space is becoming fluid again, and the urban citizens are gaining back their nomadic way of experiencing the landscape.
“By modifying the meanings of traversed space, the path has been the first esthetic action that has penetrated territories of chaos in building a new order on which architecture of situated objects has developed. […] It’s a primary creative act: the strolling as landscape architecture, where the word landscape is meaning the action of symbolic, beyond physic, transformation of anthropic space.”- Francesco Careri, Walkscapes – walking as an aesthetic practice.
The centrality of path, of vectorial linearity instead of the static point, it’s the basis of Soria’s project and of the urbanity itself: in fact it’s from strolling that the need of symbolic construction of landscape born out. As Careri highlights, the word path indicates at the same time the act of traversing (path as the action of walking), the line that traverses space (path as architectural object) and the tale of the space traversed (path as narrative structure). Two modalities of conceiving the architecture itself correspond to two different ways of inhabiting the Earth (the sedentary one born from agrarian cultivation and the nomadic one born from pastoralism): one architecture intended as physical construction of space and form against another one intended as symbolic perception and construction of space. Soria’s city is a physical architecture in space and form, but that puts in a central role the sensorial experience of symbolic construction of space, permitted by path as key urban element.
"We're facing the transition from the perspectival city of Reinassance imprint, that offers delicate balances between equally significant fullnesses, to the actual figure-setting city, which is based on the negation of every solidity, on the presence of absence."
Vincenzo Trione, Effetto Città - Arte Cinema Modernità, 2014
In designing a city for a migratory population, Constant restores the practice of walking as aesthetic act of reconnection of spread city’s zones, of leopard’s spots urbanscape, and strolling becomes the subject of the anthropic environment construction.Considered that nomadism entails a dynamic and temporary connection with locality, we can easily see how it constitutes an intrinsic feature of urban and contemporary populations. While urbanity, in contrast, is defined as “the state, the condition or the character of a city or a metropolis” : in its modern way, in the meaning of stasis given by the settlement in a place, urbanity becomes the antithesis of nomadism.
But in New Babylon the path is not representing an anti-architectural element anymore, instead it implies the passage from one architecture intended as physical construction of space and form to another architecture as symbolic perception and construction of landscape: “Nomadic trace, for how much it follows trails or ritual itineraries, hasn’t got the function of sedentary path which consists in distributing a closed space to men, assigning everyone his part, and regulating communication between parts. The nomad trace does exactly the contrary, it distributes men (or animals) in an open space, indefinite, not communicating.”
We are in the era of simultaneous, we are in the era of juxtaposition, in the era of the close and far, of the side by side, of the scattered. We find ourselves in a moment when the world prove itself, I believe, less as a huge way which would develop itself through time than a network that connects some points and that interwine its knot.
Michel Foucault, Utopies. Hétérotopies (1966)
New Babylon represents an achievement of Lefebvre’s droit à la ville, which reaffirms every citizen’s right to urban space: in antithesis to rigid modernist schemes, and specifically to the alienating popular complexes built especially during the end of the second world war, the figure of a citizen leader of his space was affirming itself, someone able to interact with and to modify places in accordance to his taste and need. So Babylonians could regulate atmospheric agents (temperature, humidity, light, sound) of their vital environment, everyone creating its personal climate; and also the interchange of day and night wouldn’t be binding anymore: in Constant’s plan it was possible and necessary for every citizen to create its own independent rhythms, more suitable to human ones. The human feeling of being dominated by nature was thus originating its aim to de-naturalize man in order to let him follow his own rhythm, distancing him from his own animality and from every link with the planet he’s living on, and anticipating in this way the spatial-temporal compression in cybernetic tendencies during the 80’s.
Roland Barthes describes how Japanese people, lacking their cities of names, are used to indicate the addresses though orientational diagrams, printed or drawn, like a sort of geographical scans that locate the domicile starting from a known reference point, as a station or a renowed store. In this way one of the biggest cities in the worls keeps living without being classified, and demonstrates how the rational and logical Occidental system is just a system as another one.
"Here, on the opposite, the domicile indication isn't supported by any abstraction: except for the real estate registry, it's only pure contingency: much more practical than legal, it ceases of expressing the conjunction between an identity and a property. This city can't be recognized but thanks to an ethnographical activity: you must orient yourself not through the book, through the address, but through the very act of walking by foot, through sight, habit, experience: every discovery is at the same time intense and fragile, can't be found except thanks to the memory of that trace that has left in us: visiting a place for the first time is, in this way, starting to write it: by not being written, the address must establish his own writing itself".
Roland Barthes, L'empire des signes, 1970
The conceptual space of New Babylon is suggestively located in connection to the archetype of the airport, an enclosed space that avoids every contextual meaning outside of the one collectable by the tourist, stuffed with people in transit and alienating environments that procure a level of comfort and interest just acceptable for short term. A place (or better, taking Augé, a non-place), which supports and promotes unexpected contacts though: “the rules and usual standards lost their value, [travellers] are spread and they got only the other travellers to count on. Contacts are tied that usually would be way more complicate to establish.”
Babylonians, as aerial commuters, are hosted in closed and artificially controlled environments where every system of natural microclimate is excluded: in absence of external or natural phenomenon, it’s the interactive technological system that produces a sense of place.
Both ciudad lineal and New Babylon constitute a paradigm of hypermobility condition of contemporary cities, and reflects some aspects of globalization, intended as perpetual movement of informations (which range from people to goods and capital) in every place given on the world map: through the metaphorical concepts of travel and airport, cybernetics, virtual and decontextualized space, urban genericity, localization. “Globalization is a process. It’s at the same time transnational and transcendental. It’s about a fluxus condition instead of a statis one. It takes the place of certainty, stability, order and equilibrium substituting them with uncertainty, instability, disorder and disequilibrium. It’s a process that can be described in terms of fluxus, network, capacity, distributions, diffusions and movements.”
With globalization has been suggested that time-space compression has “reformulated our perception of space and time, so that we experience a loss of spatial boundaries or distinctions, so that all spaces begin to look alike and implode into a continuum.” Constant’s and Soria’s designs also possess anticipatory explorations of these concepts: their cities were imagined like cosmopolis spread over the entire earth’s surface through a series of linked centers, in the very same way our contemporary cities are dominating the landscape and are linked together in networks. And the globalist conceptions of place are now intended within a worldwide context rather than focusing on specifics of localities, which is also the key to the conception of New Babylon. Even the characteristic of being always in transformation of Constant’s city is easily perceiving within nowadays urbanities: as Michel de Certeau highlights in his essay Walking the City, the contemporary city is characterized by a continual remaking, rather than growing from its past.
If there’s no more center, there’s no more periphery either: what results is the hyperville by André Corboz, who takes the metaphor of the hypertext (a combination of textual digitalized dates that can be read in many different ways – contrary to the text, which has a hierarchized linear order) to illustrate the contemporary urbanity: the hypercity doesn’t have a univocal and imperative structure, neither authors, but the layers are mixed, superposed, partially erased; there’s no order, or binary systems, but coexistence and stratification. As the hypertext, the hypercity is accessible/readable in different ways: you can go in and go put from a multitude of points; the circulation is possible on many diverse itineraries, considered that the activities are spread around, and there’s no just one center, but a series of polarities.
In 1960 the artist Stanley Brouwn began his best-known series - This Way Brouwn: he stopped passersby in the street and asked for directions, encouraging them to make a fast sketch explaining a route. He then stamped these drawings with the title, exhibited them and made them into a bookwork. These approximate sketches compose a labyrinth which is used by the artist to develop his activity, both physically than mentally.
New Babylon (and ciudad lineal before it) seems to prophetically anticipate the question of Koolhaas: “is the contemporary city like the contemporary airport (all the same)? ... What’s left, once identity is deposed? Genericity?” When centrality is lost, in the same time identity disappears too, leaving behind an expanse of homogeneous urban, without a center or a periphery, an astorical and superficial Generic City, freed by the weight of identity. Generic City, as New Babylon and ciudad lineal, is configured as a fractal repetition of the same, simple structural model, and both of them constitutes a concentrate of hyperlocal and hyperplanetary at the same time. Determined by the condition of being in transit, that’s becoming universal, the generic city/new babylon/ciudad lineal is founded by people always in movement and always ready to move: “Generic City represents the ultimate death of urban planning… because planning doesn’t make any difference now. […] Its architecture is generally air conditioned […] voids are essential constructions of Generic City… Voidness grants its own physicity… the more complete and repetitive is the internal, the less its essential repetitivity is noted. […] Variety can’t be boring. But infinite variety of Generic City is close, at least, to make variety normal: trivialized, in an overturning of what we expect, is repetition that becomes unusual, and so potentially audacious, exhilarating. But it’s about Twenty-first century.” In the same way, “New Babylon doesn’t end in any place (being the earth round); doesn’t know frontiers (doesn’t being national economies) or collectivities (being the humanity fluctuant). Every place is accessible by everyone. The entire earth becomes a home for its inhabitants. Life is an infinite travel through a world changing so fast that’s seem always different”.
French philosopher Paul Virilio describes the act of crossing a space as a geodetic power: a body who moves through space is orientating its locomotive power, considered that there's no life except in folds. The streets are seen as the essential and dynamic corridors of urban collective life: "In the open air, street is the massively rushing in pursuit, as much vital as the breathe that animates us... Illustrating the tragedy of 19th century suburbs, but in the same time forestalling the one of 20th century big periphery, Franz Mehring wrote: - I can't say how much weight on me the absence of streets -. The street (rue), as the way (route) that prolongs it, is a precipice in horizontal, a burnt sienna, a slope favourable to all type of assaults. From here the nature difference between the ancient barricade and the general strike , this temporary inactivity that's nothing else than the form of a desperation towards making progress..."
Rosalind Krauss had affirmed that sculpture after 50’s was experienced as negativity of landscape and architecture: “it was that thing, above or in front of a building, that wasn’t a building; or that thing, inserted in a landscape, that wasn’t a landscape… it was by now the category resulting by non-landscape and by non-architecture… but non-architecture is just another form of defining landscape, and non-landscape is more easily architecture.” In this way sculpture during the 60’s becomes something about construction of places, inside the action space defined by the expanded field.
In 1967 Richard Long realizes A line (made by) walking, an action that consisted in sculpting a line on the groundby just stepping on the grass. In combining two activities apparently separated (sculpture and walking), Long’s artwork contains the presence of absence and places itself at the intersection between sculpture, performance and landscape architecture: walking is transformed in an autonomous form of art. Art arrived sooner than architecture to the concepts of negative space and symbolic construction of placeness.