Research for Research 1

Bart Lootsma

Over the last decade, research has become a key issue in the debate on architec-
ture and urbanism. Architects and architectural offices like Stefano Boeri and Multi-
plicity, Rem Koolhaas and OMA/AMO, Raoul Bunschoten and CHORA, Winy Maas
and MVRDV; institutions like Harvard, the Berlage Institute, the Bauhaus and ETH
Studio Basel; museums and galleries like Arc en Rêve in Bordeaux and the Triennale
in Milan; and traveling exhibitions like Cities on the Move set up ambitious projects
that try to understand recent changes in the urban environment. Books become not
only thicker, but also bigger in size by the month to stress their importance. All these
projects focus on the broader social, economical and cultural context of architectural
and urban design instead of on projects, although projects done by the architects that
carry out the research are inevitably seen in the light of the research. This seems an
enormous change since a period in which architecture, in Manfredo Tafuri’s words,
withdrew itself in the ‘boudoir’, focusing on linguistic games and emphasizing the
autonomy of its ‘discipline’ by showing long genealogical traditions. The current
research seems to be largely ahistorical. If history plays a role, then only in the form
of quantative extrapolations of abstract statistical data, preferably shown in graphic
representations that until recently only appeared in board rooms of larger companies.
Current research focuses only on the ‘new’, on changes that seem to unsettle the
discipline.
The reasons are obvious. We find ourselves in the middle of a ‘Second Modernity’
that is defined by global networks of communication and mobility, national borders
are blurring and cities grow together in vast urban landscapes, new post-fordist
production methods replace the industrial production –at least in the Western world-,
capitalism has become the one system ruling the world, the service and experi-
ence economy are growing factors, we witness stunning processes of migration and
individualization, first and third worlds are folding into each other and we fear a new
kinds of collective risks: environmental risks and new kinds of warfare.
Ofcourse these changes have consequences for architecture and urbanism, just as
the First Modernity brought a lot of changes. In the beginning of the twentieth century
industrialization, railways, cars, congestion of the big cities, war, deseases, the rise
of the masses etcetera brought us new problems, new typologies and a new scale.
Big industrial complexes, railway lines and stations, highways, tenement blocks etcet-
era were new typologies that were developed in that period. After the Second World
War we witness among others the rise of highways, shopping malls and airports and
the beginning of individualization and urban sprawl.
Also in this first period of modernization and in the period after the Second World
War, architects and urbanists were involved in intensive research. It was a research
that Tafuri largely dismissed in ‘L’Architecture dans le boudoir’ both philosophically,
based on Michel Foucaults analysis of the problematic relation between language
and reality in ‘Les Mots et les Choses’, and ideologically. A few years before Jean
François Lyotard he proclaimed the end of the grand narratives. In ‘L’Architecture
dans le Boudoir’, similarly as in ‘Progetto e Utopia’ he destroyed the idea that archi-
tecture could bring us a new and better society and that all attempts to do so were fi-
nally absorbed by captitalism. Even after his death, Tafuri theory seems to be proven
again and again. Even the architects that withdrew in the boudoir became a chique
market niche and, with a reference to Hollywood, seem to want to compensate for

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Research for Research Bart Lootsma

their uncertainty by proudly announcing themselves as ‘star architects’ today.

But maybe Tafuri started out from the wrong expectations. Maybe when we step
aside for a moment from the expectation that the Modern Movement was a move-
ment whose main argument was to change things and try to perceive it as a collec-
tion of individuals that in the first place were facing the same or similar problems 2
and had to find solutions for them, we can still learn a lot. It seems as if, particularly
in recent architectural history, only the visionary aspect has always been empha-
sized and criticized for many different reasons. But visionary projects always have
to fail. Maybe when we try to see their projects as a means to understand the reality
they were facing and focus on their research the tragic doom of failure that lays
over these projects since the nineteen seventies disappears. When we see them as
individual moments of synthesis in a collective process of modernization that could
never be steered by one person or body, by one ideology or another they appear
differently. Not as words or syllables in a language that could just be repeated over
and over again, but as essays, as landscape paintings, photographs, snapshots of
a city at a particular moment in time, using the media of architecture: plan, section
and elevation. What we would be interested in then is not the projective, visionary
aspect of them, but the analytical side. We are looking for cities that are hidden in
these ‘visionary’ cities, to use the term for the last time, or that are even covered up
by them. Maybe this analysis could help us doing research today, not only by taking
their methods literally as it happens now, but by analyzing the analysis critically and
comparing it to the problems we are facing today, that are so different and in some-
times even contradictory to the problems that people were facing one hundred years
ago. It is so different because, as Ulrich Beck writes, today ‘any attempt to come up
with a new concept that would provide social cohesion must depart from acknowl-
edging that individualism, diversity and scepticism are rooted in Western culture’,
whereas at the time the collective and the masses were still largely unquestioned.

This is exactly what we try to do in this book. It is, as the title says, a Research for
Research. It is part of an ambitious undertaking that strives at no less than to rewrite
the history of urban planning of the twentieth century as a history of research. In this
research we analysed a series of canonized urban proposals and theories on the
basis of three questions. First: wat kind of research were these projects based on
concerning the real situation as found? Second: what kind of political and bureau-
cratic system did the projects presuppose in order to be realized? Third: what state
of technology did the projects presuppose? This leads to a history that is not so
much a history of visions, but a history of interpretations and extrapolations of the
real. The projects are not the beginning of a history, but are embedded in history.
The architects appear all like ‘surfers on the waves’ of a continuous process of mod-
ernization instead of as the ones that caused and triggered Modernity or Modernism.
And, like surfers, ofcourse they fell of the waves many, many times. But sometimes
they were able to stay on top for a while. Many discoveries made on the way still
shape our environment today. This leads to the fourth question: what was realized
from the projects –by the architects themselves or their followers- or, why were they
not realized?
At several moments we realized how blind this history has been. For example,
several archives concerning the research have already been thrown away. Hilber-
seimer made all his students in Chicago map a particular city in the world according
to a standard methodology. It must have provided him with an incredible compara-
tive knowledge on cities, of which we sometimes find traces in his writings. All this
research seems to be lost. No wonder we always see the same image of the High-
rise City. When we were looking for archives concerning the research part on the
collaboration between Van Eesteren and Van Lohuizen, they appeared to have been
destroyed at the City of Amsterdam or given away by the Netherlands Architectural

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Institute to some unknown party. No wonder that the four impressive volumes on Van
Eesteren hardly even mention the researcher Van Lohuizen or try to deal with his
research and that different critics and architects like Rem Koolhaas and Wouter Van-
stiphout can ridiculize Van Eesteren in a totally naieve way as someone whose only
goal in life was to realize a kind of big Mondrian paintings. It is naieve, because they 3
do not seem to take into consideration that the politicians and civil servants would
never have let them go away with that, certainly not on the scale of their operations,
that not only involved the extension plan of Amsterdam, the Polders, large parts of
the Dutch countryside, but even the very organization and laws of urban planning in
the Netherlands.
Already in this first round, we did some surprising findings that alter the existing
views on the history on urban planning quite dramatically. Let me just mention two of
them here.
We know for example that the First World War was of crucial importance for Bruno
Taut and the architecture of expressionism, just as well as for the whole setup of the
Bauhaus. Hardly any attention has been given to the fact that it was also important
for many other projects, such as the City for Three Million Inhabitants of Le Cor-
busier, in which the towers in the center of the project would be owned by different
countries, to be certain that this center would never be attacked by any of the coun-
tries involved. Totally neglected is the way in which Otto Neuraths ideas on the War
Economy influenced his ideas on Total Socialization after the First World War and
how he tried to implement them in Vienna.
Strikingly, apart from problems of housing, hygiene, traffic and pollution, the tradition-
al driving forces of modern architecture and urbanism, a big influence on many new
plans was leisure. It seems a fashionable issue today, but it was even more important
in the twenties. Most emblematically we can see this in the extension plan for Amster-
dam, in which suddenly enormous green flecks appear, as sporting fields, parks and
a forest. This was immediately related to the eight hour working day that was intro-
duced all over Europe in the early twenties. It meant that spaces had to be reserved
and programmed for leisure activities. In a different way leisure played a crucial
role in the settlers movement in Vienna, because workers could only build their own
houses and grow their own food if they would have the time for it. Ginzburgs plan for
Moscow was completely based on the idea of leisure. There the issue was even a
four day working week. Fifty years later, Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon was
even completely founded on the idea that people would not have to work at all due to
a totally computerized production. Interesting is to observe how Le Corbusier man-
aged to get the issue of leisure largely off the CIAM agenda. Implicitly it becomes
also clear why: France did not have an eight hours working day, but a ten hours work-
ing day, which may have diminished the urgency to deal with leisure.

Reading the book, we will find many more of these cross references and correspond-
ences that need further and deeper study. In a next phase, in which also another set
of projects will be investigated, we will dedicate more attention to them.

Two last points have to be made in this introduction. The first is that it appears pos-
sible to write a history of architecture and urban planning based on research. Just as
well as it is possible to write a history of architecture and urban planning based on
projects and influences, it is possible to establish genealogical lines of the research
we find today. Although more research has to be done, we can provisionally suggest
for now that in this genealogy Rem Koolhaas’research would appear as a synthesis
of research the in the tradition of Otto Neurath, Van Eesteren and Van Lohuizen,
Hilberseimer and Constant. Winy Maas can clearly be placed in the tradition of Van
Lohuizen. Stefano Boeri fits in the tradition of typological and morphlogical research.
Raoul Bunschoten fits in the Situationist tradition. The Swiss that are united in the

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Studio Basel, Jacques Herzog, Pierre deMeuron, Roger Diener and Marcel Meili,
fit in the modernist tradition of the Bauhaus and Hilberseimer. Hans Hollein has
given Hilberseimers teaching approach a twist in his ‘Ort und Platz’ project, in which
students begin to analyze one urban complex historically. It is fascinating to see how
the methods the different architects are using are still strongly related to the domi- 4
nant traditions of the countries they were raised and the educational trajectory the
architects followed.
If all of this is true, it would be interesting to compare the situation in which these
predecessors started their research with the condition contemporary architects are
facing today. To what extend do they simply continue existing methods of research
and to what extend are they changing them? How do they deal for example with the
fact that cities are less and less closed entities, but more and more related to oth-
ers? How do they deal with the fact that national boders are blurring to come to a
stable set of statistical parameters? It is interesting that these issues were already
problematic for Van Lohuizen and in solving them, he discovered the Randstad. For
Winy Maas’ research, it is however still necessary to establish a petri-dish situation
with a speculative autarchichal city in Metacity Datatown in order to be able to make
certain predictions.
Here, it is not only about the research itself, but also about the issue of turning this
research into a method of design and even into a bureaucratic system. The latter
was something the first modernists were incredibly good at, particularly Van Ees-
teren and Van Lohuizen in the Netherlands, and it is a point that is largely neglected
by architects and planners today. They seem only interested to get rid of all these
rules, not understanding that they were the logical result of the institutionalization of
the conclusions drawn from the research in the First Modernity. Rem Koolhaas, in
his Roman Operating System, seems to return largely to Otto Neurath’s logical posi-
tivism, in which building types are used as a kind of protocol sentences that together
make the city. With Neurath, whose Isotype language he is often using and adapt-
ing, he shares the belief in modernization as a collective process, that is hardly
influenced by ideology. But he uses the idea of protocol sentences in an ironical way
and explicitly calls his S,M,L,XL a novel. That means he takes the criticism on the
idea of protocol sentences seriously, that there is no proof that they actuallydo have
a relationship with reality. Ofcourse, philosophically speaking, there is no difference
between an analysis based on protocol sentences and a fairy tale. Wittgenstein
would also notice this problem, but he would say that we can see nevertheless that
it ‘works’. Just as we know now that Newton’s theory about gravity and his formula
are scientifically incorrect, we can still work with them. In a similar way we should
see architectural and urban research. As Van Lohuizen already insisted, it should
constantly be revised and updated in a never ending process. We should also keep
trying, even in desperation, to deal with the complexities involved. Neglecting this,
by returning to an autonomous architecture, is Ostrich behaviour.

Rotterdam, 07-12-2001

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