La ville-Paysage. Rudolf Schwarz et la dissolution des villes
Panos Mantziaras, Metis Presses, Genève 2008 (pp. 294, € s.i.p.)
What do the green city of the disurbanists, the socialist city of Milioutine, Broadacre City and Schwarz’s Stadtlandshaft have in common? Ideologically speaking, they lie on the outer edges of liberal, revolutionary and conservative thought and they are upheld by the same obsessions: a boundless spread of buildings sustained by networked configurations; faith in the ideology of the plan; and the conviction that a “unitary conceptual framework” can hold city and countryside together. It is no longer the figure-background that differentiates the urban from what is not (typical of much modern thought), but rather the dissolution of the city or, as the title says, the city-landscape. Today we could say that this core part of Schwarz’s thought alludes to many contemporary concerns.
Panos Mantziaras has inserted Schwarz’s work into a long history of the ideas and projects for Europe. Indeed, in parts it is like a theoretical text on urban thought, or rather a different history of the modern city, understood as the scattered city: a condition that is conceived, designed and pursued at least as much as its opposite. Dispersion and concentration are two different faces of modernity, as Bernardo Secchi often reminds us. They are built out of contrasting disciplinary imageries that it would be rash to define as urban and anti-urban, and the expression of opposite ways of perceiving the relationship between the political dimension and spatial form. This is very different from the anti-urban thought on the other side of the Atlantic. Schwarz’s work, based on community and social organisation, also falls within this example of modern town planning. What seems most important here is not the return of anti-Enlightenment categories of local community tradition but more the strength of a settlement design aimed at integrating the population into a moral universe. With their bizarre tangles of curved lines, the patterns reproduced in Mantziaras’s book evoke both organicist roots and harsh formal rigour. Schwarz was consistent with the severe figure of the conservative Catholic architect. Acknowledged at the end of the war as one of the few non-corrupt designers of the National Socialist party (which he never joined) and a highly successful professional and cultural figure as early as 1946, he liked to call himself a builder, partly to avoid the narrow stereotype of the church designer (although three fifths of his commissions came from the ecclesiastic sector) and he designed houses and public buildings. He wrote important books on architecture and was harshly polemic (his attack on Gropius and the Bauhaus in 1953 is famous). The 1947 Cologne plan was perhaps his most prestigious appointment, calling for the revitalisation of what had become “the biggest heap of rubble in the world”. First there was the colonisation of the occupied territories of Alsace and Lorraine, liberated (to use a euphemism) from the French people. From 1941 to 1944 Schwarz was responsible for the reconstruction of those areas and conducted important work on the development of a landscape that was essentially cultural. Its active construction referred to nature as a place in which to exercise socio-ethical responsibility.
Mantziaras deconstructs Schwarz’s project of dispersion, entwining textual descriptions, sketches, patterns and diagrams. As a consequence, the plan is firstly read as a system of symbolic forms rather than a set of professional practices, stubbornly seeking to highlight not only the substance but also the conceptual form of a different idea of urbanity. In doing so he helps to explore a historiographic perspective. Whether this history allows us to identify the foundations of the scattered city that we see all over Europe today is a different matter. Dispersion as a process and dispersion as a project have a non-linear relationship which becomes less transparent the more we make our customary link between the former and the strategies, desires and fears of a society of individuals, and the latter to the very modern desire to sustain a political design by means of a form. Something that Schwarz placed at the very core of his work.