Settlements are an analogue of cooperatives and communes of the twenties, but it turned out that later the original idea of such settlements was developed precisely in Switzerland, giving rise to an interesting architecture, in its later versions - in its own way an exquisite version of brutalism using panels. One of the first settlements, Freidorf, was built in 1919-1921 by the Bauhaus hero, collectivist-functionalist Hannes Mayer. One of the latest, Trimley, was built in Zurich in 2006-2010 by Bruno Krucker, the architect who will give a lecture at MARCH on Tuesday 17 May (19:00).
The exhibition and the accompanying program - two lectures and a round table - were organized by Elena Kosovskaya (Markus), a researcher and theorist of architecture at the Technical University of Munich (Department of Architecture and Culture Theory), and Yuri Palmin, a renowned architecture photographer. We talked with the curators about the specifics of the villages and Swiss collectivism. The interview is available in text and video format.
Archi.ru:
What is so interesting about Swiss villages that you decided to single them out as a separate phenomenon?
Yuri Palmin:
- There is one difficulty with these settlements: the fact is that the word “settlement” is not an entirely accurate and adequate translation of the word Siedlung. For example, in English-language literature, when it comes to Zidlungs in German-speaking countries, they do not use the word settlement, but they write it as Siedlung. Settlements are an independent urban-planning formation with a certain degree of autonomy; they began to develop as a phenomenon from the beginning of the 20th century, consonant with the ideas of the garden city of Ebenezer Howard and others. In Germany - in Stuttgart, Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, there were different forms of such settlements, they were invented during the avant-garde years, they operated for some time, but later ceased to function as full-fledged and autonomous urban formations. In Russia, the experiment with workers' settlements - after all, this is a similar formation, failed almost immediately, they ceased to function as such soon after construction. And in Switzerland, this very collectivity of living in connection with new architecture, with new trends and new architectural paradigms still exists and continues to develop. This is what is most interesting. Others made the fairy tale come true for a short time; and there the fairy tale lasts, lasts … It is surprising that in Switzerland these forms of collectivity are preserved.
Elena Kosovskaya:
- I have a great interest in various architectural phenomena related to Switzerland, because, although it is surrounded by Europe, it seems to me, it differs from many other states in this idea of collectivity. In our project, the word “collectivity” is the main carrier idea, because in Switzerland collectivity exists at the molecular level, it is in the political system, in institutions, so much is a part of society. The fact that for people in Switzerland the importance of the collective in relation to the individual subject is completely understandable, there is no doubt whatsoever. Based on this, the Swiss village experience is particularly interesting, because to some extent it is a miniature model of Swiss society. The village is not a set of some kind of urban planning elements, made more or less beautifully, but a social idea, even an amalgam, a combination of different phenomena, which is embodied in some kind of architecture. Architecture, in turn, becomes a kind of unifying force for the social that was conceived there and continues to be there.
Yura aptly mentioned Russian workers' settlements. We did not get accustomed, and the memories of collectivism are rather unpleasant. Although we know about Swedish socialism. And what is this Swiss collectivism, what is it, how does it manifest itself?
Yu. P.: I will say about collectivity, and then you will supplement and correct me. I think that the peculiarity of the Swiss collectivity is its diversity, the diversity of its forms. It is not one imposed form. There are as many collectives as there are collectives. This is the peculiarity of the Swiss collectivity, it is individual in its manifestations.
E. K.: I don't see it that way.
Yu. P.: But we are looking at seven villages in which there are seven different forms of collectivity.
E. K.: Yes and no, it seems to me. Each of them responds to a certain request of the time, and in a completely different plan from the point of view of architecture and in a different social plane. If Freidorf is the idea of getting out of the city, the idea of self-education according to the thoughts of Pestalozzi, this is an idea where the father-inspiration of the village leads the people-children and shows them how they really have to live in order to become better. This is a twenties idea. In the sixties, the idea is naturally different.
Yu. P.: Freedom and association for the sake of individual freedom. Another form of collectivity.
E. K.: No, it's all the same, we are constantly talking about how we will make the best society in a miniature village, because we cannot immediately influence the whole society - this is impossible, this is a utopia, we do not want to engage in utopia. The idea of a community itself is the same for all villages, otherwise we would not be able to compare them. And the implementation of the idea is very different, because the demand for time is different.
Yu. P.: I agree. But in Swiss collectivity, moreover, the role of the individual in the collective is quite high. Collectivity - it is for the development of the individual.
E. K.: Yes, this is a very important topic.
Yu. P.: Not for the sake of suppressing the individual and creating a collective like an anthill, but collectivity for the development of individuality, for the sake of saving energy on the development of individuality. That is, an individual does not spend all his strength on the fight against a hostile society, but society triples in such a way that the individual spends these forces on something more important, on internal development.
E. K.: If we talk about Soviet settlements and the complete rejection of the collective in Russia today, then perhaps this is the main difference between Swiss collectivism: it is necessary to bring up a new idea of the collective, different from such an understanding of the masses, where a person is nothing. To foster an understanding of two levels: on the one hand, a community of people cannot exist except through consensus. On the other hand, it is a consensus of people, each of whom has the right to vote, and each of them enjoys the right to vote. This is an important idea - not precisely through suppression, but through active participation or active submission to the opinion of the majority.
Yu. P.: Submission is an important thing and quite difficult, especially the balance between submission and freedom. What we are just trying to figure out using the study of architecture, but architecture in a broad sense. We will discuss all this deeply enough at our seminar, which will be held, apparently, on May 20 in the bureau of Alexander Brodsky.
Very nice, in your description, settlements are obtained. But I want more specifics. You reason so well, it is clear that you know the material well, and, fortunately, I do not know it well. How do they do it? Literally how it happens, any details?
E. K.: We describe seven villages, but in fact each is slightly different. Roughly speaking, there are two models. One model - the villagers buy housing. They gather in a community, and in it there is a clear distinction between their private homes and territories in which they do whatever they want - and some kind of regulation within the village. There is the private and the public: the private belongs to them, and the public is already regulated in different ways. For example Halen: there are houses that can be bought, but at the same time there is public property, which is managed by everyone, where no one can make decisions. There are social agreements, there are some aesthetic limitations: you cannot just take and change the facade of your house, despite the fact that it is yours, and so on.
The second model - for example Freidorf, there is an initiator or initiative group, in this case the initiator is a philanthropist and politician from Basel, he had a fix idea - he read Pestalozzi a lot, these ideas are close to him, he wanted to translate them into some kind of building. He gets money, negotiates with a lot of people, finds architects, and so on; he is the driving force. This is a rented home. People, if they get it, can stay in it for the rest of their lives, no one can kick them out, unless they have committed some terrible crime against the community, but this housing does not belong to them.
The last, most up-to-date village in Zurich, which translates from German as "more than housing", is the result of an initiative that emerged during the celebration of the centenary of non-commercial housing in Zurich. In Zurich, ¼ of all non-commercial housing is a phenomenal figure for a city where housing costs so much that almost no one can afford it. In 2007, a number of people who participated in these festivities sit down at the table and say: maybe it is worth now thinking about what the housing of the future will be like. From these conversations at the table, an initiative arises, in which as a result about 50 Zurich cooperatives participate, including financially, the city helps by giving on very favorable terms a piece of land somewhere on the outskirts; some kind of soft loans are given. And the largest of all the villages shown is being built, it is designed for 1300 people. All others are on a smaller scale.
The two named types are the main ones, within them there are subtleties and distinctions that relate, for example, to the separation of the private and the public: how big or small it is, how important is the role of the public, how much people inside the village should be involved in public life. Which also takes place in different ways in different villages. Our idea, among other things, is to create a kind of picture from different heterogeneous parts, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to show the main line, in which there are villages where people are very actively involved in life, for example, in Halen it is one big family, where they know each other, visit each other, arrange holidays. They have a store in the village, they maintain it for their own money, they consider it ethically very important to buy groceries in this store, and not go to the city to an ordinary supermarket. A common ethical moral standard is very important.
Compared to the Trimli village, which Krucker built, he comes on May 17 to give a lecture, it is completely different there, the village is a symbolic unit, it consists of two large houses united by one inner space. The idea of a community is rather symbolic here. All apartments are two-sided, they are directed both to the street and to the courtyard, all people can look at each other.
Trimley actually does not look like a village, rather it is a condominium, a house …
E. K.: No, this is not a condominium, because housing is rented there, and in all these villages - an important feature - housing is non-commercial, it does not participate in market speculation. It is not expensive, it even becomes cheaper over time. A very important idea is non-speculative land and non-speculative apartment prices. In German it is called kostenmiete, that is, each person pays the actual price of the apartment.
Yu. P.: Cost price. The difficulty lies in the fact that we use the Russian word "settlement", in fact we mean zidlung. Therefore, in English-language literature, they try to use the German word "zidlung", because it has no analogue.
E. K.: There is a settlement, but this is a translation.
Yu. P.: Or housing estate, which is completely wrong, because the main thing is absolute non-profit, everything at cost, no one gets a cent of profit, from anything, from construction to operation, everything at cost. This is the first thing. The second is this very collectivity and some form of autonomy that forms our zidlung, our village. We have no other word, this is the problem here. The word "settlement" appears in Russian in the meaning of "zidlung" also in the 1920s, because the workers' settlement is, of course, a translation of the zidlung.
Who owns the property - the land?
E. K.: Community, cooperative. You become a member of a cooperative, buy a certain amount of shares. And, which is very important in a cooperative, they have no idea of social housing or helping the poorest. This is not the main idea of the cooperative. Some even have such a rule - in order to get an apartment there at cost price, you must first buy shares at an annual cost, say, $ 30,000. This housing is not for the poorest, not to help people get out of some kind of crisis. The main idea of this housing is a way out of the capitalist system, where the most important thing is profit. Entering a certain community, traditions of which have existed throughout Europe since the beginning of the 19th century.
There are not only residential cooperatives, the same happened in Russia, this is a fairly long tradition. In Switzerland, it began in the 1820s, at the beginning of the 19th century, with agricultural products so that dealers would not receive profit. This is the beginning of a cooperative idea. The cooperative idea is not limited to housing, it is in fact an opposition to early capitalism with its initial accumulation. The political idea is very important, namely the creation of some kind of alternative concept, some kind of better community in political and social terms.
So, from this chain, as I understand it, the developer is completely excluded. But does the architect get his fee?
E. K.: Yes, in Switzerland it is impossible otherwise, no one works for free. This is a very important cultural background. Any work is respected and should be paid accordingly. It is very important.
What to expect from the lectures of the invited heroes? What is Stefan Truby doing now, what kind of subjectivist or, on the contrary, anti-subjectivist architectural theory?
E. K.: We talked a little about this topic some time ago, he was interested in this topic social and political, as the idea of some kind of cultural exchange, which is of great importance precisely in the XX century, because in the XX century the migration movement begins, which makes it clear the idea that one cannot be fixed on some cultural peculiarity of a country, group, region, but should be considered, for example, cultural phenomena that are interesting to us, in a much more global context, taking into account cultural migration ties.
Second lecture by Bruno Krucker. I think this is one of the most interesting architects. They do not build museums, they do not have any representative buildings, they mainly build residential complexes. A lot of things were built in Zurich. Office buildings are being built, and they have a very strict, clear and very radical approach to architecture, even for Swiss representations. They also see architecture not just as a minimal box, but as a cultural phenomenon. Moreover, they see architecture, and this is also a very Swiss look, in the culture of Swiss everyday life.
What can be clearly seen in the Trimli village: they correlate the language of the Trimli village with the examples of the sixties, seventies. They understand the concept of large-scale construction, which now, for various reasons, does not have a very good image. In Russia, I think it will be even more difficult to talk about this.
Yu. P.: Trimli is panel housing, which is wildly radical in Switzerland.
E. K.: In Russia it is even more radical. They also have a settlement, the earliest, most radical, Shtökenaker. There is not just panel housing, there are panels interspersed with rough stones - a picture familiar from the brutalism of the sixties. They make some kind of apartment plans for them that have nothing to do with what was once created from a silo … They create a picture from which at first you shudder, recognizing the difficult things from childhood, and then you begin to penetrate the idea of culture: this is that city, in which we grew up, which belongs to us. There is no historical city in Switzerland, Switzerland is not Italy, there is no historical example to follow. This is an attitude to culture as to the culture of modernism.
You say that it is more radical for Russia than for Switzerland. But in Russia, everything is flooded with panel construction
Yu. P.: New panel construction, and not extra-budgetary and not super-social. Imagine that some famous architectural bureau is building a panel house in Moscow. This will be a very radical gesture. Not social housing, but a normal residential development for the middle class.
E. K.: Naturally, this is connected with the image, with rejection: panel housing, what a horror, it is connected with a difficult time that we somehow went through, with the urban planning failures of the sixties, Pruitt-Igou, which was blown up in 1972. It is viewed as follows: yes, it was negative, but this is our culture, we cannot blow it up in ourselves, because we grew up in this culture and we relate to it. And here it is very important to make a kind of shift and consider this culture not as a negative, but as a positive cultural experience. It seems to me that radicalism lies precisely in this, in turning the view from negative to positive. I think it's even more difficult in Moscow.
Yu. P.: But much more relevant.
Brutalism with a human face turns out. As far as I understand, there are very interesting layouts
E. K.: The layouts are wonderful, the apartments are fantastic. We were in Bruno Krucker's apartment, it's a very high standard.
Yu. P.: I must say that these panels also have a fair amount of cunning: it's like comparing jewelry production and some hardware factory. Bolts and nuts are made in much the same way as jewelry, only in larger quantities and with large tolerances. These panels are absolutely jewelry. And they are piece. Of course, there is slyness in this. But they don't stop being panels.
E. K.: This is a very interesting topic. I think this is the most urgent topic for Moscow.
