With the kind permission of Strelka Press, here is an excerpt from Colin Rowe and Fred Ketter's Collage City.
As a concrete illustration of the problem (not so much different from the current one) - which arises when people stop believing in utopia and disown tradition - let us cite the project of transforming Paris into a kind of museum that Napoleon nurtured. The city, to some extent, was supposed to become something of a habitable exhibition, a collection of constant reminders designed to educate not only local residents, but also visitors; and the essence of the instructions, as you might guess, was supposed to be a kind of historical panorama not only of the greatness and continuity of the French nation, but also of a commensurate (albeit not so significant) contribution from the conquered Europe.
Yes, this idea causes instinctive rejection; but if today it should not arouse much enthusiasm (Albert Speer and his notorious patron are immediately remembered), one cannot fail to see in this idea of Napoleon the fantasy of a great liberator, the beginnings of a program of what for its time was a truly radical gesture. After all, this was probably one of the first manifestations of a theme that would later sound like a refrain throughout the 19th century, and not necessarily in a repressive form - the theme of the city as a museum.
Perhaps the city as a museum, the city as a harmonious consonance of culture and enlightenment, the city as a generous source of diverse but carefully selected information was most fully realized in Munich by Ludwig I and Leo von Klenz, in Biedermeier Munich, deliberately filled with references to Florence and the Middle Ages., Byzantium, Ancient Rome and Greece, with buildings like two drops of water similar to the illustrations for "Précis des Leçons" by Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand. But if the idea of such a city, which achieved the greatest popularity in the 1830s, was definitely laid down in the cultural policy of the early 19th century, its significance remained unappreciated.
We find evidence of it in Munich von Klenz, we find traces of it in Potsdam and Berlin Schinkel, maybe even in the provinces - in the Piedmont town of Novara (there may be several similar ones in the district), and when we then include earlier samples in this list of the best French quality (the library of Saint Genevieve, etc.), we observe how gradually the Napoleonic dream begins to take on real shape. The city-museum, pompous to the point of impossibility, differs from the city of neoclassicism in its variety of forms and in its purest form survives almost until 1860. Baron Haussmann's Paris and Vienna after the construction of the Ringstrasse are already spoiling the picture. For by that time, and especially in Paris, the ideal composition of independent parts was again replaced by a much more "total" idea of absolute integrity.
But if you try to identify a city-museum, a city consisting of distinctly isolated objects / episodes, what can you say about it? That, as a mediator between the remnants of classical decency and the emerging optimism of the pursuit of freedom, is it an intermediate strategy? That, despite the fact that his educational mission is paramount, he turns to "culture" and not to technology? That he still combines the work of Brunelleschi and the Crystal Palace? That Hegel and Prince Albert and Auguste Comte had a hand in its creation?
All these questions are a consequence of the vague and eclectic view of the city-museum (the original outline of the city of the ruling bourgeoisie); and, probably, the answer to each of them will be in the affirmative. For, despite all our reservations (that such a city is nothing more than a dance on bones, that it is just a collection of historical and postcard sights), it is difficult not to recognize its friendliness and hospitality. Open and to some extent critical, susceptible - at least in theory - to a variety of stimuli, not hostile to either utopia or tradition, although not at all objective, the museum city does not show any signs of an obsessive belief in value one or another universal principle. Unrestricted, implying the encouragement rather than the exclusion of diversity, he surrounds himself with the minimum possible for his time customs barriers, embargoes, restrictions on trade; which means that today the idea of a city-museum, despite many well-founded objections, is not as bad as it seemed at first. For if a modern city, no matter how open it proclaims itself, demonstrates an annoying lack of tolerance for alien influence from the outside (open space and closed consciousness), if its main position was and remains protectionist and restrictive (strictly controlled multiplication of the same) and if this led to an internal economic crisis (impoverishment of meaning and a decline in ingenuity), then the presumption of a policy that was previously uncontested can no longer provide any reliable basis for exceptions.
This does not mean that the Napoleonic city-museum offers a model for a quick solution to all world problems; but only says that this city of the XIX century, the city of fulfillment of desires is a collection of souvenirs from Greece and Italy, fragments of Northern Europe, sporadic outbursts of technical enthusiasm and, perhaps, light flirting with what remains of the Saracen heritage of Sicily - Although it seems to us like a dusty closet with old junk, it can be viewed as an anticipation and reproduction in miniature of questions suspiciously reminiscent of the questions raised by us: the loss of faith in the absolute, random and "free" hobbies, the inevitable multitude of historical references and everything else. It can be seen as an anticipation and a rough answer; for a city-museum, just like a simple museum, is a concept that arose in the culture of the Enlightenment, in the information explosion that took place at the end of the 18th century; and if today both the zone and the force of destruction of this explosion have only increased, it cannot be said that the attempts of the twentieth century to cope with its consequences were more successful than what was done a hundred or more years ago.
In Berlin's Marx-Engels-Platz, in Chicago's Eisenhower Highway, in Paris Avenue General Leclerc, in the suburbs of London Brunel University - all point to a screaming and irresistible desire to perpetuate the memory; but if all these places - referring to collective memories - are varieties of the Napoleonic museum, then on a deeper level one can find the architect's own working collection of memoirs - the island of Mykonos, Cape Canaveral, Los Angeles, Le Corbusier, the Tokyo office, the Constructivist room and certainly the Western -African Gallery (finally opened for us by the Museum of "Natural" History); in its own way it is also an anthology of memorial gestures.
It is difficult to say which of this - excessive public worship or private architectural fantasy - is more repressive or, conversely, more representative. But if these tendencies represent an eternal problem, in space and time, of the search for the ideal of legalized neutrality, then this is precisely the problem that worries us; the problem of neutrality - this main classical ideal, which has long since lost its classical content - and the inevitable penetration into it of diversity, uncontrolled and multiplying accidents in space and time, in preferences and traditions. The city as a neutral and complete statement and the city as a spontaneous representation of cultural relativism; we tried to identify the main representatives of both of these generally mutually exclusive models; and in an attempt to fill the city born in Napoleon's imagination with content, they presented a schematic sketch of what seems to us to be a 19th century attempt to settle a similar, albeit not so aggravated, situation. As a public institution, the museum arose as a result of the collapse of the classical notions of totality and in connection with the great cultural revolution, most dramatically marked by the political events of 1789. Its purpose was to preserve and demonstrate multiple material manifestations, reflecting a plurality of mindsets - each of which is considered valuable to one degree or another; and if its obvious functions and goals were liberal, if the concept of a museum, therefore, implied the presence of some kind of ethical program, difficult to define, but inherent in this institution (again, the liberation of society through self-knowledge?), if, we repeat, the museum was a relay, then it was in The concepts of the museum can formulate a possible solution to the more serious problems of the modern city.
Let us assume that the position of the museum, this cultural problem, is not so easy to resolve; suppose also that its apparent presence is easier to bear than its latent influence; and, of course, we acknowledge the fact that the very concept of "city-museum" already offends the hearing of a modern person. Maybe the city as a pedestal for the exhibition will be more acceptable; but whatever designation we choose, ultimately it all comes down to the problem of balance between the museum-pedestal and the exhibits on display; and in this regard, when working on the exhibition space of the city, the key question first of all arises: which is more important? Does the pedestal dominate the exhibits or do the exhibits overshadow the pedestal?
It is a question of Levi-Strauss's precarious balance “between structure and event, necessity and chance, internal and external”, a balance “under constant threat of forces acting in one direction or another in accordance with fluctuations in fashion, style and general social conditions”; and, in general, modern architecture answered this question, giving preference to the ubiquitous pedestal, which showed itself in all its glory, warning and suppressing any accidents. If this is the case, then the opposite cases are known or easily conceivable, when the exhibits prevail, and prevail to such an extent that the pedestal is removed underground or the very thought of it is thrown out of my head (Disney World, American romantic suburbs, etc.). But if we ignore these cases, each of which excludes the possibility of competition, then, given that the pedestal usually simulates necessity, and the exposed object - freedom, that one can simulate utopia, and the other - tradition, the one who considers architecture as a dialectic simply must imagine a two-way connection between the pedestal and the object, "structure" and "event", between the body of the museum and its contents, a connection in which both components retain their individuality, enriched by interaction, when they constantly change roles, when the illusion constantly changes its position in relation to axis of reality.
