Exhibition SiedlungsRequiem ("Requiem for the villages") was held in the Munich gallery Lothringer13 from November 16 to December 16, 2018.
Elena Markus (Kosovskaya) - architect, historian and architectural theorist, lecturer at the Technical University of Munich
How did the topic of settlements arise, how did it develop?
- It began with the fact that I and the photographer Yuri Palmin intensively took up the idea of settlements and cooperation on the example of Switzerland. Ours with Yura
we showed the exhibition at Arch Moscow in 2016 - a photo essay, graphic material and analysis of seven Swiss villages of the last century, characteristic of their time and at the same time original in idea and form. After this research, I wanted to make a more general project, book or exhibition, not tied only to Switzerland. After all, what is interesting, and it surprised me and Yura, when we discussed our Swiss project: on the one hand, the village is a modernist phenomenon in relation to the era and style, and there are an innumerable number of books about various villages, especially the 1920s. But at the same time, as far as I know, there is still not a single publication about the theory or history of the general idea of the village, and not just about specific examples (as, for example, Kenneth Frampton does in his essay in the book about Halen).
But why did it all start with interest in Swiss villages?
- Swiss townships are actually the prototype of Swiss statehood, a system founded as a permanent compromise for the good of the majority. So, for example, even at the head of the Swiss confederation is not one politician, but a collective of seven people - the Swiss Federal Council, which reflects the distribution of votes in parliament. Therefore, we decided to focus on the architecture of Swiss villages and do not even so much an exhibition as a visual and textual study. We considered, on the one hand, such well-known examples as the village of Werkbunda Neubühl (1930-1932) and the village of Halen, built by Atelier 5 at the turn of the 1960s - 1970s; on the other hand, such as the postmodern village of Seldvila near Zurich, about which few people are still known.
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zooming 1/4 Swiss village Halen Photo © Yuri Palmin
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zooming 2/4 Swiss village Halen Photo © Yuri Palmin
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zooming 3/4 Swiss village Halen Photo © Yuri Palmin
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zooming 4/4 Swiss village Halen Photo © Yuri Palmin
Swiss village of Halen. Photos by Yuri Palmin
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zooming Swiss village of Neubuehl Photo © Yuri Palmin
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zooming Swiss village of Neubuehl Photo © Yuri Palmin
Swiss village of Neubühl. Photos by Yuri Palmin
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zooming 1/6 The Swiss village of Seldvila Photo © Yuri Palmin
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zooming 2/6 The Swiss village of Seldvila Photo © Yuri Palmin
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zooming 3/6 Swiss village Seldvila Photo © Yuri Palmin
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zooming 4/6 The Swiss village of Seldvila Photo © Yuri Palmin
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zooming 5/6 The Swiss village of Seldvila Photo © Yuri Palmin
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zooming 6/6 The Swiss village of Seldvila Photo © Yuri Palmin
The Swiss village of Seldvila. Photos by Yuri Palmin
However, they are all very curious. One of the fundamental points was the realization that the idea of a Swiss society - or rather a community - is embodied in a similar way, primarily in the villages of the German part of Switzerland: in the French and Italian parts of the country, the idea of the importance of property is stronger; the difference is presumably historically based on the difference between ancient Germanic and ancient Roman land law. The political, economic and cultural structure of Switzerland is manifested in this way in the miniature form of villages - such a model of an ideal state or even more of a world order.
How is this socio-political content expressed physically in real settlements, Swiss and others?
- It is clear that any architecture is associated with political, social and other aspects of life, but in the configuration of settlements this is reflected more clearly than in other typologies. In the village, you very clearly see the social organization of space, which is expressed, on the one hand, in urban planning form, and on the other hand, in the typification of “residential units” and a clear distribution of private and public spaces. In addition, the inseparability of architecture from the urban planning concept is especially visible here. That is, it turns out that the village cannot be called architecture, it is a kind of "urbanistic unit".
If we return to the exhibition in Munich, how was its concept formed?
- My colleague Nick Förster and I made the exhibition together, and from the very beginning it was important for us to find a common idea. So we came to an understanding of the village in relation to the concept of community (German Gemeinschaft). What is a community? It is equally difficult for him to find a constant value. The concept of a community always depends on a specific context, on the state of society at a given moment, i.e. there is only a relative and not an absolute definition of it, and the villages, in turn, reflect this understanding with the help of a specific form: in this way, a certain model of the community is created within the village. This point can be traced in the etymology of the German word Siedlung, which can be translated into Russian as a settlement or as a settlement. It is no coincidence that in the catalog to the famous
the exhibition at MoMA in 1932, dedicated to modernism and international style, the curators decided not to translate the word Siedlung into English at all. Therefore, different villages with different ideas about collectivity are very different from each other. So, the villages of New Frankfurt, for example, are very different from the village of Werkbund in Stuttgart (1927). And if we take the village of Freidorf in the canton Basel-Land, which Hannes Meyer was building in 1919-1921, then in its idea it belongs rather to the 19th century, because there is a key figure of the paternalist customer who dictates the social order.
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zooming Swiss village of Freidorf Photo © Yuri Palmin
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zooming Swiss village of Freidorf Photo © Yuri Palmin
Swiss village of Freidorf. Photos by Yuri Palmin
For us, the settlement has thus become an architectural or urbanistic form that has embodied in a concrete form the idea of a community that is contemporary to it. Here the idea of cooperation in its social and economic senses plays a big role, but also, of course, earlier utopian ideas, for example, the ideal cities of Mora or Campanella, ideas about the structure of society of Hobbes, Rousseau or Tönnis (he was the first and only one to describe the theory communities in their book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft).
The idea of a village can still be found today: you will recognize its image in cottage complexes fenced with a high fence, and in coliving, and in any other attempts to create a comfortable environment for life with its own rules - both everyday and architectural. At the same time, such projects seem to be very outdated in their desire to "unify" people
“That is why we write an obituary for the village and“bury”it with great honors (as opposed to the community, which needs to be rethought and not scrapped). We believe that with such a content and with such a form, a settlement is already an irrelevant phenomenon, despite the fact that now in Germany, Switzerland and other European countries there is a new surge of interest in the movement of cooperatives and cooperative settlements. But the idea of the "third way", which the village still offers us instead of revolution and conservation, is a topic of socio-economic policy of the 19th, not the 21st century.
I think that the problem of settlements today is precisely their isolation. On the one hand, isolation as urban planning units, non-inclusion in the city-wide space. On the other hand, in refusing to influence legislative policy. After all, if in Germany now, against the background of continuously rising prices for land and housing, the topic of reviving the cooperative movement is being actively discussed, it turns out that no one believes that the state is capable, moreover, should support its residents. The isolation of settlements from the urban space is a reflection of the isolation of the cooperative community from the city society. This is a big problem that takes us back to the 19th century, when the state is not ready or cannot take care of its citizens. By promoting the idea of a 19th century settlement today, we are actually returning to a situation similar to that of that time. It is important to understand this problem in order to be able to change the perception of the cooperative movement, the community and its architectural forms.
The same situation is with the sharing economy, which pretends to be a positive practice, but in fact only replaces the concept of community and uses its positive image.
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zooming Exhibition SiedlungsRequiem ("Requiem for the villages") in the Munich gallery Lothringer13 Photo © Nick Förster
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zooming Exhibition SiedlungsRequiem ("Requiem for the villages") in the Munich gallery Lothringer13 Photo © Nick Förster
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zooming 1/3 Exhibition SiedlungsRequiem (Requiem for the villages) at the Lothringer gallery in Munich13 Photo © Nick Förster
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zooming 2/3 Exhibition SiedlungsRequiem (Requiem for the villages) at the Lothringer gallery in Munich13 Photo © Nick Förster
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zooming 3/3 Exhibition SiedlungsRequiem (Requiem for the villages) at the Lothringer gallery in Munich13 Photo © Nick Förster
However, we are not trying to criticize the current situation. Our project is not about modern architecture, but rather an interest in a more generalized understanding of the idea of the village. As I mentioned, there are a huge number of books on specific examples of villages; besides, they can be called differently at different times, at some time they are communes, then settlements, housing cooperatives, and so on. But in all these books, there is practically no comprehension of the concept of the village. And this is a very interesting point. On the one hand, there is this most important phenomenon of architecture and urban planning of the 19th and 20th centuries, and at the same time, there is practically no reflection on its theme in the architectural community. Of course, our exhibition cannot be perceived as a serious study, rather, it is an attempt to imagine what the theory of "zidlungs" might look like. That is, our idea is not to praise the village and the idea of cooperation (according to the new euphoria calling for solving the problem of housing with the help of cooperative villages), but this is not criticism either. This is precisely an attempt at a deeper understanding of the processes underlying the idea of the village, its theoretical substantiation.
What was the result of the exhibition?
We decided that its design (we worked out it together) should also be the main exhibit, that is, the expositional "interior" - also an exhibit. The exhibition was supposed to be both an object and a statement, and not some kind of decoration, within which objects and texts are shown. We also made a catalog for the exhibition; it was designed by Nick Foerster. Both the exhibition and the catalog consist of four parts: "Mausoleum", "Altar", "Earth" and "Machine". Each of them is shown as an object. In the first part, entitled "The Mausoleum", we pay tribute to the idea of the villages and their heroic demise.
The second part, "The Altar", tells about the "harmonious dictatorship of good." The paradox is that the idea of a harmonious community, which I think we all aspire to, is inherent in violence. On the one hand, it is impossible to think about a person without thinking about the community. On the other hand, there is an idea of an ideal community, for which each person must change himself in some way. Those. on the one hand, there is an idea of a better, more just structure of society, and on the other, unbearable pressure on every person to conform to this template. For example, this is demonstrated by the experience of Robert Owen, which emerges against the backdrop of the emerging "aggressive" capitalism. This is an attempt to find an answer to the question of how you can create an environment that does not obey harsh economic laws, but not with the help of a revolution, but as a system in a system ("third way").
Of course, consensus is needed. However, in many ways, the real consensus has now been replaced by populist ideas about the inadmissibility of differences (cultural, behavioral, etc.) Chantal Mouffe in
his book on left-wing populism speaks of the dangers of pseudo-participation that runs counter to productive conflict in the public interest. I am quite sympathetic to her position of conflict, because she is trying to overcome the apoliticality that has replaced the idea of a “right” community. Likewise, Markus Missen writes in his book A Nightmare of Participation about the problem that has arisen from the desire to involve as many people as possible in any decision-making, because such an attempt to smooth out all conflicts does not always lead to the best result.
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zooming 1/3 "Mausoleum" (detail) from the catalog "Requiem for the villages" © Nick Förster
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zooming 2/3 Unheimliche Heimat ("Ominous Homeland") from the Requiem for the Villages catalog © Nick Förster
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zooming 3/3 "Crash" from the "Requiem for the Villages" catalog © Nick Förster
The third chapter, "The Machine," in the meaning of "a car for housing," talks about the relationship between technological development and architecture of the Fordist era. Here we are talking not only and not so much about criticism of rationalization, but about its various meanings. It is clear that this is due to economic and technological development, rationalization of production and mass production, which is transferred to architecture, and which to this day has been severely criticized. But, for example, the Basel architect Hans Schmidt, who visited the USSR in the early 1930s, writes in his notes that the rationalization of architecture is a very important moment for creating architecture for society. Architecture is never individual, and society cannot exist in an individual space. The striving for individuality is only a reflection of the capitalist pseudo-individual world, and not at all social equality. Thus, social equality, transferred to the architectural form of the village, demonstrates to each member of the community his equality with other members of the community. Therefore, in any village, this very component is very important - the sameness of its various parts and their relationship to each other.
The last chapter, "Land," is about the problems of land ownership, speculation, and so on. The idea of the cooperative movement has positioned itself since the 19th century as the so-called third path. As the withdrawal of the capitalist component - the complete elimination of speculation in food and land in the limited community of the cooperative. The problem of speculation, especially land speculation, undoubtedly underlies the cooperative movement and, as a consequence, the emergence of the modern typology of the village. This problem is still relevant today - no less than 150 years ago. The only question is to what extent the community of the village today is an adequate solution to the land problem - by creating a structure in the structure. Therefore, today, a political discussion on land rights is needed again, although it is understandable, taking into account the historical experience of various -isms, how difficult it is to conduct such a conversation today. Associated with this is an important problem of the community and, along with it, the village, which ideologically can be very easily transferred to totalitarian concepts: therefore, it was, among other things, so successful during the days of National Socialism in Germany.
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zooming Swiss village Trimli Photo © Yuri Palmin
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zooming Swiss village Trimli Photo © Yuri Palmin
Swiss village Trimli. Photos by Yuri Palmin
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zooming 1/3 Swiss village Mehr als Wohnen (MAW) Photo © Yuri Palmin
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zooming 2/3 Swiss village Mehr als Wohnen (MAW) Photo © Yuri Palmin
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zooming 3/3 Swiss village Mehr als Wohnen (MAW) Photo © Yuri Palmin
Swiss village MAW. Photos by Yuri Palmin
You and Nick Förster begin the history of the Zidlungs with XIX century, and before the beginning XX century, this is almost exclusively the history of not architects, but philosophers, reformers, industrialists-philanthropists (the same utopian socialists), and the author of the idea of a garden city, Ebenezer Howard, also had no architectural education. And then, one after another, architectural "new worlds" appear. What do you associate such a periodization of "professional affiliation" with?
- This is a very good question. The 19th century is, of course, the age of paternalism, an attempt to change the social world order gradually, from within, with the help of “islands” where justice reigns and where architecture is only an auxiliary tool. The twentieth century is the history of precisely architects, an architectural idea that calls to change human consciousness through form.
So, the projects of Owen and Fourier are interesting precisely because they are pure ideology, equal to architecture. In the twentieth century, an architect rather becomes (or really wants to become) an educator, an organizer of life.
An architect is a creator of being. This component of the history of the villages is very much correlated with the idea of paternalism as part of the Enlightenment. Here the architect is a child of the Enlightenment, who inherits the idea of "remaking" the world.
