Greening the City: Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century

From the “Functional City” to the “Heart of the City”: Green Space and Public Space in the CIAM Debates of 1942– 1952

From the “Functional City” to the “Heart of the City” Green Space and Public Space in the CIAM Debates of 1942–1952 Konstanze Sylva Domhardt In 1952, the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) published a book entitled The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life.¹ As the principal publication of the eighth congress of the organization in 1951 and bearing the same name, the book acknowledged “a civic landscape of enjoyment of the interplay of emotion and intelligence,” and furthered the claim that “CIAM does not ignore the great movement of social renewal that, under different aspects, occupies all the peoples of the world.”² This publication advocated a city space with new qualities that the urbanite would experience spontaneously, creatively, and comprehensively ; a city space that would reflect the social composition and intellectual heft of the people who used it. The graphic layout of the book, sketches by Saul Steinberg, and countless photographs of everyday scenes suggested “as much popular appeal as possible”³ and illustrated vividly the central metaphor of the title: heart. It unequivocally outlined the strategy for analyzing a city: focus on its social and cultural functions. This essay examines how green space contributed to CIAM’s idea of the city as an integrated entity that embraces the relationship between the individual and the community, the structural and spatial interaction of the center of the city and its periphery, and the interdependence of the two poles of “city” and “region.” On the one hand, the conceptual definition and the spatial articulation of green space became an important feature of CIAM’s urban planning projects. Along with advocating the recentralization of the city, CIAM argued that landscape elements should reshape the city’s contours and guide the future development of its spaces. On the other hand, a fixation on the natural components of the city determined a crucial social point in CIAM’s debates—namely, the design of a public realm. The follow- 134 | Konstanze Sylva Domhardt ing analysis, therefore, not only provides evidence that CIAM conceived of green space as a mediator of the various parts of the city and its surroundings , but it also shows how architectural elements were to be augmented by natural elements to support the function of green space as a “civic landscape .”⁴ The contents and appearance of the CIAM book The Heart of the City demonstrated, at the beginning of the 1950s, that simultaneous with the development of the urban planning concept of the “functional city”—the central idea of CIAM in the prewar era—a view developed within the organization that clearly opposed a purely rational understanding of the city. The intellectual focal point of urban planning became the desire for new means of architectural expression for the public within the urban space. The discussion of concepts for the city center became its primary architectural task. Thus, a reform of the structure of the city at all scale-levels was propagated. The idea that an integrated city model had to be created that addressed social issues and weighed them against the backdrop of a rapidly changing society was the sole point of consensus within CIAM’s debates. However, CIAM 8—the third postwar congress—was not the first manifestation of this new orientation within the organization. Indeed, hidden beneath the deCover of the CIAM publication The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life, by Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, José Luis Sert, and Ernesto Nathan Rogers (Lund Humphries, 1952). (© Ashgate Publishing Limited) From “Functional City” to “Heart of the City” | 135 mands of this congress lay a continuous development whose roots reached back to the late 1930s—a period when most of CIAM’s members had experienced cultural and geographical displacement through emigration.⁵ Whereas CIAM’s conference reports, press releases, and publications, which were already the subject of various studies,⁶ provide a coherent picture of the official activities of the organization, the correspondence of CIAM’s leading figures and the memos from informal meetings reveal that the development of CIAM’s postwar urban planning theory was influenced more by a constant transatlantic exchange of ideas than by the periodic meetings of the organization held in Europe. Broader research on CIAM makes evident that the American planning debate supplied essential guidelines for CIAM’s work. Eric Mumford stated that the experiences of the CIAM protagonists in the United States altered the...