Being Underground: Dalibor Vesely, Phenomenology and Architectural Education during the Cold War PDF

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East West Central East West Central Re-Building Europe, 1950–1990 Edited by Ákos Moravánszky, Torsten Lange, Judith Hopfengärtner, Karl R. Kegler Ákos Moravánszky, Torsten Lange (Eds.) Re-Framing Identities Architecture’s Turn to History, 1970–1990 East West Central Re-Building Europe 1950–1990 Vol....

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East West Central

East West Central Re-Building Europe, 1950–1990 Edited by Ákos Moravánszky, Torsten Lange, Judith Hopfengärtner, Karl R. Kegler

Ákos Moravánszky, Torsten Lange (Eds.)

Re-Framing Identities Architecture’s Turn to History, 1970–1990

East West Central Re-Building Europe 1950–1990 Vol. 3

Birkhäuser Basel

Editors Prof. Dr. Ákos Moravánszky Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich, Switzerland Dr. Torsten Lange Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich, Switzerland [email protected]

Editors’ proofreading: Alan Lockwood, PL-Warsaw Publishers’ proofreading: Alun Brown, A-Vienna Project and production management: Angelika Heller, Birkhäuser Verlag, A-Vienna Layout and typography: Ekke Wolf, typic.at, A-Vienna Cover design: Martin Gaal, A-Vienna Printing and binding: Holzhausen Druck GmbH, A-Wolkersdorf

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliograie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, speciically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microilms or in other ways, and storage in databases. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. This publication is also available as an e-book (ISBN PDF 978-3-0356-0815-1). © 2017 Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, Basel P.O. Box 44, 4009 Basel, Switzerland Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston © Cover image: Martin Maleschka, San Cataldo Cemetary, Modena (Architect: Aldo Rossi, 1971–1978). Every efort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. We would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who has not been acknowledged here and will rectify any omissions in future editions of the publication. Printed on acid-free paper produced from chlorine-free pulp. TCF ∞ Printed in Austria

ISBN 978-3-0356-1015-4 Volume 1 ISBN 978-3-0356-1016-1 Volume 2 ISBN 978-3-0356-1017-8 Volume 3 ISBN 978-3-0356-1014-7 Set Volume 1–3 987654321

www.birkhauser.com

Contents

Foreword

7

Ákos Moravánszky

Introduction

13

Torsten Lange

I

Identity Construct(ion)s

Piercing the Wall: East-West Encounters in Architecture, 1970–1990

25 27

Ákos Moravánszky

Notes on Centers and Peripheries in Eastern Bloc Architectures

45

Georgi Stanishev (senior), Georgi Stanishev (junior)

An Image and Its Performance: Techno-Export from Socialist Poland

59

Łukasz Stanek

Postmodern Architectural Exchanges Between East Germany and Japan

73

Max Hirsh

Being Underground: Dalibor Vesely, Phenomenology and Architectural Education during the Cold War

89

Joseph Bedford

From the Hungarian Tulip Dispute to a Post-Socialist Kulturkampf

105

Daniel Kiss

II

The Turn to History

Russia, Europe, America: he Venice School Between the U.S.S.R and the U.S.A.

119

121

Joan Ockman

Deconstructing Constructivism

149

Alla Vronskaya

he (New) Concept of Tradition: Aldo Rossi’s First heoretical Essay

165

Angelika Schnell

Paolo Portoghesi and the Postmodern Project

179

Silvia Micheli, Léa-Catherine Szacka

Boris Magaš and the Emergence of Postmodernist hemes in the Croatian Modernist Tradition

191

Karin Šerman

“Keep Your Hands Of Modern Architecture”: Hans Hollein and History as Critique in Cold War Vienna Ruth Hanisch

209

III

Public Criticism and the Rediscovery of the City

Heritage, Populism and Anti-Modernism in the Controversy of the Mansion House Square Scheme

225

227

Michela Rosso

Preservationism, Postmodernism, and the Public across the Iron Curtain in Leipzig and Frankfurt/Main

245

Andrew Demshuk

“Le Monopole du Passéisme”: A Let-Historicist Critique of Late Capitalism in Brussels

261

Sebastiaan Loosen

Keeping West Berlin “As Found”: Alison Smithson, Hardt-Waltherr Hämer and 1970s Proto-Preservation Urban Renewal

275

Johannes Warda

Humane Spontaneity: Teaching New Belgrade Lessons of the Past

289

Tijana Stevanović

Quality of Life or Life-in-Truth? A Late-Socialist Critique of Housing Estates in Czechoslovakia

303

Maroš Krivý

Appendix

319

Notes on Contributors Index

321 329

89

Joseph Bedford

Being Underground: Dalibor Vesely, Phenomenology and Architectural Education during the Cold War

In April 1974, Dalibor Vesely – the Czech émigré who played a fundamental role in the development of architectural education in the West in the 1970s and 1980s – encountered the American metropolis for the irst time. On a road trip with his former student Daniel Libeskind, he arrived in Atlanta and visited John Portman’s recently completed Hyatt Regency Hotel, riding its glass elevator to have a drink in its revolving rootop restaurant (ig. 1). From the window of the restaurant Vesely glimpsed, for the irst time, the fragmented asphalt landscape of parking lots and oice blocks of Atlanta’s new street level. He later recalled how, soon ater emerging from the hotel at midnight, he and Libeskind had been delighted to discover the old city still lying beneath that new street level, “underneath […] kept as it used to be; [with] cobbled streets […] street lamps, and old bars.” Suddenly we heard music, we discovered a staircase that took us down to the old Atlanta and everything was going on as if it was a normal evening. We found a bar where the sound of music was coming from and there was an old guy in his […] nineties, playing on a very old piano and singing. We sat there, drinking gin and tonic until 2am.1

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fig. 1 Advert for John Portman’s Hyatt Regency Hotel placed in Newsweek, 1965.

his encounter between the Central European phenomenologist and the American metropolis captures the way that the theme of crisis was conigured in Vesely’s work, such that what lay below was considered “normal,” while what lay above was considered abnormal. In Atlanta, Vesely saw the original ground of the city as buried beneath, covered-up by a historical process whereby modern life now spins, dizzy in its abstraction (ig. 2). As Vesely said to Libeskind’s students, just before setting-of on their trip: We have fewer and fewer connections with the earth, fewer and fewer connections with the ground. Fewer and fewer links. Not only gravity but food, air; we are dizzy. […] From this, technology could advance to what it is for us. Again, what made this possible was the development of absolute analytical methods; the shiting from the visual to the imaginary. he creation of a perfectly controllable system – highway systems, new town centers or the systems of the private world, the regressive utopias. […] We are caught in a whole structure, a whole institution, a whole falseness.2 In Atlanta, therefore, the crisis of the human condition – in which instrumental reason had covered-over the human relation to being – was seen to be

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Being Underground: Dalibor Vesely

fig. 2 Postcard, “Underground Atlanta,” circa 1975.

manifest in the historical transformation of the city. hat is, the encapsulation of Atlanta’s old town by a layer of modern development presented Vesely with a spatial and urban image of phenomenology’s diagnosis of the imprisonment of being in history. Yet, crucial to this diagnosis was the fact that being could only ever be covered over. A vague conscience of being would always remain as a latent layer of existence. Underground Atlanta delighted Vesely that summer evening because its image was also one of resistance against oppression. Having spoken of the falseness of the present technological world to Libeskind’s students, Vesely went on to tell them that all was not lost; that nonetheless, in spite of technology; “In front of you is a reality, […] not the created nor the constituted, but […] life itself.”3 hat is, despite its oppression by instrumental reason, the life-world endured as a residual layer within the perception of reality; ever-present, underneath all the contemporary historical forms engendered by instrumental reason. It was still “in front of you,” and still accessible just as the depth of the city was still accessible – one simply had to follow the staircase down that phenomenology had provided.

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Phenomenology and Architecture in Underground Prague

Phenomenology had, from the beginning, diagnosed and sought to overcome the imagined autonomy of the subject dirempt from its objects. Its descriptions of “subjective” experience were always intended to reveal how the subject was related to transcendental layers of reality: irst to the essences of things; then to being as such; to embodiment; language; and inally, to the world as a whole.4 Yet, despite being a holistic discourse that aimed to bridge the divide between subject and object, relating beings to the world as a whole, phenomenology was also seen as a critical discourse that articulated a historical division between the instrumentality of modernity and the non-instrumentality of the premodern world. hat is, in critically opposing modernity, phenomenology mirrored modernity’s oppositional character. Yet, while Vesely understood phenomenology in his own time as describing a Manichean opposition between instrumental reason and the life-world, this opposition is best understood today as a product of the particular historical time and place in which phenomenological ideas developed and in which Vesely encountered them, rather than as inherent to phenomenology itself. A recent body of literature by philosophers such as Leonard Lawlor, James Dodd, David Carr, and Dermot Moran, has begun to situate phenomenology in its historical context and argue that its motif of crisis and its method of bracketing were always dialectical and paradoxical and only became strict and dogmatic as a consequence of the political circumstances of the time.5 It is a peculiar fact that phenomenology lourished in the bifurcated reality of Eastern and Central Europe in the twentieth century, under conditions of political and cultural oppression  in interwar Germany and neo-Stalinist Czechoslovakia.6 Phenomenology’s success in such a historical context was partly due to the socio-political implication of the holistic dimension of its discourse. Life in a totalitarian state was politically divided insofar as the “oicial culture” sponsored by the regime could be said to “cover-up” the older traditions of the Czech lands. Phenomenology’s account of modernity in crisis seemed capable of diagnosing (and potentially curing) such a divided situation insofar as it promised to show how the surface of reality was inextricably related to its deeper transcendental and historical layers. he socio-political implications of such phenomenological ideas had been evident from the beginning. As a Jew in Nazi Germany, Edmund Husserl expanded his own philosophical critique of modern science at the end of his life to account for the crisis of European civilization. And the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, one of Husserl’s last students in Freiburg who would become the principal intellectual inluence on Vesely’s theoretical orientation, was not only close to Husserl during this last period, but in his own

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fig. 3 Photographs taken by the Czech Secret Police, Courtesy of the Czechoslovak Secret Police Archives. Author unknown.

experience in Prague continued to relect on the theme of crisis under ongoing conditions of oppression (ig. 3). Patočka escaped arrest when the Communists seized power in 1948, but was expelled from the university for his “bourgeois background,” and because phenomenology was perceived as an idealist refutation of Marxist-Leninism.7 He was fortunate to ind work in the Comenius Archives and managed to publish occasionally, though only by concealing his own philosophy within factographic histories of science. Ater Patočka had written the introduction to the Czech translation of Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences, for example, the book was only allowed to be sold once his text was literally cut out of the already-published book with a knife. And when he attempted to give a paper on Husserl in Bulgaria, the organizers interrupted his reading; his paper was removed from the proceedings of the conference; and his passport was seized permanently at the Prague airport when he returned. He only managed to continue his philosophy in underground seminars and it has survived only due to transcripts of those events having been reconstructed by his students and circulated as Samizdat texts. hus when Vesely studied phenomenology with Patočka in this underground context between 1960 and 1963, having cautiously approached the secret location of his seminars in an attempt to avoid the eye of the secret police, he was encountering phenomenology’s conceptual tools at a time and place in which the polarization between tradition and technological progress had become deeply politicized by the ideology of neo-Stalinism.8 And when he applied the phenomenological understanding that he had acquired in

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Prague to the crisis that he saw facing architecture, he inverted the opposition between tradition and technological progress while maintaining its dogmatic character, defending tradition to the inverse degree that the neo-Stalinist regime in Czechoslovakia continued to suppress it.9 Writing in his irst text on architecture in 1963, for example, at the end of his period attending Patočka’s seminars, Vesely drew a sharp distinction between the spatiality of the life-world and “abstract space,” and used this conceptual division to criticize what he called “quantitative,” “abstract environments,” “utterly devoid of a direct relation not only to the natural world but also to natural human existence.”10 In this irst theoretical text, which reviewed the techno-utopian projects of the time as presented by Michael Ragon in his 1962 book Where Shall We Live Tomorrow?, Vesely deemed that the projects presented by Ragon had lost their relation to the historical depth of human perception and the historical depth of the city, because of their pre-occupation with the dominant idea of abstract space and thus their general submission to a culture of technological thinking. Just as Vesely could not easily include the political reality of life and its dominant technological and calculative mode of thinking in an authoritarian state as an integral part of the whole of history, neither could he easily include an abstract understanding of modern architectural space as an integral part of the whole of architecture. In Vesely’s discourse, the Heideggerian crisis of being and the Husserlian crisis of Europe came to be expressed as the civic crisis of the abstraction of space and of the forgetting of architecture’s relationship to the deepest levels of cultural traditions. And given the politicized context in which he absorbed phenomenological ideas and Husserlian history, the crisis as he expressed it within architecture took on the non-dialectical form given to it by its development in the context of a life lived under an authoritarian regime. hroughout his life, Vesely would continue to igure the relation between the depth of tradition and technological progress in similar oppositional terms. He would later remark, for example, in his seminar teaching at Cambridge several decades later that the “instrumental representation of reality” is nothing other than “reason motivated by the Will to Power,”11 that it is a “domain of violence,” and that “the phenomenological” by contrast struggles against such violence, and “struggles with the problem of overcoming the reiied domain of thinking.”12 Remaining Underground in the West

Vesely led Prague for London in August 1968 as the Warsaw Pact tanks rolled in to the city and, once exiled in the West, began teaching his semi-

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fig. 4 Essex University Campus, Photograph John McKean, 1972.

nars on phenomenology to architects in the irst independent MA course in he History and heory of Architecture anywhere in the world. Established by the architect-historian Joseph Rykwert, this new kind of course emerged as part of the expanding and subdividing institutional space of postwar higher education within the newly founded art history department of Essex University (ig.  4).13 By employing Vesely as his teaching partner, Rykwert gave his approach to phenomenology a platform from which it would continue to lourish in the West as part of the postmodern critique of modern architecture. his lourishing continued to be propelled by the twinned logic of holism and division because, yet again, phenomenology found itself in another kind of bifurcated reality, in a new space for “theory” initially separated institutionally from the space of design practice.14 his separation signaled a context within architectural education of antagonism between on the one hand new interpretative research into deeper historical meaning and existing approaches to history; either reduced to a history of style or rejected by techno-scientiic positivism.15 his antagonistic context that was perfectly captured by the wording of a petition that the students of Rykwert’s new course put to the new chair of the department Michael Podro in 1972, when they discovered that he was attempting to close the course ater only four years of its operation. hey wrote to Podro stating that the value of the course was precisely in the way that it defended tradition against mere utility, writing that the course “serves as the basis for the task of re-founding an architecture of meaning and purpose beyond the narrow demands of utility.”16 his opposition was also silently embodied within the contrast between the places of theory and practice themselves (ig. 5). Vesely’s seminar teaching

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fig. 5 Essex University Art History Department Corridor, Photograph John McKean, 1972.

took place in a small 10t x 10t room, of the long art-history corridor, in a remote campus an hour from London where he was at that moment supervising design students in the Diploma school at the Architectural Association. In his own words, “I remember sitting on a train between London and Colchester and doing the phenomenology over there and the studio here. I remember always being […] anxious to see […] how those two could possibly eventually connect. […] I was in a state of schizophrenia.”17 And with this additional form of spatial division exacerbating the institutional distance between theory and practice, the titular space around Vesely quickly assumed an atmosphere that paralleled that of underground Prague. He adopted an ascetic lifestyle as an émigré resisting domestication in his new home. And like Vesely, the academic community that he fostered believ...