Читать книгу Zionist Architecture and Town Planning - Nathan Harpaz - Страница 10

The examination of architects and movements of early modern architecture and town planning is a vital part of this study. European architects and town planners significantly influenced the urban vision of the Zionist movement in theory, on such projects as the Levy plan (1920), on the implementation of plans such as the garden city (Tel Aviv, 1909) and Geddes’s town planning (1929), and on the extensive use of the International Style (1930s).

Modern architecture emerged in the early twentieth century with a dramatic change in the relationship between aesthetics and function. It followed the concept of “form follows function” and eliminated historic styles and overuse of ornamentation. During the first half of the twentieth century, modern architecture was considered experimental, and it gained massive popularity only after World War II.

Though some scholars associate the development of modern architecture with social and political revolutions,¹ others see it as a reflection of progress in science and technology. The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design, for example, focuses on the masses: mass education, mass entertainment, mass transportation, universities with huge enrollments, hospitals with thousands of beds, and stadiums seating hundreds of thousands.² The element of the masses together with the speed of transportation expressed the “technological fanaticism of the age.”³ Science, technology, mass transportation, mass communication, and mass production and consumption all affected the development of modern architecture and design. They also reflected the predominance of the city over the small town and the country, as architects tried to develop solutions to problems encountered in designing for the masses by using new materials and new techniques.⁴

The first criterion of modern architecture was that architecture for the masses must be functional. This idea was a continuation of the principles of French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationalism. In 1841, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–1852), Great Britain’s foremost architect and designer of the nineteenth century, wrote in True Principles of Christian Architecture that “there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety … the smallest detail should … serve a purpose, and construction itself should vary with the material employed.”⁵

Other key movements in the early stage of Modernism were the English Arts and Crafts and the German Werkbund. The German Work Federation (Werkbund) was cofounded in 1907 by Herrmann Muthesius, author of The English House (1905), who surveyed practical aspects of the Arts and Crafts movement. The Werkbund’s goal was to integrate crafts with techniques of industrial mass production. Muthesius stated in 1914 that architecture was moving toward standardization (“Typisierung”) and claimed that only standardization could introduce a universally valid, self-certain taste.⁶ At the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition of 1914, there were two powerful buildings on display, the Glass House by Bruno Taut and the Halle des Machines by Walter Gropius. Taut’s structure was a prophecy of the geodesic domes to come, and Gropius’s building was influenced by Peter Behrens and Frank Lloyd Wright (two publications about Wright were issued in Berlin in 1910 and 1911).⁷

One of the participants in the Werkbund was the German architect Peter Behrens, whose studio was a training facility for architects such as Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, and Le Corbusier. Behrens became rapidly famous because he approached the industrial plant as an architectonic problem and transformed the factory into a dignified place to work. Beside classical elements, he used new materials such as steel and glass to provoke expressive forces.⁸ Behrens and his theory of inexpensive housing would later become a major inspiration to Alexander Levy’s plan for Jewish housing in Palestine.

The International Style became the mainstream of modern architecture in the 1920s and 1930s. The term originated from the book written by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in conjunction with the International Exhibition of Modern Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1932. They identified categories of modern architecture that expanded across the world. In an attempt to define the architectural style of their time, they identified three principles key to its expression: volume rather than mass, balance rather than preconceived symmetry, and the expulsion of applied ornament.⁹

Le Corbusier, a prominent architect of the International Style, introduced the free pillar method which created open space in the ground floor of a dwelling, carrying the load of the structure and leaving the walls without the function of supporting the building. He also emphasized the functional independence of the skeleton and the wall: the skeleton became not only a functional device, but also a vehicle of aesthetics. The inside partitions were used for expressive purpose and spaces alternated between inner and outer ones. Le Corbusier also promoted the roof terrace and saw the flat roof as a spatial extension of the house.

Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus also had a significant impact on the development of modern architecture and the International Style. The school of the Bauhaus continued the idea of the Werkbund in its goal “to unite art and industrial life and to find the keynote for a sound contemporary architecture.”¹⁰ The Bauhaus under Gropius used architecture as an inter-medium to unite both art and industry and art and daily life.¹¹ The new Bauhaus building, designed by Gropius at Dessau in 1926, became a major model for modern public and commercial buildings. Gropius demolished the traditional concept of a symmetric and centralized design by separating each section of the building according to its specific function. Each wing of the building was independent and its form followed its function. The Bauhaus building also revealed the application of the glass curtain as a major design element that would be adapted by the International Style. It was the most revolutionary structure in early modernism.¹²

Town planning was also part of the modern revolution, as the city of the nineteenth century had been criminally neglected by architects and by governments as well.¹³ The problem of the cities was rapid population growth along with the existence of industry inside populated sections. This led to the concept of “garden cities” or “garden suburbs.” It was an important development but not the end solution. The existing cities posed the main problems, as Tony Garnier (1869–1948), author of the “Industrial City,” foresaw: While Ebenezer Howard, the father of the garden city, was a social reformer, Garnier introduced the potential architect-planners employed by a government department or a city council.¹⁴

Inspired by Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward, Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) wrote To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), later published as Garden Cities of To-Morrow (1902). In this work, Howard proposed the establishment of urban structures as a synthesis of town and country that would benefit their residents by combining the positive qualities of both the economic development and social life of the city and the environmental advantages and affordable housing of rural areas. Howard summarized this concept in the illustration of three magnets: town, country, and town-country.¹⁵ In 1899 Howard founded the Garden City Association, later known as the Town and Country Planning Association. It resulted in the establishment of two garden cities: Letchworth, in 1903, and Welwyn, in the early 1920s, both in Hertfordshire, England.

Howard’s ideas were developed at the same time that many utopians and reformers were attempting to remedy urban and social ills resulting from the Industrial Revolution. These utopians were motivated by the concept of a golden age regarding notions of ideal community and social systems. They dealt with the dilemma of detaching communities from a broken social order and tried to define the corruption within current social systems.¹⁶

Various models for treating urban problems in England developed during the late nineteenth century. The “model communities” idea was created by industrialists or other sponsors to promote their ideal industrial society. The model of “alternative communities” grew out of ideologies that went against the established order to solve social problems. In this category of alternative communities we find utopian socialism, aiming to achieve social change for the working class; agrarian socialism, promoting the idea of getting back to the land; sectarian groups, escaping society to fulfill religious beliefs and practices; and anarchist communities, rejecting central control and choosing more cooperative methods.¹⁷

Howard’s model has had an enduring influence upon future town planning because he responded to the problems of his time with appropriate solutions for them. Howard found a compromise between the modification of the liberal system and the desire to provide an alternative way of living and working away from established urban areas.¹⁸ Howard’s garden city had a significant impact on future urban planning, but had problems with achieving social goals in urban planning designed within a liberal democracy. The ideal of the garden city was significant to urban planning achievements throughout the world because it was actually built, whereas other urban concepts were merely theoretical. Howard’s vision revealed the core dilemmas of liberal democracy: the development of the garden city brought significant improvement in living conditions, but it did not fulfill social ideals.¹⁹ The concept of the garden city still has relevance in the twenty-first century as a model for significant regional development on “Greenfield” sites. Howard’s three magnets diagram is still effective with current adjustments as it attracts small towns set in the country and has influenced the New Urbanism, a movement in the United States that promotes walkable neighborhoods with a variety of housing and job types.²⁰

Limiting the size of a community was one of the main features in Howard’s thesis. In Howard’s theory, this prevented the self-destructive forces of an ever-expanding metropolis, and increased social interaction and culture within the community. The problem of the modern suburbs is the lack of size limitation as well. In relation to a community’s size Howard designed the greenbelt, an effective town planning device to control growth that could be applied for different purposes: agriculture and rural life preservation, natural and heritage conservation, recreation creation, or pollution protection.²¹

The urban form of the garden city is an important topic in this study, as some activists of the Zionist movement, in particular Davis Trietsch, promoted the garden city model and perceived it as an idealistic and advanced form of town planning. Tel-Aviv was founded in 1909 after the European model of the garden city. After World War I, Tel Aviv lost its original garden city design and rapidly became a crowded metropolitan. The garden city idea is discussed in the Levy plan of 1920, and it also influenced the formation of new types of rural Zionist settlements.

Patrick Geddes (1854–1932), a biologist, geographer, educator, political activist, and urban planner, had an enormous impact on modern town planning.²² In 1879 Geddes first encountered the social theories of Frederic Le Play and they greatly influenced him, making him aware of the effects of environmental and geographical factors on existing social structures.²³ French scholars influenced Geddes in many other ways, for instance, the geographical concept of regionalism, which would lie at the core of his urban studies. Geddes was impressed by Auguste Comte’s evolutionary development of science, which placed the social sciences above mathematics, logic, physics, chemistry, and biology.²⁴

Geddes’s busy mind developed three-dimensional “thinking machines” that synthesized knowledge from geography, economics, and anthropology. These thinking machines attempted to show the interrelatedness of different areas within the social sciences. Geddes was also interested in civics, which concerns relations between individuals and the environment. He saw the earth as a cooperative planet where people should be taught how to properly treat their environment. Specifically, Geddes’s web of life aimed to educate children, to improve people’s physical quality of life by using new biological knowledge to produce better medicines, and to understand humans’ influence on ecology. These ideas led to his notion of Eutopia, a utopia that was realizable here and now.²⁵

While Ebenezer Howard was working with his garden cities movement, Geddes looked at problems of existing cities in order to link social reform and the urban environment, not only in small towns, but also in larger urban areas.²⁶ In 1918, Geddes became involved in the Zionist movement, turning his interest to Jerusalem and Palestine. After five years of traveling back and forth between India and Dundee College in Scotland, the prospect of working in Jerusalem seemed to him a culmination of all his dreams.²⁷ While working with David Eder (1865–1936) of the Zionist Commission, he suggested a comprehensive survey of Jerusalem that would evaluate the past and present as well as future possibilities, wanting his architectural style and good city planning to encourage the integration of Palestinians, Arabs, and Jews. Geddes received the commission’s permission to plan the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and his plan made use of his ideas about synthesizing knowledge and promoting an intimate relationship between university, city, and region. Geddes left his mark on the university with the building of the Dome, which he envisioned as a sign of unity.²⁸ In 1925, Mayor Meir Dizengoff asked Geddes to submit a master plan for Tel Aviv. Geddes’s plan, which called for Tel Aviv to be a European garden city, outlined the development of the northern part of Tel Aviv (since the southern part had already been built up); it was approved in 1929 and influenced the shape of the city for years to come.²⁹

There were four major features of the Geddes plan for Tel Aviv. The first component was the grid of streets: major streets running from south to north, intersected by widely spaced east-west secondary roads and wide green boulevards, with minor streets penetrating the large blocks. The second element was the design of large city blocks for domestic dwellings, including standardized, mostly detached buildings, each with a maximum of two stories and a flat roof. The third feature was the design of each block of dwellings around a central open space, and the fourth was the creation of a concentration of cultural institutes to function as a civic center. ³⁰

Geddes did not follow his contemporary planners with the attempt to separate the old cities from their “cities of tomorrow,” but “he closely knit together the new Tel Aviv with the original neighborhood of Ahuzat Bayit (later Tel Aviv), the ancient city of Jaffa, and the latter’s outlying neighborhoods.”³¹

Another unique chapter in modern town planning is the urban solution for working class housing. The Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century Europe created a crisis in proper living conditions for the rapidly developing cities. Some solutions for working class housing during the nineteenth century provided cooperative housing promoted by factory owners near their work sites. Such solutions failed to create healthy environments because they were too close to the polluted factories, and they generated dependency and conflicts between workers and factory owners.

Other solutions, utopian in nature, like the garden city or the industrial city, were too idealistic and difficult to implement (as was discussed in the previous review of the garden city). The German garden city movement before World War I dealt with working class housing and models for such projects were already presented at the Third German Applied Arts Exhibition in Dresden in 1906. Architect Max Taut produced simple workers’ cottages set in functional gardens. These types of dwellings depicted idyllic workers’ homes that were the opposite of those lived in by the majority of German workers in overcrowded cities. The issue of workers’ housing came also to realization through the activities of the German garden city movement before World War I. In the first establishment of the garden city of Hellerau near Dresden, Richard Riemerschmid, the chief designer of the project, designed the general plan, the factory, and the first row-house developments for workers. Riemerschmid used two concepts in his plans for workers’ housing: different “types” of models and the use of standardized materials.³²

After World War I the development of housing accommodations for the working class focused on the urban environment, with the implementation of modern town planning and architecture. While unique developments can be identified in each European nation, there are striking similarities in five major factors that had an impact on working class housing between 1880 and 1930. The most critical one was the poverty of urban working class families. Low wages of European workers resulted in low rent housing and poor living conditions. The second factor was the fact that the building industry could not provide low cost units because of insufficient profit and unattractive investment. The third factor involved the increasing organization of the working class, as labor unions and the new social democratic political parties granted the working class electoral power. These new political entities put pressure on governments to develop state initiatives for housing solutions. The fourth factor was the ideology behind private property and the traditional family. The fifth element was the emergence of a permanent and growing government bureaucracy, which rapidly developed its own interests.³³

Historically, at the beginning of the twentieth century elite groups acknowledged that the problem of working class housing could cause social instability. Given this fear, building regulations were established and tax incentives were offered to builders, but politicians hesitated to intervene with the private market, and there were few examples of working class housing constructed by municipalities and cooperative societies. The shortage of urban workers’ housing accelerated by the end World War I, and the demands for reform intensified, too. As a result, more government financed construction was executed, but the main supplier remained the private market.³⁴

The implementation of working class housing between the wars in Europe followed the spread of the International Style. Working class housing projects were erected in many European countries and were designed by the most prominent architects of that era. In the 1920s Walter Gropius took part in Germany’s solution to the shortage of middle- and working-class dwellings. Gropius designed a large number of such apartments and housing colonies in Berlin, Dessau, Frankfort-on-Main, and Karlsruhe. The second congress of CIAM (The International Congress for Modern Architecture) in 1929 at Frankfort was initiated by Ernst May, head of the city’s Department of Housing, Planning and Building. In his office, May displayed drawings of low income housing. Among the architects who participated in this congress were Walter Gropius and Alvar Aalto. The plan for the extension of the city of Amsterdam in 1934 was designed by the Department of Public Works. One section of the plan was a residential area for workers employed around the dockyards and in the neighboring industrial plants. The general extension plan did not destroy the rural belt around the city. Land unsuitable for building was converted into wooded areas. The masses of houses were broken up by strips of greenery of various dimensions. The actual building of residential units was carried out by private enterprise or cooperative societies, though the city had full control over the ground plan, the façade, and the location of different types of housing.³⁵

Gropius’s concern with the impact of industrialism upon architecture realized in Gropius’s work on mass housing, such as the workers’ housing at Toerten, Dessau (1926–1927); the proposal for high-rise flats at Wannsee (1931); or in the middle-class apartments at Siemensstadt (1929). Gropius proposed the use of prefabricated elements in buildings as early as 1909, when he drafted a proposal for advanced industrial techniques to produce standardized panels for housing projects.³⁶

The topic of working class housing is discussed in two segments of this book. Architect Alexander Levy in his theoretical paper of 1920 designed a workers’ housing project for the city of Haifa, Israel. Levy’s plans for this proposed project were inspired directly by the German garden city movement before World War I regarding the distribution of the units, the choice of several “types” of units, and the use of standardized building materials. Another part of this book discusses cooperative housing implemented in the northern part of Tel Aviv during the 1930s. Most of these cooperative housing projects were designed by the architect Arieh Sharon, a graduate of the Bauhaus, and were initiated by the labor movement. Sharon’s design was influenced by European projects of grouping apartment buildings for the working class and the application of the International Style. They were similar to working class apartment complexes designed in Germany during the late 1920s and early 1930s by architects such as Walter Gropius and Hans Scharoun.