Читать книгу Resilience - Sandrine Robert - Страница 21

During the 19th century, the development of research into planned layouts in the historical sciences ran parallel to a growing interest in ancient plans and morphological analysis within the emerging field of urban design. This interest appears to have drawn on a critical approach to industrial-era town design, in which settlements expanded beyond historical limits in the form of medieval and modern walls (Choay 1965; Cohen 1993). The desire to act on the forms of towns and cities went hand-in-hand with a desire to maintain a “legacy” state, or even to recreate an initial state from a contemporary “decayed” state. Certain town planners believed that the application of a historical plan would rejuvenate, or even resurrect, a former state. In 1936, for example, P. Lavedan criticized the vitalism present in his own earlier words as it did not correspond to planned cities:

[...] historical fatalism has its roots in the assimilation of the city to a living being. A city is seen as a living thing which, like all living things, is born, grows, and dies; it is a child, an adolescent, then an old man. I myself accepted this comparison for many years, even in the first edition of this work; now, however, I find it to be unacceptable. [...] On the contrary, a city can be rejuvenated or even resurrected. While all men start out as children, many towns do not have a “childhood”, being in possession of their full strength from the outset, like Athena springing fully-formed from the mind of Zeus; the existence, or even the very notion, of these planned cities has no place in the fatalist approach. (Lavedan 1959, p. 13)³⁰

Among urban planners, there was an idea that certain types of town plans provided a means of combatting aging and decay. Michel Parent, museum conservator of relief plans, writing in 1948, considered that the knowledge of ancient could be seen as an “applied science of curation”:

The past can serve the future in all cases, on the condition that we do not make a tyrant of it: firstly, it highlights tried-and-tested postulates or permanent laws which are helpful in finding solutions to new problems; secondly, in specific cases, awareness of a pathological evolution of a city or district enables us to distinguish between healthy and sick parts, providing urban planners with genuine remedies.³¹(Parent 1948, p. 282)

These approaches place a particular emphasis on one time of plan: that of planned cities, considered in this case of works of art.