THE CITY AS A WORK OF ART
London, Paris, Vienna
Donald J. Olsen
Yale University Press, 1986
341 pp., $35.00
The mutation of the city from a historically organic body to a "posthistorical" machine was never more evident to me than during my visit to Brasilia, the quarter-century-old capital of Brazil, last September. I had been there in 1966, when its settlement was hardly more than a gleam in the eyes of three men: President Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, who initiated the project of moving the capital of the gigantic landmass from coastal Rio de Janeiro to the inland plateau; Oscar Niemeyer, the Marxist architect with suitably Marxist dreams of a dehumanized phalanstery with nondescript, multipurpose blocks; and the other town planner, Lucio Costa, who submitted the master plan.
Niemeyer, now in his eighties, has retired to his medieval-styled castle in Rio, and only comes occasionally to Brasilia and, then, only to add some new horror to his earlier products, such as the national pantheon in the form of Picasso's marble peace dove or the "cathedral," a nightmare in cement - as inspirational as a garage.
The only insight I drew this time from visiting Brasila, a desolate landscape from my hotel window - a hotel room itself calculated to frustrate rather than offer comfort - is the realization that future cities will discard everything that architecture and urbanism have lovingly created since the first towns in the Middle East in their race for dreadful machines in concrete and skyscrapers with grotesquely elongated necks. There are, for example, no sidewalks in Brasilia; the place is designed for cars only. Since the residents can not use their legs, they commute by car from office-block to home-block, to movie-block, to hotel, school, and shopping blocks. In this communistoid phalanstery, next to which even East Berlin's Stalinallee is a daring experiment in imagination, humans are expendable. They are squeezed among and inside boxes as in a Skinner-like experiment.
The only escape route is by plane to Rio, to the world of fantasy. Yet, unplanned by Niemeyer, on the other side of the artificial lake with its sailboats reminiscent of another era, a satellite town, or suburb has grown up. There, along genuine sidewalks are actual villas, gardens, and bistros. Across the lake is a necropolis more dead than the Valley of the Kings, the pharaoh's burying place at Luxor. The satellite town is alive, but the aggressive skeletons on the other side of the lake are sinister reminders that tomorrow is another day - with resumption of work in the concrete boxes.
The Memorial City
My walk in the underworld was a prologue in contrast to my reading of the delightful book The City as a Work of Art, by Donald J. Olsen. With its publication, Yale has finally redeemed itself after many morosely narrow scholarly books in the past decade or so. This tastefully and lavishly presented volume - of large but easily handled format - contains elaborate studies of three great cities, studies whose unity is secured by their scrutiny of cities from such aspects as "the city as luxury," as "monument," as "home," as "playground." These ideas form the
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