In the western and non-western architectural practices of the 1950s and 1960s, cultural expressions and techniques, which had hitherto not been regarded as modern but as pre-modern, were assiduously studied by architects and planners. One path of this movement was to “learn from” vernacular architecture, to acknowledge the pre-industrial city as well as dwelling practices of nomadism as major influences for new methods of design and planning. Vernacular practices of dwelling and building were described in the spirit of structuralism as “essentially human” and simultaneously as “evolutionary,” as a way to “become modern”. Such references are to be found in the influential exhibitions Mostra Di Architettura Spontanea by Giancarlo de Carlo in Milan 1951 and This Is Tomorrow with the involvement of Alison and Peter Smithson at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956 or in the famous show Architecture Without Architects by Bernard Rudofsky at the MoMa in New York in 1964.
Theoretical writings followed like the influential book The Matrix of Man by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy published in 1968. In the writings and projects of the Swiss architect André Studer in North Africa, this concept of a new synthesis between the modern and the pre-modern can be found even more than ten years earlier. His housing complex Sidi Othman, built in 1952 on the outskirts of Casablanca, reflected these concepts. The building complex was embedded in the larger expansion plan of Casablanca designed by the Service de l’ Urbanisme, which was led by the architect and urban planner Michel Ecochard. Another path of this post-war modernism engaged with the locus of anti-colonial liberation movements – the bidonvilles – and from there drafted a new perspective that focused on dwelling practices and hence was critical of previous modern approaches to dwelling. As a dwelling environment, the bidonvilles was not only the locus of the first encounters and negotiations with the modern city for a lot of people coming from rural areas, above all it was also the spatial expression of a non-planned way of organizing an urban environment. European architects like George Candilis and Shadrach Woods declared the bidonvilles a subject of study and investigated this environment in an anthropological manner. They ‘learned’ from the inhabitants of the bidonvilles how everyday dwelling practices enabled an urban neighborhood through self-organization. This line of architectural debate recognized the self-built environment in the colonial city as valuable housing practices from which European planners would need to learn. The studies in Casablanca or John Turner’s similar studies on self-built housing in the shanty towns of Peru influenced a generation of non-plan architects as well as participatory planning strategies.
Moreover, non-western architects and urbanists of the era of decolonization created new adaptations and methodologies of the modern movement, some directly on the ground of colonial modern town planning in Africa or South America. Architects like Elie Azagury, Patrice de Mazieres, Abdeslem Faraoui, Yona Friedman, Yasmeen Lari, Moshe Safdie, and many others developed approaches and perspectives that related to the colonial condition of the city and local climate and dwelling practices. As the architecture historian Udo Kultermann argues, who published Neues Bauen in Afrika in 1963, the process of decolonization not only changed the former colonized world, but also questioned the western hegemony of universal planning methodologies. (MvO)
Sources:
Baghdadi, Mustafa (1999): “Changing Ideals in Architecture: From CIAM to Team X.” In: O'Reilly , William (Ed.): Architectural Knowledge and Cultural Diversity. Lausanne:Comportements. 22-56.
Candilis, Georges (1978): Bauen ist Leben. Ein Architekten-Report. Stuttgart: K. Krämer.
Kultermann, Udo (1963): Neues Bauen in Afrika. Tübingen: E. Wasmuth.
Robert Oxman , Hadas Shadar u. Ehud Belferman, «Casbah: a brief history of a design concept», in: Architectural Research Quarterly, Cambridge 2002, Bd. 6, H. 4, S. 321-336. Hadas Shadar, «Vernacular values in public housing», in: Architectural Research Quarterly, Cambridge 2004, Bd. 8, H. 2, S. 171-181.
Scott, Felicity (2000): „Bernard Rudofsky: Allegories of Nomadism and Dwelling.“ In: Ed. Goldhagen Sarah Williams/ Legault, Réjean (Eds.): Anxious Modernisms Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Smithson, Alison (1968): Team 10 Primer. Cambridge Mass.: The MIT Press.
Marion von Osten, «Learning from... » in: Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Hg.), In der Wüste der Moderne. Koloniale Planung und danach (Taz-Beilage zur gleichnamigen Ausstellung), Berlin 2008, S. 3.
