In the image production of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), animal figures were primarily condensed representations of an organic-chaotic congestion of urban space and remnants of an agrarian proximity of human and nonhuman subjects. These were contrasted with staged constellations of functionalist industrial space that presented a well-organized techno-urbanism without animals – death certificates of pre-modernity.
After the Second World War, when both the functionalist Charte d'Athènes went into crisis and anti-colonial revolutions broke out, efforts to develop a Charte d'habitat intensified. The – not entirely clear – notion of "habitat," originating from a zoological concept that is situated between the individual and the species and credited to the founder of taxonomic species differentiation, Carl von Linné, became the major point of debate for CIAM until its self-dissolution in 1959.
The “learning from” approach in the colonies and the imperial cities aimed to place concrete urban life in the place of abstract functions as the basis of architecture and urban planning. This re-conceptualization became public with the 8th CIAM congress, The Heart of the City, in 1951. In the following congress publication, the previously dominant logic of urban animality was turned upside down; suddenly aestheticized pigeon-doves populated the pages of the CIAM book, and drawings of public places showed confusing assemblages of people and pigeon-doves that looked strangely similar.
How can this change in the position of animality in the visual production of CIAM discourse, from the to-be-overcome pre-modern to the symbolic flag-bearer of the good urban life, be explained? At this point, highly potent molecules combined agriculture with cold warriors and national business plans with tourist rituals, urbanization transcended the species barrier, and images of Old Europe were brought into position – made possible by the rebellious obstinacy of the so-called city pigeons or street pigeons themselves.
These urban animals, who would and could not be put on a leash, were feral descendants of formerly domesticated animals appropriating public spaces on a massive scale. So the image of a docile and good animal, the dove, materially grounded mainly in its role as rural producer of agricultural fertilizer and natural pest control, fused with its new image as a “natural” inhabitant of the city, the street or city pigeon as a tourist nomos. The birth of the latter was made possible through the clearing of urban space and Fordist influence on agricultural products through industrialization; these last two factors along with the inclination of pigeons to inhabit the facades of human architecture created the perfect habitat for pigeons that soon would be regarded as urban pests. As residents of the nature-culture boderlands, who chose the artifactual as their natural habitat, the dove-pigeons entered the reality of urban life and the symbolic world of the CIAM imaginary as material-semiotic agents in times of chronopolitical unordering. Only then could they have functioned as mediators between the natural and the artifactual spheres, living ornaments of the congress publication, and operate as imaginary conciliators of a world in turmoil and different fractions within the CIAM at the same time. (FA)
Sources:
Tyrwhitt, Jaqueline / Sert, José Luis / Rogers, Ernesto (1952): The heart of the city : towards the humanisation of urban life. London: Lund Humphries.
Domhardt, Konstanze Sylva (2011): From the "Functional City" to the "Heart of the City" : Green Space and Public Space in the CIAM debates of 1942-1952. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
