Photograph: EAHN

Die Stadt im 20. Jahrhundert: Visionen, Entwürfe, Gebautes
Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani

Berlin: Wagenbach Verlag, 2010, 2 vols., 912 pp., 640 colour and b/w ill., € 128
ISBN: 978-3-8031-3633-6

Nowadays, the city is all there is. At least that is what current statistics are indicating: today more than fifty per cent of the world’s population is living in cities, whereas in the western world more than four out of five persons belong to urban contexts. From now on the world’s development calls for urban conceptions that are can address the quest for sustainable paths of transformation for the disturbing mix of diverging urban states—suburbia’s endless settlements, drastic inner city fragmentation, and rapidly spreading informal patterns in the developing world.

Although Vittorio Magnano Lampugnani’s take on the city of the twentieth century, in Die Stadt im 20. Jahrhundert: Visionen, Entwürfe, Gebautes, does not encompass the factual city and its emergence, the author composes instead an elegant tableau of ‘visions, designs and built projects’ of the city of architects. Mainly concentrating on European and North-American developments and on the first half of the century and its preconditions, in two volumes and twenty-eight chapters Lampugnani builds a sequence of thoughtful and impressively informed case studies. He does not ground his work within a rigid methodological framework or through an explicitly elaborated normative standpoint such as the seminal works of Leonardo Benevolo or Lewis Mumford once did. He accurately exhibits the classical topics of the Garden City and the theoretical and practical breakthroughs in Amsterdam, the Weimar Republic, and ‘red’ Vienna. His emphatic interpretation of Auguste Perret’s reconstruction of the city of Le Havre then marks the key argument in the author’s case for the project of the physical city. On the French Atlantic coast after 1945, Lampugnani finds the ‘proof that this architecture allows for the composition of a city.’  This exemplary case of an amalgamation of architecture, industrial building technologies, and urban design remained, according to the author, an isolated case and therefore one of ‘neglected opportunities in the 20th century.’

In the chapters focusing on the decades after 1960, the comprehensive reading of the periods of the first chapters gives way to punctual interpretations: Rem Koolhaas’s Euralille serves as a closely examined ‘paradigm of contemporary urban planning’s misfortunes,’ and the chapter on post-modernity in the United States rushes through diverging theoretical positions associated with such figures as Kevin Lynch and Jane Jacobs, the New York Five, and Peter Eisenman, as well as the beginnings and first milestones of New Urbanism. Recent developments such as the transformation of industrial wastelands and the ongoing reinvention of city centres based on new coalitions of landscape architecture and traffic planning are hardly discussed at all.

The reading of this impressive take leaves us with fundamental questions concerning the role of the history of ideas in architecture and urban design: How do we explain the form of the city? Do we have to look at it as a physical or even a social form? What is its relation to the factual urban conditions? One definitely has to agree with Lampugnani that the urgency of the crucial question of urban architecture demands that we ‘rebalance the difficult relation between design and planning’ and ‘to produce new forms of urban architecture.’ If this goal is to be achieved, however, Lampugnani’s approach is too limited. A lasting reconciliation between planning and architecture has to start with a critical reflection of these theories, their preconceptions and heuristics, through a critical widening of our analytical perspectives. What, for instance, is the common ground in the urban mindset of the works of Otto Wagner, Robert Venturi, Aldo Rossi, or Rem Koolhaas? What are their respective assumptions? How do they imagine everyday urban life and how do these imaginations inform their design and conceptual work? In this regard, Lampugnani’s magnum opus gives us no clues.

There will be no sustainable future of the city—i.e., a future able to establish a dialogue between the past and the present in the light of the challenges to come—without architecture and urban design. But the lingering discrepancy between the city of architectural theory and the factual urban conditions calls for cases in which architects are able to frame the urban outcome according to their expectations within the context of modern societies, their democratic principles, and division of labour. This empathic examination of the history of urban design in the twentieth century still needs to be written.

Angelus Eisinger
HafenCity Universität
Hamburg, Germany