Introduction
Modern habitation always encompass the presence of an array of service providers within the grasp of the community-dwelling: so we have country clubs, hospitals, schools and shopping halls within a certain purposive residential group of buildings. Work, however, may be within the vicinity, but many still are located elsewhere outside the immediate community.
But these groups more often than not are a part of a bigger community that is within a city. As such, there is the longing for an inveterate, ideal complex that serves its dwellers impartially, as much as possible, of its services and aesthetics. But much studies and observations on the built environment that make up cities today find indifference and danger despite the economic-driven forms of fun and entertainment.
It is quite interesting and at the same time disturbing that even architectural factors as well as built environment have a connection to man’s unconscious. This paper will try to analyse the role streets and squares, plazas or piazzas have played in the cultural life of cities, provide the importance of ‘shaping the site’ and room-like spaces in ‘traditional’ city plans with the Modern Movement / CIAM’s attitude to planning and consider how the Roman ‘art of memory’ used urban spaces and discuss the possible consequences of the destruction of such arrangements in the modern world, using Jung’s theories of the Collective Unconscious as a point of reference.
Discussion
Aristotle as early as recorded civilization have suggested that rules of city planning should be designed as to make its people at once secure and happy (Sitte, 1986, p 141). Sitte (1986) further noted how during the Middle Ages in the Renaissance that such artistic enterprise were employed but in “our mathematical century that the process of enlarging and laying out cities has become an almost purely technical concern” (p 142) of which artistic concerns were overseen. At this point, I am akin to emphasize the importance of open places and spaces in the middle of the city whether it be a forum or a market square.
As noted by Vitruvius on the forum: “The Greeks lay out their forums in the form of a square surrounded by very spacious double colonnades, adorn them with columns set rather closely together, and with entablatures of stone or marble, and construct walks above in the upper story,” (quoted from Sitte, 1986, p 144).
As the Greeks had their plaza squares, so are the Romans with a little variation using monumental public buildings with thoroughfares open only sparingly and avoiding to diminish the sense of spatial enclosure which represents modern festive halls. Monuments are not placed in the middle but along the sides of the plaza compared by Sitte (1986) to a single family dwelling with well-appointed and richly furnished main hall. In the places were lavished the unusual quantity of columns, monuments, statues and artistic treasures creating a sumptuous hypaethral interior. Statues and busts were displayed in orderly fashion leaving the centre free allowing people to survey the arranged walls as suggested by Aristotle to be assembled in a suitable way as offered by the Acropolis in Athens (Sitten, 1986) comparing it to a symphony of rich layers.
Italy was singled out as representational of the ancient cities preserved, their original plans and layout unchanged and have remained as they were to the type of the old forum down to modern times. Sitte (1986) suggested that a considerable share of public life continued to take place in the plaza so that its significance with the monumental structures that framed them persists. The agora or forum has retained its function and that the buildings in the city were maintained to be united as the centre of the community was embellished with fountains, monuments, statues and other works of art with historical significance.
The plaza is where people of various periods trafficked, celebrated, proclaimed laws, played comedies and tragedies, among other things. It was noted, too, how some architectural buildings were of use amongst the cathedral square, signora, and the mercato. Princely residence surrounded with grand palaces and embellishments of historic memorials and monuments identify the signora to find loggia for bodyguards or municipal guards combined or separated with elevated terraces where promulgation of laws and public announcements happen, as in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. At the mercato is the municipal hall as observed in most towns north of the Alps, and even until today, a fountain with its basin as grand as it could allow exists. It was noted however that “gay activities of vending have long since been shut up in glass-and-iron bird cage of a market hall,” (Sitte, 1986, p 152).
The Acropolis of Athens are still being emulated until later times such as that of the Piazza del Doumo in Pisa dotted with the magnificent cathedral, the campanile, the baptistery, and the Campo Santo as sketchy witness to an active continuance of public life on open plazas. Others that come close include the San Francesco of Assisi, Certosa at Pavia, amongst others (Sitte, 1986). Most recent observations of Sitte (1986) include the extinct artistic relationship between built environments and users, use of plazas as parking space, noise in universities and cathedrals, missing colonnade agora in parliament buildings, and even crowds of people and the buzzing marketplace. Most specifically, Sitte (1986) could have been referring to many “dying” cities of the west.
At this point, Sitte (1986) assails the “museum” as a prison for most works of art, “the most dramatic example of modern folly” (p 156) as Michelangelo’s David which was originally located in front of the masonry wall of the Palazzo Vecchio to the left of the main entrance chosen by Michelangelo himself. As suggested, there is the penchant of modern designers to choose places for art works as magnificent as possible thereby lessening the aesthetic impact of the art piece or pieces.
Frampton (1985) noted the various “modernism” approaches by the 20th century of avant-gardeism, supremacist architecture described by Roland Barhes as “repetition differente”, as followed by neo-suprematism he called as “anti-humanist” play of interval installations of varying scales as anthropomorphic or even apocalyptic “quasi-Dadaist modus operandi” described as the products of form from arbitrary overlays of various grids, axes, scales and contours with or without connection to the real context, citing as examples of the works of Eisenmann — the Berlin Friedrichstrasse housing and Wexner Center for the Visual Arts at Columbus, Ohio (p 312). The trends that followed, constructivism and deconstructivism were described as “architecture of disruption, dislocation, deflection, deviation, and distortion, rather than one of demolition, dismantling, decay, decomposition and disintegration,” (p 313).
Frampton (1985) revels at how unsettling the survival of its torture, how it appeared stronger, and how form and torture have become an integral host and parasite, a symbiosis. Under deconstruction, Frampton (1985) noted the use of Nordic vernacular of the stave church as well as the traditional timberwork of China and Japan which he construed as an attempt to revitalise certain devalued Occidental forms through an Oriental re-casting of their essential nature, and to secularise the represented institutions. Noted in this styles are the use of traditional shutters, narrow windows and wide overhanging eaves such as the Casa Borsalino at Alessandria, Italy as well as the Paseo de la Bonavova apartments in Barcelona which Frampton also labelled as “regionalist”. In addition, regionalism favours the small, a consciously bounded, tectonic architecture that are photographic (if you choose scenographic, then you may replace it).
Already, Sennett (1990) provided a sweeping view of what modern and ancient could do to individuals: “there is no modern design equivalent to the ancient assembly” (p xi) where moral dimensions of sexual desire are earned in Greeks’ gymnasium whereas it is now equivalent to psychiatrist’s couch or silence of the bedroom. Culture today is represented in shopping malls, parking lot or apartment house elevator. He argued that the Greek past used their eyes in the city to think about political, religious, and erotic experiences whereas modern culture is divided between the inside and the outside, of subjective or worldly experiences, or the self and the city. Amidst establishments of shopping and tourism are individuals who fear exposure, of being hurt than stimulated, a militarised conception of attack-and-defence aptly worded by Sennett as a city-building “to wall off the differences between people” that are more threatening that stimulating.
The effect of which are bland, neutralizing spaces that remove social contact, of street walls, highways that isolate neighbourhoods, and dormitory housing developments. Sennett suggests that a city should be a learning place for “sophrosyne” translated as poise or grace where man is exposed or oriented to the pain, of difficulty or diversity of life in order to learn how to balance. He proposed that, “The balanced person wants to make speech, a battle, love, as well as a poem with the same qualities of grace and poise.” (p xiii). He gives an insight to the “antihumanism” of Le Corbusier’s architecture against the dreadful modern streets of which Le Corbusier declared, “The street wears us out. And when all is said and done we have to admit it disgusts us,” (quoted from Sennett, 1990, p 172). This is found by Sennett to be a form of youthful rebellion about a past that is being cast out, to emphasise a present or an identity that can be called “own”. Early modernity was traced to humanity’s indifference, and the need to wall each other, by the invention of a clock and a canon (Sennett, 1990).
Further, Sennett suggests that planners must create soft borders instead of strong walls to permit new beginnings, other uses of space rather than what they were originally intended for: architects should seek to build with the power to reinvent and serve many purposes or permit constant alteration.
Carl Jung (1968) who had established studies on human consciousness and the subconscious precisely explained the meaning of signs and symbols, as that signs are limited to what they were intended for, against the much vague symbols. Symbol for him leads to ideas beyond the grasp of reason, representations of concepts that it is beyond human understanding. He went further as to agree with French ethnologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl who proposed of the presence of “bush soul” or mystical participation of man to his immediate other person or object. He has associated this even to the modern man’s fragmentation, and the capacity to isolate a part of one’s mind.
In fact, one clear connection Jung was able to point out is the tendency for modern man to erect psychological barriers to protect himself from the shock of something new. However, there is also the presence of the conscious and the unconscious in the man’s psyche, of which experiences are kept hidden or kept at bay. He further proposed that all these forms of knowledge are sometimes forgotten to make room for new impressions and ideas. In fact, Jung proposed that “in addition to memories from long-distant conscious past, completely new thoughts and creative ideas can also present themselves from the unconscious — thoughts and ideas that have never been conscious before […] where dilemmas are sometimes solved by the most surprising mew propositions; many artists, philosophers, and even scientists owe some of their best ideas to inspirations that appear suddenly from the unconscious” (p 38).
At this point, it is arguable that Le Corbusier’s urban planning ideas, the centre of this discussion are a product of a history of ancient architectural grandeur as well as war and urban decay. Decay has been much associated with the progression and populating of cities all over the world so that space becomes such a luxurious commodity that should be shared, if not greedily imparted for those who are not fortunate enough to have it.
While Le Corbusier may have noble purposes for designing box compartments to house urban dwellers, or even lay-out industrial cities based on machines and metals, it is of noble thought to have him recall the spacious centres of Athens’ Acropolis or even use columns in designing homes, so as to maximise air movement.
Conclusion
There is always the desire for every civilisation to achieve a certain degree of urbanity as to provide an ideal dwelling for its citizenry. While most planning and solid formation nowadays is based on economic reasons and purposes, many prevailed and materialised due to greed.
It cannot be said that greed proliferated during the ancient times when the Acropolis or the Podium were built by slaves and the conquered, but it cannot be denied altogether. However, the presence of free thought, free speech and free gatherings of the commoners with the royalty or authorities of ancient times provided a more harmonious habitation imaginable to modern man.
But as the ravages of war, indifference of unconscientious deaths as well as the persistence of pain that occur between individuals or even groups to the smallest denomination due to what Jung and the rest call aberrance to what may be “new”, man the designer, planner, or economist has opted for “practical” communities or settings of homes that adopt to their most immediate needs. There was “future” in the age of old, while there is fear in the modern man’s today. In his conquest to “control” his environment, man has conceptualised and built what could be protective cities or dwellings that stave away un-expected changes, effects or whatever forms of elements that could somehow disrupt his own comfort.
As such, we cannot blame Le Corbusier for his concrete boxes and high-tech community of buildings that encompass the “world” of men and individuals when they choose it. The metropolis of old may be present in ruins of history, to remain a glimpse of the past and reminder for tourists and residents, forever mystical, and forever an inspiration for those who cannot afford space.
Reference
Sitte, Camillo (1986). “City Planning according to Artistic Principles,” in G. & C’ Collins, Camillo Sitte; the Birth of Modern City Planning, pp. 141- 157. Rizoli.
K. Frampton (1985) ‘Critical Regionalism; modern architecture & cultural identity’, in Modern Architecture: a critical history, pp.313-327. Powell.
Sennett, Richard (1990). “The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities, pp. xi-xiv, and 169-202. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
Jung, Carl (1968) Man and his Symbols, pp. 20-38, and 83-103. Dell.
Dennis, Michael (1988). Court and Garden, From the French Hotel to the City of Modern Architecture pp. 189-219.
Sennett, Richard (1992). The Fall of Public Man, pp. 3-27. W.W. Norton & Company.
Yates, Frances (1966). The Art of Memory, pp. 17-41 The Chicago University Press.