Banham cites a number of references: Louis Khan’s plans and model for an unrealised Philadelphia City Tower, Myron Goldsmith, and Buckminster Fuller’s Standard Living Package – an easy to carry and install crate of utilities and furniture that suggested mobility and a new family model for whom material and sentimental attachment to a specific place would be of little importance. The package would be sheltered by the Skybreak Dymaxion Dome , sharing with the Glass House the quality of ‘simple’ protection from bad weather. Numerous examples of the same kind of projections of a mobile, wired habitable unit, of which Archigram’s Plug-In City of 1964 is perhaps the most renowned, can be found worldwide. Coming back to the Chinese example I began with, we have to observe that this kind of mobile dwelling, even if not totally dematerialised (and can any habitable structure be held only by force of information?) and that can be dismantled and reconstructed somewhere else, remains confined to experimental architecture, very far from being the new standard. Melvin Webber himself had to note in his 1998 text ‘Tenacious Cities’, that his views only stayed views, and that people remain attached to delimited areas where public and private spaces coexist. For Webber, this is principally due to the need for face-to-face interaction in business. Sociology, anthropology and psychology certainly could help us identify other factors for this persistent model of a town developing around an historic centre. Meanwhile, demographics suggest that the concept of dwelling will have to be rethought in a very near future, especially in emergent, economically empowered and increasingly influential countries. ~
of production gave way to a society of services 2 , and the inadequacy of centred and centralised policy. Webber clearly decoupled ideas of city and urban , and suggested that the constructed environment needed a new thinking frame closely linked to a new social order to come. In fact, this is the continuation of a modernist consideration of architecture, and especially of the dwelling inscribed in the city, which never was separated from social, anthropological concerns. ‘Our failure to draw the rather simple conceptual distinction between the spatially defined city or metropolitan area and the social systems that are localized there clouds the current discussions about the crisis of our cities’ Webber states, extending the recommendations formulated in The Athens Charter , collegially written under the patronage of Le Corbusier during the fourth CIAM (International Modern Architecture Congress) in 1933. The charter, published in France as La ville fonctionnelle (the functional city) in 1941 and not translated or published in North America until 1973, points to the failure of the modernist architectural and urbanist project that couldn’t go along with the political and economic necessities of the form that capitalism took as structure and ideology. These speculations naturally had manifestations in architectural thought. When a house contains such a complex of piping, flues, wires, lights, inlets, outlets, ovens, sinks, refuse disposers, hi-fi reverberators, antennae, conduits, freezers, heaters – when it contains so many services that the hardware could stand up itself without any assistance of the house, why have a house to hold it up? This question was asked by Reyner Banham in a 1965 article ‘A home is not a house’ published in Art in America , illustrated by François Dallegret.
2 The history of this shift and of its developments at the turn of the new century are clearly exposed by Jeremy Rifkin in The Age of Access , 2000.
François Dallegret Anatomy of a Dwelling, 1965
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