Modern town planning

ARHITECTURA magazine in partnership with the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Society continues the series ARHITECȚI LA RADIO with the manuscript of the radio program

From a simple agglomeration of private households, the city has over time become an organism.

However, urban planning begins not with the attention that neighboring dwellings pay to each other, but with the concern of the city's builders to merge the various functions common to each dwelling into collective arrangements.

If the city has been in existence for a very long time, then urban planning is very recent.

In fact, since almost every private interest has found a social expression in a public institution.

The aim of town-planning is not, therefore, to distribute in a picturesque manner, on a given piece of land, a number of private dwellings; but, first of all, to group them usefully around the common center on which they all depend.

It has, therefore, town-planning to ascertain and locate what are the central institutions and what is their proper place.

But then it is wrong today to allow large tenement houses, with numerous apartments, to be located in the eminently public center of the city.

In this center, private dwellings have no place; and if they are allowed to rise there, instead of composing the modern city, they contribute to making it impossible to realize.

For if the center of the city is occupied by private dwellings, the public buildings will move to the periphery.

In this case, however, the question arises as to what use would be served by the concentration of the population in the center of a city if, in order to satisfy their social interests, the same population has to return to the suburbs.

The large modern city, and particularly the metropolis, demands a clear distinction between what should be, on the one hand, the public social and economic centre, the centre of collective consciousness and existence, which is therefore, by default, monumental, grandiose and not infrequently spectacular, and, on the other hand, the belt of this centre, where private life takes refuge, in order to achieve its sole concern for the pleasant, hygienic, intimate and useful.

And just as out of place as the private dwelling is in the center of the metropolis, it is also out of place when the new architect erects it in a lighthouse-height storey.

In recent times the number of floors has been exaggerated, not so much because the technique of reinforced concrete permits it, but mainly because it can shorten the distances between a larger number of rooms which, like large businesses, require a continuous relationship between them.

For however implausible it may seem, it is nevertheless perfectly true that in architecture the same distance vertically becomes less than when laid horizontally!

It is on the basis of this observation that skyscrapers have come into being, of course, when they have not been erected merely to astonish or amaze, as in fact has happened in the centers of American plutocracy.

But the superimposition, however far it may be carried, still represents for offices a certain grouping and concentration, the same stratification.

In the case of separate private dwellings, it becomes an architectural aberration, a calamity for the municipality, and an ordeal for the residents themselves.

The tower has at all times been the most unsuitable interior; that is why in the past it was used exclusively for imprisonment.

At the present day, it is widely propagated that the massing of dwellings in vertical colonies would maximize the possibilities of comfort.

Practice proves just the opposite.

To live on the 14th floor, compressed and suspended like a balloon, because of dependence on an elevator, which is not generally different from a parachute, is in any case more uncomfortable than to live in the most primitive hut, where at least the occupant is assured of immediate access to the outside.

It is called comfort in a tenement-house, to be provided with everything, but to be able to enjoy practically almost nothing, owing to the maximum reduction in the size of all the rooms, and especially of the outbuildings which really decide the real comfort.

This neglect of comfort appears natural, when one considers that it is the speculation which dictates the interior arrangement of the houses of report, never-never... assistance!

In general, the most pretentious apartment-houses so reduce the means of access to the upstairs that not only is it out of the question to evacuate them in a moment of panic, but to go out or in twice a day is almost like an expedition.

Satisfying neither comfort, nor hygiene, nor family intimacy, and least of all what is meant by leisure, this modern vertical colonization expresses social insanity, and urban planning a non sense.

For it is not possible that the age, energetic, activist, voluntarist - as the present is pleased to define itself, should group together in the center of the city precisely the vegetative forms of private life, instead of the active forms of social life, represented by institutions of a public character.

So it is not residential buildings that the new urban planner wants in the city centre, but palaces of common social activity, buildings rising up like an enormous furnace, symbolizing eruptions of collective action, and at the same time temples of solidarity and collaboration for those who look at them from afar.

And the more this present urbanism seeks to concentrate the active life in the center of a city in a single central edifice or in a system of buildings rising together like a single band of huge towers, the more it will be obliged to open up between and around them a free space of the greatest possible extent.

Space is the key urban planning element for increasing the concentration of public life in a city.

There is the closest relationship between the surrounding space and the height of a building.

The urban planner begins to be a builder by the way in which he uses space in the city.

For if the architect creates with full volume, the urban planner creates exclusively with empty space.

Space is the urban planner's material, and his genius is shown by the way he knows how to transform it into a propulsive function when it is a question of circulation, or into a static-receptive function when it is a question of a parade square; also, by the way he knows how to make it appear optically larger than its real dimensions, or narrower than certain agglomerations claim it to be.

It is only through the use of space that the urban planner is an architect, because in all the rest of his work he can only impose himself as a director.

Thus, for example, in a town-planning scheme, the urban planner creates by merging the desires of the householder with the solutions of the technician, and those of the organizer with those of the artist.

In any case, it is a heresy to consider the urban planner as an aesthetician, when all that can be claimed of him is, certainly and uniquely, to systematize or, more precisely, to rationalize.

However, the work of the true urban planner is confused with artistic creation, because it is all too often forgotten that what is rational is implicitly also symmetrical, rhythmic or proportional, that is to say, also beautiful!

Ugly can only be what is absurd, or extravagant, what is accidentally gregarious and above all confusing.

That is why, perhaps, the inequality of social strata, through the difference in their degree of civilization, contradicts urbanist creation, just as the perished constructions of the past, which in the name of a very dubious picturesque, have as little right to be mentioned as a respectable gallstone in the bile duct.

Like a house and a city, it is an ordinary tool of human life, therefore what is required of it in the first place is its complete conformity to the present conception of life as well as to that of comfort.

However, because of the durability of the materials used in building in the past, and because of the meeting in the same present of several generations which are inevitably coming together, urban design is destined never to keep pace with the present, from whose demands it is born and for whose satisfaction it is designed to fulfill.

Conceiving for the future, and building in the present, it usually ends when the actuality of the realization has perished.

For this reason, the most gifted urban planners are only able to know the most gifted urban planners virtually according to their intentions, and effectively according to what and how much they demolish.

It is therefore an ungrateful fate that the too hasty evolution of today's society generally reserves for the urban planner, especially since, among the preoccupations of contemporary life, he has perhaps remained the only representative of the great obsessed with the good and the satisfaction of plurality.

For theoretical urbanism, the ideal would be for each generation to build its own city.

But that would mean changing both the meaning given today to the urban planning profession and the nature of the techniques used for all types of construction.

Thus, if today the town planner is, on the one hand, a custodian of those buildings handed down from the past, buildings which the longer they stand the more impracticable they become; and, on the other hand, a creator of similar setbacks and complications for future generations - he should in the future become the great architect, treating the whole city as one huge cathedral, the synthesis of a form of life specific to a generation and of an equally specific collective ideal.

As for the nature of the technique, one could imagine a new one for the urban planning of the future which, getting rid of stone, cement and, above all, the traditional huge foundations, sunk into the ground, would create a new system of eminently superficial constructions, composed of simple standardized mobile parts, which allows, as in the case of a filing cabinet, for example, construction to continue upwards and sideways as one pleases, and the present notion of the city to remain no more than an enormous paving platform, canalized over its entire surface and electrified in such a way that electricity can be taken from anywhere.

In fact, no one can predict with any precision the true direction which the development of town planning will take in the future, but each person's imagination is a reflection of the direction he wishes to take in order to escape from the constraints of the present situation.

In the case of town planning, this constraint arises primarily from the too great durability of past buildings, so that the desired evolution would be that which would allow each generation, when it dies out, to disappear with the buildings in which it lived, in other words, to be destroyed in the same way as in certain Asian countries, when the sovereign died in the past, all the palaces in which he lived were burned; a primitive custom, of course, but one which, for the prosperity of modern town planning, it may be de rigoire to adopt again.

Radio University broadcast , May 2, 8.40 p.m., S.R.R. Archives, file no. 8/1934, 11 tabs with the author's identification.

Marin Simionescu-Râmniceanu

(1883 - 1964) was a Romanian literary critic and historian, writer, corresponding member (1919) of the Romanian Academy.