The shift from the Industrial Society to the Information one in terms of urban planing

The element I wanted to highlight to show the shift from the Industrial Society to the Information one is the Urban Space. Since it is such a wide topic, I wanted to focus on the public space, its change during different periods of time and its evolution, and maybe why not suppose how it could develop in the future. 

I would have started it from the antiquity when people of the ancient greece gathered around the city "square" as it was called "agora", but I guess we already know that the importance of this important urban space have always been appreciated. I will go back to the modernity of Le Corbusier who turned all the city in a square, where the buildings were all giants in the city where the dimensions where a bit misunderstood for that time. In Modernity buildings lost the connection with the land, and with “pilotis” they worked as if they were gravity free. 

The Villa Savoye at Poissy, designed by Le Corbusier in 1929, represents the culmination of a decade during which the architect worked to articulate the essence of modern architecture. Throughout the 1920s, via his writings and designs, Le Corbusier considered the nature of modern life and architecture’s role in the new machine age. His famous dictum, that “The house should be a machine for living in,” is perfectly realized within the forms, layout, materials, and siting of the Villa Savoye.

Located just outside Paris, the Villa Savoye offered an escape from the crowded city for its wealthy patrons. Its location on a large unrestricted site allowed Le Corbusier total creative freedom. The delicate floating box that he designed is both functional house and modernist sculpture, elegantly melding form and function.

Golden Lane Project
Alison and Peter Smithson’s competition entry for the reconstruction of post-war ruins in The City of London was a bold, brash vision of new urban form. The plan intended to bring together high densities of people in a way that created “an infinitely richer and more satisfactory way of living in cities.” To achieve this, they proposed a series of “streets in the air” which connected clusters of flats accessible above and below each mid-air street. They believed that concentrating pedestrian circulation would create community and bring a kind of humanity back to some of the more bombastic and monumental CIAM modernist housing projects. Separating the pedestrian streets from the ground was also their response to the growing ubiquity of the automobile. Although the slab housing forms of the Golden Lane Project owed much to Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation and its internal street, the more radical part of the project was the de-emphasis of the building as a discreet unit of urbanization, and instead the creation of a network of continuous buildings arranged in a kind of cellular or synaptic pattern.  Such a network would respond to local needs and topography, and would exist as another layer of urbanism upon the existing city fabric.  This clustered and networked approach, a flexible system, was a rejection of the imposition of the a priori high modernist grid. The project was presented at CIAM IX. 

Science fiction was identified with mega-structures, “plug in “possibilities, steel networks over the cities. They thought of connecting the buildings with transport, with tubes and movement possibilities. If “La vie Radiese” had the idea the future, science fiction takes it in another level : Revival of the futurist precedent. But it suffered the same problem. It lost the connection with the site. It wanted desperately that disconnection. So at both these cases they were leaded by an utopic model. Case study : Agaki Tower, Japan, Kenzo Tange

Archigram                                 “Plug in City “              “Moving City”             “Instant City”

High tech Infrastructure

Between 1960 and 1974 Archigram created over 900 drawings, among them the plan for the “Plug-in City” by Peter Cook. This provocative project suggests a hypothetical fantasy city, containing modular residential units that “plug in” to a central infrastructural mega machine. The Plug-in City is in fact not a city, but a constantly evolving megastructure that incorporates residences, transportation and other essential services--all movable by giant cranes.

Persistent precedents and concerns of modernism lay at the heart of Plug-In City’s theoretical impulse, not limited to the concept of collective living, integration of transportation and the accommodation of rapid change in the urban environment. In his book Archigram: Architecture without Architecture, Simon Sadler suggests that “The aesthetic of incompleteness, apparent throughout the Plug-In scheme and more marked than in megastructural precedents, may have derived from the construction sites of the building boom that followed the economic reconstruction of Europe.” 

Dissatisfaction with this status quo pushed the experimental architectural collective to dream of alternative urban scenarios that flied in the face of the superficial formalism and dull suburban tendencies common to British modernism of the time. The Plug-In City, along with other projects such as The Walking City or The Instant City, suggested a nomadic way of life and, more importantly, a liberation from the modernist answer of suburbia. 

The bizarre imagery of Superstudio stands unparalleled in the history of the Radical Design Movementin Italy: a series of hallucinogenic sequences containing massive golden pyramids, city grids stretching towards infinity, metallic pods floating in space, gigantic reflective cubes parked in desolate landscapes, and humans mingling with giant cacti against a backdrop of rocky hills—all strangely reminiscent of the otherworldly visions of Philip K Dick, Isaac Asimov and J G Ballard. Through bold photomontages, illustrations, films, exhibitions and textual proclamations, their influence reached far and wide.