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Editors: Ana Tostões, Zara Ferreira
Guest editors: Eui-Sung Yi
Keywords: Modern Movement, Modern architecture, High density architecture, Urban growth, Modern urban planning.

The debates that followed the World Design Conference (WoDeCo, Tokyo, 1960) on the search for a “total Image for the 20th Century” pointed out among worldwide designers, architects and planners, viewpoints and intellectual ideas concerning the future of the city, particularly in the wake of technological and scientific advancement in industry. At the time of the WoDeCo, progressive architects formed the “Metabolism” group and proposed their concepts for dealing with the increasing complexity of the cities rising. Debating over the ideal city and promoting a kind of experimental architecture based on ideas of life styles and communities for a new era, its biological name suggests that buildings and cities should be designed in the same organic way that the material substance of a natural organism propagates adapting to its environment by changing its forms in rapid succession.

Published: 2014-08-01

Editorial

  • The debates that followed the World Design Conference (WoDeCo, Tokyo, 1960) on the search for a “total Image for the 20th Century” pointed out among worldwide designers, architects and planners, viewpoints and intellectual ideas concerning the future of the city, particularly in the wake of technological and scientific advancement in industry. At the time of the WoDeCo, progressive architects formed the “Metabolism” group and proposed their concepts for dealing with the increasing complexity of the cities rising. Debating over the ideal city and promoting a kind of experimental...

Lectures

  • The following keynote was presented at the 12th International docomomo Conference that took place in Espoo, Finland, in August 2012. The title refers to the lecture given by an American artist James Turrell at the symposium Permanence in Architecture organized by Virginia Tech in 1998. In architecture and in all arts the new is eroding the old earth and slowly reforming tradition. “Survival of Modern” could be seen as an effort to use the built “modern” environment in a sustainable way. Mikko Heikkinen believes that our challenge is not only to make iconic masterpieces of the Modern...

Essays

  • In this issue, the parameters for the conservation and documentation of the city are defined through multiple lenses of economy, culture, politics and history reflecting critical and acute positions within the 2014 global hegemony. Following docomomo’s focus, this issue expands the Modern Movement legacy by advocating that the holistic understanding of architecture must include the study of urbanism. Unlike architecture, urbanism is an open-ended organism and its raison d’être is reinforced through layers of history. It is through these layers that we advocate for conservation and...

  • Seoul is a city of discontinuities, a sequence of fragments that collectively converge to form an urban settlement set against a dramatic natural backdrop. At the heart of Seoul’s DNA is absence, or rather the absence of any grid. Unlike its neighboring capitals – Beijing and Tokyo, Seoul is a capital whose urban fabric expands in direct symbiosis with its topography.

  • “Post-global” is a coined word signifying a chaotic state or a transitional period after the violent gale of globalism that created a large gap between the new and the old. Reproving the global power game for having created evil paradises that repress individual evolutions and highest value of lives, the essay attempts to refute the historic and cultural agenda in global standard propagating them as a new paradigm that holds the key to accomplish the global mission, and to conjecture that small plans toward local community would offer guidelines to recur gradually to the state of...

  • Swoo-Geun Kim’s building projects in the Daehangno area of Seoul provide a remarkable example of how architects can respond to high-density environments. They also illustrate both the theoretical and the practical dimensions of the concept of correlativity, still having the potential to show us a way forward. Inspired by the urban equivalent of a traditional village structure, Kim sublimated into modern building types the fluid indeterminate spaces created by its alleyways and courtyard. This legacy is what has enabled these buildings to survive handsomely for some thirty years amid the...

  • China’s massive capital accumulation, economic ascent and wealth production has largely been the result of their rapid urbanization effort. While it is indisputable that the country has largely succeeded in its economic reform efforts given its status as the world’s second largest economy and in that process lifted hundreds of millions of its population out of poverty, it has also, in that process, created severe social inequality and friction. This essay largely argues that Chinese cities are purpose-built financial instruments for capital accumulation, a result of the forces of...

  • São Paulo started the 20th century as a 240 thousand inhabitant town and concluded it as a 10 million inhabitant center of a metropolitan zone of 17,8 million inhabitants. The congestion and disorder disguise the planning efforts conceived since the first decade, but only partially implemented. This article highlights some of the most important urban planning proposals as the Avenue Plan (1930), the Robert Moses’s Plano de Melhoramentos (1950), the Basic Urbanization Plan (PUB, 1969) and the last Review of the Master Plan (2013-14) to São Paulo, and the challenges resulted of the pace of...

  • In the Asian mini-city-states of Hong Kong and Singapore, massive public housing programmes, far more extreme in density and height than their European and North American predecessors, have played an unexpectedly prominent role in development policy since the 1950s. This article explores some of the ways in which the original conventions of public housing were transformed and “densified” in these territories, and argues that the key influences in this process were not so much avant-garde modernist architectural discourses as the organisational mechanisms and political pressures within...

  • To find multiple possibilities and to create livable spaces in an extremely dense condition – that is what Japanese contemporary architects are particularly good at. Most of Japanese architects start their career by designing small houses in an urban environment; it is a good exercise for young architects to develop their design skills. The mini site and chaotic surroundings are far from an ideal condition; in fact it is a poor environment. But the architects come to learn that from this disadvantaged condition they can do something innovative.

  • Cities in the sky, superhighways over the seas, floating layers of techno-villages. These utopic proposals for Japan were generated by a passionate and extraordinary group of young Japanese architects fueled by the futuristic vision to rebuild their nation. Parallel to their idealism, was the path of Peter Land, an Englishman by way of Yale and South America, tasked to plan housing for the poor. Incredibly, their idealism would cross and the Metabolists’ first and only project would be for a United Nations social housing development in a place very far from Japan: Peru. Eui-Sung Yi sat...

  • This article focuses on two iconic architectural works that dominate the ongoing intellectual discourse on conserving our recent past — the City of Chandigarh in India designed by Le Corbusier, and the Village of New Gourna in Egypt designed by Hassan Fathy. By examining the differential between their originating visions and their legacies that were shaped over more than five decades through many unforeseen circumstances and unaccounted consequences, this article provokes deeper reflections on our modern heritage and on the forces and entities that should decide its future.

Heritage in danger

  • A world renowned engineering marvel and masterpiece of constructivist architecture, the radio tower designed by Vladimir Shukhov has garnered much attention lately. Citing the “dangerous” condition of the 92-year-old tower, in early February 2014 the Russian Ministry of Communications announced their plans for the 160 m structure: a two stage reconstruction-restoration, with the dismantling of the tower followed by reassembly at a new location. This has been deemed the de facto destruction of the tower by both experts and public opinion in general and has led to the Russian and...

Tributes

  • Hiroshi Matsukuma, Yoshiaki Hanada

    We must bring to you all a very heartbreaking notice of the sudden and totally unexpected loss of a giant, our beloved and most admired Professor Hiroyuki Suzuki, who was not only the former and first president of docomomo Japan but also a Professor Emeritus of The University of Tokyo, Professor at Aoyama Gakuin University Graduate School and the General Director of the Museum Meiji-Mura (a major outdoor architectural museum).

News

  • The 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale is on display from June to November. This year’s edition is directed by Rem Koolhaas and is bringing major novelties. For the first time the event will be held for six months and was assembled for a longer period than ever be- fore. Koolhaas set this new schedule because he was committed to create a research-based exhibition. According to Paolo Baratta, the president of the Venice Biennale, this repre- sents an unprecedented method that had never been used in past editions. The director engaged all participants in the theme Fun- damentals and tried...

  • The Re-Use research on the Housing Complex of Lignon (Switzerland, Geneva) has been awarded with the Europa Nostra Prize for Research in 2013. The project, published in docomomo Journal 44 (2011/1), has been developed by the EPFL's Laboratory of Techniques and Preservation of Modern Architecture (TSAM), under the leadership of Franz Graf and Giulia Marino, docomomo Switzerland members. The problem of energy effiency affects all buildings and particularly social housing of the post-war period.

  • The School building “The Ship” in Amsterdam, rehabilitated by Wessel de Jonge - Architecten BNA BV, won the annual Brink- greve Award for the best adaptive re-use & restoration project in Amsterdam of 2013.

  • docomomo Chair Ana Tostões had stayed in Tokyo from 20th to 23rd February 2014 on the way to attend the scientific committee for the 13th docomomo International Con- ference, in Seoul. !ere were three missions for her visit.