… our belief in the city as a unique organism underlies the whole project.
In the Living City man is the ultimate subject and principal conditioner. The theme is interpreted by presenting evocations, accentuations and simulations of city life, not a display of suggested forms. The image is a total image of it all like a film.
The exhibition cannot be said to be a review, for its programme is evolutionary and it can only be definitive in relation to the actual experience within the exhibition itself. Can we predict the balance of evocations of the ‘city’ until we see them for the first time? Whether this exhibition is a valuable gesture depends upon whether one demands a single line of argument, whether one states that black is black and white is white, and, moreover, that they are diametrically opposite. There are several lines of argument implicit in our collection of exhibits, but like a jigsaw, the picture is amassed from the whole, and it is a coloured jigsaw with many shades of grey, also.
Certainly, Living City has come about as the reply to the situation as it appears to us, who are involved in the creation and evaluation of environment. We are in a European city, of long-established precedents, but with no clear way ahead for us to build upon them. The re-creation of environment is too often a jaded process, having to do only with densities, allocations of space, fulfillment of regulations: the spirit of cities is lost in the process. It is from America that the real warning has come. William H. Whyte in the Exploding Metropolis and more recently Jane Jacobs in Death and Life of Great American Cities treat the threat of the denouement of city centres with a concern that is at the same time intelligent and frightening. They search hard for any signs of reversal of the general trend, or a way out, or some path back to the situation when ‘city’ meant something vibrating with life. The Atlantic time-lag is about to catch up with us. The problem facing our cities is not just that of their regeneration, but of their right to an existence.
The real terror for us is that the cities we have will be sacrificed for an overall conformity covering the whole of this piece of Europe, for endless suburban communities, providing, it is admitted, a high standard of material comfort, but devoid of the quality of the city, because in the process this will have died.
In this exhibition above everything else we are being positive. The enemy is the negation of something of unique value. We are defending, moreover, a quality that is almost undefinable. The life-blood of cities runs through all that goes on in them. Some of these things are in themselves bad – vice, corruption of the young, overcrowding, exposure to risk; some are tedious, time-wasting, or just banal; but overriding all these are the positives. So far in our creation of a way of life we have enriched experience by rule-of-thumb where environment is concerned. The living city is a unique experience, but the experience is not complete without the dark greys as well as the light.
The total impression of a collection of phenomena of city life will vary between spectators. It is, however, the privilege of the exhibitor to load the emphasis and guide their conclusions.
In the living city all are important: the triviality of lighting a cigarette, or the hard fact of moving two million commuters a day. In fact they are equal – as facets of the shared experience of the city. So far, no other form of environment has been devised that produces the same quality of experience shared by so many minds and interests. When it is raining in Oxford Street the architecture is no more important than the rain; in fact the weather has probably more to do with pulsation of the living city at the given moment. Similarly, all moments of time are equally valid in the shared experience. The city lives equally in its past and its future, and in the present where we are.
Most of the pieces in this exhibition are of today, but there must be phenomena of the past and predictable items, which in this context must not be taken as architectural statements so much as the continuance of the spirit of the city in its physical image. Perhaps the key to the evasiveness of city spirit is the spirit of people themselves. In the first place they came together, for one reason or another, to make cities. They continue to interact upon each other in the shared experience. The image of the city may well be the image of people themselves, and we have devoted much of the exhibition to the lifecycle and survival kit of people within cities. Man is the ultimate subject around which we are exhibiting, and he conditions any space into which he comes. The Living City exhibition is a series of small spaces, and they alone will be fantastically affected by the number of people walking around them.
The items used to show all this will vary, from trivia to valued drawings, from monster to miniscule versions of everyday things. This again is a reflection of how the city is seen by different people in different moods. And again they are all equally valid. Typography, sound, colour, feelies, they are all in a way facets of experience in themselves. Disparate as the total effect may be, as is the intention, we have used two devices, and only two, which act as a control to the form of the exhibition. The first is the decision to use a system of triangles as the structural and formal basis. This has come about through the ability of this figure to twist itself around spaces, a freedom very necessary in our presentation. The triangles are nevertheless a structurally sensible unit that can be prefabricated. Nothing more should be read into the fact that we have used triangles; nothing more was intended. The other device has been the division of the major spaces or ‘alcoves’ (we have called them ‘gloops’, amongst ourselves; a word probably coined out of loop, or encompassment of a tight space); each gloop has a division of subject-matter and in a way represents the intensity of these subjects in certain parts of the city and certain corners of our mind. They are as follows: Man, Survival, Community, Communications, Movements, Place and Situation. They are, however, not tight, and they overlap, just as they do in reality.
It will be asked: ‘Why have you not stated an answer to the problem, why have you not an image of the city of the future?’ We feel that it has been primarily necessary to define the problem. We have set the scene. We have attempted to capture that indefinable something: the Living City. We shall not hesitate to postulate concrete ideas – but that is for another exhibition. Let this be said, if nothing else, that our belief in the city as a unique organism underlies the whole project.
Peter Cook
FINAL NOTES ON THE LIVING CITY
As an exhibition it has been thought of throughout as an experience and not as a display of data. Rather, it should be taken as the condensation of phenomena in order to create a mood.
As a catalogue this feature in 'Living Arts' has aimed to underline the contents of the exhibition and at the same time to expand on them from the points of view of the various designers. Different individuals have approached 'The Living City' ready to place differing emphasis on the various problems facing us: overpopulation, discomfort, decline, lack of direction, architectural problems, transportation problems and so on. the exhibition has come to the sum of these individual viewpoints - programmed within the gloops for convenience, and the whole has developed by cross-stimulus.
Architecture as such will be less evident than might be expected of a group predominantly architectural - but it must be remembered that the aim of the exhibition is a mood rather than a physical statement.
The time and place - 1963 in London, England - must have an influence upon what is presented. Try, as we have tried, to see beyond this. The crisis facing 'The Living City' here is equally facing Tokyo or Los Angeles.
The exhibition revolves around people, for cities are their creation, and people have created the problems of the city. People's habits and reactions to city situations reflect this basic premise.
The exhibition does not exist in a vacuum and certainly in the minds of its inceptors the situation will have begun to change further by the time the exhibition closes. We all have a positive belief, however, that despite the questionings and challenges implicit in the situation as shown, we can work towards a solution which is of the Living City.
Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, Ben Fether, David Greene,
Ron Herron, Peter Taylor, Michael Webb,
London 1963
