The Geography of Hope by Chris Turner

Author:Chris Turner [Turner, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36608-5
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2007-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

UNDERCROFTS, UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES & URBAN RENEWAL BY SKATEBOARD

Here’s a scene that would definitely please Jane Jacobs: A posh café on the south bank of the Thames, with a broad riverside promenade visible out the big picture windows. The walkway is crowded with strolling tourists, hustling commuters, hawkers and gawkers and all the other teeming masses of humanity that give thrumming life to this, one of the world’s pre-eminent cities. The promenade out there, that’s the Queen’s Walk—one of the most monument-dense riverside strolls on the planet. Hang a left and head southwest past Waterloo Station to the London Eye, where there’s a lovely view of Big Ben and the Parliament buildings, or turn right and saunter due east to the hulking Tate Modern and Shakespeare’s storied Globe Theatre and, eventually, legendary London Bridge. Or find a welcoming leather banquette inside the café, take a seat and pause for a moment to absorb it all, and understand that if English-speaking urban culture has an epicentre, you’re pretty much seated on top of it.

But the real Jacobsian heart of this grand scene was, to my mind, the discussion at one of those comfortable banquettes one fine autumn morn. I was seated there with the proprietor of a local skateboard shop and a pair of officials from the South Bank Centre—the massive multivenue arts complex whose ground-floor café we were meeting in—and we were talking about unintended consequences, unexpected opportunities, great gaffes in the history of urban design and the serendipitous correctives to same. The South Bank Centre’s ongoing rejuvenation, I discovered, was a case study in the spontaneous, unpredictable creation of vital urban space. And it was the product of the accidental intersection of two vectors that had started their journeys far apart, separated by continents and decades, converging now on the south bank of the Thames as a powerful lesson in the ways of redemption for the contemporary metropolis.

The first of these vectors is one we’ve already discussed: the ascension to paramount prominence of the modernist school in urban architecture and design. Owing to the devastations of the Second World War and the privations of its aftermath, modernism arrived a bit late to the banks of the Thames. But when it did, it came with a ferocious zeal. Pretty much the first modernist edifice in England was the Royal Festival Hall, constructed in 1951 for the Festival of Britain. The festival was intended to inject some optimistic energy into the country’s gloomy postwar mood, and the Royal Festival Hall was conceived as a reincarnation of the Queen’s Hall, which had been destroyed during the Blitz in 1941. It was the only permanent structure built for the event, and it later became the cornerstone of the greater South Bank complex.

In the years after the festival, the idealistic avant-garde in British design joined the rest of the world’s cultural elite in its enthusiastic embrace of modernism. Commissioning officers around London favoured a particularly austere form first demonstrated by Le Corbusier in the construction of his Unité d’habitation, an apartment building in Marseille that was completed in 1952.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.