Street Rooms: The Brief Situationist Guide to Urban Design
One of the shortest, most enigmatic pieces on Reading Design was written by Guy Debord, the French Marxist and founder of the influential movement the Situationist International. So short perhaps that it seems almost impossible to extrapolate too much from it. Yet on closer reading and placing that reading in context, Debord’s words not only signpost an important moment in the evolution of architectural theory in the post-war period but also highlight the reason why Debord is an important figure for even those who profoundly disagree with him. He was less a political philosopher — although he wrote using the language of philosophy — and more the theorist of an art yet-to-come-into-being.
There are also some telling details. Debord famously threw collaborators out from the Situationists for perceived heresies. (The H.O. mentioned in the article was Har Oudejans a Dutch architect who joined the Situationist international in 1959 but was expelled the next year for agreeing to build a church.) To highlight the significance of Debord’s text it is worth comparing his words with another individual associated with the movement, Ivan Chtcheglov, author of perhaps the most famous architectural statement that emerged from this group: the Formulary for a New Urbanism.
In it Chtcheglov denounces the brutalist turn in 20th century architecture. “We will leave Monsieur Le Corbusier’s style to him, a style suitable for factories and hospitals, and no doubt eventually for prisons. (Doesn’t he already build churches?) Some sort of psychological repression dominates this individual,” writes Chtcheglov making it clear that he was not only no fan of church building either but also suggesting that he, like the other Situationists, was more interested in a looser, more adaptive form of architecture. “Architectural complexes will be modifiable,” writes Chtecheglov of his imagined future. “Their appearance will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of their inhabitants.”
This statement, along with Debord’s notations, contributes to an interest with modifiable architecture; unbuilt works such as Price’s Fun Palace but also citywide superstructures such as Yona Friedman’s Spatial City and, particularly the New Babylon project by Constants which was created following his (inevitably temporary) membership of the SI and extensive dialogue with Debord. These projects are typified by the creation of an enormous superstructure within which movement is not only free but required of its inhabitant-users. Yet Debord’s few comments here also show a certain genius for understanding the shift in focus in architectural thinking at this time; not just in the utopian architecture that he and his cohorts imagined but an architecture with which the Situationists were apparently at odds.
Not only does he nail the contradictions of wanting to create structures which encourage and determine free-will in is comparison with the Baroque, he also notes something that applies to the work he criticises. “The notion of the ‘street room’ reverses the false distinction of open and closed ambiences. The closed ambience itself opens onto the open ambience (which is demarcated by the closed ambiences),” he writes. We see in this not just the terminology of the adaptable city — a structure one could both be inside nad free from — but also the interior turn of brutalist megastructures; the solid monuments that the SI group balked at.
If we look at one of the masterpieces of this movement, say Place Bonaventure in Montreal we see a massive structure, the size of a city block, that is a total interior, but which utterly disregards its outward appearance. Walking around ideas about “open” and “closed” become utterly scrambled. There is no need to make free choices because everything you might need is at hand. It is full of “street rooms”: interior, elevated walkways that are so wide you can forget your route through the building is heavily proscribed.
As enigmatic as Debord’s remarks may appear, they in fact delineate an architecture operating at the extremes. In addition and in a more modest way they prefigure our ongoing fascination with temporary structures and the way they subvert what Debord calls “closed” and “open” ambiences.
