Three stories for the XXth century
II International Ph.D Seminar on Urbanism,
Barcelona, 27.06.05
by Bernardo Secchi

1. Three different histories

The first history is the story of dual anguish. The entire century is accompanied by anguish. It is the anguish of a city growing out of control; of a metropolis that loses it dimension to become an "un-measured" megalopolis extraneous to individual and collective everyday experience. The city is perceived as meaningless because it is impossible to grasp completely and impossible to master its functional, technical and symbolic aspects. From another, and partially opposing, point of view, this anguish regards not only the dissolution of the city, but even moreso, the very concept of city. It regards the disappearance of a magical place where all technical, social, institutional and political innovations were born. Its dissolution into a territorial dispersion of remarkable dimensions takes upon unrecognizable and incomprehensible forms, whose future roles are even more difficult to understand.
This generation was dominated by the one main idea that the project of the city is part of a broader design for a new society, or, in the words of Gramsci, for "a new man." It was an idea rooted, in general terms, in the various utopias which have accompanied western culture since antiquity, but was grounded specifically in the horrible experience of the WWI and in the expectations for radical change in European and western society in its aftermath. The "great generation" does not coincide precisely with the architects and urbanists of the Modern Movement, nor with CIAM; it is broader. It cannot be confused with the story a number of heroes; it is much more than this. We find it in different disciplines such as literature, as Henry Godard demonstrates, in philosophy, just as we find it in the hard sciences, in technological research as well as in design.
The third history is the story of a patient search. This search - for the physical and practical dimensions of individual and collective welfare - first comes about through the "moralization" of the industrial city in the 18th and 19th centuries like the Amsterdam of Berlage or Vienna, and then through an attempt to construct new life space where the most important individual and collective needs and wishes might be represented. It is the story of the slow modification of interior space and its furnishings as well as the slow modification of its relations with outdoor space and its design. It is the story of the transformation of many aspects of the "in-between" public and private spaces which construct reasonable and meaningful sequences between indoor and outdoor space. It is the story of nurseries, schools, hospitals, athletic fields and anything else which, since the 1930's, but especially after WWII, was included in every social welfare program - the change in their quantities, their distribution in urban space and in their very physical make-up. It is a history of continuous research through experience - learning by doing, of multi-disciplinarity, of architects and planners working together with, and often preceding, other scholars and practitioners such as psychologist, teachers, doctors, botanist and athletes, not only economists and sociologists.