20 PROBLEMS

UIA BARCELONA-MANIFESTO

by Nold Egenter

"It will be an important challenge for architects, and society in general, to face the vast number of unsolved problems in both a pragmatic and imaginative manner. It is no longer possible to live with the illusions and ideologies that have dominated and veiled public debate. Architecture will have to be redefined according to the changes in the macro scale of worldwide transformations, as well as in those in the micro scale of human interrelation. Urban problems can no longer be separated from problems of social and political equality."

(Udo Kultermann: Architecture in the 20th Century :249)

INTRODUCTION

• UIA Congress: the atmosphere
• Architecture and its system of info-diffusion
• But there ARE problems

20 PROBLEMS

• URBANISM
  • 1 Problem number one: growing megacities
  • 2 The lack or urban ontological centrality in modern cities
  • 3 Space, an enormous problem
  • 4 Scale: the loss of the human dimension
  • 5 Architecture, urbanism: the topological questions
  • 6 Planning in the third world

• ARCHITECTS, ARCHITECTURE AND SOCIETY
  • 7 The problem of architectural form and urban environment
  • 8 Problems of the past: modernism and its dilettantic polemics
  • 9 The disaster of functionalism

• ARCHITECTURE CLASSIFIED AS ART
  • 10 An important problem: architecture as art
  • 11 The inimaginable flexibility of the art historians tools
  • 12 Architectural continuity and the art historian's rationalism
  • 13 The problem: premodern architecture was "complementary"
  • 14 The art historian cultivates the architect's 'orchid-complex'
  • 15 Another problem: the art historian and science

• ARCHITECTURE IS STILL STRUCTURED LIKE A MYTH
  • 16 The post-medieval myth of the profanised creator-genius
  • 17 Architecture, a very tenacious myth: the imperialistic trend
  • 18 Spiro Kostofs Egyptian Architect

• FINALLY: TWO FRIGHTENING PROBLEMS
  • 19 Pruitt-Igoe
  • 20 Economy

THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM

• ARCHITECTURE STARTED SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH

• SIX NEW FIELDS
  • 1) Extra-European architectural history
  • 2) The ethnology of architecture
  • 3) Architectural anthropology
  • 4) 'Habitat Research' and 'Habitat Theory of Culture'
  • 5) Anthrop Art
  • 6) Anthrop Arch

CONCLUSIONS

• WHY DID SCIENTIFIC MAN NOT STUDY HIS OWN HABITAT?

• RESEARCH IS BLOCKED BY THREE MYTHS

• SOONER OR LATER ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM WILL HAVE TO OPEN THEIR NARROW HORIZONS TOWARDS ANTHROPOLOGY

BIBLIOGRAPHY