reviews Books
Topologies: The
urban uTopia in
franCe, 1960–1970
By Larry Busbea
MIT Press, £15.95 / $24.95 (hardcover)
Busbea concentrates on the work of Yona
While the architectural zeitgeist has never been Friedman, the architect who most consistently
more hospitable to the eye-popping ‘avant- visualised the space-frame concept of huge
garde’ signature building, there is nowadays a suspended structural grids, into which inhabitants
deep anxiety about the urban ‘grand plan’. Daniel might insert and reconfigure all the functional
Libeskind or Frank Gehry may knock out another units of urban activity; and on the machinations of
breathtaking kunsthalle, but the rational, planned the cultural critic Michel Ragon, who effectively
expansion of urban space is nowadays treated with engineered spatial urbanism into a ‘movement’.
suspicion – Richard Rogers counsels restraint in Far from politically radical, Busbea suggests
urban development and Rem Koolhaas theorises that spatial urbanism was naively conservative,
the chaotic and undirected dynamics of ‘sprawl’. inasmuch as its obsessive faith in technology
Utopian aspirations and big visions are distinctly and systematised, rational administration was an
unwelcome. attempt to wish away the difficulties of the more-
Larry Busbea’s engaging study Topologies than-evident class politics of postwar Europe.
revisits the heyday of superscaled utopian Busbea deftly unpicks the ideological
urban design as it was played out in 1960s contradictions at the heart of what appear to be
France. ‘Spatial urbanism’, that peculiar strand of purely architectural questions. The spatial city,
architectural futurism that erased the distinction with its promise of nomadic, self-determined
between building and city, envisioned massive mobility could equally be seen as the technocratic
three-dimensional supercities that would contain spectre of the ‘totally administered society’
all the functions of urban life. This was what critic that radicals of the time would increasingly
Reyner Banham would retrospectively term the decry. These were divisions that couldn’t be
era of the ‘megastructure’, and while this was an solved architecturally, and Busbea rightly points
international phenomenon, Busbea explores how to formally similar but politically opposed
the Parisian architectural scene’s intense context projects, especially Constant Nieuwenhuys’s
produced an acute expression of the political New Babylon (though he bizarrely ignores the
and cultural contradictions that have haunted similar approach of the British visionary Cedric
architects’ thinking on grand urban intervention Price). Unlike the oppositional Constant or
ever since. the more playful British Archigram group, the
The ‘spatial city’, Busbea argues, was the French Spatialists earnestly hoped to influence
product of the period’s social and theoretical the masterplanning culture of the French
concerns: economic expansion in France pushed state; damning them, in retrospect, with all the
architects to think about more efficient approaches sins of ‘alienating’ bureaucratic Modernism.
to urban space and construction techniques; Given Busbea’s generally underwritten political
innovations around structuralism, cybernetics account, however, the real tragedy of Topologies
and information theory became the backdrop to is never quite spelled out: the vision of a mobile,
imagining the city as an immense, dematerialising constantly changing user-driven city-society
network of flows, movements and exchanges, could only come about in a truly democratic,
harbingers of a post-industrial ‘society of leisure’; non-privatised society – it could never produce
and politically, France navigated anxiously it. At the end, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s
between American consumer capitalism and the Pompidou Centre rises, the last and defeated
Soviet bloc, preoccupied with the limits of the expression of a utopian vision turned sour, and the
state and the liberties of the individual. first of all the pseudo-avant-garde monuments
that would follow. J.J. Charlesworth
Artreview 208
Nov_books_.indd 208 26/9/07 12:54:45
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