The potential of the incomplete

In your lecture at the conference in Mechelen, you talked about Leipzig-Grünau, a huge settlement of pre-fab tower blocks which was left unfinished in East-German times and has since been modified and largely demolished. You have discovered old documentation of the urban plan, and you’ve talked to some of the original architects about their intentions. In which respect can this be relevant for the theme of City Visions?

I’d just like to encourage architects and urban planners to reflect more critically on how they approach the city. We should critically assess the values and functions of new ideas. New political leaders usually introduce radical turns in the way of looking at their city and at previous visions of the city. As architects, we are made functionaries of this process of re-evaluation. This happens through commissions or briefings, which urban designers often accept without questioning. But this also has to do with a particular way of seeing the city. Architects like to take photos and look at things, but it shouldn’t just always be about what one sees. Young planners should go further and try to understand the city through its history, documentation, experts, through people who know the location and who once had visions of their own. It is an unwritten convention that architects look at things with fresh eyes, but I think that it’s also necessary to reconnect to existing knowledge and ideas.

Your story was very personal – including personal observations, speaking for the inhabitants. Do you think that inhabitants need a stronger voice in the city planning process?

An inhabitant is one of several types of agents. Sometimes the inhabitants simply know best. Another type of agent are the architects who were involved in the project. Being architects ourselves, it’s usually easiest for us to talk to other architects. In the case of Leipzig Grünau, however, it was quite difficult to find the original planners. But I really wanted to give them a face, because these housing estates were usually devised by large collectives of up to 150 people and there isn’t a single responsible architect whom you could visit or even name. In this case I tried to find a knowledge base by bringing together seven architects to represent the collective.

By the way: This doesn’t only concern communist plans. The underlying idea is what I call „the incomplete“. We’re faced with something that didn’t get the chance, for whatever reason, to be completed. That can be a beautiful start for thinking about a project, because then one can imagine what it would be like in a complete state and whether it would be a good idea to complete it. How does one position oneself in relation to an existing vision? So all of a sudden, you create a context, which is much more interesting than just looking at the surface of the city.

Do you think that completing these kinds of settlement according to the old plans could work nowadays?

Well, it might be 20 years too late for that. But in the past, I’ve proposed various approaches. One is based on continuity: are there continuities that could be revitalized? What were the values of a communist society? What were the architects’ means of communication? East-German architectural journals were a forum for discussion, but they all disappeared after the wall came down. That meant a total erasure of the discourse, which, by the way, didn’t only deal with eastern Europe, but also with developments in the west. It presented a different way of seeing the city. Another approach would be to experiment with the idea of completing a settlement. I would have enjoyed that. I know that now it’s too late for Grünau, but why not do it with another location? If you know that there were plans for a centre, why not invite the original architects to collaborate with new ones to finish it? Why not invest in this, rather than build a non-descript shopping mall? That’s what they did in Grünau, and to my mind it had a devastating effect, while it could have been so easy to consider the plans that already existed.

What do you think are the specific challenges for post-communist mid-scale cities in contrast to the ones in western Europe?

First of all, these cities are a laboratory. And it’s not just an urban, but also a political issue that’s at stake. But in a way, this question also comes two decades too late. You can already wonder whether there is anything specific about post-communist cities. Aren’t we talking about something that has already mutated into something else, which can’t be called post-communist anymore?

The reason for my question was that I think that many of your theories could just as well apply to post-war city extensions in western Europe.

Definitely. In a project with the Berlage Insitute a few years ago, we invited planners from East and West Germany. The architects who built Grünau sat at a table with the architects who built Cologne-Chorweiler. To everybody’s surprise, they understood each other perfectly, because they had dealt with the same scale, the same problems. There were a lot of similarities. What ensued was a very nice professional debate, which wasn’t about politics and communism versus capitalism at all, but about pragmatic issues. That’s why I want to encourage this professional discourse: to see these projects as architecture again.

What do you think could be the future of settlements like Grünau?

I think they will solidify. They’re getting stronger, because contrary to what many people think, they do have quite a lot of qualities to offer. It’s just a question of administrative, economic and cultural maintenance, which in fact concerns any building. One can’t simply make a masterplan, build something and declare it finished after a few years, you need constant upgrades and care for those large-scale projects.

Doesn’t that depend a lot on the economic strength of the city in question?

Well, we shouldn’t forget that after the re-unification, these housing projects were in huge debt. The debt was distributed among the housing corporations, which became the new owners of the buildings. So there was always a minus. In addition, the state granted subsidies for the demolition of the estates. So it was quite logical for the corporations to demolish typologies, which they found difficult to maintain. In that sense I think that the situation of the settlements will solidify now and that they can survive for a longer time, but they’ll always be limping a bit as the spatial equilibrium between housing volumes, cultural institutions, service infrastructure and public facilities is organised differently than envisaged in the original design.

Isn’t the biggest problem about the unfinished state of these estates that infrastructure always came last? Mostly the communal institutions that were supposed to be built weren’t realized, which turned the settlements into mono-functional dormitories. That’s where the problems started – in the east and in the west.

Yes, and that’s something which we can still learn from today, although it should be very obvious. But probably people involved in administrative structures lose their sense of reality a bit. And many projects are too long-term. They should better be chopped up and phased, so they can be adapted to changes in the economic situation and can grow slowly instead of being generated very quickly. I hope that the credit crunch will help us to re-think this.

Interview by Anneke Bokern for City Visions Europe.