Seite 2: The Ghost Dance of architecture

Consider the 'Ghost Dance' of planning and the 'magic shirt' of architecture at the end of the 20th century. Its last great hope is the city. The rebirth of the grand 19th century city, whose Royal Palaces, Grand Avenues, Department stores, Great railway stations, Opera Houses, Theatres, Great Parks, Parade Grounds and Military Barracks have become hotels, museums, art galleries, high-priced apartments, air-conditioned shopping centres, restaurants, bars, clubs, movie theatres, air-rights offices, cash-dispensing banks, underground transport interchanges and car parks.

This 'replacement city', capable of reoccupying and re animating the corpses of the great cities left over from the past, hypnotises the embattled defenders of the culture of architecture in Europe just as the idea of a new surface of the earth hypnotised the 'Ghost Dancers' of Wovoka in the Dakota Badlands one hundred years ago. To us the 'replacement city' promises a new lease of life, a revival of the economy of those Old World European cities whose hearts had almost stopped beating from the overthrow of Empires, the ravages of wars, the disfigurements of redevelopment, and the evacuation of investment to other continents.

Were it not for the 'Ghost Dance' of the urban professionals, these cities would already be recognised to be in as hopeless a state as Indian villages in the path of a railroad. A century after their main development ceased, all these cities are breathing with difficulty, and only with the aid of tourism. That corrosive oxygen that burns out urban lungs even as it prolongs a feeble economic pulse. Florence, for example. The great Italian city of art and culture that has been addicted to tourism for more than a century, has striven to protect its historic centre at any cost, creating in the process a vast ring of suburbs without infrastructure that is slowly choking it to death. The 'Ghost Dance' answer to the crisis of Florence is the Vittorini masterplan of 1993, with its promise to create a new polycentric 'Florentine urban zone'. It is a project that is incapable of success because its modesty displays its disproportion to the magnitude of the crisis of the city.

London is ten times larger than Florence, and its problems are proportionally bigger, so it tries to solve them differently. London still pins its hopes on development, on an agreement reached in the 1980s between the forces of development and the forces of conservation, wherein it was decided that the former would be permitted to insert vast new air-conditioned, sealed buildings with electronic satellite communications systems into old parts of the city centre -- but only behind the preserved facades of ancient buildings already there, and only within the framework of the medieval street pattern and uneconomic lot sizes bequeathed by history.