space diametrically opposed to topos, to what is contingent, but which has undergone a process of generalization to all of society and, all in all, to the City as a relational space, which has little by little grown in spatial importance in accordance with the demand for privacy of each individual.
The public spaces of the agora or forum evolved until the Renaissance and
Baroque periods, essentially in artistic and cultural refinement. Beginning
with the triumph of the French Revolution, the generalization of these spaces
throughout different areas of the city enhanced the idea of individual public
spaces for each neighborhood, for each urban area, with a minimal character
of uniqueness. The schemes for urban expansion of the 19th Century are a
clear manifestation of these ideas, which would be supported in their development
by the growing technical capacity and the prevailing need, after the order
of the existing city was described as chaos, of placing against it new ideal
orders, new polis, models which, in practice, are rationalized projections
of something imaginary. The concept of a revolutionary city, which marked
the image for our cities. The response to a technique, just as at the turn
of the century mathematicians quickly reached a barrier of complex calculation
owing to an absence of nimble operative systems, similar to the barrier
holding back protobiologists lacking in microscopes, or architects themselves,
moored to the neos.
The changes that were brewing in the 19th Century and which began to consolidate
themselves in this period pointed not to rejecting the notion of structure,
but to generating and conceiving of open structures, which would bend in
function to the specific realities under which the City was located and
developed, where the place was not considered as the frame, but rather as
the object itself.
The pre-methaphysical Greeks had a very clear understanding of this notion of topos, of Place; there almost seems to be a mathematical equation, with structure as x and what is contingent as a function of x, the result being: y = f(x). An example of this is the urban planning of the Acropolis, which interpreted what is contingent as forming an almost divine notion of space-place, where everything that was collective or individual in the city, its very aesthetic purpose, was set under almost inimitable conditions, since in its origin there was no intention of leadership or managing bodies, but instead the relation with nature in the shape of myths, where marriage with the territory was one of impregnation.
It is in the first third of the
century, where the imagination championed by the avant-gardists was the
only thing that advanced in the contemplation of the universe of details,
of progressively more subtle ideas, when this idea of Place was reintroduced
and a commitment was made to what neoplasticism meant as opposed to classicism,
open, dynamic, radical and poetic plastic arts. One of its protagonists,
Le Corbusier, was to update Aristotle's initial assertion: "The majority
of the cities studied offer a chaotic image nowadays. These cities do not
correspond at all to their mission, which should consist in satisfying the
prime, biological and psychological needs of their population."
This set of protagonists, the Avant-gardists, with their reflections and
proposals, furnished us with the basis, the grounds for structuring, rather
than a Closed City developed by classical architecture, an Open City. They
provided us with a change in our linear course and presented us with a way
out of the loop of the 19th Century. It was up to us to finalize the parameters,
create the tools, develop the language that would allow us to give expression
to that Open City which we now refer to as the Post-Industrial City. Intuition
and imagination were and are available tools, but they are not always a
given and they need for architects or urban planners to train them, in order
to enable the new city structures, initially rejected as absurd, to be satisfied
or accepted as logical.