TY - JOUR
T1 - Suburbia and Social Democracy: The golden age of Danish 'Modernism'
AU - Bjerregaard Jensen, Lotte
PY - 2003
Y1 - 2003
N2 - Both the tectonics and the way of relating to the landscape point to the same architectural stock. Do these romantic ideals regarding nature have any significance today? The first step must be to pry behind the Klintian School's silence and make the values underlying housing developments such as Søndergårdsparken and Carlsro explicit. Values degenerate if they are not made explicit, and we end up with highdensity lowrise cooperative housing with queer arrangements of bicycle sheds and buildings inserted into the green, which stand as a form of echo of something that everyone has forgotten. .The socalled 'ecological crisis' has generated a tremendous interest in nature, combined with the fundamental motivation for moving to a house, that of 'living in the green', points in the direction of the obvious potential of the housing developments of 'The Golden Age of Danish Modernism'. Those values that can influence and lash together a collective space must be particularly robust and basic in character, in order to be able to appeal and to exhibit permanence over time. It is possible that the love of nature's essence, of the climate's fluctuations, of the character of large trees, etcetera, has this robust character. In terms of the tectonic, with today's wages, to come anyway near the proud display of craftsmanship in the buildings of the past seems virtually impossible. Where William Morris wanted to liberate the worker from enslave ment to industry and alternatively off er the noble life of a craftsman, the situation now is that the industrial labourer has been f reed of industrial enslavement by heil, as one is almost enticed to say, to paraphrase the illustrious statement of a Danish union boss and this has not resulted in more or better craftsmanship. What remains is the challenge of how a tectonic programme can be expressed in architecture credibly and realistically, through ordinary every day occupations? The author herself belongs to a generation of architects who have felt a special admiration for Rem Koolhaas' thoughts, where one is 'allowed' to f ind inspiration in the absurd yet powerful phenomena of suburbia as Smithsonfound inspiration in Passaic, New Jersey. The question is thus: How do you get from the 'green', across the parking lot and to the 'mall'?
AB - Both the tectonics and the way of relating to the landscape point to the same architectural stock. Do these romantic ideals regarding nature have any significance today? The first step must be to pry behind the Klintian School's silence and make the values underlying housing developments such as Søndergårdsparken and Carlsro explicit. Values degenerate if they are not made explicit, and we end up with highdensity lowrise cooperative housing with queer arrangements of bicycle sheds and buildings inserted into the green, which stand as a form of echo of something that everyone has forgotten. .The socalled 'ecological crisis' has generated a tremendous interest in nature, combined with the fundamental motivation for moving to a house, that of 'living in the green', points in the direction of the obvious potential of the housing developments of 'The Golden Age of Danish Modernism'. Those values that can influence and lash together a collective space must be particularly robust and basic in character, in order to be able to appeal and to exhibit permanence over time. It is possible that the love of nature's essence, of the climate's fluctuations, of the character of large trees, etcetera, has this robust character. In terms of the tectonic, with today's wages, to come anyway near the proud display of craftsmanship in the buildings of the past seems virtually impossible. Where William Morris wanted to liberate the worker from enslave ment to industry and alternatively off er the noble life of a craftsman, the situation now is that the industrial labourer has been f reed of industrial enslavement by heil, as one is almost enticed to say, to paraphrase the illustrious statement of a Danish union boss and this has not resulted in more or better craftsmanship. What remains is the challenge of how a tectonic programme can be expressed in architecture credibly and realistically, through ordinary every day occupations? The author herself belongs to a generation of architects who have felt a special admiration for Rem Koolhaas' thoughts, where one is 'allowed' to f ind inspiration in the absurd yet powerful phenomena of suburbia as Smithsonfound inspiration in Passaic, New Jersey. The question is thus: How do you get from the 'green', across the parking lot and to the 'mall'?
M3 - Journal article
SP - 6
EP - 27
JO - OASE , tijdschrift voor architectuur
JF - OASE , tijdschrift voor architectuur
IS - 61
ER -