Archi.ru:
– You are well known as a specialist on housing and urban planning, author of projects, books and articles in this fields. It will be very interesting to hear your opinion how high quality urban space should look like?
Peter Ebner:
– In history when we look on old cities (and also in Moscow) there was a knowledge of what urban spaces should be. And people like Vincenzo Scamozzi who was taught by Andrea Palladio and is one of my favourite architects wrote a book about urban planning. This book was read by 22 years old archbishop who was the head of Salzburg at that time. He was so influenced by this book that he raised hundreds of houses to pray this beautiful sequence of squares and lanes which we enjoy now in Salzburg as a public space. The Quality of this historic sample are the great diversity of different sizes. I think this diversity of sizes horizontal and vertical is important. It doesn’t matter if it is shopping mall, housing or something else. In the last hundred years we lost diversity. Because we started to build in the same style and sizes repeating, repeating, repeating.
Originally we all had diversity in the city. Its not something which we create new, it is something which was already created since hundreds of years if not thousands. And this kind of quality was getting lost in urban planning.
In the period of «Gründerzeit» (late 19th century) developers started to build more and more dense buildings and they build on nearly 90 percent of the site. With this density and not perfect hygiene in cities a lot of illness was created. Sigfried Giedion and Walter Gropius for example wrote about it. The discipline of medicine was becoming strong in the discussion of urban planning and architects defined that it is needed to have certain distance between houses to get enough daylight. With this fact Gropius and others was creating their «new» urban structures and this was influencing the whole urban planning discipline. Simple urban structures. Very economical, but so sense of urban spaces as we was used to have. Now we would not need anymore this solutions in urban planning because of medicine reason etc.. But we lost the capability in the discipline how to create urban spaces with quality. The discipline of urban planning become very weak, it started to be mostly just graphical.
– Sort of a «graphical carpet».
– Indeed. Its not anymore about the quality of spaces. Its very rational, all developers like it, its very cheap to build by simply repeating, straight lines. But historic cities except of Romans and Americans, who have the strong grid, didn’t have so much this kind of system because towns were usually developed out of the historic context of different owners of sites, different relations between them and this created this quality which we all enjoy. As a result now for me at least in Germany the weakest profession in architecture is urban planning. And if you are in jury for the urban planning competition and talk with urban planners they talk mostly about graphics, they don’t think about urban spaces, they do not imagine what makes the difference.
In Germany and in all German speaking countries one of the most sold book in urban planning is Camillo Sitte and the least reading one. Which means everybody have it in their library but I am sure most of them never read it. I read it. And if you read it you understand what is the quality of the square, how people pass it, how traffic is passing and what happen if they are passing in different ways, why different sizes have different qualities. And when you are in juries sometimes they use as a marketing tool the name of Camillo Sitte squares. The only answer is - Sorry, this has nothing to do with Camillo Sitte, this is just stupid. This is the main problem now that we are too used to marketing, branding and not anymore imagine the 3rd dimension. When you look on models from top –most of them look beautiful, no question. But as a result- it has nothing to do with real life.
– So diversity of urban space is the most essential to make it high quality. Can you make an example from your practice?
– Yes. We made an urban planning in Berg-Am-Laim one of the areas in Munich there we developed ideas of diversity. It was a competition for mainly housing, offices, shopping and two kindergartens. Originally it is a workers area and a lot of families are living there. It was an international competition and we won because we introduced the qualities of Vincenzo Scamozzi to our law possibilities and to our way of living now.
We created there different qualities of spaces and variations which we all like from historic towns in a contemporary way. And this we try to do always in our urban planning projects it doesn’t matter if it is in Munich or in Mexico.
In Mexico, for instance, the sun situation is very particular as it falls down on earth practically vertical. We made a mixed used project called PM Steel in Polanco, Mexico df, because of the light situation it was necessary to make houses close to each other.
At the same time we had a historical grid of the city quarter. So the decision was to continue the square/grid structure in the outer form and to make everything very flexible and diverse inside.
Another example is in Munich Regerstrasse there we also tried to have different qualities on plazas or public spaces along the street to make everything more close to the human scale. As you know I did a lot of research on housing and housing economics. For example we asked over 1 500 people in Munich who wanted to buy an apartment. And we prepared for them several questions not only about the quality of house but also about the urban spaces.
The interesting answer is that people like to have manly 5-7 storey high building and they like to have diversity, like each house should look differently. The problem sometimes in competitions is that German architects, German jury sometimes like very long buildings with 100 - 500 meter long continuously the same, but its boring. It has nothing to do anymore what we like. The question is always- why we lost this diversity and why we like to go so simple.
– Well the answer is evident, isn’t it? In most cities after the war it become more simple and after because of the economical reasons it stayed like that.
– I think the reason is that we are all lazy as architects. If I look drawings from the past of baroque buildings I think most of us could not even draw them now. That’s why all of us like so much the motto «Less is more» because it allows us to be lazy Most of houses don’t have even interesting floor plans. That’s the reason why I wrote the book «Typology+», there the floor plans are in scale so people can copy them. If they cant develop it by themselves they should have good copies of good projects. It is better as to copy bad ones, or?
You know when I was coming to Munich and went to jury originally it was like one architect wins a urban competition and does the whole project. I said no. I think that it is much better when several architects work on one project. Like that you have diversity by itself. In this since I like the Dutch system. In Holland the architect who wins the urban planning competition can invite other architects of his choice to join him. I think this makes the quality of projects in Holland.
– The project on Potsdamerplatz in Berlin was also made by several different architects and its hard to say it is very successful.
– Its because everyone is a «bodybuilder» and this is a problem. The problem is that in architecture we are becoming too much bodybuilders. Everyone try to build more fancy, more crazy. Well Potsdamerplatz you even can accept because once it was a center of the city, a powerful place. But we also have it in suburban areas. There are architects coming from Denmark etc. from elsewhere and making bodybuilder architecture. They look good in publications, but for people its horrible. As architects we lost capability to design for people- we work just for magazines. And initially architects were the voice of the society. They were the once who told- People need this- now we lost it. I strongly recommend that we as Architects should visit buildings and urban projects by ourselves to see them in reality and not just on photos in publications where they was photoshoped like fashion models.
– There is now a new stream in Russia that we invite for competitions international companies. Is it good for the city that knowing little about Moscow for example and having just an imagination of the city architects are coming and making projects here?
– Well, for example Munich is a very close town. Its not inviting many foreign architects. Salzburg- tiny city has a lot of international architects coming. Both is good. In Salzburg we have the practice that nearly all international architects who do projects become first for several years part of the advisor board of the city planning department. The member of the advisory board are during their period not allowed to have planning commissions in Salzburg. So they get to know first the city very well. For example as Massimiliano Fuksas was making his project in Salzburg, he was not «flying with the helicopter and making sketches». He was first in the advisory board for several years and after he was invited for the project. At this time he knew already the city and more important what makes the city different from other cities before he started to design the project. For me it would be smart for the head architect of Moscow to install a similar structure because this would allow him also to listen and get to know different opinions.
