State of the legacy: reviewing a decade of writings on the regeneration promises of London 2012

Abstract

necting architectural design, urban planning, and landscape architecture. The fourth chapter, ‘Reconstructing the City, constructing New Towns,’ describes heterogeneous experiences connected by a shared attention devoted to the memory of war destruction, comparing divergent approaches and projects like the global reconstruction plan of Hiroshima by Kenzo Tange – framed in the context of the tabula rasa caused by the nuclear apocalypse -, and the series of numerous (700) small playgrounds proposed by Aldo van Eyck in the interstices of the historic city of Amsterdam. Finally, the authors devote special attention to the role of criticism in the debates on urban design, which flourished in parallel with the evolution of urban proposals. The work reveals numerous conflicts and contradictions, as exemplified by the debates on the New Towns, which originated multiple forms of criticism and resistance in the UK, France, and Scandinavia. Chapter 8, titled ‘Finding Meaning in the Postmodern City,’ traces with rigour and acuteness the divergent and articulated positions which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a reaction to functionalist planning, starting from the diverse forms of radical criticism offered by the publications and projects of Vittorio Gregotti, Oswald Mathias Ungers, and Aldo Rossi, but also in the ‘anti-modern’ positions of Colin Rowe, Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown. Excessive importance is probably assigned to the role of Léon Krier, whose singular trajectory took him from the condition of brilliant draftsman of Jim Stirling’s perspectives to a radical polemicist and the favourite architect of Prince Charles in his campaign against modern architecture. Concerning the international movement for the ‘Critical Reconstruction of the European City,’ more than Léon, it is possibly his brother, Rob Krier, who deserves to be remembered, along with other contemporary protagonists, including Álvaro Siza, Herman Hertzberger, John Hejduk, and Vittorio Gregotti and Oswald Mathias Ungers themselves, for the exemplary contribution in what was the most critical laboratory of those years: the Internationale Bauaustellung (International Building Exhibit IBA) in West Berlin, under the guidance of Josef Paul Kleihues.