Simon Sadler: The Situationist City (1998)

Reviewed by Matteo Casaburi

  Simon Sadler, born in 1968 in Solihull, West Midlands, is a professor of Architectural and Urban History at the University of California. His publications study the architectural ideas of the Archigram group, the Situationists, and other experimental practices. He wrote “The Situationist City” in 1998, trying to search for the Situationist ideas among the detritus of tracks, manifestoes, and work of art that they left behind. His intention, as mentioned in the introduction, is to draw out the common ground among the avant-garde groups that contributed to Situationism, rather than their considerable differences.   The foundation of the Situationist International (SI), and of their journal “Internationale Situationiste”, can be located in July 1957, when eight delegates, “in a state of semi-drunkenness”, met in a remote bar in Italy. They represented two key groups with different features: on the one hand the Lettrist International (1952-57), dominated by Guy Debord, whose inclination was directed toward the minimal and conceptual rather than the visual. On the other hand, there was the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (1954-57), whose founder Asger Jorn preferred an expressionist approach to the production of art. The former was specifically urban, grounded in Paris (a city considered at the moment the cultural centre of the world), the latter was removed from the metropolis being located in the Italian towns of Albisola and Alba. Yet both strands were highly politicized: the will to keep expressive social revolution at the core of the avant-garde had preoccupied also the COBRA group of artists and writer (1948-51), and in particular one of its leading light Constant Nieuwenhuys.     The structure of the book The book is organized in three parts: the first one, “The Naked City”, is a critique of the environment as it currently existed; the second one, “Formulary for a New Urbanism”, examines Situationist principles for the city and for city living; in the final part, called “New Babylon” are described the designs actually proposed for the Situationist city.   The poverty of modernism The Situationists though that Le Corbusier and his allies had instituted architecture of right angles and cadaverous rigidity. The machine for living in, rather than liberating the common man, was interring him as a component of functionalist society, leaving no space for poetry and dreams. Genuine social progress, as they argued, should not subsume the individual, but maximize his freedom and potential. On the contrary, the triumph of reason in the modernist’s city had left no space for imagination or expression. As Guy Debord stated, “unitary urbanism acknowledges no boundaries; it aims to form a unitary human milieu in which separations such as work/leisure or public/private will finally be dissolved”, providing spontaneous manifestations of social life. The Situationist city was at odds with the Corbusian vision of people at ease in an ideal landscape, a place where the struggle with nature, with the body, with space, and with class had inexplicably come to an end. The Ville Contemporaine was forever contemporary only by freezing time and ending history.

  The Naked City The Naked city was the second psychogeographic map, and was designed by Debord and Jorn in 1957. It expresses the incompatibility of Cartesian logic with the real experience of the city, characterized by the intimacy between environment and human emotion. Rather than float above the city as some sort of omnipotent all-possessing eye, the Situationist overview of the city was reconstructed in the imagination, piecing together an experience of space that was actually terrestrial, fragmented, subjective, temporal and cultural. The arrows implied a massive number of permutations for drift. The weight, shape and patterning of the arrows suggested the strength of the bonds between the so called unities of ambiance, those places with special qualities within the turmoil of the city.Its importance is recognizable as it mourned the loss of old Paris, prepared for the city of the future, explored the city’s structures and uses, criticized traditional mapping, and investigated the relationship between language, narrative and cognition.     Constructing situations “We must try to construct situations, that is to say collective ambiances, ensembles of impressions determining the quality of a moment” (Debord). The constructed situation was conceived as a twenty-four hour tragedy played out for real. It would stimulate a new sort of behaviour, an improved future social life based upon human encounter and play. It is possible to relate this feature of the constructed situation with experimental theatre, both being founded upon the concept of active rather than passive participation.     Revolution No post-war avant-garde aspired to the mantle of revolutionary radicalism more fervently than the Situationists. They promised that their architecture would one day revolutionize everyday life and release the ordinary citizen into a world of experiment, anarchy and play.   Drifting as a revolution of everyday life Wandering around the city, drifting without destination, neither going to work nor properly consuming, was a waste of time in the temporal economy, in a society where “time is money.” Being an occupation that was unproductive of anything except encounters with other people and places, the drift became a transgression of the alienated world. A “détourned” city Détournement can be defined as a variation on a previous media work, in which the newly created one has a meaning that is antagonistic or antithetical to the original. A similar term more familiar to English speakers would be “turnabout” or “derailment”. “The architectural complex will make plastic and emotional use of all sorts of détourned objects”.(Debord) The Situationists’ disregard for any conventional sense of “high” and “low”, for architectural decorum or uniformity, and their advocacy of a free mixing of architectural sources, had extraordinary aesthetic implications.   Unitary Urbanism The Situationists conceived a city constructed of grand situations, between which the inhabitants would drift, endlessly. Urban dynamics would no longer be driven by capital and bureaucracy, but by participation. This idea rejected the idealistic quest of fixed forms and permanent solutions that had been the basis of traditional town planning, considering “the urban environment as the terrain of a game in which one participates”, the city as a giant playground and architecture as a medium of social contact.  

New Babylon's Structure The city is raised on pilotis above nature and old cities, thus providing an extension of the Earth’s surface, a clean sheet for three-dimensional urban planning and growth. It is precariously suspended over entire cities and countries, making literal Debord and Jorn’s invocation of a “floating city”. It is also comparable to Yona Friedman’s spatial urbanism. It was based upon a system of movable partitions within a fixed framework, so that spaces could be constantly mounted and dismounted.   New Babylon’s utopian fun The sovereignty of fun and leisure generated the plan of New Babylon. New Babylon’s space frame was ideally suited to the creation of transitory, amorphous architecture, fantastic vistas and fertile space, ready for homo ludens to let his imagination run wild. Fun would not be a break from work or social normalcy; it was not something to be treated as a sinful diversion from work, nor a commodity peddled in specialized leisure centres.   Disorientation   Every space is temporal, nothing is recognizable, everything is discovery, everything changes, nothing can serve as a landmark; “the changing of landscape from one hour to the next will result in complete disorientation”. New Babylon was one immeasurable labyrinth, a “dynamic labyrinth” rather than a “classic labyrinth”. The disadvantage of the latter is that the subject is distracted by the fact that there is a destination, the centre. Moreover, the dynamic labyrinth would be determined by the users since they could choose their trajectories at the macrolevel, while retaining the option to reshape the labyrinth at microlevel using the mobile elements.   Conclusion The movement, despite its lack of unity, had a great influence:  orthodox modernism came to be regarded as practically inhuman. Strict zoning lost favour to mixed use, and many city centres became dominated by leisure use, even if it was of course a commercial rather than anarchic leisure. On the other hand, Situationists were unable to arrange their revolutionary devices (psychogeography, drift, détournement, constructed situations and unitary urbanism) into a coherent program, and also the program that they set themselves was so ambitious and uncompromising that it condemned itself to failure. Probably even most Situationists realized the near-impossibility of constructing truly Situationist architecture.  

         

Simon Sadler: The Situationist City (1999)

Discussed by Christina Gregoriou

The author of the Situationist City, Simon Sadler was born in 1969 West Midlands. He is a Proffessor in Architecture and Urban History at the Universtiy of California, Davis and formerly a lecturer in Architectural History at the University of Nottingham. This book was intended to extract the Situationist architectural theory from a revolutionary program that attempted to confront the ideological totality of the Western world. The aim of the book was to search for the situationist city among the manifestoes, and works of art that the Situationists have left behind. Sadler focused on the early situationist program to try and save it as he says ’from the obscurity to which it was later on banished by the Situationist International.’

The Situationists were a group of revolutionaries influenced by the artistic avant-garde groups of the time. Early situationism was formed in 1957. The principle group and journals that formed Situationist International originated from two main lines: The expressionist groups of COBRA, and the International Movement of an Imaginist Bauhaus (IMIB) and the conceptual groups of the Lettrist and Lettrist International.


The Naked City

At the first part of the book, The Naked City, Sadler take us through the Situationisms’ critique of the environment as it currently existed. The Situationists were affected by the writings of thinkers like Henri Lefebre and Michael De Certeau who explored the principle of everydayness. They developed an awareness of the social structuring of the city into self-contained distinct quarters, of the city based on class occupation and function, but yet reliant on other components of the urban machine. Sociology implied this traditional planning that had grown under a rationalist umbrella, had reduced city structuring into a misleading, simplistic level.

Their experiments and case studies, analyzing the psychogeographical factors, influencing their mood, behavior and their choice of route as they were having their “drift” around the city. Each case study of the redevelopment of the naked city illustrated the situationist claims that urbanism represented a drive to rationalize, homogenize and commercialize Paris

An example of that is Debord’s and Jorn’s psychogeographical map where they cut up city street maps of Paris in a process of studying indigenous working class-zones. The map mourns the loss of old Paris, represents the city of the future, and explores the cities structures and use.
It serves as guides to areas of central Paris threatened for redevelopment, retaining those parts worth visiting, disposing of all those parts that they thought had been spoiled by capitalism.



Formulary for a New Urbanism

In the second part, Formulary for a New Urbanism, Sadler examines situationist principles for the city and city living The situationist city was a constant play of contrasts, between confined and open spaces, darkness and illumination, circulation and isolation. They described their drifts as radical rereadings of the city. They uncovered the social body of the naked city by ‘becoming streetwise’. They would explore discreet public gardens. The passages of the drifts were lined with cheap-shops and cafes; the guettos offered not only a different ambience, but also a non-bourgeois cost of living. Situationists would use their experience of language as a way of revolutionizing our consciousness of the city. Graffiti became regarded as a sign of the primitive energy of the everyday life of the masses. They even suggested the abolition of museums and the distribution of masterpieces to bars; believing that this would completely undermine cultural imperialism and elitism


New Babylon

In the third part, A New Babylon, Sadler described the closed situationists reached in making their ideas into reality; and that was through their proposal of the New Babylon. They ultimate goal was to reconstruct the city through a series of constructed situations. They assumed there was a ‘formulary’ that existed that would permit situations to be produced on demand. They claimed that each constructed situation would provide décor and ambience of such power that it would stimulate new sorts of behaviour, a glimpse into an improved future social life based upon human encounter and play. Sadler describes the Situationists' ideas of the Unitary Urbanism where it would no longer be driven by capital and bureaucracy, but by participation. It would be a unitary organism with different organs, dependent and inter-dependent on each other. In each experimental city, unitary urbanism was to act by way of a certain number of force fields, quarters. Each quarter would tend towards a specific harmony, divided off from neighbouring harmonies.

The Situationist International began to feel that unitary urbanism should not abandon the existing city in flavor of a virgin ground. That is why Constant’s New Babylon is shown suspended over entire cities and countries making literal Situationist International members', Debord and Jorn's, invocation in the pages of their Memoires of a ‘floating city’. In the structures that he proposed he would house some of the multiple functions that the traditional city accommodates individually. A typical sector in New Babylon could handle leisure, transport and shelter, addressing some of the situationist worries about the separation of activities by rational urbanism.

For the New Babylonians fun would not be a break from work and social normality. The principal activity of the inhabitants would be continuous drifts. They wanted to create that sort of disorientation, with changing landscapes from one hour to the next. The taste of the drift tends to promote all sorts of new forms of labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of production. Situationism tried to explore the concept that the accelerated movement and change of the city in the 20th century were incapable of relation to the pattern of a preexisting fabric. New Babylonians could physically rearrange the street they stood in. Every space is temporary, nothing is recognizable, everything changes, and nothing can serve as a landmark; the sense of labyrinth and disorientation that Constant wanted to emphasize that it could work supremely well as social space

At a later stage card holding members of the Situationist International comforted themselves that it was they, not ‘the technichian’ Constant who held the key to the effective use of those situationist ideas merely represented in New Babylon. After Constant left, he was denounced as a 'public relations man…integrating the massed into capitalist technological civilization’ with his ‘models of factories’.

After a few editions of the Situationist Interantional, they took an intensive critical turn that soon terminated their direct interest in Art & Urbanism, which also put Constant’s view of the Situationist City as the New Babylon out in the cold.

Simon Sadler: The Situationist City (1999)

A review by Natasha Gershfield


Simon Sadler was born in the West Midlands in 1968 and is currently a Professor of Architectural and Urban History and a Chancellor's Fellow at the University of California. He researches the post World War II history and theory of architecture and urbanism and has since taken a strong interest in the Situationist International group.

In 1999 MIT Press published Sadlers' account of the Situationist International's efforts in his third book; The Situationist City. He puts forward his opinions of the accomplishments and more so; the supposed degradation of the group amid their most prominent years between1957 and 1972.
The Situationist International were formed by a merging of revolutionary groups, such as The Imaginist Bauhaus and The Lettrist International, whose members had the joint opinion that capitalism, professionalism and mass post war production had led to the sterilization of the works and threatened to wipe out any sense of spontaneity and playfulness. They were enchanted by places and buildings that seemed to bypass religion, modernization and capitalism.
The book introduces readers to the Situationists ideas of psychogeography, detournement, drift, situations and unitary urbanism. The vision that people would not be seduced by the city of corporate power and capital and would seek their own utopia by “cutting up” the original and putting it back together to see it in a new perspective. The drift encouraged people to wander the cities in search for events and areas unspoiled by the spectacle, traffic circulation, unsuitable and monotonous post war architecture and functionality. It was meant to be playful, cheap and surprising with a sense of organised spontaneity.

After reading The Situationist City, with little previous knowledge of the subject, the Situationists could be seen as unproductive; making little impact and giving up before they executed their ideas. However, this could be argued it gives people a warped, negative view of the group. Readers may find it difficult to admire any of the Situationists theories due to the narrator of the subject. Although Sadler originally seems to give the impression that he will convey a rather objective view, he appears to believe that the Situationists were incompetent and inept, and this opinion comes through strongly as he seizes every opportunity to discredit them; using rather provocative terms such as; “overambitious”, “preposterous” and “schizophrenic” to describe them. The fact the Sadler uses the term “Situationism” throughout the book, regardless of the fact that the Situationists were against this term, emphasises how little respect he has for the group. He again seems to be belittling their theories. He justifies his use of this term stating:



“Of course, Situationists knew full well that there was such a thing as Situationism... The situationists' caution about a “Situationism” was a clever way of reminding themselves of the dangers of becoming “academic” in their procedures.”
Sadler seems to promote this idea of drift: “If we wish to know more, we must descend to the streets ourselves,”. However, he has not carried it out and does not sound as if he intends on trying. He also has not conducted interviews with any living members of the Situationalist International such as Constant.
Simon Sadler discusses the ultimate goal of the Situationists; to reconstruct the entire city. He talks of their promise to one day revolutionise everyday life and introduce experiment, anarchy and play, with ever-changing and high-tech features. Sadler considers that members of the Situationist International seemed to be unsure whether their Situationist City would be produced using detournement or a New Babylon. He believes that the Situationist International could not decide on how to construct situations and would therefore be unlikely that they could agree on how to transform the the city itself. He speaks of how they retreated from the ambition of a new utopia, and professed Situationism as an analytical metaphor or an ongoing experiment in living, which could be envisaged by detournement.
The Situationist City depicts Sadler' sview that the abandonment of imagining utopia was a devastating decision to the Situationists, yet probably one of their greatest contributions to the history of avant-garde; the recognition that in changing the world, avant-garde art cannot replace the popular redistribution of power. Others believe that their ideas and objectives are still influential even to this day. Sadler makes only two very brief references in the book to the “revolutionary events of May 1968”. Not only does this oversight seem to assume that all his readers know all about it, but also makes the event, like all others he talks of, seem insignificant, yet mentions it as if it was an important incident.

This book is rather difficult to get into, with an over complicated introduction and the author's assumption that its readers have a rather full background knowledge of the subject.

Sadler seems to criticise the Situationists because they were not builders, and were only really interested in detourning existing routes and buildings. However, they were not architects and they did not aim to attract academics and rational thinkers.
“Occasionally the 'rightness' of the place, people and understanding would be like that moment when the reader of a complex text, suddenly grasps the content of what is being read, only to descend again into the maelstrom of words.”
Although here Sadler is describing the detournement that the Situationists carried out, it seems to fit how this book could be interpreted. Situationists, Debord and Jorn, created maps such as the “Naked city” of 1957, which highlighted urban areas, threatened by redevelopment, retaining the parts that they believed were still worth visiting and disposing of the bits that they felt had been spoiled by capitalism and bureaucracy. They called this method of mapping detournement. It seemed as though this book too should be dissected and collaged back together; highlighting sections that gave a broader knowledge about the Situationists, retaining the parts that introduced their theories and ideas, and disposing of the bits that had been impaired by the authors conservative attitude.
Simon Sadler seems to focus on what the Situationist Internationals planned to do, yet does not communicate what they actually achieved, making its readers assume, as he did, that they did not actually accomplish a significant amount.