New Urbanism and Liquid Modernity
We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That’s lost. We know how to read every promise in faces — the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry” (Ivan Chtcheglov -- Formulary for a New Urbanism)
Still from the 17-minute animated film Logorama made by the French collective H5.
In Formulary for a New Urbanism, the 1953 essay that inspired the Letterist International and the Situationist International, Chtcheglov conjures up an image of a rigid city where we need to ‘strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards’. He speaks of ‘mechanistic civilizations’ with ‘frigid architecture that ultimately lead to boring leisure’. A city of abstraction, ‘…inanimate and storyless, soothes the eye.’ A city of towers with toes dressed in cement shoes. Stuck. Sunk. Burdened by banalization. A city where everyone is ‘hypnotized by production and conveniences’. Chtcheglov proposes a new architecture to cure the city of this ‘mental disease’.
A new architecture can express nothing less than a new civilization (Chtcheglov)
Chtcheglov’s ‘new architecture’ will ‘be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be both a means of knowledge and a means of action.’ Chtcheglov may have been writing about architecture, about buildings and physical space, but the technological developments that he said would ‘make possible the individual’s unbroken contact with cosmic reality’ did not appear in the brick pits. The ‘new architecture’ that featured mobile houses mounted on tracks that could ‘go down to the sea in the morning and return to the forest in the evening’ did not appear on wheels. The ‘new architecure’ appeared on telephone wires.
It was the new communication technologies that emerged in the late twentieth century, the internet, the mobile phone, wireless, and then the smart phone, that infiltrated ‘architectural space’ and extended it with ‘virtual space’. Chtcheglov’s city districts that would rise from the ‘new architecture’ did not appear in the urban environment, but the virtual environment. The Bizarre Quarter, the Sinister Quarter, and the Useful Quarter all appeared as communities online. Chtcheglov expects that ‘the main activity of the inhabitants will be CONTINUOUS DRIFTING’ and that ‘the changing of landscapes from one hour to the next will result in total disorientation’. Drifting online. Surfing online. Oozing online.
The new architecture in the virtual space was built for ‘speed, escape, passivity’ (Richard Sennett) and this allowed ‘the system and free agents to remain radically disengaged, to by-pass each other instead of meeting’ (Zygmunt Bauman). Chtcheglov argues that drifting ‘is a good replacement for a Mass,’ as ‘it is more effective in making people enter into communication with the ensemble of energies, seducing them for the benefit of the collectivity.’
This has led me to adapt the concept of drifiting -- the dérive, developed by Chtcheglov in Formulary for a New Urbanism, to the concepts outlined by Bauman in Liquid Modernity. It appears that the period of liquid modernity, the period of modernity we currently inhabit, is an opportune time to revive the dérive. Viva le dérive.
This a short film in which Ivan Chtcheglov speaks to camera. Made after his institutionalization. Provenance unknown.