THE BODY OF THE CITY
If you make your way to the top of the Zizkov television tower, or any other tower (gothic, baroque or such), the panoramic views of Prague are stunning, but these views are also relatively meaningless because they momentarily violate the scale and texture of the city and provide a privileged point of view not in keeping with the day-to-day experience of Prague. They are rare, transcendent events, and they operate as symbolic exceptions (extensions) to the horizontal and optical unveiling of the city's body.
The optical and psychological (haptic) effect of Prague's famous complex structure is also its conceptual-corporeal soul. This secretive power within the city's form reveals itself in a topological and topographical striptease -- the zones between building complexes and at the edges of architectural formations emerge as if intimately offered to the flaneur, voyeur and traveler. A slow, evolutionary form of intimacy, it is a value that is immanent versus transcendent, residing within the physical, factual nature of the compact central city and, more primitively, more simplistically, in the more expansive outer districts where vestiges of natural systems remain. This frisson (or nervous energy) comes to expression in its most potent form - as an optical, specular, and gestural dynamic -- at the banks of the Vltava and on the peaks (Petrin, Hradcany, Vysehrad, Letna) of the urban landscape. These in-between places are in many ways erogenous zones -- passages or transitional features of the city-body formed by concentration, expansion and interrelation. Such a dimension is not a dream or fantasy but very real, and primarily subliminally or unconsciously experienced.Image (above, left) - Meier Proposal for ECM Plaza (Mlada Fronta Dnes, 06/12/2001)
It is with surprise, then, that Richard Meier and Partners' project planned for Pankrac, the ECM Radio Plaza, is promoted in the master plan documents as honoring this physiognomy when, in fact, Meier's transcendent, triumphalist, monumental and abstract architecture is completely at odds with this finely-tuned, speculative substrata. The detailed urban analysis of Meier's master plan is purely formalistic and consistent with the utopian character of such dogmatic architectures.
The existing high-rise structures on the flattened hilltop in Prague 4, built in the 1970s, were and remain questionable objects placed without sensitivity to the immediate and comprehensive environs of the Right Bank. The re-cladding and multiplication of these objects with a ground floor plaza that feigns or pretends to provide public open-space amenities is a rehearsing of the perennial fiction of modern urban planning, a ruse (trick), as the monumental character of the complex re-stages this classic error as, now, a thoughtful, respectful and forward-looking urban typology.
Angel City, and Golden Angel, by Jean Nouvel, in Smichov, is, by comparison, a work of extraordinary delicacy. Its insertion into the working-class enclave in Prague 5 was the result of an entirely different process; that is, Nouvel's famous concept of 'urban acupuncture'. Meier's exercise in neo-monumentality builds upon a former flawed master plan and further exploits the location and infrastructure of a problematic commercial complex. Such complexes have suspect rationales for consuming public resources -- for example, Rockefeller Center in Manhattan or La Defense in Paris.
Angel City does not pretend to offer public space -- given its overt appropriation of streets, blocks, and indeed the subway (as clients). To claim so would be an obvious lie. Nouvel, instead, gave to the city an enigmatic, signature building/complex that speaks to the optical unconscious of Prague's collective existence. Meier and Partners offer only the image of a commercial acropolis, vaingloriously compared to Prague Castle in the master plan. ECM Radio Plaza, as proposed, serves only the grandeur of the commercial vision and not the city itself. Nouvel's project connects to the subversive scopic (playful, voyeuristic) nature of the city and provides the Smichov district with a figure of semi-tragic complexity and, therefore, immanence.Image (right) - Nouvel's 'Andel' (1999)
The so-called "landscape" ... Given that ECM Radio Plaza is to be built in seven phases, there is no way to guarantee that the faux (pseudo-) municipal or public gestures will be realized, and it is evident that the idea of landscape represented here is a fabulous tableau of stone and trees with generic green zones surrounding select buildings. There is, in fact, very little landscape to speak of, notwithstanding the proposed tree-lined avenues (boulevards) on the five sides of the site. (The statistical evidence for this lack of landscape is carefully concealed in the numerical data presented in the master plan document. Of the entire Pentagon site, 72,750-sq.-m. is built form and 23,450-sq.-m. is so-called green space. This first figure includes 321,100-sq.-m. of real estate. The vast majority of space is paved plaza and the Pankrac Centrum includes even less landscape -- though the plan claims 17%. If you subtract the two recreational pavilions included to boost the percentage of green space in this portion of the Pentagon, the result is exactly thirteen trees.) The emphasis on retail and office space (plus the storage of cars) claims the vast bulk of the site and the remainder is classic-neo-modern, pseudo-public open space.
The complex is brazenly grand and ambitious. Too little concerned with its long-term impact on the city, with its out-sized demand on services, it represents a vigorous assault on the fragile structure of Prague and its physical complexity. It is the wrong language and the wrong message to the past and the future. It is also likely to be replicated around the city's edges, and like the panel fields (the mid-rise concrete apartments blocks circling Prague), further crush the last rich, heterogeneous reserves of the city and its lineaments -- that is, the landscape and topographic features that lie just below the masonry and paving, bleeding and bruised, or subsist disfigured and as mere vestiges in the outskirts of the city.
Gavin Keeney (June 2001)
This essay originally appeared, in Czech, in Architekt 8 (Praha, 2001)
POSTSCRIPT(S)
Dvakrát k Pankrácké pláni - Vlado Milunic (PES/CZ) - "Z duše mě mluví Gavin Keeney, který pochopil, že je v Praze nutné hledat podstatne hlubší koreny než je avantgarda a Havlícek. Predpokladem je souznení s erotogenními zónami mesta. Neco podobného je platné také pro urychlovace. Uvádím zámerne príklad z jaderné fyziky, tak aby tomu rozumeli úplne všichni. Magnetické pole se musí nejdríve dostat na vlnovou délku elektronů a pak je postupne nalákat na jinou rychlost. Je to ne nepodobné tomu, když chci nekoho sbalit."
"I could sign the words of Gavin Keeney who has understood that in Prague it is necessary to search for substantially deeper roots than the avant-garde and Havlícek. The resonance (harmony?) with the erotogenic zones of the city is the precondition. The same principle counts for nuclear accelerators. I give an example from nuclear physics on purpose so that everyone understands. The magnetic field must first harmonize with the wavelength of the electrons and then it can seduce them to another velocity. Not unlike the situation when I want to chat up someone [...] " (trans. Michal Kavan)
And, don't miss Meiered in Rome - Ara Pacis (Studium Urbis, 2001) - "At stake is whether the Ara Pacis -- an ornate marble 'altar of peace' dating from 13 B.C. and commemorating Emperor Augustus I -- will be protected by a structure that speaks of Rome and tradition or one that speaks of…well, stark, white angles and Richard Meier." (Notre Dame School of Architecture) - "The reversal -- and other shifts -- baffles the American architect, who is usually treated with more deference. 'The idea that anyone who comes into a new position of authority can undermine something that has been going on for years is outrageous,' Mr. Meier said. 'I have never heard of such a thing in all my life, and I have worked in almost every country in Europe.' He added, 'Is this typically Italian?'" (The New York Times, 06/29/01) / Artnews reported the opening of Meier's "Modernist cover" for Ara Pacis in the Summer 2006 edition ... See Lucinda Evans, "War of Words over Shrine to Peace", p. 78 ...
See also, Samir Younés (ed.), Ara Pacis: Contro-progetti/Counter-projects (Firenze: Alinea Editrice, 2002)
Richard Meier Architect
