| Popis: |
That housing is the basic building block of urban form, the architectural problem most crucial to the city’s physical quality. This statement was the backbone of the argument of issue 123 of the American magazine Architectural Forum in 1965. It is stated along with two other points of view: housing as a product subject to free market law, and as the so cial tool needed to improve the lives of those most in need. The journal’s editor sought to reconcile these three axioms over more than a hundred pages with arguments from disparate contributors. CIAM postulates and urbanizations product of modern doctrine have been identified throughout history as the wrong answer. The famous death date of Modern Architecture proposed by Charles Jencks is caused by urban housing. But what other options were being considered at the time? Were those others the correct answers? Was architecture able to come up with an alternative that understood the complexity of the problem and its many edges? This communication aims, through the analysis of some of these texts and the buildings they present, to try to understand what kind of answers were offered to the discipline from a magazine like Architectural Forum. Peter Blake, Sibyl–Moholy–Nagy and Charles Moore will defend housing projects in London, Barcelona and San Francisco respectively. Special emphasis will be placed on the reasons that led Architectural Forum to change its editorial line. Until 1964 the owner of the magazine was Henry Luce, an entrepreneur also in charge of Time or Fortune magazines. In 1965, Peter Blake, the then editor–in–chief of the magazine, managed to get a non–profit organization, Urban American INC, as the new benefactor of the publication. |
