The Terrifying Beauty of the Twentieth Century The European Metropolis any area in history —except perhaps the Forum in Rome — ever ‘been richer hitectural history than the Forum des Halles and its immediate vicinity, ding Beaubourg? : ere an entire urban region is now a seamless, almost Babylonian amalgam truction, kitsch resurrection, authentic historical particles, a delirium of iructures, a mass grave of both good and bad intentions that craw] out of pil like the rejected species of an alternative evolution. Jat parallel Galépagos is this experiment part? about the culmination at La Défense, where all the geometric rigor of a- ses in a maelstrom, of randomness and incoherence, made more the profusion of roads, ramps, and other “connections” that resem- tunnel test accidentally executed in concrete? Yet it mysteriously least, is fudl of people. talk about the richness of the Front de Seine? So many varia- theme! ular affliction that renders these treasures invisible, inac- ) Why are we all part of this ineffectual chorus that moans, about its culminating achievements? Must the 20th For those who can forget—for a fleeting‘Jn both cases, the current revisions are based on denial. ¢ richness of Berlin resides in the breathtaking sequence of its successive earnations: neoclassical city, early metropolis, Nazi capital, modernist test d, war victim, Lazarus, Cold War hero, etc. Now, in the name of history, |" is erasing this evidence, even the evidence of its destruction (the most gnificant fact of its history, not to mention its aesthetics). olierdam was the model city of the fifties, when the serene order of its slabs (the connective tissue of the Lijnbaan achieved paradigmatic status. In the (es its popularity tumbled abruptly; in the end, only planning delegations the East and the Third World came to visit. ie seventies, new generations of planners took over. The old generation ply been “building the city”; now that same city was declared “one tie problem:’ HOst unique quality of Rotterdam was the realization of openness at the of an entire center, Partly unintentional residue (simply the space around bs), this openness came under attack. Plans were made for its intensifi- forthe realization, even at this headquarters of emptiness, of the “com- + intensification —as can only be expected from architects —in the jal substance, blind to the mysterious qualities of this alleged void, especially to Hreedom, Blind to the fact that the toddlers who in the fifties played ools ut the foot of the slabs (happy evidence for tourists) had fm A mutant urban herd, perfectly equipped to fill and exploit : another wind-tunnel test executed at the scale of an everything was possible and nota single social trope ture, A new pattern of migration had emerged: the 4s an exhilarating urban experience. di {0 its original morphology.moment — the arbitrary delusions of order, taste, and integrity, Europe is now, almost everywhere, ridiculously beautiful. Through the objective agent of ideological mismanagement, its cities are now exhaustive textbooks of flaws; the European metropolis is like a reef on which each intention, each ambition, each solution, each question, each answer implacably runs aground. But like the forms that can be discovered in clouds, it is possible to will read with the same con- this landscape into an amazing spectacle of invention; ‘on as the map of a treasure island, it yields rich rewards. centrati at it is no longer One of the peculiar beauties of the 20th-century context is th the result of one or more architectural doctrines that evolve almost impercep- tibly; instead it represents the simultaneous formation of distinct archaeolog- ical layers —a perpetual pendulum movement in which each architectural doctrine contradicts and in fact undoes the essence of the previous one as surely as day follows night. ‘To disentangle the resulting landscape requires the combined interpretative ability and 19th-century classificatory stamina of Champollion, Schliemann, Darwin, and Freud. Berlin/Rotterdam Rotterdam and Berlin have much in common. both fertile grounds for their own specific mode! Both historical centers; Cain and Ab ties between the wars; both destroyed by World War IT; like one good and the other bad; both rebuilt in an atmosphere of optimism thoughtless modernity, 80 pervasive that it became a vernacular; both now the grip of intense revisionism. Berlin, first bombed, then divided, is centerless a collection of centers, of which are voids. In Rotterdam, the bombs voided the heart that is empty at