Arhitektura

KinderLad wrote:Prava medjuratna 

Automation or Meaning? Socialism, Humanism and Cybernetics in Etarea

Designed in 1967 for a site near Prague, Czechoslovakia, and exhibited that year at the Montreal Expo, Etarea was to be a city of 135,000 inhabitants, where the conveniences of automated infrastructure would satisfy future socialist generations. Conceived by the architect Gorazd Čelechovský as the ideal communist city, the case offers compelling insight into the influence of Marxist humanism and systems theory on post-war and specifically post-Stalinist state socialist architectural culture. Informed by these intellectual currents, as the article details, Etarea placed the question of meaning at centre stage. Meaning in architecture was considered in terms of both cybernetic communication and existential phenomenology, and its function was no less than to advance the communist transition. Etarea was informed by Civilization at the Crossroads (1966), an influential policy treatise that emphasized the significance of the intelligentsia and the so-called ‘scientific and technological revolution’ to future communism. The article explores the function of the ‘living environment’ as a conceptual banner and link between the publication and the project. While Civilization argued that urbanization must be decoupled from industrialization, Etarea was to be a model ‘post-industrial’ environment. Three aspects to Etarea are analysed in detail: the territorial question of the city-country divide, the balance between automation and socio-psychological meaning and tensions between political emancipation and cybernetic control.

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Dwelling units in Etarea were to be serviced by a network of pneumatic tubes, delivering grocery, petrol, newspapers and other daily goods on demand, and collecting household waste. Evidently the project’s most sensational feature, meticulously worked out by engineer Miroslav Šlezinger, was that each district was serviced by a distribution centre ‘where everything is automated, and human labour is limited to supervision and control’ (Čelechovský 1967a: B12/2).23 Supplied by an underground maze of delivery infrastructure, the network would be run by computers, monitoring reserves, evaluating optimal delivery routes, keeping a ‘systematic track of market’s anomalies’, and forecasting ‘its future behaviour’ (Čelechovský 1967a: B11/22) (Figure 8).



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https://journal.eahn.org/articles/10.5334/ah.314/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/t-magazine/olivetti-typewriters-ivrea-italy.html

Utopia, Abandoned

The Italian town Ivrea was once a model for workers’ rights and progressive design. Now, it’s both a cautionary tale and evidence of a grand experiment in making labor humane.

IN THE 1950S, the small town of Ivrea, which is about an hour’s train ride north of Turin, became the site of an unheralded experiment in living and working. Olivetti, a renowned designer and manufacturer of typewriters and accounting machines, decided to provide for its employees through retirement. They were given the opportunity to take classes at an on-site sale and trade school; their lunchtime hours would be filled with speeches or performances from visiting dignitaries (actors, musicians, poets); and they would receive a substantial pension upon retirement. They would be housed, if they liked, in Olivetti-constructed modern homes and apartments. Their children would receive free day care, and expecting mothers would be granted 10 months maternity leave. July would be a time of holiday, so that workers with homes in the surrounding countryside could tend to small farms — it was important to the company that workers not feel a division between city and country. Italy’s best Modernist architects would be hired to design in the Modernist style: Factories, canteens, offices and study areas would be airy palaces of glass curtain walls, flat concrete roofs and glazed brick tile. It would be a model for the nation, and for the world.

Gargantua wrote:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/t-magazine/olivetti-typewriters-ivrea-italy.html

Utopia, Abandoned

The Italian town Ivrea was once a model for workers’ rights and progressive design. Now, it’s both a cautionary tale and evidence of a grand experiment in making labor humane.

IN THE 1950S, the small town of Ivrea, which is about an hour’s train ride north of Turin, became the site of an unheralded experiment in living and working. Olivetti, a renowned designer and manufacturer of typewriters and accounting machines, decided to provide for its employees through retirement. They were given the opportunity to take classes at an on-site sale and trade school; their lunchtime hours would be filled with speeches or performances from visiting dignitaries (actors, musicians, poets); and they would receive a substantial pension upon retirement. They would be housed, if they liked, in Olivetti-constructed modern homes and apartments. Their children would receive free day care, and expecting mothers would be granted 10 months maternity leave. July would be a time of holiday, so that workers with homes in the surrounding countryside could tend to small farms — it was important to the company that workers not feel a division between city and country. Italy’s best Modernist architects would be hired to design in the Modernist style: Factories, canteens, offices and study areas would be airy palaces of glass curtain walls, flat concrete roofs and glazed brick tile. It would be a model for the nation, and for the world.