Paul Lester Wiener y Josep Lluís Sert, Plan Regulador para Bogotá (1953): borrador del Centro Cívico. Nótese aquí el énfasis realizado al vacío de la calle y las plazoletas de la carrera 6.ª. © The Frances Loeb Library, Josep Lluís Sert Collection, Harvard Design School. Paul Lester Wiener y Josep Lluís Sert, Plan Regulador para Bogotá (1953): dibujo de Sert para Bogotá. Se anota aquí la importancia dada a los vacíos de los parques lineales y la calle con las plazoletas de la carrera sexta, así como el vacío de la plaza de Bolívar. © The Frances Loeb Library, Josep Lluís Sert Collection, Harvard Design School. El Centro Cívico del Plan Director de Bogotá | Carlos Eduardo Hernández 239
Josep Lluís Sert, the CIAM «Heart of the City» and the Bogotá Plan: Precursor to Urban Design, 1947-1953 Eric Mumford I think that after our studies of bringing open space into the cities, we nonetheless feel the need for a civic space somewhere in them, and the most characteristic civic space will be precisely the core. Josep Lluís Sert, 1951 Josep Lluís Sert’s involvement with the planning of Bogotá began in 1948, when his New York firm, Town Planning Associates, was commissioned with Le Corbusier for a new Plan Directeur for the city. At this time Sert (1902-1983) was an exile from Barcelona, having been a strong supporter of the Second Spanish Republic. In New York he became part of a circle of avant-garde émigrés centered around the sculptor Alexander Calder. At first went into partnership briefly with another former associate of Le Corbusier, Ernest Weissmann, but by 1942 Sert had joined with the well-established German émigré architect and designer Paul Lester Wiener to form Town Planning Associates. Between 1944 and 1959 this firm planned extensively for cities in South America, beginning with the Brazilian Motor city project near Rio de Janeiro, later exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1947. In 1942 Sert published Can Our Cities Survive? the first explication in English of the urban planning concepts of CIAM (International Congresses of Modern Architecture). By 1944 he had become convinced of the importance of pedestrian vitality to urban life, and after his elevation to the Presidency of CIAM in 1947, he, Sigfried Giedion, and Le Corbusier all began to suggest that some kind of pedestrian civic center was a necessary component of modern cities for both cultural and political reasons. Exemplified both by Le Corbusier’s plan for St-Dié, exhibited in New York in 1945, and Sert’s civic center in the Brazilian Motor City project, this direction was given a conceptual framework in Giedion’s 1944 essay “The Need for a New Monumentality.” Prior to the late 1940s, modern architects were divided about whether to densify central cities with towers, as Le Corbusier advocated, or to decentralize them along transportation routes. Both factions were convinced that existing cities and their architecture and transit systems were hopelessly congested and obsolete and should probably be removed. These attitudes began to become the mainstream in American architecture by the late 1940s, as can be seen in the master plans for St. Louis (1947), Boston (1950), the District of Columbia (1950), and elsewhere. Eventually, however, the modernist premises of such urbanism began to be questioned, as architects’ ongoing concern for generating pedestrian vitality and strengthening urban life became a preoccupation of the field. In this process Sert’s work has considerable significance, despite his own limited success in advancing what he called “urban consciousness.” Sert and CIAM ’s focus on the “heart of the city” at the Eighth CIAM conference in 1951 was where this new direction in postwar modern architecture was signaled to a global audience. Among the projects used to illustrate it were Le Corbusier’s new civic center for Bogotá, along with Sert and Wiener’s urban design work for Lima and Chimbote in Peru and Tumaco, Medellín, and Cali in Colombia. As president of CIAM, Sert began to emphasize the need to design in and for the heart of the city for several reasons. Beyond the continuing centrality of capital cities in the postwar era, which was emphasized even in the Soviet Union, there was also critical view that prewar CIAM had not paid enough attention to what Lewis Mumford had called “civic center elements,” when he told Sert he could not write the introduction to his Can Our Cities Survive? Other sources for the concept were Le Corbusier’s interest in pedestrian places for the “synthesis of the arts”; and Sert’s new focus on traditional Latin American town squares, which he begun to encounter in his work there. His awareness of the approaches to urban “context” then being developed by Italian CIAM member Ernesto Rogers, who he collaborated with briefly on the plan of Lima in 1947, may also have been significant. These somewhat divergent reasons to advocate the core in CIAM also overlapped with the interests of the British, Dutch, and Scandinavian groups in creating centralized places for communal services and activities in new towns and settlements. The projects that Sert and Wiener designed in Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and Cuba between 1945 and 1959 all illustrate this new approach to urbanism. Although few of these projects were carried out as designed, when exhibited at postwar CIAM meetings and published they didactically demonstrated the basic principles of an approach to urbanism that Sert would begin to term “urban design” in 1953. This direction was clearly closely related to issues of both social and physical reconstruction in Europe, but for a long time afterward it was seen as not having much relevance for North Americans. At CIAM 7, Neutra had told the delegates that while war-damaged cities in Europe «may pose their own profound problem where reconstruction is surrounded by famous and venerable monuments of the past», in the America of 1949 this was «not an issue and would seem artificially played up». Neutra saw the task for CIAM instead as one of 240 Le Corbusier en Bogotá, 1947-1951: Precisiones en torno al Plan Director
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