8/3/2023 0 Comments Highrise city hilberseimer![]() ![]() Admittedly with a dependence on cars, without which no one can leave this island of the blessed, due to the lack of local public transport.“The word urbanization was introduced by the Spanish engineer and planner Ildefons Cerdà, who theorized the concept in his 1867 book Teoría general de la urbanización. What has emerged in Lafayette Park is a kind of suburban idyll, which at least offers the image of a “harmonious relationship between people, nature and technology” as conceived by Hilberseimer. Such planned cities, too, are commonly regarded today as anti-urban. ![]() At the same time, however, Lafayette Park is also the alternative to a chaotic, apostrophised city, which Hilberseimer wanted to transform into the “New City” by means of rational planning. And that is exactly what the residents seem to appreciate. Lafayette Park thus represents the pure aesthetics of planning – making it the exact opposite of the participatory planning models which are currently in fashion. Even the cars are hidden in sunken parking lots that remove them from view. Mies defines the aesthetic, also through the lack of other influences – except for lawns, trees and solitary hedges. Lafayette Park is an inner-city suburbia at the cost of isolation from the surrounding city.įrom Mies’ low-rise townhouses, the views extend out into a park landscape because individually designed yards, as seen everywhere else in the city, are not found here. Admittedly, however, those that live here are members of a well-to-do middle class that can afford it. Critics therefore speak of a “ghetto”, even though Lafayette Park is one of the few areas of Detroit that is ethnically mixed. To get to work, of course, residents must travel elsewhere, somewhere beyond the trees, highways and train tracks that surround the area and keep the rest of the city at a distance. Lafayette Park combines housing, recreation (park), education (school), and retail (shopping plaza) it even has its own swimming pool. The Lafayette Park development is, by contrast, influenced by Mies’ concept of flowing space and incorporates much of Hilberseimer’s idea of a “New City”: the urban structure, for example, is completely free of through traffic and the built fabric is composed within a park landscape. ![]() It is important to know that Lafayette Park was the result of wholesale urban redevelopment – a densely built slum district with a predominantly black population previously existed there. In 2015, Lafayette Park was designated a National Historic Landmark, noted as being “one of the most fully realised and most successful urban renewal developments of the mid-twentieth century”. The plans by the modernist dream team of Mies, Hilberseimer and Caldwell were never fully realised – Greenwald died in 1959 in a plane crash and other project developers subsequently took over.īy 1963, Mies had built two 22-storey high-rise towers with rental apartments on the site, as well as 186 one- and two-storey townhouses that were privately owned but cooperatively managed. In Lafayette Park, modernism – nowadays demonised by many critics and viewed as having failed – seems like a functioning idyll in the middle of a deteriorating city.īeginning in 1956, the 31.7-hectare site was built directly alongside downtown Detroit by the project developer Herbert Greenwald, who had already worked with Mies to construct the Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago. Alfred Caldwell, who, like Hilberseimer, had worked with Mies in the 1950s at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago, was responsible for the landscape design. The area is called Lafayette Park, and it was designed by ex-Bauhaus director Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hilberseimer, an urban planner who was Mies’ former colleague in Dessau. There is an enclave within all this misery. The former industrial metropolis is now a devastated and bankrupt city: at the very centre there are great numbers of vacant lots and abandoned buildings, the local public transport system is ailing, and the monumental train station meanwhile stands alone, decaying amidst an inner-city wasteland.īut not all of Detroit is a dreary place. Detroit’s urban decline has been compared with the aftermath of an atomic bomb that had been released over the centre of the city, except it is as if the devastation of its explosion would have taken place in slow motion over decades. ![]()
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