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ACCIDENT ON THE HIGHWAY

by Hans Frei



A portrait never is an objective image of reality. It is more about how something is seen rather than what it really is. That turns out to be true also for the book Switzerland. An Urban Portrait (Birkhäuser Verlag , 2005), published in three volumes by the architects Roger Diener, Jacques Herzog, Marcel Meili, Pierre de Meuron and the geographer Christian Schmid. Although the authors keep strictly to the obvious they present an image of Switzerland which is different from the image one usually makes from. It is an image of a totally urbanized territory.

The idea is not new. Already in 1763 Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in a letter, that Switzerland appeared to him like a single town divided into different districts. Up to the 20th century some variations of that image were produced. But in the view of the urban portraitists they all have the same fault: they only speak metaphorically about urbanization and hold on to the beloved image of Switzerland not wanting to be urban at all. Ultimately they rather hinder than support the full impact of the urban dynamic. “The specific urbanity of Switzerland turns out to be a culture of refusal and of hindrance of density, of heights, of masses, of concentration, of chance and of nearly everything that one would wish in a city.”

The urban portraitists are going along with most of the other authors who made recently contributions to the same topic (Urbanscape Switzerland, 2004; Baustelle Föderalismus, 2005, Raumentwicklungsbericht 2005) in the belief that the use of the land has to become much more urban when Switzerland wants to survive. For that reason they are going to sharpen the view on the material performance of the settlement. The spatial consequences should help to understand the political issues of federalism and autonomy of communities.

For some time the Dutch architects of MVRDV have been aware of the didactic value of architectural and urban projects in political debates. In Stadtland Schweiz they published seven project proposals showing the different thinkable spatial developments of Switzerland: the Matter-city for 500’000 inhabitants living in the heights of the Alps or Super-Zurich as a little Manhattan built around the lake of Zurich for about 3 million inhabitants. Such visions might be thinkable from outside - from inside they don't have the slightest chance of being realized, unless one would suppose the existence of a till now unknown Kim-Jung-il of Switzerland who takes over the power in Switzerland.

Compared with their Dutch colleagues the Swiss architects use the visualizing potential of architecture in a radically different manner. They consciously forgo the presentation of "solutions" in form of architectural projects. Instead of that they present an image of what already exists but isn’t perceived as such because it isn’t accepted. The impression of hyper-realism is strengthened by cleaning the picture of Switzerland from old clichés and by ordering the laying out according to an urban typology, giving new names to it and associating it with appropriate features. Therefore Switzerland is shown as a piecing together of 1 Central Fallow Ground, 3 Metropolitan Areas, 6 Urban Networks, 3 Quite Zones and 52 Alpine Resorts (and an indefinable rest).

This project of an urban Switzerland is not only realizable but almost already built even when it is not accepted as such. But is it therefore already a better project than the Kim-Jung-il-versions of Switzerland? Is a project that takes the obvious as the only indication of the becoming not another form of dictatorship at last? Is there anything more opportunistic than to rename the existing and to praise it as the new land? Is the hyper-realistic project not the only and true Kim-Jung-il-version of Switzerland?

As every hyper-realistic representation the hyper-realistic urban portrait of Switzerland is not exactly what it seems to be. It is made for simulation purposes, it is a fiction – even though a very clever one, because it conceals exactly its fictional character and makes us belief that what is present in the picture is also true and original. But looking closer at the fabric of its making, it fills more than 1000 pages in three volumes, one easily recognize some personal signatures which are more important for the hyper-realistic effects that real facts.

1. The Signature of the Big Movers (volume 1)

In a conversation about their programmatic intentions Jacques Herzog and Marcel Meili are giving each other the keywords to express their personal troubles with Switzerland: bigness here is only possible if everybody can afford it; federalist cowardice and suicidal stubbornness are preventing big moves and strengthen the permanent status of provinciality.

All that is more than true. For that reason Herzog and Meili hate Switzerland which they would love to save from going down, simultaneously. Because they love urban culture as well they are thinking of solving the problem by making Switzerland the place of an urban cultural revolution. Unfortunately Switzerland as a national institution is not just a case of urbanization like Basle-Nord or Zurich-West or both together. The metropolitan topic is just as helpful to generate a coherent concept of Switzerland as are cow-bells and chocolates. The inner consistency of a nation can’t be produced by urban planning technocracy. Like always there is no idea of the whole, nor idea of Switzerland as a model”. To solve that problem there must be more that the displeasure of the “big-movers” and their method of "massaging" some parts.

2. The Signature of the Theorist (Volume 1)

The urban theory is delivered by the geographer Christian Schmid. The very fact that theory here is taken as the basis of research instead of a development from it, points to a strict form of doctrine. Yet its contents turns out to be only joyful tidings: All will be good in Switzerland thanks to the rediscovery of urbanism, or more in detail: all will be good in Switzerland thanks to urbanisation, or more precisely: all will be good thanks to a further concentration of networks, thanks to the permeability of the urban borders and last but not least thanks to the productive power obtained from differences.

One does not have to be a backwards oriented pessimist to suspect that the processes of urbanisation today aren’t that harmless as Schmid would have us believe. One does not have to follow any foolhardy concepts of urbanism to observe that cities are going to be ruined precisely by the extension of networks turning into isolators instead of integrators, that a multiplicity of new borders will replace the old ones, and that growing social differences are exploited more and more brutal by few and fewer people. It is enough to take into account that urbanisation is part of a global system of production connecting the interests of the building industry best to the interests of investors. Or as it is written in the UN report on The State of World’s Cities 2004/2005saying that urbanisation often “reveals an unhealthy cocktail of underestimated costs, overestimated revenues, undervalued environmental impacts and overvalued economic development effect”. (Mal y soit who remembers in this context the project for a multiplex cinema in Basle by Herzog & de Meuron or the project for a station in Zürich by Meili & Peter.)

3. The signature of the historian (volume 2)

Volume 2 contains a “short history of the territory” of Switzerland. It is the best part of the whole publication, written by Marcel Meili in collaboration with Alfred Messerli and Markus Stromer. They successfully present the national history without the usual heroes and myths. Instead of that they focus on some important episodes of a game of territorial forces. The unstable swarm of more or less autonomous communities named "Switzerland" slowly grew out of outer influences and inner resistances. And it proved to be elastic enough to become the decisive “factor of success” preventing Switzerland from falling apart on many occasions.

Up until the 18^th century – from that moment on the history unfortunately is influenced by the joyful tidings of the theory. Now the successful swarm is criticized for not to be a herd. It is seen as the main cause for a sort of spatial “class-warfare” (147) and for the slowly falling apart of the Swiss territory. Even today the major Swiss cities are described as besieged by the mass of small surrounding communities where powerful people are living who have reached their power thanks to the money they earned in the city.

Wouldn’t it be even more correct to go a step further and argue that the powerful people are using their money not only to hinder the extension of the cities but have taken over full power in the city? They take care that nothing happens here without maximal profit (from them). However it might be, power today can’t be localized as clearly as 200 years ago. If it is true that globalization is sharpening the local differences and increasing the power of the local, so that each point on earth can become the centre – as affirmed in several parts of the publication (p.140, p.174) – then the old opposition ‘rural – urban’ or ‘centre – periphery’ has no significance anymore. Then the demanded concentration on some Swiss metropolitan areas – which would be rather small compared to other metropolitan areas in Europe - makes no sense anymore. The territorial swarm of Switzerland would be a much more clever answer to the global conditions.

4. The signature of the dementors (volume 3)

The material of volume 3 comes out of “borings” undertaken by more than 140 collaborators in four years. The results were translated by the Studio Basel in a unifying “visual language” and united by the Institute Contemporary City into “a new coherent picture”. Whatever such a division of labor means, its efficiency was so enormous, so deeply sucking out, that all local potential of imagined territories discovered by the borings disappeared completely.

So nothing is left except the display of Switzerland in a styled urbanity look whose narrow-mindedness first was hidden by the hyper-realistic effect. All activities important for the future of the country to the Metropolitan Regions and in the Alpine Resorts! The Urban Networks as “future regions of crisis” (p.210)! The Central Fallow Ground as a central zone of wasting disease! And the Quiet Zones as places where the inhabitants amuse the urbanites with village theatre!

One of the main reasons for the making of the urban portrait – besides the worries about the disperse settlement – was the state of the national economy which couldn't afford the general “equality in space” anymore. But there is no clarifying calculation of how many millions or billions of Swiss Francs could be saved by urbanizing Switzerland. So we must be content with the costs of the Calancatal which is one of the two examples showing how “enormous” the financial support really is: 5 (five) million Swiss Francs per annum for agriculture and the maintenance of the infrastructure, that is 10’000 Swiss Francs per annum and inhabitant. Compared to that the Opera House in Zurich gets 76 (seventy-six) million per annum, that is 70’000 per annum and seating.

After all the comparison shows how absurd it is to take the actual economic performance already as the whole potential of a place. Not like in the case of an economic enterprise, the potentials of a place often are napping unpretentious hidden in a corner. It is here and nowhere else that opportunities for change have a chance. But how to actualize it correctly? In terms of conventional planning the urban waste is taken as “potential for re-inventing the city” (p.536). For the Central Fallow Ground something similar is not even taken into consideration Surely it is no catastrophe – either for nature or for mankind - when the Calancatal is left and let to its destiny. It is only an opportunity missed. The economic situation of the Calancatal could easily be improved when an architect with the format of Pereira, the director of the Zurich Opera would be concerned with the performance of the beautiful valley.

∞ Real Problems

At last some words about the contribution by the former policemen Arnold Odermatt, whose photos illustrate the conversation between Herzog and Meili. Without comment! Obviously the portraitists like to prove that urbanization already has reached the periphery and can’t be denied at least in its negative appearances. But the photos are more than just documents of a latent urbanization of the countryside. They are direct portraits of the urbanization as such. Urbanization in that view is a chain of catastrophes which can be prevented as little as car-accidents. The only thing we can do is to make them aware. Similarly as Odermatt made beautiful pictures out of accidents, without eliminating the tragic, we are able to give a face to the urban crashes for confronting us with them. Migration, living standards below the minimum, destruction of the environment, the dictatorship of consumism are just a few names of real problems troubling the urban culture. They have to get a form for not getting out of control one day. Odermatt seems to be the only one in the whole publication who is concerned with real problems of urbanization.

As it is often the case, the treatment prescribed is worse than the illness. Firstly, because planning technocracy is not the right answer to solve national (and urban) problems; architecture has to be something other than a building agency for investors. Secondly, the critic of the regressive Swiss urbanism is regressive too because it excludes global problems of urbanisation. The regression has changed its contents but not its suppression of the actual. Operation successful, patient died (not a catastrophe, just another missed opportunity).


(First published in: Werk, Bauen & Wohnen, Nr.1/2, January 2006)


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