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Ochrona wartości kulturowych miast a urbanistyka

Kłosek-Kozłowska D.

Prace Naukowe Politechniki Warszawskiej. Seria Architektura

2007

nr 4

3-207

The discussion on the expression of new art and on the beauty of the functional which stirred Europe at the turn of the 20th century explains why interest in town development was initially focused on aesthetic issues. The immediate impulse came from Camillo Sittes work Der Stadtebau nach seinen kunstlerischen Grundsatzen (Town-buildingaccording to artistic principles), published in Vienna in 1889. At the time when European capitals were being extensively restructured and modernized Sitte's book, drawing the reader's attention to the beauty of towns resulting from the harmony of various stylistic layers accumulated throughout centuries, was meant as an argument for a cautious approach to ancient urban structures. According to Sitte, the unity of life and art, so greatly emphasized in the early phase of modernism, was most fully expressed by urban space, the kunstraum, which he discovered as a topic for scientific research. Therefore he wanted to see urbanists among sensitive artists not among calculating engineers. It is to them, to modern town builders, that he addressed his essays, trying to appeal to their imagination, aesthetic sense and knowledge of arts. He argued that it was necessary to look for ways of gradual development for towns, to allow them to change step by step to accommodate to the changing requirements of modern life, at the same time preserving their ancient beauty, indispensable in man's everyday life from time immemorial. He was the first to face up to the major urbanistic problem of the turn of the 20th c., namely reconciling the pressure for developing towns with conserving their cultural values. He considered the two necessities to be only seemingly in conflict. Due to his precursory multifaceted approach to the historic town Camillo Sitte was not only the father of the history of town-building but also the initiator of modern town-planning, which takes into consideration the values of heritage. He was truly a conservator urbanist, who touched the issues fundamental for the quality of urban space and related them to the necessary analytic basis, thus challenging all the modern town-planners. The first part of the dissertation, devoted to the sources of "urban conservation", stresses the influence of Sittes work on the development of the scientific investigation of urban structure, so far overlooked in our literature. It brings out the originality of his views on towns in the context of spatial values shaped throughout centuries, the multitude of topics that he addressed, the acuteness of his judgments and observations, as well as the inspiration that he provided for new disciplines of humanities. It was not only research on the history of town-building and on urban structure that benefited from his studies; also social sciences, including psychology and sociology, drew from his insights to develop new branches, such as sociology of the town or psychology of space. Similarly, Sittes mathematical principles of perspective and the physiology of vision exerted an invigorating influence on the perception of space and on landscape studies, leading to considering urban structures and architecture in a wide environmental context in order to preserve the beauty of historic towns and the picturesque interiors of their streets and squares. Sittes book, which was very popular at the turn of the 20th c., was also a significant contribution to the debate on historical monuments and the values by which they are defined. The second chapter of the present dissertation advances and motivates a claim that has not been posed in the literature so far, namely that Sittes views on the unique values represented by historic urban space had a considerable impact on the concept and definition of the monument and on the conservation theory whose scientific basis was worked out by the outstanding historians of art and conservators: Alois Riegl, Max Dvorak and Georgh Dehio. Sitte was the first to point out that the town, viewed traditionally as a work of art, is the most trouble some type of monument, especially as regards the identification of its values. It is troublesome not only because it can be evaluated differently, both by professionals and by common people, and because such judgements are usually subjective and change from generation to generation, as was later noted by Riegl in his description of the system of values defining monuments, but also because of the conflict between old structures and the needs of modernity, which influences those judgments, and which in the case of historic towns seems to be eternal and permanent. Let us note that this conflict, if it is not recognized, especially in the sphere of community values and expectations, often results in a loss of the intangible symbolic local values which Max Dvorak called "the spirit of the place - genius loci". The present dissertation has two important leading motifs. Part I shows that the role of the community in town conservation was recognized already at the outset of conservation theory. Part II demonstrates the negative results of ignoring this role as well as the beneficial influence of its recognition on the effectiveness of historic town protection and on the development of civic society in democracy. Already at the turn of the 20th c. problems of urban heritage conservation consolidated the efforts of both professionals and social activists. This accustomed town-planners to being constantly controlled by public opinion and the community, especially its elite, to the active participation in the life of their town. Heritage protection movements were initiated wherever time, tradition and history had left distinct, original traces in urban structures. They tried to block the so-called 'hausmannization of urban space', which was also criticized by Sitte, especially in the case of small and medium-sized towns, where staking out wide straight traffic corridors at the expense of old buildings was unnecessary and stemmed from irrational attempts to imitate metropolises. The restructuring of Paris, Vienna and Berlin, or of other cities that followed their example, like Antwerp, Brussels, Florence or Amsterdam, provided urbanists with excellent opportunities to confront heritage conservation principles with town-building practice. Chapters III and IV explore the origins of theoretical reflection on the history and protection of towns in Poland and the emergence of modern town-planning techniques. It is shown that Camillo Sitte's ideas were promptly accepted and creatively developed in Poland, especially in the intellectual circles of Cracow (Stanisław Tomkowicz) and Lvow (Roman Feliński, Ignacy Drexler) and among young Warsaw academics (Tadeusz Tołwiński and his Chair of Town-Planning, Oskar Sosnowski and his Section of Polish Architecture at the Warsaw Faculty of Architecture). Chapter III discusses the approach to the history of town-building and to issues of modern town-planning presented in the first Polish coursebooks, which were published by Roman Feliński and Ignacy Drexler in 1916, just before the appearance of the first great synthetic work devoted to town-building in Europe, Stadtbaukunst. Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft by Albrecht Erich Brinckmann. The theoretical perspective is broadened by pointing out direct links between the Polish concept of town preservation and the Viennese and German conservation schools, motivated by easy access to universities in Vienna an Germany. The mobility of professional elites and the free exchange of ideas characteristic of the epoch on the one hand facilitated the development of town-planning methodology and modern urbanistic techniques and on the other - stimulated scientific research on the history of town building and interest in their protection. Chapter IV discusses the issue of modern town-planning and its relation to urban heritage protection in Poland between World War I and II, also in the light of the legal regulations introduced at that time. It closes part I, intended as a broad outline of the historical background, covering the out-set of interest in old towns and of research on their history, and going back to the origins of "urban conservation", i.e. to those experiments connected with the emergence of modern urbanistic methods in the construction of the plan which enriched town-planning with historical studies. The analytic approach to the historic structure of towns, highly useful in planning, is an outstanding achievement of the Warsaw urbanistic school, constituting its significant contribution to historical studies on towns, especially after World War II. It has resulted in the development of a new research discipline, history of town-building, which since its birth at the Warsaw University of Technology has been inextricably connected with modern urbanistic methods in urban design. Those issues have not been sufficiently explored in the literature so far. The second part of the dissertation, entitled Towards a methodology of urban heritage protection, is devoted to the further development of the method of protecting the historic structure of towns through planning decisions. Chapter V, introducing the problems of town protection after World War II, contrasts the short phase of continuing the outstanding inter-war achievements, connected with reconstructing towns devastated during the war, with the following long period of arbitrary urbanistic decisions, which resulted from the enthusiastic acceptance of the modern 'theory of urbanism' presented in the Athens Charter of CIAM as well as from the peculiarities of the planning system in the Polish People's Republic. The author recalls a highly original contribution of the "Polish conservation school" of the time to the methodology of town protection, namely historic urban studies. Although their primary objective was to motivate the planning decisions taken in the course of rebuilding cities devastated by the war, they were also used as an exceptional chance to initiate the scientific investigation of urban structure of the city, to search for dispersed archives and to gather historical documentation, which resulted in extensive and often pioneering work on the source basis for a new discipline - history of town-building. Utilizing the effects of this effort in the Polish People's Republic was difficult. The protection of historic towns, arbitrarily interpreted and imperiously imposed on urbanistic projects was either defied or at best treated indifferently by society. It meant lack of visible effects in urban space or destroying the effects just achieved through great effort. In this way monument conservation, and especially town protection, became a socially-isolated domain. Consequences of this process are probably the most difficult obstacle in the efficient space management of Polish historic towns nowadays. The author's ptoposal of a community-based model of conserving historic urban structures through town-planning and plan construction, resulting from the experience of old town protection projects realized in the 1970s and 1980s, is an original contribution to the methodology of urban heritage protection in Poland. The proposed model is motivated in chapter VI, entitled The language of space and the cultural identity of the town, in which the complexities of urban structure are considered from the perspective of a historian of town-building and it is argued that understanding the nature of heritage, identifying the values of the spatial structure and valorizing it for the purposes of city space protection are all necessary conditions for the efficient management of the town in line with the expectations and objectives of the community. A historian of town-building is indispensable in this process. The dissertation proves that historical analyses of towns, their urban structures, are crucial for developing the democratic procedures of local law-making in constructing the local plan of spatial development - in urban design. The potential of heritage, in terms of enhancing the chances for the towns economic development and for creating high quality public space, helps to preserve the individuality and identity of urban structure, the centre of which is the man with his needs and aspirations. The awareness of cultural values, values of heritage, can be a crucial factor in facilitating the development of local communities based on the idea of civic society in democracy conditions.