Beyond the Modernist Failure Myth

This paper, using some major examples of modernist mass housing projects in different contexts, aims at deconstructing the main commonplaces about the failure of modernist architecture. Its thesis is that private flexibility and public rigidity are two intrinsic and in a sense ‘congenital’ dimensions of all modernist architecture, and more generally of all contemporary collective housing. There is no doubt, of course, that in some cases – as, for example, the ones of Brasilia and of the Ville Radieuse – the rigidity of modernist architecture also reflects the abstractness of an egalitarian political project, and should therefore be related to the specific historical and geographical contexts where those architectures were developed. However, blaming political and social Modernism for all the problems of collective housing is totally false and misleading. It is false, for rigidity stemmed from two major architectural innovations which – although being largely used and arising in synchrony with it – should be regarded as basically independent from Modernism per se: the advent of intrinsically ‘fox/hedgehog’ architectural techniques, which allow plan flexibility but imply rigid and difficult-to-transform structures (cast-iron, reinforced concrete); the spread of collective residential typologies intrinsically difficult to be ‘appropriated’ – as for their external facies and for their collective spaces – by its residents. But the equation modernism equal rigidity is also misleading, for it prevents us on the one hand from appreciating the attempts made by some modernist architects, and especially by Le Corbusier, of hybridizing and making more flexible residential collective typologies, and on the other hand from recognizing the main causes which in fact determined the failure of collective mass housing (realization modes, social and economic situations). Mainstream easy critiques of modernism hide the fact that quality of collective housing is largely consequential to the amount of economic investments, and that in all countries public housing policies adopted too-many shortcuts. Furthermore, the quest for a balance between public and private, rigidity and flexibility, which be better than the one realized in cut-price public housing developments, should probably start from an assessment of the successes and failures experienced in some major modernist projects.