Large-Scale Transformation, a New Sustainability Challenge. Kleiburg in Amsterdam, Grand Parc in Bordeaux
In 2017 the renovation of one of the biggest apartment buildings in the Netherlands called Kleiburg was awarded with the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award 2017. The Prize had never been won by a collective housing project until then. Two years later, the jury of that edition decided to award the 2019 Prize to the transformation of three social housing blocks in Bordeaux. In both cases, the existing buildings belonged to the wave of massive construction that happened in the 1960s in European cities. They are two successful survivors that escaped the wrecking ball. In the exhibition, these two main characters illustrate how strategic and sensible transformations are the way to avoid demolition.
“Emblematic examples of large-scale collective housing complexes were generally studied when they were projected, built and inaugurated, but very little was studied and written about how each of these buildings evolved and adapted, in order to know what its legacy really was. Homes are for living in, and their maintenance and capacity for adaptation is essential. Therefore, the key to progress lies in how and what we can learn from the experience. Modern collective housing is living heritage, which is why it is important to know its transformations and appropriations; to understand what the construction qualities and remodelling facilities have been.”
Josep Maria Montaner and Zaida Muxí
In response to the need for housing after the Second World War, large-scale social housing complexes were massively constructed all over Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. Up until today, lots of them have already been demolished. Ideologically outdated? Urbanistically failed? In any case, demolition has been considered almost the only way to deal with different kinds of problematics inherent and associated with this architectural phenomenon.
The renovation of one of the biggest apartment buildings in the Netherlands called Kleiburg was awarded with the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award 2017. A different group of jury members decided to award the 2019 Prize to the transformation of three social housing blocks in Grand Parc Bordeaux. In both cases, the existing buildings belonged to the wave of massive construction that happened in the 1960s and 1970s in European cities.
This timeline is guided by these two winning works that appear as survivors in a sea of unfortunate cases that couldn’t escape the wrecking ball. It follows their stories since the inception of the masterplans of which they were part of until the moment they were recognised with the Prize. The first masterplan for the Grand Parc Bordeaux was presented in 1954, just two years after Le Corbusier addressed the words that followed M. Claudius Petit, the French Minister of Reconstruction and Town Planning, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille:
“Monsieur le Ministre, it is my pride, my honour and my joy to hand over to you the “Unité d’Habitation”, the first manifestation of an environment suited to modern life.”
Ten years after, at the presentation of the Bijlmermeer plans in 1964, the Mayor of Amsterdam said: “Nowhere in the world has a nicer and more modern city of this size been constructed so far. This is the change: the estate for the most pleasant place to live you can imagine.”
Just four years after the same Mayor handed over the keys to the first family that went to live there, the social housing estate of Pruitt-Igoe in Missouri, United States, was dynamited. The architect and theorist Charles Jencks immortalised and used that episode in his book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977):
“Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3:32 PM (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather, several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite. Previously it had been vandalized, mutilated, and defaced by its inhabitants, and although millions of dollars were pumped back, trying to keep it alive (fixing the broken elevators, repairing smashed windows, repainting), it was finally put out of its misery. Boom, boom, boom.”
