Peter Sloterdijk
Translated from the German by Antonio Petrov
Sloterdijk, P. (2007). “Foam City: About Urban Multitudes.” New Geographies(0): 151.
In looking at assembly architectures, the topological particularities of modern cities become visible: On one hand, they are defined as locations for collectors, who move toward the gathering crowd; on the other hand, they accommodate apartment buildings that serve as dwelling pods to small families and singles; and lastly they host the diverse institutions of the Arbeitswelt (world of labor), in which the majority of urbanites secure their economic existence. In attempting to establish a common idea about the three poles of modern urban life (labor, housing, public and collector space), the concepts of traffic and communication have prevailed in urbanistic literature—as if the phenomenon city could be reduced to the generalization of movement and the flow of signs. This continued until electronics reached theory, with fictions such as the virtual city, the online territory, the City of Bits, Cyber Ville, and similar metaphors of disembodiment. The more ambitious the model, the likelier it will be to allow the actual city to evaporate into a phantomatic disorder of nodes in telematic networks. E-Urbanism dissolves the materiality and density of the urban space into Anglo-Saxon long-distance processes. The strong identity of urbanity is sought in the escape from physical localization and in the dissolution of embedded situations (disembedding). Consequently such discourses about the city regularly appear in the company of romance of decentralization and the mysticism of immaterialization, without having the attributes of tomorrow. All these sub-euphobic theorems about the urban in the cities, the atmospherically active agglomeration of intrinsic space sediments—in our terminology, the foam character of dense urban complexes – willfully overlook, or more precisely, make these nichtwahrnehmungsfoerdernde (unsupportive) terms unthematic.
The urban micro-foam can only be understood in its real-surreal spatial constitution if one sees in it a meta-collector that accumulates spaces of assembly and nonassembly. The actual function of the metropolis is clearly to guarantee the neighborly coexistence of centers and noncenters—not in the form of a supercenter but as an agglomeration or stacking of discrete types of spatial powers in the form of the type collectors, businesses, housing units, and shaped surfaces under open skies. The meta-collection that arises from the current city has nothing to do with people, who can be assembled or isolated. It refers to places—that are total space inventions—in which people experience, or not, the chance of assembly and communication.
In the topical and utopian thinking of the past half century there was something like an adventure in new urbanism—for Buckminster Fuller, Nicolas Schoeffer, Yona Friedman, Eckhard Schulze-Fielitz, Paolo Soleri, Peter Cook, Ron Herron, and particularly Constant, the emphasis of their projects was experimental, and the factual cities, are metaphorically overwritten by elevated and covered metacities. With the elevated-ground gesture of this “New City” invention, one shouldn’t only identify the utopianism of a-cosmic and half-mundane fantasies, which are content with the design of parallel realities: The intention, to rethink the multifocal metropolitan and polythematic spaces through model agglomerations, in many cases has more of an analytical and model-theoretical character. It is not uncommon for it to stand in the service of its own concreteness, as indirect interpretations of the present. The pioneers of this approach are mostly chaos theorists ante literam, who, after the failure of the Old European centralistic rationalism and the disgusting control holism, experimented with new procedures to get a better understanding of the synthesis of “society” in dense environments.
The redefinition of urban space emerges on stilts: Above the desperately exposed cityscapes of the status quo, tall pillar-systems radically elevate artificial and new spatial articulations, in which the urbanites of the future can exist among each other. With the evolving elevation, the pillars and supporting columns contribute bypassing the entangling questions of property rights on the actual ground surface. Consequently large projective energies are invested in the concept of the tower; which for the new urbanist no longer represents the feudal claim of power or the metaphysical Aufwaertsbewegtheit (upward movement) of existence1—instead he testifies, by disregarding the existing substance, to the incision between historic and post-historic. No more infills, no additions, no reconstructions. It is about the new liberated approach in the air, new layers of verticality, post-historic architectonic self-determination of the higher principles above the undeveloped nightmares of all past generations. Between the old and the elevated substance, there is no dialectic—there is only one after the other, appearing as if one on top of the other. After the first occupation of the alienated society and their tragic real estates, which we know as the growing cities, once again earth will be developed and occupied through the Ueberbauung (over-building), but this time in the air, where the tall pillars become known as the basic technology of the post-history. Une autre ville pour une autre vie.
The countless drawings and models of Constant (Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys, born 1920) made him the most important analyst and visionary of the second urban culture. His obsessively regarded megaproject New Babylon (1960-1970) gives the supporting columns virtually a histo-political meaning: clearly marking the spatially explicit post-historically liberated secondary layer of existence of radical-creative Wunschleben (wishful living) above an automated base of the old characteristics of earth, labor, and metabolism. In the new upper world of the second Babylon, one notes sees in the name the typically positive postmodern take on complexity and its political consequences: ungovernability, essentially seeing the era of materialism as completed; the Neo Babylonians are Fluxus existentialists living in a post-alienated-labor world. Their sense of reality arises exclusively from the construction of mobile spaces, atmospheres, and environments. They gather in the hanging-gardens of insanity— kombattant, kongenial, kondelirant. Therefore the old cadastrals of a psycho-geographic redefinition of space had to yield to a description that doesn’t respond to surface, parcel, and boundaries, but rather to expressive acts of the inhabitants—their moods, their works, their installations.
For all his concessions to utopianism, Constant is predominantly an analyst of the poly-atmospherical “society.” His point of reference is the irrepressible atmosphere-generating quality of human habitation practices. His utopia, which follows the social imagination of the Situationist International, conceptualizes a new society as a form of coexistence of the happily unemployed; his city of the atmospheric milieu of being, which everywhere else is only perceived as a byproduct, is released for the first time as the main product. (Guy Debord, with whom Constant collaborated beginning in the late 1950s, spoke in 1957 of “mood zones” and urban “emotional realities”2). The New Babylonians are the first residents of an explicitly aphropolitical structure— creators of a city that sprawls like a nomadic art colony on stilts, composed of reservoirs of atmospheres and reversible individuated environments. The content of this city is the art history of its inhabitants. The appearances of its structures suggest that Constant anticipated the post-historical trash aesthetic of Mad Max.
The New Babylonian Aphropolis-1974, shown in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, was visualized with the gesture of setting up nonauthoritarian (not intended to be realized) models of a possible urbanistic form of the very “social sculpture” that Beuys postulated in his metapolitical discourses. Mark Wigley notes, with regard to the polemic interference of the Situationists in the events of May 1968:
The atmosphere becomes the foundation for political actions. The seemingly ephemeral-irrelevant becomes a mobilized asset in a concrete conflict. As a fantastic endpoint of such fights New Babylon is an enormous jukebox of atmospheres, which only can be played by a completely revolutionized society. 3
Constant’s thought-experiment about the coexistence of the creative unemployed in collectively changing space leads to the conclusion that every individual is not just an artist, but more precisely, an installation artist, due to the fact that the spontaneous emanations of ambiances or meaningful environments are identical with modes of living. The aphropolitical breakthrough causes the New Babylonians to no longer be influenced by restraints of old buildings and atmospheres (a circumstance that has been discussed in older theories under terminologies such as alienation and independence; Georg Simmel, for example, describes the character constraints of people symbolically born into solidified enclosures as a “tragedy of culture”4)—rather, to not be bound to prior accumulations, to be free to continuously start over with the construction of new ambiences. The premise for this is the abolition of the classical principles of reality with their ontological addendums, the primacy of the past and the dictatorship of shortage. To think this way, Constant had to give credit to the Marxist fairy-tale motive of unleashing the productive forces leading to the abolition of estranged labor. New Babylon wants to create an artificial paradise in the form of a planetary rope-course for continuously creative mutants that give the term Weltinnenraum (world-interior-space) a new meaning. Not only does it provide the total interior, in which all spaces are air-conditioned, artificially illuminated, and ambient: The habitation within would be equivalent to the Dasein of a constantly spreading and unpredictably drifting architectural rhizome. Certainly within it there are no longer energy and environmental problems, due to the assumption of its externalization—massive remnant of the Marxist-humanist attitude about exploiting nature. Existence here has the meaning of being-in-the-installation, in fact without a permanent gallery and the desire for homeland, in constantly unplanned and coincidentally generated motion.
This drifting behavior (derive), which originates in the belief in step-by-step progress and a contempt for big plans—the antagonism of the Situationists to Le Corbusier’s Cartesians comes to mind—anticipated elements of chaos theory. But if the growth principle of this metacity is a rhizomatic chain formation, the relationship to prefabrication remains the use of modules, and standardization remains unsolved—as is generally the relationship of repetition, as mimesis and innovation blur in the amorphous; here the myths of permanent creativity have inhibitory effects. More significantly, it is articulated that the basic unit of the large urban form should not be the room or the apartment but rather a quasi-macromolecular unit that Constant calls the sector.
We have to acknowledge that Constant’s monomanic-constructivist models have extensive analytic qualities, since, despite of their futuristic jargon, they should be considered as a description of the status quo, then to be readable as a vision. Their strength is that urbanized society has been described through its very acephality, asynchronicity, and mobility. Therefore they can better suit the multifocal constitution of the modern city and the poly-atmospheric than any existing theory. Constant’s comments highlight the evolutionary and fluid character of the hypercity, to which the adjacent real cities seem more like big inhibition machines whose components are appropriately called real estate. The weakness of the concept is, that despite its emphasis on the multitudes, no valid term of the city avails itself as a meta-collector— therefore the Sammlungsleistung (collector performance) of the urban space is lost, as is the connection of spaces of assembly and cooperation with spaces of separation and immunization (literally: non-participating in the munera or tasks of the collective). According to our knowledge, in New Babylon there is an indication neither of collectors of mass culture nor of the conventional Arbeitswelt (world of labor)—the more significantly conspicuous feature is the unilateral expansion of a space typology that has only been known from museums or art environments— planetary documenta, mobilized and made permanent.
With all of its weaknesses, New Babylon has descriptive power in terms of the lifestyle conditions that became dominant in the prosperous regions of the world since the 1970s: It anticipates a world without constant ties and populates its interior spaces with human beings; the ongoing liberalization of the liens sociaux and the transformation of the existential standards of deprived economies to experiments with plentiful resources would be accomplished facts. What had been a leftist romance with the “intensive life” in the 1950s and 1960s 5 developed into normality with the establishment of a lifestyle civilization for numerous citizens of the first world. While New Babylon is trying to think through the equation of city and world, it reached the hitherto greatest harmonization between the three insular reality types—space station, greenhouse, and human sphere; 6 one is persuaded that the individualistic advancement of the New Babylonian bourgeois-bohemian artist population is comparable to the almost tribal concepts of the early Biosphere 2 teams. From the earth, Constant’s projects are seen as nothing more than a cosmopolitan substratum for a multicultural yet in reality rooted in mono-civilizatory westlichen Ausdrucksluxus (western luxury expression) space station. From existing nature, as much as possible can be preserved to be incorporated into a comprehensive greenhouse. Certainly there would also be animals and plants in a realized New Babylon, but only as cohabitants of the integral interior, and not as an autonomous biosphere or external green space. Relics of Constant’s impulse can be recognized in the Netherlands contribution to Expo 2000 in Hannover: In a multilevel, transparent-even more, a façade-less-building, like tenants elsewhere in their apartments, are a stacked sequence of biotopes on six levels of 1,000 square meters each—a material implementation of the Netherlands World Exhibition motto: “Holland creates space.” As a hybrid form between botanic garden and large residence, this brilliantly bizarre building, a kind of vertical plant-tower, offers a contemporary comment on an expanding definition of dwelling as spaces of biotopic diversity under conditions of high urban density. Perhaps this installation derives from the thesis that speeches about “multicultural society” remain irrelevant unless there is consciousness that the actual matrix of diversity can be found in biotopic diversity. This poly-biotopic finds its materialization in advanced architecture. One can read them as “natures,” and biomes in the future will be found less “outside” and more in the megagreenhouses of a civilization that developed an awareness of its role as host of biotopic complexes.
The tendency to accommodate natures or habitats in urban structures goes beyond the traditional twentieth century forms of “city parks” or greenhouses. The Entkapselungsmotiv comes to operate at such a scope that it integrates larger and previously external landscapes.7 The modern city (and urban landscape) develops more and more into an operational unit of the sprawling triad of space station, greenhouse, and Human Island. At the urban pole of the tendency, advanced interiors become evident, for example the installed Ceiling Show on Fremont Street in Las Vegas, designed in the 1990s by Jon Jerde, where an entire street was transformed into a nightly light and sound experience for a worldly wow-crowd; at the other end of the pole, one is confronted with hybridscapes in an enclosed environment, as illustrated by some well-known indoor ski slopes and golf courses in Japan and elsewhere. You have to be careful to see not only curiosities in these examples. In both cases, contemporary architecture is exceeding the Old European idea of the human assembly environment as well as the utopia of mega-interiors (the type seen in Benjamin’s Passage) and the classical collector forms. The new adventure environments are not only a parody of the old concepts of city and the rural landscape, they also seem to find amusement in imitate terminologies such as “habitat” and “environmental conservation,” instantly indicating their spatial blindness.
For the time being, those macro-interiors project such a playful tone that it is hard to believe that such constructions offer a preview of climatic emergency. Within a foreseeable time in Europe, a frivolous commentator affirmed at the end of the 1990s, breathing might be too important to be continued outdoors? Do citizens of the coming centuries in the rich nations actually have to prepare to face the end of the atmospheric commons? One would like to hear the comments of an employee of the European aeronautics and space administration from the year 2102 about the mystical work of New York architects Liz Diller and Ricardo Scofidio – atmospheric-architecture in Yverdon-les-Bains on the shore of Lake Geneva, entitled Blur Building, which became the landmark for the Swiss Expo 2002 and was popularly named “the cloud,” 8 as it invited visitors— with technical complexity—to a walk on a long boardwalk through an artificial space sculpted out of atomized lake water. Although criticized by some as a gimmick and denounced as a waste, the blurred building made out of water particles, presenting itself during different weather conditions in changing colors and moods, was welcomed by the majority of visitors to Yverdon, who considered a walk into clouds (of course, in waterproof coats) as an ingenious introduction to the world of art. Individual guests may have understood that they were confronted by a loose form of a technically sophisticated experiment, a macro-atmospheric installation—or even better, because walkable clouds, as installations in general, are not experienced in the modus of immediacy, that they have been asked to immerse themselves in a climate sculpture.
It is assumed, given the popularity of the object, that it provided the visitor with intuitive insights into upcoming issues of air design and air-conditioning technology in a larger context. From the employee of the above-mentioned administration, we would like to know for what spatial and climatic history the Yverdon experiment set an example 100 years earlier.
1 See Elizabeth von Samsonov, “Touch Down and Take Off. Entwurf einer Philosophie vom (Bau)Grund,” lecture at the Antrittsvorlesung an der Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna 1996, Architektur und Bau Forum I (1997): 33-40.
2 Guy Debord. Report to the construction of situations, “Situationistic Internationale 1957-1972”, (Vienna: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), pp. 74-77
3 Mark Wigley, Constant’s New Babylon. The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (Rotterdam: Witte de With 010 Publishers. 1998) p 13.
4 Georg Simmel, “Der Begriff und die Tragoedie der Kultur,” in ders., Aufsaetze und Abhandlungen 1909-1918, Vol. I, complete ed. Vol. 12, (Frankfurt 2001) pp 194-223.
5 Guy Debord, “Situationist International” 1957-1972, a.a.O. p. 75.
6 About this Trias described in detail in chapter 1, Insulations. “Fuer eine Theorie der Kapseln, Inseln und Treibhaeuser,”p. 309-490.
7 L. de C., “The Capsular City, The Hieroglyphics of Space,” edited by Neil Leach (London and New York 2002) p 271-280.
8 Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Blur: The Making of Nothing (New York, Harry N. Abrams.2002)
“Foam City” is excerpted from Peter Sloterdijk’s Spaehren III:
Schaeume (Spheres III: Foams) Plurale Sphaerology (plural spherology)
Kapitel 2: Indoors: Architekturen des Schaums (Chapter 2: Indoors: Architectures of the Foam)
4 Foam City- Ueber urbane Raumvielheiten (4 Foam City – About urban spatial multitudes)
Published by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, 2004.