Javier Lloret - The Situationist City, Chapter One
The Situationist City - Chapter One: The Naked City
Situationist International(SI) was a group of european revolutionaries with their ideas influenced by 20th century European artistic avant-gardes and marxism. They promote experiences of life being alternative to the one created by the capitalist order to achieve a fully lived life. The Situationist existed from 1957 to 1972 and his most distinguished theorist was Guy Debord.
Situationist felt they should take action over the city. They used the term spectacle as the collapse of reality into the streams of images, products, and activities sanctioned by business and bureaucracy. They were against the prefabricated cities, because they saw them as the example of the obligatory absorption of a repetitive spectacle. They fought the rationalism in urban planning in order to achieve a more human architecture.
Aldo Van Eyck, as part of the Team 10 organization, shared some ideas with the Situationists but preferred to reshape space in the here-and now rather than wait for the revolution claimed by SI. In 1947 he made a “Statement against Rationalism”. With his Amsterdam playgrounds he transformed pieces of ground that were not used into active urban elements. He also proposed that architects plan cities of “labyrinthine clarity” substituting a strict hierarchy of spaces in order to create a more playful interaction with the city.
The Situationists felt that mass production created a society of excess. They didn’t want to be part of the “Spectacle” as Pop art artist did. They believed in the possibility of a cultural sphere outside the spectacle of capital, party politics and imperialism and they wanted to guide the population to that sphere through Détournement.
Détournement was a technique developed by SI in order to"turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself”. It was done through some pranks that they performed in literature, political theory and film.
The name of this chapter of the book, the naked city was the name of the most famous image from Situationism. In this image we saw a map that pretended to be a guide to areas of central Paris that were keeping the condition of contemporary Paris but were threatened by the redevelopment.
Andre Note's
- Society of spectacle as the collapse of reality into the streams of images, products, and activities
- against the prefabricated cities > the obligatory absorption of a repetitive spectacle
- Aldo Van Eyck - example of action - in waht context he appers?
- Détournement - "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself”