Schwarz
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Wanted: Umberto Eco Quote On Architecture
I'm translating a text I've written into English, in which I'm quoting Umberto Eco from the Swedish translation of his out of print La struttura assente. In this book, Eco devotes several chapters to a discussion on semiotics and architecture. The passage I'm quoting, and would like the English translation of, can be found on the first page of the major chapter titled “Function and the Sign” (or something equivalent).
Here's my attempt at a translation:
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Billy Klüver
In the first part of the paper I will discuss how the universalist attitude toward town planning, as stated in Le Corbusier’s La Charte d’Athènes (1943), was challenged by the younger CIAM members who were looking for an approach that would take into account the individual, as expressed in their “Statement on Habitat/Doorn Manifesto” (1954). In the second part I will examine the manner in which they balanced this thinking with universalist ideal as demonstrated in the project they presented at CIAM 9 (1953) and CIAM 10 (1956). In the third section I will examine their stance against universalization as expressed in their critique of the CIAM “grid,” both as an epistemological framework and method of presentation. The protagonists who made contributions to this new way of thinking are referred to as the ‘younger members’ before September 1954 – when they were first recognized as Team 10.
hiving mesh
The utopias proposed by [Yves] Klein and Superstudio are rooted in an architectural systems aesthetics that mobilized the immaterial as a form of instrumental and political critique. Its origins can be found in the challenge to entrenched modern planning ideals launched by the Team 10(7) architectural group in postwar Britain, a time in which new techniques of military Operations Research and cybernetics were being made public. These had advanced a form of systems thinking that saw complexes of people and machines as information processing systems governable through procedures of decision and control. For Team 10, cities and buildings were no exception. Social change, previously imposed top-down by an avant-garde who assumed an a priori agency of architecture in bringing it about, was now seen as emerging bottom-up from society's own internal processes, which architecture and planning were to steward. The task of the designer was to build the hardware—the amplifiers, attenuators, and gates that regulated the rate and intensity of flow within those systems. At minimum, architecture was to be designed to not get in its way.