SECTION ON
ARCHITECTURE
By A. Tzonis
Buchanan’s Report was
not addressed only to the specialist but to the general public as well. It
aimed to make it more mature and alert on the subject. This notion is very
important because every day it becomes more obvious that the problem of our
urban environment (to which traffic is one of its main aspects) will not and
cannot be solved by a one man genius's vision. We can only alter the situation
after a progress of the attitude that humanity has to the question (at least
that which lives in cities).
The reality of the
motor vehicle is not just a transportation convenience but a social
institution. Its present and future affects the people who have invested in it,
the storekeeper, the driver and the pedestrian. We all agree that at this
moment the trouble the service of the car is offering to us is extremely
serious, and the situation is getting worse and worse with the increase of the
number of this technological medium in use. The opinions are divided as far as
to what the real heart of the problem is and how we derive a solution from it.
From what assumptions must we start, using what methodology?
We all want proximity,
speed, security and con fort in our transportation medium. It is time that we
realise that a humanised pedestrian world is wanted urgently. The combination
of the two looks impossible considering it in terms of our present cities.
Buchanan and his group were not asked to produce «proposals for any specific
place», but having an overall look on the present situation to find a
methodology to attack it. The danger in such an exercise is always either to
become detached from reality and overemphasize one of the aspects of the
problem ignoring the rest of them, or to work through techniques that just
delay the rising difficulties. The reason is to try to find one simple
solution. It seems this is impossible. «It is safer even to avoid the term
"solution" altogether, for the traffic problem is not so much a
problem waiting for a solution, as a social situation requires to be dealt with
policies patiently applied over a period and revised from time to time in the
light of events».
The principals of the
work were not preestablished as tools of it but were created through the study of
the object and the use of it. There was created a «working theory» which «was
evolved by a combination process of searching for principles and actual cases».
The greatest importance
of the book is its humanistic approach within a
realistic frame of the future
technology. The key of the study is to give justice to each one by its turn, a
notion of balance, reminding me of Kahn's service and served termed here as
«urban corridor» and «urban room» or «traffic roads» versus «environmental
places». Under this generative principle of polarisation both technological
needs and humanistic necessities can develop together ideally in ordered
hierarchies without any conflict between them and meet at the right point at
the right moment.
The basic form giving force out of
chaos was and is separation.
The question to find
the necessary quantitative conditions under which the whole of urban life can
exist, the point we can accomodate the greatest number of traffic through the
transportation network (under the best conditions of the driver), without
violating the standard of the quality of the environmental place leads to the
definition of environmental places.
A valuable analysis
which is a part of the study draws a clear and objective picture of what the
properties of such places must be keeping as many cars to the closest point
possible of their destination.
It is really impressive
to see how after the analysis in each case study the city from an orderless
aggregation of units takes form. One can visualise human life with the best
sense of the words coming out of the shell again. The revitalization of those
environmental places applied to the totality of the urban tissue will
definitely influence human culture.
Through all this we
arrive to a point where it is 'obvious that a new kind of architecture has come
and we must accept it. Through this New we can preserve what is valuable of the
Past and Present not only in building but inside our human
existence.
A point that I am not
convinced is the future of the «car (or some equivalent machine) ». The report
is right since it is not designing plans but studies the effect of traffic in
towns, although using concrete situations as material. The notion of a well
formed hierarchical system of traffic is unavoidable as the only perspective of
the future no matter how we are going to move through it.
A new kind of mass
transportation is coming corresponding perhaps to each urban room and working
only inside it as flexible and as satisfactory an elevator is for a building.
The efficiency of this not individually owned medium is that it needs not a
parking space but a «waiting one». Also the existing system of distribution of
staple goods will change probably drastically. But even in this case the
importance of the analysis of «Traffic in Towns» is great. Among other things
it proves that a society that spends so much by consumers in vehicles has to
spend as public authority or anything else a lot for the carrier of this
service.
A Greek P.S.: This book
is important; it is a good thing to be studied by as many as possible.
Certainly by those who are concerned with such matters in Greece it is a must.
Those who believe that traffic congestion can be cured by cutting pavements,
those who believe, in express roads for express, roads' sake. The exercise on
Norwich will be usefull for those who think that Athens is an old city with
some monuments of value, Leed's for those who believe Athens is a big town and
London a big city. There can be an interesting comparison also between the Buchanan
report and the report Smith's group prepared for Athens. It will be clear that
despite the elaborate traffic system which is proposed by Smith the same chaos
and absence of order remains all over the city. Smith's report lacks one basic
thing. It lacks motive. It is an exercise with no goal and no result. Buchanan
and his team show well what motive is in such problems; the environmental
places of the city.