MULTIPLE CITY – Urban Concepts 1908

Venue:	Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany
Duration:	4 December 2008 - 1 March, 2009
Organizer:	Architekturmuseum / Department for Urban & Regional Planning at the TU München, sponsored by Kulturstiftung des Bundes
Accompanying publication:	Hardcover, 343 Pages ISBN: 978-3-86859-001-2
Reviewer:	Katharina Holzapfel, CTBUH Development Coordinator
	Download PDF of exhibition review here

Megacities and shrinking cities, “high-speed urbanism” and “slow cities” – the cities of this world are changing. New forms of cities, new urban landscapes, new global and local networks are emerging.

“MULTIPLE CITY” shows current urban development’s worldwide as mirrored in central urban concepts of the past 100 years. Their juxtaposition and interrelationship with leading historical and contemporary ideas illustrate and explain the complex and multi-layered developments of urban planning. The exhibition as well as its accompanying catalogue is to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Department for Urban and Regional Planning at the TU Munich. The first head of department was Theodor Fischer, the great architect and urban planner, who planned and designed Munich’s expansion at the end of the 19th century, which still characterizes the city today. The correlation between typical contemporary positions, long-term influence of urban regulations and urban phenomena of the present is clearly visible in his works.

How this development is interpreted and how we react to it is thus independent of urban design debates, each of which has its specific history. These histories have been taken up in sixteen topics and are presented in the exhibition, examining their transformation up to the present: From the garden city at the beginning of the 20th century via the city landscape concepts of the early post-war period to today’s “Urban Landscapes” and from the “New Towns” of the 1960s to the current establishments of cities in China and the United Arab Emirates; from the leading ideas of a “mobile city” to the “Telepolis” of a digital era and from the “Pleasure City” of a global consumer landscape to the strategy of branding, the city as a trademark. The ‘Functional City’, for example, is a model of the modern age, still recognizable in our building legislation and still practiced by an urban society that wants to consume the city, but not tolerate disturbance by others. Uses are being further differentiated and isolated from one another, although the opposite is valued in urban design today – mixed uses, variety and overlapping. New phenomena appear which, at the same time, can be a product of traditional strategies. Cities do not emerge of their own accord, they are made by people. Spaces map social structures, are an imprint of conditions, preferences and measures typical for the time. Urban design is a cross-sectional science that combines a variety of disciplines – including architecture. Architecture implies the design of urban spaces as diverse, comprehensive, succinct, and at the same time open spaces open for interpretations and open for the diverse uses. These phenomena are heterogeneous; there is neither one manifestation nor one strategy in dealing with the city of today: MULTIPLE CITY.


La Défense, Paris \| France \| 2008 © MARKUS LANZ		Victor Gruen \| Drawing from the presentation book »A Greater Fort Worth Tomorrow« \| Fort Worth, Texas \| 1956-60 © GRUEN ASSOCIATES, LOS ANGELES		Dubai \| United Arab Emirates \| 2008 © MARKUS LANZ

The exhibition is not attempting to deliver a guide or instructions for city planning; its aim is to bring about a better understanding of the complexity of cities by pursuing the key concepts of urban design from their origin through diverse modifications and changes to the present day.

The variety of city concepts is documented in the exhibition by means of original plans, models and photographs. Among the international examples are “La città analoga”, Archigram’s “Instant City”, a project by Rem Koolhaas for the international construction trade fair in Berlin 1980, original collages by Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown as well as sketches by Lucio Costa for the Brasilia masterplan, to be shown in Europe for the first time. Historical town concepts are compared with current changes of urban spaces in photo documentation, showing pictures of Dubai, Shanghai and Istanbul among others. In the catalogue city planners, architects and sociologists are dealing with today’s city and its multiple manifestations.

Exhibition and publication are a coproduction of the Architekturmuseum and the Department for Urban and Regional Planning at the TU Munich, sponsored by Kulturstiftung des Bundes.