99% Invisible - 296- Bijlmer (City of the Future, Part 1)

Episode Date: February 21, 2018

After World War 2, city planners in Amsterdam wanted to design the perfect “City of the Future.” They decided to build a new neighborhood, close to Amsterdam, that would be a perfect encapsulation of Modernist principles. It was called the Bijlmermeer, and it tested the lofty ideas of the International Congress of Modern Architecture on a grand scale. When it was over, no one would ever try it again. Bijlmer (City of the Future, Part 1)

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 1933, a group of architects boarded a ship called the SS Patrice II and set sail from Marseille, France toward Athens, Greece. On board were several of the world's most famous modernist architects and artists, Erno Goldfinger, Le Corbusier, of our alto, and dozens of others representing more than 15 countries. There was a silent film made of the voyage that shows grainy shots of the architects on deck of the ship in short-sleeved white shirts and sunglasses, cigarettes in their mouths their hair blowing gently in the breeze as they listen to lectures.

One of the architects wrote in his journal, we eat and drink copiously, and we're all half naked. The architects were on the ship for the International Congress of Modern Architecture, commonly known by its French acronym CM. That's senior producer Katie Mangle, and I'm going to hand this story over to her now. So, yeah, the architects were on this boat trip for a CM meeting, but more specifically, they were there to talk about how to plan a better city. The members of CN thought that cities were too congested, too noisy and polluted and chaotic, and they thought that some of these problems could be solved by separating out the functions of a

city into distinct zones. So, separate everything, housing, working, recreation, traffic, separate all the kinds of traffic. So pedestrians, the cyclists, cars, the trains, it would mean the end of congestion. That's Zeph Hamel. I'm Zeph Hamel and I'm a planner. Hamel spent a bunch of years working for the City of Amsterdam as the head of the Urban Planning Department. And now he teaches at the University of Amsterdam. And yeah, I love cities. The idea of separation of functions wasn't brand new. But Hamel says the architects from CM wanted to take it really far.

The living spaces would be in high-rise apartments so that the ground level was open for recreation and collective spaces. Live in the sky, play on the ground. In fact, cars would drive on elevated roads so that pedestrians could have the ground all to themselves. There would also be separate zones for industry and shopping. Where old European cities were winding, cluttered and polluted,

these new cities would be linear, open and clean. Everything in its proper place. It should be a kind of smooth, nice machine where you're very comfortable. Modernists also saw this new kind of city as more egalitarian. They wanted to get rid of slums and create beautiful housing that everyone could afford. It was a beautiful image, a new image, a new alternative for living in cities. That's the American city planner Oscar Newman in a BBC documentary called The Writing on the Wall. Put the people up, give them a view.

The view happens to be the other buildings, but give them a view, give them space down below, free the grounds. It was a great image. But in the 1930s, that's all it was, a great image, because the world was in an economic depression. There was not much to do in the 1930s, because it was the crisis. There was not much to do in the 1930s because it was the crisis.

There was no building anymore. And then we got the Second World War. It sounds cynical, but in fact, they were rather lucky that so many cities were destroyed in the Second World War. And we even found documents that they almost celebrated at this destruction. So there was a lot of work to do in 1945. And they were really excited.

But it wasn't just that the architects had a lot of work. It was an opportunity to start over, to build cities the right way, from the ground up. Yes, and that was all, that was their idea from the start. So tear everything down. Let's start again. The CM Architect seized this opportunity. The famous Swiss architect and CM member, Le Corbusier, published a book called Le Le Charte d'Atene.

Or in English, the Athens Charter. The book outlined exactly how to build new cities in the way the architects from CM had talked about on the boat. And it became a bestseller. Le Corbusier traveled the world talking about these modern ideas for city building. And governments liked what they saw, mostly because of the price tag. What Siam proposed was, in fact, very cheap building. Concrete, the modernist building material of choice was inexpensive.

And building identical apartments in high-rises was cheaper and required less land than building standalone homes. And that was what all the governments needed after the Second World War, because whole Europe was poor. And so, after World War II, in cities all over Europe, buildings and housing developments were rebuilt with CM principles in mind. Almost everything. Here in Europe, almost everything. We built a lot of modernist style apartment buildings here in the US too. But these building projects

in post-war Europe and the United States weren't usually pure encapsulations of CM and Le Corbusier's plans. Most places took some ideas and left others. But the city planners of Amsterdam and the Netherlands wanted to go further. They wanted to build a new area right outside of Amsterdam. There would be a CM blueprint, a perfect encapsulation of these modernist principles. They would call this place the Belmer Mirror. So from the center of MSTEM, I think you could take the bike and within a half hour you

are in the Belmer Mirror. That's Dutch radio producer Chris Bayema. He co-reported this story with me and like a proper Dutchman, he wrote his bike out to do interviews many times at the Belmer Mirror. I always take my bike. So you'll hear him asking questions and occasionally speaking in Dutch. We can't even say that it's dry now, we'll just walk to that thing.

The Belmer Mirror area covers about 6 square kilometers or 2.3 square miles. I think you can walk around for a day. It's really big. Today, the Bill Mermere is also an extremely diverse area. There's something like 150 nationalities represented there. We sheep all your cargo to Ghana. It says on the... The area has changed a lot from the original design. And it's had a bunch of different chapters over the years,

including some really tragic ones. So let's start at the beginning. First can you introduce yourself to your eye and what you are? My name is Peter Brown. I'm an architect in Amsterdam and I've been along for a while. I've been educated in Delft University. It was very much in the functionalist, modernist tradition. That means that the big concrete blocks that was our paradise. When he was a young man, the brown was hired to help plan the Belmer Mirror. It would be a brand-new area right outside of Amsterdam for 100,000 middle-class residents. And it would technically be part of Amsterdam, but it would be built from scratch and designed to function almost as its own city.

A city of the future, true to the tenets of modernism. The Belmer Mere, it's the apotheosis of all modernists thinking. I say the dream come true for you? Oh, definitely, yes. I was not even 30 years old, a bit more than 25. We are going to present the world with a new, far reaching,

idea that utopic, I started to understand this is going far, and this is really unusual. It was like a fever, my every day, every moment, in that direction. The Brown worked on a team with a bunch of other planners, and the head of the team was an architect named SIGFRIED NASSUTE. Yeah, SIGFRIED NASSUTE was really a idealistic person. And he believed that how we built in the 19th, 18th century wasn't good enough. We had to do it all over again and knew and bigger and better. This is Dan Decker.

I'm a writer and I wrote a book about the Belmer. The Belmer is just a shorter way of saying the Belmer mirror. You'll hear people use it a lot. Anyway, Dan says there was never any question that the Belmer would be made up of tall, concrete housing towers. But the planners did choose to arrange them in a sort of unique shape.

Which was a shape of a honing, blah, blah, blah, blah, what's how you say, yeah, blah. I have to search the words, because I have to. Yeah, we have to search the words honing, blah, blah, blah, blah, what's how you say? Yeah, blah. I have to search the words, because I have to. Yeah, we have to search the words. Honing that. Honeycomb? Honeycomb, yeah. If the buildings were laid out in the hexagonal grid of a honeycomb, they would allow each apartment

to get a good amount of sun per day. The modernists were crazy about sunlight. That was a huge part of their doctrine. You were doing better than your predecessors. If you could bring more sun to all these dwellings. The apartments at the Belmer were meant for the middle class, and no apartment was designed to be better than another. The image of man behind this Belmermier was egalitarian. The basic idea behind it was that every man is equal to his neighbor. The modernist idea to keep all of the functions of a city separate was also strictly followed at the Belmer.

The housing would be up in the sky in towers, while the ground would be kept open for the people to congregate in green spaces and indoor collective areas. The idea being, people would discuss politics there, philosophy, help each other grow in life, make better people. At one point, Pida Brown proposed apartments be built on the ground level of the building,

and NASA was completely horrified and appalled, saying, Pete Abround proposed apartments be built on the ground level of the building, and Nassoud was completely horrified and appalled, saying, The ground is for everyone. The earth should not be inhabited by private people. The Browns has any suggestion to stray from the original principles of modernism was completely shut down by Nassoud. He would say, no, stop. We're not going this direction. We'll stay in the party line.

It was like a religion. And any, any subversive element was potentially a big danger to the House of Cards. OK, but you also were what we call, in the Netherlands, a Balmer believer. And you actually moved to a flat in 69. I was so much involved in the modern movement, in modernism.

It was no doubt that I would like to live in the middle of it. De Brown was not the only person who wanted to live in the middle of it. Debron was not the only person who wanted to live in the middle of it. Advertisements depicted a paradise, modern apartment towers surrounded by lush, green grass and trees. It's comparable with living in Central Park. It's even going to be better than Central Park. Of course, people wanted in. Each building was managed by a different housing association and there were waiting lists and interviews to be accepted as a tenant. The Brown and his wife moved in in 1969.

I lived on the ninth floor, three bedrooms and a living room and kitchen, a beautiful bathroom. I had a balcony of close to two meters white and 12 meters long. It was a paradise of a balcony. The brown had always lived in small apartments in noisy cities. Now he was on the ninth floor up in the clouds, tons of light, and he loved it. He talks about his first year at the Belmer, like it was a religious experience. Very much, and every day, saintly feeling. You know, all this daily hostility of a city, noise, wasn't the case. There was a cool and silent air,

a life that brought you deeper into yourself, maybe. But there were also pretty immediate problems. A metro was supposed to connect the Belmer with Amsterdam, but the construction was delayed. For a while there was only one road out to the area, and it was dirt. The designers had also planned for shops to come to the Belmer Mirror, but those didn't come right away either. There was nowhere to buy groceries if you didn't have a car or didn't want to ride your bike 30 minutes to Amsterdam. That came a this kind of driving van every Friday or maybe twice in a week to sell a bottle of milk. It was

twice in a week to sell a bottle of milk. It was very, very primitive. Eventually the roads did come and true to the modernist idea of separation of functions, they were elevated above the ground, sort of weaving in and out of the high rises. I remember you could drive with your car and then have this spectacular view of the Belmer, seeing all those high rises around you and then driving 70, 80 kilometers an hour through this city scape. Wow, that was amazing. That's Jeff Hamill again who you heard at the beginning and he says yeah it was amazing but it was also disorienting. It was always problematic to find your way. Where am I? Which flat building is this? Where am I going? You could not find the center. You couldn't find the center because there was no

city center, no town square, just identical concrete buildings, one after another, after another. just identical concrete buildings, one after another, after another. Visitors were constantly getting lost, and they couldn't just pull over and ask for directions. No one would walk on that high level, so you would never encounter someone that was no way to ask, how can I get to this or this address? And on the ground level, the promised green space didn't come right away either. Green takes time to grow. And the brown says in the beginning, the landscape was like a desert. Below in the desert, you would also not encode or uncode or someone,

because who would walk through the desert? But I liked it. My wife liked it because she was with me, and we all young and there is a state of pioneering that many people like. What we are saying to the designing team because you live there. I would tell my superiors these planners like Nusset, it isn't working and he would say, this is you have to wait. This is because it's not finished yet. And so the brown waited. Other residents were not as patient. I remember this kind of old elderly couple

children left home, so they thought, okay, now we're going to this paradise that has been promised to us. And they were, after one year year completely disillusioned. The waiting list disappeared really fast. Desperate people that start screaming, where's the soapway, where are the shops? By the early 1970s, as the Belmer was being built, much of the world was already turning against the massive concrete apartment towers that modernists had pushed for in the 30s and 40s.

Nobody built these kind of structures at that time anymore. In America, in Silhouez, they were tearing them down. Today is Demolition Day at Crue et Igo. Door wrecking company will explode the supporting columns from an 11-story vacant high rise. from an 11-story vacant high rise. Prudigo in St. Louis had also been an experiment in the modernist principles of CM. It was different than the Belmer in that it was never meant to function

as a city unto itself. But it was similar, too, made up of 33 high rise towers surrounded by lots of green space. The architect had envisioned rivers of trees running between the buildings. Prudigo was completed in 1954, and just 15 years later it was so overrun with vacancies and drugs and violence that the city chose to tear it down. The current secretary of housing has decided that Prudhago wasn't back to a disastrous mistake.

That's the city planner Oscar Newman again. He theorized that it was all the common spaces at Prudhago that led to its downfall. Those rivers of trees, the architect had envisioned. They became sewers of glass and garbage, rather than rivers of trees. The insides of the building, the interior spaces were vandalized, the heating equipment torn apart, garbage, strewn everywhere, lights smashed, windows broken. Newman believed that if there was a lot of space

in or around a building that residents couldn't literally see from their own windows and watch over, that that space was vulnerable to crime. The net result of all this quality design was in fact the production of an environment of fear. In 1972, Oscar Newman visited the Belmer Mirror and he gave it essentially the same diagnosis. They can seize an empty common spaces, would become breeding grounds for crime. Even members of CM were turning against the Belmer.

The famous Dutch architect and CM member Aldo Van Eyck went on national TV in the Netherlands and cried literal tears over what an awful concrete monstrosity the Belmer was. Yeah, yeah, yeah, cried. Yeah. Still more buildings went up. Massive concrete structures.

Around 400 apartments in each. First, there were a couple of buildings. Then there were four, then five, then six. There was no break, no stop. Seven, eight, nine buildings. You should have said, stop building more units because they'll be standing empty. And no have said stop building more units because they'll be standing empty and no one said that not even me. 10 15 buildings I'm gonna start

counting in five because there are too many 20 buildings 25 30. These contractors had contracts for years and years of continuous building and they just did. And that was like oil on the fire. 31 buildings in all. 13,000 apartments arranged in hexagonal blocks. So that from above, the Belmer Mirror looked like a massive concrete sci-fi honing grad. Honing grad. Honey, come on. Yeah. Honing grad. In addition to all the buildings, there were also 13,000 storage spaces on the

ground level. 31 parking garages, hundreds of elevators and staircases and common spaces, and 110 kilometers or 68 miles of indoor ground-level corridors. There was so much space, and not enough people to fill it up or watch over it. But there were still people who needed housing in the Netherlands. In fact, there were thousands of newly-arrived citizens who had traveled across the Atlantic Ocean from a tropical land in South America, and they needed a place to live. The story of the Belmer Mayor took so many twists and turns that we have to continue it next week. We'll have a preview of that episode right after this.

Next week on the show, the story of the Belmer Mayor continues. So here's a bunch of white guys. They decide to build this area. This Belmer Mayor area, people, it was the city of the future where living and working were physically separated and there would be a Subway and it would be great and it would be fantastic. Everybody would have spandex jackets. This was the idea. When the idea of the Belmer mere fails to live up to the reality, thousands of apartments said empty, and new people take them over. He said, we need houses, let's go get the houses. But the Belmer Meers newcomers aren't welcomed with open arms by all the old residents.

So it was like inferno, really. The lifts didn't work, they threw the refuse over the balconies on either side of those blocks. It was like a ghetto. We were never the problem, we were the solution to the problem and we made something from it. And a tragic accident strikes the Belmer Mirror. They didn't let anybody go inside again. Everything, we lost everything.

We lost everything. We lost everything. The only thing we get is our life. 99% Invisible was produced this week by our senior producer Katie Mingle and Chris Biema. Special thanks to Frank Wasenberg, Jean-Louis Cohen, and Boatat Yelama. Mixing Tech Production by Sharif Youssef, Music by Sean Riel. Delaney Hall is the senior editor. Kurt Colstead is the digital director. The rest of staff includes Avery Trophman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Taren Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of

91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are part of Radio Topia from PRX, a collective of the best most innovative shows in all a podcasting. We are supported by our coin carrying and sticker plastered listeners just like you. You can find 99% invisible and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI Orc, or on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But if you want to explore more of the Corbuciers modernist

vision for houses and cities, we have links to three articles come out this week and they're all really, really good. It's on our website, 99PI.org. Radio tapio. Radio tapio. From PRX. Radio Tapio from PRX.