Foreword November, 2022

This essay was written in my first term of third year in early 2020 (before the COVID Pandemic). I came to distrust the architectural narrative of the modern architect as a sort of cultural saviour, seeing that major aspects of the movement were blatant failures for the communities they were hoping to foster.  Knowing that a return to small self-built city fabrics is a stretch in the modern context, I was interested in the possibility of self-built communities on a large scale. This research had an influence on my Complex project of the same term, and gave me hope for reappropriating public space through self-building in apartment housing. 

Corviale and Kowloon : Self-Build Anti-Utopias

Since Bernard Rudofsky’s exhibition Architecture Without Architects, and the work of Christopher Alexander in recognizing a consistent syntax of forms in designed spaces, interest in ‘informal’ human settlement done without architectural designers has remained an important counterpoint in the architectural discourse.  Building at unprecedented scale and intensity has focused a discourse on what has been lost in the life of urban peoples. It is clear in human-scaled works that they are more apt to create space for the lifestyles of the local community; buildings are created and renovated over time without an overarching architectural vision, but expressly to enhance the lives of the people in the area. Buildings become manifestations of the lives which occur within them. The system of building in North America today does not follow these lines: more central than community is economic viability and profit, and designed space has been left in the hands of so-called experts.  

However, within the proliferation of top-down building, there have been examples of large-scale projects majorly influenced, built, and renovated primarily by their residents. Corviale and Kowloon Walled City are giga-manifestations of self-built structures at the scale of cities. They are unique in their existence among modern giga-projects and urban experiments, as they represent the opposite of hegemonic development seen within the modern era. Corviale, “La Serpentone”, a kilometer-long modernist megastructure on the outskirts of Rome, was designed and built through the 1970s, with the hope of heaving incorporated shops and public spaces on the ground and fourth level. However, due to the immense need for housing in Post-War Italy, these areas were never completed, but appropriated by people and built into apartments. This gave the building its reputation for its isolation-rooted crime.  Kowloon Walled City, “The City of Darkness”, a vertical informal urban fragment filled an entire block to its physical limit in Hong Kong. A Chinese-controlled tax-haven of land active between 1948 and 1993, the year of its demolition, the space was added to continually and housed all sorts in its winding dark halls built by local contractors.  

These case studies point to different exaggerations in the possibilities afforded to society in the modern era. They gained their strengths not necessarily from their architectonics, but in the creative expression of their citizens in their construction and inhabitation patterns prompted by their economic circumstances.  Furthermore, their scale made oversight nearly impossible, and the buildings began to operate as cities would, and their citizens took the agency they required for their lives. Drawing upon the work of Rudofsky and Team X, this essay will discuss each with focus on social ingenuity.  

La Serpentone

Corviale, a kilometer-long, thirty-meter-wide, Corbusian mass of concrete set in a rolling green landscape on the outskirts of Rome, has been criticized as a failure even before its relative completion in 1982. In the late 1960’s, Italian cities were expanding at unprecedented rates and beginning the process of suburban subdivision.  Organizations like the IACP (Instituto autonomo case populari) were beginning to fund centralized projects like that of Corviale.  The architect, Mario Fiorentino, had a  distaste for the sprawling suburban condition beginning around Rome at the time: 

“‘[Corviale is]…a new dimension of the habitat, which puts itself as a radical alternative to the present dispersion within the periphery […]. The new Corviale is a big residential unit, a single building complex […(which)] comprises and expresses also in its architecture the complexity and richness of relations innate to the city. […] [It is] highly integrated between dwellings and services, with separate vehicle and pedestrian access routes, designed with a voluntary bias’”.

The late-modern Megastructure was an attempt to house a city within the building.  The housing block was thus raised above an open ground level, connected to the car-lined street by a series of bridges. Split into five segments by a vertical glass elevator and stair cores the building attempts to break the monotony with light-filled spaces of circulation up to its tenth storey.  In turn the building’s center on the 5th level was designed to be a “piano libero” (Fig. 3) to develop naturally as the needs of the community willed: informal social spaces, a commercial center etc.  Furthermore. there was a series of spatial conditions adjoining apartments: outdoor hallways sometimes had large outdoor spaces which could be interpretively used by adjacent residents, and a large light-well between the two layers of apartments. The design left many generous spaces over to the residents.  However, these spaces became the source of La Serpentone’s curse: before the project’s completion, the central area was found by squatters and slowly built into a community of apartments often living parasitically off of resident apartments for electricity and water.  

The squatters resisted several evictions, and the building never reached its intended completion.  The lack of public amenity and useful public space created an isolated island known for crime, separated from any necessary shops or culture.  Furthermore, the building was entirely isolated from the rich cultural city life of Rome: the youth of Corviale actively travel 30-40 minutes to rejoin the Eternal city.  

However, this isolation caused the residents to live in an unexpected way: 

“…it has acquired another important value, that of the active participation of the occupant in the construction of the building…Despite all its negative aspects, [this work] acts as a palliative, sustaining an unexpected form of fantasy and imagination within the architecture,”.  These new citizenry have to a certain degree begun to return to the origins of communal architecture which has been rationalized into the contemporary city: “‘…[communal architecture is] a communal art, not produced by a few intellectuals or specialists but by the spontaneous and continuing activity of a whole people with a common heritage, acting under a community of experience.’

Exemplified best in the recent interventions now beginning to surface in the building, the Corviale “Void” which splits the building lengthwise into two walls of apartments faced with room-access corridors, has been actively appropriated as a garden-space by the residents (Fig. 7-8).  This act alone shows a propensity for residents toward the Lefebvre’s right to the city: “The right to the oeuvre, to participate and appropriation…”. Furthermore, in 2005 there began a community outreach program which began a closed-loop television channel for the development to showcase community events similar to other systems in social housing projects.  Original school and chapel spaces were appropriated into photography and art studios, the community has begun to take agency in their public spaces to productive means.  

The similarities between Corviale and other similar modernist projects (such as Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens, which even includes similar breaks in its unit structure for social space), may cause similar ends from stakeholders: namely, demolition. However, in recent years there has been a call for top-down renovations to Corviale: now in its later years and deteriorating, an argument must be made for a refurbishment of the building.  To garner support, ATER (formally the IACP) ran an international architectural competition in 2015, most of the results renovating spaces within the project toward the architect’s original vision.  The winning proposal aims to formalize the squatter settlement on the 5th story and link it into the existing fabric, while attempting to shift the building’s ground relationship to become something of the originally designed social space.  Furthermore, there has been a speculative urban design proposal and analysis done out of the Cornell University Rome, CRP Studio aiming to improve access and community amenities on the surrounding site.  

The City of Darkness

Corviale has a glimmer of a self-building community seizing their right to the city, however it is limited by the same forces which caused its design and construction, namely the immensely restrictive architectonics of the shell.  In contrast, Kowloon Walled City, the “City of Darkness”, is the logical conclusion to a truly urban-scale self-build megastructure.  From photographs one can instantly perceive the precarity and intense uniqueness of the “city” (Fig. 2) and the political and financial situations which allowed for its development.  

In the negotiation for the lease of Hong Kong to Britain, the Chinese Government was left the 100 meter by 200 meter area of Kowloon as a place for political oversight.  The site was initially used as a military base by the Chinese government; however, once disbanded by the Hong Kong government, the area was squatted upon by several hundred people until after the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong: “China denied that the [Hong Kong] government could do anything in the city without her permission: indeed, before and after 1933 China always insisted that the KWC was Chinese territory,”.  Between 1948 and 1968, Hong Kong’s economy grew eightfold and population increased significantly calling for the squatted 2-3 storey houses in Kowloon to be intensified.  Several private developments were done with modest 25-40 square meter units to a maximum height of 6 storeys in the 1960s, however this was furthered in the 1970s to a maximum height of 13 storeys.  The development of the buildings became more cramped precarious as time went on: The Mark IV Development had family units of only 11 square meters.  These buildings were beginning to break the Hong-Kong Building Ordinances however, they were never reinforced.  This only meant that the units could be built to standards below the law and be sold at 30% lower rates “due to risk of planning enforcement,”.  

Despite poor living conditions, the building’s social and commercial life was interestingly vibrant.  Building developers built units as demand allowed all the way to the 1990s and those units were modified to accommodate food stores and kitchens, sites for prostitution which were know to run all times of day, countless dentistry’s (with a constant supply of customers), as well as a series of ground-level manufacturing spaces for weaving, plastic forming and metal working.  This garnered a communal sensibility which contrasts that of Corviale with accounts of families cooking for each-other or passers-by, even for neighboring brothels.

This type of community-grounded development echoes a model competition which Candilis-Josic-Woods played out in 1963.  The proposal was for a comparable city block infilled with varying programs and city life based on “shuffled order, … interconnection, [and] close knit patterns of association,” called the Mat-building. The building was planned with prefab elements like Kowloon, however unlike the City, was only one story in height.  Kowloon Walled City is a type of three dimensional Mat-building where circulation is limited through several hallway-like “streets” which interweave all 35000 residents.  In essence created by the occupants themselves, relating program through the creative process of building.  This extended to the building’s infrastructure which often ran within these streets as well (Fig. 12).  There were eight water mains going into the sites requiring some transport of water for residents, electricity was wired through hallways and was a necessity for units without any access to the exterior.  

Despite the ingenuity and forward-thinking entrepreneurial attitude which the Walled City fostered, the conditions were severe.  Unregulated self-build at this scale is unprecedented and likely never will be.  However, some residents remember their time there fondly, the close communities which the form fostered were unmatched, especially in contemporary Hong Kong.

Two cities within thriving in singular buildings: one master-planned and rigid, infrastructure inherent and left to rot, the other left to develop in the shadow of under-regulation; both with reputations as the worst manifestations of cities in the 20th Century from the outside.  However, upon further inspection, the quality of life within was a more complex phenomena than simple services and space and responded to the ingenuity of their citizens.  The case studied exemplify the ideas of thinkers within the 20th Century and are architecturally and culturally significant projects in an exponentially growing world.  The ingenuity and will to create that can be found in the public can be a model for how architects begin to design giga-projects in the 21st Century.  Building with and for flexibility, truly responding to needs of those being designed for, as Team X began doing, is the spirit of Kowloon and Corviale, Darkness and Serpent.