A New Blueprint: Time to Renovate the Architecture of Our Lives

Town-scapes are changing. The open-plan city belongs in the past — no more ramblas, no more pedestrian precincts, no more left banks and Latin quarters. We're moving into the age of security grilles and defensible space. As for living, our surveillance cameras can do that for us. People are locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems.

It makes unavoidably necessary an entirely new organization of society in which production is no longer directed by mutually competing individual industrialists but rather by the whole society operating according to a definite plan and taking account of the needs of all.

I don't believe there's a challenge anywhere in the world that's more important to people everywhere than finding solutions to the problems of our cities. But where do we begin — how do we start answering this great challenge? Well, we're convinced we must start answering the public need. And the need is not just for curing the old ills of old cities. We think the need is for starting from scratch on virgin land and building a special kind of new community that will always be in a state of becoming. It will never cease to be a living blueprint of the future, where people actually live a life they can't find anywhere else in the world.

Plan in the real world.

I hope to begin a new plan... not sitting down to local matter but walking and watching.

The problem of the house is a problem of the epoch. The equilibrium of society today depends upon it. Architecture has for its first duty, in this period of renewal, that of bringing about a revision of values, a revision of the constituent elements of the house.

In the future it will be necessary on the one hand to establish a balance between the intimate and individualistic demands for housing, and on the other to take full account of general social conditions. Thus, for example, cooking should be transferred from the private single kitchen into the communal cooking laboratory; the main meal should be consumed in public eating establishments; and the rearing of children should become the responsibility of the kindergarten or the school.. .Presently our goal is the transition from housing as an agglomeration of many private dwellings to housing communes.

But you’re right that all of us, Catholics, Arabs, Jews, have got to work out some sensible pattern of life for the world, or new alignments will occur so radical that no one here can visualize

The vast individual and corporate fortunes, the vast combinations of capital which have marked the development of our industrial system, create new conditions, and necessitate a change from the old attitude of state and the nation toward property.

The modern world, more than in any preceding epoch, feels the necessity to learn anew how to pray.

This dynamic architecture provides us with the new theater of life and because we are capable of grasping the idea of a whole town at any moment with any plan the task of architecture - the rhythmic arrangement of space and time - is perfectly and simply fulfilled for the new town will not be as chaotically laid out as the modern towns of north and south America but clearly and logically like a beehive..

I would like to offer an illustration. Imagine a house which is well designed from a material or practical point of view .. .Apart from these physio-functional demands, there are also psycho-functional demands which correspond with our optical, phonetic and tactile experiences. Until now, mankind has attempted to satisfy these 'supra-material' demands with a painting on the wall or a sculpture in a room.. ..the architecture of the future will have to destroy this duality. Its task will be to express completely and fulfill all our demands.

Technology's rapid development and our ever-changing lifestyles created a fundamentally new and exhilarating backdrop for building, and in this new world context I felt we must reinvestigate the aborted and untested experiments of Modernism – not to resurrect them, but to unveil new fields of building.