Table Of Content~ SpringerWienNewYork
Jesko Fezer · Martin Schmitz (Eds.)
Lucius Burckhardt Writings.
Rethinking Man-made
Environments
Politics, Landscape & Design
SpringerWienNewYork
Editors
Jesko Fezer, D–Berlin/Hamburg
design.hfbk-hamburg.de
Martin Schmitz, D–Berlin
martin-schmitz.de
lucius-burckhardt.org
We thank Annemarie Burckhardt (1930-2012)
for her many suggestions and steadfast support.
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© 2012 Springer-Verlag/Wien
SpringerWienNewYork is a part of Springer Science+Business Media
springer.at
Coverphoto: Lucius Burckhardt painted a fly on a grape, in emulation of the artist Apelles.
Is a realistic simulation of nature the very best art can do? Photo: Annemarie Burckhardt
Cover Design: Jesko Fezer, Martin Schmitz, Ekke Wolf
Typesetting: Ekke Wolf, A–Vienna, www.typic.at
Translated from the German: Jill Denton, D–Berlin
Proof reading: Andreas Müller, D–Berlin
Printed on acid-free and chlorine-free bleached paper
SPIN: 86094037
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012944424
With 32 figures
ISBN 978-3-7091-1256-4 SpringerWienNewYork
Content
Preface: The Work of Lucius Burckhardt 7
Urban Planning and Democracy (1957) 27
Ulm Anno 5. The Curriculum of the Ulm
School of Design (1960) 35
Building—A Process with No Obligations to Heritage
Preservation (1967) 44
On the Value and Meaning of Urban Utopias (1968) 63
From Design Academicism to the Treatment
of Wicked Problems (1973) 77
Who Plans the Planning? (1974) 85
Family and Home—Two Adaptable Systems (1975) 102
Urban Design and Its Significance for Residents (1975) 115
Gardening—An Art and A Necessity (1977) 123
Why Is Landscape Beautiful? (1979) 133
On the Design of Everyday Life (1979) 142
Design Is Invisible (1980) 153
Dirt (1980) 166
What Is Livability? On Quantifiable and Invisible Needs (1981) 170
The Night Is Man-made (1982) 179
Architecture—An Art or A Science? (1983) 189
A Critique of the Art of Gardening (1983) 195
Fake: The Real Thing (1987) 204
Aesthetics and Ecology (1990) 212
A Walk in Second Nature (1992) 226
The Sermon (1994) 232
Strollological Observations on Perception of the Environment
and the Tasks Facing Our Generation (1996) 239
Wasteland As Context. Is There Any Such Thing
As The Postmodern Landscape? (1998) 249
On Movement and Vantage Points—the Strollologist’s
Experience (1999) 264
Biography 281
Bibliography 283
Index 287
Jesko Fezer · Martin Schmitz
The Work of Lucius Burckhardt
Lucius Burckhardt was bold for he claimed that design is invisible.
He was exasperating for he asked why landscape is beautiful. He
was persistent for he doggedly asked who actually plans the plan-
ning. He was egalitarian for he addressed issues such as “livability”
and everyday life. He was provocative. He declared the night and
dirt to be a focus of his research. He was realistic insofar as he es-
tablished that to build or to design is a process. He was rebellious
for he made a science out of taking a stroll. He was far-sighted for
he claimed that care and maintenance are destructive.
Lucius Burckhardt published his writings in a broad range of
newspapers, magazines, anthologies, art catalogues and yearbooks,
and propounded his ideas also via other media, art events and lec-
tures. He thus reached people from all walks of life and areas of
expertise. His extensive repertoire encompassed a rich combination
of scientific research and formal intervention, expressed through
painting, drawing, walking, curating, designing and motoring. His
novel re-contextualization and interweave of various disciplines—
including some of his own invention—had an often, provoca-
tive and irrefutably, lasting impact. He radically and consistently
reflected on everyday man-made forms and structures, and made
those aspects generally ignored in the professional realm, and over-
looked by laymen, his core concern.
7
Annemarie and Lucius Burckhardt in their office at the University of Kassel, in 1993.
From the day they married in 1955, they worked in tandem. Photo: Reinhard Franz
The Car and the City
Lucius Burckhardt’s first research interest was the mass motoriza-
tion of Europe after World War II. The so-called “Greater Basel
Correction Plan” of 1949 proposed that narrow roads in the gothic
city center be restructured to the benefit of motorists—despite
the fact that Basel, unlike many German cities at the time, was
still structurally intact. But the new means of individual transport
required accessible parking lots near shops and offices. The Cor-
rection Plan foresaw the demolition of entire rows of houses, so
8
roads could be widened to accommodate the new traffic system.
Politicians and urban planners were ill prepared for such challenges
and intervened often to the detriment of the city’s material and so-
cial infrastructures. The inhabitants of houses to be demolished “in
the cause of urban renewal,” were the most helpless of all.
Lucius Burckhardt was one of the very few to recognize the
drama of the moment. “Historic City Center in Peril” announced
his article for a student newspaper in October 1949, when he was
only 24: “Unfortunately, no critical voice has been raised in the
daily press, and traffic psychosis seems to have afflicted commen-
tators (insofar as their tastes have not already capitulated to cur-
rent economic demands—as in, suspension bridge!). If destruction
of the historic city center can be postponed until the first postwar
motor has ceased to sputter, if the development of public transport
can be put on hold for a little while longer, until good taste has got
back on its feet, until value judgments have been re-revised, until
the bomb damage in Central Europe has permeated the conscious-
ness even of Basel’s population—if the destruction of the historic
city center can be postponed say, for thirty years, the battle would
be won.”¹
From this moment on, Lucius Burckhardt set himself the task
of reflecting on the socio-cultural conditions under which architec-
ture, design, urban planning and landscape design operate—a task
he was to consider from interdisciplinary vantage points: as a re-
search fellow at the University of Münster’s Social Research Center
in Dortmund, as a lecturer at the Ulm School of Design, as editor
of the journal Werk, as a member of the “professorial sofa” (as op-
1 Lucius Burckhardt, “Altstadt in Gefahr,” in: Basler Studentenblatt Nr. 1, 31, Basel,
October 1949, p. 12.
9
posed to the professorial chair) at the ETH Zurich, as a professor at
Kassel University, as chairman of the German Werkbund and, after
the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, as founding dean of the Design
Faculty at the Bauhaus University in Weimar.
Lucius Burckhardt began quasi as a simple citizen up in arms
about plans for his hometown Basel then proceeded to make criti-
cal civic engagement the basis of his life’s work. A first and funda-
mental step was to re-imagine planning and architecture in (and
for) a democracy. Publications such as Wir selber bauen unsre Stadt²
and achtung: die Schweiz³ analyzed the new conditions under which
architecture and urban planning operated in the 1950s. Burckhardt
studied under Edgar Salin and Karl Jaspers, and graduated in Basel
in 1955 with a thesis on “Party and State in the (Italian) Risorgi-
mento.” That same year he married Annemarie Burckhardt, with
whom he was to live and work until his death in 2003.
Democratic Urban Planning
In September 1957, a special issue of the Berlin architectural journal
Bauwelt was devoted to the opening of “Interbau,” an architectural
exhibition project in the Hansa district of West Berlin. A team of
authors convened by the new editor Ulrich Conrads and the urban
2 Lucius Burckhardt, Wir selber bauen unsre Stadt (We Build Our City Our-
selves), Verlag Felix Handschin, Basel 1953; co-authored by Markus Kutter.
3 Lucius Burckhardt, achtung: die Schweiz (Look Out! Switzerland), Basel 1955;
co-authored by Markus Kutter and Max Frisch.
10
