ABSTRACT
Many modern architects of the post-war period referred to the idea of an ‘Open Society’ suggesting they were building towards such a society. While the term was not coined by him, it was the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper who both theorized and popularized it with his monumental book of 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies.1 In Team 10 circles too, it was a favourite phrase, just like the ones of ‘open aesthetics’ and ‘open form’. British architects Alison and Peter Smithson and leading voices of Team 10 stated that ‘an open society needs an open city. Freedom to move and somewhere to go, both inside and outside the city.’2 They spoke of the ‘open city’ with an ‘open centre’ with regard to the various projects they proposed for the war-devastated German city of Berlin during the late 1950s and 60s, among others their famous Hauptstadt Berlin competition entry of 1957-1958.3 This period was the heyday of the Cold War and the notion of anything ‘open’ was tailored against the Communist threat from the East, just as it was presented as the embodiment of the humanist alternative to the defeated Nazi regime and its fascist and racial doctrines. The open city of the post-war period was to be an all-inclusive city: ‘for each man and all men’ as Aldo van Eyck put it in 1959.4
The Open Society and what it stands for are key to understanding how the idea of a welfare state developed from working-class relief in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to the comprehensive, political undertaking that affected all walks of life after the Second World War. For instance, the famous Spangen housing block in Rotterdam (1919-1921) by Michiel Brinkman is a proud example of a collectivist working-class enclave, one which follows a strategy of both containment and emancipation: whereas the large-scale city expansions of the post-war period such as those by Cornelis van Eesteren for Amsterdam and Lotte Stam-Beese for Rotterdam presented all-inclusive strategies in anticipation of a much more mobile society.5 As part of these strategies, collective and public spaces were often fused into a continuous landscape of open spaces so as to build new social identities. Looking back however, we can see that the all-inclusive aspect of the Open Society as guaranteed by a neutral state apparatus paired with a new individual freedom based on egalitarianism created
irresolvable contradictory conditions for the architects who sought to build for the Open Society.
