A "Third Way"
          

A particular challenge for the Task Force was to find an urban form which bridged the qualities of old and new versions of the city. In Viterbo, Potsdam, Berlin and Sidon the sites selected were at points in the city at which two quite distinct types of fabric came together. In Potsdam, for example, fragments of a partly-reconstructed eighteenth century fabric jostled with windswept slabs from the GDR city which had gradually replaced it after wartime bombing. In Sidon the task was to meld what was a forgotten rump of the city with the fabric of the old madina, to create something resembling an urban quarter out of elements which in sum had not, during the previous forty years, possessed that quality. In such places, the Task Force was often operating between ideological, as well as physical, extremes – and, in proposing its own “Third Way”, sought to mediate between the demands of those who regarded the damaged city as a tabula rasa, and those who, in seeking the preservation or reconstruction of major historical elements (for example, the ongoing struggle by the Historical Society in Berlin to have reconstructed the eighteenth/nineteenth century Stadtschloss), risked losing sight of the larger urban design dimension. This “Third Way” was a powerful one: intended to reconstitute important civic spaces, supported fully by the typology of an appropriate, and deeply authentic, architecture, with building and block patterns derived from the historical template, but carefully modified to suit modern demands. The proposals for Potsdam and Berlin were possibly the strongest statements of this approach in the Task Force canon. Through such projects we sought to stimulate the recovery of a progressive tradition of city-making - one able to face change, and assimilate it, but with a sensitivity to whatever continuities made good sense.

  A Vision for Berlin, looking East

Vital to this process was the nature of the young participants and their expectations, and the way those expectations could be managed and directed in the studio setting. The Task Force always asked a great deal of the students and young professionals coming to it from their backgrounds in conventional architectural education – now to be found in most parts of the world. The studio discipline of the Task Force encouraged collective decision-making, as against individualistic approaches; it demanded working with the grain of a city, so that the designer becomes almost anonymous rather than self-expressive; it required of participants a kind of “apprenticeship” to the teaching community, very unlike the relationship which now prevails in schools of architecture in the West (or, increasingly, elsewhere). To enable the public to play a meaningful role it placed more emphasis than usual on the quality of the presentation of ideas. Participants did not always find this framework an easy one within which to work. But what this method forced the more perceptive participants to consider was how much remains undeveloped in the grand statement, and therefore how much vital work remains to be done. For many who were to share their positive experiences later, though, it was this encounter with a new and unfamiliar discipline in the studio that represented the greatest learning experience of the Task Force.