fritz haller: integral urban. a model
Text: Sandra Hofmeister
I have always been fascinated by utopias because, as imaginative games of the imagination, they know neither boundaries nor rules. Utopian urban designs are basically visions of free art. Whether they are ever realised and who finances them, or even under what conditions and with what building regulations they become reality... all of this is unimportant and irrelevant. Utopias give the imagination carte blanche. Anything goes, which is what makes them so exciting - mirages of a future that lies in the very distant future.
Discarded
I can't remember exactly how Fritz Haller's beautiful utopian book ‘totale stadt ein modell’ from 1968 ended up on my bookshelf. A lucky find at a flea market? The book has an unusual format - a large picture book in landscape format. It's not in good condition, the spine is coming apart and, as I realised, it's still quite a valuable rarity. The imprint says ‘walter-verlag ag olten’, no copyright is mentioned, otherwise only the succinct statement ‘gesamtherstellung in den werkstätten’ of the publisher. Back then, publishers still had workshops! Wikipedia clarifies that this publishing house was a ‘Catholic-orientated Swiss book and magazine publisher’, which was later taken over by Patmos-Verlag. Next to the imprint are several stamps of the former owners, including the Deutsche Baukadamie and the UB/TU Berlin - all with the reference ‘ausgesondert’.
Cities and orders
But now to Fritz Haller's urban utopia itself, which outlines an all-encompassing system for the city of the future with various orders. The first order is for 32,000 inhabitants - the fourth is called e4 and is for 6 million inhabitants, including a transport system and the remodelling of existing cities. How did the Swiss architect Fritz Haller, who was born in Solothurn in 1924 and died in Bern in 2012, come up with these ideas?
Despair and hope
‘in the year 2000, six billion people will live on the earth. By 2026, according to the same calculations, it will have reached ten billion,’ says the architect in the preceding chapter “facts”. His forecasts from 1968 are close to reality today; they have almost caught up with us. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) counts a total of 8.2 billion people by mid-2024 - a peak of 10.3 billion is expected to be reached by the mid-2080s. The key question for Haller's utopia is still relevant today: how should we deal with this population growth, what living opportunities and living requirements do we need? The urban model of the ‘total city’ that Haller developed is ‘the result of a labour of desire and curiosity - in part still - of despair and hope’. Haller's utopia is comprehensive, it presupposes inventions and describes an idea that is far from hoping to be realised. ‘nobody will build a city according to this model, because it is far from the necessary maturity.’ Science fiction, in other words.
The city as a system
Community cells form the core of the systematically conceived urban utopia; they are of different orders, clustered according to the number of inhabitants and assigned to different peripheries. Large spaces for utilities and services complement the cluster, which is built up in several superimposed levels. So-called ‘people-machine lanes’ connect the ‘centres of the second and third order and the peripheries of the third order with each other.’ Fritz Haller was already thinking about autonomous driving back then!
‘electronically controlled electric vehicles, called automats, with space for four people, travel on a multi-storey system of lanes built in such a way that each vehicle can reach its destination, which is given to it by punched cards, without interrupting its journey.’
Today, Fritz Haller's punched cards are software programmes, and although the automatic trains have not yet been implemented, the first steps towards autonomous driving have long been taken. Haller's automated railway has various stations and runs on different floors of the city, it knows paternosters as vehicle storage areas, ‘goods and snack niches’. In fact, everything a science fiction narrative needs to be turned into a screenplay immediately.
Utopia and drawing
The strain on transport routes, educational centres and production facilities for components - Haller considered all of this and recorded it in clear texts and meticulous drawings. The future was within reach in 1968, and individual elements and assumptions of Haller's system city of the future are reality today. The fact that we still don't live in Haller's city of the future, the ‘final expansion of the planned four-part third-order unit (e3) for 6 million people with associated recreational space around the existing lakes and the partially corrected river courses’, makes me almost grateful when reading this meticulous design book. Utopia and distopia - the two are close together. Ultimately, Haller's model of the total city is also a radical blueprint for a future that will hopefully never become reality. After all, the legacy of utopias is that they are everywhere warnings of developments that are inherent in the present.
Possibilities and confidence
Fritz Haller himself was obviously undecided. ‘- it is the immeasurable growth in life's possibilities and needs that could plunge the world into a frightening chaos,’ writes the architect in his Conclusio.
‘what the people of the coming age will consider worth living is not yet visible - or not yet invented. Perhaps the necessary ideas for this invention are still missing.’
Thank you Fritz Haller for this grandiose systemic urban utopia that continues to open my eyes - and for an unwavering belief in progress that looks to the future with confidence.
fritz haller, totale stadt, ein modell, integral urban, a model, zweisprachige Ausgabe/bilingual edition, walter-verlag ag, olten, 1968, 172 Seiten/pages, zahlreiche Zeichnungen/many drawings
