The Laws of Foreign Buildings: Flat Roofs and Minarets - Michael ...

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6 Social & Legal Studies 000(00) In legal conflicts about building codes and zoning law we see the consequences of the peculiar properties of buildings as quasi-technologies. This problem of quasi-technology as linked to zoning is central to understand why and how foreign types pose such intricate problems for both society in general and the law in particular. The following two case studies demonstrate these intricacies with examples where forms of buildings provide the starting point. This already shows that buildings are taken to be technologies or at least media, otherwise the conflicts would not occur at all. A controversy about minarets can only arise because somebody mediatizes a tower on a building as a form that necessitates in some people an urge to religious domination. The disputes discussed below show how the law in action produces foreign types by accepting them as the subject of disputes. I selected the case studies not for being representative of the universe of similar cases, but on the grounds that each of them reveals a different aspect of the problem: they both start with a different angle and both of them end with a different result. In each case I focus on how building types are contested. A contested building is either changed in its use or material form and then these changes become the subject of lawsuits. In each case, the use or the building is defined as being ‘foreign’. The courts have to decide whether the uses and changes conform to the existing legal classifications or not. By doing so, they also have to take decisions about whether a specific imported use or material form can be accommodated to existing laws. Flat Roofs and Local Identity: The New as the Foreign The first case study looks at the very introduction of building codes in Switzerland, the introduction of the first code in Ascona, Canton Ticino in the 1920s. 5 As I show, the introduction of building codes was a direct effect of trying to prevent a foreign building type, namely modern architecture and specifically flat roofs. The case study also highlights that the identification of what counts as indigenous and foreign is not so easy and, furthermore, that the foreign can become indigenous. Until the early 1920s, Ascona was a sleepy town of about 1000 inhabitants (Figure 1). In the late 1920s tourism, mostly from Germany, took off, which lead to a sudden increase in building activities, from around five applications for planning permission per year in the early 1920s to 53 in 1930 (Keller et al., 2001: 17). Most importantly, the German Baron Eduard von der Heydt became the owner of the famous Monte Verità where he commissioned in 1927 the German architect Emil Fahrenkamp to build a new hotel. At the same time the architect Carl Weidemeyer built the new theatre San Materno. Both buildings were part of the new modern spirit brought to Ascona by a commune of avantgarde artists, writers and dancers on Monte Verità, among them Hugo Ball, Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Hermann Hesse, Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Henry Van de Velde, László Moholy-Nagy, Joseph Albers, Walter Gropius, and even Lenin. The new buildings sported big horizontal windows, flat roofs and exposed concrete walls. They could be built without having to comply with a building code, because such a law did not exist at that time. Soon, other buildings were planned in the same style. The town council of Ascona reacted by establishing a building commission with four members and it asked for pre-construction drawings and prescribed that new buildings are 6
Guggenheim 7 Figure 1. Photograph of the Piazza of Ascona around 1910, photographer unknown (from Keller, 2001: 13). built in a ‘Stil del Paese’ a version of a 19th century style from northern Italy (Keller et al., 2001, 18) (see Figure 2). When in 1928 the architect Eduard Keller from the German-speaking part of Switzerland applied for a building permission for his own little modernist vacation house, Casa Catterina, the building authorities of Ascona were alarmed. They asked the lawyer Otto Maraini to write an expertise about the new buildings. Maraini noted the ‘laudable intention’ that the ‘so called rational way of building’ tried to express the ‘purest and most pristine’ facets of buildings and he maintained that the new ways of building ‘logically implicate new aesthetic forms’ (Keller et al., 2001: 20, 22). However, he concluded that the buildings under review ‘do not respect the local character and its traditions’ (Keller et al., 2001: 22). He wrote: ‘It is Nordic import’, which, carries an expression, form and character that is not acceptable here and that stands beyond doubt in contrast to the spirit of article 1 §2 of the building code that states that the town administration has to maintain the style of the country with respect to aesthetics. (Keller et al., 2001: 22) He concluded that permitting more buildings of the same kind would lead to ‘an extraordinary damage for the harmony of the milieu and an irreparable adulteration of the scenery’ (Keller et al., 2001: 22). The town administration endorsed this statement and denied planning permission to the Casa Catterina (Figure 3). Keller himself employed the lawyer Marcionni, who answered that ‘in each field new ideas grow’. He tried to save the Casa Catterina by maintaining that ‘the rational architecture conforms better to our time ... [T]hus the rational architecture has to be our 7
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