It is perhaps the supreme irony of the Twentieth Century that the tools of The Enlightenment's conclusion should become agents of unprecedented barbarism, destruction and dislocation. The collapse of Reason at precisely the moment of its purported triumph has created the voids of uncertainty and pathology that we today call 'culture'. Our faith in the invincibility of Pure Reason has, with few exceptions, been all but exhausted. The formal and conceptual structures of our vacuous Post-Modernity stand as empty monuments to what appears to have been the Great Hoax of the Enlightenment.

The question of urban form in the wake of this tempest is an open one. The notion of utopia is greeted today with profound suspicion. Total solutions, political, formal, or otherwise, are no longer valid strategies: As President Clinton concluded, with a nudge from a disgruntled electorate in 1994 , "The Era of Big Government is over."²

From the vortex of this crisis, three significant positions have cautiously emerged. A neo-avant guarde, whose protagonists include Rem Koolhaus, Bernhard Tschumi and Peter Eisenmann, suggests a fearless embrace of the existing morass with the promise of aesthetic deliverance. Utopia, for the proponents of this movement, is a dangerous folly propelled by a code of values, which, by definition, are subjective and therefore arbitrary. A reactionary movement proposes the abandonment of Modernity's materials, methods, and morals. Paradoxically, a pure strain of philosophical Modernism, in the tradition of Hilbeseimer or Gropius, characterizes the polemics of this position, whose most prolific voice is Leon Krier's. A Neo-Modernism, which fuses the utopian impulses of the original cannon with a fresh look at the nature of Rationality and the idiosycracies of humanity, proposes a re-evaluation of the project of The Enlightenment. It is the intent of this present exercise to examine this third position, as it is first articulated by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter in Collage City. The objective is to reveal in this 'New Modernism', both its sources in, and divergence from, the now infamous utopian creed of the 1920's. That the components and objectives of the original ethos are intact in the new solution is to be made made evident through an analysis of both. Ultimately, it will be proposed that the distinguishing characteristic of philosophic Modernism is the projection of Utopia.

Perhaps the most prolific vision of utopia to be born of The Enlightenment, the Ville Radieuse of Le Corbusier was proposed as the solution to the puzzle of human existence in an industrialized world. Unlike the exclusively functional models proposed by Sant Elia and the Italian Futurists, Le Corbusier's radiant City was the result of an unlikely marriage between two hither-to-distant visions. The tradition of Functionalist Utopia, born of Newton, Ledoux, Saint-Simon and finally Sant Elia, was brought together with the Aesthetic Utopia of Hegel, Piranesi and Bruno Taut. The result is a portrait of harmony between Man, Landscape and Machine that was irresistible to legions of architects and planners between and after the two World Wars. It was Le Corbusier's particular genius for synthesis, the result of a life-long preoccupation with Nietzchian heroism and the polar forces of the universe, that gave rise to this compelling vision.⁴ For Le Corbusier, humanity was the product of two great impulses, one grounded in rationality, the other in emotion: " We are in a state of expectation: Shall it be reason? Or shall it be passion? Here are two streams of thought, two individual things in conflict."⁵ The City of Tomorrow, like the citizens for whom it would be home, is here to be composed of both the rational (functional) and the emotional (aesthetic); "And we may risk the hypothesis that the greatest of emotive works, works of art, are born from a happy conduction of passion and knowledge" ⁶

The functional logic of the project was displayed in the clarity of transportation systems, the separation of functions into zones, and the isolation of discrete components. The aesthetic considerations were governed first by the geometric configuration of the whole, and second by the conviction that the 'essential joys' of light, open space and greenery would permeate the entire city, providing for the maximum mental and physical health of its inhabitants. To this end the project was explicitly a political project, a condemnation of the 19^th century industrial city as a nest of chaos filth, decadence and social injustice. Its intentions were, in the finest Enlightenment tradition, the liberation and self-determination of man through the divine gift of Reason.

The potency of this vision was a result of the synthesis it represented. Humanity could live at harmony with the machine and the landscape, in a Utopia that could, only until yesterday, only exist in the ethereal fields of great minds. Synthesis, however, did not suggest fusion. Rather, these seemingly disparate protagonists were to emerge and recede in a grand counterpoint - engaging the others without becoming them, participating in the whole without compromising their distinct roles. Indeed, one begins to discern something irrational lurking beneath this rational clarity, "…the products of reason must be carefully differentiated from the products of passion."⁷ This insistence reveals a subtle bias in the composer; it may be inferred that the 'products of passion', being associated with unreason, mystery and the irrational, were capable of contamination. It is in this subtlety that the imminent failure of the Ville Radiuse is contained, foreshadowed, prophesized. Though humanity's dionysion impulses are carefully considered in the composition, they are ultimately subordinate to the fluid operations of the totality. And as such the Ville Radiuse reveals itself to be exemplary of the totalitarian impulses of its time, which as a matter of course applied the positivism of empirical science to the mystery's of human behavior.

A re-evaluation of the Ville Radiusse, as occurs in Collage City arises principally because of a sympathy for its objectives. At issue is a potential redemption of the Enlightenment in the wake of its' expiration. In essence, Collage City represents a highly mannered and deliberately idiosyncratic resumption of the project of the Modern Utopia. Like some a-temporal tenors waking from a deep slumber, All of the original protagonists are scripted in the sequel. Their roles, however, have been dramatically recomposed and their relationship to one another turned asunder.

Rowe and Koetter also begin with a fundamental polemic, the very same that obsessed Le Corbusier. With regards to the Architecture's dueling Muses, Science and Art, or technology and humanity, they conclude, "In other words, and right at the beginning, one is confronted with the simultaneous profession of two standards of value whose compatibility is not evident."⁹ This is but the first of many dialectic relationships which characterize the project from its inception. Indeed, the entire text may be understood as a continuing presentation of polemical conditions that attempt to be resolved in some synthesis or fusion. The ethos of composition here however, is worlds away from Le Corbusiers 'happy conjunction'. The new method, based in a rejection of positivism and the embrace of quirky humanism, is collage. The ambiguity and simultaneity of a dual reading - where elements of a composition oscillate between themselves and something else - this, for Rowe and Koetter, is the solution to the paradox of an Ideal City. These intentions are, perhaps not without irony, stated with perfect clarity in the beginning of the text, " A proposal for constructive disillusion, it is simultaneously an appeal for order and disorder, for the simple and the complex, for the joint existence of permanent reference and random happening, of the private and the public, of innovation and tradition, of both the retrospective and prophetic gesture."(p.8)

According to the authors, the grave error of the Ville Radiusse was two-fold. First, in its manifest rejection of the pre-existing, the scheme was doomed to an a-historical anaesthetic numbness: the tabula-rausa which Le Corbusier demanded would produce a world without memory, reference or myths. And Second, the formal solutions of the Ville Radiusse were a complete inversion of conventional urban space-making methods. In order that the 'essential joys' be experienced by the many, the tower must rise in the park. The objectification of form was a political necessity, and the tradition of street and square, 'the pack donkey's way', was banished forever to the history books. It became soon apparent, as the bastard children of the Ville Radiusse proliferated between and after the World Wars, that the city of endless field was ill equipped to satiate that elusive human need to dwell; "For it is surely apparent that , while limited structured spaces may facilitate identification and understanding, an interminable naturalistic void without any recognizable boundaries will at least be likely to defeat all comprehension."(p. 64) Identity and comprehension are the means of continuity, both historical and spatial. To consciously ignore both, contend Rowe and Koetter, is to remove the city from time, tradition, memory and meaning. A city based upon the rationalization of human behavior, in a post-Enlightenment understanding of that word, must therefore reconstitute the virtues of texture, enclosure and discretion, both historically and phenomenolgically.

It is thus the authors contention that Corb's 'essential joys', the dominant aesthetic consideration of his vision, be relegated to a lesser position, and that the notion of a continuous matrix of texture or urban poche be elevated to the location of aesthetic priority. In so doing the figural spaces of the city become a 'theater of memory' from which meaning, identity and continuity are achieved.

As an initial proposition, this strategy would seem to imply the abandonment of modernist spatial conceptions, and such the demise of the object building. This, however, is not the case. As perhaps the most ambitious collage of the text, an attempt is made to wed the traditional city with the Modernist Utopian one; "We have identified two models: we have suggested that it would be less than sane to abandon either; and we are , consequently, concerned with their reconciliation."(p.72) The result of this final synthesis is Collage city, an urban configuration which, drawing from 19^th century notions of a Museum City, juxtaposes a continuum of texture or poche which serves as the 'scaffold' within which the exhibits of the museum are framed. It is suggested that these exhibits should be fragments of the Modernist Utopia - technological displays of scientific prowess, which allude to humanity's inevitable triumph. This 'theater of prophecy' will complement the 'theater of memory' provided by the matrix of historical texture. What this vision suggests in many ways implies an inversion of the Modernist Utopia: the agents of empirical rationalism are reduced to the role of contained artifacts, while the instrument of humane aesthetics, namely the historical matrix of the city, provide the condition of field. The protagonists of the Ville Radiusse are once again here at play, only now their formal manifestation, as much as their role in the composition, has been dramatically reconfigured. As such, the Enlightenment, which sought from conception to liberate humanity from Nature through Reason, is picked up, dusted off, and sent about its' business in a world that is now quite dubious of its intentions, "…while we surrender any illusion of free will we may yet retain, we may still be consoled by the faith that such is the way to the rational coherence of libertarian perfection."(p.100)

The lasting value of Collage City is first its' now irrefutable critique of the a-spatial empiricism of the City of Modern Architecture. Of similar resonance, is the proposition that a renewal of Enlightenment objectives might be born from a new understanding of Rationalism, which allows for the idiocyractic, the imperfect, the mysterious, as part of its definition. However, the richness of the text is also its greatest detractor - in the clever fusion of historical and phenomenological opposites through the process of collage, the message at times risks becoming completely irrelevant: on occasion the elements of collage systematically eclipse each other, with neither gaining the privilege of 'figure' or the certainty of 'field'. This is most clearly illustrated in the attempt to simultaneously employ traditional and modernist space making techniques. In short, the two are beyond compromise, unyielding to the presence of the other: Object buildings may appear within the fabric of the city, but their original conception a proposed in the Modernist Utopia, is impossible to achieve within a city of enclosed spaces. The two worlds are mutually exclusive. This contradiction is illustrated in the proposed fate of the object in the new city, "..It is proposed here that, rather than hoping away the object, it might be judicious, in most cases to allow and encourage the object to become digested in a prevalent texture or matrix. It is further suggested that neither object nor space fixation are, in themselves, any longer representative of valuable attitudes." Can the 'digestion' of the object imply other than 'space fixation'?

Perhaps one can forgive the opportunistic indiscretions of the text, which, after all, is devoted to a subversion of rational empiricism. For it appears that if Modernism, and the Utopian project it by definition entails, is to endure into the new millennium, it must do so by way of the new rationalism articulated here.