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SPEAKER_04: The architects were on the ship for the International Congress of Modern Architecture, commonly known by its French acronym, CIAM. That's Senior Producer Katie Mingle, and I'm going to hand this story over to her now.
SPEAKER_05: So, yeah, the architects were on this boat trip for a CIAM meeting.
SPEAKER_04: But more specifically, they were there to talk about how to plan a better city. The members of CIAM thought that cities were too congested, too noisy and polluted and chaotic. And they thought that some of these problems could be solved by separating out the functions of a city into distinct zones. So separate everything, housing, working, recreation, traffic.
SPEAKER_08: Separate all the kinds of traffic, so pedestrians, the cyclists, cars, the trains. It would mean the end of congestion.
SPEAKER_04: That's Zef Hamel. I'm Zef Hamel and I'm a planner.
SPEAKER_08: Hamel spent a bunch of years working for the city of Amsterdam as the head of the urban planning department.
SPEAKER_04: And now he teaches at the University of Amsterdam. And, yeah, I love cities.
SPEAKER_04: The idea of separation of functions wasn't brand new. But Hamel says the architects from CIAM wanted to take it really far. The living spaces would be in high-rise apartments so that the ground level was open for recreation and collective spaces. Live in the sky, play on the ground. In fact, cars would drive on elevated roads so that pedestrians could have the ground all to themselves. There would also be separate zones for industry and shopping. Where old European cities were winding, cluttered and polluted, these new cities would be linear, open and clean. Everything in its proper place. It should be a kind of smooth, nice machine where you're very comfortable.
SPEAKER_04: Modernists also saw this new kind of city as more egalitarian. They wanted to get rid of slums and create beautiful housing that everyone could afford. It was a beautiful image. A new image. A new alternative for living in cities.
SPEAKER_00: That's the American city planner Oscar Newman in a BBC documentary called The Writing on the Wall.
SPEAKER_04: Put the people up. Give them a view. The view happens to be the other buildings, but give them a view.
SPEAKER_00: Give them space down below. Free the grounds. It was a great image.
SPEAKER_04: But in the 1930s, that's all it was. A great image. Because the world was in an economic depression.
SPEAKER_08: There was not much to do in the 1930s because it was the crisis. There was no building anymore. And then we got the Second World War. It sounds cynical, but in fact, they were rather lucky that so many cities were destroyed in the Second World War. And we even found documents that they almost celebrated the destruction. So there was a lot of work to do in 1945. And they were really excited.
SPEAKER_04: But it wasn't just that the architects had a lot of work. It was an opportunity to start over. To build cities the right way. From the ground up. Yes. And that was their idea from the start. So tear everything down. Let's start again.
SPEAKER_04: The CIAM architects seized this opportunity. The famous Swiss architect and CIAM member Le Corbusier published a book called Le Chartes d'Atend.
SPEAKER_04: Or in English, The Athens Charter. The book outlined exactly how to build new cities and the way the architects from CIAM had talked about on the boat. And it became a bestseller.
SPEAKER_08: Le Corbusier traveled the world talking about these modern ideas for city building. And governments liked what they saw. Mostly because of the price tag.
SPEAKER_08: What CIAM proposed was in fact very cheap building. Concrete, the modernist building material of choice, was inexpensive. And building identical apartments in high rises was cheaper and required less land than building stand-alone homes.
SPEAKER_04: And that was what all the governments needed after the Second World War. Because whole Europe was poor.
SPEAKER_04: And so after World War II, in cities all over Europe, buildings and housing developments were rebuilt with CIAM principles in mind. Almost everything. Here in Europe, almost everything.
SPEAKER_04: We built a lot of modernist-style apartment buildings here in the US too. But these building projects in post-war Europe and the United States weren't usually pure encapsulations of CIAM and Le Corbusier's plans. Most places took some ideas and left others. But the city planners of Amsterdam in the Netherlands wanted to go further. They wanted to build a new area right outside of Amsterdam that would be a CIAM blueprint. A perfect encapsulation of these modernist principles. They would call this place the Belmer-Mir.
SPEAKER_11: So from the center of Amsterdam I think you could take a bike and within a half hour you are in the Belmer-Mir. That's Dutch radio producer Chris Beijme. He co-reported this story with me and like a proper Dutchman, he rode his bike out to do interviews many times at the Belmer-Mir.
SPEAKER_11: I always take my bike. So you'll hear him asking questions and occasionally speaking in Dutch.
SPEAKER_04: Yes, we could ask him what he's doing. He's looking for another thing.
SPEAKER_10: The Belmer-Mir area covers about 6 square kilometers or 2.3 square miles.
SPEAKER_04: I think you can walk around for a day. It's really big.
SPEAKER_11: Today the Belmer-Mir is also an extremely diverse area. There are something like 150 nationalities represented there.
SPEAKER_02: We ship all your cargo to Ghana. The area has changed a lot from the original design and it's had a bunch of different chapters over the years. Including some really tragic ones.
SPEAKER_04: So let's start at the beginning.
SPEAKER_02: First can you introduce yourself, who you are and what you are. My name is Peter Brown. I'm an architect in Amsterdam and I've been along for a while.
SPEAKER_06: I've been educated in Delft University. It was very much in the functionalist, modernist tradition. That means that the big concrete blocks, that was our paradise. When he was a young man, Brown was hired to help plan the Belmer-Mir.
SPEAKER_04: It would be a brand new area right outside of Amsterdam for 100,000 middle class residents. And it would technically be part of Amsterdam, but it would be built from scratch and designed to function almost as its own city. A city of the future, true to the tenants of modernism. The Belmer-Mir. It's the apotheosis of all modernist thinking.
SPEAKER_06: Was it a dream come true for you? Oh definitely yes. I was not even 30 years old, a bit more than 25. We are going to present the world with a new far reaching idea that's utopic. I started to understand this is going far man. This is really unusual. It was like a fever, my every day, every moment in that direction. De Brown worked on a team with a bunch of other planners.
SPEAKER_04: And the head of the team was an architect named Siegfried Nasrut. Siegfried Nasrut was really an idealistic person.
SPEAKER_09: And he believed that how we built in the 19th to 18th century wasn't good enough. We had to do it all over again and new and bigger and better. This is Dan Dekker.
SPEAKER_09: I'm a writer and I wrote a book about the Belmer.
SPEAKER_04: The Belmer is just a shorter way of saying the Belmer-Mir. You'll hear people use it a lot. Anyway, Dan says there was never any question that the Belmer would be made up of tall concrete housing towers. But the planners did choose to arrange them in a sort of unique shape.
SPEAKER_09: Which was the shape of a honing... What's how you say it? I have to search the words because I... Yeah, we have to search the words honing it out.
SPEAKER_10: Honeycomb? Honeycomb, yeah.
SPEAKER_04: If the buildings were laid out in the hexagonal grid of a honeycomb, it would allow each apartment to get a good amount of sun per day. The modernists were crazy about sunlight. That was a huge part of their doctrine. You were doing better than your predecessors if you could bring more sun to all these dwellings.
SPEAKER_06: The apartments at the Belmer were meant for the middle class.
SPEAKER_04: And no apartment was designed to be better than another.
SPEAKER_06: The image of man behind this Belmer-Mir was egalitarian. The basic idea behind it was that every man is equal to his neighbor. The modernist idea to keep all of the functions of a city separate was also strictly followed at the Belmer.
SPEAKER_04: The housing would be up in the sky in towers, while the ground would be kept open for the people to congregate in green spaces and indoor collective areas. The idea being... People would discuss politics there, philosophy, help each other grow in life, make better people.
SPEAKER_09: At one point, Peter Brown proposed apartments be built on the ground level of the building.
SPEAKER_04: And Nasr was completely horrified and appalled, saying... The ground is for everyone. The earth should not be inhabited by private people.
SPEAKER_06: De Brown says any suggestion to stray from the original principles of modernism was completely shut down by Nasr.
SPEAKER_04: He would say, no, stop, we're not going this direction. We'll stay in the party line.
SPEAKER_06: It was like a religion and any subversive element was potentially a big danger to the House of Cards. But you also were what we call in the Netherlands a Belmer believer.
SPEAKER_02: And you actually moved to a flat in 1969. I was so much involved in the modern movement, in modernism.
SPEAKER_06: It was no doubt that I would like to live in the middle of it. De Brown was not the only person who wanted to live in the middle of it.
SPEAKER_04: Advertisements depicted a paradise, modern apartment towers surrounded by lush green grass and trees. It's comparable with living in Central Park. It's even going to be better than Central Park.
SPEAKER_09: Of course people wanted in.
SPEAKER_04: Each building was managed by a different housing association and there were waiting lists and interviews to be accepted as a tenant. De Brown and his wife moved in in 1969. I lived on the ninth floor, three bedrooms and a living room and kitchen, a beautiful bathroom.
SPEAKER_06: I had a balcony of close to two meters wide and twelve meters long. It was a paradise of a balcony. De Brown had always lived in small apartments in noisy cities.
SPEAKER_04: Now he was on the ninth floor, up in the clouds, tons of light, and he loved it. He talks about his first year at the Belmer like it was a religious experience. Very much an everyday saintly feeling.
SPEAKER_06: There is, you know, all this daily hostility of a city noise wasn't the case. There was a cool and silent air, a life that brought you deeper into yourself maybe.
SPEAKER_04: But there were also pretty immediate problems. A metro was supposed to connect the Belmer with Amsterdam, but the construction was delayed. For a while there was only one road out to the area and it was dirt. The designers had also planned for shops to come to the Belmer mirror, but those didn't come right away either. There was nowhere to buy groceries if you didn't have a car or didn't want to ride your bike thirty minutes to Amsterdam. There came this kind of driving van every Friday or maybe twice in the week to sell a bottle of milk.
SPEAKER_06: It was very, very primitive. Eventually the roads did come, and true to the modernist idea of separation of functions,
SPEAKER_04: they were elevated above the ground, sort of weaving in and out of the high rises.
SPEAKER_08: I remember you could drive with your car and then have this spectacular view of the Belmer, seeing all those high rises around you, and then driving 70, 80 kilometers an hour through this cityscape. Wow, that was amazing.
SPEAKER_04: That's Zeph Hamel again, who you heard at the beginning, and he says, yeah, it was amazing, but it was also disorienting. It was always problematic to find your way.
SPEAKER_08: Where am I? Which flat building is this? Where am I going? You could not find the center. You couldn't find the center because there was no city center, no town square,
SPEAKER_04: just identical concrete buildings, one after another after another. Visitors were constantly getting lost, and they couldn't just pull over and ask for directions. No one would walk on that high level, so you would never encounter someone.
SPEAKER_06: There was no way to ask, how can I get to this or this address?
SPEAKER_04: And on the ground level, the promised green space didn't come right away either. Green takes time to grow, and de Brown says in the beginning, the landscape was like a desert. Below, in the desert, you would also not encounter someone because who would walk through the desert?
SPEAKER_06: But I liked it. My wife liked it because she was with me, and we were all young, and there is a state of pioneering that many people like. What were you saying to the designing team? Because you lived there.
SPEAKER_02: I would tell my superiors, these planners like Nasr, it isn't working.
SPEAKER_06: And he would say, this is, you have to wait. This is because it's not finished yet. And so de Brown waited. Other residents were not as patient.
SPEAKER_04: I remember this kind of elderly couple, children left home, so they thought,
SPEAKER_06: okay, now we're going to this paradise that has been promised to us. And they were, after one year, completely disillusioned. The waiting list disappeared really fast. Desperate people that start screaming,
SPEAKER_09: where is the subway? Where are the shops?
SPEAKER_04: By the early 1970s, as the Belmer was being built, much of the world was already turning against the massive concrete apartment towers that modernists had pushed for in the 30s and 40s. Nobody built these kind of structures at that time anymore.
SPEAKER_08: In America, in St. Louis, they were tearing them down. Today is demolition day at Pruitt-Igoe.
SPEAKER_07: Door wrecking company will explode the supporting columns from an 11-story vacant high rise. Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis had also been an experiment in the modernist principles of CM.
SPEAKER_04: It was different than the Belmer in that it was never meant to function as a city unto itself. But it was similar, too. Made up of 33 high-rise towers surrounded by lots of green space, the architect had envisioned rivers of trees running between the buildings. Pruitt-Igoe was completed in 1954, and just 15 years later, it was so overrun with vacancies and drugs and violence that the city chose to tear it down. The current secretary of housing has decided that Pruitt-Igoe was, in fact, a disastrous mistake.
SPEAKER_00: That's the city planner Oscar Newman again.
SPEAKER_04: He theorized that it was all the common spaces at Pruitt-Igoe that led to its downfall. Those rivers of trees the architect had envisioned? Newman-They became sewers of glass and garbage rather than rivers of trees.
SPEAKER_00: The inside of the building, the interior spaces were vandalized, the heating equipment torn apart, garbage strewn everywhere, lights smashed, windows broken.
SPEAKER_04: Newman believed that if there was a lot of space in or around a building that residents couldn't literally see from their own windows and watch over, that that space was vulnerable to crime. The net result of all this quality design was, in fact, the production of an environment of fear.
SPEAKER_00: In 1972, Oscar Newman visited the Belmer mirror, and he gave it essentially the same diagnosis.
SPEAKER_04: Vacancies and empty common spaces would become breeding grounds for crime. Even members of CM were turning against the Belmer. The famous Dutch architect and CM member Aldo van Eyck went on national TV in the Netherlands and cried literal tears over what an awful concrete monstrosity the Belmer was. Yeah, yeah, he cried. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: Still, more buildings went up. Massive concrete structures, around 400 apartments in each. First there were a couple of buildings, then there were four, then five, then six. There was no break, no stop.
SPEAKER_06: Seven, eight, nine buildings.
SPEAKER_04: You should have said, stop building more units because they'll be standing empty.
SPEAKER_06: And no one said that, not even me.
SPEAKER_04: Ten, fifteen buildings. I'm going to start counting in fives because there are too many. Twenty buildings, twenty-five, thirty.
SPEAKER_06: These contractors had contracts for years and years of continuous building, and they just did. And that was like oil on the fire. Thirty-one buildings in all.
SPEAKER_04: Thirteen thousand apartments arranged in hexagonal blocks so that from above the Belmer mirror looked like a massive concrete sci-fi honingrat. Honingrat.
SPEAKER_10: Honingrat. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: Honingrat. In addition to all the buildings, there were also 13,000 storage spaces on the ground level, 31 parking garages, hundreds of elevators and staircases and common spaces, and 110 kilometers, or 68 miles, of indoor, ground-level corridors. There was so much space, and not enough people to fill it up or watch over it. But there were still people who needed housing for the building. In fact, there were thousands of newly arrived citizens who had traveled across the Atlantic Ocean from a tropical land in South America, and they needed a place to live.
SPEAKER_07: The story of the Belmer mirror took so many twists and turns that we have to continue it next week.
SPEAKER_05: We'll have a preview of that episode right after this. If thinking about salsa and a variety of delicious flavors and heat levels makes your mouth water, you need to check out Green Mountain Gringo. And make sure you turn the jar around to see its all-natural ingredients. With the medium salsa, you get hearty chunks of tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers, and onions in every scoop. Some like it hot, and for those people like me, Green Mountain Gringo does not disappoint. My favorite is the hot salsa, which is a very popular flavor in the United States. And for those people like me, Green Mountain Gringo does not disappoint. My favorite is the hot salsa, which brings flavorful heat to every meal, with each bite containing jalapenos, serrano peppers, and other savory herbs. Green Mountain Gringo even has their own tortilla strips, made with stone-ground all-natural yellow corn flour. As far as I'm concerned, the secret to life is to have the ingredients to make nachos in your home at all times. Plus, they have a hot sauce with a tangy, spicy flavor that enhances the simplest of meals. It's perfect for eggs. I like hot sauce on eggs. Visit greenmountaingringo.com and start shopping. Use the store locator to find Green Mountain Gringo products, get inspiration for recipes, and purchase products using promo code PODCAST23 for 23% off. That's promo code PODCAST23. If you want to give your body the nutrients it craves and the energy it needs, there's Kachava. It's a plant-based super blend made up of superfoods, greens, proteins, omegas, vitamins and minerals, antioxidants, and probiotics. In other words, it's all your daily nutrients in a glass. Some folks choose to take it as the foundation of a healthy breakfast or lunch, while others lean on it as a delicious, protein-packed snack to curb cravings and reduce grazing. If you're in a hurry, you can just add two scoops of Kachava super blend to ice water or your favorite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. You know, treat yourself nice. Take a minute and treat yourself right. You'll get all the stuff that you need and feel great. Kachava is offering 10% off for a limited time. Just go to kachava.com slash invisible, spelled K-A-C-H-A-V-A, and get 10% off your first order. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com slash invisible. Kachava dot com slash invisible. Chances are you're listening to 99% invisible on your phone, probably while you're on the go. Think of all that you do on your phone the moment you leave your front door, whether it's looking up directions, scrolling social media, or listening to your favorite podcast. It requires an amazing network. That's why you should switch to T-Mobile. T-Mobile covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else and helps keep you connected with 5G from the driveway to the highway and the miles in between. Because your phone should just work where you are, it's your lifeline to pretty much everything you didn't bring with you. So next time you head out, whether you're taking a trip or going to work or just running errands, remember T-Mobile has got you covered. Find out more at T-Mobile dot com slash network and switch to the network that covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else. Coverage is not available in some areas. See 5G details at T-Mobile dot com. Next week on the show, the story of the Belmer mirror continues. So here's a bunch of white guys. They decide to build this area.
SPEAKER_03: This Belmer mirror area, people, it was the city of the future where living and working were physically separated and there would be a subway and it would be great and it would be fantastic. Everybody would have spandex jackets. This was the idea.
SPEAKER_05: When the idea of the Belmer mirror fails to live up to the reality, thousands of apartments sit empty and new people take them over. He said, we need houses. Let's go get the houses.
SPEAKER_05: But the Belmer Mir's newcomers aren't welcomed with open arms by all the old residents. So it was it was like Inferno, really. The lifts didn't work. They threw the refuse over over the balconies on either side of those blocks.
SPEAKER_06: It was like a ghetto. We were never the problem. We were the solution to the problem. And we made something from it.
SPEAKER_05: And a tragic accident strikes the Belmer mirror.
SPEAKER_03: They didn't let anybody go inside again. So you lost everything. Everything. Yeah, we lost everything. We lost everything. We lost everything. The only thing we get is our life.
SPEAKER_05: Ninety nine percent invisible was produced this week by our senior producer Katie Mingle and Chris Byema. Special thanks to Frank Wassenberg, Jean-Louis Cohen and Bota Yelema. Mix and tech production by Sharif Yousif. Music by Sean Real. Delaney Hall is the senior editor. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the staff includes Avery Traffelman, Amit Fitzgerald, Taron Mazza and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of ninety one point seven K.L.W. in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are part of Radio Topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We're supported by our coin carrying and sticker plastered listeners just like you. You can find 99 percent invisible and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99 P.I. or on Instagram, Tumblr and Reddit, too. But if you want to explore more of the Corbusier's modernist vision for houses and cities, we have links to three articles come out this week and they're all really, really good. It's on our Web site. Ninety nine P.I. dot org.
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