Lely’s Column
As early as the 1960s, the modernist model that lay at the basis of plan architect Van Eesteren’s new town in the new Dutch polder proved to be unrealistic. The utopian plan that proposed a complete new and harmoniously structured city, succumbed to the realities of the time. Governmental opportunism thus became the foundation on which Lelystad was built. Now, forty years later, a thorough urban renewal is deemed necessary to safeguard the city from further social-economic decline and to offer it a new future.
It goes without saying that today’s urban planning can’t be a reflection anymore of a political ideology which sees society as ‘makable’. The most important pillar of society, economics, has established itself digitally, which means that functionality no longer has to be expressed in the architectural style of buildings. The decreasing need for political and economic recognisibility has facilitated much less rigid ideas about urban planning.
In collaboration with West 8 landscape architects & urban planners, of Rotterdam, the city of Lelystad has developed an extended plan for revitalising the city, which among other things provides for a green carré consisting of hundreds of trees around the city centre. In the new town, the architects have placed an urban element as it has grown historically in many an old city. There, in a natural process, green rings grew around town centres where the old city walls were razed.
The green carré is in fact the death blow to the failing modernist ideal of the city. The chronological inconsistency of this plan will, in time, dissolve into a new image of the city in which the modernist adage of form follows function has withered away and form follows feeling will have prevailed. Contrary to modernist ideas, more and more importance is being attached to people feeling well in an environment, whatever definition of the truth they may hold. Urban planning will have to anticipate on the inevitable postmodernity of society.
Lely’s column proclaims this concept and emphasises the beginning of a new phase in Lelystad’s development. Unlike its famous predecessors in Rome, London, Barcelona and Paris, the thirty-two meter high column is made of basalt blocks, the prime material needed for draining the polders, which still protects the city against the threat of the sea. On top of the column stands the three meter high statue of the man who was technically responsible for developing the IJselmeerpolders, engineer Cornelis Lely. The statue was made in 1984 by professor Piet Esser and stood elsewhere in Lelystad until recently. The ambition of the Masterplan Lelystad Citycentre is accentuated by revitalising this statue of the city’s eponym. With purposefully applied iconoclasm, artist Hans van Houwelingen has thrown the modernist legacy to pieces and reassembled it. The plain composite of urban elements which ideologically reject each other defies the laws of modernism, but results in an urban artefact, which does not relate to the frugal functionalist architecture of contemporary Lelystad, but conforms itself to the dimensions and beauty befitting a metropolis.
Architect Aldo Rossi defines an urban artefact as a street, a block of residences, a building or monument, with a history of events and memories, which are inextricably tied to the city as a whole, which in a sense summarise it. Lelystad has no history and thus no urban artefacts. At the crossroads of its urban and social change, Lely’s Column is ahead of Lelystad’s future. The artwork marks a cultural philosophical renewal in which chronology is a point of debate. As a result, Lely’s Column can grow to become an important urban artefact in this young polder town. It will be the symbol of a new Lelystad, but also of a new way of thinking about Lelystad.
Source: Hans van Houwelingen, text brochure, 2002
Note: Piet Esser decided that his sculpture should be removed from the column, which was effectuated on April 25th 2003, half a year after it was installed. The Mari Andriessen Foundation granted the rights to make a second casting of the sculpture Andriessen made of Lely, which was placed at the brink of the Afsluitdijk at Den Oever in 1954. In September 2004, exactly 150 years after he was born, Lely’s column will be completed.
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