In 1959, Eckhard Shulze-Fielitz tried his structural approach out on urban reality. One year after Yona Friedman’s Ville spatiale, he, in his turn, presented a flexible urban structure, adaptable to all locations, based on a modular system made up of bars, main structures and standardized units. “Raumstadt (spatial city) would be the agglomeration of different spatial structures, gradually adapting to requirements. […] Load-bearing spatial elements, surmounted by many inhabited floors, straddle spaces that are as wide as they are high. At the points of concentration, the city becomes detached from the ground, abandoning mechanical traffic to it… Raumstadt recreates a continuous, three-dimensional, public place, devoid of motorized traffic, and accompanies the shape of the landscape like a crystalline layer; it is itself a landscape that can be compared to one resulting from geological formations, with mountains and valleys, gorges and upland plateaus. […] Raumstadt is a labyrinth of structural space, systematized and prefabricated, that can be assembled and dismantled, developing or retracting, adaptable and multi-functional. In addition to the low cost of its implementation, this type of three-dimensional trellis would permit the optimization of the architectural performances of the whole structure, by combining the functionalism of right-angled architecture with the structural capacities of tetrahedral and octahedral constructions. All the points are equidistant from each other, and “the network has no diagonals and its stability exceeds of the cubic system”. By joining up the points of the tetrahedral and octahedral grid, the result is a spatial grid containing all the volumes that can be associated in a complementary way. The spatial city (Raumstadt) thus comes across like “a discontinuous continuity: discontinuous because of the contrast between the whole and the parts, continuous because of the permanent possibilities of transformations” (E. Shulze-Fielitz).
