Sigfried Giedion - Architecture, You and Me
Sigfried Giedion - Architecture, You and Me
Sigfried Giedion - Architecture, You and Me
S.
GIEDION
architecture
you
and
me
The
diary of a development
Harvard
iy;8
University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London
Number 58-6578
FOREWORD
This book is not based upon organized research. Books concerned with research into past events have to be planned and written consistently from beginning to end to clarify relationships between events and developments. No such
method
is
one is standing in the midst of an evolving period, only a few signs can occasionally be traced or noted. Only later, by checking backward, can one judge whether truly constituent facts had been recognized or where the argument had gone astray. This book cannot be more than a diary of a development
is concerned the diary of a contemporary observer. The development forms and reforms as new problems appear on the horizon. Evidences are set forth of the tragic conflict between the general public and the really creative artists, architects, and planners that has existed for more than a century. Some indications are then given of the ways in which this
When
insofar as architecture
conflict
is
which the
rifts
much has changed during the last among the painters have attained
a certain influence, and the outlook for both architecture and town planning has undoubtedly improved since the last century, when, as snails destroy a fresh green sprout, the smear of the press and the attitude of the public destroyed any new architectonic beginning. But let us not deceive ourselves! Despite all, the basic situation remains at a rather low level. The prolific scale-
less
rebuilt inner areas bequeath a heavy burden to posterity. There are few glimpses of light; in general there are only
further chaos
and
stillborn buildings.
economic considerations have been Biological, social, and stressed. Here we shall lay the main emphasis sufficiently
influence of upon a greatly undervalued factor: the direct aesthetic values upon the shaping of reality. This is far realized. The statement, "I like greater than is generally this and I don't like that," is in many cases, perhaps in
most, more decisive than first costs. Today's problem is to bridge the fatal gulf between the greatly developed powers of thinking and greatly retarded powers of feeling of those in authority, no matter to what category they may belong. Once this link has been established, the search naturally follows for the most creative designers. Here, in the field
of the sciences just as much as in architecture and town can planning, it is only those gifted with imagination who
find solutions to the problems facing us today. was first published in German Architecture, You and as vol. 18 of the Rowohlts Deutsche Enzyklopaedie under
Me
the title Architektur und Gemeinschaft (Hamburg, 1956) and our thanks are due to the Rowohlt publishing house for
their permission to bring out this enlarged version of the book in English. Most of the material first appeared in the
list of the sources is provided at the liberty has been taken of making the end. Occasionally cuts or insertions. Margjindia providing continuity have been added between certain sections. The revision of Eng-
form of
articles,
and a
lish texts
and translation of material from German or French has been done by Jaqueline Tyrwhitt
VI
CONTENTS
Parti.
6
10
11
Do We Need Artists?
The Tragic
Part
2.
Conflict
1936, 1955
ON MONUMENTAUTY
22
Marginalia
25
The Need
for a
New
Monumentality
1944
1943
40
48
52
56
57
1949
Part
3.
ON THE COOPERATION
OF ARCHITECT, PAINTER, AND SCULPTOR
64 67
Marginalia On the Force of Aesthetic Values
1947
70
72 79
91
Marginalia
Architects' Attitudes
Toward
Architects
and
Politics:
1949
Marginalia
Aesthetics and the
93
Human
Habitat
1953
*
vn
Part 4-
ON THE FORMATION
OF THE ARCHITECT
100 102
105 106
Marginalia On the Education of the Architect
1947
1955
125 138
1951, 1952
Part i
The
Tragic Conflict
1937
DO WE NEED
A widespread opinion
that art has
television
ARTISTS?
Life today has become so rich in means of expression more or less lost its earlier purpose; it has beinto life itself. Movies, photography, radio, the whole gamut of modern civilization has place. So what is the use of artists? a few exceptions, a serious artist can no longer
come absorbed
taken
its
to be a salesman on or he needs far-reaching patronage. The great paside, tron of former times has become half a dozen smaller ones. It cannot be denied that the artist of today usually lives a
dog's life; and, in doing so, he conforms to another widely held opinion, that an artist has to starve to be creative! (This ethical alibi is today falser than ever.)
Another opinion certainly do not recommend a return to a primitive way of life. We love modern civilization. It is one of the few honest expressions of our being today. It is a part of us. But it is not the whole.
We
A long time ago man lost the key to the inner meaning of
technics, of traffic, of the daily round of his life. His inner feelings became disassociated from these, because art official art
grown out
from
this civilization.
Art? Feeling? Means of expression are needed with no other apparent purpose than to serve as containers for our feelings. Every-
for his feelings. The outlet can be a frown, a sigh, or a voluptuous gasp. The frown is no help, since it does not banish the feeling^.
They remain. They accumulate. So each man longs for an environment that is the symbol or mirror of his inner desires.
Everyone longs for a prolonged
desires
some more ardently, others more contentedly. There is no political platform and no community movement that has not some such symbol. There are also pseudo-symbols. These always arise when
the true situation, for reasons of convenience,
is
concealed
behind a
false fagade.
The history of the nineteenth century is a history of pseudo-symbols. The consequences are clear: For those matters which arise newly from the innermost depths of a period, that are thrust aside in the daily round
finds no inner assurance, no guiding voice. As a result mechanization becomes rampant and life brutalized.
of
life,
man
The
artist
That contact has been lost between the artist and the general public needs no discussion. But it is another matter to ask whose fault this is. The artist has it thrown up to him that his vocabulary of forms is no longer generally understandable. Whose fault
is
this?
The
artist's
or the public's?
is
When
tact
this statement
made
artists
representations.
guilds,
March
The
left
freedom the
artistic
rift
now
developed.
had
how
myself the greatest possible sales? The consequence: an art was born that catered to the known in public, more shameless than anything previously
history.
This was the art of the Salons, of the academies of art, of the gold medals, of the Prix de Rome, of officialdom. The general public in the most general sense of this term, whether rich or poor swallowed it whole. Middle-income groups raised their tone by hanging engravings on their
walls, made by skillful craftsmen; noblemen, industrialists and financiers had the originals, for which they paid their fa-
vorites as
much as a thousand
art, according to the critics appointed by the general public, who could see nothing and who had no wish to see anything.
This was
which took
on
poisonous and
it
The
drowned
all
others, proved
The
They knewright through the entire century that their position rendered all hope of success or approbation quite impossible. The right to have his work recognized, which is expected by every normal individual, was almost always denied to such artists throughout the last century and even today. That these phenomena did not die out; that there continued to be men who were to create their
prepared
invention.
work at the cost of their lives, is part of the nature of heroism, which takes on different forms in different
periods.
contact with those underlying sources that provide the nourishment for our period.
Outwardly these people lived their lives in creative isolation. For the moment, they were obliged to withdraw their work more and more from the popular taste of the general public, the critics, and the art collections. As a result a type of artist evolved whose work was more and more that of a pioneer, of a research worker, of an inventor. As the artist came to glance less and less in the direction of the public, he came nearer to the possibilities of making
Do we need
artists?
In a period in which the artist seems to have lost all rights and privileges, should we not say: Artists can more easily exist without the general public than the general public without the artists! Why? Because mechanization runs amuck when there is no line of direction, and when feeling cannot find a suitable outlet. This interchange between reality and the symbols of feeling is as delicately balanced as the influence of our unconscious upon our conscious behavior. The moment it is disturbed sound judgment disappears.
produced. nothing more disturbing to the balance of our inner vigor than production which becomes an end in itself, and which has the power (through the means at its disposal) to develop indefinitely. Inventions are important, since they are the means whereby these possibilities may find a final inner freedom. There is no other way by which we can ensure a higher
it
has
itself
is
There
The problem
tion. TTie
starts
when inventions
machine produces as much as man desires it should. The machine and its products confront something that can be interpreted in many different ways and yet never
wholly grasped: Man! The operation starts with'the producer, continues with the distributor, and ends (but not in every case) with the consumer. This depends upon the way in which, finally, the product reacts upon the general organization of society that we call its culture. It has been shown that these consequences have always been undeterminable, socially, humanly, and in the domain of man's emotions. In a century and a half industrialization has created no new reality to encompass our life cycle.
Today, as then, the situation remains the same. have not been able to cope with the new reality. have not mastered the social consequences any better than the human ones, for we have created a civilization which do not know how to lacks any desire for tranquillity. ourselves to this civilization, for our culture lacks an adapt adequate balance between physical and mental tension. In short, we have not found the key to reality, which lies hidden in our emotion. This is the matter which we must
We
We
We
discuss here.
Art as a substitute The rift between the newly created reality and emotional feeling started with the industrial revolution:
ungoverned machines outcast feeling, in itself escape into romanticism. production as an end
This dichotomy explains the
last
century, which
eral public.
The
rise of the public art of the the standard of taste of the genthe exhibitions, the officially accepted art of
is still
academies, the press: the art that had real power and that came to govern the emotional world of the general public proved to be merely a drug, a narcotic. No man can exist without emotion: he finds his expression for this where he can obtain it most easily. And what is more comfortable than to escape from the world, to shut
one's eyes
and make
is
living in
an
idyllic
period? to 1900 to see this in operation. art of Today, a safe historical distance away, the public the nineteenth century quite often has the charm of a mask
half banal, half demoniac. It can be likened to some pleasthat gives the organism a moant-tasting medicinal powder lift before the poison begins its fell work. mentary of this situation was that the greatest The
consequence
continues painters of this period, the only ones whose to survive today, were forced to capitulate to the situation
to unimportance. Production as an end in itself and in the domain of the emotions escape into romanticism, go hand in hand
work
throughout
this period.
Art approaches
life
Since Cubism assembled the possibilities created by the and then found new ones, Impressionists up to the Fauves,
art has recovered its
upon the present-day reality. But this cannot come about at once. This organically growing art works like a biological medicine, slowly and quietly, for it has to act on the organism
from within. This is the function pursued by Cubism, Constructivism, and all other movements which, unlike those of the last the world century, do not present realistic representations of and personal experiences.
the eye of the naturalistically oriented observer the abstract forms or the organic fragments they create have no connection whatsoever with reality. But it turns out that these paintings have the power to radiate a marvelous strength, so that even several decades later they are still effective and do not grow outdated.
To
not representations but symbols of the contemporary reality. This means that, by presenting us immediately with the very essence of a form, they suddenly give us the power of spatial penetration to acquire a completely new approach to the world around us, the world
These
artists create
which we
can to iron construction, from the annual rings of a tree to the furthest form of life that the microscope can disclose, from organic movement to machine precision, monolith to a tangle of wire cable in the from the stone
tin
From
age
bed of a stream wherever we look, this seemingly removed art has widened our experience.
far-
It has taught us to find an approach to ourselves, and, thus, to create once again a unity between feeling and reis essential for the start of ality, which any true culture. It has shown us that what appear at first sight to be merely banal, nondescript, utilitarian objects can suddenly be transformed into vehicles of feeling, when their inner
nature is expressed by a painter. It has shown us the links that exist between the machine and the organism and the machine. Thanks to these paintings the loathing of ugliness and banality has been removed from that reality which exists because of and as part of us. This is only the beginning, but it has opened the way for us to find anew the key both to ourselves and to cosmic forces.
Marginalia
Why was it that an art filled with the spirit of the period
could not win through?
come meaningless. The whole production of the period had little connection with real art. Even so it should not be ignored. Within it
lie
feeling
rift between retarded emotional and highly developed thinking which cuts through
art of
century has now disappeared, its influence is still strong in the emotional standpoint of the general public, of both great and small administrators, of elected politicians, and
of government
officials.
Each
cause of his position, to be a competent art critic; in this way false idyls and sentimental images of the past century
live today. It is still a favorite
Sunday amusement to
ridi-
cule an art that has sprung from the heart of our period. There are exceptions but the overwhelming mass of the
public are
taste.
still
enough to glance at postwar reconstruction of damurban areas from the bombed area around St. Paul's aged Cathedral in London, or Berlin, or the reconstruction of StaIt is
Everywhere we see
taste:
mirrored the characteristics of the ruling sham facades before the realities of life.
to erect
10
1936, 1955
of the nineteenth
nineteenth century witnessed a greater expansion of material goods than had ever been known before. Its thinking was concentrated upon obtaining a rational mastery over all the world. This approach, which had begun with the
The
now taken to extreme lengths, especially with everything to do with technical development. In this field procedures have now been developed to such a degree that almost anything that is desired can be produced. Man needs only to press the button labeled research laboratory and the desired product will be delivered. At the same time the nineteenth century lived in a fog of inarticulate feelings. It floundered between one extreme and another, reaching out blindly in all directions. It sought its release by escape into the past. It remained eternally uncertain, eternally doubtful, because it could not find the key to its inner self. Its emotions stumbled down false tracks leading toward substitute and second-rate values. All this, caused by the particular predicament of the period, was well known before the middle of the century. The statement that only posterity can estimate the true values of a period is one of those thin excuses behind which we shelter to escape our responsibilities. It is of course true that to evaluate the real meaning of public opinion, as expressed in the daily press, it is necessary to regard it from some distance in time. But any person with real judgment can recognize tie main predicaments of a period while in the midst of its problems, just as well as any later comer. When Heinrich Heine, the German poet, paid his first visit to Paris in 1831, he wrote at length about the Salon of
Renaissance, was
in connection
11
that year, which had a special claim to interest as it immediately followed the revolution of 1830. Though it was packed
with pictures depicting historic events, his estimate was "The art of today is in distasteful contrast to the actual
scene/'
But it was Charles Baudelaire, the French poet, who found the most tender spot when he published his booklet on the Salon of 1846. Here he placed his finger upon the
bound up with eclecticism: doubt. "Doubt, which today is the principal cause of all morbid affections in the moral world, and whose ravages are now Doubt begat Eclecticism/' greater than ever before And a little later in his chapter, "On schools and journeymen," he says, "Doubt, or the absence of faith and of
evil that is inevitably
.
.
naivete,
is
which
is
. Naivete" a vice peculiar to this age the capacity to approach things directly without
.
intermediary * without/'
"is
a divine privilege
which almost
all are
No period is entirely without depth, and the nineteenth century too had its great artists, but the really great those who never lost the gift of "naivet" were without influence
at that time, their works unknown and inaccessible. The strength of the ruling taste overpowered them. But real art
has one thing in common with the voice of conscience: both utter the truth which cannot, in the long run, be silenced. The art which at that time was heaped with glory and success is now stacked in heaps in the cellars of all museums and art galleries. It has become materially valueless. In its place hang masterpieces of these misunderstood
artists
and sometimes even destroyed their work in consequence. Therefore, between the highly developed powers of thinking of the nineteenth century and its debased powers of feeling debased through the acceptance of substitute outlack of
Charles Baudelaire,
trans,
and
ed. Jonathan
Mayne
12
tragic rift opened ever wider. T. S. Eliot and others have recognized the same phenomenon among the poets who were then the darlings of the ruling taste. These too were unable to interlock thinking with feeling, which alone can prepare the way for an emotional absorption of mental achievement. Without this inner connection between meth-
letsa
ods of thinking and methods of feeling it is impossible to have a positive way of life or genuine culture. In my introductory chapter to Space, Time and Architecture under the title, "History a part of life/* I sought to
express this disastrous conflict, as follows: have behind us a period in which thinking and feeling were separated. This schism produced individuals
"We
periods there have been artists who have pleasantly the people it was so in the times of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Goethe. But the nine-
In
all
know of no teenth-century situation is exceptional. other period in which genuine artists, those with sufficient imagination to distill the essence of the period and give it form, were, in such great measure, debarred from contact
with the masses.
We
Franz Roh, in "Studies of History and the Theory of Cultural Misunderstandings," included in his book Der verkannte Kiinstler (The unappreciated artist), laid the cornerstone of a Kesonanzgeschichte (history of the recep2
Time and
1954), p. 13.
tion of ideas) in which, among other things, he stressed the delay that occurs before the echo of the event reaches the
8
public.
But we still lack a badly needed history of the ruling taste of the nineteenth centuiy. This would not be a history of the reception of the works of creative artists and their disastrous elimination, but rather a study of the ruling taste
of the period
rary scene.
and
its
immediate
effect
Today it requires a certain courage to drag past favorites of the public from their forgotten graves. It is a somewhat ghostly undertaking as they can no longer stand the light of
day. These forgotten works have little to do with art, but a very great deal to do with the psyche of the nineteenth century, and with the lack of instinct the misguided instincts
which still plague us today. I once thought that I myself would write such a history and started to assemble some preliminary material, at least to make a study of one typical example. The material for this was gathered during the summer of 1936 in the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris. Then it was put aside, unused. In connection with an appointment in America it seemed
to me more urgent to make some studies of the effect of mechanization upon our daily lives, which, through the power of the same ruling taste, was misused in a way somewhat similar to art. This I tried to do in Mechanization Takes Command. Since that time my interests have become more concerned with the continuity of human experience through the ages than with the events of the period immediately preceding our own time.
41
Some fragments of this earlier material may help to clarify the picture for only through a careful study and documentation of a typical case can one gain insight into the degree to which the ruling taste paralyzed the capacity for
Franz Rob, Der verkannte Kunstler (Munich, 1948) . 4 S. Gicdion, Mechanisation Takes Command (New York, 1948).
14
typical popular artist, who by 1830 had won judgment the heart of the great public, was Ary Scheffer, a Dutch painter (1795-1857). Today his name is quite unknown, but at that time he bewitched great and small, rich and
poor. It was Baudelaire's criticism of his work in the Salon of 1846 that brought him to my notice. During the summer
of 1936 I did
my
phenomenon of
Ary Scheffer, and the following is a shorthand version of the situation which produced him. Born 1795 in Dordrecht, in the then French Batavian Republic. Milieu: thoroughly imbued with literature and art. Father a portrait painter, mother a miniature painter: "at her knee the child learnt to read Goethe and Dante in their
native tongues/' An infant prodigy: when twelve years old Ary Scheffer exhibited a picture in Amsterdam which caused
a sensation. In 1812 the family moved to Paris. The same year Scheffer made his debut in the Paris Salon with a picture of a religious subject. He entered the Paris atelier of the classicist Gu6rin, tie most famous studio of the time.
Fellow students were G&icault, Eugene Delacroix. Scheffer hesitates over the direction he should take, but soon finds it: sentimental genre pictures after the English style, such as
"The
er's
Soldier's
Widow"
on.
Grave," and so
a lithograph of
excellent
The
Soldier's
work on Ary Scheffer. 5 Sales, success, countless commissions: soon he had a riding horse in the stable. He became drawing master to the family of the Due d'Orleans, later to be King Louis Philippe. He made an unsuccessful attempt at historical pictures. The thirties marked the high
point of his career. Literary representations of Gretchens
modernes de
la France:
Aiy Scheffer
(Paris,
1858).
also representatives of the ruling taste: all these were purchasers of originals or of copies of his work. Scheffer per-
mitted
atelier of
the favorite
pictures of his clients. In 1856 the Earl of Ellesmere paid 1100 guineas for a picture, and then found that he had re-
ceived a copy. He was at once given permission to return it, but preferred to keep it. The middle classes hung lithographs or engravings in their parlors or bedrooms. In the forties Scheffer leaned more and more toward religious themes. The technique was similar, as was the delight with which they were greeted. In 1846 he showed for the last time in the Paris Salon. Perhaps this was because he had a large enough private clientele; but perhaps it was because, in this year, the twenty-five-year-old Charles Baudelaire in his "Salon de 1846" and Gustave Planche in the Revue des Deux Mondes both saw his work for what it was. The subject was "St. Augustine and his Mother Monica" {fig. 4). Some found this picture more beautiful than a Raphael. Planche, one of the first to make art criticism his chief profession, was of a different opinion in his article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and Baudelaire said saucily that the work of Aiy Scheffer was for "those aesthetic ladies who revenge themselves on the curse of their sex by
6 indulging in religious music." It was not the pictures that hung in exclusive mansions that had the greatest effect upon the representatives of the
ruling taste. We had reached the period of mechanization. Around 1830 the mass production of illustrated journals started. From the start, and right on through the whole
century, they were the servitors of the ruling taste. One need only thumb through the pages of the Magasin Pittoresque, which was started in 1831 at ten centimes a copy, or the Illustrated London News and Illustration, both of which were begun shortly after, or the German family journals of the second half of the century, to understand readily how it was that readers in all counties lost their
inevitably
*
judg-
l6
ment
of quality;
all
material.
should not subjects be selected from the work of great poets or from religious events? It all depends upon the way in which the subject is handled. The contemporary
Why
the public does not appreciate either the line of Ingres nor the color of Delacroix" remarked Gautier in Theophfle Portraits ContempordnsJ As another author stated in 1867, the public liked "art and poetry that let them relax before
misty images and daydreams." Hofstede de Groot, professor of theology at the University of Groningen, wrote a book on Ary Scheffer in 1870 in which he stated that he greatly preferred the work of Scheffer to the poems of Goethe. "He is, in comparison, both nobler and greater." His "Mignon" (fig. 2), a favorite of Queen Victoria, "does not, as in Goethe, merely E'cture return to her earthy abode. Scheffer's skillful to ng paintbrush enables us to sense her yearnings for her celestial
fatherland."*
A Polish Count Krasinski found that his ideal of Raphael was overshadowed by Acy Scheffer. By comparison, Raphael was a mere materialist. Even the great skeptic and theological critic, Ernest Renan, devotes the final essay of his famous Studies of Religious History to the discussion of a religious picture by the Acy Scheffer, 'The Search for Christ," purchased
by
Louvre. Renan speaks of him as this "eminent artist who 10 has best sought in our times to find the way to the heart."
The
lish
twenty-year-old ferule Zola came to Paris to estabhimself as a writer. Although a few years later he was
Th6oph3e
Julius
Gautier, Portraits Contemporary (Paris, 1874), p. 431. Mayer, Gesehichte den Modern Franzosichen Mttterei sett 1789 (Leipzig, 1867), p. 245. 9 Hofetede de Groot, Crutrdderistik Ary Scheffers (1870).
8 10 Ernest
P-
33-
defender of fidouard Manet, in 1860 Paris and wrote to his boyhood's friend Paul Cezanne: "I don't know if you knew Ary Scheffer, that painter of genius who died last year: in Paris it would be a crime to say you didn't, but in the provinces it can be put down to
fearless
to
become a
was a passionate lover of the ideal, are pure and light almost diaphanous. He was types a poet in the full meaning of the word, scarcely ever painted reality, but kept to the most sublime and moving sub11
jects/'
These examples
indicate
how
had
penetrated into the lungs of all layers of society. There were very few observers who, like Baudelaire, could recognize the
and judge
it
even in 1846 as
his-
a final judg-
his century: he alone recognized its Janus, twoway facing, face. In his chapter on eclecticism he writes of the truly great that "each of them has a banner to his crown
and the words inscribed on that banner are clear for all the world to read. Not one of their number has doubts of his monarchy and it is in this unshakable conviction that their glory resides." Here Baudelaire was referring more to specialists than to Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier, whom, in a highly perceptive manner, he excepts from the eclectics, of whom he says: "No matter how clever he may be, an eclectic is but a feeble man; for he is a man with neither star nor compass ... An eclectic is a ship which tries to sail before all winds at once." The nature of an eclec.
.
"Experiment with contradictory means, the encroachment of one art upon another, the importation of poetry, wit, and sentiment into painting all
these
modern
12
11 fimfle Zola,
202-204.
12
18
And
then Baudelaire
starts his
chapter entitled,
"On Mr.
Ary Scheffer and the apes of sentiment," with the words: "A disastrous example of this method if an absence of
method can be so called is Mr. Ary Scheffer." Even earlier Baudelaire has described Scheffer as a painter who "befouls"
his canvas. This
species
is followed by a diatribe on the whole which can be accepted for the entire century, and
more:
"To make a deliberate point of looking for poetry during the conception of a picture is the surest means of not finding it ... Poetry is the result of the art of painting itself; for it lies in the spectator's soul, and it is the mark of genius to awaken it there. Painting is only interesting in virtue of 13 color and form." Again and again, throughout the century and later, traditional techniques and modes of expression were adopted in a vain attempt to discover a means of interpreting the
essence of the period. Again and again it was quickly discovered that these methods failed. The period exhausted all possibilities to no result, because, eyes turned backward, it wandered always in circles, seeking escape in past history
and
Baudelaire
and mobile world of the present slips between the fingers." " And what about architecture?
interest.
self-deception. Again and again, as twenty years after an art historian expressed it, "the eel-smooth
Architecture in general lay outside the realm of public Buildings were there to provide shelter, and the architect became a decorator whose job it was to adorn them. In many interiors there is no lack of warmth and a
subtle use of architectonic effects.
of taking everything too seriously, as has sometimes hapsedulously careful selection of buildings pened recently. is to bring out those values which are worthy of necessary forming a part of the history of the development of archi-
tecture.
18
14
it is clear that the power of the was so strong and dominant that its dictatorship completely inhibited the development of architectural
ruling taste
imagination. In architecture, as with the art of the ruling taste "the eel-smooth and mobile world of the present slips
between the
fingers/'
Part a
ON MONUMENTALITY
for
The Need
New Monumentality
On
Sculpture
Mar&ndia
New York, in 1943, Fernand L6ger the Luis Serf the architect and town planner (later painter, Jose to become Dean of the Graduate School of Design, Harvard
One day
in
discovered that each University), and I met together. of us had been invited to write an article for a publication to be prepared by the American Abstract Artists. After discus-
We
would be more interesting if we all discussed the same topic, each approaching it from the point
sion,
it
we thought
of view of his
the architect,
upon the subject, "A New and finally assembled our joint views unMonumentality," der nine heads, which are here printed for the first time.
and the
historian.
We decided
The
materialized.
My contribution,
entitled
"The
New MonuNew
and City Planning. 1 Many friends whose opinion I value shook their heads at the use of so dangerous a term, and one to which the ruling taste had given so banal a meaning. They were right. It was certainly dangerous to revive a term that had become so debased. Lewis Mumford, in a New Yorker article, took up a defensive position. Despite these warnings, I lectured on this topic in many places in the United States, and also, on the other side of the Atlantic. later,
Architecture
All of us are perfectly aware of the fact that tality is a dangerous thing, especially at a time
monumenwhen most
people do not even grasp the most elementaiy requirements for a functional building. But we cannot close our eyes.
1
New
22
Pad
*944)> PP-
the problem of monumentality before us as the task of the immediate future. All
that could then be done was to point out gers and some of the possibilities.
stage ther" and, in their issue of September 1948, some of the world's leading architects and architectural writers defined
Following a lecture in the Royal Institute of British ArLondon, on September 26, 1946, the Architectural Review (London) decided "to take the matter a furchitects,
picture. Contributions came from Gregor Paulsson (Uppsala, Sweden), Heniy-Russell Hitchcock (Smith College,
United States), Sir William Holford (London), Walter Gropius (then at Harvard), Lucio Costa (Rio de Janeiro), Alfred Roth (Zurich), and myself. Lewis Mumford followed this up with an essay, "Monumentalism, Symbolism
age has not merely abandoned a great many historic symbols, but has likewise made an effort to deflate the symbol itself . Because we by denying the values which it represents
.
Style," in the Architectural Review. One can willingly ord's plaint: "Now we live in an which agree with
and
Mumf
have dethroned symbolism, we are now left, momentarily, with but a single symbol of almost universal validity: that
of the machine
day
is
. . . What we are beginning to witness toa reaction against this distorted picture of modern
civilization."
"The monument," he adds, "is a declaration of love and admiration attached to the higher purposes men hold in common. ... An age that has deflated its values and lost
sight of its purposes will not produce convincing
monu-
ments."
2
tural
Lewis Mumford, "Monumentalism, Symbolism and Style," ArchitecReview (April 1949), p. 179.
This
taste,
is certainty
monuments of the
ruling
tive
but is not just when speaking of the work of the creaartists of our time such as Brancusi, Antoine Pevsner,
Hans Arp,
Naum
Gabo, Alberto Giacometti, or Picasso. desire nothing more ardently than to see then-
streets, or squares, or in parks in the midst of the people. Up to now, however, the administrators and leaders of the ruling taste have banished
almost
tions,
all their
products to
museums and
bolts
to private collecbars.
and
1944
mercilessly misused by the representatives of the ruling academic taste in all fields concerned with emotional
expression.
buildings of perennial power such as the Acropolis, the sensitive construction of Gothic cathedrals, the geometric phantasy of Renaissance churches, and the exquisite
scale of eighteenth-century squares
The
were
all
in existence.
But they could not help. For the moment they were dead. They had become temporarily frozen in the icy atmosphere created by those architects and their patrons who, in order to compensate for their own kck of expressive force, had misused eternal names by pilfering from history. In this way the great monumental heritages of mankind became poisonous to everybody who touched them. Behind every great building of the past leered the faces of
misusers.
its
This was the period of pseudomonumentality. The greater part of the nineteenth century belongs to it Its models of the past were not imbued, as in the Renaissance, with a
strong artistic vision leading to new results. There was an undirected helplessness and, at the same time, a routine use of shapes from bygone periods. These were used indiscriminately everywhere, for any kind of building. Because they had lost their inner significance they had become devaluated; mere cliches without emotional justification. Cliches cannot be used by creative artists, only by professional eclectics. Thus the creative spirit had to be banished wherever public taste was being formed. Those obedient servants of the ruling taste have now devaluated and undermined the taste and the emotions of the public and brought about the extreme banalization which still exists today.
Periods which are dear to our memory, whose structures and work rose beyond their mere temporal existence, were aware that monumentally, because of its inherent character, can be employed but rarely, and then only for the highest purposes. In ancient Greece monumentally was used a certain sparingly, and then only to serve the gods, or, to
extent, the life of the community. The masterly discrimination and discipline of the Greeks in this respect is one of the
Contemporary architecture takes the hard way Contemporary architecture had to take the hard way. As with painting and sculpture, it had to begin anew. It had to reconquer the most primitive things, as if nothing had ever been done before. It could not return to Greece, to Rome, or to the Baroque, to be comforted by their experience. In certain crises man must live in seclusion, to become aware of his own inner feelings and thoughts. This was the situation for all the arts around 1910. Architects found traces of the undisguised expression of their period in structures far removed from monumental edifices. They found them in market halls, in factories, in
the bold vaults of the great exhibition buildings, or in the only real monument of this period, the Eiffel Tower, 1889. There was no denying that these lacked the splendor of buildings of bygone periods, which had been nourished by handicraft and a long tradition. They were naked and rough, but they were honest. Nothing else could have served as the point of departure for a language of our time.
Three steps of contemporary architecture Architecture is not concerned exclusively with construction.
First, architecture has to provide an adequate frame for man's intimate surroundings. Individual houses as well as 26
the urban community have to be planned from the human point of view. Modern architecture had to begin with the single cell, with the smallest unit, the low-cost dwelling, which to the last century had seemed beneath the talents
artist. The 1920'$ and 1930*5 saw a resurgence of research in this direction, for it seemed then senseless to push ahead before first trying to find new solu-
The main impetus lay in the fact that this problem also involved social and human orientation. But, looking back, we can see that an architecture which had to begin anew found here a problem where the utmost care had to be given to exact organization within the smallest space, and to the
economy of means. Of course, at the same time, houses were built for the middle or upper classes where, for the first time, a new space conception could be carried out. But it was housing for the lower-income classes that taught the architects the exactitude of planning which had been lost in the nineteenth century. The second step: From a human point of view, and from the architectonic view as well, houses and blocks are not isolated units. They are incorporated in urban settlements and these are parts of a greater entity, the city. An architect who is not interested in the whole scope of planning, from the right height of a kitchen sink to the layout of a region, From the is not part of the contemporary building scene. to the neighborhood, the city, and the organizasingle cell, tion of the whole region is one direct sequence. Thus it can
greatest
be
said that the second phase of modern architecture was concentrated on urbanism. The third step lies ahead. In view of what had happened in the last century and because of the way modern architecture had come into being, it is the most dangerous and the most difficult step. This is the reconquest of monu-
social, cere-
They want
these bufldings to
27
ex-
and
had
up
to
now
been more
because it has (1944) a rather limited influence or less confined to single-family dwellings, hous-
seem too
it may perhaps ing projects, factories, and office buildings, to speak about these problems. But things early fast. In countries where modem architecture are
moving
has been recently called upon for solutions of museums, theatres, universities, churches, or concert halls, it has been forced to seek the monumental expression which lies be-
yond functional fulfillment. If it cannot meet this demand, the whole development will be in mortal danger of a new
escape into academicism.
MommentaKtyan
eternal
need
Monumentality springs from the eternal need of people to create symbols for their activities and for their fate or
destiny, for their religious beliefs victions.
and
Every period has the impulse to create symbols in the form of monuments, which, according to the Latin meaning are "things that remind," things to be transmitted to later generations. This demand for monumentality cannot, in the long run, be suppressed. It will find an outlet at all costs.
Pseudomonumentdity Our period is no exception. For the present it continues the habits of the last century and follows in the tracks of pseudomonumentality. No special political or economic system is to blame for this. No matter how different they may be in their political and economic orientations, whether the most progressive or the most reactionary, there is one
28
point where the governments of all countries meet: in theij conception of monumentality. Pseudomonumentality has nothing to do with Roman, Greek, or any other style or tradition. It came into being within the orbit of Napoleonic society which imitated the manner of a former ruling class. Napoleon represents the model that gave the nineteenth century its form: the self-
made man who became inwardly uncertain. The origin of pseudomonumental buildings can be found
in the paper architecture
and
lifeless
schemes that
later be-
came
reality everywhere.
niiinitni
Jean Nicolas L. Durand (1760-1854): Design for a Museum, 18011805. typical example of paper architecture. Durand's architectural propositions and teaching examples retain their influence in countless government offices. The formula is always the same: take a curtain of columns and place it before any structure, regardless of whether it serves any purpose or of whatever consequences may follow upon the decision.
a.
A prototype is the scheme for a museum by J. N. L. Durand (1760-1834), illustrated in his lectures Precis de legons & architecture (1801-1805) which were many times translated and reprinted and were used by architects of every country (fig. a). His lectures are forgotten today, but the buildings which resulted from their study are still standing and new ones have been added in a continuous stream for 140 years. The recipe is always the same: take
some
curtains of columns
its
building, whatever
and put them in front of any purpose and whatever the conse-
quences. One could compile an immense square of "monumental edifices" of the whole world, erected in recent years, from the Hall of German Art, 1937, at Munich (fig. 10) or the Mellon Institute, 1937, at Pittsburgh (fig. 11), to recent
museums in Washington, or similar buildings in Moscow. The palace of the League of Nations at Geneva (finished
perhaps the most distinguished example of internationally brewed eclecticism. The moral cowardice reflected in its architecture seems to have an almost prophetic affinity to the failure of the League itself. How can this be explained? Those who govern and administer may be the most brilliant men in their fields, but in their emotional or artistic training, they reflect the average man of our period, plagued as he is by the rift between his methods of thinking and
1935)
is
methods of feeling. The thinking may be developed to a very high level, but the emotional background has not
his
caught up with it. It is still imbued with the pseudo-ideals of the nineteenth century. Is it, then, any wonder that most official artistic judgments are disastrous, or that the decisions
made
b.
30
period?
he capacity to
project creatively their own image of society. They were able to build up their community centers (agora, forum,
fulfill this purpose. to now, has proved itself incapable of creating anything to be compared with these institutions. There are monuments, many monuments, but where are
medieval square) to
Our
period,
up
the community centers? Neither radio nor television can replace the personal contact which alone can develop com-
munity
life.
is
but accusations alone do have to ask: what can be done? not help. The question of how to keep the people from going furAll this
We
easily recognizable,
c.
31
will
ther astray cannot easily be solved. Only complete frankness be of any use, frankness on both sides, of those who
who
of the artist
it-
and why architects had to concentrate on functional problems and to reeducate themselves through them. This had its consequences.
from the
past,
Didn't the
new
pirations of the people? That this danger still exists cannot be denied. In countries where modern architecture has won
monumental
tasks in-
volving more than functional problems, one cannot but observe that something is lacking in the buildings executed. 8 "Something" is an inspired architectural imagination able
What is more, have become unaccusarchitects, sculptors, painters tomed to working together. They have lost contact with each other. There is no collaboration. Why? Because all three have been banished from the great public tasks.
to satisfy the
demand
for monumentality.
and
The ccmanunity's emotional life The situation of toda/s modern painter differs in many
respects from that of the avant-gardists of the late nineteenth century. Paul Cezanne was proud when he could sell one of his pictures for 100 francs. Today, many private
and public
casso, Bracque,
collections are filled with the paintings of PiLger, Miro, and others. Modern art is re-
garded as a sure investment and America owns the most important collections. But in one respect the situation remains unchanged: art is still regarded as luxury, and not as the medium to shape the emotional life in the broadest sense.
Only in exceptional
*
"Guer-
This was writtea in 1944; compare Part 6, written in 1954 and 1956.
3*
nica" in 1937) have creative contemporary artists been allowed to participate in a community task. Precious artistic
linger
forces, capable of providing the symbols for our period, unused as in the nineteenth century when Edouard
Manet vainly
offered to paint free of charge murals depicton the walls of the City HalL
no
sell well, but there are where their talents can walls, places, buildings, touch the great public; where they can form the people and the people can form them. Again and again it has been reiterated that modern art are not sure that cannot be understood by the public.
known
artists
today
no
no
this
only know that argument those who govern and administer public taste are without the necessary emotional understanding. Is the artist estranged from life? There are several reasons to believe that he is not. But the artist has been unable to do anything about it because he has been artificially expelled from direct contact with the community.
is
absolutely correct.
We We
modern
artists are
throughout the whole nineteenth century, the masses, poor and rich, under the domination of the press, academy, and governments, were always wrong in their taste and judgment, and that all the official art of that period appears so ridiculous today that the museums no longer show it to the public. Those artists, on the other hand, who had been driven into seclusion, reveal the creative spirit which permeated the nineteenth century. The same situation easts today. Nothing has changed in this respect I have seen in painting, sculpture, architecture, and poetry, a long row of artistic leaders (by this I mean those who shape our emotional life) living their isolated existence, far from the public and the understanding of those who could have brought them in touch with the comthat,
Remember
to munity. How is it possible to develop an art "satisfying" forces are the people when those who personify the creative not allowed to work upon the living body of our period?
33
Not the imitator, only the imaginative creator is fitted to build our absent centers of social life which can awake the
public once more to their old love for festivals, and incorporate movement, color, new materials, and our abundant else could utilize these means technical possibilities.
Who
open up new ways for invigorating community life? I am not aware of any period but our own which, to such a frightening extent, has wasted its few available creative
to
forces.
The demand for a decent social life for all has finally been
recognized, after
is still
more than
a century's fight.
emotional
life
of the masses
is
as inessential this
left
Painting points the -way Painting, the most sentient of the visual arts, has often forecast things to come. It was painting which first realized the spatial conception of our period and discovered methods of representing it. Later, in the thirties, by these same artistic means, the horror of the war to come was foreshadowed many years
before
it
painted his figures with strange abbreviations and sometimes terrifying lines which most of us did not understand until
these forms
trate this
events. His
"Monument
Wood," 1930
(fig.
14)
may
serve to illus-
phenomenon. It is a sketch for a modern sculpture of enormous scale. Picasso did not specify for what purpose these 1930 studies for a monument were meant. But it is now clear that these sketches forecast the reality and the inherent significance of
the symbol did not reveal
It
itself until later.
symbolizes our attitude toward the war (of 19391945). It does not glorify war in a heroic gesture, as the
34
Napoleonic Arc de Triomphe on the Place de FEtoile. stands as a memorial to the horror of this period and of
tragic conflict: the not the way to solve
it
It
its
has to be done.
It
is
that
frightening. It tells the truth. It has the terribilita for his contemporaries emanated from Michelan-
which Picasso
Now,
at a
moment when we
and
re-
horror, painting announces another period. This birth of the lost sense of
the
trend can be observed in recent years, common to of the leading painters. nearly Together with the urge for larger canvases, brighter colors have appeared, full of inherent hope. At the same time there is an impulse toward simplification. This has occurred after a development of three decades during which modern painting has become ripe for great tasks. Great and unresolved complexes have had to be expressed in the shortest, most direct way. What began as necessary structural abbreviations now emerge as symbols. The work of Arp, Mir6, Leger, and many others is moving
all
One
monumentality.
in this direction.
have created these symbols out of the anonymous Nobody asked for them, have just appeared. They have no factual content, no they significance at the moment other than emotional response. They are not for those whose emotional life is still imbued with the last century's official taste. But children can understand them, because these figurations are as close to primitive life as they are to our complicated civilization. For the first time in centuries artists have returned to the
artists
Modern
simplicity which is the hallmark of any kind of symbolic expression. They have shown that the elements indispensable for monumentality are available. They have acquired
35
Once more
cast a
painting
may
life,
development
it
in architecture.
may
fore-
far
many
spheres to accom-
This
tion,
tecture should
painting, sculpture, and archicome together on a basis of common percepaided by all the technical means which our period has
is
least in the
emotional domain.
to offer.
planted for the winter. Wars have been prepared in peace. should not peace be prepared in war? The means for a more dignified life must be prepared before the
Corn
Why
demand
arises.
an enormous backlog of new means and unpossibilities held in reserve by engineers and inventors of all lands. At the same time there exists a tragic inability to use these treasures and to merge them into our human emotional needs. No period has had so many means and
There
is
used
such a lack of ability to use them. In one of his essays, T. S. Eliot says the seventeenthcentury poets, "possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience." * Their emotional and their mental apparatus functioned like communicating tubes. Technical and scientific experiences inevitably found their emotional counterpart, as is revealed in the artistic creations of that period. This is just what we lack. Today this direct contact, this coherence between feeling and has vanished. thinking, Now, after the great horrors of our period, age-old, perennial
problems
T.
S. Eliot,
arise again.
We have banned
festivities.
artistic
*
and
'The Metaphysical
1932), p. 247.
36
incorporated into human existence and are as necessary for our equilibrium as food and housing. That we have become incapable of creating monuments and festivals and that we
have lost all feeling for the dignity of urban centers is tied up with the fact that our emotional life has been regarded as unessential and as a purely private affair. Behold the patterns of present-day cities!
Urban centers and spectacles Urban centers will originate when cities are not regarded as mere agglomerations of jobs and traffic lights. They will arise when men become aware of the isolation in which they live in the midst of a turbulent crowd, and when the demand for a fuller life which means community life becomes irresistible. Community life is closely connected
with an understanding of relaxation, with the urge for another vitalizing influence besides the job and the family an influence capable of expanding men's narrow private
existence.
No
man's
great civilization has existed which has not fulfilled irrepressible longing for institutions where such
life
broader
can develop. In different periods these instihad different aims, but, whether called the Greek gymnasium or agora, the Roman thermae or forum, the medieval cathedrals or market places, all have contributed to the development of human values. These institutions were never conceived of as financial investments. Their function was not to produce money or to bolster up a
tutions have
waning
trade.
center of the coming period wfll never be a to slums. It should not be financed by bond issues neighbor on the basis that its cost will be self-liquidating within a
The urban
period of years.
Community centers? What has the economist to say about the large expenditures involved in their building? The hope of our period is that diverse groups are moving
37
unconsciously in parallel directions. The liberal economists, such as John Maynard Keynes, are stressing the fact that economic equilibrium can only be obtained by a surplus production not destined for daily use. Goods must be produced which cannot be conceived of in terms of profit or
loss,
centers,
He
supply and demand. Keynes does not speak of urban he deals with the theory of employment and money. observes that today the necessary large-scale expendi-
nonconsumable goods are only admissible in the case of catastrophes such as earthquakes, war, or "digging holes in the ground known as which adds nothtures for
gold-mining
ing to the real wealth of the world. The education of our statesmen on the principles of classical economics stands in
Why not keep the economic machinery going by creating urban centers? The problem ahead of us focuses on the question: Can the emotional apparatus of the average man be reached? Is he susceptible only to football games and horse races? do not believe it. There are forces inherent in man, which
better."
the
way of anything
We
come to the surface when one evokes them. The average man, with a century of falsified emotional education behind him, may not be won over suddenly by the contemporary symbol in painting and sculpture. But his inherent, though unconscious, feeling may slowly be awakened by the original expression of a new community life. This can be done within a framework of urban centers and in great
spectacles capable of fascinating the people. Anyone who had occasion during the Paris Exhibition of 1937 to observe the hundreds of thousands lined in
the the
evenings along the banks of the Seine and on Trpcadero bridge, quietly waiting for the spectacles of
summer
up
fountains, light, sound, and fireworks, knows that the persistent predisposition for dramatic representation, even in
no
*, /; KfP?' The Genetd Theory of Employment Money (New York and London, 1936), p. 129.
and
38
In 1939, at the
New
York World's
Fair,
when
aerial plays
of water, light, sound, and fireworks were thrown into the sky, a sudden spontaneous applause arose.
is susceptible to symbols. Our period is no exBut those who govern must know that spectacles, ception. which will lead the people back to a neglected community those life, must be reincorporated within urban centers centers which our mechanized civilization has always very
Everybody
regarded as inessential. Not haphazard world's fairs, which in their present form have lost their old significance, but newly created urban centers should be the site for collective emotional events, where the people play as important a role as the spectacle itself, and where a unity of the architectural background, the people, and the symbols conveyed by the
spectacles, will
be achieved.
39
1943
Colored space.
The
is
water and fire. Color is a raw material indispensable to life. At every era of his existence and of his history, the human
being has associated color with his
pleasures.
joys, his actions,
and
his
The
flowers
come
into the
cover themselves with color. Dresses, hats, make-up all these things call for decorative attention the whole day interest. Its action long. It is color which remains the chief
is
multiple. Inside
and
outside, color
imposes
itself vic-
toriously everywhere.
publicity has taken possession of color and roads are framed with violent-colored posters, which are destroydecorative life is born out of this ing the landscape.
Modem
main preoccupation,
world.
it
has imposed
itself
So color and its dynamic or static function, its decorative or destructive possibilities in architecture, is the reason for this study. Possibilities for a new orientation in mural painting exist; they should be utilized. 7 bare wall is a "dead, anonymous surface/ It will come alive only with the help of objects and color. They can give
life
it.
a living element.
The transformation of the wall by color will be one of the most thrilling problems of modem architecture of this present or the coming time. For the undertaking of this modern mural transformation, color has been set free. How has color been set free? Until the pictorial realization by the painters of the last
40
Gdvm
young
girl
We
is
synony-
mous with an
fo;-
angelic guilelessness. This was the formula employed in representations of the female
2.
i.S'^6.
A; ) Scheffcr: Mignou envisioning the Heavens, This highly successful Dutch painter (1795in Paris, is typical of the 18157), wno wo'rkcd
1
1
artists of
the ruling taste during the first half of century. "Schcffcr's skillful paint brush enables us to sense her yearning for her celestial fatherland," said the theologian Hofstedc dc the nineteenth
Groot
in 1870.
La Cigalo (The Cicada), 1872. 3. Jules Lefevre: Lcfcvrc (1830-1912) was another famous representative painter of the ruling taste. Many of his were exported to America. The innocent
pictures
a nude, and this all too young woman is likened to the cicada which makes no provision for the coming winter. friendly
I hits
Ary Scheffer: Saint Augustine and motlier Monica, 18^.6. This was the
last picture that Ary Schcffer exhibited at the Paris Salon. Several copies of it
were made in the artist's studio. The original was obtained by Queen Amelie and the Louvre could secure only a
copy.
The opinion
the
first
of
Count
I
sea coast
Krasinsky: Yes.
. .
experienced the true meaning of painting. In my opinion this far overshadows the art of
time
Raphael.
By comparison, Raphael
is
mere
it
as "the
5.
Adolphe William
Bougiuiretiu: 'Ihc
Virgin with Angela, iHH^. Bouguereau (1825-1905) was king among the artists of the ruling taste: member of the
French Academy and President of the French Association of Artists. lie typifies
the
official
art of the
second half
of the nineteenth century, which quite overpowered the creative artists of the
period
such as Scurat and Cezanne. This picture reaches a high-water mark of banality. The angels, with their provocative swans' wings, are behaving like
street singers, or night club entertainers to fiddle at the table of
who come up
the client.
6.
One
Ary Scheffer: Vaunt and Marguerite, i&j6. of the most successful pictures from a
sentimen-
comes out in the lines of the figures. ''What a cry from the soul!" exclaimed the Revue de Deux Mon1860 wrote: "Schcfc/<2,v, and fimile Zola in fer was a passionate lover of the ideal
.
7.
Gmtav Adolf
in Frogner Park, Oslo, about 1930. The ruling taste and official art still live on, though
is somewhat changed. In the "Drive to Beautify the City/' both the city of Oslo and the Norwegian government
of
8.
park, ig2g-ig.fi. 'I'liis twcnty-onc-foot monolith marks the center point of the park and is surlith in
rounded by
It is
the
acme
of
pscudomonmncnKduard
tality.
Munch, it was these productions that won the hearts of the general public. The sculptor was built a
studio costing two and a quarter mil-
no Renaissance had ever possessed. Similar examples though on a less exagcan still be found gerated scale
lion kronen, such as
artist
anywhere today.
PSEUDOMONUMliNTALITY
IN
SCULPTURE
9.
thirty-nix sculpture
groups
10.
The Hall
of
German
Art,
as a manifestation
taste of the
of the pure
but another 'product of the ruling nineteenth century, inaugurated by the French academicians.
spirit, is
Teutonic
PSI'IUDOMONUMF.NTALITY IN ARCHITECTURE
11.
Institute, Pittsburgh, 1957. In order that the colresearch laboratories are banished seven
12. Georges Seurat (1859-1891): Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte, 1884-1886. Parallel to the official art of the ruling taste, really creative artists were working throughout the entire nineteenth century. One of the finest of these was the young Georges Seurat, who died prematurely. His traits: forms reduced to their simplest nature, sharply modeled and at the same time in-
tangible. Only their fashionable period costumes limit their timelessness. In Scurat's painting the forceful process of elimination was established long before it was grasped by architecture, and before it was to
long
applied
bring
for
.-..
"
HUMANIZATION
AND
ABSTRACTION
is 14. Pablo Picasso (bom 1881): Monument in Wood, 1930. This painting a sketch for a sculpture of enormous dimensions. Picasso never named the
which he designed this terrifying head in 1930. But today (1943) meaning becomes slowly evident. It declared what was to come. This sickle-shaped head-like form, with its cavities and spikes, is both monstrous and human, and symbolizes our attitude toward war. It does not glorify war, like the Napoleonic Arc dc Triomphc on the Place dc 1'Etoile. This sketch in oils is a projection of the horrors of our period and its tragic conflict: to know that committing mechanized murder can solve no human problems, and yet be obliged to do it. This monument is terrifying. Its symbolism shows war for what it is, ten the same terribilita that years before the actual events. Its form emanates his sculptures. A fearful warning, "Michelangelo's contemporaries sensed from which Picasso sets forth in a modern idiom.
situation for
its
inner
in
Bird in Space, 1922-194,. In maglli f. to lunge directly upward and claim possession of all space: "Bird created to penetrate the heavenly vault" in the words of Bnmcusi. It required thirty years of labor before this' sculpture came to its final form Simplicity is not an end in art, but one arrives at
15.
Corfrtm
spite of oneself, in
approaching the
simplicity
real sense of
things" (Brancnsi)
16.
1946.
Antoine Pevsner (bom 1886): La Colonne Dcveloppable de la Vietoire, A column of victor}' developed from the wartime sign of "V for Vic-
tory." Its hollowing out of space is achieved by the juxtaposition of small straight steel rods, whose color changes with the angle of light.
gta windows
for
the church at
symlioli/cd by a
lamb and
si
pair of bloocl-
washed
in a basin.
19. The Eiffel Tower, 1889: view from the spiral stairway. All unconsciously the forms of the engineers' constructions of
the nineteenth century gave rise to a wider space conception than the work of
cither architects or painters. The simultaneity of inner and outer space and the
20. Robert
Eiffel
Tower, 1910.
The emotional conTower was first given two decades later in the
work of the poets Apollinairc and Blaisc Cendrars, and the painter Delaunay.
The
the
new
22. Piet
23. Robert Maillart (1872-19^0); Bridge over the River Thur near Saint-Gall, 1933. All parts of Maillart's bridges, even the pavements, are active elements of the construction system that is based upon the flat plane or slab.
24. T/teo van Doesburg (1883-1931): Space study, about 1920. This house was conceived as a transparent relationship between horizontal
and
vertical planes.
the Domino 25. Le Corbufiier (born 1887): Construction system of House, 1915. This construction system consists of three reinforced concrete slabs with separating supports.
26.
1914.
ing
often
floating,
interpenetrating,
and
2j.
Rockefeller Center,
New
York
City,
The slab-like 1951-1939. forms of the various tall elements that make up the Rockefeller Center betoken a revolt against the old The
offices
organized
:8,
Fenwmd
Leger:
The
is
one of
a long series of
his
time
in
New
York.
the "subject"
and
artist extracts
or a situation,
bound to an object, to a dress, a human being, a flower, a representative form. landscape, had the task of wearing color.
fifty years,
it
In order that architecture should be able to make use of without any reservations, the wall had first to be freed to become an experimental field. Then color had to be got out, extricated, and isolated from the objects in which it had
been kept prisoner. It was about 1910, with Delaunay, that I personally beto liberate pure color in space. gan Delaunay developed an experience of his own, keeping the relations of pure complementary colors (it was really the continuation on a larger and more abstract scale of the New Impressionists). I was seeking out a path of my own in an
absolutely opposite sense, trying to avoid so
sible
much
as pos-
complementary
relations
In 1912, I got some pure blue and pure red rectangles into the picture ("Femme en bleu," 1912). In 1919, with "La Ville," pure color, written in a geometrical drawing, found itself realized at its maximum. It could be static or dynamic; but the most important thing was to have isolated a color so that it had a plastic activity
of
its
own, a
plastic activity
modern publicity which at first understood the importance of this new value: the pure tone ran away out from the paintings, took possession of the roads, and transformed the landscape!
Mysterious abstract signals made of yellow triangles, blue curves, red rectangles spread around the motorist to guide
object. It was
come
It
new
reality.
was about
color-object had been discovered. this time that architecture in turn understood
utilize this free color (color set
The
Decorative papers began to disappear from the walls. The white naked wall appeared all of a sudden. One obstacle: its limitations. Experience will be able to lead toward the
colored space.
"habitable rectangle'' is space, that I shall call the to be transformed. The feeling of a jail, of a bounded, going limited space, is going to change into a boundless "colored ' C7 O O JT
space."
The
"elastic rectangle."
Destruction of a
-wall
The new
which
its
is
possibilities are
numerous.
black piano,
dimensions.
will appear even the pieces of furniture in an asymmetriyou put stronger cal organization. Our visual education has been symmetrical. Modem scenery can be absolutely new if we employ
The
visual
if
asymmetry. From a fixed dead condition in which no play, no fancy can be allowed, we are coming into a new domain which is
absolutely free.
arrangement was given to our within the stiffness of the symmetric order. imagination all have been educated in this symmetrical tradition. It is very strong as most middle-class people are still bound
possibility of interior
No
We
An
mind.
Living in the Parisian suburbs, I had in my room an old, large chest of drawers, on which I put some personal artistic objects. I liked to place them always in an asymmetrical
42
way: the most important object on the others in the middle and on the right.
I
left side
and the
this par-
ticular
I
had a maid, a girl of the people, who cleaned room every day. When I came back in the
evening,
always found my objects symmetrically arranged: the most important in the center and the others symmetrically placed on each side. It was a silent battle between the maid and me, but a very long fight, because she thought my objects were placed in a disorderly fashion. Perhaps a round house would be the place to study this. It would be the best way to perceive "the spatial and visual destruction of the wall." The angle has a geometrical resistant strength which is only destroyed with difficulty.
The
exterior
volume of an
architecture,
its
sensitive
weight, its of the colors adopted. The "exterior block" can be attacked, in the same way as the interior wall. not undertake the polychrome organization of a
Why
street
and of a
During the
about the
city? First
Montparnasse; there
thrilling
World War, I spent my furloughs in I had met Trotsky and we often spoke
city!
problem of a colored
He wanted me
and
to go to Moscow because of the prospect of a blue street a yellow street had raised some enthusiasm in him.
I think that it is in the urbanism of middle-class housing, the habitations where the workers are dwelling, that the
is
most
evident.
An
artificially in-
creased space needs to be given to the people in these areas. No serious attempt has been made as yet in this direction. The man, or the poor family, cannot find a space of
poor
liberation through the help of a masterpiece upon his wall, but he can become interested in the realization of a colored
is bound up with his inner space. Because this colored space needs for light and color. These are vital needs: necessities. Color set free is indispensable to urban centers.
The urban
center.
43
Polychrome problem, interior and exterior: a shaded view of static fagades leading, for instance, to an attractive
central place.
At this
place
bright
monument
with some
tractive, powerful means), giving it the same importance as the form of the church that Catholicism has so well succeeded in imposing upon every village. Liberated color will play its part in blending new modern materials and light will be employed to make an orchestra-
tion of everything.
The psychological influences, conscious or unconscious, of these factors, light and color, are very important. The example of a modern factory in Rotterdam is conclusive,
The
and
old factory was dark and sad. The new one was bright colored: transparent. Then something happened. Without any remark to the personnel, the clothes of the workers
tidy. More neat and tidy. They felt that an important event had just happened around them, within them. Color and light had succeeded in creating this new evolution. Its action is not only external. It is possible, while
leaving
it
to
grow
rationally, wholly to
change a
society.
conscious of three dimensions, of exact volume of weight! This man is no more a shadow, working mechanically behind a machine. He is a new human being before a transformed daily This is tomorrow's problem. job.
of a
man becoming
ber of
Paris Exhibition, 1937. The organizers summoned a numartists to try to find an attractive sensational effect;
a spectacular effect, which in their minds would bribe the visitors to keep the fete in went back memory when
home.
they proposed: Paris all white! I asked for 300,000 unemployed persons to clean and scrape all the fagades. To create a white, bright city! In the the Eiffel
I
evening,
Tower, as an
orchestral conductor, with the most powerful projectors in the world, would diffuse along these streets,
lights
upon those white and receptive houses, bright many-colored (some airplanes would have been able to cooperate
44
in this
new fairy scene) Loud speakers would have diffused a melodious music in connection with this new colored
.
world
. project was thrown back. cult of the old patinas, of the sentimental ruins: the taste for ramshackle houses, dark and dirty, but so picturesque, are they not? The secular dust which covers the his. .
My
The
toric, stirring
my project
the
opportunity of realization.
new un-
young doctors: some green and blue wards for nervous and sick people, some others painted yellow and red, stimulating and nutritious for depressed and anemic people. Color in social life has indeed a great role to fill. Color
tries
to cover over
up.
The humblest
real purpose.
cup.
A A decorative life.
daily routines. It dresses them objects use it as a concealment of their bird on a handkerchief, a flower on a coffee
itself its eternal
humdrum
magic which,
like
music, allows truth to be wrapped around. like truth, who like to think of living with
it raw, without are scarce. Creators in all domains know any retouching, how difficult it is to use truth, how it becomes dangerous to
resides in a
balanced
The work of art is a perfect balance between a real fact and an imaginary fact. Pure color is more true in the realistic sense than shaded color. But the majority of the people like shaded colors Color is a strength with two sharp knives. Sometimes when it has broken loose it attacks and destroys without any restraint, sometimes it lightly enfolds things and objects within a zone of good taste, which is called "la vie decora.
tive."
The future will certainly belong to the effective collaboration between the three major arts: architecture, painting, was a time sculpture. Since the Italian Renaissance, which
45
arts,
keep
other aspect. The successive liberations which, since Impressionism, have allowed modern artists to escape from the old constraints (subject, perspective, copy of the human form) allow us to realize a wholly different architectural
unity.
materials, liberated color, the liberty of invention are able to transform the problem and to create new spaces.
especially in the measuring of quantities, in a conscientious rationalism, that modern architecture must impose
It
is
New
itself as
The
heaping up should be avoided: they are making the art of the Renaissance into a confusion without example. A measure, a rule, the acceptance of constraints, a discipline, should be accepted by all three parties. This should be the basis of any
collective work.
of works of
Daily we hear the word "beautiful": the beautiful bridge, the beautiful automobile. This feeling of beauty which is awarded to useful constructions is a proof of the enormous need which men feel within them for an escape through art. The same term is used for a lovely sunset. There is then a
common
beauty.
Then why not make, why not manufacture the monument of beauty?
Useful for nothing, a magnificent place to repose, which shelter for the anonymous crowd during their enervating day with its hurried rhythm, which is our cadence. It is possible to realize it, with the use of the new liberties, by means of the major arts: color, music, form. Everything is set free! Let us think of former times, when so many magnificent temples were built, which mark and express those passed civilizations. It would be unbelievable that ours should not achieve
would be a
46
its
popular temples. Architecture, in every time, has been the means of plastic expression most sensitive to the people: the most visual, the most grandiose. It dominates the view and fixes the gaze. Architecture can be aggressive or welcoming, religious or utilitarian. In every case it is "ready for use" for us in a
freer sense
The exaltation of 80,000 spectators watching a football game is not the climax but the end of civilization. The new
temple must foresee an answer to a natural need
tant as this
is
as
impor-
Imagine
light steeples,
for a great sports show. a dazzling point, in which the feeling of bright, for verticality, high trees religion, the need
Man
press
to exenthusiastically lifts his arms above his head To make high and free. Tohis joy in this elevation.
morrow's work.
47
1943
Que
Pour
"Aupres de
ma
blonde")
which men have (1) Monuments are human landmarks created as symbols for their ideals, for their aims, and for their actions. They are intended to outlive the period which
tions.
for future generaa originated them, and constitute heritage As such, they form a link between the past and the
future.
of man's highest cul(2) Monuments are the expression tural needs. They have to satisfy the eternal demand of the
into symbols. people for translation of their collective force are those which express the feel-
forcethe people.
a real cultural life (3) Every bygone period which shaped had the power and the capacity to create these symbols. Monuments are, therefore, only possible in periods in which a unifying consciousness and unifying culture exists. Periods which exist for the moment have been unable to create lasting monuments.
(4)
The
last
hundred
years
tion of monumentality. This does not mean that there is any lack of formal monuments or architectural examples
pretending to serve this purpose; but the so-called monuments of recent date have, with rare exceptions, become empty shells. They in no way represent the spirit or the collective feeling of
modern times.
This decline and misuse of monumentality is the prinreason why modem architects have deliberately disrecipal garded the monument and revolted against it.
(5 )
Modern
had to
architecture, like
start
sculp-
the hard way. It began by tackling the simture, the more utilitarian buildings like low-rent pler problems, housing, schools, office buildings, hospitals, and similar
structures.
Today modern
architects
know
that buildings
cannot be conceived
have to be
incorporated into the vaster urban schemes. There are no frontiers between architecture and town planning, just as
there are
relation
no frontiers between the city and the region. Cobetween them is necessary. Monuments should constitute the most powerful accents in these vast schemes.
(6) A new step lies ahead. Postwar changes in the whole economic structure of nations may bring with them the organization of community life in the city which has been
practically neglected
up to
date.
The people want the buildings that represent their and community life to give more than functional fulfillment. They want their aspiration for monumentality, joy, pride and excitement to be satisfied. The fulfillment of this demand can be accomplished, with the new means of expression at hand, though it is no easy task. The following conditions are essential for it: A monument being the integration of the work of the planner, architect, painter, sculptor, and landscapist demands close collaboration between all of them. This collaboration has failed in the last hundred years. Most modern architects have not
(7) social
49
been trained for this kind of integrated work. Monumental tasks have not been entrusted to them. As a rule, those who govern and administer a people, brilliant as they may be in their special fields, represent the
average
man
this average
of our period in their artistic judgments. Like man, they experience a split between their
their
methods of
feeling.
The
govern and administer the countries is untrained and still imbued with the pseudo-ideals of the nineteenth century. This is the reason why they are not able to recognize the creative forces of our period, which alone could build the monuments or public buildings that should be integrated into new urban centers which can form a true expression of our epoch.
who
monuments must be planned. This will be once replanning is undertaken on a large scale possible which will create vast open spaces in the now decaying areas of our cities. In these open spaces, monumental architecture will find its appropriate setting which now does not exist. Monumental buildings will then be able to stand in
(8)
Sites for
space, for, like trees or plants, monumental buildings cannot be crowded in upon any odd lot in any district.
Only
centers
come
Modern materials and new techniques are at hand: metal structures; curved, laminated wooden arches; light panels of different textures, colors, and sizes; light elements like ceilings which can be suspended from big trusses coverunlimited spans. ing practically Mobile elements can constantly vary the aspect of the buildings. These mobile elements, changing positions and casting different shadows when acted upon by wind or machinery, can be the source of new architectural effects. During night hours, color and forms can be projected on vast surfaces. Such displays could be projected upon build(9)
50
ings for purposes of publicity or propaganda. These buildings would have large plane surfaces planned for this pur-
which are nonexistent today. Such big animated surfaces with the use of color and movement in a new spirit would offer unexplored fields to mural painters and sculptors. Elements of nature, such as trees, plants, and water, would complete the picture. We could group all these elements in architectural ensembles: the stones which have always been used, the new materials which belong to our times, and color in all its intensity which has long been forpose, surfaces
gotten.
landscapes would be correlated with nature's and all elements combined in terms of the new landscapes and vast fagade, sometimes extending for many miles, which has been revealed to us by the air view. This could be contemplated not only during a rapid flight but also from a
helicopter stopping in mid-air. Monumental architecture will be something more than In strictly functional. It will have regained its lyrical value.
Man-made
such monumental layouts, architecture and city planning could attain a new freedom and develop new creative possibilities, such as those that have begun to be felt in the last decades in the fields of painting, sculpture, music, and
poetry.
1955
time of his early work. In one of his first large paintings, "La Ville" (1919), the symbol of the mechanized town was This painting is more displayed by signs and fragments. an early example of a contemporary mural than an easel
painting destined for a museum. Our period would have been far richer if it had only known how to use the strength and simplicity of Fernand his power to translate subjects into objects, as he
Lger,
liked to say,
his capacity to juxtapose pure colors. His undiminished right up till the news came vitality appeared of his sudden death. After inserting his own contribution to our discussion on monumentality, permit me to include the lines that I was impelled to write when I received this bad news on a brilliant August morning in the Engadine.
and
is the first of the great generation of septo fall, and the last one would have expected tuagenarians to do so. Seeing him in his country place, in all his marvelous, rough-boned vigor, whose freshness was undimmed by
Fernand L6ger
time, one would have expected him to have a goodly amount of life at his disposal. He had only recently found an old country house in Gif sur Yvette, about fifteen miles from
bers
Abutting it was a former dance hall, with small chamon the upper floor, "for gallant purposes," as he said. He had had everything cleared out and the place made into a lofty studio. There he stood, in his customary blue smock, a workman's cap on his head, surrounded by the large forms
Paris.
of his pictures just as grim and independent as the unfaltering outlines of his paintings; for he had, as no other, the ability to extract from the complexity of appearances their ultimate simplicity. It is true that, through this, he exerted an immense influ-
ence on poster painting, but in his own art he was seeking different. It was in no way related to short-lived publicity. What he was seeking is shown in the stained glass windows of the church of Audincourt near Belfort: the simplification of things till they can display their symbolic content (fig. 17). In these windows, which encircle the architecturally medieval church like a magic
something completely
no
One of them depicts "Christ before There is no Christ, no Pilate, no henchmen, no people at all. At one side is the Lamb of God and in the center two hands are being washedgigantic hands, like those of L6ger himself in a basin: blood flows over them in broad
story of the Passion.
Pilate."
was
sufficient to
of Audincourt.
symbol of our time. L6ger rebuilt his country place without an architect. He thought
in the
it
would
him
for a
long time.
studio
Here he invited his friends. A table was pushed into the and spread in the midst of the paintings. One ate here with delight, with all the necessary reverence a good meal deserves, for Lger was a first-class cook. He was also, in contrast to many great men, a most excellent companion. Some female creature was always around the place, but he never paraded this before the world. For him the problems of his work rested on a completely different level. I first got to know him well during a period of close contact in Amer-
ica 1942-1945.
which included the sculptor Calder and the town planner Jos6 Luis Sert, created there a kind of Parisian atmosphere, expounding plans and commenting
circle of friends,
53
scene. Leger, with his Norman ancestry, could not accept America tel quel, but he didn't reject it in a defeatist manner as did so many Europeans. He resisted it in the sense that he opposed it with his work. This tension, as in the case of other creative natures, produced marvelous of his American period are, without results. The
paintings
doubt,
was near Fifth Avenue on 4oth Street. Skyscrapers overshadowed it. Fernand L6ger was which posed working then on his great series of "Divers" a simple black outline hoverthe problem of depicting with and transparent figures in a weighting, falling, interlocking As he often did, L6ger superimposed less space (fig. 28). wide bands of clear colors. I stood in the studio with Moholy-Nagy and asked, "Why have red and blue patches been
His studio in
laid over the lineal structure of the bathers?" I
this
New York
knew
that
was related to the play of contrasts that Lger always emphasized, but Moholy-Nagy gave the answer: "Don't you see that L6ger must get even with those things out there?" and he pointed to the skyscrapers. Defense by creative reaction.
Ldger knew well what he needed in America for his artisnourishment. Sundays, on several occasions, we went by bus out to La Guardia airport to look at the comings and goings of the planes from the gallery that encircles the buildthe day ing and to observe their movements. Each time ended in a lament, as he pointed to the glistening metal
tic
birds,
"They
There
is
nothing for
Above all, Leger knew how to smell out the food he needed for his painting. Near the Canadian border is a village, Rouses Point, on Lake Champlain. Here, in from the lake, he rented a cottage. The whole district is French-speakthe last stages of ing. I lived on the lake shore working on Mechanization Takes Command. During the summers of 1944 and 1945 we daily strolled between these two points. Never before had I realized how much more the eye of the
54
how much
deeper
it is
by appearances. The important thing about Rouses Point was that here
artistic
nourishment.
He
discovered a de-
serted farm, fifteen minutes' walk from his cottage: the house deserted, the barn full of rusted machinery already
overgrown with weeds; apples hanging unpicked upon the trees. This aroused the Norman who had been brought up to be frugal with everything. And the deserted farm also aroused the imagination of the painter and provided the basis for the last pictures of his American period, which ended in 1945. He never painted during the summer. But watercolor sketches or wash drawings accumulated one upon the other and, in fall and winter, would be placed upon canvas. Fernand L6ger was one of the few painters who have an
instinctive
murs," he
with architecture. "Donnez-moi des and again. With the exception of an unsuccessful attempt in the United Nations building in New York, they were never granted to him. He had the abilmural painter. But the period did not ity to be a great
relation
cried ever
permit his creations, in which simplicity merges into monumental greatness, to find the places for which they had been destined in advance. Now it is too late, and his ever friendly
face
those
and radiating confidence will always be lacking among who had walked with him a step of the way.
55
Marginalia
Our century has quite a different attitude toward monumental sculpture than earlier periods had. This attitude is both tied to the art of eras of long-ago, and, at the same time, turned away from methods which form the basis of
contemporary possibilities of
artistic
construction.
Through the official art of the ruling taste, which drugged the natural instincts of the people for so long, any sensitive approach to the really creative spirits of our time was lost.
So
it is
understandable that the work of the greatest sculpbeen banned from the townscape and
the public view, and is concealed behind the doors of museums or private collections. The case is the same, whether
their sculptures
cusi,
the organic vigor of Hans Arp's configurations, the space-emanating strength of Alberto Giacometti's figures,
or the absorbing power of Antoine Pevsner's creations. dialogue follows which toot place over the Zurich
Radio in 1949, on the occasion of the opening of an exhibition of the worJc of Antoine Pevsner, in order to bring his
art nearer to
our dialogue, one of Pevsner's most impressive sculptures, "La Colonne Developpable de la Victoire" (fig. 16), which
was displayed in the exhibition in model form. At that time did not think it likely that this sculpture on which we focused our interest would be erected in something approaching the size for which it was conceived. But recently Eero Saarinen, architect of General Motors Technical Center at Detroit, had the courage to select the Colonne as the sculpture to stand, 60 feet high, before the administration
we
56
1949
it is not surprising that the find your sculptures, or "constructions" as general public
you yourself call them, somewhat strange. For a century and a half the public have come into daily contact with sculpture in the form of monuments which, as everyone today will own, have more and more lowered their taste and
their natural sensitivity to sculpture. their mark.
Things
So
it is
a mathematically contrived shape than an expression of artistic emotion. I have in front of me the beautiful brochure of your last exhibition, which has been brought out by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Galerie Drouin in Paris. It contains the manifesto which, thirty years ago, you wrote with your brother Naum Gab6, whose art is so different from your own and yet, with all its differences of means and materials, attempts to solve the same problems that concern
like
more
you.
Here you both state in a wonderfully succinct way, what you have since uninterruptedly carried through.
sion of space
and
longer
and
57
shadow become
sculptural media,
eUments
integrants, in
my work.
GDEDION: I can see
how you
plane surfaces. These seem to suck the space in Us appellent Vespace, as Le Corbusier said. But how do you express
time? What sculptural means do you use to give a threedimensional form to time?
PEVSNER: This is achieved by planes which are conceived as in continuous development. I call them surfaces developpables. In sculptures there are no massive accumula-
my
tions of material. I try to create perpetual continuous change the kinetic action by
movement and
means
of these
surfaces d&veloppables.
thin,
They
are
composed
of straight,
metal rods, carefully welded to one another and thrustout into space in continuously changing angles. In their ing totality they constitute the spatial curves which my imagination imposes upon them.
GIEDION:
PEVSNER: I do not let any craftsman touch my sculptures. Every rod has been laboriously welded in place by me.
GIEDION: This procedure, which in its careful craftsmanship reminds one of the tradition of the Middle Ages, seems to
means. Perhaps here lies much of the your Everywhere they approach the and give an extraordinary impetus to the play of organic light. I don't know of any other sculptures which are able to absorb and to model the light with such intensity.
also
me
an
artistic
secret of
creations.
PEVSNER: The surfaces d6veloppables give one the possibility to accumulate both light and shadow and, at the same all know that time, color. light and shadow contain the elements of color. Through refraction the surfaces developpables change in color with changes in the intensity of light, without any direct application of color. This is a similar phenomenon to the forming of a rainbow.
We
58
GIEDION: You use, in principle, much the same methods to release color as you do to form your sculpture. Your planes that extend freely into space are not formed of heavily bent
sheets of flat metal, but from curved planes made up of variously arranged strands of light metal. So you don't force a single color to remain always in a single place, but give
life
to your work by using the perpetually changing refraction freely contributed by the power of light. Finally one more question, Mr. Pevsner. Undoubtedly
your sculptures are most serious works of art which radiate out into the cosmos. Are they also in any way connected with your personal experiences?
PEVSNER: All my work relates to human experience. Take for instance the "Colonne D^veloppable de la Victoire" as
I call it.
The impulse
"Colonne Dlveloppable de
la Victoire."
GIEDION: This "Colonne Developpable de la Victoire" seemed to me, in the exhibition hall, to be somehow a prisoner. Don't you somehow see it in the open air, in a wider
expansion?
PEVSNER:
my sculptures
Whoever
must
feel that they are not just carefully consculptures, sidered constructions but far more creative projections of
59
from the organic life, with eternally dynamic happenings of birth. To reveal ever-changing light to the phenomenon their full intensity they need a free atmosphere, with the that no artificial ever-changing nuances of natural light can reproduce. lighting I hope that we shall still see the beating wings of your "Colonne Dveloppable de la Victoire" this symbol of never resting nature freeing herself from the embrace of death standing in full size, and in full light in some public
place.
Postscript 1955
In Paris, in the spring of 1953, Fernand L6ger brought together with the Venezuelan architect, Villenueva, who built the new University at Caracas. Villenueva asked me what modern sculptors he should invite to take part in
me
named, among others, Hans Arp, Alexand Antoine Pevsner. Today, as is well known, ander Calder, a large bronze sculpture by Pevsner stands in Caracas, in the place for which it was designed in the midst of the America was the first people. This invitation from South commission that Pevsner ever received. major public
this undertaking. I
Postscript 1957 Not far from Detroit, in a wide-stretching open landhas scape, Eero Saarinen, the Finnish-American architect, for General built a spreading complex of low buildings
laboratories, experimental workshops, administration buildings. It is an uncommonly clear and most carefully worked out project, employing
and strong-colored
ce-
ramic tiles. In front of the main administration building and the experimental workshops is a rectangular basin of water, large enough to be called a lake. Here Alexander Calder has re-
60
vived the long neglected dynamics of the play of water. But, before the main building, Antoine Pevsner's sculpture the subject of this dialoguenow stands in the sunlight for
the
first
time at almost
its full
height.
The bronze casting was built up in Paris between May 1955 and March 1956 and went without a hitch despite the
great difficulties presented by the perpetual interlocking of inner and outer planes inherent in its enclosure of space.
in
Powerful sculptures, like all symbols, can be interpreted many ways. General Motors gave this hovering column a new name, the "Flight of the Bird/ The title variedthe inner sense remained the same. Recently the title seems again to have been changed this time to "Lines in Motion." Indeed, they are lines even straight lines in motion. But what the artist originally wanted to convey was the direct transmutation of an emo7
tional outburst
We are moving toward an age in which many symbols are about to be reborn. We should hold onto the artist's intention,
Victory
and I sincerely hope that the original title, "La Colonne Dveloppable de la Victoire," will be the one accepted by history.
61
Part 3
ON THE COOPERATION OF
PAINTER,
ARCHITECT,
AND SCULPTOR
Vdues
Aesthetics
On
Architects' Attitudes
Toward
Architects
and
Politics:
an East-West Discussion
Habitat
Aesthetics
and the
Human
Marginalia
The
leads at
question of whether or not we need artists today once to the wider question of the influence of aesvalues.
its
bicentenary, Princeton University held a series of fifteen conferences on various subjects, such as
To
celebrate
"The Future of Atomic Physics/' "The Chemistiy and Physiology of Growth/' and "Far Eastern Culture and Society." Among them was a conference on "Planning Man's PhysiEnvironment." It was a brilliant group of people who were invited to be the guests of Princeton University in
cal
March
The conditions of acceptance were somewhat each participant was compensated for his travel original; expenses, whether this entailed a ticket from nearby New
1947.
when
in
Zurich) ; each participant was permitted to speak for twelve address was on the "Force of Aesthetic Values." minutes.
My
On leafing through the book of the conference, Building 1 for Modem Mem, which was prepared by Thomas Creighton, editor of Progressive Architecture, one perhaps experiences a certain disappointment that no attempt is made to score the individual voices of the participants as a choral
For the conference was attended by almost all the masters of contemporary architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, Jose Luis Sert, Richard Neutra; also the Deans of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and many others, including engineers such as Frederick N. Severud, psychologists such as Adelbert Ames, and historians such as Talbot Hamlin. The reason for
fugue.
this
1
absence of synthesis was that the regulations laid down "Building for Modern Man, ed. Thomas H. Creighton (Princeton,
64
by Princeton University for these conferences forbade the formulation of any resolutions or propositions and confined the sessions to an exchange of opinions. Despite this, there is no doubt that the speeches made there have had their influence upon subsequent thought and action.
The moment one touches on the question of the impact of aesthetics, another question arises, one that is somewhat delicate and that bears upon the contactsand the cooperationthat can
The
architect
between architect, painter, and sculptor. not self-sufficient; in earlier times he was with both the painter and the sculptor the
exist
is
one person.
The problem today is that there is no cooperative work from the very start of a project. Immediately after the
Princeton conference, I struggled hard with this question and determined to introduce it at the seventh CIAM congress to be held that fall.
due to the conditions imposed and architects by the nineteenth upon painters, sculptors, century, they have become accustomed to work in complete isolation. As a result hardly any like to have working conthat,
We
have repeated
tacts with others. Most painters consider a building merely a necessary shelter for their work; most architects, encumbered with organizational detail, think of the artist only
Even
UNESCO
building in Paris this same obsolete procedure was followed. In this instance the artists were certainly chosen from the
But they were not called in was already fixed: Here is your place, these
best available.
ments/
artist's role in an integrated creaabsurd. It will lead nowhere. And it parallels utterly the unfortunate attitude that many clients still display to-
tion
65
ward
architects, regarding them as mere confiseurs whose usefulness consists in "embellishing" the work of the struc-
tural engineer. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but unfortunately is it is why it is now typical of the normal situation. This
incumbent upon us
to break down the partition walls which creative artists in the different fields. In spite of this separate
outward separation, each has an inner connection with the other, which appears in their use of a common outlook upon
the shaping of space a common space conception. This common outlook has been developing unconsciously along did not exist it would parallel lines. If this common ground
be quite hopeless to work for a closer cooperation for an organized teamwork between architect, painter, sculptor, does not mean that coplanner, and engineer; though this
all painters is possible. operation between all architects and At the present state of development no truly creative ar-
who
needle's eye of
Civilization develops only when or unconsciously establishes an emotional man consciously and intellectual equilibrium. This condition is only possible
modern
art.
some common basis of sphere: in other words, not until has been established between the arts. understanding
66
1947
To
be
begin with,
we
arbitrarily added to or subtracted from an object. Aesthetic values are inherent in things. They emanate from them, somewhat as odors do from food or from flowers.
Like intangible perfumes they determine our sensitive or emotional reaction. Aesthetic impacts influence us at all moments. Consciously, or in most cases subconsciously, they provoke friendly or hostile reactions. Evading our rational strongholds they directly attack our emotions and are therefore
out of our control. This means aesthetic values are no simple trimmings but, indeed, have their roots in the depth of the soul. Their imthe most practical pact on man's decisions reach even to
problems, into the shaping of things of daily usecars, bridges and, above all, of our human environment.
If man's aesthetic or, as I would prefer to express it, if man's emotional needs are not satisfied, he will react immethe slightest deviation diately. He will reject most violently from his aesthetic standards. He will do everything in his
An
Switzerland the case of Robert Maillart, the bridge-builder who died without the opportunity to erect in any of our cities an arch in the pure forms which
We have in
example
67
he was able to master as no one else has done. His bridges were permitted only in remote mountain valleys because they were cheap and, above all, because nobody would see them. Why? Their extreme lightness and elegance offended the taste of the laymen and the specialists, who detested their rhythmic power. Said one, "We have had enough of
this puff pastry."
In Berne, where Maillart's bridges had to span the river he was forced to disguise them completely (fig. 23), with heavy granite stonework, thus annihilating his own elegance. The officials preferred massive bridges. It made no difference whatsoever that this massiveness was very costly. It satisfied their emotional needs. Today we can observe this astonishing dictatorship of aesthetic values, or emotional needs, in every country. One can admire the officials concerned with building parks and highway systems for the courage of their conceptions, but the moment they approach architecture their courage vanishes. then see them clinging anxiously to nineteenthcentury habits. This is a world-wide official disease. The emotional training of the average man lags far behind the advanced nature of his thinking. The whole dis-
Aare
We
this divergence.
still
aster of nineteenth-century architecture derives largely from T. S. Eliot once said the nineteenth century
lingers on in the twentieth. In our period, feeling seems to be much more difficult than thinking. Man is able to invent nearly everything he wants in science and in all kinds of gadgets; but as soon as we approach the emotional, or, if you prefer, the aesthetic sphere, we meet the strongest resistance. This was not always so. It was often the reverse. Artists like Michelangelo, in spite of their bold and revolutionary inventions, were conscripted by the Pope, as present-day atom physicists are by the government. But scientific thinkers like Galileo were
the
from public
activity.
The
result
is
that aes-
68
thetic values
spirit
ignored.
Humanity versus technology Today the immediate impact of aesthetic or emotional values has become of the utmost importance. Why? Suddenly we have become aware of our predicament. Suddenly and unavoidably, we know that human needs must dominate the problems of production. The task ahead of us seems nearly impossible, and yet we must simultaneously shape the elemust accomplish it. ments and their synthesis. Town planning, the highest expression of architectural synthesis and not only in respect
We
normally comes to its height at the end, of an era. So it was in Greece. the peak, or even at So it was in the thirteenth century with its frantic founding of cities. And so it was in the late eighteenth century when urbanism of the highest spatial order was within the reach
of every speculator.
pared with other techniques, are lagging behind. How should people be housed? Apartments? Single houses? The very existence of the city itself is questioned. Look at the aesthetic uncertainty on the drawing boards the moment a
larger synthesis
is
work simultaneously
there
is
required, as in civic centers! Yet we must at the beginning and at the end. For
a revolt in the making, a revolt which can be no longer suppressed. This is the revolt of the humiliated hu-
man
instincts.
Marginalia
In September 1947, in the small town of Bridgwater in Somerset, England, the subject of aesthetic problems was introduced into the discussions of CIAM 7, the first postwar Congress (International Congresses for Modern Architecture). It can be easily understood that this was not done
in the present-day situation without hesitation. To some it seemed that we would lose our footing; others considered aesthetic problems to be a purely personal matter; still others thought that one could only discuss aesthetic questions if restricted exclusively to architecture and in connection with a particular problem, such as the relation of volumes of high and low buildings in a settlement. The main center of interest was divided and grouped
around two different aspects. The MARS Group (England) was especially interested in one aspect of the problem the emotional reactions of the common man to modern art, and
especially to architecture. This led to the formation of the far should one follow the prevalent pivotal question: taste to satisfy the desires of the common man, or ruling
How
how
far
as
M. Richards, /. according to one's own editor of the Architectural Review, London, summed up the problem in a simple question: Need the architect conconsciousness?
man in
the street?
He
queried: those qualities in buildings that have, at the present moment, a symbolic or emotional significance for ordinaiy people, so that architecture shall remain an art in whose adventures they can share?
"What can
eclectic
idiom such
as
we
the nineteenth century." The second aspect was concerned with the fact that close
contact between the architect and planner, painter and sculptor, has been lost for a century and a half. Is it possible
that they will ever again be able to work together from the outset, as was usual in other periods: in the Middle Ages
due to an
all
embracing
Renaissance
for the simple reason that the best artists were simultaneously the best sculptors, painters, architects even fortress
builders.
a thorny problem today, and so Hans Arp, the sculptor and poet, and I set about drawing up a kind of questionnaire which laid less emphasis upon the techniques of cooperation
than upon the fact that for cooperation to succeed a certain humility was demanded from all participants.
on aesthetics developed in Bridgwater, the whole Congress, and /. M. Richards brought it excited out the two alternative attitudes of the architect toward the
discussion
As the
man
in the street:
for his
own
reasons believes to be good architecture and hope that peoAlternatively the arple will come to like it by habit.
chitect can say to himself that he has some direct part to play in preventing a new architecture from being frightening because it commits the public to the unknown."
When summing up I tried to set down how we stand today in our relation to the problems of
aesthetics.
1947
TOWARD
Bridgwater, 1947)
is concerned with those problems that are just over the horizon. In 1928 it was the industrializaemerging tion of building methods; then standardization; then the development of contemporary town planning. Now we consciously take another step, a step toward a rather intangible
CIAM
emo-
It may not be unwise to repeat that it is often said that aesthetic values are not suited to theoretical or public dis-
cussion.
But twenty
North Whitehead
the great scientist and far-sighted philosopher showed us the fallacy of a belief that aesthetic values exist only within
the personal and private sphere. And Herbert Read, in one of his essays, points again to Whitehead's arguments which show that this erroneous belief can be traced back to Descartes. It was Descartes who first divorced science from philosophy. After that philosophy assumed charge of the cogitating mind and science took charge of the materialistic
was the start of one-sided rationalism. the world in two: on the one side the cogitating mind, on the other independent matter.
nature. This divorce
It split
cogitating mind which recognizes only personal experiencesas in the case of Descartes is restricted to a pri-
The
Whitehead
stresses,
Modern
objects
objects.
no longer recognizes the split between independent of mind, and mind independent of In modern physics, experiments and experimenter
science
are regarded as interdependent. This means that we are within the ambit of
ened the gap between the cogitating mind and the whole sphere of emotional expressions to such an extent that it has become insupportable. Proof? We have all experienced how rationalism merged into mechanization, and how the tools, or what the tools produced, have become master and an end are on the turning point; the in themselves. period of
We
nearing its end. If this is so, then the more intangible methods of expression will reconquer equal rights with the world of logic; and we will no longer be afraid of losing our footing when touching on the impact of aesthetics, or continue the fallacy of
is
rationalism
the nineteenth century that aesthetic values are a strictly personal matter. If we really agree with the right of the emotional world to exist in this sphere, then architecture and town planning can no longer be isolated from their sister arts. Architecture can no longer be divorced from painting and sculpture, as it has been throughout a century and a half, and as it still is
today.
The problem is clear, but not its solution. There is no doubt that most of the contemporary architects and most of the modern painters and sculptors have lost the capacity or even the will to work together. A short time ago, in Cornwall, I gave the CIAM questionnaire to Barbara
Hepworth to get the point of view of a sculptor. I should like to quote her fine letter which, with a few words, illuminates the whole situation and hits the nail on the head.
Barbara Hepworth
your short
what you had to say during was left with a very sad feelthat the gulf between architects and sculptors is a very large ing one and that it can only be bridged by a change of heart in the
interested in
visit
73
be asked should not be "should the architect and sculptor collaborate from the beginning?" but "why do the architects and sculptors not collaborate from the beginning!" To all the questions relating to sculpture and painting I felt that the answers lay implicitly in the work done during the last
I feel twenty-five or thirty years by the sculptors and painters. as a sculptor that we have said what we have to say and played our part and that architecture, as the co-ordinating part of our culture, has failed so far, to unite (and even to understand!) the
work that has been done in our time by painters and sculptors. Without this unity we cannot achieve a robust culture. During my last exhibition I found there was a keen sense,
among
life,
all kinds of people, of the part that sculpture plays in except among the architects. They all stood with their backs to the sculpture and bewailed their lot, or chattered about new materials. I was shocked by this attitude because we are working,
are all of us, for something much greater than planning. working for a spontaneous sense of life, a unity of purpose which will give heart to the nature of our own living. I cannot say
in anything new of great importance the answers are all there, the history of architecture. New conditions, new materials cannot alter the basic prin
ciples. It is then,
I
We
it
when am
I
carving.
will
water.
ever,
Barbara Hepworth.
This letter mirrors the present situation: the architects with their backs turned to the sculptor, chattering about new materials, and the only possible solution of the whole problem is expressed in the few words "Why do the architects and sculptors not collaborate from the beginning?"
74
Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier replied:
It
has given
our president, van Eesteren, reveal certain pleasure of hearing he keeps in the depths of his heart, and beliefs: a matters that delicate taste in art and philosophy. After our hard work during
all
the week,
we
For twenty years, ever since I started upon my serious work, I have been convinced that, in face of the immense changes around us, the important thing, the thing at issue, the thing that must happen, is the re-making of individual consciousness. "I think therefore I am!" For each of us, within each consciousintrinsic light that ness, this means to realize the quality of that illumines our actions, and consequently dictates our program
of work.
Personal experience; private endeavor; the participation of each in the creation of the whole. The whole can become renewed by these molecular efforts, infinitely multiplied. Responthe individual. sibility rests with The first era of mechanization spread chaos a disaster on the
debit side of a prodigious and magnificent century of conquests in the fields of science, ethics and intellect. Everywhere disa smile, an honor, an unspeakable ugliness, a lack of grace, of But there is no reason to despair, all the conabsence of delight. structive elements are still available, at hand an unlimited
that is absent, because we supply of means. It is only harmony the inclination, not had even have not had the time, nor had is the important word the idea to regard it ... over for today. Put everything in harmony! Let harmony reign
HARMONY
all!
To do
Let
this,
it
As a poetic phenomenon!
collective enterprise! be proclaimed. Poetry which only Poetry! The word needs to exists in the context of associations. Associations which bring prea desired form cise objects and precise concepts into context in
Here is the
not foggy notions and unformulated, or unformulatable, inand objectives become assembled tentions. These exact
objects
75
in such a
upunexpected, unthoughta miracle! A MIRACLE of precise associations appears before our eyes, a result of mathematically exact precision. My friends, our efforts can produce such miracles! For whom is the miracle? For the general public. For what general public? For the simple people. I repeat: for the simple people. It is concerned with the relation between man and man. It is the speech of an individual to his brothers. For communal endeavor, at the moment of its birth, is held between the hands of the one who takes responsiof, astonishing,
way
bility.
This
man
But to
strangers
and
for
modern society, may well be those in These important positions, people here and there in control of parts of the essential machinery of the state; those who, by their decisions and administration, can guide the country toward a future that is ugly or beautiful. Some among them cannot help but be
susceptible to poetry.
At
living
this
and
time of indescribable possibilities of transforming into harmony the puerile dishonor which now plagues us the individual assumes an immense importance. The individual stands there, bearer and transmitter of human emotion. I say to you that, despite the common problems which have brought us together through twenty years in a productive and friendly gathering, responsibility, in the end, lies with each of
us individually.
Harmony can
consciousness.
result
CIAM
two
Amsterdam,
76
Does CIAM intend to guide a rational and mechanistic conception of human progress toward an "improvement" of human environment, or does CIAM, criticizing this attitude, intend to help transform the background against
which
it
projects
its
activity?
A. van Eyck
ended
its
old struggle between imagination and common sense tragically in favor of the latter. But the scales are turning: CIAM knows that the tyranny of common sense has reached
The
the same attitude which, three hundred found expression in Descartes' philosophy Giedion has just mentioned its sad implicationsis at last losing ground. Yes, the deplorable hierarchy of artificial values upon which
final stage, that
years ago,
beginning to totter. already transforming man's mind. the last fifty years or so, a few ranging from poet to During architect, from biologist to astronomer have actually succeeded
rest is
A new
consciousness
is
in giving comprehensible shape to various aspects of They have tuned our senses to a new dimension. It
belief of
its
is
nature.
the firm
CIAM,
still
Bridgwater from so
sciousness,
that the collective idea which brought us to far, is the seed of a new outlook, a new con-
tomorrow.
consciousness.
drian, or Brancusi
is
expressed
in art.
CIAM refuses to overhaul outworn values that belong to an outworn world by giving them a new dress straight from the
laundry of common sense. On the contrary, it desires late a universal revaluation toward the elementary; to evolve a transformed language to express what is being analogously transformed. No rational justification of CIAM can therefore satisfy us. Imagination remains the only common denominator of man and nature, the only faculty capable of registering spiritual transformation simultaneously, and thus of significant prophecy. It architecture planis the prime detector of change. Although in general answers very tangible functions, ultimately its ning
to stimu-
77
object differs in no way from that of any other creative activity, that is, to express through man and for man the natural flow of
existence. The more tangible functions those implied by the word "functionalism" are only relevant in so far as they help to adjust man's environment more accurately to his elementary requirements. But this, after all, is no more than a necessary
The question thus arises whether CIAM, accepting the contemporary situation as an inevitable background for practical realization, should nevertheless adopt a critical attitude toward it and act accordingly. Does CIAM intend to "guide" a rational and mechanistic conception of progress toward an
preliminary.
improvement of human environment? Or does it intend to this conception? Can there be any doubt as to the answer? A new civilization is being born. Its rhythm has already been detected, its outline partly traced. It is up to us to continue.
change
1949
Bergamo, 1949)
The
a small medieval city in Italy not far from Palazzo Vecchio, the city hall, which is raised
on
by Vincenzo Scamozzi. This piazza, with its two great is situated on buildings linked by simple private structures, the crown of a hill overlooking the river Po. The Palazzo Vecchio achieved its present form as a result of centuries of growth. It is said to be the oldest town hall of Italy, its use going back to the twelfth century, to a period when in
built
other
cities the Town Council still assembled within the church. It was a fitting place to debate questions of the
within the city hall also became heated as two different attitudes toward art made themselves evident. It became clear that aesthetic problems are not just personal affairs but that the world, and that they are part of our attitude toward
politics. they merge sometimes tragically Some fragments of the discussion are here recorded. I had to open it, and proposed that we should confine ourselves to the main points that had emerged from the ques-
into
tionnaire of 1947: 1. Are there direct connections between the plastic arts;
and
2.
if
so,
what?
sculptor;
Is
painter,
3.
and the
the
and
if so,
how?
Is
"common man"
such a synthesis? the discussion, among them Eighteen people took part in Roland Penrose, surrealist painter, London; Alfred Roth, of the GraduZurich; Jos6 Luis Sert, New York (now Dean
79
Paris;
ate School of Design, Harvard University); Le Corbusier, C. van Eesteren, Amsterdam; Max Bill, Zurich;
Helena Syrkus, Warsaw; Isamu Noguchi, sculptor, New York; James Johnston Sweeney, then Director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Ernesto Rogers, Milan.
arts
The
question
is
only
how
can be achieved. During the war, painters did a lot of research into the effects of colors and textures for the purposes of camouflage of rendering buildings invisible. It would be quite possible to use the same techniques to render buildings more beauthis
tiful.
overlooked.
The importance of the economic aspect should not be The architect is in a position to make a living
is
nearer to the
means of production.
there are
The roots of all collaboration are in education. In London now two schools in which artists and architects
An important obstacle to new work in the Western world our complex about the value of permanence. In India, on the other hand, decorated walls are often whitewashed over every year and then redecorated with mural paintings by local artists. need ourselves to create works which shall be destroyed when their time has come.
is
We
Jose Luis Sert: I want to begin by saying that I have always believed in the possibility of cooperation between
painter and architect and sculptor. Perhaps because I come from a Mediterranean country, where these things have always been seen together, I have never been able to separate
I
them.
remember in the early days of CIAM, when I was associated with what one might call the group of extreme purists,
that
my
80
except perhaps a photograph of the Alps. I was even then attitude. I always believed in the possibility and against this of a close liaison between architect and painter, desirability
and, since this time,
tors.
I have often had the honor of working with some of our most famous painters and sculptogether
In 1937 I worked with my friend the architect Lucio Acosta on the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris Exhibition. There we invited the cooperation of Picasso, Miro, Alberto, Gonzales, and other painters and sculptors who were then
with
us. This was an extremely interesting experience and resulted in the production of "Guernica," which has since been exhibited all over the world. I remember discussions at the time with some people, who were of another way of to painting, who said and had a different
approach thinking that we ought to replace "Guernica" by a more realistic faced with the problem of a fountain painting. I was also of Mercury that was given us to exhibit, but which was in form and conception for the situaquite impossible both the authorities and suggested that we tion. I
approached should commission another by the one man whom I knew would be capable of the work at that time the American
sculptor Alexander Calder. These two examples of modern art by two great creative
artists
ing the
lar
one another but both expressquite different from of our own time made a very great impresspirit
sion. Calder's
"Fountain of Mercury" was extremely popuand was understood by everyone. Picasso's "Guernica,"
in quite a different style, was the greatest product of conart. The theme of this mural was also under-
temporary stood by everyone, discussed by everyone, and commented been exhibited throughout everyone. It has since
upon by
It
its
message.
was when working in that pavilion, a place of public the importance of placing works assembly, that I realized of art in places where many people gather together, and form an indispensable complethat, in these places, they
81
ment
very
opportunity we have today quite a different conception of the place of sculpture in our towns. cannot talk about the importance of cooperation between the architect, painter, and sculptor when there are
this reason
little
to the architecture. Unfortunately we have today of finding places of this sort, and for
We
no
places
where
their
respond
own time!
Where were the plastic arts displayed in ancient times? In the public places of Greece, in the open places before the Gothic cathedrals, and, to a less extent, before the Royal palaces in Renaissance towns which, though controlled by the authorities, did serve as places of general assembly of the arts Versailles, for example. But since our towns have become abandoned to private interests such centers of assembly no longer exist. New York, for example, has only Times Square, a road crossing in the center of constant tumult and uncontrolled furors of publicity. Yet it was here that New York had to barricade off the streets for the peace celebrations after the last war. New York, the center of the world, entirely lacks any civic center
of assembly.
As long as we have no
centers, I
cannot just stand them on the place our works of art. sidewalks! Where can they be put? Only in the cramped surroundings of public buildings and in museums or private houses where everything is on an entirely different scale and where they are only seen by a selected few. But, when works of art cannot be seen by everyone, they cannot be painted for everyone nor can be understood
they
We
seen by the people, these can have no idea what they are about While works of art remain immured within muse-
82
urns
and private
galleries,
through
turnstiles,
with entrance by payment or they will not be seen by the great mass
town planners
is
to create places in
our towns where people can walk freely and look around
of their lives: places that are protected by the cities or the state from advertising, swayed only by questions of profit or propaganda. Such
artists
to gatherings of the citizens and where places, consecrated can display their work, have existed in cities of
the past. The means by which artists of today would express themselves in such places is unknown to us. One cannot define things before they happen. Surely the people before the Gothic era can have had no conception of how the areas in front of the cathedrals were going to develop. This was
a thing brought about by life itself. These public places a wonderful began with simple things and then rose to enriched with glowing colors. height of magnificence
Theatrical performances, civic ceremonies, lectures, all were held here. But the center already existed, ready for any
purpose.
be developed by life
itself. But we do need a conviction that themselves are necessary. This is the absolute such centers essential. Within the centers, once they are formed, there must be absolute freedom of expression. Today we have not
have which to work. only the traditional materials with a whole mass of things that also water, movement, light have not yet been used fully. There is a whole language to new mural artists. Not murals in the trabe
We
interpreted by ditional sense, but maybe entirely new things. There must be a period of great experimentation, but first we must build
the places themselves! will not have static exhibitions in these places, but
We
There must be living things will be continually changing. exhibitions where the people can see and comment on in the world of art and where everything that is produced
83
themselves as they will. It is here then that the people will themselves judge of the results and make their opinions known. One will not be obliged to give way before the majority point of view. All should be and then the scene changed from time to
artists are free to express
freely expressed time, like the changing scenes of a theater. Our job is only to create the places themselves. Life itself will do the rest!
help we can give in developing a culture is no more than the help we can give to the growth of can do very little about this beyond making the a bean. can plant the bean in the ground, water first gestures. then just pray for fine it, protect it and take care of it and the bean will have to hold its weather! From this time on
Le
Corbusier:
The
We
We
own
I
permanent center for the plastic arts be inaugurated. This would be a center for experimay mental work which will be taken down and rebuilt each year. It would be a shell within which we could experiment with external and internal spaces in complete shadow, in full sunlight, and so forth; where one could develop examples of plastic art from the first drawings to their full-scale expression in color and volume: a place where one could try out all that the plastic arts can do for architecture whether
am hoping that a
by rendering homage
to their walls or by destroying them, or by evoking symbols, and so on. This center would become a manifestation of human poetry a manifestation of the
sole justification for our existence: a center for which we must produce works that are noble and irrefutable witnesses
of our age,
failings.
can such works be produced? First the architect be an artist. It is not necessary for him to be a practicing artist, but it is essential for him to be receptive and responsive to all plastic art. His own artistic sense must
How
must
also
influence every line that he draws, every surface that he decides upon.
Penrose has commented upon the obsession of permanency. Permanency for the artist consists in his own pleasure and patience during the period of creation of a work of
art
and
it
own
pe-
is
destroyed
matters noth-
ing! The next generation will create its own works of art. It is the world's obsession with permanence that obstructs
building, obstructs town planning, and obstructs sculpture. This is due to our obsession with profit that on every work, in the course of time, both the capital shall be recovered and interest be earned.
Painters all long for the pleasure and publicity of painting walls. I say to them, "But take them. There are walls everywhere! And if you can't find one, go to your friends and paint on their walls freely and without payment." It is not so easy to paint murals. I speak from experience. One requires practice. The same goes for sculptors. For the sculp-
experimentation is not quite so easy, but a determined man can find temporary sites in some open place where it is possible for him to make his experiments in plaster. It is not absolutely necessary always to use granite and it is not important that the object should always be of great size. It is not size that matters in art, but concentration. Color has been mentioned. This is a field in which architects can make an immense stride forward to aid the coordination of the major arts.
tor,
the major arts can be assembled. Our civilization has created no places worthy of being consecrated to this purpose. Sert, however, told us of his experiment in the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris Exposition of 1937. He had no idea what would result when he invited Picasso to paint his "Guernica" on
art,
C. van Eesteren: The architect must have a feeling for but one cannot reason too much about art. In front of a work of art it is one's instinct that says "Yes, that's it"
85
it."
have an idea before one can create, but, provided the artist holds the same idea as the architect, the rest will come of
itself.
doubtful of the receptivity of the "common man" for this all the time. In this matter of cooperation the architect must take the
I
am
conception
is
happy
to
tectural problems. I will give, as a personal example, the work of Schwitters. His collages opened eyes to certain of the world around, by revealing, as it were, the aspects world within a corner of the ground. Those banal fragments
of contemporary life of a certain aspect of contemporary display to us a reality that we may not find pleasing, but that we cannot but accept.
life
Helena Syrkus:
We
man
.
of the
.
human
self lack a fair attitude toward the people. Art belongs to the people and must be understandable by the people ... I am in entire agreement with Luis Sert that we
.
We
The Greek Agora had its function; the medieval piazza at Bergamo has its function; but open places have been deliberately degraded by the capitalist system in order that people should not have the opportunity to unite against the system.
lack civic centers.
and
ing:
the
spirit of
the people.
The words
written on
New
yet the understanding. This is the reason why it is realized in the U.S.S.R. that we have fallen into a formalism.
ists
Formalism is born from the abyss created by the capitalbetween art and reality, between Dichtung und Wahr-
86
heit. Artists
life
and
started to
Real
artistic revolutions
by
social revolutions.
The aim
of a socialist realism
man,
but there are many sorts of realism. The work of Picasso is realistic in the sense that he has developed a method of showing the rottenness of capitalist society. For this reason his works are considered valuable in the people's democracies. In the East, where the people have reached a positive phase of development, the works of Picasso have no mean-
CIAM was positive in the early days was a revolt. It made use of analytical methods, which were also socialist methods. Functionalism discovered many good things (orientation, and so on), but its importance Construction is but has gradually grown less and less a skeleton. It has great interest for the anatomist, but for the rest it only becomes beautiful when it is covered with had nothing else to offer fine muscles and a lovely skin. at the time when CIAM began, and so we made a fetish of
it
. .
.
We
the skeleton.
that
The countries of the East have come to the conclusion we should have a greater respect for the past. We do
fall
not need to
rial directly
The new a greater respect for the spirit of the past . . will conserve its link with the past that is to say, it will preserve all that is good in the lines of roads, open places, the connections with the Vistula, and with all remaining evidences of its ancient culture. In defending and
Warsaw
we defend and
preserve in-
of CIAM must revise our attitude. [Looking through the large windows toward Scamozzi's palace, Helena Syrkus concluded]: The Bauhaus is as far behind us as Scamozzi.
We
87
are profoundly grateful for the sacErnesto Rogers: made by the peoples of Eastern Europe, but for which rifices we would probably not be here today. This does not however prevent us from holding different points of view on I share the opinion of Helena Syrkus cultural matters. culture is essential. Our differences relate to the fact that the earlier part of her talk] emphathat Helena
. .
.
We
Syrkus [in
sized figures, quantities. But it is only quality that counts. beShe has said that art must come near to the people. lieve on the other hand that the people must be given the
We
means to come near to art. She has cited Goya: but in speaking of Goya one cannot and "Maja desnuda." His portrayal forget his "Maja nuda" of the disasters of war are not superior to these works We have a respect for the past. Its spirit is alive and we wish to understand its message. But we must stand firmly in our own period. There is no excuse for repetition of the done eclectically or otherwise. It is past, whether this is the people to give them forms which have no cheating relevance to living art ... We must be the defenders of
. . .
art:
the eternal
life
of the
spirit.
Sweeney: I shall make the shortest speech of this in the sense they have congress. The words "common man," been employed in this conference, simply mean a layman, a man not professionally interested in any of the arts. This "common man" is found equally in all social classes and in
J. J.
June 1947: "I do not pretend to be an artist or a judge of art, but I am of the opinion that so-called 'modern-art'
in
is
merely the vaporings of half-baked, lazy people. An artistic production is one that shows infinite ability for taking pains, and if any one of these so-called modern paintings shows such infinite ability I am very much mistaken. There are a great many American artists who still believe that the ability to make things look as they are is the first requisite of a
all in
Giedion: [I summed up the discussion thus] I will say frankly that I would have been happier if we could have penetrated a bit deeper into the problem of the means of
artistic
expression
I
for it
is
here that
I find
the greatest
am very grateful to Sweeney for having spoken as he did. He might seem in a way to have been speaking against his own country, but this was not so. He
chasm. However,
just told the simple truth, and that is what is necessary. It is not treason to show up one's own faults or the faults of one's own country. One is not working against one's country in doing this, one is working for it. Now to another matter. Helena Syrkus has talked to us today of the role of culture and of history. If the question of the method of expression is important to us it is just because it is not only a question of the outward appearance of things, for Art is for us a matter of ethics. It is something that comes from the depths of our whole being: it is the projection of our actual entity. Everything however depends on the manner in which that entity is projected. If the form in which it is shown is but a reflection of the forms of the
past
it is
But the modern historian and the modern painter cannot reenact the past ... I
have noticed in a recent architectural development that
there are signs of a return to the eclecticism of the nineteenth century, though with new labels. These new labels
are are extremely dangerous. It is a form of reaction. for the past as modern artists have themselves altogether shown. But it is quite another matter to hang a fagade of colors or a fresco over the front of a building. This kind of thing is for us pure reaction, call it what one will.
. .
nothing.
We
have shown us we should be so. Why? Because we can now see the why whole of history as a single entity. Today we can see right
are for the past
We
and modern
artists
across to the prehistoric period when man first began to "feel" and to ask "What is this that is around us?" This
method that Miro has employed; it is the method of Picasso. Today more and more we see our connections with the past and most especially we see that modern painting
is
the
We
be a form of bourgeois decaAnother point. rooted in the past dence) deeply believe believe profoundly in a modern tradition. believe that we are developing this modern tradition. further that we should have no inferiority complex when we are accosted by the common man. need always to realize that today One final point. is easier than "feeling." This means that one "thinking" of our tasks is also to educate people and that we must not believe that we can satisfy the real aspirations of the people by fobbing them off with shoddy work.
(now declared
is
in Russia to
We We
We
Postscript 1957
CIAM did not revise its attitude, but others did. It seems that the architectural horrors of the ruling taste (which has prevailed with dictatorial powers behind the
rary
Iron Curtain, suppressing to a tragic degree all contempodevelopment) are now nearing their end.
It
is
somehow comforting
shown
90
Marginalia
CIAM discussions on the problem of aesthetics from genera] demands to questions of practical passed appliSlowly the
cation.
At
CIAM
9, at
Aix-en-Provence in the
summer
of
1953, where discussions were focused on the Human Habitat the committee on aesthetics no longer debated the role of and sculpture as such, but instead tried to outline painting
new form
of the
city.
Around the
walls were displayed drawings in the form of standard panels or "grilles" from all parts of the world. This means the subjects were analyzed and presented in a similar manner so that comparisons could readily be made and conclusions drawn. These "grilles" were all concerned with the Human
Habitat,
now
in process of regaining
and
reestablishing hu-
man
dignity.
The task given to our committee 2 was not easy and demanded hard work from us, lasting throughout the days and
far into the nights.
We considered
it
and
the urban designer to an awareness of the contemporary plastic sense which he so often overlooks. Notwithstanding
"grilles,"
we
found
1.
possible to divide them under two main headings: Preservation of the human scale in the face of the mechait
2.
civili-
zations.
Our conclusion was: the necessity for cooperation from the start of a project between the urban designer-architect
Giedion, chairman, Auer, Bagnall, Bourgeois, Braeti, Brera, Chastanet, Gregotti, Haefeli, Laidlaw, Maisonseul, Richard, Sekler, Senn, Tamborini, van Eyck, Vert, Voelcker, Wicker, Tournon-Bramly, secretary.
2
Coulomb,
91
and the
sculptor-painter
who can
Some of the suggestions submitted at this congress may find a place here. They were the outcome of genuine teamwork.
92
1953
HUMAN HABITAT
at
Commission
II
on Aesthetics
CIAM 9,
Aix-en-Provence, 1953)
normally used to work with two coordinates, the one perpendicular to the other. The houses were ranged along the length of the road, they were as far of the same height, perhaps even of the same as
size.
many
responsi-
bilities.
The
shown on the
"grilles"
is still
em-
some instances, but in a new sense. Usually ployment the architect-planner is concerned with laying out a fairly area a residential section, or even an entire city
large
is
able to serve
as a skeleton for his plastic intentions. suddenly has all his disposition. This gives him a number of directions at of approach that he can use in handling the possibilities that have to be solved. territorial and social
sensibility: a new developof spatial rhythms and a new faculty of ment of a sense of volumes in space. There are many perceiving the play in which it is clear that these capacities are as instances
He
And yet, without yet only very incompletely developed. in the contemporary sense cannot be dethem, urbanism
of these faculties, based upon veloped. The development three-dimensional relationships, should form part of a uniof quite education, starting with the disposition
versity
simple elements. In opposition to the crowded and inarticulated city, which to redisresults in mere chaos and disorder, we are trying and air where nature is not banished with a cover
city
light
93
its
its
and well-difand integrated into an over-all will not be absent. The architect plan from which greenery needs to be sensitive to the plastic possibilities afforded by each site and to employ them to the full. will give an inspiration to of the The
This
new
"right
pedestrian"
the spatial imagination of architects. It is indispensable for man's equilibrium that he should have the feeling that has been conceived for him everything in the urban setting to his own human dimensions. This implies research into a new order conditioned by the needs of our period, which
characterized by large-scale mechanized production. between the different Apart from their role of liaison the streets should enable nature to vital sections of the
is
city,
as to isolate the pedestrian as penetrate into the city so much as possible from all mechanical traction. This is of the greatest importance in considering the plastic conception of urban plans. Studies of the plastic form of the new urban scene must
aware always be guided by the human scale, always being and material elements must at the that essential functional same time express man's immaterial aspirations and desires. The housing group the unit of habitationmust contain in an embryonic state all functions of life. These functions
in the social
group forming the community. Each habitable section of the city should possess a certain range of the necessities of existence integrated into a whole and independent from the rest of the urban agglomeration. This new conception is far more supple than the
normal interpretation of "zoning" which is associated with the separation of all functions from one another. Life today results, or should result, from the association
of people in groups of different dimensions. It is necessary to set up a spatial scale within each area
94
based upon the individual. This scale will be expressed plastically by the repetition of structural elements, such as the dwelling, and in the disposition of these elements in space so as to compose the new organic components of the
city.
The degree of repetition will decide the forms; the resulting scale will determine the means that can be employed to give a plastic identity to each of the sequence of group
sizes.
contribute a general rhythm throughout the city as a whole. To maintain the necessary degree of unity within each element, so that a harmonious whole be created, certain impositions will have to be enforced regarding use of building
materials,
which may be
particular case.
administrative determination of the three-dimensional expression of the elements of the habitat (the houssocial groups ing groups, or units of habitation, and the
The
forming the community) should not be arbitrary, but be the plastic form that grows out inevitably from the emotional, social, and physical requirements that govern the
functions and reasons for existence of each.
Attitude toward primitive civilizations Contemporary architecture has become involved in the great process of the extension of a way of life, up to now more or less confined to certain parts of the Western
cities, are in
its
95
tive civilizations
and ancient
civilizations,
architecture has enlarged both its domain It has been deepened as well as widened.
civilizations
attitude of contemporary architecture toward other do not regard primitive is a humble one. civilizations from the point of view of an advanced tech-
The
We
nology.
balanced civilization
civilization in which man was in equipoise. realize that they can teach us forms that can be used to express specific social, territorial, and spiritual conditions. From this our
We
social imagination
standard of life or a primitive standard of life is not necessarily linked to a low aesthetic standard. primitive Cameroon hut has more aesthetic dignity than most
A low
prefabricated houses.
life of
the Western
civiliza-
tion a weakening can be observed in the acceptance of a purely rational approach. At the same time we are met by
the desires of the rest of the world to adopt the results of our scientific methods of approach. Primitive architecture, when approached fairly, can be seen as a symbol that directly reflects a way of life which has
down through the ages, and which has roots that penetrate deeply into human and cosmic conditions. Modern painters, for the last forty years, have been demonstrating to us that primitive and prehistoric art can help us to redirect means of expression. In the same way architecture can give a new depth to primitive contemporary architecture that can enable it to meet urgent challenges of today.
come
discover
more
For this approach to be fruitful, the and the aesthetic imagination must be
It is
social imagination
inseparable.
accepted that
and indeed
primitive, materials.
To
satisfy
96
simple peoples
skeleton.
it is
The
tion will enable them to transform it into architecture, provided this vitality is not blindly blunted or destroyed. It is the duty of Western man to provide the essential
tools of his technical inventions, but it is also his duty to permit the people to complete the work according to their
own
In
vital standards.
many countries now undergoing rapid technical development, different degrees of evolution are likely to be maintained among the population for a considerable time. In some cases (notably North Africa) a progressive pattern of urban development has been worked out and adopted. The spatial module employed has generally been the smallusually a room or enclosed yard which can be repeated to become house plots, small piazzas and access ways. Provided the module is kept unchanged, the area can be re-developed progressively and with the miniest repetitive unit
mum
disruption to meet changing habits of life of the community, and yet always present a coherent physical expression.
Conclusions
The architect's widened field of operations demands the development of a far greater sensitivity than is usually evident today in the handling of spaces and in the disof positions of volumes. For the present, until a mastery these arts is attained, it is most important that the architect should work closely from the start of each project with painters
and
surfaces
in the handling of sculptors, as these are specialists and in the siting of volumes in space.
The problem of the architectural solution of the possible methods of construction is divided into two parts: The first is the plastic determination, which should be solved in collaboration between the artist and the technician.
97
The second
aim
is
is
by
dis-
ciplining
full liberty
but, on the contrary (after a very careful study of regional conditions and of the inner life of a community, not omitting its position in a period of
is
change), to create a situation that can permit of the free of each individual.
Part 4
Marginalia
After the formal proceedings of the conference at Princeton on "Planning Man's Physical Environment" (1947) had been concluded, some of the many people gathered together concerned with education began to there who were
closely
discuss the
form and reform of the training of the architect. At the end of my conference address I also touched on this problem by pointing.out that the creative budding of the young architect is often blighted by the kind of education he is offered in most universities and technical institutes.
"We
mous
tasks lying ahead. The present curricula are insuffinecessities of this period. The stuciently adjusted to the dents feel it strongly, sometimes more strongly than their
same question crops up: our training be organized so that we may realize How should the social, moral, and emotional demands of our work? "I shall illustrate from my own field. History is often
forced
tecture for the last
upon students as if nothing had happened in archihundred years. History is taught as if it were static. But history is dynamic. The past lies within us and acts in us. As the French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose shadow looms larger with the years, puts it, 'the past gnaws relentlessly into the future/ We must forge history into a weapon which will enable the coming generation to measure where they stand, to judge their strength and their
weaknesses,
in architectural education
is
nec-
UNESCO,
to
100
set
up
committee to
At the time
conclusions;
its purpose being only to permit of an exchange of ideas from which perhaps certain general guiding princi-
Huxley was therefore prewas signed by a great number of the conference pared; participants and others, including Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Neutra, and many more. Julian Huxley answered encouragingly, and in the fall of the same year Maxwell Fry, the well-known English architect, and I met
unofficial letter to Julian
it
An
then decided that CIAM should prepare in Paris. statement on architectural education for submission to the a
him
We
101
isolated case,
all-over
tion in architecture, therefore, cannot be regarded as an but must be integrated in the long run in the
reform of educational training. In sharp contradiction to the present situation, the most vital task of this period is to learn again how to coordinate human activities, for the creation of a coherent whole. What we urgently need are people with coordinating
minds, and it should therefore be one of the first purposes of education to promote in the young the development of this faculty. To achieve this, we must free ourselves from the departmentalized and encyclopedic conception of education and encourage instead the understanding and comparing of the specific problems encountered and the methods evolved in the various domains of
activity.
single organization, no university, and no country in a position to perform this task. seems today the only agency in existence having the necessary means to
is
No
UNESCO
accomplish this integration, which has to come about if our civilization is not to collapse. In the field of architecture the situation may be described
as follows:
In former periods a common pattern ran through the whole domain of architectural activity, uniting the craftsman and the artist, the builder and the town planner. A common cultural background integrated almost unnotice102
ably the various professions. The teamwork necessary to create a comprehensive whole could almost dispense with a conductor. The spirits were tuned together like the in-
struments of a string quartet. All this has changed. The professions involved in archilook.
tectural activity acquire in their training a very limited outThe attempt is being made to turn the architect into
a specialist in an ever-increasing
number
of continuously
expanding
disciplines:
This hopeless undertaking must be abandoned, for a methodological approach which will enable the student to know what questions he may ask and what solutions he may expect from other disciplines. He must be trained, of course, to become as skilled a craftsman as ever, but the stress must be laid today on his future role of a coordinator, so that he may be enabled to integrate the elements supplied
strictly
by specialized knowledge into a work of art. This involves in many respects a departure from present curricula and methods. As a historian, however, I shall
limit myself to sketching the consequences of this conception for the architect's study of history.
and to the past is In the nineteenth century the architecture of the changing. ruling taste, and consequently the training of the architect, was concerned with shapes and forms. Students were trained to regard the past as a warehouse of forms, where one could borrow or pilfer ad libitum. Today a different
architect's relation to history
The
attitude toward the past has evolved. Past, present, and future are regarded more and more as an indivisible whole. What we are looking for are the living forces and the spiritual attitudes
periods, and most are interested in those problems of bygone particularly civilizations which reveal a deep affinity with the present-
we
day situation, just as modern painters and sculptors went back to so-called primitive cultures, to get support for the
shaping of their
own
inner
reality.
103
of life
We
History conceived as an insight into the moving process comes closer and closer to the biological approach.
are interested today in knowing more than political, want to know, occurrences. sociological, and economic in the manner of biologists, how the life of a culture took
We
call anonyMethodological study of other periods will history. into the specific nature of give the student a better insight his own time, into its own accomplishments, and shortcomings in comparison to former civilizations. The practical consequences in respect to the teaching of
shape. This
mous
history,
which
still
goes on as
if
since the middle of the last century, are that, instead of a history of styles and forms, a typological approach has to be introduced: instead of elaborating a false continuity from
the Stone Age to the twentieth century, through an oversimplification and a purely formal description of various periods we must concentrate on the vertical lines going
through history. History teaching is ever tied to the fragment. But these fragments have to be chosen in such a way that new constellations will arise in the minds of the students. History can only be taught in this sense by people who have an intimate understanding of the architectural and the planning problems of the present, of their emotional as well
is the selection and limitation of subject matter in such a way that it can be tied up with the interests and the work of the student, as John Dewey has been proclaiming for the past half century.
This, too, will help to eliminate nineteenth-century methods based on a mechanistic piling up of unrelated facts, forgotten as quickly as they are acquired.
104
Marginalia
The letter to Julian Huxley, mentioned earlier, remained buried in a drawer. But the demand that history be taught
in a
my
Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, a method started to develop. It seemed to me that an encompassing approach
to the history of architecture could only be based today upon conceptions of space.
this
In Space, Time and Architecture I had tried to develop approach within the limitations of one period. In the course of my recent studies of the beginnings of art and the beginnings of architecture, I have been developing an out-
line of the evolution of space conception from its birth. I went to Harvard in 1954 the method had already
When
not at
was able to introduce it there. I was would meet with success, had anticipated. The stubut it dents reacted favorably, and in saying this I am not referring to those students who are prone to present mechanical
of their instrucrepetitions of the ideas and even the words tor in order to simplify the task of passing their all too fre-
am
dents
who showed
that the courses had provided a certain into pricked their own powers of thinking
one of the main functions of a teacher. Toward the end of the first semester at Harvard, in a lecture on "History and the Architect," I gave a short outline
of the role I believe history should play in the education of
the architect.
105
1955
Universities and Institutes of Technology regardthe relations between history and the architect. The ing of the study of history importance, or the unimportance, has repercussions upon the whole training of the architect. There are many opinions in the profession about this re-
of
many
One, perhaps oversimplified, attitude is that of the practimust be architect has to build. tioner: "History? taught the necessary know-how for this. That's what his
An
He
this job? Histraining is for. What has history to do with time in an already tory courses are only a waste of precious
overloaded curriculum/'
is
the
belief that a study of the historical just intimidates the young architectural student, and that history if taught at all should be taught only toward the end of his studies.
Others hold that the study of history produces eclectics will be seduced by the past to become
copyists instead of inventors. Opinions such as these are trying to eliminate contact
it
as
something
useless,
and even
Now suddenly an
we
find discussions
sional circles
and
interest in history has reawakened and this subject taking place in profesin the architectural magazines with more
on
scheduled.
been done to architecture by the nineteenth-century plundering of historical forms. At that time those who were framing the new architecture had to search within themselves and in the life around them
to produce
an
own
period.
Today this first step has been accomplished and contemporary architecture has become a universal language, a language capable of being adapted to meet the needs of
different conditions
and
gions
of the world.
This
from an "international
avoided.
style"
civilizations,
and
their consequences, are in the forefront. Moreover, there hovers in the background the demand for a wider range of
inner relationships, and, to a certain degree, even a feeling for what is common in human existence: a new demand
for continuity.
This
may be
in history has revived. But our approach to history is, of course, quite different from that of the nineteenth century.
century In the nineteenth century the architectural historian stood upon firm ground. An encyclopedic treatment of architectural history presented the student with a sort of inventory of the acknowledged masterpieces of architecture. A second inventory consisted of the classical orders and Gothic structural features; this was accompanied by all the
details of entablatures, friezes,
cessories.
The nineteenth
and other ornamental acThis presented the young architect with a history of styles that proved very useful to him in the design of Classical, Romanesque, Gothic, or Renaissance banks, city
law
courts,
halls,
and so on.
107
The
In the nineteenth century one stood upon firm ground. study of history certainly fulfilled a useful purpose. Banister Fletcher's History of Architecture on the Com-
parative Method* in some respects still useful today due to the exactness of its descriptive material, is significant in that it is an epitome of all the history that was then considered necessary
and useful
for the
young
architect to
know.
But when,
architecture finally
early in this century, the collapse of eclectic came about, this materialistic way of
ap-
proach slowly began to be regarded as insufficient or even detrimental to the training of the student.
twentieth century During the formative period of contemporary architecture, in the twenties and thirties, Universities and Institutes
of Technology
scriptive
still
The
methods
building.
And
of teaching the history of the styles of when contemporary architecture after many
battles
finally
won
of mistrust which,
deep inner uncertainty, caused the teaching of history to be banished altogether from many architectural curricula thus throwing out the baby with the bathwater. This is still to some extent the situation
to regard history as a static process, in past, present, and future are listed in separate columns as in a bookkeeper's ledger. The result is that the past those things that have happened is no longer seen as
We have ceased
today.
which
something dim and fusty, dead as dust, but as an inseparable part of our living human destiny. This brings us to our main problem: How can the
history
1
Banister Fletcher,
ed.,
Method ( i6th
History of Architecture
.
on the Comparative
London, 1954)
108
of architecture be taught today so that it can take account of our changed viewpoint that history is not static but dynamic, that history is an ever-changing process, depending upon the point of view of each succeeding generation.
and Freedom, Reflections on History, written nearly a hundred years ago. In this book he stated: "We, however, shall
start
us,
center of
things
he
is
suffering, striving, doing, as ever shall be. ... shall study the
man. Man,
We
recurrent, constant and typical, as echoing in us and intelligible through us ... and now let us remember all
we owe
supreme spiritual heritage." now must find where lies the key to our problem today, and in this connection we have to ask whether there are any phenomena that clearly run through the whole of historical development, upon which the history of architecture, as taught today, can be basically founded. Such phenomenasuch notions must be extracted from the innermost heart of architectural concepts.
part of our
We
objectivity of the historian Before delving further into this, however, there is a certain prejudice that must be cleared away. This is the fiction that the historian is a man who stands above the turmoil of the milling crowd and, from an ivory tower, surveys the scene with a dispassionate eye, interpreting it with a
The
a product of able to erect of a timeless quality by piecing together a sort of buildings photomontage of the ornamentations of bygone periods. There is, in fact, no such thing as an objective historian.
is
somehow believed
itself
2 Jacob Burckhardt, Force and 'Freedom, Reflections on History York, 1943), pp. 81, 82, 85.
(New
109
the beliefs of former generations which have become genand thus he gives an appearance of erally accepted truths
impartiality.
All great historians have been creatures of their own The historian should find period: the more so the better. creative forces that animate what inspiration in the same Paul Klee has called the "real artist." The historian has to give insight into what is happening
in the changing structure of his
own
must always run parallel with those specialists of optical vision whom we call artists, because it is they who set down the symbols for what is going on in the innermost life of
the period before the rest of us are aware of it. The problems of the past are as innumerable as the trees of a forest, but there are certain problems especially related to the strivings of each particular period. In order to recognize these, the historian must himself be a real creature of his own time. He must know which are the urgent problems
that have to be solved, and he must be able to develop his own researches out of them. For this the historian must have an understanding of his own period in its relation to
the past and maybe also some inkling of those trends leading into the future. History is a mirror which reflects the face of the onlooker. The historian has to show the trends of development as
clearly and as strongly as he is able. But his so-called objectivity is nothing but a fiction. should the historical past of architecture be pre-
How
The method of presenting history should not differ from the methods of presenting any other subject considered necessary in the formation of the architects, as, for instance, statics or the theory of structures. In many schools of higher learning, Universities, and Institutes of
still is,
a tend-
no
has been to turn the architect into some kind engineer with no understanding of what "statics" really means. Some time ago I asked Ove Amp, the English structural engineer who works in close contact with architects, what place he considered statics should play in the education of the architect. He told me that, from his experience in working with young architects in the London Architectural Association School, he had become convinced that it was far more important to give them a certain sense for statics than to teach them the techniques of comresult
The
of
dilettante
plicated calculations. The great structural engineer, Luigi Nervi, once complained to me that the plans he gets from architects often reveal an astonishing lack of structural un-
derstanding. It seems, therefore, that the aim when teaching statics to architects should be to develop in them a sense of the potentialities of structural materials so that
the architect's own spatial imagination may be kindled, and, second, that he may know what he can and what he cannot demand from his best helper, the structural engineer.
In other words, the architect needs to be given a methodoremember the statement of Walter Gropius, "In an age of specialization, method is more important than information/' The system of presenting history should be in the same way based on a method, rather than specialization. The student should be helped to widen his outlook. But this outlook should be widened not by a host of facts or purely historical knowledge. His outlook should be widened by strengthening in him a certain faculty: the sense for space.
111
historical
approach to architecture
From
most heart
tion.
development
rests
upon two
At the end
the
first
approach
of the last century, three great scholars were to undermine the current factual and materialistic to this problem. They were the Swiss, Heinrich
Wolfflin, in his early work on Renaissance und Barock; the Austrian, Alois Riegl, in Spdtromische Kunst-industrie; and the German, August Schmarsow, in Grundbegrijfe der
Kunstwissenschaft* The analysis of formal shapes appeared to these men as too coarse a tool to apprehend the spirit of a period.
Despite their differences, Wolfflin, Riegl, and Schmarsow recognized that the formation of space is fundamental to architecture, and that it is the changes, which occur continuously, in the formations of space that provide the unquestionable basis of the history of architecture.
all
The
Nothing is more embarrassing today than when smallminded people, taking advantage of the fact that they have
been born
later in time, venture to criticize those
who
first
opened up the paths along which we are now treading. are today born with the belief, based on a development of nearly 2000 years, that architectural space is synonymous with hollowed out interior space. It is, therefore, easy to understand how Alois Riegl, around 1900, considered that real architectural space could only be fully developed when it was given a vaulted ceiling. We, who have been born later, have the advantage that
We
August Schmarsow,
112
artists, has been considerably widened in regard to spatial conceptions. It is, therefore, not so difficult for us to recognize that the first great development of architecture was not concerned with
hollowed out space. In the birth country of architecture Egypt there was no inner space in the accepted sense. In Egypt volumes were
set in the boundlessness of endless space,
and
architectural
now
be-
stage encompasses architecture from its genesis Egypt and Sumer, including the Greek development and to some extent also the Roman, up to the building of the
first
The
Roman Pantheon.
This long evolution that connects the Pyramids with the
Pantheon had very many facets, gradations, and differentiations, and it is an exhilarating spectacle to observe how
within this first architectural evolution, characterized by the placing of plastic artifacts in boundless space, the second step is already in preparation. can observe for instance how Egyptian architecture, dominated by plane surfaces, with columns closely connected to inner walls and concealed from the outside, becomes changed during the Greek development. The plane surfaces, with their shadowless low reliefs and interior columns, here turn into temples surrounded by peristyles. The
We
interior
selves to
reliefs
columns have come outside and now offer theman exuberant play of sunlight and shadow. The low have become high reliefs and three-dimensional stat-
ues, their limbs no longer pressed closely together, reach out in all directions, their agitated movements accompanied
by wind-blown garments. To an Egyptian they may have seemed as distorted as a 1938 figure by Picasso would have appeared to an onlooker of 1890.
113
these contrasts, the same space perception Sumer, and Greece-Ze jeu savant des vopervaded Egypt, lumes sous la lumiere. The second stage of architectural development opened in the midst of the Roman period. The interior of the Pantheon, with its dominating dome and eternally open
But despite
all
eye,
its
still
exists as
not the moment to discuss the origin and use of the dome, nor whether it was derived from the East or de4 Eastern Mediterranean soil. veloped independently upon This second stage extended from the time of the great Roman vaults and Byzantium through the Medieval, the Renaissance, and the Baroque periods, up to the end of the This
is
the most impressive witness of that inhollowed out space, modeled by light, attained
exploiting simultaneously form,
is
far shorter
than the
first
but
it
was
far
more animated
in
its
spatial develop-
ment.
Even stronger contrasts in form, scale, organization, and construction meet the eye than during the first stage. However, in tracing the development from the Pantheon to the
Gothic cathedrals, and on to the spatial vortex of a late Baroque church, the continuity of the space conception itself remained fundamentally the same. Since late Roman times hollowed-out space, a circumscribed interior space, has been the major problem of the art of building. The most creative talents have concentrated
its further development, and the ever-changing form of this interior space distinguishes the phases of this second stage of architectural evolution.
upon
This connotation of architectural space with hollowed out interior space is so familiar to us that it requires a considerable effort for us to appreciate its relative nature. At the end of the eighteenth century came a short in4 See Part 6, "Spatial Imagination."
114
termediary period during which the nineteenth century searched everywhere to find its own soul. Quite aside from the nineteenth century architecture of the ruling taste, new trends were being developed in the neutral area of construction techniques. In the early years of our century, a new space conception begins to emerge, first in painting and then in architecture,
as I tried to indicate to
some extent
in Space,
Time and
Architecture. This third stage of architectural development is still in the convulsions of its formative period, yet already some of
be outlined. from the first stage and from the second. It elements of both are preserved alongside new elements Yet of its own. The constituent fact of the second stagethe hollowed out space continues to be further developed. Simultanethe first stage are ously the space-emanating volumes of
its
features can
is
different
New elements also appear, some of them announced during the last years of the second stage, partly such as transparency which is combined with the interpenetration of inner and outer space. Hollowed out space; juxtaposition of volumes; perforationall lead up to what has been termed the space-time
reintroduced.
history
History and curriculum be raised: How can Finally the practical question must of architecture be built into the general curriculum?
This can be solved in many different ways, according to the purposes of different types of schools, yet there are some
constant leading principles. In many universities an introductory survey course in the History of Art is offered as part of the general undergraduate if such courses were made program. It would be as well for all students wishing to enter the architectural
mandatory
"5
important as the usual reknowledge of mathematics. These courses provide the student with a certain foundageneral of reference in regard to the develoption and some
schools,
and considered
just as
in
what form
to architecture, painting, and general introduction can best be given. sculpture The whole question of incorporating the teaching of
circles history within the architectural curriculum
around
three problems:
How?
the student enters the school of should be presented to him from a architecture, history point of view that corresponds to our present-day demands and our present-day attitude toward the past. In my opinion this means that history of architecture should be taught from the very beginning to the present day on the basis of space conception. This is an all-embracing postulate, intimately related to the demand for spatial im-
From
the
moment
agination which
is
The widespread
knowledge of
the historical development of space conception in many fields is instanced by the recent appearance of a book entitled
Concepts of Space by
contains
the statement:
It is the history of scientific thought in its broadest perspective against the cultural background of the period which has decisive importance for the modern mind.
116
The concept
physics
torical
of space, in spite of
its
treated
How much?
If history of architecture is taught on the basis of space conception, then it can incorporate much of the material that is often now handled in separate courses such as Theory of Architecture, Architectural Philosophy, and others. one-term course on the Visual Arts, at the outset of architectural studies, destined as a kind of eye opener to arouse a visual excitement in the student, can be based upon first-rate visual material or color slides, without historical an amplification. This course can and should be handled
by
architect.
to
be the
re-
sponsibility of a fully trained art historian. History is as much a full-time job as architecture or and the
planning,
frame of reference within which courses on space conception have to be set must be rather comprehensive if misleading dilettantism is to be avoided. Care should be taken, however, that these courses do not stand in isolation. Apart from the courses themselves, history should be brought into coordination with design problems in the workshops. When, for instance, there is a design problem for a museum, a church, an assembly building, or a shopping center, the historian should be required to give an introduction whose length would be dependent
upon the importance of the problem. The purpose is to give the students a greater oversight into the nature of the prob5 Max Jammer, Concepts of Space, the History of Theories of Space in Physics (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), p. v.
117
it
it
has been tackled in the past, so that with a wider outlook and are less se-
latest fashionable
History should be as closely connected with the workshop problems as is structural design.
The whole development of architecture today leads us toward a greater attention to the long neglected study of
know of course that a knowledge of proproportions. portions alone can no more produce a good architect than the rules of sonnet-writing can produce a poet such as
Petrarch; but in a period like our own, which is slowly beginning to demand a coherence of parts in relation to the
We
whole, whether in a single building or in a larger complex, the study of proportions can provide a necessary backbone. This cannot be successfully handled in lecture courses,
but only in seminar work and discussions, as I have discovered since I first started to work along these lines in 1951. Such studies provide another way of bringing theoretical orientation into contact with the workshops, and I have had occasion to note how they have a direct impact upon the practical work of the students.
Finally, how much space can really be given to history in our already overcrowded curriculum, which needs to be curtailed rather than extended in time? Courses on
two hours weekly throughout four terms. This space can be found only by avoiding any kind of repetition and overlapping, and by an acceptance of the fact that the history of space conception can include much that is now being studied under other names.
conception
at least
demand
space
When?
taught in this way, contact with the past should accompany the student from the beginning to the end of his architectural training, as has been done for instance in the Architectural Association school in London.
If
118
gram of
studies becomes unimportant. History walks beside the student as a friendly guide, liberating but not inhibiting his spatial imagination.
In this event, the question as to whether history should be taught at the beginning or at the end of the total pro-
Part 5
Urban
Life
Marginalia
The next part of this book must deal with the question of the structural forms which correspond to the contemporary
habitat
way of life. It is evident that new forms for the human must be found if we are to check an ever-widening
human
chaos.
Much
flux.
is still
But
unclear. Crucial questions are in a state of outlines, which may set a framework for the final
The past century, even as our own, had no respect for the land. It abused the earth, allowed erosion to remove the
topsoil, sliced
up the ground, and destroyed the landscape the straggling extensions of widespread cities. by The gravity of this situation compelled Frank Lloyd
to issue the following heavy warning in 1937: "Man cannot be taken, still less can he take himself, away from his birthright, the ground, and remain sane any more than he can take himself away from the air he breathes, the food he
Wright
eats,
plan to achieve this preservation of the earth can be designed in various ways. In the Garden City movement, as
proclaimed by Ebenezer Howard in 1898, land was seen mainly as a living place for people who worked in the neigh-
borhood of London. Ebenezer Howard's plan was throughout conceived as part of a greater whole. But the idea and
its realization,
as so often, became separated from one anintention was smothered by row upon row of small houses in small gardens.
other.
The
Life
p. 301.
122
self-sufficient
homesteads, organ-
ized in gridiron fashion, but each with food for the household. This
large available tracts of land, such as exist in certain parts of America. Thickly settled Europe and much of the United
States can
no longer think
in such terms.
The development
rection
from that anticipated. Even so, this also demands man should not forgo his natural right of contact with that the soil. The asphalt deserts must disappear. A wider separation of structures is needed so that earth and landscape are not choked to death. The form and relationship of these structural volumes to the spaces between them and to one another is dictated by a new space conception, which is displayed by the play of relations of surfaces: by the interaction of high with low buildings. This is consonant with the
basic
demand
it
sense that
for a diversified habitat, diversified in the contains a variety of dwelling types for single
and for older people. This of form with function, of an emotionally felt compatibility desire with a sociologically necessary trend, is one of the
people, for families with children,
signs
moving
in ac-
cord with a universal conception. But even the most beautiful housing project remains but a segment when it stands in isolation, when it has no
"heart," no place that serves as a bridge between private life and community life, no place where human contacts between man and man can again be built up. The destruction of human contacts and the present lack of structure of the
123
The city
as
an arch-symbol of a
diversified
human
society
and has continued all periods. The community life that was develthroughout oped in each period its intensity or its weakness was a
appeared in the earliest high civilizations,
measure of the
in the following article. If we look at the city as a place in which private life and community life find a meeting place, then the mark of a true city
is
It is this
you
and
home movies nor television. Anyone who still does not realize that the most important effect of face to face human contacts is the immeasurable
nor radio,
inward and outward psychic forces which can be generated,
is
tacles
last
past helping. But, to enable this to occur, special recepmust be provided. There can be no doubt that in the
few years the demand for such developments has grown ever stronger. What is needed to bring these into being is on the side of the planners, and a sensitive imagination
understanding on the part of the clients porations or private undertakings.
124
1951, 1953
LIFE
If we examine, from a human point of view, the road which architecture has been obliged to follow during this
century in order to
come
to terms with
its
own
period,
we
The development
two
an "infected
atmosphere and as a moral revolt against the falsification of forms" (Henry van de Velde) It began far back in the nineteenth century with William Morns' purification of the immediate human environment by giving dignity of form to objects of daily use. From here it passed on to architecture, nowhere more markedly than in the single-family houses built around 1900 by Frank Lloyd Wright and others in the suburbs of Chicago. The American spark reached Europe. The work of the Stijl Group in Holland, Mies van der Rohe's projects for country houses, Le Corbusier's first Paris
.
house in reinforced concrete, were all produced early in the A study of the century and all were single-family houses. house man's most intimate environmentsingle-family enables one to understand better than anything else whether
a
man
really
of this devel-
The family cell was still the motif of the different forms of multi-storied dwellings that were developed parallel in time, including three-story row houses and skyscrapers. The so-called "tower" houses that have been particularly
between high and developed in Sweden are a compromise low forms of housing and, for several reasons, they may become discarded sooner than expected.
a volume of the 2 I was able to develop this observation when editing works of CIAM architects from twenty-two countries A Decade of Contemporary Architecture (Zurich, 1952).
125
The beginning
and
aesthetic
J.
J.
P.
Oud's Rotterdam worker settlement (Tusschendyken 1919climax in Le Corbusier's 20). It reached an experimental Uniti f Habitation at Marseilles which, by reason of its
aesthetic importance as well as its internal organization, is as much a contribution to urban design as it is an agglom-
This has been the first part of the route. The second stage of contemporary architecture is more concerned with the humanization of urban life. The relation of the parts to the
whole, the contact between the individual and the community, has to be restored. has become glance at the big cities, whose functioning the impact of mechanization, gives rise to paralyzed by Where in a "megalopolis" does one find any
based upon sponlife, or of enjoyment taneous social intercourse, other than as a passive observer? for social Absolutely true. Yet the suppressed demand contact, which has lived on imperishably in the human soul
left their ritual
first met in caves during the ice ages and symbols on the walls, breaks out spontaneI remember ously when man is shaken by some great event. the gathering that collected at the tiny Rockefeller Center at the end of the Second World War, when the voice of to the emoLily Pons suddenly arose and gave expression
ever since
men
tion that
It is
moved the
masses.
one of the curious features of present-day civilization that the contemporary creative focus can no longer be
traced to a single area.
Today creative impulses within the same movement arise all over the earth.
individual
an equipoise between the today throughout the world. This may have been the underlying 126
city reestablish
theme for
reason for the selection of the "Core of the City" as the 8 (Hoddesdon, England, July 1951 ) The term "core" which was introduced by the group of London in the place of "civic center" has
CIAM
MARS
become too closely restricted to administrative buildings) 3 may soon come into general use. Since 1300, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "core" has meant
"the central innermost part, the heart of anything" and it was defined by the MARS group as "the element which makes a community a community and not merely an aggregate of individuals."
(whose meaning
Contemporary interest in the core is part of a general humanizing process; of a return to the human scale and the assertion of the rights of the individual over the tyranny of mechanical tools. It seems possible that this demand for the reestablishment of community life is likely to be satisfied sooner in the new town cores which are now coming into being in Peru, Colombia, and India than in the highly mechanized cities of the United States. Is it possible, in our Western civilization, to build functioning city cores in the absence of a well-defined structure of society? In contemporary art poetry, music, painting, architecturewe can see that during the last forty years a new language has been evolved out of our own period by artists, who themselves seldom adhere to a formal religious
creed or well-defined political convictions. This development is not without an inner significance. It seems that a new stage of civilization is in formation in
which the human being as such the bare and naked manwill find a direct means of expression. We do not know
consciously, for instance,
why
which have no direct significance appear again and again in the works of the most diverse painters. All of these forms are somehow bare and naked as yet. They are, at any rate for the present, symbols without immediate significance.
8
Sert,
This was developed in The Heart of the City, ed. E. N. Rogers (London, 1952).
J.
Tyrwhitt,
J.
L.
127
which spring
we need today signs and symbols to the senses without explanation. He directly
then strengthened this statement by reference to experiments that have been carried out by certain psychologists.
The problem
to which
it
of the core
is
human
problem.
The
extent
will
be
fired
with
life will
themselves. Architects and planners know that they cannot solve this problem alone and that they need the cooperation
of sociologists, doctors, historians. For example, no one at was listened to with greater the eighth congress of attention than Dr. G. Scott Williamson, founder of the
CIAM
Peckham Health Center in London, which was indeed a "core" based on the spontaneous activities of people of all ages. Then the historian was asked to present the historical
background of the
core, because our period has lost so many of the formerly accepted norms of human behavior and human relations that a special interest has arisen in the conti-
nuity of
human
those
experience.
We
know how
who came before us handled For instance, how did they develop
community
life?
we
There
is,
here I come back to the symbol of the bare and naked man) that there are certain continuous features running through
human
lost
take only a very simple example: the right of the pedestrian in the center of community lifein the core. This
To
was carefully respected, and indeed self-evident, in all former civilizations. Today this right of the pedestrian this human right has been overridden by the automobile, and so the gathering places of the people the places where people can meet together without hindrance have been destroyed. Today one of our hardest tasks is the reestablishment of this human right, which is not merely imperiled but has been destroyed altogether. So, when we look back into history we wish to pose very
128
SOCIAL IMAGINATION
hills
Campo, completed 1413. This shell-like plaza The natural slope has been upon which the city is built.
lies
be-
'.
-:
^:-
;
;.r>:<
,''
</
/ji
v;'0 ?/iif
S^li
and 31. T/ie Agord and City of Miletus. The Greek gridiron system in this, home town of Hippodamus, was laid out when the city was rebuilt after
destruction by the Persians in 494 B.C. The gridiron as such was invented ch earlier in Sumer and Egypt, but a completely new sense of order was iniuced into it as a result of the Greek conception of the polis in which all
c emphasis was concentrated in the agora, the core of the community: the
.
studies,
iign,
BUSINESS
SANCTUARY
MEETIMG
RECREATION
up development. It is one of the few examples in which the inner forces of the modern space conception are brought to fulfillment. The principal buildings stand freelv each
within
its
Corbusier: Plan for the City Center of Saint-Die, Vosges. France, iq^. conception for rebuilding the city center of Saint-Die, which had been destroyed in the war, set a milestone in urban
32.
Le
The
spatial
own
space.
323. Le Corbusier: Saint-Die. Photograph of model in the Le Corbusier exhibition in Zurich, 1957. The building in the lower center of the square is the department store; to the left is the museum; in the further corner of the
square
is
is
tall office
building.
first
33- Oscdr Niemeyer: The architect's weekend house, Mendes, Brazil, 1949. At glance these two houses by Richard Ncutra and Oscar Nicmcycr have nothing whatever in common. But both arc imbued with the same
contemporary
spirit.
THE
34. Richard S. Neutra:
NEW
REGIONALISM
35. kenzo Tange: House in Tokyo, 1953. Another example of the new regionalism. The elements of the traditional Japanese house, with its mastery of the organization of plane surfaces, its impeccable feeling for clean, undisturbed space and purity of form and structure, require only minor changes to satisfy contemporary needs. But the different habits of living in East and \Ycst cannot be so easily bridged.
RETURN TO THE
PRIMEVAL HOUSE
FORM
Oval House, Crete, about 36. (Left)
B.C. 1500.
Frank Lloyd Wright: Circular 37. (Right) for Glenn McCord house.
home
in California,
about 1940,
(Bottom) House at Uruk-Warka (Irak). This house of rammed earth its curved wall had a thatched roof. Though of our time it is a continuation of the form of the Mesopotamian house of the third or fourth millennial!
38.
with
before Christ.
39-
Friedmann
circular
home.
about 1400
ing has
its
B.C.
own
41.
er:
J.L.SertandP.
L.
Wien-
3952.
42.
J.
L. Sort
and
P. L.
43.
Andre Studer: Pyramidal apartment block in Morocco, 1955. The pyrathe midal organization of this structure has a reason: it is to permit not only sun but also the rain to penetrate every dwelling and so cam- out their hygienic functions. This certainly also gives the' structure a pleasing aesthetic appearance.
mmmmmmmmmmmm
44.
Le Corbusier: Unite
IN
A LARGE CITY
Marseilles,
the
frescoes.
46.
r
Le
Corbufiier:
Unite
d Habitation,
1946-1952.
A larueilles,
is
The
"Architecture
48.
fac,adc of the
Indict,
1951-1955.
The
NEW
CAPITAL CITY
India,
monument
1951-2955.
The
Corbusier: Chandigarh, Plan of the Capitol. The building at the the High Court of Justice with its three pools (4), opposite is t "the or, assembly hall (i), to the left the Secretariat (2), upper right
50.
Le
right
is
hand"
(7).
51.
Le
of Justice
Corbuaier: Chandigarh, the High Courts of Justice. The High Coi and one of the three pools presenting with its reflection "the dou
IN
urn
1. Farming land.
2.
6. Sports,
Town
forest.
(High
rise
with
3. International
4. 5.
highway,
9.
commercial center.
nursery schools
Local road.
Industries.
High school.
and services)
12. Single family houses.
52.
J.
B.
Bdkem
and Group
as a
OPBOIAV:
number
of inhabitants
30,000.
55. /.
B.
1953.
Model of an
same
project.
BUSINESS
54.
mercial
to
Group of architects, including Walter Gropius: Boston Back Bay Comand Community Center, 1953. In America also there is a movement reduce the chaos of the large cities. One of the most important projects
for the
was this proposed new center for Boston. It is only use of pedestrians (6000 cars parked underground). As a consqucncc the center no longer faces upon the street. This urban center will never be built.
in this direction
It was unfortunately replaced by a less than mediocre apartment house project because of so-called "vested interests" and under the pressure of politicians who
had no understanding
center for a great city
of
and of what
has
now
lost.
human
is
questions such as, "What is still the same and what quite different between you and me?" Or, in this particular case, "Is there still today a need for the core?"
Does
actual
ters;
architects
There
are
many
engaged in the
of construction and reconstruction of city cenare in the midst of the practical problems of realization of their plans for the core. Besides this there are also
work
who
anonymous signs of interest in this question, which from the point of view of the historian, just as important. These are direct impulses that are arising from the
other
are,
general public.
Spontaneity
in the street and that means each of us has an urgent desire to get away from his undoubtedly purely passive position as an onlooker. Today he wants and this is different from the nineteenth century to play his
The man
own
six
part in social
life.
In June 1951,
we had
the Swiss Confederation. The streets of the medieval city center were closed for two days to all traffic, and benches were spread over the tracks of the street cars. It poured with rain, and yet one couldn't chase the people away from the streets. Everywhere there was music and throughout the
whole night people danced in the streets under umbrellas, and medieval nooks and squares were used as open air theaters. The festival was a reunion of people from the whole canton of Zurich. Those who came from the different and parts of the canton gathered spontaneously together had been very much afraid their own plays. performed that the medieval core of Zurich had been altogether de-
We
stroyed.
and that given the opportunity people will dance and put on plays in these open spaces.
129
lic.
Everybody was astonished at the spontaneity of the pubTo be actor and spectator in one person is what is wanted! Clearly the public is ready. The question is whether -we are! Let us not wait for a structurally well-defined society to arise. Let us ask what is alive in the bare and naked man that needs to be given form and expression. Let us ask what there is that lives in the bare and naked man, who is not and me. just a symbol but is you I had another experience recently in Amsterdam. I saw a number of children's playgrounds which have been created under the guidance of van Eesteren and designed by a young Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck. These have been made from very simple elements a circular sand pit, some upright
steel
But these simple elements are grouped so subtly with a background of the Stijl movement and modern art which injects some kind of vitamin into the whole performance
that they act as fantastic starting points for the child's imagination. These playgrounds also, simultaneously, fulfill another function. The careful design of their layout has
transformed useless pieces of waste ground into active urban elements. One needs only to provide the opportunity and we, the public, who are also maybe children of a kind, will know how to make use of it.
core in Greece and Rome Like plants, human settlements require certain conditions for growth, though human community life depends upon far more intricate conditions than the plant. What is
The
common to both however is that there are certain periods which favor growth and other periods which hinder it. There are periods in which many new cities are founded, and hundreds of years during which no new cities are started
at
all.
city
is
130
which have become fused into a single organism. The conditions which influence its growth can be of a widely
ships
dissimilar nature.
New
cities
dic-
tatorship, when the despot has had power to compel everyone to build in conformity with a single design. They have
also arisen in periods of purposeful communal energy. The despot has the advantage of his capacity for rapid and ruthless action; but, as his sovereign will is
bound
to ignore the
imponderable laws which stimulate human cooperation, a city built under a dictatorship can never acquire that essential quality of organic diversity. In cities that have been developed by the united efforts of their citizens, everything even to the last detail is permeated by a marvelous
strength.
Never
way
first
since the fifth century B.C., when the democratic found expression, has so much loving care been
lavished
places of the people, or space for them. Nor has the place where
the decisions of the people have been enunciated ever dominated the physical and moral structure of the town so effectively as the agora of these Greek cities. When I was in the United States I felt very conscious of the absence of places where one could stand about to rest, to stop, to speak, just to move about in. To make the future generation of architects consciously aware of this absence, I conducted a seminar on "Civic Centers and Social Life" first at Yale in 1942, then in Zurich, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard, where some of
the illustrations
These
made by
the students.
sociological question
was the relation between the plan of the city and its social life?" and we were plunged at once into this curious experiment of Greece the most exciting that mankind has ever
experienced
with, behind
this
it,
sudden awakening of the individual mind the enormous background of Oriental and
Egyptian tradition. The gridiron system is an oriental invention. This is clear, not only from recent discoveries in the Valley of the Indus, but, above all, in the work of the only Egyptian revolutionwho in the fourteenth century ary, the Pharaoh Akhnaton, B.C. built, within twenty-five years, a city on the Nile (on the site of the present village of Tel el Amara), which is an But the Greek gridiron of absolutely clear-cut gridiron.
is something quite different from (figs. 30, 31) the gridiron of Akhnaton (and also completely different from the gridiron of Manhattan). In both Egypt and the cultures of the Near East the gridiron had within its center either the palace of the king or the temple. In Greece it was completely different. Here the core of the gridiron was the
Hippodamus
the gathering place of the people. is the agora? It is now established that in the beginning the agora was above all the gathering place of the people and not just a market. It was only with increasing trade and wealth in the fifth century B.C. that it became more intermingled with commerce. The agora in principle is an open space a square surrounded loosely by simple buildings intended for public use. In the Hellenistic period
agora
What
the agora came to be bounded by standardized elements, still very simple in form columns, porticos, and an entablaturethat formed the stoa, a covered way protected against rain and sunshine which served above all as a meeting place for the formation of public opinion. Sociologically, it is especially interesting that no buildings faced directly upon the agora itself. The stoa was supreme. The public buildings, such as the prytaneum 4 and buleuterion (council Hall), were in close contact with the agora, but stood behind the stoa. The agora itself was for the community: not for the council, not for anyone else, but only for the people, and ex* Public building enclosing the eternal hearth, mystical court, and the assembly of the elders.
132
the square
itself,
Priene is one of the best examples for study because of the excellence of its excavation, and it is interesting to notice here the lack of direct relation between effect and cause.
many other cities, the final status of the agora only appeared after the Greeks had in fact lost their liberty. Agoras in their final form were made at the time of Alexander or later; very few before. But the idea of the agora is inherent in the democratic conception of Greek life.
Here, as in so
In the Greek
cities
there
is
is
a clear
classi-
only for the gods. The acropolis was never a gathering place. First it was the quarters of the king, then, when he was eliminated, it became the quarters of the gods, the consecrated area with the temples. Recent American excavations have shown that there was a temple on the agora at Athens, but this
fication of functions.
Monumentality
which was gradually built throughout centuries, was an exception. The agora is a community place, well-defined and nicely arranged, but very simple. Finally there is the private life. By the law of Athens any citizen who had too large a private house was chased out from the city. Private life was very humble. These three degrees first the gods, then community life, then private lifewere never again
agora,
distinguished so clearly.
Even
in medieval cities
the only
Now
the Romans.
What
is
Forum Romanum and the agora? great. The Forum Romanum was
is very clear and very a completely disordered place. It would have been impossible in Greece to place the prison, the career, next to the rostrum, the people's plat-
form. Career, rostrum, temples, treasure houses, and comitium (the patricians' stronghold): this was the nucleus of the Roman Forum Romanum. The Romans, from the
beginning, intermingled business, religion, justice, and pub-
133
lie life.
But this does not mean that the Romans did not understand how to build cities. It is true that Rome itself never had a plan. All failed who made the attempt Julius
Caesar, Nero, the Antonines. The city of Rome was so much a disorder that traffic had to be forbidden in the streets during the day by law. The rich lived in the best places on the hills and the poor in squalor in buildings of five to eight
stories.
But there are small Roman cities such as Ostia or Pompeii where their urban development becomes more evident. In both of these in contrast to the Greek practice there is a
temple dominating the forum. But besides differences between Greece and Rome, which
reveal divergent conceptions of community life, common features prevail. The right of the pedestrian is regarded as sacrosanct in both agora and forum. For instance, the surface of the main forum of Pompeii was depressed: "step-
made
it
to enter.
the imperial fora of Rome, which were 50 B.C. to 115 A.D. from Julius Caesar to Trajan. The imperial fora in their sterile pomp are, for me, the beginning of academic architecture. They somehow foreshadowed the nineteenth century.
built over a relatively short period
core in the Gothic period happened through the medieval period? First, decay, decay, decay, through centuries. The standard of life sank rapidly. Existing cities became depopulated and
The
What
ing. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries new cities were founded all over Europe. I may have a certain prejudice, but I find the most interesting are those in South Germany and Switzerland. The normal view of the romantic medieval city is here entirely debunked. These new towns were not in
134
the any way haphazard foundations. As a consequence of low standards of living that had prevailed through centuries, these new medieval cities, in contrast to the cities of Greece and Rome, show an intermingling of public and private life. The market place, whether bordered or not by arcades,
is surrounded by the private houses of the citizens. Also, in contrast for instance to Pompeii with its "stepping stones/' no care is taken to see that traffic is kept out of the public
square.
acquired a
new and much more intense significance. The city of Berne may be taken as an example of one
the planned towns of the thirteenth century (and also to of the medieval cowpath destroy the romantic conception Berne was laid out in regular and equal ground plots, city)
.
x 60 feet, along three parallel streets. These plots determined the whole construction of the town. The front length
100
be subdivided into four, five, six, or eight which still prevails today. The streets and parts a system the porticos which stood in front of the houses were owned
of 100 feet could
or his repreby the protector of trading rights, the emperor sentative. Both street and porticos were, therefore, respublica,
destined for the market, for public affairs, and for The life of the city took place along the street: the justice. town hall with its square was not built until the fifteenth
century.
The
we
artists
to our question: How can Finally build cores today in the absence of a well-defined struc-
ture of society? There is certainly some relationship between the social structure of a city and the physical structure, or of its core. But one must issue a warning that urban
form,
this
not always strictly true. was all so easy in the old days even in the nineteenth and so was physics: effect and century! History was simple cause in history, effect and cause in physics, effect and cause
is
It
135
in psychology. It was the physical sciences that first abolished this rule, and today we are forced to recognize that the relation between the core of the city and the social structure gf the city is not at all so simple and so rational as we once thought. It does not always obey the law of
effect
and
cause.
It is
Let
a tragic example:
The Area Capitolina ocMichelangelo's Capitol in Rome. of ancient Rome. It is composed cupies one of the hilltops
(which is not a real square, but more of a trapezoid); a broad ramped stairway (the Senatorial Palace or cordinata), and three buildings (the the Palace of the Conservatown hall in the background,
of a
Museum on the left) the Capitol can be rapThe architectural composition of in depth: idly summarized as a comprehensive development with the old medieval city relation plaza, stairway, and the
tori
on the
right,
of
Rome.
In 1530 the city-republic of Florence lost its independence to the Medici despot, Cosimo the First. Michelangelo came from an old Florentine family and, in 1534, he left Florence forever and spent the remaining thirty years of his life in voluntary exile in Rome. Here he gave concrete reality to what he had derived from his youthful democratic experiences in Florence. Here, in the Rome of the Counter
Rome in which there was no freedom and no democracy, Michelangelo's Capitol a perfect expression of the core was a symbol of the vanished liberties of the medieval city-republic that he held in his heart. It was, at the same time, a memorial to the tragic dreams of its creator.
Reformation, a
The lack of imagination usually shown today (though there are a few exceptions) in our attempts to devise new city centers new city cores is invariably excused on the ground that we no longer have a way of life that it is possible to express.
What Michelangelo has mirrored in his Area Capitolina is the baffling irrationality of historic events and the enigmatic omission of any direct relation between effect
136
and
Once more we realize that a great artist is able to create the artistic form for a phase of future social delong before that phase has begun to take shape.
cause.
In Space,
Time and
is
treated
more
ex-
137
The
torian
is
other, and become woven into a subtle pattern that portrays the emotional expression of the period. When one seeks to isolate a single movement or personality, or a single country, and there to trace back the sources
of all developments such as the birth of contemporary architecturethe proportions of this subtle pattern become
distorted.
refrain from using to describe the word "style." In a primitive sense the word "stylus" was used even in Roman times to describe different manners of writing, but "style" did not come into general use to describe specific periods until the nineteenth century, when different periods of architecture were analyzed according to a materialistic description of details of form. the moment we fence architecture Today, in within a notion of "style" we open the door to a purely
is
There
word that we
art.
contemporary
This
is
formalistic approach. Purely formalist comparisons have about the same effect on the history of art as a bulldozer becomes flattened into upon a flower garden.
Everything
nothingness, and the underlying roots are destroyed. Today we are concerned with something other than merely tangible form; for we know that this is inextricably interwoven with the whole shaping of the environment.
The architect of today regards himself not merely as the builder of an edifice, but also as a builder of contemporary life. In other words, the architect of today refuses to consider himself a mere confiseur employed to attach some
trimmings within and without
delivered to
after the structure has
been
him by the
engineer.
No, the
architect himself
must conceive it as an integrated whole. Like all real artists, he has to realize in advance the main emotional needs of his
fellow citizens, long before they themselves are aware of wholeness, a togetherness of approach, has become a "must" for any creative spirit. This forecasting of future development has become the noblest task of the contemporary development. Its cause is not hard to find. It is more than a century since a stable
them.
and secure way of life vanished from the scene. The powers that earlier stood behind it and gave environment its stability now decline more and more. In earlier times the architect and planner had merely to provide the container for an accepted way of life whether it was the way of life of a Versailles or of the bourgeois houses and squares of
Bloomsbury. Today the planner has to discover for himself how the human habitat, the outlying suburb, the changing structure of the city, can be shaped so as to avoid utter chaos. To accomplish this, the architect-planner or urban
designer must possess within himself the sort of social imagination which formerly resided in society.
results.
Such
architect-plan-
ners have everyone against them: their most powerful clients are economically dependcity and state on whom they ent, the bankers, and perhaps even the majority of their of the duties of an arcolleagues, who hold another view
chitect.
means that the urban designer's moral attitude. This is now very evifunctions include a dent among architects and planners, but can also be found
In the
final resort, this
among today's scientists, who are no longer able to limit themselves to pure research. Their consciences have become 139
troubled.
They have begun to feel responsible for the reThe historian too has been drawn
into this process. He refuses merely to submit a series of are its bald facts, for history is not something dead.
We
product. It
is
is
human
fate.
The historian,
closely bound up with contemporary All this is involved in the reason why
life.
we today
abstain
from labeling the contemporary movement with the word in the nineteenth-century meaning "style." It is no "style" of form characterization. It is an approach to the life that
slumbers unconsciously within our contemporaries. The word "style" when used for contemporary architecture is often combined with another password label. This true that, for a is the epithet "international." It is quite
short period in the twenties, the term "international" was used, especially in Germany, as a kind of protest to differentiate contemporary architecture from Blut und Boden advo-
who were trying to strangle at birth anything and everything imbued with a contemporary spirit. But the use of the word "international" quickly became harmful and constantly shot back like a boomerang. International archicates
tecturethe international style so went the argument, is something that hovers in midair, with no roots anywhere. All contemporary architecture worthy of the name is constantly seeking to interpret a
of life that expresses our period. If history teaches us anything it is that man has had to pass through different spiritual phases -of development,
way
he had to pass through different There are some signs that go to show that a
is
now
entire world. In historic periods cultural areas have usually been more limited in extent; but in the prehistoric era the
hundreds of thousands of years of dark ages we find everywhere the hand axe, the coup de poing. This hand axe is a
universal, triangular, pear-shaped tool whose sides slope to a fine edge. It has been found in China, in Africa, in the gravel bed of the Somme in the heart of France, in the Ohio
140
Valley. Everywhere this flint implement was shaped the same, as though the wide-flung continents were but neigh-
boring villages. Never again has a single culture spread universally over the whole earth nor lasted for such an unimaginably long period. Since then the establishment of great states has
resulted in national boundaries, in spheres of influence, in cycles of culture, which still remain with us.
and
formation
is
the product of
Western man. Again today, as in the time of Neanderthal man, it is passing round the whole world, only now its tempo has become vastly accelerated, and its speed excessive.
Since the beginning of his all-powerful urge for conquest at the time of the Renaissance, Western man has committed acts, in ever-growing numbers, against primitive
peoples and in the face of cultures far
his
ern
man feels
himself
somehow
When I recently had to write a short foreword for a Japanese edition of Space,
Time and
Architecture
I felt it
in
duty to explain that Western man has now, become aware of the harm he has inflicted by very slowly, his interference with the way of life of other civilizations
some way
my
whether
this
rhythms in the lives of primitive peoples, which have been the cause of their bodily and mental persistence since prehistoric times; or whether it has been an injection of rational Western mentality into the oldest existing civilizations, without simultaneously presenting some worthy anti-
dote. But, even while writing this, I was obliged to add that Western civilization is itself actually in a stage of transition.
Experience
is
the latest phase clusively materialist attitude, upon which of Western civilization has been grounded, is insufficient. Full realization of this fact can lead us slowly toward a new
141
Now
that
we no
for production's sake, the civilization that is now in the making draws closer to the mental outlook that is shared
in the West are by primitive man and Eastern man. again becoming conscious of something that they never forgot: that continuity of human experience always exists alongside and in contrast to our day-to-day existence. dangerous urge to mimic drags both the primitive and
We
the ancient civilizations helplessly toward a low level of achievement. Japan is today torn between two heterogeneous ways of life: the codes of conduct evolved through a thousand years of isolated development, and the flooding power
of mechanization. In Syria a Swiss photographer had his camera confiscated because he took pictures of camels instead of their "progressive" trucks. In many African cities
is the most prized personal possession. In Bagdad, the city of a Thousand and One Nights, one shop after another sells electric gadgets and parts for motor bicycles. In
a bicycle
the village of Babylon we wanted to have a cup of coffee. It was unobtainable; one could only get Coca-Cola. Even here, this soft drink, the hallmark of Americanism, in its world-conquering mission has ousted ancient, almost legendary customs. All these are straws that indicate the direction of a tremendous danger. Just at the moment when we ourselves are ready to set these things in their proper proportion in relation to our lives, they have become the heart's desire
of the "technically less developed countries." This may be enough to indicate that the image of this
emerging civilization, especially our particular interest the form of contemporary architecture cannot be described by so drained and bloodless a term as an "International
style."
What is
its
the
new
regionalism?
its
own emotional
own
142
Renaissance; and
period.
it is
The
all-embracing factor
concerned is the Space Conception of each period, and not the individual, separable forms which have been developed. The space conception of the Renaissance linear perspectiveradiated out from a single point of vision. For almost half a millennium this aspect dominated the composition of
day
every picture, every building, every urban design. Presentart, architecture, and city planning have as a basis a
space conception that was developed by the painters between 1910 and 1914. Instead of the outgoing "pyramid of vision" emanating from the eye, as Leon Battista Alberti named it at the start of the Early Renaissance in Italy: instead of this rigid and static viewpoint, the concept of time has been incorporated, which, with the concept of space, is one of the constituent elements of our period. This space-time conception embraces all artistic manifestations, and is becoming ever more dominant. One can tell, through observation of any project (irrespective of "modernistic" details) , whether its author is still spiritually within the space conception of the Renaissance, or whether he is creating in the spirit of the space consciousness of today. It seems and this cannot be too often repeated that all
creative efforts in contemporary art have, as their common denominator, this new conception of space. This is true no
how different the movements themselves may apfrom one another, or in what country they originate. pear It has been stated over and over again indeed, I have said it myself that the plane surface, which earlier had
matter
lacked any emotional content, has become the constituent element of our new representation. Furthermore there is no doubt that the use of the plane as a means of expression was
evolved from cubism between 1910 and 1914. On two facing pages of Space, Time and Architecture I tried to show how the same spirit emerged in several different countries, by presenting a visual comparison of a collage by Braque, a
painting by Mondrian, an architectural study by Malevitdi,
143
Art magazines have recently been stressing that the right angle and primary colors used with black, white and gray, disposed in an asymmetrical arrangement were the basic elements of "de Stijl." This factual analysis is perfectly correct as far as it goes, but it does not touch the reason behind the use of these simple elements the essential heart of the matter, which "de Stijl" shared in common with the whole
contemporary movement. This was the introduction of the plane as a constituent element to express the new antiRenaissance space conception. The right angle, the vertical, and to a certain extent the primary colors are by-products and not essential features of the modern conception. It is well known that the "de Stijl" people around van Doesburg never organized themselves into a formal group, as for example the Futurists did. "De Stijl" consisted of
various individualists working in different places. was sometimes a certain amount of collaboration
There
as at
one time between Doesburg and Oud, and, in the twenties, between Doesburg, the young van Eesteren, and Rietveld. But, on the whole, they remained individualists. J. J. P. Oud (whose early accomplishments will always form part of the
history of architecture) is typical of these individualists. I met him for the first time in 1926 he even then
When
his
Stijl/
own
way, Piet
Mondrian (who
called his
a similar standpoint. It plasticism") expressed this free cooperation of just strong individualists, often in dissension with one another, that gave the Dutch movement
its
"
undeniable intellectual strength. All contemporary architecture and painting is permeated with the spirit of our period, but there are a number of dif-
ferent
each connects
operates.
6
movements. All share the new space conception, but it in some way with the region in which he
Time and
Architecture, third edition, pp. 436-437.
Giedion, Space,
144
mean
that the
modem
architect should
produce an external appearance in conformity with traditional buildings. Sometimes the new buildings will conform to a certain extent, sometimes they will be basically different. This difference may be due to two reasons: sometimes it will be because of new production methods and the
use of new materials; sometimes, more importantly, it will be caused by the new aesthetic, the new emotional expression, that the builder is giving to the habitat of man. There is one other thing that the modern architect has learnt: that first and foremost, before making any plans, he must make a careful one might almost say a reverentstudy of the way of life (the climate of living) of the place and the people for whom he is going to build. This new
regionalism has as its motivating force a respect for individuality and a desire to satisfy the emotional and material
needs of each area. As the outlook changes, our attitude toward our environment the region or country in which our structures are rising also changes. Contemporary architecture and painting are embraced by a pervading mentality the spirit of this period. But, from out of the innumerable
possibilities of
own
specific
emotional needs. Now that we are separated by several decades from the birth period of the early twenties, we are
able to discern that certain regional habits and regional traditions lay concealed within the germinal nuclei of the various contemporary movements.
Two examples, one from Holland, the other from France, may serve to make this point clear. First, Holland. When
look at a painting by Mondrian (fig. 22) or at one of van Doesburg's architectural schemes, their abstract forms (Mondrian called them "neutral forms") seem very far removed from any specific regional influence. They seem so, but they are not. At the Congress of Art Critics in Amsterdam in 1951, for which the "de Stijl" exhibition was first assembled, I was
we
145
asked to speak on
this
audience, sprang to his feet and sharply protested when I tried to show the inner ties that exist between Dutch tradition and these so-called "neutral forms": how, in fact, these forms are rooted in the Dutch region and in the Dutch
mentality.
In the seventeenth century the great age of Dutch paintingand perhaps even later, no other people laid such stress on the plane surfaces of interior walls, or of the careful organization of the position of doors and windows (Pieter de Hooch). Similarly one can note today the careful manner in which the Dutch gardener lays out his fields of red, white, and yellow tulips. Certainly I would never wish this inter-
were claiming Mondrian's paintings to be reproductions of tulip fields! But I do maintain that the organized plane surface is in no other country so prevalent as here, in the region of the polders. It is not mere chance that neither the Russians, nor the Germans, nor the French, made such use of the plane surface, framing it and extracting from it innumerable details. The plane surface, for reasons which do not need to be reiterated, is a constituent element of contemporary art; and it seems to me that van Doesburg and van Eesteren's simple drawings of the transparent interior of one of their projected houses, 1922-23, is one of the most elucidating achievements of "de Stijl"
preted as though
I
(fig.
24).
in this "x-ray" drawing as a superand vertical planes that could transparent or translucent. It was a radi-
imposition of horizontal
cal departure from the usual structural massivity. Today there can be no doubt that this simple model was of tre-
mendous assistance in clearing the minds of contemporaries in other countries. This was made evident in two plans of
Mies van der Rohe
built.
for country houses, which were never show how he had grasped the intentions of the They Dutchmen and developed them further.
146
since her daring experiments in Gothic cathedrals, France has shown a great facility and a great eagerness to experiment with new forms of structure. have only to recall the Halle des Machines or the Eiffel Tower of 1889 and here it is interesting to note that the painter (fig. 19); Delaunay (a representative of the so-called "orphic cubism") was first inspired by Gothic churches and later by the structure of the Eiffel Tower whose poetic content was first revealed by him (fig. 20) and by the poet Guillaume Apol-
We
linaire.
France's early and extensive use of ferroconcrete as a means of architectural conception is but one more link in the same chain. Already around 1900 Tony Gamier, in his Prix de Rome project, used the new construction methods
of ferroconcrete in his Cit6 Industrielle for all kinds of
buildings. Ferret soon followed with his Paris houses, garages, theaters; and one of Le Corbusier's first sketches of the ferroconcrete skeleton construction for the Domino
its intersecting planes (fig. 25) is as reas van Doesburg's sketch. vealing These are but two examples of regional contributions to a- universal architectural conception. But one thing more:
has not been necessary for the architect to be a native of the country in which he is working in order to be able to
it
express
its
specific conditions.
We
all
Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1916) has withstood earthquakes better than Japanese structures. The reason is that the modern approach encompasses both cosmic and terrestrial considerations. It deals with eternal
facts.
This
is
no
international
phantom
that
is
appearing every-
where today. It is evident that the interior of a seventeenthcentury house is quite different from a picture by Mondrian and also quite different from contemporary Dutch interiors, and that Gothic cross-rib vaulting is quite different from a
concrete construction by Freysinnet. Even so, a current flows through them that binds them together in time and
147
from which the forms of our period have been drawn. It has been mentioned already that the aspect of the new structures may be very different from the traditional appearance of the buildings of a certain region. There is also a great apparent difference between a wide-open redwood and ferroconcrete house built in the kindly homogeneous climate of California (fig. 34) and a weekend house built for the In form these two tropical conditions of Brazil (fig. 33). houses, built by Richard S. Neutra and Oscar Niemeyer, have practically nothing in common, yet both are imbued with the same contemporary spirit. Formalistic analysis will
not help us here.
I would like to give a name to the method of approach employed by the best contemporary architects when they have to solve a specific regional problem such as a building for the tropics or for the West Coast, for India or for South America whether it is for a house, a government center or
a problem in urbanism. This name is the New Regional Approach. This new regionalism meets its greatest problem in the so-called "technically underdeveloped areas/' Innumerable
new city plans are in the making. Sometimes these are made without insight, but sometimes they indicate a positive way forward. A few are in the far north (Canada) but most are in tropical countries. This leads to an exceedingly difficult problem of the greatest urgency: the urban pattern in tropical and subtropical countries. This has been neglected for far too long. Now, suddenly, great masses of their populations, who up till now have been living in shacks made up
from old packing
cases or flattened gasoline cans, are having erected for them. Yet these dwellings must be dwellings related to the basic customs of their inhabitants, and not be facile copies of European or American rental houses,
We
Le Corbusier,
Pierre Jeanneret,
Maxwell
Fiy, and Jane Drew; important projects on the Gold Coast of Africa also carried out by the last two; and successful ex-
periments in Latin America (Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba) initiated by Jose Luis Sert and Paul Lester Wiener. Figures 41 and 42 show some row houses built in Cuba for the better-paid workers. No glass is used; instead a modern version of the lattice-like openings common around the Caribbean has been employed. Each dwelling has two bed-
rooms and a
patio.
living
to a private enclosed
In Morocco, under Michel Ecochard, and later Georges Woods, concrete walk-up apartments have been built for a very poor population. In this case the problem was the erection of several thousand dwellings very rapidly and very cheaply and employing only the simplest techniques. Each dwelling has two bedrooms that open onto a patio living room surrounded by a six-foot wall that insures privacy for the family. Great care is taken to see that every corner of the dwelling is at some time penetrated by the bacteria-destroying rays of the sun. The use of the patio as the central motif has also been employed by the
Candilis and S.
young Swiss
architect, Andr6 Studer, to create a new solution for the many-celled block of dwellings (fig. 43). The regional approach that satisfies both cosmic and ter-
restrial
conditions
that
is
symptom
a developing trend, but there is another emerging, and giving evidence of the manyis
sided face of contemporary architecture. Many of the problems of contemporary painting can also be discerned in the earliest beginnings of art. Architecture is different from painting; it is not so intimately related to man's direct projection of what flows in the subconscious mind. Yet we cannot leave unnoticed a certain symptom which has been appearing in architecture, above all in the recent work of can now Frank Lloyd Wright (especially since 1940). follow the exciting path which the human mind had to
We
travel before
man came
to standardize
(if
we may
call it
149
this) upon the rectangular house with its square or rectangular rooms. are all born to this rectangular house and are
We
it that it seems it could never have been otherwise. Yet it is important to note that an artist like Frank Lloyd Wright is plunging deeply into problems that concerned the human spirit during the period when mankind was contemplating the effects of transition from the life of a nomadic herdsman to that of a settled
agriculturalist.
At the very beginning of architecture the paramount type was not the square house, but the curvilinear house sometimes round, sometimes oval, sometimes freely curving. Today this is attempting a reappearance. Sometimes the round form is dictated by purely mechanistic reasons, such as the mast houses of Buckminster Fuller (the shape dictated by his means of construction) and other houses which are built around a central mechanical core. Such examples, which are not fully thought through, do not concern us here. Suffice to say that, from the standpoint of urban design, or close grouping in an architectural composition, the round house is undoubtedly bad. But Frank Lloyd Wright
follows exclusively the line of his artistic vision, maybe adapted to a particular site, maybe adapted to the particular man who is to inhabit the house, maybe under the compulsion of expressing that which slumbers in himself. Each of us carries in his mind the results of five thousand
years of tradition: a room is a space bounded by four rectangular planes. Whether we can feel at ease in a Cretan oval house of about 1500 B.C. with its curved outer walls and irregular three-sided or four-sided rooms (fig. 36), or in
What interests us at the moment is the symptom that, together with the desire to use the means of expression at our disposal to give form to the requirements of the soil and the climate, there comes also a desire to free ourselves from
150
Frank Lloyd Wright's circular house (fig. 37) with its remarkable similarity to this Minoan farmhouse, is a question that does not permit logical discussion.
the tyranny of the right angle and to search for a greater interior flexibility. It is not my intention to discuss the pros and cons of this kind of contemporary architecture, but it seems a duty not to ignore it. What we need more today than anything else is imagination.
Part 6
Marginalia
How
ties!
. .
mysterious
.
is
Imagination, that
all
Queen
of the Facul-
creation, and with the raw materials accumulated and disposed in accordance with rules whose orifurthest depths of the soul, it gins one cannot find save in the
It
decomposes
new world ... As it has created the world (so much can be said, I think, even in a religious sense), it is proper that 1 it should govern it.
creates a
In the following chapter of this report on the Salon of 1859, entitled "The Governance of the Imagination," Baudelaire returns to this subject, saying that, after he had written
and is ruled by imagination, he had looted through Edward Young's "Night Thoughts" written in 1741, and found the following passage, which he then quoted for (as he said) his justification:
that the world was created by
By imagination, I do not simply mean to convey the common notion implied by that much abused word, which is only fancy, but the constructive imagination, which is a much higher function, and which, in as much as man is made in the likeness of God, bears a distant relation to that sublime power by which the Creator projects, creates and upholds his universe. 2 what
Every period capable of giving concrete expression to existed unconsciously in the minds of its people through the means of its architecture has had to possess a
creative imagination.
Imagination
is
new
artistic
or intel-
By imagination an image can be created of something that has never till then existed. Thus, in A Midsummer-Night's Dream,
lectual concepts.
.
The forms
1 Charles Baudelaire, 2
Ibid., p. 236.
unknown.8
The Minor
William Shakespeare,
154
Imagination
feeling.
is
Whether
the root of eveiy creative thought or creative a building has an emotional impact or re-
mains mere dead material depends entirely on whether or not it is imbued with imagination. Imagination has been necessary in eveiy period, but perhaps never so keenly as in our own, when science and industry constantly pile
Some
up a perturbing mound of new materials. of these are seductive but dangerous to employ; others
imagination that they
call for
may
known."
The
longer as
contact between the builder and the building is no immediate as it was in the period of brick, stone,
and wood. Nowadays the immense apparatus of the building industry stands between the architect and architecture. It is
difficult for
of production, and the building industry often sets dependent standards of its own.
up
in-
There
is
today. Is it possible in
another reason for the scarcity of imagination our Western civilization to build a
bridge between a man's personal life and the life of the community? Does the man in the street want to shift from
his passive role as a mere onlooker participant in social life?
and become an
Life/'
lists
is
active
Part 5,
"The Humanization
which seem
of
Urban
certain
positive signs
to indicate that
man
in truth
not
with his position as a passive spectator. Similar are emerging all over the world. They can be observed signs in a number of spontaneous outbursts, in which the onlooker suddenly has become transformed into an active parsatisfied
the general public again cooperates in the celebration of ageold customs. However, feast days and festivals are not need crystallization points for our everyday life. enough.
We
social life
is
breaking through in
in
many
countries
and
is
made manifest
after a long projects which, once again of time, provide such points of crystallization for the lapse social life of the people. This self-healing process can be seen
new
plans and
both North and operating in many countries: in America, South; in Japan; in India; in many parts of Africa; as well as in several recent European rebuilding projects. In some countries purely commercial undertakings are providing the opportunity (for example, in some of the out-of-town shopcenters that are springing up everywhere in the United
ping
States); in others there
is the ambitious founding of new towns (such as Chandigarh in India). All give evidence of the newly realized need to provide some space where long inhabitants can take place. neglected contacts between the a new social imagination can In all these plans and projects
But we have
to be
more
specific.
In asking this, we tion in architecture, which are both rather rare today. These
are: Social
we most
156
1956
SOCIAL IMAGINATION
The creative architect and the creative planner of today both need to possess a strong social imagination because their tasks are far more complicated than they were in former periods. For instance, in the Baroque period, the architect had only to give form to the programs of a clearly
structured society. Today's architect
which
must give shape to vague tendencies only half-consciously in the minds of the general public. This means he has to take upon himself great responsibilities and that he must have an instinct for the
exist
shaping of unformed future needs. For this, above all, he has to have the rare gift of a peculiar sensitivity that I call
Social Imagination. The architect has to have this social imagination because
among
those
who
should possess
it
istrators,
usually con-
spicuous by
absence.
can understand today the truth of Louis Sullivan's an architect in one of the most marvelous books ever to come from the pen of an architect: Kindergarten Chats. Here he describes how the architect is not a surveyor, an engineer, nor a builder. He is an architect and his "true function" is "to interpret and to initiate" "Of course," he says, "I assume that other men than architects
definition of
We
may be and
are products
the broadest sense, all are such under the terms and conditions of modern civilization. But not one of these is expected to interpret the wants of the people with a view to initiate buildings. Hence the true function of the architect is to initiate such buildings as shall correspond 4 to the red needs of the people."
initiate: in fact, in
* Louis
H.
157
Most schemes
imagination has been given three-dimensional expression. in all the world, but they stand from
Contact between the individual and the community Town planning and democracy have a common basis: the establishment of an equilibrium between individual freedom and collective responsibility. This is an ever-fluctuating problem that can never be solved once and for all. It all depends on how far intentions can be implemented. In other words, the level of a civilization depends on how far a chaotic, incoherent mass of humanity can be transformed into an integrated and creative community. This requires
that the
human
approach
is
Qrigne de
la
Fonction ficonomique de
la Ville, recog-
nized that the essential nature of a city lies in its complexity. He saw that the city was not simply an economic or geographic phenomenon but, above all, a social complex.
The
city
5
comme un
must be recognized comme un fait social and not simple phtnomene g&ographique on econo-
today. A cancerous growth spreads through and destroys both inner and outer structure of the city, and the life of the individual becomes atomized. Contemporary artists do not wait to give expression to the symbols that grow within them until these can be given
5
mique. If first place is given to questions of financial remuneration and if no more of the human factor enters into the picture than can be enforced by building codes, then we inevitably arrive at the situation we see all too often
la
Fonction Economique de
la Vitte (Paris,
1907)-
158
meaning by changes in our conception of the rights of the state, by the rise of a new religious force, or by a new political order. Nor do the creative urbanists wait to form their
plans until conditions are ripe to realize them. Their starting point is the man of today, the conditions under which he is now living, and the terms he is obliged to come to
Then from their inner vision they attempt to evolve a form which reinterprets those eternal laws which human nature is bound to follow. The urbanist has the
with them.
moral responsibility of awakening in man a realization of needs and aspirations which are slumbering within him. That this is possible is evident from developments over the
last
ten years.
situation seems in
The world
tion, it
is
to-
ward a time of
utter destruction, but yet, in another direcclear that we are in an ever-developing process of
humanization. These two contradictory trends persist simultaneously. Whichever gains the upper hand will determine the destiny of our civilization.
urbanist, who inevitably stands for humanization, is required to provide an answer to the question: What form
The
should the contemporary city take in order to restore the distorted equilibrium between individual freedom and collective responsibility? His starting point must be the diversified residential unit: in other words the housing group that caters for households of differing social structure and have seen that new dwelling differing circumstances. are coming into being that express this point of view types and that imply a new social implementation of the human
We
habitat.
It is ever clearer that, despite differences in detail, there universal agreement as to the kind of operation that the present city structure must undergo to recover those values
is
that have been lost to our period: the human scale, the rights of the individual, the most primitive security of movement, within the city. How can one overcome the isolation of the individual, induced to a large extent by the chaotic
159
How can one stimulate a closer between the individual and the community? tionship
structure of the city?
rela-
The
It
is
a long-drawn-out and difficult process. Massive agglomerations of high-rise buildings offer no more of a solution than the endless sprawl of single family dwellings and row-houses. The starting point must be the diversified residential unit. This can provide differentiated dwellings for our ever more complicated social structure: dwellings that take account of the existence of single men and women and that allow for the normal changes of family life the
young married couple, the period of growing children, the and the period of old age. These needs cannot be met by an endless series of similater shrinking of the family circle,
lar cells,
whether arranged horizontally or vertically. Right from the start the social needs of the different age groups must be taken into consideration not merely the requirements of small children, but also those of young people J
and
Jilt adults.
JL
JL
The vocabulary of contemporary architecture was formulated between 1920 and 1930, and the vocabulary of the new city structure .in the following decade. This fell outside
the normal purview of the layman and of many architects. Nevertheless, a fairly clear picture of the future city can now be envisaged. What is here in process of formation is certainly of greater importance than all before in the contemporary movement: to confront a chaotic way of life with
positive action.
It is
astonishing,
in
two decades, to realize in how short a time uncertain gropings have been transformed into almost universal acceptance of the form the new city must take.
We
160
SPATIAL IMAGINATION
Dome of S. Carlo alle Quattro Fon55. Francesco Borrommi, (1599-1667): most effectively portrayed tane, Rome, 1634-1641. The hollowing out of space is in this photograph bv Kidcler Smith.
57.
Guarino
:
Guarini
(162 4-
61.
Gabo (born 1890}: Project for the Palace of the Soviets, 3931. Before the engineers, sculptors envisioned the new vaulting problems.
Naum
62.
for
Hills, California, 1947. This club house of glass and concrete, whose scallopshell form floats above the trees, was never actually built. It remains as evidence
6*.
vi'dcs
new
^
starting point
for spatial imagination.
is
pro-
House at Raleigh, N.C, 1955. The hvperbolic panb64 Eduardo F. Catalano: conconstructed of wood or as a has the same significance whether oltid
crete shell. Its balance
itself.
65. Hugh Stubbins Associates, Fred Severud, engineer: Conference Hall for International Building Exhibition, 1957 (in construction). Side view from west: two bowed arches support the hanging roof. The)' spring from the height of the platform to 65 feet and span 260 feet. These hollow protruding arches are triangular in section. The warped planes of the sagging line of the roof is formed from straight wire cables strained between the arches.
66. Naum Gabo: Spherical construction, 1937. The development of the structure of a
laboration,
67. Joern Utzon: Prize-winning design -for Opera House. Sydney, Australia, 1957. There is a conscious dichotomy in this building between its ground-connected heavy base and its shell vaults light as the velum which spanned the amphitheaters of antiquity.
6g.
Le Corbusier: Pilgrimage
the
Church
to
proclaim
the
buildings.
70. Le Corbusier: Pilgrimage Chapel at Ronchamps, 1951-1955. The interior of the church during service. The roof docs not press down upon the walls but floats above them, leaving a narrow sliver of light between.
which show
distinct
the service of the community. The first example poses the problem of a gathering place for the people of a city destroyed in the war: Saint-Die. The second tries to solve the question of how man, when living in a high-rise building, can recapture a balance between the spheres of private life and community life. This is the Uniti d'Habitation at Marseilles. The third shows the spatial and social organization of a new residential area within a metropolis: Alexander Polder, Rotterdam. The fourth is a commercial and community center within a metropolis: Boston Back Bay Center. Finally, the government center for the newly founded capital city of Chandigarh, India.
Civic center for a bombed city: Saint-Die, 1945 The civic center for the bombed city of Saint-Die in the Vosges seems to express all that we mean today by the Core of the City (fig. 32). In a masterly way it displays a new
20,000 to 30,000 inhabitants, and here theater, cinema, museum, administration buildings, hotels, shops, and restaurants are all freely disposed and yet develop a wonderful
and play of forces. The different buildings are designed in such a way that each emanates its own spatial placed atmosphere and yet bears a close relationship to the whole core. The area is perforated by volumes of widely different shape that continually fill in or hollow out the space like
contemporary sculptures. People walking around or sitting in the caf6 that forms a corner of the square would have a continuously changing
spatial experience. Theater,
museum, administration
cen-
the eye can even freely placed in space, and the distant old cathedral and, on the opposite bank glimpse
terall are
161
of the river, green-girdled factories, Us usines vertes as Le Corbusier calls them. It is a long stride from the enclosed Renaissance piazza to the freedom of this planning, which shows in terms of a city plan what in our time until now had only been expressed in the ground plans of individual dwelling houses. However, this core does not lose contact with normal life: it is from the caf6 in the southwest corner that the best view can be obtained of the life and the buildings of the
center.
Medieval
Italy
knew how
Duomo
campanile, and camposanto give an exciting display of volumes in space. The modest unrealized scheme of Saint-
relationship
was the relationship of formally closed volumes. Today we are moving toward a more dynamic conception of space, created by solids and voids. The whole area of the core of Saint-Di6 is reserved exclusively for pedestrians and this, but not only this, relates it to the Greek agora. Saint-Dte, for the first time in our of community period, would have presented a crystallization life which could have equaled the Greek meeting place. But Saint-Di6 remained a paper plan. All political parties of this small French city, including those of the extreme left, incited by the academicians, were violently against Le Corbusier's project. Instead they accepted a scheme of horrible banality,
such as is, unfortunately, common among cities that have suffered war destruction. This is but one more example of the tragic gulf that still exists between creative solutions and the powers of judgment of politicians
and
administrators.
Architecture cannot be confined to those buildings which have been erected. Architecture is a part of life and architecture is a part of art. As a part of life it is more dependent than any other form of art upon the will of the public, upon their desire to see or not to see a scheme come into being.
162
In architecture the standard of values of the client is as important as the standards of the builder. If, in the time of the Parthenon, the Pantheon, Chartres, or St. Peter's, the taste of those who had power to order the
as it
erection of public buildings had been as weak and debased is today, none of them would ever have been built.
They
to the very last against violent attacks. In architecture the cultural level of the client is as important as that of the
designer.
boldness of this experiment lies in bringing together for the needs of the individual and of the all felt doubtful whether such an expericommunity. ment could succeed in the southern city of Marseilles, whose
The
accommodation
We
inhabitants are famous for their independence and indifor viduality. But it did succeed. And this is a good augury the hope that now, everywhere in the world, there is a
latent desire to break
isolation
and loneliness
of the dwelling cell in a great metropolis. The Unit6 d'Habitation, and here lies the heart of its boldness in our contemporary scene, does not merely pile up dwelling units on top of one another (fig. 44). In the Unit6 d'Habitation the housing problem loses much of its
special
not
meaning today. The boldness of this experiment does some 1600 people under one roof just consist in housing
or even in providing twenty-three different types for its 337 apartments, varying from one room up to dwellings for
"families with eight children." Numerically there are far in America, such as the so-called larger apartment houses
London Terrace
are stacked one
The
close linkage of social opportunities with the daily life of its inhabitants. The most interesting experiment in this
residential unit was to take the shopping center from the ground and from the street and to place it on the central floor of
the building itself. From outside, this central shopping street, la rue marchande, can be immediately identified by its two-story louvers. These, together with the vertical rows of square staircase windows in the middle of the block, vitalize and give scale to the whole front. The
meat and fish, laundry and cleaning services, hairdresser and beauty shop, newspaper stand, post office, cafeteria, and hotel rooms for the guests of the inhabitants. Unfortunately, the French government, owner of the building, demands that the shopkeepers purchase the stores outright, instead of renting them as is the usual custom. This
has greatly hindered the bringing of this internal shopping street to active life, and one can understand that the shopkeepers hesitate to take the risk. On the seventeenth floor is placed the nursery for one
hundred and
pool
(fig.
A ramp leads directly to the room raised on pilotis, its shallow 47), and some charming installations for the
fifty children.
its rest
children, who are encouraged to decorate the walls with their own murals (fig. 45). The other part of the roof terrace 24 x 165 meters is designed for social activities of
the adults. There is an area for gymnastics, partly open and partly covered, and, at the north end of the building, a large slab which acts as a protection against the strong north
wind, the mistral, and also as a background for open-air theatrical performances. The variously formed volumes and walls and the movement of the levels on this terrace (fig. 46) play together marvelously in the sunshine, and yet it is perhaps under the light of the full moon that they reveal their secrets. This at least was our experience on the night of July 26, 1953,
when
celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary on this About four hundred people were able to move about freely and uncrowded on the various levels. The architecture came to its full strength when animated by this
CIAM
roof terrace.
vibrant throng. It was on this evening that Walter Gropius, always generous in recognizing talent in others, said: "Any
architect
who
had
better
lay
down
his pencil."
In this building
number in a huge buildnormal fate of the great city dwelleror whether ingthe he will spend part of his free time together with others. It has now been shown that if the inhabitant is given the poswhether he prefers
to remain a lost
sibility of choice, as is are not left unused.
In the hands of Robert Maillart, the Swiss bridge-builder, almost an its rigidity and became where every particle throbbed with life. organic skeleton, In the hands of Le Corbusier the amorphous material of crude concrete, bton brut, assumes the features of natural rock. He does not smooth away the marks and hazards of the form work and the defects of bad craftsmanship which, as Le Corbusier stated in his opening address, "shout at one from all parts of the structure!" The use of the natural imboards to vitalize a concrete surface is far prints of wooden from new, yet it has never been used so consistently to give ferroconcrete the properties of "a natural material of the same rank as stone, wood, or terra cotta." Le Corbusier continues: "It seems to
be
165
its
natural state."
The rough
concrete surface
is
employed wherever
it
can
strengthen plastic intentions, as in the herringbone pattern on the huge supporting pilotis which was left behind by the narrow boards that had been used for their wooden
form work. On the roof the rough surfaces of the ventilator shafts and elevator tower, upon which every change of the
strong Mediterranean light plays with a peculiar intensity, help to transform these utilitarian objects into exciting
plastic elements. Strong, pure colors are used in this building, but Le Corbusier, the painter, has refrained from using any colors di-
rectly upon the fagade. He paints the side walls of the balconies red, green, yellow, but not the front. In this way they are made to gleam like vivid colors through gauze. Bright colors are also used in the artificially lit rues interieures and, on each floor, one color predominates, so that the different floors are now called the green, red, blue, or yellow "streets." One steps from the elevator or the naturally lit staircase into one of these "streets," where the colors glow from the light source over each front door.
the high-rise apartment house developing a type form? point, as the problem of the high-rise dwelling type will remain acute as long as our civilization contains dense concentrations of population. One thing that must be avoided is the undifferentiated
Is
stacking of dwelling units, like sardine boxes, one above the other. This can be permitted in two- or three-story walk-up apartments, but not in high-rise buildings. Since 1922, when Le Corbusier presented the plans for his "villa apartments," immeubles villas, in the fall Salon, he continued to think over the possibilities of the two-story villa which was realized in the Unit< d'Habitation. He stated that each dwelling is "in a house, each
reality
two-story
villa
6
it
Le
166
is from the ground. Each has a loggia, twenty feet high, which makes the house like a gigantic sponge that soaks up the light: the house breathes." 7 As a dwelling type, the Unite d'Habitation embodies the
idea of the villa apartments that Le Corbusier first conceived in 1922, and of which he showed a single type specimen on the outskirts of the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris, 1925, in the Pavilion de FEsprit Nouveau. The basic conception, then as now, consisted in the conviction that, even in a high-rise building, the individual dwelling should have ample free space in the open air, even at the expense of the size of the rooms. At the
complete privacy within their apartment. This was one of the reasons why, from the first, Le Corbusier designed apartments on two floors, for this secured both enhanced
and the possibility of greater spaciousness. That the inhabitants of a well-planned high-rise building can have more freedom, light, and contact with nature than in the finest street of four- or five-story buildings was demonstrated in vain by Walter Gropius in the second half of
privacy
the twenties. None of his slab apartment blocks, interspersed with stretches of sunlit green, came into being on German soil. The first realization of this building type was
in
Rotterdam in 1933- 8
the concepts that were first given had long been discussed, but through the rise of the Swedish point houses, which appealed greatly to the laymen and to romantics among the architects, they were temporarily pushed aside. These
Among leading
spirits,
point houses, as they have become called from their cramped ground plan, remind one on the one hand of the towers of San Gimignano, and on the other hand of the horrors of
7
Le
Corbusier, Vers ime Architecture (znd ed., Paris, 1924), pp. 206-
212.
s
Wdter
See S. Giedion, "The Development of the Slab Apartment Block/* Grofrius, Work and Teamwork (New York, 1954), p. 79.
167
In city planning, in regard to our present-day unusable. Moreover space conception, they are generally do not permit of an expanded layout. they How does the high-rise building stand in relation to the attitudes toward the landscape? There are two different of a building to nature even to the cosmos. relationship One consists in the greatest possible merging with nature: Indian rock temples and the simple log hut and, in our time, some of the dwelling houses of Frank Lloyd Wright's middle period, have been deliberately fitted into folds of
Wall
Street.
the earth. The other attitude is concerned with the conscious accentuation of the contrast of an abstract man-made structure with its natural surroundings: the Pyramids, the Parthenon, and, among other examples of our own period, the
high-rise building. Both attitudes have their justification. It all depends on how they are handled. Adjacent colors of the same tone
range are just as delightful as the contrast of complementary colors. The forms of the Pyramids or of the Parthenon are
inferior to their opposing landscapes of surrounding desert and rocky eminence, despite their dominating position. But
the contrast of their man-made form with the grandeur of undisturbed nature sets up a tension that is highly impressive.
The same is true of the high-rise building as a human habitation when it is correctly sited in the landscape.
Just as
his paintings, so Le Corbusier has known how to capture it within an architectural frame. Each two-story apartment
To
arena of the limestone mountains which can be found everywhere in Provence. To the west lie the blue waters of the Mediterranean: while directly below, the eye can rest on
treetops interspersed with red-tiled Mediterranean roofs. The Unite d'Habitation has shown that the human habitation (a
168
its
largeness or its smallness. To our eyes, the wicked devastation that is caused by building regulation which, through ordinances and frontage limitations, compel the de-
zoning
struction of the countryside, is infinitely worse as a human habitation than high-rise buildings which fully express the needs for social and physical extensions of the individual
le logis prolong as the French call it. second "complete habitat," the Maison Familide de Reze, was erected at Nantes between 1953 and 1955, on a more modest scale. This building, 108 X 17 meters, con-
dwelling
tains
294 dwellings of ten different types for 1400 people. There is no doubt that the Unite d'Habitation at Marseilles will have an enormous influence in shaping the mind
coming generation. It will help to liberate also the mind of the architect and planner from the conception of units and expand it to housing as a simple addition of single
of the
the wider frame of the human habitat. Last but not least, it shows how, in the hands of a genius, Social Imagination can
find a plastic expression.
Polder, Rotterdam, 1953 Even the metropolis, the great trading or administrative center, will no longer retain the compact structure of the present-day city. Individual residential areas, with more or less predetermined numbers of inhabitants, will become another by traffic lanes and bands of separated from one
greenery.
is
B.
planned 53) This of Rotterdam for 30,000 inhabitants. On on the outskirts three sides the area, which belongs to the city of RotterThe archidam, is hemmed in by rental apartment houses. to give the new settlement a different form: tects sought barrack-like apartment houses were rejected and an effort
(figs. 52,
is
169
was made to return to small differentiated housing units. Toward the center, three high-rise slabs for 1500 people
stand amid greenery. Recreation areas, community centers, have been carefully and successindustry, and dwelling areas
fully integrated.
Their intentions
J.
may be illustrated by an
city of
abbreviation of
B. Bakema's notes:
Rotterdam
is
situated
on an
same
level as
the national highway. Each residential unit contains individual houses, row houses, three- and four-story apartment houses. There are also a few ten-story high-rise apartments. Eight of these residential units
are foreseen, each for 3500 people. These groups are called horizontal dwelling units. In addition there are three unites ( habitation each for 1500 people. Each of these blocks is placed in greenery and contains a
full
complement
of social needs.
These are
ing units.
The open
link
between the
spaces are so arranged that they form a connecting industrial area glass hothouses growing
vegetables and flowers that are within the area and the public park, individual gardens, and the sports area. There is also a
used for nautical sports. is based upon the rectangular structure of the Dutch landscape, with its small canals or ditches that drain the raised areas or polders.
is
The
characteristics. J. B.
plan thus takes into account, very happily, regional Bakema draws some conclusions:
are approaching a period in which the integration of the four functions of the city work, housing, traffic, recreationbecomes ever more important.
We
but in development both become integrated into the structure of the landscape and the community.
vertical unit never excludes the horizontal unit,
The
their
170
the result of several the differentiated handling of horizontal and vertical elements so that simultaneously uniformity has been avoided and a closer and better integration of the different functions has been achieved.
years of research
is
for a metropolis:
in the history of large enterprises that an undertaking of some seventy-five million dollars should be designed by a group of architects who were practically all university professors. Twenty years earlier it would have been unthinkable for a leading real-estate developer to have consulted a university professor in connection with an impor-
new
tant building project. This reflects a far-reaching change of the businessman's attitude toward the teacher of architecture, and it cannot be denied that this change is largely due
Mies van even clearer example Gropius. of this change of attitude appears in the acknowledgment by the Architectural Forum, in September 1943, that the earliest designs from the new Boston Center were made by students of the Harvard School of Architecture. The plan for the new Boston Center (fig. 54) made use of the freight yards of the old Boston and Albany Railroad
to the creative achievements of such architects as
der
An
which have become unbearably costly to operate owing to the increasing tax rates on the property. So it became possible for an enterprising firm of real-estate developers to
undertake the project. The strength of the spatial planning of the first coordinated group of skyscrapers the Rockefeller Center (fig. cannot be forgotten. The Boston 27), twenty years earlier is however, by comparison, a more elaborate comproject
plex and
is
more
urbanistically varied.
area was consciously created for the sole use of the pedestrian, a protected zone within which he can wan-
A large
171
der free from danger. At the entrance to the Forum at Pompeii stand stone bollards, blocking the entry of wheeled vehicles. In the Boston Center, three-story car-parking garages were proposed beneath the ground in which 5000 autos could be stored like garments in a closet. At last the pedestrian regains the right he had lost since antiquity, to move freely within a center of collective life. This is clearly connected with a third principle of urban planning: the reduction in importance of the street frontage and the
movement
the
traffic-free
of the shops to their rightful positions: within pedestrian area. Shopping calls for a certain
degree of concentration and absence of extraneous disturbance, and here the city dweller of the West was restored something that has always continued to be enjoyed in the bazaars of Eastern cities, such as the sooks of Cairo or
Bagdad.
significance of this scheme lies in its relation to the changing structure of the city: of the great metropolis which
The
here with us and cannot be simply dreamed away. It is this practical aspect that gave rise to this Boston project with its comprehensive building program, occupying a tongue of land covering some thirty acres. 9 The scheme included several office buildings, one of which, a forty-story slab, stood transversely across the project, dominating the scene. There was also a hotel, the low buildings of a motel,
is
an exhibition
pedestrian
hall for
hall,
way
7500 people.
all sides this new center was hemmed in by the dense structure of the great city, gripped as in an iron vice. It stood as an isolated phenomenon closed in upon itself. Its volumes lacked breathing space. Even so, from a socio-
From
on this project, including the difficulties which prevented its realization, are contained in the illustrated article "A Cavity in Boston," Architectural Forum (November 1953), pp. 103-115.
172
away from the commonplace business approach, toward the satisfaction of the human needs of twentieth-century man.
Civic center of a capital city: Chandigarh, Punjab, India, since 1951 The founding of new towns is a sign of vitality and of an enterprising courage. New towns are often related to
higher living standards, or to the promise of them. This was the case during the Gothic period, when new towns suddenly sprang up in Central and Western Europe. The same phenomenon occurred during the last century in the
United
States, foreshadowing its industrial hegemony. of the twentieth century we are wit-
nessing the decentralization of Western culture. New energyradiates from its former fringes: Finland, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Canada, the African Gold Coast, to name only some areas of the centers of a new vitality. The Middle
East is now also going ahead with an astonishing speed. Countries which have long been slumbering in their own lethargy or under oppression begin to awake and to become active participants in an evolution which is encompassing the entire world. In this process spirits of East and West
are meeting together. This meeting of East
explain,
why India-
through the understanding of its leader Pandit Nehrucould choose a Western architect for the new capital city of the East Punjab, Chandigarh. Yet there is also another reason. This is an inherent trend in contemporary architecture toward satisfying cosmic and terrestrial conditions and the habits which have developed naturally out of them.
This explains
why contemporary
This aspect of architecture has long been a feature of in the works literature, never more sublimely expressed than
of James Joyce, who kept his roots firmly embedded in Ireland though he grappled with the cosmos and showed humanity unsevered by division into past, present, and future. When the Punjab was divided in 1947 between Pakistan and India, the ancient capital of Lahore was attached to Pakistan. A new capital became necessary for the East Punjab with its twelve and one-half million inhabitants. On a sloping plateau at the foot of the Himalayas a superb site was discovered in 1950 through airplane reconnaissance by E. L. Varma, an eminent Indian government engineer. The new capital city was called Chandigarh after a village on the site. When complete, it will house half a million people. The first section, now largely constructed, is for a population of 150,000. Neighborhood planning, housing,
for the
first
direction of Pierre Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry, and Jane Drew in cooperation with an entirely Indian staff of architects
itself
was entrusted to Le
Corbusier, with the assistance of Pierre Jeanneret, and Le Corbusier has also been responsible for the master plan of the whole city. A town planner, an architect, an artist, a sculptor, and a man with the grasp of a poet are surveying a wide empty space at the foot of the Himalayas. These five are united in one person. This is the spot where the capital of Chandi-
garh
is
to stand. There
is
truly creative
mind than
to turn a
on this myth-soaked soil. To achieve this, it may be worth while to have accepted a lifetime of humiliations. can follow line by line in Le Corbusier's sketch book how the vision of the new Capitol crystallized, how it became a mighty monument, in which, for the first time, Eastem and Western thought merged without a break. Western calculation, shell concrete vaulting, and a butterfly roof
We
of huge size, normally associated with locomotive sheds and station platforms, here change under our very eyes
into
some dream-building
174
of the East.
nor,
probably designed in April 1952, with its roof terraces, the upper one concave, in shape almost like a sickle moon. The
10
The program for the Capitol (fig. 50) consists of a House of Parliament, a building for the Ministries, the Palace of the Governor, and the High Court of Justice. The most fantastic of these will be the Palace of the Gover-
d.
Le
High Courts of
Pilgrimage Chapel of Ronchamps, 1951-1955, designed at the same time, also has a concave roof as its most outstand-
A word is necessary regarding the High Court of Justice, which was opened in the spring of 1955. This building (figs. 48, 51 ) contains seven courts of law surmounted by an enormous butterfly roof, which provides shelter from the tropical sun and from the monsoon rains. The huge sloping eaves stretch far out from the building. Parabolic shell vaults stiffen the structure and span the wide-open entrance hall,
10
ing feature.
Le
(Zurich,
1957), pp.
102-107.
full height of the building. In this strange Palace of Justice modern techniques comply with cosmic conditions, with the country, and with the habits of
its
people. astonish the European eye are the great distances between the buildings. Only time will show whether these are not too grandiose, as has happened in India with govern-
What
buildings erected under British rule. But there will surfaces between them. The sculptor in Le Corbusier has taken the opportunity to mold the enormous
ment
be no dead
surface
by varying levels, large pools, green lawns, single and artificial hills made of surplus material; and also by symbolic representations of the harmonic spiral, such as the daily path of the sun. A dominant symbol, the Open Hand (fig. 49), will be seen from everywhere and will "turn on ball bearings like a weathercock." " The impress of the human hand placed upon the rock was the first artistic utterance of man. This symbol is still alive in India, and at the marriage feast friends leave the red stamp of their hands red is the color of good luck on the white
trees
the work of Le Corbusier. It was then an aggressive and menacing hand. Now under an Eastern sky it has quieted down like the hand of Buddha. E. L. Varma, who discovered the site of Chandigarh, has given the Indian response to this symbol in a letter to Le
earlier in
Corbusier:
Bharosa, which indicates deep faith born of the surrender of the will to the Ultimate Source of Knowledge, service without reward and much more. I live in that faith and feel happy in the vision of the new city which is so safe and so secure in its creation in your
in the ultimate
faith
We have
a word,
Ram
hands.
We
11
are
Le
No guns to brandish, no atomic Oeuvre complete, 1946-1952 (Zurich, Corbusier, 1953), pp. 150humble people.
176
energy to kill. Your philosophy of "Open Hand" will appeal to India in its entirety. What you are giving to India and what we are taking from your open hand, I pray, may become a source of new inspiration in our architectural and city planning. may on our side, when you come here next, be able to show you the spiritual heights to which some of the individuals have attained. Ours is a philosophy of open hand. Maybe Chandigarh becomes the center of new thought. 12
We
12
See
S.
Giedion, Space,
Time and
177
1954. 1956
SPATIAL IMAGINATION
The need for imagination implies that there exists a need for something more than the bare interpretation of functional requirements.
Nothing is so difficult to find today as an imaginative handling of space a Spatial Imagination. An imagination that can dispose volumes in space in such a way that new
relations develop
fices,
between
new
synthesis, a
sym-
Even greater hesitations arise when the building program demands that the architect create an interior space which transcends its purely technical and organizational requirements, as in great halls destined to reflect general aspiraof a Cathedral or the meetfor a world organization. ing place
and archiand has been solved, in all civilizations. Our own cannot be an exception. The area where the spatial imagination has always had the greatest freedom where it could unfold with the least interference has been the area that lies above normal utilifor a
The need
is
monumental
expression in art
tecture
existed,
tarian requirements. This is the space that floats over our heads, lying beyond the reach of our hands. It is here that the fullest freedom is granted to the imagination of the
architect.
In two words,
ever since the
notation,
we
dawn
of architecture.
But
and with
this their
domed
great
frequently raised.
There
is
178
vaults of late antiquity domes, barrel vaults and crossribbed vaults represent their first large-scale development.
Their forerunners have recently been thought to be the Maltese rock temples of the Neolithic period which stand half free and half hollowed out of the living rock. Today it is thought that these were mortuary buildings linked to 13 In Rome, and probably fertility rites of the Great Mother. earlier in the East, the question arises of how the change was effected between the vault considered as the mother's womb and the vault as the heavenly firmament. This is linked with the relation of the vault to the cosmos. The turning cupola (known only from coins ") in Nero's Golden House which depicted the movement of the stars
of is except for certain oriental legends the first example a direct comparison between the vault and the cosmos. Here the role of the emperor was identified with that of the crea-
is
ternal
womb
(fig.
56).
that time on, the conception of space was almost Since late antiquity, always identified with interior space. interior space, has been hollowed-out space, circumscribed of architecture. The greatest skill has the
From
major problem been devoted to its modeling. And the ceiling has been the area in which the imagination has had the fullest freedom
to give symbolic strength to this hollowing out of space. Since the time of the great Roman vaults, each period has solved the vaulting problem according to its own emotional needs. Basic forms of enclosing space were developed
der G. von Kaschnitz-Weinberg, Die mittelmeerischen Grundlagen antikenKunst (Frankfurt, 1944). Cosmic tongsftzp 14 H. P. I/Orange, Studies on the Iconography of
the Ancient
1953).
179
known techniques of spansuch as the barrel vault and the cupola. Already in ning, late Roman times more complicated construction afforded possibilities of through lighting and perforation. The development of the cupola received particular attention during the Byzantine period, and the accent was laid on strengthening the spatial effect through the introduction of mosaics, rather than on elaborating the interior form of the dome. Perforation of the walls, together with their greater spatial freedom, gave the impression that the heavenly vault was suspended from above rather than supported from below: it had become a canopy.
within the limitations of then
All was
now
tion to light rib vaulting, though, of course, this intervening period had occupied several hundred years.
the
domes
own
the vaulting problem. Both intend to eliminate heaviness and to reduce the amount of material as much as possible. The Arabs, maybe because of a mobile heritage, favored lightness and slim dimensions. In the vaulting of their small domes they invented reinforcing ribs, those binding arches which they made to spring so precisely from one support to another. The Mihrab, the chapel, orientated toward Mecca in the mosque of C6rdoba (fig. 59), shows how the Arabs developed a forerunner of the space frame construction long before the ridge ribs of the Gothic cathedrals. Another ancestor of the means of spatial construction of our period is the mathematician and monk, Guarino Guarini. The lantern of his cupola of San Lorenzo, Turin,
1668-1687,
of the
is
dome, whose
placed upon the free-standing binding arches intersections form a fantastic eight-
pointed star (figs. 57, 58). The result is a veritable light filter, for the light penetrates through the curving triangles formed by the intersecting arches so that, when the observer looks upward, the highest, light-flooded area seems to hover in space, and this without any induced
artificially
per-
180
spective illusions.
principle of the mosque in Corto the widely traveled monk has been transposed into daring dimensions. Guarini's intention was to satisfy by architectonic means the Baroque feeling for
Here the
dobawell-known
infinity. Baroque period was strongly attracted to constructions defying the force of gravity and awakening the impression of spatial infinity. Mostly this
mystery and
The
are used to defy gravity. No later architect dared to follow the precedent Guarini set in this church. The dome of San Lorenzo presents the case of an architectural vision
its age to the utmost the reverse. The means of just construction present the architects with the subtlest possibilities of development. They need but to be grasped. The next step leads from Guarinfs cupola of San Lorenzo to our own time. Today light-filters and the perforation of space, which were only achieved in the seventeenth-century
means
limit.
is
church with the utmost difficulty, have become relatively 15 consimple practical problems. Today Pier Luigi Nervi structs his perforated space frames from the simplest prefabricated elements. Maybe his Festival Hall in Chianciano, Italy, cannot be compared with the finesse of Guarini's perforated space, yet the principle of composing a dome of
simple prefabricated elements which can be assembled new and fantastic way, has been achieved by this twentieth-century engineer (fig. 60). Industrialization and the vaulting problem of this period are inextricably interwoven. Curtain walls and eggshell skinvaults have taken the place of the massive structures of former periods. Even in the field of engineerihg, there is a tendency for ever lighter structures. There is a remarkable difference between the nineteenth- and the twentieth-century approaches to the problem of wide spans. Nineteenthcentury engineering found its apex in Cottancin's Hall of Machines at the International Exhibition, Paris, 1889,
in a
15 Pier Luigi Nervi, Construire correttamente (Milan,
1954).
which, by means of its three-hinged arches, achieved for the first time a free span of 115 meters. we are on the way to replace heavy trusses with Today, small prefabricated members, each of them forming a part of a space-truss and being themselves spatial structural elements. It would have been impossible for the nineteenth century to build the enormous cantilevered hangers which Konrad Wachsmann has designed.
sinet's
reinforced slabs can almost be bent like cardboard; in Maillart's later parabolic vault for the Cement Hall in the
is
only two
is
the
German Werkbund,
lightest built up
Bruno Taut developed a fantastic dome with the kind of concrete construction. "The dome was on the principle of a wickerwork construction without the use of supports, and was the forerunner of postwar laminated wood and concrete constructions." 16 After this, principles that formerly could only be employed for the lightest of materials could be set in a space frame that at the same time absorbed both stress and strain: hanging membranes in the form of a canopy; rope nets like a hammock; stretched skins like a drum; the principle of the soap bubble whose molecular tension holds it in shape. 17 Torrochs in Spain, Dischinger and Finsterwalder in GerPavilion,
16
17
An
182
(Stuttgart,
is
1929), p. 28.
insight into
present possibilities
given
by
Frei-Otto,
Das
hangende Dock
(Berlin, 1954).
side by side developed the theoretic bases for the system. The question at once arises: what is going to happen from the artistic point of view? Here we return to the isolation of the artist, which has still not been overcome; for we find that the greatest of the structural engineers are working with mediocre architects, and the greatest architects with
talents in
many have
mediocre structural engineers. The blending of the finest both fields has as yet not been achieved, and the
e. Eduardo F. Catalano: Rippling space frame construction. One of the most hopeful signs of our time is the way in which mathematical and
ists,
structural calculations are being given emotional expression. The SurrealErnst, recognized the emotional power of models of especially
Max
complicated mathematical formulas and now the hyperbolic paraboloid shells of the engineer have become a starting point for this spatial imagination.
difficulties lie in
from most unexpected places. One very early push came from the Russian sculptor, Naum Gab6. His competition scheme for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, 1931 (fig. 61), followed the outlook developed by the Russian "Constructivists" who led sculpture into the architectural domain as "it is the spiritual source from which the future architecture will be fed/' 18 Here Naum Gab6, an artist, a sculptor, was the first, as far as we can see, to conceive two halls an auditorium for 15,000 and a theater for 8,000 like two enormous shells
18
the same area as those that exist between the architect, the painter, and the sculptor. If one examines the present-day situation more closely, one finds that even without direct collaboration between engineer and architect, it seems that similar lines of direction are being followed the evidence sometimes coming
"The Concepts
of Russian Art/'
18*
Light dome for the Carl Cherry Foundation, CarGround plan and section. The structure is designed for experimental dance performances with music and changing lights.
mel, California.
whose
and floor mirror each other and are drawn movement. Perhaps it could not have been realized in 1930, but now it could, and Catalano's stadium, 1952, taken up from the ground and floating in space, having the sky as its counterpart, could be realized imceiling
into continuous
mediately. Catalano the architect, Le Ricolais, the excellent mathematician-engineer, and other collaborators, have
184
proposed for this project three different kinds of space frames of prefabricated parts. Since the project of the Russian Naum Gabo, Frank Lloyd Wright has produced a scheme for a club-house for
Huntington Hartford, Hollywood Hills, California (fig. 62), based on a similar spatial conception. Is this "international style"? Certainly not. Two artists have been touched independently by the current of ideas inherent in our period. In schemes prepared by the youngest generation, such as the light dome for a California foundation by Paffard Keatinge Clay, the same tendency toward combining an organic and geometrical, an emotional and a rational apis again reflected. vaulting problem is certainly not the main factor in creating a community life. But the molded sphere above
proach
The
the head has always given a decisive stimulus to the places where the community has gathered for religious or political purposes, for a music festival or for theatrical performances. It is not that the creation of an all-embracing sphere immediately changes a chaotic crowd into an integrated commucandles are nity, but it is its foremost symbol. The Gothic burned out; but the cathedrals still remain as silent long
witnesses.
1957
world
rise buildings that indicate the same direction. Almost without exception these have incorporated the
185
shell vault into their architecture. Its lightness and, above of form, as well as its selfall, its tremendous
flexibility
made
it
few: Eero Saarinen's domed Kresge Auditorium for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for St. Louis, Missouri, 1955; 1954; Yamasaki's airport assembly hall for the University of Raglan Squire's large Rangoon, Burma, with its shell of teakwood; Hugh Stubbins' Conference Hall for the Berlin International Building Exhibition of 1957; Joem Utzon's prize-winning design for the National Opera House, Sydney, 1957; and Le Corbu-
imagination.
To select but a
sier's
Pilgrimage Chapel at Ronchamps, Vosges, 1955. These show, in their different ways, what differentiates the vaulting problem of our period from those of early times. What is at the root of their form of expression?
last three
It
Eiffel, in
Tower
(1889),
expression of the interpenetration of inner and outer space. Anyone who has ever climbed the spiral staircase of this
In a certain sense the present-day development of archibeen attained by the use of glass walls to achieve interpenetration of inner and outer space (the Bauhaus at
tecture has
Dessau by Walter Gropius, 1926). This desire for transparency and interpenetration which continues unabated, can now be achieved in a more sublime manner: through a new conception of the vaulting problem. From the Roman Pantheon to the Baroque Church of the Fourteen Saints, known as the Vierzehnheiligen, the vaulted ceiling has been placed like a bell over the interior space. It has assumed a wide range of forms often emphasized by marvelously contrived directional lighting. It has still much to teach us, for we are still only at the beginning of our development. But all these vaults from the first development of the
186
round house in northern Mesopotamia around 5000 B.C. have one thing in common: the enclosing of an interior
space, shaped
by
light.
In the buildings now to be consideredthe Assembly Hall for the Berlin Exhibition, the National Opera House, Sydney,
at
Ronchamps
TRANSVERSE
SECTION
Hugh Stubbins Associates, Fred Severud, engineer: Conference Hall for International Building Exhibition, 1957. Transverse section: showing the roof dipping into the Conference Hall, with the triangular sections the arches. The walls of the hall support a compression ring.
g.
h.
Hugh
it
of
it
rises
that toward the encompassing walls, indicating by this into terminate there, but that it extends further does not
the exterior.
at
Ronchamps
the separation of the wall from the hanging ceiling. The curving vault opens outward like an opening eye. 187
And
if
sees
how
brown-grey concrete vault raises itself up from the white walls and attracts one into the interior. In the Berlin Assembly Hall for the Exhibition of 1957
this great
the heavy outward curving roof seems almost to (fig. 65), hover over the platform. The engineer, Fred Severud, has here employed all the experience he acquired in his earlier building for Matthew Nowicki, who died too young.
Through its concave planes a subtle play of strength has been achieved so that the vault is supported by its own internal equipoise. It
invisible wire cables
true that the eye sees none of the which are concealed in the concrete, perceptive observer cannot but be aware
is
is a mastery of workmanship that could never have been achieved before our period. This Assembly Hall, which the United States has erected for the Berlin Exhibition, is intended as a permanent build-
ing for cultural interchange, to be handed over, later, to the city of Berlin. It is situated in the Tiergarten by the side of the river Spree. At its center is the auditorium for
afar.
Very
wisely the glass walls of the entrance hall have been pushed well back. It is this that gives the building the buoyancy
it
To
describe the
way
and crumpled planes are related to the geometry developed by Riemann and Lobatschevsky (much as the forms of former periods were with Euclidean geometry), and how molecular tension can be transformed into architectonic
space
is
task.
19
19 Information on such matters must be acquired elsewhere, for example, in the excellent booklet issued by the North Carolina State College (Student Publications of the School of Design, vol. 5, no. i) prepared under the guidance of one of the leading pioneers in architecture, Eduardo F. Catalano.
188
rectangle half of this century it became evident that the plane surface was one of the constituent elements of contemporary architecture, and after a struggle, started
Dome versus
During the
first
First Chicago School in the late i88o's, and after aberrations, the emotional content of the high-rise building as expressed in the gigantic undisturbed surfaces
by the
many
of Mies van der Rohe's immaculate apartment buildings on the lake front at Chicago may stand as the supreme solution of the intermarriage of the plane surface and the latest
structural techniques.
It can be easily understood why a good deal of interest has been aroused by the fact that, after having concentrated for so long upon a battle for the purity of the two dimensional plane, emphasis has shifted to the problem of the curving vault. So it is not astonishing that the magazines of architecture have been concerning themselves with the
question: Is there not a contradiction between the developing space frame structure and the steel skeleton? For instance, recently the Architectural Forum asked several people to express their views on the form of Eero Saarinen's
Kresge Auditorium under the general title of "Dome versus 20 1 replied as follows in December 1955: Rectangle." I could never agree to discuss in painting:
or
Their great differences are just different threads in the incontemporary art. There is neither right nor wrong. Their external contradictions have in reality * complementary function. The organic conception (Miro) meets with the geometric horizontal-vertical conception in our con(Mondrian) which has been deeply embedded sciousness ever since the Egyptians, 5000 years ago, made the horizontal-vertical relation supreme over all others. 20 "Dome versus Forum (March 1956), pp. Rectangle/' Architectural
156-157.
For Mondrian or for Mies van der Rohe, any deviation from the horizontal or vertical spoils the artistic purity, and from their point of view they have every right to believe this.
The uncompromisingly clean cut skyscrapers of Mies van der Rohe may one day stand as a testimony that our
period contained some particle of the clarity of abstract strength that gave the Pyramids their eternal force.
is one way to conceive buildings, but it is not the one. only Eero Saarinen's shell concrete dome for the Kresge Auditorium, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is by no
This
means an isolated phenomenon. It is one of the steps toward the solution of the vaulting problem of our period. This solution for which architecture everywhere is craving has not yet been found, but we are on the way to it. Each civilization since interior space was first shaped has found a
solution to the vaulting problem that has met its particular emotional needs. The area that lies above normal utilitarian
requirements, the space that floats above our heads beyond the reach of our hands, is where the fullest freedom has been granted to the imagination of the architect. In 1953 I hinted that the vaulting problem of our period will be derived from the possibilities offered by the structural engineer
particularly in the
construction.
Since Davioud in 1878 designed a parabolic ceiling for the Paris Trocadero, architects have been to find a
trying solution to the problem of vaulted interior space in our
period.
As mentioned above, Naum Gab6 made a scheme for the Palace of the Soviets in 1931 in which the ceiling and floor were curved like a shell (fig. 61 ) In 1947, Frank Lloyd for a club house in Wright prepared designs Hollywood on the same principles as this Russian In the same
.
sculptor.
year,
a scheme for the great AssemHall of the United Nations in which floor and bly ceiling
Le Corbusier prepared
190
flowed together in one continuous curve. If executed, this would have been one of the marvels of our period. Eduardo F. Catalano made interesting experiments in North Carolina and built his own house beneath a space frame vault (fig. 64) Stubbins has constructed the American Con.
its
outstanding
feature
I
(fig.
65).
stood at
Ronchamps while
the chapel of
Le Corbusier
was dedicated. The Archbishop spoke of the forward-curving bows of the roof as containing within its form both the old and the new the arch and the airplane. are on the way. This work that brings to expression the secret boldness that dwells within our times had not to wait to find recognition.
We
Dome versus Rectangle Rectangle versus Dome? This I cannot answer with a simple yes or no. Just as I could not discuss Kandinsky versus Mondrian. Both in their own way are expressing what is inherent in our period. Kurt Schwitters, the German painter and poet, would have answered this quite simply: "Whatever an artist spits is art."
National Opera House, Sydney, 1957 It is a good omen for future development when, scarcely two years after the completion of the chapel at Ronchamps, another building again widens our vision of the vaulting problem of our period. This is the prize-winning design for the National Opera House at Sydney, Australia, won by a young Danish architect, Joern Utzon (figs. three dec67, 68). His project outshone all the others as, ades earlier, Le Corbusier's project for the Palace of the League of Nations at Geneva had done. Let us hope that Fate, in his case, will be kinder. Le Corbusier's pioneering project was intended for an international center in the very heart of Europe. There has
been a change since that time; now the most courageous Western civilizabuildings are erected on the fringes of our
191
tion.
ment which
This one brings Australia into the world-wide develop already embraces Brazil, India, and Japan. A second surprise is the country in which the projec until now, has been over originated. Danish architecture, laid by a delicate mist of classicism which has given rise t< an atmosphere of fatigue, similar to that breathed by th novels of Jens Peter Jacobsen. Joern Utzon, the architect o
the Sydney Opera House,
is
known
for his
sound and
origi
i.
Joern Utzen: Prize-winning design for Opera House, Sydney, 1957. Long:
tudinal section.
nal designs for housing developments and private houses But this sudden stroke of genius was quite unexpected. The theater with its two auditoriums stands upon a prom
Poinl ontory overlooking the harbor of Sydney: Bennelong a highly exposed position. "We have been impressed," com ments the jury, "by the beauty and the exceptional poss: fee bilities of the site in relation to the Harbour that a large and massive building, however pract strongly
. . .
We
cal,
would be
only b the fact that the jury included Professor J. Lei explained by lie Martin, designer of the Festival Concert Hall, Londor architect of Kresge Auditoriuir 1951, and Eero Saarinen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1955, both of whoi the first architects to use shell concrete vaull were
entirely unsuitable
on
among
over places of public gathering. One of the features of the new regionalism is its recovei of an inner relationship between a structure and its su
roundings.
the man-made artifact and nature: by contrasts which complement and complete one another, as day and night, male and female. Among the highest of this
is
the Acropolis
with
its
expressions principle conscious juxtaposition of the of temple and rock; or the bridges
settings.
principle is the amalgamation of the structure with nature. This, too, the Greeks accomplished superbly: the steps of their semicircular theaters bite into the hillside; they are cut out from the rock, and become one with it.
Another
The new and, certainly for many people, strange aspect of the Sydney Opera House is that it makes use of both principlescontrast and amalgamation. The principle of contrast is found in the upper part of the structure: the thin concrete shells, used with great courage and freedom, have become sails billowing with dramatic expectancy. They prepare one for what will take place within. They seek to divorce the audience from the routine of their daily lives. At one blow, the banal stage tower is
also destroyed.
The
jury
commented:
great merit of this building is the unity of its structural expression. One of the most difficult problems of opera house design is to relate the stage tower to the separate and surround-
The
ing buildings and this becomes of particular importance on this exceptional site. The solution suggested in this scheme is that the two auditoria should be roofed by a series of interlocking
shell vaults in which the high stage is only one of a series of separate shells. This creates a striking architectural composition admirably suited to Bennelong Point. The white sail-like forms
of the shell vaults relate as naturally to the Harbour as the sails of its yachts. It is difficult to think of a better silhouette for this
The dynamic form of this vaulted shape contrasts with buildings which form its background and gives a special significance to the project in the total landscape of the Harbour . The use of this form of construction seems to us to
peninsula.
.
be
tect
21
particularly appropriate.
21 Assessors' Report,
"Sydney Opera House Competition," The and Building News 211 (28 February 1957), 275.
Archi-
193
The principle of amalgamation is also found. The heavy, massive base stands in complete contrast to the upper part. This lower area forms a contrasting extension of the rock
upon which it stands. "The auditoria are arranged like Greek theatres in this rising base externally and are approached either underground from cars or externally along
by elimination,
so
a magnificent ceremonial approach. This conception solves all the complex needs of escape which form
much dead space in a multi-storeyed building." The project consciously brings into play both principles
amalgamation and contrast within one building. This is the exciting novelty of this scheme, and here is one more quotation from the jury's verdict: "We are convinced that the concept of the Opera House is capable of becoming one of the great buildings of the world." In certain places, such as the entries to the auditorium,
ing.
one might perhaps prefer a certain moderation in the vaultAnd the lower walls have not yet the great lines of the
all
its
vaulting concept. But this Opera House design contains the elements of a masterpiece and will give Australia
first
great forward-looking building. One can but hope that the authorities in whose hands Fate has placed this gift are
able so to
comprehend
realization,
it
its
prevent
its
nor change
unrecognizably.
Pilgrimage Chapel at Ronchamps, June 25, 1955 On a wooded hill above the town of Ronchamps, about thirty kilometers west of Belfort, rises the Pilgrimage Chapel of Sainte-Marie-du-Haut Grey-brown like the wings of a moth, the curved roof rests on curving chalk-white walls.
The
space outside this pilgrims' chapel is more important than the interior, which hardly has room for two hundred people. Twice a year about 10,000 pilgrims used to visit the chapel, which was destroyed in the last war. The venerated
194
statue of the Virgin Mary is now so built into the structure that it can be seen from both inside and outside the church.
The boys' choir, clad in red, (fig. 69) sings gallery set in the concave back wall. The dedication takes place in the open air, under the of
:
Dedication
from a
protection
j.
Le
the valley
Corbusier: Pilgrimage Chapel at Ronchamps. Silhouette seen from the architect's sketch.
the curving concrete roof, like under the overhanging crag of one of the prehistoric Magdalenian shrines. Le Corbusier, the architect, hands over the keys of the church to Archbishop Dubois of Besangon. From the pulpit the prelate in his violet-colored cassock addresses Le Corbusier and the sun-drenched throng:
You said once that a style took form in the century of the cathedrals that led to devotion to art, to forgetfulness of self and to joy in life. You must have felt something of this inward
elevation
of the Virgin
when you cast these walls up in space. This "skyscraper Mary" that dominates the landscape far and wide,
was for you, as you have said of the architects of the thirteenth century, an act of optimism.
195
Something more rang through this address by the Archbishop: It was one of the first recognitions from such a quarter that contemporary architecture is a symbol of the inner strivings of our period a courageous recognition of the present. He spoke of the forward-curving bow of the roof, which the walls cut at an angle like the bow of a ship,
Facade est
k.
Corbusier: Pilgrimage Chapel at Ronchamps. The eastern side of the church, designed for open-air services the architect's sketch.
Le
and of arche
et avion, arch
and
and the
it.
who
change on the part of those hold power in their hands? It is a fact that,
upon this dedication day, this little chapel immediately became world famous. It appeared at once in the newspapers and magazines on both sides of the ocean. It became the symbol of a concept more quickly than any other buildof our times, ing unaccompanied by the usual attacks and
denunciations.
Does
it
deserve this?
is
a building in which all the parts are plastically interdependent. What happens here is what Naum Gab6 and others have proclaimed: the principles of modern
Ronchamps
196
have passed over into architecture and have coalesced with it. The white walls, especially in their most prominent position where the pilgrim, coming up from the vale, first catches sight of the building, raise the roof, whose conart
up
cavebearing surface is made of a double shell of reinforced concrete. This concrete is left rough. The roof swings like a canopy into the half-darkened interior of the
chaj
Coup*
1.
longltu'dlnale
Le
as the roof. The bellthe chapel in a completely unjuts upward alongside precedented manner, and, like a conch shell, sends the sound of the bells out over the plain. (Le Corbusier has talked of acoustic architecture.) There are two low, simi-
The
modeled
tower
larly formed structures which through their slits give indirect light to the two side chapels that appear as tonguelike projections of the walls.
The nave proper of the chapel is in twilight. Light sources are variously distributed. The south wall lets light in through small scattered square holes (fig. 70). On their glass, the
architect has written in his own handwriting passages from the service of the Mass, or has painted symbols. Le Corbusier accepted this commission because he was "intrigued by the prospect of going deeply into problems
197
m.
of organization of space, especially of inner and outer space or the high side chapels.
Chapel at Ronchamfis. Axionometric drawing drawing gives an excellent insight into the relationship
where no
utilitarian purposes
were to be served."
No
self-
important persons interfered; free scope was generously him. given to It is an event that cannot be brushed aside: that such a work, which brings to expression the secret boldness that
dwells within our times, has not had to wait to achieve are many fine churches in existence recognition. There
filled
is
with a worthy contemporary spirit. But Ronchamps the one that has particularly aroused enthusiasm. It has raised the problem of the vaulted interior space to a new level in which, despite meditative seclusion, the contact with the exterior
may still be
felt.
The
by
transfer of the chapel to the public was followed a banquet. corrugated sheet-iron hall was set up and
more than five hundred were served. The Archbishop, with Le Corbusier at his side, sat among the crowd on one of
the crude benches arranged in rows. Opposite was the fine
profile
some military men, a priest or two. Then the workers who had taken part in the construchad fought here, and gention, the Resistance fighters who darmes. At our table sat the Ronchamps building contractor. "Well, how do the people feel about this building?" we asked him. "At first they were go per cent against it, now
of Claudius-Petit,
they are go per cent in favor." It is not the people who are holding things up. It is those who think they can obtain power by catering to the lowest it is instincts. As a Swiss architect once said, "Generally us but those who are unnot the people who are against willing to risk anything." Have we reached a moment of change? innate strength Is the ruling taste, that has befuddled the for a century and a half, disappearing of the general public and at last, and, with it, the tragic conflict between feeling on will those few great spirits who have thinking? From now the gift of spatial imagination be able to concentrate upon imitations? real achievements rather than upon clever
It
almost seems
so.
199
FINALE
FINALE
Slowly, but uninterruptedly, the conviction becomes accepted that housing projects composed solely of dwelling
units are
no longer
is
sufficient.
needed are extensions to the dwellingsfe logis prolonge where contacts between neighbors can occur as a matter of course. Already in remote areas such as a new built Arabian housing project in Moroccoin schemes intended for the poorest sections of the community, small community centers have been incorporated from the very start of the project These additional elements, essential for community life, must be made a necessary condition everywhere. Their promotion is nothing new. Such places have existed ever since man first began
to establish a differentiated society. They began to develop as soon as a freer society took the place of the constitutionally
What
prehistory.
They
are
ber of a polis, of a
dustrialized countries, our way of life has similar to that of primitive nomads.
become more
thing that is demanded today is an almost completely neutral contact between person and person no intimate relationship. No matter how much man may
his private life
The
change his residence, he needs some wider relationships in apart from the family circle. The life of a
number of people in the same place only acquires meaning when some care is taken for their spiritual stimulation outfamily household. These neutral relationships outside the dwelling have become as necessary today as the sanitary fixtures within it, which were first introduced only
side the
two generations
ago. An opportunity is needed for the exof casual remarks and observations every day, not pression only on the occasion of some extraordinary event.
202
In order to realize this relationship, a demand has arisen to reestablish the eternal claim of the human scale in all
urban planning.
Closely linked with the demand for the human scale is another demand that is now widely accepted at least in theory: this is the right of the pedestrian, which under the influence of unbridled traffic has become neglected.
Added
to this
is
human
ship with nature must also be reestablished. Due to the destruction of the human scale, the working people of all large cities are now often obliged to spend two or more
hours a day in transportationpenned barbarously together if they wish to avoid living in the midst of an asphalt jungle. Everywhere, though maybe less grotesque, a similar
situation exists.
The
four
main functions
ing, recreation, and communication, as they were stated in 1933^ have lost their balance and their interby
CIAM
relationship. This too must be reestablished. The demand for the reestablishment of the relation be-
Great states and highly developed industries require within their ever greater agglomerations, administration and
government centers, certain places where face to face discussions can take place without the use of technical intermediaries. Monster urban agglomerations of eight millions and more with no clear internal structure must, at least for the working population, result in an inhuman way of life. These conditions will not vanish in a day, but there are already hopeful indications, and these will become more evident as the revolt against the inhuman habitat spreads
through the general public.
On
1
phenomenon can be
large cities
ob-
The
devour dispro-
CIAM
203
of people in relation to the total portionately large numbers of the country, and this seriously affects the population settlement. This is a miserable congeneral pattern of land tinuation of one of the evils of the nineteenth century. When the disproportionate enlargement of the big city first set in, there were none of the highly developed transport systems that we now possess.
If a reestablishment of the
human
scale
is
desired, if a
spontaneous relationship between inhabitants is again to come about, the dense masses of urban development must be smashed. Instead of one large solid body of masonry with an inextricable chaos of functions, there must be a number of smaller units whose size is foreseen and planned
in relation to the
human
scale.
Such units must be redivided into smaller neighborhoods dimensioned to make possible easy contacts between the inhabitants. As an integral part of this scale pattern a greater differentiation is demanded of housing types, to meet the needs of the different age groups: single men and women, and families which are small, are growing, and have again
shrunk to smaller
size.
The many-sided
possibilities of
and
new
shaping the environment. To meet these, the architect and planner must draw upon the means of expression that have been developed by contemporary art. These alone can show the possibilities by which these varied requirements can be visually expressed. It may be here repeated that the architect-planner who has not passed through the needle's eye of modern art betrays himself immediately. He can be seen to be without the necessary tools
of his trade.
into the
way
in
which units of
this
develop can be found in a country which is able to look back upon the longest development of urbanism and the closest settlement of cities: Holland. J. M. Bakema and OPBOXTW, in iheir project for the
204
Prince Alexander Polder, 1953, ^ ave shown the way in which a unit limited to 30,000 people can be planned and built in the neighborhood of Rotterdam
(fig.
52).
This urban element can be linked to other similar units and all connected to a mutual administrative and cultural
center.
How much
Recently,
three-year-old
Henry van de Velde. This ninetystood on the terrace of his charming wooden house and looked out over the landscape. 2 For seven years he has been writing his memoirs by the side of the Aegeri Lake in the Swiss mountain region of the Zug canton. These will give us an insight into the most important
I visited
man
cultural developments in Germany since 1914. He stood there in unimpaired elegance, wearing a stone grey suit he had himself designed, which made one conscious of the ri-
in
In 1897
his interior
designs at the
Dresden Exhibition, he released the latent stream of the modern movement in Germany. Now he struck the balance between the nineties and today: "At first, in the revolution against the falsification of architectural forms, every inch had to be redesigned by the architect himself, down to the door latches and tableware. Then came the period in which he could rely upon the good
designs of certain individuals. Now we are already sufficiently far along the way that an assembly can be made of
articles that are
is
certainly
decades before
development penetrated into industrial production and to the general mass of the people until it became "anony-
mous."
To
2
city
is
an
infinitely
more
Still full
205
complicated and entangled process, but if we look at it from the point of view of this old master of architecture, and take note of the present position of the contemporary
development,
of the city All that
is
it
may be
necessary
it
about.
S.G.
1955
206
1850
actual dates anything as nebu-
difficult to
pin
down with
owes much to the traveling exhibition on Urban Design prepared by the Graduate School of Design at Harvard
nated. This
list
University, 1956-1957. Changes in the city structure have often been preceded by changes in landscape design. The garden landscape of Versailles
was the forerunner of the great city plans of the Baroque period, and much the same occurred in the nineteenth century.
1856-1867
Alphonse
In the decade between 1856 and 1867 the landscape architect Alphonse Alphand created over twenty new public squares in
the heart of Paris. For one of the last he took an old quarry in a working class district Buttes Chaumont, 1856-1860 and
it into a place for active enjoyment of the populace instead of merely another pleasant public garden.
transformed
1857-1860
CENTRAL PARK,
NEW YORK
Frederick
Law Olmsted
In America, Frederick Law Olmsted was superseding the artiwith a development of the inherent ficially romantic garden
In Central Park, by judicious qualities of the natural landscape. he succeeded in achieving, for use of the natural topography,
time, one of the canons of future urban planning: the separation of pedestrian and vehicular traffic.
the
first
1882
Arturo Soria y
Mate
In isolation and without creating much interest at the time, the later Spaniard Soria y Mata worked out a new type of city which
exerted great influence. In this the different functions of living,
207
working, and circulation were allowed to develop continuously along parallel bands.
1889
CITIES
Sitte,
Camilla Sltte
essayed to set
The Viennese
Camillo
down
the principles underlying the placing of statuary and monuments in early city squares, and to inveigh against the spacedestroying crossroad "squares" of the nineteenth century.
1898
GARDEN
CITIES
OF TOMORROW
Ebenezer Howard
The
British parliamentary shorthand writer, Ebenezer Howard, wished to break up the congestion of the great metropolis of
London by the
creation of a
number
of small self-contained
garden cities, achieved great success, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, but in most of the settlements of the Garden City Movement industry was omitted, and the journey to work thereby greatly
lengthened.
Tony Gamier Tony Gamier, a French architect from Lyons, when working on a scholarship in the French School at Rome, produced a
1901
series of plans for
an
industrial city to
the Rhone. This was published in 1917 and was the first fully worked out plan for the organization of the urban structure of
a twentieth-century
city.
P. Oud's first really human working-class apartment J. J. blocks at Tusschindeyken in Rotterdam, 1919, were pioneer achievements in urban design.
and
208
Scottish Professor of Botany, Patrick Geddes, one of the pioneers of diagnostic planning, strove to bring about an integration of urban planning with sociology and economics ("place, folk, work") and to move from a mere collection of statistics to
The
an interpretation of the
1920
This
WELWYN GARDEN
CITY,
ENGLAND
Raymond UnWTl
new town for 20,000 people placed twenty miles north of London followed closely the principles laid down by Ebenezer Howard. Its new contribution to urban planning was its systematic development of the short cul-de-sac which provided for greater safety and privacy for its residents and broke up the old
rue corridor.
1922
PLAN
VOISIN, PARIS
Le Corbusier
This was a proposal for a new organization of the metropolitan contained many new ideas. city which
1927
The
late twenties saw many very hopeful developments in Germany, which were brought to an abrupt end in 1933. In 1927, under the direction of Mies van der Rohe, young architects from all over Europe were invited to erect experimental buildings at Weissenhof
.
Emst Mdy
Ernst May, the chief architect and city planner of Frankfort am Main, built many new suburbs around the outskirts of this
which new designs for mass-produced low-cost row housing were tried out on a large scale, and the separation of pedestrian walks and traffic roads was developed.
city
in
1928
Wdter
Gropius
attempt at giving a number of different architects responsiin a unified project under the general bility for single elements direction of Walter Gropius.
An
209
1929
Walter GrOplUS
This working-class housing project on the outskirts of Berlin was the most congenial of many such projects built at this period by reason of its clear lines and open layout with wide swathes of
greenery.
RADBURN,
garden suburb of the automobile age, the cul-de-sacs of Welwyn Garden City have become garage courts and the houses are turned around to face upon a footpath entrance. A ribbon
this
For
park runs through the traffic-free "super-blocks" and pedestrians cross the encircling roads through underpasses.
Clarence Perry
In the Regional Plan for New York, prepared under the direction of Thomas Adams, Clarence Perry outlined his concept of
dividing
up
New York
CIAM
Modern
living,
mind and
1934
BROADACRE CITY
On
the basis of universal ownership of automobiles and the tremendous spaces of western America, Frank Lloyd Wright developed his wide-flung "city" of self-sufficient homesteads and
dispersed centers of activity.
1935
LA VILLE RADIEUSE
Le Corbusier
In this volume Le Corbusier proposed the reshaping of the metropolis by the creation of large pedestrian open spaces, free
from
resi-
210
1938
CULTURE or
CITIES
Lewis
Mumford
Lewis Mumford, an avowed disciple of Patrick Geddes, through this book aroused the interest of the American public in the problems of urban decentralization and the planning of garden cities on the lines advocated by Ebenezer Howard.
1944
Patrick Abercrombie
This was the first large-scale working out of a permanently green belt around a large metropolis coupled with the establishment
of a
number
of
new
satellite cities
it.
1945
SAINT-DIE, VOSGES,
first
FRANCE
for a
Le Corbusier
community center
(see
The
.pp.
truly
contemporary design
165-166).
1948
Frederick Gibberd
The
New Towns'
Act
after the
Second World
War
en-
deavored to return to the original principles of the Garden City, and eight satellite towns were established around London
live
architectural de-
CHIMBOTE, PERU
P. L.
Wiener and
J.
L. Sert
The
use in modern times of the patio house to conditions in single-story buildings at high provide good living
first large-scale
density.
1951
Le Corbusier
The
plan for the new capital city of the Punjab is the first major example of the combination of radically progressive city planning with age-old habits of life. The gridiron is used as a
major
large
traffic net,
one-half
ment with
own, while still remaining part of an over-all organism. Here also the separation and differentiation of fast and slow traffic routes and pedestrian paths was first put into operation on a city-wide scale.
211
CfAM
At the Eighth Congress CIAM discussed the physical expression of "recreation of mind and body" and came to the conclusion
that the time was ripe for a concentrated endeavor to re-create urban centers of social activity.
1952
In
VALLINGBY, SWEDEN
Sven Markelius
the most elaborately planned of many recent suburbs of Stockholm, the relation of high and low buildings and the provision of a wide range of dwelling types was most carefully
this,
studied.
1953
found
its
American form.
1956
OPBOUW
Ever since 1948 this CIAM group had been working on the problem of the contemporary form of an urban settlement which could provide for all the needs of a varied population
(see pp. 173-175).
The
The
rebuilding of a complete downtown section of Detroit combines high-rise buildings in a parklike setting with patiotype row houses and a neighborhood core.
BRAZILIA, BRAZIL
1957
LuClO Costa
some
212
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Much of the content of this book first appeared in the form
lectures or papers
of
by the author; a partial list of these follows: "Brauchen wir noch kuenstler?" in Plastique, edited by Sophie Tauber-Arp, No. i (Paris, 1937); "Art as a Key for Reality," foreword for the painter Ben Nicholson (London, 1937); "The Tragic Conflict," unpublished papers on the Ruling Taste (Paris, 1936-1955); "The New Monumentality," in New Architecture and City Planning, edited by Paul Zucker (New York, 1944), Revista de Occidente Argentina, 1949, and Architectural Review, September 1948; "Nine Points on Monumentality," unpublished symposium prepared with J. L. Sert and Fernand Lger, 1943; "Fernand Leger," in Der Neue Zuercher Zeitung,
August 1955; a radio dialogue with Antoine Pevsner, Zurich, October 1949; "On the Force of Aesthetic Values" and "On the Education of the Architect," in Building for Modern Man,
by Tom Creighton (Princeton, 1949); "Architect, and Sculptor," in A Decade of Contemporary Architecture, by Sigfried Giedion (Zurich, 1954); "Architects and Politics" and "Aesthetics and the Human Habitat," unpublished material from the 7th and gth Congresses for Modern Architecture (CIAM), 1949 and 1953; "The Humanization of Urban Life," in The Heart of the City, edited by J. Tyrwhitt, J. L. Sert, and E. N. Rogers (London and New York, 1951), Architectural Record, April 1952, and Das Werk, November 1952; "The
edited
Painter,
State of Contemporary Architecture," "The New Regionalism," "Social Imagination," and "Spatial Imagination," in Architectural Record, 1952, 1954, and 1956. Credits for illustrations used in the
German
edition are as
follows: 1-6, 16-19, 3^> 47? 69, photo Giedion; 21, 23, 25, 27, 57-59, Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture; 32, 44-46, 48-49,
d, Le Corbusier, Oeuvres, IV, V; 7-9, municipal government, Oslo; f, g, h, architects' drawings; b, c, 0. Lancaster, From Pillar to Post; 61, 66, Museum of Modern Art, from publication of Naum Gab6; 12, Jacques de la Prade, Seurat; 13, Cousturier, Galerie Valentin, New York; 15, photo BranSeurat; 14,
photo
213
Architecture tfaujourdhw; 34, photo Delaunay; 33, Fimmen, Die kretische-mykenischeKultur; photo Shulman; 36, Pendelbury, Tell-El-Amarna; 37, pub. Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.; 40, Decade of Contemporary Archi41 photo Sert; 52, Giedion, A Perusset; a, Durand, Cours tecture; 56, photo Lozzi; 70, photo
cusi; 20,
d'architecture.
, Q edition are as tallows: 28, Credits for illustrations new in this L. Sert; 30, 31, seminar, Harvard University; 323 42, courtesy J. Dolf Walter Drayer; 39, Architectural Forum; 51, photo
photo
Robert Harvey; 55, Schnebli; 53, photo Vrijhof; 54, photo G. E. Kidder-Smith; 63, courtesy E. F. Catalano; 64, photo photo Ezra Stoller; 65, photo Ren6 Burri-Magnum; 67, photo ArchiCarl E. Rosenberg, courtesy Joem Utzon; 68, Progressive Publications of the School of Design, North
tecture;
e,
D.
Student
Carolina State College, vol. 5, no. i, copyright 1955, reproduced and E. F. Catalano. by permission of the publisher
214
INDEX OF NAMES
Aalto, Alvar, 64
Max, 80
173
Bird in Space, fig. 15 Borromini, Francesco, fig. Boston Back Bay Center, 161, 17173, 212,
fig.
54
Alexander
Polder
(Rotterdam),
figs.
figs.
21,
26
Brazil,
Brazilia,
Alphand, Alphonse, 207 America, 54, 123, 127, 131, 156, 173 American Abstract Artists, 22
173 212
Chaumont, 207
Byzantium, 180
Caesar, Julius, 134 Cairo, 172
Arab world, 180 Arc de Triomphe, 35 Arp, Hans, 24, 35, 56, 60, 71 Arup, Ove, 111
Athens, 133 Audincourt, stained glass, 53, ngs. 17, 18 also Sydney Australia, 193. See
Opera House
Babylon, 142
C&anne,
204-05,
Chandigarh,
52, 53
fig.
Bathers, The,
28
148-49, 155, 161, See 173-77, 211, figs, d, 48-51. also Corbusier Charte d'Athenes. See CIAM
Chartres Cathedral, 163
154 Bauhaus, 87, 144, 186 Belfort. See Audincourt Bergamo, See CIAM Berlage, 208 Berlin, 210 Berlin Conference Hall,
figs, g,
10,
185-88,
chitecture
h, 65
Moderne), 65, 87, 90, 91, 101, 125^, 131, 165, 169,
215
CIAM
(Congres
International
(cont.)
d'Architecture
Moderne)
203-04; Bridgwater Congress 1947, 7071, 72-78; Bergamo Congress Aix-en-Provence 79-80; 1949,
MARS
Group,
70;
146
Egypt, 113, 114, 132, 189 Eiffel Tower, 27, 44, 148,
fig.
186,
19
HoddesCongress 1953, 91-98; don Congress 1951, 127, 128; Group, 169, 204, Charte 212, 53;
Eiffel
Tower
T.
S.,
(painting),
13, 36,
fig.
20
Eliot,
OPBOUW
figs.
52,
68 16
d'Athenes, 210
Cigate, La, fig. 3 Clarinet, The, fig. 21
fig.
Colonne Dfoeloppabte de
16
fig.
la
Vic-
Faust and Marguerite, Femme en Bleu, 41 Finland, 158, 173 Finsterwalder, 182
fig.
Composition, 1930,
22
Fletcher, Bannister, 108 Colonne DiFlight of the Bird. See veloppable de la Victoire
Corbusier, Le, 58, 75-76, 77, 80, 84-85, 86, 101, 125, 126, 147, 186, 174-76, 161-69, 149,
Florence, 136
figs,
d,
j,
k,
m,
25,
32,
323, 44-51,
69,
Creighton, Thomas, 64 Crete, 150; oval house, fig. 36 Cuba, 149. See also Sert
Dammerstock, 209
Dante, 15 Daumier, 18 Davioud, 190 de Groot, Hofstede. Hofstede de Delacroix, 15, 17, 18
Delaunay, 41, 147
Descartes, 72, 77 Dewey, John, 104
See
Groot,
Garden City movement. See Howard, Ebenezer Gamier, Tony, 147, 208
Gautier, The*ophile, 17 Geddes, Patrick, 209, 211 General Motors Technical Center,
56,6o
Gericault, 15
24
147,
fig.
Domino House,
25
Drew, Jane, 149, 174 Dubois, Archbishop of Besangon, 195, 199 Durand, Jean N. L., 29, fig. a
144, 211,
l6 5
fig-
7'
171'
54
figs.
La Guardia
<zZ$o Pi-
Airport, 54
Lahore, 174 Lancaster, Osbert, figs, b, c Latin America. See South America Le Corbusier. See Corbusier, Le
Lefevre, Jules,
fig.
Hadrian, Emperor, 179 Hall of German Art (Munich), 29, 10 fig. Halle des Machines (Paris), 147,
L6ger, Fernand, 22, 32, 35, 48-51, 28 52-55, 60, figs. 17, 18,
Le
Ricolais,
184
181
Hamilton, Gavin. See Innocentut Hamlin, Talbot, 64 Harlow New Town, 211
Heine, Heinrich, 11 Hepworth, Barbara, 73-74
London,
210
Himalayas, 174 Hippodamus, 132 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, 23 Holford, Sir William, 33 Holland, 208. See also Bakema
Magasin Pittoresque, 16
Maillart, Robert, 67-68, 160, 182,
fig.
23
Manet, Edouard, 12, 18, 33 Manhattan. See New York Markelius, Sven, 212
MARS.
See
CIAM
Unitd d'Habitation,
Marseilles. See
Corbusier
Wright,
18
fig.
Innocentia,
Mayer, Mellon
Mesopotamia, 187
Max, 116-117
apan, 142, 156, 192 eannerct, Pierre, 149, 174
oyce, James, 174 Jammer,
fig.
59
30, 31
Mondrian,
H5'
179^
22 14
Montparnasse, 43
no
Monument
in
Wood,
34,
fig.
317
also
Eco-
Plan Voisin (Paris), 209 Planche, Gustave, 16 Pompeii, 134, 135, 172 Priene, 133 Princeton University Conference, 101 64, 65, 100,
Provence, 168
Jersey), 210 Rangoon, University of, 186 Raphael, 16, 17 Read, Sir Herbert, 72 Renan, Ernest, 17 Revue de Deux Mondes, 16 Rhone River, 208
Morris, William, 125 Mumford, Lewis, 22, 23, 211 Museum of Modem Art
(New
York), 57
Nantes, 169 Napoleon, 29 National Opera See Utzon
Radburn (New
House (Sydney).
New
34
York, 53, 54, 82, 164, 207,
Richard,
}.
210
Niemeyer, Oscar, 148, fig. 33 Noguchi, Isamu, 80 Nowicki, Matthew, 188
27
fig.
49. See
also
208
175,
-
Ostia,
134
J. J. P.,
Oud,
194-99*
fi
ss
i>
League of Nations
fig.
Rothschild,
61. See
Gab6
fig.
Madame de, 15 Rotterdam, 44, 126, 208. See also Alexander Polder Rouses Point, 54-55
Saarinen, Eero,
56,
60,
186,
189,
190
Saint Augustine
Monica, 16,
fig.
figs.
32,
147
Perry, Clarence,
210
Peru, 127 Petit, Claudius, 163, 199 Pevsner, Antoine, 24, 56, 57-59, 60, 61, fig. 16 Picasso, Pablo, 24, 32, 34, 35, 81,
85, 87, 90, 113,
Pisa,
fig.
Cathedral, 10
St. Peter's,
163
Sainte-Marie-du-Haut.
See
Ronfig.
alle
Quattro Fontane,
14
162
218
San Lorenzo, 180-81, figs. 57, See also Guarini Sartre, J. P., 128 Scamozzi, Vincenzo, 79, 87
Scheffer, Ary,
figs. 2,
58.
15,
16,
17, 18,
19,
Tremaine House, fig. 34 Trotsky, Leon, 42 Truman, Harry S., 88 Turin, 180 Tusschindeyken, 208
4,
Schmarsow, August, 112 Schwitters, 86, 191 Sert, Jos6 Luis, 22, 48-51, 53, 64, 79, 80-84, 85, 149, 211, figs. 41, 42 Seurat, Georges, figs. 12, 13
Severud,
figs, g,
UNESCO, 65, 100, 101, 102 Unite d'Habitation, 126, 161, 16369, figs. 44-47. See also Corbusier
Frederick,
64,
187,
188,
United Nations Building, 55; Assembly Hall, 190-91 United States. See America
Shakespeare, William, 13, 154 Siemenstadt, 210 Siena, Piazza del Campo, fig. 24 Sitte, Camillo, 207
i,
67,68
Vallingby, Sweden, 212 van de Velde, Henry. See Velde, Henry van de van der Rohe, Mies. See Rohe, Mies van der van Doesburg, Theo. See Doesburg, Theo van van Ecsteren, C. See Eesteren, C. van van Eyck, Aldo. See Eyck, Aldo van
Somme, 140
Sophocles, 13
Soria y Mata, Arturo, 207 South America, 148, 149, 158 Southdale Shopping Center, 212 Space Study, 1920, fig. 24. See also
Doesburg
Spherical Construction,
also
fig.
66. See
Gab6
210
186,
187,
Varma, E. L., 174, 176-77 Velde, Henry van de, 125, 205
191,
Stubbins,
figs, g,
Hugh,
h, 65
Venezuela, 173
Versailles, 82,
fig.
43
13
Park Vigeland, Gustav. See Frogner Sculpture Group Ville, La, 41, 52 Ville Radieuse, La, 210
Villenueva, 60
Violin, The,
fig.
Sweden, 125, 167 Sweeney, J. J., 80, 88-89 Sydney Opera House, figs, i, 67, 68. See also Utzon, Joern Syria, 142 Syrkus, Helena, 80, 86-87, 88, 89
Tange, Kenzo, fig. 35 Taut, Bruno, 182 Tel el Amarna, fig. 40 Torrochs, 182
Trajan, 134
26
fig.
Welwyn Garden
209
City
(England),
Whitehead, Alfred North, 72 Wiener, Paul L., 149, 211, figs. 41, 42 Williamson, G. Scott, 128 Wolfflin, Heinrich, 112
Yamasaki, 186
182
Woods,
147,
figs-
149,
150,
185,
190,
210,
37> 39>
62
SUBJECT INDEX
Architect, as coordinator, 102-03
town planning, 49
32-33, 50
Art as luxury,
2,
Human
204
Beton
brut,
165
203
Industrial buildings, 26, 181, International style, 140, 185
208
Cathedral as symhol, 37
Children's playgrounds, 130 City, as age-old symbol of social
life, 124, 158 City center. See Core City planning and community
life,
Market
places, medieval,
135
Roman, 133-34
Community
,
centers,
161-63, 171-
171-72 203
Plane surfaces, 143, 189 Pseudomonumentality, 25, 28-31 Pseudo-symbolism, 3 Public art, 4, 7
Regional planning, 148-49, 192 Round house, 150, 185
Dome,
189-91
Eclecticism, 12, 18, 25,
29-30
220
Row
housing, 149
taste, 10,
Ruling
14
*"*
Skyscrapers, 125, 171
3". 49-
65-66
185,
186-88
221