Key Modern Architects: 50 Short Histories of Modern Architecture 9781474265041, 9781474265034, 9781474265072, 9781474265058

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Key Modern Architects

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Copyright © Andrew Higgott, 2018 Andrew Higgott has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design by Eleanor Rose Cover image: Perspective of the Economist Building, 25 St James’s Street, London, 1959 by Gorden Cullen, (1914-1994), ARCHITECT: Alison & Peter Smithson © RIBA Collections All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Higgott, Andrew, author. Title: Key modern architects : 50 short histories of modern architecture / Andrew Higgott. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017049184| ISBN 9781474265041 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474265034 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Architecture, Modern–20th century. | Architects–Biography. | BISAC: ARCHITECTURE / General. | ARCHITECTURE / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945). | ARCHITECTURE / History / Contemporary (1945-). | ARCHITECTURE / Individual Architects & Firms / General. Classification: LCC NA680 .H425 2018 | DDC 720.92/2 [B] –dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049184 ISBN:

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Key Modern Architects 50 Short Histories of Modern Architecture Andrew Higgott

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Contents Introduction

1

1  Louis Sullivan

15

2  Otto Wagner

20

3  Adolf Loos

25

4  Peter Behrens

30

5  Auguste Perret

35

6  Frank Lloyd Wright

39

7  Antonio Sant’Elia/Futurism

48

8  Bruno Taut

52

9  Erich Mendelsohn

57

10  Walter Gropius

62

11  Theo Van Doesburg and De Stijl

70

12  El Lissitzky/Constructivism

75

13  Konstantin Melnikov

80

14  Hannes Meyer

85

15  László Moholy-Nagy

89

16  Grete Schütte-Lihotzky

93

17  Rudolph Schindler

97

18  Le Corbusier

101

19  Mies van der Rohe

113

20  Hans Scharoun

123

21  Eileen Gray

128

22  Gunnar Asplund

132

23  Alvar Aalto

137

24  Oscar Niemeyer

146

25  Buckminster Fuller

151

26  Charles and Ray Eames

155

27  Louis Kahn

160

28  Aldo Van Eyck

166

29  Alison and Peter Smithson

171

30  Kenzo Tange

176

31  Lina Bo Bardi

181

32  Carlo Scarpa

186

33  James Stirling

191

34  Archigram 196 35  Cedric Price

201

36  Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

206

37  Aldo Rossi

211

38  Geoffrey Bawa

215

39  Balkrishna Doshi

220

40  Richard Meier

225

41  Norman Foster

230

42  Álvaro Siza

235

43  Rem Koolhaas/OMA

240

44  Daniel Libeskind

246

45  Frank Gehry

251

46  Zaha Hadid

256

47  Tadao Ando

261

48  Herzog and De Meuron

266

49  Peter Zumthor

271

50  Kengo Kuma

276

References

280

Index

291

Image Permissions

298

Contents v

Introduction Key Modern Architects aims to describe and interpret the work of fifty of the most significant modern architects, from Louis Sullivan at the end of the nineteenth century to Kengo Kuma working in the twenty-first century. The ideas and work of many of them – Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto and numerous others – remain points of reference for current architects and historians, while others have emerged more recently from the shadows that these leading figures have created. They have been included in the book if they express a position that moves the art of architecture into a new direction, even if sometimes they might be seen as marginal in terms of their creation of built work rather than the production of projects and ideas. After all, what buildings come to be built are only part of the story and often do not represent a crucial development in architectural thought. The chronologically ordered essays introduce, discuss and develop a critique of these individuals’ work in a wider architectural and cultural context. Each intends to bring to light and to interpret the fundamental ideas that are in play in the extraordinary developments over more than a century of modern architecture. Perhaps a second volume could extend the list of architects covered: it is clearly contentious to define a list of fifty, and inevitably some readers will disagree with the exclusions and inclusions here. In almost every case the chosen architects have had a significant presence in the published media – in other histories, as well as journals and books, but the main criteria were the uniqueness of their work and their wider contribution to the practice of architectural Modernism. An original ‘short’ list of about 150 was reduced: a further book could focus on more marginal figures, talented and interesting, whose work may be less central to the shaping of thought and practice. The question of gender imbalance may be raised, and it is inevitable that further research will uncover more notable and overlooked women architects in the developing discourse of Modernism. Several non-architects are included, such as the artist Theo Van Doesburg and the engineer/inventor Buckminster Fuller, deserving a place due to their powerful influence on architectural culture. The vast majority of the architects included worked in Europe or North America, since the ideas and practice of Modernism have largely been originated and developed there, although significant figures in Latin America, Asia and elsewhere are incorporated. Their originality and the depth of their involvement in the constant

process of change in the idea of what architecture could and should be, as well as their influence on later architects, make them contenders for inclusion in this book. The main idea of this book is not so much to be a survey of the most important practitioners in modern architecture, but rather to see the developing practice of the art of Modernist architecture through those individuals who have contributed most to the development of its culture. Architecture is primarily a culturally based practice, like literature or even like fashion. Despite the talk of many of its earlier architects and historians, modern architecture has rarely been purely a functional endeavour or one dependent on technology; neither has it been only and simply a social practice, for ‘the people’, although each of these figure prominently. A central aim of the book is thus to consider and evaluate the work of twentieth-century architects as versions of artistic practice. Something similar seems to be the most significant shift in the approach of many recent historians, including a number of substantial new studies of its most significant figures. In the individual chapters, the early stages of an architect’s work are often seen to display their originality and become the main focus rather than later, when it becomes established, proficient and often repetitive. The book is therefore intended to be a useful contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of modern architecture, and certainly one relevant to architectural practice as well as to those studying its history. It is primarily about ideas and the expression of them in design. Each architect adopts a particular stance, which inevitably involves background assumptions about what architecture is and should be: the influence of cultural and philosophical texts can be traced, as well as that of other architects, and these shape the discussion of each individual, and underline why they are different and may be seen as important. Their relationship to Modernism as a practice is central – either moving towards its formulation, expressing its shifting precepts and practices, or of revising, rejecting or developing it in their own particular contexts. Their critical reception – how critics and historians have evaluated their work and the trajectory of their reputation – is presented and discussed. An extensive literature on modern architecture has developed over recent decades. It includes studies of individual architects or of an aspect of their work as well as cultural interpretations at a larger scale, and these have been used to shape the book’s discussion, aiming to bring together current thinking and to re-evaluate the architectural and historiographical significance of each figure discussed. It is also meant to be a way into that extensive field of scholarship: it makes inroads into reading much of the material that has been published and these sources are listed in the further reading given for each chapter.

Modernity and the Development of Modernism The creation of modern architecture was the result of a cultural movement in the years before its formation, which went beyond existing questions of style and was primarily an intellectual enterprise rather than the straightforward realization of a practical or

2 Key Modern Architects

technological process. The idea can be connected with the reinvention of the world undertaken, at least at the beginning, by the leaders of the French Revolution. Just as the calendar was to start afresh in 1792 and be organized into weeks of ten days consisting of ten hours, so architecture was to be conceived again as an egalitarian practice that had nothing to do with what had gone before. Far earlier than that, Thomas More’s Utopia published in 1516 had described an ideal and unified society, standardized and working in harmony, that would replace the problems of an unruly world with a rationally determined ordered community: the idea that this unlikely model was capable of being realized continued to be widely held in the modern period. The work in the seventeenth century of Isaac Newton, whose idea of the universe based upon rational processes of analysis became the basis of the ideology of the Enlightenment and led ultimately to the establishment of the modern scientific process, also had cultural significance. In the understanding that developed following Newton, analysis would replace custom, and social traditions that had seemed immutable would be changed in the light of Reason. As Georg Hegel was to pronounce in The Philosophy of History published in 1837, ‘reason is the sovereign of the world’. His interpretation of the processes of reason created the idea of the historical dialectic, a process of contradiction and negation in which difficulties come to be resolved and progress is attained. For Hegel, all history is essentially the history of thought, and the highly resonant idea of progress, through which the end result of an absolute perfection would be reached, was an attainable goal. Hegel had a great influence in shaping others’ thought throughout the nineteenth century, not least two figures who may be seen in turn as having the greatest influence on the subsequent development of architectural ideas, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, however much that the latter would resist the idea that history is a logical process. Its developments were seen not as fortuitous but inevitable, moving to a joyful fulfilment, as Marx would eloquently project in his idea of a post-capitalist society. The term Zeitgeist, generally translated as ‘the spirit of the age’, is derived from Hegel’s thought and had a great effect, motivating the idea later adopted by architects of creating a true modern architecture: Mies van der Rohe pronounced in the magazine G in 1923: ‘Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space: living, changing, new … only today can be given form.’ The belief that authentic architecture embodied the Zeitgeist is seen in the work of such historians of Modernism as Sigfried Giedion, who argued that the legitimate architecture of the modern world had to be true to its time, its fulfilment of the promise of progress. The revolution in science led also to a revolution in industry, which began in England and transformed much of the world through the nineteenth century. Its massive effects on society at large and cities in particular motivated an urgency in finding an architectural response, which was much discussed but slow in realization. Nevertheless, new industrial techniques had led to mass production, the concentration of labour and the consequent growth of cities: in metal work, the refinement of techniques and technology led to the ability to span large spaces, to build far higher than had been imagined and to prefabricate elements. But an important point is that

Introduction 3

they did not inevitably and immediately lead to the development of a new architecture. The immense glass shed of the Crystal Palace built for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London was not considered to be architecture but building, for a specific and short-term purpose. So its embrace of new technology and modular prefabricated construction, let alone the great walls of glass which form it, did not become part of architectural discourse until seventy years later, and perhaps even several decades after that, its clearest expression being in the work of High-Tech architects such as Richard Rogers and Norman Foster. Technology did not by itself determine the course of architecture, which remained primarily involved in the development of the aesthetic, predominantly interpretations of Classical and Renaissance forms, revivals of the Gothic and later the embrace of the Arts and Crafts tradition that rejected modernity. Tracing the beginnings of a shift into the formulation of an architecture that reflected and responded to the transformed conditions of the modern world, several tendencies can be pointed out. Certain of the stripped, elemental forms created at times by architects of Neo-Classicism including John Soane and Henri Labrouste, as well as later on in the last stages of Arts and Crafts architecture such as the architects Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Charles Ashbee, can be seen ahistorically as resembling a modern aesthetic. But in terms of underlying thought they scarcely prefigure an architectural Modernism as it was to emerge, fully fledged, in the 1920s. Approaches in France, such as the structural analysis of Auguste Choisy, some early work in concrete and the unprecedented design of the Cité Industrielle by Tony Garnier first shown in 1904, represent Modernism in their different ways. But it is in the development of Chicago, effectively a new city developed in the 1870s to 1890s, that saw the coming together of an approach to construction with an approach to building design that prefigures later developments. Such architects as William LeBaron Jenney, Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan built the first skyscrapers, in both brick and later using a fireproof steel frame. In their transformation of functional considerations into new architectural forms, their buildings may be described as the first Modernist architecture. It was Louis Sullivan who first talked of the modern approach implied in the phrase ‘form follows function’, although he intended a richer understanding of the functional than is generally understood. In comparison with the established cities of the east coast, Chicago was a city without culture, in other words not enforcing the conventions that prevailed elsewhere: this was its strength as it opened up the opportunity for new forms to be designed that fitted the needs of this modern, mercantile and progressive city. The earliest to commit to a modern synthesis of architecture includes also the later career of Otto Wagner, who had begun as the most academic of architects, but became the focus of innovative work in Vienna around 1900: Joseph Olbrich, Joseph Hoffman and Adolf Loos were among a larger number influenced by his approach. Wagner was the first to write a manifesto on modern architecture, arguing for the necessity of new plain forms and rational urban planning. Loos’s powerful polemics – including Ornament and Crime – were influential beyond Austria and became among the first of many architectural treatises to begin to build up a theory of Modernist practice. Auguste Perret set up a parallel theory of a rethinking of architecture based on perhaps the most

4 Key Modern Architects

quintessential modern material – concrete – while in Germany new thinking on the relationship of art to industry was developed, centred on the formation of the Deutscher Werkbund and the work of Peter Behrens. The emergence of new formal languages and architectural programmes also appeared in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, but despite such developments of progressive thinking, there remained an overweening weight of historical tradition in architecture practised in the early years of the twentieth century. It was the work of Walter Gropius that really formulated a radical Modernist programme: shaped by both the purposes of modernizing industry and the growing urgent needs of society, arguments towards a modern architecture came of age. There can be seen to be two significant directions among the extremely diverse and radical design and thought on architecture that emerged even in the years before the First World War. Alongside a rational working out of issues, as seen in the work of Perret and Gropius, there was a visionary component which created a plurality of varied approaches, these relating to larger movements in art, in the development of Cubism and its after-effects. In Germany and Russia there was a particular ferment of ideas and mutual influence and exchange, despite the war and its aftermath, as can be seen in the work of Melnikov, El Lissitzky, Bruno Taut and others. In Italy, the Futurist movement represented a polemical extreme and, like De Stijl in Holland and the Constructivists in Russia wanted to experience the world afresh, the beginning of a new civilization without preconception or convention: what these movements also had in common was a move to the elemental, to the establishment of purity of form. Gropius’s foundation of the Bauhaus in 1919 combined these avant-garde directions in a school that was established on rethinking and experiment: its focus was the workshop, a place of making and an emblematic echo of the workshop of industry. Rather than referring to history and precedent, which would start by looking at all the earlier ways people had designed and made a chair, a new question was posed: what does a chair need to be to work effectively, and how might it be made? Moholy-Nagy’s work on the crucial foundation course which embodied a process of un-learning made him pre-eminent among his influential colleagues (image 0.1). While architecture was not on the curriculum until later in its short history, the message was clear: that architecture could and should be reinvented from a new beginning, and along with other live projects its own new building at Dessau, designed by Gropius with Adolf Meyer and opened in 1926, was the most substantial as well as the most radical building of the new architecture at that date. Three years later Taut was to publish a book, Modern Architecture, that collected together the widely spread examples of the new way of building: answering the question ‘why a new movement?’, he described the rejection of historicism and the search for a harmony of form and technique. But the examples of new building were so rare, they were ‘tiny islands in the infinite sea’ where, he claims, a traveller ‘may well discover glimpses of paradise’: utopia, he felt, had been realized with these precious examples of a new kind of architecture. The most articulate arguments in favour of the new architecture were, however, those presented by Le Corbusier: before he had constructed any truly Modernist

Introduction 5

Image 0.1  From Material to Architecture László Moholy-Nagy: Bauhaus publication 1929

buildings, he wrote polemical articles in the magazine L’Esprit nouveau and these were published as a book Toward an Architecture in 1923. There exists, he asserted, a new spirit born from industry: architects, obsessed with questions of style, cannot see the potential of new means of construction which are plainly evident in the building of modern cars, ships and planes. Further, when the new architecture is adopted and applied, it will serve to make the downtrodden inhabitants of the modern city happy, fulfilled and what’s more, efficient. Many questions are posed and reiterated in the book, about the design of cities, the use of mass production, geometrical forms, how a modern house might be rethought: the answers are presented in the extensive coverage of his own unbuilt designs, which make up a substantial part of it. Despite or perhaps because of this it became the most popular and influential book on architecture in the twentieth century, and this book and later publications by Le Corbusier were used as sourcebooks by very many other architects. His authoritative voice was persuasive enough for architects to feel that his ideas expressed in Toward an Architecture and elsewhere were a replacement for the rules of the Beaux-Arts which had earlier been the dominant model in much of the world, based on the classically derived teaching procedures of the Paris School.

6 Key Modern Architects

Image 0.2  Villa Stein-de Monzie, Garches 1926–8: photograph 1929

Le Corbusier’s pre-eminence in the architecture of Modernism is due to his mastery of the media as much as it is to the originality of his designs, but that is not to discount his achievement particularly in a series of villas that still, incredibly almost a century later, provide a model for modern house design. As can be seen in a celebrated photograph of his Garches villa taken in 1929, the car looks comically antique but the house still appears modern (Image 0.2). The role of the publication of architectural work established in the practice of Le Corbusier in the 1920s is highly important and has its own history. It is problematic in that published architectural imagery, the carefully contrived and perfectly lit photograph, is almost invariably a flattering picture of its subject that says little about its context or how it is inhabited and used. But the importance of architectural publications of Modernism in the 1920s and 1930s, for what was still very much a marginal activity that represented a tiny fraction of buildings then built, was immeasurable. Beatriz Colomina has argued that the sites of modern architecture, rather than a few inconveniently located buildings, were the ‘seemingly immaterial sites of publications, exhibitions, competitions, journals’. Both Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe in particular became celebrated through published work, in Mies’s case almost entirely of unbuilt or temporary exhibition projects. The result of this influence is in the countless built reproductions of their highly original and rigorous work that appeared in later decades. As Reyner Banham wrote in 1975, introducing his short history of Modernism Age of the Masters, ‘much of our discontent with recent architecture stems from the fact that before the work of the Masters was properly understood it was widely and often insensitively copied’.

Introduction 7

Key exhibitions with their attendant publications had a great influence on the development of Modernism. The live exhibition of architecture at the Weissenhof Seidlung in Stuttgart in 1927 was seminal and included prototype houses by almost all of the leading architects deemed as sufficiently modern by Mies, its coordinator. It was the first visitable manifestation of what was to become the clichéd aesthetic of modern architecture: each house had a flat roof, white walls and cubic form despite differences in both their plan and their architect’s intentions. But the formation in the following year of the International Congress of Modern Architecture, generally known as CIAM, was of the greatest influence. Twenty-four architects met at the Swiss castle of La Sarraz and established an organization that would continue with its conferences and publications until 1959, but its five pre-war meetings were important in establishing a common ground between what had hitherto been fractured and separate activities. Publications emerged from almost every conference, but its declaration of 1928 established the indissoluble link, for its participants, between the new architecture and the economic and political situation in which they worked. Rationalization and standardization were the way forward, and from the beginning, the idea of the large-scale scheme was central. It was the Athens Charter which, incongruously, came out of a CIAM conference held in 1933 on a ship sailing through the Mediterranean from Athens to Marseille that had the most fundamental effect. The architect’s primary concern, it declared, was to remake the city on rational lines: planning predominated, road building was paramount, different functions of the city were to be separated into distinct zones, housing was to be standardized. Its dogmatic tone was persuasive and chimed with a more general cultural mood in other aspects of life that planning, organization and clarity were needed. It was highly influential, not least on what actually happened to cities in the years after the Second World War: and it was also a clear production of the limitations of its approach of rationalism. Its basis was in utopian thought, creating a city of rationality, and expressed its belief in determinism that a planned, organized city would naturally produce happy and fulfilled citizens. And this is the tragic flaw in the whole history of architectural Modernism with consequences that are still evident today. Not all modern architects agreed with this powerful prescription, and the minority voices of Mendelsohn, Scharoun, Asplund and others considered that modern architecture had a different role that was far more measured and less revolutionary. Working on a smaller scale, architecture could transform individual lives rather than the whole of society in a single gesture. The United States also largely resistant to this emerging dogma, Frank Lloyd Wright for example adopting a different kind of idealism, while a contrasting document was the book published in connection with the Modern Architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1932. Titled The International Style, it gathered together work of an approximately similar aesthetic of flat roofs, white walls and extensive glazing from some fourteen countries. It was curated by the young American historians HenryRussell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson who knew much of what they exhibited at first hand. Johnson, much later, recalled their position: ‘We wrote that book in a fury against the functionalist, German social democratic workers approach to architecture as part

8 Key Modern Architects

of the social revolution. We thought that architecture is still an art, that it was something you could look at.’ Nevertheless what followed, particularly in post-war Europe, with its programme of rebuilding the city and erasing its old forms, taking a supposedly scientific approach, came to be the dominant mode of practice. Modernism became adopted by state and city authorities, instead of being a marginal and avant-garde activity, and the buildings produced ended up remarkably similar: glass curtain-walled office blocks and box-like blocks of flats were built in the thousands, so cities all over the world, not only in the developed West, began to look the same. The largely bland and sterile environments that were created are probably as much to do with architecture’s own self-restraint as the incomprehension of a world that was causing them to be realized. The corporate world followed: its use of Modernist forms simply denoted being up to date, in stark contrast to the social transformation that had been promised by the visionary architects who pioneered modern work earlier in the century. Universality was the aim of many early Modernist architects, but the consequent monotony and banality of the results must have horrified those architects responsible for modern architecture’s formulation.

The Second Beginning Alternative architectural approaches had already been established and even Le Corbusier’s work had moved out of its Purist phase as early as the mid-1930s. The late work of Asplund and the early work of Aalto presented a Scandinavian interpretation of a modest architecture that did not try to change the world but to present innovative buildings appropriate for their use and context: the originality of Aalto in synthesizing a new direction is not always appreciated. But the importance and inventiveness of the post-war period of Modernism which also includes Mies in his maturity, Le Corbusier’s later masterful language and achievements, Louis Kahn’s deep-rooted forms, as well as new interpretations of Modernism emerging in Brazil, Japan and Britain, makes this second period in the 1950s and 1960s a richer and more productive new start. Despite the changes in Le Corbusier’s work, the establishment of CIAM began to be shaken by an international younger generation, who included Aldo van Eyck, Alison and Peter Smithson and Giancarlo de Carlo. These architects formed Team Ten as an alternative, on the basis of a discourse based on the rejection of the universality of Modernism in favour of specificity and new readings of urban context. An emerging issue also was that of materiality, as earlier modern architecture had often been close to being a diagram or model. The Villa Savoye’s purity of form, for example, is effected in an impure way: it is made of rendered and painted block work, but appears as ‘masses brought together in light’ in Le Corbusier’s Modernist definition. The later history of Modernism often made for an architecture of little more than image and the authentic making of a building was rarely considered. The Smithsons’ championing of a real materiality in the form of the often misapplied term ‘Brutalism’ has continued to resonate and directly or indirectly shapes work done by later generations.

Introduction 9

But modern architecture’s failures were both painful and clear to see, as well as intellectually deficient. Its dogma could no longer be followed; a Modernist utopia had evidently not been realized. One of its most articulate critics was Colin Rowe, who said in a 1979 lecture that modern architecture, ‘which was once to be seen as among the cosmic hopes of humanity, has suddenly come to be seen at best, incredible, at worst, a lamentable aberration’. Charles Jencks had, in a 1975 journal article, tentatively defined a new period – that of ‘post’ modernism – since, he said, no more satisfactory term had presented itself. His starting point, too, was that the standard belief in modern architecture was no longer credible, even if it continued as practice for want of anything more convincing. In the 1960s, Aldo Rossi and Robert Venturi had already adopted positions that both re-established the autonomy of the individual architect and restored the crucial role of architecture’s own history, replacing the urgent aim of starting afresh. Post-Modernism, in the sense established by Jencks, was a relatively short-lived phenomenon, but the work of Hans Hollein, Arata Isozaki and the later buildings of James Stirling (Image 0.3) made effective use of architecture’s existing language in a fruitful relationship to a fundamentally Modernist approach. Another kind of ‘after’ Modernism took its large-scale ambitions and concern with cities and society in a different way, and in the process aimed to remove its preoccupation with form-making. A British school of the 1960s, taking elements of the work of Charles and Ray Eames and the engineer Buckminster Fuller, and comprising the architects of the Archigram group along with Cedric Price, aimed to make built forms that would simply enable human life to take place within them. Its

Image 0.3  Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart: James Stirling 1977–84

10 Key Modern Architects

Image 0.4  Pompidou Centre, Paris: Piano and Rogers 1971–77

buildings would be light, alive, provisional and expendable, and quite lacking in any existing aesthetic code. As established, it became an architectural direction known as High-Tech with its buildings in the end scarcely less permanent than traditional structures, as can be seen in the work of Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano (Image 0.4), which nevertheless represent one strand of a continuation rather than rejection of Modernism. The revival and survival of interpretations of Modernism continued in the 1990s and beyond with the twin polarities of a context-free making of extraordinary forms and an understated contextualism and materiality. An earlier argument of Rem Koolhaas was that Modernism had not been ‘modern’ enough, too limited, too circumscribed by architectural convention, and he looked instead largely at the radical forms of artists and architects of Russian Constructivism as well as the architecture of others earlier excluded. This neo-Modernism has created the context for some extraordinary projects, not least by his former student Zaha Hadid and from a quite different basis in modern art, Frank Gehry. On the other hand, a quiet architecture based on the interpretation and development of Modernist forms has been achieved by Álvaro Siza in Portugal and Tony Fretton in Britain among others: in this parallel development careful contextualism has replaced the rhetorical gesture. Koolhaas and others have expressed the view that architecture has moved into a post-humanist condition (Image 0.5): the manifestation of so many failures in the application of new models for the city and housing, up to and including work built in the 1970s, seemed to indicate that a real social transformation through architecture was not possible. But in the last two decades there has also been the development

Introduction 11

Image 0.5  De Rotterdam, Rotterdam: Rem Koolhaas/OMA 2013

once again of a social brief, some architects aiming to creating architecture for social benefit rather than the narcissistic constructions which have often seemed to prevail. In the housing work of Siza in Europe and Doshi in India, imaginative approaches have been taken and a similar position has been pursued by a younger generation, including Alejandro Aravena in Chile as well as Dutch and British architects: the current work of the practice Assemble is particularly radical. The most dominant and quite shocking mode, however, is the wholesale adoption of radical modern architecture to serve international capitalism. However much architects may approach this work with inventiveness tempered by an attitude near to cynicism, it is the case that, rather than reshaping the world, current architecture provides the imagery for a world dominated by corporate interests.

12 Key Modern Architects

But in a further constructive development at the same time, the qualities of the buildings that the earlier architects of Modernism produced are now generally appreciated as the equal of the achievement of architecture of any earlier period. The subtle and highly original buildings of Le Corbusier, Mies and others are highly valued as well as remaining potent influences in current architecture. To go further, modern architecture, at its best, may be seen now as the most immediate of any period: it is sensually and materially rich, creates thrillingly transformed space and represents an original and fundamental intellectual rigour. Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion, Le Corbusier at La Tourette and Ronchamp, the Schindler House, Kahn’s Parliament at Dhaka, Siza’s pool at Leça and Asplund’s Stockholm Crematorium are among a very long list of its greatest achievements. As a newly formulated practice, it was important for Modernism to attain a new simplicity, to be against any historical reference in form or involve any decoration. But as it later developed both of these, as well as the ‘complexity’ proposed by Venturi, came to be incorporated. Abstract form and light are often seen as its most important elements but do not, by themselves, define Modernism. After all, modern architecture is fundamentally a practice of art: there perhaps remains the need to remove assumptions, still commonly held, that it ever was anything else. Thus, it is of primary importance to make an emphasis on key individuals whose position is particularly expressive and resonant. ‘Key modern architects’ are not necessarily the most famous, or most-built: rather, those who have originated ideas and practice and have effectively produced and extended the art of architecture.

FURTHER READING Baird, George The Space of Appearance Cambridge MA MIT Press 1995. Banham, Reyner Theories and Design in the First Machine Age London Architectural Press 1960. Banham, Reyner The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? London Architectural Press 1966. Behne, Adolf The Modern Functional Building trans. Michael Robinson, introduction Rosemarie Haag Bletter Santa Monica Getty Research Institute 1996 (Orig. Der moderne Zweckbau Munich: Drei Masken Verlag 1926). Cohen, Jean-Louis The Future of Architecture since 1889 London Phaidon 2012. Colomina, Beatriz Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media Cambridge MA MIT Press 1994. Colquhoun, Alan Modernity and the Classical Tradition Cambridge MA MIT Press 1989. Colquhoun, Alan Modern Architecture Oxford Oxford University Press 2002. Conrads, Ulrich Programmes and Manifestos on 20th Century Architecture London: Lund Humphries 1970. Forty, Adrian Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture London Thames and Hudson 2000.

Introduction 13

Forty, Adrian Concrete and Culture: a material history London Reaktion 2012. Frampton, Kenneth Modern Architecture: A Critical History London Thames and Hudson 1980: 4th edn 2007. Frampton, Kenneth Studies in Tectonic Culture Cambridge MA MIT Press 2001. Giedion, Sigfried Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 1941. Henket, Hubert-Jan and Heynen, Hilde (eds.) Back from Utopia: the Challenge of the Modern Movement Rotterdam 010 Publishers 2002. Heynen, Hilde Architecture and Modernity: A Critique Cambridge MA MIT Press 2000. Hitchcock, H-R and Johnson, P The International Style New York W.W. Norton 1932. Jencks, Charles Modern Movements in Architecture Harmondsworth Penguin 1973. Koolhaas, Rem and Mau, Bruce S M L XL New York Monacelli Press 1995: 2nd ed Cologne Taschen 1997. Le Corbusier Toward an Architecture trans. John Goodman, introduction J-L Cohen London Frances Lincoln 2008 (orig. Vers une architecture Paris: Crès et Cie 1923). Norberg-Schulz, Christian Principles of Modern Architecture London Papadakis 2000. Ockman, Joan (ed.) Architecture Culture 1943–1968 New York Rizzoli 1993. Petit, Emmanuel Irony, or the Self-Critical Opacity of Postmodern Architecture New Haven Yale University Press 2013. Pevsner, Nikolaus Pioneers of the Modern Movement London Faber and Faber 1936: later ed. Pioneers of Modern Design Harmondsworth Penguin Books 1960. Rowe, Colin and Koetter, Fred Collage City Cambridge MA MIT Press 1978. Rowe, Colin The Architecture of Good Intentions London Academy Editions 1994. Tafuri, Manfredo Theories and History of Architecture London Granada 1980. Tafuri, Manfedo and Dal Co, Francesco Modern Architecture London Academy Editions 1980. Tournikiotis, P The Historiography of Modern Architecture Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1999. Vidler, Anthony Histories of the Immediate Present Cambridge MA MIT Press 2008.

14 Key Modern Architects

1  Louis Sullivan (1856–1924)

Image 1.1  Guaranty (Prudential) Building, Buffalo 1896

Louis Sullivan took on the role of expressing the cultural spirit of the brave ‘new world’ of America, working in Chicago in the late years of the nineteenth century. In the creation of new architectural forms emerging from functional necessities, his work may convincingly be described as the first truly Modernist architecture.

Sullivan originated the often-misread expression ‘form follows function’ but it is crucial to understand that his use of the term ‘functional’ was far from meaning the machine-like making of form as it was later to become widely misinterpreted. For him, a real functionalism was shaped by a profound understanding of the natural world. His buildings aimed to create forms expressing deeper meaning, produced in a contemporary architectural world that was dominated by empty conventions. Chicago, having been destroyed by fire in 1871, had been reconstructed to become an enormous mercantile and commercial centre. The office buildings constructed then were built fast and with an eye to being inventive in building terms rather than for aesthetic reasons: technique, especially the technique of building tall buildings, was the requirement in the intensely developed city. Its architecture, with the work of Daniel Burnham, Holabird and Roche and LeBaron Jenney along with that of Sullivan and his partner Adler, formed a ‘Chicago School’, a particularly energetic and far-sighted period in architectural history. It has often been said that the city is the birthplace of Modernism, and its modernity lay in its unabashed striving for a commercial architecture, representing business and its consequent new social order, rather than the artistic conventions and hierarchical societies that prevailed elsewhere. This provided an arena for a completely new architecture to emerge, owing little to precedent and less to Europe. Sullivan’s exposure to architectural education both at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and preceding that at MIT left him with frustration at the way that Classicism, as it had been institutionalized and set up as systematic procedure, had little to do with any real creation of meaning. He rejected the idea of the architect’s ‘unquestioning faith’ in the ‘eternal verities’ of the Classical orders, and his intention was, rather, to create a new architectural language derived from nature rather than tradition. Following from that the work should express the new spirit of a democratic and equal society which the United States strived to be. Influential were the practices in which he had worked: Frank Furness in Philadelphia, a highly original interpreter of Gothic forms, and then in Chicago both LeBaron Jenney, pioneer of fireproof steel-frame construction, and Dankmar Adler, with whom Sullivan was to form a partnership in 1883. In Sullivan’s expressed position, two forms of modernity are combined: building that emerges directly from economic and structural necessity, and conveys that in its form rather than it being masked by an unrelated facade, and the evolution of modes of decoration and expression that made a meaningful architecture related to modern life. The Auditorium Building in Chicago was the largest project the practice of Adler and Sullivan were to undertake. On a tight city site an opera house was flanked by several tall blocks, including offices and a hotel. The ingenuity of the section with its integration of heating and ventilation systems, as well as structural and acoustic solutions, provides evidence of the new thinking characteristic of contemporary Chicago, while the more conservative exterior with its expressive heavy stonework recalls H. H.

16 Key Modern Architects

Richardson’s recently built Marshall Field store. The interiors were innovative in terms of both their architectural form and their new genus of architectural decoration: here can be seen a rich riot of vegetal ornamentation and a spectacular series of concentric elliptical arches in the theatre auditorium. Three other substantial Chicago buildings were to follow: the Schiller Building, the Transportation Building for the Colombian Exhibition held in 1893 and the Chicago Stock Exchange. But two buildings built outside the city provide the best evidence of Sullivan’s accomplished style, the Wainwright Building in St Louis and the Guaranty Building in Buffalo (Image 1.1). Both are multi-storey steel-framed office buildings built to a ‘u’-shaped plan on free-standing sites and are similar in form and treatment. The facade of each is articulated by a grid of piers starting at second floor level over a stone base: the piers, clad in brick, emphasize verticality as the horizontal spandrels are recessed and rise through the repeated form of office floors into a massive terracotta cornice, while in the Guaranty Building terracotta also covers the exterior in a geometrically inflected mass of elaborate organic form. He wrote in the essay Ornament in Architecture (1892) that in the light of the meaningless decoration generally applied to buildings at this time that ‘our thought might concentrate acutely upon the production of buildings well formed and comely in the nude’, which the Chicago School had already been undertaking. He says that ‘we feel intuitively that our strong, athletic and simple forms will carry with natural ease the raiment of which we dream, and our buildings may be thus clad in a garment of poetic imagery … a building which is truly a work of art … must have, almost literally, a life’. The argument here is that architecture, while having no fundamental need for ornament, may have it as intrinsic to its meaning and purpose. In a later text on ornament (1924) Sullivan introduced the notion of ‘the germ’, which in a poetic phrase derived from Nietzsche is an original seed that would have a ‘will to power’: the generating energy of a building’s construction and its decorative imagery would be in harmony, growing from the same source. A further essay may be crucial to understanding his approach: in The Tall Office Building Aesthetically Considered (1896), Sullivan wrote of fundamental issues faced by the modern architect. Load-bearing masonry had in the past imposed formal as well as structural limitations; with the steel frame, these restrictions had gone. Others were very doubtful of the potential of creating a new architecture, but Sullivan, celebrating and taking for granted its existence, writes that the modern office building must drop the established styles of the past. It must celebrate its loftiness and ‘must be every inch a proud and soaring thing’, and that just as ‘all things in nature have a shape … that tells us what they are’, so the design of the tall office building should represent its functions. For him, the natural expression of the office building is to be articulated into three parts: first the lower two storeys, then the unchanging form of typical office floors and then the attic floor possessing its own articulation. It is in this essay that one of the most celebrated and misapplied quotations on modern architecture originates – that ‘form ever follows function’.

Louis Sullivan 17

The larger context of the phrase is that of a reading of the natural world: that just as the flight of the eagle, the branching oak tree, the course of the sun and the drifting clouds are unchanging, so all manifestations of human life must follow the same principle, the same ‘pervading law’. In its simplified and much repeated version of ‘form follows function’ Sullivan’s intention is clearly misread: the connection with nature is lost, the poetic expression of the text comes across instead as mechanistic and the bald imperative of the slogan makes possible a whole new way of making bad architecture. And this misreading can be seen as having a resonant and lengthy life of its own, however much it may signify a process of cleansing and renewal. His own work continued, without the partnership of Adler who had set up a separate practice in 1894: further tall buildings, notably the Bayard Building in New York, were to follow and the Schlesinger and Mayer Store in Chicago provides a different architectural solution: wide tripartite windows, the so-called Chicago window, emphasize horizontality in a wide building with a concealed steel frame. Seemingly in stark contrast, rich vegetal ornament articulates the lower two floors but is consistent with his notion of the differential base, as well as forming compelling decorative window openings that frame the commodities within for the shopper and passer-by. Nine bank buildings were built later in a series of small mid-Western towns, small in scale and reinventing the building type, each is richly decorated and has an original form with more reference to a Neo-Classical inventiveness than expressing his version of Chicago Modernism. The great achievement of many of his buildings, in particular the Auditorium and Guaranty buildings, assured Sullivan’s reputation as an accomplished and innovative architect, while his writing on the subject was persuasive and widely read. His writing style, over-expressive and verbose, is emphatic about the complexities that he felt he could see through with clarity. Kindergarten Chats, first published in 1901–2, is a dialogue between an experienced architect and a notional disciple, sometimes identified as Frank Lloyd Wright who had worked with him from 1888 to 1893. This text, frequently republished, expounds in Socratic form Sullivan’s humanistic beliefs and radical architectural programme. His writing also makes clear the influences on his work from such scientific thinkers as Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, as well as the American artist Horatio Greenough whose essays on art praise the natural beauty of animal bodies and of machines, an influence on Sullivan’s idea of the functional. Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose role in establishing an American culture was paramount, outlined in his essay Nature (1836) that the true experience of nature was a transcendental and necessary experience for mankind, against the mundane demands of the world, and this was a major underpinning of Sullivan’s thinking, putting him alongside such archetypally American writers as Henry Thoreau and Walt Whitman. His establishment of an American foundation of modern architecture, as well as through his formative influence on Frank Lloyd Wright, makes Sullivan a leading figure in understanding the origins of Modernist practice.

18 Key Modern Architects

KEY WORKS – SULLIVAN (Buildings with Dankmar Adler until 1895) Auditorium Building, Chicago, 1889 Getty Tomb, Chicago, 1890 Charnley House, Chicago, 1892 Wainwright Building, St Louis, 1892 Transportation Building, Colombian Exhibition, Chicago, 1893 Chicago Stock Exchange, 1894 Guaranty (Prudential) Building, Buffalo, 1896 Bayard Building, New York, 1899 Schlesinger and Mayer Store (Carson Pirie Scott), Chicago, 1899 National Farmers’ Bank, Owatonna, Minnesota, 1908 Merchants’ National Bank, Grinnell, Iowa, 1915

FURTHER READING Nickel, R and Siskind, A The Complete Architecture of Adler and Sullivan Chicago University of Chicago 2011. Sullivan, Louis The Autobiography of an Idea 1924, Republished New York Dover 1956. Sullivan, Louis Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings revised 1918, Republished New York George Wittenborn 1955. Szarkowski, John The Idea of Louis Sullivan, University of Minnesota 1956. Twombly, Robert Louis Sullivan: His Life and Work Chicago University of Chicago 1986. Twombly, Robert Louis Sullivan: The Public Papers Chicago University of Chicago 1988. Zukowsky, John (ed.) Chicago Architecture 1872–1922 Munich Prestel 1987 texts by Lauren S Weingarden, Martha Pollak and others.

Louis Sullivan 19

2  Otto Wagner (1841–1918)

Image 2.1  Post Office Savings Bank, Vienna 1903–7

Otto Wagner started his architectural career in the 1860s with buildings that reflected the wholehearted historicist culture of his native Vienna. Its centre had been transformed by the building of the Ringstrasse, an annular boulevard inaugurated in 1857 as an act of modernization of the historically defined Austrian Imperial city. New monumental public buildings were constructed in a variety of historical styles, including the neo-Gothic City Hall, the neo-Classical Parliament and the neo-Renaissance Opera House. In his education Wagner had been exposed both to a technically orientated approach at the Vienna Polytechnic and to the influence of Neo Classicism at the Berlin Bauakademie; the wider newly developed area of the city incorporated areas of grand middle-class apartment buildings, on a number of which the young Otto Wagner was architect-developer. A second phase of his work in the 1890s showed it transformed, embracing the decorative forms of the Jugendstil or Art Nouveau that a younger Viennese generation had generated. But Wagner was to develop a radically new architecture, intended to be a prototype of modernity owing little to history although far from expressing a simple functionality. In this later stage of his work, notably the Post Office Savings Bank in Vienna, he invented instead a Modernist language of forms derived from structure and engineering: exposed materials and mute facades are articulated in a kind of expressive objectivization of industrial detail. Wagner was in addition a very significant figure in the expression of modern architectural ideas through his teaching from 1894 as the influential professor of architecture at the Vienna Academy of Arts and in his pioneering publications. In the later nineteenth century, Vienna became one of the most significant cultural centres of Europe: it was where radical ideas in the visual arts, music, psychology and new forms of social democracy were simultaneously being developed. Along with the work of Sigmund Freud on psychoanalysis and Arnold Schönberg on new musical forms, larger cultural issues including fundamental questions on the nature of art and architecture were being urgently expressed in this period of loud intellectual ferment and ongoing political crisis. A figure widely influential there was the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose books including Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883) were widely read, while his writing on the philosophy of history resonated in this city particularly defined by the past. It declared that history was fundamentally detrimental to life, and only in the service of a powerful new direction could it adopt its necessary role of shaping action. A similarly significant influence on the enquiry into what architecture should be, rejecting the idea that architectural theory should be defined by its history, was the writing of the architect Gottfried Semper. His articulation of the fundamental forms of architecture seen in his Four Elements of Architecture (1851) and based on a reading of vernacular models was to become highly influential on Wagner. Semper wrote of the cladding of a frame structure with an enclosing skin or screen, which becomes the bearer of social expression through its embellishment. But an earlier and lesser known figure is that of Karl Bötticher, whose concerns with the necessity

Otto Wagner 21

of architecture forming a new art led him to distinguish between a building’s inner kernel and its outer shell. The ‘shell’ has the obligation to communicate what is within: he asserts that the success of architecture lies in its display of the ideas of its construction. Wagner, through an interpretation of this idea, developed a new architectural language. In contrast to the contemporary architects of Chicago, an aesthetic expression of functionality supplanted the idea that form should follow function. He joined several of his own students in the Secession, a movement led by the Art Nouveau painter Gustav Klimt, and his work in the 1890s included the patterned surfaces of such buildings as the Majolica House, clad in sinuous floral ornament. But Wagner also undertook urban development projects including the building of stations and bridges on the city’s Stadtbahn urban railway. While his station designs included intricate decorative elements, their use of unclad iron foreshadowed a more utilitarian approach than the aesthetic concerns of his contemporaries. In contrast with the fantasy expressed in their work, he sought to develop new forms that expressed the modern urbanity of a secular city also expressed in both his published work and Vienna city planning schemes. In his essay Modern Architecture first published in 1896 Wagner argued that the only possible point of departure for artistic creation is modern life – a pragmatic style free of historical references. In this position he opposed his architectural contemporaries in Austria in that architecture was no longer a question of choosing a ‘style’: architecture, he asserts, must always develop its art form from the processes of construction. And this art form will be truthful to represent how a building is made. His Vienna Post Office Savings Bank designed in 1903 is a complete version of a manifestly modern architectural approach. An eight storey building, monumental and with traces of Classicism, its flat facade is clad with sheets of white marble punctuated by a grid of metal bolts with aluminium heads, and is austere in its geometrical simplicity. The architectural innovation of the use of aluminium is also seen in the entrance canopy and the heating columns in the banking hall which forms the centre of the building. Inside the hall can be seen simplified forms, minimal ornament and a tautly curved suspended glass and steel roof, which presents the image of an engineered structure apparently like the vault of an exhibition hall or railway station vault. But it is achieved with a more complex section that elevates the floor, consisting of glass blocks, and encloses the lightweight vault of the roof with a more substantial covering (Image 2.1). The facade itself also forms an enclosure: the thin marble slabs that cover and articulate the building’s public face can be seen to be insubstantial, their emphasized bolts being a metaphor of construction rather than being structurally necessary. As Harry Francis Mallgrave has written, his aim was to ‘outfit architecture with a new cut of clothing’: like the younger architect Loos, Wagner was primarily aiming to regain the real social role of architecture with new forms of representation, rather than witness its downfall through historicist irrelevance.

22 Key Modern Architects

This highly significant building and the St Leopold Church at Steinhof articulated a persuasively modern architectural language, seen as well in other buildings in Vienna including the Neustiftgasse apartment building and the second house he built for himself. The expression of mass and surface on the facade of the Neustiftgasse building, for example, is devoid of any conventional ornament but is articulated with vertical and horizontal lines, forming an undifferentiated grid of windows cut into the surface. Wagner’s modernity can also be seen in the rational urbanism of two development plans for Vienna in 1893 and 1911, based on efficiency and economy rather than the prevailing late nineteenth-century Beaux-Arts derived idea of ‘the city beautiful’. The infinite expansion of the city into a modern metropolis would be achieved instead through the uniformity and repetition of city blocks. His book Modern Architecture was the very first powerful articulation of its subject, while his architecture became influential in the formation of a ‘Wagner School’, led by Josef Hoffman and Josef Olbrich in Vienna; architects in the wider area of the Austrian Empire emulated and developed aspects of his work. Its influence can be seen also in its shaping of Sant’Elia’s visions of the buildings of a future city in La Citta Nuova and the highly original work of Rudolph Schindler, his former student, in California. More generally and more widely, it may also be seen as prefiguring the fully realized functionalist architecture to be seen two decades later in Europe, in its austerity and relationship to industrially derived forms. But it should better be seen instead as a modern architecture practiced very much an art, expressive of a modern poetic of construction and a subtle response to modern conditions and techniques that is convincing in itself rather than being a forerunner of greater and full-blooded modernity.

KEY WORKS – WAGNER Majolica House, Linke Weinzeile, Vienna, 1898 Stadtbahn Station, Karlsplatz, Vienna, 1898 Die Zeit Telegraph Office, Vienna, 1902 Post Office Savings Bank, Vienna, 1903–7 St Leopold Church, Steinhof, Vienna, 1905 Historical Museum project, Vienna, 1907 Kaiserbad Dam lock house, Vienna, 1907 Neustiftgasse apartments, Vienna, 1909 Development plan for Vienna, 1911 Wagner Villa II, Vienna, 1912 Modern Architecture 1896, 1906 editions: retitled as Building-Art of Our Time (1914)

Otto Wagner 23

FURTHER READING Geretsegger, Heinz Otto Wagner, 1841–1989; The Expanding City: The Beginning of Modern Architecture. London Academy 1979. Mallgrave, Harry (ed.) Otto Wagner: Reflections on the Raiment of Modernity Santa Monica Getty Center, 1993: essays by Fritz Neumeyer, Stanford Anderson, Werner Oechslin and others. Oechslin, Werner Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, and the Road to Modern Architecture Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2002. Schorske, Carl Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture New York Knopf 1979. Wagner, Otto Modern Architecture 1902: Introduction Harry Francis Mallgrave Santa Monica Getty Center 1988.

24 Key Modern Architects

3  Adolf Loos (1870–1933) Adolf Loos was instrumental in creating the cultural context for the development of a Modernist position in the early years of the twentieth century: his highly rhetorical essays, notably the often misread Ornament and Crime, were to become his bestknown achievement. But his work as an architect is equally significant in developing a design approach radical in its austerity and, latterly, in advancing new concepts in the creation of interior space. The context of his work was fin-de-siècle Austria, but unusually for a European of his generation, he had had first-hand experience of the new world of the United States, where he lived for three years in the early 1890s: the origin of his strongly held polemical position was the experience of Chicago and New York, American innovation and disregard of tradition offering a welcome corrective to the cultural conventions of Europe. Returning to Vienna in 1896, Loos soon became a participant in the rich cultural life of a city where issues of art and ideology were paramount, and were debated with an urgency not seen elsewhere. Reviews and essays for journals and newspapers included his acerbic commentary on current Austrian taste in the design of clothes and everyday objects: he frequently wrote of the necessity to be ‘modern’ on the American or British model. These essays, later collected in the volume Spoken into the Void, also include criticism of the building of the Vienna Ringstrasse, the reconstruction of much of the centre of the city. In Potemkintown (1898) Loos writes of it as resembling the fake Russian villages made of cloth and cardboard created for Catherine the Great to admire as she drove through the landscape: he argues that, as a fundamental matter of morality, it is wrong for its elaborate, grand facades, appearing to be aristocratic palaces, to actually house modest apartments for the middle class and – most significantly – that historicist styles are a fraud. The most celebrated of his essays Ornament and Crime (1908) deals with a similar theme, of the surface both of buildings and objects not needing any kind of embellishment: ornament was no longer wanted in the modern world as mankind had evolved sufficiently to leave it behind, but not only was it unnecessary, it was an

exploitation of the worker who would take much longer to create an object that was ornamented. For Loos, taking a historical view, ornament was created by man in a ‘primitive’ state, and he declared, ‘… the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from everyday objects’. The modern designer who developed their own form of ornamentation, irrelevant to the needs of modern life, was, he said, ‘either a criminal or a degenerate’. The connection to Louis Sullivan’s more measured argument in his 1892 text Ornament in Architecture that ‘our thought might concentrate acutely upon the production of buildings well formed and comely in the nude’ is evident, and Loos’s vision is of a future when ‘the streets of the city will glisten like white walls’. The influence of the essay, translated into French in 1913, was to make Loos’s reputation that of a polemicist rather than a building architect and Le Corbusier made the essay a key support of his argument for the radical reform of architecture and the rejection of revivalist styles. But a misreading that ornament inevitably was a crime was, however, later to become a prevalent and influential concept. It was some decades later that substantial international attention began to be given to his work as a designer: his work is given only passing mention in the histories of modern architecture by Giedion, Pevsner and Zevi. In the 1960s, a revaluation was to take place and saw the publication of the first monograph on his work. Loos’s architectural practice had started with the design of a number of apartment interiors, and the first larger commission was for the Café Museum in Vienna (gaining the hostile nickname the ‘Café Nihilismus’), its decor and fittings startlingly plain. It used the functional bentwood furniture made by the Viennese company Thonet, championed by Loos and an early example of what would later be called the ‘objet-type’. The Kärntner Bar is an intense, tiny space clad in veined marble and highly polished wood, using translucent onyx and mirrors to create an optical and spatial illusion that serves to illustrate architectural effects that do not depend on tradition, let alone ornamentation. The building of a large urban block later known as the Looshaus, completed in 1911, opposite the gates of the Imperial Palace in Michaelerplatz in the centre of Vienna is perhaps Loos’s most significant built work (Image 3.1). Declared by him to be the type of a Viennese building, the unadorned facade of the upper floors of apartments initiated a substantial scandal causing construction work to be suspended. The lower floors are, however, clad in marble with Doric columns articulating, but not supporting, the entrance front, thus making clear Loos’s intention to create a relationship to its historically loaded context. The distinction of dividing the facade into three parts, the lower floors visible to passers-by, the middle section and the top, reflects the work of Louis Sullivan as well as later generations of American builders of skyscrapers, despite the modest height of Loos’s building. It is neither a prototype of the kind of Modernist urban building which began to be built two decades later, nor is it simply a transitional half-historicist composition: instead, it reflects Loos’s overriding concerns for an architecture that is considerate of its context but which is relevant to contemporary life.

26 Key Modern Architects

Much of his architecture involved the construction of private houses, and as Loos was to write in the essay Vernacular Art (1914) the house was intended to be ‘discrete on the outside and its entire richness disclosed on the inside’. His first was the Villa Karma built in Switzerland, its opulent interior scarcely implied by the geometrical, plain exterior. The Steiner House in the suburbs of Vienna has a garden facade cool in its austerity, lacking window surrounds, but a warm interior characterized by oak wall cladding and ceiling beams, and incorporating unplastered brick. Consistency between inside and out lies, however, in Loos’s interpretation of building traditions, utilizing the plain lime mortar of the Vienna countryside and sheet metal roof of more recent tradition. So, as Benedetto Gravagnuolo writes, ‘the house is the result not so much of a process of abstraction as of an updated re-proposition of building techniques’.

Image 3.1  Looshaus (Goldman and Salatsch) Michaelerplatz, Vienna 1909-11

Adolf Loos 27

In the essay Architecture (1910), Loos made the more fundamental assertion: ‘Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art, the tomb and the monument: everything else, everything that serves a purpose, should be excluded from the realm of art.’ The house, then, was to be utilitarian: to fulfil its functions of housing the activities of its inhabitants. His later houses were not ‘composed’ according to a set of aesthetic principles, but like other of his aphorisms Loos’s statement can be seen to include levels of ambiguity since his architecture was certainly practiced as an art, and his design process complex and refined. The principle of domestic design that he developed in some twenty built and unbuilt projects, although never fully articulated in his writing, was that of the Raumplan. Generally translated as ‘plan of volumes’, it is the design in three dimensions of a house’s living spaces within a nominally cubic envelope. The intricacy of the sections of such designs as the Rufer House, the Moissi House and in particular the Moller and Müller Houses built late in his career show a completely new way of designing, with shifts in floor levels, differentiating areas of occupation. Functionally, the scullery would be of a lower height than the dining room and the main salon may have partly separated distinct spaces off it. But such designs also ensured that the experience of this inhabited space would be consistent and created a version of the promenade architecturale that Le Corbusier was later to make a primary organizing principle. Loos’s domestic interiors look inward and the interior world of the house is protected by windows either opaque or curtained; a raised sitting area off the living room of the Moller House provides a particularly intimate sensation of comfort and seclusion through acting like the box of a theatre, looking out over the main space. Loos’s architectural position, seen in both his writings and his built work, is largely consistent. For him, academic learning and architectural convention had obscured the possibility of a new architecture that was based on the processes of building itself. Modern life needed an architecture that rediscovered the processes of building, and in an act of purification related to an authentically modern culture. He emphasized the value of the production of a modest, unelaborated architecture: this approach relates to an understanding of the vernacular, although the sophistication of his approach makes it far removed from the anonymous practice that that implies. Loos advocates a sense of materials, their characteristics and appropriate use, to produce a directness of form: material could be articulated in such a way that a decorative language was unnecessary. In contrast to the following generation who were to define and establish Modernism, his work has an absence of utopianism, has no grand social or political programme, representing an architecture of evolution rather than revolution. Loos’s approach signifies a new foundation of architecture that, despite the declamatory quality of his writing, displays modesty and restraint. Chiming with the material concerns of the generation of architects emerging in the 1990s, including the approaches of such architects as Herzog de Meuron and David Chipperfield, Loos’s architecture has regained its standing as being of fundamental relevance.

28 Key Modern Architects

KEY WORKS – LOOS Café Museum, Vienna, 1899 Loos Apartment, Vienna, 1903 Villa Karma, Clarens, Switzerland, 1906 Kärntner Bar, Vienna, 1907 Ornament and Crime, 1908 Looshaus (Goldman and Salatsch), Michaelerplatz, Vienna, 1909–11 Architecture, 1910 Steiner House, Vienna, 1910 Scheu House, Vienna, 1912 Knize Store, Vienna, 1913 Zentralsparkasse Bank, Vienna, 1914 Chicago Tribune competition entry, 1922 Rufer House, Vienna, 1922 Villa Moissi (project), Venice Lido, 1923 Otto-Hass Hof housing, Vienna, 1924 Tristan Tzara House, Montparnasse, Paris, 1927 House for Josephine Baker (project), Paris, 1928 Moller House, Vienna, 1928 Müller House, Prague, 1930 Houses, Werkbundsiedlung, Vienna, 1932

FURTHER READING Colomina, Beatriz Privacy and Publicity Cambridge MA MIT Press 1994. Gravagnuolo, Benedetto Adolf Loos: Theory and Works Milan Idea Books 1982. Long, Christopher The Looshaus London Yale University Press 2011. Loos, Adolf Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays Riverside, CA Ariadne Press 1998. Masheck, Joseph Adolf Loos: The Art of Architecture London I.B. Tauris 2013. Munz, Ludwig and Kunstler, Gustav Adolf Loos: Pioneer of Modern Architecture London Thames and Hudson 1966. Rukschcio, Burkhardt and Schachel, Roland Adolf Loos Salzburg Residenz Verlag 1982 (German). Safran, Yehuda and Wang, Wilfried (eds) The Architecture of Adolf Loos London Arts Council 1985.

Adolf Loos 29

4  Peter Behrens (1868–1940)

Image 4.1  AEG Turbine Hall, Berlin 1909

Peter Behrens’s work initiated a new synthesis of industry and the arts, and prefigured the far more celebrated work of the Bauhaus, whose founder Walter Gropius worked with him as a principal assistant – as did the young Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, the two other figures who came to define Modernism internationally. Seen as an innovator in the first decade of the twentieth century, Behrens’s architecture may appear bewildering, however, because he does not appear committed to a particular aesthetic approach or style. He started working in a version of the Arts and Crafts, passed through interpretations of a modernized, stripped Classicism to a revival of medieval brick in the years after the First World War and later adopted the minimal aesthetic which came to be termed the International Style. This was not, however, a simple progression and this lack of consistency would have been unthinkable to, say, Auguste Perret or Frank Lloyd Wright. Behrens also differs from other contemporaries in that he started his career as a fine artist. Having studied in Hamburg and Munich, he worked and exhibited in Munich as a painter and later as a designer of furniture and ceramics, and was invited to participate in the setting up of an artists’ colony, the Matildenhöhe in Darmstadt in 1899. Here, Behrens built a house for himself, his first building which was an immediate success, of cubic form and with spare Art Nouveau-inspired detail. His career as an architect subsequently developed with high-profile commissions, largely for exhibition buildings and installations. In work that is clearly classically derived, he evolved his own original process of design that used a strict controlling geometry and forms that depended on number and proportion rather than historicist reference: as contemporary critics maintained, it constituted a universal or even ‘objective’ interpretation of Classicism. The group the Deutscher Werkbund (German Crafts Association) of which Behrens was a co-founder in 1907 was an officially sanctioned organization that aimed to raise the standard of production of German industry. This influential body was inspired by Hermann Muthesius who had been in Britain as a cultural attaché specifically to study British achievement in design, culminating in his production of the book The English House (1904) that appreciated the achievement of its contemporary architects. His wider aim was to adapt and apply artists’ work to the needs of Germany’s burgeoning industrial production, in order to raise its standards and ultimately its value. In this emphasis on the value of industrial design, a visually educated population would benefit from well-designed objects: while these ideas have a close relation to the English critic William Morris’s polemic in his writings and designs, its direct application to large-scale industrial production was new. In 1907, Behrens was appointed as design director of the leading German electrical company AEG in Berlin, and his work here is the most significant of his career. He gave it a visual style and was involved in the design of everything from products to packaging, from advertising campaigns to the buildings which housed their work. In his design of everyday objects such as lamps and kettles, Behrens’s design process was to discover a fundamental form related to their technology, so taking

Peter Behrens 31

the mechanical basis of an object and enclosing it in an appropriate geometrical shape. This would become the foundation both of the principles of Bauhaus design and of Le Corbusier’s notion of the ‘objet-type’ and became a highly persuasive idea. From his AEG period, when he also did the company’s graphic and interior design, can be seen the approach he adopted of the architect as a universal designer: Behrens originated the processes of modern industrial design in Germany, as well as initiating the design of corporate identity which would later become a universal practice. The first factory building for AEG was the Turbine Hall where great electric engines could be assembled: this large and functional space was, however, given a very different kind of enclosure in what was neither an expression of functionalism, nor was it a purely formal envelope. The side elevation is a glazed skin, with a defined rhythm of steel columns, each with a pivotal joint at its base creating a kind of industrial but Classical order. The facade can be seen as a version of a Classical temple front, with a polygonal pediment in concrete. The massive corner pylons appear to be solid blocks, but are thin shells of concrete, sloping inwards at the top; the huge central plane of glass panels stands forward of them, appearing (Image 4.1) to support the weight of the roof, but actually supported by the steel frame behind. Behrens’s achievement here is to create an impressive image of a classically inflected industrial block, while giving a subtle architectural treatment achieving gravity and dynamism. The facade, bearing a logo for the company also designed by Behrens, gave a striking modern image for the company – factories before this had not generally been subject to a design process and its value was as a piece of design suggesting the good and modern design of the company’s products more generally. In tracing the trajectory of the creation of a modern architecture in Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936), Nikolaus Pevsner wrote that it realized the imaginative potential of the design of factories: ‘[T]he result is a pure work of art, so finely balanced that the huge dimensions are scarcely realised.’ And as Stanford Anderson has written, Behrens’s aim was to elevate the factory and its functions to a high cultural level: ‘Beyond mere utility, he sought to create the monuments of a culture based on industrial power – both physical and corporate power.’ Other buildings for AEG include the similar form of the Large Machine Assembly Hall; with iron framing and brick infill, as well as less allusion to the Classical, it appears more a functional building. The facade of the Small Motor Works building is, however, centred on a long brick Classical colonnade: Behrens became part of a larger tendency in Germany to return to a less innovative version of the Neo-Classical. Karl Friedrich Schinkel was his acknowledged source for the German Embassy building in St Petersburg, completed in 1912. Here, though, rather than a ‘correct’ Classical design, it makes historicist reference in a version with a stripped and almost two-dimensional Doric colonnade. Elsewhere, Behrens built a number of houses

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which adopted elementary forms, geometrically ordered even if not actually symmetrical: the Cuno House (1910) is dominated by exaggerated cornices and the vertical lines of a stair tower in the centre of the otherwise plain facade, which seems to prefigure later French work to be termed Art Deco. In subsequent work, the rejection of his former sober restraint can be seen in the expressionist brickwork of the Hoechst Dyeworks, while in other buildings he adopted the minimal Modernism of Gropius and Taut. For the Weissenhof Seidlung estate in Stuttgart (1927) coordinated by Mies, he designed a flat-roofed white-walled block of flats in the required Modernist orthodox style: the approach he had evolved in the years before the First World War became abandoned. In those pre-war years Behrens’s office had become a focus of the most advanced architecture in Berlin and attracted a number of talented younger architects who were to become more celebrated than he himself in the critical history of modern architecture. Walter Gropius was the first, joining the office early in 1908 and staying until March 1910 when he set up his own office with Adolf Meyer who had also worked there. Gropius wrote in the Werkbund Year Book of 1913 that Behrens’s buildings for AEG were ‘monuments of nobility and strength’ that had an immediate and positive effect on factory design in Germany, and his own early work had an even clearer indebtedness to Behrens. Mies van der Rohe worked in the office from October 1908 to the middle of 1910, and again from June 1911 to Spring 1912, when he worked for Behrens at St Petersburg: he was later to recall that he ‘learnt the great form’, which may be interpreted as the classically derived formal model, from him. Le Corbusier’s time there was shorter and perhaps of less significance: he worked with Behrens from November 1910 to April 1911, but credits him with introducing him to an understanding of Classical proportion which was certainly to become a prominent basis of Le Corbusier’s own work. In a text written in 1907 Behrens described the goal of ‘concentrating on and implementing exactly the technique of mechanical production in order to arrive by artistic means at those forms that derive directly from and correspond to the machine and machine production’. And in describing art as an act of transformation he introduces the idea of type-objects: ‘The realm of art begins at the point where an object that has been simplified into a sovereign form becomes the universal symbol for all similar objects.’ Most tellingly, it is he who introduced the aphorism ‘less is more’, always later attributed to Mies van der Rohe: Mies recounted how Behrens used the phrase to dismiss Mies’s own more elaborate versions of the design of the Turbine Hall’s side elevation on which he was working. In the modern architectural paradigm that Behrens evolved, the creation of new proportionally derived forms, engaging with the available technology, was consistent. The innovation of such buildings as the AEG Turbine Hall is not simply as a transitional, less purely ‘functional’ form but remains a significant achievement in industrial architecture. His work stands as a valuable element of groundbreaking work in the creation of a modern architecture emerging from its new relationship with industry.

Peter Behrens 33

KEY WORKS – BEHRENS Behrens’s House, Darmstadt, 1901 North Western German Art Exhibition, Oldenburg, 1905 Product design and graphic design for AEG, 1907–14 AEG Pavilion, shipbuilding exhibition, Berlin, 1908 Turbine Hall, AEG, Berlin, 1909 Cuno House, Eppenhausen, 1910 German Embassy, St Petersburg, 1912 Large Machine Assembly Hall, AEG, Berlin, 1912 Mannesmann offices, Dusseldorf, 1912 Small Motor Works building, AEG, Berlin, 1913 Dombauhütte, Munich, 1922 Offices, Hoechst Dyeworks, Hoechst, 1924 Offices, Alexanderplatz, Berlin, 1931

FURTHER READING Anderson, Stanford Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century Cambridge MA MIT Press 2000. Buddensieg, Tilmann Industriekultur: Peter Behrens and the AEG Cambridge, MA MIT Press 1984. Windsor, Alan Peter Behrens: Architect and Designer London Architectural Press 1981.

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5  Auguste Perret (1874–1954)

Image 5.1  Notre Dame, Le Raincy Paris 1923

Auguste Perret’s work in the architectural use of reinforced concrete identifies him as a pioneer in the development of an architectural language that utilizes modern architecture’s most characteristic material. It is said that he made concrete architecturally respectable, following on from the experimental work of the engineer Hennebique and the architecture of De Baudot, among many others; his consistent and rigorous use of the material was developed through a series of buildings that developed new techniques and forms taking concrete’s properties as fundamental to his design process. He also had a pivotal role in the development of the work of the young Le Corbusier, who worked in his office for a period from 1908.

For Perret, the authentic structural form for concrete was the frame: his mode of using reinforced concrete was to create an architecture of columns and beams, thus emulating the most archetypal forms of construction in wood and stone; his later work is, in particular, classical in feeling as well as often in its detail. His training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 1890s was also within that late manifestation of a Classical tradition which the school defined, but leavened by a recognition of the need for rationality in processes of design: two influential teachers produced bodies of work that can be seen as embracing functionality, or rather what can be termed structural rationalism, instead of being preoccupied with issues of style. Julien Guadet’s Elements et Theories de l’architecture (1904) documents the logical analysis expressed in two decades of his teaching; Auguste Choisy, professor at the rather more pragmatic Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, presented a rational exposition in his Histoires (1899). He produced a particularly systematic interpretation of the great works of historical architecture, underlying which was the idea of architectural form being the logical result of technique, this belief an enduring tradition in France which Perret was later to sustain in his work. But Perret’s utilization of concrete has another more particular origin, in his family business as contractors: the Perret Frères’s making of buildings (not usually the direct concern of those then involved in what was very much the art of architecture) allowed for the direct application of ideas to practice. This was clearly the case in Perret’s first significant design, a block of flats constructed in reinforced concrete built in Rue Franklin in Paris in 1904: its radical form of construction meant that it was seen as too risky by others to undertake. Important as the first piece of architecture internationally to embody the principles of reinforced concrete construction, it was a particular application of the freedoms allowed by the material. Despite the covering of almost all the concrete, mainly with floral tiles which seem to belong to a different aesthetic, the main structural elements were visible and it created a new kind of form, while the structure allowed for less substantial and more widely spaced supports. The legislative requirement for a light well was transformed by it being put on the facade of the building, which thus has a concave face compared to neighbouring blocks, as well as bringing much more light into the flats. Innovation is also seen in the constructional rather than purely architectural decision to clad the rear facade with glass bricks. A second building in Paris for a more industrial use makes clear, though, that Perret’s intention was not simply to exploit concrete’s potential. The Garage Ponthieu’s concrete frame was left without cladding, and wide beams and vertical supports form the expression of the whole facade. But its proportion and rhythm have unmistakable classical origins, in the proportional rhythm of 3:5:3, while its architectural aims are clearly beyond those of a simple structural rationalism given the abstract design of its rose window at the centre of the facade and the stained glass of the doors. Nevertheless, this building was accurately seen by contemporaries as a radical new beginning for architecture. A major building of the 1920s, the church of Notre Dame Le Raincy, seemed to also have a historical origin: its appearance as a modern version of the light stone

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structure of the celebrated Gothic Sainte-Chapelle in Paris is belied by its form (Image 5.1). Without buttressing or pointed arches it is inspired, instead, by the Classical basilica. A skin of glass encloses the minimal skeleton: the slender cylindrical columns of the building are attenuated to their clearest structural essence, and the building has an elegance lacking in other of his major works. It has carefully finished concrete shuttering on exterior and interior surfaces and with this building, according to the historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, ‘concrete came of age as a building material’. Perret here uses a load-bearing frame with a lightweight enclosure infilling, which can be seen as an elemental composition influenced by the thought of Choisy. Elsewhere, for example in the facade of the Theatre built for the Exhibition of Decorative Art, a distinction of wall and frame is very clearly seen. This theme of the separation of support and cladding was to become one of the prevailing ideas of modernism in architecture, as can be seen in much work designed later, and the idea of which was advanced by the theory and practice of the following generation of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. Notre Dame Le Raincy, more than earlier buildings, seemed to confirm Perret’s role as the leading architect in evolving unprecedented Modernist forms through the use of its most radical new material: he was invited to form an atelier by students at the Beaux-Arts School, including Ernö Goldfinger, who was later to take Perret’s principles further in his career developed in Britain. Goldfinger later wrote that his former tutor’s ‘endeavour was to modulate structure, to bring it to human scale, to tie this new structure of reinforced concrete to the historic tradition of France and that of the Classical tradition’. Later commissions up to and beyond the Second World War show Perret’s role shifting from being an outsider not accepted by the architectural establishment – he had, after all, never completed his architectural education – and he built large public projects in Paris such as the Musée des Travaux Publiques. Such buildings represent a distinctly modern architecture nevertheless highly classical in feeling: weighty and monumental but painstakingly detailed, articulating surfaces through such techniques as bush-hammering and the use of different aggregates. Perret’s reconstruction of the centre of the north coastal French city of Le Havre which had been largely destroyed in the Second World War is, despite its austere and rigorously composed concrete forms, not far removed from nineteenth-century urbanism, its buildings placed around a sequence of boulevards and squares. At the same time, he published in one of his few writings on his architectural intentions, A Contribution to a Theory of Architecture, that if an architect ‘creates a work that will always seem to have existed, that is, in a word, banal, (he is) entitled to feel content’. This valuing of anonymity, particularly evident in his work in middle and late periods, sets Perret apart from the aims of many of the following generation of architects: the use of amorphous expressive forms, which might alternatively be seen as an authentic use of concrete, was for him estranged from the tradition of European architecture; the goal of art, he asserts, is ‘not to astonish or to move us’. If, he argues, the architect designs correctly from the demands of structure, it is not necessary to be concerned with ‘art’. Later architects, not least his most famous pupil

Auguste Perret 37

Le Corbusier, were to contradict this position, arguing for the need for the architect to invent new forms – but his influence continued, particularly in mainstream French building. Perret’s thought has reappeared in more recent times with such architects as Herzog and De Meuron savouring the delights of a more anonymous architecture. His work, by avoiding both historical pastiche and avant-garde expressiveness, stands as an alternative modern tradition, and Goldfinger and Antonin Raymond were to develop the language further; Perret’s architecture had remained rooted in the Classical rationalism in which he had been trained.

KEY WORKS – PERRET Apartment block, Rue Franklin, Paris, 1904 Garage Ponthieu, Paris, 1907 Paul Guadet House, Boulevard Marat, Paris, 1912 Theatre Champs Elysées, Paris, 1913 Atelier Esders, Paris, 1920 Notre Dame, Le Raincy, 1923 Palais de Bois, Paris, 1924 Theatre, Exhibition of Decorative Art, Paris, 1925 Tower, Grenoble, 1925 Studio Chana Orloff, Paris, 1929 Apartment block and Perret studio, Rue Raynouard, Paris, 1932 Palais du Trocadero, Paris, project 1933 Mobilier Nationale, Paris, 1936 Musée des Travaux Publiques, Paris, 1936–48 Le Havre: city reconstruction, 1945–55 A Contribution to a Theory of Architecture, 1952

FURTHER READING Britton, Karla Auguste Perret London and New York Phaidon 2001. Collins, Peter Concrete, The Vision of a New Architecture: new ed. Santa Monica 2004, with texts by K Frampton and R Legault. Frampton, Kenneth Studies in Tectonic Culture Cambridge MA MIT Press 1995: Ch 5 Auguste Perret (Institut Francais d’Architecture) Les Frères Perret: l’oeuvre complete Paris Editions Norma 2000 (French). Saddy, Pierre ‘Perret and the Commonly-Received Ideas About His Work’ 9H 3 1982, pp. 28–32.

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6  Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) Frank Lloyd Wright, along with Le Corbusier who was born a generation later, is perhaps the most significant of all architects of the modern period and the designer of some of its most outstanding buildings. As an American, he manifests a very different basis for a new architecture from the Modernist culture that developed in Europe and on which he had an influence, and one of the facets of his abundant body of work is to represent the possibilities of specifically American architecture, in opposition to historical traditions formulated across the Atlantic. The two most prominent architects in the United States who preceded him – H. H. Richardson and Louis Sullivan – were closer to both European and Classical models while others among his contemporaries, such as Daniel Burnham and Julia Morgan, were formed by their association with the tradition of the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which itself had successfully translated to the American continent. Wright’s background was without formal training, let alone that provided by the Beaux-Arts: largely brought up in pastoral surroundings in the American Midwest, his father was a Unitarian minister and music teacher. Wright’s exposure to romantic music and literature, and the humanist writing of Schiller and Shakespeare as well as that of the contemporary Americans Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, took the place of a more conventional education in the Classics. His work, as it emerged in a mature form in the early years of the twentieth century, was evidently modern in terms of what it aimed to realize in its rejection of past forms and languages. Issues of a time earlier than the twentieth century were resolved in his work, primarily derived from an anti-machine and crafts-based position, rather than any more fundamental attempt to be revolutionary. In 1952, Philip Johnson expressed the sardonic view that the still-working Wright was the greatest architect of the nineteenth century. Wright himself stood apart from the discourse of architecture as it developed elsewhere, making a clear distinction between himself as an inspired individual artist and the work done by others, even those working in a comparable manner. He wrote in a 1930 article of the destructive obsession with the ‘machine age’ seen in the aesthetics of modernism, and that modern architecture, in hands

uninspired by joy, could become ‘a poor flat-faced thing of steel bones, box outlines, gas-pipe and handrail fittings’. For him, both the dead hand of tradition and this new obsession with the functional were unable to create an authentic and beautiful modern architecture. The succession of houses Wright built after 1900, including the Robie and Martin houses, can be seen as expressions of Arts and Crafts principles, but paradoxically they transcend that interpretation: they have an abundance of unprecedented forms and innovation in their ideas of space and as design and in detail, as well as their incorporation of modern techniques. ‘Organic’ architecture is the term often applied by Wright himself and used by many of those interpreting his work. That this expresses an intended relationship to nature is clear, and while the term may often be seen as equivocal and difficult to define, it also implies the unity of a design, from the overall form of a building to the smallest details, from its siting to its interior decoration. This is a realization of the gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, an idea that emerged in the architecture of the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau. For Wright, the aim was to make a ‘complete work of art’ that related to the needs of modern life, with the building, its furnishing and siting all expressing a unity of purpose. Nature, in terms of applying its forms directly, as ‘ready-made’ was inappropriate, but learning from its structures provided a fundamental method: the Japanese term edaburi, meaning the formative arrangement of the branches of a tree, was applied by him to indicate the depth of this entirely natural unity of parts. Wright’s earliest work was in two Chicago architectural offices, first that of Joseph Silsbee and more significantly with Adler and Sullivan from 1888 to 1893. He was employed as chief draughtsman in the Sullivan office, and it provided opportunities – Wright was responsible for designs such as the Charnley House, while in the office – but also the foundation for an architectural approach both extending and repudiating the position of Louis Sullivan. Wright’s Winslow House shows an independence from Sullivan: its planning is less axial, and its composition is derived from geometrical forms more than from tradition, with an emphasis on the horizontal line. These themes were developed in the succession of houses built over the following fifteen years, known as Prairie houses both because of their Midwestern location in what were then semi-rural areas, notably Oak Park outside Chicago, and also because of their horizontality, matching the flat landscapes of the prairie. The development of themes in these houses, despite their being one-off projects with no larger programme than housing successful members of the middle class, was perhaps the greatest achievement of his long career. Ideas of abstract space, of the disposition of the functional elements of the house, their relationship to landscape, indeed of the relationship of inside to outside space, created something completely new and were certainly influential on the longer term development of Modernist ideas. The transition between the forms of houses designed both within the Sullivan office and in the early years of his own office shows Wright’s absorption of and working through of a number of contemporary influences, among them the irregularity

40 Key Modern Architects

of the ‘Shingle’ style. The theoretical writing of Gottfried Semper, translated and published in the Chicago journal Inland Architect in 1889, provided an essential reference. Semper’s description of the four fundamental elements of architecture – the fireplace as focus, the overhanging roof and the earthwork and textile wall – was a reminder, beyond the nineteenth-century question of the specifics of style, of the phenomenological underpinning of the nature of inhabited space. However, perhaps the key element of Wright’s own evolution of such new principles is his response to a traditional Japanese building – Ho-o-den – constructed in Chicago for the World’s Fair of 1893, and which furnished a pure example of Semperian principles. Ho-o-den was a hybrid consisting of elements of both domestic and temple architecture, and so in a sense it was no more than a generic example of Japanese building form. For Wright, however, it provided a radical point of departure. As Grant Manson described it in a text written in 1940, ‘Beneath its ample roof which served no purpose but to shelter, and above the platform on which the temple stood, was the area where people moved about and lived – an open and ephemeral region of sliding screens which could change its appearance according to the activity of the hour, and which, in occidental terms, was not architecture at all. In this region between roof and platform, solid walls were practically non-existent.’ The plan was centred on the tokonoma, or shrine, a fixed and unchanging focus, the rest of the building providing semi-enclosed spaces for living. This model of Japanese architecture became a fertile field for the exploration of new formal concerns for Wright. In particular, the most radical single aspect of his developing approach in domestic architecture can be seen as emerging from this discovery: the breaking down of the house from being the singular form of the box into a more open and dynamic formal composition. Wright developed what he called his ‘grammar’ of architecture in the light of Semper’s thought and what were perceived as the qualities of Japanese architecture and space. In such buildings as the Martin House built in the early years of the twentieth century, the fireplace replaced the tokonoma, as if a domestic altar, while the walls were re-imagined as screens enclosing space; windows as long strips allowed the outsized, overhanging roof to float visually over the enclosing walls, thus articulating each element as separate. Beyond their theoretical underpinning, however, the houses were built as places of repose, models of comforting shelter away from the world. As Wright wrote in his 1908 text In the Cause of Architecture, such houses’ exterior walls were meant to look as if they were organically emerging from the earth, accentuating the natural beauty of the flat, prairie-like site by means of ‘gently sloping roofs, low proportions, quiet sky lines, supressed heavy-set chimneys and sheltering overhangs, low terraces and out-reaching walls’. An integral fireplace became an important part of the building; its interior, rather than box-like rooms fulfilling specific functions, formed a succession of spaces flowing into each other as a continuum. Wright’s sense of space was abstract rather than directly functional and can be seen to relate to the thought of contemporary philosopher Henri Bergson who introduced the notion of experiential time in Creative Evolution (1907): his assertion of the fluidity of time and space, defined by experience, chimed with Wright’s thought of spaces

Frank Lloyd Wright 41

which he described as expressing ‘continual becoming’. The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching: ‘we turn clay to make a vessel, but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends’: that Wright’s spaces, based on their existential purpose, preceded buildings’ overall form gives them a radical edge which underlines their achievement as highly original formulations of architectural space. The Martin House is perhaps the most complex and most fully accomplished of the series of Prairie houses, based, however asymmetrically disposed, on a square grid which includes extensive gardens, a glazed corridor leading to a conservatory and a guest house. The main living spaces, loosely defined and flowing around the focal point of the fireplace, and beyond on to terraces sheltered by over-reaching eaves, its loose three-dimensional organization is absolutely unprecedented in house design. The last of this series is the Robie House: sited quite close to the street, the entrance is hidden, and the long strip windows of its elevated living spaces ensure the privacy of its occupants (Image 6.1). It is relatively modest in terms of size, and also more compact than most, built on a gridded plan and roughly symmetrical; its material emphasizes the horizontal with walls formed of long limestone blocks and elongated bricks set in horizontally laid mortar; its form of low extending roofs, strips of window and partly submerged service spaces make it the fully achieved type of the Prairie house, and which was reflected in such later European work as that by Mies van der Rohe, who was to take further Wright’s idea of flowing space. Its modernity is also reflected in its servicing with the design of integral heating, air cooling and lighting fixtures, in the lack of the decorative features seen in earlier Wright houses and in the extensive but hidden use of steel in construction, allowing, for example, for the extensive roof overhangs.

Image 6.1  Robie House, Chicago 1910

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The Unity Temple was built in Chicago as a new type of church, not least in having been built in reinforced concrete but also in its open, undecorated and non-hierarchical space. This and the Larkin office building of a few years earlier were radical departures in terms of the space and form of their respective building types. Centred around a five-storey atrium, the Larkin building may be read as the idealistic model of a space for honest work embellished with inspiring slogans and works of art, or alternatively as a paternalistic instrument for the control and surveillance of its workers. The monolithic form of the building with its defined service towers and massive walls of finely cut brick give it an image of Modernism more original than works by Behrens of a similar date, and not equalled in Wright’s work until much later. The German publication by Wasmuth of these domestic and public projects in a large folio of drawings in 1911 was the first public appearance of Wright’s work in either Europe or the United States. It remains an example of the undoubted wide influence of an architectural publication: as well as the documented responses of Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier owned and shared a copy, while Rudolph Schindler and other European architects travelled to the United States in the hope of working with him. In the Netherlands, the formal qualities of Wright’s work seen in the folio shaped both the three-dimensional formalism to emerge in De Stijl and the blocky brick architecture of Willem Dudok. Wright’s later work falls into distinct phases, though for most part the work appears not as complex or as substantial as this first mature period. It is consistent, though, in working through ideas of an architecture appropriate for the new world, in the sense both of expressing the qualities of a potential American architecture and of making an architecture to express humanistic and anti-authoritarian ideals. His approach develops a new relation to international Modernism and includes two buildings that undoubtedly represent the highest achievement in modern architecture – the Kaufmann House, otherwise known as Falling Water, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The use of concrete becomes far more central to Wright’s approach, and the idea of an organic architecture emerging from the use of the natural materials of wood and brick came to change its meaning with the embrace of concrete. As Kenneth Frampton has written, that the concrete cantilever was a ‘natural, treelike form’ became the basis of a new formulation. Earlier than this was a different kind of experimentation in concrete with work he did in California in the 1920s using concrete blocks, called by Wright ‘textile blocks’, since this mundane medium was transformed by the casting within it of repeated decorative geometrical forms. These forms were derived from Mayan, in other words pre-Columbian forms, thus developing a new interpretation of the possibilities of an American architecture. Were these houses, notably the over-scaled Ennis House and La Miniatura or Millard House, the only production of the architect, they would form one of a number of demonstrations of a nascent Californian architectural culture, but represent in Wright’s work a clear transition from his work in the Midwest as well as representing an advance in their

Frank Lloyd Wright 43

largely original aesthetic approach, moving decisively away from a philosophical and craft-based position. A series of houses, termed the Usonian houses and constructed in the 1930s and 1940s, are significant in working once again with the idea of the house but with means both more modern and democratic: the difference is that these designs are for clients with limited finance, are potential prototypes and can be seen as the nearest Wright achieved to a socially inclusive architecture. Houses such as the Jacobs House were built in rural locations, formed into two wings for sleeping and living and centred on the hearth: open plan living areas and built-in furniture would maximize whatever space the small house might have. Materials were used in a straightforward way and there was no applied decorative work. ‘Usonian’ is a term invented by Wright to reflect the possibilities of an expansive American culture: their larger context is the ambition for a workers’ culture, and an anti-urban approach, as well as the use of the private car as a democratic tool. These aims were expressed in his urban project for Broadacre City which as a dispersed, agrarian model of the city acts as a critique of Le Corbusier’s dominant model of a dense and highly organized urbanism: based on self-sufficiency with everyone given an acre of land, each inhabitant would thus have independence and be able to fulfil their potential, rather than being cogs in a capitalist, centralized machine. Falling Water, a weekend house built in dense woodland in Pennsylvania, can be seen as an expression of Usonian values, but also as unique in its fusion with the landscape both on a physical level – the house is built into the flat rock surfaces of a waterfall – and also experientially, as all its inhabited spaces are shaped by their visual and aural connection with the landscape and flowing water that surrounds them. Rough stone walls and floors give the interiors a primitive feel, but the prevailing visual image of the house, as first defined by the photographer Bill Hedrich, is dominated by the concrete cantilevers of the outside terraces that extend the space of the living spaces and bedrooms, and it appears as an audacious composition of suspended planes. Nevertheless, the house has, despite its three dimensionality, similarities with Wright’s earlier Prairie model: its open, horizontal, living spaces are dominated by the verticality of the central hearth and chimney stack, and its sense of enclosure and repose is very far from the glass house on a natural site favoured by such later architects as Mies van der Rohe. The Guggenheim Museum, New York, is, uniquely for Wright, situated in a prominent city location: designed in 1943 but not completed until 1959, it also has roots in Wright’s earlier designs, primarily the atrium which forms the interior of the Larkin building, while its spiral form was earlier used in a project for a drive-in Planetarium in 1925. It is a single space: the visitor starts at the top of a spiralling ramp of galleries with a gently sloping floor extending, and widening, over some five storeys. Its interior and exterior forms, which unusually for Wright are congruent, are highly photogenic and its image on the rectilinear grid of Manhattan is an extraordinary incursion into such rationality (Image 6.2). Built in reinforced concrete, it has an unambiguous

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Image 6.2  Guggenheim Museum, New York 1946-59

modernity, befitting its original collection of modern abstract art: a fusion of form and space into single element, a form which Wright described as resembling an egg shell in its simplicity. It embodies a particular interpretation of the organic, both in its unified form and in its natural reference. Other later works use the circle as their generating geometry, including his last major works, the civic centre in Marin County and Grady Gammage Auditorium which have structural contradictions, not to mention an almost historicist rhetoric and monumentality, quite at odds with his earlier position and practice. The later part of Wright’s career was characterized by his international lionization as a ‘great man’, which fed into his self-belief as an accomplished individual artist without peers. That he was rarely involved in socially conscious projects, and saw himself as apart from the realities of politics and economics, is a limitation of his achievement in a century which saw much architecture that aimed for the transformation of society into a socialist, or at least more egalitarian, condition. But his idealism was constituted differently, seen both in the self-sufficiency that underscored Broadacre City and also in the personal, inward worlds created in his many domestic projects. The ecstatic, individualistic, nature-loving figure portrayed in Walt Whitman’s poetry would perhaps have been his ideal client, rather than the urbane and knowledgeable bourgeoisie with whom he dealt. In his idealism he despised tradition and formality, and for Wright, it may have been a tragic failing that his work did not inflect society more

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widely. It is astonishing that in a career producing perhaps 800 projects, with the exception of the Guggenheim Museum, he did not construct major urban buildings. Instead, Wright addressed a different paradigm in his work, the existential realization of the individual, and it is this, beyond questions of style, that is the distinguishing characteristic of his overall achievement. Beyond this fundamental purpose, Wright remade the form of the house and also created the first truly American architecture, one that owed little or nothing to existing conventions and practice. His influence was extensive, in forming a new tradition of American domestic architecture as well as representing a significant influence in the early formation of European Modernism, in establishing the fundamental precepts of Modernist space. His best work is a coming together of form and space in an abstract language and, whether forming the mainstream or not, is among the greatest achievements in the history of modern architecture.

KEY WORKS – WRIGHT Frank Lloyd Wright house and studio, Oak Park, Illinois, 1889 Charnley House, Chicago, 1891 Lawrence Dana House, Springfield, Illinois, 1900 Heurtley House, Chicago, 1902 Larkin office building, Buffalo, 1904 Martin House, Buffalo, 1904 Unity Church, Oak Park, Illinois,1906 Coonley House, Riverside, Illinois, 1908 Robie House, Chicago, 1910 Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1911–25 Midway Gardens, Chicago, 1914 Hollyhock House, Los Angeles, 1920 Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, 1922 Millard House (La Miniatura), Pasadena, 1923 Ennis House, Los Angeles, 1924 Modern Architecture: Kahn Lectures for 1930 Disappearing City, 1932 Broadacre City project, 1935 Falling Water (Kaufmann House), Bear Run, Pennsylvania, 1937 Jacobs House, Madison, Wisconsin, 1937 Taliesin West, Phoenix, Arizona, 1938–59 Johnson Wax offices, Racine, Wisconsin, 1939 Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1946–59 Johnson Wax Research tower, Racine, Wisconsin, 1950 The Natural House, 1954 Civic Center, Marin County, California, 1959–64

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FURTHER READING Brooks, H. Allen (ed.) Writings on Wright Cambridge MA MIT Press 1981. Connors, Joseph The Robie House of Frank Lloyd Wright Chicago University Chicago Press 1984. Frampton, Kenneth ‘Frank Lloyd Wright and the Text-Tile Tectonic’ in Frampton Studies in Tectonic Culture Cambridge MA MIT Press 1995. Gutheim, F (ed.) In the Cause of Architecture: Wright’s Historic Essays for Architectural Record 1908–52 New York McGraw-Hill 1975. Hitchcock, H-R In the Nature of Materials: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright 1887–1941 New York Duell Sloan and Pearce 1942. Levine, Neil The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright Princeton Princeton University Press 1996. Manson, Grant C Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910 New York Reinhold 1958. Nute, Kevin Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan London Chapman and Hall 1993. Pfeiffer, Bruce Brooks (ed.) Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings 1894–1930 New York Rizzoli 1992. Riley, Terence (ed.) Frank Lloyd Wright New York Harry N Abrams 1994. Sergeant, John Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian Houses New York Whitney Library 1976. Wright, F L Drawings and Plans of Frank Lloyd Wright: The Early Period New York Dover 1983 (Reprint of 1911 Wasmuth folio).

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7  Antonio Sant’Elia/Futurism (1888–1916)

Image 7.1  La Citta’ Nuova drawing 1914

The extraordinary and prescient inventiveness of Futurism, an avant-garde movement of artists based in northern Italy in the early years of the twentieth century, made it an important element in the development of modern art and architecture. Launched with a scandalous manifesto by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909, its aims were wide-ranging and called for nothing less than the repudiation of all existing cultural forms and beliefs in favour of a revolution. A new aesthetic was to be created in the full realization of the reality of the new world of the machine, of a society of the masses and of universal communications. Antonio Sant’Elia was the architectural counterpart of this wider movement and fashioned the project La Citta Nuova (New City), as well as authoring the influential manifesto of Futurist architecture, a then-unparalleled vision of modernity; he built no significant buildings but had an extensive influence on the culture of Modernism. While all artistic movements and campaigns, to a greater or lesser extent, seek the destruction and replacement of existing practices, the Futurist movement represents a full-blooded, highly polemical extreme. In the world of great and crowded modern cities, they declared, life had been changed irrevocably by the processes of industry, and the speed of the train, the plane and most of all the car was a cause of celebration in bringing into being a new and dynamic form of human life. Marinetti’s founding Manifesto of Futurism caused an immediate shock with its vehemence and iconoclasm: ‘The world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed … a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace’ – a celebrated Classical sculpture here representing the standard of beauty. ‘We will destroy museums, libraries, academies of every kind … We shall sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure and by riot …’ But at this time, no painting, sculpture or other visual expression yet existed: and Marinetti’s persona, evident here as a master of the media, was a key element of his own modernity. As Norbert Lynton has written, Futurism ‘originated in a view of civilisation and found expression first in words’. Unlike other of the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century, it started with verbal expression, and in its emphatic rejection of all conventions and established institutions aimed to start afresh from a kind of year zero. And it can be seen as the vociferous pioneer of the notion, widely prevalent later, of art as rooted in a conceptual framework, rather than in experimentation through means of representation. Thus this position was in search of appropriate forms, of designs that would match its rhetoric: in the visual arts, Umberto Boccioni provided the most achieved expression of Futurist themes, in particular in engaging with movement, with city crowds, with machines and speed. Such paintings as Forces of a Street and Simultaneous Visions (1911–12) initiated a new form of representation of urban life, while his later sculptural work includes the celebrated Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) which dynamically expresses a human figure in motion in fluid, faceted form. In architecture it was a less entirely perfect fit to integrate Sant’Elia’s work into the movement, and he was to join the group long after its explosive beginning. Educated

Antonio Sant’Elia/Futurism 49

as an architect in Milan and Bologna, alongside the early influence of the Viennese modernity of Otto Wagner and Josef Hoffman was his regard for monumentality of the Milanese architect Guiseppe Sommaruga, and traces of this approach can be discerned in the drawings of La Citta Nuova, exhibited in Milan in early 1914 (Image 7.1). These drawings depict the buildings of a city based on a network of roads and railways constructed on several levels: tall, stark buildings tower above them, generally with a stepped-back section and with lift shafts standing vertically as separate elements. Such architecture was without precedent and, we can now say, highly prophetic of what would be built perhaps fifty years later. The precision of the draughtsmanship is, however, reminiscent of a more conservative architectural approach, certainly when compared to the graphic style of Boccioni, Giacomo Balla and other of the Futurist painters. Other freer drawings are of isolated buildings: meeting halls, power stations and railway stations presented as monolithic volumes with solid buttresses, creating abstract and dynamic forms. All are single images, perspectival views of an arresting vision of a modern city, perhaps depicting a Milan of the future. While the whole may be deduced from the series of images, they are not unified by a totalizing image or overall plan. These monumental structures, presumably of reinforced concrete and steel, would certainly have been buildable. Sant’Elia joined forces with the group of Futurists and The Manifesto of Futurist Architecture was published in July 1914, illustrated by his drawings captioned as ‘La Citta Futurista’. In this call to action, all architecture since 1700 is seen as worthless, with the application of meaningless stylistic detail to facades creating ‘imbecilic’ cities. Architecture must start again, it argues, by abolishing the decorative and embracing the potential of new materials and techniques: ‘We must invent and rebuild the Futurist city, like an immense and tumultuous shipyard, agile, mobile and dynamic in every detail; and the futurist house must be like a gigantic machine.’ Moving to questions of how it would be realized and in what form, Futurist architecture would be built with a new materiality: ‘The architecture of reinforced concrete, of steel, glass, cardboard, textile fibre and of all those substitutes for wood, stone and brick that enable us to attain maximum elasticity and lightness.’ While this was published under Sant’Elia’s name, it is generally accepted that almost half of the text is the work of Marinetti who added much stronger polemical language, without changing Sant’Elia’s argument for the urgent necessity of a new architecture – against the decorative and embracing the modern life of the machine and its technical possibilities. However, the concluding paragraph did introduce a new hypothesis not present in the original text: ‘The fundamental characteristics of Futurist architecture will be its impermanence and transience. Things will endure less than us. Every generation must build its own city.’ This introduces the notion of an architecture that is provisional and temporary, that is built for short-term use and thus has a contingent architectural expression of ‘lightness and elasticity’ far from the massive and monumental buildings of Sant’Elia’s own drawn imagery. The Futurists’ ideas spread rapidly and took root in local interpretations of Futurism in Moscow, Paris, London and even Japan. Like other avant-garde movements the

50 Key Modern Architects

Futurists – can be seen as very much of their time: they realized the universal significance of the recent past of industrialization and a new urban life. In the century since then, the culture of the car, the highway and the skyscraper has appeared as they foretold. But there is a degree of irony in seeing the positive energy they invested in the realization of this position: like other Modernist utopias, the world of speed and danger they wanted to bring into being would, in reality, be far from the modern paradise they desired. Their vision contributed to later developments – De Stijl, the Bauhaus and most clearly work in Russia, where Suprematism and Constructivism explicitly developed the Futurist position. The Futurist influence on Le Corbusier is on several levels. Its urgency and iconoclasm, while toned down somewhat, is seen in the pages of his publications, most notably Toward an Architecture. His excitement with the car, the plane and the factory has an unmistakably Futurist feeling: his city planning, in the creation of the modern city of towers, has much in common with Sant’Elia’s vision of the Citta Nuova, particularly in its earliest manifestation as a dense multi-level city dominated by communications in the Ville Contemporaine. The further idea of a transient, replaceable architecture seems a distant foretelling of the ideas of Cedric Price and Archigram, who effectively revived Futurist work in new forms in the 1960s. The work of certain of the movement’s artists such as Boccioni demonstrates a far more faceted, fluid making of form than any seen in Sant’Elia’s work and these fractured forms have perhaps found expression in the design of late twentieth-century architecture by Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind. To a remarkable extent, they reflect Futurist aims towards the dissolution of stable forms, indicating the longevity of the influence of this dynamic ideology which can be seen to underpin a wider impetus for the making of a new world, seen in the early years of the twentieth century.

KEY WORKS – SANT’ELIA Monumental/urban drawings, 1909–13 La Citta Nuova, 1913–14 Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, 1914

FURTHER READING Apollonio, Umbro (ed.) Futurist Manifestos London Thames and Hudson 1973. Caramel, Luciano and Longatti, Alberto Antonio Sant’Elia: The Complete Works New York Rizzoli 1988. Da Costa Meyer, Esther The Work of Antonio Sant’Elia: Retreat into the Future New Haven London Yale University Press 1995. Hulten, Pontus Futurismo & Futurismi London Thames and Hudson 1986.

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8  Bruno Taut (1880–1938)

Image 8.1  Glass Pavilion, Cologne Werkbund exhibition 1914

Bruno Taut can be seen as one of the founding figures of Modernism: as the leader of a group of architects in Germany immediately after the First World War who expressed the belief in a utopian role for architecture and as an advocate of glass as a material that would transform life. His early writing and projects helped to shape the widespread developments in architecture later in the century: for a short period his role in architecture was crucial in synthesizing and changing its culture into a vision of the modern. Taut trained in a school of building, rather than architecture, in Köningsberg: he set up his own architectural practice and designed two temporary trade pavilions, for the steel and glass industries respectively, which manifested an original, geometrically determined, centralized architecture. The steel frame construction of the octagonal pavilion built in Leipzig had four recessive floors and was surmounted by a globe, unadorned but for slogans spanning the building at each level. The Glass Pavilion built for the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne was a fourteen-sided drum set on concrete with a multifaceted glass dome designed, as Taut later wrote, ‘to demonstrate the use of glass in all its varied aesthetic charm, the variegated shining glass prisms … its glass ceilings, glass floors, glass tiles and the cascade lit up from beneath’ (Image 8.1). But as well as these pragmatic points it also embodied a visionary quality, Taut’s belief that building in glass could have a transformative effect on human life, and in this was very much influenced by the contemporary poet Paul Scheerbart. The writer envisioned other possible worlds, publishing a book Glass Architecture (1914) and contributing aphorisms that decked the building such as ‘colourful glass destroys hatred’, ‘brick culture brings harm’, ‘happiness comes with glass’. A succession of architectural schemes by others followed, including utopian crystalline projects by Wenzel Hablik and even Walter Gropius, but the ‘glass chain letters,’ correspondence circulated in 1919 between a group of fourteen architects invited to participate by Taut, represent an intriguing exploration of the visionary imagination of a glass architecture and its consequent fantastical forms. Bruno Taut’s own writings in the ‘chain’ spoke of the physical and the spiritual: the spirit could be given physical, built form by the work of the architect, and the outcome of this coming together was to be the realization of the kingdom of heaven on earth, in other words a utopia. Hans Scharoun was among the architects contributing to this correspondence, and the belief in glass building went beyond their circle into wider architectural culture: as Adolf Behne wrote, ‘it is not the crazy caprice of a poet that glass architecture will bring a new culture. It is a fact’. The glass towers of the modern city as they were later built may be banal, but the ubiquity of glass in Modernism is at the very least connected ideologically to the ideas of its revolutionary role expressed in these early years. Further and more extreme manifestations of this glass utopia were seen in Taut’s Alpine Architecture, a folio of drawings published in 1919, envisioning the highest Alpine peaks sculpted into abstract crystalline shapes, with surrounding forms made

Bruno Taut 53

also of coloured glass in a spectacular, lyrical landscape. The intention was to show architecture as a redemptive force, also to be seen in his writings, not least in his periodical Frühlicht: ‘Our dawn glows on the horizon … hail to transparency, clarity … hail the crystalline the flowing, graceful, faceted, sparkling … eternal building.’ In the journal Taut was also to present the text of St John’s vision of the new Jerusalem, while Mies van der Rohe’s glass tower projects also had their first publication there, placing their origin firmly in this visionary context. Taut’s mission was to transfigure the architecture of his day and expressed the urgent objective that the architect should transcend his traditional role and become the agent of social transformation. His book Die Stadtkröne, the ‘city-crown’, reinterprets ideas of city planning, standing against the low density of the garden city and proposing the creation of an intense centre. Adopting ideas from models of the Gothic as well as formal references from Asia, the layout is concentric, separated into housing, industrial and recreational zones with the city core of the Stadtkröne, its communal focus, including places for assembly, an opera house, library, museum and so on. Above these buildings would be a Kristallhaus, a physical representation of the spirit: animated by shining panes of coloured glass, it would radiate like a Gothic cathedral rising above the city. The scheme was formed in the light of Taut’s idea that the people were calling on architects to lead society towards a new condition of community and harmony. As Iain Boyd Whyte has written, ‘Architecture represented both the crystallisation of the desire for a communal life and the means to give visible form to religious faith … a new religiosity based on architecture.’ Taut’s embodiment of architecture’s transformational role can be connected to both the rejection of established authority articulated in Nietzsche’s philosophy and the work of the painter Wassily Kandinsky who turned his back on the material world in favour of the recovery of the spiritual, in turn forming the foundation of a new abstract art. Taut had founded the organization of radical artists and architects Abeitsrat für Kunst in 1918. In its manifesto he argued for the architect as leader to create a new total work of art, with the participation of the people; it was, after all, intended to be based on the model of the Soviet collective. In 1919, it organized a celebrated exhibition of the work of ‘unknown architects’ in Berlin: the leading young architects of the time were shown, including Mendelsohn, Scharoun and Gropius. The visionary and utopian quality of the projects was evident, but differences between the participants appeared quite rapidly afterwards. Taut was to write in a letter in the following year: ‘I am now finished with intuitive works, I might almost hope forever.’ Rather than utopianism and calls to the spirit, there was an abrupt change of direction and like others of the group he was now standing for rationalism and social usefulness. How and why this shift took place so rapidly remains intriguing: for Taut, his days as leader of the avant-garde ended with his taking on the responsibilities of city architect of Magdeburg in 1921; it is as if a conversion to the pragmatic had taken

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place and his concerns became those of fulfilling social needs for mass housing, later continuing this role in Berlin as architect for the housing association GEHAG, creating large-scale Siedlungen in the south of the city: Britz and Onkel-TomsHütte, the first dominated by the strong form of a horseshoe shape, the second bearing the image of an urban fantasy of rural life. This work was in a different way groundbreaking, using precepts derived from the garden city movement but with a assured Modernist vocabulary of flat roofs and unadorned forms, albeit with the use of strong colour to distinguish building elements. There is, however, a continuity here: the creation of smaller scale utopias than he had earlier envisaged bears traces of his earlier visionary projects; each development would have an identity and sense of community, each be a world unto itself, while the use of colour echoes the colour effects he had used in glass. Later, Taut’s exile in Japan from 1933 to 1938 enabled him to read the qualities of its built form through Modernist eyes and its subsequent introduction to European culture through his influential Houses and People of Japan. In 1929, Taut wrote the book Modern Architecture, surveying recent developments for an English audience and asserted the need for rationality. Compared to what tailors and shoemakers have already accomplished, he says, ‘our sole desire is to make everything as practical as possible, and as those others have already successfully done, to make beauty dependent on practical value’. This aim for beautiful but efficient forms of architecture seems very far removed from his visionary and messianic role of just a decade earlier: historically, his significance lies in being the architect who most embodied that ecstatic, utopian stand so widely adopted in the early years of Modernism in Germany. While his magical, crystalline city building was never realized, it continues to be a potent and influential image.

KEY WORKS – TAUT Steel Pavilion, Leipzig Construction Exhibition, 1913 Glass Pavilion, Cologne Werkbund Exhibition, 1914 Alpine Architecture, 1919 Die Stadtkröne, 1919 Frühlicht, 1920–22 Siedlung Britz, Berlin, 1925 Siedlung Onkel-Toms-Hütte, Berlin, 1927 Hyuga House, Atami, Japan, 1936

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FURTHER READING Boyd Whyte, Iain Bruno Taut and the Architecture of Activism Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985. Boyd Whyte, Iain (ed.) The Crystal Chain Letters: Architectural Fantasies by Bruno Taut and His Circle Boston MA MIT Press 1985. Mindrup, Matthew, Altenmüller-Lewis, Ulrike (eds) The City Crown by Bruno Taut London Routledge 2016. Nerdinger, Winfried Bruno Taut Stuttgart Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt 2001 (German). Sharp, Dennis (ed.) Glass Architecture and Alpine Architecture London Praeger 1972. Taut, Bruno Modern Architecture London The Studio 1929.

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9  Erich Mendelsohn (1887–1953)

Image 9.1  Schocken department Store, Stuttgart 1928

Many of his contemporaries believed that the architecture built in Germany by Erich Mendelsohn in the 1920s and early 1930s was the most important of the period, rather than the more radical architecture of Mies van der Rohe or Walter Gropius. Urban commercial buildings such as the Schocken department stores and Universum Cinema appeared defiantly original and became widely influential, however much they lacked the revolutionary impetus of others whose work came to form the Modernist mainstream. Mendelsohn can be seen instead as following consistent principles

based on the necessity of a new architecture as a response to new philosophical and material conditions, and created buildings that represented the modern world without the necessity of reinventing the world itself. His education as an architect in Munich from 1910 was influenced by Theodor Fischer who emphasized the necessity of the expression of an individual architectural voice, seen in his own modern interpretations of traditional forms. Mendelsohn’s initial self-image as an artist emerged from this and underpins his association with the movement of Expressionism. He associated with artists of the Blaue Reiter group in Munich and later with Bruno Taut and other architects of the ‘glass chain’ group. While Walter Gropius, Hermann Finsterlin, Taut and others were included in the ‘Exhibition of Unknown Architects’ in Berlin in 1919, Mendelsohn had a parallel exhibition of his own. The public exposure of his work began with this exhibition of a series of small ink and pencil drawings – some only 5 cm square in size – that expressed a highly intuitive spatial dynamic in creating proposals for buildings; plans, sections and facades were integrated into single images. For Mendelsohn, these were explorations of the possibilities of the new materials of glass, steel and reinforced concrete shaped into highly plastic forms: flowing, sculptural and quite without precedent. They still remain potent, dynamic images: that some of these drawings were done while he was fighting with the German army on the Russian front underlines the fragility and the urgency of his architectural vision. At a huge rhetorical scale, these tiny drawings represented factories, railway stations, warehouses, meeting halls; others had no particular representative function but were potential architectural forms expressive of a creative energy, inspired by and the counterpart of music which Mendelsohn continually referred in his writing as analogous to his own creative process. Rapid sketches, which remained the primary tool with which to create his work, were of great importance, in their originality relating to a pre-linguistic state. He articulated this process of drawing as ‘the unformed receives a content, and the void a form’. He declared, ‘My sketches are … the contour lines of an instantaneous vision … the moment of conception remains essential to it. From this moment on, the original conception is continually verified by the intellect.’ Thus, he identifies this synthetic moment in the creative process as a stage of inspiration, from which all other aspects of the design are involved, including factors of calculation and necessity. His sketches also had acknowledged connections with Henri Bergson’s philosophy: in Creative Evolution (1907) Bergson introduced the notion of an élan vital: ‘the material world melting into a single flux, a continuity of flowing and becoming’. The physicist Albert Einstein, well known by Mendelsohn, questioned the stability of matter; material forms were not fixed but in a constant process of change. The architect himself described in 1923 the relationship between technology and organic form: ‘Ever since science has come to realise that the two concepts matter and energy, formerly kept rigidly apart, are merely different states of the same primary element … in the order of the world nothing takes place without relativity to the cosmos.’ In architectural terms, forms could become a constructed element of a new living

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organism: matter in the universe was not capable of being subsumed into a rational, rectilinear grid as in the traditional model of architecture, and this does have some common ground with the principles of a deconstructed language seen much later in the century. The only one of the flowing expressive forms seen in Mendelsohn’s sketches that was translated into building was a spectrographic laboratory for Einstein to develop his experiments on relativity, in what became known as the Einstein Tower in Potsdam. He monumentalized what could simply have been a scientific facility: the building takes the form of a tower used for light-measurement rising up above a subterranean laboratory and unifies them into a single form, reminiscent of those seen in his drawings of the previous decade. This building was, much as it was admired by the avant-garde and by many since then was, he admitted, a ‘one-off’ not to be repeated. The reinforced concrete form apparently envisaged by earlier sketches was achieved with a rendered surface over a structure of cut bricks, a literally superficial solution to an idea distinctive and profound. In the hat factory for Steinberg-Hermann at Luckenwalde, built in the same period, he created a far more complex building without the flowing lines of the Einstein Tower. He integrated materials – and here reinforced concrete was used, albeit in a relatively conventional way – and made a coherent whole of the individual elements of the factory’s processes. As Francesca Rogier has described, ‘the building masses (are) active, full of the interplay of tension, a living synthesis of form and structure’ and this was to become a theme fulfilled in other buildings later in the decade of a different aesthetic that fulfilled a simpler brief on sites located on city streets. A third building of his early career is the extraordinary superstructure of the Mosse building in Berlin, an appendage attached to the roof of an existing nineteenth-century block, as if exploding from its conventional form into a more powerful modernity. Its position on an urban corner site gives it a prominence and presence that were to be reflected in a series of buildings developed through the decade, which were to establish Mendelsohn’s reputation. Including department stores, offices and a cinema, each was formed of strong, highly distinctive elements: horizontal lines of mouldings, strip windows, bands of masonry composed often in relation to a distinct vertical feature. In three stores for Schocken, a particular version of modernism was expressed: a positive engagement with technology and new thinking, and the creation of urban buildings both of their context but distinctly and defiantly new. The most successful of these was in Stuttgart: on an intersection in the streets of the old city the store had a clear composition of a horizontal block with concrete bands and strips of fenestration, with its tall sheerly glazed stair tower standing as an urban presence (Image 9.1). The prominent lettering of the store’s name and the use of dramatic night lighting give it the directness of modern communication and a commercialism new in the European city. It displays instead a complex relationship to the street pattern and site levels, rather than the building as a context-free object as contemporaries would do. Louis Sullivan’s work such as the Carson Pirie Scott store was an influence, while the glazed stair at Stuttgart, much emulated by others as well

Erich Mendelsohn 59

as the architect himself, is similar to that used by Walter Gropius in the Werkbund factory, cantilevering cylindrical stairs out from a concrete core, wrapping a smooth glass skin around the whole. Two Berlin buildings of later date, the Columbushaus and Universum Cinema, show a refinement of Mendelsohn’s practice in designing a dynamic urban building: the Universum, characterized by the vertical element carrying signage rising above a sleekly curved building volume, was to become highly influential on cinema design internationally, not least in the British Odeon chain designed by Harry Weedon. Travels in the United States, which led to the highly popular photo book Amerika which Mendelsohn published in 1926, expressed his absorption with the visual culture of American modernity by dynamic and radical photography. It clearly shaped his later work – in the introduction of commercialism, as well as a renewed sense of modern urban space. After the very personal and atypical achievement of his own house Am Rupenhorn, with furniture and fittings of his own advanced design in the suburbs of Berlin, he foresaw before others that his days in Germany were limited after the rise of the Nazis. He abandoned the beloved house and his Berlin career, and as early as June 1933 settled in Great Britain. The De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, a substantial commission he received soon after arriving, displays a continuity with the themes of his German work and remains a significant building of early British Modernism. Mendelsohn’s later work in Palestine and his subsequent move to the United States in 1941 continued his achievement with some major projects in a similar architectural language, though their success never matched that of the 1920s. Form was more important than function in that the image of the building was Mendelsohn’s priority: his position differs from the level of abstraction of his contemporaries. But his great achievement has sometimes been overlooked: Mendelsohn designed in terms of masses, which express a particular idea of organic unity – as such, as Bruno Zevi has argued, he forms part of a distinguished historiography separate from the mainstream of architects wishing to determine meaningful form, from Frank Lloyd Wright to Saarinen and Michelucci. His work embodies an approach which has been termed ‘dynamic functionalism’: it represents constructional innovation along with wider cultural influences, as well as a rejection of formal conventions. It rejects also the Modernist idea of building without context, and as such, it remains relevant in architecture today.

KEY WORKS – MENDELSOHN Visionary Drawings, 1914–18 Einstein Tower, Potsdam, 1921 Mossehaus, offices and press works, Berlin, 1923 Steinberg-Herrmann hat factory, Luckenwalde, 1923 Herpich store, Berlin, 1924

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Schocken department store, Nuremberg, 1926 Cohen and Epstein department store, Duisburg, 1927 Schocken department store, Stuttgart, 1928 Rudolf Mosse Pavilion, Pressa Exhibition, Cologne, 1928 Universum Cinema, Berlin, 1931 Schocken department store, Chemnitz, 1930 Metalworkers’ Union, Berlin, 1930 Own House, Am Rupenhorn, Berlin, 1930 Columbushaus, Potsdamerplatz, Berlin, 1928–1932 De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, England, 1934 with Serge Chermayeff Weizmann Institute, Tel Aviv, 1936 Park Synagogue, Cleveland, Ohio, 1950

FURTHER READING Architectural Association Ruins of Modernity: Mendelsohn’s Hat Factory in Luckenwalde London Architectural Association 1998 (texts by F Rogier and others). James, Kathleen Erich Mendelsohn Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1997. King, Susan The Drawings of Erich Mendelsohn Berkeley University of California 1969. Mendelsohn, Erich Neues Haus, Neue Welt Berlin Rudolf Mosse 1932 (on house Am Rupenhorn). Stephan, Regina (ed.) Erich Mendelsohn Architect New York Monacelli 1999. Zevi, Bruno Erich Mendelsohn: The Complete Works Basel: Birkhauser 1999.

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10  Walter Gropius (1883–1969) Walter Gropius is among the most significant of the architects who came to be seen as defining Modernism in architecture. Reyner Banham designated Gropius as one of the four ‘masters of modern architecture’ along with Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe in his 1975 book of that name: earlier, at the start of the formulation of its early history, Nikolaus Pevsner in Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936) described its trajectory in the subtitle, ‘from William Morris to Walter Gropius’. That Gropius was effective in expressing what modern architecture should be and needed to become was also articulated by Sigfried Giedion who was to credit him in Space Time and Architecture with reconciling the rupture between ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ that characterized the inadequacy of European architecture before Modernism. And, while Le Corbusier may be acknowledged as the more compelling in terms of his built work and manifold theoretical expression, his mercurial and individual quality leaves to Gropius the role of leading the mainstream. He became the institutional leader of what became the cause of Modernism in effecting radical change in architectural practice and thought. Nevertheless, he is the individual whose significance has paled more recently, as numerous other figures have emerged from the shadows that he himself had made. Both in Europe and the United States, the orthodoxy he established was pervasive, through extensive publication as well as his highly important role as an educator. One towering achievement of Gropius was the founding of the Bauhaus School at Weimar in Germany in 1919, which in its short life became the most significant cultural generator of Modernism in design and in theory, and established an entirely new model of art education which was to become universally adopted. After fleeing his homeland, Gropius reinvigorated the Harvard School of Architecture which he joined in 1937 and has been described as having transformed American architectural education as a whole from the pervasive Beaux-Arts model to the application of Modernist ideas. But no architect today is likely to admit to being inspired by his work: unlike the other leading figures with whom he is compared, his outstanding architectural work was in the early part of his career in the 1920s or before. A reassessment of it shows

an achievement then equal to any in Modernism, and this built work might be seen now as of enduring significance and worth, in addition to his highly distinguished cultural role. That he, rather than other architect-contemporaries, did become so influential is perhaps a cause for regret since so much of the effect of his thinking, unintended by him, was to reduce architecture to a functionalist practice, rather than Modernism bringing a new manifestation of it as an art. His influence on architectural practice from the 1930s to the 1960s may with justification be seen to have had deleterious effects on the acceptance and reputation of Modernism, which can now be understood as a far richer culture. The worldwide construction of mediocre versions of Modernist practice in the years after the Second World War cannot, of course, be seen as solely his responsibility, but his shaping of their context can be traced through the adoption of the supposed clear-eyed rationality of architecture as process and the application of scientific principle. Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck, who became one of the scourges of (then) mainstream Modernism through his involvement with Team Ten, summed up the negative effect of Gropius’s approach as ‘dear industry happy future teamwork no art no primadonnas kind of gruel’. The singling out of Gropius’s orthodoxy for criticism – while continuing to admire Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe – was a common thread in much of the new thinking in architecture in the 1950s and 1960s, a renewal of Modernist practice that seemed to have no space for more than acknowledging his past achievements. Gropius’s formation as an architect was through the Deutscher Werkbund, following on from his education in Berlin: this movement, intended to renew design principles and practice in Germany, was led by architect Peter Behrens among others. Behrens, in whose office Gropius worked from 1908 to 1910, prepared him for the development of a new understanding of the relationship of art and industry through the major work undertaken for the AEG at this time. But Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, known through the publication of volumes by Wasmuth in Berlin in 1910, also fed into Gropius’s evolving approach. As the independent office he set up along with Adolf Meyer in 1910 would demonstrate, building projects derived from the composition of abstract blocks of Wright and the monumentality of the glazed surface, drawn from Behrens, would become Gropius’s contribution. His article on industrial buildings in the Deutscher Werkbund Yearbook of 1913 demonstrates not only Gropius’s interest in new forms of building appropriate for industry, a fundamental Werkbund concern, but also his enthusiasm for American factories and grain silos, which illustrate the article and pre-date Le Corbusier’s more famous use of such images as a ‘reminder to architects’. Gropius also developed work as an industrial designer at this time, designing furniture, railway carriages and, later, successful car designs for Adler. Two industrial buildings constructed by Gropius and Meyer in the early years of their practice can still be seen as radical and inspiring projects. The Fagus shoe-last factory at Alfeld-an-der-Leine, begun in 1911 and taking over an existing project that dictated the building’s overall form, has become celebrated for the suspended glazing of the principal block, its sheer screens of glass unprecedented in Behrens’s

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or indeed any earlier architecture. Hanging from the concrete frame behind, it is an architecture of transparency rather than weight, the first ‘curtain wall’ that precedes countless thousands of others: at the corners the glass walls are joined against one another with no column visible or necessary. The building’s innovation is also seen in the defined relationship between the brick infill panels and the sheets of glazing which stand forward of the building’s volume, making clear that it is a designed building rather than a modest industrial production. In the model Factory Pavilion built for the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne, its overall design seems closer to Behrens, with a symmetrical plan displaying elements of Classicism. The administrative pavilion has a projecting flat roof derived from Frank Lloyd Wright, while the clear distinction between masonry and enclosure seems to invert Behrens’s version of monumentality. Again the glazing becomes a sheer skin, particularly acutely seen on the spiral staircases projecting at both ends of the facade. In the coda of Pioneers of the Modern Movement, Pevsner describes these suspended concrete staircases sheathed by a glass skin as exemplifying the achievement of the possibilities of the ‘new architecture’. Calling on Gothic church models, he writes, ‘There is something sublime in this effortless mastery of material and weight. Never since the Sainte-Chapelle and the choir of Beauvais had the human art of building been so triumphant over matter’; but compared with them ‘the glass walls are now clear and without mystery, the steel frame is hard, its expression regardless of otherworldly speculation’. For Pevsner and others of his generation, the achievement of this building in terms of its innovation in form and technique became the standard of modern architecture: it was a model that needed no further development. After his wartime experiences and the revolutionary situation, both politically and culturally, in Germany, Gropius’s position was to change. Succeeding Bruno Taut, he became leader of the explicitly socialist and experimental Arbeitsrat für Kunst in 1919 and a new visionary quality, in tune with the times, was to emerge in his thinking. He was a member of Taut’s group of utopian architects, the ‘glass chain’, believing, as he said in the introduction to the Exhibition of Unknown Architects, in an architecture that is described as ‘the crystallized expression of man’s noblest thoughts … why do we not wander through our streets and towns weeping with shame over such wastelands of ugliness?’ Such utopianism was not sustained for long, however, although the abstract design for the Weimar monument to the March Fallen manifests this Expressionist phase in Gropius’s work, as does a little-known project ‘Mountains for Living’ for crystalline housing. But it also forms his original position in starting the Bauhaus, an entirely new model of design education which he created, merging the Academy of Fine Art with the School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar into a single institution, and which he led from 1919 to 1928. In Gropius’s proclamation founding the Bauhaus, he spoke of ‘a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist. Together let us desire, conceive and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million

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workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith’. His model was the ancient bauhütte, a guild of craftsmen working together to build the medieval cathedral and enabling the achievement of that unimaginably huge task: among his early appointments was the visionary painter Johannes Itten who became the first ‘master of form’ and established a preliminary course that engaged students with a process of unlearning what their earlier education and consequent assumptions had taught. The basic model of teaching established by Gropius was for each student to be attached to a workshop in which they would learn a practical craft – though their teaching was led largely by artists rather than established craftsmen, they would learn fundamentals of form, materials and aesthetic principles in order to invent and create new forms. His appointment of staff in the early years, including the painters Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy, created an extraordinary dialectic arena: however different, each was very much committed to developing new thinking, each was original and articulate. In the nine years of Gropius’s directorship, the school changed tack several times, particularly after 1923 when the emphasis on visionary reinvention shifted into a practical engagement with the problems of industry to which he had, after all, been very much dedicated in the earlier pre-war years. Perhaps oddly, there was no school of architecture until 1927, when Gropius appointed Hannes Meyer to lead it, and it was the latter who was instrumental in shifting the culture of the school into a newly rationalistic as well as socialist direction. Under Gropius’s leadership the school provided Bauhaus students with an intoxicating arena for discovery and invention. They also applied their work in a larger field providing new models for everyday objects for the use of society: productions such as the steel-framed chairs by pupil and later master Marcel Breuer and the radical typography of Herbert Bayer, also a student who became a teacher, are just two whose work has been pervasive and enduring. The documentation and dissemination of the work of the school was highly important to him and a series of Bauhaus books, edited by Gropius and Moholy-Nagy, was published from 1925 to 1930. (Illus 0.1) Fourteen volumes including texts by Klee, Kandinsky, Oud and Malevich as well as the two editors reflected the culture of the school and provided an early and lasting example of the importance of publication in the narrative of Modernism, particularly since many went on to be republished for decades later. One such later edition was Gropius’s book bearing the English title the New Architecture and the Bauhaus (1935), which became highly influential in British architectural culture as the key book outlining the approach of Modernist architecture. As he declaimed, ‘We have learned to seek concrete expression of the life of our epoch in clear and crisply simplified forms.’ And arguing that modern architecture differed from the old in not being a matter of personal expression, but an expression of the zeitgeist he wrote, ‘It is now becoming widely recognised that although the outward forms of the New Architecture differ fundamentally in an organic sense from those of the old, they are not the personal whims of a handful of architects avid for innovation at all costs, but simply the inevitable logical product of the intellectual, social and technical conditions of our age.’ However, and this is perhaps unexpected given dominant aspects of his work and general approach, the rational process

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is not by itself enough, and architecture needs to be more than simply a matter of the functional: ‘The emphasis on its structural functions and the concentration on concise and economical solutions represent the purely material side of that formalising process … the other, the aesthetic satisfaction of the human soul, is just as important as the material. Both find their counterpart in that unity which is life itself.’ Be that as it may, and Gropius’s theory does not dwell on how this goal may be achieved, his role as the voice of architectural functionalism, of the denial of the role of the individual architect as artist, has been that which prevailed. His achievement with the building of the new home of the Bauhaus at Dessau, the culmination of the work of Gropius’s office with Meyer, is one of the great buildings of

Image 10.1  Bauhaus, Dessau 1926 with Adolf Meyer

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early Modernism and was seen as such by many of the visitors arriving for its opening in December 1926 (Image 10.1). It represents an entirely new model of architecture having little to do with earlier historically derived formal references and transforming the technical possibilities of new constructional techniques into a sophisticated and expressive language. Concrete, steel and glass can be seen used in lyrical and ingenious ways unprecedented at this time, following on from the earlier built projects at Alfeld and Cologne. Incorporating workshops, teaching rooms, student accommodation and administrative offices, each of these functions is housed in a distinct element of the building with its own defined form and detail, within the building’s overall language of white rendered walls and steel-framed glazing. The building needs to be understood in three dimensions rather than solely in plan and can best be read as a dynamic composition of volumes. It is particularly fitting that one of the most pervasive images of the Bauhaus is an aerial view, since through this its asymmetry and distinctions in scale and detail can be seen: the student accommodation with six stories the tallest, the glazed workshop block the largest. The administration – including Gropius’s own office exactly in the middle – is housed in a bridge building connecting the workshop and classroom blocks, but as there was no existing route through the site, it is an architectural rather than functional necessity. It is a building without a single facade or obvious entrance: as a composition of volumes it is a free-standing object not relating to its context, at what was then the edge of the city. Each element has its own treatment, the suspended glass walls of the workshop, apparently floating over a recessed basement floor, is the most spectacular, but small cantilevered balconies for each student room, and the planar treatment and detail of the projecting strip windows in the classroom block and administration bridge each produce their own highly original architectural effect. It was, albeit for six short years, a fitting home for the radical new thinking in design which the Bauhaus’s educational programme had generated, while for Gropius it provided a level of architectural achievement he was never again to reach. Designing new models of social housing, as is the case for all of Gropius’s generation, was very important to him. As early as 1910 he had made a convincing case to AEG for the construction of prefabricated housing for its workers: two prefabricated houses were later built for the Weissenhof Siedlung in Stuttgart as his contribution to the celebrated estate of model houses coordinated by Mies van der Rohe. Of more significance is the housing in Dessau he built with Adolf Meyer: using standardized elements and concrete panels cast on site, the sixty houses of the Törten estate are aligned by the tower crane tracks used for their assembly. As well as the large block of Siemenstadt housing built in Berlin after Gropius left the Bauhaus, an unbuilt 1930 project for ten storey slab housing blocks demonstrates with great and unfortunate clarity the limitations of a scientific, rational approach to the design of housing estates. Repetitive linear blocks are spaced according to the supposed requirements of sunlight and air, leaving vast and unused spaces between, giving no sense of identity or urban quality.

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Gropius was to leave Germany in 1935, after some attempt to work with the Nazi regime which had closed down the Bauhaus two years earlier, and spent two years in Britain where he established a partnership with Maxwell Fry. He moved again to the United States and became professor at Harvard in 1937: this provided a firm and professional basis for his architectural career, and he set about a radical reshaping of the educational practice of the institution. Assisted among others by Breuer who joined him in the same year, this new American architecture was characterized by social concern and an apparent mistrust of architecture seen as an art: among his Harvard students were Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph and I. M. Pei. The rational and science-based approach had lost the provisional and experimental nature of Bauhaus education in favour of structured teaching and a new high seriousness as befitting perhaps the difficult times in which he found himself. Instrumental in transforming American architectural education more widely, and through that the architecture of his adopted country, his influence there was as great as it had been earlier at the Bauhaus. The group practice Gropius founded in 1946 at the behest of former Harvard students, the Architects’ Collaborative (TAC), promised according to its founders ‘architecture for the sake of a healthy society’, but for the most part produced buildings proficient at best. Unlike the other celebrated architects of his generation, Gropius failed to originate a new direction in his work and such projects as the vast office tower for Pan Am built over Grand Central Station in New York actually appeared to contradict his own earlier principles without adding anything new. Understanding Gropius’s significance by taking a longer view of his achievements in the first decades of the twentieth century is to discover something central in how the mission and message of a new architecture was developed and achieved: it is unfortunate that his role as an internationally known cultural voice has meant his individual role as an architect has been undervalued.

KEY WORKS – GROPIUS Fagus shoe-last factory, Alfeld-an-der-Leine, 1911–13 (with Adolf Meyer) Werkbund Exhibition, Cologne, 1914 (Machine Hall and Office building with Adolf Meyer) Mountains for Living housing project, 1919 Monument to the March Fallen, Weimar, 1921 Sommerfeld House, Berlin, 1921 Chicago Tribune competition, 1922 (with Adolf Meyer) City Theatre, Jena, 1923 (with Adolf Meyer) Bauhaus, Dessau, 1926 (with Adolf Meyer) Masters’ houses, Dessau, 1926 Prefabricated houses, Weissenhof Siedlung, Stuttgart, 1927 Total Theatre project for Erwin Piscator, 1927 Törten Housing, Dessau, 1928 Siemenstadt Housing, Berlin, 1929

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Communal Room, Werkbund Exhibition, Paris, 1930 Slab apartment blocks project, 1930 Non-Ferrous Metals Exhibition, Berlin, 1934 New Architecture and the Bauhaus, 1935 Gropius house, Lincoln, MA, 1937 (with Marcel Breuer) Harvard Graduate Center, Cambridge, MA, 1949 (with TAC) Boston Center Project, 1953 (with TAC) Interbau Housing, Hansaviertel, Berlin, 1957 (with TAC)

FURTHER READING Barbican Art Gallery Bauhaus: Art as Life London Koenig Books 2012. Bayer, H, W Gropius, W, Gropius, I Bauhaus 1919–28 1938 MOMA New York: reprint London Secker and Warburg 1975. Futugawa, Yukio (ed.) Bauhaus, Dessau, Fagus Factory: Text Dennis Sharp Tokyo ADA Edita 1994. Isaacs, Reginald Walter Gropius: An Illustrated Biography Boston Little, Brown 1991. Nerdinger, Winfried Walter Gropius Berlin Bauhaus Archive 1985. Whitford, Frank Bauhaus London Thames and Hudson 1984.

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11  Theo Van Doesburg and De Stijl (1883–1931)

Image 11.1  Schröder House, Utrecht: Gerrit Rietveld, with Truus Schröder-Schräder 1924

Theo Van Doesburg was the leader of the De Stijl group of artists and architects in the Netherlands and was one of the most influential figures in Modernism’s early formation. Founded in 1917, De Stijl’s great objective was to bring into being a universal language of art and architecture that would represent a new spiritually inflected world order, rising above social and national boundaries. Their work and ideology put them at the forefront of the early twentieth-century avant-garde in Europe. It proposed the unity of art and architecture into a new configuration: artists were essential to enable the fulfilment of the new architecture, and art itself would be absorbed into architecture. De Stijl’s commitment was to start afresh with the fundamental questions of how

a truly modern practice might be created; how a piece of furniture, a room, a house could be made, starting from scratch with no recourse to precedent or tradition. Van Doesburg’s own role in this development was central, through his own work at the intersection of art and architecture, and through his editorship of the De Stijl journal. As Kenneth Frampton has written, ‘In many respects Van Doesburg embodied the movement in himself.’ The De Stijl journal was also the production of a number of contributors, primarily the artists Piet Mondrian, Bart van der Leck and Georges Vantongerloo, and architects including J. J. P. Oud and Robert Van’t Hoff. Its second issue published in November 1918 included the movement’s first manifesto, which declared, ‘There is an old and a new consciousness of time. The old is connected with the individual. The new is connected with the universal.’ The striving for universal values expressing an all-embracing harmony is explicitly connected to the world war, then just ending, and the aim to transcend social and political realities is very much of its time. The thought of the philosopher and former priest M. H. Schoenmaekers was known to Mondrian and other members of the group, and his books The New Image of the World (1915) and The Principles of Plastic Mathematics (1916) became the justification for the work which artists of the group were already undertaking. Schoenmaekers specified a language of form, derived from mathematics and sustained by his vision of the enduring absoluteness and purity of geometrical figures. He coined the term ‘Neo-Plasticism’ and his principles on form; the fundamental contraries of the horizontal, defined by the earth, and the vertical, tracking the rays of the sun, as well as on the deep meaning of primary colours, had a substantial influence enlarging on what Mondrian and others had already learnt from another influence, that of Theosophical thought. In the development of his abstract language of painting, Mondrian wanted to reach an essence beyond the world of contingency and appearance. Theosophy, a movement founded by Helena Blavatsky in the late nineteenth century, utilized aspects of Hindu philosophy and moved them out of their context of Indian mysticism into revealing universal and sacred truths about human life – beyond the ‘veil of appearance’. It cut through the conventions and mores of Western culture, devoid, according to Theosophical belief, of any real meaning. It taught that there is an ultimate reality behind the world as experienced and for the artists of De Stijl the fundamental role of art was to reify that: Mondrian’s paintings in particular may be said to be closer to being religious icons than the mechanistic renderings of modernity they perhaps appear to be. In terms of Van Doesburg’s own work as a painter, in his tectonic, structural approach he followed the work both of Mondrian and of van der Leck. The forms he used of the line, rectangle and space are dynamic, expressed both by the simple device of placing them in a diagonal configuration on the canvas and alternatively by having them floating in space. The development of new conceptions of space was intrinsic in this work, and Van Doesburg’s involvement with architectural proposals began in 1919 with design projects including the Bart De Ligt house, described

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by him as a three-dimensional painting. But his collaboration with the architect Cornelis van Eesteren on a series of house projects exhibited in Paris in 1923 makes clearer his idea of three-dimensional space as highly abstracted but realizable as built form. Their coloured surfaces configured into dynamic compositions of planes and projections were represented both by physical models and by axonometric representations: the plan, section and elevation were replaced by an overall, inclusive three-dimensional composition. The influence of these projects was immediate and widespread, impacting Le Corbusier’s work, as well as the villas designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens in Paris, and having an impact on many other Modernist designers including Eileen Gray. In 1924, Van Doesburg exhibited more abstract compositions entitled ‘SpaceTime Constructions’: these radical architectural propositions were intended to mean that the other arts, including painting, became redundant. Instead, a ‘total work of art’ was to be created, conceived in terms of four dimensions: length, height, width and time. He wrote in De Stijl issue XII on the new elemental architecture in a text entitled ‘Towards a Plastic Architecture’ on the anti-aesthetic, the need for functionality, the outdated notion of the ground plan, to be superseded in favour of the free and loose definition of inside and outside space with movable intermediate surfaces. He asserts, ‘The new architecture is anti-cubic; that is to say, it does not attempt to fit all the functional space cells together in a closed cube, but projects functional spacecells … centrifugally from the centre of the cube outwards. Thus height, breadth and depth plus time gain an entirely new plastic expression. In this way architecture achieves a more or less floating aspect.’ This ‘elementarism’ is the most original and influential concept of Van Doesburg’s work, which served to move the idea of the building away from the limitations of closed rectilinear forms into a new spatial freedom. The De Stijl journal had also included the discussion of existing architecture, including that of Frank Lloyd Wright, and his Larkin building, Unity Church and Robie House were interpreted as precedents to the full-blooded elementarism of the dynamic three-dimensional forms designed by De Stijl, designed as volumes and emphasizing the section rather than the plan, ignoring tradition in favour of a geometrically oriented approach. Gerrit Rietveld (1888–1964) who first trained as a carpenter had achieved a constructed equivalent of Van Doesburg’s elemental principles in 1917 with the design of a chair, the wood not yet painted, later recreated as the much-celebrated Red-Blue chair in De Stijl colours. The supports and rails of the chair were constructed of discrete elements extending beyond their required length, each element and joint emphasized as independent and distinct. Such rethinking, taking absolutely no account of the existing traditions and history of chair design, had not at that point been achieved in an architectural context. It was Rietveld who was to exceed Van Doesburg’s own achievements in such built interior projects as the Café Aubette while achieving something close to realizing the possibilities of its new

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architectural concept in the house he designed for and with Truus Schröder-Schräder in suburban Utrecht in 1923–4 (Image 11.1). Its larger historical importance is as the executed building which shows the closest relationship to the avant-garde notions in architecture widely prevailing in Europe in the 1910s and 1920s. At the same time it was, along with (but preceding) the early houses of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, a reinvention of the house, full of possibilities in relation to the domestic architecture that was to follow. Nevertheless, it is an odd and decidedly un-tectonic modern icon, giving, according to Sergio Polano, ‘the ambiguous impression that it is not a building, but a model blown up for experimental purposes’. Despite its appearance, it is built of load-bearing brick with timber floors: Reyner Banham wrote that it is ‘tiny, structurally timid … but here for the first time, the aesthetic possibilities of the hard school of modern architecture were uncompromisingly and brilliantly revealed’. A small two-storey house attached to the end of an existing terrace, it provides an open plan space on the first floor, which can be divided into separate rooms by folding screens. But its composition of elements creates an entirely new aesthetic: it is asymmetrical, without a single facade, a dynamic three-dimensional anti-cubic form. Its primary colours and anti-decorative quality also make it entirely consistent with the declared principles of the De Stijl movement. As with the chair Rietveld had designed earlier, which along with other related furniture designs was installed in the house, its elements were distinct and defined. It constitutes a dense and complex composition of lines and planes, both vertical and horizontal, which flow from inside to outside with a kind of centrifugal energy. This is emphasized by the use of planes and lines of colour: balconies project, double-height standing planes define three sides, a corner window opens out the interior space and light fittings and door furniture were reinvented consistent with the house’s modernity. De Stijl’s radical programme of starting art and architecture from year zero developed in the fairly comfortable surroundings of middle-class Europe, in contrast to the turbulent situation existing in Russia in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution. Its originality may appear as a necessary madness that has echoes running through the ensuing 100 years – the concept of elementarism and of three-dimensional dynamic composition stand as highly important aspects of the main stream of Modernism as it was to advance and thus change the world, though not as radically as Van Doesburg had intended. His influence on the Bauhaus, present in Weimar in the period of 1921–3 as a detached but highly influential teacher, served to transform it from its earlier romantic individualism into a systematic new formalism that shaped its later achievements. Further, the developing spatiality of the work of Mies van der Rohe, as well as Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer’s dynamic form of the Bauhaus’s new home in Dessau, stands as immediate evidence of its powerful direction and influence.

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KEY WORKS – VAN DOESBURG (Van Doesburg and others) Compositions, Van Doesburg, 1917–24 De Stijl journal, 1917–30, ed. Van Doesburg Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art, Piet Mondrian, 1917–18 Red-blue chair, Gerrit Rietveld, 1918/1923 Private House and Artist’s House projects, 1923 (Van Doesburg with Van Eesteren) Space-Time Constructions, Van Doesburg, 1923–4 Schröder House, Utrecht: Gerrit Rietveld, with Truus Schröder-Schräder, 1924 Café Aubette, Strasbourg, Van Doesburg, 1928: reconstruction 2008

FURTHER READING Blotkamp, C (ed.) De Stijl The Formative Years 1917–22 Cambridge MA MIT Press 1983. Doig, Peter Theo van Doesburg: Painting into Architecture Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1986. Friedman, Mildred (ed.) De Stijl 1917–1931 Visions of Utopia Oxford Phaidon 1982: Texts by Sergio Polano, Manfred Bock, Kenneth Frampton, Nancy J Troy et al. Jaffe, HLC De Stijl 1917–1931 London Tiranti 1956. Jaffe, HLC De Stijl: Extracts from the Magazine London Thames and Hudson 1970. Overy, Paul et al. Rietveld Schröder House Oxford Butterworth 1988. Padovan, Richard Towards Universality: Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and De Stijl London Routledge 2002. Van Straaten, Evert Theo Van Doesburg: Painter and Architect The Hague SDU 1988.

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12  El Lissitzky (1890–1941)/ Constructivism

Image 12.1  Proun painting 1919

El Lissitzky (born Lazar Markovich Lissitzky) was a significant figure in the art and architecture of the early years of post-Revolutionary Russia. He is seen as one of the most representative figures of Russian Constructivism and developed his practice out of the earlier work of Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich who had transformed artistic ideas and forms in the years before the First World War and the Russian Revolution itself. The new architectural practice which emerged in Russia, alongside the development of new ideas in Germany and mutually influencing each other, is the most radical new beginning in the architecture which came to be defined as Modernist. It was a period in Russia of political turmoil and economic crisis, but work

of a staggering variety of artistic and architectural originality was created in the period from 1917 until the re-establishment of historically derived forms by Stalin in 1932. The Marxist revolution in Russia in October 1917 aimed to destroy the existing political and social system in favour of an egalitarian society: as part of achieving this, a cultural shift would see existing forms of art and architecture replaced by a new order. However much both Lenin and Trotsky, the revolution’s leaders, were unconvinced about the work of the avant-garde groups that were proposing new architectural forms, the abstract forms of street decorations constructed in Petrograd by Natan Altman, as well as such projects as Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919) represented an entirely new aesthetic and approach. Tatlin’s vast structure incorporated the forms of a cube, pyramid and cylinder rotating within its spiral form to house and memorialize the institutions established in the revolution. Nikolai Punin had declared in the broadsheet Art of the Commune (1918) that ‘the proletariat will create new houses, new streets, new objects of everyday life … (through) a factory which produces new artistic things’, expressing the complete identification of revolutionary forms of society with unparalleled forms of architecture. The term ‘Constructivism’, applied from 1920, signifies the montage rather than composition of basic elements: an expression of the material properties of an object along with its spatiality, and, however varied the movement’s pronouncements and designs may be, the fundamental objective of the construction of art and architecture related to the machine. Born in Russia, Lissitzky studied architecture in Germany as well as travelling more extensively in Western Europe, later completing his studies in Moscow as an engineer-architect in 1918. He taught architecture and design at the Institute of Art (UNOVIS) in Vitebsk from the following year: Malevich was appointed director of this revolutionary school in 1920 and under his influence Lissitzky immediately shifted into making abstract paintings, compositions of abstract forms in space that he named Proun, and described as ‘a station on the road to construction’. The Proun often appears as if it were a single frame of objects in motion, with geometrical forms in relationship to each other seen in shifting perspectives. But the many images he created did owe much to Malevich, whose Suprematist paintings – done from 1913, and among the first completely abstract paintings – show a floating world, forms of coloured rectangles in a dynamic relationship to each other. In a series of ‘Architectons’, abstract sculptures taking these Suprematist forms into three dimensionality, Malevich had presented the promise, however scale-less and unresolved technically, of what modern architecture could be. In Lissitzky’s work, the spatial representation of multifaceted forms marks out his compositions in comparison with those of Malevich and also disregards Malevich’s philosophical and spiritual content, instead forming commanding evocations of new forms of space. As he later described their role in the publication De Stijl, ‘Proun supersedes painting and its artist on the one hand, the machine and its engineers on the other, (and) proceeds to the construction of space.’ Many impress as being images of architecture: some suggest city forms, others the dynamic shapes of buildings. They have in common the idea of future form-making, a utopian vision owing nothing to the structures of the past (Image 12.1).

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The Constructivism of the Association of New Architects (ASNOVA) led by Nikolai Ladovsky was more scientific in its approach, primarily aiming to evolve new building forms through existing technical means, while Ladovsky had undertaken systematic psychological studies on the meaning of forms. It expressed both a practical ideology and the authentic objectives of creating new form, articulating the need for a collective order rather than being the manifestation of the artist or architect as an individual. Although Lissitzky was associated with this group, his position was that of the UNOVIS group that spoke instead of the abstract artistic language of Suprematism. This aspired to be a universal language of forms that reflected the new society as it came into being; the supreme form of society could already be experienced through this universal art. Ultimately, the more practical approach of ASNOVA was effectively ‘anti-art’ and Lissitzky took the stand that new forms of art themselves brought about the transformation of society. Lissitzky spent much of the 1920s outside Russia and most significantly set up the First Russian Art Exhibition held in Berlin in 1922. This brought together over 700 examples of the new work in art and architecture into the most influential avant-garde circles in Europe and included Lissitzky’s Proun Room, an installation unfolding in space and time. The exhibition caused a sensation and was intended to do so, as Lissitzky was in effect a political agent of the Soviet state. The exhibition influenced Van Doesburg and appeared in the De Stijl journal, shaped the approach of the young Mies van der Rohe and had an impact on the work of the Bauhaus, while in Switzerland Lissitzky participated in the formation of the ABC group with Hannes Meyer and Mart Stam, which can be seen as the key manifestation of an international practice of Constructivism. Primarily, Lissitzky was the effective disseminator of ideas, in particular in his book Russia: The Reconstruction of Architecture in the Soviet Union (1930), later published in English with the title Architecture for World Revolution. It included a wide range of examples across the broad field of what had come to be called Constructivist architecture: sections on housing communes, the club as a social force, buildings for industrial production and the building of the new city. The political basis of his argument distinguishes it from Toward an Architecture by Le Corbusier which it resembles in some ways: the necessity of creating a future utopia which they have in common would be reached by political rather than (only) artistic means. Lissitzky may perhaps be seen even more as the creator of potent images in his radical photography and highly successful work in graphic design including journal covers and layout. The design for the platform for Lenin is effectively a Proun in constructed form, while his photographic self-portrait montage as the artist-constructor seems to crystallize the sense of a new form of a worker who would participate in the artistic revolution. The architectural project Wolkenbügel (cloud-iron) was described as a socialist form of the American skyscraper: these striking cantilevered towers would act as markers at the major intersections of the Moscow ring road. To talk of the influence of Lissitzky is also to raise the question of the wider effect that Constructivist forms and ideas had on developments of Modernism, in both

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the 1920s and beyond. The cultural transformation it represents had an outcome in the conversion of the teaching of the Bauhaus School into a new interpretation of the mechanical aesthetic, with the application of forms both dynamic and light. The conviction expressed in Lissitzky’s Prouns helped to bring into being a new basis of form-making, essentially three-dimensional and eschewing symmetry. The overall emphasis in Constructivism on the primacy and visibility of structural elements also had an effect on later architecture, perhaps even on Le Corbusier and, much later, the architecture termed High Tech. But the histories that established the trajectory of Modernism by Giedion, Hitchcock and Pevsner ignored its importance: few references were made until the 1960s when the early studies of Anatole Kopp, followed by many others who researched Russian archives in the 1980s, brought to attention the rich inventiveness of the work of many of its architects and designers. Its influence on certain contemporary architects is palpable and acknowledged, notably by Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid. And the new paradigm of Modernism it has come to represent has shaped not only the movement of Deconstruction but effectively extended the sense of what architecture can be, however much it is now drained of political meaning.

KEY WORKS – LISSITZKY Prouns, 1919–26 Lenin Tribune (platform) project, 1920 Proun Room, Berlin exhibition, 1922 Self-portrait: The Constructor, 1924 Wolkenbügel project, 1925 Room for Constructive Art, Hannover, 1926 Soviet pavilion, Pressa exhibition, Cologne, 1928 Russia: The Reconstruction of Architecture in the Soviet Union /Architecture for World Revolution, 1930

FURTHER READING Cooke, Catherine Russian Avant-Garde: Theories of Art, Architecture and the City London Academy Editions 1995. Douglas, Charlotte and Lodder, Christina (eds) Rethinking Malevich London Pindar 2007. Kopp, Anatole Town and Revolution London Thames and Hudson 1970. Lissitzky, El Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution Cambridge MA MIT Press 1930/Translation 1970. Lodder, Christina Russian Constructivism New Haven Yale University Press 1983.

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Lissitzky-Kuppers, Sophie El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts London Thames and Hudson 1968. Margolin, Victor Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy Nagy Chicago University of Chicago Press 1997. Nisbet, Peter (ed.) El Lissitzky, 1890–1941. Cambridge MA Harvard University Art Museums 1987. Perloff, Nancy and Reed, Brian (ed.) Situating El Lissitzky Los Angeles Getty 2003: with essays by C Lodder, E Forgács. T J Clark and others.

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13  Konstantin Melnikov (1880–1974) Konstantin Melnikov was the architect most prominent in post-revolutionary Russia for his production of buildings in the language of Constructivism. Nevertheless, he was largely unaffiliated to the substantive groups such as the First Working Group of Constructivists or the Association of Contemporary Architects (OSA) that were establishing programmes for new architecture in Soviet Russia, or with the practitioners such as Vladimir Tatlin who had effectively created the movement. His inventiveness, applied to many built projects rather than the unbuilt schemes done by most of his contemporaries, makes him, in international terms, perhaps the most original building architect of the 1920s in this early period of Modernism. And it also underlines that at least for a short period of less than fifteen years, Russian revolutionary society did indeed support the development of a radical new architecture. Initially trained and working as an artist in the years before the First World War, Melnikov later practiced as an architect within the Neo-Classical tradition: after the revolution he participated in the Moscow State Art and Technical School (Vkhutemas) which was set up in 1920. Strikingly similar in its programme to the far better-known Bauhaus School in Germany, Vkhutemas instituted a radical educational process of starting afresh with issues of design: like the Bauhaus, a preliminary basic course acted as the foundation for the development of approaches within different practices of art and design. Distinct from the Bauhaus, an architecture course was taught from the beginning of the school: Melnikov taught with Ilya Golosov, taking a different architectural line from that of both the surviving tradition of academic composition and the politically formed rationalist innovation of Nikolai Ladovsky. He adopted an intuitive rather than analytical approach to form-making, writing of the necessity of ‘the creative imagination’. The Institute of Artistic Culture (Inkhuk) was a significant organization initially led by the painter Wassily Kandinsky: it led to the first working group of Constructivists set up in 1921. The Constructivist manifesto was based on what were termed ‘objective criteria’ of art, which included material, colour, space, movement, form and technique: this new set of principles was to replace pre-revolutionary and outdated practices, and bring the culture of art to a new beginning. For Melnikov,

however, such a position was a step beyond the practicalities of building: as he wrote in 1923, ‘Architecture is a volumetric and spatial art. It exists as the handicraft act of building, and only the development of this approach to building can produce such forms as we call architecture.’ The 1925 Paris Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Arts is best known now through its being the origin of the term Art Deco, applied retrospectively to the decorative classically inspired forms of such architects as Pierre Patout and the high bourgeois furnishings that went with them. In striking contrast, the USSR (Russian) Pavilion was designed by Melnikov, the result of winning a competition for which Ladovsky won second prize. It was, along with the L’Esprit nouveau pavilion by Le Corbusier, the only truly Modernist design in this major international exhibition and won the Grand Prix, and immediately both Melnikov and the new Russian work he represented were widely acknowledged (Image 13.1). The building primarily aimed to communicate the spirit of the Russian revolution, and not, as other pavilions did, to display objects: its primary function was to instil an experience of the new society. It was built of prefabricated elements transported from Russia – in wood, but extensively glazed – forming an elongated rectangular block slashed through by a diagonal staircase, with an intersecting roof form of alternately inclined planes. It succeeded in combining the vernacular timber construction of the Russian steppes with strong Constructivist forms, derived from the experimentation at Vhuktemas led by Ladovsky. Bringing an architectural expression of the revolution to what was then the world centre of art was an astounding gesture and impressed the Parisian avantgarde. According to the Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre who saw the building as a young man it presented the idea that abstract art ‘was synonymous with cultural revolution’. Melnikov’s earlier design for the Pavilion was more ambitious formally, with fractured circular forms in dynamic interpenetration: used in other projects, both built and unbuilt, his use of circular forms is a recurring theme. His version of Constructivist practice was to incorporate a wide variety of geometrical elements but reconfigured into machine-like shapes. The montage of elements is highly original spatially and, as with the wood unexpectedly used for this major building, works with properties of materiality rather than simply making abstracted forms as other contemporaries did. Melnikov built six Workers’ Clubs in Moscow in the mid-1920s. Each was designed completely differently from each other, although with a similar brief for this new form of social centre. Intended to replace the influence of the church and of state power, these revolutionary institutions, termed ‘social condensers’, would in the broadest sense educate workers and include all in their community in the new post-revolutionary social order. Each incorporated an auditorium for meetings and performances, along with libraries, classrooms and, usually, sports facilities. The Rusakov Club for transport workers is the most inventive in form, the exterior characterized by three massive cantilevered structures separated by glazed vertical staircases. These cantilevers house seating for the large auditorium, which can be separated by moveable walls into smaller halls: this assemblage of diagonal geometric volumes has a

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Image 13.1  USSR Pavilion, International Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Arts, Paris 1925

representational quality, as if evoking the forms of a machine. The play of planes and volumes is seen in more muted ways in other of the club designs: at the Burevestnik Club, a cluster of five semi-circular glazed towers emerge from a rectilinear block on the street side; the extensively glazed facade of the Kauchuk Factory Club forms a quarter circle. As well as expressing new social patterns they are experiments in Modernist form irrespective of their programmatic aims. Similarly, a series of garage designs include the Gosplan Garage in Moscow in the shape of a giant headlamp, as well as the extraordinary unbuilt project for a parking garage in Paris formed of two great diagonally intersecting blocks bridging the river Seine – surely one of the most dynamic of all Constructivist projects.

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Melnikov built a house for himself and his family, its form unprecedented in its urban Moscow setting. Two cylindrical volumes intersect, one lower and dominated by a full height flat glazed screen, the other facing north, with multiple hexagonal windows punctuating its form. The circular form, as seen elsewhere in his work, may have a source in traditional Russian churches, but also in the elemental Neo-Classical forms of projects by Ledoux and Boullée. The shapes of the windows are a direct result of the structure of load-bearing brick laid in corbelled lattice form, its structural innovation seen also in the timber floors’ egg-crate construction. Despite Melnikov’s separation from contemporary Constructivist debates, the house can be seen to resemble the experimental formal ‘laboratory designs’ at Vkhutemas. But his emphasis on making, on the development of an architecture of materiality, distinguishes his work from the more gestural and polemical work of his contemporaries. His exuberant creation of form did much to communicate new architectural programmes: his individuality in a period of collectivity is a paradox, particularly as he may be seen as the primary architect of this period in revolutionary Russia. As Frederick Starr describes Melnikov in his study of the architect, he was perhaps uniquely ‘a solo architect in a mass society’, despite his successful realization of buildings that expressed the cultural aspirations of the revolution. Regardless of his earlier acceptance as a representative of the new Russia in the 1920s, he was later officially criticized as ‘formalist’ and went into eclipse: the new regime of Stalin had rejected Constructivism in favour of a populist and Russian-inflected Neo Classicism. After 1937 Melnikov was not allowed to practice, while in the West his work was no longer appreciated, as a more conformist version of Modernism became established. The later rediscovery of his work began in the 1960s when the pluralist history of Modernism was being rediscovered. However much it may be untypical of the social and collectively oriented work of the young Soviet Russia, Melnikov’s work can be seen as an attainment of great originality in this early period of Modernism.

KEY WORKS – MELNIKOV Makhorka Pavilion, Russian Agricultural & Handicraft Exhibition, Moscow, 1923 New Sukharev Market, Moscow, 1924 Garage on Seine project, Paris, 1925 USSR Pavilion, International Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Arts, Paris, 1925 Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, 1926 Kauchuk Factory Club, Moscow, 1927 Melnikov House, Moscow, 1927–9 Porcelain Factory Club, Dulyovo, 1927 Rusakov Workers’ Club, Moscow, 1928

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Burevestnik Factory Club, Moscow, 1929 Svoboda Factory Club, Moscow, 1929 Intourist Garage, Moscow, 1936 Gosplan Garage, Moscow, 1936

FURTHER READING Cooke, Catherine (ed.) Russian Avant-Garde Art and Architecture London Academy Editions 1983. Fosso, Mario, Macel, Otakar, Meriggi, Maurizio (eds) Konstantin S. Melnikov and the Construction of Moscow Milan Skira 2000. Khan-Magomedov, S. O. Pioneers of Soviet Architecture New York Rizzoli 1987. Pallasmaa, Juhani with Gozak, Andrei The Melnikov House London Academy 1996. Starr, S. Frederick Melnikov: Solo Architect in a Mass Society Princeton NJ Princeton University Press 1978.

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14  Hannes Meyer (1889–1954)

Image 14.1  Federal School of German Trade Unions, Bernau, Berlin 1928–1930

Hannes Meyer was the first to lead the teaching of architecture at the Bauhaus school in 1927 and became its second director after Walter Gropius’s departure. He can primarily be seen as the modern architect who most explicitly adopted a belief in functionalism: for him, science rather than art should be the foundation of architecture. As he wrote in his manifesto ‘Building’ in 1928, ‘All things in this world are the product of the formula: function times economy. So none of those things are works of art.’ In contradiction to the position of many of his contemporaries who imagined a renewed architecture based on new foundations of art, he declared with considerable directness: ‘Building is just organisation: social, technical, economic and physical organisation.’

Meyer practiced as an architect in his native Switzerland from 1916 and in 1923 was co-founder with Mart Stam, Hans Schmidt and El Lissitzky of the Zurich-based architectural magazine ABC: Contributions on Building. This group, and their architectural production in terms of projects and buildings, represents the position of the application of radical new Constructivist architectural principles, derived, through El Lissitzky, from the work of the revolutionary USSR. Meyer’s stance included a commitment to Communism and this also distinguishes him from many other architects of Modernism whose architectural principles, while derived from a socialist perspective, were more willing to compromise their political position to obtain building commissions. While it may appear that architectural Modernism is fundamentally shaped both by left-wing beliefs and by a functional view of architectural production, Meyer’s projects and theory may test the limits of a functionalist approach and show how much functionalist intention can be translated into building of a new kind of socialist architecture without any qualities of art. For Meyer, starting a design under functionalist principles involved a process in which the analysis of functions of whatever the building was to be used for was elaborated into a diagram: the design was to derive directly from this functional investigation. As he wrote, when designing a house, a functional, biological set of imperatives came into play, irrespective of location and culture: ‘1. sex life, 2. sleeping habits, 3. pets, 4. gardening, 5. personal hygiene, 6. weather protection, 7. hygiene in the home, 8. car maintenance, 9. cooking, 10. heating, 11. exposure to the sun, 12. services – these are the only motives when building a house … the functional diagram and the economic programme are the determining principles of the building project.’ This text was part of the programme outlined to students on Meyer’s taking over the role of Bauhaus’ director in 1928: his clear intention there was to purge the teaching of the school by removing the influence of the sensibility and subjectivity of artists such as Kandinsky and Klee in favour of a technological progressivism. His ABC colleagues were appointed to the staff, with Stam becoming a visiting lecturer on elementary building and Hans Wittwer a lecturer on light, heating and acoustics. The ‘new’ architect was, for Meyer, a specialist in organization, coordinating the work of technical collaborators: economists, hygienists, heating engineers, climatologists and so on. Prior to his work at the Bauhaus, however, two highly original unbuilt projects done with Hans Wittwer make a new approach evident. The Petersschule was designed for a site in Basel: the circulating spaces are on the exterior of the building’s volume, for example the main staircase diagonally crosses the facade, while a vast platform providing spaces for play is at second floor level, suspended by four steel cables. The architects’ rationale is to raise the school as far as possible from the ground to maximize light and air, light also being maximized in the interior by skylights and strip windows, creating an unprecedented overall form but one clearly influenced by Constructivist projects, not least those of El Lissitzky. A second project for the Geneva League of Nations competition created an assemblage of office towers and a vast meeting hall with surrounding lower structures, built according to a standardized plan and building module. Distinct functions are given different built volumes,

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and its architects exposed function and structure throughout, using such modern materials as steel windows, rubber floors and Eternit asbestos cladding panels. This dynamic configuration of elements is unparalleled, and for Meyer the new organization of the League of Nations, set up in the wake of the devastation of the First World War, could not possibly be housed in traditional forms of architecture. As he wrote of the design, ‘No pillared reception rooms for weary monarchs but hygienic workrooms for the busy representatives of their people. No back corridors for backstairs diplomacy but open glazed rooms for the public negotiation of honest men.’ Clearly, however much its architects’ stated intentions were to ‘symbolize nothing’, the project was intended to represent the open diplomacy and good intentions of a new political order, a collectivity of nations in which their building would enhance the processes of political consensus, in a way that a building whose form is shaped by history could not. It is very questionable whether this can be described as ‘functionality’, and the architects’ intentions are being directed towards a form-making that will enhance its function, rather than simply provide workable spaces for the organization to operate. The Petersschule project gives priority to just two aspects of the analysis of function which the architects had undertaken: the maximization of light and the need for fresh air. They have been made predominant in an extreme way that its teachers or students would no doubt not have wanted: after all, while countless other schools have had a similar brief, their resulting architectural forms have been completely different. Other architects who may be described as part of a functionalist tendency, notably Walter Gropius, explicitly incorporated their reading of human emotions and needs in their definition of the functional, rather than only the practical functions of servicing and structure as Meyer did. At the Bauhaus, live projects were undertaken by students working alongside teachers, and among them were the extension of a housing estate built by Gropius at Törten on the fringes of Dessau. Five blocks of balcony-access houses were built for a housing cooperative with standardized construction, their minimal space standards mitigated by the provision of good light and modern technology. A more substantial project was provided by the commission to build the Federal School of the German Trade Unions at Bernau (Image 14.1). More sober than the projects undertaken with Wittwer, Meyer’s design provides a dynamic configuration of blocks of classrooms and student housing, the strongest formal element being a long glazed corridor link connecting classrooms. Its systematic defining of the functions of accommodation, work spaces and circulation are intended to materialize its organizational programme and, as K. Michael Hays has said, envisage its ‘architecture as a diagrammatic act’. These projects and others are Bauhaus buildings, emerging from Meyer’s architectural programme at the school. Surprisingly for a committed Communist he was able as director to bring in more commercial work than the school had had before, such as light fittings designed for a number of new buildings by the metal workshop, so that the Bauhaus made its first profit under his leadership in 1929. Nevertheless, political difficulties both internal and external led to him leaving the Bauhaus in the following year.

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The move that he then undertook, along with a number of former Bauhaus students, was to go to work in the USSR. He was leaving Germany, as he said in an interview with a Russian newspaper, ‘to work in the Soviet Union, where a true proletarian culture is developing, where socialism was born’. In practice, the great opportunities he anticipated in a just and post-revolutionary society did not materialize: initially, he taught in Moscow and in the following years, he also worked on the urban development of new industrial cities including Birobidzhan and Nizhniy Kurinsk. Despite his political commitment and his established reputation in the West, he was unable to make a leading contribution to the direction of these vastly utilitarian cities, or indeed to the ongoing project to create a Greater Moscow plan. He left the USSR in 1936 and later moved to Mexico where he undertook the design of further social building projects. Meyer’s role as a leading architect of Modernism rests on a small number of projects which are scarcely convincing as expressions of the functional, and primarily on his polemic – the articulation of a position which went further than other architectural manifestos in this early period of the formulation of the programme for modern architecture. Functionalism in the sense of the disregard of history and precedent is a truly radical position, even if it seems to make the architect’s role questionable: as the production of modern architecture gathered pace in the following decades, it became clear that forgetting that architecture was an art was indeed what the future would bring.

KEY WORKS – MEYER Vitrine Co-op exhibition, 1923 The New World issue of Das Werk, 1926 Petersschule school project, Basel, 1926 (with H. Wittwer) League of Nations building, Geneva project, 1927 (with H. Wittwer) Building, Bauhaus, 1928 Dessau Törten Housing, 1928–30 Federal school of German Trade Unions, Bernau, 1928–30 Workers’ bank project, Berlin, 1929 Greater Moscow development plan, 1932 Birobidzhan development plan, USSR, 1934

FURTHER READING Hays, K Michael Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer Boston MIT 1992. Ingberman, Sima ABC International Constructivist Architecture Cambridge MA MIT Press 1994. Schnaidt, Conrad Hannes Meyer Buildings Projects and Writings Zurich A Niggli 1965.

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15  László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946)

Image 15.1  Light-Space Modulator 1930

László Moholy-Nagy was highly accomplished in several art practices: he took a world-leading role in innovation in photography, film and graphic design, as well as in his painting and sculpture, and was of great consequence in developing a radical new understanding of architecture in the key period of Modernism’s formulation in the 1920s. This emerges in particular from his work at the Bauhaus school during its most successful period, where he taught from 1923 to 1928; he was second only to founder and director Walter Gropius in his influence and achievement. Moholy-Nagy

was a self-taught Hungarian artist who had been exhibiting in Berlin from 1920 and had created an extraordinary series of paintings, entitled ‘Glass Architecture’, that married forms derived from Constructivism with a new balance and translucency, his own dynamic interpretation of abstract painting. He was invited by Gropius to run the Bauhaus metal workshop in 1923, and soon afterwards also took over the running of the preliminary course, the foundation of Bauhaus teaching which had been initiated by Johannes Itten. This painter of an other-worldly disposition is seen as representing the Bauhaus’s first period, Moholy-Nagy very much taking it in a different direction. As with his predecessor, the process of learning involved the casting aside of preconceptions and precedents, but in favour of an enthusiastic engagement with modern life and technology rather than its rejection in favour of uncovering the spiritual, which Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee as well as Itten had made central to their teaching. As Moholy-Nagy had written in 1922, in contradiction to such prevailing ideas: ‘the reality of our century is technology: the invention, construction and maintenance of machines. To be a user of machines is to be of the spirit of this century’. The preliminary course started with investigations in the use of materials and in basic form-making: under Moholy-Nagy this became a series of experiments in light, space, in visual perception and in the surface, texture and structural properties of material. The relevance to its application in an industrial context became paramount, so from being an open-ended investigation and process of unlearning, it enabled the discovery and invention of new forms. Student Marianne Brandt, for example, in the metal workshop designed a series of light fittings of simple and original form, using glass and steel. Moholy-Nagy co-edited with Gropius a series of Bauhaus books emerging from the school’s teaching and philosophy to which he also contributed radical graphic design. Apart from publications by Gropius, Moholy and other Bauhaus teachers it also began to represent an encyclopaedia of Modernist theory – Malevich, Van Doesburg and Oud were also included in the series. Moholy’s Painting Photography Film documented not only his own work and teaching, it defined a new role for photography which for him would ‘abolish that pictorial and imaginative association pattern … which has been stamped upon our vision by great individual painters’. Images created by the camera were the future – as he also said, everyone can make photographs – and he made clear that it brought with it a completely new way of seeing. But his book From Material to Architecture (Image 0.1), based on his Bauhaus teaching, provides a foundation for a radical new understanding of architecture, intimately connected with the processes of modern life. He evolved a way of approaching design through the establishment of basic, and according to him objectively derived, principles that owe nothing to history or precedent. Acknowledging nevertheless the influences of, by then, twenty years of Modernism he follows an argument through an examination of surface and material to three dimensionality in sculpture, ending with space, or ‘architecture’.

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Space is ‘for him so much the stuff of architecture that the terms are interchange­ able’ as Reyner Banham has pointed out: its articulation is what distinguishes modern architecture and he says that ‘ the elements necessary for the fulfilment of the function of a building unite in a spatial creation that can become a spatial experience for us’. This ‘space-creation’ will be achieved within the limits of physical bodies and beyond that by a ‘dynamic field of force’. His implication is that technologies will exist to create an architecture beyond existing materiality: he refers to walls of glass, unprecedented until his time, and walls of compressed air, as well as the kinetics of bodies dynamically located in space. Buildings were to comprise pure blocks, pierced volumes, virtual volumes created by lighting, or indeed transparent blocks sheathed in glass. Movement was implicit, volumes intersecting and mutually interpenetrating: all were subsumed under the notion of the machine as inspiration and as metaphor. One essential point which differentiates this body of theory from other more celebrated texts on architecture published in the 1920s is that the object, the designed building, is not the goal for Moholy-Nagy: as he asserts, ‘not the product, but man, is the end in view’. An understanding of man as a physical and sensate being, with human – ‘biological’ – needs is at the core of his thinking: built form is there to serve those definable necessities. The book’s visual quality is astounding, including all manner of striking examples, with the richness of the visual culture of the illustrated magazine. Few are of designed architecture, but instead show incidental and discovered forms: a railway signal box is presented from the inside as a glass box surrounded by the lines of train tracks and the vertical forms of masts, and an image of the huge air shaft of a ship defined by its metal staircases equally represents a new form of spatial experience. Figures located on the steel structure of a concrete shell under construction portray the possibility of bodies dynamically located in space, while sunbathers lie on the marquee projecting above a cinema entrance. From Material to Architecture is the first theoretical text to emerge not from an argument based on historical precedent, as can be seen in contemporary books such as Le Corbusier’s Toward an Architecture. His thesis is located in what he sees as the present, a kind of Futurism based on what are presented as the innate needs of man and an openness to the culture of the machine in its various forms. But rather than a simple determinism, the role of the artist as mediator is of the greatest importance: he is very far from those like Hannes Meyer who would reject it, and calls for ‘utopians of genius’ to carry forward the necessary work of transforming the world. The book was published after he had left the Bauhaus, and he also continued work on kinetic sculpture of which the most fully achieved example is the Light-Space Modulator, completed in 1930 (Image 15.1). With Constructivist origins, not least Tatlin’s Project for the Monument of the Third International, both the constructed piece and its shadow and light effects are the goal of the work. A diagonal composition of steel parts, with perforated discs, tilted planes, rods and spirals with an electric motor moving its parts in stately rhythm, it is effectively an architecture-machine, a clear counterpart of his conjectural propositions.

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Moholy-Nagy, like his contemporaries based in Berlin, saw his artistic and educational work coming to an abrupt end with the rise of Nazism, and he moved first to London and then to Chicago where in 1937 a ‘new Bauhaus’ was set up and which he led at the suggestion of Gropius. However short-lived, this new American base provided further opportunities, and his book Vision in Motion appeared after his death in 1947. There is great, if not entirely fulfilled, potential in Moholy’s ideas: a genuinely alternative approach to making new art and architecture out of the culture of the machine. His emphasis from the 1920s onwards on the production of radically new, visually effective, publications makes him appear a precursor of Marshall McLuhan, as well perhaps as prefiguring the technological production of such artists as Andy Warhol. For Moholy, history began only in the late nineteenth century: and more than any other figure of his generation his approach to architecture looked forward into a future world, which appears relevant now in a digital age, and to the possibilities which can only now be realized of fragmentary and partial forms.

KEY WORKS – MOHOLY-NAGY Compositions, ‘Glass Architecture’, 1921–4 Painting Photography Film, Bauhaus book, 1925 From Material to Architecture, Bauhaus book (translated as The New Vision), 1929 Light-Space Modulator, 1930 Vision in Motion, 1947

FURTHER READING Arts Council of Great Britain Laszlo Moholy-Nagy London 1980. Kostelanetz, Richard (ed.) Moholy-Nagy: An Anthology New York Praeger 1970. Moholy-Nagy, László The New Vision; From Material to Architecture New York Brewer, Warren and Putnam 1932. Moholy-Nagy, László Vision in Motion Chicago Paul Theobold 1947. Passuth, Krisztina Moholy-Nagy London Thames and Hudson 1985. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality New York Harper 1950.

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16  Grete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897–2000) Grete Schütte-Lihotzky (born Margarete Lihotzy) is one of a very small number of women architects recognized by the canon to have made a significant contribution to the early development of the ideas and practice of modern architecture. Her work on the development of programmes of social housing in Vienna, Frankfurt and elsewhere was imbued with a socialist vision – she was a lifelong communist – but also demonstrates an engagement with ideas of functionalism and scientific management. Her design of the prototype kitchen known as the Frankfurt Kitchen in 1926, of which over 10,000 were constructed, was highly influential on future kitchen design as its precepts were to become established practice (Image 16.1). It is ironic that her unique achievement has been masked perhaps not only by sexism: Ernst May, whose larger role as Frankfurt city architect in the 1920s, and responsible for building modernist housing at a then unprecedented scale, was often credited as the designer. But also the widespread post-war belief that the modern labour-saving kitchen was solely an American achievement ignored her very significant contribution. The first woman to qualify as an architect in Austria in 1920, she studied at the Vienna School of Applied Arts, soon afterwards joining Adolf Loos, then Vienna city architect, on the vast workers’ housing programme created in the wake of the socialist establishment of ‘Red Vienna’ in 1919. With Loos, Franz Schuster and others she designed the series of blocks of the Otto Haas-Hof, characterized by an austerity of style and lack of rhetoric; she also designed a prefabricated kitchen in concrete in 1921. Ernst May, appointed in Frankfurt in 1925, invited Schütte-Lihotzky and Schuster to join him there in working on a project which applied Modernist principles in mass housing, developing its architecture in terms of design but also in terms of programme, with the assertion that a new kind of life would be determined by these new forms of building. The publication of the journal Das Neue Frankfurt ensured its dissemination internationally. As Schuster was to write there in 1927, ‘The new dwelling sets for its occupants the task of rethinking everything afresh, of organising a new life style, and of winning freedom from the irrelevant clutter of outmoded habits of thought and old-fashioned equipment … (T)he new housekeeping, organised in

keeping with the spirit of our age, is destined to become a natural part of our everyday life.’ Schütte-Lihotzky had read the book by home economist Christine Frederick The New Housekeeping (1913). It applied the principles of scientific management devised by American engineer Frederick Taylor to the domestic environment, with particular reference to the kitchen, and introduced the fundamental principle of efficiency which was to replace traditional ways of working. This approach, known as ‘Taylorism’, had been applied before to industrial processes and management: Taylor’s work, summarized in his The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), subjected work processes to systematic observation and analysis. Their aim was to increase productivity: the new machines created for industrial processes through the nineteenth century were, according to Taylor, let down by inefficient working practices. The analysis of tasks would bring in the ‘one best way’ of working rather than leaving individuals any discretion about how they would undertake their work. She believed in these principles, publishing the article How can proper housing save women work? in 1921. Her position represents a particular version of the more general idea of ‘functionalism’ as applied to architecture, and it was in the design of the Frankfurt Kitchen that she was able to fully give form to these ideas. Described by Martina Hessler as ‘a materialised concept of modern life’, the kitchen design can be seen as being at the forefront of the application of Modernist principles in the working-class home. The Kochküche, the kitchen for cooking, was to replace the traditional Wohnküche, or living kitchen: what had been the main social space of the house would be exchanged for a place of carefully calculated work. Schütte-Lihotzky conducted time and motion studies using a stopwatch and analysed each movement in the processes of food preparation to discover unnecessary action, ensuring the economy of time and energy. The rationalization of these processes led to the design of a floor plan in which its housewife-subject walked 8 m rather than 19 m in food preparation, in a scientifically calculated narrow space of 1.9 by 3.4 m. Its design included the detailed fabrication of each piece of furniture and equipment: the kitchen was well-lit and well ventilated. Modular cupboards and long strips of countertop were fitted and up-to-date electric cooking equipment was integrated: above, a row of hooks provided easy access to kitchen tools, while provisions were stored in eighteen labelled aluminium drawers. The gleaming surfaces of tile, glass and metal manifested the transformation of everyday life in the modern world, as did the creation of a kitchen designed as if it were a machine. The kitchens were prefabricated and lifted into place by crane, with some 10,000 in three variant designs installed in Frankfurt social housing, while its exhibition as a key element of the ‘New Frankfurt’ secured its commercial sale elsewhere in Germany as well as internationally to Sweden and France. Susan Henderson has declared that here ‘the kitchen came to full maturity as a piece of highly specialised equipment – a work station where all implements were a simple extension of the operator’s hand’. Housewives nevertheless had to learn how to use the kitchen, and Schütte-Lihotzky set up training schools in the city to introduce them to modern practices, believing

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Image 16.1  Frankfurt Kitchen 1926

that architects understood users’ needs better than they themselves. This attempt at instruction was of limited success in changing habits and traditions, and in the longer run, many users resisted and complained: and the kitchen’s design was practically impossible to modify. But architects thought they were simply wrong and in need of more technical education. Its functionality, however well considered and humane in its intentions, was lacking as a solution ultimately imposed on its users and as such can be seen as a paradigm of a Modernism that sees design as a scientifically based practice. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that the kitchen was designed as a place for constructive labour rather than consumerism, its architect seeing it primarily as part of a wider socialist enterprise, it formed the prototype of the built-in kitchen later prevalent in the Western world. Its efficiencies became part of mainstream domestic design and through this – perhaps ironically – its ‘Taylorist’ principles were exported to the United States, while in post-war Germany the built-in kitchen was presented, devoid of its origins, as a model of consumerism on an American or Swedish model.

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Schütte-Lihotzky left Frankfurt in 1930 to become part of Ernst May’s ‘brigade’ of architects engaged in the idealistic aim of building modern cities in post-revolutionary Russia, working with her German colleagues in Magnitogorsk: later, after the relative failure of these collective ambitions she formed part of another German contingent and worked in Turkey building rural schools, again as part of a larger socialist aim to modernize and educate. Her long post-war life in Austria included the building of a number of commissions, although her political views limited their number: she embodied the socialist role of the architect who considered their primary role was to shape and transform the life of the working class through rational, modern design.

KEY WORKS – SCHÜTTE-LIHOTZKY Otto Haas-Hof, Vienna, 1924 Frankfurt Kitchen, 1926 Flat for Working Single Woman, 1928 Houses, Werkbundseidlung, Vienna, 1930–2 Schools, Turkey, 1938–40 Volkshaus, Klagenfurt, Austria, 1949 School, Floridsdorf, Vienna, 1980 (with Wilhelm Schütte)

FURTHER READING Betts, Paul The Authority of Everyday Objects Berkeley University of California Press 2004. Bullock, Nicholas ‘First the Kitchen Then the Façade’ Journal of Design History 1 no. 3–4 1988, pp. 177–192. Henderson, Susan R ‘A Revolution in the Woman’s Sphere: Grete Lihotzky and the Frankfurt Kitchen’ in Coleman, Debra, Danze, Elizabeth and Henderson, Carol (eds) Architecture and Feminism New York Princeton Architectural Press 1996. Henderson, Susan R Building Culture: Ernst May and the New Frankfurt Initiative New York Peter Lang 2013. Hessler, Martina ‘The Frankfurt Kitchen: The Model of Modernity and the “Madness” of Traditional Users 1926–1933’ in Oldenziel, Ruth and Zachmann, Karin (eds) Cold War Kitchen Cambridge MA MIT Press 2009, pp. 163–184. Noever, Peter (ed) Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Vienna: Bohlau 1996 (German).

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17  Rudolph Schindler (1887–1953) Rudolph Schindler was the leading modern architect working in California in the early twentieth century and, after Frank Lloyd Wright who was a clear influence on him, was the first in America to develop an individual architectural approach within the practice of Modernism. His work represents a modernity of its own: it displays great originality and achievement in the period of the 1920s and 1930s and was independent of the developments in European architecture taking place at the same time. He had early contact with the highly influential figures Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, both of whom taught him in his native Austria: arriving in America in 1914, Schindler’s primary aim was to work with Wright.

Image 17.1  Schindler-Chace House, Los Angeles 1921-22

Like many other European architects, he had seen the publications by Wasmuth in 1910 of Wright’s early work and they were a revelation. He argued, in the essay Modern Architecture: A Programme, written while still in Vienna in 1913, that it was misguided to think that the true representation of construction should be the generator of architectural form. Instead, the aim should be the creation of meaningful, inhabited space: ‘The modern architect conceives the room and forms it with a wall and ceiling slabs. The only idea is space and its organisation.’ Schindler saw Wagner’s concerns with the development of a modern formal language as misguided, while Loos’s evolution of an architecture of space had yet to be realized. Wright offered a complex and sophisticated body of work which recognized architectural principles beyond those then seen in Europe, and as Schindler declared ‘here was space architecture’. After a period working in other architects’ offices, Schindler finally worked with Wright, initially in Chicago, from 1917 on the Tokyo Imperial Hotel and other buildings, but three years later he left for Los Angeles to undertake work on the Barnsdall House and other Wright projects there. He established his own architectural practice alongside this work, and the first and most significant project was the Schindler House (correctly, the Schindler–Chace House) built in West Hollywood in 1921–2. Its programme was for an untypical dwelling reflecting a liberal and idealized social arrangement, being designed to house two couples, Schindler himself and his wife Pauline, and Clyde and Marian Chace (Image 17.1). It has shared spaces and studio room for each resident, a central ‘utility room’ used equally by them taking the place of the kitchen; the plan of the single floor of accommodation does not define rooms, but is a series of spaces that flow horizontally. The plan of three L-shaped arms allows for the integration of the garden space into small, protected courtyard ‘rooms’, even with outdoor fireplaces. Subverting its suburban setting, Schindler intended the form of the house to be a metaphor for camping in the wilderness, under the stars: bedrooms were replaced by sleeping porches on the roof. The material of the house, presented minimally and unadorned, is consistent with his idea of an architecture consisting of wall and ceiling slabs: the floor is a concrete slab with no foundations, while the walls are formed of thin, slightly sloping panels of concrete poured in situ and tilted upwards into place, leaving the impression of the texture of felt inside the moulds. They are separated by narrow gaps, most of which are glazed, giving a distinct proportionality and rhythm. The glazed walls giving on to the garden are formed of timber, as are the sleeping porches: the studio spaces were originally separated using sliding canvas screens. Schindler’s design evokes the refinement of the Japanese interior of the sukiya in an aesthetic sense, but did not use finishing materials such as varnish or plaster in the house and overall the sense of a fundamental kind of dwelling predominates, reflecting human psychological need, combining the cave and the tent. In Modernist terms, it refines architectural forms to simply defined volumes and surfaces, lacks any decorative or historicist reference and expresses the dynamic, open plan – all before any comparable work in Europe, by Mies van der Rohe or others, had been built.

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Reyner Banham has written that the Schindler House ‘becomes disturbingly near to be a totally new beginning’, given its originality in programme, spatial configuration, construction and materials, while Kathryn Smith who has undertaken extensive research on it has declared that it is ‘no less than the first modern house to be built in the world’. This realization of its unique achievement is largely of recent date: it was perhaps so different that its qualities were not understood in the making of the narrative of a ‘modern movement’. It is telling that Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who had even visited the house, did not include Schindler’s work in the definitive Museum of Modern Art Modern Architecture exhibition of 1932, considering it to lack ‘theory’ and seeing it as undisciplined, neither of which were true. The house was to remain largely unknown and unpublished until 1960, when Esther McCoy’s book on Schindler and other California architects began an extensive process of reappraisal. A second, larger and more spectacular house, designed in 1922, was built in Newport Beach for Philip Lovell: an ideal ‘modern’ client, he was a professional promoter of physical culture who identified with progressive causes. It has a far more rhetorical and specifically Modernist appearance in the cantilevers of five free-standing concrete frames that define its form, with walls and windows suspended from them. The house has its main living spaces raised up on the projecting first floor, overlooking the ocean, and above are sleeping lofts. The form has a clarity and transparency, distinct from the enclosed form of houses in Europe built up to that time, and is matched by the work of Richard Neutra who became the architect of a second house for Lovell in 1927. This, rather than Schindler’s design, became celebrated as an American expression of the great Modernist dream, an open volume steel-framed building full of sunlight, contemporary with and comparable to the early houses by Le Corbusier and Mies. Neutra had followed Schindler to California from Austria and earlier had been his partner on a number of projects: his comparative success caused a rift unhealed until the end of Schindler’s life. The main work that Schindler built later consists almost entirely of private houses, but with an inventively planned housing group at Pueblo Ribera Court of low blankwalled blocks, with outdoor enclosed courts. The architecture of the Indian pueblo is reflected here, and related to his search for geometric form: its plastic forms, constructed of adobe, were appreciated by him as deeply rooted in the land and in the indigenous culture. More typically, his work demonstrates a dynamic composition of interlocking volumes with the linear forms of the frame, for example in the How House and Wolfe House; later, Schindler moved on from different applications of concrete construction to his particular interpretation of wooden frame construction. Esther McCoy has described how Schindler ‘designed directly with building materials as much as on paper’. He adopted a distinct approach to the role of the architect, acting as his own contractor on almost all built projects, in part because of the unconventional techniques of construction: this no doubt gave the impression of lacking the requisite separation between design and execution that architects were supposed to uphold. Schindler’s early houses may be as much manifestoes about ways of living as they are about the creation of new architecture. In this he expresses

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the potent morality seen in the position of other architects and writers early in the twentieth century, of the necessity of a simpler life engaging with the natural world and new forms of culture: in the Southern California of the 1920s and 1930s, such an idea could well find expression and take root. Schindler’s aim was for an architecture of space shaped by its inhabitation: as he wrote in his essay Space Architecture, rather than implying a new stylistic approach, he searched for ‘a new medium to serve as a vehicle for human expression’.

KEY WORKS – SCHINDLER Modern Architecture: A Programme, 1913 Buena Shore Club, Chicago, 1918 Schindler-Chace House, King’s Road, Los Angeles, 1921–2 Lovell House, Newport Beach, 1922–6 Pueblo Ribera Court, La Jolla, 1923 Packard House, Pasadena, 1924 How House, Silverlake, 1925 League of Nations Competition, 1926 (with Richard Neutra) Wolfe House, Catalina Island, 1928 Sachs Apartments, Los Angeles, 1929 Oliver House, Los Angeles, 1933 Space Architecture, 1934 Walker House, Los Angeles, 1936 Bethlehem Baptist Church, Los Angeles, 1944 Tischler House, Bel Air, 1950

FURTHER READING Gebhard, David Rudolph Schindler New York, Viking 1972. March, Lionel and Judith Sheine (eds) RM Schindler Composition and Construction London Academy Editions 1993: includes texts by Schindler, and essays by Harry Francis Mallgrave, August Sarnitz, Kathryn Smith. McCoy, Esther Five California Architects New York Reinhold 1960. Sarnitz, August R M Schindler New York Rizzoli 1986. Smith, Kathryn Schindler House New York Abrams 2001. Sweeney, Robert and Sheine Judith Schindler, Kings Road and Southern Californian Modernism Berkeley University of California Press 2012.

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18  Le Corbusier (1887–1965) Le Corbusier, born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, had by far the greatest single influence on the development of modern architecture. First emerging as a major figure in the 1920s, he was crucial to the impetus to transform architecture from being defined by issues of style and suitability into a radical iconoclastic practice. His rhetorical argument, strong in its negative force, at the same time outlined clear and unambiguous objectives to re-energize and redefine it, and this was largely accomplished by many other architects who worked in the decades that followed. Others of his exact generation – Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and many more – served to collectively reformulate the role of architecture as well as to revolutionize its aesthetic. More than these other early leaders he transformed his own practice into something as successful but very different in the last decade or so of his life. Most of all, he developed a new way of being an architect in that he worked with, and effectively originated, the modern architect’s relationship with its culture through the published media, using the writing and production of journals, books and photography. His dominance of international discourse through involvement with CIAM and other groups has led to his recognition as the leading architect of the twentieth century. But his effectiveness as a figure in the culture of the media should not obscure the power of his work as a designer. From the early Purist villas at Garches and Poissy to the expressive concrete of the Ronchamp chapel or the monastery of La Tourette, his best buildings continue to be seen as among the greatest achievements, as completely original works of architectural Modernism. On the other hand, the reconstruction of cities the world over during the second half of the twentieth century can be considered, at least in part, to be the unfortunate result of his frequently reiterated theories and plans to reinvent the forms of the city. The so-called rationality of this approach may now be seen as Positivism in an extreme form, while the more complex philosophical basis of his work in general has sometimes been obscured by his mastery of the telling slogan. His most influential achievement, Toward an Architecture (1923), served as a primer for generations of architects to follow, expressed through the assertive language of a self-appointed leader.

His origins were far from what might be expected of such a significant figure, and like many of the individuals interpreted in this book he was not trained in an architectural academy such as the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts or leading university school. La Chaux-de-Fonds is one of the principal towns in Switzerland devoted to the traditional and meticulous manufacture of watches: he trained there at the Art School, initially on the engraving of watch cases. Jeanneret had abundant self-belief and also the drive to become a leading architectural pioneer, and a series of influential figures shaped his approach, some being acknowledged and others not, however much he may have appeared to proclaim an entirely hermetic, self-referential position. His primary influence at La Chaux-de-Fonds was his art school teacher Charles L’Eplattenier, whose position was formed by the radical art theories of John Ruskin; the rejection of academic tradition in favour of a new synthesis of art and nature became a founding principle for the young Jeanneret and the building of his first house, the Villa Fallet in Chaux, expressed this in a refined way. Later, a process of self-education moved Jeanneret decisively away from arts and crafts ideas, and included visits both to Florence and to Vienna. Later travels, including his self-styled ‘Voyage to the East’ in 1911, gave a series of lasting impressions: vernacular houses in flat-roofed configurations, the monastery of Mount Athos and perhaps most of all the Parthenon – the greatest ancient Greek temple and one that represented the perfection and timelessness of architectural achievement. Jeanneret read Edouard Schuré’s book The Great Initiates (1889), which led him to an interest in esoteric, hidden beliefs that was to underpin much of what he did later. The secret doctrine of geometry and the mathematically derived forms found in nature shaped his belief that both matter and spirit have validity and need to be reconciled. This dualism, derived from the thought of Henri Bergson, the sense of the harmonization of opposites, can be seen so often in his later writings, which have a sense of a spiritual dimension without being conventionally religious in tone. He shared with Mies van der Rohe and many others a further influence at this formative time, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus spake Zarathustra (1883) presented the idea of the ‘superman’, a key and formative concept for him, the superior being and leader ‘who must first be a destroyer and break values into pieces’ and who through self-denial brings into being a new and authentic order. Both the iconoclastic spirit of Nietzsche and some of his particular ideology and concepts had a lasting effect: the philosopher’s ‘ears that do not hear’ became ‘eyes that do not see’ in Le Corbusier’s polemic. He arrived in Paris in 1908 and worked for Auguste Perret, this being the most significant architectural influence in his development, and through whom the use of concrete in pioneering architectural forms became fundamental to him. Working in Berlin with Peter Behrens two years later was of less significance, although he credited him with introducing a crucial understanding of Classical proportion. The first truly Modernist design by Jeanneret was the Dom-ino diagram, drawn in 1915, that was very much derived from Perret as well as having echoes of Classical form: the drawing of three reinforced concrete slabs supported by a grid of square piloti set back from their edge

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represents both a structural system which he was to develop further and also the primary form of a house. The simplicity of the form made it more architecturally pure than earlier applications of concrete: the columns are smooth and its slabs also have a smooth surface with no supporting beams. Intended as a design for mass production it was one of a number of unsuccessful inventions through which he had intended to establish a commercial practice, but it nevertheless has had a great influence, evidenced by the countless concrete-framed, skin-walled projects built since then. After returning to Chaux and building several small-scale buildings there, Jeanneret went back to Paris in 1917 and connections with the art world began to effect the biggest shift in his work towards a fully fledged new synthesis. The art movement of Purism, originated by the painter Amédée Ozenfant, evolved from Cubist practices and was based on the idea of type-objects, producing intense representations of basic forms devoid of detail. It interpreted the world of industry and the machine and transcended their ordinariness by evoking an eternal, classically inflected order. The making of a new identity for Jeanneret in 1920 – the name Le Corbusier – emerged from his fertile collaboration with Ozenfant, through their self-invention as cultural leaders of the avant-garde on Paris with the writing and editorship of the journal L’Esprit nouveau (the ‘new spirit’). Its success in embodying the new Purist position relating art and the machine was evidenced in its articles on culture, art and city planning as well as new architecture. Typical was the published project for the Citrohan House – the name, evoking Citroën, suggesting that the house might be produced ‘like a car’ and equally expressive of modern life, and thus, as is argued, a ‘house-type’. The journal included Adolf Loos’s text Ornament and Crime and many articles by Le Corbusier and Ozenfant, often republished to form Le Corbusier’s publications, on the themes of urbanism and decorative art, and most prominently his polemic text Toward an Architecture. A prominent theme of the book is the necessity of making new forms that reflect the discoveries and structural principles of the engineer, and to distrust the world of current architectural practice: he declares ‘the “styles” are a lie’, by which is meant aesthetics in the traditional sense, based on the models of the past. Rather than referring to historical work, the reiteration of ‘eyes that do not see’ is Le Corbusier’s expression to frame the new kind of beauty – of the production of the engineer in the design of the car, the plane, the ship, as well as building structures, including notably the great grain silos of reinforced concrete seen in North America. A new principle for the composition of buildings is introduced, based on three fundamental components – volume, surface and plan. The plan, it is said, is ‘the generator’, but the form of buildings generated from volumes based on geometrical elements such as the cube or cylinder has an evident relationship to Classical compositional methods, even of the plan-led approach of Beaux-Arts teaching, and drawings by influential academician Auguste Choisy are included to demonstrate the three-dimensional form that shapes this approach. And in one of the most resonant phrases in the book Le Corbusier declares that ‘architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light’: pure forms, untainted by historical reference, will form the new architecture. But, in a key distinction that differentiates his approach from such

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contemporaries as Gropius, Hannes Meyer or El Lissitzky, architecture is work that goes beyond the making of forms into a poetic reading of materialization: ‘Architecture is the use of raw materials to establish stirring relationships: architecture goes beyond utilitarian things.’ Or in the words of Frederick Etchells’ 1927 translation, ‘Suddenly you touch my heart and that is architecture.’ Much of the book deals with plans for new forms of the house that demonstrate the need for mass production and a new more elementary domestic space that reflects the needs of modern life. ‘A house is a machine for living in’ remains a much misinterpreted phrase as in its context it is clear that it encapsulates a part of what a house does – that it needs to be efficient. But Le Corbusier’s house designs, based on such themes as the double-height living space, glazed front wall and outside terrace, have provided the basis for both his own built projects and the features of so much later building. He asserts ‘a great era has begun, there exists a new spirit’: this constantly reiterated phrase has the effect of a mantra and was intended to resonate, becoming a self-perpetuating truth that was adopted by generations of later architects. But at least as powerful as these telling slogans is the book’s use of images and graphic design. Headings in heavy capitals, its pages dominated by an eclectic collection of images represent in themselves a new way of seeing, making images as well as ideas communicate. This was radical beyond the work of others, and certainly one reason for its immediate impact and long life as a publication. One of the most remarkable spreads, coming in the section on ‘eyes that do not see’, puts together images of Greek temples at Paestum and the Parthenon with a Humbert car of 1907 and a Delage sports car of 1921. (Image 18.1) While the text argues that both the temple and the car show the evolution and refinement of the ‘type’ in their achievement of a standard form, the visual message of the conjunction – startling in a simpler time – was that the new architecture should represent an integration of the qualities of both a refined piece of mechanical engineering and the architectural perfection of the Parthenon’s form. A perhaps surprising proportion of the book deals with Le Corbusier’s own, largely unbuilt, projects. As if having proposed a series of open questions about the future possibilities of architecture, these house and urban designs were the solution. Thus, while the book is universally seen as a manifesto for new architecture adopting a more advanced position than others in this period, perhaps the main intention, effectively, was self-promotion. It linked thematically with many of the wider tendencies in ideas and practice seen in De Stijl, in Futurism, in Moholy-Nagy and is related in appearance to other publications in the early 1920s, but its success is surely based on Le Corbusier’s achievement of an expression of the spirit of the age in a form that connects words, images and a stirring call to arms. And the effect of this body of thought and images was widespread and potent: if the new world could not be built overnight, it could be realized very effectively through the pages of such publications as Toward an Architecture. A further publication on Urbanisme – rendered in English as City of Tomorrow – presented an argument for the necessity to reinvent the forms of the city, to start from scratch with an ideal plan. A plan which would generate a new, civilized and organized way of life and replace the chaos and disorder of existing cities which had not been created

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Image 18.1  Toward an Architecture 1923: juxtaposition of the Parthenon and a modern sports car

by a wholesale process of planning. Le Corbusier’s first design of a planned city was the Contemporary City of 1922: to accommodate three million, it had a city centre of twenty-four office towers, surrounded by spacious blocks of housing and extensive green spaces. A concentric diagram of straight lines and rectangles, its geometry promised a perfected world. This potent vision of a modern utopia was based on the certainties that he espoused: that the city needed to be functional, efficiently planned and organized so communication was easy; that nature would be integrated into the city so buildings were surrounded by acres of trees and parkland; and its creation of an ideal society was assured, manifesting the relationship of the individual to the collectivity that modern society demanded. While expressed in rhetorical, almost poetic language, the effective message was of rationality, its analysis like that of the social Positivism of Auguste Comte. Charles Jencks has written that ‘he continued to impose on real historic cities a very coarse pattern, as if he were Louis XIV and Picasso combined’: but despite their extreme ambition, such plans can perhaps be seen as diagrammatic rather than pragmatic solutions to very real and urgent issues. The later manifestation of Le Corbusier’s urban ideas were seen in his plans for cities such as Paris – the Plan Voisin of 1925 – for Moscow and Rio de Janeiro, and in the extensive researches published as The

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Radiant City in 1933. This compelling urban vision, based on a linear plan with theoretically infinite extension, proposed a strict separation of functions: housing, public buildings, commercial buildings, light and heavy industry, and with as many areas of open space as a garden city but built at the high density of 1,000 people per hectare. Its discussion and argument were based on scientific methods: the measurement of sunlight penetration, of traffic flow, of efficiency, and this rationalist approach can be seen to sit unhappily in the complexities of how a city might actually work in a more holistic sense. The ‘Five Points of the New Architecture’ was published by Le Corbusier in 1926. These principles extended the idea of the Dom-ino diagram into a declaration that the house should be raised from the ground on thin columns or piloti, be surmounted by a roof garden, have strip windows and enjoy the benefits of the structural frame by having both a free plan and free facade, unencumbered by the structural necessities of traditional load-bearing construction. The most significant buildings of Le Corbusier’s earlier career were a series of houses built in the 1920s for private clients in and around Paris that served to illustrate these principles. Described as Purist villas, signifying the art movement which was, at least in part, their origin, they are the houses that most clearly define a Modernist interpretation of domestic space and form, and have had a great influence on many later house designs by other architects. The restricted site of the double houses La Roche-Jeanneret makes for an ingenious solution incorporating two spectacular and unprecedented spaces: the curving, ramped studio space built to show La Roche’s collection of paintings and a soaring, triple-height entrance space that unifies the composition of the house. More clearly ‘Purist’ is the Villa at Garches, a complex composition characterized by a series of open terraces on the garden side of the house which make very clear that the house breaks out of its traditional box-like form (Image 0.2). Its large salon on the first floor takes full advantage of the structural freedom of the grid of piloti, running through the house in classical configuration, leading the historian Colin Rowe to develop connections of the composition of such an apparently unhistorical design with the high Renaissance work of Palladio. The Villa Savoye on an open site in Poissy appears to be an almost classically derived form, with four equal facades making for a perfected cube, belying the asymmetry of the plan which incorporates curving forms and flowing space (Image 18.2). The main living space is lifted above a ground floor set-back serviced area and consists of both an open terrace and a large open living space: its three-dimensional composition embodies a clear manifestation of another Corbusian theme, that of the promenade architecturale, a route dynamically linking the spaces of the house, to be experienced by walking up its ramps and stairs, ending with a framed view of the landscape beyond. But it is, also, an architecture of image rather than functional tectonics: while a concrete frame is used, the walls are of breeze-block infill covered with smooth render. Such projects nevertheless show the process of purification which Le Corbusier undertook in his invention of intensely felt forms, relevant to both modern life and modern technical possibilities, and which became paradigmatic Modernist

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Image 18.2  Villa Savoye, Poissy, Paris 1928-30

realizations. The immaculate surfaces of white, and occasionally coloured, walls form them, along with extensive areas of glass: light is seen as an unquestioned benefit. The lack of any historically derived detail of window embrasures or cornices is supplanted by the use of elements such as metal handrails derived from ship building and built-in concrete tables and shelves. But beyond the refinement and innovation of their building forms, they are shaped by their creation of space to make for potent and exhilarating experiences, unavailable in earlier kinds of architecture. The Weissenhof Siedlung estate in Stuttgart, coordinated by Mies van der Rohe, was intended as an exhibition of the work of many modern architects and here Le Corbusier built two projects, a double villa and a single house, based on his earlier Citrohan design: the Weissenhof pre-dates the formation of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), which started at La Sarraz in 1928. Over the years of its existence, especially from the time of the Athens conference on the Functional City in 1933, Le Corbusier became its dominant figure, setting agendas and dominating its pronouncements. His adoption of the role of decisive leader had an unquestionable effect on the subsequent development of modern architecture, as others were sidelined or effectively excluded. So it was during the 1930s that he became the leading modern architect, at least in the eyes of the wider progressive international group of architects, and after the Second World War this would be amplified as the world shifted inexorably towards the wholesale adoption by governments and city authorities of Modernist forms for programmes of city building and urban reconstruction. In Great Britain, in Brazil and in many other countries a Corbusian language of architecture was

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to become dominant, albeit with local variations. The irony of this is that by 1945 Le Corbusier had built few substantial buildings, his reputation largely built on his writings and projects. Ironical, too, is that just as he was fully acknowledged in the world as a leading figure in the establishment of modern architecture, it became clear that his work was taking a different course, particularly with the building of the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. It was the first opportunity for him to build a large block of social housing and was of very different form than the projects of the 1920s. A rawness, an apparent primitivism, overturned aspects of the work he had earlier refined so deliberately and in doing so shocked the many architects who had learnt and followed his earlier position and minimal aesthetic. This tendency in his work can be seen, however, in a number of earlier buildings and projects, most memorably the rubble wall of the Pavillon Suisse, where its heavy reinforced concrete piloti prefigures his work on the Unité two decades later. Along with the Maisons Jaoul begun in 1953, such buildings are highly individual, and nothing to do with the world of the machine, instead representing a shift in the design process from the universal to the particular. With this primitivism Le Corbusier introduced a new direction for architecture, almost as potent as that introduced in the period of Toward an Architecture and the early Purist projects, although, oddly, scarcely acknowledged as such in his polemic texts or even in the text of his volumes of complete works. The Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, which started construction in 1947, caused a sensation when its rough, sculptural forms appeared. Relating as a city in itself to the closed, monastic communities that Le Corbusier had consistently admired although in the form of a vertical eighteen-storey composition of double-height flats slotted into a massive superstructure raised on piloti, it is a much larger variant on the unbuilt blocks of maisonettes he had designed from the 1920s onwards. It incorporates a shopping street, community facilities, gymnasium and a nursery, and remains a successful and well-utilized communal building. Rough board-marked concrete form the piloti and the deep window embrasures which give the facades a highly expressive sense of weight. The building also is a monument to the Modulor – the system of proportional relationships Le Corbusier devised at this time – originating with a human figure, after the manner of Vitruvius, and using the Golden Section as the basis of a universal order of measurement: the figure of ‘Modular Man’ in concrete stands by the entrance. Béton brut – raw concrete – was to dominate his work from then onwards: it gave each building a quality of uniqueness and primitivism, as if the building might have existed from an earlier period, transmuted by time and use, and this created another wave of his influence on other architects from Britain to Brazil. Le Corbusier’s Chapel of Nôtre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp is a powerful building, certainly religious in feeling but of abstract form rather than being the expression of any particular representational language. It creates a unique architectural achievement which, unlike most of his work, was rarely emulated. A pilgrimage church on top of a hill in a rich landscape, it is dominated by a heavy, expressively shaped reinforced concrete overhanging roof: the curved side walls which are plastered and

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made of the rubble of the earlier destroyed chapel are separate from it. Le Corbusier spoke of the ‘ineffable space’ of the interior: like a cave inside with curved, acoustically derived walls, it is dark and dramatically lit, the south wall punctured with small square windows and with light-gathering towers derived from Roman forms. A paradoxical building in that it combines hand-building techniques with complex engineering calculations for the concrete roof, Ronchamp has a metaphorical quality which is hard to identify – simultaneously like a Greek temple, a baroque church, a crab shell, a ship’s prow and many other possible readings, simultaneously both ancient and modern. Chandigarh in India was an unlikely site for his one realized city scheme. Here, his design of the public buildings of the new capital of Punjab was very different from the towers of the Ville Contemporaine although similarly removed from the lower density of the city’s residential zones. Le Corbusier applied the concrete elements he had already used elsewhere, such as systems of piloti, Purist forms and expressive overhangs, but mediated here by traditional Indian elements. At the Palace of Assembly the chambers are surrounded by the cool square space of a forum, and elements of the traditional form of the Jantar Mantar observatory with a light tower to mark the passage of the sun are incorporated. The monastery at La Tourette was his last fully realized major project in Europe: making a building to house an enclosed community was a theme he had pursued for many years, and his visits much earlier to the Charterhouse at Ema and monastery at Mount Athos had been formative experiences. It is dramatically situated, a square form raised above the slope of a hill, with blocks of monk’s cells ranged above each other on three sides and the dining hall, library and chapel at lower levels (Image 18.3). Light becomes a particularly important element to animate the austere interior spaces: the mullions of the glazed walls of the ambulatory crossing the centre of the plan give a rhythmic, changing light quality, and shafts of coloured light pour into the tall space of the otherwise dimly lit chapel. Its complexity, including such elements as brise-soleils, angular piers, triangular skylights and the sheer wall of the chapel, makes for a kind of montage of elements within its overall cubic form. Its material quality is deliberately crude: perhaps because of budget, but also because its rawness corresponded with Le Corbusier’s respect for monastic asceticism. His own identification was with what he called ‘total poverty’, expressing the self-denial of the misunderstood leader, which was consistent throughout his outwardly successful life. Negative views of his work remain powerful – critiques of the socially disastrous effects of Modernist urban reconstruction have often specifically given Le Corbusier the responsibility for them. English critic Christopher Booker described him in 1987 as the ‘architect of disaster for the millions who are condemned to live in a concrete jungle’. More generally, the principles which he had done much to establish of the reconstruction of the modern city as an ordered system shaped by geometry and the zoning of functions were later seen as a travesty of how a city should develop: the influential criticism of Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) described his urban designs as deficient in their understanding of how a city

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Image 18.3  La Tourette Monastery, France 1954-9

actually works, as well as being ineluctably top-down in their lofty approach and assumptions. Le Corbusier’s work does prioritize functionalism as well as embodying the aim of political relevance and the possibility of social transformation through architecture. But he also represents the architect as an expressive individual artist, however much the collective, the common purpose, may be invoked. His ideas and urban plans are

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the expression of an autocratic power: a social context gives a wider arena for this, but it remains an individual enterprise rather than a wider inclusive process. And just as geometry is far from being an exclusive solution for making successful architecture, so it may be argued that the creation of perfected form is not the sole aim of the architect: Le Corbusier was less interested in time and use, as well as less involved in making a relationship to context, than very many modern architects who came after him. And unlike other contemporaries he neither wanted to subsume architecture into the larger field of building, nor to see it as primarily a social and political tool – the distinction of architecture as a practice aligns him closer than would be expected for someone so iconoclastic to the conventions and practices of the profession in which, rather than destroying, he came to take a dominant position. Awarded the Royal Gold Medal for architecture at the RIBA in London in 1953, he had been introduced by Wells Coates as honouring the honour itself by his great achievement, by Walter Gropius as the ‘Leonardo of our time’ and by Herbert Read as ‘the poet who has given us a new vision of the future’. But refusing the role of the revolutionary hero, Le Corbusier pronounced in his acceptance speech: ‘I have always had my feet in the past, and my head in the past, too.’ Identifying as an idealistic genius frustrated by a lack of appreciation in the world, he bewailed the lack, apart from at Marseille, of any public commissions and described his life as one of struggle and disappointment, as that of a ‘cab-horse’, hard working with few rewards. There are very few, if any, architects in this book whose work does not connect with Le Corbusier in some way, and while fifty years after his death his fundamental principles have lost their power, his architectural achievement is reinterpreted in many different ways as the background if not the foreground of current architectural culture: its forms as well as its ideas remain authoritative. The breadth of his ambition, and of his powerful imagination, is shaped by an almost spiritual force and can be seen as formed by his early reading of such thinkers as Nietzsche and Schuré. Shaped by a purifying impulse – out with the old, both in the conventions of life and in architectural practice, and in its place establishing a convincing representation of the new order, creating powerful images of unprecedented shining buildings made in a machine age. More than the other architects of Modernism, Le Corbusier was a new man making architecture afresh for a new and unprecedented time.

KEY WORKS – LE CORBUSIER Villa Fallet, La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1907 Dom-ino house diagram, 1915 Citrohan House project, 1920 Ville Contemporaine (Contemporary City) project, 1922 Maisons la Roche-Jeanneret, Paris, 1923–5 Vers une Architecture (Toward an Architecture),1923 Esprit Nouveau Pavilion, Exhibition of Decorative Art, Paris, 1925

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Urbanisme, 1925 Voisin Plan for Paris, 1925 Villa Stein-de Monzie, Garches, 1926–8 League of Nations Competition project, 1927 Villas, Weissenhof Siedlung, Stuttgart, 1927 Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1928–30 Pavillon Suisse, University City, Paris, 1933 Ville Radieuse (Radiant City), 1933 Weekend House, Paris, 1933 Le Modulor, 1946 Unité d’Habitation, Marseille, France, 1947–52 Notre Dame du Haut Chapel, Ronchamp, France, 1950–5 Maisons Jaoul, Neuilly, 1952–5 La Tourette Monastery, France, 1954–9 Mill Owners Building, Ahmedabad, India, 1954 Palace of Justice, Chandigarh, India, 1955 Secretariat, Chandigarh, India, 1958 Palace of Assembly, Chandigarh, India, 1962 Carpenter Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1962

FURTHER READING Arts Council of Great Britain Le Corbusier: Architect of the Century London Arts Council 1987: essays by Tim Benton and others. Benton, Tim The Villas of Le Corbusier 1920–1930 New Haven Yale University Press 1987. Brooks, H Allen (ed.) Le Corbusier Princeton Princeton University Press 1987: essays by Banham and others. Colomina, Beatriz Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media Cambridge MA MIT Press 1979. Curtis, William Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms London Phaidon 2nd edn 2015. Jencks, Charles Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture New York Monacelli Press 2000. Le Corbusier Oeuvre Complete/Complete Works 1910–65 vols 1–8 Basel Birkhauser 11th edn 1995. Le Corbusier Toward an Architecture translated John Goodman Introduction Jean-Louis Cohen Los Angeles Getty 2007. Turner, Paul Venable The Education of Le Corbusier New York Garland 1977. Tzonis, Alexander Le Corbusier: The Poetics of Machine and Metaphor London Thames & Hudson 2001. von Moos, Stanislaus Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis Cambridge MA MIT Press 1979.

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19  Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who started his career in Germany, emigrated to the United States in 1937 where he established himself in the years after the Second World War as the leading architect in America. Mies demonstrated great consistency in the philosophy and architectural means of the hundreds of projects he designed and constructed: in the 1950s and 1960s, the heyday of modern architecture’s international success, his work represented the height of its achievement. The refinement of the glass and steel skyscrapers, the complete, apparently functionalist, modernity of his designs, the subtlety of their spatial manipulation were talismans of its claim to be a viable art form to match the modern age as successfully as the architecture of former periods. But in the decades that followed, this sense of high achievement would be inverted to its opposite: he came to be seen as an architect of meaningless, cold form-making, embodying a technological supremacy which was a tool of urban destruction and capitalist control. The American architect Robert Venturi, often seen as the originator of Post Modernism, described Mies’s work as ‘ a bore’: while in another negative reaction, the spread throughout the world of mediocre, dehumanizing glass towers was often represented as his responsibility. In the late 1980s and beyond a further reappraisal began to take place, to position Mies once again at the highest level of architectural achievement. Corresponding to the more general rehabilitation of the repute of modern architecture, it is supported by the detailed researches of such historians as Fritz Neumeyer and Detlef Mertins who have emphasized his form-making in relation to an ideological and philosophical depth, giving it a new level of meaning. So now Mies is understood to be, as he was in the mid twentieth century, the paradigmatic architect of architectural Modernism. The most significant aspects of his earlier career were during the time he spent in Peter Behrens’s office in Berlin which he joined in 1908: Mies’s education as an architect took place there, and at the same time he undertook an extensive largely self-directed programme of reading. The ‘great form’, as he described it, he learned from Behrens, based in turn on Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Neo-Classical work, and this

was mediated by the work that Behrens was engaging with at the AEG in elevating industry to a higher cultural level. Among the first recognizable contributions of Mies was the design of the west courtyard facade of Behrens’s great Turbine Hall, while the architectural possibilities of the steel frame are an important part of the understanding of material and form he gained there. To Behrens’s central influence can be added that of Hendrik Petrus Berlage, the turn-of-the-century Dutch architect whose strictures on architectural integrity and material honesty were absorbed by Mies. His reading from the earliest days involved the philosophical, as well as a range of literature engaging with ideas of modernity. Before his work with Behrens, an introduction to the metaphysical was provided by Mies’s first client, the philosopher Alois Riehl, whose book on Nietzsche as well as his Introduction to Philosophy (1903) were influential on him. Riehl’s argument that philosophy and science were converging in the modern age resonated with Mies: science could be redeemed by elevating it, and as Mies was to assert in a 1928 lecture, ‘We do not need less science, but a science that is more spiritual.’ His work manifests a long-term interest in the absolute and the metaphysical: from the beginning, architecture was a philosophical activity before it was a practical one. Mies studied Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and like others of his generation was in thrall to the vision of truly modern existence that the philosopher created, in particular his theory of aesthetic salvation which exerted a powerful influence on intellectual and artistic life in German culture in the early twentieth century. There is perhaps a Nietzschean feeling implicit in Mies’s often-repeated aim ‘to bring nature, man and architecture together into a higher unity’, and the philosopher’s fundamentally radical thinking – that, for example, the church and the palace had lost their power – allowed space for different kind of construction with a more human role. Mies’s influences were extensive, and among the authors whose books he collected and re-read through his later life were Georg Simmel, Max Scheler, Henri Bergson and Romano Guardini. The Catholic theologian Guardini was an important figure, from whom he understood the situation of the modern world to be that of chaos. The need for order, for an organic harmony between the fractured elements of the world, underlies the rigorous approach that Mies adopted in his work: the existential dilemma of modern man, free from outdated belief, to find himself in a new inward order. Francesco Dal Co has observed that a passage from Nietzsche talking of the artist’s work had a particular resonance for Mies: rather than the Romantic notion of artistic creation, he asserts that the necessary working with existing order and conditions is a precondition: ‘There should be obedience over a long period of time and in a single direction.’ That this is just what Mies undertook reflects how much his work was to become a long and patient process of working and reworking. A distinction he advanced was implicit in his use of the term Baukunst: rather than ‘architecture’, its meaning is ‘building art’ which is spiritually inflected, working with material and with tradition. In Mies’s words refusing the ‘new’ in favour of the ‘good’, in the slow pursuit of self-defined excellence. After early work such as the Haus Riehl, the first project to fully indicate his own architectural position was the Kröller-Müller House near The Hague which Mies designed

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in 1912. Although unbuilt, it introduced themes that would recur in his domestic work, with its asymmetrical plan and spare flat-roofed horizontal form extending into its landscape setting. The working through of the idea of a singular, detached house located on a rural site, providing enclosed spaces within an unobstructed relationship to nature became perhaps his main concern for the next thirty years. After the First World War, he adopted a new identity: born Ludwig Mies, he restyled himself as Mies van der Rohe giving himself more gravity, as well as a fictive relationship to Dutch nobility. For him, as well as for Behrens and other architects faced with the turmoil of post-war Germany, there was an urgent interest in modes of expression that would decisively replace the past, and his later work bore only traces of historical roots and references. A series of unbuilt projects created in the early 1920s brought Mies into prominence in the crowded architectural world of Berlin, and with accompanying texts they formed a Modernist manifesto. They can still be recognized as providing truly original solutions to the design of the house and the office building, as well as representing inventive uses of reinforced concrete and glass, the building materials that represented modernity. However, a house project designed in brick in 1924 has become perhaps the most celebrated: in just two drawings, since much analysed, he created a new spatial model which crystallized ideas of space emerging from contemporary thinking. Two walls at right angles define the boundary of the site, extending beyond the edge of the drawing: the house plan consists of lines on a right-angle grid that join but do not cut across each other, creating living spaces that flow but are partly defined, forming a distinctly different model of domestic space. Full-height glazed walls demarcate the interior space and garden, while two solid chimney blocks provide vertical elements: an overhanging flat roof complements the house’s orthogonal geometry. The plan and overall form of the house is reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie houses: but its architectural language, despite the horizontally defined brickwork, is far more austere and abstract. Constructivist work, seen in Berlin in 1922, is an influence, and the plan’s visual resemblance to a De Stijl painting firmly associated it with the contemporary avant-garde. Two designs for glass skyscrapers, the first for a competition for Friedrichstrasse in the centre of Berlin in 1921 and a second in the following year, provided spectacular images of soaring, shimmering towers (Image 19.1). They could be read in several ways: as ideas of a tall urban building going way beyond the existing towers of Manhattan or the drawings of Sant’Elia in their arrant modernity; as the model of a new formal expression with their fractured plans and distinct aesthetic; and as a radical demonstration of the technical possibilities of the new materialities of the concrete frame and large sheer sheets of glass. They pre-date, and certainly prefigure, the glass towers that were later designed by others and later built in their thousands: the form of the curtain wall that was introduced with them was adapted by Mies himself in differently configured orthogonal towers built in north America three decades later. In these groundbreaking projects, glass was used primarily in an expressive way: the changing effect of reflections and the visual ambiguity of glass forms, as well as

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the idea of a transparent building, gave them a far more than an engineered quality and were his main concerns. Mies’s engagement with the Expressionist movement, represented in Berlin by Bruno Taut and inspired by the poet Paul Scheerbart’s Glass Architecture (1914), can be overstated – he was only peripherally involved in the group – but without doubt it contributed to the design of these extraordinary forms and thus, through Mies more than Taut, to glass’s predominant presence in the culture of modern architecture.

Image 19.1  Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper project, Berlin 1921

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The Concrete Office Building provides a different prototype: it uses cantilevered concrete slabs and strip glazing to create seven open-plan floors which step out gradually as the building rises – as Mies described its design, introducing a phrase that was to resonate later: ‘Maximum effect with minimum means … this is skin and bone construction.’ The formal invention of these early projects is astonishing: they have in common a clarity and directness, utilizing apparently simple forms. Mies’s process of design evolved a rigorous structural ordering, with an original spatial model that emphasized movement and openness; underlying them was an existential response to modernity that modern existence needed newly created forms. These projects were represented by large and striking charcoal drawings, and additionally the buildings’ representational qualities were heightened by the use of photomontage incorporating models and drawings, which placed these almost-unimaginable buildings viscerally in their urban sites. This radical practice in architectural representation had the effect of creating the ideal building without having to construct it: after all, the photograph of a completed building and the photomontage would sit side by side in the pages of a journal or book. Like Le Corbusier, but using very different means, Mies’s modernity can be seen as evidenced in his understanding of how representation, and photography in particular, would come to play a key role in architectural culture. The projects were also much published, in both avant-garde and professional journals internationally: in particular, the radical journal G (standing for Gesaltung or construction) invited Mies’s editorial participation and also published them. His growing role in German architectural culture, in particular through his role in the Deutscher Werkbund, was demonstrated by his coordination of the Weissenhof Seidlung in Stuttgart in 1927. This estate of model houses, bringing together the work of sixteen architects, underlined the growing strength and confidence of Modernist architects in the design of social housing with individual house prototypes by Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut, J. J. P. Oud and others, while Mies designed a steel-framed block of flats in the centre. The estate was in effect a propaganda exercise to demonstrate the strength and collectivity of this design approach of white walls, cubic forms and flat roofs – and pre-dates CIAM’s foundation as the organization to represent international architectural Modernism in the following year. In what was to become a kind of founding myth underpinning his long-standing reputation, Mies coordinated the design of the national contribution to the 1929 International Exhibition in Barcelona. This included the design of a Pavilion to demonstrate the qualities of the new German state, just a decade after the former militaristic and imperialist state had been defeated in war (Image 19.2). The new spirit of the Weimar republic, its liberalism, internationalism and most of all newness and rejection of past cultural forms were well represented in the Pavilion by its design by Mies. But it has also since become seen as perhaps the earliest and most achieved paradigm of architectural Modernism, despite its short life as a building and the indifference of many of its visitors. It was opened in May 1929 and dismantled in January 1930 and has been declared by many of modern architecture’s historians to be a masterpiece, in

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the words of Henry-Russell Hitchcock, ‘One of the few buildings by which the twentieth century might wish to be measured against the great ages of the past.’ Raised on a podium at the end of one of the axes of the exhibition site, it is a building on the scale of a small house but with few traces of domestic habitation. Indeed there are no closed boundaries to shelter its inhabitants: with a route to pass through the site, a dynamic relation of the visitor’s movement through it is established. A series of vertical planes (rather than defined walls) divide the space in a totally asymmetrical plan: these planes of tinted and clear glass and of solid marble include the great and rare onyx panel in its centre. The horizontal surface of the podium is a layer of marble, interrupted by the dark and light surfaces of two pools, and areas of black carpet: chairs, designed by Mies with Lilly Reich, provide an image of domestic space. The roof is supported by a grid of eight cruciform columns, clad in chrome: as in Le Corbusier’s earlier ‘Five Points of the New Architecture’, it is this distinction between walls as definers of space and columns which provide structure that makes the building a striking manifestation of the ‘free plan’. But it is also evidently an achieved example of Elementarism, in the sense of Theo Van Doesburg’s compositions and theory: each horizontal and vertical surface is clear and defined. Above all, it is a building created to be experienced, rather than the more loaded function of utility. Its achievement of a pure, modern aesthetic in its visual qualities and the studied effects of reflection and ambiguity in the materials used is matched by its being defined by its viewing subject. Rather than the creation

Image 19.2  Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona International Exhibition Spain 1929

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of a perfected self-referential object, it sets up the conditions for experience and the subject’s reflexive response to it. The Pavilion should be perceived from multiple positions rather than the single point perspective demanded of classical compositions: the observer in motion recreates the composition in a different perceptual frame. As Fritz Neumeyer writes, ‘The observer had become an element of the spatial construction of the building itself (…) for Mies, the discovery of the steel frame was linked not only to the technological progress of the age, but also developing its metaphysical potential and refining the idealistic construction of modern architecture.’ It is a building that can be read in many ways, and this field of interpretations, intuitive, aesthetic and analytical, has been given new life by the reconstruction of an exact facsimile on its original site in 1986. More than Mies’s work before or afterwards, its embodiment as a space to be experienced in an intuitive, dynamic way makes very clear Mies’s intention to go a long way beyond concerns with the form and structure to which his work is sometimes reduced. The Tugendhat House in Brno, designed at the same time as Barcelona, translates a similar set of formal elements into the permanent structure of a house. The plan is dominated by a great open space, fully glazed on two sides and giving on to gardens and an expansive view; two other floors provide enclosed spaces for bedrooms and services. Stung by comments that their Modernist house was a kind of showpiece, impossible to live in, both clients responded that, after living in the house for a year, on the contrary, living in its space was liberating. Fritz Tugendhat wrote of the beauty as well as the practicality of its open, largely undefined spaces. Grete Tugendhat said that the space had ‘an uncommon restfulness that a closed room could not possible have’ and that it offered a ‘heightened sense’ of the experience of seeing a flower or an artwork, or even of experiencing a person in its refined space. Writing at this time, Mies questioned how to reach the goal of the illusion of greatest possible freedom of being part of nature, and creating ‘a self-contained and comprehensible section of the world that provides a sense of protection and seclusion’: Mies’s creation of space here allows for its inhabitants to move out of the world into a space of contemplation. His directorship of the Bauhaus in succession to Hannes Meyer from 1930 was ill-starred, and his introduction of a more regulated institution did not sit well with students and staff. After its removal to Berlin, he was forced to close the school, after it had been raided in April 1933. The awkward truth, however, of Mies later producing designs, all unbuilt, for the Nazi regime in Germany was not unique and his former mentor Behrens also designed large projects; his permanent departure from Germany was later than most of the other members of the Berlin avant-garde. Mies became established in Chicago in 1937, which became his base for longer than Berlin had been. During his last years in Germany several possibilities emerged that would take him to the United States from the increasingly difficult circumstances there: and perhaps the invitation to lead the Armour Institute in Chicago with its lack of prestige was not particularly attractive. Later renamed the Illinois Institute of Technology it provided, however, not only the location for Mies’s development of an educational programme for architecture, but the opportunity to design and execute

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a new campus of buildings, then by far his greatest opportunity to build. Mies’s own position fitted Chicago perfectly – the origin of frame construction is in its earliest skyscrapers of the 1890s, in the work of LeBaron Jenney and Adler and Sullivan. At IIT, the language of its architecture developed from the Minerals and Metals Research building to the refinement and proportionality of the glazed box of Crown Hall, the School of Architecture, in 1956. Outside Chicago in an isolated location, Mies built the Farnsworth House, the final house project in the sequence he had begun four decades before. It is a completely glazed enclosure raised above a river meadow, with the refinement of placing supports on the outside, leaving the enclosed volume luminous and uninterrupted, the floor slab appearing to float. As at Barcelona, Mies transformed the frame into a reflexive architectural element and an instrument for perception. As he wrote, ‘When one looks at Nature through the glass walls it takes on a deeper significance than when one stands outside. More of Nature is thus expressed – it becomes part of a greater whole.’ At the same time as being the best realization of the Modernist dream of a glass house, celebrating both technological achievement and the utopian theme of a house without secrets and shadows, it expresses this primary role of the existential placing of man in nature. The latter part of Mies’s career produced his most prominent buildings, urban skyscrapers in several North American cities including Montreal and Toronto as well as Chicago. The most celebrated of these is the Seagram Building in a highly prestigious location in New York, which became the type of the modern skyscraper internationally and was a much reproduced design, although few of its copies were of anything like its quality of building and space creation. It is placed within rather than at the edge of its city block, a type of urban planning which has tended elsewhere to create the negative effect of underused and meaningless space. A rectilinear enclosure of glass and steel, like the Farnsworth it fully realizes the long-held European dream of a glass tower with its immaculately detailed curtain wall rising to thirty-nine storeys. But its form is more complex: bronze I-beams run down the facade and rather than being an expression of functionalism are its formal articulation. As Detlef Mertens has observed, making clear the building’s roots in Classical form: ‘The I-beams that run down the façade lay ready, waiting simply to be recognized as a primary element by being brought forward to replace the subtly classical brick pillars. Dipped into a bronze bath and then glued onto the façade of a high rise building, the I-beam was turned into the abstract pilaster of the machine age.’ The New National Gallery built in Berlin had a political intention – to represent culture of the highest order in the divided city of Berlin, an ultimate modern version of Schinkel’s Altes Museum on what was the other side of the Berlin Wall, which ran near its site, dividing the city. It also had a powerful significance for Mies, returning to his home city after the establishment of his great success in the United States and internationally. It represents also the ultimate development of his formal language: he progressively reduced plans to finally produce a single vast square space, creating a large transparent mass, and its roof is supported by eight columns on the periphery,

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with an overhanging roof slab. This open space, raised high on a podium, is intended mainly as an empty space – the gallery’s permanent collection is located underneath – remaining instead a place, as Mies had created in diverse locations before, as a space for contemplation. There is a limited vocabulary of types and themes in his later work, so city complexes, whatever their site, did not elicit a new form of design response. And the constant refinement of a formal language presenting ‘almost nothing’, in Mies’s own aphorism, ran from at least the Farnsworth House until the Berlin Gallery, in the process of emptying space. The setting of podium and pavilion seen in Barcelona, Berlin and elsewhere, where Mies effectively creates a site for his building rather than integrating it into a context, is a recurrent theme that reinforces separation. Rather than utopian form-making or the aimed for reconciliation of man and nature, his work may express a tragic view of this separation, to create space for contemplation within it. Mies van der Rohe’s work represents an unsullied interpretation of modernity and served to advance architectural Modernism in formal, material and conceptual terms. He seems to be located apart from the discourse of the ideas of social relevance and usefulness and of the expression of functionalism in architecture that, according to some, was meant to replace the aesthetic concerns of all earlier generations. In contradiction to others, he claimed the role of the architect as an individual artist, rather than being defined by the demands of technology or by a brief endowed by society. The architect was, with a palette of a different and richer scale than that of the fine artist of Modernism, able to express the meaning of an industrialized, urban and alienated society in a way that reflected the nature of modern existence. He aimed, in a series of remarkable works, on nothing less than creating meaningful, existential space by the means of his highly precise architecture. It is this that makes Mies a strong contender to be the architect who has made the most complete contribution to the manifestation of architecture in the modern world and the assured resurgence of his reputation in the world of architecture after Post Modernism. But it may well have been, as later history has demonstrated, an incomplete model – not least in its insistence on the creation of perfected form being the goal of the architect, one who is uninvolved in issues of time and context.

KEY WORKS – MIES VAN DER ROHE Kröller-Müller House, The Hague, Netherlands project, 1912 Friedrichstrasse competition, Berlin, 1921 Concrete Country House project, 1922 Concrete Office Building project, 1922 Glass Tower project, 1922 Brick Country House project, Potsdam, 1924 Liebknecht-Luxemburg Monument, Berlin, 1926

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Glass Room, Werkbund Exhibition, Stuttgart, 1927 Weissenhof Estate, planning and apartment block, Stuttgart, 1927 Haus Lange and Haus Esters, Krefeld, 1928 Barcelona Chair, 1929 Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona International Exhibition, Spain, 1929 Villa Tugendhat Brno, Czech Republic, 1930 Court House projects, 1931–40 House and Bachelor Apartment, Berlin Building Exhibition, 1931 Illinois Institute of Technology Master Plan, Chicago, 1938 Resor House project, Wyoming, USA, 1938 Minerals & Metals Research Building, IIT, 1943 Alumni Memorial Hall, IIT, 1946 Farnsworth House Plano, Illinois, 1951 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, Chicago, 1951 Cullinan Hall Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1954 Crown Hall, IIT School of Architecture, 1956 Seagram Building, New York, 1958 Lafayette Park Residential Development, Detroit, 1959 Chicago Federal Center, 1964 New National Gallery, Berlin, 1968 Toronto-Dominion Centre, Toronto, 1969

FURTHER READING Achilles, Rolf and Harrington, Kevin (eds) Mies van der Rohe: Architect as Educator Chicago University of Chicago Press 1986: essays by R Banham, R Padovan and S Honey. Cohen, Jean-Louis Mies van der Rohe London Spon 1996. Dal Co, Franceso, Figures of Architecture and Thought Ch 4 Mies New York Rizzoli 1990. Evans, Robin ‘Mies’s Paradoxical Symmetries’ AA Files 19 Spring 1990, pp. 56–68. Lambert, Phyllis Mies van der Rohe in America New York 2001. Mertins, Detlef Mies London Phaidon 2014. Mertins, Detlef (ed.) The Presence of Mies New York Princeton Architectural Press 1994: essays by B Colomina, G Baird, F Neumeyer, R Krauss and others. Neumeyer, Fritz The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art Cambridge MA MIT Press 1991. Riley, Terence and Bergdoll, Barry Mies in Berlin New York Museum of Modern Art 2001. Schulze, Franz (ed.) Mies van der Rohe: Critical Essays New York MOMA 1990. Tegethoff, Wolf The Villas and Country Houses of Mies van der Rohe Cambridge MA MIT Press 1985.

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20  Hans Scharoun (1893–1972) Hans Scharoun was an architect whose work has sometimes been described as part of an expressionist movement, or alternatively as an ‘organic’ tendency in modern architecture. However, his work may better be interpreted as central to an alternative tradition of Modernism: engaging with the specific and the generation of new forms, it took a different direction from what was to become the mainstream. Its distinctive ideology and approach to design have been overshadowed and overtaken by the hegemony established by Le Corbusier and instituted by the founding of CIAM. This was reinforced by the position adopted by the leading critics and historians of the period including Sigfried Giedion and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who largely ignored his existence. Initially working in Berlin in the second decade of the twentieth century, Scharoun participated in the intense debates on the ‘new building’ along with such architects as Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. Having become a part of the ‘glass chain’ group inspired by Paul Scheerbart’s visionary text, he participated in the key Exhibition of Unknown Architects in 1919. Early projects, such as the design for the Dresden Hygiene Museum, utilize Taut’s crystalline form of the Stadtkröne, while he attracted attention with another competition entry for the Friedrichstrasse tower in Berlin, which was distinct from other entries in avoiding traditional forms in favour of a new kind of animate massing. Scharoun met Hugo Häring in 1926, and this association was to be lasting and fundamental influence. Häring was the leading theoretical figure of an alternative position evolved in Berlin in opposition to the direct engagement with functionalism and with rectilinear forms, and Scharoun was to become the architect who most prominently built and later developed those ideas. Häring, along with Mies van der Rohe with whom he then shared an office, from 1921 led ‘The Ring’, a group of avant-garde architects committed to both the expression of architects’ individual voices and an energetic renewal of architecture in relation to modern social and technical conditions. For someone scarcely known today, it is surprising that Häring considered the issues of the relation of form and function more profoundly than others far better

known in architectural polemics: and this differentiates him from contemporaries whose primary concern was with forms that expressed, rather than fulfilled, their function. Equally, he saw a too-rapid move towards issues of the determination of form as problematic, and this led to a dramatic disagreement with Le Corbusier at the initial CIAM meeting in 1928. ‘Finding’ rather than ‘giving’ shape seemed to be the crucial distinction. For Häring, truly ‘functional’ forms, such as the form of tools or of anonymous buildings, are perfected by time and use. Describing these ‘organlike’ forms, he wrote in 1925: ‘We must call on things and let them unfold their own forms … not determine them from without to force upon them laws of any kind.’ Specific processes of ordering, in relation to context and use, would determine the shape that buildings would take, rather than any predetermined idea of form. He repudiated the universal relevance of geometrical forms as repeatedly advocated by Le Corbusier: in this alternative view, they are not of fundamental meaning, but merely abstractions. Scharoun acknowledged his adoption of Häring’s theoretical position: the house he built in 1927 as part of the Stuttgart Weissenhof Estate coordinated by Mies fulfilled the brief of minimal space standards, and at the same time differed from others in being less orthogonal in its articulation of space. A far more expansive plan and site shaped the Schminke House in Löbau, which was his largest domestic project. Organized by its functional sequence, each of the living spaces has an autonomy not controlled by the house’s overall geometrical form: twin diagonal axes give access to spaces for different functions, while the dining room projects out of the east facade which opens up to the asymmetrical forms of glazed walls, terraces and an external staircase. The house constitutes an alternative to the radical programmes of the near-contemporary Tugendhat House of Mies and the Villa Stein of Le Corbusier. It is characterized by liveable spaces and an impure geometry, yet is designed with the overall contemporary aesthetic of light-filled space, a flat roof, white walls and metal detailing. Unlike almost all of his contemporaries, Scharoun stayed in Berlin during the years of the Third Reich: devoid of public commissions, he was largely unable to work but designed a number of ingeniously planned houses for private clients which, like the houses he had built in the 1920s and early 1930s, created highly original and specific living places that reflected his concerns with movement and flowing space. The Baensch House, for example, has a large and asymmetrical split-level living room centred on a sofa which commands a dominant view over the landscape beyond; behind, at a different level, a round dining room pivots between the kitchen and an outside terrace. In contrast to Scharoun’s earlier work, their exteriors were masked with the required Third Reich aesthetic: the Möller House, for example, has a traditional pitched roof. After the Second World War, he was sufficiently untainted politically to be appointed the Head of Housing and Building in Berlin, a short-lived role. Later he was able to develop his work through entering architectural competitions and designing for private clients, although it was not until the ‘Romeo and Juliet’ apartments in Stuttgart, begun in 1954, that he engaged with built projects.

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During this later period in his life he developed and built work at a scale far beyond the years before the Second World War. As well as a number of housing blocks, Scharoun created innovative designs for school buildings of which the first to be built was at Lünen: the plan is similar to an urban form, clustering classrooms of nest-like shapes around internal streets; these protected spaces for younger pupils are differentiated from more traditional classrooms for older students, and supplemented by shared spaces in a complex plan. Asymmetrical, sheltering spaces were also designed for a number of churches, of which the only one to be built was the Chapel of St John, Bochum: a significant number of theatre and concert hall projects were also designed, starting with a competition entry for the Stuttgart Music Hall in 1949.

Image 20.1  Philharmonie Concert Hall Berlin 1956–63

Scharoun’s foremost accomplishment came with the Philharmonie – a great and successful concert hall for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and the focus of a new cultural Forum to be developed in what was then West Berlin, close to where the wall divided the city. The project, won in competition in 1956, embodies many characteristics of the approach of the alternative Modernist tradition – especially when experienced in contrast to the form and programme of Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery which is nearby, completed five years later. As Christian NorbergSchulz has written, the hall embodies the idea fundamental to Scharoun’s work that ‘human actions “take place”, and that the character of the place and the meaning of the action have a reciprocal relationship … (and) generate architecture from a meaningful centre’ (Image 20.1).

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At the centre is the orchestra with the audience seating arranged around it, broken up into separate terraces of a few hundred: the building’s section, sometimes described as a ‘valley’, has an economy of space so the audience are close to the orchestra, full participants in the space, as well as facing each other from diverse angles. The complexity of the design with its multifaceted geometry makes for an unfamiliar experience, as the space cannot be easily read: the shifted planes of seating and the tent-like ceiling generate an aperspectival composition of an almost exploded geometry. The volume underneath and beside the auditorium, packed with structural elements and staircases, is complex and maze-like, a rich spatial experience of a different order: however, the exterior is a copper-coloured aluminium skin scarcely demonstrating any civic role of representation. Scharoun seems indifferent to exterior form and appears content to make object-buildings that do not attempt to connect with their context. The criticism may be also directed at the adjacent State Library completed after his death, however much that both buildings create rich interior landscapes focused on the activities at their centres. It must be acknowledged that the popularity of the Philharmonie has been greater with the public than with many architects, who have seen it as a bewildering and wilful work not in tune with prevailing ideas of architectural clarity and order. But a more recent understanding, following the consistent appreciation of Scharoun’s work by historian Peter Blundell Jones and architect Colin St John Wilson, serves to re-evaluate his work. This new reading is to see it as a Modernism of spatial dynamism, an explosive form-making; the forms of so-called Deconstruction seem to have borrowed from Scharoun. With the faceted, fractured shapes seen in such buildings as the Philharmonie we are in the territory of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid. At best, Scharoun’s principles of design are based on interpretations of structures of human existence that stand contrary to the geometrical forms and rationalist thought processes that have dominated Modern architecture.

KEY WORKS – SCHAROUN ‘Glass Chain’ drawings, 1919 Friedrichstrasse, Berlin, office building competition, 1921 House, Weissenhof Estate, Stuttgart, 1927 Hostel, Breslau (Wroclaw), 1929 Siemensstadt Estate, Berlin, 1929–31 Schminke House, Löbau, 1933 Mattern House, Potsdam, 1934 Baensch House, Berlin, 1935 Möller House, Zermützelsee, 1937 Gerd Rosen Art Gallery project, 1948 Kassel Theatre competition, 1954 ‘Romeo and Juliet’ apartment blocks, Stuttgart, 1959

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Geschwister Scholl School, Lünen, 1955–62 Philharmonie Concert Hall, Berlin, 1956–63 Haupstadt Competition, Berlin, 1958 State Library, Berlin, 1964–78 (with Edgar Wisniewski) Municipal Theatre, Wolfsburg, 1965–73

FURTHER READING Blundell Jones, Peter Hans Scharoun London Phaidon 1995. Blundell Jones, Peter Hugo Häring: The Organic versus the Geometric Stuttgart Axel Menges 2002. Bürkle, J. Christoph Hans Scharoun Zurich Artemis 1993. Pfankuch, Peter Hans Scharoun: Buildings and Designs Berlin Akademie der Kunste 1974 (German). St. John Wilson, Colin Architectural Reflections Oxford Butterworth 1992.

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21  Eileen Gray (1878–1976)

Image 21.1  E.1027, Roquebrune St Martin, with Jean Badovici 1926–9

Eileen Gray was a highly original artist and designer who practiced architecture in France in the 1920s and beyond, and while she associated with Le Corbusier, J. J. P. Oud and other leading Modernist architects, she worked separately from them and never became part of a movement or group. Because of that, and as a woman, her work has often been disregarded and until very late in her long life she gained little recognition outside certain contemporary journals. But it may also be said that her work was largely devoid of the sense of mission, of the programme for social transformation which modern architecture intended to achieve, and which her contemporaries adopted in their different ways.

Instead, there is a strongly held aesthetic approach throughout her work, which could better be described as involving the senses, creating an architecture to be experienced rather than simply admired. Her projects are very much specific in terms of site, programme and occupancy rather than expressing design principles that were more generally applicable: compare her house E.1027 with Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, built in the same period of the late 1920s, the latter being designed for a neutral site and envisaged by its architect as a prototype. Gray was a pioneer in the development of a personal Modernism, at a time very early to do so, and this also may explain the rediscovery of her work in the later period of the 1980s when the modern movement’s grand utopianism had drained away. Born in Ireland, Gray’s training as a painter in London led her to learn the painstaking process of lacquer work: she later set up a studio in Paris and designed and made pieces of lacquered furniture of highly individual design. These, and other furniture, rugs and light fittings designed by her were sold through her own shop named Jean Désert. Among the pieces she made were an extraordinary chaise longue in the form of a pirogue, an enclosure for the body more reminiscent of an Egyptian sarcophagus than a comfortable divan: this was designed as part of a commission for the interior design of a Paris apartment in Rue de Lota for Suzanne Mathieu-Levy. This work stretched over several years but gave her the opportunity to make a number of formal experiments such as the encasing of walls with a second skin of panels, and also led to an interior – the Boudoir de Monte Carlo – designed for an exhibition of the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs in 1923 which was internationally published. While the furniture, in its luxury and high decorative finish, clearly placed it within the French tradition later to be termed Art Deco, the design is far more inventive and original. A hinged screen of lacquer rectangles on a steel wire frame, despite its luxurious finish, seems to be moving her work into closer connection with Modernism, while the room’s functionality separated into distinct zones of activity removed it from the conventions of decorative design. But it was her association with the Romanian architect Jean Badovici that she decisively moved into a different mode of working, both by undertaking architectural projects and by evolving her own version of the Modernism she had become aware of, primarily the work of Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier and the De Stijl group of artists and designers. Built renovation projects of modest ambition were undertaken initially alongside Badovici but later on her own, while unbuilt house designs, in the spirit of Loos or Le Corbusier, were created by Gray from 1923. Gray’s involvement with Badovici led to the building of her major work, on which he acted as client and also as an architectural advisor primarily on technical matters, although she lived in the house and its design was originated by her. The villa E.1027, otherwise known as Maison en bord de mer, on a sloping rocky site overlooking the Mediterranean at Roquebrune St Martin was undoubtedly her most acknowledged work and was documented in a special issue of L’Architecture Vivante in 1929 (Image 21.1). It is a modestly scaled house built on two levels into the rocky terrain, and is built in reinforced concrete and oriented to the trajectory of the sun:

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the bedrooms face the rising sun and the living rooms the evening light. The principal room is raised on piloti, and the horizontality of rooms and terraces is matched by the vertical elements of an external staircase and a spiral stair enclosed in metal and glass. The main studio room dominates the composition while having a carefully defined relationship with the subsidiary spaces: each is an independent space, with its own access to the outside. Throughout, by integrating furniture and architecture, a different kind of architecture is created using built-in elements. The principal room includes a sleeping alcove with its own cantilevered table and adjustable easel. The studio-bedroom differentiates areas for working and sleeping with modified ceiling heights, with a ceiling fixture reflecting more light into the already luminous space. The house is considered from the interior outwards, rather than having a dominant formal composition, and in this design decision Gray is closer to Adolf Loos’s later house designs than Le Corbusier’s ‘five points’, by representing the creation of defined rather than undefined space. The strip window, however, is derived from Corbusian principles: but it has an outer element of sliding shutters with pivoting segments, limiting solar penetration but allowing ventilation. Specially designed furniture includes the Transat chair, a version of the traditional deckchair form with a padded leather seat suspended on a rectilinear wooden frame; a chrome and glass bedside table has a mechanism to adjust the level of the top. In her description of the house, Gray was critical of the prevailing orthodoxy among modern architects, which emphasized the exterior appearance of the house ‘as if (it) should be conceived for the pleasure of the eye rather than for the well being of its inhabitants’. Gray proclaimed her position against the primacy of theory: ‘Formulas are nothing, life is everything. And life is simultaneously mind and heart.’ As Caroline Constant has written, it was a house which was an anti-object: ‘A flexible structure whose occupants would invest it with life.’ Gray’s association with Badovici led to the design of a further ingenious essay in personal space-making, with him as the client: a Paris apartment of 8 m by 5 m, a square studio space defined out of a larger volume and divided into work, sleeping and dressing areas with a small kitchen, bar and bathroom demarcated with panels of wood and aluminium. These could be closed off by moving metal screens along a curved track, while the use of wall-sized mirrors gave the effect of expanding the small space. She built a second house for herself, Tempe à Pailla, on the south coast of France. It is built of reinforced concrete in a mediated columnar grid on a rough stone base. Here, architectural details of scale and material difference define its sequence of spaces: a system of architectural layering produces a sense of privacy, protecting the heart of the house. She again uses the means of spatial definition and built-in furniture to create subtle and ambiguous spatial relationships within her own language of Modernism. The credit for her work seems to have been affected by straightforward sexism: while her design of furniture was acknowledged, the house E.1027 has been credited in several publications to Le Corbusier, while with only slightly more accuracy others have named Badovici. She admired Le Corbusier’s architecture, while appreciating

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the limits of his theory: he in turn very much acknowledged her achievement at E.1027 (at which he was a frequent guest) while neither giving it public credit nor respecting it by his later painting of murals on its walls, in what is now acknowledged as an act of vandalism. Her position at the heart of French Modernist architecture thus remains compromised, but her interpretation of Modernist principles which, in her words removes ‘coldness’ and reintroduces ‘emotion that is purified by knowledge and enriched by ideas’, asserts ‘one must build for the human being that he might rediscover in architectural construction the joys of self-fulfilment in a whole that extends and completes him’. Standing against the dogmatic and universal principles adopted by her contemporaries, her production of an architecture that is both modern and accommodating of human experience demonstrates an approach that could have been more widely adopted in the formative years of Modernism, but which chimes with attitudes held by many architects today.

KEY WORKS – GRAY Rue de Lota apartment, Paris, 1919–24 Boudoir de Monte Carlo, Salon des Artistes Decorateurs, 1923 Three storey house project, 1923 E.1027, Roquebrune St Martin (with Jean Badovici), 1926–9 Badovici House renovation, Vezelay, 1927 (with Jean Badovici) Badovici apartment, Paris, 1931 Tempe à Pailla house, Castellar, 1932–4 House for sculptors, J and J Martel project, 1934 Lou Perou house renovation, Saint-Tropez, 1954–8

FURTHER READING Adam, Peter Eileen Gray Her Life and Work London Thames & Hudson 2009. Constant, Caroline Eileen Gray London Phaidon 2000 includes Gray and Badovici’s dialogue (1929) From Eclecticism to Doubt. Constant, Caroline and Wang, Wilfried Eileen Gray: An Architecture for all Senses Frankfurt Deutsche Architektur Museum 1996. Johnson, Stewart Eileen Gray: Designer London Debrett 1979. Rayon, Jean Paul ‘Eileen Gray: The North Star and the South Star’ 9H no. 8 1989, pp. 164–87: also has texts on Gray by Rosamund Diamond, Peter Adam and Yehuda Safran.

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22  Gunnar Asplund (1885–1940)

Image 22.1  Woodland Crematorium, Stockholm 1935–40

Gunnar Asplund was the most important modern architect in Swedish history and an exact contemporary of such major figures as Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. Rather than developing an agenda for a universally applied new architecture as they did, he took a different direction and developed his work within the particular architectural culture of Scandinavia. He can be seen as achieving a synthesis of Classical architectural tradition with twentieth-century cultural conditions more completely than any other architect: and despite his use of Classical forms Asplund was a progressive figure, rather than one promoting historicist themes. He developed new forms of Modernism that were primarily concerned with conveying historical continuity, as well as an interpretation of site and context, before such ideas were more universally adopted. Sweden in the early twentieth century was absorbed in establishing its national identity, and the national Romantic forms of such architects as Ragnar Östberg, the architect of Stockholm City Hall, were dominant. A romantic and very particular interpretation of Classicism had originated in Denmark, evoking rather than reproducing its forms and transforming them into an unassuming but charming vernacular, as seen in the work of such architects as Ivar Tengbom. Asplund’s training at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm began in 1909, but with other students he set up a separate school where Östberg and Tengbom, as alternatives to their conventional education, were invited to teach. Asplund also developed, as a result of a long trip to Italy, a particular and subjective interpretation of landscape and of Classical form: this can be seen in the entry for the Stockholm Woodland Cemetery competition which he won in 1915, in collaboration with Sigurd Lewerentz. Its design was to leave the existing forest site largely unaltered: graves as well as two chapels were placed deep within it. The cemetery, developed over twenty-five years, was led by its landscape design and very much influenced by the German romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich: a grove of trees on a constructed hill near the entrance emulates Friedrich’s Hill and Ploughed Field near Dresden (1824). Asplund and Lewerentz, like Friedrich, intended their work as an allegorical landscape that reflected truths of human existence. The Woodland Chapel was Asplund’s first independent project there: its steep shingle roof rises above a squat timber colonnade, slightly recessed and giving the impression that the great roof, resembling a pyramid, is a solid mass out of which the circular space of the chapel is carved; its dark colour makes it part of the deep forest with which it is surrounded. It is a strong and elemental building, translating historical forms into something distinctly modern: its Classical elements seem abstracted and configuring a new kind of vernacular. Its entrance and section resemble the first building in the language of Romantic Classicism, the Fåborg Museum in Denmark by Carl Petersen, but it forms a more cohesive design, part temple and part forest hut. The Stockholm Public Library is also a strong formal composition: a tall cylindrical volume, lined with circles of books, is surrounded by a cubic perimeter block containing reading rooms and offices. It is the culmination of Asplund’s modern interpretation of Neo-Classicism: the first scheme was for a domed building, a circular drum within

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a square plan, closer than the built version to its acknowledged source, the work of French visionary architects Ledoux and Boullée – particularly Boullée’s great project for a Cenotaph for Newton. The axial entrance sequence is significant: a staircase outside the building continues to rise inside, opening up into the vast space of the reading room. Its stripped, elemental forms were quickly recognized internationally as providing an alternative direction in modern architecture. Asplund designed the plan and many of the buildings for the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930, intended as a specifically Modernist exhibition, and which displayed the modern manufactures of Swedish craftsmen and artists: its slogan, and the title of a 1931 manifesto to which Asplund was a signatory, was Acceptera ! (accept) – a request for the Swedish public to accept functionalism and standardization in order to swiftly modernize the still largely rural country. Its built forms – with little precedent in Asplund’s earlier work – used steel frames, extensive glazing and white-rendered surfaces in a manner evoking Le Corbusier’s Purist work, but as visitors reported its festive quality with flags, canopies and lighting expressed ‘a new kind of joy’. The entrance pavilion, a large open space with a grid of slender steel columns, ‘perhaps not a building’ in Asplund’s description, and the Paradiset Restaurant, dramatically sited and focused on a glazed cylindrical tower with coloured canvas canopies projecting from the facade, showed a new approach. Augmenting forms like this is evidence of a Constructivist influence, clearly seen in the forms of the Transport Pavilion and a free-standing tower of neon advertisements, in emulation of Soviet propaganda installations. Buildings following the exhibition such as the Bredenberg Department Store continued Asplund’s Modernist language, but are far less spirited: the Gothenburg Courthouse extension, completed in 1937, had started in 1913. Its relationship to the existing facade may be described as a refined contextualism, but the interior is centred on the Modernist volume of an entrance hall, with cantilevered balconies and suspended staircases. The Crematorium at Stockholm Woodland Cemetery is Asplund’s last major work. Set in an open and undulating section of landscape against the adjoining forest, it comprises three chapels, austere in form, the largest being the Chapel of the Holy Cross, with its marble-clad portico, an open volume of columns projecting into the landscape and forming its focus (Image 22.1). The portico echoes the form of a Classical temple but also modern abstraction; there are aspects of the picturesque in its location at the top of a route gently rising from the entrance and facing a low hill. Nikolaus Pevsner wrote, alluding to its archetypal nature, ‘Never before in the twentieth century had architecture and landscape been blended so perfectly.’ Asplund remained largely silent in terms of explaining his motivations, but in his inaugural lecture as Professor at the Royal Academy in Stockholm discussed the work of philosopher Oswald Spengler, whose book The Decline of the West was much read in Sweden in the 1920s. Spengler’s theory describes the growth, flowering and decline of the cultures of the past, from the Classical and Arabic to the Western: significantly he uses their different concepts of space to illustrate their cultural values.

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This model is clearly inspirational for Asplund and analysed by him in relation to the contemporary expression of space and form: he describes modern conditions as expressing fluidity in open, architectonic space, which ‘opens out to the sun, the countryside and human life and movement’. Spengler’s essential relativism, that no values were unconditional and timeless, also made clear the futility of an architectural philosophy that is based on absolute values. Asplund’s career was cut short by his death at an age when other architects develop their best work, while the variety of approaches used may have caused some historians to exclude him from their narratives of the history of modern architecture. He is not even mentioned in Sigfried Gideon’s encyclopedic Space, Time and Architecture: others have seen the Modernist forms of the Stockholm Exhibition as ‘progress’, supplanting his earlier Classical and Romantic form-making. In Britain, Asplund’s influence was strong and long-lasting as a leading member of the group of Scandinavian architects who were admired and imitated in the 1920s and 1930s. Grey Wornum’s RIBA building shows signs of his influence, while Arnos Grove underground station emulates Stockholm Library: and for the post-war celebration of the 1951 Festival of Britain, Stockholm in 1930 was the main model in intention if not in detail. According to Colin St John Wilson writing in 1988, ‘the true significance of Asplund’s work has been tacitly ignored’ and explains that his work, succeeded by that of Aalto, presents, even in the 1930s, a fully realized critique of the commonly agreed Modernism of the time. Aalto described in an obituary for Asplund how he had attempted to ‘tie together the threads of living future with those of the living past’. The relevance of cultural continuity was paramount: Stuart Wrede has described the architect’s approach as characterized by strong emotional responses, memories and associations. He introduced his book on Asplund (1980) with the assertion that the architect was at that point unknown in the United States, but the following decade saw a number of publications and exhibitions that exposed his work internationally. Asplund’s time had come, given the new interest in interpretations of Classicism, but also more profoundly in the idea that modern architecture could be contextual and could create a genuine sense of place. Instead of the abstraction and universality of the Modernism practised by his peers, his achievement is now seen as their equal, as an architect of subtlety and sensitivity, and more worthy of emulation.

KEY WORKS – ASPLUND Stockholm Woodland Cemetery competition, 1915 (with Sigurd Lewerentz) Woodland Chapel, Stockholm South Cemetery, 1918–20 Skandia Cinema, Stockholm, 1923 Stockholm City Library, 1924–7

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Stockholm Exhibition, 1930 (plan and buildings, entrance pavilion, Paradiset Restaurant) Bredenberg Store, Stockholm, 1933–5 Gothenburg Law Courts extension, 1934–7 Woodland Crematorium, Stockholm, 1935–40

FURTHER READING Architectural Association Gunnar Asplund 1885–1940 The Dilemma of Classicism London Architectural Association 1988. Blundell Jones, Peter Gunnar Asplund London Phaidon 2004. Caldenby, Claes and Hultin, Olof Asplund Corte Madera CA Gingko Press 1997 essays by Kenneth Frampton, Elias Cornell, Stuart Wrede and others. Constant, Caroline The Woodland Cemetery: Toward a Spiritual Landscape Stockholm Byggförlaget 2004. Knight, Stuart ‘Swedish Grace: Modern Classicism in Stockholm’ International Architect 1 no. 8 1982, pp. 8–43. Wrede, Stuart The Architecture of Erik Gunnar Asplund Cambridge MA MIT Press 1980.

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23  Alvar Aalto (1898–1976) Alvar Aalto is the architect who can be seen as best representing the second, revisionary stage of the maturity of Modernism in architecture. He developed an original language of built forms: equally distinctive is the use of the materials of timber and brick, rather than the typical Modernism of concrete and steel. These traditional materials give his work a quite different character compared to that of the earlier generation of modern architects: they are used in distinctly unorthodox ways, since the plans and sections of his buildings display a complexity of form and composition and make few references to more typical geometrical or classically derived elements as may be seen in the work of earlier Modernism. In his work Aalto created new forms for the modern house, the public building and the civic space which have been widely influential: its formal fluency and utter individualism represents the greatest achievement of what is described as an alternative tradition in modern architecture. Aalto’s long career was based almost entirely in his native Finland. He continually searched for new ideas and influences and in his earlier career, rather than directly working with ideas of an identity for Finnish architecture, was international in his position with ideas taken from many directions in contemporary, advanced European practice. And this interest represented a remarkably eclectic and wide-ranging engagement with the thought and formal innovation of the avant-garde. He joined the second CIAM meeting in Frankfurt in 1929: this focused on the theme of the Minimum Dwelling, rather than its larger concerns expressed later with city form. His design for a minimum apartment exhibited in Helsinki the following year represented his enthusiastic response to the question: the contact with other delegates, including László Moholy-Nagy, Sigfried Giedion and Le Corbusier, was a more lasting influence. From different connections in Berlin the work of Hans Scharoun, in its turn shaped by that of Hugo Häring, moulded Aalto’s developing aesthetic. Häring wrote of the true functionalism that was generated by the specifics of use, and it is clear that this distinct position, effectively creating an architecture of separated and atomized elements, enabled Aalto to create work that took those ideas far further. Häring proposed that every building had a potential individual ordering process to be

uncovered and expressed; his early house projects were defined by spaces for specific use and dynamic movement between them. On this principle, Juhani Pallasmaa has written that Aalto’s approach to design, rather than making a composition defined by a single concept, creates buildings that are ‘some kind of architectural creature’. They are organic in the sense of being whole, organized around activities rather than by a given principle of ordering. His buildings assemble spaces in sometimes illogical ways, being composed of separate events or acts. Frequently, facades are surfaces, like skins, that enclose the volumes created, giving an image of completeness even if they are highly asymmetrical: the building’s context is not seen as foremost in shaping the building but rather as being a part of a continuous field, in contrast, for example, to the object-building of Le Corbusier or Louis Kahn. Aalto’s architectural education was at the Technical University in Helsinki, graduating in 1921, and his earliest built work expresses a cool Classicism reflecting that of Gunnar Asplund in Sweden. Setting up an office in partnership with his architect wife Aino Aalto (1894–1949) the most remarkable early building was the Turku Agricultural Co-operative which is a five-storey urban block, austere in its geometrical form, its plain surfaces almost completely devoid of detail and reminiscent of Adolf Loos or Otto Wagner. A little later the Turun Sanomat newspaper offices and print works building is the first of Aalto’s works to express ‘functionalism’, as Modernist work is described in Scandinavia, and to emulate the work of Le Corbusier. With its strip windows and geometrical form any trace of tradition is eliminated from its design. The first building which brought Aalto international recognition was the Sanatorium at Paimio. It utilizes a concrete frame structure, with cantilevered balconies to catch the sun suspended from a tapering concrete frame in what can be seen as a Constructivist-influenced composition. A further functionalist project – the result, like the Turun Sanomat and Paimio Sanatorium of Aalto’s success in an open competition – was the Public Library at Viipuri, completed after some delay and the drastic evolution of its design from a more traditional form. The characteristic ‘free section’ of the building, seen in the volumetric composition of the library and entrance lobby, introduced an extension of Corbusian principles and prefigured much of Aalto’s later work. And the introduction of timber in the manner he was to make his own can be seen particularly in the way the design of its lecture room, clad with a curving shell formed of strips of pine, integrated the ceiling and wall surfaces in a single dynamic, undulating line. This curvilinear form, seen in spectacular shape in other projects, became his most characteristic formal invention: according to Eeva-Lisa Pelkonen, it is influenced by Moholy-Nagy’s idea of space as a continuum, ‘as a larger spatial field of dynamic forces’. Moholy-Nagy’s work may seem far removed from the reputation for solidity that Aalto was later to develop, but the dynamic line, breaking out of rectilinear and rational form-making, owes something to the Bauhaus teacher’s declaration of the principle of ‘biodynamism’ and the key precepts of his theory in From Material to Architecture. The biological and psychological were to be the foundations of a

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new, broader understanding of the needs of modern architecture. The sinuous line emerged in Aalto’s work in furniture design in the early 1930s: in architecture, the dominant tilted display wall of the Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair was a spectacular and much seen example, ingeniously utilizing the narrow space of the Pavilion. It also – itself a wood construction – was a narrative of how Finland’s most representative material was used to make paper, furniture and building. Writing on the combination of the curved and straight line, seen here and a recurrent motif in Aalto’s work, Colin St John Wilson has written: ‘One straight, the other serpentine … the juxtaposition seems to charge the air of the space like the beating of a giant wing … the “argument” of an Aalto building (is) a complementarity between the rigorous plane of analysis and the turbulent wavelike surge of fantasy.’ More generally, the use of timber construction can be seen in furniture designs undertaken from the early 1930s: the early Paimio chair in bent ply seems extreme, as if testing the limits of its material, the seat a thin sheet of plywood curved into scrolls held within a curvilinear frame of laminated wood. This design and others were produced by the Artek company, founded by Aino and Alvar Aalto along with Maire Gullichsen in 1935, and remain universally acknowledged as highly successful productions of Modernist furniture. The role of Aino Aalto as a designer in her own right is largely masked: furniture and glass designs are credited to her, and certainly she is recognized as co-designer of the New York Pavilion and as designer of the interior of the Villa Mairea, but participated fully in the work of the office apparently without receiving, or wanting, further acknowledgement. Among Aalto’s most significant built projects is the Villa Mairea designed in 1938, where the clients specifically wanted a building which expressed and embodied the approach of the avant-garde, ‘the spirit of today’, and rejected his first more traditional Finnish vernacular design. A second design showed his enthusiasm for the recently published ‘Falling Water’ by Frank Lloyd Wright to the extent of siting the house over a stream. The design of the house as finally built, however, is equal in achievement to Wright’s celebrated design, and is an original, subtle and complex synthesis of traditional and Modernist attributes (Image 23.1). It can be contrasted with the unified composition of the forms of houses by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe that came to define modern domestic architecture. Instead, the Villa Mairea’s plan and configuration is of individually defined elements, with an eclectic combination of different materials and details. The plan resembles, in Pallasmaa’s term, a ‘creature’ in the shape of an elongated building forming a fragmentary open-sided courtyard, itself a traditional rustic Finnish form, in its thickly forested location. The house is an integration of the natural and man-made, of the rectilinear and the informal: at one end is a sauna cabin of traditional timber with a turf roof. The central part is a rendered, Modernist rectangular form that includes the double-cube dining room, leading to the focus of the house, a large square space, ambiguously defined by screening elements and floor surfaces that includes the living room,

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music room and library. The house’s entrance is an amoeboid canopy with a forest of timber poles: an abstraction of the forest continues within, with slender poles gathered around the main staircase. The ‘head’ of the configuration is a studio clad in vertical timber boards with a balcony that projects above and wraps around the stone-clad wall. The intensity of the house’s composition lies also in its compactness, in the spatial flow that connects its elements, in the integration of its forms, spaces and disparate materials. As Richard Weston has observed, ‘Every view of the house represents a remarkable array of forms, colours and textures – abstract white planes, lime-washed brickwork, weatherboarding, teak and stone cladding …’ Weston suggests that the source of Aalto’s radical method is in Cubist collage, its elements integrated and working together as both visual and significant form. Thus the house’s modernity goes beyond the more doctrinaire strictures of an architectural programme declared by the polemicists of modern architecture and moves into a new and productive territory.

Image 23.1  Villa Mairea, Noormarkku 1938–40

In the years after the Second World War Aalto’s work represented an extension of this distinctive approach into larger and public projects: an architecture that was ambiguous and evocative, and connected disparate formal and representational elements. Säynätsalo Town Hall, surrounded by forest rather than being on an urban site as its name would suggest, presents an inward-looking building, almost castle-like in form, the highest point formally and symbolically being the canted form of the council chamber (Image 23.2). Its functional spaces open on to a first-floor courtyard reached both by a granite-clad formal staircase and by an asymmetrical flight of turf steps, with the building constructed of rough red brick, laid at a slight angle to provide both a visual texture and semantic ambiguity. The grassed courtyard provides an enclosed focus, and timber is used to give a formal quality to the council chamber, its pine cladding featuring elaborate fan-shaped trusses.

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Image 23.2  Säynätsalo Town Hall, 1949–1952

Aalto made clear that the model of the building owed much to the intensity of form of the Italian hill town, with the town hall at its centre: early in his career he had travelled to Italy where his concentration was on the modest vernacular buildings of traditional urbanism. Formed by life, by use and custom, rather than being shaped by any principle of composition, and with the sense of a collective activity of continued relevance, these buildings had created an enduring impression. But despite traditional elements in form and application Säynätsalo is distinctly a modern building: its traditional content is subsumed into the whole and makes an unprecedented urban form. The angularity of its volumetric composition can be seen as more related to Constructivist work, such as that by Konstantin Melnikov, than vernacular urbanism, while the dominant idea expresses Bruno Taut’s idea of the ‘city crown’.

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In this and a number of later projects, Aalto invented entirely new forms of public buildings for twentieth-century society that were democratic, open and inclusive. His model related to the ancient Greek agora, a space for assembly, for collective experience: such projects as the Seinäjoki Town Centre and the Cultural Centre at Wolfsburg intended to make a place for community and shared values. Libraries such as those built at Rovaniemi and Otaniemi had a similar function to engage their users in collective culture. Aalto’s creation of the urban focus owed something also to the more traditional planning model of Camillo Sitte, as well as to Taut. At Seinäjoki, a series of buildings, some completed only after Aalto’s death, are focused around a traffic-free precinct. The church, raised above an open square, was the first to be built, joined by a library, theatre and town hall. The building is enclosed by a grass courtyard, reminiscent at a larger scale of Säynätsalo: its inward-looking form is dominated by the apex of the council chamber. But reflecting a harder, urban location its cladding is of vertically oriented dark blue tiles which suggest a luminous variant on more traditional masonry and serves to unify the multifaceted plan. Vuokksenniska Church is one of a number that Aalto designed and consists of interlinked volumes: its plan with curving walls faces the forest at the rear and the straight walls reflect its face to the city. The complexity of the plan and section, which consists of three asymmetrically curved vaults, leads it to be seen as perhaps the most fully achieved, elaborate form in Aalto’s work. The interior is illuminated with a richly varied series of light sources so that the walls are animated by changing luminosity, conferring a sensation of them being in motion. The rich, three-dimensional composition of the church represents a new, abstracted interpretation of a typical church form, references including the tall section, basilica form and campanile. Robert Venturi praises Vuokksenniska’s complex and atmospheric interior in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture as ‘justifiable expressionism’, given the reasons that can be given for its complexity of form, in contrast (for him) to the oversimplified and refined gestures of Philip Johnson or the unruly complexity of a contemporary church design by Giovanni Michelucci. That Aalto’s work may be ‘complex’ and ‘contradictory’ lucidly defines its qualities, underlining its ability to integrate heterogenous forms, details and materials into a whole. While some larger-scale designs such as the Otaniemi Institute of Technology seem to dilute the intensity of smaller and more fully detailed projects, and others such as the Helsinki House of Culture are less successful in juxtaposing difference, Aalto’s higher achievements later in his career include the Finlandia Hall in Helsinki. The most nationally significant of the many public buildings he built, it incorporates two auditoria set in the dynamic volume of an interior landscape: in the main hall, floating balconies under the fractured form of the ceiling are among his most lyrical elements. It has often been asserted that Aalto did not use writing to interpret his architecture: the work should speak for itself, and emphatically not exist simply as the expression of a theory. But it is certainly possible to locate his work within the current of early twentieth-century thought through analysis of his published statements as well as the buildings themselves. In common with many other leading figures,

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Aalto has a debt to Nietzschean philosophy, in adopting the idea of the individual’s right and duty to challenge tradition and find and create new directions for action. The Finnish philosopher Eino Kaila influenced him, introducing the idea of ‘vitalism’ derived from Henri Bergson, which shaped his belief in the force of nature and the essential quality of individual experience: Moholy-Nagy’s writing on experiential space in From Material to Architecture chimed with this and led to a convincing architectural strategy. In his 1940 essay The Humanizing of Architecture, Aalto introduced the notion of ‘psychophysical’ functionalism that incorporated a wider sense of the prevailing term ‘functionalism’ to include human comfort and social needs. As he expressed it, ‘Architecture’s task is still one of bringing the world of material into harmony with human life.’ The ‘organic’ remains a term frequently applied to this approach, and Aalto’s relation to the natural world is certainly not one of the binary opposition of rational thought and structure versus chaotic nature. Harry Charrington has argued that this position can be philosophically related to the thought of Jakob von Uexküll in his idea of Umwelt or surrounding world: nature seen as a dynamic whole, ‘governed in all its parts by the meaning it has for the subject’. Referring to a different reading of ‘organic’, Aalto wrote in 1942, ‘Just as in nature every cell is related to the whole, so in architecture the parts must be conscious of the whole’: thus nature provides a model for the architect’s work, which, he points out, should always be more a practice of art than a process of analysis. For Aalto, architecture did not need to be invented afresh, but was an individual process of synthesis and creation: this distinguishes it from the standard Modernism then being universally adopted. An acknowledgement of his importance in the development of modern architecture was initiated by Sigfried Giedion, who in later editions of Space, Time and Architecture from 1949 gave as much space to Aalto as to Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. For Giedion, the innovation of form and reclaiming of traditional materials and processes seen in Aalto’s work introduced the irrational and the organic into the established practice of modern architecture: he led a second generation following on after the initial revolution had been achieved. For a later generation of historians, Kenneth Frampton concludes his Critical History of Modern Architecture (1980) by championing Aalto as the paradigm of a fundamental and relevant architecture, in its humanistic quality a contrast to the prevailing modern practice of prioritizing form or structure. Making existentially meaningful places, as the philosopher Martin Heidegger had identified as the modern task for architecture, is seen by Frampton as Aalto’s particular accomplishment. With a divergent point of view, Demetri Porphyrios has characterized Aalto’s work as ‘heterotopic’, against the ‘homotopic’ of the more standard forms of architectural Modernism which aim for unity. Incorporating the distinction of each activity and action, it sustains its unity only through adjacency and discontinuity. He also goes so far as to argue that Aalto was not a part of the ‘modern movement’ in architecture: rather, he says, his mindset was of the nineteenth century, retaining ideas of stylistic eclecticism. Aalto’s embodiment of a different approach to form-making,

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and his achievement within what Colin St John Wilson has defined as ‘the other tradition’ in modern architecture, has provided a basis for the development of such architects as Alvaro Siza and many British architects including St John Wilson himself. From a more eclectic combination of sources than is often realized, Aalto advanced a highly personal interpretation of modern architecture: eschewing the rhetorical, inclusive statement in favour of an architecture that used both montage and tradition in a new and fuller interpretation of functionalism. His work successfully dealt with the specifics of making meaningful places, rooted in the familiar, without reproducing earlier forms. In a wider sense Aalto remains a relevant model for many contemporary architects. His position represents the development of architecture based on an interpretation of its use and inhabitation rather than starting with the flamboyant creation of forms and manifests the evolution of an individual and intuitive art.

KEY WORKS – AALTO Agricultural Co-operative Building, Turku, 1926–8 Turun Sanomat, Turku, 1928–30 Sanatorium, Paimio, 1930 Viipuri city library, 1933–5 Artek furniture, 1935 Finnish Pavilion, Paris World’s Fair, 1937 Villa Mairea, Noormarkku, 1938–40 Finnish Pavilion, New York World’s Fair, 1939 Baker House, MIT Cambridge, MA, 1948 Säynätsalo Town Hall, 1949–52 National Pensions Head Office, Helsinki, 1952–6 Experimental house, Muuratsalo, 1953 North Jutland art museum, Aalborg, Denmark, 1958 Seinäjoki administrative and cultural centre, 1958–69 University of Technology, Otaniemi, 1955–64 House of Culture, Helsinki, 1958 Vuokksenniska Church, Imatra, 1959 Finlandia Hall, Helsinki, 1962–71 Cultural Centre, Wolfsburg, Germany, 1963 Seinäjoki Library, 1965

FURTHER READING Charrington, Harry ‘A Persuasive Typology: Alvar Aalto and the Ambience of History’ in Emmons, Paul, Hendrix, John and Lomholt, Jane (eds) The Cultural Role of Architecture London Routledge 2012.

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Pallasmaa, Juhani ‘Logic of the Image’ Journal of Architecture 3 no. 4 Winter 1998, pp. 289–99. Pelkonen, Eeva-Lisa Alvar Aalto Architecture, Modernity and Geopolitics New Haven Yale University Press 2009. Ray, Nicholas Alvar Aalto New Haven Yale University Press 2005. Reed, Peter Alvar Aalto: Between Humanism and Materialism, essays by Kenneth Frampton and others New York Museum of Modern Art 1998. Ruusuvuori, Arno Alvar Aalto 1898–1976 Helsinki Museum of Finnish Architecture 1978. Schildt, Goran (ed.) Alvar Aalto in His Own Words New York Rizzoli 1997. St John Wilson, Colin Architectural Reflections Oxford Butterworth 1992. Weston, Richard Alvar Aalto London Phaidon 1995. Weston, Richard Villa Mairea: Architecture in Detail London Phaidon 1992.

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24  Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2010)

Image 24.1  Casa do Baile, Pampulha, Belo Horizonte 1942

Oscar Niemeyer became the last survivor of the second generation of architects who followed on from Le Corbusier and Gropius and developed new work out of the origins of Modernism, largely built in his home country of Brazil. He survived the various stages of the revision and rejection of modern architecture and worked over an astounding eight decades, long enough for his reputation to regain a substantial part of the height it had reached in the 1960s. His role internationally was to take a lead in the direction of Modernism in the 1940s onwards, using the material of concrete in a way that was highly expressive and displayed an extraordinary spatial dynamic.

Niemeyer’s first building dates from 1937, and his work developed a new kind of architecture which could perhaps only be generated outside the cultural norms of Europe and the United States. Part of a larger cultural shift in the modern visual arts in Brazil, his work originated in European Modernism, and along with Lúcio Costa, Gregori Warchavchik, Affonso Reidy and others he developed a strong and individual national culture of architecture. His work was far from simply being ‘tropical exuberance’, as it was described by Sigfried Giedion, but a complex hybrid of influences shaped by an emerging national identity for Brazil outlined, among others, by the social theorist Gilberto Freyre who celebrated its racial and cultural mix of the Indian, the African and popular traditions in preference to the dominance of colonial Europe. In formal terms, however, his work was initially derived from Le Corbusier, on whose design with Costa for the Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro Niemeyer had worked in 1937: but it moved into a quite different world of expression and, according to Niemeyer, was shaped by the exuberance of colonial Baroque buildings in Brazil as well as the country’s natural abundance. With the building of Brasília, inaugurated in 1960, he was clearly established as the leader of a generation of innovative architects in Brazil. This new capital and city of three million was built at great speed to Lúcio Costa’s master plan but also at massive cost to the developing nation. But it is the great series of public buildings – the Congress, Cathedral, Presidential Palace, Law Courts and government ministries among them – that created the image of the city. All of these and many more were designed by Niemeyer. The architect was later at pains to point out that the massive number of buildings he created there were the production of an architectural salaryman, as he was employed as a public servant, not as an architect in private practice. This role was important to Niemeyer as he defined himself as a lifelong socialist rather than as the possessor of a highly developed architectural ego. While he did work for developers, such as those who built the Copan complex in São Paulo, and corporate work for banks, the large majority of his buildings were public commissions. His building of a number of buildings in Europe, for the publishers Mondadori as well as the Communist Party in France, is the product of his virtual exile in Europe during the period of Brazil’s right-wing military government. Early in his career were the buildings done in the city of Belo Horizonte: a series of projects were undertaken for Mayor Juscelino Kubitscek, later state governor and some time later as the president who was to realize the long-held Brazilian dream of building a new capital city. The mix of social ideals and a degree of nepotism worked well for Niemeyer: ultimately and ironically, as Styliane Philippou has written, ‘Niemeyer espoused the idea of architecture as a high art for clients who could afford it and governments who would sponsor it, rather than as an agent of social reform.’ Pampulha, on the fringe of Belo Horizonte, was developed by Kubitscek in the early 1940s with a series of cultural buildings around an artificial lake: each was designed by Niemeyer in an unparalleled interpretation of Modernist architectural language. The Casino is a powerful version of Le Corbusier’s promenade architecturale: the visitor enters a luminous double-height space dominated by a grid of piloti,

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then follows a double ramp up to the gaming floor and linked beyond is a restaurant and theatre stage characterized by complex, curving, interpenetrating forms. The nearby Church of St Francis uses the completely different structure of parabolic concrete shells fused into a sinuous three-dimensional form creating an extraordinary enclosed shape, with walls inside and out covered by paintings and mosaic. The small Casa do Baile is an exquisite inside–outside space for dance, the unifying factor being the flowing serpentine form of the roof canopy or marquise (Image 24.1). Each of these and other early projects are highly original, and each provides the basis for aspects of Niemeyer’s architectural language as his volume of work grew: the development of the curved form, the ramp and the expressive potential of the concrete shell are among his consistent themes over the following decades. Niemeyer in an interview in 1994 described these buildings as ‘functional, beautiful and shocking’ and they helped to form a new direction in later modern buildings, perhaps even those designed by Le Corbusier himself. From the 1940s onward, there was much international attention on the work done by Niemeyer and others in Brazil: at a time when both Europe and the United States were involved in war and plans for reconstruction, their achievement was singular as well as representing the survival and reordering of Modernism as it been established in the pre-war period. Many journal articles, books and in particular the exhibition ‘Brazil Builds’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1943 communicated its achievement. It is, however, with the buildings Niemeyer constructed for Brasília, inaugurated in 1960, that what Reyner Banham called ‘the first national style of modern architecture’ was securely established. The concrete fins of the Cathedral lantern, the slim twin towers and two domes, one inverted, of the National Congress and the sculptural inverted-cross loggia screening the facade of the Alvorada Palace were among the imagery seen far and wide and representing a modernity visible nowhere else. The buildings’ role was to house the functions of government and the needs of a city, and only here was a completely Modernist city built at this scale, one that was to symbolize the developing nation. From a country and a city that few could visit, the images of Brasília’s newly completed buildings provided a confident, rhetorical presence in the rest of the world through the published media. The buildings’ inventiveness takes further the themes of the slab block with piloti, the expressive quality of reinforced concrete and the play of rectangular and curved forms which had been seen in his earlier work. This continuity was far from being simple repetition, however, and the achievement of certain buildings such as the refinement of the form of the Alvorada Palace and its colonnade, and the modern monumentality of the unprecedented form of the National Congress building are among the greatest achievements of the high period of Modernism. The residential buildings in the areas termed superquadras in two great wings off the monumental axis of government and public buildings of Brasília are the most Le Corbusier-derived parts of the city, following quite closely the precepts of the planning of the Ville Radieuse. The high rhetoric of the city – and sometimes a coarseness must be admitted – may be contrasted with the smaller scale of buildings such as a series of houses

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in idyllic subtropical locations around Rio de Janeiro, notably the Casa das Canoas built for himself and completed in 1953. It creates its own site with rocks, pool and tree planting, framing views beyond. A radical reinterpretation of the glazed boxes of Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, it is shaped with flowing curves under a floating concrete canopy, having a second set of practical spaces below the lyrical glazed enclosure. Niemeyer’s long career after Brasília includes a number of buildings in Europe, largely in his period of exile: the Communist Party Headquarters in Paris with its combination of curved office building and submerged dome of the auditorium revisits earlier themes in a particularly successful way. The Constantine University in Algeria is an extensive complex that includes the expressive form of a low swooping curved concrete vault covering the main auditorium. Both in the period of his greatest success and later, Niemeyer’s work has often been subject to criticism: the Swiss designer Max Bill described it as gratuitous form-making with no social relevance, and the same moral tone is adopted by historian Nikolaus Pevsner who pronounced it to be ‘mid-century irresponsibility’ and an example of the ‘revolt from reason’ that he found so disturbing. But Niemeyer, in a text written for the Brazilian journal Módulo (1962), defends the right of the architect to ‘almost unlimited plastic freedom’ that makes ‘an appeal to the imagination, to things that are new and beautiful’. And he continues that pure ‘functionalism’ is not enough, and that the simple orthogonal forms preferred by his detractors are simply the denial of a more expressive response to function that incorporates the creation of atmosphere and effect, not to mention issues of monumentality, that are necessary to architecture. By extending and often contradicting the precepts of Modernist design with his dynamic forms and the creation of exhilarating spaces, Niemeyer may be seen as a liberating force, denying its rationalist and functionalist reductivism, and as a forerunner of the more expressive and undeniably modern form-making that was later to appear.

KEY WORKS – NIEMEYER Brazilian Pavilion, World’s Fair New York, 1939 (with Lúcio Costa) Grande Hotel, Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, 1940 Casa do Baile, Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, 1942 Casino (later Art Gallery), Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, 1942 Church of St Francis, Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, 1943 Hotel Petropolis project, 1950 Pavilion of Nations, Ibirapuera, São Paulo, 1951 Miranda House, Gavea, Rio de Janeiro, 1952 Own House, Canoas, Rio de Janeiro, 1953 Pavilion of the Arts, Ibirapuera, São Paulo, 1954 Museum of Modern Art, Caracas project, 1955 Pavilion of Agriculture and marquise, Ibirapuera, São Paulo, 1955

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Alvorada (Presidential) Palace, Brasília, 1958 Planalto Palace, Brasília, 1960 National Congress, Brasília, 1960 Ministry of Justice, Brasília, 1962–70 Itamaraty Palace, Brasília, 1970 Copan Building, São Paulo, 1953–66 Residential districts (superquadras), Brasília, 1959–66 Supreme Court, Brasília, 1960 Cathedral, Brasília, 1959–70 Ministries, Brasília, 1958–60 University of Constantine, Algeria, 1972 Communist Party Headquarters, Paris, 1967–80 Museum of Contemporary Art, Niteroi, 1991

FURTHER READING Andreas, Paul and Flagge, Ingeborg (eds) Oscar Niemeyer: A Legend of Modernism Basel Birkhauser 2003. Andreoli, Elisabetta and Forty, Adrian (eds) Brazil’s Modern Architecture London Phaidon 2004. Evenson, Norma Two Brazilian Capitals: Architecture and Urbanism in Rio and Brasília New Haven Yale University Press 1973. Goodwin, Philip Brazil Builds New York Museum of Modern Art 1943. Hess, Alan Oscar Niemeyer: Houses New York Rizzoli 2006. Niemeyer, Oscar The Curves of Time London Phaidon 2000. Philippou, Styliane Oscar Niemeyer: Curves of Irreverence New Haven Yale University Press 2008. Stamo Papadaki The Work of Oscar Niemeyer New York Reinhold 1950. Underwood, David Oscar Niemeyer and Brazilian Free-Form Modernism New York Braziller 1994.

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25  Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) The work of the American engineer and inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller represents a critique of the whole culture of architectural Modernism as it has generally been understood and practiced. It serves to illuminate the bias of Modernism towards a particular, highly specific aesthetic, rather than the application of the technology of modern construction which architects from Otto Wagner onwards professed to be undertaking. Fuller made a holistic attempt, more than anyone else in the field, to create and draw out a new role for architecture in the world, doing so in a way more ‘modern’ than the Modernists. In a series of highly original structural systems and design projects he displayed radical thinking, quite literally ‘outside the box’, and from 1927 presented arguments for the embrace and application of technology in a constant state of accelerating change. His model ‘Dymaxion’ House of 1928 had no relationship to the ‘machine aesthetic’ as developed by Walter Gropius or Le Corbusier at that time: instead, it presented a wholly new form of what would be an industrially produced house. Fuller described the evolution of his designs as ‘starting with the universe’, rather than with the idea of a specific form: for him, form was the result of analysis and problem-solving rather than any preconceived approach. The acceptance and application of his ideas was slow, taking place initially outside the architectural profession with functional structures for industry and for the US government, but in the 1960s he influenced a new architectural avant-garde including the work of Archigram and later informed the approach of such architects as Norman Foster in the wider field of technologically inflected architecture. The question of mass housing was the primary concern of architects in the 1920s and beyond: virtually all modern architects were engaged with social housing projects, and many created new prototypes. Buckminster Fuller, untrained as an architect, designed the model Dymaxion House with a central mast, doubling as the service core, from the top of which a hexagonal enclosure formed of lightweight walls and pneumatic floors is hung by wires and includes a fully equipped kitchen and air conditioning. It was, as Fuller declared, to be produced on an assembly line like a

car and would, at a stroke, solve America’s housing crisis. Only one, however, was built: several later modifications of the design including the circular Wichita House, intended to be built on an aircraft assembly line at the rate of 1,000 a week, similarly failed in the objective of their mass production. Fuller was a great rhetorician: language was used and stretched into new meanings – ‘dymaxion’, meaning ‘dynamism plus efficiency’, was applied to evoke the rethinking of processes including the design of the car, world mapping and even the most efficient way to sleep. He also used new words to describe new forms of structures: ‘tensegrity’ denoting ‘tension’ and ‘integrity’ applies to a continuous structural form, the integrity of which lies in the balance of its tension members (Image 25.1). Most significant is the development of the self-supporting semi-spherical ‘geodesic’ dome, which Fuller began in 1951 and which was to become by far his most reproduced structural form. It was not, however, his invention as the form had been originally designed and built by Walther Bauersfeld in the planetarium at Jena in 1926, despite which Fuller was able to patent the design. Its extreme lightness and strength, and the ability it has to cover vast spaces made more traditional solutions seem heavy and far more complex to construct: its stability and the lack of underpinning made it applicable to many scales and contexts. Initially commissioned by the US Marines in 1954, other uses include the Climatron at St Louis and many industrial applications, while the best known is the US national pavilion at the Montréal Expo of 1967. Fuller is central to a tradition, going well beyond the production of buildings, as a technological utopian who sees technology as the primary agent shaping society and culture. Robert Marks in the first comprehensive interpretation of Fuller’s work described how ‘rational’ action in a rational world demands the most efficient overall performance in relation to its input: ‘A Dymaxion structure thus would be one whose performance yielded the greatest possible efficiency in terms of the available technology.’ His concerns and theories feed into current preoccupations with sustainability, and he often referred to the finite resources of what he termed ‘spaceship earth’, but with the optimism that human knowledge and understanding would be applied to avoid global disaster. Writings such as ‘The Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth’ (1968) gave him a key role in the counterculture of the later part of that decade, as well as through the radical thinking on structures that he established. Later in the twentieth century, his urgency and optimism about technology declined with the waning of Modernism’s utopianism, but can be seen to have developed a new relevance in the past decade. The undoubted aim of Fuller’s work is to attempt to address head-on the recurrent question of an architecture for the masses of an urban population, by using the possibilities and advantages of available technology. For Reyner Banham, his projects and position represented the freshness of a figure located outside the conflicted discourses of architectural Modernism, challenging its conventions with a true engagement with technical possibilities. Referring to Fuller, Banham wrote in the conclusion of Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960): ‘The architect who proposes to run with technology … may have to emulate the Futurists and

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Image 25.1  Geodesic structure with Buckminster Fuller, 1960s

discard his whole cultural load, including the professional garments by which he is recognised as an architect. If, on the other hand, he decides not to do this, he may find that a technological culture has decided to go on without him.’ Alan Colquhoun in a review of Banham’s book questioned whether there was any absolute quality about the forms developed by Fuller: rather than being pure technology, they bear an aesthetic and embody a theoretical position. Far from being beyond critique, they are structures which leave no room for interpretation and have no relationship to the human activities they contain. Philip Johnson commented that Fuller was an inventor and a poet rather than an architect, and remarked ironically that if he could solve the housing problem, then architects could be left with more important projects. Fuller’s approach effectively denies any role for architecture as a practice to create signification and to address larger human issues: in starting with the universe and an analysis

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of its problems Fuller started with science rather than architecture. And science, as Colin Rowe argued in Collage City, was an inadequate basis to create an architecture that fulfilled its larger role as the fundamental bearer of meaning.

KEY WORKS – FULLER 4-D multi-deck house project, 1927 Dymaxion House project, 1928 Dymaxion Car prototype, 1933 Dymaxion bathroom unit, 1937 Dymaxion deployment unit, 1941 Wichita House prototype, 1946 Geodesic hangar project, 1951 Union Tank Car Geodesic Dome, Baton Rouge, 1958 Climatron St Louis, 1960 (with Murphy and Mackey) Dome over Manhattan project, 1960 Tensegrity structures, 1962– USA Pavilion, Montreal Expo ’67, 1967 (with Shoji Sadao) Tetrahedron city project, 1968 (with Shoji Sadao)

FURTHER READING Chu, Hsiao-Yun and Trujillo, Roberto New Views on Buckminster Fuller Stanford CA Stanford University Press 2009. Hays, K Michael and Miller, Dana (eds) Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe New Haven Yale University Press 2008. Marks, Robert W The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller Carbondale Southern Illinois University Press 1960. McHale, John R. Buckminster Fuller London Prentice-Hall 1962. Meller James Buckminster Fuller Reader London Jonathan Cape 1970. Zung, Thomas Buckminster Fuller: An Anthology for the New Millennium New York St Martins Press 2001.

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26  Charles and Ray Eames (1907–1978) (1912–1988)

Ray Eames and her husband Charles Eames developed a wide-ranging and inclusive practice in design in post-war America that was, and remains, influential. Their role as key architects rests largely on the house they built for their own occupation in 1949, but is also seen far more widely in the unique quality of their approach to the processes of design. The freshness of their approach, along with their assured use of visual media including film, photography and installation, makes them a later and unambiguously American version of the European avant-garde practices of the 1920s, comparable to the approach of Moholy-Nagy and of the Bauhaus more generally. America embraced modern architecture for a brief period in the years of the Second World War and afterwards: the collective effort required of wartime, and the popular energy that it released, held the promise of a renewed, contemporary life. Reflecting the democratic approach that underpinned the American ‘New Deal’ meant that, as with the Bauhaus in a very different context, design was seen as a universal rather than an elite preoccupation. The Eameses’ inclusive and open approach chimed well with this, their aim described as ‘getting the most of the best to the greatest number of people for the least’, as Charles Eames has quoted in Life magazine in 1950. The practices of design and art fused in their work, developing new meanings in that relationship: and for the Eameses, everything was included in their practice, from the setting of a table for breakfast to a circus performance, as Beatriz Colomina has written. Charles Eames studied architecture at St Louis, set up in private practice and later studied applied art; he taught at Cranbrook Academy of Art and became head of the industrial design department in 1940. Ray Eames studied and practiced as a fine artist in New York, influenced by her teacher Hans Hofmann who introduced her to the European abstraction of Arp, Miro and others, subsequently developing her education at Cranbrook. Their personal and professional partnership began in 1941: it was an extremely close collaboration, lasting until his death.

The designs of Charles Eames, together with Eero Saarinen, for the Museum of Modern Art ‘Organic Design in Home Furnishings’ competition in 1940 were awarded first prize for their work which displayed the new technique of wood moulding, first developed by Alvar Aalto. Eames would further expand the technique of plywood moulded in three-dimensional compound curves with numerous designs including chairs and other furniture, as well as splints and stretchers for the US Navy. The chairs, including a revised Plywood chair design (1946) and Lounge Chair of 1956, represent radically new and highly successful designs in technique and production: from 1946 they were produced and marketed by the Herman Miller company. Designs using cast metal, bent and welded wire and fibreglass-reinforced plastic followed: the plastic chair of 1950 produced in a wide range of colours was one of a number to become a classic. Most are still in production and have become definers of modern design culture. The house Charles and Ray Eames constructed for themselves is in Pacific Palisades, on a steeply sloping site above the ocean in Los Angeles. The Case Study House No. 8, it was part of the programme initiated in 1945 by John Entenza, influential editor of the Arts and Architecture journal, who initially commissioned eight houses including one for himself adjacent to the Eameses’ own. The aim was to utilize wartime technologies: prefabrication, mass production and industrial production in general, to create prototypes of houses that would be open to visitors and published in the journal as examples of successful modern design at a time of housing shortage. The Eames House was to become by far the best known: their aim was for the structure to be constructed entirely from prefabricated standardized parts, but put into a unique configuration. The house’s original design by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen was a raised steel and glass box, dramatically cantilevered over its site, close to Mies van der Rohe in inspiration if not in detail. With the later involvement of Ray Eames, its position was changed to one side of the site with a cooler, more reflective relationship to its meadow location. After the steel had been delivered, the Eameses reconfigured their design, adding to the house’s origin as a ‘kit of parts’: the structure was erected in a single day. The elevation is broken down into a rigidly geometric composition of panels, some brightly coloured, between thin steel columns and cross-bracing painted black, and is reminiscent of a painting by Piet Mondrian. Eucalyptus trees are planted to run along the exposed wall of the house, providing some shading and a material contrast, visually softening the rigidity of the elevation. It is a richly decorated and inhabited house, with artwork, collected objects and examples of their own design filling the interior: Robert Venturi appreciated what he called the reintroduction of ‘Victorian clutter’ rather than the more typical austerity of a Modernist interior. It is a space defined by its occupation – Ray Eames declared after a decade of living there that ‘the structure long ago ceased to exist. I am not aware of it’. For her, the enclosed volume of the house is intended as a neutral background for the signs of inhabitation, the images and objects which were carefully marshalled to inhabit the houses’ spaces (Image 26.1). And

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Image 26.1  Eames House, Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles 1949

it introduced the idea of a house incorporating living and working spaces, integrating rather separating aspects of life, to become a standard practice in the following decades. For Reyner Banham, the house was ‘one of the most persuasive of its generation, it taught the whole world a way of seeing’. For Norman Foster, the house was ‘complete yet open ended – serious but colourful – industrial and homely at the same time … (it) changed the way architects and designers would think and look’. In its aesthetic, it prefigured the approach of technologically inflected architecture as it was to develop in the 1960s and afterwards, with the strategy of the ‘kit of parts’ influential not only on the projects of Cedric Price, but also an important underpinning of the entire approach of architects including Foster and Richard Rogers. The Eames Studio was innovative in terms of working practices: it was described as a ‘laboratory’ for the research and development of product design, graphics, furniture, exhibition and architectural projects, with important work in film and photography. Underlying the Eameses’ approach was an optimism about

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the world and the application of technology: architecture and design were seen as ‘problem solving’ with little reference outside their own sphere of reference – logic rather than intuition and process rather than vision. Their work was based on investigation and invention, rejecting any idea of precedent: it has no trace of historical allusion, but is shaped by the new aesthetic of abstract art in form and in colour, the Modernist (largely European) work that came before them. They represent the American shift in the application of Modernism into corporate culture: their clients included IBM and Polaroid as well as the American government, just as Mies van der Rohe was to build the Seagram in New York, his first glass skyscraper, for a whisky company. The recurrent privileging of Charles Eames’ work in the partnership has taken many forms: often he has been named in publications as the sole designer of work. In their first television interview in 1956, Ray Eames was introduced as ‘the interesting and able woman behind him’ who helps Charles with the design of ‘his’ chairs. But as Joseph Giovannini has argued, the invention of original Modernist forms in their work can rather be seen as originated by Ray with her embrace of modern art, and reflecting the abstract curvilinear forms demonstrated in her own painting, sculpture and later graphic design – and even more the use of colour which is such a key element in their work. Together they established an inclusive and original design practice which was to become a widely adopted model, unifying modern technology and a Modernist aesthetic.

KEY WORKS – EAMES Organic Design chairs, Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, 1940 DCM Plywood dining chair, 1946 Eames House, Pacific Palisades, 1949 Entenza House, Pacific Palisades, Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, 1949 For Modern Living Exhibition, Detroit, 1949 Herman Miller Showroom, Los Angeles, 1949 Plastic Armchair, 1950 ‘Kwikset’ House prototype project, 1951 A Communications Primer film, 1953 Wire mesh chair, 1953 Lounge Chair, 1956 Glimpses of the USA Exhibition, Moscow, 1959 House of Science film, Seattle, 1962 IBM Ovoid Theatre, World’s Fair New York, 1965 Charles Elliot Norton Lectures, Charles Eames, 1971 Powers of Ten film, 1977

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FURTHER READING Albrecht, Donald et al. The Work of Charles and Ray Eames essays by Beatriz Colomina Joseph Giovannini Helene Lipstadt and others New York Harry Abrams 1997. Ince, Catherine and Johnson, Lotte The World of Charles and Ray Eames London Thames & Hudson 2015. Kirkham, Pat Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century Cambridge MA, London MIT Press 1995. Neuhart, John, Neuhart, Marilyn and Eames, Ray Eames Design New York Harry N Abrams 1989. Smithson, Peter and Smithson, Alison ‘Eames Celebration’ Eames Celebration Architectural Design London September 1966, pp. 431–71. Steele, James Eames House: Architecture in Detail Series London Phaidon 1994.

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27  Louis Kahn (1901–1974)

Image 27.1  Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut 1951–3

Louis Kahn, the leading architect to emerge in the United States in the 1950s, expressed and embodied a search for meaning, as well as a new monumentalism, within the practice of modern architecture. Kahn’s engagement with historical models was part of a larger tendency in post-war architecture and represents a great and original achievement as a transformed version of Modernism. He was engaged in a constant search for fundamental principles by which to understand architecture and through which to direct the practice of design, and much of his built work has a dignity and power unique in the architecture of its day, transcending modishness and transient meaning. Kahn studied architecture in Philadelphia in the 1920s with Paul Cret, himself trained at the Beaux-Arts School in Paris, but whose teaching interpreted the French tradition of structural rationalism rather than the correct articulation of the Classical orders. Kahn later came under the influence of European Modernism and Le Corbusier in particular, building public housing in Philadelphia in the 1930s and 1940s, working initially with George Howe, one of the leading American-born exponents of Modernism. Kahn’s first published article, on monumentality, appeared in a volume edited by Paul Zucker in 1944: he defined it as ‘a spiritual quality inherent in a structure which conveys feeling of its eternity’; for other contemporary architects the larger relevant question was the deficiency of modern architecture in creating the meaningful symbolic forms that society needed. As historian Sigfried Giedion was to argue in the same publication, however cleansing the Modernist revolution in architecture had been, architecture had to go beyond the concerns of authentic structure and social relevance in order to rediscover meaning for its next phase of development. Kahn’s work gradually transformed from a proficient interpretation of Modernism into something far more distinctive. At the time he was already in his forties, and influenced by a period at the American Academy in Rome in 1951–2, his work became transformed. A first-hand engagement with the historical monuments of Classical Rome and beyond was clearly a defining and lasting influence: while historical architects admired by Kahn included Palladio, the Neo Classical monumentality of Ledoux and Boullée has evident relevance to his work. A highly influential teacher, Kahn was professor of architecture at Yale School of Architecture from 1947 and from 1955 taught primarily at the University of Pennsylvania. George Howe led the influential Yale School of Architecture from 1950: his own position was for an evolutionary rather than revolutionary modernism, and under his influence Kahn gained his first substantial project, the Yale University Art Gallery (Image 27.1). Often described as an opposing variant to the aesthetic of Mies van der Rohe, the entrance facade consists of enclosing walls, where Mies would have had transparency. The building feels solid in the extreme, the interior surfaces are of unplastered brick and concrete with the shuttering left exposed, the first in an American public building, and has the quality of something heavy and powerful. The uninterrupted spaces of the interior are dominated by the concrete triangular ribs of the ceiling, a seemingly infinite structure derived from Buckminster Fuller. This indicates the

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influence of Kahn’s collaborator Anne Tyng and her interest in the geometry inherent in organic structures, and also emphasizes Kahn’s variation on the ineffable space of Mies. But here can also be seen the introduction of his most important spatial principle, that ‘servant’ spaces, by which is meant staircases, lifts, service ducts and so on, are differentiated from the primary ‘served’ spaces, in this case the galleries, which are geometrically pure volumes. This rigour, reminiscent of Mies, may be understood as the diagrammatic separation of solid and void: for Kahn the meaning of the void is as the space for human activity and growth. The building of the Richards Research Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania has a simple geometrical diagram: six square blocks, housing laboratories on six floors, with service towers standing outside the volume of the blocks. The service towers are emphasized to give a very distinct architectural quality: solid brick towers, taller than the laboratory blocks, make the building look like the abstracted form of a medieval castle or city wall. A more fundamental principle of geometrical ordering is seen in the extremely simple structure of a small project, the bathhouse of the Jewish Community Centre in Trenton, New Jersey. On a Greek cross plan, four square structures, built of concrete blocks without paint or render and with pyramidal wooden roofs, are disposed around an open courtyard. It is a sequence of open volumes without windows or doors: corner piers enclose bathrooms and circulation. Reminiscent of a ruin, it echoes Kahn’s fascination with the extensive Roman remains of Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli and is a timeless form – and perhaps representative of architecture itself as an archetypal structure. The Salk Institute, a biological research laboratory on a site overlooking the ocean in California, was intended by its director Jonas Salk as well as by Kahn to demonstrate the integration of the arts and sciences: its model, as envisaged by Salk, is of the monastery. The plan is presented as a ‘society’ of spaces, each with their particular geometry and structural formation, centred around an open courtyard giving on to views of the sea and sky as a kind of Acropolis. Under each floor is a full-height service floor, a more functional solution than the diagram of the Philadelphia laboratories. Materials are left uncovered and with marks of their construction and assembly: here as elsewhere Kahn’s work represents a primal sense of equilibrium, instead of the dynamic space of Modernism. The most ambitious project built by Kahn was the Parliament in Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh. Constructed over a long period, after civil war, the establishment of Bangladesh and Kahn’s own death, it remains a powerful and masterly building. Its appearance is as a modern and elemental version of a massive castle, with geometrical openings, triangular or circular in shape, cut into the walls. Inside, the public galleries that surround the octagonal form of the central hall are dark and dramatic, with the strong sunlight directed through cuts as well as reflected off the surrounding lake. Kahn here developed the idea of ‘wrapping ruins around buildings’, in other words surrounding its main functional spaces with a separate sequence of walls that act to protect them from the sun and also house service elements. A collection of cylindrical and rectangular forms are clustered around the central volume, and

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the whole surrounded by a watery landscape. His interest in the animating presence of light is used in an extreme form here given the strength of light in South Asia: the forms are elemental and despite a Roman massiveness there is no obvious reference to either Western or Eastern culture. Other substantial buildings by Kahn, including the Phillips Exeter Library and Yale Centre for British Art, represent ‘the almost alchemical integration of mass and space’ as David Brownlee has written. The Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth successfully integrates technical and architectural qualities in the dominant repeated form of an elliptical barrel vault. Daylight enters through long skylights with baffles that give evenly diffused luminosity in its apex; the effect is of a building suffused by light. It has an almost domestic scale, with an orthogonal plan ranging the vaults side by side in irregular formation, and the vault form is repeated as an open garden portico. Words were very important to Kahn. In any study of the language of modern architecture, his aphorisms, almost hypnotic in their resonance, stand alongside Le Corbusier’s frequently reiterated principles as the most powerful of utterances. Adrian Forty quotes Kahn’s ‘design is form-making in order’ as a paradigmatic statement in the language of Modernist discourse: whatever it may specifically mean, it locates this meaning firmly within the language of later Modernism that Kahn did much to define. ‘Architecture is the reaching out for the truth’: however much this may signify pure geometrical form and honesty in techniques of construction, it also chimes with the ‘expressive’ truth of Walter Gropius, that architecture must reflect its own time, and embodies an authentic spirit. Perhaps Kahn’s most inclusive statement is that ‘architecture is the thoughtful making of spaces’: what distinguishes architecture from mere building is that it is shaped by thought. Further, architecture can be understood as the making of meaningful space rather than of expressive form: architecture has a fundamental existential role. As Christian Norberg-Schulz expresses it using the philosophical terminology of Martin Heidegger, architecture is founded on the generalized forms of man’s being-inthe-world. Kahn wrote that ‘architecture comes from the making of a room’, while the plan is a ‘society of rooms’: this is contrary to his earlier embrace of modernist open, undifferentiated space. He suggests also that ‘the street is a room by agreement … its ceiling is the sky’ and that ‘the city became a place of the assembled institutions’, expressing his struggle against the loss of the meaningful centre in the modern city by creating places for mankind to come together. Kahn frequently reiterates that the architect must identify ‘what a building wants to be’, that buildings possess a spirit: this represents a different kind of truth than that embodied in the frequently reiterated phrase ‘form follows function’. Thus at its essence, there is an archetypal fundamental role for architecture, and Kahn’s belief is that architecture can reveal and enrich formations of social relations. Among his constantly reiterated ideas, evocatively embodied in his projects, is on the animating power and presence of light. Using mystical terminology, he wrote of light’s role as ‘the source of all being’: and that just as a building needs light, so light comes into being by illuminating a wall. Thus, just as other modern architects

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emphasize the need for light in shaping their work, Kahn adds a further perception of its meaning. ‘What will be has always been’ is a particularly haunting phrase and a paraphrase of a passage in the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. It appears to deny the possibility of a truly radical modern architecture, but also, as Kahn’s work may demonstrate, that modern architecture is inevitably the product of architecture’s history as a whole: architecture did not start with the material technologies invented in the nineteenth century, but with an archetypal collection of forms and processes. Kahn’s influence on architectural culture has been extensive and profound. Relating to the larger discourse in the period that considered the engagement with history to be an essential path for architecture to take, his work was embedded in historical understanding but did not produce imitations of the past. Traditional materials were often used, but with modern techniques of construction and innovative forms that owed much to the existing traditions of modern architecture. In terms of the revival of history as a direct influence, a primary example is Robert Venturi, who worked with Kahn in 1956. Of greater long-term significance is the re-emergence of weighty masonry buildings as built by architects including Balkrishna Doshi, Mario Botta, Peter Zumthor and many others, some of which have specific sources in Kahn’s work. For many architects he remains a forceful and magnetic presence, shaping and inspiring some of the best current work. His poetic language and powerful buildings continue to resonate: but however universal the context in which these commanding projects are conceived, their principles cannot necessarily be universally applied in a world less lofty in its concerns. The exclusivity of Kahn’s statements of ‘architecture is …’, while providing direction and inspiration, mean that their application may be limited to those aspects of architecture – the art gallery, the research centre, the university building – where architecture is less of an urgent need and less determined by limited resources. The historians Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco dal Co have criticized Kahn for being determined by nostalgia and describe him as ‘typically American (in) expressing the never-satisfied need to equip himself with historical points of reference’. Taking this exacting position, Kahn’s achievement of greatness in the reinvention of architecture may be moderated by a belief that he never fully achieved the potential of his richly modulated historical understanding.

KEY WORKS – KAHN City urbanization projects, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1947–62 Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, 1951–3 Jewish Community Centre Bath House, Trenton, New Jersey, 1954–69 Richards Medical Research Laboratories, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1957–65 Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California, 1959–65

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First Unitarian Church, Rochester, New York, 1959–69 Fisher House, Hatboro, Pennsylvania, 1960 Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India, 1962–74 National Assembly Building of Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 1962–83 Phillips Exeter Academy Library, Exeter, New Hampshire, 1965–72 Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, 1966–72 Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, 1969–74 Korman House, Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, 1971–3

FURTHER READING Brownlee, David B and De Long, David G Louis I Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture New York Rizzoli 1991. Frampton, Kenneth Studies in Tectonic Culture (Chapter 7) Cambridge MA MIT Press 1995. Goldhagen, Sarah Williams Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism New Haven Yale University Press 2001. Kahn, Nathaniel My Architect: A Son’s Journey Film 2003. Lobell, John Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of Louis I Kahn Boston Shambhala 1985. McCarter, Robert Louis I Kahn London Phaidon 2005. Norberg-Schulz, Christian ‘The Message of Louis Kahn’ in Architecture: Meaning and Place New York Rizzoli 1988. Twombly, Robert Louis Kahn: Essential Texts New York Norton 2003.

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28  Aldo Van Eyck (1918–1999)

Image 28.1  Orphanage, Amsterdam 1960

Aldo Van Eyck elaborated a critique of the precepts and practice of Modernism in the years after the Second World War, with an emotional charge and mercurial quality which distinguishes his position from contemporaries also involved in the same process of questioning. But he engaged with this battle from inside, initially as a

member of CIAM and was among those who proclaimed its death at Otterlo in 1959, established the Team Ten meetings that succeeded it at the same time as co-editing Forum, the leading Dutch journal. Educated at ETH Zurich, and from 1947 working in his native Holland, for Van Eyck modern architecture as practiced at the level of rebuilding a city or building a neighbourhood was imagined at a scale too large to actually make an effective improvement to the lives of those who would live there. Further, it seemed that real architectural qualities were being ironed out in what had become an unreflective process. While a passionate supporter of the artistic revolution of Modernism, he articulated a deep disappointment with what the architecture of that movement had achieved. Never before, he said, had such resources and technical possibilities produced such a mediocre result: in 1959 the cover of Forum 6 had a photograph of a jet bomber over the city, to eloquently represent the entirely negative qualities of modern planning. But as an architect he was not simply a radical critic of what had been done. His alternative was imbued with a version of humanism, in the sense of giving significance to human values and including commonplace experiences: if the world can aspire to democracy and to social equality, then architecture could be an instrument of that. He articulated his fundamental principle in a statement at the last CIAM meeting in 1959: Modern architects have been harping on continually on what is different in our time to such an extent that they have lost touch with what is not different, with what is essentially the same. This grave mistake was not made by the poets, painters and sculptors …. On the contrary, they never narrowed down experience … the language architects evolved, however (was) essentially sterile and academic – literally abstract. Along with this, in its urgency for change modern architecture had severed the past from the present: Van Eyck appreciated the historical roots of Western architectural practice but at the same time asserted that Europe could learn from other cultures. His first-hand experience of North Africa and later the Dogon in Mali whom he visited in 1960 mirrors the interest of Picasso in so-called primitive forms. These cultures were experienced directly, however, and in terms not only of their urban form but their ways of inhabitation: Van Eyck was struck by the coherence of the cosmology, village, house and man of the Dogon. In a response to Giedion’s Modernist text Space Time and Architecture he wrote of inhabited rather than abstract space: ‘Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more. For space, in the image of man, is place: and time, in the image of man, is occasion.’ His earliest work as an architect was highly unusual; working for the Amsterdam department of public works from 1947 he designed 734 playgrounds, many a very simple conversion of an unnoticed waste corner into a space both inhabited and valued: through their huge number spread across the city they served cumulatively to transform it. This work itself represents an inversion of the role of the post-war architect, generally concerned with the vast urban scheme: further, it relates to the

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world of the child, something with which CIAM’s doctrine would have no dealings in its extreme simplification of urban processes. His 1962 text ‘When snow falls on cities’ imagined the child’s reappropriation of a city which no longer functioned in its normal (and adult) way. Play could be seen as more generally important; Huizinga’s book Homo Ludens (1938) had defined it as a necessary and universal activity important in culture and society. Van Eyck’s early involvement with COBRA, an international group of artists which led to the formation of the Situationist International, also illuminates his concern with the uncovering of spontaneity and play as an act of resistance. Martin Buber’s philosophical writing on human relations was also read by Van Eyck, who developed Buber’s thinking on community and mutual dialogue in his understanding of the potential of a positive social construct. New building needed to enhance and sustain meaningful human dialogue, beyond those relations dependent on economics and process. His theory of architecture was based on setting up a series of relationships rather than fixed forms, as articulated in the 1962 essay ‘Steps Towards a Configurative Discipline’. In it he describes how the whole and each part could reinforce each other’s identity, as in his paraphrase of Alberti: ‘Make a bunch of places of each house and each city, for a city is a huge house and a house a tiny city.’ With this hierarchy of places, identifying devices needed to be invented: this concreteness should also be seen with the identity of each dwelling expressed by its threshold. The ‘twinphenomena’ of unity and diversity should be seen in every city; chaos, in Van Eyck’s thinking, was as positive as order. The formal theory thus developed came to be expressed as Structuralism, which formulated orthogonal grids that would accommodate variety and enable users to inhabit space with an immediacy denied by the instrumentalist design of the modern movement. This is parallel to the Smithsons’ ideas of urban form from their Golden Lane project onwards and was later developed in the Netherlands in the Van Eyck-influenced work of Herman Herzberger and Piet Blom. Thus, there was the necessity of a legible form, an overall framework, described by him as ‘labyrinthine clarity’. In this can be seen the influence of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss who investigated archetypal forms in vastly different human communities. Van Eyck used the word ‘casbah’, a tightly knit mix of buildings in which a community lived with all its activities mixed, countering the CIAM idea of the zoning of the ‘four functions’ of human life. The playgrounds led to the commission for what was to become his most successful building, the Amsterdam Orphanage (Image 28.1). This was a highly didactic building in its concretization of his structural theories, organized around places of dwelling and identity. Related also to the world of the child, sometimes at child scale and incorporating aspects of his playground designs, it took on an acute role to give parent-less children a sense of identity with the place they lived. Described as a ‘constellation of locations’, it was effectively a building without a facade but conceived in plan, a labyrinth of spaces with shallow domes. Distinct pavilions were configured into a

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discontinuous volume based on a square grid with classical overtones: it had interior streets and places, a house indeed like a city. Among the critics who responded to it soon after its completion in 1960 was Robert Maxwell, praising it in terms of its ‘mental shape the building provides for social intercourse, in the psychological colour it gives to each group situation and activity’. A number of projects followed in the 1960s and later, although none were to match its radicalism in inventing a new form of building. Through the simplest of means, the temporary Sonsbeek Pavilion at Arnhem created a wide variety of spaces for sculpture to be experienced. Concrete-block walls and half-cylinders made for a labyrinthine plan, reminiscent, it was said, of a little city. In Van Eyck’s Church at Loosduinen, The Hague, a tall central route is flanked by low and atmospheric top-lit spaces, with echoes of the Byzantine and Gothic. The Huberthuis, Amsterdam, had a very particular social brief as a temporary dwelling place for single mothers and children in a crisis situation. Its site in the historic centre led to a vertical composition of distinct volumes including an existing nineteenth-century building, at its pivot a spiral staircase that both unified and defined the building’s elements. Like the orphanage it had a system of identifiable places and established a dialectic of open and closed spaces, its distinctive colours added at a late stage of design to distinguish its planar elements. Were his ideas of community and identity so very different from those of the Modernist neighbourhoods being built at the same time, and were the open structures he built and proposed sufficiently distinct from the planning he abhorred? Building for ‘the people’ implies a certain optimism about the nature of human relations. By the 1990s, Koolhaas and others had established a dynamic architectural culture in Holland with very different values, and Van Eyck was seen at best as irrelevant. But while his buildings, including the Amsterdam Orphanage, have not always been successful, his ideas survive in architectural culture and continue to provide a basis, acknowledged or not, for education in many schools. In his later years, he expressed anger at a new generation who disclaimed the possibility of designing with social meaning and as he said in 1991 looking back to Team Ten: ‘We were for functionalism, a more inclusive functionalism.’

KEY WORKS – VAN EYCK Playgrounds, Amsterdam, 1947–78 Orphanage, Amsterdam, 1960 Steps Towards a Configurative Discipline, 1962 Sonsbeek Pavilion, Arnhem, 1966 Church, Loosduinen, The Hague, 1969 Huberthuis, Amsterdam, 1978 ESTEC Building, Noordwijk, 1989

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FURTHER READING Lefaivre, Liane (ed.) Aldo Van Eyck: The Playgrounds and the City Rotterdam NAI 2002. Lefaivre, Liane and Tzonis, Alexander Aldo Van Eyck: Humanist Rebel Rotterdam 010 Publishers 1999. Ligtelijn, Vincent (ed.) Aldo Van Eyck Works Basel Birkhauser 1999. Ligtelijn, Vincent and Strauven, Francis (eds) Aldo van Eyck Writings Amsterdam Sun Publishers 2006. McCarter, Robert Aldo van Eyck New Haven Yale University Press 2015. Strauven, Francis Aldo van Eyck: The Shape of Relativity Amsterdam Architectura and Natura Press 1998. Strauven, Francis Aldo Van Eyck’s Orphanage Rotterdam NAI 1996. Van Eyck, Aldo ‘Architecture of the Dogon’ Forum 7 1967, pp. 30–50. Van Eyck, Aldo ‘Steps Towards a Configurative Discipline’ Forum 3 1962 in Ockman, Joan (ed.) Architecture Culture 1943–1968 New York 1993, pp. 347–60.

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29  Alison and Peter Smithson (1928–1993) (1923–2003)

Image 29.1  The Economist Building, St. James’s, London 1964

The British architects Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson were among the most influential architects of the post–Second World War generation through their strongly expressed position, rather than their designed architectural work. In the 1950s and 1960s, their anti-utopian rethinking of Modernism began an engagement with the ordinary and the every day: they worked with issues towards ideas of human association, the specifics of urban pattern and a new sense of materiality. Along with Aldo Van Eyck, Giancarlo de Carlo and others, they were founders of Team Ten,

the international group of architects consciously aiming to transcend the restricted rationalism of CIAM. ‘That a building’s first duty is to the fabric of which it forms part is we believe, that understanding which separated the third – Team Ten’s – generation of the Modern Movement from the one which preceded it’, wrote the Smithsons in Italian Thoughts. Their projects exemplified the key shift of post-war architectural thought to inhabited rather than abstract space: what Peter Smithson later called the shift to the specific, that is, not a universal design or strategy applied at a large scale, but engaging with the particularities of a brief and site. For the Smithsons, the development of Modernism was vital, but needed to be based on a rejection of any historical basis for design. Over fifty years of their practice, relatively few buildings were built, although most were clear realizations of a didactic position. Their emphasis on the continued articulation of a rigorous standpoint makes for an undoubted strength in an area other than an accomplishment in building, and it is this that ensures their relevance in the discussion of modern architecture in the post-war period, as well as their continued currency. Alison and Peter Smithson were students at Newcastle and later worked in the Schools division of the London County Council. Their own school at Hunstanton, Norfolk, was built as the result of a competition won in 1949. Looking from a distance as if it had taken its formal clue from Mies van der Rohe, a closer view demonstrated that materials were used in a highly controlled way, structure was exposed and along with the undoubted aesthetic of modernity there was an attendant anti-aesthetic: brick, steel and concrete were used in a direct and unaestheticized way. The term ‘New Brutalism’ came to be applied to this approach: their own neologism according to the Smithsons, it became prominent through a 1955 journal article by Reyner Banham. He defines it as ‘memorability as an image … clear exhibition of structure … valuation of materials as found’, but in placing it in relationship to the art of the period, the Art Brut of Dubuffet and those artists who were members of the Independent Group, he identified that their primary reference was not to other architects of their generation. The group included artists Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson, the latter’s photographic work both on the inhabited street and on an existential sense of material being particularly influential on their development. The Smithsons’ Soho House project was referred to as the first expression of ‘the New Brutalism’, designed with bare concrete, unplastered brickwork and bare wood the building was described as ‘a combination of shelter and environment’. The paradigmatic building of Brutalism is, perhaps, an exhibition installation done for the This is Tomorrow exhibition at the London Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956. The Smithsons, collaborating with Henderson and Paolozzi, evolved a project – ‘Patio and Pavilion’. In a deceptively simple strategy, the architects designed the structure, while the artists introduced marks of ‘dwelling’. The artfully primitive, dystopian pavilion, made of salvaged wood with a corrugated plastic roof and a sand floor, was placed in a space clad with reflected aluminium sheets; thus the viewer is conscious of their place in the exhibition, as both subject and object, viewer and viewed. The Smithsons wrote on the ‘New Brutalism’: ‘Brutalism tries to face up to a mass-produced society,

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and drag a rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces which are at work. (It) has been discussed stylistically, whereas its essence is ethical.’ The larger context of their work, consistently expressed in a series of writings and projects, was focused on the making of new forms for the city as a critique of the inadequate urban rebuilding currently taking place. They aimed to achieve far more in creating successful places in which to live and work, responsive to the authentic conditions of modern life. The Smithsons’ key terms expressed the possibilities of their approach: Association, by which was meant different degrees of human relationship between the scale of the house, the street, the district and town as a whole; Identity: that every place should be specific and located, relating to the human needs of its inhabitants; Cluster: their proposed urban form which would create, in a random form, a new urban landscape; and Fix: urban identifying points which might be certain buildings either modern or historical, or the dominant form of an urban motorway. Embodied in this language was the key problem of urban re-identification, of creating new urban situations which would endow the modern city with meaning. Articles including The Built World: Urban Re-identification and Cluster City: A New Shape for the Community were published in the 1950s and 1960s and later collected in somewhat altered form as a book, Ordinariness and Light (1970). An alternative was evolved to the dominant urban discourse of urbanism of CIAM and the more immediate consequence of the poverty of contemporary building. The Smithsons’ larger arena was their participation in CIAM and their critique of its precepts, leading to the evolution of Team Ten. At the 1953 CIAM IX meeting at Aix-enProvence they presented an alternative to CIAM’s abstract categories of Dwelling, Work, Recreation and Transport with a new hierarchy of meaning: House, Street, District and City. In terms of building form, their later expressed idea of ‘conglomerate ordering’ gave a value to such early projects as the Golden Lane and Sheffield University competition entries. Its qualities are not only anti-geometrical, but make an entirely new spatial model, based on elements distinct and whole in themselves, not reduced and ‘designed’ into combination. Their new strategy was thus against the prevailing idea, both traditional and Modernist, of a building as a perfected object. In other words, the work is shaped by the sense of a potential architecture without conventional rhetorical gesture, where form is anti-formal, where its programme is inclusive. In a sense it is phenomenological, that it makes no claims to design in the conventional sense, but instead becomes the almost unnoticed context and counterpart to human life which takes place within it. Peter Salter has described their work as having a ‘reticence and quietness that can accommodate the different wishes and desires of its inhabitants’. It looks at the ordinary, the overlooked: by reifying the ordinary it is inevitably transformed but the relationship is that of the familiar. Their entry for the Golden Lane Housing competition presented an urban morphology distinctly different to the CIAM model of development: linear blocks incorporated decks, ‘streets in the air’, and as an alternative to the tabula rasa of Modernist planning it stood within the existing fabric of the city. The urbanism of their entry for Hauptstadt, at a much larger scale, for central Berlin introduced a second deck level

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above the existing street grid and in an irregular pattern provided alternative spaces and sites for new buildings. After the development of a number of other urban pattern projects, the building for the Economist in St James’s in central London, with three differentiated blocks and a plaza on a tight city site, was contextual and apparently picturesque in its plan (Image 29.1: See also drawing on cover). Their most successful built scheme, it was both a fragment of a deck pattern and an alternative to the kind of commercial architecture expressed in the gleaming materiality of a perfected glass and steel frame. Its material quality was decidedly not Brutalist, but the facing material of roach-bed limestone is figured and brings in a primitive aspect, subverting the issues of a substantial building in the moneyed heart of the city. Later buildings for Bath University are a realization of ideas of pattern and context, and within these projects a very particular and rigorous process of design detailing is developed. The paradox, however, that emerged is that Brutalism and its new morphology, rather than communicating its values and quality with an existential immediacy, has repeatedly been seen as alienating. Such buildings as their own London project at Robin Hood Gardens and the South Bank Cultural Centre (1968) built by the Greater London Council, which takes its formal parti from the Smithsons’ Hauptstadt design, as well as a distinctive materiality of shuttered concrete, were seen negatively since their completion. But perhaps the extraordinary promise of the work in its ideological form was rarely achieved by the Smithsons themselves. More recently, it has again, however, become of interest: as the social idealism of an earlier period has reappeared, the Smithsons’ work has come to regain its earlier significance. In the 1990s a younger generation including a Swiss group of architects, notably Herzog and De Meuron, began to engage with related concerns. This paralleled a British school, including practices such as those of Caruso St John, Sergison Bates and Peter Salter, who have developed their fertile concepts of materiality and the reading of site into a body of architectural projects that exceed the success of the Smithsons’ own built work.

KEY WORKS – SMITHSONS High School, Hunstanton, Norfolk, 1949–54 Coventry Cathedral competition entry, 1951 Golden Lane Estate competition entry, 1952 Sheffield University competition entry, 1953 Patio and Pavilion, This is Tomorrow Exhibition, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1956 The House of the Future, Ideal Home Exhibition, 1956 Sugden House, Watford, 1956 Berlin Hauptstadt competition entry, 1957 The Economist Building, St James’s, London, 1964 Garden Building, St Hilda’s College, Oxford, 1968

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Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar, East London, 1972 University of Bath, Arts Building, 1982 University of Bath, School of Architecture and Building Engineering, 1988

FURTHER READING Architectural Association Architecture Is Not Made with the Brain: The Labour of Alison and Peter Smithson London Architectural Association 2005. Banham, Reyner ‘The New Brutalism’ Architectural Review December 1955, pp. 355–61. Banham, Reyner The New Brutalism, Ethic or Aesthetic? London Architectural Press 1966. Goldhagen, S W ‘Freedom’s Domiciles: Three Projects by Alison and Peter Smithson’ in Goldhagen, S W and Legault, R (eds) Anxious Modernisms Cambridge MA MIT Press 2000, pp. 75–95. Higgott, Andrew Mediating Modernism Ch 4 London Routledge 2007. Robbins, David (ed.) The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty Cambridge MA MIT Press 1990. Smithson, Alison and Smithson, Peter Italian Thoughts Stockholm Royal Academy of Fine Arts 1993. Smithson, Alison and Smithson, Peter Ordinariness and Light London Faber 1970. Smithson, Alison and Smithson, Peter The Charged Void: Architecture New York Monacelli 2001. Smithson, Alison and Smithson, Peter The Charged Void: Urbanism New York Monacelli 2005. Webster, Helena (ed.) Modernism without Rhetoric London Academy 1997.

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30  Kenzo Tange (1913–2005) Kenzo Tange was the first Japanese modern architect to gain a worldwide reputation, and while he resisted the notion of representing a specifically Japanese Modernism, he can be seen as developing its principles within the particular cultural conditions of Japan. Tange participated in CIAM and in Team Ten, his innovations in architecture and urbanism advanced its contemporary international culture, and he was the first Japanese architect to build abroad. He was far from being the first from Japan to engage with Modernism: before the Second World War, two students had attended the Bauhaus School, while Kunio Maekawa and Junzo Sakakura, both later to develop substantial careers based in Tokyo, had worked in Paris with Le Corbusier. It is the engagement, at first or second hand, with Le Corbusier’s polemic and practice that marked, and continued to influence, Tange’s work, who after studying in Tokyo worked in the office of Maekawa. For him, Le Corbusier was the only modern Western architect adopting a truly revolutionary approach, and he developed a new monumentality within a Modernist language derived from Le Corbusier’s later work. Tange’s relationship to Japanese traditions of building was very different from that of such European architects as Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius: the timber construction of the Katsura Villa in Kyoto, for example, was seen by them as a refined version of lightweight modular construction prefiguring the Modernist frame. Instead, in his essay on Katsura, Tange describes its architecture as expressive and historically rooted in the ancient Jomon culture, in effect a conscious primitivism adopted by its sophisticated seventeenth-century builders. His first major project reflects this: he won the competition in 1949 to build the memorial complex at the epicentre of the atomic explosion that destroyed Hiroshima. Given its heavy cultural load, Tange designed a building that reflected both Japanese tradition and the values of Western Modernism, in other words the language of modernity rather than the extreme nationalism which had prevailed in the former Japanese regime. The site of

the complex, incorporating several public functions in two blocks flanking the focus of the memorial museum itself, is a grand axis, reminiscent of those of Classical Europe. The building of the memorial museum, a single floor raised high on piloti, is simultaneously reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s design principles and practice, and the similar raised form of the ancient Imperial storehouse Shoso-in at Nara. Distinct from the raw béton brut of Le Corbusier, the museum’s wall surfaces are in immaculately finished board-marked concrete. At the same time, Tange was working on a house for himself using a similar frame structure raised off the ground, but here using wood framing and sliding paper screens in an even closer modern interpretation of Japanese traditions. Concrete has long been particularly deeply rooted in Japanese architectural culture, especially after the 1923 earthquake which had seen many concrete buildings survive. But the material is often used in a way that differs from that elsewhere, for example in its careful finish, seen in an extreme form in the work of Tadao Ando. More widely, rather than as a neutral medium which demands no particular form, its use often resembles timber construction. The Kagawa Prefectural office building at Takamatsu was built in concrete but differently from the models suggested by Western architects: instead, with the number of columns and beams beyond what was structurally necessary, it synthesizes tradition and modernity with its echoes of monumental Japanese building in wood. The Kurashiki Town Hall has massive concrete columns similar to the tree trunklike timber of temple building, while the over-scaled and over-provided horizontal concrete beams of its construction also resemble timber techniques, albeit with an echo of Perret’s approach. The high entrance hall of the building moves Tange into a more expressive and less nationally derived application of concrete as its roughly shuttered walls with recessed slit openings make the building a potent parallel to Corbusian work of the period and perhaps equal to it in achievement. The Roman Catholic Cathedral in Tokyo has an equally powerful interior, its cruciform plan with dramatic shafts of light coming through tall slit windows animating the figured concrete (Image 30.1). The parallel is once again with Le Corbusier – it is reminiscent of Ronchamp or La Tourette – while the hyperbolic paraboloids of the exterior, clad in stainless steel, mirror Le Corbusier’s very different project for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Expo. Tange’s internationally best-known project represents a largely untypical aspect of his work: the two enclosed stadia built for the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo use suspension structures in a way then at the cutting edge to create massive enclosed interior spaces without internal supports. In the larger stadium tensile cables are anchored by two giant pillars to describe arching slopes: the effect of the interior is to resemble a vast upturned boat, with the crossing form at either end of its exterior reminiscent of the top of the ancient Ise Shrine. It is a tour-de-force, bolder and more lyrical than earlier Olympic arenas, and emphasized to its vast international

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Image 30.1  St. Mary's Cathedral, Tokyo 1964

audience that Japanese culture could create its own inventive and relevant modern architecture. As a participant in CIAM, Tange had presented his winning entry for Hiroshima at the 1951 Hoddesdon conference – its theme was ‘the urban core’– also presenting

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his Tokyo government building and Kagawa building at Otterlo in 1959. Tange began to teach at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and with his students first in Boston, then in Tokyo, generated a new discourse of urban design based on the creation of megastructures, shaped by Team Ten ideas, that allowed for modification and that were open-ended in form. The city was interpreted as an organic, growing, changing structure – and one in which old city forms were seen as irrelevant and archaic. An axis built across Tokyo Bay would enable the development of the city in a linear fashion, and the new Tokyo – a city of ten million – would be based on a system of highways that created the city’s overall form and ensured rapid communication, with more temporary elements of inhabited buildings that would subtend from their structure. This, along with other over-scaled schemes by other architects including Kiyonoru Kikutake and Kisho Kurokawa introduced the idea of Metabolism, a specifically Japanese movement that seems to overturn the expectation of subtlety and reticence that Japanese architecture had been expected to have. Peter Smithson, whose earlier work on continuous urban form prefigured and inflected the project, asserted that ‘it was above all centralised, absolutist, authoritarian’, and questioned its very basis of being an open system, however bold and visionary it might seem. Nevertheless, there remains the undoubted influence of this much published scheme on later urban proposals in the 1960s, not least those of Archigram. At the scale of the individual building, Tange developed the idea of expandable urban forms with the Yamanashi Broadcasting and Press Centre, Kofu. A number of functions are integrated into the open spatial structure, centred on sixteen reinforced concrete cores, a grid capable of further extension and embodying the idea of pod and structure seen in larger Metabolist schemes. The sense of the separation of servicing towers and accommodation relates clearly to Louis Kahn: and the overall image of the building is of flexibility and appearing deliberately unfinished was something new. But it is really as Reyner Banham has described a ‘metaphor’ of adaptability, as any subsequent alteration of its form could not actually be achieved. Tange’s interest was, finally, in developing Modernist practice in architecture, and he has sometimes been described as being opportunistic in his engagement with the local and archaic traditions of his home country. His primary interest was and remained the work of Le Corbusier, and he was one of the few of his generation to mourn the passing of CIAM. His work was original and distinctive, and like contemporary European and American architects it engaged with historical reference and local inflection while also displaying a new primitivism in his use of concrete construction. Like the very different work of Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil, his work exemplifies a third phase of modern architecture, no longer dictated by Europe or the United States, and inflected by the specifics of site and tradition. His uniquely worldwide role also made possible the international involvement of many later Japanese architects, including Arata Isozaki, Toyo Ito, Fumihiko Maki, Tadao Ando, SANAA and Kengo Kuma, whose later architectural work and thought have been seen as of the greatest importance in world architectural culture.

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KEY WORKS – TANGE Own house, Tokyo, 1953 Peace Memorial, Hiroshima, 1955 Kagawa Prefectural office, 1958 Sogetsu Kaikan, Aoyama, Tokyo, 1958 Plan for Boston Harbour, 1959 Kurashiki City Hall, 1960 Plan for Tokyo, 1960 Rikkyo University Library, Ikebukuro, Tokyo, 1960 Stadia, National Olympic Gymnasium, Tokyo, 1964 St. Mary’s Cathedral, Tokyo, 1964 Plan for rebuilding of Skopje, Macedonia, 1966 Yamanashi Press and Broadcasting Centre, Kofu, 1966 Shizuoka Press and Broadcasting Tower, Tokyo, 1967 Master plan and Theme Pavilion, Expo ’70, Osaka, 1970 Minneapolis Art Museum, 1975 Central Area, Abuja, Nigeria, 1982

FURTHER READING Boyd, Robin Kenzo Tange New York George Braziller 1962. Kuan, Seng and Lippit, Yukio (eds) Kenzo Tange: Architecture for the World Zurich Lars Muller 2012. Kultermann, Udo (ed.) Kenzo Tange Architecture and Urban Design London Pall Mall 1970. Lin, Zhongjie Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement London Routledge 2010. Tange, Kenzo Katsura: Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture: photos Yasuhiro Ishimoto New Haven Yale University Press 1972. Tokoyawa, Saikaku (ed.) Tange by Tange Tokyo Toto 2015.

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31  Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992) Lina Bo Bardi, an Italian-born architect who developed her career in Brazil, is one of the most significant woman architects of the twentieth century. As Zaha Hadid was to do later, she produced work of great strength and individuality in the context of the general marginalization of women architects, and her success can be seen as distinct from that of male colleagues in that her work is not part of a general school or practice but stands very much as an original achievement. It did not necessarily fit a conventional understanding of what a woman architect might do that she worked so often in reinforced concrete and used it in ways both powerful and lyrical. Despite her Italian origins and education, her work can be seen as relating closely to a perceptive consciousness of Brazilian culture and her architecture as part of the Brazilian tradition of Modernism. For an Italian who had passed through the Second World War and its aftermath, Brazil was, as she wrote, ‘an unimaginable country, where everything was possible … Rio was not in ruins’. Educated as an architect in Rome, she worked in Milan, both in the office of the architect Gio Ponti and later as a journalist on architectural magazines including Domus which she briefly edited. Arriving in Brazil in 1946 with her husband, the critic and gallerist Pietro Bardi, she immediately became part of a group which advanced a modern cultural agenda in the vast commercial city of São Paulo. Her opportunities as an architect were limited, however, and her first significant built project was for a glass house for the couple’s own occupation in the then rural suburb of Morumbi. Here, the idea of a transparent house first expressed by Mies van der Rohe was taken in a different direction: raised on high piloti, it has a more complex section, merging with its sloping site. But significantly, rather than achieving the perfected form and detail of Mies, it is a house that emphasizes the relationships within and outside it – its eclectic gathering of objects and activities within, and its openness to the exuberant vegetation around it. In her essay on the house, she spoke of its intended close relationship to nature, that it provided protection but was ‘open to everything that is poetic and ethical, even the wildest of storms’.

The inventiveness of the house has a close counterpart in the expressive, softedged and often coloured drawings she did for this and other projects: life takes place around the buildings represented, exuberant nature appears, anecdotal details inhabit the sheets of illustrations. The critic Rowan Moore who has championed her qualities as a uncommon kind of architect sums up Bo Bardi’s achievement as that she ‘knew that buildings act not alone, but reciprocally with the people and things around them, and that they have to be open to chance, time and life’. The contemporary work of Oscar Niemeyer provided a great point of reference, but his projects’ lack of relation to a real social context made Bo Bardi criticize them as ‘suffocated by forms, by compositions, by the evocation of monumental European squares’. Her approach, while apparently on the margins of architecture, was radical in its attempt to forge a new approach to the making of architectural form, one that has parallels with the contemporary European work of the group Team Ten, in particular that of Alison and Peter Smithson in Britain and Aldo Van Eyck in Holland. The Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci was an influence on Bo Bardi: he defined the role of the modern intellectual as articulating the experience and aspiration of the masses through the language of culture. Her work, generated within a cultural elite, was intended as an expression of a more popular and inclusive way of thinking. But it is also clear that her architectural language in terms of form was derived from the Modernism that she had brought with her from Milan, and which had formed the potent architectural culture of Brazil from the late 1930s: one of its originators, Lucío Costa, was an architect consistently admired by her. Bo Bardi’s best-known building, the Museum of Art (MASP) in the centre of São Paulo, had a long history starting as an unlikely idea in 1957, and after various vicissitudes built in the period 1966 to 1968. As the greatest art collection in Latin America, MASP is of great significance, as is its siting at the crossing of two of the city’s major routes: the centre of the site was to be preserved as an element of its conditions as a ‘belvedere’, an open space for viewing. This led the architect to create a great void, with clear spans of 70 m, at the heart of the building: the volume of the main gallery space is suspended 8 m above, while other facilities including a further gallery space, theatre and library were housed in floors below. The reinforced concrete beams necessary to achieve this were pushing the boundaries of what was possible, especially using locally developed technologies, but Bo Bardi’s primary aim was, rather, to achieve a new kind of building for a new kind of museum: one that would be open, popular and devoid of cultural exclusivity. She devised a unique way of displaying the museum’s valuable collection of paintings: each was placed on a clear glass panel inserted into a concrete block base, rather than hung on a wall surface: paintings were thus seen initially without captions, as three-dimensional objects in space. The effect created of a forest of free-standing paintings is a Modernist reappraisal of paintings as forms rather than imagery: the raw concrete, inside and out, of the building creates a new and contemporary kind of monumentality for an important cultural building. SESC (Social Service for Commerce) is a cultural organization existing throughout Brazil, established for ordinary workers and their families and incorporating

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participation in the widest range of cultural and sporting activities within their own communities. The SESC building designed by Bo Bardi in the São Paulo suburb of Pompeia is unique in being an extraordinary piece of architecture, which was completed in 1986. Her starting point was that the existing factory on the site would not be demolished, partly because of its interest as an early concrete structure, but more significantly on the grounds that it was already informally occupied by the local people which the new centre was intended to serve. They played football, made barbecues and in general passed time in its derelict spaces. Bo Bardi transformed the buildings into an informal assemblage of places, with painting studios, pottery kilns, theatre spaces and much else, and with a sinuous stretch of water, shared hearths and places to gather added in. SESC Pompeia embraces what she termed ‘poor architecture’, not impoverished, but using smaller and humbler means: low walls of concrete blocks are inserted, pebbles placed to define water channels,

Image 31.1  SESC Pompeia, São Paulo 1977–1986

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seating of untreated timber is installed. The more spectacular and audacious part of the project, however, are the tower structures she built, consciously primitive, distinctively ugly in rough reinforced concrete, window spaces apparently randomly ripped out of the walls (Image 31.1). Two towers house a swimming pool, gymnasium and dance studios, linked by the criss-crossing forms of bridges: below them, an urban boardwalk provides space for sunbathing. Bo Bardi worked on the site as the complex was being built, discussing her intentions and spontaneously incorporating ideas from users as well as her builders. This highly inclusive building goes far further than other modern architecture of the period in its positive engagement with its community and its accommodation of an un-hierarchical range of activities from boxing to painting, from theatre to picnics, that coexist in her architecture. The idea of architecture as the creation of perfected object has no place here: instead, her architectural propositions are changed by circumstances and the passing of time. Earlier, Bo Bardi had lived and worked in Salvador in the north-east of Brazil, where she realized several projects largely in the old colonial heart of the city, working with the urban grain and building fabric of what was there. Modest interventions in such buildings as the Barroquinha and Ladeira Misericordia in Pelhourinho gave a distinct and impoverished community enhancement rather than ‘improvement’ of their highly distinctive culture, and these smaller projects provide the context of what she was to achieve here in the tough urban environment of São Paulo. Rowan Moore describes Bo Bardi’s buildings as ‘devices that make possible new experiences, or intensify existing ones’: in other words, buildings that enable activities to take place rather than simply creating abstract space. Her working with what was there in the context of a site has a resemblance to the Smithsons’ ideas of the ‘as found’, but takes much further the idea of architecture that engages with the unclassifiable variety of collective life. As she wrote in 1986, ‘Until man enters the building and takes possession of the space in a human adventure which develops over time, architecture does not exist.’ Bo Bardi’s great achievement in the design of radical forms can be seen in the design of MASP and of the SESC Pompeia towers, but her creation of a more porous and inclusive architecture corresponds well with the approach of many architects of an early twenty-first-century generation.

KEY WORKS – BO BARDI Art Museum, São Paulo, 1947 Glass house, Morumbi, São Paulo, 1951 Museum on the seashore project, 1951 Museum of Art (MASP), São Paulo, 1957–68 Solar de Unhão (Museum of Popular Art), Salvador, 1959 SESC Pompeia, São Paulo, 1977–86 Espirito Santo Church, Uberlandia, 1982

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Modern Art Museum, Ibirapuera, São Paulo, 1982 Barroquinha Cultural Centre, Salvador, 1986 Salvador Pelourinho reconstruction, 1986 (project) Misericordia Ladeira reconstruction, Pelourinho, Salvador, 1987 Pierre Verger Foundation, Salvador, 1989

FURTHER READING Bo Bardi, Lina São Paulo Art Museum Lisbon Editorial Blau 1997. Bo Bardi, Lina Stones Against Diamonds Architecture Words 12 London Architectural Association 2012. Carvalho Ferraz, Marcelo (ed.) Lina Bo Bardi Milan Charta 1993. De Almeida Lima, Zeuler R Lina Bo Bardi New Haven Yale University Press 2013. Moore, Rowan Why We Build London Picador 2012. Oliveira, Olivia de Lina Bo Bardi: Subtle Substances Barcelona Gustavo Gili 2006. Pereira, Juliano Aparecido Lina Bo Bardi Uberlandia Edufu 2008 (Portuguese). Veikos, Cathrine Lina Bo Bardi: The Theory of Architectural Practice London Routledge 2014.

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32  Carlo Scarpa (1906–1978)

Image 32.1  Brion Vega Tomb, San Vito d'Altivole, Treviso 1969–78

Internationally prominent only late in his career, Carlo Scarpa was the architect who most clearly represents the development of an individual aesthetic tendency in the later period of Modernism. For him, architecture was to be composed in the manner of a painting or sculpture, creating visual effects that connected, like an artwork, with memory and history and served to re-establish its deeper meaning and connection with cultural values. His work emerged from the Veneto region of Italy and was often built there; the heavy weight of history and tradition that uniquely forms Venice was an intrinsic part of his approach. As such, he formed a truly regionalist interpretation of modern architecture, but Scarpa’s particular version of its aesthetic was also

rooted in an alternative history of Modernism, especially through reference to the Secessionist work of the Viennese Otto Wagner and Josef Hoffmann. Like other more prominent names, most obviously Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, Scarpa did not study at an architectural school, but unlike them was resented by an architectural establishment in Italy who were resistant to include him. The post-war years in the country were occupied with re-establishing a modern tradition that engaged with history and the specifics of culture, and such architects as Ernesto Rogers in Milan argued for historical context as the starting point of design, while Bruno Zevi’s influential publications including Towards an Organic Architecture (1945) developed an alternative course for modern architecture. Scarpa remained unengaged with such intellectual debates, however much their concerns might overlap with his. Studying art at the Venice Academy in the 1920s, Scarpa later became a teacher of drawing there: early work included the design of glass pieces in the Venetian craft tradition and exhibition designs including installations at the Venice Biennale. After the Second World War his work developed a more personally inflected aesthetic and alongside the influence of the Vienna Secession, a new materiality emerged. Frank Lloyd Wright became Scarpa’s acknowledged inspiration, and compositional elements, in particular the cast concrete blocks integrating decoration and structure used in Wright’s Californian work such as the Millard House, came to be interpreted in his work. Concrete, either pre-cast pieces or made in situ, is frequently used alongside marble or mahogany, as if it too were a valuable material; each material is given its own role and is never neutral. Scarpa developed a process of design using the materials of modern architecture but in a direct, pre-modern way, in continual contact with his craftsmen: working with materials was primary, while his intricate, repetitive processes of drawing to reveal form can be seen as a by-product of the craft process. As historian Joseph Rykwert has written, ‘He was one of the very few architects of the western world who for whom the link between the designer’s conception and the craftsman’s executing hand was indissoluble.’ The very particular and precious way of working adopted by Scarpa was applied to small projects, often interiors, sometimes highly successful such as the Olivetti showroom at San Marco which, transforming the scale of a single room, incorporates elements of rough and smooth concrete, marble, blown glass, mahogany and bronze. Each project has an intensity of detailing and the articulation of surfaces that puts it close to the gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, of the early twentieth century. But its formal language is always abstract, rooted in the painting of Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian: Scarpa may be seen to have applied the composition of each flat architectonic element from Mondrian’s formal language, devoid of subjectivity and figuration, every one with its own careful placing and relationship. Scarpa’s developing work had an acknowledged source in the work of Alvar Aalto, with the particular and instinctive use of disparate materials used in the form of montage, while the delight he had in the immaculate composition of form and detail in Japanese artefacts corresponds to the refinement in his own design process.

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Scarpa’s work to refine and re-create the display of works of art is the most consistent theme throughout his career: the restoration of the Accademia Gallery in Venice was the first of a series of museum projects. They display a distinct approach to the restoration of historic buildings, allowing the existing fabric to coexist with the new work which the architect has introduced. A process of purification of the building’s structure is added to by details such as handrails and floor surfaces, but most interesting is the design of displays of the art itself which removed distracting details such as elaborate frames, reduced the number of works displayed and gave each its own eloquent place in a rigorously designed sequence in which human scale was the predominant principle. In the later and most accomplished project of the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, the unconfined spaces and fewer pieces sparely displayed direct the visitor on a precisely determined route in order to make the most of their appreciation of each work of art. As Orietta Lanzarini has written, ‘It is clear that the work of art is the protagonist in Scarpa’s museums, but at the same time it is subservient to his will, being a concrete starting point for his projects.’ The revival of museum design which this approach initiated remains a significant model for the display of art: that less can be more, and that a gallery space may not be a simple container but serve to enhance the works of art on show, became a new orthodoxy. At the Castelvecchio, the existing building was stripped and subject to the removal of particular elements to reveal its history: new work is separated and clearly distinguished from the original structure, in particular by the means of revealing joints and slots. Here, the joint, as Kenneth Frampton has expounded, can be seen as Scarpa’s most significant architectonic element, embodying the whole design of a building through its detail. As he observes, ‘The revelation of engineered form is repeatedly assumed by Scarpa as a syntactical key from which all other junctions should take their cue, whether the joint is a hinge, a pivot, a pedestal, or affixed bracket.’ At a simpler gallery design at Passagno, white walls hinged by glazed corners create a space in which its plaster casts of neoclassical figures by Canova hover, defined by bright light and placed on minimal supports. At the Querini Stampalia Foundation, the ground floor of Scarpa’s reconstruction includes channels that divert the water that periodically floods the building. And as elsewhere, the use of carefully designed elements in a layered composition transforms a modest space into one full of complexity and telling detail. The Brion Vega Tomb is the most substantial free-standing building designed by Scarpa and often seen as his master work. Consisting of a series of related elements in a garden setting, including a chapel, a place for meditation, lawns and a pool, it can be interpreted as an existential garden that represents the journey through life, a garden of memory, and utilizes the natural resources of water, light and shadow with understated architectural materiality (Image 32.1). Raised as an earthwork, its symbolism is given voice by the geometry that shapes it, of the shallow overhanging canopy over the twin tombs and striking interlocking circles representing unity: its language of render and reinforced concrete leavened only by highly coloured strips of coloured tile is as timeless, universal and solemn as Le Corbusier’s late work at La Tourette.

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Along with Louis Kahn and the later work of Le Corbusier, Scarpa engaged with the high seriousness of architecture at a time when such a role was disappearing, and he may be interpreted as sharing the pessimism of Adolf Loos on architecture’s role for changing the world for the better. Alongside others in Italian culture, Scarpa helped to move architecture away from the socially led mission it had been undertaking in the 1950s and 1960s by taking an alternative path: Franco Albini, working in Genoa, was among others who, like him, initiated a new and more subtle way of working with the preservation and renovation of historic buildings. In particular, Scarpa initiated a new spatial sense in the display of art, while his work has served to remind architects of the poetic potential of their practice. Most convincingly among his Italian contemporaries, Scarpa initiated a new historical sensibility, demonstrating that history could be a living tradition that might enrich its processes. As he wrote, ‘A critic might discover in my work the intentions I have always had: an enormous desire to be inside tradition.’ Architecture need not be the result of a rational process and could be a personal expression: it could be concerned with an aesthetic that was derived neither from Kahn nor Mies, in not deriving its validity from structural truth. Instead, narrative and metaphor could form architecture in a way that presented a new role for a distinctly modern practice and this has led Scarpa to be seen as a leading figure in the re-evaluation of architecture’s recent history.

KEY WORKS – SCARPA Accademia Gallery, Venice, 1945–59 Palazzo Abbatellis, Palermo, 1954 Canova Cast Gallery, Possagno, Treviso, 1955–7 Veritti House, Udine, Italy, 1955–61 Castelvecchio Museum, Verona, 1956–64 Olivetti Showroom, Piazza S. Marco, Venice, 1957–8 Gavina Showroom, Bologna, 1961–3 Querini-Stampalia Foundation, Venice, 1961–3 Brion Vega Tomb, San Vito d’Altivole, Treviso, 1969–78 Banca Popolare, Verona, 1973–8

FURTHER READING Crippa, Maria Antoinetta Carlo Scarpa: Theory Design Projects, foreword Joseph Rykwert Cambridge MA MIT Press 1986. Dal Co, Francesco Carlo Scarpa The Complete Works New York Rizzoli 1984. Frampton, Kenneth ‘Carlo Scarpa and the Adoration of the Joint’ in Studies in Tectonic Culture Cambridge MA MIT Press 1995.

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Lanzarini, Orietta ‘Scarpa: “If Art Is Education, the Museum Must Be the School”’ Architectural Review January 2016, pp. 47–54. McCarter, Robert (ed.) Carlo Scarpa London Phaidon 2013. Olsberg, Nicholas et al. Carlo Scarpa, Architect: Intervening with History Canadian Centre for Architecture, New York Monacelli Press 1999. Schultz, Anne-Catrin Carlo Scarpa: Layers Stuttgart Axel Menges 2007.

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33  James Stirling (1924–1992) James Stirling worked in Britain in partnership with James Gowan from 1956 to 1963 and from 1971 with Michael Wilford who took over the practice after his death. Along with other architects including Aldo Van Eyck and Alison and Peter Smithson he led a shift from the universalist approach of Modernist architecture to the development of an alternative engaged with the specific brief and context: and unlike his contemporaries, his accomplishment was primarily seen in buildings rather than in the elaboration of theory. He was thus among the first architects of his generation to question the great promise of emancipation that had been presented by Modernism. Earlier architects and theorists had seen history as a contaminant, one example being Walter Gropius’s rejection of a history course at the Bauhaus. But an alternative and increasingly compelling view would hold that architecture has an inevitable relationship to its own history. The historians of Modernism have made clear their interpretation of its various origins, for example in the elemental forms of Neo-Classicism or the material strictures of the Arts and Crafts movement. For Stirling history, including Modernism’s own history, was to be engaged with, but used as a trace or inflection rather than the direct and often ironic references that were seen in the work of later architects of Post Modernism. Colin Rowe, the author of an influential series of essays later published as The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa (1976) and Collage City (1978), was a key influence on Stirling as his teacher at the University of Liverpool where he studied from 1946. Rowe’s insistence that Modernism was essentially a language, rather than representing something absolute and beyond questions of style, motivates Stirling’s departure from its norms and practices. The idea of ‘mannerism’ in Modernism evolved by Rowe is the ultimate source of Stirling’s approach, for if Rowe could translate Le Corbusier’s Purism as stylistic vocabulary, so too that vocabulary could be enriched by a wider range of references – nineteenth-century engineering structures, vernacular forms and perhaps most centrally, a consciousness of the Classical tradition which had remained part of the Liverpool School’s curriculum. According to critic Robert Maxwell, Rowe’s influence on Stirling’s development set up a long-lasting

predilection for setting up a series of formal rules and then contradicting them. What was in any case fundamental was his interest in architectural form. At a time when architectural practice was related, at least in theory, to a rational approach, with no tolerance for wilful expression or the cultivation of aesthetic judgement, exactly this came to be seen in the vitality and expressiveness of Stirling’s mature work. After working in the Modernist London practice of Lyons Israel Ellis, Stirling’s first built project, in partnership with James Gowan, was a small private housing development in Ham, west London. Its expression of architectural character and consciousness of materiality was continued in other work and culminated in the Leicester University Engineering Faculty, designed in 1959 (Image 33.1). This work became the locus of a new consciousness of form that was clearly not the result of functional analysis, but rather an exuberant architectural exercise: it owed something to nineteenth-century structures and to Russian Constructivism as well as a playful wit, seen for example in the exposed spiral stair for latecomers to the lecture theatre. What it did not do was follow Modernist formal conventions: it used brick as a cladding material on a concrete structure, and a standard, rather than specially designed, patent glazing for its extensive glass surfaces. The building forms a composition or montage of volumes described by Stirling as ‘solidified space’ that separated the low workshop block, four levels of research laboratories, an office tower and most particularly, the cantilevered lecture halls. As with his later buildings, however, Leicester can be seen as the dynamic and diverse making of form, rather than being the creation of extraordinary spaces in which to experiment or study. With this building, wrongly seen as solely his work, Stirling came to represent a new relationship of British architecture to the rest of the world: he became the first modern British architect to gain a global reputation, as the attention of world architects turned away from the cultures of France, Italy or Germany. It was followed by two university buildings, designed without Gowan, which used the same formal language, the History Faculty at Cambridge and the Florey Building at Oxford. The style translated into these buildings, while not engineering schools, emphasized engineering as an aesthetic and also formed one source of the later development of British High-Tech architecture. The means of representation of his work, important to Stirling’s self-advancement, was itself innovative: published work came to be invariably seen first in axonometrics then isometrics, emphasizing the building’s reification as three-dimensional form. Stirling came to establish an architecture conscious of its role as iconography at the same time being highly eclectic rather than homogenous in its use of sources. As it developed, much of his work formed a commentary on the formal languages of Modernism as well as specific references gleaned from site and context. As he wrote in 1986, architecturally simple solutions could only subvert the richness and variety of life: his work of the 1980s, interpreted against Stirling’s wish as Post Modern, seemed to many as literally an embarrassment of riches. And one interpretation of this later work is to see it as an abrupt and contradictory shift in its principles as well as aesthetic, rather than as a perhaps startling development of Stirling’s approach.

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Image 33.1  Leicester University Engineering School 1959–63 (with James Gowan)

The presence of Leon Krier as an assistant in his office from 1968 had reinforced a sense of the historical, and Krier introduced Aldo Rossi’s reading of urban form as an element of the complex montage he would undertake. A series of competition entries exploring these themes culminated in success with the Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, in 1977 (Image 0.3). As well as its diagram of a collage of elements, reminiscent of Rowe, there coexists the importance of the section on a steeply sloping site. The gallery is a building Modernist its lack of a specific facade and is dominated by ramps and a promenade architecturale: the office building at the top of the site is effectively a Corbusian composition, while the building’s materials include steel and glass, as in the glass lift cage and the Aalto-esque profile of the glazed wall of the entrance hall. But the greatest visual prominence goes to the thin stone cladding of the concrete structure, undermining its dominant classical appearance with such ironies as the apparently

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accidental gaps for car park vents. Its central feature is a circular courtyard, in its openness a subversion of the dome at the centre of the Neo Classical Altes Museum in Berlin by Schinkel, one origin of its complex and paradoxical plan. Stirling transformed this precedent into a composition that combined a memory – the open ruin of the central pantheon – with modernity. For Emilio Ambasz, it is a ‘magical domain … a frame for ineffable rituals’. He refers to Stirling as an all-embracing lover of architecture, a Romantic within the modern tradition. Nevertheless, the building presents form rather than space: the gallery spaces of the Staatsgalerie present neither modernity nor especially inspiring spaces for art. Other projects following Stuttgart include the Sackler Gallery at Harvard, the Social Science Centre, Berlin, and the Performing Arts Centre at Cornell. In Berlin and Cornell highly specific historical references mediate what are otherwise contrasting plans and sections. The Social Science Centre presents a paradox between the plan – a collage of autonomous forms derived from a castle keep, a Greek stoa and a basilica – and a uniformly striped elevation. At Cornell, this dramatically sited complex of culture is given specifically Italian Renaissance traces. In the later years of Stirling’s life his rhetoric appears more muted while also showing a distaste for the conventional mores of the time. The Braun Factory at Melsungen and the small bookshop on the Venice Biennale site are both memorable and evocative, reconciling brief and formal reference. Stirling’s engagement with historical forms clearly may be interpreted as a new historicism and a vivid example of the Post Modern turn in architecture of the 1980s. Alternatively, as Robert Maxwell has said, it may be working towards a modern architecture richer in associations free of the burden of utopian aims and expressing a double allegiance. Claire Zimmerman observes that he ‘ultimately bypassed utopia in favour of construction’ at the same time as including Modernist traces in his work. Francesco dal Co and Manfredo Tafuri praised Stirling, writing in 1976, that ‘the echoes of memory are utilised as ready-made objects. Between the word and the object no given significance or pre-existent relationship intervenes … not by chance do his works reveal compositional procedures comparable to formalist techniques; a continuous play of distortions and rotations, technological outrages, and an uninhibited montage of diverse materials culminate in complex forms’. Their judgement of Stirling expresses the historical significance of an architect whose reputation was eclipsed for many years but has recently become the subject of close attention once again. More than any of his immediate generation he was an architect of formal inventiveness and wit: most of all, Stirling served as a reminder that architecture was, after all, an art and the architect an individual artist.

KEY WORKS – STIRLING Ham Common Flats, Ham Common, 1958 (with James Gowan) Leicester University Engineering School, 1959–63 (with James Gowan) History Faculty, Cambridge University, 1968

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Florey Building, Queen’s College, Oxford, 1971 Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, 1977–84 Social Science Centre, Berlin, 1979–87 Performing Arts Centre, Cornell, 1983–7 Bookshop, Venice Biennale, 1991 Braun Factory, Melsungen, Germany, 1992 (with Walter Nageli) No 1 Poultry, London, 1997 (completed Michael Wilford)

FURTHER READING Arnell, P and Bickford, T (eds) James Stirling: Buildings and Projects London Architectural Press 1984. Baker, Geoffrey The Architecture of James Stirling and His Partners Farnham Ashgate 2011. Berman, Alan (ed.) Jim Stirling and the Red Trilogy: Three Radical Buildings London Frances Lincoln 2010. Girouard, Mark Big Jim: The Life and Work of James Stirling London Chatto and Windus 1998. Lawrence, Amanda Reeser James Stirling: Revisionary Modernist New Haven Yale University Press 2012. Maxwell, Robert James Stirling Michael Wilford Basel Birkhauser 1998. Scalbert, Irenee ‘Cerebral Functionalism: The Design of Leicester Engineering Building’ Archis 5 1994, pp. 70–80. Stirling, James Writings on Architecture Milan Skira 1998. Vidler, Anthony James Frazer Stirling Notes from the Archive New Haven Yale University Press 2010. Zimmerman, Claire ‘James Stirling Reassembled’ AA Files 56 2007, pp. 30–41.

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34 Archigram

Image 34.1  Plug-In City Peter Cook 1964–6; university node

A group of architects who worked together in London in the 1960s, Archigram revolutionized architectural culture in Britain and beyond, doing so without constructing a single building. Archigram’s core membership of six consisted of Peter Cook (1936–), Ron Herron (1930–94), David Greene (1937–), Warren Chalk (1927–88), Michael Webb (1937–) and Dennis Crompton (1935–). They effectively created a new model of architectural practice, based on designing projects, making publications, exhibiting and teaching. A composite of architecture and telegram, ‘Archigram’ started with the publication of that name rather than as an architectural practice and represents a collective effort to express ideas through publication, in a late emulation of the avant-garde groups of the early decades of the century. The journal’s positive reception was worldwide and unprecedented, at a time when the existing practices of

modern architecture had become institutionalized. Their influence in architecture can be clearly traced in the following decades with the development, particularly in Great Britain, of the approach that came to be termed High Tech as well as their broader influence in emancipating culture and education. Three of the group – Cook, Greene and Webb – had recently been students at the Architectural Association School or Regent Street Polytechnic while Herron, Chalk and Crompton were working in the London County Council architects’ department on public projects. Their collective view, expressed in the bold projects and often explosive texts they created, was that modern architecture had become just an established way of working that no longer reflected the technological imperatives, let alone social changes, of the early 1960s. Current architectural practice was, for them, based and watered down from the forms of Modernism established in the 1920s and early 1930s, and had no relation to truly modern technologies, when the race to conquer space was in full flood, and when technologically advanced products were universally available. One of the characteristics of the period was that technology was seen entirely positively and could be applied to solve problems, including the recurrent Modernist themes of rebuilding the city and redesigning houses. Their new concepts and ideas were intended to ‘put noise into the system’, as Warren Chalk put it, rather than being projects worked out in the conventional sense. The idea was paramount – a tower of living capsules, a mega-city that could move or a house you could carry on your back like a modern nomad – and was possible to realize, but like science fiction lived more in the world of the imagination. The powerful imagery of Archigram was as important as its content: there really had been nothing like it in the architectural world before and their graphics owed something to comics and something to pop art. At the time, this was a shocking contrast to the way that architectural projects were supposed to be presented, with radical graphics, layout and colour. David Greene wrote in the first issue of Archigram: ‘A new generation of architecture must arise – with forms and spaces which seems to reject the precepts of “Modern” yet in fact retains those precepts. We have chosen to bypass the decaying Bauhaus image which is an insult to functionalism. You can roll out steel – any length. You can blow up a balloon – any size. You can mould plastic – any shape.’ Their enthusiasm, stimulated by the projects created outside architecture by engineers Buckminster Fuller and Frei Otto, helped to create a practical basis for new ways of building, and Fuller’s invention of lightweight tectonic forms provides a fundamental element of their approach. Peter Cook wrote on expendability in Archigram 3, Expendability – Towards a Throwaway Architecture: ‘It will not be until such things as housing, amenity place and work place become recognised as consumer products’ that can be bought “off the peg”’ that change would be achieved. Or, as he succinctly put it later, ‘For us, the pre-packaged frozen lunch is more important than Palladio.’ His position here rejects architectural history as a point of reference, but its emphasis on mass consumerism also denies the radical egalitarian politics of the period as well as the reinvention of social forms that Fuller had envisaged.

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Early projects include individual buildings based on provisional open form such as Michael Webb’s ‘Sin Centre’ and urban megastructures in which the capsule – based on the recently created space capsule – would provide the basis for a new minimal living unit, as in Warren Chalk’s ‘Capsule Homes’ project. Peter Cook’s design for ‘Plug-in City’ became the group’s most reproduced image and variations of the project, first published in Archigram 4, which also formed part of later issues (Image 34.1). It presented the jagged and irregular futuristic form of buildings in an extendable megastructure, with an emphasis on movement and connection. But unlike, say, Sant’Elia’s Citta Nuova it genuinely was Futuristic as it embodied the principle of dynamic change, with each of its parts, slotted into a vast serviced structure, subject to both removal and replacement. As Cook describes, ‘You can see the habitations plugged into the giant network-structure … sometimes rising up into uneven towers of housing … it can continuously build and rebuild itself … adjoining (is) a stop on the high speed monorail.’ Thus Cook expressed Archigram’s concerns with expendability and the appropriation of new technologies in envisaging renewed architecture and cities. The impact of the historian and critic Reyner Banham, a close associate and sometime apologist of the group, was paramount. In the conclusion of Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), he described the contemporary architect’s primary task as engaging with technology, even if it meant discarding ‘the professional garments by which he is recognised as an architect’: Archigram’s presence and practice became a conspicuous example of exactly that in the following decade. Their first joint project to be realized was the ‘Living City’ exhibition, opened in London in 1963: its intention was to present the total environment of the city to include both the fleeting experience and fundamental structure, the subjective with the rational. ‘In a living city all are important: the triviality of lighting a cigarette, or the hard fact of moving two million commuters a day. In fact they are equal – as facets of the shared experience of the city. When it is raining in Oxford Street the architecture is no more important than the rain …’ The ‘living’ city was one experienced rather than built, and the originality of the structure of the exhibition itself was clearly of less importance than the change in perceptions that it was intended to create. This text serves to underline that the Situationist International movement, led by Guy Debord, is a precedent and undoubted influence on Archigram’s work. Itself a critique of the Modernist practices that re-created and in the process destroyed the life of existing cities, the Situationist position was to re-engage with individual experience, rather than the grand plan created by figures of authority, whether architects or politicians. Corresponding with Archigram’s work, Constant’s ‘New Babylon’ (begun 1959), the critical Situationist urban-architectural project, was in the form of an open-ended and flexible city structure, representing the intention to enhance human life rather than control it. Shaped by its radical libertarian position, its informing political charge was largely absent from Archigram or other subsequent architectural projects that may resemble it. A shift in Archigram’s approach came with Michael Webb’s ‘Cushicle’ project of 1966, which brings the scale of the capsule down to that of the human body: the

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emphasis remains on servicing, as it includes food and a water supply as well as projection television in its inflatable structure, to be carried by its user. At the same time, such projects as Ron Herron’s ‘Oasis’ and the later ‘Instant City’ were based on the idea that rather than constructing a whole new megastructure, the existing city would be ‘tuned up’ by small scale, provisional and changeable interventions into the existing urban fabric, and lightweight structures, inflatables and projection screens would empower and enliven its inhabitants. Here, the city was seen as a potential open field for the expansion of human experience and potential, in paradoxical contrast to the Archigram architects’ evident love for the dynamic and technologically shaped quality of the architecture they created. For Colin Rowe, Archigram was making ‘townscape in a space-suit’ in ‘picturesque images of the future’. Equally, these new forms can be seen as devoid of any of the political impetus extensively seen elsewhere in the 1960s. But the practice’s instant popularity, chiming with the optimism of the earlier years of the decade, served to shift the understanding of architecture from being the making of objects to being closer to a servicing device. Taking the definition of architecture as a technologically formed practice fulfilling a purpose in relation to the human being inhabiting it, a new architecture that was intended to be lightweight, provisional and temporary began to be built. The early work of Richard Rogers and Norman Foster and of the Farrell and Grimshaw practice provide examples, but the primary illustration is the Pompidou Centre in Paris (Image 0.4). Won in competition in 1972 by Rogers with Renzo Piano, its representation of a provisional and open-framed building, programmed by its users, had striking parallels to certain Archigram work, an impetus not fully carried out in its building. The group’s contribution to Modernism’s development can, however, be seen far more widely. Its architects effected change through shaping architectural culture with their iconoclasm and intense involvement with education and debate. Through their emphasis on the production of projects and publications, they created the context for other alternative forms of Modernism to emerge, which turned away from their technological imperative to a more complex cultural role for architecture.

KEY WORKS – ARCHIGRAM Archigram magazine, 1961–70 Sin Centre, London, 1962 (Michael Webb) ‘Living City’ exhibition, London, 1963 Capsule Homes, 1964 (Warren Chalk) ‘Plug-in City’ 1964–6 (Peter Cook) Walking City, 1964 (Ron Herron) Living Pod, 1965 (David Greene) Cushicle, 1967 (Michael Webb) Oasis, 1968 (Ron Herron)

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Suitaloon, 1968 (Michael Webb) Instant City, 1969 (Peter Cook, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton) Monte Carlo Entertainments Centre project, 1970

FURTHER READING Cook, Peter et al. (eds) Archigram London Studio Vista 1972: second edn Basel Birkhauser 1991. Crompton, Dennis (ed.) A Guide to Archigram 1961–74 London Academy Editions 1994 with essays by Pascal Schöning and Herbert Lachmayer. Higgott, Andrew Mediating Modernism Ch 5 London Routledge 2007. Sadler, Simon Archigram: Architecture without Architecture Cambridge MA MIT Press 2005. Steiner, Hadas Beyond Archigram: The Structure of Circulation New York Routledge 2009.

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35  Cedric Price (1934–2003)

Image 35.1  Fun Palace, London, project 1961: view from helicopter

Cedric Price became a significant voice in architecture in the 1960s in Britain and beyond, parallel to the work of the more exuberant Archigram group. Building little, he adopted a very distinct position consistently maintained throughout his practice, which was to see architecture primarily as fulfilling an enabling function. According to Price, modern life had little need for an architecture of permanence or of monuments, and it should rather be seen as providing enclosure and facilitating activities. Two projects in particular, the Fun Palace and Potteries Thinkbelt, went a long way towards dismissing most of the key concerns of architects both historically and in the

modern world, only leaving behind and emphasizing its role for the public good. His inventive and original thinking relates to the contemporary philosophy and practice of Buckminster Fuller, and Price can also be interpreted as returning to the socially committed anti-art position of such architects of the 1920s as Hannes Meyer, as well as having roots in the idea of individual freedom in the Enlightenment philosophy of J. S. Mill. His influence on shaping the development of so-called High Tech architecture is unmistakable, but so too is his contribution to an architectural standpoint of minimal intervention, of doing little. Price studied architecture at Cambridge from 1952 where a key influence was the socialism of John Penn, then continued at the Architectural Association School. The dominant figure there was Peter Smithson whose strictures on materiality and place shaped Price’s earliest work, but his exposure, while there, to the work of Buckminster Fuller did far more to develop his position. Rather than the heavy structures of later Modernism, Price’s interest was in the light and technologically determined forms designed by Fuller. He set up his own office in 1960: the ‘Fun Palace’ project was a collaboration with the theatre director Joan Littlewood for a site in deprived east London: it was to house cultural activities in the broadest sense, described by Littlewood as a ‘laboratory of fun’ and a ‘university of the streets’. Price’s design was revolutionary in that, rather than each activity being given a particular space, such as dance, film teaching, jazz sessions and scientific play, the building could be constantly changed: in fact, no configuration was likely to be used twice. Users were to control what was effectively a kit of parts: flooring panels, projection screens, lighting baffles, nylon-tensioned canopies, cubes with panel infill, which were all disposed within the huge open frame structure, without floors, serviced by a crane gantry (image 35.1). In Price’s description, ‘The whole complex, in both the activity it enables and the resultant structure it provides, is in effect a short-term toy to enable people, for once, to use a building with the same degree of meaningful personal immediacy that they are forced normally to reserve for a limited range of traditional pleasures.’ This connected architectural intervention inextricably to the activities it contained and attempted to make architecture on a radically different basis. It was to let users take control of a building as a natural extension to the direct processes of life. While in some ways related to (later) Archigram projects, Price’s work is simultaneously more engaged with the solution of immediate problems and less committed to them taking architectural shape. The frame itself as well as the building elements inserted into it were given a defined lifespan; and what makes it different to projects by other architects that followed it is the lack of interest in the detailed design quality of these components. Certain of the drawings of the Fun Palace are nevertheless recognizably architectural imagery of a designed, if constantly changeable, building: with his second well-known project, there is no such imagery but the communication and articulation of a highly original concept. At a time when a number of significant new universities were being built in Britain, the ‘Potteries Thinkbelt’ project provided the absolute antithesis of the established kind of modern university building which gave

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monumental expression to their buildings. Most radically, it proposed a university without a building, with a projection of 20,000 science and technology students dispersed over a series of sites spaced over north Staffordshire, the centre of the declining pottery industry, and connected by existing railways. Faculty teaching areas were to be temporary in nature and located in mobile units on the tracks themselves, while housing provision would integrate students, university workers and local residents. Along with the implicit agenda for a truly ‘open’ university, Price’s strategy is for an immediately responsive and indeterminate architecture, utilizing architectural means even though the design of forms does not predominate. The emphasis on processes of thought and analysis rather than the design of objects as the core of the architect’s work is also new, and relates to the imperative of technology, in the spirit of Reyner Banham’s warning in his 1960 book Theory and Design in the First Machine Age: that the architect needed to develop radically new ways of working in order not to be left behind as technology progressed. In this, as in other projects, Price made clear his commitment to technologically relevant solutions but there is little of the delight in technology to be seen elsewhere in the 1960s. For Price, technical means are available and can enhance and support: when they are outmoded they should be disposed of, to give way to other things, this optimism in the possibilities of technology and its immense potential being very much of its time. Consistent with his emphasis on adaptable, expendable architecture, and as befits the general cultural iconoclasm of the 1960s, he consistently stood against the conservation of buildings, at least those which had outlived their function: famously, asked what should be done with the venerable Gothic minster at York, he proposed flattening it. In 1971, he was able to build a reduced version of the Fun Palace concept, the Inter-Action Centre in London, and in 1999 agreed with its demolition, since, he argued, something better could replace it. The Generator, a project begun in 1976, emulated the Fun Palace’s capacity to respond to needs in mechanical terms by the use of information technology in building form that Price had first engaged with as early as 1961. Artificial intelligence became the generator of a responsive artefact, learning responses that are remembered: the constituent parts of a building could be altered by both wishes of the user and the learnt response of the central intelligence that would anticipate change. Such a responsive environmental model, an intelligent environment, prefigured form-making that has become a major preoccupation in the twenty-first century. But another key aspect of his approach was the concept of architectural redundancy: whatever the question, architecture may not be the answer, so designing and building may be an irrelevant activity. As Price wrote in 1966, ‘The architect/ planner must exercise all his expertise, on being asked for artefactual conditioning, on the relevance of or necessity for doing anything at all. The best technical advice may be that rather than build a house your client should leave his wife …’ The idea of doing less, of minimal intervention, stands very far away from the form-making that preoccupies almost all architects and is a salutary observation that few have heeded.

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Equally provocative was the idea of ‘Non-Plan’, published in a 1969 text, against the then firmly established systems of planning and city control when the often irrelevant intentions of the professionals were empowered against the organic transformational processes of cities and their inhabitants. One of the most original contributors to architectural culture in the later twentieth century, Price articulated questions which are still current five decades later. Buildings that deny the significance of architectural tradition and established practice, buildings that are responsive to change and buildings that genuinely fulfil people’s needs, all continue to be urgent goals. Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s competition winning entry for the Pompidou Centre designed in 1972 has clear roots in the Fun Palace project (Image 0.4). As it was built, the expendable ‘kit of parts’ and the ultimate flexibility of structure are scarcely visible, and instead it serves to monumentalize the cultural institutions it contains. But the theoretically flexible open frame structure, along with an aesthetic emphasis on its building components, became the tropes of the school of High Tech architecture in the differing practices of Rogers, Norman Foster, Michael Hopkins and others. Expressing an idealism and optimism born out of rigorous analysis, Price’s arguments against architecture were compelling to some and as Rem Koolhaas has observed, ‘Price cut a huge swath through the thicket of architectural illusions that architecture still maintained in the fifties and sixties. Ironically his scorched earth became the fertile fields for the still ongoing Anglo Saxon triumph: Archigram, Rogers, Foster … (but) the beast of architecture revived and walked away as if nothing had happened.’ What had started as being the opposite of architecture was to become reduced to a different kind of form-making, and the passion for individual freedom would remain a largely unfulfilled ideal. But ultimately Price’s acute and particular vision of an architecture of indeterminacy and enabling remains an incomplete account of its role. Others continue to engage, using a different kind of optimism, with the meaningful making of forms that give more than functional fulfilment and practice architecture in a way not too distant from its own roots and traditions.

KEY WORKS – PRICE Aviary, London Zoo, 1961 (with Earl of Snowdon and Frank Newby) Fun Palace project, London, 1961 Potteries Thinkbelt project, Staffordshire, 1964 Atom project, 1966 Non-Plan, 1969 (with Peter Hall and Paul Barker) Inter-Action Centre, Kentish Town, London, 1971 Generator, Florida, USA, 1976–81 South Bank project, London, 1984 Magnet project, London, 1997

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FURTHER READING Hardingham, Samantha Cedric Price Works 1952–2003 London Architectural Association 2016. Herdt, Tanja The City and the Architecture of Change: The Work and Radical Visions of Cedric Price Zürich Lars Müller 2015. Hughes, Jonathan and Sadler, Simon (eds) Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism Oxford Architectural Press 2000. Mathews, Stanley From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price London Black Dog Publishing 2007. Obrist, Hans Ulrich (ed.) Re: CP Basel Birkhauser 2003, introduction Rem Koolhaas. Price, Cedric Works II London Architectural Association 1984: 2nd edn Cedric Price: The Square Book Chichester John Wiley 2003.

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36  Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (1925–) (1931–)

Image 36.1  Vanna Venturi House, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia 1964

The work of the partnership of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown has been a constant and at times controversial presence in American architecture since the late 1960s. While their architectural and urbanistic practice has continued with projects completed in the twenty-first century, it is with two books that their particular significance lies: Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture published in 1966 by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the joint-authored 1972 Learning

from Las Vegas. Complexity and Contradiction, published in the same year as Aldo Rossi’s The Idea of the City, repudiated, as Rossi’s book also did, contemporary modern architecture’s reliance on a very restricted range of issues and forms and a consequent lack of meaning. Both books valued historical form: Venturi’s stay at the American Academy in Rome in 1954–6, in which he followed his Philadelphia colleague, Louis Kahn, had made him familiar with the value and quality of historical buildings, although his engagement with the Mannerist and Baroque set him apart from Rossi or indeed Kahn. However, the differences were more fundamental: Venturi’s constructions of historical reference as a series of images distinguished it from Rossi’s pursuit of meaningful form through his concept of type. Complexity and Contradiction’s underlying idea was to reject the Modernist principle that the design of a building followed a singular logic which formed its aesthetic and thus its meaning. Instead, Venturi promotes ‘elements that are hybrid rather than “pure” … messy vitality over obvious unity’. He asserts the necessity of a practice of architecture that is inclusive rather than simply rigorous – more is not less – and that ‘a valid architecture evokes many levels of meaning and combinations of focus’. His suggestive prose is shaped largely through considering a series of single images of buildings demonstrating architects’ ambiguous and complex use of Classical forms, Michelangelo, Borromini and Lutyens among them, while also delighting in the ordinary and anonymous, such as the final image of a typical Main Street, USA. Venturi’s argument is explicitly to act as a corrective to the reductivism of modern practice, and not to randomly promote the personal or subjective, still less the historical as an alternative model. He appreciates as well as criticizes Mies van der Rohe and acknowledges the complexities of Le Corbusier’s work, arguing that a mature modern architecture should be able to progress beyond purity and simplification. Nevertheless, one aspect of the book’s legacy is that its thought was often reduced to the composition of discordant Classically derived facades. Venturi himself wrote in 1977, in the introduction to the second edition of the book, that he found himself often agreeing with his critics: the work of Michael Graves and a whole generation of Post-Modernist architects scarcely follows its insights. But there is a contradiction inherent in the book itself in the inclusion of a final selection of projects by Venturi and Scott Brown, and it may stretch credulity to see them as illustrations of his argument. The Vanna Venturi House (Image 36.1) and the Philadelphia Guild House are paradigmatic works included here: the former is a literal illustration of a Mannerist use of Classical elements in a contemporary house, while the latter is a knowing exercise in the ordinary American vernacular, its distinct qualities not immediately obvious. Books, however, may transcend their content and argument and become responsible for a cultural shift. Venturi’s text was interpreted as liberating architecture from the restraints of Modernism and, particularly pertinent to the American context, allowed for an engagement with capitalism that refused the modern movement’s commitment to social progress. Students of the time recall being warned off the book, but it acted as a provocation, forcing others to define their position. Far beyond its engagement with historical reference the arguments of Complexity and Contradiction opened up

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a Post-Modern condition, in that architects were no longer obliged to make statements within the discourse of Modernism whose assumptions it discredited. The importance of its opening phrase is profound: ‘I like complexity and contradiction’: it is the personal opinion of an architect thinking about practice, not a pure theorist or historian. It is an empirical argument, anti-purist and relativist, and with a disarming and perhaps Anglo-Saxon repudiation of consistent theory being used to underpin design proposals. Venturi has no compunction about using history ahistorically, as a pool of examples to be taken out of their context. What has undoubtedly resonated is a series of aphorisms, repeated over the past decades: ‘less is not more, less is a bore’, ‘main street is almost all right’, and from the later book, approval of ‘the ugly and the ordinary’ and ‘the decorated shed’, which all became signifiers of an architectural attitude rooted in the unexceptional but confident in its revisionism. Learning from Las Vegas, with Scott Brown and Steven Izenour as co-authors, relates to Complexity and Contradiction in its examination of the overlooked qualities of the American vernacular, the advertising signs, the commercial strip. It also considers a historical correlative in parallels with nineteenth-century eclecticism and even presents the Gothic cathedral facade as a billboard. The book produces a critical analysis of Modernist thought: the irony of East Coast academics documenting manifestations of the most extreme and vulgar popular culture in America is tempered by the realization that it is in dialectic opposition to all prevailing principles of urbanism. It may be said that for architects, learning from Las Vegas produces the most radical of urban polemics. Signs, as Kevin Lynch’s earlier urban studies demonstrated, form the essential core of modern city experience: their relationship to the world is paradigmatic, urban forms not simply responding to the car but to be experienced from it. And which American experiences their city from strolling down the axial avenues of an earlier city model? The authors study the example of the Strip in Las Vegas and how it is defined by its signs not its buildings: the casinos, motels and wedding chapels are undistinguished sheds behind the signs – ‘it is anti-spatial … an architecture of communication over space’. The highway represents shared civic space, behind it lie the separate private commercial domains. The vernacular model, like the Golden Nugget Casino of the ‘decorated shed’, an unremarkable building dwarfed by its neon sign, produces architecture more successful, literally more popular than the production of modern architects could ever be. The headquarters of the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia may stand for a group of Venturi Scott Brown’s urban buildings that constitute the ‘decorated shed’. In plan and section the building is an almost undifferentiated box cut into by a corner entrance: the facades are clad in tightly geometric patterns of dazzling coloured panels emphasizing the linearity of the box and strip windows, and with the literal symbolism of the (then current) computer punch card. With such work, a scenographic presence in the street or on the strip, their practice represents the role of a critical observer; the Basco Store in Philadelphia, with huge red lettering lined in front of the store shed, is a version of the Pop Art of Claes Oldenburg.

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Venturi Scott Brown have also completed a number of more complex buildings in the very different context of the American university campus, among them the Allen Memorial Art Museum, respectful of its context, two volumes undistinguished in plan but characterized by a masonry pattern, with echoes of Edwin Lutyens as well as Modernist traces. Later projects include the Gordon Wu Hall at Princeton: by this time they were being spoken of as America’s most influential architects. Here they made reference to the surrounding buildings with differentiated facades, notably the entrance elevation with a massive sign of abstracted Renaissance motifs. Galleries at Seattle, La Jolla and the London National Gallery extension are the most substantial later projects. In London, they continued a Neo Classical portico with colliding pilasters, this facade clearly to be read as a separate skin over a partly glazed box; behind, a row of top-lit galleries is defined by Tuscan columns and reached by a grand staircase alluding to Bernini’s Scala Regia in the Vatican. In a 1978 article, Alan Colquhoun described a presentation by Venturi of their work as ‘celebrating … the death of architecture’, as undistinguished structures incongruously decorated – jokes for an exclusive group of architects with an apparent disdain for clients. The buildings, he said, were also not consistent with the strictures of Complexity and Contradiction, but rather were varying forms of the ‘decorated shed’ with an aspiration to a kind of vernacular symbolism. Their attempt at a knowing vernacular was perhaps doomed to fail – after all, their carefully designed buildings could never simply be part of the mass culture on which they comment. But the form of the decorated shed, a functional and ordinary structure on to which a familiar and representational surface is applied, does provide a different architectural model. Modern architecture, according to this argument, is a pragmatic affair embedded in a global capitalism: there is no point in going beyond that into architecture’s traditional role of embodying cultural meaning in any profound sense. Instead, there is the physicality of the building itself, not necessarily fluent architecturally, and architecture, its autonomy lost, can no longer aspire to the utopian aspiration to fulfil a better world. The world is simply what is, in the most inclusive sense: in this the work of Venturi and Scott Brown connects with the aspiration to the every day of Alison and Peter Smithson, but also looks forward to the post-humanist world of Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas.

KEY WORKS – VENTURI AND SCOTT BROWN Guild House, Philadelphia, 1964 Vanna Venturi House, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, 1964 Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1966 Learning from Las Vegas, 1972 (with Steven Izenour) Basco Store, Philadelphia, 1976 Franklin Court Memorial, Philadelphia, 1976

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Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio, 1977 Hartford Stage Company, Connecticut, 1977 Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia, 1979 Gordon Wu Hall, Princeton, 1983 Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery, London, 1991 Seattle Art Museum, 1991 Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California, 1996

FURTHER READING Brownlee, David B et al. Out of the Ordinary: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Associates Philadelphia Museum of Art 2001. Colquhoun, Alan ‘Sign and Substance: Reflections on Complexity, Las Vegas and Oberlin’ Oppositions 14 Fall 1978, pp. 26–37. Petit, Emmanuel Irony: Or the Self-Critical Opacity of Postmodern Architecture New Haven Yale University Press 2013 Chapter 2. Sanmartin, A Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown London Academy Editions 1986. Venturi, Robert Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture New York Museum of Modern Art 1966. Venturi, Robert Diversity, Relevance and Representation in Historicism Architectural Record June 1981, pp. 114–19. Venturi, Robert, Scott Brown, Denise and lzenour, Steven Learning from Las Vegas Cambridge MA MIT Press 1972. Von Moos, Stanislaus Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown New York Rizzoli 1987.

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37  Aldo Rossi (1931–1997)

Image 37.1  Cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena 1971–6

Undertaking a purpose for architecture to transform itself along with transforming society had been the self-appointed purpose of much of Modernism: in the later 1960s, Aldo Rossi became one of the most significant figures to renounce this ideal. A new movement which engaged architecture with historical models and references, later to be described by the term ‘Post Modernism’, were to come after the existential collapse of the discipline of modern architecture. Rossi’s work in Italy paralleled Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s in the United States, while it had an influence beyond that of other contemporary architects in Europe such as Hans Hollein and O. M. Ungers whose work also took on the reinvention of architecture’s direction. Rossi first worked as an architect with Ignazio Gardella in 1956, and later with Carlo Aymonino, with whom he also taught at the Institute of Architecture in Venice. From

1959 he became one of the editors of the architectural journal Casabella-Continuità under the direction of Ernesto Rogers and later went on to write for Il Contemporaneo, making him a prominent participant in the cultural and political debates of the time. Rogers was one of the most influential figures in Italian post-war architecture, and his arguments for an architecture based on historical continuity in contradiction to the Modernist idea of the new were expressed both in the journal, which became of international significance during his editorship, and in such books as Experience of Architecture (1957). He had produced a radical proposition in Casabella-Continuità in 1954: ‘No work is truly modern which is not genuinely rooted in tradition, while no ancient work has significance today unless it can resonate through our voice.’ His practice BBPR is particularly known for the Torre Velasca office building in Milan completed in 1958 which, shunning the curtain-walled forms of Mies van der Rohe or SOM, resembles a medieval fortress built at an enormous scale. In 1966 Rossi published his most important text The Architecture of the City, which became a significant influence on architectural discussion in Italy and beyond. His position as it had developed through his early writing and research was related to the idea in Structuralism that just as language is a pre-existing form of expression and cannot be transformed by an individual act of creating something new, so architecture can be understood as an existing formal language and be reinterpreted based on the notion of type. Pre-existing form is irrespective of functional imperatives and transcends time and the necessity of re-invention. His portrayal of the city as a collective artefact ‘constructed over time’ depicts a city defined by its monumental structures, such primary elements being capable of modification and change. This is demonstrated by his example of the Palazzo del Ragione in Padua, which had had multiple functions in its seven hundred year history. The permanence of such structures represents a collective memory and secures the imagery of a city, on which its citizens’ primary relationship with it is based. Rossi argues that architecture gives concrete form to society and in that lies its fundamental importance. His criticism of Modernist architectural studies of the city is their disregard of the particular and the individual in favour of the universal and the development of theories that were unworkable: the forms of the city can be seen as enduring over time, as participants in public and private events, and as embodying myth and ritual. Thus, Rossi is advancing an argument to reject the zoning of the city as made dogma by CIAM in the Athens Charter: but also fundamental in his work is an anti-functionalist polemic, in that function is not a certain determinant of form. His original idea of the ‘autonomy’ of architecture is key, and a way of distancing its practice from the demands of the contradictory determinants of social conditions and from the constraints of a mechanistic approach to urban planning. For Rossi, this autonomy was also related to the Enlightenment which was fundamental to the modern movement, and he stood against both nineteenth-century architectural eclecticism and the compromises of pragmatism in post-war Europe. The attraction of the powerful forms of Neoclassical work was an informing influence, but so also was a recognition of the work of Adolf Loos and the Rationalism of pre-war Fascist

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Italy. The geometrically determined forms that were to emerge in his later built work can be seen as aiming to re-establish architecture: an architecture that was modern, but devoid of the technical and social questions that had come to shape Modernism. In this analysis, ‘type’ is the fundamental idea behind the practice of architecture: a pre-existing form is the basis of design, irrespective of functional prerequisites. In the development of a theory of typology, the Enlightenment theorist Quatremère de Quincy’s reading of architecture as a formal language emphasized that every work of architecture had an antecedent. Quatremère gave Rossi the structuring principle of the ‘rule’, which is always present in the creation of architectural artefacts in their individual quality. Rossi writes that ‘type is the very idea of architecture, that which is closest to its essence … (it) presents itself as the study of types of elements that cannot be further reduced, elements of a city as well as of an architecture’. In expanding on how this may be understood and applied, he studies urban and building forms over a wide range, from Roman amphitheatres to modern housing projects: through this evidence his aim is to clarify the persistence of types. It is inescapable to work with what already exists – as he writes, ‘I tend to believe that house types have not changed from antiquity up to today.’ Rossi’s own architectural design work was to come later: in 1969 he designed and subsequently built part of the Monte Amiata complex in the Gallaratese quarter of Milan. He evoked the nineteenth-century housing blocks of Milan, producing what he described as ‘analogical’ architecture, abstracted from its vernacular origins, in producing a design intended to be archetypal, in a term derived from Carl Jung’s theory of the symbolic. The austerity and purity of this housing form is related also to his acknowledged influences including the Neoclassical and Rationalism: and despite the strong formality of its composition, it was intended to be the background rather than the foreground of its inhabitants’ lives. In 1971 he won the design competition for the extension of the San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena: as built, a monumental open cube form stands in front of long, mute almost brutal buildings containing tombs that are constructed with a gradually increased section height, (Image 37.1) giving the aperspectival illusion of suspended time to those passing through them. The theatre is a formal type of the collective, open space for events to which Rossi often referred, and his floating theatre built for the 1979 Venice Biennale presented an ambiguous image of its archetypal form, which echoes also the repetition of imageforms seen in his evocative drawings. Later in his career such buildings as housing for the IBA in Berlin and a hotel in Fukuoka are closer to the Classically inflected imagery of Post Modernism as seen in the work of Michael Graves or Charles Moore, making a cliché out of a vision of architectural autonomy. Such work by Rossi seems deficient in the complexity of his thought, in favour of expressing a more commonplace version of historical contextualism. Historical reference and a new reading of context made their appearance in this period from several directions: Rossi was a specific and guiding figure in that process, giving voice to the crisis of confidence in relation to the assured precepts of Modernism. His reasoning in understanding the city as a collection of cultural

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artefacts, and the architect’s role in the making of interventions, shifted the ground on which architecture stood. A respect for urban context, and the repudiation of the idea of the universal rather than the specific solution, became the generally held position. How much was the notion of type an important advance in architectural thought? Certainly it was in ideological terms, as it identified architecture with its own history, with a reasoning deeper than that of style. In the highly rigorous historical analysis of Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co in Modern Architecture (1980), Rossi’s work appears at the end of the book as a shining example of a truly authentic and rooted architecture. His work is not as narrowly about image as much architecture of its period was and is shaped by the processes of thought and reflection into its role and social meaning. But the following years have delivered a harsher judgement, as his precepts and prescriptions are less persuasive than the broader version of the interpretation of historical context which has become established.

KEY WORKS – ROSSI Architecture of the City, 1966 Housing, Gallaratese, Milan, 1969–74 Elementary School, Fagnano Olona, 1972 Analogous City, 1973 Cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena, 1971–6 Teatro del Mondo, Venice Biennale, 1979 Secondary School, Broni, 1979 Housing Kochstrasse, Berlin, 1981–8 A Scientific Autobiography, 1982 Palace Hotel Fukuoka, Japan, 1989

FURTHER READING Adjmi, Morris Aldo Rossi Architecture 1981–1991 Princeton Princeton Architectural Press 1991. Arnell, Peter and Bickford, Ted Aldo Rossi New York Rizzoli 1985. Moneo, Rafael ‘Aldo Rossi: The Idea of Architecture and Modena Cemetery’ in Michael Hays, K (ed.) Oppositions Reader Cambridge MA MIT Press 1998, pp. 105–34. Rossi, Aldo Architecture of the City Cambridge MA MIT Press 1966/English edn 1982. Rossi, Aldo A Scientific Autobiography Cambridge MA MIT Press 1982 English edn 1990.

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38  Geoffrey Bawa (1919–2003) Geoffrey Bawa was among the most significant Asian architects working in the late twentieth century and his innovative work, built in Sri Lanka and from time to time elsewhere in Asia, remains a widely admired model for architects. But he also represents a late phase of Modernism in developing the application of its precepts and principles, conceived in gloomy northern Europe, and cultivating it in the tropical lush landscapes of southern Asia. This adjustment is not only in terms of climate and services, but also in sensibility: a cerebral northern approach is replaced by the sensuality of extreme heat and humidity; materials that would age and weather are used rather than the abstracted surfaces of high Modernism. A tropical Modernism can be seen to have been generated by Bawa, which extends rather than denies its universal relevance. After earlier studies in law, Bawa attended the Architectural Association School in London in the mid-1950s, starting at the age of 35: on the teaching staff were John Killick and Peter Smithson, key members of Team Ten. While he was later to praise the school for its openness rather than the specifics of its Modernist teaching programme, Bawa clearly absorbed its prevailing architectural culture that promoted the clarity of form and importance of a social agenda, and among his contemporaries as students were Cedric Price, Richard Rogers and Neave Brown all of whom would develop their work more directly from this position. Smithson has described his own teaching approach at this time as introducing ‘context thinking’, that a building had to relate to existing patterns of human association, of movement and of use, as well as working with, rather than against, the properties of its site. This idea, central to Team Ten’s rethinking of Modernism, was to become one of the fundamental principles of Bawa’s approach as he established and developed building projects on his return to Sri Lanka. But a contrasting influence came from Bawa’s extensive experience of Italian Renaissance and Mannerist buildings, and in particular gardens, where the creation of meaningful places through both the planning and planting of such landscapes seemed to transcend their time and context. Bawa returned to practice in Sri Lanka in 1957: a local influence was the architect Minnette de Silva, who had preceded Bawa at the Architectural Association and

set up a practice in Sri Lanka in 1950, introducing Modernist architecture into the country. Many of Bawa’s early projects were undertaken with Ulrik Plesner, who had worked with de Silva and the buildings produced, such as Bishop’s College, appear to be influenced by the teaching of the Architectural Association Tropical School established by Maxwell Fry: flat roofs and white walls, moderated by brise-soleils and overhangs, became the standard new approach. There were ensuing problems with monsoon rainfall and humidity as well as material failure that led to Bawa’s adoption of a less evidently modern aesthetic, including the traditional form of the pitched roof adopted in later projects. But a modified interpretation of other Modernist principles, the open planning and free flow of inside–outside space were maintained in his adapted approach. A number of domestic projects gave him the opportunity to develop a new type of the tropical urban house: available sites of a smaller size were not enough to enable a large garden to screen the house as had been the earlier general model, but Bawa developed a form in which the plan of the traditional house was reversed and the house looked inside on to a garden at its centre. The Ena de Silva house has an enclosing wall and open-sided rooms giving on to linked courtyards and covered verandahs: its high roof enables natural ventilation, and its more traditional appearance through the use of local materials belies the house’s modernity. It represents a new kind of plan with an assemblage of elements on an orthogonal grid and resembles Mies van der Rohe’s horizontal flowing space, but with its site strictly defined and facing inwards. The A. S. H. de Silva house develops a similar theme more clearly: under a single sloping roof, a grid of linked rooms with courts and gardens between them is reminiscent of Mies’s Brick Country House project in fragmenting the conventional enclosed form of the house, albeit on a sloping rather than flat site. A small house on an isolated site at Polontalawa develops the theme of the abstracted, almost-not-there house: enclosed by a high wall of rocks, it is entered between two boulders, with the roof as a totally independent element placed above the rocks. Bawa wrote poetically as well as informatively about the significance of the roof, describing it as ‘protective, emphatic and all-important, governing the aesthetic whatever the place. Often a building is only a roof, columns and floors – the roof dominant, shielding, giving the contentment of shelter. Ubiquitous, pervasively present, the scale or pattern shaped by the building beneath’. Among Bawa’s more substantial projects are a number of hotels for Sri Lanka’s tourist industry, often simple in style but complex in form, and the Bentota Beach Hotel was the first. Beautifully located, it is a successful hybrid reflecting but not reproducing traditional forms: a spatial sequence leads from the entrance on the shore through bare rocks through a spiral route, opening on to a main courtyard at its focus. The political situation in Sri Lanka affected Bawa’s work, and the late 1970s UNP government developed public infrastructure and housing. The most prominent of Bawa’s works were built at this time, and the new Parliament building at Kotte and a campus for the Ruhunu University were at a far greater scale and social prominence than was usual for him. The plan of the Parliament is a group of pavilions echoing

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Sri Lankan temple forms, arranged in a created landscape, with copper roofs of varied pitch: under the roofs, however, Modernist forms characterized by trabeated concrete construction create its working spaces. Later developments of work in the 1990s include the Kandalama Hotel with flat roofs and an expressed concrete frame: Integrated into its rocky landscape, an outer layer of timber brise-soleils is surrounded by lush vegetation (Image 38.1). A house built for Pradeep Jayewardene, in a development from Bawa’s earlier house projects, takes the open plan into a more abstracted direction: consisting primarily of a slightly sloping roof made of galvanized steel positioned in its tropical landscape setting, its effects lie in its absences; on the main floor it is without doors, walls or windows. Lunuganga, a house in the remote southern mountains of Sri Lanka built for himself, represents his most personal work, developed over fifty years. It is a sequence of outdoor rooms to be moved through on different routes, with a kind of theatricality,

Image 38.1  Kandalama hotel, Dambulla 1991–4

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Italian in inspiration and tempered by the exuberant landscape. Its architectural elements include a series of pavilions built within the garden, displaying a refined sense of place-making. Bawa’s work, emerging from new ideas of modern architecture originating in the 1950s, demonstrates a sensitivity to context and site. His work remains culturally highly specific, although he generally applies historical and traditional forms only in an indirect way; it embodies memory and wider cultural reference within a Modernist mode of composition. His architecture removes the barriers between inside and outside space, between buildings and landscape: buildings embody a new sense of space, with tropical gardens and courts integrated into fundamentally modern spatial models. For Bawa, the building’s plan can be seen as its generator: as David Robson has written, ‘As inside and outside became one, so walls took on the role of planes that simply defined spaces or divided one space from another. The landscape was free to invade the interior and a building could colonise its surroundings, taking in pools, boulders and even whole trees.’ His work can be described as an early example of ‘sustainable architecture’, before the term was generally applied, buildings being cooled naturally by cross-ventilation and using materials that increased their thermal mass. Bawa was particularly reluctant to explain his work and avoided the theoretical formulation as any kind of justification, but nevertheless it can be seen that his work represents the successful application of a Modernist ideology within the localized context of a specific material culture and rich natural landscape. While buildings such as the Sri Lankan Parliament, being effectively a tropical Post Modernism, lack the spontaneity and subtlety of his best projects, his role as a key modern architect is as a maker of meaningful places. Bawa is the originator of a modern architectural language simultaneously international and local.

KEY WORKS – BAWA Bishop’s College, Colombo, 1959 Ena de Silva house, Colombo, 1960 A. S. H. de Silva house, Galle, 1960 Chapel, Good Shepherd Convent, Bandarawela, 1962 Polontalawa Estate Bungalow, Nikarawetiya, 1965 Bentota Beach Hotel, 1967–73 Malaka Buddhist temple, Colombo, 1978 Ruhunu University, Matara, 1980 New Parliament, Kotte, 1982 De Soysa house, Colombo, 1985–91 Kandalama Hotel, Dambulla, 1991–4 Pradeep Jayewardene house, Mirissa, 1998 House and Garden, Lunuganga, 1948–98

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FURTHER READING Robson, David Beyond Bawa London Thames & Hudson 2007. Robson, David Geoffrey Bawa: The Complete Works New York NY Thames & Hudson 2002. Taylor, Brian Brace Geoffrey Bawa includes Statement by the Architect London Thames & Hudson 1995.

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39  Balkrishna Doshi (1928–)

Image 39.1  Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore 1977–85

Balkrishna Doshi is a leading member of the international generation of architects who developed Modernist work in the 1960s, and was a member of CIAM and associated with Team Ten: he is one of small number to work with ideas of an Indian modernity shaped by, but not determined by, the prominent architects of the United States and Europe. The ongoing social commitment which he and other Indian architects have consistently displayed also provides a corrective attitude to the West, where such ideas have often lost currency. Doshi worked with Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, two of the great figures in the history of modern architecture, and his work takes starting points in the approaches and built work of both architects, but develops a particular and culturally specific synthesis of his own. India, independent from 1947, needed to establish a modern cultural identity, which had been a major issue for Nehru, the first prime minister after independence. Architectural Modernism had the correct associations for the newly established state: it embodied ideas of progress and social liberalism, was anti-hierarchical and superseded the colonial forms shaped by historical, European reference. Modernism had become enthusiastically adopted internationally, while India had a very rich and pluralist set of parallel traditions in historical architectural culture, and there existed no existing synthesis between modernity and local tradition. Doshi along with Charles Correa and Raj Rewal were the first generation to undertake this critical mission and designed substantial urban developments and public buildings in a modern Indian idiom. India is unique among developing countries in that the building by Le Corbusier of the new city of Chandigarh and buildings in Ahmedabad, together with Kahn’s buildings there and in neighbouring Bangladesh, meant that the Modernism developed in Europe and the United States was present, and highly respected, not least as these works were inflected by their Asian context and climate. In the case of Le Corbusier, the Indian work created in his late period reflected symbolic meaning and the archaic, rather than demonstrating modern enlightenment, although Chandigarh’s urbanism was undoubtedly Modernist in its formation. Doshi worked with Le Corbusier in Paris from 1951, both on the chapel at Ronchamp and in Chandigarh, as well as supervising the projects he built in Ahmedabad. Later he worked with Kahn on the Indian Institute of Management in the same city, these experiences decisively shaping his architectural development. His own practice was established in 1955 and produced such public buildings as the Institute of Indology, its reinforced concrete used as if it were a wooden structure as Kenzo Tange had done in early projects. Its design is a hybrid of Corbusian Modernism and local reference – such as the overhanging roof resembling the verandah of a traditional house form. The School of Architecture in Ahmedabad, although constructed of heavy masonry with echoes of Kahn, is a largely open form, representing the openness of the institution as well as facilitating natural ventilation, in an irregular form that reflects that of Indian cities. The complexities of traditional urban spaces are expressed to a greater extent in the Bangalore Indian Institute of Management, its plan itself like a small city, with teaching areas located around a composite formation of interconnecting courtyards, terraces and galleries

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(Image 39.1). It abounds with Indian formal references, but a specific debt is to the sixteenth-century planned Islamic city of Fatepur Sikri in its variety and intricacy. Here and in other public buildings, traditional sources are transformed by Doshi into simplified and regularized versions of references from history creating, in a way reminiscent of Aldo Van Eyck, a hybrid form that is in a distinctly modern but inflected language. One of Doshi’s most personal and accomplished projects is Sangath, his own studio in Ahmedabad. While using traditional building techniques rather than abstracted stylistic detail, it adopts the concrete vaults that Le Corbusier had used in such Indian projects as the Shodhan house, but also embodies practices of passive climate control and the reduction and diffusion of light. Its forms derived from traditional urbanism are like a village, and a complex interaction of interior spaces references the forms of vernacular architecture, lying close to the earth. While it may well be the product of an analysis of its climatic and site conditions, its composition of forms and spaces is intuitive, shaped by poetic connections, and generates a variety of spatial experiences and effects to create a sense of place. The new directions of Doshi’s work were formulated into an educational programme for the School of Architecture in Ahmedabad of which he was the founder and director, and it quickly became the country’s leading school. In 1981 he founded the research institute the Vastu-Shilpa Foundation which has undertaken work in low-cost housing nationally, this concern reflecting his interests as far back as standardized schemes built for the government in the 1950s. In the vast new settlement of Vidhyadhar Nagar, Doshi analysed the adjacent old city of Jaipur, alongside a reference to Chandigarh, in its great central avenue: a dense patterning of streets and spaces aims to reflect the ancient urban forms and mix of uses of the city. The plan of nine squares mirrors that of Jaipur itself, and its forms are based on the creation of tight streets and courts that give shape to the dense mass of housing. It is the first project in India to critically look at the issues of modernity and tradition from the scale of the city to the scale of the individual building. But as Vibhuti Chakrabarti has pointed out, however traditionally inflected the forms of this new city are, it is conceived in terms derived from Western parameters of architectural qualities: ‘The study of the older city was reinterpreted in a modern vocabulary of lighting angles, social uses, dimensions, facades and so on’, while on the other hand terms are appropriated from the traditional; the mundane qualities of the planning grid are described using the term ‘mandala’ and the water sources as a ‘lingam’. While its forms may be shaped by their location and culture, the thinking behind them remains resolutely Western. The project for Aranya Nagar in Indore created a new settlement developed on the basis of a high degree of self-building by its inhabitants, many of whom came from an area of extreme urban poverty. Most residents bought only the site and each standard plot was given guidelines for self-building: unusually, the urban plan houses a variety of income groups who are mixed together – the poorest are placed in the centre, and inhabitants’ financial limitations lead to a series of different models. Doshi designed sixty house prototypes which incorporated a wide variety of possibilities, extending upwards from one-room shelters to substantial buildings. The materials

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of brick and concrete are available, but owners are free to use any material they choose for construction and decoration of their homes. As Doshi asserts, ‘Housing is a process and not a product … in mass housing it is possible to have house form variations for personalization and a sense of belonging, without losing overall coherence.’ This model, of particular applicability in the Indian context, was to become relevant as a corrective to practice elsewhere in the developing world. Doshi has described Modernism as ‘helping India to rethink the nature and purpose of architecture for a modern, secular and democratic society’. Reflecting site, culture and climate in his work, historically nuanced as it often is, with its emphasis on social contexts and embodying ideas of civic community, his work can be understood as a powerful variant of the Team Ten architects of the 1950s and 1960s, and his built work goes beyond what they achieved. His long-term commitment to issues of sustainability also makes him a relevant model of practice: his holistic way of working with climate and topography, and the use of appropriate materials and available skills may now be seen as exemplary. Modernism has been moderated for Doshi by the intuitive, poetic basis of the work of his two mentors, Le Corbusier and Kahn. That architecture is beyond the technical and functional is a given, and the making of architectural effects is of more benefit in creating a humane architecture that accommodates the issues of climate, space, urbanism and the evolution of meaningful dwelling. Its overall success as an interpretation of Modernism inflected by local cultural and environmental issues is substantial, although created in terms formulated elsewhere, and perhaps not representing as much of a revolution as his hybrid position promises.

KEY WORKS – DOSHI Doshi House, Ahmedabad, 1961 Institute of Indology, Ahmedabad, 1962 School of Architecture, Ahmedabad, 1968 Premabhai Hall, Ahmedabad, 1972 Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, 1977–85 Sangath, Doshi office, Ahmedabad, 1980 Vidhyadhar Nagar urbanism, Jaipur, 1984–8 Aranya Nagar urbanism, Indore, 1989 National Institute of Fashion Technology, Delhi, 1989–97 Amdavad ni Gufa, Ahmedabad, 1990–5

FURTHER READING Curtis, William Balkrishna Doshi: An Architecture for India Ahmedabad Mapin 1988.

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Doshi, Balkrishna ‘The Modern Movement in India’ in Henket, H-J and Heynen, H (eds) Back from Utopia: The Challenge of the Modern Movement Rotterdam 010 Publishers 2002. Ramachandran, Premjit Film Doshi 2012. Steele, James The Complete Architecture of Balkrishna Doshi: Rethinking Modernism for the Developing World London Thames & Hudson 1998.

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40  Richard Meier (1934–) The work of Richard Meier is perhaps the most distinctly American of recent architects, representing a continuation of the so-called ‘International Style’ initiated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1932 with his immaculate, highly aesthetic versions of Modernist design. Meier’s education at Cornell and early work in the office of Marcel Breuer preceded his prominence in the Museum of Modern Art’s exposure of the work of the New York Five in 1972. This new architectural group included also his contemporaries Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey and John Hejduk. Meier’s Smith House in Connecticut, designed in 1965, was chronologically the first of the buildings and projects included by MOMA, and also represented a clear paradigm of what their work collectively stood for: a reworking of themes from the European Modernism of the 1920s and 1930s and which Meier has continued to interpret. The Smith House stands above a wooded inlet, an imposing volume of geometric forms with a dramatic double-height living space. It evokes Le Corbusier’s villas in its aesthetic of white abstract planes, as well as further buildings of that architect’s Purist phase: it also displayed the aesthetic influence of other architects of the period including Giuseppe Terragni and Richard Neutra. Arthur Drexler, the museum’s director, described the work as ‘architecture of rational poetry, picking up where the Thirties left off’: what, however, is different about Meier’s Smith House is that it is constructed of timber without the demands of the concrete structure which it resembled, and which those earlier buildings had possessed. So it might be said only to look like the reinforced concrete of Neutra’s Lovell House or Le Corbusier’s villa at Garches. Aesthetic concerns rather than material ones dominated, and this remained the case in the white-clad steel frame buildings he built later. Relatively unrestricted by tectonic constraints, the house could explore the complex geometrical themes of Meier’s choosing: punctuated surfaces, a dialectic of open and closed spaces, stratification and sequence. In such houses as this the architect is free, through the manipulation of the balloon frame, to create lightweight, insubstantial and adaptable structures that are in a tradition of American rather than European processes of building.

But as Colin Rowe has written, buildings like these acknowledged ‘the plastic and spatial inventions of Cubism and the proposition that, whatever may be said about (them), they possess an eloquence and a flexibility which continues now to be as overwhelming as it was then’. In other words, there was a continued viability in this vocabulary of forms and Meier’s ongoing utilization of an established language of white plane surfaces, ramps, frames and drums. Relating to its origins in both machine-age exactness and the Mediterranean vernacular, the unadorned geometry and white wall had, at an early stage, become the definition of Modernist architecture. Spatially, the promenade architecturale characteristic of his work and the light-suffused inside–outside spaces are a vivid extension of Modernist principles. It is on a series of public buildings that his career has primarily been focused, and in particular a number of cultural centres and galleries. These buildings have provided a civic presence, visible in more European than American cities, and have given Meier a distinct role as a widely acceptable face of Modernism since the 1980s. The Atheneum at New Harmony is a visitor centre that initiates a route, both literal and metaphorical, into the historic site of this early utopian village. With what came to be the model for much later work, its whiteness was achieved by a steel frame clad in enamel panels. But like his earlier houses, it seemed to take its formal influence from early Purist villas. Its heavy emphasis on ramp access and elevation, its use of nautical metal railings and staircases, its complex relationship of exterior to interior space are again extensions of Corbusian themes. In Frankfurt, Meier built his first full-scale museum building, the Museum for the Decorative Arts: in an urban setting and thus in relationship to the context of the museum street of which it forms part, a nineteenth-century villa on the site was incorporated in its plan and became the generator of the building’s form. It incorporated three matching, albeit more massive, volumes that echo the pitched-roof villa as abstract cubes and these provide the gallery spaces. Between these blocks is a range of circulation routes, and conspicuously a ramp that extends through much of the site. But what is also different here is a slight twist in the grid of the building, intended to relate it better to its context on the bank of the River Main. The concern is to make light-filled and dynamic public spaces, but here in opposition to the more formal, and necessarily darker, galleries. The High Museum of Art in Atlanta is also based on a plan of four pavilions, but on a more distorted grid. The fourth block is displaced and supplanted by four-storey glazed atrium in the form of a quarter-circle, which is the strongest visual presence for the approaching visitor. The approach is by a shallow ramp leading into the atrium and to a further ramp which climbs its glazed side: a clear reference to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, it gives access to the blocks of gallery spaces but unlike its model is not used to exhibit art. A number of competition successes in the 1980s included the substantial complex of the Town Hall in The Hague; a second in Ulm is a smaller-scale project in the city’s main square and adjacent to its medieval cathedral, and consists of a group of Meier’s white geometrical forms, in pronounced contrast to its highly historic context. The Museum of Contemporary Art at Barcelona once again is set in the context of a

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Image 40.1  Getty Center, Los Angeles 1984–1997

medieval city plan: responding, according to Meier, to the complexities of its site in its labyrinthine organization and in its form to the adjacent monastery building, the museum’s uncompromised and literally dazzling modernity seems quite inappropriate for its dense, historically inflected context. The largest project undertaken by Meier is the Getty Center, Los Angeles, the most ambitious in terms of scale and formal complexity, as well being as among the most expensive projects in modern American architecture (Image 40.1). Its brief incorporated gallery space including an extensive permanent collection of painting and sculpture, as well as offices and a research institute: a montage of separate buildings on a landscaped site is unified by their surface treatment and by the connections underneath the level of the plaza that joins them; a lexicon of drums, cubes and blocks with sinuous curves are picturesquely disposed. Meier evokes Italian references in his design for this vast hill-top cultural complex: the sequence of spaces of

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Vignola’s Villa Caprarola on its sloping site and the collection of autonomous pieces of the Roman Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli. Rather than the shining white cladding of earlier buildings he primarily used Italian travertine marble, from the same quarry that had supplied stone, centuries earlier, for the Colosseum: its rough-hewn appearance is the result of a carefully evolved cutting process to create a sufficiently unvarying irregularity for this facing, over a steel frame on a concrete base. In his speech on being awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1984, Meier mainly spoke of his love of whiteness. A white surface heightens the power of visual form and is constantly changing: ‘In natural light (it) reflects and intensifies the perception of all the shades of the rainbow … perhaps the memory and anticipation of colour.’ Light, for Meier, is the informing principle of the spaces he creates, and in this he relates to the earlier writing and practice of Louis Kahn, as well as recalling Le Corbusier’s celebrated definition of architecture as ‘masses brought together in light’, and thus privileges the visual. As Arthur Drexler had earlier remarked in his introduction to the Five Architects book, ‘Their work makes a modest claim: it is only architecture, not the salvation of man and the redemption of the earth.’ But at the level of the personal rather than social collectivity, there is ample evidence of the claim to transform individual life rather than the structure of the social system: an existential American utopianism where the individual is located in spaces transformed by gleaming light. Like Norman Foster, his almost exact contemporary, Richard Meier has established certain design principles and continued to reiterate them in whatever location or context his buildings might be, and these perceptions are derived from a particular and exclusive reading of certain aspects of Modernism. In Meier’s case his work has appeared particularly unchanging, and is ironic that he has built far more buildings in a Purist Corbusian language than Le Corbusier himself. And it shows a disregard for the problematic issues engaged with by other architects, such as an engagement with material tectonics, and the subtleties of the dialogue of a building’s relationship with its context and site.

KEY WORKS – MEIER Smith House, Darien, Connecticut, 1965 Bronx Developmental Center, New York, 1976 The Atheneum, New Harmony, Indiana, 1979 High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 1983 Museum for the Decorative Arts, Frankfurt, 1985 Madison Square Garden towers project, New York, 1987 Canal+ Headquarters, Paris, 1991 City Hall, The Hague, 1995 City Hall, Ulm, Germany, 1995 Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, 1995 Getty Center, Los Angeles, 1984–97

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FURTHER READING Blaser, Werner Richard Meier: Building for Art Basel Birkhauser 1990. Brawne, Michael Architecture in Detail: The Getty Center London Phaidon 1998. Five Architects: Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier New York Oxford University Press 1975. Texts by Arthur Drexler, Colin Rowe and Kenneth Frampton. Frampton, Kenneth Richard Meier: Complete Works London Pall Mall 2012. Richard Meier Architect: Buildings and Projects 1966–1976 New York Oxford University Press, 1976. Text by Kenneth Frampton. Richard Meier Architect: Introduction by Joseph Rykwert New York Rizzoli 1984. Richard Meier Architect Later volumes 2–6 1991–2014.

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41  Norman Foster (1935–)

Image 41.1  Stansted Airport, Essex 1991

Norman Foster and his London-based practice Foster and Partners became a dominant presence internationally during the 1990s: it can claim to have revolutionized the identity of corporate and commercial practice, and in particular to have reinterpreted such building types as the office tower, the airport terminal and the workplace. A series of major built projects, for government and commercial clients throughout the world, have served to redefine what is the publicly accepted face of architectural design. Foster advocates the strategy that each project starts from scratch: that there is no setting up and repeating of a formula as one might expect of a large and successful office. To a remarkable extent this can be seen as accurate: those that are similar display the elaboration of a theme, rather than a repetition of forms. Norman Foster’s education took place in the 1950s and early 1960s, starting at Manchester University and later as a graduate student at Yale. He found the Yale School and the United States a liberating environment, and his work became far more ambitious. Richard Rogers was also a British graduate student there, and together they returned to England and formed the practice of Team 4 Architects. Their programme became the renewal of the engagement with technology that early Modernism had espoused, and developed in built practice work that was parallel to what other architects, notably Cedric Price and the Archigram group, were exploring in unbuilt projects, and which was later to be named High Tech. This term, although rejected by Foster and others, came to refer to a largely British school: architecture as industrial technology professing a lack of artistic pretensions, which emphasizes steel frame structures and glass skin, and programmatically gives pre-eminence to flexibility of use. Their first significant project was the Reliance Controls Factory in Swindon, England: a cross-braced steel frame structure providing a flexible service shed, built swiftly and at very low cost. Buckminster Fuller, Charles Eames and Jean Prouvé were, and remained, clear and acknowledged influences, to be seen in the lightweight quality of the minimized enclosure: and, not least, the use of technology transferred from industrial applications rather than sourced in architectural practice: the building also incorporated the idea of a non-hierarchical workplace. The first more substantial building built by Foster’s own practice (then Foster Associates), the Willis Faber Dumas office in Ipswich is a reworking of the atrium office plan as democratic space, clad, remarkably, with an undulating, sheerly suspended skin of tinted glass. The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, embodying a public role and at a more ambitious scale, is the single most significant building of Foster’s earlier phase. Essentially a prefabricated shed, a huge singlespan space houses an art collection and school of art history. Externally a sheer aluminium skin, a second, inner skin invisibly accommodates the building’s services. The scale and global role of the practice was subsequently expanded by the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, Hong Kong, a reconfiguration of the office tower. Built from factory-made elements, its aim is to develop better social relationships within the building’s cluster of forms. Divided into three bays of differing heights, the tower itself is separated into five vertical zones, each with a double-height atrium at its

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base. These zones comprise a stack of floors hung from an external steel frame with visually distinctive cross bracing. Among a number of office towers built later are the Commerzbank Headquarters, Frankfurt, and Swiss Re, London. The sleek, tapered cylindrical form of Swiss Re, enclosing atria spiralling behind a curved cross-gridded structure, makes it the most extraordinary of modern skyscrapers. The Commerzbank and the earlier Business Promotion Centre, Duisburg, Germany, enlarge on a theme which has become a preoccupation of the practice. The term ‘eco-tech’ applies to such architecture that aims to minimize energy consumption: the Commerzbank uses natural ventilation, and the Business Promotion Centre is highly technologically advanced with an automatic environmental control system. Later work in this field has been less technically complex, but like the Duisburg building, can be so environmentally efficient that power is returned to the national grid. Stansted Airport was, perhaps uniquely for an airport, built with the overriding aim of clarity and emphasizes horizontal and vertical transparency. The formal simplicity of the terminal building, a kind of square temple, divides the roof into thirty-eight zones with tree-like structural and service columns (Image 41.1). A second and far larger airport project in Hong Kong was built on a flattened island site: Chek Lap Kok is a huge megastructural project, which stresses its efficiency in communication, but the roof structure, again defined by light, provides a unifying form. The rebuilding of the Reichstag, the German parliament in Berlin, was, as well as reinterpreting the relationship of the new to the old, a way of transferring ideas of democracy and openness in the workplace to a highly politically loaded institution. The public may climb to the top of a new transparent dome by a spiral ramp inside its skin: a funnel of mirrors reflects light into and out of the chamber below. The building of the glazed roof creating the Great Court in the British Museum in London provided what has been called an ‘urban room’, completely remaking the museum’s circulation under a roof structure of great complexity. Foster wrote in 1980, ‘High technology is not an end in itself, but rather a means to social goals and wider possibilities. High technology buildings are hand crafted with the same care as bricks and mortar or timber. Hand crafted care is the factor that makes a building loved by its users and those who look at it.’ To paraphrase, technology, however advanced, is subservient to the architectural programme of improving people’s lives, relationships and joy; and, moreover, industrial production must be moderated by hand work. This view would place his work in relation to traditional architectural beliefs, even those of Ruskin, but is also reminiscent of Mies van der Rohe. Mies wrote ‘form is not the goal but the result of our work’: that for the modern architect, technology was the source, but his architectural objectives went much further. Mies provides a point of reference in several ways: his architecture has been described as made ‘of skin and bones’. While Mies celebrated and refined the frame, it is particularly the skin, taut and light, which has concerned Foster throughout his career. Lightness in both senses of the word is emphasized: the illumination of spaces and minimalism of their enclosure. Classical qualities of the

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work may also be inferred: the generic form of Foster’s buildings is that of a refined and well-proportioned object, set in space rather than in relationship to the complexities of context. It is essentially formal and highly controlled in its exact gesture and detailing. Whether as a result of this or not, Foster has taken over from the North American career of Mies as the creator of the acceptable, progressive corporate image, and more successfully than his predecessor, also in making innovative but widely admired public buildings. Foster has often spoken of the seamless relationship between industrial design and architecture, and when a 1991 BBC Television programme gave him the opportunity to talk on a favourite building his choice was an airliner, the Boeing 747. In its industrial design, undoubtedly a refined and high performance object, it is also conspicuously expressive of an optimism about technology and the joy of flight. But it is significant that this is a universally applied form, literally travelling worldwide, without a site. The airliner’s material technologies, subject to continuous refinement and possessing a high degree of embedded energy, also provide a problematic model for architecture to engage with. Why might a different generation not subscribe to the view of architecture embodied in Foster’s buildings? First, the development of much recent architecture has been concerned with the contextual, in terms of both a project’s specificity and sensitivity to site and culture. Second, the issue of the figurative in architecture can do more than celebrate the modern world, which remains Foster’s ideal: equally, his material palette is limited to an industrial aesthetic. There is an emphasis on light, structural clarity and openness, all Modernist ideas. Like Le Corbusier and Gropius before him, perhaps Foster is left behind by current advanced technological concerns: the material world represented in his work begins to make less sense in the world of electronic media. But such criticisms are themselves limited: Foster’s buildings have, to a remarkable degree, been successful for clients, users, the public and the architectural profession. They have, almost single-handedly, provided a new lease of life for Modernism in something near its classic sense.

KEY WORKS – FOSTER Reliance Controls Factory, Swindon, 1966 (with Team 4) Willis Faber Dumas office, Ipswich, 1975 Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 1978 Renault Centre, Swindon, 1982 Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, Hong Kong, 1986 Stansted Airport, Essex, 1991 Business Promotion Centre, Duisburg, Germany, 1993 Carré d’Art, Nimes, France, 1993 American Air Museum, Duxford, Cambridge, 1997 Commerzbank Headquarters, Frankfurt, Germany, 1997

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Chek Lap Kok Airport, Hong Kong, 1998 Reichstag reconstruction, Berlin, 1999 Great Court, British Museum, London, 2000 Millau Viaduct, France, 2004 Swiss Re, London, 2004 Wembley Stadium, London, 2007 Beijing Airport, 2008 Apple Campus 2, Cupertino, California, 2017

FURTHER READING Davies, Colin High Tech Architecture London Thames and Hudson 1988. Foster, Norman Catalogue: Foster and Partners Munich Prestel 2008. Foster, Norman and Sujdic, Deyan The Great Court at the British Museum London Prestel 2010. Jenkins, David (ed.) Norman Foster: Works (vols 1–6) London Munich New York Prestel 2002–13. Jenkins, David (ed.) On Foster … Foster On London Munich New York Prestel 2000. Pawley, Martin Norman Foster: A Global Architecture London Thames and Hudson 1999. Sujdic, Deyan Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture London Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2010.

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42  Álvaro Siza (1933–) Álvaro Siza is part of a movement that has continued the development of the Modernist tradition by making successful buildings in modifications of its formal language. His work forms a contrast to contemporaries such as Aldo Rossi in avoiding the elaboration of a new theoretical position, as well as refusing the engagement with advanced technologies of others such as Norman Foster. In parallel with architects in such countries as Japan, Finland and Greece, Siza has been associated with the concept of ‘Critical Regionalism’ developed in the 1980s by Kenneth Frampton. The term, suggesting that modern architecture outside the major countries of Western Europe and the United States was developing in a richer, more pluralist direction, was actually originated by Alex Tzonis and Liliane Lefaivre prior to Frampton’s adoption of it: they described it as ‘a bridge over which any humanistic architecture of the future must pass’. This identifies the term as being as much to do with social engagement as it is a regional inflection of style: as Siza’s architecture has developed, it is less easy to see it as having a localized quality and is more evidently a continuation of an international and universal modern architecture, with a body of work characterized by its subtlety, complexity and ambiguity. Fernando Távora, Siza’s teacher at the School of Architecture in Porto from which he graduated in 1955, had evolved his own position as a modern architect in relation to the traditions of northern Portugal. Távora had published research into local vernacular buildings which he valued as displaying valuable qualities of consistency and a lack of stylistic elements, its forms emerging from necessity, interacting with the conditions of the local environment and developed as incremental rather than pure forms. This position rejected the universal nature of Modernism as it had been established in its earlier history, and also saw, as others such as Eric de Maré in Britain and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy in the United States were to do later, that such anonymous work represented a truer ‘functionalism’ than that codified by Modernist conventions. In Portugal, however, this emphasis on local building processes was at least ambiguous, as the right-wing Estado Novo government decreed the use of its own version of a Portuguese architecture, rather than any version of internationalism.

So architects with more democratic sympathies had to make clear that this approach was to develop a new more inclusive approach, rather than a new code of formal rules. In Távora’s own work, this is evident in, for example, the Santa Maria da Feira market (1959) which, while a distinctly modern work, is inflected by the site planning and materiality of local tradition. Siza initially worked with Távora, and his earliest built work comprised a number of private houses in the Porto area. Two small and beautifully located projects on the sea front north of Porto provided an opportunity for more individual expression: the Boa Nova tea house and the Ocean swimming pool on the beach at Leça da Palmeira, which remains one of Siza’s most effective works using simple and minimal means. The pool is built into and formed by the rock formations next to the sea, defined by linear concrete walls and simple timber roofs like a heightened version of the most elementary of shelters. It creates a modulated sequence of spaces as the bather enters and prepares before entering the natural landscape of the rocks, water and sky, but with a toughness that fits its less than idyllic location. His design can be seen as a poetic of its site, and in other more typical urban locations develops a narrative that includes but also transcends a building’s position: the bank at Oliveira de Azemeis fits into a tight corner site with a highly complex, stacked section that relates both to the open volume of its interior and to the mix of buildings that are adjacent. Only after 1974, when a socialist government took power, was the new generation of Portuguese architects were able to develop their work. An urgent need for social housing was addressed by several architects including Siza, and his scheme for the Bouça at Porto provided tall terraced housing on an unpromising site, elements of its design clearly recalling the German and Dutch estates of the 1920s. But a far larger project begun in 1977 on a site adjacent to Évora, originally a Roman city, provided an opportunity to develop a new and more nuanced urban form. The Quinta da Malagueira consists of 1,200 houses designed for a housing co-operative and was worked on by Siza, taking an explicitly political role, parallel to the Seidlungen of Berlin and Frankfurt of the 1920s. Grids of small terraced houses are disposed on the site according to its topography; the narrow streets follow existing pathways and serve to include two originally illegal settlements that are adjacent, as well as some remaining historical fragments. The sixteenth-century aqueduct that runs through Évora and has been integrated into its built fabric provides an unusual model of an urban identifier for Siza. Conduits that provide the houses with water and electricity in the form of an overhead network are given an architectural role that, rather than the more usual network of roads and passageways, gives a unifying if rather haphazard formalism to Malagueira’s modest houses and urban spaces. The further urbanity that would have been provided by a series of public buildings and urban spaces, their forms reminiscent of a Roman settlement, were not built: the design of the houses does echo Modernist models such as Adolf Loos and J.J.P. Oud, but is equally rooted in a southern European sensibility with reference to the ancient world as well as the vernacular forms of the region. Rather than treating the open site as a tabula rasa, Siza has made sensitive

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interventions aiming to give a sense of continuity. As Ellis Woodman has written, ‘Siza’s work at Malagueira invites a reading less as a fixed artefact and rather as one episode in the site’s ongoing transformation. An understanding of the territory’s former occupation is preserved and a framework established within which residents can enact transformations of their own.’ His relationship to a project’s site develops through a subtle interpretation of its qualities, including traces of its history and patterns of use: Siza aims to enhance those patterns through locating each building in its both physical and cultural contexts, although each remains distinctly modern. The Serralves Museum in Porto adjoins an existing villa and garden, but rather than being more evidently contextual, embodies a Modernism without rhetoric and integrates citations of earlier modern work. Its plan resembles a version of Aalto’s later work in its accretive form; the

Image 42.1  Church of Santa Maria, Marco de Canaveses, Portugal 1996

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section makes reference both to Scharoun and to Purist Le Corbusier, while the facade in its unadorned austerity may be seen as making reference to Loos. Loos’s domestic designs received a direct homage in Siza’s early Duarte House, while the curved brick-clad facade of the Library at Aveiro is unmistakably a development of Aalto’s forms. But the synthesis remains Siza’s own: almost all of his projects are individual rather than simply exemplifying an approach he has established. The industrial shed for Vitra and the church at Marco de Canaveses (Image 42.1) have in common their originality in interpreting an established building type and demonstrate a highly developed aesthetic: that the architect transcends the brief with a kind of poetic reading of site is true of few architects building at the end of the twentieth century. Siza’s most often quoted observation, that ‘architects don’t invent anything; they transform reality’, articulates the idea that the search for something completely new is fruitless and that the architect’s role is to understand and transfigure a building’s use and situation. There is a paradox that exists with the modest position he adopts in declaring that a building only lives through its occupation and use, and his work does express an understanding of that, with the contrast of the solid, powerful forms he has designed which transform their contexts and create something evidently original. In extending the precepts of Modernism by a located reading of site, transmuting the understanding of a ground condition from being an empty space to one characterized by traces, Siza incorporates the specific as a new principle. His architecture of whiteness, mute and Loosian, can include both the socially committed building of a community such as Malagueira and the refined cultural institutions in which other late twentieth-century architects have also excelled. Through his often lyrical projects that transform it, Siza is among the most accomplished proponents of an ongoing practice in architecture that has re-established Modernism, standing against both the contemporary engagement with abstract theory and a simple application of historical references.

KEY WORKS – SIZA Ocean swimming pools, Leça da Palmeira, Portugal, 1959 Boa Nova tea house, Matosinhos, Portugal, 1963 Mayor Bank, Oliveira de Azemeis, 1974 Bouça Housing, Porto, 1977 Avelino Duarte House, Ovar, 1985 Rebuilding, Chiado, Lisbon, 1988 Centre of Contemporary Art, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 1993 Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto, 1993 Casa Vieira de Castro, Vila Nova, Portugal, 1994 Vitra factory, Weil am Rhein, 1994 Library, University of Aveiro, 1995 Church of Santa Maria, Marco de Canaveses, Portugal, 1996

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Quinta da Malagueira development, Évora, 1977–2000 Campo di Marte, Venice, 1983–2010 Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, 1997 Portugal Pavilion Expo ’98, Lisbon, 1998 Portugal Pavilion Expo ’00, Hannover, Germany, 2000 Camargo Foundation, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2008 Alhambra entrance project, Granada, 2014

FURTHER READING Castanhiera, Carlos Alvaro Siza: The Function of Beauty London Phaidon 2009. Cianchetta, Alessandra and Molteni, Enrico Alvaro Siza: Private Houses London Thames & Hudson 2004. Frampton, Kenneth Alvaro Siza: Complete Works London Phaidon 2000. Testa, Peter Alvaro Siza Basel Birkhauser 1996. Wang, Wilfried (ed.) Alvaro Siza: Figures and Configurations: Buildings and Projects 1986–1988 New York Rizzoli 1988.

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43  Rem Koolhaas/OMA (1944–)

Image 43.1  Casa da Música, Porto, Portugal 2005

Rem Koolhaas set up OMA, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, in 1975 in partnership with Elia Zenghelis (1937–, a partner until 1987) and in collaboration with Madelon Vriesendorp and Zoe Zenghelis. Through a profile that includes the creation of some of the most original architectural publications as well as powerful imagery and highly inventive buildings, he has some claim to be the most significant architect of the early twenty-first century. He has consistently taken a stance against the prevailing starting point adopted by other architects, in favour of understanding the global cultural and economic changes that others seem to scarcely notice. At first a consciously avant-garde enterprise to develop and publish theoretical projects, OMA has become an international practice designing and building developments at the largest scale. What has been consistent is the polemic and provocative position taken by Koolhaas: as a self-admitted outsider he has paradoxically been very successful, largely through his deft use of the media. Arriving from the Netherlands at the Architectural Association School in London in 1968 Koolhaas has described experiencing a lack of intellectual rigour there and found his later education at Cornell with Oswald Mathias Ungers more inspiring and challenging. His development as a teacher at the Architectural Association in the mid-1970s was as a participant in the remaking of the school to be perhaps the greatest architectural academy of the 1970s and 1980s, under the leadership of Alvin Boyarsky who created a platform for the creation of new ideas – other teachers in this period included Daniel Libeskind, Leon Krier, Dalibor Vesely and Bernard Tschumi, all of whom were to espouse distinct and influential positions in contemporary architectural culture. Koolhaas’s teaching programme with Elia Zenghelis, his former tutor, related in their particular way to the predicament of architecture faced with an existential crisis of established Modernism as well as global economic collapse. The security of the ideology of how modern architecture should be practiced had, for most, vanished, leading to what came later to be named Post Modernism. But, as a radical alternative view to those who moved to engage with pre-modern historical models, the position adopted by Koolhaas and Zenghelis was that the problem with Modernism as it had developed in the years after the Second World War was that it was not ‘modern’ enough. And in particular, what remained of a humanist position, of the aim to make the world a better place and to redeem it through making architecture as expressed by Aldo Van Eyck or Louis Kahn, was rejected as delusional. Rather than taking inspiration from the established leaders of Modernism, OMA developed interpretations of overlooked alternative models, notably based on those of Russian Constructivism, with the specific application in terms of form of work by Leonidov, Lissitzky and Malevich. The chaos and disorder of the ‘culture of congestion’ were seen to form the true condition of the modern world, as explored by Koolhaas in his first publication Delirious New York (1978), towards a possible architecture of intense urbanism. It praised the success and exuberance of Manhattan – unplanned except for its 1811 street grid – over the utopian but highly controlled intentions of the CIAM model of the modern city. Raymond Hood’s stratified Downtown Athletic Club and the animation of popular locales such as the Radio City Music Hall where

Rem Koolhaas/OMA 241

‘the fun never sets’ on their artificiality had had a success a long way beyond the exalted intentions of the high minds of Modernism. OMA projects such as the Welfare Palace Hotel which proposed a hedonistic landscape of towers and gardens made a concluding section to this ‘retroactive manifesto’: it suggested a celebration of, and a more inclusive attitude to the reality of modern urban life, beyond the decentralization, zoning and dogma that formed current practice, albeit with some connection to the earlier texts of Venturi and Scott Brown. Its irony and provocation incorporate a real alternative history and radical thought in a period when far more cautious theories on urban context were being formulated. OMA’s other projects and competition entries made rather more sober proposals for housing in Berlin and new skyscraper forms for Rotterdam, but also include a highly complex entry for the competition for an extension to the historic buildings of the Dutch Parliament, which in its formal organization almost single-handedly invented a new kind of contextualism. Referring to such schemes, the historian Robert Maxwell wrote in 1981 of their current significance: ‘Sensuous, wayward, and episodic … all that strange variety of modern architecture in the days before the Pavilion Suisse defined the canon of rationality … returns now in OMA to haunt us with the possibilities of a future which we had already thought was over.’ Buildings were only realized some years later, following a period of other competitions and Koolhaas’s development of an international teaching profile, which has continued to be an important part of his career. The first, the Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague, was followed by the Rotterdam Kunsthal and the Villa Dall’Ava, outside Paris. The Dance Theatre was a Suprematist composition of elements that kept their distinct form, emphasized by their surface treatment and focusing on a golden cone that acted as both café and box office. Built as a series of temporary exhibition spaces the Kunsthal is an inclined square form, bisected by a ramp through it and with a spiral route for its visitors to follow, revealing a range of spatial differences. Each facade is different, each interior space is defined by a range of materials, from light polycarbonate panels to the stone used on Dutch dikes, tree trunks, steel cross-bracing and black concrete columns, the whole an assortment of ideas that make a surreal but reassuringly Modernist assemblage, with the whole a kind of subverted Miesian box. Working with a consciousness of the tropes of modern architectural culture in the equally inventive Villa Dall’Ava, its design discloses some elements of Villa Savoye: the long windows, its cubic volume but split into two, its piloti irrationally tilted, it is surmounted by an open pool that appears to float. S, M, L, XL, a book of 1,344 pages, set out to document the projects of OMA up to and beyond the date of its publication in 1994, classified according to their size. Within its complex and layered volume produced with the graphic designer Bruce Mau it does far more: there is a running glossary of terms from A to Z and a series of essays by Koolhaas, interspersed with a welter of forceful illustrations from soft porn to car crashes, in a format that despite its bulk is reminiscent of an avant-garde design magazine. The documentation and images of OMA work develop a critical

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practice of representation, overturning the conventions of how a project might be documented: buildings are photographed overlaid with narrative, or – in one case – inhabited by a giraffe. The book was an original in architectural publication comparable in effect to Le Corbusier’s Toward an Architecture, and reflected the newly mediatized condition of the world: it became a model for other architects to attempt to emulate. In one essay, on ‘The Generic City’, Koolhaas writes of the city without qualities: the city which is not noticed, which is everywhere the same, and can perhaps be most clearly seen in the airport: his argument is that ‘identity’– the individuality of a place – is in short supply and disappearing fast. According to Koolhaas, the absolute lack of the kind of qualities in almost all of the built environment with which most architects preoccupy themselves undermines their intentions and denies their ambition to improve the environment – except for a tiny minority who are able to live in or use ‘well designed’ buildings. As he later wrote with heavy irony in Junkspace, architecture disappeared in the twentieth century: ‘We have been reading a footnote under a microscope hoping it would turn into a novel; our concern for the masses has blinded us to People’s Architecture. Junkspace seems an aberration, but it is the essence, the main thing … the product of an encounter between escalator and air conditioning, conceived in an incubator of Sheetrock (all three missing from the history books).’ Despite Koolhaas’s frequent reiteration of the almost hopeless cause of architecture, it may appear inconsistent that he has developed radical new type-forms in designs for many buildings unbuilt, such as the Karlsruhe media centre or Jussieu library projects, and built in the Seattle Public Library and Porto Casa da Música. At Seattle, both the conventions of providing an urban face for the library and the more modern obsession with flexibility are supplanted by a project where a spiral ramp arranges the book collection in a continuous ribbon on the Dewey Decimal Classification system. At Porto, also emphatically designed from the inside out, a continuous route forms the circulation with the main concert hall raised high in the building’s section: sheer glass walls at both ends are contrasted by the plywood cladding of the walls with enlarged wood patterns embossed in gold (Image 43.1). Both are discrete rather than contextual buildings, at the same time avoiding the image-making popular with other architects from Gehry at Bilbao onwards. Koolhaas also consciously rejects the focus on aesthetics and well-wrought detail which are the primary concerns of others: a Modernist banality is often not far away. But as an architect his work expresses a new kind of modernity conscious of but moving from such origins, beyond almost all of his contemporaries. It has been remarked that Koolhaas produces architectural fictions, which begs the question of whether OMA’s built projects are less authentic than those produced with less irony. Even such massive and apparently important buildings as the Beijing CCTV headquarters and the towers of De Rotterdam, the largest building in the Netherlands (Image 0.5), can be interpreted as lacking the high seriousness adopted by almost all architects as justification for their production of designs. Certainly, satire has formed an important part of his work but more profoundly than that his work does not set out

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to implicitly represent ideologies, to be the illustration of intellectually derived theories. As Emmanuel Petit has observed, Koolhaas’s seemingly ironic projects are ‘an antidote to what he saw as the illusions of humanist idealism in which architecture abounded’ and rejected its higher aims to embody worthy abstract values in favour of ‘his own version of anti-representationalism’. Instead, a tradition of modernity, rather than Modernism, has shaped Koolhaas’s consistent position, informed by the cultural relativism of which Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard have been leading exponents. The realities of urban life, its social practices created from within rather than imposed, have been his concern. As the sociologist Georg Simmel had analysed the intimate life of the modern city early in the twentieth century, so perhaps Koolhaas has brought a new realism to architectural discussion of the individual and collective life. A second significant period of Dutch modern architecture after its leading role in the early period of Modernism is centred on Koolhaas’s prominent position: a group including Mecanoo, MVRDV, UN Studio and others developed in OMA’s wake. Koolhaas’s AA student Zaha Hadid, along with later generations he has taught, has taken his work as a starting point and went on to become as prominent as him. Others have criticized his mercurial energy that fails to focus on the making of buildings and instead is sometimes diverted and lost in an evanescent world of media. Koolhaas’s influence has nevertheless been profound in the sense that in the years since the intellectual collapse of Modernism it is his position that has prevailed, rather than more arcane theories based on notions of Deconstruction derived from Jacques Derrida, or indeterminacy derived from Situationism. He has made clear, perhaps more than the most conservative voice, the failure of the humanist model of modern architecture. Like Le Corbusier five decades earlier, Koolhaas has adopted the role of an iconoclastic figure reminiscent of Nietzsche’s superman, and his ironic detachment covers a passion for the role of architecture.

KEY WORKS – KOOLHAAS Delirious New York, 1978 Dutch Parliament, The Hague: competition, 1978 Parc de La Villette Paris: competition, 1983 Netherlands Dance Theatre, The Hague, 1987 Checkpoint Charlie, Friedrichstrasse, Berlin, 1990 Villa Dall’Ava, St Cloud, France, 1991 Karslruhe Media Centre project, 1992 Jussieu Libraries competition, 1993 Kunsthal, Rotterdam, 1993 Euralille, Grand Palais: Lille masterplan, France, 1994 S, M, L, XL, 1995 Educatorium, Utrecht, 1997 Maison à Bordeaux, Bordeaux, 1998

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Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (2001) including Junkspace Central Library, Seattle, 2004 Casa da Música, Porto, Portugal, 2005 CCTV HQ, Beijing, 2009 Wyly Theatre, Dallas, Texas, 2009 De Rotterdam, Rotterdam, 2013 Stock Exchange, Shenzhen, China, 2013 Fundamentals: Venice Biennale, 2014

FURTHER READING Böck, Ingrid Six Canonical Projects by Rem Koolhaas Berlin Jovis Verlag 2014. Gargiani, Roberto Rem Koolhaas/OMA Lausanne EPFL Press 2008. Koolhaas, Rem Delirious New York London Academy Editions 1978: 2nd edn New York Monacelli Press 1994. Koolhaas, Rem Junkspace, with essay by Hal Foster London Notting Hill Editions 2013. Koolhaas, Rem and Mau, Bruce S M L XL New York Monacelli Press 1995: 2nd edn Cologne Taschen 1997. Maxwell, Robert ‘Introduction to New Work by OMA’ in OMA Projects 1979–81 London Architectural Association 1981. Petit, Emmanuel Irony, or the Self-Critical Opacity of Postmodern Architecture New Haven Yale University Press 2013. Yaneva, Albena Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture Rotterdam NAI Publishers 2009.

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44  Daniel Libeskind (1946–)

Image 44.1  Jewish Museum Berlin, 1989–99

Daniel Libeskind reached international prominence through projects of the highest profile that undertook the role of reconciliation and the creation of a memorial for two of the most significant events of the past century – the destruction of Berlin’s Jewish community in the Holocaust, with Libeskind building the Jewish Museum there, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the New York World Trade Center and his plan for the Ground Zero site. The Berlin museum is considered by some to be the most original, inspiring building of the past two decades, while the New York project was eventually to be built by others. But his earlier role had been as a very significant figure in the much smaller circles of those rethinking architecture in the wake of the crisis of Modernism of the 1970s. Libeskind developed an intellectual approach of great sophistication that incorporated an interpretation of the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century with diverse philosophical and literary sources. Profound but hermetic texts led to his production of a new kind of work in architecture and helped to shape an innovative philosophically informed approach. Rather than being the creation or modification of new architectural forms, this approach framed work that examined architecture outside its own practice: its outcome might well be a publication, an installation or a series of drawings. Libeskind studied and practiced music at an advanced level in New York before beginning architecture at the Cooper Union in 1965. The intense didactic programme of John Hejduk involved the production of drawings in the context of geometrical invention, founded on the investigation of type. Such exercises led to Libeskind’s development of projects such as Collage Rebus, which includes a series of complex axonometric drawings related to an interpretation of form based on Cubism: it also led to his later studies with Joseph Rykwert at the University of Essex. Here, an education in phenomenology and hermeneutics, including close readings of Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer, opened a profound interpretative model which had not, hitherto, been part of architectural discourse. Both of these fundamental bodies of influence were aspects of the thought and practice of the twentieth century, but went far beyond the limits of architectural Modernism as it had developed. The cultural intentions of architecture had rarely gone beyond a Positivist remaking of the social sphere, unlike contemporary thought in philosophy or innovative practices in art. Libeskind’s series of drawings Micromegas are recognizably architectural drawings and suggestive of spatial relationships between fragmented forms, but their abstraction is reminiscent of earlier Modernist art, including Lissitzky’s ‘Prouns’. The instability of the surfaces and spaces they depict is driven by a powerful energy: they suggest, in a literal sense, an architectural world that is fractured beyond repair. The later series of twenty-eight intriguing and immaculate drawings in Chamber Works take a different direction in that however uniform, fine and precise are their lines, they do not suggest recognizable space or bear any specific representational quality. Described in the subtitle as ‘architectural meditations’, they most clearly inhabit the world of the architectural drawing and thus serve to disengage the drawing from its role of representing an architectural object. Robin Evans, whose transformative studies of the role of the drawing in architecture have been influential, described them as

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serving to reconfigure the focus of architectural creation – and representing nothing less than the relocation of the practice of architecture from building to drawing. Their fragmentation is not simply of the forms they may potentially suggest, but of the processes of architecture which have been dependent on the architectural drawing but not seen it as the end-work. Such work as this may be interpreted as reclaiming architecture as a practice of art: more than such predecessors as Aldo Rossi, Libeskind firmly locates his practice in relation to a wider and deeper interpretation, a hermeneutic view of the discipline. As Robin Evans wrote, they may also suggest the impossibility of the practice of architecture: ‘Architecture is no longer possible. Once it was, but not now.’ Rather than rediscovering history, Libeskind had re-examined the present; and perhaps this work can be best seen as making a new form of modern architectural culture that refuses both the easy significations of Modernist practice and its aim for secular, humanist goals, in making the world ‘better’. In his essay ‘Symbol and Interpretation’ he proposes a different exploration of architecture, of ‘the deeper order rooted not only in visible forms, but in the invisible and hidden sources which nourish culture itself, in its thought, art, literature, song and movement … history and tradition (are) a body whose memories and dreams cannot be simply reconstructed’. Rather than facing its impossibility, Libeskind expressed an optimism for a differently configured humane architecture, which he could articulate in a series of projects for buildings from the late 1980s onwards. Berlin, or more accurately West Berlin in what was still a divided city, became a fertile ground for new architecture in this period: Libeskind’s ‘City Edge’ housing project, despite winning first prize, remained unbuilt. The first in a series of theoretically elaborate projects for Berlin, its form, an elongated sloping beam spanning and linking several city blocks, is an audacious attempt to reconstruct the forms of urban life that includes a variety of supplementary elements, each with its own narrative. Other Berlin projects included designs for Potsdamerplatz, termed ‘Out of Line’, and Alexanderplatz ‘Traces of the Unborn’, both key sites in the newly reunified city. For Potsdamerplatz, its pre-war commercial heart that had become an empty space intersected by the Berlin Wall, Libeskind proposed an intersection of ten lines, layered in space, that would re-inhabit its void without recourse to the rebuilding of historical forms. The resuscitation of shattered memories generated these separated lines, with differing programmes and functions, that re-formed the centre of the city. This alternative, poetic version of historical reference is significant at a time when, in Berlin as elsewhere, the restoration of historical forms was the dominant, agreed practice in urbanism and provided a far richer sense of meaning. His winning entry for the competition for what became the Jewish Museum gave the opportunity to build a substantial and reflective piece of architecture, which in both formal and programmatic terms deserves to be seen as an original and profound achievement (Image 44.1). In giving the building the name ‘Between the Lines’ a geometrical relationship is its most important forming principle. Defining the structure of the building, one line is straight, but broken into fragments; the other a tortuous, zigzagging line

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that continues indefinitely and organized around the centre which is absent, the void – representing the Jewish Berliners systematically murdered in the Holocaust and a constant but impenetrable presence. Its overall form relates to a conceptual drawing of a distended Star of David, mapping sites of Berlin-Jewish significance; the interior is conceptually dominated by three routes: the route of continuation, the route of exile and the route of annihilation. The fractured but continuing history of Jewish Berlin rises from the deep basement entrance to the exhibited objects of its art and culture: the route of exile leads to a garden of concrete columns housing the roots of towering trees; the route of annihilation, abrupt and short, leads to an extraordinary and powerful space, open yet claustrophobic, high and dark except for a narrow line of light and echoing with the hum of the distant city. The elaborate form and even more elaborate intellectual context of its design may appear an over-indulgence and to remove it from architecture’s more pragmatic task to provide serviceable spaces: but it is a unique building that evokes meaning with an emotional charge. The whole history of the World Trade Center site post-2001, as Rowan Moore has written, has been ‘a chronicle of the uses and misuses of hope’ and asserted that for financial if not political reasons it would inevitably become a corporate and commercial development rather than a memorial to the worst of terrorist acts, leaving only the slightest of traces of Libeskind’s winning plan. His built work after Berlin, of which there has been much, has largely been with institutions, particularly museums, and in each case the design is informed by a narrative to shape its form, meaning and relationship to site, as his earlier projects had been. The War Museum North, for example, is based on the form of the fractured globe, scarcely needing further explanation, while the substantial extension of the Royal Ontario Museum is named ‘the crystal’, because of the way its intersecting, faceted forms are intended to provide a focus for Toronto’s cultural activity. The frequent repetition of the fractured forms seen in earlier drawn projects, and in the Jewish Museum, has become a cliché, even a new banality. This reiteration serves to undermine his earlier achievement, although perhaps may serve instead as a reminder that innovation and success in architecture can scarcely be marked by the number of published buildings that an architect completes, but rather by their larger contribution to its culture: Libeskind’s work may be a true demonstration of Robin Evans’s point made in 1984 about architecture’s relocation from building to a broader base of practice. Along with Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk and Bernard Tschumi, Libeskind became a leader of a new avant-garde practice in architecture engaging with intense aspects of cultural reference. His teaching, particularly as head of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, became, along with his early project work, the most original expression of a newly founded tradition of a deeper Modernist configuration. That it was to some extent misrepresented in the celebrated Museum of Modern Art Exhibition on Deconstructivist Architecture in 1987 is unfortunate: this put together those architects occupied with the making of inventive form, such as Frank Gehry, with those whose work was based on the analysis of architecture’s intellectual and cultural foundations. Interestingly, certain current historians of Modernist architecture such as

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Jean-Louis Cohen scarcely mention Libeskind’s work, but in the larger context of the changes in architecture since Modernism began its process of re-evaluation it stands as an original and enduring achievement.

KEY WORKS – LIBESKIND Micromegas, 1979 Chamber Works, 1983 Three Lessons in Architecture, 1985 ‘City Edge’ project, Berlin, 1987 Jewish Museum, Berlin, 1989–99 Potsdamerplatz project, Berlin, 1992 Alexanderplatz project, Berlin, 1993 Felix Nussbaum Haus, Osnabrück, Germany, 1998 Imperial War Museum North, Trafford, 2001 Danish Jewish Museum Copenhagen, Denmark, 2003 World Trade Center master plan, New York, 2003–10 Denver Art Museum extension, Denver, Colorado, 2006 Royal Ontario Museum extension, Toronto, 2007

FURTHER READING Evans, Robin ‘In Front of Lines That Leave Nothing Behind: Chamber Works’ AA Files 6 May 1984, pp. 89–96. Libeskind, Daniel Between Zero and Infinity New York Rizzoli 1981. Libeskind, Daniel Countersign London Academy Editions 1992. Libeskind, Daniel Jewish Museum Berlin Amsterdam G+B Arts International 2000. Libeskind, Daniel The Space of Encounter London Thames and Hudson 2001. Marotta, Antonello Daniel Libeskind Rome Edilstampa 2007.

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45  Frank Gehry (1929–)

Image 45.1  Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 1991-7

Becoming world famous only after several decades of work in California, Frank Gehry is the architect who most clearly represents the development of an entirely new approach in the architecture of the 1970s and 1980s often referred to as Deconstruction. Expressing fracture and dynamism in form, others including Peter Eisenman and Zaha Hadid may be grouped with him, but Gehry’s buildings, sometimes completely against all existing ideas of architectural composition, are the most extreme. He has been responsible for creating several of the most astonishing projects of the late twentieth century, notably the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which create forceful visual experiences and which seem to be without precedent and

without rationale. They relate, however, to roots in an alternative Modernist architectural history, and also have a close connection with modern and current art practices. These buildings were possible to design and build through advanced computer software and as such were the first full expression of a new digitally generated aesthetic. But his work seen over a longer period shows a wider range of forms and ideas: and certainly he was the most prominent North American architect in the early years of the twenty-first century, however much that position may not reflect the mainstream of American practice. Studying architecture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and at Harvard, Gehry began his own practice in 1962. His early work relates to the local architectural traditions of Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra as well as of timber construction, rather than the European models of Le Corbusier or Mies. In the 1970s, he began to break with the conventions of the timber frame; the Cabrillo Museum is a hybrid form of a collection of rectangular boxes and spiky glazed shapes which suggest Gehry’s developing objective to break down traditional building forms. His own house in Santa Monica begun in 1977 is the most accomplished of his early works, and is still, for some, the most successful of his career: as historian Beatriz Colomina has written, it was ‘the house that built Gehry’, becoming one of the most discussed houses of the later twentieth century. A typical 1920s suburban house on a corner site had been chosen by his wife, according to Gehry, and was subjected to a radical remaking by the architect. The timber frame was exposed and broken open, and the house’s living spaces extended by additional structures using corrugated aluminium, chain-link fencing and plywood in faceted shapes that protrude from its existing volume. Its mutated forms were shocking, but so were the low-grade materials used for a permanent structure, let alone being used to form the residence of a well-known architect. It appeared to be an unfinished building, a work-in-progress: Gehry in fact did a second round of changes beginning in 1991. The house clearly stands in polemical opposition to the pure forms of Modernism as exemplified by Le Corbusier’s villas: the idea of a work lacking finality and avoiding resolution was important to Gehry, and it stands apart, as a radical gesture, from the enduring conventions of architecture. Nevertheless, it can be seen as relating to art practices, including the work ‘Merzbau’ by Kurt Schwitters: the artist reconstructed the interior spaces of a house in Hannover in an ongoing project in the early 1930s, the rectangular spaces deformed and disturbed with layering and projections into a kind of Modernist grotto. A more recent reference is to the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, who fractured, exploded and split buildings – even a suburban house – in a series of works in the 1970s. Gehry, along with Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid and Coop Himmelblau, participated in the Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1988. Curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley this significant show aimed to create a thematic coherence between the disparate work of its contributors, which Wigley described as expressing an ‘architectural dream of pure form disturbed, form (that) has become contaminated’ and

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in which ‘the architect has located inherent dilemmas within buildings’. In a context where the project of Modernism as a conveyor of social concern was perceived to have failed, architecture took a new direction that appeared as the making of form which expressed the opposite of unity and order, in favour of rupture and dislocation of meaning. Gehry exhibited his Santa Monica house and Wigley described its accretions as ‘not imported to the site but (having) emerged from the inside … it is as if the house had always harboured these twisted shapes within it’. The house’s inhabitation was seen to have generated its forms, which makes it closer to Hugo Häring’s model of the house built from the activities within than the stability of a middle-class house plan. Other houses designed by Gehry include the Winton Guest House, a collection of irregular cuboid shapes closely grouped around a contorted central tower, described by him as a composition borrowed from the Italian still-life painter Morandi. The Sirmai-Petersen House has a tall cross-shaped block at the centre and separated bedroom blocks, forming a montage of irregular shapes and outdoor spaces. The unbuilt Lewis House, developed over a six-year period involving collaborations with artists and other architects, generated an extraordinary collection of forms, effectively becoming a research project which served to shape Gehry’s later work. The Vitra Design Museum introduced Gehry’s later approach of designing a collection of connected, collided forms and became his subsequent method: each white-rendered geometrically distinct element of the exterior, without evident relationship to each other, is mirrored in the dynamic interplay of its interior spaces. Gehry remarked that this building was the first to be a literal expression of the free forms of the animated sketch technique he uses to generate designs: the subsequent development of digitally generated forms was to take this much further. CATIA is a computer program initially created for the aeronautical industry and first used in architecture in Gehry’s office. The highly complex forms of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao were made possible by this program, with the design process directly linked to the process of fabrication (Image 45.1). The Guggenheim, a montage of disparate, sinuous, pliable forms apparently in motion, is focused nevertheless on a central atrium: its appearance seems unprecedented but relates to a twentieth-century tradition of expressive architectonic forms, including built and unbuilt projects by Hans Scharoun and Antoni Gaudí. It can also be seen as reflecting its context in a post-industrial urban site, and the river and highways adjacent: galleries of a great variety of size and shape incorporate conventional displays of paintings in orthogonal spaces as well as larger pieces in the soaring asymmetrical volumes which its exterior suggests. The role of the media, principally the published architectural photograph, is particularly powerful in the case of Gehry. Such photogenic buildings as the Bilbao Museum, the Disney Concert Hall and Experience Music Project create an impression way beyond their physical presence through the pages of journals and books. To the Guggenheim has been ascribed the ‘Bilbao effect’: that an extraordinary new building can, by itself, transform the fortunes of an overlooked city, and clearly Gehry himself as the quintessential ‘star architect’ is at the forefront of such image-building.

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He effectively reinvented architecture at the end of the twentieth century with work that was often popular with the public outside the architectural world. His arrant newness has been less controversial than other earlier highly original buildings and spoke to the current mediatized age. The intuitive nature of Gehry’s approach is paramount: his stand against logic and against precedent puts him in the kind of position adopted by an artist, of a highly personal relationship to culture and to natural phenomena. When in the 1980s the Post-Modern rediscovery of Classical forms by architects such as Michael Graves and Philip Johnson was in full flood, Gehry’s ironic response was to propose the fish as a potential origin of form: one far more ancient, 500 million years older than mankind; the body of an animal might provide a suitable fundamental inspiration. Lacking the reflective rationale and ascribed intellectual context adopted by some of his contemporaries, Gehry’s work has consistently emphasized form-making above any other issue: more specifically, the creation of iconic imagery has been what he has best achieved. The over-built exuberance of his work, as well as the lack of a political and social agenda, is a fundamental criticism of his approach, but this may well be replaced by the belief that good architecture inevitably plays a redemptive and affirmative role.

KEY WORKS – GEHRY Davis Studio, Malibu, 1968–72 Cabrillo Marine Museum, San Pedro, California, 1977 Gehry House, Santa Monica, 1977–8 and 1991–4 Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, 1978 Sirmai-Peterson House, Thousand Oaks, California, 1983–8 Norton House, Venice, 1984 Chiat-Day Building, Venice, California, 1985–91 Fishdance Restaurant, Kobe, Japan, 1987 Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, 1987–2003 American Centre, Paris, 1988–94 Lewis House project, Ohio, 1989–95 Vitra Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany, 1989 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, 1991–7 Nationaler-Nederlanden Building, Prague, 1992–6 Weisman Museum, Minneapolis, 1993 Neue Zollhof, Düsseldorf, 1994–9 Stata Centre, MIT, Cambridge, MA, 1998–2004 DG Bank, Berlin, 2000 Experience Music Project, Seattle, 2000 Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, 2014

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FURTHER READING Bletter, Rosemarie Haag The Architecture of Frank Gehry New York Rizzoli 1986. Celant, Germano Frank O. Gehry since 1997 Milan Skira 2009. Dal Co, Francesco and Forster, Kurt W Frank O Gehry the Complete Works New York Monacelli Press 1998. Friedman, Mildred and Lavin, Sylvia Frank Gehry: The Houses New York Rizzoli 2009. Migayrou, Frédéric and Lemonier, Aurélien (eds) Frank Gehry Paris Centre Pompidou 2014. Ragheb, J. Fiona (ed.) Frank Gehry, Architect New York Guggenheim Foundation 2001 essays by Beatriz Colomina, Jean-Louis Cohen, William J. Mitchell and others. Van Bruggen, Coosje Frank O. Gehry: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao New York Guggenheim Museum 1997.

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46  Zaha Hadid (1950–2016)

Image 46.1  MAXXI Museum of the 21st Century, Rome 1998–2010

Zaha Hadid was among the most prominent architects in the world at the time of her death. Her London-based practice had designed and built substantial projects in some forty-four countries and that success was showing every sign of further development. Much earlier, the qualities of the very individual work that she developed from the beginning made it a really significant point in the shifting course of modern architecture, and it emerged at exactly the time when many were saying that modern architecture no longer had relevance, purpose or validity. Working with Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis in practice as OMA and earlier as their student, Hadid established her own inimitable direction, but her architecture went beyond their concerns and

principles of design. Her originality in terms of the invention of architectural form matches the most innovative in modern architecture’s history, and certain of her built projects stand as the realization of that spatial imagination. Modernism, for Hadid, needed to continue to realize its tremendous potential. At the Architectural Association School in London at an early stage of the chairmanship of Alvin Boyarsky, when new and unfamiliar programmes for architecture began to be generated, Iraq-born Hadid studied with Koolhaas and Zenghelis from 1975. The exposure through their teaching to the work of Kasimir Malevich, El Lissitzky and Ivan Leonidov in particular began to bring about a new and exciting vocabulary of forms. The project she did for her fourth year was an almost literal transcription of Suprematism: one of Malevich’s ‘tectonic’ three-dimensional works is converted into a complex and working building proposal for a hotel that bridges the River Thames: for the final year museum project, linear beam-like forms, asymmetrically disposed, are reminiscent of Leonidov’s 1930 proposal for the new city of Magnitogorsk. Her project for the Irish Prime Minister’s residence introduced the dynamic, curved element breaking out of rectilinearity which was to become a frequent motif in her work. This may have had a connection with forms in Kandinsky’s abstraction, behind such abstract shapes were non-European roots, and as Kenneth Frampton was later to suggest, the forms of Arabic script. The possibilities of creating space through formal interventions were expressed in the early project for an apartment conversion at Eaton Place in London: its volume acted as a dynamic landscape and was intersected by elements in three dimensions, with furniture designed as articulated spatial pieces. A dynamism at a far larger scale generated the form of Hadid’s 1983 competition – winning design for The Peak, a residential club on the mountain overlooking Hong Kong, which remains the fullest expression of Hadid’s earlier work and was immediately acknowledged internationally as an astounding architectural project, even if some thought, wrongly, that it was impossible to build. Unbuilt nevertheless, five years later it was exhibited as perhaps the central project in the New York Museum of Modern Art exhibition of Deconstructivist Architecture, which aimed to define a new movement of the 1980s, with Hadid’s work alongside others including Koolhaas: this may now be seen as a quite heterogeneous body of work with very little relation to the central concept of linguistic ‘deconstruction’ derived from Derrida and which Hadid herself rejected. In her project, the rocky site is excavated and reshaped into a rectilinear landscape of polished granite, and into it are inserted four beam forms, depicted as transmuted tower blocks which have flown into the site from the city below. These prismatic forms are configured into a collision: the lower beams house apartments and in the upper two beams a void space is created – the club itself, intersected with diagonal columns, open decks, swimming pool and floating exercise platforms, is placed at differing heights. Above are penthouses and the exclusive apartment of the developer. Described as a ‘social condenser’, the building aims to create a new model of urban living that is separate from but related to the city, participates in its landscape and integrates a range of activities in the way Le Corbusier’s Unité blocks had,

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but in an utterly different and arguably far more modern form. The way the project was represented was as extraordinary as its design: a series of huge paintings were created to visualize its dynamic: images, sometimes perspectives, sometimes axonometrics, simultaneously represent the building’s concept and its realization, and as well as being explorations are an end in themselves. They depict the deconstructed building and a sense of swooping, sliding space: while Constructivist in feeling they resemble none of the painters working in that period. As Hadid has written, fully conscious of the originality of her creation, what is created here represents modernity in a primary sense: ‘The architecture is like a knife cutting through butter, devastating traditional principles and establishing new ones, defying nature but not destroying it.’ Projects for a series of urban sites were to follow, including a block facing Trafalgar Square in London and a narrow site on Kurfürstendamm in Berlin. Such more restricted sites were given a similar level of attention leading to astonishing forms, exploding with compressed energy, and ingeniously integrating a succession of geometrically derived elements, again with a series of extraordinary paintings of their forms. But Hadid’s earliest built work, after numerous unrealized competition successes, moves her approach forward by its materialization. The Fire Station for the Vitra furniture company in Germany is a free-standing building interpreted as an element in a landscape of industrial sheds, creating a layering of dynamically configured screen walls that generate its form and enclose its activities. Its design process is certainly reminiscent of the form-making of Lissitzky or Malevich – the jagged shape of the building and its interior spaces make for an unprecedented spatial experience as it articulates three dimensionally the potential of works of early modern art. During the 1990s significant shifts occurred in Hadid’s work which emerged in built form in the following decade. Its principles of design, starting with the competition-winning project for Cardiff Bay Opera House, were for far more static and less explosive forms than those represented by the Peak competition or Vitra building. Instead, a layering of compacted forms can be seen at Cardiff, in an unbuilt Manhattan hotel project and the built Cincinnati Contemporary Art Centre, but continue the architectural translation of early modernist art. At Cincinnati, a cantilevered geometry of blocks is emphasized by their extension and differentiated materiality: the spatial fluidity of the interior belies the partly Miesian feel of the exterior. Three substantial buildings in Europe marked a shift in the production of major and complex projects at a substantial scale: the dynamic integration of production and administration at BMW in Leipzig and the Phaeno Centre in Wolfsburg, particularly notable for its hybrid roof structure of a deformed grid. MAXXI in Rome, a museum of the twenty-first century, presents a quite different and emphatic form: conceived as a landscape remaking its site, its fluidity, embodying lines of force, creates a kind of continuous surface that tends towards dissolution (Image 46.1). The intention here of intertwining and superimposing interior and exterior spaces, described by Hadid as a ‘field’ of buildings, has created one of her most widely acknowledged works. Among later successful projects the Aliyev Cultural Centre in Baku has an extraordinary folding geometry with a seamless flow that creates and defines a series of public spaces.

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Patrik Schumacher became a partner in the practice in 2002: ‘parametricism’ is Schumacher’s term for the generation of form through the design of computer algorithms, evolved to describe a universal and inclusive principle, and certainly applicable to the work of many other architects including the pioneering work of John Frazer and such contemporary practitioners as Greg Lynn. This principle did not immediately transform Hadid’s conceptual creation of forms, but perhaps has tended to create the conditions for such later projects as the Dubai Opera House or the SOHO towers in Beijing that seem to lack telling realization and could as well be translated into constructed forms of a very different scale, as are the pieces of decorative art or even jewellery that the practice has produced. Joseph Giovannini has written that rather than the plan being ‘the generator’ as in Le Corbusier’s aphorism, ‘Hadid’s new plan was implicitly sectional because the explosion, her force-field, was omni-directional, and therefore radiant and diagonal, not just orthogonal’. The paintings, drawings and models so carefully created are explorations but also represent the materialization of her imagination, and in the earlier work become ends in themselves. Hadid’s drawings invariably represent what are imagined to be the forces and rhythms already in play in the sites and transform them into new forms that develop three dimensionally: her buildings transcend their functions with an abundance of new spatial practices and ensuing experiences. Her work represents an alternative route for modern architecture to take, referring to the plasticity of form seen earlier in the work of Hans Scharoun and Oscar Niemeyer: beyond others in the early twenty-first century she continued a fervent engagement with Modernism as a potential and living tradition. More than her contemporaries, she demonstrated that beyond functionality and technology architecture is a practice of expressive, imaginative art, although despite her great individual successes, the production of extraordinary but symbolically empty iconic forms has more widely been the story of early twenty-first-century architecture.

KEY WORKS – HADID Malevich’s ‘Tektonik’ student project, London, 1976–7 Museum of the nineteenth century student project, London, 1977–8 Irish Prime Minister’s residence competition, Dublin, 1979–80 59 Eaton Place renovation project, London, 1981–2 The Peak Hong Kong competition project, first prize, 1983 Grand Buildings project, Trafalgar Square, London, 1985 Kurfürstendamm office block project, Berlin, 1986 Hafenstrasse project, Hamburg, 1990 Monsoon Restaurant, Sapporo, Japan, 1990 Vitra fire station, Weil am Rhein, Germany, 1994 Cardiff Bay Opera House competition project, first prize, Cardiff, Wales 1995 MAXXI Museum of the twenty-first century, Rome, 1998–2010

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Phaeno Science Centre, Wolfsburg, Germany, 1999–2005 BMW Central Building, Leipzig, Germany, 2001–5 Bergisel Ski Jump, Innsbruck, Austria, 2002 Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2003 Opera House, Guangzhou, China, 2005–10 Issam Fares Institute, Beirut, Lebanon, 2006–14 Aliyev Cultural Centre, Baku, Azerbaijan, 2007–12 Wangjing SOHO, Beijing, China, 2009–14 Olympics Aquatics Centre, London, 2012

FURTHER READING Boyarsky, Alvin ‘Interview with Zaha Hadid’ in Zaha Hadid New York Guggenheim Museum 2006. Hadid, Zaha The Complete Zaha Hadid London Thames & Hudson 2004: 3rd edn 2013 essays Patrick Schumacher, Gordana Fontana Giusti. Hadid, Zaha Planetary Architecture 2 London Architectural Association 1983. Hadid, Zaha Zaha Hadid New York Guggenheim Museum 2006: essays by Germano Celant, Joseph Giovannini, Detlef Mertins, Patrik Schumacher. Racana, Gianluca and Janssens, Manon MAXXI: Zaha Hadid Architects New York Rizzoli 2010. ‘Zaha Hadid 1983/1991’ El Croquis 52 1991 Hadid interview, J L Cobelo text.

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47  Tadao Ando (1941–)

Image 47.1  Lotus (Water) Temple, Awaji, Hyogo 1991

Tadao Ando has developed an international reputation as an architect with a highly individual, refined approach seen as quintessentially Japanese. He also represents a tendency that emerged in the 1980s, which became known as Critical Regionalism: the term, used by Kenneth Frampton in a widely disseminated 1983 essay, saw certain current architecture, including also the work of Álvaro Siza in Portugal and Dimitris Antonakakis in Greece, as having a local inflection in relation to the internationally established tenets of Modernism. It was useful that such architects were clearly in possession not only of talent but of an individual voice: and according to this interpretation, one that was shaped by a conscious and profound relationship with

local cultures of architecture as well as one that could be convincingly interpreted as Modernist. For contemporary critics based in Europe and the United States, it seemed that Modernism had survived and been reinvented by such architects as Ando. Their approach was tectonic – an architecture based on its structural principles – rather than scenographic, in other words without the rhetorical language of Post-Modernism. It questioned, however, the classic Modernist model of the making of architecture as a free-standing object: instead, it emphasized the making of places as well as accentuating the experience of the physical senses. While its position was anti-historicist, re-interpreted vernacular elements were incorporated, and Critical Regionalism emerged at what were described as ‘cultural interstices’, including the fringes of Europe and such countries as Japan. As Fredric Jameson wrote in an essay on Ando, his work showed that modern architecture was ‘able to as it ever was to make places in which modern man can look forward to “living poetically” in some sort of re-pacified coexistence between technology and transition, nature and artifice, poetry and utility’. This statement does demonstrate clearly what Ando has been seen to achieve in his extensive body of work in both Japan and beyond, in his creation of a poetically inflected architecture emerging from Modernist tradition and infused with a Japanese sense of space. Ando is unique among architects prominent in recent years in being completely self-taught: he neither attended any school of architecture nor was apprenticed to an established architect. Instead, his extensive reading, and travels through Europe, Asia and the United States looking at architecture, stood in for an education, supported by an unusual measure of self-belief. He has written of the ‘unforgettable impact’ of seeing Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye for the first time, its powerful presence and his realization that it was the product of the architect’s reason: he asserts his understanding that real architecture was invariably the concretization of a conceptual process. After other design commissions, he opened his own architectural office in 1969. The Sumiyoshi row house in Osaka is often cited as the key to understanding his approach, largely consistent in the decades that have followed. For Ando, the challenge was to create rich spaces, animated by light, within a strictly geometrical composition, using the single material of reinforced concrete on a tiny site of 3.3 m by 14 m. Inserted into an ordinary Japanese city street of two storey houses built largely of timber, it has an arresting, utterly silent facade, with no windows and a single entrance doorway. Adolf Loos’s aphorism that a house should be mute on the outside and disclose its richness only on the inside seems relevant: the entrance leads into a courtyard open to the sky and weather, and here, a simple geometrical composition divided into three parts creates a rich spatial experience. It brings nature into the heart of the house, transforming the domestic life within. As Ando was to write in 1986, ‘It is important to discover what is essential to human life … an architectural space, stripped of all excess and composed simply from bare necessities is “true” and convincing because it is appropriate and satisfying … the employment of minimal symmetrical compositions and limited materials

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constitutes a challenge to contemporary civilisation.’ Using the slightest means and the aesthetics of absence a powerful and effective space is created by walls that are silent. The particularly hermetic nature of this house is unique in Ando’s work, but the significance of the wall remains paramount as the dominant component of his architecture. Unusually, they are not necessarily there to divide space but provide a powerful presence, not needing embellishment: they are there to shape the users’ experience, to enhance and form it. The immaculate finish of a concrete wall in an Ando building takes the finish of béton brut to a new level, often seen as typically Japanese in its refinement. The smooth concrete surface is the result of careful manipulation of the timber moulds, so there is no damage that needs to be repaired and no chamfering of the corners: the surfaces are polished and glazed, giving them a slight sheen which paradoxically makes these massive concrete walls seem light, almost immaterial. Three small religious buildings built between 1988 and 1991 are among his most successful works: the Church on the Water, the Church of the Light and the Lotus Temple. In these modestly scaled projects, powerful spaces are created with apparently minimal means: in the first, the simple form of the building of two squares looks out, in an almost theatrical effect, on to a constructed lake and landscape beyond. The rectilinear box of the Church of the Light is dominated by the rays of light that come through the narrow cruciform shape at the eastern end, the otherwise dark interior is shaped by their movement through the day, giving the light a powerful and evidently spiritual role in shaping, even dematerializing, the experience of the space. But it is built on a small oddly shaped site, close to a road in the middle of a built-up suburban area and so restricting the glazing of the church was also essential: its orientation to the light is ingenious as well as poetic in its effect. The Lotus Temple is hidden: two walls, one straight and one curved, have to be passed through to reach the space of a tranquil lotus-filled pond (Image 47.1). The temple is underneath the pond, reached by a staircase that descends through its centre and leads to an ambulatory around the space of the temple itself, full of diffused light. In these projects, potent architectural effects are created, with understated material expression and using the effects of light: each evokes the sense of time, through the visitors’ experience of entering and inhabiting these sacred spaces. Of the many larger projects built over the period from the 1990s onwards, the Naoshima Art Museum and Museum of Wood at Muraoka are particularly effective in their sense of creating a site, of ‘place making’ in expansive open landscapes. The use of geometry predominates with typically circular forms, linear routes and spiral ramps, platforms connecting building elements, repeated in different configurations. In each, too, there is a sense of Ando carefully framing nature in his work: the experience of the natural world is transformed through the architecture he has made. His work in the Muraoka Museum, like other of his buildings constructed in wood, is interesting in that the visual forms of the buildings are of necessity completely different, using timber with the craftsmanship and unadorned articulation of the material more usually seen in his reinforced concrete structures.

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In the great expansion of his office of more recent date, Ando’s buildings have shared the same material, detailing and vocabulary of forms: his immaculately finished concrete walls have made too many appearances, and sometimes the specifics of site and location, such as in the large complex and park at Awaji Yumebutai, seem unresolved. A more dynamic vocabulary of forms has appeared in such later buildings as the 20/21 Gallery in Tokyo and the Art School in Monterrey, moving away from his consistent model of the static building animated by time and movement. Ando’s roots are in European Modernism: his ideology and practice are shaped by an understanding of and sympathy with much of the architecture made in its early period. But these are leavened by a profound connection with the traditional sukiya architecture of Japan, its simplicity, humility and understated materiality. As Tom Heneghan has written, ‘The most powerful influence in his work (is) the traditional architecture of his own country’, but rather than traditional forms … ‘the ethereal aspects whereby light and shade, time and season, are the principal components of the user’s experience.’ The form of buildings seems to be there in order simply and only to create space, or in the Japanese term ma, space for an enriched human experience. In his practice, architecture is brought down to apparently simple forms, a reduced but sophisticated aesthetic that creates sometimes spellbinding buildings that have worldwide appeal, not least as they seem to be created outside the social and political constraints of the every day.

KEY WORKS – ANDO Sumiyoshi-Azuma House, Osaka, 1976 Koshino House, Ashiya, 1983 Church on the Water, Shimukappu, Hokkaido, 1988 Church of the Light, Ibaraki, Osaka, 1989 Museum of Literature, Himeji, Hyogo, 1991 Lotus (Water) Temple, Awaji, Hyogo, 1991 Japan Pavilion Expo’92, Seville, Spain, 1992 Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Kagawa, 1992 Vitra Seminar House, Weil am Rhein, Germany, 1993 Museum of Wood, Muraoka, Hyogo, 1994 Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, USA, 2002 4 x 4 House, Kobe, 2003 20/21 Design Sight, Roppongi, Tokyo, 2007

FURTHER READING Baek, Jin Nothingness: Tadao Ando’s Christian Sacred Space London Routledge 2009.

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Blaser, Werner Tadao Ando: Architecture of Silence Basel Birkhäuser 2001. Dal Co, Francesco Tadao Ando 1995–2010 Munich Prestel 2010. Dal Co, Francesco Tadao Ando Complete Works London Phaidon 1995. Frampton, Kenneth Tadao Ando: Light and Water New York Monacelli 2003. Hunter, Matthew (ed.) Tadao Ando: Conversations with Students New York Princeton Architectural Press 2012. Jameson, Fredric ‘Tadao Ando and the Enclosure of Modernism’ Architecture New York May/June 1994, pp. 28–33. Pare, Richard (photographer) and Heneghan, Tom The Colours of Light: Tadao Ando Architecture London Phaidon 1996.

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48  Herzog and De Meuron (1950–) (1950–)

Image 48.1  Railway signal box, Basel, Switzerland 1997

Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron formed a practice in Switzerland in 1978. Their work in the 1990s was highly distinctive and became widely influential, seeming to shape a new architectural direction in an aesthetic refinement of Modernist forms. In the twenty-first century the scale of the practice changed to become one of the most high profile internationally and major projects with a particularly wide range of forms were recently completed in London, New York and many other cities. Both architects trained at ETH School in Zurich and were influenced by Aldo Rossi whose teaching introduced an interest in the historical urban fabric, as well as suggesting a more complex design process than the Bauhaus-influenced curriculum of the school. Under the earlier leadership of Bernhard Hoesli, it had been based on both the rational processes of the ‘new building’ and a fundamental reading of architecture as expressing social responsibility. Herzog and de Meuron were to become the foremost members of a group that included Roger Diener and Marcel Meili, who were to exemplify a distinctly Swiss architectural approach, repudiating the prevailing interpretations of Modernism and repositioning architecture as a practice of art. Highly restrained in manner and engaging with materials as an artist might do rather than in the manner of architectural tectonics, their work was often described as minimalist. The appellation of ‘minimalist’ is applied to such artists as Donald Judd and Robert Morris: Herzog and de Meuron were concerned with architecture that is drained of any trace of subjectivity, designing neutral, geometric forms. Like comparable work in art, they argued that architecture should have its own sense of the authentic and not be dependent on any referential framework. The writing of Rossi engaged intensely with the historical fabric of the city, to read and reinterpret forms and typologies and to recognize the role of urban landmarks. But Herzog and de Meuron were, like others of their generation in Switzerland, more engaged with a response to the far less loaded urban landscape of the suburb, the industrialized zone and the periphery: rather than a historic typology to be discovered, they developed a response to the forms and fabric of everyday life. As Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown had written with a kind of new realism, ‘Main Street is almost all right’, so too an anti-utopian sense, rejecting the Modernist search for the ideal, informed this wider approach. The ordinary and the every day could be the foundation for a new architecture. Their early built architecture in the 1980s and early 1990s is extraordinary not least in that it is so mute: there is no figurative or metaphorical quality to their impeccably detailed facades, whether built in copper, cement or stone cladding. Neutral surfaces and industrial materials are used in such projects as the Ricola warehouse building in Laufen which is expressed simply as a facade that covers, but also reveals, the standardized structural frame. ‘Eternit’ fibre cement panels are carefully articulated and graded so they are larger at the top than the bottom and make the building appear as an interpreted, heightened image of a mass-produced industrial shed. Their signal box at Basel is clad in copper strips, apparently inappropriate for such an ordinary structure, although the material has a functionality to protect the electronic equipment it covers (Image 48.1). Despite its height of six storeys the building

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appears as a scaleless, mysterious box-object, while one of its minimal articulations is that the copper strips are subtly twisted at certain points to admit daylight. Herzog and de Meuron’s focus was on the making of the object rather than concerns with context or programme. They could be said to be making objects of art: their aim was to create an architecture which had a relation to the culture from which it had arisen at the level of an ideological and conceptual basis, like an artwork. At the most fundamental level they stood against the easy formulation and figuration of the then-prevailing pastiche-like facades of Post Modernism. Building for them was primarily about thought: in this they contrast with another recent Swiss tradition, exemplified by Peter Zumthor, of building based on craft, on the refinement of the practical process of making. A different kind of materiality was, however, at the centre of their approach: one of their avowed influences from art practice involved the artist Joseph Beuys, whose revisiting of the question of material had been to emphasize what had been supressed in the modern world – material related to emotion, the spiritual and its role in ritual. Herzog and de Meuron wrote in 1992 that ‘the reality of architecture is not built architecture. An architecture creates its own reality outside the state of built or unbuilt and is comparable with the autonomous reality of a painting or a sculpture. The reality of which I speak is not the real building, the tactile, the material. Certainly we love this tangibility, but only in relationship to the whole work. We love its spiritual quality, its immaterial value’. The simplicity of primary volumes remained in their work as it developed through the 1990s, redolent of the artworks that were a powerful reference. The mute material surface was transformed by the application of ornament in certain buildings, for example the leaf pattern subtly imprinted on the facade of a second Ricola warehouse at Mulhouse. At Eberswalde School, in a collaboration with the artist Thomas Ruff, repeated photographic images of historical memories were imprinted on its concrete panels. But in other buildings the intrinsic qualities of their varied material form, subjected to a tectonic rigour, create a powerful and evocative effect, from the encased stone of the Dominus Winery to the limpid glazing and matte aluminium of the Goetz Gallery. Herzog and de Meuron’s success in the 1994 competition for the new Tate Modern Gallery in London established their international reputation, and also represented a significant new direction in their work. It left almost unchanged the existing fabric of the monolithic brick block of the former power station which was its site, and insertions into it, such as metal work and floors, had a robustness fitting an industrial structure rather than the expectation of how an art gallery might be detailed. A precisely articulated light box is built above the structure of the towering brick walls: half of the interior space is left as an open volume, capable of housing the largest installations but which also emphasizes the public life of the building as a social space. In its reuse of a powerful landmark, an industrial counterpart to the nearby St Paul’s Cathedral, it is reminiscent of the ongoing life of a building admired by Rossi and analysed in Architecture of the City: at the same time it perhaps represents an acknowledgement that the optimism of making an entirely new building, and erasing the site’s history, would be an inappropriate gesture.

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The practice grew after its completion in 2000 and expressive, non-rectilinear forms began to be used, abandoning what Herzog and de Meuron were later to describe as the ‘Protestant zeal’ of their early work. Some, such as the Schaulager storage building, are an ingenious composition of opaque forms, in contrast to the Prada store in Tokyo which is formed of a transparent and highly articulated structural grid: the purism of the earlier work has gone, but almost all have a clarity of form, materiality and intention. However heterogeneous the forms designed they are subject to tectonic rigour and control, but their communication is surely no longer at the level of an art object and instead becomes a consumerist architecture of image. The high point of Herzog and de Meuron’s work remains their highly rigorous thought and impeccable realization before the practice’s great expansion. Their influence was profound in the 1990s and, following this earlier period, a younger generation of Swiss architects such as Valerio Olgiati have had great recognition in recent years. In Britain, the work of Herzog and de Meuron contributed to the development of an architectural tendency of which Caruso St John are the foremost practitioners, its precepts also relating to the work of British architects Tony Fretton and, earlier, Alison and Peter Smithson. The valuing of the ordinary and the every day and its transformation into art, and at the same time the repudiation of the high idealism of established Modernism, are articulated in their approach. And a more diffused influence can be seen that has made their kind of work supplant the rhetoric of Post Modern form with something far less expressive, quiet but radically original.

KEY WORKS – HERZOG AND DE MEURON Ricola Warehouse, Laufen, Switzerland, 1987 Stone House, Tavole, Italy, 1988 Goetz Collection, Munich, Germany, 1992 Ricola Warehouse, Mulhouse, France, 1993 Railway signal box, Basel, Switzerland, 1997 School, Eberswalde, Germany, 1997 Dominus Winery, Napa Valley, California, 1999 Tate Modern Gallery, London, 2000 St Jakob-Park Stadium, Basel, Switzerland, 2001 Laban Dance Centre, Deptford Creek, London, 2003 Prada, Tokyo, Japan, 2003 Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation, Basel, 2003 Forum Building, Barcelona, 2004 University Library, Cottbus, Germany, 2004 M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, California, 2005 Olympic Stadium, Beijing, China, 2008 House of Culture, Basel, Switzerland, 2010 Elbe Philharmonie, Hamburg, 2016 Tate Modern extension, London, 2016

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FURTHER READING Davidovici, Irina Forms of Practice: German Swiss Architecture 1980–2000 Zurich GTA 2012. Mack, Gerhard Herzog and de Meuron: Complete Works vols 1–4 Basel Birkhäuser 1997–2008. Ursprung, Philip (ed.) Herzog and de Meuron: Natural History Zurich Lars Muller 2005. Wang, Wilfried Herzog and de Meuron Basel Birkhäuser 1992: 3rd edn 2000 including Herzog and de Meuron The Hidden Geometry of Nature. Zurich, Lars Muller 2002 Including essays by Kurt Forster, Robert Kudielka and others.

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49  Peter Zumthor (1943–) Peter Zumthor is an architect admired by many of his peers in the early twenty-first century. His achievement is the antithesis of that of the large commercial, international practices that have come to dominate contemporary architecture; it also provides an illustrative contrast to the innovative and brash form-making undertaken by many of the profession’s leaders. Its modest scale suggests a contrasting model of architecture based on working on relatively few projects, often in his native Switzerland; it speaks through a refined use of materials and embodies a rooted sense of tradition. Zumthor makes clear in his poetic texts on architecture that his work is about feeling, about memory and about the sensuous effects that it creates, which chimes with more widely felt concerns with a subjective, experiential understanding of architecture. After an apprenticeship in cabinet making, Zumthor trained at the Basel School of Design and also at the Pratt Institute in New York. In contrast to the Modernist architectural education he had received, he later utilized traditional techniques as a conservation architect in Switzerland, and set up his own practice in 1979. His experience as a craftsman directly working with materials led to a distinct kind of architectural practice based on the processes of making, but his work was also shaped by the thought of Aldo Rossi who taught at the ETH School in Zurich. Zumthor has recalled that Rossi’s A Scientific Autobiography (1981) introduced him to the significance of the history of architecture and of personal memory. Rossi had underlined architecture’s essential identity as a pre-existing language of form: Zumthor realized that history, underplayed in his own education, might be seen as a living continuum and as a source of influence. There were very few architectural problems for which a solution had not already been found, and this historical sense is one of the informing principles of his work. His emphasis on the evocative, personal memory as a fundamental starting point is reiterated in his writing: in ‘A Way of Looking at Things’ (1988) he writes of the memory from childhood of the feeling of a door handle at his aunt’s house which provided ‘a special sign of entry into a world of different moods and smells. I

remember the sound of the gravel under my feet, the soft gleam of the waxed oak staircase. I can hear the heavy front door closing behind me as I walk along the dark corridor and enter the kitchen, the only really brightly lit room in the house’. Other current architects including Steven Holl and Juhani Pallasmaa also relate to a phenomenological reading of architecture as bodily experience, but perhaps only Zumthor attempts in his work to literally recreate a similar sequence of sensations as described in such recollections as this. But a project for him must be a totality, not only a series of elements, and designed so the inside and outside are a unified whole. In almost every building one dominant material is used, and timber is used in highly distinctive ways in two of his most significant early projects built in the 1980s. The Chapel at Sumvitg is built in a valley in the mountainous landscape of Graubünden in eastern Switzerland. A boat-like building, its roof resembling an upturned hull, is hung with larch-wood shingles and constructed with a timber frame set into a steep slope: the interior wall is painted silver and stands outside the line of timber supports. Lit by windows in a strip at the top of the walls, the clarity and precision of its unusual structure give a dramatic quality to this tiny space. The meticulous and refined use of timber is seen in another early project, a lightweight framework providing protection for the archaeological remains of three Roman buildings at Chur. Conceived as a kind of abstract reconstruction of the buildings’ volumes, it represents the forms of memory and displays architectural complexity, its apparently simple form suppressing the detail of construction. Facades of laminated wood with a steel frame remove the need for intermediate columns, but appear as simple as the walls of vernacular farm buildings. Zumthor declares, ‘I think the real core of all architectural work lies with the act of construction … when concrete materials are assembled and erected … it becomes part of the real world.’ His architectural intention is to create a series of events and sensations at all scales of a building, from seeing it located in a landscape to the feeling of a handrail, to a sequential experience of spaces with different qualities in terms of their scale, how they are lit and the materials that form them. This is seen in the admittedly scenographic, seductive and almost theatrical quality of his best-known work, the Thermal Baths at Vals. An addition to an existing hotel in a mountain valley, this 1996 building may appear older than the hotel built in 1960. Its monolithic form is elemental, perhaps ageless, its interior reminiscent of Roman and eastern bath houses. It is built of local banded gneiss stone, and the interior is a cavernous sequence of spaces hollowed out of a monolithic block, defined by strict orthogonal forms but sensually enriched by the constant and restrained presence of light and deep shadow. This is enhanced by the materials used: bronze doors and handrails, leather curtains, mahogany and terracotta. Intended to provide a series of experiences of hot and cold, dark and light, Zumthor has described its design: ‘We dreamed of a kaleidoscope of room sequences affording ever new experiences … Like walking in a forest without a path …’ Its precision of detailing and inventiveness in form make it unlike any other modern building and, overall, it engenders a very particular and primal experience of space.

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Zumthor’s design of the Kolumba museum built within a tight medieval street pattern in the centre of Cologne is also based on leading the visitor through a sequence of spaces. It incorporates the fragmented parts of existing buildings, including the remains of a bombed-out church, remnants of Roman wall and a chapel built in 1950 but is not simply a polite and contextual insertion of new elements (Image 49.1). Unusually for a contemporary architect working with an historical fabric, he creates a new unified form rather than making his addition in some way distinct. The exterior of soft grey bricks, specially fabricated and reminiscent of Roman bricks in their proportion, brings together existing stone and brick walls, and the load-bearing walls are in part perforated to bring atmospheric, diffused light to the inside. A secluded open courtyard is contrasted with a large enclosed volume which covers the site’s excavations, described as a ‘memory landscape’, intersected with slender columns that support the main exhibition spaces on the upper floors. A narrow, lofty staircase

Image 49.1  Kolumba Diocesan Museum, Cologne, Germany 2007

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leads to a rich variety of spaces – each one of sixteen is different in its proportions, lighting and wall treatment – and includes a reading room with highly figured walnut cladding, which contrasts with the muted materiality of the galleries. The building succeeds as a complex piece of reconstructed urbanism, as a place to experience art and as an exemplar of profound, inventive architecture. For Zumthor, making architecture is a transcendent act, beyond the prerequisites of technical and historical knowledge. It is the intensely personal work of the architect, with at least hints of the sacred. His description of the kind of architecture he values can also be applied to his own achievement: ‘The presence of some buildings has something secret about it. They seem simply to be there … they give the impression of being a self-evident part of their surroundings.’ Thus a poetic of space, distilling and personalizing a language of form, that engages both the historical sense and the haptic, is the accomplishment of his best work. But in its refinement it stands apart from the economic and social reality that almost all other architects contend with. As Irina Davidovici has written, he appears to be ‘a Prospero self-exiled from the urban world, yet surrounding himself with art, music and poetry’, standing apart from contingent use, conflict and pragmatism. In his perhaps unique practice, Zumthor is, however, an architect engaged with Modernism, not its rejection. The concern with the specific place and particular design solution, as well as an engagement with the essential qualities of historical forms, has been seen since the 1950s in the work of such architects as Alison and Peter Smithson and Louis Kahn. The particular and identified are emphasized and articulated in Zumthor’s work, creating a modern architecture that can be seen as a highly successful realization of sophisticated and individual ideas in design, poetically responding to site, use and brief and making something exceptional in its quality.

KEY WORKS – ZUMTHOR Shelters for Roman archaeological site, Chur, Graubünden, Switzerland, 1986 Atelier Zumthor, Haldenstein, Graubünden, Switzerland, 1986 Saint Benedict Chapel, Sumvitg, Graubünden, Switzerland, 1989 Art Museum, Chur, Graubünden, Switzerland, 1990 Gugalun House, Versam, Graubünden, Switzerland, 1994 Thermal Baths, Vals, Graubünden, Switzerland, 1996 Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Vorarlberg, Austria, 1997 Topography of Terror, International Exhibition and Documentation Centre, Berlin, partly built, later demolished, 1997 Swiss Pavilion EXPO 2000, Hannover, Germany, 2000 Bruder Klaus Chapel, Wachendorf, Germany, 2007 Kolumba Diocesan Museum, Cologne, Germany, 2007 Los Angeles County Museum of Art: project 2010– Steilneset Memorial for the Witch Trials, Vardø, Norway, 2012 (with Louise Bourgeois)

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FURTHER READING Davidovici, Irina Forms of Practice: German Swiss Architecture 1980–2000 Zurich GTA 2012. Durisch, Thomas (ed.) Peter Zumthor 1985–2013 Buildings and Projects (5 vols) Zurich Schiedegger and Spiess 2014. Zumthor, Peter Atmospheres Basel Birkhauser 2006. Zumthor, Peter Therme Vals Zurich Scheidegger & Spiess 2007 texts by Sigrid Hauser and Peter Zumthor. Zumthor, Peter Thinking Architecture Baden Lars Müller 1998. Zumthor, Peter Works: Buildings and Projects 1979–97 Basel Birkhauser 1998.

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50  Kengo Kuma (1954–)

Image 50.1  Nezu Museum, Tokyo 2009

Kengo Kuma engages with the history of Modernism and of his own architectural culture in Japan, producing a particular synthesis that differs from other contemporaries such as Kazuyo Sejima and Shigeru Ban. His principal preoccupation, frequently reiterated in his published writing, is the paradox of architecture as ‘anti-object’. This idea can be seen as reactive, standing against a culture of architecture that prizes the perfected isolated object, exemplified, for example, by the work of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid. Instead, Kuma emphasizes that architecture can be a continuum of site and building, outside and inside, and argues that this is, after all, how a piece of architecture is

experienced. Further, in a larger context his work can be seen as representative of a more universal current concern with materiality and adopting the anti-rhetorical position that can be traced back to the Smithsons and even Adolf Loos. Material concerns, rather than an intellectually derived position, are what originate his architecture. In his essay on Bruno Taut’s Hyuga house, built in Japan in 1936, Kuma describes the contrasting work of classic Modernist architects, notably Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, as being deliberately designed as detached, coherent, objects to be photogenic and therefore effective in the published media. For him, Taut’s house has a more subtle relationship to its site: Kuma distinguishes the idea of architecture as product of an evident process utilized by the architects of De Stijl, Constructivism and in particular by Taut, from the dominant practice of Modernism. Taut’s experience of Japan led to a particular understanding of its traditional architecture: Kuma describes the architect’s reaction to the Katsura Palace and garden in Kyoto, where he ‘encountered a beautiful form of connection between consciousness and matter. Nothing in the Katsura garden could be called an object’. For Kuma, the architecture of interrelationships, conditioned by the sequencing of experience, stands against the model of Modernism seen in most contemporary Japanese work from Kenzo Tange onwards: ‘Modernism set out to connect time and space, but ultimately managed only to create objects that used an abundance of glass … the result was merely another form of object.’ The emphasis on material in Kuma’s work – in its variety, using timber, bamboo, adobe, steel and stone – is to use it as his starting point, rather than creating an architecture predicated on its image. He makes it also part of a perceptual process: he refers to an architecture of ‘particles’, in which a building’s image may be fragmented and can ‘appear transparent and weightless one moment and opaque and massive the next’. The house project ‘Water/Glass’ might appear similar to the architecture of Mies, being a transparent box between the flat plane surfaces of floor and roof: but by using louvres, he ‘particlised’ the glass of the roof to break down its mass, making its materiality ambiguous. Kuma refers to the German philosopher-scientist Gottfried Leibniz who proposed that the universe was formed of individual particles which he named monads, distinguished by their irreducible simplicity, and Kuma asserts that ‘we must continue to shun the stability, unity and aggregation known as the object’. For him, this relates to the visual perception represented in Impressionist painting, perhaps most obviously the Post-Impressionist Georges Seurat, but it also clearly connects to the contemporary architecture of Toyo Ito, whose approach is explicitly to break down finite forms in his work. The Observatory at Kiro-san was made ambiguous in a different way, by being buried in the ground and seen only as a single narrow slit in the hillside. Thus, it reverses the idea of the observatory, with what would be expected to be seen becoming the act of seeing, turning into a different kind of anti-object. The cultural significance of the Noh Stage at Toyoma manifests Kuma’s approach in its rethinking of the form of the stage for this most characteristic of Japanese theatre arts: rather than the Western-style enclosure adopted by Noh theatres built from the late nineteenth century onwards, in its openness to nature it regains the relationship to the space created between the stage

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and audience. Its timber structure includes a fragmented screen between the building and the town, aiming to create a continuum with the town and forest beyond. A tea pavilion for a hotel adjacent to the Great Wall of China is a composition of very different walls of immaculately formed bamboo that become a series of filters with light and air passing through, while a radically different kind of wall as filter is created with an urban building in Shanghai, Z58 Zhongtai with a facade of vegetation in stainless steel planters that becomes a threshold of white noise as water runs down over its uneven surfaces. Japanese vernacular forms appear in his work, often with a double-pitched roof or a primary emphasis on the enclosing wall. At the Nezu Museum in Tokyo, its overall form and site planning have echoes of traditional building and landscape garden formation, the building is framed in steel with a overhanging roof and the transition space from street to building reflects the form of an traditional engawa formed both of bamboo planting and of bamboo cladding (Image 50.1). Kuma uses more primitive materials in rural contexts, such as the museum for an ancient wooden Buddha at Shimonoseki built in adobe with soil from the site made into unfired bricks. The Marche Yasuhara building in Shikoku introduces thatching not on the roof but on the facade, relating to the form of traditional Cha-Do tea houses in the region. Highly contrasting is the Oribe tea house based on the amorphous shapes of tea bowls by Furuta Oribe and made of white corrugated plastic in layers. With its back-lit plastic floor and diffuse light it can appear solid or transparent: this amorphous, evanescent form is one more literal variation of Kuma’s aim to make architecture that can disappear. What many of his projects embody is an exterior that becomes capable of transforming in diverse ways and depend on its perception: a building may effectively disappear, or at least have an ambiguity in its presence. A further fundamental theme is that the emphasis on the architecture of the floor, of inhabited space, relates also to the Japanese tradition of defining interior space by the tatami mat: an existential space, as can be seen in the Water/Glass house and many later projects. Such a phenomenological approach relates Kuma’s work to that of such contemporary figures as Peter Zumthor and Steven Holl, and perhaps the consequent sense of architecture as theatricalized, where experience is stage-managed. His materiality has an important role in this: the wide variety of materials and the unconventional way in which they are utilized makes for a series of extraordinary and original buildings. But, finally, Kuma aims for a quiet architecture that will become part of life and the environment in which it sits. As Juhani Pallasmaa has written, ‘Kuma’s buildings … enable us to become actively aware of the subtleties of the seasons, weather, light and human activities. Through repetitious patterns he creates hypnotisingly monotonous surfaces that highlight materiality and evoke subtle and changing sensations of transparency, reflection and levitation. Instead of making formal statements, he creates atmospheres that condition perceptions and feelings.’ Kuma is also at the forefront of using a wide variety of materials not only in the ways that they are traditionally used but stretching and innovating their possibilities, by making stone walls with properties of transparency, for example. His work, which can now be seen as a worldwide rather than Japanese phenomenon, does take for granted the context

278 Key Modern Architects

of historical Modernism as a revolution that will not be reversed: his achievement in subtleties of material and invention in form represents something of a return to tradition. He is concerned with the play of light and with abstract form, in ways related to early Modernism: and in a way representative of his generation he engages with the local and particular in a triangulation of nature, culture and time.

KEY WORKS – KUMA Kiro-San Observatory, Yoshiumi, Ehime, 1994 Water/Glass House, Atami, 1995 Noh Stage, Tome-gun, Miyagi, 1996 Kitakami Canal Museum, Miyagi, 1999 Hiroshige Museum, Bato-Machi, Tochigi, 2000 Nasu History Museum, Nasu-gun, Tochigi, 2000 Stone Museum, Nasu-gun, Tochigi, 2000 Great Bamboo Wall House, Beijing, 2002 Museum for Wooden Buddha, Shimonoseki, 2002 Oribe Tea House, temporary pavilion, 2005 Z58 Zongtai Box, Shanghai, 2006 Nezu Museum, Tokyo, 2009 Glass/Wood House, New Canaan, 2010 Marche Yusuhara, Shikoku, 2010 Museum of Wisdom, Chengdu, China, 2011 Yusuhara Wooden Bridge Museum, Takaoka-gun, 2011 Asakusa Tourist Centre, Tokyo, 2012 Victoria and Albert Museum, Dundee, 2018

FURTHER READING Bognar, Botond Kengo Kuma: Selected Works New York Princeton University Press 2005. Bognar, Botond Material Immaterial: The New Work of Kengo Kuma New York Princeton University Press 2009. Buntrock, Dana Materials and Meaning in Contemporary Japanese Architecture London Routledge 2010. Casamonti, Marco Kengo Kuma Milan Motto 2007. Frampton, Kenneth Kengo Kuma Complete Works London Phaidon 2012. Kuma, Kengo Anti-object: The Dissolution and Disintegration of Architecture London Architectural Association 2008. Kuma, Kengo Materials, Structures, Details Basel Birkhauser 2004. Pallasmaa, Juhani et al. Kengo Kuma: Atmospheric Works 2000–2014 Madrid Arquitectura Viva 2014.

Kengo Kuma 279

References INTRODUCTION Banham, Reyner Age of the Masters London: Architectural Press 1975, cover text. Jencks, Charles ‘The Rise of Post Modern Architecture’ AA Quarterly Oct/Dec 1975, pp. 3–14. Johnson, Philip interview quoted in Colomina, Beatriz Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media Cambridge MA MIT Press 1994, p. 203. Neumeyer, Fritz The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art 1988 Mies: Office Building 1923, p. 241. Rowe, Colin ‘Lecture: The Present Urban Predicament’ in Caragonne, A (ed.) As I Was Saying vol. 3 Cambridge MA MIT Press 1996, p. 166. Taut, Bruno Modern Architecture London: Studio 1929, pp. 2–3.

CHAPTER 1 Sullivan, Louis ‘Ornament in Architecture (1892) and The Tall Office Building Aesthetically Considered (1896)’ in Benton, T, Benton, C and Sharp, D (eds) Form and Function London Granada 1975, pp. 2–3, 11–13.

CHAPTER 2 Mallgrave, Harry (ed.) Otto Wagner: Reflections on the Raiment of Modernity Santa Monica Getty Center 1993, p. 11 and pp. 367–8.

CHAPTER 3 Gravagnuolo, Benedetto Adolf Loos: Theory and Works Milan Idea Books 1982, p. 139. Loos, Adolf ‘Architecture (1910)’ in Benton, T, Benton, C and Sharp, D (eds) Form and Function London Granada 1945, p. 45. Loos, Adolf ‘Vernacular Art (1914)’ in Safran, Yehuda and Wang, Wilfried (eds) The Architecture of Adolf Loos London Arts Council 1985, pp. 110x, 108x. Loos, Adolf Ornament and Crime in Loos Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays Riverside, CA Ariadne Press 1998, p. 168.

CHAPTER 4 Anderson, Stanford Peter Behrens Cambridge MA MIT Press 2000, p. 145.

Behrens, Peter (1907) quoted in Buddensieg, Tilmann Industriekultur: Peter Behrens and the AEG 1907–1914 Cambridge, MA MIT Press 1984, p. 207. Mertins, Detlef Mies London Phaidon 2014, pp. 33, 36. Pevsner, Nikolaus Pioneers of the Modern Movement London Faber 1936, p. 195.

CHAPTER 5 Goldfinger, Ernö ‘The Work of Perret’ quoted in Dunnett, J and Stamp, G Ernö Goldfinger London Architectural Association 1983, p. 11. Perret, Auguste ‘A Contribution to a Theory of Architecture’ in Britton, Karla (ed.) Auguste Perret London and New York Phaidon 2001, p. 243.

CHAPTER 6 Manson, Grant C Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910 New York Reinhold 1958, p. 37. Wright, Frank Lloyd ‘Organic Architecture’ in Conrads, Ulrich (ed.) Programmes and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture London Lund Humphries 1970, p. 25. Wright, Frank Lloyd ‘In the Cause of Architecture 1928’ in Pfeiffer, Bruce Brooks (ed.) Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings 1894–1930 New York Rizzoli 1992. Wright, Frank Lloyd ‘Modern Architecture’ in Levine Neil (ed.) (quoted in) Frank Lloyd Wright Princeton NJ Princeton University Press 2008, p. 39.

CHAPTER 7 Lynton, Norbert ‘Futurism’ in Stangos, N (ed.) Concepts of Modern Art London Thames and Hudson 1981, p. 96. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso ‘Manifesto of Futurism’ in Apollonio, Umbro (ed.) Futurist Manifestos London Thames and Hudson 1973, pp. 21–2. Sant’ Elia Antonio ‘Manifesto of Futurist Architecture’ in Apollonio, Umbro (ed.) Futurist Manifestos London Thames and Hudson 1973, pp. 170, 172.

CHAPTER 8 Behne, Adolf ‘Glass Architecture’ 1919 in Conrads, Ulrich and Sperlich, Hans G Fantastic Architecture London Architectural Press 1963, p. 133. Kuma, Kengo ‘Making a Connection: The Hyuga Residence by Bruno Taut’ in Kuma, Kengo (ed.) Anti-Object London Architectural Association 2008, pp. 9–52.

CHAPTER 9 Mendelsohn, Erich ‘Dynamics and Function’ in Conrads, Ulrich (ed.) Programmes and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture London Lund Humphries 1970, p. 72. Mendelsohn, Erich Collected Letters ed. Beyer, Oskar London Abelard Schuman 1967, p. 43.

References 281

Rogier, Francesca Emergent Form in Architectural Association Ruins of Modernity: Mendelsohn’s Hat Factory in Luckenwalde London Architectural Association 1998, p. 24. Zevi, Bruno Erich Mendelsohn London Architectural Press 1985, p. 18.

CHAPTER 10 Gropius, Walter ‘Programme of the Staatliches Bauhaus 1919’ in Conrads, Ulrich (ed.) Programmes and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture London Lund Humphries 1970, p. 49. Gropius, Walter The New Architecture and the Bauhaus London Faber 1935, p. 18. Pevsner, Nikolaus Pioneers of the Modern Movement London Faber 1936, pp. 206–7. Van Eyck, Aldo quoted in Ockman, J (ed.) Architecture Culture 1943–1968 New York Rizzoli 1993, p. 347.

CHAPTER 11 Banham, Reyner Age of the Masters London Architectural Press 1975, p. 68. Frampton, Kenneth Modern Architecture: A Critical History London Thames and Hudson 1992, p. 144. Polano, Sergio ‘De Stijl/Architecture= Nieuwe Beelding’ in Friedman, M (ed.) De Stijl Oxford Phaidon 1982, p. 87. Van Doesburg, Theo ‘Towards a Plastic Architecture’ in Conrads, U (ed.) Programmes and Manifestos in Twentieth Century Architecture London Lund Humphries 1970, pp. 78–80.

CHAPTER 12 Malevich, Konstantin ‘Proun’ quoted in Banham, Reyner Theory and Design in the First Machine Age London Architectural Press 1960, p. 194. Punin, Nikolai ‘Art of the Commune (1918)’ quoted in Buck-Morss, Susan Dreamworld and Catastrophe Cambridge MA MIT Press 2000, p. 55.

CHAPTER 13 Lefebvre, Henri Introduction to Modernity London Verso 1995, p. 110. Melnikov, Konstantin (1923) quoted in Catherine, Cooke The Avant Garde: Russian Architecture in the 1920s London Academy Editions 1991, p. 17.

CHAPTER 14 Hays, K Michael Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer Boston MIT 1992, p. 136.

282 References

Meyer, Hannes quoted in Hays, Michael K Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject Boston MIT 1992, pp. 147, 165. Meyer, Hannes Building in Conrads, Ulrich (ed.) Programmes and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture London Lund Humphries 1970, pp. 117, 119.

CHAPTER 15 Banham, Reyner Theory and Design in the First Machine Age London Architectural Press 1960, p. 317. Moholy-Nagy, L From Material to Architecture (English title The New Vision: From Material to Architecture) New York Brewer Warren and Putnam 1932, pp. 12–14, 158–60, 178, 189. Moholy-Nagy, L ‘Constructivism and the Proletariat 1922’ in Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl (ed.) Experiment in Totality New York Harper 1950, p. 19. Moholy-Nagy, L Painting Photography Film (1925) London Lund Humphries 1969, p. 28.

CHAPTER 16 Henderson, Susan R ‘A Revolution in the Woman’s Sphere’ in Coleman, Debra, Danze, Elizabeth and Henderson, Carol (eds) Architecture and Feminism New York Princeton Architectural Press 1996, p. 235. Hessler, Martina ‘The Frankfurt Kitchen’ in Oldenziel, Ruth and Zachmann, Karin (eds) Cold War Kitchen Cambridge MA MIT Press 2009, p. 163. Schuster, Franz ‘The New Frankfurt’ quoted in Bullock, N Journal of Design History 1 no. 3–4 First the Kitchen 1988, p. 177.

CHAPTER 17 Banham, Reyner The Master Builders in Banham A Critic Writes Berkeley University of California Press 1996, p. 172. McCoy, Esther Five California Architects New York Reinhold 1960, p. 150. Schindler, Rudolph ‘Modern Architecture’ in Lionel, March and Judith, Sheine (eds) RM Schindler London Academy Editions 1993, p. 10. Schindler, Rudolph ‘Space Architecture’ in Lionel, March and Judith, Sheine (eds) RM Schindler London Academy Editions 1993, pp. 53, 57.

CHAPTER 18 Christopher Booker (1987) quoted in Murray, Irena and Osley, Julian (eds) Le Corbusier and Britain Oxon Abingdon 2009, pp. 296–7. Le Corbusier Towards a New Architecture translated Frederick Etchells London Architectural Press 1946, p. 187. Le Corbusier Toward an Architecture translated John Goodman Los Angeles Getty 2007, pp. 102, 117,145–6, 151, 180–1, 233

References 283

Le Corbusier (1953) quoted in Murray, Irena and Osley, Julian (eds) Le Corbusier and Britain 2009, pp. 186–8.

CHAPTER 19 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell Architecture:19th and 20th Centuries Harmondsworth Pelican 1997 4th edn, p. 504. Mertins, Detlef Mies London Phaidon 2014, pp. 175, 178, 348. Mies van der Rohe ‘The Preconditions of Architectural Work (1928)’ in Neumeyer, Fritz (ed.) The Artless Word Cambridge MA MIT Press 1991, p. 301. Mies van der Rohe quoted in Neumeyer The Artless Word, p. 235. Mies van der Rohe quoted in Neumeyer The Artless Word, p. 241. Mies van der Rohe quoted in Tegethoff, Wolf Mies van der Rohe: The Villas and Country Houses Cambridge MA MIT Press, 1988, p. 130. Neumeyer, Fritz ‘A World in Itself: Architecture and Technology’ in Mertins, Detlef (ed.) The Presence of Mies New York Princeton 1994, p. 78. Nietzsche, Friedrich Beyond Good and Evil quoted in Kirkland, Paul E Nietzsche’s Noble Aims Lanham Maryland Lexington Books 2009, p. 70. Venturi, Robert Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture London Architectural Press 1977, pp. 16–17.

CHAPTER 20 Häring, Hugo (1925) quoted in Blundell Jones, Peter Hugo Häring Stuttgart Axel Menges 2002, p. 78. Norberg-Schulz, Christian Meaning in Western Architecture London Studio Vista 1980, pp. 213–14.

CHAPTER 21 Constant, Caroline Eileen Gray London Phaidon 2000, p. 93. Gray, Eileen and Badovici, Jean ‘From Eclecticism to Doubt’ in Constant, Caroline (ed.) Eileen Gray London Phaidon 2000, pp. 239–40.

CHAPTER 22 Asplund, Gunnar ‘Our Architectonic Perception of Space’ in Asgard Andersen, Michael (ed.) Nordic Architects Write Abingdon Routledge 2008, p. 330. Pevsner, Nikolaus Outline of European Architecture Penguin Harmondsworth 1963, p. 417. St John Wilson, Colin ‘Gunnar Asplund and the Dilemma of Classicism’ in Architectural Reflections Oxford Butterworth 1992, p. 139.

CHAPTER 23 Aalto, Alvar The Humanizing of Architecture (1940) quoted in Schildt, Goran (ed.) Alvar Aalto in His Own Words New York Rizzoli 1997, pp. 29–30.

284 References

Aalto, Alvar (1942) quoted in Charrington, Harry ‘A Persuasive Typology: Alvar Aalto and the Ambience of History’ in Emmons, Paul, Hendrix, John and Lomholt, Jane (eds) The Cultural Role of Architecture London Routledge 2012, p. 105. Charrington, Harry ‘A Persuasive Typology: Alvar Aalto and the Ambience of History’ in Emmons, P et al. (eds) The Cultural Role of Architecture London Routledge 2012, p. 105. Pallasmaa, Juhani ‘Logic of the Image’ Journal of Architecture 3 no. 4 Winter 1998, p. 290. Pelkonen, E L Alvar Aalto Architecture, Modernity and Geopolitics New Haven Yale University Press 2009, p. 105. Porphyrios, Demitri The Sources of Modern Eclecticism London Academy Editions 1982, pp. 2–3. St John Wilson, Colin Architectural Reflections Oxford Butterworth 1992, p. 91. Venturi, Robert Complexity and Contradiction London Architectural Press 1977 edn, pp. 18–19. Weston, Richard Villa Mairea: Architecture in Detail London Phaidon 1992, p. 8.

CHAPTER 24 Banham, Reyner Age of the Masters London Architectural Press 1975, p. 39. Niemeyer, Oscar (1994) quoted in Philippou, Styliane 2008, p. 11. Niemeyer, Oscar Modulo 7 1962 quoted in Philippou, Styliane 2008, pp. 255–6. Pevsner, Nikolaus Outline of European Architecture Harmondsworth Penguin 1963, p. 427. Philippou, Styliane Oscar Niemeyer: Curves of Irreverence New Haven Yale University Press 2008, p. 90.

CHAPTER 25 Banham, Reyner Theory and Design in the First Machine Age London Architectural Press 1960, pp. 329–30. Colquhoun, Alan ‘The Modern Movement in Architecture (1961)’ in Ockman, Joan (ed.) Architecture Culture 1943–1968 New York Rizzoli 1993, pp. 344–5. Marks, Robert W The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller Carbondale Southern Illinois University Press 1960, p. 9.

CHAPTER 26 Banham, Reyner Age of the Masters London Architectural Press 1975 edn, p. 77. Foster, Norman quoted in Albrecht, D et al. The Work of Charles and Ray Eames New York Harry Abrams 1997, p. 179. Ray Eames quoted in Colomina, B Reflections on the Eames House in Albrecht, D et al. The Work of Charles and Ray Eames New York Harry Abrams 1997, p. 133.

CHAPTER 27 Brownlee, David Louis I Kahn 1991, p. 126.

References 285

Kahn, Louis ‘Monumentality’ in Zucker, Paul (ed.) New Architecture in City Planning New York NY Philosophical Library 1944, p. 577. Kahn, Louis Quotations from Lobell, John Between Silence and Light Boston Shambhala pp. 20, 36, 44, 46. Tafuri, Manfredo and Dal Co, Francesco Modern Architecture London Academy 1980, p. 402.

CHAPTER 28 Maxwell, Robert (1963) quoted in Strauven, Francis Aldo van Eyck: The Shape of Relativity Amsterdam Architectura and Natura Press 1998, p. 325. Van Eyck, Aldo (1959) quoted in McCarter, Robert Aldo van Eyck New Haven Yale University Press 2015, pp. 82–3. Van Eyck, Aldo (1991) quoted in McCarter, Robert Aldo van Eyck New Haven Yale University Press 2015, p. 158. Van Eyck, Aldo ‘Steps Towards a Configurative Discipline’ 1962 in Ockman, Joan (ed.) Architecture Culture 1943–1968 New York 1993, p. 360.

CHAPTER 29 Banham, Reyner ‘The New Brutalism’ Architectural Review December 1955, p. 361. Salter, Peter ‘Peter Smithson Obituary’ Architectural Review June 2003, p. 26. Smithson, Alison and Smithson, Peter Italian Thoughts Stockholm Royal Academy of Fine Arts 1993, p. 66. Smithson, Alison and Smithson, Peter ‘Thoughts in Progress’ Architectural Design April 1957, p. 113.

CHAPTER 30 Smithson, Peter quoted in Lin, Zhongjie Kenzo Tange London Routledge 2010, p. 95.

CHAPTER 31 Bo Bardi, Lina in Carvalho Ferraz, Marcelo (ed.) Lina Bo Bardi Milan Charta 1993, p. 12. Bo Bardi, Lina in Stones Against Diamonds Architecture Words 12 London Architectural Association 2012, pp. 43, 58. Bo Bardi, Lina quoted in Moore, R Why We Build London Picador 2012, p. 23. Moore, Rowan Why We Build London Picador 2012, p. 22.

CHAPTER 32 Frampton, Kenneth Studies in Tectonic Culture Cambridge MA MIT Press 1995, p. 310.

286 References

Lanzarini, Orietta ‘Scarpa: “If Art Is Education, the Museum Must Be the School”’ Architectural Review January 2016, p. 52. Rykwert, Joseph ‘Introduction’ in Crippa, Maria Antoinetta (ed.) Carlo Scarpa Cambridge MA MIT Press 1986, p. 6. Scarpa, Carlo quoted in Frampton, Kenneth Studies in Tectonic Culture Cambridge MA MIT Press 1995, p. 310.

CHAPTER 33 Ambasz, Emilio ‘Turning Point’ Architectural Review December 1984, p. 35. Tafuri, Manfredo and Dal Co, Francesco Modern Architecture London Academy 1976, p. 401. Zimmerman, Claire ‘James Stirling Reassembled’ AA Files 56 2007, p. 36.

CHAPTER 34 Banham, Reyner Theory and Design in the First Machine Age London Architectural Press 1960, p. 330. Cook, Peter Archigram 3 London 1963, unpaginated. Cook, Peter Archigram 4 1964, pp. 3, 17. Cook, Peter Living City Introduction 1963 quoted in Crompton, Dennis (ed.) Guide to Archigram 1961–74 London Academy Editions 1994, p. 76. Cook, Peter Perspecta 11 Yale 1967 quoted in Crompton, Dennis (ed.) Guide to Archigram 1961–74 London Academy Editions 1994, p. 27. Greene, David Archigram 1, London 1961, unpaginated. Rowe, Colin and Koetter, Fred Collage City Cambridge MA MIT Press 1978, p. 40.

CHAPTER 35 Koolhaas, Rem ‘Introduction’ in Obrist, Hans Ulrich (ed.) Re: CP Basel Birkhauser 2003, p. 6. Price, Cedric ‘Action and Inaction and Uncertainty’ in Price, Cedric (ed.) Works II London Architectural Association 1984, p. 19.

CHAPTER 36 Colquhoun, Alan ‘Sign and Substance: Reflections on Complexity, Las Vegas and Oberlin’ in Michael Hays, K (ed.) Oppositions Reader Princeton Architectural Press 1998, p. 179. Venturi, Robert Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture New York Museum of Modern Art 1977 edn, pp. 14–15, 16–19, 104. Venturi, Robert, Scott Brown, Denise and Lzenour, Steven Learning from Las Vegas Cambridge MA MIT Press 1972, 1977 edn, pp. 8, 13–18, 40–7.

References 287

CHAPTER 37 Rogers, Ernesto Continuity (1953) quoted in Trevor Garnham Architecture Re-assembled Abingdon Routledge 2013, p. 159. Rossi, Aldo The Architecture of the City Cambridge MA MIT Press 1982, pp. 21, 41. Tafuri, Manfredo and Dal Co, Francesco Modern Architecture London Academy 1980, pp. 409–10.

CHAPTER 38 Bawa, Geoffrey ‘Statement by the Architect’ in Taylor, Brian Brace (ed.) Geoffrey Bawa Singapore Miramar 1986 edn, p. 16. Robson, David Geoffrey Bawa: The Complete Works New York Thames & Hudson 2002, p. 263.

CHAPTER 39 Chakrabarti, Vibhuti Indian Architectural Theory: Contemporary Uses of Vastu Vidya Richmond Surrey Curzon 1998, p. 91. Doshi, Balkrishna ‘Beyond Sustainable Cities’ Journal of Architecture and Building Science (Japan) 1492 August 2002a, p. 10. Doshi, Balkrishna ‘The Modern Movement in India’ in Henket, H-J and Heynen, Hilde (eds) Back from Utopia Rotterdam 010 Publishers 2002b, p. 197.

CHAPTER 40 Drexler, Arthur Five Architects: Preface New York Oxford University Press 1975, p. 1. Meier, Richard Pritzker Prize acceptance speech 1984. Rowe, Colin Five Architects New York Oxford University Press 1975, p. 7.

CHAPTER 41 Foster, Norman ‘Building Sights: Boeing 747’ BBC Television 1991. Foster, Norman quoted in Emanuel, Muriel (ed.) Contemporary Architects London Macmillan 1980, p. 255. van der Rohe, Mies ‘Building’ (1923) quoted in Neumeyer, Fritz The Artless Word Cambridge MA MIT Press 1991, p. 242.

CHAPTER 42 Siza, Alvaro quoted in Architectural Review November 2013 Nicholas Olsberg, p. 92. Tzonis, Alex and Lefaivre, Liliane ‘The Grid and the Pathway (1981)’ in Times of Creative destruction Abingdon Routledge 2017, p. 128. Woodman, Ellis ‘Revisiting Siza: An Archaeology of the Future’ Architectural Review February 2015, p. 91.

288 References

CHAPTER 43 Koolhaas, Rem Delirious New York London Academy Editions 1978, pp. 6, 177, 242ff. Koolhaas, Rem Junkspace, with essay by Hal Foster London Notting Hill Editions 2013, p. 4. Koolhaas, Rem and Mau, Bruce S M L XL, 2nd edn Cologne Taschen 1997, pp. 1248ff. Maxwell, Robert ‘Introduction to New Work by OMA’ in OMA Projects 1978–1981 London Architectural Association 1981, p. 5. Petit, Emmanuel Irony, or the Self-Critical Opacity of Postmodern Architecture New Haven Yale University Press 2013, pp. 178, 179.

CHAPTER 44 Evans, Robin ‘In Front of Lines That Leave Nothing Behind: Chamber Works’ AA Files 6 May 1984, p. 96. Libeskind, Daniel ‘Symbol and Interpretation’ in Between Zero and Infinity New York Rizzoli 1981, p. 29. Moore, Rowan Why We Build London Picador 2012, p. 285.

CHAPTER 45 Wigley, Mark ‘Introduction’ in Johnson, Philip and Wigley, Mark (eds) Deconstructivist Architecture New York Museum of Modern Art 1988, pp. 10, 22.

CHAPTER 46 Giovannini, Joseph ‘In the Nature of Design Materials’ in Zaha Hadid New York Guggenheim Museum 2006, p. 25. Hadid, Zaha ‘The Peak’ El Croquis 52 1991, p. 44.

CHAPTER 47 Ando, Tadao quoted in Baek, Jin Nothingness: Tadao Ando’s Christian Sacred Space London Routledge 2009, pp. 17–18. Heneghan, Tom The Colours of Light: Tadao Ando Architecture London Phaidon 1996, pp. 14–15. Jameson, Fredric ‘Tadao Ando and the Enclosure of Modernism’ Architecture New York May/June 1994, p. 33.

CHAPTER 48 Herzog, Jacques and de Meuron, Pierre ‘The Hidden Geometry of Nature’ in Wang, Wilfried (ed.) Herzog and de Meuron Zurich London Artemis 1992, p. 144.

References 289

CHAPTER 49 Davidovici, Irina Forms of Practice: German Swiss Architecture 1980–2000 Zurich GTA 2012, p. 110. Zumthor Peter Thinking Architecture Basel Birkhauser 1998 ‘A Way of Looking at Things’ pp. 9–10, 11–12, 17–18.

CHAPTER 50 Kuma, Kengo ‘Making a Connection: The Hyuga Residence by Bruno Taut’ in AntiObject London Architectural Association 2008, pp. 35, 39–40. Pallasmaa, Juhani Kengo Kuma: Atmospheric Works 2000–2014 Madrid Arquitectura Viva 2014, p. 36. Pallasmaa, Juhani ‘Voids of Light’ quoted in Bognar, Botond Material Immaterial: The New Work of Kengo Kuma New York Princeton University Press 2009, p. 40.

290 References

Index Note: Main entries for each architect/subject are in bold. Aalto, Aino 138, 139 Aalto, Alvar 9, 137–45, 140(illus), 141(illus), 187, 193, 237–8 Ahmedabad, Sangath 222 Albini, Franco 189 Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Fagus Factory 63–4 Altman, Natan 76 Ambasz, Emilio 194 Amsterdam, Huberthuis 169 Amsterdam, Orphanage 166(illus), 168–9 Anderson, Stanford 32 Ando, Tadao 179, 261–5, 261(illus) Antonakakis, Dimitris 261 Aravena, Alejandro 12 Archigram 151, 179, 196–200, 196(illus), 202, 231 Architectural Association, London 197, 202, 215, 241, 257 architectural theory, key texts 4, 5–6, 6(illus), 8, 17, 21, 22, 25–6, 28, 41, 50, 54, 65–6, 85, 90–1, 98, 103–5, 105(illus), 124, 206–8, 212–13, 241–3, 248 Art Nouveau 21, 22, 31 Arts and Crafts 4, 31, 39, 40, 64–5, 102 Ashbee, Charles 4 Asplund, Gunnar 8, 13, 132–6, 132(illus), 138 Assemble 12 Atami, Hyuga House 277 Atami, Water/Glass House 277 Athens Charter 8 Atlanta, High Museum 226 Awaji, Lotus (Water) Temple 261(illus) 263 Aymonino, Carlo 211 Badovici, Jean 128(illus),129–30 Ban, Shigeru 276 Bangalore, Indian Institute of Management 220(illus), 221–2

Banham, Reyner 7, 62, 73, 91, 99, 148, 152–3, 157, 179, 198, 203 Barcelona International Exhibition 1929: German Pavilion 13, 117–19, 118(illus) Basel, Railway Signal Box 266(illus), 267–8 Baudrillard, Jean 244 Bauhaus School 5, 6(illus), 62, 64–7, 66(illus), 73, 78, 85, 87, 89–92, 119 Bawa, Geoffrey 215–19, 217(illus) Bayer, Herbert 65 Beaux-Arts School, Paris 36, 39, 102, 103, 161 Behne, Adolf 53 Behrens, Peter 5, 30–4, 30(illus), 63, 64, 102, 113–14 Bergson, Henri 41–2, 58, 102, 143 Berlage, Hendrik Petrus 114 Berlin 31–3, 59, 77, 80, 113–17, 120–1, 123–6, 248–9 Berlin, AEG Factory 30(illus), 32, 33 Berlin, Jewish Museum 246(illus) 248–9 Berlin, New National Gallery 120–1 Berlin, Philharmonie Concert Hall 125–6 Berlin, Reichstag 232 Berlin, Trade Union School Bernau 85(illus), 87 Berlin, Universum Cinema 60 Beuys, Joseph 268 Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum 251(illus), 251, 253 Bill, Max 149 Blavatsky, Helena 71 Blom, Piet 168 Blundell Jones, Peter 126 Bo Bardi, Lina 181–5, 183(illus) Boccioni, Umberto 49, 51 Booker, Christopher 109 Botta, Mario 164 Bötticher, Karl 21–2 Boullée, Etienne-Louis 83, 134, 161 Boyarsky, Alvin 241, 257

Boyd White, Iain 54 Brandt, Marianne 90 Brasília, Cathedral, Congress, public buildings 148–9 Breuer, Marcel 65, 68, 225 Brno, Tugendhat House 119 Brownlee, David 163 Brutalism 172–3 Buber, Martin 168 Buffalo, Guaranty (Prudential) Building 15(illus), 17 Buffalo, Martin House 41–2 Caruso St John 174, 269 Chakrabarti, Vibhuti 222 Chalk, Warren. See Archigram Chandigarh 109 Charrington, Harry 143 Chicago, 4, 16–17, 40–3, 92, 98, 118–20 Chicago, Auditorium Building 16 Chicago, Robie House 42, 42 (illus) Chicago, Schlesinger and Mayer Store 18 Chicago School 4, 16–18 Choisy, Auguste 4, 36, 103 CIAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture) 8, 107, 123, 124, 137, 166–7, 168, 172, 173–4, 176, 178–9, 212, 221, 241 Cincinnati, Contemporary Arts Centre 258 city planning 4, 22, 23, 44, 48(illus), 50–1, 54–5, 104–5, 109–10, 167, 168, 173, 179, 198–9, 222–3, 243, 248 Classicism/Neo Classicism 4, 16, 21, 31, 32, 33, 36–7, 83, 102, 103, 104, 108, 113–14, 120, 133–4, 138, 161, 191, 207 COBRA 168 Cohen, Jean-Louis 248–9 Cologne, Kolumba Museum 273(illus), 273–4 Cologne, Werkbund Exhibition Glass Pavilion 52(illus), 53 Cologne, Werkbund Exhibition Model Factory 64 Colomina, Beatriz 7, 155, 252 Colquhoun, Alan 153, 209 Comte, Auguste 105 Constant 198 Constant, Caroline 130 Constructivism 5, 11, 75–9, 75(illus), 80–4, 82(illus), 90, 91, 115, 134, 141, 192, 241, 257, 258, 277

292 Index

Cook, Peter. See Archigram Correa, Charles 221 Costa, Lucio 147, 182 Cret, Paul 161 Crompton, Dennis. See Archigram Cubism 103, 140, 226 Dal Co, Francesco 114, 164, 194, 214 Dambulla, Kandalama Hotel 217, 217(illus) Darien, Smith House 225 Davidovici, Irina 274 De Baudot, Anatole 35 Debord, Guy 198 De Carlo, Giancarlo 9, 171 Deconstruction 126, 246–50, 251–5, 256–9 decoration. See ornament De Maré, Eric 235 De Meuron, Pierre 28, 38, 266–70, 266(illus) Derrida, Jacques 244, 257 De Silva, Minnette 215–16 Dessau, Bauhaus 66–7, 66(illus) De Stijl 4, 43, 70(illus), 70–4, 77, 115 Deutscher Werkbund 5, 31, 63, 117 Dhaka, Parliament Building 13, 162–3 Diener, Roger 267 Doshi, Balkrishna 12, 164, 220–4, 220(illus) Drexler, Arthur 225, 228 Dudok, Willem 43 Eames, Charles and Ray 10, 155–9, 157(illus) Einstein, Albert 58–9 Eisenman, Peter 225, 249, 251, 252 Elementarism 71, 72, 118 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 18, 39 Etchells, Frederick 104 Evans, Robin 247–8, 249 Éveux, La Tourette Monastery 13, 109–10, 110 (illus) Évora, Quinta da Malagueira 236–7 expressionism 53–4, 58–9, 64, 116, 123, 141, 142, 253 Fischer, Theodore 58 Fort Worth, Kimbell Museum 163 Forty, Adrian 163 Foster, Norman 11, 151, 157, 228, 230(illus), 230–4, 235 Foucault, Michel 244 Frampton, Kenneth 43, 71, 143, 188, 235, 257, 261

Frankfurt 93–6 Frankfurt, Museum of Decorative Arts 226 Frazer, John 259 Frederick, Christine 94 Fretton, Tony 11, 269 Freyre, Gilberto 147 Friedrich, Caspar David 133 Fry, Maxwell 68 Fuller, R Buckminster 1, 10, 151–4, 152(illus), 161, 197, 202 functionalism 2, 4, 15–16, 17–18, 23, 32, 60, 65–6, 85–8, 94–5, 110, 121, 124–5, 138, 151–4, 169, 201–3, 212 Futurism 5, 48–51, 48(illus), 152–3, 198 Galle, de Silva House 218 Garches, Villa Stein-de Monzie 7, 7(illus), 106 Garnier, Tony 4 Gehry, Frank 11, 51, 126, 243, 249, 251–5, 251(illus) geometrical form 36, 40, 53, 103, 124, 126, 151–2, 161–2, 247, 248–9, 257–8 Giedion, Sigfried 3, 62, 123, 135, 143, 147, 161, 167 Giovannini, Joseph 158, 259 Goldfinger, Ernö 37, 38 Golosov, Ilya 80 Gowan, James 191–2, 193(illus) Gramsci, Antonio 182 Gravagnuolo, Benedetto 27 Graves, Michael 207, 213, 225, 254 Gray, Eileen 72, 128–31, 128(illus) Greene, David. See Archigram Gropius, Walter 5, 33, 53, 54, 57, 58, 60, 62–9, 66(illus), 73, 87, 89, 92, 101, 111, 233 Guardini, Romano 114 Gwathmey, Charles 225 Hablik, Wenzel 53 Hadid, Zaha 11, 78, 244, 251, 252, 256–60, 256(illus) Häring, Hugo 123–4, 137–8 Harvard University 62, 68 Hays, K. Michael 87 Hegel, Georg 3 Heidegger, Martin 143, 163, 247 Hejduk, John 225, 247, 249 Helsinki, Finlandia Hall 142 Henderson, Nigel 172

Henderson, Susan 94 Heneghan, Tom 264 Herron, Ron. See Archigram Herzberger, Herman 168 Herzog, Jacques 28, 38, 266–70, 266(illus) High-Tech 3, 10–11, 78, 151–4, 156–8, 192, 197, 199, 202, 204, 230–4 Hiroshima, Peace Memorial 176–7 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell 8–9, 37, 99, 117–18, 123 Hoffman, Josef 4, 23, 187 Holl, Steven 272, 278 Hollein, Hans 10, 211 Hong Kong, Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank 231–2 Hong Kong, The Peak project 257–8 Hood, Raymond 241 House design 7(illus), 41–2, 42(illus) 43–4, 70(illus), 72–3, 83, 86, 97(illus), 98–9, 103, 104, 106, 107(illus), 115, 118, 119, 124, 128(illus),129–30, 139–40, 140(illus), 149, 151–2, 156–7, 157(illus), 206(illus), 216, 217, 225, 252–3, 277 Howe, George 161 Huizinga, Johan 168 Ipswich, Willis Faber Dumas 231 Isozaki, Arata 10, 179 Ito, Toyo 179, 277 Itten, Johannes 65, 90 Izenour, Stephen 208 Jacobs, Jane 109–10 Jaipur, Vidhyadhar Nagar 222 Jameson, Fredric 262 Jencks, Charles 10, 105 Johnson, Philip 8–9, 39, 68, 153, 252, 254 Judd, Donald 267 Kahn, Louis 9, 13, 160–5, 160(illus) 189, 221, 241, 274 Kandinsky, Wassily 54, 65, 80, 90, 257 Kofu, Yamanashi Broadcasting Centre 178 Koolhaas, Rem 11, 12(illus), 78, 169, 204, 209, 240–5, 240(illus) 252, 256–7 Kopp, Anatole 78 Krier, Leon 193, 241 Kuma, Kengo 179, 276-9, 276(illus) Labrouste, Henri 4 Ladovsky, Nikolai 77, 80

Index 293

La Jolla, Salk Institute 162 Lanzarini, Orietta 188 Lao-Tzu 42 Las Vegas 208 Leça de Palmeira, Ocean Swimming Pool 13, 236 Le Corbusier 5–7, 7 (illus), 9, 13, 33, 35, 38, 78, 81, 101–12, 105(illus), 107(illus), 110(illus), 118, 128, 129–30, 147–8, 176–7, 179, 207, 221, 222, 225, 228, 233, 238, 243, 244, 252, 262 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas 83, 134, 161 Lefaivre, Liliane 235 Lefebvre, Henri 81 Leibniz, Gottfried 277 Leicester, University Engineering School 192, 193(illus) Leonidov, Ivan 241, 256, 257 L’Epplatenier, Charles 102 Levi-Strauss, Claude 168 Lewerentz, Sigurd 133 Libeskind, Daniel 51, 78, 241, 246–50, 246(illus), 252 Lissitzky, El 75–9, 75(illus), 86, 241, 247, 257, 258 London 4, 171(illus),174, 196–8, 201–2, 232, 268 London, British Museum 232 London, Crystal Palace 4 London, Economist Building 171(illus), 174 London, Swiss Re 232 London, Tate Modern Gallery 268 Loos, Adolf 4, 25–9, 27(illus) 93, 97, 98, 103, 130, 189, 212, 238, 262, 277 Los Angeles 98–100, 227–8, 252 Los Angeles, Eames House 156–7, 157(illus) Los Angeles, Gehry House 252 Los Angeles, Getty Center 227(illus), 227–8 Los Angeles, Schindler House 13, 97(illus), 98–9 Luckenwalde, Hat Factory 59 Lutyens, Edwin 207, 209 Lynch, Kevin 208 Lynn, Greg 259 Mackintosh, Charles Rennie 4 Maekawa, Kunio 176 Maki, Fumihiko 179 Malevich, Konstantin 75, 78, 80, 241, 257, 258 Mallet-Stevens, Robert 71

294 Index

Manson, Grant 41 Marco de Canaveses, Church 237(illus), 238 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 49 Marseille, Unité d’Habitation 108 Marx, Karl 3 Marx, Robert 152 Matta-Clark, Gordon 252 Mau, Bruce 242 Maxwell, Robert 169, 191, 194, 242 May, Ernst 93, 96 McCoy, Esther 99 McLuhan, Marshall 92 Mecanoo 244 Meier, Richard 225–9, 227(ilus) Meili, Marcel 267 Melnikov, Konstantin 80–4, 82(illus), 141 Mendelsohn, Erich 8, 54, 57–61, 57(illus) Mertins, Detlef 120 Meyer, Adolf 64–7, 66(illus), 73 Meyer, Hannes 65, 77, 85–8, 85(illus), 202 Michelucci, Giovanni 60, 142 Mies van der Rohe 3, 7, 13, 33, 42, 57, 73, 101, 113–22, 116(illus), 118(illus), 123, 125, 158, 161–2, 181, 207, 212, 216, 232, 233 Milan, Gallaratese housing 213 Mill, John Stuart 201 Mill Run, Falling Water 43–4 Mirissa, Jayewardene House 218 Modena, Cemetery 211(illus), 213 Moholy-Nagy, László 5, 6 (illus), 65, 89–92, 89(illus) 138–9, 143 Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl 235 Mondrian, Piet 71, 158, 187 Moore, Rowan 182, 184, 249 More, Thomas 3 Morgan, Julia 39 Morris, Robert 267 Morris, William 31, 62 Moscow 76, 77, 80–3, 88 Moscow, Melnikov House 83 Moscow State Art and Technical School (Vkhutemas) 80, 83 Museum of Modern Art, New York 8, 148, 206, 225, 252–3, 257 Muthesius, Herman 31 MVRDV 244 Neo Classicism. See Classicism Neumeyer, Fritz 119 Neutra, Richard 99, 225, 252

New Brutalism 172–3 New Harmony, Atheneum 226 New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery 160(illus), 161–2 Newton, Isaac 3 New York 44–5, 68, 120, 139, 241–2, 249 New York, Guggenheim Museum 44–5, 45(illus) New York, Seagram Building 120 New York, World Trade Center 247, 249 Niemeyer, Oscar 146–50, 146(illus),182, 259 Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 17, 21, 54, 102, 114, 244 Noormarkku, Villa Mairea 139–40, 140(illus) Norberg-Schulz, Christian 125, 163 Norwich, Sainsbury Centre 231

photography and architecture 7, 60, 63, 77, 91, 101, 104, 105(illus), 117, 253 Piano, Renzo 11, 11 (illus), 199, 204 Plano, Farnsworth House 120 Poissy, Villa Savoye 106, 107(illus), 129, 262 Porphyrios, Demetri 143 Porto, Casa da Música 240(illus), 243 Porto, Serralves Museum 237 Post-Modernism 10, 10(illus), 113, 191, 193, 194, 206–10, 206(illus), 211–14, 211(illus) 218, 241, 254, 269 Potsdam, Einstein Tower 59 Price, Cedric 157, 201–5, 201(illus), 215, 231 Punin, Nikolai 78 Quatremère de Quincy, A-C 213

Oldenburg, Claes 208 Olgiati, Valerio 269 OMA/Office for Metropolitan Architecture 12(illus), 240–5, 240(illus), 256 ornament/decoration 4, 17, 18, 25–6, 207–9, 268 Osaka, Church of the Light 263 Osaka, Sumiyoshi house 262 Östberg, Ragnar 133 Otto, Frei 197 Oud, J J P 71, 90, 129, 238 Ozenfant, Amédéé 103 Paimio, Sanatorium 138 Pallasmaa, Juhani 137, 272, 278 Pampulha, Casa do Baile 146, 148(illus) Pampulha, Casino 147–8 Paolozzi, Eduardo 172 Paris, 1925 International Exhibition 81, 82(illus) Paris, Garage Ponthieu 36 Paris, Notre Dame Le Raincy 35(illus), 36–7 Paris, Pompidou Centre 11(illus), 199, 204 Paris, Rue Franklin Flats 36 Pei, I M 68 Pelkonen, Eeva-Lisa 138 Perret, Auguste 4–5, 35–8, 35(illus), 102 Petersen, Carl 133 Petit, Emmanuel 244 Pevsner, Nikolaus 32, 62, 64, 135, 149 Philadelphia, Richards Medical Research Laboratories 162 Philadelphia, Vanna Venturi House 206(illus), 207 Philippou, Styliane 147

Read, Herbert 111 Reich, Lilly 118 Rewal, Raj 221 Richardson H H 16–7, 39 Rietveld, Gerrit 72–3, 70(illus) Rio de Janeiro, Casa de Canoas 149 Rogers, Ernesto 187, 212 Rogers, Richard 11, 11 (illus), 199, 204, 212, 215, 231 Rogier, Francesca 59 Rome, MAXXI Museum 256(illus), 258 Ronchamp, Nôtre Dame du Haut 13, 108–9 Roquebrune St Martin, E.1027 128(illus), 129–30 Rossi, Aldo 10, 193, 207, 211–14, 211(illus), 235, 247, 267, 268, 271 Rotterdam, De Rotterdam 12(illus), 243 Rotterdam, Kunsthal 242 Rowe, Colin 10, 154, 191, 193, 199, 226 Rudolph, Paul 68 Ruff, Thomas 268 Ruskin, John 102, 232 Rykwert, Joseph 187, 247 Saarinen, Eero 158 St Louis, Wainwright Building 17 Salter, Peter 173, 174 SANAA/Kazuyo Sejima 179, 276 Sant’Elia, Antonio 23, 48–51, 48(illus), 115, 198 São Paulo, House, Morumbi 181–2 São Paulo, Museum of Art 182 São Paulo, SESC Pompeia 182–4, 183(illus)

Index 295

Säynätsalo Town Hall 140–1, 141(illus) Scarpa, Carlo 186–90, 186(illus) Scharoun, Hans 8, 54, 123–7, 125(illus), 137, 238, 259 Scheerbart, Paul 53, 116, 123 Schindler, Rudolph 13, 23, 43, 97–100, 97(illus), 252 Schoenmaekers, M.H. 71 Schröder-Schräder, Truus 70(illus), 72–3 Schumacher, Patrik 259 Schuré, Edouard 102 Schuster, Franz 93–4 Schütte-Lihotzky, Grete 93–8, 95(illus) Schwitters, Kurt 252 Scott Brown, Denise 206–10, 211, 242, 267 Seattle, Public Library 243 Semper, Gottfried 21, 41 Sergison Bates 174 Seurat, Georges 277 Shanghai, Z58 Zongtai 278 Shimukappu, Church on the Water 263 Simmel, Georg 244 Sitte, Camillo 142 Situationism 198, 243 Siza, Álvaro 11, 12, 13, 143, 235–9, 237(illus), 262 Smith, Kathryn 99 Smithson, Alison and Peter 9, 171–5, 171(illus), 179, 202, 209, 215, 269, 274, 277 Soane, John 4 social housing 8, 12, 33, 54–5, 67, 93–4, 95(illus),107, 108, 117, 124, 151–2, 173–4, 222–3, 236–7 Sommaruga, Guiseppe 50 space, concepts of 28, 41–2, 46, 67, 71–3, 89–91, 98, 106–7, 109, 115, 118–19, 120–1, 124, 125–6, 162–3, 168, 216, 218, 257–9 Spengler, Oswald 134–5 Stansted, Airport 231, 231(illus) Starr, Frederick 83 Stirling, James 10, 10(illus), 191–95, 193(illus) Stockholm 1930 Exhibition 134 Stockholm, Public Library 133–4 Stockholm, Woodland Cemetery, Crematorium 13, 132(illus), 133–4 Structuralism 168, 212 Stuttgart, Neue Staatsgalerie 10, 10(illus), 193–4

296 Index

Stuttgart, Schocken Store 57(illus), 59 Stuttgart, Weissenhof Seidlung, 8, 33, 67, 107, 117, 124 Sullivan, Louis 4, 15–19, 15(illus), 26, 39, 59 Tafuri, Manfredo 164, 194, 214 Tange, Kenzo 176–80, 178(illus), 221 Tatlin, Vladimir 75, 76, 80 Taut, Bruno 5, 52–6, 52(illus), 58, 64, 123, 141, 277 Távora, Fernando 235–6 Taylor, Frederick 94, 95 Team Ten 9, 63, 166–9, 171–4, 176, 179, 182, 215, 221, 223 Tengbom, Ivar 133 Terragni, Guiseppe 225 Tokyo, Cathedral 177, 178(illus) Tokyo, Nezu Museum 276(illus), 278 Tokyo, Olympic Stadia 177–8 Trenton, Jewish Community Centre 162 Treviso, Brion Vega Tomb 188 Tschumi, Bernard 78, 209, 241, 249 Tugendhat, Grete 119 Tyng, Anne 161–2 Tzonis, Alex 235 Uexküll, Jakob von 143 Ungers O M 241 UN Studio 244 urban planning. See city planning Utrecht, Schröder House 70(illus), 73 Vals Thermal Baths 272–3 Van Doesburg, Theo 70–4, 80, 118 Van Eesteren, Cornelis 72 Van Eyck, Aldo 9, 63, 166–70, 166(illus), 222, 241 Venice, Querini Stampalia Foundation 188 Venturi, Robert 10, 113, 142, 164, 158, 206–10, 206(illus), 211, 242, 267 Verona, Castelvecchio Museum 188 Vesely, Dalibor 241 Vienna, 21–3, 25–7, 93, 98 Vienna, Kärntner Bar 26 Vienna, Looshaus, Michaelerplatz 26, 27(illus) Vienna, Post Office Savings Bank 20(illus), 22 Vienna, Steiner House 27 Vienna, St Leopold Church, Steinhof 23 Viipuri, Library 138 Vriesendorp, Madelon 241 Vuokksenniska Church 142

Wagner, Otto 4, 20–4, 20(illus), 50, 97, 98, 131, 187 Warhol, Andy 92 Webb, Michael. See Archigram Weedon, Harry 60 Weil am Rhein, Vitra Fire station 258 Weston, Richard 140 Whitman, Walt 39, 47 Wigley, Mark 252–3 Wilson, Colin St John 126, 135, 144 Wittwer, Hans 86 Woodman, Ellis 237

Wright, Frank Lloyd 8, 18, 39–47, 42(illus), 45(illus), 60, 63, 64, 72, 97–8, 115, 139, 187 Yale University 161, 160(illus), 231 Zenghelis, Elia 241, 256, 257 Zenghelis, Zoe 241 Zevi, Bruno 60, 187 Zimmerman, Claire 194 Zumthor, Peter 164, 268, 271–5, 278

Index 297

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