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    Essays in Architectural Criticism modern and historical change

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    Essays in Architectural Criticism

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    Essays in Architectural Criticism modern and historical change

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Alan Colquhoun Essays in Architectural Criticism Modern Architecture and Historical Change Contents Preface by Kenneth Frampton 1 Introduction: Modern Architecture and Historicity 11 er 1: Modern Architecture and the Symbolic Dimension 20 ‘The Modern Movement in Architecture 21 Symbolic and Literal Aspects of Technology 26 Formal and Functional Interactions: A Study of Two Late Buildings by Le Corbusier 81 Chapter 2: The Type and its Transformations 42 ‘Typology and Design Method 43 Displacement of Concepts in Le Corbusier 51 Rules, Realism, and History 67 Alvar Aalto: Type versus Function 75 Chapter 3: Architecture and the City 82 ‘The Superblock 83 | Centraal Beheer 104 Plateau Beaubourg 110 Frames to Frameworks 120 | Chapter 4 History and the Architectural Sign 128 | Historicism and the Limits of Semiology 129 | Sign and Substance: Reflections on Complexity, Las Vegas, and Oberlin 139 } H. Gombrich and the Hegelian Tradition 152 | ‘The Beaux-Arts Plan 161 } From Bricolage to Myth, or How to Put Humpty-Dumpty Together Again 169 | Form and Figure 190 Notes 208 | Bibliography 208 Figure Credits 211 Index 213 Biographical Note 216 Hy I The If one looks at any modern city, one eannot help being struck by the fact that superblock, much of it eonsists of large pieces of real estate, each of which is financed and This essay was written in 1971.and organized as a single entity. The size of each unit—or superblock, as I choose first published in Arquitectura tocall itis not determined by any single physical factor. It may be limited “moderna y cambio histérieo: by the existing street patter; it may eneroach on one or more adjacent blocks | Ensayos 1962-1976 (Barcelona by virtue of roads having been closed off; it may consist of a single building Editorial Gustavo Gili, 1978), or a group of buildings. But however individual cases may differ, there is pp. 95-112. always one common factor: the enormous reserves of capital that exist in the modern economy which enable either private or public agencies, or a combi: nation of both, to gain control over, and make a profit from, ever larger areas of urban land. In practice the area of control is limited by the constraints of competitive interests. But this does not prevent large areas coming under single control for the simple reason that each of these interests—a corporation, ‘a speculator, a local authority—is in itself a very large unit. Bylaw legislation keeps pace With this process. The regulations covering light angles, zoning laws, and laws relating to plot ratio and density all tend to reinforce the tendency toward breaking up the city fabrie into lange discrete lumps, each of which is under unified financial control. ‘These facts are obvious enough in themselves, but they have architectural consequences which are often neglected. The financing of a piece of land by a single agency usually results in the buildings on this piece of land being consciously designed as a single entity. The larger the area of land, the larger the volume of building that is subject to a single architectural concept. ‘There are two important problems connected with this fact which T wish to diseuss—less with the idea of solving them than of bringing them to light. The first problem is, What is the relation of the individual dwelling to the super- block of which it may be a part? The second is, What are the implications of the superblock as a representational element in the city? These two problems are in turn related to the concepts of the private and the public realm. " Whatever general attitude may be adopted as to the relevance of tradition to modern life, it cannot be denied that of all institutions it is the city in whieh the past is most tangible. Ancient laws and customs still persist beneath the” surface of our social life, but it is in the city that these laws take on a physical ‘and perceptual form and in which implements made under social, economic, and technical conditions different from our own are still in use. To a large ‘extent our ideas about pleasant and meaningful city environments are based on our actual experience of living and working among the buildings and city structures of the past. The incredible time lag in architecture is the chief factor which conditions our response to the city environment, This time lag has two causes: first, the durability of architecture, which is related to the amount of capital it represents, and second, what Aldo Rossi has called its “indifference to function.” What is specific about a building is less its exclusive adaptation to particular functions than its eapacity for representing ideas. ‘The ancient structure of our cities isso strong that we are continually re minded of « distinction which has always been fundamental to the economy and mythology of the ety, the distinction between the public and the private realm. The public realm was-representational; it not only housed activities of | public and collective nature butte symboined-thesewetTVites, THe aesthetic of public architecture consisted of a second-order language organized, to use ‘a linguistic analogy, into syntagmata and constituting a complete text. The private realm, on the contrary, though still comprised of aesthetic formulae common to the whole of society, was not representational in a public sense and was the property of individuals who were free to use them much as one uses everyday language, as a personal possession, In the Middle Ages the city belonged to the merchants and artisans. The representational elements were the church, the market square, the buildings of the guilds, and the city gates. All these elements constituted a collective investment. Individual houses, on the other hand, were not financed as whole groups (fig. 70). Even in the planned bastide towns in the southwest of France, the separate lots were under individual control. Although the town was laid out on a regular grid and all the plots were identical, the housing consisted of fa kind of connective tissue. The public realm of the town consisted of the axial roads, the market square whieh occurred at their erossing and which converted them into covered arcades, and the church, always related diagonally to the market square (fig. 71). During the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, a number of critical changes ‘occurred which were to revolutionize the public realm and, though somewhat belatedly, the private realm as well. G. C. Argan has noted three fundamental characteristics of the Renaissance city:! first, a new historical awareness which transforms the city from a commercial to a political entity; second, the revival of the Platonic doctrine that the nature of the universe was geometrical? third, a change in design method, which was virtually the invention of a single man, Filippo Brunelleschi, In the design of the dome of Florence Cathedral, Brunelleschi revolutionized existing building procedures by proposing that a building was something that should be coneeived as a total project and carried out according to a precon- ceived plan (fig. 69). A building was an act of the mind; its construction was the work of builders who merely carried out the instructions of this mind. Tt is true that already in the later Middle Ages the cathedral was a conscious political and aesthetic object, but the traditional crafts made a greater con- tribution to its total semantic elaboration than in the case of the Duomo or any subsequent church, and the role of the immediate tradition was corre- spondingly greater. With Brunelleschi we arrive at the moment when archi- tecture is transformed from a eraft to a “liberal art” and its practice is raised, in the Renaissance mind, from the realm of doxa, or opinion, to that of episteme, or certain knowledge. Not only buildings but also entire cities were projected in this manner and reflected the triple values of the Renaissance: political meaning, geometrical construction, and conscious totality (figs. 67, 68, 72). (The latter value, par- ticularly, has persisted to the present day, despite the demise of so many Renaissance ideas.) If we look at any Renaissance city plan, we see the image of a community whose organic unity is metaphorically expressed in terms of geometric forms and by the geometrical dominance of the castle or public square, The medieval marketplace has become the geometrical as well as the topological center, symbol of the logos, and ideally the actual center of political potker. ‘The city is conceived as a solid, carved up by streets, hollowed outsby- Squares, and articulated by public buildings. ‘The individual house does not contribute to this imagery. The prolongation of the public realm that took Ey 67 Plan o of an ideal city. Vincenzo Scamozzi (from Dell'Idea dell: 68 Plan o Filarete, jtettura Universale, 1615) he ideal city, Antonio Averlino 1464. 69 Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence Dome by Filippo Brunelleschi, 1420-1436. 70 Engraving of the city of Aachen. 11 Montpazier, Dordogne. Thirteenth-century plan, 72 Pienza, schematic plan of the 7 Strada Nuova, Genoa (from an monumental center of the city. eightoenth-century print) 73 Circus at Bath, England. John 75 Benedetto Buonfigli, Translation Wood the elder, 175 of the Remains of Herculanus, late Jfifteenth-century, fresco. Pinacoteca, Perugia. place in the Baroque and Neoclassical city, by means of unified street facades and residential squares, did not radically alter the status of the private dwell- ing. The design of individual houses behind facades was often left to the private individual or entrepreneur, as in the Place Vendome or Berkeley ‘Square. Even in the later urban planning of Bath (fig. 73) and London, where the houses were designed at the same time as the facades, the houses conform to the public order of the facades rather than presenting themselves as inde- pendent components It is true that sometimes, as in the Strada Nuova in Genoa (fig. 74), the street is made up of individual mansions. But here each house is thought of as a palace, and a whole class of inhabitants takes on a representational role—the class of aristocrat or man of wealth, whose representational function corre- sponds to its instrumental position in society It seems clear that both in the medieval city and in that of the Renaissance there were two types of structures: representational buildings and ordinary habitations-There is admittedly a fundamental difference between the medie- val and Renaissance city. In the former both representational and private buildings were constructed according to the principle of craft tradition, upheld by the guilds, and transmitted, like an aural literary tradition, by rules of thumb. In the Renaissance both the aesthetic and the constructional codes became subject to systematic theory, and art and science were harmonized through the epistemology of a geometric universe. So radical is this difference that it is often asserted that it reflects a new split between ruler and ruled. The place becomes the symbolic representation of the logos, rather than the natural forum of the masses. But be this as it may, the medieval and Renais- sanee city both consisted of an undifferentiated mass of houses or tenements, out of which emerged the buildings which represented the mythos of collective life—social, politial, and intelleetual In early representations of the city, representational buildings become a syn- ecdoche for the whole city (fig. 75). In reconstructions of Jerusalem (fig. 76) or Rome (ig. 77), the city is depicted as a collection of publie monuments. If any residential buildings are shown at all, single houses stand for whole groups to provide the minimum context for the monuments. The monuments them selves consist of a typology of elementary forms: cylinders, obelisks, ziggurats, pyramids, and coliseums—metaphors of collective or ceremonial functions. In many of these pictorial representations, the monuments appear to be in competition with each other, and they thus ignore an important ingredient common to the medieval and Renaissance eity—the principle of hierarehy and subordination. In these depictions we have a strange foreshadowing of the modem city, in which this principle is also lacking. The proliferation of im- portant public buildings in a pictorial representation of Rome resembles the proliferation of superblocks found in the post-industrial city (fig. 78). But this analogy is superficial. The Rome which is depicted is intended as a paradigm of the historical city, prodigal in significant public monuments; whereas the modem city, if it can be said to provide a mental image at all, merely repre sents an inventory of objects of material wealth. This difference is of vital importance and ean only be explained by epistemological and economic changes which took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was then that a political and philosophical watershed.pecurred which radically changed the course of European culture and-also, if more slowly, the nature of the 87 oma ant ARATE European city and the concept of the publie realm which had hitherto been an integral part of it 1 Until the scientific and philosophical revolutions of the seventeenth century he state was able to be represented by the city in terms of a figural metaphor. Alberti’s analogy between the house and the city was supported by the further metaphor of the city as a human body with its head and its members in hierarchical subordination. The philosophical justification of the Baroque state formulated by Thomas Hobbes was based on a similar analogy With the development of mereantilism in Holland and England in the seven- teenth century and the corresponding scientific discoveries, a new political concept emerged. The theory of John Locke introduced a model of political organization, to which the American and French revolutions were eventually to give constitutional form. For present purposes, the crucial fact about these new liberal-empiricist ideas is that they introduced an era in which society was seen to be in a “lower” state of organization than before. The period of laissez-faire commercialism which followed was not subject to the same visual analogues as the previous centralist system. Bat this fact is complemented by another. If the concept of the State becomes vague, and if society as a whole is seen to cohere by means of a system of cheeks and balances and to consist of a series of subgroups whose mutual conflicts cancel each other out, the forces controlled by these subgroups be- come, in themselves, much more highly organized, complex, and powerful ‘We have only to compare a medieval town to a nineteenth-century residential quarter to see that at the level of the individual, the earlier centralist system allowed greater randomness to occur than did the later liberal system. In the liberal system the freedom of the whole was achieved at the expense of an inereasing rigidity in the parts. One of the results of the new structure is that there is an increase in the number of independent institutions, each of which has an equal importance within the organization of society as a whole. A society based on a strict hierarchy gives way to one based on anarchy, but at the same time each institution is itself organized hierarchically. To each of these institutions eor- responds a new building type, and so, to the old repertoire of church, palace, and city hall, are gradually added such new types of public buildings as law courts, parliaments, schools, hospitals, prisons, factories, hotels, railway sta- tions, department stores, galleries, and other places of amusement and con- sumption (fig. 79) Though this evolution can be traced in actual cities, it is in the parallel development of discourse—and in the delineation of utopias attempting to create a new hierarchy and a new unified concept to replace that which has been lost—that we have the clearest notion of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century developments. In Ledoux’s plan for Chaux (fig. 80) an entire com- munity is related to its place of work. The city in its traditional capacity as marketplace and political center is abandoned. In the words of Frangois-Noél Babeuf there should be “ino more-eapitals, nosmore large cities .. . the magnificence of architecture... + will be reserved for public stores, for am- 89 82 A village of harmony and ‘cooperation. Robert Owen, 1817. Aerial view. 83 Hospital of St. Paul, Barcelona. Domenech i Montaner, 1902-1912. Plan. 8h Project for a phalanstery after Charles Fourier. Victor Considerant, 188%. 85 Rockefeller Center, New York. Reinhard & Hofmeister; Corbett, Harrison & MacMurray; Hood & Pouilloux, 1931-1940. 86 Auditorium Building, Chicago. Adler and Sullivan, 1887-1889. 87 Typical facades in a Parisian street. J.F-J. Lecointe, 1835 (from Normand fils, Paris Moderne). 88 1-5 Grosvenor Place, London. Thomas Cundy, 1867. the Auditorium Building in Chicago (fig. 86) and Rockefeller Center in New York (fig. 85) a large block of offices is eombined with public functions (thea- ters, arcades, ete.) to create a new type of mixed-use building—a sort of microcosm of the city-as a whole, Rockefeller Center is, in fact, an extreme case of a more general tendeney in Chicago and Manhattan during their respective skyscraper booms, for large commercial enterprises to aim at a representational function. But though one might draw attention to even later examples, such as Place Bonaventure and Place Ville Marie in Montreal, the general tendency in this century has not been toward such quasi-representa- tional types. It has been toward specialized blocks which, though they coarsen the grain of the city in the same way as representational buildings do and create discontinuity, they do not add to its stock of truly representational types. IV During the last two decades there have been numerous critiques of the modern city, and the coarsening of city fabric and loss of meaning in relation to the size and isolation of its elements are among the characteristies which have inspired them. Broadly, critical attacks on the modern city have been based on two models which I shall call the cybernetic and the formal, or the City as Process and the City as Form. ‘The cybernetic model consists either of radically dis-urbanist ideas (aceording to which developments in the media and the means of personalized transport make the eity as such redundant) or ideas according to which the vitality of the city can be re-created by sufficiently subtle techniques of intervention, simulating the feedback mechanism found in biology and machinery. Chris- topher Alexander's paper “The City is Not a Tree” may be taken as an example of-this school of thought.* Dis-urbanists assume that the city exists purely for the sake of the products of contiguity. They ignore the fact that the physical contiguity itself and the phenomenal discontinuity of the global environment may have some meaning beyond that of the instrumentality with which it has always been associated ‘the past. They forget that, with the development of the specialized sub- stems of the commercial state; there is a residue of human need which can no longer be seen as an epiphenomenon of the funetion of survival. The town or city may continue to satisfy a need after many of its original determinants have fallen away ‘The weakness of the second kind of eybernetie model is, equally, that it does not account for the experience of the eity on a phenomenal level. It remains on an abstract plane, and the principles it supports can function, whatever physical pattern the city might have. Secretly, Alexander's model refers to 4 supposed pre-Renaissance or “natural” city and cunningly suggests an ab- stract methodology by which this image can be achieved in modern Western society. Moreover, change, which is the basis of the eybernetic model, is regarded as permissive, rather than the result of conflict, and no distinetion is made between arbitrary (and reversible) and motivated (and irreversible) change. A sort of millennium is postulated in which change has the maximum of possibility (because of feedback) and the minimum of meaning (because of the lack of any: but trivial motivation). ‘The school of thought based on the idea of the City as Form also has two %6 varieties. The first is represented by Kevin Lynch. In The Image of the City Lynch attempts to apply the findings of Gestalt psychology to problems of urban form. Although the book seems to spring from a picturesque and sub jective viewpoint, it attempts to go beyond this and to set up a series of objective rules for city design. But although its approach seems preferable to, that of the eybernetic type, insofar as it is based on a phenomenal awareness of the city, it fails to distinguish adequately, either at a morphological or historical level, among such radically different types as the medieval, the and the modern city, seeking rather a level of abstraction which will embrace all three. By restricting his systematic treatment to questions of psychological response, Lynch ean only deal in an ad hoe way with the eity itself, and in avoiding all typological analysis, he fails to isolate the characteristies which are peculiar to the modern city. Because he does not deal with the basic structure of the modem city, he is unable to demonstrate whether or not his prescriptions will, in fact, provide the minimum of legibility and coherence at which he aims—even if it is allowed that these criteria are in themselves adequate. The second variety is represented both by Aldo Rossi and the “Rationalists,’ and by Colin Rowe, who, for the first time since the advent of modern architecture explicitly admit the syntagmata of classical architecture back into the modern canon. In contrast to more “functional” and processual theories of the city, these theories are clearly related to the City Beautiful movement of Daniel Burnham. They talk of ends rather than means, Such an attitude obviously possesses a prima facie “realism,” since it allows for the division of the urban continuum into discrete blocks and a series of finite experiences, each of which can be designed according to definite aesthetic norms. All the other recent theories of the city have been vague when it has come to pro- posing specific solutions—a vagueness which is illustrated by the fact that, very solution, however radical, is immediately seen to be inadequate in relation to the absolute criteria to which it aspires: The Rationalists’ view, on the contrary, is concrete and accepts the brute fact that the city is made up of discrete parts and that these parts have to be consciously designed “for now” and related to each other in a way that engages our aesthetic judgment. ‘They go further and suggest that our knowledge of what is beautiful or ugly in the city is based on our memory of past forms of the city, since, without assuming continuity of cultural meaning, no aesthetie judgment is possible.¢ ‘These seem to be the two main streams of theory which treat the city as a formal entity. The first questions neither the symbolic and cultural role of the city nor its structure. Its terms of reference are largely psychological and perceptual. Nonetheless it is an improvement on the eybernetie model, since its discourse on the city is related to experience rather than to a positivistic and abstract utopia, At least it ean do little harm. The second is more fun-

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