Towards a New Urbanism

I got the idea for this post on a recent visit to the MoMA's new exhibition on Le Corbusier. The exhibition is fantastic - full of original plans, water colors, models and sketches, as well as furniture, full-scale recreations of interiors, and films. Walking through the exhibit, I kept thinking of a comparison I did a few years ago of Towards a New Architecture and Steven Holl's Urbanisms: Working with Doubt. I want to compare the two architects' attitudes about the built environment while celebrating the monumental career of Le Corbusier. I revisited my notes, and have written this post and read through it a few times, and I feel like it comes off as overly critical at points (and who has the right to criticize the most celebrated modern architect more than a non-accomplished, two year removed from grad school, guy with a blog?), but hopefully it reads as celebratory as well. Well, I promised at one point reviews of exhibitions worth seeing, and this is certainly one of them.

It is a nearly unchallengeable truth that Le Corbusier is among the most important architects of the twentieth century, if not the most important. His teachings, precedents and theses have been accepted, dismissed, challenged, beaten up, verified and proven. One can find holes in them, as with any theory on any subject, but Le Corbusier’s influence on architecture as a profession, art, and way of life is undeniable. His influence is discernible in an unquantifiable number of buildings. 

Steven Holl is a good example of a practicing modern master that draws inspiration from the work of Le Corbusier. It is unclear weather Holl was directly inspired by these buildings, but in analyzing various elements, the inspiration becomes undeniable. In Towards a New Architecture, Corbusier’s words cement his legacy as an architect and, at the same time, remind us to be thankful that his assuredly disastrous urban schemes were never realized. While Steven Holl is clearly a descendent of Le Corbusier and shows many similar, yet evolved, tectonic themes, he has transcended the way architects should be thinking about our towns and urban spaces.           

Several buildings by Steven Holl show evidence of influence by Le Corbusier. Although the programs are often drastically different, the influence is clear. Corbusier’s Maison la Roche – Jeanerette  and Holl’s Kiasma in Helsinki, Finland have stark differences in program, scale, location, and a number of other elements, but the buildings also have blatant similarities and a clear overriding tune. La Roche is a single structure with two residences over three stories in Paris, while Kiasma is a large scale art forum in Finland (sharing a street with Eliel Saarinen’s Helsinki Station and Alvar Aalto’s Finlandia Hall). Both buildings focus on movement, dynamism, exhibition, and at their core, act as an architectural promenade. They each offer opportunities for fluid, meandering movement as well as strait and directed, while always offering moments of pause and reflection. Corbusier provides paths through and around spaces that are as important to the building as the spaces themselves. Both works are champions of shifting phenomenal movement.

Maison la Roche

Kiasma

Holl's Housing complex in Fukuoka, Japan is described as a hinged space, using Japanese fusuma to transform the living areas throughout the day. This is a traditional technique in Japanese homes, using sliding screens to reinvent spaces as day turns to night or as children leave the home or elderly parents return. The technique has been employed in countless Japanese housing projects, from ancient times to present day. What makes Holl's project different is the 'hinged' colored panels, rather than the traditional sliders. It is a clear reference to Corbu's own apartment on the outskirts of Paris. Corbu hinged entire walls between his painting studio, entrance foyer, and living area that could create an entire array of spacial conditions throughout the day. Holl is clearly using a traditional Japanese technique, but the modern influence is undeniable. I apologize for the quality of photos below, these are the only two photos from my visit to the apartment that illustrate the transformation, but they do not do it justice. Had I known I would be writing this two years ago, I would have made better photos.

Corbu Paris Apartment

Corbu Paris Apartment

Fukuoka 

Fukuoka

The bottles of light that establish the spatial and lighting conditions at Holl’s St. Ignatius Chapel owe a debt of gratitude and tip of the hat to the circles of light at Corbusier’s Sainte-Marie de La Tourette. The buildings share many common elements, but this is the most glaring. The way in which each well allows light to penetrate in its own way, and how that penetration and wash changes from season to season. The way that light defines the space, the use of color, however bold or reserved. Holl may have never consciously referenced La Tourette throughout the entire design or construction of St. Ignatius, but he is a student, professor and master of architecture. St. Ignatius would not be the building that it is without the existence of La Tourette. The same statement can be made, but on a different scale, of Holl’s Simmon’s Hall at MIT, and its relationship to Corbusier’s Unite de Habitation.   

La Tourette

St. Ignatius 

La Tourette 

St. Ignatius

La Tourette

St. Ignatius

The most valuable comparison between the two bodies of work is the comparison of Simmons Hall and Unite de Habitation. The buildings are clearly relatives, but on this scale, they are toeing the line between building and miniature-urbanism. The same way that Corbusier toes the line of master architect and revolutionary outcast. This is no more clearly demonstrated than in Unite.  Both buildings employ a structure that frees the plan – Unite’s  post and beam system and the MIT Dorm’s “PerfCon” façade construction. One could argue that the works are different because Corbusier sought to free the plan and the façade at Unite, which is true, but the freed façade is only covered back up, or screened, for sunlight. This is accomplished within the structural frame at Simmons Hall. The structural depth of the PerfCon acts as a louver in itself. It blocks the high, harsh summer sun while allowing the low winter sun an unobstructed path to warm the building. Both buildings free the plan with the structure and use the façade to control the sunlight through the seasons. The buildings also share social aspects in that they are almost urbanisms in themselves, providing not only residential areas, but also social gathering areas, retail and restaurant spaces, and activated passages.

Unite

Simmon's Hall

The architects use their own words to further enforce the concept that Corbusier’s graceful mastering of individual buildings is lost on his urban schemes and attitude. Unite is an individual building, but it is as close to a mini-urbanism as building can get. In a writing later in his career, Corbusier says that “(Unite), is the position of the architectural revolution as it has been accomplished in this day by modern techniques”. So much deliberate design work went into creating this unique social phenomenon. The three-story blocks divide the building into two story spaces on either side, each able to see both horizons. All of this based off of the modulor. Corbusier uses an entire page of text to describe the recently completed building, yet the modulor – Corbusier’s overriding design tool for the building – gets no mention at all. Only the construction techniques that make this building a revolution. 

Construction techniques, and their mastery, are fundamental to the practice or architecture and should by no means be ignored, but to constantly strive to revolutionize building is a mistake, especially when the creation of this urban space has been carefully considered, and blatantly ignored in the building’s showcase. Ignored in the interest of self-promotion. This self-promotion and all knowing, false entitlement that is present in Corbusier’s planning schemes are the heart of this post.

Le Corbusier makes a number of bold statements that have been criticized as much as, if not more, than they have been acclaimed. That the house is a machine for living is probably the most well known, along with to send an architecture student to Rome is to cripple him for life, and that clients have eyes which do not see. The boldest claim of all, though, comes after laying out his three reminders, speaking mostly of individual buildings, then shifting to urban planning. Le Corbusier notes that:
                 

It is time that we should repudiate the existing layouts of our towns, in which the congestion of buildings grows greater, interlaced by the windows open wide to this confusion. The great towns have become too dense for the security of their inhabitants and yet they are not sufficiently dense to meet the new needs of “modern business". (Towards a New Architecture)

This is a reckless and dangerous statement by a genius of an architectural mind. Architecture is bound to its site and all of its elements. Its topography and climate, its inhabitants and users, its economic and social situation, and its time and its place. Rather than embrace these elements, Le Corbusier irresponsibly states that the existing layouts of our cities should be repudiated. 

The Cartesian density of New York City that is almost irrationally and unexpectedly interrupted by spattering of incremental green spaces that act as the piazzas of Rome, with Central Park playing St. Peters square. Repudiate it. The iconic axial movement and monumentality and history of Paris. It's sweeping boulevards, packed with cafes and places of recreation (fungus, according to Corbusier), the birthplace of architectural education. Repudiate it. The eternal city of Rome, with an ancient, layered density and confusion. With a sense of light and air and heat that is unique to this one city, and its layers of millennia past. Layers of earth as well as buildings and bodies. Repudiate it. The early nineteenth century grid layout of Lawrence, cascading down from Mt. Oread, through the historic neighborhoods that diffuse from the iconic American Midwestern scene of Massachusetts Street. Repudiate it.

The contrived notion that one man - one architect - knows better than all who came before, and all who will inhabit the spaces in the future, is dangerous. To break the bond that architecture has to its situation and to cast one fell, sterilizing swoop over our cities would have been beyond reprehensible. Corbusier is actually not breaking the bond with his statement; he is assuming that it does not exist. No city is perfect, cut to assume that one can create a sort of utopian metropolis of parkland, dotted with monstrous, perfectly regulated extrusions is irrational.

                                         It is almost that Corbusier is striving for some sort of forced perspective on urbanisms, desperate to revolutionize the way architects influence city form, rather than let his design gifts naturally evolve the way they did in his building designs. The duality in his design principles when it comes to building design and city planning is staggering. In one sense, he embraces the private automobile in his masterpiece of the ages, Villa Sovoye. The radius of the oval in the plan of the ground floor directly derived from the turning radius of the owner’s car. Then, in his City for Three Million, the car, as a mode of personal transportation and freedom, is not even considered. Rather, mass, high-speed transit lines and massive super highways connect the monstrous extrusions. There is no freedom in individual movement. There are sprawling parks as far as the eye can see, but nowhere to walk to. The residents go where the mastermind tells them that they should go. Where the route goes, so go the resident zombies of the city.

Villa Savoye - Ground Floor Plan

City For Three Million - Perspective

What Le Corbusier identified as problems are what make cities the stimulating, fascinating places that they are. Each one has evolved from an inseparable set of circumstances that has created its individual character. A city’s flaws and grittiness are as valuable as its most well planned boulevards, districts and nodes. In Steven Holl’s book, Urbanisms: Working With Doubt, the issues of movement, sensory experience, and phenomenology within an urban setting are explored. Holl clearly lays out his thesis on cities and the experiential phenomena that these urbanisms give rise to every day. The experience of the geo-spatial, the spatiality of night, sectional cities, urban porosity, psychological space, and others. These theses come to a culmination with numerous case studies, outlining how each is integrated into Holl’s buildings. He points out in the sectional cities section that “all architectural works are in some way urban works; they either deny or affirm the potential of the city.”

This is the way architects and planners should be thinking about urbanisms. Do not repudiate our cities, embrace them for what they are. If they need help, fix them, if they offer something valuable, create a building that is equally as valuable. The relationship between building and setting should always be a mutually beneficial relationship to an immeasurable degree. The quote from Holl’s book that is perhaps most succinctly ties up this argument is:                 

We aim for an architecture that is integral: landscape/architecture/urbanism, an architecture of deep connections to site, culture, and climate, rather than an applied signature style. Working with openness and doubt at the outset of each project can yield works engaged on levels of both site and culture: many different urbanisms, rather than a single urbanism.                                                                 

It is unfortunate that Le Corbusier set out to create this single signature style of urbanism and to revolutionize the way we think about cities. So early in his career, Corbu mastered the phenomenal movement through space with Maison la Roche. He created deeply emotional spaces like La Tourette, and effective, small urban schemes, like Unite de Habitation. Why was this forward thinking lost on his urban schemes? So readily discarded for monumental buildings. Fortunately, architecture is an evolutionary art. In this example of Steven Holl and Le Corbusier, we see how the most skilled architects are able to take the best laid foundations of their predecessors, and turn them into a style all their own.  Holl took the lessons of Corbusier’s masterful buildings to create his own, often creating buildings that are attacked and ridiculed as much as they are swooned over. Sounds familiar. The difference is that when considering the urban situation, Holl is arguing to exploit the valuable unique qualities of each and let that situation inform the building, rather than cast a drab signature style across entire landscapes. I enjoy that attitude - of heading towards a new architecture through urbanism, rather than in spite of it.