Cornell Journal of Architecture, vol. 2

Introduction

Preface Prefaces are frequently redundant, particularly when they relate to graphic productions which should speak for themselves. In the case of the Cornell Journal o/ Architecture #2 they presumably do. Protocol, however, requires a few words.

Last year in the preface to the first Cornell Journal o/ Architecture, I wrote that there has been a tradition at Comell that is fundamental to its unique success.

That architect ure is greater than a single parto that it is not a stylized object existing on its own but a product of its context and a contribution to that context; that architecture exists in history and that the history of architecture should therefore be taught as a discipline in conjunction with designo creating real respect of architecture and a context for ideas.

That special tradition has been summarized most concisely over the years by the Graduate Urban Design St udio under the direction of Colin Rowe. The body of work from that studio is highly theoretical and in many instances full of fantasy. I believe in facts.

However I believe that fantasy plays a parallel role with fact in most fields where design and creativity are involved. In his introduction to Five Architects, (Wittenbom, 1972) Colin wrote:

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When in the late Nineteen-Forties.

Modern Architecture became established and institutionalized. necessarily, it lost something of its original meaning.

Meaning, of course. it had never been supposed to possess. Theory and official exegesis had insisted that the modern building was absolutely without iconographic contento that it was no more than the illustration of a programo a direct expression of social purpose.

Modern Architecture. it was pronounced. was simply a rational approach to building; it was a logical derivative from functional and technological facts; and-at the last analysis-it should be regarded in these terms. as no more than the inevitable result of twentieth century circumstance.

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There was very little recognition of meaning in all this. Indeed the need for symbolic content seemed finally to have been superseded; and it was thus that there emerged the spectacle of an architecture which c1aimed to be scientific but which~-as we all know--was in reality profoundly sentimental. For very far from being as deeply involved as he supposed with the precise resolution of exacting facts. the architect was (as he always is) far more intimately concerned with the physical embodiment of even more exacting fantasies.

This quote from Colin to the enclosed work. exacting fantasies-so that and we can all be

is highly appropriate Exacting fantasiesmuch of life is like grateful.

Jerry A. Wells Chairman, Department of Architecture Comell University

This second issue of the Cornell Journal of Architecture is the culmination of efforts which began in 1980 with an exhibition in Ithaca, N. Y. of past and present work from the Studio of Urban Design at Comell University. The first Journal focused on recent trends in the undergraduate design studios at Comell. This issue concentrates on a comprehensive survey of design projects and theories emanating from the graduatelevel studio since its formation in 1963. In effect, this publication is the belated exhibition catalog for the 1980 show: most of the projects displayed at that time are included here and many new ones have been added.

Since the publication of Collage Oty by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter in 1978, many ideas implicit in studio work have gained wider exposure. The compelling reason for publishing these projects now is to demonstrate their corollary relationship to that book. Ideas first hatched and developed through studio design projects inspired many of the concepts found in Col/age Oty; subsequently, the book fed many new ideas to the studio. "Urban Design at Comell" consists of two sections. The first is a set of articles on a range of critical, historical, and methodological topics of urban designo Each article points to ideas contained in the second section, which is devoted to a chronological display and interpretive analysis of studio projects and graduate theses.

What distinguishes this oeuvre from most academic urban design research is its architectonic and formal quality, the continuity of its theoretical development and evolution, and, indirectly, its pedagogic impact in schools and in the profession.

What I want to brieny renect on here is the background of the studio and sorne unique characteristics of these projects.

The general intent of these projects has been to develop formal strategies for combining the positive qualities of the traditional city-with its well-defined spaces, continuous urban fabric, and vitality of concentrated activity-with those of the

Modem city, with its polemic of habitational equity, the need for open space, and ease of pedestrian and vehicular movement.

A distinguishing feature of these proposals is their focus on the potential of any particular urban configuration. This kind of inquiry requires that a certain level of fiction be introduced into the design process: speculation about what should be in a city plan versus what it actually can be. For example: What if Corbusian redents could be packed closer together and adjusted to form figural public spaces? What if a city plan could be interpreted as a Picassoesque collage of setpiece buildings and gridded street fields?

This inclusive design process skillfully transforms the wide range of "potentially interminable set pieces," "stabilizers," and "memorable streets" culled from the past and tests them in present-day city contexts.

In this philosophical palette of architecture, fiction (what "wants to be") and hypothesis (a possibility being tested) contend with each other for dominance in the design process. Modem architecture was rather indulgent with the latter and often attempted to suppress the former to reinforce its revolutionary polemic. In the last thirty years of Modem urban planning theory, there has been an increasing tendency toward specialization and abstraction, toward the empirical and the quantitative, in problem solving. The Comell Studio projects are, by intent and form, critical of this situation. Emphasizing formal and conceptual strategies, the design process in the studio has sought to exploit the designer's value judgements and intuition; the "reality" of the quantifiable program is not eliminated but is generalized, encouraging the discovery of the latent possibilities-the "fiction"-of urban form and function.

Much of the formative-and formalistic-studio work dates from the turbulent decade of 1965-75, when many urban design departments were centering their studies around abstract analyses of urban infrastructures or social policy planning. The

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nexus of urban politics regarding low-income housing locations, neighborhood preservation, commercial development schemes, and .urban renewal often became the focus of design studio problems or theoretical formulae. During a period of liberal revolt against what was perceived as esoteric and purely academic design, many schools of architecture and planning adjusted their curricula to retlect an appreciation for these pressing and quite real socio-architectural problems.

While the Cornell studio did not remain untouched by these dramatic vicissitudes, a total commitment to an often parametric, analytic, and essentially antiformal approach to design problem solving never quite took hold. As Ithaca is somewhat removed from the major centers of these rapid and highly emotional changes, students in the Cornell Studio were left pretty much to their own devices, convictions, and doubts.

The subsequent continuity and quality of these projects is due to a variety of factors, among which are the t1niversity's rich architectural library collection, the program's attraction to a diverse group of graduate students, a stimulating coterie of critics, and the unique enthusiasm of Colin Rowe for past and present urbanistica.

Cornell's excellent architectural library greatly facilitated the discovery of and immersion into what were at the time less popular and slightly remote manifestations of urbanism and architecture. Those entering into this two-year postprofessional degree program carne from a wide spectrum of backgrounds. Many students having had office experience and thus a familiarity with the empirical requirements of urban building, were generally more inclined toward the theoretical and critical intent of these design problems as a means of substantiating or discrediting the possibilities for Modern urban architecture. The results of these "tests" might then be put to use in an effort to c10se the persistent schism between theory and practice.

Part of the remarkable continuity in the development of these projects can be attrib-

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uted to the dialogue between first-year neophytes and second-year initiates about the Rowe approach. It is a continuity of formal vocabulary and manner of presentation and not a continuity encompassing one particular approach. Rather the works exhibit a set of evolving themes, loosely federated around the strategy of contextualism and the philosophy of Collage City, all bound together by succesive students' efforts to refine the general theory. Guiding these efforts were the studio critics, those legendary "Texas Rangers" and others, who, for the most part, denied substantial professional practice by the local conditions of an upstate New York college town, energetically reinforced CornelI's traditional formal bias in architectural teaching. AII these people orbited, albeit somewhat eccentrically, around Colin Rowe, who has directed the program since its inception. In the end, Rowe is certainly the presence that perpetrated the studio 's continuity and shaped the quality of its process and product.

While today in the architectural community there appears a general acceptance of the importance of resolving the problem of Modern Architecture in the traditional city context, few in the early 1960s perceived this as a critical issue that might be addressed from a formal standpoint. The Cornell Urban Design Studio's response to this issue has been published at best sporadically. Previous articles by former studio members have largely been restricted to theoretical discussion; the applied theory embodied in design projects and theses was generally unillustrated and has remained accessible to only a small group of cognoscenti through pirated xerox copies and the like. However, many of these theories have filtered beyond Cornell through the agency of former students become professors. The ideas generated in the Cornell Studio have probably had their greatest impact, not through any specific article or projects, but through the pedagogy of this now rather extended mafia. Through this method, the general approach has gained more credence in recent years, but an ongoing appraisal and critique from the archi-

tectural avant-garde (to which I feel Cornell in sorne way belongs) rarely has been accomplished. The need for outside opinions through which to refine the studio's ideas has been stymied by Ithaca's somewhat arcadian and upstate insularity until the advent of the Journal.

Thus the purpose of this catalog is to document and enter the work from the studio into the current discourse on the problem of Modern architecture and the traditional city. The focused and perhaps inevitable formalism of this academic urban design is rich and unparalleled in its uninhibited speculation and constant evolution.

Spanning a period of almost twenty years, the projects from the Studio of Urban Design at Cornell can be considered not as panaceas, but as visible evidence of an argument, an almost poetic vision of what might be for today's cities.

Like an extra vagant theater prod uction, this publication has accrued a large number of sponsors and producers. The list is a long one, and sorne names unfortunately have been left out, but I wish to acknowledge the special efforts of the following people.

First and foremost are all the former and present members of the Studio who submitted their work for exhibition and publication. After ten or fifteen years, it is not always easy to have one's academic work appear in a publication for public scrutiny. Their cooperation and patience through the last three years have helped make it easier for the editorial staff than might have been otherwise. Not all the work was or could be published, but each project greatly assisted in a richer understanding of what the last twenty years in the Rowe studio were about. We are indebted for their incomparable assistance in this effort. Likewise, to all of the authors is extended our sincere thanks for their contribution and dedicated efforts. Without their essays this publication would certainly be less cohesive and intelligible.

A belated thanks is due all those who assisted in the 1980 exhibition. Their work

helped lay the groundwork for this publication. Regretably, I have forgotten sorne of those who lent a hand during the last mad hours before the opening, but the help of Alissa Bucher, John Chadwick, Greg Di Paolo, Steven Fong, Peter Guzy, Craig Nealy, Todd Schliemann, Jerri Smith, and others was instrumental to the show's success. Also, Jesse Shamus at Syracuse Blueprint Company and Mark Spitzer were nearly heroic in providing superb photographic services at incredibly short notice.

A special debt is owed Professors Jason Seley, Henry Richardson, and Jerry Wells for the initial and continuing support commitment to the Journal and the 1980 exhibition. I am also indebted to Mr. Jerry Luisi for his patient help in securing funding for this venture.

To Mr. Carter Manny, Jr. and the Graham Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts for their major contributions to assist the production of the exhibition and this publication, a greatful thank you for their faith that this work should and would be produced.

Last, but by no means least, are sorne individuals to whom I wish to express my sincere thanks and appreciation: Jerri Smith, Alissa Bucher, and Steven Hurtt for their constant encouragement, timely criticism, and faith in the raison d'etre of this publication; Colin Rowe, whose modesty may have been strained by the process of this retrospective, yet without whose help and guidance many errors of concept or credit might have been committed; and finally, to the editors and the production staff of the Journal, who toiled in my trans-Atlantic absence and without whose dedicated efforts this publication would not have come into being, most especially Edward Siegel, Kenneth Gruskin, and ElIiott Le Roi Barnes. AII these people, and others, are in great part responsible for making "Urban Design at Cornell."

D.B. Middleton Rome, June 1982.

Staff

Contents 6

Foreword

Guest Editor D.B. Middleton

Leon Krier

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Program vs. Paradigm ColĂ­n Rowe

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The Street in the Twentieth Century Grahame Shane

42

w. Copper

Assistant Editor Daniel Kaplan

Conjectures on Urban Form/Studio Projects Steven Hurtt

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Managing Editor Ken Gruskin

The Figure/ Grounds Wayne

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Editors ElIiott Le Roi Barnes Edward E. Siegel

F ootnotes and credits Plates

Director of Design Ken Gruskin

Copyright Editors Maria J. Abreu-Garcia Daniel Kaplan

Advisory Board Werner H. Goehner Lee Hodgden Colin Rowe Jerry A. Wells Staff Pamela Butz Evelyn McFarlane Marie Michel Susan Sheldon Rod Willson

Journal Class Spring '82 Summer '82 Fall '82

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Foreword Leoo Krier

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remember very clearly the occasion. The lazy movements of a crowded architects' party had stranded both of us against a lonely pillar and he addressed me quite directly in a beautiful tone of voice.

"Leon ... ," he said, " quite ravishing ... I will write about it but," he added, and his insistence was on but . .. "your Royal Mint ... puah .... " I have since not forgotten the unflattering adjective.

The party soon settled on elegant chairs around the beautiful table, high on three lion paws, and went on listening to the poet well into the early morning hours. I had at long last met Colin Rowe.

We didn't know much of each other and although our conversations had been interrupted by long intervals of time and place, for a long time we stubbornly carne back to the same themes. He went on for reasons unknown to me, to believe that I was a misled Bo/shi and that is probably why, for a while, he wouldn't accept that we should both be in agreement about the Royal Mint, Garibaldi, or even the French Revolution.

We pursued the same goals with a not dissimilar sentimental ardor and yet we seemed to disagree on virtually every subject and person we carne to talk about, whether Haussmann or the Holy Trinity, Speer or Michelangelo. He probably counted me among the potential enemies of an open society, for I never waivered in my conviction that Plato's Dialogues will forever remain a better nourishment for the mind than Sir Karl's opinions. Above all he minded my disrespect for Buonarotti's vanity, as if I were ready to sacrifice talent and beauty on the bloody altars of 'Rationalismus' and 'Materialismus'.

In order to calm his many anxieties I must here again confess that I don't believe

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that man 's fate and the course of history are as yet decided. I believe in the power of ideas and in the moral strength and ultimate responsibility of the individual. I believe that whatever damage is done, must be undone; whatever the disasters that afflict us and our industrial societies, we live in the best possible of worlds. If we make a mess of this beautiful planet, it is but our own doing and mistake. Pain and wretchedness are the punishment for ignoring both our weaknesses and our powers; beauty and pleasure are the rewards for faring wisely within our earthly conditions of body and mind.

AIl my misunderstandings with Colin Rowe ceased the day I received his letter complimenting me for my Luxembourg project. He knew the city and loved, aboye all, its railway station, a Hellenistic composition of sorts, complete with a grand ducal pavilion, all done in an exquisite neobaroque gusto. Luxembourg was for me what Roma Interrotta had meant for him.

The all too mechanical and academic diagrams had at last matured into wellmeasured and well-composed cities.

We probably all agree now to regret that one of the greatest sons of our tragic age should have been born in the saddest industrial nowhere of the Swiss Jura. Had he grown up in a well-matured medieval city our task would be much easier today. Instead of confusing even the most brilliant spirits for half a century, the Voyage d'Orient (de Grece et d'/talie), would have opened his mind to the genius of European architecture and the city. He would have exhorted us to leave the transatlantic liners in the seas, the Forman-Goliaths in the air, and, instead of courting industrialists with disastrous proposals of expansion, he, like so many nobler spirits before him, would have engaged his considerable talents to protect the besieged Mother of the Fine Arts in that position of authority in which she had been heId by so many great ages and people.

Instead of wasting our best years to conceive of ships that could not swim and airplanes that could never fly, instead of forcing on people machines that were not

cities and inventing production plants which industrialists wouldn't even dream of, we would have learned our old craft and built splendid cities. Instead of being mere heralds of our art we would, by now, be its masters and poets.

Not the merchants, but only the muses would have set our limits and our heads would have been justly crowned with the laurels of respect and affection. But. alas, in an age when eccentric 'geniality' has beco me a collective disease, the best minds have to be titans of commonsense. In a world full of noise the finest music will go unheard. The first duty ofthe musician is then not to make an even bigger noise but to create a grand, and imperative, silence.

I have looked very carefully at sorne works done in Cornell University. I cannot see there any masterpiece, but just as in my own work, they represent an approach to what the city is made of. If we forget the learned small talk that always fills the corridors of universities, if we overlook the inevitable and indigestible marks of our time, we should soon be able to extract a very robust planning method, a universal framework for a global reform of city and country planning. At the moment we cannot be content with anything less.

More than ever the current academic and professional fashions trivialize the true issues of architecture and ignore the real problems of the city.

After nineteen years of relentless struggle with the dragon, the Cornell Urban Design studio seems finally to have freed itself from the indelible grasp of modern planning and fragmentation. The hypothetical synthesis between the Traditional City and the City of Industry which, for a while, had been the declared goal of Rowe and his peers has been recognised as being at an impasse and abandoned for good. For there can be no compromise between good and evil. Fate always drives towards a tragic denouement.

But let us have no illusions. However elegant the graphics, however learned the manuscripts, however clever the critics, I

dare to say that the main work is not yet done. An operative synthesis may be within reach, but it requires another even more formidable effort. To be all too triumphant at this stage would be to underestimate the candid ruthlessness and innocent brutality of the enemy who has dethroned our art and craft. Nothing could be more dangerous for us than to misjudge the depth and globality of the present confusion, the frightful candor with which the most devastating planning mistakes are undertaken.

I have visited many American cities. I have driven melancholy and terror stricken through worlds of destruction and devastation. That holocaust seems to alarm but few minds; and yet we should know from recent experience (from our inability to solve them) that the problems we choose to forget will always turn against us in unforgiving acts of retaliation.

Surely the vulgarity of the commercial strip, the unreality of the suburbs, the sheer ruin of the slums. and the aggressiveness of downtowns, are no way for the most powerfuI nation on earth to live. It is just not good enough. It is too poor a reward for so much zeal and industry. "We don 't built dties, we just produce hope/ess co/lections 01 spare parts", says Jacquelin Robertson. Indeed millions of people waste the best of their lives, their time, and their wealth to perform the most basic functions of survival. Truly, for most American citizens "Time is money", but all too much of it is waste and boredom.

In order really to beco me the good life, the "American way ollife" needs to be vastly improved.

I have heard Fred Koetter talk beautifully about the old American Main Street and about all that clumsy nostalgia which still today points, however confusedly, towards what the American city should be.

If the old cities of Europe and America were like brother and sister, the industrial city beca me the executioner of both. But, however similar our problems and however similar our overall strategy may have to be, the tactics for the reconstruction of the American city will turn out to be quite

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different from those in Europe. Because, in contrast to most Europeans, the Americans retain an unshaken belief in the power of ideas and individuals. They are convinced that an act of wilI, a simple idea makes almost anything possible, and indeed a simple idea may also be triumphant even if it is useless or destructive. For its industrial success is very often due to its utter futility and unexpectedness. One is virtualIy defenseless against an enemy one doesn't know, doesn't expect and has never seen nor heard of.

The train, the car, the suburb, the shopping malI and the skyscraper, functional zoning, advocacy planning or social

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partlClpation, the strip and the motorway are alI such simplistic ideas of overwhelming power and destructive effect, to which there exists no inborn resistence in civilized man.

Beware, the reconstruction of the city is not one such simple idea. Its promotion will therefore be infinitely more difficult and slow than the promotion of even the vastest of industrial projects, whether the electrification of whole continents or the setting up of entire armament systems.

The reconstruction of the city is a complex of cultural, political, technical and economic ideas, which demands the total dedication of the best minds of society. It calIs for an immense patience. For, if success

and glory are assured, they will be neither immediate nor can they said to be imminent.

Thus, although this grandest of tasks is to become the main purpose of a whole people, it requires, at first, the concord and imagination of a small number of individuals.

Their moral courage and wisdom will have to equal nothing less than the glorious • virtues of America's founding fathers.

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ProgJ:am vs.

Paradigm Otherwise Casual Notes

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The Pragmatic, The Typical, aod The Possible.

Colio Rowe Since the publication of Collage City, Colin Rowe s observations and criticisms of contemporary urbanism have been wideranging and, some might say, occasionally difficu/t to follow. Unlike his essays on Modern architecture published in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa (1976), which usual/y focused on specific buildings, architects, or historical topics, recent writings, which have been increasingly synthetic rather than analytic. have developed arguments and critiques out of a broad spectrum of history and philosophy to focus on a difficult subject: Modern urbanismo In "Program vs. Paradigm" Rowe criticizes two dominant forms of architectural problem solving: the reliance on the program, seen here as the empirical and neutral generator of all acts of subsequent design decisions; and the use of paradigm, the potent and value-Iaden typological model for building and city planform. Informing these casual notes the author employs a variety of speculations and observations.

One is that an overreliance on either program or paradigm creates a set ofproblems when the ideal quality of either is subjected to the real forces of time and use. This situation is iIIustrated in the authors hypothetical speculations about the planning ofa city such as Austin, Texas. Rowe then moves to a critique of architettura razionaie and what he

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sees as this movements use of a limited and select set of paradigms. The political stance regarding society and urbanism that this movement represents is called into question, as is its attending polemic. Rowe concludes his evaluation of program and paradigm with a discussion of design methodology, using the metaphor of the great detective story as a possible guide to future design study.

The authors argument is complex and overlapping. The deliberatively discursive style invites a deeper consideration ofproblems for which there are no simple answers.

This essay was first given as part of the Preston H. Thomas Memorial Lecture Series at Cornell University in April 1982.

D.B.M.

Those who refuse to go beyond facts rarely get as far as fact...almost every great discovery has been made by 'the anticipation of nature', that is by the invention of hypotheses which, though verifiable, often had little foundation to start with.

Thomas Henry Huxley Facts, then, come to be like figures in hieroglyphic writing.... There they are, holding up their c1ean profiles to us so ostentatiously; but that very appearance of c1arity is there for presenting us with an enigma, of producing in us not clarity but confusion. The hieroglyphic figure says to us, "You see me clearly? Good-now what you see of me is not my true being. 1 am here to warn you that 1 am not my essential reality. My reality, my meaning. lies behind me and is hidden by me, and this means that in order to arrive at the true and inward meaning of this hieroglyph, you must search for something very different from the aspect which its figures offer."

Jose Ortega Y Gasset Facts, then, are like sacks. They won 't stand up until you put something in them.

Luigi Pirandello

hat follows concerns the status, the virtues and the disabilities of two prevalent and rival proposals as to the 'correct' means of architectural and urbanistic problem solving. In other words, what follows is concerned with the examination of two mental orientations of the present day which are often presented as mutually exclusive.

One of these is the widespread presumption that an act of analysis will automatically result in an act of synthesis; and the other is no more than the inversion of this point of view-the presumption that a synthetic statement, of its nature, must be invariably preceded by an intensive analytical activity.

So, evidently, I find both these positions to be, if not false, at least inadequate, and it is for this reason that I have entitled this fairly brief collection of notes Program vs. Paradigm.

A program is defined by the Oxford Dictionary in relation to theater, concert, prospectus, syl1abus; and then, with a date of 1837, there is a further definition. A program is "A definite plan or scheme of any intended proceedings: an outline or abstract of something to be done"; and it is in this sense that the word program has penetrated the architectural vocabulary.

Then, as to paradigm which the Oxford Dictionary, with a date of 1483, defines as "a pattern, exemplar, example." In this case Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revo/utions may, for present purposes, give a more useful specification. For, according to Kuhn, paradigms are: "Universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners."1 Thus, on the one hand, there is the presupposition that a document entitled the program is the legitimate and neutral fons et origo of all acts of synthesis; and the proponents of this belief are both very excited and very certain about it. To quote:

W

I Cily Dream-Fantasy or Vision: Rainer Jagals. 1967

The Challenge for Process, the Program: The practice of design has increased in complexity. Interrelationships and constraints previously unrecognized or considered less important demand increased attention. No single discipline, let alone individual, can hope to sufficiently address the multifaceted problems of building. New disciplines spring into existence creating new bodies of knowledge; the number of specialists increases, owners, users and consumers become more aware of potential solutions and consequently look for comprehensive design services. As a result, the organizations and operations of the professions creating and maintaining the built environment are rapidly changing. Integrated team design, project management techniques and management operations concepts, for instance, become a reality.2 The foregoing was conveniently accessible and it may be a statement of the programmatic argument at its most extreme. On the other hand, we are increasingly bombarded with a notion that an entity, generally specified as the typical of the typological and

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apparently a reserve of col1ective memories and Platonic indiscretions, is, whether we will or not, always the insuperable starting point for investigation. And this position, as a general drift of ideas, wil1 clearly place high value on the concept of paradigm.

Therefore, we are confronted by two doctrines, and let me repeat that I am convinced by neither. The first (which might be called program-worship) is in decline and is increasingly deplored.

The second is emergent and increasingly gains the cultural upper hand. To me, the first seems to be unduly determinist and the second to disclose an unwarrantable pessimism. For surely both of them disal10w the possibilities of genuine novelty and, in the end, both of them envision the so/ution. the synthetic statement, as no more than an extrapolation of the existing. On the one hand, the procedures are too flat and empirical and, on the other, they are too exalted, too idealist and too a priori. 80th positions, I think, leave the world without hopeo For in both cases the possibility of intrinsic novelty (by which I do not mean what Whitehead cal1s "novelty in the use of assigned patterns") is implicitly denied. In the first case, the future is to be no more than a prolongation of the present (surely intolerable) and, in the second case, both present and future are to be no more than a continuation of the past (surely no better). And, by this, may one not suggest that both of these implied theories condemn us to no more than simple repetition? For the possibilities of break out and revolution neither of them al1ow; and, saying so much, I mean to suggest that alternative theories which can neither of them envisage the emergence of significant novelty must be in rather abad way.

For, in spite of al1 academic belief, newness continual1y occurs within the world; and, without any sense of this permanent effervescence (too often like the corks of cheap champagne bottles popping), without this continuous-and erratic-regrowth, serious existence would be even less than faintly tolerable.

Therefore to agitate and to animate a very few ideas we wil1 begin with a set piece which is going to be partly history and partly parable. Therefore to imagine that the time is 1839, and the place is a new political society; the problem is the location and plan of a capital city; and the result, which wil1 here be used as a counter in an argument, is Austin, Texas. Should one saya miniature Washington as contrasted with Galveston Island's miniature Manhattan?

In any case, the problem itself-the inability of the Republic of Texas3, in al1 its initiatory innocence, to accept the apparently obvious choice of Galveston as capital-is extremely American in its nature. One only needs to think of that pairing of major cities with state capitals, of New York/ Albany, Chicago/ Springfield, Philadelphia/ Harrisburg, San Francisco/ Sacramento, to recognize the issue. For all of these couplings of cities disclose a conviction (whether right or wrong) that the seat of government and associated bureaucracy should, preferably, be far removed from the freewheeling associations of commerce and from corruptions even worse.

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And, therefore, even at its inception, the mere project of Austin, Texas reveals a cultural prejudice of probably Jeffersonian articulation. Plausibly either New York or Philadelphia just might have become the capital of the United States-and, just possibly, either of these choices might have been to the general good. But the plausible sinks into insignificance when confronted with the preferred, when exposed to the still persisting ideal that both government and law, not to mention education, should be intensively protected from the theaters of temptation and the blandishments of vice. And hence Washington, which presumably repudiated not only the potential evils of Manhattan but also the Quakerish idiosyncrasies of Philadelphia; and hence Austin, almost certainly conceived as a critique of likely, though scarcely obvious, goings on in Galveston.

Now this is to guess; but, very probably, such were the almost innate prejudices of the founders of Austin. Galveston was inappropriate because it promised to be wicked. However, very visibly, there existed the alternative of San Antonio, almost-"Remember the Alamo"-a sacred site; but the iconography of battle and slaughter apart, San Antonio was equally unavailable. Its associations were Spanish and Mexican; and, if a properly gringo and AngloAmerican demonstration could not there be made, then Austin is to be construed as the resulto It may be relatable to American ideas of purity (absurd though these may often seem) and to American ideas of destiny (exaggerated though these may occasionally appear).

So, in 1839, the problem of a capital city for the Republic of Texas-at least as regards its location-was solved in what could nowadays seem to be a highly perfunctory, even Vitruvian-Albertian, manner; and, one imagines, the choice was made without ceremony and without soothsayers. A location was chosen sufficiently close to the ocean but sufficiently far removed from the appalling climatic excesses, the sweatbox, of the Gulf Coast4 • The location, at the intersection of what promised to be acceptable cattle and cotton country, was, almost certainly, provided with an adequate agricultural base; very likely it was provided with good water; and, if the founders of the city thought about such things, then toward its western extremities the site was also equipped with a brilliant topography where Poussin and, later, Cezanne might have felt at home, a topography which could never be lacking in stimulus.

It seems reasonable to assume at least this much and to imagine the founders of Austin as being influenced by most of these arguments which, for the most part, are surely rule of thumb. But, with so much (or so little) said as regards criteria for location, now to approach the plan.

The founders of this contracted Washington were not exactly highly sophisticated beings (colonists rarely are such). They were unacquainted with the splendors of France and Italy which, in any case, they might have rejected-along with London, Vienna, St. Petersburg-as being too profuse, too aristocratical for the democratically inspired and, if not connected to the Pope (the Whore of Babylon as in Fundamentalist Protestant societies he was then

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2 Abslraclion of Auslin. Texas

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conceived), then very probably connected to something even more dreadful.

However, ethnic and religious asides apart, now to examine the plan of Austin. It is a surveyor's grid into which a number of representational gestures have been quite conventionally interjected.

Nothing at all ingenious, nothing in the least bit clever; it is more or less a replica of William Penn's plan for Philadelphia which, in its turn, was an approximate replica of so many sixteenth-century and utopian propositions. A central square is to be the seat of government and around it are to be grouped the various ministries of an independent polĂ­tical society. Four avenues are to converge upon this central square and in each of the resultant quarters there is to be another public place. This is approximately all. It is a highly innocent diagram; it is almost a child's idea of a town; and, indeed, Austin, Texas does possess sorne of the characteristics of a toy. More grand and less unassuming than what could be considered its offspringsuch adjacent courthouse towns as Lockhart and Lampasas-along with these it still displays many of the charms which Levi-Strauss attributes to the miniature or many of the characteristics which we might associate with the model. In other words, it makes no pretensions to infinity and no proclamations of artistic sublimity.

But, with all this, it is not exactly dismissable. A little infantile, it is almost the urbanistic equivalent of a large dollhouse; we might feel that we can play with it; we might even feel that we can wind it up.

For, like the perspectives of Palladio's Teatro Olympico (another miniature), it possesses the capacity to engross and even to obsess the attention. Like good toys and like good miniatures, it operates with the maximum of thematic economy, parades the "essential," and conveniently suppresses the rest. It is one of the most economical of stages, emphatically a stage framed by a proscenium; just as a small and one-time capital city, Parma awaited its Stendhal, so Austin may be imagined as awaiting the writer who will forever celebrate its myth, awaiting that imaginary novel which is to be entitled, no doubt, The Balcones Fault. 5 But if it has been intimated that the Austin, Texas diagram is altogether too laconic to be completely real, there is now sorne obligation to observe the characteristic style of its failure. It is a diagram recognizing neither aspect, prospect, topography, nor possible function; and this lack of accommodation, sooner or later, could only make itself apparent. Increasingly the real could only invade the ideal; and thus, while activities carne to be generated eccentric to the major motif, certain quarters carne to be preferred and others to experience relative neglect. Only one of the four subsidiary squares, or parks, was ever undertaken; a casual railroad erratically entered the picture; and, to the north and oblique grid (signifying mostly the university) emerged in indecisive competition with the primacy of the original statement.

Hence the phenomenon of the city as it is today6 a surveyor's grid with sorne Platonic pretensions; a relatively pristine (if somewhat naive) image which has become warped and distorted by the

accumulation of unenvisaged pressures and energies. It is, nevertheless, an image which continues to be legible, respectable and, almost, exemplary.

For it is impossible to forget that, inherently, Austin js a manifesto piece; and an ultimate argument, or admonition, still there continues to survive, surely to be construed as a very elementary celebration of a basic notion-the idea of government under law.

The central square and the domed capitol are the icons of this idea.

About one hundred and forty years ago, without sophistication, and in the face of awe inspiring emptiness, the Republic of Texas wished to illustrate an endorsement of principIe, of principIe having nothing to do with the contingencies of time and place, or principIe assumed to be unquestionable. "We believe these truths to be self-evident ... " "This is a government of laws not men."

Now this is not the occasion to enlarge upon that persistent theme in frontier Texas, the preoccupation, in spite of violence, with the ideas of equitability and law (it is in any case rehearsed in so many almost rustic courthouses which still exhibit great explanatory power); but it should still be possible to assert that, in a final analysis, Austin was propounded as a didactic illustration of just such themes.

For in Austin, with a certain large generality and a casual unconcern for detail, fantasies related to the res publica provide the scaffold and fantasies related to the res prjvata furnish the infil\.

Probably there are few cities in North America-indeed few cities in the world-which one can address in precisely these terms, limited terms which may, on occasion, be incomparably gratifying.

But if, for these reasons, Austin, Texas may be categorized as a city of the mind (meaning a city which the mind, without undue endeavor, canreadily comprehend), we are, today, very far indeed removed from the happy certainties and even sorne of the unhappy frontier terrors of circa 1839. So, since distance is alleged to provide perspective, and since Austin is here being used as a clinical specimen, it may now be allowable to envisage the problem-capital city for a new politjcal society-as, most likely, it might still be interpreted circa 1982.

Of course, simply by stipulating the time as the present day, there is a far more complex methodology to be inferred. First, there would be the minimum of simple deduction and ingenuous do-ityourself; and, second, the solving of the capital city problem (Iocation and plan) would be aided by foreign governments and abetted by research foundations. Indeed the whole interminable parade of modern knowledge would become focused upon it. The government of the United States, the Russians, the United Nations, the representatives of the Common Market (with possibly the French and the British acting independently and separately), would aH be eager to offer aid and expertise. For is not the topic, "A capital city for a 'Oeveloping Nation'," at present completely irresistible for aH those so very many who are entirely unwiHing to leave anything alone? One would think so; and, therefore, one conceives planeloads of those who know would be flown in to examine and to advise. They

11

would be moderately excited, proud of their know-how, and one can imagine their appearance. Preceded by a descent of secretaries, jeeps, filing cabinets, Quonset huts, air conditioners, computers, calculators, Xerox machines, there would follow a miscellaneous troupe of geologists, meteorologists, anthropologists, psychologists, demographers, ethnographers, geographers, statisticians, sociologists; and, from then on, a positive orgy of expensive but impeccable interdisciplinary collaboration would, hopefully, ensue.

So, one perceives the idea; and now to examine the reality.

It should be apparent that the team of experts which is here conceived would be concerned with an inventory of information which might then permit an optimum delineation of policy. In other words, the team would be engaged in the preparation of a program, a comprehensive program, a schedule of requirements not only for a city but also for a society. For how to locate the site, let alone trace the model for a city, without the most exhaustive consideration of its empirical context? Or so, one believes, the argument would runo And, accordingly, our research team would proceed to issue questionnaires (although, in a wilderness, one wonders to whom they would be addressed), to quantify returns, to tabulate specifics, and to assign priorities. Its operational procedure would be analytical and inductive. It would classify presumable activity and specify possible performance. As the position papers and the memoranda, the graphic generalizations, and the printout sheets accumulated, as the scrutiny of the existing progressively yielded significant guidelines for action, then, with all due circumspection, indices of expansion would be traced, rates of growth projected, predominant 'futures' defined, and likely developments extrapolated.

We are all familiar with this approach. Its exponents proceed with the greatest caution and apparent modesty. Their discriminations are conducted with a scrupulous regard for local details of every kind. The site of their city (also its form) is to be rationaliza ble, not in terms of any 'arbitrary' or 'intuitive' choice, but rather in terms of an assumed complex of 'necessity'; and thus, they are prone to award to indigenous resources-whether human, animal, vegetable, mineral, present, or prospective-the most considerate respect. Not at all preoccupied with 'invention', their practical object is to disclose the immanent, to assist a particular condition (presumed to be latent) to 'discover' itself; and, anxious to avoid the least possible imposition, their practice could be said to derive from a never too precisely formulated theory-that of maximum nonintervention. (Let us do nothing to impede the course of the future. Let us do nothing to inhibit the creative unroHing of time.)

Now the theory of maximum nonintervention, which is so evidently conscientious and which seems to be prompted both by the illuminations of science and by the dominant mood of an educated liberalism, may proceed to an infinity of ramifications and results.

But, for the present, it should be enough to notice that, though contemporary procedure is incomparably more elaborate than the frontier practice of one hundred and forty years ago, it too is likely to

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lead to diagrams no less predictable.

So the predictable diagrams of toda y, the outcroppings of a clamoring for 'fact' and of a simultaneous obsession with the 'imperatives' of growth and change, will, as might be expected, vary just a bit from year to year. However, aH this being said, quite possibly to date one is still confronted with two versions of the sa me thing, with two diagrams which both imply high volatility and apparent horror of the a priori. There is an old style diagram, probably deriving from the Fifties, exhibiting a loose, curvilinear and biomorphic condition which is vaguely suggestive of Brazilia. Then there is a new style graphic piece, rather more jagged in outline and tending to look like a highly complicated specimen of electrical circuitry which invites comparison with, as yet, no known place. All the same and whatever the differences, since the two are very evidently icons, i.e. the contracted representatives of a state of mind, it may now be both entertaining and convenient to compare them with the Austin, Texas diagram of way back.

Nor need the undertaking be aH that difficult. For ir, on the one hand, in Austin we are presented with a highly belated piece of pseudo-Platonism and, on the other, we are the recipients of a fairly easy to recognize analytical maneuver, then apart from certain highly restricted architectural circles, which are never less than cynical, these figures will be widely regarded as: 1

bad static closed coercive retrospective sterile

ii, ยกii good dynamic open libertaria n anticipatory exploratory

However, if we can restrain the far too easy assembly of a repertory of quick value judgments, these opposed evaluations are perhaps somewhat differently to be construed. Therefore, and by the way of critique, once more to return to the year 1839 and to assume the impossible; to imagine a gang of performers, comparable to our interdisciplinary team, happily descending upon the Republic of Texas. A miscellaneous collection of Benthamites, Owenites, SaintSimonians, Comtists, disciples of Fourier, with possibly the stray Hegelian philosopher no doubt sponsored by the influence of the Prince of Solm-Braunfels,7 they too would have remorselessly accumulated data and sponsored predictions and they too would have attempted to formulate a city uncontaminated by cultural (or traditional) parti pris, a city of innocence, a mechanism, or alternatively an organic event, which would be no more than responsive to reason and circumstance.

But then-after the lapse of one hundred and forty years-what value would appertain today to those facts and annexed predictions upon which their program and its graphic conclusions might have been based? Would these facts and predictions simply have been invalidated by time, coming to appear as no more than the engaging

3 Sketch of Plan wilhout Program: i: Colin Rowe 4 Sketch of Program without Plan: ii: Colin Rowe 5 Diagram of Technical Planning Process: iii

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components of an Early Victorian, Biedermeier period piece? Would the never-to-be-anticipated vagaries of history long ago have falsified whatever facts and predictions our interdisciplinary team of 1839 might have thought it judicious or plausible to frame? And, indeed, just what developments or events might our experts and savants of that date have been able, or disposed, to predict?

A railroad up from Galveston they might well have supposed; but the transcontinental railroad network so shortly to arrive might not have appeared so likely. An economy based upon cotton would perhaps have seemed a logical inference; but, since neither the refrigerator nor the internal combustion engine could have been envisaged, the importance which cattle and petroleum were to assume would barely have impinged upon the horizon of possibilities.

Then, what to say about an economy giving quite a few indications that it promised to be based on slavery? And, precisely, how would our team have addressed this highly delicate issue? But if, very reasonably, our interdisciplinary team might have predicted that the Republic of Texas could never survive, then, just as reasonably, this is a prediction which, almost certainly, it would have refrained from uttering. For in the case of this particular prediction, there were surely the dangers of being run out of town on a raĂ­l and, consequently, the virtues of silence and discretion might very likely have prevailed. 8 By proposing the impossible and by inserting present-day procedures into a context within which, under no circumstances, could they have been found, is to carricature certain contemporary modes of analysis (and presumptive synthesis) but not seriously to distort their implications. Back in 1839 (if we can sustain our fantasy) an 'all-accommodating' plan would have been prepared; but, based on an illusionary 'fact' structure and a still more illusory 'future' structure, like the executed plan of 1839, this too would have beco me equally deformed and invaded by events which could in no way have been anticipated.

Now, if these remarks are approximately relatable to commonsense, we thus face two issues, one or the other or both of which are germane to any urbanistic problem solving. And, if implicitly, these are divergent theories as to the means by which authentic and useful configurations are to be generated, to illustrate these issues I have constructed a parable. Perhaps for reasons little more than the accidents of autobiography, sentimental addiction, and ataste for a specific landscape (Iive oaks, tumbleweed, mesquite, barrancas, and the beginning of mesa formations), I have exhibited Austin, Texas as a retarded descendant of the ideal cities of the Renaissance; and then, with a more polemical purpose, next to it, I have presented a pair of planner's diagrams deriving from a far more complex pedigree.

Which, so far as I am concerned, means that I have, more or less, arranged the confrontation of two phenomena about neither of which should it be necessary to become unduly excited.

No doubt, except in terms of a pathos-inducing conflict between purpose and result, the Austin, Texas diagram is not very satisfactory

and almost the best thing whĂ­ch can be said about it is that it is saturated with a not unrewarding iconic intention. AII the same, as the representative of a species, as a plan without a programo it may still invite us to consider the alternative predicament, that presentday and strange confusion of the analytic with the synthetic, the program without a plan. And do not all of us know this species so well-the overt denial of typology and then its surreptitious endorsement, the programmatic research and then 'the design leap', the 'irrefutable' collections of data and then the populist veneers, the planners' investigations and then the cosmetic vignettes? However, the program without a plan, that curious undertaking conceived to be democratically uncoercive, which professes to be iconographically neutral but which is patently an icon of what is thought to be scientific method (both physics in terms of 'certainty' and biology in terms of 'growth') is surely a topic which involves many issues-the constitution of 'fact' and the constitution of 'history', 'nature' versus 'culture', predestination versus free will-as abundantly to indicate that the time has now come for a change of gear.

So the issue is still pragmatics and program versus idea and paradigm; and, having used Austin, Texas (where, incidentally, idea and paradigm were almost certainly largely employed as simple empirical convenience) as a piece of litmus paper, which, according to approach, turns red or blue, remaining observations will be concerned with possible movements through that glaring no man's land ensuing from the architect's unwillingness to think except in terms of built solid and the planner's disdain to be preoccupied with anything so crude as a physical statement. And it is particularly with reference to this unassigned territory, sometimes rather imperfectly entitled 'urban design', where no elegant logic prevails and where the rival contestants conceal their largely inarticulate differences by a joint use of smarmy graphics and other would-be alluring tactics of cheap diplomatic maneuver, that something now must be said about the deelining status of the program and the reviving status of the paradigm.

"The problem with the behavioralists is that they always manage to exelude themselves from their theories. If all our acts are conditioned behavior, surely our theories are too." This, perhaps helpful little quote is extracted from the ohiter dicta of W. H. Auden 9 ; a useful prop like this aside, it beco mes increasingly elear that the whole existential situation of the program, the high valuation placed upon an allegedly neutral compilation of data, which Sir John Summerson once proposed as the crucial component, almost the motivating force of modern architecture 1o , is a very vulnerable affair; and, particularly is this so when the program professes to inelude a predictive dimensiono For, insofar as the structure of the future is to be related to the structure of future ideas, evidently no predictions can be made about it. "For to predict an idea is to have an idea, and if we have an idea it can no longer be the su bject of a prediction."1 I And, if the truth of this assertion should be no less than apparent, then it should be equally evident that, in the

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wild super-tropical jungle of almost self-proliferating information which we all inhabit, in the end, a prejudiced discrimination of relevance will always occur. Even with the greatest of good will, sorne aspects of a problem will always be downgraded and others preferred. In other words, the program will always (and, mostly, inadvertently) be biased. It will never be the simple statement of a problem so much as the implication of a solution. It will be like almost any question. It will frame a highly restricted repertory of possible replies. And, if a question can only rarely be neutral, then what to say about that complex of largely dissimulated value judgments which seems invariably relatable to any extreme infatuation with programmatics?

About this topic, quite the best remarks have been made by Alan Colquhoun,12 who has accused the devotees of data as being, quite naively, the not so innocent victims of an aesthetic doctrine.

But, apart from Colquhoun on the program, what else does there remain to suggest? That the program, except for the iconographical program, must be of fairly recent origin? That the program, as a listing of empirical requirements, begins as mostly a French business of the third quarter of the eighteenth century?1J That preoccupation with the program is p.ossibly the great thread which unites the 'doctrines' of modero architecture with the practice of the Ecole des Beaux Arts? That the role of the program was probably immensely reinforced by the characteristic conviction entertained by nineteenthcentury positivists that the enlightened individual, the apex of intelligence, was-at last-capable of making judgments (like those of the ideal and mythical physicist) which would be absolutely objective and impartial?

"Je ne suppose rien. je n Ă­mpose rien, je ne propose rien.

J'expose". One has forgotten the name of the nineteenth-century French character who made this intellectually bizarre remark; 14 but its abundant response is surely to be found in a rather more famous piece of mid-Victorian repartee-Disraeli to the Dean of Windsor.

The very old, very sceptical, very romantically minded, very Jewish, Prime Minister of England, had, one imagines, become infinitely exhausted by the dinner table prattling of the desperately openminded Dean who, most depressing of all, had confessed to a disbelief in dogma; and the tone of Disraeli's reply is completely opposed to that of French Positivism: "Well, Mr. Dean, well-I am sadly disposed to say no dogma no dean, Mr. Dean." And Disraeli, apart from his constitutional anxiety to be witty and his distaste for liberals was here, surely, implying a critique of the whole Positivist point of view. He was surely invoking the ultimately prejudiced nature of all observation there: we see what we wish to see and we are honest when we admit this limitation.

So, with the respective attitudes of French Positivism and Benjamin Disraeli in mind, then what to say about the constitution of 'fact' that has oot already beeo intimated by the prefatory quotes to this particular essay? Do we add aoother quotatioo, this time from Dorothy L. Sayers, ooe of whose stupid aod mildly rustic cops 6

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6 Sketch; Rainer Jagals, 1967

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suddenly produces the statement that "Facts are like cows. If you look at them in the face long enough they will probably go a way"? Or do we concern ourselves with issues much more stern and serious?

With, for instance, such issues as: are 'facts' invariably external to the human consciousness, a'nd is an accumulation of 'facts', apparently without any human intervention, infallibly equipped to promote its own controlling hypothesis?

Stern and serious, these questions, or absurd? In any case they are rarely confronted by the devotees of programmatics and the enthusiasts for data collection whose practice (otherwise known as waiting for printout) might, as a policy, be summarized as follows: we can't act until we have all the facts, and then we won't need to act, since, then the facts will automatically arrange themselves.

About the cultural ingeniousness of an attitude of mind which, in the end, is scarcely able to envisage the existence of mind, which can in no way conceive of a transcendence of the tyranny of the contingent; which, in the name of 'scientific', 'historical', and 'democratic' exigency, is impotent to imagine even the most modest theater for the exercise of free will, no doubt there is much which requires to be said. AIl the same, since, in this particular essay we are already part of the traffic of anautostrada and can in no way permit ourselves the luxury of digression, there is no more that need be said other than to remark that, in the failure of the tradition of modern architecture and the related tradition of the contemporary planning establishment to address the value-impregnated qua lity of all observation, there is to be discovered a large part of the reason for our present urban squalor.

For, as the retarded descendants of Positivism, these traditions retain the horrible presumptions of their origin; and, not the least, a basic notion that between 'matter' and 'mind', between 'reality' and 'speculation', between 'fact' and 'fantasy', there exists an asbestos and fireproof stage curtain which is never to be breached. 'Matter', 'reality', and 'fact' are apprehensible without serious problem. They are irreducible, irrefutable and-if we abandon prejudice-painlessly easy to articulate. They are what can be measured and what can be quantified; and, of course, if such are to be considered the criteria of 'reality', if'reality' is to be such a very small affair, there is no way to be imagined in which factual substance might also appertain to the circumstantial statements of important intelligence-to such intellectual constructions as the Declaration of Independence; LibertéEgalité-Fraternité; the Communist Manifesto, the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception, to itemize just a few among the so many.

For, if metaphysics is to be excluded from any conspectus of the real, any propositions such as these must be considered irrelevant, null, and vacuous.

There are, therefore, thoroughly ample reasons as to why the architectural community, and particularly the community of students, over the last few years, has come to divorce its attention from strict programmatics. For, increasingly, and particularly since 1968-69, the pretensions of an old intellectual consortium-academic liberalism,

technophilia, and every form of determinism-have become intolerable, have ceased to appear either enlightened, progressive, or reasonable; and, as a consequence, it has been among the great virtues of the protagonists of architettura razionale-of Aldo Rossi, the brothers Krier, et al-to have staged an extremely noisy revolt, implicitly against a theory of the program which is an assault upon common sense, against the unspeakably odd assumption that at best the architect should be no more than a transparent filter, a lens (interjecting nothing) between the 'scientific' program and the 'popular' result. Because, no doubt about it, it is evidently architettura razionale which has effected this revolution so suddenly called into question the credentials of that consortium which, only recently, seemed to be so solidly established.

Which, certainly, must now be the occasion to transfer attention from what, so far, has mostly been an Anglo-American to a Continental focus, from what one knows only too well-by experience, to what one knows only too slightly-by hearsay, from the innocent empiricists whose activities are to be discovered wherever the English language prevails, to those many others, equally innocent, who can never undertake the slightest intellectual journey unattended by PascaI's esprit de géométrie (very rarely by his esprit de finesse), who, without Baedeker, always make their cultural trips with Descartes in one pocket and Marx in the other. 15 For, conceding all its merits and all it has sought to redress, just how to respond to that spectrum of typological (and anti-programmatic) brilliance to which the world has lately been exposed?

How to react to that spectacle of semiotic argument, circular courtyards, neo-Greek peristyles, high staccato, FeIlini billowing curtains, semi-Tuscan altane. the pseudo-Boullee, the neo-Schinkel, the revived Von Klenze, and all the other current, and 'metaphysical', graphic paraphernalia? That the visuals are too easy and the apologetics too opaque? That, when it comes with all the now standard decoration of quotes from early Structuralist criticism, probably from Adorno, and (emphatically) from Quatremere de Quincy, it is an almost but not a completely convincing transaction?

That, if one is quite willing to suppress the more exacting requirements of the pragmatic intelligence and to avail oneself of the equivalent of stencils, then-surely-one will be enabled to arrive at results of engaging schematic ideality? That, all the same (and even with the pleasant possibility of a sale of the drawings to Leo Castelli), Durand, De Chirico, and Morandi cannot entirely be the solution to all the problems of the city and all the quandaries of the drawing board?

In my preceding exhibition of Austin, Texas I have, I hope, disclosed my own sympathy with the typological concerns of the Neo-Rationalists and my own absence of too much belief in those assorted (and often still highly advertised) academic doctrines which presume that a factual accumulation will lead-quite simply-to a scientific conclusion with the corresponding liberation of a disciplined and completely authentic creative impulse. But, all the same and

15

having said so much, though frequently charmed, l am still left unpersuaded by Neo-Rationalism's formal repertory and particularly unpersuaded by its attendant polemic.

So, as we speculate on the problems of program versus type, on the problem of an academy become recently extinct and the problems of another academy not yet in full working order, might it not-possibly-be argued that we find ourselves confronted with no more than the superficial alternatives of a false empiricism and a false idealism? And, if an empiricism which refuses to concern itself with the fabric of ideas can only be illusory and, if an idealism which rejects involvement with empirical detail will only be inadequate, then must it not further be argued that it is exactly within this theater of the mind that today we find ourselves placed? l think it must so be argued. But l also think that this argument should not be allowed to impede a recognition of that diverse but devoted band which has done so much to restore the possibility of a renewed debate between architecture and the city. So l refer again to Leon and Robert Krier, to Aldo Rossi and, most particularly to Matthias Ungers. But, in saluting these individuals (and others could be included), l also ask why, with the occasional exception of Ungers, the Neo-Rationalists in general are so characteristically uptight? Just why do so many of them, while rejecting the morphology of LeCorbusier, feel obliged, after a good fifty years has gone by, to recapitulate the extravagant pitch of his polemic? Why, when forms are repudiated, does a certain psychology persist?

And might there be suggested the very obvious affiliation of architecture and urbanism to left-wing politics? And might there further be suggested the very characteristic preference of left-wing politics for an abstracted, a generalized, a simplified, a diagrammatic diagnosis and prognosis ofthe human condition? And such questions, if they may be answered in the affirmative, are no way intended to denigrate left-wing politics. For, from this source and ever since its inception in the late eighteenth century, such enormous ameliorations have ensued that the world would seem a very small and smelly place were it not for this particular contribution. No. Such questions are not, in any way, intended to illuminate the virtues of the political right-possibly, though not always, apt to proclaim an adherence to specificity, to things as found, and to the obdurate complexity of existence. Nor are they intended to draw attention to that ironical condition of the present day in which multinational corporations, oil companies, and the most callous exploiters of real estate regularly clothe themselves in what were once the vestments of an architectural and social utopia. Rather-these questions (and after all these qualifications the initial questions are becoming slightly remote) are propounded in order to advertise the interrelationship between a too simple political style and what may be a too simple architectural strategy. For, if everyone is more conservative today than many people were in the 1920s, if imaginable horizons and spaces have shrunk, it may still be argued that, for all the shrinkage, in its ideological essence the cilta nuova of architettura razionale is far too 7

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7 City Dream-Fanlasy or Vision; Rainer Jagals. 1967

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often not SO very remote from the vil/e radieuse and the appalling figments of Ludwig Hilberseimer's imagination. For far too often it displays itself as no more than more of the aprioristic same.

Now we all know a lady from Latin America. Does she mostly come from Mexico, from Caracas, from Havana, or from Buenos Aires? I suspect principally from Beunos Aires. But she spreads herself wide, she is Utopian and she arrives in a variety of related editions. Invariably she is elegant, energetic, intellectually chic, ambitious, perhaps a little loud. Almost a femme type of a certain background, she is dedicated to the memory of De Saussure and the texts of Adorno, to semiotics and to fashionable Marxism; and, there, I shall call her La Passionaria. But, always a pleasure to meet, La Passionaria is invariably a problem to consider-and I myself often spend quite a lot of time considering her. For her tastes and her intellectual passions are at variance. Indeed, La Passionaria's emotional Jife is unconsciously bul scrupulously divided. For, in terms of precepts and things to buy, La Passionaria is never to be imagined too far away from the perpetual parade of Madison Avenue, the Rue SI. Honore, Knightsbridge, and the Via dei Condotti. never too painfully divorced from the prospect of endless shopping in the capitalist bazaars de luxe. In terms of concepts and sociopolitical toys, however apparently, for her, Moscow is a basic necessity. And just how would La Passionaria be enabled to shop in Moscow, either for shoes (no Gucci) or for ideas?

So, at every meeting (in her various editions she isn't hard to find), I always love La Passionaria; and I always think how very quaintly similar is her predicament to that of so many of the NeoRationalists, with their not so sophisticated damnations of the pillars of the capitalist world, the banks of New York, Zurich, London, and their apparent willingness to avail themselves of the products of just these institutions.

So my trouble wilh the Neo-Rationalists may be quite simply expressed. In terms of practical politics they may be astute (and hence their rapid rise to prominence); but, in terms of theoretical politics-their ideal world-they are prone to be simplistic. Nevertheless to repeat, the Neo-Rationalists have done very much to restore a possible balance between the circumstantial and the representational; and, with their graphic campaign, probably one only argues that, perhaps, the balance has been overrestored with an excessive preference for the Platonic dimensiono For how can we who have surely lived with the inOuence of Mondrian, who have been exposed to his superlative equilibrium of contingency and ideal state, just calmJy and without more ado, simply wish contingency (and therefore programmatics) a perfunctory goodbye? For surely, confronted with any overt classicism, most of us, for better or worse, are protestant and equipped with an embarrassment of reservations.

And with all these reservations, can we-so very easily-revert to a pre-Enlightenment condition of unempirical innocence? And can a romantically proclaimed Marxian devoutness-the verbal campaignbe seriously imagined as helping to bring such a condition about?

And, for that matter, are not Marxism and classicism (however sophisticated their presentations may be) incompatible states of mind which can only be held together with rhetorical glue?

In spite of the discriminations of the late Joseph Stalin one would have thought so. For, surely, one is obliged to think of classicism as an heroic and magnificent attempt to defy the limitations of chronology, geography, latitude, longitude, and all the rest. And, if in universalistic terms such as these, one may also think about Marxism, then one should also consider the profoundly retrospective and pessimistic components of classicism-a doctrine which, presuming the existence both of the Golden Age and the Platonic Idea, locates the one at the beginning of time and conceives the other to be permanently inaccessible. A closed and tragic doctrine which can only invite stoical response. Surely, in the end, such is classicism. And, by comparison with such an attitude, then what an overture to Marx are both the music and the words of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony!

The words are not to hand but the music is persistent; and, compared with classicism (which one may well prefer), how ex pansive, how fOlure oriented, how exuberant all this is. And, surely, it is in such a framework, lhe 'dynamic' context of nineteenth-century Romanticism, against the Hegelian background of historical melodrama, against the background of Weltschmerz. optimism and scepticism, against the whole tourbil/on of mid-Victorian London and Second Empire Paris, that Marx should properly be placed.

Indeed, to imagine his walkings, backwards and forwards (with Engels) from Haverstock H ill to Regent's Park Road, to know this terrain, and to imagine the two negotiating the Chalk Farm Underground Station, is already to place Marx in an historical context as neither hero nor bogey man but as a manifestation of a culture and a period almost completely estranged from any comprehension of the classical idea.

But even if (without sorne sneaky creeping up from behind) the physique of classicism and the morale of Marxism might be imagined as precariously fusible, the question remains would the private sweat, the intellectual effort, and the bureaucratic tyranny really be worthwhile? And, so far as I am concerned, they would not.

One musl, of course, concede the need of the architect to avail himself of highly simplified critical schemes (exactly like those which have here been under review). But, when heuristic convenience beco mes interpreted as universal panacea, when useful metaphor becomes translated as naive prescription, when paradigm (without apology) is simply substituted for program, then surely the fundamental error of modern architecture is yet again rehearsed (this time in reverse), and, yet again, we are confronted with the glare from the eyes of Medusa, which so much theoretical concern seems determined to impose upon the world.

Which is almost to complete an argument. Worship of program (or data addiction) and worship of paradigm (or excessive typological concern) are, both of them, relatively easy to destroy. Neither

17

position is even faintly adequate, and there 1 wish simply to notice that, when confronted with two doctrines which are both incomplete, intelligent humanity-when it thinks-will be inspired to consider the possibilities of their dialectical interanimation-the method of not only Marx, but also of Aquinas and the Talmud.

So why not try? And as a first step (and not to be pretentious), 1 suggest that, when confronted with a problem, it might be a good idea to observe the inferential evidence of the detective novelallegedly the invention of Edgar Allan Poe, so much admired by Baudelaire and the French, and by his own compatriots never sufficiently regarded.

And what to say about Edgar Allan Poe except that he was the progenitor ofSherlock Holmes, Arsene Lupin, Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe, Peter Wimsey, and aH the rest? That, before Karl Popper was born, Poe was Popperian avant la lettre? That quite privately and still scarcely noticed, he invented the hypothetico-deductive method, the proposition that in all problem-solving operations, it is the hypothesis, the paradigm, which, of necessity, preceeds aH empirical investigation? For, with Poe as with Popper, it is the initial conjecture that awaits either refutation or confirmation. In other words, related to a particular situation of crime, the investigator should have a knowledge of the great criminal paradigms beca use without it he will not be able to place 'facts' in their proper place.

This was Edgar Poe's invention, one for which he deserves to be more celebrated than he is. He invented-or recognised-a particular structure of mental interaction. In other words, he postulated a c1assic strategy of investigation between not-so-amateur amateurs and not-so-professional professionals; and since his time, his method has persisted as the traditional presumption of the detective novel.

For the great detective has very little use for simple induction.

He leaves this to the idiot-friend whom, so very often, he has conveniently acquired; and, while the idiot-friend constantly prescribes action, energy, movement, the great detective is prone to sit at home and to contemplate the typology of crime. Indeed, for him, it is almost a matter of intellectual chic to be, physically, highly immobile. So he restricts his in situ investigations. He meditates and he postulates. And, meanwhile, the police who mostly despise the great detective, scurry around, active as little ants, collecting the most absurd accumulations of typically irrelevant detail and, usually, arriving at the most wildly premature conclusions. For, in the mythology of the detective story, the police must surely be the equivalent of those supposedly many Anglo-Saxon empiricists who it is often supposed can never know very much because, with a fatal facility, they so instantly reject speculation and so readily assume the painless accessibility of "fact. " But, also, it is of the essence of the great detective, working from hypothesis, to be equally sceptical about hypothesis. For, whatever his private opinion about the police who, for the most part, are the idiot-friend turned into an institution, the great detective never waivers in his politeness and patience towards them. For, though his 9

18

8 Sketch; Rainer Jagals. 1967 9 Sketch; Rainer Jagals. 1967 lO City Dream-Fantasy or Vision; Rainer Jagals. 1967

essential intellectual style seems to be mostly a stereotype of what is conventionally thought to be 'Latin', in spite of a preponderant ability to leap to abstract conclusions, the great detective also knows that naive and disembodied abstractions will never help the solution.

He remains responsible and he knows very well that only the police-with all their official resources-can provide him with the ultimate, empirical, material to which, otherwise, he could have no access. And of course, the great detective further knows-and quite infallibly-just how and in terms of which typology (or paradigm) all this material is, usefully, to be organized.

So Who Cares Who Kil/ed Roger Ackroyd? But, if along with Edmund Wilson, one neither can nor should care extremely much, all the same-and literary snobbism apart-there still persists the suspicion that, both psychologically and heuristically, the detective story is an illustration of the problem-solving process (deprived of funny mystifications) as it is widely understood to be. Meaning that, in spite of the showy histrionics of the final presentation, the detective story is always a relatively modest affair. It is two-pronged and hybrid; and its success derives from a conflation of findings-the often naive discoveries of unsuspecting cops and the alternative suppositions of the all-suspecting detective, the ultimate sceptic, who, in spite of his temperament, never imagines that pretentious speculation will conceal the lesion between things as they seem and the solution as it must be.

Which is so much for the model and the orchestration of the detective story. But, considering the detective story, is it apparent that anything so positive and interesting is to be said for the current styles of urbanisticj architectural investigation and projection? To me, it is not very apparent that there is. For, so far as I am concerned, there still exists a highly presumptuous and institutionalized empiricism (fictional cops, real planners, and in spite of its disarray, the predominant apparatus of architectural education). In contradistinction to this, there is a slightly hysterical something else which exhausts itself in unavailing protest against a prevalent ethos.

But, with all this observed-an empiricism which is dreadfully tedious and a Platonismj Marxism which is appallingly abstract, both of them intellectually undistinguished (much more undistinguished than Corbu)-then what to say?

In Berlin, in November '81, I made a lecture related to these topics and 1 ended with a little exhibiti?n of things which gave me joyo Conveniently, they carne ,from Berh!1' 1967; b~t to me they are universal. They are the graphlc speculatlOns of Ramer Jagals who, about to die, feh obliged to draw. He was only twenty-seven and he was dying; but almost following Michelangelo's instructions to Tommaso dei Cavaliere-Disegno, disegno e nonperd'il tempo-he drew and drew and he used whatever time was available.

So, to the results of all this, 1 gravitate; and, about this individual I think that one might say that if Friedrich Gilly was the Giorgine to Schinkel's Titian, then he is the Gilly-Giorgione to something which is to come. He has not been paraded by the

exponents of architettura razionale. He well could have been. But, meanwhile with his drawings-funny derivatives from Klee, Miro, and the primitive-he indicates what I believe: that a visual idea, properly recorded, will always transcend, if not polemic, at least practice. Because, in the end, 1 am compelled to suppose that it is drawings such as these-desperate, translucent, eclectic, elegant, and ironical-and not the programmatic compilations of the data collectors that are going to affect our vision of the city.

Whether so much might be said for the products of the Cornell Urban Design Studio-over a period of 19 years-I do not know. 1 have been too connected with it to be able to judge; and, therefore, 1 am left simply with a recapitulation of what I might have been trying to sayo That a reliance on either program or paradigm is impoverishing; that ifwe are to talk typology, then a more expanded conception of type becomes necessary; that, if the programmers are on the way out, then the neo-Rationalists have received only a very small slice of the typological pizza and, out of it, they are trying to erect the substance of a large urbanistic dinner party. •

10

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The Street in the Twentieth Century Three Conferences: London (1910), Athens (1933), Hoddesdon (1951) Grahame Shane Onebasicspatialcomponentofurbanism In the 1933 meeting, however, Le Corbus-the street-has been the focus for much ier's Plan Voisin and the Algiers projects theoretical study and debate since the turn invert these qua/ities: the street becomes lost ofthe ce;uury. Ihree international meetings, in open expanses offields and skyscrapers the 1910 RIBA conference and the CIAM or even solidified in continuous bui/dings. conferences of 1933 and 1951, are the source Shane documents the alterations and counfor some of the influential theoretical pro- terattacks to the Le Corbusier-inspired posals on the street that underlie a good "Charter of Athens," noting the conferees' portion di urban design practice since World recognition of the persistent problem of War 11. Bound together in their constant Modern building types in the old city consearch or an idea/istic urban order for text, and how this was a theoreticalobstac/e. society and architecture, these confe ence Review and revisions occurred once again in imp/icit neo lassi- the 1951 conference. The city of the past, propo ls contained cism . in e¡¡rat: of m 1 and with its spatia//y defined and cultura//y he entieth charged historic centers, began to be seen nature.

"The Stre~ Century. " Graham evea t at th--no ras bsJa u e m lar. Whi/e heú:...applic.atlO n u ban so e . e le" lLdf he 1910 conference these i ~ s a design ere subject to constant re ision or sur acea, t e jo a oImsals for the . ns ead, r:vrrcepts-of-t~tv refutatio . Consensus on the sing issue o s ree al the street, and subsequently on he devel- scape and dialectica//y synthetic, inc/uiiw, opment of a general Modernist rthodoxy, and abstract planning processes became ¡he remained elusive over thisforty-year periodo inheritance ofpostwar urban designo Ihe author shows, for example, that D.B.M. while the results of the 1910 meeting displayed an acceptance ofthe street as an integrated spatial entity, the Athens conference of 1933 saw much less agreement on this topic. Ihe Parisian architect Henard stands out in the first conference for his mechanistic elaboration o/ Haussmann 's bou/~vard rationalism; the spatial configuration of the street remains essentia//y continuous.

20

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history of the modern movement might stress the decadence of the Conference of 1910, the coming of age of modern town planning in the Charter of Athens of 1933 and its arrival at maturity in CIAM 8 in 1951. In the portrayal of the radical break between 1910 and 1933 it might be easy to lose sight of the thematic and analytical continuities that linked neoclassical and modern urbanism. The portrayal of the development from 1933 to 1951 would stress the continued development of the "functional city," masking the contradictions and revisions from 1933 and 1951. Through an examination of the various themes of the street, the state and the monumental public realm, it was hoped to explore the intellectual and structural changes behind the facade of modernism. 1

A

I Abslraclion of Viclorian and Medieval Slreels of London

London 1910 The street was a prime instrument for the expression of the power of the state in the nineteenth century. Monumental urban arrangements of palaces, churches, chancelleries and other government offices, coHeges, museums, gaHeries, banks, and even commercial establishments demonstrated the ideal balance and content of the neoclassical nation state. From the neoclassical "museum" streets of 1800 to the highly technical sections of the grand boulevards of 1900, the idealized harmony of the classical street made a deep impression on the course of the nineteenth century. In Germany Hegel's reaction to the Romantics had, by 1810, firmly tied the German spirit, destiny, and history to a transcendent idealism associated with the state. Schinkel's work in Berlin and Potsdam and Von Klenze's work in Munich were completed within the framework of tltis idealism, which sought a rebirth of classicism in the modern world. Indeed the attempts later in the century of Stubben, Sitte, Wagner, and Eberstadt to rationalize the city and control its industrialization had this neoclassical idealism at heart. The state was seen as a balance between industrialized "progressive" culture and a romantic conception of nature. The programs of the various competitions at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris during the last years of the century also read Iike component parts of this idealized, classical society.2 From 1891 onward a series of international conferences on L'Art Publique brought this neoclassical idealism into focus. These international gatherings studied the city, culminating in 1910 with the Berlin Conference and the RIBA Conference in London. 3 The London Conference was the larger and more elaborate conference, and it received both royal patronage and the backing of the Liberal government. Many of the participants in the Berlin gathering carne on to London. Conference events included receptions held in the Guildhall and at the Royal Academy, and banquets were organized and addressed by prominent Liberal members of Parliament. An exhibition was organized at the Royal Academy and visits were made to garden cities and historical sites. 4 The conference was divided into three main parts: "The Cities of the Past," "The Cities of the Present," and "The Cities of the Future."

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These sections were so full that overflow meetings had to be organized and speakers repeated their lectures twice in a morning.

Sir Reginald Bloomfield presided over the first section, "The Cities of the Past." Professors Gardner and Haverfield of Germany spoke on Hellenistic and Roman town planning, respectively. Each illustrated his lectures with plans of excavations and imaginative reconstructions of whole cities. The Director of the British School of Rome followed, tracing Rome's history and arguing against the Haussmannesque straight lines of the San Juste Plan of 1909. Dr. Brinckmann, professor at Aachen and a friend of Stubben, then lectured on the evolution of the ideal town since the Renaissance, an evolution that ended in Burnham's plan for Chicago. s A clear connection was made between the idealism of the past, that of the present, and that of the future.

Rational planning formed the framework for the second part of the study, "Cities of the Present." Raymond Unwin presented an optimistic portrait of the recently enacted British Town Planning Act. 6 He illustrated his work at Letchworth Garden City and Hampstead Garden Suburb. His lecture included references to his major Continental influences, including Stubben, Brinckmann, and Sitte.

The chief architect of the London County Council, Mr. W. E. Reilly, followed with a description of the disorganized growth of London, including the chaos of the fragmented street, railway patterns and the poor housing conditions. He then iIIustrated the efforts of the London County Council in the Aldwych-Kingsway Improvement scheme at the center, with its complex underground section and strong, geometric "trident" plan. He also illustrated three types of housing estates: five-story blocks at the center, terrace-house types in the inner suburbs, and cottage estates on the outskirts. AH layouts were based on the street. His lecture mentioned the many competing municipal authorities and the impossibility of road planning, suggesting an orbital ring around the city, similar to Liverpool, as a solution.1 Next was a paper by Augustin Rey, a member of the French Ministerial Council responsible for urban and rural housing who was also a prominent hygienist. He incorporated aH the more radical ideals of beaux-arts rationalist planning, including the segregation of functions and the public ownership of development land with the medical and hygienic arguments for nature, sunlight, air, and low density to fight tuberculosis. He also referred to the achievements of German town planning in these respects and to the cities of Antwerp and Wurtenburg, where development land was controlled in the public interest. 8 This presentation was foHowed by Stubben's lecture on recent town planning advances in Germany, illustrated with many slides. Stubben described how Germans had once looked to Paris for their ideas on the systematization of the city, and then had turned to the picturesque irregularities of medieval Germany for their inspiration. The "free style" of England, which was flexible and could take sections from appropriate systems, was his present ideal solution. He

21

2 Great Gallery of Palmyra. Pla"n 3 RIBA Town Planning Conference; Readers of lhe Papers. 1910 4 RIBA Town Planning Conference; Readers of lhe Papers. 1910 S Diagram for lhe Slreel; London. 1910 I 6 RIBA Town Planning Conference; Menu-Card. 1910 7 Hampslead Garden Suburb; Healh Close 8 Ring of Cities of Health 9 Aldwych-Kingsway; Entrance of lhe Holborn lO Strand Improvement; London 10 The Mall; London; Webb 11 Ideal City; Scamozzi; Plan

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illustrated this ideal by reference to his own schemes as well as those of his students and circle. 9 His former student, Eberstadt, one of the winners of the Greater Berlin Competition, then described his entry and also spoke of his admiration for the English villa and cottage style suburban developments. His design for Berlin projected the growth of the city along radial traffic arteries that would penetrate the old ring system. Development land would be municipalized to facilitate rational planning; access to the countryside would provide more open space and relieve congestion at the center. A rationalized railway system would give access to the center and the expansion of the city would include adequate local centers with public facilities housed in monumental complexes. Eberstadt compared his plan to that of Jansen, with its green belt rings, three-story suburbs around central parks and squares, and "sally streets," huge roadways leading to resorts by lakes and in the countryside. IO Eberstadt projectetl his rational examination of the city into the future, incorporating mechanized transportation systems and new settlement types to relieve the old city center. In "The Cities of the Future" Professor C. H. Reilly of Liverpool University predicted that the whole city would be rationally planned as the "ultimate work of art." This city, with its formal classical central area and medieval, Georgian, and Victorian extensions, would be surrounded by informal new communities, garden suburbs which would carefully balance public and private property and space.

Henard, the city architect of Paris, then presented his development and futuristic mechanization of Haussmann's street section, which had epitomized the ideal of the 1850s and 60s. Henard concentrated on rationalizing the provision and extension of technical services. In this "City of the Far Distant Future," which drew inspiration from H. G. Wells' War in the Air, elaborate underground service and transportation networks were installed beneath the surface ofthe street: local ahd cross town freight lines, passenger trains, and separate compartments (with service access) for water, sewage, electrical, telephone, and gas lines. Exotic provisions for the future included oxygen supply lines for health chambers, salt water, coolants for refrigerators, and hydraulic and steam lines. The street surface would never be disrupted to repair these services and the street would be relieved of the enormous traffic generated by services and deliveries. The paved sidewalks were covered with glass canopies. They were lined with trees while an electric tramway provided efficient and silent local transportation along the center of the road surface. The apartment blocks along the street of the future were improved versions of Haussmann's Paris. In one scheme they formed "Redents", buildings set back around small parks at the side of the street. They incorporated all the latest technical marvels and comforts for overcoming time and distance. They had rationalized bathrooms and kitchens, providing saltwater baths as well as the health chambers with oxygen and solariums. Apartments on or near the roof developed greenhouse sections that corresponded to the outdated Haussmann mansards. In other apartment blocks, small

26

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23 Grealer Berlín Compelilion; Embankmenl Proposal;

Jansen 24 Grealer Berlín Compelition; Scheme for New Suburb;

Jansen 25 Grealer Berlín Compelilíon; Aeríal View of "Sally Slreel;" Jansen 26 Brídge over 1Oames; Aerial View; COIICUll 27 Desígn for Approach from SI. Paul's Brídge; Pror. Pile 28 Brilísh M useum Place; Proposed Plan; Pror. Adshead 29 Brílísh M useum Place; Aeríal View; Pror. Adshead 30 AClual París Slreel; Plan; Henard 31 Víew of City of lhe FUlure; París; Henard 32 Proposed Slreel of lhe Fulure; Paris; Plan. Seclion; Henard

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34 33 Aerial View of Proposed 80ulevard for Michigan Avenue; Chicago; 8urnham 34 View of Project for Stepped 8ack Terrace Slreet; Paris; Sauvage 3S View of Slepped 8ack Terrace Streel; Paris: Sauvage 36 Town 8ui1t on Pile ; Seclion: Le Corbusier. 1915 37 Hislory of Slreel: Le Corbusier

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6

planes could land on rooftop airstrips and be conveyed by hydraulic elevator past the front door on the way to the basement hangar.

Automobiles traveled by the same elevator from street level to apartment and garage. The whole city, as in H. G. Wells' story, was designed with air travel in mind. Orientation for pilots was included.

Eight 500-meter high towers ringed the center of the old city, each unique but all connected to the surface road and railway systems. At the center of the city stood the highest tower, with its beacon, as a central orientation point. Henard emphasized, "There could be no question whatever of removing out art treasures or interfering with our historic monuments and the time honoured aspects of our ancient cities. "11 Indeed, รกll the central orientation skyscrapers were treated in a different ecIectic monumental style. One was Iike Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, London; another Iike the Kremlin; yet another Iike the Campanile from Venice, and so on.

Henard 's presentation at the Conference of 1910 was followed by that of Daniel Burnham from Chicago. Burnham's Chicago Plan linked a similarly complex underground street section to a standard apartment block typology. In addition, the full apparatus of beauxarts planning was applied. He placed municipal functions in discrete, palace structures or garden pavilions, located in order of importance on the hierarchy of streets at their junctions and midpoints. The streets were classified, from the primary axes, to the secondary diagonals or cross axes, to the tertiary back-up grid for local uses.

Nowhere in Burnham's Plan, Henard's presentation, or in Professor Reilly's speculations was any doubt expressed as to the validity of the street as an instrument of urban reform in the future program of a sympathetic government. A partial realization of this "street of the future" already existed in the London County Council's Aldwych-Kingsway scheme, shown to participants. In postwar France Henard's research was continued by Toni Garnier in Lyons and Henri Sauvage in Paris. In addition, the early projects of Le Corbusier, "The Town Built on Piles," showed a section based on "an immense space under the town in which would be placed the gas, watermains and sewers, the viscera of the city. "13 Participants in the 1910 conference linked the state, street and a rational ideal that projected cIassical harmony into a mechanical and popular future.

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Athens 1933 The publication of the first draft of the conclusions from 1933 conference were embedded in Le Corbusier's publication of The Vil/e Radieuse of 1935. 14 This book depicted the city of the future without the monumental street or the neoclassical state. In their place was a central business district of cruciform skyscrapers which dominated the skyline. Housing, cultural and sporting facilities surrounded this core in monofunctional zones. Each element of Henard's formulation of the street of the future was detached from the axis of the street and treated independently. They were connected by the axis of a great highway which led to the core of the city. The multilayered

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mechanical section of Henard, which had been buried beneath the surface of the street, was brought out into the sunlight as an object of beauty. Each previously buried channel of communication was segregated by speed along the axis of the highway, which was surrounded by parkland. The image of the City of Three Million (1922), the great axis of the Plan Voisin (1925), the linear highwayhousing spines of Rio (1929), and AIgiers (1930-34) formed the background to the text. 15 These images demonstrated the triumph of modernism in the city. In the last projects, the inversion of the values of the nineteenth-century street was complete. In place of the communal void at the center of the "rue corridor," a solid linear slab was formed overlooking the ocean. Housing and commercial functions were located aboye and below the great route which thus became a linear city, inflected to follow the curvature of the shorelineo Against this background, in place of the mediative street and state, Le Corbusier proposed an unmediated, utopian transparency between man and nature. This transparency he called a "new harmony," a "biological harmony," brought about by the "second machinist" era.

The text published in The Vil/e Radieuse was intended to form the conc1usion of CIAM's fourth conference on the "functionalist city." These conclusions were read to the steering committee of the conference "behind closed doors" on board the S.S. Patris II en route to Athens in July 1933. Le Corbusier described the scene in Ville Radieuse: the harmony between man and nature as the machine intervened. "The cruiseship was turned ÂĄnto meeting rooms, committee rooms and secretarial offices. There was only one sound: the hissing and splashing of water along the hull; there was only one atmosphere: youthfulness, trust, modesty and professional conscience. "16 In planning the conference the steering committee, which had met in Berlin in 1931 and Barcelona in 1932, had hoped for a review of world urbanism, from capital cities of the Western world to the smallest colonial outposts. The conference was intended to c10se a sequence of investigation which had started after the foundation of CIAM as a professional body at La Sarraz in 1927. The second conference had studied the Minimum Dwelling (Frankfurt 1929); the third conference Rational Housing (Brussels 1930) and the fourth would elevate the scale from the neighborhood to the whole city.

Each delegation was instructed to examine national cities and present cbnc1usions within a graphic format and analytical code developed by Van Esteren, the city planner of Amsterdam and President of CIAM. All cities were to be drawn to the same scale and information on each city-its growth and future development-was to be standardized. I7 From this study it was hoped that delegates might derive a fundamental analysis of world urbanism and formulate the modern principies of the "functionalist city." The more than 100 delegates on board represented 18 countries, and 33 cities were examined. The maps were exhibited in Athens at the Polytechnic, where dĂ­e Greek cabinet attended the exhibition, the open lectures and discussions. Besides Van Esteren, the President and S. Giedion, JX

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42 Aerial View of Project for South Amstenlam; Berlage, Van Esteren, et al, 1934 43 Collage of Propaganda for Segregation of City Functions 44 Analysis of Overcrowding 45 Diagram for the Street; Athens, 1933 46 Weissenhof Siedlung Stuttgart Diagram; Stam, 1927

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the secretary general, delegates on board included Le Corbusier (France), Alvar Aalto (Finland), Erno Goldfinger and Wells Coates (Mars Group, England), Szyman and Helena Syrkus (Poland), J. L. Sert (Spain), and Pierro Botoni and Gino Pollini (Quadrante Group, Italy). Le Corbusier's guests included his brother Pierre Jeannaret (musician), Dr. Pierre Winter (hygienist), Dr. Neurath (Viennese statistician), Moholy-Nagy (Bauhaus), and Ferdinand Leger (painter).

It was hoped that the Fourth International Congress of Modern Architects, as a professional body representing the avant-garde of Europe, would solve the problem of the modern city through functional analysis. In his suggested conclusions, read to the steering committee on board, Le Corbusier described the modern city-region as an organism responsive to social, economic, physiological and psychological pressures, including various political "authorities."

New stimuli brought new responses; the modern planner's job was to coordinate these responses to meet future needs. Housing, work, recreation and traffic-the "four functions"-had previously been aligned about the axis of the street. Each should form a separate analytical category, as they did in the Ville Radieuse. Each was to be studied in its historical development, then to be segregated and projected in to the future as an independent "urban element." To these four elements Le Corbusier poetically added sky and trees. His text also incorporated a preconference questionnaire on housing.

The questionnaire defined housing as the primary urban element. Le Corbusier and Gropius stressed the high-rise slab solution, while other clauses stressed the segregation of functions, the proper re lation between the house and the work place, the city and nature. The conclusion of the document identified private interest and private property as the major obstacle to the "biological" harmony and proper transparency between form and function in the modern city.

It proposed a "mobilization" of private property rather than nationalization of land by the state. This "mobilization" of the land would be the first step to the organic development of the modern city region. 18 Le Corbusier clearly hoped for a unified front in support of modern architecture and a statement that would be "carefully weighed in order to express the maximum agreement possible between all the necessarily diverse tendencies represented." The official conclusions of the conference were published as the last appendix of J. L. Sert's Can Our Cilies Survive?, which appeared in England and America in 1942. Sert's book was an illustrated commentary upon the conclusions of the 1933 conference. A parallel publication in Paris was also planned, but the Charler 01 Alhens did not appear until ayear later, and then only text and commentary without illustrations. Sert called the official conclusions the "Town Planning Chart," not "Charter." This "chart" included several of Le Corbusier's initial observations on the new "biological" humanism, the inf1uence of various factors on the development of the city and region, the four functions as basic categories, the need for the segregation of housing, work, leisure and traffic, and the necessity for the

suppressionof private interest in favor of the larger, public goOd.'9 But while the skeleton might survive from Le Corbusier's proposals, the "Chart" also included a variety of amendments that transformed its purity as a statement of the modernist doctrine of the. "functional city" and represented a retreat from modernismo Giedion's voice might be detected in the preliminary statement attacking "the uncontrolled and disorderly development of the Machine Age which has produced the chaos of our cities." Van Esteren perhaps emphasized the rational "scientific planning" necessary for the proper preparation of a city plan. In each of the "four functions," the attack on the street is elaborated in great detail and with much passion, suggesting perhaps the Swiss-German radical inf1uence of the absent Mart Stam. In particular, the section on transportation details the faults of the street: too many intersections, bad for traffic, lack of open space, lack of greenery, lack of differentiation in functions, bad orientation for housing, tendency to monumental effects and so on. This attack is contradicted in the seventh section on "Buildings and Districts of Historic Interest," included at the insistence of the Italians. In this section, historic districts of the city, if they were of "universal interest" and when not "unhealthy" or "in the way of traffic," could be maintained as representative of "past cultures." This admission of the past as an asset rather than an obstacle marked a change of emphasis away from modernism, allowing the historic street as a museum piece. Sert did not illustrate this section since it "applied only to certain cities." Le Corbusier's commentary in the Charler 01 Alhens softened its impact to fit with the Ville Radieuse-Plan Voisin pattern of isolated relics in parkland.

The official Town P/anning Charl continued beyond Le Corbusier's suggested conclusion about the "mobilization of land." It emphasized the need for the collaboration of specialists to properly respond to the political, social and economic factors of the day. The conference conclusions stressed that it was these experts and their evaluation and "not the spirit of modern architecture" that would shape the city-region of the future. 20 Le Corbusier's version of this conclusion altered the position of the negative to obscure its finality. It also reversed the emphasis to read: "and it is nol as a last resort that architecture will intervene. "21 The alterations of the Charler 01 Alhens were intended to emphasize unity and the progress of modernismo The commitment to modern architecture masked a diversity and confusion, as well as the bureaucratic tendencies, revealed by the Town P/anning Charlo It is clear that delegates did not endorse the fundamental transparency, the "biological harmony" proposed by Le Corbusier. In its place a whole series of mediative approaches were proposed, From its initial formation, the International Congress of Modern Architects had been divided on the role of the state in the twentieth century. At La Sarraz in 1927 the German Swiss and Dutch radicals, inchiding Hannes Meyer, Ernst May, H~ns Schmidt and Mart Stam, had insisted on a role for the progressive state. They, with the then President Berlage and with Professor Moser (both

33

••

I 47 47 Hellerhof. Frankfurl; Slam. 1929 48 Aerial View of Projecl for New City in USSR; Stam 49 View of Civic Centers 50 Palace of Soviets Compelition; Variations; Le Corbusier, 1931-33 51 Palace of Sovicts Competilion; Model; Le Corbusier.

1931-33 52 Perspective View of Palace of Ihe Soviets Competition; Perret. 1931-33

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judges favorable to Le Corbusier on the League of Nations jury) had inserted politics, sociology and economics between the autonomous professional "egg" of the International Congress and the various nation states. 22 Mart Stam had been particularly outspoken in his criticismo In his own work, for Hannes Meyer at the Bauhaus and later with Ernst May at Frankfurt, he placed low-rise industrialized housing at right angles to the street, but still at the service of the progressive sta te. Indeed for Stam the elimination of the iconography of the street only served to heighten the instrumenta lity of the progressive state in a truly socialist society. The intervention of the state was presumed. With the crash of 1929 and the fragility of the Weimar Republic, Russia appeared as the prototype of the modern progressive state, committed to the planned intervention between man and nature on an unprecedented scale. In 1930 Ernst May moved to Russia with other radical founders of CIAM and forty members of his Frankfurt design team. 23 He was to plan the Soviet expansion eastward. Le Corbusier had recognized this triumph of rational planning and been to Moscow three times in connection with the completion of the Centrosoyus, planned as the termination of the first five-year plan. 24 Indeed the Fourth Congress of CIAM had originally been planned to take place in Moscow, in connection with the future planning of that city and the announcement of the results of the Palace of the Soviets Competition. 25 The presentations of the versions of the conference conclusions did not allude to the prominent role that had once been assigned to the state, even with the absence of the street. The problem for CIAM revolved around the proper architectural representation of the state and the creation of a new, monumental public realm. The Vil/e Radieuse had proposed a symbolism of skyscrapers, which radicals associated with capitalism and business interests. The Palace of the Soviets Competition, like the League of Nations Competition earlier, demonstrated the issues released by the absence of the neoclassical street. Russian modernists and five of the seven invited foreign competitors had sought a new monumental expression for the state within the established language of modern architecture. Variations might be detected between Le Corbusier's purism, Poelzig's expressionism, Gropius' elementarism and various constructivist linear or close packed solutions. But, all sought an internal functional logic within the language of Modernism with little thought to the disposition of the buildings on site or in the city. Perhaps Le Corbusier's eight permutations indicate a sensitivity to site and an attempt to form a public enclosure aboye the traffic circulation and parking.

When compared with the project of Perret, with its streets and squares, scale and linkage to context and traditional neoclassical monumental representation of the state, his project indicates the problems of modernism when attempting a new public realm. The isolation of functions in object buildings did not allow for the enclosure of space in the traditional manner of the city. The abstract sculptural treatment of masses and circulation did not allow for the differentiation of the various public realms of the city, from monu-

/ /

52

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35

mental to informal, which had been accommodated in the street and square. This abstraction and an associated change in scale did not allow for connection to the old city which, as in the Athens Conference first draft, remained an obstacle in the proper transparency between form and function in the modern city.26 The Italian delegates in particular had protested the association of the past with private interests and property, vestiges of capitalism and an obstacle to progress. While they received unsympathetic treatment from Le Corbusier and were ignored by Sert, they saw their urban heritage as a record of human progress of general interest and universal appeal. It was clear that "streets-in-the-air" or "street buildings" in parkland were not adequate substitutes for the organic, communal representation that could be found in Italian towns. The seventh section of the Town Planning Chart opened an opportunity for a critical reassessment of the traditional hierarchies of public and private realms which could mediate from the monumental to the private hearth. What had been considered an obstacle could now provide illumination. Modernism was being stood on its head and the need for mediation again being recognized. Sert himself acceded to this revisionism in Can Our Cities Survive? He illustrated a street solution for the new Fascist Party Headquarters beside the Coloseum in Rome and many photographs of the Rockefeller Center, New York. He also illustrated Arthur Ling's precinct proposal for the rebuilding of the bombed center of Leicester, England and Breuer's idealized neighborhood center.27

Hoddesdon 1951 The long delay in publication of the Town Planning Chart and the Charter ofAthens reflected the temporary collapse of CIAM and the dispersal of its members to the West and the East. Sert, Giedion, Aalto, and Mies Van der Rohe were all in America and the reemergence of CIAM owed a great deal to Sert's efforts in the U.S. He, Giedion, and Leger, all of whom had been on board Patris 11 in 1933, publilÂĄhed the "Nine Points on Monumentality" statement the year afterCan Our Cities Survive? was issued. 28 Their statement was a recognition of a central failure of the modern movement with respect to representation and symbolism of the state and of mano Sert's emphasis in his Can Our Cities Survive? also stressed the "new monumentality" at the city center, the symbolic communal coreo Giedion, as secretary of CIAM, organized a series of conferences after World War 11 on the issue of the monumental aesthetic and a new abstract symbolism. The meetings at Bergamon (1947, CIAM 6) and Bridgewater (1949, CIAM 7) dealt with the "new aesthetic" and the relation between "art and architecture," while the CIAM 8, planned for Hoddesdon in 1951, was intended to treat the "Heart of the CĂ­ty," or "The Coreo "29 CIAM appeared to be attempting to deal with the failures of the modern movement and to be reviewing methodically the weak points of modernismo

36

The conference at Hoddesdon in 1951, like Bergamon and Bridgewater, continued to operate within the framework of modernism. Le Corbusier made a presentation of the CIAM grid of the "four functions" analytical approach derived from the Athens Charter.

There were also pioneers from the prewar Finsbury Health Centre in London, who supported the "biological humanism" concepts and the transparency of form and function based on the machine. 30 But clearly after the debacle of Moscow and the "New Monumentality" statement of New York, a revision of the modernist thesis was underway. Indeed, the conference proceeded to discuss the city of the past, not as an obstacle, but as examplar. Under Giedion's leadership, Gropius, Le Corbusier, Sert, Rogers, Bakema, Van Eyke, and others discussed the lessons of the Italian piazza for contemporary architects. 31 Giedion's paper used his Harvard students' work to analyze the difference between the Greek agora and the Roman forum. 32 The lone voice of the Swedish delegate, Paulson, a Romantic nationalist, protested on functional grounds that such forms were inappropriate in his country. A further discussion was recorded on the meaning of the heart or core of city. Contributors from Holland stressed the sociological and anthropological aspects, while Van Esteren noted the need to locate future centers accurately.

Sert and Rogers both stressed the communallife of the core, citing Las Ramblas in Barcelona and the passeo through the Piazza Navona in Rome. 33 From these considerations of precedents, the conference moved to examine the reconstruction of the city and its core in the present and future. In these discussions and presentations it is apparent that the concept of the heart of the city is somewhat elastic. Gropius presented his Graduate Student Housing at Harvard as a small-scale coreo Sert illustrated his project for Cimabute, in which a large overhanging roof enclosed the edge of a communal courtyard containing mixed uses beneath the shaded periphery of the space. Le Corbusier stressed that events did not necessarily need formal structures. He recounted the arrival of an airship amidst townsfolk and tribesmen in Brazil in the 1930s. He described a more recent experience in which actors and musicians had moved through the city of Venice, using it as their backdrop in a production of The Merchant of Venice. He then presented his plans for St. Die, in which, as at the Palace of the Soviets, he again sought to create a sense of enclosure within the modern language of architecture. Traffic was segregated to the periphery and "street-buildings," a theater, and a market building were manipulated to create an axial approach to the town hall tower block. It appeared that object buildings in conjunction with a long, linear element might achieve his goal. Le Corbusier continued to illustrate this idea in the administration complex at Chandigarh, where a monumental, abstract language was put at the disposal of the Indian state. 34 It appeared that the problems ofthe new monumentality, public symbolism, the state, and the new public realm had all been addressed successfully. The return of the state passed without

54

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56

55

53 Figure/Ground of Palace of Soviets Competition; Perret.

1931-33 54 Neighborhood Center; Model; Breuer SS Le Modele; Le Corbusier, 1926 56 Open Hand Monument; Le Corbusier 57 Rebuilding of Coventry; Axonometric and Plan; Ling 58 Maekawa, Rogers. Sert and students 59 Analysis Forum Romanum; Giedion 60 Diagram of the Street; Hoddesdon. 1951

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38

comment. The conference proceeded to endorse the traffic-free precinct concept as the mediative tool to alleviate the ills of the undifferentiated transparency which had been a problem of modernism. 35 A hierarchy of five levels of precincts was overlaid upon the segregation of the four functions and four routes. In these precincts, enclosure and mixed use were desirable; public symbolism and community activity to be sought. These cores would be similar to the Rockefeller Center or Ling's Coventry project illustrated by Sert in 1942. At this grand scale they would represent the center of the polycentric city, the metropolis. Below this scale. lay the smaller single center city scale or an entire township. Below that was the city sector center or an entire small town; then the neighborhood unit or small rural market center; and as the final basis the primary housing unit or village. This double scale of city and country was intended to provide a hierarchy of traffic-sheltered enclaves at all scales for communal and commercial life, where society would be free to express itself through consumption, monuments and spontaneous acts. English members of the conference could point to Ling's studies of the communities of London, which had been incorporated as a biological "cell" structure as a basis of Abercrombie's plan for London. They could illustrate the application of the hierarchical thesis in the Festival of Britain model estates and arcaded central market in Poplar or in Harlow New Town centre. Clearly, the liberal welfare state required such an enclosure. J. M. Richard's presentation illustrated the pedestrian enclave on the South Bank at the center of London that accommodated the Festival of Britain itself.36 Holford, Abercrombie's associate and planner of the City of London, could also illustrate the application of the precinct principIe south of St. Paul's Cathedral, along with the use of various light angles to control height and density.J7 Town planners and architects appeared to be unanimous in their endorsement of the precinct solution based on the biological model of the cell.

The concept of the enclosure, the precinct, was fundamentally at odds with the transparency based on the machine that had formed the basis for the conference of 1933. While it did not mark a return to the street of 1910, it was clearly a move along the line indicated by the Italian's seventh section in the Athens Town Planning Chart and "Charter." But, all the talk of historic cores did not equip the modern architect to deal with them, as Le Corbusier's St. Die project had shown. There still remained the rationalized housing units, the units or low-rise blocks, which provided no support or connection to the centers. In England the contrast between the picturesque cottagestyle housing on curving streets and the enclosed core is extreme. In addition, as Van Esteren remarked, how was one to know where to place such a core? Le Corbusier's quick reply, to try various temporary locales, did not address the basic question of center and periphery, center and support, old and new. Even the plans illustrated for Nagasaki and Hiroshima sought a link to the vestigial symbols of the past. The city of the past and memory occupied the center and clearly could not be easily dismissed. The English dele-

The Cornell Journal of Architecture

gates illustrated the work of the Townscape Movement and Gordon Cullen, who sought an instant past, presented a mixed pastiche of buildings and styles without coherence or authenticity, but which gave expression to a deep seated nostalgia. This pastiche, without any functional basis, provoked no comment at the conference. An historical precinct could be formed within this mixed style and townscape that would appear to fit within modernist urban theory.

Clearly modern architecture, in terms of a stateless, natural transparency, purism or the five points of modern architecture, did not exist at this point.

There was no public recognition of this situation until Ernesto Roger's speech at CIAM 8. 30 He spoke of the situation of architecture and of cultural stereotypes. There had been the "Transcendent City of God," the city for the religious. There had been the "Total City of the Sun," the fascist model based on the instrumentality of the state. There had been the "Business City of Skyscrapers," based on the instrumentality of capital. There had been the "Factory" as the center, based on the instrumentality of the proletariat. There had been the modernist machine age transparency, which Rogers associated with an "architecture of cosmopolitan, overbearing arrogance." In opposition to this "arrogance" was the "subjective" organicist position associated with an architecture of "demagogic folklaw," such as Townscape or romantic nationalism. None of these positions was complete in itself since all were highly specialized.

Rogers continued that while "the functional method is at the root of our creative process, recurs to us, represents our ideological premise," the search was for "a universallanguage" beyond functionalism. He continued, "Our task is to give form to a dialectical synthesis of the complex field of culture in which we are participating." Whether a city should have one or many centers was a technical question. More important was that there be a "universallanguage" to mediate the multifunctional, complex and plural perspectives. No monofunctional description could be given of a successful heart of a city; he cited the case of Milan, with its many functions, or aRoman piazza.

In these piazzas multifunctional mediative configurations successfully combined abstract universal forms and the particulars of everyday-life monuments and events. This mediation, a dialectical synthesis, was essential at the coreo Rogers wrote: "The composition of the whole, no matter how logical and elegant it may be, cannot, however, achieve its aim unless it offers, beyond the vision of the whole, the enjoyment of a rich, varied and surprising orchestration."

This was the "human problem of cities" that CIAM's preoccupation with the transparency of the machine and nature had made impossible. Orchestration implied a complex web of relationships among elements, overlapping, interpenetration, transition and opposition.

CIAM's isolated object buildings each contained its own internal history in terms of type, but they eliminated relationships among each other except as defined within the abstract code of the CIAM grid. Rogers reemphasized the social and historical context of architecture, the monumental and "universal language" of architecture,

39

67 67 Corel Cell Structure; Coventry; Ling 68 Corel Cell Structure; Coventry; Shadow Plan; Ling 69 The New Market in Lansbury; Lee Architects Dept.

70 The Parade; Festival of Britain, 1951 71 Westminster in the Heart of London 72 Westminster Restored; Project; Gordon Cullen

40

while preserving the various insights and perspectives of CIAM as cultural stereotypes within the larger matrix. Functionalism remained as a base, but a complex field of culture carne into play that could include fragments from a variety of sources and multiple perspectives from the previous order. The manipulation of relationships among these pieces became part of the architect's vocabulary, while the formation of new elements and combinations was always possible.

door for regional variation, history, and politics as well as socioeconomic and anthropological interpretations. It represented the collapse of Modern Architecture and the return of the architect to the production cycle of postwar reconstruction in which architecture once more (as it had in 1910) became the representational and symbolic dimension of the mediative, liberal state. •

Conclusion The Smithsons noted that Team X first began to emerge from "Orthodox Modernism" at CIAM in Aix-en-Provence (1953)39.

Orthodox Modernism referred to the revisions of CIAM 8 at Hoddesdon and was distinct from the Heroic Period of the 19205.

But in either period it is difficult to conceive of a concensus or orthodoxy, other than the highly abstract, personal, and intellectual formulations of protagonists such as Le Corbusier and Rogers.

By contrast, the theory of the liberal state and the urban order of the stret, harmonizing culture and nature about its increasingly mechanized axis, represented an orthodoxy in the 1910 conference.

Dissenting voices remained peripheral. With the collapse of the belief in the liberal state and the reevaluation of the urban order of the street, a series of related propositions formed the basis of discussion in 1933. These varied from the dismissal of the state and street by Le Corbusier, to the retention of the state without the street by Mart Stam, to the retention of both state and street by the Italians. Within this field of discourse a bureaucratic and moderate center surrounded Van Eesteren. It was from this center that the "New Monumentality" solution emerged in New York with Sert, Leger, and Giedion in 1942-3. Despite various attempts to cover differences and produce an orthodoxy, a close reading of the Town Planning Chart of 1942 and the Charter 01 Athens of 1943 easily reveals the rifts and tensions within modernismo No one could agree on the role of the state, the street, nature and culture or the position of the machine.

By 1951, in the midst of postwar reconstruction, the acceptance of the state as the planning authority passed almost without question. With the return of the authority of the state, the more traditionalliberal formulation of state and street or square also returned.

It reappeared under the pseudoscientific, "biological" guise of the cellular structure of cities, neighborhood and hierarchies of pedestrian precincts. Orthodox Modernism abandoned the utopian radicalism and idealistic transparencies of the 1920s and early I930s for the revisionist formulations of Giedion and Sert. They brought modernists closer to 1910 than might have been imagined possible in 1933. While the state and street had returned as the key to the core or heart of the city, the voices of the dissenting Italian delegates to Athens might also be heard in the reevaluation of history, culture and nature implied by the Hoddesdon discussions on the piazza. This revision of Modernism marked the recognition of the limitations of the abstract machine-age interpretations of the 19305, opening the

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The

Figure/ Grounds Wayne Copper In this article, Wayne W. Copper develops an argumentfor usingfigure/ground plans as an abstract representational technique for urban form analysis and designo Describing the conceptual reversibility of buildings and spaces, either of which can be highly defined or ambiguous, the author demonstrates the interdependency of each while offering, through these plans, a perception ofthe urbanistic whole. This method finds certain antecedents and inspiration in gestalt images, the graphic hierarchy of Nolli's 1748 planfor Rome, and Sitte's plan analyses and design proposals for Vienna.

This text and the drawn plates confi;m,edfor the Cornell Urban Design Studio many of the formal problems of Modern architecture in the traditional city contexto Written in 1967, often referred to yet never before published, Copper's graduate thesis had a tremendous impact on subsequent studio projects. Most of the drawings are of pre-Modern city plans. Drawn in black and white, they illustrate the usual conftguration of figural spaces within a dense and randomly defined field of buildings. Modern city plans, such as Le Corbusier's Antwerp project, are included in the study too, and they show the general modernist tendency to polarize figural buildings in undefined voids.

42

Such studio design concepts as Contextualism find their roots in the author's observations ofthe prob/em ofharmoniously relating modern building types to o/d city fabrico This paper is not an argument that figure/ ground drawings should be the exclusive form of ana/ysis 'or representation.

Rather. this method pro vides an abstract and interpretive framework usefu/ for the preliminary stages 01 urban design: by iso/ating and generalizing the patterns of buildings and spaces into fields and zones, one can begin to conceive potemia/ extensions or comp/etions of a city plan.

D,B.M.

ne device employed by both architecture and literature, though

Ăœ probably derived from the latter, is the analogy. For example, in a given architectural problem, one might plot out the functional

I Palma. Ita/y /830

disposition of spaces into a coherent set of relationships, using such a layout as a point of reference in establishing the total formo This then would serve as a working analogy, for necessarily the functional aspect is only one of many determinants of the final organization. If emphasis on the analogy and the use of references is carried much further, of course, it might present an apologetic fot an historicism of what many practitioners would deem the most evil variety; "any copying of or taking directly from any past age or other culture was ludicrous, meaningless, and had no validity in a fresh design approach,"1 or so the story usually goes.

A natural counter for such dubious emphasis on the seat-of-thepants-genius method of design is Santayana's well-known statement: "Those who don't understand history are condemned to repeat it."

Understanding history, in architectural disciplines, hardly advocates the establishment of models worthy of repetition, but rather advocates an attempt to extract from whatever phase of history one may be studying the essentials, or the denotational functions that may be observed. Though open to considerable speculation, one can argue that Le Corbusier, when confronted with his first hilltop site for the Chapel of Ronchamp, recalled his investigations of the Acropolis and the siting of the Parthenon, an analogy which, among other things, the external circulation route and facade conditions will support to sorne degree.

If one were to define analogous as including a range of similarities des pite obvious differences, then such a comparison gains sorne degree of verification, though hardly concrete proof. Analogies provide access to a range of possib~lities as solut.ions to particular problems, without reference to or rehance on physlcal archctypes. In other words, there is a difference between the use of archetypes and models and their literal transposition (the Parthenon and von Klenze's Val halla project) and analogies (the Acropolis and Corbusier's Ronchamp). These examples represent the difference between the use of archetypal forms and archetypal situations; between forms and the ideas behind these forms.

Figure/ Ground In order to understand sorne of the ideas with which this monograph is involved, one must first dissolve various setshistorical, connotationaL and otherwise-as well as establish sorne common level of abstraction in the hope that the familiarity of things known might be overcome. To these ends, the figure-ground phenomenon has been called into play, in an attempt to argu~ that the roles of solids and voids are somehow conceptually reversible.

As defined in various studies of Gestalt psychology, the figure is normally seen as resting spatially aboye the ground, an interpretive

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factor brought into play by the closure-or the implied closure-of the contour that separates the two. Rudolf Arnheim, in his book Art and Visual Perception. explains that "the enclosed surface tends to be figure, whereas the enclosing one will be ground."2 This may be seen from a circle drawn in the center of a sheet of paper; though the surface of the paper continues beneath this contour, the interior of the circle appears as figure, with the surrounding area as ground.

One can mentally transform, though with sorne difficulty, the interior of the circle to ground by imagining the figure of the paper with a circular hole punched through it.

The contour which separates figure from ground does not necessarily have to be complete for an interpretation to be made.

Take, for example, the letter C; the space enclosed by the letter seems more densely packed than that surrounding the letter, therefore allowing one to read a partial definition of a figural convex form in space. In contrast, a scattering of rectangles about a surface normally results in reading such a scattering as figures; any possible isolation of a ground reading will occur only when the rectangles arrange themselves along sorne imaginal contour of sufficient strength to reverse its role to that of figure.

Arnheim later suggests one of the architectural implications of this figure/ ground ambiguity. "The original window is a hole in the wall-a relatively small area of simple shaped boundary within a large surface of wall. This involves a peculiar paradox, in that a small enclosed area on a ground plane is destined to be 'figure' and at the same time it is, and is meant to look like, a hole in the wall."3 Is it possible, then, for a puncture in the ground to become figura!?

Obviously it can, an observation which leads quite easily to a discussion of urban spaces which are, in one sense, figures cut out of the ground of the surrounding texture. In reality, however, what has just been termed ground-in this case, buildings-are positive masses and thus more normally seen as figure. .

Perhaps this ambiguity is only a relative one. Arnheim's windows are figural in relation to the wall that they puncture, while the wall itself becomes figural in relation to its silhouette. This space of the residential squares of Paris, the Place Vendome for example, cannot help but remain figure in relation to the texture that surrounds it, although larger masses of this texture, if sufficiently isolated, as on the Isle SI. Louis, may also be seen as figural. It seems more a question of relative dominance as to which one, solid or void, will appear figural. In sorne instances there is no clear dominance of one over the other, as in the case of the Piazza and Palazzo Farnese in Rome; dimensionally the volumes of both are almost equal, with only the facade of the palazzo separating the two and permitting alternative figure-ground readings, depending upon the context in which they are read.

Once it is recognized that figure and ground are conceptually reversible, it follows quite naturally that their roles are interdependent. Take as an example the Piazza San Marco; the primary image recalled is one of a space with very definite boundaries; in

43

other words, the space-negative or ground-has received a strong enough contour to become figura!. If, however, solids are made out of voids and voids are made out of solids, in the case of San Marco it would be slightly naive to consider only the space and not the solids.

In studying urban configurations, these interrelated concepts of solid and void, figure and ground, become particularly valuable when they are seen in sorne manner of abstraction. In architectural terms, the contrast of figure to ground may be observed in the relationship of a plastic object in space to a backdrop. Within a group of buildings, however, any classification of just which is object and which is backdrop is normaJly rendered impossible by variations in building height, color, and so on. For analytical purposes, therefore, sorne sharpening of focus is required. The method chosen here is a set of strictly black and white plans, with sorne shades of gray for minor space definers. In this case, sorne level of conceptual ceiling must be read into these plans (six stories in most examples) as weJl as sorne prior knowledge of what certain honorific buildings actuaJly look like in plan. Such an elimination of certain specifics in order to analyze sorne of the essentials has obvious limitations. It would be absurd, for example, to attempt to analyze midtown Manhattan with only one level of plan (perhaps four or five levels of sectional-plan would be needed), although with Rome it would noto

Field/Zone When expanding the scope of attention from single spaces and buildings to the structure of an entire city, one might be tempted to foJlow the maxim laden tack that a city is just a large house, that living rooms become piazzas, and so forth. Such an analogy may have sorne vague relation to the functions within a city, but a glance through any survey of houses will indicate that there is hardly any similarity of forms, or even arrangement of functions, that would help us envision any common theory of city structure. Roman planning is the only major exception. Surely, however, a strategy which permits the juggling of scales would prove helpful, one which . might attempt to visualize Venice as a regional plan or the town of Richelieu as a private house.

As the scale of consideration increases, however, the definition of structure becomes a prime question with obvious perceptual limitations, although conceptual limitations may not be quite so restricting. If one adds the term field to this discussion, analysis becomes somewhat easier. As in analytical cubism, a field is an area whose limits are defined by a variety of means-by positives or negatives, emphatic edges, etc.-so that those objects scattered within that area may be seen as having sorne direct relation either to the edges of the field or to other objects within that field of observation.

An essential difference is seen when one distinguishes between a field and a space. Within a cubist painting, pictorial space (or the

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more common notions of foreground, middle ground, and background) has been shattered into an intricate display of overlapping elements rarely complete in themselves; yet these elements find their organization through reference to larger elements often superimposed over them or bounding them in sorne way. Essentially, however, this means of organization does not involve a "space" in its literal definition. Similarly, within urban examples, a selection of objects may be seen as cohesively organized by their reference to sorne larger order of definition, though again this may not involve the literal ordering of a "space." It seems a simple matter of juxtaposition; a field of objects can be seen as a unit when the objects are defined by sorne dissimilar means of organization, or when they polarize themselves into a cogent grouping through sorne idiosyncrasy of formo Within a particular city either solids or voids can define a field.

Particularly clear examples may be seen in the two archetypal city patterns-the medieval voids cut out of solids as contrasted with the modern solids placed into a void. In the latter, one might point to the Voisin Plan of Paris (1925 version) where a field of towers may be seen as a cohesive unit of its own, or as lines or definers in support of the smaJler figural notions at their base and of the existing configurations of Paris itself. Likewise, the mammoth wall structures currently in vogue can serve to polarize a field of dispersed objects, in part by their value as a backdrop, but also when used in conjunction with towers or other waJls of similar scale, by their operation as a "superspace" or positive field.

In a typical medieval structure, as in present-day Vienna, the field of the center city is defined by the void (or at least partial void) of an outer (circular) major avenue such as the Ringstrasse. Voids, however, can possess considerably more finesse as field definers than in so straightforward an example by operating as nodes within a uniformly textured structure. Take, for example, the center of present-day Rome. With the exception of several latter-day boulevards, the texture would appear completly chaotic and without noticeable order were it not for several major piazzas, like the Piazza Navona and Piazza Farnese, which polarize the homogenous texture around them and which, with their singular quality as major voids, begin to set up relationships, paths, fields, and so on. Voids that define field may also be found in those cities that underwent a major Baroque carving and facelift or in which a conscious manipulation of the peripheral figure was made.

If a field may be defined by either solid or void, one can now search for those devices that give internal structure to such a field. If one isolates and examines each of the possible patterns-rectilinear, radial, or freeform-and their variations, one may begin to see the limitations of each. AII are extendable; the grid has no natural cut-off point, nor does the radial pattern of Karlsruhe. Any reading of fields can result in endless permutations of whatever number of likeorganized units one wishes to assemble. Variations or accidents within a relatively pure system become extremely important points of

2

Dominant solids placed into a void

2 Santa Maria del Fiore. Florence: The solid of the cathedral remains relativcly platonic, while the surrounding texture has been carved away to produce a diagonal view of the apse area and Brunelieschi's dome.

3 Santiago de Compostela. Galicia. Spain: The cruciform-planned cathedral, unlike its counterpart in Florence, has annexed a variety of masses which control a sequence of spaces played completely around it.

Dominant voids shaped by solids

4 Piazza San Marco. Venice 5 Place Stanislas. Place Royale. Nancy: A Baroque sequence of three spaces, with appropriate transition devices between each; like San Marco, the space defining masses were considered ground to the figure of the space.

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6 High Slreel. Oxford: The quanlily and lhe qualily of lhe solids almosl equal lhal of lhe voids, producing a ralher undifferenlialed lexlure lhroughoul lhe area and reducing mosl considerations lo a local level of manipulalion.

Dominant voids shaped by solids 7 FOn/aineb/eau Pa/ace: An inleresling comparison lo lhe Cambridge schema; of particular nole are lhe differenl means of accommodating lhe askew orienlalion of adjacenl courtyards. Cambridge docs so via a laye red mass sandwiched belween lhe lwo voids, wilh one layer projecling inlo lhe slreel and dividing lhe space al lhal poinl in lwo; Fonlainebleau uses a roughly apse-shaped void, one-half of which has been carved back inlo lhe mass lo affecl a joinlure.

8 SI. John's and Trinily Col/eges. Cambridge: Again lhe voids crealed by wrapping solids around lhem are lhe dominanI elemenls, wilh occasional references made loward lhe masses of lhe adjacenl lown (parlicularly in lhe manipulalion of lhe slreel which separales lhe lWO).

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conflict, as in the clash of two grid systems or the insertion of major diagonals. In addition, within any expandable system, the establishment of a periphery gains tremendous significance, especially in its power to define a field. Examples are the Chicago River and Wacker Orive in Chicago and, as we will examine later, the Ringstrasse in Wiesbaden, Germany.

The application of what one might term zoning supplements the field defining qualities of solids and voids. Thus, given a relatively articulate field, one may be able to discern a grouping of objects, a particular grid pattern, or a series of boulevards that tends to striate or zone a field much as one would describe the functional zoning of a house plan or the cross spaces through the bearing walls of Le Corbusier's Maisons Jaoul or Villa Sarabhai. One might speculate about the effect upon midtown Mahattan had the site for the U.N. Headquarters Plaza been placed between 40th and 42nd streets aligned with the Public Library and Bryant Park, and what sort of zone, spatially and functionally, might have been created.

Hierarchy In accepting the orgamzmg concept of the field, one is eventually bound up with certain value judgments concerning the elements with which one is playing. Logically, in the case of more local situations, the defined objects within a spatial structure normally have more importance than the elements that do the defining. While one may be tempted here to enter a plea for a more conscious selection of foreground and background buildings, the central issue is one of hierarchy in the most general sense. As usually defined, a hierarchy is set up by the application of either of two basic principies: domination-subordination or gradation. Urbanism abounds in examples of domination-subordination; Karlsruhe is probably among the most formal prototypes, with the entire structure of the surrounding town generated radially from the schloss, which dominates both by size and location. Examples of cathedral towns (such as Chartres and Cologne) may illustrate the dominance of a single building by its mass alone; its precise location within the town structure, for the most part, plays but a minor role.

Similar cases, of course, may be cited for dominant voids.

To operate correctly, a dominant-subordinant schema must rely on the clearly perceptible dominance of the object over what must surround it and be subordinant to it. In other words, the Gestalt idea of a noticeable difference between objects being compared must be exceeded several times over before a perceptible hierarchy of this sort may be created. Otherwise, should the noticeable difference be lessened andl or the number of comparable items be increased, one begins to approach a gradation format, where a more elaborate ranking system has been applied. Though such a graded schema may seem as elementary as a dominantsubordinant one, the subtleties may be considerably more complex

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than the more obvious size ordering may suggest. For example, not only can the size and direction of a series of spaces be graded, but one can also grade the degree of enclosure or definition of each, as when a corner or edge has been carved away, to produce a distinct hierarchy. Additional questions arise when one considers at which end of the scale a structure graded from large to small might have its hierarchical center.

A hierarchical ranking, then, can produce either the size and/ or the location determinants of the elements within a given organization.

But what if this organization is to expand? Obviously the scale of moves must increase along with any expansion process, while the principies established for a lower scale will undoubtedly still apply. A fundamental decision must be made between the two strategies the new elements may assume: whether they should be segregated from, or integrated with, the old. One of the more advantageous means of correlating old with new is to create an understandable dialogue between the two: build the new to its specific requirements but throw into the new sorne meaningful remnants of the old. Otherwise one might take into account a theory of morphology that form systems or field patterns possess sorne inevitable logic as to how they would be expanded. Such a theory, ifforced to apply to other than the most platonic form systems, demands observations of the existing structure at the most basic level of field definition-whether the field may be visualized as cellular or linear or radial or whatever, what implicit geometric figures may be either inscribed, completed, or overlayed, what edge conditions should be continued or disrupted, etc.

It is only at such a level of observation that form systems and their extension may be argued, as the plan for Sto Die might again exemplify. Given half of a partially destroyed city of solids and its relation to the river and valley, Le Corbusier proposed a graded format for its extension: moving from existing solid, to edge, to the first line of Unites, to the second line of more dispersed Unites, and to the hills with scattered single houses. By scattering solids throughout the new sector and by entwining both old and new with the major circulation systems, a meaningful dialogue was created, yet one with quite a clear hierarchical order.

The three ideas just discussed (figure/ ground reversibility; the definition, structuring, and zoning of a field; and the application of two orders of hierarchical ranking to the elements within a city) remain primary considerations in any present-day urban design problem. The schemata of hierarchy, however, may seem to lack direct application. Unfortunately, few residential palaces or major cathedrals are normally available as hierarchy establishing elements from which an orderly scale of subordinants may be arranged. In fact, it has been argued with convincing validity that society today has no real hierarchy of elements; one finds it increasingly difficult to order what could be designated the dominant forms or functions in the modern city. Were a well defined hierarchy to be postulated, "civic" functions would probably be placed near the top of the listo But would civic include government or recreation facilities? And 10

48

11

Probably lhe e1earesl examples of solids selling up a field wílhín a void may be found in lhe urbanism of Le Corbusier. In addílion lo lhe Voisin Plan for Paris, one mighl also invesligale sorne of his laler projecls, of which lhe 1945 plans for SI. Die are probably lhe mosllucid.

9 Si/e Plan. SI. Die Franee: Two lines of Uniles are eslablished approximalely parallel lo lhe major enlrances lo lhe lown vía highway, railroad, and river.

A new edge added lo lhe norlh of lhe old lown allows for a meshing of lhis field of slabs wilh lhe exisling lown slruclure, while lower figures are sprinkled wilhin parallel zones crealed by lhe slabs.

10 Wiesbaden. Germany 1900: Here lhe field of the town

is defined by a single peripheral conlour, lhe semicircular Ringslrasse. The field lhus eSlablished is lhen divided belween solids and a void with scallered solids, cenlered and recenlered about lhe wall which separales the two halves, and then allowed to disinlegrate completely into lhe hills al lhe opposite end of town.

11 Town Center. SI. Die: Wilh four Uniles acting as "bookends," the lower civic buildings and lhe lozengeshaped lower manipulate the major palh running perpendicular lo lhe zone of slabs. Beginning at the railroad slalion in the exisling lown, the axis ends on the administralive lower in lhe new seclor; bUl before one can cross lhe river on f001, one musl shifl onlo a new palh which runs adjacenl lo lhe museum and which ends on lhe side facade of an exisling church lo lhe norlh. Such a recenlering game, while a consislenl means of manipulaling a promenade, appears lo be a direcl consequence of lhe zones on Uniles shearing againsl lhe edge of lhe exisling lown.

12 SlulIgarl, Germany: A negalive field has been created by lwo approximalely parallel culs made inlo lhe exisling fabric of lhe lown. When seen as one complele field, lhe objecls scallered wilhin lake on a differenl characler lhan lhey do al a more local level, as exemplified by lhe rambling H-shape of lhe Neues Schloss and Akademie and ils ingenious configuralions al eilher level.

13 Projeel Jor Slrasbourg. Franee 1951: Employed again as brackels of a zone, lhe Uniles are slipped somewhal lo recognize lhe lurning of lhe boulevard which runs belween lhem, while lhe circular lower acls as a piVOl for lhe boulevard and as a figure wilhin lhe zone of lhe slabs.

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. see a problem of . h Germany /840: AgaIn . regular we corestructure 14 Mum.c . ddition to an Ir h r by a strong hat se is held toget e as inserted In W secunng an which. in thls ca • The Residenz W ripheral opposition to ::; a cirele .has peripheral appears Imost to be as I'f the fourth quaby a foreign obJect. laced figure, a d and then rep Hofganen thus been remove the adjacent ment anta a The Residenz and rectilinear develop rted only the sponsored a fU7:e;reviouSIY have figun: tha: rings of t e f the masses o . uing into an disposltlOn o may be seen COOlIn ganization. original figu:asiCallY rectangular or . The three through lIs Roya/e. Nancy. nd in thelr 1 D/ace Slams. /as..Place . e from sma 11 to large . toasquare )• r, d both In SIZ . dinal aXIs. are grade axis longltu . the same is The field of Jorientation 'ust as the tow . egular to ngldly g d by two large . from trr brackete directlOn. the medleva I town . cthas the rigld.ty o f the later town hich proJe

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what of the masses of commercial structures that comprise most of attitude is the competltlOn design for the Royal Chancellery of our existing skyline, or the home, either detached or encapsulated Stockholm submitted by Gunnar Asplund with Ture Tyberg. The apartment-style? Such futile speculation would only reach the site was an important corner near the Royal Palace and numerous conclusion that the lack of organization in our society means that no other government buildings scattered over two small islands in the adequate dominant-subordinant hierarchy exists to establish an wide inlet that divides Stockholm. The program, with the exception encompassing order for today's city. This is not to say the only valid of several reception rooms, consisted mostly of cellular office space. hierarchical system available is one based on a gradation format, Rather than add another palace form in line with the existing Police though of course it can prove useful, as illustrated in the following Office and the Town Hall to the north, Asplund chose to emphasize the definition of the avenue connecting the Royal Palace with the discussion.

Analytical cubism and the products and ideas of that era are smaller island and its sculptural Russian Church. To accomplish this, singularly applicable to urbanismo For the most part, these paintings Asplund borrowed from the fan-shaped solids to the west and are structured by a grid system oriented with the edges of the canvas, recreated four of them on the opposite side of the avenue; colonnades with numerous variations of light and dark forms played within this then tlanked the sluice-like space of the avenue and a small object orientation. The definition of single objects may take up a diagonal was placed asymetrically within it.

When one considers what the more obvious parti would have pattern woven through the base grid, while curvilinear shapes are usually set up as another system. Larger readings within these proposed, Asplund's alternative seems that much more remarkable. systems are available through more local field-defining clues, as The fractured edge along the water and its sequential walkway explained previously, though for the most part any super-dominant provide a perfect foil for the semicircular government building; the readings are suppressed in favor of a continuing collage of minor colonnades at the ends of the arms of the H-shaped Police Office ones. The general has been fractured, in hopes that the local specifics have been continued as a screen in front of the three side entrance will reassemble sorne version of it in an ever-changing manner. spaces to the Chancellery. Yet in a larger sense, the transposition of the adjacent pattern of solids, with their subsequent inversion, Christopher Gray defines this phenomenon as "iridescence." illustrates a form consciousness of the highest degree, one that Forms are broken apart and recombined in other abstract forms. develops a potentially honorific building into the definition of a Elements perform multiple functions, reading at times as displaced street, thus clarifying the relationship of existing honorific masses. It representational elements, and at others, when the focus of provides a continuation and reinforcement of the context in which attention changes, as parts of geometrical patterns. Forms in the existing masses should have worked in the first place. space seem to have multiple and often conflicting positions, The Chancellery competition was dated 1922, the same year that depending on the conceptual context in which they are read. 4 Le Corbusier presented his plan for a city ofthree million inhabitants, While the overall effect may be one of relative stability, the local Une Ville Contemporaine. To say that the urbanistic ideas of these situations may be quite ambiguous; the eye is permitted, in fact two projects are diametrically opposed would be an understatement. usually forced, to search out the role that these local specifics play The Chancellery is tied to its context and is highly empirical; Une Ville Contemporaine is idealized and highly platonic. Considering within the guiding structure presented.

One may, with sorne degree of abstraction, apply the principIes the architecture and urbanism of Le Corbusier, it is questionable outlined aboye to the ideas of urban structure, as a response to the "whether this Ville Radieuse was ever a serious proposition or lack of hierarchy problem mentioned earlier. The result of their whether it was not simply a necessary mental convenience providing application to urbanism is a variation of a graded form~t, one which, him with a closed field in which activity could be isolated and raised by its positional a~bi~uity of elements and overlappl~g networks, into prominence. "S Such utopian thinking is not confined to urbanism alone. prohibits the compllatlOn of a clear A through Z rankmg. Because the individual "forms in space (may) seem to have multiple and often Nearly all architectural thought revolves around the use of platonic conflicting positions," stability of arrangement must be derived from forms and form ideas which, though serving as ideals, as conceptual other forms working in a similar manner throughout the contextural objets trouvĂŠ, cannot exist in reality without sorne manner of situation. Once such an interrelation of parts is recognized, the net distortion. For example, somewhere, perhaps only in the minds of the alchitects of that era, the archetypal Renaissance palazzo was effect wiU begin to stabilize.

What is demanded in an urban situation, however, is an formulated from which architects of the Palazzo Borghese took their awareness ofthe context through which these plays may be made. In general parti. Given a highly irregular site, however, they were forced fact such an awareness may produce an opposite approach: a to evolve a rather contorted structure partially held together by the rec~gnition of the chaos resulting f;om a multiplicity of u.nsta?ilized strength of their local correcting manipulations (the shifting centers events might demand a strengthenmg, and perhaps a redlrectmg, of of the courtyard, for example) and also partially by their conscious the context within which they must play. A prime example of this reference to the ideals of the archetypal palazzo. The platonic object,

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17 Jaipur, India: The basic field of the city has been eslablished by a syslem of walls, while lhe gridded inlerior, more densely packed near lhe enlrance wall, has been graded off loward lhe center where il fragments complelely inlo isolaled, though highly organized, objects. In lhis central complex, one realizes thal lhe landscaping and waler pieces have been undergoing an inverse gradalion-from irregular lO regular-in their approach loward the center.

lB Tur;n, l/o/y 1840: In lhis case, lhe original Roman grid was mainlained lhroughoul lhe cily's expansion, resuIting in lhe same condilion seen al Oxford: a uniformly lexlured silualion in which any manipulation of pans will eilher be al a very local level (Wilh which Turin abounds!) or al a disproportionaleIy large scale (lhe Piazza Caslello and the arcaded diagonal which inlersects the Po River perpendicuIarly). The periphery of the city is held by a series of ralher ingenious local plays approximaling lhe line of fortificalions, lhough lilUe emphasis on a dominanl periphery lhal mighl conlrol lhe entire field can be observed.

19 Parma, I/a/y 1830: Beginning with aRoman grid al ils

cenler, as did Turin, mosl of lhis field remained intact, though the river was to present a problem to any furlher expansiono A separate rectilinear figure, askew to the grid, has been inscribed over the original field and completes itself in a similar V shape across the river, allowing the market square al the crossing of the cardo and decumannus to remain cenlral lO lhe field of the grid and lO the new figure. At a locallevel, the Roman cardo has been bent slighUy to the left before it enlers the central square from the south, beginning a diagonal sequence of major spaces along the river's edge.

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18

One wants to improve what has been built, and not to spoil what is yet to be done.

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in other words, as soon as it is placed into sorne context, cannot exist without sorne degree of distortion forced upon it by that contexto Even a house in the most pastoral of settings will have to make allowance, probably in the parti stage of its development, for any approach and entry sequence as a distorting force, just as did Bramante's Tempieto de S. Pietro in Montorio, possibly one of the most idealized structures ever built.

At the larger scale of consideration of an urban context, one must take into account the height, texture, mass, etc., of those buildings surrounding a given site and the pressures or lines of organization that these might impose on the site. Such an awareness might result, in sorne hypothetical instance, in treating the yet unformed mass on the site as a sponge that will soak up all pressures, textures, rhythms, etc., and will respond in sorne hierarchical manner to each in determining the final massing schema. At the scale of a complete urban context, the idea that platonics will be pressured and distorted appears that much clearer and more inevitable; in evolving into the 1925 Voisin Plan of Paris, Une Ville Contemporaine became aligned with the existing Champs Elysees-Louvre organization, with appropriate pivots and engaging devices between the two.

This discussion has been limited to aspects of formal ideas without relying upon an historical construct to support them. It is an attempt to argue that the products and ideas of this and other centuries are part of an historical continuity, and that we of this century are not engaged in rewriting the entire book with every new step taken. Such an attitude permitted Hitchcock and Johnson to discuss the architecture of the 1920s as a "style," one which found its beginnings in sorne level of rationality-part of a continuum in the organization of forms-in which Une Ville Contemporaine remains an important chapter. This could to sorne degree explain the interest registered previously in the qualities of contexto lf history is a continuum, then the notion of context may be effectively argued and may reasonably demand recognition. â&#x20AC;˘

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The Cornell Urban Design Studio 1963-1982 Steven Hurtt Urban design emerged in the ear/y 1960s as a reaction to the urbanistic shortcomings of Modern architecture. During the previous decade Modern architecture had become the establishment sty/e and was no /onger revo/utionary. Its shortcomings cou/d not be ignored. Judged especial/y disastrous, in tecms ofthe city, wfre the eflects ofsegregated /and use and continuous open space.

Modern architecture was dee/ared a social and urbanistit catastrophe, most cogent/y

by Jane Jacobs in The Life and Death of Great A erican Cities (1961).

A" an academic concentration or profession, u ban 'design "carce/y existed in the ear/y 1960s )Jeginni g at this time, Jose Luis ert s elns to nave e"tablished it as a discipline (Jistinct from p/anning, which in ts increasing/y abstract treatment of '/arid use qnd density had abandoned concern for physica/ formo From its embryonic stages, ur/jan design was to be concerned with a broader range of issues than Civic Art, as it d been cal/ed by Hegemann and Peets in 1922.I The AlA路 Journa/'s commission of , Pau/ Spreiregan's Urban Design, The Architecture of Towns and Cities represented a conscious attempt by the profession to reestablish the appropriate role ofarchitecture in the domain of p/anning. Urban design was proposed as a time-honored and synthetic art, a necessary conjunctive to the ana/ytic, socioeconomic, regu/atory, and administrative processes of p/anning. Its

S4

acceptance represented a criticism of Modern architecture and p/anning, which had condoned the suburbanization that had imp/oded time and exp/oded space. These open-space tenets had destroyed the variety, sense ofe/osure, and sense ofp/ace provided by o/der cities. .

Created as a program within architecture. schoo/s, urban design was not a separate department, degree, or programo Hard to . distinguishfrom architecture, it had a comparative/y smal/ Iiterature2 and no known method. It was under these conditions that Colin Rowe was asked to initiate and deve/op urban design as a postprofessiona/ degree program at Cornel/, in 1963.

In this artie/e, Steven Hurll examines the methods and theories of the Cornel/ Urban Design Studio. The aulhor corre/ates studio projects with the evo/urion of the theories of Contextua/ism, Co//ision City, and Col/pg茅 Clly. He noles thal Ihese theories emerged in parallel and Ihal no particular projecl represents one or all of these Iheories in apure formo This inlerprelive analysis oflhe Cornel/ sludio work relales il lo Ihe majar concepts subsequently propounded by sludio members and esp,!cial/y

by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter in Iheir book, Collage City.3 D.B.M., S.H.

e

I Royal Chancellory: Stockholm: Gunnar Asplund.

Wayne W. Copper

ontextualism, Collision City, and Collage City have been among the major architectural-urbanistic theories of the last decade. These theories evolved from studies made by the Cornell Urban Design Studio, directed by Colin Rowe since 1963. They are most completely propounded by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter in their book, Collage City.4 Although Collage City is illustrated, no studio projects accompany the texto This issue of the Cornell Journal 01 Architecture illustrates, for the first time, many of the studio projects that provided the critical basis for these theories. This essay will correlate the studio projects that are illustrated here with the evolution of the theories of Contextualism, Collision City, and Collage City. It will describe characteristics of studio study at Cornell under Rowe's guidance, architectural-urbanistic problems the studio attempted to address, and the emergence of those architectural-urbanistic theories identified with the studio. These theories may be brief1y described as follows.

Contextualism is the attempt to derive architectural-urbanistic form from context, generally one of physical form but also including what Rowe and Koetter have called the psychocultural field. Contextualism evolved as a resistance to the zeitgeist mentality and object building fixations of Modern architecture. It sought sources of formal order in time and place, a search theoretically extended to culture and history.5 Collision City is the attempt to recognize in the order and design of cities the positive political, social, and formal values that result from the processes of healthy competition among social, political, and economic institutions. It evolved from the attempt to understand admired urban form complexities as more than simply picturesque.

Collage City recognizes the importance of symbolic forms that depict and transmit culture. As an argument for timeless images in the city, it opposes the antihistorical. antistylistic, and antieclectic tenets of Modern architecture. It evolved from the correlation of the idea of collage with the idea of the city.

These theories emerged in parallel. Their mutua lity is derived from sharing the same critical ground, that of the designs generated and critiqued within the studio. Each theory is distinguished by its particular emphasis, not by its exclusion of the theoretical suppositions and implications of the others.

The Character oC the Cornell Urban Design Studio In architectural schools, the design critic generally sets the tone of a studio. Through his attitude toward education, the projects selected for study, the suggested methods of study, and the background material provided the critic establishes a framework for teaching design theory.6 The approach of the Graduate Studio of Urban Design at Cornell University was formed in great part by the attitudes and

â&#x20AC;˘ The Come)) Journal of Architecture

beliefs of Colin Rowe regarding architectural education, the nature of architectural design, and his assessment of Modern architecture and urbanismo Rowe has suggested that education in architectural design is best accomplished by first teaching faith or belief, and subsequently instigating doubt. Rowe promoted common consideration of design problems directed both at mutual learning and the quality of an overall design solution.1 Most importantly, Rowe's attitude toward the studio effort needs to be distinguished from a profile that treats architecture as what in scientific or mathematical terms might be called a proof.

Proofs are offered only after an hypothesis has been proven, not before. Rowe was not so much interested in proofs as in projects that explored or elucidated problems, however vague or undefined. Thus the Cornell urban design projects cannot be viewed as demonstrations or proofs of studio theories. They are rather a record of conjectures leading toward those theories. Through Rowe, the studio was inf1uenced toward Karl Popper's Conjectures and Refutations.

Popper's argument forms the basis for a process that accepts, even demands, hypothesis as a point of departure in problem solving: "One must speculate and criticize until, through successive attempts at testing to disprove the hypothesis ... the hypothesis is changed or refined to become a more tenable solution."8 The interactive process of design and criticism in the studio was one in which formal solutions were hypothesized and tested in terms of their formal quality, socioeconomic and political validity, and possible meanings. It was through this process of conjecture and refutation that forms and meanings were clarified and the theories of Contextualism, Collision City, and Collage City emerged.

Much of what has been written about the Cornell Urban Design Studio creates the misimpression that the theories and methods were fully formed in Rowe's mind from the very beginning. William ElIis has written, "Thus it is crucial to understand how he [Rowe] usesor decides not to use-the various strategies of composition available to him (resolution, collage, collision)."9 This suggests that all the strategies now perceived in the work were equally available from the beginning, and supported by the theories stated in Collage City. It also denies, by the image of Rowe as an artist at work, the interactive and contributory role of the student in the process of design, criticism, and theoretical postulation, a role that Rowe has always generously acknowledged.

The relationship of theory to studio work was, in fact, more like that described by Mondrian and quoted by Charmoin von Weigand: I found him painting on Broadway Boogie Woogie. and he wasjust putting a yellow rectangle in the center of a red plane.

"But that doesn't go with your theory," I exclaimed.

"Does it work?" he asked, and standing back to look he said, "Yes, it works." After an interval of painting he continued, "You should know that all my paintings were done first and the theory derived from them. So perhaps now we will have to change the theory. "10

ss

Theory was mutable, not fixed. Successive studios judged their Qwn work by critically comparing it to both that of preceding studios and a continually expanding awareness of a corpus or architecturalurban form that could be considered urban designo For Rowe felt uncomfortable with an entity called urban design distinguishable from architecture. History suggested that distinctions between planning, landscape architecture, civil engineering, urban design, and architecture had contributed nothing to the cohesiveness and quality of the environments addressed. Rowe did two things to encourage an expanded basis of design conjecture and criticismo He introduced admired architectural-urban form complexes into the studio. And he exposed his students to those broader intellectual forces that had brought forth the conditions under study. Most particularly, Rowe put Modern architecture and planning into the largest possible philosophic and historic perspective, exposing their philosophic underpinnings in nineteenth-century thought-utopian, millennial, chiliastic, Hegelian, Darwinian. Consequently, one soon carne to see Modern architecture and planning as a chimera of those forces and was confronted by their iconic and mythic dimensions.

In the early '60's, the prevailing urban design approaches were those of townscape at one extreme and megastructures at the other.

Townscape valued existing urban forms and emphasized the picturesque through studied sequences of space and views. JI Futurist megastructures extended the utopian inclinations of Modern architecture to the point of logical absurdity, becoming architectural diagrams of abstracted social relations previously supported and synthesized by traditional urban form. 12 In contrast to both of these approaches Rowe always encouraged the studio to consider the city as a holistic perceptual entity.

Suspicious of those intellectual forces that have tended to emphasize particular and analytic thought over general and synthetic thought, Rowe proposed that the city be considered as a whole, a gestalt.

While criticism might emphasize analysis, design conjectures should emphasize synthesis. Consequently, dealing with the city as a gestalt has been one of the most continuous underlying themes in studio thought and method.

The study method supporting this approach was the reduction of the complex form of the city to black and white drawings that delineated mass and space-figure/ ground drawings. These drawings derive from the principIes of gestalt psychology. They polarize space and mass, alternatively emphasizing the shape of each, drawing attention to their reciprocity and, at an urban scale, the structural relations of figure, field, texture, pattern, edge, axis, and so on.

Figure/ ground drawings also allow for morphological comparison of cities, building groupings, and other form orders (such as painting). The utilization of these figure/ ground drawings was a conscious rejection of both the townscape and the science-fiction, megastructure approach. In contrast to townscape's incremental and exclusively perceptual emphasis, the scale of urban consideration represented by the figure/ ground plan insisted on viewing the city as

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a perceptual-conceptual whole. It also prevented the consideration of any form in vacuo, a bulwark against the utopian and megastructure excesses of Modern architecture, so often presented in ignorance of, or in spite of, their contexts.

One criticism of this abstract method is that the full range of compositional qualities in existing cities cannot be discerned in the figure/ ground drawings, and that correlation between actual experience and the drawing is not possible. Precisely the opposite assumption was made by Rowe and his students. Cities known to be of high experiential quality were examined in terms of figure/ ground plan to understand the complex order and experiential richness they represented. In the studio, figure/ ground plans beca me a design shorthand that carried rich perceptual potential analogically recalling the exemplary urban conditions represented by Wayne W. Copper's figure/ ground drawings. In the early studio years, it was felt that the figure/ ground plan carried the crucial information, the genetic code for future design decisions. Specific 3-D implications were explored primarily to make a case to planners and developers that the schemes could be realized with standard technology and building types.

To confront sorne of the biases of modern thought, Rowe often assigned sites for study without preset programs. This strategy directly resisted the deterministic. socioeconomic. program-dominant mode of thought so pervasive in our society and especially in Modern architecture and planning. In much of the studio work one is struck more by an image of Modern architecture than by a model of revolutionary theory. Asked to do urban design in an urban contexto students were confronted with the antiurban stance of Modern architecture. While this was a difficult confrontation for students schooled in the virtues of Modern architecture, both their prior training and indoctrination led to a slow evolution in critical thinking rather than radical design departure.

In the early '60s, the students were of two sorts. One group carne from schools (including Cornell) in which Modern architecture had, partially if not wholly, replaced other academic styles. Modern architecture had been methodically analyzed and presented by the professors and mastered by the students in the design studio. JJ Their teachers had subjected Modern architecture to the same critical analysis that historians like Wittkower and Panofsky had brought to their subject matter. Abstract principIes were derived from a range of examples. Preferences of form and spatial order, material selection, decorative systems, and so on were treated analytically with reference to a cohesive architectural theory and prevailing currents of thought.

To this group, Modern architecture was an historic period, a current of which one was a parto But, even though Modern architecture's ideals were antithetical to traditional urbanism, through analysis and comparison to earlier styles on the basis of abstract formal principIes, its forms were converted to the solution of traditional architectural urban problems. This conversion of Modern architectural forms to the solution of traditional urban-architectural problems promoted

2 Wiesbaden; Figure/Ground Plan; Wayne W. Copper.

1967 (Thesis) Thinking of the city as a formal gestalt has been lhe mast continuous underlying theme in sludio procedure.

Reducing the complex city lO black and while (figure/ ground) drawings which polarize mass and space is the principal lOol of analysis and designo Copper's figure/ ground plan of Wiesbaden has almost become a symbol of lhe studio beca use 隆nherent in the plan are lhe polar路opposiles of urban form order. Half the cily is predominantly sol id Wilh spaces carved oUl of il; lhe olher half continuous open space wilh a lexture of object buildings; urbs. exurbs; thesis. anlithesis. tradi路 tional city. modern city; here uniquely synthesized as a si ngle duaJily.

belief in Modernism, encouraged its acceptability, and dulled criticism of it. This analytic study and studio mastery of Modern architecture will be referred to in this essay as Academic Modernism.

The other group carne from schools in which the former academicism of the Ecole-des-Beaux-Arts pedagogy had established an uneasy truce with the antithetical presumptions and procedures of the Bauhaus. In these schools remnants of both attitudes existed, but where theory was taught it remained aloof from detailed examples and unrelated to the processes of studio designo Thus the rift between Modern architecture and all that had gone before it was exaggerated, and romantic attitudes of the common-man student as latent geniusartist filled the void created where academicism of either an Ecole or Modern strain was banished from the scene.

To this meLd of students Rowe opened the resources of history and provided arguments for using them. In the 1960s constructing a counterargument to the prevailing antihistorical attitude was crucial.

Rowe introduced readings to build that counterargument. 14 So constructed and reinforced, this academicism encouraged a studio disposition to criticize the Modern city and studio designs for it on the basis of direct comparison to historic exemplars. But the distinction between design and criticism quickly blurred. Initially urban exemplars were occasionally collaged into design projects as a technique of criticismo Almost immediately the same technique was adopted as a basis for design departure. Subsequently, the untransformed and direct use of urban exemplars began to be rationalized on the basis of the idea of collage; the modification of the perception and meaning of an object through its changed context. These investigations led the studio away from orthodox Modern principIes toward the more inclusive and conjectural bias imbedded in Contextualism, Collision City, and Collage City.

In summary, Rowe encouraged a complete openness to the lessons and uses of history. In design, conjectures are easily made on an analogical basis. If the analogues are widely selected, the attitudc that seeks them might be regarded as an eclectic one. Diderot's definition of an eclectic seems an apt description of Rowe's approach.

An eclectic is a philosopher who tramples underfoot prejudice, tradition, seniority, universal consenl. authority and everything which subjugates mass opinion; who dares to think for himself, go back to the clearest general principIes. examine them, discuss them. and accept nothing except on the evidence of his own experience and reason; and who. from all lhe philosophies which he has analyzed without respect to persons, and without partiality. makes a philosophy of his own. peculiar to himself.ls Rowe constantly projected this rigorous ecleetic attitude in his references to historic exemplars as relevant to the problems of today.

The compositional strategies of cubism and the idea of collage that had emerged in cubist painting also influenced the studio.

Collage as an idea necessitates the same scrutiny of selection and juxtaposition as that required of an eclectic, so these two terms

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describe both the philosophy and the method that Rowe introduced to successive studio groups.

In this collage-eclectic attitude there is equal appreciation for all periods of history, including Modern architecture, for what they offer to the present. Hut the acceptance of this attitude is to move from 1963 to the present, from a frame of mind that belonged to only a few people in the early 1960s (Rowe, Venturi, Moore, etc.) through an interim avant-garde phase to establishment status. So let us return to the 60s and trace the critical phases in the development of studio thought.

The Early Years-Academic Modernism In the earliest studio years there were several overlapping influences that affected the identification of problems and possible solutions to be studied. The dominant frame of mind was one of Academic Modernism-the analytic study of Modern architecture with an increasing tendency to convert its forms to the solution of traditional urban-architectural problems.

The scant urban design literature suggested the presence of a schism between the principIes of urban design and the principIes of Modern architecture. This literature examined past urban form and drew principIes from these examples. Modern architecture had offered itself as a necessary alternative to that very urbanismo Although the schism was not surprising, its resolution was difficult.

Urban design principies can be summarized as: hierarchy and focus (usually provided by major civic buildings, most often churches and palaces); c1ear edge definition that distinguishes the city, town, or village from the surrounding land or seascape; and a sense of enclosure provided by the city as a whole and especially by its major spaces. These urban design principIes are contrary to the generalist solutions of Modernist proposals typified by undifferentiated fields of idealized building types that pattern continuous and naturalistically treated open space.

This schism was highlighted by Rowe's assessment of the contemporary city as a product of both traditional and modern urbanismo To c1arify the condition that each stipulated, Rowe compared and contrasted them. He pointed out the extent to which the Modern city suffered from an irresolution of these two contrasting suppositions about city form, suggesting that a better resolution might be achieved through sorne process of hybridization. In cities of the United States these qualities seemed to exist in isolation the result of superblock clearance and renewal. Rowe suggested tha~ one solution might be to introduce components of one into the other to decrease their polarity and isolation. What, then, were the methods, the principIes, the style with which these problems were to be investigated?

In the early 1960s there was no reason for the students to understand Rowe's criticism of Modern architecture-urbanism as anything

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but academic; no reason to think that Rowe expected more than a resolution of these deficiencies within the framework of Modern architecture. On the basis of their previous experience and Rowe's writings, his students made two tacit assumptions. The first was that Rowe's academic interest in the spatial qualities of Le Corbusier's work included a sympathy rather than antipathy for Le Corbusier's urbanistic principies. The second was that Rowe possessed an abiding interest in the spatial and compositional potentials of cubismo These factors set the style of studio investigations for nearly the first full decade of study: the academic conversion of the building types of Modern architecture to resolve the schism and polarity between principies of urban design (traditional city) and principies of Modern architecture (modern city); use of gestalt methods and techniques of investigation; and the principies and spatial implications of cubism, with particular attention to Rowe's written descriptions. 16 The consequences of these influences can be seen in most student projects from 1963 to the presento But they are most apparent between 1963-1970, the same period that saw the evolution of the theories of Contextualism, Collision City and Collage City. And they are most easily seen in projects for U.S. cities. Dominated by an extensive and regular grid, the U.S. city is ordered by the regularity of the spatial interval between both blocks and buildings. Differentiation of the grid depends principally on shifts in the density of that spatial interval and the solidity of the texture. The U.S. grid, extensive and marked by wide corridor streets, is especially resistive to the urban design principies of focus, enclosure, and edge definition. Both the American mind and the U.S. grid are especially susceptible to Modern architecture's spatial tenets. The American mind, equipped with a Jeffersonian anti-urban prejudice and romantic landscape preference, is receptive to the open-space tenets of Modern architecture. And the American grid provides a rhythmic understructure to the fields of repetitive building forms dispersed in a naturalistic landscape. Although ideally continuous, equal, and extensive, U.S. grids are actually fractured and variously aligned as a result of historical accident or landscape incident. They are similar to the fractured . and overlapping fields of cubist paintings, which are delineated by either the pattern and texture within the field or an emphatic edge or contour. These correspondences of formal order between U.S. cities and cubist paintings supported most of the studio investigations and projects.

Between 1963 and 1965 project selections and their modes of resolution reflected acceptance of Modern architecture-planning and featured low density and segregated land use, a preference for continuous open space, an avoidance of classical composition, and a tendency to deal with open and undeveloped sites on which the relation between architecture and landscape might be explored.

Irving Phillips' Satellite City for Houston, Texas combines Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse housing with an Aaltoesque definition of the waterfront. Wang's project for downtown Cortland, New York uses

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both tower-object buildings at the edge of the city and a texture of smaller scale buildings to establish an edge to the extension of the principal civic spaces. The city's main axis is extended toward the hills which are the backdrop to the space.

The attempt to bring Modern architecture closer to the urban design principies of the traditional city is most easily seen by contrasting Le Corbusier's post-Ville Radieuse planning schemes with those of the Cornell studio. Whereas Le Corbusier's schemes usually refer to a single dominant field direction, studio projects accept several field directions and attempt a compositional resolution. Whereas Le Corbusier's principal field of orientation is idealized on the basis of landscape view or climate and is not orthoganally aligned with preexisting field directions, the Cornell studio projects work entirely with preexisting field directions and attempt their extension or idealization relative to local and specific conditions. Whereas Le Corbusier's projects emphasize continuous open landscape, depending on distant views and topography to close the spatial composition, the Cornell projects attempt to enclose or to at least define the edges of fields architecturally. Whereas Le Corbusier's object buildings are rhythmically ordered in large spatial fields and are seen as objects in a continuous space, studio projects tend to use object buildings in a more traditional manner to provide hierarchy and focus rather than a large-scale pattern. Thus the building types, open-spaced tenets, and compositional qualities of Modern architecture and planning epitomized in Le Corbusier's work were re-directed toward traditional urbanism by studio projects.

The gestalt emphasis and figure/ ground methods encouraged the study of figure-field structures, and especially the textures and edges by which such figure-fields are perceived. Correlations were sought and easily established between traditional urban design principies and those of gestalt perception. Hierarchy and focus could be equated to figure, enclosure to closure and modified closure, and edge to contour or good continuation. Applying these correspondences, edge definitions were postulated for each identifiable field of constant texture, pattern, or alignment. Fields were simplified to take on the figure characteristics of simple or good shape. Establishing these figural qualities at a large scale required either the isolation of figural fields or the extension of nonaligned grids into one another to produce the required simple shapes, even if they overlapped. To the studio these overlaps were similar to the effects of phenomenal transparency in cubism described by Rowe and Slutsky.J7 But where in cubist painting the distinctions between space and mass and deep space and shallow spaces are blurred, in urban forms the distinctions must remain clear. lt was not so much a spatial analogue to cubism that was made as an analogue to the understructure of cubist painting, an understructure of interpenetrating nonaligned grids. This understructure of overlapping fields provided the studio with a method of extending the existing order of one field alignment into another to make a more complex urban form structure. The focusing ofaxes and street corridors could be achieved at areas of

3 Satellite City; Houston, Texas; Plan; Irving Phillips, 1965 (Thesis) 4 Bandung, Indonesia; Figure/Ground Plan; Raysoeli Moeloek, 1965 (Thesis) Both Nigg's and Moeloek's projeets demonstrate academie Modernism-the eonversion of the style of Modern architeeture to traditional urban design principies of enclosure and foeus. Using a Le Corbusian arehiteetural vocabulary, both projeets extend the dense urban fabrie to make urban spaee(s). Moeloek loeates objeet buildings within those major urban spaces. Nigg's object building attaches to adjacent walls analogous to Medieval object-background relations exemplified by buildings such as the Duomo, Siena; S. Giovanni and Paola, Venice; S. Agnese, Rome: and so on.

S Cortland Project: Shadow Plan; Michael C. Wang, 1964 6 Seattle; Figure/Ground Plan; Roger Sherwood, 1964 (Thesis) 7 Seattle; Figure/Ground Plan; Richard Cardwell, 1967 (Thesis) The lhree-year difference in design generation of lhese two projeets (111. 6 and 111. 7) shows the impact of field extension in the studio. In both projects the major landscape axis of Lake Union is extended to the south, crossing an axis from the Seattle World's Fair site. In the Sherwood proposal (111. 6) fields are isolated from one another, and open space areas make the transitions. In Cardwell's project fields are extended into one another. Composite Buildings crank and twist from one field alignment to another at points of major interseetion to eompose the eollision: Cardwell spreads design control fairly evenly over the entire site. Sherwood's focuses design interest on central axes, a strategy that will be returned to in reeent work to avoid total designo

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8 8 Downlown Ithaca; Plan; Manfred Kolb, 1964 9 Charler Oak Meadows; Figure/ Ground Plan; Philip Handler, 1964 (Thesis) 10 Downlown Syracuse; Plan; Thomas Schumacher, 1965 These lhree projecls (111. 8,9, 10) eXlensively ulilize lhe Modero linear building lype lo make aspecls of lhe lradilional city. In Kolb's project the linear building atlempts to eSlablish bolh a medieval wall~ge and dense center to .Ihe commercial center of the cily. The linear buildings bend about in reference to various lOad alignments, but these different alignments do not generate an implied understructure of field geometries.

Whereas in Handler's Charler Oak Meadows project lhe overlapping of extended field geometries that beca me a c1assic studio design stra legy is clearly evidenced. Schumacher's Syracuse downtown projecl makes both a dense core and exlends and regularizes the dominate grid to establish a tradilional city wall· edge and a major urban piaZ1.a.

11 Vienna Hofburg, Vienna; Figure/ Ground Plans; Wayne W. Copper, 1967 (Thesis) 11 Seattle Model Detail; Richard Cardwell, 1967 (Thesis) IJ Figure/Ground Plan of Composite Building

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field overlap or intersection and thereby mark changes in field direction or axis.

The linear building was the principal architectural means for the c1arification of fields, with their edges, overlaps, major junctures and occasional deformations into a local figure. Super-scale linear buildings were common to both the visionary phase and late revisionist work of Modern architecture. Like cubism, the linear building was within the fold of Academic Modernism. But studio use of the linear building contrasted with its paradigmatic use in Modern architecture. In Modern architecture the linear building was a general and idealized proposal contrasting with its surroundings; in studio use it was specifically intended to be derived from and to support contexto The evolution of the linear building in the Cornell studio illustrates the Academic Modernist mind at work as it deflects an apparently Modern building type to the resolution of traditional architectural-urbanistic problems. The linear building seemed a panacea, the principal mediator between the Modern and traditional city.

Inherently nonfigural, it could provide enclosure, define traditional figural space, and define the edges of fields, all at the open-space to built-solid ratios typical of twentieth-century urban development.

With a strategy for defining spatial fields and completing the figures implied by nonaligned and fragmentary grids, attention shifted to the need for focus. These investigations were encouraged

by Rowe's persistent criticisms of the Modern city in contrast to traditional urban models, a criticism which included the perception of the mutual dependency of figural buildings and background texture.J S Rowe's observation led to an intense studio study of what Rowe and Koetter in Co/lage City have called composite buildings. These are buildings like the Vienna Hofburg, which are perceived as both figure and ground, independent of but attached to their contexts.

They display continuity with the urban fabric or the definition of space which they partially form, but they also compose into figural and focusing objects. Only occasionally in early studio study do linear buildings become significant object buildings. But as study progressed, such metamorphoses are more frequently and skillfully made. Such figures are most commonly stipulated in plan by small and simple shapes like circles or squares. They are most often attached to or engaged by a background linear building and are often located at a grid juncture that focuses streets in an intersecting field, as in Cardwell's Seattle project or Fong's Marylebone Square project.

In this critical transformation from linear building toward composite building, two extreme types evolved, both dependent on an overall order, a kind of megastructure that defines either a field or an axis. One type was spatially introverted, throwing a continuous facade against the street or defining a field edge, and generally producing well-defined courtyard spaces. (See the Buffalo Waterfront Project compared to Le Corbusier's Maison Redent housing.)

The other type was extroverted, Its continuity and linearity produced order, with edges highly responsive to inflection from the surround-

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14 14 Marylebone Rail Slalion; Regenl's Park London; FigurejGround Plan; Sleven Fong, 1979 (Thesis) 15 Plan of 'Composite Buildings' InOuenced by buildings Iike the Vienna Hofburg (111. 11), the studio learned to transform linear buildings into buildings which were both background and objecl. Such buildings and their crucial location evenlually became a central studio interes!. These two projects represenl lhe evolution in thought regarding 'Composile Buildings.' In Cardwell's projecl (111. 12) objecl buildings allach lO background linear buildings al imporlanl focallocations. In much laler projecls like Fong's (111. 14) lhe composile building is inspired more directly by nineleenth<entury exemplars, and not al all by Modern architecture.

16 Buffalo Waterfront; Plan detail of waterfront housing 17 Paris, Plan Voisin; Le Corbusier. 1925; Detail of Maison Redent Housing; Model by Alexander Carragone. Stuart Cohen. Frederick Hammann. Steven Hurtl and Michael Schwarting 11 Harlem Redevelopmenl; Plan Oclail; 1967

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Buffalo Waterfront; Group Project, (1965-66) (For more information see project seclion).

As a group projecl, lhe Buffalo Waterfronl Project demanded a sludenl debate of ideas. lheir critical acceptance, and synthesis into a single proposal.

Various segments of this project indicate differenl altitudes more fully developed in later studio thought and designo

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ings and often focusing those field energies. This type is most potently represented in the Harlem Redevelopment Project, in which an additional form problem and conjecture can be discerned. The problem is the acceptance of the typal Modern solution to the highrise building represented by the Lever House: a two- or three-story base surmounted by a tower-slab. In the Harlem project the base is shaped by infiection and focus, but its mass and elevational potential do not sustain that focus, which shifts to the tower-slab. A further limitation inherent in the linear building type was that it could not constitute the solidity and textural rhythm of the traditional city from which urban space and figural buildings are such a significant relief. The linear building could not make a solid or a texture but only constitute an edge and pretend to the desired mass it often represented.

During 1966, the Buffalo Waterfront Project focused studio effort and required a critical exchange of ideas. As a joint studio project to be presented at the AlbrightKnox Gallery in Buffalo, a single synthetic solution of design ideas was demanded. Despite the overall cohesiveness of the Buffalo project, the variety and debate that occurs between its segments points to the direction from which emerged the theories of Contextualism, Collision City, and Collage City. But during 1965-66, with the completion of the Buffalo Waterfront project, there was a feeling in the studio that many of the formal strategies that had been developed were workable and had even been codified. This feeling produced a sense of both euphoria and anxiety. The euphoria arose because the studio seemed in possession of a new, or old but forgotten, theory of archite~ture, one more holistic than the townscape or megastructure competItors. The anxiety resulted from the temporary hiatus; despite codification there remained a sense of incompletion. Enough projects had been generated that critical refiection could be undertaken.

How can projects like these be achieved? In what ways are they consistent with the formal and sociopolitical reality of the American city for which they are conceived? What values are esp~)Used? What meanings do they convey? Answers to these questlOns evolved through deeper examination of historic exemplars and through the intense critical insight afforded by speculating on the relation between the formal conjectures produced and the meanings conveyed relative to the intended contexts.

Schumacher's South Amboy project and Copper's figure/ ground drawings of urban exemplars, both completed in 1966, acted as the alpha and omega points for the work that had preceded and was to follow.

Schumacher's South Amboy project used the studio's codified manipulations of figure-field and may be regarded as a classic example of these strategies. Seemingly an idealized world making minimal references to a context, it concludes the innovative conscription and transformation of the building types of Modern architecture into the service of a traditional city. For if the image of Modern architecture specified by the buildings themselves can be ignored,

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what is seen is a traditional city: solid blocks enclosing regularly shaped spaces, clearly defined city edges, and mini mal agitation of one field as a result of the transparent overlap of another. The problems of texture and enclosure were directIy addressed. While enclosure was achieved, the idea of inventing texture remained elusive.

Although a dense texture of regular spaces was made, it did not present an image of texture like that of an existing urban fabric, at once regular and irregular, ordered and varied. Schumacher's project seemed to illustrate the futility of attempts to invent texture and the importance of dealing with an existing urban structure and fabric, a contexto Most troublesome was the unavoidably utopian image projected by this apparentIy new city. For it smacked of those same political overtones of total design projected by any tabula-rasa scheme. Schumacher's project encouraged investigations of the texture of cities and means of designing with that texture, embracing and elaborating the existing order. It also aroused an uneasiness with certain regularities in earlier projects, regularities that seemed inconsistent with the sociopolitical reality that frames and encourages activity, but does not control it to the degree most designs suggested.

Consequently, an attitude to reject the idealized solutions represented by Modern architecture and embrace context as a guide to making urban form was formulated: hence Contextualism.

Copper's figure/ ground drawings were equally persuasive and guided the search for the meanings of contexto Many of the exemplars to which Rowe referred were available only in fragmentary form, unrelated to their urban contexto Those contextua] relations could be understood only by correlating them with maps, often available only in guidebooks like Baedeker and Michelin. Until Copper completed his extensive set of figure/ ground plans in 1966, reference material was scarce. Copper's drawings enriched the design efforts of the studio, until then limited by the tendency toward diagrammatic solutions. (See unbound plates included in this issue.)

The Schumacher and Copper projects, superficially opposed in intent and form, were executed in pursuit of the same investigation, that of texture and context-the relation of incident and figure to underlying structure. Each gave new impetus to studio design and the emerging theories. As design speculations were made, described, and criticized, words and phrases were coined and manipulated, their meanings explored and extended. In this manner Contextualism, Collision City, and Collage City were born.

Contextualism By the mid-1960s, the object building, surrounded by open space and designed in isolation from both place and cultural history, had become the symbol of everything wrong with Modern architectureits rejection of the traditional city and traditional iconography. As a reaction against this predominantIy figural and anticontext bias, composite buildings and the relation of figure to context were

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19 A classical axis and boulevard inspired by Place Nancy indicale an increasing inleresl in lradilional axial and symmelric composilion. And Ihe increased use of preModero exemplars was germane lO Ihe ideo of Collage Cily-Ihe appropriale use of limeless images in lhe cily.

10 Introverted linear buildings make regular urban seale spaces. While nol unlike Le Corbusier's early Redenl housing (111. 17), they nevertheless suggesl a move toward the regular and enclosed space of tradilional architeclure, and away from the open spalial preferences of Modero archileclure.

11 Zones in which Ihe solid-void rendilion of overlapping fields suppress Ihe reading of Ihe individual space or building as a simple figure indicale an inleresl in Ihe extreme contexlual argument againsl Ihe figural buildings Ihal dominale Modero archilecture. In Ihis segmenl Ihe lwo argumenls presenl Ihemselvesexisling Modero cross-shaped lowers, isolaled objecls in a conlinuous open space, are juxlaposed wilh a complex 'Composite Building' formed by lWO inlersecling r",ld geomelries.

11 Soulh Amboy New Town; Shadow Plan; Thomas Schumacher, 1967 (Thesis) 13 Linear buildings, which melamorphosed inlo 'Composite Buildings', exlend Ihe principal axis of lhe cily from Ihe cily hall lo Ihe walerfronl. Buffalo's original plan is 'ideal'. Thus a design exlension of Buffalo Ihal is conlexlual demonslrales a deference lO bolh lhe 'ideal' and Ihe 'circumslanlial'. More lhan any olher early sludio projecl, Buffalo makes a case for lhe idea Ihal Conlexlualism refers nol only lo Ihe local and particular, bul also lo Ihal idealily conlained in Ihe 'psychoeullural' field and which is ever presenl in archileclural-urban formo 14 Projeel for Anlwerp; FigurejGround Plan; Le Corbusier; Drawing by Wayne W. Copper.

Seemingly an idealized Modero city, Schumacher's projecl (111. 22) uses Ihe building types of Modero archileclure lo make a lradilional cily; defined edge, dense texlure, and regular enclosed spaces. The predileelion of lhe sludio lo resolve Ihe opposition belween Iraditional urban design principIes of enelosure and Ihe modero archileeture principie of conlinuilY of open spaee can be seen by comparing Schumacher's Soulh Amboy Projeet with Le Corbusier's Anlwerp seheme.

Where lhe edge of Amboy is defined, Anlwerp is open.

Where Amboy's 'redenls' make regular, simply shaped and enclosed spaces, Anlwerp's are complexly formed wilh modulaled bul open channels of space direeled toward the surrounding landseape.

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25 Santa Marta, Colombia; Urban Pattero; Manuel R. de Vengoechea, 1968 (Thesis) The dense fields and regular spaces of both the Schumacher and de Vengoechea projects look backward to Le Corbusier's early urbanistic proposals, which included solid blocks (City for Three Million), and forward to Perez O'Arce's polemical infilling at Chandigarh (111. 56).

26 Royal Chancellory, Stockholm; Gunnar Asplund: Orawing by Wayne W. Copper Asplund's Royal Chancellory scheme became a symbol lo Ihe studio of 'Contextualism.' In opposition lo Ihe object building fixations of Modero archilecture, Asplund's scheme can hardly be distinguished in plan view form the adjacent texlure. And it is deferenlial to the olher major buildings whose relalionships it reinforces.

27 Oerby Civic Cenler Competition; North-Soulh Seclion; James Stirling, 1972 By 1972, Venturi and Stirling had bolh used lhe collage idea lo inlroduce architeclural iconography into their work. This 'collage' technique was an acceplable Modero arl stralegy that allowed them lo break Modero archileclure's unwritten slricture againsl the use of traditional styles of architectural elemenls. The Coroell Urban Oesign Studio used Ihe same technique to break down lhe barriers to using older building Iypes in the making of urban/ architectural formo The collage lechnique, Ihe actual introduclion of architeclural exemplars inlo design projects as design conjeclures, led to Ihe question, "Why not?" Consequently, Collage City was eventually rationalized, allowing for buildings of a tradilionally symbolic and nontemporal image.

28 The Yale Mathematics Building Competition; Section looking easl; Venturi and Rauch, 1974

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promoted in studio work. In contrast to the dominant image of Modern architecture, Le Corbusier's various ideal cities, Gunnar Asplund's Royal Chancellory project represented an opposing position. Viewed in plan, Asplund's scheme can barely be discerned from the complex texture adjacent to it. Yet its program suggested a monumental object building. Because it emphasized background rather than figure, texture rather than object, Asplund's scheme became the symbol of a counterargument to the object building fixation.

By 1966-67 the studio shared the feeling that it had become privy to a new theory of architecture-urbanism. Clearly opposed to prevailing thought and practice, the theory needed to be distinguished by name. 19 Contextualism conveyed the values of the theory as an antithesis to Modern architecture.

Narrowly described Contextualism is the derivation of form from its contexto It depends upon and extends a preexisting form order. Contextualism is opposed to the utopian aspects of Modern architecture, an architecture derived from new determinants and opposed to the old and traditional. In a broader sense it was conceived to embrace and value context of all kinds: natural, manmade, and historical-what Rowe and Koetter have called the psychocultural field. It values place, history, and culture and their preservation and extension as a generative base to formo It was a word free of elitist overtones, understood without esoteric knowledge. Contextualism was also intended to reconcile the ideas of Rowe and Venturi, which in 1966-67 were being presented as antithetical. Rowe's ideas, extrapolated from studio projects, were regarded as excessively formalistic and lacking ideality.20 Venturi was regarded as obsessed with the iconography of popular culture.

The Rowe studio projects demonstrated an interest in place and continuity of urban form; Venturi's an interest in intelligible and rich symbolic form based on culture, whether popular or elite. Together their ideas seemed to represent a theory of architecture that included the full range of architectural-urbanistic considerations. Stuart Cohen's 1974 article, "Physical Context, Cultural Context; Including It AII," described and promoted this inclusive contextual attitude. 21 Thereafter Contextualism descriptively captured the concern for the uniqueness of place and culture as a foil to the presumed universal qualities of Modern architecture. It has become, rhetoricalIy if not actually, a modus operandi of current practice and apology.

But Contextualism limited to the formal procedures of the studio and exclusive of the psychocultural field is dangerously misunderstood. For deduction and determination by context elevates the circumstantial and historical to the realm of the ideal. Thus the traditional contrast between the circumstantial and the ideal is lost.

The essence of Rowe's urban-architectural theory has been that both the ideal and the circumstantial are facets of human endeavor and it is the struggle between the two that has produced our most exhilarating cities and habitable buildings. 22 To Rowe and Koetter this idea is not carried simply by the

interaction of type and context, as many explanations of the theory suggest, but by interaction between ideal type and contexto Ideal type represents what is aspirational, utopian, ideal, and prophetic, while context represents the circumstantial, the real, the empirical, the remembered, the traditional.

In Co/lage City urban-architectural form is treated as a dialogue between these two facets of man's mind and politics. Ideal type and context are seen variously as signs of: Utopia and Tradition; Theatre of Prophecy and Theatre of Memory; order and disorder; for the joint existence of a permanent reference and random happening, (p. 8); tragic and comic (p. 14); the "rational" and the relative (p. 40); the possibility of the general and the recognition of the specific (p. 72); empiricist reacting to site and the idealist concerned with normative condition (pp. 72-73); archetype and accident (pp. 77); local concession and a declaration of independence (pp. 77-78); the joint existence of the overtly planned and the genuinely unplanned; of the public and private, of the state and the individual (p. 83).

In the early years, 1963-70, and beyond, there was a tendency to focus more on physical context and deformation of building types than on ideal types. Consequently articles that explain the theories of the studio in contextual terms tend to place too much emphasis on the morphological and deductive aspects of the theory and not enough on the importance of a dialectic between ideal type and contexto Likewise, the studio projects demonstrate an overbalance of interest in the spatial field and not enough interest in the psychocultural field.

ColIision City and ColIage City attempted to redress this imbalance. ColIage was an existing acceptable art strategy for juxtaposing old and new. It provided the rationalization for the reuse of old forms and styles by Modern architects. Robert Venturi's Yale Mathematics Building and James Stirling's Derby Competition Project introduce or use the art strategies of colIage for explicit stylistic reference or manipulation of architectural artifacts. These two projects broke the barrier to the use of non-Modern forms.

ColIage City would provide the same rationale at the urban level.

And ColIision City would describe the preferred polĂ­tical condition symbolized by a dialectic between ideal type and contexto

Collision City Just as context was the concept that focused the interest and investigation that sponsored Contextualism, so, too, ColIision City emerged from a specificalIy focused investigation.

InitialIy a collision was simply one of those places common to American cities in which grids of different alignments abut, join, or collide. Often, each field of urban blocks, street pattern, or texture had a fractured contour or boundary. There was no hierarchy estab-

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lished among them, no integration, no overlap, no resolution, no composition of the formo The term "collision" described the accidental, fragmentary, and messy quality of most of these places.

Grid collisions were seen as a typical problem of U.S. cities, one for which a compositional design strategx should be developed. The early studio strategies had been to isolate joining fields and eliminate such collisions; to extend the fields to create larger overlaps that established hierarchy, with one grid as object within a larger grid; or to design special joints-forms and spaces-to achieve a composed shift in direction of the two adjoining fields. (For example see Seattle, III. 6, 7; Buffalo Waterfront III. 19-23; Baltimore, III. 46).

Grid collisions were of special interest for several reasons. First, Rowe often assigned them as "interesting sites" to investigate beca use they promoted attention to focus and hierarchy in a way that the normal grid did noto Secondly, as a common urban problem in the United States, these areas are often underdeveloped or deteriorated.

Thirdly, such conditions often exist near major city centers and often in conjunction with major landscape features. Finally, they offer opportunity for development with few of the c1earance problems associated with major urban interventions.

But most importantly, just as the grid denies the possibility of hierarchy or focus, these areas of collision offer the opportunity to achieve it. It became increasingly c1ear to the studio that the city required both figure and texture, object and context, the ideal and the circumstantiaI. In both functional and formal terms these collisions provided the contextual rationale to support composite buildings.

When compared to the Copper figure! ground exemplars, the earliest studio projects-even the codified strategies represented by the Buffalo Waterfront project-suddenly seemed too simply geometric, too stiff, too resolved, too monistic, too ... total designo By contrast, there were examples among Copper's drawings that were apparent collisions, but nevertheless resolved compositions. This was especially true of many medieval piazzas, which possess a complex formal order, a beauty different from that of a c1assical composition, a beauty less stable, less perfect, more dynamic, more irresolute, more picturesque.

From a nearly exclusive attention to fields, which were identified, extended, and resolved (c1assically composed?), the Cornell studio interest shifted toward exemplars of field collisions. Historically such areas have often produced complexly formed urban spaces of intense social occupation, with honorific buildings partially emerging from adjacent fields to compete for spatial and visual dominance. The Piazza della Signoria in Florence is an outstanding example of this condition, one easily related to the American city because of the exceptionally c1ear abutment of nonaligned grids at the piazza.

In examples like the Piazza della Signor铆a the spaces and buildings focus field energy; thus total design is not needed to achieve composition. The studio recognized that the strategy of field exten-

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sion and figure completion, useful as an analytic tool, was prone to produce designs that could be criticized for being as monistic and utopian as Modern architecture.

In the study of Copper's exemplars the studio carne c10sest to the perceptual concerns of townscape and the picturesque. But explorations beyond the formal-visuallevel were equally instructive.

In attempting to understand how much regularity or ideality was required to order the irregular and circumstantial, and in attempting to determine what generative or dependent relationships and temporal and causal conditions had occurred, it was discovered that those forms that appear generative or oldest often occurred later than those forms which seemed to have been sponsored as a result of this presumed preexistence. 23 Collision City was a step away from the earlier formal preoccupations with extended field structures. It was a step away from Picasso's Portrait 01 Danie/-Henri Kahnweiler, in which figure is destroyed by field, toward the later and more integrated cubist structures of Gris and Braque, in which figure is partially submerged by, and partially emergent from, the field structure. In this step can be seen the necessary process of first recognizing the object fixation of Modern architecture-urbanism and then exploring a procedure in which, like early cubist paintings, the object is totally destroyed by a context or field. Collision City reintroduced the role of both figure and ideal type to an interaction with the field or contexto In studio studies there is a tendency to destroy figure at the small scale, to submerge it in the background structure as a cubist painting might. But figure is dominant at the large scale; huge spatiotemporal areas are ordered by their common field attributes. Collision City disputed these preferences. Resolution at the large scale had become too perfect, too ideal, too monistic, and at the smaller scale independent order had been suppressed. There remained no record of dissent and debate. Theoretically, rather than dispersing the potential energy of field collision over large, extended, and completed fields, incompleteness was allowed to remain and in the area of greatest energy-the place of conflict between two or more fields-major buildings and building complexes engaged, focused, or redirected that visual energy. Ultimately these compositional perceptions were positively linked to the sociopolitical realm.

The idea is simply the conflict of contending powers, the almost fundamental conflict of interest sharply stipulated, the legitimate suspicion about others' interests, from which the democratic process-such as it is--proceeds; and then the corollary to this idea is no more banal; if such is the case, that is, if democracy is compounded of libertarian enthusiasm and legalistic doubt, if it is inherentlya collision of points of view and acceptable as such. then why not allow a theory of contending powers (all of them visible) as likely to esta blish a more ideally comprehensive city of the mind than any which has as yet been invented,?24

Villa Adriana and seventeenth-century Rome are offered by Rowe and Koetter as exemplars of this condition:

29 29 Piazza della Signoria; Florence; Figure/Ground Plan The Piazza della Signoria in Florence is an especially clear example of a 'collision' of several grids analogous to those in U.S. cities. In Florence the energy of the collision is focused by the space of the piazza and its civic buildings and monuments. This complex focusing of field energies beca me a new studio design strategy and led to the perception of the positive political implications of 'Collision City' in contrast to 'Total Design.' Collision City is expressed by the healthy competition among social institutions evidenced by idealized spaces and buildings erupting from a surrounding field of texture in a nonhierarchic fashion.

30 Project for Birmingham. Alabama; Figure / Ground Plan; Fred Koetter, 1967 Koetter's early project for Birmingham, Alabama demonstrates his intuitive interest in 路Collision.' Unlike the more typical studio responses of extension and reolution. Koetter's solution focuses the surroundings with a large figural object. abstractly comparable to the Coliseum in Verona or Rome. A similar attitude is seen in the Harlem Redevelopment project, the center of which is dominated by the extroverted type of linear building developed in the studio to resolve axes and field energies through focus.

31 Portrait of Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler; Pablo Picasso, 1910 32 Portrait of Picasso; Juan Gris. 1912 Picasso's Porlrail 01 Daniel-Henri Kahn ...eiler is ilIustrative of the anti-Modern architecture, anti-object building stance of embryonic Contextualism. like many studio projects. figure is destroyed by field. But in most studio designs there is a countertendency to make figure at the large scale while destroying it at the small scale. Thus a more direct parallel can be made between the studio projects and the later and more integrated cubist structures of Gris and Braque. Gris' POr/rail o/ Picasso is fairly directly analogous to much studio work between 1965 and 1976. The field structure is clearly ordered. Small-scale figure is partially submerged by, and partially emerging from, the field structure.

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An inextricable fusion of imposition and accommodation, that highly successful and resilient traffic jam of intentions, an anthology of c10sed compositions and ad hoc stuff in between which is simultaneouslya dialectic of ideal types plus a dialectic of ideal types with empirical context. 2S "A dialectic of ideal types" extends the Rowe-Koetter thesis considerably beyond its understood boundaries in 1967 and it is difficult to find in studio projects.

The crucial essence of Collision City is one of political idealism and political reality, equal concern for the individual and for society, and for the continuous struggle toward an equilibrium between the two that such values presume. 1t avoids any monistic notion of either governance or designo

Collage City 33 Manhallan Lower Easl Side. New York Cily; Figurel Ground Plan; Group ProjecI. 1967. (For more informalion. see projecl seclion).

34 :\ollimap: Panlheon Segmenl 3S Manhallan. Wesl Side: Plan; Sleven K. Pelerson, 1969 In early 'conlexlual' work 'figure' is suppressed al Ihe small seale. bUI eSlablished in larger spalio-Iemporal 路fields.' Collision Cily debaled Ihese assumplions. reeslablishing Ihe importance of Ihe ideal, Ihe 'figurar space or mass and ils .ymbolic role in Ihe cilyseape.

36 Projecl for Harvard; Figure/Ground Plan; Charles Graves. 1978 37 Projecl for Monlreal; Figure! Ground Plan; David Griffin. 1979 (Thesis) The small~ale figura) qualilies evidenced in Ihese recen! Sludio plans indicate Ihe impacl of Ihe idea of Tollision Cily;' somewhal neoelassical multiple cenlers of foeus order Ihe surroundings. Idealized spaces and buildings. presumably represenling imporlanl inslilulions. compele for allenlion.

38 Lincoln Memorial; Washinglon. D.e.

Collage Cily reinlroduces inlo archileclure Ihe imporlance of buildings which are symbolic of timelcss values. .

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In explaining the full meaning of Collage City, Rowe and Koetter quote Picasso: To me there is no past and no future in art. ... The several manners which I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting.... AH l have and made was for the present and with the hope that it wiH always remain in the present. 26 Picasso can be supplemented with a similar passage by T.S. Eliot: [Tradition] cannot be inherited. and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves in the first place. the historical sense ... and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence ... a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together,27 Collage was a formal procedure identified with the compositional characteristics of cubismo The idea of Collage was omnipresent in the studio memory. Collage City developed in para11el with Contextualism and Collision City. As early as 1966, Rowe had proposed to the studio the idea of th~ city as a .m~mory theatre---:a record of man's aspirations and faI1ures. Thls Idea of the clty contains that quality aspired to by both Picasso and Eliot, the eternal and contemporary presence of not only the past, but of the timeless.

This emphasis on the timeless is antithetical to the Modernist zeitgeist rationale that a11 archi~ecture should express its own time or age, and be a monument to It. . . .

Rowe and Koetter explain Collage Clty by contrasttng an antlhistorical modero city with the nineteenth-century ideal city of enlightened culture. To the nin~teenth century the city offered potential as an instrument of educatlOn and culture.

Within the theory of Modern architecture one could not design buildings such as the Jefferson or Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.e. that symbolize timeless values and pretend to what Rowe has

elsewhere called an "inextinguishable antiquity." Such buildings celebrate men, events, and values whose authenticity is unquestionable. They elevate events and the values they represent from history to the realm of myth.

It fa lis to myth to preserve true history ... it is in the myth that the principies and paradigms for all conduct must be sought and recovered. 28 Collage City encourages the full use of symbolic, associational, and typological resources that a rigorous ec1ecticism allows. It proposes the use of the temporal and the timeless together. It provides the substance of townscape and the picturesque. And as an idea, it rationalizes the city as a theatre of memory, proposing an ec1ecticism that ineludes both utopia and tradition.

The idea of Collage continually opened the door to history as a constellation of relevant exemplars, encouraging their use, juxtaposition, and transformation. Concomitant events had a liberating impact on the range of forms available to the studio: the increasingly frequent appearance in architectural journals of projects that could be considered contextual; a reinvestigation of type and new resistance to the dictates of program and type; a willingness to reuse history; the pronounced death of Modern architecture; and the resurrection of the Ecole des Beaux Arts by the Museum of Modern Art in 1975.

By the late 1960s studio conjecture included the collaging of historic exemplars into design projects. This technique was used initially as an analytic tool to examine form and meaning without an interim process of abstraction. Such processes are design tools. But the ultimate importance of collage is not one of design process or compositional quality. Rather, Collage City is, like Contextualism, a resistance to all presumptions of linearity in thought and progress in art, architecture, and urbanismo Collage embraces lateral and associational thinking, symbolic and iconic form; in short, the full complexity of the human mind admitting not only the rational, deductive, and scientific, but also, the a-rational, inductive, emotive, and romantic. According to Rowe and Koetter: Remembrance of former function and value: shifting context: an attitude which encourages the composite: an exploitation and recycling of meaning (has there ever been enough to go around?): desuetude of function with corresponding agglomeration of reference: memory: anticipation: Ihe connectedness of memory and wit ... it is in terms such as these, in terms of pleasures remembered and values desired, of a dialectic between past and future, of an impacting of iconographic content, of a temporal as well as a spatial collision, that ... one might proceed to specify an ideal city of the mind .... Objects and episodes are obtrusively imported and, while they retain the overtones of their source and origin, they gain also a wholly new impact from changed context. 29 Collage City is a Contextualism that embraces culture through history. It is the attitude of Picasso and Eliot, that respects not only the pastness of the past, but also its presence. The impact of this

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frame of mind can be seen in the most recent studio projects, which offer their own commentary on earlier studio conjectures.

Retrospective-Prospective In the early studio projects Modern building types predominate, unchallenged by building forms that evoke pre-Modern styles. In more recent projects buildings that are clearly Modern are scarcely in evidence.

Early projects primarily feature housing, linear buildings establishing field edges and object buildings focusing field areas. More recent projects concentrate field energy (Manfredi, Project for Upper Manhattan; Griffin, Project for Montreal; Boulous, Project for Beirut; Fong, Project for Regent's Park; Middleton, Project for Providence). They evoke civic places like the Vienna Hofburg scaled to and engaged with their surroundings. There is evidence of that architectural sensibility that thrived in the United States between the World Columbia Exposition in 1893 and the publication of Hegemann and Peets' Civic Art in 1922, and then suddenly died at the very peak of its vigor and health.

In the early projects the dominant compositional device is the cubist extension and resolution of spatial fields. Design control is spread fairly evenly over the entire area under consideration. More recently, the necessity to achieve order through field extension and resolution has almost disappeared. There is more design concentration on smaller areas of ordering potential. The potential energy of grid collisions is gathered and focused in grand civic spaces and buildings. Two nearly contemporary projects may be compared to demonstrate these points. Arikoglu's Project for Baltimore '76 is replete with the classic studio strategies: it proposes field extension and resolution, and linear buildings everywhere define edges and make important street facades. At a smaller scale there is a buildup of classical passages or set pieces, centralized building and landscape compositions. Very much like Baiter's project for the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Arikoglu seems to have applied Schumacher's ideal city for South Amboy to South Baltimore.

By way of contrast, Kleinman's Project for Brooklyn rejects the large-scale field extension strategy in favor of a series of composite buildings connected by a set of major boulevards and parks along the line of grid fracture. The composite buildings are both traditional and Modern in style. They owe more to Louis Kahn and Michael Graves than to Le Corbusier, but they are primarily transformations of the idea of the Vienna Hofburg, a building that attaches to the surrounding fabric and sponsors figural voids and solids that provide focus and stabilize the surrounding spatial energies. Kleinman's approacfi is closer to the theories of Collage City and to the late nineteenth-century tradition of urbanism, a tradition that was interrupted by the intercession of Modern architecture. It is an approach that has become increasingly evident in studio work since 1975.

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39 Project for 1978 Upper (ThMa,nhauan; Site Plan' M' h Manfredi, 40 Project f M eSls) , IC ael (Thesis) or ontreal', S'.te Plan; David G 'ffi 41 Project for B n m, 1979 Plan' Shi eyroulh Cenlre VilIe! B 42 ,1979 (Thesis) ord de Mer; Sile

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In Kleinman's project the individual buildings are still Modern, as evidenced by their asymmetry, multiple geometries, clipped corners, erosions, and so on. The landscape, however, is more traditional, recognizably classic, or romantic. In more recent projects both the landscapes and the plan order of the buildings owe more to nineteenth-century prototypes than to those of Modern architecture.

In this step away from larger field orders toward the creation of foci, there is an increased interest in topography and landscape and a hierarchical concentration on designing in the public realm.

Early projects were often too large to be thought of as anything but flat (Duncan, Hamman, Valk-Project for Baltimore), open space is little more than a blank, white abstraction; or, at best, an articulation of intersecting field geometries defined by water edges and trees (Buffalo Waterfront). More recent and smaller projects demonstrate a real concern for landscape, as in Manfredi's Urban Development Project for Upper Manhattan. A perspective drawing is made to assure cognizance of the major landscape view that generates the organizing axis for the scheme and toward which the major spatial figure is directed.

This landscape interest is also discerned in the Providence Redevelopment studies of D. B. Middleton. A major pond and dam, first discovered in early engravings of Providence, are refurbished making the stream bed a center rather than the dividing edge of the downtown. Middleton's project also differentiates landscape types.

The city hall sponsors a surrounding classical landscape, while the mili pond area succumbs to the picturesque and naturalistic romantic mode.

Smith's project for Cincinnati's downtown river front focuses on the relation of landscape to urbanismo The design is of a terraced urban park which acts as entourage to the city and existing set pieces in the area. It also becomes a formal urban park on the scale of the Tuilleries or Central Park, reestablishing and celebrating the generative force in Cincinnati's history, the Ohio River.

These sensitivities point to a reawakening interest in all the landscape traditions that the City Beautiful movement had received from the neoclassic and Ecole-des-Beaux-Arts traditions, traditions that were casualties of Modernism. Only the romantic mode, exacerbated by a purist-ecologist-environmentalist mentality has survived.

Consequently the ground plane of the modern city is as undistinguished and unaccommodating as the facade of Modern architecture. What has been lost, and what these projects promise to rediscover, is the thread of the great landscape traditions best represented in the United States by Olmsted and Burnham.

These recent projects demonstrate the lessons of Collision City.

Design order in the public realm is promoted while disorder in the larger private field is tolerated. In the democratic city, certainly it is the public realm which ought to project order and be the stabilizer of individual and capitalistic agitation, while the private realm ought to be minimally regulated. It ยกs, after all, the preference for democratic politics and free enterprise that makes the jagged skyline of New 45

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.... ProjeCl for Baltimore; Shadow Plan; Kaya Arikoglu; 1976 (Thesis) 45 Projecl for Brooklyn; Figure/Ground Plan; Martin Kleinman, 1975 (Thesis) Arikoglu's projecl for Baltimore (1976) illuslrates lhe cJassical sludio slralegies developed during lhe mid 60s. Similar lO Bailer's projecl for lhe Brooklyn Navy Yard '67, or de Vengoechea's projecl for Sanla Marta, Colombia '68, il proposcd tield eXlension and resolulion, lhe detinilion of field edges and slreel facades wilh linear buildings , and a build up of a classical axis al a smaller scale. In contras! lO lhem, Kleinman's projecl for Brooklyn favors lhe inserlion uf composile buildings al crilical locations of tield junclure.

46 Ballimore Master Plan; Figure/Ground Plan; Donald Duncan, Frederick Hamman, Arthur Valk, 1968 (Thesis) 47 Buffalo Waterfront; Waterfronl Delai!.

4g Urban Development for Upper Manhattan; Perspective; Michael Manfredi, 1978 (Thesis)

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York City preferable to the monistic implications of the Ville Contemporaine.

The most recent projects demonstrate a concern for the communication of these ideas. There is a zone where decisive action of a public architectural nature should occur, and other zones in which more randoll1 developments can be allowed (the lessons of Collision City). Compare, for example, the figure/ ground of West 14th Street in Manhattan, circa 1973 (McDonald, 111. 53) with several more recent projects: Urban Development for Upper Manhattan, 1978 (Manfredi) or the Marylebone Rail Way District Project for Regent's Park, London, 1979 (Fong).

In retrospect we can see in all the studio projects background investigations for the theories of Contextualism, Collision City, and Collage City. As investigations of urban-architectural form order, they are both investigations of problems and student demonstrations of knowledge, mastery, and skill. But there are sorne problems that tend to be ignored because they will not yield so easily to the developed formal strategies of the studio or because criticism has induced shyness toward certain problem types.

Thus if project selections indicate respect for Falstafrs battlefield philosophy, "Discretion is the better part of valour," at the same time it must be recognized that certain other urban conditions are not as commonly selected and energetically investigated. These are (1) the grid, where it is continuous and uninflected; (2) the smaller town, where there is an awkwardly difficult paucity of solid compared to void; (3) the suburb, whose modern rendition scarcely recalls either the English landscape garden from which it is derived, or the city which it surrounds; and (4) the relationship among these components of the city. The studio projects illustrated here demonstrate various avenues of thought, sorne partially explored and abandoned, others simply identified but as yet unexplored. Where certain problems are identified and solved, others fall into the background remaining to be rediscovered at sorne future time.

First among these is the need to bring visual order, memory, and meaningful structure to the enormous spatiotemporal fields which now constitute the Modern city. Certainly the Duncan, Valk, Hamman project for Baltimore represents the spatio temporal scale at which the city needs to be considered. Recent studio projects have moved away from this problem, but while the prevailing sentiment may be that "small is beautiful," the opposite corollary that "big is ugly" does not necessarily follow. The projects for Baltimore and Buffalo are on a scale comparable to those made by Olmsted and Burnham. The city of today is in dire need of the synthetic, analogic, and comprehensive proposals that so positively affected it a century ago.

In more recent studio studies, principally between 1977 and 1981, many of the problems of earlier projects have been identified and addressed. Most demonstrate an interest in the specifics of the landscape at a scale of both the block and the region. A Nolli type poche technique has supplanted the harsher, extreme-contrast, figure/

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49 Project for Providence, Rhode Island: Perspectivo; D.B. Middleton, 1980 (Thesis) Recent projects treal the landscape specifically rather than abstractly and geometrically. In Middleton's plan for Providence bolh romantic and classic landscape modes are in evidence. 80lh the style and tradition or appropriate use of each is being rediscovered.

SO Project for Cincinnati Waterfront, Axonometric: Jerri Smith, 1981 (Thesis) Smith's Project proposes classical landscape park terraces celebrating the Ohio River's generative role in Cincinnati's history.

51 The Towers of Mid-Town Manhattan; Photo by William Frange 52 Ville Contemporaine; Le Corbusier Our inluitive preference for the jagged skyline of Manhattan to Le Corbusier's regularized city of lowers derives from the valuation of heallhy compelilion between conlending powers, demacralic or olherwise.

Jt is lhese values lhat Collision City embraces in contrast lO the implicalions of centralized aUlhority conve~d by Le Corbusier's field of lowers.

53 Projecl for W. 14 St., Manhattan; Figure/Ground Plan; Arthur McDonald. 1973 (Thesis) 54 Projecl for Cincinnali Waterfront; Elevalion of Walerfronl: Jerri Smith, 1981 (Thesis)

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ground drawings (Manfredi, Fong, Middleton), signifying a conscious association with traditional urbanism, rather than Modern abstract art. A willingness to make clear, simple spatial figures abounds.

Axonometrics have given way to perspectives (Manfredi, Middleton and Nealy), which deal more clearly with the landscape as a generative order. Elevational and perspective drawings ameliorate the somewhat questionable assertion of a split between conceptual and perceptual order, between gestalt and townscape (Smith).

There can be little doubt that the investigation precipitated by Rowe and emerging from the Cornell Urban Design Studio have had a major impact on thinking about urban form and structure. At the same time, it would inflate the case to suggest that the Cornell Urban Design Studio has been alone in these investigations. The proposals of Rodrigo Perez D'Arce, for example, have directly attacked the object fixation icons of Modern architecture bysurrounding LeCorbusier's capital buildings at Chandigarh with an apparently locally derived texture, making a traditional dense city. Likewise, contemporary Cornell student projects (Manfredi, Fong, Middleton) are strikingly similar to Rob Krier's work now illustrated in Urban Space.

Surely it can be argued that the rediscovery of important architectural and urban traditions was inevitable and that the Cornell studio was only one of several places in which that rediscovery was made. But it is also c1ear that the projects presented here have been the background sponsor to what today are among the most holistic of urbanistic and architectural theories, represented by Contextualism and Collage City. In Collage City Rowe and Koetter have presented one of the few comprehensive critiques and theories of the city available today. While most urban design literature presents principIes unconscious or disconnected from a sociopolitical philosophy, Collage City does not. It is a theory mired neither in pure aesthetics nor pure function. It accepts no reductionist models, but rather connects urban form to meaning, and that meaning is specifically sociopolitical. It is pro-democratic, pro-free enterprise, in short pro American idealism. 30 The important and active dialogue between European urbanistic precedents and exemplars and the American context that the studio work and Collage City often represent is forever useful and enlightening. This interchange is often initiated with a prejudice that American resources are too limited for it to be otherwise. This is at least a half truth. Only a chauvinist would blind himself to what European experience has to offer. At the same time Rowe has always been especially conscious of the American condition-its values, its politics, its resultant style. 31 This sensitivity points toward a fuller understanding of American urbanism through a more complete understanding of those transformations of European precedents that have occurred in what J.B. Jackson has called American Space.

Those transformations began with the colonial American settlement patterns that idealized European agricultural and urban community patterns, and they extend through our contemporary urbanismo U.S.

78

sociopolitical history has always been cognizant of these transformations. But only cursory attention has been paid to the relations between U.S. urban form and the sociopolitical values that shaped it.

At a most general level, Collage City relates democratic and capitalist values to the form of the city. Certainly the projects illustrated here and the conjectures and refutations they have supported have brought us c10ser to an understanding of the limits and potentials of â&#x20AC;˘ that urban form which is our inheritance.

55

Studio Projects The following design projects are selected from a collection of over 150 firstyear projects and second-l'ear theses completed in the graduate program of the Urban Design Studio. Dating from 1963, these examples represent different problem types and some basic design strategies; the reader may note in this work some patterns in both the architectural elements used and the kind of sites chosen for study. Most projects are not fully documented due to limitations of space. The illustrations and accompanying descriptions should, however, give the reader a reasonable idea of the intent and scope of each designo The first-year studio projects have a distinct pedagogicfocus, often using a specific site condition as the basic parameter: waterfront sites or impacted grid co//ision areas are the most recurrent. But other problem types have been used, inc/uding large-scale "mapping"problems (theformal relationships ofwhole city districts to each other), urban garden design (contour and spaces madefrom verdure instead ofbui/dings), typology problems (such as tower versus perimeter block) and, more recently, design speculations and fantasies on historic city plans (Roma Interrotta and its spin-offs).

Contrary to the first-year projects, which are inspired by a professorial bias and curiosity, the second-year design theses often ref/ect the student's interest in a specific city. The site selectedfor the yearlong thesis might be the "home town" or its emotional equivalent-a visual and experiential memory at once familiar to the student and yet, after the previous year of study, something different. The site under consideration would generally be seen as part of an urbanistic macrocosm (in both form and history); connections and relationships to other parts of the city are exploredfirst, then a more detai/ed examination and its proposal are developed for the specific area.

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Center Binghamton Erwin P. Nigg (1963) One of the earliest studio projects, this scheme demonstrates the initial concentration on Modern architectural building types and articulation. The program for this development includes a mixed-use residential building wrapping around a theater as part of a new civic center. The theater is oriented on axis to the old county court house and city offices, establishing a formal link with these civic structures. A complex section for the apartment building is proposed to facilitate connections to an urban square and parking below. The scheme retains many of the Modern architectural attributes of separation of pedestrian and vehicular movements, but at the same time focuses the apartments on a central space around public structures, much like European piazzas, â&#x20AC;˘

55 Project for Burlington, VT:, Perspective of Battery Street Norlh; Craig Nealy, 1981 (Thesis) 56 Perspective; Rodrigo Perel de Arce, 1977 Perel de Arce's projected infill of the vast open spaces between Le Corbusier's capital buildings at Chandigarh displays the same attitude toward reaffirming the spatial qualities of traditional urbanism as Ihal developed in the early years of the Cornell Studio.

57 EXisting Site Plan 58 Proposed Site Plan

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Charter Oak Meadows, Hartford, Connecticut Philip S. Handler (1964)

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The site is a low-Iying, mixed-use area along the Connecticut River south from Constitution Plaza in Hartford Center. The proposal in this thesis is to create a residential community connected to the downtown area through a series of apartment slab and linear building linkages. The residential area consists of low- and high-density groupings (courtyard, row houses, towers) located primarily along a double spine running south from the central business district.

Commercial and institutional structures are located along the river front, sponsoring a secondary grid of tower slabs and avenues.

A new stadium terminates the southern development, while additionallight industry facilities complete the city center river front to the north. As in other studio schemes of this period, this one relies on overlapping fields to make connections and interpenetrations of various edges and districts of the ~.

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Bandung, Indonesia

Raysoeli Moeloek (1965) Bandung, the capital ofthe Province of West Java, is located on a flat plateau, surrounded by a chain of mountains and hiIls. The site chosen does not possess the characteristics of a downtown area in the United States; rather it resembles a plaza and market square in Europe. In Bandung, a traditional square is known as alun-alun and is surrounded by goveroment buildings, a mosque, and a prison. This seheme foIlows the traditional pattero while unifying a set of structures on an impacted site.

The program ineludes a civic center (Goveroor's office, Regent's Office, municipal offices, and a large mosque), a cultural center (theater, art gaIleries, library, aquarium, elubs) and semicommercial buildings (bus station, hotels, shops). The main square, with amosque, penetrates through the grid pattero from the stadium and connects the various fields from four directions. Diagonal openings extend the entries from different transportation links into the square. The scheme uses modero buildings on pi/oris to permit a "transparency" of circulation while framing and forming urban space.

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Houston Satellite City Irving Philli ps (1965) This design proposal for the development of a new "satellite city" outside of Houston, Texas on a large undeveloped forest site was submitted for consideration, along with a housing market analysis, to the city of Houston in 1965. Situated next to a river that would be dammed and produce a smalllake front, the scheme envisions a new town developed perpendicularly between a highway connection to Houston and the waterfront. A gridded matrix of housing and streets is proposed: the housing ranges from high density towers and row houses to low-density freestanding houses; the streets range from smaller access roads that wind through the forest to larger axial arterial connections to the major centers. AIl these elements are hierarchically arranged in both scale and use. The center of organizational gravity sits between the civic and shopping center along the highway and the clubs and recreational center along the waterfront.

Although the scheme has many aspects of "ideal city" planning and certain English garden city precedents, it is provocative in both its composition and conception of the forest as pochĂŠ, out of which streets and public park space are "carved," providing a conceptual infill of anonymous texture like that found in large cities. â&#x20AC;˘

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Zurich Center

Franz R. G. Oswald (1966) This thesis addresses a particular urban development problem in Zurich, Switzerland: the contraditory expansion tendencies along and across the river Limmat versus the lake front. The center of Zurich has expanded continually from east to west, starting along the Limmat River in the Middle Ages, shifting to the Bahnhofstrasse with the introduction of the railroad in the nineteenth century, and finally bridging the Sihl River in the present century. Recognizing the need for expansion in 1966, this scheme proposes a redevelopment within the center of the city on land currently public (old rail tracks and military barracks).

The primary design strategy is to reestablish the traditional urban links to the Limmat River and both sides of the Sihl River. A secondary and preexisting link along the fortification canal from the Sihl River to the lakefront is reinforced, enhancing the centralization of the medieval district. A new Bahnhof becomes the major linking device between the hillslope to the west and the Limmat River, consolidating the major transportation systems while enhancing the existing platz. This "superblock" or composite-form building is the interface for highway, parking, and rail and tramway services for the city. The various fields along the Sihl River are reconnected by means of refiexive spatial tactics, such as the apsidal building and the bridge and gate conditions. â&#x20AC;˘

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South Amboy New Town Thomas Schumacher (1966)

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Posited as a new town on a site in South Amboy, New Jersey, this thesis was one of the first to attempt a total fabrication of urban texture on an open site. The heirarchy of traditional city spaces-ordered squares and disordered fields-has been reversed in this scheme: the regularity of less important spaces is countered by the irregularity in the more important ones. Civic structures and public functions occur in the larger, irregular spaces. This is meant to sponsor greater activity of spatial action in the specific spaces designed for such purposes. Housing systems have been invented to form a grid matrix, or field of blocks, with a hierarchy of public to private use.

The housing blocks are also.intended to be a modification of Corbusian redents, made denser and with a more elaborate section.

The notion of transparency, or overlapping grids, is intended to minimize functional and regional edges and their separation from the • centers of the overall site.

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Buffalo Waterfront

Group Project (1969) R. Baiter, R. Cardwell, O. W. Chao, W. W. Copper, H. N. Forusz, A. H. Koetter, M. Miki, E. F. Olympio, F. R. G. Oswald This large-scale studio project began as a series of individual design studies for the site and concluded with a composite design exhibited to the city of Buffalo in 1969. The scheme proposes an extensive rehabilitation or construction within mostly eroded or decayed portions of the city: the waterfront, divorced from the city center by the highway, is one major problem; the colliding gridded field intersection around the city hall is another. The general design strategy has been to recognize the historic, but incomplete, square grid of the city center and make it the /ocus for extending field development to the northwest and southeast along the lakefront diagonal, and to extend the original grid past the highway boundary to the precincts north and east of the center.

Various tactics for resolving grid collisions and establishing c1ear boundaries can be observed. Spaces around the city hall are more open and continuous, making the field edges felt at this focus point. A large linear apartment building to the northwest sponsors a set of smaller 'arms' that subdivide and articulate surrounding spaces, providing a hierarchical arrangement of the public realm. The stadium is sited on the water edge, acting as both terminus and figural element in the open park field. The small development to the south along the waterfront is intriguing in its complexity of spatial figure and attachment to the city proper by c1ipping around the highway. Subsequent studio projects were inspired by this project's resolution of edge, contour, and tactical design within a generally Modernist palette of architectural elements. â&#x20AC;˘

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Lower East Side Redevelopment Project, Manhattan Group Project (1967) A. Caragonne, D. Duncan, F. Hammann, L. Nichols, F. Pannenborg, S. Potters, M. Schwarting, A. Valk This large-scale redevelopment scheme is inspired by a recognition of the site as it was before urban renewal removed the continuous edges and strong gridded street patterns, and replaced them with isolated and randomly distributed apartment towers.

The project hypothesizes a restructuring of the site while remaining critical of the almost total program of housing of the renewal projects. By somewhat reducing the quantity of housing and instituting a multiple-use program, a hierarchy of public to private spaces was made possible. The larger public spaces are distributed about the overall site, following the polycentric pattern of lower Manhattan. These new squares connect to other imbedded centers such as Washington Square and City Hall.

This is one of many early studio projects that placed an emphasis on open spaces and figural building types to resolve the difficult grid collisions and connections. A certain influence of Le Corbusier's Algiers Projects of the 1930s is seen, although this scheme is more fragmented because of the shifting grids of lower Manhattan. The project was initially a set of individual sites with teams of students assigned to each one; later their proposals were stitched together to explore the possibilities of an overall scheme. This in turn led to problems of joint resolution, identification of use, and the impression of total designo However, the overall scheme has more to do with possible linking and edge-defining tactics than one set, definitive design proposal. â&#x20AC;˘

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Brooklyn Navy Yard

Richard Baiter (1967) The Brooklyn Navy Yard lies at the southern end of the East River, opposite the bulge of lower Manhattan, and between the hills of Brooklyn Heights and Williamsburg.

The site can be isolated by observing that it falls within the loop framed by the Williamsburg Bridge, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. Understood from the point of view of aspect as well as prospect, the site can be seen as an important termination of the river or as a bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan. As a whole, the Navy Yard has been thought of as a continuation of the park system on the East River. Although located in an industrial zone, a residential development is proposed as a general program to facilitate access to the river from Brooklyn proper.

The three major constituents of this thesis are the main "wall," a median between river and expressway; the dialogue between the continuity of the shore line and the freeway; and the stabilization of the river termination. Entrances are formed and adjusted to existing street connections while simultaneously sponsoring new gridded field penetrations from the perimeter inward.

This redevelopment proposal envisions an educational complex on the site, making reference to both the institutional zone along the East River (Gracie Mansion, Cornell Medical Center, and the UN Building, all to the north) and the Brooklyn Civic Center, an entity of similar scope. Apartment towers located around the educational complex relate to towers along the Manhattan expressway. Lower-density housing units are situated at the periphery. Shopping is distributed throughout the site, and a limited light industrial area is extended from the western edge of the site to the new docks below Brooklyn Heights. â&#x20AC;˘

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Bronx Development Project Studio Projects (1967) This studio project is for a site on a hillslope near the Major Deggan Highway in the upper 8ronx, New York. 80th schemes retain some buildings already on the site.

New and higher density apartment buildings are proposed with open, semipublic spaces in the interior of the block. Each design has a garden and terrace development with assorted parking facilities below grade.

There is an attempt to create a higher density housing than what exists without destroying the immediate scale of the surrounding neighborhood. The Schwarting scheme proposes linear-type buildings, divided laterally like the row houses near the site; the Valk design envisions a larger, curvilinear apartment building to open up land for terraces to the north. 80th designs are implicitly critical of the anonymous slab structures to the south of the site, which are aspatial and have no defined public realm.â&#x20AC;˘

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Harlem Redevelopment Plan Group Project (1967) A. H. Koetter, F. R. G. Oswald, S. Potters, T. Schumacher, M. Schwarting, C. Rowe, C. Streans, J. Wells

This project, more than others before it, demonstrates sorne of the inherent strengths and weaknesses of Modernist principIes in a hypothetical transformation of an extensive portion of Upper Manhattan. While the scale of the project is a problem, it does demonstrate a range of techniques for field linkages from neighborhood to neighborhood, special and composite building types of a distinctly Modern character, and the hierarchical relationship of towers and rowhouse blocks to main avenues, side streets, and open landscape.

The use of towers implicitly acknowledges the tendency of New York housing toward high density. It attempts to organize these towers in a spatially coherent order, while interposing them with low-rise structures to promote a mixed-use condition.

Sorne parts of the overall site have additional row-house structures to complete and preserve their fields; the long building complexes foresee the mixed use of commercial and light industry. Despite sorne of its problems of scale of intervention, this scheme's chief purpose is to reveal an order awaiting to be extracted from the city's chaos. Out it is an order produced by encouraging variety rather than by suppressing it.

Though this project was produced by Studio members, it was not done under the auspices of Cornell University and was funded by the RockefeHer Foundation. â&#x20AC;˘

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Denny Regrade Area Redevelopment, Seattle, Washington Richard Cardwell (1967) This thesis addressed a portion of Seattle that, although centrally located and long marked as an area of potential growth, has remained virtually barren of intensive development. It is one of a number of studio projects that focused on grid collision sites in this case, the congruence of three grids o~ a moderate hill slope to Puget Sound. The project boundaries extend roughly from the retail core on the south, northward to Lake Union, and from the freeway on the east, westward to Seattle Center.

The grid-shift conditions of the site are absorbed by park development and special figural building types that require open space around their edges. The scheme makes a large-scale response to Lake Union to the north, connecting it by various sequences through the grid shift and linear buildings to the west and t:le Sound. A variety of building types is employed to formally resolve joints and grid collisions while establishing clear definitions for the edges surrounding the rough triangle of the site. â&#x20AC;˘

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Baltimore Master Plan Group Project (1968) D. Duncan, F. Hammann, A. Valk Within the predominately gridiron matrix of Baltimore, exists a series of key sites from a north-south /ocus in the vicinity of Howard Street, Park Avenue and Cathedral Street. It is further supported by the parallel north-south circulation of Charles, St. Paul, and Calvert streets. The designer's interpretation of this north-south spine directly engages adjacent precincts within a coordinated transportation matrix. The intent is (1) to afford a perceivable spatial order of the numerous shifts and discontinuities of the main street grid; (2) to offer a coherent axis for the extension of the present commercial district; and (3) to alleviate the major north-south vehicular load with a set of tail streets that might accommodate future development in South Baltimore.

Four districts are identified and the following proposals are made: The North A venue Corridor: A primary arterial network within the city is interpreted as a sequence of corridors. These corridors define four major residential areas within their boundaries and at the same time act as linear "centers" for residential areas situated on either side. The Pennsy/vania A venue Precinct: Because of the convergence of several major roads at the southwestern corner of Druid Hill Park, Pennsylvania Avenue is recognized as a primary collector for the central business district. The Inner Harbar: Both the geographic and historic center of Baltimore, the inner harbor is expanded to become a major site for office and commercial development. The South Ba/timore Precinct: This thesis proposes that the majority of housing presently in South Baltimore be subjected to gradual restoration and remodeling and that any new housing, schools and commercial facilities be located on the perimeter. â&#x20AC;˘

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Santa Marta, Colombia, S.A. Manuel R. de Vengoechea (1968) A city originally oriented toward its port and the sea, Santa Marta, Colombia, has developed away from the water's edge inland toward the mountains. In addition to the mountain edges, the site is further impacted by raíl Iines, mílitary property, and a private residential distríct to the east.

The basic proposal of this thesis for the future development of Santa Marta is to redevelop marginal sectors to the north, next to the port, and to the south along the Manzanares River. The central city, set within the original Spanish grid pattern, beco mes a focus for the newly developed areas and the nucleus for the city's expansiono The scheme employs various Corbusian elements, such as Y-shaped slabs and open boulevards. but at the same time proposes a series of gridded districts in the new developments. Complex building and park systems surround the central city, marking a transition between old and new quarters.

The referents to the Schumacher thesis and the Buffalo Waterfront project from the studio are evident; the elements are similar, but the overall strategy of connections and extensions is unique to the site.

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The city of Utica is one of many Greek Revivalist towns spawned by the coming of the Erie Canal to the Mohawk Valley during the early 19th century. The city is composed of a patchwork quilt of orthogonal grids paralleling the Mohawk River Basin and the Erie Canal. Piercing this orthogonal network are a series of diagonals generated by the city's main street. As in any collision, the point of impact-in this case the center of the city-has become warped and the downtown streets have been skewed and bent in an attempt to accommodate the two unrelated systems. The result is a traffic planner's nightmare and a serious detriment to any attempts to revitalize the downtown area.

The primary objectives in the scheme were a resolution of the conflicting orthogonal and diagonal systems and a reorientation of the city toward the Mohawk Valley, using a major waterfront focal piece for cultural and recreational uses. Outlying sites, which might potentially contribute to an entire network of parks and cultural or educational facilities were also identified and proposed.

A dense mixed-use development was proposed, consisting of medium density housing combined with shopping and commercial activities, in order to create a critical mass of activity which would be able to sustain the degree of change proposed for the downtown area. Physically the diagonal system was greatly strengthened in order to weight it more equally with the underlying orthogonal grids. A small greenbelt separates the new development from the smaller scale blocks of primarily single family dwellings. A network of pedestrian spaces has been created internal to the new development linking the housing, commercial, cultural and recreational facilities unimpeded by vehicular traffic.

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Steven Peterson (1969) The focus of this studio problem is on a new 48th Street spine, proposed by the city to revitalize the West Side, connecting Times Square and the theatre district to the passenger-ship terminals on the Hudson River. The solution envisaged an expanded site accommodating a new link to the West Side Highway, a diagrammatic extension to the south (the "pier" housing), and a new convention center just north of 42nd Street.

The entire composition is a study of how the Manhattan grid might be translated from an orientation perpendicular to the river edge, into one parallel to it, while also accommodating the free forms of highway, river edge, and convention center. Public spaces framed by repetitive rhythms of buildings and walls provide a contrast and setting for more and fluid forms. â&#x20AC;˘

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Covent Garden Proposal Grahame Shane (1971) The proposal for Covent Garden attempts to recognize the historical dimension of urban designo Previous studies of the development of the West End of London had highlighted the gridded patterns oĂ­ "The Great Estates" and their squares.

These stood out as fragments of an ideal urban order, each a self-contained "set piece" within the landowner's property boundary. Through analysis they could be contrasted with corridors of irregular, less ideal and less ordered slum properties, which followed stream beds or various boundaries.

Six strategies were employed in the Covent Garden project to accentuate and build on these urban patterns. The first was the proposal to restore to its original state the design of Inigo Jones for the Piazza of Covent Garden (1632). The second strategy involved the renovation of the "Seven Dials" set piece, a round-point design of the 166Os. In this case the streets would become glass covered pedestrian gallerias leading to a central domed area. The third strategy involved traffic control, the removal of cars to the periphery of the area, aHowing only cul-de-sac entries to large underground carparks, created beneath new plazas and parks on the periphery of the ideal pieces.

These plazas and parks were part of the fourth strategy: ventilation, the articulation of the interstices between ideal pieces. The fifth strategy involved linking aH the parts via selected pedestrian streets or "straps."

The sixth strategy involved the "injection" of a new ideal set piece, the linear northsouth "stoa" element, to connect Covent Garden to the 8ritish Museum.

The project was developed in conjunction with the International Institute of Design, Summer Session 1971 and a short description was published in Architectura/ â&#x20AC;˘ Design. (London, April 1972, p. 229).

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Providence, Rhode Island Joel Bostick (1973) The essential strategy for reconstituting the central government and business district of Providence is to c1early establish the edges and contours of the Capitol Hill slope.

A new train station is proposed for Kennedy Plaza, attached to a linear building that by its extension to College Hill on the east links the residential field with the central business district. The old mill pond, destroyed in 1889 and now a parking lot, is remade with an ÂĄsland connecting it for a pedestrian garden sequence to the Capitol Building on the hill. New park and apartment slabs are proposed for the western end of the site; similar elements are found along the inner harbor front to the south. â&#x20AC;˘ 128 Existing Site Plan 129 Proposed Site Plan 130 Axonometric View 131 Detail of Proposed Plan 131 Shadow Plan 133 Existing Sitc Plan 134 Proposed Sitc Plan

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Because the harbor of Manhattan Island is no longer a great port where cargo ships unload, the docks of the waterfront and adjacent areas have great potential for redevelopment. The possibility of a physicallink between the city's dense internal structure and its open waterfront edge is suggested at 14th and 23rd streets. The complex site conditions at the end of 14th Street become the inspiration in this thesis to (1) complete the major street grid of Manhattan, (2) accommodate the change in direction of the pier line edge (the approximate line of landfill), (3) provide a public transportation center with connections to the center of the city, and (4) open a direct sequence between waterfront and interior of the island.

The primary emphasis in this design is on the grid shift resolution of the west side of Manhattan, centered about 14th Street.

This resolution is accomplished by proposing a large void that would provide a visual connection into the island center and at the same time establish a more appropriate southern terminus for Eighth Avenue. This scheme also proposes an extension of the island edge, continuing the landfill strategy for the new Battery Park City to the south.

On this new fill a series of public park areas are located, varying from large landscaped spaces to linear promenades.

The gridded field of West Greenwich Village is currently disrupted by Seventh Avenue. Its proposed closure reinforces the current traffic circulation plan. Seventh Avenue terminates at Central Park at its northern end. It is not one of the through avenues of Manhattan. Therefore, a southern terminus at 14th Street is feasible and might define Seventh Avenue as an internal link for local traffic, as well as allowing West Greenwich Village to reestablish its uniformity. â&#x20AC;˘

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Central Boston Redevelopment

Jeffrey Chmura (1974) A Boston Redevelopment Authority project forms the basis for the wider site design proposal embodied in this thesis. The waterfront district is bounded by the solid city to the west and by the isolated field of the North End. The length of waterfront from the North Station trainyard to the South Station and Postal Annex becomes the primary area for study. The concern of this project is to examine the problems of relating the waterfront edge to the inner city.

The relocation of the Southeast Expressway becomes part of the major design tactic for strengthening the ties between city center and edge. In this scheme, it runs straight along the waterfront, and becomes integrated into a linear building. It is then extended to a landfill island, circumventing the high activity of the historic waterfront.

Where the freeway descends below ground, a stadium is placed overhead to orient the expressway as it enters the city. This connects the stadium with the city, and dominates the huge transition plaza/ park required by the road pattern. The expressway exit/ entrance from the north bisects the North Station edge condition, which has been developed as a screen wall for the trainyards and highway "spaghetti" of ramps and curves. The recess between receives the new cross-town avenue that continues over an existing bridge to Charlestown.

Along the edge of the park, five circular towers are situated aboye the expressway, forming a colonnade that defines the edge and frames different views; an auditorium building breaks this rhythm to emphasize the Mystic River "thrust" and peninsular edge. The nineteenth-century style romantic park plays against a new waterfront slab apartment structure, which continues the directionality of the park extensions. â&#x20AC;˘

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Brooklyn Redevelopment Strategy

Martin Kleinman (1975) Ăźld and current maps of Brooklyn, New York contain information that presents the urban designer with a set of "what ir' conjectures: What if the central ridge, which is the topographic feature distinguishing the development pattern in the north from that of the south, had not been obscured by a progressive extension of the surrounding grid patterns? What if the ridge had maintained its role as a natural shear line between the northern and southern housing areas?

The lost opportunity to provide a four-milelong greenbelt linking Prospect Park in central Brooklyn to Forest Park in Queens is even more provocative, given the ease with which it might initially have been accomplished. This thesis addresses these questions by forming strong landscape and architectural connections from one park to the other.

The design restructures the currently irregular and decaying edges of the different grid patterns along this greenbelt, giving definition to the once clear grids. A series of images and preconceived ideas were applied to the specific areas under study along this grand interstice. The empirical content of the site, that is, grid edges, topography, circulation, and resultant voids, provided the critical perspective to adjust image and prejudice to a state of conceivable reality.

Five schemes were developed. This one attempts to resolve grid collisions through three solid "nodes," with central zones of pure geometric spaces entered axially. â&#x20AC;˘

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Richmond WateĂąront, Virginia

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Richmond, Virginia possesses two basic characteristics of the traditional American city. First, it is located on an important transportation artery (the James River) and second, its physical plan is based on an orthogonal grid. Its specific location was dictated by the need for a man-made canal in this area to bypass a seven-mile unnavigable stretch of the river. Thus Richmond became an important shipping and manufacturing port before being named the capital of Virginia.

This thesis investigation began as a critique of an existing urban design proposal for the Richmond waterfront, entitled the "Main to the James." In contrast to the separation of functions embodied in that proposal, this alternative proposes to integrate the waterfront with the downtown coreo The major objective is the contextual determination of a downtown field that connects the three existing east-west zones from the river up the hillslope. The waterfront parcel serves as the southern-and frontal--face of the entire city. â&#x20AC;˘

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South Baltimore Development

Kaya Arikoglu (1976) The objectives of this design thesis for South Baltimore inelude developing a variety of waterfront conditions around the peninsula that would facilitate transportation links of rail, shipping, and highways to the center of Baltimore to the north, with a concomitant buildup ofhigh-density, low-rise housing within the boundaries of waterfront edges.

The general design strategy has been to establish a ring-like boulevard about the center of the development (marked by the cruciform square) that sponsors extensions of streets and avenues to the east and to the west and a commercial waterfront zone to the south. A two-pronged street connection to Ft. McHenry is one of these extensions; the field of housing along a Middle Branch canal to the northwest is another. The current rail yards are modified or removed to the commercial warehouses along the waterfront. The resultant open area is developed as an extension of the already existing housing. The new fields of the residential districts are polycentric, finding specific buildings and public spaces located at their edges or centers. Sorne of the primary north-south connections (Charles Center with South Baltimore) find specific termini along the waterfront on the southern edge. It is useful to compare this scheme to the 1968 and 1980 studio proposals to note similar strategies but different articulations or tactics at sorne of the grid collision areas. â&#x20AC;˘

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Harvard/ Charles River Design Project

Studio Projects (1977) The open site by the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts is used as a problem for resolving the scale differentiation of surrounding building textures and connections from a major inner city space (Harvard Square) to the riverfront. Bounded by freestanding wood and brick structures to the west, Harvard dormitory quadrangles to the east, and four to five-storey commercial buildings to the north, the site is located in a dense and active part of the city. The John F. Kennedy Library is inc1uded as part of the condition, forcing each designer to accept and operate with it in his proposal.

This studio problem focused on more detailed resolutions for grid collisions and textural scale problems than sorne earlier projects. The schemes have an open space toward the river and sorne semblance of a quadrangle organization. Each uses a variety of modero and traditional building types, as well as an emphasis on landscape elements for sorne of the difficu1t open-joint conditions. â&#x20AC;˘

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Upper Manhattan Development Strategy Michael Manfredi (1978) This study centers on a semivacant area currently owned by the City of New York and situated on the northwestern bank of the Harlem River. Two readings of the context prefaced the design solution: A. An attenuated development along the waterfront would make reference to Tenth Avenue as an important datum.

B. The potential of reading Broadway as a spatially significant sequence tended to support a highly figural scheme.

The proposed solution has a centralized sequence and an orthogonal development along the waterfront. IncJuded are the following components: l. The primary sequence links the Harlem River, Broadway, Isham Park, and Inwood Hill Park. This sequence varies perceptually from a cJearly defined residential space on the Harlem River through a thick commercial zone at Broadway and on to the larger Isham Park. Finally this sequence terminates in Inwood Hill Park with its Poussinesque landscape.

2. The gridded residential zone along the Harlem waterfront is intended as a foil for the complex topography of the region. It also reconstitutes a pattern along the waterfront suggested by existing buildings and streets.

3. The scheme completes the curiously irresolute diagonal of 2 15th Street.

4. The need to locate a highly identifiable community center, led to the rotated positioning of a square, freestanding building on an axis with Sherman Avenue. A raised garden connects the center with the main commercial space off Broadway. â&#x20AC;˘

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Roma Interrotta

Studio Projects (1978, 1979) Both these projects were given in the studio to demonstrate the vices and virtues of a most traditional city context: in this case, those latent in the 1748 No. III Plan of Rome. Finding its direct precedent in the "Roma Interrotta" exhibition of 1977, the pedagogic intent of this project is to teach an appreciation for the structure of traditional city hierarchy of public to private space, and to examine the continuities and discontinuities of different segments of such a city. The idea of the program as an empirical generator or restriction is so deemphasized here that it is nonexistent; a premium is placed on the designers' abilities to supply a hypothetical scenario of historical or programmatic intent behind the formal manipulations.

Both schemes demonstrate a certain naiveté for the specific architectonic qualities of Rome, and both have design maneuvers extreme in their scale and insistence.

But problems abound in logically subtracting elements from the poché or adding new texture to open fields on the Nolli Plan. This becomes a problem similar to that in the Schumacher thesis, except there it was a matter of inventing the poché of Modern architecture. One of the schemes (Nichols) is distinctly French and Valadier, especially in its axial inspiration; the other (Ohnishi) has more selective and discreet fields of intervention, spread out over a larger field.

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162 NolIi Plan of Rome, 1748 163 Proposed Plan, Robert Nichols, 1978 164 Proposed, Shin Ohnishi, 1979

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Marylebone District Development, London

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Steven Fong (1979) There are many residual pockets of land in London. The site selected for this thesis, a "backyard" to Regent's Park, is one of these. The area is located over the railyards of Marylebone Station, bounded by a canal to the north and Regent's Park to the east. Proceeding from a study of the whole city of London, the eighteenth-eentury estate, with its identity, centrality, and autonomy, was used as a model for the new localized neighborhood. At the same time, modero requirements of vehicular and public continuity were considered.

The solution works from a centralized square of housing; its grid of alignment oscillates among the surrounding gridded fields to establish its identity as a distinct development. At the same time, different building types surround this centralized field to tie it into the immediate context; terraces facing the canal (a modero equivalent of the Nash prototypes across the park), a reflexive, composite building to the south, and anonymous block buildings to the east reinforce these connections. â&#x20AC;˘

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Beirut Waterfront Redevelopment

Shirine Boulos (1979) This thesis envisages a reconstruction of the Beirut, Lebanon port and waterfront, heavily damaged during the 1975-77 Civil War. Once an active commercial and passenger port, this scheme foresees a restoration of these facilities along with new commercial and residential blocks. A maritime station is proposed for the western quai of the harbor. Facing this station is a new arcaded crescent for shops, travel agencies, and the like, which acts as an outdoor "antechamber" to the long sequence of built and open shoreline leading west, known as the "Corniche." Arcaded ramps, leading pedestrians to the souk, connect the city to the southern quai of commercial docks. A strategy of connections to the old French ĂŠtoile via avenues and streets links waterfront and inner city. Gardens, fountains, and terraces terminate the main axis, establishing a tranâ&#x20AC;˘ sition between city and ocean.

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Baltimore Urban Redevelopment Group Project (1979) J. Chadwick, R. Gerard, D. B. Middleton, R. Nichols, J. Smith .

Focusing essentially on the same sites as the Baltimore Master Plan of 1968, this studio project was fírst worked by individual designers and then collaged together. While it has aspects of the land of total design projects that it was initially critical of, it retains the different styles and prejudices of the designers while proposing a larger, more general order for city redevelopment. Unlike the earlier Baltimore Master Plan, this scheme posits a denser gridded fabric with more emphasis placed on spatially defined street sequences.

The basic intent of the design is to define the central business district with clear boundaries, strengthen the cohesion and defínition of outlying fields, and make distinct entry sequences to the city center. The site plan shows the highways (1-83 and 1395) proposed by the Baltimore Department of Planning overlaying on the existing condition. A major boulevard follows the angle of the outlying fíeId of housing from the northern end of the city to an intersection with 1-70N to the east. Together, this boulevard, a widened Fremont Avenue, and a new Russell Street boulevard make the proposed ]-395 unnecessary and provide entry sequences from the north and south (Site A). Another entry sequence from the north is made with a terrace on Mt. Royal Avenue, leading south to the central business district and Mt. Vernon Place (the cruciform space), and east to ]-70N. The Jones Falls Expressway is submerged and the western edge is increased in height where possible, giving a stronger frontage to a new park and to the inner harbor (Site B). A new development, consisting of housing, hotels and a convention center contributes to a more articulated waterfront, and provides a terminus to the axis of a new south esplanade (Site C).

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The West End of London John Charlton Chadwick (1980) The Aye Brook sequence starts at the York Gate to Regent's Park. It is completed by minor alterations to the rear of S1.

Marylebone Church and to Oxford Street in the vicinity of South Molton Street, by means of a galleria inserted into the blocks parallel to Bond Street and amendments to the Shepherds' Market area. The pedestrian would finally pass down a ramp to a grotto below Piccadilly. leading to a colonnaded pool and then, at the head of a lake, emerge onto a promenade in Green Park. The sequence that already exists from Berkeley Square through Grosvenor Square to Manchester Square would also be extended to Green Park ando through a new square, across Marylebone Road and beyond. At the same time a lowered Park Lane, somewhat removed from the edge of the park. would allow a series of bridges to renew old connections between Mayfair and the park.

The relocation of Marble Arch would mark the other entrance to Park Lane. just as the indentation of the building edge in this art"" would more effectively mark the terminĂŠl tion of Oxford Street and a possibly more commercial North Row. In this scheme. it was impossible not to suggest that in Hyde Park the path system be unravelled and an inner ring drive added. and that in Green Park the proposed lake be seen as a link in a chain of water including the Serpentine, the lake in S1. James Park, and, of course. the Thames. Analysis of the irregular street pattern associated with the Aye Brook in the wider context of the West End. revealed not only that the sequence could be completed by means of very limited intervention. but that there were also a number of other locations where limited intervention could have equally far-reaching effects. They were. however. conceived in a piecemeal fashion and respond primarily to practical necessity. â&#x20AC;˘

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Providence: Capital District Development Strategy O. B. Middleton (1980) In a partially abandoned and totally nonhonorific site fronting the Rhode Island State Capitol in Providence, this thesis proposes a restoration of appropriate landscape and architectural elements while simultaneously accommodating demands for new office and residential space. Conflicting problems of rail, water courses, highways, and topographic edges all converge at this central location.

The final design strategy for the site consists of three major simultaneous tactical operations: 1) The isolation of the Capitol Hill area as a "citadel" with strongly defined edges and center. Buildings and verdure are used in a gridded field with alternating rhythms of orthogonal and irregular edges, the bulk of the Capitol dominating and controlling the entire arrangement of loose and ordered pieces. A proposal initiated in 1925 to extend an axis from the State House down to the central business district was used to visually and conceptually connect the city proper with the Capitol.

2) The expansion of a waterway and park system as both binder and separator of the various gridded fields of college Hill, the CRO, and Capitol Hill. The park becomes the focus for the different districts; local edge conditions respond directly to it through the incIusion of a ring road and street embankment.

3) The consolidation of existing fields by connections and infill. The lower edge of College Hill along Canal Street is strengthened with new housing and other structures; Kennedy Plaza is made a c1early orthogonal and impacted space, marking a center for the CRO field. â&#x20AC;˘ 188

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Firenze Interrotta

Studio Projects (1980) In 1865 the Florentine architect, Guiseppe Poggi, designed a plan to accommodate the rapid growth F10rence experienced in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. This plan sought to provide (1) an ordered extension of the city beyond the wall structure; (2) the replacement of the wall structure with a ring road and several new piazzas located at important points of entry; and (3) a systematic infill of the undeveloped areas existing within the wall structure.

The concern of this project is primarily with the strategy of infill. One criticism of the Poggi Plan is its failure to propose a solution for resolving the irregular and confusing medieval texture surrounding the central coreo A second criticism might be made concerning the nature of the proposed perimeter block infill. These blocks tend to be excessively large and do not offer an appropriate hierarchical gradation of public and private space. Comparison should be made with the Nolli map of Rome, which best represents an interwoven relationship of exterior and interior positive space.

The collage plan of Florence is an initial study that attempts to identify key issues . of scale, hierarchy, spatial linkage, and spatial definition. In the Lonmann scheme, various i"ound' urban fragments and set pieces are inserted into the plan. The resulting juxtaposition provides a starting point from which more careful analysis and transformation can proceed.

The proposed composite plans are a structured accommodation of circumstance and incident. Various building types and spaces are tested within the Florentine urban plan as a means of exploring their formal and paradigmatic potential. Like the "Roma Interrotta" studio problem that preceded it, this kind of project induces a student to become familiar with the specific character of F10rentine architecture and its more general urbanistic history. â&#x20AC;˘ l'

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The Milwaukee Lakefront Design Competition 1980 Group Project D. Fredericks, L.F. Hodgden, C. Rowe, D. Tynan The site comprises 176 acres, divided by a bridge approach and freeway ramps. It consists mainly of a large landfill area along the lake shore. As Milwaukee has a troubled economy and a declining population, there is proposed a modest amount of new construction in strategic places, combined with an extensive new waterfront park on most of the filled area.

At the lake end of the principal downtown street, a new city square is proposed.

This arcaded square serves office and commercial purposes. An extensive terrace with parterres mediates between the commercial square and the lower level of the lakeside park. This terrace overlooks a new yacht basin, and provides access to the War Memorial Art Museum. While the park contains many naturalistic areas and elements, its vast extent is stitched together by a formal axis parallel to the water. At one end of this axis is placed an artificial mountain on which is to be built a "Bavarian Village." This caprice is inspired by the reconstructed Spanish Village of the Barcelona "Exposition of 1929.

A deteriorating commercial area is rehabilitated. A certain amount of luxury housing is added with a canal or basin supporting marina townhouses.

The competition jury characterized this design as influenced by the Beaux-Arts tradition. The indictment that we wish to revive the beaux arts is correct in the sense that, while planning the pragmatic renewal of the city, we also wish to invoke the spirit and breadth of vision which once animated such great American urban planners as Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmstead. â&#x20AC;˘ Lee F. Hodgden

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Burlington Vermont Urbanization Strategy Craig Nealy (1981) Burlington Vermont is situated' on a waterfront Iying in ruin since the end of that pbase of tbe industrial era that it served. Tbe city has a central business district containing fragments of an Enlightenment-era gridded plan tbat contains a wide range of architectural building types, from single-family dwellings to perimeter block structures. Tbe lack of connection and sequential"dialogue" between center and waterfront was furtber exacerbated by tbe demolition of twentytwo acres in tbe city center and a partially completed zone of object-Iike buildings constructed in tbe 1970s. These buildings usurp the order of the area without providing a coherent replacement for it.

This design thesis plays on tbe contrapuntal relationship between open landscape and ordered urban development, a condition of great potential in cities like BurJington. The basic strategy for tbe inner city is the insertion of a series of new "Jiner" buildings, connecting the disparate modern office buildings and organizing thero into a set of distinct spaces. These in turn are linked to the waterfront, where a new landscaped park with urban villas overlooking the lakefront is proposed. This recent thesis from the CornellStudio places great emphasis on researching potential facade conditions for urban spaces, seeking to define succinct relationships between the "old" Modern architecture and new structures. â&#x20AC;˘ 207 208 209 210 211 211 213

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BerlĂ­n Tiergarten

Group Project, 1981 R. Carvalho, O. Fredericks, E. Sennyey The urban decay and destruction seen in Berlin was not, as in many American cities, a process of "urban removal" of blighted areas. Rather it was the product of Allied bombings during World War 11, which left random gaps in the city fabrico The problems of urban continuity were further compounded by the Berlin Wall, which separated one side of the city from the other. Instead of proposing a vast new construction scheme of housing in a city with a continually declining population, this project envisions a reuse of the old railyard area about the Tiergarten as an "urban park." New buildings and streets are proposed to complete or define certain edges or fields; sorne of these idealized elements are seen in textural contrast and counterpoint to the surrounding contexto A set of water courses and pools extends the river/ canal system, providing an axial center for disparate elements to either side. â&#x20AC;˘

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Dublin: The Park and the City

Derek Tynan (1982) This project is a response to certain local conditions of park, river, and city in Dublin and explores the relationship between the garden and the city in general. Running through the oval form of Dublin and the eighteenth-century circular roads is the River Liffey, connecting the seventeenth-century Phoenix Park to the west, the city with its honorific buildings, and Dublin Bay to the east. The present project for the western end of the city suggests the c!arification of this series of connections and the potential of the river as a major organizing element, through the creation of a lake reuniting the fragmented park and a new entrance space to the city. Comparable to the large eighteenth century squares, this large space opens on its western side to receive, in addition to the river, the central axis of Phoenix Park, the railway station, and the major western approach to the city. Its eastern side acts as an entrance facade to the city and the quay sequence. The edge between the park and the city, in which this space forms the major incident, is fragmented by local topographical features to the south. To the north it is stiffened to provide a hard edge indented only at the junction with the North Circular Road. From here the new road and bridge, traversing the lake and the river basins, complete the oval of the city within the park, allowing continuation of the circular road sequence in a drive through the park.

Within the park itself new facilities are added to augment the existing Wellington Obelisk, Lutyens War Memorial, and the Royal Hospital as an assemblage of objects within the landscape-the counterpoint to the emphasis upon discrete voids within the city. The central avenue ofthe park, equipped with new gates at its extremities, and the lake, which redefines the river as the major axis of the city, are connected by a great terrace from which the city can be viewed. •

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Footnotes Progr.m vs. P.r.digm 1 Thomas Kuhn, The S/ruc/ure of Scientific Revolu/ions.

Chicago, 1962, p. viii.

1 Mr. Hardlkoppff-AIA Journal. The lille, monlh and year of lhis publicalion are unknown.

3 The firsl permanenl Anglo-American seulemenl in Texas was eSlablished in 1821 al San Felipe de Auslin on lhe Brazos River; and, as furlher settlemenls carne inlo being, in 1830 lhe Mexican governmenl issued a federal decree prohibiling furlher immigralion from lhe Uniled Slales.

Hoslililies belween lhe Texas colonists and the government of Mexico broke out in 1835; and, preceeding the final defeal of lhe Mexicans at San Jacinto, lhe Texas Declaration of Independence was issued on March 1, 1836. In 1837 the Republic of Texas was recognized by the Uniled Stales, Great Brilan, France and Belgium. It survived for exactly eight years; and on March 1, 1845 it became a member of lhe Uniled States.

4 General Sherman's remark (presumably of lhe 1840s) is still possibly the best observation on lhe c1imate ofthe Gulf Coast-"If J owned both Texas and hell, I'd rent OUl Texas and Iive in hell.

5 There already exisls a novel about Austin entitled The Gay Place. published one imagines before the lerm gay acquired its present connotations. The Balcones Fault is a geological rifl which Iraveis to the west of lhe city.

6 'Today' is somewhal of a misnomer. Not having set foot in the place for sorne lwenty years, 1cannot, seriously, speak of Austin loday. But, all the same, the configuration ofthe city, as it lhen was (and perhaps lhe changes have not been so very great), does remain indelibly inscribed in my mind.

7 The Prince of Solm-Braunfels one assumes was one of those, hopefully, illustrious characters-Lafayette, Rochambeau, Bulaski, Von Sleiben, are olhers~who seem to infest lhe by ways of early American hislory. 1 know little abOUl him, nor do 1wish lO know very much; and, in any case. his introduction, in 1839, is certainly an anachronism. Probably he was a pa lron of lhe Deu/scher Adelsverein which, in 1844. founded New Braunfels, sorne forly miles wesl of Austin and in the heart of what is now Lyndon Baines Johnson counlry. As to whether Solm-Braunfels ever visited Texas, 1 have no idea; and as to whether a presumably mediatised prince might have sponsored 'a slray Hegelian philosopher,' 1 am equally in the dark. BUl both seem to be plausible assumptions; and, if they are noto then, in lhe place of a protege of lhe prince of Solm-Braunfels. as a member of our leam, we might-perhaps just as wellsubstilule a protege of John Stuart MilI. 8 See Willis W. Pratt, Galves/on Island ofa Few Months off /he Coas/ of Texas, Austin, Texas 1954. This book is a publication of lhe journal of Francis G. Sheridan, grandson of the playwright and apparently a mildly Byronic character who, allhe instigalion of Lord Palmerston, was seni lo Texas in 1839 more or less to smell oul the scene. Al this lime the Republic of Texas seems to have been anxious to secure a British loan; but, if there were certain intersets in the Cily of London which might have been willing to oblige, one is lold that the Abolitionist lobby in the House of Commons was unable to lolerate any such transaction.

So it may have been lhe queslion of slavery (lhough scarcely a crucial issue in Texas) which helped to bring about the rapid demise of the independen! Republic.

9 See Charles Osborne: W. H. Auden: /he Life of a Poe/; New York, 1979, p. 329.

10 See RIBA Journal. John Summerson.

11 See, R.M. Medawar, The A" of/he Soluble, London 1967. p. 99. From a Presidential address lO lhe British Association first published in Na/ure. September 25, 1965.

J1 Alan Colquhoun. Typology and Design Ne/work. First published, Arena, Vol. 83, June 1967.

13 Reasonable intuition seems to suggesl at leasl so much; and, if the promplings of intuition may nol be considered adequale, then see Peter Collins. Changing Ideals in Modern Archi/ec/ure. London 1967. p. 219.

14 Who really was it who made this highly arroganl and silly remark? Myself once knew bul, long since. 1 have forgollen.

It was revived in my mind by Martin Kleinman who, also, once knew bUl who, also, has fargotten.

15 1 am indebted for lhis specification to Richard Eitlin who has probably forgollen that he said so mucho

10 Ibid .• p. 249.

11 Le Corbusier, The Char/er of A/hens, op. cit., p. 103.

See also A. Eardley, "Giradoux and the Athens Charter," Oppositions 3, M.I.T. Press.

11 J. L. Sert, op. cit.. pp. 242-43 (diagram designed by French delegation). Revised version: Le Corbusier, Radiant City. op. cit., p. 28.

13 See E. May, "Moscow: From Frankfurt lo lhe New Russia and "Cily Building in lhe U.S.S.R." in El Lissitzky, Russia and Archi/ec/ure for World Revolution. M.I.T. Press, 1970. pp. 175-79 and pp.

188-203. Also Mart Stam, Documenta/ion 1920-65. edited by G. Oorthuys, RIBA Publication (n.d.).

14 Le Corbusier, Precisions. Edilions Creso 1930, pp. 261-68.

15 S. Von Moos, op cit, pp. 168-69.

16 For discussion of the Palace of Soviels Competilion, see H. Schmidt, "The Soviel Union and Modern Archileclure in El Lissitzky, op. cit., pp. 218-22, and for projects see A. Samona, 1/ Palazzo dei Soviet 1931-33. Officina Edizioni, 1976.

17 J. L. Sert, op. cit.. pp. 231-33.

18 S. Giedion, Archi/ec/ure, You and Me. Cambridge, Mass., 1958, pp. 25-61.

19 J. Tyrwhiu, J. L. Sert, and E. N. Rogers, ClA M 8.

The Hearl of Ihe City: Towards Ihe Humanizalion of Urban Ufe. Lund Humphries, 1952.

30 Ibid., pp. 171-74.

31 (bid., pp. 74-80.

31 (bid .. pp. 17-25.

33 Ibid., pp. 36-39.

34 Ibid., pp. 4(-52.

35 (bid., pp. 164-68.

36 Ibid., pp. 60-66.

37 (bid., pp. 97-100.

38 (bid .. pp. 69-73.

39 See A. Smithson, Team 10 Primer. Studio Vista, 1968. fl

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The material presented is a revised texl from my Cornell Ph. D. dissertation, "The Birlh and Rebirth of the Street". written 1976-77. J am indebled to my thesis commiuee: Prof. Colin Rowe (Chairman), Prof.

Chrislian Ouo, Prof. Dominic LaCapra. and Prof.

Michael Dennis for inspiration. support. crilicism, and guidance. As Edilor of Oppositions. Kenneth Frampton helpfully reviewed lhis malerial in lhe fall 1977. For a sketch outline of the entire lhesis see: G. Shane, "A Short History of lhe European Street," Lo/us Interna/ional 24: 1979, pp. 103-114.

See D. Wiebenson, Tony Garnier and /he City Indus/rielle. Braziller 1969. pp. 22-24.

See W. Hegemann, Ca/alogo delle Esposizioni Interna/ionali di Urbanis/ica: Berlino 1910, Dusseldorf 1911-/2, 11 Saggiatore, 1975.

RIBA, Transac/ions of /he Royal Town Planning Conference 1910. London, 1911, pp. 1-71.

Ibid., p. 161.

Ibid., p. 247.

Ibid., p. 274.

Ibid., pp. 275-76.

Ibid., p. 309.

Ibid., p. 313.

Ibid., pp. 357-67.

Ibid., p. 368.

See Henri Sauvage, "Projet d'une rue a gradins 1920" and "Immeuble a gradins 1928," in Henri Sauvage l873-1932, Archives d'Architecture Moderne, 1976, p.

171 and pp. 195-200. For Tony Garnier, see Bruno Taut, "Project for the Quartier des Etats-Unis," Modern Archi/ec/urf!. London, 1929. p. 48. For Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architec/urf!. London, 1931, p. 59. Le Corbusier saw the 1910 Berlin Exhibition: see S. Von Moos: Le Corbusier: L'Archilecture et son Mylhe; Horizons, 1971, p. 149: footnote 37 Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, Grossmann. 1967, pp.

187-89.

Ibid., p. 207, pp. 221-25, and pp. 226-59.

Ibid., p. 187.

See J. L. Sert, Can Our Ci/ies Survive? Harvard. 1942, pp. 7-9. For a list of cilies analyzed, see Le Corbusier.

The Char/er of A/hens. Grossmann. 1973, p. 26.

Le Corbusier, The Radian/ Ci/y. op. cit., pp. 187-88.

J. L. Sert. op. cit., pp. 246-49.

4 5

6

The Figure/ Grounds 1 Eric Clough, "LSD: A Tool for Design," Progressive ArclÍilec/ure, August 1966. page 151.

1 Rudolph Arnheim. Art and Visual Perceplion, (Berkeley: Universily of California Press, 1966), page 220.

3 lb id. , page 232.

4 Chrislopher Gray, Cubisl Aeslheli(' Theories (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953).

5 Colin Rowe, "Le Corbusier; Utopian Archilect," The Usú,ner, February 1959, page 289.

6 Rudolf Wiukower. Archileclural Principies in Ihe Age of Humanism (New York: Random House, 1962). page 43.

Conjedures on Urb.n Form Hegemann, Werner and Peels, Elbert; Civic Art, The American Vi/ruvius; An Architect's Handbook of Civic Art.1922.

1 A non-inclusive list of such publicalions could inelude: Hegemann and Peels, Ibid.. 1922; Sille, Camillo, The Arl of Building Cities, republished 1943; Rasmussen. Steen

7

8 9 10

11

Eiler, Towns and Buildings. 1945 (Danish), 1951 (English); Gallion, Arthur B.. The Urban Pallern, 1950; Hiorns, Frederick R., Town Building in History, 1956; Lynch, Kevin The Image of Ihe City, 1960; Cullen. Gordon, Townscape, 1961; DeWolf, Ivor, Ilalian Townscape, 1963; Benevolo. Leonardo. "Le Origini Dell'Urbanistica Moderna." 1963 Gallion and Eisner, The Urban Pallern, 1963.

(The Origin of Modern Town Planning, 1967); Bacon.

Edmund, Design of Cities. 1967.

Rowe, Colin and Koeller, Fred; Collage Cily, M.I.T., 1978.

The lexl of Collage City was apparently completed by December, 1973. But it was nol published until 1978.

Portions of il appeared in abbrevialed form as: Collage Oly by Colin Rowe & Fred Koetter," Archi/ec/ural Review, Vol. 158, No. 942. pp. 66-91.

Other publicalions of the studio lheories, listed chronologically, are: Schumacher, Thomas: "Contextualism: Urban Ideals and Deformations," Casabella 104, 1971.

Cohen, Sluart, "Physical Contexl, Cultural Contexto Including It AII," Opposilions 2, 1974.

Shane, Graham, "Conlextualism," Archilec/ural Design, N. 111 1976.

Peterson, Sleven K., "Urban Design Taclics," Archileclural Design. Vol. 49, No. 3-4, 1979, pp. 76-81.

Ellis, William, "Type and Context in Urbanismo Colin Rowe's Contextualism: Opposi/ions 18, 1979.

Koeller. Fred and Rowe. Colin, "The Crisis of the Object: The Predicament of Texture," Perspee/a 16, The Yale Archilu/ural Journal, 1980.

Rowel Koeller, (bid.

Cohen, op. ci/.; Cohen's article describes lhe extension of the idea of 'Contextualism' from 'physical context' to 'cultural context' by critically comparing several projects including the Brighton Beach Compelition entries by Koetterl Wells and Venluril Rauch.

One lhing learned in architecture schools is a method of solving architeclural problems, including a set of design principies that allows for formalizalion. Together these methods and principies might be called a style. So defined, style is both a method of solving design problems in an integrated manner through identifiable rule of composition and preferred forms, and is a formulation and expression of attitudes about mano sociely, nature, and their relationships.

Rowe's leaching stance may be distinguished from several others. One assumes that radically different solutions lo a given projecl will elueidate its crilical parameters (a process which Rowe encouraged in ea rly phases of design 'conjeclure.' Another assumes thal architeclure is an extension of ego. and excessively individualistic solutions are encouraged irrespeclive of resulting qualily. For further insights into Rowe's teaching assumptions and a history of his impact on architectural education see: Rowe, Colin, "Architectural Education USA: Issues, Ideas. and People," paper for conference al the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1971. Also see Framplon, Kennelh, "Notes on American archilectural education," Lo/us Interna/ion al 27.

198011.

Popper, Karl. Conjulure and Refuta/ions. 1962.

Ellis, op. eil.• p. 10.

Carmean, Jr., E.A., Mondrian. The Diagonal Composilions, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1979. quoted from Wiegand, Charmion von, "Mondrian; A Memoir of His New York Period," Arls Yearbook.4.1961.

Cullen, Gordon, Townseape, 1961. Cullen had been publish-

142

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13

14

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ing articles with lhis emphasis for several years in English archilecluraljournals. AIso see Thiel, Philip, "Processional Archileclure," AlA Journa/16; 23-28, and "A Sequence Experience NOlalion for Architectural and Urban Space," Town Planning Review, April 1961.

In To ....nscape, CuIlen'sapproach, while importantly caIling allention lo and valuing lhe exisling, the historic. lhe character of lhe old city is dominaled by lhe picturesque composilion of specific visual palhways. This sequential vis ion approach was also pursued by olhers, nOlably Philp Thiel, and is commonly presented in many Urban Design books. AIso see footnole 12 below.

In Collage City. Rowe/Koetler characlerize Team XArchigram as 'Science Ficlion' and contrasl it lo 'Townscape,' lhe one futurislic, lhe olher noslalgic.

The major difference belween lhe lWO was thal 'lownscape' atlempled lo amplify exisling scenography while lhe pseudo-scientific mega-structures lended loward generalization and disconneclion from time and place. SuperficiaIly opposed. both alternatives avoided the generalized ordering systems of neo-<:Iassicism and relied on picluresqueeffects lo achieve memorability. As indicated in Collage CiIY. both are nostalgic, one for the pasl. lhe olher for the future.

Nearly every studio group included students not only from CorneIl's undergraduate program but from schools where they had been influenced by "The Texas Rangers;" that group of teachers who had been briefly assembled at the University of Texas, Austin, including Colin Rowe, Bernard Hoesli, John Hedjuk, Lee HOOgden, Werner Seligmann, Robert Slutzky, etc. Dispersed, lhey were foIlowed by or met such olher sludents as Jerry Wells, Michael Dennis, Fred Koeller, Roger Sherwood. elc. For a partial descriplion of lhe influence of these leachers on architeclural education in lhe U.S .. see Kennelh Framplon's "Notes on American Architeclural Education," Lolus InternalianaJ. 27, 198011.

For a discussion of sorne of lhese readings, see Jon Michael Schwarting. "The Lesson of Rome," Harvard Architeclural Review, Vol. 2, Spring 1981. pp. 22-47. Schwarting received a B.Arch. and M. Arch., CorneIl, Prix de Rome 68-70.

Diderot quoled here from CoIlins, Peter, Changing Ideals in Modern Archileclure. This 'eclectic' process of thought Opposes determinismo It can be seen lo paraIlel changes in lheory in urban geography and urban anthropology as well. The shifl has been from 'delerminism'lo 'probablism' lO 'possibilism' wilh more and more emphasis placed on 'Cullure.' See Amos Rappaport, Human Faclors in Urban Form.

References to and descriplions of 'Cubism' run lhroughoul Rowe's critical wrilings. Bul most specificaIly see Rowe, Colin, Malhemalics of Ihe Ideal Villa and Olher Essays, 1976; "Transparency; Lileral and Phenomena," 1976, firsl published in Perspecla. 1963. More lhan any olher single article, lhis one was inilialory reading lo the studio.

Through lhese descriptions, co-aulhored with Robert Slulzky, one carne to understand lhe numerous varielies of possible spatial slructure, positive and negalive space and clarily or ambiguily of the figure. The result was lhe nOlion lhal a wide range of invesligation and interpretations could OCcur wilhin lhe slruclural paramelers of cubismo Ibid.

The discussion of this relalionship is especially clear in ColJage City. Sant'Agnese in Piazza I\avona is ulilized lO describe the dependenl and independenl relalions of 'figure,'

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The Cornell Journal of Architecture

19

20

21

22

23

24 2S 26 27 28 29 30

31

'objecl' or 'ideal' type Wilh its 'background,' 'texlure,' 'contexl.' Schumacher's "Conlexlualism: Urban Ideals and Deformalions," (op.cit.) focuses on lhe range of possible 'figure vS. background' oplions available in volume-mass, elevalion, and plan forms.

As Schumacher notes in his article, 'Contextualism' was first coined as a name for the Urban Design lheories of lhe CorneIl studio by Sluarl Cohen and Sleven Hurll.

'Conlextualism' was conversalionaIly proposed lO lhe sludio in lhe spring of '67, and included in lheir jointlhesis of lhal year.

Hatch, Richard c., "The Museum of Modern Art Discovers Harlem; Architectural Forum, Vol 126, No. 2, March 1967. The Museum of Modern Art commissioned four universilY based leams to prepare urban design schemes for lhe Harlem area of Manhallan, New York; Princelon; CorneIl; Columbia; M.1. T. The teams worked on adjacent sites. Hatch reviewed each team's work, and concluded his summary with the following slalement. "Not specific enough lO qualify as serious contenders for construction, lhe proposals aIllack the vision of social place and purpose which would qualify lhem as utopian-and ulopian they should have been, opening our eyes lo new, more desirable ways of life and subtly creating public demand for an adequale governmental response to the grave problems of lhe inner city."

Cohen op. cil. Curiously, this 'Opposilion' between the 'conlextual' lheories of Rowe and lhe 'populis!' lheories of Venturi-Moore are still presumed lo exisl-see Framplon (op. cil.): "Thal Rowe's influence had foundered somewhat in lhe last few years is due lO lhe strenglh of lhe opposed populist approach slemming from lhe Philadelphia School and from Yale-lhat is lO say lhal influence represenled by the work of Robert Venturi and Charles Moore.... " Since 'Conlexlualism,' lhe presumption of an anti-lhesis in lhese views seems mainly to derive from lhe Penn- Yale side of the argument (monologue).

Koeller/ Rowe, "The Crisis of the Object, lhe Predicament of Texture", op. cil. "Contexl"-the spalia! or psychocultural field which gives meaning to a specific gesture or demonslralion ... the observer places himself in something like contexlualism in lhe fuIl sense of lhe word-there is nothing private, or striclly hermelic, here. Bolh iconicaIly and spatiaIly the building explains itself." p. 123.

Fred Koetler had been a studenl in the Urban Design Studio '65-'66, and part of lhe Buffalo Waterfronl Projecl leam. Subsequently he was hired by CorneIl and assigned part lime to lhe Urban Design Studio. In lhal capacity he carricd forward a sludio-related seminar series which had previously been initiated by the studio. Koetler was especiaIly responsible for developing those ideas relaled to CoIlision.

Rowe, Koetler, Collage City, op. cil.. p. 106. {bid., p. 106.

Ibid.. p. 144.

Eliot, T.S., The Sacred Wood, 'Tradition and the Individual Talenl.'

Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and Ihe Profane, Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1959, Harvest Book, p. 102.

Rowe/ Koetler, Collage Cily, op. cil.. p. 138.

Presumptions of 'a-political' or 'non-politicaIlily' relative lo lhe study ha ve been made by both Ellis, op. cil., and Plunz, Robert, "A Note on Politics and Academe," Preciso 11, 1980. See also Framplon, op. cil.

Rowe, Colin. Lockhart, Texas,. This article mosl clearly shows Rowe's sensitivily lo lhe relalion between European

experience and the American condilion, and is again revealed in Rowe's article for this publication.

AcknowJedgements: . The author would like lO lhank lhe foIlowing people for their commenls on earlier drafts of this work. AII have been immensely helpful in clarifying the major lhemes of this essay and eXlracting them from personal experience. Stuart Cohen, John McDermotl, D. B. Middlelon, Colin Rowe, Jerri Smith, Tom Schumacher, Derek Tynan.

IntrOOuetion 1 Galerie Slrecker, Berlin Foreword Reproduced from a facsimile by Hisloric Urban Plans, Ithaca, New York from an engraving in lhe Geography and Map Division of lhe Library of Congress.

Program vs, Paradigm 1,6,7,8,9, 10 Galerie Slrecker, Berlin 2 Susan Sheldon S Roo WiIlson Conjeetures on Urban Form 27 IIIuslralion courtesy of Venturi, Rauch and SCOIl Brown 28 Oxford University Press 29 Michael Dennis 31,32 Art Inslilule of Chicago 38 H.P. Craemmerer SI Photograph by WiIliam Frange S2 ŠSPADEM, Paris/VAGA, New York 1982 S6 Archives D'Archileclure Moderene, BrusseIls. Reprinled by Permission.

Tbe Street in the Twentieth Century 3-33,46,47 RIBA publications, LId., London 34, 3S Archive D'Architecture Moderne, Reprinled by

Permission 36,37,38,39,40, SO, SI, SS, S6, 6S ŠSPADEM, Paris/VAGA New York, 1982 41,42,43,44, 48, 49, 54, 47 Harvard Universily Press, Cambridge S2, S3 Samona and SaveIli, S.r.I., Rome SO, S9, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72 Lund Humphries Publishers, LId., London. Reprinled by Permission The Figure/ Ground.

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