Adaptation of a codified style

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ADAPTATION OF A CODIFIED STYLE: “CINNAH 19” – AN APARTMENT BLOCK1 SERAY TÜRKAY With its radical orientation and idiosyncratic façade, one particular building attracts attention while walking up Cinnah Street in Ankara. Although the buildings lining this elegant road in Ankara are generally sited with their main façades facing the street, “Cinnah 19” is strikingly positioned perpendicular to the road. The building was designed in 1956 by Nejat Ersin who is a follower of Le Corbusier and his housing blocks of the 1950s from architectural publications (Cengizkan, 2002).

The label “Cinnah 19” is simply an indication of the street and the number of the lot that the apartment occupies; however the building’s label can also be considered as a critique on modernism.

Figure 1 “Cinnah 19” from Cinnah Street

Figure 2 Entrance canopy of “Cinnah 19”

1 This paper is edited from the term assignment of Arch 513 ‘Introduction to Architectural Research I’ course in Fall 2009. The references include the texts from the reader of the course.

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The building leaves the topography below as an elevated mass emerging from the ground. The housing units are in a double-storey plan configuration, each with equal benefits; while the common areas at ground level include a garden, a coal cellar, storage areas, and a paved area suitable for sitting and sporting activities. The result is a frame that unifies the modules, which resemble beehives, constituting their own particular worlds; creates elevated internal streets; and introduces a public space at the roof with a terrace and a swimming pool. There is little doubt that “Cinnah 19” takes references from Le Corbusier‘s Unité d’Habitation.

Figure 3 A photograph of “Cinnah 19” from 1958, the year construction was finished.

Figure 4 Unite d’Habitation, Marseilles.

This outcome is legitimized by a formal analysis. As suggested by Robert D’Amico in his seminal book Historicism and Knowledge, a skeptical approach enables the comparison of these two distinct buildings. In this paper, these buildings will be treated as objects of study and approached with ‘phenomenological virginity,’ to borrow a term coined by Allen Forte. By following the method used by Forte in his 120

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study of a musical composition,2 the formal analysis will separate the objects from ‘the contingencies of historical context’ so as to carve out a level of architectural abstraction (D’Amico, 1989, pp. ix-xiv). The formal analysis will scrutinize architecture from the rules within.

Another dimension of an analysis of these two products of Modern Architecture itself also requires a level of architectural abstraction. Since Modern Architecture aimed to create ‘an architectural Esperanto, an internationalism’ (Goldhagen and Legault, 2000, p.12) and to become international, Modern Architecture needed to withdraw from everything contextual, everything conventional, everything known and everything seen. By separating, in other words abstracting, the architectural object from its context, one was able to focus on the inherent qualities of the architectural object, allowing the consideration of the form that appears at first sight; and this led to criticisms of Modern Architecture as a ‘style-based paradigm’3 (Goldhagen, 2005).

In her critical article Something to Talk About. Modernism, Discourse, Style, Sarah Williams Goldhagen discusses style as being modernism’s unifying feature.

She states that Modern Architecture is identified via ‘formal tropes’: [F]lat roofs; transparency and lots of glass; reinforced concrete or metal buildings, tough-edged and stark; compositions controlled with geometric rigor; structural armatures split off from building skins, opening up free-flowing spaces articulated lightly with space dividers that barely touch the horizontal planes; a dynamically asymmetrical distribution of spaces; an absence of ornament or historical reference Calvinist in its rigor, an abstraction, and a resulting emphasis on the compositional play between elements or volumes (Goldhagen, 2005, pp. 149-151).

Goldhagen’s use of the term ‘trope’ in expressing the formal characteristics of Modern Architecture can be interpreted in general terms as a representation of the word ‘style,’ which actually provides a basis for formal analysis in the sense that style is ‘an essential object of investigation’ (Schapiro, 1998, p. 143).

In this regard, style becomes a system of forms with a quality and a meaningful expression through which the personality of the artist and the broad outlook of a group are visible. It provides a common ground against which innovations and the individuality of particular works may be measured (Schapiro, 1998, p. 143). In this 2 Allen Forte, music theorist at Yale University, suggests a formal analysis of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”. He ignores cultural and historical variations and concentrates on the formal structure of the musical piece. The method is referred to in Robert D’Amico. “Introduction.” Historicism and Knowledge, New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc., 1989, ix-xiv.

3 The conceptualization of the “style-based paradigm” in this study is based on a discussion of the terms “paradigm” and “style” generated in Arch 513 - Architectural Research course, with reference to the following articles: Sarah Williams Goldhagen, “Something to Talk About: Modernism, Discourse, Style” JSAH, vol. 64, June 2005, 144-167; Heinrich Wölfflin, “Principles of Art History,” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 115-126; E. H. Gombrich, “Norm and Form: The Stylistic Categories of Art History and Their Origins in Renaissance Ideals,” in Norm and Form: Studies in Art of the Renessaince 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1966, 81-98; E. H. Gombrich, “Style,” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 150-63; James Ackerman, “Style,” in Distance Points: Essays in Theory and Renaissance Art and Architecture, Cambridge Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991, 3-22; Meyer Schapiro, “Style,” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 143-149 and Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd Ed., Chicago, 1970, originally published in 1962, 10, 23, 17 and 52-56.

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regard, a description of a style draws upon three aspects of art: ‘form elements or motives’; ‘form relationships’; and ‘qualities’ (Schapiro, 1998, p.145). A style is like a language, with an internal order and expressiveness, permitting a varied intensity or delicacy of statement (Schapiro, 1998, p. 148). If style is accepted as ‘an object of investigation’ that provides a common ground for a formal analysis, by focusing on the common ‘formal tropes’ of Unité d’Habitation and “Cinnah 19,” it can be claimed that ‘the type with type, the finished with the finished’ (Wölfflin, 1950, p.14) will be compared.

To start with, both buildings are full of deferences to the landscape. While Unite d’Habitation stands on huge pillars and on a flat topography in a large park, “Cinnah 19” is located in the middle of the city, on a topography with noticable differences in levels that Ersin had to overcome so as to connect both with the landscape on which it stands and the adjacent road. If one looks at the axonometric sketch of “Cinnah 19” the intention of leaving the topography beneath is clear. Although the building would appear to be attached to the land, to the context that it occupies, it is obvious that the building actually does not have to be physically adjacent to the road with a retaining wall, nor does it have to sit partially on the topography. It can be considered as an interpretation, or as a way of using the principle of pilotis in a different manner.

Figure 5 Axonometric sketch of “Cinnah 19” at the early stages of design.

The elevation of the mass from the ground enabled the free flow of topography, allowing for the introduction of public spaces underneath the mass, which is actually in the landscape. What is significant about the idea of elevating the mass from ground, in other words, ‘by abstracting the building from its context,’ is that Le Corbusier achieved an understanding of the architectural object as an independent whole in itself. Moreover, he transferred his conceptualization of architectural abstraction to the mass itself. Unite d’Habitation, though referred to in this study as the housing block in Marseilles, is actually an indication of Le Corbusier’s principle of modernist residential housing. In this principle, he went beyond abstracting the architectural object, rather abstracting the architectural object within itself. In this way, he interpreted the ‘units’ that compose the housing block as independent elements.

The main principle behind the apartment in Marseilles is that it is a complete element in itself, completely unconcerned with the ground or its foundations.

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By expanding the consideration of architectural abstraction to the mass itself, Le Corbusier imagined that what the housing units require is only a skeleton of reinforced concrete in which they can be placed. This led to the use of the terms ‘Bottle’ and ‘Bottlerac’ when describing this form of construction, as applied in the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles. Some day the components of these bottles will be made entirely in workshops for assembly on site, each complete apartment being hoisted into position one at a time. In the illustration it can be seen that a model of “a bottle” is lifted in the hand. It is a container, in this case an apartment, which can be considered as a complete element, much like a bottle.

Figure 6 An illustration for the idea of ‘Bottlerack’ in a housing unit.

Although the dimensions and volumes of the housing units have been standardized in the frames of the regular grid structure of the concrete skeleton, which may be considered as a restrictive system, the consideration of each housing unit as an independent element in itself allowed for variation in standardization.

While Le Corbusier introduced 337 apartments of 23 different types in Marseilles, varying from bachelor apartments to residences for families with eight children, Ersin was required to design 17 apartments, of which 15 were to be identical (Cengizkan, 2002, p. 183)4. The Marseilles block offered a complex result with 4 In the interview with Nejat Ersin on “Cinnah 19”, Ersin explains the reason for identical design of 15

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variations attained in a simple solution. In contrast, “Cinnah 19” was entirely standardized in its reinforced concrete skeleton. In the plan configuration of the “containers” it can be also observed that while in the Marseilles block the interior road serves two sides, in “Cinnah 19” it serves only one.

Figure 7 Typical story plan of “Cinnah 19”.

Figure 8 A story plan of Unite d’Habitation.

This adaptation of the overall dimensions means that the repetitive system of independent units in the standardized structural system of the mass is reflected also on the façade. In “Cinnah 19,” as opposed to the emphasis on the ‘individuality’ of units on the northern glass façade, which is compartmentalized via the reinforced concrete skeleton, the southern façade presents a unified whole with an impressive introduction of brise-soleils in the form of solid rectangular frames.

double-storey apartments. The building belonged to a cooperative association, and thus it was essential for all the apartments of the 15 partners to be identical.

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Figure 9 North façade of “Cinnah 19”.

Figure 10 South façade of “Cinnah 19” and brise-soleils.

As indicated previously, both of the buildings stand on pillars, giving them a similar relation with the ground. While the ground floors include common spaces for inhabitants, public spaces have also been introduced at the roof level. Both emphasize the extrusion of the chimneys from the mass and introduce a roof garden and a swimming pool.

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Figure 11 Roof terrace and pool in “Cinnah 19”.

Figure 12 Roof of Unite d’Habitation, Marseilles.

While Unité d’Habitation is 165m long, 24m deep and 56m high, “Cinnah 19” measures 35.40m long, 12m deep, and 20m high. If the difference in their dimensions of total form is interpreted into the clothing terms adapted by Mark Wigley, the former can be considered as an ‘L,’ and the latter an ‘S’.

The criticism of modern architecture as a ‘style-based paradigm’ has found a striking reference in Wigley’s book entitled White Walls, Designer Dresses with the brave addition of the statement ‘The Fashioning of Architecture’. Wigley’s criticism is grounded on a logic of clothing. For Wigley, modern architecture cannot be separated from dress design, and claims that architects working as dress designers are completely modern in terms of the stereotypical image of Modern Architecture as the systematic reduction of ornament and dedication to function (Wigley, 1995, p. xix). The analogy of dress, thus, fashion, has been used to discredit the idea that although modern architecture is a style, ‘it must resist degeneration into just another fashionable outfit’ (Wigley, 1995, p. xix). The word ‘style’ has supposedly been contaminated by the nineteenth century sense ‘of fancy costumes in which buildings may be clothed according to the whim of their designer’ (Wigley, 1995, p. 86).

In the light of Wigley’s statements, what Le Corbusier designed in Marseilles was a costume that Ersin did not hesitate to put on. Modern Architecture is conceived as a style, or rather, as a jacket that is nothing more than the carcass of the building, 126

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forced to wear a set of accepted conventions. In Wigley’s terms, while opposed to the whims of fashion, Modern Architecture has been, from its very beginning, an art of tailoring (Wigley, 1995, p. 110). Reyner Banham also interprets the Modern architect as a dress designer, and for him, Le Corbusier was a fashion master, ‘[f]or thirty years he discovered, codified, exploited, demonstrated – even invented – and gave authority to more forms than any other architect around’ (1966, p. 98).5 When Le Corbuiser codified ‘Five Points of a New Architecture,’ he actually stated the abstract certainties of Modern Architecture, and invented, arguably, a fashion with formal tropes. For Wigley, fashion provides ‘the basic frame of the discourse, its limit condition’ (Wigley, 1995, p. 52). From a reductionist point of view, his work can be understood only in aesthetic terms, and reduced to a ‘style’ devoid of its social, ethical and political content. However, Le Corbusier succeeded in creating a ‘model’ through the interweaving of the generic and particular, and the ideal and circumstantial, and Ersin adapted Le Corbusier’s generic and ideal principles to a particular situation. Modern Architecture, which was codified by Le Corbuiser in 1926, was thus able to be reproduced at the end of 1950s in a distinct context.

What enabled this reproduction can be seen as Modern Architecture’s severance from its historical context, which means that while the separation of the building from its ground allowed a concentration on the architectural object in itself with its formal qualities, it went beyond the aim of achieving ‘an internationalism’ and allowed for this international architecture to become reproducible. While listing the familiar ‘formal tropes’ of Modern Architecture, Goldhagen bases her critique on their becoming Modern Architecture itself. She opposes the idea that they are tools or types of form to reinterpret, thus, to produce and reproduce ‘a modern architecture’ that actually has an original version that contains an essence.

Within the confines of its formal tropes, and independent from its context, the critique of Unité d’Habitation’s reproducibility in Ankara can also be analyzed from a different perspective. The adapted reproduction of Le Corbusier’s generic and ideal principles to a particular circumstance is, surely, enabled with the severance of the architectural object from its context. It can also be stated that ‘formal tropes’ enabled phenomenological mass production, and thus Modern Architecture regained its essence. Walter Benjamin, in his seminal essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit), uses the concept of ‘the loss of aura’ to describe the decisive changes witnessed in art in the first quarter of the twentieth century, laying the blame for this loss firmly with the changes in techniques of reproduction.

In Benjamin’s view, the withering of the aura is a socially determined event that relates to the need of the masses to ‘get closer to things’. The aura, however, consists of the ‘unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be’ (Benjamin, 1969, p. 224), and it is this distance that has been destroyed by the techniques of reproduction; but for Benjamin, it is the technique of reproduction itself that becomes communicative, significant and charged with messages. As technical reproducibility presents itself with all the characteristics of a mass medium, it turns the (reproduced) work of art into a commodity. On the other hand, Benjamin 5 Banham asserts that, for all his less than saintly qualities, the architect should indeed be honored as “the fashion-master of his age”.

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argues that the new mode of perception that results from the universal availability of reproduction techniques provides considerable potential for emancipation, bringing about a change in the attitude of the masses towards art from one that is retrograde to one that is progressive (Benjamin, 1969, pp. 219-253).

Furthermore, Benjamin states that architecture can be seen as a prototype for the new mode of reception of the work. Buildings are objects of a collective and distracted attention – the perception of architecture is tactile (through the use of buildings) rather than optical; and this mode of perception is in keeping with the new conditions of life imposed by the industrial civilization (Benjamin, 1969, pp.

219-253).

Fashion is found in the obscurity of the lived instant, but the collective lived instant – fashion and architecture (in the nineteenth century) emerge from the dreams of collective consciousness. (Benjamin, 1991 cited in Wigley, 1995, p.

154) Following Benjamin’s conception of mechanical reproduction, a consideration of ‘Le Corbusier’s engagement with mass culture’ (Colomina, 1994, p. 201) is essential.

Le Corbuiser intended to be the producer rather than the interpreter of the existing industrial reality. For him, contemporary style was to be found in everyday objects and industrial products, and in this respect the ‘house’ should be treated as a media center, a reality that will transform the understanding of the private and public (Colomina, 1994, p. 210). Le Corbusier’s buildings were exhibitions, and houses subsequently became their applications in real life. Thus, Modern Architecture is returned to everyday life through its transformation into a commodity, a fashion to be consumed by a worldwide and (to a large extent) middle-class market (Colomina, 1994, p. 212).

In a Benjaminian sense, “Cinnah 19” was not just a reproduction of a codified style, as it can also be reinterpreted as a reproduction that has been reinvested with an ‘aura’ – being the very thing that the reproduction processes eliminates.

Modern Architecture had to be international, and thus reproducible. However, from its inception, the modern movement has been based upon the notion that architectural culture must grapple with the society of its time. Since society itself is evolving, the movement, from its very outset, invited critique, reassessment and revision from within. In turn, the ambition to become an ‘international style’ undermined the movement’s socio-critical orientation (Goldhagen and Legault, 2000). Mass production, arguably, helped Modern Architecture to regain its sociocritical orientation, its essence, or rather, its ‘aura,’ and a housing block was a perfect means of introducing it to the masses.

“Cinnah 19” should be recognized not only as an object of collective and tactile perception that revitalizes modern architecture’s essence, but also for its label.

In labeling the building simply with the street and the plot that it occupies, the building is conceptualized. It places the architecture, which can be interpreted as a generic form, into its context by giving it a name that is constituted by the very indication of its place.

As stated by Goldhagen, it is time to end the reliance on the style-based paradigm of modernism in architecture. She proposes that the discipline should retain Modernism in architecture as a coherent phenomenon, but conceptualize it as a discourse (Goldhangen, 2005, p. 145). Since this paper is based on a formal 128

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analysis which is enabled through a conceptualization of the term “style” as “the essential object of investigation”, Wigley’s approach to structuring the discourse serves as a model for critical reassessment. For Wigley, the discourse is built on the absence of an analysis of fashion’s relationship with architecture (1995, p. 83).

When the line between modern architecture and fashion does become explicit and the rejection of fashion by that architecture is addressed, it is always in isolated moments (even with such antifashion zealots as Giedion) and almost always to clarify some point about the status of function. In fact, what usually happens is that the tacit argument about fashion is encouraged to slide into and over the argument about function. All we learn is that function is what fashion is not. Function ends up appearing more certain without having been opened up any further. On the contrary, some uncertainty about it has been covered up. In this sense, a map of confident rejections of fashion in the historiography of modern architecture would actually be a map of its insecurity: a map of cracks in the apparently smooth surfaces of the cartoon image it constructs, cracks that harbor the very uncontrollable forces whose presence is being denied. The explicit rejections of fashion might actually be the most precise map of its enigmatic operations, operations that structure the discourse, but only appear within it at idiosyncratic moments. (Wigley, 1995, p. 83) Taking all of this into account, “Cinnah 19” can be said to go beyond being just another product of a style-based paradigm. In the discussions that evolved within the dialectics of the generic and particular, ideal and circumstantial, original and reproduction, “Cinnah 19” can be assessed as an idiosyncratic moment that serves to structure the discourse of modernism.

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Banham, R., 1966. The Last Formgiver. Architectural Review, August Issue, pp.

97-108.

Benjamin, W., 1969. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

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Cengizkan, A., 2002. Foreword by Uğur Tanyeli. Modernin Saati: 20. Yüzyılda Modernleşme ve Demokratikleşme Pratiğinde Mimarlar, Kamusal Mekan ve Konut Mimarlığı / The Hour of the Modern: Architects, Public Space, and Housing in Modernization and Democratization Practices of the Twentieth Century (translation

by Sibel Bozdoğan in her evaluation published in JSAH, 63:1, March 2004). Ankara: Mimarlar Derneği ve Boyut Yayın Grubu, pp. 173-187.

Colomina, B., 1994. Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture and Mass Media.

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Colquhoun, A., 1981. Introduction: Modern Architecture and Historicity. In: Peter Eisenmann and Kenneth Frampton eds., Essays in Architectural Criticism: Modern Architecture and Historical Change. Preface by Kenneth Frampton, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, pp. 11-19.

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and Their Origins in Renaissance Ideals. In: Norm and Form: Studies in Art of the Renessaince 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 81-98.

Gombrich, E. H., 1998. Style. In: Donal Preziosi ed., The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 150-63.

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Schapiro, M., 1998. Style. In Donal Preziosi ed., The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 143-149.

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Williams Goldhagen, S. and Legault, R., 2000. Introduction: Critical Themes of Postwar Modernism. In: Sarah Williams Golhagen and Réjean Legault eds., Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, pp. 11-22.

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