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SPACE & ANTI-SPACE The Fabric of Place, City, and Architecture
BY STEVEN PETERSON & BARBARA LITTENBERG INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL DENNIS FOREWORD BY JONATHAN BARNETT
Table of Contents
Introduction
MICHAEL DENNIS
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Foreword JONATHAN BARNETT
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PART ONE ARCHITECTURAL AND URBAN SPACE
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A. MODERN SPACE
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—The Dematerialization of Architecture and Ineffable Space
B. ALTERNATIVE IDEAS OF SPACE Prologue
Space & Anti-Space Subtexts
1. Post-Modern and Neo-Rational
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45 47 72
2. Las Vegas and Le Corbusier
3. The Fundamental Dichotomy—Space or Anti-Space
4. A Brief History of Space
5. Cubism—The Turning Point
6. Palazzo Barberini—Negative Space
7. The Invention of Virtual Thickness
PART TWO THE URBAN FABRIC C. ROMA INTERROTTA: CONTINUOUS DESIGN FIELDS
Colin Rowe—Towards a Standard Model of Urban Form
D. THE ELEMENTS OF URBAN FORM Urban Design Tactics
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110 112 144
PART THREE SHAPING PLACES E. PARIS: LES HALLES DESIGN COMPETITION
The Aims and Means of Urban Design
F. NEW YORK: KNITTING NETWORKS OF URBAN FABRIC The Urban Design Plan for Lower Manhattan
PART FOUR TOWERS AND TEXTURE G. NEW YORK: VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL SPACE
The Re-Urbanization Of Ground Zero—A Proposal for the World Trade Center Site
162 165 197
214 217
H. THE TAXONOMY OF URBAN FORM
URBAN FABRIC: THE COMMON DENOMINATOR OF CITIES
THE URBAN MOLECULE
When Buildings Touched
How a City is Built
Afterword
BARBARA LITTENBERG
253 273 292
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Introduction: Space & Anti-Space MICHAEL DENNIS
Michael Dennis; Architect, MIT Professor Emeritus, Author Court & Garden
The articulation of architecture from the city is not a new phenomenon. Both classicist and modernist architects have favored the design of highly-crafted architectural objects over urban design. Both may have valued interior space, but rarely urban space, and as Steven Peterson has pointed out, space is the primary medium of urban design.1 Thus, it is clear why the civic realm of urban space has disappeared from our cities. This book points to a timely way of understanding the relationship between architecture and the city. The work and ideas of Steven Peterson and Barbara Littenberg are presented cleanly and forcefully. Indeed, the virtuosity of their projects at the intersection of architecture and urban design is unique today. Space & Anti-Space should serve as both a reminder of the rich historic relationship between architecture and the city, and as an exemplar of possibilities—the simultaneous presence of assertive architecture and legible urban space. The idea of architectural or urban space has had a checkered career. An architectural historian or “theorist” once remarked that Renaissance architects were not interested in space, “because they didn’t write about it.” I am now happy to not remember that person’s name because I found the observation stunningly ignorant. One of the first things a beginning architecture student learns (or should learn) is that architecture is about space, or as Louis Kahn said: “Architecture is the thoughtful making of space.” Architects may also write, but the fundamental medium of architecture is not words, but form—and the design of space. As a literary topic, space seems to have appeared rather late in the nineteenth century among German historians and aestheticians involved with the “new science of art history,” especially Adolf von Hildebrand and August Schmarsow.2 It was Schmarsow who said: “Architecture, therefore, is the creatress of space, in accordance with the ideal forms of the human intuition of space.” He delivered an extensive exposition relating the axes and characteristics of space to the human body and our perception. Adolf von Hildebrand, a sculptor, introduced the principle of “frontality,” arguing that even sculpture in-the-round has a primary, frontal point-of-view. Later, in the early twentieth century, Wilhelm Worringer extended the discussion of space to a cultural level.3 He contended that cultures like that of early Egypt tended toward monotheism
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and abstraction; i.e., that they were space-shy, and not at ease with their environment—a condition he describes as “an immense spiritual dread of space.” The counter-pole to this condition is to be found in cultures like that of Hellenic Greece, which tended toward polytheism and empathy; i.e., that Greeks were at home in space, with representations of space, and at ease with their natural environment—a condition that Worringer describes as “the sense of being at home in the world.” Early modern architects as diverse as Wright, Mies, and Le Corbusier all talked about space, and all explored it in their architectural work. Modernist architects were interested in iconic objects, however, and in continuous open space rather than urban space. Beginning in the 1890s, enclosed urban space began to disappear from both discourse and practice. Hegemann and Peets’s The American Vitruvius: An Architects’ Handbook of Civic Art, published in 1922, was the last gasp of a long urban tradition, followed by Rockefeller Center, in 1931–39, as the last physical example of that tradition—and still probably the best urban space of the 20th century. Civic Art was neutered by the publication of Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine, in 1923, and “towers in the park” became the model of urban development for the next half-century. The 1960s and 1970s marked the emerging rediscovery of the city— the traditional city—as architects and urbanists began to forge a new relationship between architecture and urbanism, one that reconstructed a public realm of civic space. Peterson Littenberg Architects were important in that movement, and this book might now be seen as a latter-day companion to Rob Krier’s Stadtraum (Urban Space) of 1975. Despite nearly a half-century of urban progress, however, too many architects are still intent on pursuing ever-increasing levels of architectural novelty at the expense of the city. There is no more startling example of the mindless hegemony of architecture over the city than the World Trade Center in New York—at least until Hudson Yards is completed. The World Trade Center site is similar in size and scale to that of Rockefeller Center, but that is where the similarity ends. The architecture of Rockefeller Center is simple, but the buildings are assertive and related to each other. They are also related to the city—to the spatial structure of the city—and they define one of the most beautiful urban spaces in the world. Rockefeller Center is timeless. In contrast, the World Trade Center is like a junkyard for once-trendy architectural toys. Future generations will probably marvel in bewilderment at the urbanistic incompetence of the project. Unlike Rockefeller Center, there is no relationship to the urban pattern; the buildings make no urban fabric and no urban space. Why did this happen when there was a better alternative?
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The Peterson Littenberg project for the World Trade Center reinforced the adjacent urban pattern of streets and blocks and defined a public space that included the footprints of the twin towers. Like Rockefeller Center in the skyscraper age of the 1930s, this project defined the space of the city at the lower levels with buildings that filled the urban blocks from which the towers rise. It is the primacy of the plan at the lower levels that allows variation above. The Peterson Littenberg project was the only project among the competition entries to make the city. The project’s towers could have adjusted during the development process, but the urban space would have remained. It is interesting that the memorable image of Rockefeller Center is formed by the two smallest buildings in the composition and the tallest building. Together, they define the space of the mall, and the plaza and courtyard (ice rink). Without this spatial and architectural figure Rockefeller Center would have been just another group of New York buildings without focus. The World Trade Center could have had another of the world’s most beautiful urban spaces, but it doesn’t. We need to ask ourselves: why did this not happen? When the Commissioners’ Plan of Manhattan was laid out in the early 19th century it provided only a pattern of streets, blocks, and parcels. The parcels were a module of 25 feet x 100 feet—relatively small grain within 200 feet x 600–800 feet blocks. There was no provision regarding programs or architecture. It was not until 1916 that the zoning code linked the plan to architectural development by relating building heights to the width of streets. (This was a technique used historically to integrate private buildings with the public space of the city.) It assumed that buildings would fill the block to the street line. Increasingly, however, architects and developers today pursue ever more idiosyncratic buildings. But, as long as the spatial pattern of the city is maintained, odd buildings can be absorbed. Mega-parcels are a different problem, however. They promote urban interventions rather than town planning, and when the urban pattern is erased, craziness is almost inevitable. Both Rockefeller Center and the World Trade Center occupy large urban areas, but Rockefeller Center was developed within the street pattern of the Commissioners’ Plan, while the street pattern of the World Trade Center was erased, leaving a mega-parcel. This difference provided a disciplined framework for the design of Rockefeller Center, but opened the World Trade Center site to anti-urban development. Both of these sites might be called urban interventions; i.e., they are both architecture and urban design on a relatively large scale. This means that they may either be designed “compositions” with a vision (Rockefeller Center), or merely the accumulated result of numerous political and economic forces
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(the World Trade Center). The United States was founded on the principle of a balance of civic responsibility and private prerogative. This idea survived until the Second World War and facilitated many large-scale urban compositions in American cities. After the war, however, private interests began to trump civic responsibility. Consensus and judgment evaporated, anti-urban modernist buildings became the flavor du jour, and larger and larger parcels were created. The results have not been inspiring. Another example of a remarkable urban intervention is Peterson Littenberg’s Clinton project in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan. The overall site is bounded by 10th and 12th Avenues and 51st and 56th Streets and is, at 31 acres, therefore larger than either the World Trade Center or Rockefeller Center. The official urban renewal plan for the site proposed the demolition of existing buildings and the construction of new residential towers. In contrast, the Peterson Littenberg plan maintained the street pattern, and existing buildings, while deftly knitting new housing and a new sequence of neighborhood spaces into the existing blocks. This project demonstrates the interweaving of old and new buildings as well as the possibility of making a major public space across New York side streets to establish a new center for a vital and cohesive neighborhood. It is both architecture and urban design. It is safe to say that, today, most architects neither understand nor care about urban design and the city. Fortunately, Steven Peterson and Barbara Littenberg are not among them. Their projects are an inspiration for what could be, and what ought to be, not for what is. This book is therefore a treasure trove of ideas for those who love architecture and the city. It deserves to be studied carefully by students, architects, planners—and even non-professionals. Notes: 1. Peterson, S. “Urban Design Tactics,” Architectural Design (1978). 2. See: Mundt, Ernst K. “Three Aspects of German Aesthetic Theory,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 17, no.3. (1959), pp 287–310. Also, Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893. The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities (1994). 3. Worringer, W. Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.) 1953. (Translated from the German Abstraktion und Einfürhlung, 1908).
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Foreword: Why JONATHAN BARNETT
Urban Designer, Fellow of Penn Institute for Urban Research, Professor Emeritus Urban Design, University of Pennsylvania, Author Redesigning Cities: Principles, Practice, Implementation.
When I asked Steve and Barbara to identify the most important issue in this book, they sent me aerial photographs, at the same scale, of lower Manhattan and the Lujiazui financial district in Pudong, Shanghai. (see figure C1) Both are bounded on three sides by water and have about the same size and shape. Lower Manhattan has a clear pattern of intersecting streets defining compact blocks, while the Shanghai district has a few big streets encompassing much larger blocks, with many separate towers of different sizes, each surrounded by open space. Accompanying the photographs was a one-word question: Why? My foreword to their book starts with answers to this question. The original plan, by Crijn Fredericksz for the Dutch West India Company in 1626, for lower Manhattan was laid out with streets leading up from the water, linked by streets that run parallel to the shore.1 Fredericksz’s job was to survey the actual location; the design followed what was then a standard way to lay out a town. There was a fort, the Battery, and a wall, now remembered by Wall Street. Unlike the Spanish settlements in the Americas, there was no town square, but there was a main street, Broadway. Over the years, lower Manhattan was extended several times by filling in piers along the waterfront, and the streets were extended as well, so the street pattern of small blocks originally created for the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam continues to shape this part of New York. The Lujiazui financial district was developed in the 1990s across the Huang-Po River from the center of Shanghai in an area that had not seen much urbanization and was partly a fresh-water wetland. The Shanghai city government, recognizing that the creation of Lujiazui was an extraordinary urban design opportunity, held an international competition in 1992. The submission by the firm headed by Richard Rogers, a circular central park surrounded by concentric rings of buildings, was the proposal that attracted the most attention. The actual commission to design Lujiazui went to the Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Institute. They modified their own competition design to include a central park, but one with an informal shape. Rather than the short, walkable street frontages of the Rogers proposal, pedestrian bridges linked buildings by spanning the wide streets. As built,
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much of the limited coherence of the original design was lost. The result is similar to development in many other cities, the default position of modernist urban design: a collection of disparate towers competing with each other for dominance, large parks unconnected to buildings, residual open spaces between the buildings and the streets, and an environment unfriendly to pedestrians. Why? The Chinese central government enacted a series of laws beginning during the 1980s. These laws were based on concepts promoted by the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne (CIAM) and widely adopted all over the world. The Chinese laws are written as performance specifications: streets, parks, and buildings must meet metrics. Street widths are codified, as are the total linear meters of streets per square kilometer. Parks and other land uses are separately defined and the expectation is that each is to be built separately. Residential buildings must meet sunlight requirements for December 21st. The other principal metric for buildings is the floor area ratio, designated for each block by the local planning authorities, but not necessarily coordinated over larger areas. The result, similar in all Chinese cities, has been development where isolated towers predominate, with all residential buildings facing south, and widely-spaced, multi-lane streets designed to facilitate automobile traffic. These cities are rigidly zoned to separate land uses. The open spaces are ample but are designed as parks and kept apart from other urban activities. Development regulations in Japan and Korea have comparable objectives. Except for the south-facing requirement, the regulations of many other countries, including many local zoning and subdivision codes in the United States, also contain similar directives emphasizing separate land uses, isolated buildings, and streets designed to facilitate auto traffic. What explains the worldwide acceptance of ideas about architecture and urban design put forward by a small group of European architects almost a hundred years ago? The CIAM in its own publications, and in books by such once well-known architectural historians, Sigfried Giedion, Nikolaus Pevsner, and J. M. Richards,2 promoted modernism not as a way to design buildings and cities, but as the only way to design buildings and cities—the inevitable result of historical progress. Modernist city planning and design theory has seldom been challenged effectively, perhaps because so much of it has found its way into development regulations. The modernist visionaries of the 1920s advocated the total reconstruction of cities; dismissed historic preservation as sentimentality; romanticized travel by fast cars on wide highways to
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the exclusion of other transportation; and had no concern for the natural environment. While Modernist city planning continues to be the basis for most development, it has become almost completely inappropriate for actual modern conditions. Today, we understand that, while some industrial uses need to be segregated, a well-designed mix of activities is a far superior way to plan cities than rigorous separation of each use. We have learned that preservation of existing buildings and neighborhoods is important not only to safeguard good architecture, or the sites of important historical events, but also to preserve successful neighborhoods and generally to conserve the resources that went into the construction of buildings and infrastructure. Conserving buildings promotes more equitable development, as spaces in older buildings can be more affordable. Today, walking is recognized as the most efficient form of transportation for short distances, followed by bicycles where protected bicycle paths can be created. While cars and trucks are essential for their ability to reach the widest possible range of destinations, buses—including bus rapid transit—rail transit, passenger and freight trains, and airports are all important in achieving a balanced transportation system. We are also learning that the natural environment should not be manipulated and flattened by engineering, but must be treated as the context for all design decisions. Our growing understanding of climate change has made conservation of a balanced natural environment an imperative. Modernist planning and urban design impede every one of these objectives. The work of Steven Peterson and Barbara Littenberg should be understood in the context of a world-wide search for designs that relate to the traditional way that cities develop, while accommodating today’s technology, environmental concerns, and social needs. Instead of a sharp break with the past in the service of an outdated modernist ideology, the principles of traditional city design can be used to manage the transition from the way cities and towns are now to a desirable future. While not the only way to design cities, these principles should be part of every city design. What Steven and Barbara call anti-space is the modernist imperative to open up cities and give primacy to buildings and highways, where what is left over is residual. What they call space is the traditional series of urban streets, squares, and parks, linked to each other in a plan framework that provides the armature for all construction. There are some exceptional places where traditional urban design principles have successfully replaced modernist regulations, beginning
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with New York City’s special zoning districts in the 1960s.3 For example, the Lincoln Square special zoning district, now completely implemented, holds the street wall along the east side of Broadway from just above Columbus Circle past Lincoln Center, with a multi block arcade that defines the space of the street and provides a continuous retail frontage. Without the special district, there would have been a collection of towers surrounded by plazas to comply with New York City’s then existing modernist zoning code. Battery Park City in lower Manhattan, is a completed urban design by Cooper, Eckstut, whose designer in charge, Brian Shea, created the coherent street and public open space plan, reinforced by building-placement and street-wall concepts, which were then implemented using urban design guidelines. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Peter Calthorpe, with their colleagues in the New Urbanist movement, have successfully challenged modernist city planning doctrine—mostly in suburban growth areas. New Urbanism is a return to traditionally designed public openspace plans, reinforced by design guidelines and codes for building placements that define and shape streets and public spaces. In 1991 Hans Stimmann, the director for housing and construction in Berlin, established height limits and requirements for stone-like facade materials for all new buildings, preserving a sense of continuity with Berlin’s traditional street design. In the early 1990s, Stimmann held a design competition for the area around the Potsdamer Platz. The winning design, by the Munich firm Hilmer, Stadler, laid out a system of traditional streets, blocks, and open spaces that could be implemented incrementally. The redevelopment of downtown Vancouver, under the leadership of Co-Planning Director Larry Beasley, uses traditional principles of street organization, public open space design, and building placement. The tall towers are mostly sheathed in glass, but are set in a matrix of lower buildings that create the necessary design continuity.4 Other examples include the City of Stockholm’s design for the Hammarby Sjöstad district, based on height controls and a strong public open-space plan. Its traditional streets and blocks form a charming neighborhood of simple—although expensive—modern buildings. Helsinki’s 2050 Plan will remove the city’s radial expressways and replace them with boulevards lined with apartment buildings, shops and offices, including both traffic lanes and tram lines. The area no longer used by the expressways is large enough to accommodate much of the city’s predicted growth.
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Steven and Barbara have devoted their professional lives to a deep study of traditional design principles as they can be applied to organizing modern cities. Their account of the way their ideas have developed, of the influence of Colin Rowe and other colleagues, and the circumstances in which their work has been created will repay close attention. Their plan for lower Manhattan and their entry in the 2001 competition for rebuilding the World Trade Center are especially significant.5 Steven and Barbara have sought continually to create designs for cities that relate to the past but are living organisms capable of continued growth and change. Notes: 1. New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designation of lower Manhattan Streets, June 14, 1983, Designation List 165. 2. See Space Time and Architecture, by Sigfried Giedion, Harvard University Press, 1942, and subsequent editions; Pioneers of Modern Design from William Morris to Walter Gropius, by Nikolaus Pevsner, Faber & Faber, 1936, and subsequent editions; and An Introduction to Modern Architecture by J. M. Richards, Pelican Books, 1948, also with subsequent editions. 3. For descriptions of New York urban design initiatives see Urban Design as Public Policy by Jonathan Barnett, McGraw Hill, 1974 and The Nature of Urban Design: A New York Perspective on Resilience by Alexandros Washburn, Island Press, 2015. 4. See Vancouverism, by Larry Beasley, University of British Columbia Press, 2019, and also Ecodesign for Cities and Suburbs by Jonathan Barnett and Larry Beasley, Island Press, 2015. 5. For an evaluation of the Peterson Littenberg proposal as the only entry in the World Trade Center rebuilding competition that could have been implemented, see “Problems with Urban Design Competitions� by Jonathan Barnett in Harvard Design Magazine 34 F/W 2011.
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