Architecture and Urban Design

These lectures

• Begin by situating architecture’s role in urbanism in general, and its importance in the political economy of urbanization in particular

• Then a timeline of styles prominent in US and Europe

– Arcadian Classicism of Early Industrial Era

– Beaux Arts of City Beautiful

– Early Skyscrapers

– Modernism

– Post-modernism

Architecture and Urban Change

• Echoing many geographers, Lewis Mumford noted that “in the state of building at any one period one may discover, in legible script, the complicated process and changes that are taking place within civilization itself.”

– Within the landscape tradition of geography, it has long been argued that the built environment can be “read” by those with the right vocabulary, just like archeologists can analyze pottery shards and other bits of material culture to learn about past societies

• But also, architecture is responsible for creating the very societal conditions it reflects

– For example, it helps to create product differentiation and stimulate the real estate market.

– In fact, an “architect-designed” label adds exchange value to a building for those in the know, even if it is not apparent to the average onlooker.

• Fashion – the replacing of the old with the new – is also a big part of any capitalist economy, and changing fashion within architecture keeps people filtering through the housing market

– Without changing style preference, the housing market would stall and suffer from under-consumption

• In fact, historically, investment in the built environment has been a way out of overaccumulation

Architecture and Urban Change (cont)

• Architecture has also historically been seen as providing support for the actions of powerful interests

– As the book says, the built environment can “can help suggest stability amid change”, as well as dynamism in periods of stagnation

– It can also display power through large monumental projects, while distracting the populace from other issues

• Although sometimes power wants to be inconspicuous – often the most repressive elements of totalitarian societies had the most unimpressive buildings

– Furthermore, it is not just monumental architecture through which society is disciplined, workplaces and residential neighborhoods do this as well

Architecture and Urban Change (cont.)

• But perhaps this overstates the case, because there is always a gap between intent and reception, especially since everything is received in a multitude of ways

– A building which reassures the rich and disheartens some of the poor, can also piss some of the poor off and spur them to action

• Ideally, the built environment should be functional, attractive, have a sense of identity and continuity, as well as variety and security

– Most of what is out there falls far, far short and is not “designed” at all, just coming from plan books (like almost every strip mall and most residential developments)

– This, of course, puts architects’ turf under threat – thus they more and more aspired to elite Art, and had less and less to do with most of the built environment

Arcadian Classicism and the Middle Landscape

• In the early industrial era, cities were growing rapidly, and required structures to fulfill all types of new economic, social and cultural functions

– Thus no time for a distinct style to develop; thus American architecture was often derided by Europeans as monstrous and directionless

• Thus this period was primarily marked by a lot of revivals that expressed anti-industrial Romantic or Classical values, so that government , court and college buildings had prominent Greek or Roman elements; but also some structures with Gothic, Italianate, and Jacobean elements

Arcadian Classicism (cont.)

• However, the first local American style was Arcadian Classicism (named for a pastoral, scenic, mountainous area of Greece)

– It was strongly influenced by Transcendentalist writers like Emerson and Thoreau who believed in the redemptive powers of time spent in nature; as well as European romantics who argued for the pastoral ideal – not “wild” but not “civilization” either (like the life of the shepherd)

– This gelled with Frederick Jackson Turner’s idea that America was made at the “frontier” and that the love of open space was uniquely American

– Thus the “middle landscape” that will strongly influence suburban growth

• For cities, this movement was about bringing the values of nature into the city, while also bringing out the best in people through institutions that would “enrich” and “refine” them culturally, politically and socially

Arcadian Classicism (cont)

• The first place to see this designed, pastoral landscapes were a series of “rural cemeteries” like Mount Auburn (Boston), Laurell Hill (Philly) Green Wood (Brooklyn), that were meant to contrast with the unplanned, crowded urban cemeteries of their day, and send a moral/religious message about harmony and peace

• Soon the idea came to bring these type of landscapes (minus the dead) into the heart of the city, in the form of parks to civilize and uplift urban dwellers

Arcadian Classicism (cont)

• The most important builder of parks was Frederick Law Olmstead, Sr.

– Wanted to provide city residents with a naturalistic landscape, with seclusion and greenness away from the dirt and noise, but also recreation space and place to instruct people in restraint and decorum

• The masterwork (along with Calvery Vaux) was NYC’s Central Park, started in 1858 and completed in 1862

– It had four avenues with independent traffic lanes, bridges and underpasses designed to blend with the landscape

• He then went on to design parks in many other US cities, as well as the campuses of Cal Berkeley and Columbia

Arcadian Classicism (cont)

• Vaux would go onto to design “picturesque buildings” meant to be viewed individually on curved streets, with interiors featuring asymmetrical rooms to spark interest, as well as mental hospitals (which were some of the grandest and most picturesque campuses in the United States)

– Facades included a mix of influences like neo-Gothic, Tuscan and Moorish

Beaux Arts

• Emerged from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, where students were trained to mix Baroque, Renaissance and Classical styles to make new buildings that would fit in with the older urban fabric of European cities

• The US had none of the old buildings, but borrowed the style because of its high culture cache and merged it with Arcadian Classicism

• The first show piece were the temporary buildings (called the White City) in the Chicago Columbia Exhibition of 1893, designed by Daniel Burnham

– Known for its parkland, neo-classical style, broad avenues with “imposing perspectives”, arches and statuary

• This became known as the City Beautiful Movement

Beaux Arts (cont.)

• Burnham along with Olmstead, Jr, made the plan to redevelop the Mall in DC, lining it with Beaux Arts buildings, ending it with the neo-Classical Lincoln Memorial, and adding a water basin, bridge and pantheon (the Jefferson Memorial) nearby

– This led to more work, creating new districts in cities like Cleveland’s Burnham Mall, Chicago, Kansas City, Denver and Harrisburg

• It had two lasting impacts: it helped professionalize the profession of landscape architecture and brought architectural criticism into the public awareness (which would help spur new styles which emerges as critiques of Beaux Arts)

– In the end, it was a very authoritarian style, sent down by government, but with very lofty goals

• However, it did not deal with housing at all (thus was seen as elitist), and had no answer to mass transit, the automobile, and the skyscraper

Skyscrapers

• Ironically, Burnham had also designed skyscrapers to help make a living, including the Flatiron Building in NYC

• Chicago was the first city to turn over to skyscrapers, because it had been destroyed by the fire of 1871, just as the necessary technologies had developed:

– The iron-case frame, first used on the Equitable Insurance Company Building in NYC (which meant the walls did not have to be load barring masonry)

• Thus a very tall building could be built on a relatively small lot

– The passenger elevator (so you didn’t have to walk up stairs)

• The density they provided made great sense for high rent CBD’s, but they really became practical with the invention of the telephone, so people could converse without sending messengers or clogging the elevators

– To get around this problem, some buildings used pneumatic tube systems to move documents around internally

Skyscrapers (cont.)

• Newspapers and insurance companies quickly saw the advertising potential of dominating the city skyline and building something substantial and stable looking

• First person to develop a skyscraper style was Louis Sullivan (of “form follows function” fame), who believed that the nature of things (and nature itself) should be obvious in their structure and orientation

– His most famous building was Buffalo’s Guaranty Building, which showed its steel frame origins through rows of narrow windows, but with brick and terracotta façade to soften the buildings appearance.

• One interesting feature of these early skyscrapers was that the need for setbacks became apparent quickly – namely, that unless the buildings got narrower near their tops, the street would be cut off from all light and circulating air

– Thus why many early 20^th century skyscrapers have a tiered wedding cake appearance

Modernism

• Modernism was a complex movement, but was primarily a reaction to the conspicuous consumption of the 19^th century bourgeois and their tendency to over-adorn everything.

– Modernism held the best design was simple, pure and timeless; it should be functional; and that new progressive social conditions were possible through good design

• The earliest ancestors were Arts and Crafts movement of the UK (against Victorian extravagance, and pro-craftsman and simple, honest, vernacular forms for houses) and France’s Art Nouveau (which used organic forms (most especially stylized plants and florals) and curved lines to adorn more simply)

• But in the US, the early leader was Frank Lloyd Wright, who drew inspiration from the horizontal and geometric shapes of the Japanese Pavilion at the Columbia exhibition

– He developed the Prairie Style, with large overhangs and chimneys, a horizontal orientation, and no attics or basements

Modernism (cont.)

• Architects then go on to draw inspiration from Picasso’s Cubism, which was abstract as opposed to representational, and brought more angularity into buildings

• Secessionsits, Deutscher Werkbund and Machinists took inspiration from the unadorned, streamlined, metallic nature of industrial design, getting rid of all “useless” ornamentation

• Futurists like Antonio Sant’Elia had no concern for the past, and imagined urban landscapes of concrete and factories in permanent revolution

– The hope was eventually architecture which was socially redeeming could be mass produced and inexpensive through use of industrialized production, modern materials and functional design

• Bauhaus School was the most influential of all these, with an emphasis on simplicity of line, plain surfaces, and suitability for mass production (ie Less is More)

– Hitler closed the school, and most members ended up in the US, where they set the stage for postwar architecture and design with their International Style, which would define commercial building

Le Corbusier

• The single most influential urban designer of his age, and perhaps of all time

– Was an all-around creative thinker in all the decorative arts

• Central idea – architecture and cities should be a machine for living

– In La Ville Contemporaine, he suggested the key to relieving crowding in cities was density, in terms of towers, which would leave plenty of space for wide boulevards for cars and green space for recreation (minus the adornment of Arcadian Classicism and Beaux Arts)

• This city was to be class segregated with industrialists, engineers and artists in the tallest towers at the center, and workers in garden apartments in the outskirts

– What he misunderstood is that people like visual diversity in human scale urban neighborhoods; and that big open space (minus central park landscaping), is not utilized and makes walking hard

• Tried to put these ideas into the Plan Voisin for Paris, which would have got rid of Haussman Paris and replaced it with 18 towers 700 m high, with uniform apartments and uniform furniture (it was, luckily, never accepted by the elites); refined them in La Ville Radieuse

Le Corbusier

– Though his biggest plans were never realized (his furniture remains his most influential design, modified versions of them became the core ideas behind the Athens Charter, which was published by CIAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture) and laid out the principals of modern design

• His ideas were accepted less because they were pretty (although some were), but because of their grand sweep and ambition

– Thus the modernist idea that cities had to be “fixed” by ruthless development, tearing out city centers and replacing them with high-rise residential and freeways

– After WWII he turned from Urban Planning mostly (although he did design Chandigarh, India, which showed the evolution of his thought) to individual buildings like Chapel Rochamp and l’Unite d’Habitation

• Why he is sometimes hated is not for his own buildings, but for what he unleashed – cheaply made, less well considered buildings of glass and concrete that sprung up everywhere

Chandigarh

American Modernism

• Wright, unlike Corbusier, was not enamored with the car (nor density)

– He wanted to decentralize metro areas, get rid of car for commuting, using it only for getting to nature

• The idea was called Usonia, and it would get “wage slaves” out of expensive cities, into Prairie homes in semi-rural areas, with parkways connecting them to service stations where low order services would be found

– He also wanted these homes to be individualized and blend with the natural environment (where as originally, Corbusier wanted to make stand out towers)

– But like Corbusier, interested in using mass produced materials like high pressure concrete, plywood, and plastic

• What he is really remembered for are his buildings: Fallingwater, which blended with its surroundings, and his late period curved forms typified by the Guggenheim

– This style was known as Modernist Expressionism