JAN VERWIJNEN Professor, University of Art and Design Helsinki email: jverwij @ uiah.fi
Process versus Product: What about an Architectural History of µThings in the Making¶?
I understand the architectural avant-garde of the 1950s and 60s as part of a cultural movement of µsingularity negotiating universality¶ differently then during the Modern Movement¶s µheroic¶ µheroic¶ period before World War II. In this paper my point is that in the 1960s perhaps out of a need to counterbalance the growing dominance of cognitive reasoning and its instrumental rationality that came into the design processes through advances in building buildingtechnology technology and particularly through the growing complexity of building programmes architects increasingly started to use new design instruments. Recent research points towards the the 1950s and 60s a s a period that conceals an unwritten history of modernity in architecture. It is my opinion that the history of 20th century architecture is a history more of concepts than of anything else. After World War II this becomes apparent, although its origins lie in the 1920s and 30s. These concepts operate at an intermediary diagrammatic level of the design process between the aesthetic choice for a final form of a building and the analytical cognitive logic of increasingly complex programmatic requirements. Robert Somol (1999) acknowledges this as follows ³... ³... the procedure of architectural knowledge has seemingly shifted over the second half of the twentieth century, from the drawing to the diagram.´ diagram. ´ This paper will explore as an example the diagrammatic design process of Le Corbusier¶s La Tourette, the Dominican monastery, in relation to his earlier concepts for the µVilla Savoie¶ and the µPavillon Suisse¶. An interesting feature is that the µPavillon Suisse¶ was originally µmisunderstood¶ and left out of The International Style catalogue by the authors, because it appeared unexplainably different different from the µVilla Savoie¶. In search for µa style¶ they failed to see that there was a conceptual consistency between them from a point of view of µthings in the making¶. In this context my point of departure is: what would it mean for architectural history to think in relation not to µthings made¶ but to µthings in the making¶? This perspective of µthings in the making¶ is in this paper understood: 1. as a discourse of the process of designing itself ( as µprescriptive¶ mode) 2. as connected to a conceptual diagrammatic level of designing and 3. representing a shift in the idea of architectural composition (the joining of parts). The question that follows is: can an internal discourse of architectural design, of projects and how they were thought exist? Eisenman addresses this as architecture¶s µinteriority¶. ³Rarely ³Rarely has architecture theoretically examined its own discourse, its i nteriority. My work on the diagram is one such examination. It concerns the possibility that architecture can manifest itself, manifest its own
interiority in a realized building. The diagram is part of a process that intends to open architecture to i ts own discourse, to its own rhetoric «.´ (Eisenman 1999b, 37). This position marks a different, perhaps alternative way of dealing with architecture¶s history, one not founded on resemblance and return to origins but on modes of becoming. This entails a shift away from style and towards knowledge central to the generation of f orm. Based on the idea of design as a material practice - an activity that works in and among the world of things - that condenses, transforms and materializes concepts there is increasing evidence that the concept and its illustration through a diagram (and no longer a plan) become the generator of form. They guide the concrete decision-making process in a design. The increasing importance of the concept as an idea within the field of professional imagination, which is different from historical imagination, points to the fact that within the world of design a rupture between descriptive (design products) and prescriptive (design processes) modes of operation seems to exist.
Actuality of the Diagram In the past five years an increased interest in the diagram has led to a series of publications and conference presentations. In his introduction to Peter Eisenman¶s Diagram Diaries Robert Somol (1999) traces the history of the diagram and states about its actuality that: ³In general the fundamental technique and procedure of architectural knowledge has seemingly shifted over the second half of the twentieth century, from the drawing to the diagram. This is not to suggest that a diagram of one form or another was not always constitutive of architecture at various points in its history, but simply that it has only been in the last thirty years or so that the diagram has become fully ³actualised´, that it has become almost completely the matter of architecture. Proceeding with halting steps through serial obsessions with form, language and representation « the diagram has seemingly emerged as the final tool, in both its millennial and desperate guises for architectural production and discourse.´ (Somol 1999, 7).
In his Diagram Diaries Peter Eisenman reflects on the nature of the diagram: ³W hile it can be argued that the diagram is as old as architecture itself, many see its initial emergence in Rudolf itkower¶s use of W the nine-square grid in the late 1940s to describe Palladian villas«. In architecture the diagram is historically understood in two ways: as an explanatory or analytical device and as a generative device. Although it is often argued that the diagram is a postrepresentational form, in instances of expl anation and analysis the diagram is a f orm of representation. In an analytical role, the diagram represents in a different way from a sketch or a plan of a building. For example a diagram attempts to uncover latent structures of organization, like the nine-square, even though it is not a conventional structure itself. As a generative device in a process of design t he diagram is also a form of representation. But unlike traditional forms of representation, the diagram as a generator is a mediation between a palpable object, a real building, and what can be called architecture¶s interiority.´ He continues ³The diagram is not only an ex planation, as
something that comes after, but it in also acts as an intermediary the process of generation of real space and time. As a generator there is not necess arily a one-to-one correspondence between the diagram and the resultant form.´ (Eisenman 1999a, 27-28)
Le
Corbusier as Case
To illustrate the existence of a conceptual and diagrammatic level in design processes I make a case for the relationship of three projects of Le Corbusier that appear totally different in style, but show a certain conceptual consistency. These three projects are the Villa Savoie (1929), the Pavillon Suisse (1932) and the monastery of La Tourette (1960). They represent three very different programs: a villa, a student dormitory and a cloister for Dominican monks. For each of the projects exist similar diagrams that allow to understand how the projects were conceived through a set of relationships, of complementing systems. Starting with the Villa Savoie we see (fig 1):
PROGRAM STRUCTURE ENCLOSURE CIRCULATION (spatial layout) (load bearing system) (skin + openings) (system of movement)
four axonometric drawings representing respectively (1) the program or spatial layout, (2) the structure (or load bearing system), (3) the enclosure (or skin) and its system of openings and (4) the circulation that are four complementary subsystems of the building. This illustration of interacting components, taken from the introduction of Francis Ching¶s classical schoolbook on form and order is not new and was widely applied by Richard Meier in his early works. We can understand these components not just as separate layers, but as a double set of relationships: (a) each represents a relationship in itself, and (b) even more important is how they particularly relate to each other. For example, as structure the µplan libre¶ (free plan) expresses (a) an independent relationship of load bearing columns and non-load bearing walls. But (b) it also constitutes an uninterrupted strip window as opening system. Thus we can understand the µplan libre¶ not just as a configuration, but more as a composition. It means that instead of what was traditionally the subject of formal composition and such as the proportions of the façade, compositional thinking now extends itself to the subsystems or components of a building design and particularly to the relationship of these components to each other. Together they make up ± they literally µcompose¶ ± the entire building. In other words composition has become a professional
concept of the potential arrangement of these components that define a building in terms of circulation, structure, enclosure and spatial layout. This aspect of Le Corbusiers thinking is a different interpretation of his 5 Points for A New Architecture and has in my opinion largely been overseen. They are the beginning of a systematic diagrammatic thinking through which the notion of composition shifts to a more abstract level of joining the parts of a building conceptually. In this context the following small anecdote reveals a perhaps important clue: in 1932 the Pavillon Suisse was already finished, but left out from the The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 (1932) catalogue by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, because it appeared unexplainably different from the µVilla Savoie¶. In search for µa style¶ they failed to see a consistency with his approach to the µVilla Savoie¶. In his preface to the 1966 edition of The International Style Henry-Russell Hitchcock admits that they in 1932 had had difficulties including Corbusier¶s Villa de Mandrot into the exhibition, because it violated the principles of International Style they had just created. He explains that particularly the rubble wall of the Villa de Mandrot caused them problems and was finally accepted as an aberration of the three main principles of International Style. But he concedes that while writing the book that served as catalogue for the exhibition in 1932 they were not clear about how far Le Corbusier with his Pavillon Suisse would go beyond the principles that they were trying to establish with International Style. Particularly the thick, rough concrete and sculpturally shaped pilotis (columns) under the building were unexplainable (Hitchcock 1966). Although construction was well under way and more or less ready it seems that the Pavillon Suisse was left out from the exhibition for this reason. VOLUME
Complementarity of program and circulation system STRUCTURE Steel skeleton on elevated concrete base of columns PROGRAM based on the standardization of a student room
The analytical drawings of the Pavillon Suisse (fig. 2), a dormitory for Swiss students in the Cité Universitaire in Paris, reveal a systematic approach to the programmatic requirements ± starting with a study of what a student room would need to be and how the circulation system works complementary to that. Thus a volume emerged that was translated into a steel structure and suitable for a µconstuction à sec ¶ - a (dry) montage of panels. The enclosure and its opening system follow the potential of the steel skeleton and become large window panels with floor high sheets of glass. In other words conceptually the same principles that were demonstrated at the Villa Savoie had been employed, but because the notion of composition had partly shifted to a conceptual level, this consistency was not directly visible. On the outside, stylistically there is perhaps an unexplainable break between the two, but conceptually the composition of complementary subsystems as a relationship of parts that make up the building and bring its construction, the making of it in unison with the compositional idea, had even ad vanced. Le Corbusier himself expressed this in 1928 commenting on his Weissenhofsiedlung houses ³...il s¶agit de standardiser un système de structures «. u n système nouv eau assez riche de conséquences pour qu¶il puisse de str re uc t u déterminer une variété infinie de plans, « répondre à des programmes petits, moyens ou grands. Créer un système de structure.³ (Reichlin 1987)
With the third example, the cloister of µSainte Marie de la Tourette¶, completed in 1960, this conceptual aspect becomes even clearer. The program needs to combine the private quarters of the monks with their need for communal spaces and further Le Corbusier introduces a roof garden. These different uses were stacked on top of each other ± private rooms on the top two floors, communal spaces below. For architects of the post war period this stacking had become a typical problem accompanying the increasing programmatic complexity of their tasks, but it also reflected an increased will for achieving differentiation. For Le Corbusier both µplan libre¶ and µfaçade libre¶ now become compositional elements of the design process in combining these programmatic and spatial aspects of the project. Figure 4 reveals how the principle of the µplan libre¶ at the communal level accommodates the spaces. This diagrammatic sketch shows how curved walls for the communal spaces. were simply superimposed over the plan of the private rooms located one floor higher and are totally independent of its structure. It was, however, built with straight walls that never the less run completely independent of the column structure. (fig 5) There is more: the cloister for the monks, their main µmeditative corridor¶ becomes for Le Corbusier a circulation system that consists of ramps ± but this leads beyond the scope of this paper. Thus I conclude that in the 1960s with modernism becoming mainstream, new diagrammatic and conceptual tools seem to
become necessary and architectural style becomes a more personal, singular problem. Le Corbusier¶s style may now change rapidly and no longer needs to express the progress and rationality of µa machine age¶, because it seems as if that element of discourse has shifted to a higher level of abstraction ± it has become a new tool, a mode of designing conceptually.
Axonometric view
of the dormitory rooms on top of the column and beam structure of the communal spaces.
Bibliography Eisenman, Peter (1999a). ³Diagram: An Original Scene of Writing´. In: Diagram Diaries edited by Peter Eisenman. London: Thames and Hudson. Eisenman, Peter (1999b). ³Diagrams of Anteriority´. In: Diagram Diaries edited by Peter Eisenman. London: Thames and Hudson. Hitchcock, Henry-Russell and Philip Johnson (1966 [1932]). The International
Style: Architecture Since 1922 . New York: W.W. Norton Ockman, Joan (2000) ed. The Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking about µThings in the Making¶. New York: Princeton Architectural Press Reichlin. Bruno (1987). ³Eine Strukturanalyse: Das Einfamilienhaus von Le Corbusier und Pierre Jeanneret auf dem Weissenhof´ in: Werk, Bauen + Wohnen 74/41 (1/2): 29-35. Ronner, Heinz (1987). ³Standardisierung als Idee´ in: Werk, Bauen + Wohnen 74/41 (1/2): 36-39 Somol, Robert E. (1999). Dummy Text, or The Diagrammatic Basis of Contemporary Architecture. In: Diagram Diaries, Peter Eisenman (ed) . London: Thames & Hudson. Van den Heuvel, Dirk (2000). ³The Diagrams of Team 10´. In: Daidalos Issue 74 (October 2000): 40-51
