roof deck, 1953
A new enlightenment seemed to be born from the appalling spectacle of World
War II. Europe was rebuilt along modern lines both in terms of government and
urban planning. Modern architects were able to find sympathetic institutional as
well as private clients. Old World attitudes were strenuously challenged and
Modernism seemed to prevail in the arts and architecture. No longer confined
to the shadows, Modern Architecture took center stage, displacing traditional
housing and education prototypes with bold new interpretations, which were
copied throughout the world.
A new collective housing prototype was designed by Le Corbusier, which would
have a profound impact on multi-family housing projects. In a small way, Le
Corbusier was able to realize the concepts of the Radiant City, which had
alluded him throughout the inter-war years. Le Modulor would become the
standard system of proportions for modern architects. He had firmly
established himself as the world’s leading architect, asked to take part in major
projects like the United Nations Headquarters (1947-50) in New York. His
proposal would serve as the model for the final solution. But, it was in the Unité
d’Habitation (1947-53) for Marseilles, where Le Corbusier left one of his most
lasting impressions.
An unprecedented rise in the number of children and young adults resulted in a
great number of new schools and universities being built in the 1950’s and 60’
s. Several of these campus designs stand out, including the design for the
Illinois Institute of Technology (1939-58) by Mies van der Rohe. He redefined
the college campus, abstracting ancient historical as well as modern industrial
examples to create an idyllic setting for higher learning. Mies was the most
successful of the immigrant architects in America, designing numerous small
and large scale projects based on the concept of “universal space.”
Primary and secondary schools were also looked at in intriguing new ways,
resulting in more open planning which encouraged greater interaction between
teachers and students. This more humanist approach defied the institutional
concepts, which had dominated education for centuries. The open school
became the icon of this liberal era.
The Collective Housing Prototype
There had been many attempts to come up with a prototype for multiple family
housing following World War I. The focus had been on minimum requirements
for habitation, or Existenziminimum as the Germans called it. Flats tended to
be compact, regimented units fit into massive housing blocks, or “workers’
fortresses,” which covered an entire city block like the Karl-Marx-Hof (1927) in
Vienna by Karl Ehn.
This idea was carried forward by the Soviet architects, which took the form of
“social condensers,” like the Narkomfin Apartment Building (1928-30) in
Moscow by Moisei Ginzburg. He used an ingenious 3:2 system, which allowed
hallways to be placed at every third level, resulting in interlocking apartments
that had views to both sides. Ginzburg termed these hallways “street decks,”
which he saw as providing a means of social communication. The building
also included a wide variety of social functions such as a cafeteria, gymnasium,
library and day nursery.
The question of appropriate urban housing types dominated the CIAM
(Congrés Internationaux de l’Archtitecture Moderne) conferences but a
consensus was hard to reach, resulting in numerous defections. The Athens
Charter would serve CIAM from 1933 to 1947, during the height of Le Corbusier’
s influence. However, in the aftermath of WWII this manifesto would be
challenged by younger architects, who felt that architecture should meet man’s
emotional as well as material needs. The period between 1947 and 1953 was
the most turbulent, resulting in a number of counter proposals, but the one
project that stood out was Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles,
which was built during this period.
Le Corbusier had emerged from his wartime hibernation to create one of the
most important buildings in Modern Architecture. Unité d’Habitation combined
most of his previous ideas on multiple-family housing, and was the largest
embodiment of his new system of proportions, Le Modulor.
The proportional system was based on a man, 1,829 meters in height, with an
upraised arm at 2,260 meters in height, inserted into a box that was subdivided
according to the Golden Section. The system was further subdivided using a
variation of the Fibonacci series (6,9,15,24,…), with the two scales forming a
double-helix, which he called the Red and the Blue series. Curtis noted “the
Modulor was more than a tool; it was a philosophical emblem of Le Corbusier’s
commitment to discovering an architectural order equivalent to that in natural
creation.”
different types of units arranged in a 2:1 system, similar to that of Ginzburg, with
hallways on alternating floors. The basic concept was that of an ocean liner.
The ventilator towers read as smoke stacks on the garden roof. A communal
service level exists on the middle floor, so as to make it convenient for the upper
levels as well as the lower levels. The whole structure is lifted off the ground on
monumental columns, so as to make as minimal contact as possible with the
ground plane.
The building was made of reinforced concrete with a rough finish, which lent to
it a natural feeling like that of stone. The units are variations of the Citrohan
prototype, adapted to various sized families. These units are unusually long so
as to have views to both sides of the building. There is no attempt to condense
families to minimum standards. The two story galleries were intended to serve
as gathering places, with sunlight filtered in through the brises soleil. The
rooftop served as a playground with a running track around the perimeter. The
parapet walls are just high enough to screen out the city below while providing a
view of the sea beyond. The mountain peaks hover on the horizon as tough in a
Japanese painting. It seemed like Le Corbusier had struck the perfect balance
between the necessary function of a communal housing project and the poetic
aspirations of man.
When first opened in 1952, Unité d’Habitation received a mixed reaction. Some
critics charged that the building would cause mental illness, Curtis noted. But
the younger generation of architects regarded it as the “parent building” for
collective housing types in the post-WWII era. Le Corbusier himself imagined it
as a prototype, a machine à habiter, and felt that by using Le Modulor to help
regulate the relationship between large and small elements, it could be
successfully copied.
At the Ninth conference of the Congrés Internationaux de l’Archtitecture Moderne
(CIAM IX), held in 1953, the decisive split occurred. A generation of younger
architects, led by Alison and Peter Smithson and Aldo Van Eyck, challenged
the four functional categories of the Athens Charter, noted Frampton. They
stated that what the charter lacked was a sense of “neighborliness.” Man had
to have a sense of “belonging,” and that these functional categories did not
satisfy these basic human yearnings. Le Corbusier and other members of the
“old guard” did not attend the next meeting of CIAM in 1956, essentially passing
the torch to the next generation of architects which would call themselves Team
X. But, Le Corbusier had left a lasting monument that would prove most difficult
to improve upon.
The Smithsons’ solution was a hypothetical design, which they called the
Golden Lane Housing System (1952). It combined many of the ideas of
preceding collective housing projects, including the Unité d’Habitation. They
attempted to project the basic residential patterns into a “house in the air,” with
street decks on every third level, a la Ginzburg, which were open all the way
through the building. The labyrinthine building would be constructed over time,
with the housing slums it was replacing gradually diminished. In this way they
hoped not to displace residents, as was usually the case with new housing
projects. However, despite all their concerns, the Golden Lane Housing
System did not represent a significant improvement over past systems and was
never realized.
Denys Lasdun offered an interesting counter design to the linear housing
project in the “cluster block,” built in Bethnal Green, London, in 1954. Lasdun
contained the service functions in a central core, with the units placed in four
separate volumes connected by bridges to the core. This allowed for greater
exposure to sunlight and better ventilated units. Most importantly, the project
avoided the bleakness of a long corridor. He used the scale and rhythms of the
neighboring buildings to determine the proportions of his façades.
Kunio Mayekawa, who had worked under Le Corbusier, imported his ideas to
Japan, designing the Harumi Building (1958) in Tokyo along similar lines as
the Unité d’Habitation. However, Mayekawa gave it a distinctive character,
expressing the reinforced concrete construction in terms of heavy timber
framing. He also chose to bring the building to the ground with splayed walls
that gave the building a greater sense of monumentality. Inside, he tried to
combine Western and traditional spatial planning so as to conform to modern
Japanese society.
However, not all such housing schemes were successful. The attempt to
transplant these ideas in America proved to be an abysmal failure in the Pruitt
Igoe low-cost housing project (1950-6) in St. Louis. The massive housing
project, containing 2,870 individual units, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, was
grossly overscaled for the site. Yamasaki had reduced the Unité d’Habitation to
its most simple components, repeated ad nauseum, so that it more closely
resembled the “workers’ fortresses” of the 1920’s. It soon became a ghetto for
the underclass of St. Louis, rife with crime and vandalism, which finally led to its
demolition in 1972.
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Unité d'Habitation
