Tag Archives: Bauhaus

Architecture, Building Social Spaces, Housing

Gropius on the Scope of Total Architecture

April 4, 2020 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

I almost wholeheartedly loved Walter Gropius on the Scope of Total Architecture. One of the key figures of Bauhaus, he still writes this as his preface, reminding us of the ideals behind the best of this new architecture:

CREATION AND love of beauty are elemental for the experience of happiness. A time which does not recognize this basic truth does not become articulate in the visual sense; its image remains blurred, its manifestations fail to delight.
Since my early youth I have been acutely aware of the chaotic
ugliness of our modem man-made environment when compared to the unity and beauty of old, preindustrial towns. In the course of my life I became more and more convinced that the usual practice of architects to relieve the dominating disjointed pattern here and there by a beautiful building is most inadequate and that we must find, instead, a new set of values, based on such constituent factors as would generate an integrated expression of the thought and feeling of our time.
How such a unity might be attained to become the visible pattern for a true democracy-that is the topic of this book. It is based, essentially, on articles and lectures written-with a few exceptions-during my years in Harvard University as chairman of the Department of Architecture (1937-1952). (7)

So much in common here with so many others I have read:

ENTERING A new chapter of my life that–contrary to the normal expectation of life after seventy–looks to me just as turbulent and perilous as the period preceding it, I realize that I am a figure covered with labels, maybe to the point of obscurity. Names like “Bauhaus Style,” “International Style,” “Functional Style” have almost succeeded in hiding the human core behind it all, and I am eager, therefore, to put a few cracks into this dummy that busy people have slipped around me. (11)

So many cracks! I am so glad to have read this.

Part 1: Education of Architects and Designers

He is and architect and planner, but in many ways and above all a teacher. There is so much here about supporting the following generations to think, imagine, create for themselves. It is lovely, open-minded, focused always on self-improvement through collective endeavor. I also love the way he italicises sentences — much like Ruskin’s aphorisms but not pulled to one side. I have highlighted them because the formatting loses them just a little.

MY intention is not to introduce a, so to speak, cut and dried “Modern Style” from Europe, but rather to introduce a method of approach which allows one to tackle a problem according to its peculiar conditions. I want a young architect to be able to find his way in whatever circumstances; I want him independently to create true, genuine forms out of the technical, economic and social conditions in which he finds himself instead of imposing a learned formula onto surroundings which may call for an entirely different solution. It is not so much a ready-made dogma that I want to teach, but an attitude toward the problems of our generation which is unbiased, original and elastic. (17)

This is a little more of what I was expecting:

Only perfect harmony in its technical functions as well as in its proportions can result in beauty. That makes our task so manifold and complex. (18)

But this relates more to understanding architecture as not simply of aesthetic value but its role in our everyday lives. The way he writes shades sometimes into the uncomfortable pronouncements of the expert upon how lives should be lived, but there is enough sensibility of people’s need to have ownership and control over their environments that could win out over such a top-down assumption of privilege. I am not sure they always did of course, but they might have.

More than ever before is it in the hands of us architects to help our contemporaries to lead a natural and sensible life instead of paying a heavy tribute to the false gods of make-believe. We can respond to this demand only if we are not afraid to approach our work from the broadest possible angle. Good architecture should be a projection of life itself and that implies an intimate knowledge of biological, social, technical and artistic problems. (18)

My Conception of the Bauhaus Idea

After that violent eruption, every thinking man felt the necessity for an intellectual change of front. Each in his own particular sphere of activity aspired to help in bridging the disastrous gulf between reality and idealism. It was then that the immensity of the mission of the architect of my own generation first dawned on me. I saw that, first of all, a new scope for architecture had to be outlined, which I could not hope to realize, however, by my own architectural contributions alone, but which would have to be achieved by training and preparing a new generation of architects in close contact with modern means of production in a pilot school which must succeed in acquiring authoritative significance…
I tried to put the emphasis of my work on integration and co-ordination, inclusiveness, not exclusiveness, for I felt that the art of building is contingent upon the co-ordinated teamwork of a band of active collaborators whose co-operation symbolizes the co-operative organism of what we call society. (19)

I can’t help but feel that this is the genius of Gropius, not so much in what he designed but in the open vision he developed and invited others to own, the creation of collaborative spaces that respected all aspects of creative work, the support of an ideal that working together we are always better than working alone. This thread runs throughout his writings, as does the necessity of reconciling the new industrial reality with a high quality of art and life in a way that someone like Ruskin never could.

Thus the Bauhaus was inaugurated in 1919 with the specific object of realizing a modern architectonic art… It deliberately concentrated primarily on what has now become a work of imperative urgency–averting mankind’s enslavement by the machine by saving the mass-product and the home from mechanical anarchy and by restoring them to purpose, sense and life. This means evolving goods and buildings specifically designed for industrial production. (20)

And so we have interdependence rather than individualism:

What the Bauhaus preached in practice was the common citizenship of all forms of creative work, and their logical interdependence on one another in the modern world. (20)

Our conception of the basic unity of all design in relation to life was in diametric opposition to that of “art for art’s sake” and the much more dangerous philosophy it sprang from, business as an end in itself. …

Here again the emphasis on an openness of vision:

The object of the Bauhaus was not to propagate any “style,” system or dogma, but simply to exert a revitalising influence on design. A “Bauhaus Style” would have been a confession of failure and a return to that devitalizing inertia, that stagnating academism which I had called it into being to combat…

God knows we have too much of the stagnating academism. He opposed this as much as he did the early specialisation to the ignorance of other forms of art and knowledge:

The Bauhaus aimed at the training of people possessing artistic talents as designers in industry and handicrafts, as sculptors, painters and architects. A complete co-ordinated training of all handicrafts, in technique and in form, with the object of teamwork in building, served as the basis. (23)

It embraces this idea of industrialisation as a force that can free us from labour rather than enslave us further. When exactly did we lose that?

The standardization of the practical machinery of life implies no robotization of the individual but, on the contrary, the unburdening of his existence from much unnecessary dead weight so as to leave him freer to develop on a higher plane. (20) … Ruskin and Morris were the first to set their faces against the tide, but their opposition against the machine could not stem the waters. It was only much later that the perplexed mind of those interested in the development of form realized that art and production can be reunited only by accepting the machine and subjugating it to the mind. (21)

and this, refining and repurposing their critique for modern times:

The difference between industry and handicraft is due far less to the different nature of the tools employed in each, than to subdivision of labor in the one and undivided control by a single workman in the other. (22)

His solution? Perhaps not immediately obvious, I am not sure even now perhaps with the benefit of hindsight given all the complexities of capital and consumerism.

DEVELOPMENT OF STANDARD TYPES. The creation of standard types for everyday goods is a social necessity. The standard product is by no means an invention of our own era. It is only the methods of producing it which have changed. It still implies the highest level of civilization, the seeking out of the best, the separation of the essential and superpersonal from the personal and accidental It is today more necessary than ever to understand the underlying significance of the conception “standard”–that is to say, as a cultural title of honor–and firmly to combat the shallow catchword propaganda which simply raises every industrial mass product to that high rank. (26)

Last point here, the importance he set on practice, on experience, on book learning and classroom teaching less than half an education. I love how the material space of the Bauhaus came to be.

In particular, the erection of our own institute buildings, in which the whole Bauhaus and its workshops co-operated, represented an ideal task. (27)

Is there a science of Design?

This looks at design psychologically, understanding how we experience reality and illusion, how children’s perceptions change, the impacts of our subconscious. All the new insights swirling about at the time that now perhaps feel a little dated — but so will our theories in the same span of time. I would like to think architects continue to grapple with them. Gropius again turns to a kind of standardisation:

If design is to be a specific language of communication for the expression of subconscious sensations, then It must have its own elementary codes of scale, form and color. It needs its own grammar of composition to integrate these elementary codes into messages which, expressed through the senses, link man to man even closer than do words. The more this visual language of communication is spread, the better will be the common understanding. This is the task of education: to teach what influences the psyche of man in terms of light, scale, space, form and color. (33)

I am unsure what quite I think of this. What resonates more clearly is the insight into a need for change and motion, the enjoyment of creative tensions.

THE NEED FOR CHANGE. This shift in the basic concept of our world from static space to continuously changing relations engages our mental and emotional faculties of perception…Art must satisfy this perpetual urge to swing from contrast to contrast; the spark, generated by tension of opposites, creates the peculiar vitality of a work of art. For it is a fact that a human being needs frequently changing impressions in order to keep his receptive abilities alert. (40)

He writes a bit later:

We have also learned that the human being needs frequently
changing impressions in order to keep his receptive abilities alert. To produce such a stimulus for him contemporary artists and architects try to create the illusion of motion. (69)

Part Two: The Contemporary Architect

Appraisal of the Development of Modern Architecture

I think the present situation can be summed up as follows: a breach has been made with the past which enables us to envisage a new aspect of architecture corresponding to the technical civilization of the age we live in; the morphology of dead styles has been destroyed and we are returning to honesty of thought and feeling; the general public, which was formerly indifferent to everything to do with building, has been shaken out of its torpor; personal interest in architecture as something that concerns every one of us in our daily lives has been aroused in wide circles; and the lines of future development have become clearly manifest throughout Europe. (59)

I am not sure this still feels true, but I love how it rings.

Archeology or Architecture for Contemporary buildings?

This reminds me quite a bit of Lefebvre, and I love this stretching towards how the co-constitution of society and material built environment might work.

ARCHITECTURE is said to be a true mirror of the life and social behavior of a period. If that is true, we should be able to read from its present features the driving forces of our own time. There is conflicting evidence, however. …

Surely there will always be conflicting evidence, surely this conflict must reflect the various social conflicts as much as capital and its dominant aesthetic and social ideals.

Good original architecture depends just as much on an understanding public as on its creators. (66)

I’m still thinking through that.

The Architect Within Our Industrial Society

His is a broad vision far beyond architecture conceived as a single structure, as his writing on housing issues and planning show. He has strong critique of capitalism:

The satisfaction of the human psyche resulting from beauty is just as important for a full, civilized life, or even more so, than the fulfillment of our material comfort requirements.
We sense that our own period has lost that unity, that the sickness of our present chaotic environment, its often pitiful ugliness and disorder have resulted from our failure to put basic human needs above economical and industrial requirements. (71)

As already noted, a strong preference for the collective above the individual, and a very different vision of leadership based on this:

to collaborate without losing their identity. This is to me an urgent task lying before the new generation, not only in the field of architecture but in all our endeavors to create an integrated society. (78)

The conditio sine qua non of true teamwork is voluntariness;
it cannot be established by command. It calls for an unprejudiced state of mind and for the firm belief that togetherness of thought and action is a prerequisite for the growth of human culture. Individual talent will assert itself quickly in such a group and will profit for its part from the cross-fertilization of minds in the give and take of daily contact. True leadership can emerge when all members have a chance to become leaders by performance, not by appointment. Leadership does not depend on innate talent only, but very much on one’s intensity of conviction and devotion to serve. Serving and leading seem to be interdependent. (79)
Synchronizing all individual efforts the team can raise its integrated work to higher potentials than is represented by the sum of the work of just so many individuals. (80)

Architect–Servant or Leader?

So what has Bauhaus achieved in his view?

If we look back to see what has been achieved during the last thirty or forty years we find that the artistic gentleman-architect who turned out charming Tudor mansions with all modern conveniences has almost vanished. This type of applied archeology is disappearing fast. It is melting in the fire of our conviction that the architect should conceive buildings not as monuments but as receptacles for the flow of life which they have to serve, and that his conception must be flexible enough to create a background fit to absorb the dynamic features of our modern life. (84)

If only this had not been quite so true, resulting in today’s starchitect working in service of capital:

This cult of the ego has delayed the general acceptance of the sound trends in modern architecture. Remnants of this mentality must be eliminated before the true spirit of the architectural revolution can take root among the people everywhere and produce a common form expression of our time after almost half a century of trial and error. This will presuppose a determined attitude of the new architect to direct his efforts toward finding the type, the best common denominator instead of toward the provocative stunt. (85)

It feels like we now live in ever more global cities of provocative stunts and banal ‘luxury’ residential sameness precisely because ‘we’ (developers, planners, people with money) have failed to put ‘basic human needs above economical and industrial requirements‘. Principally economic as financialisation sweeps all before it. It has resulted in a cold and sterile style that draws on Bauhaus, but has none of its soul, vision or open adaptability to facilitate life rather than capital.

Anyway, a few more posts on this to come — much better than the old post on another of my dad’s old books that I read some time ago now.

Gropius, Walter ( 1966 [1943]) Scope of Total Architecture. New York: Collier Books.

Books, Building Social Spaces, Housing

‘Rich is Right’ – Bertrand Goldberg

January 19, 2016 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

Betrand Goldberg with Detroit Park City

America is rich, America is right. Rich is right. Architects have always worked for the rich. We are now also working for the right. And that hasn’t always been the case during the last hundred years. We had better find out who we are working for and what we are trying to say.

The second speech/essay from Bertrand Goldberg to be found in Dans La Ville, and more provocative I think, than even the ‘Critical Mass of Urbanism‘ because it really digs down into the whole point of architecture.

Because it names the reality that for millenia ‘architecture’ — not the everyday homes and settlements and lovely little towns and villages and farms that have grown up over those same millenia, but ‘architecture’ — has been for the rich.

The traditions and history of architecture have been bound together with the ruling societies of their time. Whether the Mayans or the Shakers, architects designed the buildings that spoke for decision-makers. From one period to another, the architect looked not to his colleagues for his kudos , but rather to his clients. For a new plan, a new technology, for a different and sometimes new society, the architect wanted approval from the priest, the banker, or the corporation.

Because it names the hope of architects and planners who are not radical, that the rich will seek what is right through architecture. What is just, what is fair, what will create a better world. We may not share that belief exactly, but I do think that architecture can help to do that.

I like thinking about this potential connection between people and buildings, though it is more dialectical I am sure:

Even in the most usual buildings, architecture is the public
art that shows people what they’ve been thinking. And when architecture creates an unusual building with new technology, it even can nudge social change forward.

But what are we doing instead? I gather Goldberg doesn’t really like post-modernist architecture too much:

Today we find our post-modern buildings are silly and confused. More than a symptom, they are an infection of our times, our people, our economy – a witless, de-humanizing caprice purveyed in the name of historical conscience and stylistic freedom.

There is no question that such trendy garbage relates to the strange, disastrous goings-on in our daily life. Post-modern buildings for the rich who can afford them have the same nonsense quality, the same immaturity, that we presently find in our governments, our economy, and our behavior. Architects are no more confused by this new style than by the many art and architecture critics it inspires; but buildings have more social influence than the critics they give voice
to. In some strange way buildings even reinforce moral majorities and goofy governments. (199)

Damn.

So what should we be building instead? He looks at how much memory has been lost of what came before Bauhaus, and he pulls out some visionary things that are truly awesome:

1784. the French architect Ledoux proposed a rather more than literal functionalism in this design tor a water inspector's house at the source of the River Loire. The river was allowed to run through the house. which was vaulted across the flow of the water. — 1784. the French architect Ledoux proposed a rather more than literal functionalism in this design tor a water inspector’s house at the source of the River Loire. The river was allowed to run through the house. which was vaulted across the flow of the water.

Ledoux designed in 1800 a theatre at Besanion, literally as reflected in the eye of the beholder. — Ledoux designed in 1800 a theatre at Besancon, literally as reflected in the eye of the beholder.

But that connection between wealth and architecture sent developments in different directions.

This is how Goldberg explains the rise of postmodern architecture, the social currents it is channeling, its connection to new technologies and means of production:

The artist – the architect – designed for the newly developed rich and shared their change of values. The abstraction of management in governments and business was matched by the abstraction in the arts and architecture. The building artisan was replaced by the factory. The artistic pictorial was replaced by the pattern. Light and shade were replaced by the plane and the line. At the beginning of the 20th century Taut, Loos, Oud, and Gropius shared in the belief of Le Corbusier that “the right angle is the most perfect of all forms because with it we can measure all things.” By the end of World War I, the box was recognized as the perfect shape to package a right-angled society. The design of the perfect box kept pace with mechanization of all types of production : with factory-made clothes, with steel rolling mills, with automobiles, radios, and packaged food…. What started as democracy in government, industrialization in our economy, structuralization in our aesthetics – as three startling promises for individual freedom in the early 19th century – by the first half of the 20th century had produced a controlled, managed, measured, and confused mass society packed in boxes. (202-204)

So arguably they got some things right, started to some extent in the right direction, but:

They forgot that all men are created equal and different.

And what precisely was the need such architecture came to fulfill? Money.

The multinational corporation, like the late 19th century scientists had been seeking a formula for a universal face – a faceless face that would say money, but not whose, without identity as to how it was made, without accountability as to how it was spent. For them, the universality of the International Style served very well.

The governments of the world have been managing people quite the same way that corporations have been managing money. Governments strengthened by social revolution have developed an unconcern with persons, with individuals, and their problems. Our governments, however idealistic in purpose, are organized to orchestrate masses of the electorate. For this kind of government, the design of the buildings according to the International Style has been perfect. These could be designed like business buildings ; official buildings only had to add a facade of columns. (205)

It is a damning indictment of corporations, government AND architecture, and this juncture in which the failings of all three can be seen built into permanent and concrete form.

Where does he see hope lying?

In the past five years we have seen these changes focus as three events: We have changed our expectations about government ; We have said it should become minimal. Give us room. Go away. Leave me be. Second, we have rejected the mechanization which we imposed upon ourselves in our development of industrial society. Architectural verities associated with the box and the right angle are being expunged as part of this larger wave of rejection. Third, we have revived individual ethics, as represented by the Moral Majority. (206)

Minimal government, it sheds a bit more light on the privatised nature of Marina City, and its methods of self-taxation he talks about a little in ‘The Critical Mass of Urbanism’ — a key question for the buildings and community that architecture facilitates.

To return to the built form, though, in a way this is a critique of Bauhaus as a kind of forerunner to postmodernism, despite his categorical refutation of Tom Wolfe’s rather different critique of Bauhaus:

As a Bauhaus student in 1932 and 1933, I can state that almost nothing he described about the Bauhaus is true.

For Goldberg it is this — the failure of living up to the hopes and ideals they themselves professed:

What the idealistic governments of the 19th century became for people, the Bauhaus became for architecture. Abstract, mechanized, industrialized, without concern for humanism, nevertheless they both had a concern for society. Both in a sense have failed to change our values. The serious consequence of that failure we haven ‘t yet recognized: the original targets, the original idealistic goals, the original concerns of the early 19th century remain an incomplete process with an urgent need for development. We have not fulfilled our promise to ourselves for democracy, for humanism, for using mechanization to give us a better life. These main changes in the human condition are still in progress. (207)

Bertrand Goldberg isn’t one in these essays to criticise capitalism, to face squarely the rise of real estate capital, the pressures and drivers of segregation and suburbanisation. I wish he had been younger when Harvey wrote Limits of Capital, or had felt able to identify and call out these larger forces. I always get a sense of subdued desperation from such figures as Goldberg, visionary and imaginative and able to see more than most about how form and function and community come together, while also genuine in their desire to improve the world. Yet not quite able to see what is distorting every vision — or perhaps feeling unable to express it out loud. Perhaps there was nothing else he could write or say having come through McCarthyism and the continuing red baiting of American society.

Goldberg here seems to me to be writing in desperate hope, as though by writing this he could make it true that rich is right. As though by selling a vision, building a single complex, he could show the way and change everything.

I just wish more people built such fabulous buildings, put such time put into making them perfectly suited to the uses for which they were meant:

When Pope John Paul II, in his Encyclical on Human Work, says that the dignity of work “practically does away with the very basis of its ancient differentiation of people into classes according to the kind of work done,” he is continuing the 19th century battle for a classless society. When in the same document he says, “The right to private property is subordinated to the right to common use, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone,” he is continuing the 19th century battle for redefinition of capitalism. Pope John Paul reminds us that the struggle for change Americans launched politically in 1776 is still alive.

The art of architecture is part of that change. Architecture needs a face that can be recognized as committed to that change – a face to show that architecture is a social art in an industrial age, but above all concerned with the individual. Architecture is not frozen music, as Goethe suggested; it is the body of humanism. Let us protect it.

View of the complexe comprising the obstetrical and gynecological departments and the Institute of Psychiatry of the Medical Faculty of North Western University. The concept of a bed-tower rising above a base building housing the support services has been used in many of Bertrand Goldberg's hospital projects. The Prentice Hospital has solved the structural conflict between bed-tower and base columnar patterns by an engineering breakthrough : the first fully cantilevered high-rise shell. The base building rests on traditional concrete columns. — View of the complexe comprising the obstetrical and gynecological departments and the Institute of Psychiatry of the Medical Faculty of North Western University. The concept of a bed-tower rising above a base building housing the support services has been
used in many of Bertrand Goldberg’s hospital projects. The Prentice Hospital has solved the structural conflict between bed-tower and base columnar patterns by an engineering breakthrough : the first fully cantilevered high-rise shell. The base building rests on traditional concrete columns.

Books, Building Social Spaces

Bertrand Goldberg: Dans La Ville

December 20, 2015 Andrea Gibbons 3 Comments

You can find Michel Ragon’s Goldberg: Dans La Ville or On the City, online now, part of the wonderful website that has tried to collect everything available on Bertrand Goldberg and his work. The book itself in physical form is long out of print and not to be found anywhere.

Myself, I’ve wanted to find out more about Goldberg since his work first stopped me dead in my tracks on a visit to Chicago, and I heard a little about his ideas and his ideals on the river cruise tour of Chicago’s architecture:

Here his ideals are as described by Michel Ragon in Goldberg: Dans la Ville:

To save the heart of the city to rehabilitate, repopulate. revitalize the modern city, best characterizes Bertrand Goldberg ‘s architecture. His work is completely oriented toward the problems of the modern city. It is first of all an urban architecture, a high density architecture, an act of faith in the technical, industrial and mercantile city.

Thus Ragon places him in the tradition of Louis Sullivan rather than the 2nd Chicago School —

He thereby finds himself in opposition to both of the great Chicago leaders who followed that first Chicago School: Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. In opposition to Frank Lloyd Wright, because Wnght, by embracing Rousseau’s philosophical celebration of the American prairie pioneers is a dis-urbanist; in opposition to Mies van der Rohe, because this leader of the second Chicago School was hardly concerned with the city, setting his jewel-like glass boxes down like strange objects in an urban landscape to which they contribute no new life.

Marina City, totally contradicted Mies ‘ work. Not only by its
form, in which the curve “thumbed its nose ” at the right angle, but also by its material (concrete instead of steel). Beginning with this architectural manifesto, Bertrand Goldberg undertook a veritable crusade against box architecture, advocating the naturalist shell form over the abstraction of the parallelepiped rectangle. In Chicago, Bertrand Goldberg ‘s Marina City (1963) seems to be a reply, almost an affront, to Mies ‘s Lake Shore Drive apartments (1951). The disciple revolts. (011)

I love this quote from Goldberg about this revolt:

“I was revolting against a century of static space, against the straight line, against the idea of man made in the image of the machine. All of Mies’ drawings are identical, whether they are meant to describe a factory, a hospital, or a private home. Mies perceived architecture like an artist, and the inhabitants as people who could be folded to fit inside. Faced with the realization that modern urban planning was heading for a catastrophe, if I turned to Mies to find an answer, it seemed to me that Mies was not an urbanist, but rather an anti-urbanist. In the end I transcended the notion of Mies’ post-and-beam structures without realizing it. Moving beyond these structures was inevitable. My own structures were geocentric. For Mies what was clear was in the form, not in the function. Now what is important to me is to give clarity to the function. Mies ignored the potential of American machines which could transform the nature of materials. He was a synthetic thinker rather than an innovator.” (017)

This led him in search of very different shapes and forms, a very different architecture:

His concern for man, for man ‘s development in an architecture which would no longer be box architecture, but rather a reassuring envelope, like an egg or a womb… (012)

but the form always had very practical reasons behind it, and demanded new materials:

Goldberg abandoned steel in favour of concrete because it was
the only material which allowed him to use the shell technique, and he proposed a round architecture because the cylindrical form reduces the effects of the wind force in a very windy city. But with their sixty-five stories, the Marina City towers became the tallest building in the world using this shape and this technique. (013)

And I love how he experimented with them, using his skills and imagination to try and meet the very real needs of a world emerging from war:

In any case, from his return from the Bauhaus until the Second World War, Bertrand Goldberg produced a great number of industrializable products . He wanted to create for the masses. Son and grandson of Illinois brick-makers , he was a child of the factory and the machine. Thus he studied the prefabrication of steel furniture, bathrooms , kitchens, and homes. He was completely absorbed by individual procedures and their applications to architecture. He designed prototypes for prefabricated houses with the aeronautic industry during the war. He also designed armament containers which could be transformed into housing once they reached Europe. (015)

3. A view of a unit bathroom appliance which contained a bathtub, shower, lavatory, water closet and plumbing. 4. A view of the shower fixture which was pivoted to permit a variety of uses. 5. A view of bathing a small child in the lavatory basin. 6. A view of the lavatory which was pivoted to swing either over the bathtub or over the water closet. Goldberg: Dans la Ville — 3. A view of a unit bathroom appliance which contained a bathtub, shower, lavatory, water closet and plumbing. 4. A view of the shower fixture which was pivoted to permit a variety of uses. 5. A view of bathing a small child in the lavatory basin. 6. A view of the lavatory which was pivoted to swing either over the bathtub or over the water closet.

Out of this developed a new kind of architectural philosophy

A space created by a force (an egg) is different from one created by an intellectual concept (a box). The egg, the womb, the bee hive are forms which were brought about by forces. This leads Goldberg , through a paraphrase of the famous slogan “Form follows function” used by all proponents of functionalism, from Sullivan to Le Corbusier, passing through the Bauhaus, of course, to declare “Function creates form.” Thus the forces of structures more than the shapes of structures are what guide Bertrand Goldberg’s quest. And for a compact and complex architecture forming the equivalent of a neighborhood or a small city, this multiplication of forces and their interconnection are what must be taken into account. “When you create a building, says Goldberg , “you think of a structure, but when you create a community, you think of a series of forces reacting with each other.”

5. A view of the concrete balconies in the Marina City residential towers. Every habitable room in the towers opens onto a balcony. 6. The steel frame supporting the sprayed concrete lead-sheeted roof of the theater building. 7. The circular parking structure and the beginning of the apartment levels which both surround the already completed core structure. 8. Schematic floor plan of the structure of the apartment buildings. Goldberg: Dans la Ville — 5. A view of the concrete balconies in the Marina City residential towers. Every habitable room in the towers opens onto a balcony. 6. The steel frame supporting the sprayed concrete lead-sheeted roof of the theater building. 7. The circular parking structure and the beginning of the apartment levels which both surround the already completed core structure. 8. Schematic floor plan of the structure of the apartment buildings.

So he thought about buildings in terms of forces and their relationships with each other, and this emerged out of a detailed observation of the forces that would be contained within his buildings:

Bertrand Goldberg ‘s architectural philosophy has been particularly useful as it is expressed in his hospitals: he never regarded a hospital as a building, but rather as an ensemble of social relations and functions for which architecture was supposed to be the graphic illustration. Bertrand Goldberg always devotes himself to a scientific study of the patterns of life in those settings he is responsible for designing. In hospitals the medical systems impose numerous restrictions on the architect which he must translate into architectonic shapes.

Health Sciences Centre -- State University of New York, Stony Brook. Goldberg: Dans la Ville — Health Sciences Center — State University of New York, Stony Brook

St Joseph’s Hospital, Tacoma, with a schematic plan of the design for the surgical rooms.

This concern for community, for human beings and their needs translated into a concern about the health of cities as a whole.

“The hard core of urban planning,” observes Bertrand Goldberg further “is people.” That means the users of architecture, the users of the city. (019)

Raymond Hilliard Center — Children use the public areas between the elderly and family buildings. The site plan was designed to promote the participation of the elderly residents in the activities of the children.

The following thoughts fascinate me as the phenomenon of white flight connected to capitalism’s spatial fix (the subject of my thesis after all) is here looked at so superficially, as a natural phenomenon almost, and an attempt made to save the central city by providing what they believe people seem to be in search of…They were in the middle of it after all, and I cannot help but applaud the effort and the unwillingness to accept the movement of whites and resources to the suburbs.

All large American cities saw their central population moving out to the expanding suburbs around their periphery. Chicago was no exception. Lewis Mumford spoke of modern cities in terms of “necropolis,” and Mc Luhan in Understanding Media (1964), affirmed that he was a resolute dis-urbanist. And Gutkind in The Twilight of Cities (1962), revived the thesis of the dispersion of living so dear to Frank Lloyd Wright, and declared ” Cities as we know them cannot survive’.’

Bertrand Goldberg observed the same exodus, but his conclusion was completely different. The sclerosis of downtown areas seemed to him to be a warning symbol of agony of a humanistic culture which he therefore intended to defend. To the originality of its round form Marina City added the much greater originality of creating , in two vertical blocks, a mini-city in which living, work, and recreation would mingle as they had done formerly in traditional cities. By situating his two towers on the bank of the Chicago River, Bertrand Goldberg was reconnecting symbolically with the old theme of water as a factor in urban animation. And since transportation and communication have become key words in contemporary life, he grafted his two apartment towers onto a port for boats and a garage for cars. Thus these two buildings were directly linked to the river, to Lake Michigan, and to the street. They didn’t constitute a privileged island in an amorphous center, but rather a kind of radiator (doesn’t their shape suggest a car radiator more than the ears of corn with which they are often compared?) which was to heat up lukewarm urban life. (012)

Ragon asks him this question — ‘So why persist, then, in believing in the city as a moral and spiritual value?’ He answers:

“Because…people need to communicate personally with each other. This is a primitive instinct which architecture must understand, even if governments don ‘t always understand.” For,” says Goldberg, “communication makes community’.’

After communication , there is a second word which recurs the most often in his speech: community. (018)

This focus means he saw things very differently from most planners and architects of his time — the same ones we now excoriate (or some of us do anyway) for a nightmare of unsustainable sprawl and toxic and segregated lifestyles. This means he is a very interesting figure to return to in thinking about how we reimagine our cities, especially in light of energy descent:

Contrary to the urban planning tendency which favors the suburbs and decentralizes the city, Bertrand Goldberg believes that urban life will only be improved by increasing the population density. Denser urban communities would make it possible to finance public transportation , to develop high-technology companies, to offer an intense cultural life, and to economize energy resources. High density urban design would also make it possible to reduce the costs of housing and to lower rent prices…(018)

“A city can no longer afford the burden of buildings which are only used thirty-five hours a week,” adds Goldberg. “Spatial urban planning must therefore be multifunctional, and as open, as mobile, as possible. Cities, if they are not to wallow in perpetual budget deficits, must function all day long, spreading their operating costs among commerce, education, housing, leisure activity, and high-tech industries.” (019)

I’m not sure that density is in fact any more sustainable than other models on this scale, though Ragon states that:

In any case, Marina City demonstrated that a high population density in a well thought-out space didn’t cause any problems . The nine hundred families at Marina City, who form one of the most dense populations in the western world, live in perfect harmony. The rooms which expand from the center of the tower toward the outside give the impression of being larger than they actually are. And in summer, the barbecues on the balconies create the congenial feeling of an Indian camp . (012)

But there was a whole movement of tower blocks and megastructures that has to some extent been discounted these days. That said, I think many would still jump at the chance to actually live in one of Goldberg’s buildings:

And since we are discussing architectural futurology , Bertrand Goldberg ‘s work since 1959 illustrates another one of its notions: the megastructure, although he never uses this term, neither in his conversation nor in his numerous writings. Bringing together all the functions of a neighborhood in one architectural unit, conceiving thick buildings that reduce energy consumption , breaking down the classic skyscaper with buildings linked by horizontal as well as vertical passageways, moving in some way toward a spatial urban design : these are some of the advantages of the megastructure. But Bertrand Goldberg never uses the term “megastructure,” because he is wary of it. For him, megastructures like those proposed by the futurology of the sixties are too large. He prefers, as in his Stony Brook building , to separate the megastructure into sections and create focal points so that people can orient themselves and form clusters of activity. (014)

Goldberg: Dans la Ville — A view of the office building supported above its base structure. The base floor of the office building contains a recreational bowling its base structure. The base floor of the office building contains a recreational bowling alley and commercial retail space. The roof of the base is a recreational terrace for the office employees. The ten floors of office space are supported on a transfer system created by the columns.

Interesting that this also began in a way with Louis Sullivan here in Chicago:

In the tone of Bertrand Goldberg ‘s writings and in their philosophy there is an evident kinship with Sullivan, even with the mixed-use building which Louis Sullivan undertook as his first influential work. The Chicago Auditorium Building (1886-1889), a gigantic architectural complex , included an auditorium, meeting rooms, offices, and a hotel. And the skyscrapers were of course the first stage in this history of three-dimensional urban design which Bertrand Goldberg fully intends to bring to a new, influential form, moving from the static to the kinetic. (020)

Louis Sullivan – Auditorium theater. Chicago, Illinois, 1889.

There is also in both an idea of community and democracy that became centered in Chicago’s architectural traditions:

Like the poet Walt Whitman, who united the machine and democracy in his songs. Sullivan believed that from industrial society a profoundly democratic society would be born; the Chicago School became one of the first artistic expressions. And his disciple Frank Lloyd Wright, like him, bestowed a moral mission on architecture, proclaiming democratic convictions which his architecture was supposed to help propagate and consolidate.

There is much more here, particularly in Goldberg’s two essays that have been included and that I think I just might look at separately.

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Books, Reviews

Introduction to Walter Gropius

April 7, 2015 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

A fairly good short introduction to Walter Gropius I think. My principal critique is that despite its emphasis on Gropius’s own belief in collaborative work, he is the focus to the exclusion of all others — it actually treats Gropius as one of the individualistic architects that he tried to set himself apart from. So Bauhaus as a school and a community in which many wonderful artists took part — particularly Klee who I love — remains very opaque. Still, Gropius’s vision is fairly clear I think, though I fear the U.S. red-baiting of the time affected some of the Fitch’s protestations of the distance between Walter Gropius’s politics and any kind of dreaded socialism.

Fascinating, though, is Fitch’s compilation of the Bauhaus vision from various quotes:

The Bauhaus believes the machine to be our modem medium of design and seeks to come to terms with it.

All design must recognize this fact of life and distill a new set of esthetic criteria from it. Such a process would, for architecture, lead to “clear, organic [form] whose inner logic will be radiant and naked, unencumbered by lying facades and trickeries”.

The Bauhaus teaches “the common citizenship of all forms of creative work and their logical interdependence upon one another.”

The scale and complexity of modern problems necessitates collaborative design. “Any industrially produced object is the result of countless experiments, of long systematic research.” The design school must recognize this and equip the student with “the common basis on which many individuals are able to create together a superior unit of work”.

The education of the designer “must include a thorough, practical manual training in workshops actively engaged in production, coupled with sound theoretical instruction in the laws of design”.

This contrasts with Le Corbusier in very interesting and fundamental ways while still retaining the aesthetic of machines and modernity.