The Architectural Project (Studies in Architecture and Culture)

The Architectural Project Number Six: Studies in Architecture and Culture Malcolm Quantrill, General Editor

i Foreword

The Architectural Project

By Alfonso Corona-Martínez Edited by Malcolm Quantrill Translated by Alfonso Corona-Martínez and Malcolm Quantrill

Texas A&M University Press College Station

Copyright ©  by  (Center for Advancement of Studies in Architecture) Manufactured in the United States of America All rights reserved First edition The Studies in Latin American Architecture series of CASA’s Studies in Architecture and Culture is published with supporting grants from the Graham Foundation for the Advancement of Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, and the Office of the Vice President for Research and the College of Architecture, Texas A&M University.

The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, .-. Binding materials have been chosen for durability.

For a complete listing of books in this series, see the back of the book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Corona Martínez, Alfonso. The architectural project / Alfonso Corona-Martínez ; edited by Malcolm Quantrill ; translated by Alfonso Corona-Martínez and Malcolm Quantrill. p. cm.—(Studies in architecture and culture ; no. ) Includes bibliographical references.  --- (alk. paper) . Architectural design. . Architectural design—Study and teaching. I. Quantrill, Malcolm, – II. Title. III. Series. .  —dc 

Contents

Foreword, by Marco Frascari Preface

vii

xiii

Introduction 3  . Design Processes

7

. Description Generation . Design Education

25

41

. The Two Faces of Functionalism . Typology

60

79

. Development of the Project: The Elements of Architecture . Elements of Composition 124 . Changes in Design Method: The Future in the Present Notes

187

Index

199

164

99

Foreword Lege feliciter

Unhappy thoughts have dominated most contemporary architectural thinking, and this has forced the basic components of the architectural discipline to separate out in the same way that the oil and the egg-yolk break apart when a mayonnaise curdles. My grandmother, who was an astonishingly good cook, had a secret method for saving the situation when that happened. Meanwhile, my job was to continue whisking the eggs and oil. I will try to convert her time-honored method into an analogical tool by pointing out that this essay by Alfonso Corona-Martínez introduces a powerful recipe for overcoming the present curdling tendency in both the practice and teaching of architecture. CoronaMartínez’s own “secret method” succeeds by explaining the material nature of architectural imagination. The crucial question raised by this extraordinary book is: “What does the author mean by “an essay on the architectural project” (from the Spanish title Ensayo sobre el Proyecto, or An Essay Concerning the Project)? Corona-Martínez’s book is certainly not an essay about architecture— our bookshelves are already full of such architectural essays. Instead he has written something quite different. His essay is rather concerned with what goes on within architecture, or, to be more precise, in the use of architectural composition. At the deep level of description, the processes of architectural composition are universal; the elaborations of a few simple structural values and principles result in a great variety within the scope of the architectural imagination, which can cut all the way through temporal, spatial, and cultural divisions. If our quest is to understand architecture by thinking within architecture rather than thinking about architecture we have to understand the workings of the mechanism that drives compositional thinking. Otherwise, we will be condemned to watch in despair as the architectural world created in the past continues to slip further and further away from our awareness and intellectual perceptions. Modern architects do not make buildings as such, rather they compose them in drawings. Two processes of “essential polar intelligence” characterize architectural drawings. These are the categorical and inferential processes.

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Thus drawing might be considered as a form of “predicament deciphering” in which some of the input happens to come in part through the senses and in part through needs, expectations, and beliefs, and in which the output is the category of the building being perceived. There is no distinction between drawing and thought. Because of this, drawings are the main expression of architectural theory, and this expression takes place through the process Corona-Martínez refers to as “composition.” In the real project of architecture, drawings and buildings exemplify and suggest rather than determine or impose, integrating the art of composing well with the art of living well. Reflective architects should always concern themselves with the art of composition. The appropriate use of composition is indispensable both to the disciplinary relationship between theory and practice and to the professional relationships between architects, builders, and clients. Representing clients, users or any other conglomerate that generates a request for construction, the architect cannot be the builder. Instead, his task is to control the making of buildings by means of well-constructed graphic compositions. These mediate between those powers which govern every design; namely, the client, the contractor, and the building concept. A building can be designed only through a continuous creative, intellectual mediation between the imagination and imagining, and both these mediations are performed by means of well-tempered compositions. The idea of architectural composition implies, if not demands, this performance. Virtually any form of drawing is a kind of composition, and any form of drawing is a type of performance. Drawing is an intensely physical art, one that activates several senses at once. In visual societies drawing has traditionally been accompanied by facial movement, gesture, manipulation of symbolic objects, the wearing of costumes, and so on—all of which, in a tribal context, are part of a cultural vocabulary. Composition is a physical talent using multiple senses: the body as a whole. Drawings make use of a particular sensory conjunction—that between touching and seeing. By looking at and feeling the surface of a drawing, designers are in contact respectively with the outward appearances and finish of edifices and the interior inauguration and sturdiness of their constructions. The chasm between the two senses makes the designers aware of the complex interplay between the inside and the outside by providing a new locus of architecture, since to draw is to enter into participation with the inscriptions and compositional essays that mark the surface of the drawing. However, in the mainstream culture of the western world, during the twentieth century, architectural drawing and consequently composition has become an ever more ephemeral,

dephysicalized act. At the same time contemporary drawings work against this tendency, rediscovering drawing methods from other cultures and other periods, while discovering new ones of their own. Though for most people drawing becomes more and more a system of simple data transference, architects attempt to find alternative notations and to expand the range of their performance. For Corona-Martínez, the mystery of architecture is all in the divinatory nature of the mirroring metaphors that rule the acts of composition. The composition of buildings in drawings (a recollection), and the composition of drawings in buildings (a foretelling), is a speculative chiasma, a hypogean structure, on which the project of architecture must be erected. This project recognizes and confirms architecture as a trade with an intellectual tradition. Composition is the locus of the transmutation of recollection in foretelling intelligence: it generates the quasiarchitecture of the dream, the Heraclitean idios kosmos that undercuts empirical discernment by refusing the scientific separation of past, present, and future. To compose means to recognize or guess at what has instituted an imagined state into a composition. This involves instituting an interpretation. A translation is the result of the univocallity of the interpretative scheme and the ambiguity of composing. The architect who is composing a building in a drawing or a drawing in a building proceeds by alternating schemes and corrections. These translations are not abstractions but steps in the process of successive definitions: they constitute an architectural project. Embodied in the drawings, architectural imagery acts as the generator of architectural expression, which is the beginning of any architectural composition. In the practice of architecture, the most ingenious segment of the process by which our constructed world comes about has always involved a characteristic act of composition. Unfortunately, now, this intriguing and desirable projectile operation has been disguised beyond recognition within the meanderings in the back rooms of professional practice. This critical segment of the art of architecture has been reduced to a prosaic activity. The problem with its negative connotation begins within the educational realm, and Corona-Martínez clearly indicates how the distrust and the destruction of the power of architectural virtues are predicated not upon ideas of design value, which unfittingly always becomes “valuedesign,” but on a sense of wonder made real through elegant design principles embodied in compositions elaborated by knowledgeable architects. These are the practitioners who are respectful of the edifying and beatific measures of human dwelling. The quasi-doctrine of composition in the architectural project is the fundamental and necessary

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premise to rediscover genial and substantial architectural cosmologies and cosmographies. These are predicated on a moral imagination rather than on an inapposite mix of aestheticizing social and behavioral predictions. In the architectural project, the integration of the art of building well combines with the art of composing well, and both drawings and buildings exemplify and suggest rather than determine or impose. The union of dream and “solid stuff” in architectural events becomes an expression of pleasure, a subjective presence rather than an objective procedure to which both the user and the architect must be subjected, in which the details and the fabricated devices are playful demonstrations of events that are cosmologically part of an edifice. A building can be designed only through a continuous creative, intellectual dialectic between the imagination and imagining. Using this bipolar condition, architects do not make a sensory phenomenon out of an idea. On the contrary, they shape the sensory phenomenon into an idea using composition and “character.” Architects with their graphic dreams do not open the doors for the spirit to enter everyday life. On the contrary, they raise everyday experiences to the sphere of the imagination, converting mere imaginings into the dimensions of physical reality. The grasp of happy beginnings that is the core of the architect’s moral imagination, is expressed through the conjuring act of drawings, which elaborate the relationship between the mundane and the sacred in a transhistorical condition. Questioning the pseudo-completeness of present CAD drawing techniques, which cannot even perform the fundamental act of establishing the indispensable cosmological relationship between material being and cultural order, a composition remains the necessary component of these inaugurations. Corona-Martínez’s comprehension and explanation of the transhistorical condition for the architectural project provides a common ground for future actions, not only in the pedagogy, but also with the aim of achieving an appropriately elevated level, by establishing criteria that permit countries, schools, and professional organizations to evaluate and improve on the quality of architectural production. As embodied in a transhistorical understanding of the relationship between people and buildings, and between buildings and environments, composition calls for exchanging human scale to needs. Well-tempered compositions create a constructive approach to the realization of quality in building through the medium of graphic ideas. Composition is not just a manual skill, or as Corona-Martínez puts it “a mere technique,” but a manifestation of a design sense acquired through appropriate exercises of prudent observations and temperate explorations through architectural storytelling.

The most difficult assignment for architects is to draw a construction (project) through virtuous reflections. In other words, to extract from the blank surface of a sheet of paper the inauguration of a future building. This demanding task is based on the art of assembling and converting invisible configurations into a visible drawing. This is achieved by concretizing in a set of lines, marks, and strokes, the future potentiality of an edifice, which cannot be fully expressed initially, but is present, suspended in architectural thinking. Only through these thoughtprovoking procedures, can drawings become callimetric technographies that weave thoughts into those magical projections of buildings. The grasp of architectural beginnings, the core of the architect’s professional imagination is expressed in technometric tracings, i.e., tempered and prudent analogical drawings that make possible the construction of edifying edifices. Well–tempered compositions elaborate the relationships between the mundane, the sacred, the dream and the more solid stuff into an elegant transhistorical condition. An elegant transhistorical condition implies that certain features of causation remain invariants. Architecture is formed within a tension field of these invariants, between reason, emotion, and intuition. Correctly, Corona-Martínez points out that it should be the mission of architectural education to foster the conceptualization, coordination, and execution of those constants of building that are rooted in human traditions. The understanding of the transhistorical experience of architecture remains the key issue for architectural education. In transhistorical pedagogy, learning and teaching are based on ongoing historical examples that have been meticulously documented during the various stages of development as a narrative of the immanence of environment, or as a full-fledged experiment in mastering the art of the well-tempered drawing. Within the degraded state of theoretical sentimentality and visual vulgarity that dominates the ostentatious and pretentious architecture of today, the idea of composition might be proposed as a novel, and at the same time as a venerable approach to the project. Quality in architecture relates to and respects natural and built environments together with the expression of collective and individual cultural heritages. Well-tempered procedures cannot be abstractly constructed or described; they are the result of a process of assimilating heritages and environments that can be exemplified through moral tropes, geometric ordering, and constructive analogies that are embodied both in buildings and in drawings. Cognitive appropriation, rather than disciplinary justification serves as the base for well-tempered compositions, the ideal locus where a condition between rationality and non-rationality results in a cosmography that sustains the making of places. They are

xi Foreword

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instruments capable of integrating the solid stuff of the spaces that encircle us with the dream stuff that takes shape in human minds. The cognitive composition advocated by Corona-Martínez is productive and inference-based on instinct, just as the oral tasting of children is an instinctive part of cognitive appropriation. Architectural composing is an illuminating and elegant dream of cognitive appropriation. We can master and teach these elegant design procedures only through what Pascal has called “esprit de finesse et esprit de geometre.” Fostered by fluid mental attitudes, these procedures dwell among the classical dichotomies proposed by philosophy and the puzzling but powerful paradigms generated by imaginal thinking. Following the tradition of many medieval authors writing about theoretical matters, Leon Battista Alberti closes his preface to De re aedificatoria by wishing his readers a joyful grasp of his theories. “Lege feliciter,” or “Happy reading,” Alberti implores. I would like to extend the same wish to the readers of Corona-Martínez’s essay, feeling confident that they will not be disappointed. —Marco Frascari Virginia Polytechnic Institute Alexandria, Virginia

Preface

In The Architectural Project I aim to show that in the nineteenth century, by freeing composition from the elements of classical architecture, a new and almost invariable form of design practice was created. It is the practice of an abstract “composition” which is, however, a composition of architecture. In this way, a succession of styles becomes possible, within a compositional methodology that essentially changes very little. The idea underlying this text is to show that the revolution in architecture leading to modernism—which took place at the end of the nineteenth century or the beginning of twentieth, depending on the authors considered—does not correspond to a change in design methods. Design methods had been silently revolutionized between the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. The design methods produced by that revolution were applied in the schools of architecture established at that time. These methods persisted in the twentieth century and they have proven adequate as the basis of modern architecture. This idea contradicts prevailing myths about the origins of the Modern movement, but it has been with us for a long time. Reyner Banham demonstrated in  how for design practice, the original Modern movement is no more than a new style.1 This condition continues. I am not suggesting that all the stages of modernism, up to the present, are no more than so many styles; I am merely saying that in operative terms they are so, because the design process has proven to be adequate for various formalizations. It also coincides with the utilitarian ideology of the two centuries following the Industrial Revolution. The design process remained almost immune to stylistic change in the nineteenth century and also in the twentieth. It is perhaps riskier to say that those of us who teach students to design buildings, following the tradition of elementary composition, are working to perpetuate this relation of method and style. Unwillingly we work to make the successive styles of this long end of the twentieth century—no matter whether we judge them to be superficial fashion or

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transcendental movements—behave as no more than trends that are added to the top of the permanent discipline of composition. Perhaps it is our design method that preserves the status of styles through the succession of the moments of modernism. Perhaps our design methods condemn them to be like the styles of the nineteenth century. We should not despair: a change in the techniques of representation is taking place. Whether we like it or not, there will probably be a change in architecture. This is not prophesy—only an extrapolation from the past, an analogy. We dare to expect another revolution in architecture, perhaps as extraordinary as the ones that took place in the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Architects as we know them first appeared in the Renaissance. Their new professional competence was based on the exact representation of space and on a revival of Roman architecture. Computer graphics provide us not only with new forms of representation but also with a change in the mode of production and in the use of drawings. Therefore, this new mode should be capable of changing architecture. The present book, written initially as a warning against the tyranny of representation over imagination, addresses a particular stage in the architect’s life, the formative years: schooling. It is written with precisely that moment in mind when the student’s effort is centered on appropriating a technique for design. Later, students will center on the architectural values to be incorporated in their designs or those they want to incorporate. This book deals with design theory, not with a possible theory of architecture. When we have overcome design technique, when we “already know how to design,” we will be free from this stage of learning, from the tyranny of representation. Or perhaps we shall be forever chained to this obstacle, to the identification of design with architecture itself. The technique of design is not simply instrumental, one tool that we could possibly exchange for another. It has the same status as the socalled media. Perhaps there is no mere instrumentality in human actions. As the project is an act of invoking an object so as to make it exist, Marco Frascari has poetically described it as an act of magic: “The role of architects is to produce design, an act of graphical magic, a kind of divining that describes a future built event. This architectural prognosis is later translated wisely into a building.”2 Design “summons” a nonexistent object and relies completely on our belief that representation can make this future object exist, or preexist. In the words of Robin Evans: “Without the architect’s faith that a few lines geometrically defined will engender something more substantial

than the drawing, but discernible through it, without that faith in the genetic message inscribed on paper, there is no architecture.”3 In The Architectural Project, we hold the view that the way we learn to use these instruments both conditions and sets boundaries for our conception of architecture; it defines what architecture will be for us. We learn procedures for designing, and these will be our first routines in the making of successive new projects. If we are successful, these will become for us the way to design; we will believe we have learned the correct way of inventing the nonexistent building, and this practice will become second nature to us. We may escape being victims of this magic if we don’t possess it. If we learned at the same time to represent existing buildings and to create new ones, we would create in our minds a just correlation of representation with real, experiential spaces. To learn this method we must first draw existing buildings. Unfortunately, this is an element of tradition (rélevé) that we have almost completely lost. As Herman Crowe and Steven W. Hurtt put it: In the pedagogical system of today, partially transformed by the impact of Modern Architecture, the habit of making visual (graphic) notes and keep them, as a necessary part of the education in design has practically disappeared. . . . For an architect with experience, the relation between architectural form and its graphic representation is intuitively understood. Most of us, however, can remember the enormous difficulties we experienced not so long ago, when we tried to translate our experience of a building, a space or a detail into a drawing; or, conversely, when we tried to understand the reality represented in the abstraction of drawings.4 The experienced architect has overcome many of the limitations that come from taking representations for reality, from believing representation to be the final reality; or perhaps has accepted these limits without ever thinking about them. In professional practice the traditional motto of the Modern movement becomes true: architects do create spaces, but only then do they gain understanding. The architecture of a mature architect can really be spatial. Through experience our architect escapes, up to a point, from analogic tyranny, from the power of the means of representation over our imagination. The architect is building real spaces and, given a few moments of reflection, will correct and refine them in successive

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works. Only then can architects become reunited with the world of inhabitants, with the people who will live in their buildings, with the world they have left to be trained as creators of new objects. This is the role of The Architectural Project. It is a book of warnings for students and their teachers. It is also a book aimed at provoking readers to become experienced in architecture by a firsthand knowledge of spaces—ideally, spaces they as architects have already built and occupied.

xvi Preface

The Architectural Project

1 Design Processes

2 The Architectural Project

Introduction

Design is the invention of a new object through the mediation of another object that precedes it in time. The designer operates on this, the project, modifying it, confident that it is satisfactory. Then its characteristics are translated into a code of instructions that can be understood by those in charge of realizing the second object, known as “the work” or building. A design process, then, has as its result the production of an ensemble of representations and specifications circumscribing the construction of the object they represent. The ways of representing and specifying vary through time and from one cultural environment to another but are always conditioned by two factors. () The separation of designers and executors, as different persons or groups, began in the Renaissance. This division of responsibilities created the need to make the ideas of designers explicit and to have them stated in a language that executors can understand. As Richard Neutra notes: Historically speaking, drawings and blueprints are a rather recent development. In past periods, the originator of a design usually communicated his idea directly to his working crew, and clarified it by showing them what to do. His success in effectuating his design depended also on imponderables of personality. Musical productions long followed a similar pattern of immediate transference. The first full score of a composition, leaving almost nothing to be filled in and “ornamented” during execution, is only about two centuries old.1 () The need for a design arises, depending on the complexity of the object being designed and its greater or lesser degree of novelty compared to others existing in the same class: that is, its proximity to a known “type.” Graphic representations of the future object constitute the main part of the project. They are made by using projections in plan, façade, and section, which have been described since antiquity and were made rigorous by descriptive geometry in the eighteenth century.2

3 Design Processes

4 The Architectural Project

The representation of the project displays the properties of the object as such, the physical object: its forms, dimensions, and materials. It does not include what the designer imagines as the use of the building, the actions of its future inhabitants.3 This manner of representing buildings, in which geometrical qualities and reference to materials dominate all stages of the design, is strictly necessary for communicating with builders. Because of this, the building as object is predominant in the mind of its designer, quite independent of its practical and social objectives. The architect tends to work like an artist, concentrating on analogic models.4 For architects, the function or use of the building is part of the external relations of the work, in spite of the fact that they need those relations to bring a creation into being. The designer invents the object in the act of representing it. That is, a designer draws a nonexistent object, repeating the process with everincreasing precision. This precision depends on an increase in detail, always within the rules of the representational system. Design is therefore the progressive description of an object that does not exist at the beginning of the process. This progress in the knowledge of the future object has its correlations in the stages of the design process. Those suggest moments in the communicative interchange with the client. The client is first shown preliminary drawings, containing the general idea of the design, then a schematic project, and finally the working drawings. The architect’s fees are generally coordinated with these stages of the process. The working drawings are intended to facilitate construction. As we can see, the ideational process advances from general schemes to particulars of the object, ending in defined detail of configuration of parts and materials. Following this pattern, the final design is derived from a schematic design, and this in turn has an “essential structure,” which was traditionally called a “parti” (from the French prendre parti, taking a decision between possible alternatives). From the same parti, different projects can be developed. The design process then is a progression from stages of greater generality and lower definition to others of high definition. Definition means a finer specification of parts and their relations. Generality points to the extension of the field of objects that could be designated by the same program. The greater the precision, the more the field of possible objects will be circumscribed. Finally, the project will point to a single object. Greater definition should eliminate all ambiguity and make it possible to build an object in which all parts and relations are controlled before realization. Although this condition has been achieved by industrial serial production, it is seldom found in architecture. Definition has to be

Fig. 1. Villa Zeno by Andrea Palladio, circa 1560. The design defines the shape of the building and contains indications about the dimensions of its parts. Redrawn by Haydée Barrionuevo from Palladio, Quattro Libri dell’Architettura 5 Design Processes

helped by the interpretation of its author, who follows its realization as a kind of latter-day version of the medieval master-of-the-works—who was a part of the building team, as Neutra observed. The growth in definition is effected through successive representations, not by modifying the same drawing. Each new drawing makes the earlier ones redundant and they are discarded. Along the way the successive stages of transformation disappear, until finally, working drawings bear no traces of the generative process. It is as if the architect had conceived the whole building entirely in mind, even down to the last details. It appears as an infallible act of creation, neither progressive nor based in representation. This professionalization is also the architect’s apotheosis: it seems merely a case of copying the plans of a complete building already held in mind. But such a fantasy conceals the design task, the architect’s real skill. It also hides the dependence of that mental image on the series of drawings in which it is really founded. In the writings that make up this book, the focus is on the process and its instruments; on the real operations involved in design. We are less centered on the real ends of architecture: satisfying the need for shelter; social utility; or the symbolic expression of collective values or of those of the subjective sensibility of an artist. Design drawings and models, as we have remarked, are analogic models of physical objects. One arrives at the determination of the object by employing these models within the design process. There is a necessary selection of the more apt representations for each stage of the process as well as the coordination of all stages and drawings. From our present perspective, it is hard to imagine the importance

6 The Architectural Project

of making the design free from the imperatives of construction. This separation, which looks natural to us now, transformed the practice of architecture. It changed even the way architecture is defined, the values it seeks, and the social status of architects. It could be argued that toward  architecture entered the era of written language, just as natural spoken language entered the era of alphabetic writing about , .. In the same way as alphabetic language “accurately represents” the sounds of spoken language, since the Renaissance architectural drawing has accurately represented objects in space. The written word tends to become free from spoken language and to substitute for it as the “natural” mode of existence for discourse. In the same way, drawings claim to contain the essential values of architecture. The properties of buildings are transferred to representation, and only those better expressed in drawing are deemed relevant. The written word stops the flux of words and makes it visual; in this way the character of discourse changes. The “written language” of drawing compresses time, showing the final result of building; it hides the work of construction; and it shows the future object in all the ways it will be possible to see it as well as in many other ways in which it will never be seen. It makes design work the private property of its author, who can ponder in solitude the alternatives of this creation to the point of believing it is to be purely his or her own. Representation changed architecture, leading production toward what looked best in drawing, what could be controlled best through drawing. It also changed the status of the architect, providing an intellectual dignity that is clearly defined by Alberti (see chapter ). It has been suggested that Renaissance architects invented their professional competence as based on drawings, stressing formal problems that could only be solved by architects using the new tools of design. Although this analysis exaggerates the professional cunning of architects in the s and s, it meshes with my view concerning the importance of representation as the trigger of the architect’s professional transformation. As Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis observe: “The new formal abstraction of building was a problem-solving tool. So, too, the drawing as an object became an implicit assertion of the autonomy of architecture. It contributed to the production of a formally perfect plan while it silently argued for the right of existence of the formal problem. It assumed the architect to be the guardian of the rules of beauty, the proprietor of special problem-solving instruments, and the dextrous negotiator in the conflict between the canon of form and deformation.”5

CHAPTER 1

Design Processes

The design process consists of a series of operations that will generate a model from which a building may be “copied.” There is not one single design process, one unique way to advance that progression. Most design processes progress from a state of lower definition and greater generality to one of lesser generality and higher definition. Yet this does not mean that the approaches from one state to another follow a single road. Even if we could imagine that the road from preliminary sketches to working drawings was always one of sustained improvement in the definition and in the precision with which the designer makes drawings and models—if it were a linear process that produced the object—there would always subsist an unknown fact: how was the first configuration produced that will later be “developed”? Using the terms we have earlier adopted: how did the designer arrive at this general configuration that we usually call a parti? If we ask ourselves about the possible alternatives for the production of this basic scheme, we will identify different types of design process. We will further be led to an interpretation of words like composition in order to name the design act. We must also question the idea of a building’s functionality, an idea that has been dominant for the last century and a half. We will then have to evaluate the importance of preexisting forms and dispositions in the design act; forms and dispositions which constitute for architecture a repository of knowledge that remains available for each new design; in other words, the problem of type. It should be made clear that this subject not only describes what an architect does in designing; it also concerns the question of how to teach design. Design theory and the teaching of architecture go together. Many of the texts quoted in the present work were written with a didactic intention. The first we shall consider deals with E. E. Viollet-le-Duc’s “ideal” architect involved in designing: An architect has a building to build; he has received a confused brief (as many written briefs are) and his first task is to put order

7 Design Processes

8 The Architectural Project

into this document. There are different requirements and services to be satisfied; he will study them separately, and he must not think of the architecture—that is the skin with which he will wrap these different aspects; he will content himself with ingeniously putting each thing in its place. In each part of the brief, the architect will perceive a main point and underline it. His complicated, intricate work is simplified little by little (because simple ideas are the last to arrive). After a while he will try to solder together these parts he has studied separately and he will carry on his work of simplification. However, this ensemble of studies, to which is added a statement of economic resources, will not satisfy him. He senses that the new “body” lacks unity, because the seams are too visible and the overall result is clumsy. He continues seeking, putting to the right what was to the left, back what was forward. The details of his plan will go through a hundred permutations. Then—and I am assuming he is a conscientious architect, a lover of his art, who is strict with himself—he withdraws, leaving aside the papers covered with sketches. Suddenly he believes that he sees a main idea in his program, a dominant trait (you must observe that no one puts it there). Fiat lux: instead of beginning by the details to arrive at a combination of the whole, he turns the operation upside down. He has briefly glimpsed the edifice, the way in which the different services must be dominated by a general composition that fits all. Only then do those details which have tortured his spirit fall into their natural place. Once the general idea is established, secondary ideas set in at the right moment, as if organizing themselves. The architect is now the master of his program, he dominates it, he remakes it with order, he completes and perfects it.1 What is Viollet-le-Duc describing? He is telling us about the actions of an architect who has to “satisfy a brief ”—that is, who has a commission for a building and is approaching it in the first moments of the design. The brief is seen as confusing. This is not because the client does not know the needs. The reason for the confusion is that the written brief is just a list; it does not have any correspondence with the spatial order of the future building. The architect will introduce order into the brief—this happens at the beginning of our quotation—until the brief has the same order as the design in the making, at the end of the passage quoted. In Viollet-leDuc’s story we see the architect first solving the building problem bit by bit (we suppose it is a complex building), devising sectors and attempting to join them into a whole. Finally a general idea forms, an order de-

9 Design Processes

scribed as simplifying complexity. It has been born in the architect’s mind (“no one puts it there”). Some things are implicit in the passage quoted: all the events described take place within a drawing. We discover this when the architect “puts to the right what was to the left.” Then in his plan, the details go through a hundred permutations. For Viollet-le-Duc, it is not necessary to say that the project begins with a plan. From the plan the architect will deduce all the rest, because in the plan will be the organization of spaces demanded by the brief. In the passage following the quoted text Violletle-Duc says: “Once the plan has been determined, the building rises in his spirit; he sees how he will build it and the dominant idea of the plan is reproduced in the elevation, the idea of the plan reappears in the elevation, indicating the parts that have to be enriched and those that must be sacrificed. This is the way the architect composes.” We have watched the architect at the moment of creating the general scheme, the parti. In our quotation this is a plan of the building; a schematic plan. For Viollet-le-Duc the act of design, or at least this first stage of the design, is called “composing.” Fifty years before Viollet-le-Duc, J. N. L. Durand had declared that his text dealt for the first time with composition, a subject that “astonishingly, has not been treated by other authors.” In his Précis des Leçons données à l’Ecole Polytechnique we find his instructions on how to begin a design: The way to proceed in the Composition of any project. Combining the diverse elements together, then passing to the different parts of

Fig. 2. Holkham Hall in Norfolk, England, by William Kent, 1734. A complex building design constituting the sum of units of the same type as those in the Villa Zeno. Redrawn by Libertad Vigo from J. Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830

10 The Architectural Project

the ensemble—this is the way we must follow when we are still learning to compose. When we compose, on the contrary, we should commence by the whole, continue by the parts, and end in the details. Given a building project, we must first of all examine whether, according to the use for which the building is destined, all the parts that compose it should be joined or separate; and in consequence, whether it should offer in its plan a single mass or several masses. We must determine if the mass, or masses, should be full or emptied in the center by courtyards; if the building, no matter its disposition, should face the public street or should be separated from it by an enclosure; if all its parts are devoted to similar or different uses and, in consequence, should be treated in a similar or dissimilar fashion. Second, we examine which are the principal parts and the parts subordinated to these. The architect should determine what the number of principal and secondary parts should be and their respective sizes and situations. He should recognize, finally, whether the building should have only one story or several, or one floor in some sections and several in others.2 At the beginning of Durand’s passage we again find the requirement later stated by Viollet-le-Duc of conducting the design process from general matters to particulars. We also find the didactic indication that learning must follow the opposite direction: one should first become familiar with simple elements and their combinations to understand how they compose ensembles. At the beginning of his lessons, Durand warns us: “Elements are for Architecture as notes for music, as words for language; without a perfect knowledge of them it is impossible to advance.”3 In Durand’s text we find the word element and the classification of parts into “principal” and “secondary.” What Durand calls elements are the physical, constructive components of a building. He uses the term parts for the different spaces and their groupings, constituting what Viollet-le-Duc called the “different services” that compose a building. In a general sense, the word composition implies the notion of putting one thing next to another—that is, of relating parts to form a whole; deciding the relationship between those parts, creating a structure for the future building. The design method set forth by Durand at the beginning of the nineteenth century is not a revolutionary innovation. Rather, it is a legitimizing of the design practices in the decades before he taught his course. They can be characterized as a growing independence of the parts of buildings and a decrease in the perfect subordination of Baroque archi-

tecture, this supplanted by a new kind of structure in which components are relatively autonomous. There is then a progressive dissolution of the ties of traditional typology—a subject to which we will return. It is not only in architecture that we find this trend toward substituting the logical order of components for the formal subordination in which hierarchical order mimics the visible order of living organisms, as characterized classicism. It is in fact a movement that can be perceived throughout all culture, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Following this trend, any complex object is interpreted as an orderly grouping of relatively autonomous elements: What is the cognitive style intrinsic to technological production? It is important to stress that the cognitive style is fundamentally given in the relationship of this type of work to a machine process and the logic of the latter. It is not necessarily present in the consciousness of the worker in terms of this logic, in phenomenological terms, the cognitive style is not necessarily at hand in a thematizable form for the worker, but it provides the background of his thematizations. A strategic element in the cognitive style in question is componentiality. The components of reality are self-contained units which can be brought into relation with other such units— that is, reality is not conceived as an ongoing flux of juncture and disjuncture of unique entities. This apprehension of reality in terms of components is essential to the reproducibility of the production process as well as to the correlation of men and machines. Thus, everything is analyzable into constituent components, and everything can be taken apart and put together again in terms of these components.4 For the theory of architecture of the nineteenth century, which we can here consider as a single corpus made up of the writings of Durand and Viollet-le-Duc as earlier quoted, parts or components exist at two clearly differentiated levels, which belong to different moments of design practice. These correspond to the building conceived as an organization in space of useful rooms, the composition of parts or “elements of composition”; and the building as a construction of physical parts, the “elements of architecture.” Parts or elements of composition have been deduced from the decomposition of existing types, the isolation of individual rooms to create new groupings. Each room will have a usefulness of its own, and the ensemble will be the reason to design and build. Elements of architecture are the means to realize the limits of those spaces.

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12 The Architectural Project

In any Art, before composing one must know what to compose with; as the composition of buildings is nothing more than the result of the assemblage of its parts, one must know these before dealing with the other. As these parts are nothing but a composition of the elements of building, those elements should be the first object of study. We shall deal with the elements of building—that is, isolated and nonisolated supports, walls, the different openings pierced in them, foundations and vaults. We shall later see how it is possible to arrange them one in relation to another. Then we shall see how it is possible by means of these combinations to produce the diverse parts of buildings, such as porticoes, porches, vestibules, stairs, halls of every class, courts, grottoes and fountains. When all these parts become rather familiar to us, we will see how these are combined in the composition of the ensemble of a building.5 By the end of the century, Julien Guadet’s book established a normalized terminology. The parts of buildings are called “elements of composition.” Addressing the student, this last great academic says: “As he has to construct his building with Elements of Architecture, so he must establish his composition with Elements of Composition.” The term composition does not apply to the development of the building’s form as a material object. It alludes to the general disposition of its spaces, a basic structure over which the work on form will later take place.

Academic Teaching At its outset, the curriculum of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which was to be imitated in most parts of the world for more than a century and a half, was centered on the instrumental mastery of architectural design as it was then understood. Some traits of this concept are: (a) The method affirmed the deductive character of design. The student had to produce a project, starting with a schematic design that had to be made in isolation (en loge) on the same day the student was introduced to the subject. This subject was stated at first in just a single line. In a few hours the student was expected to produce a general scheme (esquisse) fixing the overall composition. This involved deciding upon the disposition of the parts and volumes of the future building and not being allowed to depart greatly from this parti pris. The final design would thus be the development of a general decision taken in haste without any detailed study of the problem.

Fig. 3. Le Corbusier’s successive schemes for the Palace of the Soviets, Moscow. Here the same set of Elements of Composition produces different partis. From Oppositions 15/16

13 Design Processes

(b) This was a “training for unreality.” Graphic skill was overvalued; the final presentation would be of a design with a generally conservative disposition but finely rendered for consideration by a jury. The system was established by the middle of the eighteenth century, but only by  did detailed briefs gradually appear. Real sites were more the exception than the rule. Many generations of architects would graduate from the school before the pressures of reality forced the development of a written brief. Peter Collins registers as a historical date the year in which a project was rejected because it did not follow the demands of the brief.6

14 The Architectural Project

(c) Building science was not taught at all, or if taught, it was not up to date. At the very time when new iron structures were being introduced and developed, students of architecture were still accepting the old stone construction as valid, leaving in their section drawings blank areas where the real structural elements would be hidden. (d) From known and published examples it is easy to deduce that the elegance of plan drawings reflecting symmetry was valued over the practical merits of spatial distribution. Absolute symmetry was still the rule, only moderately challenged at the end of the century by Guadet. (e) “The materials with which the Ecole student composed were precisely congruent interior spaces and exterior volumes. The manner in which the student arranged the spaces and volumes was by grouping them along axes, symmetrically and pyramidally. The basic solution for the composition of a monumental building on an unencumbered site (the sort of building and site usually specified at the Ecole) was discovered almost at once: two axes embodied in two enfilades and intersecting at right angles at a major central space, the whole compressed inside a circumscribed rectangle.”7 (f) The invention of the architectural object, as a disposition of masses or volumes, was registered on paper in two dimensions; this would give birth to a plan as the result of the esquisse. The development of the esquisse within the discipline of a fixed style or in the loose catalog of eclecticism generated a sequence for the design process. Not only does this sequence go from the general scheme to the details; it promotes as a normal design sequence the successive consideration of projections, the plan being the first and leading projection. We should also bear in mind the indifference to structural form already mentioned; this reduces the interest in section and façade that will be drawn later as a verification of decisions taken in the plan. Three-dimensional characteristics are supposed to be implicit in the plan. Even Le Corbusier, a confirmed enemy of Beaux-Arts, agreed that “le plan est le générateur.” The same plan can be implemented with different elevations, as if the object the architect imagines could really be segmented in its projections and not in its parts. To consider the different projections as independent is tantamount to accepting that these are the parts of the project and that it is somehow “natural” that they should not coincide with the parts of the building we are imagining.

This way of considering composition is not limited to academic practice. The following quotation from a text by Renato de Fusco is a description of the design sequence of the Rationalist decade of –:

There is no doubt about the priority of the functional factor.The typical models of architecture and urbanism, the dwelling cell and zoning respectively, were schemes born out of function and function prevailed in their configuration. The functional scheme allowed for all hypotheses, elaborations and experiments suggested by function, leaving open many successive formal possibilities. Through intermediate factors, schemes and types, this process led from function to form. The different kinds of schemes led to another architectural category, that of typology. Types were still another field in which functions played the role of constants while forms were considered variable. If the scheme could be considered as a practical instrument to go operationally from function to form (this refers to the typical transformation of a bubble diagram of functions into a plan), typology both included and preceded the thematic phase of the design: it was even more remote from the formative phase of materialization. It should not be that Functionalists, having defined the schematic-type to be more adequate for the function, would admit that there was a wide margin between the schematic and its material, volumetric definition. On the other hand, having to materialize types and schematics, the suggestions provided by cubism, neoplasticism, constructivism and so on were appropriated.8 De Fusco is going to the core of the problem we have just described. For functionalists, as for academics, the plan is the basic scheme or element of the project. Over the plan forms will be raised, relatively indifferent to the influences of previous architectural styles. The principle influence over forms derives from contemporary art. Sometimes, as is the case with Le Corbusier, these forms appear in someone’s work as a painter before becoming elements in his architecture. It would be wrong to deny the importance of the formal revolution that took place in twentieth-century architecture. Liberation from styles was an important step toward a new architecture, but we should also observe that there was no equivalent revolution at the time in design practice. The Beaux-Arts system of teaching has a more general effect beyond the particularities surviving in other systems of learning that at first sight seem quite dissimilar. First of all, there is the general postulate that you learn to be an architect by producing a series of theoretical designs. Projects develop a conventionally growing complexity, without ever having a practical verification. A tight relation with other subjects taught in the schools dealing with the material aspects of building is not standardized and is still a matter for discussion among different groups of professors.

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16 The Architectural Project

The Beaux-Arts system still constitutes the basic structure of the schools of architecture, although permanent tutorship has been incorporated into it. Tutorship inside the studio was an Anglo-Saxon contribution that gives present-day studios their character. Technical subjects have grown with the addition of all kinds of installations as well as the increase in perfection of the study of structures and materials. Other subjects have grown also, in parallel with their own independent development. This is the case for the history of architecture, which assumed a theoretical leadership in the s and s in many schools in the Western Hemisphere. None of the influences felt in the second part of the twentieth century have been able to displace the autonomous, selfcentered design studio created almost two centuries ago. It is still the axis around which the learning of architecture turns.

Composition as Distribution: The Early Nineteenth Century We are assuming as a fact that the disposition of the plan, the master element of composition, has been guided by functional considerations. This means that the useful organization of the ensemble will be the main reason to devise one kind of plan and to prefer it to an alternative. We also suppose that this useful organization of parts has been deduced from a detailed study of the brief. The study of the brief will have been conducted in the stages described by De Fusco, through the mediation of a bubble diagram. Such a description might be valid for many designs of the first part of the twentieth century, but it is not true for the beginning of the age of elemental composition. Another description of the design procedures, once again taken from Durand’s Précis, shows us the differences. Durand exemplifies his recommended design process with the design of a building he summarizes as devoted “to the reunion of the wise, men of letters and artists”: Having recognized that such a building must have only one mass, and that this mass should be complete (meaning: without courtyards); that the building can be conveniently located in the center of a public square; that many of its parts must be similar and others different; that among the last, the hall for public assembly is the main one; that the parts for the three classes and the common vestibule are the next in importance; that each class demands three assembly halls of equal importance; then by a conventional sign the center of the public assembly hall will be determined somewhere, as in point A. From it the two main axes of the building will be traced by hand, as the lines BB and BB. On four points of these

axes, such as B, B, B and B, and at equal distances, by a conventional sign we will indicate the center of the place for each one of the classes and the common vestibule. The axes of these parts should be then traced. Finally, on each of these secondary axes, we will mark the middle point of the halls for each section, with the letters b, b, b, b, b, b, at equal distance from the points B, B, B and B. Having in this way indicated the number and situation of the main parts of this edifice, we will deal now with the disposition of accessory parts.9 If we are unwilling to accept this procedure, wholly dependent on symmetry, as the appropriate way of obtaining a parti, we will be acting correctly as twentieth-century functionalists. We would want the disposition of parts to be guided by rational considerations instead of repeating existing monumental configurations. We would reject the a priori formal relations of parts and demand a better composition of its elements, probably expressing function in what we would consider a more vivid way. It is not in academic teaching that we will find the model for this freer composition. In the nineteenth century there is another architecture that is a bridge between the early, Durandesque formal composition and the liberation of the disposition of elements of composition of the twentieth century. A change in the ideals of architectural form was needed to allow for the liberation of the parti, and it was provided by the Picturesque movement. For the Picturesque, vernacular architecture was an inspiration that would supplant the rigid, monumental composition inherited from the Renaissance. In such a “free” style, total symmetry is abandoned, as is the concept of unity produced by the total subordination of elements.

Composition as Distribution in the Twentieth Century During composition the parts of the building are determined; these parts are the inhabitable spaces, and their relative position is fixed by drawings. Some spatial dispositions are recurrent in design processes and it may be useful to relate them to general notions. The proximity of the parts in a plan generally indicates the need to circulate freely from one to another; in modern buildings it often indicates a similitude in the use of these rooms. The idea of “zoning” a building is implicit in Violletle-Duc’s designation of such clusters of rooms as “different services,” as discussed earlier. Zoning becomes almost automatic in routine functionalism, grouping rooms of similar use even if they are not to be used in

17 Design Processes

Fig. 4. The approach necessary for the execution of any project. Redrawn by Haydée Barrionuevo from Durand, Précis

18 The Architectural Project

any foreseeable sequence of acts. Viollet-le-Duc’s conception of a “service” was more adequate than mechanical zoning. By itself, proximity is a pregeometric, topological characteristic. We can find it in the groupings of single-room dwellings, be they tents in a modern camping area or villages of remote tribes. Proximity becomes a problem in composition when many rooms compete for proximity to a privileged one or for access to outside space. Clustering rooms produces a conflict between proximity and accessibility; but this last only enters the problematic field when we have many-roomed buildings, and in the former example it is outside space that takes care of access to each “unit.” We may imagine that this exterior is the origin of public space as we know it, and some authors have studied in detail the progressive growth of more complex urban systems.10 Accessibility leads to the consideration of distribution, which as we have seen was already established as one of the problems of architectural design. The word distribution alludes to the idea of a space considered as somehow unified; parts are distributed in that space, or the space available is distributed between them. The existence of many different rooms is the expression of a multiplicity of uses. A certain set of specialized rooms constitutes, for a moment in time, the program of a class of buildings. Only in the nineteenth century was it accepted that different architectural programs demand building forms that are greatly different. This difference lies not only in the “services” and their grouping but also in the image these buildings show to the public. Thus, a new meaning for the term character as the image of the different programs supplants the old “character as temperament” of the eighteenth century.11 In the nineteenth century, architectural programs multiplied in accordance with social, technical, and scientific evolution. This process was accelerated not only by the appearance of hitherto nonexistent building types but also by a change in cultural orientation toward utilitarianism. In this sense the early nineteenth century is already a part of our time. The progressive appearance of functionalism as the dominant ideology of the twentieth century is heralded by the primacy given to the program by Viollet-le-Duc. The notion of distribution implies dividing the spaces of a building according to their use and defining a special class of spaces that give access to all others. Circulation spaces will become a special class of elements of composition, created to accomplish accessibility and at the same time marking the appearance of privacy. As we have noted, accessibility becomes problematic as the number of parts and their relations increases—this number is the definition of

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20 The Architectural Project

complexity in systems theory. The increase in difficulty of distribution is greater if what grows is the number of relations, and not the number of parts subject to the same relation. Because of this, the differentiation and hierarchy of circulation makes its appearance; it was practically unknown in the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century a new conceptualization was on the rise: the building was conceived as subordinated to its internal circulation network; this network became the main part to be designed. Main spaces were in fact elements annexed to this circulation network, rooms strategically located by the sides of corridors. If we look at a succession of plans of complex buildings from  to , we shall see the gradual birth of that new entity, the circulation network within the building. This new interpretation of the building with a circulation network as the basic structure of form allows for a new interpretation of type. A typology of functions is born, having its foundation in the differences in circulation between different kinds of buildings. Still another functional typology can be perceived: one based in the shapes of elements of composition according to their internal needs. Examples of this are the shapes of opera halls or concert halls, derived from acoustic factors. Some of the most brilliant examples of architectural composition in the twentieth century present both kinds of configuration, the overall structuring in accordance with circulation and the specialized configuration of some parts. A progressive abstraction is involved in the gradual liberation of the circulation system. It is first a group of parts included in the general layout of the plan. Gradually the circulation system gains continuity and geometrical identity; finally it becomes optimized and a typology of circulation systems emerges. Those may be applied in the design of very dissimilar kinds of programs, often remote from the type that gave them birth. This process has been fostered by Louis Kahn’s theory about servant and served spaces—an echo of Durand’s principal and accessory parts. An example of the autonomous growth of circulation spaces can be found in the plan schemes devised for flexible hospitals in the s and s; for a short time these schemes became a model for many other building programs. Another instance is the urban metaphor, in which urban circulation models are employed for complex buildings (as in the Berlin Free University plan by Candilis, Josic and Woods, a very influential example in the s). The Metabolist trend in Japanese architecture produced many designs for city buildings where the circulation and structural system were explicitly the fixed elements of the scheme and habitable spaces formed changing additions to this skeleton.

Fig. 5. Berlin Free University by Candilis, Josic, and Woods, 1964. This design can be read either as an analogy with the square-blocked colonial city or as an extension of Durand’s compositive method, a pattern of circulation that feeds functionally disparate spaces. Redrawn by Haydée Barrionuevo

21 Design Processes

Fig. 6. School of Engineering at Leicester University, England, Stirling and Gowan, architects, 1959–63. Courtesy J. Wojtowicz and W. Fawcett, Architecture: Formal Approach, 1985 22 The Architectural Project

This approach to distribution is characteristic of contemporary architecture and can be called “additive composition.” It has its origin in the eighteenth century and constitutes the main practice of the BeauxArts tradition. However, we can find in twentieth-century architecture many examples of the opposite procedure, of which some of the more obvious are the latest work of Mies van der Rohe: buildings like Crown Hall at Illinois Institute of Technology or the National Gallery in Berlin. In “subtractive composition,” parts for different uses are defined within a preconceived limit, generally of a pure geometrical shape. In such layouts the possibilities of freedom for the circulation network are severely

Fig. 7. Le Corbusier’s second floor plan for the Villa á Garches, 1927, showing subtractive and subdivisive compositions. From Oppositions 15/ 16. This Cottage Picturesque shows an additive, relatively indeterminate plan composition. Redrawn by Libertad Vigo from Cloquet, Traité d’Architecture

Fig. 8. Charles Percier’s A Building for Assembling the Academies. Compare with the proposal by Durand as the approach to designing any building. Redrawn by Haydée Barrionuevo from Arthur Drexler, ed., The Architecture of the Ecole 23 de Beaux-Arts Design Processes

limited. The total form of the building is given more importance than the particularities of the circulation scheme as a definer of form. In many normal cases, the combinations of the parts and the whole are designed according to different types of composition. Parts of the ensemble organized “subtractively” are combined in an “additive” whole. A famous example is the scheme of the Bauhaus building designed by Gropius and Meyer. Regular parts have simple structural dispositions and a more economical perimeter wall, compared to purely additive compositions. We should remember that in the practical conditions of many cities, where buildings fill the width of lots from one party-wall to another, a maximum volume allowed by regulations has to be filled by the designer, who is therefore obliged to undertake a “subtractive composition” within that volume. It is as if the classical prejudice in favor of compact, regular built volumes has been perpetuated in building regulations. The growth in the importance of circulation and the subsequent study of circulation networks produces the conceptual identification of

a “circulation determination” within the composition as a whole. This conceptualization is remote from the origin of the term and represents the hypertrophy of one of the aspects of design. However, it should be borne in mind that an autonomous circulation system makes its appearance at a very early date in “school architecture”; it is in Charles Percier’s design for the Grand Prix de Rome of . Van Zanten describes Percier’s design:

24 The Architectural Project

Percier’s configuration was something new in the Renaissance tradition and introduced possibilities important to the Beaux-Arts composition. The reduction of almost all spaces to rectangles adhering to a continuous modular grid greatly increased the ease with which they might be combined and manipulated. Furthermore, the rectangle-within-rectangle figure produced a system of communication quite different from that of the Renaissance and Baroque enfilade. It introduced a web of multiple readings over the surface of the plan and created a system of secondary axes along the lines of juncture of the principal spaces of the enfilades. These secondary axes also became lines of movement and of sight—a phenomenon vividly demonstrated by a visit to the Panthéon (the church of Ste. Geneviève by Soufflot)—enfilades of a sort, not monumental, but of varied and rather picturesque spaces between the monumental spaces. And these secondary axes were also, conveniently but secondarily, corridors. The rectangle-withinrectangle figure and the overlapping of the outer rectangles introduced the possibility of the separation of functioning spaces and communications, which by the time of Guadet () had become one of the cardinal rules of Beaux-Arts composition.12

CHAPTER 2

Description Generation

It is the function and duty of lineaments, then, to prescribe an appropriate place, exact numbers, a proper scale, and a graceful order for whole buildings and for each of their constituent parts, so that the whole form and appearance of the building may depend on lineaments alone. Since that is the case, let lineaments be the precise and correct outline, conceived in the mind, made up of lines and angles, and perfected in the learned intellect and imagination. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books

Design is the description of an object that does not exist before that description. This description is achieved by successive approximations. The first descriptions refer to the behavior of the new object in the world— the contextual relationships it has to enter, the needs it has to satisfy. These descriptions are verbal or written and parts of them will be registered in the design program. After this approach some graphic attempts are made to suggest the kind of object intended. These graphic attempts simulate the kind of drawings usually made to represent existing buildings, but the building represented will be new, with characteristics of its own. The result of the design process is an object, or rather the description of an object. This description consists of an ensemble of analogical representations: drawings, models, and specifications about the materials proposed for the building. The invention of the object is achieved through the use of these “representations” of the as yet nonexistent object. The representations are coded not very precisely in a graphic system, the syntax of which “resembles” that of the drawings that will be made for building. Each new representation is commenced to solve an aspect of the

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26 The Architectural Project

problem as perceived by the designer upon beginning that particular drawing or model. The designer’s understanding of the problem changes with completion of each of these tentative solutions. Producing each drawing results in a representation in which the designer reads more information than he or she introduced. This new information deals with possible spatial configurations, compatibilities or incompatibilities between partial solutions, and new formal proposals. In the process, the designer also finds unexpected kinds of kinship in the growing solution with other already familiar but for the moment forgotten, architectures recalled, which that from now on will constitute a part of the context of the new design. Michael Graves said, “That a certain set of marks on a field can play back into one’s mind and consequently bring forth further elaboration is the nature of this quite marvelous language.” Ideally, the process will continue by increasing the definition of the object. As the graphic syntax becomes more precise, the possible number of objects represented by the models is reduced; in the end it comes down to a single one. Each drawing added to the growing project implies discarding many possibilities that are no longer compatible with this new drawing. The new drawing also opens many options for the development of the final object; among these possibilities the designer must choose. The final complete representation of the architectural object, then, is not only a determination but also the elimination of other future objects that will not be born. If from the beginning we try to represent the object as if we were sure of it, either the process will fail completely or the new object will be impoverished. This also happens when the designer concentrates on a single projection—usually the plan—and expects to have the plan fully defined before tackling the other projections. Premature definition can likewise result if we try to draw what little we know with precision. In that case the object would “crystallize” too fast, losing its flexibility to incorporate into the design all the aspects of the brief, because only some aspects will have been taken into account in arriving at a first scheme or parti. This could occur either because we extrapolated what appeared to be the essence of the program (as in Viollet-le-Duc’s account) or because in response to the proliferation of requirements, we may have paid attention only to the most evident. If we pay attention only to the plan, we will likely produce a scheme with walls, which will satisfy only the most elementary connections and measurements. This is the meaning of Viollet-le-Duc’s criticism of the first schemes of his architect, which he calls “clumsy” and in which “the seams are too visible.”

Fig. 9. Studies for the design of a church by Baldassarre Peruzzi. The simultaneous development of the work in plan, interior perspectives, and detail drawings can be seen here. From Manfredo Tafuri, L’Architettura del Manierismo nel 27 Cinquecento Description Europeo Generation

The plan produces the illusion of control over three-dimensional reality; an illusion that the student is too quick to fall for. Control over all three dimensions is quite difficult for the student, and the plan is misleading. It can be misleading for buildings of large scale, where the intuitive grasp of the designer tends to fail. This happens often in urban design. In urban design projects, where the size of the “object” to be controlled is quite different from that of a single building, even experienced architects make serious mistakes due to this habit of controlling the object from the plan.

28 The Architectural Project

The analogic pressure is stronger in the functionalist project, because it acts like a “hidden operator.” In the functionalist project, the formal result of the design is unforeseeable. Also, the graphic medium is stronger here in its power to define the shape of the future building. Once this influence is discovered, the argument of this book springs into view. “Means of representation” are seen not to be neutral at all, nor merely instrumental. The alternative to the functionalist project, the traditional employment of typological precedents, reduces this dependence on graphic media. The schemes selected are in fact synthetic references to classes of existing buildings that may even be known firsthand. The complete separation of design and construction in the teaching of architecture makes the influence of representation over design even stronger. In spite of the fact that very few designs are free from typological precedents, when taught, these precedents more often crop up as drawings or photographs than as the experience of real buildings. This may appear to be a problem of our time. However, we can see that it was already present by the late s: “Very little profit will be obtained by those who study the design of ancient buildings without seeing the works themselves; bigger or smaller height, distances, the angle under which the building is seen, and so many other factors can give it an appearance entirely different from that represented for our eyes by drawing.”1 For a better understanding of the mistakes produced by premature object definition it is useful to return to the subject of the kinds of representation we employ and to inquire into the links these representations have with the world of objects. Let us insist on the project as an ensemble of representations of a nonexistent object. Representation is perhaps not the right word, as there is no actual object as yet to represent. It is more a case of imagination pretending to represent an object as though it did exist. This fictive nature of the project is more acute in the design studio; the teacher’s role is to comment on the imaginary object and to modify it with criticism. As the object is in the making, hypotheses pile one on another when the teacher evaluates the qualities of a “building” as if it were real and part of an actual context. In fact, what the teacher sees is the transient, mutable register of a moment in a creative process. There is in operation a convention that endows the transient with the character of the irrevocable; this can be shown by comparing the status of the drawings made for the survey of an existing building with those of a design in progress. Even if they display the same precision with respect to the definition of the object represented, distinct differences are present:

Fig. 10. Studies for the Neuestaatsgallerie in Stuttgart, Germany by James Stirling and Michael Wilford, 1977– 84. From The Architectural Review

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Survey

→

Necessary relation

→

Design (project)

→

Conventional, modifiable relation

→

to a real, physical object to an imaginary object

The representations on the left are joined by a syntax; that is, they must be correctly constructed expressions of the same “language” or graphic convention: the graphic convention used to represent three-

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dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface, such as a sheet of paper. The plans in the survey must be consistent with one another, plans and section and elevations, as well as with the object described. The plans of the project must also have concordance between the different projections—that is, in syntax—but as they do not denote any object of the real world, they can be modified indefinitely as long as the syntactic laws of the graphic system are respected. If the plans representing the survey have less than complete coincidence with the real object, they are false. That can never be said of design plans. At most, if the different projections lack coincidence, they can be called “impossible” or said to represent an object that cannot be brought into being. If we modify the plans, we are at the same time modifying the ideal object. These modifications constitute what we call “development of a project.” We should keep in mind that the goal of the design process, from a practical point of view, is to produce a description of the object that can be understood and accepted by clients, in the first instance; and then by the builder who will later give it material form. The codes of representation accepted for the second task, communication with those who will build the design, tend to be used also for other purposes of communication. In the last two centuries they have become the universal representation of architecture. Perhaps they will be displaced by computer graphics, which in the past few years have introduced other, more naturalistic representations for the consideration of clients and potential building users. Composition in architecture consists of the manipulation of entities to which the value of a sign is given. These entities are disposed one in relation to another over the surface of the paper. Their disposition depicts or “means” something similar to three-dimensional entities in space in the real world. Sometimes it is a three-dimensional model that refers to a larger reality. In both cases, the entities employed are not strictly “signs” because they designate open classes of objects. The extension of the class meant by the graphic sign can change suddenly through a minor change in the drawing. The marks indicating elements of composition are perimeters that can be modified; they are the suggestions of rooms or areas that still lack precise limits. These representations operate over ideation itself. The provisional fixation of a design idea is made visible by such systems of marks on paper. If we were to observe an architect designing, we might say that this involved describing an object in a code that lacks precision. This code will gradually converge into another, more precise and conventional one, the code of working drawings.

In order to save time, the architect designs from the beginning in the “same language” as will later be used to translate the design. This language is a system of conventions that can be understood by third parties, all those who share the codes derived from projective geometry. In this way, an identity is achieved between the languages of the first and last steps of the design process. The architect engaged in this process is socializing the creative activity, by externalizing it step by step, as though still in the architectural studio where learning to design involved revealing every stage of the effort to an assistant or a professor. That architect is also working like an artisan, feeling from the very first moment that the work engages with the material from which the object will be made. The plans constitute this material.2 It is from the beginning, then, that the final reading code is introduced into the process, as though the ideation preexisted, purely mental and independent of successive graphic traces. Yet it is not so; we have seen the designer making and modifying a series of diagrams. In spite of this, designers will not accept that their ideas have participated in dialog with their own inanimate creation. They will say that their drawings are impossible for anyone but themselves to interpret, and that the diagrams they trace are no more than verifications of partial aspects of the problem. And they will probably also deny that these seemingly casual traces may have provided them with a guide to the final form of a project. Designers will not accept this influence because they believe drawings and models are simply the vehicles of a content they will perhaps call “mental images.” They will have formed in their minds images of the buildings before even looking for pencil and paper. Perhaps we should not embark on a discussion about the existence and quality of mental images. It will be enough to say that in the case of a project in the making, a mental image is enriched by successive partial appearances. These are embodied in the drawings made by the architect alongside the design process. In each of those a new formulation of the design is set forth, and a new mental image is sure to appear on the screen of the mind. Image 1

→

Diagram 1

→

Image 2

→

Diagram 2, etc.

→

We can accept that if the drawings are subject to a code and this is established and strong, any drawing will have a large proportion of the syntactic components of the code, perhaps more important than the specific demands of the brief. If we take into account that the design process develops over a long period—days and sometimes months—the

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continuity of these drawings in their socialized code, a pile of tracing paper on the design table, will be more effective than the fleeting mental images from which they spring. Very few architects have made concrete references to this process. The following anecdote in an article by Michael Graves is a distinct exception:

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In a recent, rather tedious faculty meeting, I made a number of marks on my pad which resembled the beginnings of a plan organization. After making several passes at my drawing, I found that I had reached an impasse. I handed the pad to a colleague who added a corresponding number of marks and returned it to me. The game was on, the pad was passed back and forth, and soon the drawing took a life of its own, each mark setting implications for the next. The conversation through drawing relied on a set of principles or conventions commonly held but never made explicit: suggestions of order, distinctions between passage and rest, completion and incompletion. We were careful to make each gesture fragmentary in order to keep the game open to further elaboration. The scale of the drawing was ambiguous, allowing it to read as a room, a building, or a town plan. After each of us had taken several turns we realized that the drawing had once again faltered. A third colleague was brought in. He casually dropped in a rather large stair on his first move: the ambiguity was lost. It seemed that either the game had been so well understood that the jump in scale had reversed the rules, or that the third player had missed the point altogether and his set of marks had subverted the preceding ones. In either case, the speculative aspect of the original drawing could not absorb the shift of meaning which the figure of the stair produced. The game was over.3 In Graves’s anecdote, the nonexistent object is attained by the modification of its “representation.” It is ideally modified, but the two alternate designers cannot see immediately after each modification if it is possible for the object to continue developing. There is doubt about whether the object is still coherent, even if some properties of the new object envisaged by one of the designers have not been canceled by the other. After each intervention there is a sort of taking stock, a revision of achievement and damage. The power to modify the object through representation is fearful. It is the possibility of spoiling everything, the possibility of degrading the new object instead of perfecting it. There is a new tool that allows us to see this power dramatically: graphic computing. With this tool we can make almost instant changes

in the object we are beginning to imagine. We operate on the screen over an object we create, which behaves almost as real objects do. We can modify one of the projections on the screen. Magically the other projections follow and adapt to the change. The trial-and-error process of architectural invention is accelerated by this slave that accepts changes in things and portrays the consequences, increasing the designer’s power over the incipient object. Each new tool for representation has two faces. It makes easy a task hitherto difficult or even impossible—and therefore ignored or left aside. It opens new horizons and at the same time subjects us to its own rules. All we have said has meaning only in the modern domain of design and in the way an architect is trained within the tradition we have inherited, a tradition we carry on. Let us for a moment recall its traits. The project is an analogic model of the future building, preceding it in time and executed within conventions in a predominantly graphic medium. The model is discontinuous from the reality of the future building, be it considered as an object or as the environment of human life. Learning to become an architect consists of passing through a succession of fictive design processes under the guidance of an expert, making designs for buildings that may never exist. The question of the means of representation in architecture is that of using them for our goals without becoming an unwitting victim of what looks better in drawings. The plan exerted great fascination as an instrument for distribution; the cost was that composition became distribution. Buildings ceased being aesthetic compositions and became “wrapped distributions.” Robin Evans writes: “In the Renaissance, perspective permitted the exact control of the appearance of internal spaces. The cost of this new tool was that, for a long time, interior spaces became just like one-point perspective drawings. Descriptive geometry was a mathematician’s generalization of architectural drawing, the powers of which were vastly increased in some respects and reduced in others. Pictures became more abstract, losing much of their illustrative character as solid bodies dissolved into a nexus of trace lines. Ageometric bodies could not be represented, but on the other hand a wider range of more complex geometric figures and their intersections could be represented with much greater ease.”4 Computer systems allow us to use their power to see our designs in perspective and even in the dynamic perspective of animation. Gone are the days spent in search of the best viewpoint and the tedious geometrical

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constructions. Although computer perspectives are universally inferior to those drawn by hand, these new systems reveal their own tyranny over our imagination. Representation has many virtues. Innocence and neutrality are not among them. Each work of architecture carries the marks of the means of representation by which it was created. Surely it would not be possible to avoid analogic models in the creation of buildings. It is not a question of avoiding being conditioned by media. What we should do is be conscious of the existence of media conditioning. This has two goals: first, not to lose sight of the external relations of the architectural object, the reasons for its existence. We have a tendency to be fascinated by intrinsic, formal relations of parts within the objects we create, in emulation of artists and artisans; and second, not to mistake the formal relations that appear in representation for those which are valid for the real buildings and spaces. I have already suggested that with the complete representation of the project in the Renaissance, architecture achieved something like the era of writing achieved for language. This analogy can be shown explaining the consequences writing had for language: Sound and sight, speech and print, eye and ear have nothing in common. The human brain has done nothing that compares in complexity with this fusion of ideas involved in linking up the two forms of language. But the result of this fusion is that once it is achieved in our early years, we are for ever after unable to think clearly, independently and surely about any one aspect of the matter. We cannot think of sounds without thinking of letters; we believe letters have sounds. We think that the printed page is a picture of what we say. . . . The speaker or writer can now hardly conceive of language, except in printed or written form.5 The quotation is from H. J. Chaytor, as quoted in Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy. McLuhan declares that Chaytor’s From Script to Print is “a book to which the present one owes a good deal of its reason to be written.”6 I would add a similar statement, this time regarding McLuhan’s work. His conception in Understanding Media of the “Narcissus myth” as the complete subjugation of the whole of conscience by one single sense was revealing. And the paragraph quoted here contains the clue to my argument about representation if we substitute for a few of the words: the architect can now scarcely conceive of representation except in drawings.

Fig. 11. A design for a centralized-plan building by G. B. Montano including plan, perspectival section, and partial façade. The building is conceived as an object over which the designer has complete control. Redrawn by Haydée Barrionuevo 35 from Tafuri, L’Architettura Description del Manierismo nel Generation Cinquecento Europeo

Drawing—representation—creates another world, and the artist is prone to believing it is more real than reality. Artists are magicians who fall for their own magic. Consider what Michelangelo wrote: “Sometimes I imagine that among men there is no art and science other than drawing and painting, from which all others come. Considering all we do in this life, I think that each one without knowing it is painting the world. This he does by producing new forms and figures, but also when dressing

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and when occupying space with buildings and houses; when working the earth according to a design; when sailing the seas, when fighting with weapons, and finally in funerals and death; in most of our actions, feats and movements.”7 Each architectural conception, every architecture we can imagine, will be a prisoner of the medium we use for imagining. The prison is not in architecture itself; it is in the representation. If you paint a picture, it can be a representation of the thing itself. But when you draw a plan of a building, it is not the real thing. It is an “intermediary object,” as Norberg Schulz calls it. Musical notation is not music itself but the convention for representing music, a “blueprint.” Beethoven was deaf: he could write music using the pentatonic scale. He had to guess what the sound would be like. But music is more conventional than architecture—at least, it was in Beethoven’s day—and he had not been born deaf. He was a composer before he became deaf. Students of architecture have never built anything, but in a sense they are asked to write a musical score. They are worse off than Beethoven. As architects acquire real experience, they make an effort to overcome the difficulties imposed by this intermediate language. They try to make their architecture against representation. They must go beyond representation to reach architecture itself. This is the opposite of the situation of the student. While learning to design, students willingly erect around themselves the prison of representation. It is the way they have of speaking the language of those in the know: they are obliged to make their statements in that language. While the language remains alien for them, they cannot make it “say” what they want. In the beginning the language will “speak its own mind” and the students’ own conceptions will almost disappear, eclipsed by the syntactic code. This code is more real than their desires and their imagination. And if representation takes flight, if perfection in representation is more important than the links with represented reality, the students’ attention and devotion will be bestowed on images and not on real architecture. Architecture and representation have stronger links in the world of values than do architecture and construction. And the links of representation and use are even less strong. The graphic harmony of the project— architectural calligraphy—feeds on other kinds of graphic harmony, on painting and graphic design, assimilating and integrating them in an old tradition. The geometric tradition of architecture is much older than descriptive geometry. Can we untie this knot, which seems to be identical with architectural culture? We probably cannot, but it is our duty to give it a new life, to transmute it. We have to remember that until some two centuries ago,

great buildings were the prototype and model of human achievement. Buildings were the privileged artifacts, the largest and most enduring. The design practices for other kinds of objects were born mostly from the way architecture is designed. Even the geometry that until not so long ago was enough to explain the universe was born and developed together with architecture. It was perhaps created for architecture. Today another world of artificial objects, produced by different methods and conceived for a world of dynamism, has displaced the static permanence of architecture. Architecture is a cultural relic—and not because humankind has succeeded in freeing itself from the artificial environment, which has never been so vast. It is a cultural relic because the media we use to imagine the buildings, as well as those employed to bring them into being, are both in crisis, and we do not have a replacement. We are no longer designing for eternity; but we use the same methods to design and very similar ones to build. Our goal in design is not only the beauty of the object; we try to improve the net of relations between society and its physical environment. However, we try to achieve this new goal using the same media devised in the Renaissance to produce and to define Beauty. The media used to design architecture and the values we attribute to architecture developed together. Their correspondence was not problematic as either could be seen alternatively as a value and the representation of a value. Perhaps the best demonstration of the loss of value in these media is that we have discovered their presence. Our design procedures were there all the time, during the lapse in which the architects of the nineteenth century went through the gamut of the meanings that one could attribute to architecture without substantially modifying it. To make architecture and to make it using a certain graphic code were one and the same thing. Only in the twentieth century did we perceive that what we can represent as architecture cannot at all show the evolution of the object through time, the changing relations of the building and its context in time. Our representation techniques are unable to control very large dimensions that were hitherto beyond the designer’s scope; the only precedent we can claim for large scale lies in the times of absolute kings, when architects subjected territorial extensions to the same simple geometry of royal edifices. Our means are also insufficient to account for the perception of architecture by its users, as we have had to acknowledge that perspective was not the mirror of reality but only one of the visual components of that perception. Perspective mirrors only a part of reality, a fixed point of view that has been much criticized in the twentieth century by proponents of “serial vision.” The other aspects of space

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perception—temperature, air movement, kinesthetics—are excluded from the fixed viewpoint and visual basis of perspective. Architecture in the twentieth century has become loaded with mechanisms providing heating, cooling, air, and light. We are forced to admit that these appear in our drawings only as machines and ducts, things that occupy space. Their effects are not represented in our drawings. The “built environment,” if it is to supplant “architecture,” has certainly not yet found its graphic correlation. No matter how much we architects pay lip service to these intangibles—I should say “undrawables”—still, we try to keep our domain within the limits of the drawing. It is there that we feel at ease, claiming the essence of architecture to be in values we can control in drawings, like proportion, clear lines, harmonious façades, and similar virtues. This graphic product freed from the hindrances of reality is transmitted intact from one country to another, from one magazine to another. It is transmitted instantly by the World Wide Web; it is ever more available. When somebody finally achieves the goal of giving material existence to those images that transmit architectural ideas, the resulting building is already well known through those images. It offers only a verification of an “old” image. Architecture used to be the prototype of permanence. Through the diffusion of its representations it has entered the circle of fashion. Buildings, however, are not produced in quantity, or so quickly as to belong effectively to the world of consumption. Only through the medium of print can architecture enter the world of premature obsolescence. In this way, architects will design without conviction something that they know will be dated before it gets built. Conversely, other architects will try to escape the tyranny of Time by reducing architecture to a play of simple Platonic volumes; those are expected to be eternal. The graphic codes of architecture possess great precision for defining a physical object. This object is unreal in the design stage; but it is clearly one and only one object. Here lies the great strength of design— but also the difficulty of assimilating values other than those of the aesthetic object. From this springs an inversion of the design process, one we take for granted. In the beginning of the design process, the designer’s conjectures are focused on the behavior of inhabitants in the future building. These conjectures lead to preformations, to the adoption of elements previously subject to a typification. They also lead to the adoption of distribution schemes in a space as yet unclear that develops within seemingly available limits. In the beginning this is an organization as shapeless as possible. It is as yet quite far from the development of form and from the precision of materiality. After a certain moment, this informal

Fig. 12. Progetto Venezia by Patricia Rabino and Alfonso Corona-Martínez, architects, 1984. The design sketch as a conciliation of site data with a typological repertoire assumed for the parti. Used with permission of the author

39 Description Generation

scheme will find its parti, its synthetic diagram. From that moment onward, a long return into the world of geometry as applied to architecture begins. Through successive representations, the incipient object is reintegrated into the domain of geometry. From the parti on, the process becomes deductive, firmly guided by the laws of representation. These laws help it “to become.” They also decide what it will be.

40 The Architectural Project

CHAPTER 3

Design Education

In schools of architecture we find subjects called “Architectural Design,” “Design,” or as was usual in the past, “Architectural Composition.” All these course titles point to a single although varied reality: the design studio. The design studio is where the student learns to design; and design is considered the key activity for an architect. Therefore, the studio is the most important piece in the set of subjects; the essential activity, offering the main chance for the future architect to become a good designer. Other courses in a school of architecture are usually termed theoretical. This means that studio is deemed to be practical: the student will “feed” on the other subjects in order somehow to translate this wide spectrum of knowledge into the only thing that matters, design. The design studio can be a single unit that accompanies all the other subjects throughout the whole curriculum: this is the “vertical studio” that brings to the present the traditional atelier of the Ecole des BeauxArts. In the Beaux-Arts, the student entered the atelier of a “patron” and usually remained there during all the formative years.1 The student’s designs would bear the imprint of that particular master; the hope was that this would lead the student to win the coveted Grand Prix de Rome, which would assure a career as a designer of state architecture. In modern schools this continuity is rarely the case. The student goes through a succession of studios, sometimes spanning one or two years of the period of schooling but more usually only a semester.

Simulation However, the practice itself is very similar in all cases. The student— sometimes a group of students—produce a simulation of a real design for a building. This will happen time and again in successive studios. The same professors and assistants who guide and follow the development of the design conduct the evaluation of it. In some cases ad hoc juries decide on the value of the design, evoking the Beaux-Arts prix

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d’émulation. Gaining the favor of the jury or obtaining a good mark from the professor gets the student promoted to the next level. Juries and evaluations take the place of theoretical exams, of which there are none in the usual design training. Studio is considered an essential part of the architect’s training. The key activity of the architect is represented in the studio where he or she designs buildings. In spite of this, seldom do we find a specific doctrine expounded in the studio. It is a case of learning by doing, because you learn to design objects by designing objects. That is, you learn about something in the exercise of that something.2 What matters in the studio is not having knowledge but being able to deploy that knowledge (which often remains implicit) in the design product. It is not a discursive knowledge but one that experts identify in the product and approve of when acting as a jury. Design knowledge makes its presence felt in practice, or rather in the simulation of practice. It is an incomplete practice in which design and construction are “naturally” separated, still following the Renaissance conception of architecture. If we believe that architecture resides in every building and can be identified in the project, it follows that in the process of making that project, everything meaningful for architecture will somehow happen in the design studio. Through the minds of the students and over their drawing boards must pass everything that is relevant for architecture. It is not enough to learn the routines of a practice the student still cannot master. Students must also learn there, and through the same medium, what architecture is or should be. The autonomy of the project as a substitute for “live” architecture reaches a maximum in schools of architecture. Students are set apart from the environment in which they live, from that with which they are familiar. This is judged to be “bad architecture.” Experience cannot overcome the good examples of modern architecture. After graduating, students have a mission: to impose upon reality a parallel world of Architect’s Architecture, which they know mainly through representations. If they fail, they become skeptics: they have not succeeded in imposing the Good. If they are successful, it is because they have imposed over their own environment an exotic product that is perhaps rejected even in the land of its origin. Instead of knowing what there is in a particular environment and trying to design the evolution of that environment, the prospective architect is led to adopt fashionable forms. Although buildings belong to the place where they are built, teaching—at least in the informal sense—does not help students to understand this simple fact. Projects, the designs made in the studio, are not simply drawings of buildings according to usual conventions. They are simulations of a de-

sign produced in answer to real demand. But in fact they are only a part of the real process of design, abstracted and deformed in the act of being separated from other requirements; finally they become self-sufficient. The would-be designer finds out about a “real” design problem and undertakes a design process; this will produce the description of the building that would “solve the problem.” The student has a counselor or mentor who helps, as if the student were intended to face the prospective client. In fact the mentor is the client. The “other client” seldom appears on the scene. Clients who did appear would be confronted with representations of objects quite far from what they imagined—perfected “for architecture,” not for clients’ personal needs. The design responds to the dialog between the student, who is learning architecture, and the tutor/pro-fessor, who knows a lot about the subject. It is common to forget the strict demands of the brief somewhere along the way. After all, it was only a pretext. The modern academic design process shares many of the shortcomings of the Beaux-Arts routine. Both lead to the formal perfection of the building instead of dwelling on the intricacies of professional practice. The formal values of architecture have changed since , and theory declares them to be of secondary use; the design procedure that led to the perfection of form is still in command. Unity is required of a design; so it must be “complete.” Every design assignment is done starting with a problem conceived as a whole: from this intuition of the whole, the project has to be created. Very seldom will we find parts of a building as a design subject. That would not be adequate, as the new project is considered proof of the student’s creativity. His or her artistic personality is reflected in it. Selfrealization as an artist is a strong component in the student’s selection of this career. Beginning from the whole product—the complete design of a building—means that the student is expected to produce a model of a building that would satisfy a real program in the real world. Projects are made in answer to needs described by analogy with others known in the social milieu where we are teaching. So the general pattern remains: you learn to be an architect through the imaginary design of buildings, buildings that will never get built but will be judged as if realized. Some of the difficulties that naturally arise in connection with this relation between studio problems and real problems are addressed in the rest of this section. How is the “real case” reduced to the design assignment? That is, what parts of the real problem are omitted in the design assignment, and in what way are others reduced or schematized? In The Design Studio Donald

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Schon lists the items dealt with in the studio. He finds that cost considerations are absent. “The designer’s repertoire of domains has a structure of priorities for attending to features or situations. In our protocol, there are many references to the organization of space, several references to scale, building elements, program/use, and the sense of form. But there are only single references in each of the domains of precedent, structure/technology, and explanation. The domains of cost and building character do not appear in the protocol at all.”3 The case observed is a “first Studio”; the part of the process Schon has observed is the establishment of the general schema or parti. We can suggest that the “domains” listed as having few or no references are inactive in the determination of the parti. The apparent absence of precedent mentioned by Schon reflects the fact that precedents are mentioned casually by the teacher, as “examples” that spring to mind, apparently provoked by the student’s performance. Construction matters will be left until later; meanwhile they are entrusted to geometrical regularity. Costs—budgetary matters—very seldom appear in a design studio. This answers our question in part: in a design studio, although the work is conceived of as a simulation of reality, practical matters that constitute much of real practice are not allowed to distract students from their main task, which is first learning to design, then acquiring excellence as designers. This conception also guides the selection of programs. As Durand pointed out long ago, it is not possible to train students in the whole variety of programs they might face in their professional lives. It would take too long. More important yet, much of what they had learned would refer to other contextual conditions, and the student “might be tempted to adapt his school project to this new situation.”4 What had to be taught was design method—the way he conceived it—and that was the school’s task. Today the problem of selecting programs for studio exercises is still with us. Will we propose to students only up-to-date programs that will interest them and make them feel they are being trained “for reality”? Or will we insist on other programs, not very frequent as real commissions, but providing comprehensive knowledge difficult to replicate with other types of building? Other questions are important for design education in this framework of the studio. Every system of schooling has implicit answers to all of the following; few are subject to scrutiny, and the answers each school has are considered “common sense.” How do we subdivide training into levels? How do we create a gradually more complex sequence of design problems adapted to the years or semes-

ters of learning while always keeping the pattern of simulation of a “real case”? It is normally accepted that the student should solve problems of growing complexity in the course of advancing in successive studios. This may seem obvious, as architecture has this in common with any type of learning. The problem resides in the definition of complexity. Traditionally, the growth in complexity is translated as designing larger buildings each time: from the garden shed to the hospital. This betrays the lack of a theoretical framework already mentioned. It is also traditional: the grande composition came last in the Beaux-Arts tradition, so that the student in training would begin with small buildings and even ornamental fragments. Often the studio has no explicit program; work co-incides with the enunciation of the design brief. In this case, the studio is defined as the place where people are taught to solve this or that design problem. This “program dependency” implicitly reflects the functionalist trend that has dominated most of twentieth-century teaching. Complexity can be confronted—for studio teaching—by approaching it in several ways. At least two of these can be suggested: complexity as intrinsic to the object itself, and the complexity of the process that has to be followed. The first—complexity of the object—can be defined according to systems theory as the increasing number of parts and their relations in an object. This is close to but not necessarily the same as growth in size of the building. Complexity can also mean an increase of the explicit conditioning factors in the environment of the design. This narrows the field of possible choices, or it may be a spur for creativeness. Complexity can simply be the need to go a long way to gain knowledge of the context; and in this sense a more complex object serving a familiar context can be less difficult than a simpler one that demands more contextual research. However, in large programs, complexity increases with the number of free options; while, on the other hand, many practical restrictions may help an innovative designer, as is usual in the programs proposed in early studios. A material restriction, such as designing a small building employing only wood as a building material, will allow the student to concentrate on small-scale functional and ergonomic matters and learn simple frame construction. More generally, a restrictive repertoire will guide learning other aspects of the problem at hand. The problem itself will have to be “designed” in large programs approaching those of urban design and planning. The upper-level students will be allowed more freedom and they may be allowed to choose the subjects for their final designs. These definitions of complexity pay homage to the conception of the growing creativity of the student. The prize simultaneously placed on

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creativity and on the importance of the program point to the importance of the parti. Even if the parti is not finally developed, it is still valued as proof of the creativity of the student. It is assumed that he or she will be a high-quality architect.5 If this way of approaching teaching is modified by more sophisticated thought, growing complexity should be reconsidered. Less complex subjects would be those based in wellknown types; a more complex assignment would propose designs with less familiar precedents. How do we incorporate the types of knowledge provided by other subjects in the curriculum? It has always been supposed that these subjects would provide help for the design studio.6 It is not clear if that knowledge is broadly conceptual or applied, as is the case when teachers demand that students make structural calculations or constructional details of their projects (seldom with success). Technical courses in the second part of the twentieth century have provided students with information about new materials and techniques. The other alternative—applied knowledge—faces some difficulties. The first is translating the data of presentday construction systems into the general plan of the building: this is discussed more extensively in chapter , Development of the Project: The Elements of Architecture. There is also the question of actively incorporating service systems in the “creative” phase of the design. To make nonvisual considerations active in the early design process, it is probably necessary to add other kinds of design assignments, different from the complete building in some of the projects. Teachers of short studios— those that last only for a semester—are usually reluctant to abandon the “integral” design assignment, which gives the studio masters the chance of deploying their architectural stance. Only very recently has computer simulation been tried to reinforce the relation between design and construction in the design studio. The authors of a course in which students undertake “virtual” construction projects register as a reason for their studio the same complaint we have heard already: “It is often suggested that architecture students do not gain much practical knowledge of construction methods and management during their education. Although students typically complete courses in construction methods, many studio projects lack any semblance of cost or project management and may indicate only a rudimentary attention to construction.”7 Some interesting issues appear in their paper. For instance: “The discipline of creating D models that are precisely sized to match actual dimensions helps students to obtain an awareness of construction materials. The creation of D models of details drives home the issues of assembly and construction in a more powerful way than does conventional D drafting.” Later they suggest that the way to show con-

struction will change too: “These methods are also a nascent approach to innovative construction documentation. A D model of a building, sequenced to illustrate construction and hyper-linked to specifications and product information, may be a very effective way of communicating to contractors and trades people.”8 Courses dealing with representation—what used to be called the “drawing studio”—promoted the employment of abstract shapes and two- and three-dimensional grids. These were apt to be translated directly into the “megastructures” of the s. In this sense, it is quite telling that the practice of free drawing was centered in drawing simple solids instead of the classical models of statuary employed hitherto. The separate consideration of perceived qualities like color and texture follows along similar lines. Sometimes knowledge is expected to be manifest in the design in the same way that other cultural content appears in the work of an artist, who is considered an interpreter of culture. That would be the case for disciplines like history of architecture, very influential for modernists and Postmodernists, although in a different sense. History of architecture was strangely subject to a kind of schizophrenia toward . Architectures of the past were presented as a reflection of the social structures that “caused” them, while modern architecture was presented as the work of a few heroes who had made discoveries leading to our own “period.” Urban planning was presented as a geographically enlarged version of functionalism, joining single-use areas with circulation channels. Of course, more recent decades changed this scenario, especially in history of architecture. When historians consciously adopted their role of heirs to the theory of architecture, this was strongly influential in the rise of self-conscious movements, of which Postmodernism is the most evident. How do we make comparable the work of different students in order to evaluate them? This is a consequence of the freedom of design accorded to each student in the studio to solve a problem in his or her own way. People who have different prejudices about the problem will produce designs with different emphasis. In theory at least, the relative success of each student’s proposal will be measured by its adequacy to address the requirements set out in the brief. It will also be measured by the quality of the representations the student shows to communicate the design; those deemed adequate to represent buildings change very much in time, giving rise to “styles” well beyond the simple technical representation of objects. A third and surprising criterion is the originality of the design. The first item is largely a theoretical matter, because the design really will be evaluated by its similitude to other designs serving similar functions.

47 Design Education

Fig. 13. The continuity of Durand’s method of composition: above, Paris, 1824. Below, Buenos Aires, 1936.

48 The Architectural Project

That is, it will be judged by more or less explicit, more or less partial analogies with established type. The second requirement in fact refers indirectly to the possibility of building the design, if we consider trivial the requirement that projections coincide; that is, that they point to a single hypothetical object. The first criterion—adequacy to the brief— defines architecture as functional; design teaching is generally within the frame of functionalism. We have earlier seen that the design procedure was invented before functionalism became the dominant ideology; it

Fig. 14. Henri Labrouste, Grand Prix de Rome, “Un Tribunal de Cassation,” 1824. From Drexler, The Architecture of the Ecole de Beaux-Arts Fig. 15. Carlos A. Pereyra, “A Building for the National Archives.” 49 From Revista de Design Education Arquitectura Taken together, both projects form examples of the interdependence between plan composition and the Elements of Architecture employed for the façade design.

should not be surprising to find that buildings designed with the best functionalist intention often fall well below their expected performance. In school, a strong distinction should be made between the usefulness of real buildings and the expectation of usefulness derived from students’ designs. What is the role of precedents in the design process and in the evaluation of results? Our former question introduced this consideration. There are two kinds of functionality: that of real buildings and the one designs are supposed to have. If there is an established functional type, an accepted one, then functionality in a design could be measured simply by the conformity of the new design to that type. This is barely the case today—we might even say it is against the tacit rules of modernism to allow the existence of types. However, the studio teacher will give continuity to established precedents simply to concentrate on the real task of teaching the student to produce an orderly, unified object. Many studies have been made of buildings in use to assess whether they met the expectations existing during their design.9 Only a few of those have gained wide public dissemination. They are not used in design teaching and are seldom found in bibliographies concerning design methods.

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Fig. 16. The Schröder House by Gerrit Rietveld, 1924. A formal re-elaboration of the design employing the same Elements of Architecture. Student work by Mariano Akerman used with permission by the author, Universidad de Belgrano, 1986

This kind of study would constitute a solid foundation for perceiving the potential functionality of designs in school. In chapter  I examine Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, which is an attempt to create or to confirm the validity of a repertoire of solutions for identifiable problems. It is hard to recall another book in this area that has become as widely known as Alexander’s. We can deduce that there is not much real interest in finding out whether buildings are functional or not, whether they are fit in the way their designers imagined. Studies of this kind should be distinguished from those produced in the s establishing measurements of spaces adequate for human actions in relation to definite equipment. Those studies postulated what people should need to carry on their activities but did not incorporate the verification of user experience of such spaces. If we accepted, even on a provisional basis, the results obtained in the studies made by Alexander and other recent authors, we would have a definite base for evaluating the probable performance of as yet unbuilt structures. As a profession we do not accept these results; therefore our evaluation of the probable performance of a design is really based in its similitude with models, selected from the subjective repertoire of teachers. This applies to the global evaluation of a design. However, this is not the only type of evaluation a design in the making receives. In observation of design studios, co-workers and I found it useful to distinguish between what we called “formal rules”—what makes up the “house style” referred to in the next item—and “practical rules or traits.”10

Practical rules seem to be taught in most studios independently of the architectural ideology of professors. Some examples of practical rules are the dispositions that assure that opening doors will not hit furniture or fixtures, or the design of stairs that will reach the next level without difficulty. Professors looking at the designs in a strange environment (as guest critics, for instance), if they are not sympathetic to the studio “style,” will safely concentrate their comments on practical rules. Practical rules make sure that the design, if built, could be inhabited conventionally. In this case more than in others, the plans shown by the student are read by the critic as if they represented an existing building. The practical rules to be applied are unambiguous and are slow to change. Many professors apply conservative criteria, rejecting alternative solutions to established practical devices. Thus, much of the design can be judged on a yes/no basis, limiting innovation to formal additions to a practical disposition. Practical rules make buildings apt for habitation. However, there is a general agreement that on their own, they are not adequate for making a building that qualifies as Architecture. We have divided practical rules into four kinds: () Elementary rules state the minimal conditions to make a building inhabitable, such as the height of doors, sizes of stair treads and risers, the existence of windows in most of the rooms, and others matters of that kind. These rules are supposed to apply to any building over a long period; at least until technical innovation makes them obsolete. () Program-specific rules are incorporated for particular programs, as in hospitals, fire stations, or laboratories. They are explicitly written into the brief. () Graphic rules are the conventions that rule the making of plans and sections in such a way that they can be understood by architects (and supposedly by contractors). There are also conventions to show building detail dispositions, structural devices, etc. () More complex practical rules are those coming from specialist studies that have gained some acceptance; they are incorporated as a kind of folklore in studios. These include ideas about adequate proportions for large rooms, the use of light colors to suggest more depth in a room, and so on.

Which are the design methods to be taught to the students and how will they be taught? There was a time around the mid-twentieth century when there was a definite demand to interpose in time, between the linear text of the brief and the graphic disposition of the parti, another construction, the bubble diagram.11 This was also a graphic device but one that

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52 The Architectural Project

presented only the names of the rooms required by the program. Those were written inside circles, later to be joined by lines establishing the most important links between the future spaces of the building.12 Needless to say, this is yet another portrait of additive, elementary composition in the Durand tradition. It postulates without questioning that spaces will each have a single function. It also tends to reduce all kinds of links between spaces to circulation. Thus it strongly suggests that the functionality of a building rests in its spaces having adequate dimensions and in creation of a circulation network strategically joining a constellation of points in a plane. At most, such an occurence and the need to enter the ensemble from somewhere at the perimeter will limit the neutrality of points in the horizontal plane. The bubble diagram will not show the conditions that make a space inhabitable. Sound isolation, heat interchange, and the proportions of spaces are absent from this first scheme. Therefore, they will not enter the group of considerations leading to the parti. The design process that follows the sequence needs– bubble diagram–parti assures no functional qualities other than those derived from circulation links and exclusions; these are eloquently described by Robin Evans in “Figures, Doors and Passages” and are discussed in chapter  of the present volume.13 Spatial values, cultural meaning, and environmental considerations are counted out of this process.14 In spite of that, these values are important in the real experience of buildings; they can also be perceived in the project, but it seems from the process that they should enter the design surreptitiously, by accident. What fills this gap between the apparently rational method and the final form of the design? It is obvious that it is the help of precedents, whether admitted freely or with the concurrent guilt of copying models. Training the student in a purely functional “method” does not have as its goal the pursuit of functional efficiency, as was the case for the Design Methods movement of the s. It is instead a kind of moralizing approach, stressing use as the foremost value. The intention of teaching these processes is architecture as social service, apparently as opposed to architecture as art. Where will the architect’s creativity go? If it is functionalism that dominates the scene, and it is understood as those aspects of architecture that can be controlled by these schemes and diagrams, then creativity will concentrate in the design of parts. These parts will be elements of composition, odd volumes if function lends to their adoption. Or they may be elements of architecture, if something like extreme climate can justify new devices. Mechanical functionalism leads to the overstressing of plan design. The architect—and the student—are always tempted to seek new plan dispositions; they will try to create novel “architectural organisms.”

Fig. 17. Relations between buildings, be they actual or known only through their representations, student designs, and theories articulated by teachers. Designed by the author

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How do we evaluate a student’s design when it is still in the making; that is, not yet really codified as architecture? This is one of the central aspects of the skill of a design assistant or instructor—and also one of the least neutral. Design instructors play a very unusual role in the students’ design process, sometimes giving psychological help, sometimes playing the leader or client. By doing sketches, the designer translates some aspect of the problem (or the assignment, in the case of a student). This already suggests a possible disposition of parts in the solution. The portrait of the problem is on its way to becoming a possible, although still blurred, portrait of the solution. The role of the teacher in the first studios consists precisely in guiding students to “read” their program graphics as possible architectural representations. Students are making tentative drawings or models; the instructor “interprets” these sketches, suggesting the next step that the students should take to “clarify their ideas.”15 Graphic clarification proceeds by way of geometrical order and unity. Clarification has at least one other definite goal: the drawings must

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finally be of the same kind as those conventionally used for representing buildings. That will help the instructor to be more “objective” about the design. Instructors will find it easier to read a student’s project but at the same time more difficult to transmit their own ideas through the student’s hand. These conventionalized drawings are necessary for collective criticism of designs in the making, for the “studio crit.” Designs by different students must be comparable and must therefore be coded as though they were complete and real buildings. This causes premature crystallization of the design; students have to fill the gaps in their ideas with conventional parts of which they are still unsure—all the more so in the present studio, where computer representation of plans and elevations makes use of “catalog items.” These are the equivalent of prefabricated parts—or the elements of architecture and stylistic ornaments of the nineteenth century.

Communication in the Studio Some authors hold the opinion that the graphic codes employed by architects in “self-dialog” are private and not communicable.16 I do not share this opinion; trained architects may use “reduced” codes, but having been trained as architects, with professors and instructors, they will inevitably use shorthand versions of the traditional projections: plan, section, elevation. To my knowledge, there are no studies showing what deformations or influences are exerted on imaginative, private sketching by formal architectural education. That is, in school there is no purely private dialog between the author and the work; the assistant is there to intervene in that soliloquy from time to time—sometimes daily—so that there is a kind of teamwork between unequal partners. The assistant reads into the student’s sketches much more than was originally intended, because of being able to anticipate consequences of some “manipulation” of elements that the student does not yet understand. This also means that the assistant can transmit preconceptions of architecture to the students; that is the instructor’s secret role, over and above the overt mission of helping students find their own way. The instructor will provide the models mentioned in the previous section. When these models (reflecting “house style”) conflict with those admired by the student, we will have a clash of referents: the favorite authors (architects) of the assistant on one side, and the latest magazines on the side of the student. Thus, architectural magazines have great importance for students. Just like the designs the student has to make, they present architec-

55 Design Education

ture as representation. They provide examples codified just like his design and quickly become substitutes for real buildings. Whatever we try to teach is compared with the content of magazines. Each student soon becomes the pupil of a remote Master. That famous architect will never know of his self-appointed disciple. The “real” professor becomes a mediator between the student and that famous Author, verifying that he is a good imitator, and the student will respect him if he is a good guide to lead him on the road to perfection. That is, if his design is an appropriate imitation of the Master’s designs. If the chosen Master is not acceptable to the professor, the student will fall into disgrace. He will be considered someone who does not listen and tries to follow his own whimsical preferences.”17 Before this predominance of magazines, the design studio was really the heir to the art studio of the Renaissance. There was a master to be followed: architecture (or Art) was “what we do here.” Still, entering a studio—and all the more so if it is a “vertical” studio of several years’ standing—is something like joining a religious group. In the studio apprentices learn many conventions that will shape their convictions about architecture. Authority is exerted informally in the master-apprentice

Fig. 18. Physical study model made from cardboard, wrinkled paper, and scraps of corkboard. The student builds an intuitive representation of a project in progress. Student work used with permission by the author, Universidad de Concepción del Uruguay, 2000

Figs. 19a and 19b. Design for an existing, difficult environment. The model of buildings around the site—Museum of Fine Arts in the foreground, School of Law in the background— is common to all students. In the following photo one of the designs 56 for theThe extension of the Architectural museum is in place. Project Student work used with permission by the author, Universidad de Concepción del Uruguay, 2000

relationship. Conventions are transmitted fragmentarily and often remain implicit. Schon states that the teacher of the first design studio has a double task: simultaneously teaching the student to design and teaching a vocabulary to describe that process. This contrasts with higher studios, in which students and teachers are supposed to share a common vocabulary. Teachers introduce at most some “new words”; of these, students will ask their “proper” meaning and adopt them—at least when dealing with the professors in that studio. The language used to describe designing is not unified. First, there is a denotative lexicon to refer to the parts of the building as a physical

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construction (column, beam, ceiling). There is a second lexicon, equally denotative, which refers to types of representation (plan, section, axonometric). These two “dictionaries” are more or less unknown to students at the beginning, but they very soon become aware that they must learn these in order to communicate at all. These vocabularies coexist with another one, more closely related to the design process itself. This contains words referring to actions, properties, virtues, and faults: words like parti, sketch, rhythm, control, and order. The student soon learns that a “strong” composition is better than a “weak” one. Clarity is opposed to confusion, and so on. Authority will also be used to eradicate commonsense preferences of taste, substituting modern abstraction. Each studio is like a magical realm from which students look at the production of other studios—when there are “parallel studios,” for example in France, Argentina, or at the Architectural Association school in London—without fully understanding the logic of the production of that alien subculture. For the teaching group, the studio is an environment in which instructors can define architecture in their own way, and therefore a comfortable, pleasant environment. If there are heretics in the studio, they must be expelled from time to time: the best instructors are those who understand the master almost without words; they excel at teamwork. It

Fig. 20. A perspective set up by hand that tries to be mechanical (early 1970s). The stick-on human figures and dot textures are later reproduced as machinemade perspective drawings. Student work used with permission by the author, Universidad de Buenos Aires

Figs. 21a and 21b. Large-scale models help students understand how buildings are put together. They also become a temptation for the student to try his or her hand at theoretically high-tech designs. Student work used with permission by the 58 author, Universidad de The Architectural Belgrano, 1999 Project

is not necessary that they be the best didactically, as students are a secondary element of the studio. They are “hands” who execute the designs of their teachers. This comfortable, intimate environment was becoming threatened toward the end of the twentieth century. For studio masters, experiences in shared design studios working at a distance, showing the progress of their designs on the Internet, pose the threat of strangers. It is not through magazines that different shapes and opinions enter the magic circle. They will be on screen and in real time. The uncomfortable situation of the studio crit, in which teachers and students alike feel judged by external

critics, is now possibly a permanent situation. Once the students become proficient at dealing with both CAD and the Net—and this last happens long before they enter a school of architecture—they can be “nongeographical” students. The days of the traditional studio under a leading professional seem to be at an end. The adoption of new goals in design should imply new instruments. Conversely, the appearance of new design tools will push to the fore some values instead of others; and this may or not coincide with those explicitly willed by practitioners and theorists of their day. The Beaux-Arts system of composition was independent of the styles of the nineteenth century and could also span most of the twentieth century without serious problems. The last two centuries are in their turn included in a wider, post-Renaissance way of thinking and of making architecture through representation. The final decade of the twentieth century has given a new strength to the identification between architecture and its representation. This will provide the link to the future, even if the design studio we have known is suffering a profound transformation. We are heirs to many traditions of design. In teaching designers, we reinterpret and transform these traditions; we reinvent design traditions.

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CHAPTER 4

The Two Faces of Functionalism

60 The Architectural Project

Even if everything has to be done for the sake of ornament, yet he (the architect) should furnish the building in such a way that you would not deny that utility was the principal motive. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books

The idea that the usefulness of the building should be its most important value is clearly stated by Durand. He defines what architects should deal with: According to what we have said, we should not try to make architecture agreeable; because if we endeavor only to make it fulfill its real goals (usefulness and economy) it is impossible for it to provoke dislike; also if we try too hard to please we might fall into ridicule. We should also not seek for variety, effect, or character. Because it is impossible that a building will not have those qualities in the highest degree if, using only the true elements of this art, the building has all that is necessary, nothing but the necessary, and that disposed in the simplest manner. It is therefore only with disposition that an architect should occupy himself, even he who loves ornament and wants to please.1 Durand is here showing his extraordinary utilitarianism. He arrives at a conclusion that would be surprising were it not for the fact that it is a principle that has now ruled over composition for more than a century. This is the conclusion: usefulness resides in distribution. The functionality of a building is something that can be studied in its plan. In Durand’s day such an idea would have had revolutionary value, as a break with the immediate past. In time this would become a dogma, overestimating with its “clear circulation” and “correctly dimensioned spaces” many buildings that are uninhabitable for other reasons.

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In the moralistic style of his time, Durand redefines architecture as a social service. In so doing, he displaces the nucleus of architectural knowledge. The classical architect controlled form, mastering the art of creating beauty, even if that meant leaving aside or postponing utility and construction. In the future, the architect would be the one who knew how to make useful buildings; that is, how to make efficient distributions. The most efficient and economic building would be the best. In the pursuit of usefulness and good construction, aesthetic attractiveness would inevitably follow. The process of composition described in chapter , detailed step by step by Durand, is the tool we use to design/compose/distribute rational buildings. The different programs translate into different distributions. Each theme is reflected in a plan type. In this way a new typology begins, wherein each of the multiple functional attributes that proliferate under the rhythm of Progress finds its new type. The generation before Durand had certainly begun this process of functional differentiation. Sometimes this happened on request, the result of actual instructions. On other occasions those new types issued from the speculative imagination of men like Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Etienne Boullée.

Figs. 22a and 22b. J. N. L. Durand’s “Hospitals and Prisons” is an example of an early nineteenth-century attempt to establish a typology of functions. Redrawn by Haydée Barrionuevo from Durand, Précis

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This first “functionalism”—the term does not appear until the end of the nineteenth century—would then point to a normalization of the relations between use and form, and thus to a “functional typology,” which in due course would lead to the reproduction of buildings by industry, giving them the same status as other goods produced as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution.2 Modernity, however, is not only utilitarian and egalitarian; it is also individualistic. This individualism is particularly visible in its artistarchitects, who had to go through a gradual metamorphosis from courtiers into free “liberal” professionals who have to compete for commissions; among other things, this competition is based on a display of their creative talents. For this reason, functionalism would also provide the opportunity for each author to show a personal interpretation of function, that “service to society” which justified the author’s existence. This attitude would be reinforced by the ever-deferred industrial production of architecture. Buildings are still mostly produced one by one, the product of craft rather than industry. This invites architects to consider in depth the circumstance of the site where the building is erected, be it interpreted from the demands of the program and the client or from a particular determination of the geographic or urban environment. Possibly those who thought of architecture as something capable of industrialization forgot the traits that make architecture different from other artifacts: fixity in space, long life, and high symbolic significance for its inhabitants. The proto-functional attitude that starts with the search for a new, stable typology ends as quite the opposite: namely, an underlining of particular cases, extending even to the justification through “function” of uncontrolled personal expression. Meanwhile, another design process continues to be the source of most of the built production, creating new and stable types and models.3 The academic system prized a certain originality, which was limited by retaining those precedents deemed valuable. Modern architecture would transcend those limits by denying all explicit precedents, in a process reaching its zenith around . On the one hand, then, functionalism is the search for new types or models; on the other, it is an endless search for innovation through the rejection of all typologies—even those of the Modern movement itself. In view of this contradiction, the Design Methods movements of the late s and s is an attempt to make functionalism more rigorous, to circumscribe the problem of design by focusing on the design process from the viewpoint of the program.

The term program has already made its appearance in chapter . When explaining design procedures, Viollet-le-Duc declared the origin of the design to be a program, although this was expected to be a “confused brief (as many written briefs are).” Viollet-le-Duc could not have imagined that a hundred years later, the last important theoretician of functionalism—Christopher Alexander, in Notes on the Synthesis of Form— would take up his point about the writing of briefs. In its traditional form, the program as developed during the era of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts is a brief statement, specifying to which class of general uses the building will belong; where it is to be implanted (a museum in the center of a capital city, a leisure residence by the seaside); and giving a list, ever more detailed as the nineteenth century runs its course, of the parts or elements of composition the building must have. From the first interpretation of this “confused” document, the architect will produce a parti; that is, a general layout that will satisfy the requirements of the brief. We have read Viollet-le-Duc’s description of this search for the parti. Then ensues the development, that part of the work devoted to the resolution of all kinds of details and coordination of parts. We will finally have a completed design, a document to guide and control building operations. The existence of a written program reflects the novelty of many of the buildings of the nineteenth century, either because they were needed for activities that did not exist before (as in the case of a railway station) or because of a change in the user and client (public libraries, art collections). Some would make their appearance as a result of a change in social habits (as in the case of the bourgeois apartment for the rising middle class) and others due to radical transformations in activities (industrial buildings, hospitals, and office buildings). The celebrated English historian John Summerson said in a  lecture: “The programme as the source of unity is, so far as I can see, the one new principle involved in modern architecture. It is part of my case for a theory of modern architecture that it is the source.”4 Viollet-le-Duc had said almost a hundred years before that the architect “should be respectful of truth in two things: respect for the program and respect for construction.” As already noted, the program indicates the needs to be satisfied in the project, giving an enumeration of the useful parts or rooms of the design. It does not specify their relations clearly. This leaves a certain freedom for the architect, that of determining the relations of parts in distribution. Viollet-le-Duc described this special skill of the architect as establishing a kind of order: transforming the lineal order of words into the spatial order of the parti. If the program is only a text, the architect is free to design. Writing the program is not the architect’s task. Guadet

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tells us explicitly that the architect should not be the one to elaborate it, perhaps to preserve the absolute mastery over form and the magic of the translation of the written document into the incipient form. The program is thought of as previous to the design process: in that case the architect has to answer to a well-defined need, stated by the client. The program can be synthesized by its generic name: a house or a hospital. This would be the name of a type of building. But in modern times a functional typology of buildings has never really been constituted. We have already mentioned two opposite tendencies in the architecture of the twentieth century, typification and particularity. The architectural program is enfeebled by this conflict. The text of the program often reflects the doubt about the validity of existing solutions. If a simple list of the elements of composition required—a list of standard places—will not be enough, then the designer’s attention is directed to study of activities that will take place in those spaces. The early twentieth century was the time for a detailed study of all human activities: including the most representative and solemn but, above all, the most mechanical and trivial. From this another impossible attempt at typification would ensue, involving the minimal necessary spaces for each activity. The impulse comes from two different fronts: the economic imperative of sparing space and materials, and the desire to carry all the benefits of well-designed spaces to all social groups. To do this, architects will return to a programmatic stage of design: that of determining and codifying of minimal spaces and dimensions. The grouping of functions into the most elementary activities and their study is complemented by an attempt on the part of the architect to encompass the range of scales in the built environment. As the environment of modern humankind becomes more and more artificial, architects have claimed as their design field all the fixed parts of the environment. This goes far beyond the attempts to design monumental buildings and urban perspectives as well as the general layout of parts of cities, as in earlier centuries. The intention is now to design all the buildings and all the surrounding territory through a new discipline derived from architecture—planning. Designing all the buildings substitutes Architecture for its more popular forms. Or, perhaps, Architecture can disappear in the domain of popular architecture. If architects must design all buildings, then everything will aspire to the status of Architecture. There will be no plain building. Or perhaps all buildings will be what used to be “plain building” and Architecture will disappear, its symbolic role becoming unnecessary for an egalitarian society. The complication involved in determining patterns for the “correct functioning” of buildings is

increased with the functionalist interpretation of the city. The ensemble, buildings and city, are envisaged as a single system of circulation and the spaces it serves—at all scales—and the architects believe they can control the whole of the city with their design tools. Many of the grandiose urban designs of the s bear witness to this aspiration of controlling the whole of the artificial environment with the tools of architectural design. This grandiose professional aspiration goes hand in hand with a methodological reductionism, the roots of which I have tried to show. At the microscale of the building, the analysis of functions and their decomposition, the questioning of the habitual ways of carrying out human activities, has yielded good results. These results can be found both in the fine quality of many functionalist buildings and in many technological advancements that arose thanks to the functionalist attitude to building. At the urban scale the desire was to reduce the whole built environment to specialized locations and segregated circulation systems. The attempt to materialize this model literally led to the failure of cities and of urban areas built as the renewal or extension of existing cities. The model propounded by functionalism is that of either the machine or the organism. It is a set of places devoted to specialized use joined by circulation; finally, it is essentially a very differentiated circulation system. Specialized locations are “clipped” to it. The need for these specialized spaces to be adjacent disappears as the path from one specialized space to another is by the appropriate channel; juxtaposition of spaces is accepted as a necessary evil because of constructional convenience or simply lack of space. Following the same logic, in cities and regions, specialized spaces will be located at an ever greater distance from one another, and the circulation systems grow accordingly. At the scale of the building and also in the city sector, there are other very different reasons for making spaces adjacent. There is a desire to create sequences. Sequential spaces often contradict mechanical functionalism, but they tend to keep built space in a compact form. At the city scale, if this sequential character is lost, urban space is completely dispersed for the sake of rapid circulation. The result is finally to exalt an old component with mechanical characteristics. In the s the failure of these urban models entailed a condemnation of functionalism as a whole. New trends of thought challenged what had been the dominant ideology for half a century. We have been using “functional” as a synonym for “useful.” Functionality would be the contemporary image of “utility,” one of the three virtues of architecture, according to Vitruvius. But there is more than that to function. Function is a metaphor that declares buildings to be like

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physiological organisms or, as we have said, like machines. Metaphors were devised in the nineteenth century to explain a new viewpoint about architecture. There is a classic development of this subject in Peter Collins’s Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture. It will be sufficient to remember some of Collins’s argument:

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The biological analogy is based in an interpretation of a certain theory of evolution, presented by the French biologist Lamarck. This theory had been abandoned by the time Charles Darwin published a different vision in The Origin of Species; this did not prevent artists and architects from becoming Lamarckian in their own fashion. Louis Sullivan’s “Form follows Function” is a lateLamarckian enunciation of the idea that birds develop wings “to” fly. Sullivan’s motto, however, maintains its power; probably because buildings don’t grow, reproduce or evolve except in metaphorical terms. They are designed.5 The analogy with mechanisms has already been commented upon in relation to the idea of “component.” The usual mechanical analogy is not so profound. It simply postulates a functioning of buildings following the image of the machine. And this was a very suggestive image for the late nineteenth century. Each part of the machine serves a function and one only. Taken together, all of them make their contribution to a general function. The machine means economy, performance, no concessions to ornament or tradition. In the imagination of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architects, everything happens as with the design of machines, function passes directly to the forms of mechanism; as if machines made themselves without any designer involved. Some thinkers believe that such objects, being a direct reflection of utility, cannot be anything but beautiful. Others—and this is the case of Le Corbusier—defend the architect, saying there is another, more elevated beauty to be sought. All moderns admit, in one way or another, that this Brave New World of machines is in some aspect a model for the architect. As Viollet-le-Duc puts it: “The locomotive is almost a living being. Its exterior form is the expression of its power. The locomotive, therefore, has Style.”6 Both mechanical and biological analogies present architecture as an activity called upon to solve practical problems, namely “functions,” and the designer is concealed behind the screen projected by objective needs. Ideally, the creative personality of the architect will be eclipsed by the appearance of an operator of a design methodology that will yield “objective results” in solving the needs of human habitation.7

Fig. 23. An example somewhere between architecture and urban design: structural and circulation systems carrying habitable space as additions. This seems to be the logical limit of the functionalist model. “Plug-in-City” by Peter 67 Cook. From Archigram Magazine The Two Faces of Functionalism

The contradiction between the desire for subjective creation and this pretension to objectivity has already been mentioned. Creative artists present themselves in the twentieth century in the guise of functionalists. The shapes they create, no matter how strange they look, will have been generated by a devout attention to functional needs. Otherwise, they would be formalists, a terrible indictment in the first half of the century. The shapes they invent—no matter how strange—are the products of their sensitive creativity. They have a better sense of function than do others. Both the mechanical and the biological analogies give permission to invent buildings that are circulation assemblages (physiological) of highly differentiated parts, characterized in answer to particular uses. And these parts are interchangeable—as in a machine—when they have the same use. This leads to the refinement of “standard parts,” but these parts will not be parts of the construction, the elements of architecture. They will

be the “minimal bathroom,” the bedroom, or the office clerk’s workstation. In the new dialect of designers, these are called “cells.” Another consequence is the creation of ever new dispositions of those cells or of homogeneous assemblages of such cells, according to the physiology of each ensemble. Complete buildings will be called “architectural organisms” in the mid-twentieth century. Thus, the metaphor is completed. Only some architectural programs will have the right to develop strange organs, to serve very special functions. This viewpoint about architecture reflects the notion of interchangeability of human beings. In this sense functionalism is egalitarian, as 68 Fig. 24. A bedroom in Le The Architectural Corbusier’s Weissenhof Project apartment house, Stuttgart, Germany, 1927: an example of minimal space. From Oppositions 15/16

Fig. 25. Rationalizing distribution of space in low-cost housing. Rooms are designed on the basis of equipment and furniture, not as the spaces themselves. Redrawn by Haydée Barrionuevo

Fig. 26. Interior arrangement of a sailboat by J. G. Alden, 1934. Minimal size of accommodation depends on the need to distribute equipment into the reduced space of the hull. Redrawn by Haydée Barrionuevo from 69 Yachting Magazine The Two Faces of Functionalism

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befits an ideology that originated in the late eighteenth century. We have seen this trait in the passages of J. N. L. Durand. For him usefulness is located in the same way as in contemporary buildings: in the presence of spaces adapted to defined uses. Before Durand’s time, a building was not considered fit for use simply because of the presence of those rooms. Well-defined typological precedents confirmed that a given building was a palace or a monastery, and confusion was impossible. In the same way, class and birth distinguished the inhabitants of different building types. From the nineteenth century onward, function does not belong to a type in which it is “immanent” but resides in the elements of composition and their links. These elements and links define different design responses to different architectural programs. We can see now why there were no programs as such before the nineteenth century. Function is impersonal, as it belongs to the situation of any human being. Anyone can, in principle, be the one who lives in “this situation” and therefore conducts “that use.” Hitherto persons and their roles corresponded to each other, and that link could not be broken. By the ascent of the middle classes, those links have been dissolved. Thus we see that Durand’s treatise does not contain any revolutionary social information: it merely makes public a condition already established. Laugier, in the mid-eighteenth century, writes about the parts of which an appartement in a palace should consist, but he makes clear that this applies to those who can permit themselves a palace, not to people of modest means. Durand’s treatise is egalitarian in more than one way. The method he recommends—designing the plan over grid paper—dramatizes this rising reality. Each square on the paper is the exact equivalent of every other square: the most important or the most insignificant of spaces can be located on it. If this does not happen in designs done in the early nineteenth century, it is only because inherited values preserved a formal hierarchy of composition. In the twentieth century all a priori hierarchy of spaces vanishes. Gradually functions become more permanent and concrete than both personal traits and special spaces. The people who assume certain functions may change, for better or worse, in the social scale. Others will take their places in the social scheme that is gradually assimilated to the productive scheme. It is not only social mobility that is reflected in architecture; the differentiation of spaces and buildings according to functions also reflects the segmentation of people into their different roles, public and private, exposed and solitary. All these different transient roles demand different spaces in different kinds of buildings and urban places: all are distinguished according to function.

Social mobility does not have a correlation to the way activities are developed. These tend to become static and mechanical: “An extreme example in which I was involved was the design of a School of Electrical Engineering. In it a computer, arriving at the most efficient “free form” optimized “elections,” movements, structural criteria and services. This was later translated into a “built form” that also reduced to a minimum initial costs and maintenance. Retrospectively, the final product limited the user’s free election. He was assigned an efficient space in a totally efficient structure. In it movement was reduced to a minimum, but also his capacity for choice.”8 In this way we can understand unifunctionality, which for the better part of the twentieth century was considered synonymous with functionality. I want to show that it does not depend only on an extreme individualization of “function”—of what it must be possible to do in a certain place—but also on the depersonalization of the actors. The actors must use only that part of their egos that is relevant for the accomplishment of the function. What portions of their subjectivity may be left out are really of no concern for the designer. An example of a physical disposition invented for a function illustrates the limits of the concept. A few years before Durand wrote his Précis, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed a novel architectural disposition that he called the “panopticon.”9 With this layout a single individual could survey many others without being seen. The scheme could be adapted for many different kinds of buildings in which such supervision was considered necessary. Bentham offered his design to the Revolutionary Assembly of France in  for new prisons, although he thought “it could be adapted easily for schools and manufactures.” The panopticon creates a condition of extreme inequality between any person who occupies its privileged center and those in the peripheral cells.10 Hierarchy is clearly inscribed in the plan of the panopticon, but it is not simply the accepted hierarchy of symbolic buildings. It is the brutal domination of one person over a group based on location in space. The person in the center is the master of those observed. Modern functionalism was born complete and perfect in . We can conclude that two apparently opposing tendencies rule the functional disposition. On the one hand, every part of the building and all the persons who occupy it are equally important for the functioning of the whole. This is the most important consideration. But on the other hand, the functional consideration of the roles of users and inhabitants reduces them to single-function individuals, and at one extreme they can become—functionally—mere prisoners and wardens in that “perfect machine.”

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Fig. 27. A school in Hertfordshire, England, Norman and Dawbarn, architects, 1954. In a large site the plan is almost the direct translation of the “bubble diagram” coordinating specialized functional areas by the use of circulation links. Redrawn by Haydée Barrionuevo from The Architectural Review

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Functionalism and Popular Architecture From the eighteenth century onward, architects have taken an interest in indigenous or vernacular buildings. In the beginning this attraction depended on natural sites and the use of materials considered unusual. In fact, they were simply the materials country people used for their dwellings and barns before being attracted to cities by growing industry. It was an aesthetic interest related to the Picturesque movement. Rural architecture was part of landscape, and landscape painting was rising in esteem. Popular, rural architecture also provided a model for composition. Its simple volumes freely composed by adjacency present a parallel to the more formal parts of Durandesque theory; but the rules of symmetry, unity, and subordination of academic composition naturally do not apply to vernacular buildings. A new possibility makes its appearance: imagining partis in which the rules of grouping are dictated by

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Fig. 28. Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon,” circa 1790. A strictly functional plan arrangement is obtained by emphasizing one part of the building’s use over all other considerations. In this case, the surveillance of those occupying “A” spaces from the central tower. Redrawn by Haydèe Barrionuevo

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convenience or by a picturesque appearance of the whole. Picturesque composition would provide a bridge spanning the divide between academic composition by elements and functionalist grouping of parts. Indigenous vernacular architecture would also be considered to possess other virtues that were more in harmony with a new age. Sincerity in the use of materials, functional efficacy, and a respect for the demands of climate: all these are traits that fit the utilitarian idea of architecture postulated by Durand. Indigenous architecture, according to Amos Rapoport, proceeds with its task by the repetition of a model or icon, usually another building that is immediately accessible to the builder.11 This icon is perfectly integrated into the way of life of its users; therefore, no maladjustment can be produced, either in function or in construction. The forms of indigenous building seem to blend better with the landscape than do those that make up “cultured” architecture, which is always set in contrast to nature. This adaptation is not due to a special sensitivity of the builders to landscape—an eighteenth century concept, and therefore inapplicable. Rapoport shows that it is the scarcity of materials other than the local ones, and the difficulties encountered in changing the shape of the land, that force buildings to bend to the particularities of topography. Modern societies in their turn have a repertoire of types adapted to their different groups. These types have a slow evolution, perhaps following the process described in the next chapter. We can say that in spite of many changes in the productive structure of society, the design processes of indigenous architecture survive. We can even say that, as in all previous periods, a kind of popular architecture constitutes most building production. An Argentine theoretician, César Janello, called this contemporary production “sociotecture,” to distinguish it from architects’ architecture and from an impossible popular or “spontaneous” architecture—impossible, that is, in the urban environment of present-day society. Today, as in the eighteenth century, the interest of critics and architects focusing on indigenous architecture is directed to remote and exotic developments of arrested civilizations. In this sense it is anachronistic and romantic, attributing to such human groups an instinctual functionalism, an infallible feeling for materials and landscape, both poetic and practical. It is interesting to note the possible consequences of considering indigenous architecture as a model. Adopting the procedures of indigenous architecture would make the design process disappear; at least, the process as we know it, as a sequence of decisions about the building as a global matter. This would happen if the procedure adopted were the one described: namely, the

repetition of known, socially accepted forms as being valid for architecture as a whole. Those forms would be modified only in part and only when local conditions dictated the need for such an adaptation. Faced by this option, modern architecture has preferred to keep indigenous architecture at a distance, maintaining it as an “ideal,” while holding onto the evolution of design acquired over the last five centuries. At the same time, modern architecture has made an attempt to absorb indigenous architecture by adopting what are believed to be its modalities and values: an attentive eye focused on usefulness, the lack of classical ornament, and the use of “practical” materials instead of those deemed to be “representational.” This attempt goes hand in hand with the intention of substituting indigenous construction for academic architecture. The evolution of Christopher Alexander’s theoretical work offers a clue to understanding this attitude. From Alexander’s  Notes on the Synthesis of Form to his more recent works, his thought defines his way as an attempt to restructure the practice of cultivated architecture over the pattern of indigenous building.12 In Notes Alexander avoids the dissolution of cultivated architecture into an indigenous practice by declaring that the complexities of modern society and its unceasing transformation demand the use of systematic design methods. These last will have to incorporate those part-by-part adjustments considered the main value of spontaneous architecture; but it will be objectified by a reflective methodology. Alexander’s central thought is the belief that it is the correlation between a problem and the form that solves the problem: a functionalist faith. This is also the germ of his future development of “patterns” or fragments of a solution. However, in the Notes he portrays the ideal, creative functionalist architect, devising a novel solution for each problem. It is only in the epilogue that he announces the direction of his future research: My main task has been to show that there is a deep and important underlying structural correspondence between the pattern of a problem and the process of designing a physical form which answers that problem. I believe that the great architect has in the past always been aware of the patterned similarity of problem and process, and that it is only the sense of this similarity of structure that ever led him to the design of great forms. The same pattern is implicit in the action of the unselfconscious form-producing system, and responsible for its success. But before we can ourselves turn a problem into form,

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because we are self-conscious, we need to make explicit maps of the problem’s structure, and therefore need to invent a conceptual framework for such maps. This is all that I have tried to do.13

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Here lies the core of problem and its physical answer: for Alexander, design is defined as the correspondence between two parts of reality that he calls “form” and “context.” The part he calls form is not the appearance of the building or the laws that define its structure. For Alexander form is that which the designer can modify, the part on which the designer can act. The context is not the total environment where the new object will take its place but that part of it that cannot be modified by the designer and also those parts of the new object that the designer is not allowed to design. Form and context force us to consider the new building as part of a system, and the dividing line between the two does not coincide with the conventional building/environment distinction. The limit between form and context, then, cannot be determined before considering the problem. This limit will also change within the design process, as earlier decisions will incorporate into the context more and more features limiting the later decisions about form. (If this reminds us of Beaux-Arts partis and development, it does so rightly.) Fourteen years later, Alexander has even firmer convictions about the similitude between the pattern of the problem and that of the solution: “The elements of this language are called ‘patterns.’ Each pattern describes a problem often repeated in our environment. Then it describes the hub of the solution to that problem, so that the solution can be used again a thousand times without exactly repeating it.”14 Alexander’s later theories are expounded in A Pattern Language and two other books, The Timeless Way of Building and The Oregon Experiment.15 Taken together, these constitute a trilogy of his evolved design theory. Experimenting with the method he had propounded in Notes, Alexander perceived the existence of constants in architectural problems, or rather in the design of the physical environment. “Misfits” between form and context reappeared in many different circumstances, and their solution was to be found in generic physical dispositions. In an essay by Alexander and Poyner called “The Atoms of Environmental Structure,” we find an elaborate description of the misfit produced when two people walking along the sides of a rectangular building suddenly find themselves face to face at the corner.16 As a solution to this potential conflict, or collision, they describe in a meticulous if circuitous manner the chamfered corner. (As literature, this description deserves a place alongside Julio Cortázar’s “Instructions for Climbing Stairs.”)

Alexander has detected a recurrent problem or misfit; he delineates the class of physical solutions to avoid it. This class of solutions will surely include the “true solution” to the misfit. From this starting point in “Atoms,” Alexander writes the monumental Pattern Language, a repertory of  units classified into three groups. The first group involves urban and even regional scale. In the intermediate group, items pertaining to the scale of the building are found; the last group deals with building. The problem of producing a general scheme or parti, so difficult in the method put forward in Notes—one had to arrive to the general scheme by adding particular detail solutions—is now solved: patterns are included in other larger patterns. The design process becomes a progressive selection of patterns to be applied according to the “level” of the problem within an existing hierarchy. The program will take its place in the appropriate level of this hierarchy. With the appearance of a large dictionary, A Pattern Language has a system of cross referencing, so that each pattern refers to others of smaller scale, which it “contains,” and also refers to larger ones, of which “it is a part.” By reading this book, designers may find answers not only to the problems they perceive but also to others that the system suggests they will encounter: “In a word, none of the patterns is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world only in the measure in which it is backed by other patterns. The largest patterns rely on those included by them, the medium one in the others surrounding them, and the smaller ones on the earlier. This is a fundamental viewpoint about the world.”17 The “fundamental viewpoint about the world” is none other than the systemic outlook: the built environment at all scales must be harmonious. This harmony is guaranteed by the compatibility among patterns, and this is the fruit of many years’ work by a team of Alexander’s associates. Alexander, however, still perceives the arbitrariness underlying any selection of components and the impossibility of eliminating subjectivity. He tries to attenuate this by classifying patterns according to the degree of certainty their own authors believe them to have. He appeals once more to an analogy with science: “You will see that the patterns are alive and in evolution. In fact you can consider each pattern as a hypothesis, like the hypotheses of science. In this sense, each pattern is our best bet in the present about the arrangement of the physical environment that will work to solve the problem at hand. Empirical questions center on this problem: does it happen and it is lived as we have described it? About the solution: does the physical disposition we propose really solve the problem?”18 Consequently, Alexander invites readers to reexamine the “language of patterns” and to enrich it with their own experience, but he never

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loses his faith in having found real constants that can be applied to any built environment: “If we succeed, it is possible that every person will embark in the construction and development of his own pattern language, perhaps taking as a starting point the language contained in this book. However, we believe with certainty that the language here presented is more than a handbook or a possible version of a pattern language. Many of the patterns here are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that probably they are a part of human nature and the actions of men. They may be as valid in five hundred years’ time as they are today.”19 In the end, the attempt to produce a really functional architecture leads Alexander to a typology. It is either the typology that organizes buildings traditionally or a new one, a typology of “atoms of situations”: the synthesis of a need and the form that satisfies it. Although not declared as such, A Pattern Language is an attempt to constitute a new source of typology.

CHAPTER 5

Typology

The subject of type in architecture may be considered in two different ways. The first is directly relevant to design: typology as a form of knowledge that can be applied directly to design work. The other approach considers typology as a terrain of encounter between inhabitants and architects. The first of these aspects has been extensively treated and gained the attention of architects in the s and s. In the last two decades the question of type, which had in some way been linked to Postmodernism, has been abandoned as if a new wave of unlimited creativity had swept aside this probably reactionary attitude. In fact the question of type has its place in architectural design theory quite apart from trends. It is none other than the way to evaluate the greater part of the architectural production at any moment in time. The use of typological precedent also plays a major part in the way designs for many new buildings are made. The first step to take must surely be to clear the ground on the matter of creativity and repetition. Every building stems from a project. The project can be more or less explicit, almost to the point of being completely implicit, as we have seen in the case of indigenous architecture. The explicit design is an instrument of creation. Apparently we design to create something new and not to repeat “the same.” Architectural creation leans on the rejection of established typology. But we must also acknowledge that not every building is an occasion for integral creation. It is the same in music, literature, or painting. In spite of this reality, the work that interests the critic is the one that moves away from type. Originality is not always highly rated by the general public. Architects and critics give a higher value to buildings if they are original. For users who consider buildings simply as practical objects there is a certain fear of the new. Users expect to get something known and proven; certainly they do not expect some novel and impractical solution after having consumed enormous resources to produce a building.

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We have to compare buildings with industrial production. In order to design a new product, industry is ready and willing to invest large sums of money although the result is uncertain. If the research was well structured, however, the cost of experimenting with prototypes may be more than offset by the sale of a large number of identical objects. Buildings, on the other hand, are made one by one. This means that a new efficient building will need to be more proven and conventional than a new airliner. And the design of airliners is verifiably conservative. It is quite understandable that if a new, “nontypological” architectural design happens to be successful, future clients will prefer a repetition of this “unique” design rather than risking a new experiment. We are avoiding the matter of cultural affections and repetitive needs that make users prefer what is well-known. In the preceding paragraph we only addressed some of the notions installed in the architectural debate by functionalism, with its insistence on unending creativity. Our answer is given in terms of the logic of production, which indicates the desirability of practical solutions based on standards, and thus based on typology. Another reason for buildings to belong to types is not only the evident resemblance of buildings of similar use but also that those buildings are in cities. In cities the sites of buildings of similar use resemble each other; they occupy equivalent lots of land, and those have similar positions in city blocks. This involves the relation between building typology and urban morphology, which saw great development in Italy in the s and which is still an important field for research. If we are going to think within this framework, we must acknowledge that the isolated building is an instrument to escape the limitations of type (and has been considered as such since the Renaissance) and also a way to escape the interdependence between the building and its position in the urban tissue. This became particularly evident in the residential suburb of the nineteenth century. The isolated house in the suburb became a field of experiment with new architectural forms, and the flowering of that program is recognized as one of the original moments of the Modern movement. The community ideals of the “garden city” are subservient to the detached house; but the garden city is in itself a source for urban open models of the Modern movement. Both led to a preference for the isolated building that became a rule rather than an exception in urban tissue. Urban regulations were rewritten in the second part of the twentieth century to open urban tissue even in central areas. Considering this evidence, it is unusual that the first histories of modern architecture have avoided showing any movement toward type in modern architecture, with the salient exception of social housing. They

emphasize instead originality and the individual values of particular authors and works. Finally, leaving aside typological matters when writing a history of architecture—be it of the twentieth century or not—has some clear consequences. Needs are hidden; it is the undisclosed that makes a work of architecture a part of human habitat—not the needs defined in a mechanical and acultural way, as functionalism used to state them, but needs and actions as they appear in reality, in the cultural and architectural frame where they exist. These needs are sometimes supplanted by the personality of the artist, sometimes by the Zeitgeist (spirit of the times), or by a not very definite sociocultural conditioning. In any case, between formless matter and the finished work we are presented only with the unexplained creative personality of the architect. Or the architect is shown as the unexplained interpreter of the Zeitgeist and social conditioning. The illusion that it really happens this way laid the foundations for the formalism of the generation that entered the scene toward —and for others that followed. The design act is also hidden. Preexisting elements and solutions that may be present in the new design—that should exist in any new design— are not explained, because they might show a kinship with normal building or with previous works of recognized architecture. Form is insistently attributed to the creativeness of its author. It is not surprising that for the new avant-garde of the s and s, the idea of type was again to be rejected. A fin de siècle architecture-as-art has no place in any explanation of the greater part of the built production. Things were more balanced for the classical theorist of type: The word represents not so much the image of a thing that has to be copied and imitated perfectly but that of an idea of an element that must serve as a rule for the model. The model, understood according to the practical execution of Art, is an object that has to be repeated just like it is; type on the contrary is an object according to which, for clarity, it is possible for one to conceive works that will not resemble each other at all. Everything is precise and given in the model; everything is more or less vague in type. Thus we see that there is nothing in the imitation of types that feeling and spirit would not accept. An antecedent is necessary for everything: nothing comes from nothing.1 The concepts of type and typology seem not to have existed in the s, the period in which modern architecture had won the war against

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Fig. 29. Adaptations of a traditional Argentinian residential building type (the half-patio house, in the center) for deeper lots (left) and a corner position (right). Courtesy Dardo M. Arbide

styles and eclecticism. In that decade every building aspired to be a new creation, and the history of architecture occupied the place of theory. This explains why an essay by Giulio Carlo Argan in his Progetto e Destino begins with these words: “Most modern criticism is founded on idealist thought and denies any value to the concept of an architectural typology.”2 In the s the concept reappeared and was affirmed in criticism. In design theory for the English-speaking world, it begins with Alan Colquhoun’s essay “Typology and Design Method.” In the Argan essay already quoted, we get some indications about the position of typology in the design process as well as about its formation: “In the process of comparing and superimposing individual forms to determine a type, the specific characters of each building are eliminated. The only ones kept are those that appear in the whole series.”3

Type is produced by a mechanism of abstraction: type is therefore something like an ideal building form different from all its models or examples. It is rather schematic, sometimes very abstract, in other cases quite defined. This depends on the number of features found in common in the series of examples. In any case, type is a schematic in which “everything is more or less vague,” to use Quatremère de Quincy’s words. What kind of schematic is that? Perhaps a plan? As Argan says: “Type is thus configured as a schema, deduced through the reduction of an ensemble of formal variables to a common base.” The type is presented here as a basic form, the basic form of many possible designs.4 Again Argan explains: “The basic form thus obtained cannot be understood as a mere structural frame but as the internal structure of the form or as a principle which in itself implies the possibility of an infinite number of formal variants. Perhaps it implies a later modification of the type itself.” We are contemplating a basic form: one that different designs may have in common, reflecting the moment in a design process that fixes the principal relations among its parts. As to the level of abstraction, type seems to occupy a place equivalent to that of the parti in academic composition. For academic composition, type has a precise disposition of elements of composition. Parti determination in Beaux-Arts teaching was, up to a point, a selection from possible types; it was also the recreation of existing types through the use of a new assemblage of elements of composition. A class of pre-existing solutions = Type ↑ Base forms → Project ↓ A disposition and ensemble of elements of composition = Parti

Building types reflect elapsed time, a kind of sedimentation of form. They are part of the tradition of architecture. Types are presented that way by Bernard Huet: “It will then be possible to see clearly that typological invention happens slowly and never precedes the transformation of social relations or the institutionalization of practices. Standard types belong essentially to a collective production on the part of social groups, or even to society as a whole when it recognizes the permanence of some forms.” Time has not passed in the “laboratory of architecture”; it has developed in a precise society after a certain time lapse. If this is true and types reflect the lifestyles of a society, then architectural types belong also to the area of user satisfaction. They belong to the synchronic

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dimension of the present. Huet limits severely the profession of the architect: “The function of the architect consists in discovering those types (very seldom) in determining them (sometimes) and paraphrasing them (always).”5 This viewpoint agrees substantially with that of Christopher Alexander. Architectural type is shown as possessing the quality of a present that has historical depth. At the same time it is the meeting ground of architects and building inhabitants. It does not seem that Huet takes into consideration possible variations in lifestyle, nor the intervention of design itself. Unless we imagine a constant repetition of architectural forms without any modification—an improbable happening in presentday society—the types we can find in the present will not be the constant types of a primitive culture. Types will be a basic design material, a repertoire of forms constantly being modified by the designs of many different authors. The “problem of typology” is thus installed at the crossing of two axes: the social present of architecture, which by evolution extends in a diachronic axis, and in the presence of architecture as the satisfying of needs extending in a synchronic axis. Each design operation today seems to entail an option: whether to develop a type, which is to design a building that pertains to an existing class of buildings with a recognizable referent, near or remote. It allows us to recognize in the design the figure of that referent. Otherwise, we can devise a parti that would eventually give as its ideal result a unique building. For academic design there is a fluent interrelationship between type and parti. To establish a parti, elements of composition must be employed. Those elements have to be studied in the theory of architecture. Where will theory find its examples? Established types, known by their exemplary models or cases, provide the natural source. Only later on will the transformation of the history of architecture, from an implicit system of types into a parade of particular cases, suppress these teaching resources. This attitude of modern architectural historians pushes the future architect into the position of an obsessive researcher. It requires that everything must be investigated before determining the elements, not only for the different functions but also for each and every one of the elements of both architecture and composition. Established typology had several different roles. It was a respected precedent for academic architecture. In the nineteenth century there was a will to establish a functional typology of buildings classified according to their use. This was distilled into attempts to teach “distributive characters” and, on a lesser scale in the twentieth century, through the study of specialized rooms, in the days of Existenzminimum.

The attempt to build new typologies confronts the designer’s freedom of deciding on a parti. A parti is defined precisely as the right to avoid typology in the general schematic. We have pinpointed the opposition between parti and type. It would not be correct to deny that following the Renaissance we can find the parti in architecture, although the term gains currency only with the onset of academicism. From the beginning of the Renaissance we find the equivalent of parti decisions: there is a decision of that kind in Brunelleschi’s constructional novelties in the dome of Florence Cathedral. However, inventing a new parti is not necessary for every building designed after the time of Brunelleschi. It is not a possibility for every new design. The parti as a seal of originality of a project tends to be confused with the personality of its author and confirms its quality of unity, of its being a work of personal craftsmanship. The set of buildings by the same author portrays that author’s biography; it shows the public this person’s unending creativeness as an artist. Once this idea was established after the sixteenth century, if typology were forced on the architect, it would be resented as a barrier to creativeness. Artistic freedom would express itself in the skill of being able to avoid repeating established patterns. As Francesco Borromini reputedly said: “I would beg to be remembered when sometimes I stray from the usual design, by that phrase of Michelangelo, Prince of Architects, who said that he who follows others never advances. To tell the truth I have not devoted myself to this profession to be a mere copyist; although I know that by creating new things the fruit of this effort cannot be received but too late.”6 The transformation of architecture, beginning with the Renaissance, can be interpreted as a movement from typological design toward invention. Invention would then be developed and formalized as “elementary composition.” We could assign a place to every artist from the s onward and even reduce their artistic production to a formula fixing the proportion between invention and typological redesign. This interpretation would help us to understand the coexistence of two design traditions that survive in present-day architecture. Modern architects trained in one of those design traditions—the elementary versus the academic tradition—have sometimes wanted to recover the values of tradition and the cities where they work. Their training did not prepare them to understand typology as a ground for design. Either they had to understand this “other tradition”—more accessible in Europe—or they fell into a superficial decorativism that constitutes a large part of so-called Postmodernism in architecture. The notion of type we have been entertaining assumes that types are “not created,” as Aldo Rossi says explicitly. Perhaps this is an excessive

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Fig. 30. A typological analysis of the schemes for Palladian villas according to Rudolf Wittkower. Redrawn by Haydée Barrionuevo

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reaction against the proliferation of arbitrary forms and dispositions of the s and s. Another definition of type can be found in the writing of Manfredo Tafuri, who suggests the existence of series or “typological cycles” in the work of some architects, like Palladio or Christopher Wren.7 Both Palladio and Wren would have created partially new types by the reiterative exercise of design for the same program: villas and parish churches, respectively.

This interpretation of the term type is interesting because it includes the activity of the individual designer. It brings us back to the normal contemporary condition of “architecture with architects.” It does not reduce the application of the term to traditional or indigenous architecture, displaced in modern society. Both interpretations are obviously valid. We will later review the interaction of the designer with commonplace architecture. The reason to evoke Tafuri’s vision is to remind us that there exists in the design of renowned creators a typological process at work, the progressive construction of knowledge on a certain theme by the reiteration of designs. “Palladio and Wren present us with cycles of architecture that can properly be called themes with variations.” A work by Jean Castex takes up this interpretation of type and applies it to the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright. At the beginning of his analysis, introducing the concept of cycle, Castex writes: “Each typological cycle in Wren, as in Palladio, develops like a research activity in search of those logic chains that nourish invention and provoke it. The same logic chains help the type to display the whole extension of its formal possibilities, the surprising richness it contains.”8 For Castex each typological cycle—and he can identify more than one for the different authors he analyzes—is referred to a spatial schematic. And the spatial schematic is a disposition and relative organization of spatial units. Castex’s spatial units correspond approximately to elements of composition. The spatial schematic can be described in the tradition of Paul Frankl; for our text it can be assimilated to a class of partis.9 This class, when found in the works of a certain author, has for that author the value of a type. It is not a type received from tradition but one composed deliberately and adopted by the author through time as the basis for a long-term development. Thus we can deduce the possibility of evolution and fusion of typological cycles.

Degrees of Abstraction in Typology Among the ambiguities of the term type is one that generates conflict. It is the decision about the level of generality or abstraction at which type will be considered. Sometimes a geometrical abstraction is called a type; on other occasions it is a very definite plan, almost the draft of a finished drawing. In a strict sense, a type can be described or named but not shown. An example or a case can be near to or far from the type, but it cannot be the type in itself; a concrete object is already a model. All this is well-known and no more than the logical consequence

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of the definitions given by Quatremère de Quincy, in which type and model are opposed. Even if we leave aside models, complete representation of real or imagined buildings, there remains the problem of the degree of abstraction in the type understood as a schematic. The easiest way to face this problem is by admitting a stratification of the world of type. There would be a highly defined level very near to a model; at the other end of the scale we would have schematics without any dimensional or functional precision, just below the maximal abstraction of geometrical shapes. It is certain that the first levels of abstraction are obtained by an inductive procedure, selecting common features from a sample of actual buildings. This would be the case of the residential typology for a particular region. On top of this level there is “another typology” made of schematics applicable to a larger and perhaps loosely definite corpus: and this is the sense the term has in most of typological literature today. These are the types we bring into the discourse when we want to illustrate the concept: the Mediterranean house or the Latin cross church. The location in time and space of those types is less precise. Types determined by induction starting from examples found in our environment will probably have more general referents. In the case of postcolonial countries, these will be found in Europeans precedents. For instance, the Argentine half-patio house is a particular subtype of the Mediterranean courtyard house, and in other Latin America countries also, different branches can be found derived from that Mediterranean precedent. In this way typology as a proper kind of architectural knowledge is articulated in diversified strata; some are quite general and are transmitted through the history of architecture; others belong to local phenomena and demand a study of regional architecture together with its evolution and influences. In such a framework a place is immediately found for “pattern language” research of the kind done by Christopher Alexander. Although less abstract than the usual studies on typology, it can be considered part of typological knowledge about architecture. There are more or less abstract interpretations of type. At the abstract end of the spectrum some authors use types to mean geometrical shapes and their combinations that can be used for architectural design; ideal forms that may be used for architecture but not only for architecture. It was traditionally supposed that when guided by proportional rules, these geometrical shapes would produce beauty. Cesar Janello worked for many years on the construction of a theory of architecture based on the study of this domain of geometrical shapes and their combinations. For him this was the proper domain of design.

Design for this Argentine theoretician was the world where two- and three-dimensional forms resided with their combinations; and it represented the origin of the design of artificial objects. If we were to abstract more than this, we would simply arrive in the domain of geometry. Geometry provides the basic material for all other levels.10 A few words must be said about the role of typology in the design process. First, we must accept that design has a place for typology. A very simple, nonproblematic design process, like the one practiced by those who build most of the houses on Earth, would operate over a direct and nonthematized knowledge of a type. It simply repeats with minimal variation the type or types present in the region where a builder operates. Modern architecture—that is, as practiced by professional architects formed in the tradition of the Modern movement—often avails itself of models rather than types. Properly typological preexistences are excluded from these architects’ design practice, so they are forced to copy entire solutions from the “great form givers” and try to adapt them—or to force them into strange conditions with the pretext of an “international style.” The only case in which the Modern movement takes for granted that typological precedent can be used is in indigenous housing; even there, copying famous buildings—like Le Corbusier’s Unités—has been more the case than taking the originals as typological precedent. After  the typological option is opened by theory. What Argan calls the “typological moment” of the design process is admitted. Ambiguities arise that make our discussion necessary. Where can we find a type to develop, to use as a starting point for the new design? Perhaps it is a regional type obtained by the inductive process described. At a more abstract level, it can be one of those types transmitted by history, sacralized into being atemporal, almost independent from any concrete history. More abstract yet, the type can be a geometrical shape, a prearchitectural configuration that can refer to more than one type of lower-level abstraction; simply a gestaltic referent for a new project. If understood this way, the typological framework is either too generic to provide real design support or it becomes an alibi for declaring that “somehow similar” buildings are completely different. If we are willing to find something deeper than figural analogy, we must decompose forms into parts and find correlations between the ways these parts are connected: this is the way to carry on the description of a type. Along the way we will find the circumstances that link a type with a kind of environment. The links among the internal elements of the type will find a partial explanation in environmental conditions of the class of buildings we are studying. We can say, for instance, that the half-patio houses making up a large part of the residential tissue of Argentine cities

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Fig. 31. Goldenberg House project, Louis Kahn, 1959. A particular interpretation of the patio type. From Brownlee and DeLong, Louis Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture

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in the first part of the twentieth century really constitute a type. They have the same shape in plan; their interior subdivisions yield spaces of similar conformation and connection. Also the gallery and patio have a similar role in all the examples. And the relations they have one to another are similar. The relation to the public street is provided by access into the patio and only then to other parts of the house. All these features describe a type and the ancestry of that type in the Roman house. If all those conditions did not appear, we might be looking at a building of a plan resembling that of the half-patio house, but we could not confidently say that it was “of the same type.” We could reason by analogy about centralized or basilican churches or the opera house of the nineteenth century. Although we have defended the possibility of applying the term type to different degrees of abstraction, we must not fall into the trap of accepting any use of the term without clear specifications. Otherwise we might find ourselves calling a simple square shape a type or, conversely, calling the variation in the number of rooms in apartments “different typologies,” when in fact no distributive patterns have changed. Making use of the term to allude to simple geometrical shapes reveals a bad habit among architects, that of exaggerating the importance

of formal similitude and believing that if such a similitude is present, all the other qualities attributed to the building evoked will also be perceived by other people.

Privileged Parts Another matter that has a contentious status is that of the need for a type to have some elements of composition. It is not a question of a strong link, like that of the dome to a religious space for the Christian West. Other elements or parts would be necessary for the type; say, the courtyard for the Mediterranean house. If the courtyard is present, all the other elements would be a matter of “free choice.” Conversely, we could assume that only the disposition of the parts would be unavoidable. (Any group of closed volumes surrounding any void would produce a courtyard design—is La Tourette a patio design? And how do we categorize Stirling and Wilford’s Science Center in Berlin?) If all the parts of the type were unavoidable, the type would become more and more a model. If we also demanded that a certain set of ele-

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Fig. 32. Joseph-Marie Peyre, “Un Batiment qui Contiendroit les Acadèmies” plan of the central building project, circa 1750. A combination of space-types divorced from their original use and meaning. It precedes Durand’s theories by half a century. Redrawn by Haydèe Barrionuevo

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Fig. 33. An example of an assemblage of types can be seen in the Berlin Science Center, by James Stirling and Michael Wilford, 1979– 87. From R. Maxwell, Stirling: Writings on Architecture

ments of architecture be used, then the model would be complete. No variations other than details in ornament would be possible. To our eyes, there would be no design process.11

Transformations of Type Now let us consider the nature of the “type” and its applicability in the design process. Type is an abstraction constructed over a determined set of buildings. Around this abstraction the building forms a constellation. However, studying a large series of buildings we find units or “cases” that imply the transition from one type into another. Then we need to introduce the notion of transformation. As we verify these transformations the constellation becomes a net. Using this criterion we could deploy a map of all types and all cases from which types have been established. We will also be able to say that there is a process of convergence leading to the constitution of type and a divergent process in search of new ways of life. These will eventually converge into a new type and the process will repeat indefinitely.12

The concept of type in architecture depends on the circumstances of its use. There is not a necessary level of abstraction that would correspond to the “proper use” of the word type. Carlo Aymonino says: “There is not a single definition of building typology. It is an instrument, not a category.”13 In an architecture produced by architects, as is the case for modern society, we do not find a single type of dwellings, for instance. There are many variations, transitions, and intermediate cases. Even intuitively, the field of study appears to be dynamic and changing, far from being a static and permanent typology. It becomes important to decide what the transformations are and to show the possible transitions between static types. While the periods of repetition define a type, it is lapses of variation that describe a typology, because they show the direction of a morphological change that in its turn reflects a change in meaning. It may also be that the morphological change will contribute to the production of a change in meaning. This unified vision leads to a comprehensive consideration of the field of architecture. It does not need the duality between indigenous architecture and architecture by architects. The latter is not different— in a typological analysis—for reasons of intellectual or aesthetic quality. The only relevant difference is the greater or lesser design intervention acting on preexisting type. Each new design is conceived as occupying a position after its antecedents. It is different to a degree but also similar up to a point. Each new building bears the mark of a previous referent. This reference mechanism is unavoidable; through it meaning is transposed from one work to another. We will call any building that precedes a new one and has this character of precedent a “typological referent.” The referential nexus can be understood positively or negatively. A new design can explicitly deny the referent as a compositional schematic while keeping some of its traits. This is the mechanism often applied by Le Corbusier, as in the house in La Plata in which the layout of the half-patio Argentine house is intentionally twisted.14 If we want to describe adequately the types present in the cities of Latin America, where atypical buildings are found at least as frequently as typical forms, we must be able to seek a link between the two both classes of buildings—those that can be deemed typical and the “anomalies.” Atypical buildings can be explained as variations of socially accepted types that are their referents. Variation is the way to produce new types; a variation is a new disposition of parts and/or the addition of new parts. The new design seeks through use to gain social acceptance. A succes-

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sion of variations will produce a new spatial layout; if this endures for some time, it will deserve to be called a new type. The permanent type for a certain interval represents the constancies in lifestyle. Atypical examples or variations represent the possibilities of change driven by changes in social practices and lifestyle. Variations are the mechanism by which new types are created, the architectural response to the social will for change. Periods in which variations are produced correspond to the transformation of one type into another. Periods of repetition correspond with the construction of a definite kind of building, which we usually associate with the term type. We have elsewhere suggested expressing shifts in graphic form: A graph can be drawn representing in its axes time and change. The horizontal lines are building types and the diagonals joining them contain successive buildings that cannot be ascribed to a type but are necessary to provide the transformations from one type into other. The succession of horizontal and diagonal lines can be called a typology. In this way we can explain and establish relations not only among typical buildings but also including a great number of buildings that share only some of the characteristics of “type.” Each point on a horizontal line represents an example of the type. Each point on a diagonal represents a building we call a transformation. We thus call “typology” the relation over time of a building with its multiple referents.15 Typological research is usually circumscribed by a theme, be it because we are dealing with monumental architecture or because we want to learn something about houses at a certain time and location. This tends to confuse the structural/spatial concept of type with a “typology according to function,” as attempted in the nineteenth century. It also leaves aside the interesting field of what we could call “synchronic typology,” the correlation among the different types which at a certain place and time serve the different needs of society. The evolution of these various types is not indifferent to the constitution of practices in everyday life; that is, to the way different building types allow for the activities of members of society and for how they divide their time. Examples include the Roman thermae, which played an important role in the urban life of the late empire, or the reduction of the house’s functions after the Industrial Revolution, expelling work to the shop, office, and factory.16 Government has dispersed since the eighteenth century, if we consider that absolutism concentrated all its functions in a single compound, such

as the Versailles of Louis XIV. Versailles was not only the government house but also a palace, housing a church and a theatre for the king. Existing types in a certain time and place form a system. They complement each other and each is an explanation of the others. Changes in one of the types will promote a reassignment of activities and therefore produce changes in the other types. This dynamic joins the one we have described as “internal to a type,” which is subject to more or less free variations.17 Some reasons for the transformation or variation of type are: () Adaptations of the type, or schema, to different dimensions, positions, and orientation of urban lots, without changes in the lifestyle; these changes are prompted only by the concrete siting of particular buildings but may provide inspiration for others. () Variations caused by changes in lifestyle or by expectations of such change (e.g., “futuristic designs” after the Second World War). These expectations act on the programs of buildings and the ratio of kinds of elements. As has been already mentioned, this can make some rooms fall into disuse and can also create a new relation of circulation to livable space, both at the scale of the individual building and at that of the city. () When an intrinsic relation exists between the production of variants and the activity of design. This has been growing since the first Renaissance, driven by the separation of design (in drawings and models) and construction. The architect is by definition a producer of new projects. Permanent invention corresponds with the growing autonomy of the project vis-à-vis the building.

Building types today, then, are not like the constants of a primitive culture. They are design material for the architect and the basis for understanding by building dwellers. Types are a repertoire of patterns always modified in concrete designs through design operations such as the selection of a type and adaptation and contamination of types. Even the reuse of existing buildings relies heavily on the perception of reading a building as capable of belonging to more than one type. If we accept that typology is a knowledge that can be accumulated, we will find that it is a powerful tool for design. We can also see that those creative artists we remember in the history of architecture are precisely those architects who have been able to create long-lasting variations derived from existing types; thus producing new types. Architects themselves tend to produce variations, prompted by their ability to design. Everything seems possible on paper. The social group—

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Fig. 34. Transformations from the linear house to the compact house can be seen in examples from La Plata, Argentina. Courtesy Dardo M. Arbide

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and this includes other architects—makes some of these variations permanent. This permanence is given by repetition. Repetition creates more or less stable new types. We have an analogy with another biological theory, that of Charles Darwin: surviving mutations will be those better adapted to the environment. But here I should issue a warning: the world of the architect can endow a “new type” with durability although most of society might reject it. This is not a new fact, belonging purely to this

era of architecture magazines; it will suffice to remember those Renaissance architects who preferred centralized churches without a nave, against the evidence of the liturgical needs of their time. We can also find a parallel with Darwin’s ideas in Jean Castex’s study of the early work by Frank Lloyd Wright.18 Darwin’s ideas, Castex writes, may have influenced the variations Wright follows for detail in the design of the Prairie houses. Fig. 35. Transformations from the linear half-patio house and early 97 apartment buildings in Typology Buenos Aires. Courtesy Andrea Brigante

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Fig. 36. General typology of the Prairie Houses. The diagram reproduced in part shows the different partis or basic compositional arrangements adopted by Frank Lloyd Wright and the houses that realize these schemes. From Jean Castex, Le Printemps de la Prairie House

To sum up: it is the frequency of repetition that defines a type, but to define a typology we must include also periods of variation. Typology shows the direction of meaningful, morphological change. A type can be defined by its position within a typology. This reference allows us to establish the scope and definition of the type, by fixing its differential features with respect to other types present in the classification and also with respect to atypical cases. It also allows us to establish the variations permitted within the type as well as the threshold where the variation enters a different type. Each type has a referent that is another type; they are separated by a variable number of transformations. I have tried here to span the two opposed interpretations of the notion of type; that which professes type to be a collective, nondesigned pattern and the “typological series” that can be attributed to an author— Palladian villas or Wrightean houses. In our time, most buildings are designed—more or less designed—by someone. The implication is that the production of buildings will entail a project, some kind of graphic model prior to construction. Even if the design reaffirms a typological pattern well established (as happened in much of European architecture in the s), there will be a design for its realization. Even this simple passage through the graphic model, connoting the possibilities of change, is enough to produce an acceleration in the evolution of type.

CHAPTER 6

Development of the Project The Elements of Architecture

We have seen that in the first part of the design process, the architect arrives at a general disposition considered satisfactory. That disposition is called a parti, and it displays the mutual relations among the elements of composition in the program. The disposition has perhaps been adopted by modifying an existing type. In either case we have what G.C. Argan calls a “basic form.” Elements of composition are only abstractions without the elements of architecture, the material substance of the limits that produce architectural space. There is, then, an essential difference between the elements of architecture and those of composition, but this follows from the succession of events in the design process. Elements of architecture are material things; they have a perceptual image preceding the existence of any their realizations. In classical times they could be found in the treatises of architecture published after . In modern architecture, elements are real things: standard windows and doors, bathroom fixtures you can buy. All the parts in the case study house built by Charles and Ray Eames in Santa Barbara () are standard elements readily available for purchase. Elements of composition are nearer to concepts than to things. They comprise rooms of a certain proportion and dimension bearing names that refer to their use. In the beginning, they are always far from the objective reality of elements of architecture. Elements of composition do not have a “natural” use; they are only pieces of virtual space ready to receive a label that will assign them a “function.” That function may change later. When a new architecture takes hold of a certain system of elements of composition, as when early Christianity appropriated the Roman basilica, the new use (the sacred cult) could occupy almost the same spaces as the old administration of justice. Form does not change with function. When the same Christian builders removed columns from Roman buildings, they meant to use them precisely as columns. It is hard to imagine that they could have done otherwise. In this chapter I discuss elements of architecture; in the next one we shall return to elements of composition. We have said that to make spaces

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Fig. 37. Ancient basilica and Christian basilica, according to Charles Blanc, Grammaire des Arts du Dessin. Redrawn by Haydée Barrionuevo

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exist, we must generate their spatial enclosure. The ensemble of the parts of that enclosure coincides with the set of elements of architecture, that which the student of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts would study after having consolidated a parti. We should keep in mind that for classical architecture not all the parts of the spatial enclosure were considered elements of architecture, very much in the same way that not all buildings were considered architecture. Only those buildings that had well-studied proportions, featured noble materials, and displayed the proper forms of elements were worthy of that name. The proper forms of elements were understood to be those of the classical orders. The other parts of the enclosure, those that were not part of the orders and their complements, were not considered elements of architecture. The elements are active forms over the neutral background of the other parts, considered merely useful and constructive. From the eighteenth century onward, more and more parts of the building would be incorporated as elements; that is, as worthy of being designed. Finally, all the parts of the building would be considered elements, as we saw in Durand’s Précis.

At the same time, Western architecture was to acquire new “elements.” Those elements received from the Renaissance now had to compete with other repertoires, taken first from Greek architecture, then from Gothic, and even from architectures of the Far East. Each of these repertoires would be considered as a different “style,” in the manner of different languages that could be spoken alternately but not mixed. Therefore, in the nineteenth century there was an extension of understanding of the term element to include all the parts of the built enclosure, on the one hand; on the other, we find a multiplication in the number of parts of enclosure in accordance with different “styles.” More than that: technical evolution would deliver into the hands of architects new materials and constructive schematics. And those new materials were in general incompatible with all those existing styles in spite of the fact that they were used for the best part of the century to simulate them. The progressive incorporation of more and more parts of the built enclosure can serve as a sketch of the evolution of architecture since the eighteenth century. The first of the new “elements” is perhaps simply the wall, which before the designs of Soufflot and Boullée was merely a neutral background for columns and pilasters.1 Later on, structural members would be incorporated; and this meant not only the traditional columns and trabeation of the orders but the whole repertoire constituted gradually by forms derived from new materials, culminating in the appearance of a complete building skeleton at the end of the nineteenth century. In accordance with this skeleton, instead of the heavy load-bearing walls, we find light surfaces for space enclosure. Windows and doors would cease to be deep insertions in the wall mass to become superficial parts of the lightweight enclosure. We could say that the procedure for an architect of the year  to follow in defining the enclosure of a designed building would be no more than that of proportioning adequately the volumes decided upon to suit the type or “invention” the architect intended to carry out; the construction of those volumes would present no problem for architect or building team. They would simply be boxes of load-bearing masonry, the limitations of which were well-known to designers, builders, and occupants. Over the volumes the architect would install an ensemble of ornament, the elements of architecture of a familiar classical repertory with clear meanings attached to its various components. Only a century later, by the s, a variety of available styles would assail the architect with as many alternative repertoires of elements. Construction would no longer be neutral; it would include new and unsettling possibilities, such as new materials not yet aesthetically assimilated but readily available and therefore difficult not to use.

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Fig. 38. “Elements of Buildings” from J. N. L. Durand’s Précis. In Durand’s handbook all the parts of building become Elements of Architecture replacing the Classical Orders, which are significantly relegated to a schematic form in a corner of the plate. Redrawn by Haydée Barrionuevo

The architect would also be subject to bitter attacks from historians and critics, underlining the inability to create “a style of the time.” This new style, according to the current notion, was nothing if not a new repertoire of elements of architecture with which to dress the composition in contemporary clothes. Composition was the territory conquered for the architect in the wake of Durand: an architect was one who knew how to distribute, to compose, to make an efficient plan. Already architects had been obliged to acquire other pieces of knowledge: they needed to know the mutually exclusive styles and how to apply them. And now they had to invent a new style, one that would substitute those repertories of elements bequeathed by various traditions after centuries of local sedimentation. More than that: when the early twentieth century finally produced what seemed to be a new repertoire of elements, heroes like Walter Gropius also demanded that modern architecture should not become a style. In the end, every architect was nominally obliged to constitute an individual repertoire of architectural elements and even to vary them for each successive design. Modern architecture imagines that it has left aside the problem of form to concentrate on function, of which the form would merely be a consequence. Instead of that, modernism becomes obsessed with form and creativity. Renewal of forms becomes continuous, as does the process of discarding forms already employed. Within the Modern movement elements

are created and lost before really becoming usable, repeatable elements like those of all previous architectures. The forms of those “elements” no longer signify a function or a system, keeping only the meaning of the signature of an author. Form, apparently neglected in the moralizing discourse of functionalism, becomes toward  the center of all design work: complete repertoires of elements are created for each individual design and discarded for the next. This sketchy venture into the antecedents of our present as designers is intended to make our predicament more vivid. Bear in mind that the mechanism of composition as described by Durand demanded that elements of architecture should not be problematic. The author of the Précis seeks to dilute the problem of elements by accepting all the arguments of the previous century as causing the forms of elements. This was an indispensable attitude if the specific task of the architect was to be modified from questions of proportion and the orders to the design and organization of use. It would embrace everything from the façade to the plan, we might say. This new competence of the architect was accepted by the academy and the profession as the kind of knowledge that would permit a new social role for the architect in times of utilitarianism and democracy. However, the problem of elements reappeared with force in the nineteenth century, as we have seen. Purely distributive architecture was only possible during lapses of “stylistic quiet” when there was some confidence in having found a stable formal language, like that of classicism. This was the case for the followers of the first masters of modern architecture, perhaps from  to . Curiously enough, a freer distribution or a richer spatial composition also prevailed in the periods of skeptical eclecticism at several stages during the nineteenth century. To bring a building into being, then, the architect had to arrange the elements of architecture. These elements were the arsenal that could be used to achieve expression. The elements provided both materialization and expression, but we should keep in mind that the control of form is achieved through the medium of representation, and in representation the material qualities are adjourned or implicit. For the classical tradition elements were supporting and supported parts—columns and trabeation—which indicated that construction had been elevated to the rank of Architecture: a practice initiated by Roman architecture. The next parts to be incorporated as elements were the vertical limits, more so than the horizontal ones. Vertical limits can be studied in façades, where they occupy large parts of the projection plane in the drawings, while horizontal structures are only revealed by the comparatively thin lines of cornices and string courses.2

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The perforations of windows and doors in the wall indicate the presence of interior spaces, and by their magnitude and detail, the importance and character of those spaces are expressed. They also show literally how to get into that inside space and how light and air gain access. This conception of the element is based on the notion that the façade is the face of a three-dimensional volume; that face is a plane where a rhythm of columns or pilasters makes explicit the proportion of each face and by implication of the whole volume. Columns spell “Architecture.” Openings are disposed in the intercolumniations and are subordinated therefore to that basic rhythm of the volume. Their size is also a function of the separation of columns or pilasters more than a function of the spaces they connect to the outside. Structure: real or apparent/parts/ signifies “Architecture”

Supporting/ Supported

Figures: active elements

Enclosure: wraps interior space/parts Means “convenience or usefulness”

Openings (voids) Wall surface Ground: passive

The first table suggests a way to systematize a role for the elements of architecture in a classical schematic; the same role was carried over into the “age of the styles” with some variations that had already been explored in the eighteenth century. Modern architecture in its turn would first reestablish a frustrated experience of the late s, pushing to the front of the composition the blank wall plane hitherto considered “mute.” Then an impoverished system of elements would be promoted, not only because the ornament was repressed but also by the simplification of one of the pairs shown in the table. The rejection of classical tectonics, the pair “Supporting/Supported” with the ornaments of classical styles, left most buildings in the first period of modern architecture lacking half the resources of a classical language of elements. In a building like the Villa at Garches, or the earlier Vaucresson by Le Corbusier, the “table of elements” would look like this: Enclosure

Void

Figures

Solid Ground

In the works of some architects we find an equivalence of void and solid in the surface effect of the enclosure, but this tectonic pair is then revived in a more abstract way: Structure

Supporting/ Supported

We can alternatively read structure and enclosure as figure or ground and also between open and closed surface; sometimes structure will be assimilated to divisions of enclosure

Open/closed

The “new artificial object” that European modern architecture produces as a substitute for traditional architecture in the s is supposed to be the manifest result of a “technical-structural objectivity.” However, it has often been pointed out that the decisive influence on its set of elements lies in the plastic arts of the preceding decades. When real advances in building technology enter the scene, which is mainly after World War II, this leads architects to an endless choice among different structural systems not too different from the selection of the “adequate style” that had been the keynote in the nineteenth century. Before the war, the adoption of abstract forms like those of the Dutch Elementarists caused serious construction difficulties: these were nonarchitectural forms, or rather forms not previously employed in architecture. Pure geometrical configurations had always been used as the graphic substratum of architectural design but were not visibly displayed. They were implicit in traditional construction but not shown in the shapes of elements of architecture, even in the schematic presentation of elements of Durand’s Précis. These changes turn the spatial enclosure into a problematic matter. The traditional concept of an element of architecture is lost during the first phase of modernism. The meaning of the term element is inverted and becomes ambiguous. A modern architect will call elements those parts not yet decided or designed, leaving for future phases of the design process a formal determination the architect is willing to make alone. It is the opposite of the traditional notion of elements, a socialized repertoire of constructive and ornamental parts. The parts of the new built enclosure, both individually and in their relations, will now speak about real construction and not of symbolic tectonics. The parts will explain how the building stands and how its parts are joined; hence a new tectonic makes its appearance, first with New Brutalism and later with different structuralisms.

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Fig. 39. Le Corbusier’s Curutchet House, La Plata, Argentina, 1949. This residence exemplifies a personal repertory of Elements of Architecture. Even these elements are based on simple geometrical forms. Vertical bris-soleils over the façades, a shade-roof over the terrace, and a particular version of an entrance “frame” have been later repeated by Le Corbusier in other works. Photographed and used with permission by Claudio Meszel

The question of elements can be summed up in one of two ways: it is either a case of the built form appearing as the sum of predetermined parts or elements, linked by a system of fixed rules; or a case of the built form being a summation of indeterminate parts, with the rules for joining them not previously known. The first corresponds to classical architecture or, more generally, use of the Greek-Latin tradition as developed in Europe and its colonies after the Renaissance. In these instances, visible parts represent structural elements (columns, pillars, beams, arches) or those that spell simple functions (door, window, step). In the second case, elements correspond to a different segmentation of the object, relating only partially to the former case. In the case of contemporary architecture, visible parts transmit the existence of simple functions as well as a representation of a new manner for understanding construction. This goes beyond the representation of conventional tectonic elements in the effort to show the building as the expression of the pair “Structure/Enclosure.” The repertoire of parts tends to add those belonging to new systems employed to produce comfort, such as ducts, water reservoirs, sun barriers, and even antennae or aerials. The Structure/Enclosure pair has new possibilities for the second term of this duality, which was passive in classical architecture. The spatial envelope of the building can now have different proportions of the opaque and the transparent. Both values of the “skin” are equivalent and opposed to structure. Therefore, the optimal expression of the pair Struc-

ture/Enclosure is that in which the skin is completely transparent, a homogeneous surface that contrasts with the skeleton. Mixed systems in which the assimilation of open and closed parts of the surface is attempted tend to confuse structural members with subdivisions of the surface. Of course meaningful elements always will appear as figures over a ground; and the last is ideally neutral. That was the role of the wall plane, but the transparent skin is aesthetically reluctant to assume this role. In the first place, the function of the wall, that of separating inside from outside, is dubiously fulfilled by a glass wall, which is read functionally as a window. Most useful spaces demand some regulation of openness, so in the end most buildings that do not intend to be emblematically modern end up expressing a “bare” version of the system of traditional architecture: Structure Enclosure mass

Orders Opaque

Walls

Transparent

Windows

Built

One of the first instances of modern architecture repeats this schematic quite faithfully: the designs of Auguste Perret. As noted, this becomes critically difficult with the introduction of Dutch Elementarism. In most previous instances neutral planes play the role of ground in the composition of the façade. The new architecture of Theo van Doesburg and Gerrit Rietveld thrusts the abstract plane into the foreground. It becomes active. Limits of space and form are understood as regular planes, strongly individualized. In this way the plane emerges as an “element of architecture” in the general composition. This can be read either as the desire to activate all the parts of the building or as a desire to invert the former system, as now planes substitute for lines of columns as the active elements in the perceived form. In either case, an ambiguity is created as to what should be interpreted as ground and what as figure. By a fluctuation of attention, real depth and transparency are underlined. Architectural composition is achieved by representation. The result is the production of an analogic model of the built environment at its different scales. Composition is developed with elements of composition, abstract spaces and volumes that require for their limits of elements of architecture. Those belong to the art or science of building, for in them resides the material existence of architecture. Elements of composition lack any real existence until their limits are materialized. They cannot be

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built, therefore they cannot be reduced to technical and constructive reasoning. For modern architecture, it is precisely technical rationality that explains the shape and materiality of elements. For classical architecture, instead, this relationship was secondary. Elements belonged to the domain of form, and the paradigm of elements was the classical orders. Modern architecture declared its elements to be authentic, and thus superior to those inherited from the past, for several reasons: pure novelty in the formal transmutation of elements into abstract shapes, as was the case of Elementarism; rationality in the use of materials and techniques in the most economic way; or simply the cult of technology when praising the skill in overcoming problems of its own artificial invention, as is the case of the curtain wall.

The Shape of Elements First we considered the classic orders; then we incorporated the elements of “the styles,” at least those which had a differential shape. If we look for traditional elements in a repertoire—for example, in the pages of a book—we will recognize them to be either traditional parts, namely columns, windows, and so on; or the parts belonging to a style that comprises some parts of differing functions, corresponding to those of the classical styles but “in a different language.” The twentieth century would be able to produce a new kind of element that was already heralded in the late eighteenth century: elements of generic, noncharacterized form; more precisely, elements that materialize simple geometrical forms. It is beyond our scope here to analyze how these forms came to be accepted into the realm of elements. It is traditionally assumed that the influence of abstract art was a decisive factor; perhaps it was the last resource after having tried all possible formal combinations during the s. Simple geometrical abstraction seemed to be all that was left. In any case, the examples we have shown employ such a repertoire of abstract elements, a repertoire that would not make sense as a catalog, at least not in the sense of a catalog of a style. We would find in that imaginary catalog of early modernism only different rectangles—shapes that outside of a determinate composition do not signify their position in a formal system; shapes that can be walls, openings, or structural members—all rectangles. In fact, that repertoire is most suitable for that formal neutrality which composition as taught by Durand really needed. And for some years it was used precisely in that way to give form to the new modern architecture.

Fig. 40. A symmetrical recomposition of Rietveld’s Schröder House using the Elements of Architecture. Student work by Facundo de Alzaga. Used with permission by the author, 1989 109 Development of the Project

However, from the nineteenth century onward, forms highly specific to new materials and techniques make their appearance. Some of them simply substitute with steel sections traditional columns and beams. Others have special functions, belonging to ways of constructing or servicing spaces hitherto unused. New types of openings, visible installations, developed in the last two centuries; almost all of these are made of new materials. This would in turn cause the rise of new contents for architectural form. A whole field of expression is created for and by these new shapes of architectural elements, therefore the option of a technical and constructive Expressionism comes into being.

There is finally another option, already conjectured by architects of the late eighteenth century: shaping strongly the envelopes of “elements of composition” and making of their inexpressive limits—blind walls and shaped roofs—the elements of composition of the new building. This we call “functionalist expressionism.” As we have already seen, it was Durand who extended the notion of element to include all parts of the building. According to his classification of the reasons for elements to have their shape, in Durand’s time, most of those shapes should have been subject to the then rising science of construction: 110 The Architectural Project

We have had to stress that from the union of those materials, forms and proportions are naturally born. This could not be otherwise, since matter necessarily has by itself forms that offer us relations and proportion. The elements of construction should then be considered from these two points of view. Forms and proportions of elements should be divided into three classes: those that are born of the nature of materials and the use of the objects made with them. Those that habit has made necessary for us in a way, as proportions and forms found in ancient buildings. And finally those simpler and more determined than all others should obtain our preference, the reason being that we perceive them more easily.3 The main forms of elements, then, are those that issue from use and construction, but they are neither traditional, like those of antique architecture, nor immutable, like “the simpler ones.” Durand continues: “The first kind of forms are the only essential ones; but they are not fixed by the nature of things in such a way that nothing could be taken from or added to them. So nothing prevents their alliance with the second kind.” Nothing prevents it, but nothing forces us to do that either. Classical tradition for Durand is only an option that “satisfies eye and spirit.” Durand’s explicit stance is found only at the end of his chapter, when he outlines consequences for design: In composition we will not occupy ourselves any more with forms and proportions under the aspect of pleasure. We will not deal much with the forms of the first kind, which are related to usefulness, because although they are the most important, they are born out of the use of objects and the nature of materials employed to build them. The forms and proportions of the second kind will be considered as purely local things, the finality of which is not to

shock our habits: if we were to build in Persia, China, or Japan, we would abstain from using those forms. Using them would go against the uses of the country and the materials they employ there. We will try to use the forms and proportions of the third kind because for many reasons they favor economy and make the study and the exercise of architecture easier. Finally, we will only study disposition, which, when it is convenient and economic, reaches the goal of architecture and becomes a source of the agreeable sensations buildings inspire in us.4 For Durand simple geometrical forms are always applicable, because they are economical and simple to grasp. Constructive and useful forms are essential and they can evolve—that is, be subject to evolution. Stylistic forms belong to circumstance. Without knowing it, Durand had prophesied the misfortunes of form in architecture for the next two centuries. We have mentioned the introduction of new modern elements of architecture. This does not do justice to the deep transformations in building introduced by modernity. Elements in the old sense were applied to a construction that was almost independent of the shape of elements. In a modern building, at least ideally, all the physical parts of the construction are involved in transformation. Structural skeletons and their correlative lightweight enclosing structures define a new type of habitable space. Economy of materials is introduced as a new criterion in the sense of using less material, not necessarily spending less money. In an imitation of engineering, efforts were made to reduce the weight of buildings, as if dealing with bridges or vehicles. This stance was probably the prolog to industrializing construction, but the decisive factor is the admiration for technique. The idea of doing more with less is seductive, but we should at least make sure that the built envelope has the same qualities as traditional construction. Habitable space demands more than simply a glass enclosure that is self-supporting. However, for a long time this seems to have been the ideal of modern architecture. Considering the building in this way was instrumental in getting rid of stylistic and eclectic forms of architecture, those enemies of early modernists. By transforming buildings into abstract boxes that could not serve as a support for traditional elements of architecture, a way was opened to impose a new style. We can verify this reading in the manifestoes of Theo van Doesburg, who had no specific knowledge of construction technique. Van Doesburg had a role as a propagandist for modern architecture from the critical standpoint of a commentator, and he is

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probably the voice best expressing the intention of substituting new kinds of objects for those built in a traditional way: “The new architecture possesses no single passive factor. It has overcome the opening in the wall. With its openness the window plays an active role in opposition to the closedness of the wall surface. Nowhere does an opening occupy the foreground; everything is strictly determined by contrast. Compare the several counter-constructions where the elements of which architecture consists (surface, line, and mass) are placed without constraint in a threedimensional relationship.”5 This transformation was bound to eliminate not only the forms of past architecture but also the crafts that produced its buildings. In the same way as Renaissance architects had freed themselves from medieval construction guilds to join artists and intellectuals, modern architects were ready to get rid of their old subordinates definitively. In order that architecture would become an industrial product, they would extinguish craftsmen. It is a paradox of the twentieth century that although the building trades did not disappear, skill and craftsmanship almost dissolved. Until the “triumph” of the Modern movement, buildings made by craftsmen experienced in the building trades required specific detailing only to make new ornaments, to create exotic styles, or for the introduction of a new mechanism. In modern architecture of later decades, all detailing became problematic, and everything had to be on a custom basis for the use of builders who had lost many of the skills in their trades without developing new ones. It is not surprising that this effect was very pronounced in countries with a tradition of heavy masonry construction and much less so in those that had a long tradition of framed, wood construction. That used to be the normal way to build, and it still is for domestic architecture in countries like the United States and Scandinavia. Monumental architecture in the West was almost invariably built in masonry. In those regions where the tradition of frame building prevailed, the adoption of the new architecture was easier. Both in Northern Europe and in the United States it was easier to assimilate a new form of building that kept the tradition of the assemblage of pieces. Significantly enough, the twentieth century brought a sudden fascination with the traditional architecture of Japan. Japanese architecture had both the characteristic of frame construction and a scarcity of applied ornament. Such ornament occurs only in certain kinds of temples. It has been often commented upon connection with modern architecture that its earlier practitioners concentrated on visual values and were uninterested in the qualities of thermal and acoustic insulation, trusting these qualities of space comfort to machinery and artificial ma-

terials. We will not go into depth on this subject, although in the s it was one of the reasons to criticize modernism and for a renewed interest in traditional forms and construction. For our subject, the renewal of elements of architecture in the twentieth century, we should say that modern architecture was formally successful in a way, but it had at least as many shortcomings as achievements in other aspects of the building envelope. Modern architecture tried unsuccessfully to industrialize building but almost killed traditional skills associated with construction; exactly those skills disdained by many of the great masters of the s. The example of Le Corbusier is paradigmatic; the plaster of his corniceless walls and smooth surfaces has had to be repaired countless times in the handful of houses kept as monuments to that heroic era. The Modern movement came on the scene at a time when there was in the building industry an empirical body of knowledge that made it possible to create acceptably habitable buildings: in less than half a century the sphere of modern architecture succeeded in forcing their replacement by semitransparent boxes made of lightweight materials, uncomfortable unless equipped with expensive services. In addition, they were built in such a way that they deteriorated like the machines they were supposed to emulate, resembling old cars in a parking lot. Modern architects found the building trades able to assemble with traditional efficiency almost all kinds of materials, but they changed all the rules, inventing new “details” to create the illusion that a building had been assembled by a machine.6 On the other hand, if traditional construction is accepted, the obsession with detailing tends to fade. But this prudent attitude was impossible for modern architects because they rejected the cultural meaning of traditional architecture: therefore, they also had to reject previous detailing. An empirical way to recognize whether a building was modern in the s was simply to see whether the traditional ways of assembling materials had been supplanted by another with the goal of obtaining a novel appearance of “simplicity” and lack of “ornament.” If this seems frivolous, one should keep in mind that in the earliest and most famous histories of modern architecture—those written between  and — this was exactly the criterion used to decide, first, who was modern and who was “premodern,” and then to separate the orthodox modernist from Expressionists and other heretics. In the passage quoted from Durand’s book, constructive determinism is presented as common sense or dogmatic hypothesis. Viollet-leDuc, among others, would later develop such determinism. Of course this notion is not sustainable. We can simply see the differences among

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“styles” that employ the same materials. The nineteenth century was also ambiguous in this respect, practicing a variety of styles for semantic reasons while at the same time demanding an authentic architecture of the new materials. I mention this only to note that such determinism is not a scientific truth, as it was presented some decades back. Constructive determinism is merely one of those idées fixes that in its day had a great influence on the course of architecture, particularly the practice of design.

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Architecture after the Renaissance gradually substituted architectural representation for the real buildings. The essence of architecture is now to be found in drawings. Thus a misfit is created between formal ideal conceptions of architecture and the daily life and use of buildings. This has grown over time, so that it has become a really difficult problem today. There is a significant gap between the conception the user has of architecture and the one held by architects as a body. Some of the forms most admired by architects do not meet with approval of the public. This is not a twentieth-century fact to be imputed to Le Corbusier; we should remember, as earlier noted, the attempts of Alberti and his followers to impose the centralized church plan against the needs of the fifteenth-century liturgy. This contributed to the long ensuing conflict over the design of St. Peter’s in the following century. Strangely enough, the rise of structural sciences in the nineteenth century introduced through the materialization of architecture a duality not unlike that caused by the project in the Renaissance. Structural science promoted an abstract vision of built phenomena. Things composed of a variety of materials were reduced to schemata. Over those schemata calculations were made. In the beginning this new formalized knowledge overlapped with empirical know-how about construction. Later on we would have different fields of study established in schools of architecture—“structures” and “building practice.” If we stick to structures, we will notice that from that field of study a determination was established over the elements of architecture, one we have already mentioned in connection with the character of those elements in modern architecture. Now this determination originates from the field of composition; in composition, elements of architecture occupy a precise place in the design sequence. We could argue that this place is similar to that occupied by the styles in academic composition, as they exist before any particular design and they form a repertoire of fixed pieces. However, even if the determination of style is also external to the compositional process, it is

Fig. 41. Variations on the “mushroom” column, designed and used by Frank Lloyd Wright in the Johnson Administration Building, 1936. A new Element of Architecture abandoned after being used only in a single building. Courtesy J. Wojtowicz and 115 W. Fawcett, Architecture: Development Formal of the Approach, Project 1985

also more homogeneous with it. The forms of the styles were “naturally” incorporated into the figures of the composition, since they were shapes of elements already employed in architecture. Structural schematics are more abstract, not really a catalog or repertoire of parts but conceptual schematics without a defined formal quality. Elements defined by structural schemata do not form sets, they do not “belong together,” nor do they have a mutual pertinence, as is the case with stylistic forms even if only because of the lapsed time in which such groups of elements have been present. Stylistic sedimentation gives an appearance of reason to usual groupings of shapes. The coherence of each stylistic repertoire is validated by the simultaneous presence of the same features in different buildings: this makes buildings recognizable. Style has one characteristic feature or more for each part of the building, an answer for each ornament and every useful part. None of this happens with structural schemata as such, because stylistic repertoires do not make a distinction between “structural” and “constructive” but have sets of features proper to the whole object. Only a later analysis will tell if they are more or less rational from a structured viewpoint.

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Technical determination of the elements of architecture appears to us as a strange factor in composition for a second reason also. The progress of design since the s and the increase of creative freedom for the architect would reach its utmost in the Modern movement, allowing designers to create their own elements of architecture. In other words, architects’ control over the objects they were creating reached its zenith with Scharoun or Aalto, or later on even more so with Hadid or Gehry. In a more abstract but almost equally arbitrary decision, the elements employed by Wright, Mies, or Rietveld are personal and subjective. The creation and metamorphosis of elements began perhaps with Mannerism and the Baroque, reaching a culmination when, free of the orders and styles, modern architects found themselves almost free from traditional techniques. The fact that this liberation from traditional technique did not imply a subjection to new structural and building practices can be verified almost to the end of the twentieth century. It can also be shown that in the realm of modern architecture, details were devised that had more of the ornamental than the rational, producing aesthetic effects, but that is beyond our scope here. If there is a new and better way of building apart from traditional practice, it will constitute a powerful determination of forms of the elements of architecture and of their dispositions, apart from their use in composition. These forms are even more alien that the ones previously employed. They are outside architectural aesthetics, in spite of the efforts of a generation of great engineers like Nervi or Candela to persuade architects of the “natural” identity between beauty and economic structure. “Rational structural forms” lack a traditional relationship with the elements of composition they are meant to shelter. In earlier times the formal determination of elements of architecture and of composition responded to similar principles. Palladio, for instance, used the same system of numerical proportions both for volumetric spaces and the orders, in spite of the fact that the latter had the traits we relate to a style and the spaces were limited in size by established constructional factors. Certainly we should attribute this close proportional relationship to the use of precedents, of which Roman buildings formed the main corpus. Those traditional types and compositions were almost never contradicted, and the dependence of type and elements upon traditional masonry construction did the rest. Only some local traits and those forced by climate—like the steeply sloping roofs of French Renaissance and Neoclassicism—found their way in as modifications of the basic classical repertoire.

Even if it is so, we should point out that the possibility of composition is conditioned by what we could call reliability of the elements of architecture. If the meaning of the figures with which designers preform a composition is well-known to them, the rectangles or other polygons they traces on paper really mean for them spaces to be materialized later with elements of architecture. If elements of architecture are not previously defined or there are too many alternative incomplete sets of elements—as opposed to the “complete” sets displayed by the styles—the plan drawing lacks its imaginary concreteness. In earlier times plan design was “safer,” and the support it provided to the imagination had more power. Deprived of a certain set of elements, the plan does not really control and coordinate space; it is only a plan, after all. The complete separation of elements of architecture and those of composition and the indefiniteness of the former creates “plan-ism.” Composition and technique are both, and at the same time, too abstract and too concrete. In the late twentieth century they tend to segment into pairs of concrete and abstract components, increasing the chronic state of the unending analysis of modern architecture. For the technical field there is a great distance between structural conception that is abstract and mathematical and the empiricism of construction. These two “branches” rarely come into contact, and their specific discourses seldom meet. For composition what is too concrete is use that cannot be captured by bubble diagrams or abstract formulae. Composition deals with ease with its analogic model