Architecture of the 1960's: Hopes and Fears
Municipal Public Hall, Karlsruhe, Germany 1957 Lincoln Center, New York, 1966 HOPES & FEARS
A symposium at the Metropolitan Museum of New York in the spring of 1961 discussed the question, "Modern Architecture, Death or Metamorphosis?" As this topic indicates, contemporary architecture is regarded by some as a fashion and - as an American architect expressed it - many designers who had adopted the fashionable aspects of the "International Style", now found the fashion had worn thin and were engaged in a romantic orgy. This fashion, with its historical fragments picked at random, unfortunately infected many gifted architects. By the sixties its results could be seen everywhere: in smallbreasted, gothic-styled colleges, in a lacework of glittering details inside and outside the toothpick stilts and assembly of isolated buildings of the largest cultural center.
An easy pandering to popular taste in architecture has been tried several times since the optical revolution around 1910. These trends came and went. And the playboy attittude of the sixties will vanish too. There are definite signs that the process of developing a new tradition is continuing in spite of temporary disturbances.
The directions in which architecture will develop have become increasingly clearer: strengthening of its plastic tendencies and strenghtening of conditions for its further evolution.
In the nineteenth century, structural engineering gave expression to desires which lay slumbering in the subconscious of the architecture of that period. In this century things are different. Architecture is no in the forefront and often asks more from the engineer than he can yet accomplish.
Structural engineering grew out of new methods of calculation and new developments in the manufacture of ferrous metals. For purposes of calculation, all structural parts were conceived as linear elements - forces obliged to follow and act in a prescribed direction - so that their behaviour could be measured and controlled in advance. These forces were guided through beams, trusses, and arches as through a pipe line. Prefabrication and standardization naturally followed this linear procedure. The Eiffel Tower is the most famous example of its early application.
Twentieth-century structural engineering is moving along a different path. The tendency to activate every part of a structural system instead of concentrating the flow of forces into single lines or channels continues to grow. Such systems can expand with full liberty in all directions. This results in certain difficulties. The forces cannot be easily controlled: often they evade precise calculation. Only tests by means of models and mock-ups can help. Construction merges with the irrational and sculptural.
"Surface tension", "active emanating bodies" and "the synthesis between the rational-geometric and the mystic-organic principle"
This development required a more flexible material than straight-line steel trusses. About 1900 reinforced concrete was sufficiently developed for shell construction to be possible. Robert Maillart was one of the first to conceive and to develop the idea of using surface tension in the flat or curved slabs of his bridges and mushroom ceilings, eliminating all linear elements. Freyssinet and Maillart their eggshell vaults about 1930.
Maillart once said he had got his inspiration from a steam boiler. The directive of a spatial distribution of forces throughout an entire structure has now been extended in many fields. In the design of automobiles and railroad rolling stock, the chassis and the body have been replaced by a single stressed-skin structure.1 A move from open-truss to stressed-skin bodies in airplane construction presents the most spectacular development, but shell construction also occurs in shipbuilding. Large-scale thin-shell dams (first developed in France) are slowly replacing the heavy arch and buttress types. Even furniture design follows this trend. The single-legged chairs of Eero Saarinen are pure shell structures.
Since the death of Maillart in 1941, shell structures and space frames have continued to develop an astonishing richness and versatility and to offer more and more possibilities to kindle imagination. Shapes formerly possible only with the use of the lightest materials can now be made in shell concrete.
A bewildering multitude of possibilities can arise from combinations of rational shells with a single or double curvature or complicated spatial forms such as hyperbolic paraboloids arising from straight-line generators. Cables - the most flexible of building materials - acquire symptomatic importance for prefabricated concrete.
The lightness and great flexibility of form offered by shells are now, for the first time in the history of vaulting, accompanied by no lateral stress. The structural system is equilibrated within itself. Shell construction appears ever more strongly to be the starting point for the solution of the vaulting problem of our period.
This does not mean that linear structural elements have been discarded. They continue to be used both in large and in small constructions. They have been developed further by great engineers, such as Pier Luigi Nervi, who uses prefabricated linear elements in spanning his large vaults and domes. In his Turin Exhibition Hall of 1961 - one of Nervi's most daring experiments - he strives for a more complicated spatial organization by the use of huge free-standing columns of different heights, which radiate fanlike structural fingers. A certain dichotomy arises between the form of these individual structural members and the total boxlike enclosure with its flat ceiling. It may be that this building represents both the peak and the end of a long development.
The way ahead lies with a freer use of shell construction such as has been developed by Candela in Mexico, the architect-engineer Catalano and, above all, Torroja in Spain. Eduard Torroja, who died in June 1961, was a profound theoretician as well as a great artist who sometimes, as in the structure of the Madrid Racecourse (1943), seemed to reach the point where construction requires the organic power of nature. The Tachira Club of Caracas, Venezuela (1957), one of his latest works with S. Vivas, has the lightness and overwhelming grace of a moving sail.
Jorn Utzon solved the vaulting problem in yet another way in his use of a sequence of ten great shells, rising up to sixty meters over the Sydney Opera House. The folding wings of each of these giant shells (erected without use of scaffolding) tilt over a single section of the complex, each closed by a concave glass wall designed to be spatially sucked up into the vault. It is clear from the form of these shells that they have been built up from prefabricated elements of a heavy material. It is quite otherwise with Kenzo Tange's hall for the Olympic games in Tokyo, 1964. In its interior the primeval form of the tent takes on a fantastic new dimension, and its exterior has the dynamic tension of a seashell. Its construction - which presented some difficulties - depends from a great steel cable.
Solutions to the vaulting problem of our period show a marvelous symbiosis: they make full use of the most advanced methods of construction and simultaneously come ever closer to organic forms.
Today we are again becoming aware that shapes, surfaces and planes do not merely model interior space. They operate just as strongly, far beyond the confines of their actual measured dimensions, as constituent elements of volumes standing freely in the open. It is not just the size of the pyramids or the never-surpassed perfection of the Parthenon that is significant. It is the interaction between volumes which gives full orchestration to the first architectural space conception. Today we have again become sensitive to the space- emanating powers of volumes, thus awakening to an emotional affinity with the earliest origins of architecture. We again realize that volumes affect space just as an enclosure gives shape to an interior space. We can turn to the work of a sculptor for an expression of his contemporary awareness of the relations between volumes of different form, height and position. For twenty years Alberto Giacometti experimented with the interplay of primitive forms: From his Pour une Place of 1930 and the Palace at 4 a.m. of 1932 until he designed a small bronze group, Passers-by on a Square, in 1948. The bodies of these passers-by are dematerialized to the utmost, yet they are so formed and placed that they fill the space between and beyond them.
In contemporary architecture I think the first planned relations of volumes in space can be found in Le Corbusier's project for the City Center of Saint Die' (1945). Here the different buildings are designed and placed in such a way that each bears an intimate relationship with the whole.
Squares without walls are developing. One of the first plans of this type is the triangular Plaza of the Three Powers in Brasilia (1957-60), where the dominating complex of senate, congress, and administration buildings enter into a free relation with lower structures - the presidential palace and the high court of justice - at the corners of the triangle.
That architecture is approaching sculpture and sculpture is approaching architecture is no deviation from the development of contemporary architecture.
One of the features of this evolving tradition is the simultaneity of freedom and involvement. Through this volumes have required the significance they possessed at the dawn of civilization. They have again become active emanating bodies. This is one of the reasons why buildings like the Ronchamps Chapel, the Tokyo Festival Hall, and the Sydney Opera House are so strongly modeled. The shaping of Ronchamps constantly reminds one of the interconnection between inner and outer space that Le Corbusier calls "acoustic space".
At the beginning of the present development painting stood in the foreground. Now it is sculpture.
We are still at the beginning of a period. It is far too early to make any statement in view of this multitude of different vaulting possibilities offered to architects by the engineers of our time. It is possible, in contrast to earlier periods, that many forms may develop simultaneously.
One possibility is that ceiling and floor may mirror one another like mussel shells, as in Naum Gabo's early design for the assembly halls of the Palace of the Soviets (1931). Le Corbusier's outstanding proposal for the assembly hall of the United Nations in New York (1947), which would have created one of the most exciting interior spaces of our period. also moves in this direction.
The greatest possibilities are offered by shell concrete vaults. Up to now the center of a vaulted ceiling has always been indicated by its point of highest elevation. But now ceilings are able to become concave and their center can occur at the lowest point: Le Corbusier's Ronchamp Chapel (1955), Berlin Conference Hall (Stubbins and Severud, 1957). This is psychologically significant. The interpenetration of inner and outer space, fundamental at the beginning of the new tradition, has become transposed into a more refined form. The concave ceiling rises to the encompassing walls, indicating that it does not stop there but extends further. At Ronchamps a narrow rim of glass separating ceiling and wall underscores this intention. The ceiling rests upon the walls like a descending bird.
The hyperparaboloid space frame offers a new starting point for the spatial imagination. Whether of wood or of shell concrete its balance is always contained within itself and its hovering impression derives from its inner constitution.
Contemporary interest in sculpture and in the possibilities of architecture results in an increasing interest in mural relief's on the part of the sculptor and in the revitalization of the wall on the part of the architect. Artists pioneering in this field, even before 1920, included Lipschitz, Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp. A big impetus was given in the early fifties by Mirko's beautiful relief portals in the Fosse Ardeatine, Rome (1953), a monument to murdered prisoners of war; by Henry Moore's brick relief's growing out of a brick wall, Rotterdam (1955); and by the entire work of Etienne Hajdu.
In Le Corbusier's Chandigarh Secretariat (1952-56) the revitalization of the wall acquired the strongest expression it had yet received, This result from a sculptural use of construction elements, such as vertical parapets and vertical and horizontal brise-soleils. The delicate vertical expression joints which separate the Secretariat's four divisions, subtly articulate the entire 254-meter building. The section for the Minister Aquarius an especial charm through the plastic differentiation and variation of its massive and perforated elements. But the most daring feature of this structure is the building housing the 40-meter high ramp, with its great unbroken plane surface, which shoots forward at a sharp angle, like a pointing finger. The contrast of a filigree-like articulation of the wall with the large planes of this slender ramp structure brings the wall surface of this building into an inspirited tension.
Rational geometric forms were characteristic of the early period of contemporary architecture. They were developed especially in the de Stijl movement and had great influence over the whole later development.
The trend to the organic again asserted its right in the buildings of Alvar Aalto, in the late work of Le Corbusier, in Kenzo Tange's National Indoor Stadium for the Olympic Games, 1964, as well as in the work of Jorn Utzon, to mention but a few. All faced a common problem of linking a geometric structure to organic forms.
A very direct confrontation of these opposites - geometric and organic - can be found in the work of Le Corbusier. It existed quite early, as in the roof structures of the Villa Savoie, 1928-30, where curving and rectangular forms stand side by side. The same principle - the emergence of the organic next to the geometric - appears on the roof of the Unite' d' Habitation at Marseille, 1947-52.
In the House of Parliament at Chandigarh (1957) an organic hyperbolic form is the main element of the entire interior. It thrusts its mighty curve upward through the roof. In the Pilgrimage Chapel at Ronchamps, 1955, the organic principle permeates the whole building. In the crypt of the church of La Tourette (1960) Le Corbusier achieved an interplay between progressive geometric elements and an organically undulating curve.
We have only referred to a few examples, but the synthesis between the rational-geometric and the mystic-organic principle runs through all the late work of Le Corbusier. He made no clear separation between purely geometric and purely organic forms, as can also be seen in his paintings.