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Towards New Architecture (changes)

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Controversy: Instead of Towards a New Architecture, should be Toward an Architecture

The Dude

• Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris 1887, b. Swiss, became French citizen later; major founder of modern architecture
• Felt out-of-the-way, visits Paris, works for reinforced concrete pioneer Auguste Perret
• Also worked in Berlin; may’ve met Gropius, Mies
• Name: changed version of grandpa’s last name (we can reinvent ourselves!)
• Friends w/disillusioned Cubists; it’s “romantic;” est. Purist movement with post-Cubist friend (their manifesto, Apres Cubisme)
• Influence: Paris housing crisis, slums, need better homes for lower-class workers
  • 1922: Villas (apartment block), and also an entire city, Ville Contemporaine (cruciform skyscrapers—for office buildings—around transportation centre; separate walking paths and car roads; outside this area, apartment blocks w/lots of green space
• His journal, L’esprit nouveau; this book was made of articles he wrote for this journal
• Taylorism and Fordism for Society!
• 1925: Let’s bulldoze most of central Paris and turn it into my Ville Contemporaine! (people didn’t agree)
• 1935: Radiant City (where he doesn’t classify people by class but instead by family size)
• Vichy regime: given a post, but his plans were never executed
• What He Actually Realized
  • Unite d’Habitation, Marseille (constructed after WWI-early fifties)
    • It inspired Brutalism
    • Residents still like it (middle-class professionals)
  • Chandigarh (a new capital for Punjab and Haryana), India
    • A model of urban planning with great reputation for good living standards
    • Originally planned to go to two American achitects who wanted to use Garden City ideas (but one dies and so the other gave up)

Themes

• Modernity
  • Shares the “vast break with past” model of history with many modernists
    • Modernity: whatever is industrial—that is in accordance with the laws of Economy and mathematics—is modern; everything else is anachronistic
    • “we are living in a period of reconstruction and of adaptation to new social and economic conditions” 63
    • The styles that people love are “old clothes of a past age,” making them “servile” to the past, a “lie” 94
    • “fifty years of progress,” an “age of might effort” 103 has yet led to “unstable” society, so we need to construct better
    • “this period of science, of strife and drama in which the individual is tossed about” 144
    • “we do not appreciate sufficiently the deep chasm between our own epoch and earlier periods” 271
    • 276: industry dominates our thoughts and media, making “delight” and “fear” the staple of the modern mind: “bewilderment” at new objects that we love but that make us unhappy in the end b/c we contrast them with our non-modern homes “putrid and useless and unproductive homes” 277
  • Frederick Etchells, a Bloomsberry, translates and writes the fawning preface
  • What is his modernity like? All modern men have “mechanical sense” whose morality is economy 127 (“cold, intelligent men” will build the city)
• Order and Method
  • The words “order” and “method” are everywhere, just like Poirot
  • Elevates geometry, physics, and mathematics as the key to the new order, for they are the key to the beauty the eye sees
    • “Geometry is the language of man” 72
  • Elevates construction developments and materials creation b/c they make these geometric dreams come true
  • The “regulating line” is mathematics made tangible, using same law throughout, rather than “capriciousness” of single person
  • Order: good proportions are “an indefinable trace of the absolute” 203; whittled down to the absolute necessary only; where emotion is just the “unity of an aim” 206: all is a Project indeed
• Enlightenment to Fascism
  • His narrative of the builder: the “disorder” of the natural forest yields to man, who uses the size of his arm or foot to make the first measure: man measures world according to himself LITERALLY to his body: human harmony and scale
    • That’s enlightenment: nature yield to man; man makes order
    • Despite his later, natural laws and economic laws and laws of beauty are all the same
  • For him, order = sameness. “All men have the same needs.” 136 and 138 “perfection universally felt”
    • He SAYS that “social contract” has led up to “standardized classes” (showing that while he wants the working classes to be comfortable, he still wants em to be working classes; which meshes with the vein of “elite people will run the world” in here)
      • cf a collaboration “between architects and men of taste” 264
  • “Architecture is the first manifestation of man creating his own universe” 73
    • But then in next moment collapses “our nature” and “laws of nature” as the same thing: the end result of Enl. is to say that man’s nature is ALL nature, after you’ve imposed your will on it
  • He’s my example for someone who takes too far the Rational Man
  • Man is only rational for him, and he wants to purify all!
    • See here: “Culture is the flowering of the effort to select. Selection means rejection, pruning, cleansing.” 139
      • It’s an architecture of eugenics
  • On Ancient Rome being simple and direct: “If it was brutal, so much the worse—or so much the better” 156
• Positivism
  • Both physical laws and moral laws “are simple and few in number” 74
• Industry
  • Big business is the model of “healthy and moral organization” 284
  • Present picture of culture obsessed by industry
    • industrial activity “constantly at the back of our minds” 277
    • causes a state of “delight and fear” (go to “Modernity” topic for more)
  • He wants industry to be the model for EVERYTHING in society: social organization needs to appease the demands created by industry 278
    • And this is a RIGHT: “claim their rights to a machine for living in, which shall be in all simplicity a human thing” 278
    • We see definition of the human at stake
      • I’d actually say this isn’t anti-humanism, but merely a variant of humanism w/diff def of human. Anti-humanism doesn’t mean “unlike traditional view of human” but rather decentered human.
  • Taylorism and Fordism are to be used for modeling society and leisure too, not just work: apply “spirit of mass production”
  • We have the “right” to have all our lives structured as rationally as our work spaces
  • Laws of industry and profit will now be used: “minimum use of means” (incl workmanship, color, sound, form, words) with “maximum output” 137
  • Believe in standardization as key to solve needs
  • Competition is the “birth of style” 138
• Political Economy
  • Believes the economy is a rigorous natural law, just like other silly folks
    • “Economic law unavoidably governs our acts and our thoughts”
      • Extreme of positivism here, part of scary utilitarian tradition, the new variation bubbling up again
    • “The laws of Economics demand their rights” 232
  • Industry “overrunning everything like a flood that rolls on to its destined ends” 229 (manifest destiny, anyone?)
  • We should be “inspired by the law of Economy and governed by mathematical calculation…puts us into accord with universal law” and “achieves harmony”
• Art/Aesthetics
  • Takes them to be just the play of the eye that likes pure masses that are balances and put into relation w/one another: this is emotion, he says
• Little by little, “beauty,” “aesthetics,” and finally even “architecture” is rhetorically marginalized as an afterthought
  • At first he says it IS all about beauty but later they begin to drop off as he focuses his effort
  • Beauty: relation of pure shapes creating emotion (sounds like Fry on post-impressionists), using “evident laws” to “excite our visual senses to the fullest degree” 143
    • cf his figures: the buildings with the angles and lines all drawn so the reader can see the popping back and forth, excited
  • Formula: “And beauty? Well, there’s order!” then later “Aesthetics? You have mathematics,” and finally “Architecture? Well there’s rationality!”
    • “Economy. Efficiency. And architecture? We can always achieve this when the problem is clear.” 260
  • Says that businessmen, bankers, and merchants, the people who design machines, are the real artists, the ones with real aesthetics
• Revolution
  • If we don’t change housing, there will be a Revolution. To avoid it, change housing.
  • Conservative and yet does seem to care about people being comfortable in their homes: he just has an odd way of determining what the proper environment is
  • Last Lines: “Architecture or Revolution. Revolution can be avoided.” 289
• Manifesto
  • “The machinery of Society is profoundly out of gear” b/c they don’t fit the needs of today
  • Typical: There is a new spirit. X, my topic, needs to follow it.
  • “Society is filled with a violent desire for something which it may obtain or may not. Everything lies in that.” 288
    • The generalizations; the assertion that one topic is of the most importance; a feeling of immanent change; violence
    • cf the “alarming symptoms” we must deal with 289
• Machine for Living
  • When we have an “critical and objective point of view,” we’ll arrive at the “House-Machine”
    • Me: he doesn’t GET our oneness with objects, how our subjectivity snakes in and out of objects. Too much enlightenment man, with subject/object divide in tact.
  • House should be a tool
  • Compares old way of homes to milkman providing tainted milk
• Leisure
  • B/c homes are boring and “furniture stores,” we’re forced to clubs (men), tea-parties (women), and night-clubs (couples)
    • Our homes make life “too difficult” and “kill the spirit of the family” 122
    • Morals: anti-Malthusian clubs and temperance societies and mothers of families should listen to him, he says
  • Says that leisure needs to follow work: should be the same
    • We need work space and home space (private leisure space) to be the same; otherwise, “anachronisms”
    • “Machines will lead to a new order both of work and of leisure” 107
    • Machines lead to “comfort,” so making people comfortable will avoid revolution
  • Seems to divide “good” types of leisure space from “bad”
    • The bad ones are morally wrong: clubs, night-clubs, and tea-parties: b/c break up the family
    • The good ones: sleeping cars, dining cars on trains; cafes; ocean liners: b/c no fuss, cleanly ordered
  • Reflects the fact that leisure has become a problem
    • Says that eight hour days lead to problems, it’s dangerous: won’t lead to good family life; b/c our houses are terrible, they will demoralize us.
      • Actually seems to lament the reduction of the work day
    • Leisure is one of the ways that exposes people to revolution b/c allows them to spend time in uncomfortable places (for him, it’s not that there’s too much industry that’s the problem; it’s that there’s too little)

Architecture

• Force, organization, and method will take out confusion and chaos from homes and from society by using large-scale construction and mass production at home
  • But the model of the human thus implied is the world of Brave New World, perhaps of fascism
• Architecture, “pure creation of the mind”
  • Now, it’s stifled by “custom” too academic and trivial
  • “masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses brought together with light”
    • “establish emotional relationship by means of raw materials” “beyond utilitarian needs” 151
    • “art enters in” at the plastic: that is, the eyes
    • will convey mood and emotion of designer
  • Arch emotion is when “work rings with us in tune with a universe whose laws we obey” (Worringer?)
    • Cubism was first art to reach harmony with our new epoch, “a source of meditation”
  • “impresses the most brutal instincts” and “calls into play the highest faculties” and “spiritualizes” hard facts b/c they are what materialize ideas
  • Must follow needs by articulating a clear problem
  • Variety of forms, but unity in decoration (opposite of Ruskin; and opposite of today’s style, he says, b/c it has unity of form so boring, but tons of decoration so useless)
• PLAN
  • We must have a plan! or “poverty, disorder, shapelessness, wilfulness”
    • Doesn’t want “capriciousness” or “wilfulness:” the person is subjugated to the plan, which is industry plus math
• Futurism
  • Love of machinery “machinery has aroused a new spirit” (he’s a futurist of architecture)
  • Though actively denies: “this isn’t dangerous futurism”

His Recommendations

• Not “styles,” ie Gothic Byzantine etc
  • Those are like “a feather on a woman’s head” at most pretty
• Clean rhythms, just proportions
• Plan whole cities (we can do it b/c of state of finance and the progress of construction
• Depthless: lots of flat planes (windows are big but flush to wall; bedrooms living rooms etc have nothing or next to nothing on them; unimpeded planes = outer walls; the use of gigantic units
  • Rationalism made visible
• Sequestration/separation
  • Business in one area, with homes far away
  • Different levels of ground: one below for “slow moving” transactions (like purchasing; one above for “fast” traffic;” and then even a third one on top of buildings for social spaces (cafes, recreation)
    • He boasts that you “triple the area of the town” but notice you do so by filing everything into crannies
• Large living rooms; smaller houses overall; simple furnishings fitted into home; less furniture; well aired; “machines for sitting in” (chairs)
• Big bathroom w/shower and exercise equipment; sunbathing; no undressing in your bedroom (unclean!); vacuum; concealed lighting; no stuffing your maids in the attic
  • Obsession with cleanliness: he notes men’s love of “shiny white collars” and women’s love of “fine white linen” 277
• Use of homogeneous, artificial materials, unlike slovenly Nature who gives you trees with knots in them, ruining a bunch of perfectly good material
• House made in three days!
• Houses are molds of concrete being “poured in” just like into a bottle
• Trade your drawing room for a bathroom: wants spacious bathroom; trades cleanliness for sociability; reflects the common connex between social mixing and dirt
• “House will no longer be this solidly built thing which sets out to defy time and decay and which is an expensive luxury” but instead will be a tool 237
  • not longer “archaic” and “rooted in the soil” and part of the “cult” of family and race: clearing those “romantic cobwebs” 238; homes are “object of sentimental hysteria” where “every man makes one poem” so house is the “crowning of a career” which he damns as “crazy ideas” only 263 (and actually houses are “tuberculosis” 277)
    • Sounds to me like opposite of Ruskin (wanted monumental homes)
    • But why? To stop revolution b/c proportioned homes will give “a feeling of calm, order , and neatness and inevitably imposes discipline on the inhabitants” 243
• Old houses cramped and crowded, “bad use of space” 240; new will be “as serviceable as a typewriter” 241

Assumptions/Notes/Comments

• Technological determinism: we have these machines, and they determine the new spirit
  • “Steel and concrete have brought new conquests” 269
• Wants “health, logic, daring, harmony, perfection”
• Believes that all architectural experience is sensation, and that only sensation of the EYES alone
  • What about tactile? cf Benjamin “work of art in…”
• “Almost unknown to us, the ‘great city’ is engendering its plan” 54 (cf Yeats anyone?!)
• He’ll say something like, “This horrifies people,” or “These figures are terrifying, pitiless but magnificent,” but won’t answer the problem brought up. Next idea!
  • It’s the pitilessness of industry gone mad, of Enlightenment without restraint, a variant of the Utilitarian arguments, everything taken to its limit: like Robert Pippin points out that the main points of modernity were laid out early and were only left to play out.
    • I say it’s a fugue, a bunch of variations, one turn of which got us Utilitarians, the other turn of which got us futurists, the next Fascism
    • My originality here is not the futurist/fascist (Ed Comentale) but the Utilitarian stuff and the adding Pippin in
• Disappearance of Aesthetic as Autonomous Realm
  • “Harmony” (his word for aesthetic enjoyment) comes from economic and physical necessity, that is, “pure functioning”
    • Harmony “vibrates” in us, “the axis on which man is organized in perfect accord with nature…probably with the universe,” a “primal will” 208-9
      • Even though in the end it ends up in shunning nature for artificial materials!
  • Art, math, nature all turn out to be the same thing
• Parthenon
  • 288: “the old architectural code no longer concerns us” yet you love the Parthenon (tons of pictures of it)?
  • To state the problem in a diff way: how can you give an historical basis for modern architecture (math and optics and new tools and new industry standards) and yet say that it’s obeying eternal laws?
  • Well, Parthenon is universal law, and new arch is “return to universal law” 212
  • Parthenon “gives us sure truths” 221 in an uncertain age
  • What it shows to me is a lack of thought given to separating out the eternal from the historical
• Reflects the problem of understanding enlightenment equality of people with … well reality. How do you translate equality? People are now trying to understand it mathematically: one vote; by “sameness.” It’s a debate!
  • cf John Stuart Mill on votes: more votes for smarter people
• Remember that mass production didn’t start on large scale in England and Europe till post WWI, and that Fordism isn’t norm until after WWII: which means Le C is the first one to champion the nightmare world Marx drew a picture of
  • See here, where he recapitulates a Marx narrative, but from a celebratory perspective: Development of tools now means that tools are “out of our grasp” “Human animal stands breathless and panting before the tools” thus “he feels himself to be the slave of a frantic state of things” “no liberation or comfort or amelioration” and feels a “moral crisis” 271
    • His attitude: how to solve it? well, once the “human animal” has a new “harness” he will be happy with the change
    • Again, he has no real defense against arguments!
    • Contradicts Marx by saying Taylorism = “new collective spirit” 275
• We see here the end of the growing drama of progress versus what progress takes (its tolls, the pauperized working class, the stunted and dirty and immoral—ha ha he seems to take his concerns from early Victorian era)...now with a final act of will we can eradicate the evidence that progress isn’t always progress, that it’s not unilateral and universal
  • See him as the anti-Benjamin (theses of history – anti-progress)
• Attitude that you solve industry by adding more industry: need to go through capitalism, except puffed up a little and made a virtue rather than a necessity

Steamships/Ocean Liners

• As the first example of the style of the epoch (they are followed by automobiles and airplanes)
  • “freedom from an age-long but contemptible enslavement to the past” 103
  • They are the future in what we can see NOW
    • 103: “discipline and harmony” “calm, vital, and strong,” a solution to a clearly stated problem
  • The major example of seeing how industry is creating modern aesthetics
• Where industry becomes design: the ocean liner shows where the industrial spirit is “disengaging itself from the creations of modern industry,” like a monster “it’s alive!”
• Now, what’s funny about this chapter is that the pictures are all about steamships and there are a few quotes about ships particularly, but main topic is Ornament!
  • Maybe should reference Wharton’s The Decoration of Houses, which also wanted to minimize useless frills
  • Ornament is “dead spirit”
• Steamship: a “regeneration” that we need “to raise our hats to” 92
• Graphic of Curnard’s Aquitania: superimposes scale pictures of Notre Dame, St. Paul’s, and Arc de Triomphe onto silhouette of the ship to compare size
  • He wants to cram as many people in as possible
• It’s a part of the “Eyes Which Do Not See” part of the book (one section about them, one of cars, one of planes): where we have modern aesthetic in front of us but don’t see it: pencil, typewriter, safety razor, office furniture, limousine 95
• What’s to Like about Liner?
  • Size/scale: “Vast and intimate”
  • No stifling “styles”
  • “satisfying and interesting volume” of the promenade
  • Unity of materials
  • Stuff is “sanely exhibited and rationally assembled”
  • Powerful contrasts between mass and void, light and shadow
  • “Pure, neat, clear, clean, healthy”
  • No carved stuff, no cushions, no carpets
• Question: a ship is a crisis space…one that’s beset by problems (see Titanic)...he clearly conceives of society as in crisis…thinks that the dangers of the ocean are a proper inspiration for life itself