1998 Carré Bleu 40 years

Beyond Monuments, Beyond Zip-a-tone. Shadrach Woods's Berlin Free University, a Humanist Architecture.

Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre

"We are concerned not with "architecture" or "town planning" but with the creation of environment at every scale The problems which we face in making our world are entirely new; for our society is entirely new. The concept of society towards which we strive: that of a completely open, non-hierarchical co-operative in which we all share on a basis of total participation and complete confidence... We cannot think of planning in static terms, in three-dimensional space, when we live in a four-dimensional world. The realization, for instance, that the scene of action of reality is not a three- dimensional Euclidean space but rather a four- dimensional world (1) in which space and time are linked together indissolubly sets our civilization apart from any others. "
This passage, published by Shadrach Woods in 1964,(2) emphasizing, as it does, the relation of architecture to the "fourth dimension" provides the best introduction to this essay on the Free University of Berlin by Woods and his associates, Georges Candilis and Alexis Josic, as part of the conceptual change that occurred in architecture and urbanism during the period following World War II. More specifically, we will be looking at the new design developments involving the key concepts of "space/time" and "movement': along with the less Important ones that were associated with them, such as "plasticity': "mobility': "flexibility" and "process" in the struggle towards a redefinition of a humanist architecture, an architecture of community.
Shadrach Woods was an outsider to architecture. This is true of a great number of innovators. Leon Battista Alberti was a lawyer: Claude Perrault a medical doctor: Christopher Wren a mathematician: and Laugier a preacher at the Chapelle de Versailles. Le Corbusier never went to architecture school. Serge Chermayeff had only a high school degree. When Woods arrived to work for le Corbusier, it was without any formal education in architecture. But Woods was an outsider in a second sense. like other major innovators in architecture -Mies and Breuer and once more, le Corbusier and Chermayeff -he spent most of his life uprooted. But unlike the architects of the European diaspora during the 1930s, for whom the flight from home was imposed by external conditions, Woods was more like many American artists who, after the War, were in self-imposed exile in Paris -the city of avant-gardism -in an idealistic search of their true selves, away from what they saw as a stifling rule of conformism at home. He lived most of his life as an "American in Paris': rejecting the booming architectural scene in North America, which he dismissed in the name of more humanistic values, working first as an apprentice in the office of Le Corbusier and later in collaboration with two other "exiles": a Greek, Georges Candilis, and a Yugoslavian Alexis Josic, until he was appointed visiting critic at Yale University in 1962. From that moment only did he gradually reorient himself towards the US, as a resident architect in the State of New York, as a resident of New York City and as an endowed Professor at Yale University.
Being an outsider can be a major impediment to running a major professional practice. But it may also be conducive to mental leaps, creative thinking and to the formation of new conceptual systems for a discipline and subsequently modifying its products. And this is precisely the case with Woods' architecture and urbanism and with the design of his scheme of the Free University.
Political; social and cultural conditions can also help the emergence of new ideas in design as well as the networks of people working out solutions to problems in dialogue. Both factors have played a role in the transformation of the new idea of movement, constructing, in Woods' words "space measured not by inches but by speed of moving pedestrian" from a purely visual-aesthetic category.
To many; the designs of this period the late 1950s and 60s, appear to be without much significance, they are naive and banal; utopian and ideological; confused and lacking in intellectual content. Contrary to this received wisdom, we will argue that both the Berlin Free University and the ideas linked to it -spatial; social; cultural; political -are not only historically significant but also relevant today.

Plasticity
There was nothing new in the fascination with movement hat Woods shared with his generation. It goes back at least as early as the description of the whirling column in Exodus in the Bible. There was nothing unique about it either. It extends up to the latest technologies involving modern transportation and the merging media technologies in the 1960s, predecessors of today's digital virtual reality, the internet and the web.
Capturing movement within the spatial framework of design has always been and continues to be a sought after goal and an obsession of artists, architects, and urbanists alike. One of the strategies to incorporate movement has been to use the expressive visual-spatial qualities of the design object. It can be applied, for example, to what we have written about elsewhere in relation to the work of Santiago Calatrava as the 'aesthetics of the pregnant moment': the design strategy of arranging the masses of the artifact in controlled disequilibrium in a manner that is portent of a changed state.(3)
In the period preceding World War II the one word applied to describe this strategy was "Plasticity': the conic likeness of the artifact to an organism which moves or grows, or to the memory of movement embodied in streamline structures or "non-finito" surfaces. It has been argued that this cerebral preoccupation with movement was in response to the challenge of robust models of science and their perceived capabilities to capture "time and space", the new, non-Euclidean geometry introducing the "fourth dimension", the formidable theory of relativity conceived by Albert Einstein or the philosophy of "duration", "flux" and "movement" of Henri Bergson. The obsession with movement came also from material culture, the new subjugation of every day life to the imperative of speed. Ilya Ehrenburg, in his 1929 The life of the Automobile, reports about dances called "Monsieur Simon's Automobile Gallop and Monsieur Salabre's Automobile Polka." And the Futurist F.T. Marinetti, as a way of promoting the "new beauty of speed", proclaimed that all prepared food should be replaced by pills -with "pasta at the top of the list."(4)
Up to World War II Plasticism in the arts was associated with the "fourth dimension " such as, for example, in Theo van Doesburg's "Hyper-cube Color Construction in the Space/Time Dimension" (1924). But we also find it in Buckminster Fuller's "4D sketch" (1929) and the work of the Italian Futurists. As for Siegfried Giedion, the Swiss historian and main propagandist of the modernist movement as embodied by Le Corbusier, Gropius and their CIAM group, he found that the new Einsteinian "space/ time conception" was as relevant to architecture as it was to physics. Both, in his view, "conceive of space as relative to a moving point of reference, not as absolute and static entity. "(5) In fact he was so fascinated with the concept that he entitled his subsequently best-selling book, based on his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1938-39, Space, Time and Architecture.
Giedion's writings were most significant for contemporary architects and clients of architecture despite their inaccuracies and capriciousness. Its omission for example, of the works of Erich Mendelsohn in particular the ones most relevant to his title: Einstein Tower {1920j and the Schocken Department Store in Chemnitz (1928) was scandalously partisan and exclusive. But it was Giedion who best summarized architecture's engagement with movement in the first part of this century, ascertaining its physical spatial/formal characteristics, and encapsulating them as "plasticity" of form.
Plasticity continues to playa central role in shaping the conceptual system of architecture after the Second World War. Scientific research in mathematics and physics and transportation technology - both powerful stimulants responsible for the surging of the movement-mania in design before the war -emerge with even more mighty influence after it.

Preoccupation with plasticity, however, in post-war de- sign is also related to the cultural politics of the time. Plasticity is a leading category in New Monumentality; the post-war architectural movement instituted very much with the help of Sigfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner towards the end of the 1940s. (6) It is the concept that unites arts with architecture and away from functionalist design and engineering. With Giedion plasticity comes to be synonymous with the rejection of strict orthogonality; what post-war modernists came to call "match-box architecture." (7)
Thus, in his new, post-war edition of Space, time and Architecture, Giedion uses 'plasticity" to analyse the aesthetic qualities of his most current favorite projects: the undulating riverside wall of the MIT Dormitory (1947-4 9) by Alvar Aalto. Giedion who had left Aalto out of the first edition of his book, as we have mentioned praises the monumental qualities of the project which he sees as echoing earlier experiments by Borromini with the "culminating spiral" "resembl(ing) some organic growth" "with its inherent movement." He also praises Gropius's Graduate Center of Harvard University (1949-50) for its "dynamic", i.e. non-symmetrical, repetitive shapes as they "spread informally, no enclosures separating the dormitories from the outside... (their) covered long horizontals and slim and widely separated columns impart(ing) movement..." Le Corbusier's post-World War II non-realized Civic Center of St-Die, is also applauded by Giedion for "display(ing) in a masterly way a new kind of spatial relationship..., people walking around... would have a continuously changing spatial experience. " Even the 1940s Illinois Institute of Technology by Mies van der Rohe is described in similar terms. Indeed Giedion depicts the 24 buildings of the scheme as "so disposed that an all embracing space is created though not visible at one glance -a space that can only be slowly perceived by including the dimension of time, that is, by movement. "(0)
Woods' projects are no less characterized by 'plasticity". Take the Nid d'Abeilles housing projects he designed with his partners Georges Candilis, Alexis Josic and Paul Dony in the mid-1950s. One can easily see in their staggered white prismatic masses reverberating in the Mediterranean light the search for plastic effects as the buildings just mentioned by Aalto, Gropius and Mies. This is true of the housing project for Bagnols-sur-Ceze, presented at the anti-CIAM meeting in Otterlo in 1959. In fact here Woods himself will explicitly refer at that time to the plan masse of the project consisting in the visual grouping of asymmetrical, stepped units on an orthogonal grid as introducing "a fourth dimension into architecture ". (9)
Away from Plasticity
But this hardly makes Woods a follower of Giedion or New Monumentality. On the contrary. This same text delivered at the Otterlo conference, about Bagnols-sur-Ceze, reveals a Regionalist approach, albeit a highly unconventional one. Next to the reference that the architects "have tried to avoid the deadly alignment of the straight line" of the building blocks, Woods states that "the structure of the new town" was "directly determined" by the old town. Now; the declaration that the structure of the old town served as a guide in the design of the new; was indeed in the context of the times, a novel way of interpreting Regionalism. What made it exceptional was the claim that a modern project had been based on guidelines drawn from the "structure" of a traditional settlement. Thus the "structure of the new" could be determined by an old precedent. Woods was not very clear as to how this relation between new and old was established. His statement was probably even more puzzling to his contemporaries present at the congress, like the Smithsons or Aldo van EyCk- than to us. For them, Regionalism meant one thing: the mimicking of local building styles, and this, in their view; was a mistake. Here, Woods' Regionalism is expressed in a way so new as to be hard to comprehend that is in the borrowing of the layout of the modern blocks of the new city from the elongated semi-enclosed one of the old city. One suspects this early example of what we might perhaps call "Critical Regionalism"(10) was misconstrued by Woods' contemporaries, especially the close circle of his friends. It was not clear to them that Woods' intention was to sustain social cohesion and identity in a manner that was consistent with what they called and what we may still call; a Humanistic one.
First Steps Towards a New Framework: Mobility as Stem
The experiment with Bagnols-sur-Ceze was just the beginning of Woods' most important contribution to post-war architectural thinking. He elaborates this initial idea a year later, in a 1960 issue of Architectural Design (II), and in a 1961 article of Carré Bleu, the famous architectural review founded by Andre Schimmerling. Parenthetically; although very small in size, the Carré Bleu played an enormous role in promoting the anti-formalist new ideas by architects of Woods' generation. Here he dismisses the view that architecture is a formal composition. Plasticity is no longer a concern. The article is divided into two parts: a polemic/criticism on one hand and, on the other, a vision of a new architecture. Architecture as practiced is "static" and "closed': he argues. It is guided by the concept of plan-masse, putting together mass- produced blocks to form dynamic looking, abstract space compositions. Any composition of this kind is only a 'plastic or aesthetic arrangement... {and} does not work in our mobile civilization... These fleeting images are built to last fifty or a hundred years, and in one tenth of that time, the image is already out of date". Plan masse, whatever its design qualities representing in a plastic way the fourth dimension or movement does not over- come the static confines of traditional culture. It still leads to monuments. (12)
To what he viewed as the obsolete formalism of the monumental architecture, Woods proposes an alternative which could not be inscribed in terms of any of the existing concepts belonging to the existing framework of architectural thinking. It required a new conceptual system. In this new framework for design thinking, the idea of time, fourth dimension movement were retained, but they were no longer related to any "ingenious plastic arrangement." Instead they became part of a something new. He gives to this new thing the name of "Stem"
"Stem" goes beyond the plan masse and the plastic architectural composition to include the notions of activity and interaction. It prescribes a way of linking locations in an orderly pattern a topological order within which people might encounter each other and activities might occur. It is a support system, very much like the one we find within an old-fashioned network of paths of an old town. In short Woods talking about the structure of the new town meant the topological structure rather than the visual/spatial one linked with New Monumentality.
Beyond Zip-a-tone
In the same article, Woods is opposed also to another aspect of New Monumentality- inherited from the pre- war CIAM. One of its techniques was to analyze an urban or building program in terms of elementary functions and visualizing them in terms of spatial "zones" leading to a "zoning plan". The new dogma of functional zoning was embodied by a new means of representation: the famous zip-a-tone, a patterned plastic surface which could be easily glued on a piece of paper indicating a general purpose usage rather than a particular volume or shape. Ironically one of the first designers to react against this trend was Le Corbusier himself; who had probably done most to promote the CIAM "mentality" in the design of urban and building complexes. Zip-a-tone had become emblematic of this thinking thanks in large part to Le Corbusier's own repeated use of it. But in 195.5; when he wrote his Modulor 2, he composed a playful; surrealist visual poem about the tool in an attempt to subvert the narrow-minded thinking it served. (13)
Woods' reaction against the "zoning mentality" was to offer the "Stem" as an alternative way of viewing function one based no longer on space only, but on human mobility in space. As Gunter Nitschke wrote: "...some of latest explorations for new towns made by Candilis and Woods, with ...the system STEM, ...for Toulouse-le-Mirail, originated in considerations of mobility, in other words in form/energy interrelations ...are no longer given in measures of length (Renaissance Principle of Planning) but of speed (measure of energy): 2,5 miles per hour, 60 miles per hour... (and) measures of validity, 5 years, 25 years".(14)
In 1962, again in Carré Bleu N°3, Woods publishes a short essay under the title "Web", elaborating the idea of "Stem". Presenting the project of his firm for a new neighborhood for Bilbao, Spain for 100,000 inhabitants, he refers to the project as incorporating "more than the usual three dimensions ...a time dimension". The project is referred to as "a system" which at first glance appears to be nothing but an arrangement of circulation paths. Woods, aware of the possibility of this misunderstanding, will point out that the "Web" is "an environmental and not just a circulation system". It is a way to establish a large-scale order which by its existence makes possible an individual expression at the smaller scale ". "More than a technical device", the "Web" is "a true poetic discovery of architecture". (15)
Stripped of its aesthetic suggestions, the dimension of time with Woods, even as a 'poetic discovery': assumes a social connotation. It relates to society evolving a way from "the limits of perceivable human groupings (villages and towns, classes, casts and sects) ". For this society, "the approach" of architecture "can no longer be only visual;' we call upon the whole range of sense, intellect and emotion to elaborate an architecture consonant with our aspirations". The "Web" emerges, not very differently from the "Stem': a kind of "frame" within which "function can be articulate ". Without imposing any repressive order, the same time it excludes "the chaos of disparate elements in pointless competition ". (16)
In a later text, of 1964, Woods expresses his opposition to functionalist zoning with equal force as he did with materialistic 'plastic monumentality". Architecture "can- not result from a zoning plan" which does not associate functions. It only lays them out. Neither it can be made "from a composition of solids and voids': no matter how dynamically they are shaped. They are still "static and therefore the least adapted to the change and growth of life". The reasons for this rupture with the inherent ideas and practices are clearly set up in the article. He writes, as we noted in the opening lines of the present text, that "the problems which we face in making our world are entirely new; for our society is entirely new;' indeed our perception of the universe we live in is completely different from previous periods. The realization, for instance, that "the scene of action of reality is not a three-dimensional Euclidean space but rather a four-dimensional world in which space and time are linked together indissolubly sets our civilization apart from any others". He continues: "The concept of society towards which we strive: that of a completely open, non-hierarchical co-operative in which we all share on a basis of total participation and complete confidence. ... We cannot think of planning in static terms, in three- dimensional space, when we live in a four-dimensional world".1!7}
A year later, and in a more polemical tone, he will challenge New Monumentality on historical grounds. "It appears evident that, unlike Michelangelo, we cannot deal with our environmental problems in terms of perfect Euclidean space since we are aware that we live in a space-time 4-0 world. In fact we might say that the most perfect composition would also be the least interesting, since its very perfection would conceal an imperfect unstable state of becoming. To add to, or take away from, the Campidoglio would destroy it. We are unwilling to sacrifice to change, with its unknown visage, this perfection. So we will keep it -as long as we can -not entirely useless but finally less satisfactory to the spirit than Hoyle's and Narliker's work on the nature of the universe. The Campidoglio is its own universe, statically balanced and perfectly exclusive". Woods brought in the humanist critical dimension by concluding his critique of the architecture of the past by dismissing it not as "human" but "super-human". (IB)
In this, Woods was no more and no less than a member of his generation. He developed his ideas in opposition to those which he and his contemporaries looked at with frustration not to mention angel;: for their attachment to old beliefs and their inability to cope with current problems. The difference between the pre-war world and post-War II realities lay not only in the physically devastated environment caused by the war, but also, paradoxically, in the equally devastating unexpected economic miracle which succeeded it. New Monumentality; as well as functionalist zoning produced by members of the pre-war generation and implemented in cultural or commercial complexes in North America, and cités-dortoirs or "new towns" in Europe, always met with failure when put to the test by common people.
This is because the new post-war reality was more complex than it had been in 1928 when the Charte d'Athenes had been conceived. The differences between age groups and social and cultural groups was now becoming very evident. The complexity of solving social and technical problems was also much more sharp now. Yet the 8th CLAM conference, whose proceedings were published in The Heart of the City, was still thinking in terms of "master plans': "centers" and cultural monuments. (19)
Yet despite the polemics against the positions of pre-war modernism, Woods did not break with it in a radical way. His work is still indebted to it. He continues to work, adopting movement change and "fourth dimension" as objectives to be fulfilled by architecture and urbanism as pre-war CIAM and modern architecture disciples did. He simply gives to them a different meaning that of mobility. Woods perceived himself as an inheritor of the humanist tradition of the modern movement a modernist albeit a radical reformer of modernism at a moment when the movement had lost or appeared to be loosing its humanist identify. He rethinks and reuses basic concepts of modernism for purpose relevant to what he perceives to be new, post-war needs and aspirations.
Post War Circulatory Rigorism, Mobility and
the "Stem" and The "Web"
Technically speaking, Woods' notion of the "Stem" and then its variant the "Web ': introduced mobility in the late 1950s as a new conceptual framework for design thinking. For this, Woods depended not only to his modernist pre-war predecessors but on his contemporaries who were also trying to confront the new dynamic post-war reality. Clearly, the idea of the "Stem" had deeper roots which we will not discuss here, in the development of "Circulatory Rigorism. "{20j We will refer to some contemporary precedents which helped the new conceptual system come about.
It is natural to look first at the work of Le Corbusier with whom Woods was so intimately linked. Le Corbusier had developed already before the war the concept of the promenade architecturale. Although in many respects a formalist device to highlight the aesthetic appreciation of volumetric compositions by a person in motion, stricter inspection reveals that it was also intended as a means for social interaction between different groups, as the "Stem" was. The most logical outcome of this thinking was the original plan for the architectural masterpiece, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University designed in 1960.
Without doubt the Radburn Plan also, having become popularized around the world through the writings of Lewis Mumford, is another important precedent. Generated out of a system of movement it was highly publicized by Mumford's writings. (21) These ideas were in turn highly influential on the Polish architect Matthew Nowicki, who already in 1950 had coined the phrase "the city is a leaf" in his proposal for the new town of Chandigarh. (22) He wanted a leaf, an organic pattern of movement. Nowicky unfortunately died in a plane crash, having had no opportunity to pursue his highly creative ideas.
In addition to Mumford whose The Culture of Cities (1938) is very much in the back of Woods' post-war thinking, as is the case with most of Woods' contemporaries -the book was read even by prisoners in Auschwitz -Jane Jacobs was also a forerunner. Her journalism of the late 1950s, before she published her bestseller, The Life and Death of Great American Cities, addressed problems concerning movement in the cities, streets and buildings as a mechanism for social interaction.
Indicative of the new fascination with movement is the Japanese movement known as Metabolism. In a 1963 article (23), Noriake Kurokawa will analyze the road by the Greek architect, Dimitris Pikionis leading to the Acropolis of Athens, comparing it to similar roads in Japan in terms of ideas of movement, also linking it to the new town near Toulouse by Candilis, Woods and Josic, and to the idea of the "Stem" and last but not least, to his own projects. In a subsequent issue of Bauwelt of 1964, Kurokawa elaborates. "The present -an experience of hell..., "which includes" ideas of CIAM, of Futurism," and generally of the "established heroes in Japan", is juxtaposed to "a new philosophy of action, from which may eventually arise the "Beauty of Metabolism". Life is movement -road is architecture." (24) In words very much similar to Woods, Kiyonori Kikutake wrote: "... contemporary architecture must be metabolic. With the static theory of unsophisticated functionalism, it is impossible to discover functional changes. In order to reflect dynamic reality,... we must stop thinking about function and form, and think instead in terms of space and changeable function ...unity of human space and of service functions ...to serve free human living. " (25)
In the same spirit and at the same time the Archigram group also developed its radical ideas about architecture and urbanism based to a high degree on movement as mobility. Dennis Crompton in "City Synthesis" (/964) writes "the city is a living organism, it divides and multiplies. The complex functioning of the city is integrated by its natural computer mechanism. Optimal responsiveness is achieved to invoke an ode of Peter Cook's. His is in fact closer to the nature of today's "information city" (26) than Woods' Free University of Berlin is, as we will see later.
Precedents and Concurrencies: Team Ten
But there was another context, more intimately linked with Woods than this wide horizon of projects and publications that we have just discussed within which we have to place the design of the Free University, and this is the international circle of young European architects commonly known as Team Ten, of which Woods was a member. The exchange of ideas between Woods and this small group holds the key to understanding many of the original intentions and beliefs which shaped the scheme.

The discussions between the members of Team Ten were very often informal without keeping always detailed records. It is hard therefore to specify the role of each member in initiating a new idea linked with the Free University. In addition, the very idea to search for the initiator of a novel idea within Team Ten will necessarily overlook the special character of the way the group -or rather the "family", as, characteristically, its members liked to call their group - worked, that is in the manner of a creative "think tank", uninhibited in the give and take of ideas, striving towards common enrichment and a common social objective. Characteristically, a non-dated statement of the Team about its aims, published in Team Ten Primer (27), a key manifesto of the group reads: "Team Ten is a group of architects who have sought each other out because each has found the help of the others necessary to the development and understanding of their own individual work ...because of mutual realization of the inadequacies of ...architectural thought which they had inherited from the modern movement ...each sensed that the other had already found some way towards a new beginning".

Trying to identify the original intentions and beliefs that might have had an impact on the scheme of the Free University, we will list here the intellectual contributions by members of this "family": that ran concurrently or slightly ahead of those of Woods and have strong affinities to his ideas about movement in architecture as a mechanism to enhance and sustain community and democracy; social interaction and maximization of choice.

Jaap Bakema

Significant for the development of the scheme of the Free University and the idea of the "Stem" was, first of all the precedent of the Lijnbaan project in Rotterdam commissioned in 1951 and finished in 1953. The complex is in a poor state now due to both negligence and "improvements": giving a very poor impression of the original scheme. It was designed by Van den Broek and Bakema. Bakema, like Woods and his partner and companion from the days of the Le Corbusier office, Candilis, was a member of CIAM. While Woods served in the US Navy, Bakema spend the war years part imprisoned by the Germans and part active in the underground resistance. After the war, still preoccupied with the legacy of the anti-fascist struggle, Bakema became an outspoken champion of the campaign to redefine an ailing modern architecture to be able to confront the novel post war realities. His position in architecture, which he saw as a continuation of his activities in the resistance, was made clear immediately after the war in an article in the first issue of the "Vrije Katheder" of 1946. Post-war architecture should aim for social quality rather than material quantity or abstract aesthetics. "A society", he asserted, "can only find its cohesion-belonging together, by... the way we express in housing how to live together ... architects must know that the culture pattern of tomorrow can only be a great-number-participation culture ...the modern architect must be able to communicate with people ...beauty has to express openness in human relationships … ".
Bakema stresses the same idea in the first 1949 edition of Forum, an architectural magazine very much controlled by him, in an article originally published in 1945 but reprinted here, entitled the "New is always social". In it, he stresses the same need to re-humanize the abstract, space-based conceptual framework of pre-war architecture: the period of "to possess" is being replaced by the period of "to be", he writes. "We measure space by means of house as we measure time by means of hour and day." (28)
We quote these passages to point out the similarity between Bakema's and Woods' values, defined explicitly in opposition to pre-war ones, values which were materialized in the Lijnbaan project, a most untypical solution to a very typical European problem after WWII. The task was to reconstruct the historic center of the city and part of the residential area of Kralingen, devastated during the May 14, 1940 bombardment of Rotterdam by the Germans. The opportunity given to the architects appeared to be unique that time. Rather than being obliged to follow the pre-war property parceling and circulation system, they were unimpeded to employ their new design ideas as they saw fit for the new post-war conditions. What we find designed and built is new layout based on a movement structure, a mobility system, which corresponds to the call in Bakema's text for an architecture to "express openness in human relationships" rather than plastic, compositional prerogatives.
Within this scheme, individual properties and traffic lines are redistributed and rearranged to fit a mobility system organizing accesses and services in a linear pattern, separating, in the manner of Radburn vehicular and pedestrian conduits. One can see in this an effort to modernize the commercial activities of the area by "Americanizing" them, recasting the old shopping street patterns into a "shopping mall': an idea just emerging in the States. On the other hand as opposed to such ideas in US at that time, which conceived the modern commercial center outside the urban fabric and very much uni-functionally serving commercial needs. Indeed as opposed not only to what an American but also a pre-war CIAM plan would have done, the Lijnbaan project mixed -instead of segregating -a variety of uses: the shopping mall, with it's commercial activities, along with the residential aspects of Radburn and offices.
Clearly, in designing the Lijnbaan Bakema and his collaborators rejected both plastic or uni-function zoning principles popular at the time. Equally clearly, in generating a scheme by combining utilitarian social and recreational activities together with a linear pedestrian movement system made the Lijnbaan project the earliest example in the development of a new design conceptual framework after the goal of social interaction and maximization of choice, the closer predecessor the scheme of the Free University of Berlin.
The communication links between Bakema on one hand and Woods and his associates on the other passed through Team Ten, a true incubator of new ideas vehemently opposed to those of CIAM, Bakema also belonged CIAM. Interestingly Team Ten, an anti-CIAM group, was born from within CIAM itself. There was no paradox in this. Ultimately CIAM was a much more open group than its officially published dogmatically stated ideas imply. Most of its members and in particular Le Corbusier, were conscious of the need of keeping the doors open to incoming younger architects irrespectively how critical they were to the ideas of the founding fathers of the organization as these were crystallized in the Athens Charter. Thus in 1954, Bakema was a member of a team for the preparation the 1956 CIAM Congress in Dubrovnik, meeting at Doorn with members of the English CIAM group, MARS. As Denys Lasdun remarked, in a concise article summarizing the results of the meeting, one of the major commitments of the new generation, explicitly a humanistic one, was to "make creative use of the forces of human association" which the Charter of Athens had in the view of Team Ten ignored. (29) In stating this, Bakema, having already constructed the Lijnbaan project, made a real demonstration rather than a theoretical declaration.

A decade later, Woods abstracted out of the Lijnbaan basic principles related to the "Stem" as a system of movement and in 1961 reused them for the schemes of Caen-Herouville and Toulouse-le-Mirail, the first built complex where the idea is actually materialized. A number of explanatory diagrams accompany the publication of the project in which the multi-level organization of the "Stem", its hierarchical structure and its principle of bifurcal tree-branching are exemplified both characteristics first put forth in the Lijnbaan.
Minima/ Open Structure
The Lijnbaan, then, is creatively redesigned and reborn in Woods' "Stem" structure. Also associated with Bakema and significant as a precedent for the development of the scheme of the Free University and the "Stem", was a 1960 publication in Forum (Dutch), about Split, the town that grew out of the original Palace built by Diocletian about 300 BC. The article, a short text accompanied by a large number of photographs, sketches and old representations of the town, is not in any sense a historical study. Bakema uses an extensive historical documentation of Split to explain and justify his design ideas which have nothing to do with historical conservation or historical context.
The documentation showed the town quartered by the movement structure of the cardo and decumanus. Within the mobility system made up of these two axes, the town's old ruins (columns, architraves, gates, walls) laid entangled in a close embrace with newer constructions, settlements, houses, shops and small workshops. The article includes photographs of people milling around in the streets flanked by ghosts of tall Corinthian arched colonnades of the original Diocletian 's Palace, demonstrating how the old was perfectly fit to be reused for new purposes. Bakema was particularly interested to show how a long term structure, as exemplified in the skeleton of the palace-town complex, could co-exist with short term elements, and how this minimal structure, sustained for hundreds of years could flexibly change forms of human interaction, temporary divisions responding to faster rhythms of evolving ways of life.
Bakema admired Split because he saw in it a path that he believed post-war architecture had to take, providing a minimal open structure, what John Habraken called a "support system': rather than a complete but static building. (301 Here the principle of modern architecture succeeds in bringing together time and space successfully, and not so much in a formalist plastic manner as Giedion and the old CIAM had advocated, as in a new, Critical Regionalist manner.
We can see the relationship between Bakema's publication and Woods' minimal structure "Stem" for the com- petition of the Frankfurt Center. Here, a year after the Forum issue, Woods replaces the bifurcated "Stem" structure as proposed for the 1961, Caen-Herouville and Toulouse-le-Mirail competitions, with a square one similar to Split's. The advantages, under the circumstances, for the Frankfurt site were obvious. In the previous projects Woods was planting building complexes on open field areas. The blocks could branch out, freely following the bifurcation rule. In Frankfurt, by contrast, Woods had to plan settlements within the gaps opened by war bombing, of an existing dense European city.
But, based on discussions between Woods and Alex Tzonis, Woods had already begun to think that even square grid generating implicit centers at its cross inter- sections, was a negligible detail not to be taken into consideration perhaps one more relic of the formalism inherited from the previous generation. The issue of "flexibility': movement expressed in terms of the capacity of a project to change its form in time, which was underplayed in previous projects, was now becoming a major concern. In the Free University of Berlin the Split model returns, but in order to demonstrate how the idea of movement could be translated into two complementary design strategies, mobility as well as flexibility, the two together environmental means to enhance and sustain social interaction and maximization of choice. Design as movement meant not just mobile people and objects circulating in space. The whole project was conceived as an object in flux, changing in various speeds of transformation to relate to changes in peoples needs and aspirations. That Woods recognized the importance of Bakema's article on Split as a precedent, we can see in his book The Man in the Street published after his death. He places an aerial photograph of Split with the caption "a city ...may be thought of as a building ..." to accompany the text on problems of change, decay, maintenance and replacement which are common to both cities and buildings and should be treated in a similar way.(31)
The point here is not to show that Woods took ideas from Bakema or vice versa (in fact as we will see later, even the city-building analogy; which underlies most of the Free University scheme ideas, was initially used in the post war period by Aldo van Eyck). Exactly the opposite. It is to show how a closely knit number of people succeeded while working separately, but having instituted a free dialogue between each them, to accelerate their highly creative design production by constantly enriching the genetic pool of design categories and solutions.

Ordinariness vs Order
Design for the "Man in the Street, " as Woods will call his book, was what Team Ten cared about, as opposed to CIAM's top-down, imperiously normative preoccupations. The scheme of the Free University, the idea of the "Stem': the reinterpretation of movement not as a for- mal; plastic ideal but as mobility and flexibility for ordinary people, facing problems of everyday life, emerged very much as a result of the search for ordinariness rather than order. Its democratic empiricism is particularly conspicuous in the writings of Alison and Peter Smithson going back to the early 1950s. This is where they come into Wood's thinking.
As with Bakema, the link between Woods and the Smithsons passes through CIAM. The Smithsons were elected members of CIAM in May 1953 as part of the English MARS Group. The same year they publish in the Architect's Yearbook 5, 1953 "An Urban Project': where we find some of the origins of the concept of the "Stem". Commenting on their Golden Lane project they allege that "the idea of "street" is forgotten by the CIAM architects. It is the "idea of street, not the reality of street, that is important -the creation of effective group spaces fulfilling the vital function of identification and enclosure, making the socially vital life ...possible. " 132)
Two years later in a similar preliminary meeting movement in the report of the CIAM commission 85 of August 9, 1955, under the title "Mobility'" the program included the study of themes such as 1. "Man as a traveler -the man going to work in the morning -what he sees the enjoyment of points of interest ..." 2. "The approach to the house … the corridor … as a social element". September of the same year, in a gathering of members of CIAM in La Sarraz, as Denis Lasdun reported in Architects' Yearbook 1957, "MARS Group 1953-1957": the Smithsons will state "if, 30 years ago, the use in a creative way of new techniques was an urgent problem for CIAM, today... is to create the forms of habitat which can stimulate the development of human relations. " (33)
Following this statement is a detailed list of "relationships" which specify connections between buildings and the outside public spaces as one moves from one location to an other without mentioning any visual-plastic qualities of the designed space. After long preparations and preliminaries, the CIAM X Congress is convened in Dubrovnik August, 1956. Here the Smithsons present a condensed diagram showing a causal link between "social order" and "environment". The diagram projected the aspirations of the new generation pointing out to new avenues of design. The same time expresses more the young architects' wishful thinking than truly empirically- founded principle. 134)
Aldo van Eyck. Place and Occasion
The study of the evolution of the "Stem" and the scheme of the Free University must also take into account another member of the Team Ten family, one of the most aggressive polemicists against the ailing dogmas of CIAM: Aldo van Eyck. He expressed his new approach to movement in a most charismatic, poetic prose. His slogans are memorable:
"Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more".
"Space and time must be opened-interiorized; so that they can be entered; ...place acquires temporal meaning and occasion spatial meaning. "(35)
In these statements we have encapsulated the gist of the rethinking of modern architecture by the post war generation. Aldo van Eyck took Giedion's framework of "space/time/plastic architecture": or at least the way it was interpreted by mainstream practice after the Second World War, and turned it on its head. He re- humanized it introducing what he called the "image of man."
There is a deep affinity between the powerful poetic statement of van Eyck and Woods' vision of the "Web': expressed in much more prosaic language. The "Web" "'intends (sic) to find ways for man on foot to associate ... It seeks to re-establish the human scale ...in relation to speed the measure of which is distance, the human scale is the pedestrian who moves at about 4 km/h ...If the human scale is to survive, it must subjugate all the other scales ...It is clear that the measure of speed is distance and the measure of distance is time. "(36)
In his many writings trying to define the "Stem': Woods has been constantly careful that it applies irrespectively of scale, that it is to be put to use both for the larger size environmental projects and individual smaller ones. It is a conceptual schema that contains no constraints of metric size. It does not distinguish between building, building complex and urban conglomerate. In a similar vein, van Eyck echoing in fact the Renaissance humanist architect Alberti, will say "a house is a tiny city, a city a huge house ". (37) Behind this almost mystically expressed motto, there is a striking similarity with Van Eyck's ideas. Echoing the renaiassance humanist architect, Van Eyck will write: "A house is a tiny city, a city a huge house…The time has come to conceive of architecture urbanistically and urbanism architecturally" meaning that the distinction between them is none but quantity, in both cases people acting rather than abstract configurations of space. (39)
It was Van Eyck also who, like Woods, departing from very similar principles will design a building as paradigmatic as Woods' Free University of Berlin the Children's House in Amsterdam (/960j. It is fascinating to see how the two buildings, departing from the same principles, implemented them, taking different directions, one opting for specifying maximally every building furniture or prop to sustain a welcomed activity the other for, as we will explain later, a "minimal structure" maximizing choice of alternative uses in an unknowable future.
Giancarlo de Carlo and Sustainability
Giancarlo De Carlo was also a member of the small informal family of Team Ten and he too must be seen as having played an important role in the development of Wood's thinking. At the beginning of /960s he leads a study of the historical city of Urbino. Rather than analyzing the truly monumental architecture using visual- esthetic categories, the study applies in his words a "structuralist" approach. By this he meant that by abstracting the properties of materials and geometric configurations of the fabric of the town he disclosed a structure which was nothing once more but a movement system, very close to the sense of the "Stem" that Woods was to write about a year later. According to the method adopted the single apartment the building, the town block, that is the whole hierarchy of the historical tissue of the town was analyzed in terms of controls and potentials of accesses, and through those attributes, the underlying structure of the town was delineated The analysis took into consideration the dynamics of the fabric and its potential of change. The diagnostic analysis, in turn lead to a set of suggestions for future development of Urbino, in today's terminology; as a "sustainable" project as it had proven to be in the past. The study was pioneering in bringing together two aspects that had not been previously combined the analytical apparatus of the new conceptual structure of movement and the historical facts supplied by a most significant European cultural product. (40)
In 1963, the year the Free University of Berlin was conceived Giancarlo De Carlo designed a campus plan for a competition organized by the University College of Dublin. Many of the analytical tools applied on the historical case of Urbino were again applied to shape this new project. The scheme also seems to apply principles that Woods had adopted in his "Stem" article two years earlier. The presented plan was neither a plastic composition nor a zoning proposal. It was a "system": a movement system "serving the requirements of ...flexibility and social contact at all levels". No distinction was made between individual building and urban fabric. The system provided "the structure ...the space and social organization ...based on a time- distance factor". More concretely, the proposal consisted of "a main spine" and a series of "routes" interlinking pedestrian and service-mechanical paths branching out of the main spine ranging a hierarchy between community-privacy, general-specialized usage.

It is interesting that Woods did not refer to any of the efforts which we have just seen of Bakema, the Smithsons, De Carlo, or Aldo van Eyck running in parallel with his own. It is very possible that he did that because he took for granted that everybody would consider the ideas produced by the individual members of the Team Ten family very much the result of group thinking rather than individual genius. But there was another major debt which he did acknowledge without any hesitation. This was to Louis Kahn.
Louis Kahn. Rivers and Docks
Many of Wood's ideas about movement and "Stem" are prefigured in Kahn's 1953 essay "Toward a Plan for Philadelphia". "Architecture is also the street ...the design of the street is design for movement ...not for speed but for order and convenience". In the essay Kahn puts forth his movement-based model of architecture using an "aquatic" analogy whose components, "rivers", "harbors", "canals", "docks" specify qualities and levels in a hierarchy of flow. Embedded in the model are the concepts of "serving" and "served" applied in "areas" and "buildings." (41)
The new ideas are reinforced by the illustrations of the article which introduce a new system of representation of the city and its buildings where the Euclidean volumetric description of buildings and outdoor spaces of the city gave their place to a system of notation of hierarchies and qualities of mobility.

On the level of buildings, one observes the suppression of the component of circulation through the disappearance of the corridor. Modernist architects turning to pre-18th century prototypes or to vernacular ones. Woods, like Kahn, reacted against this under- differentiation and suppression of aspects of movement and interaction in space. He, again like Kahn, was not so much concerned with developing a new kind of architecture to facilitate circulation vehicles, machine, bureaucratic efficiency as much as to preserve, sustain and ultimately privilege human associations, community. They both were after a new conceptual framework for design, the "servant and served" being Kahn's basic concepts, the stem and the cell, (A.D.) term not much used Woods equivalent ones.
In their 1961 statement about Toulouse-le-Mirail, CWJ underline the importance of the linearity of the scheme and the relation between linear pattern and movement. In the 1964 presentation of the same project in World Architecture One, exemplifying the idea of the "Stem" and the merits of its linearity; he will state "a line is open ended. its has no dimension. It can change direction at will". And in reference to the "Web": and its rejection of a central point, he will say "when we predetermine points of maximum intensity -centers -we are fixing a present or projected state of activities and relationships ...we compromise the future, closing doors ..." and in a verse form (echoes of Louis Kahn poem about architecture) he will state:
"A point of static, fixed.
A line is a measure of liberty.
A non-centric "Web" is a fuller measure." (42)
By contrast the topology of servant and served provided by Kahn, was implemented in three dimensionally in terms of vertical elements, point towers rather than Woods' horizontal elements, linear paths, because of Woods attachment as a preferred way of life to the ground paths.
Streets and Corridors
However, this is a minor difference in comparison to their kinship in bringing back to architecture the idea of differentiating a plan into corridors and rooms, "corridors" in this case being something similar to "streets." Kahn, like Woods, disliked corridors as such. But they both liked the organizational idea of differentiating the built environment into two specialized components, "rooms" / "corridors": an idea modern architecture had abandoned for the sake of undifferentiated universal space identified usually with Mies although not the real originator of the concept. Thus one can say that ultimately with Kahn as well with Woods one witnesses a kind of return to the mid 18th century French concept of "distribution" splitting buildings into "salles" / "corridors": initially conceived to protect the socializing of the upper classes from noise and intrusion, a concept they generalized on the urban scale. Like the "Stem': the servant/served was a device to resolve conflict in the environment. It provided a new differentiated architectural set of categories, next to the traditional spatial-visual ones of solid and void or the structural-functional ones of support and supported which we might call movement categories. The "Web" elaborated the idea of the "Stem". It is "intended to find ways of circulation by which man on foot can exist and associate without inflicting hardship on many machines". f43)
Toulouse-le-Mirail; still carries characteristics of a traditional-modernist project. There is a detached "center': a "head': an agora or acropolis, next to the "Stem" linear pattern, very much like the centers one finds in the plan of Chandigarth and even Brazilia.
The significance of the Frankfurt scheme is that the disembodied agora-acropolis center, which we find in Toulouse-le-Mirail, has totally disappeared.
One finds also the "Stem" implemented in the plan as a rectilinear square grid rather than a bifurcating tree pattern. It appears that Woods was no longer afraid of the possibility of a "center" appearing in the intersections. The idea of the non centric "Web" is exemplified in the bifurcation of the linear pattern because for Woods such a configuration which was not geometrical but only topological was rejecting or overcoming the idea of a point again according to a private communication of Woods to Alex Tzonis.
The metric dimensions of the grid were determined by the maximum span permissible without expansion joints and a span which would give economic manageable areas. These distances varied between 35 and 45 meters. The final dimension was set at 36.47 meters. The pedestrian ways are 3.66 meters wide which left a grid of free spaces for development each 32.81 meters square, dimensions based on Le Corbusier's modulor.
Berlin Free University (1963) is one of the most unique if not fortunate cases of a very advanced architectural idea that did not stay on paper as a theoretical project but was built not very far from the original design. It is the most mature of the series of projects by Woods in a long line in search of an architecture based on the idea of movement as a physical medium to enhance and sustain social interaction and maximization of choice.
It took three years of systematic search for the initial bifurcating "Stem" pattern of Caen-Herouville (I 961} to become the rectilinear frame of the Free University of Berlin passing through the square grid minimal structure of the Frankfurt center. If the Frankfurt center emerged using the analogy of the precedent of the Diocletian palace at Split, the rectilinear woof and warp pattern of Berlin recalls of the structure of Manhattan whose precedent Woods, still the "American in Paris", would openly acknowledge, acknowledging also at the time of the conception of the project, his personal nostalgia for New York. The rectilinear variant of the grid idea brings back informality as well as versatility underscoring even more the principle of social interaction and maximization of choice, which the, almost dogmatically chosen square pattern of the Frankfurt Center scheme, obviously limited. By differentiating the two directions of the grid into "avenue II and "street'" and by spacing the "streets" of the grid irregularly, the Free University Woods came closer than any of the previous projects to translating the "Stem" into a real building rather than one more built diagram, its movement-generated ideal plan accommodating constraints of program, construction and site more rationally and more realistically.
Flexibility, spatial urbanism by Yona Friedman and Archigram
Mobility and flexibility were the two complementary ways for achieving community and democracy through design. In almost all projects of Woods we have seen up to now mobility was given priority in the conception of the project. In the Berlin Free University, however, the two strategies are equally important.
As we have already seen, flexibility was recognized by Bakema in his article on Split. He developed a general approach about the way two scales of permanence can coincide in the same scheme. (44) The basic idea can be found sketched by Le Corbusier in his 1930 Plan Obus "A", for Alger. Certainly, other prewar projects also come to mind such as E1 Lissitsky's experiments of the 1920s. A built precedent employing industrial means achieves that before the war is La Maison duPeuple (1937-39) with its mobile, sliding floors and equally mobile, sliding glass ceiling. (45)

The scheme of the Free University was conceived with no plastic, compositional intentions. Visual considerations do not determine the lay-out of the project. The building however started life as something intended to be very appealing to the senses. This was very much planned to result from the cladding of the building, made up of the light weight paneling system that Woods asked Jean Prouvé to design, as a more youthful, skin-like alternative to the rough, brutalist, almost pachyderm exteriors the 1960s and 70s.
In the 1960 's, when The Free University was being conceived the vision of flexibility reaches extremes. Projects by members of the Archigram Group, for instance, such as in the Plug-In City 1962-64 and the Utopian projects by Peter Cook, and Ron Heron's Walking city and Drop City, are cases in point along with Frenchman, Yona Friedman's L 'Architecture Mobile (1957-58) and L 'Architecture Spatiale (1958-60). (47,48) Flexibility also found a particularly congenial fit into the Japanese forma mentis, as expressed in the Metabolism movement which was a variation upon this basic theme. It polemically opposed architecture and city as "closed form': arguing that they are above all matters of 'process" and "open form". (49)
Many of the project of the early 60s appear to be obsessed by movement as a source of private experiential joy perhaps but not as a social experience related to the goal of community cohesion. By contrast Woods's engagement with movement critically confronted these narcissistic technophilic projects. Similarly; in the defense of place-based human interaction, what he frequently called "urbanity" both in his writings and in describing his buildings -in particular the Free University of Berlin - Woods reacts against end-of-place, anti-urban assaults by ideas such as Melvin Webber's idea of achieving community without the physical proximity of place and the renown Global Village of Marshall McLuhan envisaging community without any human contact or Karl Deutsch's "city as a switchboard".
Manhattan was Shadrach Woods's ideal urban arcadia of sorts. Although an apostle of the idea of the street and the promenade street and the arcade both predominant attributes of Paris, he was never at home in Paris. Paris after all was always a city of monuments, of fixed facades and ordered vistas. Parisian boulevards still carried on the rules of the ancient regime gentilhomme, not the "people" in the sense of modern participatory democracy. Without doubt the anarchism of Manhattan appealed to him, not as an expression of libertarian jungle, but as a demonstration of unconstrained vitality; and freedom. From this point of view, although very much inspired by the 19th century concept of the street and the corridor, Woods ideas had nothing to do with the revivalism of the postmoderns of the 1980s. Neither had his minimal structure anything to do with the neo-Manhattanism of the late 1980s.
Woods was committed to community and participation and exchange rather than technological convenience. This is the key to the idea of flexibility he espoused. Not an efficient interchangeability of building parts to satisfy technocratic or bureaucratic compulsions but a deeper liberation which permitted a creative and festive disco- very of the possibilities of social life, "even today a revolutionary notion. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker ...no one is condemned ...".
The political meaning of the Free University scheme was evident. It was a clear alternative both to the New Monumentality "humanism" of mainstream "western" architecture as well as to "humanism " of official "east block" architecture as projected by the late 1940s on the eve of the Cold War. The political implications of the "maximization of choice" principle of the complex become even more significant if one considers that Free University attracted many escapees from the East Berlin and East Germany escaping the oppression of the bureaucratic-police state who as they moved to the west adopt by the end of the 60s, extreme left positions. Within this context the humanistic message of Woods was most appealing, assuming, certainly; that one could grasp it.
Critique
The impact of the Free University was enormous in the very first years of the publication of its initial plans. We can see its influence in buildings conceived by architects around the world. Perhaps, it even helped Le Corbusier to change the course of his work and retune once more his ideas about desirable building typology removed from the dogmas of plan masse, plasticity and new monumentality which he did so much to help come about. There is an apocryphal story related to Alex Tzonis by Julian de la Fuente, according to which Shadrach Woods brought his plans for the Free University to Le Corbusier, who subsequently plagiarized it in the plan for the Venice Hospital.
Apart from having such an important impact, how successful was the building of the Free University? Did it accomplish an "integration of a physical, social and temporal milieu into one habitat" the highest goal to be achieved in the mind of Woods? Given the highly innovative character of the scheme, the fact that it was built rather than remain a paper project, was a major success. Very often, however, there is a price to be paid for having a novel thus unfamiliar architectural idea be implemented The product becomes problematic be- cause of the difficulties the user encounters to understand its original meaning and consequently to finding ways of utilizing it and benefiting from it socially. Aldo van Eyck's Amsterdam Orphanage, which we mentioned above, faced similar difficulties when its administrators received it from the hands of its creators. In the case of Free University, it was hard both to interpret Wood's plan and to construct Prouvé's panels, with their industrial but the same time "seasoned" look.
Woods, however, knew from the outset that implanting such a high-density machinistic structure next to Dahlem, one of the suburbs most renown for its wealth in pre-war Europe, was going to raise questions. Contrary to the fabric proposed for the Center of Frankfurt am Main which was inter grated into the existing fabric, in the case of the Free University Woods consciously opted to con- front the predominantly suburban character of Dahlem, and through that the very life style of Dahlem, with a piece of urban structure and a manifestation of urban life style. To the impressive, unhurried leisurely alleys of the suburb, he juxtaposed the busy street-corridors of the university; and to its sparsely populated green garden-settlement, the conditions of living together in high density; close contact settings, full of frequent fortuitous encounters and human vitality.
In a private communication to Alexander Tzonis who, working in the late 1960s as academic editor for the series on the Man Made Environment for Penguin Books, had commissioned Woods to write Man in the Street, Woods said that the "gallerias of the university': as he called the passageways of the building, were meant to attract the inhabitants of Dahlem to the university; to make them shed their suburban identity and ultimately be converted to the other style of life.
This never happened. In this case Woods fell victim to what one might call environmental determinism, the over-optimism of the architectural profession of the rimes, fatuous enough to assume that environmental conditions can change human habits, behavior and ultimately; even belief systems. More specifically, Woods, like other members of Team Ten were convinced that in this case the key was the circulation system of buildings whose pattern could control social change. Witness the plan of Fort Lamy in Tchad: the purpose was the interweave the existing urban fabrics of the European colonial quarter and the dense African kasbah in order to bring the two populations. This never happened either.
The Free University fell into other kinds of troubles as well which were indeed disturbing for Woods. The building which was finished in 1960s in the midst of the student uprisings around the world and especially in West Berlin was not received well by the students. Again in a private communication to Tzonis, Woods claimed that what the students objected to in the end was not the plan or the looks of the building, its possibilities for flexible use, change and growth. Flexibility was of no concern to them. "Oh, that was fine," they said. And when Woods counter-confronted them and suggested that if they did not like the building they might as well start dismantling it they responded that they were not interested in doing that. What really bothered them was the very fact that they had not been consulted in the process of the conception of the project. For them the key issue was: you cannot make a democratic product through an autocratic process. They saw the Free University, at best as an unfinished project at worst as a failure to enhance and sustain community and democracy, social interac- tion and maximization of choice.
Clearly the students' objection put forth a problematic which was not far from Woods's own as revealed in his own statement that "the man in the street is the real town builder and the job of town planners is to interpret his ideas." It is understandable however that in the context of the 1960s such a participatory process was very difficult to be practiced. If Woods had lived longer, would he have shifted his efforts from an architecture focusing on the form of the product and searched to achieve higher social ends in the aspiration that good plans could achieve this to an architecture involving the users of the project and all the interested parties in the design process? His fellow Team Ten, De Carlo and Ralph Erskine, had already done so by that time. Or would he have continued to experiment with new ways of bringing together buildings and the larger scale that contain infrastructure or fabric/urban structure towards community ends, a craft that has very much atrophied ever since?
It is impossible to say. The fact remains that he very clearly stated in The Man in the Street. " The fault of course lies not in the plan but in ourselves... We do not practice democracy nor do we live in an open society. ...we hold these up as ideals to be revered while going about the sordid business of getting and spending. " {50}
Coda: Recuperating the Free University
In an age of relativism and doctrinaire the scheme of the Free University offers certainty and openness as guiding ideas in the design of buildings. One can find implied in its minimal structure, a restricted set of rules (proscriptive rather than prescriptive constraints) enabling the free generation of the maximum of activities and alternative uses to unfold in the building well served protected and free of conflict. The scheme might have failed in innumerable details, an aspect that matters enormously in our times, dominated as they are by programnmed tediousness. It succeeds however in presenting a vision, a most rare commodity today which is there to be recuperated.
Its mobile, flexible, minimal structure, offers a "direction for design", to paraphrase Descartes' "Direction de l'Esprit. "{51} It links program and form, instead of controlling spatio-stylistic characteristics. Similarly; the minimal method offers a minimal certainty, supplied by spatial rather than conceptual rules. It has chosen the possible organisation of places and plan of the building instead of the improbable 'power of persuasion " expressed in the rhetoric of loud volumetric images. Splitting issues between known and unknown, simple and difficult certain and uncertain, determinable and indeterminable, graspable and speculative, intractable and innumerable, well-defined and unexplored it offers the best option we have today that genuinely maximizes choice and freedom for gradual but steady replacement of old ideas by new ones.
Descartes wrote in a period of great upheaval; wars and catastrophes, explorations of new lands and confrontations with alien cultures, inventions of new instruments and collisions with strange data -a period very similar to ours. He provided a system for coping with the conflicts and contradictions of his time while supporting evolution and creativity. In many respects, Shadrach Woods's Free University does the same.

Notes
1 -Our emphasis.
2- World Architecture One, J. Donat (ed.), London, 1964. p. 151.
3 -Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, Movement, Structure and the Work of Santiago Calatrava, Zurich, 1996.
4 -Ilya Ehrenburg, The Life of the Automobile, London, Pltu, 1976 and Marinetti The Futurist Cookbook, Camp Hill 1989, p.72.
5 -Sigfried Giedion Space Time and Architecture, Cambridge, Ma. 1941.
6 -Sigfried Giedion (1941) and Nicholaus Pevsner; Outline of European Architecture.
7 -Unpublished manuscript by Jerzy Soltan 8 -Sigfried Giedion (1941).
9 -Jurgen Joedicke and Oscar Newman New Frontiers in Architecture, New York, 1960, p. 126.
10 -See Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre "Critical Regionalism"
11 -Shadrach Woods, "Stem': Architectural Design, 5; 1960. See also n° 12, 1962, pp. 594-596.
12 -Shadrach Woods, "Stem': Carré Bleu, 3,1961.
13 -Le Corbusier; Modulor 21955, London 1958.
14 -Gunther Nitschke, "Cities. Stasis or Process': Architects' Yearbook ", 1965, pp. 165- 181.
15 -Shadrach Woods, "Web': Carré Bleu, 3,1962.
16 -Ibid.
17 -Shadrach Woods, "Urban Environment. The Search for System': World Architecture " p. 151.
18 -Shadrach Woods, "Free University, Berlin': World Architec- ture 2, London 1965; pp. 113.
19 -Jose Luis Sert, Walter Gropius, Jacqueline Tyrwitt, The Heart of the City.
20 -Alex Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, "Skin Rigorism. A New International Non-Style", Casabella, Jan-Feb. 1996, pp. 128- 135. See also our Architecture in Europe since 1968, London, 1992 and our Architecture in North America since 1960, London: Thames and Hudson, 1995.
21 -Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities, New York, 1938
22 -The Writings and Sketches of Matthew Nowicki, ed. B.H. Schafet; Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1951, p. 34.
23 -Noriaki Kurokawa, "Architecture of the Road': Kenchiko Bunka, Jan 1963.
24 -Noriaki Kurokawa, "The Architecture of Action " Bauwelt, Dec. 1964.
25 -Kiyonori Kikutake, "The Great Shrine of Izumo ': World Architecture 2, London 1965; p. 13.
26 -Dennis Crompton "City Synthesis': Archigram, 1964.
27 -Alison and Peter Smithson Team Ten Primet; Architectural Design special issue, December 1962 and Studio Vista and MIT Press, 1968, p. 10.
28 -Jaap Bakema, "An Emperor's House at Split became a Town for 3000 People': Forum, 2, 62, pp. 45-78.
29 -Denis Lasdun "MARS Group, 1953-1957': Architects'Year Book, 8, 1957, pp. 57-61, p. 60.
30 -John Habraken Supports. An Altemative to Mass Housing, London The Architectural Press, 1972.
31 -Shadrach Woods, The Man in the Street, Harmondsworth, 1972, p. 89.
32 -Peter and Alison Smithson, "An Urban project': Architects' Year Book, 5, 1953.
33 -Lasdun, 1957, p. 59.
34 -Note by the Smithsons. Bakema Archive, Nederlands Architectuur Instituut.
35 -Aldo van Eyck "Labyrinthine Clarity': World Architecture Three, London, 1966, pp. 120-129, p. 121.
36 -Shadrach Woods.
37 -Aldo van Eyck, 1966, p. 120.
38 -Shadrach Woods.
39 -Aldo van Eyck.
40 -Giancarlo De Carlo.
41 -Louis Kahn, "Toward a Plan for Midtown Philadelphia': Perspecta 2: The Yale Architectural Journal, 1953, pp. 10-27.
42 -World Architecture One.
43 -See L.Lefaivre at A. Tzonis "l'Architecture expérimentale de Labfac ou les nouveaux cartésiens" dans Labfac, Paris, Centre Pompidou, 1999, pp.65-72
44 -Shadrach Woods, Le Carré Bleu, 3/1962.
45 -Jaap Bakema, 'An Emperor's House at Split'; Forum 2, 1962, p.52
46 -Jean Prouvé Constructeur, Delft, 1981, pp. 62-63.
47 -See particularly Yona Friedman 'Ein Architektur versuch'; Bauwelt, 16, 1957, pp.361-63
48 -Pour une discussion de la "Switchboard City" et de l'influence sur l'urbanisme de Marshall McLuhan et Karl Deutsch, see Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre "The Emergence of Communication Space': Cultures, 5, 4, 1978, pp. 114-25.
49 -See Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, "Planning and Tomatoes': Casabella, Jan-Feb, 1992, pp. 146-49.
50 -Shadrach Woods, The Man in the Street, p. 11.
51- René Descartes, Discours de la méthode.