Beyond Monuments, Beyond Zip-a-tone, Into Space/Time: Contextualizing Shadrach Woods’s Berlin Free University, a Humanist Architecture
Alexander Tzonis and
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, in
which space and time are linked together indissolubly, sets our civilization
apart from any others.
Shadrach Woods, 19641
The above passage, in
emphasizing the relation between architecture and the 'fourth dimension', time,
provides the best introduction to our discussion of the Free University of
Berlin. We will consider the building designed by Shadrach Woods and his
associates, Georges Candilis and Alexis Josic, as part of the conceptual shift
that occurred in architecture and urbanism following the Second World War. More
specifically, we will look at how it sought to redefine a humanist
architecture, an architecture of community, incorporating new design
developments based on space/time and movement and the associated concepts of
plasticity, mobility, flexibility and process.
Shadrach Woods did not
have a formal architectural training. This is true of many innovators in the
field: Leon Battista Alberti was a lawyer, Claude Perrault a doctor,
Christopher Wren a mathematician, Laugier an abbot in the chapel of Versailles.
Le Corbusier served an apprenticeship in watch-engraving and never went to a
recognized school of architecture. Woods, a New Yorker, studied engineering,
then philosophy, before joining Le Corbusier's office. Woods was an outsider in
another sense, too. He spent most of his life uprooted, but in contrast to the
architects of the 1930s European diaspora - among them Le Corbusier,
Chermayeff, Mies and Breuer - his migration was voluntary. Though the economy
of North America was booming, he preferred to live in Paris, the city of the
avant-garde, where he set up his practice with two other expatriates: Candilis
was Greek, and Josic, Yugoslavian.2
Being an outsider can
be a major impediment to running a large practice, but it can also stimulate
creative thinking, helping to reshape the conceptual systems of a discipline.
This was precisely the case with Woods’s architecture and urbanism, and the
project for the Free University in particular.
New ideas in design can
emerge from changing social, cultural and political conditions or from a
dialogue between people working on similar problems. Both of these factors
played a role in constructing a new idea of space transformed by movement in the words of Woods, 'space
measured not by inches but by the speed of a moving pedestrian'.
For many people the
designs of the late 1950s and 1960s are without much significance; they are
held to be naive and banal, Utopian and ideological, confused and lacking in
intellectual content. Contrary to this view, we will argue that the Free
University and the spatial and cultural ideas linked to it are not only
historically significant but also relevant today.
There was nothing new
about the fascination with movement shared by many of Woods's generation: a
precedent can be found as far back as the Bible, in the description, in Exodus,
of a whirling column. Nor was this fascination unique to architecture: it
triggered the developments in transport and the emerging media technologies of
the 1960s -the forerunners of virtual reality and the Internet.
Artists, architects and
urbanists have for a long time sought to capture movement within the spatial
framework of design. One approach to achieving this has been to emphasize the
expressive visual-spatial qualities of the design object, arranging its masses
in controlled disequilibrium so as to anticipate a future state. (Elsewhere, in
relation to the work of Santiago Calatrava, we have called this the 'aesthetics
of the pregnant moment'.3 Prior to the Second World War the word
used to describe this strategy was 'plasticity', relating the iconic likeness
of the artefact to an organism which moves or grows.
It has been argued that
the twentieth century's renewed obsession with movement was a response to the
perceived ability of robust models of science to capture 'time and space': a
response to non-Euclidean geometry introducing the 'fourth dimension', to
Einstein's theory of relativity, and to Henri Bergson's philosophy of duration,
flux and movement'. Material culture also played a part, as everyday life after
the First World War was subjugated to the imperative of speed. Ilya Ehrenburg,
in The Life of the Automobile (1929),
described dances called 'Monsieur Simon's Automobile Gallop' and 'Monsieur
Salabre's Automobile Polka'. The idea of fast food took hold; in 1932 the
futurist Filippo Marinetti proclaimed that all prepared meals (with pasta 'top
of the list') should be replaced by pills, in the interests of promoting the
'new beauty of speed'.4
Sigfried Giedion, the
Swiss historian and main propagandist of the modern movement as embodied by Le
Corbusier, Gropius and the ClAM group, maintained that Einstein's 'space/time
conception' was as relevant to architecture as it was to physics: both
disciplines, in his view, conceived 'of space as relative to a moving point of
reference, not as an absolute and static entity'.5 This belief
inspired his best-selling book, Space,
Time and Architecture (1941). Giedion's writings could be both inaccurate
and capricious. Space, Time and
Architecture makes no mention of the works of Erich Mendelsohn - not even
the buildings most relevant to the title, the Einstein Tower in Potsdam (1920)
and Schocken Department Store in Chemnitz (1928) - a scandalously partisan
omission. None the less it was Giedion who most effectively summarized
architecture's engagement with movement, mapping its physical spatial/formal
characteristics and encapsulating them as plasticity
of form.
Plasticity continued to
play a central role in shaping the conceptual system of architecture after the
Second World War, stimulated not only by advances in the sciences and transport
technology but also by changing cultural politics. Plasticity was seen as the
key to liberating architecture from the realm of functionalist design and
engineering and reuniting it with art. As such, it was a principal component of
New Monumentality, the movement championed by Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner in
the late 1940s.6
For Giedion, plasticity came to be synonymous with
the rejection of strict orthogonality - the model that some of his
contemporaries tended to call 'match-box architecture'.7 In the
second edition of Space, Time and
Architecture (19491 he used the concept to analyse the aesthetic qualities
of his favourite projects at the time. The undulating riverside wall of the MIT
Dormitory by Alvar Aalto (1947-9) was praised for its monumental qualities,
with its 'culminating spiral... resembling some organic growth...' and 'its
inherent movement', which seemed to echo earlier experiments by Borromini.
Gropius's Graduate Center at Harvard University was singled out for the dynamic
way its buildings 'spread informally' and its columns imparted 'movement'. Similarly
the twef1ty-four buildings of Mies van der Rohe's Illinois Institute of
Technology (19401 were so disposed that they created an 'all-embracing space...
not visible at one glance -a space that can only be slowly perceived by
including the dimension of time, that is, by movement'.8
Woods's projects are no
less characterized by a search for plastic effects. His nid d'abeilles housing blocks of the mid 1950s, for example, are
staggered white prismatic masses which appear to reverberate in the
Mediterranean light. Equally, the housing at Bagnols-sur-Ceze is a visual
grouping of asymmetrical stepped units on an orthogonal grid, intended -as
Woods explained at the anti-ClAM meeting in Otterlo in 1959 - to introduce 'a
fourth dimension into architecture'.9
However, this hardly
makes Woods a follower of Giedion or of the New Monumentality. On the contrary,
the Otterlo text reveals a quite different approach. After describing how the
Bagnols-sur-Ceze project had attempted 'to avoid the deadly alignment of the
straight line', Woods stated that 'the structure of the new town' had been
'directly determined' by that of the old town. What Woods was describing was
not the mimicking of local building styles, but a means by which the layout of
the modern blocks of a new town could be derived from the elongated
semi-enclosed layout of a traditional settlement: an early example of 'critical
regionalism'.10 These ideas were in all probability misconstrued by
the other participants at the congress, who included the Smithsons and Aldo van
Eyck. It was not immediately clear that Woods's intention was to sustain social
cohesion and identity in a manner consistent with what they called, and we may
still call, a humanist architecture.
The experiment at
Bagnols-sur-Ceze marked the beginning of Woods's most significant contribution
to post-war architectural thinking. Its ideas were elaborated in articles
published in Architectural Design (1960)11
and in Le Carre Bleu (1961 ),12
the influential architectural review founded by Andre Schimmerling. The latter
article was divided into two parts: a critique of existing approaches, followed
by a vision of a new architecture. Contemporary practice, Woods argued, was
'static' and 'closed', guided by the concept of plan masse -the assembling of mass-produced blocks to form
dynamic-looking, abstract spatial compositions. Any composition of this kind
was merely a:
plastic or aesthetic arrangement [that] 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.
Plasticity was no
longer a concern. The plan masse, representing
movement in a plastic way, did not
overcome the static confines of traditional culture. It still led to monuments.
As an alternative to
the obsolete formalism of monumental architecture, Woods proposed a new
framework for design thinking. The ideas of a fourth dimension -time -and
movement were retained, but were no longer related to any 'ingenious plastic
arrangement': instead they became part of something new, which Woods named
'Stem'.
Stem goes beyond the plan masse and the plastic architectural
composition, prescribing a topological order, a way of linking locations that
accommodates human activity and interaction. The Stem is a support system, very
similar to the network of paths in a traditional town. In short, when Woods
talked about the structure of the new town of Bagnols-sur-Ceze, he was
referring to a topological structure
rather than the visual-spatial structure associated with New Monumentality.
In the same Le Carre Bleu article Woods attacked
another aspect of New Monumentality inherited from the pre-war ClAM: functional
zoning. This required an urban plan or a building programme to be analysed in
terms of elementary functions and then visualized in terms of spatial 'zones',
to produce a 'zoning plan'. The dogma of functional zoning was embodied by a
new means of representation: Zip-a-tone, a patterned plastic adhesive material
which denoted a general-purpose use rather than a particular volume or shape.
Le Corbusier himself helped to popularize Zip-a-tone, but he was also one of
the first to react against it. His Modulor2
(1955) contains a surrealist visual poem which playfully attempts to
subvert the narrow-minded thinking the material promoted.13
Woods's defence against
the 'zoning mentality' was to use the Stem as an alternative means of viewing
function: an approach based not on space alone, but on human mobility in space.
As Günter Nitschke wrote:
...some of the latest explorations for
New Towns made by Candilis and Woods, with... the system STEM... originated in
considerations of mobility, in other words in form/energy interrelations...
[which) 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
Woods framed the idea
of the 'Web' in a short essay in Le Carre
Bleu (1962), in which he described his practice's scheme for a new housing
quarter in Bilbao for 100,000 people. This project incorporated 'more than the
usual three dimensions... a time dimension' within its arrangement of paths.
But it was not just a circulation system; it was an environmental system, 'a
way to establish a large-scale order' which by
its existence made possible 'an individual expression atthe smaller scale'.
More than a technical device, the Web was 'a true poetic discovery of
architecture'.15
Stripping away the
aesthetic implications of the dimension of time revealed more clearly its
social connotations, which related to a society evolving away from 'the limits
of perceptible human groupings (villages and towns, classes, castes and sects).
For this new society 'the approach' of architecture could '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 emerged, not
unlike the Stem, as a kind of framework within which function could be
'articulate'. Without imposing any repressive order, it excluded 'the chaos of
disparate elements in pointless competition'.16
A later text in World Architecture 1 (1964) attacked
functionalist zoning and 'plastic monumentality' with equal force. Architecture
could not 'result from a zoning plan', which did not associate functions but only laid them out. Nor could it be made
'from a composition of solids and voids'; no matter how dynamically these were
shaped, they were still 'static and therefore the least adapted to the change
and growth of life'.
A year later, in a more
polemical tone, Woods challenged 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 40
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 is to
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.17
Concluding his critique.
Woods dismissed the architecture of the past as being not 'human' but
'super-human'.18
In introducing a
humanist critical dimension, Woods was typical of his generation. His ideas
were developed in opposition to those of pre-war architects, who were seen as
being rigidly attached to old beliefs and incapable of confronting new
problems. The sharpening divide between the generations arose from the
devastation caused not only by the war but also, paradoxically, by the
unexpected economic miracle which succeeded it. The products of the New
Monumentality and the functionalist zoning favoured before the war -the
cultural and commercial complexes of North America, the cites-dortoirs and 'new towns' of Europe -never found favour with
the general populace. The world had changed since 1928, when the Charter of
Athens was conceived; both society and technology had become more complex. Yet
ClAM VIII in 1951 continued to think in terms of 'master plans', 'centres' and
'cultural monuments'.19
Though Woods challenged
modernism, he did not break with it in a radical way. He adopted the pre-war
objectives of movement, change and the 'fourth dimension', but gave them a
different meaning -that of mobility. Woods saw himself as an inheritor of
modernism's humanist tradition at a time when that tradition appeared to be
disappearing. He rethought basic concepts of modernism, adapting them to
post-war needs and aspirations.
Technically the Stem
and its variant, the Web, defined mobility as a new conceptual framework for
design. In developing these concepts, Woods drew both on pre-war precedents and
on the ideas of contemporaries who, like him, were attempting to respond to the
dynamic realities of the post-war world.
A significant precedent
was Le Corbusier's concept of the promenade
architecturale, developed before the war but given its most logical
expression in the original plan for the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at
Harvard University, designed in 1960. The promenade
architecturalewas in many respects a formalist device intended to give
people in motion a greater aesthetic appreciation of volumetric compositions,
but it was also a means of facilitating social interaction between different
groups, as was the Stem.
The writings of Lewis
Mumford, in particular The Culture of
Cities, were also important. Mumford popularized the Radburn plan, which
was generated out of a system of movement separating pedestrian and vehicular
traffic.20 This plan was the basis of many garden communities of the
1920s and 1930s. A variant of it may also be seen in a proposal (1950) by the
Polish architect Matthew Nowicki for Chandigarh, called the 'city as a leaf'.
Nowicki's successor at Chandigarh, Le Corbusier, took up the idea of
differentiated traffic in his own plan for the city (1951-4). A further
influence was Jane Jacobs, whose journalism of the late 1950s (pre-dating her
best-seller, The Life and Death of Great
Americiln Cities) discussed movement in cities, streets and buildings as a
mechanism for social interaction.
The new fascination
with motion was explored in Japan by the metabolists. Kenzo Tange was among the
first to investigate the implications of increased mobility in his plan for
Tokyo (1960). In Kenchiku Bunka in
1963,21 Noriaki Kurokawa wrote aboutthe path up to the Acropolis
designed by the Greek architect, Oimitris Pikionis, comparing it with roads in
Japan based on similar ideas of movement, with the new town of Toulouse-Le
Mirail by Candilis, Josic and Woods, with the idea of the Stem and, finally,
with his own projects. In an issue of Bauweltin
1964 Kurokawa elaborated:
The present -an experience of hell...
which includes ideas of ClAM, 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.22
Another metabolist,
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.23
In London around the
same time, the Archigram group was developing radical ideas about architecture
and urbanism which were to a large extent based on mobility. In 'City
Synthesis' (1964) Dennis Crompton wrote: '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...' This
Archigram project in fact came closer to anticipating today's 'information
city'24 than the Free University did, as we will see.
The design of the Free
University should, however, be placed in another context, more intimately
associated with Woods than the above spectrum of projects and publications:
namely, the circle of young European architects known as Team 10. The exchange
of ideas among the members of this small group holds the key to understanding
many of the original intentions and beliefs behind the university scheme.
The discussions of Team
10 were often informal, and it is hard to specify the role each member played
in initiating ideas linked tothe Free University. Moreover, the very idea of
searching for the initiator of an idea ignores the special character of the
group -or 'family', as they liked to call themselves. They were a creative
'think-tank', exchanging ideas freely, striving towards common enrichment and
common social goals. A characteristic statement of the group's aims, published
in the Team 10 Primer,25 reads:
Team 10... 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.
Work by other Team 10
members had strong affinities with Woods's ideas about movement in architecture
as a
mechanism for enhancing and sustaining community and
democracy, social interaction and maximization of choice. We will
attempt to outline their intellectual contributions below.
A significant precedent for the development of the Free
University and the idea of the Stem was the Lijnbaan project in Rotterdam
(1951-3), designed by Jacob Bakema and J. H. van den Broek.26
Bakema, like Woods and Candilis, was a member of ClAM.
Whereas Woods served in the US Navy, Bakema spent the war years either
imprisoned by the Germans or active in the underground resistance. After the
war he became an outspoken champion of the campaign to redefine modern
architecture and equip it for a changed world. He spelled out his architectural
position, which was influenced by his activities in the resistance, in the
first issue of Vrije Kathederin 1946:
A society 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...
In an article entitled 'The New is Always Social',
published in Forum in 1949, Bakema again emphasized the special role of
architecture. He wrote of the need to restore a human dimension to the abstract
space-based conceptual framework of pre-war modernism:
The period of 'to possess' is being replaced by the period of 'to be';
we measure space by means of 'house' as we measure time by means of hour and
day."
These passages underline how Bakema and Woods shared
similar values, defined in explicit opposition to pre-war ideas.
Bakema's values were given material expression in his
Lijnbaan project. This was an atypical solution to a common task in post-war
Europe, involving the reconstruction of the historic centre of Rotterdam and of
part of the residential quarter of Kralingen, devastated by German bombing on
14 May 1940. The architects appeared to have a unique opportunity: instead of
being obliged to follow the pre-war property parcelling and circulation system,
they were free to apply their design ideas as they saw fit. The result was a
new layout based on a movement structure which responded to Bakema's call for
architecture to 'express openness in human relationships' rather than plastic,
compositional prerogatives.
In this scheme, individual property lines and traffic
routes were redistributed to fit within a mobility system; access points and
services were organized in a linear pattern separating vehicular and pedestrian
conduits, in the manner of the Radburn plan. An attempt was made to modernize
commercial activities by 'Americanizing' them. The old shopping street patterns
were recast into a 'shopping mall' -an idea then just emerging in the United
States -but in contrast to Americ4n planning, which segregated uses, the
project mixed together retail and commercial activities, offices and
residential areas.
At Lijnbaan, Bakema and
his collaborators rejected both plasticism and the mono-functional zoning
principles that were popular at the time. By incorporating utilitarian, social
and recreational activities within a linear pedestrian movement system, they created
the earliest example of a new conceptual design framework promoting social interaction and tne maximization of choice. In this respect
Lijnbaan was the immediate predecessor of the Free University of Berlin.
In 1961 Woods employed
in his schemes for Caen-Herouvilie and Toulouse-Le Mirail some of the basic
principles first seen a decade earlier in Bakema's project. The Stem acquired a
multi-level organization, a hierarchical, bifurcal branching structure;
Lijnbaan was creatively redesigned and reborn in the Stem.
Another significant
precedent for the development of the Stem and of the Free University was
Bakema's article of 1962 about Split, a town that had grown out of a palace
built by Diocletian c. 300 B.C.28 Bakema used historical
documentation to put forward design ideas unrelated to conservation or
historical context. He showed the town quartered by the movement structure of
the Roman carda and decumanus. Within these two axes, old
ruins (columns, architraves, gates, walls) were entwined in a close embrace
with newer constructions: settlements, houses, shops and small workshops. The
article included photographs of busy streets flanked by Corinthian colonnades
from the original palace, demonstrating how the old was perfectly adaptable to
new uses. Bakema was particularly concerned to show how a long-term structure,
as exemplified by the skeleton of the palace-town complex, could co-exist with
short-term elements, and how this minimal structure, sustained over centuries, could
respond to changing ways of life.
Bakema admired Split
because it provided freedom of choice through flexibility, a path he believed
post-war architecture had to take. A 'minimal open structure' -or what John
Habraken called a 'support system' -replaced the traditional concept of the
complete and static project.29 The modernist principle of bringing
together time and space was implemented, not by formalist, plastic means, as
Giedion and the old ClAM had advocated, but by organizing space in a new procedural
manner.
The influence of Split
is evident in Woods's entry to a 1963 competition to re-plan the centre of
Frankfurt. In this scheme the Stem is no longer bifurcated, as it had been in
the 1961 Caen-Herouvilie and Toulouse-Le Mirail competitions, but has a square
configuration. The advantages for the Frankfurt site were obvious:whereas,the
earlier projects had been located on open sites where the blocks could branch
out freely, following the bifurcation rule, this development had to fit within
the gaps opened up by war bombing in an existing dense urban fabric.
Conversely one has to
note that, by this time, Woods had begun to think that even a square grid,
generating implicit centres at its cross intersections, was perhaps just one
more relic of the formalism inherited from the pre-war generation.30
The issue of flexibility - movement expressed in terms of the capacity of a
project to change its form over time - became increasingly important to him.
The Split model resurfaced in the design for the Free University, but its
purpose was changed. It now served to show how the idea of movement could be
translated into two complementary design strategies: mobility and flexibility, both
environmental means of enhancing and sustaining 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,
transforming itself in relation to people's changing needs and aspirations.
Woods acknowledged the
importance of Bakema's article in his book The
Man in the Street, which was published after his death. An aerial
photograph of Split, with the caption 'a city... may be thought of as a
building', accompanies a text on treating problems of change, decay, maintenance
and replacement common to both cities and buildings.31
Designing for the 'man
in the street' was a primary concern of Team 10. The scheme of the Free
University, the idea of the Stem - the reinterpretation of movement not as a
formal, plastic ideal but as mobility and flexibility for ordinary people in
everyday life - emerged largely out of Team 10's search for ordinariness, as
opposed to order. The group's democratic empiricism - in contrast to the imperiously
normative preoccupations of ClAM - was particularly evident in the writings of
Alison and Peter Smithson from the early 1950s onwards.
As was the case with
Bakema, the link between Woods and the Smithsons passed through ClAM. The
Smithsons were elected members of ClAM in May 1953, as part of the English MARS
group. In the same year they published in the Architect's Year Book'an urban project' -Golden Lane -in which some
of the origins of the Stem can be found. In their commentary they alleged that:
...the idea of 'street' has been
forgotten [by the ClAM 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.32
The idea was taken up by others in their generation. Two years later, in August 1955, a ClAM study programme entitled 'Mobility' included themes such as 'man as a traveller - man going to work in the morning - what he sees... the enjoyment of points of interest' and 'the approach to the house... the corridor... as a social element'. In September 1955, at a gathering of ClAM members in La Sarraz, the Smithsons stated:
If, thirty years ago, the use in a
creative way of new techniques was an urgent problem for ClAM, today... [the
problem] is to create the forms of habitat which can stimulate the development
of human relations.33
This statement was followed by a detailed list of 'relationships' which specified connections between buildings and external public spaces as a person moved from one location to another, with no mention of the visual-plastic qualities of the designed space.
At ClAM X in Dubrovnik
in August 1956 the Smithsons presented a condensed diagram that showed a causal
link between 'social order' and 'environment'. The diagram projected the
aspirations of the new generation, pointing out new avenues of design. At the
same time, it was more the expression of the young architects' wishful thinking
than of truly empirically founded principles.34
A study of the
evolution of the Stem and the design of the Free University must also take into
account another member of Team 10, Aldo van Eyck, who was one of the most
aggressive opponents of the ailing dogmas of ClAM. Van Eyck expressed his
approach to movement in poetic prose:
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
Van Eyck took Giedion's
framework of 'space/time/plastic architecture', as 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 was a deep
affinity between Van Eyck's powerful poetic statements and Woods's vision of
the Web, expressed in more prosaic language.
The 'Web' intends 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 kms/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 all his writings
Woods emphasized that the Stem could be applied irrespective of scale. It was a
conceptual schema, suited to both large environmental projects and smaller
designs; it did not distinguish between building, built complex or urban
conglomerate. In a similar vein Van Eyck, echoing the Renaissance humanist
architect Alberti, said:
A house is a tiny city, a city a huge
house... the time has come to conceive of architecture urbanistically and
urbanism architecturally.37
Woods reiterated the
same idea when he said that, rather than being concerned with the distinct
categories of 'architecture' or 'town planning', architects should address the
'creation of environment at every scale' because, irrespective of scale, what
mattered was 'human association'38 - the actions of people - rather
than abstract configurations of space.
These principles guided
the design of both Woods's Free University and Van Eyck's Children's Home in
Amsterdam (1960), though the outcome in each case was quite different. Whereas
Van Eyck chose to specify each prop, each piece of building furniture, in order
to sustain a welcome activity, Woods opted for a 'minimal structure' maximizing
the choice of alternative uses in an unknowable future.
The Italian architect
Giancarlo De Carlo was another member of Team 10 who contributed to the
development of Woods's thinking. At the beginning of the 1960s De Carlo devised
a master plan for the city of Urbino which used a 'structuralist' approach, as
opposed to visual-aesthetic categories, as the basis of analysis. This method
focused on the material properties and geometric configurations of the fabric
of the city, revealing a structure pared down to a movement system, very close
to the sense of Woods's Stem. The whole hierarchical fabric of the historical
city - individual apartment, building, block - was analysed in terms of access,
both controlled and potential, taking into account the dynamics of the urban
fabric and its ability to change. This diagnostic analysis in turn generated a
series of guidelines for the future development of Urbino as a 'sustainable'
project, as it had been in the past. The study was pioneering in that it
brought together for the first time two different aspects: the analytical
apparatus of the new conceptual structure of movement, and the historical data
supplied by an important European town.39
In 1963, the same year
the Free University was begun, Giancarlo De Carlo designed a competition
project for University College, Dublin. His campus plan made use of many of the
analytical tools applied to the historical example of Urbino, and also appeared
to adopt the principles outlined by Woods in his 'Stem' article of 1961. It was
neither a plastic composition nor a zoning proposal, but 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, branching out of it, a series of 'routes' -interlinked pedestrian
and service/mechanical paths -which defined communal versus private areas,
general versus specialized use.
Woods did not refer
explicitly to any of the above work by Team 10 members which ran in parallel
with his own, quite possibly because he took it for granted that the ideas of
the group were freely shared. But there was at least one other major debt which
he acknowledged without hesitation: this was to Louis Kahn.
Many of Woods's ideas
about movement and the Stem were prefigured in Kahn's 'Toward a Plan for
Philadelphia' (1953):
Architecture is also the street... the design of the street is design for movement... not for speed but for order and convenience.
In this essay Kahn put
forward his movement-based model of an architecture of community, using an
'aquatic' analogy whose components -rivers, harbours, canals, docks -specified
different qualities and levels in a hierarchy of flow. Embedded in this model
were the concepts of vehicular 'serving' and social 'served', applied to urban
'areas' and 'buildings'.40 These ideas were reinforced by the
illustrations to the article, which introduced a new system of representation:
a notational system of hierarchies and qualities of mobility replacing the
traditional Euclidean volumetric description of buildings and outdoor spaces.
In the early 1950s the
prevalence of Mies's idea of 'universal space' often resulted in the
suppression of the component of circulation on the level of buildings. Like
Kahn, Woods reacted against this underdifferentiation of aspects of movement
and interaction in space. Again like Kahn, he was not so much concerned to
develop a new kind of architecture that facilitated circulation or bureaucratic
efficiency, as he was to preserve, sustain and ultimately privilege human
association: community. They both sought a new conceptual framework for design,
the 'servant and served' being Kahn's basic concepts, the Stem and (less
frequently) the 'Cell' being Woods's.
A 1961 description of
the Candilis-Josic-Woods housing atToulouse-Le Mirail underlined the importance
of the scheme's linearity and the relation between linear pattern and movement.
The presentation of the same project in World
Architecture in 1964 extolled the idea of the Stem and the merits of its
linearity, Woods stated: 'a line is open ended; it has no dimension, It can
change direction at will,' With reference to the Web and its rejection of a
central point, he said:
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,…
In verse form
(prefiguring Louis Kahn's poem 'Architecture' of 1972) he added:
A point of static, fixed.
A line is a measure of liberty.
A non-centric 'Web' is a fuller
measure.41
But whereas Kahn's
topology of servant and served was implemented three-dimensionally, in terms of
vertical elements and point towers, Woods used horizontal elements - linear
paths -because he preferred the activities of life to be centred on the ground.
Streets and Corridors: Yona Friedman's 'Spatial
Urbanism' and Constant's New Babylon
Though Kahn and Woods
disliked corridors as such, they defined 'rooms' and 'corridors' as the two
distinct components of the built environment, an idea contemporary architecture
had abandoned, as we have said, in favour of undifferentiated universal space.42 With both Kahn and Woods one can
observe a kind of return to the mid-eighteenth-century French concept of
'distribution' which split buildings into salles
and corridors - a concept
originally intended to protect the upper classes from noise and intrusion but
applied, in their work, to bring people together while shielding them from
disruptive technology. Like the Stem, Kahn's device of 'servant/served'
resolved conflict in the environment. It provided a new set of architectural
categories -alongside the traditional spatial-visual 'solid and void', or the
structural-functional 'support and supported' -which might be called movement categories. Both the Stem and
the elaborated idea of the Web were 'intended to find ways of circulation by
which man on foot can exist and associate without inflicting hardship on other
men in machines'.43
Toulouse-Le Mirail
still bears the hallmarks of a traditional modernist project, Alongside the
linear Stem pattern, there is a detached 'centre' or 'head' (an agora or
acropolis) very much like the centres one finds in the plans of Chandigarh or
even Brasilia, In the later scheme for Frankfurt, however, the agora-acropolis
centre has disappeared completely. The Stem is implemented in the plan as a
square grid rather than a bifurcating tree pattern.44 The grid is
divided into economically manageable areas whose dimensions were determined by
the optimum span achievable without expansion joints. Distances of between 35
and 45 met~s were examined; the finat dimension was set at 36.47 metres.
Pedestrian paths are 3.66 metres wide and a grid of free spaces, each 32.81
metres square, is left open for development.
Berlin Free University
is a rare example of an advanced architectural idea being translated into
building without undergoing major modifications, It is the most mature of a
series of projects in which Woods used an architecture based on the idea of
movement as a physical medium to enhance social interaction and maximization of
choice. It took three years for the initial bifurcating Stem pattern of
Caen-Herouvilie (1961) to become the rectilinear frame of the Free University
of Berlin, via the square grid structure of the Frankfurt competition scheme.
If Frankfurt refers to the precedent of Diocletian's palace at Split, the
rectilinear weft and warp of Berlin evokes the structure of Manhattan. (Woods,
we recall, often proclaimed his 'Manhattanism' in relation to this project.)
The rectilinear variant of the grid restored informality as well as
versatility, allowing greater choice and social interaction than did the
dogmatically square pattern of the Frankfurt scheme. By differentiating the two
directions of the Free University grid into 'avenue' and 'street', and by
spacing the 'streets' of the grid irregularly, Woods came closer than in any of
his previous projects to translating the diagram of the Stem into a real
building. In this shift another precedent was important for Woods: namely, the
so-called 'spatial urbanism' that Yona Friedman had developed in the late
1950s, around the time Constant was elaborating, in a much more studied visual
way, his dada-Utopian plans for New Babylon.
We have already
mentioned that mobility and flexibility were two complementary
strategies for achieving community and democracy through design. In almost all
of the projects by Woods examined up to now, mobility was given priority in the
conception of the project. In the Free University, however, flexibility was
equally important.
As shown above, Bakema
acknowledged the significance of flexibility in his article on Split, and
developed a new design method for making two scales of permanence coincide in
the same scheme -a method applicable both to buildings and to urban projects.45
This basic idea had been sketched out by le Corbusier in his 1930 urban plan
'A'for Algiers, Other pre-war projects broach the same theme: for example,
Ellissitsky's experiments of the 1920s, or the Maison du Peuple at Clichy
(1937-9) by Beaudoin and lods, with Bodiansky and Prouve,46
The design of the Free
University was not determined by plastic, compositional considerations, Butthis
does not mean that Woods was oblivious to its potential visual impact, The
intention from the start was to make the building appeal to the senses. In
particular the smooth cladding, made up of the lightweight panels designed by
Jean Prouve, offered a deliberate contrast to the rough, almost pachyderm
exteriors typical of 1960s brutalism.
Many of the
technophilic projects of the early 1960s appeared to treat movement as a
narcissistic sensory experience. In critical opposition to these projects,
Woods emphasized movement as a social experience rerated to the goal of uniting
a community. Similarly, in defending place-based human interaction, he
confronted 'end-of-place' anti-urban schemes such as Melvin Webber's proposal
for achieving community without the physical proximity of place, or Marshall
Mcluhan's Global Village (a community with no human contact), or Karl Deutsch's
'city as switchboard'.47
Woods's ideal - his
urban arcadia - was Manhattan. Although he espoused the ideas of the promenade
and the arcade, both attributes of Paris, he recognized that Paris was a city
of monuments, of fixed facades and ordered vistas; it reflected the values of
the ancien regime gentilhomme, not
those of a modern democracy. He undoubtedly also found the anarchy of Manhattan
appealing, as a demonstration of unconstrained vitality and freedom. Thus,
although his ideas were very much inspired by the nineteenth-century concept of
the street and the corridor, they are entirely unrelated to the postmodern
revivalism or neo-Manhaottanism of the 1980s.
For Woods, flexibility
was not about an efficient interchangeability of building parts to satisfy
technocratic or bureaucratic demands. Its aim, rather, was to open up a
creative, festive discovery of the possibilities of social life, 'even today a
revolutionary notion. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker... no one
is condemned'. Woods was committed to community, participation and exchange.
In this context the
political meaning of the Free University is clear. In a divided city, the
building presented a humanist alternative to both mainstream western New Monumentality
and official eastern block architecture. The implications of its 'maximization
of choice' become even more significant, when one considers that the university
attracted many people who, having fled the persecution of the East German
police state, pursued extreme left-wing agendas in the west.
In the years following
the publication of the initial plans, the Free University had an enormous
impact around the world. We may even conjecture that it helped Le Corbusier, in
late projects such as the Olivetti Centre (1963) or Venice Hospital (1964), to
redirect the course of his work and reassess his ideas about desirable building
typology- a typology removed from the dogmas of plan masse, plasticity and New Monumentality which he himself had promoted.
In recent years the guiding ideas of the Free University have been renewed in
the designs of a younger generation of architects, including Labfac and J.
Ferrier. This, more than any theoretical argument, indicates that the Free
University is still a prototype for our time. And yet the question remains: How
successful was the Free University? Did it accomplish an 'integration of a
physical, social and temporal milieu into one habitat', Woods's ultimate goal?
Given its highly
innovative character, we might say that the fact that the scheme was built at
all was a major achievement. Very often, however, there is a price to be paid for implementing a novel architectural
idea. The building can become problematic if people have difficulties
understanding its original meaning and consequently utilizing it effectively.
In the case of the Free University, there were difficulties both in
interpreting Woods's plan and in constructing Prouve's cladding panels, to
achieve an industrial yet 'seasoned' look.
Woods knew from the
outset that the siting of such a high-density machinistic structure next to
Dahlem, one of the wealthiest suburbs in pre-war Europe, would be contentious.
In contrast to his Frankfurt scheme, which is integrated into the existing
built environment, the university confronts a suburb with a piece of urban
structure. The unhurried grand avenues of Dahlem are juxtaposed with the university's busy street-corridors; the
sparsely populated garden settlement yields to high-density living and close contact
settings, full of frequent chance encounters and human vitality.
Woods said that the
university's 'gallerias', as he called its passageways, were intended to draw
in the residents of Dahlem, to make them rethink their views, shed their
suburban identity, and ultimately be converted to a more humanistic way of
life.48 This never happened. Woods had succumbed to what we might
call 'environmental determinism', the architectural profession's optimistic
tendency to assume that environmental conditions can effectively change human
behaviour and even belief systems. Woods, like other members of Team 10, was
convinced that the circulation system of buildings could bring about social
change. This is evident in his 1965 plan for Fort Lamy in Chad, which attempted
to weave together the existing urban fabrics of the European colonial quarter
and the dense African casbah in order to unite the two populations -a goal
which was never achieved.
The Free University
encountered other problems which Woods found disturbing. The first phase of the
building was completed at a time of student unrest and was not well received.
When Woods confronted the students and suggested that if they did not like the
building they might as well dismantle it, they responded that they were not
interested in doing that. What they objected to was not the plan or the look of
the university, but rather the fact that they had not been consulted during the
development of the design. It was impossible, they said, to make a democratic
product by means of an autocratic process. They saw the Free University, at
best as an unfinished project, at worst as a failed experiment.49
The students' objection
was evidently one which Woods understood. He himself had written that 'the
"man in the street" is the real town builder, and the job of the town
planner is to interpret his ideas', but this two-way process was difficult to
implement in the 1960s. We cannot say how Woods's work would have developed if
he had lived longer. It is possible that he would have shifted the focus of his
architecture from the form of the product to a search for higher social ends,
involving all the interested parties in the design process. But, equally, he
might have continued to experiment with new ways of bringing together buildings
and the larger-scale urban structure to serve the community- a practice that
has atrophied since the 1960s. The issue is clearly academic. One thing,
however, is unquestionable: Woods's commitment to a humanist architecture. In The Man in the Streethe wrote:
The fault of course lies not in the
plan but in ourselves... We do not practise 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
This quotation
represents for us the most lucid and concise expression of Woods's credo of
architecture.
Amidst the relativism
and doctrine of the 1960s, the minimal structure of the Free University
contained an implicit set of rules (proscriptive rather than prescriptive) for
generating activities and alternative uses. The scheme might be considered to
have failed in innumerable details -an aspect that matters enormously today, in
an age dominated by programmed tediousness. However, it succeeds in presenting
a vision, a rare commodity we should attempt to recover.
The Free University's
mobile, flexible, minimal structure offers a 'direction for design', to
paraphrase Descartes' 'direction de "esprit'.51 Rather than
controlling spatio-stylistic characteristics, it links programme and form. This
minimal method offers a 'minimal rationality', supplied in this instance by
spatial rather than conceptual rules. It chooses a possible organization of the
places and plan of the building in preference to the improbable persuasiveness
expressed in the rhetoric of loud volumetric images. Dividing issues between
known and unknown, simple and difficult, certain and uncertain, determinable
and indeterminable, intractable and innumerable, well defined and unexplored,
it offers the best model we have today for maximizing choice and increasing
responsiveness to new ideas.
Descartes wrote during
a time of great upheaval- a time of wars and catastrophes, of geographical
exploration, of scientific discovery -a time very similar to our own. He
provided a humanist system which was able to cope with conflicts and
contradictions, which protected against oppression while supporting evolution
and creativity. In many respects, Shadrach Woods's Free University does the
same.
1 Shadrach Woods, 'Urban Environment The Search for System' in J
Donat, ed, World Architecture, 1
(London: Studio Vista, 1964) p 151, The emphasis in the quotation is ours,
2 It was only in the early 1960s that Woods began to turn back towards
the United States. He taught first at Yale, and later became an endowed
professor at Harvard and a registered architect in the State of New York
3 Alexander Tzonis and liane lelaivre, Movement, Structure and the Work of Santiago Calatrava (Zurich Birkhäuser,
1996),
4 lIya Ehrenburg, The Life of
the Automobile (reprinted London Pluto, 1976) and Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook, trans, S Brill
(San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1989) p 73,
5 Sigfried Giedion, Space,
Time and Architecture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941)
6 Giedion (1941) and Nikolaus Pevsner, Outline of European Architecture (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1943),
7 This is how Jerzy Soltan referred to the modernist architecture of
the time
8 Giedion(1941),
9 Jurgen Joedicke and Oscar Newman, New Frontiers in Architecture (New York, 1960) p, 126,
10 See AlexanderTzonis and Liane LeFaivre, 'Critical Regionalism' in
A Graalland, ed" Critical Landscape (Rotterdam
010,1996; first published 1991).
11 Woods, 'Stem'
,ArchitecturaI Design, 5, 1960,p 181,See also Architectural Design, 12,1962, pp 594-6,
12 Woods, 'Stem', Le Carre
Bleu, 2,1961 Despite its small circulation, this magazine played an
important role in promoting the ideas of Woods and of Team 10 in general,
13 Le Corbusier, Modulor2, French
edition, 1955 (london: Faber& Faber, 1958) pp 148-52
14 Gunter Nitschke, 'Cities, Stasis or Process', Architect's YearBook, 11, 1965. pp,
165-81,
15 Woods, 'Web', Le Carre
Bleu, 3, 1962,
16 ibid
17 Woods, World Architecture, 1
(1964lp.151,
18 Woods, 'Free University, Berlin' in J Donat, ed" World Architecture, 2 (London: Studio
Vista, 1965) p 113,
19 The proceedings of the conference were published in E N Rogers,
Josep LIuis Sert, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, eds" The Heart of the City (London: Lund Humphries, 1952).
20 Lewis Mumford's writings, particularly The Culture of Cities (New York Harcourt, Brace, 1938), were an
important influence on the post-war generation.
21 Noriaki Kurokawa, 'Architecture 01 Roads', Kenchiku Bunka, January 1963
22 Kurokawa, 'The Architecture of Action', Bauwelt, December 1964
23 Kiyonori Kikutake, 'The Great Shrine of Izumo', in World Architecture, 2(1965) p. 13
24 Dennis Crompton, 'City Synthesis', Archigram, 1964
25 Alison and Peter Smithson, Team
10 Primer, special issue 01 Architectural
Design, December 1962 Reprinted in book form by Studio Vista, London, in
1968
26 The lijnbaan complex has suffered from both negligence and
ill-considered 'improvements', and now gives a poor impression of the original
scheme
27 See D. Lasdun, 'Mars Group 1953-7', Architect's Year Book 8, 1957, pp 56--61 In 1954 Bakema was a
member of a group preparing for the 1956 CIAM congress in Dubrovnik who met
members of the English MARS group at Doorn. The results of the meeting were summa
riled in an article by Denys Lasdun. One of the major commitments of the new
generation, he reported, was to .make creative use of the forces of human
association' which in the view of Team 10
the Charter of Athens had ignored. The construction of the lijnbaan project
had demonstrated that for Bakema this was not a theoretical declaration but a
practical issue
28 Jacob Bakema, 'An Emperor's House at Split became a Town for 3000
People', Forum, 2, 1962, pp. 45-78.
29 John Habraken, Supports: An
Alternative to Mass Housing (London Architectural Press,
1972)
30
Based on discussions between Woods and Alexander
Tzonis
31 Woods, The Man in the
Street (Harmondsworth Penguin, 1972)
32 Alison and Peter Smithson, 'An Urban Project' in Architect's YearBook 5, 1953
33 Lasdun (1957) p. 59
34 Note by the Smithsons, Bakema Archive, Netherlands Architectural
Institute
35 Aldo van Eyck, 'Labyrinthine Clarity' in J Donat, ed, World Architecture, 3 (London Studio
Vista, 1966) pp 120-9.
36 Woods, Le Carre Bleu, 3,
1962
37 Van Eyck (1966) p, 120,
38 Woods, Le Carro Bleu, 3,1962
39 Giancarlo De Carlo, Urbino.
La storia di una citta e il piano della sua evoluzione urbanistica (Padua: Marsilio,
1966),
40 Louis Kahn, 'Toward a Plan for Midtown Philadelphia', Perspecta, 2, 1953, pp. 10-27.
41 Woods, 'Urban Environment The Search for System' in World Architecture, 1 (1964) pp. 152-5.
42 Woods, Le Carre Bleu, 3,
1962
43 Mies's invention of universal space is usually associated with
Crown Hall. LeFaivre has argued that it was developed in an earlier project
Cantor's Drive, Iowa. See her 'On the Road with Mies van der Rohe' in Arie
Graalfand, ed., Cultural Landscape (Rotterdam:
DID, 1997) pp 126--47,
44 According to a private communication from Woods to Alexander
Tzonis, it appears that Woods was no longer afraid of the possibility of a
'centre' appearing in the intersections. The idea of the non-centric 'Web' was
exemplified in the bifurcation of the linear pattern because such a
configuration, which was not geometrical hut only topological, rejected or
overcame the idea of a point
45 Bakema (1962) p. 52
46 Jean Prouve Constructeur
(Delftl: Delft University Press, 1981) pp. 62-3,
47 For further discussion of Marshall Mcluhan, Karl Deutsch and the
Switch hoard City, see our 'The Emergence of Communication Space', Cultures, 4, 1978, pp. 114-25
48 Woods, in a private communication to Alexander Tzonis who, as
academic editor for the Penguin 'Man-Made Environment' series, had commissioned
him to write The Man in the Street.
49 Again in a private communication to Tzonis, See Tzonis and
LeFaivre, 'Planning and Tomatoes', Casabella,
January/February 1992, pp. 146-9.
50 Woods, The Man in the
Street,p 11,
51 Rene Descartes, Discours de
la methode, 1637,