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20 Century Architectural and Urban Theories Th definition of what constitutes a city chang's from tim to tim and plac to plac, but it is most usual to x plain th trm as a matter of dmo graphics. Th United Nations has rcommndd that countries read all plac's with mor than 20, 000 inhabitants living clos together as urban; but, in fact, nations compile the statistics on th basis of many different standards. Th United Stats, for instant, uss urban plac to man any locality whr more than 2, 500 people live. What th numerical definition, it is clar that th cours of human history has bn make by a process of accurate urbanization. It was not until th No lithic price, roughly 10, 000 yar's ago, that humans wr abl to form permanent sttlmnts. vn 5, 000 yar's ago th only such sttlmnts on th glob wr small, smiprmannt village of past farmers, towns whos siz was limited by th fact that thy had to mov whir th soil nearby was xhaustd.
It was not until th tim of classical antiquity that citi's of mor than 100, 000 xsd, and vn ths did not bcom common until th sustained population x plosion of th last thr centuries. In 1800 lss than 3 print of th world's population was living in citi's of 20, 000 or mor; this had increase to about 25 print by th mid- 1960 s and to about 40 print by 1980. Thy dynamics of dvlopmnt of urban architecture wr yt vn mor n lightning. Beginning with private houses by Hood, Les caze, Edward Stone, Neutral, Gropius, and Breuer during the 1930 s, American Modernism gradually supplanted the historical styles in a range of building types, including schools and churches; for example, Eliel Saarinen's simple, brick Christ Lutheran Church (194950) at Minneapolis, Minn. After World War II, big industry turned to Modern architects for distinctive emblems of prestige. The Connecticut General Life Insurance Company hired one of the largest modern firms, Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, to design their new decentralized headquarters outside Hartford, Conn. (195557).
Lever Brothers turned to the same firm for New York City's Lever House (1952), in which the park like plaza, glass-curtain walls, and thin aluminum mullions realized the dreams of Mies and others in the 1920 s of freestanding crystalline shafts. Designed by Eliel Saarinen's son Eero, the General Motors Technical Center (194856) at Warren, Mich. , was compared with Versailles in its extent, grandeur, and rigorous conformity to an austere, geometric aesthetic of Mission forms. (Jacobs 104) The Harrison and Abramovitz's tower for the Aluminum Company of America at Pittsburgh (1954) advertised its own product, as did Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill's Inland Steel Building at Chicago (195557). Perhaps the most chaste of all was the Seagram Building (195458) at New York City, designed by Mies and Philip Johnson. Wright alone avoided the rectilinear geometry of these office buildings. In 1955 he saw his Price Tower rise at Bartlesville, Okla. , a richly faceted, concrete and copper fulfillment of the St.
Mark's Tower he had designed more than 25 years earlier. About 1952 there was a significant shift within Modernism from what had come to be called Functionalism, or the International Style, toward a monumental Formalism. There was increasing interest in highly sculptural masses and spaces, as well as in the decorative qualities of diverse building materials and exposed structural systems. Wright's Guggenheim Museum is a manifestation of this aesthetic. Those who had focused their attention on the rectilinear portions of Le Corbusier's Save House and Unite d'Habitation apartments at Marseille (194652), tended to ignore the plastic sculpture on the roofs of those buildings; to such people, Le Corbusier's highly individual buildings at Chandygarh, India (begun 1950), and the cavernous space in the lyrical church of Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ron champ, Fr. , seemed to be examples of personal whimsy. (Pevsner 46) Pier Luigi Nervi in Italy gave structural integrity to the complex curves and geometry of reinforced-concrete structures, such as the Orbetello aircraft hangar (begun 1938) and Turin's exposition hall (194850). The Spaniard Eduardo Torroja, his pupil Felix Candela, and the American Frederick Several followed his lead.
Essentially, each attempted to create an umbrella roof the interior space of which could subdivided as required, such as Torroja's grandstand for the Zarzuela racetrack in Madrid (1935). Mies constructed rectilinear versions of such a space in Crown Hall and his Farnsworth House at Plano, Ill. (194650), while Philip Johnson allowed a single functional unit, the brick-cylinder utility stack, to protrude from his precise glass house at New Canaan, Conn. (1949). Other designers used curvilinear structural geometry, best indicated by Matthew Nowicki's (191049) sports arena at Raleigh, N. C. (195253), in which two tilted parabolic arches, supported by columns, and a stretched-skin roof enclose a colossal space devoid of interior supports. In 1949 Nowicki had challenged Louis Sullivan's precept, form follows function, with another, form follows form, a dictum that freed architecture from programmatic expression.
Hugh Stubbins' congress hall, at Berlin (1957), and Eero Saarinen's Trans World Airlines terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York City (195662), were outstanding examples of these dynamically monumental, single-form buildings the geometric shapes and silhouettes of which were derived from mathematical computation and technological innovation. International competitions for the opera house at Sydney (1957) and a government centre at Toronto (1958) were won by the Dane Jorn Upon and the Finn Video Revell, respectively. Both architects were exponents of the new monumentalism. (Jacobs 106) These designs posed problems in structural engineering and in scale, but many architects, such as the American Minoru Yamasaki in the McGregor Building for Wayne State University at Detroit (1958), attempted to make structure become decorative, while the decorative screen, as used by Edward Dell Stone at the U. S. embassy in New Delhi (195759), offered a device for wrapping programmatic interiors within a rich pattern of sculptured walls.
Mexico and South America broke their bonds to French, Spanish, and Portuguese academic design during the 1930 s. Le Corbusier's influence became partially strong in Brazil, where the Brazilian Oscar Niemeyer and other architects designed the Corbusier-inspired Ministry of Education and Public Health at Rio de Janeiro (193742). Brazil's Lucio Costa, Alfonso Reidy, and Niemeyer; Mexico's Felix Candela, Juan O'Gorman, Jose Villa gran Garcia, and Luis Barragan; and Venezuela's Carlos Raul Villanueva were the vanguard of Latin-American architectural modernism. Whole communities such as Caracas and Sao Paulo essentially were rebuilt during the 1950 s, and new cities, such as Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, and university cities, such as those of Mexico and Venezuela, were conceived and erected. In Mexico there was avid support for modern design in buildings such as the Presidente Juarez housing at Mexico City (1950) by Mario Pani and Salvador Ortega.
In Colombia, after World War II, enormous strides were made in thin-shelled reinforced-concrete construction. In Brazil, dramatic complexes were erected from concrete by Reidy, such as the school and gymnasium at Pedregulho housing at Rio de Janeiro (1953) and Rio's Museum of Modern Art (196067). (Pevsner 56) After 1959, office buildings for administrative headquarters of large corporations followed the 195557 suburban-campus model of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill's Connecticut General Life Insurance Company or, if urban, the tower like form, often with strong structural expression (Torre Velasca, Milan, by Belgiojoso, Peressutti, and Rogers, 1959) or the slab form, usually emphasizing glazed walls (Mannesmann Building, Dusseldorf, by Paul Schneider-Eleven, 1959), but they rarely achieved an urban composition such as the 1962 Place Ville-Marie, built at Montreal by the Chinese-born American architect I. M. Pei. Air transportation, trade exhibitions, and spectator sports summoned the often awesome spatial resources of modern technology. The stadiums for the 1964 Olympics at Tokyo by Tange Kenzx, Rome's Pallazzi dello Sport done by Nervi (1960), Eero Saarinen's Dulles International Airport at Chantilly, Va. (195862), and Chicago's exposition hall, McCormick Place, by C.
F. Murphy and Associates (1971) are examples of the colossal spaces achieved in reinforced concrete or steel and glass. International exhibitions seldom offered comparable architecture. At the New York World's Fair (1964) the Spanish pavilion by Javier Carvajal and the Japanese pavilion by Maekawa Kunio were buildings of merit. There were also several notable examples at Montreal's Expo 67: the West German pavilion by Frei Otto, the U. S.
pavilion by R. Buckminster Fuller, and the startling Constructivist apartment house, Habitat 67, by the Israeli Moshe Safe, in association with David, Barott, and Boulva, whose 158 precast-concrete apartment units were hoisted into place and post-tensioned to permit dramatic cantilevers and terraces. World's fairs continued to provide a setting for occasionally distinguished examples of modern structures that demonstrated innovations in building technology. The architecture of South and Southeast Asia as well as of Japan has been decisively influenced by Western architects, particularly Le Corbusier. The leading figure in Japanwas Tange Kenzx, whose many powerful buildings of rough concrete include the Peace Centre, Hiroshima (194955), and St. Mary's Roman Catholic Cathedral at Tokyo (1965).
His disciples included the so-called Metabolism Group, led by Kikutake Kiyonori, Maki Fumihiko, and Osaka Masato. Their work, characterized by a dynamic science-fiction quality expressive of fluidity and change, culminated in the Osaka Expo 1970, with constructions such as Tange's giant space frame, known as the Theme Pavilion, and Kikutake's Landmark Tower. (Pevsner 59) Much significant architecture in the postwar period was sponsored by cultural centres and educational institutions, such as Berlin's philharmonic hall (1963) by Hans Sc haroun. Louis I. Kahn, in his design for the Richards Medical Research Building (1960), gave the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia a linear programmatic composition of laboratories, each served by vertical systems for circulating gases, liquids, and electricity. Paul Rudolph's art and architecture building (1963) at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. , gathered its studios, galleries, classrooms, and light wells on 36 interpenetrating levels distributed over six stories. (Drexler 72) The Morse and Stiles colleges (1962), also at Yale, were designed by Eero Saarinen and set a new standard for multiple-entry urban dormitories. Even the traditionalist campuses of New England preparatory schools gained modern architecture, such as the art building and science building at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. , by Benjamin A.
Thomson (1963) and the dormitories at St. Paul's School in Concord, N. H. , by Edward Larrabee Barnes (1965). The innovations in educational architecture were international. In England, distinctive educational architecture arrived at Hunstanton Secondary School, Norfolk (194954), by Peter and Alison Smithson. An example of what became known as the New Brutalism, this building was influenced by Mies van der Rohe.
Most New Brutalist buildings, however, owed more to Le Corbusier's late worker example, the gray concrete masses of Denys Laden's University of East Anglia, Norfolk (196268) while James Stirling's History Faculty, Cambridge (196467), brought a neo-Constructivist element to the Brutalist tradition. Canada gained the Central Technical School Arts Center by Robert Fairfield Associates (1964) and Scarborough College by John Andrews, with Page and Steele (1966), both at Toronto. Italian innovative educational architecture is exemplified in Milan's Instituto Marchiondi (1959) by Victorian Vigano. Led by disciples of Le Corbusier, the Japanese built Waseda University (1964), which was designed by Katsuo And, and Maekawa Kunio's Gakushuin University (1964), both in Tokyo. Some of the new educational settings proposed solutions to what was undoubtedly their- 20 th century's greatest problem, its urban environment. The high-rise, dense campus at Boston University by Jose Luis Sert and the skyscraper towers of MIT's earth-sciences building (1964) by I.
M. Pei, as well as Harvard's behavioral sciences building (1964) by Minoru Yamasaki, were imaginative single buildings responding to urban circumstances. The Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Colo. , and the Chicago Circle Campus of the University of Illinois (1965), both by the firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill with Walter A. Netsch as the principal designer (1956), and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies at La Jolla, Calif. , by Louis I. Kahn (1966), all offered intimations of a new city built around a cultural, educational centre. (Jacobs 109) No comparable concentration of intensive, harmonious urban architecture was achieved for cities, even though, after 1955, the building of new cities produced some remarkable examples such as Vallingby, Swed. ; Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil; Cumbernauld, in Scotland; and Chandygarh, in India; and some remarkable renovations of old cities, as in East wicks in Philadelphia (Reynolds Metals Co. ; plans by Constantinos Doxiadis, 1960) and Constitution Plaza in Hartford, Conn. (Charles DuBose, with Sasaki, Walker & Associates 1964), and New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (1962). By this time, however, it was beginning to be felt that the application of Modern movement principles had caused visual damage to historic cities and had also failed to create a humane environment in new cities.
It was at this moment that the postmodernist era began. The 1960 s saw the rise of dissatisfaction with consequences of the Modern movement, especially in North America, where its failings were exposed in two influential books, Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966). Jacobs highlighted the destruction of urban coherence wrought by the utopian iconoclasm of the Modern movement, whereas Venturi implied that Modern buildings were without meaning because they were designed in a simplistic and puritan way that lacked...
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