The New Space

This list contains only those books held by the British Architectural Library. Where possible prices are given in the currency of the country of origin. Otherwise prices represent those paid by the British Architectural Library. Who better to begin with than the progenitor of modern architecture? Fondation Le Corbusier: Projets d’architecture de Le Corbusier (Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1977. 36 pp. F22.20). At his death Le Corbusier left 32,000 architectural plans, drawings, and sketches and the Fondation inherited these. They have drawn up a complete inventory of the material and 25,000 have been microfilmed. This is a small printed catalogue to the riches they possess. The classification is by country and within each country by date. There is also an elementary subject index.Who better to begin with than the progenitor of modern architecture? Fondation Le Corbusier: Projets d’architecture de Le Corbusier (Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1977. 36 pp. F22.20). At his death Le Corbusier left 32,000 architectural plans, drawings, and sketches and the Fondation inherited these. They have drawn up a complete inventory of the material and 25,000 have been microfilmed. This is a small printed catalogue to the riches they possess. The classification is by country and within each country by date. There is also an elementary subject index.

The city is formed as a mosaic of various elements which affect its attractiveness. These elements range from location attributes, through economic opportunities, to social aspects. Therefore, urbanity and urban planning should be considered in a multi-dimensional context. In the paper we address the problem of urban planning by Le Corbusier according to praxeological and system knowledge. From praxeological point of view an active human being takes his/her choice between various possibilities by preferring one of these possibilities to the others, and by manifesting it by her actions. The same applies to the design process. Due to this fact, the scientific design process can be treated as a systematic rational reconstruction of the designer’s behaviour. Such a reconstruction requires previous reflection on designer’s work, as well as some consideration and design experience, thus know-how knowledge based on methodological knowledge. In the paper several city visions of Le Corbusier, as well as the characteristics and organisation of his design process are analysed. Le Corbusier’s innovative design ideas resulted from industrialisation changes and motorisation accelerating progress, which gave foundation to a new urban array. This array based on strict geometric forms, regularity and repetition determining standard. Thanks to his theories, Le Corbusier established principles of modern city construction and planning. Although some doubts were expressed as to the scale of centralisation of the cities designed by him and his class-based conception, he was awarded that overall welfare of the individual living in a city was the quality of built environment. Therefore, his designed creations were not only functional but they also produced emotions. The analysis of his prolific design activities allows us to state that the organisation of his architectural and urban planning process was very efficient and complex. The city concepts proposed by him were the subject of analysis by generations of designers. Also now, they can still be the basis for modelling virtual and navigable cities by modern planners. Le Corbusier’s comprehensive approach to modern city planning showed that research activities, that is theoretical thinking, and production activities, that is practice, are linked methodically. Therefore, urban planning should be understood not only as a projection of the possibilities of architecture, but as a multidisciplinary process. Due to this fact, an urban plan, as a result of that process, should be a synthesis of various social, industrial and economic aspects.

<p>This thesis considers spatial and architectural language used in philosophical text to determine the value of a cross-disciplinary relationship between architecture and philosophy. It approaches architectural figure as more than just metaphor for philosophy, and proposes that philosophy relies on the spatial nature of architectural language to constitute itself. The case studies provided elucidate a realm where architecture and philosophy have been explored simultaneously; where architecture is used as a tool to develop philosophical propositions and where philosophical text generates architectural design. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Adolf Loos worked in this way, rethinking how architecture is done while rebuilding philosophical propositions. Wittgenstein’s work as an architect was not a break from philosophy but an exploration in architectural space that developed his philosophical perspective. The house he designed is considered here as an extension of the ‘visual room’, an aphorism about image forming in The Philosophical Investigations. Loos’s writing on an ethics of style is philosophy bound to a body of architectural work. His architecture, in particular the House for Josephine Baker, and its conflicts of modernity and the relationship between interior and exterior, is inextricably linked to his normative theories of how we should live. Maurice Merleau-Ponty defined phenomenology in spatial terms that depend heavily on the experience of architectural space. His description of the ‘phenomenal body’ and its ability to understand the ‘spatiality of a situation’ is evidence for an epistemological link between phenomenology and architecture. The architecture of Steven Holl is analysed for its reconstruction of Merleau-Pontian spatiality in the Residence for the Swiss Ambassador, a commission that offered Holl a generous affordance of space with which to explore this influence. The main philosophical text used in the thesis is the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre due to the largely ignored latent spatial nature of it. It is significant that the text relies on spatial relationships to convey its meaning. Sartre’s concepts have been defined, developed and implemented by architecture in the resulting design, ‘A House for Sartre’. The design builds on Sartrean concepts of the self, other people, objects in the world and consciousness. It does this by rethinking and rebuilding on this philosophy, while at the same time rethinking and rebuilding the architecture of the house, a domestic space. The programme of a ‘house’ offers concepts of domesticity as context for the design project, and this adds another dimension to the philosophy. The project pushes the limits of Sartre’s descriptions and tests his examples in the tangible realm of architecture. Through inhabitation of such an architecture, one can better gain an understanding of this philosophy. As Sartre so often appeals to his readers to inspect the state of their own consciousness, then perhaps most significantly, the architecture provides not only a conscious experience of the house, but an experience where inhabitants are conscious of their own consciousness in ‘A House for Sartre’.</p>

Since its two publications, 1948 and 1953, the Modulor has been incorporated as an anthropometric and human proportion reference until today as part of the design process heritage. Therefore, reliable metric information sources are needed, real data-based, useful in the architectural design process. Using documentary research, this critical essay deconstructs Modulor's attributes as a reference to the human scale, as it is based on a fanciful abstract drawing but not on real population stature measurements. Le Corbusier sought to justify the 2.20 meters height fitting to the human scale only considering an arm raised humanoid figure. Anthropometric databases are used from different sources, some French, where wide samplings indicate that height measurements considered by Le Corbusier's advisers, 1.75 and 1.83, do not correspond to population mean stature, 1.60-1.69, when the Modulor was made up. It was considered, in France, from the beginning of the physical anthropology of which anthropometry is a part, 18th century, until the trends of the 20th century. In addition, data from other countries during the 19th and 20th centuries also has through Le Corbusier´s lifespan. Human height is a variable measure, not standard. People can be 2.00 tall (Netherlands, 1996) or small, 1.49 (Guatemala, 1996). Neither the standing nor the seated body width was studied anthropometrically at all. Modulor besides is an excluding metric model in gender and ages. No more databases were analyzed, but those studies offer enough contrast between the abstract (Modulor) and the concrete (real people) height measurements. A large sample design, based on mean measure, is an erroneous criterion because it applies only to a population's small range. That is what Le Corbusier established with the Modulor to be the measure of all things but with fixed standard. Therefore, it is recommended to check other sources to corroborate it. The Modulor is a myth, so it is recommended to stop including it like a database or an anthropometric manual. As a human-scale option, it might be helpful for design learning as an incorrect criteria example.

Soft systems attempt to account for non-linear processes whose complexity derives from shifting interrelationships between elements. The move towards soft systems, whose stability is rooted in dynamism, represents a significant shift across disciplines with important implications for the way we approach architectural environments and materials. This article investigates the effects of physical and operational softness on the experience of architectural space through the lens of a recent installation using mycelium biocomposites, an emergent soft material. This contemporary exploration of architectural softness builds in new and technically sophisticated ways on earlier experiments in architectural softness that explored the promise of creating responsive and flexible architectures.

In this interview Lidewij Tummers explores issues relating to contemporary women’s experience of architectural space, including urban space. Drawing on her experience as an architect, and informed by feminist and other contemporary theorizations of space, Tummers seeks to find ways in which women can ‘journey’ more effectively through the built environment, finding practicable utopias, in which existing architectural codes might be challenged.

Christopher Long The New Space: Movement and Experience in Viennese Modern Architecture New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016, 246 pp., 130 color and 114 b/w illus. $75 (cloth), ISBN 9780300218282 Until recently, critical discussions of Viennese modernism have centered primarily on the fin de siecle. Major themes have included the Wagner school, the Secessionist movement, the Wiener Werkstatte, and the rejection or remaking of ornament and symbol. By contrast, Christopher Long's The New Space: Movement and Experience in Viennese Modern Architecture offers a fresh perspective by looking closely into spatial experiments within Viennese modernism from around 1910, with the waning of the Jugendstil, until 1938, when Hitler and the Nazis annexed Austria. Long traces the evolving ideas about space articulated in the writings and buildings of three Viennese architects—Oskar Strnad, Adolf Loos, and Josef Frank—and highlights their shared investments in conceiving spaces that might elicit perceptual sensitivity. Pursing this line, The New Space opens a new and significant chapter in the history of modernist space making. Of the book's three protagonists, Loos has received the most extensive scholarly interest, especially for his rejection of modern ornament and his Raumplan concept. By contrast, Frank has remained a relatively peripheral figure, despite growing attention to his distinctive approach to architectural space.1 Strnad is the least known. Aside from a few early monographs and a recent exhibition catalogue published in German, The New Space is the first major publication in English to examine his work in depth.2 In the course of ten chapters, Long weaves the three architects' individual experiments into an account of a shared quest to create affective spatial experience. Chapter 1 summarizes key debates about architectural space in contemporary German-speaking intellectual circles and lays the theoretical groundwork for the three architects' practice. Art historian August Schmarsow is a central figure in this discussion, given his influential assertion that the essence of architectural creation is the framing of space; everything else (facade, structure, mass, and ornament) is secondary, …

H. Allen Brooks has unearthed a wealth of letters, diaries, family records, school reports and unpublished sketches and drawings that document every facet of the formative years of 20th-century architect and urbanist Le Corbusier. The text examines every aspect of his education from preschool through to and including his training as a designer of ornamental watch cases and his early studies in decoration and architectural design. This was followed by extensive travel, studying in Paris and Berlin before returning home to La Chaux-de-Fonds to teach and practice architecture, interior decoration and furniture design. Finally in 1917 Le Corbusier moved to Paris, where he became an unsuccessful entrepreneur before turning his talents to writing, painting, architecture and urban design.

A Study on the Connection between Nature and Architectural Space in Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital Project

The paper poses the question about the planning modernization processes happened in Latin America, and about the role that disasters, and specifically earthquakes, played within them. In the case of Chile, earthquakes have been present all along its history. During the 20th century, some of them have been significant factors in the development of modernization process: Valparaiso, 1906, Talca 1928, among others. What kind of discussion about urban modernization did those disasters open, and how was modern planning perceived within them? The proposed hypothesis suggests that resilience, developed as a cultural feature, after a long exposure to earthquakes and others disasters, not only promotes the reconstruction processes, but also offers the opportunity to discuss urban models and paradigms. Following the way in which Schumpeter and others have put it (creative destruction), reconstruction processes have been occasions to promote already existing urban agendas or introduce new concepts, methods and paradigms. The Chillan earthquake, happened in Chile in January 1939, is proposed as an study case to examine those processes. The earthquake coincided with a political crises, involving social, economical and cultural dimensions. The reconstruction of Chillan and other cities in the region, opened a big discussion among local planners. This surpassed the technical domain and permeated into the media and the public opinion. The two main struggling forces were those of Karl Brunner disciples and Le Corbusier partisans. Both considered themselves as modern planning representatives, but conceiving this in very different ways. Karl Brunner (1887-1960) had visited Chile in 1929 and 1932. He delivered the first Latin American planning seminar at Universidad de Chile and did urban plans for the government and Santiago Municipality. He had set an agenda for urban modernization in the country, which had been developed by his disciples in the following years. Le Corbusier (1887-1965) on his side, had visited some Latin American countries (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay)in 1929, while Brunner was working in Chile. After the Chillan earthquake, a group of architects invited Le Corbusier to visit the country and have a leading role in the reconstruction process. Brunner disciples strongly opposed the idea, detonating a public controversy about the nature of modern planning. The paper suggests that this local discussion reflected tensions that went far beyond the local realm. They had to do with different conceptions about modernization processes and urban planning renovation. At the same time, this polarization, taking place within the experts’ realm, reflected a wider dispute about Latin America as a possible professional field for European or North American planners.

During my early introduction to architecture I found that I was motivated not only by matters pertaining to what architecture is, but also, to what it can do. Thus, the questions motivating this work derive from my education in architecture which, at their most rudimentary level, entail a deep fascination with the nature of space, and thus the problem of time. And, subsequently, a practical desire to understand the conditions that constituted experience, and thus perception, sensation and mind. My interest also developed from a general disposition towards others and world founded in principles of human equality and rights with respect to both freedom and responsibility. During my years practicing architecture, these questions as they were brought through the perspective of design continued to inspire me. At the same time, my interest in investigating these questions through theoretical and philosophical research persisted until my aspiration to engage in critical thought outpaced my desire to practice. Hence, a turn in career to work as an academic in the discipline of architecture and the area of architecture theory. This research may be perceived by some as situated outside the realm of architecture. However, this is not the case. My approach to architecture theory is not one that begins with a study of the object, or, for some, one might say the subject of architecture. That is, if the object is understood as the manifestation in thought, process or form of the building or built environment (real or conceived) itself; and if the subject is understood as the thought or idea emanating from the mind of the architect (as author). While there is much architecture theory advanced from this perspective lining my own bookshelves and utilized in my work as an educator. The concerns that have always called me towards thinking about architecture as the imagined and constructed world in which we live are those that query the very nature of concepts, notions, ideologies and intellectual constructions and beliefs upon which culture and society – architecture as both a cultural product and a social actor – are formed. This goes, as well, to the considerations that motivate my concern for people, not users or inhabitants as such, but as ontologically situated beings in the world. Accordingly, my work primarily deals with the content, history and effects of architecture as it relates to theories of space, time, the body, and cognition. Employing and developing theories and methods from disciplines including philosophy, cultural studies, literary theory, political, social and economic theory, cognitive psychology, and the neurosciences in the broadest sense. Admittedly, the nature of theoretical discourse has shown itself to be problematic over the past fifty-plus years; it has also proven to be transformative. Critical thinkers in the late 1960s developed a sustained critique of their philosophical predecessors – primarily in regard to Marx on one hand and Heidegger on the other – with a critique of social history and a displacement of metaphysics resulting in a repositioning of social and cultural discourse. Of course, the debate unfolded against the philosophical and aesthetic background of not only Marx and Heidegger, but also Nietzsche, Hegel and Freud on one hand, and Manet, Cézanne, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, Wagner and Debussy on the other. In architecture, the debate extended to Ruskin and Wölfflin, and to Wright and Corbusier, amongst others. This period, in itself, refers to an unprecedented artistic, scientific, economic, and technological mutation. Prevalent underpinnings remain identifiable, for instance an attack on the absolute nature of knowledge, which has brought about a fundamental rethinking of both the nature of consciousness, as well as a critique of science. As Foucault suggested, one of the great problems that arose in the 1950s was that of the political status of science and the ideological functions that it could serve. Another rebuke can be seen as the challenge to the primacy of truth as an adequation of subject to thing. This culminated in a radical critique of subjectivity resulting, some years later, in the so-called post-humanist-subject. In order to be rid of the subject itself, Foucault, in ‘Truth and Power’ (1977) argued that it was necessary to dispense with the essentialist subject both at the extremes and in-between the enlightenment’s humanist subject and its ideals of knowledge as self-constituting; as well as phenomenology’s fabrication of the subject as evolving through and embodying the course of history. Reflecting on this history, that post-war moment of theory, one cannot help but be struck by the complexity and the ambiguity of the adventure; qualities most evident in the fact that new spaces and new means of writing and drawing, of thinking and making emerged. Ideas that modified our understanding of both communication and the image, of both space and time. Discourses, when combined with a reflexivity within certain architectures and certain texts, rendered them somehow indefinitely open. In the 1960s, literary theory transformed thought on both sides of the Atlantic. For instance, Roland Barthes’s de-sanctioning of the biography-centric author, or the removal of authority from the author turned scriptor in ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), or Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality with ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’ (1969). These works impacted our thinking on linguistic phenomena and the origin (or non-originality) of textual content and further, on the invention of new forms of writing and affective relations. Such theories informed and redirected thinking in architecture, for instance, Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas’s work ‘Semiotics and Architecture: Ideological Consumption or Theoretical Work’ was published in the first issue of Oppositions, an architectural journal produced between 1973 and 1984 by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York. With this, the influence of the French intellectual climate as well as the Italian discourse on semiotics was brought to the centre of Anglo-American discourse in architecture theory. The intellectual trajectory along which this history is traced and the terrain on which it now takes place will be recognisable to anyone familiar with the work of such thinkers as Henri Bergson, Louis Althusser, Gabriel Tarde, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and, of course, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and Maurizio Lazzarato. The importance of the radically original works that emerged in the seventies and eighties cannot be overestimated, for instance: Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and his lectures at the Collège de France, The Birth of Biopolitics, and Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These works, translated into English shortly after their original publication, were being read throughout many disciplines outside of philosophy including schools of architecture, and their influence can only be said to have increased. I share the above brief history so as to situate my work for those less familiar with the work of theory – whether architecture or otherwise – as this, too, is the intellectual trajectory and exploration along which my own work, as well as many of my contemporaries, travels. In my own work, the influence of the nineteenth/ twentieth-century French vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson – the great thinker of time and, as Walter Benjamin suggested, a seminal source to consult in considering the problem of experience – has quite profoundly informed my thinking and shaped its outcomes. Both with respect to time and space as well as body and brain, his influence is reflected in the title of this volume. That said, this is not a collection of chapters on Bergson’s philosophy. It is a collection on critical concepts I believe to be of importance for contemporary critique, delivered through topics that are relevant – at times directly and at others indirectly – to our current moment. This is a work of great commitment and it has sustained itself over time. It is my hope the reader finds some value in this as well.

In the 1960s, the theoretical concept of a megastructure - an extremely large structure - arose in architecture, which predicted the further development of architecture in practice. The concept of megastructure became more complicated and gained depth, combining progressive architectural concepts and theories of the second half of the 20th century ("open form", "indeterminacy", structuralism, architectural metabolism, etc.). But deepening the individual provisions of the concept introduced by F. Maki, one of the defining characteristics of a megastructure – its multifunctionality – did not receive further development among theorists of the middle of the 20th century. Also, in our opinion, it is important to emphasize that the excessive size of the building is accompanied by the extreme complexity of the project program and the construction of the architectural form. We traced the evolution of the concept, which began with the design of cities as a single structure, and spread to the design of buildings and the organization of city fragments. The border of the 20th and 21st centuries is filled with the practice of building super-large buildings and complexes, the construction of which requires enormous economic efforts of the country, the introduction of technical innovations and the attraction of particularly large investments. We practically witnessed the emergence of a new typology of buildings that combines architecture and urban planning, and for which in most cases the term F. Maki - megastructure is used. Architectural theory responds to the problem of super-large structures with the concepts of Groβform, Bigness architecture and megaform. Each of the concepts considered in the study offers its own strategy for solving the problem of gigantism (beyond the boundaries of classical architectural methods) - a megastructural approach (F. Maki), an approach based on a large-scale architectural theme (O. Ungers), a topographic approach (K. Frampton). All presented concepts combine the determination of the city-forming role of super-large buildings, their consideration as an effective means of solving the problems of the modern city.

Le Corbusier, quien durante los años 1947 y 1953 diseñó algunas de las obras arquitectónicas y urbanas más importantes del siglo XX, también desarrolló una de las creaciones artísticas más interesantes de toda su carrera: el Poema del Ángulo Recto. En esta obra, Le Corbusier reflexionaba acerca de aspectos relacionados con la creación que nunca antes había expresado. Él siempre atribuyó a este poema este papel fundamental, considerándolo como una síntesis de su pensamiento y de su actividad creativa. En este sentido, el presente artículo se propone desvelar, a través del estudio del Poema del Ángulo Recto, pero también del análisis de sus escritos, proyectos, obras, dibujos y apuntes de viaje, ese lugar imaginario que precede y en el que se asienta su actividad creativa, con el objetivo de conocer mejor no sólo su obra, sino también aspectos acerca del proceso creativo del que surge esta y de su pensamiento.

An architectural approach through Le Corbusier’s groundings Roughly, all through history of mankind, solar solutions in constructions always have been purchased fiercely during periods of energy crisis, mostly when non-renewable energy sources were endangered in some way.For this paper an architect of the 20th century was chosen, Le Corbusier, as a good example of how to design and build with the sun. Not only he knew how to harvest the sun for comfort issues, balancing wisely natural light and heat (gathering and storing heat for cold periods, or protecting openings from harsh sun beams), but he also dominated the light to valorize shapes and volumes. Here one of his famous project: the “Unité d’habitation de Marseille” is analyzed to show a well conceived architecture in urban area. Le Corbusier teach us awesome lessons on how to take sides of so called “passive” solutions and fully merge them in architecture, creating not only energy efficient buildings but an astounding architecture. This study focuses on a particular building to point out comparatively simple solutions in architecture and looks forward to the possibility of sprawling such solutions with a huge potentiality in energy savings. It also tries to demonstrate that good design must consider architecture ruling an ensemble of fields, including urban inclusion and respect to local social and geographic peculiarities. Harvesting solar energy in architecture doesn’t mean necessarily adding technical devices to buildings but certainly depends on designers’ postures and abilities to integrate technical solutions into an artistic and aesthetical whole.

The architectural treatise “De Architectura”, written around 20 BC by the roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, is the most recognized and analyzed architectural treatise in the history of mankind. Particularly in the Renaissance period, the Italian artists have shown great interest in Vitruvian treatise, upon which they have based their own architectural treatise. Through the Renaissance recognition of Vitruvian architectural theory, the European classical architecture acquired the tradition of proportional design called the “module system” as it is apparent in Le Corbusier's concept of “modulor”. On the other hand, the true image of Vitruvius and the historical context of his treatise are yet to be thoroughly understood. Reading “De Architetura”, it becomes obvious that Vitruvius often introduced Greek terms, when he describes technical matters in detail. However, when he draws examples from other regions such as Egypt, Persia or Cyrene, he uses Latin terms and the topic remains to be superficial, omitting details (Tab. 1-2). From this fact, it is obvious that his references for writing his treatise were limited to Latin and Greek sources. Looking outside of the Greco-Roman culture, we see that Vitruvius' architectural theory is hardly his original thought. For instance, the analogy between a temple and a human body is already existent in Ancient Egypt. In the so-called “Book of Temple”, there is a specification that certain column styles are to be differentiated between the male and the female deities. The archaeological evidences confirm the validity of this statement. Other archaeological evidences show that the gender was not the only aspect applied to the columns. Some columns had a funerary aspect, others acted as emblems of the land, etc. In the case of Ancient Egypt, one style gained multiple meanings as time went by, so that, at the end, the columns formed several groups to express different aspects in variety of situations. In contrast, Vitruvius limited and applied the concept of gender to only three orders, despite the fact that he admits the existence of other styles. The fact that these three orders originated from different regions and eras, seems to indicate that this group of symbolism cannot be earlier than the mid-5th Century BC, and also that the varieties of symbolic meanings also existed for the classical orders. In this sense, Vitruvius consciously chose and concentrated on the gender of the columns among other possible symbolisms of the columns. The module system described by Vitruvius may also have an Ancient Egyptian origin. In Egypt, there are some tantalizing evidences that show the use of module for elevation drawings of naos-shrines (Fig. 1-2). It shows that the width of the post is given one unit and other larger parts are given the multiples of the unit, and the smaller parts mostly the unit fractions. As for the Vitruvian system, the Doric system correlates with the Egyptian, whereas the Ionian system, the major dimensions of the building, which is defined by the primary module (= column diameter) as in the Doric system, becomes the secondary modules for the smaller parts that surrounding them. As a result, the Ionic system allows the architect to adjust a selected group of dimensions without disturbing the overall appearance. Although the cases considered in this paper comprises only a modest part of the treatise, it shows that Vitruvius unconsciously adopted the architectural philosophy of other culture, particularly the ancient Egyptian. In order to escape from the illusion that Vitruvius created and to understand the true context of the Vitruvian treatise, it is essential to reassess the Vitruvian architectural theory from the view of his contemporary and preceding architectural cultures.