Letters To A Young Architect

by Christopher Benninger

  This trend coincides with the emergence of new façade technologies. Stainless steel clips now allow us to paste thin sheets of stone across broad strips of wall. Aluminum and ACP sheets offer a variety of easy-to-clip-on, easy-to-clean surfaces.

  Thus, there is collusion between need and opportunity. Just at the time when the market is demanding a blank wall, the market is supplying a plethora of cladding options to decorate blank walls. Architects are becoming exterior designers, while interior designers are thrust with the more complex tasks of creating moods, creating ambience and integrating diverse kinds of lighting, air conditioning and utilities.

  Instead of a trap, this can become a new challenge. As architects we must rebel against defeatism and the velvet box.

  In retrospect I feel the World Architecture Festival was more of a memorial meeting bidding farewell to poetry, to art, to meaning and to architecture itself!

  (Article for Buildotech magazine published in June 2010)

  Letter

  Le Corbusier: The Modern Project and the Challenge

  My subject here embraces two centuries of technological, artistic, economic and social history. I refer to the modern age, of which Le Corbusier is a symbol and an icon. The connections between technology, urbanization, society and aesthetics are complex and lengthy, but our attention spans are short. Perhaps this is where Le Corbusier and his contemporaries excelled over us. They could compress into one page all these factors, trends and the artifacts resulting from them. My intention in this discussion with you is to bring us all onto that page and to pick up the journey where Le Corbusier left off.

  To do this I must make sweeping assumptions about economic and technological developments that span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, culminating in a movement that got formalized in the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM), of which Le Corbusier was an important member.

  There were many other members of this movement including Hendrik Berlage, Walter Gropius, Jose Lluís Sert, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer to name just a few. Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, Pier Luigi Nervi and many more were a part of the movement, though not formal members of groups. In India, Balkrishna Doshi, Achyut Kanvinde, Charles Correa and the devoted team in Chandigarh nurtured the movement in its early years.

  One could even date the movement back to 1894, when Otto Wagner took over the Vienna School of Architecture and published ‘Modern Architecture,’ in which he asserted, ‘Our starting point for artistic creation is to be found only in modern life.’ He influenced a generation of modernists including Peter Behrens, Adolf Loos and José Olbrich. It was in Behrens’ studio that Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and many others found their moorings in the new aesthetic.

  The underlying forces that drove the modern movement are more compelling today than ever before, yet we seem to have lost our bearings and drifted into an architecture that celebrates the effete and the spectacular, and relishes pure amusement park stunts. Even our view of Le Corbusier is one of a man who created monumental sculptures, rather than of a man with a social mission to drive design and technology toward the solutions of a rapidly urbanizing world. This is our self-inflicted ignorance, along with a fascination for things foreign, and things strange, that has diverted us from our professional mandate.

  I want to drive home the point that Le Corbusier was not a ‘stand-alone’ artistic figure. He was part of a vast social movement composed of many revolutionary people and organizations. All of these people had a common goal of harnessing the forces of technology to the common good of common people, who were being uprooted from their rural existence and thrown into a new urban environment that could not fulfill their basic human needs. What was happening a century ago in Europe and America is happening in the emerging economies today.

  This human crisis inspired Dickens to write of working class London in the nineteenth century and it is the condition of masses of Asians today. This situation inspired Karl Marx to contemplate the organization of society around modes of production. All knew that a New Man and a New Society must be invented. Le Corbusier conceptualized this in terms of a New Culture, expressed through functional and efficient artifacts.

  Perhaps the first instance of this concern being put in the forefront was the Werkbund movement in Germany. The movement understood that the role of the designer was to take products whose costly production made them exclusive possessions of the rich and to mass-produce them at low cost, bringing them to the doorsteps of the poor. Early modernists like the Belgian Henry Van de Velde, founder of the Weimar School of Art, stated, ‘A completely useful object, created by the principles of rational and logical construction, can only capture the essence of beauty.’

  Le Corbusier was not a ‘stand-alone’ artistic figure. He was part of a vast social movement composed of many revolutionary people and organizations.

  Thus, there was a schism in the art world between those like John Ruskin and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who saw the machine as an enemy of art, and those who saw it as a friend with great potential. The new breed saw the machine world as offering great opportunities for mankind.

  In fact it was in the Weimar School of Art where the links between practical workshops, design and consumers was first created, as the products of the students were sold through commercial outlets. Gropius took over the Weimar School of Art in 1919 and soon after founded the Bauhaus there. Under his leadership the marriage between industry, art, architecture, design, and town planning emerged.

  Thus, the modern movement grew out of a sea change in technologies and in modern production, which had driven rapid urbanization, pushing masses of people into unplanned and inept city forms that could not offer even a modicum of civilized living and culture to the New Man.

  Early modernist concerns with the concept of ‘the city’ can be seen in Tony Garnier’s 1901 drawings for La Cité Industrielle (published 1917-18); in Antonio Sant’Elia’s utopian design of La Città Nuova (1912-14); and in Victor Bourgeois’ garden settlement, La Cité Moderne (1922-25), around the same year that Le Corbusier began releasing his images of Le Plan Voisin for Paris.

  The modernists discovered that the solution lay in technology itself and not in sentimental reflections of bygone times. They knew that designs pretending to be Greek Temples or Roman Forums were lies. They branded these lies as ‘Effetism.’

  Le Corbusier’s edict, ‘A house is a machine for living in’ articulates this new understanding and can be validly applied to the city. He understood that there was a complete integration between art, architecture and city planning. He saw the need for a new aesthetic, a new way of building and new assumptions about urbanism. As a group the modernists broadly envisioned that change could not be segmental, or part by part. It had to be sweeping, and in that sense revolutionary. The vision was to create a new culture, wherein an uprooted humanity addressed ancient needs in totally new settings and contexts, with totally new solutions, tools and environments. The movement saw ‘design’ as the critical intervention, not as an end in itself. They were driven to design a new culture that addressed a plethora of new behaviors. They set out on a mission to do this through a series of new design interventions.

  The modernists also realized that ‘machine art,’ and indeed affordable art, had to be simple, minimalist and rationally produced through logical design. In this realization lay the genesis of the search for a new aesthetic, mentioned above, where architects like Mies van der Rohe proclaimed ‘Less is More’. Several decades earlier in 1896 another new aesthetic had emerged from America, through the voice of Louis Sullivan, who asserted that ‘Form Follows Function’. The steel and glass structures, the horizontal lines, and the appropriate use of motifs established the ‘Chicago School’ of modern architecture. Sullivan’s student, Frank Lloyd Wright used Sullivan’s slogan as his motto. The 1910 publication of Wright’s wo
rk in Europe invigorated Berlage, who directed the young Le Corbusier in 1912 to study it.

  Thus, the Modern movement collected a band of like-minded revolutionaries who knew their history and where they stood in the light of history. They saw the light and they grabbed the moment.

  Yet, we have lost sight of history and been blinded by false and frivolous fashions. That is why I have come here to Chandigarh today.

  I have come here to ask you, young architects, to Grab the Flame of Modernism and to Run.

  I have come to ask you, sincere teachers of architecture, to inculcate into the teaching of architecture an understanding of history, knowledge of social change and the meaning of aesthetics.

  I call upon all of you to stop the monster of effetism; stop making iconic blunders in the name of design and get back on track with rational and logical design processes.

  We have the huge challenge of a mushrooming urban society growing right in front of our eyes and we are sleeping. Out of this sea change I wish to isolate two facts:

  First, modernism, or the modern architecture that Le Corbusier championed, is primarily concerned with humanist values in enabling an agrarian society to adapt to an urban environment; modern architecture has primarily addressed itself to alleviating human suffering in overcrowded conditions with no educational, recreational, hygiene or health facilities that ensure a minimally acceptable milieu for human living. It is focused on the creation of a New Man through a New Culture. Modern architecture has also championed appropriate technology and a new aesthetic. That is what we see, but that is not what lies under the skin. What lies under the skin is an agenda, a set of values and a movement. What lies under the skin is the intention to create a new, urban, industrialized society.

  Second, I wish to say that Le Corbusier was part of a movement which saw the potential of taking away the drudgery of mass-production and the evils of urbanization and turning them into a tool for the good. He realized that a new culture and a new civilization must be created around a new technology, a new aesthetics and a new social reality.

  The idea that industry can mass-produce everyday necessities at a hundredth of the cost of hand-tooled elite artifacts, and thereby bring a better life to more people, fired the Weimar School of Art, the Werkbund Movement, the Bauhaus, the Art Nouveau Movement, the Modern Architecture Research Society (MARS), the CIAM, the Metabolist Group and Team 10. It molded the thoughts of Charles Eames and created the foundation for the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad.

  Moreover, the idea that design is a rational process grabbed the modernists. They saw a link between the stating of a problem; the stating of performance criteria; the creation of sketch options; the evaluation of those options and making rational design decisions through drawing and modeling simulations as a correct process. The later modernists, through Team 10, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and the Metabolist Group, promoted the need for better contextual understanding and a more specific focus on the users of buildings and artifacts.

  Le Corbusier’s legacy to us lies in his heroic efforts in writing, in painting, in furniture design, in designing buildings and in planning cities. His gift lies in networking, in coordinating and in organizing large groups of people in a manner that touched us all. His intention was the search for a New Culture that would generate a New Man.

  Le Corbusier was neither an architect nor a painter, nor a city planner. He had no formal training in any of these disciplines. He was a modern man who saw the need to design a new culture and a new society. Design was his tool and his medium of change. More than anyone, he threw out effetism. He replaced romanticism with objective reality as his life’s narrative. More than anyone else he saw the dangers of nostalgic and romantic aesthetics as the Trojan Horse of reactionaries. Effete design is the thin edge driven by crass, self-serving minds to infiltrate the search for a new society. For Le Corbusier effete art and architecture were like a cancerous growth destroying society. I urge you, young architects, to pick up the gauntlet that he has thrown to you. Reject effetism, reject stupid iconic designs, start thinking and be rational. Have a design process and follow it.

  We must tear ourselves away from the image of Le Corbusier as being a stand-alone, one-of-a-kind man. This Great Man Theory has deflected our attention from his true worth with a false role model. It has led young architects to think that becoming famous is the goal of architects.

  The yearning to become famous has lured Indian architects to cheating and to copying monumental, ugly stunts created by megalomaniacs in the West. A mercantile architecture driven by builders and developers has replaced the search for urban solutions and the creation of a relevant urban aesthetic. This trend takes one back to the International Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, when it destroyed the seeds of the modern movement in America, known as the Chicago School of architecture. Recovery from this devastating blow took thirty years of reconstruction and a new European leadership to move forward again.

  In the second decade of the new millennium we find ourselves back in the 1893 conundrum. Doing something ‘different’, something ‘unusual’, something ‘spectacular’ has replaced our search for an appropriate aesthetic, appropriate technology and dreams of a New Society. This is the tragedy of our times and of our profession. Le Corbusier epitomized the heroic characteristics of his age. He exemplified courage and daring. He used publicity artfully to push the modern agenda, not his own image.

  We must see Le Corbusier as a simple man who was part of a movement involving a large circle of devoted workers. We must see ourselves as his fellow workers. We must join the movement; get back to the basics of our role and our life’s work. We have forsaken his mission, his values and work. Let us pick up the threads where he left off. I call upon you, young architects of India, to make your own beginning and revive the spirit of the Modern Movement. Give purpose to yourselves and meaning to your work. Walk in the true footsteps of Le Corbusier.

  (Le Corbusier Memorial lecture ar CCA, Chandigarh, Saturday, October 10, 2009; published by Architecture+Design in its December 2010 issue)

  By placing Le Corbusier on a pedestal we are separating his quest from our own; by idealizing him as a maverick and an oddity, we are distancing ourselves from his reality; by making him the one-off case, we are lowering his and our own place in history; we are estranging his duties and ours.

  In Search of the City

  Letter

  The Principles of Intelligent Urbanism

  The Principles of Intelligent Urbanism (PIU) are a set of axioms, laying down a value-based framework, within which participatory planning can proceed. After being reviewed and amended by stakeholders, the PIU act as a consensual charter based on which actual planning decisions can be constructively debated, evaluated and confirmed. The PIU emerged from several decades of my urban planning practice in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. They formed the foundation upon which the new capital plan for Bhutan was based. The ten Principles of Intelligent Urbanism are:

  Principle One:

  A Balance with Nature emphasizes the distinction between utilizing resources and exploiting them. It focuses on a threshold which, if crossed, would lead to deforestation, soil erosion, aquifer deterioration, silting, and flooding. These, operating together in urban systems, would destroy life support systems. The principle promotes environmental assessment of ecosystems to identify fragile zones, threatened natural systems and habitats that can be enhanced through conservation, density, land use and open space planning. This principle promotes the employment of ‘green practices’ in city making.

  Principle Two:

  A Balance with Tradition integrates plan interventions with existing cultural assets, respecting traditional patterns and precedents of style. It respects heritage precincts and historical assets that weave the past and the future of cities into a continuit
y of values.

  Principle Three:

  Appropriate Technology promotes materials, building techniques, infrastructural systems and construction management that are consistent with people’s capacities, geo-climatic conditions, local resources, and suitable capital investments. The PIU propose integrating interfaces between the physical spread of urban utilities and services, watershed catchments, urban administrative wards and electoral constituent boundaries.

  Principle Four:

  Conviviality encourages social interaction through public domains, in a hierarchy of places, devised for personal reflection, for engaging friendship and romance, for household, neighborhood, community and civic life. It promotes the protection, enhancement and creation of ‘open public spaces’ which are accessible to all.

  Principle Five:

  Efficiency promotes a balance between the consumption of urban resources like energy, time and finance, with planned achievements in comfort, safety, security, access, tenure and hygiene levels. It encourages optimum sharing of land, roads, facilities and infrastructural networks to reduce per household costs, increasing affordability and civic viability. The principle finds a link between access to basic, ‘user end’, infrastructure services and the per capita life cycle costs of these services.