Architecture and Movement

the Dynamic Experience of Buildings and Landscapes

Peter Blundell Jones, Mark Meagher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317655299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The experience of movement, of moving through buildings, cities, landscapes and in everyday life, is the only involvement most individuals have with the built environment on a daily basis. User experience is so often neglected in architectural study and practice. Architecture and Movement tackles this complex subject for the first time, providing the wide range of perspectives needed to tackle this multi-disciplinary topic.

Organised in four parts it:

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• documents the architect's, planner's, or designer's approach, looking at how they have sought to deploy buildings as a promenade and how they have thought or written about it.

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• concentrates on the individual's experience, and particularly on the primacy of walking, which engages other senses besides the visual.

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• engages with society and social rituals, and how mutually we define the spaces through which we move, both by laying out routes and boundaries and by celebrating thresholds.

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• analyses how we deal with promenades which are not experienced directly but via other mediums such as computer models, drawings, film and television.

The wide selection of contributors include academics and practitioners and discuss cases from across the US, UK, Europe and Asia. By mingling such disparate voices in a carefully curated selection of chapters, the book enlarges the understanding of architects, architectural students, designers and planners, alerting them to the many and complex issues involved in the experience of movement.

PART 1 Moving through buildings and landscapes The designer’s perspective

1.0 INTRODUCTION TO PART 1

DOI: 10.4324/9781315764771-1

Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

Figure 1.0.1 Villa Malaparte 1937, by Adalberto Libera, on the coast of the Italian island of Capri overlooking the Mediterranean, a site discussed by Peter Wilson in Chapter 1.10

Source: Photo Russell Light

We begin this book by looking at movement from the point of view of designers and their apologists, to reveal what they have said about it and what were their stated intentions. The contributions range from traditional works of theory intended to propagate ways of doing architecture to reflective statements by current practitioners, and for convenience we have placed them in chronological order. Being only a quarter of the book, this section can hardly be comprehensive: indeed, it reveals a potentially enormous field that could grow into an encyclopaedic work. Here, we can only dip into this ocean of material, choosing for variety of period and of approach, while also presenting some of the cast of the invited lecture series at Sheffield that first prompted us to undertake the book.¹

An obvious start was the earliest book of theory and the foundation of the classical tradition: Vitruvius. In Chapter 1.1, he is considered, along with the writings of his Renaissance followers Alberti and Palladio. Remarkable here is a lack of discussion about the experience of movement, except in terms of the most basic convenience. There is, in contrast, vastly more on the orders and correct proportions. Yet, reading between the lines and adding the interpretations of modern classical scholars, one sees that progress through buildings and awareness of the visual sequences must have been essential. The reasons for the lack of discussion seem to have been twofold: first, that these books were dedicated to advice for the architect on how to achieve a building as a physical object, with all its symbolic and ornamental apparatus, and, second, that the standard building types and technology were relatively stable and well established, along with the habits that sustained them, and so the general sense of propriety in the ordering of spaces could mostly go unquestioned.

Questions of route and progression must also have been important in medieval buildings, especially in the transitions from the profane to the sacred in Gothic cathedrals, and yet here there is even less specific theory, and one has to read between the lines of The Rule of St Benedict or examine the spatial arrangements from the plan of St Gall to deduce what must have been important.² The greatest retrospective apologist for medieval architecture was Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-duc, whose ten-volume Dictionnaire Raisonné, with its wonderful engravings, though pragmatic and rational in tone, is still an essential gateway into that world,³ and we reproduce in translation in Chapter 1.2 his description of Cloître, Cloister. Its position and squareness are well described, but not so much its essential centrality and echo of the paradise garden. When it comes to the contemplative role of the cloister as refuge from the world and centre of virtue, he resorts to quoting a medieval source, adding an inner sample of earlier history.

The beginning of architecture as an academic subject, with attendant detailed theory, belongs to France and the eighteenth century, moving from the Académie Royale to the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the Ecole Polytechnique.⁴ The courses at the Beaux Arts grew into a model of architectural education that prevailed worldwide, until the takeover by the modern movement about 60 years ago with its Bauhaus-based courses. The rise of architectural theory so engendered included ideas about movement explicitly described by the word marche, which was used as a critical term in judging the all-important Beaux Arts competition projects from at least 1828. Arthur Drexler explains:

The word marche meant, literally, ‘spot where the foot is placed’, ‘action of placing one foot forward, then the other, to proceed in some direction’, as in the marching of troops. Figuratively, as a ‘manner of proceeding according to a certain order’, it was commonly used to denote the sequence of images in a poem or of action in a novel, the progress of a piece of music or of the moves in a game of chess. . . . It must have denoted the experience of the building under analysis imagined as if one were walking and looking down the principal enfilade. Marche did not mean the abstract layout of the plan, for which the Section d'Architecture used the term parti. Like marche, parti was derived from a common phrase, prendre parti (to take a stand). Parti designated the conceptual disposition . . . whether a theater foyer have a main staircase at the centre or two at the sides. The parti pertained to the architect, the marche to his design, so the Section d'Architecture could note, on the one hand the originality of a competitor's parti and on the other the grandeur and simplicity of the project's marche.⁵

Charles Garnier's Opéra in Paris is one of the most important products of the Beaux Arts tradition and of Beaux Arts thinking. Built by imperial command, it was also one of the major monuments of its time, and it played a key role in Haussmann's reorganisation of the city. It further marked the high point in the evolution of opera as a social art and ritual, becoming the international model for the building type. The compelling reason for including the building here is Garnier's remarkable book Le théâtre, which describes its design and operation and the intentions behind it in great detail, starting with the entries and vestibules and moving on to the lobbies and stairs, before dealing with auditorium and stage. Readers will notice that as much attention is given to the experience of the crowd as to the performance they are coming to see, and that concern for convenience of circulation is more than balanced by an explicit desire to bring about the optimum social ritual. With our limited space, we have chosen as a sample in Chapter 1.3 about half of Chapter 4, Staircases, because the main stair is the very heart and centre of the building.

In England of the same period, which had been enriched by the Empire and industry, both financial resources and architectural effort went into the country house, again an elaborate social organism providing stages for persons of various genders and classes to play out their roles.⁶ It was scrutinised at the end of the century by Hermann Muthesius (1861–1927), an attaché to the German Embassy from 1896, who went home to write the best and most detailed history of the period, Das englische Haus, in three volumes, published in 1903 and 1904.⁷ He admired particularly the architects of the Arts and Crafts Movement, presenting their honest simplicity as a nascent functionalism, and after his return he became an adviser to the Prussian government, and then he was the first president of the Deutsche Werkbund from 1910 to 1916. He was simultaneously the successful architect of several country houses in and around Berlin, following the principles established in his famous book, but drawing also on German vernacular and building methods.⁸ Another book, Wie baue ich mein Haus (How I build my house), published in 1917, was intended for the guidance of clients. It shows concern with room relationships, including how one moves from one room to another, and concentration on the social niceties of a society still dependent on servants. We include as Chapter 1.4 two short chapters, 12 and 13, from the middle of the book, about how the house is approached and about the circulation within it.

With Chapter 1.6, we move on 12 years to the modern movement. Le Corbusier merits first place for his explicit description of the promenade architecturale and his exemplification of it in the Villa Savoye of 1929, perhaps his most famous work. Every architect knows the folded ramp at the heart of the house, which leads from the ground-floor entrance to the main rooms of the first floor, then into the outside air and on up to the roof and a framed view (see Figure 1.0.1):⁹ it engendered half a century of ramp fantasies from other architects. In everyday use, such a long ascent or descent might prove irksome, displacing inhabitants on to the staircase, but its dramatic effect imagined from drawings and photographs, the main means of its dissemination, is unforgettable. As well as demonstrating the conceptual rethink presented by the five points, the Villa Savoye as published represented the interior rather than the façade as the essential architectural experience, prompting Sigfried Giedion to adopt it as an example of the fourth dimension.¹⁰ In our text in Chapter 1.6, Flora Samuel, who has already written a whole book about the promenade,¹¹ sets Le Corbusier's statements in the general context of his work and theory, adding layers of meaning, as well as noting some of the paradoxes.

Figure 1.0.1 Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye 1929, on the upper ramp

Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

The Swedish modernist Gunnar Asplund (1885–1940) was born the same year as Le Corbusier and initiated a modernist revolution under his influence with the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930,¹² but Asplund had already built his more classical Stockholm City Library of 1920–8, with one of the most powerful entry sequences in twentieth-century architecture (Figures 1.0.2–4).¹³ The building centres on a clerestory-lit circular drum that grows out of a larger cube, and it is entered by an axial staircase penetrating through several layers to the very centre, arriving in front of the librarian's desk. Asplund had been interested in spatial sequences from the start of his career, and they occur throughout his work, especially at Stockholm's Woodland Cemetery, whose design he shared with Sigurd Lewerentz. However, this article of 1923 does not concern his own work: rather, it examines that of colleagues building at the Gothenburg Exhibition. His critique, written for Sweden's leading architectural journal of the time, concentrates almost entirely on the effects of the spatial sequence. We make no suggestion of ‘influence’, for the Stockholm Library concept was already long determined. Rather, it is a case of common interests: Asplund was also, in this year, just completing Skandia Cinema, the work of his most dedicated to powers of illusion.

Figure 1.0.2 Gunnar Asplund, Stockholm City Library 1921–8: view on approach

Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

Figure 1.0.3 Gunnar Asplund, Stockholm City Library 1921–8: view on the main stairs looking towards the great drum and librarian's desk

Source: Photograph by Peter Bl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Moving through buildings and landscapes: the designer’s perspective
• Part 2 Movement as experienced by the individual
• Part 3 Movement as social and shared
• Part 4 The representation of movement
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index