Revolt and Reform in Architecture's Academy

Urban Renewal, Race, and the Rise of Design in the Public Interest

William Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317307891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Revolt and Reform in Architecture's Academy uniquely addresses the complicated relationship between architectural education and urban renewal in the 1960s, which paved the way for what is today known as public interest design. Through an examination of curricular reforms at Columbia University's and Yale University's schools of architecture in the 1960s, this book translates the "urban crisis" through the experiences of two influential groups of architecture students, as well as their contributions to design's lexicon.

The book argues that urban renewal and campus expansion half a century ago recast architectural education at two schools whose host cities, New York and New Haven, were critical sites for political, social, and urban upheaval in America. The urban challenges of that time are the same challenges rapidly growing cities face today—access, equity, housing, and services.

As architects, architects in training, and architecture students continue to wrestle with questions surrounding how design may serve a broadly defined public interest, this book is a timely assessment of the forces that have shaped the debate.

1 Architecture’s Academy

Beaux-Arts and Bauhaus Legacies

The story of architecture’s academy in America – the pedagogies and practices of architectural education – is the story of two dominant approaches to teaching design and how to articulate space. The Beaux-Arts approach, after the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where scores of American architects had trained since the mid-nineteenth century, represented one pedagogy. The Bauhaus, named after the influential German art, industrial design, and architecture school from which many instructors and students had emigrated prior to 1945, represented another. For the most part, the multi-platform curricula represented by these approaches were reduced to a contest between, respectively, traditional and progressive thought, in both art and politics, in their American versions. Notions of historic precedent, monumentality, and civility on one hand contrasted with instruction that emphasized craft, community, materiality, and social issues on the other. At the core of both the Beaux-Arts and Bauhaus systems of architectural training, however, was the idea that architecture remained a professional culture outside of society with an insular, tribal language and methodology operating as a hybrid between fine art instruction, engineering, craft, and philosophy.

Although the École des Beaux-Arts was officially founded in 1819, it represented a 25-year consolidation of the Académie Royale d’Architecture (founded in 1671) and the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (founded in 1648).¹ As a royal charter and as an elite school of fine arts, the École des Beaux-Arts’ architecture division centered on teaching students how to design buildings of authority or civic necessity such as military barracks, Greek temples, clock towers, or, palaces. Accordingly, historians of the École have described the methodological focus as “rationalist” in the twentieth century and, perhaps more accurately, it has been described as a methodology founded on “reason” after the French Enlightenment.²

Les élèves, or, its students, having been sponsored by the patron of an atelier and having passed a four-part entrance exam, would find themselves at the base of a pedagogical pyramid upon matriculation. They advanced by participating in competitions (concours d’emulation) that assessed sketching (esquisses) and more formal rendering abilities (projets rendus). After 1876, the ability to analyze the Classical orders – the éléments analytiques – became the third component of the concours methodology. To advance to the next level, students took on additional concours that focused on construction methods in stone, iron, wood, and general principles. The charrette served as the system’s primary process of design and final evaluation, which reinforced the Beaux-Arts ethos of careful and decisive mastery of historical models mapped onto selected programs. Named after the cart that would collect student work for review, this brief charrette period forced students to work against an artificial deadline during which they developed their parti, or scheme, for a project into something more formal. Judged by a panel of professionals, work completed during a charrette would be then loaded into the cart, which passed through the atelier at a prescribed time. It is at this intermediate level that students spent several years within their ateliers while working part-time. At any point, after completing some study at this level, the student could be called an ancien élève, a designation that set him apart professionally from other architects who needed only purchase a patent to practice as an “architect.”³

Between the projet rendu and the esquisses, students developed a working knowledge of how building plans related to their massing and elevation. Through lectures delivered at the École itself, and during the first level study process before their official entrance exam, they were to glean the lessons of architecture’s history and develop a working knowledge of typological precedents – particularly how program dictated plan and, ultimately, elevation. Hierarchy within the design process and within the structure of the École was a fundamental value in design practice and principle, reinforced by the status of the ancien élève within architectural culture.

The final stage of the pyramid was the Grand Prix de Rome, which was administered outside of the École by the Académie des Beaux-Arts within the Institut de France. The importance of the Rome Prize in European design circles was exceeded only by its importance to the French state. Winners were supported through several years of architectural study in Rome before returning to an open position as un architecte du gouvernement and, if they wished, as patrons of their own atelier. Unsurprisingly, as the historian Richard Chafee has noted, “French students were attracted to the ateliers that were currently capturing the Prix de Rome, if only because those were the ateliers where the best students were exchanging ideas.”⁴

Within the Beaux-Arts system, a building began with a program and developed, initially, from the parti. The composition of a building plan reflected the inherent hierarchies of the program and their respective spaces and, as such, the central, guiding principle of design assumed the logic of a well-ordered universe. If a given concours focused on “a royal library,” for example, the elements of that program might include book storage, a circulation desk, public reading space, and offices. The book storage area would have to be accessible to librarians, protected from direct natural light, and offer a logical circulation pattern; public reading space would have to be large and airy, well lit, and offer a sense that each patron had adequate individual reading space; the circulation desk would have to mediate between book storage and public reading space; finally, the offices would have to facilitate the daily operations of the library (acquisition, membership, and so on) and be somewhat unobtrusive.

Based on Classical precedents for public buildings, Renaissance examples such as Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library, or Rationalist contributions such as Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, the Beaux-Arts solution to this hypothetical library plan would include a dominant interior feature, such as a large central reading room or entry stairs, as well as secondary features such as peripheral book stacks, and a series of axial corridors. In this way, the civic space of the library would be ordered logically and therefore impel a logically ordered society. The architect as cultural agent, then, acted on both the scale of the civic building and the scale of the community within which it was located.

Architecture students in the 1960s, particularly at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, would come to understand this idea from architects like Louis Kahn, who often lectured about the fundamentals of “served” and “servant” spaces in architecture, after his own teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, the École graduate Paul Philippe Cret.⁵ For Cret, the École’s pedagogy existed as a product of the particular culture of its time and place. The post-Renaissance division of popular art and craft from fine art, the guild from the artist, national traditions from the “ideals” of the court, and master builders from architects, forged a new arena for the École des Beaux-Arts: the production of artist-architects who, ultimately, practiced a historically technical trade. The division, then, was not a limitation for the school’s growing ranks, but an approach that ultimately outlived the school itself; whether it was the interplay of Classical and Neo-Classical precedents or the plan and parti, the École’s culture supported this formal, hierarchical tension, which was in evidence even in Kahn’s servant and served dichotomy, later.⁶

“Attacks on the academy are as old as the academy itself,” Cret wearily noted in the account of his time at the school.⁷ Indeed, since the mid-nineteenth century, the domination of government work by the royal architects, prominence of Antiquity in the curriculum, and what Cret called the “pedantic, narrow, and out of date teaching” of the École prompted regular complaints and occasional coups within the academy. While liberalism defined the school’s character – in as much as students could align themselves freely with certain teachers and develop their own curricula – the pedagogical character remained divided. Despite the hope that the French Enlightenment architects Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Étienne-Louis Boullée’s examples of stripped-down Neo-Classicism offered students, their Roman models ultimately proved just as constraining as Classical Greek models.

Alternatively, students could work in other, related design modes as a way of traversing some of the strident lines separating Classicism and Neo-Classicism as they progressed through their programs. Félix-Jacques Duban, Émile-Jacques Gilbert, and Henri Labrouste’s interpretations of Gothic and Renaissance models, along with Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc’s Neo-Gothic approach, fostered Rationalist design within the curriculum, even if Classicism carried the school. The École course of study, shaped by affiliated ateliers, lectures, and competitions, operated according to historical “case studies,” or fixed reference points that allowed both students and practitioners to produce and evaluate design.

Conceptually, all students agreed that good design depended on a good building plan, which offered proof of a building’s “fitness.”⁸ The parti existed as further proof that the design was not just fit, but spatially integrated. Preoccupied with producing the beau plan, however, Cret concluded that the École student often neglected the “organic arrangement” of an overall design. “The cleverness of the planners from the 1880s to the [First] World War,” he said, “was both astonishing and alarming. Alarming because the graduate of the École had acquired much more planning ability than he needed, but was too often sadly deficient in good taste.”⁹

Other observers pointed to both the École des Beaux-Arts graduate’s lack of taste and his apparent lack of practical knowledge, as well. The American architect William Le Baron Jenney once told the story of an engineer colleague who surmised, “the students of the École des Beaux-Arts make beautiful drawings, but chances are they are entirely unconstructable.”¹⁰ It has been difficult for architectural historians to fit Jenney within the typical narrative of architecture’s fin de siècle elite, since he trained at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures (rather than the École des Beaux-Arts like his American peers). The École Centrale did not offer architecture at all, but mechanical engineering, metallurgy, chemical engineering, and civil engineering (Jenney’s specialty), “to provide remedies for the industrial impotence of Post-Napoleonic France,” as the historian Theodore Turak has noted.¹¹

Yet, the École Centrale’s administration, including Jenney’s mentor Louis Charles Mary, considered architecture, industrial design, and engineering to be interrelated – a concept not unfamiliar to most architects 150 years later. Confident that students were competent in all three disciplines, the school’s alumni – its ancien élèves de l’École Centrale – could choose to identify themselves as “architect” or “engineer” upon graduation. Jenney, for his part, identified himself as both an “architect” and a “landscape engineer” in an 1889 alumni directory, more than 30 years after first enrolling in industrial art school and four years after completing his landmark home insurance building in Chicago.¹²

It is unclear if this was a case of Jenney legitimizing his education through the words of this old engineer “colleague.” Clearer, perhaps, was the picture of architectural education’s emerging pedagogical divisions. The fine arts, the industrial arts, and engineering (at a third school, the École Polytechnique), represented differences in terms of their respective curricula or skill sets. But, the act of design and the principles of composition united all of these pedagogies. One can find remarkable drawings in the archives of all three French schools from this era, even if the École des Beaux-Arts renderings were the best known, and the American graduates were the most influential.

The formal, program-based system of design of the École des Beaux-Arts that relied on historical precedent also defined American architectural education between the 1880s and the 1920s. Americans who attended the school, having been accepted to the few ateliers that would take them, later returned to the United States to professionalize architecture by establishing École-influenced curricula. What the École guaranteed for its graduates, a “well-organized curriculum, rational design theory, and government patronage,” was distilled for the American context in schools in California, Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts.¹³ Ateliers Vaudremer, Laloux, Pascal, and Gisors, some of which were among the largest associated with the École at the turn of the last century, had begun to have a much larger influence in the United States through professional organizations like the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects (established in 1893) and the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design (established in 1916, now the Van Alen Institute), which attempted to push the profession of architecture toward this set of standards for design services in commercial practice.¹⁴

By 1898, nine American schools of architecture existed in the United States, all of which, in some form, had appropriated the Beaux-Arts system as a way of training students to be competent draftsmen for their later work in increasingly larger American architecture firms.¹⁵ John Galen Howard, appointed the dean of the architecture program at Berkeley in 1903 and an MIT graduate, who had worked for Henry Hobson Richardson and Charles McKim and attended the École, recast Berkeley’s program accordingly. He emphasized program, process, and Classicism as the core principles of a Beaux-Arts education.¹⁶ Yet, Howard’s interests were not entirely technical; he also appropriated the patriarchal model of the École, in which students advanced within a social and pedagogical hierarchy.

Warren Perry, a student who assumed Howard’s deanship in 1927, continued the symbolic c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1. Architecture’s Academy
• 2. Columbia University in the City of New York
• 3. Renewing New Haven, Building Yale
• 4. What Is the Public Interest?
• Sources
• Bibliography
• Index