Times of Creative Destruction

Shaping Buildings and Cities in the late C20th

Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317010050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Times of Creative Destruction is about the years that followed the end of WWII, one of the most seminal and dramatic epochs in human history, during which extraordinary star-buildings were born, cities exploded, and an unprecedented world of a 'Third Ecology' emerged. Never before was there such a flurry of daring mega-constructions, such daring spatial acrobatics, 'star' buildings by star architects attained by star developers, mega-constructions, technological feats, and flourishing spatial acrobatics. But, for all its exhilarating creativity, this was also an era of unanticipated, intractable, irreversible destruction reducing the uniqueness and diversity of cultural, social and ecological peaks and valleys of our world, to a 'desert flatland', environmental inequality and unhappiness.

This book critically discusses and revaluates these contradictory events, bringing together and commenting on a selection of shorter key texts by Tzonis and Lefaivre, the product of a rare research and writing partnership. The texts, published between the early 1960s and the present, are significant as documents that inform about the period. They are also important and timely because of their critical and influential role in the debates of this era, both creative and destructive.

Times of creative destruction

The early 1960s until now

By the early 1960s, when negative reactions to post-war architecture and urbanism began to rise, one remarkably critical voice, surprisingly, was President Kennedy’s.

In our time, the accession to power of world leaders is not generally significant from the point of view of design. This was an exception, however, brought on by the urban crises of the time. Soon after his inauguration, Kennedy delivered a ‘Special Message to the Congress of the United States’ on 9 March 1961, dedicated to ‘Housing and Development’, clearly assuming a radical stance that had been abandoned by government administrations since Roosevelt’s death. Among the surprising policy points he made that day, he attacked the ‘the present patterns of haphazard suburban development’ in the US that he saw as ‘contributing to a tragic waste in the use of vital resource now being consumed at an alarming rate’ and pointed to the ‘encroachment of blight and slums’ due to undue speculation. He argued that what was needed was a ‘comprehensive metropolitan or regional development’ for ‘effective nerve centres’ in order to reshape the ‘eroding central cities’ and to shift approach to urbanism away ‘from slum clearance to slum prevention, to conservation and rehabilitation of existing residential districts’. He announced a national housing policy for achieving ‘a decent home and suitable living environment for every American family’ and juxtaposed the ideal of community with the current condition of ‘blight and decay,’ urging for laying ‘the foundations for liveable, efficient, and attractive communities of the future’. A memorable phrase clinched his speech: ‘Our communities are what we make them. We as a nation have before us the opportunity – and the responsibility.’

Remarkably, the speech also pointedly criticized the poor state of knowledge related to these urban issues in universities. ‘We have lagged badly in mobilizing the intellectual resources needed to understand and improve this important sector of our civilization,’ he wrote. Noting that ‘the problems related to the development and renewal of our cities and their environs have received comparatively little attention in research and teaching,’ he pledged ‘long-term federal commitment’.

Many of the views aired in Kennedy’s speech had already been spelled out before the elections by critics, a few professionals and young academics. Harvard scholars, in particular Charles Haar, who had a joint appointment between the Design School and the Law School, were, directly and indirectly, important policy shapers. Kennedy’s talk also echoed a number of writings that had taken a critical stand against ‘establishment’ approaches to the built and natural environment by Jane Jacobs, Michael Harrington, Kevin Lynch, Serge Chermayeff and Rachel Carlson. All were dealing with the social and physical quality of the environment, the ecological crisis and ‘community’.

But Kennedy, more than anyone else, succeeded in bringing to the fore the mounting anxieties and disapproval of a growing distressed general public about the condition of the environment, a public that asked for new ideas and action. Years later, in 1993, Alan Temko, in his book No Way to Build a Ballpark, recalled 1962 as the time Americans became aware that ‘suddenly the country was being ruined before our eyes, smashed, raped, poisoned, stunk up and not least disfigured by inhumane and even hideous buildings’.

Kennedy had good reasons to complain about ‘the problems related to the development and renewal of our cities and their environs’ having ‘received comparatively little attention’. Most of these burning issues could not have been more at odds with the mainstream nonchalant point of view of the architecture profession. Revealing in this light is a series of three issues of the leading American professional journal Progressive Architecture (March, April and May 1961). Thomas H. Creighton, the editor of the journal, organized an annual Design Award Program and subsequently put together a virtual symposium entitled the ‘Sixties, the State of Architecture’. The participants of the symposium considered projects produced during the second half of the 1950s by leading US architects, such as Manure Yamasaki, Eero Saarinen, Edward Durrell Stone, Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph and Walter Gropius, and came to the conclusion that, since there was no overall direction that characterized them, the situation was ‘chaos’.

For several architects, including Philip Johnson, chaos expressed the flight from the ‘prison house’ of the so-called Miesian ‘functionalist box’, typical of a great part of post-war architecture. But Johnson went one step further from simply denouncing functionalism. He declared that ‘the only principle that I can conceive of believing in is the Principle of Uncertainty’ – a remark opening the door to a freewheeling architecture, hardly constructive for a country facing urban and environmental crisis.

The idea of the ‘chaos’ of the 1950s was a concept that legitimized self-promotion through a belief in architecture for architecture’s sake rather than as a ‘social art’, as many architects believed during and after World War II. It became the driving force behind the formation of the self-proclaimed ‘Procrustes Club’. Its credo was that architects could feel free, like the legendary Procrustes himself, to stretch or chop the client’s specifications to fit the iron bed of an architectural idea, independently of the requirements of the project. Openly elitist and outspokenly anti-functionalist, the ‘club’, which in fact was a small informal group of architect friends, one of whom was Philip Johnson, was influenced to a great extent by Sigfried Giedion’s call of 1943 asking for a new ‘monumentality,’ that disregarded functionality and social needs – despite Giedion’s assurances that he supported social architecture – and that rejected the role of architecture not only in maintaining the quality of the physical environment but also in respecting the resources and cultural values of the region.

Given the fast-improving conditions of the US, several American architects and schools of architecture in the 1950s became sympathetic to the Procrustean doctrine and most education instututions remained cut out of the new problems that the human-made environment presented. However, most of them remained rather pluralistic.

Typical is the case of the Yale Department of Architecture. Paul Rudolph had been part of the Procrustean circle. In 1958 he was appointed chairman of the Yale Department of Architecture as Louis Kahn was leaving the department. Rudolph had pursued a practice characterized by experimentation with new construction technologies and new building types, mostly single structures responding to the regional challenges of a semi-tropical region in Sarasota, Florida (Paul Rudolph, ‘Regionalism in Architecture’, Perspecta 4, Yale, pp. 12–19, 1957).

However, at Yale, Rudolph turned away from novel technical thinking and regionalist concerns. He focused instead on the creation of new types of complex institutional buildings responding to new urban technological and economic realities. Yet he was not completely absorbed by the insular formalist Procrustean approach. One of his goals, against mainstream tendencies, was to tame the ‘chaos’ resulting from the freewheeling use of structural potentials, which other architects had welcomed. He also avoided a regression to the reductive, inhuman, ‘functionalist box’. Towards this goal he tried to develop a finite, rule-based, combinatorial typology of elementary spaces able to generate an infinite repertory of combinations of spaces (recalling similar elementarist efforts by early F. L. Wright and pre-war De Stijl). In the case of the Arts and Architecture Building at Yale, he produced a complex with no fewer than thirty-seven spaces on a multitude of levels and with an equal variety of lighting conditions.

Like many buildings of the period in search of a humane architecture, the building was indifferent to human associations. While the complex was 'space-rich, it was ‘place-poor’.

Figure 1
Paul Rudolph typology drawing, 1962. This sketch by Rudolph was done at almost midnight in one of his unscheduled night visits (his home and office being a few minutes away from the studio), that were on the still-unoccupied top floor of Kahn’s gallery. There was no fear about theft and vandalism at that time. Rudolph came to Tzonis’s desk, looked at the scheme and sketched on the yellow drafting role his theory about building types to make Tzonis conscious of what he was trying to do in his scheme. He never corrected anyone drawings directly. He only sketched options on the side

There were other efforts to make American architecture responsive to the new needs of the environment and break away from the confines of recent tradition. Many tried to invent new types of buildings fit for the new transportation needs, especially the need for parking in cities that by the beginning of the 1960s was seen as the major destructive force of the urban environment and social quality.

Louis Kahn, who between 1947 and 1957 taught at Yale, had developed highly innovative urban design plans for the future midtown Philadelphia. Kahn felt that to model the dynamic character of the modern traffic in towns he had to experiment with new means of graphic notation and poetic prose. In his new plans the city was represented as a complex hierarchy of movements, resembling a score of contemporary music, rather than as a three-dimensional static urban design space composition of solids and voids, with the exception of the gigantic parking facilities inspired by Buckminster Fuller structures. The project was shown in the Museum of Modern Art and was received positively, especially by young people. However, quantitative, analytical tools to grasp the environmental and social quality of the city were absent (Towards a Plan for Midtown Philadelphia, 1951–53, Perspecta II, August 1953).

Most architects, on the other hand, turned to more conservative solutions in an attempt to recruit historical precedents. The Yale historian Carroll Meeks suggested early railway stations, in particular Italian monumental ones. In this spirit, Rudolph, commissioned to design a modern mega-parking for the city of New Haven, was inspired by a historical precedent, the Roman aqueduct. The project introduced into the humdrum New Haven urban setting drama and sublimity. Yet the historical precedent did not help him to design a truly functional facility. In addition, the narrow and unreal requirements of his client to bring the automobile in big numbers into the heart of downtown, the programme asking for the parking to cut New Haven from its surrounding vital areas, excluding any typological or urban innovation, led to the intractable conclusion that historical precedents could not be of any help.

In most of these cases, history was reduced to narrow formalistic historicism, less a discipline to understand the world, natural and social, than a low-level handmaiden of design fostering bygone tastes. It applied skin-deep nostalgic tools drawn from simplified theories of the picturesque adapted to Victorian conformism and drew from ideas of the ‘City Beautiful’ architecture of ‘good manners’, whereby new buildings obeyed etiquette of ‘sociable behaviour’, to quote Trystan Edwards’s (1924) Good and Bad Manners in Architecture.

Figure 2
Louis Kahn, Philadelphia Plan, 1953

Thus, the failure of architectural practice of the 1950s and 1960s was, to refer to Kennedy’s speech again, to ‘conserve and rehabilitate existing residential districts’ and fit new buildings into pre-existing historical urban fabrics.

In this spirit, Rudolph tried to integrate the Arts and Architecture Building, a Wrightean pinwheel scheme, into the Chapel Street fabric of the other Yale University buildings and Peter Millard designed his New Haven fire station buildings as transitional components ‘responsive’ to town’s urban fabric and vistas (Robert Stern, Perspecta 9–10, 1965).

The let-down of this historicist tactic was even more evident in Eero Saarinen’s Styles and Morse Colleges at Yale (1958–1962), where the architect tried to ‘re-urbanize’ architecture adapting the scheme to the surrounding Yale buildings by employing eclectically ‘picturesque’ neo-historicist tools. But the complex failed to capture the identity of the ‘cognitive map’ (to use Kevin Lynch’s term), not to mention ‘lifestyle’ of the New Haven Yale eclectic neo-Gothic colleges, emerging as an alien ‘kitsch’, disruptive element to the city. The colleges raised highly unsympathetic remarks such as those by Reyner Banham in the New Statesman review (‘Morse and Stiles’, New Statesman, 13 July 1962).

Rudolph as chair of the Yale Department of Architecture sensed that architectural education had to open up to new ideas coming from many directions and specializations. However, he expressed this into educational policy by inviting criticism, even of his own work, and he did not hesitate to invite dissenting visiting critics, such as James Stirling, at that time.

In his 1962 lec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Times of creative destruction
• Conclusion
• List of publications whose covers were used for the design of the Frontispiece composition
• Index