Module 2

INTRODUCTION

This module examines the city as a set of theories in which an

architectural position has wide-ranging consequences for the
city's shape and structure. These ideas also coincide with social
and urban changes in the post-World War II period.

Module Learning Objectives

 Analyze the city as an architectonic artifact.
 Discuss the relationship between high vs. popular culture in
urban design.
 Identify the role of modernism in urban design.
 Debate the role of historical forms in the modern city.

Readings
 Aldo Rossi, "The Urban Artifact as a Work of Art" (PDF, 919.2
kb)
 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, "A
Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las
Vegas" (PDF, 1433.4 kb)

Module Coursework
 Read and view all module content and media in the pages
that follow.
 Complete all items in any Graded Coursework, Other
Activities, and Quizzes and Exams areas included in this
module.
CITY AS IDEA

Theories of architecture discuss both the design of cities as well

as the design of buildings; the city is simultaneously the result
and the aggregation of design decisions made at the individual
building level. The city is also a design condition and concept in
itself, and architects have often used it as a topic of their
investigations and as a theoretical position related to
architecture.

The development of modern architecture is integrally connected

to the growth of the city during the 19th and 20th centuries;
with the introduction of high-speed roads, an advanced public
transportation infrastructure, and high-rise buildings, the
modern city underwent drastic physical changes during this
period. The 19th-century Industrial Revolution made great
technological strides, but also had a critical impact upon its
urban inhabitants. The positive and negative consequences
related to the changing condition of the city are both essential
aspects of contemporary urbanism.
London depicted during the early Industrial Revolution

Modern architects aspired to increase the common good. As

such, they aimed to improve the modern city's environmental
design, thereby making it a better place to live. As Le Corbusier
argued, modern architecture was a key determiner of social
happiness, and the site of this grand collective experiment was
the contemporary city. His 1925 Plan Voisin proposed to wipe
out a large section of old Paris and replace it with a set of
towers, surrounded by green space, which would act as the
"lungs" of the reconfigured city.

This metaphor of the city as a body and the park as a set of

lungs interprets the metropolis as a kind of organism. This is an
established way of viewing the city. For Le Corbusier, the
biological metaphor was a way to think about architecture as
well as the city. The image of the body contrasts with Le
Corbusier's angular, machine-like architectural forms. However,
Le Corbusier held the common view of the body and architecture
as complementary kinds of machines—the former biological, the
latter metaphorical.

The notion of the city as a body is just one metaphor, and one
approach, to thinking about the city as a theoretical concept or
proposition. Throughout the 20th century, the city would be
identified in a number of different ways—as an organism, a
machine, a network, a structure, and so forth. The architects
that we look at in this module frame the city in ways that extend
to methods of thinking about architectural design.

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THE SMITHSONS

Though the seminal work of Peter and Alison Smithson predates

the nominal beginnings of this course by about 10 years, they
are important figures because their ideas were critical to the
development of later architects and their theoretical positions.
The Smithsons were members of the Independent Group, a loose
coalition of artists, architects, and writers in London who
organized a series of lectures and exhibitions around
contemporary art and culture in post-World War II Britain. In
1953, the first of these exhibitions, "Parallel of Life and Art,"
deliberately juxtaposed high and contemporary art with
primitive art and the sophisticated with the vernacular. For
instance, architectural works displayed here include projects by
Le Corbusier, the Temple of Neptune at Paestum, U.S.
skyscrapers, an Eskimo settlement, Machu Picchu, and an Irish
bus garage.
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The Independent Group, The Parallel of Life and Art, ICA, London, 1953

By deliberately juxtaposing contrasting images, the Independent

Group intended to reinforce the idea that art was not solely in
museums, but could be seen anywhere—specifically, in the
everyday environment. The idea of popular art (pop art)
stemmed from the Independent Group's interest in the gritty
conditions of postwar Britain; beauty was present in utilitarian
architecture, mass advertising, comic books, science fiction, and
found objects. The Smithsons demonstrated this pragmatic
approach to architecture in works such as the Hunstanton school
in Norfolk, England. In this project, they displayed an
uncompromising industrial attitude toward architectural design,
or what they dubbed New Brutalism. They asserted that
"Brutalism tries to face up to a mass-produced society, and drag
a rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces which
are at work."
Peter and Alison Smithson, Hunstanton Secondary Modern School, Hunstanton,
Norfolk, England, 1954

The Smithsons worked as architects in the postwar

reconstruction efforts in England, so they were well aware of and
intimately involved in the incremental rebuilding of the urban
landscape. They were also part of Team X (also known as Team
10), a splinter group that broke away from the CIAM (Congrès
Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne), an organization that
was widely influential in architecture and urbanism during the
first half of the 20th century. In contrast to CIAM's efforts to
reshape the city in an idealized functionalist form, Team X was
interested in the local and specific realities of existing cities and
how inhabitants actually occupied and used them. In the Team
10 Primer (1962), Alison Smithson outlined a theory in which "no
abstract Master Plan stands between him and what he has to do,
only 'the human facts' and the logistics of the situation."

The most important shift that occurred here was the move away
from functionalism as an abstract consideration, and towards a
concern for users, community, and society in the design process.
These aspects of social activism, community involvement, and
collective thinking became important considerations for the next
generation of urban architects.
ARCHIGRAM

Like the Smithsons and the Independent Group, the English

group Archigram was also very much interested in popular
culture and science fiction, and against the perceived
functionalist rigidity of Bauhaus modernism. For
Archigram, modern meant the use of exotic materials,
advanced technologies, new forms, and new spaces. The name
Archigram combines architecture and telegram, implying "a
quick architectural message." Archigram was the title of the
first issue of their magazine, and it became the name of their
group as well.
Archigram, issue no. 1, 1961

For the Living City Exhibition at the London Institute of

Contemporary Arts (ICA), Archigram produced a series of
futuristic projects that proposed radically different ways of
thinking about the city—hanging in the air, as a networked
computer, and as a series of modular components.
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Archigram (Warren Chalk, Ron Herron), Elevation, from the City Interchange Project,
Living City exhibition, ICA, London, 1963
Archigram (Peter Cook), Come-Go Project, Living City exhibition, ICA, London, 1963
Archigram (Dennis Crompton), City Synthesizer Project, Living City exhibition, ICA,
London, 1963

Archigram further developed concepts of modularity in a series,

titled Plug-In City, which imagined the city as a large
megastructural frame from which transportation, living, service,
and other components could be added or removed as needed.
Archigram did several variations on the megastructural concept,
as did other architects throughout the sixties and seventies.
They were attracted to its futuristic look and stylistic break from
the old modernist box forms. These and other similar projects
were tremendously influential for the following generation of
young architects. Among that generation were Richard Rogers
and Renzo Piano, who designed the Centre Pompidou in Paris,
and Norman Foster, who like the Archigram group, was also
attracted to the tensegrity and dome structures developed by
the U.S. engineer Buckminster Fuller.
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Archigram (Peter Cook), Plug-In City Study, 1964

One of the most radical of Archigram's proposals was the idea of

a Walking City. Not only was the city conceived of as a large
mechanical entity, it was a self-sufficient organism that was not
tied to any specific location. Its inhabitants were world citizens—
nomadic travelers who were continuously on the move. The idea
of nomadism also became an object of study, as the Archigram
group looked at inflatable structures, tents, capsules, and other
kinds of experimental forms.
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Archigram (Ron Herron), Walking City in New York, 1964

Though the Archigram architects had few built works (one

significant work is Peter Cook and Colin Fournier's Kunsthaus
Graz museum in Austria, which is reminiscent of Walking City),
their radical visions inaugurated the work of other artists and
architects who were interested in the social and cultural
implications of a reconfigured city in the wake of the social
unrest and changing political and cultural tides of the 1960s.
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Peter Cook and Colin Fournier, Kunsthaus Graz, Graz, Austria, 2003

SITUATIONISM

Beginning in the late 1950s, Situationist International was a

loose postwar coalition of writers and artists in Europe who
produced texts and artwork criticizing capitalism. They proposed
alternative views of society and the urban condition; their
projects laid the groundwork for the revolutionary actions of the
1960s. Influenced by Marxist thought and surrealist art, the
Situationists criticized consumerist culture's preoccupation with
mass media, commodity objects, and reactionary politics. The
site of their dissatisfaction was the city itself—the locus of these
consumerist activities.

The intellectual leader of the Situationists, Guy Debord, used

Paris, among other cities, as a means of developing the notion
of psychogeography, a subversive approach to conceiving of
the city not as an ossified structure of places, rules, and
regulations, but rather as an unstructured, localized, and
somewhat arbitrary collection of places tied together by random
events and forces. The psychogeographers would navigate the
city in a randomized (usually drunken) manner, which they
termed the dérive—a means of reconsidering the planned and
monotonous order of the city in a novel and unplanned way.
Enlarge Image +
Guy Debord, Psychogeographic Guide of Paris, 1957
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Film still from Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, 1973

Debord's best-known text, The Society of the Spectacle (1967),

criticized modern society for being obsessed with—if not
completely taken over by—commodity culture. The authentic,
directly lived life, Debord argued, had been replaced with a
succession of spectacular, superficial images designed to
distract and lull society into the passive consumption of media
and commodities. In opposition to this, Debord proposed "radical
action in the form of the construction of situations," which was
designed to wake up the spectator from their cultural stupor. In
the 1973 film adaptation of The Society of the Spectacle, Debord
interposed television advertising, classic U.S. films, and student
riots with his own critical commentary. His goal was to disrupt
the expected order of things and analytically question the
images placed before the viewer.

For architects such as Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas, the

role of film as not simply a passive tool but an active instrument
—as it was for Debord—used to reconstruct events and
situations is apparent in their own early work. Moreover, the
cinematographic and storytelling aspects of filmmaking
influenced their approaches to architectural design. The legacy
of Situationist production inspired the idea of architecture as a
constructed situation or set of subversive experiences within the
city.

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Production still from The White Slave, a film co-written by Rem Koolhaas, 1969

Bernard Tschumi, Screenplays, 1976

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Bernard Tschumi, Advertisements for Architecture, 1976–1977

NEW BABYLON

One of the critical figures with the Situationists was the Dutch
artist Constant Nieuwenhuys, who was a founding member of the
CoBrA art group (the name is an amalgam of Copenhagen,
Brussels, and Amsterdam, where the artists came from) in the
late 1940s. Known simply as Constant, he worked with the
architect Aldo van Eyck on several exhibitions; van Eyck was
himself a member of Team X along with the Smithsons, and his
work was distinctly non-formal and influenced by surrealism and
sociological research. Van Eyck was responsible for the design of
several hundred different playgrounds throughout Amsterdam,
and this idea of children at play within the city was influential for
Constant's major project, New Babylon.

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Aldo van Eyck, playground, Amsterdam, 1968
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Constant, Construction with Transparent Plans, 1954
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Constant, Monument to Reconstruction, Rotterdam, 1955

Constant's models took on a progressively larger scale as he

imagined users inhabiting the spaces. Through hundreds of
sketches, paintings, maps, and models over several decades,
Constant developed his utopian vision of New Babylon in
constructing an environment for the future Homo Ludens—a
megastructural overlay for the ruins of the old European cities.
This future population would have no fixed locus, but, rather,
would be constantly on the move, travelling from place to place
in a global dérive, enjoying a post-labor world where people
were no longer obligated to work, but would spend their days as
tourists permanently at leisure, navigating the planet.
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Constant, Hanging Sector, 1960
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Constant, Design for a Gypsy Camp, 1956–1958
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Constant, Concert Hall for Electronic Music, 1958–1961
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Constant, model for New Babylon, 1959
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Constant, Yellow Sector, 1959
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Constant, Hanging Sector, 1960
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Constant, Design for a Gypsy Camp, 1956–1958
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New Babylon would grow organically in a web-like structure,

covering and then connecting cities to each other until it
gradually traversed the planet.
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Constant, New Babylon Paris, 1963
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Constant, New Babylon North, 1960
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Constant, Comparative Map New Babylon/Amsterdam, 1962
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Constant, New Babylon Paris, 1963
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Constant, New Babylon North, 1960
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Constant met and became friends with Debord around 1956, and
together they wrote articles about the concept of "unitary
urbanism," which incorporated ideas of Situationism, the dérive,
and psychogeography into a critique and exploration of the
postwar urban condition. (Initially, New Babylon was called
"Dériville" after the Situationist term.) Constant joined but later
split from the Situationists because Debord felt that Constant's
vision of New Babylon was too idealistic, instead of acting as a
political critique of existing institutions.

Nonetheless, Constant's ideas were tremendously influential to

architectural thinking in the 60s and later. He first introduced his
vision of a high-tech, ludic, global environment in 1960, to an
audience at the Architectural Association in London. It was there
that the nascent members of Archigram were inspired by
Constant's work to develop their own futuristic concepts, such as
the Instant City project, which also travelled the world. The
Italian group Superstudio later developed their own New
Babylon-like project as a megastructural glass "monument" that
served to connect and unify the planet; Rem Koolhaas created a
similar collage overlay of London for his student thesis project at
the Architectural Association School of Architecture. Tschumi
also adopted some of Constant's urban concepts, such as the
idea of random ordering and overlaying as a design and urban
strategy.

The heady mixture of postwar urban reconstruction,

revolutionary social politics, and conceptual art practices in the
1960s made possible the vibrant examples of theoretical
proposals in Europe; in America the conditions and the solutions
were somewhat different, as we will see next.
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OMA, Yokohama Master Plan, 1992
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Archigram, Instant City Visits Bournemouth, 1968
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Superstudio, Continuous Monument, 1969
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Rem Koolhaas, Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, 1972
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Bernard Tschumi, Joyce's Garden, 1976
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Constant, Large Yellow Sector, 1967
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OMA, Yokohama Master Plan, 1992
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Archigram, Instant City Visits Bournemouth, 1968
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LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS, PART 1

Unlike Europe after World War II, the United States was fortunate to have escaped any wartime
damage to its urban infrastructure; instead, what arguably had the greatest impact upon its cities
was the massive construction of roads and highways throughout the U.S. during the 1950s and
1960s, largely driven by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. Throughout the nation, large
swathes of urban land were bulldozed to make way for the interstate highway system. What were
once relatively compact city forms steadily grew larger, and with the simultaneous growth of
suburban development during this period, cities expanded outwards to create what appeared to be
an undifferentiated mass of strip malls, convenience stores, and gas stations. In the midst of this
enthusiasm for reconstruction, many cities lost historical districts and buildings. This led to the
creation of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, and the National Register of Historic
Places, which serves to protect landmark buildings.

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Construction of Interstate Highway 45, Houston, Texas, 1961
Enlarge Image +
Tucson, Arizona, c. 1970

This kind of generic, motor-centric environment was seen as the antithesis of what most
architects would have considered good urban form or a significant example of architecture. As
seen in these photographs of Tucson and Las Vegas, cars and large signs dominate these urban
environments, while the buildings are simply nondescript boxes.
Las Vegas, early 1950s

The Las Vegas strip of the 1960s represented an architectural infrastructure that appeared
completely antithetical to the historic urban forms exemplified by European cities like Paris and
Rome. Even in the American postwar context, few critics would have acknowledged the
architecture of the strip as a serious urban condition.

Two of those were Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. Scott Brown was educated at the
Architectural Association School of Architecture in London during the early 1950s, where she
was influenced by the Smithsons' interest in the prosaic environment of postwar Britain. In a
similar manner, she was able to see how the physical infrastructure of Las Vegas grew
organically in response to economic and transportation needs. For his part, Princeton-trained
Venturi interpreted the city in somewhat the same way as he saw Rome—as a dense
agglomeration of small, formal decisions compacted towards an urban whole. Together they
were able to reconsider Las Vegas as an example of a valid urban and architectural condition.

Venturi and Scott Brown studied Las Vegas as part of the studio course at Yale in 1968, later
publishing their findings in their groundbreaking 1972 text Learning from Las [Link] the
urban scale, they found that, contrary to initial impressions, the commercial strip was not a
chaotic, unorganized jumble, but contained a highly systematic order relating to automobile and
pedestrian traffic.
LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS, PART 2

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Las Vegas strip, 1960s

Venturi and Scott Brown saw that the architecture of Las Vegas
operated at a number of scales: the highway demanded that
viewers see buildings at the speed of freeway traffic; hence,
large signs dominated the architecture, while the buildings
tended to be neutral backdrops. The Vegas Strip, on the other
hand, contained a combination of large and small signage
relating to the variable speeds of cars and people at the level of
the sidewalk. Rather than creating a complex architectural
composition, the architecture of Las Vegas is radically simple
and information is presented by billboard.
Enlarge Image +
Excerpt from Learning from Las Vegas

As competition for tourists increased, casinos needed to attract

more attention, so buildings became gigantic sculptural objects
visible from a distance in the desert landscape, such as the
Luxor Hotel in the shape of a pyramid, or the Venetian Hotel,
which copied the famous Campidoglio tower in Venice. In these
instances, rather than a separate sign indicating what the
building next to it is, the building itself acts as the sign.
Enlarge Image +
Luxor Hotel, Las Vegas
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The Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas

Venturi and Scott Brown differentiated between these two

different kinds of buildings in the Las Vegas landscape: on the
one hand, the building as a large sculptural object, which they
called a "duck," and on the other hand, the neutral box with a
billboard, which they termed the "decorated shed."
Enlarge Image +
Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, The Decorated Shed vs. the Duck, diagram,
1970

The significance of Learning from Las Vegas lies in the authors'

understanding of the American commercial vernacular, not as
examples of "great" architecture, but as case studies that
describe the underlying aspects of how meaning is conveyed in
architectural form. The urban structure of the American city is
different from the traditional European city, but no less
important. In Las Vegas, meaning in urban form is conveyed at
vehicular speeds, either through billboard signs or as gigantic
icons.

Venturi and Scott Brown argued that the distinction between

these two different kinds of buildings applied not only to the
spectacle of Las Vegas, but also to contemporary "high design."
That is, there are buildings which attract attention by way of
their sculptural form, such as in the work of Zaha Hadid or Frank
Gehry, while buildings with more conventional shapes gain
meaning by way of their façade treatment, such as the library in
Eberswalde, Germany by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.
Enlarge Image +
Zaha Hadid, London Aquatics Centre, 2012
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Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Eberswalde Library, Eberswalde, Germany,
1998

THE CITY AS URBAN ARTIFACT

In contrast to the American city, European architecture in the

1960s faced a different set of urban and social issues. Rather
than an open terrain that could accommodate a wide range of
new and disparate forms, the European city developed over time
—many cities developed over the span of thousands of years.
The Second World War destroyed much of this existing
infrastructure, and modern developments threatened to erode
the traditional city. To an extent, postwar urban renewal began
to dismantle American cities as well, most notably in highway
construction, as discussed earlier.

Rather than continuing the trend of replacing the historical

fabric of the traditional city with modern objects, the Italian
architect and theorist Aldo Rossi argued for the continuity of the
city as an essential aspect of the social and cultural memory of a
society. For Rossi, the architecture of a city is a living record of
how a place and a civilization develops over time; it forms the
collective memory of its inhabitants.

In contrast to the disposable nature of architecture in the

American city, Rossi saw architecture as a critical element in
understanding the historical continuity and meaning of places.
His 1966 book The Architecture of the City was one of the first
significant postwar texts to criticize the destruction of the
historical urban fabric and advocate for the central role of the
form and typology of architecture in the city.

Rossi, however, was not a conservationist, but rather an

architect who advocated for an understanding of contemporary
architecture within a larger historical context. Using the example
of the Palazzo della Ragione (Palace of Reason) in Padua, Italy,
he explained how this building, over the span of 800 years,
changed its functions to accommodate different uses (it has
been an administrative building, a court, apartments,
marketplace, and now an event center), but its essential form
and relationship to the city remained the same. The Palazzo's
architectural and urban role is as a monumental anchor and
public space for the city of Padua, no matter its particular
function at any point in time.

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Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, Italy, built in 1233

Rossi's point here was to argue against the idea of modern

architecture as a kind of form-follows-function relationship and
instead say that architectural form is indifferent to function—
form is about the essential shape and typology of the urban
elements that make up a city. His own architecture described an
abstract vocabulary of geometric elements—cubes, spheres,
pyramids, and so on—that together generated the underlying
elements of civic form.

Often criticized as being a postmodernist, in the sense of

adhering to a stylistic tendency, Rossi instead offered a
counterpoint to a superficial understanding of architectural form,
tying it to larger questions about historical memory and the
construction of a city over time.
Enlarge Image +
Aldo Rossi, Centro Fontivegge, Perugia, Italy, built in 1988

CONCLUSION

This module presented several different theoretical attitudes

towards the city. In each of these concepts, architecture has
significant consequences for the larger urban fabric. These ideas
ranged from reinterpreting the architecture of the everyday, to
speculative visions that proposed fantastic views of the future.
The ideas these architects proposed also implied changes to
culture and society.

Readings
 Aldo Rossi, "The Urban Artifact as a Work of Art" (PDF, 919.2
kb)
  Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, "A
Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las
Vegas" (PDF, 1433.4 kb)

Module Coursework
Complete all items in any Graded Coursework, Other
Activities, and Quizzes and Examsareas included in this
module.