The Modular: An
Analysis into Generative Architecture
Mahnaz Shah
PhD Candidate, Architectural Association, School of Architecture London
e-mail: shah_ma@aaschool.ac.uk
Abstract
Le Corbusier’s
city grids, domestic layouts and the Modular are generally considered to be
expressive of the spatial innovations of the new sciences, thus providing an
homogenous, quantitative, infinitely extensible continuum.
Jack H.
Williamson [1986] reads this into the alleged ‘dematerialization’ of Le
Corbusier’s interiors and christens it the ‘anti-object paradigm’. He considers
this spatial development to be parallel to the loss of autonomous individuality
under the new collectivist and determinist social and psychological
sciences.
Andrew McNamara
[1992] similarly reads Le Corbusier’s grid as an evidence of a desire to
collapse all boundaries – natural, spatial, social and aesthetic – into an
undifferentiated field. Le Corbusier is apparently committed to imposing this
field at all levels, ‘to transform it into a broad social vision encompassing
every aspect of life’.
According to
Richards[2003]; although these readings maybe applicable to other modernists
grids, they are not applicable to Le Corbusier.
This Paper
proposes to challenge Richards[2003] assumptions and tries to prove that,
through Le Corbusier’s final project; the Venice Hospital 1964-65, the Modular
formulated a code that is capable of articulating dynamic, generative
architecture.
The Modular: An
Analysis into Generative Architecture
Mahnaz Shah
PhD Candidate, Architectural Association, School of Architecture London
e-mail:
shah_ma@aaschool.ac.uk
Le Corbusier tried to embed …ideas in Jullian’s mind during
their early discussion, but ultimately the most novel and powerful ideas came
in the few sketches Le Corbusier showed him later. The key to the project was
there, presented in a completely unprecedented way. Mazzariol added,
The young Chilean architect who for several years had been
living like a moine in the atelier, realized in bewilderment that something
quite unprecedented was taking place … Was this the beginning of a new
architecture? The drawings were made of few strikingly precise indications; the
form was spatial and the space developed in a regular movement like the ripples
sent out by a stone dropped into a pond. No previous design had ever evolved so
easily and so quickly.
Giussepe Mazzariol
1966
Introduction: Drawings to the Grid in Le Corbusier’s Design
Strategy
The core
challenge in translating Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital project 1964-65
conceptual drawing remained in defining the order – the systematic content of
the project defined by repetition and numbers - understood as a given, as a matter of strategy. This design
strategy of systematic repetition remains the core element in identifying the
dynamics of the city of Venice and its replication in the form of Generative
Architecture.
According to Le Corbusier’s primary assistant in the Venice
Hospital project, Guillermo Jullian de la Fuente; the real question in the
Venice Hospital project, arose at the level of tactics; on how to manipulate
the number, the structure, the module and the pattern to become architecture –
that generates its essential dynamics.
The above discipline was mastered by rigorous calculations
and testing. Sometimes the precision of the building elements and their
sequencing in extension were so complete that the building plans turned into
virtual musical notations: One day while working on the drawings for a huge
longitudinal section, which covered the complete atelier space in Venice,
Jullian along with other assistants decided to ‘play’ the hospital building.
Each member of the team selected a different sound and Jullian assigned to each
‘instrument’ a building element – piloti, ramp, vault, partition – as ‘notes’.
Then acting as an orchestra conductor, Jullian followed the section by keeping
a constant rhythm.[1]
Although the above exercise in all probability seems
possible, it is a highly subjective approach, an abstract rationality and
therefore not feasible for further investigation unless taken as a geometric
and mathematical exercise – with the key note being the sense of or a
return to order. In an attempt to
understand this definition of order, it seems imperative to briefly examine Le
Corbusier’s architectural philosophy.
1.1 Spirit of Age – Spirit
of Geometry
Le Corbusier architectural philosophy defined the post war
1914-18 sentiments, it was an era of strong reaction against the anarchy and
uncontrolled experimentalism of the pre-war avant-gardes. As such, according to
Colquhoun [2002], a ‘return to order’
was deemed necessary. For some French artistic circles this meant a return to
conservative values and for others it meant an embracing of the imperatives of
modern technologies. The situation was further rendered complicated by the
assimilation of cultural pessimists like the poet Paul Valery and technological
Utopians like Le Corbusier both invoking the spirit of classicism and geometry.[2]
Banham [1960] believed that Le Corbusier defined a specific
modern sentiment found in the ‘spirit of geometry’ with exactitude and order
and its essential condition.[3]
This sentiment according to McNamara [1992], equally sought to encompass more
than a reductive functionalism derived from the logic of contemporary economic
processes. The mix of the mass, the serial and the geometric provided a recipe
for uncovering the gestalt of a higher aesthetic and spiritual order.[4]
Ozenfant, Le Corbusier’s colleague in the 1920s remarked
that, ‘mass production had led to the desire for perfection’[5]
thus implying that it led to an ideal model but not an end in itself. He
maintained that all human perception is gauged through a geometric filter of
sensations, and argued that since it is one of man’s passion to disentangle
apparent chaos, then mathematics, geometry and the arts are all forms of
apparatus that reduce the incomprehensible to credible forms.[6]
According to McNamara [1992], the technological viewpoint of
the avant-garde owed much to the mystical, theosophical and Neo-Platonic
interpretation of art characteristic of Itten or Kandinsky. Schlemmer’s diary
entry of 1915 marked the impact of these ideas on his early artistic
formulations: ‘The line is traced with pure cold calculation; crystal appear;
cubic forms. Universal application towards the mystical.[7]
Schlemmer referred to the path towards the incomprehensible
in the simple basic forms – while Ozenfant subsequently proclaimed the
transformation of the incomprehensible into credible forms. These somewhat
mystical declarations could be readily channeled into rhetoric advocating the
establishment of objective criteria necessary for the new order of rational precision, while still maintaining a
pronounced spiritual emphasis. In response to the reformulations of these
conceptions, Schlemmer raised what became a common concern amongst the
avant-garde – a search for fundamental constants found in ‘credible forms.’[8]
It may have been this search of ‘credible forms’ in
formulating an ideology of modern painting, that Le Corbusier along with
Ozenfant developed many of architectural ideas/philosophy that was later
documented in L’Esprit Nouveau. According
to Colquhoun [2002], in Apresle Cubisme
[1918] and in the essay ‘Le Purisme’[9]
an idea that played an important part in Le Corbusier’s architectural theory
was introduced, that of the object-type.
In these texts the authors praised Cubism for its simplification of forms along
with its method of selecting certain objects as emblems of modern life. Ozenfant
and Le Corbusier claimed that, ‘ of all the recent schools of painting, only
Cubism foresaw the advantages of
choosing selected objects…but by a paradoxical error, instead of sifting
out the general laws of these objects, Cubism showed their accidental aspects.’[10]
Thus by virtue of these general laws, the object would become an object-type its Platonic forms resulting
from a process analogous to natural selection, becoming ‘banal’ and susceptible
to infinite duplication, the stuff of everyday life.’[11]
1.2 Geometry, Mathematics and Art Combined
According to McNamara, Geometry, mathematics and art
combined to realize the universal forces – regulated, measured and complete and
thus shifted everything from the domain of ‘sensory origin to that which excludes
natural doubt’[12] –
corresponding to Wells pronouncement of the imminent movement ‘from dreams to
ordered thinking’.[13]
Le Corbusier similarly proclaimed an elevation to the
spiritual in art. For him geometry represented ‘the language of man’[14]
and he aimed to transform it into a broad social vision encompassing every
aspect of life. His starting point for this was ‘that key site of modernity –
the metropolis – as is evident in his Voisin
Plan of 1925.’[15]
In this proposal for restructuring Paris, a grid plan was devised as means of
evoking the precise and harmonious relations that only become possible in the
‘great epoch’.
As he wrote in Towards
a New Architecture: the spirit of functional utility found expression in a
sense of order: The regulating line is
a satisfaction of a spiritual order which leads to the pursuit of ingenious and
harmonious relations … The regulating line brings in this tangible form of
mathematics which gives the reassuring perception of order.[16]
1.3 The Grid – the Modern Metropolis: Towards A
Generative Architecture
According to McNamara, in the Voisin Plan Le Corbusier
used the grid layout to bring the modern metropolis into line with the ideal
relations that had only been glimpsed in mass production. The plan also
revealed that social utility and aesthetic form could be identical in the grid.
The plan lived up to its name by employing notions of bordering or neighboring
as a central device. The design, however did not simply aim to suggest any
continuum of adjoining patterns and endless additions – neighboring. Rather it
sought to elaborate and weave the order of all orders at the base of chaos –
this characteristics remains an important definition of generative
architecture.
Voisin evokes a design
which is at once, a founding base and also its most elevated and refined form.
The grid thereby erases its imprint as artifice by mapping the structural form
of the city which enables ease of passage through the chaotic energy of the
modern metropolis.
Recalling the grand schemes of Sant’Elia, the project
emphasizes conjunction and flow and acts as an ‘inhering mechanism inseparable from the body of the world and operating on
it from within.[17]
The process of geometric filtering ideally constituted a form of dispersal
rather than a centralization of the ‘scopic drive’[18]
it offered a creative silencing of the urban cacophony and the confusion of
form.[19]
Hence the grid functioned as the ideal exemplar of the
generative architecture; ‘progressive’
order, operating not as an aesthetic reflex but as the pure equivalence of the
system it aimed to engender.
It also implied mathematical exactitude and the equality of
all co-ordinates in an infinite extension,[20]
thereby acknowledging the essence of uncertainty and change. Le Corbusier was
very aware of this characteristic of the grid.
This characteristic of grid may have been the key element in
Le Corbusier’s final drawing for the Venice hospital project – juxtaposing
geometric order with spatial programming into an emblematic generative architecture.
Retracings: From the Plan
to the Grid in Le Corbusier’s Design Strategy
Venice Hospital was planned in 1964 to be built in San
Giobbe neighborhood, in the Canareggio area at the edge of the city of Venice,
it was commissioned to cater for the acutely ill. The proposed hospital was unique in its design considerations, as
the challenge was not just to design the hospital, but also to design the
topography of the structure beneath the hospital - thereby creating a physical
extension to the city of Venice.
Figure 1: Atelier Julian, plan of
Venice with new hospital [third project], 1966.
2.1 Rapport Technique
In the Rapport Technique discussed below, Le Corbusier
evokes both the programmatic issue and the flexibility issue in discussing the
design of the hospital. The report turns to the problem of horizontal
circulation that sprawl would create and proposes mechanization as the means of
solving it. By virtue of its location and its scale, the building turned in on
itself and created its own interior subenvironments in the form of wards
centered around courtyards that repeated in a seemingly endless manner. These
courtyards were supposed to extend the residential areas of the city into the
water, but also create an abstract, clear logic that reciprocated back onto the
labyrinthine context of Venice.[21]
The Hospital is sited near the northwest end of the Grand
Canal and extends over the lagoon separating Venice from Mestre. The decision
to contain the wards in a solid wall and to light them from the roof is
justified by the proximity of the railway terminal and the industrial squalor
of Mestre. The building covers a large area and is comparable in its mass and
public importance to such groups as the Piazza San Marco, the Ospedale Civile
and the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore. It therefore forms an important
addition to that small but significant collection of buildings symbolizing the
public life of Venice.[22]
Figure 2: Atelier Jullian, model of the Venice
Hospital, 1966
Unlike the assimilation of the Venice Hospital to its
immediate surroundings and everyday life, Kenneth Frampton[23]
points out that the Metabolist were unable to find such harmony in their work.
According to Frampton, Kiyonari
Kikutake’s floating cities are among the most poetic visions of the Metabolist
Movement, yet Kikutake’s marine cities seem even more remote and inapplicable
to everyday life…[24]
Gunther Nitschke et al. had this to say when making an assessment of the
Metabolist Movement in 1966:
As long as the actual building get heavier, harder, more and more
monstrous in scale, as long as architecture is taken as a means of expression
of power, be it of oneself or of any kind of vulgar institution, which should
be serving not ruling society, the talk of greater flexibility and
change-loving structures is just fuss. Comparing this structure [Akira
Shibuya’s Metabolic City project of 1966] with any one of the traditional
Japanese structures or modern methods suggested by Wachsmann, Fuller, or Ekuan
in Japan, it must be considered a mere anachronism, a thousand years out of
date, or to say the least, not an advance of modern architecture in terms of
theory and practice.[25]
Le Corbusier was determined not to unsettle the existing
typology of Venice through his proposed Hospital project. Le Corbusier wanted
to translate his perception of the city in his design, according to him; “one
cannot built high; it would be necessary to be able to build without building. And then its necessary to find scale.”[26]
(emphasis mine)
Although Le Corbusier was not alone in his pursuit to find a
balance between the concept of innovativeness and integration in his design
solutions[27], his
solution according to Colquhoun, combines the monumentality of the Hospital as
part of the grandeur of the city with an intimacy and textural quality in
harmony with the city’s medieval scale. If built, it would have gone a long way
towards revitalizing the “kitchen sink” end of the city which needed more than
the tourist trade to keep it alive.[28]
Incidentally, Eric Mumford in his essay[29]
believes, Le Corbusier’s concept of ‘ineffable space’ as a new basis of
architectural form, articulated in a 1964 essay, usually relied on the
transformation of existing typologies.
In comparison, Candilis-Josic-Woods, were attempting to
generate a new method of formal expression that loosely linked the various
program elements in ways that allowed to continuous flexibility and change.[30]
As in the example of the sketches illustrating the design approach at Berlin
Free University, 1964.
Figure 3: Candilis Josic Woods,
sketches illustrating design approach at Berlin Free University, 1964.
Although this approach was different from both Le Corbusier
and Blom[31], the idea
of linking elements that form open courtyard and connect programmatic areas has
been extensively utilized by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in works such as
the Centrosoyuz in Moscow, the League of Nations competition entry in Geneva,
the Salvation Army Cite de Refuge in Paris and the Palace of the Soviets
competition entry in Moscow, as Colquhoun had perceptively analyzed. Colquhoun
identified how these projects begin to indicate a new urban pattern with
multilevel circulation systems, which at the same time are adjusted to the
particularities of each projects complex urban site.
Figure 4: Piet
Bloom, “Noah’s Ark” project for urbanization of the Netherlands, shown at Team
10 meeting at Abbaye Royaumont, 1962; model photos and plan of one village
unit.
In each, Le Corbusier perfected the technique of
elementarization of the various major program elements, such as the linear bars
joined at right angles to form open courts, which permitted a large number of
plan variations with potentially infinite extensibility.[32]
Le Corbusier was able to realize such projects only in greatly reduced form,
but Candilis-Josic-Woods began to build such ideas in enlarged but at the time
spatially limited projects such as the Berlin Free University.[33]
Although Eric Mumford in his arguments cites the example of
the Berlin Free University, it must be noted here that in an assessment[34]
of this University by Tzonis et al. The Berlin Free University is somewhat
termed as a magnificent yet redundant structure in its present condition.
Unlike Le Corbusier’s proposed Venice Hospital it remains an isolated part of
its immediate infrastructure, in terms of its scale as well as its functional
programming.
2.2 Plan of the Venice Hospital
In terms of the plan of the Venice Hospital, Le Corbusier
integrates the communication channels, the recreational and religious centers
along with immediate hospital personnel space in the ground level of the
hospital. According to Colquhoun, “The ground level accommodation occupies an
L, with an isolated block contained within the arms of the L. The reception,
the administration, and the kitchen occupy the L, and the nurses hostel the
isolated block. A straight access system breaks through the L where gondola and
car entries converge onto a common entrance lobby thrown across the gap.
Figure 5: Le Corbusier, Venice Hospital, Figure 6: Le Corbusier, Venice Hospital, first
first project [1964]
level 1. project level 2a [1964]
The gondola approach route is bridged by a route linking
religious and recreational centers at its extremities. There is an entresol
containing extensions of the ground level accommodation….(similarly) the
analytical and treatment departments are on the level 2a are arranged freely
around the cores in an analogous way to the wards above.
Figure 7: Le Corbusier, Venice Hospital, first project Figure 8: Le Corbusier, Venice Hospital, first project [1964] level 2b level 3.
Level 2b consists of a horizontal interchange system between
all elevators points – patients using the central and the staff the peripheral,
corridors fig…. The ward block which is occupies the entire top floor, is both
the largest department of the building and represent its typical element, and
organization allows this element to extend to the limits of the building with
which it becomes identified by the observer, whatever position he may be in.
The basic unit of the plan and its generator is a square
groups of wards rotating around a central elevator core – Le Corbusier calls a
campiello. These units are added in such a way that wards next to each other in
adjacent units merge, thus ‘correcting’ the rotation and making the independent
systems interlock. An agglomerate of units creates a square grid with a
campiello at each intersection. The plan differs from those isomorphic schemes
where the unit of addition is elementary (as implied, for instance, in the roof
of Aldo Van Eyck’s school at Amsterdam).
Here the basic unit is itself hierarchically arranged, with
biological rather than mineral analogies, and capable of local modification
without the destruction of its principle…The concept of the top-floor plan is
reminiscent of the Islamic medresehs of North Africa, where subcommunities of
students’ cells are grouped around small courtyard, forming satellite systems
around a central court. As in the medresehs the whole dominates the parts, and
the additive nature of the schema is overlaid with a strong controlling
geometry.
The geometric as apposed to the additive schema consists of
a system of overlaid squares and the golden-section rectangles. The smaller of
the two squares established a center of gravity asymmetrical in relation to the
scheme as a whole and related to it diagonally. This center is also on the
intersection of the rectangles formed by dividing the total square according to
geometrical proportion. The additive grid consists of eight units, which allows
for division of the Fibonacci series into 8, 5, 3, 2. The center of the small
square is the center of gravity of the treatment department and the main
vertical circulation point for the patients around which there is an opening in
the top floor giving light to the ground-floor court which wraps around the
central core. As at the monastery of La Tourette, the traditional court with
circulation around it is modified by a cruciform circulation system on its axis
– a typical Corbusian superimposition of functional and mythic order.
Figure 9: Showing the Venice Hospital, geometrical schema(left),
additive schema (right).
The central core (which from another point of view is merely
one of a number of equidistant elevator cores) assumes a fixed relationship
with the southeast and southwest faces of the building only. Conceptually, the
building can extend on the northeast and northwest faces, and these are
developed in a freer way over the lagoon to the northwest and the Canale di
Cannaregio to the northeast, where one assumes further extension could take
place. (Colquhoun notes that; between the first and second project a new site,
became available, and it is therefore possible to see how extension has been
achieved without detriment to the overall schema.)
The wards are grouped around the central light well in a
wing over the lagoon, and form a U – shape over the gondola entrance to provide
the echo of an avant-cour. From this “soft” side a bridge extends over the
canal to an isolated ward complex on the opposite side.
According to Colquhoun; despite the uniqueness of this
building in the work of Le Corbusier – a uniqueness that perhaps can be
explained by the complexities of the problem and by the peculiarities of the
site – a number of prototypes exist in his earlier work(that can perhaps
testify to the feasibility of his design solution for the Venice Hospital). At
the Villa Savoye in Poissy the flat cube, projected into the air and open to
the sky, was first established as a “type” solution. It seems clear that this
sort of “type” solution cannot be equated with the object-type discussed by
Banham in his Theory and Design in the
First Machine Age, since Le Corbusier frequently uses the same type in
different contexts. However it can be assumed that Le Corbusiers’ concept of
type relates to a mythic form rather than to a means of solving particular
problems, and that, as with physiognomic forms or musical modes, a number of different
contents can be attached to the same form. A similar idea is apparent in the
project of for the Museum of Endless Growth of 1930-39, also connected with the
problem of extensibility as at Venice, though solving it in a different way. In
the 1925 Cite Universitaire project a solid single-story block of studios was
proposed, where the rooms were lit entirely from the roof.”[35]
In the Venice Hospital patios are more than just the static
result of a solid that has been carved out to gain light and air. Following the
explorations started at the 1964 Carpenter Center in Cambridge, the interaction
of the inside and outside spaces are consciously activated by means of layers
of transparencies and visual fluidity that dissolve the void and penetrate the
mass. The idea successfully solved the contextual difficulties faced in the
Harvard Building by dematerializing the facades and the limits of the envelope,
and projecting the surrounding buildings as the ultimate façade. In Venice this
effect is intensified by the shimmering reflections of the sun on the water and
its projections on the slabs, walls, glassed surfaces, and pilotis.
The idea of a building on pilotis extending over water, may
stem from Le Corbusier’s earlier interest in reconstructions of prehistoric
lake dwellings in central Europe. The monastery of La Tourette resembles such
schemes through the way in which the building is projected over rough sloping
ground which, like water, offers no foothold for the inhabitants of the
constructed world suspended above it.[36]
Thus in the hospital scheme the potential symbolism of these
forms has been harnessed to a new and unique problem. The space of the pilotis
forms a shaded region in which the reflections of sunlight on water would
create continuous movement. Over this space, which is articulated by numerous
columns whose grouping would alter with the movement of the observer, floats a
vast roof, punctured in places to let in the sunlight and give a view of the
sky. This roof is in fact an inhabited top story, whose deep fascia conceals
the wards behind it. It is the realm of the sky in whose calm regions the
process of physical renewal can take place remote from the world of water,
trees and men which it overshadows. But apart from its suggestions of sunlight
and healing, it has more somber overtones.
The cavelike section of the wards, the drawn representation
of the sick almost as heroic corpses laid out on cool slabs, the paraphernalia
of ablution suggests more personal obsessions and give the impression of a
place of masonic solemnity, a necropolis in the manner of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux
or John Soane.
Figure 10: Atelier Jullian, Venice Hospital, Detail plan and section of typical
3rd project; Detail Plan of patients
rooms patient cells, 1965
layout [level 3], 1966
The analytical way in which the constituent functions are
separated allows them to develop pragmatically around and within fixed
patterns. The form is not conceived of as developing in a one-to-one relation
with the functions but is based on ideal schemata with which the freely
deployed functions, with their possibilities of unexpected sensuous incident,
engage in a dialogue. The building is both an agglomeration of basic cells,
capable of growth and development and a solid which has been cut into and
carved out to reveal a constant interaction of inside and outside space. The
impression of complexity, is the result of a number of subsystems impinging on
schemata which, in themselves, are extremely simple,”[37]
yet elegant as is evident in the Rapport Technique[38] by Le Corbusier. The Rapport is a detailed
listing of functions of the Hospital – from outpatients, department to
emergency services, to performance space, public square, hotel, school, shops,
lecture rooms, chapel, and the morgue – and the different user group, each
given their place in this tapestry, conveying a strong urban feel.
The Rapport[39]
suggests strong emphasis on technological enabled circulation and communication
systems so as to make the vast horizontal spread operate tightly. The three
main iterations of the Venice Hospital were produced between 1964 and 1966.
“The broad strokes are set in the first, the programmatic complexities are
worked out in the second, and in the third the construction logic begins to
appear.
Fig…..illustrate respectively the projects’ conceptual
outline, its urban density, and the programmatic compartmentalization and logic
of internal circulation.
2.3 Programmatic consideration of the Venice Hospital
Project
Below is a brief comparison of the programmatic
consideration of the Venice Hospital as outlined in Le Corbusier’s Rapport Technique (1965) with Alex Wall’s
“Programming the Urban Surface” (2001).
The Venice Hospital as opposed to the classical conception
of hospitals built and organized vertically, was a ‘horizontal hospital.’ Three
main levels were planned.
The first level, on the ground is the level of connection
with the city; there one finds the general services and all public access – by
water, by foot, and from the bridge across the lagoon.
The second level is the story of preventive care, of
specialized care, and of rehabilitation. It is a level of medical technology.
The third level is the zone for hospitalization, and the visitor area. The
height of the level is 13.66 meters; this dimension corresponds to the average
height of the buildings in the city….
The point of departure for the hospital was the room
[cellule] of the patient. This element, created at the human scale, gave rise
to a care unit, of twenty eight patients, which functions autonomously. This
unit is organized around a central space of communication (Campiello) and four paths (Calle),
which are intended for both circulation and inhabitation by patients in
convalescence. Four units of care form a ‘building unit.’ Through the juxtaposition of building units, this framework yields a
horizontal hospital. Thus the hospital stops being a static organism and
acquires a flexibility required both to follow the evolution of medical
innovations and to accommodate the possibility of future growth. The hospital
department can be interchangeable and will be used in accordance with the
changing needs of the hospital. The care units receive indirect natural light
that helps to create the best possible conditions for the patients. On the same
level the patient will find the conditions of the city life, upon entrance into
the “Calle,” the Campiello,” and the hanging gardens.
For the patient, a more comfortable hospitalization
represents, in fact a more effective cure, which is always more economical.
This means that one must go beyond the step of curing and emphasize the
preventive and rehabilitation capabilities of the hospital. This process presumes a medical organization
based on teamwork, and for this reason the second level is conceived in such a
way that the medical services that it contains….can be used indiscriminately by
all hospitalization services. This level is exclusively reserved for the
medical staff, except for the circulation space, which is directly linked to
the first floor and is used for prevention and rehabilitation…
By opening the ground floor directly onto the city, one
allows for a city-hospital encounter and facilitates the visual transmission of
medicine towards the outside. In this way the outpatient … will find himself within reach of all the services that facilitates their contact with a
hospital (prevention, therapy, rehabilitation). The hotel, the restaurant, the
cinema, the shops, etc,. will effectively enable this integration with the city,
allowing many patients to be treated without being hospitalized, and thereby
allowing the beds available inside the hospital to be occupied more
reasonably….. The Unite de soins, the
Campiello, and the Calle serve to create relationship
between the patient and the city.
The various specific functions – patients check in,
emergency care, visitors, etc. - are all given a point of contact with the
ground at level 1, which is organized vertically to lead to their corresponding
levels and spaces. The horizontal network of shallow ramps on the fourth floor
is reserved exclusively for the patients and medical staff; it ensures their
circulation all the while prohibiting the passage of patients into the services
areas where they do not belong. The fifth story is thereby left entirely for
the use of hospitalized patients and their visitors.”[40]
Similar design consideration is formulated by Alex Wall in
his argument, according to him the “goal of designing
the urban surface is to increase its capacity to support and diversify
activities in time – even activities that cannot be determined in advance –
then the primary design strategy is to extend its continuity while diversifying
its range of services. This is less design as passive ameliorant and more
as active accelerant, staging and setting up new conditions for uncertain
futures.[41] He further
believes that the “traditional notion of the city as a historical and
institutional core surrounded by postwar suburbs and then open countryside has
been largely replaced by a more polycentric … metropolis. Here multiple centers
are served by overlapping networks of transportation, electronic communication,
production and consumption. Operationally, if not experientially, the
infrastructures and flows of material have become more significant than static
political and spatial boundaries. The influx of people, vehicles, goods and
information constitute … “daily urban system” painting a picture of urbanism
that is dynamic and temporal.[42] The emphasis shifts here from forms of urban
space to process of urbanization, processes that network across vast regional –
if not global – surfaces.[43]
Unlike the treelike[44],
hierarchical structures of traditional cities, the contemporary metropolis
functions more like a spreading rhizome, dispersed and diffuse, but at the same
time infinitely enabling[45].”
According to Guillermo Julian de la Fuente, he tested the
urban ideas considered in the Venice Hospital at a broader scale between 1969
and 1970 in a competition project for the renovation of the waterfront of the
city of Cuomo.
Figure 11: Jullian, sequence of
models Figure12: Jullian,
competition project for the urban depicting spatial relations in patios renovation of Cuomo, Italy
1979-70.
Final Version 1970.
After visiting and analyzing the city, studying its Roman
fabric, and reviewing the spatial relations of Giuseppe Terragni’s work, Julian
decided to deploy a new urban fabric that following Venice’s example, included
major public programs and amenities such as theatres, exhibition halls, and
parks. “The structure is permeable to the lake underneath” he said. “Without
facades, this structure is in reality conceived within the spirit of an open
and flexible program.”[46]
For Jullian, the Cuomo project is part of the same research he undertook for
Venice, in this case taking the Roman city as a starting point. Here the
project is a reiteration of the Venice principles, but influenced by the
existing plan of the city and its texture. For Julian, projects like Cuomo or
Valencia are part of that continuous search for ways to operate at such scale,
and these experiments generated a process of cross-referencing that always
converged on Venice as a point of departure and arrival.[47]
As Julian puts it; “It is very important to remark that the
idea was not to create a block or wall towards the city … In Venice there is
this special characteristic called the “transenna,” that is the way buildings
water and light merge into a completely different condition where there are not
single buildings any more but generates a whole architectural compound.[48]
This architectural compound is an active entity, the
“activity becomes a way of describing both the presence of a building, as well
as the presence of an urban field.”[49]
According to Hashim Sarkis, in the Venice Hospital; “the
programmatic-change kind of flexibility caters to shifting functions within the
building and to growth both outward and inward. Relocating departments within
this framework is made easier by the layering of the hospital into three
strata….The radical change in the Venice Hospital is in the way the building
transform into a series of network themselves and these networks acquire their
shape from an external rather than a programmatic source. The horizontal and
block attributes of the hospital are juxtaposed against, rather than derived
from, the program. They come from the city. The growth of the hospital is also
made in increment of the city, not in increment of the internal module. Thereby
articulating in essence an excellent example of generative architecture.
The urbanization of the building program made possible the
consolidation of this scale of institution with modern life. This is one of the
main attributes of the Venice Hospital and one that distinguishes it from other
iconic mat buildings like the Berlin Free University.”[50]
The Berlin Free University remained the key example in the ‘Rational
Architecture’ sensibilities of the 1960s.[51]
Conclusion
As noted above, Le Corbusier’s city grids, domestic layouts
and the Modular do merit a consideration, as an ideal example of the spatial
innovations of the new sciences, thereby providing a homogenous, quantitative,
infinitely extensible continuum.
Jack H. Williamson read this into the alleged
‘dematerialization’ of Le Corbusier’s interiors and christens it the
‘anti-object paradigm’. He considers this spatial development to be parallel to
the loss of autonomous individuality under the new collectivist and determinist
social and psychological sciences.[52]
Andrew McNamara similarly read Le Corbusier’s grid as an
evidence of a desire to collapse all boundaries – natural, spatial, social and
aesthetic – into an undifferentiated field. Le Corbusier is apparently
committed to imposing this field at all levels, ‘to transform it into a broad
social vision encompassing every aspect of life’.[53]
According to Richards; although the above readings may be
applicable to other modernists grids, they are not applicable to Le Corbusier.[54]
In contrast to Richards, Stoppani in her essay entitled, The Reversible City:
Exhibition(ism), Chorality and Tenderness in
Manhattan and Venice [2005]
believes that
both Manhattan and Venice represent unsolved
complexities for the
modernist
discourse in architecture[55]
and therefore the Venice Hospital project
did
support Le Corbusier’s articulation of an infinitely
extensible continuum. And
a ideal place to
explore generative architecture.
According to
Stoppani [2005], Anti-modern (Manhattan) and Venice
Hospital
project
in its attempt at replicating the intrinsic program of the city may have pre-
modern
(Venice), resist the separations and classifications that the language of
the
Modernist discourse in a architecture imposes on the urban space…While
the many
different worlds of Manhattan coexist because
they are separated and
con-tained (held together and held inside) by the Grid, Venice is regulated in her
structure but is never contained inside a defined
envelope: the interior of Venice
flows, overruns, changes, constantly redefines its
boundaries. The chorality of
Venice is a collective and constitutive process. Here even the
voice of
modernism
capitulates.[56]
In Sur Les Quatre Routes (1941) Le Corbusier
acknowledges:
‘Venice is a
totality. It is a unique phenomenon […] of total harmony, integral
purity and unity
of civilization.’ ‘Here everything is measure, proportion and
human presence.
Go into the city, in its most hidden corners: you will realize that
in this urban
enterprise one finds, everywhere, tenderness
[tendresse].’[57]
Stoppani goes on to question whether this
Venetian tenderness a product of its ‘total harmony, integral purity and
unity’, ‘measure, proportion’.
It seems Le Corbusier believed that this
certainly was the case. Stoppani argues that; Venetian architectural
tenderness – Venice making as a process – seem more attuned to the fluidity of
current post-compositional trends in architecture.[58]
Or more specifically generative architecture.
Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital project 1964-65 may have been
the first and perhaps the finest example in this direction towards of
generative architecture.
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