The Liberal Monument Subrayado

The
Liberal
Monument
A definition of urban design as the manifestation of
romantic late-modernism
Alexander DHooghe

The Liberal Monument
Dit proefschrift is goedgekeurd door de promotor(en):

Prof Wiel Arets, Technische Universiteit Delft
Prof. Jurgen Rosemann, Technische Universiteit Delft
Samenstelling promotiecommissie:
Rector Magnificus, voorzitter instellingen allemaal volledig uitschrijven
Prof. Wiel Arets, Technische Universiteit Delft, promotor
Prof. Jurgen Rosemann, Technische Universiteit Delft
Prof. Wytze Patijn, Technische Universiteit Delft
Prof. Henko Bekkering, Technische Universiteit Delft
Prof. Marcel Smets, K.U.Leuven
Prof. Rem Koolhaas, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Prof. Alex Krieger, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Author
Alexander DHooghe
Graphic Design:
Alexander DHooghe,
Mick Morssinck
Alexander DHooghe, 2007
For Natalie, Jakob and Adriana
Acknowledgement
This is a ph.d. manuscript, prepared at the Berlage Institute and the
T.U.Delft. I wish to thank in particular my promotors Wiel Arets and
Jurgen Rosemann. I also with to especially thank Marcel Smets, as well
as Rem Koolhaas and Alex Krieger, who provided invaluable criticism to
the project. Also the projective theory group at the Berlage Institute, for
the support and stimulating exchanges: Roemer van Toorn and Pier Vittorio Aureli. Finally, a broader community of peers who have been willing
to comment and critique the work as it developed in its various stages,
without a formalized institutional role: Steve Swiggers, Jan Mannaerts,
Geert Antonissen, Talia Dorsey, Kersten Geers, Hashim Sarkis, Richard
Sommer, Veronique Patteeuw, Vincent Brunetta, Natalie Seys and Ole
Bouman. Preparation for the study began in 2000, and were formalized
as a ph.d. project in November 2002. By February 2005, the project was
formally completed, although editing continued until February 2007.
The rule of the idea is

stronger than the rule of law.

Fry, Maxwell. p.89 in The Idea and Its Realization published in: Tyrwhitt, J.; Sert,
J.L..; Rogers, E.N. (ed.) The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life. CIAM 8.
(London: Lund Humphries and New York: Pellegrine and Cudahy, 1952) (reprint: Nendeln: Kraus,
1979).
The following unearths a project to

give a form to the public after the demise of the city. This project has laid
dormant for too long in the archives
of Late Modernism. It was first called
the New Monumentality, and later
became Urban Design. Rather than
a discipline, this was an intellectual
and aesthetic enterprise to formalize
a political ideal for the emerging audiences of post-war western world.
Its features appear in the drawings
and writings of Late-Modernist architect-planners of late modernism
on the American East Coast, such as
Sert, Maki, Giedion, and Kahn when
read through the intersecting lenses
of Ernst Cassirers Symbolic Form, and
Isaiah Berlins Romantic Liberalism.
As a result, terms such as urban design, monumentality, assemblage, and
symbolic form are redefined within
the project of modernism.
Foreword:
History and Liberty
Introduction:
Totality and Anxiety

A project against Mass Regression

1:2.000 1:50.000
Dilemma: Disurbanism or Re-urbanization?
Cores
1:200-1:5000
Dilemma: Fabrics or Monuments?
The Group
1:2 1:500
Dilemma: Abstraction or Empathy?
The Monumental Symbol

Conclusion:

Addenda:
On Method

Index and Bibliography
Foreword: History and Liberty

Introduction: Totality and Anxiety
First Dilemma: Disurbanism vs. Re-Urbanization
1. THE CORE
1.1. Discourse
1.1.1 Serts Complex
1.1.2 Kahns Station
1.1.3 Tyrwhitts Constellation
1.1.4 Metropolitan Urbanity (Sert, Whyte, Jacobs)
1.2 Form
1.2.2 Consolidation/Disintegration
1.2.3 Eccentric Knots
1.3 Traces
1.3.1 Demise of Urban Designs Cores
1.3.2 Metropolitan Object (Koolhaas / Zemghelis)
1.3.3 Interfacism (Herron /Richards / Hollein)
1.3.4 Pragmatic Late-Modernism (Sola / Quaroni)
1.3.5 A new Medieval (Sola)
1.4. Towards a Liberal Public Sphere
1.4.1 Liberalism as a Political Aesthetic
1.4.2 From Program to Organization
1.4.3 From Model to Prefiguration
1.4.4 Towards Formalism
Second Dilemma: Monument vs. Fabric
2. GROUPS
2.1 Discourse
2.1.1 Serts Groupings
2.1.2 Giedions Group Design
2.1.3 Makis Group Form
2.2 Form
2.2.1 Shattering and Regrouping
2.2.2 Consolidation
2.2.3 Densification
2.2.4 Opening up
2.3 Traces
2.3.1 Urban Renewal: A Formalist Critique
2.3.2 Kallmann vs. Moneo: The Plaza
2.3.3 Harrison vs. De Geyter: The Arrangement
2.3.4 Bakema vs. Sola: on Context
2.4 The Almost-Project of the Group
2.4.1 Political Aesthetic of Conflicting Mythologies
2.4.2 Fundamentalist Pluralism
2.4.3 The Not-Yet Form
11
15
45
59
65
73
90
93
99
103
107
113
119
127
141
145
159
171
189
205
215
217
223
231
233
239
249
261
265
271
Third Dilemma: Abstraction vs. Empathy

277
3. THE MONUMENTAL SYMBOL
3.1 Form Discourse
3.1.1 Cassirers Symbolic Form
295
3.1.2 Giedions Quest for Monumental Symbols
315
3.1.3 Serts sculpto-architectural unit
337
3.1.4 Kahns Frozen Movement
355
3.2. Traces
3.2.1 Monument and Movement (Hollein, Bakema) 369
3.3 Towards a Public Architecture
379
4. THE LIBERAL MONUMENT

4.1 Theses
The Meeting that Never Took Place
4.2 Modernist Debris
4.3 Romantic Modernism
4.4 Liberal Political Aesthetic
4.5 Emancipation from Above
4.6 Myth as Project
4.7 Formalism
4.8 Ideal Figures:
4.9 Urban Design
4.10 Then = Now
4.11 Crisis and Monument
4.12 Not Fabric but Figure
4.13 Not Object but Complex
4.14 Not Urban but Public
4.15 Not Program but Organization
4.16 Not Singularity but Assembly
4.17 Not Complexity but Clarity
4.18 Not just Abstraction but also Body Language
4.19 Towards a Project

403
407
411
417
419
421
423
426
427
430
433
434
435
437
437
438
439
440
Notes on Method
Index and Bibliography
447
453
393
10
Foreword
History and Liberty
Every generation has the right to frame its own historical interpretations, and none of them final; But not only has it a right, it
also has a kind of obligation to do so ... It is this need which, if not
answered by rational and fair means, produces historicist interpretations. Under its pressure the historicist substitutes for a rational
question: What are we to choose as our most urgent problems,
how did they arise, and along what roads may we proceed to solve
them?, the irrational question: Which way are we going? What,
in essence, is the part that history has destined us to play?
The will of a protagonist is not determined solely by the historical moment in which he acts, but also by freely choosing a purpose to orient his
actions. This is one of the fundamental tenets of a political philosophy
of liberalism. In architecture and planning, the dramatic result of such a
tenet is twofold. First, that forms drawn in the past cannot be locked up
in the province of history, but that they may contain intentions and acts
that are as relevant today as they were at the moment of their inception.
Modernist projects, for instance, ought to be studied as the possible result
of contemporary choices. Second, the aforementioned tenet implores us
not to be imprisoned by todays commonplace opinion. We have a tendency to consider the status quo as the unavoidable result of an ongoing
development. Karl Popper called this despicable determinism, historicism.
Another philosopher of liberalism, Jose Ortega Y Gasset, claims that
We have need for history in its entirety, not to fall back on it, but to
see whether we can escape it.
To destroy the false commonplaces of our own time, we need to re-inter

Popper, Karl Raimund. The open society and its enemies, Vol. 1 (originally published 1945). (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). Pp. 267-268).

Ortega Y Gasset, Jos. The Revolt of the Masses. Authorized translation from the Spanish. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., Publishers, c1932); (Original
publication: Le Rebelion de las Masas, 1930); (New York: New American Library, 1950, c1932)
completely reset and printed from new plates. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., [1957,
1932]; Reissue. New York: W. W., Norton, Inc., 1993.
We have need for history in its entirety, not to fall back

on it, but to see whether we can escape it.

11
pret history. It may give us the freedom to choose our own purposes, and
base the construction of our techniques, aesthetics, and vocabularies for
those.
Architects and urban designers born after 1972, the date on which
Charles Jencks declared modernism to be dead, grew up with a series of
reactions against modernism. These eventually became the received wisdom that complexity, the everyday, and so-called self-organization are
an antidote to the totalizing tendencies in the project of modernism. To
this corresponded a shift in the discourse, from dissatisfaction with reality
and large plans to transform it, to a celebration of reality and intensive
efforts to understand and justify it. We moved from urban design to urban
studies: from the city as it ought to be to the city as it was. However, to
those born after modernism had already been buried, this historico-cybernetic-anthropological turn is no longer a critical project, as its enemy modernism itself has vanished already. Worse, have we not, by
abandoning a project against reality, cleared the path for the uninterrupted
execution of ruthless post-urban development governed by no principle
but that of privatization? The intellectual class has voluntarily surrendered
its arms to the business class. Under its aegis, form and its judgments are
relegated to the private sphere as mere expressions and interests of private
subjects.
What if we revisit the paradigm preceding the current one: late modernism? A powerful critique against it came out of the social analysis of the
Frankfurt School: modernist planning, by placing reason at the service
of politics and economy, regressed into its opposite myth. The myth
of reason legitimized the hegemony of a functionalist discourse, thus
enabling an extremely reductive, even an anti-humanistic approach to the
form of the city. But was Modernism ever such a monolithic project? Is
it possible that there was a counter-project within late Modernism based
on the opposite principle, namely the counter-enlightenment project of
Romanticism? And if so, could such a counter-project, until now latent,
not relate to a political aesthetic of liberalism, since Isaiah Berlin, among
others, conceived of liberalism as a consequence, an intellectual conclusion
based on the premises established by Romanticism?

Jencks, Charles. On the controlled destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe apartment
complex. In: What is Post-Modernism. (New York: Rizzoli, 1989).
We moved from urban design to urban studies:

From the city as it ought to be to the city as it was.
12
My motivation for the following labor is simple. Liberalism is under

threat, today, both outside and inside the West, by various instance of
resurgent totalitarianism. A forceful, popular argument for its project
is desperately needed. Well, if Boris Iofans 1933 Soviet Palace is the
symbolic from of Stalinism, effectively crystallizing an entire vision of
the public into a single monolithic form, then what is the symbolic form
that corresponds to a liberal ideal of the public sphere? Thus, this research
arrives at a contemporary counter-project in architecture and planning.
This position crystallizes into a proposition on public form and its political
aesthetic. It is not a discussion of what exists or what has existed, but, to
the contrary, of what ought to exist.
The point is not to generate a consensus, but rather to demonstrate how a
particular purpose structures formal templates in our field. In the end, the
point is not to get as many converts as possible; but rather to encourage
students in urbanism to formulate a purpose, elaborate its templates, and
expose these to mutual criticism in an almost Popperian process of conjecture and refutation. Upon doing this, once again progress may occur in
our discipline. This requires sincerity rather than irony: it requires a retreat
to commitment. My concern is that a strategy of silence will only further
disintegration.

After the title of a William Bartleys 1961 Ph.D. thesis, which elaborated
the Popperian principle of Conjecture and Refutation into the realm of metaphysics and belief
systems. Bartley, William Warren, The retreat to commitment. (New York, Knopf, 1962).
Was Modernism ever such a monolithic project?

Is there a symbolic expression of a liberal ideal of the public
sphere?

13
Above: Artists impression of NASA study for thoroidal space station, 1970.
Right: Logo from a corporation selling network systems equipment
We live in a post-urban continuum,
14
Introduction:
Totality and Anxiety
The planet is transforming, little by little, into a kaleidoscope in
which names and places, as well as politics and history, are being
pulverized into signs which jostle, turn upside down and evaporate,
leaving one in a state of dizziness.
A quick survey of satellite photography of Western Europe and the US
coasts (not to mention developments in Asia) confirms a deeply disturbing reality, experienced every day by the citizens of these territories. This
reality is that we live in a post-urban continuum, a quasi-endless grey
carpet, a semi-urban condition from which there seems to be no escape.
The shock-value of this fact is that it simply eradicates one of the oldest,
most primary forms of mental understanding of space: the distinction
between the city and the countryside as a distinction between figure and
background. Instead, both have merged to constitute a new, second nature,
an overall background. This new condition constitutes a de facto regression
to a pre-civilizational understanding of the territory: there is the infinite
background of (second) nature and there are no figures on it to organize, structure and access it. As
Pascal said, Le silence ternel de ces espaces

infinis meffraye. Indeed, it is scary. Also, it demands a response.
An example of such a total background is Europes Blue Banana. Roger
Brunet coined this concept in 1989 to describe one of the most densely
developed and most interconnected zone of Europe. The Blue Banana is
a territory, 500 km wide and 1800 km long, stretching from London, via
Randstad Holland, the Flemish Diamond and the Rurhrgebiet, onwards
via Basel onto the corridor of development along the Cote dAzur, ending

Aron, Jean-Paul. Printemps 1950. Cration du Club Mditerranne. in:
Les Modernes. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984) (translation: Alexander DHooghe).

Pascal, Penses, ch.XXV, sec.18.

Brunet, Roger. Les Villes Europennes, (Paris: La Documentation Francaise, RECLUS, DATAR, 1989).
See also: Brunet, R.: La France dans lspace europen, (Paris: GIP
RECLUS,1989);
Brunets analysis was also a wake-up call to the French government about the threatening peripheralization of France Paris in the geography of a unifying Europe, centering itself in this corridor.
... a quasi-endless grey carpet from which there seems to

be no escape

15
Above:Maps of the urbanized territory in Western Europe. Made by author on the basis of European land cover
maps made in 2000 by European Topic Centre on Land Use and Spatial Information
Here, there is no horizon, no outside anymore.

16
in Barcelona. This system is composed of a multitude of smaller cities,

whose peripheries have begun to touch each other. Thus, a grey realm is
spreading further outward and linking ever more agglomerations into a
diffuse territory that obliterates the distinction between city and countryside, becoming an ever larger unified system. This new totality simply
swallows and thus obliterates national boundaries, city-country distinctions, and other existing ways to organize its territory. Although European
sprawl has inherited a number of characteristics from the American original, European cities are spaced much closer to each other. The sprawling
systems of European cities are increasingly overlapping and interweaving
to create a new, vast semi-urban morphologic carpet devoid of a horizon:
without a clear boundary. The Blue Banana has exceeded the scale that
allows for an escape. Here, there is no outside anymore. Grey goo extends
in all directions. The interweaving of various sprawling systems in Europe
has created a system without a horizon. Such a system should be described
by its proper name: it is a totality. A totality is a situation that collapses
any perception of outside situations. A totality is like a prison. This gigantic collective artifact is a surround sound system beyond the confines
of historical, national development. Its perpetual noise is evident to us;
we are not questioning its right to exist any more. We have acquiesced
to its continuous presence. Yet, its reality is not inevitable; it is the result
of a series of conscious choices by particular actors. Therefore, it is not an
understatement to call this the dominant, hegemonic, yes even totalitarian
urbanization project currently in place. It is now Europes second nature. It
is to Europeans what water is to fish.
Like deer caught in a cars headlights, this is how we as a discipline have
responded to this new reality: fascination, eventually regressing into
celebration. Meanwhile, we have not noticed the mass anxiety and identity

This is a strictly philosophical term, used often by Marx and Lenin to
identify the apparatus of historical development. It has been used derivatively to describe a condition
that is total, in other words, that encompasses the entire spectrum of possible experiences.
Merriam-Webster defines totality as: 1 : an aggregate amount : SUM, WHOLE. 2 a : the quality or
state of being total : WHOLENESS b : the phase of an eclipse during which it is total : state of total
eclipse.
Such a system is a totality: it is Europes second nature.

17
crises that have coincided with the new totality. However, when Manuel
Castells wrote the Rise of the Network Society trilogy, has was careful to
devote only the first volume to the geographic fact itself, calling it a space
of flows. He wrote the third volume about the popular reaction against it:
the power of identity argues that the more a completely interconnected
and, to a certain degree, homogenized geography becomes a fact, the more
a popular desire for distancing, separating, and clarifying will appear. The
Power of Identity is devoted to the virulent reaction against this ultimate
principle of exchange, expressed through the proliferation of identity crises
in various communities and the resurgence of sectarianism in its various
guises religious fundamentalism and nationalism. In the years since Castells trilogy, the situation has further polarized, radicalizing its terms into
a clash between globalization and intolerant sectarianism. Counter-forces,
from Al-Qaeda, or Europes political inheritors of national-socialism, to
the USAs fundamentalist Christians are engaged in a highly Romantic
operation, trying to pre-empt their own dissolution in the global flow of
exchanges (and architecture and planning become part of this aberration
of Romanticism, as for instance on a billboard by the Flemish ultra-right
wing party Vlaams Blok in the late 1990s, depicting a minaret on top of
the cathedral of Antwerp). Thus, the last utopia now lies shattered, and the
mood is darkening. Where to turn? Two terms of this dialectic the network and the counterpart it calls up, namely sectarian identity, may not be
new at all. Thus, the totality the post-urban continuum may very well
self-destruct. Recent events invite us to question the future dominance of
the Blue Banana. Its political system is a series of welfare states. However, the stability and consensus that first fed the emergence of the Blue
Banana seems to be gone. Its grey goo now is hosting sectarianism, various
attempts to break up the territory into more homogeneous parts. Meanwhile, as its inhabitants are for now wealthier then ever before, they

Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Vol. 1. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. (Malden MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
------------------.The Power of Identity. Vol. 2. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture.
(Malden MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
-----------------. End of Millennium. Vol. 3. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture.
(Malden MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.)
Left: Poster of Municipal Election campaing of far-right party Vlaams Blok in Antwerpen, 1990s. (color manipulations by author).Right: still of zombies in George Romeros Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Counter-forces engage in a romantic operation to pre-empt

their own dissolution in the global flow of exchanges.
18
are complaining ever louder: indeed, the popular vote in most Western
European democracies shows that, since the late 1980s, xenophobic and
sectarian thinking has returned. Populist parties carrying the ideological
inheritance of the fascism and national-socialism of the 1930s and 1940s
are getting double-digit scores in France, Belgium, parts of Germany,
Austria, Great-Britain, and Italy. Suffering from an extreme case of tunnel vision, Europeans are wandering in their post-urban territories like
the zombies in the Night of the Living Dead. They are lost in their own
peripheries. And while one part of the population is thus renouncing its
own rationality, others are ignoring this collective crisis of identity, and
they defend a status quo that has become untenable. The Blue Banana,
while centrally located in Old Europe, seems tired of the weight of its own
history.
The last utopia of the West has been that of the Information age: endless
networks connecting endless terminals in a self-organizing system providing all of us with a capacity to surf at will in an endless matrix of people,
knowledge production and power. Throughout the 1990s, the discourse of
vanguard architecture and planning has attached itself to this utopia of the
network society as a digital, globally connected village. Architecture then
sought for a new aesthetic to express this ideal. Now, the dream has shattered. Urbanism and architecture cannot remain silent in the face of this
disintegration. It has to address the new condition somehow. But where, in
such a drought of investments, enthusiasm and ideas can a project for the
city blossom?
It is quite possible that formless sprawl and the endless society of the
network cannot be redeemed. In the dialectic between advanced networks
of globalization and the uprooting, displacement, and identity crises that it
unlocks, vanguard architecture and urbanism have surfed the waves of the
first; however, to approach the problems of contemporary architecture and
urbanism from the angle of the latter could be more urgent.
Europeans are lost in their own peripheries.

19
Public Space . Alexander DHooghe, 1998
There was an address of this crisis, already within latemodernism.

20
A Project against Mass Regression

[CIAM 8was only] a light background sketch for a future painting.
The territorial manifestation of the dialectic between totality and
anxiety is but an instance of a much older dialectic of modernity: that
irreconcilable entanglement between emancipation and alienation. Yes, the
effective realization of the endless city constitutes an emancipation from
older centers, it allows for an unparalleled mobility. Yes, todays posturban continuum does emancipate its citizens from being imprisoned in a
particular place. And we can celebrate this all we want yet such a reality
is profoundly destabilizing. It alienates citizens from any sense of place,
let alone identity, as everything gets subsumed in the broader system
of exchanges. The ensuing (perceived) loss of identity generates a huge
counter-force a reaction, an attempt to, through sheer will, once more
establish beacons of identification in what is coming to be perceived as a
gooish netherworld. So if this tension is not new, but quintessentially part
of modern life for at least one century, is it possible to discover an urban
or territorial project that effectively tackles the crisis? Since we are dealing
with modernity, the first place to look would be the modernist movement
itself. Is there, somewhere within its radical pluriformity, a clear project
that goes beyond mere celebration of the infinite post-urban realm? This
book contends that there was such an investigation in late-modernism,
and that the time has come to unearth, retrieve and operationalize it. To
understand this counter-project we need to revisit two historical instances
of the totality-anxiety dialectic: American sprawl and European fascism,
both emerging at the same historical moment as two ways in which a mass
society constructs itself.
The Chicago geographer Chauncy Harris describes the 1930s as a decade

Giedion, Sigfried. P.160 in: the heart of the city: a summing-up, in Tyrwhitt, J.; Sert, J.L..; Rogers, E.N. (ed.) The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban
Life. CIAM 8 (London: Lund Humphries and New York: Pellegrine and Cudahy, 1952) (reprint:
Nendeln: Kraus, 1979).
The time has come to unearth, retrieve and operationalize it.

21
of marked suburbanization. By 1957, William Whyte coins the word

sprawl to describe an ever-increasing, seemingly self-organizing, formless
cloud of private developments, each feeding off a vastly expanding
infrastructure system of highways, telephones, and mass media. These new
networks are considered to create a new mediation of the experience of
the city and indeed life itself, for instance prompting Marshall McLuhans
famous one-liner the medium is the message, or Melvin Webbers NonPlace Urban Realm. This statement sounds a lot like the cheers for the
network paradigm of the 1990s. By 1963 Jacqueline Tyrwhitt and Martin
Meyerson have already proposed the notion of the Middle City. Thus,
vast, sprawling suburbanization was already a concern before WWII and
became, especially for liberal urban elites, a terrifying reality during the
postwar construction boom.
While sprawl conquers America, totalitarian regimes were victorious in
Europe: during the 1930s, Italy, Spain, Germany joined the USSR in
establishing a continental, totalitarian hegemony. The regression forces
many modernist architects, planners, and intellectuals into exile, bereaving
them of previous occupation, and enabling them to engage in a reflection
about the tasks of architecture and planning in the face of mass anxiety
and its consequence at the time: totalitarianism. In 1944, this reflection
materializes through various publications. Jose Luis Sert and Sigfried
Giedion co-author Nine Points on Monumentality, Giedion publishes
his lecture the Need for a New Monumentality, and Sert publishes The
Human Scale of City Planning, a manifesto for the creation of a series of
civic centers in the sprawling city. Also, Louis Kahn publishes a manifesto
called Monumentality. All these are published in the same book, edited
by Paul Zucker in New York. In the same year, Ernst Cassirer publishes

pp.1-14 in: Harris, Chauncy D. in: The American Journal of Sociology,
(Chicago, July 1943).

Webber, Melvin. The urban place and the non-place urban realm. In:
Webber, Melvin, et al. Explorations in Urban Structure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1964).

They still frame this territory as the zone between the historic city center
and the outlying areas By 1992, Peter Rowe would coin the Middle Landscape to describe once
more this zone, but this time completely on its own terms Rowe, Peter. Making a Middle Landscape.
(Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1991).
Meyerson, Martin (ed.) with Tyrwhitt, Jacqueline, Falk, Brian and Sekler, Patricia. The Middle City.
(New York: the Random House, 1963).

Zucker, Paul (ed.). New architecture and city planning : a symposium.
(New York, Philosophical Library, 1944); (reprint: New York, Books for Libraries Press, 1971)
1944
1932
1945
1946
1947
Sert
Towards a New Monumentality

S. Giedion, J.L. Sert
Giedion
Kahn
Monumentality L.Kahn
Cassirer
Ortega Y Gasset
The enemy transforms, from barbaric masses in Europe to

sprawling territories in America:
22
Essay on Man, a summary version of his earlier trilogy in German, Die

Filosofie der Symbolischen Formen. Also, Rudolf Wertheimer, who pioneered
Gestalt Theory in Germany, publishes his first major English article,
Gestalt Theory in an American social sciences journal in 1944. Karl
Popper completes his manuscript (but cannot find a publisher until 1948)
of The Open Society and its Enemies. The aesthetic intuitions contained
in these theories in philosophy and cognitive science will influence the
fledgling concept of a New Monumentality as it matures into a definition
of urban design. Sert, Giedion and Kahn are second-generation
modernists. They are conflicted between the first dogmas of modernism
abstraction, decentralization, functionalism and the gigantic neoclassicism of Albert Speer (in Nazi Germany) and Boris Iofan (in Soviet
Russia), which deployed monumentality, centrality, and symbolism on a
vast, thoroughly modern scale. While considering the latter as repulsive,
the modernists begin to realize the importance of mass appeal in a time of
mass anxiety. From this tension stems their endeavor: to re-invent these
principles within modernism, in order to, as I would argue, build a popular
case for liberalism. With this departure they want to regain the high
ground. By appealing to the masses while installing their own aesthetics,
they seek to diffuse a set of values of Romantic liberalism that stand how
architecture, planning and its political philosophy could contribute to
stemming the sectarian violence of modern masses. Here, the germs of a
liberal monument appear for the first time.
From 1944 onwards, these protagonists are also deeply troubled by the
sprawling of the American city. As they develop their project, the enemy
transforms from barbaric masses in Europe to sprawling territories in
America: both require injections of liberal principles of civilization against
the homogenous hegemony of the totality called the masses. Rather than
a celebration of networks, sprawl and exchange, they set out on a quest
for the artificial creation of a renewed centrality defined through finite,
monumental public spaces and forms.
By 1959, Sert succeeds in institutionalizing this project by building
the first Urban Design department at Harvard. However, the project
is ill-born and soon loses all sense of purpose. The year 1961 witnesses
another series of landmark publications. First, there is Fumihiko Makis

Gestalt theory. Social Research, 11, 78-99 (1944).
1949
1948
1950
1951
THE CORE:
THE HEART OF THE
CITY (Ciam 8)
UN Headquarters
Le Corbusier
both totalities require injections of liberal principles of civilization.

23
Investigations in Collective Form, a powerful synthesis of the work

done in the preceding decade. However, Jane Jacobs also publishes The
Death and Life of Great American Cities, demonstrating the critical
errors committed in the name of modernism. In the American context,
the tide turns against all forms of modernism and the unfinished, still
fragile research lineage from New Monumentality to Urban design
is swept away by then critical counter-paradigms of everyday life
and community life. Thus, the investigation has remained incomplete
it has remained an almost-project. By 1964, Rudofsky curates a show
Architecture without Architects at the MOMA, devoted to the organic
architecture of pre-industrial communities; and one year later, Paul
Davidoff will demonstrate the unavoidable subjectivity of any planning
effort10. These statements finally seal the fate of modernisms argument:
namely, that was able to define the common good. Nevertheless, after
postmodernism we have learnt to accept that there are only viewpoints,
perspectives, and positions and no truth, certainly not about the
common good. What, then, could possibly stop the resurrection of the
project for the liberal monument, this time not as an effort to claim the
sole answer to todays crisis, but merely as an ideal that a minority could
embrace based on its own ideals and beliefs?
To narrow the field of research, the focus will be, within the 1944-1961
period, on the writings and designs of six protagonists on the American
East Coast. We will trace the work of the authors of the Monumentality
manifestoes in relation to a Romantic conception of the liberalism, a
political aesthetic of which Ernst Cassirer developed the aesthetic and
Isaiah Berlin developed the political side. The various protagonists
investigations run on different tracks, but various interactions occur and

Although the manuscript began circulating in 1961, it was only published
in 1964.Maki, Fumihiko, Investigations in collective form. (St. Louis, School of Architecture, Washington University, 1964).

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York,
Random House, 1961).

Rudofsky, Paul. Architecture without architects, an introduction to
nonpedigreed architecture. (New York, Museum of Modern Art; distributed by Doubleday, Garden
City, N.Y. 1964). See also a recent discussion of Rudofskys Exhibition: Scott, Felicity. Bernard Rudofsky: Allegories of Nomadism and Dwelling. Pp. 215-238 in: Goldhagen, Sarah; Legault, Rejean.
Anxious Modernisms, (Montreal: CCA, c2000).
10

Davidoff, Paul. Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning. Journal of the
American Institute of Planners 31 (1965): pp. 103-114.
1953
1954
1955
1956
Sert
Giedion
Kahn
Maki
Berlin
As the 1944 New Monumentality manifestoes expand and

transform to become the basis for the invention of
24
it is possible to begin establishing the contours of a common project.

To extract its content from what the historian of ideas calls the general
climate of opinions11 of this period forms the task of this book. However,
in some cases the protagonists have been unable to see through the
consequences of the stance they began to develop because they were still
clouded by their own CIAM dogmas, or because the changing climate of
opinion made them and their students abandon the work at hand. In these
cases, the research has been extended to include later work that contains
traces of their efforts.
Sprawl has arrived in Europe with a considerable time-lag from America.
Today it is becoming intertwined with Europes overall mass identity
crisis, sense of decline, and its welfare states decomposing into an
inescapable formlessness. Yet the European discourse on architecture
and planning, has, throughout the 1990s as suggested earlier, remained
captured in a utopization of the new, territorial totality. That is why we
need to go back to that brief moment in history when architecture was
willing to address both sides of the dialectic simultaneously. There, we
may find a proposal to work with those aspects of mass culture that point
outside of it.
11
This term was developed by Whitehead as a modification of Hegels older
concept of Zeitgeist, in:
Whitehead, A.N. Science and the Modern World (London and New York, 1925).
1957
1958
Group Design
coined at Carngie Mellon Lecture series
Two Concepts of Liberty
1959
1960
Foundation of
Urban Design Dept. at
Harvard
Shinjuku Project
Collective Form
book
an entirely new discipline, Urban Design, gradually the purpose of this project evaporates.

25
Gasset
Sert
the public square
urban design
ig n
AM
CI
ore
eC
th
des
on
an
w
Ne
urb
Giedion
lity
nta
e
um
m
sy
bo
lic
p
ou
gr
for
rm
s
form
Cassirer
sy
bo
lic
Kahn
sig
bolic
sym
orms
fo
de
olic f
ms
sym
b
Ur-
For
m
Maki
Late-Modernist
Architect-Planners
26
Berlin
Liberalist
Intellectual
Historians
Protagonists
Sert, Josep Lluis, 1902 (Spain) -1983. Architect. Arrival at US East Coast in
1940. Publisher of Athens Charter in USA in 1942. Chair of the 1951 CIAM
conference on The Core.. Organizes the first Urban Design Conference in
1956 at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the first Urban Design
Department in 1959. With TPA (Town Planning Associates) Designs urban
projects in Latin America; buildings in Europe and North America.
Giedion, Sigfried, 1883 (Swiss)-1968. Architecture historian. Student of
Heinrich Wlfflin. Key figure in the CIAM Congresses from 1928 until 1953.
Lecturer of architecture history at Harvard University from the 1930s until his
death.
Kahn, Louis, 1901 (Estonia) -1974. Architect. Arrives in US East Coast at age
2 in 1905. Appointment as Professor of architecture at M.I.T. (Cambridge,
Massachusetts) in 1956 and at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania) in 1957. Citizen of Philadelphia.
Maki, Fumihiko, 1928 ( Japan). Architect. Arrival at US East Coast (Graduate
School of Design at Harvard University, Cambridge) in 1952. Student of Sert
and Giedion. Assistant professor at Washington University (St. Louis, Missouri) from 1956 to 1961 and at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard
University (Urban Design program) from 1962 to 1965. Returns to Japan in
1965.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset, 1883 (Spain) -1955. Intellectual historian. Founder
/ Editor of Revista Occidente. Magnum opus: The Revolt of the Masses
(1938).
Cassirer, Ernst, 1874 (Germany) -1945. Intellectual historian. Arrival at US
East Coast in 1940. Professor at Yale and Columbia universities. Magnum
opus: The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, published in German in the 1920s.
Berlin, Isaiah Sir, 1909 (Russia) -1997. Intellectual historian. Emigration from
Russia in 1921, to UK. He was professor at the University of Oxford and
founding president of Wolfson College, Oxford. Developed a political philosophy of liberalism and pluralism tracing it back to the roots of nineteenthcentury Romanticism.
27
disurbanism
vs.
re-urbanism
Cores
fabric
vs.
monument
Group
empathy
vs.
abstraction
Monumental
Symbol
Symbolic Form
New Monumentality
Frozen Movement
Discourse
Gestural Form
Form
Template
Mass as Ornament
Traces
A Romantic
Myth-Project
Almost-Project
The more abstract the truth you want to teach the more
you must seduce the senses into it - Nietzsche
28
Book Guide
Constructing the Liberal Monument happens on three territorial scales,
from large to small. At each scale a public form appears. Together these
constitute the project. Cores constructs the regional scale (historically the
scale of planning), Group composes the scale of pedestrian experience
(today the scale of urban design), and the Monumental Symbol constructs the architectural objects in the aforementioned group. The Liberal
monument project bridges scale levels and thus disciplinary apparatuses.
The book does not evaluate actual performance of projects, but studies
drawings and texts for authorial intentions. To focus on the ideas proposed (and avoid over-contextualization), the work simply juxtaposes and
compares those works of the protagonists, between which a family resemblance emerges. From a unity of method follows a unity of argumentation.
Each part has a symmetrical structure, preceded by a dilemma. As these
dilemmas still structure ongoing debates, they act as bridges to the present.
Discourse unearths authorial intentions through text analysis; Form
unearths them in drawings. Each sequence is chronological within the
1944-1961 era, constructing a template of increasing sophistication. The
resulting excavation delivers a generic template: an a priori, the naked
idea to be deployed in the territory. The chapter traces looks at occurrences of these templates beyond the era of study, Here, recent projects
are interpreted as (un)conscious iterations of the historical project, and
the contours of a tradition become visible. Finally, almost-project relates
the formal template to a broader political aesthetic by reading postwar
liberal philosophers (Cassirer, Berlin, et. al.) as the protagonists would
have: as evocations of an aesthetic theory, rather than a rigorous scientific
studies. Isaiah Berlin constructed a history of Liberalism that originates
in German Romanticisms destruction of any overarching rational order.
He thus arrives not only at a stark concept of Pluralism, but also at a
conception of Liberalism as a perpetual negotiation of mutually exclusive
and incompatible, Romanticist entities. The scales correspond to this sequence: Cores (Liberalism), Group (Pluralism), and Monumental Symbol
(Romanticism).
From a unity of method follows a unity of argumentation.

Each part has a symmetrical structure.

29
first dilemma:
30
disurbanism vs. re-urbanization

URBANISM: 1: the characteristic way of life of city dwellers. 2a:
the study of the physical needs of urban societies b: CITY PLANNING. 3: URBANIZATION : the quality or state of being urbanized or the process of becoming urbanized.
The word disurbanism describes a project for the abolition of the city,
dispersing the complete population over the territory instead. Although
we conventionally associate it with a particular lineage of planners and
architects within Soviet Constructivism of the 1920s,it also makes sense
to broaden its scope to include American and European projects for the
dissolution of the city. For if urbanism means the process of being urbanized, then disurbanism simply means the dissolution of the city into its
hinterland, resulting in a dispersed pattern of post-urban debris: singular
objects and small communities. Disurbanism has been plannings first
choice since its first inception during the first decades of the twentieth
century. E. Howards Town-Country diagram launched the Garden City
movement; it proposes to dissolve the town-country distinction. Soviet
disurbanists such as Ladovksy (Green City, 1930; Plan for Greater Moscow, 1932) and Miliutin proposes the dispersal of the city into ribbon
developments of activity along major continental arteries, with occasional
settlements as dots in the surrounding greens. CIAMs 1933 Functional
City manifesto disentangles the existing urban functions, spreading them
out over large territories divided into mono-functional sectors. And Frank
Lloyd Wrights 1934 prophecy of Broadacre City in the USA calls for

This is the 2004 Merriam-Webster Definition of urbanism.

A perspective on the similarities of soviet disurbanism with other antiurban movements can be seen in:
French, R.A.. Plans, pragmatism and people: the legacy of Soviet planning for todays cities. (London: UCL Press; Pittsburgh, Pa. : University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). P.36.
Starr, S.F. , P.235 in: The revival and schism of urban planning in twentieth-century Russia.
(Pp 222-242) In Hamm, M.F.. (ed.) The City in Russian history. (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 1976).

Howard, Ebenezer. Garden Cities of To-Morrow. A Peaceful Path to Real
Reform. (London, 1902. Reprinted, edited with a Preface by F. J. Osborn and an Introductory Essay
by Lewis Mumford. (London: Faber and Faber, 1946).

Miliutin, N.A. Sotsgorod : The Problem of Building Socialist Cities.
(Moscow, 1930). Translated from the Russian by: Sprague, Arthur. Prepared for publication by
George R. Collins and William Alex. (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1974).
Left: Excerpt of Frank Lloyd Wrights Broadacre City

Right: Ladovskys competition entry for Moscow Green City
Disurbanism has been plannings first choice since

its first
inception during the first decades of the 20th century

31
first dilemma:
a dissolution of the city into a continental grid, a quasi-endless series of
parcels that would grant to all citizens their own piece of land. The apparent diversity of these proposals conceals a common premise, namely the
abolition of the historical city and its concept of centrality. The emerging
bureaucracies and institutions of planning support this agenda. The first
American planning conference of 1910 marks the defeat of the heroes
of the City Beautiful movement, who proposed solving urban problems
through the re-design of city centers with generous public spaces and
monumental buildings, against the emerging vanguard of planners-engineers, favoring a systematic and rigorous treatment of the city as a
functional system. Their logic culminates in a presentation of the complete
decentralization of all the urban functions as the most adequate solution to the problems of the city. We could understand the subsequent
development of landscape architecture as a professional discipline to be
no less than the institutionalization of a technical knowledge set, propping up plannings freshly defined agenda, giving a concrete shape to its
intentions, and preparing the territories for the arrival and dispersal of
the urban masses after their exodus. Thus, from various angles, a disurbanist consensus appears, and new disciplines are born to realize its agenda.

Professionalization of planning as a rigorous discipline of territorial order
became established in England and America in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century.
France, with its Saint-Simonian tradition of centralized governance, anticipated this moment; so
did Germany. The rise of French planning as a professional discipline is thoroughly studied from a
Foucaultian disciplinary perspective by Paul Rabinow; the rise of American planning is thoroughly
studied by among others Christine Boyer and John Reps.
1989. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press,
1989) (University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Boyer, Christine. Dreaming the rational city : the myth of American city planning. (Cambridge,
MA: M.I.T. Press, c1983.
Reps, John W. The Making of Urban America: a History of City Planning in the United States.
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965).
Key dates in the UK and the USA include the following moments. From a legal perspective, the first
influential planning laws were: 1909, the British Town Planning Act; 1916, the first zoning laws of
New York City. 1910, the first National Conference on City Planning in Boston, USA. 1910, the
RIBA International Conference on Town Planning.

The American Society of Landscape Architects was founded in 1899. In
1900, the Harvard Design School organized its first degree program in landscape architecture. In the
ensuing decades, other schools would follow suit (for instance, University of Pennsylvania in 1924).
This professionalization marks the shift away from landscape design as the work of a designer
genius (such as F. L. Olmstead), towards a disciplinary treatment of the principles of suburban
formations.
32

After the end of WWII, the disurbanism paradigm became enshrined in
official policies of decentralization in the USA. Also, the postwar reality of disurbanism becomes visibly different from its earlier theoretical
depiction: historical city centers are not destroyed but merely weakened.
Therefore, postwar disurbanist manifestoes change tone and proclaim a
revised version of the project, increasingly locating city centers worldwide
within a much broader net of disurban development, effectively terminating the centers hegemony and reducing it to just another exit on the
highway. Constantin Doxiadis proposed such a continuous semi-urban
territory on a global scale as a conscious scenario in the late 1950s, calling
it the Ecumenopolis. Jean Gottman, orbiting the intellectual sphere
of Doxiadis, coined the concept conurbation as a post-urban system of
continuous settlement on the American coasts. Ludwig Hilbersheimer
proposed continuous ribbons of development throughout American territory as a strategic defense against the Soviet nuclear threat: if the city is
everywhere, you can no longer take it out with a series of bombs aimed at
centers. And, the list continues. It is therefore a funny historical twist that
todays vanguard architect-planners in Europe are re-discovering this as
if it is wholly new. Several mappings of todays Europe arrive at the same
result but coin new names: Hollocore10 (AMO), After-Sprawl11 (XdG),
and USE12 (Boeri). What they discover as new facts on the ground is only
Doxiadis Ecumenopolis (1974)

An excellent scholarly about the government role in the growth of suburbs
is:
Logan, John R.; Molotch, Harvey L. Planning to Grow. pp.153-179 in: Urban Fortunes. The Political
Economy of Place. (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, c1990).

Doxiadis worked on this concept from the 1950s onwards, and published
his work and collaborations prolifically throughout. Syntheses of the work are:
Doxiadis, Constantinos. Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1968).
Doxiadis, Constantinos. Ecumenopolis: The Inevitable City of the Future. With J.G. Papaioannou.
(Athens: Athens Center of Ekistics, 1974).

Gottmann, Jean. Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the
United States. (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1961).
10

Koolhaas, Rem; Ru, Nan de; Brown, Simon; Content, Jon. Hollocore
(Kln: Taschen, 2002).
11

De Geyter, Xaveer (ed.) After-sprawl (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers and
Antwerp, Belgium: deSingel International Arts Center, 2002).
12

Boeri, Stefano. Multiplicity use : uncertain states of Europe : a trip through
a changing Europe .(Milano : Skira, 2003).
It is a historical irony that todays vanguard architectplanners in Europe discover the primacy of sprawl as if
it is a new fact.

33
first dilemma:
Serts Diagram for an ideal city of 960,000 (left) vs. Wrights Broadacre City (right).
Sert image as published in the Human Scale of City Planning, 1944.
34

the belated European realization of a series of much older manifestoes.
But the postwar hegemony of disurbanism awakens its counter-project:
re-urbanization. Already during the 1937 CIAM Conference in Paris
Logis et Loisirs
, Le Corbusier, Sert, and Giedion, among others, propose
the definition of a Fifth Function. This is a combination of entertainment, recreation, places for the staging of events, and housing. However,
by calling it a fifth function, they obscure the bomb this concept places
underneath the separation of functions proclaimed in the Athens charter.
Instead of an endless sequence of separated functions, bound together
only by a continuous substratum of nature and infrastructure, the public
sphere of the new society will find its expression once again in a manmade, finite, discrete space. Over the ensuing years, the fifth function will
gradually emancipate itself from the Athens Charter dogmas. By 1943,
the Athens Charter is finally published both in Europe by Le Corbusier13
and in the USA by Sert14. But just one year later, Sert and Giedion are
already publishing radically different propositions that begin to give autonomy to the fifth function, in Nine Points on Monumentality (jointly)
and in The Human Scale in City Planning (Sert)15. These texts respond
to the popularity of totalitarian urbanism in Europe and Russia after
1932. Peter Hall equated projects such as Speers vision for Berlin and
Iofans Soviet Palace with the final stage, a last flicker of the City Beautiful paradigm16: a concept of urban planning based on the form of spaces,
rather than functions. Sert and Giedion realize that the Athens Charter
13

Le Corbusier, La Charte dAthenes 1933-1942 (Paris: Plon, 1942). (Published again: Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1971).
14

Sert, Can our cities survive? An ABC of urban problems, their analysis,
their solutions; based on the proposals formulated by the CIAM (Cambridge, Harvard University
Press; London, H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1942).
15

Sert, J.L. The Human Scale in City Planning. pp.392-412 In: Zucker, ib..
Sert, J.L.; Lger, F.; Giedion, S.; Nine Points on Monumentality in: Zucker, ib. (re-published again:
pp.62-63 in the Harvard Architecture Review, 1984).
Giedion, S. The Need for a new Monumentality. in: Zucker, ib. Published again, pp.53-61 in
Harvard Architecture Review, 1984). Also: pp. 29-30 in: Ockman, Joan; Eigen, Edward. (eds.),
Architecture Culture 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology (New York: Rizzoli, 1993).
16

Hall, Peter. Pp. 215-217 in: The City of Monuments. Pp. 188-217 in: Cities
of Tomorrow. An intellectual history of urban planning and design in the twentieth century (Oxford,
UK ; New York, NY, USA : Blackwell, c1988).
35
first dilemma:
had omitted such a concept for a formal apparatus to give meaning and
legibility to the regional urban system. In the Nine Points on a New Monumentality, Giedion and Sert write that people need buildings that represent
their community life. In Human Scale, Sert develops a planning concept
to address this need. Three principles are fundamental for Sert:
Re-Urbanization for Sert
Wrights Broadacres
Disurbanism
(1) growth boundaries to re-establish the difference between city

and country; (2) civic centers that anchor an urbanization process
that remains otherwise beyond control (3) develop pedestrian zones
to check the hegemony of the automobile17.
In the diagram for an ideal city illustrating the article, these centers are
abstractly represented by a series of rectangles with lines connecting to the
surrounding neighborhood units and to the main trunk lines of communication18. However, they are still conceived of as separate developments,
isolated from the other zones of the city by parkland. Sert has not been
able yet to break loose of the basic aesthetic of the functional city. At this
point, these rectangles ought to be considered as merely tokens of Serts
conviction that:
Decentralization has become a fashionable word in late times
but I still believe that [it] should not become our motto.19
Contintental Ribbons:
Doxiadis, Hilbesheimers, and early Soviet
Russian Disurbanism
The centers are connected to form a central spine through the city. As
a consequence, they are not simply neighborhood-scale meeting places
within the residential fabric (for a bakery, primary school, etc.) but spaces
that radiate on the scale of the entire city. They operate on a quintessentially metropolitan scale. This nascent metropolitanism distinguishes Sert
most strongly from contemporaries in favor of the Garden City, such as
Lewis Mumford, who favored a dispersed system of small-town cores as
17

P. 396 in: Sert, J.L. The Human Scale in City Planning 1943. Zucker, ib.
18

Serts diagram for a city of 960,000 people included as an illustration with
the article, resembles closely a series of radical plans for London done in the late 1930s by CIAMs
British chapter, the MARS group. These projects are by Arthur Korn and Felix J. Samuely (1942)
and Thomas Sharp (1939). They have been discussed in:
Gold, John. Towards the Functional City? MARS, CIAM and the London plans. Pp. 80-100 in: Deckker, Thomas (editor). The Modern City Revisited. (London: Spon Press, 2000).
19

P. 407 in: Sert, J.L. The Human Scale in City Planning 1943. Zucker, ib.
People need buildings that represent their community

life
36

anchors for community life20.
After Francos victory in 1936, Sert leaves Spain. When he subsequently
moves to the USA, he is inserted in a culture with a strong anti-urban
tradition. Already in 1782, Thomas Jefferson had written extensively about
the need for America to remain an agricultural, decentralized nation21. A
dispersed settlement pattern, where every citizen could occupy a quad in a
continental grid of subdivisions, amounted for Jefferson to the territorial
translation of Enlightenment values such as liberty and equality. And in
1934 two years before Serts arrival Frank Lloyd Wright presented his
Broadacre City. For Wright, humanity consists of cave-dwellers (imprisoned in historical city) and wanderers (liberated from historical codes of
behavior)22. The second, almost Nietzschean category is glorified in his
subsequent Broadacre City. If Wrights work signals a refusal to define
American urbanization any longer in emulation to the European city
(compact, permanent), but rather as its complete opposite (expansive,
ephemeral), it also echoes Jefferson vision of agrarian America23, and indeed hints a continuous American rejection of the European industrial city.
This idea also surfaces in Louis Mumfords concept of the fourth American migration: from the city back to the countryside24. The hegemony of
disurbanism in American intellectual traditions makes William Whyte ask
rhetorically in 1957: Are Cities Un-American?25 Sert however establishes
20

In that respect it is extremely important to point out the confusion generated by the word community; in Serts Mediterranean universe, it implied the citizens of a big city
as belonging to the same community. Many Garden City protagonists however, associated it with a
smaller, local, closely knit group, reminiscent of Simmels concept of Gemeinschaft. This misunderstanding will be address in the chapter on the fragile alliance between architects and planners.
21
Jefferson expresses his vision of agrarianism most eloquently in: Notes
on the State of Virginia (1781-1782). Available online at the Jefferson Database, http://etext.lib.
virginia.edu/Jefferson/texts/. Spring 2005.
22

Wright, Frank Lloyd, The Shadow-of-the-Wall. Primitive Instincts still
alive. Pp. 21-24 in: The Living City. (NYC: Horizon Press, 1958)
p.21: Cave-dwellers bred their young in the shadow of the wall. Mobile wanderers bred theirs
under the stars in such safety as seclusion by distance from the enemy might afford.
23

Reps, John. Gridiron Cities and Checkerboard Plans. Pp. 292-324 in: The
Making of Urban America. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, c1965).
24

Mumford, Lewis. The Fourth Migration, pp.130-133 in: Survey Graphic
Number 54, no. 3 (May 1, 1925).
25

Whyte, William. Are Cities Un-American? in The Exploding Metropolis
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1957).
The urbane Spaniard is inserted in a culture with a

strong anti-urban tradition

37
first dilemma:
his position within American urbanism by actively opposing this American self-diagnostics.
I dread the pictures of a city of tomorrow, formed of endless suburbs, one cottage close to the next and a helicopter in every backyardthe Superman complex prevailsWe cannot deny that there
is an American culture which is civic and urban. 26
The quasi-automatic link in Anglo-American discourse between city
as industrial, (therefore a problem) and decentralization as the answer,
is not spent on an urbane Spaniard for whom cities had been essentially
civilizing devices, warding off the vegetational imbecility of the countryside, paraphrasing Serts friend Jose Ortega Y Gasset. Serts quest against
sprawl spans almost two decades. In 1951, he states that:
To put an end to this unplanned decentralization process we must
reverse the trend, establishing what we may call a process of recentralization27.
And by 1956, again, during the first Urban Design Conference:
The necessary process is not one of decentralization but one of recentralization.28
26

p. 392-393 in: Sert, J.L. The Human Scale in City Planning (pp.392-412)
In: Zucker, Paul (ed.). New architecture and city planning: a symposium. (New York, Philosophical
Library, 1944); (reprint: New York, Books for Libraries Press, 1971).
27

P. 4 in: Sert, J.L. Centres of Community Life as republished in the
proceedings of the CIAM 8 Conference. Tyrwhitt, J.; Sert, J.L.; Rogers, E.N. (ed.) The Heart of the
City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life. CIAM 8 , ib.
28

J.L. Sert, Urban Design p.97 in Urban Design. Condensed Report of an
invitation conference sponsored by Faculty and Alumni Association of Graduate School of Design,
Harvard University, April 9-10, 1956. pp. 97-112 in: Progressive Architecture, Aug. 1956.
Excerpt of Frank Lloyd Wrights Broadacre City
I dread a city of tomorrow, formed of endless suburbs...and a helicopter in every backyard...

38

After the end of WWII, exactly at the moment when federal and local
decentralization policies achieve cruising altitude, other architects
(such as L. Kahn) and planners (such as W. Whyte) echo Serts call
for a counter-project of re-urbanization. Thus, as the city evaporates,
nostalgia for its erstwhile metropolitan experience dawns. Thus, two
types of nostalgia for a lost nature and a lost city are shaping
a fundamental dilemma of planning, which exists up to this day.
Plannings own endgame is at stake here: the final territorial form of a
new equilibrium, to which all efforts will be put to use. If Sert remains
too focused on the return to existing city centers to find a way out of
the dilemma, there are latent strains in his own work and more explicit
proposals in the work of his fellow protagonists that constitute the
contours of a way out of the dilemma of contradictory nostalgia. This
is a project of dispersed re-urbanization, an agenda for the insertion
of artificial high-density, high-intensity public moments at strategic
points within the expanding suburban territory. Today the market is
already creating points of higher density in the suburban grid, and
these are what Joel Garreau has called Edge Cities29. However, we can
do better. Several late-modernist protagonists consciously conceived of
dispersed re-urbanization as a third way out of the dilemma, a project
of which the first serious investigations begin in the 1944-1961 era,
eventually culminating in the establishing of urban design as a field
of knowledge necessary to realize this agenda. Even after its demise
in the USA, this project will resurface and leave substantial traces in
Western Europe.
29

Garreau, Joel. The Words. Glossary of a New Frontier. Pp. .441-460 in:
Edge city : life on the new frontier. (New York : Doubleday, 1991)
Several late-modernist protagonists consciously conceived

of dispersed re-urbanization as a third way out of the dilemma.

39
Los Angeles after the Big One. Alexander DHooghe (2000)
40
1 CORES

Cores
41
CORES is a template to infuse tributes

to a liberal ideal of the public sphere
in a disintegrating city. Its first inception occurred between 1944 and 1961.
It is the a priori form of the project
of dispersed re-urbanization, itself
a way out of the dilemma between
disurbanism and re-urbanization. In
this period, J.L. Sert organized various conferences towards a new type
of space: the civic complex, a grouping of monumental symbols in a pedestrian setting. Not only during but
also after these conferences, different
protagonists develop elements of the
Cores manifesto. L. Kahns proposition
was to develop these centers as gateways, civic endpoints of substantial
automobile flows, necessitating large
parking garages. Jacqueline Tyrwhitt
envisioned that the territory was to
be dotted with a constellation of such
centers, thus establishing a web of
civic markers throughout a fast suburbanizing territory. And, finally, William
Whyte and many others elaborated on
the promise of urbanity and density as
an essential contribution to the establishment of a civic society in postwar
America.
42
1.1 DISCOURSE
About: Cores
Scale: 1:2.000 1:50.000
A commitment to a theory may be made because the theory is
congruent with the mood or deep-lying sentiments of its adherents,
rather than merely because it has been cerebrally inspected and found
valid.

P. 498 in: Gouldner, Alvin W. in: Metaphysical Pathos and the Theory of
Bureaucracy. The American Political Science Review, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Jun., 1955), pp. 496-507.
Cores
43
Above: Cover of CIAM 8 Conference Proceedings. Right: Sert- Corb plan for the transformation of the Barrio
Gotico into a Civic Center, in the MACIA plan. As published in: Rovira: Jos Luis Sert : 1901-1983.
Sert focuses on establishing an autonomy for the Fifth

Function.
44
1.1.1 Serts Complex

A Development Unit for the Consumer State
Serts quest to define the template of a modernist Civic Center begins in
Barcelona. When collaborating with Le Corbusier on the 1935 Plan for
Barcelona, they sketch the Barrio Gotico as a civic center for Barcelona.
Unlike the 1950s American urban renewal civic centers, this sketch preserves the historical fabric, retaining its linear built mass along the narrow
streets. However, they do hollow out all the interiors of the blocks, integrating the ground plane into a vast green carpet. Most of all, the sketch
demonstrates that the civic center idea had not yet developed its own a
priori formal principle. Then, in the preparations for CIAM 5 Logis et
Loisirs, Sert proposes to extend the four functions of the Athens Charter
Housing, Leisure, Work and Transport to 5, including Community
Life (and Provisions).
The site for a citys community services, administrative services, and
civic centres must be studied more in depth, because this nucleus has
a great influence on the other areas.
By the end of CIAM 5, a unification of housing and leisure in the fifth
function becomes possible, and from that moment onward, the functional
categories begin to fall apart. The Civic Center takes pieces of all of them,
and Sert focuses on establishing its own autonomy. The urgent task of
rebuilding Europes city centers after WWII provides a new impetus:

The most important scholarship on J.L. Sert is by J.L. Rovira; Eric
Mumford has also studied the work and writings of Sert, predominantly in relation to the implosion
of CIAM The MACIA plan for Barcelona is discussed in:
p. 78 in Rovira i Gimeno, Josep M., Jos Luis Sert : 1901-1983. (Milano : Electa Architecture :
distributed by Phaidon Press, c2003).

p. 82 in Rovira, ib.

P. 86 in Rovira, ib. At this point Sert and Le Corbusier begin to diverge
in their adaptations of the four functionalist categories: Sert invents a new, overarching one; Le
Corbusier merges and unites the existing categories.
Cores
45
Photograph illustrating Serts opening article in the CIAM 8 Conference Proceedings
The need for re-urbanizing Americas suburbs now coincides

with the need to rebuild Europes urban centers,
46
We have also made this choice [of the topic of the Core, ad] because
after the last war, a great many of our members and groups in
particular, and modern architects and planners in general, have
been faced with the replanning of central areas in bombed-out cities,
and they soon found out that these areas require a special treatment
that previous city planning studies had never dealt with.
The need to re-urbanize Americas suburbs now coincides with the need
to rebuild Europes urban centers, and thus an international project about
Cores is born. Sert prepares, with Giedion and Tyrwhitt, a large conference around this theme. For the first time, middle-generation modernists take the front seat. Sert and Giedion propose to name it the Civic
Center, but Tyrwhitt and the British CIAM chapter MARS, possibly
supported by Le Corbusier are in favor of the Core, to which Sert says
he is opposed because it translates badly into French and Spanish. The tile
is finally agreed upon as The Core: the Heart of the City, and in several
texts it is abbreviated as the Civic Core. The Conference takes place in
Hoddesdon (UK) in 1951. Serts opening lecture completely abandons
the functionalist principle in urbanism, instead addressing a need for the
superfluous through the formal representation of community life. He
proposes a list of programs that have one thing in common: their capacity

P.4 in Sert, J.L. Centres of Community Life as republished in the proceedings of the CIAM 8 Conference. Pp.3-16 in: Tyrwhitt, J.; Sert, J.L.; Rogers, E.N. (ed.) The Heart of
the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life. CIAM 8 (London: Lund Humphries and New
York: Pellegrine and Cudahy, 1952) (reprint: Nendeln: Kraus, 1979). This is an adaptation of a text
first presented at a lecture in 1949.
Also Eric Mumford states that this problem serves to legitimize the project of the Core.
P.183 in: Mumford, Eric. The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960. (Cambridge: The M.I.T.
Press, 2000)

However, in many cases the sheer emergency need for housing pre-empted
the elaboration of seriously planned Cores in Europe. In the USA, sprawling peripheries are also
in dire need of public amenities, but due to public subsidy mechanisms and priorities, housing and
infrastructure are prioritized until the 1960s, and the project of the core has a hard time finding
clients (although Victor Gruen deserves a discussion for his search to integrate ideas of the Core into
his shopping malls but we will here stick to the argument that the mere development mechanism
blocked any sincere attempt in such direction). In short, there is a need but not a policy priority.

Mumfords description of the Sert-Giedion alliance.

Correspondence evidencing this discussion can be found in:
Folders E003 and E004, in particular Letter from Sert, dated Sept. 7th 1951. (Sert Archives at the
Harvard University Special Collections of the GSD Loeb Library, Cambridge, MA).

P. 13 in: Sert, J.L. Centres of Community Life, ib.
and thus an international project to buildCores is born.

Cores
47
to generate public life.

Administration buildings, museums, public libraries, theatres,
concert halls, recreation centers, commercial and sports areas, parks,
promenades and squares, tourist centers, hotels, exhibition and conference halls, etc. all form part of these community centers..
This vast amount of civic program should transform the civic center into
a hive of human activity. But which assumptions are made here about
the public? Paul Lester Wiener, Serts partner in his Town Planning and
Associates (TPA) office, also gives a lecture at the conference, called New
Trends Affecting the Core. Wiener elaborates on the explosive growth of
leisure time for the expanding middle class. The excess of leisure time became a popular topic in the 1950s. In The Future as History 10 for instance,
R. Heilbroner is investigating how the rise of nuclear power (endless energy), space exploration (endless space) and technological progress (endless labor) are once and for all abolishing the historical problem of scarcity,
which had formed the foundation of western economies. Instead, we arrive
at a condition of perpetual abundance. This creates a new category of time
mass leisure time demanding a new form of public space. Wiener is
concerned that such an emancipation from labor may lead to decadence.
There is an ever-increasing trend toward effortless consumer satisfactions, and passive spectator pastimes and amusements.11
We will be wise to provide facilities for greater and more numerous
common meeting places, based on more and more leisure and upon a
greater freedom from wantThe Civic Core should be the physical
expression of a collective better self : it should reflect the general

Zucker, ib.
P. 400 in: Sert, J.L. The Human Scale in City Planning (pp.392-412) In:
Also: p. 11-13 in: Tyrwhitt, J.; Sert, J.L.; Rogers, E.N. (ed.) The Heart of the City: Towards the
Humanisation of Urban Life. CIAM 8, ib.

10

Heilbroner, Robert L. The future as history; the historic currents of our
time and the direction in which they are taking America. (New York, Grove Press .1961, c1960).
Heilbroner taught at the New University in New York.
11

P. 85 in: Wiener, Paul Lester. New Trends will affect the Core. Pp. 81-86
in: Tyrwhitt, J.; Sert, J.L.; Rogers, E.N. (ed.) The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation
of Urban Life. CIAM 8 (London: Lund Humphries and New York: Pellegrine and Cudahy, 1952)
(reprint: Nendeln: Kraus, 1979.)
Not the proletariat, but a vast, consumerist middle class

freed from the constraints of mass labor, becomes the prime
constituency for the Core.
48
forces and conditions which I have defined as [partly] technological,

biological and ideological.12
The Core positions itself as a space for mass gatherings, but not based on
the principle of consumption. Wiener thus pleads for an alternative to
what Guy Debord would soon describe as the Society of the Spectacle13.
Not the proletariat, but a vast, consumerist middle class freed from the
constraints of mass labor becomes the prime constituency for the Core.
The Core becomes the answer of architecture to the rise of the consumer
class. It pre-empts the dissolution of the leisure principle into the
entertainment principle. Wiener, like Sert and Giedion, is careful to point
out that a new aesthetic expression will be fundamental to the success of
the Core. Most importantly, the Core, is now beyond a Fifth Function of
the Athens Charter. It incubates a new type of city; the spatial expression
of the rise of a class (middle class) with a new principle (leisure). The
Core is presenting itself as the universal generic template for an idealized
consumer welfare state. In his own lecture, Sert merges two obsessions:
the civic center with the synthesis of the arts. The latter term seems to
aspire to everything and therefore nothing. What did Sert mean by it?
During the 1947 Bergamo Conference14, Sert is part of the committee
on the synthesis of the arts, chaired by Giedion15. During the public
discussion, he invokes his own Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World Fair as
an example. This building integrates Picassos Guernica, Calders Mercury
Fountain, and works by Miro. A public monument, integrating painting,
sculpture, and planning into its architectural structure, it results in a
total work of propaganda of modernist art for itself. By 1951, he believes
that given a strategic location and a concentration of public programs,
such a project can expand to become an actual urban center: a synthesis
12

P. 85 in Wiener, Paul Lester. New Trends will affect the Core. ib.
13

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. (transl: Nicholson-Smith,
Donald. New York, Zone Books, 1994). (transl. Perlamn, Fredy; Supak, John. Black and Red, 1977)
I have diverged from his translation in many other cases. His translation (Zone Books, 1994) and the
earlier one by Fredy Perlman and John Supak (Black and Red, 1977) French original: La Socit du
spectacle. (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1967) (Paris: Champ Libre, 1971) (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).
14

Proceedings to be found as: CIAM 7 Bergamo Documents. In the library
of the Delft School of Design.
15

And Giedions own intellectual career has been largely devoted to constructing the terms of a modernist synthesis of the arts. See also: Parts 2 (Group) and 3 (Monumental Symbol).
The Core becomes the answer of architecture to the rise of

the consumer class.

Cores
49
of previously unbridgeable differences through a spectacle of abstract

sculpturalism:
The treatment of grouping of public buildings, together with their
related open spaces, requires the reunion of the arts to display a more
generous plastic expressionin these centres of community life the
city planner-architect deals with civic design uniting planning and
architecture16.
Sert and Giedion posit that the cores should explain their specific task in
the urban grid by deploying a specific formal coding, beyond functionalism and historicism, to awaken contemporary mass desires. This encoding
installs a dominant leitmotiv that ought to penetrate into all the nooks
and crannies of the project. Such a formal rigor almost brings to mind that
other architectural template of mass consumerism: the themed environment. According to Mark Gottdiener, the themed environment is a
development paradigm that has expanded far beyond its initial locus in the
theme park17, to become an overarching principle of large-scale developments. It is based on a single thematic principle that achieves the developments brand identities. However, in parts two and three of the book, we
will also observe the critical difference between the themed environment
and the project of the Core; this is a difference between purely emphatic
figuration, and more abstract formations that are semiotically inexhaustible. This corresponds to the fundamental difference between sign (in
the theme park) and symbol (in the civic complex). Finally, as the Core
detaches itself from the Athens Charter, it not only reverses the total
approach of planning in favor of highly specific interventions, but also
requires the penetration of an aesthetic principle of abstract symbolism
into every detail of its formalizations.
16

P.12 in: Sert, J.L. Centres of Community Life, ib.
17

Gottdiener, Mark. The theming of America : dreams, media fantasies, and
themed environments. (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2001).
As the Core detaches itself from the Athens Charter, it not

only reverses the total approach of planning in favor of highly specific interventions,
50
From Center to Complex

One of the greatest challenges for architects is the carrying out of
large civic complexes: the integration of city-planning, architecture,
and landscape architecture; the building of a complete environment.
This is a vast and ambitious task. We should be aware of that fact
and of all barriers and limitations that lie in between such as
inflated land values, great, vested interests, etc. The twenties and
thirties, which did away with the use and misuse of historic styles,
was only a good start in a long race and contemporary architecture
as a style is still in its beginnings; the search for a more complete
architectural vocabulary, a more satisfactory expression, should
continue; the development of such a style is not the job of a few men
no matter who talented they are but, as it has always been in
the past, in both architecture and city planning, the laborious result
of the persistent creative efforts of several generations. I am talking
here of style in the broadest and truest sense of this word, as when
it is applied to Gothic, Romanesque, or Baroque for instance, rather
than in the sense in which fashion people use it, where it can be one
mans profession to be a stylist. Architects should decide, together
with city planners, to invade the no-mans land of civic design. It is
a joint job that is required a teamwork job, where both architects
and city planners need the advice and the technical help of many
other specialists. I call this field a no mans land because contemporary architecture and planning have not developed in it and it
offers no really full size example of a complete civic complex that can
give us a picture of an entire civic environment, where architecture
is at its best in true relation to open areas and traffic networks can
be shown as an example of what the city centers of our time can
be. Up to now, contemporary architecture has produced at its best a
few scattered good examples of isolated buildings. But much of the
more recent work will be absorbed by an overpowering, hostile
environment: the chaotic streets, the creeping blight, and the slums of
our cities. This culture of ours is a culture of cities, a civic culture
where the landscape is really a man-made landscape it is where
city planning and architecture are at their best. No isolated building
can compete with them. 18
18

Large civic complexes is a description used by Sert in:
pp. 4-5 in: Sert, J.L., Lecture Urban Design at the 1953 A.I.A. Regional Conference of the Middle
Atlantic District on October 23rd, 1953. File D91, 6 pp.. (Sert Archives at the Harvard University
Special Collections of the GSD Loeb Library, Cambridge, MA).
but also requires the penetration of an aesthetic principle of

abstract symbolism into every detail of its formalizations.

Cores
51
These are excerpts of a 1953 speech in which Sert calls for the creation
of a series of civic complexes. How should we decode it? Cities, having
reached maturity after their explosive growth during industrialization, are
now more stable and expanding moderately. They are ready for a second
act, correcting the mistakes and chaos resulting from the haphazard
growth of the first wave. This second wave is urbanism, not urbanization:
it is an act of will, not the result of uncontrollable forces. It will consist of
a new type of strategic intervention beyond architecture itself. The architectural object itself has been disarmed by the overwhelming scale of what
is surrounding it: infrastructures, networks, mass productions. The city has
bypassed the architectural object. To succeed in the heroic re-conquest
of semi-urbanized territories, a more powerful device will be necessary.
The Civic Complex is such a device. The crucial distinction between the
complex and the center is about much more than size only. The complex
consists of various objects, and consequently defines the space between
them. The complex is about the creation of a pedestrian environment.
Already in 1943, Sert states that the human scale i.e., the area defined
by the walking radius should be the measure of what he at that point
still calls creative planning19. And it is iterated in almost every speech by
Sert afterwards, but also increasingly by Kahn, Giedion, and (later on)
Maki. With a pedestrian environment comes a greater density than with
automobile-driven development. From the planning perspective, pedestrian circulation requires that a whole array of functions brought in tighter
proximity to each other. From the architectural perspective, as Sert said,
there must be high elements, expression of the use of the elevator:20 as
the density of the proposed core projects increases, they contribute more
to the pedestrianism inherent in the Core.
19

Pedestrianism is already an overall intention in Human Scale in City
Planning, although it is not linked yet to the specificity of the core. In 1951, Sert does make this link
explicit.
20

Sketch by Sert about the Civic Complex (from Sert Archives, Harvard Loeb Library)
52
Walled Square
The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega Y Gasset (1930/193221) heavily
influenced Sert22. A liberal philosopher, Ortega Y Gasset, when writing
his Revolt of the Masses (1932), is deeply pessimistic about the regression of
twentieth-century Europe under the dictatorial hegemony of the masses
over minorities. He finds that the dissolution of the individual into a mass
amounts to a process of dehumanization, suspending ones most important
faculty as a citizen critical thought on public matters and replacing
it with lower animal instincts (following the pack, following the leader,
turning on the others,). Consequently, dictatorship and manipulation
are replacing civicness and reason. Gasset surveys European history in the
hope of finding inspiration to construct a contemporary alternative. When
he stops to discover Greek polis and the Roman urbs, he is astonished
by its revolutionary23 enclosed space. And Sert is in agreement with his
discovery. The following quotation constitutes the opening lines of Serts
opening lecture for the Core conference.
For in truth the most accurate definition of the urbs and the polis
is very like the comic definition of a cannon. You take a hole, wrap
some steel wire tightly round it, and thats your cannon. So, the urbs
and polis starts by being an empty space, the forum, the agora, and
all the rest are just a means of fixing that empty space, of limiting its
outlines,. The polis is not primarily a collection of habitable dwellings, but a meeting place for citizens, a space set apart for public
functions. The city is not built, as is the cottage or the domus, to
shelter form the weather and to propagate the species these are personal, family concerns, but in order to discuss public affairs, Observe
that this signifies nothing less than the invention of a new kind of
space, much more new than the space of Einstein. Till then only one
21

Ortega Y Gasset, Jos. The Revolt of the Masses. Authorized translation from the Spanish. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., Publishers, c1932); (Original
publication: Le Rebelion de las Masas, 1930); (New York: New American Library, 1950, c1932)
Completely reset and printed from new plates. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., [1957,
1932]; Reissue. New York: W. W., Norton, Inc., 1993.
22
This is confirmed in a Roviras massive study on Sert: Ortega himself, a
champion of liberalism whose writings Sert habitually read p. 29 in Rovira, ib.
23

I dare use this word because Ortega Y Gasset claims that the invention of
this new space, described in the quotation below, is a more radical discovery than Einsteins discovery of a new space in physics.
Cores
53
Summary page of the proceedings of the 1951 CIAM 8 Conference
The square is purely and simply a negation of the fields.

54
space existed, that of the open country, with all the consequences that
this involves for the existence of man. The man of the fields is still a
sort of vegetable. His existence, all that he feels, thinks, wishes for,
preserves the listless drowsiness in which the plan lives. The great
civilizations of Asia and Africa were, from this point of view, huge
anthropomorphic vegetations. But the Greco-Roman decides to
separate himself from the fields, from Nature, from the geo-botanic
cosmos. How is this possible? How can man withdraw himself from
the fields? Where will he go, since the earth is one huge, unbounded
field? Quite simply, he will mark off a portion of this field by means
of walls, which set up an enclosed finite space over against amorphous, limitless space. Here you have the public square. It is not, like
the house, an interior shut in from above, as are the caves which
exist in the fields, it is purely and simply the negation of the fields
(bold: ad). The square, thanks to the walls which enclose it, is a portion of the countryside which turns its back on the rest, eliminates
the rest, and sets up in opposition with it. This lesser rebellious field,
which secedes from the limitless one, and keeps to itself, is a space sui
generis, of the most novel kind, in which man frees himself from the
community of the plant and the animal, leaves them outside, and
creates an enclosure apart which is purely human, a civil space.24
Hence: the core is empty. But to make its emptiness appear, a definition of
its boundaries is required. Ortega Y Gasset speaks about the surrounding
condition of the limitless fields. But he rejects the organic quality of such
territory as leading to a merely vegetative life. For him and Sert, Enlightenment or the emancipation of the individual and society by virtue of
the exercise of reason is to be found in a space that has separated itself
from this natural condition. This is a declaration of independence from
all philosophies of determinism those that say things are bound to be
the way they are because of history, or because of nature, or because of
whatever excuse theory that absolves one from taking the responsibility for ones own fate. For this is for Sert, the humanist principle that
is underneath the project of the Core: by creating an empty square, he
is calling out for the right of the citizens to exercise their basic human
24

Ortega Y Gasset, pp.153-154 in the Norton Edition, ib. Quoted by Sert on
p.3 of Centres of Community life, ib.
thanks to the walls which enclose it, is a portion of the countryside which turns its back on the rest, eliminates the rest,
and sets up in opposition with it.

Cores
55
faculty of reasoned choice. Totalitarianism is the historic background

against which this humanism appears: rather than using the center to pay
homage to a specific leader or idea, the center is empty, forcing each and
everyone to speak out. For both Spaniards, empty squares are to emerge
as strongholds against future regressions of the masses25. Sert concludes
that the design of such beacons should be the postwar project of modern
urbanism. The Core, in its definition of emptiness, is proposing itself to be
a counter-project against Iofans Palace of the Soviets or Speers Germania.
The contrast with Wrights Broadacres, as well as with his agrarian utopias
of his predecessor Jefferson, looms large. Here, the organic is considered
as a return to the authentic roots of Enlightenment allowing for a more
free and egalitarian society. Ortega Y Gasset and Sert while invoking
the same values, arrive at a vastly different conclusion. For Wright and Jefferson, the evil is in the city, which eradicates humanism; whereas for Sert
and Ortega, the evil is in nature, which leads to a mere vegetational mode
of existence. Hence, Wright and Jefferson idealize nature, whereas Sert
and Ortega idealize the public square of the city as the locus of progress.
Even more important are the many extensions of both belief systems in
the actual shape of postwar urban development. The sprawling of America
could only succeed because of a popular underwriting of the Jeffersonian
vision; whereas such total sprawl for Sert contained a threat of a possible
degeneration into barbarism. If his Monumental Core was originally a
project against European totalitarianism, it evolved, upon Serts relocation
in the USA, into a project against sprawl. The Core has remained a counter-project, even though for a brief moment it gained considerable support
among American intellectuals.
For a brief period between 1951 and 1959, Sert succeeded in convincing
people of the project of the core, almost turning it into what Imre Laka-
25
In hindsight, these early texts have to be considered as a reflection on the
reasons and roots of the self-destruction of Europe. Also in 1944, Adorno and Horkheimer publish
the Dialectic of Enlightenment, a severe critique of the very principle of reductive, functionalist
thinking as fundamental to the barbarism of Europe. Although Sert, Giedion and Kahn are unable to
perform such a stinging critique on the intellectual foundations of their own work at the SS Patris,
their new texts indicate a consciousness that fundamental themes of city building had not been addressed in the Athens Charter.
56
tosz called a research program an agenda that, superseding institutional

boundaries, united and steered a multitude of investigations and interests
across the field of architecture and planning26. Thus, the Core almost
becomes hegemonic: an almost-paradigm. Its quasi-intentional vagueness guarantees that it can be understood in different ways, that it can
reconcile many different agendas. But in the end, this vagueness may also
be held accountable for its quick evaporation, as different interpretations
are soon growing ever farther apart. Nevertheless, for a while it is aroused
the imagination across disciplinary boundaries, for planners and architects
alike. In the following chapters we will be tracing the outlines of this fragile consensus, and most importantly, attempt to achieve a level of precision
that destroys its consensual nature and propels the project of the Core into
a polemic. At this stage, the summary of Serts conception is as follows:
First, to concentrate public programs in a series of strategic interventions
Second, to address with these the new freedoms of the leisure society
Third, to incubate an artificial rebirth of urban life
Fourth, to formalize differently than the private sphere
Fifth, to intensely juxtapose pedestrian, car and mass transit modes
Sixth, to be dense
Seventh, to not be objects but rather complexes, a new scale of operations
26

Lakatosz, Imre. The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes:
Philosophical Papers Volume 1. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
Cores
57
Above: Kahn, Sketch of one of the studies for Philadelphia as published in: Ronner, Haveri (Ed.). Louis I, Kahn.
Complete Work 1935-1974. Second Revised and Enlarged Edition (Boston, Basel: Birkhauser, c1987)
That architecture of stopping can be a marvelous architecture

58
1.1.2 Kahns Station

The architecture of the viaduct, the street, the express-way, and the
garage which is part of it, is not expressed at all I believe this is a
great mistake. I believe both architectures (that of infrastructure and
that of buildings, ad) must be separated from one another, because
they are not the same architecture. One is a tough, kickable architecture, and the other is delicate could be gossamer, in our present
technology, could be completely remarkable. And these viaduct
architectures in the outlying areas coming into the city must be more
respectable. Theyve got to come in and doff their hats and be better
materials. They must also integrate other services with those viaducts
and not just be the same old stilts and the crude construction only
gathering newspapers and dust below. And the terminal points of
this architecture the garage, but Id call it the gateway could
be marvelous structures. I think architects would all be jealous to do
such structureswhich would give you the sense of entrance into
certain areas and give direction to the growth of those areasAnd
they should be part of the architecture of the street, and that architecture of stopping, which in itself can be a marvelous architecture.
Those would be equipped immediately with those conveniences which
would make it possible to circulate as you would in any kind of
pedestrian way.27
Such are Louis Kahns words in a 1960 lecture called The New Art of
Urban Design. Where does this insight come from? By 1951, architecture
is engulfed and on the verge of being submerged by the relentless onslaught of ever-growing vast territorial networks and infrastructures, best
epitomized by the rise to power of the automobile. Serts civic complex is
one answer: an expansion of the architectural object to achieve a critical mass necessary to withstand being engulfed by flows. However, Team
X (in Europe)28 and Louis Kahn (in the USA), propose to resolve the
27

P.79 in: Kahn, Louis. The New Art of Urban Design. Pp. 75-80 In:
Twombly, Robert (ed., intro.) .Louis I. Kahn: Essential Texts. (New York, London: W.W. Norton
Company, c2003). (transcript of a speech at the 1960 New Forces in Architecture Conference in
NY, sponsored by Architectural Forum and the Architectural League of New York).
28
For instance the early traffic studies of the Smithsons in London, as published in the Team X primer, and again at the Otterlo Conference, in: Newman Oscar (ed.). CIAM
59 in Otterlo. (Stuttgart: Karl Krmer Verlag; New York: Universe Books Inc., 1961) Republished:
...Kahns answer to the relentless onslaught of ever-growing

vast territorial networks and infrastructures.

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59
issue by approaching the problem from the opposite angle: by pressing

for the transformation of the flow itself. Thus, after 1951, traffic flows
become a central topic in architectural discussions. Louis Kahns studies
for Philadelphia emblematically represent this approach. Witnessing the
disintegration of downtown Philadelphia by an ever-greater proliferation
of gas stations and parking lots, Kahn is appalled. How could architecture
counter-balance the excruciating force of giant infrastructures crushing
the fabric of the city at its every entrance (gate), simply by virtue of their
scale and speed? His answer: to turn these gates into transfer stations,
transformators, flipping automobile flows into public pedestrian ones. The
gates civilize the utilitarian networks. Like terminal stations, what enters
the gate as automobiles, comes out at its city center side as a series of civic
personae. He proposes this concept most forcefully in his Philadelphia
studies, developed between 1951 and 1959, and the above quotation is but
a summary of this project. The planning for Philadelphia, developed in
tandem with Edmund Bacon, culminates in the designation of a sizable
area of the historic city is designate as a Core. However, Kahn places at its
perimeter a series of tall monuments which together, establish a gathering
of forms, markers of a newly defined area. These monuments are traffic interfaces. As large parking garages, they are not only channeling the
boundless kinetic automobile energy into a solid form, but also they are
establishing nodes, where the citizen shifts between using a car, using mass
transit, and using his feet. The architectural essence of the Core reveals
itself to be a monumentalized transfer station and traffic node. Kahn does
not invest in the details of the design of the actual pedestrian zones, but
he is realizing that the central challenge lies in the transitional moment.
To do this Kahn has to completely shelve the dogmas of city planning
of the Athens Charter. In his Concluding Remarks of the 1959 Otterlo
pp.37-61 in: Twombly, Robert (ed., intro.) .Louis I. Kahn: Essential Texts. (New York, London:
W.W. Norton Company, c2003).
The architectural essence of the Core reveals itself to be

a monumentalized transfer station and traffic node.
60
Conference29, he states that: Forget the program. The program is nothing30.

Instead, Kahn suggests that the form of the city be a manifestation of the
existence will of modern institutions. We have to understand institution as
a Kahnian word for a genre of places, defined not by their historical form
thus, not a typology but by the civic potential that they could embody and express. As Sarah Goldhagen explains, Kahn is, throughout the
thirties and forties, very much influenced by Americas reformers such as
Mumford and the Goodmans. They belong to the great American tradition of communitarianism, which favors the Greek polis as a small-town
ideal of direct democracy. This intellectual current is shifting throughout
the fifties to take an increasingly pro-urban stance31 (see Core: discourse).
And indeed, Kahn himself also states that the street is an urban example
of such a modern civic institution. He considers the task of architects and
planners to be the materialization of the latent ideals contained in these
institutions. The Existence Will of such a program is exactly this latent ideal
contained in its procedures. Kahns existence will disconnects the notion
of program from its bureaucratic-technical connotation. Kahn repeated
this formulation several times: not what it is, but what it wants to be; not
what it does, but what it wants to do: to find the form of what a street, or
plaza, or center, wants to be. His civic core is therefore a form that brings
to the surface the latent ideals of the activities it carries. Existence Will
of a Modern Institution requires the discovery of a form that most aptly
articulates the civic ideal contained in the routines and procedures of the
postwar world. The institution he tackles here is that of the urban street,
which is being sandwiched between the contradictory concepts of the
pedestrian zones and the highway. The institution of the street is thus
born again as a monumental transfer station.
Thus, Kahn contributes three concepts to the Core. First, it is now con29

The last CIAM Conference, controlled by and large by the European
younger generation: the Smithsons, Van Eyck, Bakema, Rogers.
30

P. 207 in: Kahn, Louis. Talk at the Conclusion of the Otterlo Congress. In:
Newman Oscar (ed.). CIAM 59 in Otterlo. Ib.
31

See chapter: Core: Metropolitan Urbanity.
Kahns civic core is therefore a form that brings to the

surface the latent ideals of the activities it carries.

Cores
61
ceived as a series of distinct interventions instead of one large monolithic

project. Kahn breaks up the different elements of the Sertian plug-in, he
monumentalizes them, and finally he disperses them intelligently to form
a series of loose markers around a central area. The ultimate consequence
of this approach will lead to a wider constellation of interventions.
Second, the focus is no more on pedestrianism per se, but rather on the
moment of transition between car, mass transit, and pedestrian. The intelligence of the monumental markers is that they transform car traffic into
pedestrian movement, giving birth to a new kind of district. Thus, the
Core is becoming more and more like a transfer node or an interface. It
is a testimony to Kahns intuition that he considered the transfer node as
a most intense generator of public life. The intensity of flows generated
around a train station, airport, or subway gate explains why today they
are aggressively invaded by private developers turning these zones into
shopping mall-like environments: fake cities. That is not Kahns vision.
His intense engagement with the city never leads to the dissolution of
the formal project of the Core itself. To the contrary, the more it engages,
the more its formal apparatus acquires relief vis vis the rest of the urban
realm.
Finally, Kahn has realized that the design of interfaces and transfer nodes
cannot succeed without an integration of architecture and infrastructure
design. Like Sert and Giedion, he arrives at the need for a synthesis of the
arts, albeit from a different angle.
(1) a constellation of monumental stations

(2) focusing on an intermodal transition between car, mass
transit and pedestrian
(3) integrating architecture and infrastructure
62
Penn Station, Manhattan
Cores
63
Intercity India: studies for a polynuclear system, a constellation of Cores as published in: Tyrwhitt, J., and
Doxiadis, C. Ekistics Journal (1961)
64
1.1.3 T yrwhitts Constell ation

The cure for our widespread, amorphous modern cities is more readily achieved by the creation of new Cores new concentrations of
activity that express the special values of each scale or grouping,
than by endeavoring to slice the whole area into village neighborhoods: by a visual emphasis upon centres of integration rather than
upon bands of separation. 32
In 1944, while Sert (and Giedion) and Kahn publish papers about a New
Monumentality and the need for civic centers, Jacqueline Tyrwhitts role
is still unclear. She participates in the 1930s CIAM conferences on behalf
of the British chapter MARS, but assumes an increasingly central role in
the postwar years. In the proceedings of the 1951 Conference, she contributes an article about a Constellation of Cores that will decisively turn
the regional map of the project into a constellation of cores a project
for polynuclearism that drastically differs from Serts myopic focus on the
singular urban centers. Certainly, there are areas of agreement between
both protagonists: the proceedings summary states that there ought to be
different Cores in one urban region, each with its own identity. They will
be differentiated by program (public administration, entertainment-oriented, business-oriented, etc.). Sert himself writes:
Each of the parts of the city needs to have its own centre or nucleus,
and the system as a whole results in a network or constellation of
community centres.33
However, Tyrwhitt fundamentally disagrees with Sert when he states that
[the Cores are] classified from small to large, one main centre being
the expression of the city or metropolis as a whole, the heart of the
32

Tyrwhitt, Jacqueline. P.104 in: Cores within the Urban Constellation. (pp.
103-108) in: Tyrwhitt, J.; Sert, J.L.; Rogers, E.N. (ed.) The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life. CIAM 8 , ib.
33

P.11 in Sert, J.L. Centres of Community Life, ib.
the system as a whole is a constellation of centers...

Cores
65
city34.
This theory of the single center, surrounded by a series of satellite cores
on lower scale levels replicates the existing condition of the historical city.
Sert, incapable of escaping this compulsive obsession for the singularity of
the existing city center, has no choice but to place his most decisive civic
complex projects in the middle of the historic city. Tyrwhitt posits the
exact opposite:
In the final scale level [of the metropolis, ad], the Core, for purely
physical reasons, must comprise a series of several related centres. 35
She sketches a constellation of Cores, a net cast over the sprawling region,
implying new nuclei where there was previously only sprawling formlessness. Tyrwhitts idea implies the amelioration of sprawl rather than its
abolition, adding various activity clusters in a series of dispersed centers,
which are to become dense and highly urban. Instead of re-urbanization,
she concentrates moments of metropolitanism in a net of dispersed nuclei.
Tyrwhitts turn-about constitutes a fundamental re-formatting of the
Core on the basis of an acceptance of the suburban condition rather than
its denial. She further elaborates this hypothesis in her 1963 The Middle
City, describing a series of architectural interventions meant to become
core for suburban areas. The consequence is that the historic city center
can simply become one Core among many, in a dynamically, ever-further
expanding system of gravity points in suburban sprawl. She disagrees
with Serts focus on the one main core and argues instead that the city is
becoming poly-nuclear. From that perspective, the current associations
conflating the concept of the Core with that of the urban renewal wave
that has harshly transformed Americas urban centers is factually incorrect.
Other interpretations of the Core concept have existed, yet none of us has
seen them because we were too eager to destroy the aspirations, yes the
entire worldview of late modernism. Unfortunately, that leaves us today
34
35
P.11 in Sert, J.L. Centres of Community Life, ib.

P. 105 in: Tyrwhitt, J. Cores within the Urban Constellation, ib.
Tyrwhitts turn-about constitutes an acceptance of the suburban condition rather than its denial.
66
without serious templates to transform formless sprawl into a regional

civic structure. Tyrwhitt predicts here the potential of the project as a
constellation, a net of nodes cast over suburban sprawl. Where did this
concept come from? The notion of dispersed nuclei first appeared in the
Garden City theories, as Paul Adamson notes:
The modernist planners in postwar America, however, tailored
their interpretation of the traditionally humanist model to suit the
abstract aims of the free market. Accommodating the free-flow of
capital and unrestricted access to speculative development, postwar
American planning consistently rejected the centralization and
hierarchy of the Garden City model, retaining only its innovation of
the poly-nuclear field.36
Tyrwhitt grows up under the influence of the Garden City movement
and is very indebted to Patrick Geddes interpretation37. Several of his
diagrams call for a series of dispersed settlements in a larger natural
landscape. The basic settlement form is village-like. These plans fitted
within a broader proposition about an exodus from the city into the
territories of nature, dotted with occasional villages. However, Tyrwhitts
poly-nuclear proposition plans for after the completion of this exodus as
it happened in reality: not villages amidst nature but a continuing carpet
of sprawling developments. Her nuclei are not in the rural landscape, but
amidst the grey goo of the sprawling metropolis, and they distinguish
themselves with a much higher density and a civic programming.
Strikingly, the fundamental premise is now inverted. Instead of a model
in support of an agenda of disurbanism, the poly-nuclear model has
now come to support the agenda of metropolitanism, calling for the
construction of a series of civic nuclei, differentiated in program and
form, throughout the sprawling region. The marriage of the idea of highdensity modern urban center (from Sert) with that of a poly-nuclear
system (Garden City) is in that sense innovative. Importantly, Tyrwhitt
studies in 1936-37 at the University of Berlin-Charlottenburg, where the
36

Adamson, Paul. Looking back on our future: conflicting visions and realities of the modern American city. In: Deckker, Thomas (ed.): The Modern City Revisited. (London:
Spon Press, 2000).
37

See: Strathclyde University Archives, where all Tyrwhitts papers are being held. This collection contains all her correspondence with her mentor Patrick Geddes.
The marriage of the idea of high-density modern urban center

(from Sert) with that of a poly-nuclear system (Garden City) is
an innovation brought forth by Tyrwhitt.

Cores
67
Above and above right: diagrams from Walter Christallers research in its Englsih publication (1969)
a theory of the poly-nuclear field

68
geographer W. Christaller was teaching a new theory (devised in 1933)

about the rules underlying the creation, mutual distance, and growth of
urban centers in capitalism. Central Place Theory38 studies the concept of
centrality under the most abstract, generic conditions, and its spatial result
is a map that shows a net of nuclei of various sizes, extending themselves
endlessly without a significant boundary or ultimate point of centrality
within its system. Central place theory constructs a template that is, by
virtue of its very definition, an abstract description of a poly-nuclear
territory. For that reason, it could equally have been called theory of the
poly-nuclear field, given that that was its fundamental output. Enriched
and modified in various ways, CPT is still used as a valid framework for
contemporary research39.
In 1941, the geographer W. Lsch proposes a similar model to that of
Christaller40. However, Lsch developed his version for intra-metropolitan
development, predicting the growth of nuclei within one urbanizing
region. This theory therefore provides the contours for Tyrwhitts
own proposal at the Core conference. Nevertheless, one important
difference stands out: the Christaller-Lsch theorem is fundamentally
descriptive, whereas in the hands of Tyrwhitt, and in the frame of the
Core conference, it becomes a pro-active project, a radical addition to the
carpet of suburbanization that effectively transforms the latters totality. In
1961, Jean Gottman proposes the concept of the Megalopolis as a larger
concept which describes aggregates of metropolitan areas.41 By proposing
emerging entities consisting of several adjacent metropolitan regions
as a single system, he is effectively uniting our practical perception of a
38

W. Christaller, The Central Places of Southern Germany (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J., 1966).
39

Important reviews and update of CPT include:
Derudder, Ben; Witlox, Frank. Assessing central places in a global age: on the networked localization strategies of advanced producer services Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Volume
11, Issue 3, May 2004, Pages 171-180.
Beavon, Keith S.O. Central Place Theory: A Reinterpretation. (London: Longman, 1977).
Parr, J. B. (1977) . Models of the central place system : a more general approach. Urban and Regional Studies Discussion Paper 24, Dept. of Social and Economic Research, University of Glasgow.
40
The poly-nuclear field theory is therefore often referred to as the
Christaller-Lsch theory of central places Published in English in:
Lsch, August. The Economics of Location (New Haven, Connecticut, 1954).
41

Gottmann, Jean. Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of
the United States. (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1961).
Cores
69
territory that was already theoretically united by the similarity between the
studies of Christaller (inter-urban logics) and Lsch (intra-urban logics).
In reality the poly-nuclear field is now approaching the same endlessness
that it had in the initial theoretical model. Gottmann erases the historical
distinction between city and countryside. Here, effectively the notion
of a post-urban continuum is born42. It becomes an incredibly powerful
concept for the background against which Tyrwhitts earlier net of Cores
acquires its meaning or figure, for Gottmann was a friend of Doxiadis,
with whom she would collaborate closely. Unfortunately, by the time she
begins collaborating with the architect-planner Constantinos Doxiadis in
195443, who had also studied at Charlottenburg with Christaller the year
before Tyrwhitt44, the latter develops concept of the Ecumenopolis which
effectively proposes a global, post-urban continuum stretching through the
five continents to all the corners of the globe, a further extrapolation of
Gottmanns Megalopolis45. This vision begins to captured her imagination
as the exalted sublime of an aesthetic based on infinity, effectively making
obsolete the opposite principle of human, monumnetal counterpoints to
the infinite.
42

Gottmanns proposition became heavily contested from various corners.
Prominent critics have included
Mumford, A New Regional Plan to Arrest Megalopolis. Architectural Record (March 1965): 147154.
Blumenfeld, Hans. Continuity and Change in Urban Form.. in: Journal of Urban History, Vol.1,
No.2, (Sage Publications, Inc. Beverly Hills, Calif.) February- 1975. Republished in: The Metropolis
and Beyond. (New York: John Wiley and Sons: 1979).
43

pp.1-2 in: Jacky, Ekistics, 50:300 (May-June 1983).
44

See: Pyla, Panayiota I. Ekistics, architecture and environmental politics,
1945-1976 : a prehistory of sustainable development. (Ph.D. manuscript, c2002, held at M.I.T.s
Rotch Library, Cambridge, MA, US).
From 1954, onward, both planners become close friends and co-editors of the magazine-with-journal-aspirations Ekistics, (Science of Human Settlements) which attempted to develop a systemic
framework for solutions to rapid urbanization problems worldwide and especially in developing
countries. Together with Buckminster Fuller, they develop by the notion of Dynapolis: a slightly
more ordered version of the sprawling metropolis, endowed with large continuous open space
systems and civic areas. The central weakness of the Ekistics model is that it has never made
a conscious choice about its own status: prophecy prediction a self-organizing evolution, or
project a proposition to alter the course of things, the status quo (see PhD. Pyla on this problem).
Furthermore, as Serts influence receded, so did the project of metropolitanism in planning circles,
and the Dynapolis and Ecumenopolis prophecies/projects really began to take the shape of a globally
continuous village-fabric.
45

In her manuscript, Pyla discusses how Gottman circulated in the Ekistics
milieu.
above: daigram of the East Coast conurbation, as published by Gottmann in Megalopolis
below: one of Ferriss illustrations for The Metropolis of Tomorrow
ts elegance resides in its relative modesty no large, all-encompassing plans for the transformation of suburbia are necessary...
70
Tyrwhitt is not the first one to hint of a constellation, a net of different

nuclei as a strategy to address and ameliorate the formlessness of
sprawl. In 1929, Hugh Ferris publishes his prophecy for New York,
untangling what he considers as the formless heap of skyscrapers and
instead proposing a series of nuclei containing mega-skyscrapers46. His
proposition is to decrease the overall densities by increasing it specific
points. A similar approach appears in Moscows 1935 general plan. Also,
Kahns proposition for Philadelphia could be re-read as an embryonic
prediction of the poly-nuclear city. Throughout the 1950s, other planners
develop the idea from a different angle. Already in 1956, the planning
theorist Hans Blumenfeld had noted that the poly-nuclear field theory
would be the appropriate answer to the amorphous structure of American
sprawl47. Much later, Blumenfeld studies a number of old metropolises
that have established their identity exactly through a poly-nuclear
structure48 (such as London), criticizing the notion that an adherence to
the identity of a city had to be tied to a dogmatic preservation effort of a
single central Core. Tyrwhitts proposition reads like a transplantation of
this idea to the suburbs, which are thus provided for the first time with a
regional civic structure across the (mostly sub-) urban region. Its elegance
resides in its relative modesty no large, all-encompassing plans for
the transformation of suburbia are necessary, instead a few well-chosen
interventions can achieve a similarly legible structure. They supply the
amorphous city with a sense of identity through a series of multiple civic
complexes. Sprawl, instead of the great evil and the most important enemy
of the planner-architect, has now become the fertile underground for a
project for its re-ordering.
46

Ferriss, Hugh, The metropolis of tomorrow. (New York, I. Washburn:
1929).
47

Blumenfeld, Hans. p.82 in: Metropolis and Beyond: Selected Essays.
(New York: John Wiley and Sons: 1979).
48

Blumenfeld, Hans. Continuity and Change in Urban Form. in: the Journal
of Urban History, Vol.1, No.2, (Sage Publications, Inc. Beverly Hills, Calif.) February- 1975. Republished in: The Metropolis and Beyond: Selected Essays., ib.
...instead a few well-chosen interventions can supply the

amorphous city with a sense of identity through a constellations of civic complexes.

Cores
71
based on photo of the Capitol Complex of Albany, New York (2004, Alexander DHooghe)
72
1.1.4 Metropolitan Urbanity

(Sert, Whyte, Jacobs)
While good intentions about public space drive the aforementioned concepts of Sert, Kahn and Tyrwhitt, a more precise definition of this public
space is absent. In 1951 Sert, Giedion and others frequently employ the
notion of community to gloss over any unstated differences and present a
unifying agenda. But the term community contains at that point so many
conflicting concepts that it throws Giancarlo de Carlo into despair already
in 1959.
In 1951 a discussion was held on the core of the city collecting on
this theme such a huge amount of inaccurate statements and idle
nonsense that on re-reading the report today we wonder how it was
possible for so many serious-minded persons, some of whom had also
participated in drafting the Charter of Athens, put up with them,
let alone accepted them.49
To save the project from such harsh demotion, a benign salvaging of the
word community is necessary. In the American context, the movement
of communitarianism had propagated, already in the late nineteenth
century, the template of New Englands historic covenant communities as a
contemporary alternative to the industrial city. Religious groups fleeing persecution in Europe had built hundreds of these communities in
the seventeenth and eighteenth century in New England50. They have a
clearly defined civic religious center, closely surrounded by the inhabitants dwellings.. Lewis Mumford prophesizes in 1934 that the new trend
of decentralization in the twentieth century should not result in sprawl,
but quite to the contrary, in an ordered system of villages: no longer mine
and move, but stay and cultivate51. Mumford is a communitarianist, and
49

P. 86 Carlo, Giancarlo De. Talk on the Situation of Contemporary Architecture. Pp.83-86 in: Newman, Oscar (ed.). CIAM 59 in Otterlo, ib.
50

This settlement process is well documented in:
Halloway, Mark. Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America, 1680-1880. New York:
Dover Publications (1966, first edition: Turnstile Press, 1951).
51

P. 430 in: Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. (NY: Harcourt
The term community contains so many conflicting concepts that it throws Giancarlo de Carlo into despair.

Cores
73
the communitarian model
the metropolitan model
=
metropolitan urbanity
74
the twentieth-century notion of community in America relates to the aesthetic of the small town as a residue of the covenant community concept.
According to Sarah Goldhagen, Sert is under the influence of Mumford,
Goodman and other communitarianists when he introduces centers of
community life in CIAM first at the CIAM Bridgewater Conference of
194752. However, his 1949 and 1951 lectures on
Centres of Community
Life
speak of a community life, vastly different from that envisaged by
Mumford and other American communitarianists. He associates community with the urban life in Mediterranean metropolises such as Barcelona.
Given Serts background, that is no surprise. Yet the question remains
concerning what aspect of metropolitan life Sert was after. The sociologist H. Chombart de Lauwe demonstrated in a 1952 study of Paris53 that
within the metropolis, small, tightly-knit communities exist in particular
pockets.
The Marxist Henri Lefebvre and the Catholic sociologist PaulHenri Chombart de Lauwe rediscovered the lot or quartier as the
socially cohesive lived experience of Parisian working-class life
that countered state decentralization plans and the banality of the
suburban mtro-boulot-dodo life. The natural milieu of the quartier,
Chombart de Lauwe argued, offered the structure of everyday life
and work, providing not only economic and housing needs, but
psychological ones as well. The vernacular space of the city was the
arena of social reconciliation. What cities within the city! Small
inner worlds, distinct, with their own personalities and street life.54
Chombart has thus discovered elements of community life, corresponding to the American ideal of communitarianism, within the big city rather
than in the surrounding suburbs. Yet, Serts interest in the big city is beyond this community scale. He builds a discourse on big event places, the
unplanned, on a main core where all scales of life meet. He illustrates his
Brace and Company, c1934, c1963).
52

Pp.17 in: Goldhagen, Sarah. The Situated Modernism of Louis Kahn.
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
53

Chombart de Lauwe, Paul-Henri (dir.) Paris et lagglomration parisienne.
(Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1952).
54

Wakeman, Rosemary. Nostalgic Modernism and the Invention of Paris in
the Twentieth Century. French Historical Studies 27.1 (2004) 115-144.
vision with frequent pictures of large crowds in the proceedings. By 1957,

Sert proposes to study the principles of metropolitan urbanity itself as the
central task for urban design:
The most important principles to study are...the 24 hour cycle
the humanization of the urban scenethe new factors of production,
mechanization and transportation etc. and the constant unchangeable factors (the angle of vision, eyes, ears, steps, etc) result in
coexisting scales pedestrian and mechanized, horizontal and vertical, birds eye views and normal views, etc.55
This demonstrates that he is after a different social space than the communities that Mumford and other American theorists of the Garden City
movement were talking about, and the Chombart had retrieved in Paris.
Sert is more interested in more metropolitan (as in Groszstadt) experience
of urban public space. Here, anonymity rules, Baudelaires flaneur has some
of Simmels
blas attitude56, and this metropolitan experience is profoundly
associated with a sense of modernity, as Marshall Berman so captivatingly
described57. Serts interest, fundamentally, is to transform the metropolitan
Grozstadt aesthetic into a civic project that integrates this larger, diverse
public through the establishment of the civic complex. For lack of a better
word, he confusingly describes this generically as community, but one
should argue that his description is closer to what Richard Sennett has
called urbanity.
What I think of as urbanity is precisely making use of the density
and differences in the city so that people find a more balanced sense
of identification on the one hand with others who are like themselves
but also a willingness to take risks with what is unlike, unknown....
It is the kinds of experiences that make people find out something
about themselves that they didnt know before. Thats what urbanity
is at its best.... To me, how to privilege the notion of difference that
55

Also: p.1 in: File D119, 9 pp. (Sert Archives at the Harvard University
Special Collections of the GSD Loeb Library, Cambridge, MA).
56

Simmel, Georg. pp.409-424 in: The Metropolis and Mental Life. In: Kurt
Wolff (Trans.) The Sociology of Georg Simmel. (New York: Free Press, 1950).
57

Berman, Marshall. All that is solid melts into air. (New York : Simon and
Schuster, c1982.) (re-issued: New York, Penguin Books, 1988).
Cores
75
Architecture
is what urbanity is all about.
Planning Sennett finds the urban experience in the great European metropolis
58
as defined by the overlap between localized community tissue and the

maelstrom of much larger, city- and region-wide flows of people. Where
both modes of social existence touch, a modern sense of civicness is born.
Sennetts definition of urbanity, which he first begins to construct in
197059 but develops especially from 1977 onwards, builds on earlier work
of the anthropologist Henri Lefebvre60 and is therefore also related to the
Chombarts 1952 study. Serts quest is for architecture staging urbanity,
but the word itself does not exist yet. He designs his last project in 1979,
too late for Sennetts 1977 book to have any lasting impact. Because
of Serts fusion the European urban masses in the Groszstadt with the
American concept of a civic community, later developed by Sennett in
his concept of urban density, we could describe Serts vision as that of
the civic crowd. And he would find considerable support for this vision
amongst a number of American planners and sociologists.
Alliance between Architects and Planners
After WWII, the exodus of the city is in full swing, and the disurbanist
agenda is being executed. But the results bear little resemblance to smalltown neighborhoods proposed by the Garden City movement. Instead,
a formless continuum, a non-descript grey goo appears. This condition is
so radically new and different that in 1957 William Whyte writes Urban
Sprawl61, defining a new term to capture this territory. His definition is so
powerful, the logic so pervasive that we still use it today. As stated earlier,
Metropolitan Urbanity
Metropolitanism
58

Sennett, Richard videotape of public lecture at the School of Architecture,
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, November 3, 1994.
59

Sennett, Richard. The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life
(New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1970)
Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man - On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1977) (the edition used is Vintage Books/Random House, January 1978).
60

Lefebvre, Henri. La production de lespace, (Paris: Anthropos, 1974)
(2nd ed. 1981; 3rd ed. 1986; Italian trans. Moizzi, 1975; Japanese trans. Fukumura Shuppan, 1975;
Danish trans. Archipress 1980). English trans. of first French edition: Donaldson-Smith, N. (transl.),
The Production of Space. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) (with preface by Michael Trebitsch and
Postscript by David Harvey).
61

Whyte, William. Urban Sprawl in ib.
Communitarianism
At the exposure line between local community life tissue and

the maelstrom of much larger, city- and region-wide flows
and programs, a modern sense of civicness is born.
76
sprawl in combination with the demise of the historic city effectively

launches a second aspirational lineage within planning, based on nostalgia
for the city as a civic artifact. The earlier Baudelairian association of urbanity with modernity has vanished, and both terms are now dissociated62.
This dissociation turns urbanity into an acceptable object of (scientific)
study and planning strategy. Instead of an instrument of destabilization, it
becomes increasingly associated with the concept of pluralism and public
debate (Sennett). Instead of an expression of historical development
towards modernization, urbanity becomes a project to civilize it. Whytes
text appeals to a considerable segment of American intellectuals, and it
obviously touches a raw nerve. For Whyte, diverse and lively communities
can thrive in the big cities, not in suburbia. Thus, the community argument, previously used against the city, is now transplanted into it, culminating in Jane Jacobs 1961 seminal work on city life, which is a grand
definition of city life and city-ness as it ought to be63. Jacobs and Whyte
also develop a friendship based on this common insight64. During the first
Urban Design Conference in 1956, Jane Jacobs admonishes city planners
for ignoring the rich fabric of city life, but nevertheless praises the projects
of, among others, Kahn and Gruen for their inclination to address the
urban rather than the suburban65. A fragile alliance between architects,
planners, and intellectuals is born around the project of metropolitanism. American pro-communitarian intellectuals begin to appreciate the
city as a valid alternative to sprawl. The Americanized Europeans Sert
and Giedion thus redefine their agenda; after their first texts of 1944,
which testified to the attempt of architecture and planning to ward off
62

This point will be argued in: 1. Core : Traces : Fragmentation
63

Jacobs, Jane. Ib.
64

In Jacobs own words:
I admired some of the people who I worked with at Architecture Forum for instance. And Holly
Whyte, William H. Whyte. He was a friend of mine. And we used to talk together. He was an important person to me and he was somebody whose ideas, yes, we were on the same wavelength. And it
was through Holly that I met Jason, and he became my publisher. He [Epstein] had started Anchor
Books which were the first trade paperbacks. So Holly introduced me to him. And I told him what I
wanted to he agreed to publish it and give me a contract.
Jane Jacobs Interviewed by Jim Kunstler. For Metropolis Magazine, March 2001.
65

Jacobs, Jane. p. 103 in: Forces that are shaping Cities today. Intervention
in Discussion at First Urban Conference. pp.97-112 in: Urban Design. Condensed Report of Invitation Conference. In: Progressive Architecture, August 1956.
Instead of an instrument of destabilization,

dense urbanity becomes increasingly associated with the
concept of pluralism and public debate

Cores
77
above: Hirshorn Building on the Mall in Washington DC (photo: Alexander DHooghe, 2004)
below: Manhattan (photo: Alexander Dhooghe, 2004)
78
any future regression of Europe into barbarism, their civilizational project

has now found a new cause: the sprawling of America. At the same time,
some of Americas intellectuals are re-defining the city as a positive model
for human interaction instead of as its antidote66. Like in the nineteenth
century, when urbanists in various European cities were able to implement
large-scale civic schemes that ordered the results of the first wave of wild
industrialization, and integrated several fragments into a urban scheme,
now the protagonists of the Core are developing the generic template
for a second wave to bring a civic order to the wildly expanding system
of automobile-driven sprawl. Urban design presents itself here not as the
propellant of urban growth itself, but rather as the device to civilize it, and
this project generates a considerable consensus.
Failure of the Aesthetic of the Civic Crowd
Nevertheless, the consensus remains fragile, and will fall apart when
architectural form and the aesthetic of the civic crowd becomes an issue.
The front page drawing for the Core conference simply shows people, not
form. The lower end of the drawing show a number of human figures at
a clear distance from each other, emphasizing the individuality of each
figure. As the eye moves up, more figures come into view, placed in an ever
more close composition. At the top of the drawing, there is a crowd. The
figures are standing on a light-grey cloud-shape, an intended stage for
the gathering, which has nevertheless not achieved a definitive form yet.
This drawing is a testimony of intentions. No stage design is provided; no
definition of the urban crowd is given. The drawing therefore remains tautological, just like Giedions definition of the Core in 1951 as the element
66

It is important to point out that there was certainly not a national consensus on the need for urbanity. It seems more appropriate to envisage the landscape of postwar
intellectual America as divided into two lineages. The one is in favor of urbanity, the other embarks
on a project to redeem sprawl itself, searching for kernels of community life within its social organization. We witness here the recurring dilemma between re-urbanization vs. that of disurbanism. In
the first camp, we find among others William Whyte, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, Donald Appleyard,
Jonathan Barnett, Richard Sennett, and more recently Michael Sorkin. In the second camp, Reyner
Banham, John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Richard Neutra, and
Herbert Ganz, and more recently Margaret Crawford.
Cores
79
that makes a community and not merely an aggregate of individuals.67 Consequently, when the architect-planners set out to give space and form for
the civic crowd, they lack a formal concept, and their project disintegrates
under the pressure of two competing historical visions. The community
life and the civic complex, while pronounced simultaneously in the
period of study, seem to evoke two different categories. The former calls up
a spontaneous, informal kind of urbanity, whereas the latter evokes a more
solemn, almost templar or sacral environment. To the former corresponds
our contemporary view of New York a bustling lively city as a marketplace; to the latter, Washington DC a solemn, templar celebration of
civic values. Which typology is at stake here? Marketplace or temple?
At the Core Conference, Giedion compares Fontanas 1690 proposal for
a connection from the river Tiber to the Cathedral of St. Peter in Rome,
to the project that Piacentine realized in 1937 for Mussolini. Fontanas
proposal is a simple, irregular approach lined with shops, whereas the
latter is a geometrically precise, wide axis-boulevard. Giedion is favoring
the irregular scheme over the monumental one. He chooses for a form
that symbolizes bustling city life. But Sert compares the formal, secluded,
almost templar Harvard Yard favorably with the nearby bustling atmosphere of informal Harvard Square68 in 1956. No consensus appears yet.
Nevertheless, the actual forms and spaces produced by the protagonists do
not express or symbolize this program. They are perceived as monumental,
solemn, abstract, yes almost sacred temples. Tyrwhitt criticizes that:
The
Civic Centre that monumental group of buildings standing
in isolated grandeur is not what is meant by the Core. The Core
is not the seat of civic dignity: the core is the gathering place of the
people.69
It is almost as if she is irked by the premature architecturalization of the
67

P.160 in: Giedion. Sigfried. The Heart of the City: a summing up, pp.
159-163 in: Tyrwhitt, J.; Sert, J.L.; Rogers, E.N. (ed.) The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life. CIAM 8. ib.
68

P.97 in: Sert, J.L. Urban Design in: Urban Design. Condensed Report
of an invitation conference sponsored by Faculty and Alumni Association of Graduate School of
Design, Harvard University, April 9-10, 1956., ib.
69

P. 103 in: Tyrwhitt, Jacqueline. Cores within the Urban Constellation, ib.
Which typology is at stake here? Marketplace or temple?

80
core: the program of urbanity ought to be considered as more important

than just the form. This statement manifests the coming schism between
architects and sociological planners. Her idea of a rather informal gathering place reflects an increasing concern among Anglo-American sociologists, mirrored by Jacobs comments at the 1956 conference:
The starting point must be that whatever has charm, and above all,
whatever has vitality, in city life, these are the qualities that must
be given new firmness, commodity and delight.70.
We have to conclude that the protagonists search for a new format: a fusion between temple and marketplace. They want to re-invent monumentality as a humanist, urban form to capture the desired metropolitanism in
a proper form. Theirs is a project to celebrate, glorify, and formalize (like a
temple) the bustling spontaneity of city life itself. The sacralization of metropolitan urbanity is their project. They build a monument, if not a tomb,
to an urbanity that has now irrevocably receded into the past. Thus, the
temporary alliance falls apart again, partly because the adequate form for
the civic crowd had not been thoroughly conceptualized yet by the architectural protagonists. Nevertheless, I will argue that the protagonists did
intuitively grasp the beginnings of a basic formal template, which I will
develop in part 2 as Group Form. In this format, they shy away from the
crowd as a single form, as it was when serving the purposes of totalitarian
government in Europe in the 1930s.
70
P. 103 in: Forces that are shaping Cities today, ib.
They build a monument, if not a tomb, to an urbanity that has

now irrevocably receded into the past.

Cores
81
As the protagonists transplant the

Core from the city center to its peripheries, they leap into the unknown.
Where, in this vast grey goo, should
they locate these station complexes?
How should they interact with their
new surroundings? These questions
require the buildup of a new knowledge apparatus. Sert wanted urban
design to become the disciplinary
container of this apparatus. We will
study the actual forms of various
Cores later; this chapter focuses on
the search for locations for the suburban cores. Importantly, location and
the subsequent relation to the new
surroundings also contribute to the
internal structure of the new Cores.
The protagonists thus look to embed
their newly found a priori. This search
oscillates between complete contextualization of the Core (and consequently, its disintegration), and its
complete independence (and consequently, its isolation and irrelevance).
The protagonists had to construct
this knowledge empirically through
practice: drawing and possibly building projects.
82
1.2 FORM
About Cores
Scale: 1:2.000 1:50.000
The more abstract the truth you want to teach, the more you must
seduce the senses into it. - Nietzsche
Cores
83
Above: Le Corbusier, plan for Chandigarh (as published in CIAM 8 proceddings)

Below: Le Corbusier, view of Capitol Complex in Chandigarh (as published in CIAM 8 proceedings)
Right: Le Corbusier, plan for Nemours (as published in Rovira, 2004)
Le Corbusier can establish his ideal of the Core only by

removing it completely from the reality of the city.
84
1.2.1 EMbedded otherness

Already in his 1934 plan for Nemours, Le Corbusier proposes a civic and
a leisure zone71. This complex, comprising a series of huge monumental
forms, is located in a separate zone outside the citys housing zones and
segregated from it by the main infrastructure line. To articulate the still
embryonic idea of the Core, Le Corbusier resorts to a most primal
graphic technique: separation of the Core from the rest to guarantee its
identity. For Le Corbusier, the civic zone is fundamentally ceremonial and
he is not interested in the agenda of metropolitan urbanity that is fundamental to its idea. His project for Chandigarh makes this even clearer.
Chandigarhs population projections begin at 150,000 and are to grow
eventually into 500,000. As an ideal city plan, it installs a major revision
by Le Corbusier of his previous ideal models such as Plan Obus and Ville
Radieuse. Upon presenting the project at the Core Conference72, he explicitly departs from these earlier radical statements, to install the precept of
the Core. But the two cores of Chandigarh are standing outside the grid
of the new city, in splendid isolation, at the end of the major axes. Viewed
from the city, they are almost like peripheral temples or monumental objects free from city life, reminiscent of Ledouxs civic and leisure temples
for Chaux-de-Fonds,
planned for outside the perimeter of the housing and

factory zone. Thus, Le Corbusier demonstrates that his ideal of the Core
can only be established by removing it completely from the reality of the
city. He finishes what he began in Nemours. This quest for splendid isolation moves him in the opposite direction of his former disciple Sert, who
will be striving for what we could call Embedded Otherness.
When Le Corbusier and Sert are preparing their Plano piloto for Bogota in 1950, both men already have experience in the application of the
71

Pp. 118-119 in Rovira, ib.
72

Le Corbusier; Jeanneret, Fry, Dew. Chandigarh, India. Pp.153-155 in:
Tyrwhitt, J.; Sert, J.L.; Rogers, E.N. (ed.) The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban
Life. CIAM 8., ib.
Cores
85
Above: Le Corbusier, general plan for Bogota (1950)

Below: Sert, general plan for Bogota (1950) as published in: Bastlund, K. Jose Luis Sert: Architecture, City
Planning, Urban Design (1967)
86
Athens Charter in South America73. Their respective drawings of the same

project differ strikingly. Bogota had grown linearly, parallel to a mountain
range. Their plan complements this system with a perpendicular axis for
factories and production facilities, resulting in an overall T-shaped city
form. They locate the Core at the intersection74 and re-organize this city of
700,000 inhabitants into sectors, segregated by large greenways with traffic
arteries75. However, even if Sert joins Le Corbusier in condemning streets
lined with buildings in 1943, he appreciates and refers to the qualities of
the South-American colonial grid, as prescribed by King Charles Is 1542
Laws of the Indies76, which does exactly that. These laws prescribe among
others a grid system of subdivisions, with buildings lining the street, and
most importantly, an oversized plaza, by European standards, in the center
(dimensions minimally 70mx100m or 175mx265m77). Sert is the only one
to use this historic logic of the grid. Le Corbusier emphasizes the internal
consistency of each sector by establishing en elaborate system of cul-desacs. Quite to the contrary, Sert uses the historic grid to emphasize the
external continuities between the sectors, made possible by the continuous
street grids already in place. These street systems impact the Core deeply.
Le Corbusiers Core is like a sector in its own right: captured between major arteries, without connections to the other sectors. Serts Core has tentacles extending in all directions, connecting with most of the street grids,
but also bridging and incorporating an important artery. It plugs itself into
the city. But Sert is never confused: the Core maintains its own distinc73

Sert had previously worked on the Cidade dos Motores (Brasil), on Chimbote (Peru) both new towns as well as on Medellin and Cali, both in Colombia. Le Corbusiers
intervention in Buenos Aires is well known. Serts urban plans were made in collaboration wit Paul
Lester Wiener, in their joint office TPA (Town Planning Associates).
74

In fact, the location of the perpendicular axis already locates this intersection at the existing city center with the playa mayor.
75

The greenway system diverges in both projects: Sert prefers a strong
longitudinal green stretch along the linear city, while Le Corbusier draws a series of perpendicular
greenways slicing through it.
76

P. 148 in: Sert, J.L.; Wiener, P.L. Medellin, Colombia. Pp.148-149 in:
Life. CIAM 8, ib.
77

The Laws of the Indies (1573) have been made available publicly online
at: http://www.arc.miami.edu/Law%20of%20Indies.html, October 2005.
Sert uses the historic grid to emphasize the external continuities between the sectors.

Cores
87
Above: Le Corbusier, plan for Core of Bogota (1950)

Below: Sert, plan for Core of Bogota (1950). as published in: Bastlund, K. Jose Luis Sert: Architecture, City
planning, Urban Design (1967)
Serts Core does not dissolve into the city, it is charged

by it through its connections with urban circuitry spreading in various directions.
88
tive formal apparatus, focused on a series of monumental buildings and a

continuous open pedestrian space with several sub-centers. In other words,
Serts Core does not dissolve into the city; it is charged by it through its
connections with urban circuitry spreading in various directions. The result
accentuates the uniqueness of the core. In this design, Sert declares the
independence of the project of the Core from the principles of the Athens
Charter, claiming that it does not take a re-organization of the entire city
to deploy a successful Core. It can exist as a project in its own right, if located strategically and provided with enough circuitry: an elaborate system
of passages, streets and arteries connects the core with the surrounding
fabrics. As a result of the contrast between these historic patterns and the
core itself, the latters modernistic peculiarity stands out more clearly than
in Le Corbusiers plan, which features a continuous green carpet with
monumental towers, whether housing or core functions78. In other words,
Serts core is simultaneously more integrated with the city, and precisely
for that reason can assert its own otherness most strongly. Thus, Serts
Core begins to mature from its initial diagram that illustrated the 1943
vision for an ideal city of 960,000.
78

Strikingly, Le Corbusier had almost steered his Core this other direction.
Among the drawings of his 1945 project St.-Di according Eric Mumford (p.152 in Mumford,
Eric. Ib.) an early example of the conscious research into the monumental Core there is a fascinating location drawing, exhibited at the Core conference in 1951. St.-Di is shown as comprised of
four morphologies: a suburban / garden city territory to the north, a mixed industrial/residential
district to the south, and urban residential pattern (to become a series of Unites) to the east, and
agricultural territories to the west. Le Corbusier plugs his Core right into the intersection of these
four quadrants. His project glues together the separate sectors of the proposed and existing St.-Di.
Here the isolationist logic is reversed. Traffic arteries are brought into the site from the various sectors. These measures of integration are balanced with a measure that emphasizes the autonomy of the
Core. It is a slightly raised platform, its objects are large yet placed far apart, in a formal language
that differs from the surroundings.
In other words, his core is more integrated with the city,

and precisely for that reason can assert its own otherness most strongly.

Cores
89
1.2.2 Consolidation/Disintegration
Other projects presented at the 1951 conference79 fragment themselves
completely to fit into their context. The Providence thesis project of Serts
Harvard students Ian McHarg, Robert Geddes, and William Conklin,
made in 1950, falls into this category of core studies. They redevelop the
center of Providence by adding and modifying a few of its objects and city
blocks. While the breakup of the project into smaller blocks increases the
feasibility of the scheme, it now risks transforming the Core in a mere juxtaposition of private developments, abandoning its centralizing force. The
abandonment of the integration of infrastructural, landscape, and architectural thinking concerning flows reduces the scheme to a mere juxtaposition of low-rises. Finally, the students abandonment of the monumental
interfaces further normalizes the scheme to the point of its almost-disintegration into the existing city. If the Core vanishes through an excess of
contextual conformism, it also becomes redundant through the opposite
operation: the pristine isolation of consumer fortresses, a prefiguration
of todays shopping malls. Already in 1951, Stephenson is presenting at
CIAM a Core vision that is a barely concealed shopping mall80. Located
off an exit of the motorway, it is surrounded by parking lots. The buildings
of the Core have turned their back to the world and encircling an inner
pedestrian street, complete with a campanile and two attractor-programs
at each end of the walkway. Even Le Corbusiers pristine Chandigarh core
provided the viewer with magnificent views of the city lying below.
79

Harvard University Students, Providence, U.S.A. P. 142 in Tyrwhitt, J.;
Sert, J.L.; Rogers, E.N. (ed.) The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life. CIAM
8, ib.
Also further reference in: Alofsin, Anthony. The Struggle for Modernism. Architecture, Landscape
Architecture and City Planning at Harvard. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, c2002).
80

Stephenson, Gordon. Stevenage New Town. p122-123 in: Tyrwhitt, J.; Sert,
J.L.; Rogers, E.N. (ed.) The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life. CIAM 8, ib.
Above: Providence project as published in CIAM 8 Conference proceedings
Right: plan and view of Stephensons plan for a Core in Stevenage as published in CIAM 8 Core proceedings
If the Core vanishes through an excess of contextual conformism, it also becomes redundant through the opposite
operation:
90
Indeed, the contemporary typology of the shopping mall begins its typological journey as a descendant of the Core. Victor Gruen the father of
the shopping mall presents a redevelopment project for Forth Worth at
the 1956 Urban Design Conference81. In this proposal, he transforms the
car-wrecked downtown into a pedestrian paradise, adding leisure, entertainment and housing programs to the existing business district. Because
Gruens vision leads to densities that do not allow for access to all the
programs by car, he proposes building a beltway around the downtown,
with several exits to large parking buildings, from which there is a net of
paths, plazas, and courtyards distributing the pedestrians throughout the
center. But the exclusive focus on the downtown area leads to a complete
disregard for what is outside of it. As a result, Gruens beltway-system
effectively encapsulates the Core into a huge, partially open-air shopping mall with several exits off the highway. The rigid separation between
pedestrian and non-pedestrian movement identifies the new schism
between the city and the Core, and the latters ensuing internalization,
its increasing self-referentiality, and its ensuing, renewed isolation. Even
the most well-intentioned architects hardly move past this dilemma.
Fumihiko Maki professes his allegiance to Kahn in his Collective Form
and Linkage manifestoes of 1960. His Doijma Redevelopment Project
intensifies pedestrian flows, again, by separating them from the rest of the
city. Even this, most metabolist, metropolitan drawing in the end depicts a
mere shopping mall. As a result, this civic complex operates almost like a
capsule, steering all the flows to its innermost space, rather than re-organizing the flows that are surrounding it by virtue of its own presence and
organization. The critical difference is that Sert and Kahn had begun to
seek a balance between contextualization of the Core and simultaneously
the enhancement of its own ideals. As a result, their projects began to
enhance their surroundings without touching them. But the Providence
project lost itself in utter respect for the existing city, while Gruen and
Stephensons projects are based on a move of secession.
81

P110-111 in: Urban Design. Condensed Report of an invitation conference sponsored by Faculty and Alumni Association of Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, April 9-10, 1956., ib.
the pristine isolation of consumer fortresses, a prefiguration of todays shopping malls.

Cores
91
Above: Serts plan for Cidade dos Motores (red zone delineates Core area, added by Alexander DHooghe)
Below: Serts plan for Chimbote (red zone delineates Core area, added by Alexander DHooghe). Images as
published in: Bastlund, K. Jose Luis Sert: Architecture, City Planning, Urban Design (1967)
92
1.2.3 eccentric knots

In the Athens Charter, the notion of a geographic center for the urban
realm is replaced by a non-hierarchical juxtaposition of sectors. At first
sight, the Core is about re-introducing an overarching idea of centrality in the urban realm. However, one may argue differently on the basis
of Serts projects in South America. Two projects stand out. In 1944, his
office prepares the Cidade dos Motores in Brazil, and in 1948 they make
a plan for Chimbote, Peru. Both projects are new towns, with the Core
as a fifth function, separated from other urban zones by greenways and
traffic arteries82. References to the historic city center are shoved aside so
that a modernist notion of a non-hierarchical city appears in full view. The
modernist legacy in the Core is that the connection between geographic
centrality and the civic core has been severed for good. If,
historically and
geographically, the city center was defined as the location to which most
of the surroundings traffic lines led, this definition is no more.
In 1949, they plan for the re-organization of Medellin, Colombia. Then
a city of 700,000, it has a linear shape, caused by its location in a valley.
Serts attempts to impose development grids onto this city soon conflict
with existing railway lines and thoroughfares. This conflict results most
dramatically in a triangle that cannot be incorporated in a grid or any
other continuous urban system. This space is what Ignasi the Sola Morales
would later call a terrain vague a nondescript area, a leftover zone between dominant development zones83, left outside the center of activities.
Sert decides to locate the Core here. In the plan for Havana, prepared
between 1955 and 1958, Sert performs the same strategic displacement.
The four main grids of Havana are at 30-degree angles with each other.
Again, Sert is placing the nucleos civicos in the void space opening up
82

One may argue about this interpretation for the position of the core in
Chimbote, where core elements can be found on both sides of a major artery. However, these building complexes turn their backs to the artery (parking lots etc), and have their public front on the
other side, facing pedestrian plazas and routes.
83

Sola-Morales, Ignasi de. The Form of Absence: Terrain Vague. Pp. 21-23
in: Present and Futures. Architecture in Cities. Pp. 10-23 in: Sola-Morales, Ignasi de; Costa, Xavier.
(Present and Future. Architecture in Cities. (Barcelona: Actar, 1996).
Cores
93
Above: Serts plan for Medellin (red zone delineates Core area, added by Alexander DHooghe). Below: Serts
plan for Havana (red zone delineates Core area, added by Alexander DHooghe). As published in: Bastlund, K.
Jose Luis Sert: Architecture, City Planning, Urban Design (1967)
94
between these systems. Strikingly, the historic center of Havana has just
become one of the grids, and as such receives no particular attention. Sert
has simply made the civic core an eccentric moment. By virtue of being
outside of the different sectors and grids, but more importantly, by being
between them, in the left-over area that is not controlled and subdivided
as a regular part of the city, Serts Cores can affirm their actual intention.
This is to function as the knots, tying together the different constituencies
and elements of the city. Rather than in the center as prescribed by the
European historic city this is now happening in the cracks and gaps of
the functional city. Interestingly, only then can the Core start to fulfill its
civic vocation as a meeting place of differences.
The Core finds a place in the gaps and cracks between

suburban developments.

Cores
95
Can we trace fragments of this template after the historical moment of

the Core? Sert establishes the first
urban design department at Harvard
University in 1959 as a nascent discipline necessary to develop the
knowledge apparatus for the realization of the agenda of re-urbanization.
Research into the template was channeled into this new and then hot
field. Unfortunately, this promise was
left largely unfulfilled. The dissolution
of urban design soon after its institutionalization should form the topic of
a different book. Nevertheless, a new
generation of architects in Europe
propelled its initial agenda forward.
As late-moderns, they continue to believe that abstract symbolism can not
only develop into a formal apparatus
of public meanings, but also structure
and urbanize traffic flows. Fragments
of the 1950s template are thus re-activated.
96
1.3 TRACES
Of Cores
It would seem that the confusion between polemics and theory, or
even the substitution of polemics for theory, was inherent in the
rhetoric of the Modern Movement.
Introduction to: Denise Scott-Brown, On architectural formalism and social concern:

A discourse for social planners and radical chic architects. In: Opposition, c1975. Published

again: pp.317 in: Hayes, Michael (ed.) Oppositions Reader. Selected Readings from a Journal for
Ideas and Criticism in Architecture 1973-1984).
Cores
97
R.I.P.?
98
1.3.1 Demise of Urban Designs

Cores
The dissolution of this agenda of urban design soon after it became a
fledgling institutionalized discipline should form the topic of a different
book. Nevertheless, two hypotheses about its demise seem worthy of mention The first is that modernity and urbanity were being dissociated from
each other to the point of becoming mutually exclusive, dislocating urban
design from a position in the vanguard of architecture and planning. The
second is that the institutionalization of urban design forced it to abandon
its own highly non-consensual purpose, which ran counter to dominant
development trends, pressuring it to legitimize and justify itself according
to academic standards of rational study, which fundamentally contradicted
its internal drive to be an idealistic counter-project to the hegemonic
forces of urban development. First, If Baudelaire had equated the experience of the Parisian Boulevard with the experience84 of modernity itself, in
the 1960s this kind of city is already a fossil in opposition to the suburbs
with their thriving suburban consumer middle classes. A new generation
of architects in the 1960s and 1970s sense that cultural change no longer
happens in the decaying centers but, to the contrary, in the new, thriving
territories of sprawl. It is the logical turn for the architectural vanguard,
who, to remain at the forefront of modernity, had to turn away from the
city towards the suburbs as the source for the innovation of architectural
typologies. As the postwar suburbs were commonly considered as the
social locus of middle and lower-middle class culture, it is not surprising
that they simultaneously embrace the aesthetic of popular culture, sweeping away the very notion of urbanism and planning as an outside intervention from above. It is in this context that we have to situate Venturis
Learning from Las Vegas85, Rudofskys Architecture without Architects
modernity
urbanity
modernity
urbanity
84

pp.134-147 in: Berman, Marshall. Baudelaire. Modernism in the Streets.
Pp.132-172 in: All that is solid melts into air. (New York: Verso, c1982)
85

Venturi, Robert; Scott-Brown, Denise; Izenour, Steven. Learning from Las
Vegas (Cambridge, M.I.T. Press, 1972)
Modernity and urbanity are being dissociated from each

other to the point of becoming mutually exclusive, dislocating urban design from a position in the vanguard of
architecture and planning.

Cores
99
show at the MOMA (1964), and even the earlier turn towards the everyday in the last CIAM conference of 1959 and the work of Team X. This
position places them in opposition to the protagonists of the Core, who,
with the memories of the 1930s, distrust popular culture and aspire to
civilize it, as it were, from above, and thus wanted to liberate popular culture from its own pitfalls (barbarism in Europe, sprawl in America). The
distance between the modernist project for the city and popular culture,
which Sert and his fellows had already began to address in the search for
a new aesthetic to celebrate the civic crowd, could no longer be resolved
within modernism and even within modern society. As a result, urban
design was bypassed by a middle-class consumer culture developing more
rapidly than urban design could reinvent itself. Second, the fragile alliance
between architecture, planning, and anthropology around the notion of
urbanity and re-urbanization falls apart. The first realizations of urban design are dispiriting. Urban renewal projects in America, such as Kallmanns
Boston City Hall redevelopment project, effectively destroy city centers by
replacing them with projects that not only lack the contextual intelligence
necessary to match their urban ambitions, but to many observers suggest
an outright hostility to urbanity, thereby completely contradicting their
own stated agenda. As a consequence, many planners let go of the project
and retreat into the agenda of community-building: to help in the protection and enhancement of local communities pressured by bigger forces of
development. 86 Again, this constitutes a turn away from the intervention
from above and towards the architect-planners stance of learning from
everyday and popular culture. This was a common choice for planners
after Davidoff had demonstrated that the notion of a common good they
chose to believe in, was simply vacuous87. Between the destruction of the
possibility of the project of urban design to work for the common good,
86
To demonstrate the dramatic shift, it suffices to look at the topics of the
Urban Design conferences a dozen years after the first one of 1956.
th
12 Urban Design Conference, June 8th 1968. Panel Discussion concern four topics: Community
Process, Implementation, Physical Form, and Regional Context.
13th Urban Design Conference, May 6-8, 1970. Main Theme: Housing: Mass Industrialization.
Both in: File NAC46.HAR1968, 2 pp. (Sert Archives at the Harvard University Special Collections
of the GSD Loeb Library, Cambridge, MA).
87

Davidoff, ib.
Above: Cover of Rudofskys Architecture without architects. Below: Denise Scott-Brown and Robert Venturi,
Precedents of Suburban Symbols, Exhibition of the Learning from Levittown studio, taught by Denise Scottbrown, Stephen Izenour, and Robert Venturi at Yale, 1970.
This double blow, first of denying their project its claim

to be for the common good, and second of destroying its
future-oriented, projective character,
100
and its institutionalization into the bulwarks of academia, the only ethical
way out appeared to be a sociological and anthropological turn to study
community life and to discover its fragile patterns. Thus borrowing the
methods of the social sciences, they had to abandon the activist notion of a
project to transform the status quo, but it allowed urban designers to live
up to academic standards of self-legitimization. This double blow, first of
denying their project its claim to be for the common good, and second of
destroying its future-oriented, projective character, bereaved urban design
of its arrow of direction, its purpose, and ultimately its project. Nevertheless, its initial agenda an intensification of urbanity and the development
of an appropriate language of civic spaces and forms without nostalgia
for the historic city center was propelled into the future by a new
generation of architects in Europe. Three highly specific, highly different
lineages stand out. First, there is the approach of Elia Zenghelis and Rem
Koolhaas at the AA school geared towards the definition of metropolitan
urbanity. Second, there is the early work of Archigram (especially Warren
Chalk), epitomizing the celebration of infrastructure and flows into an
architectural aesthetic. Third, there is the work of a number of European
architect-planners some of which were grouped together by Kenneth
Frampton under the heading of Regionalism. I will call these Interfacism,
Metropolitanism, and Urban Pragmatism. Fragments of the 1950s template are thus being re-activated.
bereaved urban design of its arrow of direction, its purpose and ultimately its project.

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Above left and right: OMAs Seabruges Ferry Terminal as published in S,M,L,XL. Below: Peckham Centre as
published in the CIAM 8 Conference proceedings.
102
1.3.2 Metropolitanism in an Object

(Koolhaas/ ZENGHELIS)
In the fact of the overwhelming negative evidence about the direction of our Urban Society, and under the threat that the metropolitan situation is doomed through a series of evils, contradictions,
physical and nervous decay, that it has exhausted its potential by
the corruption of its own ideological and practical raison dtre, the
course in Urban Design would aim to retrieve and re-interpret
some of the attributes of this metropolitan situation the advantages of millions living together on relatively restricted areas, in
order to recreate a new kind of Metropolitan context, and re-invent
urban models that correspond to a desirable human existence.88
In 1969, Elia Zenghelis organizes an Urban Design course at the Architectural Association. The agenda is familiar. Serts agenda of metropolitan urbanity is transformed here into an architectural belief system, a
definition of an architectural aesthetic. A few years later, Koolhaas, who is
already making a number of presentations in Zenghelis class89, publishes
Delirious New York. Its prototypical image features the skyscraper as
a quasi-endless vertical stacking of different civic programs, effectively
expressing a vision of metropolitan urbanity condensed within a single
building. OMAs winning competition entry for a Sea Terminal in Zeebrugge characterizes this attitude best. Its context is the sea or from the
perspective of urbanization nothingness. With nothingness as context,
the internalizing of an entire city program into single building becomes
a dramatic gesture. The metropolitan building no longer requires a city
around it for its survival. Context, in a suburban environment, has made
itself irrelevant. In fact, already in 1951, Sert himself presents a project
during the Core Conference based on a similar principle. Peckham Centre
is a rectangular container of three stories, mixing swimming pools with
club centers, cafes, and restaurants. It is a Sertian civic center, mixing
88

Zenghelis, Elia. Syllabus for Urban Design Class at the Architectural Association, London. 1969. Unpublished manuscript.
89

Zenghelis, ib.
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programs within the plans and section of a single architectural container.

Peckham Centre prefigures what Koolhaas will present more forcefully
two decades later. However, by placing the focus of attention on the single
building, the urbanity agenda is also severely distorted. Peckham Centre
is the only project in the Core Conference book where the entire program
of urbanity is effectively folded into a single building. The regeneration of
the urban design agenda through the architectural object itself led to the
paradoxical result that its principal ambition successful metropolitan
public spaces was interiorized. By this I mean that its public space ambition was internalized within the architectural object, thus fundamentally
contradicting the initial ambitions of Sert and his fellow protagonists.
They had wanted to expand the field beyond that of the singular architectural object, but the architectural redevelopment of the urban-design
agenda led to an implosion of that field, into the architectural object
itself, the interior of which now hosts the city rather than, in the previous
conception, its exterior. . Both Sert and Koolhaas share a desire to transform the conventions of suburban life by injecting intense moments of
metropolitan urbanity. For at least in the rhetoric of Koolhaas, congestion
serves an agenda of destabilization for its own sake: the de-legitimization
of codes, institutions, and the entire oppressive apparatus of the state and
corporations. It celebrates metropolitanism as a negative aesthetic90. Yet,
as we have seen before, in Sert and Sennetts interpretation, the project of
metropolitan urbanity also aims to develop a positive aesthetic of civic values, beacons of civilization for a mass society bereft of a guiding principle.
As a result, they aim for a civic crowd, fundamentally supporting a liberal
and pluralist vision of the public sphere, which is an interpretation I will
further in the chapter Almost-Project. As a result, the Sertian aesthetic
is fundamentally not negative, that is to say, it is not about introducing
alienation to become more conscious of the actual social relations structuring our world. Instead, it aims to project a positive project, revaluing the
90

This interpretation of Koolhaas work is confirmed in the analysis of Jeffrey Kipnis, for instance, who characterized OMAs work as an effective line of resistanceturning
program, code,into the service of an architectural resistance conceived as disestablishment. In: P.
105 in Kipnis, J. Is Resistance Futile?, Log No. 5, 2005.
104
role of civic institutions in the creation of a civic crowd. With the internalization of metropolitan urbanity into the architectural object, urban
designs agenda was effectively folded into the discourse of architecture,
further impeding the development of its own discourse. The agenda of
interiorized urbanity, no longer enriched with urban design principles, was
consumed by the market through the development of various shopping
mall typologies, which operate exactly on the principle of an interiorized
urbanity.
OMAs Seabruges Ferry Terminal as published in S,M,L,XL.
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Left: Archigrams design for a transfer station (1964). Right: the Smithsons sketch for central London
interchange as published in proceedings of the 1959 CIAM Conference in Otterlo.
Should the complex be shaped by the flows, fitting them

almost like a glove fits a hand a literal expression of
the exchange principle? Or should they, to the contrary,
acquire form independent from all these exchanges?
106
1.3.3 Interfacism (HERRON/Richards / Hollein)

Speakers in Zenghelis 1969 class include not only Charles Jencks and
Alan Colquhoun lecturing on symbols, icons, and forms of meaning in
architecture, but also Peter Cook and Paolo Soleri. Indeed, Archigram are
among the first architects after Antonio SantElia to define architecture
almost exclusively through its organization of flows, an aesthetic based on
speed, technology and exchange, and typologies based on the interface or
traffic exchange. Between these two groups of speakers, a new dichotomy
presents itself: should the forms of the complex be shaped by the flows of
people, fitting them almost like a glove fits a hand a literal expression
of the exchange principle? Or should they, to the contrary, acquire form
independent from all these exchanges and flows, and engage primarily in
their own, pre-linguistic gesture language? Or is there a third way between
these positions? At first sight, Warren Chalk91 and Ron Herrons project
for a communication interchange explores the organizational and aesthetic limits of an architecture based on expressing an interchange of flows.
A closer look reveals that the project merely celebrates flows for their
own sake, forfeiting an interest in the moment of trans-substantiation:
where technological high-speed systems are (temporarily) converted into
pedestrian citizens. This confusion between the means and the end stands
in stark contrast with Kahns ambition as described before to give a form
to the moment of stopping, exiting the vehicle, and becoming a pedestrian
and therefore public citizen. This exact moment of becoming stands at the
center of the project of the Core. By 1966, the transfer station becomes a
temporary nexus of architectural-urbanistic thinking, as demonstrated in
publications such as Brian Richards New Movement in Cities92. In this
book, Richards shows a project (done in collaboration with Archigrams
91

Jencks, Charles. From Unicentre to Polycentre. (pp.334-339) in: Modern
Architecture (New York: Penguin Books, second edition 1985, c1973).
Warren Chalk and Ron Herron were members of Archigram.
92

Richards, Brian. Future Transport in Cities. (Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, and London: Studio Vista, c1976).
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Holleins Interchange project (1964) as published in the Catalog of the Hollein exhibition at Feigen Gallery, 1969
108
Warren Chalk) for a series of transfer stations in the center of London.

The organizing principle is the establishment of two interweaving systems:
an urban motorway on the one hand, and a system of linear buildings with
people movers on the other hand. Where these intersect, citizens can park
their cars in a multi-story lot and access a bus station or get on the people
mover to enjoy their shopping experience. Drawings of these intersections
show an intricate system of tubes, occasionally or rather, marginally
allowing for actual pedestrian spaces. While this project embeds the
early Archigram ambitions as depicted in the 1962 Interchange proposal
within a realistic context, the problems inherent in the earlier ideal scheme
are now even more obvious. The aesthetic of infrastructure and movement
has invaded the city itself, narrowing all its spaces to transport corridors.
As a result, actual public space and form is suppressed. The project loses its
own telos in an aestheticized spaghetti of infrastructural ambitions. What
makes this kind of project important to the Core is that it investigates the
principle of movement of flows as an important principle underlying the
re-establishment of a metropolitan urbanity. But again, the means become
an end in itself, and the aesthetic of technology-driven movement becomes an architectural metaphysic that at first may seem to be supporting
the agenda of the Core, but upon a closer look disintegrates before it can
achieve this. In fact, Archigrams pre-occupations end up abolishing the
intermediate terrain of a civic, public space. As Kenneth Frampton said,
If anything was destined to reduce architecture to the level of the
activities of certain species of insects and mammals [] it was
surely these residential cells projected by Archigram.93
The flow aesthetic collapses here into a biological metaphor of veins,
arteries and cells, effectively resorting to a new techno-organicism.
Compared to these beehives, Hans Holleins project for a communication
interchange (1959) reads like the exact opposite. In fact, it is a counter93

Frampton, Kenneth. Excerpt on Archigram (pp.280-283) in Place, Production and Scenography. International Theory and Practice since 1962. in: Modern Architecture. A
Critical History. (London: Thames and Hudson, c1980).
The project loses its own telos in an aestheticized spaghetti of infrastructural ambitions.

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project94. More abstract and rectilinear, this project actually establishes a

recognizable form, a monumental piece that not only organizes its own
traffic flows but also effectively structures its surroundings. Holleins
project focuses only the moment of interchange itself and distills from
that a crisp, X-shaped form. The result is clear and precise delineation and
faade. Hollein simplifies and monumentalizes the flow interchange into a
form that also structures the surrounding public spaces into four quadrants. By that I mean that Holleins interchange clarifies and makes legible
the logic of the interchange through its formal structure, rather than
confusing the urban citizen in a spectacle. The context is clarified rather
than obscured. For that reason, his interchange becomes the illustration of
an ambition stated three years before:
Architecture, sculpture and painting become one. The totality of
space, governed by things. Buildings spring into being. They rise
high up in the air, the hover over the ground. Some dominating,
strong and radiant. Some intimate, indifferent, subordinated under
the ordering rule of the focal structures. Everybody can build them,
there are no architects. Architects give form to the focal structures, to
the ruling spacedeterminators. Under the strong and ordering rule
of the higher orders of space and their determinators, buildings can
grow and decay, can expand and contract. They can live a life.95
The project transcends its own organizational logic. Chalks interchange
simply confirms the flows and aestheticizes them; Hollein transforms
them into a device to give structure and legibility to the surrounding territory; they become spacedeterminators96. The problem of the formalization of flows is absolutely critical to the establishment of successful public
spaces, because the latter will be physically defined by the design of the
94

Between 1957 and 1960, the Viennese architect Hans Hollein is studying
in the Chicago (I.I.T..) and Berkeley. One could argue that in his work, three lineages are meeting:
the Viennese tradition of luscious building-as-ornament (from Wagner to Loos to Hollein himself),
the aspirations for an abstract timeless classicism as witnessed in the work of Mies (who was his
teacher) and Kahn (see Tafuris analysis of Kahn in the Monumental Symbol), and populist lineage
of Archigram.
95

P.3 in Hollein, the catalog of an exhibition at the Richard Feigen Gallery
in Chicago at the occasion of the June 22-June 28 A.I.A. Convention in 1969.
96

In Hollein, ib.
110
former. This form does so while it also powerfully symbolizes97 the moment of interchange. The underlying architectural principles will be studied
in the chapter Monumental Symbol. Meanwhile, the transfer station as a
functional unit has taken a new lease on life in the 1990s. In several European countries, planners have successfully implemented a series of transfer
stations in the suburbs of cities. These transfer stations, which are close
to the intersection of a highway with a public transit system, not only
contain major parking areas but also an access point to the public transit
grid. Their ambition, obviously, is to alleviate car congestion in the city
proper by having people leave their cars before actually accumulating into
urban traffic jams. Some of these transfer stations are very basic (parking + platform), but in others, several small amenities (shops, cafes, and
services) have been added into the mix. Planners have given a name to this
emerging typology of transfer stations, calling them transferiums. Brian
Richards, who has updated his 1966 publication in 200498, includes several
such examples. In the Netherlands, nine such transferiums have recently
been realized. In France, public authorities, aware of its importance, have
attracted one of the worlds most famous architects, Zaha Hadid, to design
a transferium in Strasbourg. And in Belgium, several transfer stations have
been realized with the potential of being upgraded into transferiums. The
great promise of transferiums is that they establish a new centrality which
remains hitherto unexploited: they are very accessible within the regional
traffic grid for both cars and public transit. Thus, they could contribute to
the polynuclearization of sprawl.
97
The notion of Symbol is used here as defined in the tradition of German
idealist aesthetics. Chapter 3, the Monumental Symbol will go into much more detail on this term.
98

Richards, Brian. Integration with other Systems. (pp. 145-151) in: Future
Transport in Cities. (New York: Spon Press, c2001).
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Quaroni, 1964 Civic Center of Tunis as published in Urbanismo Revista 1989
112
1.3.4 Pragmatic Late-Modernism

(Sol a / Quaroni)
The design of the city was sublimated in a discussion of grand,
almost philosophical, political and sociological principles, summed
up in the Athens charter[this] led, by placing discussion of the
city on the level of general principles, to architecture ignoring the
city in reality and constantly hiding behind the pretext that these
general principles had not been realized. In this way the great alibi
was invented and that split occurred between architecture and city
planning which is still waiting to be bridgedthe urban project, as
an intermediate field of work in which the scales are interwoven
was discredited from the official avant-garde and erased from the
vocabulary of propaganda.99
The Barcelonese architect Manuel de Sola-Morales, once a student of Sert
at Harvard, had become rather critical of his former teacher at Harvard.
In a seminal essay called the Urban Project100 he blames Sert as part of an
axis with Le Corbusier and Giedion for having sidelined another modernist lineage consisting of, among others, Van Eesteren, Leslie Martin, and
Ludovico Quaroni. Sola steers clear from any sterile theological discussion
about form and at all costs wants to avoid being dragged into an architectural metaphysics which could harm a contextual intelligence. Instead,
he proposes a definition of the urban project based on the following five
points:
1. Territorial effects outside their area of intervention
2. Complex and interdependent character of the contents; superseding of mono-functionality (park, road, typology, etc.); mixture of
uses, users, temporal rates, and visual orientations
3. Intermediate scale, to be completed within a limited time scale of
99

P. 72 in the Urban Project as published in the Manuel de Sola: Designing
Cities. Lotus Quaderni Documents .23 , ib.
100

The Urban Project. First published for the exhibition Progetti per Napoli
(1987) in: Urbanismo Revista (UR), no.5, November 1987; and titled Another Modern Tradition. in
Lotus International, no.64, 1990; and again as The Urban Project., pp.60-79 in: Zardini, Mirko (ed.)
Manuel de Sola: Designing Cities. Lotus Quaderni Documents .23 (Milan: Elemond, 1999).
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Above: Quaroni, project for Porto Navile, Bologna, 1984, as published in Urbanismo REvista 1989.
Right above: de Sola-Morales, model for parking garage in Leuven project (Masterplan: Marcel Smets Projectteam Stadsontwerp, 1997). Right below: Quaronis 1964 project for a Civic Center in Tunis as published in
Urbanismo Revista 1989
114
a few years
4. Voluntarily assumed commitment to adopt an urban architecture,
independently of the architecture of the buildings
5. A significant public component in investments and in collective
uses of the program
Serts civic complex aspires to be a critical moment in the experience of
the city, joining the various, previously unrelated constituencies; it wants
to be the strategic intervention that Sola describes, having transformative
effects far beyond the perimeter of its own intervention. What for Sert
was the desire for a synthesis between architecture and planning has been
crystallized by Sola in the establishment of an intermediate scale, which
is the scale at which public space is experienced. Serts own translation had
been that of the civic complex. Conversely, Solas intermediate scale does
not require the size of a big complex to achieve its intentions.
Serts call for civicness translates into the European context for Sola as
the requirement of public investment and most importantly, the need for
an urban architecture. The biggest difference appears to be Solas rejection
of an a priori formal template, something which Sert definitely implied
in his descriptions of the Civic Complex. But is Sola truthful to his own
intuitions here? He states:
Thus designing the place is the fundamental method for what we
call urban projects. Projects that, as far as we can tell, do not fit in
to the urban design of Harvard in the sixties (Sert, Soltan, Maki),
or into the structuralism of the Smithsons, nor into that of Cullens
townscape, de Carlo, Bakema, Tange, or Team X. Nor are they the
grand design pursued by Bacon in Philadelphia and by Hugh Wilson in Cumbernauld. They do not believe in Krier or in Gossling,
in Alexander or in Colin Rowe. Even though, of course, they take a
few elements form each of these models, there is in them an operative
and pragmatic bent, an ethic that is more professional than ideological, for they are distrustful of principles and highly appreciative of
results.101
101

p. 79 in the Urban Project. As published in: Manuel de Sola: Designing
Cities. Lotus Quaderni Documents .23, ib.
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Sola thus criticizes the very notion of a template, grounding his design
instead in the unspoken intelligence of place. Forms, patterns, and continuities of the urban fabric become prime referents for the formation of
the project. Solas projects do not historicize; they interpret the regional
patterns. His work fits will within Kenneth Framptons proposition of
Critical Regionalism102, a practice that is critical vis vis modernity yet
embraces its emancipatory potential: focused on the place rather than on
the architectural object, chooses to be fragmentary, etc.
Yet this supposedly anti-ideological stance manifesting itself in his resistance to a priori templates is of course as ideological as its counterpart.
Sola leaves an important issue unmentioned, namely his own a priori conception that form itself has the capacity to structure urban growth. And
even if no particular form is a priori considered as more important than
any other one, a rigorous formal scheme remains at the basis of his urban
project. Precision, clarity, definition, and geometrical legibility remain at
the center. While this preconception has to be filtered away to achieve his
pragmatic (professional) discourse, it shows up in his admiration for the
work of Ludovico Quaroni as the first to touch in depth on the intermediate scale, the civic-urban intelligence, in short the definition of the urban
project103. But he also appreciates Quaronis formalism: the rigorous and
methodological use of formal systems to establish this scale of operations.
In fact, it is precisely the presence of a clear geometrical ordering principle
in the intermediate scale that defines Quaronis urban project. Buildings
and other more private objects are then arranged and grouped to enforce
the centralizing power of that geometry. Quaronis designs span four
decades, beginning in the 1930s and ending by the 1970s, and they reflect
the stylistic pre-occupations of the architectural paradigms he traversed.
But more importantly here is the continuity in urban thinking that is
established. From the first projects for Aprilia, to the project for Martella,
Mestre and Tunis, Quaroni defines geometries on a scale that at once
102

Frampton, Kenneth. Critical Regionalism. Modern architecture and
cultural identity. Pp.314-327 in: Modern Architecture. A Critical History. (London: Thames and
Hudson, c1980).
103

Sola-Morales, Manuel de. Quaroni, A Distant Lucidity. Pp.37-45 in::
Urbanismo Revista, nr.7, 1989.
Quaroni, section of 1964 Civic Center project for Tunis as published in Urbanismo Revista 1989
116
establish a basic order for future growth, but most importantly, define a
civic center, indeed often a civic complex. Quaronis work therefore delivers an important interpretation of the template of the Core. In the Tunis
civic complex (which he also called acropolis), Quaronis work may well
reach the most mature and simultaneously radical re-interpretation of the
concept of the Agora. A grouping of buildings around a rectangular square
with cross-sections increasing in height as they approach the perimeter
of the square, this project operates from exactly the same template and
agenda as the one developed by Sert and his fellow protagonists. However, Quaronis proposition, more than Serts, has more successfully left
behind formal clichs of Corbusian modernism, showing a form which
is exclusively defined by (1) the organization of intersecting flows onto a
central civic area, (2) a formal definition of the boundaries of this core and
an intelligent sectional build-up from its outer to its inner edge and, (3) a
more respectful contextualization of the template, by careful insertion and
regard to the surrounding territorial logic. Quaronis Civic complex occupies a forgotten piece of land, a precursor to the terrain vague104 squeezed
between different highway infrastructures and remaining Kasbah-like
districts. Just like Serts project in Medellin, the transformation of a leftover terrain in the middle of half-developed pieces of urban infrastructure
into a moment of centrality, connects what was previously disjointed. This
strategy seems especially appropriate for deployment in the sprawling
territories.
104
Sola-Morales, Ignasi de. The Form of Absence: Terrain Vague. Ib.
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118
1.3.5 a new medieval (Sola)

For Sola and other Spanish architects of this generation, the territory
of operations had been very much the historical European city, which is
loaded with an impressive set of contextual intelligence, allowing one to
hide behind that instead of being forced to produce ones own a priori
statements. The combination of modesty and intensity, which makes the
work of this generation so remarkable, nevertheless begins to lose some of
that power once it is deployed in more peripheral locations, where the lack
of contextual intelligence results in projects that, in the absence of a strong
a priori template propelling them forward anyway, have to be charged by
something else altogether that never quite materializes. Sola acknowledges
that deduction, here, has to be put aside straightaway. In 1999, the problem
of sprawl or the peripheries is placed front and center in a theme issue of
Urbanismo Revista105. The critical difference between this and the dozens
of other publications about European sprawl that are impressionistic
journeys end up justifying the status quo of sprawl is that Sola places
central the search for a new logic of interventions .Because of its activist
nature, the issue is called Periphery as a Project. In this book, Sola claims
that the spatial principle of sprawl is that of organizing distances. If the
historic European city becomes legible because of continuities that are
established by sheer building mass (which is why for Sola the longitudinal
section is the prime medium for the study of intervention in this apparatus), then in sprawl this principle is reversed. The open areas between
developments establish a net of distances. These distances establish the
visibility of the developments, define what is object and what is not, and
give a renewed force to the markers of settlement by placing them on the
background of a fundamentally white empty canvass the terrain that one
glosses over as the perception is guided from towards the vertical elements
standing out. Because it seems so analogous to the physical geography of
the late-medieval economies of northern France and Flanders, where flat
105

Manuel de, ed.).
The Periphery. Pp.4-5 in: Urbanismo Revisto 9-10, 1992. (Sola-Morales,
Above: WIllem Sulsters drawing of fragments of the Barcelona periphery. As published in Urbanismo Revista
1992. Below: Van Eycks 1432 Divine Lamb (red marking by Alexander DHooghe)
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de Sola-Morales, project for the Eilandje, Antwerp, 1992, as published in Urbanismo Revista 1992
120
lands are punctuated by a series of gothic church towers that dwarf the
remainder of the town and make it blend with the land from a distance,
towers which moreover re-appear in a triangular pattern with distances of
12-15 kilometers, corresponding the time it took to walk from one market
to the next one and back within a single day, Sola speaks about the resurrection of a model of interventions akin to a Gothic model of space.
Testing proposals for clusters of buildings, models of settlements,
even if they are insecure and open. These would be urban images of
mixed forms, with sufficient symbolic value to reply in the isolation
with which they are faced with enough formal personality as
to understand the territory as a landscape form, which is therefore
subject to very strict ecological and environmental demands. More
specifically, able to appreciate the void and the interstitial lands as a
positive material.
I am thinking of the enlightenment effort to imagine autonomous
peripheral establishments such as the Palladian villa, the factory
towns or the first garden cities. Perhaps for us in our repertoire, the
idea of grouping (bold: ad) would be that which most needs updating and revising. And we should work out autonomous intermediate
scale models in which the cohabitation in new neighborhoods of
heterogeneous buildings, spaces, and infrastructures takes strength as
a paradigm of a new metropolitan culture.
I think that these peripheral establishments must be based on the
concept of interesting distance positive separation between
multiple objects as with the Suprematists or in the classical still
lives of Morandi. The empty space between things is the subject, and
this protagonism of the empty space is the peripheral alternative to
the unifying contiguity that is the great virtue of the traditional
compact city.
Maybe we are today returning to a gothic model of space. It is the
loss of classical (Roman) regularity in urbanism which wishes to be
modern and still needs regularities (of scale, volume, material, and
use). A non-regularity however, governed from within itself by
the law of the mutual distances as its main regulator, rather than
thought through from above or from outside. The urbanism of the
periphery may involve a sequence of groupings built by induction
and by dialogue: in this field deduction is always thwarted.106
106
Sola-Morales, Manuel de. The Periphery. ib.
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de Sola-Morales, project for the Eilandje, Antwerp, 1992, as published in Urbanismo Revista 1992
122
The reader will be struck by the dramatic similarity in the language of

Solas description of the project for the peripheries, and the language of
Sert and other protagonists for the core. Both talk about groupings, yes,
assemblages of symbolic forms, the distances between which establish a
constellation. Most strikingly however, we have come full circle. To address sprawl, Sola implicitly returns to template-based thinking, and is
embracing some of the principles of the Sertian civic complex. Therefore,
it seems appropriate to heed the call of these two generations of urban
designers, and to study the principles of the grouping and the role of the
symbolic in more detail. But first, we will examine the theoretical and
philosophical underpinnings of the template of the Core, or, as Sola called
it, the Cluster.
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Thus, a strong and continuous a priori

project begins to shimmer through
the various shifting arguments with
which the project of the Core proclaims its relevance. During the fifties, the noise emanating from the
earlier dogmas of modernist urbanism
incapacitates the protagonists from
extracting a precise concept from
their intentions. Today however, such
an extraction may be possible, consequently allowing for its redeployment
as a contemporary strategy for the
post-urban realm. The shared desire
speaking from these documents is for
tributes to what was once the experience of the city (urbanity), now to
be artificially recreated in peripheral
complexes. Yet to call them memorials would be a mistake, for the residual nostalgia contained in the template serves as a mere launch pad for
a distinctly late-modernist publicness.
On the surface, a more precise definition of this publicness has remained
absent. Nevertheless, they protagonists have left us numerous clues for a
more precise definition.
124
1.4
TOWARDS
A LIBERAL
PUBLIC SPHERE
Intentions behind the Cores Project
It is necessary that the institutions of society should make provision for keeping up, in some form or other, as a corrective to partial
views, and a shelter for freedom of thought and individuality of
character, a perpetual and standing opposition to the will of the majority...a centre of resistance, round which all the moral and social
elements which the ruling power views with disfavour may cluster
themselves, and behind whose bulwarks they may find shelter from
the attempts of that power to hunt them out of existence.

Mill, John Stuart. Civilization. In: Dissertations and discussions. Political, philosophical and historical. (New York, Haskell House Publishers, 1973). (First published: London: London
and Westminster Review in the April, 1836)
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125
Combination of various drawings by Gyorgy Kepesz as published in Language and VIsion (1944)
The public shaped here is an ideal public, not one that actually exists already. This public is a Project.
126
1.4.1 liberalism as a political

aesthetic
Romantic Liberalism of the Public Sphere
Sert and Wiener harbor no illusions about the publics they are building
for, seeing them as suburban consumerist masses. Serts endorsement of
Ortega Y Gassets pessimistic view of European mass culture illustrates
the deepness of their distrust. Therefore, it is important to be aware that
the public shaped here is an ideal public, not one that actually exists
already. The project is about a reformation of publics from potentially
regressive masses to more enlightened citizens. Their public is a Project.
But what is being projected here? The notion of a Project107 takes shape
in the eighteenth century as, of course, the Project of Enlightenment.
From that moment onwards, there appears also within architecture and
urbanism the notion of a Project, denoting the intention to achieve a set
of purposes that lie outside of these fields: emancipation, equality, liberty,
etc. What is the ideal public in the Enlightenment project? As Habermas
points out in his discussion on Kant, it consists of a gathering of citizens
who are capable to engage in a calm, rational discussion towards the
definition of a common purpose. This public is founded on the strict
separation from a private sphere, which contains religion and identity,
but also business and work, all guaranteed and exercised without restraint
by virtue of being kept outside of the public sphere, which is henceforth
not contaminated by any of these issues. Kants rational conversation
requires citizen without financial needs whose engagement in a public
conversation is not contaminated by their own private interests. But with
107

Merriam-Webster description:
Etymology: Middle English proiecte, from Medieval Latin projectum, from Latin, neuter of projectus, past participle of proicere to throw forward, from pro- + jacere to throw - more at JET.
1 : a specific plan or design : SCHEME; 2 obsolete : IDEA; 3 : a planned undertaking: as a : a definitely formulated piece of research b : a large usually government-supported undertaking c : a task
or problem engaged in usually by a group of students to supplement and apply classroom studies; 4 :
a usually public housing development consisting of houses or apartments built and arranged according to a single plan; synonym see PLAN.
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127
industrialization, burgeoning proletariats and, increasingly, also other

minorities with un-resolved private issues find themselves excluded from
this model, which henceforth loses its legitimacy as a model for public
sphere. Each fields private interests penetrate and increasingly dominate
the public sphere, and the ideal bourgeois public sphere recedes into
the background. While Habermas acknowledges that the appearance of
a mass society demonstrated that this early Enlightenment concept of
public sphere turned into an instrument of oppression, he is optimistic
about the possibility that a revised rational public sphere could appear
again:
We can study the extent to which, and manner in which, the
ability [of the bourgeois public sphere] to assume its proper function
determines whether the exercise of domination and power persists as
a negative constant, as it were, of history or whether as a historical
category itself, it is open to substantive change.108
Within the discourse of urbanism, this persistent Enlightenment notion
of an ideal public would seem to be detectable whenever reference
is made to the Greek polis and its spatial expression in the agora and
acropolis. Indeed, Sert, Giedion, Doxiadis, and Kahn refer to it frequently
as an ideal precedent109. As modernists, we assume they engage the
aesthetics of light, transparency, order, calm, and abstraction, further
confirming the continuity of the Enlightenment conception of the public.
Yet this superficial reading is completely misleading. The protagonists are
suspicious of mass and popular culture. The masses identity crisis gives
rise to unbridled barbarism in Europe, and they henceforth decide that
this crisis ought to be addressed directly in the form of the civic complex.
Europes crisis had issues of identity religion, language, nationalism,
and other belief systems, which in the Kantian polis had belonged to the
108

Habermas, Jurgen. Pp. 250 in 1991 edition of: (Transl: Burger, Thomas
with the assistance of Lawrence, Frederick) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
(Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1989; paperback: 1991). Originally published as Strukturwandel der
ffentlicheit , (Darmstadt / Neuwied: Luchterhand Verlag, BRD, 1962).
109

See the part on the Group.
The template finds itself not in light, transparency, order,

calm and abstraction, but is aware of a completely different reality:
128
private realm, completely overtake the public sphere110. Now, the template
finds itself in the midst of an entirely different Project: Romanticism, or,
as Isaiah Berlin called it, the Counter-Enlightenment. Here, the will and
desire of an individual or community takes precedence over all concerns
of universality and reason. Building on the texts of among others Vico,
Herder, Fichte, Herzen, and Machiavelli, Isaiah Berlin (who devoted
his life to the study of Romanticism) constructs a history of the idea of
the subjective will as a force against the universalizing rationality of the
Enlightenment.
Fichte is the true father of Romanticism, above all in his celebration
of will over calm, discursive thought. A man is made conscious of
being what he is of himself as against others or the external world
not by thought or contemplationself-awareness springs from
encountering resistance. It is the impact on me of what is external to
me, and the effort to resist it, that makes me know that I am what
I am, aware of my aims, my nature, my essence, as opposed to what
is not mine; and since I am not alone in the world, but connected
by a myriad strands, as Burke has taught us, to other men, it is this
impact that makes me understand what my culture, my nation, my
language, my historical tradition, my true home, have been and
are. I carve out of external nature what I need, I see it in terms
of my needs, temperament, questions, aspirations: I do not accept
what nature offers because I must, says Fichte, I believe it because I
will.111
Berlin observes not only the historical continuity of the Romantic
tradition, he also redeems it. For, Berlin blames the regression of Europe
on its perverting the Romantic project.
One is not committed to applauding or even condoning the
110
The very insistence on the confirmation of a collective identity in 1944
can be understood as a belated realization that modernist urbanism could not afford having these issues hijacked by the extreme City Beautiful projects of totalitarian urbanism such as those of Speer,
Iofan, etc.
111

Pp. 225-226 in: Berlin, Isaiah, The Apotheosis of Romantic Will: the
Revolt against the Myth of an Ideal World. pp. 207-237 in: Hardy, Henry (ed.) The Crooked Timber
of Humanity. (New York : Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1991). Also published in: Hardy,
Henry; Hausheer, Roger (ed.) The Proper Study of Mankind. (London : Chatto & Windus, 1997).
Romanticism, or, as Isaiah Berlin called it, the CounterEnlightenment.

Cores
129
Exactitudes project Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek. online at www.exactitudes.nl, 2004
The liberal vision bears an almost uncanny resemblance

to the project of a constellation of civic complexes...
130
extravagant forces of Romantic irrationalism if one concedes that, by

revealing that the ends of man are many, often unpredictable, and
sometimes incompatible with one another, the Romantics have dealt
a fatal blow to the proposition that a definite solution of the jigsaw
puzzle is, at least in principle, possible, that power in the service of
reason can achieve it, that rational organisation can bring about the
perfect union of such values and counter-values as individual liberty
and social equality, spontaneous self-expression and organised,
socially directed efficiency, perfect knowledge and perfect happiness,
the claims of personal life and the claims of parties, classes, nations,
and the public interest. If some ends recognised as fully human are at
the same time ultimate and mutually incompatible, then the idea of
a Golden Age is shown to be incoherent in principle.112
Most importantly however, he posits anew the notion that the Romantic
will and the mythologies it creates to legitimize itself are not only
absolutely foundational to ones existence, but also that they are mutually
exclusive and perennially incompatible. Kants public sphere of calm,
rational discussion is shattered for good. Berlin rejects any idea of a public
unified through the objective reason and prefers an uneasy, perpetually renegotiated co-existence of constituencies which cannot be unified without
resulting in a totalitarianism that eradicates basic values of humanism.
For Berlin, then, the project of Romanticism accepts, even celebrates the
reality of perennially incompatible belief systems, but also constructs, from
each belief systems point of view, a will to awareness and understanding of
(but not identification with) other ones.
When thought through as an ideogram, such a vision bears an almost
uncanny resemblance to the project of a constellation of civic complexes
each public and thus accessible in its own right, yet each one different;
from each complex, you have a purview on adjacent ones; at each
complex, you stage a civic crowd a meeting of different constituents in
proximity and co-existence. Yet not neutral, but rather itself the result
of a profoundly unique will and belief system. The profoundness of the
Berlin revolution lies in the fact that a neutral public space disappears;
112

Pp. 236-237 in: Berlin, The Apotheosis of Romantic Will: the Revolt
against the Myth of an Ideal World. ib.
Each of them accessible to all, yet each of them also the

result of a profoundly unique will and belief system.

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131
instead we arrive at a constellation of particular spaces, each structured by

very different and mutually incompatible belief systems; yet these spaces
remain open and accessible to all.
The Public vs. the State
Berlins first seminal article, Two Concepts of Liberty, appears in 1958 in
the UK, too late for an impact on the formative years of Sert, Giedion,
and Kahn. Nevertheless, they develop their work in the same climate
of opinions, namely the early postwar era, structured by a desire to preempt a future regression into barbarism in Europe, as happened in the
1930s and 1940s113. Berlin is one among several European intellectuals
including Popper, Whitehead, Cassirer, Y Gasset, but also non-liberal
philosophers like Adorno and Horkheimer who are investigating in
how far the evil that came about was in a sense called up by the project
of Western philosophy itself. And we do know that the protagonists are
familiar with Ernst Cassirer, whose work on symbolic form and myth is
influential throughout the 1950s.114 Cassirer also analyzed the origins of
European totalitarianism and national-socialism, in a manner scientifically
inferior to but ideologically related with Berlin. Cassirers The Myth of
the State, published posthumously in 1946, is almost prescient to Berlins
political philosophy as published from 1958 onwards. Like Berlin, he
refuses to blame Romanticism for the destruction of humanist values:
The totalitarian view of Romantic writers was, in its origin and
meaning, a cultural and not a political view. They never meant
to politicize but to poeticize the worldeven in their extreme
113

Not only Berlin and Cassirer, but many philosophers of the immediate
post-war generation were guided in their investigations by a desire to understand the root causes of
National-Socialism. This led many of them into a rigorous revision of the Western philosophy and its
history of ideas. Karl Popper established proto-fascist tought patterns in Plato in The Open Society
and its Enemies, for instance.
114

Of Cassirer earlier magnum opus the trilogy Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms, written in German between 1925-1929, an abridged version is published, re-written by Cassirer himself in English, as Essay on Man (1944), and the original books are translated throughout
the 1950s. Cassirers concepts also influence the work of Suzanne Langer, whose best-sellers
fundamentally contribute to the 1950s thinking about symbol and myth. See the chapter: Cassirer,
the Marburg School and German Formalism in part 3: The Monumental Symbol.
They refuse to blame Romanticism for the destruction of

humanist values...
132
nationalism, they would not disavow or denounce their universal

ideas of human culture.115
Similar to Berlins principle of incompatibility, he credits the Romantics
for having posited the principle of individuality, be it on the level
of the citizen or on that of a constituency, culture, or nation. The
incommensurable differences between these individualities were at first
not considered to be in conflict with the political dimensions of the
Enlightenment project. For that reason, Cassirer is also rather sympathetic
to the philosophers of the will Fichte, Nietzsche, etc. ignoring the
later transposition of their view of culture into a political project. For
him and Berlin, the Romantics individualism opens up a concept of
the public as differentiated constituencies. Therefore, they can hardly be
held responsible for the rise of National Socialism. Rather than blaming
Romanticism itself, Cassirer and Berlin blame the notion of the state as
its own independent apparatus, with a power that is autonomous from
the society it establishes. This idea was first established in Machiavelli but
powerfully re-asserted in Hegels political theory:
No other philosophical system has done so much for the preparation
of fascism and imperialism as Hegels doctrine of the state this
divine Idea as it exists on earth. Even the idea that, in every
epoch of history, there is one and only one nation that is the real
representation of the world spirit and that this nation has the right
to rule all the others was first expressed by Hegel.116
Even in the best of intentions, this autonomous state operates as a SaintSimonian technocracy, occupying itself with organizational efficiency
by simply pretending the absence of a public sphere and all the timeconsuming negotiations that it entails. However, at a time when instability
occurs and daily routines in the private lives of citizens are uprooted, the
legitimacy of such a state is easily thrown in doubt. At such a moment,
115

Pp.184-186 in: Cassirer, Ernst. Myth of the State. Ib. (London, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1974, c1946).
116

P. 273 in: Cassirer, ib.
Instead blaming the notion of the State as its own independent apparatus, with a power that is autonomous from
the society it establishes.

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133
Cassirer asserts that a Romantic conception of identity-as-will will be

politicized on the level of the state, giving rise to modern myth.
As [Malinowski117] points out, even in primitive societies the use
of magic is restricted to a special field of activities. In all those cases
that can be dealt with by comparatively simple technical means man
does not have recourse to magic. It appears only if man is confronted
with a task that seems to be far beyond his natural powers...a highly
developed magic and connected with it a mythology always occurs if
a pursuit is dangerous and its issues uncertain.118
Myth, which he defines as
the collective desire personified into certain objects119
is now consciously personified into the state, and from there its mythical
identity is disseminated amongst its subjects and legitimize its own
continued possession of power. Furthermore, myth has the quality of
dissolving all boundaries and presenting the world as an essential organic
unity. Consequently, the autonomous state becomes a totalitarian state,
And since there is no private sphere independent of political life,
the whole life of man is suddenly inundated by a high tide of new
rituals.120
Hence, the separation between a private and a public sphere disappears.
Everything is inundated with myth. Thus, in addition to Berlins
destruction of the idea of a public unified through reason, Cassirer
had destroyed the vehicle of the state as a neutral ground for such
117

Malinowski, Bronislaw. The Foundations of Faith and Morals. (London,
Oxford University Press, 1936).
118

119

P. 280 in: Cassirer, ib. He builds this definition based on the French
anthropologist Edmond Doutt.
Doutt, Edmond. Magie et Rligion dans LAfrique du Nord. (Paris, Maisonneuve/Geuthner, 1984,
1994). First published in 1908.
120

When the separation between a private and a public

sphere disappears, everything is inundated with myth.
134
attempts. Similarly, Berlin in Philosophy and Government Repression121,

and Ortega Y Gassets The Greatest Danger: the State122 distrust
the autonomous state and its idea of an autonomous, monolithic,
institutionalized public. They re-construct it instead as a staged
negotiation of conflicting private interests and mythologies, thus reestablishing the separation between private and public sphere. What else
is the meaning of the protagonists abandonment of the Athens charter
which implied total public planning of the entire urban territory, a total
invasion of the private sphere by the public authority in favor of a series
of strategic interventions leaving most of the private land untouched, and
focusing the efforts of the welfare state onto a few strategic spots where
they accommodate and stimulate a sense of publicness as a neutral staging
area for the battle between competing visions. This shift is the planning
equivalent of the shift from the total state to an ideal liberal democracy.
We are left with a prefiguration of the public, to be established through
the daily uneasy coexistence of incompatibles. And how else should we
understand Serts project for metropolitan urbanity? Liberalism the
staged co-existence of incompatible entities ultimately realizes itself
not through the state, but through a space: the civic crowd; or: urbanity,
articulated through a series of publicly accessible platforms each devoted
to a different ideal. The common argument emerging, while not explicitly
stated, is that one has to work through a series of incompatible myths
to get out on the other side into a more radically rational conception
of the public. This redefined public has radical consequences. It allows
us to better understand a series of crucial shifts in the conception of
planning itself when it comes to the project of the Core. The first shift is
that the construction of public in space should no longer occur primarily
through government-related programs, but rather through a particular
organizational logic bent on promoting and exposing the uneasy co121

Berlin, Isaiah. Philosophy and Government Repression. Pp. 54-76 in: The
Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History. (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998).
122

Ortega Y Gasset, Jos. The Greatest Danger, the State. pp. 115-124. In:
The Revolt of the Masses. Authorized translation from the Spanish. (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, Inc., Publishers, c1932); (Original publication: Le Rebelion de las Masas, 1930); (New
York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1957, c1932). (Reissue. New York: W. W, Norton, Inc., 1993).
The shift from total planning (Athens Charter) to a series

of strategic interventions equals the shift from totalitarianism to an ideal liberal democracy.

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135
Below: Movement diagram of Doijma redevelopment project by Fumihiko Maki, 1961. Above: interpretation of
programmatic outline to complement the Doijma movement diagram, by Alexander DHooghe, 2004.
When architecture was placed in the context of a larger

project to change the status quo, it often turned to program as a prime carrier to achieve its goals.
136
existence of compatibles. The second shift abandons plannings inherently

utopian drive towards complete, totalizing, utopian models in favor
of a mere tribute to a variety of a particular model, each encapsulated in
a discrete figure: the constellations of civic complexes. The third shift is
from embodiment to representation parallel to the liberal shift from
direct to representative democracy. From this follows a redefined need for
formalism.
Yet in the protagonists projects, the program is remarkably unimportant.

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137
1.4.2 From Program to Organization

The early urbanistic tradition established by utopian socialism (Fourrier,
Owen, etc.) as well as the work of Russian Constructivists built its
new aesthetic by first proposing a series of programmatic innovations
a new typology of housing, the invention of new programs such as
collective child care systems, collective kitchens, etc. Also planning in
Europe and the USA focused, from its very inception around the turn
of the twentieth century, on the structuring of the life of human subjects
by defining, primarily, separations between productive, dwelling, and
leisure-related functions. The first legally enforced planning doctrine
in the USA is New Yorks zoning law. The fact that plannings initial
dogma of functional separation evolves toward to the dogma of mixeduse from the 1970s onwards, has not affected the notion that functions
and programs are the primary tool for interventions. When architecture
was placed in the context of a larger project to change the status quo, it
often turned to program as a prime carrier to achieve its goals. Yet in the
protagonists projects, whether Serts civic complex, Kahns Station, or
later on Solas urban project, the function of the program is remarkably
unimportant. Serts listing of programs in the civic complex includes
almost every imaginable function (except for industry), and demonstrates
that it is in fact not through the particular functions that the project of
the Core distinguishes itself. Instead, Sert places the study of flows and
their manipulation center stage in the early years of the urban design
program123. His interest is in the moment between the active private
programs, the moment of exposure of various users of different programs.
Makis concepts in the early sixties focus almost exclusively on the flows
that establish a relation between different private programs. His Doijma
project depicts a series of drawings where the entire architectural agenda
reduces its essence in terms of publicness: its form as it defines the nonprivate areas on the one hand, and the organization of the flows that
123

Sekler, Eduard. Sert, CIAM, and the GSD , pp. 86-93 in Harvard Design
Magazine no.21 Fall/Winter 2004.
Their challenge is to stage an ideal, liberal public at the

moment when traditional public spaces are evacuated.
138
activate it on the other hand. Louis Kahn who, as stated earlier, had said
that the program is nothing, is, by virtue of his commitment to the
transition moment from automobile to pedestrian in Philadelphia, also
primarily concerned with the organization of flows and public moments.
For that reason, we can say that the protagonists effectively shift the
attention of urbanism from program to organization. What accounts
for this shift? The protagonists underlying concept of publicness may be
held accountable. Their challenge is to stage an ideal, liberal public at the
moment when traditional public spaces are evacuated. The public, in other
words, has to be actively staged and created in a scene that summons the
liberal ideal of the public. But how? The 1950s witness the development
of an institutional apparatus (welfare state and corporations) to bring
mass culture under control with the help of an impressive apparatus of
programmatic requirements, rules and codes, bureaucratic prescriptions.
This over-structuring of the private sphere of through rules of governance
was parodied in Jacques Tatis
Mon Oncle
(1958), forcefully laid open
in William Whytes Organization Man (1956)124, in Vance Packards
The Hidden Persuaders (1957)125 and objectively confirmed in the
foundation of a series of postwar institutions devoted to the development
of procedures and rules of everyday life such as the ISO (International
Standards Organization). Institutional frameworks define the rules for
an increasingly sophisticated system of international exchange, and the
result is a regimentation of the spheres of offices, production, housing, and
shopping. In architecture, Eero Saarinens IBM office powerfully expresses
the new paradigm, as Reinhold Martin argues126. The difference between
this project and Makis Doijma reveals a striking contrast. Saarinen, the
architect, conjures up a stunning beauty, the supreme aestheticizations of
124

Whyte, William H. The Organization Man. (New York, Simon and Schuster, c1956) (Reprint: Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1957).
125

Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. (New York, D. McKay Co.,
1957).
126

Martin, Reinhold. Computer Architecture: Saarinens patterns, IBMs
brains. Pp. 141-164 in: Goldhagen, Sarah; Legault, Rejean (Ed.). Anxious Modernisms, (Montreal:
CCA, c2000).
For a more elaborate discussion on this project in the post-war era, see also:
Martin, Reinhold. The organizational complex: architecture, media, and corporate space. (Cambridge, Mass. : M.I.T. Press, c2003).
The protagonists are now using the organization language in a different sphere and towards the opposite
purpose

Cores
139
A Zen Garden
The Core is a precisely circumscribed figure on the background of a (dis)urbanizing territory.

140
these organization logics, its plan resembling the very microchip on the
production of which IBMs empire is built. Maki the urbanist couldnt
care less about the private programs and instead defines the intersections
of flows and thus establishes moments of uneasy co-existence. As the
increasing regimentation of private programs blocks their access to
manipulations by vanguard designers, they find themselves forced into
a retreat into what was formerly the public space of the Groszstadt, but
after the war has been reduced to the leftover terrain between these
private areas. There, they aim to deploy the same organizational techniques
deployed in the mainstream, but, of course with a completely different
purpose: instead of efficiency, they want friction; instead of smoothness,
intersection. Organization had of course also been the main theme of
the increasing structuring of the formerly private spheres through rules
of governance. The protagonists are now using the same language in a
different sphere (formerly public space) and towards the opposite purpose
(uneasy coexistence and dysfunctional frictions instead of mere efficiency).
They are using sophisticated organizational logic to defy the very purpose
for which they were designed in the first place. Thus they are hoping
to find an alternative to the disenchantment lamented by Kahn, who
wondered why nineteenth-century train stations were always designed
by architects and became cathedrals of the modern time, but how it was
then possible that parking garages and highway exits were surrendered
to a narrow engineering logic defying any hope whatsoever in finding a
contemporary civic grandeur?127 Therein lays a fundamental difference
with the programmatic inclinations in the work of Rem Koolhaas. When
the latter redefines function as program he opens the possibility to
redefine the private functions themselves, and open them up towards each
other; but the protagonists did not embark on such a project to transform
the private sphere, as this conflicts with their liberal instinct.
127

:Kahn, Louis. The New Art of Urban Design. Pp. 75-80 In: Twombly, Robert (ed., intro.) .Louis I. Kahn: essential texts. (New York, London: W.W. Norton Company, c2003).
(transcript of a speech at the 1960 New Forces in Architecture Conference in NY, sponsored by
Architectural Forum and the Architectural League of New York).
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141
1.4.3 From Model to preFiguration

Utopia is an ideal city encapsulating an ideal program as the expression of
an ideal social model. If the historical association between the program as
primary focus and the tradition of utopian models in urbanism is correct
as Franoise Choay assumes in The Rule and the Model128 then does
the abandonment of program for mere organization (of the residual area
between programs) also constitute a turn away from utopianism? Choay
defines the utopian lineage in urbanism as a particular genre engaged
with the proposition of a model, a complete prototype of an ideal society,
described in social, political, cultural, and, yes, also formal terms129. The
liberal concept of publicness proposed by the protagonists, however, is an
ideal but not a utopia. I would argue that it presents a tribute to various
utopias and dreams of ideal societies, but refuses to enact and realize
any one of them. As a result, it presents itself as a dream-figure on the
background of reality, rather than as a model that embodies a wholesale
alternative to reality and for that reason must remain separate from
it. The Core is a precisely circumscribed figure on the background of a
(dis)urbanizing territory. J.M Richards already describes this property of
the Core in 1951:
At the South Bank exhibition which was in a sense the starting
point of a new Core for London older London was used as a kind
of contrasting back-cloth to the new buildingsa scenic background
to certain groupings of modern buildings.130
Richards is distinguishing the figure of the Core from the background
128

Choay, Franoise. Bratton, Denise (Ed.) The Rule and the Model. On the
theory of architecture and urbanism. (Cambridge, M.I.T. Press, c1997).
129

She opposes the model to the other, more pragmatic approach that sets up
a number of rules to accommodate and beautify existing mechanisms of development, describing both currents as genres, with the one originating in Thomas Mores Utopia and the other in
Albertis De Re Aedificatoria.
130

Richards, J.M. Old and New Elements at the Core, pp.60-66 in: Tyrwhitt,
J.; Sert, J.L.; Rogers, E.N. (ed.) The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life.
CIAM 8 , ib.
What began as Serts attempt to insert moments of civilization in the functional city becomes, after traveling from
Europe to America, a project of civilizational moments
within the expanding territory of sprawl.
142
of the status quo. Richards claim is confirmed in Serts admiration for

Ortega Y Gasset and his choice of quotations is clear: the public square
is, pure and simple, the negation of the [limitless] fields. The Core
abandons any ambition to plan the city in its entirety. Instead, its strategy
is geared towards a few crucial elements: civic kernels, embryos of an
intense urbanity. What began as Serts attempt to insert moments of
civilization in the mono-functional zones of the functional city becomes,
after traveling across the ocean from Europe to America, a project of
civilizational moments within the expanding territory of sprawl. The
liberal ideology appears now with greater clarity. The great realm of private
enterprise the realm of sprawl remains fundamentally untouched. But
in addition to this, the element that is missing publicness as a forced
uneasy coexistence in one space instead of segregated in the private parcels
is introduced. Direct state control over the territorial organization, while
almost self-evident in European states, is far less common in the USA,
where suburbia is expanding rapidly and beginning to organize itself as a
poly-nuclear system. Consequently, the apparatus of direct interventions
taken for granted in Europe is now shrinking towards a bare minimum.
And if mass housing can be provided through the regulated market, the
remaining minimum is the civic complex. Therefore, the Core should
be considered as a figure that acquires its identity in opposition to its
background (the city as it is) rather than as a utopian model (a wholesale
oppositional alternative to the city as it is). How exactly though, is the
figure different from the model? On the one hand, the figure is defined by
virtue of its contrast a counter-proposition to its background, yet it is
to remain surrounded by this background at all sides to exist. On the other
hand, the model exists only by virtue of the exact absence of a background.
It is literally a projection into thin air, a dream image that creates its own
In other words, the figure of the core, is a figure of resistance; a choice not to participate in the hegemony of the
status quo.

Cores
143
totality. Because the figure wants to retain its difference, its exceptionalism
by existing exactly within the field of the real without conforming to
it, blatantly stating its own otherness, it also remains a pointer to the
possibility of a utopian alternative to reality. It is a tribute to utopia, rather
than its enactment.
In other words, the figure of the core, is a figure of resistance; a choice not
to participate in the hegemony of the status quo. It is therefore a tribute to
the possibility of choice within that existing order. Again, with the words
of Gasset:
It is our fatal duty to exercise our liberty131.
And Giedion agrees:
Release lies solely in the human will132.
The project becomes a sheer act of will, not to be defeated by the
automatic acceptance of the status quo of a reality Karl Marx called
second nature. Point two of the summary statement of the Core
conference confirms this:
2. The core is an artifact a man-made thing.133
This position also appears in the protagonists shared appreciation of
the Greek Acropolis as a spatial configuration in its own right134, everpresent in the landscape yet strictly separated from it. They interpret
the Acropolis into a symbolic form of a society liberating itself from its
own historical and natural constraints. Serts conclusion to the opening
131

P 48 in: Ortega Y Gasset, ib.
132

P. 160 in: Giedion, Sigfried. The Core: A Summing up. In: Tyrwhitt, J.;
8, ib.
133

P. 164 in: A Short Outline of the Core. In: Tyrwhitt, J.; Sert, J.L.; Rogers,
E.N. (ed.) The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life. CIAM 8 (London: Lund
Humphries and New York: Pellegrine and Cudahy, 1952) (reprint: Nendeln: Kraus, 1979).
134

See chapter 2 The Group where the discourse on the Acropolis is dissected.
The Core is about heroically constructing, against the

forces of nature, history and economy, a definition of
ones sense of civilization.
144
remarks of the first Urban Design Conference includes a reference to

Pico Della Mirandolas Oration on the Dignity of Man135, left out in
the published version. This Renaissance text praises man as the ultimate
creation, because of his capacity to transform himself and his world by the
act of his own will: not to be dominated by nature, history, or technology.
Ortega Y Gasset parallels the limitless fields of nature with the faceless
masses of Europes industrial nations. Sert pushes further by equating the
sprawling territories of suburbia with the undifferentiated limitless fields.
And against plannings ploy to normalize this territory in an overall plan,
he opts for a series of probes to articulate civic aspirations. All this evinces
the figure of the Core as, essentially, a constructivist project not in a
stylistic sense, but in its fundamental aspiration of heroically constructing,
against the forces of nature, history and economy, a definition of ones
sense of civilization.
135

This reference is not in the proceedings of the conference, but can be
found in the original typescript Sert prepared for his lecture. Harvard GSD Archive document DXX.
A liberal philosophy of the public sphere depends on the

principle of representation rather than on the principle of
democracy.

Cores
145
1.4.4 Towards Formalism

Against a public opinion that, as it seemed, had been perverted from
an instrument of liberation into an agent of repression, liberalism,
faithful to its own ratio, could only summon public opinion once
again. Yet what was needed now was a restricted arrangement to
secure for a public opinion finding itself in the minority an influence
against the prevailing opinions that per se it was incapable of
developing. In order to save the principle of publicity even against
the tyranny of an unenlightened public opinion, it was to be
augmented with elements of representative publicity (ffentlichkeit)
to such an extent that an esoteric public of representatives could
emerge.136
L. Kahn is considered by Tafuri as a formalist137. Giedion is, by virtue of
his disciplinary outlook as a former pupil of the art historian Heinrich
Wlfflin, a formalist. Sert states that
We will design the container, the people will do the rest,
a formalist statement. Is formalism a necessary ingredient of the project
of the Core? As noted earlier, a liberal philosophy of the public sphere
in and after the arrival of mass culture depends on the principle of
representation rather than on the principle of democracy. The legitimacy
of the democratic state depends on the houses of parliament forming a
representation of the totality of all the individuals commonly referred to
as the public. In an ideal democracy, if that public is stratified in different
politico-cultural fields as Bourdieu would have it, the houses, ideally,
will represent this stratification accurately thanks to the principle of
one citizen, one vote. Notwithstanding gross simplifications entailed in
this approach, mass democracy is assumed here to result in an accurate
representation of its subjects in the parliament. This is direct democracy,
136

P. 137 in Habermas, ib.
137

Tafuri, Manfredo. P. 36-37 (in: Barbara Luiga La Penta (transl.) Architecture and Utopia. Design and Capitalist Development. (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, c1976) (Italian
original: Progetto e Utopia. Bari: Guiseppe Laterza i Figli, 1973).
The liberal figure of the parliament reduces democracy to

a mere ritual,
146
and its logic results in the legitimacy of majority rule or majoritarianism138.

But a liberal political philosophy rejects majoritarianism. If the results of
the vote lead to a representation that certain minorities find unsatisfactory
and illegitimate, liberalism will adjust the system so that they too
find themselves represented. Examples include rules of affirmative
action, strengthening the representation of women and minorities,
or the historical role of the senate as chamber of parliament where
historically upper classes are represented above their numerical weight.
Representation thus supersedes democracy itself as the foundational
principle of a liberal concept of the public sphere. The parliament serves
as a figure that crystallizes a liberal vision of the entire body of the public
and indeed of society as a layered cake of different interests, within itself.
Not just different from direct democracy, the liberal figure of parliament
is its direct opposite. For, a democracy that installs the hegemony of the
masses corresponds to Marxs dictatorship of the proletariat139 and to De
Tocquevilles observation of American democracy as a dictatorship of the
middle classes140:
The very essence of democratic government consists in the absolute
sovereignty of the majority; for there is nothing in democratic states
that is capable of resisting it. Most of the American constitutions
have sought to increase this natural strength of the majority by
artificial means.
To the contrary, a liberal concept of the public sphere is starkly opposed to
such a hegemony by one particular field, even if it constitutes a numerical
majority. In the liberal figure of parliament, representation supersedes
democracy. In his essay Civilization, Mill writes:
138

Term developed in: Pateman, Trevor. Majoritarianism: An argument from
Rousseau and Condorcet. In: Cogito, vol. 2, number 3, 1988, pp 29 31.
139

Marx, Karl. Critique of the Gotha Program, (1875). Pp. 13-30 in Selected
Works. Volume Three (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970). First published as abridged version in:
Die Neue Zeit, Bd. 1, No. 18, 1890-91.
140
De Tocqueville, Unlimited power of the majority in the United States, and
its consequences. In (Goldhammer, Arthur, Transl.): Democracy in America. (New York : Library of
America : Distributed to the trade in the U.S. by Penguin Putnam, c2004). Originally published as
Dmocratie en Amrique.( (Volume I, 1835 and Volume II, 1840).
but this reduction is necessary to save the idea of democracy, by protecting it against its own authoritarian
impulse.

Cores
147
It is necessary that the institutions of society should make provision

for keeping up, in some form or other, as a corrective to partial
views, and a shelter for freedom of thought and individuality of
character, a perpetual and standing opposition to the will of the
majority...a centre of resistance, round which all the moral and
social elements which the ruling power views with disfavour may
cluster themselves, and behind whose bulwarks they may find shelter
from the attempts of that power to hunt them out of existence.141
For that reason, the liberal figure of the parliament reduces democracy to
a mere ritual, but this reduction is necessary to save the idea of democracy,
by protecting it against its own authoritarian impulse. The interest of
this paragraph is not to defend or attack liberal democracy, but merely to
interpret the project of the Core as a translation of a liberal conception
of the public sphere into a project that, in the words of Mill, serves as a
centre of resistance against the proliferating hegemony of the middle
classes. It is therefore nothing less than the symbolic form of a liberal
political aesthetic. The populace is aestheticized into a grouping of icons,
each representing the interest of a larger constituency. Together, these
establish the contours of a public. In hindsight, we can say that the Core
had to become to postwar liberalism, what the Soviet Palace was to Stalin,
what cardus and decumanus were to the Romans, and what cathedrals
were to the Catholic Church.
The fundamental consistency between representation as a political concept
of liberalism, and representation as an aesthetic project in the arts, is to
be found in the underlying notion of formalism. Politically speaking,
formalism is associated with the representation of citizens and community
in institutions, while informality is associated with grassroots democracy
and community life. However, the rise of the informal society in the
sixties in opposition to societys formal structure corresponds to a similar
evolution in architectural urbanism, eloquently expressed by Rudofsky
in his 1964 Architecture without Architects. Here, informality becomes
the new dogma. Formalist architects Kahn, Rudolph, and others of this
141

Mill, John Stuart. Civilization. In: Dissertations and discussions. Political,
philosophical and historical. (New York, Haskell House Publishers, 1973). (First published: London:
London and Westminster Review in the April, 1836).
148
generation were considered to be out of touch with the reality of mass

and popular culture, which was associated with immediacy, informality,
and also with a new authenticity. Yet the quest for informality, once very
critical as an emancipation project from state, church, and other dogmatic
institutions, may have its own limits as informality itself has been elevated
to a dogma at least in Europe. For it ought to be said that informality also
constitutes a retreat on the part of the subjects (citizens and communities)
away from a regional, national, or larger institutional figure, which is
henceforth surrendered to special interests.
Also, formalism in the arts has historically been a movement that treats
the form as its own content, irrespective of the degree to which it actually
represents the world of phenomena. Formalism in relation to a liberal
concept of representation politics is related to the treatment of democracy
as a ritual to confirm a representation that is in fact not democratic at all.
The form (or representation) of the public is independent from its actual
statistical composition. This crystallization of a vast, sprawling, culture into
a singular precisely defined space the space in the houses of parliament
requires the introduction of a high degree of formalism. The form of the
public that is crafted here is its own content, namely liberalism itself, and
democracy the actual composition, in reality, through numbers or data,
of the actual totality of individuals and citizens is a different matter.
The analogy is clear. Formalism in a liberal concept of the public and
formalism as an aesthetic for the project of the core both represent the
public as a layered cake or a grouping of difference. The uneasy coexistence
of incompatible entities is thus confirmed through its transformation
into a political aesthetic. Within the project of the Core, what are the
fundamental axioms of this formalism? The acknowledgement by Cassirer
and Berlin of myths and belief systems, in defiance of the project of
the Enlightenment, finds its counterpart in the protagonists audacious
development, in the midst of the project of modernism, of a new concept
of monumentality and symbolic form.
This crystallization of a vast, sprawling, culture into a

singular precisely defined space the space in the houses of parliament - requires the introduction of a high degree of formalism.

Cores
149
second dilemma:
DeMars and Reay, project for Santa Monica, 1961
150
monument vs. fabric

Santa Monica, 1961. The architects DeMars and Reay make a proposal
for an urban settlement containing housing and a civic center. The project
contour has a vaguely ziggurat-like outline. The base consists of kasbahlike housing, arranged so that an overall tapestry appears, increasing in
elevation towards its center. There, a monumental tower scrapes the skies.
This design illustrates how the postwar search for urban form is torn
between two radically different and mutually exclusive ideas. This is the
dilemma between Monument and Fabric. Both templates have a rich history. As Carl Schorske demonstrates, around the turn of the nineteenthcentury Vienna was the place of a heated debate between proponents of
what was then considered as a new modernity appearing in the newly
completed Ringstrasse, with its new monumental scale of architectural objects and open spaces, as well as the new speed of fast trams, that defined
its experience. Otto Wagner demonstrated his admiration for this new
mode of urbanity in his 1911 Groszstadt project. Daniel Burnhams 1909
Plan for Chicago, a plan culminating the principles of the City Beautiful movement similarly celebrates the grandeur of a new modern scale of
bourgeois successes. This and other such schemes were often sponsored
by the entrepreneurial elites of American cities, who were announcing
their readiness to spectacularly surpass the Old World. The monumentality of the City Beautiful movement would continue to be applied in the
1930s by Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, after which the very notion of
monumentality would become increasingly discredited. Boris Iofans 1934
winning entry for the Soviet Palace in Moscow could be considered as
the ultimate, unfinished City Beautiful project, because in it the logic of
axis, symmetry, monumentality, ornament, and beautification are pushed
to their logical limit. Camillo Sitte, on the other hand, crystallized the opposition against this repulsive modern city epitomized by Vienna Ring

Rowan, Jan C. Projects for Santa Monica, pp. 190-192 in: California,
Ekistics Journal, 1961.

Graf, Otto Antonia. Otto Wagner. Baukunst des Eros 1900-1918. Band
2/7 (Schriften des Instituts fr Kunstgeschichte, Akademie der bildenden Knste in Wien) (Boehlau
Verlag, c2000).
the post-war search for urban form is torn between two

radically different and mutually exclusive ideas - yet b oth
templates have a rich history.

Groups
151
second dilemma:
strasse, with his City Planning according to Aesthetic Principles. . Sittes
treatise springs from the premise that the German-speaking societies
are repressed in the foreign and alienating forms represented by modern
Vienna, and they instead need a form that is truthful to their own culture.
The aesthetics of authenticity that Sitte then presents are in fact a study
of generic formal rules underlying the structure of medieval city fabrics
in Northern Europe. Things of a large scale an inhuman scale are in
his discourse associated with modernity, liberalism, internationalization,
etc., whereas tightly knit urban fabrics with precisely defined plazas and
winding streets are associated with the innate will of the people to develop
their own form. Of course, this debate crystallizes the Enlightenment vs.
Counter-Enlightenment belief systems once again: Carl Schorske has
demonstrated the relation between Sittes formal proposals based on a
Romanticized template of medieval urban form, and his association with
Viennese counter-enlightenment Romantics, who were enthralled with
the collective will of a German Volk. Modernist urbanism wanted to
supersede this formal dilemma by focusing on function rather than form.
However, in the postwar era, the debate surfaces again with great intensity.
In 1946, J.M. Richards describes the need to address the desires of the
common man, in to make a case for the New Empiricism in Sweden. In
the postwar decades, this common man is at the center of the urbanism
discourse as a target audience improperly neglected by the first generation
of modernists. Especially the Team X generation has invested in a search
for authenticity concerning the lives of the people. Van Eycks study of

Sitte, Camillo. City Planning According to Artistic Principles
(transl. George R. Collins and Christiane Crasemann Collins) (London: Phaidon Press, 1965).
(German Original: Der Stdtebau nach seinen knstlerischen Grundstzen, 1889).

Carl Schorske, The Ringstrasse and the birth of urban modernism.
Pp. 24-113 in: Fin-de-Siecle Vienna. Politics and Culture. (New York: Vintage Books, 1981,
c1961).

The Swedish New Empiricism is a movement that proposed to plaster
ornamentation and small-scale elements onto modernist blocks, offering small gestures towards an
easy interpretation, and as it was hoped, appropriation of its modernist stance, for the common man.
It was defined and described in:
Richards, J.M. The New Empiricism: Swedens Latest Style. pp. 199-204 in: Architectural Review
101 (June 1947)

Hilde Heynen, Andr Loeckx, Lieven de Cauter en Karina van Herck.
DAT is Architectuur. (Uitgeverij 010, Rotterdam 2001).
Left abvoe: Viennas Ringstrasse. Left middle: Otto Wangers Groszstadt project. RIght above: Viennas fabric.
Right below: Ralph Erskines design for an Arctic Village as published in the Proceedings of the CIAM 10
Conference in Otterlo.
152
monument vs. fabric

Timimun (1951, 1953), Herman Haans study of dwelling patterns in the
Sahara (1959), and Bernard Rudofsky MOMA exhibition architecture
without architects (1964) present pre-industrial life as more organic,
relating everything within the community fabric to everything else. The
universal connectivity translates itself into the architectural aesthetic of
kasbaism: a patterning of fabrics, establishing an intricate web of small
spaces and forms on a supposedly human scale, placing itself purposely
outside of the mainstream of modern society, as exemplified by R. Erskines Arctic Village. This generations intellectual tour de force has been
to invoke metaphors of systems theory (cybernetics), structuralism, and
biology to legitimize this anti-modern lineage as the most modern of all.
We can now re-read DeMars and Reays scheme as a convoluted exercise
to reconcile both extremes: Erskines kasbah village, with Iofans monumental tower in the center. The Santa Monica project now appears as an
exercise in schizophrenia, not knowing which model to choose from. The
simplicity of this dichotomy may explain its continuing impact: fabrics as
a symbolic expression of the people (bottom-up), monuments as a sign of
power exercised over the collective (top-down). However, the protagonists
find themselves in a double bind with regard to this dilemma. We have
established previously that they are suspicious about popular culture (the
common man) and the innocence of its motivations; yet they are also
profoundly dissatisfied with the pseudo-monumentality10 (Giedion, Sert)
of the City Beautiful and various Eclectic styles of the nineteenth century.
In other words, they need to find a way out of the historical dilemma of
modernity in urban form. They are, in fact, looking for a third way.

These trips are discussed in a Dutch biography of Van Eyck:
Strauven, Francis.
Pp. 143-149 in: Aldo van Eyck: Relativiteit en Verbeelding. (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, c1994). Strauven cites among others:
Eyck, Aldo van. Pp. 28-37 in: Forum. 1953, nr. 1

Haan, Herman. Life in the Desert. Pp. 150-156 in: Newman, Oscar (ed.).
CIAM 59 in Otterlo. Ib.

Erskine, Ralph. Sub-Arctic Habitat. Pp. 160-168 in: Newman, Oscar (ed.).
CIAM 59 in Otterlo. The public discussion about this project, as published on the same pages, was
overwhelmingly positive.
10

Giedion, Sigfried. The Need for a New Monumentality, ib.
Groups
153
2 THE GROUP
Project of a Group Form for a Civic Center in Opglabbeek Belgiunm (Competition Entry).
Alexander DHooghe with ORG, 2006
154
Groups
155

Group Form (F. Maki, 1961)
, Group

Design (S. Giedion,
1957) , and Groups
(J. Sert, 1951): these terms describe
the progression towards such a formal template for the Core. L. Kahn also
intuitively develops it in his urban
design work in Philadelphia. From the
protagonists thus emerges a common
definition of a series of independent
monumental forms, placed in such a
close proximity to one another as to
constitute a gathering with closely
knit interstitial spaces. The constituents are architectonic, landscape and
infrastructural forms. Their perception
oscillates between a contour of the
overall grouping and a recognition of
the radically different individual elements. Its scale never exceeds that
of the pedestrian walking radius; and
in this radius, it generates a sense of
centrality which is always fleeting,
always where one is not, but nevertheless in the vicinity. The following
paragraphs will build up this definition of the Group.

Maki, Fumihiko, Investigations in collective form. ib.

Giedion, Sigfried. Group Design, pp.9-15; and pp. 269-274 in: Architecture and the phenomena of transition; the three space conceptions in architecture. (Cambridge,
Mass., Harvard University Press, 1971). (edited by J. Tyrwhitt).

Pp. 13-14 in: Sert. Centres of Community Life, ib.
156
2.1 DISCOURSE
About:the Group
Scale: 1:200 1:500
There is an almost complete absence of any theory beyond the one of
single buildings This situation has prompted us to investigate the
nature of Collective Form.

p. 5 in: Maki, Fumihiko, Ohtaka, Masato. Collective Form Three Paradigm. Pp.3-24
in: Investigations in collective form. (St. Louis, School of Architecture, Washington University,
1964)
Groups
157
158
2.1.1 Serts Groupings

Grouping Objects
Sert does not tackle the concept of the grouping of buildings explicitly yet
throughout the 1940s. Its idea remains latent, waiting while folded into
the more general desire for a synthesis of the arts, which he and Giedion
propose at the postwar congresses of Bridgewater (1947) and especially at
Bergamo (1949). While Sert states:
We cannot know the means of the synthesis before the facts. Life
itself will define the frame,
during the 1951 Core Conference, he distinguishes three precise methods
to relate the arts. In the integral relation, all the arts are synthesized in
a single form, which is consequently redefined as a sculpto-architectural
unit. The second method consists of one art form using another one as its
canvass, and Sert calls this the applied method, where
Sculptor and painter only participate in one section of the
building
Here, each discipline grafts itself on the back of another one, like Picassos
Guernica on a wall of Serts World Exhibition Pavilion in 1937. However,
the third related approach is most important for the concept of the
Group.
Finally, architecture, painting and sculpture may be simply related
to one another, each work standing alone. The best examples of this
type belong to the field of city planning. We here refer to groups of
buildings, generally public buildings, where a certain relationship
has been established between open and built-up space. Sculpture and
painting may come to enrich these groupings; and, as a result of a
relationship of values, the whole becomes greater than the separate

The synthesis of the arts was a session topic in both conferences.

P. 5 in: CIAM 7 Bergamo Documents, ib.
Montage of various Core designs by TPA (Sert and Weiner) between 1944 and 1960
...the whole becomes greater than the separate parts...

Groups
159
parts. Like instruments in an orchestra, each plays its part, but it is

the added effect that counts.
Serts vocabulary needs to some sharpening here, for this related approach
is not a synthesis at all. At once the most flexible and most urban designoriented of the three methods, this method envisions a gathering of
sculptural forms, buildings, open spaces, and artworks in close proximity.
This is not a synthesis, because the new unity does not dissolve the
parts (thesis and antithesis) that constitute it. Each form remains visible
independently. However, the forms do relate to each other so as to
constitute more than a mere sum of parts. Having established a general
notion of grouping, Sert then elaborates its consequences on architecture.
We can say, in general, that these [cores, ad] will have open areas
for public gatherings, such as public square and promenadesthe
plans for community centers should establish two different scales
an expression of the separation of pedestrians and automobilesthe
differentiation in scale can also be expressed in the heights of the
buildings. Many of them must be walk-ups, two or three floors
.There must also be high tower elements, expression of the use of
the elevator. All intermediate heights could easily be omitted. This
contrast of high and low, of slab-like towers and patios, and of open
and enclosed spaces will help animate these Cores. The spacing and
form of these groupings of buildings and the open areas for public
use, presents an interesting subject to the planner-architect today.
Such forms could be the expression of our culture, our technical
knowledge, and above all, of a new way of living.
The grouping is thus defined by virtue of the mutual contrasts between
the constituent forms. The overall coherence is a matter of careful
composition, radicalizing these contrasts until right before the moment
where the entire composition would fall apart. Architectonic forms
are reinforced in their independence (because they contrast with the
surroundings), yet they are also placed in an uneasy co-existence with
other. The 1951 statement is not a whim. In the 1956 opening conference


AD = added by A. DHooghe.
...This contrast of high and low, of slab-like towers and

patios, and of open and enclosed spaces will help animate these Cores...
160
of urban design, Sert intervenes several times during the discussion against
a series of biology metaphors brought forth by Richard Neutra. For Sert,
there is nothing organic or fabric-like about the grouping. It is a manmade artifact10 , a willed composition. Yet he also reiterates his opposition
to the other extreme:
It is not the isolated monument that counts, but the pleasure of
looking at outstanding buildings in a setting that is harmonious and
valid.11
He goes on with one of his favorite analogies of the grouping, namely that
of the orchestra where each individual instrument plays according to a
common score:
If everything is assembled in correct proportion with the score, the
work allowing for modifications will benefit. 12
Sert also begins to reveal the real purpose of his groupings, namely
the terrain between them. This is the public space where metropolitan
urbanity will be celebrated as a means to a liberal sense of publicness.
The Interstitial Scale
The purpose of the group is to define public space between its constituent
forms. This purpose becomes ever more apparent in Serts work, reaching
a tipping point in 1957, when the public space becomes the centerpiece
of design and the solid forms of the group are relegated to being mere
auxiliary pieces for the definition of the open-space grouping. Thus,
two groups appear: a first one of solids, and even more importantly, its
10

Bulletpoint nr.. 2 in: p. 164-168 in: Short Outlines of the Core.
11

Pp. 98 in: Sert, J.L. Urban Design. Condensed Report of an invitation
conference sponsored by Faculty and Alumni Association of Graduate School of Design, Harvard
University, April 9-10, 1956. pp. 97-112 in: Progressive Architecture, Aug. 1956.
12

P. 99 in: Sert, J.L. Urban Design. Condensed Report of an invitation
conference sponsored by Faculty and Alumni Association of Graduate School of Design, Harvard
University, April 9-10, 1956. ib.
With this statement we are getting awfully close to Makis quotation on Stirling concerning the
assemblage as a tool for flexibility.
The purpose of the group is to define public space between its constituent forms.

Groups
161
I would like to list some points on which I believe there is general agreement among the different
professions here represented.
1. the need for organized and classified land use
2. the re-introduction of open space and natural elements in the city and the establishment of a
balance between buildings and open spaces
3. The recognition that the shape of these open spaces and their design is as important as the design
of the buildings themselves.
4. The need for a classified system of roads that will be designed to protect population from the
nuisances of motorized traffic and allow the free movement of the automobile, now handicapped
in congested streets
5. The recognition of the pedestrians right for security and easy movement within certain areas
of the city independently from traffic ways and the need to ban the automobile from certain
pedestrian areas.
6. The need for organized off-street parking that will correspond to densities of population and
land use.
7. The need for community facilities and open spaces for recreation and rest.
8. The organization of focal points or cores that would attract populations and act as magnets for
recentralization
9. The need for new legislation that would replace the obsolete zoning codes and would permit
cities not only to become better but more beautiful
10. The abolition of existing building laws that are a barrier to the use of new materials and new
methods of construction and the establishment of new codes based on modern technical knowledge
and thinking
11. The departure from street-front design that has resulted in corridor streets and congestion.
12. The demand for light, ventilation and view, and consequently the need to eliminate courts in
high buildings, which is already resulting in the increased use of slab and tower-shaped structures.
13. The acceptance of courts or patios in low buildings where they can provide light, [ unreadable], views, privacy and ventilation.
14. The establishment of proper bulk-zoning principles based on floor-space ratios that will consider the interrelationships of heights and open spaces, densities and traffic requirements, angles of
vision, etc.
15. The desirability of mixed types of buildings high and low to avoid monotony and repetition such as was common in the first modern developments of the 20ies and the 30ies.
16. The awareness that dispersion and low densities have [unreadable] resulted in suburban
sprawl and do not cure the evils of the city
17. The conviction that we should aim at re-urbanization and not sub-urbanism, which has
resulted in the development of patterns that are neither city nor country.
18. As a consequence of the foregoing, the recognition that land should not be misused or wasted
and that our plans should be tight and well-measured plans.
19. The belief that our times can develop beautiful, dignified cities providing for the right kind of
urban environment
20. The conviction that as designers we can make an important contribution to the building of
this environment and that we are willing to work as a team with other designers and technicians.
21. The recognition of the need to implement these ideas and ideals so that they become a physical
reality.
162
dialectical counter-image, one of public spaces. During his opening

lecture in 1957 of the second Urban Design Conference, Sert proposes
twenty-one points of agreement that would constitute the program
of urban design13. These points constitute Serts understanding of a
consensus from the preceding First Urban Design Conference of 1956.
Many of these relate to the creation of the grouping of public spaces
propped up by an inverse drawing of a grouping of solid forms. If we read
these points against the background of the template of the group, they
acquire a sudden consistency. For instance, Serts legislative points aim
to take out zoning laws that favor monotonous fabrics and street-front
designs to allow for a freer, sculptural group. Also, at least ten points are
directly concerned with the interstitial space between buildings in such
a grouping. And of course, one point takes up the collaboration between
the disciplines as a necessary condition for urban design groups. The
grouping of forms and their counterparts, public spaces, remains a central
element of Serts thinking throughout the rest of his career. In 1967, Knud
Bastlund writes that:
In the more recent work [of Sert], the outside spaces influence
the forms of the buildings to such an extent that they would be
meaningless if unrelated to their neighbors.14
The importance of open space design as a prerequisite to a successful
modernist city had already emerged in the Bergamo Conference, where
the Brazilian delegation presented the work of Roberto Burle-Marx15.
However, for Sert, the poverty of public spaces in the modernist city
cannot simply be solved within themselves: it is dialectically related to the
design of the built forms that define their edges. The grouping transforms
mere open space to interstitial space between the forms of the group.
Thus, Serts overall argumentation breaks down as follows. The problem of
disurbanization is that it leads to sprawl, which itself demonstrates a lack
13

P. 2 in: Sert, Introductory Notes for the Second Urban Design Conference,
ib.
14

P. 15 in: Bastlund, Knud, Jos Luis Sert, architecture, city planning, urban
design, ib.
15

P. 7 in: CIAM 7 Bergamo Documents, ib.
Excerpt of Serts Introductory Notes for the Second Urban Design Conference.
The grouping transforms mere open space to interstitial

space between the forms of the group.

Groups
163
of culture and a potential regression into barbarism. The counter-project

is re-urbanization. The template for this is a constellation of Cores. Here
a renewed celebration of metropolitan urbanity will instill the values of a
liberal idea of publicness in the citizens. This celebration and its intention
will acquire form through the template of the grouping of sculptural
forms, which for the first time since the City Beautiful movement
establish, a formal spatial principle of public space as interstitial, inbetween the object of architecture and the broader scale of planning.
Thus, Sert smoothly bridges different scale levels from planning to
architecture to arrive, finally, somewhere in between, at an interstitial scale
of operations. And even if his aesthetic of the group will encounter more
and more resistance amongst contemporaries, the notion of the interstitial
scale will survive to become one of the most common descriptions for the
field of urban design. The synthesis of arts has made way for a synthesis
of scales, establishing a third term between the scale of architecture and
that of planning.
Institutionalization and Demise of Urban Designs Group Form
After CIAM 8, Sert, Giedion and especially Le Corbusier steer CIAM
towards a new charter for urbanism to complement or even replace the
Athens Charter. This Charter of Habitat, as Le Corbusier calls it, ought to
become the reference document for postwar urbanism. At Serts insistence,
the Core is to become a crucial element of this project. However, the
Smithsons had already presented their scales of human associations at the
1953 Congress of Aix-En-Provence. Their work displays a more holistic
conception of the charter placing the human environment in a broad
sense central, rather than a particular project of architecture and planning.
The following discord between CIAMs middle generation (mostly
Giedion and Sert) on the one hand, and a younger generation soon to be
known as Team X on the other hand, makes a consensus more and more
unlikely16. In 1956, Sert de facto abandons CIAM, when he asks the
16

Mumford details the debates during the transitional period 1951-1956 in:
pp. 225-266 in: Mumford, Eric. The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960, ib.
Even if Serts aesthetic will encounter increasing resistance amongst contemporaries, the concept of the interstitial scale will survive
164
meeting:
Are you agreed that the work of completing the Charter should be
done at Harvard University?17
With a positive answer, in the same year Sert hosts the first Urban
Design Conference at Harvard, and by 1959 establishes the first ever
Department of Urban Design. For Sert, urban design denotes the
apparatus of knowledge and techniques necessary for the realization
of the Core as a grouping of sculptural forms. The discipline of Urban
Design should therefore be considered as one of the fragments resulting
from the splintering of postwar modernism into a series of different
and contradictory projects. In fact, Sert does not define Urban Design
as a discipline at all; he considers it as a specific normative project with
its own formal logic based on a particular agenda. Soon enough, the
institutionalization of this project leads to such severe tension as to result
in its complete disappearance. Already in 1957, when preparing for the
second Urban Design conference, Serts preparatory notes show the
beginning dilution.
This Conference is confined to a discussion of the design section
of the planning process. This does not mean this is considered more
important than other essential sections such as the establishment
of relevant data or the means of implementation which may fall
more directly in the fields of sociology, economics or government.
He continues with a humble list of 8 points, most of which relate to issues
of planning and regional organization18, which he considers agreed in
principle. These have been purged from Serts own predilections, and
instead propose vague generalities (see inset). He then proposes a second
list of goals that are:
17
1960, ib.
18
ence, ib.
Not so widely accepted and should from the bases of discussion at the

Pp. 257 in: Mumford, Eric. The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-
Pp. 1-11 in: Sert, Introductory Notes for the Second Urban Design Confer-
to become one a most common descriptions of urban

design. The synthesis of arts has made way for a synthesis of scales.

Groups
165
1. That an urban area should be divided into residential sectors designed with all
relevant local services
2. That major industrial areas should be separated from residential areas
3. That a general park system should be designed to include both neighborhood
parks and buffer areas
4. That traffic routes should be classified and restricted to the types of traffic they
are designed to carry
5. That adequate off-street parking is essential whether vertical or horizontal
6. That centers for commerce, entertainment, etc. should be designed for the use of
the pedestrian
7. That primary schools should be within safe and convenient walking distance
from residences.
8. That the use of high rise apartments is admissable in order to free ground area
and permit greater light and air to all dwelling units.
(1) re-urbanization with cores;

(2) the need for man to interact with fellow man and with nature,
(3) the need for 3-dimensional design thinking about the city
(4) collaboration between architecture, landscape and planning towards a
design framework
(5) separation between automobile and pedestrian logics of perception
(6) design of open spaces within an urban environment.
Excerpt of Serts Introductory Notes for the Second Urban Design Conference.
166
Conference.
The overall tone of the addendum is defensive. Serts vision for the
grouping has been watered down and relegated to the list of issues
of discussion, rather than to those of agreement. The difficulties Sert
encounters provide evidence of the specificity and peculiarity of his vision
for urban design as a highly particular project template built around
a number of formal axioms. As the institutionalization of the project
implied not only its infusion with planning discourses based on the notion
of the common good, but also its judgment by (supposedly) value-neutral
academic standards, Serts vision, which was too specific to accommodate
either one, was almost bound to strand. Thus, the project of the core as
grouping runs into aesthetic and ideological resistance. Even the most
general expression of the project the study of the interstitial scale
will lose support throughout the 1960s. At the twelfth Urban Design
Conference of 1968 for instance, panel discussions revolve first around the
topic of the community process19. In this panel there are no architects and
planners, but experts from sociology, education, medicine and the political
sciences (chairman: Donald Kennedy, Assistant Professor of Preventive
Medicine!)20. Overall, of the four panels, only one is devoted to physical
form; and of the more than sixteen panel members, only three are related
to architecture. By 1972, city planning will be moved form the design
school to the Kennedy school of public policy. It is hard to qualify this as
anything else than the end of the Sertian dream for a synthesis of spatial
disciplines. Upon its institutionalization, urban design enters a phase
of bewilderment. The ideological transition within American academia
towards the sociology-driven notion of participationism exposes the
19

Records of the twelfth and thirteenth Urban Design conference are at the
Harvard Design School Loeb Library, Special Collections: file number: RARE NAC HAR 1968.
20

The second panel, on implementation, features among others Kevin
Lynch and Wolf von Eckhardt (chaired by W. Doebele, pProfessor of city planning). The third panel,
physical form is chaired by Wilhelm von Moltke, the then director of the Urban Design Program.
Panel members are H. Imus from Larry Smith and Co.; Neil Mitchell, professor of construction at
the GSD, Adele de Sousa Santos from the Harvard School of Fine Arts, and George Kostritsky, from
Kostritsky, Taliaferro, Rogers and Lamb Architects. The last panel on regional context is chaired
by William Nash, chairman of the department of city and regional planning at the Harvard Design
School.
Upon its institutionalization, urban design enters a phase

of bewilderment.

Groups
167
Serts De Maeght Foundation as published in: Bastlund, K. Jose Luis Sert: Architecture, City Planning, Urban
Design (1967)
168
double bind of urban design. In 1964, Davidoff exposed that all planning
discourses claiming to be value-neutral were in fact not at all neutral or
promoting the common good, but rather that they were serving particular
agendas. Before 1964, urban design had to prove its value-neutrality
something it could not do without renouncing the very principles of its
project. After 1964, its elitist discourse ran counter to many planners new
sense of guilt, as they explicitly chose the side of oppressed minorities to
make up for their previous association with elitist agendas.
Urban Design had to prove its value-neutrality - something it could not do without renouncing the very principles of its project.

Groups
169
Representation of drawings by primeval tribe in: Winchell, Newton H. . The Aborigines of Minnesota (1911,
Minnesota Historical Society)
Giedion studies the uncanny similarity between prehistoric art and the abstract-primitivist aesthetic of among
others Picasso, Braque, Leger, Miro, Arp and Giacometti
in his surrealist phase.
170
2.1.2 Giedions Group Design

The people want the buildings that represent their social and
community life to give more than functional fulfillment. They want
their aspiration for monumentality, joy, pride and excitement to be
satisfied.21
Primitive Adjacencies
In 1943 Giedion describes the first step in the development of modernism
as the architecture of the single cell the early modernist object such as
the Corbusian, Loosian or Rietveldian villa and argues that the second
step of architecture was concentrated on planning the Athens Charter.
The time has come to develop a third step, bringing a synthesis between
the scale of the architectural prototype and that of large territorial
organization22. We should consider this as Giedions way of calling
for an interstitial scale of operations.. Then, during a lecture series at
Carnegie Mellon in the late 1950s, Giedion coins the concept of group
design. These lectures were later published under the title Constancy
and Change: the Eternal Present in Art, and Constancy and Change:
the Eternal Present in Architecture23. The first book studies the uncanny
similarity between prehistoric art and the abstract-primitivist aesthetic
of among others Picasso, Braque, Leger, Miro, Arp and Giacometti in
his surrealist phase. To Giedion, this is no coincidence, but evidence of a
fundamental error in the conventional outlook of art history, exemplified
in Giorgio Vasaris The Lives of Italian Painters, Sculptors and Architects
21

Sert, J.L.; Lger, F.; Giedion, S.; Nine Points on Monumentality in:
Zucker, ib. ;.
22

Opening paragraphs in: Giedion, Sigfried. The Need for a New Monumentality, ib.
23

Giedion, Sigfried. The eternal present in Art: a contribution on constancy
and change. (New York, Bollingen Foundation; distributed by Pantheon Books, 1962).
Giedion, Sigfried. The eternal present in Architecture: a contribution on constancy and change. (New
York, Bollingen Foundation; distributed by Pantheon Books, 1964).
Part of the following series: Bollingen series ; 35.; A.W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts ; 6, pt. 1-2.
To Giedion, this is no coincidence, but evidence of a fundamental error in the conventional outlook of art history.

Groups
171
(1550) 24. This outlook bases the historical development of art is based
on the principle of naturalism: art imitates nature, and as its knowledge
progresses it asymptotically becomes ever more realistic. Also, Giedions
teacher, the art historian Heinrich Wlfflin, had derided this position, but
Wlfflin had proposed a study of art works in comparison to each other,
establishing art as an ongoing generational dialogue relatively indifferent
vis vis the world of phenomena. Giedion pushes this indifference to its
extreme limit by stating that all art has an innate drive towards abstraction.
Prehistoric art, which been discovered first in the caves of Altamira in
187925 but with more and more new discoveries became a hot topic for art
historians, entered the discourse at the right moment to provide Giedion
with a justification for the abstractions of modernism. This is because,
in his argument, the naturalistic reflex was only a temporary cultural
deviation which had become obsolete with the rise of photography,
liberating art once more to develop independently. Hence, the subtitle
of his books: the Eternal Present. Constancy and Change. With his
interpretation, Giedion also deviates from the interpretation that Wilhelm
Worringer, a disciple of Alos Riegl, had made in his 1908 Abstraction
and Empathy26. Worringer had explained the appearance of abstraction
in art to the collective psyche of its culture, which, when confronted with
new and uncanny phenomena, would search for re-assurance in forms that
allude to permanence. To Giedion, this is false. Abstraction is an absolute
constancy of human expression, and naturalism but a temporary deviation.
When looking at the cave paintings, Giedion focuses on the manner in
24

Vasari, Giorgio. Vite de pi eccellenti Architetti, Pittori, et Scultori
Italiani, 1550 (enlarged edition in 1568, other editions in 1760, 1811, annotated edition in 1868).
Translation in English: Lives of the artists : biographies of the most eminent architects, painters,
and sculptors of Italy (abridged and edited by Betty Burroughs) (New York : Simon and Schuster,
c1946). OR, more recently: Lives of the artists. a selection (translated by George Bull) (London ;
New York : Penguin Books, 1987).
25

Given that by the turn of the twentieth century, many of the prehistoric
paintings were only just discovered, or were even still being discovered, the archeological and art
historical scholarship was developing more or less synchronically with the modern movement. That
is why Giedions spirited combination of the two could not have occurred earlier.
26

Worringer, Wilhelm. Abstraction and empathy : a contribution to the psychology of style / (translated from the German original by Michael Bullock ; with an introduction by
Hilton Kramer). (first
English translation: New

York, International Universities Press, 1953) German
original: Abstraktion und Einfhlung : ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (Mnchen : R. Piper, 1948,
c1908).
Left: Representations of Primeval cave art across the world. Right from top to bottom: Alexander Calder,
Untitled (1944), Untitled (1934), and Arp, Shirtfront and Fork (1922)
Abstraction is an absolute constancy of human expression, and naturalism but a temporary deviation.
172
which different abstract symbols are juxtaposed and placed in a mutual

relation. Invoking existing scholarship of the archeologist Leroi-Gourhan,
he claims that the position of each ideogram is not random or chaotic. To
the contrary, even if the surfaces of the drawing differ wildly (oblique cave
walls, ceilings, and floors all have received drawings), often the relative
position of each ideogram vis vis other ones in its proximity recurs. For
Giedion, the drawings are therefore
Intentional groupings, formulas if you will27.
By positioning each icon in a recurring relation to others, a compositional
order is established that is not orthogonal, Cartesian, or even geometric,
but completely relative, based on the character of the ideogram and its
relative distance to adjacent ones. We have here a primitive version of
a modern-day cartoon, with each idea, force, or actor represented by
an ideogram, and consequently related by virtue of relative proximity.
The meaning of the ideogram thus equally derived from its place in the
overall constellation or, as Giedion calls it here, grouping. He then sets
out to rediscover this template in architecture. The second book treats the
history of architecture as a succession of three space conceptions. This
history remains incomplete, and Giedion never finishes Architecture and
the Phenomena of Transition, which was to elaborate the third space
conception. Jacqueline Tyrwhitt completes and edits it, publishing it
posthumously in 1971. By that time, Giedion become hopelessly pass, as
the discourse of architecture had become rather inimical to modernism.
Our overview of discourses on the Group would be rather incomplete
without mentioning the chapters on group design in the second but
especially in the last book. It remains a powerful crystallization of
Giedions own thoughts about monumentality in the 1940s and 1950s,
relating the primitive grouping to a modern template for the interstitial
scale: group form.
27

P. 245 in: Giedion, Sigfried. The eternal present in Art: a contribution on
constancy and change, ib.
Giedion focuses on the manner in which different abstract symbols are juxtaposed and placed in a mutual
relation.

Groups
173
Giacometti, Project pour un place (!930-31). Image as published in Gieidons Architecture and the Phenomena
of Transition (1971)
174
Surrealist Assemblage
Group design comes into play when architecture takes on a
sculptural character. Though sculpturally related, the buildings are
spatially distinct In the second space conception, very noticeably
in the late Baroque period spatial accents were given to the urban
scene by creating open plazas and square with space-defining walls.
In the third space conception this function is performed by a spatial
interplay between volumes. 28
A photograph of Giacomettis projet pour une place (1930-1931)
introduces the last chapter Giedion writes in his life: about modern
group design. The sculpture features a platform with four oddly-curved
shapes standing upright, complemented by two oddly-shapes distortions
of the platform itself, similar in size and formal outlook to the four
others. Together, the configuration of the six forms appears unstable,
without a rigid geometrical order, seemingly random, like flotsam. It is an
assemblage of figures, each completely different yet each holds the others
in balance. Giacometti produces this piece during his surrealist phase,
and many other surrealists such as Morandi, Calder, Arp, and Leger have
produced works with an internal structure resembling that of the Project
for a Plaza. The surrealist technique of assemblage was invented as an
alternative to the conventional structure of the narrative. The latter is
syntactic, relating the different elements into a continuity that supersedes
its constituent elements, establishing a new semantic whole. But when
describing surrealist dialogue, Andr Breton said that
The remarks exchanged are not, as is generally the case, meant to
develop some thesis, however unimportant it may be; they are as
disaffected as possiblethe words, the images are only so many
28

P. 270, 274 in: Giedion, Sigfried. Architecture and the phenomena of
transition; the three space conceptions in architecture, ib.
Groups
175
springboards for the listener.29

The assemblage, therefore, is paratactic, or simply a juxtaposition of
elements without explicit expression of the nature of the relation called
up by this proximity. The paratactic organization implies a third term
between two juxtaposed elements, a term which, while not articulated by
the artist, nevertheless is filled in and called up by the observer. Adorno
said
There is a shattering and regrouping, but no dissolutionThe
subject is at work much more openly and inhibitedly at work in
Surrealism than in the dream.30
This in-between space is the purpose of the assemblage. Here the
prefiguration of the public sought after in the Core results from creative
semantic labor on the part of the observer, who defines interstitial space
that has not explicitly postulated its own form, but emerges anew every
time the observer witnesses the assemblage, opening an inexhaustible
source of interpretations. The art historian Rosalind Krauss discusses
this concept of spacing in her analysis of the surrealist photography and
photomontages.
The photograph is a declaration of the seamless integrity of the
real a document of its unity as that-which-was-present-at-onetime. But spacing destroys simultaneous presence: for it shows things
sequentially, either one after another or external to one another
occupying separate cells. It is spacing that makes it clear as it
was to Heartfield, Tretyakov, Brecht, Aragon that we are not
looking at reality, but at the world infested by interpretation or
signification, which is to say, reality distended by the gaps or blanks
which are the formal preconditions of the sign.31
29

P. 35 in: Breton, Andr, Secrets of the Magical Surrealist Art. Written
Surrealist Composition or first and last draft. pp. 1-48 in: Manifestoes of Surrealism (Chicago:
University of Michigan Press, 1969).
30

P. 87 in: Adorno, Looking back on Surrealism, pp. 86-90 in: Notes to
Literature. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
31

P. 107 in Krauss, Rosalind; Photographic conditions of Surrealism. Pp.
87-118 in: The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press,
1986, c1985).
176
In Krauss interpretation, the gaps or spaces are the crucial features that
separate, or even alienate the image or sign from the reality it was taken
from. The modernity of the experience is no longer within the object,
which can be a fossil or a historical artifact, but in the spacing that takes
it out of its conventional or vernacular context, and necessitates a moment
of interpretation on behalf of the observer. Spacing makes the observer
aware of having entered the realm of representation. How does surrealist
parataxis relate to the urban design template of group form? Krauss
spacing gives to public space its concept. It reminds us that the return to
formal urbanism happens on terms that are radically different from the
last such iteration, namely that of the City Beautiful Movement. In 1934,
two projects for a Palace were proposed that elucidate this shift.
The Palace at 4 Oclock in the Morning is another sculpture by
Giacometti: Again, a series of plastic forms appear in an incoherent
combination. Now they are not juxtaposed on a platform, but hung at
different heights in what looks like a bruised birdcage. Soviet Russia has,
one year before, concluded its competitions for the Palace of the Soviets
with the winning project by Boris Iofan, and this choice is dismaying
several avant-garde communist artists in the West. A comparison between
both palaces suggests that Giacomettis group is a counter-project to the
hegemonic unitary mega-object of the Soviet Palace, a shattering and
regrouping of its monolithic structure, exposing its internal contradictions.
Iofans Soviet Palace is at the same time the culmination and the final
asymptotic limit of the City Beautiful:
The City Beautiful had come to Moscow Stalin, too, had his own
Socialist equivalent of Hitlers giant domed hall: the 1,300-foot
Palace of the Soviets, to be crowned by a gigantic statue of Lenin.32
That totalitarian regimes deploy City Beautiful templates simply confirms
the latters ambition to create an aesthetically unified whole to obscure
the unsavory frictions of the real city. This exaggerated City Beautiful
project is a Potemkin city, a series of facades projecting a city that does
32
Pp. 201-202 in: Peter Hall, The City of monuments, ib.
Left: GIacometti, the Palace at 4 o-clock in the morning (1934)

Right: Iofans winning entry for the Soviet Palace (1934)
There is a shattering and regrouping, but no dissolution

Groups
177
not really exist. If the City Beautiful in America visualized the ideals of
its bourgeois society, in the Soviet case, it serves to announce a future
reality communism achieved and to bring its image to the present.
Representation equals realization. That explains the colossal dimensions
of Iofans Palace. With enough program to contain an entire city in itself
a dome, a statue, offices, hypostyles, a skyscraper, gigantic plazas etc..
this gigantic form pushes beyond the boundary of architectural object.
A modern tower of Babylon, it is to synthesize all the differences of the
Soviet Union into one pinnacle, topped by the statue of Lenin. As a
primal scream for the unification of the public, it elicits a strong reaction
in the West. Western modernists first appear angry at the abuse of formal
urbanism and unsurprisingly, dislike the use of pseudo-historical orders
and ornamentation in the Soviet Palace33. Giedion for instance, already
in 1932 sends a protest montage to Stalin against the American Hector
Hamilton, then front running project for the palace. Giedion criticizes
the pseudo-modern warehouse and church architecture.34 Giedion
and Sert together mercilessly trash the pseudo-monumentality of City
Beautiful architecture and urbanism in their 1943 texts on a new, modern
monumentality. However, by the very act of writing Nine Points on
Monumentality, they begin to admit that the Palace addresses unresolved
issues such as monumentality and a relation the common man. Bear in
mind that in the 1930s the Soviet Union is perceived as one of the most
advanced societies, while western capitalism tries to recover from the 1929
stock market crash. For that reason, Giedion and Serts investigations
ought to be seen as a counter-project to the Soviet Palace that
acknowledges its importance by agreeing to work again with the agenda of
form, ornament, and symbolism. Against the narrative unity and symbolic
synthesis beyond all contradictions of Iofans palace stands a disjointed
33

After the 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing crises, capitalism
appears as a dysfunctional system from the past, and the alternative of a centrally planned economy
seems suddenly much more attractive. The Soviet Union enjoys worldwide admiration for pioneering this approach, and numerous Americans and Europeans move there to live in the new paradigm
They are, in a sense, the most modern. For that reason, Stalins palace proposal comes as a shock to
those that are thinking of themselves in the West as the most modern by advocating the opposite.
34

Protest-montage reproduced in p. 71, Mumford, Eric. The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960, ib.
Against the narrative unity and symbolic synthesis beyond all contradictions of Iofans Soviet palace, stands a
disjointed gathering of deviant forms.
178
gathering of deviant forms. Giacomettis early interests in primitive arts

capacity for abstraction and his fascination for Surrealism as an exposure
of logics of decay and desire converge in his alternative Palace.
From the perspective of the history of modern sculpture, this
is the inaugural act of Giacomettis artand [here] we once
again encounter Giacomettis relationship to tribal art and the
primitive for in the thinking of the thirties, with its obsession
with the Minotaur, the labyrinth was set in primal opposition to
classical architectures connotations of lucidity and the domination
of space. In the grip of the labyrinth, it is man who is dominated,
disoriented, lost.35
In a strictly surrealist move, Giacomettis title suggests that he who
dominates and unifies everything under his command, at night will be
haunted by disunity and fragmentation, as the ghosts of his nightmares
come to confirm all the contradictions that continue to exist beneath the
surface. He shatters the Potemkin representation of unity concocted by
the ruling classes of his time and regroups its debris. In her discussion on
the scholarship on Giacometti, Rosalind Krauss distinguishes two lineages
of analysis on Giacometti: one studying his work from the perspective of
his own psychology and biography; and the other studying his work based
on its contextualization with the history of modern sculpture. If for many
other artists, the results are overlapping, Krauss states that this is not the
case for Giacometti:
For Giacomettis sculpture viewed from the perspective of his
individual oeuvre is overwhelmingly that of the monument: the
single, vertical figure, raised commemoratively in space, hieratic,
immobile, tall.But from the point of view of history this
entire production is less totally innovatory than the work he made
in the years from 1930 until 1933. For that intervening work is
horizontal. The formal innovation of those sculptures, almost wholly
unprepared for by anything else in the history of the medium, was
their ninety-degree turn of the axis of the monument to fold its
35

P. 74 in: Krauss, Rosalind. No More Play. Pp. 42-86 In: The Originality of
the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths, ib.
...A ninety-degree turn of the axis of the monument to

fold its vertical dimension onto the horizontally of the
earth...

Groups
179
Analysis of viewpoints of an Akropolis by Doxiadis in the English publication of his thesis
In order to save public life, Giedion needs a formal arrangement that is not the symbolic expression of totalitarianism, but of liberal democracy itself.
180
vertical dimension onto the horizontally of the earth.36

Thus, the group design becomes a horizontal counter-project to the
hierarchical orders of classical architecture, present as a hypertrophy in
Iofans Soviet Palace. Here, a modernist urbanism appears, far removed
from the functionalism of the Athens Charter, instead shifting to
formalism. It is the core as an assemblage of sculptural, symbolic forms.
Liberal Assembly
Architectural buildings should not all be placed upon axes, because
that would be like so many people talking at once...because they are
outside a main axis, you get a three-quarter view of them, in their
full aspect. 37
In these words Le Corbusier praises the Athens acropolis in Vers Une
Architecture: He posits this template in opposition to the axial sterility
of the French imperial beaux-arts templates. Now it becomes possible
to move beyond the negative aesthetic of surrealism and re-project it as
a positive ideal of the public sphere: from assemblage to assembly. The
multiple axes and perspectives should be considered as an embryo of the
group concept. Giedion returns to the theme of the Acropolis several
times, expanding on Le Corbusiers early observation. In his main lecture
at the 1951 Core Conference, he compares several ancient acropolises
along the Aegean coast, arguing that while in feudal regimes, the center of
the city grid is a palace, in Greek democracy it is this open space described
by Le Corbusier.
One word about the Imperial Fora of Rome, which were built over
a relatively short period Julius Caesar to Trajan. The Imperial
Fora in their sterile pomp are, for me, the beginning of academic
architecture. They somehow foreshadow the beginning of the
nineteenth century when again the emperor, religion and money
36

P. 73 in Krauss, No More Play, ib.
37

Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (New York: Dover Publications, 1986). (Original translation: Rodker, John: London, 1931). Original French Edition: Vers Une
Architecture. (Paris: G. Crs et cie. pref. 1928).
Groups
181
group design
academicism
Above: analysis of viewpoints of the Athens Akropolis in the English publication of Doxiadis thesis. Below:
anonymous postcard of a fake reconstruction of the Forum Romanum.
The principle of group design is extensively applied to

the planning of the democratic Greek city-states...
182
were fused into an inextricable whole.38

This sterile pomp resembles what Giedion is later to call the pseudomonumentality of, for instance, Iofans Soviet Palace. To save public life,
Giedion needs a formal arrangement that is not the symbolic expression
of totalitarianism, but of liberal democracy itself. The captions with his
images illustrates this:
Forum Romanum: birthplace of sterile architecture versus The
Agora of Athens never had a plan. It sprang up like democracy. But
it had an idea.39
In 1951, this reading is still rudimentary and riddled with contradictions.
Giedion for instance acknowledges that Greek temples are for the gods,
and only later was an open space between these explicitly devoted to the
agora. However, by the end of the decade, the Acropolis has been further
developed to become a cornerstone of the group design concept.
The layout of Greek monumental buildings gives rise to the
freest interplay between their volumes. In this, it represents the
culmination of the first space conception. The principle of group
design is extensively applied to the planning of the democratic Greek
city-states, where the rights of the individual and the rights of the
community are clearly demarcated. Group design means that a
spatial harmony is set up between several independent buildings,
each of which has its own formal individuality. An optical interplay
is created between their volumes. The term was first brought into
use by Robert Scranton to describe the placing of sacred buildings
within a walled temenos, or of the assembly of buildings and stoas
in an agora. The Acropolis in Athens shows well how group design
was used in the fifth century. Looking inward from the entrance, the
Propylaea, the Parthenon appears as a complete entity. So does the
Erechtheum. From the step of the Propylaea one sees both standing
on the rising terrain within the same angle of vision.40
38

P. 20 in: Giedion, Sigfried. Historical Background to the Core Pp. 17-25
in: Tyrwhitt, J.; Sert, J.L.; Rogers, E.N. (ed.) The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of
Urban Life. CIAM 8.
39

P. 24 in: Giedion, Sigfried. Historical Background to the Core, ib.
40

P. 9 in Giedion, Sigfried; The eternal present in Architecture: a contribution on constancy and change, ib.
Groups
183
Giedion goes on to describe the specific attributes of this arrangement:

(1) the base and (2) the precise spatial distribution of the forms in the
group. As for the base or plane on which the group design organizes itself,
Giedion states that:
Now in the twentieth century, we are regaining an ever stronger
awareness of the role of horizontal planes, and the interaction
between one horizontal level and another. volumes that relate to
each other in space demand a common basisScranton recognizes
the horizontal plan as a constituent element of Greek group
design.41
We hear echoes of Giacomettis radical shift from the vertical to the
horizontal. The fragments of the Soviet Palace section are now lying
scattered on a base, as the symbolic form of a more pluralist organization.
Regarding the distribution of forms, Giedion invokes the thesis of the
Bulgarian architect-planner Doxiadis, written at the University of Berlin
in 1937. Doxiadis had studied the formal structure of about a dozen
different acropolises42:
The Greek city planner C.A. Doxiadis made an early attempt to
establish the distribution of building masses according to a system
of polar coordinates, so that theyare optically evenly distributed
at the entrance. Some archeologists have raised objections to his
procedure, but the methodology he presents, of establishing the
angular distances between the different buildings, at the point of
their first visual appearance, seems decisive. 43
To avoid any confusion, Constantin Doxiadis most well known legacy,
his theory Ekistics, developed after the war and was first published
41

P. 10 Giedion, Sigfried. Architecture and the phenomena of transition; the
three space conceptions in architecture, ib.
42

Doxiadis, Constantinos Apostolou. Architectural space in Ancient Greece.
(Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1971).
43

P. 9 in: Giedion, Sigfried. Architecture and the phenomena of transition;
the three space conceptions in architecture, ib.
Doxiadis demonstrates that all the monuments obey to a

normative geometry of polar coordinates.
184
in 194644 differs completely from the group concept studied here45, as

Ekistics presented a theory of international suburbanization based on the
Romanticization of pre-industrial life-styles and community experience46.
Nevertheless, he was closely associated with Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, who
translated his 1937 thesis to English and had it published in 1971.
Doxiadis comparative study reconstructs the projects figure-grounds and
analyzes their internal sequence of perspectives. He discovers a systematic
logic based on the following rules:
(1)
At the entrance or an otherwise important
viewpoint, different temple buildings are always visible
simultaneously, creating in effect a multitude of foci.
(2)
Between these monuments, the landscape outside
of the complex remains always in sight; it serves as a backdrop
against which the figure of the grouping manifests itself. The
landscape or city is now framed by the monuments.
Doxiadis demonstrates that all the monuments obey to a normative
geometry of polar coordinates (coordinates of perception rather than the
Cartesian coordinates of the plan). Although in many cases, the temple
complexes have been built up over centuries, each addition confirms the
dominant perceptual logic. Exactly this logic is aligned with Giedions
more illustrations of Akropolises from the English

publication of Doxiadis thesis
44

Doxiadis, Constantinos Apostolou. Ekistic Analysis (1946).
After the breakdown of CIAM, Doxiadis is hoping to revive the international manifesto-making for
the modern city under a flagship theory of worldwide urbanization, which he considers as a continuation and fulfillment of Le Corbusiers wish to see CIAM produce its second charter, the Charte de
lHabitat. Doxiadis invents a new name, referring to the then highly fashionably systems theories
of cybernetics - namely ekistics. In analogy with the SS Patris, where the first Charter of Athens
was written, Doxiadis organizes a new boat-Conference called the Delos Conference in 1963;
Buckminster Fuller and Margaret Mead are only a few of the prominent urban theorists present at
that moment.
45

Nevertheless, there is a clear evolution from a formalist approach of
institutional space to a broader concern with the growth and transformation of entire cities and agglomerations (Doxiadis only stops his research at the scale of the earth itself, where he sees a global
city emerging. He calls it the Ecumenopolis). Athens to a more systemic (based on systems theory)
perspective on the city. Article topics in the Ekistics magazine, published from 1958 onwards,
illustrate this. Architectural concerns are gradually seeping away, and by 1962, the magazine is
devoting ever more graphics, statistics and mappings of the emerging urbanity of the postwar world,
especially also in developing countries. Form has become pass.
46

Panayiota I. Pyla Ekistics, architecture and environmental politics, 19451976 : a prehistory of sustainable development. Ph.D. Thesis manuscript at M.I.T. Rotch Library,
c2002.
Exactly this logic is aligned wit Giedions conclusions

about the constellations of primitive art that he analyzes.

Groups
185
conclusions about the constellations of primitive art that he analyzes.

Strikingly, Giedions study of the temple complexes at the 1951 Core
Conference uses similar examples to the ones in Doxiadis thesis: the
Athens Acropolis, Priene, and Miletos. Rather than using Doxiadis
precise analytical drawings however, Giedion explicitly deploys Gyorgy
Kepes representation technique of introducing grey surfaces into the
traditional black-and-white drawing, to allow not only the figure to be
drawn but also the ground or topography or what we now call context
in the project. This technique is better suited to bring out the conclusions
of Doxiadis research than Doxiadis own conventional figure-ground
drawings, but Giedion makes no mention of Doxiadis yet at that time.
That only happens with the publication of Three Space Conceptions,
but we should not forget that Tyrwhitt has edited this book, published
posthumously. Giedion then turns to the political aesthetic of group
design.
Their [the Greeks, ad] sacred precincts and centers for political life,
laid out on the principles of group design, express the same psychic
intensity that we find in the Greek myths.47
The warring gods and the perpetual conflicts of interests, rather than
the hegemony of a single ruler, are translated into the spatial concept of
the grouping, a mythical form of perpetual conflicts between the gods.
Group design as represented in the Greek agora thus becomes for Giedion
a symbolic form of pluralism, and therefore, of the liberal assembly.
Giedions thinking about this politico-social model remains incredibly
crude, as he uses words that are too general, such as democracy but
his intuitions and associations give us an insight into his proposition.
Probably it was better formulated by Christian Norberg-Schulz, who
wrote that:
The Greek concept of space, then, is pluralisticfor the Greek space
was not one thing, but many, and the Greek language does not
have a single word for space. This pluralism was a highly important
47

P. 10 in: Giedion, Sigfried. The eternal present in Architecture: a contribution on constancy and change, ib.
ASSEMBLAGE
Left: Giacomettis projet pour une place (1934).

Right: Athens Akropolis, from the English publication of Doxiadis thesis
186
solution to mans environment, as it liberated man from the fetters

of an all-comprehensive system, and allowed him to transcend the
world of casual improvisation. The orthogonal system of the
city (such as Priene, ad) does not constitute any general idea as in
Egyptian architecture. The Greek path is usually the topologically
defined way (Delphi), but strict axial organization is also used,
mainly to make the temple and independent, symmetrical organism.
But the axis is neither employed to let one building dominate, nor to
represent a general superior orderThe fact that they chose different
spatial organizations according to each individual situation implies
that the Greek wanted to concretize a multitude of existential
meanings, rather than a few general relationships. But the choice
was never casual; it happened within the limits of an integrated
language of building types and means of articulation (orders).48
The brief but powerful surge in interest for the Acropolis in the work of
Sert and Giedion coincides with the development of the paradigm of the
Core. The Greek Acropolis influences the conception of a group form
as a shattering of the geometrical orders of the pseudo-monuments of
totalitarian regimes, with the debris regrouped incompletely and which
the interpretative observer must make sense of. Therefore, surrealisms
negative aesthetic of the assemblage moves into a positive aesthetic
of assembly of various, opposing constituencies. The next step in the
development of the group happens in the work of Fumihiko Maki.
48

P. 39 in: Norberg-Schulz, Christian; Meaning in Western Architecture
(New York: Rizzoli, c1981). Translation from Italian original: Significato nell architettura occidentale. (Milan: Electa, c1974).
ASSEMBLY
Groups
187
Above: Makis Shinjuku project. Right: daigrams of compositional form, megastructure and group form.
Illustrations from Maklis Collective Form manifesto, 1961.
There is an almost complete absence of any theory beyond the one of single buildings.
188
2.1.3 Makis Group Form

Flexible Accumulation
Although Makis first text on Collective Form is published in 1961, just
beyond the scope of the 1950s, it is included here because it elegantly
synthesizes several of the notions of group developed in the preceding
decade. Sert and Giedion were Makis teachers at Harvard, but in this
book he also explicitly acknowledges his indebtedness to Louis Kahn.
Makis interest is not in the individual building. He criticizes architectural
theory for its obsession with singular buildings rather than with the urban
environment.
Naturally, the theory of architecture has evolved through one issue
as to how one can create perfect single buildings whatever they are.
There is an almost complete absence of any theory beyond the one of
single buildings This situation has prompted us to investigate the
nature of Collective Form.49
In the ensuing paragraphs, he is proposing his own theory of collective
form, by organizing a subjective history of collective form as a progression,
from compositional form (pre-modern history), via megastructures
(very fashionable in his own time), to his own vision: group form.
Compositional form is based on a geometric order and can therefore be
understood in a classical formal urbanism. This order has been produced
primarily in Europe in the era of absolutism (Karlsruhe, Versailles, Rome
of Pius VI, etc.) extending into the City Beautiful movement in America
and Haussmannian urbanism in France. Compositional from relates
various buildings and open spaces through an explicit, fixed, and internally
consistent geometry of the plan. Historically, compositional form has been
compromised because it often served as a representation of institutional
power. All too often, its plans are built as around singular points,
symbolizing the power of the ruler or ruling elite as a point of unification
49

P. 5 in: Maki, Fumihiko, Ohtaka, Masato. Collective Form Three Paradigm. Pp. 3-24 in: Investigations in collective form. (St. Louis, School of Architecture, Washington
University, 1964).
Groups
189
that subsumes the actual differences within society.

Although Maki never claims that this historical complicity of such a
formal approach with a specific societal configuration of power makes
formal urbanism itself suspect, he realizes there are no reasons to
restrict formal urbanism to the compositional template. He borrows this
argument from Paul Goodman in Communitas:
We could centralize or decentralize if we want to, we can do it...
It is just this relaxing of necessity, the extraordinary flexibility, and
freedom of choice of our techniques, that is baffling and frightening
to people50
Hence, any return to strictly geometrical composition would constitute
for Maki a matter of thoughtless use of historical conventions rather than
taking advantage of the newly found freedoms:
It is no surprise that [compositional form] is the most
understandable and used technique for architects in making
collective form, because this process resembles the one of making a
building out of given components. It is a natural extension of the
architectural approach. It is a static approach, because the act of
making a composition itself has a tendency to complete a formal
statement.51
In the void resulting from the withering away of centralized, autocratic
power which, if not a reality is for him at least an ideal to be pursued52
a new symbolic form condensing an idea of social order should be
50

P. 9 in: Maki, Fumihiko; Ohtaka, Masato. Collective Form Three Paradigm, ib.
This is a quotation from Goodman in:
p. 13 in: Goodman, Percival; Goodman, Paul. Communitas: means of livelihood and ways of life
(Chicago, Ill., The University of Chicago Press, 1947). (republished: New York: Vintage books,
1960)
51

52

Wendelken states that about these Japanese architects: the group was thus
Marxist in orientation
p. 284 in: Wendelken, Cherie. Putting Metabolism back in place. The making of a radically decontextualized architecture in Japan Pp. 279-300 in: Goldhagen, Sarah; Legault, Rejean. Anxious
Modernisms. (Montreal: CCA, c2000),
In the void resulting from the withering away of centralized, autocratic power another symbolic form condensing an ideal of social order should be discovered.
190
discovered. Nevertheless, he is already indicating his hypothesis: that this

new symbolic form of collective meanings, intentions, and conventions
in postwar society has to be found in the interrelationships between
buildings. The resulting complex will require a different apparatus of
knowledge. Thus, Maki is preparing the ground for the development of a
new formal template that ought to symbolize the ideals and aspirations
of the new, postwar liberal-democratic mass society. Maki defines the
megastructure as
A large frame in which all the functions of the city or a part of the
city are housed. It has been made possible by present day technology.
It is in a sense, a man-made feature of the landscape. It is like the
great hill on which Italian towns were built 53
Maki refers to the 1960 Moma show Visionary Architecture, which features
a chapter on the work of a new generation of Japanese architects, such as
Kikutake and Tange. These projects were already introduced before the
exhibition as a new proposition in architecture called Metabolism54, and
Maki was often considered as a supporter of proposition. However, Makis
use of the word Megastructure rather than Metabolism indicates that he
is referring to an international line of architectural discourse, rather than a
specific Japanese proposition. Reyner Banham argues that Maki is in fact
the first one to define and label the Megastructure, thus giving it a place
in the international history of ideas55. Using Makis definition, one may
therefore argue that the megastructure lineage also includes projects of
Archigram, Ludovico Quaroni, early works of Ungers, the Smithsons plan
for Berlin and other similar projects.56.
53

p. 8 in: Maki, Fumihiko; Ohtaka, Masato. Collective Form Three Paradigm, ib.
54

Noboru Kawazoe (ed.); Metabolism 1960: Proposal for a New Urbanism
(Tokyo: Bijutsu shuppansha, 1960).
55

Banham, Reyner; Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976).
56

Makis definition of Megastructure, by folding Metabolism in an international development, stands in opposition to Western attempts to frame Metabolism mostly referred to
an contextualization in Japanese post-war trauma, as Cherie Wendelken explains in:
Wendelken, Cherie. Putting Metabolism back in place. The making of a Radically decontextualized
Architecture in Japan, ib.
Thus, Maki is preparing the ground for the development

of a new formal template that ought to symbolize the ideals and aspirations of the new, post-war liberal-democratic mass society.

Groups
191
Maki severely criticizes the megastructural template it for its lack of

flexibility. Both compositional form and the Megastructure are hampered
by internal rigidities. For Maki, these problems are caused by dogmas of
technology that are underlying the megastructure project.
We frequently confuse the potential that technology offers with
a kind of compulsion to use it fully. Technology must not dictate
choices to us in our cities57.
What kind of technology is Maki referring to? A series of major
scientific breakthroughs drastically alter the perspective on technology
by the humanities and the social sciences. The rise of systems theory or
cybernetics, based on the feedback loop as the guiding principle for the
development of semi-autonomous systems, was first postulated in 1949
by Norbert Wiener at M.I.T. 58 The first scientific theory of information
was proposed by Claude Shannon in 194859. Also the Q-method in
statistics is developed in this period, relativity theory, quantum theory,
and nuclear science develop at a breathtaking rate. A new technological
paradigm appears to be about to break through, promising to bridge what
was hitherto drifting ever farther apart: technology, nature, and social
knowledge. Gone is the machine metaphor that was influential to the
modernist aesthetic, and instead systems theory, with its promise to unite
the sciences and the arts with fundamental theorems of transformation
becomes a new paradigm across the sciences and arts, and especially also
Wendelken refers to other authors that have previously discussed Metabolism in depth (apart from
Banham): Nitzschke, Gunther. Tokyo 1964: Olympic Planning / Dream Planning. Pp. 485-524 in
Architectural Design, October 1964.
Pp. 16-25 in: Boyd, Robin: New Directions in Japanese Architecture (New York: George Braziller,
1968).
57

58

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the
Animal and the Machine, (Paris: Hermann et Cie, Paris; Cambridge (Mass.), The M.I.T. Press; New
York: Wiley and Sons, 1948). Second edition, revised, with two more chapters, The M.I.T. Press,
Cambridge (Mass.), Wiley and Sons, New York, 1961. 2nd Edition March 1965.
59

Shannon, Claude. A Mathematical Theory of Communication pp. 379423 and 623-656 in: Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27 (July and October 1948). Reprinted in
Slepian, D. (ed.), Key Papers in the Development of Information Theory, (New York: IEEE Press,
1974).
For Maki, many problems are caused by dogmas of technology

192
in architecture and urbanism. Fundamental in this paradigm is the notion

of self-organization and feed-back, allowing for the transfer of concepts
from biology into the study of human society.
The promise of cybernetic self-organization for architect-planners is
largely derived from the fact that it relieves them from their duty to make
decisions on behalf of others. It relieves them of the guilt complex that
developed after the first realizations of modernist projects. Cybernetic
self-organization, when applied to the society of humans, basically states
that things are alright, that they take care of themselves. In this sense, it
provides a pseudo-scientific legitimacy to a political economy of laissezfaire; Adam Smiths hidden hand matches the cybernetic axiom that
systems tend to self-organize, to search for an optimal equilibrium. It
even suggests that the status quo the situation as it is is the result of
these invisible force-fields and self-organizing systems. It is therefore
fundamentally opposed to a liberal conception of individual responsibility
and its importance in shaping the course of history. Nothing illustrates
the fallacy of the cybernetic architecture better than the failure that
Maki proves the megastructure to be. Moshe Safdies Montreal housing
complex, for instance, although built only by 1976, is one such example.
It is a worldwide icon, because it is one of the most paradigmatic built
embodiments of the megastructure-as-artificial-landscape. The project
consists of three hills, each of these built as an intricate stacking of always
slightly different apartment cells in always different orientations. Any
semblance of the modernist slabs is gone and instead the project is a
distorted simulation of a town that has organically grown over centuries,
whereas of course it was built in one phase, as a large architectural object
that refuses to acknowledge its own development logic: it is, like Maki
says, a man-made feature of the landscape. Instant history, instant
identity: this project is indeed one of the few and belated realizations of
the megastructural theory. As Cherie Wendelken states, this movement
Addressed the need to construct meaning out of the erasure of
Cybernetics suggests that the status quo - the situation as

it is - is the result of self-organizing systems. It is therefore fundamentally opposed to a liberal conception of
individual responsibility and its importance in shaping
the course of history.

Groups
193
memory and the loss of identity.60

For Maki, the megastructure relies too much on technology to achieve
its purposes of collective identity, while lacking context, history, and
cultural depth. As a result, the megastructure is a self-enclosed totalitarian
system, rigid and prescriptive, just like compositional urbanism. What
begins as the desire for an artificial landscape with a wealth and variety
of experiences, transforms into a fixed apparatus that determines all the
details of life. What is the good of constructing anything determined
by the ideological a priori that technology will liberate, if it really is
imprisoning the population inside this determinism? To express its
intentions of growth, flexibility, self-organization and variety, it has to
be poured into a form that is in fact static, rigid, determined and sterile.
Maki then sets out to develop an urbanistic template that includes the
actual logic incremental development, rather than an aesthetic device that
expresses that idea but in fact represses it.
Master Form
Maki praises Kenzo Tanges Community for 5,000 and Noriuki
Kurokawas Agricultural City, because they have a degree of flexibility
and even uncertainty built into them. They allow for a cycle of change61.
As James Stirling said:
The application of proportion and the obvious use of geometrical
elements appear to be diminishing, and instead something like the
variability found in nature is attempted. Dynamic cellullarism is an
architecture comprising of several elements, repetitive or varied. The
assemblage of units is more in terms of growth and change than in
terms of mere additionThe form of assemblage is more in contrast
to the definitive architecture and the containing periphery of, for
example, a building such as the Unite.62
60

P. 280 in: Wendelken, Cherie. Putting Metabolism back in place. The making of a Radically decontextualized Architecture in Japan, ib.
61

62

P. 21 in: Maki, Fumihiko; Ohtaka, Masato. Collective Form Three
Left above: Tanges Community for 5,000; Left below: Kurokawas Agricultural CityI. Right: principles of
linkage. llustrations from Maklis Collective Form manifesto, 1961. All as published in Makis Collective Form
Manifesto, 1961.
Maki develops an urbanistic template that includes the

actual logic of incremental development,
194
Maki discovers that:

The megastructure which is composed of several independent
systems that can expand or contract with the least disturbance to
others would be preferable to the one of a rigid hierarchical system.63
Against the rigidities of a total structure, Maki proposes to arrange a series
of independent elements into an open framework: organic change is not
a matter of intentions expressed through an aesthetic, but a matter of
integrating reality: existing artifacts and mechanisms of development. Yet,
if the independence of the constituent elements is central to Makis vision,
in what way does his template differ from the haphazard, fragmented
juxtaposition of private developments that is the reality of urban sprawl
itself?
The ideal is a kind of master form, which can move into ever new
states of equilibrium and yet maintain visual consistency and a sense
of maintaining order in the long run.64
For Maki, a purpose needs to be inserted: establishing this master form
is still the task of the designer. The whole constellation needs to be more
than just a flexible, growing system, and the group therefore has to be
more than just the sum of its parts. The master form inserts a purpose
into the grouping. Urbanism is still about the creation of form; but Maki
is proposing to replace compositional geometry with a master form. The
new apparatus of knowledge needed for this framework of master form,
he calls Linkage. Linkage is the quintessential tool of urban design
to establish its project of group form as an assemblage of independent
elements. There are five formal techniques of linkage:
(1)
To mediate is to connect with intermediate elements
or imply connection by spaces that demonstrate the cohesion between
Paradigm, ib.
63

digm, ib.
64

digm, ib.
P. 9 in: Maki, Fumihiko; Ohtaka, Masato. Collective Form Three ParaP. 11 in: Maki, Fumihiko; Ohtaka, Masato. Collective Form Three Para-
rather than an aesthetic device that expresses that idea

but in fact represses it.

Groups
195
the masses that surround them.65 Example: the arcades of

Bologna.
(2)
To define is to draw a perimeter around the
constituent elements that can hence become recognizable as
a whole: to surround the site with a wall, or any physical barrier,
and thus set if off from its environs.66 Example: the medieval
city-state.
(3)
To repeat: to link by introducing one common factor
in each of the dispersed parts of a design.67 Example: historical
typologies of housing as variations on the same theme.
(4)
To make a sequential path: Here Maki is invoking
the functional diagram or flow-charts that often precedes the
design of large complexes. He is proposing to adapt this as
follows: the case we are interested in however, is one in which
each symbol is a place with the scale of a building. The arrows
then become some three-dimensional path between buildings,
or a progression through the mega-frame that contains quasibuildings.68
(5)
To select: to establish unity in advance of the design
process by choice of site. Examples: the Greek peninsula towns
such as Priene and Miletos.
Thus, Maki introduces an economy of means in urbanism. No longer are
larger singular geometries required; and none of his linkage strategies
require the Core to be built from scratch. Therefore, his propositions
allow for the integration of existing developments into its framework.
There is no longer a need for a tabula rasa. This newly found elegance
has to do with the use of walls, landscape elements and other tools of
intervention that are lite compared to the architectural object. These
new features can easily be deployed into an already occupied territory.
Although Maki makes no explicit reference to Kevin Lynch in his 1961
manuscript69, his linkage manuscript could be read as a transformation
65

P. 37 in: Maki, Fumihiko, Goldberg, Jerry. Linkage in Collective Form
(pp. 25-52) in: Investigations in collective form. (St. Louis, School of Architecture, Washington
University, 1964).
66

P. 38 in: Maki, Fumihiko, Goldberg, Jerry. Linkage in Collective Form, ib.
67

68

69

Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press 1960).
Principles of linkage. llustrations from Maklis Collective Form manifesto, 1961.
What Lynch discovered in the historic city, Maki turns

into operational categories for modern form.
196
of the latters analytical devices into a theory of operations. Lynch had

been studying the city as an experiential unit, rather than as a plan from
above. His analysis of how people form mental maps of their cities had
resulted in a series of basic templates with which people organized their
perceptions: these are the landmark, the path, the district, the node, and
the edge. Both men replace the top-down view of plan geometry with
a more experiential order of understanding (and in a sense continuing
what Doxiadis began in his study of polar coordinates). What Lynch
discovered in the historic city, Maki turns into operational categories for
modern form. Most importantly, Makis proposition is the first (known)
application of principles of uncertainty and change within a master form.
These principles are pushed to their breaking point with LlewellynDavies 1966 project for Milton Keynes70. Such a reading of Makis places
him far away from Metabolism and the techno-organicist / cybernetic
fixation in architecture. Makis fundamental intellectual innovation relies
on the understanding that organic growth is unrelated to the organicist
aesthetic; whereas this confusion has been guiding the project of the
Megastructure.
By organic relationship we do not mean a relationship that
involves the subordination of one element to another, but one in
which each element maintains its identity, while at the same time
being engaged in dynamic contact with others.71
In hindsight, the Megastructure has confused three differing meanings
of the notion of organic. In the Marxist vocabulary, it is the opposite
of alienated; a seamless reconciliation between form, identity, and
70

See: unpublished interview with Prof. John De Monchaux by Alexander
DHooghe, May 2004.
This project has translated into urbanism a number of earlier studies of the integration of uncertainty
and change into architecture of the early 1960s, developed by the same firm in a series of hospital
buildings. In Milton Keynes, a series of paths and intermediate spaces were fixed, and at each
intersection of (pedestrian- and bike-) paths with the roadways, a perimeter was defined in which a
public function could be erected. The designers of Milton Keynes, although not explicitly referring
to Makis work, have therefore used some of his formal strategies of flexibility in group form.
71

P. 76 in: Maki, Fumihiko. An Appendix pp. 53-86 in: Investigations in
collective form. (St. Louis, School of Architecture, Washington University, 1964).
organic should mean: authentic within the political

economy of his time.

Groups
197
inhabitant. In Art History, organicist is referring to an aesthetic that

imitates nature Romantically; and in economy, an organic process
is a process not stymied by institutional directives, but growing by
entrepreneurship from bottom up. If the megastructure relies on the
identification of the first two meanings, Maki instead proposes to relate
the first and last term: organic as authentic within the political economy
of his time. What then, is the aesthetic of Makis work?
Open Work
Maki, like the Team X generation, is inspired by an aesthetic of flexibility
and growth. He quotes, for instance, Voelcker:
In an open aesthetics, form is a master key not of any esthetical
significance in itself, though capable of reciprocating the
constant change of lifeopen aesthetics is the living extension of
functionalism72.
Voelckers open aesthetics calls up associations with Umberto Ecos
definition of the Open Work73. Of course, any actual historical
relationship is improbable, as Ecos book appears in Italian only in 1962,
and in English translation only by 1989. Eco elaborates an aesthetic
theory of modernism in literature. He states that: now is the period
in when aesthetics has paid special attention to the whole notion of
openness and sought to expand it.74 By opening itself up to interpretation,
modernist art is searching for a new richness of experience within a
medium
Installed in a language that has already done so much speaking75.
72

73

Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Translated by Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Opera Aperta, (Milan: Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri,
Bompiani, Sonzogno, Etas S.p.A., c1962, rev. ed., 1972, 1976).
74

P. 22 in: Eco, Umberto. The Open Work, ib.
75

The radical innovation in Makis group form is that he

senses that the architectural object in itself cannot
achieve this openness. Only in the grouping of forms does
the open work of architectonics realize itself.
198
For Eco, the liberation from historical conventions is just a means to

achieve this:
Every work of art, even though it is produced by following an
explicit or implicit poetics of necessity, is effectively open to a
virtually unlimited range of possible readings, each of which causes
the work to acquire new vitality in terms of one particular taste, or
perspective, or personal performance.76
Eco posits that inexhaustibility is a consequence of the open aesthetic in
modernism. Maki wants to crystallize the public collective form, without
resorting to the imposition of compositional geometries. Ecos modernist
aesthetic, however, opens up the possibility of a form that does not impose
itself on the public, but, to the contrary, is constructed by it through an
endless series of differing interpretations. The inexhaustibility of such a
form guarantees that it cannot become a clear singular symbol, like the
Soviet Palace. The radical innovation in Makis group form is that he
senses that the architectural object in itself cannot achieve this openness.
Only in the grouping of forms does the open work of architectonics
realize itself. Maki touches here for the first and maybe the only time on
the aesthetic foundation in modernism, of urban design. Eco agrees with
Benedetto Croce that each work of art is a totality77, using a necessary
set of codes to capture the world. But when art begins to overlap with
urbanism, the totality of the artwork becomes complicit to the totalizing
ambition of the ruler. This is the complicity of formal urbanism in politics,
complicity that art in and of itself is not burdened by. Maki may intuitively
have stumbled upon this fundamental problem of formal urbanism in a
liberal democracy, and he resolves the problem by assembling a plurality
of totalities into a group, thus denying each its own hegemony. But the
resulting master form is not completely abstract nor without semiotic
intention. When Maki rhetorically asks:
76
77
Do we have in urban design an appropriate spatial language

(master form) within which we can organize the master


Maki touches here for the first and maybe the only time
on the aesthetic foundation in modernism, of urban design.

Groups
199
program?78,
he states the need for an overall master form to emerge from the grouping.
The need for an overall formal proposition is as important as ever. Again,
Eco is in agreement when he says that
A narrative structure must remain below all the interpretations it
may elicit, but he is wrong in thinking that it can entirely avoid
them because it is extraneous to them. It cant be extraneous to
them, since it is a sort of propositional function, which can stand
for a series of situations that are already familiar to us. Narrative
structures have become fields of possibilities precisely because, when
we enter a contradictory situation in order to understand it, the
tendencies of such a situation can no longer assume a unilinear
development that can be determined a priori. Rather, all of them
appear to us as equally possible, some in a positive fashion and some
in a negative, some as a way out of the situation and others as form
of alienation to the crisis itself.79
In other words, there is no realm outside of the propositional. There is no
abstraction so total that it removes all residual meaning. Makis formal
proposition for the master form is a contour, a template. This level of
abstraction cannot be achieved within the concrete field of architecture;
it can only emerge in the interplay of forms. That technique allows the
utopian promise to remain vital, to not be consumed or, as Eco said,
exhausted. This is where a prefiguration of the collective, of the public,
becomes possible. Maki stresses the relevance of this formal language for
society as a whole.
As soon as a form is invented, it becomes the property of society.
One might almost say that it was the property of society before its
discovery. A design, on the other hand, belongs to the designer.
Urban design has to be about the creation of forms to embody the
collective content of a society. Rather than an act of designerly preferences,
78

Paradigm, ib.
79

200
Pp. 4-5 in: Maki, Fumihiko; Ohtaka, Masato. Collective Form Three
the master form therefore has to become an objective symbol of the

underlying ideals of society. It seems that the inexhaustibility of a
modernist aesthetic may create the multitude of possible interpretations,
necessary to validate the work as collective. For Maki, Group Form is the
tool to supersede designerliness and to arrive at a higher, more objective
level of representation of the collective.
Such a level of abstraction cannot be achieved within

the concrete field of architecture; it can only emerge in
the interplay of forms.

Groups
201
After studying the written intentions

explicit and implicit of the
protagonists of the group, the
following is an investigation into
the first formal experiments in a
modernist urbanism of group forms.
One could extract a formal evolution
of the template, starting from the
shattering of Iofans Soviet Palace
into various pieces of debris on a
Corbusian platform (St.-Die). The
platform with monumental debris
then evolves towards densification
and contextualization of the template
of the group. Group Form gets a
second wind in the early 1960s as
it allows for a flexible and phased
construction, and demonstrates that
this template is inherently less static
and compositional than the first
investigations of Sert and Corb would
make it seem to be.
202
2.2 FORM
Of the Group
Scale: 1:200 1:5000
Groups
203
The pieces of Iofans Stalinist Soviet Palace are shattered and regrouped on the modernist platform. Drawing
by Alexander DHooghe. Right above: diagram of requirement for parades through the Palace. Right below:
Soviet Palace Competition entry by the ARU group. As published in: Cooke, Catherine. The Russian AvantGarde. Theories of Art, Architecture and the City. (London: Academy Editions, 1995)
the Soviet Palace competitions first brief suggests that

large manifestations need to be able to march through
the palace.
204
2.2.1 SHATTERING AND Regrouping

Iofan vs. Le Corbusier
The illustrations of Giedions last chapter first show the roof-deck of the
Unit dHabitation
: a concrete deck featuring an assemblage of surrealist
forms. Giedion then presents Le Corbusiers 1945 project for St.-Di as
the first manifestation of group design: platform separate from the rest
of the city, and an arrangement of monuments placed on top of it. But
what has inspired Le Corbusier to come up with this proposition? The
model is not only completely different form landmark urban models such
as Plan Obus and Ville
Radieuse
, but also from his earliest civic center
in the plan for Nemours (1934) or Barcelona (1935), as discussed in the
previous chapter. However, Le Corbusiers entry for the first Soviet Palace
competition in 1931 may provide us with a clue. Jean-Louis Cohen has
discussed in depth the development of Le Corbusiers project for the
palace. He states that:
The originality of Le Corbusiers entry, when compared with
others, is the result of several choices, most importantly the refusal
to conceive of the Palace as a large building centered around the
great hall. Le Corbusier refuses at once to subordinate the entire
composition to this hall, as well as to enlarge the entrance to the
building. 80
Cohens observation correctly implies that none of the constituent forms is
allowed to dominate and subjugate the others. The competition brief calls
for a monumental, contemporary architecture to symbolically embody the
new society of workers in the USSR. Yet, this rhetoric was contradicted by
the competition brief, which divided the program in four clearly distinct
segments. Furthermore, the first brief suggests that large manifestations
need to be able to march through the palace81. The brief also states that
80

P. 227 in: Cohen, Jean-Louis. Le Corbusier et La Mystique de lURSS.
Theories et Projets pour Moscou 1928-1936. (Bruxelles: Pierre Mardaga Editeur, 1987).
81

P. 210 in: Cohen, Jean-Louis. Le Corbusier et La Mystique de lURSS, ib.
This issue comes up in the Questions and Answers between the architects and the organizers of the
Groups
205
Le Corbusier, Competition entry for the Soviet Palace, 1930. As publsihed in J.L. Cohens Le Corbusier et la
Mystique de lURSS (Brussels: Mardaga, 1987)
The Palace project, in Le Corbusier hands, becomes a

precursor to group form, for a grouping is the outcome of
the functional diagram required stated in the brief.
206
the measure of integration between the different program segments is

a question to be resolved by the architects82. Le Corbusiers numerous
studies show a variety of assemblages, each time using the same forms
embodying the same programs, as components of the grouping. In the
final result, achieved in November 1931, two major halls with peripheral
functions are spaced far apart, and the interstitial open space is divided
into a raised platform and a ground floor plaza; both are bridged by a long
skywalk, to which several minor programs are attached. Over one of the
halls, a large U-shaped monument is hovering; not quite a tower, but very
much the one vertical accent in the scheme83. The palace project, in Le
Corbusier hands, becomes a precursor to group form. Incredibly, he arrives
at this conclusion by simply following the tenets of functionalism; for a
grouping is nothing else but the unavoidable outcome of the functions
stated in the brief. So the modernist tenet the form ought to express
function may have contributed to such a choice of organization. Are
the origins of the group therefore to be found in functionalism itself?
This is a good question; the commissioners organizing the competition,
at least in the beginning, appeared to support a constructivist agenda84.
The constructivist mission had been to shatter the historical architectural
object into pieces to regroup it with the greatest effect. Critical dogmas
of constructivism, such as the accentuation of different functions and
the public passage through the project (instead of simply in front of
it), appear to have been smuggled into the competition brief. This also
explains why Boris Iofans earlier 1931 scheme has a similar massing as Le
Corbusier: two major halls, separated by a long skywalk, with the bigger
hall complemented by a tower. Other projects, such as that of Hamilton,
Zholtovsky, Karra, and the ARO and VOPRA proposals, are desperately
striving to unify the disparate parts, with mixed results. When looking
competition; see of Cohen.
82

P. 204-206 in: Cohen, Jean-Louis. Le Corbusier et La Mystique de
lURSS, ib.
83

This arch has a similar appearance as Eliel Saarinens arch in St. Louis.
84

I dare say this not only because the first series of invited participants
contain many constructivists such as the Vesnin Brothers, ARU, VOPRA, Ladovsky, and others. See
also Cohen, ib.
section
=
plan
Is one origin of Group Form therefore to be found in Functionalism itself?

Groups
207
Above: Le Corbusier, analysis of functions for the Soviet Palace competition entry.As publsihed in J.L. Cohens
Le Corbusier et la Mystique de lURSS (Brussels: Mardaga, 1987). Below: Le Corbusiers plan for St.Die as
published in the CIAM 8 Conference proceedings. Right: image of model of St.Die as exhibited in St,Die. Color
Manipulations: Alexcander DHooghe
The Palace elements are pulled even farther apart in the

project for St.-Di.
208
at Iofans final proposal of 1934 and one ought to remember that he

developed this version in cooperation with the Vesnin brothers it is clear
that the separate constituent forms, once arranged horizontally, have now
been superimposed to form a giant ziggurat.
There is now an eerie resemblance between Le Corbusiers plan (and that
of Iofans first proposal), and the section of Iofans final proposal. This shift
mirrors Giacomettis move from a vertical to a horizontal monumentality
(discussed by Krauss, see paragraphs on Giedion). Of course, the similarity
allows us to see even more sharply the actual difference: horizontal
assemblage, resulting in a play of differences and contrasting forms, or
vertical stacking resulting in a giant monument dominating all of the
surrounding territory: the opposition between both models speaks for
itself. For that reason, the group form, as Le Corbusier has developed it
first in his Soviet Palace entry, but afterwards also in his proposal for the
United Nations, positions itself as an alternative to the desperate attempts
for synthesis, which made Iofans final proposition such a symbolic
mirror for Stalins drive for total unification of the Soviet territory under
his command. If in the studies for the Soviet Palace, the differentiation
of forms according to their respective functions is still aligned with
the functionalist tenets of the modernist movement, the function itself
whether Soviet Palace, League of Nations, or United Nations already
has an explicitly political agenda. This implicit shift from a functionalist
aesthetic of group form to a more political one will become explicit in the
immediate postwar era. The palace elements are pulled even farther apart
in the project for St.-Di. The vertical arc has become a soaring tower;
there is a shell-shaped auditorium in St.-Di similar to that of the palace;
and the plans are laden with primitive symbolism. In the palace, the plan
is the primitive human figure, and in St.-Di there is the snake-like form.
Finally, the open passage required for manifestations through the Soviet
Palace here returns as not one but two broad and orthogonal boulevards.
Linearity is giving way to a planar approach, where the constituents are
`organized in a non-linear manner85.
85

Some of these themes are also occurring in the paintings of Le Corbusier
and contemporaries such as Miro, Giacometti , Braque, Leger and Arp.
Groups
209
Sert , Core for Cidade dos Motores. As publsihed in: Bastlund, Jose Luis Sert: Architecture, City Planning,
Urban Design (1967)
Serts core is composed as a chain of events, containing

four different public spaces brought together in a linear
sequence.
210
Public Space Groups (Sert, Le Corbusier)

When Sert and Wiener design the Cidade Dos Motores, or Brazilian
Motor City, Le Corbusiers, Nemours project serves as an inspiration86.
However, there are also major differences. Both projects have a main
core. In Nemours, it consists of two zones, namely the sports center and
a longitudinal leisure/civic zone, placed in separate quarters outside of
the perimeter of the housing developments, whereas in the Cidade Dos
Motores, they are placed along a spine running through the middle of the
development. This central location is consistent with Serts own ideal city
presented in his 1944 article Human Scale. The main innovations vis vis
Nemours are as follows87. Serts longitudinal core is, in the third and final
proposal, composed of two zones, separated by a highway and united by
a pedestrian bridge running over it. Not only does he constructs his Core
in the midst of (and across) infrastructure flows instead of as far away as
possible, the entire system is composed as a chain of events, containing
four different public spaces brought together in a linear sequence. From
north to south, these are a sports arena, a rectangular plaza aligned with
buildings, a maze of civic and entertainment buildings partially covered
under a large roof, and another rectangular plaza adorned with trees,
defined by a skyscraper, a shell-shaped building, and one edge of the
roofed civic-leisure zone. Especially the last zone depicts an embryo of the
group design developed by Le Corbusier and Giedion: the tower building,
the shell building, the open plaza, etc. Sert enriches the group by making
it part of a longer sequence with roofed pathways. The roof structure
not only provides cover from the sun on hot days, but it also fulfills, like
Le Corbusiers platform, a unifying function, bringing together a series
of dispersed elements underneath it. A forest of columns interspersed
with patios and boxes, Serts new device would fit Makis description
86

Pp. 120-123 in: Rovira, ib.
87

Rovira is detailing 3 stages of the project design of the Cidade dos Motores. We are here discussing the drawings of the third version.
Especially the last zone depicts an embryo of the group

design developed by Le Corbusier and Giedion:

Groups
211
The Corbusian / Giacomettian mega-platform is cut into

pieces, re-arranged, lowered, and heightened, into an
intricate pubic space structure.
212
of mediation as a design tool to link the independent elements of the

group: if Maki is referring to walls or arcades as unifying elements, Sert
is beginning to dismantle the architectural mega-object and keeping its
roof as a contour of unity around the grouping. Sert is indeed designing
a variety of spaces along the spine, as it crosses underneath the roof,
which is frequently opened for a patio, a skylight, etc. The Corbusian /
Giacomettian mega-platform is cut into pieces, re-arranged, lowered,
and heightened into an intricate pubic space structure. The result is that
public infrastructures as much as architectural forms constitute the group.
The central spine is not simply a large open stretch, but rather a series of
intricately detailed public spaces: modernist interpretations of courtyards,
passages, plazas, etc., all of which have proven their success in the context
of the historic Mediterranean city. The buildings almost serve purely to
define the edges of the public spaces, which are consequently designed
with a great attention for detail. The result is almost like a Rohrsach test.
Sert is drawings two sets of interweaving figures: built forms and open
space forms; each is defining the other to the extent that it is really the
interplay between both that emerges as the figure of the core. This is
entirely different from the figure-ground logic of Le Corbusier, who is
placing fantastic forms on an indistinct platform.
Groups
213
Core in Oslo, CIAM Norway group. As published in CIAM 8 Conference proceedings.
Lazy architects reduce the group concept into a generic

formula for deploying welfare state programs with an
excuse for not having to worry about outdoor spaces.
214
2.2.2 Consolidation
Reductive Template
Following Sert and Le Corbusier, group forms begin to proliferate, and
by the Core Conference in 1951, several designers are ready to present
remarkably similar interpretations: a new aesthetic is born. Unfortunately
it is based on the Corbusian dogma of the generic platform rather than
on Serts more refined treatment. Projects by Sert and Le Corbusier are
presented, but also the work of other national CIAM groups and a series
of projects by American students. Between these, a consensus appears
concerning the formal language of the core as a dynamic juxtaposition
of these freestanding objects. The typical group project at the conference
contains the following elements: a freestanding tower, a large freestanding
two to three story building, and a freestanding trapezium-shaped indoor
meeting hall, and a free-standing sculpture/monument. Unfortunately,
the critical layer added by Sert is not fully understood in several of these
cores, as the Core template seems more reminiscent of St.-Di and, in
hindsight, it is clear that this consensus interpretation of the group now
reduces it to an empty formalism. The Oslo project by the Norway group
exemplifies the outlines of this reductive model: scattered buildings on
a platform separated by large yet undefined outdoor spaces88. In fact, the
group falls apart here into a series of separate architectural objects. The
increasing reduction of the group concept into a generic formula for lazy
architects deploying welfare state programs with an excuse for not having
to worry about outdoor spaces leads to a series of radical revisions. The
way out of sterility is through densification, opening up and, much later,
also a certain degree of contextualization.
88

Oslo Suburb, Norway. Pp 119-120 in: Tyrwhitt, J.; Sert, J.L.; Rogers, E.N.
(ed.) The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life. CIAM 8, ib.
Groups
215
Serts project for Boston University. As published in: Bastlund, Jose Luis Sert. Architecture, City Planning,
Urban Design (1967)
Densification allows for a more intricate definition of the

public spaces, with a series of fairly small courtyards
and narrow passages.
216
2.2.3 Densification
Le Corbusiers UN Headquarters and Serts B.U. Campus
Serts project for the campus of Boston University (1959) and Le
Corbusiers proposal for the Headquarters of the United Nations in New
York (1949), are both realized projects located between a city and its river,
orienting themselves to both simultaneously. The prime location increased
the real estate value of the land so drastically as to necessitate a much
higher floor area ratio (FAR) than in previous groupings. In his project
for Boston University, Sert most clearly synthesizes his conception of the
core as a grouping of sculptural forms. Again, we find the different types
that together constitute the modernist core: tower, slab, low building,
and trapezium-shaped shell with auditorium. Compared to the Cidade
dos Motores or Medellin, the constituent forms have not only become
much more expressive and differentiated, but also the ground floor of
public space is much more intricately defined, with a series of fairly
small courtyards and narrow passages. The ground floor architecture
is sometimes in glass, while elevator shafts, stairwells and sanitary
equipment, which have a much smaller footprint than the overall building,
are solids. As a result, each outdoor space, while clearly defined in relation
to historical typologies of public space in the Mediterranean, is also visibly
connected with the adjacent interior spaces, and a form of continuity, a
flowing space sequence is established. In this configuration, the identity
of each space is simultaneously more sharply defined precisely because of
the modernist move to expose it to other spaces with a different character.
What was a common roof in Cidade dos Motores, has now fragmented
into a series of buildings, but the space underneath is still open and
made available for the public. Notwithstanding the increasing proximity
of the constituent forms of the group, the fundamental openness to the
surroundings as defined by Doxiadis in the Acropolis remains present.
Views are framed between (and underneath) buildings towards both the
city and the large water surfaces of the Charles River.
Groups
217
Above: Serts project for Boston University (drawing by Anahita Anandam, 2005). Below: Le Corbusiers project
for the United Nations as presented in the CIAM 8 Conference proceedings. Right: View of Serts Boston
University as publsihed in: Bastlund, Jose Luis Sert: Architecture, City Planning, Urban Design (1967)
The shattered pieces have now not only been regrouped

but effectively glued back together.
218
The United Nations site is an even more valuable piece of real estate,
forcing a further densification. The UN design is featuring an assemblage
of different elements. Each of these mirror elements also found in
the St.-Di Core: the assembly hall (trapezium-shaped), the tower
of administration, the low building, a slab and a plaza. Yet here, these
elements are brought in much closer proximity. The vast open stretches
between the free-standing objects are squeezed out, and several of
the forms actually touch, interpenetrate, and collide with one another.
The grouping becomes, again, one single building comprised of several
constituent forms. The UN and the Soviet Palace are both institutions
of internationalism, aspiring to overcome historical differences into a
contemporary synthesis. The UN thus adds a new chapter to the evolution
of the core: the shattered pieces have now not only been regrouped but
effectively glued back together. In short, it seems as if the real estate
pressure have benefited the development of the group concept, sharpening
the definition of its public spaces and increasing the overall consistency of
the project.
Groups
219
Above: Images from Makis Shinjuku project as publsihed in Collective Form (1961). Below: redrawing of the
project by John Rothenberg and Andres Sevtsuk, 2006
It is as if they want to become a fabric; yet, they do not or

they cannot;
220
Makis Shinjuku
Makis plan for Shinjuku89 consists of a repetition each time at a different
angle, of similar strangely shaped towers. In section and elevation, these
almost have the contours of an abstract human figure. In other words, they
appear as giants, towering anthropomorphic symbols. The power of this
drawing relies on the dual interpretation it elicits. It is as if the grouping of
buildings corresponded to a democratic gathering of individuals listening
to each other. The forms appear to be leaning over slightly towards each
other, expressing empathy. Such an interpretation comes close to Giedions
description of the grouping as the symbolic form of liberal democracy.
It is exactly the same desire that motivated Sert and Giedion to propose
the Core as the meeting place for translating democratic community life.
However, these figures are almost yet not really touching each other. And
therein lays the second interpretation. While the constituent forms are
large, towering, monumental objects, they are arranged so that they almost
become a fabric; it is as if they want to become a fabric; yet, they do not
or they cannot; they are just out of reach of each other their relationship
remains platonic, the synthesis postponed.
89
Form, ib.
Pp. 53-58 in: Maki, Fumihiko, Goldberg, Jerry. Linkage in Collective
They just not touch one another their relationship remains platonic.

Groups
221
Serts Core for Bogota as redrawn by Anahita Anandam, 2005
Gone is the rigid platform, the institutional core is fundamentally a clearing in the urban grid.
222
2.2.4 Opening up
Serts Bogota and Kahns Philadelphia
In his Boston University project, Sert integrates existing buildings into
a new arrangement. There is a church near Boston University; the first
belonged in the nineteenth-century fabric of the city. Sert turned it into
an object, destroying this surrounding fabric for his own project, but
also integrated the church in a series of closely positioned other group
objects: it really belongs in the new scheme. Therefore, both old and new
elements are acquiring a renewed meaning. This approach is even more
strongly present in Serts Bogota Project and Kahns Philadelphia project.
Serts Bogota Core is located in the middle of a historic city fabric, rather
than on green fields (as in the Cidade Dos Motores) or separated by
large motorways (as in Medellin). It links three civic zones by a series of
pathways: the leisure zone, a commercial-retail zone, and an institutional
zone. The leisure zone is a sloping park dotted with a number of large
objects. Gone is the rigid platform, instead the natural topography is
becoming the direct ground here. The historic city grid, which has been
defined as a series of equal squares according to the principles laid down
in the Laws of the Indies, acts as a motherboard for the other two
zones: the institutional and the commercial core. Again, Sert does not
reject this context. The institutional core is fundamentally a clearing in
the urban grid, a large open space, the edges of which are defined by
a series of square city blocks. These blocks contain a series of formal
variations on a theme, each with its own sculptural identity with its own
square perimeter. However, Sert still employs the by now well known
constituents of St.-Di (slab, tower, shell/trapezium, etc.) on one edge
of the plaza. Louis Kahn pushes Serts openness to the next level in his
studies for Philadelphia. Kahn also distributes sculptural forms across city
blocks, rather than on a rigid empty undefined platform. But he dares to
abandon the pre-established typologies of tower, slab, shell, and platform
and he invents a new sculptural language and a new kind of assemblage,
Groups
223
Kahns project for the Core of Philadelphia as published in: Ronner, Haveri (Ed.). Louis I, Kahn. Complete Work
1935-1974. Second Revised and Enlarged Edition (Boston, Basel: Birkhauser, c1987)
Kahn emphasizes the edges of the center rather than the

center itself.
224
fit specifically for the downtown of Philadelphia. Kahn designs a grouping

of ziggurats and cone-like beehives. Together, these are performing an
almost-circle around the city center. The monuments are interconnected
with a network of pedestrian paths, plazas, and courtyards. Several of
these sculptural forms, with an almost prehistoric monumentality, are
parking garages serving a transfer points for citizens to leave the car and
become pedestrians at the entrance of the core. Strikingly, Kahn is doing
here the opposite of what Gruen did in Fort Worth. He emphasizes
the edges of the center rather than the center itself. Rather than
completely determining the inner structure of the Core, he is designing
its monumental interface with the rest of the city, and merely providing
a number of pathways in its center. In these projects, the rigid platform
that formed the basis for the groupings in Le Corbusiers Soviet Palace, in
Chandigarh, and in St.-Di, has been replaced with a series of paths and
plazas linking the different forms of the group. It is almost as if big holes
and openings have been cut in the platform, through which reality the
teeming and vibrant city itself is allowed to become visible.
Groups
225
2.2.1
Shattering and
Regrouping
2.2.2
Consolidation
2.2.3
Densification
An overview of the earrly formal development of Group

Form shows how the template is still in flux, going from
an extremely abstract geometric template to
226
2.2.4
Opening Up
3.x.x
Development of
Monumental Symbols
?
?
Speculations about
Re-activation
a denser project that explicitly relates to the existing

city. Clearly, the development is not finished and question
arise about its possible future trajectory.

Groups
227
Several projects reminiscent of group

form were built in the USA the late
1950s and early 1960s, including
the Boston City Hall redevelopment
(Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles
1963-1968) and the Albany State
Capitol (Harrison and Abramowitz,
1978). It is impossible to discuss these
projects without briefly revisiting
the stinging and by now almost
universally accepted criticism they
have received as Urban Renewal
projects. Were some of their errors
causally related to their intrinsic
formal structure or not? To discuss
this, we will compare these projects
with recent projects that received
wide praise yet also still carry traces
of the group aesthetic. Boston City
Hall will be compared to the recent
development of Rafael Moneos
Atocha Station in Madrid; and the
Albany State Capital project will
be compared to Xaveer de Geyters
Brussels European Crossing project;
and finally, Bakemas plan for Tel Aviv,
which trumps the other projects in
terms of ambition, will be juxtaposed
to MVRDVs plan for a New York
Olympic Village.
228
2.3 TRACES:
Of the Group
Scale: 1:200 1:500
Groups
229
After the demoliton, group forms were employed in complete separation from their agenda of metropolitan urbanity and thus became a hollow rhetoric, servicing a project opposite to its own.
230
2.3.1 Urban Renewal:

A Formalist Critique
As Jacobs, Logan and Molotch and others have by now demonstrated
exhaustively, urban renewal was based on a fundamentally anti-urban
premise. Urban renewal was so traumatizing in the USA that the term
by now denotes a historical category of projects in the 1950s and early
1960s, very different from the urban restructuring projects occurring in
Europe two decades later. American urban renewal served to increase
rental income of major stakeholders in city centers by expropriating
poorer communities and thus reducing urban diversity90. Upon declaring
an urban district as blighted, government contractors would move in
and demolish it completely with generous federal aid. The blighted areas
in question often were African-American neighborhoods. After the
demolition, group forms were employed in complete separation from
their agenda of metropolitan urbanity and thus became a hollow rhetoric
servicing a project opposite to its own. Thus group form was propelled
forward towards the opposite of its own purpose. But architects, by
reducing their own task to that of pure formalism, allowed cynical politics
to dictate the agenda, and therein lays precisely the difference between the
architect and the urbanist, who, as Sert repeated countless times, places
formalism within a broader social agenda. Second, these operations were
placed squarely in the centers of main cities instead of in their peripheries.
This distinction is of huge importance, as the resurrection of elements of
the group form template is not intended to reshape city centers, but rather
towards establishing dense cores in suburban areas. One consequence has
been that the group aesthetic has come to be associated with an elitist
tabula rasa approach and vicious racial policies. That there is a dislike for
such projects is evident but that the formal template of the group became
associated with it is tragic. Within the perspective of this chapters search
to define a formal template in the service of a particular agenda, these
projects deserve another look.
90

Pp. 167-170, 85, 174-175. in: Logan, John R.; Molotch, Harvey L. Urban
Fortunes. The Political Economy of Place, ib.
Groups
231
Moneo, Atocha Station, Madrid, 1992
232
Kallmann, Boston City Hall, 1968
Groups
233
Photograph of the plaza surrounding Boston City Hall, looking southward. As published in: Alex Krieger, ed. The
Architecture of Kallman McKinnell & Wood. (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1988)
In Boston, the elements of the grouping are placed in

such a way that the entire project is centered around a
large open space, from which the city is invisible.
234
2.3.2 Kallmann vs. Moneo: the pl a za

Rafael Moneo realizes the new Atocha railway station in Madrid between
1984 and 1992. Moneo, who has on several occasions collaborated with
Manuel de Sola-Morales, ought to be considered as a fellow pragmatic
late modernist. The Atocha project and Bostons City Hall redevelopment
have a similar scale, and both are located very central in the city, along
a major urban highway. Boston has a subway station, a major bus
terminal and parking garage and it is near North station, a major railway
station. Atocha also has the same infrastructural components but its site
effectively contains the station. And, yes, both employ an arrangement
of various forms on a platform. But all further attempts to relate the
projects break down. First, the objects in Boston are arranged around a
central space, and they block the rest of the city from view. The elements
of the grouping are placed in such a way that the entire project is centered
around a large open space, from which the city is invisible. Its view is
blocked by City Hall, the highway, and a long curved linear new building
that half-destroys city blocks like a giant concrete barrier. An essential
feature of group form, namely its framing of views of the surrounding
territory, has been eradicated in the scheme. Within the project, there is
only the project, no outside horizon. Of course, this has consequences to
its presence, as City Hall cannot be said to organize the perspective and
legibility of the surrounding territory (since there appears to be none).
Streets dead-end at the edges of the scheme, an elevated highway cuts
connections off one edge, and several long linear office buildings cut off
the remaining sides. Second, the subway station and the bus station are
completely separate points of discharge, and they have been made invisible
by virtue of being underneath the main pedestrian platform (conceived
of as the plaza),a large seven-story parking garage situated at the other
end of the project. The underground flows remain underground, and as a
result the generous plaza, the largest of its kind in the city, appears empty
Groups
235
Photograph of the Plaza in front of Atocha station
While in Boston, all these aspects remained separate,

Madrids Atocha architecturally integrates various infrastructures. As a result, the plaza is activate by various
kinds of flows.
236
most of the time. Not only isolated from the surrounding city, but also
isolated from the flows it generates within itself, its emptiness defines a
lack of city where there used to be one. Thus it also goes against the grain
of a central promise of Core thinking, namely to transcend programs and
work through flow organizations. At Atocha, this situation is the reverse.
Here, the two initial promises of group form, denied in Boston, are
fulfilled: the framing of the surrounding territory and the organization of
an intersection of flows to create a moment of metropolitan urbanity. The
Atocha grouping is situated on only two sides of the central plaza. As a
result, the remaining two sides maintain openness to the city. Furthermore,
the pedestrian plaza is sunken; it is an excavation, allowing direct access
from the train, subway and bus platforms around it. Therefore, flows
of pedestrians are discharged on and across the plaza, and activate it.
Programs contained in its edges spills out directly onto it. Importantly,
the attention paid to the grouping has included a rigorous integration
of infrastructural thinking. Infrastructures, be it automobile parking,
park-and-rides, or bus stops and train platforms have been treated as full
architectural problems, fulfilling Kahns older call for the architectural
design of the modern gateways. But in Boston, all these aspects have
remained separate: the roads are for Massachusetts engineers, the subway
for the MBTA, and the parking- and bus station for a private developer
and the buildings for the architects that won the competition. Never
was an integrated form of architectural thinking brought to bear on the
spaghetti of infrastructures, again dismissing one of the first tenets of
Serts definition or urban design.
Groups
237
De Geyter, Intersection Europe,

Brussels, 1999
238
Harrison & Abramowitz,

Albany Capitol Complex, 1972
Groups
239
Photograph of the Albany Capitol Complex as it stis over the interstage coming into the city (Alexander
DHooghe, 2005)
The new surface allows Harrison to completely disregard the highway and the surrounding topography, and
having created his own tabula rasa, he proceeds to then
distort the group concept by forcing into an axial logic.
240
2.3.3 Harrison vs. De Geyter:

the arrangement
The State Capitol in Albany is of a shocking beauty. Its pristine concrete
surface defines a pedestrian platform on top of which a variety of abstract
objects have found a place. Wallace Harrison, the architect who was also
responsible for the United Nations headquarters after quarrels with Le
Corbusier led the latter to abandon the project, and Max Abramowitz,
face a major problem here. The historic State Capital building is a
symmetrical construction, but a steep ravine perpendicular to it blocks an
extension of its central axis outwards. Nelson Rockefeller, who was the
driver of the entire project, suggests putting a six-lane highway, part of
Albanys new arterial highway system, in the ravine, and then span the
entire valley with a large concrete deck. The city engages the planners
Candeub and Fleissig to elaborate the overall project. For Rockefeller
however, the new superstructure would also allow to extend the symmetry
axis of the historical capitol building91. Harrison conforms to this idea,
and sets out to cover the highway by resorting to the group protagonists
first invention: the platform. The platform extends the axis, on grade,
across the highway, creating the new institutional datum. The new surface
allows Harrison to completely disregard the highway and the surrounding
topography, and having created his own tabula rasa, he proceeds to then
distort the group concept by forcing into an axial logic. The objects on
the surface do add a series of secondary, oblique directions, but these
all remain clearly subsidiary to the institutional axis coming out of the
historical Capitol building. This is not only a major difference with the
system of the Greek Acropolis, which developed a series of oblique axis
that were, fundamentally, equally important, but it also returned the entire
idea of the Group back into the earlier, nineteenth-century compositional
method of the beaux-arts. The politicians had transformed the Group back
91

York: Rizzoli, 1989).
Pp. 244-273 in: Newhouse, Victoria. Wallace K. Harrison, Architect. (New
Groups
241
Xaveer de Geyters Intersection Europe project, Brussels. As publsiehd in: Xaveer de Geyter Architecten: 12
Projecten. (Ghent, Amsterdam: Ludion, c2001)
242
Above: photograph of Albany Capitol Complex (Alexander DHooghe, 2005). Middle, below: The Albany Capital
Complex as published in: Newhouse, Victoria. Wallace K. Harrison, Architect. (New York: Rizzoli, 1989)
Groups
243
Xaveer de Geyters Intersection Europe project, Brussels. As publsiehd in: Xaveer de Geyter Architecten: 12
Projecten. (Ghent, Amsterdam: Ludion, c2001)
The urban grouping is a prefiguration of unity, yet they

still are almost proudly showing the uneasy co-existence
of incompatible remnants from early modernism, late
modernism, postmodernism and De Geyters own architecture.
244
into an older, more authoritarian model.

Xaveer de Geyter, who worked at Rem Koolhaas OMA in the 1980s
and 1990s, proposes exactly the opposite in a competition project for the
Europakruispunt or Crossroads of Europe. This is an area in the heart of
what used to be medieval Brussels, in which he deploys a highly consistent
vulgarization of the group form as defined by the protagonists92. The area
had been destroyed by a series of Belgian versions of urban renewal. State
engineers had a train tunnel dug through the medieval city with open
trench technology, resulting in the wholesale destruction of a large swath
of urban fabric. The trench was covered with an oversized urban highway,
and late-modernist projects added on the edges of the trench further
destroyed stretches what remained. Given that their commissioner was
always one or another branch of national government, the incoherence
between these projects especially striking, The condition in which De
Geyter had to work, was one of a series of buildings as city blocks,
separated by vast asphalt surfaces, with a huge infrastructure apparatus
railroads, parking garages, subways, etc. underneath them. This system of
scattered pieces of urban debris containing state bureaucracies, swimming
in a sea of roadways and parking, indicates little potential for metropolitan
urbanity. Yet, while De Geyters project consists of leaving large chunks
of this asphalt land alone, he does add chunks of architecture within a
large, square-like perimeter. As a result of these additions, the Crossroads
area itself becomes like a rectangular super-block, with entries and exits
to parking garages, bus stops, and the central train station itself, but
also with numerous housing, office, park and other programs. Stackings,
juxtapositions and superimpositions create an amalgamation, where
the sense of a unified environment is perfectly offset by the mutually
incompatible individuality of the constituent chunks. Car traffic is forced
to drive around the complex as if it were a giant rotary. The project is a
grouping there is no distinct centralizing geometry imposed on the
scheme. By virtue of the accumulation of additions in a single zone, its
92

Drawings published in:
Bekaert, Geert; Davidts, Wouter; Van Toorn, Roemer; Wendt, Dave (eds.) Europakruispunt pp. 8295 in: Xaveer de Geyter Architecten: 12 Projecten. (Ghent, Amsterdam: Ludion, c2001).
Groups
245
The Albany Capital Complex as published in: Newhouse, Victoria. Wallace K. Harrison, Architect. (New York:
Rizzoli, 1989)
246
density increases substantially. Furthermore, the older platform template is

splintered into a multitude of smaller spaces, some below ground level (on
the levels of parking and train platforms), and other on ground levels, and
even others on the second and third floor. The urban grouping is sharply
defined here: an amalgamation of forms that establish a prefiguration
of unity, yet still are almost proudly showing the uneasy co-existence
of incompatible remnants from early modernism, late modernism,
postmodernism and De Geyters own architecture. Instead of one central
axis, there is a multitude of them, and they contradict each others premise.
Yet they are held together by simple features: continuous pedestrian
and public transit arteries within the system, and a clear perimeter that
establishes the new group as a new entity even far outside its own mass.
Groups
247
De Sola Morales, Moll de la Fusta,

Barcelona 1992
Left: Google Earth image of Moll de la Fusta, Barcelona. Right: Bakemas project for Tel Aviv as redrawn by
Sandra Baron and Gordana Jakimovska
248
Bakema, Tel Aviv Waterfront,

1962
Groups
249
Above and Right: Bakemas Tel Aviv project redrawn by Sandra Baron and Gordana Jakimovska, 2006
Below: de Sola Morales, project for the Moll de la Fusta, Barcelona
Tel Aviv, in 1962 still a relatively new settlement, makes

Bakema resort to inventing context.
250
2.3.4 Bakema vs. Sola: on context

However, the contextualization of the group would find its final act of
contextualization in the work of Manuel de Sola-Morales in the
Moll
de la Fusta
in Barcelona. What happens if you compare this waterfront
project with another, very different one, namely Bakemas project for Tel
Aviv?
Bakemas brilliant project for Tel Aviv recapitulates the theme of the
spine: long, tall, linear buildings placed adjacent to the major roadways.
These spines reinforce the overall organization of urban flows, visualizing
these with built masses93. These spines eventually converge in the new
city Core, of which each edge is defined by one of the constituent spines.
The spine theme is present in several other projects by his firm, especially
Ashdod, Plovdiv, Eindhoven, and Tilburg, and most clearly in the scheme
for Bochum, which is a tabula rasa project. Bakemas concern with the
creation of these bundles, where housing, traffic, and pedestrian life are
brought so close as to create a metropolitan condition, is to counter the
disintegration and general drive towards formlessness of postwar sprawl.
Through sheer force of will, Bakema imposes an urban morphology that
reinforces the most important gestures of the existing context. Nowhere
does this approach become more crystallized than in his competition
project for a new Amsterdam City Hall (1969), where a short spine is
introduced that stands perpendicular to major traffic arteries to reinforce
the much older trajectory of the river Amstel, which takes a turn at the
site of the project. This is an intelligent form, because as the river has for
500 years structured urban growth in this area, any reinforcement of its
structure simultaneously strengthens the legibility of what historically
grew around it. The brilliance of Bakemas urban projects could therefore
be said to reside in its combination of a confident and even aggressive
modernism with an early sense of context, urbanity and legibility. When
confronted with Tel Aviv, in 1962 still a new settlement consisting
93

Drawings published in: Bakema, J.P. Tel Aviv, Israel. pp. 60-61 in:
Thoughts about Architecture. (London: Academy Editions and St.-Martins Press, c1982).
Groups
251
Above: Bakema, Family Sketch. as published in: J.P. Bakema. Original Drawings. (Ed. Ente Fieri di Bologna,
Bologna, 1978). s, Below: MVRDV, project for New York Olympic Village, as published on: www.mvrdv.nl, 2004
Buildings could make friends with each other

252
mostly of 3-story housing, Bakema almost seems aware that the lack
of historic context may push his own boldness into such extremes that
the delicate balance, on which the quality of his work rests, will be lost.
Bakema has to resort to inventing context. First, he builds a wall of
buildings along the waterfront, creating a spine parallel to the beach.
He then places car traffic and mass transit underneath a continuous
platform that allows for a connection between the wall of buildings
and the actual beach. This platform is frequently cut open to allow for
light wells and views for the cars passing by. Thus, platform begins to
interiorize and digest its organizational and infrastructural tentacles. It
does so to allow for smoother transitions between project and context.
In Tel Aviv, not enough urban material has accumulated yet to integrate
existing architectures into a grouping it has to be created from scratch.
Bakemas spines however, establish the exact opposite: they are long, linear,
homogenous elements. At the civic core, a different solution is necessary.
For that reason, Bakema makes a drawing of a series of individual, tall,
monumental buildings placed in each others proximity as a gathering of
individuals, meeting, hugging and shaking hands. As if they are engaged
in a gentle conversation, this group of highly different individuals
establishes what was lacking: a skyline, an urban identity for the city from
a long distance. Bakema describes the drawing as a:
Family sketch: the public (urban) space and the private
(architectural) space become communicative towards each other
by means of transitional elements which can be distinguished in
the building program of every big building. Buildings could make
friends with each other, the way it may happen through their
children.94
Bakema had in a sense already impressed this group concept in a more
philosophical manner during the 1951 Core Conference, by saying that:
The Ding An Sich does not exist, it is the tension between things
94

P. 52 in: J.P. Bakema. Original Drawings. (Ed. Ente Fieri di Bologna,
Bologna, 1978). (Pub: Mostra in occasione della partecipazione dellOlanda al SAIE 78 Salone
Internazionale dell Industrializzazione Edilizia, Bologna 7/15 Ottobre 1978.
Groups
253
Left, right: de Sola Morales, project for the Moll de la Fusta, Barcelona, as published in Urbanismo Revista,
1992
However, in a context saturated with history and urban

density, Morales resorts to the 0-degree of group form:
the platform only; the background of the city itself has
enough monumentality already.
254
that defines an identity95.

His sketch approximates Makis drawing for Shinjuku, and it redefines
the city core not just as a meeting of spines, but also as a group form. The
group as a gathering of anthropomorphic forms has resurfaced recently
in a competition entry by MVRDRV (Winy Maas, Jacob Van Rijs and
Natalie Devries) for the 2012 Olympics in New York. Like De Geyter,
Winy Maas has worked for Rem Koolhaas OMA office. Their project
on a non-descript waterfront area of Queens, not far from Manhattan.
The sites desire for identity is further frustrated by the great skyline
of Manhattan just across the bay. The designers propose a system of
kissing towers. Arguably on the basis of a real estate argument giving
views to all the towers, even the ones that are second- and third-row
away from the waterfront- the arrangement of towers is again a gentle
conversation of giants. Queens now has its own distinct skyline with
its own iconic markers, not tributes to themselves to their togetherness.
The great irony is that the architectural discourse of MVRDV differs
completely from that of Bakema, Maki, and the protagonists. The
extrapolation games that frequently return in MVRDV stated rationale
for form, here lead to a formation that is, fundamentally, primitive and
pre-historical. When their work reaches this double depth Datascapes
yet also pre-linguistic formations or Ur-forms, thus escaping the confines
of contemporary technology again to reflect the most common and old
language, namely that of the human body it is fundamentally enriched.
It also demonstrates that at least in some projects, a definite architectural
intuition is steering MVRDVs experimental attitude into a particular
direction. Thus, we see that the template of urban design continues to rear
its head even 50 years after its first inception, surfacing even practices that
operate within a completely different discourse. Bakemas family sketch
and Maas kissing towers had to create a landmark visible from afar. But
what to do in a context where there is already such an amalgamation
of historic materials that more tall buildings would merely duplicate or
95

Cited in a footnote on p. 284 in: Strauven, Francis. Aldo Van Eyck.
Relativiteit en Verbeelding (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, c1994).
Translation from Dutch: Alexander
DHooghe.
Groups
255
even obscure existing, but perhaps latent, group forms? Such was the
daunting challenge placed before Manuel de Sola-Morales in the design
of the Moll
de la Fusta
, Barcelonas most important waterfront area. Here,
the city is dense and built-up to the fullest, yet it remains incapable of
effectively fulfilling its intention of reaching the waterfront: like in Tel
Aviv, a large urban highway separates the city from its sea.
Sola does what Bakema did: he designs a platform to bridge over the
roadways. This platform is predominantly pedestrian-oriented, and
becomes a generous boardwalk, an urban promenade. But rather than
stopping at this generic move, he goes on to detail the platform and
especially the relation between the above-ground and the underground
organization. Here, the platform becomes a full-fledged section project.
The section is the analytical tool that allows for the most precise study
of the connection between city and water. Solas project, like Bakemas, is
based on the partial interiorization of the infrastructures and flows that
allow his site to acquire an important visibility and place in the overall city
grid and its mental reconstruction by the citizens. The platform is stepped,
allowing both the pedestrians on top, the parking below, and the major
roadways underneath a view of the Mediterranean. Simultaneously, he
succeeds in resolving the problem that the city is constructed on terrain
at least two levels above the actual waterfront. Most importantly, Solas
reorganization places the existing line-up of waterfront buildings again
in full view. His platform places these on a pedestal, effectively making
them function as a grouping. In Tel Aviv, Bakemas conflict between the
template of the spine and his desire for a family could only be resolved
by creating a giant plaza at the intersection of the different spines, a place
where their linearity was finally dissolved into a grouping. Sola avoid this
conflict entirely by bringing out what was already latent in the city itself:
the linearity of a waterfront complemented by its own fragmentation into
a series of constituent pieces. Therefore, Solas project should be considered
as the ultimate contextualization of the concept of Group Form, and this
contextualization is pushed towards the very evaporation of architectural
form as a conscious counter-project. Importantly, such a strategy has
Solas project should be considered as the ultimate contextualization of the concept of Group Form, achieving
the very evaporation of architectural form as a conscious
counter-project.
256
been possible only in the very city center, where the accumulation of
architectural material has reached a density that absolves the need for
an actual insertion of large Core programs. In the peripheries of urban
sprawl, the situation is of course entirely different. However, new Core
projects, for instance American Edge Cities, market-driven hot spots of a
newly emerging density in the midst of suburban sprawl, could integrate
some of its architectural elements into a new group form project as well.
A most important legacy of these efforts to contextualize group form,
however, is to be found in the solution it brings to the problem of
embedding. In Tel Aviv, New York and Barcelona, sectional design of
platforms successfully integrates infrastructures, flows, and organization
into the projects rather than excluding them. Previously, the complexity
of organizing these flows had forced them into the surrounding terrain,
creating large and indistinct buffer areas with on-and off ramps and large
parking areas that effectively isolated the project itself as in several projects
presented at the 1951 Conference. Now, the architectural integration
of infrastructural design proves to have become a critical factor in the
contextualization of the Core and its Group Form.
de Sola Morales, project for the Moll de la Fusta, Barcelona, as published in Urbanismo Revista, 1992
Groups
257
The labor of Sert, Giedion, and Maki

towards the definition of a group
form template remains incomplete.
But the least we can say is that by
layering their various interpretations,
both in writing and in drawings, we
find the outlines for an aesthetic
theory for urban design. Furthermore,
there are some striking indications
that even after the abandonment
of modernism, the group template
continues to re-surface in the work
of prominent architects, albeit
without a clear consciousness
about its idea. The agenda of the
Group is the establishment of a
template on an interstitial scale of
operations. Compared to Camillo
Sittes Romanticism of the historic
city, and Frederick Law Olmsteads
Romanticism of nature, the Group is
the first attempt to define a template
based on the aspirations contained
within modern culture itself, rather
than on one of its escapist counterimages.
258
2.4 THE ALMOST

PROJECT
Of the Group
Scale: 1:200 1:500
Groups
259
In the suburban context, such a grouping of incompatible terms has to be artificially created. Here, the Core
chooses to organize itself through a plurality of perspectives, intersecting sightlines leading towards different
elements of the group as well as towards the surrounding world.
260
2.4.1 Political Aesthetic of

Conflicting Mythologies
The group as we have described in the previous chapters emerges as a
third term between the fabric and the monument. It is an assemblage
of monuments on a base holding them together, a gathering, embrace,
conversation between architectonic elements. The meeting does not lead
to a synthesis, as the architectonics are too different. The grouping is not
smooth, to the contrary, it is built of internal oppositions. For just like
after De Saussures General Course on Linguistics, it became accepted
that a word acquires its meaning through oppositions with other words,
so in the group the particular identity of each constituent form in the
group only becomes visible through its difference with others. Through
their mutual proximity one can begin to understand a constituent element
in opposition to other ones to which it can now be compared. Without
the grouping, there is no consciousness of this irresolvable difference.
An architectural project in historic city centers may not need the group
form it is provided with a backdrop of existing buildings, a testimony
to difference cast in stone over centuries already, and a singular statement
acquires depth simply by virtue of what surrounds it. But in the suburban
context, such a grouping of incompatible terms has to be artificially
created. Here, the Core chooses to organize itself through a plurality of
perspectives, intersecting sightlines leading towards different elements of
the group as well as towards the surrounding world. Consequently, the
centrality established by the group is fleeting one; wherever you are in it,
you are close the central point, yet it is always where you are not. Group
form is a dismissal of the architectural mega-object, the desperate, heroic
attempt to synthesize massive amounts of program into a single gesture
of the architectural object think of the Soviet Palace. The group also
dismisses the notion of the fabric, conceived of as the expression of an
organically growing and self-organizing community, where the aspirations
Groups
261
of individual and community are in harmony. Nevertheless, its own

assertion remains hopeful. Its intention is to formalize the liberal vision
of the public sphere in its desire to reconfigure the public or the masses
into a plurality of constituencies. It installs, within its form, an intention
for pluralism. We will now discuss two issues. Berlins concept of the
uneasy coexistence of incompatible terms (Berlin) seamlessly blends with
the formalist concept of group form to bring out that a concept critical
to the political philosophy of liberalism: pluralism. As a result, the group
ought to be considered as a prefiguration of a unified public, a promise of
its possibility that yet leaves its concrete realization behind the horizon.
Therefore we should qualify it as a not-yet form. Here we will invoke
both the Blochian not yet referred to by Frampton on Maki, and the
correspondence with precepts of Gestalt Theory, both published for the
first time around the 1950s.
The different protagonists have a common agenda of metropolitan
urbanity as a way to define an ideal, liberal public. Now that we have a
clearer view of its formal structure as a group form, can we also refine the
political aesthetic proposed here? The life work of Isaiah Berlin has been
the development of a historical lineage of the Counter-Enlightenment.
Within this lineage, Berlin relates the appearance of the Romantics in
the nineteenth century to the rise of a liberal concept of the public sphere
based on the mutual incompatibility between the competing visions
and wills that Romanticism gives birth to. He comes to the conclusion
that a liberal concept of the public sphere, based exactly on this uneasy
co-existence of incompatible terms, is the one political philosophy
able of integrating Romantic notions of the will to power, the right
to self-determination, subjectivity, and the absence of universal truth,
into a framework that precludes the self-destruction and descent into
barbarism that Romanticism ultimately led to in the 1930s and 1940s.
Berlin is a student of the nineteenth-century German resistance against
the drive for universality in French rationalism. This resistance lies at
the foundations of Romanticism, and it is embodied in the writings of
The group ought to be considered as a prefiguration of a

unified public.
262
among others Herder and Fichte, seeing cultures as inextricably alien to

each other, rendering all attempts to supersede culture in favor of reason,
useless. Berlin locates the origins of such German Romanticism with the
Renaissance thinker Giambattista Vico. For Vico, expression supersedes
utility, and this has far-reaching consequences for the nineteenth-century
rise of Romanticism, and, after its politicization, nationalism. The will of
the people to find its optimal expression began to supersede the notion
that a common rational basis between peoples could be established96. The
world of human perspectives and desires is thus composed of a series of
conflicting mythologies, without a possibility for this unbridgeable conflict
to be redeemed or dissolved into a greater synthesis.
Myths are not as enlightened thinkers believe, false statements
about reality corrected by later rational criticism, nor is poetry mere
embellishment of what could equally well be stated in ordinary
prose. Each culture expresses its own collective experience, each
step on the ladder of human development has its won equally
authentic means of expression. Vicos revolutionary move is to
have denied the doctrine of a timeless natural law the truths
of which could in principle have been known to any man, at
any time, anywhere. He preached the notion of uniqueness of
culturesThereby he laid the foundations of at once comparative
cultural anthropology and of comparative historical linguistics,
aesthetics, jurisprudence, language, ritual, monuments and especially
mythology.97
Berlin developed the notion of pluralism to summarize a political
acceptance of these conflicting mythologies into a perpetual struggle
that has therefore to be continuously negotiated. He does so long before
the word pluralism would become associated with an anything goes
relativism. To the contrary, for Berlin, pluralism has nothing to do with
relativism. Relativism states that there is no single absolute viewpoint;
Berlinian pluralism states that there are only absolute viewpoints, and
96

Berlin, Isaiah. The Counter-Enlightenment Pp. 243-268 in Hardy, Henry
(ed.) The Proper Study of Mankind. (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1997). First published:
Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Vol. 2 (New York: Scribners, 1973).
97

P. 247 in: Berlin, Isaiah. The Counter-Enlightenment, ib.
The world of perspectives and desires is conflictuous,

without possible dissolution into a greater synthesis.

Groups
263
they contradict with each other. Pluralism is based on the vision of a

deeply fractured society. There is no true peace here, only a truce. Yet,
he transforms the impossibility of reconciliation into a worthy concept.
Berlins thinking about Pluralism is deeply disturbing: it states that good
intentions are bound to conflict with each other, no matter how justified
they are. The utopia of one group will inevitably be on a collision course
with the utopia of some other group or individual; even if the aspirations
of each are completely justified. Berlins revolution is that he sees no
synthesis in sight, because each so-called objective solution for the
common good is bound to coerce certain groups into subjugation. Berlin
is offering us irresolvable conflicting desires as a fundamental driving force
of any form of organization.
Berlins pluralism is deeply disturbing: it states that good

intentions are bound to conflict with each other, no matter how justified they are.
264
2.4.2 Fundamentalist Pluralism

What is, then, an ethical position in a world divided into a series of
irreconcilable utopias? For Berlin, this is an essentialist conception
of Pluralism. In his essay two concepts of liberty, Berlin discusses
positive liberty, namely the emancipation from cultural and historical
backgrounds by virtue of the exercise of a rationality that knows no limits
established by cultural or social orders. Such rationality would lead to an
objective synthesis. Against this he conceives of negative liberty, which is
merely the freedom from oppression or tyranny from others. He favors
the latter.
Pluralism, with the measure of negative liberty that it entails,
seems to me a truer and more humane ideal than the goals of those
who seek in the great disciplined, authoritarian structures the
ideal of positive self-mastery by classes, or peoples, or the whole
of mankind. It is truer because it does, at least, recognize the fact
that human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and
in perpetual rivalry with one another. To assume that all values
can be graded on one scale, so that it is a mere matter of inspection
to determine the highest, seems to me to falsify our knowledge that
men are free agents, to represent moral decision as an operation
which a slide-rule could, in principle, perform. To say that in some
ultimate, all-reconciling, yet realizable synthesis, duty is interest,
individual freedom is pure democracy or an authoritarian state, is
to throw a metaphysical blanket over either self-deceit or deliberate
hypocrisy. It is more humane because it does not (as the systembuilders do) deprive men, in the name of some remote, or incoherent,
ideal, of much that they have found to be indispensable to their life
as unpredictably self-transforming human beings. In the end, men
choose between ultimate values. They choose as they do because their
life and thought are determined by fundamental moral categories
and concepts that are, at any rate over large stretches of time and
space, a part of their being and thought and sense of their own
identity.; part of what makes them human. It may be that the ideal
of freedom to choose ends without claiming eternal validity for them,
and the pluralism of values connected with this, is only the late
fruit of our declining capitalist civilization: an ideal which remote
men choose between ultimate values.

Groups
265
ages and primitive societies have not recognized, and one which
posteriority will regard with curiosity, even sympathy, but little
comprehension. This may be so; but no skeptical conclusion seems to
me to follow. Principles are not less sacred because their duration
cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that
our values are eternal and secure in some objective haven is perhaps
only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute
values of our primitive past. To realize the relative validity of
ones convictions, said an admirable writer of our time, and yet to
stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man
from a barbarian.98 To demand more than this is perhaps a deep
and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine ones
practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral
and political immaturity.99
Pluralism thus results from the following two axioms: First, any
overarching synthesis equals tyranny. Second, communities strive towards
such a synthesis through the production of mythologies that reinforce
their desires and utopias. The way out of the ethical dilemma resulting
from the juxtaposition of these two Berlin calls pluralism. Berlins
definition of pluralism differs from the pluralism emanating from
post-structuralism, with Deleuze and Guattaris writings as major poststructuralist discourses imported into the field of architectural and urban
theory. As Michael Hardt notes:
Deleuzes most important contribution to political thought is his
non-liberal conception of pluralism.100
However, is the fundamental non-alignment between both views purely
political, with Berlin coming in from liberalism and Deleuze from
Marxism, as Hardt suggests? One difference, we shall see, is that Berlin
destroys all attempts to utopianism, replacing them with a concept of
empathy.
98

P. 243 in: Schumpeter, Joseph. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy,
(London 1943).
99

P. 242 in: Berlin, Isaiah. Two Concepts of Liberty, pp. 191-242 in: Hardy,
Henry (ed.) The Proper Study of Mankind, ib.
100

Hardt, Michael. Deleuze, Pour Quoi Faire? [Deleuze, Whats the use?]
- Magazine littraire 406, February 2002.
Berlin destroys all attempts to utopianism, replacing

them with a concept of empathy.
266
To understand Berlins conception of pluralism, it is important to

realize that he places it squarely in the lineage of the Romantics.
For
Berlin, myth-making belongs to the internal dynamics of a community
throughout its historical development, and reason cannot deconstruct
these myths to the point of their dissolution. Pluralism is nothing else
than the consequence of such Romanticism:
What can we be said to owe to Romanticism? A great deal. We
owe to Romanticismthe notion that they are many values,
and that they are incompatible; the whole notion of plurality, of
inexhaustibility, of the imperfection of all human answers and
arrangements; the notion that no single answer which claims
to be perfect and true, whether in art or in life, can in principle
be perfect or true all this we owe to the Romantics. As a result
a rather peculiar situation has arisen. Here are the Romantics,
whose chief burden is to destroy ordinary tolerant life,, to raise
everybody to some passionate level of self-expressive experience, of
such a kind as perhaps only divinities, in older works of literature,
were supposed to manifestand yet, as a result of making clear the
existence of a plurality of values, as a result of driving wedges into
the notion of the classical ideal, of the single answer to all questions,
of the rationalisability of everything, of the whole jigsaw-puzzle
conception of life, they have given prominence to and laid emphasis
upon the incompatibility of human ideals and so, are a result
of this passionate, fanatical, half-mad doctrine, we arrive at an
appreciation of the necessity of tolerating others, of the impossibility
of driving human beings into the single solution which possesses
us,. The result of Romanticism, then, is liberalism, toleration,
decency, and some degree of rationalised self-understanding. This
was very far from the intentions of the Romanticsthey were
hoist with their own petard. Aiming at one thing, they produced,
fortunately for us all, almost the exact opposite.101
For Berlin, these mythologies are inherent, innate, and they cannot
be dissolved or deconstructed through the application of rational
thought onto them; for that merely implies one set of belief systems
with another one; whereas this approach remains exactly the project
101

Pp. 146-147 in: Berlin, Isaiah. The Lasting Effects. Pp. 118-147 in: Hardy,
Henry (ed.) The Roots of Romanticism. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, c1999).
To realize the relative validity of ones convictions and

yet to stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a
civilized man from a barbarian.

Groups
267
of post-structuralism. This explains why Berlin continues to legitimize

nationalism, while sharply distancing himself from relativism.
I am not a relativist; I do not say I like my coffee with milk
and you like it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer
concentration camps -- each of us with his own values, which
cannot be overcome or integrated. This I believe to be false. But I
do believe that there is a plurality of values which men can and
do seek, and that these values differ... And the difference it makes
is that if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am
able to understand why he pursues it or what it would be like,
in his circumstances, for me to be induced to pursue it. Hence,
the possibility of human understanding. I think these values are
objective -- that is to say, their nature, the pursuit of them, is part
of what it is to be a human being, and this is an objective given. The
fact that men are men and women are women and not dogs or cats
or tables or chairs is an objective fact; and part of this objective fact
is that there are certain values, and only those values, which men,
while remaining men, can pursue. If I am a man or a woman with
sufficient imagination (and this I do need), I can enter into a value
system which is not my own, but which is nevertheless something
I can conceive of men pursuing while remaining human, while
remaining creatures with whom I can communicate
That is why pluralism is not relativism -- the multiple values are
objective, part of the essence of humanity rather than arbitrary
creations of mens subjective fancies. Nevertheless, of course, if I
pursue one set of values I may detest another, and may think it is
damaging to the only form of life that I am able to live or tolerate,
for myself and others; in which case I may attack it, I may even -in extreme cases -- have to go to war against it. But I still recognize
it as a human pursuit. If pluralism is a valid view, and respect
between systems of values which are not necessarily hostile to each
other is possible, then toleration and liberal consequences follow, as
they do not either from monism (only one set of values is true, all the
others are false) or from relativism (my values are mine, yours are
yours, and if we clash, too bad, neither of us can claim to be right).
My political pluralism is a product of reading Vico and Herder, and
of understanding the roots of Romanticism, which in its violent,
pathological form went too far for human toleration. 102
102

This is a section from the last essay written by Isaiah Berlin, who died on
November 6, 1997. The essay is published in the New York Review of Books, Vol. XLV, Number 8
(1998).
Even the most radical deconstruction will not succeed in

dissolving fundamental belief systems.
268
Berlin presents the differing belief systems as equally objective. Even the
most radical deconstruction will not succeed in dissolving either one of
them. The construction of difference in the Berlinian seems completely
opposed to the role of difference in post-structuralism, which seeks
to dismantle mythological apparatuses, showing their lack of essential
features, by stating that they acquire meaning purely and only by virtue
of seeking differences within themselves and with other apparatuses103.
This attitude, to Berlin, still assumes that the application of Reason on the
world of human beliefs will result in its emancipation. Reason itself, as an
attempt to legitimize overarching frameworks of theory about the world
of human belief systems, is at fault here. Therein lays the danger of Berlin,
for he discredits large swaths of Western philosophy as monistic, and
credits the Romantics for finally having begun to get rid of this inherent
totalitarian trait of Western thought. OF course, Popper, whom he quotes
in his very last essay, in fact made this critique more forcefully in the
Open Society and its Enemies. Between monisms totalizing drive and
relativisms nihilistic assumptions104, what is Berlins way out? He proposes
the use of ones imagination to temporarily penetrate into the others belief
system emphatically. The purpose is not to align the differing beliefs, but
rather to ease the perpetual negotiation that is necessary to avoid a descent
into violence. The only objective facts for Berlin are the belief systems and
corresponding utopias themselves: they are irreducible yet incompatible.
The only way out of a probably disaster is not reason, but the emphatic
imagination as a pre-requisite for a successful ongoing negotiation
or armistice. Berlin does not deny that identity myths are themselves
constructed based on a desire to differentiate from other identity myths
(the poststructuralist paradigm of difference), he simply states that this
insight simply will do nothing to dissolve these oppositions:
103

There is a powerful current in post-structuralism that relates it back to
the aspirations of the Frankfurt school, to save principles of Reason through the method of negative
critique.
104

Of course there have been many attempts to place Berlin squarely in the
camp of the relativists. One noteworthy such attempt has been in the following article:
Emerson, Caryl. Isaiah Berlin and Mikhail Bakhtin: Relativistic Affiliations Symploke, 12/22/1999.
emphatic imagination is a pre-requisite for a successful

ongoing armistice.

Groups
269
Logical objections are no good, in principle, against beliefs about

reality.105
They will continue to persist as objective facts of the world of human
culture. Berlins approach is pragmatic. He proposes the emphatic
penetration from the one position into a mutually exclusive other, by
virtue of the use of imagination, and so, although there is no reconciliation
in sight, he hopes to make a truce possible. So Berlin, while destroying
utopia, in fact proposes to pay tribute to its idea through the technique of
emphatic penetration in the others utopia.
105

In a letter to Philip Toynbee, 23 June 1969. See: Berlin, Isaiah. Quotations.. http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/quotations/quotations_from_ib.html, June 2005.
If Stalinism was based on the abolition of a central space

to negotiate conflicts between competing desires, the
Group template takes that space for the negotiation of
conflict as its very point of departure.
270
2.4.3 The Not-Yet Form

Just like Berlin answers to the dogmas of forced enlightenment leading
Stalinism in Soviet Russia, so the Group-form protagonists answer to
its spatial corollary, Iofans Soviet Palace. If Stalinism was based on the
abolition of a central space to negotiate conflicts between competing
desires, and if in the end, Stalinism exploded for this very reason, the
Group template takes that space for the negotiation of conflict as its
very point of departure. In other words, I argue that Berlins political
philosophy of liberalist pluralism translates into formal principles of its
representation in the group form as developed by the protagonists. This
is not only a matter of Serts desire to make forms that are as contrasting
as possible, but also of a transportation of the discourse of architectural
form from the sphere of technology to that of politics. Le Corbusiers
functionalist interpretation of the competition brief for the Soviet Palace
resulted in a precursor to group form. Of course, Le Corbusier had also
studied the Acropolis. The protagonists, however, really abandon the
machine metaphor in favor of a the reference model of the Acropolis.
Sert often refers to it, Giedion devotes several articles to it, and Doxiadis
wrote his thesis about it, which Tyrwhitt will publish by 1972106. But the
Acropolis as a symbolic form of modern pluralism really gains traction in
the postwar years.
The best examples of the past are well-known the acropolis in
Athens where also the landscape views are part of the whole and
incorporated, like the free-standing sculptures, to the buildings and
their space relationshipWhy should not our modern world have
similar examples to offer?107
A base with a series of different, even contradictory symbolic forms creates
an in-between space charged with perpetual conflicts of interest.
When considering Giacomettis Palace project, one has to realize that
106

And surely, Le Corbusier has, by virtue of his travels to the ancient
monuments, put the Acropolis back on the agenda of the Moderns already in the 1920s Vers Une
Architecture comparisons.
107
Sert, p. 9 in: Centres of Community Life, ib.
Groups
Maki, Shinjuku project. As published in Collective

Form Manifesto, 1961
271
the political aesthetic of Berlinian pluralism also taps into surrealism.

Surrealist sculpture appears after S. Freuds discovery of psychoanalysis108.
From him it borrows an acceptance of the structural incompatibility
between different parts of the Self: Id, Ego, and Super-Ego. After this
acceptance, just like the artist ego can abandon its attempts at synthesis,
also urbanism can abandon its attempts for a collective form, instead
paying tribute to the contradicting desires and wills between which a
space of friction is established. Thus, what is presented as a negative in
surrealism exposure of inconsistencies is reformulated as a positive in
the group. Instead of assemblage, assembly. Instead of unification, it pays
tribute to the vitality of negotiated conflict. In the view of Berlins denial
of social synthesis, what should be concluded about the overall formal
synthesis of the group? Formal synthesis, or the merger of constituent
elements into an overall composition, has been studied in the psychology
of perception, especially in Gestalt theory. Gestalt theory investigates
the perception of form as a construction of the mind, organizing and
summarizing different components into an overall form according to a
set of a priori rules. In French, it is called
thorie de la forme. After
a
shot across the bow by Christian Von Ehrenfels in his 1890 On Gestalt
Qualities109, the holy trinity of scientists that establish Gestalt Theory
as a field in its own right, are Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Kohler, and Max
Wertheimer. All three thinkers work in Frankfurt, where they establish
the periodical Psychologische Forschung, until they go into exile to
Massachusetts and New York in the 1930s110. Wertheimers first American
publication appears in 1944. Wertheimer says:
108
Sigmund Freuds landmark publications of great influence to the surrealists include: the Interpretation Of Dreams (1900), and The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life
(1901).
109

Ehrenfels, C. Von; ber Gestaltqualitten, pp. 242-92 in: Vierteljahrsschrift fr wissenschaftliche Philosophie, 14, 1890
Eng. transl.: pp. 82-117 in: Smith, Barry (ed.); Foundations of Gestalt Theory, (Munich and Vienna:
Philosophia, 1988). Secondary Literature on Ehrenfels, see: pp. 88 94 in: Ash, Mitchell G. Gestalt
Psychology in German Culture, 1890--1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity (Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995).
Heider, Fritz; Gestalt Theory: Early History and Reminiscences; in Mary Henle, Julian Jaynes and
John J. Sullivan (Eds.) Historical Conceptions of Psychology (New York: Springer, 1973).
110

Koffka left Europe for the United States in 1924; Wertheimer in 1933.
Kohler.
Instead of assemblage, assembly. It offers a political

aesthetic of emancipation from the State, yes from any
project of unification and normalization. Instead, it pays
tribute to the vitality of negotiated conflict.
272
The fundamental formula of Gestalt theory might be expressed in

this way. There are wholes, the behavior of which is not determined
by that of their individual elements, but where the part-processes are
themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole. It is the
hope of Gestalt theory to determine the nature of such wholes. 111
Gestalt theory occupies itself with establishing which a priori rules
allow us to discern ordering and overall form in what enters the retina
as a chaotic field of stimuli. Much of the research has been conducted
by presenting subjects with random fields of dots, in which they were
consequently asked to discover a form. Gestalt theorists claim that
the subject merely constructs forms out of these dots based on innate
perceptional axioms. Paul Goodman, an influential progressive activist
philosopher promoting a renewed Communitarianism, becomes one of
the promoters of Gestalt thinking in the USA in the 1930s. In fact, the
influence of Gestalt theorists on the American postwar discourse should
not be underestimated. Rudolph Arnheim expand Gestalt theory it into
the arts, influencing artists such as E. Vasarely. Also, Gyorgy Kepes 1944
Language and Vision was deeply influenced by its principles112. Kepes
would continue to search for structural principles of perception as a key to
establish the foundations of a public art that, while based on principles of
abstraction, would appeal to the masses. In 1959 he proposes to establish
a center for advanced visual studies at M.I.T. for precisely this reason.
In 1968, approval was granted and the center still exists today113. The
influence of Gestalt theory on the protagonists comes into full view if
we take another look at Makis early work. Maki speaks of assemblages,
as opposed to what Berlin would have called the monism of overarching
geometrical orders. Maki faults Chandigarh for exactly such a purely
compositional order114, while this project was initially in 1951, upheld
as a quintessential example of a core with a grouping. Makis critique is
111

Wertheimer, Max; Gestalt theory Pp. 78-99 in: Social Research, 11,
(1944). German original: ber Gestalttheorie [an address before the Kant Society, Berlin, 7th
December 1924], Erlangen, 1925.
112

Kepes, Gyorgy; Language of vision (with introductory essays by S.
Giedion and S. I. Hayakawa) (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1944).
113

Piene, Otto; In Memoriam: Gyorgy Kepes. pp. 34 in: Leonardo. Vol. 36,
No. 1, 2003.
114

Pp. 4-5 in: Maki, Fumihiko; Ohtaka, Masato. Collective Form Three
Paradigm, ib.
The Gestalt claim is that the subject consequently engages in an operation, which is merely discovering forms,
based on innate perceptional axioms.

Groups
273
about the liberation of group form from residues of geometrical order still
present in the work of architects that have to be considered as transitional
figures within the context of the group idea, such as Le Corbusier. Maki
does so at first, by using biological metaphors. However, the newness of
this late-modernist organicism soon exhausts itself for Maki as well115. His
consequent work on Linkage draws its inspiration mostly from Gestalt
theories. The six fundamental relations that Gestalt theory assigns to
the process of discovering a formal synthesis out of a chaos of unrelated
elements are the following: proximity, similarity (or repetition), closure,
continuity, symmetry, and figure-ground separation. Why is this relevant
at the end of the group form chapter? Because it provides us with the
final piece of the puzzle of understanding how Maki, who advanced the
principles of group form beyond the insights of his predecessors, really
did conceive of an anti-totalitarian formalism. Makis elements of linkage
match not only with Kevin Lynchs categories of mental understanding of
the city (node, district, landmark, path, edge) but also, most importantly,
with the principles of Gestalt theory. However, the essential feature here is
Makis conception of collective form as an incomplete figure. His project
uses Gestalt categories to merely suggest (but not state explicitly) an
emerging master form. He never deploys these Gestalt categories only
to the benefit of the whole and to the detriment of the individual parts.
Consequently, he never makes this overall form unequivocally clear. It
still has to be constructed by the observer. For that reason, it remains
an almost-form. This interpretation resonates with the closing words of
Kenneth Frampton on Makis Pritzker Ceremony:
[Rather than indulging in iconographic excessesInstead] his
work is informed by a disconcerting and contradictory combination
of anxiety and optimism. On the one hand he remains extremely
skeptical, while, on the other, he projects the Blochian idea of hope;
the famous not yet of the Weimar Republic.116
Makis not yet matches the prefiguration of the public that was the
initial agenda of the Core. The Blochian not-yet is equal to the not-yet
115
116
Sert, Introductory Notes for the Second Urban Design Conference, ib.
Frampton, Kenneth; Thoughts on Fumihiko Maki (1993); In: http://
www.pritzkerprize.com/maki2.htm#Thoughts%20On%20Fumihiko%20Maki,
August 2003.
Maki really did conceive of an anti-totalitarian formalism.

274
completeness and unification of the public. What remains is a prefiguration, a contour. Makis collective object remains unachieved; its
contours can, through extrapolating the role of the various constituents
of the group, be imagined; and Maki effectively uses the mind of the
beholder to invite him or her into such imagination. Yet the actual master
form itself, the totality of the group form, its synthesis, is never postulated
explicitly. In Freudian terms, it remains a coitus interruptus. The group
form does not completely close the doors to the promise or, formally
speaking, the prefiguration of a more organic public. From the mere
arrangement of incompatible terms may yet emerge the contour of a
public form. Indeed, by transforming its own very fracturedness into a
definitive virtue, a public form comes into view as a gathering of symbols
and gestures that establish a dialogue in the space between them. Yet the
elements of the group never merge to become a fabric on the one hand, or
a single object on the other.
Thus, the group template begins to address the fundamental question that
lies at the basis of this research: how is it possible to think of collective
or public form which has been the historical task of urban design at a
moment when any consensus as to the meaning, identity of that collective or public seems more fragmented and distant than ever? The answer
to that is neither a new monism or drive for monumental synthesis, nor
a renewed relativism or passive acquiescence in the state of things, and
most certainly it is not the depiction of a happily reconciled fabric. The
formal principle that most forcefully defines such a stance presents itself in
the group template as the Not-Yet Form. The remaining unknown in this
quest for the definition of a template for urban design remains the nature
of the constituent architectonic and infrastructural forms themselves. All
we know from the above readings is that they are architectonic and infrastructural. According to Norberg-Schulz, such forms were, at least in the
precedent of the Acropolis, related to Ideas117. And Berlin has suggested
that a pluralist form should allow the beholder to emphatically penetrate,
by virtue of his or her imagination, into the desires and aspirations that are
trapped in the constituent mythical forms of the group. This is the topic of
the next chapter.
117
Norberg-Schulz ibidem
Makis collective object remains unachieved; its contours can, through extrapolating the role of the various
constituents of the group, be imagined.

Groups
275
third dilemma:
Uwe Neuhold, Metamorphose study, 2000
The 1949 debate about aesthetics in Bergamo still rages: art vs. the people; abstraction vs. empathy.
276
abstraction vs. empathy

Once group form establishes a zenith of abstraction, achievable only
by going beyond the architectural object, the modernist theory of that
object itself evidently becomes problematic. Abstraction was the subject
of heated debates and investigations within the modernist movement
throughout the 1940s. Our protagonists will eventually abandon
abstractions achieved through functionalism or architecture-as-structure
(a hypertrophy of structure). In its place, they commit to a system of
what they called symbolic forms, forms that are not only abstract but
also emphatic and sensuous. To appreciate this shift, we need to turn
the spotlight on the heated discussions in the early postwar period as
crystallized in the 1949 Bergamo debate about a new aesthetic. Strikingly,
this debate, while using different vocabularies, fundamentally still rages.
In Bergamo, Giedion chairs the second commission (out of six) on Plastic
Arts. It is the only commission devoted to architecture itself. During
the public session, the discussion triangulates between (1) a renewed
functionalism, (2) a plea for more realistic-figurative representation
and, (3) an intuition towards aesthetics of primitive surrealism as a way
out of the above . First, Marcel Lodz defends the old tenets of CIAM
functionalism, stating that modernist urbanism should focus on its
primary program, namely mass housing. Arguments about form and
the adjoining anxieties of meaning and identity are to be ignored. But
Lodzs functionalist urbanism has already fallen back into a rear guard
position; Sarah Goldhagen did not call the 1950s in architecture a time
of anxious modernism. Nevertheless, Lodz stays the course. A few
minutes later, Helena Syrkusz presents her work in postwar Poland. The
Stalinist line of socialist realism inspires Syrkuszs bold and passionate

Already in 1946, Giedion and Arp prepared a questionnaire for all the
CIAM members regarding the precise terms of the collaboration needed to achieve a synthesis of
the plastic and spatial arts. This questionnaire was reformatted at the Bridgewater Conference of
1947, and a major discussion was devoted to it at the Bergamo Conference of 1949. See: CIAM 7
Bergamo Documents, ib.

The other commissions focus on many more bureaucratic items such
as CIAM management and planning policy. The first commission on Urbanism which had the
sub-themes of implementation, preparation for the next congress and diffusion of the Athens
Charter, in other words. The other commissions were: Education (third commission), Industrialization (fourth commission), Legislation fifth commission), and Social Programs (sixth commission).
None of these had to do with the contents of the architectural project of urbanism.
The answers at Bergamo consist of (1) functionalism

(2) socialist realism, and (3) - a synthesis based on the
development of primitive-surrealist aesthetics.

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third dilemma:
2
Melnikov, Narkomthiazprom (1933). As

published in: Cooke, Catherine. The
Russian Avant-Garde. Theories of Art, Architecture and the City. (London: Academy
Editions, 1995)
plea for an architecture that is monumental, figurative, and based on a

communication as direct as possible. Socialist Realism in architecture
makes form central to its task. For Syrkusz, its consequence is an aesthetic
made in the language of the common mans imagination. Art should be
brought closer to the people rather than the other way around.
It is wrong to think that art has nothing to do with politics. Every
statement of Athens is political. I agree with Sert that we lack civic
centers. This was the function of the Agora. This place in Bergamo
has such function. But these places were degraded consciously by
capitalism in order to not give the people the opportunity to unite
against the system. We need art, but an art that serves humans
and heightens the level of the people. The
words inscribed on Le
Corbusiers Pavillion de l esprit Nouveau were comprendre, juger,
revendiquer. Until
now, unfortunately no one has understood this.

That is why we have realized in the USSR that we have fallen into
formalism. Formalism is borne from the abyss created by capitalists
between Art and Reality, between Dichtung and Wahrheit. Artists
have detached themselves from life and have begun making art for
the sake of art.
Real artistic revolutions have always been accompanied by artistic
revolutions. Goya changed his entire technique and palette to show
the disasters of war. The goal of Socialist Realism is to elevate man.
There were other forms of realism before that: the critical realism of
Goya for instance. Picassos work is realist in the sense that it has
developed the means to show the rottenness of capitalist society. For
this reason, his work is considered useful in populist democracies,
but only to the extent that it stays in the western democracies. In
the east, wHere the peoples have reached the positive phase of their
development,the work of Picasso is useless for these reasons.
The formalism of CIAM was positive in its time, it was a revolt
then. It used analytic techniques, which are also socialist techniques.
Functionalism has discovered good things (sunlight, etc). But its
content has been lowering increasingly There is a sad difference
between what we want and proclaim on the one hand, and with
what we can do on the other hand.
Construction is but a skeleton. It would be interesting for an
anatomist. But for the others it is only beautiful if covered with good

Syrkusz is at that moment an important figure in CIAM. She has replaced
the Belgian Victor Bourgeois, as one of the vice-presidents of CIAMs general directorate.
278

muscles and a nice skin. We had nothing else to offer in the early days
of CIAM and have made structure into a fetish.
The countries of the East have arrived to the conclusion that we
must have more respect for the heritage of the past. It should not
use eclectically form of the past, but it must pay respect to its spirit.
The USSR does not impose the culture of Imperial Russia on the
rest of the countries, but it does encourage the culture of each region,
rejecting everything that is out of date...The Polish CIAM fight
against formalism, but also against professors from the Academy
that use eclectic forms. New Warsaw will respect its link with the
past that is it will keep what was good in the street tracings, plazas,
it will conserve the link with the future, with the sky and with
ancient culture. By defending this national culture, one also defends
international culture. We at CIAM must revise our attitudes.
Bauhaus is as outdated as Scamozzi.
Of course, Syrkusz comments start a heated debate. Various modernists
take the opposite position. Ernesto Rogers says:
She said that art needs to be closer to the people. We believe more
that people need to be given the means to get closer to art.
Rogers assumption of an abyss between common taste and high art can of
course not be acknowledged by Syrkusz: for such a differentiation in taste
is the result of class stratifications, creating the alienations so proper to
capitalism. In communist regimes, these contradictions have been declared
to be abolished. As Boris Groys argues, Socialist realism brings the future
utopia of the complete realization of communism into the present, by
inserting an image apparatus depicting this utopia in the present. Socialist
Realism thus accelerates history. Representation equals realization. The
debate becomes completely dogmatic and a possible synthesis seems ever
more distant. Giedion observes that the discussion has completely gone
awry

Translated from French by Alexander DHooghe from: CIAM 7 Bergamo
Documents, ib.

The Stalinist art of Living. Pp. 33-56 in: Groys, Boris; Rougle, Charles
(transl.) The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992).
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279
third dilemma:
We need to return to the problem at hand: the vital question for
the arts is to question whether we can reach the common man with
expression that are proper and authentic to our time.
However, Giedions comment is not one of desperation he says this

because he and Sert are eager to advance a third way, a solution for the
dilemma. Sert then steps up to the plate and defends the projection
onto the disintegrating city of a series of civic centers as beacons for the
Contemporary Arts. While seemingly programmatic, his call is in fact
about the creation of a new aesthetic.
In Mediterranean countries, the arts have always served together.
Examples: the Spanish pavilion in Paris in 1937 with Picasso,
Miro, Alberto. Guernica and the Mercurius Fountain of Calder
have had a great popular appeal. At that point, it was realized that
the pavilion was destined for large gatherings. In the past artworks
were always linked with spaces of gathering, at the Agora, Palazzo
della Ragione
, Versailles, etc. Today we no longer have such spaces!
Times Square in NY for instance is a simple example of a street
crossing with lots of traffic and noise, but that is where 7 million
inhabitants have celebrated the peace. We will have no synthesis
of the arts without a space for gathering, spaces where people can
walk, look around, a SACRED space for the synthesis of the arts.
Artworks in a private house or in a gallery are useless. There are not
seen by all and that is why nobody understands them.
It is our task to create the necessary civic centers. We cannot know
the means of the synthesis before the facts. Life itself will define
the frame. Nevertheless, we have to grant artists a maximum of
freedom in this frame. We must create a living museum and after
that, it will be up to the people to decide. We will achieve nothing by
circulating questionnaires among artists. We need to facilitate things
and life will dictate the rest.

Giedion published his account of this discussion in:
Giedion, Sigfried. Pp. 79-90 in: Architecture, You and Me (Cambridge: Harvard University Press
1958).
However, I am using here the french proceedings of the original document, and any quotations in the
text are my own translations in English.

Translated from French proceedings by DHooghe, Alexander; p. 4-5 in:
CIAM 7 Bergamo Documents, ib.
Sert, Barcelona Pavillion. As published

in: Rovira, Josep M., Jos Luis Sert :
1901-1983 (Milano : Electa Architecture :
distributed by Phaidon Press, c2003)
280

The word Sert carefully avoids, but that he nevertheless hints at here, is
the development of a modernist Gesamtkunstwerk, which is simply
the German translation of the synthesis of the arts. He suggests merging
a plenitude of abstractions into a total experience a dazzling spectacle.
With this re-casting, Sert builds a hypothesis for a synthesis between elite
and popular taste. His own design for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937
World Fair features painted wall-panels and free-standing sculptures
that define the contours of the architecture itself: a sharp and austere
modernist box. Such a project will not stop at appealing to popular taste
but will effectively transform it. The strategic deployment of civic centers
throughout the urbanizing territory will be a way to civilize it and to
broadcast fundamental human values. The abstract spectacle now serves as
a propaganda device for the promotion of a liberal-pluralist conception of
the public, against the threatening return to barbarism that Sert considers
as in inherent problem in mass culture. For all of them, construction is but
a skeleton, and form has its own purposiveness independent of it, or as
Sert would say two years later:
We need to add flesh to the bones.
If for Syrkusz, modernist abstraction laid bare the alienation within
capitalism, for Giedion and Sert, her realism in fact hides the potentially
new synthesis contained in project of modern liberalism. This becomes
clear in Giedions criticism of Richards New Empiricism. He agrees
with Richards desire to re-connect the modernist project with the
desires of the common man; but is extremely concerned with the rise of


When preparing the Bridgewater Conference of 1947, Giedion was
arguing that this theme should dominate the first post-war CIAM congress in Bridgewater 1947,
but Richards MARS group dealing with the relation between modernist urbanism and the common
man, as well as the Swedish New Empiricists, had their own agenda, and consequently the notion
of an overall theme was abandoned; the congress was seen as a preparation for CIAM 7, and should
serve to again install the CIAM network after the damages it suffered during the war. This episode is
presented on
pp. 170-171 in: Mumford, Eric. The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960, ib.
He suggests merging a plenitude of abstractions into

a total experience. Sert thus builds a hypothesis for a
synthesis between elite and popular taste:
a Modernist Gesamtkunstwerk

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281
third dilemma:
Kulissenarchitektur10, which emerges from Stalingrad to Washington11.
According to Jos Bosman, Giedions plea is directed specifically against the
Dutch plans for postwar reconstruction, which dress up a modernist urban
plan with historicist facades. For Giedion, this approach while seemingly
unrelated to Fascism, uses in fact its logical methods of populism
(Volksverfuhrung)12. All attempts at historicism, including winning entry
for the Geneva League of Nations building13, fall under the heading of
a pseudo-monumentality14. However, he agrees with Richards that the
correct response however, is not to ignore the masses, who demand the
translation of their collective force into symbols, but to channel this
demand into a form that is more authentic to the new spirit of the times.
They arrive at a total work of art. The transformation of the synthesis of
the arts into a veritable new aesthetic was already promised in the 1944
monumentality texts, and Sert re-confirms his commitment to this agenda
at the 1951 Core conference:
In planning the core the architect should employ contemporary
means of expression and whenever possible should work in
cooperation with painters and sculptors.15
Also, Giedion searches, already in the 1947 Bridgewater Conference, for a
10

Giedion uses this word in Die Toten und die Wiederafbau, an unpublished
article. It has been partially published and discussed in:
Bosman, Jos. CIAM 1928-1956: Inwieweit ist die communis opinio der modernen Bewegung eine
Schopfung Giedions? Pp. 127-146 In: Rykwert, Joseph (introduction) Siegfried Giedion. Die Entwurf einer modernen Tradition (Zurich: Amman Verlag, 1989).
11

Already in 1932, Giedion sends a protest-montage to Stalin, failing
Hamiltons project for the Soviet Palace for being nothing more than a decorated shed.
12

Translation from German by DHooghe. Original discussed in:
P. 141 in Bosman, Jos. Inwieweit ist die communis opinio der modernen Bewegung eine Schopfung
Giedions?, ib.
13

If for instance, in 1927 Le Corbusiers scheme for the League of Nations
had not been killed by the leading politicians of the League, the development of monumentality
today would probably be on another level P. 56 in: Giedion, Sigfried: The Need for a New Monumentality, ib.
14

P. 54 in: Giedion, Sigfried: The Need for a New Monumentality. As published in pp. 52-61: Harvard Architecture Review. Nr. 4, 1984. First published in: Zucker, 1944. ib.
15

P. 164-166 in: Short Outlines of the Core. Pp. 164-168 in: Tyrwhitt, J.;
8 , ib.
We need to arouse the imagination of the common

man with a new monumentality...
a repository of the collective mind...
282

new conception of integrated planning16. In this synthesis, programs are
injected with a new formal purposiveness. The Core is to become one large
artwork on an urban scale, able to arouse the imagination of the common
man17. Giedion also actively supports Richards claim that the form of
the Core ought to function as a repository of the collective mind18. The
shared interest is to relieve the distressed emotional life of communities19:
to address the alienations brought about by modern capitalism, through
modernism itself.
Worringers Abstraction vs. Empathy
In liberal democracies, the need for a unification between the art and
people springs from the public vocation of the civic center. The underlying
terms of the debate were already brought up in 1907 by Wilhelm
Worringer in his Abstraction and Empathy. Worringer attempted to
build a rigorous aesthetic theory to address the rise of non-figurative art.
He was a descendant of the late nineteenth-century lineage of German
Romanticism. With the intellectual frameworks put forth by the Swiss
art historian Jacob Burckhardt in Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien
(1860)20, who had attempted to transform art history from a dilettante
pass-time into a rigorous scientific project21, a Romanticist concept of
16

Giedion at Bridgewater according to:
p. 172 in: Mumford, Eric. p. 172, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960, ib.
17

term often used by Richards in:
Richards, J.M. The New Empiricism: Swedens Latest Style, ib.
The French equivalent, lhomme dans la rue was central to the discussions in Bergamo.
18
Giedion quotes Richards as saying this in:
p. 80 in: Giedion, Sigfried. Discussion on Italian Piazzas. Pp. 74-80 ain: Tyrwhitt, J.; Sert, J.L.; Rogers, E.N. (ed.) The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life. CIAM 8 , ib.
19

Giedion, Sigfried; Sert, Jose L.; Lger, Fernand. Nine Points on Monumentality. p. 62-63 as published in: Harvard Architecture Review. Nr. 4, 1984. First published in:
Zucker, 1944. ib.
20
Burckhardt was the teacher of Heinrich Wlfflin, who himself was very
influential on the development of his student Sigfried Giedion.
21

Alexander Tzonis classifies the theories of German aesthetics of this era
into three categories: (1) the interpretation of form as the expression and mirror of the particular
culture form which it springs: here we find of course Wlfflin and the invention of Zeitgeist, but
also Alois Riegl in a later stage also Nikolaus Pevsner and Sigfried Giedion,. (2) the interpretation
of form as the expression of fundamental human emotions and associations: here we find Theodor
Lipps, Vischer and Worringer,. (3) the semioticians: Tzonis places here Warburg, and Cassirer.
Our interest will be in between the second and third category, and we will attempt to redefine War-
The underlying opposition at Bergamo is not art vs.

people but abstraction versus empathy.

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283
third dilemma:
empathy begins to take shape 22. Here
we find among others Robert

Vischers Ueber das Optische Formgefuhl: Ein Beitrag zur Aesthetik23
(1873).
The intuited fact that object and self are one.24
This is how Vischer understands the concept of empathy, and it lies at the
basis of the aesthetic experience.
My kinship with the elements is too remote to require any kind of
compassion on my part. . . At this point, however, our feeling rises
. . . we miss red-blooded life and precisely because we miss it we
imagine the dead form as living25.
Fondness for a form is the consequence of a recognition of oneself in
that which is perceived. For Vischer, this results literally from an intuitive
understanding of phenomenal forms in anthropomorphic terms: one
recognizes ones own human body. The body is the primal referent for
forms. This explains for Vischer why the fundamental operation in
mythology is one that assigns human characteristics onto dead things: the
moon is face, a rock is a sitting man, etc. Dead things are given names.
burg and especially Cassirer as providing a way out of the abstraction vs. empathy problem. When
doing that, we will argue that Cassirers is not a semiotic theory but rather a normative aesthetic
theory.
22

While Violet Paget was publishing a similar theory around the time the
Germans were pursuing theirs, we will stick here to the German tradition, for it is leading us to
figures such as Aby Warburg and especially also Ernst Cassirer, who have proposed a fusion between
the concept of symbol as a highly abstract emblem or template or scheme of an Idea, and the notion
of empathy which becomes visible in its first, most naked state here.
Vernon Lee [Violet Paget], Beauty and Ugliness and other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (London and New York, 1912), written with C. Anstruther-Thompson; and The Beautiful (Cambridge,
1913) are her most important works. She has been discussed at length in among others:
Langfeld, Herbert. The Aesthetic Attitude (New York, 1920).
Stewart, David. Preface to Empathy (New York, 1956).
23

Vischer, Robert. Uber das Optische Formgefuhl: Ein Beitrag zur Aesthetik, Leipzig, 1873.
This has been recently translated as On the Optical Sense of Form, . pp. 89-123
in: H. F. Mallgrave, C. Fiedler, E. Ikonomou, H. Wlfflin, R. Vischer. Empathy, Form, and Space.
Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Oxford University Press; 1994).
24

P. 86 in: Gauss, Charles Edward, Empathy, ib.
25

P. 104 in: Vischer, Robert. On the Optical Sense of Form, ib.
Secondary literature see: Rampley, Matthew. From symbol to allegory: Aby Warburgs theory of art.
In: The Art Bulletin, March, 1997
The aesthetic of empathy is based on the experience

intuition that the object and the self are one.
284

They appear endowed with an empathic force. Theodor Lipps Aesthetik26
(1897) further develops the theory of empathy, focusing on the
recognition of bodily movements or actions rather than static positions.
A mountain is beautiful because it stands for the rising up of man. Lipps
theory is more dynamic than Vischers. A frozen body movement, which
itself translates the will of the subject, is projected onto the object. The
receptivity of this form to this projection is the key for our aesthetic
experience; this is empathy in form27. But Vischer and Lipps do not
historicize the principle of empathy, but rather place it beyond confines of
cultural-historical development by relating it only to the structure of the
human body: they trans-historicize aesthetics. However, Heinrich Wlfflin
(in Renaissance und Barock, 188828) and Riegl (in Stilfragen, 189329)
expressly historicize art forms. They understand art forms based on the
cultural epoch and its spirit in which they emerge: the Zeitgeist. These
art historians replace the then dominant framework of art interpretation
installed by Vasari, namely that of mimesis, which posits that all art wants
to do is imitate nature as realistically as possible. Riegls Viennese school
analyzes the great transformations in Western art from Renaissance to
Baroque, Baroque to Classicism, and on to Romanticism as fluctuations
between basic oppositions; with one epoch leaning towards one extreme,
26

Theodor Lipps, Raumsthetik und geometrisch-optische Tuschungen
(Leipzig, 1897), and sthetik, 2 vols.
(Hamburg and Leipzig, 1903-06; 2nd ed. 1914-20).
For an introduction to Lipps, see: Gauss, Charles Edward, Empathy. Pp. 86-89 in: Wiener, Philip P.
(ed.): The Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, Volume 2. (Charles
Scribners Sons, New York, 1973-74).
27

This is of course a very narrow interpretation of a narrow piece of Lipps
theory.
28
Heinrich Wlfflin taught for a long time at the University of Two of
Wlfflins most influential publications include:
Wlfflin, Heinrich. Renaissance und Barock: Eine Untersuchung ber Wesen und Entstehung der
Barockstils in Italien (Mnchen: T. Ackerman, 1888).
English Translation: Simon, Kathrin (transl.);
Murray, Peter (intr.) Renaissance and Baroque (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966).
Wlfflin, Heinrich. Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der
neueren Kunst, (1915) English Translation: Hottinger, M.D. (transl.). Principles of Art History: The
Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (New York: Dover, 1932).
29

Alois Riegl taught at the University of Vienna. His seminal publication is:
Riegl, Alois. Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik.
(1893). The most
recent translation in English is: Kain, Evelyn (transl.); Castriota, David (annotations and introduction); Zerner, Henri (preface): Problems of Style: Foundations of a history of ornament. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993).
While Vischer and Lipps treat empathy as a structural, a-historical aesthetic imperative, Wolfflin and
Riegl expressly historicize art, defining it through a
particular Zeitgeist.

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third dilemma:
followed by a complete reversal of aesthetic preferences into its opposite,
with less of a bias towards a trajectory of historical development than
Wlfflin, whose work breathes a Hegelian worldview, tracing a progress
towards purification throughout the different stages of Western art.
Nevertheless, their approach appears in a stark contrast with the a priori
theory of empathy which suggests its existence can be confirmed outside
of historical eras. To the contrary, for Riegl, art distinguishes itself from
reality precisely because of its drive to invent specific codes that reflect
fundamental attitudes within a cultural epoch. Wilhelm Worringer, a
student of Riegl, made a brilliant attempt to relate the two lineages of art
history in his Abstraktion Und Einfhlung (Abstraction and Empathy,
1908, available in English from 1953). German expressionists soon take
a liking for Worringer, because his appreciation for primitive art and its
abstract symbols lead him to develop a wider theory that legitimized
Expressionism. That his theories are abused in the thirties by the Nazi
party to condemn abstract art (Entartete Kunst or Degenerate Art) is a
cynical twist of history. Worringer, witnessing the complete abandonment
of realistic representation in the art of his contemporaries around the turn
of the century, is searching for an explanation. How to explain the rise of
abstraction, which at first sight appears to be in complete contradiction
with the supposedly structural principle of empathy?
Let us recapitulate: The original artistic impulse has nothing
to do with imitation of nature. This impulse is in search of pure
abstraction as the sole possibility of finding rest amidst the confusion
and obscurity of the image of the world, and it creates a geometric
abstraction starting with itself, in a purely instinctive manner. It is
the realized expression, and the sole expression conceivable for man,
of the emancipation from any arbitrariness and any temporality
of the image of the world. But soon this impulse tends to rip out
the individual thing from the exterior world, which retains as
its main interest its obscure and disconcerting connection with
this outside world, and so tries to get closer to it through artistic
restitution of its materials individuality, to purify this individual
thing of everything that is life and temporality in it, to make it as
much as possible independent both from the surrounding world and
security
Empathy
reconciliation
286

from the subject of contemplation, which does not want to enjoy
in it the vitality that is common to both, but the necessity and the
legitimacy where this impulse can find refuge from its connection
with ordinary life, in the only abstraction to which it can aspire and
which it can attain. Restitution of the finite material individuality
is both important and possible underneath the surface boundaries
but also in the intermingling of artistic presentation with the rigid
world of the crystallo-geometric: namely, the two solutions that
we could observe. Anyone who understands his own solutions in
the light of all their presuppositions can no longer speak of these
charming childish mumblings of stylization.
Now, all these momentums that we have just analyzed, and which
revealed themselves as so many aspects of the need for abstraction,
are what our definition wants to gather and summarize with
the help of the notion of style, and what it wants to oppose as
such to any Naturalism that results from the need for Einfhlung
[empathy]. Because the need for Einfhlung and the need for
abstraction appeared to us as the two poles of mans artistic
sensitivity in as much that it can be the object of pure esthetic
appreciation. These two needs are antithetical, they exclude each
other, and the history of art never ceases to display the continual
confrontation between the two tendencies.30
Societies that suffer from uncertainty and lack of self-confidence, produce
art that is more self-reflective, looking for permanence in abstractions
that appear disjointed from the high pace and flux and unpredictable
unfolding of reality. The slider on the bar hung between the extremes of
complete abstraction and total empathy finds a place according to the selfconfidence and sense of organic identity of a society: that is Worringers
claim. When Worringer presents them as two equal poles, and Einfhlung
amounts to the passing of the self into the object, he is in fact saying that
Abstraktion emerges when the self no longer wants to pass into the object.
The abstract object then represents an ideal of what the self would like to
be rather than what it thinks it is. Let us not underestimate Worringers
tour de force: for he is stating that societies in crisis which amounts
to every society undergoing modernization processes will resort to
30

P. 94 in: Ferrier, Jean-Louis, Director and Yann le Pichon, Walter D.
Glanze [English Translation]. Art of Our Century, The Chronicle of Western Art, 1900 to the Present.
(New York: Prentice-Hall Editions. 1988)
insecurity
Abstraction
trauma
The need for empathy and the need for abstraction are
two poles of mans artistic sensitivity

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third dilemma:
abstraction as a means to affirm timeless values and permanence at the
very moment when the reality of that society seems to push these values
completely behind the horizon. Worringers oppositional hypothesis
frames the Bergamo discussion: on the one hand, the Westerners who
addressed the crisis of modernization by resorting to abstraction; on
the other hand, the Easterners, who prematurely proclaim the end to
the alienation brought about by capitalism, as communism reconciled
society into an organic whole and allow for a return to an aesthetic based
on empathy31. The need to build for the common man implies the need
for an empathically accessible architecture. However, the very principles
of modernist architecture had been geared towards an ever-greater
abstraction. The simultaneous sympathy for and repulsion of socialistrealism prove that Giedion and Sert search for a third way a synthesis
between Abstraktion and Einfhlung.
31

This exact debate played itself out within Marxist circles. Especially the
discussion between Theodor Adorno against realism, for abstraction and Georg Lukacs against
abstraction, for realism deserves mention.
Georg Lukacs. Wider den missverstanden Realismus.
(Claassen Verlag, 1958). Published in English:
(transl. Mander, John, Mander, Necke) The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (Merlin Press, 1962).
Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle. (New York: Harper and Row, 1964).
And: Adorno, Theodor W. Extorted Reconciliation: On Georg Lukacs Realism in Our Time. In:
Notes to Literature, Vol.1, pp. 216-240; and Reconciliation under Duress. Bloch, et al., Aesthetics
and Politics. (transl. Ed. Taylor, Ronald) (London: NLB, 1977).
288
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289
Project for VIlla in Bruges, 2005. ORG architecture office (Alexander DHooghe with ORG, 2006).
290
3 THE MONUMENTAL SYMBOL
Groups
291
New Monumentality, a Third Space

Conception, Symbolic Form, Collective Symbol, the Sculpto-Architectural
Unit, etc.: the protagonists use these
words as embryos for a theory of public architecture. In this endeavor they
take cues from late-romanticist German aesthetic theories and import
these into modernism. The normative
concept of symbolic form as embodied in the writing of Ernst Cassirer
helps to explain their inspiration,
since this exact term returns, almost
ad nauseam, in their writings throughout the 1940s and early 1950s. The
formal discourse of Sert, Kahn, Maki
is, of course, legible in their projects.
However, understanding Giedion
and Cassirer requires a reading of
their work not as a scientific opus (in
which case it is very weak anyway)
but rather as a normative aesthetic
project, described through writing.
It is literature posing as a history of
ideas. In the project of a constellation
of Cores, each staging a public scene,
each formed as a grouping of monuments, together embodying the aspirations of a fractured public, this part
addresses a theory of the individual
monument.
292
3.1 FORM
DISCOURSE
About the Monumental Symbol
Scale: 1:2 1:500
Original man must have wandered through a world full of uncanny signs. He must have trembled at each step.
Every visible form will constitute the likeness and image of the true
and invisible form existing in the mind.

1938

thetics, ib.
P.14 in: Chirico, Giorgio de. Mystery and Creation, in: London Bulletin, n6, October
Cusanus as quoted in: p. 219 in Tatarkiewicz, Wladislaw. Form in the History of Aes-
Monumental Symbol
293
Ernst Cassirer: biographical note

Instead of defining man as an animal rationale, we should
define him as an animal symbolicum.32
Ernst Cassirer writes his
Philosophie der Symbolische Formen
in the 1920s33.
He leaves Germany in 1935. Upon his move to the USA, he became probably
the most important philosopher that has taught at Yale34. The English translation of the first two volumes of his trilogy appears posthumously, in the 1950s.
Cassirer himself wrote his last book, Essay on Man, in English (1944). In
the introduction, Cassirer explains this book as a summary of his trilogy on
Symbolic Forms. Nevertheless, Cassirers works had been read in German by
Susanne Langer, who integrated elements of his thinking into her own writings, including Philosophy in a New Key. A Study in the Symbolism of Reason,
Rite and Art (1950) and Feeling and Form (1953) 35. In contrast to Cassirers,
new editions of Langers books are available almost every other year during
the late forties and the fifties and become best-sellers and required literature in
humanities departments, an indication of the tremendous success of the promise
of symbolization to become a new paradigm in its own right. For Cassirer,
symbolic forms are the most fundamental and unifying aspect throughout the
different fields of expression myth, religion, art, language, science - of any
civilization. The act of symbolization is what sets man apart from nature. For
Cassirer, the Symbolic Form is to become a new, unifying paradigm of human
civilization.

P. 101 in: Cassirer, Ernst. Essay on Man, ib.
32
33Cassirer, Ernst. Wendel, Charles (Ed.) The Philosophy of Symbolic Form, part 1: Language.
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955) (Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Erster Teil: Die
Sprache. Berlin, 1923)
__________. Wendel, Charles (Ed.) The Philosophy of Symbolic Form, part 2: Mythical Thought.
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955) (Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Erster Teil: Die
Sprache. Berlin, 1925)
__________. Wendel, Charles (Ed.) The Philosophy of Symbolic Form, part 3: Phenomenology of
Knowledge. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957) (Philosophie der symbolischen Formen.
Erster Teil: Die Sprache. Berlin, 1929)
34
Proceedings of the Colloquium Philosophy of Culture and Symbolic Forms: New
Perspectives on Ernst Cassirer, October 1996
35
Langer, Susanne K. Philosophy in a new key. A Study in the Symbolism of Reason,
Rite and Art., (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950);
_____________. Feeling and Form. (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1953)
294
3.1.1. CASSIRERs Symbolic form

It is characteristic, for example, of the first seemingly nave and
unreflecting manifestations of linguistic thinking and mythical
thinking, that they do not clearly distinguish between the content
of the thing and the content of the sign, but indifferently merge
the two. The name of the thing and the thing itself are inseparably
fused, the mere word or image contains a magic force through
which the essence of the thing gives itself to us. And we need only
to transfer this notion from the real to the ideal, from the material
to the functional, to find that it contains a kernel of justification.
In the immanent development of the mind, the acquisition of the
sign really constitutes a first and necessary step towards knowledge
of the objective nature of the thing. For consciousness the sign is,
as it were, the first stage and the first demonstration of objectivity,
because through it the constant flux of the contents of consciousness
is for the first time halted, because in it something enduring is
determined and emphasized. No mere content of consciousness as
such recurs in strictly identical form once it has passed and has
been replaced by others. Once it has vanished from consciousness,
it is gone forever as that which it was. But to this incessant flux of
contents, consciousness now juxtaposes its own unity and the unity
of its forms. Its identity is truly demonstrated, not in what it is or
has, but in what it does. Through the sign that is associated with the
content, the content itself acquires new permanence. For the sign,
in contrast to the actual flow of particular contents of consciousness,
has a definite ideal meaning, which endures as such. It is not, like
the simple given sensation, an isolated particular, occurring but
once, but persists as the representative of a totality, as an aggregate
of potential contents, beside which it stands as a first universal. In
the symbolic function of consciousness as it operates in language,
in art, in myth certain unchanging fundamental forms, some a
conceptual and some of a more sensory nature, disengage themselves
from the stream of consciousness; the flux of contents is replaced by a
self-contained and enduring unity of form.36
36

Language, ib.
Pp. 88-89 in: Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Form, part 1:
But to this incessant flux of contents [of sensory perception], consciousness now juxtaposes its own unity and
the unity of its forms.

Monumental Symbol
295
The symbolic form appears here as a construct of the mind that can
be recognized in the phenomena of reality, but nevertheless does not
depend on reality because its meaning is embedded in its form. If this is
suggested in the above quotation, the very headings of Cassirers opening
chapter make it tantalizingly clear: it has a paragraph called the problem
of meaning, followed by the problem of representation, to produce a
synthesis in the ideational content of the sign. It is a diagrammatic form
that embeds its own content, while providing a pre-cast structure to the
stream of sensory stimuli. This content itself may be applied to a realm
outside of the symbolic form, but that does not reduce the potency of the
symbolic form on its own terms. Therein lies the quintessential difference
between mere signs and the symbol:
For the sake of a clear statement of the problem we must distinguish
between signs and symbols.37
The sign, for Cassirer, is essentially a Pavlov reflex mechanism. It points
directly, without further mediation, to a real phenomenon. It has no
significance within itself, it is simply a pointer, a device that directs you to
a specific association which in its turn requires action. Cassirer goes on to
analyze language, myth/religion, science, and art from this perspective.
The illusion of an original division between idea and phenomenon
vanishes. True, we still remain in a world of images but these are
not images which reproduce a self-subsistent world of things they
are image-worlds whose principle and origin are to be sought in an
autonomous creation of the spirit.38
The symbolic form is part of the family of innate forms that are present
within us before we experience reality, and that we use as a mould to
transform a mere sensory stimulus into an experience. This particular
selection of forms has its content embedded in its form. Charles Wendel,
Cassirers first important scholar, often refers to these forms as schemata39.
37
38
P. 111 in: Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Form, part 1: Language, ib.
39
WEendel, Charles. Introduction in: The Philosophy of Symbolic Form, part 1: Language. , ib.
The Symbol embeds its meaning in its form.

296
What he suggests seems like an ideogram. The Encyclopedia Britannica

defines the ideogram as a pictography that stands for an individual idea or
meaning for indeed what distinguishes a diagram from a mere sign, is that
it narrates an idea into a condensed, simple, generic form. This graphic
utterance explains rather than represents. Ideograms belong to the family
of pictographs, or the forerunners of actual writing; it is pre-linguistic, and
it has to be according to its own definition: once writing comes into play,
the separation between sign and content has already become irreversible.
De Saussures theory of the sign separates the form of the sign from its
content. As Tyson points out, [in structuralism] the bond between the
signifier and signified is arbitrary.40 Proof for this claim is in the fact that
different languages have developed entirely different signifiers for the
same concept41. Structuralism thus places itself squarely outside of the
Cassirerian concept of symbolic form. These forms42 cannot be derived
from linguistics and semiotics, which begin to develop in earnest also
during the 1950s. Cassirer fiercely attacks the sensationalists in these
emerging fields:
Measured by the limitless richness and diversity of all intuitive
reality, all [linguistic] symbols would inevitably seem empty;
measured by its individual concretion, they would inevitably seem
abstract and vaguethe unity of the sentencepossesses a definite
independent character of signification.43
Symbolic forms are much more than a means to copy our experience
of reality into a mirror world of signs; they belong to a universe that is
independent of the phenomena. For Cassirer, from the moment that
things enter our consciousness, they have left the universe of reality and
40
Pp. 197-200 in: Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide (New York
and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1999)
41
In fact, Cassirer himself makes a passing mention of De Saussure on p. 122 of Essay
on Man. He dismisses his distinction between langue (language) and parole (speech), as well as the
subsequent emphasis placed on speech by De Saussure. Cassirers interest is not in the development
of individuations through parole, but only in the general rules of languages.
42
Which from here onwards we will simply refer to as symbolic forms omitting the
Cassirers qualifier. Meanwhile, we will only add qualifiers when explicitly not referring to
Cassirers conception.
43
P. 108 in: Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Form, part 1: Language, ib.
Ideograms belong to the family of pictographs, or the

forerunners of actual writing; it is pre-linguistic,

Monumental Symbol
297
they have been filtered through the universe of symbolic forms. The
relative independence of this universe implies these stimuli entering the
retina are grafted onto a well-fitting ideogram or symbolic form before
entering the realm of observations. The symbolic forms therefore act as
moulds, as templates. They shape our perception of reality. Conversely, the
totality of expressions of human culture is coded and structured by them.
Aesthetic Project of Immediate Cognition
The aesthetic project here, then, is to isolate the templates from the
observations in which they are embedded and which they have shaped;
the two seem inseparable. That, exactly, is the project of Cassirer and
his students. He constructs his symbolic form as an ideal rather than
as a description of an existing medium of communication. Therefore, J.
Koerner finds grounds to dismiss the scientific value of Cassirer:
The idea of signs irreducible to contents, of concretions of the mind
in the object, had been the ideal of aesthetics and art criticism
since the Enlightenment. What Goethe termed the symbol, and
contrasted to allegorys artificial relation to meaning, had roots in
religion, for which an inaccessible God (like the thing in itself )
is present only in symbols. Cassirers symbolic forms are already a
sacramental aesthetics, far removed from the arbitrary signs of the
semioticians.44
Koerner finds Cassirers work to lack an empirical grounding necessary
to be taken serious as a philosophy of science and history. However, if
one reads Cassirers work not as a rigorous scholarly endeavor, but rather
as a normative aesthetic theory, a wholly different picture appears. Let
us then redeem Cassirers work from its self-inflicted pretension to
write a comprehensive description of the unifying principles of cultural
production, and instead approach it for what it really is: an aesthetic
theory. Donald Philip Verene, one of Cassirers more recent scholars,
44

Koerner, Joseph Leo. Perspective as Symbolic Form (book review). The
New Republic; 4/26/1993.
The aesthetic project is to isolate the templates from the

observations in which they are embedded. Cassirers
Symbolic Form is an ideal rather than as a semiotic description.
298
provides a sharp summary:

Cassirers notion of the symbol is a transformation of the Kantian
notion of the schema, that is, the notion of a sensuous-intellectual
form that lies at the basis of knowledge. Kant reaches this notion
of a schema through a process of making distinctions within his
transcendental analysis of the elements of experience. Cassirer wishes
to find this schema in experience as a phenomenon. He does so in his
discovery of the symbol as the medium through which all knowledge
and culture occur. Cassirer understands his philosophy as an idealism
that he, in fact, traces back to the problem of form in Plato, but he
insists that the object of which he speaks is truly there. It is not
a creation of the mind of the knower. This is a point on which he
insisted in a lecture to the Warburg Institute in 1936, Critical
Idealism as a Philosophy of Culture, and later, to his students at
Yale in the 1940s: The notion of the perceptual object as something
there being pregnant at the same time with something that is not
there.45
Our observations become pregnant with symbolic forms. The Gestalt
theorists W. Kohler and K. Wertheimer first develop the concept of
Prgnanz. In Gestalt Theory, Prgnanz is the degree of likeliness that a
seemingly random, complex, and non-figurative configuration of dots will
be intuitively interpreted as a simple form46. Cassirer draws explicitly on
their definition in Essay on Man and develops the concept of symbolic
pregnance:
By symbolic pregnance we mean the way in which a lived
perception, as a sensuous experience, contains at the same time a
certain non-intuitive meaning which it brings to a n immediate
and concrete representation.47.
45

Verene, Donald Philip. Metaphysical narration, science, and symbolic
form. IN: The Review of Metaphysics; 9/1/1993
46
Wertheimer defines this Pregnancy in a 1914 Conference as: a law of
the tendency towards simple formation.
As quoted in the following publication providing an in-depth reading of the historical development
of Gestalt Theory.
pp. 154-160 in: King, Brett D.; Wertheimer, Michael. Marx Wertheimer and Gestalt Theory.
(New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004).
47

P. 202 in: Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Form, part 3:
Phenomenology of Knowledge, ib.
proximity
similarity
closure
continuity
symmetry
Our observations are pregnant with symbolic forms.

Monumental Symbol
299
Pregnancy is the likelihood that one will extract particular symbolic

forms out of an arrangement of sensory stimuli. An aesthetic moment
appears when that likelihood is close to 100% that the object perceived
becomes almost identical to the ideogram within. The project, then, is to
retrieve those features present in signs, images, and other appearances
that are not meant to point directly to outside content. In other words,
what is inherently present in the form of the sign that breathes life into its
continued existence. Cassirers insistence on covering all fields of culture
is now shed in a different light. Instead of a totalizing attempt to fit
everything in a general theory of culture, it is merely an attempt to show
that any expression of culture can provoke a moment of cognition an
aesthetic moment in our mind, based on our capacity to recognize the
symbolic form in it.
The Romantic Symbol
In one sense Cassirers conception of the symbol derives from the
essay Das Symbol (1887) of the Hegelian aesthetician Friedrich
Theodor Vischer,[but also] from what caught his imagination in
his first book of systematic thought, Substance and Function (1910).
In the first chapter of this work Cassirer advances a conception
of the logic of modern science based upon the generalized notion
of a mathematical function what he offers is a statement in
purely formal terms of the interrelationship between universal and
particular that is the inner form of the symbolic form itself 48.
Where to place Cassirers concept of form? The above analysis by Donald
Verene, one of Cassirers most important scholars, places Cassirer with one
foot in the traditions of the Romanticist symbol of nineteenth-century
Germany; and with the other in the absolute formalistic reason of modern
mathematics, as studied by the Neo-Kantians of the Marburg School.
When saying symbol, one is tempted to imply prepositions: symbol of
48

Verene, Donald Philip. Metaphysical Narration, Science and Symbolic
Form. The Review of Metaphysics, 9/1/1993.
An aesthetic moment appears when the object perceived

becomes almost identical to the ideogram within.
300
or symbol for. In fact, this constitutes the destruction of the symbol, and
results from a profound misunderstanding of the distinction between the
symbol and words like sign and image. That, at least, is the claim of the
German Romantics in the nineteenth century. Conventional signifiersignified of form-content relationships may be useful to dissect signs,
words, and images, but there is a historical development of the definition
of a symbol, which hinges exactly on the fact that it defines a content not
determined by a referent in the outside world of phenomena. The content
is embedded within the symbol. Throughout the nineteenth-century
development of German aesthetics, a tradition from which ultimately
Cassirerian thought will spring, authors hammer away at an apparently
crucial distinction between symbol and allegory. This well-documented
intellectual history is of crucial importance for understanding the
development of the symbol. Susanne Knaller says:
The distinction and polarization of symbol and allegory are
semantic events of the theoretical discourse of aesthetics developed
since the second half of the eighteenth century. According to
Goethe and the Romantics, the task of art lies in speaking the
unspeakableUnlike allegory, meaning lies in appearance itself; the
symbol should make appear what is always present but nevertheless
absent, by overcoming the difference between present expression and
absent content. This coming together does not enable an external and
abstract pretext/meaning, as ascribed to allegory, but rather what is
individually general in the symbol, which can never be reduced to a
concept.49
And like Isaiah Berlin traced Romanticism back to the work of
Giambattista Vico, Matthew Rampley traces the rise of the romanticist
symbol back to Vicos writings50.
49

Susanne Knaller, A theory of allegory beyond Walter Benjamin and Paul
de Man: with some remarks on allegory and memory. in: Germanic Review, 3/22/2002.
50

Now let us return Romanticism and its father, Goethe. Goethe establishes
for the first time a clear definition of the symbol in opposition to the allegory. True symbolism is
where the particular represents the more general, not as a dream or a shadow, but as a living momentary revelation of the Inscrutable Allegory changes a phenomenon into a concept, a concept into
an image [While the symbol] changes the phenomenon into the idea, the idea into the image, in
such a way that the idea remains always infinitely active and unapproachable in the image, and will
remain inexpressible even though expressed in all languages. (Goethe. Maximen und Reflexionen:
Unlike allegory, here meaning lies in appearance itself.

Monumental Symbol
301
Symbolic representation oscillates between two polarities, the one

magical-associative, where the symbol and the symbolized merge,
and the other logical-dissociative, in which a relation of disjunction
operates between the symbol and its object. The lineage of such a
conception is clear, since the notion of a history of symbolization
can be traced back to Giambattista Vicos New Science, and the
distinction between the two repeats the Romantic opposition of
symbol and allegory51.
Rampley notes the importance of Nietzsches The Birth of Tragedy as
a point of clarity and culmination of the German tradition of opposing
symbol with allegory52. Nietzsche argues that the co-existence between
Apollonian forces (of order, transparency, reason) and Dionysian forces
(of will, excess, nature) is fundamental to achieve a work of art. In Greek
tragedy, the hero is Apollonian, the chorus is itself quintessentially
Dionysian:
we must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus
which ever anew discharges itself into an Apollinian [sic] world of
images.53
He relates images and words to the Apollonian, but music to the
(Nos. 314, 1112, 1113).
Cassirer indebtedness to Goethes thinking here should be acknowledged. As C. Wendel states: the
importance of Goethe to Cassirer cannot be overestimated [Also] Goethes theory of thought being exemplified in his biological theory of metamorphosis (P. 30 in: Wendel, Charles. Introduction
in: The Philosophy of Symbolic Form, part 1: Language. , ib.). Cassirer, like Berlin, descends from
the Romantics, saving it even after it led to one of the great barbaric regressions in the history of the
West.
The Symbol continues to play a central role in the development of a romantic aesthetic in the nineteenth century.
In Vorlesungen Ueber Aesthetik (1829), W.F. Solger considers all art as symbolic.
For him, the beautiful is to be found in the union of the general and the particular, of content and
form, of essence and reality. And this precisely mirrors his definition of the symbol: The symbol is
the existence of the Idea itself. It is really what it signifies. It is the Idea in its immediate reality. The
symbol is thus always true in itself: not a mere copy of something true(p. 129).
51

In: Rampley, Matthew. From symbol to allegory: Aby Warburgs theory of
art., ib. See also: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0422/is_n1_v79/ai_20824295, October
2005
52

In: Rampley, Matthew. From symbol to allegory: Aby Warburgs theory of
art., ib.
53

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Section 8 in The Birth of Tragedy.
The Romantic Symbol begins with Goethe and culminates

in NIetzsche desperate justification of Wagners Gesamtkunstwerk.
302
Dionysian. Nietzsche then arrives at his point: the looming disintegration

of Western art:
The Apollinian [sic] tendency has withdrawn into the cocoon of
logical schematism as well as (in Euripides) a transformation of
the Dionysian into naturalistic effects.54
The way out of this crisis consists of staging both, simultaneously, in
Western art. He quotes Schopenhauers insight that both music and form
have the quality of abstraction from the world of real things, but that
music abstracts the moment before the things materialize, whereas pure
form abstracts the things after they have appeared55. Then, Nietzsche,
who otherwise uses the word symbol extremely sparingly throughout the
Tragedy; deploys it all of a sudden most densely.
According to the doctrine of Schopenhauer, therefore, we understand
music as the immediate language of the will, and we feel our fancy
stimulated to give form to this invisible and yet so actively stirred
spirit-world which speaks to us, and we feel prompted to embody it
in an analogous example. On the other hand, image and concept,
under the influence of a truly corresponding music, acquires a higher
significance. Dionysian art is therefore wont to exercise two kinds
of influences on the Apollinian [sic] art faculty: music incites to the
symbolic intuition of Dionysian universality; and music allows
the symbolic image to emerge in its highest significance. From
these facts I infer the capacity of music to give birth to myth and
particularly the tragic myth: The myth which expresses Dionysian
knowledge in symbols.56
In the absence of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the Dionysian regresses into
mere image as a naturalistic representation, and begins to operate
allegorically. A painting of a male figure juxtaposed to a lion will infer
qualities of courage onto that person. The lion is an allegory for the
superhuman force bestowed upon the human, who, by virtue of a bright
ray of sunlight falling on his forehead, is protected by the Divine. This
54
55
56

Monumental Symbol
303
is an allegory: communicating a specific morality or wisdom by using

concrete and direct, naturalistic images. In the allegory, the form is in fact
purposefully dissociated from its content. It is an unfortunate twist of
terminology that the late nineteenth-century allegorical approach in art
has come to be called Symbolism. For reasons of consistency, it should
be retro-actively renamed as Allegorism. Russian Formalism and the
Nouveau Roman reacted exactly against this, by refusing to engage in any
form of narration. They are in the camp of what the Germans called the
Symbol.
Neo-Kantian Formalism
As a student at the University of Berlin, Cassirer becomes acquainted
with the thinking of Hermann Cohen and in 1897 becomes a student
of his at the University of Marburg. Cohen is considered as one of the
important thinkers coming out of the Marburg School of Empirical
Neo-Kantianism, together with Paul Natorp, whose Platos Ideeenlehre
(1903) provides a seminal contribution to this position. Cassirer and
his contemporary Aby Warburg are both Neo-Kantian students of the
Marburg School and have influenced each other considerably57. Natorp
and Cohen aim to reconstruct idealism58 by focusing on the formal
utterances produced by human culture, rather than on general truths about
nature (which has been relegated to the exact sciences). Or, as Cohen
states:
Not the stars in the heavens are the objects which [the
transcendental] method teaches us to contemplate in order to
know them; rather, it is the astronomical calculations, those facts
of scientific reality which are the actuality that needs to be
explained. What is the foundation of the reality which is given
57

Upon accepting a chair at the University of Hamburg in 1918, he gains access to Aby Warburgs Kulturwisschenschaftliche Bibliothek. This library, which moves to England
in 1933, and which exists there since 1944 as a part of the Warburg Institute, is first the personal
library of Aby Warburg.
58

Re-construct Hegels idealist philosophy had been dismissed by the
late nineteenth century, and idealism itself had become increasingly suspect, giving way to unbridled
Romanticism on the one hand and positivism on the other hand.
Listengurt, description of urbanization formula as published in Soviet Geography, 1975
Neo-Kantians focus not on the external objects of nature,

but on the codes and forms that we use to describe them.
304
in such facts? What are the conditions of that certainty from which
visible actuality takes its reality? The laws are the facts, and [hence]
the objects [of our investigation]; not the star-things59.
Natorp and Cohen thus take on the notion of the scientific formula on
its own formal terms as such an utterance. This approach focuses not
on the external objects of nature, but on the codes and forms that we
use to describe them. It studies the formulas and the laws we discover
to describe the natural world, rather than the natural world itself. Thus,
our intellectual energies are devoted to the deciphering, sharpening and
critiquing of our own cultural codes and formulas. This universe of formsas-ideas exists independently of the world of phenomena and sensory
stimuli, and does not depend on it for its existence. The object of study,
then, is the genetic development of forms, formulas, and codes, which
become more precise at every new iteration, yet remain structurally unable
to reach their objective limit (an exact and transparent display of the
idea they point to). This development is therefore called asymptotical,
its method formalism60. This genetic concept of formal development is
present in Cassirers first work, his 1910 Substance and Function61. As
Friedman says,
In developing an alternative theory of knowledge and reality,
Cassirer rejects empiricist and inductivist accounts of scientific
knowledge in favor of the so-called genetic conception of knowledge
characteristic of the Marburg School. Empirical science proceeds
59

Cohen, Hermann. Kants Begrndung der Ethik. Nebst ihren Anwendungen
auf Recht, Religion und Geschichte.
(Berlin, 1910)
60

We can call it formalism, as the form is considered to provide its own
content of study.
It appears that such formalism has strong analogies with the formalist movements in the arts, which
emerge around the same time. Russian formalists, reaching their zenith around the 1920s, and the
New Criticism in English and American literary circles, share a focus on the form itself. These artists
want to destroy the dichotomy between form and content that has structured for so long existing
forms of expression. Quite to the contrary, formalists such as Boris Eikhenbaum search for the primacy of form and the techniques that shape our impression of it: we need to destroy the traditional
correlatives [of form and content] and so to enrich the idea of form with new significance. Their
common claim is that a form produces its own content, one that is not shaped by or the social, political, and cultural context of the epoch in which it has been produced. Is not the nature of art that in its
realm, form becomes its own content.
61

Cassirer, Ernst. Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff. Untersuchungen
ber die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik. (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer 1910).
Monumental Symbol
305
by progressively embedding natural phenomena in an ordered

sequence of relational structures as we successively articulate and
refine mathematical representations of these phenomena in the
historical development of our theories. This procedure results in
an infinite, never-ending sequence of relational structures, but
one that is nonetheless converging on a limit structure or limit
theory representing the ideal completion of scientific progress. The
object of scientific knowledge is thus never completely given: it is
only successively approximated in the ideal X toward which our
mathematical representations of nature are converging. 62
Form is the content of this study. The Marburg School searches for
absolutes: an ideal form, which will never be completely grasped, but
which nevertheless lies at the end of an asymptotical development, at the
end of the genetic process of formal development. This claim derives its
authority from the exact sciences, with its development of formulas that
become ever-closer approximations of supreme natural laws.
The dead-end of Neo-Kantian absolute form
However, the transition of this authority into the humanities and the
arts is not evident, if we think of Berlins conception of culture as a field
of competing belief systems, and that is why a cultural formalism has
not been able to legitimize its claim for absoluteness. Russian formalist
writers like Boris Eikhenbaum sought such a definition. Like Natorp and
Cohen, Eikhenbaum wants to achieve a certain objectivity, a departure
from subjective, emotional interpretations, by treating the formal codes
of language on their own terms. However, this illusion has not been able
to withstand the test of time. In a powerful critical essay, Caryl Emerson
juxtaposes Isaiah Berlin and Mikhail Bakhtin. The central claim, for both,
is the impossibility to really take on the perspective of the other, to pass
into the others viewpoint of things. There was, for both of them, not really
an answer to this problem beyond a distanced empathy63. The neo-Kantian
claim for a thing to be true of the world thus moves beyond the horizon of
62

Friedman, p. 26 in: Kuhn and Logical Empiricism, in: Thomas Nickles
(Ed.). Thomas Kuhn, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
63

Emerson, Caryl. Isaiah Berlin and Mikhail Bakhtin: relativistic affiliations. Critical Essay. Symploke; 12/22/1999.
If formalism in the sciences aspires to a form that is objectively true of the world, formalism in the arts is merely
true from one angle. That is why absolute formalism
floundered.
306
the possible, at least in the realm of culture. That may be why also Western
formalist literature such as the New Criticism and the Nouveau Roman
has floundered. If formalism in the sciences aspires to a form that is
objectively true of the world, formalism in the arts is merely true from one
angle: from other viewpoints it remains merely self-referential, enclosed
within its own logic, and not capable of crystallizing the insights of the
observer. About this Eco said:
Robbe-Grillet [proponent of the Nouveau Roman] is wrong in
thinking that [a narrative structure] can entirely avoid [all the
interpretations it may elicit] because it is extraneous to them. It
cant be extraneous to then, since it is a sort of propositional function
which can stand for a series of situations that are already familiar
to us. It is a propositional function that each of us fills in a different
way depending on how we look at it....64
That is exactly what the protagonists of the monumental symbol want
to avoid they are instead looking to develop a focus on the public or
external function of architectural form. Objective formalism thus faces a
dead end65. A more culture-oriented (less science-based) development of
formalism is necessary. Are there subject-independent a priori forms in the
field of culture, and if so, how we can get to them?
Dynamic Plurality of Forms
Cassirer greatly admires the work of Herder, calling him the Copernicus
of history66 . Just like Isaiah Berlin, he greatly appreciates Herders
early phenomenology of culture, which he defined as a thousand
protean forms. While often misunderstood as an early legitimization of
nationalism, Berlin explicitly re-interprets Herder as an early proponent of
pluralism.
64

P. 153 in: Eco, Umberto. The Open Work, ib..
65

In Kants conception of a priori form, he is distinguishing two such forms,
namely Space and Time, in Critique of Pure Reason. However, in his Critique of Judgement,
which addresses problems of aesthetic judgement in cultural production, he refuses to make any
claims as to the universality of forms.
66

Cassirer as quoted in: p. 39 in: Wendel, Charles. Introduction in: The
Philosophy of Symbolic Form, part 1: Language. , ib.
Monumental Symbol
307
Hieroglyph wall from the tomb of Ramses the 6th, Luxor, Valley of the Dead. 1148 BC
Panofsky transforms the Symbolic From into a cultural

product, open to change.
308
Is not the good distributed throughout the whole world? Simple

because no one form of humanity and no one spot of earth could
contain it all, it was divided into a thousand forms, transformed
an eternal Proteus! in every region of the world and in every
century and yet a plan of striving forward is always visible.67
According to Wendel, this is exactly why Cassirer is so fond of Herder68.
The prefiguration of a veritable radical pluralism in Herders writing
seems at first hard to reconcile with Cassirers own Neo-Kantian
background the critical idealism of his teachers Natorp and Cohen.
In fact, Cassirers own thinking evolved on this, starting from a rather
universalistic viewpoint, for instance in his 1910 Funktionsbegriff und
Substanzbegriff (with a universalistic tendency towards ever greater
abstraction and development towards an absolute finality), towards a
much more culture-centered deterministic perspective in his trilogy and
even more in Essay on Man. There, Cassirer places more emphasis on
the continuing evolution of forms, rather than on their final endgame.
Science becomes just one field of expression, on equal footing among
several others such as myth, religion, language, and art. Although there
is still a Hegelian sequence of development (from myth, via religion, art,
and language, to science), various stages continue to co-exist as forms of
expression. Symbolic forms in a particular era are the result of a process
of abstraction and interpretation of the productions of a culture, and this
culture cannot exceed the constraints of its own thinking. This drastic turn
has a number of consequences. Nowhere is this illustrated more clearly
than in Panofskys Perspective as a Symbolic Form. In this small book,
the art historian Erwin Panofsky, as a student of Cassirer, develops the
argument that the perspective is a symbolic form that defines the scope
and limits of the new thinking in the Renaissance. Its cultural meaning
is more important than its scientific value. Importantly, he does so at a
moment when Einsteins relativity theory and space-time continuum are
67

Herder in Problems of Knowledge as quoted in: p. 39 in: Wendel, Charles.
Introduction in: The Philosophy of Symbolic Form, part 1: Language. , ib.
68

Pp. 37-39 in: Wendel, Charles. Introduction in: The Philosophy of Symbolic Form, part 1: Language. , ib.
Monumental Symbol
309
radically transforming existing models of perception, leading to a general

questioning of the accepted truths about the common understanding of
the categories of space and time. The perspective, which unites disparate
things by virtue of a support system that is itself transparent, depends
on active participation on the part of the observer, who must recognize a
depth where there is none. With this tour de force, Panofsky transforms
the symbolic form into a fundamentally cultural product, which is open
to change. He would generalize this theory as Iconology69. The universe
of symbolic forms continues to organize our perceptions of phenomena,
but it is itself being altered in the process. As Cassirer himself says: for
every reproduction of a content embodies a new level of reflection.70 The
symbolic forms are now dynamic, they can change, and their formation
and re-formulation is always accompanied by a moment of invention and
imagination. The templates and ideograms are not just evolving, each
cycle of change adds a layer or an imprint onto an already existing surface.
The forms contain their own history. Cassirer invokes the metaphor of
mnemic biology71. This is a theory claiming that stimuli leave a trace
in the form of the organism that records them. It is also reflected in the
journey from embryo to newborn, when the formation of a new human
being passes through the previous stages of his history as a species (fish,
amphibious, ape, etc.). So, the templates are a record of their civilization,
whose development is recorded within their very structure. Cassirer
also argues that the forms are open to evolution every time they surface.
Rather than a mere container of historical layers, each time one articulates
or recognizes a symbolic form, one also effectively re-collects, re-organizes
the form, so that history is not merely recorded, but actively formed. This
69

Panofsky, Erwin. Studies in Iconology. Humanistic themes in the art of the
Renaissance. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).
70

P. 90 in: Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Form, part 1: Language. , ib.
71

Importantly, Cassirer himself maintains an ambiguity between the plurality of symbolic forms that
can be found in the various fields of cultural production, and the singularity of calling every field in
its own right a historical form. Scholars of Cassirer diverge on this. Of course Panofskys Perspective as a Symbolic Form defines the SF as one in a plurality within the field of art. Others, such as
Bertaltn (metaphysics of history) call language itself a symbolic form. We will stick here with the
interpretation of the symbolic form as a plurality of forms within a sector of cultural production.
Cassirer has redeemed the symbolic forms from the universality they had in the Marburg school. They form within a culture, and this leads to the acceptance of a plurality of symbolic forms.
310
re-writing of history to fit the reality of phenomena encountered, Cassirer

also considers as the active principle of myth-making: a reconstruction of
the world into a schema that resolves conflicts and dialectic oppositions
into a unified form. Cassirer has redeemed the symbolic forms from the
universality that they needed to have with his predecessors of the Marburg
school. They form and are formed within a culture, and this insight leads
to the acceptance of a plurality of symbolic forms. This is how we have to
understand the use of the plural in the title of his trilogy.
Abstract-Sensuous Form: Solving the Dilemma
[Symbolic forms in language and myth] are both resolutions of
an inner tension, the representation of subjective impulses and
excitations in definite objective forms and figures. [The resulting
being] an abstract-sensuous form. 72
The sensuous symbol, as Verene reminded us earlier, is defined by Vischers
concept of empathy, which allows the observer to project his/her inner
drives onto particular materials found in the world of phenomena. The
abstract symbol of modern science allows the observer to distill and
extract more general formulas and codes from materials found in the
world of phenomena. Empathy moves from the general to the particular;
abstraction moves from the particular to the general. Symbolic form is
defined on the intersection. The forms are abstract-sensuous, because
they are always addressing a change in medium, and have to perform
like an interface between two modes. We will stick to the definition
of empathy as the passing of the self into the object by projecting its
identity onto it and abstraction as the transformation of the object into
the concept, conceivable only by the self in its own consciousness. If we
furthermore accept that these concepts constitute the identity of the self,
the first operation, empathy, is on an arrow from the subject into the
outward phenomenon, the second one is on an arrow from the outward
72

P. 88 in: Cassirer, Ernst; Langer, Susanne (transl.) Language and Myth.
(New York: Dover, 1946).
the Symbolic Forms provide a way out of the dilemma

between abstraction and empathy.

Monumental Symbol
311
phenomenon into the subject. Third, the universe of symbolic forms

operates as a membrane, an interface between the world of phenomena
and the work of the mind in its various layers. The forms are called into
existence via a double operation. From the world of phenomena into the
mind, through the process of abstraction, stripping the experience from
its particulars and keeping the essences necessary to store in memory
and allow for future projection. And from the mind into the world of
phenomena, by virtue of this projection of its schemata on a sensuous
reality which it then begins to frame. In other words, the symbolic forms
provide a way out of the dilemma between abstraction and empathy.
Towards Architecture
Cassirers trilogy lacks a chapter on architecture. Nevertheless, the writings
of Giedion, Sert, Kahn and Maki frequently refer to the symbolic form,
but their more interesting elaboration happen in the designs and drawings
themselves. I will argue that they attempt the materialization of underlying perceptual schemata in architecture, in other words they propose the
transposition of a priori templates into physical artifacts. The purpose of
such architecture is to spark a moment of immediate recognition, a flash
of empathy with the abstract constructs of the mind itself. Through that
moment, a romanticist-modernist aesthetic is established. The purpose of
our excursion into Cassirerian aesthetics is to present the symbolic form as
a way out of the abstraction vs. empathy dilemma. In Cassirers abstractsensuous schema, cognitive logic and sensuous experience interpenetrate73.
The Cassirerian aesthetic is sacramental. It penetrates pre-modern worlds
of myth as anthropomorphic cognition. It is fascinated with pre-modern
cultures, with their esoteric and undecipherable pictographs, like hieroglyphs74. Thus, the romantic desire for an impenetrable, non-commodified
form reminds us of the great continuity between romanticisms desire for
monuments and symbols, and modernisms drive for abstraction, first legitimized by functionalist thought, but now finally defining its own terms as
73

P. 46 in: Wendel, Charles. Introduction in: The Philosophy of Symbolic
Form, part 1: Language. , ib.
74
In: Rampley, Matthew. From symbol to allegory: Aby Warburgs theory of art., ib.
312
the materialization of pure cognition, not obscured by figurative imagery

designed for easy access and consumption. In order to achieve this, Cassirer wants us to work through myth rather than accept it. He is determined
to liberate the symbolic form, which originates in mythical thought, from
mythical thought itself. That is how we have to understand his intention
to treat both mythical thought and the exact sciences with a single theory
of form. Cassirer, in his efforts to isolate forms of pure cognition, needs to
strip observations from the flesh of reality and discover the pure ideogram,
the pure template, the element of pure cognition. In doing so, he attempts
to strip away the images of phenomena that obscure the template itself
that has molded them in the first place. The recovery of these templates
ought to reveal almost hieroglyph-like schemata, ideograms that have a
timeless depth. Cassirer believes we may be able to recover these templates
on their own terms, as autonomous utterances. The aesthetic experience,
then, is triggered through the moment of immediate recognition of the
template observed with the template within the self. Architectures project, then, will be the deployment of such forms as built form: buildings
as ideograms of pure cognition, templates of the mind itself. It ought to
be clear that Cassirers symbolic form has little or nothing to do with the
word symbolism as employed in the work of Venturi and Scott-Brown,
or Jencks, or even Kevin Lynch. Venturi then dismisses both the New
York Five and the Italian rationalists for, while being eclectic rather than
expressionistic, still shunning the role of a symbolism of the ordinary: our
argument with them is their choice of symbolism. These authors actually
mean to use the word signs or allegories instead of symbols.
Monumental Symbol
313
Franz Kline, Untitled, 1957
The Cassirerian symbol enjoys a family of resemblances

with the more architectural intuitions described by the
later Giedion.
314
3.1.2 Giedions Quest for

Monumental Symbols
Convergent Formalisms of Giedion and Cassirer
Giedion has been often rightfully criticized for focusing exclusively on
the promotion of Le Corbusier, and ignoring more expressionistic75
explorations by figures such as Bruno Taut, Erich Mendelsohn, Hans
Scharoun, Melnikov, and others. Given the love affair of the expressionists
for Worringer, there is a definite relation. In hindsight, these architects
drawings show glimpses of what Giedion was looking for in his writings.
However, one may argue that Giedions impulse is to write an aesthetic
theory about abstract expressions in architecture that moves beyond
German expressionism, and reconnects older Romantic notions of the
Symbol with the power of modernist abstraction. In that sense, the
Cassirerian description of the symbol, has a family of resemblances
with the more architectural intuitions described by Giedion in his later
writings.
However, we cannot compare Giedions formalism with Cassirers without
addressing the apparent irreconcilability between Giedions outlook, as
a student of Wlfflin, and Cassirers Neo-Kantian origins. Wlfflinian
formalism concerns the discovery of the formal apparatus proper to a
certain historical moment, whereas the Neo-Kantian formalism is about
an overarching, general formal structure of cognition throughout different
phases of historical development. Wlfflin and Giedion study works of
art to arrive at an understanding of the spirit of a historical moment
or Zeitgeist, whereas Cassirer seeks to understand the general features
of art, religion, language, and science that are exactly beyond their own
75
As in the critique on Giedion and Sert formulated by Manuel
de Sola Morales in the Urban Project. (see discussion on the writings of de Sola Morales in part 1,
the Core).
The repression becomes particularly blatant when we look at Charles Jencks structuring of modernism as based on six currents (through an application of Levi-Strauss structuralist principles on the
theories and practitioners of architecture).
pp. 28 in: Jencks, Charles. Modern Movements in Architecture. (New York, Penguin, c1973).
Monumental Symbol
315
particular moment. Nevertheless, there are also grounds for compatibility.

Both thinkers are deeply influenced by the tradition of German idealist
Romanticism and its concept of the Symbol. Georgiadis, who is an
important scholar of Giedions work, acknowledges as much76 and places
Giedion squarely in relation to Schellings concept of the symbol, thus
explaining Giedions discourse on the symbol, which appears as early as in
Space, Time and Architecture. Contrary to the monolithic clich about
Giedion as a vulgar Hegelian, he develops, in the latter part of his career,
a profound interest in elements of form that stand outside the concept
of the historical development of civilization as evolving into ever new
stages of abstraction and purity. This is the later Giedion, as he himself
acknowledges:
At this point [after Mechanization takes Command and Space,
Time and Architecture, ad] I became concerned with those elements
that remained constant despite the advent of mechanization and the
tragic 19th century rift between thinking and feeling.77
Giedion, prominent student of Wlfflin, is now saying goodbye to his
mentors approach:
Scholars of the nineteenth century concentrated on intensive studies
of individual stylesCareful comparisons were then made between
stylistic periods, so that by such juxtaposition the peculiarities
of each would become more evident. Renaissance Und Barock by
Heinrich Wlfflin (1888) may serve as an example of this method.
But Giedion then defines his own position in opposition to Wlfflins:
Today we are interested in what it is that great periods have in
common no matter how greatly individual forms may vary. The
problem of continuity is far more important to us than the definition
of separate styles and their special characteristics.78
76

Georgiadis, Sokratis. Sigfried Giedion: eine intellektuelle Biographie.
(Zrich: Amman, c1989).
77

78

Wlfflinian Formalism (Zeitgeist-based style)

Giedions Trajectory
Cassirerian Formalism (Neo-Kantian forms)
316
Giedion has marked his intention to wave goodbye to the historical

determinism of the Wlfflin school, while Cassirer, in his later work,
Essay on Man, has departed clearly from the idea the there exists a system
of Kantian a priori forms, which are to be gradually uncovered through
scientific and philosophical progress. Instead, Cassirer argues,
We enjoy the polychromy and the polyphony of mans nature. But a
philosophical analysis sets itself a different task. Its starting point
and working hypothesis are embodied in the conviction that the
varied and seemingly dispersed rays may be gathered together and
brought into a common focus. The facts here are reduced to forms,
and these forms themselves are supposed to possess an inner unity.
[] But man is no longer considered as a simple substance which
exists in itself and is to be known by itself. His unity is conceived
as a functional unitythis is a dialectic unity, a coexistence of
contraries. []79
This, of course, is mans drive for symbolization: his desire to abstract and
internalize sensory reality in a series of schemata. Cassirer goes on:
The various modes of this expression constitute a new sphere. They
have a life of their own, a sort of eternity by which they survive
mans individual and ephemeral existence.[] WE may speak of
a tension between stabilization and evolution [of these forms],
between a tendency that leads to fixed and stable forms and another
tendency to break up this rigid scheme.80
With the latter statement, the distance between Cassirer and Giedion
shrinks. For Giedion says in his introduction to his last work that
In the two volumes of The Eternal Present Beginnings of Art
and The Eternal Present Beginnings of Architecture, I attempted
to get at some fundamental principles. The foremost question was the
relation between constancy and change. Constancy does not imply
mere continuation, but the ability of the human mind suddenly
to bring life to things that have been left slumbering through long
79
80

today we are interested in what it is that great periods

have in common no matter how greatly individual forms
may vary.

Monumental Symbol
317
ages.81
Thus, Giedions teleology begins to fall in line with that of Cassirer,
even though they arrive there from greatly distinct traditions. So we
find an unexpected alignment between the purposes of Wlfflinian
formalism of features of style and Cassirerian formalism of features
of cognition. This sustains further scrutiny if we examine the body of
reference literature that makes up the writing of both authors. A common
knowledge base appears, broadly centered on the concept of empathy
through abstraction. We have already discussed the importance of the
thinking of Vischer, Lipps, and Worringer (the late nineteenth-century
German psychology of aesthetics school), as well as Kohler, Wertheimer
and Koffka (the Gestalt theory school) for Cassirer. Strikingly, Giedion
builds his two volumes The Eternal Present (1962 and 1964), which pave
the ground for his final book on the third space conception, on the same
concepts, referring often to the same authors. Giedion in fact concentrates
the bulk of his references under the heading Annunciation of an Art
Historian82. Both authors also refer to the early scholarship on primitive
art (Levy-Bruhl, Luquet, even Freud on Totemism), which emerges only
around the turn of the century, after the processing of the 1879 discovery
of the caves of Altamira. Giedion in fact acknowledges Cassirer in 1962,
when he says that Cassirer demonstrates that
Man lives in a new dimension of reality a symbolic universe,
which is the result of the autonomization of the Uexkull or
Funktionskreis shared by man and animal: namely the mechanism
which maintains an equilibrium between inner and outer worlds
by adapting its own mindset as well as structures actions that are to
change the environment.83
It is impossible to understand Giedions development of a formalism of
81

82

P. 40 onwards in: Giedion, Sigfried. The Eternal Present. A contribution on
constancy and change. vol.1: Art. (New York: Bollingen Foundation, distr. Pantheon Books, 1962).
83

Pp. 82-85 in: The Eternal Present. A contribution on constancy and
change. vol.1: Art, ib.
Giedion concentrates the bulk of his references under the

heading Annunciation of an Art Historian
318
the New Monumentality, without knowledge of his analysis of primitive

or in his words primeval art. His 1962 volume is opens with a large
study of the drive towards abstraction in primeval art. His next three
major chapters, on symbols (of body parts), sacred animals, and human
figures, serve to underpin the claim to abstraction made in the beginning.
Building on the aforementioned scholarship, Giedion sketches primitive
mans mythological universe made out of symbols of the human or animal
body. These symbols are invariably abstract sensuous forms, the reduction
of primeval gestures to their schema:
Important is Worringers essential insight that abstraction started
with the beginnings of art. The material from the Aurignacian
period was unknown when he first set down this theory.84
The discoveries of primeval art, made after Worringer formulated
his hypothesis on empathy and abstraction, seem to validate it. Thus,
Giedions investigation has defined its purpose to demonstrate the
constancy of the abstraction drive in all forms of human expression,
from the very onset of the history of mankind. This, for him, constitutes
a fundamental unity of expression. For Cassirer, the functional unity
is mans drive for symbolization, contained in every expression since
the dawn of civilizations. But this difference at times appears to be a
difference of words, rather than of teleology. Cassirers symbolization
relies on a fundamental human desire for empathy to be at one with his
surroundings by projecting himself onto it which proceeds and develops
in ever higher stages of abstraction. But abstraction itself lies at the very
root of the drive for symbolization. For the appearances of reality, upon
being approached emphatically, can then be internalized as concepts of
the mind, and be generalized as symbols. Thus, Giedionian abstraction
and Cassirerian symbolization present themselves as two sides of the same
coin. The bigger remaining gap between the teleology of Giedion and
that of Cassirer may reside in the opposition between Giedions monism
vs. Cassirers implicit pluralism. Giedions obsession with modernism as
84

P. 41 in: Giedion, Sigfried. The Eternal Present. A contribution on constancy and change. vol.1: Art.
Giedionian abstraction and Cassirerian symbolization

present themselves as two sides of the same coin.

Monumental Symbol
319
Fernand Leger, the Builders, 1950
320
the only justifiable culmination of Western art seems to be at odds with

Cassirers tolerance for an as great variety as possible of cultural utterances.
However, I will argue that Giedions discourse differs substantially from
his own aesthetic sensibility, which hints at the promise of a variety of
viewpoints. Like Cassirer, we will read Giedions account of history as
an aesthetic project, rather than as the academic / scientific work of a
historian.
Symbol and Spectacle
Nine Points on a New Monumentality, co-authored by Sert, Giedion,
and the artist Fernand Lger places the emotional life of communities
at the center of architectural purpose. This manifesto summarizes
a more elaborate article by Giedion called The Need for a New
Monumentality. In it, he inconsistently presents different ideas that will
later by synthesized in his theory of the third space conception, presented
most forcefully in his posthumously published Architecture and the
Phenomena of Transition (1971). First, Giedion assigns monumental
modern architecture to a specific urban project:
Spectacles, which will lead people back to a neglected community
life, must be re-incorporated into civic centers, those very centers
which our mechanized civilization has always regarded as
inessential.85
But with which architectural templates, theories and principles? A second
segment of Giedions text revolts against resurgent neo-classicism e.g.,
the Soviet Palace to which he refers in industrialized nations throughout
the 1930s.
The present continues the habits of the last century and follows
in the tracks of pseudo-monumentality.as different as they may
be in their political and economic orientations, there is one point
where the governments of all countries meet: in their conception of
85

Giedion also suggests integrating the provision of these centers into a
Keynesian policy of public investment.
Monumental Symbol
321
Giedion, Sert, Leger: Towards a New Monumentality (1944)

1.
Monuments are human landmarks which men have created as
symbols for their ideals, for their aims, and for their actions. They are
intended to outlive the period which originated them, and constitute
a heritage for future generations. As such, they form a link between
the past and the future.
2.
Monuments are the expression of mans highest cultural needs. They
have to satisfy the eternal demand of the people for translation of
their collective force into symbols. The most vital monuments are
those which express the feeling and thinking of this collective force
the people.
3.
Every bygone period which has shaped a real cultural life had the
power and the capacity to create these symbols. Monuments are,
therefore, only possible in periods in which a unifying consciousness
and unifying culture exists. Periods which exist for the moment have
been unable to create lasting monuments.
4.
The last hundred years witness the devaluation of monumentality.
This does not mean that there is any lack of formal monuments or
architectural examples pretending to serve this purpose; but the socalled monuments of recent date have, zith rare exceptions; become
empty shells. They in no way represent the spirit or collective feeling
of our times.
5.
The decline and misuse of monumentality is the principal reason
why modern architects have deliberately disregarded the monument
and revolted against it. Modern architecture, like modern painting and sculpture, had to start the hard way. It began by tackling
the simpler problems, the more utilitarian buildings like low-rent
housing, schools, office buildings, and similar structures. Today,
modern architects know that their buildings cannot be conceived
as isolated units, that they have to be incorporated into the vaster
urban schemes. There are no frontiers between architecture and town
planning, just as there are no frontiers between the city and the
region. Correlation between them is necessary. Monuments should
322
constitute the most powerful accents in these schemes.

6.
A new step lies ahead. Postwar chqnges in the whole economic structure of nations may bring zith them the organization of community
life in the city which has been practically neglected up to date.
7.
The people want the buildings that represent their social and community life to give more than functional fulfillment. They want
their aspiration for monumentality, joy, pride and excitement to be
satisfied. The fulfillment of this demand can be accomplished, with
the new means of expression at hand, though it is no easy task. The
following conditions are essential for it: A monument being the integration of the work of the planner, architect, painter, sculptor and
landscapist demands close collaboration between all of them. Most
modern architects have not been trained for this kind of integrated
work. Monumental tasks have not been entrusted to them. As a rule,
those who govern and administer a people, brilliant as they may be
in their respective fields, represent the average man of our period in
their artistic judgments...
still imbued with the pseudo-ideals of the
nineteenth century. This is the reason why they are not able to recognize the creative forces of our period, which alone could build the
monuments or public buildings that should be integrated into new
urban centers which can form a true expression of our epoch.
8.
Sites for mouments must be planned. This will be possible once
replanning is undertaken on a large scale which zill create vast open
spaces in the noz decaying areas of our cities. In these open spaces,
monumental architecture will find its appropriate setting.....Only
when this space is achieved can the new urban centers come to life.
9.
... Man-made landscapes would be correlated with natures landscapes and all elements combined in terms of the new and vast facade, sometimes extending for many miles, which has been revealed
to us by the air view. This could be contemplated not only during a
rapid flight but also from a helicopter stopping mid-sit. Monumental architecture will be something more than strictly functional. It
will have regained its lyrical value. In such monumental layouts,
architecture and city planning could attain a new freedom and
develop new creative possibilities, such as those that have begun to be
felt in the fields of painting, sculpture, music and poetry.
Monumental Symbol
323
monumentality. 86
(See dilemma of public architecture87). For Giedion, this approach
while seemingly unrelated to Fascism, uses in fact its logical methods of
populism. The search for an alternative monumentality is on.
What began as necessary structural abbreviations emerges now
as symbols. The work of Arp, Miro, Lger, and many others is
moving in this direction. The modern artists created these symbols
out of the anonymous forces of our period [] But children can
understand them, because these figurations are as close to primitive
life as our complicated civilization. For the first time in centuries
artist have gone back to the simplicity, which is the stamp of any
kind of symbolic expression. They have shown that the elements
indispensable for monumentality are already at hand.88
Giedion, by virtue of his alliance with Leger, finds in surrealist primitivism
and cubism with a nascent language of symbolic forms. The relation with
the Cassirerian discourse of abstract-sensuous, primitive mythic utterances
is unavoidable. Since for Giedion, art has advanced farther in the discovery
of this new language, the cooperation between artists and architects
becomes a way for architecture to conquer this New Monumentality
and internalize the aesthetic conventions of abstract primitivism
into its own logic. The triangulation of authors uniting art (Leger),
architecture (Giedion), and planning (Sert) is meant to overcome any
remaining interdisciplinary barriers. The New Monumentality is for a new
architectural theory for the constellation of civic complexes. However,
the early definition differs from its development in the 1950s, as becomes
blatantly clear in the last paragraph called Civic Centers and Spectacles.
From the enormous popularity of fireworks and water-light spectacles,
observed especially during the world fairs of 1937 and 1939, springs an
equally enormous promise: for are not these spectacles abstract sensuous
86

Pp. 54-55 in: Giedion, Sigfried: The Need for a New Monumentality. As
published in pp. 52-61: Harvard Architecture Review, ib..
87

Already in 1932, Giedion sends a protest-montage to Stalin, failing
Hamiltons project for the Soviet Palace for being nothing more than a decorated shed.
88

P. 57 in: Giedion, Sigfried: The Need for a New Monumentality. As published in pp. 52-61: Harvard Architecture Review, ib.
What began as necessary structural abbreviations

emerges now as symbols.
324
events, where all attempts for figurativeness have been abandoned? From
this Giedion concludes that
Everybody is susceptible to symbols [...] Newly created civic centers
should be the sitewhere people play as important a role as the
spectacle itself, and where a unity of architectural background, the
people, and the symbols conveyed by the spectacles will arise.89
From this conception springs the need for architecture to expand beyond
fixed structures, to encompass
Mobile elements, constantly varying the aspect of buildings []
and color- and form projections onto vast surfaces of buildings
[]90.
With this description, Giedion comes awfully close to our interpretation
of Serts early synthesis of the arts as a Gesamtkunstwerk, as exemplified
in the Barcelona pavilion. Even the audience itself becomes part of the
spectacle. However, also Giedion will abandon this inquiry into the
ephemeral and throughout the 1950s and 1960s he develops the New
Monumentality as a question of massing: the architectural organization of
mass and void.
Alexander Calder, Guillotine for Eight, 1963
Symbol as Third Space Conception

Giedion never succeeds in writing a thorough definition of a modern
monumentality. Instead, his historical foreword proliferates ever more, and
Giedion dies before completing the work itself. Can we perform its postmortem reconstruction in the light of the Romanticism of Cassirer?
Giedion organizes the history of architecture with a rough brush (and
is often criticized for that91): he recognizes three successive space
conceptions. But what is this category?
89

P. 60 in: Giedion, Sigfried: The Need for a New Monumentality. As published in pp. 52-61: Harvard Architecture Review, ib..
90

This is point 9 in: Sert, Jose; Lger, Fernand; Giedion, Sigfried. Nine
Points on Monumentality in: Zucker, ib.; Harvard Architecture Review, ib.
91

See: Addendum: defending Giedion against accusations of totalitarianism.
Monumental Symbol
325
It is possible to set physical limits to space, but space itself is limitless

and intangible. Space dissolves in darkness and in infinity. It is
necessary to take action before space can become visible: it must
acquire form and boundary from the hand of nature or the hand of
man Space is intangible yet it can be perceived.92
This first era shows Mans demiurgic faculty:
Man takes cognizance of the emptiness which girds him round
and gives it a psychic form and expression. The effect of this
transfiguration, which lifts space into the realm of the emotions, is
SPACE CONCEPTION. It is the portrayal of mans inner relation
to his environment man thus realizes his urge to come to terms
with the world.
In other words, the space conception is a schema for the retrofitting
of sensory impression into pre-existing concepts. It is a template of
understanding. With this definition, Giedion comes awfully close to the
Cassirerian symbolic form. Both concepts also imply a great continuity
through history. For Giedion, the third space conception, dawning with
modernist architecture, presents a synthesis of the preceding space
conceptions. It elaborates what man discovered from prehistory onwards:
The three space conceptions discernible in the history of architecture
have one thing in common, despite other major differences: all accept
the dominance of the vertical. [] a sense of order: the vertical on
its corollary, the horizontal plane.93
Architecture, throughout the ages, is defined first and foremost as an
elevation. Its first metaphor is already that of a lift-off, a conquest, a
victory over gravity. Its massing, however, has transformed greatly through
the successive periods of different space conceptions. Our interest is
neither to confirm nor to repudiate Giedions account of history, but
merely to understand his definition of the New Monumentality as it
92

93

Giedion, Phenomena of Transition, op. cit.
Architecture, throughout the ages, is defined first and

foremost as an elevation.
326
relates to the broader definition of an architecture of symbolic forms.

Preceding the first space conception, Giedion discerns a prehistorical
conception of space. This can still be found in the manner of observing
and drawing of children.
The childs drawing does not reproduce the actual object that he
has in front of him, and which he often does not even look at, but
it gives a representation of the object as he sees it in his mind, an
aspect that I have called the internal image (le modle interne).
This internal image consists of a spontaneous mental selection from
among the visible attributes of the object...the finished work may
contain aspects of the model which cannot be seen, while others
which leap to the eye may be entirely neglected.94.
This intuitive ordering can be found also in prehistoric cave paintings
(see the Group). Its reference here is because Giedion notes that these
works are marked by simultaneity, a feature which will return in the New
Monumentality:
The most usual way to give a simultaneous picture of both the
inside and the outside of something is to show the thing itself as
transparent by delineating its outline and then depicting its interior.
In primitive art, anthropologists have dubbed this X-ray. 95
Similarly, a chronological sequence of events and emotions is represented
simultaneously, without indication of successions. Time is thus subsumed
into space, which for Giedion is a reason to claim that the sense of space
precedes the sense of time in primitive man.96 Giedion then locates the
first space conception at the dawn of the first great civilizations, including
Sumer, Babylon (Mesopotamia), Egypt, and Greece. Here we find that
first conception of monumentality that we are still familiar with: the
pyramid, the ziggurat, the totem, the obelisk. He calls these space94
Luquet, p. 69 in chapter on intellectual realism, in: Art Primitif (Paris,
1930), as quoted by Giedion in: Giedion, S. p. 49-60 in; The Eternal Present. A contribution on
constancy and change. vol.1: Art. op.cit.
95

96

P. 520 Onwards in: Giedion, Sigfried. The Eternal Present. A contribution on constancy and change. vol.1: Art.
Pyramid of Medum, as published in Giedions
Architecture and the Phenomena of Transition.
Monumental Symbol
327
radiating volumes, for the force of their architecture is directed towards

their surroundings. They are primary markers, moments of verticality that
speak of the power and victory of nature of the collective, as embodied in
the state or ruler. Giedion consciously relates these expressions to those of
a strong state. There is no public inside to these monuments, because the
inside, the most sacred space, is reserved to the priests, or the ruler only.
What happened to man when states started to become organized,
when masses of people become subjected to the will of a single
individual. What experiences and traditions of prehistoric man
persisted through the high civilizations of Egypt and Sumer?97
Importantly, the surroundings of these monumental objects are subjugated
to the master volume not only by the sheer height and force of its
elevation, but also by a series of landscape, infrastructure, and architecture
devices that serve to orient all towards to the single, unifying prism: the
monument as a frozen gesture of control of the ruler. For Giedion, the
memories of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia are still fresh.
For Giedion, Greek architecture, when viewed through the lens of its
architectural production, finds itself in the final stage of the first space
conception, already nearing however a moment of transition between
the first and the second space conception. Giedion explains the pressure
on the first space conception with a pars pro toto: a micro-history of
the hypostyles a hall densely packed with columns as a stand-in for
a larger evolution. If the monuments of the first space conception are
marked by their massiveness, in a literal sense their being filled up with
matter, with almost no space left for an actual interior, then the rise of
hypostyles in late Persian and in Greek architecture marks the dilution of
this massiveness. Instead, the first, prudent signs of an interior space are
becoming clear. Yet the hypostyles still reduce the interior space to series
of corridors.
With the development of Roman architecture and the discovery of
vaulting technology, the column will finally come into its own and acquire
97

P. 2 in: Giedion, Sigfried. The Eternal Present. A contribution on constancy and change. Vol.2: Architecture.
The Pantheon in Rome, as published in Giedions
Architecture and the Phenomena of Transition.
328
individuality. Larger spans are possible, and the monumental interior

spaces are the result. The great palaces, markets, and thermae of Ancient
Rome are proof of the development of an inward-oriented monumentality.
The most emblematic project here is the Pantheon. A simple comparison
between the mausoleum for Augustus and the Pantheon, both on a
circular floor plan, show what has changed: the mausoleum is a massive,
full cylinder, which is experienced only from the outside. The Pantheon is
primarily a large indoor space. Giedion places this evolution in the light of
technological progress and the rise of a secular mass society, which, thanks
to technology among other things, is now allowed into the spaces that
were once reserved for the sacred aristocracy only. This space conception
extends throughout the development of European civilizations: gothic,
renaissance, and baroque all belong to the second space conception,
made possible by the twin discovery of arch and vault. Giedion points
out that each space conception builds on the previous one; the result is
a layered consciousness, several of which may be suppressed in favor of
a dominant one, but which nevertheless are retained in a dormant state.
Hence the importance of the third space conception, which allows all
its older precursors to come to the surface simultaneously. This is why
Giedion gives ample attention to the periods of transition between two
space conceptions; for it is in these periods that the elements of constancy
become most visible. For in the transition, the intertwining of two space
conceptions appears, and this will be the exact prerequisite for the third
space conception: a synthesis of the preceding ones.
Monumental Symbol
Because the third space conception is a synthesis between the first, the
second, and the prehistoric space conceptions, a modern monumentality
will be deeply rooted in the historical traditions of architecture, most
specifically in its verticality: the power to structure territories through
vertical markings. This verticality is furthermore a lift-off, a victory over
gravity and therefore, over nature. This brings to mind Ortega Y Gassets
The third space conception is a synthesis of the first two

space conceptions

Monumental Symbol
329
Kenzo Tanghes 1966 project for Shinjuku, as published in Giedions Architecture and the Phenomena of
Transition.
New Monumentality buildings compose their solid parts

so that they never completely subject a space to the hegemony of a single architectural component.
330
assessment of the walled square as a civilizational moment, a victory of the

endless vegetational fields. The modern result is an architecture of which
the monumental interior (of the second space conception) is merged and
brought into synthesis with the monumental, space-radiating exterior
(of the first space conception). Therefore, a new kind of continuity is
established, hitherto unknown: this continuity unites the inside of the
building with its outside, thus establishing a continuous surface that runs
through the building, making the insides of the monument open to the
public. To illustrate this claim, Giedion refers for instance to Utzons
Sydney Opera, where the outsides and the insides of the shells are visible
simultaneously. Another example is Kenzo Tanges project for Tsukiji
(1966), where long high slabs are penetrated by huge openings, in effect
creating a 3-dimensional figure. The continuous surfaces stretching from
the inside to the outside create a continuous monumentality. This play of
volumes and space, interweaving inside and outside, is possible only thanks
to the invention of transparent materials (high quality glass), which allow
the creation of effective indoor spaces in this fluid, continuous sequence of
volumes and surfaces. For Giedion, technology remains a crucial factor to
allow for the New Monumentality. But the monumentality is not at the
service of a demonstration of new materials and technologies, but rather to
the opposite; these new systems are at the service of a most sophisticated
interplay of volumes, surfaces, and spaces. In a sense, the architecture of
the third space conception is a group form with a roof on top. There is
indeed an intricate relation between the urbanistic concept of the Group
and the architectural definition of the New Monumentality. This relation
appears in full view during Giedions discussion of the Forum Romanum.
He interprets the Forum not only as an orthogonalized version of the
Greek grouping, but also as a configuration where the space-radiating
forms of the Acropolis have been internalized into a large architectural
structure containing courtyards and interior open spaces. The group form
is transformed here from the scale of urbanism to that of architecture.
It becomes architecturalized. New Monumentality buildings compose
their solid parts so that they never completely subject a space to the
Monumental Symbol
331
Above: Le Corbusier, X-ray of the Chapel of Ronchamps
What he describes through writing had, it can be argued,

not yet arrived in architecture.
332
hegemony of a single architectural component. With the fusion of the first

and second space conception with the prehistoric space conception, an
argument of transparency emerges: that several spaces, programs, insides,
and outsides ought to be simultaneously present. Simultaneity is indeed a
critical feature of the prehistoric space, and the continuous monumentality
allows for the simultaneous presence of a series of diverging, contrasting
spaces, and functions. The result brings to mind again this hidden longing
in both Sert and Giedion to achieve a modern spectacle, a modern version
of the Gesamtkunstwerk. And if the Gesamtkunstwerk was marked by the
desire to re-unite content and form, the same desire manifests itself here.
For Giedion, it is essential that the new architecture will be sculptural:
[Le Corbusiers 1930 Swiss Pavilion] was a beginning that led to a
conception of the entire building as a single sculptural volume.98
The sculptural choice as opposed to historical typology, or functional
box, or structural honesty choice in form-making however, is not
innocent. It is in Giedions assessment the appropriate way to get back
at the direct force of primitive forms and symbols. Cubism, primitivism,
and surrealism all aim to bring back to the surface these lingering
deep expressions of the pre-civilizational human mind. The sculptural
quality Giedion refers to is in fact that of the abstract-sensuous symbol.
Cassirerian symbolic form, as a concept or template, is made explicit as
possible in the massing of the building. And here precisely, the continuous
monumentality finds its vocation: the play of continuous monumental
surfaces that are interweaving inside and outside spaces will establish
a three-dimensional gesture. The various continuous surfaces are not
to be simply abstract, but the volumes they are creating will merge to
become a monumental symbol, the openings of which are part of the
overall scheme of the symbol, which therefore manifests itself primarily
vertically, in elevation. Notwithstanding the examples in Giedions book,
what he describes through writing had, it can be argued, not yet arrived
in architecture99. However, his descriptions are similar to the paintings of
98
99
P. 266 in Giedion, Sigfried. Architecture and the Phenomena of Transition., ib.

Although the concluding chapter of his final book did include numerous examples, the
Monumental Symbol
333
Franz Kline, also made in the 1950s. Klines paintings show a great many
iterations of destabilized hieroglyphs and characters, simple geometries
thrown onto the canvass with great ferocity and still vibrant, even after the
paint has dried out, suggesting not just a crystalline geometry but at least
as much the contours of a simple life form, moving and gesturing as it gets
caught on the canvass. Instead of solid objects, the New Monumentality
promises us architecture as a system of frames. What was still a passage
through the building in Melnikovs Soviet Pavilion of 1929, Le Corbusier
1953 Carpenter Center, and OMAs 1992 Kunsthal in Rotterdam, has
now expanded to collapse the hermetic core of the object, organizing
the remaining matter as merely a system of edges and ribbons. These are
welded together to become a veritable mute symbol, organizing views and
passage, and large open spaces flowing through its own body. In fact, a
space that belongs to the public now penetrates all the way into the solid,
perforating and shattering its unity. What is left is monument that frames
the public, while making legible for it the surrounding urban structure.
The monumental symbol thus stands as a three-dimensional hieroglyph
pointing upwards, structuring with its gestures also sideward, and
establishing continuity from its front to its rear end, and between its sides.
In the openings, program is nesting, in its solids, the notion of private
finds a heightened significance; and the clear contrasts between solids
and openings establish a public volumetric, testimony to an architecture
devoted to its public function.
most relevant of which is a project by Kenzo Tange. Overall however, the projects shown varied
between classics of modernism on the one hand and Team X projects on the other hand.
334
Monumental Symbol
335
Sert, Peabody Terrace Student Housing, Cambridge, USA. As published in Bastlund, Jose Luise Sert:
Architecture, City Planning, Urban Design (1967)
A total synthesis of the arts: today, back to pre-renaissance items, free forms, Miro.
336
3.1.3 Serts sculpto-architectural

unit
Gesamtkunstwerk
When explaining the synthesis of the arts, Sert in 1951 distinguishes
between three means of synthesis: related, applied, and integral. In the
related approach, elements remain independent but are placed in close
proximity. In the applied approach, sculpture and painting are placed into
an architectural framework. However, in the integral approach, all the arts
merge into a sculpto-architectural unit. By 1953, he develops techniques,
for these, exulting especially the total synthesis100.
1 related
1. Architecture in the nude, emphasis of structure

2. Sculpture detached or put on architecture
3. Sculptural architecture bones and flesh
4. Painting on the Structure
5. Painting through the structure, perspective
6. Today, back to pre-renaissance items, free forms, Miro.
Sert prepares six points, but he clearly favors the last option: in the
manuscript, it is underlined with great pathos. He thus begins to treat
architecture increasingly also as sculpture and painting. The purpose is
to develop a series of extractions from the realm of primitive myth. How
else should we understand his explicit reference to the pre-renaissance
and to Miro? The shift towards appears in full view if we first compare
his earlier Barcelona Pavilion to his later De Maeght Foundation,
and then look at its translation into a public architecture in his bigger
projects in the USA. The architectural structure of the Barcelona pavilion
is ruthlessly straightforward: a grid in plan, a grid in elevation. But this
framework allows for a rich variety of in-fills: paintings and colored panels
100

Sert, J.L. preparatory notes for Towards a Synthesis of the Arts. File
D115 (Sert Archives at the Harvard University Special Collections of the GSD Loeb Library, Cambridge, MA)
Monumental Symbol
2 applied
3 integrated
337
Sert, Barcelona Pavillion as published in Bastlund, Jose Luise Sert: Architecture, City Planning, Urban Design
(1967)
sculpture on building
338
Sert, De Maeght Foundation as published in Bastlund, Jose Luise Sert: Architecture, City Planning, Urban
Design (1967)
sculptural building
Monumental Symbol
339
Above: Sert, Barcelona Pavillion. Below, Right; Sert, De Maeght Foundation. Both as published in Bastlund,
Jose Luise Sert: Architecture, City Planning, Urban Design (1967)
Sert does so in order to recover the primal energies suppressed by a decaying bourgeois culture.
340
as rectangles in the grid; sculptures and temporary elements placed as

markers in the neutral spaces; and a sculptural walkway elevating itself
from the street and passing through the second story of the building to
come out on the other side101. The prefabricated architectural structure
serves as a mere frame for an apparatus of sculptural forms, but Sert is still
firmly embedded in the modernist language of architecture as structure,
explored by first-generation modernists such as Gropius and Mies. But
the sculptural forms will soon overtake the grid structure of the building.
The flesh will overwhelm the bones. In the De Maeght Foundation
project (1957-1959), the roof is a series of extruded bull-horns so large as
to dominate the entire building underneath it. The walls contain a variety
of patterns in brick and concrete. The actual structure of the architecture is
pushed completely into the background. The landscaping of the site, which
forms an integral part of the project, accentuates dramatic approaches at
varying angles. Sert now fulfills his promise to go back to an architecture
of pre-Christian, pre-renaissance forms. He does so to recover the primal
energies suppressed by a decaying bourgeois culture, and in that sense is
part of the Spanish primitive surrealists whose works will be featured in
the Foundation: Dali, Miro. In 1957, Sert becomes an actor in a movie
by Hans Richter. Called A Chess Sonata, its cast includes also Wiener,
Duchamp, Jacqueline Matisse, Ernst, Cocteau, Kiesler, and others. The
surrealist play features characters such as the bull-fighter, Daedalos, the
Minotaur, Ariadne, etc. Mythical forms and subconscious characters are
merging in an eerie meta-universe, where primal energies and drives are
materialized without much further mediation102. A new avenue is opened
here: of architecture re-conceptualized as a clash of mythical forms. The
abandonment of architectures definition through program or structure
construction constitutes a radical break with architectural modernism as
it has been defined up until that point. Sert expands his role as architect
to that of the sculptor and the painter. The distinction between different
media withers away to make place for a synthetic environment: a spectacle
that, by using all the visual means at its disposal, transforms itself into a
101
102
P. 240 in: Rovira, ib.

Monumental Symbol
341
Above: Sert, Barcelona Pavillion. Below; Sert, De Maeght Foundation as published in Bastlund, Jose Luise
Sert: Architecture, City Planning, Urban Design (1967)
342
dynamic, sculptural, total environment. Just like the Baroque had been
the integration of art and architecture to integrate all expression into
one overarching, jubilant narrative. After the Baroque, the integration of
arts re-appears again in the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. The musical
form par excellence of the Baroque, namely the Opera, was dismissed
by Nietzsche for letting the words the explicit narrative dominate
over the music, which serves as a mere background. For Nietzsche, the
primacy of text over music signals nothing less than the victory of the
detached, rational mind over the more expressive will, while Wagners
Gesamtkunstwerk gave primacy to the music. This victory of what he calls
the Apollonian over the Dionysian. He has the Dionysian energies of
music structure the totality, and all the other media involved text, scenes,
and characters work to enlarge the primacy of the music. The Baroque
is too narrative; the Gesamtkunstwerk promises a non-linguistic turn. For
Nietzsche, the former is about taming the primal energies of man, whereas
the latter is exactly about releasing it. And it is exactly this release that
primitive surrealism is also aiming for. The primitive surrealists set out to
redefine the beacons of cultural expression by resorting to techniques to
gain access to the subconscious and the primitive to blow up the codes
of petty bourgeois culture in a convulsive release of primitive energy.
Like Wagner in his time, Sert searches for this release by controlling all
the factors of plastic production, a superhuman effort to create a total
spectacle. Nietzsche prefers the Gesamtkunstwerk because it is symbolic
rather than an allegorical. Can we claim that Sert architecturalizes a
specifically Cassirerian notion of symbolic form? Certainly, his forms are
simultaneously abstract and sensuous, but is that enough? In the next step
of his development, we will see that Sert begins to deploy his sculptoarchitectural units as gestures to crystallize and explain the surrounding
territory. The notion of sculpture-as-gesture as a pre-linguistic form
of communication will, I will argue in the concluding chapter called
almost-project, establish the final missing link between an architecture of
Cassirerian symbolic forms of myth and the late architecture of Sert.
Monumental Symbol
343
Above: Sert, Peabody Terrace. Below; Sert, Harvard Dept. of Engeineering as published in Bastlund, Jose
Luise Sert: Architecture, City Planning, Urban Design (1967)
344
Massing as Schema of the City

It should come as no surprise that the previous theme returns in Serts
big urban projects in Boston103, as the template of the arts center is a
mere precursor for his concept of the civic complex. The Peabody Terrace
student housing complex in Cambridge is composed of two lower threestory-buildings and of three towers. Rather than adding structurally
unnecessary gestures, Sert conceives of a double skin: an inner one in
concrete, and six feet away an outer shell in wood and glass. The latters
overall form deviates substantially from that of the concrete inner shell.
The result is a dress with a number of protrusions and openings, because
of which the building appears as one sculptural form. Thus, these towers
are transformed them from simple obelisks into Gestalten. Facing the
Charles River, as three graces they remain clumsy characters, facing
each other and the river. The towers are much more abstract exercises in
sculpturalism than his previous work in Spain. The scale of the project,
its economy of financial means, and the need to use prefabricated
modules may be responsible for this. A more sculptural project is the
1968 Harvard Science Center. This project defines an area just beyond
the gated historical campus of the university. In other words, it colonizes
part of the town of Cambridge for the expanding university. In this
context, Sert makes a gesture to redefine the edge of the campus and
assert its identity through form. The buildings overall massing is that of
a T-shape. A long, sculptural, wall of offices explicitly outlines the new
edge. Its roof is adorned with expressive forms. However, this figure is
complicated by another volume, which extends perpendicularly from the
middle of this office wall towards the historical campus yard. It leans, as
it were, with its back against the wall, and faces the newly defined public
square, between the new building and the old campus. For Rovira, this is
a shy attempt to begin introducing complex elements of popular culture
into the project, as he explicitly places it in the context of the crisis of
modernism, the rise of pop art, of Venturis decorated shed, which left
103

Both these projects Peabody Terrace and the Harvard Science Center
have been criticized for the urban design shortcomings as well as for their inarticulate detailing,
but our interest here is in the way in which Sert develops their overall massing.
Monumental Symbol
345
Sert, Harvard Dept. of Engeineering. Middle diagram by Alexander DHooghe. other images: As published in
Bastlund, Jose Luise Sert: Architecture, City Planning, Urban Design (1967)
346
Sert in an odd place104. However, we can also interpret this project as

an attempt by Sert to transform the formal vocabulary of modernist
architecture into a more expressive symbolic form. Most important in
such an interpretation is to understand the purpose of these forms. The
architecturalization of primitive surrealist forms (such as the Minotaur)
results in expressive vaguely human-like figures, the position and form of
which simultaneously explains and defines the surrounding environment.
In the case of Peabody terrace, the river, its edge, and its direction become
visible from afar because of the towers; in the case of the Science Center,
a new edge for the Harvard campus is defined, and the old compound,
surrounded by brick walls, is expanded. This is not a coincidence. A
reflection on the purpose of his mythical forms in an urban context
apparently leads Sert to believe that they ought not to be self-referential
gesture, cries into emptiness, but, to the contrary, that they ought to relate,
organize, and crystallize its surroundings. The anthropomorphic form is
Serts way to humanize the city and make it legible, accessible again to
its citizens. This becomes most clear in one of Serts last projects in New
York.
104

Monumental Symbol
347
Above: Roosevelt Island, New York. Below; Sert, residential project on Roosvelt Island. As published in
Bastlund, Jose Luise Sert: Architecture, City Planning, Urban Design (1967). Right: Rem Koolhaas project for
Roosevelt Island. Painting by Madelon Vriesendrop. As published in Delirious New York (1978).
Serts project explains the structure of Manhattan itself:

it summarizes its entire cross-section into a single building.
348
Welfare Island: Sert vs. Koolhaas

Between 1970 and 1976, Sert builds about 1,360 apartment units
on Roosevelt Island, next to Manhattan. Dictated by an economy of
financial means this project is at least partly a social housing scheme
a simple manipulation of the massing is one of the few ways left for
Sert to express his definition of architecture. Like ribs, he designs a
series of long buildings that stretch from the edge to the central axis
of this long, narrow island. Most importantly, what is in plan a linear
building is in section a stepped volume, increasing from seven levels on
the edge to twenty-three levels at the middle of the island. The different
buildings repeat this stepping-up. Thus, the built topography is not only
accentuating and radicalizing the natural topography of the island. But
most importantly, Roosevelt Island explains, with a simple section, the
entire complex narrative of neighboring Manhattans cross-section, which
is also builds up height towards the middle of the island. Roosevelt Island
is thus transformed from a residual space (before the housing project, it
hosts among others a penitentiary institution and several other rest uses)
to a gesture that explains, crystallizes and enhances the structure of the
surrounding city.
Rem Koolhaas New Welfare Island, proposed in 1975-1976, while on the
same site as Serts stepped blocks, highlights a very different conception
of form, which helps to highlight the specificity of the Sertian symbolic
form. Koolhaas proposal is a constellation of isolated interventions
scattered along the spine of the island. Koolhaas early fascination with
surrealism is well known and made explicit in the first pages of Delirious
New York, in which the project is published105. At first, it seems as if
Serts project could have easily fit in as one of the diverse projects in the
constellation for the island. In fact, Koolhaas proposes a similar steppedup form elsewhere in Manhattan: the hotel Sphinx on Times Square.
But there is a marked difference. Koolhaas graphic depicts a city made of
individual extremes, just barely held together by the grid of Manhattan.
The various extremely different propositions as held together by a
105

Pp. 300-303 in: Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York, (NY: Monacelli
Press; Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1994) (first published in 1978).
Monumental Symbol
349
Sert, residential project on Roosvelt Island, as published in Bastlund, Jose Luise Sert: Architecture, City
Planning, Urban Design (1967)
350
OMA, City Hall competition entry for The Hague., as published in S.M.L.XL (1995)
Monumental Symbol
351
Sert, Roosevelt Island residential development,

as published in Bastlund, Jose Luise Sert:
Architecture, City Planning, Urban Design (1967)
background of consistency. When it comes to the Island, the individual

extremes persist, and while the grid is gone, a minimum of cohesion is
provided by the concise shape of the island itself. The projects here are
buildings once proposed for New York, but for whatever reason aborted [will
be] parked on the blocks to complete the history of Manhattan.106 A reservoir,
a residual space for left-over, unfinished projects: the project is consistent
with the islands historical function. The individuality of the interventions
dominates: the scattering of insane subjects over the Manhattan map now
extends to Welfare Island. Yet, the arrow of the will to form points in two
different directions. Sert wills the form to summarize, crystallize, and
explain the form of the overall city. Koolhaas, on the other hand, wills the
form to become a diagram of his interpretation of city culture in general.
When Sert looks at Manhattan, he sees a global form emerging from the
grouping of individual elements. The program is utterly irrelevant. When
Koolhaas looks at Manhattan, he sees an alignment of insane reactions to
the overall order of the grid, which if in the end they confirm it anyway,
form the central concern of his interpretation107.
Where Koolhaas detects an almost uncanny freedom to erect a wild
variety of forms, each with their own logic, Sert is convinced of the
importance of form to act as a schematic gesture that explains itself
and the surrounding territory. For Koolhaas, Manhattans skyline is an
amalgamation of entirely different skyscrapers. For Sert, a global form
is emerging. In later projects, Koolhaas re-deploys his interpretation
of Manhattan wherever he judges an injection of metropolitanism as
necessary. This is the case, for instance, in a competition project for
the town hall of The Hague. This project produces a simulacrum of the
Manhattan skyline, extruding various areas of the floor plan to different
heights. The studied randomness of the higher zones stands in a stark
contrast to the controlled stepping-up of Serts project.
106

P. 301 in: Koolhaas, ib.
107

Koolhaas individual projects in some cases testify of a sharp formal construction that explains and crystallizes its own surroundings; for instance, the big convention center
as an entrance point to the city, when the Interstate crosses Welfare Island on its way to Manhattan.
My concern however, in the above analysis, has predominantly been with the intentions that speak
from the overall approach.
352
Welfare Island is Serts last project in the USA. It is the final step of his
formal investigations into a language of gestures. Such a gestural apparatus
is a fundamentally emphatic one: it is about the recognition of ones own
body movements and positions in dead objects. Serts architecture searches
to elicit such a reading. Thus fusing aesthetic principles of empathy with
the pre-existing principle of abstraction, he endeavors into an architecture
of abstract-sensuous forms. Most strikingly, the other protagonists of the
1944 manifestoes of the New Monumentality do the same thing.
Finally, it is important to distinguish between a reading of these projects
as symbolic forms and a reading of them as allegorical structures. The
latter would conceive of the anthropomorphic building as a reference
to Harvard s tradition of humanism, for instance, or of Le Corbusiers
United Nations towers as a reference to the bureaucracy which is the
organizational form of an international welfare state. These allegorical
interpretations are not our concern here. To call this the symbolism of a
building is in fact extremely misleading, as these analyses have little to do
with the notion of symbolic form. This category of associations will arise
regardless of the form of the project; it is a function of the form being
deployed into a particular cultural context. The distinction is the same
one as that made by Panofsky between the iconography of an artwork
(allegorical), and its iconology108. The symbolic form explains rather than
represents, which is the function of allegory. Serts humanoid gestures
explain the city that surrounds it, making it legible, by simultaneously
crystallizing its structure in a clear symbol, and enhancing that structure.
108

naissance., 1939.
Panofsky, Studies in iconology; humanistic themes in the art of the Re-
Where Koolhaas detects an almost uncanny freedom to

erect a wild variety of forms, each with their own logic,
Sert is convinced of the importance of form to act as a
schematic gesture that explains itself and the surrounding territory.

Monumental Symbol
353
Kahn the street as an Institution. as published in: Lobell, J. Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture
of Louis Kahn. (London: Shambala Publications, 1979)
Kahn disconnected the notion of program from its bureaucratic-technical connotation:

354
3.1.4 Kahns Frozen Movement

Proto-Form and the Fairy Tale
As Sarah Goldhagen demonstrates, Kahns interest is always in the civic.
His discourse comprises not only a theory of civic architecture, but almost
amounts to a theory for public architecture. By this, I mean that Kahn
sets out to liberate conventional civic programs from their traditional
formulation through middle and upper-middle class tastes, as happened
in the City Beautiful movement. Kahn searches for a formal language
that could go beyond the culture of this class and address the wider
populace. He wants to reinvent a civic code of form for the public at large.
The first signs of this are already apparent in one of Kahns early studies,
Monumentality, which calls for monuments for to the communitarian
tradition:
But have we yet given full architectural expression to such social
monuments as the school, the community or culture center?109
Kahn dwells on the possibilities of new technologies, but most
importantly, he cancels out the association between monumentality and
government, and instead places it at the service of liberal democracy. He
also abandons the word monumentality soon after 1944, but continues to
develop at length his concept of the existence will of modern institutions,
articulated especially in his 1959 Otterlo lecture. He considers it as the
task of architects and planners to be the materialization of the latent
ideals contained in modern and urban programs. Existence Will of
such a program was exactly this latent ideal contained in its procedures.
Kahns existence will liberates urbanism from the obsessive functionalism
imposed on it by the Athens Charter, because he disconnected the notion
of program from its bureaucratic-technical connotation:
109

P. 22 in Kahn, Louis: Monumentality. pp. 21-31 in: Kahn, Louis; Twombly, Robert (ed.) Essential Texts. (New York, London: W.W. Norton, c2003). First published in:
Zucker, 1944 ib.
Monumental Symbol
355
The program is nothing. The program is a hindrance.110

In Kahns reading, forms are not to be derived from the reality of modern
programs. Instead, these programs have to be considered as institutions.
A street, for instance, is in fact an institution of public interaction. Kahns
idealistic vision of the institution does not refer to the bureaucratic
institutions of public government, but rather to the intrinsically civic
potential of a whole series of everyday activities. The idealization of these
activities is the purpose of a public architecture. The task at hand is the
excavation of these civic ideals in everyday actions. Existence will thus
manifests itself as an ideal state waiting to be discovered in the chaos of
the everyday. Kahns discovery of such will in urban institutions sounds
much like Blochs discovery of a utopian intention in routines of Western
culture. Ernst Bloch describes, in his 1954 Principle of Hope, the
discovery of an emancipatory, even utopian drive in the everyday activities
and developing phantasmagorias of Western mass society. For instance:
We may finally risk the proposition that precisely because the doctor,
even at the individual sick-bed, has an almost crazy utopian plan
latently in view, he ostensibly avoids it. This definite plan, the final
medical wishful dream, is nothing less than the abolition of death.111
Kahns definition of existence will as that which an activity wants to be is
similarly explained:
Reflect then on the meaning of a school, institution a specific
design is what is expected from us. But School, the spirit school, the
essence of existence will, is what the architect should convey in his
design. (65).
Both are reading or projecting a latent ideal in what at first seem to
be standard routines of social organization. By locating a will to utopia
110

P. 207 in: Kahn, Louis. Talk at the conclusion of the Otterlo Congress. In:
Newman, Oscar (ed.). CIAM 59 in Otterlo.
111

p. 465 in: Bloch, Ernst. in: The Principle of Hope. (1959) (transl. 1960:
Plaice, Neville; Plaice, Stephen; Knight, Paul), Vol. 1, Vol.2, Vol. 3, (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T.
Press, 1995) (German, Das Prinzip Hoffnungs 1952-1959).
As soon as a form is invented, it becomes the property of

society. One might almost say that it was the property of
society before its discovery.
356
in modern procedures, Kahn wants to enlighten society about its own

aspirations. It is in the light of this idealism that Kahns theory of form
emerges:
The existence will of something will be the thing that makes the
form112.
A condensation of an ideal organizational schema, clotted, solidified, and
materialized into a form that becomes the expression of this ideal: that is
how we can understand Kahns description. So he arrives at a conception
of form which beyond the subjectivity of designerly whims, and instead
is true to the aspirations of the society in which it materializes. Therein
lays Kahns distinction between form and design. Fumihiko Maki, much
inspired by Kahn, is in complete agreement:
The distinction between form and design was given in a speech
at the World Design Conference (Tokyo, May 1960) by Louis
Kahn. Kahn said at that occasion: there is a need to distinguish
form from design. Form implies what a building, whether it be a
church, school, or house, would like to be, whereas the design is the
circumstantial act evolving from this basic form, depending on site
condition, budget limitation, or clients idea, etc. As soon as a form
is invented, it becomes the property of society. One might almost say
that it was the property of society before its discovery. A design, on
the other hand, belongs to the designer.113
For Kahn, this existential will to form brings out the aspirations of a
society, and in that sense, it functions like a fairy tale.
We definitely need the new fairy talebut [we cannot give it a
position in the making of things until] we think in terms of form
that which distinguishes one thing from another instead of
design.114
112

Kahn, Louis; Twombly, Robert (ed.) Essential Texts, ib.
113

P. 20 in: Maki, Fumihiko, Ohtaka, Masato. Collective Form Three Paradigm. Pp. 3-24 in: Investigations in collective form.
114

P. 79 in: Kahn, Louis. The New Art of Urban Design: Are we Equipped?
Pp. 75-80 in: Twombly, Robert (Ed.). Essential Texts, ib.
A design, on the other hand, belongs to the designer
Monumental Symbol
357
These fairy tales, the aspirations, ideals, dreams and myths, form the
substratum, a fundamental will that the architect can transpose into a
form.
The form acquires its legitimacy as an expression of lingering ideals: this
allows us to better understand Kahns understanding of civicness, of a civic
spirit. It stems from nothing else but the desire to formulate explicitly
what has remained until then latent ideals of the collective. The forms
of architecture are now casting notions of the spirit, mental constructs,
into concrete. If concretions of the collective spirit, this architecture then
acquires a legitimacy as a public form. In this sense, Kahn is now coming
very close to Cassirers membrane of symbolic forms. He effectively
distinguishes between reality appearances and the underlying symbolic
form:
Now take the institution house. A house has to answerhouse,
symbolically house, [and] it has to answer a house which is the
problem. A house is a circumstantial house. It indicates how much
money you have. It means who your client is. It means where it
is or how many rooms it has. It means a lot of things. But the
architect lies in his ability to make house, not a house. That is what
architecture really is. A House can be the professional, but the
architect lies in house itself symbolically house.115
At a loss for words to more aptly describe this house symbol, Kahn states
that:
I mean not necessarily form as it finally is, I mean really preform.116
A few sentences later, he also refers to this as proto-form. What he
really means is a Cassirerian symbolic form of the house. Something that
is already there before you draw it that means it has to have found a
place in the collective mind, an a priori schema that explains the ideal of
115

116

the real form of the house is an a priori schema that explains the ideal of inhabitation
358
inhabitation. In Cassirers words:

The Symbolic Forms constitute a new sphere. They have a life of
their own, a sort of eternity by which they survive mans individual
and ephemeral existence117.
According to Tafuri, Kahn is indeed tapping into this sphere. In a
discussion on the Mall of Washington DC, he finds crucial similarities
with Kahns generation of American modernists
Washington tends to underscore in every way its own separation
from development. In it, as in a timeless, indisputable, completely
positive Olympus, is concentrated the anxiety of an America in
search of roots. Thus the representation of the stability of value
can show itself for what it is, That is to say, a conventional but
real aspiration, which must be satisfied by keeping it carefully
separated from the forces of development, from technologys
continual revolutionizing modernity. Values, stability and form
are thus presented as objects that are unreal but have nonetheless
taken material form. They are symbols of the American longing
for something other than itself, terms of reference for a society
continually terrified by the processes it has itself set in motion
and indeed considers irreversible. Classicism, as an ideal of
uncontaminated reason, is thus consciously presented in all its
regressive character. This is what has taken place in Washington
all through the century. But it also happens in a less obvious way
everywhere in America, coming to a head in what Kallmann
has defined as an architecture of compositional rigorists of
L. Kahn, of Kallmann himself, of Giurgola and Johanssen who
between 1950 and 1960 could present their aspirations to from as
an evasive expression of anticonsumerism. The bad conscience of
radical America, from Jefferson to Kahn, turns in upon itself in a
pathetic homage to inoperative values.118
Tafuris argument resonates with Worringers earlier claim that a society
undergoing rapid change and an accompanying set of insecurities about
identity will search for forms emanating permanence, and that they will
117

118

Pp. 36-37 in: Tafuri, Manfredo; Barbara Luiga La Penta (transl.) Architecture and Utopia. Design and Capitalist Development. (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, c1976) (Italian
original: Progetto e Utopia. Bari: Guiseppe Laterza i Figli, 1973).
Monumental Symbol
359
Above: Kahn, diagrams of car traffic before and after his project for a Core for Philadelphia (1951-1959). as
published in: Ronner, Heinz; and Jhaveri, Sharad. Louis I. Kahn: Complete Work, 1935-1974. (Birkhauser,
1987). Below: diagrams Alexander DHooghe
360
consequently retreat into an aesthetic of abstraction; of crystalline forms

that are eternal.
Frozen Movement
Kahns formal development of a New Monumentality, like that of Sert,
abandons functionalism and structure. For a while, Kahn drifts towards
Buckminster Fuller-like studies in techno-organic form, which in fact
relate to Kahns own statements in his 1944 Monumentality, which
focused on the use of new materials allowing for new lightness and
transparency. However, he soon abandons this fixation as well, heading for
a mature conception of modern symbolic form. Goldhagen says:
He slowly extricated his architecture from a Fulleresque vocabulary.
He came to conclude that he might more effectively create
monumentality by using an idiom abstracted from architectural
precedents, hoping also that in such allusions, he could directly foster
communal sentiment because his users would comprehend or intuit
symbolic references to past communal endeavors. But this new
symbolic vocabulary had to be abstract because otherwise it would
descend into the familiar and comfortable particularism. So Kahn
set out to integrate symbolic allusions into, and to merge them with,
his existing repertoire of abstract modernist aesthetic devices. 119
Abstract-sensuous forms indeed. Kahns 1948-1950 paintings show
this development earlier than his architecture does120. Transparency #1
shows a grouping of abstract yet expressive gestures placed in each others
vicinity but without apparent geometric order that relates them. Almost
like an architectural version of El Lissitzkys Prouns, these forms are
3-dimensional ideograms of architectural elements: a portico, a triangle
vaguely resembling a roof, a corridor, etc. These are elements of an urban
architecture, reduced to their schematic and organizational essence. What
Cassirer tried to do for myth, language, and science, Kahn sets out to do
for architecture: define a system of essential schemata, form-diagrams
119

P. 204 in: Goldhagen, Sarah. Louis Kahns Situated Modernism, ib.
120

Some of these drawings are published in: P. 53 in: Goldhagen, Sarah.
Louis Kahns Situated Modernism, ib.
Monumental Symbol
361
Kahn, diagrams of traffic flow as it transforms into a chain of monuments for a Core for Philadelphia (19511959). as published in: Ronner, Heinz; and Jhaveri, Sharad. Louis I. Kahn: Complete Work, 1935-1974.
(Birkhauser, 1987)
Kahn freezes the flows of Philadelphias car flows into

monumental clottings: the parking garages where the
suburbanite becomes a public persona again.
362
that establish the a prioris of architectural thinking. What will happen

when these forms are transformed into an urbanistic project? For that
purpose, we turn to the downtown Philadelphia scheme, developed
between 1951-1959. The Philadelphia studies are unique because they do
not answer to a narrowly defined commission. Instead, in this project the
architect-planner himself has defined the problem (the hollowing out of
central Philadelphia into a formless residue of what used to be the city,
because of the invasion of the automobile), and then sets out to define the
terms of the solution. His agenda is visible in much greater clarity than
in his designs for churches, temples, and community centers. The striking
feature of the Philadelphia work, then, is Kahns architecturalization of the
moment of transition between automobile infrastructures and pedestrian
urban spaces. The plan features a series of abstract-sensuous monuments
are placed in each others vicinity, together encircling the downtown
(pedestrian) area, while serving as stations or endpoints of the car traffic
on the surrounding highways. Kahn states the following:
The motor car has completely upset the form of the city. I feel that the time has
come to make the distinction between the Viaduct architecture of the car and
the architecture of mans activitiesthe Viaduct architecture enters the city
from outlying areas. At this point, it must become more carefully made and
even at great expense more strategically placed with respect to the center. The
Viaduct architecture includes the street which in the center of the city wants
to be a building, a building with rooms below for city piping services to avoid
interruption of traffic when services need repair. The Viaduct architecture would
encompass an entirely new concept of street movement which distinguished
between the stop and go staccato of the bus and from the go movement of the
car. They are framing expressways are like rivers. These rivers need harbors.
The interim streets are like canals which need docks. The harbors are the gigantic
gateways expressing the architecture of stopping. The terminals of the Viaduct
architecture, they are garages in the core, hotels and department stores around
the periphery and shopping centers on the street floor. This strategic positioning
around the city center would present a logical image of protection against the
destruction of the city by the motor car. In a sense, the problem of the car and the
city is war, and the planning for the new growth of cities is not a complacent
Monumental Symbol
363
Kahn, diagram of single parking tower in the Core for Philadelphia (1951-1959). as published in: Ronner,
Heinz; and Jhaveri, Sharad. Louis I. Kahn: Complete Work, 1935-1974. (Birkhauser, 1987)
Kahn effectively transform the perpetual movements of

the network society into an eternal arrival.
364
act, but an act of emergency. The city [then] would have form.121
Kahns first diagrams contain an analysis of the traffic flows in place
at that time: a series of arrows with varying thickness, showing a city
drowning in a (suburban) sea of cars. Second, Kahn, following the plan
of Edmund Bacon, proposes a more desirable flow of traffic, creating a
sizable pedestrian zone in the city. Car traffic flows are concentrated on
major arteries adjacent to the city center. In a third step, Kahn defines
transition moments from car-driver to pedestrian along these arteries,
by drawing a series of solenoid-like spires (rotating arrows going upwards)
These are on the edge between an artery and the pedestrian zone. In a
fourth step, he monumentalizes these parking garages into large beehive
tower-like forms. Kahn thus celebrates the traffic mode change, clotting
it into a series of solemn forms, themselves arranged in a composition
that leaves room for each objects individuality. The juxtaposition of forms
creates a larger gesture (the encircling / embrace of the city center), thus
contribution to the meaningfulness of each constituent form. These, then,
are Kahns public prouns, his symbolic forms for a public architecture for
the city. Old schemata of urban order such as the citadel, or a circle of
towers (like in the medieval Kremlin) are now transformed into devices
that solidify, clot and freeze the flows of the network society. Kahns
public architecture emphasizes the very moment of transition between
the viaduct logic (of networks and infrastructures) and the place logic
(of architecture). He thus expands the field of architecture to include the
exit ramps, garages, and gas stations, in short all the clutter and junk that
comes with automobile space. Kahn chooses to monumentalize a gesture
of arrival or departure. His ziggurats and totems are not merely emblems
of a mythical past; they effectively transform the perpetual movements
of the network society into an eternal arrival. They freeze the movement.
They are symbolic forms of frozen movement, celebrating the moment
of stopping rather than the movement itself. That is Kahns version of
gestural form.
121

Pp. 73-74 in: Kahn, Louis. Form and Design. Pp. 62-74 in: Twombly,
Robert (Ed.). Essential Texts, ib.
Monumental Symbol
365
Summarizing, the architecture of

symbolic forms is architecture
of simplified bodily movements
transformed into 3d-ideograms. To
fulfill their public function, these
symbolic forms manifest themselves
not only in plan, but primarily in
elevation and therefore in the
third dimension. Their empathic
force shimmers through their
anthropomorphic features. These
gestures organize, schematize, and
therefore steer our perception of the
surrounding territory. Their specificity
as architecture of symbolic forms
depends on the treatment of the
massing as a sculptural whole,
resulting in a form that unifies all its
part into a single whole. The formal
identity of this whole is exactly its
three-dimensional structure, a result
of choices to compose masses and
holes or openings in such a manner as
to configure a gesture, itself a symbol.
The production of architecture
since 1961 has been so vast that it is
impossible to provide an overview of
lineages that have continued to work
with the monumental symbol. Suffice
it to show a few projects that allow us
to read a continuation of the overall
project.
366
3.2 TRACES
Of the Monumental Symbol
Scale: 1:2 1:500
A commitment to a theory may be made because the theory is
congruent with the mood or deep-lying sentiments of its adherents,
rather than merely because it has been cerebrally inspected and found
valid.

p. 498 in: Gouldner, Alvin W. in: Metaphysical Pathos and the Theory of Bureaucracy.
The American Political Science Review, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Jun., 1955), pp. 496-507
Monumental Symbol
367
Above: Hollein, Floating city over Vienna, 1960. Middle: interpretation a possible section of Floating City as
defined by Christoph Hesse, 2006. Below: Hollein, Monument, 1963. Hollein images as published in Catalog of
1969 exhibition at Richard Feigen Gallery.
368
3.2.1 Monument and Movement

(Hollein, Bakema)
Hans Hollein, a Viennese architect, sends a considerable amount of time
in the USA between 1956 and 1960, studying at Berkeley. In 1960, he
presents a Project for a City for Vienna: a series of rock-like, sculptural
shapes on fat, irregular columns are joined and standing in a pastoral
field almost as a natural artifact. In consequent montages placing this
formation of rock-clouds in the middle of first Salzburg and later Vienna,
the project calls up associations with an Acropolis-like group form,
albeit this time up in the skies. 122 This is an attempt to give a form to the
collective in a Europe that, in the aftermath of WWII, has lost all selfconfidence about its own identity. The forms install a monumental public
space, continuously flowing from the one side of the project, between its
legs, onto the other side: a third-space-conception project reminiscent
of Klines paintings. Giant anthropomorphic symbols are standing there,
frozen, structuring outdoor space in the vicinity by establishing a clear
separation between public and private zones. Soon after that, Hollein
begins a flirtation with Pop Art, blowing up banal everyday consumer
products to giant proportions, thus endowing these with a monumental
quality that gives them an almost blasphemous spirituality. A 1963 project
called Monument is a gigantically scaled-up railroad freight wagon
placed on a pedestal. With such a transformation, the gigantic object
becomes an enormously heavy portico, which happens to also look like a
freight wagon, but acquires a depth that exhausts interpretation. An icon
of industrialization the train is represented here as a dead thing of
the past, once moving fast, now at a standstill forever. Looking beyond
the obvious semiotics, the sculptural quality of a three-dimensional
monumental symbol, defined primarily through its elevation, has
remained. The new balance between solid and space, more precisely a
sequence of continuously flowing public spaces in, through and around

See: Hollein. 36 pp.. Brochure: Catalogue Richard Feigen Gallery,
Chicago; presented at the occasion of the 1969 A.I.A. Convention.
(Printed: Tusch-Druck,
Austria. 1969)
122
Monumental Symbol
369
Hollein, Subway entrance in Vienna, 1966 as published in Catalog of 1969 exhibition at Richard Feigen Gallery.
The physiognomy of this form is so direct, what is calls

up so ancient, yet its materialization so abstract, that it
may achieve better than most of the previous projects the
quality of being both abstract and sensuous.
370
these masses, is in place. For the first time, the form itself also resembles
another object. In 1966, Hollein designs a plastic structure in place of
a demolished baroque church on a Vienna intersection. This project
most closely defines the abstract-sensuous monumental symbol implied
by the protagonists. This project replaces a prime example of Giedions
second space conception a Baroque church. Hollein replaces it with a
tribute exchange itself (liberal democracy). He builds a monument to a
rapidly secularizing postwar Europe. The project places two staircaselike forms on the ground at a 90-degree angle. At the top, where they
touch, four long L-shapes are joined. They cantilever outwards, defining
four quadrants, based on 4 L-shapes. They fully take advantage of their
being made of plastic, with filleted corners. Each quadrant is defined by
two arms, pointing in perpendicular directions with the lower arm, while
always diverging with the upper arm: once upward, once straight, then
inward, again inward, straight again, and upward again. Each territory is
thus embraced in its own unique way. The physiognomy of this form is so
direct, what it calls up so ancient, yet its materialization so abstract, that it
may achieve better than most of the previous projects the quality of being
both abstract and sensuous. The continuous flow of public infrastructure
is now interrupted at a certain point to allow for its transformation, reorganization, and re-definition from a space of flows to a place, a territory
with a boundary. The program of this proposal an entrance for a subway
terminal is therefore no coincidence. A caption to the project reads:
The function of this structure is to spatially activate the dead leftover void.123
With this simple sentence, Hollein has defined the task for architecture
in the sprawling territories of the nebulous city. He defines architecture
as the art of spacedeterminators [sic]124. The facades and the sections
are the critical tools to achieve this: Holleins project is no less than a
three-dimensional version of the T-form. The project proves that the
space determined is not only inside but at least as much also the space
123
124
Hollein. Ib.
Hollein. Ib.
Monumental Symbol
371
Joze Plecnik, student of Otto Wagner: National University Library, Ljubljana, 1936-41
Hollein is simply re-interpreting the historical architectural answer of the Vienna school to the citys most
shocking modernity experience: the Ringstrasse.
372
outside of the project, the surroundings, the city. Furthermore, through

this act, Giedions third space conception is re-connected with the urban
purpose for the civic complex that Sert sought in the new civic designs
they searched after together after the war. Like these protagonists, Hollein
links the verticality that is essential to monumentality in all ages, to their
quest:
You dig a hole. Pile up some rocks. Put up a pole. Architecture comes
into being. Architecture, sculpture, and painting become one. The
totality of space, governed by things.125
By 1967, Holleins interest shifts as his Everything is Architecture
manifesto demonstrates. This text, a testimony of its own historical
moment, declares everything related to organization of the artificial
environment experience of man to be architecture: from hallucinogenics
to climate control systems and the like. Thus, the Viennese schools
investigation into a New Monumentality disappears in a hazy smoke.
The spirit of this work returns, however, in a project by another Viennese
architect: Gustav Peichls PEA complex in Berlin-Tegel126. Peichl,
famous mostly for postmodern ironies, realizes here an expressionistic,
anthropomorphic form that again organizes the flows through its own
gesture. The spirit of Mendelsohn, Loos, and the early Hollein appears
in what is, for the 1980s, a rare balancing act between abstraction and
empathy. The use of plastics, a fluid material par excellence, in the
construction of a monument, reinforces its project of clotting the flows by
summarizing and schematizing them into a solid symbol. The monument
becomes frozen movement. But in fact, Hollein is simply re-interpreting
the historical architectural answer of the Vienna school to the citys most
shocking experience of modernity: the Ringstrasse. Otto Wagner, probably
the most prominent architect of the Secession Movement, at the turn of
the century is translating the new aesthetic patterns developed by Klimt
and other artists into a new, then radically modern conception for building
125

From space in space in space, 1960.
Quoted in: Hollein. Ib.
126

This project is published among others in:Peichl, Gustav; Guell, Xavier
(Ed.); Scolari, Massimo (introduction): Gustav Peichl. (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1987)
Monumental Symbol
373
Bakeam, project for theater on intercdhange in Zurich,1963 based on an interpretation of El Lissitzkys project
for Moscow. As published in: Original Drawings, (Ed. Ente Fieri di Bologna, Bologna, 1978).
With this, the historical function of the ornament to

hide the architectural problem of the joint by turning it
into an opportunity to communicate specific values is
brought on a new level.
374
facades. As Carl Schorske says,

In the fast-moving world of time and motion, what Wagner called
painful uncertainty was all too easily felt. The architect must help
to overcome it by providing defined lines of movement. The style
of Klimt and the Secession greatly helped Wagner in this effort.
Klimts two-dimensional concept of space, while conceived to
present symbolically the abstract essence of the illusory world of
substance, lent itself in architecture to create a new sense for the
wall. As opposed to the heavily articulated and indented wall of the
Ringstrasse Mietpalast, Wagners first Secession-style apartment
house, presented a faade proclaiming in its flatness its function as a
wall. Wagners secessionist front reflected the streets simplicity as a
plane, thus submitting to and reinforcing its direction..127
Wagners innovation is that he transfers the ornament from an articulation
of joints, a three-dimensional accent that communicates with naturalistic
figurations, to an articulation of the overall surface, and therefore of the
overall massing. Neo-classicist and eclectic architecture before Wagner
still deploys ornaments for pedestrians to decipher at close range.
Wagner now transforms the ornament for a fast-moving, mechanized
environment. Higher speeds on the Ringstrasse result in a sharp decrease
in the amount of time to see or observe a building, from which moreover
one has a greater distance than in the traditional streets of the historic
city. Consequently, the building has to achieve its visual power in the blink
of an eye: its overall form and outlook is etched in the retina, rather than
any details. This leads Wagner into studies of faade-wide patterning.
His building masses function as an ornament on the scale of the city. The
entire massing serves to communicate a proto-linguistic gesture.
With this, the historical function of the ornament to hide the
architectural problem of the joint by turning it into an opportunity to
communicate specific values is brought on a new level. It begins to serve
as a way to solve the architectural problem of massing by turning it into
proto-linguistic three-dimensional gesture, made for cognition in the age
of high-speed flows.
127
P. 85 in: Schorske, ib.
Monumental Symbol
375
El Lissitzky, Community Center in Moscow, 1923-1925
376
Bakema and Vandenbroek also produce a sketch for the design of an

intersection building in Zurich, which again structures the surrounding
city through the anthropomorphic form of the object. Bakemas section
design is a double T-form two legs and a giant horizontal structure
hovering over them, cantilevering outward. Strikingly, Bakema connects
the T-form to a notion of knotting, inserting an artificial centrality.
In other words, Bakema suggests that the T-form is an appropriate
monumental symbol for the project of the Core. In a 1982 publication of
their work, Jaap Bakema organizes their projects thematically, with themes
such as visual groups vaguely reminiscent of the group form and the
theme of knots. His definition is vaguely reminiscent of that of the Core:
The knot of a building or the not of buildings that form the heart of
a town is the point where all the spines and radials and transitional
elements and junctions meet and interweave. Its where several
happenings in time and space meet and pass on their messages,
shaping their environment in a kind of network-like web cluster: a
knot in a web-system128.
But the massing of Bakemas sketch, represents, almost literally, the El
Lissitzkys constructivist community center. There is no doubt that the
architectural production between 1961 and 2000 contains many sculptural
projects. The number of such projects that have also structured the urban
movement, and thus have enabled us to understand the city, however, is
significantly less.
128

Martins Press, 1982).
P. 73 in: Bakema, Jaap. Thoughts about Architecture. (London: St.-
Monumental Symbol
377
Notwithstanding minor differences,

the protagonists share a purpose: to
develop an apparatus of monumental
ideograms that structure and unlock
the surrounding territory. From now
on, pretenses to functionalism and/
or structural purity are abandoned.
The symbolic forms solve the
problem of form from the viewpoint
of architectures external purpose,
its public function. The following ties
together the various threads between
the concept of myth, symbol, gesture,
and anthropomorphism.
378
3.3 TOWARDS A
PUBLIC
ARCHITECTURE
Of the Monumental Symbol
Scale: 1:2 1:500
Monumental Symbol
379
Example of primeval rock art in Western Alps
380
Mythical Form
Through tragedy the myth attains its most expressive form. It rises
once more like a wounded hero, and its whole excess of strength
together with the philosophical calm of the dying, burns its eyes with
a last powerful gleam.129
The labor and will to form is leading to an apparatus of gestures,
resembling bodily movements frozen in a particular position. And this
is exactly one of the fundamental apparatuses of symbolic forms that
Cassirer studies. In his first volume on symbolic forms in myth, he studies
the pre-linguistic stage of mankind. The stage can still be recognized in
early notation systems, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, where frozen bodily
movements gestures are simply transferred onto papyrus to become
a sign an embryo of our current abstract apparatus of letters. The prelinguistic stage is still recognized today in the clich that about 80% of
human communications are non-verbal, that is to say, with body language.
Body movement indeed constitutes a primeval language without words,
communicating not through abstract codes but through portrayal, or even
more profoundly, enactment of that which one is trying to convey130. This
is utterly different from the mere pointing to, referring to that occurs in
abstract language such as in our own modern alphabets. Here, the form is
still connected with the content. The various gestures embody their own
meaning. And this is possible because this primeval language is not about
the formulation of facts and observations, but according to Cassirer, about
129

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Section 10 in: Birth of Tragedy.
130

Cassirer, when pondering the transition from this pre-linguistic stage to
the development of abstract language, switches from historical analysis to a comparative study of
languages. Here he relies heavily on the anthropologist Wilhelm Von Humboldt (17671835) : The
real difference between languages is not a difference of sounds or signs but one of world-perspectives, p. 120 in EOM. The latter then go back to the primal reactions a community builds to its
environment. In other words, the early gestures and utterances are still lingering in our minds; language itself never has become the pure and abstract vehicle for communication. That is why Cassirer
treats the issue of gestures not only in his chapter on language but, at least as importantly, in the
chapter on myth and religion. The importance of this residue is that it relates discourse of community
identity and nationalism, the presence of what Berlin called irreconcilable world-perspectives, to
the monumental symbol, which celebrates one such outlook (and consequently to the group form,
which represents a fundamentally pluralist outlook, the uneasy co-existence of the irreconcilable
world-perspectives).
Monumental Symbol
381
the outward portrayal of inner state.

[Primal] utterancesare involuntary expressions of human
feelings, interjections, and ejaculations.131
Gestures and utterances have this function. In his work on myth, Cassirer
reveals a primary mechanism of myth-making to be at the intersection
between the act of body gestures and the human desire for empathy by
projecting those gestures onto ones environment.
In mythical imagination there is always implied an act of belief
in the reality of its objectwhat myth primarily perceives are
physiognomic characters the world of myth is a dramatic world
a world of actions, of forces, of conflicting powers. In every
phenomenon of nature, it sees the collision of these powers. Mythical
perception is always impregnated with these emotional qualities.
[] Here we cannot speak of things as a dead or indifferent stuff.
All objects are benignant or malignant, friendly or inimical,
familiar or uncanny, alluring and fascinating or repellent and
threatening. We can easily reconstruct this elementary form of
human experience, for even in the life of the civilized man it has
by no means lost its original power. [] the distinction between
physiognomic qualities seems to precede the distinction between
perceptual qualities.132
The world of myth-making primitive man is one of radical unity.
This unity is mirrored in the universal empathy man feels toward his
environment. This is the primitive Dionysian that Nietzsche searches to rediscover and that the Symbol is alluding to: a unity of content and form.
Consequently, there is empathy between him and each rock and tree, for
he recognizes in them the same emotional gestures and utterances that
he himself makes. This very primal layer of understanding is still with us
today, and Cassirer states that when distanced logical thought is switched
off such as in instances of half-sleep, or intense stress, this mode of
mythical recognition becomes active again. In other words, when we are
seeing, not consciously looking, we are already on the verge of entering the
131
132
382

P. 76-77 in: Cassirer, Ernst. Essay on Man, ib.
world as a universe of gestures.

Of course, Cassirer recognizes that at this stage, man has not yet
dissociated himself from this indissoluble unity with the universe. This will
happen at the onset of civilization. In Greece,
Homeric gods lose their authority. Their anthropomorphic character
is clearly seen and severely criticized.133
Cassirer then goes on to develop how myth transforms into magic, a move
in which man is asserting a newly found individuality and self-confidence.
Magic itself will later transform into religion:
It is this form of universal ethical sympathy which in monotheistic
religion gains the victory over the primitive feeling of a natural or
magical solidarity of life.134
Here Cassirer recasts the principle of empathy as part of the mind of
primitive man, of pre-linguistic thinking, as a principle of myth-making.
The sensuous form of these emotive gestures lies in the realm of primitive,
mythological man. Cassirer tracks its transformation into abstract
language systems that we are familiar with today. In this development,
spatial consciousness plays a pivotal role. Between the sensuous gesture/
utterance and the abstract codes of modern language, there stands an
abstract-sensuous phase that historically mediates between both and
organizes their transition:
Thus the step from the world of sensations to that of pure intuitions
[occurs] through the medium of intuitive forms, through the
intuitions of space.
For him, the development of spatial concepts constitutes the fundamental
principle of the first development of language:
The essential role of spatial representation is most clearly shown in
133
134

Monumental Symbol
383
the universal terms which language has devised for the designation
of spiritual processes. Even in the most highly developed languages
we encounter this metaphorical rendition of intellectual conceptions
by spatial representations.135
Our architectural interest lies exactly here, for Cassirers formulation
suggests the possibility of reversing this rendition: to use spatial
representations of gestures to explain concepts. The first gestures are
direct expressions of emotions in reaction to sensory stimulus like pain,
anger, fear, shock, love, and protection. Cassirer denotes the study of this
as the psychology of expressive movements.136 These evolve into a protolinguistic apparatus by virtue of indication and imitation. Indication is
A continuous transition from physical grasping to conceptual
grasping.
What is initially a movement to grab or clutch something gradually
becomes a mere pointing-to. This development can still today be
witnessed in children, who, when trying to grab something outside their
reach, develop a pointing gesture. Indication occurs after one becomes
distanced from the object and is no longer one with it. The second force,
imitation, is fundamentally that of pantomime. Again, Cassirer argues,
a moment of consciousness is inserted, as it is required of the mind to
never retrace, line for line, a specific content of reality; but in selecting a
pregnant motif in that content and so producing a characteristic outline
of its form.137 Cassirer then considers the transposition of this basic
apparatus of gestures into phonetics and utterances. He is, however, struck
by the persistent presence in present-day language of spatializing devices.
Invoking Kant, Cassirer believes that:
Pure understanding (of abstract language, of conscious thinking)
can be applied to sensory intuitions only through a third, mediating
135

136

Language, ib.
137

Language, ib.

P. 181 in: Cassirer, Ernst. Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1:
Cassirer suggests to use spatial representations of gestures in order to explain concepts.

384
term: a transcendental schema, which is both abstract and sensory

Language, possesses such a schema in its terms for spatial contents
and relations. 138
He then goes into an analysis of proverbs, pronouns, and definite articles
across a variety of languages stemming from diverse roots. His thrust is
to demonstrate that underneath modern, abstract language, there still
lays a schema, a cognitive diagram that organizes our thinking on a more
fundamental level. This level is an imaginary representation of space, built
on the consciousness of ones own body in relation to other bodies in
the surrounding reality. Thus, underneath language, there is a layer that
remains unspoken but constitutes a reading of space defined by abstractsensuous gestures and it is by positioning himself in this space that man
exercises his consciousness. We know that Sert, Giedion (and Leger) as
well as Kahn and Maki frequently refer to the need for symbolic forms
when they construct their first briefs on a modern monumentality. We
have seen that their evolving design intuitions lead them to a development
of these symbolic forms as an apparatus of gestures resembling bodily
positions and movements that explain the city. But we have also seen that
Cassirers development of the symbolic form in its early stages is pointing
in a similar direction. For him, human understanding is structured by a
series of basic gestures derived from bodily positions. From this comes
language. The recognition of these forms in ones surroundings is what
allows man to conceptualize his reality and therefore to navigate in it and
to be conscious of his own position in it.
Hence, the drive towards an architecture of symbolic forms is about the
transposition of the apparatus of basic emotive gestures into a priori
symbolic forms as abstract mental constructs, and from there into concrete
matter architecture: directly, without further mediation. Such forms
operate simultaneously as abstractions (having gone through a mentalintellectual conceptualization phase) and sensuous items (based on ones
own bodily experiences and the projections of those). This, then, forms the
138

Language, ib.
Monumental Symbol
385
departure point for the development of an architecture of symbolic forms.

This is a theory for the overall articulation of a building or landscape or
infrastructure form: its massing, its volumetric organization. What are the
consequences of this approach to traditional architectural categories such
as ornament and structure?
Gesture vs. Organization
The modernist dogma of abstraction, which, upon its evocation in Loos
1908 Ornament and Crime, had been consequently developed into a
rhetoric of functionalism and structural purity, here seems to be crumbling
away in the light of an architecture of gestural forms that symbolically
structures the territory. But the architecture of symbolic forms is
dispensing with much more than the dogma of structure and function.
In a pointed article, Anne-Marie Sankovitch argues that the distinction
between ornament and structure which lies at the basis of the modernist
refusal of ornament is much older than Loos. Sankovitch points out
Why nineteenth-century Romantics, early twentieth-century
formalists, and contemporary contextualists are so frequently
in agreement about the fundamental (structure/ornament)
character of buildings about which they are otherwise in apparent
disagreement.139
This dichotomy has been a way of thinking about architecture since
the Enlightenment, when the internal logic of architecture came to be
associated, in a typically positivist fashion, with its structural system.
The general thrust of her argument is to demonstrate that the structureornament binary pair is still predominant in contemporary architectural
thinking. Historians of architecture also apply it to interpret texts (such
as Albertis treatise) which in and of themselves do not call up this
distinction. Our compulsive use and apparently unconscious, uncritical
acceptance of its validity makes us complicit in the re-writing of history

Sankovitch, Anne-Marie. Structure/Ornament and the Modern Figuration of Architecture. In: The Art Bulletin, Dec 1998.
139
386
according to principles that dominate our own thinking.

Sankovitchs claim is again relevant here because the kernels of the
architectural theory formulated above have indeed nothing to do with
structure-ornament distinction. Unfortunately, general clichs about
modernism have severely distorted our reading of the work of the
protagonists. By folding them into the monolith of modernism, the
interpretation of their work has been reduced to one that happens
according to the structure/ornament dichotomy. Thus, we have done great
injustice to its unique specificity. But perhaps this specificity is simply off
our radar because it does not conceive of itself in this pervasive traditional
binary pair? Before modernism as well as after it, architectural theory
is largely organized around the structure/ornament distinction. Robert
Venturis and Denise Scott-Browns new definition of architecture as a
decorated shed in the 1960s jumps here to the forefront immediately.
Venturi re-iterates the structure-ornament distinction as the modernists
did, but of course, he does so to revalue ornament as a cladding,
decoration, allegory, the ordinary, figurativeness. Yet, in doing so, he
precisely maintains the rigid separations between both.
The main trouble with rejecting a formal system in architecture
is that the architects who do so in order to avoid the dangers of
formalism, ironically, become more prone to formalism. Latemodern fundamentalist architects accepted the words of artists of
the heroic period but not the substance of their work. By attempting
to exclude symbolism and decoration, and by emphasizing spatial
and structural expression, they ended with an architecture of
abstract expressionism: pure but limited, it was soon not enough. So
they substituted articulation for decoration articulation through
the exaggeration of structural and functional elements: structure
protrudes rhythmically, functions protrude sensitively, clerestories
pulsate on the roof. Articulation provides visual richness for from
stripped of decoration. In frequent cases, orgies of complex and
contradictory articulations produce dramatic expression that becomes
expressionism in architecture. Ironically, the exclusion of applied
ornament distorts the whole building into an ornament. [].140

P. 65 in: Robert Venturi, A Definition of Architecture as Shelter with
Decoration on It, and another Plea for a Symbolism of the Ordinary in Architecture. First
published in: pp. 3-14: A+U, January 1978, Again in: pp. 62-67 in: Arnell, Bidkford, Bergart
140
Monumental Symbol
387
Venturi states that the abolition of ornament leads to a hypertrophy

of structural articulation, through which the entire building becomes
ornament. Thus, central to Venturis claim is that the modernist was doing
something different form what he said141. Consequently, Venturi can
claim that his definition of architecture, in the end, is more truthful to the
ambitions of functionalism:
The definition of architecture as shelter with symbols on it
presupposes an acceptance of the functional doctrine, not a rejection
of it an augmentation of it for the sake of maintaining it142.
His definition indeed inherits the doctrine of architecture-as-structure
much more than the late-modern protagonists who preceded him. In
the end, Venturis argument should be considered as a plea for clear
distinctions between structure and ornament. In the light of the work of
the protagonists discussed above, Venturis claim about late modernism is
only partially true: yes, the entire building begins to operate as a symbolic,
gestural form and thus becomes one large ornament on the scale of the
city. Yet this ornament is not derived from structure or a celebration of
it; it is simply unrelated to it, developing instead from a reading of the
morphology, culture, and organization of the surrounding city, as well as
from the vocation of the built program in relation to these surroundings.
Structure and program are secondary to this ambition, contrary to the
generalizing claim Venturi ascribes to Gropius that When you get
structure and program right, expressive architecture will be the automatic
result.143 However, is it possible that Venturis own obsession with the
structure-ornament distinction blinds him to the fact that some of the
late modernists are already engaged in a conscious reflection on the role
of a building-as-ornament? If Venturi had to reiterate the separation
(ed.) Views from the Campidoglio, (New York: Harper and Row).
141

Decoration on It, and another Plea for a Symbolism of the Ordinary in Architecture, ib.
142

143

388
between structure and ornament to place new value on the latter, our
protagonists have in fact already re-united both terms. We can conclude
that, contrary to Venturis assumption back then, these protagonists were
not inhibited by the functionalist dogma that we in hindsight ascribe to
their generation. This dogma seems to have weighed more heavily for the
next generation than for these last actors conventionally placed within
modernism. Venturis definition of architecture brings the structure/
ornament dichotomy to the postmodern age, where it has thrived until
this very day. One of its recent manifestations can be found in Koolhaas
treatise on Bigness144, which states that the depth and sheer volume
of contemporary programs erases the possibility to have a relation of
integrity and honesty between the buildings insides and its facades. As a
result, the facades become independent, purely decorative or ornamental
skins applied to whatever bulk program inside.
In the emergent theory of symbolic architecture, more force could be
given to a different argument, that the newly described purpose of
architecture introduces a new tension: between territorial gesture and
internal organization. This is because gestural architecture is not in
the least a question of massing. The organization and placement of the
programs such that they constitute a form organizing ones perception
from afar is critical to the establishment of an architecture of symbolic
forms. This need towards the erection of a symbol that operates in the
elevation will unavoidably lead to tensions with the internal maximum
efficiency diagram defined by an economic cost-benefit study of the
program. It is precisely this tension that generates the difference between a
mere building and an architecture that aspires to fulfill its public function.
The introduction of a public element which necessitates its own price
tag defines the future fault line and dichotomy in architecture.

Koolhaas, Rem. Bigness. Pp. 494-517 in: Koolhaas, Rem; Mau,
Bruce. S,M,L,XL. (NY: Monacelli Press; Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, c1995).
144
Monumental Symbol
389
390
4. the liberal
monument
Groups
391
392
4.1 THESES
About the Liberal Monument
Theses
393
Fundamentally, the theory of the

project interprets a forgotten thread
of late modernism on the East Coast
a modernism with romanticist
echoes of monument, symbol, and
myth, integrated into a confident
neo-modernist template to directly
address the mass alienation
spawned by decades of territorial
disintegration. Architecture places
its autonomy at the service of this
project; and planning contributes
a belief in the possibility of
emancipation from above. The result
outlined the contours of a project
for the city that would eventually
come to be called urban design.
When the Enlightenment principles
underlying liberalism itself are
endangered, the New Monumentality
aims to project these ideals into
the territory, affirming their validity
in the face of mass regression.
The project does not confirm the
status quo; it inserts symbols of
the ideal form of liberalism. It
does so by deploying a series of
civic complexes throughout the
sprawling suburbs. These complexes
394
involve various public buildings

and spaces, on a limited footprint,
built on the potential centrality
promised by the intersection of
various infrastructure lines. As the
intersections become switch-over
points between automobile and other
traffic modes, there will be a resulting
pedestrian flow. The complexes
will be connected by a series of
infrastructures which diversify the
suburbs current monogamous relation
with the car: aqueducts, boulevards,
transit lines, etc. The result we
could call a regional city, a posturban network of monuments and
public forms in a basically privatized
suburban realm. The following realignments within architecture and
urban design theory underlie the
templates extracted through the
labor of the previous chapters. The
basic theses conveyed through the
historical project described above are
as follows:
Theses
395
(1)
The modern movement has, especially
in its later years, given birth to a
plurality of different projects, many of
which have been buried or otherwise
not properly studied as these later
projects were dismissed before they
had a chance to mature.
(2)
There exists a romantic tradition
within late modernism in architecture
and planning, radically different from
the one of the preceding decades.
(3)
Its purpose was to create a project for
the city that could glorify liberalism
in the same way Iofans Soviet
Palace glorified Stalinism: it could
become the symbolic form of an ideal
society, anticipating its arrival and
prophesizing its form.
396
(4)
They believed in the need to plan this:
to organize emancipation from above.
(5)
The project could be called a Mythproject: to glorify, reify, celebrate,
monumentalize, and propagandize the
political ideology of liberalism, thus
anticipating a new reality.
(6)
Its genome is a political aesthetic
based on the common ground of
formalism.
(7)
This project gives birth to a series of
ideograms that capture and crystallize
a concept of the public, while at the
same time aiming at the aesthetic
effect of an immediate cognition.
These could be called ideal figures.
Theses
397
(8)
This project is a major
unacknowledged source of urban
design, a term that today suggest a
institutionalized discipline voided
from content through systematic
overuse and marketing, but in fact
consists of a political-territorial
project: the New Monumentality.
(9)
This discovery of an urban
modernism not only discards
modernisms typical interpretation
as a monolithic project of reason,
but also questions the consequent
reactions against modernism as
possible misinterpretations, and most
importantly, invites a re-interpretation
of architectural and urban design
history after modernism historical
high point. As a result, suddenly,
a continuing and living tradition
appears: that of the liberal monument.
398
(10)
That this living tradition is, today,
more urgent than ever before,
because ever since 9/11 the various
emancipatory projects of progressive
liberalism seemingly lost credibility
worldwide, while the destabilizing
forces of modernity rage more
strongly than before. In a time of
crisis, the monument achieves a new
relevance.
(11)
The insertion of the historical project
described above as a contemporary
one into todays discourses of urban
design and architecture would lead
to fundamental re-alignments and
shifting vocabularies:
Theses
399
(12)
Not grassroots but emancipation from
above
(13)
Not fabric but figure
(14)
Not object but complex
(15)
Not urban but public
(16)
Not program but organization
(17)
Not complexity but clarity
(18)
Not just abstraction but also body
400
language
Theses
401
The meeting that never took place

Only now does it become possible to imagine a fictional conversation, which is rigorously based on the actual ideas of the
protagonists, but which nevertheless focuses predominantly on
the concrete openings and relationships that can be constructed. The minutes of such a meeting, which never took place,
serves as a summary of key concepts discussed above.
Sert: Progress for architecture will be possible only if we can place it
within a larger project vis vis the current mechanisms of territorial development. Sprawl, as William Whyte calls this phenomenon
in America, is already demonstrating its overwhelming force as a
quasi-endless sequence of private developments. I dread the utopization of this scenario in pictures of a city of tomorrow, formed of
endless suburbs, one cottage close to the next and a helicopter in every
backyard. We cannot deny that there is also an American culture
which is civic and urban. Therefore, I propose the insertion in key
strategic points of the sprawling private territories, of public devices,
devices that civilize these territories. I propose to call these civic
complexes.
Cassirer: Sert, you Euro-elitist! You mean you want to impose your
civilization on others, which we have to gather you consider an
uncivilized lot? Your proposition reminds me of Stalins Palace of the
Soviets, replicating itself throughout the territories to broadcast the
propaganda of a unitary state. Isnt that the same strategy?
Sert: Not quite! Think about the Greek concept of democratic space.
As Ortega y Gasset said, their revolution has been to define a space,
amidst the endless fields of nature, defined by its exclusion from the
continuum of vegetation. Man erects a space for public discourse. My
Civic Complexes will do the same they interrupt the continuous
stretches of privatized commercial life are interrupted to introduce a
moment of public reflection.
Giedion: I think Sert does not conceive this separation literally, as
a walled-off space; but rather as a specific, recognizable form in the
midst of a formless continuum.
Cassirer: Well- you can hardly claim that privatized commercial life
402
Modernist Debris
European architects and urban designers born after 1972, the date on
which Charles Jencks declared modernism to be dead, have been fed a
series of discourses all of which are reactions against modernism. This
generation our generation grew up with the received wisdom that
complexity, the everyday, and so-called self-organization are part of an antidote to the totalizing tendencies discovered in the project of modernism.
To this corresponded a shift in the discourse, from the city as it ought to
be to the city as it was. After abandoning modernism, we have embraced
the richness of life itself in the city. However, to those born after modernism had already been buried, this historico-cybernetic-anthropological
turn is no longer a critical project, as its enemy modernism itself has
vanished already. Worse, have we, by abandoning a transformative alternative project, cleared the path for the uninterrupted execution of ruthless
late urban development? This process could be described as the tyranny
of collective privatization. Under its aegis, form and its judgments are
relegated to the private sphere as mere expressions and interests of private
subjects. It was the historical task of the intelligentsia to critique hegemonic discourses and modes of development and investigate alternatives.
Instead, we have been told to be content with the status quo.
What if we revisit the paradigm preceding the current one what if we
look at late modernism again, not as a piece of history, but as an incomplete project? Could it allow us to find a template that embodies and
defines our ideals in the same way that Boris Iofans Soviet Palace project
defined Stalinism? A powerful critique against modernism, common to
both architects and planners, resorting to critical methods of the Frankfurt
School, was that by placing reason at the service of politics and economy,
it regressed into its opposite myth. The myth of reason legitimized the
hegemony of a functionalist discourse, thus enabling an extremely reductive, yes an anti-humanistic approach to the form of the city.

Jencks, Charles. On the controlled destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe apartment
complex. In: What is Post-Modernism. (New York: Rizzoli, 1989).
Theses
403
is barbarian or vegetational! Furthermore, if the Greeks regarded

infinity as negative, because formless and therefore inaccessible
to human reason, for Giordano Bruno this is reversed after the
Copernican revolution. Infinity or the endless fields, now means
the immeasurable and inexhaustible abundance of reality and the
unrestricted power of the human intellect that can be exercised over
it. Sert, you are one revolution behind!
Sert: My claim, merely, has been to say that the Greek revolution
is that man sets himself apart from the totality that he was always
part of. A totality is a system without a horizon, a continuum from
which there is no escape. This was nature for the Greeks, it is the
state for totalitarian regimes, but it can also be the endless continuity of a post-urban sprawling realm. Allow me to draw a parallel
between Brunos view of infinity and modernist urban planning. Modern planning has declared its purpose to be the efficient
organization of the territory through functional zoning. Well then,
planning proves itself to be a totalizing endeavor: the entire territory is its scope and a single organizing principle is to be applied
all over it. That is the transposition, in our field, of what you call
Brunos revolution. And today tithe peripheries of cities are expanding so drastically as to link up and become a post-urban continuum:
a system without a horizon, without escape valve. I consider this
such a nascent totality. What is lacking is a public moment, defined
as a moment in which these dispersed private things become visible
simultaneously. Therein lays the purpose of the Civic Complexes.
Kahn: Sert, I agree with you. We need a counter-project within the
modern tradition.
Sert: Our purpose is not to plan for a brave new world, but to provide exceptions to it. Havens, if you will.
Giedion: We will need an alliance between architects, artists, planners, and intellectuals!
Cassirer: Well, many urban intellectuals deplore the civic poverty
they perceive in the suburbs. They may support your havens, but not
if they imagine your insertions as a mono-functional office district
for public bureaucracies. Are they wrong?
404
Peter Eisenmans early re-interpretation of modernism as a harbinger of

autonomy in architecture constitutes an attempt to void this regression.
Reason only works in the absence of an ulterior motive. Autonomous
architecture builds an internal purposiveness and rationality, thus seeking
to re-instate a form of reason that was completely interior to itself. Architecture ensuing self-referentiality turns it into a resistant object, allowing
for neither abuse nor engagement. No longer instrumental, it has again
become pure. Logically, the primary template in which the autonomy can
realize itself is that of the object. This operation, however, confirms modernism as an articulation of the project of Enlightenment: reason.
But was Modernism ever such a monolithic project? Manuel de Sola-Morales salvaging operation differs from that of Eisenman. Morales argues
in the Urban Project (1985) that modernism went awry when it transformed its own sensible arguments, through a propaganda effort, into a
system of absolutes, orthodoxy, and a myth of reason. The new orthodoxy
repressed the presence of another tradition within modernism, which,
while using abstract formalism, is more expressive and contextual. Morales
resurrects this as the urban project. He finds this tradition amongst
others in the work of German expressionists, Cor van Eesteren and Willem Dudok in the Netherlands, Leslie Martin in the UK, and Ludovico
Quaroni in Italy. Morales insists on the transformative, projective force
of architecture beyond the limits of its own intervention. He stresses
need for the project to be urban to stage a civic crowd. He thus places
modernisms abstract formalism explicitly at the service of a larger, and
I would argue, liberal ideal of the public sphere. Thus, while Eisenmans
formal autonomy resists the outside world, Morales formal project seeks
to transform, beyond the boundaries of its own intervention, that world.
Most importantly, he claims a territory that the autonomous object, by
its very definition, vacates: that of the interstitial scale, the scale of urban
design, of architectural urbanism or, as Quaroni had called it, urbanistics.

Eisenman, Peter. Aspects of Modernism. Maison Dom-ino and the SelfReferential Sign. In: Oppositions, nr, 15/16. Published again: pp. 188-199 in: Hayes, Michael (ed.)
Oppositions Reader. Selected Readings from a Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture 19731984).
Theses
405
Sert: Yes. I would like to define civic space as an event space, where
the unplanned can unfold and where people can freely meet a
space of the unexpected encounter. You know that I have had good
conversations with Le Corbusier on the need for civic centers. But I
noticed that he tends to move this complex into a pristine site, like in
Chandigarh where the project then acquires an almost sacral, templar quality. This is contrary to the civic life, described by Mumford
and White, and to my own observations of the cities in my native
Catalunya. However, for the unexpected encounter to occur, different
trajectories need to intersect. Different flows of people need to intersect. Therefore, it is also absolutely necessary that the Civic Complex
be embedded in its surroundings. Surrounding streets, flows, and
roads ought to be addressed in and through the project.
Kahn: I agree, but perhaps we can push this even further. In my
research on Philadelphia, I have been shocked by the degree to which
the assault of automobile networks and infrastructures is destroying everything that we value about civic space. These highways
and parking lots are being designed from the narrow standpoint of
engineering efficiency only. For that reason, the great promise for a
new modernity that they contain remains untapped. The great train
stations of the 19th century were the monuments to the modernity of
this era. Can the parking garages, exit ramps and traffic junctions
perform contribute to the monuments for our time? The crucial task
is to organize the moment of transition from car or train to pedestrian, into a grand civic moment. Serts Civic Complexes should
be such gateways. They will become actual nodes where flows are
transubstantiated, and in this metamorphosis, we as architects will
be able to define a civic moment.
Sert: I want to add some contextual intelligence to the Civic Complex. It should bolt together disparate developments in its vicinity.
We all know how suburban development takes place: 500 homes
here, a commercial zone there, and shopping center across from the
motorway. This is the debris of the city, thrown out over the countryside. But through a strategic choice of location, we may transform
some of the leftover terrain between these private developments into
an interface.
Giedion: Your statements prove that the Civic Complex is not some
nostalgic surrogate copy of the historic city center.
406
Morales work opens up a different kind of modernism: a clear and radical project for emancipation, however without a functionalist-rational
metaphysic built into its foundation. The most radical possibility here is
that Modernism, within its own narrative, contained also a counter-project
that was in fact deliberately romantic, addressing myth, monument and
centrality.
Romantic Modernism
Modernism in architecture and especially in urbanism has been conventionally understood as a translation of the project of Enlightenment
through reason. Reason itself was in this respect considered as the opposite of myth with reason invoking transparency, lightness, functionalism,
structural logic, whereas myth invoked opacity (impenetrability), darkness,
symbolic logic, ornament, centrality and monumentality. After the Athens
Charter, modernist urbanism became progressively more associated with a
rational approach: emphasizing functionalism, structure, etc. Unfortunately, while this reading of Modernist urbanism is monolithic, it has remained
dominant. However, the above chapters suggest a different interpretation.
There are more than a few lingering traces to be found within the Modern
Movement that relate to the persistent forces of a counter-project called
up by the Enlightenment. Isaiah Berlin called this the Counter-Enlightenment project; in intellectual history, it is generally called Romanticism. Born in late eighteenth-century Germany and heralded already
by Goethe, as a response to the (French) Enlightenment, Romanticism
eventually spreads through Europe in the course of the nineteenth century.
However, German aesthetic theorists will most thorough develop theories
of a Romanticist aesthetic throughout the nineteenth century, reaching
a zenith in Nietzsches eulogy of Wagners Gesamtkunstwerk. The most
fundamental recurring term in their work is that of the Symbol, a form
embedding its own content, as opposed to the despicable Allegory, which
is full of metaphors, references, narrations forms referring to outside
Theses
407
Cassirer: Interesting, but my concerns are not assuaged yet. What

are its own functions?
Sert: We want to transform the shopping paradigm. The ascent of the
middle classes is turning ours into a consumption-driven economy.
We should use this new force of development to propel the project of
the Civic Complex forward with updated definitions of public space.
Take for instance, a combination of shopping, a movie theatre, with
hotel, offices, apartments, post-office, and conference amenities. We
want the private sector to build this in a manner that maximizes its
public character and accessibility. In this orchestration lies the task
of the public sector. It can do so through infrastructure design, the
provision of a formal master plan, or a regulatory framework. This
new toolbox will need to be studied in the Urban Design Program
that I have started.
Cassirer: For liberal philosophers, the public emerges where private
interests collide or align. There is no separate, legitimate public content except for that which the citizens and interest groups put into
it. Liberal democracy, then, is a perpetually ongoing negotiation of
perpetual conflicts of interest. The only task sui generis for the public
sector is to guarantee a neutral staging area for these negotiations.
This is the only foundation of the state that excludes its regression
into fascism. Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin, and I agree about this. Is
this your view, then?
Sert: Yes, it is, and that is why I quoted Ortega Y Gasset earlier. I
believe he belongs in your line-up. And this political theory of the
state or public government - implies a concept of public space,
closely aligned with William Whytes concept of what is urban: the
exposure of oneself to difference, to others a density of different
desires.
Sert: What is the form of an architecture defined by this public function?
Giedion: The apparatus of typologies for a public architecture, delivered to us through European history has been inextricably tied to the
ideology of state or church. It is our task now to translate the eternal
need of the people to own symbols into a new monumentality that
408
content. This is not an easy category: the German romanticists used it to

describe, through weighty intellectual elaborations, the ideal work of art,
rather than any existing one.
In-depth readings of our protagonists of the second and third generation of modernism show a fascination for centrality, symbolic form, and
monumentality. Such notions are reminiscent of exactly the aforementioned tradition of German romanticist aesthetics, from authors such as
Schelling, Vischer, and Worringer to Nietzsche. The romanticist symbol
is also effectively related to the aforementioned late-modernists through
figures such as Ernst Cassirer, who left Germany for the US East Coast
in the 1930s and transformed the Romantic Symbol into that a more
Kantian abstract-sensuous schema, template, or ideogram. Cassirers
affinity for both primitive myth and the abstractions of modernism and
science brought him on a path towards the development of its theory
as a sacramental aesthetics. Cassirer thus began to connect romanticist
symbol with modernist abstraction. For the architectural protagonists, this
is a liberation. They no longer have to achieve modernist abstraction, and
through it, emancipation from historical convention, through the formulas
of functionalism; rather, it can now emerge from pre-bourgeois traditions
of rituals, gestures, and symbols. Cassirer and like-minded scholars such as
Susanne Langer inspired intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s, including
that of the architect-planners mentioned above. In fact, Sigfried Giedion
aimed to demonstrate a similar point in his Carnegie Mellon lectures.
Under the heading Constancy and Change, Giedion argues that the
abstract-sensuous forms of Le Corbusier, and the work of primitive surrealists such as Calder and Leger have an ritualistic, mythological aspect
in common with primitive art such as cave-paintings. Giedion grew up in
German Romanticism, Sert and Kahn read Giedion, and all of them read
Cassirer and Langer.
Ultimately, the presence of a romanticist current in an essentially modernist project does not certainly not lead to a synthesis between two great
historical histories of ideas, namely Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment; rather, the intertwining of these apparently opposite positions
Theses
409
responds to the utopias of the aforementioned citizens and interest

groups rather than the state. The demand for monumentality cannot
be suppressed. It tries to find an outlet at all costs. If liberalism ignores this, it will fail to channel a very potent and dangerous desire
for identity. This explains our shock, in the West, with Stalins Palace
of the Soviets, while we were engaged in the suppression of all forms
of representation.
Cassirer: I am convinced now that the basic function of human
culture is to symbolize: to make sensory reality understandable by
transforming its appearances into cognizable forms of the mind. I
have called them symbolic forms. They are a series of proto-linguistic
diagrams, templates that embed their content in their form. They
explain rather than represent (the function of an image) or point
to something else (the function of a sign). These forms are at once
abstract and sensuous. You are proposing to transport these schemata
of the mind directly into concrete matter, with the least amount of
mediation.
Kahn: And conversely, we read these forms in even the most banal
routines and man-made things. These are therefore shimmering
with implicitly stated, underlying ideal diagram. If latent, it is the
architects task to excavate this ideal form. Thus, we find ourselves
part of the same project, with your approach from the philosophy of
knowledge, and mine from art and architecture!
Maki: Such forms are discovered rather than invented; in a sense,
they belong to society even before the designer discovers them. What
I like about the symbolic forms is that it lifts the making of forms for
the city out of the realm of subjectivity. For if I understand Cassirer
well, his symbolic forms are collectively understood within a culture
and therefore objective to it. That is why I call them collective forms.
Giedion: For me, an architecture of symbolic forms corresponds to a
new kind of monumentality, one that belongs to humanism instead
of to an ideology of the state. This new monumentality will be
mythologizing mans will for emancipation. The first modernists surrendered the mythologizing force of the architectural monument by
attempting to achieve absolute abstraction. As a result, weve created
architecture and urbanism that are silent, allowing the ruling elite
to abuse its capacity to speak. Let us take back architectural speech
410
leads to a highly peculiar, specific project for the city one could ultimately
summarize as the Liberal Monument. The project is Romanticist because
it accepts that reason should never conquer myth and its irrational ideals,
but it is Modernist in that it transforms that acceptance into a project to
emancipate individuals and groups by working through their own as well
as others belief systems to arrive at an understanding and acceptance of
irreconcilabilities contained within the whole.
Liberal Political Aesthetic

Berlin described the project of postwar pluralism as coming out of a
liberal political philosophy, itself largely a legacy of the romantic tradition.
Nevertheless, the two older terms continue to exist in Berlins new definition. In our definition of urban design, they are interwoven as follows:
Liberalism asserts itself through the multitude (rather than singularity) of civic complexes. This is part one, Cores. Pluralism asserts itself as
a perpetual conflict / armistice of opposing myths; this is part two, the
Group. Romanticism, finally, asserts itself most poignantly at the level of
the Monumental Symbol: part three.
The resulting political aesthetic comes into full view if we place Cassirers
Essay on Man and Myth of the State adjacent to Jose Ortega Y Gassets
The Revolt of the Masses and especially the work of Isaiah Berlin. These
books respond to the European mass regression of the 1930s and 1940s.
Its authors set out to dig up the roots of Europes regression in fundamental perspectives contained in Western thought. They expose the totalizing,
yes, even totalitarian stance contained within the project of reason, namely
its claim to supersede all cultural biases as an objective apparatus. Against
the tyranny of reason, the Sturm und Drang of Romanticism becomes a
project of liberation. The Enlightenment calls up the Counter-Enlightenment. This Romantic resistance is against an overarching notion of
Theses
411
and use it to address popular culture directly.

Cassirer: The French anthropologist Doutt has once called myth le
dsir collectif personnifi, which we could translate as the collective
desire condensed in a humanly figure - and that for me says it all.
Mans first emotional utterances (cries, screams, etc.) are transformed into bodily gestures and facial expressions, which therefore
become symbols to explain a state of mind. These are then projected
onto the surrounding world. The world is thus transformed into a
series of physiognomic forms, performing a pantomime. Here we
cannot speak of things as a dead stuff. All objects are benignant or
malignant, friendly or inimical, familiar or uncanny, alluring and
fascinating or repellent and threatening. Primitive man is radically
united with his world, dissolving in it. This primal layer of understanding is still with us today and resurfaces when distanced logical
thought is switched off. In other words, with a disinterested gaze, we
are already on the verge of entering the world as a mythical universe
of gestures. Architecture as a myth-project is the materialization of
these gestures as three-dimensional forms. What follows is that the
elevation and sections of the project become of utmost importance.
Sert: An architecture of gestural forms means a series of abstractemphatic forms that explain the surrounding city!
Giedion: I agree, and my studies on monumentality throughout the
development of western architecture, one element always stands out,
namely verticality, confirming Cassirers suggestion that a public
architecture involves the problem of the elevation. You know my
obsession with the definition of a new monumentality in architecture I also call it the third space conception. I conceive of the third
space conception as a synthesis between the first and second space
conception. The first space conception is an architecture of pyramids,
ziggurats, obelisks, etc.: massive forms whose force is predominantly
geared towards the organization and definition of the spaces that
are surrounding it. In the second space conception, architectures
vertical force is geared inwards, towards the monumentalization of
its interiors. Now, the third space conception, the new monumentality, is a synthesis. Here, the vertical force continues from the inside
to the outside. We are arriving at a new generation of architectural
forms where the space is flowing through the building, from its exteriors and surroundings, through its inner core, to the other sides. The
412
Reason, against the installation of a new totality disguised as its opposite.

Instead, there is, according to the Romantics, only the will of individuals
(heroes) and groups (nationalism) to pursue their drives, which, in the absence of an overarching connecting notion, are bound to conflict with each
other. For Berlin, such Romanticism leads to one unavoidable conclusion:
a concept of liberalism as the perpetual negotiation of irreconcilably conflicting ideals, consequence of mutually exclusive myths of identity, will,
origin, and destiny. It does place center stage issues such as symbolic form
and monumentality, rather than functionalism and muteness. However,
Berlins political aesthetic does not serve to validate these mythologies of
the will, but rather to interrogate their antagonizing force by placing them
willfully in a context of mutual contrast: conflicting myths, symbols, and
monuments. Therein lays the boldness of Berlins Romanticism: to propose
that nationalism and the forces of myth can never be vanquished through
reason, but can only be addressed by working through them; and to say
this at the exact moment when the atrocities of Romanticist Europe are
becoming known requires no mean intellectual courage. Thus for Berlin,
Romanticism (and its corollary Nationalism) give birth to liberalism. Its
central terms, while still the romantic myth, symbol, monumentality
are radically re-framed. This time they are deployed not to legitimize their
own political pursuit, but rather to demonstrate precisely the impossibility
of these pursuits in the light of their mutual exclusivity. Its central scheme
of post-Romanticism is the uneasy coexistence of incompatible myths,
rather than their withering away once the lamp of reason has poured
its light onto them. Furthermore, this counter-project leaves little or no
tolerance of the postmodern habit. For the liberal project takes myths
extremely seriously. Instead of irony, there is agony. Instead of peace, there
is only a truce, uneasily negotiated amidst a bitter fight over incompatible
myths. Late Modernism no longer presents itself as a premature end of
history in the realms of rational light, but rather as a new chapter in the
ongoing quest of Romanticism.
The relationship between the political philosophers of liberalism Berlin
first of all, but also Cassirer and the architectural protagonists of the
Theses
413
elevations are opened up, a new level of transparency is achieved,

there are continuous surfaces go from the inside to the outside.
Sert: Your prophecy implies that on the horizontal surface, a series
of continuously flowing spaces are defined, that pass by, through,
and under the form. As a result, a new aesthetic of public space is
established that gives very precise definitions of this space.
Kahn: Another breakthrough is that we are now finally abandoning
the structure-ornament distinction, which has impeded our discussions on modern architecture. Instead, the newly found public purpose of architecture leads to a different dichotomy: between gestural
force and internal organization.
Giedion: This new monumental symbol will be our answer to the
Soviet Palace.
Maki: He exaggerates! If we conceive the Civic Complex as a giant
powerful symbol, we are, just like the totalitarian regimes of the
thirties, forcing a diverse people into a unified whole. We are therefore not doing justice to our own principles.
Cassirer: Well, that brings us to the question as to what constitutes
the people or the public. We agreed that it is constituted of an
extremely diverse set of groups and individuals, which adhere to
different worldviews, have different aspirations and utopias, and
defend different interests. If this is the public, how can we conceive
of its symbolic form?
Giedion: To answer this I want to invoke the concept of the
grouping. In surrealist art, this is the juxta- and superimposition of entirely different and unrelated items. This grouping is
adequately illustrated by Giacomettis projet pour une place: a series
of freestanding symbolic forms are placed without clear geometrical
relation on a platform. I believe that this approach, which in itself
was meant as a critique of the objects of capitalism, also contains a
great promise as a symbolic form for liberal democracy. This becomes
clear once we compare the surrealist grouping to the Greek Acropolis.
The Acropolis is one of the first examples of group design. Instead of
a single unifying vision, there are different viewpoints, and from
each viewpoint, one sees at least two or three different monuments,
414
New Monumentality and urban design, goes far beyond their mere co-existence in the same historical climate of opinion, or even the protagonists
familiarity with some of the philosophers writings. For they share a fundamental worldview which accepts that there are a plurality of viewpoints,
and that these are mutually exclusive; they are not only initially incompatible, they are fundamentally irreconcilable. And that is no longer considered as a problem, but rather as a productive point of departure. Each
protagonist asserts this in his or her own way: from Tyrwhitts installation
of a plurality of civic complexes rather than a singular one, Serts articulation of the forms of the group as different as possible, and Giedions
quest to make each monumental symbol speak to a particular popular
desire, and on to Makis proposition to make these incompatibles co-exist
through various means of linkage. The answer to this looming war of ideas
is the installment of an armistice since these irreconcilable entities can
nevertheless be made to co-exist without mutually destroying each other,
through the principle of empathy imagination of what things look like
from the viewpoint of the other, without necessarily accepting or adopting that other viewpoint. This empathy returns not only in the aesthetic
of Romanticism (Vischer, Worringer, Cassirer) but also in the writings
of Berlin as the last and fundamental stronghold of a postwar civilization
based on the principles of liberalism. The fundamental device is herein
always the same: first, to achieve a sense of clarity within each monumental symbol, each myth represented on its own terms; second, to make these
co-exist. This co-existence is achieved through various means.
First, on the level of the individual public architecture/ monumental
symbol, abstract-emphatic form: the abstraction which allows for a wide
range of interpretation; and the emphasis which allows for access to and
cognition of the ideals stated in the form. Second, on the level of the
assemblage of monument: to stage a grouping of these, where the very
abstract and unpredictable contours of a whole emerge but no yet coalesce
into a singularity. Third, by placing a constellation of these throughout the
suburban territory and to abandon any lingering dreams for a single, totalizing center. Thus, when Berlin posited that liberalism and his agonized
Theses
415
against a background of nature. Doxiadis has studied this system

with polar coordinates as a project marked by a simultaneous presence of different monuments in one viewpoint. In it, a plurality of
interests together constitutes the collective. The surrealist assemblage
now becomes the democratic assembly. Its perpetual conflict of interest is presented here as a positive aesthetics.
Briefly compare Iofans drawings Soviet Palace to Giacomettis Palace at 4 oclock in the morning. What kind of Palace do you think he
is referring to? At night, Stalin is haunted by the fact that there is
no singly unifying synthesis as the elevation of Iofans Palace want
you to believe. Quite to the contrary, in Giacomettis sculpture the
different interests and contradictions come to the surface again.
Cassirer: You are implying that the overall form of the Civic Complex is a juxtaposition and superimposition of different Monumental Symbols. Each has its own aspirations and purpose, each is
pointing to its own utopia, yet each made impossible by the immediate presence in its vicinity of the other ones?
Giedion: Exactly.
Maki: The collective cannot be expressed in a single architectural
form, for architecture is a language that has already exhausted
itself by doing to much speaking. Instead, the contours of a collective
form will be found exactly in this grouping of different paradigms.
Through the juxtaposition and superimposition of two forms, a third
one will, implicitly, emerge. Only urban design can engage in this
aesthetic, because it emerges between buildings.
Sert: Lets be clear: this grouping will consist of architecture, but also
of landscape forms and even infrastructure forms. Let us re-state our
purpose here: to build a definition of architecture by placing it in the
service of a larger project vis vis the current mechanisms of urban
development. This project is called the Civic Complex, and defines
architecture purely from the point of view of its public function. Its
template is that of a grouping of monumental symbols, and together
they establish the symbolic form of liberal democracy. Are we in
agreement?
Kahn, Cassirer, Maki, Giedion: Yes.
416
pluralism were the final outcome of the Romanticist movement, after

having gone through a catharsis of rational thought, he really posited the
principle of a romantic modernism. This shared view of irreconcilability
and empathy does not result in a falling apart of the modernist project; for
it seems clear that the acceptance of the former as well as the realization
of the latter needs to be actively installed. The modern project, then, is
continued: emancipation from above remains the mantra. The aim, simply
put, is no longer to install a modernist totality, but a carefully crafted
formalized representation, staged assemblages of the various myths that
together constitute a contour of the collective.
Emancipation from Above

The protagonists, conscious that such a project has remained utterly unrealized, set out to transform it into the present, by anticipating it through
architecture and planning. They are, like true modernists, unabashedly
elitist about it. Their project implies an emancipation from above, and a
thorough distrust of the people or the common man. A vanguard has to
install the political aesthetic of liberalism top-down as a means to rally
the people around it and thus achieve it. Given the historical moment in
which they find themselves, this should hardly come as a surprise. Lets
rewind to the year 1944. The regression of Europe has forced a great many
modernist architects, planners and intellectuals into exile from Europe.
They reflect on the self-destruction of Europe, where
Sectarianism and crypto-totalitarianism have become commonplace, made
mainstream by systematic, aggressive propaganda campaigns that build on
the fear and sense of insecurity of the masses. Humanist values become
expendable, and this actively orchestrated mass regression once more gains
widespread popular acceptance because almost everybody considers his or
her identity (myth) as being threatened by an enemy, which personifies
the vices of a much larger but less tangible process of uprooting: globaliza-
Theses
417
Sert: Well, then, I suggest we begin writing out this in a manifestoform so that we can present this as a new project within the modern
movement, right?
Kahn, Cassirer, Maki, Giedion: Yes.
418
tion (or, as it was called then: cosmopolitanization).

These second-generation modernists are torn between their own functionalist principles as published in the Athens Charter two years earlier,
and the gigantic neo-classicism of Iofan (USSR) and Speer (Germany),
which deployed monumentality, centrality, symbolism, and ornament
in an neo-academic manner, but otherwise on a vast and in that sense
thoroughly modern scale. Architects like Giedion and Sert despise its
pseudo-monumentality, yet the popular appeal of these forms impresses
them. From this tension stems their endeavor: to re-invent these principles
within modernism. They asked how architecture and urbanism could contribute to a turning of the tide away from mass regression, while simultaneously tabling an ambitious but realistic scheme for the reconstruction
of a disintegrated continent. That such an answer would not come from
below was clear to them. Ortega Y Gasset, for instance, claimed that the
masses have no sense of self-direction, turning them into a blind force that
could legitimize tyranny if mischievous elite could present the supposed
will of the masses as rational.
Myth as Project
Therefore, theirs is a project to build a counter-propaganda apparatus: to
monumentalize, propagandize, mythologize, and thus celebrate the project
of liberalism by mounting / staging a presentation of its ideals. Their
project is to mount a myth of, a monument to the ideals of a liberal political philosophy. The principle of Myth structures each of the three scales
of the template of Public Form. The very notion of a Core, the very idea
of an anchor point, underlies the drive of Sert and the other protagonists
towards civic complexes. Their idea is that a society adrift is in need of
anchor points, temples to its own existence. The very notion of city centers,
churches, etc. as anchor points has been exposed as a fundamentally
Theses
419
mythical operation by Rykwert. The protagonists mythical centers ought

to be citadels of an idea of the public otherwise invisible. The mythical
fundament here is in the belief that there is such a thing as a public that
the various constituencies with their own belief systems which compose
it do have something in common that would allow them not only to
co-exist, but to be represented in a single space and to become visible to
each other through it as a collective. Here, the personification of a series
of individuals into a single civic entity takes root. That there are multiple
centers does not weaken this point because it is through their constellation that the figure takes shape. The template of the group as a tight
juxtaposition of different monumental symbols, confirms that a singular
figure of the public is not imposed from above. Instead, myths belonging
to the different constituencies that can be recognized within society are
actively staged and forcibly staged from above. Each monumental symbol
itself mounts the pure form of a singular myth or ideal; it crystallizes a
complete ideal for an entire city on behalf of one of its constituencies, but
by limiting this ideal into a single object, it simultaneously pre-empts the
danger for a sectarian take-over. And in a sense, such forms simply reflect
back onto the surrounding the city an ideal of what is already there in a
more muddled manner.
Ultimately, myth itself becomes the project here. At stake is not only the
fetishization of liberalism, but a massive tour de force to reverse the arrow
of historical direction. Adorno and Horkheimer had written the Dialectic
of Enlightenment to describe the regression of reason (or the project of
the Enlightenment) into myth, through the instrumentalization of reason
and the mindless adoration of rational principles, elevating them to a
quasi-religious status. The regression of the project of reason into myth
is reversed in the project of liberalism. Now, myth becomes the substance
of the project: By working through myth, by presenting and staging their
multitude and their mutual exclusivity, they are at once accepted and demonstrated as being irrational. The project is, simply put, a formalization

Rykwert, Joseph. The idea of a town : the anthropology of urban form in
Rome, Italy and the ancient world (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1976). He stresses,
for instance, the importance of myth in ancient Rome, when it came to defining the center and the
sub center of new settlements: the cardus and decumanus.
420
and clarification of what exists, but all too often remains unacknowledged,
in Western nation-states. That is why the project is liberal.
Formalism
Why does it the expression liberal monument make any more sense
than absurd expressions like fascist doorknob? To conflate political and
aesthetic categories seems very slippery. Having done this up until this
point probably raises the readers eyebrows. Yet postwar liberalism and the
architectural templates of the protagonists have an important argument in
common, and this argument does allow us to effectively speak of a shared
platform a political aesthetic. Both approaches are based on formalism:
the autonomy of a presentation, as opposed to the accurate representation
of something outside the figure staged.
We had already established the antecedents of Sert, Kahn and Giedion
in the historical art movement of formalism. Suffice it to say now that
like liberalism, strict formalism finds its roots in the nineteenth-century
German Romanticism, in the latters case specifically through the definition of the Romanticist symbol. As noted earlier, a liberal philosophy of
the public sphere in and after the arrival of mass culture depends less on
the principle of accurate statistical (data) representation than on principle
of forcibly installing multiple contradicting viewpoints. Pure democracy
legitimizes the tyranny of the majority. That is why Mill writes:
It is necessary that the institutions of society should make provision
for keeping upa perpetual and standing opposition to the will
of the majority...a centre of resistance, round which all the moral
and social elements which the ruling power views with disfavour
may cluster themselves, and behind whose bulwarks they may find
shelter...
These liberal centers reduce (statistical representation) democracy to a
Theses
421
mere ritual, but this reduction is necessary to save the idea of democracy, by protecting it against its own authoritarian impulse. The civic
complexes with their monumental groups are nothing else than Mills
centres of resistance. They dont represent an idea of liberalism; they are
its symbolic form. The populace is formalized into a grouping of icons,
each representing the interest of a larger constituency. Together, these
establish the contours of a public. The project described in this book had
to become to postwar liberalism, what the Soviet Palace was to Stalin,
what cardus and decumanus were to the Romans, and what cathedrals
were to the Catholic Church. Formalism in the arts has historically been
a movement that treats the form as its own content, irrespective of the
degree to which it actually represents the world of phenomena. Formalism in relation to a liberal concept of representation politics is related to
the treatment of democracy as a ritual to confirm a representation that is
in fact not democratic at all. The form (or representation) of the public is
independent from its actual statistical composition. This crystallization of
a vast, sprawling culture into a singular precisely defined space the space
in the houses of parliament requires the introduction of a high degree of
formalism. The form of the public that is crafted here is its own content,
namely liberalism itself, and democracy the actual composition, in reality,
through numbers or data, of the actual totality of individuals and citizens
is a different matter.
Ideal Figures: Templates of Public

Cognition
The concept of publicness proposed by the protagonists presents a liberal
422
ideal, but does not enact a liberal utopia (it does not imply a social revolution). The civic complex assembles tributes to various utopias and dreams
of constituent groups, but refuses to enact and realize any one of them.
As a result, it presents itself as an anticipatory figure on the background
of reality, rather than as a model that embodies a wholesale transformation of the entire city. The Core is a precisely circumscribed figure on the
background of a (dis)urbanizing territory. From a planning perspective,
the project constitutes a retreat from any ambitions towards general plans
(master plans) for large parts of the (post)urban territory. Instead, by placing all the public investment in the Cores of public form, it becomes possible to relinquish the surrounding territory. This, of course, is in complete
agreement with liberalisms urge to define clear boundaries between the
private sphere and the public sphere. The project is a figure, not a background. What began as Serts attempt to insert moments of civilization in
CIAMs functional city becomes, after traveling from Europe to America,
a project of civilizational moments within the expanding territory of
sprawl. Direct state control over the territorial organization, while almost
self-evident in European states, is far less common in the USA, where
suburbia is expanding rapidly and beginning to organize itself as a polynuclear system. Consequently, the apparatus of direct interventions taken
for granted in Europe is now shrinking towards a bare minimum. The
liberal ideology appears now with greater clarity. The great realm of private
enterprise the realm of sprawl remains fundamentally untouched. But
in addition to this, the element that is missing publicness as a forced
uneasy coexistence in one space instead of segregated in the private parcels
is introduced.
Ortega Y Gasset and his choice of quotations are clear: the public square
is, pure and simple, the negation of the [limitless] fields. Sert pushes this
further by equating the sprawling territories of suburbia with the undifferentiated limitless fields. And against plannings ploy to normalize
this territory in an overall plan, he opts for a series of probes to articulate
civic aspirations. All this evidences the figure of the Core as, essentially,
a constructivist project not in a stylistic sense, but in its fundamental
Theses
423
aspiration of heroically constructing, against the forces of nature, history and economy, a definition of ones sense of civilization. The project
becomes a sheer act of will, not to be defeated by the automatic acceptance
of the status quo of a reality Karl Marx called second nature. In other
words, the figure of the core is a figure of resistance. On the one hand, the
figure is defined by virtue of its contrast a counter-proposition to its
background, yet it is to remain surrounded by this background at all sides
to acquire its own profile. So within modernism, the project constitutes a
retreat: from the aspiration to realize a tabula rasa new reality, a utopian
model, to the crystallization of its ideal in a single figure on a background
of reality. This figure is heralding, announcing, anticipating, presenting,
and paying tribute to the utopia of liberalism.
However, can figures still have utopian content? According to Cassirer,
definitely. His symbolic form was much more than a mere category to
describe a mechanism of the human intellect:
Just as man has a real past but he cannot know it, because he only
has access to his symbolic past those of moments which he has
transformed into symbols mans real future is not accessible, but he
is constantly capable of defining his symbolic future. His symbolic
past is what we call myth, his symbolic future, prophecy.
The great mission of the Utopia is to make room for the possible as
opposed to a passive acquiescence in the present actual state of affairs It is symbolic thought, which overcomes the natural inertia
of man and endows him with a new ability, the ability constantly to
reshape his human universe.
For Cassirer, this human universe is not the limitless fields of reality but
the realm of the mind, which is the world of symbolic forms, which is
not in a one-on-one relation to the real, but maintains its own independence from it and remains impenetrable by it. For escaping the tyranny
of reality as second nature requires the presence of terms that allow
imagining an alternative these terms are Cassirers symbolic forms. They

424
pp. 54-55 in: Cassirer, Ernst. Essay on Man, ib.

Pp. 62 in: Cassirer, Ernst. Essay on Man, ib.
are first and foremost present inside the mind of the beholder, shaping
his sensory stimuli. The forms therefore act as moulds or templates. The
forms are not simply a factor of the anatomy of the mind, but also of the
culture in which they form themselves. And most importantly, Cassirer
believes that because of the non-phenomenal character of these forms,
they are, in their pristineness, also ideal forms, crystallizations of culture,
the prime containers of the aspirations and desires of man; they contain
the potential formulation of the utopian. Several architects and urban
designers have, between 1944 and 1961, engaged in a project to make
explicit the growing yet still implicit perception that with the arrival of
mass consumerism, sprawl, and the welfare state, a new public sphere is
taking shape. Giedions Third Space Conception, Kahns Ur-forms, Makis
Collective Symbols, and Serts Sculpto-Architectural Units all use the
notion of symbolic form. Theirs is a project to reformulate the paradigm
shifts of their era into the formulation of a new possible ideal form of
the public. They wanted to achieve this by transforming into concrete
matter the ideal symbolic forms that were present as pristine moulds in
their minds, but, at least so they believed, also in the minds of the newly
emerging publics. Their mission, then, is to pour these ideal templates of
cognition directly into concrete matter. By shining a Cassirerian lamp on
their texts and drawings, one discovers that the developing theories of the
New Monumentality are an architectural translation of the cultural theory
of symbolic form as posited by Cassirer and his followers. And while the
utopian retreats into a symbolic form that embodies its prefiguration, this
retreat is the only way towards its survival an eternal promise, a flame
kept alive.
Urban Design

Cassirer makes this link most explicitly in the facts and ideals chapter
of Essay on Man. Cassirer, Ernst. Pp. 27-62 in: An Essay on Man. (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1944).
Theses
425
The purpose of architecture radically alters once it has been placed in the
perspective of a larger territorial project with its own political aesthetic.
Most importantly, we can no longer conceive of architecture as an object
defined by laws of internal consistency. Pure autonomy is not an option.
Architecture once again begins to discover its external purpose or public
function: staging the public by maximizing the legibility of its aspirations
as well as the reality of the territory that surrounds it, and the consequent
gap between both. The public function has nothing to do with faadism or
Potemkin architecture, which completely inflates the faade, separating it
from any (if at all) internal programs. Instead, the public function necessitates a rigorous reconceptualizing of all the nooks and crannies of the
design according to this newly found prime rationale. Architecture then
places its own autonomy in service of a broader societal project. This task
was considered as so important that some of these architects and urbanists wanted to invent a new disciplinary framework beyond architecture
itself, which had become all too enclosed in its own object-ness. Especially
Serts work in the foundation of the first urban design department, Kahns
text on urban design, and Makis studies illustrates this.
However, from this follows also a radical conclusion: urban design is not
a discipline, but a project. This project is about the development, propagation, and deployment of a modern, liberal political aesthetic. And as
a project, its origins are to be found directly in the reflections on a New
Monumentality, and from there, in the theory of symbolic form.
Today, urban design is often summarized as the intermediate scale
between architecture and planning. Yet the content of this scale is unclear
if not absent. Serts efforts to institutionalize the project of urban design
have somehow thwarted its directionality, erased its sense of purpose. As a
discipline, it had to submit to standards of scientific thought in architecture: peer consensus. Given its highly peculiar, if not polemical political
position, it could not survive such an academicization.
Furthermore, the more conventional view of the late modernists is that
they were anxiously trying to save the movement from its alienating
effects by searching to inject more authenticity into their work, whether
426
in the everyday, or in historic city patterns, or in historicist aesthetics, as

some scholars of this time-period claim (Goldhagen). The interpretation of the birth of urban design then becomes likewise an exercise in
re-assurances about identity, belonging, human scale, etc. However, this
perhaps tells us more about our own anxieties than about the work of the
protagonists. From the joint perspectives of Cassirerian and Berlinian
Romanticism, the project of the liberal monument constitutes no less than
a complete departure from modernisms early principles of functionalism,
as well as from the later authenticity-based, bottom-up undertakings of
the American East Coast: The project is not about either one of these, and
it is appears most definitely not as a transitional moment.
The fundamentally modernist attitude, revealed in urban designs opening
gambit, is the following: in its pursuit of pure abstraction, it realizes that
it can no longer achieve this through the architectural object itself , which,
transposing the words of Eco, installed in a language that has already
done too much speaking. True abstraction appears through the combination of forms into a contour, an interplay, that requires interpretation anew
form every changing angle. Urban design was born because the modernist
aesthetic could no longer realize itself through the building, and needed a
different medium. Hence no anxieties, but a push forward, beyond the
frontier of the architectural object.
Then = Now
Why is the incomplete historical sketch of a project for the Liberal
Monument urgent today? Are we in a different world today? Not Really.
The first years of the twenty-first century are presenting us with a massive
crisis of identity across the globe. These reactions against globalization are
not just innocent, romantic aspirations; they also represent a grave threat
to a polis based on the liberal ideal of the public sphere. The rise of sectar
Goldhagen, Sarah. Anxious Modernisms, Introduction.
Theses
427
ian discourses in Europe, the USA, and the Middle East illustrates this
better than anything else. The Liberal Monument project accepts that it is
impossible to reason away these resurgent mythologies.
After WW1, many romantics, expressionists, left the scene, disillusioned
and disgusted about the barbarism of European infighting; they made way
for the modernists, for whom nothing less than a complete tabula rasa was
the solution. The first generation modernists (1910s) built their case in a
world whose conventions and codes were all breaking down resulting in
an unparalleled potential for emancipation from the historical conditions
of their own time, which had already resulted in a profound alienation of
people from themselves and nature. Academics today capture that historic
sense of total instability, so powerfully voiced by Marx when saying all
that is solid melts into air, with the word modernity. And first generation
modernists effectively grasped that experience and built an architecture
out of it: abstract, white, glass, ethereal, with little matter and a maximum
amount of mobility.
However, our protagonists, reaching maturity throughout the 1940s, are
more conscious than ever that the alienation of the masses, in the end,
becomes a recipe for regression, if not barbarism. Anxious to get out of
this terrible dialectic of modernity, they realized that while modernity was
exhilarating for an artistic and intellectual elite, it was even more disorienting and dehumanizing for large segments of the population for whom
the emancipatory effect was completely unclear. Thus they introduced a
more romantic modernism, eventually culminating in the almost-project of the Liberal Monument. Solidity, centrality, myth, and monument
become projects of a different modernism which thoroughly transforms
these terms, emancipates them from the historical background, and abstracts them.
There are striking analogies with recent events. Throughout the 1990s,
sociologists such as Scott Lash, Anthony Giddens and especially Ulrich
Beck began to support the latters definition of a second modernity: a
condition where the destabilizing potential of modernity is internalized
to the degree that it no longer threatens the structures of society and
428
economy at large, but in fact allows for individuals to surf, find opportunities and exploit the instabilities of the system to their own advantage.
While they were critical of the hollowing out of political institutions in
this second modernity, they also hoped for a democratization of modernitys destabilizing and emancipatory potentials. And soon enough, the
internet became an icon for this: supposedly bottom-up, democratic, hightech, with an extremely volatile content made possibly by a solid global
infrastructure of capitalism. In hindsight, such naivet is much like that of
the first-generation modernists.
However, after 9/11 it becomes increasingly difficult to deny the existence
of the demons and monsters of modernity (or, as it is being called lately,
globalization), We are only beginning to see the contours of a post-cold
war world; a world ruled by on the one hand, a relentless drive towards
ever further integration based on the principle of exchange much glorified in the 1990s as Castells Rise of the Network Society, but on the other hand, ruled by an equally relentless resistance against this maelstrom: a
world in which myths are being erected to inflate a sense of identity, where
there is in fact only the whirring air of virtual exchange left. Romantic
will becomes once more a counter-paradigm to the disenchanted world of
instrumental rationalities and could be recast as what Castells called the
Power of Identity, a force of resistance appearing against the alienating
forces of globalization.
As stated before, architecture and urbanism has spent the better half of its
last decade-and-a-half celebrating the network its focus on one side of
the dialectic risks ending it up once more on the side of a post-national
elite that is completely disconnected form the anxieties of the plebs and
thus risks the same mistake that Sert, Giedion and others became aware of
in the 1940s: that dangerous, totalitarian regimes and propaganda would
take over the other half of the dialectic and systematically exploit the
massive identity anxieties that result of this. That is why the project of the
Liberal Monument is today, once more, urgent.

Castells, ib.
Theses
429
Crisis and Monument

9/11 and its imperial exploitation, the denial of crypto-fascism in the
West, the various political murders in the Netherlands, the popular
embrace of various fundamentalisms across the globe, and the rejection
of the EU constitution, cannot be read but as a raw scream of Unbehagen, a deep-seated discontent with globalization, a sense that people
have become unable if not unwilling to read and internalize the signage
of (Western) capitalism. Facing this extreme anxiety and insecurity, mass
estrangement becomes unbearable and regression ensues, with calls for
strong father figures, law and order, conquest abroad and defeat of unfit
enemies at home. That is the cry coming from the grassroots already
today, but dramatically more so after the crisis. At this point, we can no
longer assume that the people with their popular taste and community
fabric are intrinsically endowed with a sense of ethical direction strong
enough to withstand any kind of mass regression. Besides, history proves
otherwise. We can no longer trust the people.
Estrangement is a disconnection between man and his city incapacity
to relate meaningfully to both nature and other men. Estrangement is not
only a psychological condition, but also an objective fact: the lower middle
class, daily struggling to survive, is forced to reduce its most self-defining
relationships to financial equations, and finds most of these relationships
to be insecure and unstable. However, estrangement is not something we
shall completely resolve: the redemption of man lies obviously outside
the bounds of architecture, urban design or bureaucratic organization.
However, we should address it, because estrangement itself is leading the
masses onto a path of regression, steering us away from the very Enlightenment values that could spawn progress. The ideal of liberal democracy
for instance an as of yet unrealized project moves behind the horizon
as a popular desire for sectarian and even totalitarian order takes over.
The project of the New Monumentality should contribute to preventing
estrangement from plunging us all into an abyss of twenty-first-century
430
mass regression in the west. Estrangement shall not be treated. But our
project should project a ray of light, hope, shimmering at the horizon of
an existence otherwise bereft of any imagination of a rational alternative
to the crisis. The consciousness of this alternative could then give birth to
a popular awareness about estrangement itself. As stated before, estrangement is, fundamentally, a disconnect (1) from nature and the material
world, and (2) from others.
The disconnection from the material world results, among other things, in
a sense of disorientation. This is again not only a psychological term, but
also a spatial, even territorial concept, and there its treatment falls within
the bounds of urban design and architecture. As Melvin Webber demonstrated, in the sprawling suburbs, there is no common mental map each
citizen has its own few known and familiar trajectories plotted onto the
asphalt ocean, but this matrix of subjective maps cannot be argued to build
a wider, collective understanding of the territory, allowing a knowledge
of where one is and what is surrounding you. Similarly, Fredric Jameson
described the disorienting, labyrinthic quality of the XX hotel as a quintessential innovation of postmodernism. For both, this new disorientalism
contained a promise, a potential for liberation. However, the project of the
liberal monument accepts that such a potential is by now exhausted; and
that instead of a celebration of disorientation, we once more need to intervene to increase the level of public awareness of the territory that is being
lived in. Orientation is based on the possibility to decipher figures, forms
which are accessible to all but onto which everyone can project a different
meaning. The imposition of shared figures thus becomes a primordial task
to address disorientation.
Estrangement from others has another consequence: in the absence of
relations that construct the self s identity, it will soon succumb to an overall sense of doom. Coupled with disorientation, this lack of self-esteem
results in pessimism, cynicism, and depression. The economic crisis thus
finally finds its way into the psyche of the masses.

The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm in Melvin M. Webber
(Ed), Explorations into Urban Structure, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964) pp.
19-41.
Theses
431
The project of the New Monumentality is therefore about the positing,

against all odds, of a principle of hope. Paraphrasing Gramsci, the optimism of the will has to trump the pessimism of the mind. Deciphering
the territory is not only a question of drawing lines on a tarmac; it is also
about the introduction of a third dimension height, a towering presence
that surveys, opens up and frames the territory for the people. The New
Monumentality is not only a question of height relative to the flat tarmac.
Its building projects ought to be antennas broadcasting the promise of a
better civilization, broadcasting that ray of hope the masses are thirsting
for in a time of crisis. In a sense, these building projects ought to portray
an ideal form of liberal democracy, just like Boris Iofans Soviet Palace
(1934) portrayed the ideal symbolic form of Stalinism. However, the
content of our broadcast is not as homogeneous, singular, and total as that
of Stalinism. The central template here is that of an assemblage of monuments, analogous to the assembly of interests, a collision between conflicting ideals which forms the central premise of liberal democracy. Each
of these monuments represents a constituency within the masses each
allows for identification by a group of citizens. Placed together, they make
not a form but a contour, a not-yet form, a suggestion of the collective.
The process of identification happens through the concept of empathy. The
beauty of empathy is that this term exists both in psychoanalysis and in
aesthetic theory. In the latter, it refers to the recognition of a human body
expressing, through its own gesture, an emotion. This basic anthropomorphism is general enough to allow for a multitude of interpretations on the
level of cultural signification, while allowing primary identification on a
pre-cultural level of body language. It is elaborated in the template of anthropomorphic form. Finally, as the assemblage of monuments introduces
a scale of architecture beyond that of the architectural object, but more
akin to the scale of urban design, defined as the conception of an entire
pedestrian-accessible complex.
Finally, the project of the Liberal Monument aims to integrate these
templates into a coherent territorial project. Its overall template has
the advantage of clarity. The project involves the deployment of a series
432
of civic complexes throughout the middle suburbs. These are building

projects with a radius that generally does not exceed one mile, built on the
potential centrality promised by the intersection of mass transit lines and
highways. Testing the limits of compactness is of the essence in exploring the alternatives to an automobile-driven development pattern. As the
intersections become switch-over points from automobile to mass transit,
there will be a resulting pedestrian flow. To this flow will be attached programs and functions as numerous as possible from housing and schools
to more escapist programs stacked to achieve maximum compactness.
The complexes will be connected by a series of infrastructures which
diversify the grey goos current monogamous relation with the car: aqueducts, boulevards, transit lines, etc. The result we could call a regional city,
a post-urban network of public forms in a basically privatized suburban
realm.
Not Fabric but Figure

Planners and architects feel the lure of authenticity when using the word
fabric something woven not by them but by the people. Fabric suggests
something natural. It erases a sense of personal responsibility on the part
of the architect-planner, who hands over the drawing board to (supposedly) self-organizing processes. Alas! The fabric of cities and suburbs is
not woven by the people rather, it is the result of a relatively limited
number of conscious choices that a few key developers make. Sprawl is
not a coincidence, but the result of a conscious project. There is no organic
society, there are only constituencies making choices and developing priorities. To draw and propose fabrics not only contributes to this lie, it also
glamorizes the real, ugly face of fabric. For its template states something
total, where all the elements dissolve in the greater whole. Underneath the
organic disguise sits a totalitarian monster. As Sert and Ortega y Gasset
claimed, civilization appears only when an opening is artificially cut into
Theses
433
the totality of the fabrics of nature, allowing a distance from the net, the
whole, the totality. Our historical protagonists abandon any ambition to
plan the city in its entirety (this only two years after doing just that with
the Athens Charter!), instead focusing on what is missing: civic kernels,
drawn as precisely circumscribed figures on the background of a disintegrating, disurbanizing territory. These cores are figures of resistance.
They pay tribute to the possibility of choices beyond the normal fabric.
The project becomes a sheer act of will against the automatic acceptance
of the status quo of a reality Karl Marx called second nature. Humanity emancipates itself from this false organicism by turning to artificiality.
All this evidences the figures of the New Monumentality as emblems of a
constructivist project, not in the sense of style but in its fundamental aspiration of constructing, against the forces of nature, history and economy,
a definition of ones civilization. Direct state control over the territorial
organization, while almost self-evident in European states, is less common
in the USA. Consequently, the protagonists shrink the apparatus of direct
interventions taken for granted in Europe towards a bare essence. At the
same time, such project could also define the deployment of the dwindling
resources of the European welfare state into strategic points of development.
Not Object but Complex

The figures of the New Monumentality are not architectural objects. They
are complexes. What the object is to academic architecture, the complex is to urban design. It places architectures autonomy at the service
of a larger intervention. The historical protagonists artificial centers are
pedestrian environments at the intersection of major traffic flows automobile and mass transit. Form todays point of view, they are in fact
transfer stations. The pedestrian flow generated in such a station drives
the development on top of it. Such an organization limits the size of the
434
complex to a diameter of less than three miles (a larger size exceeds the
logic of pedestrian mobility). However, the size exceeds that of a single
architectural object; the artificial centers contains infrastructures, parking,
platforms, tracks, and series of built programs erected in various phases. In
1953, J.L. Sert strikingly calls these: Civic Complexes: a tight assembly
of objects, platforms, and other elements of an artificial environment. This
project continues to make great sense in the post-urban realm of urban
sprawl. Here, the architectural object itself has been disarmed by the
overwhelming scale of what is surrounding it: infrastructures, networks,
mass productions. The city has bypassed the architectural object. To succeed
in the heroic re-conquest of semi-urbanized territories, a more powerful device will be necessary. The civic complex is such a device. Finally,
an important distinction between object and complex goes beyond size
into substance; the complex consists of various objects, and consequently
defines the space between them. The interstitial space public space is
the central feature of the complex.
Not Urban but Public

However, the complex as a unit of development also appears in the
context of Soviet planning. After the 1917 Revolution, Soviet planners
prepared for the dissolution of the city, aiming instead for an equitable
distribution of the population over the country, as Karl Marx had called
for in the Communist Manifesto. To achieve this, the planners developed
a theoretical apparatus, based, among others, on the productive complex.
Towns, cities give way to public complexes. Small farming towns would
be reconfigured as agricultural complexes. New factories would include
worker housing and civic amenities, and be called industrial complexes;
and from the 1950s onwards, they erected scientific complexes. They all
share a wide spectrum of programs in close (pedestrian) proximity, artificial live-work capsules for entire communities, linked to other such com-
Theses
435
plexes by rail and road. In fact, the project for the dissolution of the city
was executed more successfully in the US than it was ever in the USSR.
However, the adjoining project of the public complex remained mute
, although the spread of gated communities and various self-enclosed
themed environments in the USA could be interpreted as a development
of a series of more private complexes.
If we were strip our fascination with the urban (metropolitanism, density, urbanity etc.) from any nostalgia for the city as a historical artifact,
what we are really left with is a desire to be able to experience, witness,
and thus conceive of the public. And it may be about time to abandon the
city and focus directly on this public itself. When the industrial revolution
destroyed nature as a background of daily life, we romanticized nature.
Now that we have destroyed the city as a recognizable artifact of human civilization (the city is everywhere you drive, and therefore nowhere
really), we also tend to romanticize it. This Romanticism obscures the rationality we need to deploy in the work cut out for us: to deal with 80% of
the post-urban territory: the grey goo, the middle suburbs. The city ceases
to be a figure here, but a series of complexes could impose new ones, each
a different interpretation and staging of the public in a territory hitherto
a quasi endless succession of private spheres. In such a scenario, the urban
ceases to exist, while the public comes into focus, just like the city as a
historic figure has ceased to exist and the complex becomes a project.
Not Program but Organization

Planning, whether in its early inceptions in utopian socialism, or later on
as a zoning system, has historically defined itself through the manipulation of program. Yet in the protagonists projects, the program is remarkably unimportant. Serts civic complex includes almost any function
whatsoever (except for industry), instead placing the manipulation of
436
public flows center stage. Fumihiko Maki one of Serts first pupils focuses in the early sixties almost exclusively on the flows between different
private programs. Louis Kahn, who said that the program is nothing, is
committed to the transition from automobile to pedestrian flow in his
Philadelphia urban studies. The protagonists effectively shift the attention
from program to organization.
Instead of contributing to the increasing taylorization of life, expressed
through the increasing regimentation of private programs, our protagonists retreat into the spaces between those regimentations: the residual
public spaces of flows. And instead of efficiency and smoothness, Makis
projects, for instance, are about uneasiness, coexistence. They strive for
the inherently dysfunctional. The architects of the liberal monument find
themselves forced into a retreat into what was formerly the public space
of the Groszstadt, now a left-over piece between highly regimented private
areas, and has been increasingly abandoned under the dominant trends
of decentralization, and they go about recharging it. They thus took the
new art of governance and deployed it subversively towards the artificial
creation of a public sphere.
Not Singul arity but Assembly

The complexes consist of an assemblage of forms not only shells for various programs, but also infrastructural devices, captured in a platform. This
assemblage could also be read as an assembly of conflicting ideals, thus asserting the symbolic form of liberalism. Giacomettis Projet pour une place
(1930-1931) deploys what Adorno called a shattering and regrouping of
elements; in the resulting interstices, public space appears. Thus, the group
design becomes a horizontally shattered counter-project to the composed
hierarchies of classical academic spatial order. By the 1940s, the project
moves from assemblage to assembly: surrealisms aesthetic of negation
transforms into a positive project a political aesthetic, an ideal public
Theses
437
from the viewpoint of a liberal conception of the public sphere. During his
main lecture at the 1951 CIAM conference, Giedion compares the Acropolis in Athens as an actual group form to the sterile compositional pomp
of Roman architecture. From each viewpoint, different temple buildings
are always visible simultaneously, establishing multiple foci. Also, between
these monuments, the landscape outside of the complex remains always
in sight as a backdrop against which the figures of the group appear. The
monuments frame the surrounding territory. The warring gods and the
perpetual conflicts of interests, rather than the hegemony of a single ruler,
are translated into the spatial concept of the grouping, a mythical form of
perpetual conflicts between the gods.
Not Complexit y but Cl arit y

Giedion and Sert want to recover an architecture of pre-Christian, prerenaissance forms to release the primal energies suppressed by a decaying
bourgeois culture. These correspond to Cassirers symbolic forms. Cassirer
had planned to expose these forms through a comprehensive study of
the various fields of human expression: myth, religion, language, art, and
science. When reading his text as a modernist manifesto, it becomes clear
that the protagonists project is to transpose the symbolic forms mental
schemes into concrete matter: architecture, immediately, without further
mediation. Cognition rather than obfuscation; clarity rather than complexity: the protagonists wanted to realize a truly public language, appealing directly to all, penetrating directly into the mass subconscious, without
having to pass through various layers of cultural mediation and conscious
interpretation. The public purpose of architecture then becomes identical
to its internal formal logic.
438
Not just Abstraction but also

Body Language
Cassirer pointed to the physiognomic character of his symbolic forms:
body movements constitute a primeval language without words, through
portrayal or even more profoundly, enactment. This is utterly different from the mere pointing to, the referring to, that occurs in abstract
language such as in our own modern alphabets. The aesthetic principle
at work here is that of empathy, or the identification of the self with the
object. Frozen body movement, which itself is the translation of the will
and the ego of the subject, is projected onto the forms we perceive. The
receptivity of this form to this projection is the key to our aesthetic experience. The principle of empathy is also that of myth-making: the fundamental operation in mythology assigns human attributes to dead things.
This very primal layer of understanding forms as gestures is still with us
today when distanced logical thought is switched off such as in instances of half-sleep, or intense stress. In other words, when we are seeing,
not consciously looking, we are already on the verge of entering the world
as a universe of gestures. Such symbolic forms synthesize two mutually
exclusive aesthetic mechanisms: empathy and abstraction. They explain
things that simply bypass conscious interpretation, identity politics, and
speak directly to that part of our brain that takes the lead when conscious
reasoning is no longer at the steering wheel.
towards a project
Few projects have, over the last decade-and-a-half, specifically addressed
Theses
439
sprawl, and those that do, lack a theory of operations particular to the
grey goo. The reaction of architects and urban designers has oscillated
between denial and celebration. There is a growing tendency to abandon
architecture as an operation to restructure sprawl. That a discipline would
collectively lay down its arms and surrender may seem hard to fathom, but
then again the objects of architecture seem to lose their structuring force
when deployed within an overwhelming system of infrastructures and
subdivisions, dwarfing any isolated act of architecture. Instead, landscape
design and infrastructure design would fill that gap, and the word landscape urbanism has been launched recently as a critical alternative. Among
planners, however, there has been a long-standing project for the restructuring of sprawl, based on the provision of dense transit nodes. Most
of this work, however, has remained highly abstract and never engaged
architecture. The project of the Liberal Monument does exactly that. No
wholesale transformation is required the private sphere is left untouched.
The projects recover residual public areas. Most critical is the addition and
formalization of a public sphere, currently completely absent. The project
realizes this public sphere through a series of centers of resistance, civic
complexes that stand out as figures in a quasi-endless continuum, connected with equally decipherable infrastructural figures. These complexes
are artificial they are not meant to be cities and they will never be, but
they do install, through a particular organization flows and forms, a liberal
concept of the public. The forms constitute an assembly of monumental characters; the flows organized between them are set up to expose
themselves to each other. The civic complexes are not a new idea they
merely crystallize an old and existing tradition anew. Their bodies orient
the lost suburbanite in his world, and their programs relieve him in a time
of crisis. Thus, they finally offer alternative choices for the inhabitants of
a territory whose structure today completely imprisons and exhausts their
own potentials. Even if their call is not followed up and their ambition
remains a cry into emptiness, they will have stood up for an ideal of what
the suburbs could be, now that the initial wish-image of sprawl arcadia
has finally been covered under a vast layer of tarmac.
440
Theses
441
442
Theses
443
introduction of a public element which necessitates its own price tag

defines the future fault line and dichotomy in architecture.
444
method, index and

bibliography
445
446
NOTES ON Method
The intellectual historian must have a kind of commitment to the
ideas and ideologies he studies in history.
History Today
The1950s are back in fashion, and the scholarly treatment of its major figures in architecture and planning has begun. Over the last decades, scholarship on J.L. Sert, Bakema, Maaskant, Yona Friedman, the Smithsons,
Buckminster Fuller, Kahn, Giedion, and many other international and
local protagonists of late modernism has appeared. Upon looking into
these studies, one - at the danger of oversimplification- comes under the
impression that the postwar world has not really produced a fundamental
contribution to architecture and planning, as it was squeezed between
on the one hand, the more influential moment of vanguard modernism
preceding it, and on the other hand the onslaught of consumer society and

Baumer, Franklin Le Van, p.8 in Methodology and Interpretation, pp.3-18 in: Main
currents of Western thought; readings in Western European intellectual history from the Middle Ages
to the present. (New York, Knopf, 1964, c1952)

These are just some of the many studies and doctoral manuscripts published, and there
are many others studies being prepared, or not been distributed widely.
Sarah Goldhagen and Rjean Legault. Anxious Modernisms. Experimentation in Postwar Architecture Culture. (Montreal: CCA Press, and Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000)
(several entries on various protagonists and projects of the late 1950ies and early 1960ies; these
articles were more often than not the output of ongoing Ph.D. research at the turn of the 21st century).
Rovira i Gimeno, Josep M., Jos Luis Sert : 1901-1983 (Milano : Electa Architecture : distributed
by Phaidon Press, c2003)
Heuvel, Dirk van den; Risselada, Max (ed.); with contributions by Beatriz Colomina and others:
Alison and Peter Smithson : from the House of the Future to a house of today (Rotterdam : 010
Publishers, 2004)
Krausse, Joachim; Lichtenstein, Claude (ed.) Your private sky : R. Buckminster Fuller, the art of
design science [translation, Steven Lindberg, Julia Thorson] (Baden : L. Mller, c1999)
Lebesque, Sabine. Yona Friedman : structures serving the unpredictable (Rotterdam : NAi Publishers
; New York : available through D.A.P., c1999)
Goldhagen, Sarah Williams. Louis Kahns situated modernism (New Haven, CT : Yale University
Press, c2001)
Provoost, Michelle. Hugh Maaskant : architect van de vooruitgang (Rotterdam : Uitgeverij 010,
2003)
Georgiadis, Sokratis. Sigfried Giedion : an intellectual biography (translated by Colin Hall). (Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 1993)
447
the rise of the networks that would come into full view in the 1960ies. But
such a conclusion may be influenced by the historians method.
Notwithstanding minor variations, the overarching method of study is
either borrowed from the social sciences (critical theory-based), or from
art history (biographical), or from a combination of both. The central
effort is to contextualize and explain the genesis of architectural and
planning projects both through the broader cultural, political forces in
which it played a role, or through the personal history, cultural background
and psychological structure of the protagonist studied. By focusing on
an individual architect or planner, rather than on a particular concept or
template, the architectural and urban theories studied become thoroughly
historicized.
This leads to a dramatic result. The projects and ideas studied become the
product of the past, and its formal subject matter its idea - no matter
how relevant for contemporary problems of architecture and urbanism, is
doomed to the status of archived history, that is to say, dead matter. As a
result, such an architecture and planning history forgets these disciplines
own fundamental need to be operational; to draw, build, and plan a concrete, alternative future. In none of the aforementioned studies does the
formal content of the actual plans produced take center stage.
One example of this problem is the treatment of figures such as Sert and
Giedion as mere figureheads and prop men for the Corbusier. Of course,
Le Corbusiers architecture indcible was extremely influential on both Sert
and Giedion. However, the latter also transform Le Corbusiers intuitions
into a radically different project. Sert, for instance, completely re-defines
Le Corbusiers drawings for Civic Cores, from platforms with a few scattered objects, into a densely knit grouping of sculptural forms with smaller,
precisely defined public spaces. The result, however, is not a difference in
degree but a difference in kind. Neither J. Rovira, nor E. Mumford, Serts
main contemporary scholars, develops this argument, which can only be
constructed through a formal study of the projects on their own terms.

Giedions Space, Time and Architecture (1941), has often been characterized as a
rationalization of Le Corbusiers intuitions. (Cambridge, The Harvard University Press; London, H.
Milford, Oxford University Press, 1941) (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, [c1949])
448
Knud Bastlund, who wrote about Sert in 1967, touches on this subject but
does not elaborate the consequences of Serts vision. Giedions main scholars, S. Georgiadis and J. Bosman, focus on the first decades of Giedions
intellectual life, and do not really enter the consequences for urban design
of his later writings. I will argue that again, Giedion transforms a Corbusian concept into a vision of monumentality and public space that, by
virtue of its definition through writing, becomes independent from Le
Corbusiers purist aesthetic.
How to discuss debris from the history of architecture and planning in a
manner that releases its potentials for a contemporary theory of operations? To answer this, I have sought inspirations in the methods from the
history of ideas or intellectual history.
Formal History
The approach of the history of ideas, although present in the Western
philosophy since the Renaissance, is presented as an autonomous form of
knowledge for the first time by the philosopher Arthur Lovejoy. Lovejoy proposed, throughout his numerous writings, to construct ideas as
independent units out of a variety of discourses. The key to the discovery of these unit-ideas amidst a sea of words is to unearth the authorial
intention. As we shall se, this is the opposite the postmodern technique
of deconstruction. Lovejoy sought to isolate such particular intentions
through the overlapping of various authors. In order to achieve this, he felt
it was also important to cross-reference discourses from the broader field
of culture (architecture, planning, for instance?) with rigorous philosophical writings:
Ideas are the most migratory things in the world. A preconception, category,

Apart from the articles referred to in this paragraph, it is useful to mention what is
generally considered as Lovejoys role in the establishment of the Journal of the History of Ideas.
His most important book is a history of the scholastic worldview and its intentions.
Lovejoy, Arthur O. The great chain of being; a study of the history of an idea. (The William James
lectures delivered at Harvard university, 1933, by Arthur O. Lovejoy) (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard
university press, 1936) (re-published: Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, c1964)
449
postulate, dialectical motive, pregnant metaphor or analogy, sacred word,

mood of thought, or explicit doctrine, which makes its first appearance upon the
scene in one of the conventionally distinguished provinces of history (most often,
perhaps, in philosophy), may, and frequently does, cross over into a number of
others. To be acquainted only with its manifestation in one of these is, in many
cases, to understand its nature and affinities, its inner logic and psychologic
operation, so inadequately, that even that manifestation remains opaque and
unintelligible.
The Unit-Idea is a neo-Kantian conception, and it ought to be considered
as no coincidence that both Sir Isaiah Berlin and Ernst Cassirer, with the
neo-Kantian predilections, are regarded as intellectual historians or scholars of the history of ideas. However, Lovejoy and the broader field of the
history of ideas have been subjected to several criticisms. Daniel Wilson, a
contemporary historian of ideas, summarizes these critiques as follows.
Methodological critiques of the last 25 years have focused on Lovejoys conception of the unit-idea, calling into question the very existence of such entities and
the ways in which Lovejoy used the concept. The criticism has not been totally
negative, for even those scholars who dismiss the unit-idea have found value in
Lovejoys emphasis on dialectical motives and metaphysical pathos, the non-rational factors affecting thought.
Wilson excellently explains the various severe criticisms on Lovejoys supposed atomism- his conception of an idea as existing outside of the his-

Lovejoy, Arthur, p. 7 of Reflections on the history of ideas. pp. 3-23, Journal of the
History of Ideas, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan., 1940)

Cassirer is explicitly placed in this tradition in:
Kelley, Donald R. What is Happening to the History of Ideas?, pp.3-25 in: Journal of the History of
Ideas (JSTOR). Vol. 51, No. 1 (Jan., 1990), pp.13
Also many observers placed Isaiah Berlin in this tradition. One example is the opening sentence in:
Berger, Marilyn. Isaiah Berlin, 88, Philosopher and Historian of Ideas. Obituary from the New York
Times, November 10, 1997.

Wilson, Daniel. P.196. in: Daniel Lovejoys Great Chain of Being after fifty years.
Pp.187-206 in: Journal of the History of Ideas. Vol. 48, No. 2 (Apr., 1987)

Lovejoy himself is partly responsible for the critique of atomism. He used the metaphor
of analytical chemistry to present his method. Like the latter, the historian of ideas must isolate a
particular element out of a greater amalgamation and trace its various occurrences.
450
torical subject. The fundamental problem of this conception is that it leads

to the historian projecting ideas of his own time as overarching categories
into the past, onto texts and discourses which were in fact completely alien
to it.
Nevertheless, recent defenders of Lovejoy have attempted to save his
method by proposing a fundamental alteration. Moltke Gram and Richard Martin on the one hand, and Nils Bjorn Kvastad on the other hand,
have simultaneously but independently invoked the notion of the family
resemblance (first developed by Wittgenstein). According to this concept,
the unit-idea can no longer be described in its complete autonomy, but
only appearance as a similarity across various occurrences which are clearly
related and similar yet are also differ according to the historical moment
and culture in which they were uttered. This witty defense allows saving
the notion of the independent idea, by stating that it can never be observed independently, but only when embedded in a particular context. Or,
as Gram and Martin said, unit-ideas may have had different formulations,
but there are always family resemblances sufficient to bring them all under a
common rubric.10
Lovejoys theory and method have gone out of fashion amidst the rise of
postmodern and critical discourses of the last two decades. Some of its
central assertions are diametrically opposed to those of postmodernism.
Intellectual history understands authorial intention as endowed with a
kind of rationality, whereas postmodernist analysis engages in the demonstration of its irrational features; Intellectual history constructs these
intentions, postmodernism and criticism deconstructs them. We cannot
ignore the seminal work of Lyotard, Foucault, and Baudrillard. And, as
Donald Kelley admits, we cannot accept uncritically the notion of an autonomous subject,we cannot ignore the fundamental criticism of old -fashioned

See: Wilson s Discussion on Lovejoys Legacy. Wilson discusses the consecutive
critiques and modifications but discusses at length the most virulent attack, by Jaakko Hintikka,
Moltke S Gram and Richard Martin: The Perils of Plenitude: Hintikka contra Lovejoy. JSTOR, Vol.
41, (1980), 497, 508-10
Nils Bjorn Kvastad. On Method in the History of Ideas. International Logic Review. 9, (1979). 100101, 104.
10
Wilson, ib.
451
historicism (which warns us against the illusions of a direct dialogue with the
past)nor can we, in pursuit of meaning, dispense with notions of gender, class
interest, and political commitment, which are embedded in language and which
link language with life However, for Kelley all of this does not announce
the end of intellectual history.
Yet what phenomenology has taken away, hermeneutics as to some extent
restored, and within the temporal and cultural horizons of our understanding
of the modern project to rigor, our enterprise remains historical rather than
literary of philosophical. What I should like to see restored to the study of
intellectual history is a historical project comparable to the conception of rational
enquiry as embodied in a tradition.11
Concluding, a study of ideas and their historical appearance becomes once
more possible by adopting the hermeneutic method. As Hans-Georg
Gadamer proposed, this method consists among others of the study of a
range of other viewpoints and interpretations of the texts before proposing ones own12. This approach is already generated in the very setup of
this book, by studying a circle of protagonists who interpreted each others
work, but using the most important sources of the existing recent scholarship about them further enforces it. In a sense, only after rigorous archive
work has been completed can the work for an architectural and urbanistic
theory of operations begin. In other words, this is a second round of study,
of which the purpose is to interpret more thematically some of what has
recently been recovered about the 1950ies. I have only under specific
circumstances (some of Serts urban design lectures) performed additional
archive work.
11
12
452
Kelley, ib. p.24

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Wahrheit und Methode. (Tbingen, 1965)
INDEX
Architect-Planners
Bakema & Vandenbroek
Chalk
De Geyter
Doxiadis
Giedion
Gruen
Harrison
Hollein
Howard
Kahn
Kallmann
Koolhaas
Le Corbusier
Loos
Lynch
Maas
Maki
Martin
Mendelsohn
Miliutin
Moneo
Plecnik
Quaroni
Richards (Brian)
Rudofsky
Sert
Sitte
Smithsons
Stirling
453
Sola-Morales, De
Tyrwhitt
Cities Discussed
Albany
Amsterdam
Barcelona
Berlin
Bogota
Bochum
Brasilia
Brussels
Chandigarh
Copenhagen
Fort Worth
Havana
London
Madrid
Medellin
Milton Keynes
Moscow
New Haven
New York
Philadelphia
Tel Aviv
Tunis
Vienna
Zurich
Intellectuals Discussed
Adorno
Arendt
454
Banham
Berlin
Blumenfeld
Bloch
Cassirer
Eco
Fichte
Herder
Jacobs
Krauss
Le Van Baumer
Lovejoy
Lenin
Nietzsche
Ortega Y Gasset
Popper
Reps
Schelling
Schorske
Shannon (Claude)
Vischer
Wiener
Whyte
455
456
Bibliography
Primary Documents Concerning 1944-1961
This lisitng also contains literature from some of the preceding or following years, if these were either disseminated, translated in the period of
study or prepared during its last years. Also older books that were being
re-published in the period of study and were relevant to the discussions
studied, but had been published much earlier, have been included.
Of authors whose work was seminal in the period of study, all their other
publications are also included here in order to avoid useless fragmentation
of the bibliography.
[ 1 ]
Adorno, Looking back on Surrealism, , pp. 86-90 in: Notes to Literature. (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991)
[ 2 ]
Adorno, Theodor W. Extorted Reconciliation: On Georg Lukacs Realism in Our Time.
In: Notes to Literature, Vol.1, pp.216-240; and Reconciliation under Duress. Bloch, et al., Aesthetics
and Politics. (transl. Ed. Taylor, Ronald) (London: NLB, 1977)
[ 3 ]
Adorno, Theodor. Functionalism Today: An address to the 1965 Meetingof the
Deutscher Werkbund. Published and translated in: Opposition 17 (Summer 1979)
[ 4 ]
Adorno, Theodor. In Search of Wagner . 1937 (New York: Schocken: 1981)
[ 5 ]
Adorno, Theodor; Horkheimer, Max. Dialectic of Enlightenment, (transl. John Cumming) New York: Herder and Herder (1972). (first English edition, German original: 1944)
[ 6 ]
Adorno,Theodor. Freudian Theory and Fascist Patterns of Mass propaganda. 1951. pp.
11837 in: Arato, Andrew; Gebhardt, Eike (eds.) The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. (New York:
Continuum, 1982)
[ 7 ]
Arendt, Hanna. The Human Condition. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958)
[ 8 ]
Arnheim, Rudolf. Perceptual and aesthetic aspects of the movement response. Toward
a Psychology of Art. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1951/1966)
[ 9 ]
Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkley: University of California Press, 1954); new version (1974).
[ 10 ]
Arnheim, Rudolf. Film als Kunst. (Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt, 1932).
[ 11 ]
Arnheim, Rudolf. Perceptual abstraction and art. Toward a Psychology of Art. (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1947/1966)
[ 12 ]
Arnheim, Rudolf. The gestalt theory of expression. Toward a Psychology of Art.
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press) (1949/1966).
[ 13 ]
Ashby, W. Ross. An Introduction to Cybernetics. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1956)
[ 14 ]
Bakema, J.P. Tel Aviv, Israel. pp. 60-61 in: Thoughts about Architecture. (London:
Academy Editions and St.-Martins Press, c1982)
[ 15 ]
Bakema, Jaap. Thoughts about Architecture. (London: St.-Martins Press, 1982)
[ 16 ]
Banham, Reyner. A critic writes : essays by Reyner Banham . selected by Mary Banham (et.al.); foreword by Peter Hall. (Berkeley : University of California Press, c1996)
[ 17 ]
Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles. The Architecture of Four Ecologies. ( New York,
457
Harper & Row,1971)

[ 18 ]
Banham, Reyner. The New Brutalism. In: The Architectural Review 118: 354-361
(1955). Reprinted in: A critic writes : essays by Reyner Banham . selected by Mary Banham (et.al.);
foreword by Peter Hall. (Berkeley : University of California Press, c1996)
[ 19 ]
Banham, Reyner; Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1976).
[ 20 ]
Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, (Transl: Annette Lavers) (Or: Mythologies, Paris: Editions du Seuil: 1957), (Hill and Wang, New York : 1972)
[ 21 ]
Bartley, William W. IIIrd, Rationality vs. The Theory of Rationality. In: Mario Bunge
(1964)
[ 22 ]
Bartley, William W. IIIrd, The retreat to commitment. (New York, Knopf, 1962)
[ 23 ]
Baumer, Franklin Le Van, Methodology and Interpretation, pp.3-18 in: Main currents
of Western thought; readings in Western European intellectual history from the Middle Ages to the
present. (New York, Knopf, 1964, c1952)
[ 24 ]
Berlin, Isaiah, The Apotheosis of Romantic Wil: the Revolt against the Myth of an Ideal
World. pp. 207-237 in: Hardy, Henry (ed.) The Crooked Timber of Humanity. (New York : Knopf :
Distributed by Random House, 1991). Also published in: Hardy, Henry; Hausheer, Roger (ed.) The
Proper Study of Mankind. (London : Chatto & Windus, 1997)
[ 25 ]
Berlin, Isaiah. Two Concepts of Liberty, Inaugural Lecture as Chichele Professor
of Social and Political Theory (Oxford, 1958: Clarendon Press), 55 pp.; repr. in Four Essays on
Liberty, The Proper Study of Mankind, and Liberty, in Preston King (ed.), The Study of Politics:
A Collection of Inaugural Lectures (London, 1977: Frank Cass) and Philip Pettit and Robert E.
Goodin (eds), Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology (Oxford, 1998: Blackwell), and
in part in William Ebenstein (ed.), Modern Political Thought: The Great Issues, 2nd ed. (New York,
1960: Holt, Rinehart and Winston) (as Freedom: Negative or Positive?), Anthony Quinton (ed.),
Political Philosophy (London, 1967: Oxford University Press), David Miller (ed.), Liberty (Oxford,
1991: Oxford University Press), and Michael Sandel (ed.), Liberalism and its Critics (Oxford, 1984:
Blackwell); ed. with notes by Kimiyoshi Yura (Kyoto, 1967: Apollon-sha); trans. Arabic, Bulgarian,
Dutch, Estonian, Georgian, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Slovenian (in part), Spanish, Ukrainian
[ 26 ]
Berlin, Isaiah. Philosophy and Government Repression. Pp.54-76 in: The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History. (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998)
[ 27 ]
Berlin, Isaiah. Political ideas in the twentieth century, in: The Proper Study of Mankind. An Anthology of Essays. (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1997; c1949-1989)
[ 28 ]
Berlin, Isaiah. The Counter-Enlightenment Pp.243-268 in Hardy, Henry(ed.) The
Proper Study of Mankind. (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1997). First published: Dictionary
of the History of Ideas, Vol.2 (New York: Scribners, 1973)
[ 29 ]
Berlin, Isaiah. The Lasting Effects. Pp. 118-147 in: Hardy, Henry (ed.) The Roots of
Romanticism. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, c1999)
[ 30 ]
Berlin, Isaiah. Two Concepts of Liberty, pp.191-242 in: Hardy, Henry(ed.) The Proper
Study of Mankind, ib.
[ 31 ]
Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. (1959), Vol 1, transl. Neville and Stephen Plaice,
Paul Knight (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995) (German, 1952-1959). Translated: 1960
[ 32 ]
[ 33 ]
[ 34 ]
Bloch, Ernst. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Translated
by Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988)
[ 35 ]
Bloch, Ernst. Traces. (Spuren. Frankfurt Am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1959)
[ 36 ]
Bodkin, Maude. Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological studies of the Imagination. (1934; New York: Vintage Books. 1958)
458
[ 37 ]
Bonner, John. Cells and Societies. (Princeton University Press, 1955)
[ 38 ]
Bonner, John. Morphogenesis. An Essay on Development. (Princeton University Press,
1952). Reprinted 1963 Atheneum Press and 1965 Oxford + IBH Publishing Co.
[ 39 ]
Bonner, John. The Evolution of Development. (Princeton University Press, 1958)
[ 40 ]
Carlo, Giancarlo De. Talk on the Situation of Contemporary Architecture. Pp.83-86 in:
Newman, Oscar (ed.). CIAM 59 in Otterlo, ib.
[ 41 ]
Cassirer, Ernst. An Essay on Man. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944)
[ 42 ]
Cassirer, Ernst. Myth of the State. (London, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974,
c1946)
[ 43 ]
Cassirer, Ernst. Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff. Untersuchungen ber die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik. (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer 1910)
[ 44 ]
Cassirer, Ernst. Wendel, Charles (Ed.) The Philosophy of Symbolic Form, part 1:
Language. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955) (transl. from German original: Philosophie der
symbolischen Formen. Erster Teil: Die Sprache. Berlin, 1923)
[ 45 ]
Cassirer, Ernst; Wendel, Charles (Ed.) The Philosophy of Symbolic Form, part 2: Mythical Thought. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955) (transl. from German original: Philosophie
der symbolischen Formen. Erster Teil: Die Sprache. Berlin, 1925)
[ 46 ]
Cassirer, Ernst; Wendel, Charles (Ed.) The Philosophy of Symbolic Form, part 3:
Phenomenology of Knowledge. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957) (transl. from German
original: Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Erster Teil: Die Sprache. Berlin, 1929)
[ 47 ]
Chombart de Lauwe, Paul-Henri (dir.) Paris et lagglomration parisienne. (Paris:
Editions du CNRS, 1952)
[ 48 ]
Chomsky, Noam. Syntactic Structures. (The Hague: Mouton, 1957. Reprint. Berlin and
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The

The Liberal Monument

Dit proefschrift is goedgekeurd door de promotor(en):

The Liberal Monument

The Liberal Monument

For Natalie, Jakob and Adriana

The Liberal Monument

The Liberal Monument

The rule of the idea is

The Liberal Monument

The following unearths a project to

The Liberal Monument

History and Liberty

The Monumental Symbol

The Liberal Monument

Foreword: History and Liberty

The Liberal Monument

Third Dilemma: Abstraction vs. Empathy

4. THE LIBERAL MONUMENT

The Liberal Monument

The Liberal Monument

We have need for history in its entirety, not to fall back

The Liberal Monument

We moved from urban design to urban studies:

The Liberal Monument

My motivation for the following labor is simple. Liberalism is under

Was Modernism ever such a monolithic project?

The Liberal Monument

We live in a post-urban continuum,

The Liberal Monument

Pascal said, Le silence ternel de ces espaces

... a quasi-endless grey carpet from which there seems to

The Liberal Monument

Here, there is no horizon, no outside anymore.

The Liberal Monument

in Barcelona. This system is composed of a multitude of smaller cities,

Such a system is a totality: it is Europes second nature.

The Liberal Monument

Counter-forces engage in a romantic operation to pre-empt

The Liberal Monument

Europeans are lost in their own peripheries.

The Liberal Monument

Public Space . Alexander DHooghe, 1998

There was an address of this crisis, already within latemodernism.

The Liberal Monument

A Project against Mass Regression

The time has come to unearth, retrieve and operationalize it.

The Liberal Monument

of marked suburbanization. By 1957, William Whyte coins the word

Towards a New Monumentality

The enemy transforms, from barbaric masses in Europe to

The Liberal Monument

Essay on Man, a summary version of his earlier trilogy in German, Die

Gestalt theory. Social Research, 11, 78-99 (1944).

both totalities require injections of liberal principles of civilization.

The Liberal Monument

Investigations in Collective Form, a powerful synthesis of the work

As the 1944 New Monumentality manifestoes expand and

The Liberal Monument

it is possible to begin establishing the contours of a common project.

Two Concepts of Liberty

The Liberal Monument

The Liberal Monument

The Liberal Monument