69

Carlotta Darò 3 Nicolas Schöfer and the Cybernetic City

Léa-Catherine Szacka 12 Pink Floyd and the Imago Urbis

Michel Foucault 18 Heterotopias, with an introduction by Anthony Vidler

Tim Benton 23 Dom-ino and the Phantom Pilotis

David Campany 48 In Conversation with Lewis Baltz

Lewis Baltz 62 Notes on Park City

William Firebrace 65 Location Görlitz–Zgorzelec

Víctor Larripa Artieda & Miguel A Alonso del Val 77 Café Culture

Gillian Darley 84 John Summerson in the Crow’s Nest

Justine Sambrook 96 Ordinary Beauty

Thomas Daniell 100 Acting Natural

Fabrizio Ballabio 107 Snails and Hawkwings

Maarten Delbeke 118 A Book Accessible to All

Alan Powers 123 Epicurean Architecture

Christopher Pierce & Thomas Weaver 128 In Conversation with Ricardo Boill

Catharine Rossi 138 Architecture Goes Disco

Pablo Bronstein 146 Apologia for a Beach Hut

Nicholas Olsberg 151 Housewright

Jonathan Meades 166 Divinity

168 Contributors

69
aa Files The contents of aa Files are derived from the activities
Architectural Association of the Architectural Association School of Architecture.
36 Bedford Square Founded in 1847, the aa is the uk’s only independent
London wc1b 3es school of architecture, ofering undergraduate,
t +44 (0)20 7887 4000 postgraduate and research degrees in architecture and
f +44 (0)20 7414 0782 related ields. In addition, the Architectural Association
aaschool.ac.uk is an international membership organisation, open to
anyone with an interest in architecture.
Publisher
The Architectural Association For Further Information Visit
aaschool.ac.uk
Editorial Board or contact the Admissions Oice
Mark Cousins aa School of Architecture
George L Legendre 36 Bedford Square
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury London wc1b 3es
Irénée Scalbert
Brett Steele The Architectural Association (Inc)
Martino Stierli is a Registered (Educational) Charity No 311083
and a Company limited by guarantee
Editor Registered in England No 171402
Thomas Weaver Registered oice as above

aa Publications Editor aa Members can access a black-and-white and/or larger-print

Pamela Johnston version of speciic printed items through the aa website
(aaschool.ac.uk) or by contacting the aa Membership Oice
Editorial Assistants (membership@aaschool.ac.uk/+44 (0)20 7887 4076)
Clare Barrett For the audio infoline, please call +44 (0)20 7887 4111
Sarah Handelman

Design A Note on the Display Initials

John Morgan studio
No 69, 2014 Contents
© Architectural Association
and the Authors
issn 0261-6823
isbn 978-1-907896-64-4
Printed in England
by Pureprint Group
aa Files is published twice a year
Subscription for two issues
(including postage & packing)
uk £32 (students £27)
Overseas £33 (students £28)
Single issues: £15
(plus postage & packing)
Back issues are available
The display font in this issue, drawn by Adrien Vasquez from
the John Morgan studio and featured in ‘Heterotopias’ by
Michel Foucault, references the disco aesthetic of the Italian
radical movement, described by Catharine Rossi in her
essay on Gruppo 9999, also in this issue. Typographically
speaking its characteristic squares and circles can be traced
back to the 1920s, such as experiments by the avant-garde
poster artist A M Cassandre with his font Bifur – ‘The letter
which we place before you does not pretend to substitute the
forms of the past’, announced the commissioning foundry,
Deberny et Peignot, ‘it simply marks the crossroads which it
may be well to explore.’ Our own letter face further draws on
numerous Bauhaus posters and paintings – from Kandinsky’s
colours and shapes to Hannes Meyer’s images of the Neue
Welt – but ultimately has its true home in the subterranean
discos of 1970s Florence.

aaschool.ac.uk/aailes
 Café Culture
Víctor Larripa Artieda &
Miguel A Alonso del Val

J J P Oud, elevation of the Café de Unie, 1925

© Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut/OuDJ-cu3
 Images evoking Hannes Meyer’s ‘Neue Welt’:
Marcel Renault, Paris-Madrid race, Zeiss Planetarium, Josephine Baker
German electric plant, Gret Palucca, Rotor ship Buckau
Hannes Meyer’s zip, Fokker f Vii, New York Yankee Frank Baker
Harold Lloyd, German power plant, Red Electric passenger train
 ‘Aircrat slip through the air: Fokkers and Farmans increase both
our reach and the distance between us and the earth… Burroughs’
calculating machine sets free our brain, the dictaphone our hands,
the Ford motor our place-bound senses… Psychoanalysis has
blasted open the all too narrow dwelling of the soul… We can move
house like never before: apartment blocks, sleeping cars, house-
boats and transatlantic liners are undermining the localised con-
ception of a “homeland”. The fatherland is going into decline. We
are learning Esperanto. We are becoming citizens of the world.’1
This is the architect Hannes Meyer in 1926, barely pausing for
breath as he reels of the latest advances to enrich everyday life in
‘The New World’ – his own declaration, in a time of manifestos, of
the way to move beyond the cataclysm of the First World War. As
such, Meyer’s neue Welt mirrors the most progressive strands of
Weimar Germany in the ‘Golden 1920s’. With the help of machines,
he tells us, humans can ‘live faster and therefore longer’, grow more
food, create less stratiied, more egalitarian societies, with no divi-
sions between genders or nations. He goes on to cite ‘the bowler
hat, bobbed hair, the tango, jazz, the Co-op product, Din standard
size and Liebig’s meat extract’ as evidence of the ‘standardisation of
our requirements’.
Mirroring this extensive list of the early twentieth-century’s
most modern touchstones, Meyer illustrates his argument with
a series of images, beginning with a trio of buildings completed the
previous year which are presented under the heading ‘The Inter-
national’: Le Corbusier’s Maisons La Roche-Jeanneret in Paris,
Konstantin Melnikov’s Soviet Pavilion for the Paris Exposition des
Arts Décoratifs and the Café De Unie by Jacobus Johannes Pieter
(or more familiarly, J J P) Oud in Rotterdam. Meyer’s thinking
behind his grouping is clear: each of these projects was conceived as
a built manifesto, an international call for a revolution in the ield
of architecture. And good modern propagandist that he was, Meyer
was powerless to resist their battle cries.
‘Each age demands its own form’, Meyer continued, ‘it is our
mission to give our new world a new shape with the means of today’.
In many ways, though, this mission statement was merely posing
a question that had already been answered by Le Corbusier three
years earlier, writing in Vers une architecture that ‘today, painting has
gotten ahead of the other arts, it is the irst to become attuned to the
era’.2 Like Melnikov and Oud, Le Corbusier understood that in order
to construct his own demand for change in architecture he had to
build on the foundations established by painting. It therefore fol-
lowed that the white forms of the Maisons La Roche-Jeanneret and
their transition from a rounded body to a right-angled volume were
suggestive of the expressive games played between ‘theme-objects’
and ‘pure’ igures that Fernand Léger, Amédée Ozenfant and Le
Corbusier himself had all sought in their purist artworks. Similarly,
Melnikov’s Soviet Pavilion tapped into the Russian avant-garde –
its diagonal stair chimed with suprematism, the interplay of engi-
neering elements in the tower with the more artful leanings of con-
structivism. And then there was the Café De Unie, perhaps now the
least known of the three, but in this internationalist grouping the
building was seen to capture the essence of neo-plasticism, with
the composition of its facade, the dominance of its primary colours
and the independence of the café’s signage all clearly revealing the
inluence of De Stijl.
For Meyer these buildings were proof that adapting to the new
strategies of the visual arts was the only way for architecture to break
aa files 69
from its stagnation and set of on its own creative path. Or as Oud
himself put it some years later, ‘At the beginning it was a question
of “art” in such a way that the “liberal” arts – especially painting and
sculpture – sought to provoke a reaction against traditional archi-
tecture. Cubism, futurism, expressionism, all the “isms” paved
the way for the new architecture, ofering a new vitality at the very
moment at which traditional architecture was being abandoned.
Once that had been achieved that terrain also had to be abandoned
as soon as possible. As in architecture, all isms quickly become
mannerisms.’3 In this sense, the construction of a manifesto-build-
ing meant more than simply adhering to the aesthetics of the avant-
garde; rather, the architecture itself had to be consistent with the
concept of a manifesto – jolting, revolutionary, political.
Again, in obvious echo of Le Corbusier, Meyer contextualised
these entreaties with the deduction that ‘if we are to shape our world
in a radical way, then we need to change our means of expression’.
Of course, Le Corbusier was then already exploiting the new media
to the full, using the pages of L’Esprit Nouveau as a platform to pro-
mote his views and broadcast the most powerful graphic messages,
oten through manipulated images and his own strategic use of
advertising space. By contrast, Melnikov avoided all forms of debate
and instead trusted his projects to speak for themselves. Oud’s posi-
tion lay somewhere in between the two. An early alliance with the
artist Theo van Doesburg, seven years his senior, initially signalled
a period of intense activity. In 1916 the pair had founded an asso-
ciation, Sphinx, which by the following year had developed into the
group and magazine De Stijl.4 As the magazine’s editor, van Doesburg
promoted a number of his protégé’s early texts and projects, which
quickly put Oud at the forefront of the European scene.5 Yet in 1918,
when De Stijl released its neo-plasticist manifesto, Oud refused to
add his name, and three years later, at the height of the group’s fame,
he broke away entirely6 – a move which ironically marked the begin-
ning of his inest neo-plasticist works: the site hut at Witte Dorp,
Café De Unie and the cubic church at Kiehoek. Parallel to this was
his eminently practical work as an architect for Rotterdam’s Munici-
pal Housing Department, which took him still closer to the Neue
Sachlichkeit movement. And while he later established himself as
one of the founders of the so-called International Style, thanks not
least to a notable contribution to the Stuttgart Weissenhof exhibi-
tion in 1927, his long-awaited conference talk for the irst ciaM meet-
ing in La Sarraz in 1928 was dropped from the programme because at
the last minute Oud turned down an invitation to take part.
‘Too much of an architect to fully assume De Stijl’s aesthetic
principles, too much of an artist to satisfy the tenets of the Con-
grès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, Oud felt obliged to
sidestep this tension, creating a personal approach to architec-
ture.’ So wrote the Spanish historian Charo Grego of a path that
was, to say the least, unique.7 Oud never stood still. He received as
much praise as criticism from the most inluential theoreticians.
He experimented formally. He embarked on and broke of count-
less friendships, joined and let numerous groups and associa-
tions, and collaborated on publications that embraced conlicting
positions. In fact, the one constant throughout his career was this
propensity for change. And in this respect a number of Oud’s writ-
ings defend the Wölinian notion of art and style as an ‘evolution’
directly related to the cultural, social and economic situation at
any moment8 – justiication for the variation in his own work and
his need to, on occasion, break with the past. ‘I totally agree with
79
modern art insofar as a new style will emerge from this great enthu- More than its form or colours, however, perhaps the most strik-
siasm’, he wrote in 1925. ‘However, I am well aware that I sometimes ing aspect of the building’s elevation was the huge De Unie sign,
admire the force with which the old is destroyed every bit as much whose size and placement made it virtually impossible to work out
as I do admire the talent with which the new is constructed.’9 And how many loors were contained inside. Likewise, the continuous
the appearance of Oud’s architecture shited seamlessly in step with street-level window, along with the three intermediate windows
this evolving theoretical stance, with his most famous projects, above, indicated two loors, when in reality everything behind this
including the housing at Hoek van Holland (1924–27) and Kiehoek lower half of the facade belonged to the same ground-loor space.
(1925–30), owing their qualities not so much to any interior plan or Access to the café was through a door that formed one of the mod-
spatial distribution but to their outward disposition. ules in the glazed front of the building. This then opened into the
Oud’s chance to construct a manifesto of his own came the main cafeteria space, with the bar, kitchen, toilets and stair down
same year that work began on the Hoek van Holland housing, when to the basement at the rear. On the irst loor, accessed via a spi-
Rotterdam’s planning department rejected three proposals for ral staircase at the front, two small oices faced a larger meeting
a café submitted by the De Unie company and made him the con- space, while an expansive terrace and skylight allowed sun to reach
sulting architect on the project (essentially the municipality’s way of the rear of the oices and the cafeteria below. One more staircase,
policing a private developer’s incompetence). Located on the Cools- accessible from the main oice but hidden from view by the large
ingel, opposite Calandplein, the restricted 10m × 25m site was the De Unie sign, opened out onto the roof.
only open lot on a street lined with nineteenth-century buildings, Whether the man on the street had any clue of the building’s
meaning that the two-storey café would have to squeeze between layout or function was not Oud’s concern. Instead he played up the
a portico-fronted school and large, similarly neo-classical oice disconnect between the well-ordered interior and the colourful,
block. In stylistic terms, the café’s looming neighbours represented asymmetric facade, using the compositional principles of neo-plas-
everything from which Oud wanted to lee, yet the café, as a pub- ticism to combine primary colours, textures, large letters, artiicial
lic building, had to mediate between them. Two more constraints lighting and glazed openings in an ‘experiment in “liberating” form
inluenced the design: one was the requirement that all commer- and colour’.11 ‘The critic who wrote in a local paper that “the whole
cial buildings in the city had to have a kind of storefront character, fell apart somewhat” was to some extent not far wrong’, Oud would
the other was the peculiar fact that the café was meant to stand for later note. ‘Form and colour were intended, by virtue of the destruc-
no more than ten years (the site was considered too important for tive character of their manifestation, to emphasise the element of
a permanent café, although the building had a longer life-span than impermanence, although by the same token – it goes without saying
expected, lasting until 1940, when German troops blew up the entire – the aim was to produce a balanced composition.’12 And to enable
street and inadvertently upheld the city’s side of the deal). the building to function as a whole composition without diminish-
Oud, however, sought to turn every one of these limitations to ing the neo-plasticist character of the constructed image Oud used
his advantage, and the temporary nature of the project gave him each piece of the facade to form two enormous l-shaped compo-
free rein to incorporate ideas with greater freshness. For example, nents – one white and punctured by three inset windows, the other
he had no problem maintaining a signiicant portion of the interior turned upside-down and encompassing a large red surface and the
layout designed by the previous architect (the scant documentation De Unie sign – which joined via the building’s top set of ive win-
regarding the café’s loors in both Oud’s own iles and the various dows, invoking a sense of difering trajectories while perfectly snap-
publications that featured the building conirm his lack of interest ping together. The resulting tautness spread attention across the
in the arrangement of the interior) and instead he devoted his whole whole front, and the weight of the centre as a point of meeting was
attention to the formal experimentation of the facade, relaxing the relativised to become a three-dimensional plane. More colour was
programmatic and functional issues to develop the building’s com- introduced for relief – yellow windowsills, rough wood painted red,
municative capacity. Like Piet Mondrian’s paintings (too much like and smooth white cement. Everything seemed to be in movement.
them for MoMa’s Alfred Barr, who called it Oud’s ‘most unfortu- In fact, once the supericial shock of the café’s facade had been
nate work’), the café combined striking primary colours – red, blue established, it was Oud’s implementation of these architectural
and yellow – with grey and white. Rejecting ornament, which he elements that emphasised the building as not only a composition,
declared ‘the universal panacea for architectonic impotence!’, Oud but a call to arms.
instead envisioned ‘the very purest architecture composition’,10 Although Oud’s most recognisable projects addressed residen-
a universalist building that detached itself from the nineteenth- tial questions, he maintained that public buildings – whether of
century city it just happened to ind itself wedged into. The result- a municipal, cultural or institutional nature – played a crucial role
ing facade seemed to loat of the ground and between the adjoining in ensuring the representative character every city required. This
buildings, a formal sleight-of-hand achieved by way of a continu- could be the reason why the café, his only public project up to then,
ous street-level window abutting the pavement and the addition exaggerated this vocation in a clear declaration of a new idea for the
of two thin recesses, 25cm wide, running from top to bottom on city.13 And fundamental to this exaggeration was the implantation
either side of the café and painted dark grey as if to suggest shadow of illuminated signs – in efect, vertical prisms – which made the
lines. Furthermore, no element of the café – no horizontal plane, building visible both night and day. ‘Café Restaurant’ and ‘De Unie’
window, sign or building crest – lined up with the heavy cornices, they read, but only on the front and inward-facing sides. The side
pediments or balconies of the adjoining buildings, and its manifest they presented to their neo-classical neighbours was let blank – an
diference in height to these immediate neigh- active negation of the old order.
J J P Oud, Café de Unie, Rotterdam, 1925
bours made even more explicit the image of © Collection Het Nieuwe For Oud, however, this desire to upset con-
a forced insertion. Instituut/OuDJ-ph255 vention was nothing new, as evidenced by his

aa files 69 81
1924 design for the site manager’s hut in the Witte Dorp neigh- by Mondrian that Oud would have seen either as 1921 Composition
bourhood of Rotterdam, a ‘white village’ made up of rows of little at a small exhibition celebrating the artist’s itieth birthday, or as
houses, all designed in a sort of reined vernacular with pitched Tableau I at a 1922 exhibition held by the Hollandsche Kunstenaar-
roofs. In the midst of the triangular plan sat the wooden hut, an iso- skring (Dutch Artists’ Circle), in Amsterdam. The other was a paint-
lated outburst of neo-plasticism. As with the café, Oud exploited its ing given to Oud in 1924 by the Hungarian artist Vilmos Huszár.
ephemeral nature – few structures are as temporary as a site hut – to While Mondrian’s piece suggests the proportions of the café and
experiment with the insertion of an architectural element into a res- the juxtaposition of the planes of colour, white surfaces and lines,
idential arrangement that was already aesthetically contained. The Huszár’s is more dynamic, with fractured black bands which in
formal expression relied on the interplay of three cubes – one red their placement and movement are precursors to the café’s signage.
and two blue – connected from above by a central yellow passage- Oud’s treatment of typography on the café’s signage, however, took
way. Wooden slats forming a motif of concentric rings lent an addi- this constellation of references one step further.
tional textural quality, foreshadowing a similar approach on the red Many avant-garde artists had begun to explore the visual
L of De Unie’s facade. Although both the site hut and café were exer- and communicative possibilities of the layout of text. As Meyer
cises in surface – neo-plasticist compositions made up of abstract observed: ‘Today’s culture of expression is predominantly construc-
combinations of elements which constructed an image when exter- tive. Human inertia being what it is, this impulse comes most clearly
nally imposed – Witte Dorp was pure formal experimentation and to the fore in domains where the Greeks and Louis XiV never set foot
represented less of a break with its surroundings, which Oud had – in advertising, in typographical mechanical composition, in the
in fact also designed. All the same, the site hut formed the basis for cinema, in photographic processes. The modern poster presents
what the café would even- lettering and product or
tually become, only in trademark conspicuously
a more complex context: arranged. It is not a poster
pure manifesto. Describ- work of art but a piece
ing the two projects, Oud of visual sensationalism.’
wrote, ‘I purposely stress The immediacy of the
the “temporary nature of techniques of the poster –
the form” – the destruc- type, collage, photomon-
tive too, to protect myself tage – made it the ideal
from becoming rigid in platform for broadcast-
my search for unambigu- ing the messages of the
ous forms; [the café] was, artistic revolution, or any
like the site hut at Oud- other revolution, for that
Mathenesse, a dadaist- matter. As a good inter-
like provocation, a token nationalist, Oud was also
of the need to demolish familiar with the graphic
the old rather than a con- strategies of the Soviet
tribution to “the new”.’14 avant-garde, which mag-
A number of Oud’s niied posters as urban-
declarations about the scale agitprop, and (at
café mention the dadaists, and his ainity for the group is not dii- the other end of the political spectrum) with the gigantic billboards
cult to understand considering that every one of their collages, pho- and neon signs that lit up the American metropolis.15 To look at
tomontages and performances sought out all the possibilities that the cover Oud designed for the Dutch magazine Het Overzicht in
contrast, destruction, rupture and irony would allow. The dadaist 1924 and then compare it to the Café De Unie, is to immediately see
modus operandi was destruction, an absolute negation of the estab- how much he had absorbed these developments.16 In this sense,
lished order. But while the dadaists negated, they also proposed, the facade was composed not as a painting but as a neo-plasticist
believing that out of the void would come something new. What, poster, so that the café ‘by all the right appropriate means, such as
then, was the café proposing? Though he no longer belonged to De illuminated signs, graphics, form, colour, etc, does all it can to focus
Stijl, Oud deployed the language of neo-plasticism to construct his attention on itself’. And these means, Oud went on to tell us, were
manifesto for an aesthetically puriied form of architecture – one ‘not invoked at a later stage, as is usually the case, with all the untidy
that used only the most basic elements in their most fundamental and bland consequences that entails, but were composed before-
state. The notion of absolute abstraction, the search for harmony hand into a whole.’17
and equilibrium through the reciprocal abolition of tension, the This strategy, which Oud likened to introducing a ‘pre-estab-
superposition of straight lines and planes of primary colours and, lished corset into architecture’, was deployed not only at the Café De
above all, the creation of a three-dimensionality through the aboli- Unie but also at the Witte Dorp site hut and the church at Kiehoek.18
tion of the compositional centre – all these ideas had originated in The term ‘corset’ brings to mind Gottfried Semper’s ‘principle of
painting, but were now expressed in architectural elements: doors, dressing’, which held that the essence of a building resided in its
windows, signs, construction materials. cladding or decoration, freighted with symbolic
J J P Oud, Witte Dorp site, 1923
In this sense, two artworks undoubtedly © Collection Het Nieuwe meaning: the geometric patterns of a brick wall,
inluenced the café’s design. One was a painting Instituut/OuDJ-ph230 for example, might evoke ancient weavings.19

82 aa files 69
Semper’s work was highly inluential in Dutch architecture schools
around the turn of the century, and as a student Oud would have
consulted Style in the Technical and Structural Arts, or Practical
Aesthetics, which includes primitive geometric and ornamental pat-
terns similar to those later used in the site hut and the café’s facade
(notably the spiralling, textile-like articulation of the dominant red
panel). Thus a building as bare as De Unie was still a construction
‘dressed’ in an abstract language, and that envelope – here modern-
ised and puriied as a neo-plasticist poster – was capable of giving
form to the work independent of the structure and programme.
The purity of the café’s facade, however, soon succumbed to
incremental encroachments. By 1930 the building had a new owner.
Awnings, curtains, blinds, posters and drawings began invading the
street elevation and before long the café’s main sign was replaced
and its colours painted over. The original was subsumed, although
much later, in 1986, a second Café De Unie was built by the Dutch
architect Carel Weeber. Located on Mauritsweg, just 500m from the
original site, the building is a faithful replica, but somehow because
of this pastiche, as much as its new site without any overbearing
neo-classical neighbours, the new café seems deprived of all its
rupturist associations.
But did it really matter? The Café De Unie was designed not as
an enduring monument but as the expression of a moment – of a
desire for renewal. ‘Yesterday is dead; Bohemia is dead’, Meyer’s text
proclaims. ‘Dead are atmosphere, colour values, burr, mellow tones
and random brushstrokes… Dead picture and sculpture as images
of the real world… Dead is the work of art as a “thing in itself”… The
nine muses were long ago abducted by practical men. They’ve come
down from their pedestals and re-entered life, more insightful and
more grounded.’ Oud’s café briely occupied a place in a new world
where ‘illuminated signs twinkle, loud-speakers screech, posters
advertise, display windows shine forth’. And in this new world ‘the
simultaneity of events enormously extends our concept of “space
and time”, it enriches our life’.20

1. Hannes Meyer, ‘Die Neue Welt’, Das 12. J J P Oud, ‘Een Café’, Boukunding
Werk 13 (July 1926), pp 205–24. English Weekblad 46, no 31 (July 1925), p 399.
translation, edited here by Pamela See Donald Langmead, ibid, p 43.
Johnston, in Claude Schnaidt (ed), 13. For further information on Oud and
Hannes Meyer: Buildings, Projects and public buildings see the chapter ‘Oud
Writings (London: Alex Tiranti, 1965). and the Public Building’ in Ed Taverne,
2. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, Cor Wagenaar and Martien de Vletter,
translated by John Goodman (Los op cit, pp 334–60.
Angeles, ca: Getty Publications, 2007), 14. J J P Oud, letter to B Adler, 14 October
p 97. 1927, OuDJ-b, Netherlands Architecture
3. J J P Oud, ‘De nieuwe bouwkunst Institute, Rotterdam. Translated in
beweging in Europa’, in Nieuwe Ed Taverne, Cor Wagenaar and Martien
bouwkunst in Holland en Europa de Vletter, op cit, p 335.
(Amsterdam: De Driehoek, 1935), 15. ‘All night New York lies before my eyes
pp 18–19. See also Donald Langmead, with its gigantic dada neon signs. And
J J P Oud and the International Style: the rhythm of the city fascinates me’,
A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, ct: wrote the architect Knud Lönberg-
Greenwood Press, 1999), pp 66–67. Holm to J J P Oud in 1923. Translated in
4. Along with J J P Oud and Theo van Ed Taverne, Cor Wagenaar and Martien
Doesburg, the other De Stijl founders de Vletter, op cit, p 23.
were Vilmos Huszár, Antony Kok, 16. The magazine Het Overzicht was
Georges Vantongerloo, Jan Wils, Piet founded in 1921 by Michael Seuphor.
Mondrian and Bart van der Leck. Unlike other magazines such as De
5. J J P Oud’s international fame can be Stijl, the editors, Seuphor and Jozef
said to have lasted from 1917 to 1932. Peeters, were not looking to start a
The publication of his housing project, movement, but rather to bring together
Huizen Complex Strandboulevard, a network of avant-garde artists,
in the irst issue of De Stijl took place at attracting the likes of van Doesburg,
the beginning of that period. Marinetti, Oud, Werkman and Walden.
Undoubtedly the crowning moment From 1923 the cover of each issue was
was the role his work played in the 1932 designed by one of the artists who had
‘International Style’ exhibition, collaborated on that number.
organised by Henry-Russell Hitchcock 17. J J P Oud, ‘Een Café’, op cit, p 399.
balance is similarly altered and the an Architect’. See Donald Langmead,
and Philip Johnson at the Museum of 18. J J P Oud speciically stated: ‘In principle,
next phase of cultural evolution op cit, p 43.
Modern Art, New York. for me the very language of the project is
begins, leading to another new style. 10. J J P Oud, ‘Over de toekomstige
6. ‘Manifest i’, De Stijl, no 1 (November worth much less than its spirit, although
These theories appealed to Oud due bouwkunst en hare architectonische
1918), p 2. The manifesto was published in some “normal” architectural projects
to the legitimacy bestowed on the mogelijkheden’, Bouwkundig Weekblad
in Dutch, German, French and English I have tried to realise this aesthetic in
substitution of one style for another 42, no 24 (June 1921), p 154. This was
and signed by Theo van Doesburg, some way “cut of from the world”,
and the connection between art the irst publication of Oud’s basic
Robert van’t Hof, Antony Kok, Piet without over-forcing either the function
and social reality. See Ed Taverne, philosophy, presented as a lecture to
Mondrian, Georges Vantorgeloo, Jan or the construction, introducing them
Cor Wagenaar and Martien de Vletter, the Rotterdam group Opbouw in
Wils and Vilmos Huszár. into the “pre-established” corset. Like,
J J P Oud: The Complete Works. February 1921. In English: ‘On future
7. Charo Grego, ‘Introducción’, in J J P for example, the Oud-Mathenesse site
Poetic Functionalist (Rotterdam: nai architecture and its architectonic
Oud, Mi trayectoria en ‘De Stijl’ (Murcia: hut (1922–23), made up of cubes painted
Publishers), pp 27–28. possibilities’. See Donald Langmead,
Galería-Librería Yerba, 1986), p 8. diferent colours, the Café De Unie in
9. J J P Oud, ‘Ja und Nein. Bekenntnisse ibid, pp 36–37.
8. J J P Oud admired the work of the Rotterdam (1924–25) and the Kiehoek
eines Architekten’, Bouwkundig 11. J J P Oud, Mein Weg in ‘De Stijl’ (The
art historian Heinrich Wöllin, who Church (1925–29).’ See Mein Weg in ‘De
Weekblad 46, no 35 (August 1925), p 432. Hague: Nijgh en Van Ditmar, 1960),
saw style as a historical, dynamic Stijl’, op cit, p 18.
In English, ‘Yes and No: Confessions of p 25. See Donald Langmead, op cit, p 110.
phenomenon caused by a temporary 19. See Gottfried Semper, The Four
harmony between culture, on the Elements of Architecture and Other
one hand, and social and economic Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge
circumstances on the other. Whenever Spiral costume from Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet, University Press, 1989).
one of these variables changes, the Co-op vitrine, Hannes Meyer, Norge airship, Suzanne Lenglen 20. Hannes Meyer, op cit.

aa files 69 83
Víctor Larripa Artieda is a doctoral candidate and assistant
professor at the school of architecture of the University of
Navarra. His research into concepts of form in the 1920s and
1930s was partly assisted by a visiting scholarship at the
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. He is also an architect
and co-founder of the irm MlMR.
Fabrizio Ballabio graduated from the Academy of Architecture
in Mendrisio and received his masters in architectural
history from the aa. He currently practises in London as an
architect and teaches at the aa in both the First Year Studio
and History and Theory Studies.
Lewis Baltz was a visual artist and photographer who grew
up in Newport Beach, California, but who moved to Paris
at the end of the 1980s, where he sadly died just before this
issue went to press. His photographs of the more desolate
landscapes of his home state, and of generic, industrial
vernaculars made him a key igure in the New Topographics
movement in photography in the mid 1970s, celebrated
in the exhibition and catalogue of the same title curated
by William Jenkins. Since then, his work has featured in
numerous other exhibitions and museum collections, and
has been published in various volumes by the German
publisher Gerhard Steidl.
Tim Benton is an architectural historian who taught for 40
years at the Open University and occasionally the aa, as well
as visiting professorships at the Clark Art Institute, Williams
College, Columbia University, the Bard Graduate College
and at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
He is the author of numerous titles, including The Villas of
Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, 1920–1930 (1984), The
Rhetoric of Modernism: Le Corbusier as a Lecturer (2007)
and LC Foto: Le Corbusier Secret Photographer (2013) and has
also curated several exhibitions, among them ‘Art Deco
1910–1939’ and ‘Modernism: Designing a New World’ at the
V&a, and ‘Luigi Moretti: From Rationalism to Informalism’
at the MaXXi in Rome.
Ricardo Boill established Taller de Arquitectura in Barcelona
in 1963, and in its irst years explored traditional Catalan
architecture before tackling more obviously urban
problems, initially with conceptual projects – like The
City in Space – and then with fully realised buildings – like
his housing block, Walden 7. In an efort to further explore
larger-scale design, he set up satellite oices in Algeria and
then France, where from the late 1970s onwards he
concentrated on the completion of a number of striking
monumental housing developments. Since the early 1990s
his focus has been back in Spain, but the Taller continues
to produce urban designs for cities the world over.
Pablo Bronstein is a London-based artist with a particular
focus on architecture. Highlighted solo exhibitions include
the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the ica, London,
Konsthall Charlottenborg, Copenhagen and the Centre
d’Art Contemporain, Geneva. Forthcoming exhibitions
of his work will be held at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire,
Nottingham Contemporary and Museo Marino Marini,
Florence, among others. His publications include
Postmodern Architecture in London (2008), Ornamental
Designs (2008) and A is Building, B is Architecture (2013),
all published by Koenig Books.
David Campany curates exhibitions and is the author of
several books including The Open Road: Photographic
Road Trips Across America (2014), Walker Evans: The Magazine
Work (2014), Jef Wall: Picture for Women (2012), Photography
and Cinema (2008) and Art and Photography (2003).
Recent curatorial projects include ‘Lewis Baltz: Common
Objects’ at Le Bal, Paris (2014) and ‘Victor Burgin: A Sense
of Place’ at AmbikaP3, London (2013). He teaches at the
University of Westminster.
Contributors
Thomas Daniell is an architect and writer currently dividing
his time between Japan and Macau, where he is head of the
department of architecture and design at the University of
St Joseph. His books include FOBa: Buildings (2005), Ater
the Crash: Architecture in Post-Bubble Japan (2008) and Houses
and Gardens of Kyoto (2010).
Gillian Darley is a writer, broadcaster, journalist and
president of the Twentieth Century Society. Among
her books are Villages of Vision (1975), biographies of Octavia
Hill, John Soane and John Evelyn and cultural studies of
industrial architecture, Factory (2003) and Vesuvius (2011).
Her most recent book, co-authored with David McKie,
is Ian Nairn: Words in Place (2013).
Carlotta Darò is an art and architectural historian, a member
of the Laboratoire Infrastructure Architecture Territoire,
and teaches at the Paris Malaquais School of Architecture.
Her work explores the impact of sound technologies,
telecommunications infrastructures and media on modern
architectural and urban theories, and she is the author of
Avant-gardes sonores en architecture (2013).
Maarten Delbeke is professor at the department of
architecture and urban planning at Ghent University and
also leads the project, ‘The Quest for the Legitimacy of
Architecture in Europe, 1750–1850’ at Leiden University.
Among his publications are Bernini’s Biographies (2006)
and The Art of Religion: Sforza Pallavicino and Art Theory
in Bernini’s Rome (2012). He also acts as editor-in-chief
of Architectural Histories, the online open-access journal of
the European Architectural History Network (eaHn).
William Firebrace is the author of Marseille Mix (2010), and
his forthcoming books, The Missing Planet, on the London
Planetarium, and Memo for Nemo, on living undersea, will
be coming out in 2015. He is currently working on Hop Baltic,
on the culture and architecture of a number of Baltic cities.
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French philosopher,
historian and critic, whose writing typically addressed the
relationship between power and knowledge, and whose
books include Madness and Civilisation (1961), The Birth
of the Clinic (1963), The Order of Things (1966), Discipline and
Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976–84). He was
a member of the Collège de France and later taught at the
University of California, Berkeley. The original version
of his essay ‘Hétérotopie’ was delivered as a radio talk for
France-Culture on 7 December 1966.
Jonathan Meades is the author, most recently, of
An Encyclopedia of Myself, which was long-listed for the
Samuel Johnson Prize and won the Spears Book Award
for Memoir of the Year. He is currently working on a literary
project which does not draw on his own experience and
preparing a ilm called Ben Building, a companion piece
to his previous essays on twentieth-century totalitarian
architecture, ‘Jerry Building’ and ‘Joe Building’.
Nicholas Olsberg is a historian, archivist, curator and writer,
and former director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture
in Montreal. His architectural publications include work
on Marcel Breuer, Frank Lloyd Wright and Carlo Scarpa,
with major exhibitions on Arthur Erickson (2006), John
Lautner (2008) and the California Ranch House (2012).
He has also lectured on the design of the American suburb,
led analytical studios in the Cities Programme of the lse
and at Woodbury University, and is a regular contributor
to The Architectural Review.
Christopher Pierce teaches at the aa and also directs the
Visiting School programme. He has published widely on
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drawings as well as
writing critiques that cover a disparate range of contempo-
rary architects and buildings, from Léon Krier to Ron Arad.
Among his recent publications is an edited monograph
– Ceramica Cumella: Shaping Ideas/Modelando Ideas – on the
work of Spanish ceramicist Toni Cumella.
Alan Powers was professor of architecture and cultural
history at the University of Greenwich until 2012, and
currently teaches for nYu London. He curated a retrospec-
tive exhibition of YRM at the Heinz Gallery in 1992, and
more recently ‘Eros to the Ritz: 100 Years of Street
Architecture’ at the Royal Academy and ‘Ivan Chermayef:
Cut and Paste’ at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea.
A former chairman of the Twentieth Century Society, he will
be teaching history for the London School of Architecture
from the autumn of 2015.
Catharine Rossi is a senior lecturer in design history at
Kingston University and the curator of ‘Space Electronic:
Then and Now’ at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale.
She is the co-editor of The Italian Avant-Garde: 1968–1976
(2013), the author of Crating Design in Italy: From Postwar
to Postmodernism (2015) and has contributed to publications
including the V&A exhibition catalogues The Glamour of
Italian Fashion Since 1945 (2014) and Postmodernism: Style
and Subversion (2011), as well as the journals Design and
Culture, Journal of Design History and Journal of Modern Crat.
Justine Sambrook is curator of photographs at the Riba
where she has just co-curated ‘Ordinary Beauty: The
Photography of Edwin Smith’. She has contributed to
a number of publications including the Phaidon Atlas
of Twenty-irst-Century World Architecture, The Phaidon
Archive of Graphic Design, The Modernist House and
Twenty-irst-Century Architecture, and has a regular column
in the RIBa Journal. She is about to undertake a PhD at
Kingston University researching the use of photography
in The Architectural Review.
Léa-Catherine Szacka is an architectural historian based
in Paris and Oslo. She studied at the Université de Montréal
and iuaV before completing a PhD in architectural history
and theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, with
a thesis soon to be published as 1980 Venice Architecture
Biennale: Exhibiting the Postmodern (2015). She has done
research and curatorial work at the Barbican Art Gallery and
the Centre Pompidou and recently presented her research
project, ‘Eimero, or the Postmodern Italian Condition’ at
the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Miguel A Alonso del Val is chair and professor of design at
the University of Navarra where he leads the doctoral
programme in applied creativity. He has previously taught
at Madrid’s etsaM and ie School of Architecture, in
addition to a number of us and Latin American universities.
He is also principal of aH Asociados Architects, which he
founded in 1989 with Ruino J Hernández, whose built work
has featured in numerous books and journals.
Anthony Vidler taught at Princeton University from 1965
to 1993 and served as dean of the Irwin S Chanin School
of Architecture, the Cooper Union, New York between 2001
and 2012. He is currently Vincent Scully Visiting Professor
of Architectural History at the School of Architecture,
Yale University. His recent books include Histories of the
Immediate Present (2008), James Frazer Stirling (2010) and
Scenes of the Street and Other Essays (2011). A forthcoming
book, Utopia, will shortly be published by the aa.