Stuart
Harrison
PAPER
for SAHANZ 2005
‘Celebrating
Civicness in Modern Architectural Language through Arcading’
ABSTRACT:
This paper will examine how selected architects
attempted to present a civic quality in modernist public buildings, focusing on
the technique of figuring architectural language through the arch and arcade.
The paper will discuss selected public projects designed at the same time in
the post-war period by Frank Lloyd Wright (Marin County Civic Center, 1957-70),
Oscar Niemeyer (Ministry of Justice in Brasilia, 1957) and locally Roy Grounds
(Academy of Sciences in Canberra, 1957-59). The work of Louis Kahn will also
come under review. The projects are by architects who worked simultaneously
across the world, and whose careers have ultimately been regarded as operating
on the edge of Modernist dogma, and addressed the task of making the civic role
of a building evident.
Grounds used the referential device of the arch,
and the Modern aspirations of abstraction and lightness are also rejected in
the massive quality of many of Grounds’ later projects, including the Academy
of Sciences. Kahn’s use of arched forms is argued as part of a lineage that
passes to Venturi & Scott-Brown and the architectural discourse of
Post-Modernism. Both Wright and Niemeyer combine repetition and formal
manipulation of the arch to produce civic buildings that are both modern and
grounded within traditional forms of the civic.
This discussion is part of wider research into
the nature of the civic in architecture and its application in current
environments.
ILLUSTRATIONS:
Roy Grounds, Academy of Sciences, Canberra, 1959
Photography by Stuart Harrison
Oscar Niemeyer, Ministry of Justice, Brasilia,
1957)
Photography by Marcus White, used with
permission
PAPER:
This paper attempts to demonstrate that several
Modern architects addressed the issue of distinguishing civic or public
buildings at the same period in the mid to late 1950s using similar method of
employing arch-based arcades. Both arches and arcades will discussed in this
paper, and an arch is referred to as commonly known but not commonly used (in
the 1950s) architectural device, a readable figure. An arcade as discussed here
is formed through the repetition of arches, typically as part of the façade of
a building.
It is generally accepted that Modernism, as an
international movement, moved away from associative forms of typology and
decoration to a language of abstraction and universality, that had its roots in
a social vision for humanity, where status or ability to read bourgeois
semantic systems would not be required. It is the proposition of this paper
that several modern architects simultaneously confronted the issue of making
the function of civic buildings expressed. The civic here is seen as the
collective desire to value the instruments of public and urban life.
This paper examines several buildings designed
at a similar time, that of the late 1950s. At this time, following the Second
World War, modernism had become the principal mode of operation for
Architecture, exhibiting qualities such as expression of function, universal
language without decoration and associative motifs. It is the proposition of
this paper that certain architects saw this mode as limited and sort an architectural
language to distinguish civic buildings – so that in universalising modern
city, they would be read as different to other new buildings. The arch based
arcade is developed by these architects as the system of readable architectural
language as been collapsed to historicism by the massive success of
architectural Modernism.
These architects’ identification of a gap in
architectural modernism is later addressed widely in the movement known as
Post-Modernism, where the dogma of modernism is inverted in an attempt to
address the perceived failures of identification of Modern buildings. This
return to ideas such as typology and style was then in turn widely rejected as
both kitsch and lacking in substance. The following architectural movements
that operate to this day did not provide an alternative to this absence within
modernism, and this gap remains. The using of the referential arch introduced
into modernism by the architects in this is still used by some architectural
practices to address the same concerns.
Louis Kahn (1901-1974) spent almost his entire
career at the task of developing an appropriate architectural language for
community and public buildings, as it documented by Sarah Williams Goldhagen in
her book Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism. Moving from an expression of
technology and the organic to form and association, Kahn employs simplified
historic devices such as the arch to this aim. Furthermore, he develops the
circular ‘cut-out’ as distinctive development on the arch to become a new type,
whilst maintaining a quality of abstraction and purity. Kahn’s use of
traditional arch forms is demonstrated in projects such as the Kimball Art
Museum (1973), but Kahn begins to develop an interest in the referential device
of the arch in 1957 when reworking his (Trenton) Jewish Community Center
project[1],
as is extensively documented by Goldhagen,
Kahn, acknowledging
this new direction, added Roman arches to the now brick façade which coincided
with the concrete beams that supported the gymnasium roof (during this period
he was also considering arched windows for the Richards Medical Center).[2]
Kahn’s use of arches and circular cut-outs is
gradually introduced in his work as he moved away from an organic and
technology inspired language. By 1959 Kahn’s movement away from this has become
clear, as Goldhagen states;
For Kahn, modern
buildings that echoed historical ones bound a viewer to a greater community of
past users: ‘modern space is really not different from Renaissance space,’ he
said in 1959. ‘We still want domes, we still want walls, we still want arches,
arcades, and loggias of all kinds.’ In embracing architectural precedents, Kahn
reshaped his architectural language to reinforce the social bonds that make a
community cohere.[3]
Goldhagen locates a critical interest in the
mid-fifties in historicism, particularly in the classical; “Edward Durrell
Stone, and Yamaskai followed (Philip) Johnson’s lead, producing in the middle
of the decade a mini-revival of classicism, or formalism”[4]
Goldhagen’s book revisits accepted ideas about Kahn, particular that he was a
solitary figure of individual genius, and suggests he was continually
influenced by other figures as he became increasing involved in teaching,
including students Charles Moore and Robert Venturi - who he assessed in 1950.
The practice of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)
is well documented, but his late work, normally associated with the Guggenheim
Museum in New York, showed a change of direction. The Marin County Civic Center
(1957-70), California, is the clearest built example of the shift in imagery
and language, as Wright is called upon to design a civic component of the
expanding post-war American city. Completed in two stages, both after his
death, Marin County Civic Center demonstrates an allusion to the repetitive
arches of a Roman viaduct. Twenty minutes after arriving at the site, Wright
said to his associate Aaron Green, “I’ll bridge these hills with graceful
arches.”[5]
The use of the arch had occurred before in
Wright’s work - the V. C. Morris Store, San Francisco (1948) used a single
Syrian derived arch. Repetition of arches represents a shift, and can be seen
to a lesser extent in the Wauwatosa Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church scheme
that ran concurrently to Marin County, the design of which commenced one year
earlier in 1956. The Monona Terrace Civic Center in Madison, Wisconsin was
commenced by Wright in 1938 and remarkably not built until 1997. Wright revises
the scheme in 1957[6] (as he starts the design of Marin County) and
the Monona Terrace project (originally known as Orin Terraces) begins to
develop an arching façade treatment as the project mutates from a large
bridge-like series of terraces in 1938 with three large domes into a singular
building with a curved front with grand arches. These arches, like those of the
Greek Orthodox Church form the boundary between inside and outside, rather than
an arcade. Importantly, the Monona project revisions represent Wrights’ evolved
approach to designing a civic centre.
At Marin County, the allusion to a load bearing
Roman viaduct or aqueduct is perhaps informed partially by the site and
generally large-scale nature of the project - to which a bridge is an analogy.
The system of arches used on Marin County exhibits an underlying classical
vertical system (of decreasing weight with height), where the larger spanning
arches occupy the lower levels, and then decrease in size up the façade. The
top series of arches are continuous to form circular profiles, in a point of
departure from the illusion to a Roman viaduct.
Wright’s operations on these arches however
reveal a different quality that moves them away from the load bearing
traditional arch, for the main body of arches are not structural and are
supported out from the main concrete construction. This is in a manner similar
to a contemporary curtain wall system and Wright makes no attempt to suggest
that they are thick - built as a stucco cladding on a steel frame. In addition
the junction between the arches is almost point-like. Here the arches seem to
hang from the building, inverting the structural logic of the Roman
viaduct. This subversion of a Roman
series of arches and lightness of the system explains the building’s inclusion
in two mainstream science fiction films as a building of the future.[7]
Detractors of Wright’s late work suggest his
remoteness to the project and large practice workload account for the thinness
of the building and its lack of detail, unlike in his early work. Robert
McCarther is typical in this view:
Like many of Wright’s
late works, this design for the Marin County Civic Center seems to have
developed without any significant constraints, limitations or even goals, and
is merely an exercise in unfettered imagination.[8]
The Marin County Civic Center was one of
Wright’s few built civic projects for a government. Despite his enormous body
of work, Wright was principally an architect for private clients, both houses
and businesses. Another account for Wright’s change of direction in this late
work is possibly a search for a way to demonstrate the civic; rather than a
lack of interest, recycling or lack of time as suggested by McCarther[9].
In addition, the project was designed and built on a tight budget.
By evacuating the structural role of the arches
and expressing this, they became a screen and signaling device, identifying the
civic function of the centre. In order for this to be successfully
communicated, residents would need to decode arches, particularly in a
serialised form as denoting of building of some civic nature. Prior to the
Marin County’s occupation of the Wright building, the County administration was
principally located within the simple Classical temple fronted San Rafael Court
House.[10]
Historic images of San Rafael reveal the only linear buildings with repeating
elements were those for railways. Given that the Marin County Civic Center is a
bent (at the dome) linear building that buries itself into the two hills of
site, it has a continuous quality. It is impossible to say whether the
population of Marin County was immediately aware of the building’s purpose –
there is little doubt as to whether the building was distinguished from its
surroundings however.
In 1893 Wright entered the Milwaukee Library
Competition (his closest previous project of this type), with an symmetrically
composed classical scheme, featuring a central dome above a temple portico. The
Marin building can be read as a radical reworking of this scheme, with dome in
the middle. Elements of association and repetition are used in both schemes, to
give them a grandness of vision that is transferable from the pre-modern to the
modern. Wright does not develop a modern architectural language for the civic
until 1957.
Prior to Oscar Niemeyer’s (1906-) commencement
on the government buildings at Brasilia, his use of arch forms, or curved
profiles generally in elevation was restricted to the Chapel of St. Francis of
Assisi (curving elements were frequently used in plan). The chapel is part of a
complex of buildings (1942-43) for a residential development at Pampulha, Belo
Horizonte, in the Brazilian State of Minas Gerais. The chapel is the most well
known of the suite, which also includes a casino (now a museum), restaurant,
and a yacht club all on an artificial lake. The well known series of four
ground touching vaults on the mural façade creates an asymmetrical
configuration of reinforced concrete shells. Here, Niemeyer uses arching forms
to distinguish the chapel from the other buildings he designed in the suite,
suggesting a principle where buildings of more social significance are
apparent. This reflects the chapel as the most civic building of this
collection. Niemeyer is Jewish by birth but not religious, and the chapel after
completion was not blessed by the Catholic Church[11],
assumedly due to its failure to appear as a church building. The buildings’
fame is often attributed to its innovative use of concrete, “The Church of St
Francis is the birthplace of proper Brazilian Architecture. With its
self-supporting vaulting of varying dimensions, it makes use of the structural
and sculptural potential of concrete.”[12]
The use of curves in Niemeyer’s work is often attributed
to either landscape, or by Niemeyer himself as natural forms such as the
profile of the human body[13].
The issue of type is often not engaged with. The other buildings at Pampulha
use curves in plan, but not in elevation. The residential landscape by the lake
is not overtly undulating, therefore not establishing a connection of the
arching roofline of the chapel to the invented landscape.
The commission for the new Brazilian capital of
Brasilia was a direct result of the Pampulha project, through Juscelino
Kubitschek who was the Governor of Minas Gerais and had initiated Pampulha, and
then Brasilia after his election as President of Brazil in 1956. Soon after
Niemeyer commenced the design of a suite of governmental buildings - where a
system of typological hierarchy in architectural language is further developed.
Some
indication of Niemeyer’s adherence to an appropriate system of hierarchical
expression can be read through a statement related to monumentality, “I have
never been afraid of monumentality when a corresponding theme justifies it”[14] Justification
is key in this statement, making clear Niemeyer considers appropriateness
in his work; that not all buildings should be as expressive as others. In this
way, the work can be seen to fall into a system of decorum.[15]
The collection of buildings around the eastern
end of Brasilia’s Monumental Axis form the key components of Government. In the
centre is the twin domed Congresso (Parliament), immediately behind (to the
east) at to each side is the Palacio do Planalto (Executive Branch) and the
Supremo Tribunal Federal (Supreme Court) – with the Plaza of the Three Powers
between these three. In front (west) of the Congresso and also to each side and
opposite each other are Palacio Itamaraty (Foreign Affairs) and the Ministry of
Justice. Valerie Fraser discusses how the Itamaraty Palace and Justice Ministry
relate to the other pair of buildings on the other side of the Congresso,
These two ministries are
again ‘palaces’, like the Planalto and Supreme Court beyond. Each is enclosed
with a modern version of a classical peristyle, this time with the colonnades
the right way up, but having a more traditional type, Niemeyer then backs off
again: the structures are not faced in classical marble but left as explicitly
modern coarse-textured concrete.[16]
In addition, the ministry buildings further west
and out from the Congresso after Ministry of Justice and Itamaraty Palace
become simple vertically louvered slab blocks, with no arcading or colonnading;
and are general government administration. The Brasilia buildings are
essentially glazed boxes with some form of treatment wrapping around them.
Fraser suggests these two buildings are less
radical in their operations on the traditional arcaded form than the Planalto
and Supreme Court, where Niemeyer develops an inverted and double arch system,
running perpendicular to the main facades. The Palacio da Alvorada (‘Palace of
the Dawn’ – the Presidential Residence) departs from a traditional reading the
most - by inverting the arcade as readable in elevation. This building is not
accessible to the public and is removed from the main concentration of public
buildings. The materiality of Alvorada Palace is white painted concrete, rather
than the marble facing of Planalto Palace and the Supreme Court. In addition
Niemeyer makes the reading of the concrete arches of Alvorada Palace as thin as
possible, this coupled with the whiteness of the arches suggests them as far
more delicate than the other more robust buildings directly around the
Congresso. The overall scale of this building is lower than the others, perhaps
akin to a large villa (suiting a residence). Its placement off the ordering
armature of the Monumental Axis also plays down its role as an instrument of
government. The thinning of the edges that assist in achieving this lightness
is possible with concrete as the exterior finish – to clad this is stone would
involve complex faceting of the material. The arches that are stone clad for
the Planalto Palace and Supreme Court are by the same logic flat, or
two-dimensional.
The Ministry of Justice, although equal with the
Itamaraty Palace across from it in the wider system, deviates from Itamaraty
Palace’s regularity considerably. The key operation to the arch on this
building is the asymmetrical arch system on the southern (axis facing) façade.
These half arches repeat in the same direction across this facade, like a giant
order with the wall set back behind them. The directional nature of these
arches is revealing, going against the flow of the traffic on the road in
front, but gesturing toward the Congresso and Plaza. Interestingly, the
opposite north façade, with the same bay spacing, employs a more traditional
fully rounded arch, registering its distance away from the Congresso and
Monumental Axis. Indeed, all four facades of the Ministry of Justice are
different – the eastern façade is a series of even simple vertical blade
columns, whereas the western façade is a dense varying cluster of the same
blade columns, at differing spaces. Assumedly this dense array is to block
harsh western sun hitting the glazed wall – a consideration not addressed on
Itamaraty Palace opposite. A photograph of this façade from the Birkhauser book
on Niemeyer shows the western façade of Itamaraty Palace with curtains drawn
and several wall air-conditioners installed in the glazed wall.[17]
It seems that the built design of Itamaraty Palace is a redesign, whereas the
Ministry of Justice is not.[18]
Different dates for both buildings make it hard to suggest if the design of one
affected the design of the other, or if they had originally intended to be
different.
Justin Read speculates on the use of arching in
the buildings at Brasilia;
Brasília, we should recall, was built for a
nation that had not fully “modernized” by the time the capital opened in 1960;
at the same time, it is precisely the urge to modernize that produced a city
that seemed far more “modern” than any other at the time, either in the third
world or the first. Paradoxically, much of the sense of modernity surrounding
it stems from Niemeyer’s employment of “surreal” curved forms—to produce the
sense that something “new” had been built unlike anything built before.[19]
Fraser cites Niemeyer to establish the
connection with arch as a historic device;
I rejoice in realizing that these forms bestowed individuality and originality upon the Palaces in their modest way and (and this I deem important) establish a link with the architecture of colonial Brazil.[20]
Niemeyer used the arch as an associative device,
and as such recognised
the limitations of the version of modernism that adheres to abstraction as
universal social device. Niemeyer, as a dedicated communist, could be no closer
to the desire for an open society that is as far from the elitism of the
pre-independent and pre-20th Century world as possible. However, a system of
hierarchical architectural language is employed using new concrete technology.
The differences in use depending on building type indicates Niemeyer was not
making architecture as fluid and expressive as possible in every case, that
buildings demonstrate their place in a hierarchy.
Niemeyer’s work came to Australia through the Architectural
Review and via the book Brazil Builds, Architecture new and old,
1652-1942 by Phillip Goodwin. This accompanied the Brazil Builds
MOMA exhibition in 1943, and came to Australia toward the end of Second World
War. James Birrell, studying at Melbourne Technical College (now RMIT) at this
time recalls these arrivals in Australia after the War.[21]
Birrell transferred studies to the University of Melbourne, where he studied
under Roy Grounds, Robin Boyd and other well-known Melbourne architectural
figures. The influence of Niemeyer and Roy Grounds (1905-1981) is clear within
Birrell’s work and it is possible that Niemeyer’s work came to Grounds in the
post-war period.
The Academy of Sciences in Canberra was Grounds’
first major commission and was designed in 1957 and completed in 1959.[22]
Grounds’ biggest works before this were multi-residential flats, and this
project represented a major typological leap for Grounds, designing a new
institutional building. The pure low-slung dome building shows a simultaneous
development with the domic forms of the Congresso in Brasilia, the design of
which commenced sometime between 1956 and 1958. Niemeyer’s use of arcades is
restricted to orthogonal buildings, whereas Grounds is able to produce an
arcaded edge to the base of the copper clad concrete dome. Like Niemeyer’s
Ministry of Justice and Itamaraty Palace, Grounds uses water around the
perimeter of the building, in an interaction with the arcade. For the Academy
of Sciences this also provides a water collection point from the copper roof
and animates reflected light onto the vertical perimeter glass wall and into
the spaces inside. The continuous circular arcade opens and closes to the
surroundings with the flow of the complex curved arch, the depth of which
changes in relation to the user. As a result, there is a changing quality of
enclosure around the edge. This, coupled the reflective consequences of water
and glass, make this arcade an unexpectedly dynamic and public space, given the
purity and mass of the form.
The Academy of Sciences has been dubbed for many
years the ‘Martian Embassy’[23],
which tells of the building’s science fiction-like qualities, similar to that
of the Marin County Civic Center. Grounds’ design was selected from a
competition process as the most radical[24].
At the same time it utilises traditional forms such as the arch, symmetry and
moat. Like Niemeyer’s public buildings in Brasilia, the effect of deep arcades
and colonnades around the building is the creation of deep shadowed facades,
also suggesting a difference from generic building types.
The interest in pure geometry had been
escalating in Grounds’ work, but extends back to the Round (Henty) House
(1950). Conrad Hamann suggests that the Academy of Sciences draws from Eero
Saarinen’s Kresge Auditorium (1950-55) at MIT, being also a “large scale
geometric work”[25]
which Grounds is believed to have visited. Precedent for Grounds’ use of
arches, or arcades, is not immediately apparent, especially given the
simultaneous nature of the Niemeyer work in Brasilia. The Academy represents
Grounds’ first use of the arch, and can be seen as a prototype to the
monumental National Gallery of Victoria completed in 1968. Normally regarded as
a massive enlargement of Grounds’ experimental own house in Hill Street,
Toorak, Melbourne (1952-53), the National Gallery is different to this house
via the use of the central arch (forming a single arch arcade), rather than
conventional doorway on the house. The common denominator between Academy of
Sciences and National Gallery, as public buildings, is the use of an archway –
suggesting Grounds is using it as a civic device.
The reworking of the arch and arcade is a
strategy that that does not involve pure invention in architectural language,
but operations and reconfiguration of an existing language still alive in the
consciousness of often classically trained architects. For a general population
that sees civic buildings as pre-modern, and modern architecture as the style
of reconstruction - mass housing, industry and commerce; the arch can connote
the civic. This proposition, whether true or not, seems to be the assumption by
which the featured architects in this paper rely on for design of these
institutional and civic projects. The arch however in the pre-modern period was
not an exceptional device, and featured on many types of buildings. Only with
the onslaught of Modernism does the arch gain this meaning of connoting the
civic as it is no longer widely used in either civic or utilitarian buildings.
The projects examined in this paper use repeating
arches, often to form arcades rather than singular arch openings in studied
civic projects. Repetition is a key tenet of modernism, as is the use of new
materials and technologies. The projects these Architects develop around 1957
all show a major departure from the universality and non-referential qualities
of the ‘International Style’ or Modernism generally[26],
as they all attempt to distinguish their new civic buildings from the postwar
city that is becoming dominated by Modernism itself, as it became the default
architectural style.