ALADICARICOM
7.3 UNION EUROPEA
Louis I. Kahn (with Anne Tyng): Trenton Jewish Community Center Bath House and Day Camp, Ewing, New Jersey, 1954–59, sketch plan and photograph
define the perfect relationships between spaces. His design process generally began by defining a generic space—a room—with its own structural and functional identity, a unit he would repeat until fulfilling the pro-gram requirements. In his own words, “The plan is a society of rooms … where it is good to learn, good to work, good to live.” (Kahn, page 254) The process ends with the discov-ery of an overall geometry that perfectly adapts and transforms a collection of indi-vidual spaces into a whole.
After 1950, Kahn returned to Philadelphia and began using a specific form—the Greek cross, with its four equal arms—as a mecha-nism to provide order, constantly reusing it regardless of program or scale. We rec-ognize this form as an obsession in designs such as the Trenton Baths, the Washington University Library competition, the Mill-creek Apartments, and the Adler, Fleisher, and Goldenberg houses.
In some cases, Kahn implements this geom-etry as a constraint that would remain through the final version—in the Trenton Baths, for instance—whereas, in other cases, such as the Adler House, the Greek cross that appears in the early sketches disappears once the final program is installed into the plan and the house begins to address its context. Kahn consistently used the historically symbolic geometry of the Greek cross as the primary mechanism for initiating a comprehensive arrange-ment of the distinct elearrange-ments of a plan’s organization.
— Iñaqui Carnicero (Cornell University;
Polytechnic University of Madrid)
Louis I. Kahn: Adler House, 1954–55 project sketches
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Order often the case with housing, offices, orschools—the challenge is to avoid tedious repetition, ideally without resorting to arbitrary distinctions.
Especially with housing, it is often believed that the ability of people to identify their own units is an important aspect of promot-ing a sense of individuality within a context of community. The challenge is to develop distinction within a repetitive system, often accomplished by composing variable overall masses, arranging the units into several typologies (such as courtyards, slabs, and towers), or, often with less success, using changes in materials or colors to artificially indicate uniqueness. Of course, when every unit is treated distinctly, the opposite of particularity occurs; the complex is perceived as a uniform, mottled texture.
In projects founded on texture, especially those involving pattern fields, the manipula-tion of the pattern—three dimensionally, morphologically, through distortion or transformation—is the primary tool in developing a sense of variation and order.
A typical strategy in organizing highly repetitive elements is to emphasize the individual systems that comprise the
whole—circulatory, services, units, and possibly even structural and mechanical.
It is often common to identify the various hierarchies that emerge within these systems, with, for example, entry circulation, vertical circulation, and horizontal circulation each given a distinct form. This can even extend to the level of the city, with hierarchies of vehicular traffic or public transit being articulated in terms of highways, boulevards, streets, and alleys, or hierarchies of building
The four distinct programs of the Wolfsburg Cultural Center, designed by Alvar Aalto in 1958–62 in Wolfsburg, Germany, are organized around an exterior central court. The five lecture halls that comprise the adult education component of the
program are iterations of the same form, increasing in scale from the smallest which holds 26 persons, to the largest which holds 238, all fanning out as the principal marquis for the building’s entry from the town square below.
heights or volumes based on degrees of public or private usage.
The organization of similar elements that vary only slightly (by volume or height, for example) can be accommodated through clustering or by serial sequencing, whereby both their similarities and their differences are identifiable.
MVRDV’s 2001–12 Mirador in Madrid, Spain, takes the typical urban block composed of a series of individual apart-ment typologies surrounding a collective courtyard space, and conceptually hinges it 90 degrees to create a single vertical neighborhood of connected, yet still distinct, apartment complexes with the former “courtyard”
becoming a window that frames the city beyond.
THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE
Hierarchy
Hierarchy can provide an ordering system in which elements or groups of elements, while recognized as being related to an overall whole, are not necessarily of equal signifi-cance. It is this inequality that signals the relative significance of the part to the whole.
Hierarchies are revealed in every aspect of architecture’s constitution. One can identify levels of importance in the composition of plans, in the development of sections, in the disposition of elevations, and in the produc-tion of distinctive objects or figural voids.
While a program might suggest hierarchies, the designer’s determination of program-matic hierarchy can have great significance.
When designing a city hall, for example, an architect communicates much about a government when determining whether the meeting hall or the mayor’s office predomi-nates in the building’s organization.
Hierarchy can also be sociocultural. For example, the mihrab, denoting the direction Aggregation
The designer is presented with different challenges when attempting to represent order when given a series of individual elements with little or no repetition. Decisions must be made regarding how the identity of the elements might be constituted and how conspicuous these identities might be. The designer must consider the varying scales that must be accommodated, even when those scales run counter to the relative importance of the elements. Finally, perhaps of the greatest consequence, is the problem of how the disparate elements might be associated. In situations involving the aggregation of such elements, the connective tissue—circulation, structure, services, surfaces—might, paradoxically, be the most important aspect of the design.
The designer may choose to merge a collection of distinct elements into the intrinsic differences of a city, dispersing a building throughout an urban fabric or simulating the production of a new city
fragment. The various programmatic elements might be given their own materials or even their own stylistic languages.
Alternatively, the designer might wish to suppress difference, to cloak everything within the same skin, possibly within a singular mass, so that only internal divisions determine the differences.
Similarly, a reason that the orders of architec-ture—Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite, among the most familiar—had occupied much of architectural theory from the Renaissance until the twentieth century is that they inevitably brought order to programs that were becoming increasingly complex. There were prescriptions regarding the appropriate hierarchies of orders and even suitable functional uses for the orders when used in a design. Each order proposed its own propor-tioning system. It was possible to understand the interior of a building by reading the orders used on its exteriors. A street, district, or entire city could be unified by subscribing to a consistent theory of the orders.
While the plan of Jørn Utzon’s Bagsværd Church outside Copenhagen, Denmark (completed 1976), is extremely straightforward, the interior section is defined by an undulating concrete roof plane that begins with a
modestly dimensioned space above the congregation and builds to an enormous wave of concrete reaching toward the sky above the altar, capturing the Nordic light and drawing it deep into the primary space of the church.
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Order for prayer in a mosque, may be one of itssmallest spaces, but it is also one of its most hierarchically important components, a focal point of the mosque. Or the only fragment of a village to have survived an earthquake may develop a special place in the new city.
When the components of a work are nested within each other—when the overall archi- tecture frames other architectures, like a set of matryoshka dolls—the sense of order resembles the mise en abyme effect: the process of penetrating buildings within buildings reveals the relationships between the pieces. This is, for example, frequently the case in buildings like theaters and concert halls, where one moves through numerous distinct buildinglike spaces—
entryway, lobby, stairways, loges, hall, and then (vicariously) the space of the stage with all of its autonomous architectures—
each proposing its own identity.
While rare, the absence of hierarchy may be intentional in designs where complete equality or anonymity is desirable. And while a sense of order may be one of the basic human compulsions, human involvement can always be counted on to introduce an element of vital disorder to even the most rigorously ordered architectural designs.
Louis Kahn’s Dominican Sisters’ Convent designed in 1965–68 organizes the cells into a perimeter wall, creating a large “container”
within which is arranged the communal programs of the convent, with the exterior spaces between these primary figures and the enclosing cell wall forming a series of private “cloisters.” The corner connections allow for a continuous sequence through the interior of the complex.
The two distinct semispheres of Oscar Niemeyer’s 1957–64 National Congress of Brazil in Brasilia both house and represent the two principal government bodies, the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. Juxtaposed against the low rectangular plinth in The forum of Pompeii is the
primary urban “courtyard”
around which the city’s public buildings are gathered, and the first of a series of courtyards begetting courtyards. This organizing device of a primary space lined by subsidiary spaces is a frequent motif in ancient Roman towns. From the forum one moves to the basilicas and markets with interior spaces also organized
which are located the complex’s more public spaces, their forms demonstrate their programmatic and cultural significance. Additionally, the complex’s siting on the capital city’s main visual and organi- zational axis announces its significance at the urban scale.
around large open spaces.
Beyond are the residential blocks, with interior court- yards that both organize and bring light to rooms that surround them while choreographing the sequence that moves from the public street to the atrium and finally to the inner sanctum of the peristyllium (garden courtyard).
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THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE